Category: Old Dish

I know I’ll be excoriated as a Bush toady for saying this, but I don’t actually get the notion that the Bush administration has done a palpable U-turn on global warming. Check out this story. “Last year, the White House described climate change as a serious issue after seeking opinions of the National Academy of Sciences but was undecided about how much of the problem should be blamed on human activities,” the Associated Press reports. This year, in a report to the U.N. no less, the administration argues that “The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability.” Wow. What a change. And no one is claiming that the Bush administration has shifted actual policy. It’s also a grotesque distortion to say that most conservatives completely rebut the notion of some human effect on global warming. Certainly Bjorn Lomborg acknowledges it. My own view of this weird little summer story is that it’s a major Howell Raines coup. A reporter finds some tiny and insignificant change in the wording of administration policy, and Raines puts it on his front page. Drudge takes the bait and Rush follows. Chill, guys. It seems to me that the Bush administration has long held the sensible skeptical position (which does not preclude taking human impact on global warming seriously). The difference between them and Al Gore is that they don’t take this as a certainty or buy the notion you have to throw the economy into reverse to prevent it.

RAINES OF TERROR: Did you get through that New Yorker Ken Fellata piece on the New York Times under Howell Raines? Okay, I did. But I share Tim Noah’s skepticism about the caveats in the piece about the Times’ doing well under Raines. Pulitzers are establishment prizes given to establishment friends (with occasional credentializing outreach). And as Tim points out, “Chatterbox would argue that a major newspaper that can’t sweep the Pulitzers in a year when a gigantic disaster befalls its hometown is a very poor newspaper indeed. The awards are as much for the disaster as they are for the coverage.” I’m not just saying this because Mr Raines banished me, but I used to feel I was missing something when my Times didn’t get delivered and I read the Washington Post instead. Now I don’t. What I got from Auletta’s piece was that Raines is a left-liberal populist ideologue, who likes to big foot his reporters and editors. Not that there’s anything wrong with it! There are plenty of great editors who have been from a similar mold, and having a crusading, left-liberal paper, with more pop-culture and vivid writing could be a great addition to the reading world. But one thing it isn’t: the paper of record. It has excised almost all non-left commentary from its op-ed and editorial columns. It is skewing news coverage in ways that will please Nation-readers – like the hysterical Enron coverage, the bogus poll designed to argue that the public blamed Bush for Enron, or the burying of politically incorrect studies about the validity of racial profiling in speeding tickets. And it’s increasingly happy assuming its readers agree with it. So it explains less and hectors and preens more. Again, this is fine. But let’s acknowledge what it is. Raines is on a crusade for the populist left. And Raines is now the New York Times.

BOOK CLUB: Here’s another Amazon review of this month’s book club selection, “My Dog Tulip,” by J.R. Ackerley:

My Dog Tulip is the ultimate bitch session–in the canine sense of the phrase, of course. In 1947, J.R. Ackerley rescued an 18-month-old German shepherd, and from the start her every look and move were to undo him. “Tulip never let me down. She is nothing if not consistent. She knows where to draw the line, and it is always in the same place, a circle around us both. Indeed, she is a good girl, but–and this is the point–she would not care for it to be generally known.” As he anatomizes her from head to toe with the awe-struck precision of a medieval courtier, Ackerley instantly turns us into Tulipomanes. Alas, many of the mere mortals she encounters feel differently, for there are indeed two Tulips. One is highly strung but heroic, flirtatious but true. The other is a four-legged rejoinder to authority: a biter, a barker, and a dab hand at defecating her way around London. Not that any of these are her fault. “You’re the trouble,” Tulip’s one good vet tells Ackerley as she banishes him from the surgery. “She’s in love with you, that’s obvious. And so life’s full of worries for her.”

Get this book for a great summer read and join fellow andrewsullivan.com readers for a canine conversation in the last week of the month. One sign of your market power: Tulip soared from #52,000 on Amazon’s best-seller list to #50 in just a few hours. Not bad for a book published in 1956.

