Not In Your Hand Seems it’s been a while since the religious Right went into full freakout mode over a logo or ad campaign, but they pretty much lost their minds over a change in those multi-colored and commercially personified 
candies known as M&M’s. At issue is Mars Inc.’s introduction of a new mix of colors, and thus characters, in some of its packaging. The new line includes only the three female characters (green, brown, and purple), two of whom are holding hands and appear to be more than just friends. There’s even a slogan under the inverted cartoon: “Supporting women flipping the status quo.” Okay, so the morality police are upset about the lesbian pair; we get that. What’s amazing is the way they piled on with invective directed not at Mars Inc. but at the people being represented in the image. Daily Wire editor Ben Shapiro asked: “Women, do you feel represented now … on the M&M package that you’re guzz-ling down, lonely in your apartment with your wine and your cats? How’s that going for you?” Tucker Carlson outdid his usual virulence, singling out the “plus-size, obese purple M&M” for special ridicule. Um, Tuck, the last time we checked, all of the M&M’s were equally round.
Shifting Fulcrum In its eternal quest to find a conservative columnist to balance its lineup, The New York Times has hired an attorney named David French, who drew immediate fire from the LGBT community. French has close ties to a group called Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), whose entire raison d’être is opposition to LGBT civil rights. As senior counsel for ADF, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled a hate group, French is big on defending people who’ve been taken to task for promoting anti-gay propaganda in places like classrooms and psychotherapy sessions. He’s a defender of “conversion therapy” and wants to ban what he calls “transgenderism.” Anyway, having watched both David Brooks and Ross Douthat abandon Trump and drift slowly to the left—at least relative to the Republican Party—The Times may just have found the guy who can satisfy conservatives’ demand for “balance” at a time when the fulcrum has shifted decidedly to the right. The fact that French has earned his extremist bona fides entirely through his opposition to LGBT rights does give one pause; the biblically inclined might be reminded of the sacrificial lamb.
Swearing by Superman There’s a new gay congressman in town (Washington, DC, that is), and he’s already distinguished himself in another way by being sworn in, not on a Bible, but on a comic book! There were actually three items under hand when Robert Garcia took the oath of office: an original Superman #1 comic from 1939, a photo of his parents, and a copy of his citizenship certificate. Garcia stressed the importance of these items, noting that both parents died of Covid in 2020 and describing his travails after leaving Peru at age five and growing up in Southern California. Suffice it to say, his vintage comic collection is something he takes very seriously. How all this intersects with being gay is unclear, though some people will undoubtedly try to make something of it. In rejecting the Bible, Garcia was passing on the book that’s been the justification for so much anti-gay hatred. And the choice of a comic book to replace it—the substitution of low culture for high—is pretty much the definition of Camp.
Breaking News The story accretes from day to day, so anything we say about Congressman (for now) George Santos will seem quaint by the time you read this. At this writing we’re learning that he once had a drag act in Brazil, a story he’s denied (kind of), but there are photos to prove that “Kitara Ravache” existed. And while pageant queens are expected to assume a fake name, Santos would go on to invent many identities with which to defraud customers, employers, or voters. What’s remarkable is the sheer number of scams and deceits that he devised and juggled. (How did he keep track?) One searches for an organizing principle that unites his claims of descending from Holocaust survivors, being a volleyball star at Baruch College, working for Goldman Sachs, employing four people who died in the Pulse Nightclub massacre, and on and on.
Doubtless crimes were committed, but so much of what Santos claimed seem like the tall tales of a bullshit artist. Bloggers have joined the parlor game of diagnosing his personality disorder, and clearly he has one, but it’s also possible to see him as a creature of social media culture gone mad. The various aliases all started out as avatars to which he attributed fabulous deeds and ancestry. His mistake was running for political office—something that could also be said for Donald Trump or anyone who has a lot of skeletons. You can create all the trolls and profiles that you want on-line, but eventually you may have to make an appearance IRL, as when you run for public office. If there’s a psychological disorder at work, it may be that—like some unknown percentage of today’s TikTok celebs—Santos came to believe that identities in the real world could be created and managed as easily as those in the virtual one. Alas, we only have one physical body to work with.
Alternatives to The Pill A woman claiming that she became a lesbian after she stopped taking birth control pills became a TikTok sensation when her story struck a chord for many women. This is big news if her case is typical, as it would mean that one side effect of the pill is heterosexuality! The report set off a conversation about the hormonal changes caused by the pill and whether they could alter one’s sexual orientation. Various theories came into play: the effect of returning to natural levels of progesterone and estrogen; a change in pheromone response to male and female scents; certain changes in “mental health.” They all sound plausible enough, but is it not possible (one’s inner economist is asking) that going off the pill, by putting pregnancy back on the table, simply alters the calculus of sex with men for some women? This effect could still be the work of hormones, which could apply some ancient brakes on the lure of procreative sex, an epigenetic switch that causes one to look at other women in a whole new way.
