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.