I kinda wanted to vote for Nader in 2000, but did not, and I certainly won’t do it this time. However, there are two ways that his campaign—if he can keep enough news coverage on what he’s saying—might be good for those voting to the left.

1. Draws out more daring stands from candidates. Like Dean, who seemed to transform the other contenders, Nader might have a similar effect. I think it was someone on Kerry’s campaign who said they want to appeal to those who would vote or voted for Nader.
   
   
2. Makes the Democratic nominee sound more mainstream. By sounding far-out, Ralph makes the Democratic nominee sound less revolutionary by comparison. Maybe a voter wasn’t sure about the Democrat, but now, he sounds so normal! Or maybe the voter likes some of what Nader is saying and votes for the less frightening alternative.

On the other hand, it could all end in tears, and I’ll need to open my chain of weight training salons in Canada and Europe ASAP. (Note to Ralph: Please be sure to drop out before the end and deflect any alleged votes apparently headed your way to the Democratic contender.)

Bush Urges Congress to Begin Process to Amend Constitution

This was inevitable because it had become clear to the Bush/Cheney/Rove junta that evangelical Christians would remove their active support of Bush’s reelection efforts if he didn’t come out strongly for an amendment. The realpolitik of it all doesn’t soften the blow, though, and the President’s hypocrisy only adds insult to the injury. To wit:

“America’s a free society which limits the role of government in the lives of our citizens,” Mr. Bush said. “This commitment of freedom, however, does not require the redefinition of one of our most basic social institutions. Our government should respect every person and protect the institution of marriage.

“There is no contradiction between these responsibilities.”

Perhaps tacitly acknowledging the emotion that has accompanied the debate over gay marriage, Mr. Bush closed by saying: “We should also conduct this difficult debate in a manner worthy of our country, without bitterness or anger. In all that lies ahead, let us match strong convictions with kindness and goodwill and decency.”

So, I’m free to want whatever freedoms I want, as long as they aren’t important ones. The concrete, daily, and implacable denial of basic rights to property and association that we seek is nothing when weighed against some entirely theoretical harm to the institution of marriage. And we are told there is no contradiction there.

In his sop to tolerance, he is subtly asking that the bigots that clearly call the shots with his administration to keep their hate on a low simmer, so as not to appear unseemly. Fat chance of that–their zeal as they fight to make us second-class citizens once and for all will be bright and withering.

One might hope that Americans would see them for what they are and stop this, but in doing so one would be naive. I fully expect the amendment to pass the Congress rapidly–given the overwhelming approval of the Defense of Marriage Act at the Federal level and the similar laws in 38 states, the math looks pretty clear. We could see the first states ratify the Amendment before our wedding in May. The sooner this happens, the more Bush can use it against the eventual Democratic nominee–who (let’s not kid ourselves) will not attempt to sail to victory on the warm breeze of respect for gays and lesbians. No, we’ll be asked to dutifully pull the lever for a candidate forced to kowtow to the religious right just as surely as Bush has.

So along with wedding plans and honeymoon plans and the hum of a shared daily life, David and I have had to think about what we will do if this happens. I am adamant–I will not stay in this country if the amendment is ratified. Thanks to David’s Australian citizenship and “indefinite leave to remain” in the UK, we have options. Canada will take us–and even my mother admits that Vancouver looks like a good option by the dimming light of American freedom.

While I don’t relish the prospect of selling our home, leaving family and friends behind, and beginning a career over elsewhere, I would rather do that than stay here and wonder what’s next. I distrust my country too much at this point to dismiss the example of German Jews in 1935 and 1938… many bright and successful people were convinced that nothing would even happen to them, that things would not get worse, that Hitler and his followers were only using rhetoric as a means and not an end. When one understands that the Bush administration is deeply influenced by groups bent on establishing Christian theocracy in the US, who have advocated stoning homosexuals to death in the public square, what once seemed like paranoia can begin to feel like prescience.

When coupled with the coming economic calamity that Bush’s policies portend, the outlook seems very dark indeed. If there is a crash, what better target for outrage than an upper-middle-class gay couple? One of us is even a foreigner! Things could get much, much worse. And I won’t be the last rat off a sinking ship, thank you very much.

This amendment is, however saddening, only a symptom of the larger and much more tragic erosion of freedom and personal rights since WWII–something that should concern every American, straight or gay. The Cold War national security state, the war on drugs, and now the permanent crisis of the war on terror look a lot like the widening gyre. Perhaps the falcon cannot hear the falconer, but I can. The voice of reason is calling, but who among our leaders will answer?

Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership

I could spend hours on this site having my mind completely, totally boggled.

I could have asked for one of these for Valentine’s Day. Next year, Little Smith, OK?

I was skeptical when I heard the CNN blip about Naomi Wolf’s article about being “sexually encroached upon” by Harold Bloom almost 20 years ago. Not that I doubted such a thing out of Bloom, whom I have long regarded as something of a cretin when it came to his treatment of women; rather, I doubted Wolf’s motivation for coming forward.

Wolf is now more or less a professional pundit, rightly or wrongly associated with her fateful (she swears misconstrued) advice that Al Gore act the “alpha male” part in the 2000 elections. And let’s face it–The Beauty Myth will always be the ugly stepsister of Backlash.

