Because our conservative justices are a joke year round! Rebecca Watson is righteously irate at the ongoing threat to our basic freedoms by a mob of idiotic right-wing ninnyhammers.
There is a transcript here.
I thought we lived in a democracy, but it’s amazing how often a regressive minority is imposing their will on all of us.
It’s 48 seconds long. You might still want to shut it off in disgust halfway through.
Oh, look. Another bogus claim by an extremist conservative.
The point of sex is to create children — this is natural, normal, and good.
No, that is one of the purposes of sex. One of many. Do he and his wife only have sex when they intend to have children?
Masturbation is perfectly natural. So is every sex act I can imagine. I’d like to know which ones are unnatural or supernatural…list them for us, Chris. I’m sure it would be educational.
I don’t have procreative sex. Am I not normal? Is everyone who has sex after menopause or after sterilization abnormal? What about people who are naturally sterile?
If Rufo’s attitude is “good,” how do we account for all the oppressive, puritanical harm done to people in its name?
His whole schtick isn’t about natural, normal, or good. It’s all about control and punishing people who don’t follow his sick, sad ideology.
The Alabama Supreme Court has decreed that human life begins at conception and that terminating a blastocyst is a crime. This decision came about because three people, rightfully upset at the accidental loss of some frozen embryos (a property crime) decided to escalate the loss into an immoral act of murder in order to get retribution…and now look what they’ve done. They took advantage of a technology that involves excess production of embryos, making those embryos themselves, and then turned around and took legal action to make sure no one else could use those reproductive technologies themselves. Thanks, guys.
Then, of course, one of the most backward states in the union has ignorant religious zealots on their court (whoa, can’t hold that against Alabama, since the federal court has the same problem) who then decided that a small collection of undifferentiated cells is a “child”. Alabama ranks 47th in the nation on overall child well-being, but now they can claim to be first in the nation for overall “child”/tissue/zygote well-being.
The Alabama ruling is the first to attribute human rights to a developing organism at such an early stage following conception. The ruling states that “unborn children are ‘children,’” and that frozen embryos should be afforded the same protection as babies under the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.
Lila Rose, president and founder of Live Action, a national antiabortion organization, heralded the court for showing “moral clarity” in ruling that the unborn deserve the same rights as children.
“You have children being created in petri dishes at will and then destroyed at will and used for experimentation,” Rose said. “It’s not acceptable to leave human beings on ice. It’s not acceptable to destroy them. These are not commodities.”
You know who creates these “children” in petri dishes? Hopeful parents who can’t conceive otherwise. I guess people who want children under those circumstances are going to have to flee Alabama, if they can afford it. IVF is a fairly expensive procedure so it’s mostly well-off people who can afford it, so this is another of those laws that will selectively hurt the poor and middle class — the rich will be unaffected. That’s why it’s safe for the sanctimonious Christians to applaud this decision, since it won’t hurt their priesthood, yet.
Jennifer Lincoln, a board certified OB/GYN who practices in Portland, Ore., said she doesn’t think people understand how “scary” the Alabama ruling is. She raised a common scenario: A patient undergoing IVF has an egg retrieval that leads to the creation of multiple embryos, with the hope that at least one turns into a live birth. If successful, the remaining embryos remain frozen for possible future use — but not all may be used.
“If someone has five embryos left and they decide not to have any more kids and want those embryos destroyed — and someone in that physician’s office hears that, could [the doctor] be criminalized for being an accomplice in a crime?” Lincoln asked.
I said “yet” because every Xian fanatic is cheering this decision as another avenue to attack women’s reproductive rights. The anti-choicers are gearing up to use that precedent as a tool to oppose abortion rights in Florida. Declaring that a “child” exists the instant sperm meets egg is a nice bit of sophistry to justifying outlawing abortion…and also, eventually, contraception. Oh, look, a nice example of a “slippery slope”!
