My latest letter to the editor

Here:

Regarding the ombudsman’s May 20 column “Is The Post anti-Catholic?”:

I do not see how The Post’s obsequious coverage of religion could qualify as either anti-Catholic or anti-religion in general. Instead, I believe that in this age of right-wing political correctness, the religion card is the new race card.

People of faith often claim to be the victims of religious bigotry when someone presents facts or logical arguments for which they do not care. People have made that accusation against me when I have made arguments that they could not or would not rebut. Indeed, it has long been a punch line that such people complain about persecution and bigotry when called on their own persecution and bigotry.

Quote of the week

"The Catholic Bishops never thought the monster they helped create would cease to obey their command." — Comment left by Brutus on Separating Church and State Money

But then, statists never do, do they?

What does The Washington Blade want to be when it grows up?

As I noted yesterday, "America's leading gay news source" is now "a National Corporate Partner of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force." (Conflict of interest? What's that?) Previous corporate identities of The Washington Blade include a fluffy suburban advertiser newspaper and the sort of "gay" newspaper that launched religious-right-style attacks against gay men at every opportunity. Here's a fun new idea for its next incarnation: Why not be the sort of publication that gives us enough information about serious topics, and in such a dispassionate manner, that we can feel comfortable that we can form an informed opinion about them?

The Washington Blade: Watchdog or lapdog?

The legacy media have developed the disconcerting habit of jumping into bed with the very organizations whose activities they are supposed to be scrutinizing on our behalf. In the latest development, The Washington Blade, the LGBT community's "newspaper of record" (and heaven help us if that's actually the case), has announced a "strategic partnership" with the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force:

WASHINGTON — The Washington Blade, the nation’s oldest and most acclaimed LGBT newspaper, today announced it has become a National Corporate Partner of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

The Blade becomes the sixth National Corporate Partner of NGLTF and joins Grey Goose Vodka, Showtime, Southwest Airlines, Chili’s Restaurants and Wells Fargo as National Corporate Partners.

It's one thing for a restaurant chain or bank to assume that role, but quite another for a newspaper that is supposed to keep tabs on LGBT activist organizations so that we can know whether they are representing our interests adequately.

Religious right or P.C. left? Quote 38

In this series of blog posts, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to read each quote and guess, before doing a Web search, whether someone in the religious right or the politically correct left said it.

38.

He’s the Copy/Pasta Queeeen!
Only bothering to change the first word, and nothing else from the black civil rights stuff…

Quote of the week

"Cultural conservatives' moral concerns about marriage are based on a view of history that is almost entirely false." — George Monbiot

Religious right or P.C. left? Quote 37

In this series of blog posts, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to read each quote and guess, before doing a Web search, whether someone in the religious right or the politically correct left said it.

37.

That's exactly what “HOOTERS” restaurant chain does—exploiting women's bodies for a profit.

Quote of the week

“It is good to see that after intense political pressure that President Obama has finally come around to the Dick Cheney position on marriage equality.” — Christopher Barron, GOProud

Discussing same-sex marriage with the fundies

Yesterday, in a discussion of Obama's announcement, someone said to me, "Marriage has always been one man and one woman. Read the Bible." In addition to the toxic level of irony, that person just refused to listen when I tried to tell him what his own holy book actually says. Yes, I do so want you to run my life out of a book that you haven't read or, worse, about which you are willing to lie.

Amendment One in North Carolina

I have no comment on this, so instead, I'll just post a pretty picture that I found on the Internet.

Concern troll is only concerned about your health, or: Be careful what you wish for.

The latest favor that the nanny-statists are doing for us is the war on obesity. Apparently, since we cannot be trusted to make the appropriate choices over our own bodies, the government needs to step in to prod and in some cases force us to do the right thing.

In addition to the basic issue of overriding people's choices over their own bodies, the war on obesity presents the further issue that we cannot empower government to do only what one side wants it to so. Homophobes love to trot out health concerns as a pretext for wanting to deny LGBT people the equal protection of the laws, and opponents of abortion rights engage in similar concern trolling about breast cancer.

Quote of the week

"[M]edical marijuana is far more popular than Obama is." — Rob Kampia, writing in The Washington Post on the Obama administration's hostility to medical marijuana