While people are going after Focus on the Family for its astroturfing, it’s worth pointing toward similar behavior from pro-gay groups, in this case: Human Rights Campaign.

HRC’s campaign, however, is aimed at senators, which makes it a bit less offensive — at least to me, as someone who has edited a letters to the editor section. There’s little more annoying, or more pointless, than mass spamming of newspapers. It takes about 2 minutes to figure out a campaign is underway, and then you just don’t run those letters.

At least HRC’s campaign is aimed at sending letters to senators from their constituents.

UPDATE (5/31): Andrew Sullivan notices.

I  hold no brief for any version of Christianity, but this piece in Slate is a nice overview of the ludicrously off-the-mark history much of the Code is based off of.

I’m perfectly willing to discuss a historical Jesus — his lack of divinity don’t bother me none. But if you’re going to make up a story like this, you might want to start with at least a cursory understanding of what various early Christian sects believed.

(via Hit & Run)

An interesting take over at Slate on Toni Morrison’s Beloved. My memory of it is a bit foggy, having read it in high school, but I do remember thinking it was a cut above the many "diversity" picks I’d read in English classes (one year, we read Maya Angelou, a Native American author, an African author … and I believe an Eskimo was thrown in for good measure — this was all instead of, well, anything else).

Anyway, Stephen Metcalf seems to think that despite all the awards and honors, the book is seriously lacking in intellectual and artistic depth, awash in the self-help culture of its author’s era:

In some very real sense, the central deranging tragedy of American life
has found its finest expression in the oceanic rhythms of Morrison’s
prose, with its deft use of synecdoche, anaphora, and incantatory
repetition, with its unique combination of seething plaintiveness and
iron triumph. At the same time, though, one notices a secondary effect
of these rhythms: The traumas depicted in Beloved don’t
actually feel, to the reader, particularly traumatic. On the contrary,
the dominant sentiment of the book is the nobility of sheer endurance,
a sentiment that transfers rather too easily to the reader’s own
self-regard. Would this nobility have transferred so easily had the
book portrayed its humiliations more graphically? For a novel that will
educate many Americans about racism, the grislier facts of the
post-bellum world have been strangely muted—there is a single, somewhat
oblique mention of the Klan ("Desperately thirsty for black blood,
without which it could not live, the dragon swam the Ohio at will"),
and there is almost no sense of hunger or deprivation. ("Feeding her is
no trouble," Sethe says of Beloved. "I pick up a little extra from the
restaurant is all.")

I read it too long ago, and at such a young age, to offer any more insight (if I’ve offered the least bit so far). But the piece is worth a read.