Just submitted via the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund’s contact page:

I really liked your youtube video featuring the audio of the Oklahoma state legislator making the homophobic comments. (Well, I was appalled by it. But I like that you’re helping to publicize it.)

I’m trying to figure out why you would fail to identify the person making the remarks. It seems to me that if posting the audio is justified, then identifying the person speaking is also justified. I mean, she’s a politician, and should be held accountable for her remarks. If identifying the person speaking is not justified, then posting the audio isn’t justified, either. I mean, it’s trivially easy for someone who is active in Oklahoma state politics to identify her based on the recording, so you’re not actually protecting her identity in any meaningful way, right?

The best I can come up with for a rationale is this: Something about the recording itself might have been illegal, or unethical. The video indicates that she was recorded without her knowledge. Maybe that’s actually a violation of Oklahoma law? Or maybe the editing of the audio omits remarks by others questioning her that would cast the people making the recording in a less-than-flattering light?

If that’s the case, then I can see a rationale for leaving her unidentified in the video. By not identifying her, you avoid the side issue that would be raised if she were to challenge the authenticity, completeness, or legality of the recording. In the meantime, you still get the benefit of shocking people with what she said (which probably translates into fundraising, or at least awareness-raising, for your organization). If she’s not identified, then she would have to “out” herself (so to speak) to raise an objection to the recording, which she might be unwilling to do.

But here’s the thing: If that’s the explanation, it strikes me as a shady ethical approach for your organization to take. I come back to the same position I felt when I first heard the audio: It’s shocking, and it makes me want her identity to be known so she’ll pay whatever price her constituents think is appropriate. Not identifying her may make some sort of tactical sense in terms of the rough-and-tumble of politics, but for me, it doesn’t pass the smell test. I’d be more inclined to support your organization if I believed that you were being scrupulously ethical in your actions.

She sounds like a homophobe, and a hate-monger. But she’s also a human being. She deserves to be exposed for having made those comments. But she also deserves an opportunity to give her side of the story, to the extent she wants to give one.

If you’re concealing her identity in order to prevent your audience from knowing the full story behind the recording, I’m not sure that’s ethically cool. It’s a pretty minor ethical lapse compared to denigrating and discriminating against a whole class of people based on their sexual orientation, granted. But it’s still uncool.

I wish you would be more cool.

John Callender
jbc@lies.com

Update: Apparently the Oklahoma state legislator whose voice is heard in the recording is Sally Kern. GayPolitics.com, which appears to be operated by the same people as the Victory Fund, posted the following comment yesterday:

One of the primary questions people have had after hearing her hateful speech was why no one ever mentioned her name. If the audio was worthy of being publicized, why not single out the person responsible?

There are a couple reasons.

First, we don’t want to make her a hero in anti-gay circles. Running a name and a picture would merely serve as a feather in her cap.

Also, while this speech is remarkable in its statements, it’s not unique. For every bit of hateful rhetoric we hear, scores of other anti-gay statements go unchallenged.

It is not our intention to make this individual the target of animosity and hostility. It is, however, our intention to let her know that we heard what she said, we do not approve and that we support public officials who recognize people in the LGBT community as equal, ordinary citizens.

I appreciate their providing the explanation, and I don’t doubt that that was the intention behind not mentioning her name. At the same time, I think their logic was muddled. By publishing the clip, they guaranteed that she would be identified and would receive the responses (both pro and anti) that they say it was not their intention to promote. This is a fish-or-cut-bait kind of situation. They can’t have it both ways. If they didn’t want to publicize her actions, then the appropriate course of action was… not to publicize her actions. If they were willing to publicize her actions, then I don’t think they’re really carving out any sort of moral high ground by letting others take the predictable next step of tracking down and sharing her identity.

I like all the politics folks have been posting, and have been thinking that since I’ve had a hard time finding time to play with Lies.com as much as it deserves lately, I should open things up to more article postings by more users. Maybe it’s time for Lies.com to morph into something more like a social bookmarking site, where users post and vote on high-profile falsehoods. I’ll have to think about that some more.

In the meantime, here’s the most Lies.com-ish thing I’ve seen lately: Warning sounded over ‘flirting robots’.

The artificial intelligence of CyberLover’s automated chats is good enough that victims have a tough time distinguishing the “bot” from a real potential suitor, PC Tools said. The software can work quickly too, establishing up to 10 relationships in 30 minutes, PC Tools said. It compiles a report on every person it meets complete with name, contact information, and photos.

