The House of Representatives has decided to add sexual orientation and gender identity to the list of categories covered under US federal hate crime law, 365 Gay reports.

I’m still torn on the issue of hate crimes. On the one hand, it is important to address the systematic attacks on minority groups; one the other hand, all violence should be condemned and punished equally hard regardless of whom is the victim.

Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church are at it again.

After a vote in the State Senate a few hours ago, New Hampshire seems set to become the fifth US state to legalize same-sex marriage:

New Hampshire’s Senate passed a bill on Wednesday that would legalize same-sex marriage after an amendment was added that allows clergy to decline to marry gay couples.

The bill, which passed in a 13-11 vote, needs to be signed by Governor John Lynch to make New Hampshire the fifth U.S. state where gay marriage is legal. The Democrat has not indicated whether he will sign or veto the bill, but has expressed opposition to the measure.

Update: More here.

A good Christian hates gay people. Any hint of opposition to homophobic violence and discrimination proves one is not a true Christian. This is the motivation Emanuel Henrysson has given for removing some of Sweden’s largest Christian bloggers from his blog portal. They simply aren’t judgemental enough.

I think Jesus would have bitch-slapped Henrysson had he been around today.

Ed Morrissey:

Barack Obama told me that if I voted for John McCain, I’d see a revolving door between Wall Street fat cats and smoke-filled back rooms of the White House and Congress. What do you know—he was right!

Amnesty International pleads with the Senegalese government to protect nine men who had been acquitted on charges of homosexuality. The human-rights organization fears the men are in danger of violent homophobic attacks.

Senegal is one of Africa’s strongest suppressors of gay people. Homosexual acts are punishable by up to five years imprisonment.

Yaakov Litzman, Israel’s ultra-Orthodox deputy minister for health, has renamed swine flu. He will call it “Mexican flu” because swine is not kosher. I’m not making this up. He said so himself at a press conference yesterday.

The State of Israel turns 61 today.

Three weeks after the state’s Supreme Court made same-sex marriage legal, Iowan officials began processing marriage applications for gay couples yesterday.

For Israelis who can’t control their desire for phone sex:

Israeli consumers will soon be able to buy “kosher” calling cards that automatically block callers from reaching pornographic services. The new kosher calling cards, adorned with photos of the Western Wall and other sacred Jewish sites, will be sold at post offices and kiosks.

Blocked numbers will be monitored by Clean Line, an agency run by Israel’s national phone company, Bezeq, in coordination with the Rabbinical Committee for Communications.

The Clean Line is a special filtering service offered by Bezeq, similar to that made available by internet providers to families with children who wish to limit their access to adult material when using the computer.

“A Buddhist preacher in Thailand has announced plans for new guidelines aimed at curbing the flamboyant behaviour of gay and transgender monks,” BBC News reports. From the article:

Senior monk Phra Maha Wudhijaya Vajiramedhi told the BBC he would address issues like smoking, drinking alcohol, walking and going to the toilet properly, which are all detailed in the traditional 75 Dharma principles of Buddhism, and the 227 precepts for monks.

He was especially concerned, he said, by the flamboyant behaviour of gay and transgender monks, who can often be seen wearing revealingly tight robes, carrying pink purses and having effeminately-shaped eyebrows.

Thailand has a very large and visible population of transgender men, and Phra Vajiramedhi acknowledged that it was difficult to exclude them from the monkhood but he hoped his course could at least persuade them to curb their more extrovert habits.

I haven’t really paid much attention to the sudden outbreak of swine flu, which has so far killed at least 83 people in Mexico. But I now realize this may become something much worse than the first reports suggested.

“Over 1,300 people are now thought to have contracted the virulent H1N1 swine influenza after it mutated into a form that spreads from human to human,” Sky News reports.

The World Health Organisation now warns that the virus may continue to mutate. “It’s quite possible for this virus to evolve... when viruses evolve, clearly they can become more dangerous to people,” says a WHO spokesperson.

There is no evidence that people are being infected with the virus from exposure to pork or pigs, but several countries are stepping up checks on meat imports.

If you ever considered going kosher, this is the time to do it.

Update: “Governments around the world were put on high alert yesterday for a possible swine flu pandemic as the death toll from the virus at its epicentre in Mexico continued to rise, and possible cases were reported as far afield as Israel, New Zealand and Scotland,” the Guardian reports.

