The New York Times goes to Harvey Fierstein for a “gay marriage” analysis this morning. In his op-ed, among other things, Fierstein brings up the name of Father Mychal Judge, the chaplain priest who died on 9/11. The mention strikes me as nasty—the kind of unanswerable line one throws out in seeking to stop a debate short. The implication is that because he may have been a gay man (not the written-in-stone fact Fierstein says it is, by the way: many who knew him have said as much, others have said otherwise), his ghost can therefore be called upon to endorse the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s decision of last week, which, of course, Fierstein has no right to do. Likewise, I’m not going to pretend to know the late Fr. Judge’s heart—or posthumous take on current affairs. The man is a hero—who ran down to those burning buildings—and died while doing his job and living his vocation (and that’s true whether he was homosexual or not). Trying to use him to score political points might seem like a great gotcha idea, but it strikes me more as patently unfair.