Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Politics & Religion => Topic started by: Crafty_Dog on November 04, 2004, 06:01:06 AM
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Woof All:
Like the title says, this thread is for matters pertaining to gender.
I begin with something from Glenn Sacks, who has a radio show heard here in LA and elsewhere and who has me on his mailing list. I listened to the show one time and found his vibration to be kind of whiny and abrasive in an ineffective way-- but I also find him to consistently raise matters of interest that most are afraid to discuss and so I skim his emails and click upon those that pique my interest.
Woof,
Crafty Dog
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Sacks writes
I invite you to call the show and join the discussion in progress at 5 PM PST/8 PM EST at 1-877-590-KTIE (in California) or 1-800-439-4805 (out of state).
For those who are outside of our radio stations' coverage ranges, you can listen to the show live this Sunday (11/7) via our station's excellent Internet stream at Listen Live. His Side with Glenn Sacks can be heard on WSNR AM 620 in New York City and North-Eastern New Jersey, and on WWZN AM 1510 in Boston on Sundays at 10 PM EST. The show can also be heard in Southern California on KTIE AM 590 at 5 PM PST.
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Feminist Law Professor Leads Backlash
Against Paternity Fraud Laws
The stories of victims of paternity fraud often provoke disbelief. Many men are falsely assigned paternity in default judgments and are compelled by the state to pay 18 years of child support for children whom DNA tests have proven are not theirs. Many of these men are not properly served notice of the paternity proceedings, never get their day in court and have no idea they are "fathers" until their wages are garnished.
Often by the time these men realize what has been done to them, the statute of limitations for challenging paternity has already passed, and sometimes lose half or more of their take-home pay to child support, arrearages, interest, and penalties -- often to support children they have never even met.
In other cases, men are misled into supporting children who are not theirs. Sometimes unwed men are urged to declare paternity of their girlfriend's or ex-lover's children at or near birth, and such declarations, when later found to be the product of deception, are hard to undo. Other men are deceived by wives who bear children through adulterous liaisons and who mislead them into thinking that the children are theirs.
In response to the paternity fraud crisis, several states, including California, Georgia, Maryland, Alabama and others, have passed paternity fraud legislation. Now paternity fraud activists' success has created a backlash.
Law Professor Melanie Jacobs has emerged as a leading voice in the backlash against paternity fraud laws. Family law attorney Jeffery Leving has authored legislation to make paternity fraud a criminal offense. Jacobs and Leving will debate paternity fraud laws and their philosophical underpinnings on His Side with Glenn Sacks on Sunday, November 7 at 5 PM PST/8 PM EST.
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The Case Against Paternity Fraud Laws
BY PROFESSOR MELANIE B. JACOBS, JD, LLM
The family unit has dramatically changed in recent years. In an era in which individuals and couples, heterosexual and homosexual, are embracing new reproductive technologies to create families, the biological connection often does not assist in establishing legal parentage for intended parents.
Couples and individuals alike may contract with egg donors, sperm donors, and gestational surrogates to create their families. As a result, reliance on biology as the determinative means by which to establish legal parentage no longer makes sense. Functional parenthood?emphasizing the daily, routine, and even mundane aspects of everyday parenting?provides a more realistic approach to defining legal parentage, especially for nontraditional families.
Simply because we have the means to determine biological parentage with greater certainty does not mean that it is in the best interests of children to do so.
Additional scientific advances, particularly improved genetic testing, are similarly changing how we define traditional families. While res judicata and estoppel principles have long existed to preserve the unitary, nuclear family, some states are moving away from these doctrines in favor of biological paternal certainty. Thus, if a man is not the biological father of a child?and was either uncertain or unaware of this biological fact?he may petition to disestablish paternity. These disestablishment petitions represent the emergence of a new family law phenomenon?the theory of paternity fraud.
Michigan is among a growing number of states seeking to enact a paternity fraud law. About 12 states currently have some form of paternity fraud law that permits a man who learns he is not the child?s biological father to vacate an order that previously established his legal parenthood. Several of these, like Michigan?s proposed statute, are open-ended, such that the man can file his motion to vacate his paternity at any time?for example, five, 10 or 15 years after the child?s birth. Still others have a stricter statute of limitations of two to three years. The statutes also vary with regards to vacating child support orders and arrearages and also ongoing visitation and parenting time. Thus, paternity fraud jurisprudence has at its core the difficulty of balancing competing best interests: those of the child and the child?s non-biological yet legal father. Whose rights are paramount? Whose should be paramount? And can we characterize this issue as one of genetic innocence?
Michigan House Bill 4120 would allow a man to have a prior judgment of paternity vacated upon showing that the man is not the child?s biological father or adoptive father and that the man did not know or had no reason to know that he is not the biological father.1 The proposed bill contains no statute of limitations for the filing of the motion, other than a requirement that the man must file the motion within six months of learning that he is not the biological father. The proposed bill does not, however, prevent a man who learns that he is not the biological father of his child 12 years after the child?s birth, for instance, from filing a motion to disestablish his paternity. Worse yet, the proposed bill and a companion bill, House Bill 4650, would permit the court to vacate all child support obligations and any arrearages, while still permitting the man to seek parenting time with the child. The proposed bill thus miserably fails to protect the best interests of children and instead places the rights of non-biological fathers well above those of the children that they have actively fathered for months and, oftentimes, years.
Paternity fraud statutes?predicated on enhanced and cheaper genetic testing?are being used to destroy established, functional families. Simply because we have the means to determine biological parentage with greater certainty does not mean that it is in the best interests of children to do so. For wrongly convicted felons, improved DNA testing has increasingly provided the means by which innocence was finally proved and freedom from incarceration secured. Regularly, newspapers regale readers with stories of prisoners who were wrongly convicted and were proven innocent through advanced scientific testing. Reliance on DNA testing is not relegated to criminal law, however. Many men who have either been adjudicated fathers or who have voluntarily acknowledged their paternal legal status are now challenging those legal determinations because genetic testing subsequently revealed their non-paternity. A grassroots movement is under way to exonerate these innocent fathers from the ?bonds of parentage.?2 Likening newly discovered evidence of non-paternity to DNA testing that exonerates a felon, the U.S. Citizens Against Paternity Fraud website includes this motto: ?If the Genes don?t fit, you must acquit.? ?3
The issue of paternity disestablishment has become a cause c?l?bre for men who have unsuccessfully petitioned to disestablish their paternity subsequent to genetic testing which disproved their biological fatherhood. Non-biological fathers equate their non-paternity with a wrongful criminal conviction. As authors Anderlik and Rothstein have recently observed, ?...those within the fathers?s rights movement...tend to view family law through the lens of criminal law?It is common to find the issue framed as one of justice or fairness, in the sense that evidence admissible to ?convict? should also be available to ?exonerate.??4 But can (should) family law be equated with criminal law? A wrongly convicted man should be exonerated: he has been the victim of the system. A man who has no biological connection to his child may also feel wrongly adjudicated and tricked by the mother of the child and/or victimized by a federal and state system that forces the mother to name her baby?s father in order to qualify for certain financial benefits. To simply disestablish paternity, however, ignores the crucial difference between the criminal and family law contexts: the presence and best interests of a child.
As our societal understanding of ?family? grows, changes and moves away from the traditional, nuclear family, an interesting disconnect has emerged. As Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman has observed, these scientific advances force us to ask, ?What does make a father? Diapers or DNA??5 She aptly continues, ?...family law seems to be going in two directions at once. We are giving more recognition to non-biological relationships?[a]nd more weight to DNA.?6 In recent years, scholars, judges and legislators have begun to recognize the importance of functional parenthood. For example, several states have permitted non-biological lesbian coparents to maintain visitation and custody petitions because of their intent to parent and their history of parenting. Similarly, other non-biological parents such as stepparents, grandparents, and foster parents have been able to maintain greater access to the children they have helped to raise. Thus, biology is not the sole criterion for determining parent-child relationships. Moreover, it should not be the only criterion for determining such a relationship. As one judge has noted, ?A father-child relationship encompasses more (and greater) considerations than a determination of whose genes the child carries. Sociological and psychological components should be considered. The laws governing adoptions have acknowledged that parentage comprises a totality of factors, the least significant of which is genetics.?7
What determines a parent has been the subject of much scholarship, and many scholars are now embracing nontraditional definitions of parentage and family.
