Year: 2003

“Sports Eye for the Gay Guy.” Read the whole week’s strip. The boyfriend (“The Cubs are in first place! The Cubs are in first place!”) will doubtless be offended at the notion that all gay guys are clueless about sports. Just me, dude. Just me. And a few million others.

“Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority? The former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, has said: ‘The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defence of incompetence.’ … The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the “global war on terrorism” has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda – the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project.” – Michael Meacher, Blairite minister from 1997 – 2001, reiterating the kookiest conspiracy theories about how the U.S. engineered the massacre of 3,000 innocents. Meacher is not a fringe figure – he was a senior member of Blair’s government until recently. And you wonder why Blair is beleaguered.

Just a revealing throw-away, caught by blogger, Anthony Cox. As an afterword to his predictably inane ramblings on his website, Michael Moore links to a story he describes thus: “And sadly, an 11 year old British anti-war activist takes his own life after being tormented in school for his views.” The piece he cites argues no such thing. If anything, this bullied and probably gay kid in Britain, who killed himself at 11, found some solace in his “anti-war” campaigning. Will Moore use even a completely unrelated, dead 11-year old to advance his bile? You bet he will.

If you’re wrestling with whether to remain a Catholic any more, then you probably shouldn’t go see “The Magdalene Sisters.” It’s a gut-wrenching account of how the Irish Catholic church policed sexual morals in the last century in part by removing up to 30,000 “errant” young women – with the consent of their families – into penitential workhouses. Young girls could be sent away for flirting or getting pregnant or, in some cases, even getting raped – in a “Christian” version of the misogeny and sexual repression of fundamentalist Islam. It’s a simply horrifying tale – and, so far as I have been able to research, completely true. What you see is how the Gospels have been turned by some into a mechanism not of liberation and love but of social control and sexual panic. The brilliance of the movie is in showing how this system of extirpating human pleasure is perpetuated by those already victimized. In these Catholic gulags, women who themselves have internalized the idea that all sex is evil proceed to impose that system on girls and women with a brutality made all the more intense by their own misery. The cruelty enacted by those in the name of Jesus, the folly of attempting to extinguish the simplest sexual and emotional needs of the human heart: here you see it all. It resonated for me partly because part of my own family came from exactly that Irish-Catholic atmosphere. Women especially were inculcated with sexual self-hatred, traumatized in many cases by the prospect of eternal damnation if they so much as expressed interest in boys or men. (My mother was disciplined severely once at school for shining her shoes too brightly. Boys might be able to see reflections of what was up her skirt! My grandmother – one of thirteen dirt-poor kids, who eventually found work as a servant for priests – viewed all sex with a mixture of horror and disgust.) And all the while, of course, many of the men who controlled the institution were raping boys and girls with abandon and impunity. How is it possible to describe an institution constructed in this fashion as anything but fundamentally sick? Or, dare I say it, “objectively disordered?”

Fascinating new details on how closely linked the war in Iraq is to the war against al Qaeda:

The al Qaeda network is determined to open a new front in Iraq to sustain itself as the vanguard of radical Islamic groups fighting holy war, according to European, American and Arab intelligence sources. The turn toward Iraq was made in February, as U.S. forces were preparing to attack, the sources said. Two seasoned operatives met at a safe house in eastern Iran. One of them was Mohammed Ibrahim Makawi, the military chief of al Qaeda, who is better known as Saif Adel. He welcomed a guest, Abu Musab Zarqawi, who had recently fled Iraq’s Kurdish northern region in anticipation of the U.S. targeting of a radical group with which he was affiliated, Arab intelligence sources said. The encounter resulted in the dispatch of Zarqawi to become al Qaeda’s man in Iraq, opening a new chapter in the history of the group and a serious threat to American forces there. “The monster is already near you,” said one Arab official who is familiar with the intelligence and who spoke on condition that he not be identified by name or nationality. “I don’t know if you can kill it.” The official added: “Iraq is the new battleground. It is the perfect place. It will be the perfect place.”

If this pans out, then the Bush administration really will have pulled off something important: taken the war to the enemy, taken it out of the West, and given us a chance for military victory. What Bush must tell us tonight is that the war in Iraq, far from having ended, is now entering its most critical phase. That’s why we need more troops, more resources and more focus. Now.

If you’re as eager to understand what on earth is going on out there as I am, take a look at this website, which has been a big help to me in recent weeks. It’s called “Iraq Today,” and has a plethora of stories on the difficult transition to democracy in that newly liberated country. My own view that we do indeed need more troops for basic security measures was only buttressed by this report in the New York Times today. Many munitions dumps only lightly protected? Why don’t we just hand the terrorists weapons while we’re at it? Glad to see the president is going to address the country tomorrow night on the state of play in Iraq. I hope it isn’t just pablum or optimism. He needs to frankly acknowledge the problems, as well as telling us how we are going to overcome them.

