Pastor Terry Jones Calls Off "Burn a Koran" Day

Well, he clearly lacks the courage of his convictions. I propose an alternative: "Burn a Moron" Day. First on the fire:

Those chops'll catch like kindling!

I joke - in seriousness, it is never a failure of courage when one chooses to do the right thing. Congrats, Pastor Jones, on doing the right thing. Now let's never hear from you again.

UPDATE: The Guardian has a short but insightful article on Pastor Jones' past in Germany.

Just sitting there, you were ‘disordered’.

In the London Review of Books, Colm Tóibín has an engaging article on the Catholic Church and gays - the love some of the latter have for the former, and the growing hatred the former has for the latter. The case of Ireland, which Tóibín, an Irishman, knows and describes particularly well, aptly demonstrates that the Church is now reaping the harvest from the seeds of dishonesty and oppression that it sowed, there and elsewhere, for centuries.

The suggestion that the Church's obsessive hostility to gays is rooted in deep-seated sexual repression - a suggestion made in the book by Angelo Quatrocchi, reviewed by Tóibín in the article - is certainly not new. It is one of those banal truisms that never become less banal even as they are shown to be less true than previously thought. Quatrocchi seeks to make great hay from it; parodically protesting too much, he titled his book The Pope Is Not Gay! and speculates therein that the Pope may be gay.

Tóibín, for his part, makes some effort not to take Quatrocchi's suggestion for more than it is worth. Nevertheless, he gives more credence than I would to the notion that the Pope's close personal relationship with his comely personal secretary, along with other indicia, at least suggest that the Holy Father may be, in Quatrocchi's phrase, "the most repressed, imploded gay in the world."

I see no real reason to believe such a thing, much less to be convinced of it. Suggestions like these always seem to have the same aim that Lyndon Johnson had when he floated the notion that a political opponent had sex with pigs: "make him deny it." But believing it is different from suspecting it, and in this sense, Tóibín makes a very lucid connection between the child abuse scandal and the nominally unrelated speculation on the Pope's sexuality. Tóibín notes that, as the Church has systematically destroyed its own credibility by coddling sexual predators, it has inadvertently allowed doubt and suspicion to cast shadows where once they would never have fallen. This is always the consequence of a loss of credibility, and the fight to restore it is always fought on many or indeed all fronts. So now the Pope, that arch-scourge of gays, finds his own sexuality questioned, and however specious that speculation is, it cannot be dismissed summarily. He is reaping what he sowed.

I Wish It Weren't So

...but it is.

Okay. I Cheated.

I labeled the previous post under "yo-yos." It does discuss yo-yos.

Well, if you're going to have so many freakin' views on running a blog, why don't you start one yourself? Sheesh!

Money Well Spent

The tragicomic saga of Dr. George Rekers - the antigay crusader who co-founded the Family Research Council with James Dobson - is only just unfolding, and it makes for great reading. To bring you up to speed: Rekers recently took a ten-day European vacation and brought along a lithe young twenty-year-old he had met on the website rentboy.com. That by itself earns Rekers a place of honor alongside the inimitable Larry Craig and Ted Haggart as antigay hypocrites par excellence. Pass the popcorn, please.

Unfortunately, Rekers' sordid little comedy didn't just play out in the corner: the people of Florida had to pay for his nonsense. (Floridians, please note: I provide assorted nonsense at a much better rate. Return my calls!)

It seems that the attorney general of Florida recently paid Rekers at least $60,900 to provide expert testimony in a case challenging Florida's outrageous ban on adoption by gays. According to NBC's Miami affiliate, Rekers intended to testify that "gays make inferior and even dangerous parents and that adopted kids living in gay households, even after 10 years, would be better off removed from the home and placed with straight parents." Ech, suddenly the "comic" part of "tragicomic" doesn't seem quite so applicable. Fortunately, the judge concluded that Rekers' testimony was neither "credible nor worthy of forming the basis of public policy."

NBC story here, with some interesting quotes from Rekers.