It was Bear Week in Ptown. Bear Week? Well, where do I begin? Every time I try and write a semi-serious sociological assessment of the phenomenon, I find myself erasing large amounts of text. Part of being a bear is not taking being a bear too seriously. And almost every bear and bear-admirer I asked during the festivities came up with different analyses of what it is or might be to be a "bear." But no one can deny that bears are one of the fastest growing new subcultures in gay America -- and that their emergence from the forests into the sunlight is culturally fascinating. Quite what it means for the future of gay America is another thing entirely. But my, er, gut tells me it's, er, a big deal. So here's my own idiosyncratic, CIA-unapproved take on what this new and obviously growing phenomenon in the gay sub-subculture amounts to.

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The court did strike down a Colorado anti-gay measure in 1996, and the 6-3 decision in that case, Romer vs. Evans, was the first sign of where this conservative Supreme Court was heading. But the new consensus was always fragile and needed subsequent support. Now, with Thursday's ruling on the Texas criminal sodomy law, the court has given it. As the apoplectic reactionaries on the far right have been pointing out, four of the six justices who just established that gay people have as much right to privacy as straight people were appointed by Republicans. This was a bipartisan decision that represents a huge cultural shift, a recognition, quite simply, that gay people are human beings who deserve dignity and equality under the law.

Check out Justice Kennedy's moving description of the issue. The notion that it is merely about

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So what to say about his latest offering, attacking two openly gay Episcopal bishops? Its philosophical premise is actually one shared by many on the left: that individuals are sometimes best not judged by their own capabilities or merits but by their membership in a group. Here's a section of this argument:

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You'd think that this would be the central story on the left in this country. As blogger Don Watkins explained: "Here are a bunch of brave souls fighting a tyrannical regime through the old liberal favorite of massive protests. Here's the chance for them to get behind the cause of freedom without having to support war."

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Back on April 27 of this year, the Times' cultural critic, Frank Rich, weighed in on the calamity of the alleged ransacking of the National Museum in Baghdad. Rich opposed the war to liberate Iraq, preferring that Saddam stay in power if that's what it meant to oppose the Bush administration. But he really let rip when in the aftermath of the liberation, the National Museum appeared to be looted. Original press reports cited the loss of 170,000 priceless artifacts. Of course, even as Rich conceded in his column, "[t]here is much we don't know about what happened this month at the Baghdad museum, at its National Library and archives, at the Mosul museum and the rest of that country's gutted cultural institutions." We had no inventory of what had been lost, no reliable account of where the treasures might have been stored, how widespread the looting was, and so on. The situation in Baghdad was chaotic.

But Rich had an administration to bash. And in the wake of this extraordinary military victory, it was vital for left-wing ideologues to find something -- anything -- with which to denigrate the liberation. Rich had found his cause célèbre. And boy did he unload:

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But the real story was the Democratic Party's response. A sardonic comment from some authoritative Democrat would have sufficed to deflate the president's ego. But no. There is, it seems, no such living creature as an authoritative Democrat. Instead, the Democrats actually thought they could use this spectacular public relations coup as a political weapon against the president. They went through at least a couple of news cycles, hoping some sort of slur would stick. After a while, you realized they were serious. They actually believed that Middle America, after a brilliantly successful military campaign, was just itching to have an opportunity to express its pent-up anger and resentment at the commander in chief. Yep, they couldn't wait to tear into him for thanking the sailors on the aircraft carrier for their service in a dangerous, distant war.

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The homosexual is equal in God's eyes to the heterosexual.

Thanks, Dennis, for letting some people who might still harbor this kind of ignorance and prejudice know what even Jewish and Catholic orthodoxy teaches.

Parents must love their children, including the child who is homosexual. At the same time, a homosexual child must understand a loving parent's sadness over his or her inability to sexually love a person of the opposite sex.

Sure. But it's incumbent on parents to try to understand the pain and difficulty that gay children also endure, growing up. It is not enough to love someone, despite their being gay. Parents should love their children, however hard it may be at first, because they're gay; and the mystery of their sexuality is as deep and as beautiful as any heterosexual's.

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"If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay) sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. All of those things are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family. And that's sort of where we are in today's world, unfortunately. It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that doesn't exist, in my opinion, in the United States Constitution."

First off a simple question: What did Santorum actually say? The reason I ask this is that I don't know anyone who speaks in parentheses. Did the AP reporter add the "(gay)" part to provide context for the quote? But such context could easily be provided by a simple sentence beforehand, while leaving the actual quote intact. From the story, it seems as if reporter Lara Jakes Jordan added the "(gay)" in order to get around her poor sentence construction. If so, she ruined a huge and damaging Freudian slip. Because it's clear from the quote that simply consensual sex -- gay or straight -- is precisely what Santorum wants to police.

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"The prison in question was inspected by my team in Jan. 1998. It appeared to be a prison for children -- toddlers up to pre-adolescents -- whose only crime was to be the offspring of those who have spoken out politically against the regime of Saddam Hussein. It was a horrific scene. Actually I'm not going to describe what I saw there because what I saw was so horrible that it can be used by those who would want to promote war with Iraq, and right now I'm waging peace."

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Let me take two comments this past week. In the Boston Globe, James Carroll explicitly denied any moral difference between the regime in Baghdad and the administration in Washington. He described the "shock and awe" air campaign as if it were the direct equivalent of 9/11:

"And what, exactly, would justify such destruction? What would make it an act of virtue? And is it possible to imagine that such violence could be wreaked in a spirit of cold detachment, by controllers sitting at screens dozens, hundreds, even thousands of miles distant? And in what way would such 'decapitation' spark in the American people anything but a horror to make memories of 9/11 seem a pleasant dream? If our nation, in other words, were on its receiving end, illusions would lift and we would see 'shock and awe' for exactly what it is -- terrorism pure and simple."

