I know! How about if we redefine homophobia as a disease?

Sadly, an Indian health minister has gone on record calling homosexuality a “disease”.

For the Union health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, men having sex with men (MSMs) is not only “unnatural” but also a “disease.”

According to Azad, “this disease has come to India from foreign shores”, and Indian society needs to be prepared to face it. Unfortunately, he said, the number of “such people” is increasing by the day.

All gay people are alien immigrants from Gaydonia, I guess, and no natives of the subcontinent could possibly be gay. Unless maybe they’re from Pakistan.

I think we could make a legitimate case for calling homophobia a disease or mental illness, though. All you have to do is browse this sampling of homophobic comic books to see that there is something just wrong with those people. The bizarre, crude work of politician Brent Rinehart alone makes a disturbing case for institutionalizing the wackaloon.

i-d23cb5a21686c8586b479139b11b3923-homophobic.jpeg

I had no idea that gayness gave you superspeed and that rainbows trailed behind you wherever you went, but if it were actually true, it would be awesome. Except for the children of the corn who’d be pursuing you all the time.

Common sense from a liberal senator

Bernie Sanders gave a wonderful speech to the senate. Here’s the conclusion:

So, today, I am asking the American people that, if you believe deficit reduction should be about shared sacrifice; if you believe the wealthiest people in our country and the largest corporations should be asked to pay their fair share as part of deficit reduction; if you believe that, at a time when military spending has almost tripled since 1997, that we begin to take a hard look at our defense budget; and if you believe the middle-class and working families have already sacrificed enough, I urge you to make sure that the President hears your voice–and he needs to hear it now.

I would urge the American people to go to my Web site, sanders.senate.gov, and sign a letter to the President letting him know that enough is enough…

I would like to vote for Bernie Sanders for president in 2012. Can someone convince him to run?

Something has stirred up the anti-circumcision brigade

It’s been a rough weekend. It was a rough night, with little sleep. This morning I had the double whammy of a doctor’s appointment and a dentist’s appointment. So I’m feeling a little cranky, and my teeth are all coated with this gummy gritty cherry-flavored fluoride goop. You don’t want to cross me today.

And then some idiot going by the name ‘eident9’ charges into a year-old thread and first demands an audience with me, and then demands an apology. WTF? This is a blog. Just post your comment and be done with it. And what bug has crawled up his butt suddenly? He says, “Recent matters have reminded me of this board.” Which had me wondering. What matters?

I’ve found out. It seems Russell Crowe had a twitter tantrum over circumcision. He’s against it. So am I. But apparently, I am not sufficiently angry about circumcision, and I belittled people who make it an obsession. I’m not going to apologize for that; I consider circumcision to be needless cosmetic surgery and a barbaric practice, and I’m not going to condone it, but neither am I going to go off the deep end like that guy and consider my life ruined by it. A majority of American males have been circumcised, and we’re a randy, raunchy, sexed-up lot who don’t seem to be suffering from an epidemic of sexual inadequacy. Well, maybe eident9 is, but one frustrated guy does not an epidemic make.

Now Salon has followed up with an article that suggests that circumcision may actually have some health benefits. I am not impressed. They cite a couple of incomplete epidemiological studies in African populations for HIV infection, and they come up with some astounding figures: a 50-60% reduction in infection rates. Wow, with that kind of advantage…sign me up.

However, these are deeply flawed studies. None of them were completed: they all abandoned the protocol and stopped the research as soon as preliminary results gave them positive values. This is like shooting craps and announcing that all your dice throws were practice…until you get a good roll, and then, yeah, that was the real deal. That one counts.

They all overstate their results. That 50-60% reduction was in relative rate, in comparison across the two groups. The actual calculated protection in absolute terms conferred by circumcision was a 2% reduction in the likelihood of infection. That doesn’t dazzle me, either, and given that the studies were terminated when they got their best results, I’m not persuaded.

And finally, give me a plausible mechanism for how circumcision would achieve these remarkable gains. Tell me how it is supposed to work. If it’s something to do with hygiene, it seems to me that better sex and health education should have the same or better effect than lopping off bits of skin.

