Please, hide the children, and steel yourself: style icon Tim Gunn confessed on national television to being a complete freak about sex. The man actually admitted to having been celibate for nearly three decades! No, really, he did. And get this: he claims that he’s not maladjusted, either. Reports the L.A. Times:

If you watch the above video until the end, you’ll see Gunn speaking in halting sentences, holding back emotion, as he explains that his decision to remain celibate by choice followed a difficult breakup and is partly “psychological.” He cites health, and fear of sexually transmitted diseases such as AIDS.

“Do I feel like less of a person for it? No!” he said. “I am a perfectly happy, fulfilled individual.” He said he started his self-imposed celibacy as AIDS began ravaging the gay community, and that he and many other people simply retreated from that danger.

He suggested that he has no regrets, adding as the audience applauded: “I am happy to be healthy and alive, quite frankly.”

Well, Tim Gunn, clearly we have a new champion for History’s Greatest Monster. Everybody knows that you cannot be happy or fulfilled without having sex, even if the kind of sex you are inclined to have could make you very sick, and even kill you. They ought to find a home for weirdos who have sworn off sex, where they can sequester themselves and think about other things in their sad, meaningless lives.

Oh, wait.

Spengler has been reading the numbers coming out of Egypt, and he says the country is very close to the brink. Excerpt:

Egypt faces a disaster of biblical proportions, and the world will do nothing about it. Officially, Egypt’s foreign exchange reserves fell by half during 2011, including a $2.4 billion decline during December – from $36 billion to $18 billion, or about four months of imports.

But the situation almost certainly is worse than that. More than $4 billion left the country during December, estimates Royal Bank of Scotland economist Raza Agha, noting that the December drop in reserves was cushioned by a $1 billion loan from the Egyptian army and a $1 billion sale of dollar-denominated treasury bills.

The rush out of the Egyptian pound is so rapid that Egyptian investors refuse to hold debt in their own national currency, even at a 16% yield. After Islamist parties won more three-quarters of the seats in recent parliamentary elections – 47% for the Muslim Brotherhood and 25% for the even more extreme al-Nour Party – the business elite that prospered under military rule is counting the days before exile.

The first reports of actual hunger in provincial Egyptian towns, meanwhile, are starting to trickle in through Arab-language press and blog reports. A shortage of gasoline accompanied by long queues at filling stations and panic buying was widely reported last week.

Spengler further speculates that the accession of Islamist parties to power will drive those who have the money to leave Egypt soon to flee, and will collapse the tourism industry.

That’s a pretty funny Super Bowl ad for the Chevy Silverado pickup. It takes an amusing swipe at Ford pickups at the end. Ford is so ticked off that it sent a letter to GM and NBC demanding that the ad not air during the Super Bowl. Jalopnik has text of the letter. 

I cannot imagine who at the Ford Motor Company thought that this kind of protest would be a good idea. It just makes them look silly. I, for one, have a decent amount of confidence that my Honda Accord will survive the 2012 Mayan apocalypse, no matter what GM says — and I’m man enough to endure their contumely with my head held high.

So says Newsweek. Excerpt:

We think of homeschoolers as evangelicals or off-the-gridders who spend a lot of time at kitchen tables in the countryside. And it’s true that most homeschooling parents do so for moral or religious reasons. But education observers believe that is changing. You only have to go to a downtown Starbucks or art museum in the middle of a weekday to see that a once-unconventional choice “has become newly fashionable,” says Mitchell Stevens, a Stanford professor who wrote Kingdom of Children, a history of homeschooling. There are an estimated 300,000 homeschooled children in America’s cities, many of them children of secular, highly educated professionals who always figured they’d send their kids to school—until they came to think, Hey, maybe we could do better.

Just over a decade ago, when our firstborn was still a toddler, we belonged to the New York City Homeschool Educators Alliance (NYCHEA).  It’s non-sectarian, and as I recall, there were many secular homeschoolers in the group. We moved from NYC when our son was only three, so we never got fully involved. Still, it’s there, and I bet it’s a lot bigger today.

I don’t think this has ever happened to me before. After yesterday’s spectacular Tour de Cajun Food — see here for details (it involves a boudin-stuffed beignet, boudin, a crawfish etoufee omelet, Abita TurboDog beer at 9 in the morning, and large quantities of smoked, highly seasoned meat )– I’ve been hung over all day. Seriously, I have consumed more meat and pork fat in the last 24 hours than I’ve done in years, and I’m paying for it today. Clearly, all these years of being away from Louisiana has left me badly out of shape for things like this.