I THOUGHT IT WAS FUNNY TOO: Was there any follow-up to the story that the Israeli Embassy in Paris just happened to burn down by accident? Larry Miller shares my disbelief.

SOCCER AND AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM: Okay, okay, for some reason I mistranscribed Clint Mathis’s name as Clint Davis. Fixed now. I’m not sure I share the view of many soccer-fan readers who believe that this typo eviscerates any credibility I have as an opiner about football. But for those of you interested in the topic, here’s a book recommended to me on the subject. It’s called “Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism.” Apparently it makes several of the points I tried to. With fewer typos. Robert Samuelson chimes in this morning with an upbeat column, arguing that the U.S. will win the World Cup one day soon. I don’t buy it. Here’s one reader who supports me:

I would rather pluck my eyes out with a cocktail fork than watch a soccer game. Soccer is boring; that’s why Americans don’t watch it. One of the key reasons the rest of the world plays soccer is that it is the most inexpensive game there is: you need a round ball and a flat field. A good baseball glove costs over $40, not to mention bats and balls. Even a high school football player wears over $100 worth of equipment. Soccer’s low costs make it egalitarian; perfect for Europeans and third worlders.

Chauvinism worthy of the English.

GOODBYE, GOOD LOGIC: Here’s an email that I thought worth sharing with the Dish. It takes up a central – and overlooked – point in the current Church crisis. Most of the pedophile and abuse cases now coming to light concern an older generation and events that happened some time ago. How does that square with the theocon argument that the 1960s started the rot? Or the main point of Michael Rose’s hysterical book, “Goodbye, Good Men.” Here’s the point:

There is a thus far unstated irony in Rose’s thesis and, indeed, in conservatives’ take on the current crisis in the church. If Rose’s thesis is correct, it actually exculpates gays and suggests that the good old ways we
re the source of the pedophile problem in the Church. Rose’s thesis as I understand it (I have not read the book) is that “orthodox” priests have been systematically selected out of the priesthood in the past few decades by progressives and homosexuals promoting reform within the Church. And, equally important, this represents a change in seminary training from previous decades.
If Rose’s thesis is correct, priests ordained since the 1970s should be disproportionately more progressive and homosexual and less orthodox than priests ordained before the 1970s. Based on all media reports I have seen, it would seem that most of the cases of pedophile priests are from
the pre-1970s orthodox pool. Very, very few cases appear to involve priests ordained in the past three decades, the presumably progressive and homosexual pool. It would seem then, that if Rose is correct, it isn’t progressives and gays who have brought corruption into the Catholic Church, but rather, a previous generation of conservative, Orthodox priests.

That confirms my impression. It’s the repression, conflict and poor training of the pre-1970s generation that led to disaster once the 1970s happened. Merely going back to that model would only make things worse not better.

If you’ve spent much time around the newly graduated, you’ll find something striking about this younger generation. They have a new religion. It’s called “sensitivity.” There are plenty of things wrong in human conduct, but by far the greatest sin is “insensitivity.” Anything that could faintly unsettle, upset, disturb, unnerve or discombobulate another person according to the Litany of offenses – ethnic, religious, sexual, etc. – must be excised from speech and thought. The reductio ad absurdum of this new creed is to be found in New York States Regents’ Exams for graduating high school students. In the New York Times yesterday, we found out that even Isaac Bashevis Singer and Anton Chekhov have been bowdlerized to conform to the new faith. Their writing has been gutted of any conflict, ethnic references, sexual innuendo, and even hedonistic mentions of wine. It’s so clarifying when all the fusty puritanisms of new left and old right combine. According to the bureaucrat defending this violation of literature, “The changes are made to satisfy the sensitivity guidelines the department uses, so no student will be ‘uncomfortable in a testing situation.'” Doesn’t she understand that making students uncomfortable is the point of education? It’s precisely when we read something offensive or strange or alien that we start to think, to put ourselves and our myopic lives into a broader context. What our education system is now attempting to do is therefore literally instill incuriosity into children, a stultifying, inoffensive, comfortable state in which all the difficult conflicts of the modern world are conflated into anodyne pabulum. Thank God there are some feisty people with brains ready to expose and fight this. Thank God also for Cathy Popkin, Lionel Trilling professor in the humanities at Columbia. She wrote the Regents: “I implore you to put a stop to the scandalous practice of censoring literary texts, ostensibly in the interest of our students. It is dishonest. It is dangerous. It is an embarrassment. It is the practice of fools.” But the fools are now running a large part of the educational asylum.

