Blue State Blues

(Photo Credit: Mark Gail, Washington Post; news conference held after Maryland Court of Appeals announced its decision in same-sex marriage case)

Message from MD to the Moms and Other Queers: Hey, there are seats in the back of the bus. What's the problem?

Message from the Moms and Other Queers to MD: What part of "equal justice under law" do you not understand?

Ironically, the moms are hard at work educating the young citizens of Maryland today, so my typist doesn't have time for a long post. (Clearly, there's a whole lot of educating to be done here in Maryland, wouldn't you agree?) Still, we had to register our profound disappointment with the long-awaited ruling by the Maryland Court of Appeals in Conaway v. Deane and Polyak, a case that challenged a 1973 law against same-sex marriage on the grounds that it violated the state constitution's ban on gender discrimination. In a 4-3 decision (actually, 4 1/2 to 2/12 because one judge concurred in part and dissented in part), the court ruled that

limiting marriage to a man and a woman does not discriminate against gay couples or deny them constitutional rights. Although the judges acknowledged that gay men and lesbians have been targets of discrimination, they said the prohibition on same-sex marriage promotes the state's interest in heterosexual marriage as a means of having and protecting children.

That's from Wa Po's report on the decision. For good, extensive coverage, including a link to the decision itself, go here.

Message to Children in Same-Sex Parent Families: Legally, you don't exist, and that's okay because the state has an interest in promoting other kinds of families that are better than yours. Got that? Britney Spears is a better mom than the two hard-working women who feed you and clothe you and read you to sleep every night. You are a second-class kid in a second-class family, and the state of Maryland is just fine with that.

Message to my Legions of Loyal Fans: Contact our good friends at Equality Maryland, the state's major LGBT civil rights organization. Thank them for their hard work on behalf of the community. Then write them a big fat check to keep the work going. Marriage may not be all we need or want, but it's a civil rights battle we can't afford to lose.

Your favorite dog blogger is covering her head with her paws this morning. I am ashamed of my home state and sad for all my queer pals. There are no second-class citizens in Roxie's World, beloveds. The fight will go on -- and I'm in it for Aaron and Maya and all the first-class kids out there whose parents happen to be queer.

Pot Shots

(Photo Credit: Showtime; Mary-Louise Parker and Hunter Parrish on Weeds)

The war drags on and the details of Hillary Clinton’s new health care plan may still be fuzzy, but there is joy on the couch in Roxie’s World today for one simple reason:

The latest episode of Weeds does not suck.

This is great news for the moms, who were just about to give up on the Showtime series starring the adorable Mary-Louise Parker. Weeds has been a house favorite since its debut two seasons ago. In its first season, it garnered rave reviews from Roxie’s World’s Special Task Force on Representations of Marijuana in the Media (“Pot Shots” for short) for its nuanced yet hilarious treatment of a suburban widow, Nancy Botwin, who begins selling dope in the planned community of Agrestic when she realizes that her beloved late husband has left her and her two sons with a fabulous new kitchen and nothing to live on. Parker was brilliant and sexy as the resourceful, grieving mom helping the fine (mostly middle-aged male) citizens of Agrestic cope with the quiet desperations of their routinized, sanitized, hollow lives. The cast (including Kevin Nealon as the sweet but corrupt accountant and city councilman and Elizabeth Perkins as the Cruella de Vil-ish Celia) was superb and the writing pitch-perfect. Weeds was the smart satire Desperate Housewives dreamed of being in the best moments of its first season.

In its sophomore season, though, Weeds, as Mr. Bruce Springsteen might put it, took a wrong turn and it just kept goin’. The moms cringed when Nancy started dating Peter, who was revealed to be a DEA agent in the final episode of season one. Season two was wholly devoted to developing the Nancy-Peter relationship and the increasingly ridiculous web of plot twists and professional complications that ensued from it. That season ended with Peter’s apparent murder in a drug deal gone awry. The moms spent the entire hiatus wishing the next season would open with a Dallas-like shower scene in which Nancy would explain that Peter and his whole stupid subplot had been a bad dream. They longed for the show to get back to what it did best: devastatingly insightful suburban satire with three-dimensional characters who managed to be flawed, funny, and lovable. Forget the Armenian drug dealers, the shootouts, the crosses and double crosses. This isn’t Pulp Fiction, people. It’s a 30-minute slice-of-life comedy!