What determines a parent has been the subject of much scholarship, and many scholars are now embracing nontraditional definitions of parentage and family. For example, both the American Law Institute (ALI) and the newest version of the Uniform Parentage Act (UPA) recognize the fact that parental status and legal parenthood may be established without regard to biological connection.8 To fairly balance the competing interests between a legal, yet non-biological father and his child, the father should have a limited time in which to challenge his legal fatherhood; specifically, I propose that a man have no recourse to challenge his paternity after two years from the date on which he begins to function as a parent and hold himself out as a parent to the child. A two-year period in which to challenge legal fatherhood comports with the two-year statute of limitations contained within the UPA to challenge paternity and/or presumptions of paternity. Furthermore, the two-year period further comports with the ALI Principles time frame for establishing a functional relationship with a child, when the relationship begins after the child?s birth. Just as the ALI Principles recognize that it often takes a period of time in which to establish a functional parental relationship, courts should not ignore the time during which a man has fathered his child. Since legal parenthood can be established based on a two-year period, it would be incongruous to disestablish paternity after an even greater length of time. Finally, by using a two-year statute of limitations in which to challenge legal paternity, the rights of a non-biological father are preserved while ensuring that a child is not deprived of a parent after a significant bond has developed between the parties.
The Michigan legislature should redraft its proposed paternity fraud statute so that it strikes a more equitable balance between the rights of a non-biological, legal father and his child. More often than not, diapers make a daddy?not DNA. The proposed Michigan paternity fraud statute should be amended to better reflect the reality of today?s families.
Portions of this article are excerpted from ?Using Functional Parenthood to Make the Case Against Paternity Fraud Laws,? a paper that Professor Jacobs presented in Eugene, Oregon, at the International Society of Family Law Conference in June 2003.
Melanie B. Jacobs is an assistant professor of law at Michigan State University-DCL College of Law. She holds a JD from Boston University and an LLM from Temple University. Before coming to MSU-DCL, Professor Jacobs was a Freedman Fellow and lecturer in law at Temple University, a clinical instructor for Harvard Law School?s Hale & Dorr Legal Services Center, and an adjunct instructor at Boston University School of Law. While in Boston, she also practiced with Witmer, Karp, Warner & Thuotte and served as counsel to the Massachusetts Department of Revenue Child Support Enforcement Division. She publishes on family law, is admitted to the Massachusetts Bar, and teaches family law; decedents, estates and trusts; and property.
1 Mich. H.B. 4120 (2003).
2 See, e.g., U.S. Citizens Against Paternity Fraud, http://www.paternityfraud.com (visited June 10, 2003). Carnell Smith, the founder of the organization and website, attempted several times to vacate his paternity judgment and support obligation in the State of Georgia. He became a lobbyist for paternity fraud reform and, after Georgia recently passed its paternity fraud bill, Mr. Smith returned to court and had his child support obligation vacated. Id.
3 Id.
4 Anderlik, Mary R. & Mark A. Rothstein, DNA-Based Identity Testing and the Future of the Family: A Research Agenda, 28 Am. J.L.M. 215, 220 (2001).
5 Ellen Goodman, ?What Makes a Father?? Baltimore Sun, May 1, 2001, at 11A.
6 Id.
7 Hulett v. Hulett, 544 N.E.2d 257, 263 (Brown, J. concurring).
8 The ALI Principles include establishment of a legal parent-child relationship without regard to genetic connection in specific circumstances. ALI Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution ?2.03 91) (2000). Moreover, the UPA also includes presumptions of legal parenthood that are not predicated on biology. For example, the UPA presumes a man?s legal fatherhood if ?for the first two years of the child?s life, he resided in the same household with the child and openly held out the child as his own.? UPA ?204 (a)(5), 9B U.L.A. 15 (Supp. 2002).
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?Sperm Theft? Ruling a Step Forward for
Men?s Reproductive Rights
By Jeffery M. Leving and Glenn Sacks
All?s fair in love, war, and paternity cases. When child support is sought, there is scarcely any deceit that courts won?t push aside under the ?best interests of the child? test.
Courts have ruled that boys who were statutorily raped by older women must pay child support. Courts have ruled that when a woman has taken the semen from a condom a man used for sex with a different woman and has inserted it in herself, the man must still pay child support. Courts have ruled that when a woman has concealed her pregnancy (denying the man the right to be a father) and then sued for child support a decade later, the man must still pay child support. Courts have ruled that when a woman has deceived her husband into believing that her baby is his child, he must still pay child support. Few if any men are relieved of child support obligations due to the circumstances of the pregnancy, no matter how bizarre or unjust.
Recently, however, the Illinois Appellate Court took a step towards fairness by ruling that an Illinois man can sue his former lover for emotional distress over her pregnancy. Dr. Richard O. Phillips alleges that six years ago Dr. Sharon Irons secretly kept his semen after the two had oral sex, and then impregnated herself with it. Phillips claims he didn?t learn of the child?s existence until two years later, when Irons went to court to get child support. Irons now receives $800 a month in tax-free child support from Phillips.
In yesterday?s ruling the court stated that, if Phillips? story is true, Irons ?deceitfully engaged in sexual acts, which no reasonable person would expect could result in pregnancy." The court reinstated Phillips? lawsuit against Irons, which had been thrown out by the Cook County Circuit Court in 2003.
Unfortunately, the court couldn?t bring itself to properly uphold Phillips? reproductive rights, instead ruling that he must continue to pay child support because ?when plaintiff 'delivered' his sperm, it was a gift?There was no agreement that the original deposit would be returned upon request.? Of course, in Phillips? version of events, there was also no agreement that Irons would use his sperm to make a baby.
Research shows that men are often deceived into paternity. A recent poll of 5,000 women conducted for That?s Life! magazine in the United Kingdom found that 42% of women say they would lie about contraception in order to get pregnant, regardless of the wishes of their partners. According to research conducted by Joyce Abma of the National Center for Health Statistics and Linda Piccinino of Cornell University, over a million American births each year are the result of pregnancies which men did not intend. Jo Checkley, the editor of That?s Life!, notes:
?To deliberately get pregnant when your partner doesn?t want a baby is playing Russian roulette with other people?s lives."
Phillips says he feels as if he?s ?being trapped in a nightmare,? and has had headaches and trouble sleeping and eating.
If Phillips? story is true, Irons has committed one of the most damaging acts a woman can do: knowingly create a child with an unwilling father. The Appellate Court acted correctly in allowing Phillips to take legal action against the person he claims deceived him in such an important, intimate, and emotional matter.
This column was first published in the Houston Chronicle (3/6/05).
Jeffery M. Leving is one of America's most prominent family law attorneys. He is the author of the book Fathers' Rights: Hard-hitting and Fair Advice for Every Father Involved in a Custody Dispute. His website is www.dadsrights.com.
Glenn Sacks is a men's and fathers' issues columnist and a nationally-syndicated radio talk show host. His columns have appeared in dozens of America's largest newspapers.
Glenn can be reached via his website at www.GlennSacks.com or via email at Glenn@GlennSacks.com.
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Freeze! I just had my
nails done!
Posted: March 16, 2005
6:32 p.m. Eastern
By Ann Coulter
Atlanta court officials dispensed with any spending issues the next time Nichols entered the courtroom when he was escorted by 17 guards and two police helicopters. He looked like P. Diddy showing up for a casual dinner party.
I think I have an idea that would save money and lives: Have large men escort violent criminals. Admittedly, this approach would risk another wave of nausea and vomiting by female professors at Harvard. But there are also advantages to not pretending women are as strong as men, such as fewer dead people. Even a female math professor at Harvard should be able to run the numbers on this one.
Of course, it's suspiciously difficult to find any hard data about the performance of female cops. Not as hard as finding the study showing New Jersey state troopers aren't racist, but still pretty hard to find.
Mostly what you find on Lexis-Nexis are news stories quoting police chiefs who have been browbeaten into submission, all uttering the identical mantra after every public-safety disaster involving a girl cop. It seems that female officers compensate for a lack of strength with "other" abilities, such as cooperation, empathy and intuition.
There are lots of passing references to "studies" of uncertain provenance, but which always sound uncannily like a press release from the Feminist Majority Foundation. (Or maybe it was The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which recently released a study claiming that despite Memogate, "Fahrenheit 9/11," the Richard Clarke show and the jihad against the Swift Boat Veterans, the press is being soft on Bush.)
The anonymous "studies" about female officers invariably demonstrate that women make excellent cops - even better cops than men! One such study cited an episode of "She's the Sheriff," starring Suzanne Somers.
A 1993 news article in the Los Angeles Times, for example, referred to a "study" - cited by an ACLU attorney - allegedly proving that "female officers are more effective at making arrests without employing force because they are better at de-escalating confrontations with suspects." No, you can't see the study or have the name of the organization that performed it, and why would you ask?
There are roughly 118 million men in this country who would take exception to that notion. I wonder if women officers "de-escalate" by mentioning how much more money their last suspect made.
These aren't unascertainable facts, like Pinch Sulzberger's SAT scores. The U.S. Department of Justice regularly performs comprehensive surveys of state and local law enforcement agencies, collected in volumes called "Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics."
The inestimable economist John Lott has looked at the actual data. (And I'll give you the citation! John R. Lott Jr., "Does a Helping Hand Put Others at Risk? Affirmative Action, Police Departments and Crime," Economic Inquiry, April 1, 2000.)
It turns out that, far from "de-escalating force" through their superior listening skills, female law enforcement officers vastly are more likely to shoot civilians than their male counterparts. (Especially when perps won't reveal where they bought a particularly darling pair of shoes.)
Unable to use intermediate force, like a bop on the nose, female officers quickly go to fatal force. According to Lott's analysis, each 1 percent increase in the number of white female officers in a police force increases the number of shootings of civilians by 2.7 percent.
Adding males to a police force decreases the number of civilians accidentally shot by police. Adding black males decreases civilian shootings by police even more. By contrast, adding white female officers increases accidental shootings. (And for my Handgun Control Inc. readers: Private citizens are much less likely to accidentally shoot someone than are the police, presumably because they do not have to approach the suspect and make an arrest.)
In addition to accidentally shooting people, female law enforcement officers are also more likely to be assaulted than male officers - as the whole country saw in Atlanta last week. Lott says: "Increasing the number of female officers by 1 percentage point appears to increase the number of assaults on police by 15 percent to 19 percent."
In addition to the obvious explanations for why female cops are more likely to be assaulted and to accidentally shoot people - such as that our society encourages girls to play with dolls - there is also the fact that women are smaller and weaker than men.
In a study of public-safety officers - not even the general population - female officers were found to have 32 percent to 56 percent less upper body strength and 18 percent to 45 percent less lower body strength than male officers - although their outfits were 43 percent more coordinated. (Here's the cite! Frank J. Landy, "Alternatives to Chronological Age in Determining Standards of Suitability for Public Safety Jobs," Technical Report, Vol. 1, Jan. 31, 1992.)
Another study I've devised involves asking a woman to open a jar of pickles.
There is also the telling fact that feminists demand that strength tests be watered down so that women can pass them. Feminists simultaneously demand that no one suggest women are not as strong as men and then turn around and demand that all the strength tests be changed. It's one thing to waste everyone's time by allowing women to try out for police and fire departments under the same tests given to men. It's quite another to demand that the tests be brawned-down so no one ever has to tell female Harvard professors that women aren't as strong as men.
Acknowledging reality wouldn't be all bad for women. For one thing, they won't have to confront violent felons on methamphetamine. So that's good. Also, while a sane world would not employ 5-foot-tall grandmothers as law enforcement officers, a sane world would also not give full body-cavity searches to 5-foot-tall grandmothers at airports.
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I'm not a fan of the American Spectator; over the years it's proven to be too rabid and too fond of tin foil hats for my tastes. With that said, found some info here I haven't seen published anywhere else.
Collocating Coffins
By George Neumayr
Published 3/18/2005 12:08:02 AM
Political correctness in the U.S. military did not end with the Clinton administration. President Bush's military is also pushing an ideology of "equality" at the expense of military effectiveness. For the sake of an absurd feminist experiment, the Bush military is willing to sap its strength, expose women to torture and death and mar the lives of children and families. The price tag of this experiment is on the body bags carrying mothers, wives, and daughters who have died in Iraq, and on the growing list of orphans produced by the war. Read the casualty reports: Lori Ann Piestewa, 23, mother of two preschoolers; Melissa J. Hobart, 22, mother of a 3 year-old; Jessica L. Cawvey, 21, single mother of a 6-year-old; Sgt. Pamela Osbourne, 38, mother of three children, ages 9-19, Katrina L. Bell-Johnson, 32, mother of a 1-year-old.
"Tens of thousands of children are struggling to cope while Mom goes to war," reports the Sacramento Bee. And if Mom does come back, she may return as an amputee. Or shell-shocked, reports the Bee: "Returning female vets are bringing back wounded minds, beset by post-traumatic stress disorder, an illness that affects women at twice the rate of men. Health care experts fear an avalanche of cases among female vets will smother the military health care system."
Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness reports that the Bush military, far from reconsidering the feminization of the military under Bill Clinton, is advancing it. The Bush Pentagon has now done what Clinton didn't even do by implementing a de facto women-in-combat policy of placing women in front-line support groups alongside combat units.
"Under current federal law and military regulations, women are barred from ground combat groups," reports the Bee. (And Bush has said "no women in combat.") "There are indications, however, that the Pentagon is less steadfast than its commander-in-chief about maintaining the status quo. In February, the Army's 3rd Infantry Division acknowledged it has assigned women to units in Iraq that directly support combat troops by providing food, equipment maintenance and other services. The process, called 'collocation' -- literally to place side by side-- is at odds with an 11-year-old Army policy that bans women from serving in front-line support groups."
Elaine Donnelly tells TAS that a Pentagon attitude of "This is how women grow their careers" is driving the new collocation policy. The Pentagon has bizarrely said that these women will only serve alongside combat units when they are not in combat but should they find themselves in combat the military will "evacuate" the female troops. If that doesn't show the military's willingness to lose battles for the sake of a gender-integration experiment, what does?
What a lunatic scenario: the military is placing women with combat units on the assumption that they won't see combat but should they see combat it will dissipate battle resources to "evacuate" soldiers who shouldn't have been there in the first place all so that it can maintain a modified "collocation" policy that conforms to a careerist feminist ideology in the Pentagon.
Soldiers have told Donnelly that the new collocation rule is insane. An infantry officer described what evacuating the 24 women in these units will mean: "[Removing] 24 fully loaded soldiers [would require] two Blackhawk helicopters, six Huey helicopters, one Chinook helicopter, two 5-ton (or LMTV) trucks, 12 up-armored HMMWV's (with a full crew of three) and four to six unarmored HMMWV's to move. These are assets that cannot be spared simply to move females to the rear. In combat, helicopters are preferable but a very scarce asset. Imagine an entire brigade trying to chopper out these female contingents before combat -- it would require almost half of a division's worth of aviation assets to move them all at once."
A female officer told Donnelly: "The key question...remove females when combat begins. That is ridiculous. When does the combat begin? According to the President the war ended and we are not in a 'war zone' but in a 'Theater of Operations' now. I think it is a play on words and commanders in the field will not follow those guidelines. This is political language that we commanders are not aware of. Once soldiers are in the units they will all be placed wherever they are needed regardless of their gender."
In other words, the new collocation policy is a formula for at once losing battles and getting women killed. It is not even accurate to say that death is an equal opportunity provider on the battlefield as women will have less chance of surviving than the men.
But it is not surprising that the military is blurring the distinction between combat and noncombat field positions for women. The door blocking women in combat has been ajar since it became clear that "noncombat" jobs would mean de facto combat jobs (as evident in the fact that "noncombat" women carry weaponry and are dying in combat situations). The military's new collocation policy signifies that it is readying to kick the door wide open. In the meantime, however, female soldiers will learn the hard way what the military means by career benefits.
"You're not generally told as a female that you will be in that type of situation where you are in harm's way directly," National Guard Sergeant Brenda Monroe said to the Sacramento Bee. "I never dreamed that I would wake up every night and have to run to a bunker and take cover because we were being attacked or under direct fire."
The feminist dream that began under Clinton is producing a nightmare under Bush. How many women and mothers will have to die before a Bush military that should know better stops it?
George Neumayr is executive editor of The American Spectator.
http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=7911
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May 09, 2005, 9:21 a.m.
Recruitment Killer
Army semantics and sophistry over women in combat are dangerous.
By Elaine Donnelly
If the moms and dads of America find out what the Army leaders are planning for their sons and daughters considering military service, recruiters are going to have a much tougher job than they do now.
General Peter Schoomaker, speaking at an American Enterprise Institute symposium on April 11, raised eyebrows when he dismissed the women-in-combat controversy as not a ?gender issue.? The Army chief of staff was responding to a questioner who rightly praised the courage of female soldiers, but expressed concern about the unprecedented number of women being maimed or killed in Iraq (33, to date) and Afghanistan (5).