And still, I can’t wait to go back to Breaux Bridge. This is going to be a problem.

Did I mention that the elliptical trainer gets delivered tomorrow? And not a moment too soon.

Re: the subject line, you don’t often see those words together, but The Browser provides perhaps the only extant case. This is worth a look.

UPDATE: It’s not whimsical, but it’s still pretty funny to imagine, as SNL did last night, how the bro network, Spike TV, would handle “Downton Abbey.” Watch:

UPDATE.2: Dang, the clip was taken down from the site. Oh well. It was the funniest thing that was ever on television, and if you missed it, your life will never be as good as it otherwise would have been. Nothing left to do but drive to Lafayette and eat yourself to death at Johnson’s Boucaniere. As hung over as I was all day from the meat-a-palooza yesterday, what did I eat for dinner tonight? Was it the salad in the fridge? No. Was it the chard? No. It was smoked ribs, over rice. And God help me, it was the best thing I’ve had all year.

Via Andrew Sullivan, this short essay by the Reformed theologian James K.A. Smith, about Mitt Romney, Mormonism, and the deification of America. Excerpt:

In a way, this is refreshingly honest theology. In fact, if one pays close attention to the actual theology at work here—that is, if one starts asking just which God is being invoked—one finds that it is a particular deity: “the divine ‘author of liberty.’” The god of the culture warriors has always been a generic god of theism (precisely like the god of the Founding Fathers): a “God who gave us liberty” (to do what we want). The “Creator” is a granter of inalienable rights and unregulated freedoms, a god who shares and ordains “American values.” If evangelical culture warriors had worries about Romney’s faith, his jeremiad today should confirm that he pledges allegiance to the same “God of liberty” that they do. We’re all Americanists now.
But I hope Mr. Romney and his culture warrior friends (whether on the Right or Left) won’t be surprised if some of us find it hard to believe in Americanism and its God of liberty. Some of us just can’t muster faith in the generic theism that is preached on the campaign trail, whether from the Right or Left. Some of us Christians have a hard time reconciling the Almighty, all-powerful, law-giving God of liberty with the crucified suffering servant born in a barn and executed at the hands of the elite. Some of us are trying to figure out what it means to be a people who follow one who relinquished his rights rather than asserted them, who considered submission a higher value than freedom. We serve a God-man who wasn’t concerned with “preserving leadership” and the hegemony of the empire’s gospel of freedom, but rather was crushed by its machinations for proclaiming and embodying another gospel.

Though up front about how much he has to learn about Mormonism, Smith claims that Mormonism makes claims for the godliness of America that goes beyond any other religion. He suggests that Mitt Romney is not at all being a phony nationalist on the stump, but that he really believes what he’s saying. Smith’s essay brought to mind the old Cleon Skousen book “The 5,000 Year Leap,” which became briefly a bestseller after Mormon convert Glenn Beck began championing it. A Salon journalist wrote of the book at the time:

“Leap,” first published in 1981, is a heavily illustrated and factually challenged attempt to explain American history through an unspoken lens of Mormon theology. As such, it is an early entry in the ongoing attempt by the religious right to rewrite history. Fundamentalists want to define the United States as a Christian nation rather than a secular republic, and recast the Founding Fathers as devout Christians guided by the Bible rather than deists inspired by French and English philosophers. “Leap” argues that the U.S. Constitution is a godly document above all else, based on natural law, and owes more to the Old and New Testaments than to the secular and radical spirit of the Enlightenment. It lists 28 fundamental beliefs — based on the sayings and writings of Moses, Jesus, Cicero, John Locke, Montesquieu and Adam Smith — that Skousen says have resulted in more God-directed progress than was achieved in the previous 5,000 years of every other civilization combined. The book reads exactly like what it was until Glenn Beck dragged it out of Mormon obscurity: a textbook full of aggressively selective quotations intended for conservative religious schools like Utah’s George Wythe University, where it has been part of the core freshman curriculum for decades (and where Beck spoke at this year’s annual fundraiser).

