Free Republic

Ken Mehlman, President Bush's campaign manager in 2004 and a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, has told family and associates that he is gay. Mehlman arrived at this conclusion about his identity fairly recently, he said in an interview. He agreed to answer a reporter's questions, he said, because, now in private life, he wants to become an advocate for gay marriage and anticipated that questions would arise about his participation in a late-September fundraiser for the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER), the group that supported the legal challenge to California's ballot initiative against gay marriage, Proposition...

<p>And then you hear the one about the "top Vatican official," one of those ultra-dour black-robed cardinals who never see daylight or the modern world or love, espousing the official Vatican line in a recent interview, claiming that condoms do not, in fact, prevent the transmission of the AIDS virus.</p>

At a time when religious and conservative right-wing groups are attempting to dismiss homosexuality as "unnatural," a leading zoologist has said gay people could be seen as the "pinnacle of evolution." Speaking at the Edinburgh Book Festival, Clive Bromhall said that humankind's evolution has resulted in our present state of "infantilism," in which we break the primate mold by being playful, creative and childlike right into adulthood. "From men's obsession with swollen breasts to our constant search for a pseudoparental God, everything about the human species is infantile," Bromhall said in a lecture. "Like baby chimps, we have soft, downy...