Quote of the week

“Why do you always talk about Christian love? Where do you find so much misery, injustice, violence, sin and greed, if not among the Christians?” - attributed to Gediminas, Grand Duke of Lithuania

Gay men and manhood (2)

I recently watched a show on gay men's attitudes toward masculinity, on which various people bemoaned the "fact" that gay men all go for masculine men to the exclusion of others. That hasn't been my experience. Since I came out, no one has told me to butch it up. Quite the opposite: People keep telling me that I am "not really gay," or words to that effect, and that I need to act more like a stereotypical twink.

Also, the next show was on bears, stating that the bear community started as a refuge from twink-oriented mainstream gay male culture. If we're all excluded from the mainstream, then who is in the mainstream?

The "blue" state of Maryland (2)

Maryland is a heavily Democratic state, and everyone knows that Democrats favor personal freedom (or at least keep saying that they do). Why, then, does this study rank the "Free State" dead last in personal freedom by a wide margin among the 50 states? It looks as though what I said here has been confirmed.

Quote of the week

"What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Christian Legal Society v. Martinez (2)

It's amazing how many people leaving comments on the D.C. Agenda article just do not get it. The issue before the court is not what the Christian organization ought to do, but what it has a Constitutional right to do.

Let's also think about unintended consequences. If courts started micromanaging organizations to the extent to which those commenters want, such micromanagement would lead to disastrous results for LGBT organizations.

Christian Legal Society v. Martinez

As a militant homosexual and equally militant atheist, and as someone who has previously noted the irony of conservative appeals to judicial activism, I guess that I am supposed to favor the law school in this case. Nonetheless, I support the Christian group.

As long as the group is not demanding special privileges from government, as do some religious organizations that I could name, it has the right to freedom of association. A long string of court decisions holds that one should not have to surrender a fundamental Constitutional right to enjoy a public benefit -- decisions that I cited in a Michigan case to help gay activists.

If we want gay-straight alliances to enjoy freedom of association, we should be willing to honor the same freedom for others. Others' freedom is the price that we pay for our own.

When white people play the race card

I've found something more annoying and more useless to reasoned discourse than playing the race card: playing the race card when it's been dealt to someone else. In both the loony left and the loony right, European-Americans presume to lecture others on what to think and how to feel about those European-Americans' pet issues, as though one could just declare oneself to be a different racial or ethnic group's Borg Queen. Unsurprisingly, those wannabee Borg Queens often get it exactly backwards.

The Tea Party (2)

We've heard much about the teabaggers who demand smaller government, as long as they keep getting their Social Security, Medicare, and VA benefits. On the other hand, I've known persons of political correctness who demand autonomy over their own lives as long as the all-encompassing nanny state treats everyone else as a meat puppet. The right has no monopoly on hypocrisy.

Quote of the week

"And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam [is] in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye." - A book to which modern Christians pay no attention

The Tea Party

I've commented before on the right's disdain for facts. Now we have yet another example that those who oppose the right are not necessarily better.

"Everyone knows" that the teabaggers, in addition to being lily-white, are poorer and less well educated than the country as a whole. Nonetheless, The New York Times, which can hardly be dismissed as having a pro-Tea-Party bias, has reported something quite different. Feel free to agree or disagree with the Tea Party's aims, but at least be factually correct.

Republicans and smaller government (2)

Gotta love that Republican commitment to smaller, less intrusive government. Not only did Bob Ehrlich earn a reputation for turning the Maryland State Police into the KGB, but also, The Washington Post reports that state government spending increased more under Ehrlich than under O'Malley. As conservatives love to say, but only when it suits them, "What happened happened, and what didn't happen didn't happen."

Quote of the week

"They would have been equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced." - Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh

Naked Guy

Jurors have given "Naked Guy" something resembling justice and have stood up to both the ever-expanding nanny state and Virginia state and local leaders' penchant for making this state a national laughingstock. Countdown until someone screams about unelected liberal activist jurors: Five, four, three ....

Oh, but I forget. Nanny statism isn't really nanny statism when social conservatives like the result, right?

Sancta iPad, ora pro nobis.

Apple fanboyism resembles a religion in more ways than just fervor. The fanboys use many of the same tactics as do religious apologists: willful ignorance, refusal even to look at counter-evidence, ignoring inconvenient questions, and just plain intellectual dishonesty in putting words into others' mouths.

Quote of the week

"We do not tell -- we show. We do not claim -- we prove. It is not your obedience that we seek to win, but your rational conviction." - Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged.