Look beyond the kissing dudes to the folks protesting the ruling of California's Supreme Court regarding same-sex marriage. The message reminds me of another guy nobody takes seriously.Outdoor advertising company Maximedia has notified the distributors of 'Sex in the City' Forum Films and its publicist, Golan Advertising - that the movie based on the popular TV series of the same name will not be allowed to advertise in Jerusalem and Petah Tikva, because the word "sex" appears on the signs.I don't agree on religious grounds, partially because it is not "Sex in the City" as the Haaretz reports states, despite letters larger than Sarah Jessica Parker. I just can't stand that show.
I cannot wake up tomorrow and not be a Black woman. I am genetically and biologically a Black woman and very pleased to be so as my Creator intended. Daily, thousands of homosexuals make a life decision to leave the gay lifestyle evidenced by the growing population of PFOX (Parents and Friends of Ex Gays) and Exodus International just to name a few. Frequently, the individuals report that the impetus to their change of heart and lifestyle was a transformative experience with God; a realization that their choice of same-sex practices wreaked havoc in their psychological and physical lives.Dixon has sought the help of the conservative ACLU, the Thomas More Law Center.
Men who ejaculated more than five times a week were a third less likely to develop prostate cancer later in life. ... Dr Giles said fewer ejaculations may mean the carcinogens build up.To be sure, the next study on this topic will likely report auto-stimulation increases the risk of heart disease. Circumcision, for example, is a practice that, though conversely biblical, has been found to reduce the transmission of AIDS in Africa and to have little medical benefit; it depends on who performs the study.
"It's a prostatic stagnation hypothesis. The more you flush the ducts out, the less there is to hang around and damage the cells that line them."
A similar connection has been found between breast cancer and breastfeeding, where lactating appeared to "flush out" carcinogens, reduce a woman's risk of the disease, New Scientist reports.
Another theory put forward by the researchers is that ejaculation may induce prostate glands to mature fully, making them less susceptible to carcinogens.
A fast-rising Democratic governor, an out of control sex drive and an Israeli enabler — it feels like deja vu all over again on the Hudson.Unlike McGreevey, who was accused of a homosexual affair with his Israeli-born former homeland security chief, Spitzer stands accused of utilizing the services of Mark Brener, an Israeli who allegedly pimped high-class hookers.
Throughout our history, men in high places have engaged in low sexual activities. From Thomas Jefferson to Franklin Roosevelt to John Kennedy to Lyndon Johnson to Bill Clinton, great political figures have behaved like adolescent boys in private, while at the same time brilliantly and effectively leading our nation in public.Case in point, check out Slate's "Map of Shame" guide to trysts within the Beltway.
The laws criminalizing adult consensual prostitution — especially with $5,000-an-hour call girls — are as anachronistic as the old laws that used to criminalize adultery, fornication, homosexuality and even masturbation. These may be sins, but there are no real victims, except for family members.
Our nation, unique among Western democracies, is obsessed with the private lives of public figures. Whether it be Larry Craig soliciting favors in an airport bathroom or Rush Limbaugh getting illegal pharmaceuticals in a parking lot, this obsessive focus on the private imperfections of public figures threatens to drive many good men — and soon, good women — out of public life for fear that they will be brought down by their private peccadilloes.
He stands close to ruin’s precipice, this tireless crusader and once-charmed politician reduced to a notation on a federal affidavit: Client 9.The assumed end of Eliot Spitzer the public figure has been all over the Web today. I found this story from the NY Times and this piece -- "after 9 on the night before Valentine’s Day when she finally arrived, a young brunette named Kristen. She was 5-foot-5, 105 pounds. Pretty and petite." -- particularly interesting.
The ascent and descent of Eliot Spitzer’s career have been dizzying. He was the brainy kid who graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law School and became an avenging state attorney general, hunting down Wall Street malefactors with a moralistic fervor that sounded pitch-perfect. Everywhere he found “betrayals of the public trust” that were “shocking” and “criminal.”
Then he ran for governor in 2006 and seized a vast electoral mandate. Reformers chortled at the thought of this young bull with a national reputation stomping about the calcified halls of Albany.
Mr. Spitzer cast himself, self-consciously, as the alpha male, with a belief in the clarifying power of confrontation. Long predawn runs, fierce basketball games: He did nothing at half-speed. “Listen, I’m a steamroller,” he told a State Assembly leader in his first days as governor, adding an unprintable adjective into the mix for emphasis.
