I haven’t written anything on the blog for ten days. Its not for want of subject matter. The depredations of Boston certainly call for comment but the last post is all I feel compelled to say on the subject. There’s been another story that has caused me deep reflection and its about a much more common crime. Its the news of a young girl named Audrie Pott who committed suicide after several friends raped her when she got drunk. I should add the perfunctory adjective “allegedly.” The details that have been in the news are still being sorted out but they remind me of people I know and have known. (more…)
Archive for the ‘Sexuality’ Category
Spitting on the Stripper
Tuesday, April 16th, 2013Heck, purple sex may come to an end
Wednesday, October 31st, 2012Re: the last post:
When God abets rape
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2012The GOP purges centrists like Senator Dick Lugar and replaces them with creatures like this guy:
GOP Senate candidate Mourdock: When rape results in pregnancy, ‘that’s something God intended’
When reason is strangled…
Thursday, August 30th, 2012…the only reply is outraged farce: Sorry, its too much for me to actually put on my blog. I know some rape victims.
I roared after she said to talk to your Doctor.
Openly gay
Tuesday, August 28th, 2012Until I read this Star Trib story about the Duluth that is no longer your grandparent’s Duluth (I’m a grandparent!) I had never read that former candidate for the Congressional Seat held by Chip Cravaack was gay. This story mentions it as though everyone knew it. Not me. I only heard it rumored by a local DFL operative who explained to me that because of it this candidate would never get elected.
I feel better that I apparently didn’t out him.
In the near future, in that better world I anticipate our gravitating toward, it should be unnecessary to announce your sexual predilections when you run for office. We’re not there yet. If Obama only had a 5% loss of voters due to his being black if you were to compare that to oppositon based on sexual preference I’d guess that in Northern Minnesota that figure would be closer to 10 to 20%. If I’m right that would be enough to guarantee a loss for any DFL challenger to Chip Cravaack.
Just because life isn’t fair doesn’t excuse a candidate from failing to disclose possible impediments to his getting votes. Who can forget Senator Thomas Eagleton failing to tell George McGovern that he had undergone electroshock before being selected as a VP candidate by McGovern? That may account for the worst drubbing any democrat has endured in a presidential election.
If this candidate was still in the closet so that the Strib couldn’t mention it as though it was no big deal that would be different. But he semi-outed himself. I guess all his buddies and the political insiders knew but not the delegates at the DFL caucuses and conventions. Had they decided to endorse him even though they knew he had to bear the cross of being gay that would have been different, laudable even. Instead he allowed the delegates to remain uninformed with a potential bombshell to be detonated by the GOP after the primary. In a year when all Democrats are aching to take back the Congress he did them a major disservice.
Don’t judge a book by its cover
Saturday, August 25th, 2012Do you recognize this person?

This story was a bit of a revelation to me. I did recall that the woman above as a much older women, famous for being ugly, got a face lift. Its obvious she didn’t need one when she was younger.
Playboy’s editors thought it would be funny, she said, and what better way to get a laugh than by sending out seductive centerfold photos of a hilariously tacky, impressively unsexy woman? It seemed like a foolproof plan. There was, however, one problem: Diller, who had long obscured her figure with the trademark ill-fitting lamé dresses she often wore onstage, turned out to have a shapely, sexy physique–and a pretty face, too, under all her clownish makeup. To everyone’s bewilderment (except maybe Phyllis Diller’s), Phyllis Diller was a bombshell.
Fiddling around
Friday, August 17th, 2012I put up a lawnsign a few weeks ago urging voters to vote no on the proposed constitutional ban on gay marriage. I mention this only to give some context to the following comments.
The Trib has done a good job outing Rep. Gauthier who was caught by police just after a hurried act of intimacy at a highway rest stop with another fellow. Tawdry, embarrassing and human.
I’ve never had a very positive feeling about Rep. Gauthier. It wasn’t because he was rumored to be gay but had more to do with his personality. Despite that I can’t help feeling a little pity for him. At 56 he came around long after gay liberation which has been a great improvement over the bad old closeted days. He may be one of the last gay Americans to suffer the indignity of such a public outing.
He’s unmarried. The act was consensual. Also, as the DNT points out with some apparent irritation, no laws have been broken. Its too late for the DFL to field another candidate and I know nothing about the Republican challenger except that before this he had zero chance of being elected.
I long for the day that voters can vote against a guy like Gauthier in good conscience because he fiddled around with a kid and not because he was fiddling around with a boy.