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A month ago, she avowed that she had been finally convinced by Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations that Saddam had to be stopped. She was impressed, as we all were, by the mountain of evidence of Saddam's duplicity and malevolence. "I don't know how the United Nations felt about Colin Powell's 'J'accuse' speech against Saddam Hussein," she wrote. "I can only say that he persuaded me, and I was as tough as France to convince." She concluded: "I wasn't so sure about the al Qaeda connection. But I had heard enough to know that Saddam Hussein, with his stockpiles of nerve gas and death-dealing chemicals, is more of a menace than I had thought. I'm not ready for war yet. But Colin Powell has convinced me that it might be the only way to stop a fiend, and that if we do go, there is reason."

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The series -- produced by the BBC, naturally -- recounts the story of how Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt betrayed their own country in order to support the mass murders of Joseph Stalin. Vanity Fair gives us the requisite, sepia-toned, boy-band-like group photograph. Its caption describes these supporters of totalitarianism "glamorous turncoats." The writer of the series is unabashed in his admiration for men who knowingly betrayed secrets that led to the deaths of their fellow countrymen and perpetuated a system that imprisoned thousands and condemned millions to death and terror. The four traitors were "devastatingly effective double agents who knew from the start that they stood or fell together," opines Peter Moffatt. "Burgess is the loudest spy in the history of espionage. Philby is the most successful spy of the lot, becoming head of counterintelligence in M.I.6. Blunt is cool, viciously funny and clever, while Maclean veers between being warm and friendly and drunk and difficult."

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This week's idiocy comes from one Eric Alterman, Nation columnist, blogger-come-lately, conservative-hater, and George Stephanopoulos' best man. It was in Esquire magazine. It's about Rush Limbaugh. Here's a link to Esquire's Q&A on media bias, reproduced by Rush Limbaugh's Web site.

Throughout, Alterman takes the low road. You may disagree with Ann Coulter, dislike her style, loathe her views, etc. Alterman goes one step further: "I debase myself every time I say her name." Charming. He later likens her to "an animal in a zoo." Yah. Boo. Sucks. The guy can debate. Then Alterman sinks even lower: "The lack of civility he [Limbaugh] demonstrates toward liberal politicians is really dangerous to our political public. I hate to say it, but I wish the guy would have gone deaf. I shouldn't say that, but on behalf of the country, it would be better without Limbaugh and his 20 million listeners."

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There are good reasons to run a deficit now, of course. We are still at risk of actual deflation. We have a jobless recovery. And extra military spending and homeland defense are, to my mind, no-brainers, given the current terrorist threat. But Bush doesn't simply allow for a temporary deficit, with a goal of longer-term balance. He has returned to the Reagan era of permanent deficits and a growing national debt. Worse than this, he won't admit it.

Here's my nomination for an idiocy of the week. It's from the helpful "fact sheet" put out by the White House to justify its profligacy. The short paragraph, verbatim:

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"The Race to War"

Let's start with the headline. The truce that ended the Gulf War in 1991 made it a condition of cessation of hostilities that Saddam completely disarm. That meant primarily his massive stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and his research into nukes. Since then, Saddam has done everything he can to avoid such disarmament. After some initial success by the U.N., the inspectors were kicked out of the country in 1998. So Saddam has been in violation of the terms of the truce for more than 11 years. He has been given chance after chance to change his position. The U.S. agreed to a new U.N. attempt to disarm Saddam last fall, but Saddam's cooperation has been, by the estimate of every fair observer and by the U.N. inspectors themselves, less than satisfactory.

The Times calls all this a "race" to war. In fact, it's the slowest, most protracted attempt to force a despot's hand in recent memory. It's an 11-year rush to war.

"The countdown to war has begun."

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That's a shame, because not long after hitting the newsstands, the story has completely fallen apart.

The story centers on a bizarre sub-subcultural phenomenon known as "bug chasing." A few HIV-negative gay men, for all sorts of deep and dark psychological reasons, appear actually to be seeking out HIV infection. Some HIV-positive men, it is also alleged, are just as willing to infect these troubled souls with HIV. This disturbing phenomenon is not new. There were occasional stories about it in the late 1990s, stories that fueled an urban legend but that never made it to the mainstream. Why? Because of simple lack of hard evidence that anyone but a very few disturbed people were involved.

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I mean actors and celebrities and pop stars and others not exactly known for being the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree -- almost all of whom seem to drift into the camp of the knee-jerk left. I mean people like Barbra Streisand, who doesn't know the difference between Iraq and Iran, and who at this point must have done more to discredit Hollywood liberals than an entire bookshelf of National Reviews. I mean Sean Penn, another man who just helped Bush win more support for war. I mean, well, Sheryl Crow.

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Still, you can glean a few hints from Didion's prose about what she actually proposes for our current predicament. Among them: allow Saddam Hussein to get nuclear, biological and chemical weapons; abandon Israel to its fate; withdraw from Afghanistan; have a national discussion about how America is the real source of the world's current problems. I don't want to put words into her mouth; but since she won't explicitly state what she thinks -- a style that seems far more appropriate when she's observing pop culture than foreign policy -- I don't have much of a choice.

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But two fatuous comments stand out. The first is by Bob Novak. I've long wondered whether Novak's ubiquity on cable talk shows is some kind of Democratic plot. Just on a purely visceral level, he exudes contempt for his opponents, sneers at every opinion, and almost always assumes bad motives on the part of his rivals. He's about as unlovable a media entity as you could possibly find, and he revels in the fact. But he's also an old guy, a man of his generation, the kind of guy you'd expect to be befuddled as to why anyone could ever take offense at the notion that segregation was once a good thing.

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