Jodie Foster's Golden Globes speech isn't nutty or incoherent.

That's my working theory. Maybe you disagree. Transcript here. Highlights:

"So while I’m here being all confessional, I guess I have a sudden urge to say something that I’ve never really been able to air in public.... I am single. Yes I am, I am single...."

That is, she rejects the yep-I'm-gay routine. She's not being all confessional, like these other people.

"... But now I’m told, apparently that every celebrity is expected to honor the details of their private life with a press conference, a fragrance and a prime-time reality show.....

"But seriously, if you had been a public figure from the time that you were a toddler, if you’d had to fight for a life that felt real and honest and normal against all odds, then maybe you too might value privacy above all else. Privacy.  Some day, in the future, people will look back and remember how beautiful it once was."

Well said. That's rather old-fashioned and not what the pop-culture media have been telling us is the right way to be these days.

ADDED: Andrew Sullivan says: "What unadulterated bullshit."

"How can gender be 100% nurture and sexuality be 100% nature?"

The question of the day, pithily articulated.

"Herman Cain Tells Piers Morgan That He Is Anti-Abortion, Yet Pro-Choice?"

Mediate has that headline, as if it's hard to fathom. But I think most Americans are anti-abortion yet pro-choice. I am.

As I view the clip at the link — and it cuts off just at the point where I'd ask a few more questions — Herman Cain believes abortion should be legal. He can maintain his own opinion that abortion is always wrong and, at the same time, that it is the woman's decision and that it is not the role of government to intervene.

In the clip, he says the same thing about homosexuality. He thinks that it's wrong, and also that it's not the government's role to prevent anyone from choosing to engage in homosexual behavior. Piers Morgan drags him into the question whether homosexuality is inborn, and the 2 men never draw the distinction between homosexual orientation and homosexual behavior. Whether it's inborn or not, there's a choice about acting out on your desires, and since Cain — I think! — sees that choice as belonging to the individual and not to the government, the science question about the origin of homosexual orientation is irrelevant. I love the idea of freedom of choice, based on a commitment to freedom, as opposed to a concession to the hard facts of biology. (And I remember when people who supported gay rights were enthusiastic about sexual orientation as a choice and got quite angry at a scientist who studied sexual orientation at the biological level.)

What's missing from that Mediaite clip — perhaps not from the interview as a whole — is whether Cain wants to see the Supreme Court overrule the cases that find constitutional rights to choose abortion and to choose to engage in homosexual behavior. You can't tell from the statement in the clip that he thinks there are rights that preclude legislation. Cain might be saying that he wouldn't sign legislation depriving the individual of those choices, but that his disapproval of that legislation doesn't mean that there is a constitutional right — which is what his favorite Supreme Court justice says about such things.

[The law criminalizing homosexual behavior] “is … uncommonly silly.” Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 527 (1965) (Stewart, J., dissenting). If I were a member of the Texas Legislature, I would vote to repeal it. Punishing someone for expressing his sexual preference through noncommercial consensual conduct with another adult does not appear to be a worthy way to expend valuable law enforcement resources.

Notwithstanding this, I recognize that as a member of this Court I am not empowered to help petitioners and others similarly situated. My duty, rather, is to “decide cases ‘agreeably to the Constitution and laws of the United States.’ ” Id., at 530. And, just like Justice Stewart, I “can find [neither in the Bill of Rights nor any other part of the Constitution a] general right of privacy,” ibid., or as the Court terms it today, the “liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions,” ante, at 1.

Some men who claim to be bisexual... actually are.

According to 2 new studies that offsets an old study that outraged some men who claim to be bisexual.

Psychology professor Lisa Diamond says: “I’ve interviewed a lot of individuals about how invalidating it is when their own family members think they’re confused or going through a stage or in denial... These converging lines of evidence, using different methods and stimuli, give us the scientific confidence to say this is something real.”

Let's talk about morality.

America has a strong consensus about a lot things even as we are divided on others:



What surprises you the most here? Are you surprised that 80% of Americans say suicide is morally wrong? I've often had to struggle with commenters on this blog when I have taken the firm position that suicide is murder, but I think America mostly agrees with me. There is generally an outpouring of sympathy when someone commits suicide. Why don't we express our moral opprobrium toward the self-murderer? I think it's because that person is gone, and we feel sorry for those who are left behind. They are the victims.

Doctor-assisted suicide is an important subcategory of suicide, and the Gallup report says that it "emerges as the most controversial cultural issue in Gallup's 2011 Values and Beliefs poll." But what is notable is that support for assisted suicide has been dropping and has reached its lowest level of support in 8 years.