WOOF WOOF: Here’s what the dust jacket says about “My Dog Tulip,” June’s Book Club Selection:

“J.R. Ackerley’s German shepherd Tulip was skittish, possessive, and wild, but he loved her deeply. This clear-eyed and wondering, humorous and moving book, described by Christopher Isherwood as one of the “great masterpieces of animal literature,” is her biography, a work of faultless and respectful observation that transcends the seeming modesty of its subject. In telling the story of his beloved Tulip, Ackerley has written a book that is a profound and subtle meditation on the strangeness abiding at the heart of all relationships.”

Ackerley was, in his day, one of the most celebrated literary impresarios in London. As editor of the Listener, he published some of the finest prose and poetry of his time. But arguably his greatest achievement was this small classic, arguably the greatest book about a dog ever written. Why pick it? I needed a break from carbon dioxide. And I have to say that this modest little story gave me as much pleasure as any book I have ever read. It’s a book I always recommend to friends, and have never been disappointed in their response. It’s about a dog, but as all dog-owners know, that hardly limits its purview. It’s about love and its mysterious, weird forms. It’s about a real relationship between man and beast that somehow transcends every other relationship this particular man has ever had. It’s about the indignities of being mortal, about fluids and solids, about mating and fighting, about devotion and sexuality. It’s also screamingly funny. I’ve rarely laughed out loud uncontrollably in public spaces by myself, but this book had me sputtering coffee, choking on french fries, and alarming fellow passengers on airplanes. In a strange way, I also found this book a beautiful meditation on freedom; and how such freedom might even be thought of as applying to lesser creatures than men. It brought up a lot of experiences I have had with my own beagle and helped deepen my respect for the lessons she has taught me. What will we discuss? The relationship between animals and humans, the forms of love, the wonder of dogs. Add your own dog experiences and meditations to the mix. If you’ve found the more recent books a little hard to get through, this one you won’t. So join up now. We’ll start discussing it in a couple of weeks.

JEW, JEW: Woody Allen and Ed Koch go at it over the French and anti-Semitism. This is a normal media cycle. After a while, Leon Wieseltier will write a diarist, and everything will be clear.

PRE-EMPTION: This is the new doctrine for American foreign policy. It needs to be. No responsible American administration can simply sit and wait until a rogue terrorist or terrorist state prepares to use weapons of mass destruction, or just weapons of destruction against citizens of the United States. Perhaps president Bush realizes that many of us need reassurance that he hasn’t gone soft or lost focus. Or perhaps it’s part of a concerted campaign to prepare the public for war. Whatever, it’s a highly impressive speech – yet another one. Still, and I never thought I’d say this about a Bush administration, eloquence is one thing. What we need to see now is action – reform of the agencies that have been too passive in the past, and preparation for taking out the biggest single threat to our security, Saddam.

MODO AWOL?: Maureen Dowd gets the blogger treatment from the Judd Brothers.

DID THEY USE BOX-CUTTERS? The often invaluable Edward Jay Epstein lays out the case for skepticism.

FRIEDMAN GETS IT: He’s quietly something of a heretic at the Times op-ed page. Now, he’s another voice understanding the importance of Pim Fortuyn. It’s time we started challenging Muslims about the unreconstructed hostility to liberal institutions in their religion. And those who do shouldn’t be intimidated by phony accusations of bias. These questions must be asked. Good for Tom for broaching the subject.

