It’s things like this L.A. Times article on social conservatives clamoring for a “pink purge” of gay Republican staffers that make me wary of political outings that folk like John Aravosis seem so keen on, quite apart from my general feeling that people’s private lives shouldn’t be dragged into the public eye just to score […]

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The Mark Foley scandal has afforded an opportunity for social conservatives to revive the old canard that gay men are unusually likely to be pedophiles, with the Family Research Council touting an old study by Timothy Dailey “Ph.D.” (in theology) purporting to show just this. Andrew Sullivan links a sound scholarly response which gives the […]

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Ampersand of Alas, a Blog has been catching serious flak from his large feminist audience for cutting a deal with pr0n websites to boost their Google rankings via links from his own highly-linked site. Brandon Berg at Catallarchy explains why, even if you think pornography is teh evil!!!, the rage is misplaced: Search-engine optimization is […]

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I was reading Will Saletan’s most recent piece (on conservatives and contraception) and got to thinking about two arguments with the same basic structure: Contraceptives and abortion lower the expected costs of sex, such that many people will be more willing to have more sex with more partners than if these things didn’t exist. In […]

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I think I finally understand the (non-religious) conservative case against gay marriage—and, simultaneously, why it has remained so maddeningly opaque just what the real argument is. I was thinking back on an old argument with Maggie Gallagher in which we’d reached the familiar point where the gay marriage opponents try to explain why the idea […]

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My friend Rachel Kramer Bussel has a new Village Voice column on resurgent feminist fretting about “unladylike” behavior, which is well worth reading. For an opening line, you can’t beat: “Ladies, be warned: Your pussies are causing the downfall of society.” (Though maybe an attention-grabbing lede was the only way to yank readers’ gaze from […]

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As Rick Santorum takes the floor of the Senate to remind us that a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage is really about showing contempt for the sodomites, a who’s-who of conservative scholars (of whom, one can’t help but note, only a few seem to be social scientists) try a more respectable tack via the Princeton […]

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Much as I’d like to follow up that headline with a moving account of a ceremony officiated by Ed Crane in the glass-enclosed atrium, I’m actually referring to a forum on Gay Marriage, from which I’ve just returned coinciding with the release of a new Cato paper opposing the Federal Marriage Amendment, at which Yale […]

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Have you been feeling a little, well, queer? You may be one of millions of Americans afflicted with a condition called “homosexuality.” Fortunately, there’s Hetracil, the prescription medication guaranteed to put an end to chronic impure thoughts about members of your own sex. Such, at any rate, is the premise of Anti313!, an ingenious fictive […]

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Pandagon, Feministe, and Feministing have all written on a new line of line of Abercrombie and Fitch shirts for women bearing slogans that… well, let’s just say I don’t expect to see Gloria Steinem rocking any of these in the near future. They range from merely snotty to fairly offensive, with some depending a good […]

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