Author: Andrew Sullivan

My readers flex more muscles:

"Regarding the nerd stuff about the time and date reading 01:02:03 04/05/06 at 2 minutes and 3 seconds after 1 AM on Wednesday, I think they haven’t gone far enough.. Depending on how you arrange and display time and date, then at 34 minutes and 56.7 seconds after noon on August 9, 2010, the time and date will be: 12:34:56.7 8/9/10."

Er, thanks.

"I said a little prayer before I actually did the fingerprint thing, and the picture. My prayer was basically: ‘Let people see Christ through me. And let me smile,’" – Tom DeLay, channeling God again. John Judis has the scoop on his possible successor.

It’s just one small, seedy strip. But it meant a world to a lot of people over the decades. Hank Stuever has a moving piece on the end of D.C.’s drag and sex block in Southeast, all to make way for a baseball stadium, when Washington has a perfectly good one as it is. Oh well. My TNR essay on the end of gay culture can be read here. A Christianist sneer can be found here.

(Photo: Aaron Tone.)

There’s a Chef connection to the Cynthia McKinney saga. She paid Isaac Hayes $1000 to commemmorate her new office – from tax-payers’ money.

"I get a call the other night. They’ve found four more bodies in western Baghdad. They’re bound, hands and feet. They’re blindfolded. They’ve been shot in the head. Their bodies bear wounds from beatings and electrical burns, and someone has used a drill on their flesh. That’s just one phone call. I get a few more. Every night it seems, dozens of bodies turn up, both Shiite and Sunni, often killed in the same fashion.
We spoke with a journalist recently who works for an Iraqi television station. For the last nine days, he’s been sleeping at the office. He’s been threatened with death because of his work and he doesn’t want to bring the danger home to his parents and six sisters. He told the Ministry of the Interior about the threat. They told him to get a gun," – NPR’s Baghdad producer JJ Sutherland, today.

(Photo: Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty.)

"Sexual orientation cannot, and must not, be the basis of a second-class citizenship," – Irish prime minister, Bertie Ahern, yesterday.

Ireland will soon legislate civil partnership rights for gay couples, the legal equivalent of marriage in the UK. What’s fascinating to me is how two of the most historically Catholic countries in Western Europe, Spain and Ireland, are now in the forefront of recognizing gay civil equality. Italy and France are, however, less evolved. Perhaps the link between Spain and Ireland is that both countries endured many decades of Church-State collusion, allowing the Church to enjoy astonishing civil powers. The sex abuse scandal helped the collapse of the Church hierarchy’s moral authority in both countries. But it’s politicization that wounded both Spanish and Irish churches in the long run. There’s a lesson there for America’s Christianists. There is a price for conflating religion and politics. Eventually, it will come back to haunt you.

Another item: think-tanks essentially bribed to promote special interests.

I had no idea how many readers are Nietzsche readers. Here’s another:

"Based on that article on Richard Neuhaus in TNR, it seems like the man could be a perfect caricature for everything Nietzsche saw as wrong with modern Christianity. Here’s a quote from The Gay Science:

"The less one knows how to command, the more urgently one covets someone who commands, who commands severely – a god, prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience… for fanaticism is the only ‘strength of will’ that even the weak and insecure can be brought to attain, being a sort of hypnotism of the whole system of the senses and the intellect for the benefit of an excessive nourishment of a single point of view and feeling that henceforth becomes dominant."

Neuhaus’ desire for certainty and authority seem to be the exact opposite of what could make for a pure faith that does more than simply project our personal deficiencies. Nietzsche thought no such thing was possible, and Neuhaus’ bizarre idea of faith as fetishism of authority only works to prove Nietzsche’s side of the argument."

This, alas, is an age longing for authority, when what it really needs is nerve.

A British reader writes:

"As for the date thing not happening for another 1000 or 100 years – well they’re both wrong. As you know, it’ll actually happen next month –  4th of May  – as unlike your American friends we in the UK put the date the correct way round. Please feel free to correct the cousins."

Just one of life’s little lessons: open a package before you buy it off the street. (Hat tip: Jack Lewis.)