Juicy bait not taken.

Deborah Solomon, the NYT Magazine's ace interviewer, has an enticing, feminist question for Elizabeth Stroud, a minister convicted by the United Methodist Church of violating its ban on homosexuality:

You're the third lesbian in two decades to be tried by a jury assembled by the Methodist Church, but they haven't openly tried any gay men. What do they have against lesbians?...

[Solomon adds this prompt after Stroud's nonanswer.] I would guess that lesbians are viewed as a menace by a patriarchal institution like the church because they take men out of the equation, or at least make men feel less important.

Stroud does not take the bait. She says "I think it's because we have chosen to tell the truth," which, of course, does not address the question why try the women and not the men. Unless Stroud means to imply that no male homosexual ministers have "chosen to tell the truth," she has simply opted -- perhaps wisely -- to avoid the question.

Solomon pressed that question awfully hard, even proffering the answer. Maybe we're seeing how Solomon manages to extract such great answers from her subjects every week. I wonder if the original transcripts of her interviews are full of prompts like this. She is so successful, week by week, in getting people to say amazingly revealing things.