You’ll never catch Geraldine Granger saying things like that.
There’s more to the story at The Guardian, but this part — this is incredible:
A Church of England vicar could face disciplinary action for saying gay men should have “sodomy” warnings tattooed on their bodies.
The Rev Peter Mullen, who is a parish priest and rector in the City of London, made the remarks on his blog, which has since been removed from the web under an agreement with diocesan officials.
Mullen, 66, wrote it was time for religious believers to recommend the discouragement of homosexual practices in the style of cigarette packet warnings.
“Let us make it obligatory for homosexuals to have their backsides tattooed with the slogan sodomy can seriously damage your health and their chins with fellatio kills.”
What kind of tattoo would he suggest for a parish priest who has nothing better to do with his time than fantasize about the backsides of homosexuals?
Mullen later described his comments as “lighthearted jokes” and maintained that he isn’t prejudiced, saying, “Many of my dear friends have been and are of that persuasion.” Yeah, and from a very young age, his two greatest loves were always Jews and Cuban food.
Does this make anyone else want to rewrite the lyrics to “Vicar in a Tutu?” Maybe something like: “The monkish monsignor/With a head full of plaster/Said, ‘My man, get your ass tattooed.'”
Classy reality TV personality and retired bisexual Abi Titmuss
“You are not bisexual, that is reserved for 15-year-old goths and Abi Titmuss, you stupid lesbian.”
That is from Laura May Coope’s account of her romance with Linzi Symons in this month’s installment of The Observer‘s Ex Files, which has both sides of a failed relationship dissect what went wrong. If I ever have the opportunity to say it to someone, I will do so with glee. And if I didn’t have a monotone, I’d make sure to deliver the line with the haughtiness and mock scorn it so richly deserves.
BTW, Coope’s assessment was correct and Symons now refers to herself as gay.
If you fuck with the miniskirt, you fuck with Debbie Harry. If you fuck with Debbie Harry, you fuck with the gays. You do not want to fuck with the gays.
James Nsaba Buturo, the Ugandan Minister of Ethics and Integrity who last month railed against the evils of the miniskirt, told reporters at a Saturday press conference that homosexuality is an “attempt to end civilization.”
Buturo, who is under the mistaken impression that gay people can’t reproduce, said: “Who is going to occupy Uganda 20 years from now if we all become homosexuals?” If I could take a crack at this, I’m pretty sure the answer is — wait for it — homosexuals. Am I right? Do I get a cookie? But Buturo should worry not; the gays are still too busy signing up everyone who wanders into West Hollywood to take a stab at Uganda anytime soon.
Someone finally gets it…
Campbell Brown, the CNN host who destroyed McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds on live TV not too long ago, explains to the New York Timeshow the media lost its way:
“As journalists, and certainly for me over the last few years, we’ve gotten overly obsessed with parity, especially when we’re covering politics. We kept making sure each candidate got equal time — to the point that it got ridiculous in a way.
“So when you have Candidate A saying the sky is blue, and Candidate B saying it’s a cloudy day, I look outside and I see, well, it’s a cloudy day. I should be able to tell my viewers, ‘Candidate A is wrong, Candidate B is right.’ And not have to say, ‘Well, you decide.’ Then it would be like I’m an idiot. And I’d be treating the audience like idiots.”
She’s absolutely right, though I’d change “Then it would be like I’m an idiot” to “That would make me an idiot.” There’s no ‘like’ about it. And I can already hear the Fox News faithful, who won’t settle for anything less than being treated like total idiots, taking umbrage at her analysis and shaking their tiny fists and screaming: It’s not your job to tell us about the sky! You’re not a meteorologist!
Also at the Times:
For all the starburst magic she worked on Rich “Never Going to Live This Down” Lowry, Sarah Palin failed to sexually arouse Gail Collins and Bob Herbert, whose post-debate columns were appropriately somber.
Collins concludes:
This entire election season has been a long-running saga about the rise of women in American politics. On Thursday, it all went sour. The people boosting Palin’s triumph were not celebrating because she demonstrated that she is qualified to be president if something ever happened to John McCain. They were cheering her success in covering up her lack of knowledge about the things she would have to deal with if she wound up running the country.
Herbert writes:
But after Senator Biden suggested that John McCain’s answer to the nation’s energy problems was to “drill, drill, drill,” Ms. Palin promptly pointed out, as if scoring a point, that “the chant is ‘Drill, baby, drill!'”
