Pennsylvania’s HR 535, declaring 2012 the “year of the bible” is, depending on how you look at it, an empty, non-binding gesture, or a tool in a broader political game. Read my take on this “noncontroversial” legislation over on The Bilerico Project.

It’d take a braver blogger than I to comment on something insightful that celebrated author Cat Valente has written! For the next month she’s guest blogging on author Charlie Strosser’s blog and her post today is a must read. Some highlights:

My adult life has been characterized by radical technological and political change I, as a classicist who did not even have an email address until she was twenty, could not have begun to predict. (Ok, not true, classicists are really good at predicting politics. It’s the tech that stumbles us. I could have predicted my 8 bit games turning into Skyrim, but not that a glorified classmates.com would take over the technological world.)

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culturally we have about two generations worth of memory, maybe three, and then the black curtain comes down and we can’t imagine that life in a 20th century first world nation is itself the aberration in human experience.

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Will the internet go the way of the steel mill? I don’t know, maybe. We still use steel, but the way we make it, buy it, and sell it has changed profoundly and cannot change back. (Nothing changes back, only forward. I suppose this is a relevant lesson for publishing, really. Radical change is the new black.) Certainly the current state of the internet, which is itself changed pretty radically from just five or six years ago, will change enormously, no matter how many articles I read on the permanence of Facebook.

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It’s tough to say everything’s going to be ok. Living at the end of one way of life and the beginning of another sucks. Most people just want to be fat and happy and do some meaningful work, have kids, and die. Except for dying, the ability to do all of that is up in the air these days. And that’s where we are. Industrial life is in its death throes and it isn’t pretty or fair.

Check the whole thing out here: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/01/hello-my-name-is-the-problem-o.html

Salon.com recently carried this fascinating interview with the author of the new book “Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality.” I’m adding this book to my “must read” list because the questions, history and issues she raises point to the possibility of a fundamentally different understanding of sexuality in culture, psychology, and history. My favorite quote from the interview would be this one:

I question their (research pointing to physiologic differences between straight and gay bodies/brains) validity  primarily because nobody has established or in fact attempted to establish that there is a canonical straight body. And if you don’t have characterized control, you can bet your bottom dollar I am not going to believe your hypothesis. It’s really that simple.

All of this research that is purporting to look for physiological material differences between gay bodies and straight bodies: What are they comparing it to?  Their assumption that they know magically what a heterosexual body is?  When no one has actually established what that is.  That’s bad science.

On a personal note, I am feeling much better, although my energy level isn’t coming back as quickly as I would like. But the full length blog post should be up in the near future, along with my next Bilerico piece.