Okay…it’s getting just plain medieval deep in the heart of Texas.  Bill Nye, The Science Guy, was giving a presentation at McLennan Community College in Waco, and some people walked out after he told them that a literal interpretation of Genesis 1:16 just doesn’t square with the facts…

And God made two great lights: A greater light to rule the day, and a less light to rule the night, and he made the stars also. -Tyndale’s Old Testament

Well…okay…  As poetry it kinda works, but it isn’t right.  The sun is a star, and a fairly common type of star at that.  And the moon shines in the sun’s light (and also a bit of reflected earth light too from time to time, so we get light from it that’s been doubly reflected), not its own.  The moon is not a light, anymore then the mountaintops that reflect the last light of the day as the sun goes down are lights.  It’s the moon…a pretty amazing object in its own right, but it is not a light.  And the sun is a star too…little different from most of the other stars whose light we see at night.  But the person who wrote those lines could not have known any of that and you can see their intent well enough.  God made all the things which shine down upon us from the heavens above…the sun which gives us the day, and the moon which shines brightly in the night and also all the stars that shine in the night…

Fine.  I can dig it.  I’ve spent many a night gazing up in rapture at the creator’s work.  This is a beautiful amazing universe we live in.  Depending on how expansive your view of God is (or how willing you are to admit you really don’t know crap about what God is, other then it’s that which created the cosmos), science and religion don’t really have much to argue about in Genesis 1:16.  But some people just don’t want to hear it…

The Emmy-winning scientist angered a few audience members when he criticized literal interpretation of the biblical verse Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.”

He pointed out that the sun, the “greater light,” is but one of countless stars and that the “lesser light” is the moon, which really is not a light at all, rather a reflector of light.

A number of audience members left the room at that point, visibly angered by what some perceived as irreverence.

“We believe in a God!” exclaimed one woman as she left the room with three young children.

Fine, but you don’t seem very willing to embrace that which God hath wrought are you?  What the hell were you doing in a science lecture lady?  See…this is what’s a tad scary about this story.  This fundamentalist woman took her children to a science lecture expecting to hear nothing that contradicted her religious conceits.  So what have they been teaching in science classes in Texas for the past generation or two?

Did you remember to count all the hungry mouths you feed…?

More Mark and Josh tax time fun, here and here.   I missed getting one in for 2005.  The 2003 cartoon is obviously an early effort at drawing the two…I’d only just discovered them recurring in my political cartoons.  They’ve managed since then to get themselves a better kitchen table set, and a slightly better artist. 

This is hilarious.  From the Washington Post…

It was with some trepidation that we opened a most interesting card, which announced on a blue-jeaned cowboy’s belt buckle something called the "5th Annual VOLPAC ’06 Weekend" in Nashville on April 21-23.

Problem was you had to unbuckle the cowboy’s pants and look inside to see what this was all about. Seemed a bit too "Brokeback Mountain."

VOLPAC is Senator Frisk’s grassroots leadership committee.  I’d have loved to have seen the look on the grassroots face as it unbuckled the cowboy belt.  But wait…it gets even better… 

The back of the card shows the cowboy from behind with a red flowered handkerchief sticking out of his right pocket. Wait a minute — wasn’t there something about how this used to be some kind of code in the gay community years ago? A way to signal each other in crowded, noisy bars?

So we checked the GayCityUSA.com’s Hanky Codes. Sure enough, there it was in the chart explaining what they mean: red hanky in right pocket. Oh, dear.

…but not entirely out of step with Karl Rove’s way of doing business though, as Ron Suskind found out one day outside of Rove’s office… 

Eventually, I met with Rove. I arrived at his office a few minutes early, just in time to witness the Rove Treatment, which, like LBJ’s famous browbeating style, is becoming legend but is seldom reported. Rove’s assistant, Susan Ralston, said he’d be just a minute. She’s very nice, witty and polite. Over her shoulder was a small back room where a few young men were toiling away. I squeezed into a chair near the open door to Rove’s modest chamber, my back against his doorframe.

Inside, Rove was talking to an aide about some political stratagem in some state that had gone awry and a political operative who had displeased him. I paid it no mind and reviewed a jotted list of questions I hoped to ask. But after a moment, it was like ignoring a tornado flinging parked cars. "We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!" As a reporter, you get around—curse words, anger, passionate intensity are not notable events—but the ferocity, the bellicosity, the violent imputations were, well, shocking. This went on without a break for a minute or two. Then the aide slipped out looking a bit ashen, and Rove, his face ruddy from the exertions of the past few moments, looked at me and smiled a gentle, Clarence-the-Angel smile. "Come on in." And I did. And we had the most amiable chat for a half hour.

So…I mean…maybe Frist really meant to put a red handkerchief in that cowboy’s back pocket.  The right pocket would have been right.

Which…brings me to something I’ve wanted to vent about for years.  Beg pardon for a moment…

I fucking hated that handkerchief code!

Thank you.  (whew!)  That felt good…

See, before there was a code, back in the 1970s, there were only cute longhaired gay guys who discovered how really tantalizing it was to hang a bit of that kerchief us longhairs had all been tying around our hair out the back pockets of our jeans.  There was no code, just a little something to draw the other guy’s attention to the fact that you had a really nice ass and make him all hot and bothered.   Jeans were low around the waste, and tight around the hips and thighs, and a few good designer brands had just started to come out, that really accentuated a guys natural attributes.  Ah…those were the days…  And then some idiots decided to make a goddamn formal code out of it, with right being "active" and left "passive" and various different colors for various different kinds of sex (and a lot of stuff I don’t really consider to be sex at all…but then I’m like that…).

