It’s crystal clear.

The past few days have seen extensive international discussion of an incident (known online as #shirtstorm or #shirtgate) in which a participant in a European Space Agency media conference wore a shirt with sexualized images of gun-toting women and made an unfortunate remark comparing the featured spacecraft to a woman. Viewers responded critically to these inappropriate statements, especially jarring in such a highly visible setting (one in which very few women appeared), and the scientist apologized sincerely. But in the meantime, unacceptable abuse has been directed toward the critics, from criticism of “over-active feminism” to personal insults and more dire threats.

We wish to express our support for members of the community who rightly brought this issue to the fore, and we condemn the unreasonable attacks they experienced as a result, which caused deep distress in our community. We do appreciate the scientist’s sincere and unqualified apology.

The AAS has a clear anti-harassment policy, which prohibits “verbal comments or physical actions of a sexual nature” and “a display of sexually suggestive objects or pictures.” Had the offending images appeared and comments been made under the auspices of the AAS, they would be in clear violation of our policy.

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I recieved this breathless email that reveals the ghastly truth about liberal Oregon and their evil sex education plans.

KOIN, the CBS affiliate in Portland, is set to air its special investigative report “Triple X-Rated Education” Tuesday at 11pm. This report will expose the Oregon Adolescent Sexuality Conference and its pornographic sex education forced on area children. Planned Parenthood is on the steering committee of the annual Oregon ASC.

“I felt really horrified and unsettled by it all,” says a student on the KOIN report trailer. “A conference intended to teach kids as young as 11 about safe sex, but you won’t believe what they’re learning,” the commentator continues.

A local watchdog group, Parents’ Rights in Education, has had its eye on the Oregon Adolescent Sexuality Conference and the XXX-rated presentations and materials being peddled to and by schoolchildren there for several years. In 2013, the group asked Rita Diller, director of American Life League’s STOPP Planned Parenthood International, to attend the conference and see for herself what was being promoted to children. Diller says she came away scarred. “I monitor Planned Parenthood sex education on a regular basis and I have seen some unbelievably horrifying situations that young people are put in because of the abortion giant’s fixation with sexualizing children, but never have I seen so many adults work so hard to defile young people than at this conference,” she said. “It is blatant child abuse.”

Several parents attended on behalf of the investigative effort and brought out materials that matched and expanded on the cache that Diller brought out in 2013. Those materials are now up on the website of Parents’ Rights in Education for the world to see.

Also on the website are some videos from the 2014 conference. One of them shows a presentation where a teen boy blows up a condom, lubricates it, and performs a simulated sex act with it while adult sponsors and teens laugh. The trailer for the KOIN exposé is also linked on the website.
American Life League president, Judie Brown, stated, “Planned Parenthood continues to receive funding at taxpayer expense and uses this money to shove pornographic material down the throats of our children. Congress must defund Planned Parenthood immediately.”

Media inquiries, please contact Rob Gasper at 540.659.4171 or RGasper@all.org.

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It takes courage to make such a big change, and to be open about it.

But he can be a useful hack. In his recent column in which he sneered at feminists, he distilled down the entirety of his complaint to a single paragraph. This is the part where he described ALL THE TERRIBLE THINGS feminists had done to Matt Taylor. ALL OF THEM.

The Atlantic’s Rose Eveleth tweeted, "No no women are toooootally welcome in our community, just ask the dude in this shirt." Astrophysicist Katie Mack commented: "I don’t care what scientists wear. But a shirt featuring women in lingerie isn’t appropriate for a broadcast if you care about women in STEM." And from there, the online feminist lynch mob took off until Taylor was forced to deliver a tearful apology on camera.

Oh My Gourd, the feminists lynched him? Dragged him out to a nearby tree and hanged him until he was dead?

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Ana Kasparian of the Young Turks weighed in on That Evil Shirt, and she got everything wrong: she ranted about feminist extremists, and how you’d have to be really weak to give up on science because of one shirt — it was an embarrassing exhibition of non sequiturs. I was disgusted, and would have let it go, but a youtube commenter (!) named florzinnha3 did an excellent job answering it, so I thought I’d just steal her comment and post it here.

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Matt Taylor has apologized for the distracting and disrespectful shirt he wore while acting as a spokesperson for the ESA.

It’s a good first step. But there’s more that needs to be done, since Matt Taylor is only a small part of the problem.

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Is everyone’s morning like this? You get up, you get dressed, you get a stimulating beverage, you knock back the giant pill your doctor is making you take, and then you open the Email and the Twitter and get reminded again that humanity is a great big complex organism that is pocked with suppurating ass pimples, and they’ve all got your address. Today I got to meet @Auto_Math.

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This.

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Apparently, India has these ‘voluntary’ sterilization drives to reduce overpopulation. I put ‘voluntary’ in quotes because these kinds of programs have an ethical catch: they pay women a small amount to have the service done, so for some desperately poor women, it may be more of a necessary sacrifice they have to make to survive. There may be another catch, too: at least one of them was incompetently run.

More than 80 women underwent surgery for laparoscopic tubectomies at a free government-run camp in the central state of Chhattisgarh on Saturday. Of these, about 60 fell ill shortly afterwards, officials in the state said.

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Sometimes, the bad guys actually get punished.

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