"I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes."

"You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical."

"Duck Dynasty" star Phil Robertson talks about sin and logic. The line before the one quoted above is more graphic (and I didn't want to put it in the post title): "It seems like, to me, a vagina — as a man — would be more desirable than a man’s anus."

I note the ambiguity in what Robertson says about logic and sin. At first, I thought he meant that when he thinks about anatomy, the vagina makes more sense as a place to put a penis, if one has undertaken the reasoning task of determining the most desirable orifice. But there's nothing logical about that. There are unexamined premises: 1. that the penis be inserted somewhere, and 2. that the place should be the most desirable place. Even assuming those 2 premises, there's the obvious problem of the subjectivity of what is desirable, and Robertson admits that by saying "to me" and "I'm just thinking." In this interpretation, the word "logical" is effectively jocose.

Then, I saw an alternate meaning: The prefatory clause "But hey, sin" gives meaning to the repeated phrase "It's not logical." Sin is not logical. What impels us toward sin and what constitutes sin? These are not matters for logic. Perhaps we could reason logically about what sin is, but Robertson's approach is to accept the traditional Christian beliefs and this faith is not acquired through logic. In this interpretation, there's no logic in defining sin, and, too, there's no logic in a person's feelings that draw him into doing things that fit that definition of sin.

Of course, Robertson is getting criticism for these remarks, which are called "anti-gay," but he's rejecting all of what is traditionally understood in the Christian religion as sin, including adultery and fornication. In the process, he talks about his own natural sexual orientation and seems perhaps to concede that it's easy for him to avoid one sin that he knows other people feel drawn toward. But overall, his effort is to call people into traditional religion and to save them from what he believes is sin. Myself, I support gay rights, but I do not like the simple portrayal of traditional religionists as mean or bigoted (even though I do understand that it may be the most effective way to defeat them politically).

"The U.S. government lobotomized roughly 2,000 mentally ill veterans—and likely hundreds more—during and after World War II..."

"... according to a cache of forgotten memos, letters and government reports unearthed by The Wall Street Journal."

The U.S. government lobotomized roughly 2,000 mentally ill veterans—and likely hundreds more—during and after World War II, according to a cache of forgotten memos, letters and government reports unearthed by The Wall Street Journal. Besieged by psychologically damaged troops returning from the battlefields of North Africa, Europe and the Pacific, the Veterans Administration performed the brain-altering operation on former servicemen it diagnosed as depressives, psychotics and schizophrenics, and occasionally on people identified as homosexuals....

“Realistically looking back, the diagnosis didn’t really matter—it was the behaviors,” says psychiatrist Max Fink, 90, who ran a ward in a Kentucky Army hospital in the mid-1940s. He says veterans who couldn’t be controlled through any other technique would sometimes be referred for a lobotomy. I didn’t think we knew enough to pick people for lobotomies or not.... It’s just that we didn’t have anything else to do for them.”

In a standard lobotomy, the surgeon opens the skull and severs the prefrontal part of the brain from the rest of the brain.

Much more at the link. It seems that the government was looking mostly at men with what today we would call PTSD and taking advantage of a way to control intractable people. I'd like to see more details on how this related to homosexuals. Presumably, as Fink said "it was the behaviors." This was back in the days before Thorazine, so it's hard for us today to picture what these doctors were seeing.

During eight years as a patient in the VA hospital in Tomah, Wis., [Roman] Tritz underwent 28 rounds of electroshock therapy, a common treatment that sometimes caused convulsions so jarring they broke patients’ bones. Medical records show that Mr. Tritz received another routine VA treatment: insulin-induced temporary comas, which were thought to relieve symptoms

To stimulate patients’ nerves, hospital staff also commonly sprayed veterans with powerful jets of alternating hot and cold water, the archives show. Mr. Tritz received 66 treatments of high-pressure water sprays called the Scotch Douche and Needle Shower, his medical records say....

“You couldn’t help but have the feeling that the medical community was impotent at that point,” says Elliot Valenstein, 89, a World War II veteran and psychiatrist who worked at the Topeka, Kan., VA hospital in the early 1950s. He recalls wards full of soldiers haunted by nightmares and flashbacks. The doctors, he says, “were prone to try anything.”

My mother, who is no longer alive, was a WAC who worked in wards like this in the 1940s, but I never heard her say anything about the treatments, only very general things about how the men suffered.

"The Idea of 'Art School Stole My Virginity' came around when I was Sixteen..."

"... when all my peers at school were losing their Virginity it was incredibly hard for me to ask why I was still a Virgin and why it meant so much to the people all around me."

