Bees, Bats, and Butterflies April 12, 2012April 12, 2012 NOT A CHOICE A key proponent of the notion that you can change your sexual orientation has repudiated his own widely-cited 2001 study. For those of you hoping to turn yourselves gay, or vice versa, the prospects are even dimmer than before. Read it here. (Executive summary: Teenager enrolls at parents’ urging with a therapist who specializes in helping people change; it doesn’t work; he goes to Yale, grows suicidal from the pressure to change, checks himself into Yale’s psychiatric facility; eventually accepts himself; gets married; to a guy; is happy; writes this article in which he visits Dr. Robert Spitzer, author of the “explosive” 2001 study; Spitzer asks him to print that he retracts the thrust of his study.) POLLINATION UP CLOSE And other dazzlements of nature in four-and-a-half minutes. Amazing footage. (Thanks, Fain. Thanks, T.E.D.) IT’S MITT! Thorsten: “Re your column, and speaking as a registered Republican, even before yesterday’s news I had found it hard to believe that the four people left in the race were the best that our Republican half of this 300-million-people country would have to offer. The only reasonable guy in the mix, Jon Huntsman, we threw out long ago. Well, that will make it that much easier to vote for President Obama. Not that I necessarily agree with many of his decisions, but at least this guy is intellectually flexible and pragmatic, something that the Republican side has now proven, beyond any doubt, not to be. (Everybody knows that taxes on the rich must go up, but Republicans would rather see our country go over a cliff before admitting that). I noticed that many Democrats (not you) have complained about perceived weakness of President Obama in his political dealings with the other side, but to me this simply shows which side is the reasonable one, and I hope many other Republicans will see it the same way come November.” ☞ From your Republican lips to a million Republican ears.