Hey everyone! I can’t tell you how much I’ve wanted to write this review for y’all. Do you know why? Because teenage sex! And homosexual sex! And does it get any more controversial than teenage homosexual sex?

If it does, then I don’t want to know about it.

Anyway, this week’s episode of “Glee” was set to the music of “West Side Story,” which emulates perfectly the forbidden love of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” Seriously, who doesn’t love a good Pyramus and Thisbe story?

As was dramatized in previews and therefore on the Internet… this week was a week of firsts. First time to shock us? No. First time to push the barriers? No.

But it was the first time that two of the couples on the show had sex.

Cutie pie Blaine has been dating Kurt for a while, pushing the bounds of appropriateness on network television for a season or more. At the same time, Rachel and Finn have had an on-again-off-again relationship that has weathered the storms of teenage pregnancy (Finn’s girlfriend was pregnant with his best friend’s baby), identity issues (Rachel’s biological mother Shelby has been in and out… oh, and, by the way, is the adoptive mama of Quinn’s baby), and general teenaged messiness.

There are probably eight thousand things I could grab onto in this episode, but personally, there’s only one hook for me.  No, it’s not the gay thing… I’m sure much has already been said about that.

For this prude chica, it’s all about the teen sex.

Gay, straight, lesbian, or bi, when did it become appropriate for teens to have sex with each other on prime time TV? Is this really the message that we want to send to our kids? That teenage relationships are as mysterious and wonderful as Shakespeare made them out to be?

No!

Teenage sex leads to depression and other crappy stuff. Why is Hollywood trying to romanticize teenage relationships? Yeah, two couples (one gay, one straight) on the show gave themselves to one another, but will they be together in ten years?

Probably not.

Gay or straight, Hollywood should not be romanticizing sex amongst teenagers.

Quit laughing.

In a recent Washington Post column, Kennicott takes issue with “a litany of shameful events and grievances” committed against homosexuals in the arts, from “the ‘super-macho’ ethos of the American abstract expressionists” to the recent removal of an explicit exhibit from the Smithsonian Museum. Basically, he believes that despite the disproportionate contributions of homosexuals to the arts world, the arts world has failed to honor them appropriately. And he believes that the only way to do this is to make sure that museums are upfront about (1) the sexual proclivities of artists and their subjects, and (2) the subjects’ role, if any, “the iconography of same-sex eroticism.”

For instance, since Saint Sebastian has been appropriated as a homosexual icon, museums are supposed to mention this wherever they display paintings of him. Never mind that he was not himself homosexual.

And if all this openness makes museums seem a little less “family friendly” to some, well, they just need to get with the times. “‘Family’ is now understood to include gay parents, married gay couples and people with gay children, and the absence of basic information about the role of same-sex desire in art history has become an overt sin of omission,” Kennicott explains. Because society is now more accepting of various forms of sexuality, clearly, kids need more sexual information shoved in their faces! (Since, you know, they’re not getting enough of it already from the culture around them.)

Whether or not this is actually good for the arts themselves, Kennicott doesn’t spend much time considering. He should. As Mark Steyn notes in his brilliant book Broadway Babies Say Goodnight, the modern theater’s relentless focus on homosexual issues has made the theater world more insular—and shrunk audiences.

Using the musical Rent as an example of this trend, Steyn writes:

Well, I was moved, but not because of the transvestite sculptor or the lesbian performance artist. In Puccini’s bohemia, the artiness is merely the specific characteristic of universal characters. . . . But there’s nothing mythic or emblematic or enlarging about the characters of Rent: La Boheme is about everyone, Rent is about its participants. I was moved by its inability to move us, by its inability to speak to the world beyond. . . .

A theatre that loses interest in all but a few select minorities is doomed.

And so is a museum.

An average kid with moderate talent, since her late teens, between acting, mothering, cooking, and singing, Gwyneth Paltrow has subjected America to incessant rounds of painful “No wait…let me start again,” off-tempo renditions of Für Elise followed by impromptu tap-dancing exhibitions by a grown woman who might as well be dressed in a tight pink tutu.

Gwynie (I like to call her Gwynie) is an attractive woman with a superior gift of imitating British accents.  Ms. Paltrow started her career in Hollywood when her mother, actress Blythe Danner, and her father, the late director Bruce Paltrow, together with family friend Steven Spielberg brokered a deal and got her a starring gig in the movies at 19 years of age.

