I’m going to steal this shtick from Atrios, but I don’t think he’ll mind…
So I make myself some coffee and open my dead tree version of the NY Times this morning only to see a call for blogger ethics on the front page. How interesting. Another call for "managed civil speech" (which is claimed to be "freer" than unfettered free speech.) There was no word on who would be the managers of such speech, but I think we can count on those who call for it to be the ones who feel they are most qualified to define and enforce it. (Apparently, this will all be done "voluntarily" and will be dealt with through purges and link boycotts and the novel concept of moderated comment sections. Or something.)
Meanwhile, on the media page is a story about the execrable Don Imus and the fact that he routinely makes racist, misogynistic and eliminationist jokes on his show while half the Washington press corps spends time there kissing his ring. For some reason that kind of "incivility" doesn’t upset the journalistic prima donnas half as much as the uncivil blogosphere does.
So what’s up with this? The blogosphere is admittedly an uncivil place. Nobody disputes that. But it is comprised of a bunch of disparate individuals who are arguing amongst themselves with varying degress of seriousness and talent as part of the national (and international) dialog. There is a corner of it that is despicable and revolting, as the misogyny that set off this latest debate clearly demonstrates. But for inexplicable reasons it’s the liberal blogosphere that is being particularly attacked for our alleged incivility by the mainstream media. (I suspect it’s the fact that we drop the "F" bomb too much, which is simply shocking in American life)
However, for almost two decades now, talk radio has been spewing vile racist, misogynistic and eliminationst spew — and their stars have been feted and petted for it among the highest levels of the capital cognoscenti. I don’t know for sure why that would be, but I have my suspicions.
Via Atrios…via Digby… Okay…Now I understand why that gutter crawling bigot Don Imus is so popular among the Washington Beltway glitterati. I was always puzzled by that, always kept wondering how many times that babbling bar stool bigot would have to go over the line before someone finally booted his ass off the radio. Yet every time I look in his direction I see that he’s just gotten bigger, and Even More respected. What the fuck was it about this low-life crank’s power to attract big names onto his show? Now I know. His blessing on their books directly translates into book sales…
I can’t help but be reminded of the Imus profile of a year ago in Vanity Fair (not online, unfortunately) in which his psychotic freakshow was fully revealed. I’m sure all these disgusting sycophants read it. After all, it featured them in starring roles — being insulted by Don Imus:
"They don’t make good decisions," he says of MSNBC and its programming. "You can’t make idiotic decisions like (hiring hosts) Tucker Carlson and Ron Reagan." Of conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, he says: "He’s a twit. He’s a pussy." This is in the same spirit as an earlier comment on Senate majority leader Bill Frist ("a fucking criminal"). Similarly, when he looks up from his circular desk at a television monitor during a commercial break and sees Chris Matthews, the host of Hardball, silently nattering away, he says, "There’s that idiot," to no one in particular.
It makes you wonder why they continue to appear on his show and are making complete fools of themselves today assuring everyone that Imus is a "good man."This might explain it:
I can feel the high of becoming part of his incestuous circle of regulars-the media elite who have entree with the I-Man and have never seemed troubled, at least publicly troubled as far as I can tell, by the show’s forays over the years into homophobia and crudeness and sexism. I like this idea of being right in there with columnists Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich of The New York Times and NBC’s Andrea Mitchell and David Gregory and Tim Russert (husband of Vanity Fair special correspondent Maureen Orth), all Imus regulars. I wonder if there’s some secret media-elite handshake I need to learn, just so I can hear the jubilant sound of the cash register ringing when it comes time to sell my next book, because nobody (with the clear exception of Oprah) sells a book better than Imus.
He likes that power, enjoys going on Amazon to see just how much he can boost a book. During the week I’m there, he has Larry the Cable Guy on as a guest-Larry has just written a book called Git-r-Done. Before the show, according to Imus, the book was about 1,800 on the Amazon list. But when he checks on the Internet just after the show, it’s No. 122.
