This was going to be a different kind of column. My friend Jackie, through a mutual contact, arranged for me to interview 20-year-old Tyler Winkler, a gay student born and raised in North Carolina and going to college there. Tyler and I were going to talk about his home state's constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage and how he felt after the overwhelming majority of his fellow citizens voted... Read more.

Big brewers like Anheuser-Busch frequently admonish us imbibers of their grain products to "drink responsibly." Well, I say back to them: Lobby responsibly. In particular, I point to a disgusting binge of besotted lobbying by Anheuser-Busch (now owned by the Belgian beer conglomerate InBev) and other beer barons this year in the Nebraska legislature. At issue was the "town" of... Read more.

How the Supreme Court majority will rule on President Obama's Affordable Care Act may well have been foretold months or perhaps years ago — not so much by their questions during argument this week, as by their flagrant displays of bias outside the court, where certain justices regularly behave as dubiously as any sleazy officeholder. While the public awaits the high court's judgment on the constitutionality... Read more.

A troubling story: Ricky Sargent, a football and track coach in Hempstead, Texas, was fired a few weeks ago for leaving two seniors behind at a restaurant for about an hour, at night, after they misbehaved and refused to get back on the team bus. According to local press reports, the young men were acting up on their way back from a meet, and as a punishment, they were told they wouldn't be allowed... Read more.

Like a lot of guys of my age and class, you say "gay," I think "anal sex." You say, "lesbian," I think "chick with a mullet" or "porn movie." Not nice. Just true. Truth's not nice a lot of the time. So, this gay marriage thing, it's about what (shiver) those people do to each other. It's what they do in prison. In the showers. You want a minister... Read more.

TAMPA, Fla. — An axiom of American politics holds that, in choosing their presidential nominees, Democratic voters are prone to "fall in love" with the nominee, while less emotional Republicans generally "fall in line." Think about it. Democrats are vulnerable to long-shot, first-time candidates (George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama), while Republican... Read more.

I promise you this is not another one of my columns about how polls suck. Point One: You already know polls suck. Ask journalists about polls, and they will not only tell you the latest numbers, but about margin of error, weighting and callback polling. They will also say things like: "Have you looked at the crosstabs? Hey, you gotta look at the crosstabs." (This is another reason never to... Read more.