Category: The Dish

The Christian movement for more modesty for women’s clothing is a real one, if a pale shadow of the kind of strictures in most Islamic countries. Here’s a survey of young Christian men and their views on modesty. And here are some replies:

Ladies, this is where you can get confused. Many women would think guys are ‘all about’ women who flaunt their bodies. I am here to attempt to speak for us Christian men fighting the fight for purity. Women like this disgust and frustrate me. They take advantage of something that God intended to be beautiful. They lure men away from that which they truly love. They make men like me fight and struggle, and cause many to fall. THESE WOMEN SHOULD NOT BE ADORED OR FOLLOWED! Christian sisters, please do not think that this attention is anything more than a result of short-sighted shallow men who are sexually frustrated and unwilling to follow God’s plan for sex. To me, women who flaunt their bodies make me turn my head, repulsed, and pray that God would guard my heart, eyes, and mind, and that somehow He would show them His infinite love, and that they don’t need to act in this way to be loved.

It’s all the fault of the women, see? That makes some Christian men mad:

It actually really angers me. I find it disrespectful. I don’t think they get it. Do they realize that they have just caused someone to have sexual thoughts about them in their mind? Now the guy feels bad because he fell AGAIN and the girl wiggles on her merry way. If an unsaved girl dresses this way it doesn’t bother me that much, because really how would she know better? But a girl who says she is a Christian, and she says her body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. When that girl flaunts her body in a sexual way, I get really frustrated, because she should know better! Another thing I would like to know is..where is her father??!! He is a man, he knows how we think, how can he let her go out dressed like that??!!

Maybe D’Souza’s Christianist-Islamist alliance has more potential than I thought.

"So choose your first person deliberately. Too many newspaper first persons — and a lot of magazine first persons too — are written in the voice of the neutral feature-writer. They’re the voice of the Journalist. That is the least interesting first person you have. Nobody cares about journalists. They’re not normal people. So choose a first person that draws on a more normal side of your personality. And think about which one will help you tell the story. You’ll see that in very subtle ways it will shape your point of view and your tone and unlock interesting things." – Michael Pollan, giving good advice on writing about nature and science.

A glimpse of what happened in the Pentagon that day.

A defense from Michael Petrelis. He cites Human Rights Campaign spending last year of $1.2 million on lobbying. It sounds impressive until you realize that that’s out of $39 million in 2006 income, according to their annual report – around 3 percent of the total. In contrast, they spent 21 percent of their income on fundraising for more dollars. In total, they say they spent another 19 percent of their budget on "federal, field electoral and legal advocacy" in 2006, an election year, and 25 percent on "Public Policy, Education and Training". The categories are vague to me (perhaps deliberately so) and I may be missing something. I’m not an expert on these things and I don’t want to misrepresent them. If readers more familiar than I with lobby groups can analyse and inspect the report here, I’d be grateful. All I’m trying to do is figure out if HRC as a whole is giving people value for money. Maybe readers can help.

Ideologues have a right to be offended by the comparison.

Hanoi, Vietnam, 9 am.

"This is why, in the end, the greatest victims of torture-as-usual are the rest of us, the informed public. A precious part of our collective identity has been irretrievably lost. We are in the middle of a process of moral corruption: those in power are literally trying to break a part of our ethical backbone, to dampen and undo what is arguably our civilization’s greatest achievement, the growth of our spontaneous moral sensitivity," – Slavoj Zizek, in the NYT today.

Want to reduce carbon emissions and fight the diabetes and obesity epidemic? Paris has the right idea.

This is the final straw, surely. We now know he directly lied about his involvement in the firings of the eight U.S. attorneys. A month ago he said this:

"So far as I knew, my chief of staff was involved in the process of determining who were the weak performers,’ he said. "Where were the districts around the country where we could do better for the people in that district, and that’s what I knew… That is in essence what I knew about the process; was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on," he said. "That’s basically what I knew as the attorney general." …

"Many decisions are delegated," he said. "We have people who were confirmed by the Senate who, by statute, have been delegated authority to make decisions." Mr. Gonzales then repeated: "I never saw documents. We never had a discussion about where things stood."

Yesterday we found out that

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and senior advisers discussed the plan to remove seven United States attorneys at a meeting last Nov. 27, 10 days before the dismissals were carried out, according to a Justice Department calendar entry disclosed Friday.

Of course the relevant emails came out after a suitable delay, to keep the press at bay. No one can have any confidence any more that the AG isn’t a liar. He has lied to Senators; he has lied to the press. He’s got to go.

(Photo: Win McNamee/Getty.)