Robert Skolrood: “Douglas Martin, Robert Skolrood, 79, Argued Religion Cases. Skolrood was an attorney who represented right-wing religious groups:

• He was the executive director of the National Legal Foundation, started by Pat Robertson in 1985;
• Represented “Bridget Mergens, a high school senior in Omaha whose proposal to start an after-schoo Bible class was rejected by her principal. In 1990, the United States Supreme Court ruled that if groups started by and led by students were permitted, religious groups could not be excluded.” (This ruling, in and of itself, seems reasonable).
• In 1987, Skolrood persuaded a “federal district court judge to ban 44 books from Alabama public schools on the ground that they promoted agodless, humanistic religion. The ruling, reversed on appeal, put ’secular humanism’ on the same constitutional footing as conventional religions.” Got that? Atheism and agnosticism are actually religions, even though they definie themselves, essentially, as non-religions.
• Skolrood was active in a number of efforts to prevent gay people from receiving equal protection.

The general rule in journalism, or so I’ve always understood it this way, is that the most important details are reported, or referred to, in the beginning of the piece. But in graf 17 another dimension of Skolrood’s life is revealed to us:

In 1980, he moved to Tulsa, Okla., to teach at Oral Roberts University Law School. After a year of teaching, he became Mr. Roberts’s personal lawyer. He left in 1985 to go to Virginia Beach to help start the National Legal Foundation.

In 2002, when he was semi-retired, Mr. Skolrood was arrested on charges of uttering obscenities and making sexual advances toward a male undercover police officer at an overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway. He denied all the charges at a trial before a federal magistrate in Roanoke, Va., but he pleaded no contest to disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor, and paid a $125 fine.

So - at least from the Times’ account of his life, here’s a man who spent a lot of his time making life difficult for gay people at the same time he was having sex with other men on the down low.

On the other hand, the Right Reverend Paul Moore, Jr. has just been outed by Honor Moore, the oldest of his nine children. For at least the last decades of his life Moore had a hidden gay existence.S So, on the front page of the section is this article by Paul Vitello, “A Bishop Unveiled God’s Secrets While Keeping His Own,” about Honor Moore’s article in the The New Yorker.

Link to Honor Moore’s article in The New Yorker here; link to audio interview here.

What these men had in common was a closeted gay life. Moore eventually told his second wife, who told his nine children. We don’t know who Skolrod confided in.

But we can tell you a little bit more about Paul Moore. From the Wikipedia entry:

Paul Moore, Jr., was a graduate of St. Paul’s School and Yale University, where, like his father before him, he was a member of Wolf’s Head, a secret society at Yale College.He left Yale to join the Marine Corps. He was a highly decorated Marine Corps captain, a veteran of the Guadalcanal Campaign during World War Two earning the Navy Cross, a Silver Star and a Purple Heart [1]. Returning home after the War, Moore was ordained in 1949 after graduating from the General Theological Seminary in New York City. He was then named rector of Grace van Vorst Church, an inner city parish in Jersey City, New Jersey, where he served from 1949 to 1957. There he began his career as a social activist, protesting inner city housing conditions and racial discrimination. He and his colleagues reinvigorated their inner city parish and were celebrated in the Church for their efforts. In 1957, he was named Dean of Christ Church Cathedral in Indianapolis, where he served until his appointment as Suffragan Bishop of Washington, D.C., in 1964. During his time in Washington he became nationally known as an advocate for civil rights and an opponent of the Vietnam War. He knew Martin Luther King, Jr., and marched with him in Selma and elsewhere. In 1970, he was named as coadjutor and successor to Bishop Horace Donegan in New York City. He was installed as Bishop of the Diocese of New York in 1972 and held that position until 1989.

Bishop Moore was widely known for his liberal activism. Throughout his career he spoke out against homelessness and racism. He was an effective advocate for cities, once calling the corporations abandoning New York “rats leaving a sinking ship.” He was the first Episcopal bishop to ordain an openly homosexual woman as a priest in the church. In his book, Take a Bishop Like Me (1979), he defended his position by arguing that many priests were homosexuals but few with the courage to acknowledge it. His liberal political views were coupled with fierce traditionalism when it came to the liturgy and even the creed. In his writings and sermons he sometimes described himself as ‘born again’, referring to his awakening to a fervent Christocentric faith as a boarding school student.

