Top story down in the "Opinions" box at WaPo today is the Happy Headline: Sunshine for the Virtual Town Hall. Now of course we have a certain reaction to the words "Town Hall," but the writer would like us to take it in the generic sense.

What does he want? He wants us naked. He thinks it will make us more polite.

What he wants is abolition of anonymity in comments. What he'd like is for everybody to have to sign their full, legal name to every comment, with anonymous, or more properly pseudonymous, commenting priviliges granted by the moderator when in the moderator's opinion the commenter is a whistleblower or otherwise Worthy and In Need Of protected status to speak freely. Sort of like when Republicans talk.

The example he gives is telling:

Imagine going to a meeting about school overcrowding in your community. Everybody at the meeting is wearing nametags. You approach a cluster of people where one man is loudly complaining about waste in school spending....You notice his nametag -- "anticrat424." Between his sentences, you interject, "Excuse me, who are you?"

He gives you a narrowing look. "Taking names, huh? Going to sic the superintendent's police on me? Hah!"

In any community in America, if Mr. anticrat424 refused to identify himself, he would be ignored and frozen out of the civic problem-solving process. But on the Internet, Mr. anticrat424 is continually elevated to the podium, where he can have his angriest thoughts amplified through cyberspace as often as he wishes. He can call people the vilest names and that hate-mongering, too, will be amplified for all the world to see.

Got any straw left, Mr. Grubisich? I could use some to mix with the horseshit in the compost bin. Read more…

Their designs are ugly. And their jokes aren't funny. Read more…

I went over to WaPo to read the Episcopal Bishop's response to the Scaife-funded Christianist loons (sorry for the triple redundancy, there) who are splitting the Episcopal church over teh gay (and female bishops (and female priests (and, for you cognoscenti, the 1928 Prayerbook))), and read a lot of Christianist yammering about how homosexuality was against the Bible, the ultimate authority (definitely not true for Episcopalians, but that's another post).
A representative comment:

Church is not a welcoming mat for everyone to trample on its core beliefs. God gave us the bible no person should change the beliefs. Everyone is welcome in church but no one is welcome to change it core beliefs.

But only way downthread came, you know, chapter and verse. Turns out Leviticus 20:13 is the key verse for these bigots. So I thought I'd cite a whole boatload of Leviticus, so you can see for yourself what a selective, twisted interpretation these guys are operating on--and what the consequences of really believing that the Bible is the inerrant word of The God of Your Choice, If Any, must be.

Here goes. Hold your nose, because ritual purity in Palestine, c. 2000 BCE, is strong stuff:

Leviticus 20:8 Keep my decrees and follow them. I am the LORD, who makes you holy.
Leviticus 20:9 If anyone curses his father or mother, he must be put to death. He has cursed his father or his mother, and his blood will be on his own head. Read more…

With this handy map. Read more…