NOT ECSTASY: Useful reminder of how some hysterical evidence against the use of soft recreational drugs should not always be taken on trust – even in a prestigious journal like “science.” I was skeptical when I read reports of a study that showed ecstasy gives you Parkinson’s or could kill 20 percent of its users. It turns out the study was using the wrong chemical. The poor monkeys. They weren’t so much loved up as fried.

Our server got swamped with spam email last week and for a day or so wasn’t receiving emails. Apologies. It’s fixed now. For similar reasons, the Inside Dish will start up again next Friday. Emerging from the August vacation has been a little groggier than I expected. But, hey, I must have had a good time if I’m still adjusting.

At the Senate hearings yesterday on whether the Defense of Marriage Act is in trouble and a Federal Marriage Amendment is necessary, no fewer than two – count them – two Republican senators bothered to show up. Five Democrats did. One Republican stayed for only a few minutes. I think we may have seen exactly what’s going on here. No serious legal scholar thinks that one state can impose marriage rights on another, under current law. Despite disingenuous attempts to claim otherwise, the Full Faith and Credit Clause has never applied to marriages and still doesn’t. DOMA makes sure that federal marriage rights are exclusively heterosexual. This entire FMA charade is entirely designed as theater for the fundamentalist base of the GOP. It seems even the Senate leadership can’t take it seriously. I’m grateful, of course. But if I were one of the fundamentalists trying to amend the U.S. Constitution, I’d be more than a little perturbed.

What a breath of fresh air to read Alan Simpson’s moving and genuinely conservative defense of the Constitution and the dignity of gay citizens in the Washington Post today. Eschewing the hysteria of some social conservatives, he sees gay people not as a wedge issue or a threat to anyone, but as a group of human beings asking merely to come home, to belong fully to their own families, and to their own society. Money quote:

In our system of government, laws affecting family life are under the jurisdiction of the states, not the federal government. This is as it should be. After all, Republicans have always believed that government actions that affect someone’s personal life, property and liberty – including, if not especially, marriage – should be made at the level of government closest to the people. Indeed, states already actively regulate marriage. For example, 37 states have passed their own version of the Defense of Marriage Act.

I do not argue in any way that we should now sanction gay marriage. Reasonable people can have disagreements about it. That people of goodwill would disagree was something our Founders fully understood when they created our federal system. They saw that contentious social issues would best be handled in the legislatures of the states, where debates could be held closest to home. That’s why we should let the states decide how best to define and recognize any legally sanctioned unions – marriage or otherwise.

As someone who is basically a conservative, I see not an argument about banning marriage or “defending” families but rather a power grab. Conservatives argue vehemently about federal usurpation of other issues best left to the states, such as abortion or gun control. Why would they elevate this one to the federal level?

Why indeed? Unwarranted fear; baseless panic; fundamentalist fervor. Three things conservatives have always been against. And should be today.

Mike Kinsley has long been brilliant at jabbing people on high horses. Now he’s climbed on top of one. Kinsley has long advocated the removal of any public figure’s privacy and so is delighted to see Arnold’s lively sexual past come back to haunt him. But he’s particularly outraged by AS’s recounting in an old interview in Oui magazine of an alleged “gang-bang” between a bunch of bodybuilders and a woman. Here’s what Mike says:

But if it did happen, exactly as Arnold described it in 1977, it’s pretty disgusting. It’s disgusting even if it was consensual all around. It’s disgusting even though Arnold wasn’t married at the time. It’s disgusting even if this amounts to applying the standards of the 21st century to events of the mid-1970s. Schwarzenegger isn’t running for governor of California in 1975.

But why is group sex between consenting adults in private “disgusting”? I guess disgust is not something you can justify or explain. It’s a feeling, not an argument. As for arguments, I can understand why someone who takes a culturally conservative view of sex might feel this way, but a good libertarian-liberal like Mike? Kinsley’s attempt at a justification is that the incident, even if made up, reflects “an attitude toward women that is not acceptable in a politician.” Hmmm. Is this the same Mike Kinsley who defended Bill Clinton? By any standards, AS’s sins are, in fact, far less significant than BC’s. Arnold’s gang-bang wasn’t sexual harrassment, so far as we know, which gives Arnold a moral advantage over the ex-prez. It wasn’t adultery, ahem. It wasn’t hypocrisy, as Kinsley concedes, which gives AS another advantage over Clinton, who was busy signing the preposterous “Defense of Marriage Act,” while getting sucked off under the table in the Oval Office by an intern. It was private and consensual. For all we know, the woman had a great time. Does Kinsley believe that all women are so sexually vulnerable that they cannot consent to such group sex and enjoy it? Why does this harrumphing sound a little like partisanship to me?