A completely unsurprising result

A recent survey that correlated the degree of fundamentalism, as measured by positive responses to questions about the absolute, literal truth of the Bible, and teenage birth rates, has discovered something we all suspected all along: fundie kids are getting pregnant despite their stern, restrictive upbringing. There are caveats, of course, and some implied messages here.

However, the results don’t say anything about cause and effect, though study researcher Joseph Strayhorn of Drexel University College of Medicine and University of Pittsburgh offers a speculation of the most probable explanation: “We conjecture that religious communities in the U.S. are more successful in discouraging the use of contraception among their teenagers than they are in discouraging sexual intercourse itself.”

Fancy that. The adolescent sex drive is a power greater than Jesus.

Just in case you’re looking

It turns out that there are a few simple rules to follow when submitting your computer dating form.

Around 42 per cent of messages which included the word “atheist” achieved replies, significantly higher than the average response rate of 32 per cent.

References to “Christian”, “Jewish” and “Muslim” boosted a message’s success rate only marginally, while mentioning “god” in a first approach actually discouraged people from replying.

So just maybe, being godless will increase your fitness in this next generation. Although, given the growing reputation of Christianity, it might just be a matter of distancing yourself from labels that are associated with obsessive kookiness.

What kind of laws do you have over there in Australia?

I’m very disappointed in Australia. Here I thought it was the kind of place where individuality was valued, and there was some good old rugged common sense to the people. But then I read this ghastly story.

In short, Tegan Leach gets pregnant at the age of 18, she and her boyfriend sensibly realize they are too young to be having children, and she obtains some RU486 to induce an abortion. That’s smart and practical, although it would have been better if she’d gotten the assistance of a health care professional to monitor the situation.

Apparently, that wasn’t an option. Doctors refuse to perform abortions of any kind in Queensland, and the laws are hopelessly muddled. The courts are freaking out, and the citizens are insane. These kids had their house firebombed, and their car attacked. Now she’s being prosecuted, and faces seven years in prison.

Maybe she’ll feel mature enough to bear children when she gets out. It’s an interesting social strategy: perhaps you could cage all the girls and women until they are of an age to get pregnant, and then you could release them briefly for breeding? Then, of course, they’d be returned to a larger cage with a crib and a changing table.

This is not a dilemma for the church

William Saletan highlights an interesting study in reproductive biology.

In a paper presented to the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, Dr. David Greening, an Australian infertility expert, reports that 81 percent of the men in his study significantly improved their sperm quality, as measured by DNA fragmentation, through a simple one-week program.

The program was so easy that even the average guy could follow it. According to a summary of the study, “The men were instructed to ejaculate daily.”

He presents it as a conflict for religious organizations like the Catholic church, which frown on masturbation. Unfortunately, Saletan gets it wrong. The Catholic Church can still condemn masturbation as sinful and urge their followers to procreate madly because there’s nothing in their doctrine to favor quality reproduction. To the simple-minded, human beings are all r-selected. Pop ’em out and let God sort ’em out should be their motto.

They must be weak in Wisconsin

Ah, poor Wisconsin…our neighboring state to the east, where the people are frail and frightened, and unable to cope with the rigors of reality. (That ought to get a few of them fired up, don’t you think?)

There is a little dustup going on in the town of West Bend, Wisconsin. The local bluenoses noticed that there are books that discuss human sexuality in the library — and some of them are even written for teenagers! Teenagers, of course, never think about sex and have no interest in the subject unless some vile prurient publication stirs them up, so the crusaders for purity are stridently demanding that these books be removed from view.

One particular target of their fury is a book by Francesca Lia Block, Baby Be-Bop, which commits the sin of writing positively about young gay men and negatively about gay bashing. A group called the Christian Civil Liberties Union has filed suit over the book, since it exists at the library, and they don’t like it.

The plaintiffs, all of whom are elderly, say their mental and emotional well-being were damaged by the book at the Library, the claim states.

That must be one powerful book. It sits on a shelf balefully, emanating damaging gay-rays that permeate the whole town, and disrupting the sexual health of its inhabitants. Perhaps the elderly are especially fragile and sensitive to its effects. Imagine some tired old codger, exhausted after a lifetime of aggressive heterosexuality, sitting in his easy chair before the TV, and suddenly he starts feeling frisky at the sight of Matlock reruns — it must be distressing. And the fault must lie in some kids’ book sitting in a library a few miles away, undermining their ancient manliness.