General Schoomaker?s rambling answer confirmed a supposedly ?unofficial? plan for women in combat, being implemented in the 3rd Infantry Division despite frequent denials that anything has changed. The blueprint appears to be a ?Women in the Army Point Paper? prepared by the office of Army Secretary Francis Harvey on January 24, which includes a subtle but significant change in the wording of Defense Department regulations.
Current directives exempt female soldiers from direct ground-combat units such as the infantry and armor, and from smaller support companies that ?collocate? (operate 100 percent of the time) with land-combat troops. The new, unauthorized wording narrows the ?collocation rule? to apply only when a combat unit is actually ?conducting an assigned direct ground combat mission? (Emphasis added).
General Schoomaker recited Defense Department regulations, but claimed (without justification) that the Army has separate rules that exempt female soldiers from collocation with land-combat battalions ?at the time that those units are undergoing those operations? (Emphasis added). By adding the words ?conducting? or ?undergoing? (a direct ground-combat mission) to the collocation rule, the Army has created a new regulation that has not been authorized by the Secretary of Defense, or reported to Congress in advance, as required by law.
Secretary Harvey?s plan presumes to alter the ?gender codes? of 24 of 225 positions ? mostly mechanics ? in order to accommodate women in a typical forward-support company (FSC). Unlike transportation units that come and go intermittently, these units are designed to operate in constant proximity with combined infantry/armor battalions.
Army officials say they don?t have to notify Congress of any rule change because women in those formerly all-male positions are ?not collocating.? For this to be true, officials would have to compromise organizational efficiency, or remove female soldiers from embedded forward support companies when their infantry/armor battalions begin ?conducting? land combat. Never mind that spare helicopters and armored vehicles for evacuation purposes would be as rare as ?beam me up Scotty? transporter machines.
The insurgent battlefield in Iraq has not reduced enormous demands on infantry, special-operations forces and Marine units that engage in deliberate offensive action against the enemy. In the fierce battle for Fallujah, great physical strength and psychological bonds essential for unit cohesion made it possible for soldiers and Marines to accomplish combat missions and survive.
The politically correct view is that training alone can prepare female soldiers for land combat alongside such men. According to General Schoomaker, ?we have a moral responsibility to prepare those women that are serving in our armed forces?by providing them with the warrior skills and tasks that are required?.? Improved training on how to evade or survive ambushes makes sense, but gender-normed ?warrior ethos? training ? an oxymoronic concept ? cannot prove feminist illusions of interchangeable men and women in or near land combat.
When the British military replaced ?gender fair? training standards ?appropriate to women?s physique? with an egalitarian ?gender free? regimen, injuries more than doubled. At the Naval Academy, a 1998 study documented knee-ligament injuries among women at rates nine times greater than men.
Women are smart and courageous, but Army would never send female football players to beat Navy on the gridiron. The same officials seem to believe that a few weeks of ?warrior? training is sufficient to transform black-bereted female ?S?oldiers into the functional equivalents of men.
Physical disparities are not the only issue. Noting that many parents teach their sons to be protectors of women, the questioner respectfully asked General Schoomaker whether such a moral upbringing can be reconciled with the Army?s current policy of sending women into hostile circumstances to kill or be killed. Admitting that he hadn?t thought about the questioner?s moral reservations, Schoomaker seemed to equate them with the attitudes of conscientious objectors, or with people who would say that ?men and women can?t even share the same tornado shelter in Oklahoma" ? whatever that means.
The response did not inspire confidence, especially when the Army is implementing an unauthorized ?stealth? plan to gender integrate combat-collocated support companies. Secretary Harvey?s plan even eliminates several land combat units from the list required to be all male.
If the Army succeeds in circumventing law and policy, consequences will be felt in seven major areas, starting with doubts about Army leadership and legal consequences with regard to Selective Service. Military complications could needlessly cost lives and social/cultural dynamics will detract from discipline, leading to readiness/deployability problems and precedent that will eventually apply to special-operations forces and eventually the Marine Corps.
There is no military justification for an incremental, ?little bit pregnant? plan for gender-integration that undermines the advantages of modularity in the Army?s new, smaller ?unit of action? combat brigades. There is no evidence of a shortage of male soldiers, but if there is a need for more men, Army officials should end counterproductive recruiting quotas for women.
Recruiting is difficult, but forcing young women and mothers in or near land-combat units would degrade respect for women, and make it tougher to enlist male recruits that the Army needs now more than ever. If Army leaders are serious about its new recruiting campaign aimed at parents, they need to stop the sophistry and semantics, and take this issue seriously.
The law requires that the Secretary of Defense provide formal advance notice to Congress of policy changes regarding female soldiers, accompanied by an analysis of proposed revisions on women?s exemption from Selective Service obligations. This is a national security matter, not a less important ?women?s issue.? Members of Congress, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and President George W. Bush should intervene to enforce the law. The future of the volunteer force depended on principled leadership now.
? Elaine Donnelly is president of the Center for Military Readiness, an independent public-policy organization that specializes in military personnel issues. A shorter version of this appeared in the Washington Times.
http://nationalreview.com/comment/donnelly200505090921.asp
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No Women In Combat Passes House
Associated Press
May 19, 2005
WASHINGTON - Women in the military would be barred from serving in direct ground combat roles, under a House bill that sets Defense Department policy and spending plans for the upcoming budget year.
The House Armed Services Committee approved the overall measure early Thursday on a 61-1 vote. The same committee in the Senate passed a different version last week. The House and Senate are to vote on their respective bills next week.
President Bush requested $442 billion for defense for the budget year that begins Oct. 1, excluding money to pay for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The House bill, like the Senate's version, envisions creating a $50 billion fund for the conflicts for next year - but provides no money for it.
The measure also calls for increasing the military by 10,000 Army soldiers and 1,000 Marines, boosting pay grades for uniformed personnel by 3.1 percent and permanently providing all Reserve and Guard members access to military health care services.
In a nearly 15-hourlong committee hearing, the most contentious issue was the role of women in combat.
The language would put into law a Pentagon policy from 1994 that prohibits female troops in all four service branches from serving in units below brigade level whose primary mission is direct ground combat.
"Many Americans feel that women in combat or combat support positions is not a bridge we want to cross at this point," said Rep. John McHugh, R-N.Y., who sponsored the amendment.
It also allows the Pentagon to further exclude women from units in other instances, while requiring defense officials to notify Congress when opening up positions to women. The amendment replaced narrower language in the bill that applied only to the Army and banned women from some combat support positions.
The Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps currently operate under a 10-year-old policy that prohibits women from "direct combat on the ground" but allows the services discretion to open some jobs to women in combat as needed.
"We're not taking away a single prerogative that the services now have," McHugh said.
Democrats opposed the amendment, saying it would tie the hands of commanders who need flexibility during wartime. They accused Republicans of rushing through legislation without knowing the consequences or getting input from the military.
"We are changing the dynamic of what has been the policy of this country for the last 10 years," said Rep. Vic Snyder, D-Ark.
Added Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, the committee's leading Democrat: "There seems to be a solution in search of a problem."
The issue arose last week, when Republicans, at the behest of Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., added a provision that would have banned women from being assigned to "forward support companies."
Those units provide infantry, armor and artillery units with equipment, ammunition, maintenance and other supplies in combat zones. The Army started allowing women to staff such support posts last year and says it is complying with the 1994 policy.
Some Republicans aren't so sure. "The Army is confused. They're all over the place on this one," Hunter said.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Wednesday the Army is working with Congress and battlefield commanders "to find an appropriate way that's consistent with our country's view on that subject."
He said the Army's attempt to reorganize and an asymmetrical front line on the battlefield muddies the issue.
Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., cast the lone dissenting vote on the overall bill.
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From today's LEFT Angeles Times:
----------------------------------------------------
Lawmakers Retreat on Women in Combat
By John Hendren, Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON ? In a major reversal, congressional Republicans on Wednesday abandoned an effort to limit the role of women in combat and instead instructed the Pentagon to keep Congress informed about the status of women deployed in war zones.
The compromise, part of a $490.7-billion defense spending bill for 2006, marked a retreat from a campaign by Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-El Cajon), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and other Republicans to restrict the role of women in the military.
That plan raised hackles across Washington, drawing the opposition of Army Secretary Francis Harvey, the American Civil Liberties Union and lawmakers of both parties.
Commanders feared that any new restrictions on women in combat would make it more difficult to fill the ranks at a time when wars on two fronts have dampened enthusiasm among young Americans to enlist and have left the Army missing its recruiting targets.
Democrats on Capitol Hill derided it as a sexist effort to carve into law a special ? and reduced ? status for women in uniform.
"At a time when our armed forces are overstretched, we shouldn't be turning away people who want to serve their country," said Rep. Ellen O. Tauscher (D-Walnut Creek).
