Courage

If you haven't seen this yet, watch it. In an age of unbridled cynicism and partisanship, it serves as a powerful and emotional reminder that those in power can search their souls and ultimately do the right thing. Thank you, Mayor Sanders, for having the courage to listen to your heart.

Spot on

ash is pretty on point in her judgment of Garrison Keillor's "kinda culpa". I would add to her remarks the pragmatic consequences of unexamined privilege: poor job performance. Garrison Keillor's job is to be humorous, but his inability to judge his own social location and that of his listeners affected his ability to make people laugh, or even smugly smirk.

Humor, like so much in our world, is nothing if not a reified social relationship. What flies as funny in one social context will fall flat in another. As a professional, we'd expect Keillor to know this. I've come up three possible scenarios about what led to Keillor's tin ear:

1. I actually believe Keillor when he says he has tons of gay friends, and they make jokes about each other all the time. Keillor will call his gay pals fussy hairdressers, and they, in turn, will rib him as a frog-faced serial adulterer. Good times are had by all. I'm sure Keillor thought that since his witty bon mots were such a hit with his friends in Minneapolis, the rest of us would love them as well.
   
   Look, we all have in-jokes with close friends. A dear friend who lives in DC has a lesbian partner who is a middle school phys ed teacher - a stereotypical lesbian occupation - and we regularly make jokes about that. Would I ever address another group of people - maybe an audience I was writing for? - and then talk about all those lesbian gym teachers? Probably not. The in-jokes I have with friends are born from years of trust and understanding; they don't translate to wider audiences. Football players at USC have a similar problem - an in-joke that they had the poor judgment to take public burned them. The bottom line here: "in-joke" is short for "intimate" joke. Those jokes should probably stay between intimates.


2. According to some accounts, Keillor's piece was actually inspired after seeing Dan Savage read a piece on a "This American Life" tour. Apparently, Savage himself made some of the remarks upon which Keillor riffed. Keillor's thought process may have been something like this: hey, a gay man is making jokes about owning little dogs and interior decorating! Hooray! We've come so far in this country that making fun of teh gays is fair game! Equality in humor! Of course, when these remarks are made by Savage, they come off as edgy, self-conscious parody, whereas when Keillor makes them, they come off as stodgy, All-American homophobia. Bottom line: it matters who delivers the joke.


3. There's an alternate take on Savage being the inspiration for Keillor's piece, and that is that Keillor bears some sort of personal animosity towards Savage. If that's the case, this probably has more to do with Garrison Keillor being a world-class prick. I don't want to think that's the case, but it should be put out there. Bottom line: taking a personal grudge public through some puerile gay joke is just lame and unbecoming of a public radio treasure.

Cured!

Well, we can all breathe a sigh of relief, because Ted Haggard's a changed man. You remember Ted Haggard, don't you?

Haggard resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals last year after allegations of sexual misconduct surfaced. He was also forced out from the 14,000 New Life Church that he founded years ago in his basement after Jones alleged Haggard paid him for sex and sometimes used methamphetamine when they were together. Haggard, who is married, has publicly admitted to "sexual immorality."

Thankfully, after weeks of intensive counseling, he's been cured!

"[Haggard] is completely heterosexual," [Rev. Tim] Ralph said [to the Denver Post]. "That is something he discovered. It was the acting-out situations where things took place. It wasn't a constant thing."

What a story. After struggling with his sexual identity for years, Haggard embarked in a magical voyage of self-discovery (in which I'm going to assume there was much talk about "feelings"). And now that this trip to the center of his heart is finished, Haggard can come out as "completely heterosexual!"

A complete heterosexual, mind you, not some crank-smokin', male prostitute-patronizing partial heterosexual.

And now that Haggard, like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, has come out as completely and utterly straight, what are his plans?

Haggard said in an e-mail Sunday, his first communication in three months to church members, that he and his wife, Gayle, plan to pursue master's degrees in psychology.

Presumably in order to help cure more partial heterosexuals.

Will someone pay me if I make shit up and rant like a loon?

I've found myself wondering what inner workings compel David Horowitz to act like Pat Buchanan on acid. Perhaps the psychological torment of seeing his beatnik parents, reciting bon mots from Mao's Little Red Book, in carnal embrace? I sometimes feel bad that he is so completely and utterly disconnected from any semblance of reality.