I wonder if the media elite’s failure to seriously take Imus to task for anything is due to a fear that their book-promotion pipeline will be cut off if they rub him the wrong way. In a 1998 New Yorker piece, Ken Auletta drew up a list, confirmed by Imus, of more than a dozen high-profile journalists who made contributions to the Imus Ranch. It’s hard to quibble with donations to a worthy cause. As George Stephanopoulos said on the air to Imus in 1998, with his book on the White House still in the works, "I’m not too proud to suck up for a good cause. So count me in for $5,000 on the ranch!"
I wonder what I would have done, had I been an Imus regular with a book to sell, when the previous sports announcer for the show, Sid Rosenberg, said on the air last May of a female entertainer who had been diagnosed with breast cancer, "Ain’t gonna be so beautiful when the bitch got a bald head and one titty." I wonder how I would have reacted to the cackling of various members of Imus’s ensemble over the next minute or so to Rosenberg’s remarks, as well as Imus’s own hardly outraged response: "There’s a reason I fire you about every six weeks." He did get fired from the show, and Imus distanced himself from what Rosenberg had said. He says the remarks were "horrible," but there seemed to be something disingenuous about Imus’s repudiation-complete bullshit, as he might put it-given that Rosenberg had already distinguished himself on the show in 2001 by calling tennis player Venus Williams an "animal" and noting that she and her sister, Serena, had a better chance of posing nude for National Geographic than Playboy. I wonder what I would have done had I been in the audience the night Imus made his crude and unfunny remarks about President Clinton and his wife. Would I have said, That’s it, never again. Or would I have been like Cokie Roberts of ABC television, who called Imus’s remarks "profoundly rude," vowed never to go back on the show, and then did several years later when the opportunity arose to push her new book, We Are Our Mothers’ Daughters.
It’s as if they believe we can’t read or are too stupid to figure out what they are doing. I read Vanity Fair. I hear his disgusting show and hear them on it, kissing up to him like he’s some sort of oracle instead of a spoiled, petulant bully with an incoherent worldview. And I also listen to their complaints about the vituperation on the internet, how the bloggers — especially the "angry left" — are horrible people who treat them disrespectfully. And I have to laugh because I know that Don Imus can call them and their colleagues twits and pussies in Vanity Fair and they come back licking his boots, begging for more. And we know why.
They have earned their reputation — even some of the good ones, the ones who write things I like. When you sell your personal integrity for money to a racist scumbag like Don Imus, you have to expect that people are not going to treat you with a lot of respect.
Well that about sums up the history of the mainstream news media ever since Reagan, doesn’t it? They followed the big money into the gutter. They followed the big money into the gutter. And they’ve been busy trying to drag their country into the gutter along with them ever since, so they won’t have to know that they’re not living on main street anymore, but in the gutter.
Another good song, for those days when old friends tell you to go back into the closet. This is The Travelling Wilburys version…
I’ve discovered that YouTube is a pretty good place to find all those good songs that iTunes still isn’t selling. I wonder how long That’s going to last…
Well I know whats right, I got just one life…In a world that keeps on pushin me around…But Ill stand my ground and I wont back down
So you’re a 53 year old gay man. You remember coming out to yourself in the early 1970s, when the only places you could go to buy a copy of The Advocate or the Washington Blade were seedy adult bookstores. You remember Antia Bryant. You remember when you heard Dan White had shot and killed Harvey Milk. You remember the first time you saw The Quilt. You remember making your first panel for it. You remember all the friends you lost. You remember the first March on Washington. And the Second. And the Third. You remember the day the Warren Court upheld the sodomy laws. You remember Rush Limbaugh bellyaching that Bill Clinton had allowed “human garbage” into his inaugural parade because the Gay Men’s Choral was in it. You remember Sam Nunn posing in a submarine bunk while congress debated Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. You remember the Hawaiian Supreme Court saying we could marry, and then 70 percent of Hawaiians passing a constitutional amendment saying we could not. You remember when Matthew Shepard was murdered. You remember Justice Kennedy’s words, overturning Hardwick v. Bowers…
And one Easter Sunday evening you find yourself writing a Go To Hell letter to that old friend, that once close friend, that once upon a time best friend you loved so very, very dearly, and who just sent you Yet Another EMail insisting that you need to stay discreetly closeted, and respect other folk’s cheapshit prejudices (cheapshit prejudices he’d never tolerate if they were racist ones directed at him) in order to get by in this world…and I should really shut up about my issues and stop being such a self-centered bore…
…what better song to compose that letter to then…
This One….
