Too Easy

Here's the question I want someone to ask the human simalcrum whose name, thanks to Dan Savage, means "frothy mixture of semen, lube and feces."

"Given your insistence that the only allowable sex is procreative sex, and given that your wife is post-menopausal, are you now celibate and if not, who or what are you fucking?"

Read it at LGM.

What You Get When Children Grow Up Fearing and Hating Sex

Politicians who thinks sex is disgusting and necessary only for creating children and thus keep making clueless comments that should be keeping a platoon of Freudians in business for decades.





Crooks and Liars:

Rick Santorum spoke at the Iowa State GOP Convention this weekend to talk to Conservatives about ‘banging’ the President. I think Mrs. Obama might raise an objection or ten as to Rick Santorum having sexy time with her husband. 

“Look, I understand why campaigns and all of you want to go out and just bang the president. It’s fun. I mean, it’s fun. It’s easy. It’s getting easier every day,” Santorum said. 

Many of us have thought that Santorum’s objections to equality for the gay community might be due to a sense of self-loathing, but now it’s confirmed.

Yeah, Sex Always Makes Me Want to Deal Drugs

I can't even

Greg Kocher, who gets all the good stories at the Herald:

Former Garrard County magistrate Ronnie Lane was sentenced Friday to serve six months in jail on felony drug-trafficking charges.

SNIP

Zeroogian said Lane, (74) who is married and has two adult children, had a relationship with a younger woman "he shouldn't have been carrying on with." Zeroogian did not identify the woman or say how the relationship began.

SNIP

Daugherty acknowledged that "old guys are doing stupid things for young women" these days, and mentioned how Donald Sterling, co-owner of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team, is in danger of losing that NBA team as an offshoot of a relationship with a younger woman.

OK, young women voters of Jessamine and Garrard Counties: the next time Circuit Judge Hunter Daugherty comes up for re-election, remember that he thinks you all are to blame for crimes, stupidity, drug-dealing and racism by old men.

Thought Crimes

Via Digby, Andrew Sullivan nails what's really going on: the criminalization of harmless expressions of thought.

This is Andrew Sullivan at his literary best (and I agree with what he's written too!) He's responding here to Ross Douthat's maidenly screed against virtual naughtiness:

His view is that cutting online sex out of one's life entirely is the only way to avoid its temptation. I tend, in contrast, to think that human nature is so flawed that a sane moral life cannot and should not insist on constant perfection/abstinence, but constant attention to morality, to conscience, and to what human beings can reasonably expect to achieve. If your standard is never to commit a venial sin, you will almost certainly fail. And you may set up a destructive pattern of perfection, failure, depression, more failure, more depression, a new commitment to perfection, failure ... and so on: rinse and repeat. I think that cycle is horribly destructive and believe that moderation and risk-minimization is a safer guide to avoiding sin than total abstinence. That's why diets fail; and why the Christianist South has higher rates of divorce and illegitimacy than, say, "barbaric" Massachusetts.

Yes, you can get lost in an online hall of mirrors and addiction and narcissism.

Yes, there is a lack of dignity in what has happened to Weiner - but only because what was meant to be private became public. If videos of all of us taking our Morganscheisse were streamed live, a few of us would lose some dignity as well.

But if a married man jacks off to porn, I don't think we should consider him an adulterer, let alone on a route to what Ross calls "barbarism". (And if it is considered adultery, what percentage of American marriages would be intact?) Ditto if someone "kills" real-people-acting-as-avatars on World of Warcraft. That does not convict someone of murder. And if a married man chats online with a paid sex worker, and jacks off on his laptop, is that adultery too? What if he is just playing at wooing or preening with online strangers or fans but with no real intent to, you know, have sexual relations with any of them? In the grand scheme of social ills, these do not rank high on my list. The real-virtual distinction is a meaningful one.

Yes, this is a santorumy slope in many ways, but the element that Ross (and the Vatican) dismisses is that sex need not always be deadly serious. There is a vital part of the human experience that we call "play". Fighting the need for play gets sex and work out of proportion and can distort our moral lives in ways far worse than the occasional victimless online flirt. And that's what this technology has really opened up: not the potential for sin, which is always with us, but the potential for play. From Angry Birds to anonymous chat rooms to World of Warcraft to Chatroulette or Grindr or OKCupid, this is a safe zone for unsafe things by virtual people. That's why we call it play. It is often a balance to work or lack of work. It is not the end of civilization. It is, in fact, the mark of one.

And, by the way, no matter how much you try to eliminate pornography or online "play", until you manage to lobotomize the entire species, the human imagination will always provide the necessary images for someone to commit "virtual adultery." If that's a crime, I think everyone over the age of 14 has committed it.

Republicans have always been eager to criminalize any expressions they don't like, which is exactly what this is. The suicidal rush of Democratic politicians to help repugs criminalize this particular kind of expression is by far the most despicable aspect of the whole thing.

How the Failure to Expose Arnold's Dick Killed California

I am a long-time advocate of the position that a politician's or elected official's sexual behavior - no matter how unconventional or even despicable - is irrelevant to her job qualifications and performance.