So besides making it impossible to wear that really nice red bandanna you liked so well, because you thought red was just a sexy color, especially when hanging provocatively down around a nice tight set of denim curves with maybe a wee bit of skin showing just above the belt line, it also formalized a rigid set of sex roles, which just don’t work for some of us…maybe most of us.  I do not identify as either "active" or "passive" and in fact I find the terms mildly idiotic.  Sex isn’t something one person does to another…it’s something you both do together.  These terms just don’t make sense to me sexually.  If you’ve ever found yourself in the sack with someone who turned out to be an "aggressive bottom", then tell me please who was the active and who was the passive partner.  It might make sense in a given moment, but not as a state of being and not even as a descriptive term for fucker verses fuckee.  And I don’t get "top" and "bottom" either, as terms of identification.  I mean…I do…but neither one of them is me.

But there are only two back pockets in a pair of pants, and damn if putting your kerchief in one of them suddenly meant you were one thing, and putting it in the other meant you were the opposite thing.  And I guess you have to be a painter to appreciate how imprisoning it feels to have colors suddenly confined to particular sex acts.  ARRRGH!!!  I Hated it!  And as I said, I like the effect of a red bandanna over blue denim.  Well…boy was that one spoiled for me when I looked up the code.  Ugh!

It was all just cheerful spontaneous gay male sexuality for a brief moment in time.  And then they had to fuck it up.  I went and looked up the Hanky Code again and there are 76 X 2 possible ways to identify your sexual preferences listed there, and back in 1979-’80 when things started getting really crazy, I saw guys wearing several kerchiefs at a time in their back pockets.  Then they started hanging little plastic cupie dolls and stuffed bears off their back pockets.  I don’t even want to know.  Nothing ever stays simple and sexy in this culture.  And no…I don’t mean gay culture, I mean American pop culture.  It’s like we have to hype everything, even the simple joys of life.

Young man on a skateboard – circa 1977
Copyright ©  2006 by Bruce Garrett. All rights reserved.

Eye candy of the late 70s, before the Reagan years and the rise of the religious right, and the gay panic set in among young heterosexuals.  Yes, believe it or not there was a time when even a straight boy felt perfectly fine showing off his body to the girls like that.  But the kerchief in his pocket means he’s probably gay because even before the code that was mostly a gay thing.  It’s color does Not correspond to any code…so don’t even go there!  He’s just being sexy.  There was a time when you could just do that and all it meant was you were trying to bother the other gay guys.  It was a lot more fun when that was all it meant.

Brokeback Mountain has been released onto DVD and I’ll probably pick up a copy sometime this weekend.  I might skip through it when I get it back home but I doubt I’ll sit through the whole thing for quite a while.  As I’ve said before, I am not really up to watching tragic and doomed love affairs these days.  But after Hollywood’s giving it the pie in the face last month, I figured the least I could do was my part to help DVD sales.

While scanning google for articles about the DVD, I came across a little tidbit in the Deseret News, which all the more interesting because that paper is owned outright by the Mormon church.  It’s about Larry Miller, the Utah creep who canceled the showing of Brokeback at his theater right at the last minute, while ticket holders were in line, allegedly after he was told what the movie was about.  And I say, allegedly…

Miller says he knew he’d catch some flak for pulling the film about homosexual cowboys from his theaters,  but did so because he’s very worried about the break-up of the traditional American family.

In his words, he wanted to draw a line in the sand by not showing the film.

Miller said, "Getting away from the traditional families, which I look at as the fundamental building block of our society, is a very dangerous thing." 

Oh really?  Well…here’s what Scott Pierce in the Mormon owned Deseret News had to say about that…

 Miller, of course, has every right to his opinion. And every right to choose what movies to show in his theaters. And we should be grateful to him for standing up for "traditional families."

Just like he does with the TV station he owns, KJZZ.  Let’s look at a few things airing on Ch. 14 next week:

• "Friends," which is replete with extramarital sex, plots about porn and even homosexuality.

• "Cheers," which revolves around an unrepentant womanizer.

• Various forms of extramarital sex and vulgar shenanigans on such sitcoms as "Just Shoot Me," "Becker" and "The Parkers."

• "ER" — sex and a decidedly pro-gay agenda.

And here are a few of the movies KJZZ will be airing:

• "The List," about a high-priced prostitute.

• "Her Best Friend’s Husband," about a woman who has an affair with her best friend’s husband.

• "Primary Suspect," about a man who kills his wife.

Miller’s TV station it turns out, also carries Montel Williams, Tyra Banks, and Maury.  Swell family values fare that.  But it gets even more ironic:

Oh, and don’t forget next week’s eight airings of "Will & Grace," which not only features healthy, happy gay guys but is replete with the most off-color humor you’ll find in a network sitcom.

Will and Grace.  Miller’s TV station shows Will and Grace, and he balks at showing Brokeback Mountain in his movie theater?  No.  I think not.  Pierce goes on to complain about what Miller does show…

This week alone Miller’s theaters are showing R-rated "Basic Instinct 2," "Slither," "Inside Man," "Find Me Guilty" and "V for Vendetta."