How’s that for perspective? The credit markets are frozen. Our top general in Afghanistan is dialing 911. Americans are losing jobs by the scores of thousands. And Sarah Palin is making sure we know that the chant is “drill, baby, drill!” not “drill, drill, drill.”
Bob is forgetting that the “baby” is important. It’s what sends things we’d rather not imagine ricocheting through Rich Lowry’s living room. Speaking of which, if you missed Keith Olbermann naming Rich Lowry the “Worst Person in the World” last night, you can watch the segment online. Lowry’s mention starts around the 90 second mark and it’s an instant classic.
Kristin Davis should join her next time…
Cynthia Nixon kicks ass, but you probably already knew that. Addressing a standing-room only crowd as she campaigned for Barack Obama in South Florida last week, Nixon ripped into Amendment 2, a superfluous anti-gay initiative cynically designed to drive homophobes to the polls on November 4. As she points out, that already worked in 2004:
“In Florida… [Republicans] have tried to do again what they did four years ago: they put anti-gay initiatives on the ballot to bring out the homophobes in droves. What happened four years ago was so horrible. It was such a kick in the stomach. We all felt like we were the scapegoat, like we were the target.”
Nixon went on to say:
“It’s going to be really close in Florida. But my hope is that when Barack Obama wins, we’re going to know that those were LGBT votes. And last time they used us as a wedge, but this time we’re going to be the edge.”
You can read more about Amendment 2 at SayNo2.com.
And finally…
I don’t get all the media interest in a supposed rivalry between CNBC anchors Maria “Money Honey” Bartiromo and Erin “Street Sweetie” Burnett. Maybe it’s that I can’t get past their sexist nicknames, which make them sound like wisecracking Joan Blondell characters trying to claw their way to social respectability in an early ’30s comedy. Maybe it’s that I’m not a sexually frustrated hedge fund manager with X-rated dreams of turning on the TV one day to find them in the heat of an erotically charged catfight over tech stocks.
Whatever the case, I found this Vanity Fair article about the two of them interesting because it mentions that Burnett played college field hockey. Have you ever seen a woman on TV and thought to yourself, She definitely played field hockey? It happens to me only rarely, but Burnett was one I felt very strongly knew her way around a stick. Which is one of the many reasons I cringed (and gagged, and cringed some more) when Hardball host Chris Matthews went all lecherous on her last year. Didn’t he see Red Eye? Didn’t it teach him anything?
“You were forced to lie every single day of your life. I lied to my parents, I lied to my teachers, I lied to get into the Army. Now you don’t have to lie anymore.” — Garrison Phillips, 78
“Way back then, being gay or lesbian was viewed as sinful. We hid. There were raids on the bars. Society looked down on us. A lot of people remained under the influence of that prejudice and kept their lives secret. We have to reach these seniors and let them know life is much different now. You have to speak up.” — Ruth Juster, 85
When you have a moment this weekend, I suggest reading this article about the unique challenges facing elderly gays, many of whom lack family members to help care for them and are fearful of being mistreated by homophobic doctors or nursing home staffers. Then head over to the SAGE website and see what you can do to help.
And note to SAGE: Assemble the remaining Golden Girls and have them record a PSA about this to run on Lifetime, LOGO, and Oyxgen. It sounds silly, but I’m not kidding. When Bea and Betty and Rue talk, the gays (and a whole lot of young straight women) listen. Trailblazers like Frank Carter, Garrison Phillips and Ruth Juster made it possible for the rest of us to come out, and we owe them more than we could ever repay. We need to be reminded of that.
Colonel Sanders on the importance of the surge… and honey mustard sauce.
“Oh, yeah. It’s so obvious I’m a Washington outsider complete idiot.” That’s what I got out of last night’s debate, which I had to watch with my thumb on the ‘mute’ button because Sarah Palin’s grating voice and cheerful vacuity were hurting both my ears and my brain. Has a politician ever gone on TV and seemed so happy not to know anything?
There was no escaping her intellectual inferiority last night. I tried to do so by reading her answers (which were technically non-answers) via closed captioning instead of listening to them, but all that did was make my eyes cross. The woman is fundamentally incapable of saying anything that makes sense.
No, they’re not talking about Anderson Cooper — he isn’t a pundit, silly. And the “liberal” rules out FOX’s Shep Smith, which leaves us with the brilliant Rachel Maddow, whose new MSNBC show has garnered impressive ratings for the network since premiering earlier this month. It also has the distinction of being the only show on TV that my teenage sister and middle-aged father watch together, which I think could form the basis of an inspiring ad campaign.
