This is long but it’s worth spending time with

Listen to Matthew Vines, speaking earlier this year in Wichita, Kan.

And thanks, DickG., for the link.

I’ll have some hash browns and a side order of marital bliss

Jay sends this: Grand Slam Nuptials: Denny’s to Open Wedding Chapel.

Thank God so many states are out there protecting the sanctity of marriage, including in Nevada, where this chapel will open..

Hey! White guys!

And thanks, DickG., for the link.

Leave Gabby’s hair alone

For all kinds of reasons I don’t understand, the Interwebs have been burning up over Olympic darling Gabby Douglas’s hair. (Go to Google, type in “Gabby Douglas,” and the Google Gods helpfully add “hair” to the end of that. Sad to know even the Google Gods objectify.)

If you’ve been watching the Olympics — and I have been, obsessively, in a way that’s starting to worry me — you know that Gabby is a gymnastics phenom who defies gravity. She has a killer smile, and she is African American, and somewhere in the manual that means we all get to comment on her hair. I haven’t posted on this because the discussion seemed too stupid for color television, but here: Read what Krissah Thompson has to say at the Washington Post and then, if you feel the urge to comment on anything but Gabby Douglas’s spirit, charm and athleticism, teach yourself this song:

So if you’re against marriage equality, what SHOULD I call you?

Does bigot work?

Read what Hemant Mehta has to say at Patheos about the whole Chick-fil-A conflab:

Is bigot too strong of a word? It doesn’t matter. The hurt feeling you have when you get called a mean name pales in comparison to the hurt the LGBT community feels when you strip their rights away.

(Plus, you know, I said the word “bigot” with a smile.)

No one should be tolerant of intolerance — and that’s a game Christians love to play (“Well, you’re just intolerant of our religious beliefs!”)… but no one’s taking away their rights. No one’s forcing gay marriage in their church. No one’s asking them to attend a gay wedding against their will. (Let’s face it; they weren’t invited in the first place.)

And thanks, Jac, for the link.

As it should be:

And thanks, Mike the Heathen, for the link.

And while we’re having birthdays…

Medicare celebrated its 47th birthday earlier this week.

And thanks, Leftover, for the link.

What’s the big deal about a hijab?

A Saudi Arabia athlete is scheduled to participate in the Olympic event of judo on Friday, but she wears a hijab, a head scarf and a traditional form of Muslim dress, and officials say Wodjan Ali Seraj Abdulrahim Shahrkhani, who was born and raised in the U.S., cannot wear her head scarf during competition. Her father says if the ban stands, his daughter will withdraw from the event.

The officials say they are concerned about safety, but they could follow the lead of soccer officials, who lifted the ban on hijabs in competition earlier this year.

And conversations are ongoing, which is hopeful.

Meanwhile, some 45 percent of the Olympic athletes are women, and every country represented has sent female competitors. But that may not be that big a deal for Saudi women, writes Valerie Bonk at U.S. News & World Report. Bonk writes:

They didn’t qualify for the games. They’re not welcome to compete in their country or attend sporting events even as fans. And they are receiving little to no training or promotion from the Saudi Arabian Olympic Committee. But despite these obstacles, Sarah Attar and Wodjan Ali Seraj Abdulrahim Shahrkhani have arrived in London as their country’s first female athletes ever to compete in the Olympic Games.

Yet while the two women, who were born and raised in America, are hoping to make a statement for women in sports, experts say their inclusion in the 2012 London Olympic Games will have little impact for women abroad.

“It probably means very little,” says Christoph Wilcke, a Saudi researcher at Human Rights Watch. “It is unlikely that the Saudi government or the Saudi sporting authorities of their own volition will make changes inside the country as a result of sending two women to the Olympics.”

For more on hijabs, go here. And you know what strikes me? That this woman and other Muslims are competing during Ramadan, when observant Muslims fast during the day. When you consider the amount of calories it takes to get an Olympic athlete going, that’s pretty incredible. Based on that alone — that this athlete might be competing on an empty stomach — I say let her wrestle, and let her do so in her hijab.

(Of course, the fasting rules have exceptions, and let’s hope the Muslim athletes are exercising those exceptions rigorously.)

Let’s end this.

To read more, go here.

Does this song make you gay?

Because David Caton, of Florida Family Association (click on the link only if you’re in the mood for a snootful), thinks this is tantamount to gay evangelicalism.

For slow readers, this is not gay evangelicalism. I would know evangelicalism. And thanks, DickG., for the link.