An unabashed recipient of Hollywood nepotism, after winning an Academy Award for Shakespeare in Love Gwyneth was crowned the “Muse” of Miramax studios by film producer Harvey Weinstein.  Since that day, Gwyneth has been nothing short of unbearable.

Raised in Massachusetts, Gwynie moved back to Los Angeles where her career and love life with Brad Pitt took off. Paltrow traveled the world, and now speaks British-style English, French, Spanish, and a little Italian. Gwen even married a temperamental British rock star – Chris Martin of Coldplay – who she’d never have met without the benefit of a VIP backstage pass.

After adopting London as her new home, Ms. Gwyneth, in classic Madonna I’m Evita-I’m British-I’m a single mom to a couple of African kids- mode, dissed America, set up house in Berkshire Gardens, and practiced her fake English accent while taking children Apple and Moses to buy groceries in trendy food shops.

Over the years the only thing more irritating than Paltrow feigning a British accent in the movie Sliding Doors was seeing her accepted as a gourmet cook. Gwyneth Paltrow even traveled with Mario Batali through Spain and lunched with Ina Garten, the “I’m cooking a fabulous dinner for my good friend Gwyneth” Barefoot Contessa.

After soaking fava beans became too much of a chore, Ms. Paltrow re-focused and said “I could do that. I bet I could do that,” and decided to resuscitate her former career as a Duet singer, but not just a singer, a country singer, which right there was weird enough for a woman who spent so much of her life practicing speaking with a British accent. Nevertheless, two weeks into her revitalized singing career golden child Gwyneth was starring in the movie Country Strong.

Soon after, Paltrow showed up on the 2011 Grammy Awards singing “Forget You” with the Muppets and Cee Lo Green and vamping around in a precociously overconfident number on Glee.  Mrs. Coldplay’s routine was rivaled only by Katie Holmes embarrassing herself while torturing the nation on So You Think You can Dance.

The desire to share her varied gifts must have motivated Paltrow to go beyond her expertise in thespianism, Epicureanism, and crooning, because in addition to mastering all three, Paltrow created Goop.com, a place where a Renaissance woman could branch out, blog, and author an informative newsletter.

At Goop.com, the artiste/chef/chanteuse tells readers: “Make, Go, Get, Do, Be and See.”  The only way to describe the venture is that Goop is authored by an overindulged, self-impressed, spoiled rich kid sharing navel-gazing insights into experiences, locations, products, and ideas few people will ever encounter, let alone be able to afford.  Can anyone say “Clueless?”

Paltrow’s Oprah-style New Age views are a cacophony of beliefs similar to the Cheese Board area of Goop’s “Make” section. While Gwyneth’s channeling of Tammy Wynette, making Duck Ragu, recommending skin products from a French pharmacy, and explaining the Year of the Tiger is irritating, it is still all relatively harmless. However, her views on religion, philosophy and sexuality step out of the Christian Louboutin realm and into the downright unappreciated.

Case in point: Gwyneth recently introduced her seven year-old daughter Apple, whose name was chosen because it was “Biblical,” to the idea of lesbianism. Mom assured the tyke that her classmate, who had two Mommies, was “lucky,” after which she implied on Goop that she didn’t know the answer to the question: “What does it actually say in the Bible that will cause some people to be upset by my line of thinking?”  You mean besides confusing a first grader?

I don’t buy the feigned perplexed confusion, because based on Gwyneth Paltrow’s history the query was more of a challenge than a question.  It’s likely that Paltrow has already resolved the issue and feels totally confident that, even if the Bible and God Himself doesn’t support her “line of thinking,” hers is still the right answer, because in Gwyneth Paltrow’s superior world her answer is correct simply because it’s hers.

In case you missed it, here is the back story: Tracy Morgan, stand-up comic and one of the stars of the NBC hit sit-com “30 Rock” was busted doing a stand-up routine at the Ryman Theater in Nashville. Unlike back when St. Lenny was being busted the cops didn’t rush the stage and drag Mr. Morgan off. No, a single audience member got offended and reported Mr. Morgan to “the authorities” through Facebook.

The verboten topic was lack of empathy for homosexuality. The “authorities” are the liberal media. A gay man in the audience, Kevin Rogers took offence and wound up on CNN chatting about how horrible the show was.

I wasn’t there and I doubt there is a recording or transcript but from reports the “bit” was pretty raw. What I have read and seen on the Internet is that Mr. Morgan was doing a rant where he imagined his son came home and announced he was gay. Mr. Morgan said if that happened he would stab him.

Yeah, I know, it’s not exactly knocking me of my chair either but that’s not the point.  

I have seen Mr. Morgan perform and found a lot of his act to be tasteless. I didn’t find a lot of his material to be funny. I don’t condone bullying or violence against anyone. However I also don’t condone drawing lines for performers or establishing sacred cows. Does anyone think that this was the first Mr. Morgan performed this routine? Doubt it! Now, under pressure from NBC, Tina Fey and uber-hypocrite Alec Baldwin, Mr. Morgan says his rant was “not funny in any context.”  Even though according to one person who attended the show, “No one was booing him. Everyone was laughing…”

Let’s step back and imagine for a minute that instead of the word “gay’ in his routine he had used the word “Republican” or “conservative.”  What if he had said, “… if my son came home and said he was joining the GOP I would stab him!” The audience and liberal media would still be praising his talent. Genius! Let’s further imagine the next day Reince Priebus issued a statement asking for an apology. More howls of laughter and perhaps a statement from Mr. Morgan telling the GOP leader he could plant one where the sun don’t shine. High fives all around!

So why isn’t the outspoken Mr. Morgan telling the GLAAD folks to kiss off? Simple, he’s worried about his job. He’s got plenty of reason to worry.  Isaiah Washington got canned from Grey’s Anatomy after using a gay slur and he did the entire apology tour. The movie “The Dilemma” was roundly criticized for using the dreaded “f’ word.  The “f” word, by the way, is not “fuck.” If you tried to stop comedians from using that word because you find it offensive Hollywood types would brand you a Nazi, fascist or worst some sort of Christian zealot. 

Meanwhile a congressman is sending pictures of his penis around the country and is being defended by Charlie Rangel who is saying “He wasn’t going out with little boys. He wasn’t going into men’s rooms with broad stances.”  That statement sounds offensive and more that a little homophobic to me. GLAAD, where are ya?

Cover art by Royal Roberts

Yet at the end of the day, Stevens always redeems himself.  The holier-than-thou social gospel-ers at my school were right to put him on because he’s one of the only Christians in the music world who isn’t a total embarrassment. His work, however immense and lofty it gets, sounds so meticulous because he’s agonized over and found the best possible way to arrange and express his ideas. Regardless of his inexplicably lame choice, his “Song Xchange” contest was an unprecedented event, connecting artist and fans in a way that never would have been possible before the Internet.  And, most importantly, he hasn’t retired from music or tried to redefine albums or whatever he was getting at.

After numerous side projects, he’s following up the universally-acclaimed Illinois with his first proper album since 2005– The Age of Adz– and he’s surpassed his previous work by light years. I came into Adz fully expecting to be the cynical contrarian I was to The Suburbs, but within one playthrough I knew I was listening to an inspired masterwork by a supremely gifted artist.

For those who have only heard Illinois, prepare yourself:  Adz is noisy and messy, both musically and lyrically.  Stevens intertwines the lush orchestration of his signature works with aggressive synthesizers and drum machines, and he’s (thankfully) abandoned his perpetual hushed-whisper singing for a longing wail drenched in reverb and other effects.  The press for the album claims that it is based on the artwork of Royal Robertson, who was known for developing schizophrenia after his wife of 19 years left him and took their 11 children.  His magic-marker-and-glitter works were amateurish pulp science fiction visions with apocalyptic, misogynistic messages railing against sexual deviancy; Robertson considered himself a prophet but included all kinds of syncretistic numerology and speculation about aliens in his work.  It’s a strange connection:  Robertson, the unbridled bush leaguer, evoked by Stevens, the meticulous master, but it absolutely works.

 The frenzied blips, warbles and beats suggest Robertson’s strong sci-fi elements, and the lyrics scream of sexual turmoil compounded by a commitment to Christ.  The main difference is that Robertson obsessed over a love that left him, while Stevens rages against himself for leaving a love.  And– against my better judgment, I’m going to say this– it appears the reason for this is that Stevens has tried and failed to reconcile homosexuality with Christianity.

I’m not bringing up the issue for an Ingraham-esque “outing” of Stevens or as gossip-mongering; I have no idea about the man’s sexuality and wouldn’t care if I didn’t get this interpretation from the source material, and even then, I wouldn’t care if it weren’t so moving.  Of course, I could be absolutely wrong; he’s made a career on writing as other characters.  However, there’s no narration, he doesn’t set it in a particular time or place, and it’s all extremely personal.  Whether it’s autobiographical or exaggeration/fabrication through a character, this struggle does appear to be a running thread that conceptually links the songs.

Album opener “Futile Devices” is a restrained, acoustic love song to a man who plays the guitar and crochets– two activities Stevens is known for– but I can’t bring myself to think he would write a love song to himself from someone else’s perspective.  “All for Myself,” the album’s most openly erotic song, talks of him and his lover running shirtless “with hairy chests.”  Stevens is often a very obtuse, indirect writer; a choice such as this is as close to an open confession as he could get.

And when I bring this up, don’t think I’m being some sort of Fred Phelps inquisitor.  This is only important because of Stevens’ explorations of theology in his music (check out his excellent Seven Swans if you can).  And if you are gay and believe in Jesus, to some degree or other, you will question whether these two attributes can coexist or not.  For Stevens, he appears to have repented from his sin, and he’s broken a few hearts and eviscerated in his own during the struggle.  It first rears its head in the title track, named after Robertson’s art. 

Through a massive, majestic techno-orchestral arrangement that’s equal parts Tron soundtrack and Wagner, Stevens equates the feeling of romantic love with the exhilaration of wrapping your head around eternal life, then lets his love know “I must be moving on,” though he still loves his partner deeply.  On “Get Real Get Right,” the album’s most funky and light-hearted track (at least at its start), he nods to Robertson with an appearance by an alien prophet telling the narrator to “get right with the Lord.”  Stevens says to his lover, “I know I’ve caused you trouble, I know I’ve caused you pain, But I must do the right thing, I must do myself a favor and get real, Get right with the Lord.”  After drawing a sacrificial commitment from his lover, he must withdraw from the relationship if he is to take his faith seriously.

 —–

The real power of The Age of Adz is that Stevens doesn’t slip into empty moralizing and he doesn’t gloss over the difficulty of his choice; his love seems all-consuming, and his temptation is overwhelming.  “Vesuvius” finds the perfect metaphor; the pressure and desire to revert to autonomy is a volcano; its eruption has destroyed everything around him, and he rages against its resurgence with all his might.  In this song alone, he addresses himself, saying “Sufjan, follow your heart, follow the flame or fall on the floor,” a call to follow his deceitful desires rather than prostrate himself in submission to God.  The penultimate song “I Want to be Well” likens his sin to an illness, which could be both literal and figurative, and shows his violent anger– at himself, at God, at the lover he has to leave right now.  He starts out rationalizing, “I’ve come to realize life is not about love with someone,” then has to respond to objections:  “I’m not fucking around!” he cries as the track’s drums careen out of control.

It all comes to a head in “Impossible Soul,” a 5-part, 25-minute denouement that finds Sufjan beating himself up over all this drama, lamenting the impossible situation wherein his heart finds itself.  He begins by apologizing to a woman who loves him; he cannot desire her the way he’s described for his true lover over the past 10 tracks.  The remainder of the song chronicles an interior monologue where he first questions his decisions, then curses himself, then tries to psych himself up and snap out of his self-loathing.  In the final section, he sings alone over banjos, ending the album with a wistful summary of his love:  “Boy, we made such a mess together.”  I’ll never know exactly how that feels, to have such an integral  part of your identity be such a blazing contradiction to your spiritual convictions; but Stevens makes the struggle, confusion, and longing so real, it’s hard to keep your eyes dry.

I’ll get the review-y stuff out of the way first.  The Age of Adz is as unique a vision as you’re going to find in today’s music world.  Sufjan balances his well-established mix of classical composing and pop melodies over a tightrope of fishing line; he populates the mix with all manner of novel synth sounds in perfect counterpoint to the traditional orchestra; and he connects through his lyrics like never before, abandoning all the distance and haughty intellectualism of his past albums.