“As a tool that can be used by hackers to conduct identity fraud, CyberLover demonstrates an unprecedented level of social engineering,” PC Tools senior malware analyst Sergei Shevchenko said in a statement.

And in a weird case of synchronicity, I noticed the following item languishing in the moderation queue of another weblog I frequent. I’m not sure if it’s a machine translation of Russian porn spam, or what Hiro described to me as “madlibs spam,” where a thesaurus program is used to fool shared blacklists.

Whatever it is, I think it’s fairly hilarious:

Kind time of days!

I am a fresh, chic seducer, with a wonderful bust and appetizing popkoy! I am a nice and mischievous miniature small child, will compliment with the real unforgettable sex! That it can be better the real meeting with a charming, young girl. I invite you to itself in a very class apartment, where nobody will us mix. Photos are my real 100%

Wild sex! For a hour with me, you will understand how to love and be sweet one!!! Innocence and hidden passion, external sensuality and internal fire - my society never does without flirtation and game. My sparkle is tenderness, caress, passion, blitheness and unconcern. You want me to see?

I HERE - TAKE ME!

buy buy!

Final entry in the automated-love department (also courtesy of Hiro):

Okay. That’s it for me and my amazing popkoy.

I’ve been thinking through tomorrow’s announced press conference, at which it is widely reported that Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) will announce his resignation from the Senate.

I hope that’s all he does. As I think through the various scenarios, though, I have this paranoid sense that, faced with the loss of everything he’s defined himself by, faced with the prospect of public recognition, of his own personal recognition, that he is not only a liar, but far worse, an abomination of the sort he was taught to despise from an early age, he might decide that his only way out is to kill himself.

Which is an inherently ludicrous idea on the face of it. Like the heckler who called out disdainfully at the end of his September 28 press conference, “what if you are gay? Come out of the closet.” It’s just not that big a deal, once one accepts the simple fact that his being attracted to other men is neither a disease nor a moral failing. It’s just how he is, like being left-handed.

I wouldn’t even be thinking about the possibility of a televised suicide, probably, if it weren’t for the example of Bud Dwyer. But there’s something about the zeal with which Craig has been asserting his non-gay-ness that makes me wonder how he will handle the announcement tomorrow. There’s something tense and fractured and brittle about him; he’s lived his whole life in this cage of his own construction, refusing to face the truth. How will he deal with reality? Will he be able to?

If I had to put money on it, I guess I think he’ll just continue the way he has. He’ll assert that he’s not gay, and did nothing wrong, other than the lapse of judgment that led him to plead guilty to the bathroom-incident misdemeanor. More in sorrow than in anger, for the good of the party and the people of Idaho, Nixon-like, he’ll step down. And then he’ll just continue in the closet.

But there’s that self-loathing, that mental illness, that underlies the choice to stay in the closet, and it just makes me nervous. And then there’s the Idaho factor, and his military service.

Sigh. Maybe this sense of dread I’m feeling is Stanley Kubrick’s (and Matthew Modine’s, and Vincent D’Onofrio’s) fault.

Update: So, I’m not the only one who’s anxious about this: blacktygrrrr, commenter Harold on this Rolling Stone item, and this copy-and-pasted version of the same comment in the Boise Weekly.

Later update: Whew. Resignation announced, still alive, still in the closet.

Larry Craig fails his accountability moment.

Embarrassing. Embarrassing. No wonder why we’re going down the tubes.

In my mind, this is up there with Ted Haggard’s in-the-car interview on the eve of his confession. Anyway, here’s a portion of the chat session in which Adam and I agreed that we couldn’t decide which of our feelings toward Larry Craig was stronger: pity or loathing.

Me: hey, you know what?
Adam: what?
Me: I hear that senator larry craig of idaho… Is. Not. Gay.
Adam: HE LOVES HIS WIFE!
Adam: WHO IS A WOMAN!

And later:

Adam: the thing is, I think that’s the one thing he thinks he’s telling the truth about
Adam: that’s why he’s so emphatic about it

My favorite part is the off-camera question at the end:

Hey, what if you are gay? Come out of the closet.

