The Republicans who legalized gay marriage

Well, I'm not sure if he's a Republican, but he sure has a conservative pedigree. Quoteth David Boaz, via Reason:

In other words, this “liberal San Francisco judge” was recommended by Ed Meese, appointed by Ronald Reagan, and opposed by Alan Cranston, Nancy Pelosi, Edward Kennedy, and the leading gay activist groups. It’s a good thing for advocates of marriage equality that those forces were only able to block Walker twice.

He also notes that two other very prominent pro-gay marriage judges – the one involved in Iowa's surprise gay marriage legalization and the one in Boston who overturned DOMA – were also appointed by Republicans.

Ted Haggard's new ministry

Ted Haggard, the disgraced Evangelical megapastor caught doing meth with a gay prostitute and last seen hocking debt reduction software, has started up a new church in his backyard. The whole article is almost too good to excerpt, but I'll try:

He acknowledged grave lapses of judgment in the episode he refers to as "my crisis." But Mr. Haggard also said that in his sorrow and shame, he accepted too much guilt after the scandal broke.

"I over-repented," he said. [...]

He portrays his encounter with the prostitute as a massage that went awry and said he doesn't have same-sex attractions. He dismisses as a "witch hunt" the findings of his former church that he engaged in a pattern of misconduct, including sordid talk and inappropriate relationships. (He said his only fault was cracking a few crude jokes.) [...]

Mr. Haggard plays up his new regular-guy image. At the picnic, he asked a friend whether anyone noticed he had said "hell" in the sermon—and not in a Biblical context.

"I cuss now," he said proudly.

Russian neo-Nazis mistake bubble blowers for gay pride marchers, beat them up

The Moscow Times, eternal font of all weird Russian things, has this dispatch from the motherland:

Young people who gathered to celebrate spring by blowing bubbles at an annual flash mob in central St. Petersburg were attacked by a group of suspected neo-Nazis who mistook the gathering for a gay pride event, flash mob organizers said.

Some 500 people stood blowing bubbles on the steps of Gorkovskaya metro station and in the surrounding Alexandrovsky Park at about 4 p.m. Sunday — the agreed time for the start of the flash mob — when about 30 men ran up and started beating them and firing rubber bullets.

Several people fell to the ground before the attackers fled at the sight of approaching OMON riot police officers. A reporter saw officers detain at least one attacker. Police also detained about 30 bubble-blowers for five hours on suspicion of walking on the grass, a charge that they denied, organizers said.

Emphasis mine. True story: I've actually been vaguely threatened with arrest by Romanian police officers because I was standing on the grass (an Eastern European euphemism for mud, as far as I can tell). I think they were shaking me down for a bribe (or at least sizing me up/priming me for one), though eventually they left me alone.

In this specific case, I think the, uh, "mix-up" was probably genuine and not directed on high, but I think the Kremlin deserves ultimate responsibility for the rise of Russian neo-Nazism generally. And not just for indirect reasons like a poor economy and the government's political scapegoating of immigrants; rather, the Russian is literally training them:

Human Rights researchers in Moscow have published documents showing "Nazi skinheads are being encouraged, organized, and used by Russia's ruling circles in their own interests." And Isvestiya reported that "Nazi skinheads from an openly fascist organization, the NNP (People's National Party), were being trained at the Moscow OMON special-purpose police detachment facilities and that they were being trained specifically by OMON coaches." Several years ago Russian historian Vladimir Ilyushenko asserted that "some parties view skinheads as their reserve. The process of encouraging fascist sentiments in Russia is steered by government officials."

John Edwards' Asian sex scandal

The National Enquirer might not have won its Pulitzer (though, considering the contenders, it probably should have), but maybe it's for the best after all, because the Buffalo Beast has beasted them in the John Edwards sex journalism genre with this exclusive (yet still relatively unreported) mega-scoop:

“In order to give rise to close to nearly one billion children, [John Edwards] must have begun sexual activity in the late 5th century, sometime during his first marriage to a woman who had ovarian cancer,” said Dr. Eli Irving, a geneticist at Northwestern University. “It really is quite remarkable.”