My piece isnt a statement as much as it is a question. The whole aspect of Virginity was incredibly emotional for me and has been ever since. It became a thought process that turned into the performance piece that I wish to create for the public on January the 25th. The London Art Scene has slowed down recently and whilst London is in its prime and is constantly changing the contemporary artists are the same and they aren’t so contemporary anymore. I want my piece to inject some speed into the arts, a performance of the people if you will. I feel like now is the time for the new scene. To lose my Virginity with the new age is the Avant Garde that London has been unintentionally waiting for.

I got there via a Time Magazine blog post by Laura Stampler that has the subtitle "So cliché!" Stampler links to a HuffPo piece titled "Student... To Lose Virginity In Live Gay Sex Show For Art Project," which includes a poll with 3 options: 1. "It's art," 2. "It cheapens sex," and 3. "I'm undecided." I know from my experience composing polls here on this blog that people are always going to say "You left out the option I wanted," but they obviously left out a few options.

What's the most important option HuffPo omitted from its poll?
	It cheapens art.
	It's exactly what it is: a sex show presented as an art performance.
	It's art if it's done artistically and the participants are good performers.
	It's art of the low kind, which only uneducated people exclude from the category "art."
	It's art if there is artifice, which I think there is if he's not really a virgin (or Virgin).
pollcode.com free polls

"Homosexuality became illegal again in India Wednesday after the Indian Supreme Court ruled that a colonial-era law banning gay sex was improperly struck down."

Reports the NYT:

The ruling reverses a landmark judgment by a lower court, which in 2009 decided that an 1861 law that forbids “carnal intercourse against the order of nature with man, woman or animal” was unconstitutional. The law, passed by the British, makes homosexuality punishable by 10 years in prison. Only Parliament can change that law, the Supreme Court ruled.

There is almost no chance that Parliament will act where the Supreme Court did not, advocates and opponents of the law agreed. And with the Bharatiya Janata Party, a conservative Hindu nationalist group, appearing in ascendancy before national elections in the spring, the prospect of any legislative change in the next few years is highly unlikely, analysts said.

The NYT quote I've put in the headline is a bit inaccurate — probably willfully so — in saying that "homosexuality" is illegal. It's homosexual intercourse that is banned, not the status of having a homosexual orientation. But those who want equality for gay people frequently elide this connection. In the American case dealing with homosexual conduct, Justice O'Connor, concurring, made the connection openly:

Texas argues... that the sodomy law does not discriminate against homosexual persons. Instead, the State maintains that the law discriminates only against homosexual conduct. While it is true that the law applies only to conduct, the conduct targeted by this law is conduct that is closely correlated with being homosexual. Under such circumstances, Texas’ sodomy law is targeted at more than conduct. It is instead directed toward gay persons as a class. “After all, there can hardly be more palpable discrimination against a class than making the conduct that defines the class criminal.” [Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S.] at 641 (Scalia, J., dissenting) (internal quotation marks omitted). When a State makes homosexual conduct criminal, and not “deviate sexual intercourse” committed by persons of different sexes, “that declaration in and of itself is an invitation to subject homosexual persons to discrimination both in the public and in the private spheres.”

"Pope Francis, The People’s Pope" is Time's Person of the Year.

"He took the name of a humble saint and then called for a church of healing. The first non-European pope in 1,200 years is poised to transform a place that measures change by the century."

Here's the post where I analyzed Time's 10 finalist and concluded that the person would be Edith Windsor. My runner-up was Edward Snowden.

But my rejection of the Pope had an "unless" clause: "Popes have won, but I think it's a bit early to go with another Pope yet, unless the Time folk are itching to play Obama's recently attempted income inequality theme. I think that would be shabby, so I say no."

A number of commenters here thought the Pope would win, and I want to single out Pat:

I think it goes to the Pope and not because he's said some "leftist" things. In a very short term, he has sparked new life into a very large religion. I am a crotchety grumpy conservative, and I love everything about the guy.

I haven't read the whole article yet and probably never will. Here's a key passage that connects to American political themes:

[B]ehind his self-effacing facade, he is a very canny operator. He makes masterly use of 21st century tools to perform his 1st century office. He is photographed washing the feet of female convicts, posing for selfies with young visitors to the Vatican, embracing a man with a deformed face. He is quoted saying of women who consider abortion because of poverty or rape, “Who can remain unmoved before such painful situations?” Of gay people: “If a homosexual person is of good will and is in search of God, I am no one to judge.” To divorced and remarried Catholics who are, by rule, forbidden from taking Communion, he says that this crucial rite “is not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.”

And:

He can barely contain his outrage when he writes, “How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?” Elsewhere in his exhortation, he goes directly after capitalism and globalization: “Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This ­opinion … has never been confirmed by the facts.” He says the church must work “to eliminate the structural causes of poverty” and adds that while “the Pope loves everyone, rich and poor alike … he is obliged in the name of Christ to remind all that the rich must help, respect and promote the poor.”

ADDED: Is that last sentence miswritten or does the Pope talk about himself in the third person like that? I looked it up. The answer is the latter, or really neither. It's more of an opinion about the role of whoever occupies the position of Pope.