Unfortunately, the writers didn’t listen to my moms when they started doing scripts for the third season, which began airing in August. Over the first five episodes, things went from bad to nearly unwatchable as Nancy was forced into servitude for U-Turn, an overblown stereotype of the vicious black drug thug. Desperate to pay off a debt, the terms of which the aptly named U-Turn keeps changing, Nancy is subject to repeated humiliations and wholly gratuitous threats. None of it feels believable, not because the world of drugs isn’t a violent one but because the world of Agrestic, so compellingly drawn in the show’s first season, is shaped not by the violence of melodrama but by the soul-sapping violence of upper-middle class ennui. In places like Agrestic, guns don’t kill people. PTA debates over snack foods in vending machines kill people. Such a debate, in season one, was one of Nancy Botwin’s finest moments. The same cannot be said for “the brick dance” she is forced to perform in the course of running an errand for U-Turn in season three.

Finally, however, in the latest episode, “Grasshopper,” which aired last night, Weeds seems to be finding its way back to sanity. That return was signaled by the sudden (and wholly necessary) death of U-Turn, who died, as so many TV characters do, because the writers didn’t know what the heck else to do with him. Actually, U-Turn died because he had humiliated his hapless lieutenant, Marvin, one too many times. U-Turn, Nancy, and the hugely obese Marvin are out for a run in the hills when U-Turn, who has high blood pressure, collapses. Marvin, instantly realizing an opportunity, sends Nancy to get help and, in a moment reminiscent of Tony Soprano’s quick decision to help his nephew Christopher slough off this mortal coil, calmly holds his hand over U-Turn’s mouth until he dies. “This is for saying I was too stupid to be your second in command,” he says as he pushes his hand down tighter. “And this is for laughing at me for going to Dreamgirls.” Moments later, U-Turn deservedly breathes his last.

You know you are back in a sit-com when a man will kill to defend the dignity of having seen Dreamgirls. I know my good pal over at Queering the Apparatus would applaud that move and joins me and the moms in saying good riddance to U-Turn and all the dopey (not in a good way) plot twists he represented. The moms and I are well aware of the fact that the trunk load of heroin U-Turn left in Nancy’s garage could create a whole new series of equally ridiculous machinations, but his death also sets the stage for Nancy to have a rapprochement with Conrad and Heylia, her former partners who dumped her like a hot potato in the course of the battle with U-Turn. It’s true that Nancy has lost something of her innocence over the last season and a half, and it’s arguable that a drug dealer can’t afford to be as naïve as she was when she stumbled into the business. Still, one hopes the show has made something of a “U-turn” away from shoot-‘em-up melodrama and back toward the sly send-ups of suburban domesticity that served it so well in its early days. Weeds is too good a product to waste. We wish it a long, slow burn.

Peace out, righteous dudes.

Told Ya So

Not that we're in a bragging mood or anything, but:

On Tuesday in Roxie's World, we said, and I quote,

What matters is that the ground and the discourse have shifted. Troop reductions will happen. If the administration can fudge the data enough to make its claims of progress appear credible (to the credulous), then the reductions may be larger and sooner than Petraeus was willing to suggest in his testimony before Congress.

This morning, Wa Po reports that the administration is already opening the door to larger troop cuts, as it continues to fudge the gains made under the "surge":

One day after President Bush announced a limited drawdown of U.S. troops from Iraq by next summer, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said yesterday that it might be possible to reduce U.S. forces there further over the course of next year, down to approximately 100,000 troops by the end of 2008.

Gates's comments followed a White House report yesterday concluding that the Iraqi government has not made satisfactory progress on several political and security benchmarks. In a congressionally mandated assessment, the administration found only modest improvements since an interim report in July.

In the fairy-tale world of the Bush administration, saying a thing still makes it so, which perhaps explains why the president's "new" policy has been named "Return on Success." Apparently, "Declare Victory and Get Out" is still under copyright protection, so the Bush brain trust decided to make the "return" of American soldiers sound like the profit on some particularly shrewd investment. I wonder how the families whose sons and daughters "returned" home from Iraq in pine boxes feel about the latest effort to brand war policy.

Also on Tuesday, Roxie's World predicted that if conditions in Iraq don't improve enough for even the adept liars of Bush world to declare a success, the administration would simply "buy time until the disaster can be passed along to someone else." No less a genius than New York Times columnist Paul Krugman agrees with us on that one. Yesterday, Krugman declared that the administration already realizes "that the surge has failed, that the war is lost, and that Iraq is going the way of Yugoslavia." Noting, among other things, the administration's lackadaisical efforts to get the Maliki government to get closer to meeting some of benchmarks it was supposed to be aiming for, Krugman writes:

All in all, Mr. Bush’s actions have not been those of a leader seriously trying to win a war. They have, however, been what you’d expect from a man whose plan is to keep up appearances for the next 16 months, never mind the cost in lives and money, then shift the blame for failure onto his successor.

Finally, on the cultural front, glancing at the early reviews, we think we were probably also right about Jodie Foster's new movie, The Brave One. Last Friday, we expressed ambivalence "about the whole gun-toting vigilante aspect of the story" and suggested that Ms. Foster needed to get a little braver about the kind of parts she was taking. A. O. Scott in the Times calls The Brave One a "cowardly" film and "a pro-lynching movie that even liberals can love." Stephen Hunter in Wa Po is more favorably inclined toward the film, calling it "great Jodie Porn" and apparently impressed by director Neil Jordan's attention to "the kinesthetics of violence." Still, his review makes us think this film is going to make us more secure in our conviction that Foster needs to venture out of Hollywood to find scripts and roles more worthy of her talents and intelligence.

We'll offer up our own review of The Brave One as soon as I can persuade the moms to step away from the computers and get themselves to the multiplex. Eventually, they will. Poor Moose is still a sucker for Jodie Porn.

Careful out there, kids. It's a dangerous world.

Declare Victory

Message to MoveOn: STFU!
Message to Dems: You're WINNING, You Idiots!

You know it's going to be a weird day when Moose shouts out from the breakfast nook, "George Will is right, by god!" Trust me, that rarely happens, no matter what Goose puts in the coffee. It happened this morning, though, as Moose ran tired eyes over these words:

Congressional Democrats should accept Petraeus's report as a reason to declare a victory, one that might make this fact somewhat palatable: Substantial numbers of U.S. forces will be in Iraq when the next president is inaugurated. The Democrats' "victory" -- a chimera but a useful one -- is that Petraeus indicates there soon can be a small reduction of U.S. forces.

Will goes on to argue that Dems can only claim victory by making a mountain out of a molehill, given the modest size of the troop reductions Gen. David Petraeus is advocating, and by making a spurious claim for having created the mountain. Will is wrong (as of course he must be, unless the world is flat and the law of gravity has been repealed) about the spuriousness of the claim. Democrats, who gained control of the Congress on the strength of strong anti-war sentiment throughout the country, can justifiably take credit for having created the conditions under which the Bush administration and its generals had to put troop reductions on the table. It doesn't matter how small they are. It doesn't matter that sizable numbers of U.S. troops are likely to be in Iraq when the next president takes office and perhaps well into her second term, though it would obviously be vastly better to bring as many troops as possible home as soon as possible.

What matters is that the ground and the discourse have shifted. Troop reductions will happen. If the administration can fudge the data enough to make its claims of progress appear credible (to the credulous), then the reductions may be larger and sooner than Petraeus was willing to suggest in his testimony before Congress. Otherwise, the administration will buy time until the disaster can be passed along to someone else -- and the blood of every single soldier and citizen who dies in this conflict in the meantime will be on Republican hands. Democrats will be on record as having been in opposition to the so-called "surge" and as having advocated timetables for withdrawal. In concrete terms, the victory may be modest, even hollow, but it is a victory nonetheless. Troop reductions of any size would not be a foregone conclusion if Democrats did not hold the gavels in the House, the Senate, and on all the Congressional committees.

You wouldn't know that from listening to the chatter among Democrats and progressives. Roxie's World is sorry to be giving a great big PAWS DOWN to our good friends from MoveOn.org, but their full-page ad in the New York Times in advance of Petraeus's testimony has to be one of the dumber political gestures we've seen in awhile. It fully justified Wa Po's Chris Cillizza's provocative debate topic: MoveOn.org: Momentum or Menace? The ad was a gift to Republicans, who wasted no opportunity to bring it up during the hearings to try to smear Democrats as troop-haters. That trumped-up reminder of the Vietnam era flummoxed Dems yesterday, though the Senate Foreign Relations Committee seems to have been less deferential in its treatment of the general and Ambassador Ryan Crocker today. (Wa Po coverage of today's testimony is here.)