But Wolf’s article Sex and Silence at Yale in New York Magazine is actually quite good. Bloom didn’t harrass her, exactly, but he did use his position to try to get laid–at a moment in Wolf’s life as a student and a burgeoning writer when she needed mentorship, she got instead a clammy pass from a Big Lech on Campus. The man who was supposedly guiding her in independent study, and had agreed to write critical letters of recommendation, leered across a table at her over her unread manuscript, and delivered one of the creepiest come-on lines in the history of campus sleaze: “You have the aura of election upon you.” Ewww! Election, erection, hand on her thigh– she responded (as I would have!) by puking in a nearby sink.

Not shockingly, her academic life suffered drastically. She had no idea what to expect as far as a grade for the independent study, and worry over the whole situation hurt her senior-year grades across the board. I find her description of the effect this had on her fairly reasonable–and her portrayal of Yale’s institutional wishy-washiness rings solidly true. Worse still, she catalogs a list of Yale’s horrible responses to harrassment and outright rape that makes me never want to give my alma mater a dime.

I quote below the ending of the piece, which is a terrifically reasonable and actionable suggestion for getting us past the “sexual harrassment” impasse to something that will do less to punish individuals (and criminalize sex, dating, and flirtation) and more to ensure that institutions are transparent and accountable so that when something does happen, it gets dealt with in a manner that treats both accuser and accused fairly.
Read the rest of this entry »

Funny story from the UK Telegraph of case of mistaken identity backed up by some serious chutzpah. Oxford engineering student Matthew Richardson is invited to China to give a series of lectures on global economics. (The Chinese were actually looking for an NYU professor of the same name.) Undaunted by his total lack of knowledge on the topic, he brushes up on a student textbook during the flight to China and bluffs his way through.

I wonder if the rights have already been sold.

Right here, about halfway down. And we agree!

That’s right, Ballard’s Favorite Jew is now Croc-a-licious. We’ll be seeing him for the British Sea Power show next week.

Congrats Pete!

We’re pretty sure there is a gay gene, but I think we now have proof there is an “undisclosed location” gene. Dick Cheney’s out lesbian daughter Mary is MIA in the gay-marriage debate despite two very salient facts:
1) She has lived with her female partner for years and wears a gold wedding band on her left hand, and
2) She is chairing her father’s reelection bid and getting paid $100K a year to do it.

In my book, this makes her a public figure and a worthy target for some shrewd political activism. The same gay-rights operatives who successfully rousted Dr. Laura from her TV talk show perch are out to find Mary and take her to task for this apparent schizophrenia. Their site, DearMary.com, offers folks a chance to send Mary a postcard asking for an explanation.

Cheney has famously reversed himself of the issue, selling out his own daughter–but given her sell-out status, I suppose we shouldn’t be too hard on him. (Hell, he used to think Saddam was a good ally.) In the 2000 campaign, he said the issue should be left to the states, but now he faithfully sings from W’s hymnal–meaning, I’m sure, that he is “troubled” by the gay couples receiving official recognition in SF and Massachusetts.

On the other hand, maybe we shouldn’t be too hard on poor Mary–it’s bad enough growing up a gay Repub, but she has the added burden of looking just like her father. Oh, and just to revisit the “gay gene” intro, I find it really interesting to look back on her mom Lynne Cheney’s secret early writings. Perhaps the fruit has not fallen too far from the tree.

I don’t know what distresses me more about this report from the Union of Concerned Scientists: that the Bush administration is ignoring, bending, or outright refuting scientific fact to meet their political whims, or that the Administration can dismiss the legitimate concerns of 60 prominent scientists (including 20 Nobel laureates) with claims of “bias” or “political motivation”. Frankly, if you can’t trust the opinions of leading-light scientists on the issue of science, then who can you trust?

But this issue is illustrative of a wider problem with the Bush administration I find even more troubling (to use a word Bush himself is rather fond of lately): Bush’s penchant for wish-politics. Like no President before him, Bush really, truly, seems to believe that he can make something true simply by wishing for it. Facts, political realities, practicalities, the will of the people be damned: it simply shall be. In fact, Bush appears to go out of his way to actively avoid any facts that might conflict with his will: he famously does not read newspapers, and his ignorance of scientific advisors in decisionmaking is symptomatic of this, too.

Bush wished that there should be a war in Iraq. He dearly wished that weapons of mass destruction would be the justification of that war, and no amount of evidence to the contrary from the weapons inspectorate, nor opposition from the UN or allies would convince him otherwise.

Bush wished that tax cuts would lead to job growth. With each tax cut, jobs were lost, in their millions, rather than gained as wished-for. Bush appears truly oblivious to this fact.

Bush wished that 2.6 million new jobs would magically appear this year, and the White House Council of Economic Advisers was apparently happy to publish this wish, in the face of doubt from every economist alive. Even Bush won’t repeat his wish now, but he won’t deny its self-willed truth, either.

Bush wished that Iraq would be a democracy by the end of June. The fact that the UN insists it’s simply not possible, not only politically but practically has no bearing on this: it will happen, according to Bush.

I have this image of Bush when he’s alone in the White House. He’s wearing his ruby slippers. His eyes are closed, and as he taps the heels together he softly chants: “There’s no such thing as truth. There’s no such thing as truth. There’s no such thing as truth.”

I’m afraid there is, George.

Read on for examples from the full UCS report of the head-in-the-sand mentality of the Bush administration with regard to politically unpalatable scientific fact:
Read the rest of this entry »

So I’ve heard plenty of gay rugby jokes over the past few years, including every possible dirty pun involving the word “scrum.” But this story (copied below) from Australia goes, quite simply, a knuckle too far.
Read the rest of this entry »