It’s just one small, seedy strip. But it meant a world to a lot of people over the decades. Hank Stuever has a moving piece on the end of D.C.’s drag and sex block in Southeast, all to make way for a baseball stadium, when Washington has a perfectly good one as it is. Oh well. My TNR essay on the end of gay culture can be read here. A Christianist sneer can be found here.
(Photo: Aaron Tone.)
There’s a Chef connection to the Cynthia McKinney saga. She paid Isaac Hayes $1000 to commemmorate her new office – from tax-payers’ money.
"I get a call the other night. They’ve found four more bodies in western Baghdad. They’re bound, hands and feet. They’re blindfolded. They’ve been shot in the head. Their bodies bear wounds from beatings and electrical burns, and someone has used a drill on their flesh. That’s just one phone call. I get a few more. Every night it seems, dozens of bodies turn up, both Shiite and Sunni, often killed in the same fashion.
We spoke with a journalist recently who works for an Iraqi television station. For the last nine days, he’s been sleeping at the office. He’s been threatened with death because of his work and he doesn’t want to bring the danger home to his parents and six sisters. He told the Ministry of the Interior about the threat. They told him to get a gun," – NPR’s Baghdad producer JJ Sutherland, today.
(Photo: Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty.)
"Sexual orientation cannot, and must not, be the basis of a second-class citizenship," – Irish prime minister, Bertie Ahern, yesterday.
Ireland will soon legislate civil partnership rights for gay couples, the legal equivalent of marriage in the UK. What’s fascinating to me is how two of the most historically Catholic countries in Western Europe, Spain and Ireland, are now in the forefront of recognizing gay civil equality. Italy and France are, however, less evolved. Perhaps the link between Spain and Ireland is that both countries endured many decades of Church-State collusion, allowing the Church to enjoy astonishing civil powers. The sex abuse scandal helped the collapse of the Church hierarchy’s moral authority in both countries. But it’s politicization that wounded both Spanish and Irish churches in the long run. There’s a lesson there for America’s Christianists. There is a price for conflating religion and politics. Eventually, it will come back to haunt you.
Another item: think-tanks essentially bribed to promote special interests.
I had no idea how many readers are Nietzsche readers. Here’s another:
"Based on that article on Richard Neuhaus in TNR, it seems like the man could be a perfect caricature for everything Nietzsche saw as wrong with modern Christianity. Here’s a quote from The Gay Science:
"The less one knows how to command, the more urgently one covets someone who commands, who commands severely – a god, prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience… for fanaticism is the only ‘strength of will’ that even the weak and insecure can be brought to attain, being a sort of hypnotism of the whole system of the senses and the intellect for the benefit of an excessive nourishment of a single point of view and feeling that henceforth becomes dominant."
Neuhaus’ desire for certainty and authority seem to be the exact opposite of what could make for a pure faith that does more than simply project our personal deficiencies. Nietzsche thought no such thing was possible, and Neuhaus’ bizarre idea of faith as fetishism of authority only works to prove Nietzsche’s side of the argument."
This, alas, is an age longing for authority, when what it really needs is nerve.
A British reader writes:
"As for the date thing not happening for another 1000 or 100 years – well they’re both wrong. As you know, it’ll actually happen next month – 4th of May – as unlike your American friends we in the UK put the date the correct way round. Please feel free to correct the cousins."
Just one of life’s little lessons: open a package before you buy it off the street. (Hat tip: Jack Lewis.)
You know it’s bad for the GOP when National Review and Instapundit barely mention the big news of the day. Tom DeLay’s resignation from elective politics, barely a year and a half after the triumphant Republican re-election campaign of 2004, is a remarkable fall from grace. It happened because the bankruptcy of contemporary Republicanism is increasingly unmissable. And it happened because of obvious corruption, sleaze and a complete lack of broad public appeal. DeLay’s skills were not retail; they were back-door: the schemes and deals and handshakes that are inextricable from effective government but not pretty in daylight. DeLay took that ruthlessness too far, got exposed, and now fairly taints the GOP’s broad national image. It’s probably good news for the Republicans in the short term. They get some time to distance themselves from the architect of their Congressional hegemony. But he was the architect, as integral to contemporary Republicanism as Karl Rove; and the product of the same Southern/Texan Christianist movement that has turned the Republican party into a religious sect, with some business interests along for the ride. Should DeLay have an epitaph? I think so. Let it be his astonishing speech of merely a week ago to a Christianist conference in Washington DC:
"Sides are being chosen, and the future of man hangs in the balance! The enemies of virtue may be on the march, but they have not won, and if we put our trust in Christ, they never will … It is for us then to do as our heroes have always done and put our faith in the perfect redeeming love of Jesus Christ."
In the end, even the Republican candidate from the Congressional district of Galilee couldn’t save him.
(Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty)
The Dish 