Not bad.  But wait…it gets even better…

And one of the biggest stories the Jazz generated this season was about how the wife of one of the players granted him the right to one extramarital sexual encounter per year.

"The Jazz" would be that Utah NBA basketball team that Miller owns.  I guess more then one extra-marital affair a year might count as a dangerous thing for the Traditional American Family.  Mind you…this criticism comes from a newspaper that almost certainly welcomed Miller’s canceling showings of Brokeback Mountain, and would have probably liked it very well thank you if the film never saw the light of day anywhere in the United States, let alone Utah.  But Miller is no more a true believe then George Bush.  What Miller, like Bush, knows is when to throw a little human flesh to the mob, and from whose skin.

Here’s what I think: Miller knew damn well what the subject matter of Brokeback Mountain was, and to him it was just another booking until someone(s) in the powerful Mormon church had a chat with him and told him they’d like it very much thank you if he just pulled it from the venue.   R rated fun and games for sexually ignorant and repressed heterosexuals in Utah is one thing, but a film that so graphically shows how ignorance and prejudice have utterly destroyed the emotional lives of gay and lesbian people in America is more then the market will bear.  Particularly when that market is so deeply implicated in that destruction.  Miller can show Will and Grace and the religious right may bellyache about it, but Will and Grace is lite TV entertainment that manages to have its cake and eat it too, re-enforcing many gay stereotypes along the way while laughing along with them like it’s all an in-joke.  Brokeback on the other hand, is desolate landscape with a finger pointed right back at hate.  That simply cannot be tolerated.

A man from Johns Hopkins came this morning and delivered my CPAP machine, and gave me a short lecture on how to use it.  He came to my door with the CPAP in its smallish carrying bag slung over his shoulder, and I was surprised at first glance by how small and innocuous looking it was.

We sat around my kitchen table, a spot that’s become my place to interrogate the various contractors that have come into my house to do business.  Last time it was a parade of home heating and air conditioning contractors that sat there with me.  For about an hour the guy from Hopkins gave me the beginner’s lecture on how to operate and care for the unit, at first speaking to me like I was a little old lady who’d never seen an electronic device before, except maybe radio she listens to her soap operas on.  There was a time when that sort of thing would have really gotten my goat, but I’ve mellowed a tad in my middle age. There’s this so true it hurts passage in William Dale Jennings’ The Cowboys, where the trail boss, Wil Andersen, observes that it’s the smart boys you have to watch the most, because the slow boys will eventually get it, and once they do they’ve got it for life, but the smart ones are always trying to out think everything and it gets them into trouble.  Do tell.  So now when I’m being lectured below my grade level I just sit and listen anyway.  And the lecture gave me a chance to glean what the typical CPAP patient must be like, and what they usually didn’t get right about using their machines.

The Unit they sent me is a REMstar Pro-2, which according to my paperwork, only cost my insurance company 90 dollars.  However, the add-on humidifier unit cost an additional three-hundred.  With extras (like the mask) the total bill to my insurance company was about five-hundred and fifty dollars.  A lot less then I’d worried.  For kicks I searched for a price online and saw the same unit selling for around five-hundred dollars without the humidifier, and five-hundred, ninety with.  I have no idea what kind of creative billing is going on here with my insurance company and Johns Hopkins, but it boils down to the same price either way.

The REMstar is smallish and very lightweight… about the size and heft of a largish toaster.  It seems made particularly for traveling, an issue I’d raised several times at the sleep clinic.  It takes a two-prong non-polarized plug so it can theoretically plug in just about anywhere here in North America.  The mask they gave me is similar to the one I used at the sleep clinic: it fits just around my nose and has a nice soft gel cushion around it, making it very comfortable to wear.  It straps around my head like a pilot’s oxygen mask with Velcro and buckle adjustments.  But you take it off by unsnapping a toggle snap around the front of the mask. 

The air hose attaches via an elbow joint that can freely move around as you turn your head on the pillow.  I just tried laying down with it on a moment ago and without all the wires attached to me I had on at the sleep clinic, it’s actually very comfortable.  The only thing is I can’t bury my face in the pillow.  But I don’t do that anyway.  Mostly I sleep on my side or my stomach, with my face to one side or the other on the pillow’s edge, and this mask works just fine for that.  The only thing that might disturb my sleep is tugging on my face by the air hose.  But they gave me a six foot hose so I’m hoping that won’t happen.

My prescription pressure setting is the lowest possible for this machine, which makes sense because in the first sleep clinic they determined that I didn’t have it severe enough that I actually ever stopped breathing.  I only have these periods of difficulty during the night that pull me back out of a deep sleep, so I never get much of any deep sleep.  I strongly suspect that it’s more the sound of snoring, then any mild difficulty I have breathing, that’s jarring me awake at night.  I know for a fact that’s what’s been knocking me awake while I’m trying to nap in the afternoons.  I’ll be drifting to sleep and then the back of my throat suddenly catches and I’ll start to snore and it’ll just pop me right back awake.  First thing I noticed during the second sleep clinic stay was that wasn’t happening with the CPAP machine on.  I still had a horrible night, but it was all the wires they’d attached to me that kept waking me up.  And that damn coffin sized bed I couldn’t stretch out on.

I’ll probably try my new machine out this afternoon during one of my naps.  I’m hoping to notice right away that I’m breathing much better, and going to sleep better.  How long it will take my body to notice after all these years of not sleeping well is another story.