Now that Alabama’s supreme court on Friday took the remarkable step of declaring that frozen embryos are “children,” a conservative group is trying to derail an expected 2024 ballot initiative in Florida that would enshrine abortion rights in that Sunshine State’s constitution.
On Monday, a religious civil rights law firm alerted the Florida Supreme Court to the neighboring state’s recent ruling in an attempt to have the high court block the amendment from reaching voters as it currently stands.
Earlier this month, the conservative-leaning Florida court heard arguments on the proposed constitutional amendment. It will decide by April 1 whether to approve the language in the measure, which states, “No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.”
Please note that these same black-robed dingbats who are wallowing in their self-righteous, superficial pretense of respect for human life are the same people who approve of the state experimenting with novel methods for executing prisoners. It did not go well.
Kenneth Smith, who survived an attempt by the state to execute him by lethal injection in 2022, was put to death Thursday evening in Atmore, the rural home to Alabama’s execution chamber near the Florida state line, Governor Kay Ivey’s office confirmed.
Smith, 58, was executed at 8:25 p.m. local time, according to a press release issued by the state Department of Corrections.
The execution took roughly 22 minutes, the Associated Press reported. He appeared to stay conscious for “several minutes” after the gas began to flow, shaking and writhing and sometimes pulling against the restraints of his gurney for more than two minutes, the wire service added.
See? Alabama does not oppose all technological advances. They just have to be technologies that kill the right people.
I did not know that Chaya Raichik, the hatemonger behind Libs of TikTok, had an official position in Oklahoma schools. But she did. She was on the Oklahoma Department of Education’s Library Media Advisory Committee, placed there by the far-right extremist, Ryan Walters, who runs things in that state, unfortunately.
Raichik specifically targeted one school district for her hate campaign.
One of these instances was at the Owasso School District (just outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma). In 2022, Chaya Raichik targeted an Owasso teacher for speaking out in support of LGBTQ+ students who lacked acceptance from their parents. Raichik’s post was shared thousands of times on social media and resulted in the teacher getting condemned and harassed until they resigned. The posts Raichik made about the teacher were later deleted, but have been archived. It’s unclear what prompted the deletion of the posts by Raichik. We know Raichik’s Libs of TikTok posts have contributed to a culture of intolerance against LGBTQ+ youth in schools, and now this hate may be manifesting beyond mere threats.
She deleted a bunch of those posts? Why? Has she learned some shame?
No, that’s not it.
This month, a non-binary 16-year-old student at Owasso High School was brutally murdered in the girl’s restroom. According to local news outlets and family, Nex Benedict was beaten by three older female students. The mother of Benedict’s best friend told KJRH News that “one of the girls was pretty much repeatedly beating [Benedict’s] head across the floor.” Reports say Benedict was unable to take themselves to the nurse’s office after a teacher finally intervened in the brutal assault. For reasons that remain unclear, Owasso High School refused to call an ambulance for 16-year-old Nex Benedict, who died from their injuries in the hospital the next day. A motive for this killing has not been shared by law enforcement, but we know that schools in Oklahoma have been specifically pushing violent eliminationist rhetoric against transgender and non-binary youth— a fact exemplified by the state’s hiring of Chaya Raichik following her incitements of terror against the state’s schools over LGBTQ+ rights.
This is not a murder mystery, even though the MSN headline is “16-year-old Owasso student who died unexpectedly was laid to rest”. Died unexpectedly? They were brutally beaten to the point they couldn’t walk, and died in the hospital the next day. They were killed by those three students, who had been incited to the act by Chaya Raichik. That’s 4 people, at least, who need to be arrested for manslaughter, for a start.
Maybe Ryan Walters should be fired, too.
CripDyke has a thoughtful post on this crime. Go read that.
Time to get the popcorn ready!
We can make all kinds of arguments about what defines or doesn’t define a sex, but it really doesn’t matter — especially when it’s from a stock vanilla cishet person like Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, or me. What we should be discussing is the lived experience of trans people who are better acquainted with the actual life in a trans body.