Invoking the names of two female soldiers captured by Iraqi insurgents and later freed, she added, "This step is a slap in the face to the Jessica Lynches and Shoshana Johnsons of our military, who served our nation ably and nobly."
The measure on women in combat was stripped from the defense bill that authorized $441.6 billion in regular defense spending plus $49.1 billion in emergency budget authority to support costs related to the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The overall bill, approved on a 390-39 vote, would provide a 3.1% pay raise to military personnel and authorize 10,000 more Army soldiers and 1,000 more Marines. The bill also includes $3.4 billion for the Army's next generation of combat vehicles and weapons systems, and $7.9 billion for ballistic missile defense. Those numbers could change when the Senate takes up its version of the defense bill.
As of Wednesday, 35 women were among the 1,649 American troops who had been killed in Iraq, and six female troops had been killed in Afghanistan.
Another 279 women in Iraq and three in Afghanistan had been injured. Women comprise 22,020, or nearly 10%, of the 232,974 U.S. troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and surrounding regions.
In his proposal on women in combat, Hunter sought to codify a 1994 Pentagon policy that barred women from serving in most direct combat roles in armor, artillery, infantry and Special Forces units. It allowed them to serve in the military police and, since last year, in combat support jobs.
The policy, based on Cold War-era concepts of warfare, was rendered partly moot by insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan who do not distinguish between troops on front lines and those on theoretically safer missions elsewhere, such as escorting cargo convoys.
Women now serve as gunners atop Humvees on perilous Iraqi streets. Hunter was particularly concerned that women were allowed to serve in armored Stryker vehicles that are used in combat situations.
In proposing stricter laws, Hunter said he feared that the Pentagon was violating the 1994 rules and placing women at risk. Hunter agreed to the compromise Wednesday after meeting Tuesday with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, although Pentagon officials stopped short of saying that Rumsfeld opposed Hunter's earlier legislative wording.
The final measure would require the Pentagon to give Congress 60 days' notice ? instead of the previous 30 days ? before changing the role of female troops. The compromise was approved by a vote of 428 to 1.
"It has always been our intent to inject Congress into any policy changes that the Department of Defense may propose regarding the assignment of women to units such as infantry, armor and artillery," Hunter said. "This provision does that."
Rumsfeld, apparently satisfied, wrote Hunter on Wednesday, saying, "I do not anticipate any shift in present department policies, nor in the quality and scope of opportunities available to military women."
The battle to oppose the measure was led by Rep. Heather Wilson (R-N.M.), the only female veteran in Congress.
"In the history of this country, there has never been a law limiting the assignment of women in the Army, and we will not do so now," Wilson said.
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I always said if you can do the job who cares what your gender is. But I mean that in the sense that you must do the job, not a dummied down version of it.
Here in New York there was an issue with women firefighters a few years back. If i remember correctly they were given the physical part of the test, with an exception, instead of carrying a 200lb sack up and down a ladder, they only had to carry a 150lb sack. A stop was quickly put to that and all these lawyers and activists were clamoring over it and for once my take on it came out on top. It was decided that it didnt make sense that if one of the women fire fighters found someone weighing 175lbs on the floor of a building that they should leave him for the next person. So that was that. And it was right and just and made sense.
So yeah, if your capable of passing whatever physical and mental stuff you have to, to be in combat, then go. If you dont pass the standard test dont blame it on being a woman. Especially in jobs invoving life or death matters.
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Soldier Earns Silver Star for Her Role in Defeating Ambush
By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 17, 2005; A21
Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester fought her way through an enemy ambush south of Baghdad, killing three insurgents with her M-4 rifle to save fellow soldiers' lives -- and yesterday became the first woman since World War II to win the Silver Star medal for valor in combat.
The 23-year-old retail store manager from Bowling Green, Ky., won the award for skillfully leading her team of military police soldiers in a counterattack after about 50 insurgents ambushed a supply convoy they were guarding near Salman Pak on March 20.
The medal, rare for any soldier, underscores the growing role in combat of U.S. female troops in Iraq's guerrilla war, where tens of thousands of American women have served, 36 have been killed and 285 wounded, according to Pentagon figures.
After insurgents hit the convoy with a barrage of fire from machine guns, AK-47 assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, Hester "maneuvered her team through the kill zone into a flanking position where she assaulted a trench line with grenades and M203 rounds," according to the Army citation accompanying the Silver Star.
"She then cleared two trenches with her squad leader where she engaged and eliminated three AIF [anti-Iraqi forces] with her M4 rifle. Her actions saved the lives of numerous convoy members," the citation stated.
Hester, a varsity softball and basketball player in high school, joined the Army in 2001 and was assigned to the Kentucky National Guard's 617th Military Police Company, based in Richmond, Ky.
A female driver with the unit, Spec. Ashley J. Pullen of Danville, Ky., also won the Bronze Star for her bravery. Pullen laid down fire to suppress insurgents and then "exposed herself to heavy AIF fires in order to provide medical assistance to her critically injured comrades," saving several lives, her citation said.
Six other soldiers with Hester's unit won awards for defeating the ambush, leaving 27 insurgents dead, six wounded and one captured. They include Hester's squad leader, Staff. Sgt. Timothy F. Nein, who also won the Silver Star.
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Might be the wrong thread for this, but this instance of the nanny state running amok made my jaw drop. Guess if one of my kids is about to step into traffic I'd best let them, at least next time I'm in Chicago.
He grabbed girl's arm -- now he's a sex offender
July 1, 2005
BY STEVE PATTERSON Staff Reporter
Fitzroy Barnaby said he had to swerve to avoid hitting the 14-year-old Des Plaines girl who walked in front of his car.
She said he yelled, "Come here, little girl," before getting out of his car and grabbing her by the arm.
He said he simply lectured her.
She said she broke free and ran, fearful of what he'd do next.
In a Thursday ruling, the Appellate Court of Illinois said the 28-year-old Evanston man must register as a sex offender.
While acknowledging it might be "unfair for [Barnaby] to suffer the stigmatization of being labeled a sex offender when his crime was not sexually motivated," the court said his actions are the type that are "often a precursor" to a child being abducted or molested.
Though Barnaby was acquitted of attempted kidnapping and child abduction charges stemming from the November 2002 incident, he was convicted of unlawful restraint of a minor -- which is a sex offense.
'Most stupid ruling'
Now, he will have to tell local police where he lives and won't be able to live near a park or school.
"This is the most stupid ruling the appellate court has rendered in years," said Barnaby's Chicago attorney, Frederick Cohn. "If you see a 15-year-old beating up your 8-year-old and you grab that kid's hand and are found guilty of unlawful restraint, do you now have to register as a sex offender?"
But Cook County state's attorney spokesman Tom Stanton said Barnaby should have to register "because of the proclivity of offenders who restrain children to also commit sex acts or other crimes against them."
In the criminal case against him, Cook County Judge Patrick Morse said that "it's more likely than not" Barnaby planned only "to chastise the girl" when he grabbed her, but "I can't read his mind."
"I don't really see the purpose of registration in this case. I really don't," Morse said. "But I feel that I am constrained by the statute."
Recognizing the stigma that comes with being labeled as a sex offender, the appellate court said "it is [Barnaby's] actions which have caused him to be stigmatized, not the courts."
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Might be the wrong thread for this, but this instance of the nanny state running amok made my jaw drop.
Something doesn't smell right. What kind of guy gets out of his car and grabs a 14-year-old girl to "lecture" her? I have to swerve to avoid people and objects all the time, but it's never occurred to me to pull over and physically restrain someone to "chastise" them.
Why are you willing to cut this guy so much slack? What do you think your reaction would be if someone swerved to avoid you, then got out of his car and grabbed you or your wife by the arm to deliver a lecture about watching where you're going?
-milt
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Milt ask:
"Why are you willing to cut this guy so much slack? What do you think your reaction would be if someone swerved to avoid you, then got out of his car and grabbed you or your wife by the arm to deliver a lecture about watching where you're going?"
Dude, why are you willing to slap a life-long sex offender label on someone who merely grabbed an arm, particularly in light of the fact that the judge in the case said the law prevented him from exercising good sense and restraint?
If there is any sexual component here I say rip the fellows 'nads off and grate them on his teeth. But if this is merely some guy lecturing an erstwhile pedestrian that is now labeled for life due to an inflexible justice system then this is about as odious an exercise in government power as I've heard of late.