Fred Clark has this wonderful picture up on his blog of a group of second graders, who were watching a presentation from an educator with the Philadelphia Zoo.  They had just introduced the kids to a great horned owl and the owl had just spread its wings when the photographer snapped…

Some months ago my brother and I were on the phone brainstorming vacation times and places.  I live on one coast, he on the other.  It would be neat, says he, if we could all meet somewhere, like the Bahamas, or the Florida Keys…or say, how about Jamaica?

Uhm…not: 

(Kingston) Students at University of the West Indies rioted as police attempted to protect a gay student and escort him from the campus.

The Daily Gleaner reports that the student had been chased across the Mona campus by another student who claimed the gay man had attempted to proposition him in a washroom.

Dozens of students joined in the case and the student sought protection in a university building.

The mob demanded that campus security turn the student over. With security guards badly outnumbered college authorities called in police fearing the gay man would be killed.

The Gleaner reports that a contingent of police in full riot gear battled with students in an effort to protect the gay man.

Students threw objects from all directions at the officers. At one point the gay man was stabbed by another student, although the injuries are reportedly superficial.

The crowd only began to disperse when one officer drew his gun and fired a shot in the air.

This is far from the first story I’ve heard in a year, of Jamaican mobs chasing down gays (or more to the point, people only suspected of being gay) with the intention of killing them.  Last January a mob chased a young man through the streets and off a pier to his death, shouting homophobic epithets at him all the while.  And in December the man who who ran Jamaica AIDS Support for Life, Lenford Harvey, was shot to death on the eve of World AIDS Day.  Three men broke into his house, tied up two of his housemates and then forced Harvey into their car.  His body was found two hours later.

The Jamaica tourism web site says of the island country that it is a place of "sweet fragrances, shimmering sunsets, spicy flavors.  No wonder hearts beat faster in Jamaica."  Especially when they’re being chased through the streets by bloodthirsty mobs no doubt.

I had my second round of sleep clinic exams last weekend, and I’ve been meaning to post a little about the overall experience.  But then I read this guy in the New York Times (registration required), and I see an experience eerily similar to my own…

Lights out. During the night, as I traveled between wakefulness and sleep, sending back streams of data like a space probe, the technician appeared and disappeared, adjusting my wires, and exiting my consciousness in a ring of light — the door to the corridor — like a spectral visitor, a goblin that only the sixth-sensed see. He monitored my voyage from a desk somewhere in the clinic, taking notes as I sped through the blackness.

The next morning, miles from a cup of coffee, my head damp with mist and dotted with what looked like old toothpaste, I filled out another form, asking, among other things, what I had dreamed about.

"I dreamed I was wired to a bunch of wires, in a threatening tangle, that pulled me back to a wall every time I tried to escape," I wrote, truthfully.

"Perhaps it was not a dream," the technician said, reviewing my responses, with a graveyard humor that was also chilly and serious. Working nights will do it to you.

Yeah…something like that.  After a second miserable night in the sleep clinic I began to wonder if they aren’t measuring how well I sleep, so much as how well I sleep with a lot of wires attached to me.  Going in I was assured that they had the wiring down to an art now, and it would not disturb me in the least.  Well, that might be true if you sleep like you’re in a coffin, but I turn this way and that all night long and you just can’t do that with wires attached to several different spots on your head, and on both legs.

You go in bearing a little overnight bag.  They lead you to a room that looks half like a cheap motel room but with a (way too) narrow hospital bed in the middle, that has lots of plugs and gizmos in the headboard.  I sleep like a cat, sprawled all over the bed.  I took one look at that sleep clinic bed and just knew it was going to be a bad night, even before they put the wires on.  Hamilton in the Times describes a similar room to mine, so I reckon they’re all doing it the same now…

Try this sometime.

Plaster about two dozen electrodes to your face and head and tape some more to your chest and legs. Give yourself two to three feet of wire on each, and attach the other ends to the wall next to a bed, so they tug tightly when you move. Make sure the bed is in a room that you’ve never seen before, something that looks like a hospital room disguised as a hotel room. A kind of Soviet-era bugged spy box for information gathering, with a video camera, pointed at the bed, blinking silently from the ceiling.

Then turn out the lights and go to sleep.

At least they didn’t need to cut any of my hair to get the head leads on.  They use a paste that’s conductive and which comes out easily in the shower with just a little soap and water (really).  They didn’t bother misting my head at Johns Hopkins to get the leads off…just pulled gently.  I was given pretty much the same questionnaire that Hamilton was, but nobody reviewed it with me.  The first time I did the sleep study I dreamed that a technician woke me up and led me into the Hopkins Director’s office, where the Director sadly informed me that they probably couldn’t cure my sleeping problems, but if I wanted to I could finish the night sleeping on his office sofa. 

This second visit was to calibrate a CPAP machine for me.  They got a small nose mask that fit me very well, and after a time I hardly noticed it was on me.  Putting it on though caused a weird sensation because they had the machine on when they did it.  CPAP stands for Controlled Positive Air Pressure…it’s supposed to keep your post nasal breathing passages pressurized just enough that they don’t collapse (which is what causes snoring) and make it hard for you to breath while sleeping.  They tell you to close your mouth when they put the mask on, but it’s instinctual to open it when your nose is being closed off by something, and for an instant I had air going in my nose and coming back out my mouth.  Felt…very funky.  My brother, who scuba dives, would probably have seen it coming.  But I sleep with my mouth closed normally, and once you close your mouth you don’t notice the pressurization. 