William of Orange's gay lover

I was reading William of Orange's Wikipedia page when I stumbled on this excellent (and well-cited, if you click through to the original) paragraph, which is about his suspected gay lovers:

Bentinck's closeness to William aroused jealousies, but some modern historians doubt that there was a homosexual element about their relationship. The same could not be said for Keppel, who was 20 years William's junior and strikingly handsome, and had risen from being a royal page to an earldom with suspicious ease. Portland wrote to William in 1697 that 'the kindness which your Majesty has for a young man, and the way in which you seem to authorise his liberties ... make the world say things I am ashamed to hear'. This, he said, was 'tarnishing a reputation which has never before been subject to such accusations'. William replied, saying, 'It seems to me very extraordinary that it should be impossible to have esteem and regard for a young man without it being criminal'.

The first part I like is that he was doing a page, which just goes to show that Mark Foley wasn't doing anything original (even for the US Congress).

The second is that, when confronted with the allegations, he proves that the phrase "so much fun it should be illegal" dates back to at least 1697.

Ceaușescu's balls

Radio Free Europe has an interview with a reporter who met Nicolae Ceaușescu not long before he was ousted from power in 1989 and executed. It's a pretty typical profile of a tyrant and his decrepit country, except for this extremely bizarre part:

RFE/RL: During the interview, Ceausescu and Auchincloss were seated on a dais. From where you sat, you had a better view of the "Genius of the Carpathians," as he liked to be referred to in the Romanian media. What struck you most about his appearance?

Meyer: I just began taking notes, and one of the notes said "balls," and this was not editorial commentary, this was a literal observation. Ceausescu was sitting and I was looking at his testicles, resting on his seat, in his overlarge trousers, and they...they looked, like, as I wrote in my notebook, overripe tomatoes, sort of flattened, squatted there on his feet -- malignant -- them so big; him such a small dictator.

...whaaat? This doesn't even make anatomical sense...how could his falls be "resting on his seat [...] sort of flattened, squatted there on his feet"? Anyway, not very intellectually stimulating, but it was too good not to share.

Hasidic Jews, ecstasy, and prostitutes

So this might be almost a decade old and a bit esoteric for some, but I found a fascinating article today on the former Israeli ecstasy kingpin Jacob "Cookie" Orgad, who had Hasidic school boys and strippers ferrying drugs across the Atlantic for him and ended up as a rabbi behind bars. The whole thing is almost too good to excerpt, so before I remember all the other great parts, here are two that stood out:

As much as 90 percent of the world’s ecstasy supply is manufactured in secret, high-tech labs scattered throughout the Netherlands, where the materials to make the hallucinogen [ed.: ecstasy isn't actually a hallucinogen] are not as closely regulated as they are in the rest of Europe and the United States. For years, a cabal of Israelis have used Holland as a base for diamond smuggling through the ports in Antwerp and Rotterdam. In the mid-nineties, some of them noticed that an even more lucrative trade had blossomed around them, one with few players as well positioned to cash in as they were. "Israelis are everywhere, and they get to know each other very fast because of the language and the tradition," says an Israeli intelligence official familiar with his countrymen’s stronghold on the world ecstasy market. "It doesn’t take long for a guy like Cookie to get big."

According to documents seized by the feds, Cookie began making frequent trips to Amsterdam, where he set up a connection with a Dutch chemist who had a lab in an industrial building north of the city. The ecstasy trade was quickly consolidating as well-connected players staked out their markets. The alleged former diamond smuggler Israeli Oded Tuito was already said to control much of Miami. Tuito also had a major piece of the New York market, along with Ilan Zarger (also an Israeli) who was the head of BTS, the notorious Brooklyn Terror Squad infamous for beating and robbing clubgoers and other dealers to insure their dominance of the market.

