The Dish

Inimitable:

Cal Thomas: You’ve read the Iraq Study Group Report?

Donald Rumsfeld: I haven’t. I’ve read reports of it and gone through the executive summary.

(Photo: Cherie A. Thurlby/DOD/AP.)

If tofu makes you gay and reduces the magnitude of your member, then gay men should all be feeling inadequate. In fact, Alfred Kinsey conducted serious empirical research in this area and two researchers recently went through the data and published a paper in the peer-reviewed Archives of Sexual Behavior. Here’s the abstract:

The relation between sexual orientation and penile dimensions in a large sample of men was studied. Subjects were 5,122 men interviewed by the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction from 1938 to 1963. They were dichotomously classified as either homosexual (n = 935) or heterosexual (n = 4187). Penile dimensions were assessed using five measures of penile length and circumference from Kinsey’s original protocol. On all five measures, homosexual men reported larger penises than did heterosexual men. Explanations for these differences are discussed, including the possibility that these findings provide additional evidence that variations in prenatal hormonal levels (or other biological mechanisms affecting reproductive structures) affect sexual orientation development.

We win.

Seattle, Washington, 3.10 pm.

A reader writes:

I’m a gay widower whose husband, age 54, died last year of an unexpected heart attack. Unfortunately, despite my reminders, he had neglected to do all those good things like making a will, etc.; thus, predictable unpleasantness followed with his family, and there I was, alone with just our little fuzzy dog, in a cow-patty-size, homophobic town far out on the prairie, without any of the protections of law in this gothically conservative state. I’ll skip the tedious details – nothing much really dramatic happened, save some nasty conversations; by the grace of God, I happened to have some savings in the bank and was able to move on the spur of the moment, just a week after the funeral, sans almost all of what belonged to my husband – let me tell you, it was a feeling and an experience I’ll never forget.

So forgive me if I say that the word "conservative" has a really bad taste in my mouth now; I used to feel somewhat conservative, but when your whole life as well as your home – our home – disappears overnight due to the oh-so-righteous attitudes of your friends, neighbors, and family, well – you get the picture.  I cried when I watched the broadband video of the vote not to revisit the equal marriage issue in Canada last week – because I know exactly what that means in concrete terms. If it stands there, and I think it will now, it will come to the U.S. eventually, even to Texas; and can’t come too soon to suit me.

Pity Canada is so far north, ya know?  All that ice and snow …

Of course he opposes it. And it is a good thing that he has now publicly said so. Money quote:

"The new shape of conflicts, especially since the terrorist threat unleashed new forms of violence, demands that the international community reaffirm international humanitarian law."

Geneva Conventions, anyone? What this administration has done with respect to torture and abuse of detainees and indefinite suspension of habeas corpus has put the United States in a morally compromised position – one that intrinsically violates the constitutional core of this country. Maybe Benedict’s words will prompt some theocons to speak some truth to power. Unless power, of course, is their truth.

(Photo: Wolfgang Radke/AP.)

Slate’s editor, Jacob Weisberg, with whom I once shared an intern pit, has a great piece on Obama in Men’s Vogue. Money quote:

As a speaker, Obama does not strive for the soulful effect of an African-American evangelical. Nor does he conjure instant empathy with an audience, the way Bill Clinton does. He delivers his message with the understated charisma of a Midwestern news anchor. But when he writes or when he speaks, Obama does something no one else in politics does: He plumbs his own anxiety and doubt, and ties his life story to political problems that few elected officials dare to discuss so personally, including the disparities of race and class, drug abuse, poverty, and, of course, faith.

I assume that Vladimir Putin is behind the poisoning of several political opponents as well as the assassination of Anna Politskaya. I also assume he’s smart enough to hire various middle-men to protect his own involvement. He’s a mafia-boss, trained by the KGB. But his dangerous game may have gone awry and the disappearance of the material should be of enormos concern, because it is necessary for the kind of nuke we know Islamists want to use against us. Ed Epstein provides a helpful guide to where this material could have come from here. This strikes me as a matter of extreme urgency.

"If Republicans can’t win New Hampshire and the Mountain West, they can’t win a national majority. And they can’t win those states without libertarian votes. They’re going to need to stop scaring libertarian, centrist, and independent voters with their social-conservative obsessions and become once again the party of fiscal responsibility. In a Newsweek poll just before the election, 47 percent of respondents said they trusted the Democrats more on "federal spending and the deficit," compared to just 31 percent who trusted the Republicans. That’s not Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party," – David Boaz and David Kirby, TCS.

A reader writes:

Background on my attitude: I thought the war was unsupported from the outset. It was a mistake and one we have just piled on mistakes to make worse. We should never have gone in, if we did, we needed double the troops, a better plan for the postwar period, one that was flexible so that if X happens, we can adjust to point Y. In short, this is a cluster-f**k. It could be worse, but that’s like Bill Parcells saying Sunday night "Hey, we could have missed that field goal". Clear enough about my attitude towards Iraq? Good.

However, I’m a firm believer in the Colin Powell thought process: we broke it and everything that’s happened since, including things outside our control, is our responsibility (not nessesarily our fault). If we leave now, we create a humanitarian crisis of such epic proportion that if it were any other country, we would be begging our leaders to intervene. I believe in being responsible for your actions, right or wrong. With that in mind, I think it is our responsibility to throw everything we have at this to fix it. If it means doubling the Army by starting the draft again, let’s do it. If it means paying every Iraqi $1000 to stop fighting, lets raise those taxes and start sending checks. If it means we have to fly the Iranian flag on the Fourth of July, we do it. Whatever it takes to fix the problem, we do, even if it causes much more pain than we’ve felt so far. Like a parent for their child, we protect them with our lives and if it takes the end of America to make Iraq whole, we owe it to them to go to that extreme. 

I see any options short of solving the problem with the fewest Iraqi deaths to be passive-aggressive.

A reader writes:

It was so fun to see you mention Matthew Scully’s book on animal welfare today! I discovered "Dominion" and your blog at roughly the same time two years ago, and together they’ve played a big role in my re-examination of my own convictions.

Like your blog does when it’s at its best, "Dominion" casts aside partisanship for a search for truth. I never questioned our treatment of animals before reading his book. Mostly, I dismissed the issue – and the bleeding hearts who typically promoted it – as entirely juvenile and misdirected.  It took a conservative, Catholic, former Bush speechwriter to show – in beautiful and horrifying terms – the seriousness of the problem, and the contradiction between our treatment of animals and any claim of moral superiority.

Matthew has indeed done God’s work in bringing this to the surface. The photograph above is courtesy of Farm Sanctuary. Wikipedia’s description of it is:

"Female pigs used for breeding (called ‘breeding sows’ by industry) are confined most of their lives in ‘gestation crates’ which are so small that they cannot even turn around. The pigs’ basic needs are denied, and they experience severe physical and psychological disorders."

Pigs are as intelligent and as sensitive as dogs. And the way we treat them in factory farms is a form of barbarism.