Update: According to BBC News, Dr Keiji Fukuda, a top UN health chief, has said the international community is better prepared than ever to deal with the threatened spread of a new swine flu virus. Years of preparing for bird flu had boosted world stocks of anti-viral agents. That’s comforting.

An English translation of a twelfth-century Hebrew poem by Sephardic writer Isaac Ibn Abraham:

The secret of love, how can it be contained
The heart and the tear are talebearers
The heart is restrained from what it seeks
Shut up and be passion of him besieged
Unable to obtain its desire
If it presumes to attain to the stars
Its pride is brought down, laid low
Beloved like a hart, with heart of a panther
If you desire to slay
My heart is in your hand as clay
But do not summon wanderings upon it
For in its midst your name is sheltered
Beloved, like a scarlet cord his lips
Burning like fire for they are his censer
And in them is the work of his signs
Live by them, for it waits for them—
A heart long suffering because of them
How my fate has hardened its spirit
A while and separation will cause it to be odious
To my friends who knew its thoughts
If wandering has separated us
It has increased love
I will watch for the gazelle
To leave in the garden my pleasures
Although my rebuker stands to accuse me.

Australian actor Hugh Jackman has been forced to deny rumours about him being gay. Many celebrities have been forced to do the same, but Mr Jackman should be given credit for acknowledging he feels uncomfortable about denying he is gay. “I’d be happy to go and deny it, because I’m not,” he tells the Courier-Mail. “But by denying it, I’m saying there is something shameful about it, and there isn’t anything shameful.”

A sane take on Miss California and Perez Hilton. More here. Background here.

Ugandan newspaper The Red Pepper has published a list of about fifty gays, which includes their names, occupations, physical descriptions, HIV status, and partners. “This is a killer dossier,” the newspaper article reads. “A heat-pounding and sensational masterpiece that largely exposes Uganda’s shameless men and unabashed women that have deliberately exported the western evils to our dear and sacred society. They have been influential in spreading the gay and lesbian vices in schools to kill the morals of our lovely kids!!” The article ends with a promise of a list of “more shocking things you didn’t know about Homos” to be published next week.

The Advocate writes:

Ugandan police have been given greater authority in investigating gays and punishing them in recent months. Ethics and integrity minister James Buturo expressed concern in October 2008 that the prevalence of homosexuality would diminish the population. “Who is going to occupy Uganda 20 years from now if we all become homosexuals? We know that homosexuals don’t produce.”

The Ugandan newspaper published a similar article in 2007.

Update: Box Turtle Bulletin has more here.

Yet another European country has legalized civil unions. It’s not marriage equality, but it’s a giant step in the right direction. Congratulations to gay Hungarians.

The other EU countries to have civil unions or same-sex marriage are Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Spain, Britain, the Czech Republic, and Germany.

Internet humour by The Atlantic’s Sage Stossel.

Gary Cass, president of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission, is lobbying hard against the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act, a proposed new federal law aimed to curb homophobic crimes in the United States.

“One of the gravest threats to religious liberty and freedom of speech is proposed hate crime legislation,” Dr Cass says to World Net Daily. “All freedom loving Americans must voice their opposition to this bill. If this bill passes it lays the foundation for censoring Christians. In other countries, like in Canada and Sweden, where these types of hate crime laws have been implemented, pastors and Christians have been jailed and fined for their faithful adherence to biblical values.”

This is a lie. No Swedish pastor has ever been jailed or fined for his or her “faithful adherence to biblical values”.

I don’t know why so many American bloggers and journalists are curious about Matthew Drudge’s sexual orientation, but the rumour of him being fond of man-on-man action has once again resulted in an article in which he says, “I do not love sex with men.” Unless someone finds a man who claims to have had sex with Mr Drudge, I think we ought to take his word for it. But then again, there seems to be some substance to the rumour:

David Brock, the former right-wing writer, wrote in his memoir Blinded by the Right about a “scary” date in which Drudge, after bringing Brock flowers and navigating the Santa Monica gay strip “like a pro,” stepped on a competing suitor’s foot “really hard” (in Drudge’s purported words) in a nightclub to scare him away from Brock. He also reproduced an overly blunt email in which Drudge wrote, “Laura [Ingraham] spreading stuff about you and me being fuck buddies. I should be so lucky.”