"The excuse that you're not breaking new gossip you're just helping to spread gossip seems like a pretty lame excuse."

Jack Craver — the Isthmus writer who did that hit piece on me — takes some heat for writing "Oh, and Herb Kohl is long-rumored to be gay." That came in the context of talking about whether Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin — who is openly gay — could run successfully for Herb Kohl's Senate seat.

If the question is what counts as outing? then it's not outing to report the existence of well-known rumors. How well-known are the rumors about Herb Kohl?

But the question isn't really how to define the term "outing." It's whether it's whether a journalist should bring up the subject of rumors in a particular context. Here, the context is whether an openly gay candidate will be successful running for an political position now held by a rumored-to-be-gay person. Another context where it might seem justified is reporting the rumored-to-be-gay person's vote on the repeal of Defense of Marriage Act or Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

I think the mainstream norm is to avoid mentioning the rumor and to wait until the person identifies himself as gay — even in those special contexts. Perhaps it depends on how obvious the rumors have been balanced against how gay-related the context is. And the thumb on the scales is: How edgy/mainstream do you want to be?

Isthmus is our "alternative newspaper." We could talk about what that term means. And Craver's on-line writing self-identifies as a "blog," whatever the hell that is.

"They're All Bullies and Whores!"

Ha! Emily Bazelon and I talk about the election, the gay rights cases, the gender card, what you can say about women, Christian fundamentalism and anti-gay harassment, and all the complexity that doesn't fit into your ideological templates. Feast your eyes and ears on 28 minutes of bullies and whores:

Carl Paladino's "Cuomo Land" ads.

There's this spoof of the children's game:



What is he accusing Cuomo of there? The Daily News says:

Paladino, who staunchly opposes gay nuptials, accused Cuomo of being a hypocrite for touting his support for same-sex weddings now - but being "all but invisible" when the issue was before the Legislature last year.

"He was asked by those pushing for the measure to call three wavering senators," the Paladino campaign said in the first of what it promises will be daily "Cuomo Land" attacks.

Political pros were puzzled that Paladino would attack Cuomo on gays, given that the Tea Party darling's campaign unraveled this week after he delivered an anti-gay diatribe.

Veteran Democratic operative Hank Sheinkopf called it a "bad choice of a first issue" for the "Cuomo Land" attacks.

Well, look at the illustration. The whole "Cuomo Land" idea seems to be some crazy fantasy about luring children into homosexuality.

If we are to believe the plethysmograph, then men know exactly what they want.

Either women, if they are straight, or men, if they are gay. Meanwhile, women respond to... everything... including apes.

And the men's subjective account of what aroused them matched what the plethysmograph recorded, while the women's subjective account was — if we are to believe the plethysmograph — a pack of lies.

As soon as I asked about rape fantasies, [sex researcher Meredith] Chivers took my pen and wrote "semantics" in the margin of my notes before she said, "The word 'rape' comes with gargantuan amounts of baggage... I walk a fine line, politically and personally, talking frankly about this subject. I would never, never want to deliver the message to anyone that they have the right to take away a woman’s autonomy over her body. I hammer home with my students, 'Arousal is not consent.'"

We spoke, then, about the way sexual fantasies strip away the prospect of repercussions, of physical or psychological harm, and allow for unencumbered excitement, about the way they offer, in this sense, a pure glimpse into desire, without meaning — especially in the case of sexual assault — that the actual experiences are wanted.

"It’s the wish to be beyond will, beyond thought," Chivers said about rape fantasies. "To be all in the midbrain."...

She spoke about helping women bring their subjective sense of lust into agreement with their genital arousal as an approach to aiding those who complain that desire eludes them...

"The only openly gay male athlete in Beijing pulled off one of the great upsets at the Olympics in a spectacular fashion."

And NBC did not mention that Matthew Mitcham — who won the gold medal in the 10 meter dive — is gay.

Ah, but you say NBC didn't inform us of anyone else's sexual orientation? Yes, it did:

NBC did not mention Mitcham’s orientation, nor did they show his family and partner who were in the stands. NBC has made athletes' significant others a part of the coverage in the past, choosing to spotlight track athlete Sanya Richards' fiancee, a love triangle between French and Italian swimmers and Kerri Walsh's wedding ring debacle.

Mitcham was the only openly gay male at the Olympics. His surprise win was stunning, and NBC had great footage of his reaction as he realized he'd won. So this was one of the stories that deserved expansion with a little human interest documentary. Was NBC just afraid of putting off viewers? I suppose there are some people in the audience who would interpret any sort of emotional presentation of his background as some sort of in-your-face proselytizing.