(This video alas does Not do the song justice…but you can stillDance to it…)
Okay…I have a temper. I admit it. But…swear to God…if some (x) friends of mine are going to keep acting like it’s still the late 70s and the only goddamn thing they know about gay people is what they learned in gym class or when they watched Richard Burton and Rex Harrison act like a couple of faggots in Staircase…well then…(ahem) I’m Not The Fucking One With A Listening Problem!
I never thought of myself as a Disco queen. There’s maybe four or five songs from the period I like at all. Thing is…music won’t make your heartaches go away, but sometimes it lets you dance over them…
We were born…born…Born to be Alive! (Born to be Alive) Yes we were born…born…born… Born to be Alive!
And I mean, completely different. Leper colonies for Sodomites anyone…?
You get the distinct impression he is only marginally less offended by Catholics then by sodomites. I think he’d probably fill in the chunnel too if he could. And it sounds like there was at least one other person in there, possibly more, while he was venting for the camera. I wonder if they’d all just been drinking or something.
Oh…and he used to be a policeman. Good thing for British gays that’s in his past isn’t it?
…and discover that most of my adult life was all a dream and it’s still 1974…
Shades of Rose Mary Woods? An 18 day gap?
I think a commenter in our document dump research thread may have been the first to notice that the emails released by the Justice Department seem to have a gap between November 15th and December 4th of last year.
(Our commenter saw it late on the evening of the dump itself — see the comment date-stamped March 20, 2007 02:19 AM in the research thread)
The firing calls went out on December 7th. But the original plan was to start placing the calls on November 15th. So those eighteen days are pretty key ones.
Rumsfeld: No. There comes a mike! Just take a second.
Maybe if people who have questions stick their hand up now, someone will get a mike to you and then the mike will be right there with you. There’s one in the back, good.
Go ahead.
Q: Thank you, sir. First, it’s a pleasure to hear you and to be this close to you and see you in person. We’ve seen you on TV a lot, and it’s a neat experience for us.
I’m part of an AEF rotation here, a part of a group that is deployed for AEF 7 and 8, and this is a great place to be deployed, no doubt. But many of us are asking, how long will we be frozen? But my question is, on the behalf of some of our Guard and Reserve men who are here, we know that some units have been mobilized, partially mobilized. Their question is, do you — are we going to go to a full mobilization of Guard and Reserve? And if we are, when will that decision be made?
Rumsfeld: Well — (laughter) — let me say this about that. (Laughter.) It is highly unlikely that we would go to a full mobilization. We — I have been signing a great many deployment orders and mobilization orders and alerting orders. The forces have been flowing now for a good number of weeks, and that has had its intended effect. There is no question but that the world’s focus is on the fact that the Iraqi regime, now for some 12 years, continues to ignore and disagree with the now 17 resolutions of the United Nations. The world understands that; they are looking for cooperation and hoping that the force flow will bring about cooperation, but thus far, it has not.
We don’t talk about deployments in the specific, but we have brought a good many Guard and Reserve on active duty. Fortunately, a great many of them were volunteers. We have been able to have relatively few stop losses. There are some currently, particularly in the Army, but relatively few in the Navy and the Air Force. And it is not knowable if force will be used, but if it is to be used, it is not knowable how long that conflict would last. It could last, you know, six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.
Like…you know…six days…six weeks…you know… Whatever. You know.