Cook County Illinois is well known as an iniquitous den where Democratic Party hacks are appointed to judgeships and other municipal jobs despite any spinelessness and incompetence they display. Unless you are aware of some fact that does not appear in this piece I don't see how you can argue for this Scarlet Letter punishment that clearly doesn't fit the crime as described.
Chicago grapplers beware: grab an arm and be labeled for life.
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Dude, why are you willing to slap a life-long sex offender label on someone who merely grabbed an arm, particularly in light of the fact that the judge in the case said the law prevented him from exercising good sense and restraint?
I agree that the sex offender label probably isn't warranted, but something seems wrong with a guy that would get out of his car and grab someone like that. I bet he wouldn't have done that to just anyone, but felt like he had the right to do it to a relatively powerless teenage girl.
If there is any sexual component here I say rip the fellows 'nads off and grate them on his teeth. But if this is merely some guy lecturing an erstwhile pedestrian
Again, I doubt you'd tolerate a stranger restraining you by the arm and lecturing you about walking properly for longer than a couple of seconds before lowering the boom, as it were.
that is now labeled for life due to an inflexible justice system then this is about as odious an exercise in government power as I've heard of late.
Really? You think this is worse than the recent Supreme Court decision that now allows the government to seize your property
and give it to wealthy developers if they can generate more tax revenue from it than you can?
-milt
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Milt writes:
?I agree that the sex offender label probably isn't warranted, but something seems wrong with a guy that would get out of his car and grab someone like that. I bet he wouldn't have done that to just anyone, but felt like he had the right to do it to a relatively powerless teenage girl.?
I ?spose that?s one way of seeing it. I?m a fire warden in the building I work in, though, and have had to physically restrain folks seeking to reenter a building with an alarm ringing; several years ago I was in charge of a group of international high school student in town for the World Math Olympiad and fished one out of the Potomac, kept others from stepping in front of busses, etc; I go on sundry fieldtrips with my various kid?s classes where I?m called upon to intervene in assorted situations. I ?spose it could be said I?ve done all the above ?cause I?m a powerful guy who felt like he had the right to do so, though I wouldn?t modify my actions despite this pejorative frame.
?Again, I doubt you'd tolerate a stranger restraining you by the arm and lecturing you about walking properly for longer than a couple of seconds before lowering the boom, as it were.?
Most likely, though context would come into play. If I stepped into traffic, realized I?d done something foolish, communicated that I was at fault, only to have someone try to grab me I?d do what I could to keep harm from coming my way. If I?d done all the above, then flipped off the driver, called him a mo fo so and so, etc, then I wouldn?t be particularly surprised if things escalated.
?Really? You think this is worse than the recent Supreme Court decision that now allows the government to seize your property and give it to wealthy developers if they can generate more tax revenue from it than you can??
Uhm, if I have to choose between selling the house in Connecticut or being unfairly labeled a sex offender for life, I?d sell the freaking house.
Bottom line is I wouldn't be surprised if the gent sporting this scarlet label could have made a better choice, though, from what I read I don?t think his choice warrants the punishment. If someone is being punished for murder I expect that somewhere there?s a corpse, if someone is incarcerated as an arsonist I expect there was a fire he lit, and if someone is punished as a sex offender I expect there to be a sex crime committed.
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The News and Observer | July 30, 2005
JACKSONVILLE, N.C. - Inside an Afghan village, her unit was conducting random searches for Taliban fighters and weapons caches - then they heard what sounded like a cell phone.
That didn't sound right to Marine Sgt. Christine Griego.
"It's a poor country, and, if someone has a cell phone, it means they're doing something they probably shouldn't be," said Griego, an aviations mechanic with Marine Aircraft Group 26, 2nd Marine Air Wing.
That was the first deployment for Griego, 22, who's now stationed at New River Air Station. The Afghan people had become accustomed to Army and Marine troops conducting searches, she said, so some women would try to hide things under their robes and veils.
"Because of the culture and customs of the country, males are not allowed to talk to or look at the women," she said. "It's not uncommon for female Marines and corpsmen to search the women."
Because of that, Marines with 1st Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment requested the help of a female Marine.
Griego volunteered.
The thought of women serving in combat - on the front lines, no less - is unsettling to some. Earlier this year, congressional representatives sought to repeal some of the jobs made available to women only within the last few years. The debate flared again following an attack in Iraq late last month on a convoy of female troops. A 21-year-old Camp Lejeune Marine, Lance Cpl. Holly A. Charette, was killed.
It's a distasteful debate to many of the female Marines serving today.
Women, they say, are trained just as thoroughly as men are. Women, they say, understand the risks and knew them when they decided to sign up.
Is training enough?
"I went on a convoy ... and was walking around with the squadron, carrying my M-16," Griego said. "I did exactly the same things they did. When we encountered females, I searched them to make sure they didn't have anything and kept them moving."
At times, Griego said, she was scared. But she was confident she had the training needed to do the job.
On this particular search, there were two women who looked suspicious to Griego. Searchers cannot hold a weapon while they work because it might go off by accident - or worse, the enemy might get a hold of it.
"One woman had an infant (in one arm) and a bundle of something in another," Griego said. "She had her arms under her burka which was unusual."
Reciting phrases from the Poshtun language, Griego asked the woman to raise her arms.
The woman didn't move.
"So I lifted her arms and saw the muzzle of an AK-47 begin to slip out," she said. "I slapped the gun down."
All the while, the Marine next to her kept his gun aimed at the Afghan woman. But when Griego slapped the gun down, the woman tried to run, she said.
Griego used her martial arts training to tackle her. The team found not only the gun, but several AK-47 magazines.
"All I wanted to do was get the woman on the ground and cuffed," Griego said.
"Every man who I work with has received the same training. "We all have the same capabilities because of the training."
But some would say training is not enough.
In May, House Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., and House Personnel Subcommittee Chairman John McHugh, R-N.Y., pushed a provision that would have barred all female troops in forward deployed support units from moving to the front lines during combat. Language in the 2006 defense authorization bill would prohibit assigning women to units below the brigade level whose primary mission is to engage in direct ground combat.
McHugh's amendment would have left the door open for other restrictions, particularly if the mission involves long-range reconnaissance or Special Operations Forces. But the issue quickly generated partisan turmoil. Army leaders and two associations representing retired Army and National Guard members fought against its passage. The proposed legislation was shot down.
Had it passed, the amendment would have closed nearly 22,000 positions now available to female service members in heavy and infantry brigade combat, according to an article published on GovExec.com.
Army officials argued that the modern battlefield isn't clearly defined, and locking out female troops, they said, would have caused confusion among the ranks.
Some women who serve every day alongside their male counterparts in the Marine Corps say they want to be regarded as Marines first, women second.
Capt. Jennifer Schrantz, a CH-46 helicopter pilot, joined the Marines during her last year of college. She was 21.
"My dad is pretty traditional and believes women have a certain place, so he wasn't real happy about my decision," Schrantz said. "The Marine Corps offered me a guaranteed flight contract, and I took it."
Schrantz said she went through the same rigorous training as the other pilots. In her class, the men outnumbered the women 20 to 1.
Corpswide, there are nearly 9,700 female Marines enlisted today compared to almost 150,000 males. Male officers outnumber the females roughly 18,000 to 1,100, said a spokeswoman at New River Air Station.
Schrantz, 27, deployed to Afghanistan at the same time Griego did. They're in the same squadron.
While in Afghanistan, Schrantz conducted helicopter medevacs. She would fly from Kandahar Air Base, where she was based, to Tarin Kowt to pick up anyone who had been injured. It could be something as small as a bee sting. It could be life or death, she said.
"It gives you a really good feeling to know that you're helping save someone's life," she said. "I could never have had that feeling anywhere else, and I'm glad I had the opportunity."
Women were not allowed to fly in the military until 1991, when the restrictions against women flying combat aircraft were repealed.
During pilot training, Schrantz said, she saw many people - men and women who simply broke down. They couldn't cut it.
"It's hard in the beginning, but a lot of guys wash out, too," she said. "At least 18 percent don't make it. Females get a lot of attention when they don't make it, but you don't see the same for the males."
Schrantz does not believe women should be limited in what they can or cannot do so far as their jobs are concerned. If that means going into combat, so be it.
Other women Marines tend to agree.
"I earned my title as a Marine the same way the men did," Lance Cpl. Tiffannee Girard said. "I'd fight to the death if I had to."
Girard, 20, from Chicago, is trained as a firefighter and emergency medical technician.
She will head to Iraq for the first time in August. "I joined the Marine Corps during wartime, and I knew I would be going out at some point," she said.
Cpl. Rachel Pasco serves in the same unit as Schrantz and Griego. She trained as an aviation mechanic.