But I noticed the effect it had on my breathing immediately.  My sleep problem has been developing over a period of about a decade now, and I hadn’t realized how hard it had become for me to breath at night with my head on the pillow, until it was suddenly effortless again.  I’m actually starting to think now that I may get this problem licked after all.

And in researching my problem I’ve discovered that sleeplessness is no joking matter.  The consequences of chronic sleeplessness that I’m digging up out there, are actually starting to scare me a bit…

The mortality rate is significantly higher in patients with untreated OSAS [obstructive sleep apnea syndrome] than in patients who have received adequate treatment or who experience primary snoring. Several studies have shown that there is a positive relationship between OSAS and cardiovascular morbidity, including myocardial infarctions and stroke. Patients with coronary artery disease may experience myocardial ischemia during episodes of apnea.

Systemic hypertension is found in 70% to 90% of patients with OSAS, and 30% to 35% of patients with essential hypertension also have OSAS. Cardiac arrhythmias are another serious complication of OSAS. The most common pattern consists of repeated cycles of bradycardia during apnea followed by tachycardia with arousal that terminates the apnea. Other arrhythmias include sinus arrest, second- or third-degree heart block, premature ventricular contractions, and potentially lethal tachyarrhythmias.

Automobile accidents caused by sleepiness or degraded perception and response, or both, are another cause of morbidity and death. In addition to higher mortality and morbidity rates, patients with OSAS have more cognitive impairment and a poorer overall quality of life than people without OSAS. Other complications include peripheral neuropathy, gastroesophageal reflux, increased intracranial pressure, optic neuropathy, glaucoma, recurrent delirium, and exacerbation of cluster headaches.

Fuck! 

Okay…this explains why my HMO isn’t bellyaching about paying for all this.  Supposedly they got enough data from me at the sleep clinic last weekend to know how much pressure my CPAP machine will need.  Too little and the breathing problems come back.  Too much and I’ll keep popping awake like I always do now anyway.  I’m supposed to be contacted by someone about getting my machine this week.  If it works for me I’ll look into my surgical options, because I don’t want to be tied to a machine for the rest of my life.  Especially one that requires a visit to the sleep clinic every time it needs adjusting.  These sleep clinic visits are running about two grand a pop.  And I’m not ready to have my house, and especially my bedroom, invaded by a lot of weird looking medical equipment.

And how the hell am I going to attract a boyfriend if I have to sleep next to him looking and sounding like Darth Vader?  No…if this works, I’ll have the surgery.

Really good post from The Malcontent about Penn and Teller’s season premiere: 

For the past several years, ever since the landmark Boy Scouts of America v Dale case, I thought I had staked out a solid position: As reprehensible as I found the Boy Scouts’ discrimination against gays and atheists, I don’t cherry-pick the First Amendment.  I think that freedom of association is generally a good thing, because it means the assholes of the world will usually cordon themselves off where they won’t bother the rest of us.

But then came last night’s season premiere of Showtime’s outstanding series "Bullshit!"

Penn and the silent though emotive Teller laid bare the tangled relationship between the Boy Scouts and government, relying on an almost incalculable amount of public funds and accommodations to carry out Scouting activities.

See…this is the problem I’ve had with them when the case of James Dale came up.  You’d have had to be living in a cave not to know how much money the BSA sucks from the public teat for their own purposes.  Their annual jamboree, held with pentagon help and funding, costs the U.S. Taxpayer from what I’ve heard something between seven and eight million dollars every year.  That’s just the jamboree.  Atheists pay a portion to fund that thing.  So do gay and lesbian Americans, and the parents of gay and lesbian kids.  And without even they tiniest compunction or shred of shame, the BSA cheerfully takes that money and puts it into its pocket.

As an aside, a few years back when I worked in the Senate, I played a bit part in helping to turn back legislative threats to the Scouts’ dependence on government.  Even though I was accurately representing the position of my boss, I felt I could do so in good faith, based on my own experience in the Boy Scouts dating back to the early 1980s.  But as "Bullshit!" points out, the BSA was hijacked by the Mormon Church in the mid-’80s, and today I’m sickened that I didn’t know the full story before now.

You may have heard that Mormons have this reputation for being thrifty self sufficient hard working people.  That’s certainly the reputation I grew up hearing.  So either it wasn’t true all along or something’s changed since then, because now it seems as though self sufficiency is more like bigoted insularity, and thrift is not spending your own money so long as you can spend other people’s money.

The bottom line is, you cannot have private membership standards that exclude a good swath of the public while continuing to suck off the public teat…

Just so.  My feelings at the time of Dale were that that BSA had worked so diligently for so long to make itself into a national institution, and now that it had this special place in the law and in public funding, for it to suddenly claim it was a private religion based club when it suited its purposes to do so was such transparent hypocrisy it deserved to be thrown out of court.  They wanted that special place over all other youth organizations in American culture, that Norman Rockwell spot in American life.  Now they needed to accept that with that came an obligation to actually serve all American youth…not just the chosen few. 