Admittedly, this email is a bit gay, but I think Matthew Drudge is simply a man of the first generation of bicontextuals.

Bicontextuality is about men behaving like bisexuals without actually having sex with men. I think it could be the new big thing in modern urban culture. Why be straight and square when you can be a proud bicontextual?

Here are some pictures of a bicontextual couple.

After a quarrel with blogger Perez Hilton over same-sex marriage, Carrie Prejean has become something of a martyr. A nose job, some bleached teeth, and a set of outdated ideas is all it takes to be a Christian crusader these days.

Reuven Rivlin, Speaker of the Israeli Knesset, has sent a letter to his colleagues in parliaments around the world. In it, he compares Iranian President Mahhoud Ahmadinejad at the ongoing UN conference on racism in Switzerland to Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.

“The hate expressed by the President of Iran is a warning to all humanity: We risk seeing a repetition of the Holocaust and it will be brought about by people like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,” Rivlin writes. “Seventy-five years after the Berlin Olympics, yesterday the world witnessed the return of Adolf Hitler. This time he has a beard and speaks Persian. But the words are the same words and the aspirations are the same aspirations and the determination to find the weapons to achieve those aspirations is the same menacing determination. Unfortunately, just as at that shameful Olympic event, the world has again given him a platform.” Rivlin continues, “If there is one lesson to be learned from the destruction and devastation the first Hitler brought to the world, it is to be found in the realization that anyone who remains silent, anyone who ignores evil, anyone who deals with the devil—he too in the final analyses pays the price. I therefore call upon you, my colleagues around the world, not to remain silent, not to turn away and above all not to think for one moment that Ahmadinejad is not a threat to you too.”

Iraqi militias have deployed an unprecedented form of torture against homosexuals by using a very strong glue that, if applied to the skin, sticks to it and can only be removed by surgery. The militias glue the gay men’s anuses and then force-feed them a drink that causes diarrhoea. Since the anus is closed, the diarrhoea causes death. Videos of this form of torture are being distributed in Iraq.

According to human-rights activists, the ongoing crackdown on homosexuals began three weeks ago, after the publication of a religious decree that demands gay men be killed.

Read more in English here, and in Arabic here.

While most people seem to think that sexuality is all about what goes on in the privacy of one’s home, I have long argued that there is a gay perspective on many political issues. The Middle East conflict certainly has a gay angle, as Hamas, Hezbollah, and most—if not all—Arab and Islamic states systematically torture and kill gay people. Israel is not only the sole democracy in the Middle East; it is also the only country to recognize its gay citizens’ human rights.

The similarities between anti-Semitism and homophobia are striking to me. Whenever bigoted people try to legitimize their prejudgments against Jews or gays, they come up with fantasies about all-powerful lobby organizations, media takeovers, and secret plans to destroy the very fabric of society. Therefore, it makes perfect sense to me that Israel now seeks support among gays in Europe:

Israel is stepping up its public relations effort to discredit Iran within the international community, and part of its new campaign focuses on Tehran’s abuse of human rights and sponsorship of terrorism.

“We have to lay the foundation in the world, and particularly in Europe, in order to be able to take harsher steps against Iran, especially in the economic sector,” said one senior political source in Jerusalem.

The new campaign, to be overseen by the Foreign Ministry, aims to appeal to people who are less concerned with Iran’s nuclear aspirations and more fearful of its human rights abuses and mistreatment of minorities, including the gay and lesbian community.

The campaign plans to recruit the international gay community, which Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dismissed in 2007 when he said there were no homosexuals living in his country.

Senegal’s court of appeal overturns the conviction of nine men for homosexuality and orders their immediate release, BBC News reports.

When I was a 14-year-old boy, I read J. G. Ballard’s autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun. I was so moved by the story of the young James separated from his parents and left behind in occupied China during the Second World War that I decided to write the author to thank him for a magnificent read.

A few weeks later, I received a hand-written letter from Mr Ballard. He thanked me for my kind words and asked about me. I guess he didn’t get too many letters from teenage boys in Sweden, so he was curious.

I just learned that J. G. Ballard died a few hours ago. Now I wish I had taken the time to tell him how important those letters were to me when I was young.

From The Atlantic:

Why does the ocean still have all that water when it has all those sponges living in it?