And then I remember that Horowitz is being paid handsomely in wingnut largesse so that he can continue publishing his delusional drivel:

Nearly thirty years after the onset of the AIDS epidemic and several hundred thousand mainly needless deaths, the US government is finally adopting a testing policy, which would have provided a frontline defense against the spread of the disease. Testing is the standard and proven way to fight epidemics and contain them. Testing for AIDS is especially important because the retrovirus lurks in the body without visible symptoms for long periods of time. Hence an AIDS infected person will not know they have the disease and can infect others. According to the NY Times report on the new testing policy, more than 50 percent of new AIDS carriers don't know they have the disease. That's 250,000 individuals, mainly Hispanic and Black. And that's mroe [sic] than 25 years after the first cases were identified and despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent on AIDS "education."

The hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths that have occurred since the onset of the epidemic were not accidents. They were caused by a political campaign mounted by the left to prevent standard public health policies -- testing most prominent among them -- from being implemented. In the name of political correctness the left has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of mainly young, mainly gay men. The left's argument -- testing will stigmatize AIDS victims and the government will put them in concentration camps -- was as hysterical and insane then as its its argument that the Bush Administration has created the terrorists and if we give them what they want they will go home. But it was persuasive enough to liberals and the Democratic Party and public officials like C. Everett Koop, that hundreds of millions of dollars were wasted on education campaigns that didn't work,and unsuspecting gays were left to die.

The consequences of the left's murderous propaganda and policy demands were known at the time. Peter Collier and I sounded an alarm in 1983. Michael Fumento and other conservatives followed in an attempt to counter the left's campaign to disarm the gay community in the face of this threat with reasoned argument and evidence. But to no avail. The leftwing juggernaut was too powerful, and the grim result is now there for anyone with eyes to see. Let's hope that the left's current campaign to disarm America in the face of the Islamic threat will not succeed the way this one did.

So now we're supposed to believe that culture warrior David Horowitz is standing up for the health of fornicating sodomites because "the Left" let them down? (Apparently, we are.)

I suppose Horowitz was pushing these "standard public health measures" twenty years ago while his hero, über-president Ronald Reagan refused to publically acknowledge [pdf] the skyrocketing rates of HIV infection until 1987 - six years after the first inklings of the epidemic - effectively refusing to commit the resources of the federal government to fighting AIDS.

I also find it telling that Horowitz singles out gays and minorities in his piece (the NYT article says that the CDC recommends that HIV screening become part of routine medical care). Why single these groups out? Isn't "the Left" also waging a war against the 35% of HIV+ individuals infected by heterosexual partners?

And why bash on education when there are plenty of credible studies which clearly demonstrate the efficacy of HIV education?

Let's step back for a moment and follow Horowitz's logic: HIV education has clearly failed; that is, warning gay men (exclusively, in his fevered brain) of a disease that can kill them and giving them the tools to prevent infection has not stemmed the rate of infection. Out at the Freedom Center, one can imagine Horowitz holding forth about how AIDS education just empowers the gays to keep having libinous gay sex, which is, of course, the cause of AIDS. If those men would just stop having hours and hours of well-oiled, manly gay sex, AIDS would just go away.

And how would testing solve the problem? In Horowitz's house of mirrors, mandatory HIV screening is the first step towards criminalizing HIV transmission: containing the epidemic by compelling infected individuals to adhere to a regime which eliminates the risk of transmission (which could lead to the outlawing of homosexuality as a "public health risk, you know, like smoking"), or by containing the epidemic in our jails (where, incidentally, sticky, musky gay sex never occurs). Bigotry all tarted up in the rationalizations of the law.

Yes, crazy Dave - it's "the Left"'s fault that there is still the AIDS. It's "the Left" who has gutted inner-city public education funding, ensuring that the minorities Horowitz sees fit to defend when it serves his (wildly outlandish) rhetorical points may never have an opportunity to receive proper HIV education. And I doubt he'll savor - or even notice - the irony of his "mandatory screening during routine exams" regime failing to dent the transmission rate for exactly the same reason: the ideological anti-tax hostility ("drowning government in the bathtub") towards any sort of public health policy which would allow people from disadvantaged social milieu access to medical care.

God, the more I think about the case Horowitz makes here, the more boggled I become. It doesn't make sense on so many different levels. So the trick is to stop thinking about it.

Done.