You could start off with a family sitting in awkward silence at the dinner table. When they do speak, their comments are terse and accusatory. The teens are surly, the dad seems exasperated, the mother defeated. But later that night, as Maddow’s show is about to start — she can stand in front of a standard-issue network promo backdrop and smile benevolently with her arms crossed as this happens — the parents put down their copies of Nixonland or What’s the Matter with Kansas? and the teens silence their cell phones and lower their laptop screens for the first time all day.
They watch the show as a family, wearing similar expressions of slack-jawed disbelief as a torrent of clips showing John McCain referring to himself as a maverick plays (or maybe it should be a clip of Sarah Palin talking about Alaska’s participation in the Russian civil war and how they bravely rode into St. Petersburg on dinosaurback to fight on the side of Union because slavery was taking jobs away from Americans — I’m sure CBS has something like that on the cutting room floor).
Then Maddow would offer some kind of wry commentary and the family would relax and find themselves united in laughter. At which point one of those deep-voiced announcers who tries to make everything sound heartwarming would say: “Rachel Maddow, bringing families together in living rooms across America.” Accompanied, perhaps, by a small picture of Rachel at the bottom of the screen and a quickie voice-over: “I’m Rachel Maddow, and I approved this ad.”
Can you tell I’ve had too much time on my hands today?
Salon’s David Talbot scared me like Freddy (the world needs a Sugababes reference every now and then) two weeks ago with his article “The Pastor Who Clashed with Palin,” which explained why even 80-year-old retired Baptist ministers think the Governor of Alaska is “Jerry Falwell with a pretty face.”
The article detailed Palin’s interest in book banning (gay books, natch), her work as an anti-choice crusader, and her wacky creationist belief that man and dinosaur walked the earth at the same time in what had to have been an Odd Couple-esque “Dinosaur = Oscar Madison, Humans = Felix Unger” arrangement. Then there was the issue of her reported response to Philip Munger, an Alaskan political acvitist, when asked if she believed in the End of Days. According to Munger, “She looked in my eyes and said, ‘Yes, I think I will see Jesus come back to earth in my lifetime.'” (What about Elvis and Tupac?)
Now comes an article in today’s L.A. Timesthat determines Palin “treads carefully between fundamentalist beliefs and public policy.” It quotes John Stein, who helped her early in her political career, as saying “She’s got a fine-tuned sense of how far to push.”
Allison Mendel, an attorney who sued the state of Alaska seeking mandated health insurance benefits for same-sex partners of state employees, says Palin “has been careful not to squander all her political capital on social conservative issues.” All the Times has to say on the insurance matter was this:
Palin also did not challenge an Alaska Supreme Court ruling that mandated health insurance benefits for same-sex partners. Instead she signed a nonbinding referendum that asked voters their opinion on the issue.
While it’s true she didn’t challenge it, she had a few things to say about it, all pandering to bigoted voters.
The part of the Times article that really got to me, though it may seem trivial to some, goes back to Palin’s comments about dinosaurs. Bill McAllister, her chief spokesman as governor, is asked about it:
McAllister said that he never heard Palin make such remarks about dinosaurs and that Palin preferred not to discuss her views on evolution publicly.
“I’ve never had a conversation like that with her or been apprised of anything like that,” McAllister said. He added that “the only bigotry that’s still safe is against Christians who believe in their faith.”
If ever a statement deserved to be met with a chorus of boos and the throwing of rotten tomatoes, it’s that crap about “the only bigotry that’s still safe” being “against Christians who believe in their faith,” but I wouldn’t expect the anti-gay, anti-choice crowd to understand that.
Having spent yesterday caught up in debate mania, I missed this Times article about the progress openly gay actors have made in landing TV roles. It doesn’t say much that gay viewers don’t already know (the headline is “Out in Hollywood: Starring Roles Are Rare”), but it’s nice to see actors like Bryan Batt of Mad Men and Jasika Nicole of Fringe mentioned alongside the usual suspects like T.R. Knight and Neil Patrick Harris. One thing that caught my eye:
Never before have gay story lines been so prominent. Nor have there ever been so many gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender characters on television — 83 by a recent count from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, not counting reality shows, daytime dramas or gay-oriented cable networks.