This is an important question. I have not paid sufficient attention to the threat posed by rampant sponge reproduction. I asked Dave Gallo, the director of special projects at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, whether the oceans are in imminent danger of sponge-related desertification. “Let’s assume sponges hold about 10 times their weight in water,” he told me. “Let’s also assume that there are about 16 ‘average’ sponges per pound. The planet’s ocean water weighs 1,450,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons, or about 1.5 million trillion trillion tons, which is a lot. The weight of sponges necessary to sop up all that water would be about a tenth of that, or 150,000 trillion trillion tons, which is also a lot. So, 16 sponges per pound means 32,000 sponges in a ton. Multiply that by 150,000 trillion trillion tons, and you come to the conclusion that you would need 4,800,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 sponges to soak up the Earth’s oceans.”

I think I just found the solution to rising sea levels—grow more sponges!

The Swedish government has decided against sending ministerial officials to the UN conference on racism in Geneva. The Netherlands, Australia, the United States, and Israel are boycotting UN’s anti-Semitic hate fest altogether. The conference’s agenda is set entirely by the countries with the worst human-rights records. But Iran and others have been successful in labelling oppression of women and gay people a matter of “cultural diversity”.

Israeli soldiers and a Palestinians doing things much of the Western media forgets to portray.

So far, Barack Obama’s presidency is a disappointment. He has done nothing to curb discriminatory legislation, he appears weak in international relations, and his economic policies are socialist. But until now, he’s commitment to Israel has seen stable and reliable. Now, more and more Israelis says Israel can no longer call the United States its best international friend, as an ultimatum is used to force Israel to surrender Judea and Samaria. Jason Koutsoukis reports:

One could be forgiven for thinking that the more immediate threat to Israel's national security lay across the Atlantic rather than from closer to home.

It is bad enough that President Obama uses almost every opportunity he can to set the parameters of a final peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. Now US officials are openly using Israeli anxiety over Iran's fledging nuclear program as a bargaining chip to force Israel's hand on giving up control of the West Bank Palestinian territory.

No less a figure than White House chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel—whose father fought with the militant Zionist group the Irgun, and whose appointment had provided such reassurance to Israeli officials—was quoted this week laying down the law to Israel.

If Israel wants US help to defuse the Iranian threat, Mr Emanuel was reported to have told Jewish leaders in Washington, then get ready to start evacuating settlements in the West Bank.

Watch the news segment here.

I got this fine looking certificate after taking Reason’s terrorist quiz. I’m so honoured.

Background here.

Mohammed Tawfeeq reports for CNN:

Six gay men were shot dead by members of their tribe in two separate incidents in the past 10 days, an official with Iraq’s Interior ministry said.

In the most recent attack, two men were killed Thursday in Sadr City area of Baghdad after they were disowned by relatives, the official said.

The shootings came after a tribal meeting was held and the members decided to go after the victims.

On March 26, four additional men were fatally shot in the same city, the official said, adding that the victims had also been disowned by their relatives.

The official declined to be identified because he is not authorized to speak to the media.

Witnesses told CNN that a Sadr City cafe, which was a popular gathering spot for gays, was also set on fire.

A new official study suggests more than 4,000 teenagers in Stockholm are victims of so-called honour cultures that involve traditions which run counter to Swedish law. Unfortunately, I think this is a correct estimate. Here in Malmö, the gay-rights organization RFSL runs a project aimed at gay teenagers who fear that family members will hurt them because of their sexual orientation. You can visit the project website here.

I have just seen the Baader Meinhof Complex, a German film about the notorious terror group that called itself the Red Army Fraction. It’s a fairly good film, and I recommend it to everyone interested in modern European history.

One sequence I found particularly interesting in the film portrayed the naivety of the young Western communists during a visit to a Palestinian terrorist training camp. The men and women from Berlin undress and go sunbathing on a rooftop while the Arab militants stare at them with contempt. The Germans then start to shout something about “fucking being a part of the revolution”, not realizing that the Islamist revolution represents the exact opposite to the sexual revolution of the Western 1970s.

I have often noted the same kind of naivety among leftist activists today. The prevailing idea among communists in Europe is that anti-capitalist radicals everywhere are the same, which is why European communists so eagerly support Taliban rebels one day and so enthusiastically march for women’s rights the next.