You know we're idealists here in Roxie's World, kids. You know the Division for World Peace and Free (Legal, Organically Grown, Government-Regulated) Dope is one of the largest units of our vast corporate/political empire. Our official theme song is "Imagine." Our company uniform is flax pants, Birkenstocks, and whatever peace tee-shirt we can lay our hands on. It pains us to find ourselves advocating patience, pragmatism, and realism in trying to end a war we've been protesting since before it began. We hate it, but we don't see any alternative. If the left splits over the war, the right will win. If we allow the perfect to be the enemy of the best-we-can-get-under-the-circumstances, then President Romney will shred what's left of the Constitution with another Supreme Court appointment -- and people will go right on dying in Iraq. And Afghanistan. And, soon enough, Iran.

Six years past the nightmares that found us on a crisp September morning, we must all reflect on what we can do to end the horrors of war, of any death in violent conflict. We may never agree on a single answer, but we must bear that shared, noble purpose in mind and move forward with compassion and respect for differences. Otherwise, we lose, regardless of the outcome of any particular struggle.

Peace out, beloveds.

(Photo Credit: Tyler Hicks, New York Times; 6th anniversary of 9/11 attacks, NYC)

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
--W. H. Auden, "September 1, 1939"

An Open Letter to Jodie Foster

(Photo Credit: Justin Stephens)

Dear Ms. Foster,

Congrats on the forthcoming flick, The Brave One. The moms and I have some ambivalence about the whole gun-toting vigilante aspect of the story, but you look great in the publicity photos, somehow managing to find that elusive mixture of fierceness and fabulousness that has served you so well throughout your career. (You also look stunning in the photos that accompany the Entertainment Weekly cover story/interview you just got.) Moose wants to talk to your trainer. She can't believe you've had two kids and are still so incredibly. . .fit. Goose, on the other hand, would like to talk to your agent. She's disappointed by some of your recent projects. Frankly, she has never gotten over Panic Room, which was laughably bad, despite the very fetching eyewear you sported. She totally gets the "Hollywood has no good parts for intelligent women in their forties" problem. She just hopes we don't have to suffer through twenty more years of seeing you play Smart Women in Ludicrous Situations before you start getting to play the Wise and Feisty Old Broad roles. We can't wait for you to become an American Vanessa Redgrave.

But that's not why I'm writing to you. We couldn't help but notice that you figured prominently in a recent Out magazine cover story by Michael Musto, "The Glass Closet: Why the Stars Won't Come Out and Play." The "glass closet," according to Musto, is "that complex but popular contraption that allows public figures to avoid the career repercussions of any personal disclosure while living their lives with a certain degree of integrity. Such a device enables the public to see right in while not allowing them to actually open the latch unless the celebrity eventually decides to do so herself." The flamingly gay Musto identifies you as one of the "foremost residents" of the glass closet and is untroubled by the coy way you have negotiated questions about your sexual identity that have arisen over the years. He describes you as,

one of the original out-but-not-really-out queens of “at least.” You know: She’s never come out publicly, but at least she’s never tried to claim she’s straight either. She’s talked incessantly about her kids, but at least she hasn’t named the father and tried to make it sound like he was any kind of love interest. She won her greatest acclaim for a movie protested by gay activists — The Silence of the Lambs — and reportedly refused to do a short film based on the lesbian classic Rubyfruit Jungle, but at least she isn’t afraid to play tough women, single moms, and parts originally written for men (even if that might be what she mostly gets offered).

Musto is right as far as he goes, though with the passage of time your association with the transphobic Silence of the Lambs becomes more rather than less difficult to comprehend, even if it was a great part and a riveting performance. (And it was. Moose still can't watch that scene of you in the house with Buffalo Bill in his night-vision goggles without wanting to leap into the screen to rescue you. She's a real sucker for that tough-yet-vulnerable thing you do. If she had a locker, it would probably be covered with pictures of you, but I digress.)

For years, the moms gave you a pass on the matter of coming out. After a deranged fan tried to assassinate a president to get your attention, they figured you were entitled to all the privacy you could manage as an incredibly public figure. They were also persuaded by a former teacher of theirs who argued that you were in some special category of sublimely talented Artists who somehow transcended politics. Yes, and this teacher was a big old dyke herself and a founder of women's studies. She had no problem knocking Shakespeare off the top of Mount Olympus, but the hem of your garment was not to be soiled by the vulgar politics of gender and identity. Shakespeare was a dead white guy, but you had serious work to do. If you want my opinion, I think it was that Yale degree in French lit that earned you the aura of untouchability among otherwise sensible people who had put themselves and their careers on the line in order to be visible and to transform disciplines and institutions. "She got a degree in deconstruction," another of the moms' awestruck colleagues used to say. To which I reply: Big whoop!

