Bauer is the Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina, and when the news broke that Governor Mark Sanford had taken the longest and steamiest hike on the Appalachian Trail in the history of outdoorsmanship, Bauer began to edge his way into the national limelight.

As Sanford’s sex scandal – which would have been irrelevant had he not walked into that big, glass Governor’s mansion as a Christian right candidate who ran on his narrowly defined “pro-family” morals – and the related you-were-using-state-funds-for-WHAT? scandal began to build up steam and as South Carolinians raised objections to their Governor disappearing for days on end, it looked to everyone like Bauer would almost certainly move up a rank.

And suddenly it was important for the 40-year-old bachelor to let us know how straight he is.

We all knew what was coming next, right?

At the exact moment of Bauer’s announcement of congenital not-gayness, if someone had blindfolded you, spun you around three times, and made you take the exact same sedative they use when they have to knock out a gorilla at the zoo, couldn’t you still have typed out the news stories that would be coming out a couple of months later?

Of course you could have. Probably with 95% accuracy or better.

And if I told you that Bauer is also a hard-right Christian candidate who has (say it along with me) repeatedly worked against LGBT rights, you could pretty much double up on the tranquilizer darts and write the stories while you were still in the coma, right?

You will be flabbergasted to hear that last Monday Bauer was (allegedly) outed by a blog that specializes in outing politicians who vote against LGBT rights, and by Friday the mainstream media began to pick up on it.

This process was helped along – AGAIN by Bauer, who needs new media advisors, and fast – when he accused Governor Sanford of having planted the big gay rumors. Which gave the Sanford camp the chance to very publicly deny the accusation of spreading rumors and bring said rumors incredible amounts of publicity along the way.

Lieutenant Governor Bauer and Governor Sanford, one hears, are political rivals and can’t stand each other.

Bauer had helpfully announced that it would be better for everyone if Sanford would resign, and Sanford announced that would be staying right where he is, even though that is of absolutely no help to anybody.

And now the legislature and the Republican party are stuck trying to figure out whether they’re rather have a known sleazebag in the office or a possible closet case who’s about to have his door ripped off the hinges.

Correspondents in South Carolina have pointed out to me that there is an odd baseline tolerance in the state – more than a few “open secret” politicians have done quite well, thank you very much. It’s OK to be gay and in office there, just not to be so indiscreet as to mention it.

Which indicates that if Bauer had just kept his yap shut instead of preemptively announcing his ramrod, country-road, geometrically perfect straightness, he might have been politically fine. At least for a while.

But now the rumors are out there, and everyone will have to deal with the idea of an out, or at least outed, gay Governor. (Including, one hopes, Bauer.)

Thanks to André Bauer’s vicious voting record, his own press conference, and the magic of the Internet, those rumors will never, ever go away. And I will laugh and laugh every time they come up, because he deserves it.

But in the interest of being a better person and making a better world, I’d like to offer a little advice to politicians who may be watching Bauer’s case with a certain vested interest:

Remember that you can’t legislate the naughty feelings away.

You can debate about whether or not programs designed to “cure” same-sex attractions actually work until you’re blue in the face. I suspect we’ll have to agree to disagree on those.

What isn’t up for debate is the idea that writing things down on paper to mess with the rights of other people who are perfectly happy and in love with members of the same sex will somehow make you less gay. It won’t, no matter how many times you do it. It just makes you spiteful.

In fact, it won’t even make you look less gay. In some cases, when you write things down that are too aggressively anti-LGBT, it makes you look like someone who is trying too hard to show how very not-gay they are, which in turn raises a few eyebrows.

And there you are, right back where you started, wondering if legislation to stop members of the LGBT community from operating motor vehicles or being allowed in the produce aisle would help.

Plus, once you start legislating private matters for other people, your own privacy is pretty much fair game.

Can you see why you might not want that? You know, just in case?

So what’s a closeted politician to do?

There are things that Bauer could have done and said that would make his position a lot easier right now.

Simply asserting everyone’s right to privacy would have bought Bauer the right to his own privacy, gay or straight. But for some reason that’s not enough pop and sizzle for some people.

If you, as a politician, are asked to sign on to anti-LGBT legislation and need a little public bluster, you can say something along the lines of, “I think that’s for individual churches to decide,” or “I have deep convictions in that regard, but I can only speak for and within my own church.”

See how moral you sound?

Or you could just say, “As a Christian, I’ve been taught not to judge, and to treat everyone with compassion and respect.”

It sounds great, it should, if you recall, be entirely true, and it buys you a lot more room for “moral lapses” than “As a Christian, I am absolutely certain that God has approved exactly one way to live and appointed me to enforce that.”

Or you could try “I’m concerned that legislation like that is the first step towards our government interfering in the bedrooms of married heterosexual couples.”

If you can make crazy eyes while you say it, you get instant wingnut street cred! Try to work in Communism for extra bonus points.

But above all…

Do not hold press conferences about how not gay you are.

Especially if you haven’t been asked.

I promise you, it’s not the clever ruse you think it is.

The criticism comes ahead of a Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing Thursday for David Ogden, Obama’s pick for deputy attorney general, the No. 2 position at the Justice Department.

Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, was confirmed by the Senate on Monday and started work the next day. As he waits for confirmation of his top aides, many on the religious right are questioning the nominee’s backgrounds, saying they have promoted far left, pro-abortion, pro-gay policies.

“Ogden has been an activist in the support of a right to pornography, a right of abortion and the rights of homosexuals,” said Patrick Trueman, a former Justice Department official during the first Bush presidency who is now in private practice.

“It isn’t so much that he’s represented pornographers or that he’s been a porn attorney, but it’s his world view, and his world view reflects President Obama’s world view,” said Trueman, echoing criticism from conservative activist groups like the American Family Association and Focus on the Family.

While a private attorney, Ogden argued on behalf of Playboy and librarians fighting congressionally mandated Internet filtering software. His clients also include corporate giants such as an oil company and the pharmaceutical industry.

The challenge to Obama’s Justice picks come as conservative evangelicals seek to limit the power of the new Democratic administration and maintain their own within the Republican Party.

Some Republicans believe a tight embrace of social conservative values turns off independents and moderates, but many Christian right leaders resist compromise and contend that, if anything, the GOP has strayed too far from its principles.

Besides Ogden, conservatives also have taken aim at two other Justice picks – Indiana University professor Dawn Johnsen for her association with an abortion rights group, and Thomas Perrelli, who represented the husband of Terry Schiavo, the brain-damaged woman at the center of a right-to-die case that energized evangelical groups across the country.

Michael Greenberger, a law professor at the University of Maryland and a past colleague of the three during the Clinton administration, said the conservatives’ criticism of the trio is unusual and unwarranted.

“Usually, you may have a fight over who the attorney general is, but this is not par for the course, picking off next to the attorney general three of his top appointments,” Greenberger said. “This is harassment and it is an attempt to reverse the election.”

Accusations of political manipulation at the Justice Department are not new. Over the past two years, the Bush administration has been investigated and excoriated by Democrats for making firing and hiring decisions based on political considerations.

Tom Minnery, a vice president at Focus on the Family, charges that through the nominations, the new Democratic administration is not depoliticizing, but re-politicizing the Justice Department.

“They take our breath away the more we learn about these people,” said Minnery. “This is left-wing politicization of the Justice Department. This is not a Justice Department that looks like America.”