Byron Hefner and Stan Rosenberg, Massachusetts State Senate President

If it makes you feel any better, call me a crazy, far-right whacko, I don't care.

Fact is, the President of the Massachusetts Senate, Stan Rosenberg, despite the justly celebrated diversity of his own district, is becoming a sitting duck politically.

I have been trying to communicate with Rosenberg's office (he is my state senator) about the MassHealth CarePlus mess, so I Googled him a little.

Appears he had a domestic mess of his own when his boyfriend, Byron Hefner, bragged a little too loudly about his own legislative influence on the Baystate.

Influence, indeed. Rosenberg is about 65 and Hefner is about 27.

Okay, okay, true enough. Age really shouldn't matter. I agree even. A little. In the rare exception. But in a lot - and I mean a lot - of people's minds, a big age difference does matter.

If the difference were, say, ten years, no big deal. Maybe even twenty. But almost forty? That's not love. You don't share enough of the truly important things, the inner milestones so to speak, in life in order to have a constructive relationship with someone born when you were already on the doorstep of forty. You have very little of the most important things in life in common, including the kind of wisdom that comes exclusively with age.

C'mon, Rosenberg, this is not a privacy issue. And it's definitely not a gay issue. It's an issue of good judgment, common sense, and feeling comfortable about who you really are, where you’ve come from, and where you’re headed.

Dating, then marrying, someone forty years younger, while it is obviously not totally the worst thing in the world, and while it's certainly not illegal (nor should it ever be), is still more or less wrong. It speaks more than anything of insecurity, not merely the kind of insecurity unique to a lopsided marriage, but the broad conduct and judgment of a high ranking public official. Like Rosenberg.

Already, months ago, when they were still only boyfriends, Rosenberg had to tell Hefner to stop bragging about his, Hefner's, influence on Massachusetts politics.

But that's not even the worst. The worst is when they attend public events together and the age difference is so great and obvious to everyone else that it simply says - really, really loudly in its own elephant-in-the-room voice - that you are too cowardly to date and marry someone you can respect because they have more or less traveled if not exactly the same life road as you, but the same life time, the same life span, the same world, have had many of the same inner life experiences, more or less, as you.

For whatever reason, life experiences that are dependent almost entirely on one's age are maybe the biggest factor in love and life-long commitment. And deep down, most ordinary people know this, regardless of what they claim about May/December marriages.

I have not read enough to know whether Rosenberg and Hefner ultimately tied the knot, but their dating and plans to become married are enough.

Rosenberg now comes across as a lost soul. And that is terrible. He comes across as feeble unless united with someone four decades younger who can prop up his ego with the flimsy and false reassurance that those life experiences, especially the bad ones that either built your character up or tore it down, they don’t really matter that much. What kid forty years younger than you could even know this?  It's not even close to being realistic about the way life works on you and makes you who you are.

Rosenberg may not totally be a sitting duck politically, especially considering his district, but he's shown a surprising vulnerability that can only be described as a weakness that, by definition, dominates his entire life. And that includes politics. Because when you marry someone, your lives, for better or worse, are entire together. That’s why the age difference matters and why it affects Massachusetts politics - in this case, to its core.

And which is why Natasha Perez, Rosenberg's chief-of-staff, is utterly wrong when she says her boss's marriage is a private matter. The overall judgment of the President of the Massachusetts Senate is most certainly not a private matter.