The uproar over "gay" Christmas lights in Rome.

"A rainbow-flag theme has been selected for the traditional lights along the city's main shopping street, the Via del Corso. The lights run for almost a mile long."

The right-wing Fratelli d'Italia (Italian Brothers) party labelled the decision "provocative and ideological."

They called for the lights to be replaced with ones showing the three colors of the Italian flag, red, white and green.

Does the expression of Italian national patriotism have anything more to do with Christmas than celebrating the multiplicity of sexual orientations?

"Rachel Tutera... runs a blog called The Handsome Butch."

"Daniel Friedman... makes custom men’s suits, mostly for corporate clients in his end of Park Slope, Brooklyn."

When she wrote to him last year, seeking a sales job, she had a proposition: Why couldn’t Mr. Friedman, with his expertise in men’s suits, make them for women like her — not women’s suits, but the same gear he was making for guys, with the same masculine profile, but fitted to women’s bodies? It was a question he had never considered.

That's an excerpt from an article in the NYT, and here's the blog, The Handsome Butch, which is very aesthetically pleasing and makes an immediate visual argument that females can look quite naturally attractive in man-tailored clothes.

From the NYT article:

What is the meaning of a man’s suit? Every day men disappear into them, as into uniforms. In wool and creased flannel, the suits tell a story of power and belonging. When Ms. Tutera approached Mr. Friedman, she offered a new twist on that story.

“We started looking at these weddings from Maine, because it had legalized gay marriage,” he said. “And these women who were getting married in these tuxedos looked ridiculous. They looked awful. The suits were giant. And I can only imagine these people going into a Brooks Brothers in Maine and saying, ‘I want a men’s suit that’s going to fit me,’ and I can imagine how uncomfortable it was for both sides.”

Note the statement that "men disappear" into suits, so it's not just those women in tuxedos who look "ridiculous." Everyone looks better in clothes that fit properly. No one...



... almost no one... wants his body lost inside a giant suit. But there is the meaning of "disappear" that means — as the NYT acknowledged — I am powerful and I belong here amongst the powerful. Not all men in a suit "disappear" that way. Some disappear into: I'm forced to wear this thing because of the occasion and I don't really belong here. They're like the lesbian in the wedding tuxedo that bothered Mr. Friedman.

Do your clothes fit? Do you fit your clothes? If not, why not? Is it is the clothes, is it you, or is it what you are doing?

Despite his public support for gay rights, Alec Baldwin is punished for uttering an anti-gay slur.

And he even apologized. ("I did not intend to hurt or offend anyone... Words are important. I understand that, and will choose mine with great care going forward.... Behavior like this undermines hard-fought rights that I vigorously support.")

Is that fair?


Baldwin — like many celebrities and assorted other humans — wants esteem from those whose esteem he's decided he values, those in the entertainment industry and among the American cultural elite, and these days, it's easy to see that this means that he ought to support gay rights. But that doesn't tell us how he really feels at a gut level. What pops out when he's angry and looking to express hatred shows us what he hides when he's doing his mundane PR.

Who knows how much hatred against gay people there really is out there and to what extent it's apportioned among people who support gay rights on the one hand and people who oppose gay rights on the other? I don't find it hard to imagine someone who hates a particular type of person nevertheless believing that those people deserve equal rights — because it makes sense philosophically or it fits a political ideology. I also don't find it hard to understand someone feeling no hostility for gay people and still rejecting same-sex marriage and thinking that all non-procreative sexual behavior should be discouraged.

Eagerness to support gay rights may stem from a desire to compensate for strongly felt aversion to gay people. Baldwin's problem is that this compensation cannot stand up to his intense emotionality, and paparazzi who know this have made a game out of provoking him to the point of explosion. It's actually kind of sad. He's a great actor, and since he tends to play villains — wonderfully — he doesn't even need us to think that he's a good person.

But should he have a political talk show on MSNBC? That's for MSNBC to decide, and obviously they have. MSNBC has chosen to be more genteel and respectful toward the cultural elite. It doesn't seem to know how to foster vibrant discourse about politics, and the gambit of putting on the over-passionate Baldwin was always lame, even before he embarrassed them.

"New Study Says That Lesbians Hold Hands Better."

A headline at Slate marks the emergence of a new rule in reporting on scientific studies: Where a difference is shown between gay and straight people, portray what is true of gay people to be better.

What's bad about the way heterosexual people hold hands? There's a "dominant" position, and the man takes it. That's funny. I always thought there's a more comfortable position and the man lets me take it. Am I supposed to feel all subordinated retrospectively?

In 1971, the sociologist Erving Goffman wrote that while handholding appears egalitarian, “the details neatly allow an expression of the traditional [heteronormative] ideal.”