And now for what I really feel:  Adz is one of those albums that, once you’re done listening, you’re not done with it emotionally.  For an hour, for a day, you can’t stop thinking about it.  It agitates you, puts you in strange moods.  It’s so perfect, so beautiful, and it’s recounting something so awful, you don’t know what to do with yourself.  You listen again and again, and it sinks further and further into your head.  This isn’t just an enjoyable bit of music; this is a refresher on how important art is for understanding the human soul.  And when such art is so truthful and so powerful, it shouldn’t be missed.

[Author's note:  I would like to minimize any offense I may cause by calling homosexuality "sin."  I do not count myself as righteous above anyone else, so I do not use the term to alienate or judge.  In the Bible, homosexuality is given no more fierce condemnation than the adultery that every single person on earth commits through mere lust.  Because it is so strong an element in one's identity, I understand why it is such a sensitive issue.]

The goal? To echo the mosque’s own website, which says it’s trying to promote integration and tolerance. I figured, I could return the favor, by opening a gay bar.

After all, Islam despises homosexuality – and this Muslim-friendly gay bar would help mend fences.

Right now the working name of the bar is Heaven and Halal. It will be two floors – one serving Hallel food, and other other serving cocktails. There will be 72 of them. And they will be virgin.

So here’s an update, since last night.

Now, I’ve scoped out some properties. And, I’ve received countless inquiries regarding investment, folks who have offered up to six figures. But because some of them were drunk, they may have placed the decimal point in the wrong place.

I also contacted the Cordoba House, the folks behind the mosque – but they have not returned my calls.

So I tweeted them.

Here’s what they tweeted back.

You’re free to open whatever you like. If you won’t consider the sensibilities of Muslims, you’re not going to build dialog.

By the way, I’m not building dialog, I’m building a bar.

And as for the sensibilities of Muslims – which involves homophobia – thats not for me.

And that’s my point – its weird being educated in tolerance by an incredibly intolerant ideology. As long as gays and women are treated so poorly, how can they teach us compassion and generosity?

Anyway, I will keep you all up to date on the progress – and for more info, always come here.

If you don’t you’re probably a racist homophobe.

The Founders of this nation understood full-well that a nation of liberty could not long survive without a strong moral foundation.  If government exists to control people, then limited government naturally would control them very little.  The potential upside was tremendous.  If allowed to live free, a human being might pursue their own interests to the betterment of all of society.  Freedom means a man might strive, risk, and fail, but it also meant that he might strive, risk, and succeed.  As this process played out over time, it might well become the single greatest engine for innovation and wealth creation in all of human history. 

But it came with great risk.  To give man this freedom meant to largely leave him alone.  Government could not overly interfere in his decision making, other than to ensure that he did not, in his pursuit of his own freedom, encroach unduly on the freedom of others.  In fact, it might be said that our Founders saw government’s exclusive rightful job as providing just that much protection to its citizens — protecting their freedom from those that would rob them of it.  Of course, that meant that government’s first job was to restrain government, that great and historic robber of liberty. 

The problem with so limiting government, however, was that a government that cannot force people to conform to ideas they do not hold, cannot rob man unduly of his freedom to act on his own will, and only has a limited means by which to prevent a man from robbing the freedom of his fellow man.  In order for man to live free from outside law, he must first have a strong and predictable internal code.  It is that code which would provide him the majority of his regulation.  Government would only have to concern itself with behaviors that violated that personal norm.

Of course, the Founders did not arrive at this conclusion in a vacuum.  Free from the constraints of governmental religion, the Founders had actually read the Bible.  While many churches attempt to act as mini-governments and control men, the New Testament makes clear that, “It is for Freedom that Christ has made us Free.”  The Apostle Paul proclaimed that the “Power of sin is the law.”  That, “law came that sin would increase,” but that Christ had, “Set us free from the law of sin and death.”  What does this mean?  It means that there is a natural, inherent evil in man that causes him to rebel against any authority.  Paul says he did not even know what it was to covet, but then the command came saying “thou shalt not covet,” and sin in him, that inherent flaw, seized the opportunity afforded by the commandment and wrought in him every covetous desire. 

