Gays may not recruit your children, but they will recruit your ancestors, if your ancestors were famous.

* Gays may not recruit your children, but they will recruit your ancestors, if your ancestors were famous. The latest candidate for posthumous outing is Abraham Lincoln, courtesy of a recent book, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, by C. A. Tripp. Tripp parses Lincoln's tempestuous marriage, a failed courtship, and several male friendships, and claims to smell a whiff of lavender. Most Lincoln scholars disagree, and a former co-author of Tripp's has alleged plagiarism, and a variety of other scholarly sins, in an article in The Weekly Standard. But Lincoln's intimate life was starved of normal intimacy. NR senior editor Richard Brookhiser, reviewing Tripp's book for the New York Times, concluded, "Lincoln loved men, at least some of whom loved him back." The coincidence of the gay-rights agenda, and the approaching bicentennial of Lincoln's birth in 2009, will keep such discussions rumbling. What we may miss in the din is Lincoln's central accomplishment: defining the threat that a desperate, slave-owning South and a weak, accommodationist North posed to America's ideals. Everything about Lincoln is interesting; Lincoln on the hustings, and in the White House, is vital.