So to my crackpot complainer, I say no apologies. I also say as I always have that I oppose circumcision, think it is a pointless and petty bit of suffering to put children through and ought to be discouraged, but I also don’t think it’s as hideously damaging as the obsessive nuts want to claim. Also, in the context of the original post, I consider it a prime example of selfish privilege to invade discussions of female genital mutilation, which does cause serious sexual and medical problems, with demands that we pay more attention to the lesser concerns of males getting lightly scarred penises.

Why is Silvana Koch-Mehrin being appointed to the Research Commission of the European Parliament?

This is a German scandal: Sylvana Koch-Mehrin was recently found to be guilty of extensive plagiarism in her doctoral thesis, such a blatant abuse of scholarship that the University of Heidelberg took the remarkable step of revoking her doctoral degree. Before that happened, she had been marching up the ladder of the European political cursus honorum, reaching the rank of vice-president of the European Parliament until her disgrace forced her to resign.

But now a very odd thing has happened: this ex-scholar, this impeached student, this deplorable fraud has been appointed as a full member to the Committee on Industry, Research, and Energy of the Parliament. I don’t get it. She’s screwed up so badly that she’s been tumbled out of a prime political position, so the Parliament turns around and elects her to the committee that oversees research policy? Doesn’t this suggest that the Parliament cares little for competence and integrity, but loves it some cronyism?

Scienceblogs.de has more information and a petition demanding her resignation. Support good science and science policy and throw the rascals out.

All Christian-y and bright

Matt Taibbi is giving me nightmares. Read his long political biography of Michele Bachmann, with this terrifying conclusion.

Even other Republicans, it seems, are making the mistake of laughing at Bachmann. But consider this possibility: She wins Iowa, then swallows the Tea Party and Christian vote whole for the next 30 or 40 primaries while Romney and Pawlenty battle fiercely over who is the more “viable” boring-white-guy candidate. Then Wall Street blows up again — and it’s Barack Obama and a soaring unemployment rate versus a white, God-fearing mother of 28 from the heartland.

It could happen. Michele Bachmann has found the flaw in the American Death Star. She is a television camera’s dream, a threat to do or say something insane at any time, the ultimate reality-show protagonist. She has brilliantly piloted a media system that is incapable of averting its eyes from a story, riding that attention to an easy conquest of an overeducated cultural elite from both parties that is far too full of itself to understand the price of its contemptuous laughter. All of those people out there aren’t voting for Michele Bachmann. They’re voting against us. And to them, it turns out, we suck enough to make anyone a contender.

Now watch the cartoon. Get ready…”When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.”

Don’t worry about Sarah Palin, world

She’s done. She’s been on this cross-country bus tour to promote her folksy ways, and now she has quit halfway through. This is a woman with a very short attention span and a complete lack of discipline and focus; she couldn’t complete her governorship, she can’t finish a bus tour, there’s no way she could cope with a grueling presidential campaign. And if, by some bizarre fluke, she were to actually get elected, I think she’d get bored halfway through the presidential oath of office and decide to go moose hunting, instead.

Good Texans

I often pick on Texas — that is one screwed-up, backwards, insane state, you know — but just for a change I thought I’d mention a few good people working there and doing what they can to improve the dump.

  • Aron Ra, of course, who is one of the best purveyors of scientific information on youtube.

  • Dr Michael Soto, who is on the Texas State Board of Education and is one of the few people there who promotes teaching kids good science instead of that hackneyed medieval crapola other board members peddle. Keep him on the board, please, and elect more like him.

  • All the scientists working in Texas universities who do a fine job doing and teaching science. To represent them all, I’ll just cite the biology department at Sam Houston State University, which goes against the political grain and makes a clear statement about evolution:

    We unequivocally support evolutionary theory, which has gained unwavering support by scientists who acknowledge that scientific validity comes only as a result of hypothesis testing, sound experimentation, and replication by others. It is this respect for the scientific method and scholastic integrity that has convinced the scientific community that evolutionary theory and the work of Charles Darwin are one of the most important of our time.

    In short, we acknowledge that “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” (Dobzhansky 1973).

  • All the fierce readers of Pharyngula from Texas who are fighting the good fight. You can take a bow in the comments.

Keep on battling!