What word got replaced by that distinctively un-1971 word "heteronormative"? Here's the context, in Goffman's "Relations in Public," and it turns out he just said "the traditional ideal." Slate's Katy Waldman barged in there with "heteronormative." Why? To keep us from thinking too positively about heterosexual couples for a second there? In case we're unable to realize that "traditional" in 1971 is a reference to heterosexual couples?

[Goffman] continues: “The insides of the two hands are pressed together, in mutual embrace as it were, but the outside of the male's hand typically faces the oncoming world, whereas the outside of the female's hand merely follows in the wake of projection." Goffman believes that the man can "let go at will, since he is the grasper, allowing him to deal with the enemy; she, however, must wriggle out to be free." But, he asks, "For what reason could she have for needing to free her hand?”

Did you ever perceive that it was harder for one of 2 handholders to break loose? This gives new insight into the old Beatles song "I Want to Hold Your Hand." It meant: I want to dominate and control you.

In the new study, by Alison Che and Richard Wassersug in the Journal of Homosexuality, 340 women in same-sex relationships were asked to report on their handholding positions:

Out of that overwhelming stream of variables, exactly two made a difference: height (the taller partner was more likely to lead) and relationship history with a man (the partner who’d dated a guy was more likely to trail). “Our results suggest that handholding position does not reflect a dominance or power differential between partners, at least within a female-female relationship,” the researchers write. Instead, it is matter of anatomical expedience. Straight women should be so rational.

Where is the evidence that straight women aren't going mainly on physical comfort? All I see here is the correlation to having previously been in a relationship with a man, but that seems to suggest that within some same-sex couples, one woman takes what we call the feminine role. And that raises a deeper issue in Waldman's concept of what is "better." Within a couple's physical relationship, do we know that it is "better" for neither to dominant? Waldman wields the pejorative "heteronormative" — the oppressive assumption that what heterosexuals do is the norm — but she's insensitive about insinuating that there's something bad about couples whose erotic feelings arise out of domination and submission.

Che and Wassersug take things a little further by theorizing a link between heights and dating history, suggesting that shorter (smaller) women may feel more “femme” relative to other ladies, which could lead them to adopt traditionally feminine gender roles. Those same roles would also dispose them to dating guys. So the same variable— shortness — that leads gay women to experiment with men might independently steer them toward taking the lower hand position in their same sex partnerships.

Can we take things a little further by theorizing other explanations?! These researchers (and Waldman) are trying so hard to put some formal idea of equality first that they're loading bizarre meaning onto the phenomenon of being short. It would make much more sense to acknowledge that sexual feeling isn't about abstract concepts of equity. A man and a woman — or 2 women or 2 men — can have completely equal respect for each other's worth and still have a sexual relationship with elements of domination and submission. That could even be better. What do these people really know about what is better?

Waldman ends like this:

The life-altering effects of a few inches aside...

Do you find it amusing — that idea that height affects your sexual orientation?

... what difference does it make how we entwine our extremities while meandering through the park? I guess it’s nice to be aware of when your expressions of affection are doubling as power displays. 

Why is that nice? So you can back off from enjoying what naturally felt good to you and align your behavior more with abstract ideals?

Same-sex couples have been held up before as examples of healthy egalitarianism. This study speaks, in one small, specific way, to lesbians’ ability to discard gender scripts that don’t suit them. If only their hetero counterparts were so good at knowing when to tighten a grip — and when to let go.

Learn from lesbians, you hetero counterparts. The press will be leading the way, reporting studies that can be presented as showing that lesbians are teaching us as we progress along the historical arc toward equality.

ADDED: Helping me proofread, Meade read this out loud. At the Beatles reference he sang — "I wanna dominate and contro-o-o-ol you, I wanna dominate and control" — when he got to the end — he was all: "'Equality,' I spoke the word/As if a lesbian wedding vow/Ah, but I was so much taller then/I'm shorter than that now."

What Justice Scalia really means when he says he believes in the Devil.

About halfway her wonderful interview with Justice Scalia, after some discussion of homosexuality in legal and in Catholic doctrine, Jennifer Senior pushes the old judge to worry about how history will look back on his era of the Court. The first prompt — "Justice ­Kennedy is now the Thurgood Marshall of gay rights" — gets merely a nod. She tries again, with another non-question: "I don’t know how, by your lights, that’s going to be regarded in 50 years." He says doesn't know and he doesn't care:

Maybe the world is spinning toward a wider acceptance of homosexual rights, and here’s Scalia, standing athwart it. 

Some might hear "standing athwart" homosexual rights and get an amusingly unintentionally sexual picture of Scalia straddling gay men. But I assume it's an allusion to William F. Buckley's famous 1955 mission statement for The National Review: "It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it." The topic was history, you know. And who else says "standing athwart"?

