Manhattan Diary
by Cahir O'DohertyRSS 
Recent Posts
- Violent attacks on gays in New York up 70 percent in 2013
- Will New York Senator Chuck Schumer ditch gay couples for an immigration deal?
- If nobody's happy, it's working – the abortion debate and Irish politics of stalemate
- Conservative news entertainment complex claim Barack Obama leader of Al Qaeda
- Why Irish grudges are passed on - a long tradition of never forgetting
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When the election is over in November I suspect we’ll have an Irish Setter named Seamus to thank if Mitt Romney doesn’t close the deal.
I mean for sheer weirdness, for what it says about Romney’s determination to accomplish his goals regardless of the cost to the less fortunate individuals concerned, poor old Seamus’s travails are hard to beat.
A few years ago the Los Angeles Times reported that the 'most rapidly growing category today is composed of those Americans who say they have no religious affiliation.'
It's really not hard to see why. Respondents claimed they were alienated from organized religion due to its increasingly conservative politics.
On Monday 40 Catholic organizations, including the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. and the University of Notre Dame, filed suit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services over its contraception coverage mandate. The announcement was made early to catch, and presumably shape, the week's news cycle.
It's important to stress that this has never happened before. America's bishops have chosen a key moment in an election year to sue the president over one of his policies.
Why is Mitt Romney the presumptive GOP presidential candidate?
It's a question we may think we know the answer to, which explains why so few are asking it.
It's a question the party itself probably doesn't want you to ask, because of what it reveals about its current internal state.
I'm running. It’s a bright, clear autumn night, the sky framed by the eaves of Victorian houses.
There are 12 of them and two of us. A word passed between them and the chase is on.
I don't know this part of Belfast, but I know that if we make a wrong turn now we'll be killed. Just stopping in the wrong street will get us killed.
I vividly remember the way boys like that talked about women among themselves: like they were livestock. I didn't hang around with these boys, I didn't even like to be in their vicinity. It was easy enough to avoid them though, if you weren't part of their exclusive social network then they simply couldn't see you. That was a relief to me.
But I remember this one particular kid. There's always this one particular kid. I'll call him George. It looked as if nature had created George to be a scapegoat. He was overweight and effeminate and anxious about his appearance. He bumped into things and knocked them over, every day. He was a closeted gay of course, so deep in the closet he was into his late twenties before he came out. One look into his big frightened teenage eyes was a glimpse into the horrors of adolescence. This kid was in pain, so much pain you could see it in his face.
President Barack Obama's announcement yesterday that same sex couples should be able to get married is a historic moment in a presidency that hasn't been short of them.
We are living in two different Americas.
Last week Republican Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney stayed stonily silent through a relentless and bigoted campaign that was waged against his only gay staff member by the hard right.
North Carolina residents will go to the polls this Tuesday to vote on Amendment One, which would define marriage as being between a man and a woman in the state's constitution, banning both gay marriage and civil unions (for heterosexuals too).
The state already bans same sex marriage, but some particularly anxious lawmakers feel it's their civic duty to prevent gays from forming legal unions in the state's constitution.
The New York Times reports that recent polls of the state and an analysis of past ballot initiatives in other states suggest the measure is likely to pass.
They call it the Leaving Certificate. It’s the name given to the high school graduating test in Ireland, and your results in it will determine where – or if – you go to college.
Ireland doesn’t continually assess you based on schoolwork throughout the year like American high schools. Instead the only assessment that really counts is the exam you take toward the close of your high school career.