Speaking of the lies.com domain dispute, I enjoyed reading about Justinsomnia’s recent dealings with Exodus International over his parody of the anti-gay group’s billboard: My first cease-and-desist letter. I especially liked the snarky use of scare quotes in the C-and-D:

You appear to believe that the stolen image is exempt from federal intellectual property laws as a “parody” due to “fair use.” Unfortunately, the intricacies of federal law cannot adequately be covered on “Wikipedia” due to the variety of facts addressed by courts in numerous cases.

Yeah, well, despite the efforts of “lawyers” who work on behalf of “organizations” that believe the US would be better off as a “theocracy,” we do in fact continue to live in a “country” that has a “Constitution” that guarantees certain “rights.” And now, thanks to the efforts of the ACLU, and a well-crafted response from lawyer Laurence F. Pulgram of Fenwick & West, Exodus International appears to have backed off.

From Pulgram’s conclusion:

Exodus may not find the parody humorous and may dislike people mocking its views. Nevertheless, Mr. Watt’s parody is precisely the free expression that the copyright laws protect. There is no colorable legal basis for any claim against Mr. Watt. Mr. Watt therefore expects that Exodus will abandon its attempts to censor a viewpoint with which it disagrees.

Heh. In your “face,” Exodus.

I don’t want to like this, since it’s pretty much on a par with the scantily-clad-woman-on-the-mechanical-bull Carl’s Jr. ad. But it does have a certain… punch. Anyway, the not-really-very-safe-for-work (depending on where you work) Napster striptease commercial: Get the whole thing.

I really, really hope this happened as given. From Acephalous: My morning: A play in one uncomfortable act.

I love this (well, not love, but you know what I mean): Online daters sue matchmaking Web sites for fraud.

Match.com, a unit of IAC/Interactive Corp. (IACI.O: Quote, Profile, Research), is accused in a federal lawsuit of goading members into renewing their subscriptions through bogus romantic e-mails sent out by company employees. In some instances, the suit contends, people on the Match payroll even went on sham dates with subscribers as a marketing ploy.

[snip]

The company said it does not comment on pending litigation. But Match spokeswoman Kristin Kelly said the company “absolutely does not” employ people to go on dates with subscribers or to send members misleading e-mails professing romantic interest. The company has about 15 million members worldwide and 250 employees, she sa

Salon’s Meghan Laslocky has a story tailor-made for this site, about people having “relationships” with their Real Dolls: Just like a woman.

Thanks to J.A.Y.S.O.N. for the link.

I like this one. How’d they know I’m such a sucker for a meet-cute scene? I anticipate one of those somewhat painful moments when the cab driver, like Ghosts of Pasha and birthday “Ted” before him, finds out it was all a prank, but I think their heart is pretty much in the right place here. Anyway: Improv Everywhere mission: Romantic comedy cab.

Via Miniver Cheevy I learned of these extremely fun color-coded marriages as delivered by the Church of the Subgenius: ShorDurMar categories.

Hey kids, Lewbowski Fest just ended in LA and is coming up again in KY in a few months. Mark it 8, Dude.

From Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin: Desperately seeking Lily. It concerns a 1950’s-era toy that shows a little rubber model of a naked woman gyrating seductively. And it’s kind of interesting to me, and not just for the obvious reason; I’m curious about the thing’s actual backstory (as is Xeni Jardin), and I’m also amused by the meta-idea of a popular weblog using the bully pulpit of its network effects to try to tease out this particular truth.

He claims he’s not looking for advice, just confirmation of the fact that the more time he spends in relationships with women, the more “slick moves and mad skills” he acquires. So Michael Williams asks for his older, married readers to confirm or deny that observation.

Yeah, well, I think he doth protest too much. Anyway, I pulled out my false teeth long enough to give him some advice from Gramps. Then I felt guilty to be writing long comments on his weblog when I’d been neglecting mine so much, so I figured I’d better link to it: Slick moves and mad skills.

I’ve felt a certain bond with David Sedaris ever since he almost got me killed. I was driving to work on the 405 freeway, negotiating the South Bay curve on the southbound side, in the fast lane next to the concrete divider (this was before the carpool lane was added — there’s a carpool lane there now, right?). And I was listening to Morning Edition, and they were playing Sedaris reading from The Santa Land Diaries. (I’m linking here to an expanded version of it that was part of a later This American Life episode. It’s a RealAudio stream, which I hate, but in this case it’s worth putting up with the technological suck to get the hilarious content. Sedaris begins at 4:41.)

