NEWS: The Doubt Of Dawkins, Ageless Madge, Hip-Hop Improves, Brian Brown's A Jerk (VIDEO)

 Playboy's Chip Rowe's excellent interview with Richard Dawkins.

  In California, kids will soon be protected from "reparative therapy" -- but aren't their parents churches often just as dangerous?

  For legal purposes, Arizonians may be pregnant up to two weeks before conception. 

  Lynyrd Skynyrd bails on RNC.

  The best bit of political writing last week came from Gawker, and included these lovely lines:

It's a pernicious bit of false piety in America to assume that wealth confers goodness and goodness wealth; that the two evidence an indivisible value to anything other than profit. Asking how Romney became wealthy and how he manages wealth transgresses nothing. It is not an unreasonable intrusion or a heretical line of inquiry. There is not and will never be a minimum number of zeroes to your net worth that confers either absolution or immunity.

  Last week, the nutso Gambian President Yahya Jammeh, who claims to cure AIDS with magic and wants to chop off gay people's heads, pledged to execute all his country's death row inmates before September.

  It seems nine death row inmates have been executed so far. The EU responds:

"I strongly condemn the executions which have reportedly taken place on Thursday 23 August 2012, following President Jammeh's stated intention to carry out all death penalties before mid-September," EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton said in a statement.

"I demand the immediate halt of the executions," she added.

The European Union has previously condemned death sentences passed in Gambia, but Sunday's statement went further by indicating that action might follow.

"In light of these executions, the European Union will urgently consider an appropriate response," 

  Brian Brown's "civil" description of those GOP legislators who voted for marriage equality in New York: "Slippery" "slithery" "traitors."

  Hip-hop's long journey to acceptance:

"People are learning how to live and get along more, and accept people for who they are and not bash them or hurt them because they're different," Snoop Dogg said in a recent interview ... 

"When I was growing up, you could never do that and announce that," Snoop said of [Frank Ocean's recent public acknowledgment of his homosexuality]. "There would be so much scrutiny and hate and negativity, and no one would step (forward) to support you because that's what we were brainwashed and trained to know."

  FOX News correspondent thinks Neil Armstrong's death provides an excellent opportunity to attack Barack Obama. 

  Madonna has been singing "Holiday" for a really long time. How long? Watch AFTER THE JUMP ...

 

France Almost Certain To Adopt Marriage Equality

In an address on Saturday to fellow members of his Socialist Party, French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said: 

In October, we will send a bill to the National Assembly and the Senate to allow same-sex couples to marry. It would also allow them to form families and adopt children.

In so stating, Prime Minister Ayrault keeps a promise made by President Francois Hollande, who's stumped for full marriage equality since his run against Nicholas Sarkozy. (Sarkozy never did support full equality, even when trying to woo back the gays he'd lost to Hollande.) And he's keeping that promise ahead of schedule: Marriage, said Hollande during the campaign, would be a priority of his government in 2013.

With the Socialist president and Socialist prime minister in agreement, a bill legislating marriage equality will pass to the National Assembly and the Senate. The former's controlled by the Socialists. The latter has a left-wing majority. Paris is about to get a lot more romantic.

Extraordinary Student Film About Augmented Reality: VIDEO

You've heard that "augmented reality" is the coming thing? (In April, Andy posted a slick demo video on the potential uses of Google's extremely cool augmented reality glasses prototype.) Well -- two film students at Jerusalem's Belazeal Academy of Arts, Eran May-Raz and Daniel Lazo, have taken it as the subject of their graduation project, and come up with the following, very impressive student film.

Their vision of humanity's technofuture is pretty grim, but their filmic abilities are delightful. That amateurs can put something this advanced, this slickly CGI'd on film convinces me: We're living in the future. Watch, AFTER THE JUMP ...  

