I slag Andrew Sullivan when I get the chance, but in his hopeless struggle to reconcile gay rights with contemporary American conservatism, he posts some fairly good stuff -- like a reader’s letter about Douglas Kmiec, a likely Bush appeals court nominee, that discusses an article Kmiec published in the Los Angeles Times in 1997 with the incredibly patronizing title "Gays Need the Helping Hand of Counseling."

Give Kmiec a tiny bit of credit: Judging from the excerpts quoted in the letter, he’s one of the few right-wing gay-bashers who is at least somewhat consistent in his sex-fear -- he chides straights, too, saying, rather apocalyptically, that condoning sex outside of marriage leads either to a generation of violent, illiterate, unwanted bastards or to no kids at all. But I guess he still knows who the real enemy is -- the letter-writer says he "approvingly" quotes the English barrister William Blackstone’s statement that "the very mention of homosexual sodomy [is] a disgrace to human nature and a crime not fit to be named." As the letter-writer says, "Is murder, for example less of an offense than consenting homosexual sex since it is obviously worthy of being ‘named?’"

By the way, a Web search reveals that Kmiec was one of several dozen law professors to sign "A Statement on the Definition of Marriage from Law Professors Across the World," an attempt to persuade lawmakers in the Netherlands not to grant full marriage rights to gay people in their own country. Don’t these meddlesome bastards have anything better to do?