Reductio ad Hysterium A seventeen-year-old boy in North Carolina is facing ten years in prison after being charged as an adult for possessing sexually explicit photos of a minor—himself! The case stems from the arrest of Cormega Copening (name released by police despite his age) for exchanging “sext” messages with his sixteen-year-old girlfriend. But when police discovered the selfies with forbidden zones on Copening’s phone, he was slapped with three more felony charges, each carrying a penalty of two years in prison. Okay, so let’s get this straight. You can go around all day owning these body parts, occasionally taking them out for bodily functions, showering, dressing, etc., but you’re not allowed to own a picture of these same regions of your own body? So, can you also get arrested for looking at your naked self in the mirror?
File Under When These Things Write Themselves Could this be one of those times when one segment of the population can only see something hilarious, while another (the majority?) can’t see it at all? The image went viral on the social media for those in on the joke, but the double entendre was apparently missed by the editors at Rightwing.com. Which brings us to another thing we learned today: There’s a website called Rightwing.com! And it’s very popular! Now we know.
Little Ditty ’bout two politicians in the heartland. Rep. Todd Courser and Rep. Cindy Gamrat are both members of the Michigan House. Both are married with children, both are Republicans, and both have taken an especially vocal stand against gay marriage. For example, the two reps jointly proposed a bill to require all Michigan marriage certificates to be signed by an ordained clergyman (seriously). Oh, and they’re having an illicit affair. As reported by The Detroit News, things started to unravel last spring when rumors of the affair surfaced, at which point Courser cooked up a novel scheme. Reasoning that a gay fling would be seen as far worse than the actual one, he ordered an aide named Ben Graham to start a rumor that he, Courser, had been caught having sex with a man in a Lansing nightclub—with lots of sordid details. Graham declined the gambit for as long as he could, and before being fired he managed to record Courser trying to explain the need for the rumor to his staff: “It will make anything else that comes out after that—that isn’t a video—mundane, tame by comparison.” This, he said, would “inoculate the herd” against revelations about the Gamrat affair. Needless to say, once the scheme got out, Courser was exposed not just as a rogue but as an idiot. On September 11, he resigned, and Gamrat was expelled, from the Michigan House.
Two Steps Back It was a sad day when Rentboy.com went dark, because … let us count the ways. The website was performing a public service, no one was getting hurt, and it had been operating for years. When the Feds shut it down in August, the GLBT press was duly alarmed and vocal. What’s amazing is who else rushed to defend this sexually explicit website devoted to a type of transaction that’s still illegal in 49 states. For starters, The New York Times, which ran a lead editorial on August 29th denouncing the raid. The piece pointed out how strange it is for the Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) to have taken an interest in Rentboy, as if men paying men for sex were a matter of national security, and it pointed to the weird prurience of the complaint, written by agent Susan Ruiz, who obsessed over “sex slings” and “twinks.” The Atlantic pointed out that “no evidence was presented that Rentboy.com has even a single victim” and reminded us that seven people were hauled off and face long trials. The fact that Rentboy was a gay website, and the suggestion that its users constitute a security threat, reminds us of the McCarthy era of the 1950s, only now the gays aren’t seen as communists but instead as potential terrorists. This is progress?
Political Machinery We can’t avoid the biggest gay story of the season, the refusal of county clerk Kim Davis of Kentucky to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. It was widely covered in the media—the refusal, the court order, days in jail and release, visits from Republican politicians (Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz) for photo ops with the clerk, now a hero of the religious Right. The fact that Davis turned out to be something less than a poster girl for Christian values was well-publicized, too. U.S. News noted: “Davis divorced three times, first in 1994, then 2006, and again in 2008. She gave birth to twins five months after divorcing her first husband. They were fathered by her third husband but adopted by her second. Davis worked at the clerk’s office at the time of each divorce and has since remarried.” You got all that? And yet, right-wing talk-show hosts praised Davis as “an American hero” and compared her to Rosa Parks! It doesn’t matter that she’s fighting a losing battle; on the contrary, it makes her a hero of the Lost Cause, which today means celebrity and big bucks. So watch for Kim as she starts turning up (and cleaning up) on speaking tours and conservative media outlets. The dirty laundry will only serve to boost her speaking fee.
Up in the Air “We cannot stop looking at this new Delta ad,” declared the headline of a clever piece by Andrew Richdale, senior editor of Afar.com. We surely don’t need to convince readers of this magazine that these guys are probably not co-workers on a business trip. Richdale sees two strangers meeting on a flight at “cruising altitude” and wonders where they’re flying to. Palm Springs, perhaps? He admits that the ad worked for him—“I do want it all!”—and he’s just upgraded to Economy Comfort+. Proving once again that it pays to advertise.