There are, of course, what you might call the side effects of such behavior that do have a bearing on job qualifications/performance.

For example: Presidential Candidate Gary Hart's open dare to Miami Herald reporters in 1988 to follow him around if they thought he was having an affair. He was, of course, boning a local bimbo, they caught him, they published photos, Hart dropped out of the race and was never taken seriously again. Which is a real shame, because it was Senator Hart's special commission from President Clinton in 1998 warning of terrorism threats that presciently had on its cover a bulls-eye over a drawing of - I am not making this up - the Twin Towers.

Now we have a similar situation in California, in which the lack of time to fully expose another candidate's sexual escapades led directly to the economic disaster that is tearing California to shreds.

Kevin Drum explains:

Shortly before California's 2003 special election for governor, the Los Angeles Times reported that a number of women had accused Arnold Schwarzenegger of groping and various other sexual advances. Arnold vaguely fessed up to some bad behavior in the past, but said, "I don't remember things that I've done or said 20 years ago. I don't remember things that I've done 30 years ago." The Times series was widely viewed as a thinly veiled hit piece scheduled to run just days before the election in order to ruin Schwarzenegger's chances.

That was never true. The reason the stories ran so late is because the special election was only six weeks long. If it had been any ordinary election, the Times would have spent far more time on its reporting and the story would likely have broken months before election day. In the event, though, the accusations were out there and the Times did heroic work putting together a hugely complex story under tight deadline pressure. As far as I know, the accuracy of their reporting hasn't been seriously challenged to this day.

And what about Arnold? He insisted that this stuff was so far in the dim past that he could barely remember it. But it wasn't. Today we learn that he had cheated on his wife and had a child out of wedlock just a few years before. His megawatt-smile denials were pure pap, and if knowledge of his affair had been public it's almost a dead certainty that the recall would have failed and Gray Davis would have remained governor. The car tax would have stayed in place, no bonds would have been issued to make up for it, and California's deficit problems would have been less than half as bad as they turned out to be under Schwarzenegger.

That's what comes of running a politically motivated snap election with weird rules in six weeks: you don't really know what you're getting. In the end, the Times was right about Schwarzenegger, and his folksy boys-will-be-boys denials were lies. We've paid a pretty high price for that.

National Leader is Atheist Shacking Up With Lover

No, not here. Australia. PZ Myers:

Julia Gillard, the new Prime Minister of Australia, is unmarried…but she has a boyfriend, a partner, a…a…paramour, which brings up the horrific possibility of a leader of the country living in sin in official accommodations. Oh, lord, I'm getting the vapors just thinking about it.

And now the Sydney Morning Herald is getting all fluttery over it, too. Why, what kind of role model can she be if she refuses to obey the strictures of Church and Convention?

SNIP

Gillard was in a radio interview, and look at what she said:

This morning during a Melbourne radio interview, the new Prime Minister of Australia Julia Gillard was asked point blank:

"Do you believe in God?"

Her reply:

"No I don't, John"

The Australian news media must be in a total meltdown right now. If a major American politician said something like that, Fox News would be howling about it 24/7. There'd be demonstrations on the mall in DC. Televangelists would be calling down hellfire. Good ol' boys would be sighting in their rifles.

Say…I just checked the front pages of a couple of Australian news sites. This satanic revelation isn't even mentioned. What's wrong with Australia? And can we get the same infection?

A day later, our sexy atheist political pinup had already betrayed us:

You knew it was too good to be true. Julia Gillard has just announced that she is against gay marriage. The honeymoon is over, no more plaudits. At least we still have Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir to admire.

Sex and the Torturing Politican

Twenty years ago this Sunday, a Miami Herald reporter got a phone call and the rules of political campaigns changed forever.

When Tom Fiedler's phone rang the evening of April 27, 1987, he thought it might be another crank call, the kind political reporters get all the time. But Fiedler, a veteran campaign chronicler for the Miami Herald, couldn't ignore the caller's message: "Gary Hart is having an affair with a friend of mine."

Hart's inexcusable stupidity - he actually dared reporters to follow him - set a new standard for political coverage: sex lives are fair game.

The Clinton impeachment a decade later may seem to be the apotheosis of that standard, but in fact it was its nadir; it made most people realize that a politician's consensual adult sex really wasn't as important as how he did his job.

In Kentucky, Governor Paul Patton provided the egregious example of a public official who let his dick affect his job performance; he gave his mistress Tina Connor sweetheart contracts and regulatory exemptions for her businesses. His real crime, however, was that the exposure of his malfeasance led directly to the election of Republican Criminal Ernie Fletcher.

But it wasn't until the American people got collectively though metaphorically ass-raped by a frat-boy with arrested development who has probably never cheated on his wife that we really understood the moral calculus of presidential flaws.

In a president, which is preferable? Discreet extramarital affairs with consenting adults or treating the Constitution as toilet paper?

Let me put it more baldly: rather than a "good Christian" sociopathic failure bent on destroying the nation in a futile attempt to out-macho his father and who gets his jollies personally approving sexual torture of innocents, I'll take a homosexual, atheist, liberal, feminist, elitist, UN-loving, business-hating, gun-confiscating abortionist any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.