Today’s Miscellany

How Bush Helped My Marriage

McClel­lan gets reamed about Bush’s ser­vice record

From there­veal­er­feed—Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I don’t read Hebrew:
Too hum-drum? Max Gross rec­om­mends J.T. Wald­man’s “180-page graph­ic nov­el [about] an orphan… tak­en to a broth­el. She meets an alco­holic, lech­er­ous king. He suc­cumbs to her charms and makes her his queen. She uncov­ers a mur­der­ous plot to kill thou­sands of her peo­ple and—through her wits—saves the day.”

That’s right—the bib­li­cal Esther makes her debut on the fun­ny pages. Unroll the scroll here

MANDATORY CELIBACY AND SEXUAL ETHICS IN THE LATIN RITE OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH .
By the twelfth cen­tu­ry, as we have illus­trat­ed, Rome had con­sol­i­dat­ed an enor­mous amount of pow­er in itself. For the most part, how­ev­er, it was “paper pow­er,” the pow­er flow­ing from signed con­cor­dats, papal pro­nounce­ments, decrees of its mar­riage tri­bunal, and so forth. To make that pow­er more “real” Rome need­ed real estate. Many bish­ops were liv­ing like feu­dal lords, own­ing large tracts of land, and the priest­hood was fre­quent­ly passed on from father to son as an inher­i­tance. Part of that inher­i­tance was land, often giv­en as “a benefice” to the local bish­op or priest by a rich patron. Rome saw a pos­si­ble bonan­za here, if it could find a way to get its hands on all that real estate. Celiba­cy was the key. The inher­i­tance lines had to be cut. That would bring all benefices under the con­trol of the Church’s bureau­cra­cy and the appro­pri­at­ed lands could be leased out to fat­ten the papal cof­fers. Celiba­cy made Rome an impor­tant pow­er bro­ker in the real estate business.

And Chris­tians claim they’re “per­se­cut­ed” here in the US:
A strug­gle for spir­i­tu­al free­dom in China

Bet­ter late than never?
Gay GOP group chal­lenges Bush on marriage
Log Cab­in Repub­li­cans to air TV ad in D.C., sev­en states
The ad fea­tures grainy black-and-white footage of Dick Cheney talk­ing encour­ag­ing­ly about gay rela­tions dur­ing an Octo­ber 2000 vice pres­i­den­tial debate in Kentucky.

“The fact of the mat­ter is we live in a free soci­ety, and free­dom means free­dom for every­body,” said Cheney, whose daugh­ter Mary is open­ly gay and works on his campaign.

“We don’t get to chose, and should­n’t be able to chose, and say you get to live free but you don’t. Peo­ple should be free to enter into any kind of rela­tion­ship they want to enter into. That mat­ter is reg­u­lat­ed by the states.”

The Embar­rass­ment President
Move over, Howard Dean. Piece by piece the Bush admin­is­tra­tion is self-can­ni­bal­iz­ing, offer­ing future admin­is­tra­tions a detailed tuto­r­i­al on polit­i­cal implo­sion. Each week brings anoth­er mis­step, anoth­er mis­cal­cu­la­tion, anoth­er bone­head­ed move.

Mis­counts, Changed Votes, No Paper Trail: Is Elec­tron­ic Vot­ing a Threat to Democ­ra­cy? led me to Ver­i­fied Vot­ings — Cam­paign to Demand Ver­i­fi­able Elec­tion Results

From democ­ra­cynow’s head­lines today:
South Dako­ta Pre­pares to Ban Abortions
South Dako­ta Gov. Mike Rounds said Tues­day that he sup­ports a bill that would ban almost all abor­tions in South Dako­ta. The sign­ing of the law could lead to a Supreme Court chal­lenge to Roe vs. Wade.