Scalia has shifted from the topic of Kennedy's legacy to his own and — declining to guess what the people of the future will think — he says: "When I’m dead and gone, I’ll either be sublimely happy or terribly unhappy."

That is, he pulls Senior back to the perhaps-more-comfortable topic of religion. She obliges, asking him if he believes in heaven and hell, which he does, and they go back and forth about who goes where, and then, as she proceeds to a new topic — "your drafting process" — he pulls her back again: "I even believe in the Devil."

You do?

Of course! Yeah, he’s a real person. Hey, c’mon, that’s standard Catholic doctrine! Every Catholic believes that.

He's already connected his Catholicism to the accession to the authority of Catholic doctrine. The devil is in the doctrine, he's Catholic, and ergo, he believes in the Devil.

Asked for evidence of the Devil lately, Scalia says:

You know, it is curious. In the Gospels, the Devil is doing all sorts of things. He’s making pigs run off cliffs, he’s possessing people and whatnot. And that doesn’t happen very much anymore....

What he’s doing now is getting people not to believe in him or in God. He’s much more successful that way.

Later, he asks Senior if she's read "The Screwtape Letters," and not having read "The Screwtape Letters" in decades, I'm not sure if he's lifting these nifty observations from C.S. Lewis or not.

Senior wants to know whether it's "terribly frightening to believe in the Devil." He says:

You’re looking at me as though I’m weird. My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It’s in the Gospels! You travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the Devil! Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the Devil.

He seems to be trying to get a reaction out of her, because she defends with: "I hope you weren’t sensing contempt from me. It wasn’t your belief that surprised me so much as how boldly you expressed it." He says:

I was offended by that. I really was.

She doesn't grasp his statement or at least what she says next indicates that she didn't. She says: "I’m sorry to have offended you," as if he was an ordinary person taking offense, when in fact, he's cracking a joke. The joke is to point at her surprise at his bold expression. It was a subtle way to say: Hey, I thought I was famous for bold expression! But he's not so bold — or so bad a comedian — as to redo a joke to drive it home. Either you get it or you don't. He moves forward. Here's where he brings up "The Screwtape Letters," which she says she's read. He says:

So, there you are. That’s a great book. 

That suggests all the interesting things he's throwing out about the Devil are ideas in or closely tracking that book he likes.

It really is, just as a study of human nature.

And there you are. He believes in the Devil not just, perhaps, because he yields to the authority of a religion of dogma and authority, but he believes in the Devil because the Devil is a literary device for exploring human nature, and how can we not believe in human nature and literature?

The mutable sexuality of an internet celebrity.

Antoine Dodson, the hide-you-kids-hide-your-wife viral-video celebrity, has been tweeting about causing a pregnancy in a woman:

"I just became the happiest man alive!! My beautiful Queen and I are having a baby!!" he tweeted. "Wait what?" one user wrote. "Aren't you gay?" another added.

Last May, Dodson claimed he wanted "a wife and family" and "to multiply and raise and love my family that I create." Dodson explained in a series of tweets that he had become a "True Hebrew Israelite descendant of Judah" and referred to his former lifestyle as "foolish."

"I have to renounce myself, I'm no longer into homosexuality," he concluded.

ADDED: He doesn't seem to be denying his homosexual orientation, just rejecting the behavior urged by the orientation, which is exactly what many religions teach. He isn't claiming to be sexually attracted to the woman that he's gotten pregnant. You'd think if he were devoted to following traditional religious teachings he would refrain from pregnancy-causing behavior outside of marriage. Who knows what the whole story is?

There are several moral/religious issues that we can't disentangle in this particular case without knowing more. And I don't really need to know more about Antoine Dodson to go on with the issues raised in a more general fashion:

1. A man's desire to produce offspring is separate from his desire to have sexual intercourse with a particular human being, and many men of homosexual orientation have produced children with women who don't interest them sexually. One reason it's helpful to be honest and not repressed about homosexuality is so that people don't deceive themselves into entering sexually unsatisfying marriages.

2. A homosexual man who wants a family with children might attract a woman into a marriage (or other child-bearing relationship). He could be deceiving himself and her — which is very sad. He could be only deceiving her — which is just plain wrong. Or the 2 of them could be eyes-wide-open about what they are doing, which is, if they really understand what they are doing, a matter of individual choice.

3. It's a separate issue whether that man and woman, having formed a family like that, give each other permission to find sexual satisfaction with other partners. That's not traditional morality, but it is a matter of individual choice.

4. And it's a separate issue whether a man and a woman, having come together to bring a child into the world, must stay together to raise that child. This is the most serious moral issue, because the child isn't given any choice.

"The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently."

Said Pope Francis.

The new pope’s words are likely to have repercussions in a church whose bishops and priests in many countries, including the United States, often appeared to make combating abortion, gay marriage and contraception their top public policy priorities. These teachings are “clear” to him as “a son of the church,” he said, but they have to be taught in a larger context. “The proclamation of the saving love of God comes before moral and religious imperatives."...

