Touched by a convicted felon’s rendition of Lionel Richie’s “Hello,” judges Paula Abdul and Randy Jackson gave the man a reduced sentence.
Kit Bond, the Missouri Senator who I believe was recently played by Abigail Breslin in Patricia Rozema’s An American Girl movie, gave a rousing speech in Cape Girardeau today urging voters to support John “At Least I Don’t Plaster on the Makeup Like a Trollop, You C*nt” McCain. His greatest quote:
“Just this past week, we saw what Barack Obama said about judges. He said, ‘I’m tired of these judges who want to follow what the Founding Fathers said and the Constitution. I want judges who have a heart, have an empathy for the teenage mom, the minority, the gay, the disabled. We want them to show empathy. We want them to show compassion.'”
Oh no, not empathy and compassion! That’s just plain un-American!
Robert Draper’s much-buzzed-about New York Times Magazine article about the chaos behind the scenes at the McCain campaign went live on the Times website this afternoon, my fellow prisoners, and it’s a doozy. Not as explosive as some might have hoped, but still an interesting read. It’s nine pages long, so here’s the abridged version for those of you with compromised attention spans:
This summer, Steve Schmidt, the large, bald man billed as the campaign’s chief strategist, was all, “Aaarrrghhh, we’re losing!” Not in those words, exactly — I’m taking some creative license here — but you get the point. So he got together with his fellow strategists and strategized, as strategists are wont to do. Let’s listen in:
Greta Garbo disguised herself as a lesbian to spy for Germany. Or maybe not.
This is a really dumb article. One of the dumbest I’ve ever read, and I used to read Seventeen and Teen Beat faithfully.
The problems start with the headline, which asserts that “bogus lesbians” are “causing emotional damage.” There are two possible responses to this. The first is a joke about it being old news to actual lesbians that fake lesbians cause emotional damage. The second isn’t a joke, just a confused “Who to the what now?” We’re only headline-deep and the article already feels unintentionally funny, not to mention rather quaint.
Then there’s this:
Several high-profile relationships involving “real lesbians” and women more often linked to men — such as MTV’s Ruby Rose and Jess Origliasso, and Samantha Ronson and Lindsay Lohan — have reportedly encouraged a wave of “fauxmosexuals” on the real life party circuit.
Oh, please. If Lindsay Lohan can’t get leggings to catch on, how is she going to convince a girl who wasn’t already interested in kissing girls to kiss another girl? Let’s give women (yes, even young women), a bit of credit here — they do have minds of their own. And let’s be realistic: “fauxmosexuality” (which is sometimes more complicated than someone simply craving attention, but it’s easier to pretend everyone is completely one-dimensional, isn’t it?) is nothing new. Perhaps the media only recently caught onto it, but “the gays” have been dealing with it, and in many cases rolling their eyes at it, forever.
And then there’s this:
Gay social commentator Tim Duggan has described the “lesbian trend” as a fad which is actually doing “more damage than good”.
“Experimentation is healthy — what it leads to can sometimes be a great thing, but you need to wonder what effect [fake lesbians] are having on women,” said Mr Duggan, co-founder of gay and lesbian site SameSame.
“Women who pretend to be lesbians do it to titillate men.”
Why does lesbianism always, always, always come back to men? I know that not everyone understands this, and that even some gay men have difficulty looking at women’s issues without trying to relate them back to men, but not all experimenters are women who are “pretending to be lesbians,” and not all of them are doing it to titillate men. Certainly there must be a way for concerned social commentators to tackle the subject of “faux lesbianism” without diminishing the complexity of female sexuality and apparently dismissing the notion of bisexuality altogether.
(And why do these lectures always seem oddly prudish, like there’s something inherently distasteful about straight girls wanting to titillate their boyfriends in this manner? Not every girl who kisses a girl to get a reaction from a guy does so under duress. Sometimes — gasp! — women are in control of their own sexuality, know what they’re doing, and like kissing other women and like turning on their boyfriends.)
Finally:
Online gay forums are abuzz with talk of the “bogus lesbian” craze, with some questioning whether the trend is putting real homosexuals at risk.
“Where do these fauxmosexual fads leave queer teens once they’re packed away in the cupboard (with other fads)?,” user timbo84 wrote.
“The statistic of 30 percent of teen suicides in the US being gay or lesbian teens is very distressing.
“Here’s hoping pop culture moves on to focus on people like Ellen and Ian McKellen and not those who are just ‘out’ to make a buck!”