So they did.
The report, called the 2022 US Trans Survey, presents an early look at findings from a survey of more than 92,000 people who identify as binary or nonbinary transgender adults. It is the first such report since the NCTE produced a survey of more than 28,000 individuals in 2015. Individuals were asked a variety of more than 600 possible questions. No respondent received all questions.
Importantly, the transgender survey is large but is not random. Although surveyors weighted the responses to try to account for biases, people who took the survey might still be unrepresentative of transgender people living in the US as a whole.
The report found that 94% of transgender individuals who live at least part of the time in a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth – in other words, who “transitioned” – were either “a lot” (79%) or “a little more satisfied” (15%) with their lives. Nearly 98% of respondents were receiving some kind of hormone replacement therapy, which made them “a lot” (84%) or “a little” (14%) more satisfied with their lives.
I don’t think the report will convince the opposition to shut the fuck up, unfortunately. I predict two responses. One, they’ll focus on the 6% (although it’s actually less than 1% who were unhappy after hormone treatments or surgery) and shriek about their ruined lives while ignoring the majority of successful outcomes, and not bothering to ask what went wrong in that minority. Two, they’ll point to the study as proof that they were right all along, see how seductive the trans lifestyle is? I remember how the anti-gay people moaned about how appealing the self-indulgent, self-gratifying, sybaritic gay life was, and how we must ban all gay references to keep our children from falling into the trap. This is the same thing. They’re going to call this study trans propaganda and ignore the actual data.
The one thing I can say as a stock vanilla cishet person is that no, I’m not going to suddenly shed all my sexual preferences and change my interests because I see somebody else having a good time. I’m going to be happy for them. What’s the matter with those people who’d rather others were unhappy?
It looks like it’s Jerry Coyne. Those two need to be separated — every time they get together they start hooting and jumping on the furniture and throwing unmentionables out the window.
The New Zealand Government’s Chief Scientific Advisor is so ignorant of science that she thinks sex isn’t binary. She may be right about “gender” (whatever that might be) but sex is binary, defined by gamete size. A government’s Chief Scientific Advisor should advise on science, not on the latest fashionable opinion of Generation TikTok.
In case you’re curious to know what outrageous insanity the science advisor, Juliet Gerrard, said, it’s this: “Sex and gender are different but related things. Neither is binary. For an accessible introduction to why sex isn’t binary, Wikipedia is not a bad place to start.”
Are you reeling in shock? No? Neither am I. That’s actually an eminently sensible statement, since sex and gender are different but related, and neither is binary. This is the kind of thing biology professors all around the world, at least those who aren’t poisoned by an ideological freak-out, are saying all the time. That’s a mundane, normal, healthy expression of our current understanding of the science of sex. Calm down, guys.
I have a couple of other objections to Dawkins’ statement.
Biologists do not define sex by gamete size. Gamete size is one of the many consequences of sexual development, and not the only one.
Come on, complaining about “Generation TikTok”? Do you also shake your cane at those kids on your lawn? Face it, we’re older than most people, the young’uns will be taking over the world soon enough. Get used to it.
You know, those two olds are making the rest of us look foolish. If you can’t keep up, Grandpa, go back to gumming your pablum while watching Wheel of Fortune. Some of us still have brains that are relatively uncalcified and can enjoy watching the world progress around us.
Did you know that Richard Dawkins began his career as an ethologist? He got his Ph.D. studying animal behavior under Niko Tinbergen. If you’re an ethologist, you might study things like courtship behavior and parental investment and feeding strategies etc., etc., etc. Dawkins studied how animals make choices.
That was in 1966. Apparently he’s forgotten all that ever since.
Sex is not defined by chromosomes, nor by anatomy, nor by psychology or sociology, nor by personal inclination, nor by “assignment at birth”, but by gamete size. It happens to be embryologically DETERMINED by chromosomes in mammals and (in the opposite direction) birds, by temperature in some reptiles, by social factors in some fish. But it is universally DEFINED by the binary distinction between sperms and eggs.
