It seems that Canadian Tory PM Stephen Harper is a pragmatist, not a dogmatist, preferring to guy his social conservative heartland over issues that he knows that he can win. Apparently, rehashing Canada’s abortion debate isn’t one of them, according to the Globe and Mail.
Harper stated that he was a fiscal conservative first and foremost, […]

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Muriel Newman seems oblivious to the exclusion of Bruce Logan from most mainstream New Zealand media outlets due to the plagiarism incident that resulted in his retirement from the Maxim Institute two years or so ago.  Let me remedy that.
As one might guess from his time editing Cutting Edge in the nineties, and Evidence for […]

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A further fundamentalist televangelist sex scandal has emerged in the United States, involving one Tony Alamo (74), who runs an outfit in Fouke and Alma, Arkansas, named Tony Alamo Ministries.
Alamo is a Romanian- Jewish convert. Born in Missouri, he pursued a musical career, before being arrested on a minor firearms charge, and then converted to […]

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Sarah Palin has been defended by US Republicans who are trying to paint opposition to her vice-presidential candidacy as sexism- never mind that Palin is a hardcore anti-abortionist and gun lobby supporter, who believes in so-called ‘reparative therapy’ for lesbians and gays. Well, they can’t pretend she’s normal any more…
According to news stories about her […]

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Queensland took a long-overdue step into the twenty first century yesterday when right-wing gun lobbyist and homophobe Ron Owen was found guilty of inciting hatred against lesbians and gay men in his native town, Gympie.
Owen was fined $A12,500, to be paid to three of the four lesbian and bisexual complainants, and he would also be […]

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In the Journal of Pacific History, Christine Stewart has written an intriguing piece about gay sex and attitudes toward it in Papua New Guinea, which was administered by Australia until 1975.
In 1972, that was still in the future. Copper mining, secondary and higher education, new employment opportunities and mass media, were all altering the traditional […]

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I came across a fascinating article in BBC History, a magazine associated with the broadcasters BBC4 highbrow channel. In it was a look back at how medieval Europeans would have seen the world around them. Hence the irreverent title.
In medieval England, life expectancy was rather short. Maternal mortality was commonplace, as was infant mortality, death […]

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In this month’s UK Gay Times, Tim Teeman has an amusing piece on the ’self-help’ industry, that form of personalised psychotherapy that tries to teach you to assert yourself in order to become healthy, wealthy, better educated and in possession of better social skills.
Teeman argues that all this relentless self-improvement is not good for broader […]

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John Key argues that it is now time that we should shelve the issues of the past, as they are mostly in either adjudication or active policy development, and get on with our lives. It’s time that we stopped fighting the battles of twenty to thirty years ago, he argues.
Sorry, I am unconvinced by Mr […]

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“Stop it! Stop it! No more nudes!!   Stop it! Stop it! Crude and lewd!!” Will Kapiti Coast be beset by bellowing bigots if they grin and bare it on the beaches this Summer?
The Kapiti Coast District Council’s regulatory management committee has just ruled to allow nude bathing and fishing (???) on its beaches. This apparently […]

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