Something that annoyed me, though – and this happens with most reporting on drugs – is when journalists take the police's value estimations seriously. The police will always take the highest price they've ever seen for a drug – retail! – and then multiply that by the total amount. At one point, the article claims a pill can sell for as high as $40 – an absurdly high price that you couldn't even get a gullible and rich 13-year-old to pay. At another point it claims that the street value of 9 million pills is more than $27 million, implying an average retail price of $30 per pill. In actuality, you can only get away with selling a pill for even $20 if you're taking great risk and vending within some sort of music event (generally on the dance floor itself). The further away you get from the probing eyes of security, the lower the price. So, a pill bought on the dance floor will be more expensive than a pill bought outside the venue, which will in turn be more expensive than you'd get it for at a huge festival (where there are even fewer police), all of which is more expensive than if you buy it from a normal dealer in the outside world. Generally at that point the price will fall to around $10/pill.

The "date rape drug" is a myth

I'd been following this story for a while, but it looks like it has come up in the media recently – stories of men surreptitiously dropping some sort of tasteless drug (generally Rohypnol or GHB) in their drinks and then taking advantage of them sexually once they pass out. Every college student knows a few people who claim to know a few people who have been "roofied," but the actual evidence is scant. I personally have been around a lot of illegal drugs in my day but I have never heard of anyone selling or using GHB or Rohypnol (a powerful benzodiazepine, similar to oft-prescribed anti-anxiety medications like Xanax, Klonopin, and Valium). But anyway, a study in Australia showed that exactly zero out of 97 people who claimed they were slipped the date rape drug actually were:

Earlier this year, Australian researchers found that no[t] one of 97 young men and women admitted to hospital over 19 months to two Perth hospital claiming to have had their drinks spiked, had in fact been drugged.

I've seen other studies that put the percentage of people who claim to have been roofied and actually were at under 3%, depending on what one classifies as a "date rape drug." Like I said, Rohypnol (the namesake of "roofie") is related to many other commonly-perscribed medications, and it seems order of magnitude more likely that someone who believes they were roofied actually just took a benzo and didn't how poorly they react with alcohol (something that psychiatrists should be more fastidious in mentioning).

Schneier, a fascinating "security" blogger, summarizes the study's suggestion as to why the myth of the date-rape drug myth is so persistent:

Basically, the hypothesis is that perpetuating the fear of drug-rape allows parents and friends to warn young women off excessive drinking without criticizing their personal choices. The fake bogeyman lets people avoid talking about the real issues.

It's worth mentioning that the idea of a drug leaves you vulnerable to attacks is older than Rohypnol and GHB. Some may recognize the term "Mickey Finn," or the phrase "to slip someone a mickey" – meaning to drug them by putting something in their drink without their knowledge. The story – I don't know whether it's as apocryphal as the modern date rape drug ones – is that a Chicago bartender named Mickey Finn used to drug people (whether by chloral hydrate, antimony, or potassium tartrate) and then rob them. Not rape, but the same idea – watch your drink, or something bad could happen to you. Nevermind that excessive drinking is usually the culprit, and spiking drinks almost never is.

Newfoundland, mumming, cross-dressing, and Shakespeare

Via Reason, a particularly odd article on the old European roots of "mumming and disguising" – something that will sound familiar to Philadelphians, who hold the Mummers Day Parade in early January. It's about some holiday rituals practiced by Newfoundlanders fishermen as late as the 1960s, who were supposedly so isolated that they persisted in these odd practices longer than any Europeans. It's a long article, but here are some excerpts:

A party of mummers would gather in someone house, gear up, and set off for whatever house was closest that they figured would let them in. Once in, the group would entertain their uncomfortable hosts by singing, telling stories and dancing, in other words, each member doing some routine, speaking and singing in a peculiar but traditional manner that disguised their voices. As soon as the hosts recognized one of them, off would come the mask and the gloves and the monster would metamorphose into a relative or neighbor. As soon as everyone’s identity was guessed, on went the disguises again and they were off to the next house. This was through piles of snow, of course, so far north, so they were bundled up against the cold as well. Needless to say, a great deal of alcohol was consumed in the process, along with various homemade holidays treats.

That men generally dressed as women and vice versa probably says something about the emotional satisfactions of the tradition as a factor apart from the need for total disguise. It may also suggest that the gender-bending in Shakespeare’s holiday plays have a broader basis in tradition than modern critics, fond of ascribing it to various psycho-sexual factors, are willing to acknowledge.