By birth, by inherited wealth, by friendships and career success, Bishop Moore was an acknowledged member of what was often called ‘the Liberal Establishment’, a group that included, among others, Kingman Brewster and Cyrus Vance, along with many other graduates of Yale College. He wrote three books, The Church Reclaims the City (1965), Take a Bishop Like Me (1979), and, after his retirement, Presences: A Bishop’s Life in the City (1997), a memoir of his life.

In 1944, while in the Marine Corps, Bishop Moore married Jenny McKean, a daughter of Bohemian privilege reared on the North Shore of Boston and educated at Madeira School, Vassar College and Barnard. (Her mother was Margarett Sargent McKean, a noted painter in the Ashcan School and a follower of George Luks.) Together they had nine children (and, at his death, many grandchildren). Jenny McKean Moore published a well reviewed account of their decade together in the slums of Jersey City under the title, The People on Second Street (1968). During that time the family lived in the tenement-like rectory of Grace van Vorst Church on Second Street in Jersey City (now called in his honor, Bishop Paul Moore Place).

There were photos of Emmet holding a stray puppy his platoon had adopted, of his teammates loaded with 40 pounds of hand grenades in specially equipped vests, of the crew arrayed around the Stryker vehicle, the soon-to-be-dead platoon leader at the edge of the shot. Nothing remotely Abu Ghraib worthy, to my immediate relief.

And yet Emmet’s stories kept coming, about cars rushing toward the convoy, no way to tell if they were carrying bombs or if the driver was just plain scared. About swooping in on houses via Blackhawk in the middle of the night with only the most rudimentary language skills to help the soldiers find weapons, and physical force to fill in where words couldn’t. About women holding dead children in the street, little more Emmet’s team members could do but bandage wounds and stare with stricken faces.

Excerpts here.

Entire SF Chronicle  article (in two parts: Part I here, and Part II here).

Why non-believers don’t have integrity or character (from today’s Times):

“If integrity and character are divorced from God, they don’t make sense,” he writes in his book, with John Perry, “Character Makes a Difference” (B&H Publishing Group, 2007). “Integrity, left to define itself, becomes evil because everyone ends up choosing his own standards.”

“Charming and Aloof, Huckabee Changed State,” by Adam Nossiter and David Barstow

I’m so relieved. Now we can all go back to being amoral. And, in a nod to Dickens, Huckabee thinks conditions at Guantanamo are too cushy:

 ”The inmates there were getting a whole lot better treatment than my prisoners in Arkansas. In fact, we left saying, ‘I hope our guys don’t see this. They’ll all want to be transferred to Guantanamo. If anything, it’s too nice.”

Paul Vitello, “Where’s the Gruel?,” The New York Times, December 22nd, 2007, page A21 column 5. Oddly missing from the on-line editions.

A Timeline of Imagery Firsts at MaxPower

Timeline of Imagery Firsts at MaxPower.

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Via Strange Ink.

He’s also got some outgoing links that held our attention:

Night Charm

Dog Poet  this man’s dog is so cute that it beggars description

The Ninth Circle of Helen (”Helen Damnation,’  which seems to be based in Brooklyn.

Moveable Type, a new permanent art installation in the lobby of the New York Times is the ultimate in real and virtual news. Created by artist Ben Rubin and UCLA professor/statistician Mark Hansen, 560 vacuum-fluorescent display screens mounted on 2 walls use statistical methods and natural-language processing algorithms to parse the daily output of the paper (news, features, editorials) and the archives, as well as the activity of visitors to the paper’s website, browsing, searching, commenting etc. Watch a Video of the installation, read more from Flowing Data, check out a few more shots of the installation.