In other words, rules (laws, external governance) do not make man better.  On the contrary, they make him worse.  But, taught the New Testament, Christ was the author of a New Covenant in which the written code no longer had power.  Instead, God had freed man through the sacrifice of Christ and now offered man a New Life in which Christ lived in the man, writing his laws upon our hearts.  It was only in this state, free from external governance which wars with our internal flaw — but given a new, personal internal righteousness that is Christ, that man was truly living the life God desired. 

Whatever your religious belief, you can see how revolutionary this line of reasoning is, and how directly it impacted the Framers of our Nation.  If God made man free, then he should be free indeed.  It is the inner goodness that would make him good, not external law.  This was an idea so important to our Founders that they almost all spoke about it.  Washington even dedicated a portion of his Farewell Address to the idea:

“Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.  It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government. Who that is a sincere friend to it can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric?”

Free men must be moral men.  Immoral men must be slaves to external regulation.

Which brings us back to the events of the last several weeks, and an examination, not of Roman Polanski’s moral choices, but of our moral health as a society.  There is good news and bad news.  The overwhelming public sentiment in the wake of Polanski’s apprehension in Switzerland seems to be in favor of his arrest and extradition.  The majority of people recognize internally that drugging and raping a child in your care while she cries, says no, and asks to be taken home, and then fleeing justice, still qualify in the hearts of most American’s as abhorrent behaviors. 

Of course, one might think that this would go without saying.  It is a common belief that in prisons, hardened criminals and even murders won’t tolerate child-rapists.  Even people whose own moral codes are tolerant of extreme violence and crime know that raping children is especially evil.  Here we find the bad news. 

Apparently many prominent people in the arts and politics are blind to such wanton acts of depravity that even convicted murderers acknowledge.  The danger here is readily apparent.  The Hollywood community that believes Roman Polanski does not deserve to be punished for raping a child, or that having sex with anyone of any age who is crying, saying no, and asking you to stop is “rape-rape,” are the very people who pride themselves in setting the trend for the rest of us.  And the politicians around the world who are coming to the aid of this predator are the same men and women who believe they have the authority to define the external laws that they would see regulate us.  That means that while we may all commonly agree that raping children is evil, the trendsetters and external morality regulators out on the leading edge of society do not think it is evil, and they are working tirelessly to bend our morality to their own through art and law.

Now, it might seem a bit far-fetched to say that a few actors in Hollywood supporting a brilliant, tortured artist could possibly lead to a culture that is so morally bankrupt that they cannot identify raping children as evil, but consider how rapidly common morality can change when the trendsetters and politicians take a strong stand.

Whatever a person’s personal feelings about homosexuality, it is beyond dispute that, with some few and specific exceptions, for most of human history homosexuality has been considered immoral by most people.  And yet, it is equally clear that our culture is moving quickly toward a position that not only sees this behavior as morally acceptable, but that sees the very belief that homosexuality might in fact be immoral as itself being immoral. 

This fundamental shift in a common moral-view has happened very rapidly.  It has only been eleven years since Ellen DeGeneres came out of the closet on primetime, an act widely associated with the death of her show.  In 1997, America just “wasn’t ready.”  Contrast that with 2008 when the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation determined that 42% of HBO’s primetime hours were dedicated to depicting the lives of homosexual people (ABC was the highest rated non-cable network at 25%).  And of course, Ellen herself is back, and one of the biggest stars on television. 

It isn’t just in the media.  There is a nationwide movement to legalize same-sex marriage and brand as hate-speech any opposition to homosexuality.  Even Bill Clinton has changed his mind on the subject.  According to a recent Gallup poll, only 48% of Americans currently see homosexuality as immoral.  The exact number who see it as being moral.  That number keeps moving, and only in one direction.

Now, again, the point is not to debate the morality of homosexuality itself, but to demonstrate just how rapidly a common moral position can shift, for better or for worse, when the media and politicians lead the way.  In the case of homosexuality, thousands of years of moral structure are reversing themselves in a window of only forty or fifty years, but for most of recorded history, the age of sexual consent was much younger than our current law would allow.  In fact, the common age of consent across numerous cultures throughout most of the last several thousand years has been the age of puberty, typically thought to occur between the ages of12 and 14 (Shakespeare’s Juliet was only 13 when she decides to marry Romeo). 

