We know D.C. Get our free newsletter to stay in the know.
* The New York Times profiles Eve Tushnet, a “celibate, gay, conservative, Catholic writer” opposed to same-sex marriage:
Marriage should be reserved for heterosexuals, whose “relationships can be either uniquely dangerous or uniquely fruitful,” she explained in an e-mail message. “Thus it makes sense to have an institution dedicated to structuring and channeling them.”
But same-sex marriage, she wrote in The New York Post in 2007, “can bring one of three outcomes: A two-tiered marriage culture, where heterosexual couples are asked to do the hard things (sex only within marriage, marriage for life in most circumstances) and homosexual couples work out their own marriage norms; reshape marriage into an optional, individualized institution, ignoring the creative and destructive potentials of ‘straight’ sex; or encourage all couples to restrict sex to marriage and marry for life, and hope that gay couples accept norms designed to meet heterosexual needs.”
* The National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association calls Tushnet “a prime example of the kind of sources mainstream journalists should be talking to when they want to ‘balance’ a story about same-sex marriage. Rather than dialing up a homophobic talking head from some religious-right-wing group to peddle junk scientific claims or just wildly ignorant statements lacking in any bases of fact, there are sources out there to quote who won’t just spew more anti-gay hate speech.”
Really? Because she sounds like standard-issue wingnut to me, floating a wacky essentialist conception about gays and straights and then concluding that only straight marriage “makes sense.” What differentiates Tushnet’s views from “junk scientific claims or just wildly ignorant statements lacking in any bases of fact”? Is it that she’s also gay?
* Heather Corrina addresses the myth that all rape survivors compulsively pursue sex.
* Carnal Nation on the sexual politics of vanity plates: An ecologist’s attempt to pay tribute to the “pine genus” on his license plate has been knocked down by Michigan officials who say the word “PINUS” “might carry a connotation offensive to good taste and decency as judged by the Department of State.” In other words, it looks too much like the word “PENIS.”
* Tiger Beatdown on sexism, Lynn Hirschberg and MIA:
M.I.A. is a fake, the article more or less says; no matter what she says or writes or records about global capitalism being a bad thing, no matter how fiercely she would seem to defend marginalized people, she’s just a shallow, narcissistic, bossy, stupid woman who only wants your attention, only wants to be famous, only wants to be a star. And did you hear that she was having contractions when she sang “Paper Planes” at the Grammys? Shocking! Provocative! Fame-whorey! Regular-whorey! Unfeminine! Selfish! Bad mother!