Tag Archives: Frank Bruni

“Tuesday nears, after such epic ugliness. ‘It’s almost over,’ friends say. ‘We’ll finally be done with this.’ What a lovely thought. What a naïve fantasy. There’s no end here, just a punctuation mark, a measly comma between the rancor that has built until this point and the fury to come. And there’s no way to un-see what all of us …

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni rips Ted Cruz for this week’s anti-trans ads: “I’m guessing that Cruz hasn’t met or read much about transgender people. ‘Grown adult men’ is precisely how many transgender men appear — with beards, muscles, pants — and exactly how they’d look to little girls in the women’s rooms that the North Carolina law would …

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni dissects last night’s Democratic debate: How much does President Obama mean to the voters in New York’s primary? Clinton is betting that he means a lot. She mentioned him every time she could. How do voters know that she has good judgment? She noted that President Obama trusted it enough to ask her to …

“Just when you think it can’t get any worse for the sober-minded, cool-headed traditionalists in the Republican Party, it does. They see their gold-plated gate crasher taken down a peg, only to find themselves faced with the prospect of kissing up to Ted Cruz. On Saturday he matched Donald Trump’s two victories, in Louisiana and Kentucky, with two of his …

“I USED to be a child molester. Not in actuality. In the popular imagination. In public debate. That’s how gay men were once portrayed — not just as sexual deviants but as sexual prowlers, sexual predators, their eyes lecherously trained on the young, the vulnerable, the recruitable. Hatemongers spread this slander to argue that we mustn’t be teachers, shouldn’t be …

“This wasn’t a debate, at least not like most of those I’ve seen. This was an inquisition. On Thursday night in Cleveland, the Fox News moderators did what only Fox News moderators could have done, because the representatives of any other network would have been accused of pro-Democratic partisanship. They took each of the 10 Republicans onstage to task. They …

“Now we stand nervously and hopefully on the brink of a milestone. Before the end of June, a month associated with wedding bells and wedding cake, the Supreme Court will issue a major decision about the right of two men or two women to exchange vows in a manner honored by the government. It may well extend same-sex marriage to …

“I know a hot trend when I see one and I hate to hop aboard too late. So here goes: I’m announcing my candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. Sure, I have severely limited name recognition in the hinterlands and, come to think of it, in most urban, suburban and exurban areas as well. But that isn’t stopping Lindsey Graham. …

“This week, Frank Bruni, fresh from asserting with approval that Mitchell Gold wants to make Christians take homosexuality off their sin list, decides to attack the Catholic Church for committing the primal sin of patriarchy. ‘Catholicism Undervalues Women.’ The pope is always a man! Listen, I get that growing up gay in the South was no picnic. I get that …

“Frank Bruni writes that many Americans wrongly treat him as a threat to religious liberty because he is gay. The trouble is that he is a threat to religious liberty. It’s not because he’s gay. It’s because he is one of those contemporary liberals who has a conception of religious liberty that is illiberal and narrow, especially compared to the …

“Ive been called many unpleasant things in my life, and I’ve deserved no small number of them. But I chafe at this latest label: A threat to your religious liberty. I don’t mean me alone. I mean me and my evidently menacing kind: men who have romantic relationships with other men and maybe want to marry them, and women in …

“Jeb and Hillary. Hillary and Jeb. It’s getting to the point where a mention of one yields a reference to the other, where they’re semantically inseparable, presidentially conjoined. Should we just go the extra step, save ourselves some syllables and keystrokes? The 2016 matchup as envisioned by many: Jebary. Or, more economically still, Heb. The fascination with this pair as …

“One of the impediments to consensus is manifest on a plane: There’s little sense of a common good, no rules that everybody follows so that nobody gets a raw deal. Instead there’s an ethic of every passenger for himself or herself. The existence of, and market for, the Knee Defender, that device that prohibits the person in front of you …

“Let’s take [Ross] Douthat at his word and just accept that it didn’t occur to him the event was a fundraiser even after the MC began soliciting donations from the stage during the event. Let’s focus on this this instead: Douthat isn’t apologizing for crawling into bed with the ADF, an organization that wants to send Douthat’s colleagues Frank Bruni …

“Repeatedly over the last year and a half, I’ve written about teachers in Catholic schools and leaders in Catholic parishes who were dismissed from their posts because they were in same-sex relationships and — in many cases — had decided to marry. Every time, more than a few readers weighed in to tell me that these people had it coming. …

“A kiss is nothing. On the sidewalks, in the park, I see one every few minutes, a real kiss, lip to lip. It barely registers. It’s as unremarkable as a car horn in traffic, as an umbrella in rain. And yet a kiss is everything. A kiss can stop the world. The football player Michael Sam recently demonstrated as much. …

“A leading supporter of gay marriage, [Andrew] Sullivan warned other supporters not to practice ‘a fanaticism more like the religious right than anyone else.’ I can’t get quite as worked up as he did. For one thing, prominent gay rights groups weren’t part of the Mozilla fray. For another, Mozilla isn’t the first company to make leadership decisions (or reconsiderations) …

“A news flash for every straight man out there: You’ve been naked in front of a gay man. In fact you’ve been naked, over the course of your life, in front of many gay men, at least if you have more than a few years on you. And here you are — uninjured, uncorrupted, intact. The earth still spins. The …

Lots more at New York Magazine.

“If Liz Cheney, whose bid for the Senate has always had a stench of extreme opportunism, wants to discuss traditions and values, I’m all for it. Let’s start here: Isn’t there a tradition of close-knit family members’ taking care not to wound one another? Is there not value in that? [snip] But she plunged forward anyway, disregarding the inevitable discord. …