The Dish

What did I start? Beliefnet takes a peep under the vestments of many faiths here.

Benedict XVI keeps surprising. We are seeing, as John Allen notes, the greening of institutional Christianity.

"Mary Cheney is going to make a fine mom and she’s going to love this child a lot," – closet-tolerant, president George W. Bush. And Heather too, I might add.

Gerard Baker is surely right about the broad nature of the president’s likely decision:

More even than a president normally is, Mr Bush is alone with this decision. He can choose to manage the messy consequences of his Iraq gamble, cut his and the world’s losses and wind it down. But if he does that he knows for sure his presidency will be judged a colossal failure. His vision of democracy in the Middle East will be a bloody shambles.

He is more likely to think, I suspect, as he reflects alone in the next few weeks, that he still has a chance to change that verdict — to bring all that America’s might can muster and give it one final, serious, push for success. It is, surely, at least, what he should do.

Somehow, however, I don’t think rearranging the troops with a temporary surge will ever amount to "all that America’s might can muster." And there’s no evidence that the president is attempting anything much more ambitious. As I said before: if he adds 50,000 more troops, we’ll know he’s serious. Short of that, it’s all spin – paid for by others’ lives.

(Photo: Brooks Kraft/Corbis for Time.)

Nashville, Tennessee, 7.20 am.

Can we all just leave the kids alone? Ugh. The World’s Least Cool 8-Year-old:

A reader writes:

Thanks for the pointer to Rich Lowry at the Corner.

Lowry compares Romney’s flip-flops to the movements of the Bush campaign in 1999/2000. But I think things have changed since then, and it is this change that I think is the real back story that deserves more attention.

In 1999/2000, Bush did not have to say much about or defend his religion. He ran a little bit on faith-based initiatives, but mostly spent his campaign reaching out for "wider appeal to the party and the electorate." Mostly, the Christianists stood by like a standard-issue politician’s wife: smiling at his side when he needed them, out working the neighborhoods where they had influence, and generally following along when he made guarded statements (remember how he said he would have no "pro-life litmus test"?). He did not need to pander to them, because they mostly already believed he was their man. Once he got through the dirty business of campaigning, he would be coming home to them.

Contrast that with the beginnings of this election cycle, where it is clear the religious right feels it was mostly betrayed over the last six years. Indeed, while the media polling says the Republican’s 06 loss resulted from losing the middle, the Christian right blames politicians for not following through on their promises and loosing the faith-based voters.

Now, it’s no longer possible for a Republican candidate to make guarded statements with a wink and a nod. The Christianists are demanding ideological purity from "their" candidate, which is why the pre-08 Republican contenders (McCain, et al) are forced into this groveling posture.

So the question becomes, how much power do the Christianists really have? They believe they have enough power not only to win the nomination but the general election too. If the movements by all these early candidates are any indication, I’m almost worried they’re right.

A reader answers my earlier reader’s worry about the statistical validity of the large study that found that gay men have bigger willies than straight men:

As a stats nerd myself, I had to comment on your reader’s concerns about the differential sample size regarding the penis size. His concern is very likely unfounded. The differential sample size, per se, would have no effect on the relative differences between the two groups or on interpretation of the differences. Indeed, both of these samples are very large sample sizes and so sample size should not affect the characteristics of distributions. Generally, you only worry about it when you have sample sizes below 30 and that is not the case here. If there were differences in the shape of the distributions, your reader would be right and it would confound interpretation. However, it does not appear as though that is the case (see attached article).

Even if the distributions were skewed with a small proportion having very large penises (and more so than the proportion of those having very small penises), it would not really be a problem unless they were skewed in different directions. Because of the large sample sizes, the outliers (either very large or very small) would not have substantial effect in affecting the interpretation of the differences (or the mean in this case). Unfortunately, as a straight guy, I‚Äôd like to believe it‚Äôs not true!, however I don’t believe that there are statistical reasons to doubt the analyses …

I’ve had several expert emails on this and they all agree. Here’s the math:

According to Wikipedia, the population standard deviation in penis sizes is .8 inches.  Other surveys had a smaller SD, but for argument’s sake, we’ll use the larger one.  If we assume that gay and straight men have different average penis lengths but the same variance in lengths (i.e. Same standard deviation – this property is called homoscedasticty – no joke) we can use this .8 figure for our SD without issue. Our calculation is straight-forward:

Mean Difference in Penis Size: .33 inches
Gay Sample Size: 935
Standard Error (Gay Average): SD*Sqrt[N]/N = (.8)(Sqrt(935))/935 = .0262
Standard Error (Straight Average): (.8)(Sqrt(4187))/4187 = .0124
Standard Error (difference) = Sqrt(.0262^2 + .0124^2) = .028986
Z statistics = .33 / .028986 = 11.3847

With this very high z-statistic, the probability of Kinsey’s results happening by pure chance are extremely, extremely low – way less than .0001. Of course, this result depends upon accurate self-reporting and our assumption about having the same variance. If this result is not true, it is not because of the sample sizes.

Alas, stats was not my strong suit in grad school – but I did pass! The issue of self-reporting would only be salient if gay men were more boastful than straight men, but I don’t immediately see why this should be so. They’re probably all exaggerating a little.

Of course, if we are to agree that gay men have slightly bigger peepees than straight guys, the question is: why? Maybe hormone levels in the womb are a factor. I’ve long thought that the theory that homosexality is partly a function of abnormally high levels of testosterone n the womb was worth looking into. The stereotype is that gay men are somehow more feminine than straight men. But it could be that they are actually more masculine in the sense of having higher testosterone levels in fetal development. That might also shed light on the black-white-Asian penis differential. Are there any solid studies on that? (Apparently not.)

You know it’s true:

Norm Geras notices it.