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Willful Ignorance or Shameless Provocation?

2005-08-22T20:38:00.000-04:00

It's hard to evaluate these posts by Eugene Volokh.

A couple thoughts occur.

One, the claims that he responds to are best understood as antidotes to the sort of anti-gay propaganda that unfortunately still infects too much of the public discourse. He focuses on a definition of "convert" that may come from a dictionary but is divorced from the reality of how this issue is talked about in our country today.

Two, to the extent that Volokh's claims are accurate, they are vacuous. Gay men try to convert straight men. Straight men try to convert lesbians. Straight women try to convert gay men. Lesbians try to convert straight women. So what? These sorts of claims are not the ones that Gay Family Support or the Winnipeg Committee for Safety are responding to, nor are they particularly relevant to the rhetoric I mentioned above.

What I can't figure out is if Volokh is willfully ignorant or just being provocative.

The Poverty of the Modern Conservative Mind

2005-06-23T21:21:00.000-04:00

While flipping through channels waiting for the NBA Finals' Game 7 to start (the first basketball game I expect to watch from beginning to end) I stumbled across the Discovery Channe l's "Greatest American" charade in time to hear Dinesh D'Souza, idiot pamphleteer of the modern conservative movement, describe the young men and women J.F.K. called to serve in the Peace Corps as "government bureaucrats."

What a moron.

Opening Day

2005-06-10T22:19:00.000-04:00