Bill Gates has one smart wife
Monday, May 14th, 2012From the Daily Beast:
Gates believes that by focusing on the lives of women and children, and by making it clear that the agenda is neither coercive population control nor abortion, the controversy over international family-planning programs can be defused. Right now, she points out, 100,000 women annually die in childbirth after unintended pregnancies. Six hundred thousand babies born to women who didn’t want to be pregnant die in the first month of life. “She is somebody who really sees this as a public-health necessity,” says Melanne Verveer, the United States ambassador at large for global women’s issues. “I think she believes, and I hope she is right, that people of different political persuasions can come together on this issue.”
Fair and balanced
Wednesday, May 9th, 2012ABC Video – Fox Headline
Wisconsin and Michigan Republicans are in race…
Saturday, April 7th, 2012… to alienate the most people.
Using anti equal pay for women reasoning like this Wisconsin closes the gap:
Whatever gaps exist, he insists, stem from women’s decision to prioritize childrearing over their careers. “Take a hypothetical husband and wife who are both lawyers,” he says. “But the husband is working 50 or 60 hours a week, going all out, making 200 grand a year. The woman takes time off, raises kids, is not go go go. Now they’re 50 years old. The husband is making 200 grand a year, the woman is making 40 grand a year. It wasn’t discrimination. There was a different sense of urgency in each person.”
Hoisted on your enemy’s petard
Thursday, March 15th, 2012Michael Brodkorb was a rising star in GOP politics. He was as I recall a hotshot in the UMD College Republicans when I was still a nominal Republican. Like a lot of them he drunk pretty deeply of the self righteousness that attends political ascendancy.
Recently he was canned for having an affair, something I hinted at without any confirmation. Now its out. He was intimately involved with his female boss. In the world according to GOP its bad to threaten another person’s family. Its doubly bad to threaten your own. Brodkorb has done both.
I find it ironic that after having done this he is clinging to a very liberal claim of rights – the one having to do with sexual equality. Only heretical Republicans like me ever believed in the Equal Rights Amendment. There was always the fear that if it was passed women would find themselves in combat or that children could be torn from their mother’s breast during the dissolution of a marriage.
Yet because some female staffers have reputedly nookied with their powerful male legislators and survived to tell the tale (if they are really talking about it) with their jobs Mr. Brodkorb is planning to file a sexual discrimination suit. Well fair enough. Its the philosophically liberal way to proceed. However, I can’t help but think this is more about revenge and payback than civil rights.
Until Brodkorb lost his job he was quite willing to be just one more paramour of a powerful legislator if a male paramour. Now that he’s been fired he wants all the females in a similar situation to be called out just as he was. Of course, the hypocritical male legislators who have enjoyed non marital conjugality might quail at being exposed. I think that is rather the point. No idealism here. Certainly there is no liberal idealism from the true conservative Brodkorb. He mostly wants to show that his former bosses included people as hypocritical as he was. Either that or he’s hoping to blackmail them into giving him a big settlement for his embarrassment. If he gets it It will just prove that Mike had lots of company in the hypocrisy department.
If you are a Republican watching from the sidelines you have to hope that Mike Brodkorb mostly has Democratic dalliances to expose. Good luck with that.
A lot of Republicans stress that Rush has apologized but isn’t getting credit for it.
Thursday, March 8th, 2012Rush Limbo
Wednesday, March 7th, 2012Here’s a more salutary commentary on the Rush dust up. Liberal yaps take a deserved beating. We live in an age where anything seems to go.
I’ve heard that Colbert has a commentary on the subject. My wife said it was funny.
It is:
What Rush Limbaugh should have said instead of being “funny”
Wednesday, March 7th, 2012My Buddy has sent me a counterpoint on the Rush Limbaugh fooferah. Except its not really about Rush. Its a WSJ op ed piece offering cogent criticism of Sandra Fluke who wanted to testify for the required inclusion of birth control pills in her student insurance.
What about Rush Limbaugh? I won’t defend his use of epithets (for which he’s apologized), but I understand his larger point. At issue isn’t inhalers for asthmatics or insulin for diabetics. Contraception isn’t like other kinds of “health care.” Yes, birth-control pills can be prescribed to address medical problems, though that’s relatively rare and the Catholic Church has no quarrel with their use in this circumstance. And the university’s insurance covers prescriptions in these cases.
Still, Ms. Fluke is not mollified. Why? Because at the end of the day this is not about coverage of a medical condition.
Ms. Fluke’s crusade for reproductive justice is simply a demand that a Catholic institution pay for drugs that make it possible for her to have sex without getting pregnant. It’s nothing grander or nobler than that. Georgetown’s refusal to do so does not mean she has to have less sex, only that she has to take financial responsibility for it herself.
Should Ms. Fluke give up a cup or two of coffee at Starbucks each month to pay for her birth control, or should Georgetown give up its religion? Even a first-year law student should know where the Constitution comes down on that.
