The Bush Administration has once again been caught up in its own bullshit.

Randall Tobias, an Abstinence Czar in charge of AIDS foreign aid, had to resign in a hurry over the weekend after his name was linked to “a Washington call-girl ring”, as the Washington Post rather antiquely put it.

Antique because so-called “scandals” involving joy girls — or joy boys, for that matter (like the model playing one at right) — are amusing non-starters for most of us, including the Washington Post.

Especially when such merely human peccadilloes are placed against the backdrop of recent and truly egregious Bush fuckups — the mismanagement of military aftercare at Walter Reed Hospital, say, or the systematic leaking of an undercover CIA agent’s name by a White House intent on selling a war with disinformation.

The only reason the call-girl story has traction is because Republicans are involved, and not just Republicans but those who have set themselves up as caped crusaders in a “morals” war on sex. (more…)

We live, Gore Vidal observed during the Salem Witch Follies known as the Starr Investigation, in a nation “evenly divided between political reactionaries and religious maniacs.”

There isn’t a liberal in sight, he chortles — not a pretty sound — off the pages of The Last Empire — Essays 1992-2000 .

And, really, of all the “liberals” who have announced their candidacy for President in 2008, not a one wants to handle gay marriage in anything like a sober, informed way.

Not a one makes anything like a forthright declarative sentence in support of the full and equal civil rights of that dependable portion of their base that has been relegated to weekend trysts on Brokeback Mountain. (more…)

Good news, bad news.

Gay people are no longer the most reviled group in America. We’re the second most. That’s the good news.

The Gold in the Hate Olympics goes to the atheists.

According to a recent CNN\Gallup poll, the type of person that most parents (46%) would not want their children to grow up to be are those who do not bow down to that great American thunder-hurler who dwells where the eagles soar.

Coming somewhat tardily in for the Silver (at 26%) are those of us who, as the college kids now say, have seen Dorothy — as in “Gay? Man, that guy’s so gay, he’s seen Dorothy.” (This comes as music to the wizen ears of those of us brought up on movies who wonder if our rich allusions to say, Karen Black fall on Xbox-sodden minds.) It will be only a matter of time before “godless atheist” replaces “faggot” on the playground as the slur du jour .

Did I mention, that was the good news? (Storm clouds gather over an American crossroads, above, in John Rogers Cox’s moody Gray and Gold.)

The bad news is: start packing your bags. Many readers will now part company with this writer and say that he is overstating the case. Really? (more…)

And the Answer is …. Yes!

Last month we wondered if Dreamgirls would be aced out of a best-picture win for reasons similar to 2005’s shut out of Brokeback Mountain.

As Brokeback was a clear-eyed picture of gay men in love that accurately assayed an American landscape of self-loathing and violence, so too did Dreamgirls, in its seemingly lighter way, show the sidetracking of black talent in a culture that awards sameness over sharp-angled innovation, that can only superficially look at the sights, sounds, moans and screams of its Jim Crow heritage.

Well today, with the announcement of the Oscar nominees, we got our answer. Dreamgirls received the most nominations (eight to be exact) of any one picture in the field, but fell shy of a best picture run. The candidates for best picture are Babel, The Departed, Letters from Iwo Jima, Little Miss Sunshine, and The Queen.

Why was Dreamgirls brought right up to the top and yet shut out from the ultimate award? After the jump we run our original reflections on the matter, from December 20, 2006. (more…)

It’s getting hard to keep up.

Just this past weekend, a second Colorado pastor had to step down from his evangelical church due to an unscheduled outing from the closet.

“I have struggled with homosexuality since I was a 5-year-old boy,” confessed Paul Barnes, in a videotape message played on Sunday for his congregation. “I can’t tell you the number of nights I have cried myself to sleep, begging God to take this away.”

We can think of a lot of reasons for hardline evangelicals to cry themselves to sleep. The least of which would be a little harmless R&R with one of the boys. Just for starters, wasn’t being born the first time traumatic enough without wanting to repeat the trip?

It seems every time we turn around, some new evangelical blowhard — someone you never heard of, from the back of beyond — is catching media fire with an even nuttier stand against Darwin, or medical research, or Walmart (which we have learned not only sells the Brokeback Mountain DVD to “families” but has begun actively “pushing the gay agenda”, according to WorldNetDaily, a Christian publication currently in the throes of “Operation Just Say Merry Christmas.”) (more…)

Give us shelter.

In an important and clarifying article that appears this month in The New York Review of Books, author Mark Danner contends that there has really been two wars going on in Iraq.

An imaginary war — the one which the administrations touts, full of “turning points’ and “dead-enders” in their “last throes” — and the actual war on the ground, the one that reporters report, the one exploding nightly outside the 4-mile-square perimeter known as the Green Zone, a vast bunker, redundantly fortified, with no windows looking out.

So invested is the administration in its own imaginary narrative, Danner argues, that our government is unable to figure out not only when or how possibly this war could end, but where it began: (more…)

Has the anti-gay marriage strategy finally backfired?

For the Republicans last night, getting anti-gay amendments passed in six states proved to be the booby prize. The amendments carried but they didn’t necessarily bring Republican candidates with them — which was the whole point of this cynical exercise in gaybaiting. Let’s look at the tally.

Of the seven states considering gay marriage bans only Arizona rejected the measure, by a narrow margin, becoming the first state to do so.

The states that passed anti-gay measures were Colorado, Idaho, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia and Wisconsin.

But by the end of the evening, the legislation ushered in 30 Democrats, as well as 33 Republicans (see breakdown, below) — something of a wash for White House strategist Karl Rove, who has built a career on gay-baiting the Republican base and gay-slurring Democratic opponents. (more…)

Girl, it’s raining MEN!

Not just men: Gay men! Sodomites! Flippin’ Freakin’ Q*U*E*E*R*S!

And the women of Golconda — that town in Magritte’s painting where it’s always raining what look like stockbrokers — the women are totally losing it. They are going around that final bend. They are — in a word — concerned.

Sisters in alarm with our very own Betty Crocker division of professional homophobes, the Concerned Women of America. (more…)