All right, because everybody is reminding me in the comments, I’ll also recommend The Atheist Experience. I wasn’t trying to be exhaustive, there’s a swarm of good Texans out there!

Respect his authority!

The Minnesota Senate’s loudest voice against climate change, it’s chief denialist, is a Republican (of course) named Michael Jungbauer.

Sen. Jungbauer is fond of making pronouncements from on high regarding the scientific weakness of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He takes positions in direct opposition to 98 percent of published and peer-reviewed climate, atmospheric scientists and glaciologists. But the water and sewer treatment specialist by day is, apparently, quite knowledgeable on all manner of science. It certainly appears to be. He uses big words and cites studies in his lectures.

Now here is the amusing thing. Jungbauer attended Moody Bible College, Anoka Ramsey Community College, and Metropolitan State University (nothing wrong with the latter two, but the first is a bit dicey). He has not even completed his bachelor’s degree; he’s kind of a flaky dilettante. So, no credibility there.

He also claims to be an ordained minister, but but again, he’s a failure — he hasn’t even completed the course work at Moody Bible College. Instead — are you ready for this? — his sole academic credential is…

The truth is that Jungbauer was ordained by Christian Motor Sports International out of Gilbert, Ariz. His Senate biography says the organization provides “chapel services, pastoral care, outreach and Christian fellowship at car races, car shows, cruise-ins and tractor pulls.”

Clearly, he’s nothing but a shill in the pockets of the Tractor Pull industry.

Clever and insane

Be afraid. She could make it to the election for the presidency. The Daily Beast has an excellent article on Michele Bachmann’s background, with little hints about how she manages to get elected — she’s specifically tapping into evangelical Christian lunacy.

On Monday, Bachmann didn’t talk a lot about her religion. She didn’t have to—she knows how to signal it in ways that go right over secular heads. In criticizing Obama’s Libya policy, for example, she said, “We are the head and not the tail.” The phrase comes from Deuteronomy 28:13: “The Lord will make you the head and not the tail.” As Rachel Tabachnick has reported, it’s often used in theocratic circles to explain why Christians have an obligation to rule.

Indeed, no other candidate in the race is so completely a product of the evangelical right as Bachmann; she could easily become the Christian conservative alternative to the comparatively moderate Mormon Mitt Romney. “Michele Bachmann’s a complete package,” says Ralph Reed, the former Christian Coalition wunderkind who now runs the Faith and Freedom Coalition. “She’s got charisma, she’s got an authentic faith testimony, she’s a proven fighter for conservative values, and she’s well known.” She’s also great at raising money–in the 2010 cycle, she amassed a record $13.2 million in donations. (Bachmann’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

When Ronald Reagan was president, I thought we’d hit bottom and could not possibly get worse. When George W. Bush was president, I was astonished that we’d sunk even lower, but hoped that this was the worst we could get. President Michele Bachmann is the nightmare that exceeds even that.

I’m not going to be able to vote for anyone, ever, am I?

Once again, politicians are going on little, petty crusades to help the government economize, and as usual, they go for cheap shots that do nothing, other than to reveal their screwed up priorities. Here’s Joe Biden, letting us know where the real problems lie.

Did you know that the government spends millions to maintain buildings that have sat vacant for years? Or that your tax dollars pay to needlessly ship copies of the Federal Register to thousands of government offices across the country even though the same information is available online?

And I bet you didn’t know that your tax dollars pay for a website dedicated to the Desert Tortoise. I’m sure it’s a wonderful species, but we can’t afford to have a standalone site devoted to every member of the animal kingdom. It’s just one of hundreds of government websites that should be consolidated or eliminated.

Hey, Joe! Did you know that the cost of maintaining that website dedicated to an entire species is about $125/year?

And the cost of the war in Afghanistan is currently at $423+ billion?

I would like our representatives to take a rational, cost/benefit analysis of major government programs and actually make changes that make a difference, instead of this penny-ante grandstanding.

The Democrats should know that if there is any liberal, ecologically minded candidate running in the primaries for the presidency, I’ll vote for them without a qualm. I’m probably going to be stuck voting for Obama/Biden again in the national election, but I’ll be holding my nose and only pushing that lever under protest, because the Republican candidates will be even worse.