Hugh Hefner almost died having sex.

The 83-year-old Playboy publisher - who is currently dating Crystal Harris and twins Karissa and Kristina Shannon - choked on a sex toy while in bed with a group of his girlfriends.

He said: "What is the closest I've come to death? There was a moment when I was having sex with four Playmates and I almost swallowed a Ben Wa ball." The media mogul also revealed he prefers to spend most of his time in bed, doing as many activities as possible there.

He added: "My most treasured possession is my rotating round bed. "I don't have dinner parties - I eat my dinner in bed. I relax with my girls in bed, just watching a movie and having a good time. "If I had to dress up in fancy dress, I'd wear my pyjamas."

However, Hugh admits the aging process is starting to affect his sleep patterns.

"I need to go to the toilet several times a night - that comes with age," he said.

Source: http://au.news.yahoo.com/

Who is sexy? Who is sexual? Who is sexually desirable? Who is sexually vibrant?

Are the people that society designates "beautiful" really sexier or more sexual than the people who get labeled "plain"?

What about older people, heavier people? What about people with disabilities? Are these people fully sexual human beings even though they don't show up in movies, on tv, or in advertising? What happens to all of us when we write off huge sections of the population as non-sexual or sexually undesirable?

These are some of the questions addressed in Sins Invalid: An Unashamed Claim to Beauty in the Face of Invisibility, whose fourth annual multi-media presentation is being performed this coming weekend at the Brava Theater.

Most specifically, Sins Invalid is about the sexuality of people with physical disabilities -- an opportunity for people with disabilities to affirm and celebrate the vibrancy of their sexuality through performance art, theater, film, dance, song, and the spoken word. The cabaret-style performances in Sins Invalid range from mild to graphic, from tender to passionate, from the gentle spoken word to a sexually explicit depiction of a scene involving loving dominance and submission.

"The theme of this year's show is the magic of embodiment," says Patty Berne, artistic director of Sins Invalid, "the magic of all life and the spirit incarnate." The 12 artists in Sins Invalid all possess disabilities, some quite apparent, others less so, such as deafness and environmental illness and injuries. "Each of these artists is in a non-normative body," Berne notes, "and each is a miraculous, sexual being."

Sins Invalid was founded in 2006 by Patty Berne and Leroy Moore, two Bay Area activists with disabilities who were frustrated with the propensity of many to view people with disabilities as asexual, deviant, or undesirable. "We wanted to address the disconnect between what we know to be true about our beauty and what the world seems to believe -- that we are 'less than,' undesirable and pitiable," Berne explains.

But Sins Invalid is more than a statement about sex and disability, going beyond the specific issue of discounting the sexuality of people with disabilities to challenge a whole range of conventional notions about what is normal, what is beautiful, and what is sexy. In place of the familiar notion that sex, beauty and desirability are limited to people who are young, thin, and physically agile, Sins Invalid offers "a vision of beauty and sexuality inclusive of all individuals and communities," an affirmation that we are all sexual, all sexy, all attractive, regardless of age, body form, or skin color.

What makes Sins Invalid so powerful is that it thoroughly succeeds artistically and erotically, separate from the impact of its political message. Sins Invalid challenges its audience to think about sexuality, beauty, and disability in new and expanded ways. But Sins Invalid is also, quite simply, a hot, arousing, sexually charged evening of thought-provoking, imaginative sexual entertainment that only happens to be entirely by and about people with disabilities.

Mat Fraser, a celebrated disabled performer from Great Britain offers "No Retreat, No Surrender," an athletic performance piece using martial arts, and "Beautiful Freak," a tender cleansing ritual. Antoine-DeVinci Hunter, an accomplished deaf choreographer/dancer, asks the audience to share the element of risk he faces every day as a deaf person by rolling a die, each side of which corresponds to a different sound score.

In "The Scene," Leroy Moore, seeley quest, Ralph Dickinson and Patty Berne enact a sexual encounter in which a dominatrix conducts an erotic medical procedure, captured on live video feed integrated with surreal images. Nomy Lamm offers two rock-opera pieces involving a "nest of legs" comprised of the prosthetic limbs that she has worn since she was a child. Spoken word pieces are offered by Leah Lakshmi ("Dirty River Girl"), Maria Palacios ("The Hunger" and "Vagina Manifesto"), and Aurora Levins Morales.

Sins Invalid will be performed at Brava Theater, 2789 24th Street (at York), San Francisco, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, October 2, 3, and 4, Friday and Saturday shows at 8:00, Sunday at 7:00. All shows are wheelchair accessible and ASL interpreted. Tickets are $15-25, sliding scale (no one turned away for lack of funds), available from brownpapertickets.com, or at the door. More information at sinsinvalid.org, or 510-689-7198.

Source: http://www.sfgate.com/

The rise of the religious right in Australia and New Zealand can be linked to the development of organisations in the United States that emerged in the 1970s.

These organisations were, at first, concerned about the de-segregation of schools under the administration of then-US president Jimmy Carter.

That is, conservative white North American Christians opposed the idea of their children mixing with Black children.