First and foremost this issue has only been tangentially about insurance and first amendment rights to practice one’s religion as conscience dictates. That was the issue until Rush Limbaugh – the sacrosanct “conservative” pundit – weighed in. Rush took a vulnerable argument and he attached sluttery, prostitution and juvenile jokes about an oversexed law student hobbling to class after orgiastic bouts of sexual athleticism. Ha Ha Ha.
The Pope of poop is having to eat his own. Cheers!
I wrote a few posts back about my wife, Claudia, having had insurance coverage for her, our, contraceptives. I mentioned what I’d written to her (she never and I mean never) reads my blog. She corrected me. We paid for her pills out of pocket. then she added, “and it wasn’t fair.”
That was forty years ago. She was prescribed “the pill” long before she became sexually active. She had a highly irregular menstrual cycle that was debilitating. I guess, not being a woman, that its not good to go two months without a period only to have two kick in over a two week period following that.
I was a blessedly clueless guy. That menstruation stuff was stuff I didn’t really want to know about. When my younger sister was hit with puberty and suffered and my Mom made her hot toddy’s to get through it I really wished I didn’t know anything about it.
Then I got married and suddenly my wife’s health was my concern. I remember the helpless dismay I felt upon opening the bathroom door and finding her passed out from the pain of her period. I called the hospital and was appalled when the female voice on the other end of the line seemed pretty indifferent to my plea for help. I guess other women can be pretty blase about this subject.
So, Buddy, your point is taken. It was taken by me long before the voice of true conservatism called Sandra Fluke and by implication my wife and daughter sluts and prostitutes. As far as I’m concerned this hasn’t been about contraception or first amendment rights. Its about a king with no cloths vomiting out puke and an entire political party, once my entire family’s political party, eating it up without blanching.
“Thank you for the civil wonderful debate today”
Saturday, February 18th, 2012Hope in and for the Republican Party – once we get past the desperate lunge back to the crappy old days.
This Republican proposal sounds a little like gang rape
Friday, February 17th, 2012Virginia Republicans know a good cause deserving of becomeing law:
Virginia House has passed a bill that would require women to undergo an ultrasound before having an abortion. In many cases (most, in fact) that would mean having what’s called a “transvaginal ultrasound,” in which a probe is inserted into a pregnant woman’s vagina to get the necessary image. This may just seem like an attempt to punish women who choose to have an abortion and a way to make the procedure even less attractive than it already is—and there may be some element of that involved—but there is a medical reason for the transvaginal ultrasound, at least, if an ultrasound is required by law. Most abortions are conducted at a period during pregnancy when the fetus may be too small to be properly seen with the “jelly-on-the-belly” ultrasound.
The GOP’s business…
Thursday, February 16th, 2012…is not a lady’s business. Apparently:
This morning, Democrats tore into House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) for preventing women from testifying before a hearing examining the Obama administration’s new regulation requiring employers and insurers to provide contraception coverage to their employees.
Some of these old misogynists ought to be paying more attention to their base in Mississippi.
I bash Mississippi regulalry…
Thursday, February 16th, 2012…but if you exclude the majority of old white Mississippians who still want to outlaw marriage between the races its changing before my very eyes.
The other night I saw a PBS program that showed the students of Ole Miss deciding to end the popular call: “The South Shall Rise Again” at their football games. And Ole Miss is still overwhelmingly white. They even withstood a puny protest by what’s left of the KKK.
And recently the voters of Mississippi voted down the “personhood amendment” that sought to end morning after birth control pills.
Now this.
Good luck Rick Santorum. The masters of the GOP have been betting on the wrong horse that’s come up lame.
Sexual grandiosity
Thursday, January 26th, 2012Victor Davis Hanson is one of the current Era’s right-wing political pundits. He’s also a historian. I got about half way through his book on the War between the Spartans and Athenians and like many other of my books a book mark is stuck where I left it beckoning me to finish someday.
My Buddy sent me one of the typical emails with nothing but a link to some bit of punditry in it. Today’s was a piece by Hanson pooh poohing the harrumphing about Newt Gingrich’s three wives which he seems to excuse because he’s “grandiose.” Mormons of old got nothing on Newt.
Well, I took the bait and sent my Buddy this reply:
Buddy,
Hanson should stick to the Spartans and their eccentric homosexual military organization where his moral flexibility is aided by his historical view. He probably likes the historian Gingrich’s romanticism but I wonder if Hanson ever decried the GOP’s desire to remove Clinton from office for lying about his daliance with an intern? Maybe Hanson was too busy writing about the Greeks back in the 90′s to offer his opinion on Clinton for public consumption. For that matter Newt himself seems to have a different standard for Clinton than he has for himself.
Harry
On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 5:46 AM, [your Buddy] wrote:
John and Yoko updated
Monday, January 23rd, 2012Its a new evangelism and it ain’t the Presbyterians.