FISK AND PEARL: Weird detail in Robert “Please Beat Me Up” Fisk’s recent piece complaining about death threats from John Malkovich. (Yes, it’s a funny old world, isn’t it?) Here’s something a reader caught in the text:

But the e-mails that poured into The Independent over the next few days bordered on the inflammatory. The attacks on America were caused by “hate itself, of precisely the obsessive and dehumanising kind that Fisk and Bin Laden have been spreading,” said a letter from a Professor Judea Pearl of UCLA. I was, he claimed, “droolin
g venom” and a professional “hate peddler”.

Is Fisk aware that Daniel Pearl’s father is called Judea and works at UCLA? And that when he hears people like Fisk supporting the hatred and anti-Semitic violence of Islamist terrorists, he might have good reason to be outraged?

GOODBYE! GOOD BOOK: Another fair – and devastating – review of the theocons’ favorite book, “Goodbye! Good Men,” which blames the Church’s current crisis on a conspiracy of ‘liberals and homosexuals.’

A MOSQUE AT GROUND ZERO: A rabbi proposes.

Here’s what The American Prospect is trying to tell us about their traffic in yet another snide post. In the last month, the online magazine had 450,000 unique visitors. In the same period, the most popular part of that site, TAPPED, the blog, got 70,000 hits. “Hits” are not the same as visitors (you could have twenty little gidgets on one page and one visit would give you 20 hits) and a good rule of thumb is to divide the number of hits by 10 to get the visitors. So let’s say TAPPED got 7,000 unique visitors in May. Does it make sense to you that the rest of the site would get 64 times as much traffic as the blog? I’m just confused, guys. So is Jonah. Maybe one of the numbers is right and the other isn’t. But both numbers together make no sense, if you believe, as I do, that TAPPED is obviously more interesting than the rest of the unreadable magazine. Hey, guys, that’s a compliment! Why get all snarky instead of running a simple correction or explain the weird discrepancy? This is the web, guys. No-one will get upset if you made an honest and easy mistake.

Energizing piece in the New York Times today about a new lay Catholic group called Voice of the Faithful. It’s an attempt by faithful Catholics to channel their frustration at a hierarchy seemingly immune to reform or responsibility. If it leads to more lay control of the Church, more lay oversight of administrative and financial matters, all to the good. But what it must do is persuade the hierarchy to open a real debate – not a phony one – about whether the decline of the Church in the last thirty years is in part a function of the current doctrines on priestly celibacy and sexual morality. I profoundly believe that this sex abuse scandal is not the real crisis. It’s a symptom of the deeper one of a Church without leadership in America, without confidence in its own doctrines, and credibility among its own people. Until that changes, nothing will stop the slide. But this is a sign that this time, we, the people of God, the real living, breathing Church, will demand that change occurs. If Erasmus is not listened to, Luther may be around the corner. For more information, check out the website, www.voiceofthefaithful.org

A BOWDLERIZED JIHAD: The Harvard senior whose class day address was entitled “American Jihad,” has finally decided to remove the word “Jihad” from the title of his talk. The text will remain unchanged. How depressing. If that is the right summary of his talk, why shouldn’t he have the cojones to use the word in the title? I wasn’t sympathetic to those wanting to silence this young man, let alone to those thugs who threatened his life. And not knowing the text, it was impossible to make a judgment about the talk. It’s probably multi-cultural uplift of the sort that now passes for wisdom at universities. (Hey, but at least he’s not Tony Kushner.) But if he’s going to talk, let him talk boldly, in the language he wants, to make the statement he desires. This urge for sensitivity – at the expense of bruising and difficult dialogue – is a sickly sign of our times. No surprise harvard has catered to it again. But sad nonetheless.

SEXUAL ABUSE AND SPORTS: A harrowing story from ESPN magazine about an isolated 15 year old child prodigy being sexually used by a college football team while police and college administrators looked the other way. It’s not just priests.