It was the funniest thing I’d ever heard, and I came fairly close to slamming into the center divider, which would have been interesting, in that I would have made a scuff mark matching the one I’d made on the northbound side shortly after getting my driver’s license a few years earlier. But I guess that’s a story for another time.

One more digression before I get to the actual link this item is about: I finally saw Elf, with Will Ferrell. It was actually pretty good, thanks to (as Adam pointed out in his review at Words Mean Things) Will Ferrell’s complete commitment to selling the joke, at whatever cost.

David Sedaris’ little sister Amy is in the cast of Elf (as Adam also pointed out), and since the movie could well be taken as a riff on Sedaris’ earlier comic mining of his department store elf experience (though they were careful to mix things up by putting Will Ferrell in Gimbel’s, rather than Macy’s), I was alert for any explicit references to The Santa Land Diaries.

And there it was! It came when Ferrell’s Buddy was meeting Zooey Deschanel’s Jovie, as she was decorating the tree. At one point she shoots him a suspicious glance and says, “Did Crumpet put you up to this?” (Crumpet was Sedaris’ elf name at Macy’s.)

Okay. I think I’ve purged most of the mental debris that crowded into my brain when I saw this item by Sedaris in The New Yorker: Old faithful. It’s got nothing to do with elves, or Christmas, but it’s good stuff. Go read it! Thanks.

You probably already saw a mention of this, but if not it’s worth a look. Congressman Henry Waxman has a new report out that shows that 11 of the top 13 abstinence program receiving federal funding (funding that has doubled under Bush) include blatantly false educational tidbits as part of their outreach efforts. Anyway, I’m linking to it via Pandagon because I like their title: Lies, lies, lies.

A fun item on what did, and didn’t, pass muster with MSN’s automated blog censors: Seven dirty blogs.

From Liza Sabater, whom I just now discovered via her enviable googlerank for the phrase “george bush sally hemmings,” an uplifting story that will resonate with anyone who’s ever been to the emergency room with an allergy-constricted airway: For love and turkey.

From Gina Lynn writing in Wired comes this interesting item: Ins and outs of teledildonics.

Cybersex gets blamed for a lot of things, including social isolation, infidelity and divorce. It’s a temptation previous generations of lovers didn’t have to face, and it’s technology, and therefore it’s scary for a lot of folks.

Yet remote interaction technology — or, as I like to call it, teledildonics — has as much potential to bring people together as it does to drive people apart. If you travel often, or if you’re in a long-distance relationship, this technology provides another avenue for intimacy, especially if it’s harder for you to use toys with a partner than have sex au naturel.

Anybody who says John Edwards is “way out of the mainstream” obviously hasn’t run into him and his wife at a Wendy’s on their aniversary.

I’m not sure why I like these “open letters to people or entities who are unlikely to respond” so much, but I do. Anyway, from Muffy Srinivasan, via McSweeney’s Interent Tendency: An open letter to my three-year-old daughter, Sylvie.

Ann Coulter obsessive (though I understand he prefers “shrill blonde harpy obsessive”) Barry Ritholtz writes to bring the following actually-fairly-disturbing item from the New York Press’s Mark Ames to my attention: The Coulter challenge.

In brief, Ames is challenging Coulter to have sex with him. If she does so, and succeeds in, um, satisfying him, he promises to vote for Bush. If she fails, she has to “dress like a genuine Republican woman.”

Okay; this letter is cool: Gentle Jesus. So go read that.

Now, check out the chain of blog postings that led to my reading it:

• The original posting (since gone 404) was apparently at a site called Elephants with Wings.
• It then was linked to, and reposted (thankfully), by Signal Shift.
• Which was linked to by Fresh Bilge.
• Which was linked to by Unqualified Offerings.
• Which was linked to by Atrios at Eschaton.
• Which was linked to by Jerome Doolittle at Bad Attitudes.
• Which was linked to by the obscure obsessives at lies.com.

You have to link to this now, yourself! A friend of mine did, and he found a wallet with $1000 in it the same day! Someone else didn’t, and he got in a car accident and had his foot amputated! Ohmygod!

From the Fishbowl: The Mac is a Harsh Mistress

One of the advantages of working at a really large company is finding interesting stuff in the printer bin.

This particular item apparently made the blog rounds allready, but just in case you missed it: 12 Reasons Same-Sex Marriage will Ruin Society. The Gator Gay-Straight Alliance “Flash!” site is fairly intolerable, but I think I might be Straight is easily the best flyer I’ve seen from a college organization, and the Not-A-Cutout project seems pretty cool.