In their Easter message, Venezuela’s Catholic bishops said the country’s democracy is in “serious danger of collapse” as more and more power is concentrated in Hugo Chávez’s own hands. Opposition activists are arrested without evidence, trade unions are taken over by the regime, new laws are introduced to strip human-rights groups of funding, and plans are made to tighten legal controls on the media. It doesn’t happen often, but in this case, I second the words of Catholic bishops.

When the police discussed the suicide of a transsexual woman, several officers couldn’t refrain from laughing at the pictures. The incident was reported, but the Swedish Prosecution Authority has decided not to take the case any further.

I think my Swedish readers will find this mockery of Andreas Mam quite amusing. Malm is a Swedish communist who made it his mission to defend radical Islam from liberal criticism. He loves Hezbollah and Hamas as much as he hates Israel and Middle East democratization.

David Samuels thinks an Israeli attack on Iran makes sense. I agree. Not that war is good, but because the prospect of Iran with nuclear weapons is worse still.

Worried people phoned and emailed me yesterday after I wrote that the execution of an Iraqi gay man was scheduled for this morning. It feels nice to know that a cry for help can set so many people in motion, and I have been told that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are both looking into the case. However, I have no new information and do not know if the man has been executed or not. The lack of information is frustrating, so I kindly ask the person who contacted me to do so again. Your anonymity is guaranteed. Your email address will not be passed on to anyone. I just want to know as much as possible about this case and others like it.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will attend next week’s UN “anti-racism” conference in Switzerland, Iran’s state news agency reports. I think he can expect a triumphant reception when Jew-haters from around the world gather to sling mud at Israel.

“Iran has succeeded in denying Jewish NGOs the possibility of taking part in the preparations,” the Jerusalem Post writes. “The Iranian representatives has also succeeded in deflecting possible criticism of his country’s dubious human rights records by attributing practices such as the stoning of adulterous women and the hanging of alleged homosexuals to ‘cultural diversity.’”

So why wouldn’t the king of anti-Semitism attend the conference when he has so successfully set the agenda?

“Antigay violence, though it never disappeared, is flaring,” Dutch Minister for Education and Culture Ronald Plasterk says. “In some urban neighbourhoods, it’s to do with youths from an Islamic background who are encouraged by the notion that homosexuality is morally repugnant. This is extremely worrying. When I talk about this at schools, it is shocking to hear how some young people think and talk about this.”

A large-scale survey of the favourite venues of Dutch gays shows that Amsterdam is now far from the "Gay Capital of Europe” it once was. The city failed to win a single category. Almere, Arnhem, Apeldoorn, and Utrecht have become increasingly popular as religious violence torments gays and lesbians in the Dutch capital.

“The Iraqi government must do more to protect homosexuals in the wake of a reported spate of killings of gay young men,” Amnesty International says in an official letter to the Iraqi government. From BBC News:

In the last few weeks, 25 boys and men are reported to have been killed in Baghdad because they were, or were perceived to be, gay, Amnesty said.

In a letter to Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, the rights organisation called for “urgent and concerted action”.

Continuing:

The recent killings are said to have been carried out by armed Shia militiamen as well as by members of the tribes and families of the victims, Amnesty said.

It cited reports that three corpses of gay men were found in the Shia area of Sadr City last week—two of which were reported to have had pieces of paper bearing the word “pervert” attached to them.

The letter also raised concerns that religious leaders may be inciting violence against members of Iraq’s gay community, and over reported statements by one senior police officer that appear to condone or even encourage the targeting of gay Iraqis.

A number of gay Iraqis are about to be executed. A gay-rights group in London received a plea for help from one of the prisoners:

My name is [name and address removed], Baghdad, Iraq. I was detained at my residence December 15, 2008 after midnight, by the Ministry of Interior. During the detention process, they hit me on the head and my rear end to make me confess that I am a member of the Iraqi-LGBT. Later on, the Ministry of Interior transferred me to the criminal justice court in al Karkh, and after a short trial, I was sentenced to death. I was sentenced without given the chance to defend myself or to hire an attorney. Two days later, I was returned to the same place and was told that the execution will take place in two weeks. Please pass this message to [my friend] in London. I just wish to tell him not to forget about my mother and siblings, I was their only supporter. I am all hopeful that Allah will show Iraqis a life with no death sentences. And lastly, I ask you for help. Is there anyone to help me before it is too late?