Pop culture hasn’t moved away from Ellen and Ian McKellen. They both have successful careers and legions of adoring fans who respect them for coming out. But let’s back this up a bit: An obscure (outside of Australia) MTV VJ being photographed in a clinch with an almost equally obscure (outside of Australia) pop star might be putting real homosexuals at risk? If ever a remark called for a heavy sigh and a major “Oh, Mary,” that has to be it. (Or “Oh, Martina,” if you prefer, if you’re dealing with a clueless woman.)
I was a teenage lesbian. (That is also the title of my next pulp novel.) That was way back in the ’90s and the early aughts, before Tila Tequila, or whatever the hell her name is, had her own bisexual dating show — a show I’ll admit I’ve never bothered to watch. It was before The L Word existed, before South of Nowhere was on a cable channel aimed at young adults, and, most lamentably, it was before YouTube fulfilled the promise of the world wide web by giving everyone with an Internet connection free and immediate 24-hour access to gay content.
The only lesbians the public knew at that time were Ellen DeGeneres, Melissa Etheridge, Billie Jean King, k.d. lang, and Martina Navratilova. There was also Janis Ian, but the song “At Seventeen” depressed everyone and they tried not to think about her. (As a side note, who have we added to the list since then? A tennis player here, a WNBA player there, a few awful singers with acoustic guitars and the occasional relic from the ’60s. Maybe the world can only handle five powerful lesbians at once. I know I’ve tried to handle six before and after a while it just got confusing.) Back then, even after I started coming out to friends, no one believed I was gay. My sheltered Midwestern classmates seemed to think lesbians were like the Abominable Snowman: “Personally, I don’t believe they exist, but I know this guy who says he saw a picture…”
They thought it was a phase, or that I was simply confused. (A few objected on the grounds that my hair wasn’t short. Yes, my school was obviously crawling with geniuses). They were confident that one day I’d meet the right guy and burst into the home-ec room singing, “Gonna wash that gay right out of my hair!” or something equally catchy. I was fifteen at the time and none of my classmates were openly gay, though we were pretty sure about Tom, a cute Southern Baptist who proudly served in the color guard and loved to quote Designing Women.
A number of my classmates were outspoken homophobes, which was more common than not in the 1990s, in a town that had more churches than bookstores, where PTA moms would stop each other in the grocery store to share their disappointment about Ellen on the cover of Time. Some days I thought I heard the words “gay” and “fag” in the hallway more than I heard the words “and” and “but.”
Nearly ten years later, at the exact same school, my sister came out of the closet. No one thought she was going through a phase. No one thinks she’s going to magically turn straight. (Maybe it’s because she has short hair. We’ll have to gather data.) There are still homophobic students. There are still teachers who do too little to rein them in. Comments are still made and hostile looks are still felt. Sometimes lockers are even defaced. But the school now has a gay-straight alliance, which would have been unthinkable 10 years ago.
And there are so many gay, lesbian and bisexual students that I still get confused when I hear my sister gossip about this girl dating that girl or this guy being interested in that guy’s boyfriend. “Are we talking about the same school?” I want to ask. When I was 13 there was talk the prom would be canceled if the only openly bisexual student in the entire high school brought her girlfriend. Now her gay friends are running student council and planning school dances. It doesn’t compute. (Her response would probably be, “Like we’d let straight kids plan the dances.”)
These teenagers are blazing their own trail. They don’t particularly care who Jess from the Veronicas is spotted kissing, and neither do their heterosexual peers. Jess from the Veronicas doesn’t attend their GSA meetings or write on their Facebook walls. Not only do they not feel their quest for equality is imperiled by Lindsay Lohan’s relationship with Samantha Ronson, they’d roll their eyes at the suggestion that their straight classmates would either assume the Lohan-Ronson union is a publicity stunt or react to news of a Lohan-Ronson breakup by saying, “If the girl from The Parent Trap isn’t really gay, then you’re probably a bunch of impostors as well! We don’t take you seriously now, and once we’re allowed to vote we’re going to make sure you can never get married!”*
Really, how fucking stupid do these people think kids are?
UPDATE (10/14): To answer a few questions, the reason Rosie O’Donnell was left off my “the only lesbians the public knew at that time” list is because … drum roll, please … she wasn’t out of the closet yet. She came out in 2002, five years after Ellen, and I’d graduated from high school by then. As for the “five powerful lesbians” concept, I’m sticking with it for now but would add that Rosie replaced k.d. lang on the list quite some time ago.