"As far as what I'm expected to do, there is a billet description that everyone must follow," Pasco said.
Pasco, too, was based at Kandahar Air Base in Afghanistan. She joined the Marines two years after 9/11.
"Women have come a long way in our country's history," she said. "People are always going to remember what women were allowed to do and what they were not allowed to do, something we won't ever be able to escape."
In 1948, President Harry Truman signed the Women's Armed Services Integration Act. At that time, women were limited to filling 2 percent of the entire military. Today, it's 15 percent.
While restrictions for women flying combat aircraft were repealed in 1991, the 1948 law still banned women from serving on combat vessels.
Then in 1994, the Defense Department opened previously closed billets in aviation, including attack helicopters, to women.
The official policy of the Army and Marine Corps still excludes women from filling combat and infantry billets.
The largest single deployment of American military women occurred in 1991 during Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm. More than 41,000 women deployed; five died. Two were captured as prisoners of war.
Kathy Hoxie, a veteran Marine and civilian air traffic controller based at New River Air Station, was among the 41,000 women who served in the first Gulf War. She was an air traffic controller in the Marine Corps from 1986 until 1997.
Hoxie has mixed feelings about women serving in combat. As a rule, there are certain jobs that women simply shouldn't do - some of the ground combat jobs, she said.
"On the same note, I do believe that there are some women out there who would be better at those jobs then some of the men," Hoxie said. "I don't think it's because of a lack of desire but the mere fact that there are physical differences that will never change.
"Typically, men are physically stronger."
In the Persian Gulf, Hoxie said, she did exactly what the men did.
"I was initially sent over with a combat replacement company filled with many infantry Marines who had never worked with a woman before," she said. "I was one of two women in my company and one of the senior Marines. I did not know tactics because I had never been taught that, but I did have the smarts to learn quickly and step up to the plate."
http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,FL_female_073005,00.html
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What joy! Boys wearing
nail polish
Glenn Sacks
? 2005 WorldNetDaily.com
It's one thing to be respectful of gays and gay parents. It's quite another to engineer a deceptive study and use it to assert that lesbian families are a better environment in which to raise boys than heterosexual families. That's what former Stanford University gender scholar Peggy F. Drexler, Ph.D. does in her new book, "Raising Boys Without Men: How Maverick Moms Are Creating the Next Generation of Exceptional Men." Not surprisingly, a friendly mainstream media is helping her promote her claims.
In the book's opening pages, Drexler's message is one of tolerance for various family forms, as she notes that lesbian and single-mother families "can" effectively raise boys. But "Raising Boys" soon devolves into outright advocacy of lesbian parenting. In Drexler's world, lesbian families ? protected from fathers and their toxic masculinity ? are the best environments in which to raise boys. Married heterosexual mothers try their best, but the positive influence these hapless moms try to impart to their children is overwhelmed by that of the malevolent family patriarch.
According to Drexler, lesbian moms are "more sophisticated about how they teach their sons right from wrong" than heterosexual couples, and there are "real advantages for a boy being raised in this new type of family." Heterosexual mothers don't measure up in "moral attitude" and are less likely than lesbian moms to "create opportunities for their sons to examine moral and values issues." This in turn slows the "moral development in their sons."
Furthermore, Drexler asserts that boys raised by lesbians "grow up emotionally stronger," "have a wider range of interests and friendships" and "appear more at ease in situations of conflict" than boys from "traditional" (i.e., father-present) households. Fatherless boys "exhibit a high degree of emotional savvy ... an intuitive grasp of people and situations." Best of all, sons of lesbian couples are much more willing to discard traditional masculinity than boys trapped in heterosexual households.
For example, Fiona's son paints his nails, while both of Maria's sons dance ballet. Ursula's son chose sewing and cooking for his electives in seventh grade. Kathy's son has rejected playing baseball as being "too competitive" ? no surprise, because in their local, father-led baseball league, "the better players get more playing time."
Yet Drexler's research has obvious flaws. For one, the families she studied were middle to upper class, older women who volunteered to have their lives intimately scrutinized over a multiyear period ? an unrepresentative, self-selected sample.
More importantly, her research suffers from confirmatory bias ? Drexler saw what she wanted to see. Drexler is not an objective social scientist, but instead a passionate advocate for lesbian mothers. She calls the "maverick mothers" raising sons without men "avatars of a new social movement" and says her book's "stories, voices, data and findings will reassure, hearten and empower" them. Her research did not measure objective indices of child well-being, such as rates of juvenile crime, drop-outs or teen pregnancy. Instead, Drexler personally conducted interviews of mothers and their sons and made subjective judgments about their family lives. It is not surprising that Drexler found lesbian families to her liking. In fact, her dogged determination to see only good in lesbian couples and problems in heterosexual ones at times reaches absurd proportions.
For example, though Drexler doesn't seem to notice, her lesbian moms, particularly the "social" (i.e., non-biological moms), cheerfully endure insults and disrespect that no parent should ever tolerate. Carol's son calls her "stupid." Bianca's son calls her "lazy." Martha's son hops into her bed and effectively tells Martha tough luck, sucker ? go sleep somewhere else. Thankfully, in each case progressive lesbian mom dealt with the problem through patience and talking. By contrast, Dad ? who Drexler usually portrays as being overly strict ? would probably have had junior pull weeds in the yard for a few hours as he waves goodbye to his PlayStation. He is (sigh) sadly unenlightened.
For Drexler, boys raised by lesbians are a better breed than those raised by heterosexual couples. When Drexler was struggling to hold on to her briefcase and her bags, 11-year-old Damien saw "that I needed help and immediately offered it." Drexler is taken aback ? a boy being helpful and caring? She notes, "When I thought about it later, it clicked in my head: This is a boy being raised by two moms."
Lesbian-raised Cody helps clean up the playroom. Lesbian-raised Brad offers Drexler a stool to sit on when she comes to his room to interview her. Both considerations are the product, we are assured, of their special upbringings. Yet Drexler could have found many kind, helpful, empathetic boys raised by heterosexual couples ? like my 12 year-old son, who recently told his grandparents, "I want you to move next door to us, even though it will mean more chores for me" ? if only she had been willing to look.
At the same time, Drexler refuses to see obvious indications that the boys she interviews need fathers. When one of Brad's two moms picks him up from the day-care center after work, every day she has to pry the 6-year-old off of the leg of an after-school worker named Ron to whom Brad is ? pun intended ? quite attached. A less determined researcher might see this as evidence of Brad's need for a dad. Not Drexler, who instead tells us that, given Ron's presence, Brad's mom "knew she didn't need to worry about Brad's lack of an everyday father in his life."
Julia's little boy says, "I want a daddy." Darlene's little boy tells his mom: "We could find a daddy and he could move in with us." Three-year-old Ian ? fatherless by the decision of his "single mother by choice" mom, Leslie ? watches TV with mom, continually pointing at male figures on the screen and saying, "There's my daddy." Leslie explains, "No, we don't have a daddy in our family," but little Ian doesn't get it and continues to point and ask. A problem? Not according to Drexler, who writes, "Will some little boys trail after men they don't even know, perk up at lower-decibel voices or hang on to the pant legs of the men who cross their paths? Maybe." But whatever it is, she assures us, it isn't father hunger.
She enthuses that "sons of lesbians went to great efforts to define the terms of the bonds and relationships in their lives that the boys from straight families seemed to take for granted. All terms in their lives were complex." Is this a good thing?
Drexler does allow that some male figures can be positive for boys. Who? "Grandfathers, godfathers, uncles, family friends, coaches" ? in short, anybody but dad. In fact, boys being raised without fathers benefit because they enjoy "more male figures in their lives than boys from traditional families." But more does not mean better, and a group of men with little stake in a boy's life are a poor substitute for a father's love and devotion to his children. Nor can they provide the modeling that boys need ? the best way for a boy to learn how to become a good husband and father is to watch his father do it.
Drexler believes that boys in heterosexual families are worse off because they are "stuck with a single male role model" ? dad ? whereas in lesbian families boys are free to choose their own. Yet a child does not have the judgment to properly select his own role models, even with a parent's input. The fact that fatherless boys usually choose older, rebellious, thuggish boys as their role models ? and are often led by them to their perdition ? eludes Drexler.
Drexler holds up a variety of other family forms and "nonofficial parenting figures" as alternatives to heterosexual, married families, including Hillary Clinton's village, "communal living" and "seed daddies." She approvingly quotes a columnist who writes, "With so many single mothers around, and double mothers becoming less of a novelty, it is the children of traditional couples who are going to be asked, 'Who is that man in your house?'"