I just learned by email that the execution of the man who wrote this plea is scheduled for tomorrow morning.

Medical technology seems to provide the most interesting ethical dilemmas nowadays. This one is new to me.

A 21-year-old Texan man by the name of Nikolas Colton Evans died of head injuries after a fight. His mother, Missy Evans, then decided that she would fulfil her son’s dream of becoming a father by having an urologist collect testicular tissue from the body. It was a success—much of the sperm harvested is viable and can be stored. Mrs Evans is now trying to find a surrogate mother.

“Evans isn't concerned about what others might think,” Jamie Stengle writes in an article about the case. “She says she is only doing what her son would have wanted.”

I don’t know what to make of this. However, I do think there is a general problem with bodies being used for other people’s needs. I don’t particularly like the idea of organ donation, and in this case, I cannot see how anyone would really benefit from a dead man becoming a father—not even from a strict utilitarian perspective; which tend to legitimize the most horrendous experimentation.

From the article:

Mark Vopat, a professor of philosophy and religious studies at Youngstown State University in Ohio, questions whether the court should have granted the mother’s request. He said that while Nikolas Evans may have told his mother he wanted children someday, it’s wrong to assume he also would have wanted to father a child posthumously if he died prematurely.

This is true, but then again, we do assume that a person’s wish to donate other organs and body tissue should be respected posthumously. In Sweden and most other Western countries, medical doctors are allowed to take a dead person’s heart if a living relative confirms that the deceased agreed to such a procedure at some point in the past. No living wills are required. So why wouldn’t that apply to sperm donation and posthumous fatherhood?

Meet Bo, the successor to former First Dog Barney. Probably the single best decision by Barack Obama since he took office in January.

Hong Kong-based graphic designer Toby Ng Kwong To says, “I used simple vector graphics that related to a statistic in order to present the information in the simplest and most accessible way.” The result is world statistics applied to an imaginary village of a mere hundred people.

Pope Benedict XVI used his Good Friday meditations to compare deliberate attempts to remove religion from public life to the mockery of Jesus Christ by the mob as he was led out to be crucified, the Daily Mail reports. So, modern secularism is violence and torture. Says the man who speaks favourably about the days when the Vatican sanctioned such godly things as the trials and torture of the Spanish Inquisition!

The Pope is funny though. During the same meditation, he condemned sexism, saying there were many societies in the world where women fail to receive a fair deal. He must be kidding, right? After all, he is the head of the world’s only all-male state. Having a penis is at the top of every priestly CV. Without the male sex organ, you are barred from every Catholic office of importance.

You go, fish dude!

I never thought about it before, but Passover must be a very difficult time for the observant Jew with a heroin or cocaine addiction. Finding the pure stuff is hard at the best of times.

(Cartoon by Asher Sarlin.)

Oscar Wilde, “Sonnet to Liberty”, Poems (1881):

Not that I love thy children, whose dull eyes
See nothing save their own unlovely woe,
Whose minds know nothing, nothing care to know,—
But that the roar of thy Democracies,
Thy reigns of Terror, thy great Anarchies,
Mirror my wildest passions like the sea
And give my rage a brother—! Liberty!
For this sake only do thy dissonant cries
Delight my discreet soul, else might all kings
By bloody knout or treacherous cannonades
Rob nations of their rights inviolate
And I remain unmoved—and yet, and yet,
These Christs that die upon the barricades,
God knows it I am with them, in some things.

Gerald Warner:

President Barack Obama has recently completed the most successful foreign policy tour since Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. You name it, he blew it.

Wouldn’t a pair of stone tablets with the Ten Commandments be a perfect gift for friends and family? I bet it would be highly appreciated. It turns out that Jesus Saves Ministry in Sparta (!), Tennessee, can satisfy your request. For just $59.95, plus the cost for shipping and handling, they deliver the stone tablets to your door. If you buy ten sets, you get a heavy discount.

I will buy a pair of stone tablets to all my friends. People say I’m too liberal, so I try to be more judgemental. And what better way to manifest my new image than to preach Mosaic Law in hard rock?

Warning: This entry contains traces of humour.

