Darn UK show-offs

The Girl Guides, which is the original name for the Girl Scouts, have just made an amendment to their policies to be inclusive to non-believers.

Girlguiding UK has announced a new version of its Promise – ‘the core expression of values and the common standard that brings everyone in guiding together’ – which is inclusive for the first time of those who don’t believe in any god. The British Humanist Association, which responded to Girlguiding consultation and met with Girlguiding in the course of their work to reformulate the Promise, has welcomed it.

The new formulation will have Guides promise to ‘be true to myself and develop my beliefs’, in place of the previous formulation to ‘love God’. It is the twelfth amendment to the Promise in guiding history, but the first version to open guiding up fully to non-religious girls.

It’s not clear in the article whether this change will translate to the American Girl Scouts, although they stopped discriminating against atheist girls 20 years ago — but I think they still have to promise to “serve God”. I know the Boy Scouts had to be dragged with great drama and breast-beating into allowing gay kids to enroll, and still reject atheist boys.

But good work, Girl Guides. Now we just need to fix America.

Quick! Let’s change the conversation to another continent!

The nonsense women have to put up with here in the US is positively embarrassing…so I propose we distract everyone with Australian sexism.

But perhaps, sadly, Gillard’s most immediate legacy will be one that you don’t need numbers to measure. We don’t need polls to tell us that many Australian men are not comfortable with a female prime minister. The indisputably sexist attacks against Julia Gillard forces us to acknowledge the deeply ingrained habits of sexism in Australian public life. If the Prime Minister is treated this badly, how do less powerful and privileged women fare?

We know that women are paid less than men. We know that women are underrepresented in boardrooms, in the media, in politics. There are all kinds of inequalities that we’ve been able to quantify for decades. But the assaults on Gillard reveal the unspoken double standards that govern the treatment of men and women.

I don’t think this is going to work. The Australians at least managed to elect a woman prime minister.

Progressive policies are creeping in everywhere despite you

We sometimes focus too hard on the struggle with the regressive jerks who squawk and scream on the internet, but I have to tell you — they are completely irrelevant to major policy initiatives in academia (note: this does not mean academics can’t be assholes, too, it just means policies try to be more enlightened). Every time I have to deal with the people managing the major granting institutions, it’s simply taken for granted that we will be doing our best to encourage equal opportunities for everyone. The blind stupidity we seem to encounter when dealing with leaders of major skeptical organizations just doesn’t happen — that behavior would get them fired.

Latest example: the NSF is expanding maternity leave opportunities. Why? It’s obvious: because sexist policies derived from the conventions of the 1950s drive good people out of science.

Instituted in 2012, NSF’s Career-Life Balance (CLB) Initiative is an ambitious, ten-year initiative that will build on the best of family-friendly practices among individual NSF programs to expand them to activities NSF-wide.  This agency-level approach will help attract, retain, and advance graduate students, postdoctoral students, and early-career researchers in STEM fields.  This effort is designed to help reduce the rate at which women depart from the STEM workforce.  Further information on the CLB initiative may be found on the Foundation’s website.

…

The purpose of this DCL is to announce a new opportunity for GRFP institutions to submit supplemental funding requests to sustain the research of  active NSF Graduate Research Fellows who have been granted an NSF-approved medical deferral for dependent-care (family leave) situations (see Guide for fellowship status options).  This gender neutral supplemental funding opportunity is in addition to the limited paid leave option for Fellows on Tenure with an NSF-approved medical deferral.  GRFP institutions are invited to submit supplemental funding requests to provide additional personnel (e.g., research technicians or equivalent) to sustain the research of NSF Graduate Research Fellows on approved medical deferral due to dependent care (family leave) situations.  The supplemental funding request may include funding for up to 3 months of salary support for the additional personnel, for a maximum of $12,000 in salary compensation.  The fringe benefits and associated indirect costs may be in addition to the salary payment and therefore, the total supplemental funding request per Fellow may exceed $12,000. The supplemental request also must include a letter from the Fellow’s faculty advisor supporting the CLB/GRFP Supplemental Funding Request.

Beneath the bureaucratese, it’s pretty simple: gender-neutral family leave opportunities are now available at all ranks of the scientific enterprise, from graduate students on up. And they don’t ask questions.

There should be no privacy related information provided in this request, i.e., the rationale for leave should not be disclosed to NSF.

Quit picking on Marissa Powell!

All right, as we’re seeing splashed all over the news now, Miss Utah, Marissa Powell, fum-fuhed a question about resolving income inequities. Here she goes:

And I say, so what? No one expects a dissertation in the feel-good blurb you’re allowed to give in a beauty pageant. She clearly hadn’t thought about the question before, and was simply floundering to come up with an answer…and the one she stumbled out wasn’t inherently bad. She’s trying to recommend education as a solution.

So, not an inherently wrong answer, poorly expressed, and contrived on the fly by a young woman who wasn’t really prepared for it. I dare any of the people who are dressing her down to get on the air before a national audience, get a question on a subject they’ve never really thought about, and answer it as well.

What’s really going on here is an effort to find supporting evidence for a bias that women in beauty pageants are stupid — and the media are happily jumping on one instance of a clumsy, misspoken answer as confirmation.

Theodore Beale, racist asshat (and not embarrassed by it)

I recently highlighted NK Jemisin’s speech in Australia, which pointed out the disgusting degree of racism still common in the US. One small part of the speech noted a remarkable recent occurence.

…the membership of SFWA also recently voted in a new president. There were two candidates — one of whom was a self-described misogynist, racist, anti-Semite, and a few other flavors of asshole. In this election he lost by a landslide… but he still earned ten percent of the vote.

It was clear who she was talking about: flaming hatemonger and regressive thug Theodore Beale, who also goes by the name Vox Day. Not a good person, a really nasty, unstable, vicious wackaloon. And of course, Vox Day noticed and flew into a furious snit, demanding apologies and threatening lawsuits, because he’s so annoyed at being called a racist.

So he wrote a post denying the accusations and making his demands. He also insists that he can’t be kicked out of the Science Fiction Writers of America because he’s a paid-up lifetime member.

If you go to his page now, here’s a sample of what you’ll find.

Reality isn’t racist, Mr. Sanford. Neither is history. They simply are. And you can’t escape the fact that Ms Jemisin lied about me and about the state laws of Texas and Florida. As some of my Australian readers have already pointed out, Ms Jemisin has no idea what she’s talking about concerning Australian race relations either.

Oh, that doesn’t sound so angry or racist, you may be thinking. But what you’re seeing there is the stripped-down, cleaned-up version of his original racist rant, probably revised when he realized that threatening lawsuits for being called a racist while flinging racist insults was probably not a wise idea.

Fortunately, screen shots of the original tirade were captured. It’s rather different. Another short excerpt from the ugly:

So, perhaps their assertions should be taken with at least a small grain of salt. And it should be obvious that, being a libertarian, I am not actively attempting to take away anyone’s “most basic rights”. Jemisin has it wrong; it is not that I, and others, do view her as human, (although genetic science presently suggests that we are not equally homo sapiens sapiens), it is that we do not view her as being fully civilized for the obvious reason that she is not.

She is lying about the laws in Texas and Florida too. The laws are not there to let whites “just shoot people like me, without consequence, as long as they feel threatened by my presence,” those self-defense laws have been put in place to let whites defend themselves by shooting people, like her, who are savages engaged in attacking white people.

Keep in mind that Jemisin is black. Here’s Theodore Beale coming right out and saying that while she’s human, she’s not fully equal to a white man, himself (and please, his invocation of “genetic science” is reeking bullshit). And then he says that the racist “stand your ground” laws some states have in place are there to protect white people like him from savages like her.

Or how about this?

Unlike the white males she excoriates, there is no evidence that a society of NK Jemisins is capable of building an advanced civilization, or even successfully maintaining one without significant external support.

Racist as hell.

Hmm. Why do you think he felt it necessary to cut that kind of racist noise out of his post?

There is now a rising swell of people calling for Beale’s expulsion from the SFWA (and apparently there are provisions within the organizations by-laws that allow for that). It sounds like a good idea to me. Remember, the standard you walk past is the standard you accept, and Beale certainly is setting a low standard. I’m surprised they’ve let him poison the organization for so long.

Then comes the tricky question. What about the 10% who actually voted for that turd?

Oh, wait, I didn’t dig deep enough into the sewer. Beale did not edit his complaint; he posted a cleaned-up version for circulation. The racist rant is still online in all of its feculent glory! The man has no shame at all.

Just how racist is America?

This 11-year-old boy, Sebastien De La Cruz, can really belt them out. Here he is singing the national anthem:

It’s an awful song, but De La Cruz can cope — I hope he’s getting some serious voice training.

But…do you want to hear how people reacted to “a beaner singing the national anthem”? No, you probably do not. There are so many proud and unabashed racists in this country.

The facts are that De La Cruz is a native American citizen and the son of an American Navy veteran. But he’s brown.

Leaders stand up for what is right

Wow, Australia, are you trying to shame the US by example or what? While rape is endemic in our military, and old greyheads waffle about in committees avoiding stating anything clearly about the problem, look at Lieutenant General David Morrison of the Australian army laying down the law.

Yes. The time is long past due to recognize that equality by race and sex and sexual orientation is a moral obligation. I commend Morrison for being at least one man who stands up for that obligation.

But what about us? Rebecca Watson is exactly right.

Recently, I’ve been discussing and sometimes arguing with friends about the current state of the skeptic and atheist communities. It is my firm belief that we are, as a “movement,” cowardly, and that is why we ultimately will fail. There are too many of us, and especially too many people in positions of power, who are unwilling or unable to take any real action that might help stop the incessant harassment of women in our ranks, or to take any other real moral stand. I’ve seen people who think of themselves as allies actively covering up sexual harassment at an event and then going on to invite the harasser back to speak. I’ve seen “skeptics” write blog posts defending Brian Dunning as a hero instead of an embarrassment. I’ve seen organization employees privately rage about the nonsense their boss is spewing but then refuse to even try to hold him accountable. If we’re going to get anywhere, we have to demand better. We need leaders who are more like Lt. Gen. Morrison.

I feel that American leadership in a lot of domains has been crippled by that Clintonian disease of triangulation — straining to find a position that accommodates a maximum number without regard to truth or moral status. That’s a dangerous approach when the majority is not moral, and often, not even right.

Knowing a little history clarifies issues

We’ve had this long-simmering football controversy here in the upper midwest — a North Dakota football team named itself after an Indian tribe. They try to argue that it’s not racist and claim that it’s a respectful homage to the natives, but look at the history of such naming elsewhere: the Washington DC football team name is unabashedly racist.

This Washington football team was named by one of the most vehement racists in the history of American professional sports. When George Marshall bought the team in 1932, they were called the Boston Braves. He changed the name — to a slur, because he was a racist — and moved them to Washington. He made “Dixie” one of the team’s fight songs and refused to hire black players well into the 1960s. The NFL integrated in 1946 but Marshall’s team held out until the federal government actually forced them to field black players in 1963. The all-white Washington teams of the 1950s and 1960s were among the worst in the league, but segregation was more important to Marshall than winning football games. The NFL had actually already been raciallyintegrated until black players were suddenly banned in 1933. Interviews with owners suggest that Marshall was responsible for the ban.

This is the man who named the team and white supremacy and racism obviously informed his every decision. In his will he insisted that his foundation not spend any money on “any purpose which supports or employs the principle of racial integration in any form.” It is extremely hard to believe that this man selected the name — specially changed the name from a less offensive term for American Indians to this term — to “honor” anyone, the usual argument used by the team’s modern defenders.

The current owner has vowed to never change the name, and is desperately working to build up some PR spin to cover his butt. So what does he do?

The Washington DC-area NFL franchise has commissioned veteran Republican pollster Frank Luntz to conduct some focus groups to see how American football fans feel about the franchise’s name, which is a vile racial slur.

Oh, yeah. When you want to whitewash racism, you call the professionals: a Republican apparatchik. Everyone knows that.

If you read some of the linked articles, you’ll discover that one of the reasons the team refuses to change their name is that they did a poll…and found that Americans preferred that they keep their racist name, 9:1. Are we at all surprised? And is it any wonder that they’ve now hired a Republican pollster to skew the bias even more?

I notice Mal Brough is rather flat-chested himself

OK, Australians, help me out here — I’m always getting confused by your political parties. Here in the US, the word “liberal” is strongly associated with the political left and progressive politics. Elsewhere in the world, it’s not: the Australian Liberal party refers to classical liberalism, which is actually center-right, rather conservative politics, right? And they’re in a coalition with the National Party, which is predominantly rural and conservative? I get so tangled up trying to sort these things out.

Aww, screw it. Let’s just identify them as the misogynist jerkwad party. It seems they have a unique way of sniping at the Labor Party (center left, ja? Like our Democrats?) which involves printing up sexist dinner menus.

The menu was presented at a dinner for former minister and Liberal National Party election candidate Mal Brough.

It offered up "Julia Gillard Kentucky Fried Quail – Small Breasts, Huge Thighs and a Big Red Box".

Charming. Well, they just lost my vote, if ever I emigrated to Australia.

Dublin, 29-30 June!

In a bit more than two weeks, it’ll be time for the Empowering Women Through Secularism conference in Dublin. It’s going to be excellent, you should go!

I know there has been some concern that Michael Nugent has been enabling certain abusers to mouth off, but as Ophelia mentions, we’ve been talking about it behind the scenes. We haven’t resolved all of our differences by a long shot, and there are still some substantial disagreements, but, and this is an important point of agreement, none of those differences are to be the subject of the conference, which is going to be tightly focused on women’s rights. We might be having some interesting arguments in the bar afterwards, but none of that will be on the podium.

Also, don’t forget that the conference is the work of Atheist Ireland and the always awesome Jane Donnelly, not just Michael Nugent. When Ophelia says now that she has much more confidence in the work of the conference, she has good reason. It think it’s going to be very productive and successful.

One other interesting observation. You may notice that there are men listed as speakers, including me. I think this is appropriate, since women’s issues should also be men’s issues (and vice versa). However, women clearly have priority here — and the way it’s going to work is that the men will be sprinkled throughout to provide that complementary male perspective, but in every case, women will be in the majority on all of the panels. We guys will be very careful not to talk over the women or to launch into mansplaining mode, I hope. The audience can be encouraged to fling rotten fruit at us if we do.

So if you’ve been waffling over whether to go, be reassured. It’s going to be good.

Oh, and if you’re stuck in the midwest and flying across the Atlantic is just a journey too far, don’t forget SkepchickCon, the skeptic track at CONvergence, is the weekend after Dublin. You’ll also be entertained by the spectacle of Rebecca Watson and me stumbling about jet-lagged from our European excursion.