to pick up on this puzzling line: "(JA's)....not stealing other men's husbands."

Other men's husbands? She's a man?

That might explain the alleged "fixation," I guess.

I don't watch network TV, and have never seen an episode of "Friends." So I'm not sure why I even began reading this piece, other than the fact that I have a Pavlovian tendency to open and read Salon's lead story every day. I stopped reading around the end of page 1, however--sometime when I realized I was consuming a piece of writing that possessed all the depth of my haircolor mixing tray.

Good lord, Salon. What's happened? Must I edit my autorenew options for the Premium membership?

Cary hasn't quite grasped the potential dangerousness of the LW's situation, I fear. His highminded assurances that the LW isn't chattel may make her feel better, but nothing--NOTHING--is going to change the Neanderthal mind of her assmarmot boyfriend.

A man who wrangles a woman's intimate secrets out of her, then holds her to a "higher" standard of "purity" than himself, and who thereafter verbally obsesses over her past, throwing festering buckets of jealous slop on her...well, this is the kind of man who is going to start smacking her around (or worse) once they've been together a year or two.

And in his own mind, he'll be justified. Because she's "a little slut" who isn't worthy of his studly perfection.

This isn't even an issue of gender politics. It's a matter of her personal safety in the future. Go, LW, study the profile of the classic domestic abuser.

Then run like hell.

And from now on, until you really, really, really, really know a man's heart and soul...REFUSE TO HAVE SUCH DISCUSSIONS.

The right man won't care whether you banged the entire football team the night before you met him. He'll only care that you're with him now.

Just a couple of days ago, a male obsessed with the LW's "impurity" earned the nearly unanimous consensus of CT readers: "Dump this a-hole pronto."

Now we hear from an equally psycho LW who, although she rationally "knows" her boyfriend is faithful, can't keep herself from abusing and berating him over imagined "infidelity.

I suggest that we get the boyfriend of LW 1 and this mad female LW 2 together.

They deserve each other.

The rest of humanity--those of us who have managed to salvage relatively normal interpersonal and relational skills from our own invariably imperfect upbringings--will be better off without either of them in the dating pool.

Let them BOTH rot with each other in tortured misery.

Nobody who can see their own folly is "incapable" of fixing it. They're simply unwilling to do so.

Anybody who poses a question about how mankind went around blind for millions of years is obviously so ignorant of basic 4th-grade science, it's not even worth arguing about.

Honestly, Parent. You seem to have serious persecution complex on top of your inability to distinguish talking points from facts.

Seriously, go to church, believe in God, homeschool your kids, teach them anything you want to teach them.

My nieces and nephews will out-earn them by a factor of 5, and will outlive them, what with going to doctors when they're sick. (You do know that doctors rely on evolutionary theory to cure illness, don't you?)

Good luck at the faith-healer's. We'll pray for you.

...to admit that I agree?

In the West, at least for the past few hundred years, we generally have managed to refrain from offing each other over disagreements about whose interpretation of the 14th line of the 56th chapter of is the right one.

Call me a moral absolutist, but I think that's more moral and tolerable than thousands of years of endless cyclical ethnic/religious slaughter.

Then again, if we'd "calmly contemplated" the Muslims "over there" slaughtering each other in 2001, we'd have never invaded Iraq, right? Hello? Revisionist wingnut? Hello? (I simply adore wingnuts who now--fed different talking points for the past two years since that "Ooops, no WMD, uh, well um, OK, well, they're better off without the murderous tyrant" turnabout--seem to recall initially invading Iraq in order to end Saddam's "human rights abuses.")

A lot of people would have a v-e-r-y hard time believing that a kid who hadn't been to church in years suddenly Got Jesus on the very morning of the day he was going to die. Now, either it didn't happen, or life was imitating (stilted) fiction, or this young man had at least SOME inkling that BAD S*IT was about to go down, and figured he might not make it out alive.

It is always tragic when a young person dies for no good reason. But this piece is advocacy, not reporting. Oddly, after reading the piece, I'm not quite sure what I, personally, am being asked to do about it. Not shoot young black men? OK, think I have that one under control. Not own slaves? Yup, good there. Become a full-time "shadow" who personally follows a young black man around to make sure he doesn't cut class? Uhm, no, see, I have this job and it requires me to *be there*.

Which leaves, what, exactly? Handwringing over the terrible state of affairs in our urban areas, wherein the young black men seem hellbent on exterminating each other? Well, sure, yeah, I guess I can wring my hands. Not sure what that's going to do to bring this young man (or any other one) back.

Overall, I have to say the preacher quoted in the piece is the only one making any kind of sense. It's really time to stop killing each other.