It's possible that NBC failed to obtain shots of the family and the partner in the stands (since Mitcham wasn't expected to win). But if NBC deliberately eclipsed his sexual orientation, that was wrong.

What's with the Abercrombie & Fitch product placement in Obama's "concession" speech last night?

Thanks to Toby, a commenter on the previous post, for this observation:

Somewhat off topic, but did anyone else notice the people behind Obama during his concession speech? There was the guy who looks like a Larry David clone (and may well have been him for all I know); and there were the three male college-age guys all wearing easily identifiable Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirts, which may be a case of a company taking guerrilla marketing [to] a presidential contest, or may be an odd coincidence. Weird in any case.

Somewhat off topic, but now, it's the topic. So, you'd think they'd arrange the crowd better. Or is this the crowd they arranged? You know, sort of "We need more white people."

IN THE COMMENTS: Palladian notes that Titus observed it first, thusly:

I am watching Barack's concession tonight on CNN and I want to do the three guys wearing the A&F shirts behind him.

A 4 way with them would be hot.

And Palladian added:

I like the one in the middle with the "Yes We Can" sign. Yes you can, indeed. The chubbier one to his right is also hot.

But it is hilarious that there are THREE men standing together wearing Abercrombie & Fitch shirts. How much do you think that vulgar company shelled out to those boys for this product placement?

Given the tenor of those remarks, I wonder if the Obama campaign is trying to reach out to gay voters — something the Clinton campaign is doing openly:

Accompanied by Governor Ed Rendell, Chelsea Clinton trolled through Philadelphia on a gay bar crawl, posing for photos and shaking hands with supporters.

In what may be one of the most unique campaign tactics yet employed in the hotly contested Democratic race, the Clinton family targeted one of their most valuable weapons straight toward the heart of the gay community on Friday. Surrounded by a moving crowd of admirers, Chelsea walked through the streets of Center City in Philadelphia, visiting four gay bars along the way to shake hands and chat about her mother's campaign.

Outside of the Tavern bar, patrons shouted "You're gorgeous, baby!" and "We love your highlights!" as Chelsea exited on her way to another gay club. "Thank you," she replied, "but that's not why you should vote for my mom."

According to the Washington Post, Governor Ed Rendell has a tradition of touring the most popular gay clubs in Philadelphia before elections. For this round, Rendell invited Chelsea Clinton to crawl the bars with him to speak to LGBT community members....

"The gay community has great feelings toward the [former] president and Hillary and they happen to love Chelsea," Rendell said, according to the Washington Post. "These are important voters, they're smart, they're sophisticated and they turn out in large numbers and always have," Rendall said of the LGBT community.

Busted because the park is closed and then publicly humiliated.

Glenn Reynolds flags this New York Post story:

CNN personality Richard Quest was busted in Central Park early yesterday with some drugs in his pocket, a rope around his neck that was tied to his genitals, and a sex toy in his boot, law-enforcement sources said.

It was after 3 a.m., and the park was closed, so he was arrested for loitering:

"Mr. Quest didn't realize that the park had a curfew," [his lawyer] said. He was simply "returning to his hotel with friends."

At a hearing in Manhattan Criminal Court, Quest agreed to undergo six months of drug counseling in return for an "adjournment in contemplation of dismissal," which means the misdemeanor charges against him will be dropped and the case sealed if he stays out of trouble and completes his drug program.

He was released with no bail after spending most of the day behind bars.

Glenn says:

WELL, THIS IS EMBARRASSING...

Best line from the story: "It wasn't immediately clear what the rope was for."... Really, with this sort of arrest on his record, he might as well just run for Congress. He'll fit right in!

My first reaction was to laugh at the rope too. (And then to worry that kids might get the idea to experiment with rope and hurt themselves.) But now, I'm outraged that the public humiliation was out of proportion and unrelated to the offense.

It's not illegal to walk around with a rope tied around you like that. (It was under his clothes, I'm assuming, but even if it wasn't.) Being in a park after hours is a piddling offense. Don't police normally just tell you the park is closed and let you walk away? That happened to me and my then-husband once, and we just got in the car and drove away, laughing at the police and saying, mock hippie-style, "The park is closed? You can't close a park, man." I'd have been shocked if the police had arrested us and searched us for that, not that we had drugs on us. We didn't.

It was mildly bad and slightly stupid of Quest to have a small amount of drugs on him, and he deserves the same treatment as anyone else for that offense, but I don't see why it's acceptable for the police to injure him gratuitously by revealing private information about him the way they did.

