Writing in Sunday's paper about the negative reaction in "the gay community" to Cynthia Nixon's (Sex in the City) description of herself as gay by choice, Frank Bruni makes several interesting points. Most importantly, he asks why it is necessary to prove that homosexuality is genetic? The unstated implication of the claim that people are born gay is that, without that assertion, there is no basis for claiming equal rights.
As he points out, our laws safeguard religious freedom without the assertion of a Presbyterian gene. The right to bear arms isn't "a biological imperative."
Remember all the excited hype when Cameron became PM in Britain about how the US should apply the same stringent economic measures as his government? Remember the hopeful articles being published in US magazines and newspapers three years ago about what was going on in Britain? In today's paper, Paul Krugman highlights a study by a British think tank showing the complete failure of Cameron's austerity measures. Britain had actually recovered more at this point during the great depression of the 1930s, than is has four years into the current recession. The same applies to Italy and Spain. Sometimes counter-intuitive measures actually work, but the idea of economic expansion through austerity isn't one of them. As Krugman likes to say, its belief in "the confidence fairy" has been proven to be the fantasy that any student of Econ 101 knew it was.
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