If the trendsetters have been successful in altering the common moral position on homosexuality in so short a time, even with all of human history working against them, how much more quickly might they succeed in altering the common view of sex with thirteen-year-olds with almost all of human history behind them?  And if they succeed here, what lines are left for them to cross?

To be sure, moral absolutes have always shifted with time.  When our forebears took slaves, it was certainly not morally good, but the absolute moral disparity was perhaps not clear before the signing of the Declaration of Independence.  Before that great document, many forms of slavery and servitude existed in the world, and most everyone lived at some point on that sliding scale.  The complete slavery of black men and women was only an extreme level of the general tyranny and oppression that marked all men. 

Only after the signing, when the natural rights of man were declared loudly as being from God, and violations of those rights were declared unnatural acts and acts of war, was black slavery in this nation truly singled out as a special breed of crime, and not a degree of crime.  In other words, it is only in the presence of good that evil is clearly seen.  The question is, who should a society look to for guidance in judging common morality?  God and philosophers; or government and movie stars? 

As Jefferson pointed out, God has the power and right to force his beliefs on us and yet made us free, the government has not that right, and yet seeks to wield that power over every aspect of our lives.  The media seems obliged to help.  One thing is certain, if we ignore the former, then as Washington warned, we will be slaves of the latter.  If so, we will all be sons-of-bitches for it.

After his big international success with the superb martial arts saga “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” Chinese-born film director Ang Lee continued in the eclectic manner indicated by his earlier films, jumping from genre to genre and style to style. Over the years he has directed the genial “Sense and Sensibility,” the thoughtful historical film “Ride with the Devil,” the gloomy family drama “The Ice Storm,” the homosexual love story “Brokeback Mountain,” and the inept superhero action film Hulk, among others.

This eclecticism and the tendency toward a rather downbeat style have kept Lee from developing a large following among U.S. moviegoers, as has the fact that he tends not to work with the top stars or in popular genres. Thus it was perhaps to be expected that his latest, the historical comedy “Taking Woodstock,” didn’t do much business at U.S. movie theaters in its opening weekend, taking in only $3.7 million and finishing ninth in the box office standings.

Released without much hoopla other than the general publicity surrounding the fortieth anniversary of the Woodstock concerts, the film simply hasn’t generated much interest among audiences. A serious comedy with a homosexual lead character plus a cross-dressing Marine and a variety of other cute, quirky types is just not any kind of an original idea these days. The movies are full of such characters, and we’ve all heard just about enough about Woodstock.

Despite the odd variety of subject matter, time periods, and geographic locations of his films, Lee has in fact been consistent in one way: conveying modern antinomian-individualist platitudes and shibboleths. For years he has functioned as the champion of the social outsider–a position guaranteed to earn plaudits from the contemporary media elite. Thus his Academy Award-winning and ecstatically praised “Brokeback Mountain” was perhaps the clearest distillation of the point of view evident in all of his films.

Although Lee’s passion for individualism to the point of antinomianism has sometimes had very interesting results–as in “Ride with the Devil,” with its open sympathy for the Confederacy–it has more often resulted in compendia of social-liberation cliches.

“Taking Woodstock” follows this template exactly. It assumes the U.S. elite’s accepted point of view of Woodstock as a critical event in the nation’s much-needed process of liberation from stifling bourgeois conformity, etc., which ushered in a new world of greater authenticity that has unfortunately been continually thwarted by forces of repression, especially business people and those vile and pesky fundamentalist Christians who still somehow infest the republic despite freely available abortions.

This cliched and indeed platitudinous notion was boring and silly when Milos Forman brought it to the big screen in “Hair” in 1979, and it is particularly obsolete today, when there is an entire genre of stoner comedies about young people living the Woodstock life while enjoying the benefits of bourgeois comfort and prosperity, plus a wider genre of zany comedies centering on the amazingly free and indeed feckless lives of American young people. If today’s young people are being oppressed by Puritan witch-hunters, there’s very little evidence of it. The public schools, run by an aggressively secular government, are in fact the real bane of their lives.