TAP DANCING: The partisan Democratic site, TAPPED, puts out some good, if to my mind shrill, stuff. But they have had an odd response to inquiries about their web stats. The Columbia Journalism Review numbers – touted by Alterman – show the American Prospect Online to have a staggering 450,000 unique visitors in May. When pressed to substantiate that, TAPPED says its own site – the only part of the American Prospect anyone seems to read – has gotten 70,000 “hits” so far this month. What do they mean by “hits”? No one really uses that terminology any more. If that means 70,000 unique visitors, it follows that the main snooze-fest TAP website gets three times as many visitors as the hot blog attached and twice as much as web-king, Instapundit (and please don’t start calling me the web-queen. I’ll cry). I guess I find that somewhat unlikely. If by hits, they mean 70,000 unique visits, then the discrepancy is even larger and weirder. I’m not saying they’re fibbing. They may be flubbing. But I don’t believe it. My burly beer-buddy Jonah has some suspicions about Slate’s endowment as well.

THE BBC’S ISRAEL PROBLEM: You have to go to Britain to really appreciate it. But the sheer viciousness and slant of the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Palestinian dispute permeate every item of news. The London editor of the Jerusalem Post finally decided to stop being interviewed by the BBC. He’s a journalist; he’s not uncritical of many Israeli policies and actions. But he knows anti-Semitism when he sees it:

Since September 11, I have refused all invitations to appear on BBC radio or television. The reason is not that I wish to avoid a debate, but rather that I believe that the BBC has crossed a dangerous threshold. In my judgement, the volume and intensity of this unchallenged diatribe has now transcended mere criticism of Israel. Hatred is in the air. Wittingly or not, I am convinced that the BBC has become the principal agent for reinfecting British society with the virus of anti-Semitism. And that is a game I am not willing to play.

Good for him. What he fails to understand is that the BBC, from its very inception, has never been about open journalistic inquiry. It began as a smothering, paternalistic effort to uphold social morals, to inculcate the right national spirit, to protect the establishment of its day. That’s still its mission. Except the current establishment is no longer the fusty, puritan condescension of Lord Reith, but the fusty, trendy condescension of the Blair generation, the former student radicals whose anti-Americanism is as ingrained as their addiction to pop-cultural ephemera. I’ve long believed that the media in Britain will only regain real vibrancy once the BBC is abolished. Like the National Health Service, it is an idea whose time is past.

ARE THE POLES MELTING? Not according to this interesting anlaysis. Climate change is definitely occurring – but much of it for the colder; and some melting ice-flows might have nothing to do with global warming. I’m no expert on this but having read Bjorn Lomborg, this stuff seems reasonable to me.

Another fantastic column from Hitchens. Is there a consensus building that we cannot win the war on terror until we have secured regime change in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan? Not before Iraq, but surely after.

BLOGGER-TIME: I’m sorry about the screwy dates on my posts. It’s a Blogger problem. No clue when it’ll get fixed.

Will Saletan tries to argue that Bush’s tacking on Iraq is actually a brilliant strategy to get what he wants: a real war. Man, I hope Will is right (and he often is). Then again Will declared in the last election campaign that Bush was toast. What’s interesting to me is that this liberal mag, edited by my friend, Jake Weisberg, who also published “Bushisms”, is publishing pieces that make Bush seem like a master chess player. I have a feeling that the truth is somewhere in between.

PRIVACY CONTINUED: Eugene Volokh has an excellent legal follow-up to the story of pro-life activists taking photos of women seeking abortions. It looks like it’s constitutional – as most invasions of privacy already are.

THE NEW AFGHANISTAN?: Islamo-fascist strikes against soft Western targets; a safe harbor for al Qaeda refugees; nuclear brinksmanship with India. It seems to me Pakistan is slowly moving toward the axis of evil. And we’re neutral between them and the Indians? Safire usefully helps you figure it all out today. I think he’s too soft on Musharraf.