That was the political issue as far as I was concerned.  But there was a moral one too, which made me furious.  The Boy Scouts were telling certain kids that they were lesser beings, destined to live immoral squalid lives simply as a matter of their religious beliefs, or their sexual orientation.  I don’t care what your religious beliefs are, to beat up on a kid’s deepest sense of themselves, their relationship to their creator, their emerging sexuality, is obscene.  It is a crime against humanity to take hope away from a child…to teach them that it’s pointless for them to reach higher, to strive for the best within themselves, to teach them that in fact they have no best within, only squalor they will never escape from.  You can argue that youth groups deserve some degree of public support, but only to the extent that they actually nurture America’s children.  An organization that takes some of America’s children and shoves their faces into the mud and then tells them that’s all they deserve in life is beyond contempt.  After all the BSA had strived to become to America’s children, somebody needed to hold them to their own damn standards.

But…no, this is not the America it once was.  The case came down against Dale and I was furious.  Okay…fine…they want to be a private club…let them exist as one…on their own dime from now on.  But judging from the religious right, and the ferocity by which they’ve fought to keep the BSA sucking at the public teat, you’d think hypocrits were Christ’s favorite kind of people.

Man…I wish I’d caught that premiere of Bullshit.  Over at Naked Writing, Jody Wheeler says they’ve signed on for two more seasons of it, but in the process of doing their shows they’ve managed to piss off just about every executive at Showtime so more then five aren’t likely.  Fine.  I was looking to see if any of the big cable movie channels were going to be running Brokeback and I saw Showtime was running Crash, so they’ve pissed me off.  Two more years of Bullshit is just about enough reason to keep subscribing despite that.  But barely.

Having failed to force Ford Motor company to discriminate against homosexual people via threats of a boycott, the religious right will next attempt to force it to discriminate via shareholder vote…

(Washington) Ford Motor Company shareholders will vote next month on a resolution to drop protections for LGBT workers from the company’s human resources regulations.

The company had fought the motion, submitted by shareholder Robert Hurley of Alton, Ill, but when Alton took the issue to the  U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission the commission said the automaker must put the resolution to a vote at Ford’s annual meeting May 11.

The motion calls for Ford to change its policy to exclude any reference to sexual interests, activities or orientation.

Fine.  Let’s see how the shareholders feel about their gay and lesbian neighbors.  Every time we buy a Ford product, which now includes Volvo, that’s money into their pockets too after all, in one way or another.  It isn’t just the executive salaries we’re helping to pay.

Pitching wares to the gay community while discriminating against glbt employees is nothing new in the auto world of course.  BMW seems more then willing to try it , and they don’t even have the excuse of being located in a nation that religious fundamentalists are holding by the balls…

Our goal is not to incite a boycott of BMW’s cars, but rather to arm you, our readers, with awareness of the company’s actions as well as of those of the media outlets that published the ad. Speaking of which, one would hope that the publishers of GLBT-owned magazines and web sites would have higher standards than to accept advertising from a major, multinational corporation whose policies discriminate against the very audience that those publications were created to serve. Advertising dollars are scarce these days, but there is plenty of business from other car companies to go after—Gaywheels.com lists no less than 30 brands that qualify as gay-friendly.

But what really makes you angry about Robert Hurley’s cheapshit attempt to put a knife in the back of loyal Ford Motor Company employees, is that Ford management wants to be part of the civilized world, was willing to stand up to bigotry in a way that it’s founder, who admired Adolf Hitler, could never have fathomed.  And like an infection the homophobic bigots keep trying to drag it down into their gutter. 

You’d have thought that by now the United States of America would at least be past the point about arguing whether or not gay and lesbian people should even be allowed something as basic as the ability to hold down a job.  But you’d be wrong.  Never mind same sex marriage…it’s the twenty-first century and we’re still arguing about evolution, let alone about the humanity of women, people of color, and homosexuals.  There’s an old joke about how Australia got all of England’s criminals, and America got all its religious fanatics, and between the two countries we got the shit end of the stick.

It would probably go something like this:

Why would a boy raised by a family of conservative republican Mormons want to mock rape 18 children under his charge at a Student Leadership camp and then plead for leniency so he could go on missionary duty for his church?  Why would a conservative family values republican allow his son to evade responsibility for the serial sexual assault of children, some 15, some as young as 11 years old?  Why would a staunchly conservative family values church institution like the Mormon church allow someone who mock raped 18 children with broomsticks, canes, mop handles and flashlights, and who despite being confronted by the testimony of his victims, continued to maintain it was nothing but a little hazing, go on a mission so they could become an elder member of the faith?  Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it does not make sense.  And if it does not make sense, you must acquit!

Clifton Bennett, the 18 year old son of Ken Bennett, the president of the Arizona state senate will, in all likelihood, get probation instead of a prison term, for mock sodomizing  18 children aged 11 to 15 with an assortment of implements, including a broom, a cane, a mop handle and a heavy-duty flashlight.  The assaults occurred at the Chapel Rock Camp in Prescott Arizona, at a week long camp held for student council leaders. 

The son of Arizona’s Senate president confessed that he and another counselor shoved broomsticks and flashlights into the rectums of 18 boys in at least 40 incidents at a youth camp in June.

Now Yavapai County prosecutors say they will drop all but one assault charge and likely recommend little or no jail time if 18-year-old Clifton Bennett agrees to plead guilty.

A similar agreement has been offered to co-defendant Kyle Wheeler, 19, who faces an additional assault charge for choking three of the boys until they passed out.

The plea agreements were first presented in court last week and could be completed at a hearing Monday.

