The Tea Party we were told is only about economics; not true. It was always about economics and social issues. They just hid the social issues and now we just see who they really are.

When you fuse Christianity with power, it isn't long before Christians start imposing the cross on others rather than taking it up for themselves.

That's what torture does: it creates a miasma of unknowing, about as dangerous a situation in wartime as one can imagine. This hideous fate was made possible by an inexperienced president with a fundamentalist psyche and a paranoid and power-hungry vice-president who decided to embrace "the dark side" almost as soon as the second tower fell, and who is still trying to avenge Nixon. Until they are both gone from office, we are in grave danger the kind of danger that only torturers and fantasists and a security strategy based on coerced evidence can conjure up.

My own early crusade for same-sex marriage, for example, is now mainstream gay politics. It wasn't when I started.

What's great about it is that you see, the great struggle for gay people is that the politics is just not going to work for us.

In academia, left-liberalism is so entrenched its advocates' debating skills have gone rusty. When you've been talking to yourself for decades and imposing speech codes on everyone else, your ability to argue coherently - let alone entertainingly - inevitably wanes.

What gay culture is before it is anything else, before it is a culture of desire or a culture of subversion or a culture of pain, is a culture of friendship.