In addition to the Boy Scouts, the National Football League may be the only major organization with a male membership that seems to think that there are no gay people in its ranks, even thought it should be obvious by now to even the dimmest bulb that gay people are present in every area of work and life and the only difference is whether the climate allows them to be open or not. But just as the Boy Scouts are beginning to take tentative steps towards acceptance of gays, so is the NFL. In fact, things are moving quite rapidly over there, with players from both the Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers, the teams playing in today’s Super Bowl game, calling for equal treatment of gays. [Read more…]

The US government routinely invokes its right to keep things secret and the courts are loath to overrule them whenever the government wraps itself with the cloak of national security. For example, consider a recent ruling by a federal appeals court. [Read more…]

Glenn Greenwald writes writes about how a forthcoming event at Brooklyn College is being threatened by a campaign led by Alan Dershowitz and others who think that any event that promises to be critical of Israel in any way should be suppressed. [Read more…]

Politics often features heated rhetoric. Hyperbolic language is often deliberately used by politicians in order to achieve more modest goals like electoral gains but, like a controlled burn in a forest that suddenly breaks its boundaries and wreaks havoc, it can take on a life of its own that its originators can no longer control. [Read more…]

Jonathan Turley flags a disturbing story about a seven year old boy Wilson Reyes who was accused of stealing $5 from another child after school one day. The police showed up at his school one morning and handcuffed him. [Read more…]