Gay Culture In Boston

The old clubs may be dying, but a new one is being born:

In less than three months, the Estate’s weekly Thursday night party – called the Glamorous Life – has grown into one of the most frenzied and fizzy gay nights in the city. Glistening shirtless male dancers stationed on perches high over the dance floor thrust along to the beat. On the floor below, a racially diverse – by Boston standards, at least – mix of young professionals, collegians, and a smattering of men who probably should have gone to sleep after "Grey’s Anatomy," flail along to the music.

Yep: gay hip-hop. Love it. Bob Mould’s and Rich Morel’s "BlowOff" in DC (and occasionally in NYC) has also charted new ground by appealing to bears and mixing rock and pop. But my sense is that we will soon witness an eruption of openly gay culture within the black and Latino populations. Repressed for so long, and still less public than white gay culture, minority gay culture, already vibrant, may achieve greater visibility. I sure hope so. We desperately need strong public gay role models for black and Latino gay kids, who deal with stress and discrimination many of us white guys no longer experience in quite the same way.

“Bishop Romney,” Ctd.

A reader writes:

I of course do not know who your ‘Mormon reader’ is—and therefore how involved with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints the reader actually might be — but s/he gets a number of points wrong:

1)  Latter-day Saints are not, nor do they consider themselves to be, polytheists. 2)  Latter-day Saints do not reject ‘Salvation by Grace,’ though clearly their understanding of such is closer to a Catholic than to a ‘New Calvinist’ (your Mormon reader’s term) one:  access to the grace of Christ requires both belief and the exercise of free will to access that grace through sacraments/ordinances and obedience to Christ’s teachings.

3) Though the Book of Mormon clearly rejects Biblical infallibility, it nowhere contradicts Biblical literalism, reinforcing the literal nature of many parts of the Bible which have come to be seen as figurative by many Christians.  In fact, Latter-day Saints are amongst the most literal of Bible believers; for example, they accept the literal reality of Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, the Noachic flood, the existence of Job, etc.

4) LDS bishops do not ‘interview’ and ‘approve every person in their Ward boundaries…who wishes to convert to Mormonism and be baptized.’  This is the work of full-time missionaries, and bishops are actually prohibited from interfering in this process.  A bishop may ‘interview’ a potential convert, but this is only to get to know the future member of his congregation.  Readiness for baptism is an issue determined exclusively by the missionaries.  Bishops do conduct baptismal interviews for ‘children of record’—eight-year-olds who have at least one member parent—in their wards.

5)  Bishops do not interview ‘every single member’ of their congregations yearly.  Church handbooks recommend that annual interviews occur for young men and women between the ages of 12 and 18, for whom a bishop has especial care, but other ward members may go years without being interviewed by their bishop.  Recommends to enter an LDS temple must be renewed every two years, but not all adult Latter-day Saints hold a current temple recommend, and, for those who do, these can be renewed by meeting with one of the bishop’s counsellors.

6)  Bishops naturally are considered to have a clear understanding of Latter-day Saint theology, but they are not official spokesmen for the Church.  Most stakes (dioceses) have trained Public Affairs Specialists who fulfil this role in their local areas, and the statements of (even) bishops and stake presidents are not considered authoritative proclamations of doctrine.

In short, I suspect that your ‘Mormon reader’ has been disaffected from the Church of Jesus Christ for some time and is perhaps not the most reliable source of information in this regard.

Actually, when you examine this, there isn’t a great deal of dispute here. Mormonism’s view of the Trinity does speak of "individual Gods". Some view this as polytheism. Mormons view the Bible as literal in many respects but also assert that it contains errors. Its view of grace is distinct from fundamentalist Protestantism. And a Bishop would indeed be in a position to explain Mormon theology in great detail, as my first Mormon emailer wrote.

The Torture Tapes

This AP nugget suggests that the destruction of evidence of war crimes was done with the knowledge and consent of the key Congressional leaders:

CIA Director Michael Hayden said House and Senate intelligence committee leaders were informed of the existence of the tapes and the CIA’s intention to destroy them. He also said the CIA’s internal watchdog watched the tapes in 2003 and verified that the interrogation practices were legal.

Legal according to whom?

This Is A Banana Republic

Agabuse

What defines such a republic? How about an executive that ignores the rule of law, commits war-crimes and then destroys the actual evidence? Today’s bombshell is that the CIA has done just that with respect to tapes  made recording the torture of enemy combatants. Read the whole story. We live in a country where the government can detain indefinitely, torture in secret, and then secretly destroy the tapes of torture sessions to protect its own staff:

The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terror suspects — including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in CIA custody — to severe interrogation techniques. They were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that tapes documenting controversial interrogation methods could expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy, several officials said. The CIA said today that the decision to destroy the tapes had been made "within the CIA itself," and they were destroyed to protect the safety of undercover officers and because they no longer had intelligence value. The agency was headed at the time by Porter J. Goss. Through a spokeswoman, Goss declined this afternoon to comment on the destruction of the tapes.

My italics. This was a deliberate act to destroy evidence of war-crimes and to protect war criminals from facing the rule of law. The Congress needs to find out who authorized the destruction of those tapes. I should add that this is not the first time that videotapes of alleged torture sessions have been "lost." The same happened in the case of Jose Padilla:

The missing DVD dates from March 2, 2004. It contains a video of the last interrogation session of Padilla, then a declared ‘enemy combatant’ under an order from President Bush, while he was being held in military custody at a U.S. Navy brig in Charleston, S.C. But in recent days, in the course of an unusual court hearing about Padilla’s mental condition, a government lawyer disclosed to a surprised courtroom that the Defense Intelligence Agency — which had custody of the evidence — was no longer able to locate the DVD. As a result, it was not included in a packet of classified DVDs that was recently turned over to defense lawyers under orders from Judge Cooke.

The disclosure that the Pentagon had lost a potentially important piece of evidence in one of the U.S. government’s highest-profile terrorism cases was met with claims of incredulity by some defense lawyers and human-rights groups monitoring the case. "This is the kind of thing you hear when you’re litigating cases in Egypt or Morocco or Karachi," said John Sifton, a lawyer with Human Rights Watch, one of a number of groups that has criticized the U.S. government’s treatment of Padilla. "It is simply not credible that they would have lost this tape. The administration has shown repeatedly they are more interested in covering up abuses than getting to the bottom of whether people were abused."

A potential opening for Congressional investigation:

The tapes, recorded in 2002 and destroyed in 2005, were not provided to the September 11 Commission despite a formal request to the CIA for "transcripts and any other documentary evidence" taken from interrogations. The Commission completed its work in 2004.

The story also reports that CIA attorneys told "federal prosecutors in 2003 and 2005, who relayed the information to a federal court in the Moussaoui case, that the C.I.A. did not possess recordings of interrogations sought by the judge in the case." Moussaoui had sought the tapes as exculpatory evidence.

This administration commits war-crimes, hides the evidence from federal law officers and the 9/11 Commission and then destroys the evidence completely. Give that some time to sink in.

Jettisoning Belief

A reader writes:

It’s interesting that when you quoted Romney saying:

Americans tire of those who would jettison their beliefs, even to gain the world.

my immediate reaction was to think of those ex-Muslims who have "jettisoned their beliefs" despite the threat of violence or death. Most people I know seem to admire them, not tire of them.

And they chose the world’s doubts over Allah’s certainty, didn’t they?