The Dish

E. J. expands on what we’ve been exploring all week.

Professor Hanlon O’Faolin has cracked the Bloomsday Code. The Onion’s crack reporters are on the case.

You have to see Joe Lieberman’s latest to believe it.

I’m absorbing the email flood after Larry King last night and will try and get back to everyone, but several are asking if I have written on these subjects. Er, yes. My first book, "Virtually Normal," makes the key arguments about why the Catholic teaching on homosexuality is incoherent on its own terms. My second book, "Love Undetectable," is a memoir of my faith-journey through the plague years, an account of the origins of homosexual orientation, and a celebration of friendship as a core Christian virtue. If you’re interested, check them out. Part of my next book, "The Conservative Soul," tackles the deeper philosophical issues behind Catholicism’s treatment of sexuality as a whole – straight and gay – as well as presenting a defense of a non-fundamentalist Christianity as the Christian life closest to Jesus’ example. You can pre-order it here.

A reader writes:

I, along with my 91 year-old, daily-Mass-attending Irish-Catholic mother, watched the CNN Larry King show last night. Says mom at the conclusion: "The only one making any sense to me is that guy who you say you read online everyday." There is hope for us all.

Thanks for all the emails. If I’ve got 91 year-old Irish-Catholic grandmas on my side, what do I have to fear? I had my own Irish Catholic grandma, of course: the seventh of thirteen kids from the town of Tralee, in County Kerry, Ireland. I think she held the world record for a decade of the Rosary; and she lived with us as I grew up. I’ve never witnessed faith like hers, and she never read a book of theology in her life. If she’s interceding for me with Our Lady in heaven, and she may well be, I’m gonna be ok (or, at least, forgiven).

Coulter tries one more publicity ploy. If only the returns were diminishing.

Not from Republicans – but from Democrats. Check out the new Rasmussen poll (although Rasmussen polls are not the most reliable). Lieberman may run as an Independent – and could probably win. What if McCain is denied the Republican nomination and invites Lieberman to be his running mate on an Independent ticket in ’08? Hmmmm.

"For people in America who are a part of my political tradition, our great sin has often been ignoring religion or denying its power or refusing to engage it because it seemed hostile to us. For … the so-called Christian right and its allies, their great sin has been believing they were in full possession of the truth," – president Bill Clinton, in one of the wisest formulations I have read on American politics and religion in a long time.

In some quarters, gay culture obviously is not over. And I watched "Valley of the Dolls" this week for the first time as well.

McLean, Virginia, 3 pm.