Hollywood, with its depictions of cowboy lovers and lesbian neighbors, has done much to make gay men and women part of mainstream American life.
That makes things sound much rosier than they are. Gay characters in general and lesbian characters in particular don’t have nearly the kind of visibility on network television such reporting would have you believe. Or, if you will: There are gays on TV, you just have to strain your neck to see them.
If you haven’t already, you can dig through GLAAD’s findings yourself. For the record, there are currently zero lesbian leading roles to be found in scripted broadcast programming. (We’re typically underrepresented on network reality shows as well.)
In supporting roles you’ll find zero confirmed lesbians, though FOX’s Bones and House each have a bisexual supporting character and ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy has something brewing between the heretofore heterosexual doctors Torres and Hahn. (I’ve already weighed in on that; my expectations are low.) NBC’s Knight Rider, meanwhile, has a supporting character who is either bisexual or lesbian; as AfterElton’s Michael Jensen reports, the creative geniuses behind that show aren’t sure of her orientation. With cancellation looming on the horizon, they’re running out of time to make a decision.
That leaves the recurring character category, the paltriest category of all, and naturally that’s where we make a showing with the town mayor on NBC’s Friday Night Lights and Marge’s sister Patty on The Simpsons. There will also be a lesbian couple on The Goode Family, Mike Judge’s upcoming animated series on ABC, voiced by former SNL-ers Laraine Newman and Julia Sweeney. But never before have gay storylines been so prominent! Yay for gays! That lesbian chic thing has really taken off, hasn’t it?
Just wanted to remind you all, in case you missed it any of the eight thousand times he pointed it out last night: John McCain was never voted Miss Congeniality.
McCain seemed to wear this failure like a badge of honor, not realizing it was both a groaner of a line and a repeated reminder of his appallingly unqualified running mate, who isn’t allowed to take questions from reporters but used to put on a swimsuit for a panel of judges in hopes of winning a tiara.
Truthfully, a Miss Congeniality title could only help his campaign at this point; McCain’s irritability and juvenile unwillingness to even look at Obama during the debate hasn’t played well with voters. Plus, if box office returns are any indication, America loves a bumbling but ultimately competent beauty pageant contestant.
McCain seemed to have the bumbling part down as he informed us of the advanced age of his pen (which appeared to be a Sharpie) and launched into countless meandering anecdotes of dubious relation to the topics he was asked to discuss. What he didn’t do was convince anyone he could foil a terrorist plot as ably — or dare I say as adorably — as Sandra Bullock.*
* Well, I’m assuming she foiled the plot in Miss Congeniality. I’ve only seen about ten minutes of that movie but the fact that a sequel was made indicates everyone survived. Bullock, come to think of it, is no stranger to battling terrorism. There was Dennis Hopper in Speed, Willem Dafoe in Speed 2, cyberterrorists in The Net, the beauty pageant terror plot in Miss Congeniality. And I won’t even get into Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. She’s a one-woman Department of Homeland Security.
If they’re anything like my grandma, they’ve been known to accidentally buy dog food for their cats — and then pass it along to you, sighing, “I don’t know, Pepper wouldn’t touch it, but maybe yours will like it.” That’s crazy, right? It makes you question their mental competency almost as much as the hideous sweaters they give you each holiday season.
The sad fact of the matter is some grandparents aren’t qualified to make important decisions, like who to vote for in the upcoming presidential election, on their own. That’s where we come in, for reasons Silverman helpfully explains in this video.
I’m fortunate in this regard. My grandparents, while insane, are not insane enough to vote for John McCain. But they are Jewish septuagenarians, a group McCain was hoping to frighten into supporting his bid for the presidency by having other right-wing sleazeballs suggest that Obama has some kind of secret, religiously-motivated political agenda that would threaten Jews.
Fearmongering is, as Karl Rove taught us in 2004, an effective way of grabbing votes. But the only candidate capable of terrifying Jews this election season is Sarah Palin, whose church is tied to all kinds of things that most Jewish voters would find alarming. (See: this and this. My grandparents aren’t Internet-savvy, so I’ve been printing these types of stories out for them to distribute to their friends.)
If your grandparents need a swift kick in the ass, take a page from Sarah Silverman’s book and tell them what’s what. If that fails, you could always point out — respectfully, lovingly, and of course with great tact — that odds are they’ll be dead in 10 years and you’ll be around for another 50. Which is why it’s monumentally important they don’t fuck this up for you. And if they let you down, it’s off to Shady Pines.