Thus the idea of Woodstock Nation as something distinct from the rest of American life and in fact quite heroic is simply absurd and fatuous in a nation populated in good part by what columnist David Brooks calls the Bohemian Bourgeois–people who are able to live as freely as hippies in their free time while still enjoying the prosperity and stability of bourgeois life.

No, the real story of the contemporary United States is not a yearning for liberation from repressive Christian theocrats. On the contrary, as the Tea Party movement and related phenomena make clear, the real concern is for liberation from the strangling hand of an elitist government and a desire for a more bourgeois–and family-friendly culture.

In such a context, there should be little wonder why audiences don’t rush out to subject themselves to a couple of hours of cute, smug, elitist cliches. They get enough of that on the nightly news.

Proving once again its claim to the hotly contested title of Stupidest Television Network, ABC has canceled “The Goode Family” and “Surviving Suburbia,” continuing their business strategy of desperately trying new things and failing to give them a chance to succeed.

No wonder the cab/sat USA Network actually beat ABC (and the CW network) in the national ratings last week. USA’s formula of original series with unusual but likable characters and sound values carries consistently impressive audience appeal.

Although the ABC cancellations were expected–given the fact that the network had brilliantly moved both series to Friday night, a network television Dead Zone, thus guaranteeing that the shows would not be able to generate an audience over time–they nonetheless prove that ABC hates anything with decent values and ideas and cannot appreciate good, solid entertainment with real sense (Castle being the rare exception).

Expertly produced by Mike Judge (“Beavis and Butthead,” “King of the Hill,” “Office Space”), the animated sitcom “The Goode Family” expertly satirized the conformist, braindead nature of much Green thinking and brilliantly identified the movement’s evolution into a commercialized lifestyle. Judge and co. also made merciless fun of countless other aspects of lefty conventional thinking, such as the passion for being seen as encouraging homosexuality and supporting public radio and other big-government nonsense.

They accomplished all this, moreover, while managing to make the central characters likable in spite of the silliness of their pursuits, by emphasizing their good intentions.

Naturally, Disney-owned ABC, widely known as the “gayest” network and a tireless promoter of statist hedonism, couldn’t tolerate the program once it realized what Judge and co. were actually delivering.

Given the high expense of animated shows, it’s unlikely that “The Goode Family” will be picked up by a cable network. It would seem perfect for Fox, of course, but that network seems committed to destroying the last semblances of taste and common sense in this society through its presentation of Seth McFarlane animated shows such as “Family Guy” and “American Dad.”

Like “The Goode Family,” the Bob Saget sitcom “Surviving Surburbia” was a sprightly, often satirical comedy which promoted sound values. Naturally, it couldn’t last on the network that has long promoted itself as the youthful, innovative, clever alternative but has in fact become a stagnant, boring bastion of statist hedonism.

Coming after the cancellation of the interesting and appealingly unconventional police comedy-drama “The Unusuals,” the jettisoning of “The Goode Family” and “Surviving Suburbia” show that even as it plunges ever-further into the ratings basement, ABC refuses to deviate from its evident mission of pushing modern liberalism instead of providing good, appealing television.

Here is the reason: in the future if you do not conform to the health police’s standards you will be denied access to healthcare. You smokers and drinkers, you fatties and stoners, you are a drag on the system. Your behavior is making you cost too much so go to the end of the government rationing line and hope we get to you. You oldsters and people with chronic conditions take a pain pill. You are a bad risk for successful treatment. In fact, why don’t you do us all a favor and take the whole bottle of pills and check out!

All you kids born in less than perfect health, best of luck! President Obama has already given his opinion on this when he was back in Illinois! All you gay folks with incurable illnesses, those drug cocktails that are keeping you alive are tres expensive! All you folks who are past 60 or 70, your healthcare plan for transplants and serious surgery is to pray you don’t get sick. You see, the best way to control healthcare costs is to give healthcare to as few people as possible! If the government can find some reason to exclude you, it will. Do you think it was hard to deal with your HMO? Try arguing with some government functionary for your kidney transplant. Want a preview? Try to get a little extra service from the post office “civil servant” behind the counter.

Remember way back in September and October when the Candidate Obama was promising you the same healthcare that Senators and Congressman get? I have yet to hear any of them say, “I can’t wait to get on Obamedicade!”