Apparently the revelers had an idea that what they were doing was a bit odd:

The anthropologists said that it was very difficult to get the people to talk about their holiday practises. They were shy about talking to strangers about anything, and particularly shy about this tradition. The scientists got the feeling that they weren’t being told everything. This for at least two reasons. First, such holiday practises were dangerous. Shameful things could happen during this period when everything was turned upside down. It was not only a time of making merry, it was potentially a time of reprisal, of setting things straight, of settling old scores. There was a lot of drinking. Things could get rough.

And then here's the sociological money shot:

Several things came clear from this that were not discussed by any of the researchers. First, it is clear to me that these people who lived so close to each other year in, year out, whose families all knew each other intimately, and knew everything there was to know about each other’s family histories, some of it no doubt shameful or embarrassing, needed a break from being themselves. They desperately needed a few hours of being with people without the burden of their ordinary identities.

This is not something that would be immediately understood today. If anything, people today, city-dwellers in particular, tend to suffer from the opposite problem, from being too unknown, too anonymous. Today, if we should feel the need to shuffle off our identities for a time, we can go downtown or to the mall or take a drive to another town or city. If we live in the country, we can go to the city, or we can fly off to some distant beach resort. But for people living in small, isolated, unchanging communities for their entire lives, the ritual may have been a psychological necessity.

There's tons more, including a bunch of links to Shakespeare and other bits of Elizabethan culture.

The Daily Mail: Kim Jong-il is bisexual...O RLY??

So, according to the Daily Mail, Kim Jong-il has bisexual tendencies (emphasis mine):

Kim Jong Il has ruled it with absolute authority since 1994. He was born in the Forties, but his exact birthday is asecret [sic]. He wears platform shoes and a teased hairdo and is reputed to have had a string of lovers, both male and female. His hobby is watching old Hollywood movies including Rambo, Friday The 13th and James Bond.

...and yet, I can't find any other mention of that in any other media source. Not only that, but the Dear Leader supposedly overlooking his second son, Kim Jong-chul, as a successor because he was "too effeminate."

In other words: it looks like the Daily Mail is makin' shit up again.

A better way to decrease homophobia on campuses

The Weekly Standard has an article criticizing Yale's new expenditure on an "Office of LGBTQ Resources," in light of recent cut-backs in other areas. Though I disagree with some things in the article (what's so bad about "gender-neutral housing," which doesn't cost a cent?), I agree with the overall gist, which is that an LGBTQ office isn't going to do jack-shit for anyone.

Might I suggest another strategy colleges around the country could take to decrease incidences of homophobia on campus: stop giving sports scholarships and recruiting people for sports who otherwise wouldn't have gained admission. It might not be PC to say it, but in my experience, those are the worst offenders when it comes to homophobia.

Where are they now? Ted Haggard edition

Remember Ted Haggard, the evangelical pastor at a Colorado mega-church whose fall from grace involved meth and a gay prostitute? Well, he's resurfaced recently as it's come out that his church has been paying off a boy who had a three-year relationship with Pastor Ted that started when the boy was 18. So, where is he now?

Well, former Pastor Ted has two things going on in his life. For one, he's the subject of an HBO special. But on a more mundane level, the NYT gives a great one-sentence synopsis of his life since the ordeal:

In an interview with The Associated Press this month, Mr. Haggard said he was selling insurance and debt-reduction software and that his sexual identity was hard to pin down.

Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic explains why we should all care about the fact that Ted Haggard had to lie about his sexuality:

The countless gay men who are currently running many of the world's leading Christian denominations are threats to themselves, to other gay men, to their wives and their churches because ancient doctrine forces them into twisted shells of human beings. In the Catholic church, this led to a horrifying epidemic of child abuse, protected and enabled by the last two Popes. And their response to this? To ratchet up the psychological pressure even further on the men whose psyches and souls they have already permanently warped.