UPDATE: Glenn updates his post to respond to mine, and calls attention to a rather strangely put detail in the NYT report of the incident:

The police noticed Mr. Quest at 64th Street and West Drive at about 3:40 a.m., the official said. As he was being escorted out, he volunteered, “I have meth in my pocket,” according to an official briefed on the case. The police searched him and recovered a small amount of methamphetamine in a Ziploc bag.

Glenn says:

So had Quest not volunteered that he had methamphetamine on him, he might have gotten precisely the treatment Althouse suggests, simply being "escorted out" of the park. And -- assuming this NYT report is correct -- why did he do that? Beats me.

I find it hard to believe Quest is stupid enough to have said "I have meth in my pocket" unless he knew they were about to find it on him.

ADDED: Mark Steyn weighs in.

And then Christopher Hitchens said to Andrew Sullivan: "Don't be such a lesbian."

The Singles Map.

In case you want to pick where to live based on the supply of singles of the sex you prefer, Richard Florida has the info depicted nicely on a map. That map is telling me to get out of New York City — and back to Madison.

By the way, this idea that you should go where the sex ratio is best is called "the Jan and Dean rule":



I'm not sure which one is Jan and which one is Dean. I'm going to assume it's Jan on the left, because we read left to right, and moviemakers were probably trying to help us. But the first few seconds of that video are quite interesting, and I don't mean just as a study of nonactors not even trying to act. Why does "Jan" already have his 2 girls? It doesn't fit the dialogue (unless the point is supposed to be that Jan is an idiot and girls find Dean hopelessly unattractive). I think it's because without the girls, the dialogue would make Jan seem gay.

Which reminds me: Florida's map leaves you on your own to figure out the extent to which an oversupply of one sex means a lot of gay people choose to live there. But he's already telling us that New York has a huge oversupply of women.

Footnote: Richard Florida did a Bloggingheads recently.

"If you think Jeremiah Wright is gruesome..."

Writes Christopher Hitchens:

... wait until you get a load of the next Chicago "Reverend," one James Meeks, another South Side horror show with a special sideline in the baiting of homosexuals. He, too, has been an Obama supporter, and his church has been an occasional recipient of Obama's patronage. And perhaps he, too, can hope to be called "controversial" for his use of the term house nigger to describe those he doesn't like and for his view that it was "the Hollywood Jews" who brought us Brokeback Mountain.

"I started getting translations of the phrase the president used as the image appeared... I thought, 'oh my God, what an insult' ... "

"Tom and I are just a couple, like any other couple around the world."

Irish-born New York resident Brendan Fay reacts to the discovery that Polish President Lech Kaczynski used pictures of his wedding in a national speech railing about gay marriage. Fay is suing. [ADDED: Fay has sent his complaint to the Polish Consulate in New York.] Kaczynski was warning Poles about the EU's new Charter of Fundamental Rights. He said

"An article of the charter, due to no clear definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman, may go against the universally accepted moral order in Poland and force our country to introduce an institution in conflict with the moral convictions of the decided majority of our country."

"I don't even know why straight people want to get married because you invite the government in your bedroom."

"But that's okay. It seems to be a very basic human need that I don't share." — says lesbian novelist Rita Mae Brown, who wrote that book "Rubyfruit Jungle" and who got kicked out of NOW. Time Magazine asks her what she thinks of gay marriage and she says "I don't understand it."

Asked about coming out as a gay person, she says:

The funny thing is, I don't believe in straight or gay. I really don't. I think we're all degrees of bisexual. There may be a few people on the extreme if it's a bell curve who really truly are gay or really truly are straight. Because nobody had ever said these things and used their real name, I suddenly became the only lesbian in America. It was hysterical. It was a misnomer, but it's okay. It was a fight worth fighting.

She seems pretty sharp and irreverent. Lots of animals too: 11 cats, 5 house dogs, and a pack of fox hounds (i.e., 70 hounds). She's the Master of Hounds at Oak Ridge Fox Hunt Club.

Do you ever hear about somebody whose life is so interesting that you're envious, even though you don't want to do any of the things that person does?

A new angle on why the political wife stands by her husband like that.

Maybe she's not that innocent.

Remember when Dina Matos McGreevey was on "Oprah," pimping her memoir – another phony memoir? — and saying "No one ever said to me that he was gay. It's a cliché that the wife is always the last to know, and it's true." She was making cute faces like this:



Are you reading that face differently now?

Little Miss Attila snarks:

How much time did I spend, in my twenties, trying to get it out of my boyfriend why it wasn't gay for us both to hop into bed with another woman, but it would be if we got into bed with another guy?