Here's the thing, Ms. Foster: I know the arguments for coming out all sound really quaint and old-hat at this point. I know you've got kids to raise and Work To Do. I admit there is integrity in trying to live life on your own terms and in refusing to put your guts on display
for a culture addicted to stories that have anything to do with celebrities and sex. Nonetheless, I would still like to see you offer a simple, matter-of-fact acknowledgment that you are, like my moms, a sister of Sappho. We're not saying you need to do a full-on Melissa Etheridge or offer yourself up as a poster girl for same-sex marriage. Just stand up and say, "I'm gay. It's no big deal, and it's nobody's business, but, yes, I am a proud, happy lesbian. Next question?"

Why? Because your studied evasion of the question suggests that your sexuality is a big deal. The open secret is still a secret, and secrecy suggests shame, fear, some scary old thing that dare not speak its name. Do you really think such an acknowledgment would have serious professional repercussions for you at this point? I mean, seriously, Ms. Foster, could it get much worse than Flight Plan? To be honest, I think the more significant threat to your career is your own diffidence, your refusal so far to venture beyond the safety of Hollywood studio films. I think you'd find better scripts and juicier roles if you looked elsewhere, but what do I know? I'm just a dog who watches a lot of HBO.

Coming out still matters. There are still queer kids who hunger for role models and straight kids who have never met an openly gay person in their lives. Moose had a coming-out moment in one of her classes just the other day. She's teaching a queer lit course this term, so it was a no-big-deal kind of thing, because it fit in with a conversation the class was having about labels, terms, the language we use for talking about sex and gender. She tucked it in slyly, as she so often does, in the form of a joke, but the students got the joke, and she could feel a collective sigh of relief spread across the room as they took it in. The relief was all about the difference between an open secret and real openness. You and Moose, with your degree in French lit and her PhD in English, might argue til Hell freezes over about what it is that gets revealed in such declarations of sexual identity. Given time and enough wine, the two of you might actually come to agree on the ontological aspects of the question, but Moose would still insist on the political and pedagogical value of coming out.

Why? Because when she made her declaration the other day, she looked back to the corner of the room and noticed a queer kid smiling. And it wasn't just because he got her joke.

Yours sincerely,
Roxie

P.S. Another nice piece on you in the Sunday Times, this one by Manohla Dargis. It occurs to me your penchant for "secrecy," which is also a theme in Dargis's prelude to The Brave One, is a cagey marketing ploy. Keep 'em guessing -- and keep 'em coming back to try to solve the riddle of the sphinx-link Foster. Whatever, girlfriend. I think they'd come back for the acting chops and the husky voice, no matter what you were selling, but that's just me.

P.P.S. On the other hand and just in case you think I've been harsh, check out this hard-hitting reaction to your reticence and your recent roles from Modern Fabulousity. He's promising to boycott The Brave One!

Back to School

(Photo Credit: University of Maryland)

That's it, kids. Labor Day has come and gone. The white shoes are back in the closet. The pencils are sharpened, the syllabi carved in stone. Moose spent the morning brushing up on the tyrannies of the bipolar gender system and the afternoon trying to find a parking space on a campus suddenly bursting at the seams with eager young scholars, experienced plagiarists, and enervated administrators.

You know what that means, don't you? Yes, it's true: Less content, more LINKS! Welcome to September in Roxie's World. So much to read and watch, so little time to think.