Prosecuting attorney James Landis explained the plea agreement in court, saying the "broomsticking" was a hazing ritual and a punishment, not sexual assault.

But legal experts, sex-crimes prosecutors and victims’-rights lawyers say the acts clearly fit the definition of sexual assault.

Perhaps, but that definition does not take into account being the son of one of the most powerful republicans in the state of Arizona, which can turn even the serial mock raping of 18 children in less then a week into a non-dangerous, non-repetitive offense…

The pleas, which describe the assault charge as "a non-dangerous, non-repetitive offense," have outraged parents who say their sons were victims of violent sexual attacks. The boys, who were 11 to 14 years old at the time, have had trouble going to the bathroom, sleep with clothes on, are afraid at night, and have undergone sexual-assault counseling.

Boys will be boys.  Probation in this case is being sought as the preferable outcome, as this will allow young Bennett to continue with his upcoming missionary duties…

They [Bennett’s lawyers] described Bennett as an honor student and active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, planning to go on a mission in September. "A felony conviction for assault will make his desire to complete his mission impossible," they wrote.

And this poor world could certainly use another missionary like him couldn’t it. 

Brooming’ suspects may get plea deal

Police reports say he was assaulted with a broomstick, a flashlight and a cane — and now a 12-year-old Tucson boy may see the camp counselors accused of attacking him receive a plea deal that could allow them to avoid prison.

 

…

 

According to police reports, the assaults took place at Chapel Rock Camp during a weeklong camp for school leaders in June. The reports say some campers clogged a toilet and, when no one would confess, witnesses told police the junior counselors lined up the youngsters, told them to bend over and "broomsticked" them.

 

The boys told police that "broomsticking" was done alternately with a broom, a cane, a mop handle and a heavy-duty flashlight while they were clothed. The exact definition of broomsticking varied, according to witness reports, from touching brooms to the boys’ rectal areas to one description of how a boy was held down and the witness said the broomstick was "shoved" into his bottom.

 

…

 

The father of that boy says he did not know about the assaults until a detective called the family’s home in December. The father said his son spoke directly with the detective and has been reluctant to discuss the incidents with his family.

 

…

 

The father said he spoke to the victim advocate in the County Attorney’s Office, who told them Clifton Bennett was going to be offered a plea bargain to one count of aggravated assault. Cadigan also said she was told by a representative from the office that Bennett is being offered a plea bargain to one count of aggravated assault and Wheeler will be offered two counts. They’ll both face probation rather than jail or prison time, a possibility.

 

"Come on. I told her that was unacceptable. This was not roughhousing. These are 12 and 13-year-old kids. Anyone else would go to prison for six to 10 years," said the father, whom the Star is not naming because it would identify his son.

 

"I do remember when we picked him up from camp he complained that his butt hurt. But we didn’t pursue it. We had no idea what had been going on," he said. "He’s a pretty accomplished kid and he’s in counseling now, so hopefully he’ll get over it. He’s a strong kid."

The next time either the Mormon church or the republican caucus of the Arizona state senate go on a roll about how homosexuals, and same sex marriages, are such a dire threat to the welfare of children, someone ought to ask them where Clifton Bennett is doing his missionary duty these days, and if he’s allowed anywhere near children or broomsticks.

[Update…] Photo of our fine young Mormon missionary-to-be and one of his accomplices via Pam’s House Blend:

Eighteen boys ages 11 to 15.  Broomsticks.  Canes.  Mop handles.  Flashlights.  Good thing Dad’s the president of the Arizona State Senate..!

Mystified by a rash of burglaries where thieves made off with…oven doors…the cops in South Bend think they may now know what the heck is going on…

South Bend detective Sgt. Jim Walsh said police arrested a suspect Thursday they believe sold the door to the woman. Police said an oven door and packaging materials were found in the trunk of the man’s car.

Oven doors are an increasingly hot item in burglaries targeting vacant properties. Walsh said oven doors were among the items stolen in five recent burglaries.

… 

In the case of the bilked woman, she was approached by the suspect Feb. 20 at her workplace with an offer of a flat-screen TV for $500. The suspect settled for $300. But when the woman unwrapped the packaging, she found a cord, a controller — and an oven door.

Do you really need a flat screen TV so badly you’ll buy it from that shady character selling them out the back of his van?  Look…go buy a book…

They’re remembering the death of pope John Paul this week, and in couple more it’ll be the ascendancy of pope Ratzinger.  So since my weekly cartoon is late again (I did another sleep clinic at Hopkins which really mucked up my weekend…), I’ll try and bribe you with a re-run:

And that’s pretty much been the way it’s been with Ratzinger: 

Calling same-sex unions “pseudo-matrimony” the pope said: “The various forms of the dissolution of matrimony today, like free unions, trial marriages and going up to pseudo-matrimonies by people of the same sex, are rather expressions of an anarchic freedom that wrongly passes for true freedom of man.”

Although was his first public comment on same-sex marriage since becoming Pope, Benedict had long history of attacking same-sex unions. 

As Cardinal Ratzinger he was the Vatican’s most outspoken opponent of gay marriage.