(Via Instapundit.)

ADDED: The novelist Richard Russo spun out his ideas for a fictionalized version of the Spitzer story. I'm sure this new rumor about Dina should fire up the novelist's brain. Maybe the wife's interest is not all about her husband and children. She might be enjoying sexual opportunities of her own. I don't know if the rumor is true, but that's an attractive young man her husband allegedly brought home to her and approved of her consorting with. If her husband was, in fact, gay, he was not much of a sexual partner for her. I'd like to see this scenario spun out by a novelist who is capable of seeing the woman as something other than outraged and wronged.

UPDATE: Dina Matos McGreevey says she didn't do it. But Governor Jim — enmeshed in divorce proceedings — says she did.

"Transgressive caregiving" and a view of a frozen lake.

At the race-and-feminism conference this morning, I'm sitting next to a huge window, with this view of Lake Mendota:



Ah! The warmth of home!

I'm listing to Utah lawprof Laura Kessler read from a paper about "Transgressive Caregiving." Transgressive caregiving? It sounds alarming. From her paper:

Can unpaid family caregiving be a form of political resistance or expression? I argue that it can, especially when done by people ordinarily denied the privilege of family privacy by the state. Unlike feminists from other disciplines, feminist and queer theorists within law have largely overlooked this aspect of caregiving, regarding unpaid family labor as a source of gender-based oppression or as an undervalued public good. Consequently, prominent feminist and queer theorists within law have set their sights on employment or sexual freedom as more promising sources of emancipation for women.

This book examines a less well-explored conception of family caregiving within law, revealing the way that family caregiving can be a liberating practice for caregivers. Specifically, sex, reproduction, parenting, and housework can constitute affirmative political practices of resistance to a host of discriminatory institutions and ideologies, including the family, workplace, and state, as well as patriarchy, racism, and homophobia. I label such political work “transgressive caregiving” and locate it most centrally—although not exclusively—in the care work of ethnic and racial minorities, gays and lesbians, and heterosexual men, whose family caregiving practices are the focus of the book.

Sex, reproduction, parenting, and housework can constitute affirmative political practices of resistance to a host of discriminatory institutions and ideologies.... Discuss!

ADDED: You can download Laura Kessler's article here.

"American Idol" — the boys were pretty good last night, all retro-80s.

Each did a little intro interview on what was supposedly their "most embarrassing moment." But David Hernandez had a story about a booger, and not anything about his time as a stripper in a gay bar or the way that's now splashed all over the internet. And Danny Noriega told us about a time he fell down stairs, and not about that YouTube video everyone's clicking on — the one where he hopes Santa Claus will rape your mother. (NSFW, but it does have some sly humor to it. Why do people think this one man who breaks into your house at night is okay? Santa does have a bit of a rapist M.O.)

But about the singing. I loved David Cook making that dorky Lionel Ritchie song "Hello" into something rockish. And Jason Castro sang "Hallelujah," such a great song, winningly enough. Michael Johns sounded too much like he was just horsing around with the 80s the way he did "Don't You Forget About Me." Ditto Luke Menard with "Wake Me Up Before You Go Go." Another thing about Johns was that he bleated and seemed cheesy. Menard, on the other hand, made me reminisce about how passionate and exciting George Michael was in the original Wham version, which is my favorite 80s single. (Chez Althouse, it got played a lot on a Fisher-Price record player back then.) Danny Noriega sang some damned thing that I didn't like and couldn't even recognize as a song. David Achuleta sang Another Day in Paradise" earnestly and prettily and used his after-song interview to deliver a mini-sermon about the homeless, for whom he cares. David Hernandez — I've already forgotten what he did. Has the bad press wrecked my opinion of him? Chikezie? What was that thing he sang?

ADDED: Jacob at Television Without Pity gets very heavy-handed about Danny Noriega:

[W]hat I can't fucking abide is this idea that some dumb kid is going to see Danny on the screen... and realize that this is a way to get approval, attention, and acceptance. Taking the Danny route means putting all the scary things about gay people and stuffing them into a tiny little asterisk, while magnifying all the childish, feminine, negligible things -- all the things that put you in the category of not mattering -- and expanding them so that they cover your whole personality, with just a tiny little asterisk of things that we can, as a culture, forgive. As long as we don't have to see them, think about them, or otherwise confront them in a way which isn't hilariously powerless....

Maybe Danny's the Marilyn Monroe of the show and knows that fulfilling an archetype this insanely well is actually a power play. I can see that, actually. I just don't like what it does to everybody else -- also, now that I think of it, a problem with people like Marilyn, who excel at putting on the face like that.