If you click on the link I’ve provided, to this U.S. Department Of Defense DefenseLink News Transcript, you might notice that it’s a page from the Google cache. Click on the link at the top of the cache page. You know. Where it says, Click here for the current page without highlighting. Go ahead. The original page is gone. We have always been at war with Eastasia…
First it was the liberal Bishop of Chelmsford, John Gladwin. Now Sir Elton John is the latest to be hit by trouble over plans to visit the Caribbean island of Tobago. As we reported, Gladwin had to cancel a diocesan visit to Trinidad and Tobago after opposition from conservative Anglicans. Church leaders are now trying to ban Sir Elton from visiting in April, when he is due to play in the Plymouth music festival. According to reports running on agency wires today, it is feared that if the musician, pictured here with his partner David Furnish, even sets foot on the island his presence there might tempt local people to become gay. The Jamaican Gleaner is reporting however that the singer will be allowed to take to the stage. Apparently, a clause in Tobago’s immigration laws bans self-confessed gays from entering the country, although it is thought that none has actually been turned away.
The Archdeacon for Trinidad and Tobago, the Ven Philip Isaac, said the star’s openly gay lifestyle and the fact he had a partner did not conform to ’biblical teachings’. He said Christian principles dictated that a ‘man should not lie with a man’. The Anglican Archdeacon said: ‘The artist is one of God’s children and while his lifestyle is questionable he needs to be ministered unto. His visit to the island can open the country to be tempted towards pursuing his lifestyle.’
What a jackass. And let it be said, the man’s another Anglican Bishop on a crusade against homosexuals. I wonder if he’s so much as uttered a single breath of censure toward the violence against homosexuals now sweeping the Caribbean. Or is that just another stupid question on my part. Whatever the Episcopalians decide to do regarding the ultimatum gutter crawling haters like Ven Philip Isaac have given them, the damage is already done, the wounds already carved into the hearts of thousands of gay Christians and their families, and their friends. It’s not the Episcopalians who need to repent. The Anglican church will be repenting for this for generations.
On the March 6 edition of Fox News Live, while discussing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-NY) March 4 speech and her participation in a commemorative civil rights march in Selma, Alabama, host E.D. Hill accused Clinton of affecting a "Southern drawl" during her speech and asked pollster Scott Rasmussen: "[W]ould it happen elsewhere, if she was attending, say, a GLAAD [Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation] convention, would she speak with a lisp?"
You just know they all think gays have limp wrists and walk with a swish too. Why the hell did Harry Reid agree to have a democratic presidential candidates debate hosted by Fox News? He going to ask Focus On The Family to host the one after that?
The following opening sentence, taken from a genuine newspaper story, is brought to you as a public service of the Society For Laughing In Robert Bork’s Face:
A jazz musician was injured Friday after jumping from a burning motor home driven by a one-time roller skating stripper from Lodi.
As long as there is Jazz there will always be an America…
…I believe this is a vital issue in the life of the church. The hope of wholeness and holiness of life is integral to the Gospel message. Jesus didn’t die on the cross to save us from throwing gum wrappers on the sidewalk or using the wrong fork to eat our tofu, he died to save our deepest selves from our darkest sins. And, because we are created with human bodies full of hormones and fallen psyches full of what my friend Bill Stafford calls "disordered affections," many of those deepest sins will involve our sexuality. We are not given new life and new power in Christ so we can do what we darn well please. We are not our own, we are bought with a price, says St. Paul. Therefore, he says, we are to glorify God with our bodies.
…
In August of 21003, ECUSA’s General Convention created an uproar when it decided to endorse and bless the consecration to the office of bishop a man publically and proudly living a homo-erotic relationship. This unprecedented decision–made in the face of international pleas that it not take place–created an uproar in the whole Christian and, indeed, the entire mono-theistic world. The Anglican Communion, under the direction of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, created a commission to explore how the communion could and should respond to this provocative, unilateral action by one small branch of the Anglican Communion…
…
The Episcopal Church needs to be called to just the sort of repentance and humility it says it believes. Only that sort of clear, forthright repentance can lead to reconciliation…
Church ousts him after ‘inappropriate relationship’
An Orange Park priest and leading voice in the theologically conservative Anglican movement in America has been stripped of his clerical credentials after having "an inappropriate relationship" with an adult female church member, the parish’s top lay leader said Monday.
