Tuesday, July 10, 2007

APA to review counseling of gays

Conservative religious groups say it’s stacked against them and calls for “diversity” on the panel but the science is on our side:

The American Psychological Association is embarking on the first review of its 10-year-old policy on counseling gays and lesbians, a step that gay-rights activists hope will end with a denunciation of any attempt by therapists to change sexual orientation.

Such efforts - often called reparative therapy or conversion therapy - are considered futile and harmful by many gay-rights activists. Conservative groups defend the right to offer such treatment, and say people with their viewpoint have been excluded from the review panel.

A six-member task force set up by the APA has its first meeting beginning next Tuesday.

The report won’t be ready until spring.

Xanadu on Broadway opens tonight

And the early reviews say NYStories was right. Frank Scheck (Frank Sheck???) for the Hollywood Reporter:

[A] character also declares at one point: “This is like children’s theater for 40-year-old gay people!”

Unfortunately, such self-consciousness is not likely to increase your enjoyment of this slipshod enterprise, which belongs more in a fringe festival than on Broadway. Despite running a mere 90 minutes, it quickly proves wearisome in its one-note camp attitude.

Well, yeah. What’s wrong with that??? I’ll wait for the Times…

LATER: Hooray! The Times’ raves, “Can a musical be simultaneously indefensible and irresistible? Why, yes it can.”

Why, you may wonder, would anyone deem it necessary, or even worthwhile, to pay lavish mock homage to a dreadful movie by exhuming it for exhibition onstage? Has Broadway nothing better to do? Has the American musical theater reached such a nadir of inspiration?

Well, yeah. I guess. Whatever. Why pester me with silly questions when there’s so much silly bliss to be had at the Helen Hayes Theater, where the new, improved “Xanadu” opened last night? In any case, Douglas Carter Beane, the impish playwright who has ingeniously adapted the screenplay for the stage (while wearing a Hazmat suit, I hope), trumps such hectoring queries by acknowledging the inanity of the enterprise himself. In his adorably ditzy new book for the musical, Mr. Beane posits 1980, the year “Xanadu” dawned and the year in which the stage version is set, as a cultural turning point. “The muses are in retreat,” muses the god Zeus, played by Tony Roberts, in the musical’s poignant climax. (Kidding!) “Creativity shall remain stymied for decades. The theater? They’ll just take some stinkeroo movie or some songwriter’s catalog, throw it onstage and call it a show.â€Â�

Prophetic words, mighty Zeus, but the creators and performers of “Xanadu” desecrate the theatah with such sharp good humor and magnetic high spirits that you won’t have much time to weep for the cultural blight that too much of Broadway has become. And in fact, there is enough first-rate stage talent rolling around in “Xanadu” to power a season of wholly new, old-school, non-jukebox musicals, if someone would get around to writing a few good ones.

I liked it too. Congrats to the audacious young first-time producers who pulled it off. 

Senator: Investigate release of Wilson sex video

You’re damned right it should be:

A state senator who has railed against the 10-year prison sentence given a Douglas County 17-year-old for having sex with a 15-year old has asked the state attorney general for an investigation into the distribution of a tape depicting the act.

State Sen. Emanuel Jones (D-Decatur) said it is “an absolute, utter disgrace” that a videotape of the raunchy party in a Douglasville hotel room that led to the conviction of Genarlow Wilson on aggravated child molestation charges has been shown to both reporters and legislators. He characterized the videotape as child pornography.

REMEMBER TOO: Matt Towery, who wrote the law used to prosecute Genarlow and who has recently filed papers on his behalf, comments on the letter-of-the-law arguments prosecutors use to fight on:

...federal law would define this tape as child pornography, with no exceptions provided for legislators or lobbyists. It’s too bad everyone seems so hell-bent to carry out “the letter of the law” that has imprisoned Genarlow Wilson, while enjoying reasonable prosecutorial discretion in the interpretation of laws regarding their own actions.

And the AJC’s Maureen Downey notes another letter-of-the-law inconsistency:

Factually, all the teenagers at the party who were drinking and smoking pot - girls and boys alike - broke the law. Yet McDade chose not to prosecute the girls for drinking or drug use. Such a decision was well within his discretion.

And Ann Woolner at Bloomberg:

It isn’t clear whether the girls’ faces were obscured in the video. But the idea of a prosecutor distributing a sex tape to lawmakers in the name of victim protection is bizarre at least. The young women and their families can’t possibly be grateful for help like that. We aren’t talking about Paris Hilton here.

Jones wants McDade investigated for witness intimidation, too. I’m absolutely down with that!

Free Internet Law Advice

Ron Coleman at Likelihood of Confusion:

It’s the Internet Law Treatise, “a project to maintain a free, open licensed, collaborative treatise summarizing the law related to the Internet with the cooperation of a wide variety of attorneys, law students and others.” The last place I’d go for legal advice is a Wiki, but this resource might make a very good first place.  (Follow that?)