Soon enough, his enemies and even admirers and friends came to affix another adjective to his name: reckless. So often the new governor seemed to accumulate enemies for sport, to threaten rivals with destruction when an artful compromise and a disingenuous slap on the back might do just as well.
“I am not naturally suited to this job,” he told a reporter recently, and perhaps he knew more than he was letting on.
The tawdry nature of his current troubles — to be caught on tape arranging a hotel-room liaison with a high-priced call girl, according to law enforcement officials — shocked even his harshest critics, though not all were surprised that he would risk so much.
“Here’s a guy who won an overwhelming electoral landslide and has inflicted fatal wounds on himself publicly and privately,” said Douglas A. Muzzio, a political scientist at Baruch College and a student of the state’s politics. “I’m not a psychologist, but this is just utterly, completely reckless.”
A southwest Florida church issued a challenge for its married members: Hanky panky every day.The accompanying video report, embedded above, is a joke. So trite. The reporter so obviously clueless. My favorite line: "Jarrett Haas says even if a sexy girl tempts him, he won't break the challenge."
Relevant Church head pastor Paul Wirth issued the 30-day sex challenge to take on high divorce rates.
"And that's no different for people who attend church," Wirth said Sunday. "Sometimes life gets in the way. Our jobs get in the way."
The challenge doesn't extend to unwed congregants, however.
The New York Times has been on the gay-Muslim beat of late, with this piece from Iraq in December and this dispatch from Berlin last week.European Muslims, so often portrayed one-dimensionally as rioters, honor killers or terrorists, live diverse lives, most of them trying to get by and to have a good time. That is more difficult if one is both Muslim and gay.That photo is of Souad, who looks a lot like Andy Dick.
“When you’re here, it’s as if you’re putting on a mask, leaving the everyday outside and just having fun,” said a 22-year-old Turkish man who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear that he would be ostracized or worse if his family found out about his sexual orientation.
Safety and secrecy come up regularly when talking to guests, who laugh and dance, but also frequently look over their shoulders. To be a gay man or lesbian with an immigrant background invites trouble here in two very different ways.
“Depending on which part of Berlin I go to, in one I get punched in the mouth because I’m a foreigner and in the other because I’m a queen,” said Fatma Souad, the event’s organizer and master of ceremonies.
"The Sextival will showcase the wildest things your imagination can come up with," the excited Kirshenboim promises. "You know, some people have a fetish for women with really-really big noses, and this will also be represented in the event."
In January, a United Nations report described the increased persecution, torture and extrajudicial killing of Iraqi lesbians and gay men. In 2005, Iraq’s most revered Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, issued a fatwa, or religious decree, calling for gay men and lesbians to be killed in the “worst, most severe way.”
He lifted it a year later, but neither that nor the recent ebb in violence has made Mohammed or his friends feel safe. They yearn to leave Iraq, but do not have the money or visas. They agreed to be interviewed on the condition that their last names not be used.
They described an underground existence, eked out behind drawn curtains in a dingy safe house in southwestern Baghdad. Five people share the apartment — four gay men and one woman, who says she is bisexual. They have moved six times in the last three years, just ahead, they say, of neighborhood raids by Shiite and Sunni death squads. Even seemingly benign neighborhood gossip can scare them enough to move.
“We seem suspicious because we look like a cell of terrorists,” said Mohammed, nervously fingering the lapel of his shirt. “But we can’t tell people what we really are. A cell, yes, but of gays.”
Hooters is just the sort of establishment that many of Netanya's religious expatriate Americans were happy to leave behind. But the giant restaurant chain followed them home last week when it opened its first Israeli branch in Ramat Poleg.Hooters also is planning on opening a shop in the pious Muslim emirate of Dubai.
Although they say they'd never even seen the new restaurant, prominent members of Netanya's large contingent of religious Anglos were outraged to learn of the opening. But other native English-speakers seem eager to enjoy this piece of Americana, together with dozens of Israeli youngsters who filled the restaurant to capacity.
"Of all the beautiful things in the States, this is what they bring," Rachel Morrowitz, who grew up in New York, complained. "This restaurant comes from the bottom of the American cultural barrel, and it should stay there."
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Deputy Mayor Mendi Weiss (National Religious Party) referred to Hooters as a "cheap and crude establishment" and "a foreign element that should never have been imported from the U.S." Weiss added that "this connects to what Hanukkah is about: a culture war in which the Jews had to struggle to retain their own identity."
