If he's ever outed, he'll just give this lame excuse about how his personal and professional life should be separate - and in most cases they should be, but not in a case like this. "Sure, I bang guys in the shower and hit every gay bar that I can, but that's my personal life, I just vote against gay rights at every opportunity because that's my professional career. There's a big difference."
Suppose a politician enjoys gambling, goes to casinos and horse tracks and views gambling as a legitimate business, but that politician represents an area that is strongly opposed to gambling. Would it be hypocritical for that politician to vote against all pro-gambling bills? Who does the politician represent when they vote - the voters in the politician's district or the politician's personal beliefs?
I've had a couple of arguments with my boyfriend about that. My answer is the politician's own beliefs, of course. That's why we're a representative democracy, not a direct democracy; elected officials should be responsive to their constituents insofar as they can, but they have no duty to directly parrot their district. It is simply impossible to believe that voters have enough information about the issues, and that politicians have enough information about their own voters' preferences, to make anything along those lines practical or beneficial. If the hypothetical politician in your example truly believes that gambling is a legitimate business, they should have no qualms about supporting it wholeheartedly, as, contrary to their voter's supposedly universally expressed preferences, they should feel assured that having gambling is truly better for their constituents than not having gambling. If their constituents are annoyed enough by that, they can just vote them out in the next election.
Anyway, re: thread, I find the chances of some sort of staffing cabal being deployed to hide every trace of Schock's gay activities to be rather low. That's not to say that these gay rumors are necessarily false, nor that this guy's allegations are untrue, but it's kind of unlikely that he has some sort of cleanup crew that bribes entire gay bars into forgetting about his existence. I mean, what gay dude wouldn't brag about having Aaron Schock as a lay?