I spent the whole day in Copenhagen yesterday. It was a beautiful day with plenty of sunshine and a summery temperature. I love this time of year; winter is like death to me, so when spring comes, I feel born again. Anyhow, I walked in the city centre for hours, with only a break for coffee, beer, and tofu sausages in some outdoor café.

When I walked by a bookshop window, my eyes noticed a children’s book with a very angry Moses holding his stone tablets. It’s a book about the Ten Commandments, in Danish. I don’t know if it’s any good, but I like the cover.

By coincident I came across this picture of Barbie wearing Tefillin, which is the name for small leather boxes worn on the arm and head during certain Jewish prayers and services. Since most Orthodox congregations will not allow women to wear Tefillin, and many Progressive congregations ignore them altogether, I think we can assume Barbie is a member of the Masorti Movement.

Unless you are a Christian promoting homophobia and marriage inequality. In the name of divinely inspired homophobia, everything goes.

I just came back from Copenhagen and this year’s Seder at the Progressive Jewish Congregation. It was an interesting evening, with a brilliant guest leader from Stockholm. Despite the bad lighting, I snapped a few pictures. Since I don’t want to publish any with people in them, here are three pictures that show some of what I ate and drank during this ceremonial Passover dinner.

The dance too daring for straight couples:

The tango was born by the end of the 19th century from a mixture of several rhythms that were danced in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. Originally it was almost exclusively connected to cabarets, a sort of contention house for the predominantly male population that was increasingly immigrating to the country. Since only prostitutes would dare performing this dance, in the beginning most couples were formed by two men.

Vermont has become the fourth US state to legalize same-sex marriage. Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Iowa are the other three.

Congratulations to all gay Vermonters!

From the Guardian:

For many years the [British] government has been under pressure to conduct an objective cost-benefit analysis of the current drugs policy, but has failed to do so despite calls from MPs. Now the drugs reform charity, Transform, has commissioned its own report, examining all aspects of prohibition from the costs of policing and investigating drugs users and dealers to processing them through the courts and their eventual incarceration.

As well as such savings is the likely taxation revenue in a regulated market. However, there are also the potential costs of increased drug treatment, education and public information campaigns about the risks and dangers of drugs, similar to those for tobacco and alcohol, and the costs of running a regulated system.

The report looked at four potential scenarios, ranging from no increase in drugs use to a 100% rise as they become more readily available.

“The conclusion is that regulating the drugs market is a dramatically more cost-effective policy than prohibition and that moving from prohibition to regulated drugs markets in England and Wales would provide a net saving to taxpayers, victims of crime, communities, the criminal justice system and drug users of somewhere within the range of, for the four scenarios, £13.9bn, £10.8bn, £7.7bn, £4.6bn.”

I will bore my secular readers with a religious metaphor I just found in The Torah: A Modern Commentary. It explains the nature of God’s covenant with the Jewish people:

Doctors say that scar tissue is much stronger than tissue that has never suffered trauma, and the same is true of covenants. After the sin of the Golden Calf in Exodus 32, God, Moses, and the people Israel are reconciled. The covenant that was broken through idolatry is mended and emerges even stronger...

I have a soft spot for metaphors like this one. Don’t know why.

Steve King, a conservative Republican, has voiced fears over Iowa becoming a “gay-marriage Mecca” after a Supreme Court ruling allows for same-sex couples to marry in the state. Jeff Winkler makes the point that the state should be lucky if Mr King is right. There are economic reasons to welcome an big influx of gay visitors. The pink dollar is money, too.

Christmas came early for all communists this year as North Korea successfully fired a long-range missile over capitalist archenemy Japan and into the Pacific Ocean. It is indeed a big breakthrough for the proletariat in its global struggle for a classless world.

Warning: This entry may contain traces of sarcasm and irony.

Glenn Greenwald has written a report for the Cato Institute about Portugal’s decriminalization of drugs—“which is what enabled the Portuguese Government to address their exploding drug problems in the 1990s and to achieve far better results than virtually every other Western country.” An interesting read. Download the report here.

Sweden’s centre-right government is now more popular than the socialist opposition. That is good new.

“Malmö has been banned from hosting Davis Cup tennis matches for five years following the city’s controversial decision to stage Sweden’s clash with Israel in an empty arena,” The Local reports.

All thanks to a bunch of anti-Semitic commies.