When their schools were threatened with the loss of tax-exempt status if segregation was not ended, the “religious right”, as we know it today, was born. It was a product of open racism.

However, Christian fundamentalism can be traced back further to older Bible-based sects and the 19th century religious reaction to Darwinism. In Tennessee, teacher John Scopes was put on trial in 1925 for teaching evolution in a public school.
A jury found him guilty.

But the case received widespread publicity that discredited fundamentalism in the eyes of many.

However, like anyone who is convinced of their righteousness, fundamentalists believe they have a mission to impose their will on others. They ignore criticism, use a range of means to achieve power, and never give up.

Education

Traditionally, control of education has been a way all religions have sought to influence politics and governments to further their agenda. This gives them access to the minds of children. The indoctrinated children of today are potential functionaries for the religion-influenced government of tomorrow.

In the 19th century there were major battles between government and religion about the setting up of state schools in Australia. The industrial revolution needed workers who could read and count. But the churches thought “free, secular and compulsory” education was an attack on their educational hegemony and bitterly opposed these schools.

The various churches also detested each other on doctrinal grounds. This was mainly reflected in the Protestant-Catholic divide. But differences between sectarian factions within these traditions also existed. This made it impossible for government to surrender the education system to one group, as in Catholic Ireland.

So religious-based schools went their own way, and state schools, which educated the majority of children, became non-religious institutions. A trade-off for the loss of this control was the establishment of the legal right for religious education and instruction in state schools for one hour a week, provided parents give permission.

Not happy with that, fundamentalists went further and persuaded the Victorian and Queensland governments to hold referendums to remove the word “secular” from their Education Acts so Bible lessons could be taught in state schools.

This failed in Victoria, but succeeded in Queensland in 1910. To this day, Bible lessons are legal in Queensland state primary schools. The Humanist Society of Queensland is running a campaign to have the word “secular” put back into the Act. They will demonstrate outside the state parliament on April 13, 2010 — the centenary of its removal.

More recently, the Howard government agreed to fund the placement of chaplains in state schools in 2006. In Queensland, the chaplaincy program, run by the Scripture Union, has become a vehicle for open-slather proselytising. The National School Chaplaincy program continues under Rudd ALP government.

The ’70s and ’80s

The modern religious right may have started with racism but it quickly moved to take up a broader agenda. The 1973 Roe v Wade case in the United States, which legalised abortion, infuriated them.

The sexual revolution of the 1960s — partly fuelled by the invention of the oral contraceptive pill — gave them an agenda to fight against.

Their reaction was to aggressively campaign for the traditional nuclear family with Christian values. This included support for: patriarchy, women staying at home with children, regular church-going, prayer and the belief that the Bible is literally correct.

The religious right was also pro-censorship, homophobic, supportive of capital punishment, anti-communist, intensely patriotic and, later, strongly opposed to voluntary euthanasia.

It was not until the 1980s that thereligious right realised itself in Australia and New Zealand. One of its first expressions was the Logos Foundation in NSW started by a former New Zealand Baptist minister, Howard Carter.

It soon spread its influence in Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s National Party in Queensland. It campaigned against a Bill of Rights and argued for “parent-controlled” Christian schools.

The 1990s

By the early 1990s the conservative Lyons Forum — a secretive Chrisitian faction inside the Federal Coalition — formed to promote family values. Two key events in 1994 speak to its influence.

It backed the “Say No To Sodomy” rallies in Tasmania in an ultimately unsuccessful bid to keep the state’s laws banning gay sex. The laws were finally repealed in 1997.

The Lyons Forum was also instrumental in removing the then Leader of the Opposition, John Hewson, who dared to publish a media release that year supporting the Gay Mardi Gras. This was the beginning of the Howard era.
In 1995, the fundamentalist Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) was formed. It continued where the Logos Foundation left off. Abortion is its central concern.

In 1996, John Howard became prime minister. He was soon met with the ACL and other fundamentalist groups. Since Howard, bible study meetings now regularly occur in the parliament, attended by members of most parties.

Despite this, the religious right is on the back foot. In the states, governments have reformed laws relating to abortion, censorship, prostitution, drugs and queer rights.
At a federal level, the battle for legalisation to the abortion related drug RU-486 was won even over the heads of Howard and the ACL. There have been significant changes to laws affecting gays, giving them financial equality with heterosexuals. However, gay marriage is still a major issue.

In 2008, the ACL invited Malcolm Turnbull to be the keynote speaker at their annual conference. To its surprise, Turnbull defended a woman’s right to choose and gay rights. So, to some extent, small ‘l’ liberalism is back, at least temporarily.

On its web page, the ACL claims victories concerning euthanasia, “R” rated computer games, gay adoption of children in the ACT and Tasmania, the placement of brothels, offensive advertising and a by-law to prohibit preaching in parks. If that’s all they can claim then they’re not exactly taking the country by storm.

Moral crusaders

The religious right is mainstream religion in drag. They use their money to grandstand on moral issues such as their current campaign to censor edgy TV programs.