The Rev. SAMUEL C. PASCOE was removed Feb. 10 from his position as senior rector at Grace Church (Anglican) and lost his ministerial license as a result of the relationship, said David Nelson, senior warden of the former Episcopal congregation.
Pascoe, who is married with three sons, said he couldn’t comment on the situation and referred all questions to Nelson.
Pascoe, 56, for several years has been an outspoken critic of the Episcopal Church USA for what he and others see as the denomination’s increasingly progressive interpretation of Scripture and its growing acceptance of homosexuality.
When the denomination elected an openly gay priest as bishop of New Hampshire in 2003, Pascoe helped lead a movement that resulted in his and several other parishes quitting the denomination and its Jacksonville-based Episcopal Diocese of Florida. He sharply criticized Florida Bishop John Howard for refusing to quit the national church.
"He’s known nationally, for sure, and he’s probably the biggest player in Florida," said David Virtue of Virtueonline.org, an Internet-based Anglican news and commentary site with about 4 million readers.
Pascoe led his parish into the Anglican Mission in the Americas, then orchestrated a $4 million fundraising campaign to build new facilities after the congregation left Grace Episcopal property in 2006, Virtue said.
Virtue said the tragedy isn’t for the Anglican movement but for Pascoe and his family.
"He is a godly evangelical who struggled for the faith, led his parish out … and started all over again, and then suddenly this," Virtue said. "It defies all reason."
The Rev. Kurt Dunkle, a spokesman for Howard and the newly installed rector at Grace Episcopal Church, said the diocese has no comment.
Nor did the Rev. Neil Lebhar, a spokesman for the Anglican Alliance of North Florida and another leader of the region’s Anglican movement.
Nelson said the parish was informed of the relationship and Pascoe’s status during Ash Wednesday services last week and again in services Sunday.
"It’s a painful thing that has taken place," Nelson said. "And it’s difficult for Sam given the comments he has made" on issues of sexual morality.
Ah…just blame the homos. That’s the routine in that glass house you call a church isn’t it? It isn’t Sam’s fault, whatever he did that was…inappropriate. It’s ours…right? Because Gene Robinson became a bishop poor Sam just lost all his moral bearings and he couldn’t help himself. Blame Gene Robinson. Sam’s a righteous man of God so it can’t be his fault he’s a jackass. It has to be the gays fault. Blame us. That’s what you think we were put on this earth for after all, isn’t it?
The lawyer for a former Baptist church leader who had spoken out against homosexuality said Thursday the minister has a constitutional right to solicit sex from an undercover policeman.
The Rev. Lonnie W. Latham had supported a resolution calling on gays and lesbians to reject their "sinful, destructive lifestyle" before his Jan. 3, 2006, arrest outside the Habana Inn in Oklahoma City.
Authorities say he asked the undercover policeman to come up to his hotel for oral sex.
His attorney, Mack Martin, filed a motion to have the misdemeanor lewdness charge thrown out, saying the Supreme Court ruled in the 2003 decision Lawrence v. Texas that it was not illegal for consenting adults to engage in private homosexual acts.
"Now, my client’s being prosecuted basically for having offered to engage in such an act, which basically makes it a crime to ask someone to do something that’s legal," Martin said.
Both sides agree there was no offer of money, but prosecutor Scott Rowland said there is a "legitimate governmental interest" in regulating offers of acts of lewdness.