US trade policy pushes Cambodian girls into prostitution, US foreign policy causes Cambodia to arrest them

Radio Free Asia has a sad article on young Cambodian girls being pushed into prostitution, made all the more horrific because it seems that US trade and foreign policy is exacerbating the trend. The US is working in a few ways that harm these young girls: they push for labor standards that make employing these girls legally more expensive, and thus they are left to professions not subject to the law. But more directly, they pushed for anti-trafficking laws that the Cambodian government interpreted as a directive to crack down on prostitution, driving prostitutes deeper into the underworld and away from the protection that legal tolerance provides to these most vulnerable of businesswomen.

In his NYT column two weeks ago, Nicholas Kristof did a good job of summing up the ways that US pressure on Cambodia's labor standards has decreased employment opportunities:

Cambodia has, in fact, pursued an interesting experiment by working with factories to establish decent labor standards and wages. It’s a worthwhile idea, but one result of paying above-market wages is that those in charge of hiring often demand bribes — sometimes a month’s salary — in exchange for a job. In addition, these standards add to production costs, so some factories have closed because of the global economic crisis and the difficulty of competing internationally.

The Radio Free Asia article explains how the worsening plight of prostitutes is thanks to US foreign policy, and how NGOs are willing partners in crime:

In February 2008, the Cambodian government began enforcing the new “Law on the Suppression of Human-Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation” after years of U.S. pressure to crack down on sex trafficking.

Human rights groups, however, say the law and its enforcement have made life harder for the women they aim to help.

Prostitutes caught in police raids are made to pay fines of up to U.S. $200 for their release, the 17-year-old girl said.

“They take us to district police headquarters and take our money. If we don’t have the money, we will be kept in custody for two or three days. So we have to run for our lives when we see police approaching us.”

“Police arrest us in the hope that the brothel owners will pay, but if we don’t have anyone to pay for our release we will be sent to one of the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). It’s o.k. to live at the NGOs, but then our families have nothing to eat,” she said.

“If [the NGOs] want to help me, they should also help my family. Otherwise I can’t quit.”

Obama on gay marriage: for it 'fore he was 'gainst it

Via the Huffington Post, Barack Obama told reporters for the Windy City Times during his 1996 Senate seat campaign that he "favor[s] legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages."

Funny, because he told MTV during the election that he is "not in favor of gay marriage." There's not even room for linguistic weaseling – he didn't just say that he wouldn't support it politically, he said that he outright does not favor it.

Also, back in 1996 he said that not only does he support gay marriage, but that he would fight those who oppose it. Which leaves me a bit puzzled as to where he was when California was debating Proposition 8, whose anti-gay marriage outcome was at least in part influenced by the votes of Obama's most loyal constituency, African-Americans.

One black man vs. hundreds of thousands of gay couples

Radley Balko at Reason's blog has an interesting post up about the paradox of last night's elections: while blacks helped Obama become the first black president in US history, they also happen to have been far more bigoted than whites when it came to gay rights. Though a single black man might have become president, hundreds of thousands (millions?) of gay Californians lost rights, likely because of the historic turnout by black Americans. Radley Balko sums it up:

In California, the Proposition 8 ban on gay marriage actually failed among white voters, 51-49. It was the 70 percent support from black voters that put the measure over the top.

Florida's ban would have passed among white voters 60-40. But it passed among blacks 71-29. [...]

Kind of a sad irony if in helping achieve one civil rights milestone, last night's historical black turnout also helped perpetuate state-sanctioned discrimination against gay couples who wish to marry.

Edit: It turns out, this is actually not the case – despite blacks being by far the most likely minority to vote yes on Prop 8, it seems that at 10% of California's population, there weren't enough of them to have matter. Were blacks to vote in the same proportions as the rest of Californians, the outcome still would have been the same.

An orgy fit for an Olympian

Every four years, the Olympics happen. But more importantly, every four years there are stories in the press about the notorious orgy-like atmosphere in the Olympic Village. This Olympic season's story (or, at least, the best I've seen) goes to the Times of London. It's long, detailed, has tons of sexual puns and erotic imagery, and even sports a list of hot 2008 Olympians at the end, sorted by medal. But this one also includes an interesting sociological observation:

Before we get to that, however, it is worth noting an intriguing dichotomy between the sexes in respect of all this coupling. The chaps who win gold medals - even those as geeky as Michael Phelps - are the principal objects of desire for many female athletes. There is something about sporting success that makes a certain type of woman go crazy - smiling, flirting and sometimes even grabbing at the chaps who have done the business in the pool or on the track. An Olympic gold medal is not merely a route to fame and fortune; it is also a surefire ticket to writhe.

