The makers of Sesame Street released the following message today, in response to a Facebook petition that had called for Bert and Ernie to finally come out and get married: Bert and Ernie are best friends. They were created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from [...]

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So, I’m as amused as anyone when the umpteenth “ex-gay” evangelist is spotted leaving a leather bar after another triumphant speech about how Jesus magicked away their sinful homosexual feelings. I’m as incredulous as anyone at folks who insist that homosexuality is a “choice,” seemingly without ever having paused to ask themselves when they “chose” [...]

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I’m inclined to agree with Amanda Marcotte that the media feeding frenzy over Anthony Weiner’s extramarital sexting and online flirtation is unsettling insofar as it seems to abandon any pretense that some public nexus—lawbreaking, misuse of public authority, or at the very least a clear conflict with an official’s avowed political positions—is necessary to make [...]

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One of the more noxious and predictable genres of social conservative screed takes the form of whining that the only discrimination we really need to worry about is the failure to make special accommodation for the sensibilities of bigots. Perhaps the ideal form of this particular whine was served up at the American Spectator yesterday: [...]

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If you’ve ever wondered what a lobotomy in print form looks like, search no further than this tedious, rambling piece in The American Spectator by Daniel Oliver. The author strokes his chin, at great length, over the question of why, in all The New York Times‘ recent reporting on sexual abuse by priests, “the word [...]

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A few years back, during his candidacy for the presidency of South Africa, Jacob Zuma was accused of rape by a longstanding family friend. I don’t know enough about the case to say anything about the legitimacy of the verdict—contemporary reporting depicts disgusting vilification of the accuser and support of the politically powerful accused—but Zuma [...]

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Via Andrew, I see that conservative news outlets haven’t been even a little shamed by the serial exposure of previous slanders against “safe schools czar” Kevin Jennings.  The Washington Times‘ editorial bashing Jennings for penning the foreword to Queering Elementary Education isn’t just stupid and offensive, as you’d expect; it’s downright bizarre. As you would [...]

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Lisa Wade at Sociological Images muses on why commercial depictions of “lust” or “sexy” overwhelmingly involve images of women, making the implicit lust-er or perceiver-of-sexiness a straight male: Thought Experiment:  If nearly naked men had been dancing in those columns, do you think the audience would have thought “hot men for the women!” or “how [...]

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Quinn  Hyler is very eager for someone to press Sonia Sotomayor about how differences in judging may stem from inherent physiological differences. I hate to disappoint him, but there’s a thoroughly boring answer he could have unearthed himself with about ten seconds of research. The line originates in a speech Sotomayor gave that was exclusively [...]

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The federal government’s first Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra, used to be the District of Columbia’s top geek. He caught the Obama administration’s eye by, among other things, finding innovative ways to put public data online, and especially to make it more easily accessible through the use of third-party apps. A prime illustration of the [...]

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