Gay Pride

WASHINGTON -- It's official. The moral majority is dead. That's the word from Paul Weyrich, the conservative broadcaster who first suggested that televangelist Jerry Falwell name his famous political organization "Moral Majority."Those were happier days for Mr. Weyrich, who is president of the Free Congress Foundation. Now, in an open letter to conservatives in the wake of President Clinton's acquittal, Mr. Weyrich is raising the surrender flag."I believe that we probably have lost the culture war," he writes in a letter posted on his organization's Web page, and he no longer believes "there is a moral majority."

WASHINGTON -- Not long ago, if the name Hormel had resonance in international circles, it had to do with the exporting of Spam and other curious canned cuisine, not Luxembourg and the exporting of a homosexual agenda.But in recent months, James C. Hormel -- a 65-year-old food magnate, mild-mannered philanthropist and President Clinton's nominee to be ambassador to Luxembourg -- has become a lightning rod in the Senate. Hormel is openly gay.The San Francisco investor's confirmation has been blocked by conservatives ever since his nomination was approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by a 16-2 vote in November.

THIS Sunday, supporters of gay rights are expected to converge on Washington for one of the largest demonstrations in the nation's history. As I await the event, and recall earlier marches in which I have participated with other parents of gay children, I am reminded once again of society's upside-down notions about the relationship between homosexuality and "family values."The latest flurry of misguided moralism was touched off by a popular comic strip in which a teen-age character reveals his homosexuality to his best friend.

Washington. -- The school board of District 24 in the borough of Queens, New York, has been suspended by school chancellor Joseph Fernandez, who is the sort of bureaucrat-bully who may yet shatter America's valuable but perishable support for public education.The board refuses to implement the ''multicultural'' curriculum Mr. Fernandez's staff wrote to indoctrinate children with particular attitudes about, among other things, homosexuality. The bibliography of the ''Children of the Rainbow'' curriculum recommends for first-graders (preschoolers must make do with a gay and lesbian coloring book)

PORTLAND, Ore. -- On the first page of the Oregon voters' pamphlet is a remarkable disclaimer that the usually staid ballot guide contains "language that citizens and parents may find objectionable" -- one more sign that this isn't just an ordinary political season here.This is the year of Measure 9, an unprecedented and intensely publicized ballot initiative that would write into the Oregon Constitution a moral condemnation of homosexuality and require state and local government agencies to discourage it.The proposal has turned this normally well-mannered state into an explosive battleground between the gay-rights movement and religious conservatives, who included a graphic description of sexual practices in the ballot arguments printed in the bulky voters' guide.

In case you've been hunkered down on Mount Kenya, Brokeback Mountain opened last weekend. No hurricanes destroyed Orlando. No meteorites were reported in Los Angeles. In fact, the film quietly attracted huge crowds in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco and will premiere in other markets this weekend. And so it seems Ang Lee's film about two cowboys in love is - at minimum - surviving. Why is a question we'll have to figure out later. Could be that all three opening cities have hefty gay populations.

ANTONIETTA.John Hersey. Knopf.304 pages. $21. "Antonietta" is John Hersey's 300-year chronicle of a fictitious Stradivarius violin named for the luthier's second wife. Although its five chapters are labeled "acts," they more closely resemble the movements of a musical suite, each composed in a different style.The instrument's creation in 1699 is described in a conventional, third-person narrative -- although little about cantankerous Stradivari seems conventional. Next comes a series of letters by Mozart, whose fancy has been captured by Antonietta and by the female pupil who plays her.The instrument then passes into the hands of a French violinist who delivers a first-person account of his visits to Berlioz; fired up by Antonietta's music, the composer writes the "Symphonie Fantastique."

Showtime cable channels tonight will launch the first nationally distributed, weekly block of gay-targeted programming with Night Out on Sho Too, four hours of films, short features and its highly successful Queer as Folk drama every Wednesday starting at 9. In and of itself, tonight's debut of Night Out is no big deal. For one thing, Sho Too (Showtime 2) is one of the multiplex digital channels, which means fewer than one out of five American homes probably has access. Nor is the programming strikingly unusual.

Cars began lining up before 7 a.m. to get into the parking lots at M&T Bank Stadium for the shuttle bus ride to Fort McHenry and the Blue Angels air show. Yellow school buses stretched from Camden Yards to beyond the football stadium to handle the crowds, which are expected to fill the fort to capacity by 11 a.m. The historic site holds about 25,000, but The Star-Spangled Sailabration is expected to draw 1 million people to Baltimore's Inner Harbor area by Tuesday. Elsewhere, several thousand people are expected to attend Gay Pride Parade activities in Mount Vernon, and the combination could mean congested traffic around downtown Saturday.

Michele Bachmann says that the earthquake and hurricane that have recently hit the East Coast of the United States were sent as some sort of divine warning message to politicians in Washington to curb government spending. I must respectfully disagree. I thought the divine message was a warning not to raise taxes for the wealthiest 1 percent of our population. But then, I don't claim to be as close to the message's source as Ms. Bachmann. It is, of course, a real shame that a number of people in the U.S. have lost their lives in Hurricane Irene as part of God's warning about government spending, but sometimes collateral damage cannot be avoided.