Many of the people who I spoke with were professors who taught sexually or researched aspects of sexuality in a university setting, and several of them were interested in our films, either for use in their classrooms, or in their experiments. This included a professor from an Oklahoma university, who himself was at the conference to present a paper on BDSM. “I’d really love to use your films in my class, but penetration is illegal in Oklahoma.” This is the second time in a month that I’ve heard this. The first time was last month at a trade-show in Las Vegas. A woman who owns a lingerie shop was at our booth, delighted by what she saw. “Do your films have penetration?” she asked. “Of course they do. Our films are about sex.” “Oh, then I can’t carry them. Penetration is illegal in Oklahoma. If you stick your tongue in someone’s ear and it’s sexual, it’s illegal in Oklahoma.” Of course this is nonsense. Legislators in Oklahoma can no more outlaw the photographic depiction of sexual penetration than they can outlaw the photographic depiction of blue shirts. Yet apparently they have. There is variety of expression not seen as worthy of First Amendment protection – obscenity. Throughout the Twentieth Century, what is and is not obscenity has been the subject of a number of Supreme Court decisions, the last being the 1973 case of Miller v. California. With regard to what sort of sexually explicit expression is not protected by the First Amendment, Miller v. California ((http://www.oyez.org/cases/1970-1979/1971/1971_70_73/; Wikipedia entry here)) is the law of the land, and defines obscenity by a three-pronged test. A work is considered obscene, and therefore may be suppressed by the government if: The average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest And The work depicts/describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law. And The work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, and scientific value. What that means is that if a jury decides the answer to any one of these three questions is “no”, then the work is not obscene, and if it’s not obscene than the state of Oklahoma has no power to suppress the distribution of the work. In theory. In practice, the threat of an obscenity prosecution is enough to prevent work from being seen, even films recently described as, “Perhaps the most cinematic and pro-social depictions of sexual behavior ever produced.” (You gotta love how sex scientists talk!) The simple fact is that the Oklahoma professor I talked to this weekend is afraid that if he uses our films in his classroom, he’ll go to jail. The Oklahoma shopkeeper we talked to is afraid that if she offers our films to her customers she’ll go to jail. And that fear is enough to keep people from seeing our films in the Sooner State.

Tony Comstock’s Blog: When Penetration is Illegal in Oklahoma, Oklahomans Get Fucked

I’ve been looking through Oklahoma statutes - and haven’t found the relevant “penetration” provision. But here are provisions which are a bit disturbing:

Oklahoma Statutes, Title 21, Crimes and Punishments, §21-1024.1. Definitions

[(A) defines child pornography (B) essentially recites the Miller test, with a few details to make it even easier for prosecutors]

B. As used in Sections 1021 through 1024.4 and Sections 1040.8 through 1040.24 of this title:

1. “Obscene material” means and includes any representation, performance, depiction or description of sexual conduct, whether in any form or medium including still photographs, undeveloped photographs, motion pictures, undeveloped film, videotape, CD-ROM, magnetic disk memory, magnetic tape memory or a purely photographic product or a reproduction of such product in any book, pamphlet, magazine, or other publication, if said items contain the following elements:

a. depictions or descriptions of sexual conduct which are patently offensive as found by the average person applying contemporary community standards,

b. taken as a whole, have as the dominant theme an appeal to prurient interest in sex as found by the average person applying contemporary community standards, and

c. a reasonable person would find the material or performance taken as a whole lacks serious literary, artistic, educational, political, or scientific purposes or value.

The standard for obscenity applied in this section shall not apply to child pornography;

2. “Performance” means and includes any display, live or recorded, in any form or medium;

3. “Sexual conduct” means and includes any of the following:

a. acts of sexual intercourse including any intercourse which is normal or perverted, actual or simulated,

b. acts of deviate sexual conduct, including oral and anal sodomy,

c. acts of masturbation,

d. acts of sadomasochistic abuse including but not limited to:

(1) flagellation or torture by or upon any person who is nude or clad in undergarments or in a costume which is of a revealing nature, or

(2) the condition of being fettered, bound, or otherwise physically restrained on the part of one who is nude or so clothed,

e. acts of excretion in a sexual context, or

f. acts of exhibiting human genitals or pubic areas ….

Particularly disturbing is (B) (4), which essentially makes defines child pornography as that which a police officers reacts to as child pornography: From Oklahoma Statutes, Article 21, §1024.1 (B)(4):

“Explicit child pornography” means material which a law enforcement officer can immediately identify upon first viewing without hesitation as child pornography.

In other words - if the government says it’s bad -it’s bad.

The notion of “penetration” as the test - which two reasonable people described to Tony Comstock - sounds like a layperson’s distillation of cautious legal advice in this sort of environment: don’t.

An obvious constitutional problem with Miller is this: by definition, a “community standard” allows a majority to decide what’s acceptable for minorities - this sort of system lets majorities - or powerful minorities - make cultural choices for the rest of the population - with liberty and rights of citizenship at risk.

Oklahoma lyrics (Rodgers & Hammerstein) here.