• Start with this funny bit by Richard Cohen on what you might have missed while you were on vacation. It includes such under-reported stories as, "On a voice vote, congressional Republicans decided to limit themselves to one sex crime per session."
• Once you've tickled your funny bone, see if you can stomach reading the choice morsels from Robert Draper's new book on Shrub, Dead Certain, that have appeared in The New York Times. Are we surprised that the Great Leader looks forward to his post-presidency as an opportunity to make money ("replenish the ol' coffers" by giving speeches, as his father and Bill Clinton have done)? Or that he envisions just "getting in the car, getting bored, going down to the ranch?" Has there even been a smaller, shallower, cruder occupant of the Oval Office? The Deciders here in Roxie's World say no, in thunder.
• Then, if you can bear an update from the Department of Lost or Sold Souls, read the excerpt from Glenn Kessler's forthcoming book on Condoleezza Rice, The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy. The central argument is that the woman who tutored Bush in foreign policy when he was running for president has
  been transformed by her long partnership with the man whom she once referred to as "my husb-" before pausing and saying, "the president." She has gone from being a foreign policy realist to being a cheerleader for Bush's vapid idealism about exporting democracy. Kessler reports that Bush enhanced Rice's clout with foreign leaders during his first term by advertising their closeness, telling them, "Miss Rice is like my sister" and "When she speaks, you know that she is speaking for me." Is anybody else creeped out by these strange suggestions of incest and ventriloquism in the White House?
• Reward yourself for enduring all that unpleasantness by heading over to Queerty to see clips of Hillary Clinton's appearance on the season premier of Ellen this morning. (Sorry to take you off-blog, but it's not up on YouTube yet.) Aside from Clinton's smooth performance, the bit is worth watching because the usually ridiculously careful, non-political Ellen is refreshingly open about her gayness and her commitment to LGBT issues.
  
• Finally, take a look at Clinton's recent appearance on Letterman. We'll just give the second part of her lengthy visit, where she does a killer Top Ten List of her campaign promises, which includes a vow to bring order and stability to The View. Remember what we said about finding her funny bone? When she puts her hand on the Bible on January 20, 2009, you just remember that Roxie's World called it first. Here's the clip:

Enjoy the new school year, kids. We hope you got the coolest new lunch box at your bus stop and that all of your teachers will recognize your unique gifts and charm. Barring that, let us hope they're too busy to catch your nose-picking and your unattributed borrowings. Peace out.

Criminal Gestures

(Image Credit: Matson, St. Louis Post Dispatch)

Roxie's World will shed no tears for the ignominious end of Senator Larry Craig's political career. (He announced today he will resign his office at the end of September, after Republicans abandoned him in droves when his June arrest in a men's restroom at the Minneapolis airport became public this week.) Good riddance, we say, to a hypocrite whose public actions aided and abetted the causes of homophobia and discrimination against LGBT people. As a senator, he helped to enact the ridiculous "don't ask, don't tell" policy, which continues to hound and persecute gays and lesbians who have served with honor in the armed forces of the United States. (William Saletan has an excellent piece in tomorrow's Wa Po which argues that by the standards of "don't ask, don't tell," Craig's conduct would have resulted in his discharge from the military. It's here.) He voted for the mean-spirited federal Defense of Marriage Act, supported a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman, voted against prohibiting job discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and voted against expanding hate crimes to include sexual orientation. (Check out his sorry record here.)

Bye-bye, Larry. Don't let the (bathroom) door hit you on the way out.

And yet, the sizable gay caucus here in Roxie's World got a little queasy this week when we paused to reflect on the nature of the crime to which Senator Craig pleaded guilty. He was not, after all, charged with having public sex or paying for sex or exposing himself or anything clearly, explicitly, actively sexual. Instead, Craig pleaded guilty to engaging in conduct (gestures that were interpreted as sexual signals) which he "knew or should have known tended to arouse alarm or resentment of others," according to his plea agreement. We have to admit that's a pretty low threshold. I mean, gosh, kids, if arousing alarm or resentment is a crime, I could come up with a pretty long list of folks I'd like to see in handcuffs, couldn't you? I'd start with the entire Bush administration and work my way down to all those celebrities who are rich and famous for no apparent reason and still manage to behave badly. I resent that, a lot, and think the amount of attention they get for such behavior is, yes, criminal.

We'll waste no sympathy on Craig, but it is worth pointing out that laws against "disorderly conduct" have historically been used to police a range of non-normative sexual behaviors that pose no threat to anything but an extremely narrow view of sexual propriety. Moose says you should all go read the work of historian George Chauncey to get a sense of how statutes against "lewdness," "vagrancy," and "loitering" have been selectively enforced to punish same-sex sexual conduct, or merely, as in Craig's case, the apparent desire to engage in same-sex sexual conduct. Political science professor Aaron Belkin briefly touches on the sordid history of such statutes in an op-ed on Craig in today's Wa Po.

There is more than a little irony in the fact that the Supreme Court de-criminalized sodomy in 2003 but it's still possible to be arrested for "wishing to engage in lewd conduct," as the officer who arrested Craig put it. If wishing is a crime, then your favorite dog blogger is guilty as can be. As, I imagine, are you, my beloved, desiring readers. Perhaps that's why they say, Be careful what you wish for.