While Swedish bloggers seem to think Internet piracy is the ultimate human right, our most fundamental human rights are threatened by the UN body that is supposed to protect them. From The Economist:

At first glance, the resolution on “religious defamation” adopted by the UN’s Human Rights Council on March 26th, mainly at the behest of Islamic countries, reads like another piece of harmless verbiage churned out by a toothless international bureaucracy. What is wrong with saying, as the resolution does, that some Muslims faced prejudice in the aftermath of September 2001? But a closer look at the resolution’s language, and the context in which it was adopted (with an unholy trio of Pakistan, Belarus and Venezuela acting as sponsors), makes clear that bigger issues are at stake.

The resolution says “defamation of religions” is a “serious affront to human dignity” which can “restrict the freedom” of those who are defamed, and may also lead to the incitement of violence. But there is an insidious blurring of categories here, which becomes plain when you compare this resolution with the more rigorous language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 in a spirit of revulsion over the evils of fascism. This asserts the right of human beings in ways that are now entrenched in the theory and (most of the time) the practice of liberal democracy. It upholds the right of people to live in freedom from persecution and arbitrary arrest; to hold any faith or none; to change religion; and to enjoy freedom of expression, which by any fair definition includes freedom to agree or disagree with the tenets of any religion.

In other words, it protects individuals—not religions, or any other set of beliefs. And this is a vital distinction. For it is not possible systematically to protect religions or their followers from offence without infringing the right of individuals.

What exactly is it the drafters of the council resolution are trying to outlaw? To judge from what happens in the countries that lobbied for the vote—like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan—they use the word “defamation” to mean something close to the crime of blasphemy, which is in turn defined as voicing dissent from the official reading of Islam. In many of the 56 member states of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, which has led the drive to outlaw “defamation”, both non-Muslims and Muslims who voice dissent (even in technical matters of Koranic interpretation) are often victims of just the sort of persecution the 1948 declaration sought to outlaw. That is a real human-rights problem. And in the spirit of fairness, laws against blasphemy that remain on the statute books of some Western countries should also be struck off; only real, not imaginary, incitement of violence should be outlawed.

Amen to that!

The Supreme Court in Iowa has overturned a ten-year-old ban on same-sex marriage.

אנו מודים לך על ערב נפלא.

A queer take on queer.

A Hillary Clinton spokesperson says the United States will push harder for a two-state solution in order to end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. I welcome almost any solution that would stop the ongoing attacks on Israel. But for the record, I don’t believe in a two-state solution. Gaza should be handed back to Egypt, and the West Bank turned into either a sovereign state or an autonomous region within a federal Israel.

The G20 Summit in London was a big blow to all friends of liberty. Regulations caused the financial crisis, and now governments are trying to fix it with more regulations. To pay for it all, governments are borrowing money it will take a generation to pay off. And for what? To get their hands on money hidden in so-called “tax havens”?

I was searching the Internet for some images of Jesus I intend to use in a seminar. When I googled, I came across these pictures and it hit me that my feelings towards Christianity changed dramatically when looking at them. Some of them made me angry and sad as they represent contempt, hatred, and bigotry; others made me happy as they portray Christianity as a religion of love, compassion, and humanity.

Despite my most commonly used first name, I feel more Jewish than Christian. However, the stories about Jesus were always a natural part of my childhood Christmases. Perhaps that is why I feel this sad loss when I study the photographs of these men doing evil things in the name of Christ. How could a message of love become a mission against love? How could saving lives at all costs become refuse people condoms that would help them avoid death from a lethal virus? How could the evildoers be allowed to hijack Jesus and Christianity?

President Evo Morales “had the chance to be the Mandela of Bolivia, but instead he chose to be the Mugabe.” Eliza Barclay of The Atlantic has written an interesting article on yet another socialist turning racist.

Wikipedia was quick to update its map:

A few minutes ago, the Swedish Parliament approved a new law granting same-sex couples the right to marry. The new law come into effect next month.

Later today, the Swedish Parliament will end marriage discrimination in this country. A massive majority is expected to vote in favour of the proposed new gender-neutral marriage law. Voting is scheduled for four o’clock this afternoon.

Today, 1 April 2009, will be a historic day. For the fist time since Sweden became a Christian country, same-sex couples will be able to marry. The new marriage law will come into effect on 1 May.

If I’m not too drunk on champagne, I will post a comment once the decision has been taken.