Disappointed? Surprised? How about enraged and pondering violence against your birth father?DECATUR, Ga. -- The 80-year-old leader of a suburban Atlanta megachurch is at the center of a sex scandal of biblical dimensions: He slept with his brother's wife and fathered a child by her.
Members of Archbishop Earl Paulk's family stood at the pulpit of the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit at Chapel Hill Harvester Church a few Sundays ago and revealed the secret exposed by a recent court-ordered paternity test.
In truth, this is not the first — or even the second — sex scandal to engulf Paulk and the independent, charismatic church. But this time, he could be in trouble with the law for lying under oath about the affair.
The living proof of that lie is 34-year-old D.E. Paulk, who for years was known publicly as Earl Paulk's nephew.
"I am so very sorry for the collateral damage it's caused our family and the families hurt by the removing of the veil that hid our humanity and our sinfulness," said D.E. Paulk, who received the mantle of head pastor a year and a half ago.
D.E. Paulk said he did not learn the secret of his parentage until the paternity test. "I was disappointed, and I was surprised," he said.
A 31-year-old returned missionary aiming at some holy combination of seduction and surprise. Mormons stripped down to show us, with their unapologetic camera coyness, that they're not "these awkward, naive religion peddlers. Kind of dorky. A little backwards, or cult members."
Hardy has sold more than 1,000 calendars since September. Come Christmas, he'll have them in 500 stores throughout the country. Meanwhile, some church members have called for his excommunication.
The calendar has been disparaged on LDS Web sites, where anonymous writers have suggested Hardy is no longer worthy of his church. One commenter asked, "Did you each get 30 pieces of silver for your betrayal?" - a reference to Judas' payment for betraying Jesus. And not every writer has been so delicate in his phrasing.
The Mormon faith embraces modesty and sees sexuality as something best expressed in the marriage bed. So for many Mormons, photographing an icon of chaste spirituality doing his best to affect sexiness is utterly horrifying.
(skip)Hardy says the Mormons he knows - with the exception of an aunt in Arizona - think the calendar will help dispel the myth of the milquetoast missionary. Moreover, they think it's hilarious. They see a calendar beef-caked to a degree that borders on parody. This view has also been expressed in Internet debates over the calendar, though seldom without swift return fire from the dissenting camp.
"This is not just a calendar ; it's a movement," Hardy says. "We want them to laugh at us. We don't care. We are comfortable enough in our faith."
Say you are a God-fearing Christian, not puritanical but also not one to take blasphemy lightly. How would you feel about a gay festival promotion that depicts leather-clad men as Jesus and the Apostles partaking of the Last Supper?On September 30, a Sunday – the Lord’s Day in the Christian church – San Francisco will host the Folsom Street Fair, perhaps the most hedonistic event held in public in America. The fair is the San Francisco homosexual community’s annual celebration of promiscuity, sadomasochism and debauchery. The ad for this year’s fair mocks Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, with a half-naked beefcake Christ and disciples bedecked in all manner of leather and chains. The bread and wine of The Last Supper are replaced with sex toys.
"Senator Larry Craig was arrested and driven out of the Senate for allegedly soliciting public 'gay' sex, yet during this event the city of San Francisco suspends the law and allows 'gay' men and women to parade the streets fully nude, many having sex – even group orgies – in broad daylight, while taxpayer-funded police officers look on and do absolutely nothing," (said Concerned Women for America policy director Matt Barber).Barber encouraged mainstream media to cover the event with cameras in hand.
"There's an unbelievable news story here," he said. "The Folsom Street Fair is reminiscent of biblical Sodom and Gomorrah, and the media should document exactly what the city of San Francisco is allowing to occur – in public – in the name of 'tolerance.'"
Of course, Bill Donahue of the Catholic League had something to say.
Since its beginnings in the 1970s, the ex-gay movement has engaged gay advocates in a battle of testimonies. Transformed ex-gay leaders are the best argument for their movement. Likewise, those who've left the ex-gay movement in despair and disgust are the best counterargument. The debate continued this June, when Exodus International held its 32nd annual conference in Irvine, California, featuring dozens of speakers and seminar leaders who have quit homosexuality. Down the road outside the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, a news conference featured three former Exodus leaders saying "ex-gay" is a delusion.(skip)
An older, wiser ex-gay movement is certainly clearer about what it has to offer. Early hopes for instant healing have given way to belief that transformation occurs through a lifetime of discipleship.