In contrast to Benedict, who sometimes envisioned a smaller but purer church — a “faithful fragment” — Francis envisions the church as a big tent.

“This church with which we should be thinking is the home of all, not a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected people,” he said. “We must not reduce the bosom of the universal church to a nest protecting our mediocrity.”

Interesting to picture the smallness as protecting not purity but mediocrity.

We also learn that the Pope's favorite movie is “La Strada.”

"For many gay people, the years they spent (attempting) to live a 'straight' life in the straight world were not pretty ones."

The Straight Years Project.

This is the best picture, seen large. Great expression (on both faces.)

And here's the Awkward Years Project.

What I like about these 2 projects is that they could give all sorts of people an idea of something they can do when confronted with any current photograph of themselves that they don't like. Visualize yourself in the future holding that photograph and laughing, because you like the way you look in the now that is the future. What do you look like? Go there. Get there knowing that you will be happy there, that there is a you waiting in the future and empathizing with the poor you that's here now.

Bill de Blasio — with the help of Maureen Dowd and her untrustworthy tape recorder — hands Christine Quinn the gay card and she plays it...

... for all it's worth:

“I have a family. In my apartment, my wife and I, we’re a family,” she said, her voice cracking slightly. “Our 10 nieces and nephews and grand nieces and nephews, we’re a family. My father and I, Kim’s dad. we’re a family. When I took care of my mother when she was dying, that’s a family. Kim and I lost our mothers. People make personal decision, for medical reasons, all kinds of reasons, that go into why people do and don’t have children. And no one should comment about that and make it a political issue.”

Here's the background, in case you haven't been keeping up. Quinn and de Blasio are running for Mayor of NYC. Quinn is a childless lesbian. De Blasio's wife, Chirlane McCray, said something to Maureen Dowd that Dowd transcribed as a statement that Quinn is "not the kind of person I feel I can go up to and talk to about issues like taking care of children at a young age and paid sick leave."

Quinn jumped on that, de Blasio said his wife was misquoted, and Dowd's column was corrected, and the NYT revealed McCray's full quote, which came in response to Dowd's question why Quinn "was not rallying women." McCray said:

"Well, I’m a woman, and she’s not speaking to the issues that I care about, and I think a lot of women feel the same way. I don’t see her speaking to the concerns of women who have to take care of children at a young age or send them to school and after school, paid sick days, issues in the workplace — she’s not speaking to any of those issues. What can I say? And she’s not accessible, she’s not the kind of person that I feel that I can go up and talk to and have a conversation with about those things, and I suspect that other women feel the same thing that I’m feeling."

So McCray's point was that Quinn isn't speaking the right way, not that her being lesbian makes her not the kind of person who can relate to women with children. Maybe McCray was cleverly creating an occasion for people to think that, but she didn't say it.

And now, wait. I'm just now seeing Dowd's next paragraph, and it shatters the mental image I'd had of McCray:

Last spring, McCray did an interview with Essence magazine about her feelings about being a black lesbian who fell in love with a white heterosexual, back in 1991, when she worked for the New York Commission on Human Rights and wore African clothing and a nose ring and he was an aide to then-Mayor David Dinkins. With her husband, she was also interviewed by the press in December and was asked if she was no longer a lesbian, and she answered ambiguously: “I am married. I have two children. Sexuality is a fluid thing, and it’s personal. I don’t even understand the question, quite frankly.”

Whoa! Why isn't this the part of Dowd's column that's getting more attention?

Dowd goes on to talk about how Quinn has been "unable to get traction, even with women, despite talking more freely about the historical nature of her bid to become the first woman and lesbian to be mayor." Good. People shouldn't vote just to rack up another first.

NYC had a gay mayor in Ed Koch — right? He won in 1977, when his sexuality was known well enough that there were posters reading "Vote for Cuomo, Not the Homo." He said in a 1989 interview: "I happen to believe that there's nothing wrong with homosexuality. It's whatever God made you. It happens that I'm a heterosexual."

So it's great if people find Quinn boring despite her firstiness. Dowd — either craftily or bumbling — found a way to make her interesting, and Quinn is displaying some political skill, exploiting what is exploitable.

Lefties who fear that Cory Booker is "a Manchurian candidate who, while running as a nominal Democrat, is and has been deeply entrenched with the vulture capitalists..."

"... and their disaster capitalism education 'reform,' grew up in and has never rejected the religious right (while selling himself as gay-friendly, he's cultivated the same extremist movement that has promoted homophobia in Uganda and benefited from their mythology of Newark's 'transformation'), is steeped in Wall Street money and philosophy and is deeply admired by the usual right-wing think tanks."

Rachel Jeantel made it sound like Travon Martin profiled George Zimmerman... or... what is a "creepy ass cracker"?

