Now that President Clinton is out of office, no doubt he’s enjoying his ability to be a little more free with his words than he was back when he was in office and a stray remark could get him sued or cause a war. Even discounting for that, he crossed the line this week with a comment suggesting that a gay Republican political consultant organizing voters against Senator Clinton might be motivated by, as Mr. Clinton unkindly put it, “self-loathing.”

The notion that sexual orientation must dictate party affiliation is an identity-politics trap of the sort that Mr. Clinton at his centrist New Democrat best would have known enough to avoid. It doesn’t seem to occur to Mr. Clinton that a gay person might have strong views on, say, tort reform, or taxes, or the war on terrorism, that might outweigh concerns about the party’s view on marriage. The Web site of Rep. Jim Kolbe, for example, who is an openly gay Republican congressman from Arizona, notes that he is “an impassioned advocate of Social Security reform including the creation of personal accounts … and a fierce proponent of smaller government, lower taxes and more individual responsibility.”

This is only the most recent of several instances in which a prominent Democrat has inaptly sought to stereotype gay persons. Only a few months ago, Senators Edwards and Kerry outraged the nation in their efforts to exploit the fact that the daughter of Vice President and Mrs. Cheney is gay. Has Mr. Clinton ever met a gay conservative? Does he read Andrew Sullivan? Does he think the Log Cabin Republicans and the Independent Gay Forum crowd are all “self-loathing,” too?

The idea that gays are concerned about specifically gay political issues to the exclusion of all else and that they are all Democrats is a stereotype as insidious in its way as any far-right conservative conception of them as uniformly perverted pedophiles. If Mr. Clinton’s Democratic colleagues persist in insulting gay Republicans, the effect will likely be to create more of them, as it’s hard not to recoil at the narrowness of a view that says a gay person who campaigns against a Democrat is therefore self-loathing.