According to 365Gay.com, the gay pride celebration at the Department of Justice will be allowed to happen after all. I bet there are some angry fundies out there.

Culture reminder: The Museum Mile Festival is today from 6-9. All of the museums from 82nd Street to 104th Street along Fifth Avenue have free admission, plus the avenue itself is closed to traffic and has bands, entertainment, etc.

The NY Times has a few more interesting details:

“The president believes everybody ought to be treated with dignity and respect, but he does not believe we should be politicizing people’s sexual orientation,” said Scott McClellan, a White House spokesman.

…

Mr. Ashcroft, socially conservative and deeply religious, was known for his strong views against homosexuality during his days in the Senate. He said then that he considered homosexuality a sin, and he opposed legislation to protect gays.

But in his confirmation hearings in 2001, he pledged not to tolerate discrimination against gays in the Justice Department. Critics said today that the decision to bar the gay pride event amounted to his backpedaling.

Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, said in a statement today that he had asked Mr. Ashcroft before confirmation about DOJ Pride’s use of government facilities. Mr. Ashcroft said then that he had “no intent to treat this group differently than any other.”

Regarding Bush’s “not politicizing sexual orientation”, I refer you to my earlier post on queers and the GOP.

On a similar point, I’m always annoyed by people who think a gay man in the office who puts a photo of his lover on his desk is “flaunting his sexual orientation.” I was reminded of it when I saw this photo of Blanche Lincoln, a Senator from Arkansas, in the Times:

Doug Mills/ The New York Times
Senator Blanche Lincoln has a photograph of her twin sons, Reece and Bennet, 7, on her desk, facing visitors.

The original photo in the print edition showed about 5 such photos of her husband and children in a row at the front of her desk.

I found this cool site, Exactitudes, via Witold Riedel. The description:

Rotterdam-based photographer Ari Versluis and stylist Ellie Uyttenbroek have worked together since October 1994. Inspired by a shared interest in the striking dress codes of various social groups, they have systematically documented numerous identities over the last 8 years. Rotterdam’s heterogeneous, multicultural street scene remains a major source of inspiration for Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek, although since 1998 they have also worked in cities abroad.

They call their series Exactitudes: a contraction of exact and attitude. By registering their subjects in an identical framework, with similar poses and a strictly observed dress code, Versluis and Uyttenbroek provide an almost scientific, anthropological record of people’s attempts to distinguish themselves from others by assuming a group identity. The apparent contradiction between individuality and uniformity is, however, taken to such extremes in their arresting objective-looking photographic viewpoint and stylistic analysis that the artistic aspect clearly dominates the purely documentary element.

Apparently, the lifestyle choice of being Christian and having prayer meetings at the Department of Justice is OK, but having an event for Gay Pride Month is not:

The Justice Department has barred a group of employees from holding their annual gay pride event at the department’s headquarters, the first time such an event has been blocked by any federal agency, gay rights leaders said yesterday.

Justice Department officials told the group, called DOJ Pride, that they could not hold their annual event this month at the department’s Great Hall because the White House had not formally recognized Gay Pride Month with a presidential proclamation, said Marina Colby, a Justice Department policy analyst who is president of the group, which represents several hundred gay and lesbian department employees.

“This sends a real chilling message to Justice Department employees who are gay and lesbian,” said David Smith, a spokesman for Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest gay advocacy group.

“This says, ’You’re not welcome,’ " Smith said. “It says that employees can celebrate Asian American heritage month, and Hispanic heritage month and so on, but you cannot.”

Barbara Comstock, spokeswoman for the Justice Department, declined to comment.

The gay pride event has been an annual tradition at the Justice Department since about 1997, organizers said, and many other federal agencies have held similar events since the mid-1990s, when President Clinton first declared a Gay Pride Month.

Check out the photo of Glenn on the web site of photographer Melanie Grizzell.

The Baghdad Blogger, Salam Pax, who also happens to be gay, now has a fortnightly column in the Guardian. There is an article by freelance journalist Peter Maass in Slate about him discovering his interpreter was the world-famous blogger.

Peter Maass wrote a very powerful article in April for the NY Times Magazine about being with the Third Battalion as it entered Baghdad — killing all in its path, civilian and otherwise.

I’ve been terribly remiss! Get Your War On episodes twenty-four and twenty-five are available.

From The Guardian, via Ruminate This.

The US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz – who has already undermined Tony Blair’s position over weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by describing them as a “bureaucratic” excuse for war – has now gone further by claiming the real motive was that Iraq is “swimming” in oil.

The latest comments were made by Mr Wolfowitz in an address to delegates at an Asian security summit in Singapore at the weekend, and reported today by German newspapers Der Tagesspiegel and Die Welt.

Asked why a nuclear power such as North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found, the deputy defence minister said: “Let’s look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil.”

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UPDATED: The Guardian has issued a correction on this:

A report which was posted on our website on June 4 under the heading “Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil” misconstrued remarks made by the US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, making it appear that he had said that oil was the main reason for going to war in Iraq. He did not say that. He said, according to the Department of Defence website, “The … difference between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq.” The sense was clearly that the US had no economic options by means of which to achieve its objectives, not that the economic value of the oil motivated the war. The report appeared only on the website and has now been removed.

Thanks to Matt Stoller for pointing this out.

I think Hillary Clinton is a secret double agent for the Republicans. It’s the only explanation that makes sense. I’ve written before about how she’s no friend of homos, and the NY Times has written about how much she’s being attacked from the left. In that article, we learn the charming fact that she’s afraid to meet with the family of Barry Winchell, a gay soldier who was beaten to death with a baseball bat as he slept in his cot. The Senate Armed Services Committee, of which Hillary is a member, has decided to hold a closed door session on the promotion of Major General Robert T. Clark to Lieutenant General. MG Clark is former Commanding General of Fort Campbell, where Winchell was murdered in 1999 by fellow soldiers. Targeted because he was believed to be gay, PFC Winchell endured constant anti-gay harassment in the months leading up to his murder.

Now, as the media could be talking about the mass deception involving weapons of mass destruction that Iraq doesn’t seem to have had, instead we are treated to a repraisal of the blowjob scandal that nearly led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment, thanks to the release of her new memoir. While doing very little of use to New York or anyone else, Hillary has managed to find time to write a memoir. Its release gives the press another chance to remind us that lying about sex is an impeachable offense, but the treason of lying about weapons to start a war to distract us from the corporate scandals of Enron and Worldcom is just business as usual.

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Updated: I left out the fact that the GOP uses the threat of Hillary becoming President in its fundraising letters.