The prudes have created a blog, and it’s clear that it isn’t just gay sexuality that terrifies them, it’s any sexuality. They link to a couple of pages from books that horrify them: they don’t like sex ed with illustrations kids can understand, fiction that talks about high school kids’ experiences with sex and drugs, or books about female sexuality.

It’s pathetic and sad. I shouldn’t laugh at Wisconsin too much, though, since this really is the work of a timid minority — the city had a referendum on whether the library should censor these books, and the majority said no. That has just inflamed them, though, and now the puritans are suing for the right to burn books.

It always gets down to that with the knuckle-draggers, doesn’t it?

I offer them a compromise. They already have the right to burn books: all they have to do is buy a copy, take it home, and toss it into the fireplace. That’s not at all illegal! Unfortunately, what they want is the right to burn other people’s books, and I’m sorry, that would be uncivilized.

Missouri absolves pharmacists from responsibility

And Ema gets very, very snarky. Missouri’s legislators have just passed a vague law that says pharmacists don’t have to fill prescriptions for things that they don’t like, especially nothing that might look sorta like an abortifacient. This is a bad law that removes standards of professional conduct from licensed pharmacies, and further removes all liability from pharmacists who disregard the doctor’s prescriptions for their patients. Well, some of their standards. Ema has a plan.

One last thing. I have a question for Rep. Ed Emery, Rep. Cynthia Davis, and all the other Missouri politicians who passed HB 226. Since you’ve removed the professional duty and standard requirements for the sale of drugs, can I haz street stand for the glorious, Capitalist selling of Plan B in your state?

Silly Ema. Only lawyers and politicians and priests are allowed to determine what is best for women’s bodies.

Catholic geezers deny biology in Louisiana

Legislators in Louisiana are considering a bill to prohibit human-animal hybrids. We’ve been all over this subject before — it’s ridiculous and founded on complete incomprehension of what the research is all about. How ridiculous is it? SB 115 bans the “mixing of human and animal cells in a petri dish”!

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Guess who is pushing this ban? The Louisiana Conference of Catholic Bishops, a collection of professional ignoramuses, like this guy, Archbishop Alfred Hughes: old, white celibates with clerical collars and heads stuffed full of decaying dogma.

Look, Hughes, let’s face up to reality. You aren’t promoting this ban because you have any knowledge of the science; if you knew anything about the subject, you’d know that culturing cells of different species is common. Those cell lines to which George W Bush limited government-funded research? Many of them are grown on beds of mouse feeder cells. We could grow specific human cell lines on human feeder cells, but you’d freak out over that, too. There are gene mapping procedures that use fused rodent/human cells to produce cell lines with partial chromosomal losses. Monoclonal antibodies are made by combining immune system cells with immortalized cancer cell lines. And then there’s the ultimate miscegenation: bacterial cells made with copies of human genes, to make human gene products, like insulin. You look old enough that if you aren’t diabetic yourself, you probably have friends who are…and they’re shooting up the product of a human-non-human hybrid. Are you going to ban those next?

Let’s not pretend this is a decision based on morality, either. People are not harmed in the production of these hybrid cell lines, the work is biomedical in intent and produces knowledge and treatments that help people. The decrees of the Catholic church seem to have little to do with human values any more; they’re all about enforcing a rigid dogma and regimenting people, not in mutual cooperation to help one another, but instead to perpetuate your authoritarian hierarchy.

You aren’t promoting this silly because it’s good science or good morality: it’s simpler than that. You’re doing this because biology disgusts you. This isn’t unusual at all — many people are squeamish about the oozy, squishy, squirty, gooey, slimy, sloppy, messy wet business of what goes on beneath their skins. That it makes you feel icky is not grounds for demanding that others unburdened by that bias must follow your taboos. Your personal sense of revulsion is not an argument for your position.

Worse, this is a topic all tied up in your, umm, issues with sex. Your priesthood is just plain weird in its denial of a basic and healthy human urge and its obsession with regulating the private behavior of others. You are not normal. You are the wrong people to be taking on the responsibility of dictating anything about human sexuality — you’re just too far out on the fringe of perversity. There are a lot of weird sexual practices out there, but I’m afraid denial and repression and the kind of self-loathing that characterizes the professional celibates of the Catholic church are among the weirdest. That doesn’t mean you have to stop, of course — your kinks are your kinks, and I will defend your right to not do whatever you want in the privacy of your bedroom — but you have to realize that in the face of the riotous diversity of human sexual behavior, no one gets to use their personal preferences to instruct others on what they may do in private and between mutually consenting adults.