 

Building The War Chest For Marriage Equality In Maryland

Last week, Marylanders for Marriage Equality announced an almost impossibly star-studded fundraising banquet to be held on September 13th. The guest list: Susan Sarandon, Sean Avery, Barbara Bush, Josh Charles, Thom Browne, Andy Cohen, Tom Colicchio, Julianne Moore, Edward Norton, Hilary Rhoda, Russell Simmons, John Waters, Sarah Jessica Parker, Julianna Margulies, Keith Lieberthall, Cornelia Guest, Kathleen Keener, Paul Boskind, Tonio Burgos, Brian Ellner, Ryan Greenwalt, Charles Myers, Ken Mehlman, Charles John O'Byrne, Larry Poston, David Rabin, Johnny Swet, and Maryland's Governor Martin O'Malley (pictured right). Wow!

The banquet's venue isn't in Maryland, probably because it's easier to move the banquet to its various VIPs than to move all the VIPs to Maryland. It's in SoHo, in Manhattan: the extraordinary James Hotel. Tix run from $250 a head to $25,000 for a top-shelf sponsorship package.

In November, Maryland may become the first state in the country to affirm marriage equality in a ballot referendum. Along with Maine and Washington, it'll be the first state to put marriage to the vote since Barack Obama and the NAACP came out in favor of equality. From the New York Times:

"The two biggest factors for us this year are that it’s 2012, and public attitudes have continued to evolve,” said Josh Levin, the director of Marylanders for Marriage Equality. “When the president talked about how his position has evolved over the course of some years, there are a lot of people for whom that’s the case.”

The ballot language will also be different in Maryland. In the other 32 states where voters have been asked about the issue, the referendum question was phrased so that a vote in favor of the measure was a vote to reject same-sex marriage. In Maryland, ballots will ask the question in the affirmative and will explain that there will be an exemption for religious groups.

Anti-Gay Maryland Lawmaker Drunkenly Injures Four Children

Don H. Dwyer, Jr., a gay-bashing Republican delegate from Maryland, got drunk last Friday on his motorboat. At approximately 7 p.m, while cruising the Magothy River with a friend, the wasted Del. Dwyer crashed his boat into a smaller craft full of children. Four of them were injured. From the Gay Star News:

Four of the children were injured with one, a five year old girl, taken by helicopter to Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Children’s Center.

Two adults on the boat were unharmed.

The smash was so severe that Dwyer’s boat sunk in the river.

Dwyer later admitted to having a blood alcohol level of 0.2 – twice the legal limit.

‘It is true that I was drinking while operating my boat,’ Dwyer told a press conference outside the Maryland Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore where he is being treated.

Del. Dwyer has argued in the past that marriage equality would be injurious to those children raised by same-sex couples, and he has attempted to impeach Maryland's Attorney General, Douglas Gansler, over Mr. Gansler's opinion that Maryland would recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere.

As the Gay Star News notes, Del. Dwyer this year supported a law that would strip public officials of their titles if they are found guilty of "serious" crimes. That measure shall be put to the ballot in November. But why wait? If Del. Dwyer has the strength of his convictions, he'll know what to do. 

 

Mormon-Owned Station Won't Air 'The New Normal'

KSL-TV is a Salt Lake City-based NBC affiliate, owned and operated by a company called Bonneville International. Bonneville, in turn, is owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Which is why KSL-TV won't air NBC's new series The New Normal, about two gay dads, their surrogate, and their kid.

From the Salt Lake City Tribune:

"From time to time we may struggle with content that crosses the line in one area or another," said Jeff Simpson, CEO of KSL’s parent company, Bonneville International. "The dialogue might be excessively rude and crude. The scenes may be too explicit or the characterizations might seem offensive ... For our brand, this program feels inappropriate on several dimensions, especially during family viewing time."

Simpson, of course, doesn't explain why the show's inappropriate. Is he worried it'll be pornographic? That it'll depict religious people in a negative light? Or that it will depict gay people as people?

A competing station in Salt Lake City -- channel 30, KUCW-TV -- has announced plans to air The New Normal on weekends. In the non-Salt Lake City market, The New Normal premiers Tuesday night.