You may argue about “gender” if you wish (biologists have better things to do) but sex is a true binary, one of rather few in biology.
Somehow, an awful lot of biologists study sexual behavior — like lekking, or sexual displays, or fidelity, and on and on — that don’t necessarily involve sperm collection or measuring ovulation or that kind of thing. It is absurd to insist that only gametes define sex. I recognize spider sexes by the morphology of their palps, and by their differences in behavior, not gametes. I see the birds flying outside my window, and I discriminate sexes by color, primarily. To say that biologists have better things to do than study gender is ridiculous. Every biologist who looks at the plumage of birds or watches the courtship of spiders is studying a phenomenon far removed from basic gamete formation yet is an indispensable, unavoidable, intrinsic consequence of sex in that species…and the animal isn’t getting a semen count before engaging in it.
This is true of human biology, too. People don’t have to check their gonads before engaging in all kinds of sexual behaviors; they would rather not have to worry about the sex police telling them what they can and can’t do, and generally they disregard the prudes in private anyway. You can be a feminine man or a masculine woman, or any shade in between or beyond, and gametes don’t come into play at all, except in reproduction. Reproduction is not the sole function of sex.
Dawkins is just being an extreme reductionist to the point he’s making himself and his position look silly. Go ahead, all you reactionary biologists, rant about how there can be only two true sexes because people have some cells that are almost never seen in public, in defiance of all the other valid signals they openly display. Better biologists will go on recognizing all the factors that define sex without your self-imposed, narrow-minded blinders.
P.S. Dawkins is not an embryologist. No, sex isn’t solely determined by chromosomes embryologically, but by a battery of influences that shape the embryo, including a few genes on some chromosomes. He is an evolutionary biologist, and he doesn’t recognize that the fluidity of sex determination mechanisms suggests that maybe biology isn’t as rigid as he thinks?
I may have to give my students extra credit just for being born. They’re all “Gen Z” (personally, I’m not a fan of lumping people into these cohorts), and polls are showing some heartening trends.
A new poll demonstrates that younger Americans are decidedly more progressive, less religious, and more likely to describe themselves as LGBTQ than other generations.
In fact, Generation Z adults in the survey were more likely to identify as part of the LGBTQ community than to say they were Republicans.
Now that is hope for the future! I would love to live in a world where gay people outnumber Republicans, while aware that LGBTQ+ people can also be conservative. I would say that Republicans ought to be dreading the future, except that they already do — it’s their nature — but also, Democrats need to wake up and smell the coffee too. They Dems haven’t been doing a great job of securing progressive bona fides.
On political ideology, the poll found that Gen Z voters were more progressive than all other generations, with 43 percent describing themselves as liberal, 28 percent as moderate and 28 percent as conservative — versus 31 percent of adults overall who said they are liberal, 34 percent moderate and 33 percent conservative.
On which party they supported, a plurality of Gen Z’ers said they were either independent or unsure of what party they supported, with 43 percent expressing one of those two views — a higher rate of those combined options than any other generation besides Millennials, among whom 44 percent said the same.
Other good news:
Gen Z voters also expressed less religiosity than Americans overall in the survey. According to the report, 33 percent of Gen Z respondents said they were religiously unaffiliated, versus 27 percent of adults overall. Only Millennials expressed less affiliation with religion than Gen Z’ers, with 36 percent of that generation defining themselves that way.
Hey, atheists: same thing I said about Democrats. If you ignore progressive values, this demographic change won’t help you.
Conservatives, at least, don’t understand what’s going on. Here’s that notorious twit, Tim Pool, making a prediction that conservative Christians will win out, because they “have babies.”
There are a few obvious problems with his reasoning.
I think I’ll just rest easy, knowing the kids are mostly all right.