But - and this is the thing - success does not work both ways. Gold-medal winning female athletes are not looked upon by male athletes with any more desire than those who flunked out in the first round. It is sometimes even considered a defect, as if there is something downright unfeminine about all that striving, fist pumping and incontinent sweating. Sport, in this respect, is a reflection of wider society, where male success is a universal desirable whereas female success is sexually ambiguous. I do not condone this phenomenon, merely note it.

Soviet women had on average seven abortions

Radio Free Europe has an article about the sorry state of Russian family planning. Among the bombshells is the claim that women in the Soviet Union averaged seven abortions in their lifetime, though that factoid is in the blurb on the main page but is nowhere to be found in the article (something unfortunately I've noticed more than once with articles on that site). More babies are aborted than are actually born, and only between 3 and 13% of sexually active women use oral contraception, compared to over half in Europe. The article cites wariness about contraception due to decades of Soviet-made contraception that was ineffective as a reason for the low adoption rate in post-Soviet Russia, though it notes that the abortion rate has fallen from its pre-1991 level. Reliable contraception is now widely available, though at a price of $25 per month for the pill – this in a country whose constitution gives every citizen the right to free healthcare.

Won't somebody please think of the parents!

Via Slashdot, an article from the English-language news site about Sweden thelocal.se: "Children concerned about parents' web habits":

Children in Sweden are becoming increasingly concerned by their parents' internet habits, according to a new report from Children's Rights in Society (Barnens Rätt i Samhället - BRIS). [Only in Sweden!]

Last year the organization dealt with 1,895 IT-related cases, up sharply on figures from the previous year. Further investigation revealed that more than 100 of the children who made contact with BRIS did so because they were in some way worried about their parent's behaviour on the internet.

Dads visiting pornographic websites represented the most common complaint, while philandering fathers were also a cause for concern.

"It seems that my dad is 'unfaithful'," wrote one 15-year-old boy.

"I read his MSN conversation log. I was just curious. And then I saw that he was talking to, like, young girls. And the disgusting part is that he's 53!

"And they talk about sex and how they're going to meet and everything. It makes me want to puke. It really makes me feel bad.

"I don't know if I should tell mum because I'm worried they'll get a divorce. Please, what should I do?"

Black Philadelphia and the Prophet's Arabia

I was listening to All Things Considered on NPR today, and they were playing the second part of a piece about polygamy in Islam in America. It was about the increased occurence of polygamy amongst black American converts to Islam. It was a fascinating piece, and included this interesting parallel between seventh century Arabia and modern-day black inner-city neighborhoods:

Abdullah, the imam, has conducted religious ceremonies for a dozen polygamous marriages.

Abdullah says polygamy in Islam dates back to the 7th century, when battles were killing off Muslim men and leaving widows and children unprotected. [...]

The single women at the mosque say polygamy is a fact of life. But it's not their first choice.

"Every woman has a preference to be the sole wife," says Aliya, echoing the sentiments of the others. Aliya is a 28-year-old single woman who is finishing up a master's degree. She says that South Philadelphia in the 21st century is a little like Arabia in the 7th century. There is a dearth of men to marry.

"We're dealing with brothers who are incarcerated — that is, unavailable," she says. "And then unfortunately, you have the AIDS and HIV crisis, where HIV has struck the African-American community disproportionately to others. So when you look at it that way, there is a shortage."

RIP, Deborah Palfrey

Another victim in the war on prostitution. I guess all the embarrassment was for naught.

Edit: This is apparently not the first suicide to come out of the investigation and prosecution of this woman's escort service. Brandy Britton, one of the employees of Palfrey's escort service, hanged herself a few years ago after someone tipped the police off to what she was doing.