TalkLeft describes "a train wreck" witness:

She said (on direct exam no less by the prosecutor) that shortly after first spotting Zimmerman, Martin described Zimmerman to her as a "Creepy-a*s Cracker" and later, described Zimmerman a few times as "this ni*ga" (as in this ni*ga following him.) The two minute clip above is of Rachel and the prosecutor repeating creepy a*s cracker over and over as the court reporter struggles to make out what she's saying, Rachel explaining that creepy as* cracker means a white person, then and expressing concern the creepy guy might be a rapist.

So "cracker" is a way of saying white guy, but "ni*ga" is apparently just a way to say guy? I can understand that, but I'd like to ask a few questions — out of curiosity. I'm not saying the defense lawyer should ask this on cross-examination. (Which should make for some interesting TV today.) I'd like to know whether perhaps Trayvon Martin perceived Zimmerman as a person of color and not a white man at all. You assume that there's no way he'd say "cracker" if he didn't see him as white? But he didn't say "cracker." He said "creepy ass cracker." I understand the use of "ass" as an intensifier connected to the adjective "creepy." Creepy-ass cracker, as in very creepy cracker.

But "ass" could go with "cracker" — "ass-cracker." The conversation continued, according to Jeantel: "So... he told me the man was looking at him, so I had to think it might have been a rapist."

Why rapist? A man raping a man? How common is that as a fear? But it was the first thing Jeantel thought to say after he said creepy-ass cracker/creepy ass-cracker. The term "ass cracker" could easily mean a man who rapes a man, especially one who goes after a teenaged boy.

Urban Dictionary has some definitions of "ass cracker" that predate this trial:

1. ass cracker...
One who not knowing the code or combination to a particular slice of ass is nonetheless able to get inside the ass...

2. Ass Cracker...
One who engages in anal sex.
That wanker is an ass cracker.

3. Ass Cracker...
A term used to describe a man with a large enough penis, to brake the anus of the woman or man he is having anal intercourse with.
"Damn, his's cock is so big, he is definatly an ass cracker!"

The word "creepy" makes special sense if you reinterpret the "ass" to go with "cracker." Martin said a man was following him, looking at him. He might have thought Zimmerman was a man out looking for sex and was watching him for that reason. What conversations had Martin had in the past with Jeantel about worries of this kind. She "had to think it might have been a rapist."

TalkLeft says:

She describes how Martin was "right by his father's house" after he lost Zimmerman, and refused to run home. I think he had plenty of time to go home, he obviously chose not to....

Why didn't Martin take Jeantel's advice and run home? The rapist/ass-cracker theory makes sense of Martin's decision to go after Zimmerman. If he saw Zimmerman as a sexual predator, he might think confrontation was a good idea or even an important step: These creeps in the neighborhood need to know that I'm not their prey. It's not enough to run inside daddy's house. My manhood must be established here and now or I can't walk free around here anymore.

"Perhaps Regina Marcia Benjamin should suggest teaching pro-abortion-rights bloggers that masturbation is part of human sexuality."

Says Meade, here, in the discussion of the ugliness of the mockery of the "masturbating fetus," and alluding to Benjamin's predecessor in the role of Surgeon General, Jocelyn Elders, who was fired by Bill Clinton in 1994 for saying that children should be taught that masturbation "is a part of human sexuality, and it's a part of something that perhaps should be taught."

(She meant taught about, but there was much mockery, as people assumed or pretended they believed that she thought that school teachers should be showing children how to do it, as opposed to simply teaching that it's something that many people do, that isn't physically harmful, and that avoids pregnancy and disease.)

This mockery of masturbation is quite fascinating. I'm drawn to Scalia's notorious dissenting opinion in Lawrence v. Texas, in which he defended the state's power to criminalize sodomy:

State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers’ validation of laws based on moral choices.

Imagine a state today attempting to prosecute the crime of masturbation. Of course, the defense would be the right of privacy, and the courts would hear masturbation described in the loftiest terms. It would parallel what we heard — over the past few decades — about homosexuality, which was initially viewed as a lowly or ridiculous matter that didn't belong in the treasured realm of constitutional rights.

Given the importance of privacy rights to the pro-abortion-rights bloggers, I think their laughing at the masturbating fetus shows the poverty of their understanding of the very rights they'd like to pressure others to believe in.

By the way, that much-produced theater piece "The Vagina Monologues" gets reverent about masturbation:

I lay back and closed my eyes. I put the mirror down. I watched myself floating above myself. I watched as I slowly began to approach myself and re-enter. I felt like an astronaut re-entering the surface of the earth. It was very quiet this re-entry, quiet and gentle. I bounced and landed, landed and bounced. I came into my own muscles and blood and cells and then I slid into my vagina. It was suddenly easy and I fit. I was all warm and pulsing and ready and young and alive. And then, without looking, with my eyes still closed, I put my finger on what had suddenly become me. 

