Catching Up

It's been kind of sketchy this week, but I haven't been completely idle. Here's a couple of things I think are worth looking at.

First, David Link at IGF has done a very good take-down of Robert Gagnon's latest diatribe.

I am unqualified to criticize the theology in Robert Gagnon’s hefty essay on the biblical errors in Alan Chambers’ leadership of Exodus International.  But what’s at stake here is pretty considerable, and more than just theological.  Chambers is president of Exodus, the group that assists Evangelical Christians with “same-sex attraction.”  Exodus had famously supported the notion that gays could change their sexual orientation, but Chambers – a gay man who is satisfactorily married to a woman, though he does not deny he continues to be sexually attracted to men – says now that he doubts such change in orientation is possible.

His change about change is important, as the sheer length of Gagnon’s critique (35 pages, with appendices) suggests, because it lets us see what Maggie Gallagher and the NOM Choir try so furiously to obscure: all that is left of the debate over homosexuality is the vestigial tail of a religious question about sin.

I seldom agree with Link, so this is sort of important.

And at The Advocate, there's an interview with Barry Sandler, who wrote Making Love, which is a pretty important film in gay history. Remember what it was like in the early '80s?

On the DOMA Wars front, although BLAG (which is the acronym for the House's Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group, and somehow the acronym is just right) is defending DOMA in the courts, since no one else in the government wants to be humiliated, House Democrats are taking their own action -- 132 of them have signed on to an amicus brief in Golinski vs. Office of Personnel Management, which is being appealed to the Ninth Circuit after coming a cropper in the district proceedings:

Unlike most Acts of Congress, DOMA cannot be viewed as the rational result of impartial lawmaking and should be treated with judicial skepticism. The brief makes it clear that the House is not united on DOMA’s validity, that the BLAG lawyers do not speak for the entire institution, and that there is no legitimate federal interest in denying married same-sex couples the legal security, rights and responsibilities that federal law provides to couples who are married under state law. …This law affirmatively harms married gay and lesbian couples and their children.

And, sure as god made little fishes, 60 Democrats refused to sign on. There's a list at the link. If your rep is on it, write your Congressman.

So, let's finish off with a picture. I got a little point-and-shoot digital camera, just to try it out, and I hate it -- there's a time delay between when you point and when the image shows up on the display, and for better than thirty years I've been shooting really fast. But you can get some nice stuff. From a visit to Lincoln Park Conservatory.