Neely, you know it’s bad to take liquor with those pills.
Speaking as someone who lives in the what was it? asshole in the buttcrack of America there are a lot of us who think this guy is nuts and don’t agree with him whatsoever. But pay no mind to that…carry on lumping the entire population of the state along with the Rep. Allens and the Roy Moores here.
I know there are nice and reasonable people there, you just wouldn’t know it from reading the news.
In your opinion, what’s the ratio of enlightened people to knuckledraggers there?
Except cars. Everyone must drive a car. And non-birth-control pharmaceuticals.
It makes 'em work faster.
Sorry I can’t approve of banning a book even if it is total crap. We need some examples of bad literature, although I’m not sure why.
Aries, you know I think you’re the bee’s knees. And that hubby of yours, the incredibly erudite and witty Sauron. And I think the redoubtable Ogre lives in Alabama as well. So yes…there are a goodly number of good people living there.
So why the heck is it that it’s only the unibrowed, gritty-knuckled, I’m-my-own-nephew troglodytes who get airtime? 
That’s exactly my point…I could find something stupid or someone suggesting a stupid bill/law in any state. Being an idiot isn’t limited to a certain state. When I read stupid news I don’t automatically say, “Oh…well…then…Insert state name here is the asshole in the buttcrack of America.”
Actually, tdn I should have probably not even brought this up. I’ve been away from the boards for months due to this very same kind of thing and when I popped back in today I see the same stuff.
Rep. Allen is a moron of the highest degree but I still take offense at the state I love being classified as the asshole in the buttcrack of America.
Because that gives more credence to the everyone in the South is backwards and marry their sisters and live in trailers and love NASCAR and beat people over the heads with their Bibles they have on the ready at all times stereotype.
A person in Alabama doing something good isn’t going to make the national news because nobody cares about that. That wouldn’t fit into the image.
But only pharmaceuticals made and sold in the good ol’ USA. Slipping across the border to Canada to buy them helps the terrorists win.
Given the number of revisionist interpretations of various works of literature, I’m wondering what sort of standards this guy might have for deciding if a character is or is not homosexual.
Consider: it is not exactly a leap of great distances to claim that Professor Henry Higgins and the Colonel from My Fair Lady may be living in a homosexual relationship. Certainly, given that interpretation of their relationship, it makes Higgins’ reluctance towards any relationship with Eliza much more understandable, in my mind.
Likewise, how many of Shakespeare’s characters have been accused of having homoerotic overtones?
I honestly can’t think of a single text that would be completely innocent of homosexual characters or figures from the latest romance novel to history (Especially not any history written by Winston “Buggery and the Lash” Churchill.) to the Bible. Hell’s bells, I’ve heard someone accuse Maurice Sendak’s Wild Things as being homosexual predators in disguise!
Heh. Yeah, that’s subtext that all but stands up on a table and waves its arms around to get your attention.
“Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” indeed…
That’s Winston “Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash” Churchill, to be precise.
I’d consider it a leap, since the characters meet at the beginning of the play, when they have a chance encounter with each other and Eliza, the flower girl, with her atrocious Cockney accent:
Pickering: I am myself a student of Indian dialects; and–
Higgins: [eagerly] Are you? Do you know Colonel Pickering, the author of Spoken Sanscrit?
P: I am Colonel Pickering. Who are you?
H: Henry Higgins, author of Higgins’s Universal Alphabet.
P: [with enthusiasm] I came from India to meet you.
H: I was going to India to meet you.
I’m not sure how it came about that two intelligent male characters, or an intelligent male character reluctant to pursue a romantic relationship with a woman, has to have a homosexual subtext. The song Why Can’t a Woman be More Like a Man? suggests irritation to me, not homosexuality.
Milton’s Paradise Lost?
Actually, the song is titled: “A Hymn to Him.” Given the outright insanity of the arguments in the song (“Men are so honest, so thoroughly square…”) it goes beyond mere irritation to at least exasperation, perhaps even to a complete revisionist view of the two sexes.
Seriously, I’m not arguing in favor of the idea of the homosexual relationship between Pickering and Higgins. I only meant that compared to many such theories (such as Hamlet as a gay male) it is much less of a leap. Given the level of homophobia that this guy in Alabama is expressing, does it matter how reasonable the leap might be, so long as someone can make it?
Well, of course it doesn’t HAVE to have a subtext. I like it mostly because it gives me a chance to snicker over quite a few lines in the script. 
That and it gives supervenusfreak and I a long-lasting running joke…
Yeah. Why can’t people just read something innocent and heterosexually wholesome? Like the King James Bible.
As someone who was born there and is returning there next month, I appreciate and second your statement.
Yes, of course they do. But if my child has a right to your money, would you please send some this way? She’s studying fashion design, and aced her recent algebra test.