THAT BRITISH GIFT: Great dinner tonight with old Oxford pals – now all Economist machers. But the highlight was a classic understatement from a fellow Brit diner. “What I want to know,” she asked, “is whether anyone had ever heard or written about Pim Fortuyn before his recent difficulties.” Ah yes. Getting shot in the head can be frightfully awkward at times.

DANCING QUEEN: Okay, so I couldn’t resist. I won’t say who forwarded this to me. But you’d be surprised.

POSEUR ALERT: “And anyway I am a very old-fashioned kind of homosexual, or rather sexual minoritarian, I am the kind of homosexual sexual minoritarian who believes that sexual minoritarian liberation is inextricable from the grand project of advancing Federally protected civil rights, and cannot be separated from the liberation struggles of other oppressed populations, cannot be achieved isolated from the global struggle for the abolition of the legacy of colonialism, cannot be achieved isolated from the global resistance movement against militarism and imperialism and racism and fundamentalisms of all sorts, the global movement for the furtherance of social and economic justice, the global multiculturalist, anti-tribalist identity-based movement for pluralist democracy, I am the kind of homosexual who believes that all liberation has an inexpungeable aspect that is collective, communitarian, and also millenarian, utopian, which is to say rooted in principle, theory, dream, imagination, in the absolute non-existence of the Absolute and in the eternal existence of the Alternative, of the Other, in the insistently unceasingly mutable character of our character, I am an old-fashioned sort of homosexual/sexual minoritarian and I think if you wanted a gay commencement speaker in this dark day and age you might have chosen one of those newfangled neo-con gay people with their own website and no day job.” – socialist playwright Tony Kushner, Vassar Commencement address. Ouch.

Wonderfully clarifying piece by Michael Barone.

LORDY LORDY: The Brits can still churn out whack-job peers. Here’s a priceless obit from the Telegraph of an English lord who just couldn’t stop drinking and fornicating. (Thanks to Andrew Stuttaford for noticing it). Five wives, and hundreds of lovers, and yet he couldn’t help but remark that “Queers have been the downfall of all the great empires.” Stanley Kurtz, eat your heart out.

FIXED! The permalinks are working again. I’m sorry they were screwed up. My thanks to Eric Olsen et al for alerting me.

It comes from the New York Review of Books interview I linked to yesterday. It resonated with several readers and is still resonating with me. It’s about negotiating with the Palestinian leadership:

They are products of a culture in which to tell a lie…creates no dissonance. They don’t suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as an irrelevant category. There is only that which serves your purpose and that which doesn’t. They see themselves as emissaries of a national movement for whom everything is permissible. There is no such thing as ‘the truth’.

The tantalizing question is whether he’s referring to the PLO or the literature departments of most Ivy League colleges.

WHEN WILL I DISS BUSH? Some of you think I’m a toady; a gay man says the Church scandal is about homosexuality; and why ‘innocent before proved guilty’ is a principle that should be kept in the courtroom, not public discourse. All on the Letters Page.

A CONSERVATIVE CATHOLIC’S SKEPTICISM: If you log on to National Review’s excellent website, you’ll occasionally notice an hysterical pop-up ad, blaring that “liberals and homosexuals” are conspiring to corrupt Catholicism. It’s plugging a book by one Michael Rose, a very traditional Catholic. No, I haven’t read the book, despite Rod Dreher’s plugs. The hysterical tone of its advocates put me off. But I was intrigued to see it criticized by another conservative catholic, Amy Wellborn, on her fine blog. Here’s her analysis:

Goodbye! Good Men may contain lots of stories, and most of those stories may be true, but the fact is, this book is not a comprehensive look at all seminary education in the United States and shouldn’t be read as such. In order to really prove his thesis that there has a been a church-wide conspiracy against the orthodox and the straight, Rose would have to get data from many dioceses, seminaries and religious orders about how many candidates have applied, how many of those have been turned away, and what the reasons for dismissal were. He might even have had to personally visit some of the seminaries which he critiques and do on-site reporting, rather that relying on the testimony of only the dissatisfied. As it is, all we have in Goodbye! Good Men is the story of what happened to a self-selected group of men who attended particular seminaries. It’s their stories, more often than not anonymously related. It’s their side of their stories.

