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.
Andrew SullivanI believe in the pursuit of happiness. Not its attainment, nor its final definition, but its pursuit. I believe in the journey, not the arrival; in conversation, not monologues; in multiple questions rather than any single answer. I believe in the struggle to remake ourselves and challenge each other in the spirit of eternal forgiveness, in the awareness that none of us knows for sure what happiness truly is, but each of us knows the imperative to keep searching. I believe in the possibility of surprising joy, of serenity through pain, of homecoming through exile.
Andrew SullivanThe first person I came out to was God. And the first conversation I ever had with anybody was in prayer.
Andrew SullivanNot many people sleep with other men and when the other man leaves have a nervous breakdown.
Andrew SullivanIt's only because you can now watch cheerfully biased Fox News that you begin to realize how cheerlessly biased CNN really is - and always was. Or CBS. Or ABC. Or the BBC.
Andrew SullivanI like the pluralism of modernity; it doesn't threaten me or my faith. And if one's faith is dependent on being reinforced in every aspect of other people's lives, then it is a rather insecure faith, don't you think?
Andrew SullivanI think there were two great gay Americans obviously, and that was Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman.
Andrew SullivanWhen you fuse Christianity with power, it isn't long before Christians start imposing the cross on others rather than taking it up for themselves.
Andrew SullivanI must say that the Katrina response does help me better understand the situation in Iraq. The best bet is that the president doesn't actually know what's happening there, is cocooned from reality, has no one in his high-level staff able to tell him what's actually happening, and has created a culture of denial and loyalty that makes fixing mistakes or holding people accountable all but impossible.
Andrew SullivanI think you earn your reputation for honesty and integrity literally hour-by-hour, and taste for that matter.
Andrew SullivanIs it not a rather fantastic historical irony that the torture techniques that the North Vietnamese used against McCain that forced him to offer a videotaped false confession are now the techniques the Bush administration is using to gain "intelligence" about terror networks. How is it possible to know that everything John McCain once said on videotape for the enemy was false, because it was coerced, and yet assert that everything we torture out of terror suspects using exactly the same techniques is true?
Andrew SullivanThe success of the stock connect program and the increased market volatility means investors are looking for more products to access China markets performance than exchange traded funds, and futures are feeding that rising demand.
Andrew Sullivan[T]he myth that there was somehow a magic wand in the early 1980s to cure AIDS - a wand that Reagan deliberately refused to wave - is now almost conventional wisdom.
Andrew SullivanDon't fool yourself that you're blogging when you're really just putting stuff up online.
Andrew SullivanWhat'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.
Andrew SullivanBlogging is to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.
Andrew SullivanThe day of reckoning is not just coming for Saddam Hussein. It's coming for the anti-war movement.
Andrew SullivanMonsters remain human beings. In fact, to reduce them to a subhuman level is to exonerate them of their acts of terrorism and mass murder — just as animals are not deemed morally responsible for killing. Insisting on the humanity of terrorists is, in fact, critical to maintaining their profound responsibility for the evil they commit. And, if they are human, then they must necessarily not be treated in an inhuman fashion. You cannot lower the moral baseline of a terrorist to the subhuman without betraying a fundamental value.
Andrew SullivanThere is something about hearing your president affirm your humanity that you don't know what effect it has until you hear it.
Andrew SullivanThe middle part of the country - the great red zone that voted for Bush - is clearly ready for war. The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead - and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column.
Andrew SullivanWhen Bush says that Abu Ghraib was the work of a few, he forgot to mention that he was one of them.
Andrew SullivanI actually bought the argument that if we democratized Iraq, we could create a space for venting some of the stuff that's going on in the Middle East in these autocratic regimes that is expressing itself through jihadism, because it has nowhere else to express itself.
Andrew Sullivan[Senator] Kerry [democrat MA] is emerging as the worst of all the viable Democratic candidates. He has the backbone of Clinton and the charm of Gore.
Andrew SullivanI think essentially corrupting institutions in Washington are turning conservatism into something that is really very creepy, but also emotionally and psychically powerful for people.
Andrew SullivanThe most successful marriages, gay or straight, even if they begin in romantic love, often become friendships. It's the ones that become the friendships that last.
Andrew SullivanWhen I first started talking about gay marriage, most people in the gay community looked at me as if I was insane or possibly a fascist reactionary.
Andrew SullivanThe one thing we know about torture is that it was never designed in the first place to get at the actual truth of anything; it was designed in the darkest days of human history to produce false confessions in order to annihilate political and religious dissidents. And that is how it always works: it gets confessions regardless of their accuracy.
Andrew SullivanIt's also one thing to see a celebrity or some kind of character on a TV show being gay. It's a totally different thing when you know your husband... not your husband, but your brother or your friend or the dude you hung out in high school was gay. I mean, that is what changes people's minds, what changes people's minds.
Andrew SullivanYou just have to keep going. I mean I think our job, my job, is to keep articulating that I exist and that there are lots of people like me exist and we just have no home.
Andrew SullivanWhat modernity requires is not that you cease living according to your faith, but that you accept that others may differ and that therefore politics requires a form of discourse that is reasonable and accessible to believer and non-believer alike. This religious restraint in politics is critical to the maintenance of liberal democracy.
Andrew SullivanMy own view is simply that there are some very basic rules; very simple rules that apply to all writing in a way, which is: don't lie; if you're wrong, correct; do not misrepresent; and try and keep oneself intellectually honest - which means, as a writer, the very difficult task in public of admitting you were wrong.
Andrew SullivanThere is no escaping this fight. It is civilization or Jihadism. We can and should debate tactics; but the sides are clear enough.
Andrew SullivanMichael Moore: a man who never without an excuse for keeping murdering tyrants in power. But now he's supporting the man who bombed Milosevic into submission? How about an explanation, Mr Moore?
Andrew SullivanI think of these imperial adventures like welfare programs; you start them with all good intentions, they never end, they go on forever and get more expensive as they go on.
Andrew SullivanThe 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.
Andrew Sullivan