As the Supreme Court said: "one's own concept of existence." Or as the commenter at the fetus-mocking pro-abortion-rights blog said: "'I fap, therefore I am'? Sounds like a plausible slogan for today’s GOP wankers. Jesus God." Exactly. Jesus. God. Cosmic.

"The heckler wrote: 'After years of these lonely, isolating and dehumanizing experiences...'"

"'... I’ve only recently been able to find the strength to advocate for myself and millions of others.'"

So basically she waited until laws were changed, the political battles were fought, and even TV commercials and marketing ads contain openly gay themes in people presented as normal Americans. Then, when gay marriage and family life is normalizing legally and socially, she comes out of the closet as an aggressive, rude activist.

Sounds like she waited until it was safe, and now she is jumping on the wagon after it's left the barn, trying to be loud and attract attention to her false pretense of bravery.

Top-rated comment on the WaPo column "Why I confronted the first lady."

"I think he has little grip on what it actually means to govern a country or run a war."

"He’s a purist in a way that, in my view, constrains the sophistication of his work."

He = Glenn Greenwald. The quote, from Andrew Sullivan, appears at the end of a NYT profile of Glenn Greenwald, the man who received and publicized the leaked secret court order about the NSA acquisition of phone records.

Selecting that Andrew Sullivan quote for this post, I didn't think about the fact that it's one gay man commenting on another gay man, but I'm thinking about it now, as I read the linked article more carefully and see this quote from Greenwald:

“I do think political posture is driven by your personality, your relationship with authority, how comfortable are you in your life,” he said. “When you grow up gay, you are not part of the system, it forces you to evaluate: ‘Is it me, or is the system bad?’ ”

By the way, I believe there's a deep connection between a person's individual psychology and his political positions. It's a central topic of mine on this blog, as you may have noticed (or not, depending on the kind of person you are). Whenever I encounter someone who insists that he's purely reasoning about the issues and deciding everything rationally, I always wonder what's going on in his psyche that's given rise to his need to be seen that way.

And now, here's Greenwald, inviting us to analyze his politics based on his homosexuality. "When you grow up gay...." One might say, when you grow up gay, you might have an exaggerated fear of surveillance by the authorities. Or when you grow up gay, you're critical of others who grow up gay and are too pure and lacking in sophistication....

But I doubt if Greenwald really wants other people analyzing him that way. He only wanted to leverage his specialness into a super-power to see when the system is bad. 

"Blue Is the Warmest Color" — that movie about lesbians that won the grand prize at Cannes — is hated by...

... the lesbian who wrote the graphic novel upon which the movie was based. And by "graphic novel," I don't mean that it has detailed descriptions of the sexual act. (The movie, however, has a 10-minute sex sequence that the author calls pornographic.) What I mean is what the NYT is referring to as a "comic book-novel" to avoid the ambiguity that appears in my first sentence.

Here's the Wikipedia article for "graphic novel":

The term "graphic novel" was first used in 1964; it was popularized within the comics community after the publication of Will Eisner's A Contract with God in 1978, and became familiar with the public in the late 1980s after the commercial successes of the first volume of Spiegelman's Maus, Moore and Gibbons's Watchmen, and Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. At the beginning of the 21st century, the Book Industry Study Group added "graphic novel" as a category in book stores.

Oh, but the author-artist of "Le Bleu Est une Couleur Chaude," Julie Maroh, will be stuck with the less respectful terminology as the topic under discussion is porn. Her book has sensitive images like this:



And the movie doesn't capture what she meant to convey.

Noting that the director and actresses are “all straight, unless proven otherwise,” she said that with few exceptions, the film struck her as “a brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn.”

Even worse, she said, “everyone was giggling.”

Heterosexual viewers “laugh-ed because they don’t understand it and find the scene ridiculous.

“The gay and queer people laughed because it’s not convincing, and find it ridiculous,” she continued. “And among the only people we didn’t hear giggling were” the “guys too busy feasting their eyes on an incarnation of their fantasies on screen.”

But what do you expect when a commercial movie is made from a book? The story is much less about the inner thoughts and feelings of the characters, and what's on the screen are superficial images, particularly beautiful faces and bodies, and the audience is invited to gaze and feel whatever they feel. The movie director,  Abdellatif Kechiche, said:

“What I was trying to do when we were shooting these scenes was to film what I found beautiful,” he said. “So we shot them like paintings, like sculptures. We spent a lot of time lighting them to ensure they would look beautiful; after, the innate choreography of the loving bodies took care of the rest, very naturally.”

So, like many, many movies — perhaps nearly all movies — this movie is about how beautiful women are. Meanwhile, we learn that the actresses were not as naked as they look. "We were wearing prostheses," one says, mysteriously.