From Janus/onan comes word of this nifty service: Imaginary girlfriends. “The girls are real. The relationship is not.”

Joshua Micah Marshall posts some very interesting email he has received since posting about his own wrestling with the issue of gay and lesbian marriage versus civil unions: As probably comes as no surprise….

Here’s a cool idea: Flowers.

This link care of my buddy Wess, who’s always curious about what laws he’s breaking: C.U.D.D.L.E — Cousins United to Defeat Discriminating Laws through Education.

As a special Valentine’s Day public service announcement for those in the Lies.com readership who suddenly have the ability to actually marry their chosen life partners, here’s another one from falsehood-obsessed Professor Tyler Cowen: How to stay together. The short version? Don’t grimace and roll your eyes when looking at your partner. Or, more to the point, maintain those rose-colored glasses that let you overlook your partner’s flaws and criticisms, while noticing his/her nice legs and sweet nothings whispered tenderly in your ear.

The Mrs. and I will be celebrating our 20th next month. Hooray for the power of long-term self-deception!

My buddy Mark put it best when he sent me this link…

Is this the best the Christian abstinance brigade can do?
“100 things do to with your boyfriend or girlfriend instead of it”
I mean, do they read this? Seriously? Do they have teenagers? Have they
ever been a teenager? And what’s with the circa 1950’s ‘it’… come on, even
Jerry Falwell can say “sex” with a straight face.

As is frequently the case with the Onion, it’s not just the idea, but the execution. Anyway: CEO’s marital duties outsourced to Mexican groundskeeper.

Thanks to Hiro for reminding me to actually read the story, after I’d giggled for a while at the accompanying photos yesterday.

[Name removed by request] has a memorable, if predictably depressing, account of his trip to a brothel in Virginia City, Nevada: Bunnyranch [delinked by request]. This is the kind of thing I love about the Web, and have loved about it from the beginning. No, not stories about sex. I mean the way the Web lets you connect up with other human beings you wouldn’t otherwise have known, share their stories, vicariously experience a piece of their lives, if only for a moment.

One other thing I have to say: The next time I’m buying a car, I want [Name removed by request] with me. Dude can seriously negotiate.

Update: Just got the following in the mail:

Dear Mr. Callender,

I fished this email out of the Whois for lies.com — I hope it’s the correct one. If this email would be better served by sending to a different recip, would you kindly forward it? Thanks.

My names is [name deleted], and on November 6th, 2003, my web-essay on the Bunnyranch brothel was linked to by lies.com. This was great — I got something like 10,000 hits in one day.

However, it doesn’t look all that wonderful when “[name deleted]” is googled, and the lies.com link to that article comes up in the top 10 google hits.

I took the article down, so your link in lies.com is now dead. I would ask that my name be removed from that page of your site, or that that archived entry be taken down entirely (perhaps this would be appropriate, since your link no longer works — there is no longer a Bunnyranch article on my website).

Thanks so much for understanding — I’ve been applying for “real” jobs lately, and I understand that employers sometimes google employees’ names.

Take care.

To which I replied:

Hey, I even praised your negotiation skills — an unsolicited testimonial sure to influence a discerning potential employer. Maybe you’re just applying for the wrong kinds of jobs? :-)

Just kidding. I’ve modified the page to remove all specific references to your name and web site. Sorry to have created problems.

Please let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help. Likewise, if you’d be willing to let me host a sanitized version of the essay (which I really enjoyed, and still remember), please consider emailing me a copy, which I’ll add to the lies.com page in question.

So we’ll see where that goes.

So, it looks like our society intends to have itself a little discussion about gay marriage. I suppose Karl Rove thinks this is a way to cement his boy’s hold on power, or something. Well, all I can say is, bring it on. John Kusch appears to have a similar attitude, judging by some of the stuff he’s been writing lately. Like this: An Open Letter to Wisconsin State Representative Samantha Kerkman (R-Powers Lake).

I can’t resist a Top 10 list, so here you go: A queer girl’s top 10 gay myths.

Tanya Hadden, the California science teacher who previously served 6 months in Nevada for running off with her 15-year-old student, has now been sentenced in California. In return for guilty pleas, she received a 2-year sentence: Teacher gets 2 years for sex with student.

