"The Boy Scouts of America may soon give sponsors of troops the authority to decide whether to accept gays as scouts and leaders..."

"... a potentially dramatic retreat from an exclusionary nationwide policy that has provoked relentless protests."

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Was Giglio chosen for the inauguration benediction in order to provide cover for Chuck Hagel?

"An evangelical pastor from Atlanta [Rev. Louie Giglio] announced Thursday that he would not give the benediction at President Obama’s swearing-in ceremony after a sermon he gave on homosexuality in the mid-1990s resurfaced earlier this week."

Suspicion: Giglio was chosen with full knowledge of that sermon and the intention that it would "resurface" and that he would then conspicuously withdraw. This would promote Obama's pro-gay stance and take the heat off Chuck Hagel, who's got an anti-gay remark in his record which the Obama people would like to submerge. It was all planned: the desire for Hagel to become Secretary of Defense, the known problem of his anti-gay remark, the desire to perform a conspicuous expiation, the identification of Giglio as a plausible benediction-giver with an anti-gay remark in his history, choosing Giglio, revealing the old Giglio sermon, Giglio bowing out in a tribute to Obama's rejection of homophobia, Hagel saved by the scapegoat.

I'm not saying I believe this is what happened, and I certainly have no inside knowledge. I'm just noticing the correlations and putting together a hypothesis. Please discuss.

You can pull me back from this suspicion if you make a great case for why else Giglio would have been chosen for this honor. He's a white male, by the way.

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"An evangelical pastor from Atlanta announced Thursday that he would not give the benediction at President Obama’s swearing-in ceremony..."

"... after a sermon he gave on homosexuality in the mid-1990s resurfaced earlier this week."

In that sermon, the Rev. Louie Giglio called for Christians to “firmly respond to the aggressive agenda” of some in the gay community and warns that widespread gay marriage ”would run the risk of absolutely undermining the whole order of our society.”

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Obama's inauguration poet "tackles 'the intersection of his cultural identities as a Cuban-American gay man.'"

The poet is Richard Blanco, the verb "tackles" comes from Politico, and the quote within the quote is in the Presidential Inauguration Committee press release.

I'm not a poet, but I pay attention to images, and I find the picture of tackling an intersection absurd in a particularly amusing way. Intersection of his cultural identities is also absurd but only in that dry, dreary academic way that makes you want to say to all your children and grandchildren: Do not major in the humanities!

What amuses me about tackling an intersection is that it seems to reveal the author's anxiety about the masculinity of the gay poet. Why make us picture a football move? Admittedly, the verb tackle originally meant to equip (a ship) with the necessary furnishing and then to harness (a horse), and only later "To grip, lay hold of, take in hand, deal with; to fasten upon, attack, encounter (a person or animal) physically." So says the OED. But it's all pretty damned macho.

There's no Blanco poetry at the link, but there is a description of an essay "Afternoons as Endora" from a collection "My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them."

“According to [my grandmother], I was a no-good sissy — un mariconcito — the queer shame of the family,” Blanco wrote. “And she let me know it all the time: Why don’t we just sign you up for ballet lessons? Everyone thinks you’re a girl on the phone — can’t you talk like a man? I’d rather have a granddaughter who’s a whore than a grandson who is a faggot like you.”

Go here for a little more of the writing, including Blanco's description of dressing up like Endora and watching "Bewitched" on TV:

Together we'd turn Mrs. Kravitz into a chihuahua, Derwood into a donkey, or Uncle Arthur into a chair. We were unstoppable....

I was a helpless and scared child, powerless against my grandmother, while Endora was a mighty witch with limitless powers. Unlike Samantha, her foolish daughter, she was a witch who wasn't afraid of being a witch, and used her magic to get her way or enact revenge every time she had a chance.

A fantasy of power. Suitable for a presidential inauguration.

AND: More on Blanco:

"Since the beginning of the campaign, I totally related to [Obama's] life story and the way he speaks of his family, and of course his multicultural background,” Mr. Blanco said... “There has always been a spiritual connection in that sense. I feel in some ways that when I’m writing about my family, I’m writing about him."...

Cynics might say that in picking a Latino gay poet, Mr. Obama is covering his political bases....

Aw, come on. People observing the normal things that happen in politics don't deserve to be called "cynics." OED defines "cynic" as:

A person disposed to rail or find fault; now usually: One who shows a disposition to disbelieve in the sincerity or goodness of human motives and actions, and is wont to express this by sneers and sarcasms; a sneering fault-finder.

Oh, what the hell. I'll accept the label. With politicians, we should be cynics. By the way, "cynic" comes from the Greek for dog-like (which you can sort of see in the word currish, which echoes in churlish).

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Al Pacino avoided meeting Phil Spector, whom he's portraying in an HBO movie.

"It would have been meeting a different person. Now he’s been convicted and he’s in prison. I play him before his first trial."

After doing the film role, said Pacino, he didn’t feel he knew Spector much better – but that it didn’t matter, because his job was to explore the film character, not the real-life person.

“The play’s the thing,” said Pacino. “I was looking for the truth of the drama.”

It's not an impersonation, but something much deeper.  Or that's the PR for the HBO movie. Maybe it's a preemptive defense against the criticism that he doesn't seem like Spector at all.

ADDED: In other HBO celebrity impersonation news:

HBO’s new Liberace biopic was “too gay” for every studio in Hollywood, director Steven Soderbergh says.

What big name actor will be probing the depths of the truth of the drama of Liberace? Matt Damon? No. Damon's playing Liberace's younger lover. Liberace will be... Michael Douglas!

Aw, give me a break. The studios turned down this movie because it was (whine) too gay? It's obviously insufficiently commercial.

Promos of the film screened for TV critic in Los Angeles yesterday contain numerous scenes of the two male stars shirtless and about to kiss.

No one wants to see that. It's not anti-gay to say I don't want to see that. Who wants to see Michael Douglas shirtless and about to... do anything?

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"In the case of the male vegetarian, what may look like vegetarian or sexual orientation discrimination is really sex discrimination in the form of gender stereotyping..."

Says the abstract for a law review article titled "Of Meat and Manhood," which has led to a defamation and invasion of privacy lawsuit against the author:

New Jersey banker Robert Catalanello on December 28 sued Zachary Kramer, an associate dean at Arizona State University Sandra Day O'Connor School of Law....

The article cites former employee Ryan Pacifico's 2009 complaint against Catalanello, including a charge that he made numerous derogatory comments equating Pacifico's vegetarianism with homosexuality. "You don't even eat steak dude. At what point in time did you realize you were gay?" he said, according to Pacifico's complaint....

"Catalanello harassed Pacifico not because Pacifico is vegetarian, but because Pacifico was not sufficiently masculine," reads one passage that Catalanello cited. "The key here is that vegetarianism acts as a proxy for effeminacy."

Defamation? Presumably, Catalanello disputes Pacifico's allegations and doesn't like the way Kramer, in at least one part of his article, presents the allegations without saying something like "according to Pacifico's compliant."

Here's the "Meat and Manhood" article. More from the abstract:

[Current doctrine says] that an employee cannot raise an actionable theory of sex discrimination to “bootstrap” protection for an unprotected trait.... By focusing on the male vegetarian case study – which involves allegations of vegetarian, sexual orientation, and gender-stereotyping discrimination – the Article argues that sex discrimination often manifests as other forms of bias.

That is, the law doesn't give special protection to you because you're a vegetarian, but it does let you sue for sex discrimination. So the litigant tries to present anti-vegetarian animus as a matter of gender. That's an interesting problem of employment discrimination law, but think about why the courts don't approve of this "bootstrapping."

(Via Taxprof.)

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