I hope Mormon believers in this blog’s readership will help us understand the way Mormonism regards America. If Smith is right, and if Skousen’s views more or less reflect what Mormonism teaches about the theological meaning of America, then I suspect that many mainstream Christians, whether they realize it or not, pretty much agree with this “God of Americanism” heresy.  That is, they would be American before they would be Christian. Then again, if Smith is correct about the way Mormon theology regards America, isn’t it the case that America is today what Israel was to the ancient Hebrews: an outward manifestation of a divine covenant? From the point of view of small-o orthodox Christian theology, this is not only wrong, but dangerously wrong. But I think very few mainstream Christians are aware of this fact, or as aware of it as they ought to be.

Patriotism is not the same thing as nationalism, and neither of them have anything to do with holiness. One certainly hopes that one is never forced to choose between being a patriot and being a faithful servant of God. But if I were ever put in that position by historical circumstance, I pray that I, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, would have the courage to betray my country.

Of course, uncomfortably enough, that’s what Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, would say.

UPDATE: MC, a reader of this blog who is a Mormon, says this is not what Mormons believe. Be sure to read his comments in the thread below.

You may not have realized it, but Planned Parenthood has an absolute right to taxpayer dollars — so says Planned Parenthood of Tennessee. The organization’s Tennessee branch is suing the state government for pulling funding for “political” reasons. Excerpt:

Two Tennessee Planned Parenthood groups sued the state Thursday for denying the nonprofit more than $150,000 in grant money to participate in programs funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Planned Parenthood wants a federal judge to intervene and asked for an injunction against the state.

In the lawsuit, Planned Parenthood accuses the state of arbitrarily denying the funding in December and this month — without providing a reason — after approving it in August. Planned Parenthood also accuses the state of violating the organization’s First Amendment rights and patients’ rights by restricting access to non-abortion services based solely on an aversion to abortion.

While the state did not provide Planned Parenthood a reason for denying it access to the grant money, Gov. Bill Haslam and his political allies have been open about their opposition to funding the organization with government money.

Of course it’s politically motivated, fools! Whatever a legislature does is politically motivated. So what? Last time I checked, in a democracy, legislatures have the right to allocate taxpayer dollars as they see fit. If voters don’t like it, they can vote the politicians out.

Planned Parenthood lost a political fight, so they’re asking the court to fight for them. The Tennessee governor and his legislative allies may have made a bad call here, but it is utterly galling that Planned Parenthood thinks it has a right to taxpayer dollars, despite the will of the taxpayers, as expressed through their elected representatives. If a liberal Democratic state government defunded an organization favored by social conservatives, that might anger me, but I couldn’t imagine thinking that my favored group had some kind of unassailable claim on taxpayer dollars. That is wildly undemocratic.

The implication of Planned Parenthood’s First Amendment complaint is that abortion is somehow a sacred topic, removed from ordinary politics. They appear to be saying that because a democratically elected government dislikes the organization’s involvement in abortion, it has no right to decide not to fund other things the organization does. That is a bizarre First Amendment claim. The Tennessee government is not telling Planned Parenthood it cannot provide abortions, or advocate for abortion and abortion rights. It is not telling Planned Parenthood it cannot solicit private donations to fund its services. The government is merely telling the organization that it will not provide money to it. What on earth does that have to do with a First Amendment violation? Are we to think that it’s unconstitutional to refuse to give government money to Planned Parenthood?

The reader who sent this item to me remarked:

Good grief.  So now people don’t have the right to stop state money from going to Planned Parenthood because of an “aversion to abortion.”  We don’t just have to allow unrestricted access to abortion on demand, we have to pretend to like it?  Or get sued?

UPDATE: Philosopher, a reader, points out below that the US Supreme Court sided with the KKK some years ago when the State of Missouri tried to keep the Klan from participating in an Adopt-a-Highway program, because it disapproved of the Klan’s beliefs. That is news to me. This would seem to put the state of Tennessee at a significant disadvantage in this case. One possible difference: Tennessee doesn’t seem to object to Planned Parenthood’s advocacy of abortion, but rather that it provides abortions. Another possible difference: the Missouri case didn’t involve the disbursal of funds, but rather permission to participate in a state-run program.

Question to lawyers, then: is it really the case that if Planned Parenthood wants government money, the government has to give it to them? That can’t be right. What are the guidelines here?

Not on the media’s radar, says Ross Douthat. Excerpt: