So…not all Texans are dumbass crackers. It’s good to be reassured about that now and then.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
So…not all Texans are dumbass crackers. It’s good to be reassured about that now and then.
It’s a standing joke that the most homophobic ranters are likely to turn up in the news some day getting their luggage lifted. As it turns out, though, some of them face a fate that’s even sadder.
Remember Jonathan Katz, the physicist who briefly held an advisory position with the Obama administration until his online essay declaring that he was proud to be a homophobe made the news? He raved about how homosexuality was simply disgusting and people with “unnatural desires” need to learn to repress them, for their own good and to prevent disease from spreading through the population.
Surprise, Jonathan Katz has not been exposed as a practicing homosexual. Instead, his son Isaac has come out publicly as a homosexual.
The elder Katz is going to have to learn something now, which is a good thing.
By now, everyone knows that the hateful gerontocracy of the Mormon Church was on proud display by Boyd Packer. Besides the message of ignorance he’s passing on, this video also reveals something we became familiar with in our years of living in Utah: the leadership of the church is really a collection of feeble-minded, doddering old fools, who frighteningly have an audience that thinks they’re wonderful, no matter what they say.
A Salt Lake City television station is running a poll on whether the audience agrees with that benighted homophobia. The numbers aren’t as bad as I expected, but then, SLC is full of gentiles.
Do you agree with President Packer’s statement on homosexuality and same-sex marriage?
Yes (59.8%)
No (40.2%)
Anderson Cooper nailed Andrew Shirvell. Shirvell has been on a long-running crusade against a fellow named Chris Armstrong, creating a blog called “Chris Armstrong Watch” (always a bad sign), picketing his house, monitoring his facebook page, making wild accusations that Armstrong is abusing his power, etc., etc., etc. Shirvell is the perfect picture of insanity. He’s so out of control that he was invited to appear on CNN, presumably because crazy haters make good copy.
Shirvell acknowledged protesting outside of Armstrong’s house and calling him “Satan’s representative on the student assembly.”
“I’m a Christian citizen exercising my First Amendment rights,” Shirvell told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “I have no problem with the fact that Chris is a homosexual. I have a problem with the fact that he’s advancing a radical homosexual agenda.”
Of course Shirvell is a Christian fanatic. He’s also dishonest: browse his blog and you can tell he is just freaking out over the fact that Armstrong is gay…it’s all he talks about. He’s a militant radical gay activist who hates God, Christians, the unborn, and wants to have gay sex with everyone but Andrew Shirvell.
The scary part is that Armstrong is just the student body president at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, a position with almost no power. Shirvell is an assistant attorney general for the state of Michigan. Let’s just hope that that is the peak of his political career.
Minnesota should be embarrassed to have two organizations targeting our elections with the goal of blocking the possibility of gay marriage. The Nincompoops Opposing Marriage (NOM) is campaigning for the Rethuglican candidate for governor, Tom Emmers, while the Catholic church is sending out DVDs whining about gays. But they’re both following the same playbook: they’re making these pious, earnest appeals that it’s only fair that the issue be put to a vote, and they’re sounding exactly like the creationists, who make similar pleas for their pseudoscience.
What they so blithely ignore, though, is that just as science is not decided by the popular vote, neither should the civil rights of a minority be placed at the whim of a majority. It’s fundamentally demagoguery that they’re playing at — calling to the bigoted and ignorant to squash the truth and what is right at the polls.
Everyone should watch this video. Dan Savage has started a new project, prompted by the suicide of a bullied gay teenager, Billy Lucas, in Indiana. So they’re trying to get the word out: It gets better. Don’t despair. And they’re collecting other people’s stories, too.
This particular project is specifically about giving gay kids the strength to carry on, but it’s not just gays who are made miserable by schools and religion and other agents of the enforcement of artificial norms. I suspect that the readership of Pharyngula, all you geeks and nerds and oddballs, is enriched for people who were outliers in their youth…and still are, but most of us have reconciled ourselves to our status. It gets better for all of us.
Another good essay to read is The disease called “Perfection”. We all face ridiculous expectations from our culture, and we all face these pressures to conform with the boring mundanes with their distressingly unrealistic and uninteresting ideals. I didn’t have the stigma of being gay, but I was the homely, unathletic, four-eyed weirdo no girl would look at twice…and I can say that it got better for me, and it can also get better for everyone.
By the way, Dan Savage also talks about the unenlightened oppression of a Catholic upbringing. If that’s your burden, rest assured that that can get better, too—you can become an ex-Catholic, and while the world may still be tinted in shades of sin and guilt for a long time to come, you’ll get better.
Hang in there.
All you have to do is look at their official state party platforms. The platforms are typically wish lists forged at multiple levels: I’ve been involved a little bit with our local Minnesota DFL, and anyone can show up and propose an addition to the party platform, which means you’ve usually got a few pie-in-the-sky items suggested…and those all get voted on at the local convention and then at the state convention, and the wackier or excessively improbable items get winnowed away in the voting. If you look at the Minnesota DFL platform, for instance, you find a rather idealistic document that gives you an idea of what the Democratic electorate wants to do. It’s not entirely practical (“We oppose terrorism” isn’t exactly breaking news), but it’s at least representative of a liberal/progressive party, and I’m not at all embarrassed to be part of that political party.
Look at the Texas Republican platform, and you see something different: they’re for God and guns, and against gays and Darwin. It seems to be a nationwide theme for Republicans. The Montana Republican platform is in the news because it actually endorses something entirely illegal.
At a time when gays have been gaining victories across the country, the Republican Party in Montana still wants to make homosexuality illegal.
The party adopted an official platform in June that keeps a long-held position in support of making homosexual acts illegal, a policy adopted after the Montana Supreme Court struck down such laws in 1997.
Like I said, party platforms often aren’t practical guidelines for specific legislative action, but they do reflect the will of that segment of the electorate. The heartening part of this news, though, is that at least some Republicans are embarrassed by their own party platform. Now if only the ones who favor such medieval nonsense would split off and join a new party (Teabaggers!) and let the Republicans equilibrate back to something slightly more sensible.
(via Kobra)
The answer to that little logic question is Catholics. We’ve got a little buzz going on in Minnesota to legalize gay marriage — one of our gubernatorial candidates is for it, for instance, while the other is against it (guess which party he’s from) — and already the Catholic Church is gearing up to oppose it.
The bishops of Minnesota are “alarmed” by continuing attacks on marriage, Bishop of Winona James Quinn has said. He reported that Catholics of his diocese will receive a DVD and a letter from him to remind Catholics of church teaching and to explain the dangers of the legal recognition of same-sex “marriage.”
“From the beginning, the church has taught that marriage is a lifetime relationship between one man and one woman,” the bishop wrote in his diocese’s newspaper The Courier. “It is a sacrament, instituted by Jesus Christ to provide the special graces that are needed to live according to God’s law and to give birth to the next generation.”
Please, please, any fair-minded, charitable Catholics who receive the bishop’s DVD of hate: rip it and upload it to youtube and let me know about it. If you don’t know how or are reluctant to out yourself, send it to me and I’ll do it. Or quite possibly the bishops are so proud of their message they’ll make it public. At any rate, we ought to expose the dishonesty of the fear mongers and liars.
Why is it that organized religion is so consistently on the wrong side of every issue of civil liberties and social justice that has come up in our time? You’d almost think they were always in favor of tyranny.
It looks like I have to add another book to my currently neglected reading list. In an interview, Cordelia Fine, author of a new book, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), has a few provocative things to say about gender stereotypes and the flimsy neuroscience used to justify them.
So women aren’t really more receptive than men to other people’s emotions?
There is a very common social perception that women are better at understanding other people’s thoughts and feelings. When you look at one of the most realistic tests of mind reading, you find that men and women are just as good at getting what their interaction partners were thinking and feeling. It even surprised the researchers. They went on to discover that once you make gender salient when you test these abilities [like having subjects check a box with their sex before a test], you have this self-fulfilling effect.
The idea that women are better at mind reading might be true in the sense that our environments often remind women they should be good at it and remind men they should be bad at it. But that doesn’t mean that men are worse at this kind of ability.
…
But it seems like a Catch-22: Women who pursue careers in math are being handicapped by the fact that there are so few women pursuing careers in math.
Gender equality is increasing in pretty much all domains, and the psychological effects of that can only be beneficial. The real issue is when people in the popular media say things like, “Male brains are just better at this kind of stuff, and women’s brains are better at that kind of stuff.” When we say to women, “Look, men are better at math, but it’s because they work harder,” you don’t see the same harmful effects. But if you say, “Men are better at math genetically,” then you do. These stem from the implicit assumption that the gender stereotypes are based on hard-wired truths.
Here we have a brain, receptive and plastic and sensitive to learning, constantly rewiring itself, with a core of common, human traits hardwired into it, and over here we have scientists who have been the recipient of years of training, often brought up in a culture that fosters an interest in science and math…and somehow, many of these scientists are resistant to the idea that the brain is easily skewed in different directions by the social environment. I don’t get it. I was brought up as a boy, and I know that throughout my childhood I was constantly being hammered by male-affirmative messages and biases, and I think it’s obvious that girls were also hit with lots of their gender-specific cultural influences. Yet somehow we’re supposed to believe that the differences between men and women are largely set by our biology? That women aren’t as good at math because hormones wire up their brain in a different way than the brains of men, and it’s not because our plastic brains receive different environmental signals?
Fine appeals to my biases about the importance of environmental influences, I’ll admit; the interview is a bit thin on the details. But I’ll definitely have to read her book.
The Australians are having an election, and one of the parties is the Family First Party — a Christianist group — and another is the Australian Sex Party, which would have my vote just for the name, if I were Australian. And after watching this debate between the two, I am confirmed in my bias.
I’m a bit disillusioned with Julia Gillard, who’s a bit too quick to throw away principles to pander for votes (which probably means she’ll get elected). Fiona Patten, though, seems quite nice and forthright. And I like their ads.
Now if only the US had a party like that…