Oh, and the point of the post — and I think most people got this, but in case there are any questions — wasn’t that it’s wrong to discuss so-called “fauxmosexuality.” My point, as the first sentence of the post makes clear, is that this particular article on the subject is dumb. It’s a terrible, terrible, shallow, worthless article that reads like it was put together in two seconds. And I’m an expert on sloppy effort, as anyone who has perused this website knows.
* Gay teens do love Lindsay Lohan, though. Call it the Mean Girls factor. The new gays quote that movie as much as the old ones quoted Heathers. The “too gay to function” line is a perennial favorite.
My parents’ yard sign was stolen, much like the 2000 election.
Note: If the time line seems screwy, it’s because this post was originally written on Saturday night.
Last night my dad did something he’d never done before in his life: He put up a political yard sign. He’s approximately one trillion years old (or maybe he’s closing in on 50 — it’s easy to lose track), so it’s something he avoided for a long time. The whole time I was growing up, in fact, I remember him rejecting the very idea of yard signs.
He’d see them pop up around the neighborhood as elections approached and he’d get that ‘blah, blah, blah, boring dad stuff’ tone of voice that would make me close my eyes and think of things I liked, like Beach Boys songs or Edina drunkenly falling out of a car on Absolutely Fabulous. Faintly he’d drone on in the background, pointing out miserable truths like “a campaign only lasts a few months, but you’ll be living next door to your neighbors for a long time after that.” Best not to ruffle feathers, then, over something as deeply personal as politics.
What was different about this election that he felt compelled to stake a sign in his lawn? I think what finally did it for him, what made him feel he had to take a stand, was the wave of disgusting rallies John McCain and Sarah Palin held this week. The tenor of those meetings turned his stomach, and to step outside his own house each day and see McCain-Palin signs in his neighbors’ yards only added to his outrage. My mom, who’d normally do anything to avoid attracting attention, agreed: they needed a sign of their own.
And so they got one. In my official capacity as the family’s paranoid cynic, I predicted it would be stolen within 24 hours. “Attach a personal alarm to it, something the thief won’t see, so it scares the hell out of him when he tries to steal it,” I advised. They seemed to think I was overreacting. But I know what kind of people their neighbors are, and they’re not as friendly as they try to appear. I also know what kind of kids their neighbors raised. (Beasts, almost all of them. Racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic little brats who thought nothing of reheating whatever Rush Limbaugh rhetoric their parents regurgitated at dinner each night and making the rest of us inhale its putrid fumes on the school bus and in the cafeteria the next day. These were kids who’d earnestly declare between bites of tater tots that Jews are “God’s chosen people,” then solemnly inform me that I’d be damned to the fiery pits of hell if I didn’t hop aboard the Jesus train.) There was no way that sign was lasting longer than 24 hours.
So … 24 hours later, the sign is gone. Someone waited until it was dark outside, trespassed onto my parents’ lawn and stole their $8 political statement, which had been the only Obama-Biden sign on their street. (It would’ve been stolen even sooner, I think, had it gone up before nightfall yesterday.)
There’s a problem with this, beyond the obvious issues of laws being broken and rights being violated. Two problems, actually. The first is that my dad is stubborn. Really stubborn. Incredibly, impossibly stubborn. If you think that I’m a stubborn jerk — and just about everyone who knows me will tell you I’m a big one — multiply that by ten and you have the beginnings of a composite sketch of my father.
The second problem is a much bigger problem, at least for the area thief. You see, my dad owns a print shop. Not one of those rinky-dink operations college kids use to make copies of black and white flyers, but a serious, professional print shop. One that’s filled with all kinds of high-end equipment he can use to print anything he wants, from books and business cards and brochures to posters and signs (including, yes, yard signs) and large outdoor banners. If he tires of paying for something that keeps getting stolen, he might be tempted to take matters into his own hands and turn his entire yard into an Obama sign of his own creation. Stealing someone’s entire yard would be pretty hard, don’t you think? You can’t exactly swipe it when no one’s looking and disappear into the night.
Not that I’d advocate doing anything that flamboyant. (Hell, I’d never get a yard sign of my own to start with. I don’t want my neighbors to know anything about me. My desire for privacy is such that I regularly put on a Reagan mask or Groucho Marx glasses and nose just to get the mail.) My suggestion was to put up a new sign that says “Stealing My Sign Won’t Change My Vote.” Too confrontational for my parents, but it’s also beside the point: They won’t settle for anything less than “Obama-Biden ’08” in their yard, and have already put up a second sign. How long until this one disappears?
