The Dish

This truly is a tale of two conservatisms. In America, a core plank of the Republican party is fear and loathing of homosexuals, banning any civil rights for gay couples, persecuting gay servicemembers, and reiterating claims that children need to be protected from the gay menace. Republican intellectuals are intent on Biblical proscriptions of the alleged gay threat to the family, resurrecting the idea that psychotherapy can "cure" gays, and reviving natural law to ensure that gay couples are rendered second class citizens in their own constitution. In Britain this week, at the Conservative Party Conference, there will be a big event to celebrate gay inclusion:

The official Conservative event will be hosted by high-profile LGBT Conservatives Iain Dale, political blogger and shortlisted Parliamentary candidate for the safe Conservative seat of Bracknell and openly-Lesbian Vice Chair of the Party Margot James.  It will include a live performance by singer Angie Brown and addresses by senior shadow cabinet members, Nick Herbert and Theresa May, as well as Stonewall’s Ben Summerskill. 

There's a protest – by the left. Labour is terrified that the Tories have left previous bigotry behind and can now appeal to gay voters on the basis of their core ideas and arguments. And look at who's scheduled: Two openly gay future cabinet members and the openly gay vice-chair of the party. That's better than the Democrats.

Why the inclusion? Because conservatism should be about what it stands for, not the people it excludes. But not in America. Here, the base hatred only deepens; and the cowardice at the top endures.

Jerry Coyne blogs from the atheist meeting that took place over the weekend:

Dan Dennett talked about interviews with active priests and ministers who are atheists, and also mounted a hilarious attack on theologians like Karen Armstrong, who mouth pious nonsense like, “God is the God behind God.” Dennett calls this kind of language a “deepity”: a statement that has two meanings, one of which is true but superficial, the other which sounds profound but is meaningless. His exemplar of a deepity is the statement “Love is just a word.” True, it’s a word like “cheeseburger,” but the supposed deeper sense is wrong: love is an emotion, a feeling, a condition, and not just a word in the dictionary. He gave several examples of other deepities from academic theologians; when you see these things laid out — ripped from their texts — in a Powerpoint slide, they make you realize how truly fatuous are the lucubrations of people like Armstrong, Eagleton, and Haught. Sarcasm will be the best weapon against this stuff.

They're really charming, aren't they? It is as if everything arrogant about the academy and everything sneering about cable news culture is combined into one big snarky smugfest. Maybe these atheists will indeed help push back the fundamentalist right. Maybe they will remind people that between these atheist bigots and these fundamentalist bigots, the appeal of the Christianity of the Gospels shines like the sun.

"Since this story was originally published, the former student referred to as "Brewster" has stepped forward to reveal that he was 16 years old, not 15, at the time of the incident described in this report," – Fox News.

Propagandist Sean Hannity, never missing a chance to describe gay people as pedophiles or potential supporters of pedophiles, has accused Kevin Jennings of abetting "statutory rape" because of the case. Greg Sargent wonders if he too will correct and apologize for the error.

This will make the neocon right mad:

The United States is the most admired country globally thanks largely to the star power of President Barack Obama and his administration, according to a new poll. It climbed from seventh place last year, ahead of France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Japan which completed the top five nations in the Nation Brand Index (NBI).

"What's really remarkable is that in all my years studying national reputation, I have never seen any country experience such a dramatic change in its standing as we see for the United States for 2009," said Simon Anholt, the founder of NBI, which measured the global image of 50 countries each year.

Now, of course, this needs to be accompanied with shrewd diplomacy and smart warfare. But those of us who saw Obama as a real chance to reboot the US' relations with the rest of the world and remove the taint of the Cheney era were not dreaming.

Conor Friedersdorf makes the obvious point:

A reader writes:

Andrew, you defended your attack on Bill Kristol – who I can't stand – by saying he hadn't spoken up for the victims of hate crimes in Iraq.  Those hate crimes are horrible; but Andrew, if you're going to start criticizing people for not speaking up on every horror, you may as well give up blogging about anything else.  I'm not saying these crimes aren't awful – but saying that a man's silence on an horrific crimes means he's celebrating them?  Andrew, he probably hasn't even heard of them.  That makes him callous, cold, and thoughtless, among many other sins, but it does not mean he's celebrating torture and death.

Yes, you're right, of course. Although let me point out that these are not hate-crimes, they are planned and executed murders by religious death-squads. Nonetheless, my emotions got the better of me, and that was an unfair hyperbole. I apologize to him and you. But please understand how it feels to have originally supported a war that ends with this. The guilt I've felt for the past few years at what I helped enable – even though I did so in good faith – is pretty intense at times. And the constant assault from the right in this country simply for being gay, and the lack of any real public empathy or concern for gay citizens, is brutalizing after a while. To endure that for so long and then elect a president who seems to believe we are the last priority and can be fobbed off with mere words … well, the frustration and anger builds up. Bill Kristol doesn't deserve to be the object of all this. Just some of it.

And here, by the way, is what my readers have found in the way of any defense by Bill Kristol of gay people. It's of Mary Cheney and the one moment when neoconservatives expressed horror at what they perceived was an unfair reference to her open lesbianism in the Kerry-Bush debate of 2004. To  my mind, the offense taken was in direct relation to the need to defeat Kerry, and based on a sense that mentioning someone's sexual orientation is some kind of embarrassment. But it was a defense of sorts. Theyb defend the right of gay people to stay closeted and to have their political families never called on enabling a viciously homophobic party base. That in an election in which a vice-president with an openly gay daughter was running on a platform to strip her of any rights in her marriage. And succeeded. She lives in Virginia. She has no rights in her relationship at all.

It’s called Asperatus. Here’s the Wiki entry:

The clouds are most closely related to undulatus clouds. Although they appear dark and storm-like, they tend to dissipate without a storm forming. The ominous-looking clouds have been particularly common in the Plains states of the United States, often during the morning or midday hours following convective thunderstorm activity. As of June, 2009 the Royal Meteorological Society is gathering evidence of the type of weather patterns in which undulus asperatus clouds appear, so as to study how they form and decide whether they are distinct from other undulatus clouds.

One more pic after the jump:

Matt Steinglass on the ways of the internet:

I make mistakes of tone all the time, and I say things I don’t have adequate support for. And I’m not going to claim that I will try to eliminate all of them; sometimes a mistake of tone is the price you pay for trying to say something sharp and original, and enough of those bets pay off that it would be unwise to forswear all stylistic adventurism. And on the factual-support count, I think if I really made a commitment to only make claims I had adequate footnoted evidentiary support for, it would be a form of dishonesty. Part of the function of a blog is to air our snap reactions and our generalized rough convictions about the universe, and a lot of that is stuff we couldn’t produce solid support for on the spur of the moment even though it’s clearly true.