Latham’s lawyer has a point. And as a card carrying member I am happy to see that the ACLU filed a brief on his behalf. But if the government is poking its nose where it doesn’t belong, its louts like Latham who’ve made that inevitable. The pulpits bear a heavy responsibility for our culture’s dysfunctional attitudes toward sex and sexuality. I can see where people might not like having to navigate through a gauntlet of men out looking for sex when they’re just trying to walk down a street or though a park but that’s what you get when you treat sex like its something that’s radioactive, instead of a normal part of our flesh and blood lives. Here in America sex is either dirty or its cheap, but it isn’t allowed to be wonderful. And it’s mostly pulpit thumping jackasses like Latham who are to blame for that. They’re the ones who’ve made sex another three letter word for sin. They’ve taken what should be a wonderful, playful, joyful, part of our lives, and tainted it with guilt and shame. Then they cash in on the damage that does. It’s unforgivable.
I remember watching Phyllis Schlafly on TV babbling about how all you need to teach teenagers about sex is don’t touch anything inside your bathing suits. Well if that’s all you teach them, then don’t be shocked, shocked, when they grow up to be adults who troll the streets at night for random cheap anonymous sex, because an instinct they never learned how to deal with honorably, that’s hundreds of millions of years older then the human race itself, is dragging them out there by the cords on their bathing suits and they don’t have clue one why they can’t stop themselves. Just on principal I hope Latham wins his case, but I don’t feel sorry for him in the least. So called men of God like him have a lot of human misery to answer for.
ABC News’ Jonathan Greenberger Reports: Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney offered a new explanation today for why he supported a Democrat in 1992.
That year, Romney, then a registered independent, voted for former Sen. Paul Tsongas in the 1992 Democratic presidential primary. He told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, in an interview that will air Sunday on "This Week," that his vote was meant as a tactical maneuver aimed at finding the weakest opponent for incumbent President George H.W. Bush.
"In Massachusetts, if you register as an independent, you can vote in either the Republican or Democratic primary," said Romney, who until he made an unsuccessful run for Senate in 1994 had spent his adult life as a registered independent. "When there was no real contest in the Republican primary, I’d vote in the Democrat primary, vote for the person who I thought would be the weakest opponent for the Republican."
But 12 years ago, the Boston Globe reported that Romney was giving a different explanation for his vote for Tsongas.
"Romney confirmed he voted for former U.S. Sen. Paul Tsongas in the state’s 1992 Democratic presidential primary, saying he did so both because Tsongas was from Massachusetts and because he favored his ideas over those of Bill Clinton," the Boston Globe’s Scot Lehigh and Frank Phillips wrote on Feb. 3, 1994. "He added he had been sure the G.O.P. would renominate George Bush, for whom he voted in the fall election."
(Emphasis mine) Some folks unaccountibly find this a bit hard to believe…
Romney’s contention that his vote for Tsongas was a vote for the weakest opponent for Bush – a phenomenon that political scientists refer to as "raiding" – surprised Professor William Mayer of Northeastern University in Boston.
"That would have been a strange election to have done that in, in the sense that Paul Tsongas was obviously going to carry his home state" of Massachusetts, said Mayer. Tsongas won the Massachusetts primary with 66 percent of the vote.
Doubter. What’s not to trust in this fine upstanding man of God? See…he voted for the hometown candidate, whose ideas he liked. Except he didn’t. And that was then and this is now. I’ll say this for Romney…you seldom see a politician so blatantly telling the public that his word doesn’t mean a goddamned thing.
Buying a greeting card for someone’s birthday, anniversary or if they’re feeling under the weather is pretty straightforward. But what if they’re undergoing chemotherapy or struggling with depression? "Get Well Soon" probably won’t cut it.
Likewise, most cards lining the store shelves don’t work on occasions as someone leaving an abusive spouse, undergoing drug rehab or declaring their sexual orientation.
Hallmark Cards Inc., which has built its $4.2 billion empire on sentiments for life’s happier times, is releasing a new line of cards that will speak to those and other situations that the company says have either been ignored by greeting card companies or received only a smattering of attention from niche players.
Well I just know I’m going to enjoy reading the "declaring my sexual orientation" card that’s somewhere between the So Sorry You Have Cancer and Congratulations On Your Drug Rehab cards…
No topics were off-limits, said company spokeswoman Rachel Bolton, noting two cards that could be sent to gay people who have disclosed their sexuality. The cards don’t directly refer to homosexuality, only extolling the person to "Be You" or "This is who I am" or featuring a rainbow, a symbol of gay pride.
