Month: June 2012

Josh Weed, a devout Mormon, outs himself as a gay man happily married to a woman. He spares no details:

Some might assume that because I’m married to a woman, I must be bisexual. This would be true if sexual orientation was defined by sexual experience. Heck, if sexual orientation were defined by sexual experience, I would be as straight as the day is long even though I’ve never been turned on by a Victoria’s Secret commercial in my entire life. Sexual orientation is defined by attraction, not by experience. In my case, I am attracted sexually to men. Period. Yet my marriage is wonderful, and Lolly and I have an extremely healthy and robust sex life. How can this be?

The truth is, what people are really asking with the above question is “how can you be gay if your primary sex partner is a girl?” I didn’t fully understand the answer to this question until I was doing research on sexuality in grad school even though I had been happily married for almost five years at that point. I knew that I was gay, and I also knew that sex with my wife was enjoyable. But I didn’t understand how that was happening. Here is the basic reality that I actually think many people could use a lesson in: sex is about more than just visual attraction and lust and it is about more than just passion and infatuation. I won’t get into the boring details of the research here, but basically when sex is done right, at its deepest level it is about intimacy. It is about one human being connecting with another human being they love.

Dreher applauds:

Perhaps most interesting of all, he says that the love and acceptance he got from his parents and from others as a gay teenager helped him make the choice he did to be faithful to his religion, and ultimately to have a happy traditional marriage — this, as opposed to being filled with self-hatred and shame. He is a faithful Mormon, and believes that acting on same-sex desire is sinful.

Millman has mixed feelings:

[I]t’s telling that [Weed] lumps a grand word like “passion” in with weak ones “visual attraction” and “infatuation.” There are plenty of people who go through life without ever experiencing passion, or without ever experiencing it in a sexual context, and I don’t think anyone should make fun of them for it. But it’s not a small word, nor a small concept, nor a small matter to resign it to life’s dustbin. 

Brandon K. Thorp calls Weed's confession "one of the most fascinating things you'll read this June":

If he's to be taken at his word, it seems he ignored the imperatives of his own natural attractions to settle down with the person he believed to be his soul-mate, and with whom he wanted to build a family. If he was an atheist or a Unitarian or a Buddhist who did that and wrote about it, he'd be proclaimed a bold sexual rebel. The fact that he just happens to be a member of a religion that condemns homosexuality makes the decision feel a lot less bold, and more like the result of brainwashing — but he's so nice! So reasonable!

Gay LDS Actor makes an important point:

Josh, himself, says his path is not necessarily the right path for anyone else and pleads with people to allow them to find their own path, and I think that is key. I have always said in my blog that my path was right for me, but I do not dismiss that other paths are just as valid based on each individual's circumstance.  Never in a million years would I say that Josh and Lolly's path is wrong if it's truly working for them.  Whether it is, only they will know.

My feelings entirely. The point of the gay rights movement is not to make everyone gay; it is to help everyone be themselves, to expand the possibilities of a fulfilling, loved life for more human beings. If that means some gays really want to marry women, and they are not deceiving anyone, it's totally their choice – and their right not to be mocked for it.

Eli Lake is the senior national security correspondent for Newsweek/Daily Beast. Previous videos of Eli here, here, here, here and here. “Ask Anything” archive here.

A reader writes:

The post on how fruits perceive each other ripening explains a long-puzzling Latin proverb" “uva uvam videndo varia fit," i.e. "A grape becomes different by seeing another grape."

This proverb is found in the ancient commentaries to Juvenal’s Satire 2.81, which itself says that a grape picks up its color from another grape. It seems to be an ancient agricultural belief common to the Romans, Greeks, and Persians.

It is nice to see that modern science is confirming traditional practices.

Author Daniel H. Wilson imagines how ethics might change once robot implants are possible for humans:

Along the same lines, as we trust robots more and more, we may require a new moral framework:

Should a drone fire on a house where a target is known to be hiding, which may also be sheltering civilians? Should a driverless car swerve to avoid pedestrians if that means hitting other vehicles or endangering its occupants? Should a robot involved in disaster recovery tell people the truth about what is happening if that risks causing a panic? Such questions have led to the emergence of the field of “machine ethics”, which aims to give machines the ability to make such choices appropriately—in other words, to tell right from wrong.

John Ellis is pretty close to where I am on the campaign Obama needs to wage. No, not scorched earth against Romney (though some Bain ads are legit). The following:

“Framed choice” is Team Obama’s only hope of holding enough white voters to avoid dismissal. The “framed choice” strategy is basically this: Everyone knows that pensions (Social Security) and health care (Medicare, Medicaid, child health programs) are going to bankrupt the nation unless they are “right-sized” to revenue and existing debt. Whoever is elected president in 2012 will have to “right-size” these programs over the course of the next four years.

The framed choice for the white voters who will decide this election is this: Who do you think will better protect the interests of working-class and middle-class families when the inevitable cuts are packaged? Who do you want negotiating for you when it comes down to who gets hurt and who doesn’t? Do you really want Mitt Romney and a bunch of right-wing congressmen making these decisions?