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.'”
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?
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.
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.
I’ve watched this clip of Sarah Palin trying to explain her foreign policy experience to Katie Couric twice now, and I’ve read the transcript more times than that, and I still don’t know what the hell she’s saying. All I got out of it is that Sarah Palin can’t form a complete sentence, and that I’ve heard drunken winos — and Tracy Morgan — make more sense than this elected official who somehow ended up the Republican vice presidential candidate.
For example, what’s this business about “our next door neighbors,” which are “foreign countries,” being in Alaska? My elementary school must have had really crappy geography textbooks, because I thought Anchorage and Juneau were in Alaska. I didn’t realize foreign countries were also wedged into the state.
Makes all those stories my grandparents used to tell me about their grandparents fleeing to the U.S. from Imperial Russia to escape anti-Semitism seem kind of meaningless, doesn’t it? Turns out they were in “the state that [Palin is] the executive of” all along. And Canada? Also in Alaska. My sister, a baby dyke who’s obsessed with Tegan and Sara, and Canada by extension, will be disappointed to hear that. She was looking forward to visiting Montreal one day and it might dampen her enthusiasm to learn she’ll really just be going to Fairbanks.
Palin’s comment about Vladimir Putin and how he “rears his head” in Alaska by coming into their airspace is equally fascinating. Hopefully Couric followed it up with questions about whether he does so in a helicopter with Natasha Fatale at his side. If Palin answered yes, that raises all kinds of other questions, like why she hunts moose when we need Bullwinkle to thwart the Russians, and whether she advocates aerial squirrel gunning. If Bullwinkle must die to make burgers for Bristol and Trig, we at least need assurance that Rocky is safe.
Remember that ludicrous Jacqui Smith business from earlier this week, when the Home Secretary of the United Kingdom was stupid enough to suggest that Iran is safe for homosexuals? All they have to do, she more or less advised, is spend their lives hiding in the closet. Then they won’t have to worry about being hanged or seeking asylum in the UK.
Well, Smith is again commenting on homophobia, only this time it’s the kind that happens on her own soil. A Stonewall-commissioned report released on Thursday found that one in five gay, lesbian and bisexual people in Britain have been a victim of some kind of hate crime or homophobic incident since 2005, and that 3/4ths of them declined to file police reports about it.
The results of this poll have been called shocking, but I was immediately reminded of another survey about gay Brits, and have to say that if you’re not willing to divulge your sexuality to a random census-taker, chances are you’re not going to walk into a police station and say you were just assaulted or verbally harassed for being gay. (You could argue that it isn’t a fair correlation to make, as the Stonewall report obviously used self-identified gays and lesbians as their sample group; additionally, respondents cited perceived police indifference as a reason for not filing reports. But I think that taken together, the results of the surveys indicate a sizable percentage of gay men and women in the UK don’t feel as comfortable standing up for themselves as they should.)
Curiously, given Smith’s own indifference towards gays in Iran, she responded to the report swiftly and decisively, stating:
“In the 21st century no one in Britain should ever feel under threat of verbal or physical violence just because of their sexual orientation.
“We’re determined that lesbian and gay people should have the confidence to report crimes to the police knowing that they will be taken seriously, the crime investigated and their privacy respected.
“Our key priorities are to increase reporting; increase offences brought to justice and to tackle repeat victimisation and hotspots.”
All sentiments that are very nice and proper, but how about extending that sense of justice to people who are in danger of being executed because of their sexuality?
And while I’m complaining…
This is admittedly shallow — inappropriate, some might say, given the seriousness of the subject matter we just dealt with — but why does it seem as though ESPN and NBC, in their coverage of Wimbledon, conspired to keep me from staring at Dinara Safina’s arms? She’s out of the tournament now, having been ousted by Israel’s Shahar Peer in a close three-setter earlier today, and what did NBC show instead? A Venus Williams match that’s result was old news.
I’m demanding better treatment next year. You hear that, you programming bastards? I’m like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction: I will not be ignored. I don’t care if Americans played earlier in the day, I want live tennis. Live! If you do not meet my demands, I will not watch the rest of your network’s offerings. And if I’m already giving your shows the cold shoulder (sorry, NBC, but you know you suck), well … I don’t know. I’m sure I’ll come up with better threats over the coming months.