In related news, the boy’s family seems to have upgraded to a more-ambitious kind of lawyer. After initially filing a claim with the El Cajon school district for $1 million for the original incident, they’ve now filed a claim for $350 million for an incident in February when the boy was allegedly attacked by another student: District denies $350M claim by SB boy’s family. Both claims have been denied by the district, but filing such claims is apparently a precursor to filing a civil lawsuit.

Interestingly (or not, depending on how you view such things), the way I found out about this latest sentencing was through a sudden influx of sex-obsessed teenage males posting comments to this earlier lies.com story on the case. I checked my referrers to see if some high-profile site had linked to us, but no, it turns out to just be the result of the page’s #1 googlerank in the search for “Tanya Hadden”. Woo. Go lies.com!

I’m not going to comment on this, beyond posting the item. You get to assign your own meanings. From ABC News’ Lynn Sherr: Like a virgin. (Thanks to Aaron/Hiro for the link.)

People reveal a lot when they get upset. When we’re calm and collected we can present whatever face we want to the outside world, but when something jars us loose from our moorings we start acting in ways that aren’t so mediated.

I think back to the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when Ann Coulter made her call for a bloody Crusade against those evil Mohammedans occupying the Holy Lands. I mean, it was just way out there. But she was upset, and not necessarily thinking about the longterm consequences of revealing that side of her personality, so she Just Did It.

But that’s really just a preliminary digression. Mrs. du Toit strikes me as being both significantly smarter and significantly less vile than Ann Coulter. But if you find it interesting to see someone start off sounding rational, and then suddenly just go off in a self-revelatory way, check out this post in her weblog, and (especially) the discussion that follows in the comments: Mind the gap.

Basically, Mrs. du Toit makes this impassioned posting about how awful it is that gay-rights advocates have managed to secure a toehold for their agenda in the public schools. Her argument is actually kind of interesting: she says she’s worried about the victimization gays will suffer during the inevitable cultural backlash.

Then Adam from words mean things shows up, disagrees with her, and things get ugly.

I don’t know; this may well be one of those things that seems more interesting to me than it does to anyone else. I’ve always been a sucker for that weird intersection of high-level intellectual discussion and visceral potty-mouth name-calling that surrounds the various never-to-be-resolved online political debates.

Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, has a new book out: Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market. He looks at the free-market side of the marijuana, sex, and undocumented-worker stories, pointing out some interesting facts along the way. Like, marijuana has now passed corn as the US’s leading cash crop, and the black-market business in drugs, pr0n, and illegal labor now constitutes nearly 10% of the US GDP. Schlosser’s conclusion is that as a country we’re deeply screwed up, with high-profile public morality masking a depraved underbelly.

A few links: The book’s first chapter, as excerpted by the New York Times, a review in the Times, and an interview with Schlosser at bookpage.com.

I remember the first time I read a real diary on the Web. It was Bryon Sutherland’s The Semi-Existence of Bryon, and it must have been in 1995 or so. Wow, I thought. The Web is even cooler than I thought.

I was reminded of that this morning when I followed a link from Adam’s Words Mean Things to Bobby Burgess’s a gray box with words inside, where you can read Burgess’s thoughts about his girlfriend, Michelle.

If you haven’t heard about Sen. Rick Santorum’s AP Interview from earlier this month, you should really check out the transcript. The overall feel of the interview can best be summarized by a comment the interviewer made in the middle: “I didn’t think I was going to talk about “man on dog” with a United States senator, it’s sort of freaking me out.”

And just for the record, I love news.google.com so much, I want to marry it and have it’s babies — I was searching to see if I could find any longer transcripts of the interview, and I found several superb opinions on the whole incident (from various sides of the US Political Machine).

There’s something fairly delicious in having the Weekly World News included in the list of publications available from Yahoo! Entertainment. Because, for example, it allows me to link to stories like this: Saddam starred in gay porn films!

Gasp!

In the newly uncovered 86-minute prison flick, Saddam, then just 34, plays a naive young peasant who is wrongly convicted and sent to jail. He is initiated into homosexuality by a series of older and more experienced cons.

“Saddam’s acting in the picture is actually quite good,” al-Sabah notes. “One scene, in which he buries his face in a pillow and cries, is so touching you almost can forget you’re watching a low-budget sexploitation film.”