They are always welcome in parliament, are on the religious tax-exempt gravy train, can influence the outcome of elections, but they don’t always get what they want. Labor, Liberal and National politicians, whose central concern is their re-election, happily engage them for that purpose, mindful there are other constituencies they cannot alienate.

A different set of circumstances has seen the re-emergence of the religious right as a stronger force in the US. The situation in Australia is different, insofar as the population is significantly less religious. Successive censuses have shown a steady downward trend in religious belief.

In the not-too-distant future, religious belief in Australia should drop below 50%. This is likely to be the result at the next New Zealand census in 2011.

A problem is that despite the widespread indifference to religion, Australia and New Zealand remain constitutional monarchies, not republics. There is no constitutional separation of church and state to act as a check on governments funding religion with taxpayers’ money.

[Max Wallace is Director of the Australia New Zealand Secular Association and author of The Purple Economy: Supernatural Charities, Tax and the State.]

Source: http://www.greenleft.org.au/

Ross Fitzgerald imagines an amalgamated Christian superlobby squaring up to the newly-registered Australian Sex Party.

Here’s a thought. Peter Costello resigns his seat of Higgins and links up with his old National Party buddy, John Anderson. Then with the backing of the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) and Pete’s brother, the Rev Tim, they form the Queen Mary of religious politics, the Australian Christian Party. Putting aside the obvious battle over the name with the Revd Fred Nile, this scenario may not be so far-fetched as it seems.

Everyone knows we’re living in the ‘end times’ – well, the end times for religion, anyway. Science is quietly leading people towards an understanding of universal intelligence, while prayer is increasingly seen as being unable to stop the tragedies of modern life. More and more, Christianity in Western societies is being hijacked through advances in science like quantum state theory and recent breakthroughs in astronomy, genetics and cosmology. And as the scientific movement into deeper and deeper levels of reality continues, faith-based philosophies on life mean less and less.

Add to this trend one of the most appalling sex scandals of all time, involving thousands of church clergy and possibly hundreds of thousands of child victims around the world, and it’s no wonder that the mainstream churches are floundering. They can’t find enough new priests and their numbers of committed supporters are in significant decline.

The end of any major era or epoch always shows a last-minute rally on behalf of the old guard. I reckon we’re seeing the death of religion through religion’s need to infiltrate political parties over the last few decades. And a corporate merger of the major Christian denominations in a desperate last bid to head off the increasingly secular state makes a lot of sense. There are many Christians in Australia who feel a need to counter the evil Sex Party and the slightly less evil Greens.

In fact, the Australian Christian Lobby was formed not long after the sex industry organised its own political lobby group, the Eros Association, in 1992. The timing said it all. So it would be no surprise to see the religious lobby do the same again, hot on the heels of the Australian Electoral Commission's approval of the Sex Party's registration as a political party and during the Secular Party's continuing efforts to win the same status.

There are other indicators of a mounting change in strategy by the religious right. The rhetoric of Christian groups is becoming more aggressive and more focused. Jim Wallace, head of the ACL, recently let fly with an outrageous attack on gays and lesbians. Last month while debating members of the Sex Party, the Greens and the online watchdog the Electronic Frontiers Association, he blamed the infiltration of our churches by homosexuals for the appalling conviction rate of clergy in child sex offences.

At a gathering in the NSW Parliament meeting-room organised by the Forum of the Round Table (FORT), Wallace - a born again Baptist - told a stunned group of church supporters of different denominations, and some anti-censorship campaigners, that the Catholic, Anglican and Pentecostal churches and their teachings bore no blame at all for the 500 convicted paedophile priests in Australia. The Church had let its collective guard down by allowing large numbers of gay men to enter the priesthood and ministry, he said. It was those poofs who were to blame, not the Pope or the head of the Anglican synod.

When he was first asked the question on this, Wallace stormed to his feet. Even before he got to the microphone, he was telling the audience about how glad he was that this question had come up. And clearly he had rehearsed his response.

The real question is, who has he been rehearsing with? The ACL are pretty tight-lipped about where their funding and support comes from and who they count as their friends. Not so with our federal
politicians. When he was prime minister, John Howard gave the Exclusive Brethren special access to his political office. Peter Costello makes hallelujah videotapes for the Victorian-based Catch the Fire Ministries. And now Kevin Rudd has agreed to be guest speaker at the ACL’s Annual General Meeting in November.

For Rudd, this is a major public relations blunder. His weekly worship at the local church is tolerated by most Australians as a folksy, personal tradition. A ringing endorsement of the ACL is a very different matter, which may see his electoral fortunes tied more closely to the death of corporate religion than he would like.

If the super-duper, cross-factional, multi-allegiance Christian party becomes a reality, Rudd's problems in the Senate with Family First's Steve Fielding will pale into insignificance. If the Sex Party manages to win seats as well, the Senate may well be transformed into a religious debating house.

Spectator Australia 2 October 2010

The Australian Christian Lobby's CEO, Brigadier Jim Wallace. Is that a gun in his pocket?

Source: http://www.the-spectator-australia.com/