Bolton said the writing is general enough for other uses, however, with one focus group member saying they would send it to a friend starting a new job.
"Our findings determined that people didn’t want to be labeled or identified,’’ Bolton said. "We want to be inclusive and not exclusive."
Coming from the company that was protecting the sanctity of stuffed bear family life a few years ago (more about that Here), I’m probably expected to regard this as progress of sorts. Except it isn’t. Hallmark isn’t merely trying to grab a piece of the gay dollar here, they’re trying to position themselves as "inclusive and not exclusive". That card isn’t for gay customers. You don’t market a card that’s too scared to utter the word "gay" to gay people who’ve taken that difficult, nerve wracking, terrifying step of coming out to family and friends. Who the hell sends a card that can’t even utter the word "gay" to a gay person, congratulating them on coming out of the closet? Be Who You Are…Just Don’t Say It… That’s crap. The card is PR, nothing more. Here’s what’s going on…
The $7 billion greeting card industry already brims with tiny niche players who make and sell cards dealing with such things as serious illness or thanking caregivers, said Barbara Miller, a spokeswoman for the Washington, D.C.-based Greeting Card Association.
But she said none of them have the ability to reach customers searching for those types of cards across the country.
Oh yes they do, if they want to exploit it. It’s called the Internet lady. It’s been four years since a Hallmark store had security escort a same sex couple out the door for trying to buy a pair of boy bears they’d discovered kissing, even though the magnets weren’t supposed to allow that, and now all of a sudden the company is a tad concerned that all those little niche players are going to run away with a big chunk of their market while they’re busy appealing to the lowest common denominator. Having a Hallmark store in shopping malls from one end of the country to the other won’t keep the piles of cash coming, in an age where people can make or buy their cards online and print them out at home. Yet even in the face of that, Hallmark can’t bring itself to reach out to that potential market, to actually be "inclusive and not exclusive". On the other hand, that’s probably exactly why Hallmark gets it so right with their core market.
This isn’t progress, it’s window dressing. Cheap, insincere sentiment from your one stop shopping center for all-purpose cheap, insincere sentiment. What you send when how you feel about yourself is more important then what the person you’re sending it to is feeling. Why is it not surprising that it’s a Hallmark moment.
The Rev. Ted Haggard emerged from three weeks of intensive counseling convinced he is "completely heterosexual" and told an oversight board that his sexual contact with men was limited to his accuser.
…
[Rev. Tim Ralph of Larkspur] said three weeks of counseling at an undisclosed Arizona treatment center helped Haggard immensely and left Haggard sure of one thing.
"He is completely heterosexual," Ralph said. "That is something he discovered. It was the acting- out situations where things took place. It wasn’t a constant thing."
Why Haggard chose to act out in that manner is something Haggard and his advisers are trying to discern, Ralph said.
I’ll hazard a guess…because he’s gay. This is the guy after all, who said he didn’t even know the guy he was paying for sex, right up to the moment the answering machine tapes came out. Not your most trustworthy source, this guy.
On the other hand, this could also just be the usual ex-gay double-speak too. Haggard isn’t gay, because according to ex-gay dogma nobody really is anyway. He’s just in therapy to control his acting out behavior. But the human identity isn’t a blackboard anyone can scribble their will upon. His acting out was on the order of seeking sex under less then wholesome circumstances. But that was because of denial, not homosexuality.
Sex is one of the strongest of all instincts, and you can’t bottle it up inside a person without damaging consequences. Haggard’s adventures with the prostitute were eminently predictable. You see that kind of behavior all the time in married, closeted homosexuals. The ex-gay solution is merely to bottle it up even more. So it looks like Haggard’s first step out of therapy is taking him right down the same old road he was on before he got caught with his back being rubbed. No wonder they were encouraging him to stay out of the ministry.
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