Tanya Erzen, a professor at Ohio State University, spent 18 months studying New Hope Ministry, a live-in program led by the Worthens in San Rafael, California. Though unsympathetic to ex-gay goals, Erzen came to empathize with the people she met. In Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement, she describes their view of change.
"Ex-gays undergo a conversion process that has no endpoint, and they acknowledge that change encompasses desires, behavior, and identities that do not always align neatly or remain fixed," she writes. "Ex-gay men and women are born-again religiously, and as part of that process, they consider themselves reconstituted sexually. … In the words of Curtis [one of the program's participants], 'Heterosexuality isn't the goal; giving our hearts and being obedient to God is the goal.' … Desires and attractions might linger for years, but they would emerge with new religious identities and the promise that faith and their relationships with one another and God would eventually transform them."
Erzen's point, I believe, is a valid one. It's the reason scientists don't believe in "ex-gay" therapy. If homosexuality is a genetic predisposition -- and the Rev. Al Mohler is willing to admit that possibility -- then how could Christian counseling affect it? Instead, working with the premise that God doesn't approve of homosexuality (despite the perceived contradiction that he would have given people a desire he prohibits), the mission of these therapists should be to train their patients hearts more fervently on what they believe to be God's desire for man.
I'm sure there are plenty of people who disagree with this.
As the late Yale historian John Boswell showed, where there is homophobia, anti-Semitism very often lurks around the corner.Is Craig a victim of homophobia? And, if so, should that be enough to swing the pendulum back in the direction of getting to keep his job?
"The same laws which oppressed Jews oppressed gay people; the same groups bent on eliminating Jews tried to wipe out homosexuality," Boswell wrote.
While his study was based on medieval Europe, his words ring true in modern America. Jews may disagree about the status of homosexuals within our own religious communities, but when there is an upsurge of homophobia in society at large, all Jews should take note.
Craig, even though he insists he is not gay, appears to be a victim of homophobia.
Please remember that this is satire (not my indirect way of saying I wish I was still single, or that single people should be sleeping around). Here is the unadulterated Onion version.ARLINGTON, VA—An alarming new study published in Jewish Action reveals that casual sex, the practice of engaging in frequent, spontaneous sexual encounters with new and exciting partners, may only provide unimaginable pleasure and heart-pounding exhilaration for, at most, 25 to 30 years.
"People who choose to participate in random, no-strings-attached lovemaking sessions with sexually adventurous strangers should be advised that this type of behavior is only incredibly liberating for the first quarter-century or so," said Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, executive vice-president of the Orthodox Union, who coauthored the study on the long-term side effects of living out one’s wildest fantasies on a semi-weekly basis. "Though sometimes it can be longer."
The study observed 100 sexually active volunteers who were not tied down by dull, passionless relationships and were therefore able to have sex with whomever they wanted, whenever they wanted. A control group of individuals who were married or had otherwise allowed their erogenous zones to fall into complete and utter numbness was also monitored for comparison.
The Vietnam War-era slogan "Make love, not war" has been taken to its logical extreme by an Israeli pornographic website, which is engaged in a sort of cultural exchange of bodily fluids with the Arab world.Yeah, right. Right? Forget the fact that plenty of people find pornography to be a demeaning, degrading thing. Is the LA Times -- a lightning rod for anti-Israel accusations -- really saying that if a Hamas suicide bomber watches a porno featuring Jews and Arabs together (think "Assraelis in the Occupied Territories") that he's suddenly going to think twice about exploding in a crowded market?
According to a recent report in Daily Variety, when executives at Ratuv installed software that could track where their users were logging in, they found that the site was getting thousands of hits a week from such countries as Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq, even though some of these governments block the ".il" domain address on Israeli websites. So Ratuv responded by translating the entire site into Arabic, and traffic quickly skyrocketed.
What makes this more than a tale of clever entrepreneurs making a buck off Middle Eastern sexual repression is that Ratuv isn't an ordinary porn site. It's a clearinghouse of political parody porn, making fun of Israeli affairs such as sex scandals and often featuring Mossad agents or army soldiers getting out of uniform, thus providing a view of the Israeli military seldom seen in the Arab world. The next step, says Ratuv's manager, is to make movies with Israelis and Arabs performing together, in order to foster more intimate relations between the two peoples.
