Noli Irritare Leones

Andre Braugher, my current favorite actor, will guest star on House, Joel’s current favorite TV show. He will be playing Dr. Nolan, who treats House after he goes into rehabilitation.

Paging Dr. Nolan: Who has the lucky job of diagnosing one of the most famous diagnosticians in the world? That job is left up to Dr. Nolan, played by Andre Braugher, whom you may remember from Gideon’s Crossing. Katie describes the surely to butt heads pair: “House’s version of how well he needs to be to go back to work and Nolan’s version of how well he needs to be to go back to work is very different. You can check yourself in voluntarily, and you can leave voluntarily, but whether or not he’s going to be permitted to practice medicine is another story. Before he is going to be allowed to practice medicine, Dr. Nolan needs to make sure House is on much sturdier ground than at the end of the season.”

Natalia Antonova on “Converting on Paper”: Faith vs. Warm Bodies.

This post on Muslimah Media Watch caught my eye, because it reminded me of one of my favourite topics – converting on paper. I think the subject is pertinent. I disagree with Yusra’s assertion that for Muslim women, marrying non-Muslims is not an issue, because, as she puts it, “Muslim women believe that their freedom lies within the teachings of Islam.” I rather view this as a minority issue – no more irrelevant than the issues the GLBT community faces when trying to carve out its own space within a particular religion. I also think that this issue will continue to grow in importance, because, crisis or no crisis, the world is progressively getting smaller. More and more people are leaving their communities, or stretching the concept of what “community” means in the first place. As their numbers continue to grow, so will the issue of “mixed” marriage.

What do I mean by the phrase “conversion on paper”? Let’s put it this way – We all know people who had to convert to a particular religion because of their prospective spouse. Whether due to religious law, family pressure, inheritance issues, etc., people convert in order to get hitched all the time. While some are sincere in their conversions, others view it purely as an issue of convenience….

Some thoughts on heroes and clay feet … Ta-Nehisi Coates had a couple of posts up about Martin Luther King, one that talks about his getting taped cheating on his wife (with some interesting bedroom talk), and another in which he clarifies that MLK, flaws and all, is still a hero to him.

Decades ago, I was at Pacific Yearly Meeting, talking to a couple of people about Joan Baez. (For those readers who don’t already know this, Pacific Yearly Meeting is a Quaker Yearly Meeting, and Joan Baez comes from a Quaker family; at the time this conversation took place she was occasionally attending Palo Alto Friends Meeting.) One of them was a young man who was deeply disappointed in meeting her. She’d sung about casual sex (I think it must have been one of the two “Love Song to a Stranger” songs); he’d met her after the show and thought (rightly or wrongly) that she’d made a pass at him. I think he may also have been disappointed to learn that she and David Harris had (long since) gotten divorced. He’d been expecting St. Joan the Peace Activist, and instead he encountered a human being.

I thought she was all the more inspiring as a human being, that seeing her as an imperfect person like myself who still did great things was better inspiration than imagining her to be somehow way more perfect and flawless than me. And, as some of TNC’s commenters point out (not in contradiction to anything TNC said), the same goes for MLK. Goes double for MLK, really, because if getting caught at hidden affairs comes off worse than an open divorce (much less having lovers when you’re not married at the time you have them), MLK’s accomplishments are also greater, and he didn’t, after all, quit when the FBI tried to blackmail him with the tapes. Knowing that flawed people can also be heroes is a good kick in the butt to the rest of us.

While TNC writes about realizing the humanity of our heroes, the Economist has a short post on Humanising Iran.

ONE thing seems certain to emerge from the chaos in Iran. Whether it becomes the next revolution or the next Tiananmen, Iran has been humanised to Americans—and to many others around the world—to a degree not possible in the earlier era of “mad mullahs” versus “Great Satan”. For a long time, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad *was* the face of Iran for those in the West who feared it (or wanted to engender fear of it). Now, that face may as well be Neda Soltani (pictured), the young woman shot dead on the street while she spoke on her mobile phone….

figleaf critiques reporting of a study of macaques in Foreplay as “Payment” for Sex? Seriously?

Christy of Dry Bones Dance talks more about her evolving views about nonviolence in Peace, Love & Ass-kicking.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 7:24 am and is filed under Blogwatch, News and Commentary, Race, Sexuality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.