And that includes using a little polyethylene glycol on an assortment of cells in a dish to encourage a bit of fusion. As long as no aware, autonomous individuals are slithering out of the dish, you don’t get to argue that it is wicked and hurting people.

You’re being a sour old prude trying to impose your quaint morality on situations in which you are probably among the least qualified people on the planet to judge, and I have no sympathy with your position at all. But I’ll make you a deal. If you grim old white male virgins leave sex and science alone, I won’t suggest that your sexual pathologies could be treated with regular exposure to the soft and slippery bits of living, squirming human women (or, if you prefer, the flesh and fluids of human men)…you know, all that biology you deny. Even if it would be good for you.

Gingi is angry

She’s so mad about how mean pro-choice people are, that she’s making up new facts. She says she received death threats over her callous use of the death of children, which may be entirely true (and if it is, I’m pissed off at you: no, it doesn’t matter how vile her behavior is, you don’t threaten physical harm over it), but she also makes strange claims about how harmless the raving loonies of the anti-choice movement are. Part of it is fallacious context. The anti-choicers haven’t blown up as many buildings as the number of churches that have been burned down! (Never mind that there is no group advocating the destruction of churches.) EarthFirst! and ALF/ELF have done more property damage than they have…and we people who believe that women should have a right to choose endorse those actions. Wait, what? She couldn’t have really said that. Yes, she did.

It’s astounding that the open-minded abortion-loving crew can’t seem to wrap their heads around the concept of hostility towards buildings that house infanticide and mass assembly-line slaughter, all while they support and applaud the regular targeting of churches, synagogues, forestry companies, corporate and university-based medical research laboratories, medical-supply firms, fur farms and other industrial buildings.

It’s the first time I’ve ever been accused of applauding the destruction of laboratories, anyway. I also don’t think of women’s health clinics as places of mass assembly-line slaughter.

She also makes up some weird numbers. How about this?

In the entire history of the struggle over abortion, only 7 pro-abortion activists (including three abortionists) have been murdered. Compare that to the 520 murders by pro-aborts and the 360 fatal botched abortions by abortionists including: 145 pregnant women, 360 abortion clients, 71 other women, 110 born children, 164 wanted preborn children and 30 men.

I like that. They’ve only murdered 7! They must not be so bad after all.

I’m baffled by the other numbers, though, and no source is given. So pro-choice activists have acted like Paul Hill, walked up to 520 people, and gunned them down in cold blood? What are the circumstances behind these claims?

But anyway, don’t bother with Gingi Edmonds — she’s demented and hysterical. In particular, do not send her threats of harm! That is never appropriate under any circumstances.

There is something productive that you can do, though. Every year on Good Friday, the MisogynyNow! crowd, thousands of rabid anti-choice fanatics, converge on family planning clinics and do their usual sign waving, shouting dance of hate against women using the facilities. It’s not as if you people have church services you need to attend, so sign up for a counter-demonstration at the Highland Park Planned Parenthood and show your support with peaceful social action. There may be similar activities in your neighborhood — look them up. There may be a thousand Gingi Edmonds howling and weeping there, but all you have to do is stand up against them in defense of reason and women’s autonomy.

(via Sunny Skeptic)

The pope is an evil quack

You’ve all heard the news by now, I’m sure: the pope was traveling to Africa, a continent plagued with widespread sexually transmitted diseases adn also, coincidentally, one of the few places where Catholicism is growing, and he dispensed a little medical advice:

Speaking to reporters on his way to Cameroon’s capital, Yaounde, the Pope said HIV/Aids was “a tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone, that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which can even increase the problem”.

The solution lies in a “spiritual and human awakening” and “friendship for those who suffer”, the AFP news agency quotes him as saying.

Consistent condom use is associated with a reduction in the incidence of HIV infection of approximately 80%. It does not increase the problem. I know the Catholic church is reliant on the denial of human nature, something demonstrated regularly by the activities of its own priests, but at some point they have to recognize a simple reality: people like to have sex. You aren’t going to talk them out of it without warping their psychology in a truly pathological way (again, witness the Catholic priesthood), but you might be able to get them to practice sex in a way that protects their health.

Claiming that condoms increase the problem is disinformation and outright quackery — it’s a lie that will kill people. That is what the pope is doing on his little tour, spreading lies, doing harm, and setting back efforts to materially help the afflicted. “Friendship” won’t help the children of a woman dying slowly of AIDS, nor will gilt-robed old men whispering about “spirituality” do one scrap of good against a dangerous reality.