He was the author of the a 2003 Vatican directive to priests around the world calling for a proactive stand to stop governments from legalizing same-sex marriage and for a repeal of those those already on the books that give rights, including adoption, to gay couples. (story)

In just a year Ratzinger took John-Paul’s various assaults on the humanity of homosexual people, removed the paternalistic veneer from them, and turned it all into a relentless machine.  And now worldwide, violence toward homosexuals is on the rise.  Imagine that.  You’d think the Catholic church would know better then to go down this path again…

We shall see how defenders of the Church take pains to distinguish between “anti-Judaism” and “antisemitism”; between Christian Jew-hatred as a “necessary but insufficient” cause of the Holocaust; between the “sins of the children” and the sinlessness of the Church as such.  These distinctions become meaningless before the core truth of this history: Because the hatred of Jews had been made holy, it became lethal. 

-James Carroll, “Constantine’s Sword”

…but hate takes away all reason.  In another year people will be marveling at how Ratzinger managed to make the climate for gays and lesbians even worse then he already had.  And that hostile climate will in turn, kill more innocent people.

Once upon a time, I wanted to be a photojournalist…

Time was, I had several small newspapers running my photos.  But for a kid fresh out of high school there was scant little money in it, and my soul was never competitive enough to keep pounding doors for work in a market that was saturated with other guys like me looking to get their pictures printed.  By the mid-70s I’d given it up, and for a decade I just wandered aimlessly in the workforce.  But my interest in what news photographers do has never flagged, and I’ll reliably stop to listen whenever a photographer comes forward to tell the story behind a photo.  Their stories are worth hearing, to understand the struggle it sometimes is just to take the images that can keep the public informed, let alone deal with the fallout…

So here, ultimately, is how it all plays out: when the Iraqi man in the mosque posed a threat, he was your enemy; when he was subdued he was your responsibility; when he was killed in front of my eyes and my camera — the story of his death became my responsibility.

The burdens of war, as you so well know, are unforgiving for all of us.

You’ve probably already seen the photo of supreme court justice Scalia making an obscene gesture in a church, after a reporter for the Boston Herald asked him how he would respond to people who question his impartiality in matters of church-state separation.  Scalia responded thusly:

…telling the reporter, "To my critics, I say, ‘Vaffanculo,’"  Michelangelo Signorile, himself of Italian descent, said on his show the other day that the word translates roughly into "get fucked up the ass".  This is the man the right has been for years calling the most intellectual justice on the court.  You have to figure they think it’s too bad Al Capone wasn’t available when Reagan had an opening to fill.

Whether Scalia knew there was a photographer there when he did that I’m still not sure.  But the moment he heard the camera go off, he said "You’re not going to print that, are you?".  So at minimum he knew he’d been caught being the crude barstool asshole he always is when he thinks the cameras aren’t there.  But this time one was.

The photographer, Peter Smith, an assistant photojournalism professor at Boston University, was freelancing for The Pilot, a newspaper of the Boston Archdiocese.  The operative word here is freelancing.  Had he been staff, the photo of Scalia making an obscene gesture would have been the newspaper’s property and likely would never have seen the light of day.  But, at least when I was doing it, a freelancer owns the photos they take, until they sell them to a newspaper.  Whether The Pilot offered to buy the photo I don’t know, but I know had that been me I’d have held onto the rights for dear life.  

For a couple days the photo stayed in the shadows, while the republican Mighty Wurlitzer went into operation, to convince the public that Scalia had made no obscene gesture…that the reporter was lying…blah blah woof woof…  I was watching the whole thing unfold from the sidelines, knowing from my own experience just how suddenly things can happen, and how being just a fraction of a second on either side of the moment means you missed it.  You get yourself back home to your darkroom (or nowadays I guess your computer), and you develop your film and you look over what you got and you see that you were close, but not spot-on enough that the picture is clear and unambiguous about what that moment was.  Where the difference between capturing the moment and missing it entirely is less then a heartbeat, less then the blink of an eye, to be good at what you do you have to train your mind to see it coming and be there when it happens, just to stand a chance of getting it at all.  The rest is chance, and chance can do even the best photographers wrong sometimes.  I’d expected the photo of Scalia would hit the papers and the Internet almost at once, and when it didn’t I started to wonder if either Scalia had successfully managed to have it suppressed, or the photographer simply didn’t get a good shot of it.

Then, after several days of republican spin machine bellyaching that Scalia didn’t do it, the photographer came forward with the photo. 

“It’s inaccurate and deceptive of him to say there was no vulgarity in the moment,” said Peter Smith, the Boston University assistant photojournalism professor who made the shot.

Despite Scalia’s insistence that the Sicilian gesture was not offensive and had been incorrectly characterized by the Herald as obscene, the photographer said the newspaper “got the story right.”

Smith said the jurist “immediately knew he’d made a mistake, and said, ‘You’re not going to print that, are you?’ ” 

The Archdiocese of course, fired Smith immediately.  Only I’m a little fuzzy about how you fire a freelancer.  I guess what they meant was never darken our door again…  Well, they covered up for child molesters.  You have to figure that demanding a photographer cover up for a gutter crawling thug, who feels perfectly free to treat a church like it’s the corner bar, would be even less likely to strike them as unethical behavior.  Morals.  Values. 

Peter Smith has taken what will become one of the iconic photographs of our times.  That face, and the gesture, say it all, not only about the man, but about the times we are living in.  That is what photographers live for.  The god of shadow and light smiled on him in that one instant, and he captured an image that says it all, and he did not just the right thing, but the only thing a photographer could do with it; he showed it to the world.  Because the world needs to see.