NY-18: Openly Gay Congressional Candidate Sean Eldridge Announces

Sean Eldridge is the male spouse of Chris Hughes, the openly gay co-founder of Facebook who bought The New Republic last year and was the architect behind Presidential candidate Barack Obama's campaign website BarackObama.com in 2007. Eldridge has been rumored to want to run for Congress from New York State for quite awhile. Eldridge is 27 years old and probably best known in LGBT circles as the former Political Director of Freedom To Marry, the campaign to win the freedom to marry nationwide

Bizarrely, if elected, he would be the second, not the first openly gay guy named Sean who is a Congressman from New York. Sean Patrick Maloney was elected in 2012 to represent the 18th Congressional District of New York. There are currently 7 openly LGBT members of Congress, 6 in the U.S. House and Wisconsin's U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin.

This week Eldridge indeed announced that he is running to represent the 18th Congressional District of New York, in a curious video where he mentions his family (but not the fact that he is married to a man) and touts his supports for abortion rights and small business. It's not clear if this would count as "straight-washing" but it does appear a little odd to this openly gay viewer.

Then again maybe we are now living in a world where the fact that you are gay will not be brought up or of interest to the general public during a political campaign. I seriously doubt it. After all, he is running against a Republican incumbent Congressman (named Chris Gibson).

With his husband's hundreds of millions of dollars at his disposal Eldridge should be able to make the race for the 19th District competitive, at the very least.

Hat/tip to BuzzFeed