That's particularly true given the likelihood of a narrowly GOP Congress. Obama should say to voters what Clinton did: we all know we're going to have to sacrifice. Would you rather I was in the mix defending your economic security – or do you want to leave it all to Romney and Ryan? Do you really think we can tackle this debt without any contribution from the super-rich? If you do, vote Romney-Ryan.

As Jerry Sandusky's trial starts, Luke Dittrich revisits Joe Paterno's role:

You will find, if you dig into [Paterno's] archives from 1998, that he was a very busy man — he wrote in one letter that he had "committed all my free time to" and was "really stretched" by the ongoing fundraising campaign. You will find that he was a very reliable man as well. When he planned to do something, he would do it. In fact, if you look at his agenda from 1998, you'll see that he almost always kept to his schedule, and that his only cancellations fall within a very narrow window of time. The first cancellation is on May 15, two days after police listen in on Sandusky's half-confession to the mother of a young boy. That evening, Paterno cuts short a fundraising trip to Valley Forge, then cancels a four-day-long personal vacation he had been planning to take from May 16 to 19, to his summer home in Avalon, New Jersey. He resumes his scheduled fundraising trips in June, about a week after the investigation against Sandusky is dropped. He doesn't miss any more events for the remainder of the year.

The following season, Sandusky abruptly and unexpectedly announces his retirement. Did Joe know? Who knows. The files raise questions but provide no answers. And regardless, it doesn't change the basic fact, testified to by almost everyone who's ever met him or worshiped him: Joe Paterno was a good man. But let's just agree on one more thing. Joe Paterno did precisely what school regulations required him to do in 2002, when a graduate assistant came to his home to tell him he had just witnessed Jerry Sandusky molesting a preadolescent boy in a shower stall at the football building. Joe Paterno notified another Penn State administrator. Joe Paterno did not do anything more than that.

There are lots of words you could use to describe Joe Paterno's behavior. Managerial. Bureaucratic. Lawful. Heroic? Let's agree that if you are going to look for any real heroes in this story, you're going to have to look elsewhere.

Dish coverage of the fallout here, here, here, here and here.

(Photo:  Former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky arrives to the Centre County Courthouse before jury selection begins in the Sandusky child sex abuse trial on June 5, 2012 in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. Sandusky is a former Penn State assistant football coach charged with sexually abusing children. By Patrick Smith/Getty Images)

She now has "MDS or myelodysplastic syndrome". It's great she is prepared to share so much of her private life. It helps others in similar circumstances, dispels stigma and advances education.

Yep, he's a goddamn-pinko-lib, as far as his own stark-raving-bonkers state party is concerned. The reason? He endorsed the far right candidate, Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst, against the seriously far right insurgent, Ted Cruz. But my favorite part of the story is how Dewhurst spun the crowd's discontent:

"I thought they said Dew!"

As Zeke Miller noted: Cue the Simpsons.

Well, sabotage may be too strong a word, but this is telling:

Republicans have opposed a lion's share of stimulus measures that once they supported, such as a payroll tax break, which they grudgingly embraced earlier this year. Even unemployment insurance, a relatively uncontroversial tool for helping those in an economic downturn, has been consistently held up by Republicans or used as a bargaining chip for more tax cuts. Ten years ago, prominent conservatives were loudly making the case for fiscal stimulus to get the economy going; today, they treat such ideas like they're the plague.

Traditionally, during economic recessions, Republicans have been supportive of loose monetary policy. Not this time. Rather, Republicans have upbraided Ben Bernanke, head of the Federal Reserve, for even considering policies that focus on growing the economy and creating jobs.

At some point, Obama has to stop sounding defensive on the faltering recovery and start pointing to who is actually responsible.

A new report from the Food Chain Workers Alliance found that only 13.5 percent of food workers make a liveable wage:

The [report] looks at five aspects of the food industry — food production, processing, distribution, retail, and service — and is filled with data and policy recommendations. Collectively, these five arenas sell over? $1.8 trillion in goods and services annually, accounting for over 13 percent? of the U.S. gross domestic product. And yet front-line workers in the food chain — the ones not in management or office positions — earn a median of $18,889 a year.

Often food workers are paid by piece rate instead of hourly. Maddie Oatman excerpts Tracie McMillan's undercover stint at a garlic farm in The American Way of Eating:

Even though Rosalinda's tarjeta will show that she came in at 5:30 a.m. and left at 2:30 p.m., a nine-hour day, her check will say she was there for two hours—exactly the number of hours she would have had to work at minimum wage ($8) to earn what she made via piece rate ($16). Later, I ask advocates if this is unusual, and everyone shrugs: Not every contractor does it, but they see it regularly. Earning minimum wage at our piece rate would require a speed that seems impossible: five buckets an hour. (In my month in garlic, I do not meet anyone who can average that for an entire day.)