Dan Savage, the syndicated sex columnist and editorial director of the Seattle alt weekly The Stranger, yesterday wrote on the paper's news and arts blog that he has been in Los Angeles all month working on a "non-airing presentation pilot" for HBO that would basically bring his advice column to the screen. The screen!

According to a draft of press release that's sitting on my desk here at HBO—in my own office! with a lock on the door! I could be naked in here!—"Savage Love," the (potential) teevee show, "will focus on current events and cultural trends with sex as the filter." I'm hoping to bring a new kind of conversation to TV about sex—an honest conversation, one that's informed without being (too) wonky, funny without being (too) cruel, sexy without being (too) cheesy. Basically, my sex-advice column—but on the teevee!

The Association of Alternative Weeklies today links to a Craigslist "Rants & Raves" section ad posted a week ago – headed "HBO Savage Love" – that offers one clue about the pilot, which is being taped Aug. 27 in Glendale, Calif. The ad seeks "people who use the CB6000 (or any model) to talk about their experiences using the device."

That would be a male chastity belt.

William Saletan vs. John McWhorter and Stephen Colbert vs. Byron York, after the jump.

• At his New Republic blog, John McWhorter lights into Slate's William Saletan (Amanda Hess' favorite pro-lifer). A few years ago, McWhorter writes, Saletan "was shot at like a varmint...after writing some columns on evidence that black people are genetically less gifted mentally than whites," and now he's being too timid in response to findings that No Child Left Behind has failed to close the achievement gap between white and black students. Specifically, McWhorter thinks Saletan made a  mistake by asking "Why categorize and measure students by race?" McWhorter, who is both black and conservative–two decades after Armstrong Williams rose to prominence, this still qualifies as a novelty–backed off a little when he read the mea culpa that Saletan, who's white and conservative, published. The novella-length exchange is worth your time. In short, McWhorter maintains that education critics shouldn't shy away from the topic, even if the new study suggests that disparities in academic performance transcend environmental factors, but Saletan just isn't ready to go there. My two cents: The best public schools in the country are light-years behind mediocre private institutions. Why, then, are we surprised that a federally mandated public education program put together by Republicans failed to do what university-level education departments haven't been able to accomplish in decades of classroom experiments? Now would be a great time to stick it to Congress–most of which members' children attend private schools–for killing D.C.'s voucher program.
  
• Also on the race front: FishbowlDC (yeah, that Fishbowl) did a nice job capturing (and by "capturing," I mean, "imbedding a video of") Stephen Colbert lambasting Washington Examiner columnist Byron York. The sentence that got Colbert's team of writers–as well as Matt Yglesias (or, at least we think it was Yglesias who wrote about it)–so upset? "But if a new survey by the New York Times is accurate, the president and some of his policies are significantly less popular with white Americans than with black Americans, and his sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are." The rest of the column is simply a recitation of approval ratings broken down by race (York discovered that Obama has a significantly higher approval rating–we're talking 20-30 percentage points–among black voters). The fallout from his column was hot enough to inspire York to write a follow-up. IMHO, this kind of analysis is innocuous compared to the racial finger-pointing that Andrew Sullivan, Dan Savage, and, yes, even I committed when exit poll data suggested that blacks and Latinos bore a disproportionate responsibility for the passage of Proposition 8 in California. (Nate Silver, god love'm, proved us all wrong.)

That's it for me, good readers. Keep your eyes peeled for next week's Summer Music Guide.

While I agree that the "phenomenon" of abstinent teens finding ways to get each other off without sticking the P in the V deserves a name, I'd like to point out that oral not (anal) sex is the go-to act for nice, Protestant youthgroupers.

I only wish that I could have had Dan Savage with me during winter break 2003, when I and hundreds of other pubescent Jesus Freaks met at Grace Episcopal Church in Ocala, Fla., to listen to our ministers explain why pre-marital oral sex, pre-marital hand jobs, and pre-marital heavy petting were all just as bad as pre-marital "real" sex. Savage might have found it interesting that our pastors never said anything about pre-marital anal sex until a curious camper raised his hand and asked if that meant anal sex was ok. The answer was "No." Turns out it's never ok for Christians to do anything with their asses besides shit and sit. Not even when they're married. Because "sodomy is always a sin."

Using anal sex to get off without compromising a woman's virginity is contrary to what the average evangelical or fundamentalist Protestant, looking to skirt rules about sex, would do. In or outside of marriage, anal sex (especially in the eyes of Warren and his contemporaries) is far worse than any other objectionable sex act. And that means teenage congregants are more likely to see oral sex and hand jobs, (not anal sex) as the less sinful alternatives to vaginal intercourse.

I've heard that Catholic teens are big on the anal alternative, but when have Catholic teenagers–the A.D. equivalent to secular Jews–ever come under the categorical umbrella of "Christian teenagers"? Saddlebacking, insofar as it describes anal sex and the type of teens in Warren's sphere of theological influence, describes a phenomenon that doesn't exist.

"You can call me Ted. I sell life insurance, if you need some." That's Ted Haggard, the former evangelical preacher who was fired and/or resigned from his posts after having an affair with a male prostitute and buying meth, talking to TV critics Friday here in Los Angeles.

Haggard and his family were promoting Alexandra Pelosi's 45-minute HBO documentary "The Trials of Ted Haggard," which debuts Jan. 29. "Now that we've got the freedom to answer questions, we want to answer questions," he said. Pelosi, daughter of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, revealed that "Ted had an agreement with the church that he would not tell his story, and he was recently released from that."

As to his "trials," the life insurance salesman and former National Association of Evangelicals president said, "I now know more about hatred than I've ever dreamed. And I know it doesn't help. And I know about judgment, and I know it doesn't help."

Haggard said "I made the wrong decision" and that "my hope was always that I could deal with my issue on my own," he's "grateful now for [gay escort] Mike [Jones]'s decision to expose that, and I'm grateful for my family's decision to be faithful to me when I wasn't faithful to them." His wife, Gayle, told critics that "our marriage was strong and is stronger now because of the honesty and the transparency and our ability to communicate about these things."

As to the drugs, Haggard said, "I'm not sure what I bought. And it conflicted me. It was, I love it; I hate it. I don't really know what to do with this." But he said he's convinced that "without this scandal, I had the potential of becoming dependent and increasingly compulsive, and probably really ruining my life. I certainly lost my career and my reputation."

While Ted called his behavior "hypocrisy," he sidestepped repeated questions about sexual orientation, including his own. "I think sexuality is confusing and complex," he said, vaguely referencing the "very positive, constructive process" he's going through, adding later, "I am thoroughly and completely satisfied with my relationship with my wife." He also insisted that "all people are in equally desperate need of redemption, love, inspiration, kindness, compassion, forgiveness, those things. We are in a world that's short on love and high on hatred and judgment, and I've gotten it from every side. I get it from the religious side as well as the unreligious side, and I just think we can all improve."

Haggard's daughter Christy — who appeared in front of critics along with her brother, Marcus –was more direct. While she said "there was a lot of misrepresentation which resulted in a lot of confusion, a lot of unnecessary hatred towards our family," she said later, "We were more judgmental than we are now, and people were hurt by us. And I know that a lot of people deserve a very sincere apology from our family because we are all the way we are for a reason."