It’s not the sickest fetish you’ll ever hear of, but the amusing part to focus on here is that it took the Los Angeles District Attorneys a while to figure out what charges they could file against a man who was sneaking up behind people to cut off their hair. Apparently “Hair is property like anything else, and it was taken by force, so that’s robbery”. That’s why they make the big bucks ladies and gentlemen.

Interesting arguments at the US Supreme Court yesterday, concerning whether or not the Texas sodomy law, which criminalizes various acts, but only when the participants are both of the same sex, should be struck down as unconstitutional. Based on the questions they put to the two sides, the court is “deeply divided,” with folks like Rehnquist and Scalia probing for ways to justify what is clearly, at least to my way of thinking, a bogus law, and folks like Breyer and Souter apparently taking the other side. But we’ll have to wait until late June or so to hear what the decision is.

In the meantime, in the interest of recognizing high-profile falsehood, I feel compelled to point out the op-ed piece Norah Vincent has running in today’s Los Angeles Times: ‘Rights Just for Us’: The Gay Left’s Self-Serving Agenda (stupid free login required; cypherpunk98/cypherpunk works). I get the feeling Vincent would like to chime in on the side of those who portray the current court challenge as somehow being about getting “special rights” for gays. Which it isn’t, of course; the law in question functions as exactly the opposite: a codification of special rights for heterosexuals. That is, after all, one of the two bases on which the law is being challenged.

But Vincent finds another way to make the same case: She points to the actions of groups like the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, which have been active in using boycotts and negative publicity to target sponsors of anti-gay talk show hosts like “Dr.” Laura Schlessinger and Michael Savage, and claims this constitutes a curtailment of free-speech rights.

Which is completely ludicrous. The First Amendment says Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech. Nobody’s passing laws to muzzle homophobic speech here. Schlessinger and Savage are free to spout off whatever bigotry they like. And people who disagree with their views are similarly free to speak out against it, including banding together to pressure advertisers not to support them.

Update: I confess to not having a clue who Norah Vincent was when I wrote the above. I vaguely remembered seeing her byline on previous LA Times op-ed pieces, but had just dismissed her as another right-wing anti-gay crusader. That point of view fueled my pissy rant, above.

Well, duh. Norah Vincent, upon further investigation (thanks, Janus), turns out to be, among other things, gay. She’s written extensively on the intersection of gender and politics, and seems pretty likely not to have been trying to make the particular coded-language appeal to the “gays want special rights” position I accused her of.

I still think she’s wrong to protray the attempted boycotting of companies that sponsor anti-gay talk show hosts as a violation of First Amendment rights. But given that she’s a lesbian who’s 1) out, 2) outspoken, and 3) positioned somewhere significantly off the main left/right axis that defines most politically active types in this country, I’m going to have to plead guilty to my own brand of bigotry in how I interpreted her column, above.

I confess I felt an inclination to just edit my comments, Dave Winer-like, to erase the evidence of my lame-osity. But I won’t. I’d rather leave it as a reminder to myself of my own fallibility (which I will predictably ignore next time an opportunity to do so comes up). Oh well.

Lots of snow in the East has apparently led to an outbreak of naughty sculptures: Police Field Complaint About Busty Snow Woman, Women’s Group Debates Snow Penis, and a statue that brings new meaning to the term snow blower. Remember to wear your mittens! Update: Hiro brought another one to my attention, for those who prefer their snow pr0n to be hard core.

Nice article at the Houston Press (pointed out to me by Hiro), about a lawsuit brought against Klein High School and the Klein Independent School District in Harris County, Texas, to get the school to allow formation of a club for gay and straight students to talk about discrimination. The school board, with the encouragement of right-thinking parents, intends to fight the suit. More detail available from the Houston Voice, the New York Times, and the Houston Chronicle.

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal of a conviction based on the Texas sodomy law, which criminalizes oral or anal sex, but only when the participants are members of the same sex.

Apparently Clinton’s critical mistake was failing to be president of Taiwan. A group of sixty Taiwanese judges has met and concluded that oral sex is not sex, and does not constitute adultery.

I am reminded of the words of the late J. Edgar Hoover: “I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce.”

I would have figured this story was completely fictional, but I dunno; ABC News? Anyway, do not miss the tale of Terrifica, a pretty New Yorker who puts on a red leotard and hits the city’s bar and party scene, helping protect young, drunk women from the men who would take advantage of them. And then there’s her arch-nemesis, a suave sexual predator who likes to wear velvet and calls himself “Fantastico.” It just gets better and better.