The New Primary Schedule

It’ll all be over by the end of next January. Ambers has the details:

Jan. 5:   Iowa caucuses (both parties)
Jan. 8:   New Hampshire primary (both parties)
Jan. 12:  Nevada caucuses (both parties)
Jan. 15  Michigan GOP primary; Dem beauty contest
Jan. 19:  South Carolina primary (both parties)
Jan. 29:  Florida GOP primary; Dem beauty contest

A Culture War Moment

The Breitbart-Ehrenstein dust-up is a classic of the genre, except that Andrew is a real blue-stater, and can rebut some left-liberal cliches with lines like this:

I know your biracial homosexual bio perfecta trumps my humble multiculti checklist, but I did have a bitchin’ Bar Mitzvah.

And he’s right about the Matthew Shepard case, which, even now, is being misleadingly exploited by interest group politics to enact a completely symbolic and utterly irrelevant "hate crimes bill." (I should add it’s just as symbolic and irrelevant as all hate crimes laws, despite the rancid double standards of the GOP.) Money quote: 

I think you represent the majority in Hollywood. The type that green-lighted a troika of Matthew Shepherd movies after he was senselessly killed because it affirmed their gut feeling that a gay young man living in backward America is destined for death at the hands of hateful ultraconservatives. A street in West Hollywood still stands in his name despite ABC News reporting the story false: He was killed by crazed meth addicts for drugs and money — not because he was gay. Isn’t that tragic enough?

Yet Shepherd is still the icon of gay victims’ rights, and the mistaken story of his "fate" soon thereafter befell Jake Gyllenhaal’s character in "Brokeback Mountain." The Oscar statuette stands as the exclamation point. Victimhood wears like a cashmere sweater in Hollywood, and the mistaken story line of red-state Americans as murderous homophobes is now a timeless artistic truth.

And yet Andrew must also know that the Shepard case was not devoid of homophobia, even if it was grotesquely distorted as a pure hate crime by the usual suspects. And he also knows that the situation of many young gay men in red state America is still dire. Larry Craig isn’t reduced to restrooms because it’s easy to be openly gay in Idaho. I know many red-staters have a justified objection to thinking of themselves as murderous homophobes. Many aren’t. But in many red states, gay couples have been told recently by large majorities that their relationships are not only meaningless, but a threat to people they know and love. Andrew has never experienced growing up in that kind of climate, let alone living a life in it. If he did, his well-deserved skepticism of Hollywood liberals would not descend to prettifying what remains ugly.

Quote for the Day

"I’m just a little bit shocked myself that a college in good standing would back up students who insist that people who have been through college and have a master’s degree, a couple actually, have to teach that there were such things as talking snakes or lose their job," – a community college instructor, Mr Bitterman (!), in Red Oak, Iowa, who says he was fired after he told his students that the story of Adam and Eve should not be interpreted literally.

The Fabulous Life Of Venetian Nuns

In the 1400s no less:

By poring over contemporary letters, diaries, and legal documents, historians have established that Venetian nunneries were the most liberated in Europe. In the 1400s, the skyrocketing cost of dowries meant that many of the city’s noblest families were obliged to place their teenage daughters, regardless of their wishes, in convents. Few of these developed a spiritual calling. It was openly accepted that the top convents were a “safety valve” for Venice’s surplus of well-born single women, who could go on to enjoy a level of sexual freedom unique for the time.

The nunneries were run like luxury boutique hotels.

Novices were given duplicate keys so they could come and go as they pleased from their palatial apartments, which were filled with artwork and overlooked the Grand Canal. Wearing the most fashionable, low-cut dresses, they would entertain male visitors with wine-fuelled banquets, then invite their beaux to spend the night in their rooms. They took romantic gondola rides with admirers to private picnics on the islands of the Venice Lagoon, and went on poetic moonlit walks in the secluded gardens. The most passionate eloped – presumably with men who were not obsessed with dowries. The mature-age abbesses rode the city in luxury carriages with their pet dogs and oversaw their girls’ activities with a maternal eye. If a nun fell pregnant, she would simply give birth in the privacy of the convent and the pass the child off as an orphan abandoned on the doorstep.