If that’s true, it sounds like a case-study in fish-in-barrel journalism. Caveat lector.

MGM AND HIV: An interesting story about male genital mutilation (aka circumcision) and HIV. A new study suggests that the inside foreskin is particularly susceptible to infection with HIV. But what are the odds of men contracting HIV in this way from women? Or even from another man? Cases of HIV infection from female to male or from bottom to top are rare indeed. This seems like a stretch to me. A far likelier cause of HIV infection from women to men is other STDs, sores and lesions – many of which are exacerbated by sex with mutilated penises. What I want to know is why there hasn’t been mounds of research to create HIV-resistant lubricants for hereos and homos. That could help protect the inner foreskin as well. But it would counter the notion that the only real solution is abstinence (true but highly unrealistic). Anyway here’s the story. Keep reading andrewsullivan.com for all those indispensable circumcision debate developments.

MARRIAGE NOW: A striking new Zogby poll among gays and lesbians finds one important result. Marriage rights are now easily the most urgent priority for gay men and lesbians – or at least those identified by these survey-takers. Around half – 47 percent – placed equal marriage rights as the most important goal for the gay rights movement. The closest competitor was protection against discrimination in the workplace, with 16 percent. A full 83 percent put marriage as one of the top three goals for the movement. This may seem unsurprising to many. But if you take a look at the last decade or so in gay rights, you’ll see a phenomenal change. When some of us first broached the idea of equality in marriage, we were savaged by the gay establishment. Marriage – some leftist activists complained – was patriarchal, assimilationist, pseudo-religious, sexist, and on and on. Those of us who persisted in making the argument had to take on both the social right and the radical left to make our case. Some left-wing allies soon came around; but the mainstream gay groups were never comfortable with the idea. The Human Rights Campaign did everything it could to bury the issue and even now hates using the m-word for fear of upsetting their older, partisan donors. But the marriage issue is real; it matters; and the silent majority of gay men and women understand its centrality to the question of gay equality. That’s enormously encouraging. There were times in the last fifteen years of campaigning on the subject that I felt almost numb repeating the arguments, making the speeches, doing the talk-shows, attempting to get some pro-marriage voices in the gay press, supporting the real workers in this battle – the lawyers and activists and religious people and lesbian mothers, who saw better than many why this was so important. So forgive me a moment of celebration that more and more people “get it.” It’s especially encouraging to see the highest levels of support among the younger generations and among lesbians. I always believed that marriage would turn out to be a primarily lesbian issue. So much for claims of patriarchy. Now let’s hope the national gay rights organizations get the message, and keep at it until they catch up with the people they are supposed to represent.

The Onion has the scoop.

An emailer sent me the following despatch from Eurovision hell. Americans may not know that this silly song contest is broadcast live across almost every European country in prime time. It’s about as international a cultural event (sports excluded) that occurs in Europe:

For the fourth year in a row, we subjected ourselves to Eurovision Saturday night…. Had a feeling something like what you reported happened to Israel….their entry was by far the only really creative one, with the best lyrics, best arrangement….we were amazed at how few votes they got. 90% of the others (including the winner) were like rejects from a 1975 American Disco Show…I was waiting for lyrics about “Disco Canard”, frankly.

On another note, if anyone has found a single EU official, Chris Patten especially, who has said a single thing about the latest Arafat-sponsored suicide attacks in Israel, please let me know. Whenever these characters huff and puff about Israel’s self-defense, they always put in a disclaimer that of course, they find Palestinian terror appalling. But then, when it happens, they say … nothing. That’s more eloquent than any of their massaged press statements.