The boys Drexler studied don't need their dads, but instead benefit because their absence helps create what one might call the "maternal dictatorship." For Ursula, the single mother of two boys, Drexler enthuses that there's "no discussion about parenting methodologies. No crossed signals ... no compromising ... the decisions, the choices, the priorities were all hers." Better yet, "lesbian co-parents achieve a particularly high level of parenting skills ... [and] a greater level of agreement than heterosexual couples. A higher degree of consensus cut down on conflict in the home, enabling a clear message of love and support to be heard by the kids."
Drexler has it exactly wrong ? conflict over parenting methods and strategies is not a negative but a positive, for two competing and different viewpoints wean out bad ideas and help preserve good ones. This is particularly true in heterosexual couples, where both male and female perspectives are considered in decision-making. By contrast, in single parent homes ideas and parenting strategies are implemented without consultation, and the effect can be harmful. In lesbian homes, parenting strategies are used on boys without input from anyone who actually knows what it's like to be a boy.
While "Raising Boys" is being promoted as a harmless, feel-good affirmation for "maverick moms," it is in fact an attack on the institution that research shows is the best-suited to raising children ? the family. Drexler encourages women thinking of having fatherless children to make that "leap of faith." But the rates of all major youth pathologies, including juvenile crime, teen pregnancy, teen drug abuse and school dropouts, are tightly correlated with fatherlessness. Drexler waxes poetic about the nebulous benefits of fatherless parenting, but makes little attempt to explain why fatherless families produce so many troubled and pathological children.
The boys raised by the well-heeled, educated San Francisco lesbian couples Drexler studied will probably do better than most fatherless boys because their socioeconomic status is higher. But nothing in Drexler's research indicates that an extra mom can replace the strength, tough love and modeling a father gives his son.
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Glenn Sacks taught elementary school and high school in the Los Angeles Unified School District and others, and was named to "Who's Who Among America's Teachers" three times. His columns on men's and fathers' issues have appeared in dozens of the largest newspapers in the United States. His website is GlennnSacks.com.
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Drexler is a completely nutball...
If what she says stands true, then heterosexual mothers have been ineffective for the past several thousand years. Yeah, right.
My mother would be more than happy to show Drexler some "moral attitude"
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Under the Microscope
From an Ingredient
In Cosmetics, Toys,
A Safety Concern
Male Reproductive Development
Is Issue With Phthalates,
Used in Host of Products
Europe, Japan Restrict Them
By PETER WALDMAN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
October 4, 2005; Page A1
In the 12th week of a human pregnancy, the momentous event of gender formation begins, as X and Y chromosomes trigger biochemical reactions that shape male or female organs. Estrogens carry the process forward in girls, while in boys, male hormones called androgens do.
Now scientists have indications the process may be influenced from beyond the womb, raising a fresh debate over industrial chemicals and safety. In rodent experiments, common chemicals called phthalates, used in a wide variety of products from toys to cosmetics to pills, can block the action of fetal androgens. The result is what scientists call demasculinized effects in male offspring, ranging from undescended testes at birth to low sperm counts and benign testicular tumors later in life. "Phthalate syndrome," researchers call it.
Whether phthalates -- pronounced "thallets" -- might affect sexual development in humans, too, is now a matter of hot dispute. Doses in the rodent experiments were hundreds of times as high as the minute levels to which people are exposed. However, last year, federal scientists found gene alterations in the fetuses of pregnant rats that had been exposed to extremely low levels of phthalates, levels no higher than the trace amounts detected in some humans.
Then this year, two direct links to humans were made. First, a small study found that baby boys whose mothers had the greatest phthalate exposures while pregnant were much more likely than other baby boys to have certain demasculinized traits. And another small study found that 3-month-old boys exposed to higher levels of phthalates through breast milk produced less testosterone than baby boys exposed to lower levels of the chemicals.
RELATED READING
See various studies related to phthalates:
? Phthalate Exposure and Human Semen Parameters
? Phthalate exposure and reproductive hormones in adult men
? Dose-Dependent Alterations in Gene Expression and Testosterone Synthesis in the Fetal Testes of Male Rats Exposed to Di (n-butyl) phthalate
? Analysis of Consumer Cosmetic Products for Phthalate Esters
? Phthalate Exposure during Pregnancy and Lower Anogenital Index in Boys: Wider Implications for the General Population?
? Decrease in Anogenital Distance among Male Infants with Prenatal Phthalate Exposure
? Medications as a Source of Human Exposure to Phthalates
? Human Breast Milk Contamination with Phthalates and Alterations of Endogenous Reproductive Hormones in Three Months Old Infants
? Follow-Up Study of Adolescents Exposed to Di(2-Ethylhexyl) Phthalate (DEHP) as Neonates on Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) Support
Scientists are raising questions about phthalates at a time when male reproductive disorders, including testicular cancer, appear to be on the rise in many countries. Seeking an explanation, European endocrinologists have identified what some see as a human counterpart to rodents' phthalate syndrome, one they call "testicular dysgenesis syndrome." Some think it may be due in part to exposure to phthalates and other chemicals that interfere with male sex hormones.
"We know abnormal development of the fetal testes underlies many of the reproductive disorders we're seeing in men," says Richard Sharpe of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, a researcher on male reproduction. "We do not know what's causing this, but we do know high doses of phthalates induce parallel disorders in rats."
It isn't surprising to find traces of phthalates in human blood and urine, because they are used so widely. Nearly five million metric tons of phthalates are consumed by industry every year, 13% in the U.S. They are made from petroleum byproducts and chemically known as esters, or compounds of organic acid and alcohol. The common varieties with large molecules are used to plasticize, or make pliable, otherwise rigid plastics -- such as polyvinyl chloride, known as PVC -- in things like construction materials, clothing, toys and furnishings. Small-molecule phthalates are used as solvents and in adhesives, waxes, inks, cosmetics, insecticides and drugs.
Users and producers of phthalates say they are perfectly safe at the very low levels to which humans are exposed. Phthalates are among the most widely studied chemicals and have proved safe for more than 50 years, says Marian Stanley of the American Chemistry Council, a trade association.
She says studies suggest primates, including humans, may be much less sensitive to phthalates than are rodents. She cites a 2003 Japanese study of marmoset monkeys exposed to phthalates as juveniles, which found no testicular effects from high doses. The study was sponsored by the Japan Plasticizer Industry Association. Scientists involved in a California regulatory review questioned the study and maintained it didn't support the conclusion that humans are less sensitive to phthalates than rodents are.
Ms. Stanley's conclusion: "There is no reliable evidence that any phthalate, used as intended, has ever caused a health problem for a human."
Societal Issue
The phthalate debate is part of the larger societal issue of what, if anything, to do about minute, once-undetectable chemical traces that some evidence now suggests might hold health hazards.
With much still unknown about phthalates, scientists and regulators at the Environmental Protection Agency are moving cautiously. "All this work on the effects of phthalates on the male reproductive system is just five years old," says the EPA's leading phthalate researcher, L. Earl Gray. "There appears to be clear disruption of the androgen pathway, but how? What are phthalates doing?"
To Rochelle Tyl, a toxicologist who works for corporations and trade groups studying chemicals' effects on animals, the broader question is: "If we know something bad is happening, or we think we do, do we wait for the data or do we act now to protect people?" Based on her own studies of rodents, Dr. Tyl says it is still unclear whether low levels of phthalates damage baby boys.
Some countries have acted. In 2003, Japan banned certain types of phthalates in food-handling equipment after traces turned up in school lunches and other foods.
The European Union has recently banned some phthalates in cosmetics and toys. In January, the European Parliament's public health committee called for banning nearly all phthalates in household goods and medical devices. In July, the full parliament asked the EU's regulatory body, European Commission, to review a full range of products "made from plasticised material which may expose people to risks, especially those used in medical devices."
With the controversy particularly hot in Europe, the European market for the most common phthalate plasticizer, diethylhexyl phthalate, or DEHP, has fallen 50% since 2000, says BASF AG, the German chemical giant. In response, BASF says it is ceasing production of DEHP in Europe this month. A spokesman for the company says the cutback won't affect its phthalate production in the U.S.
The U.S. doesn't restrict phthalates, and has lobbied the EU hard in recent years not to burden manufacturers with new regulations on chemicals. Still, a few companies, under pressure from health groups, have agreed to abide by European standards in their products sold in the U.S. Procter & Gamble Co. said last year it would no longer use phthalates in nail polish. Last December, Unilever, Revlon Inc. and L'Or?al SA's American unit promised to eliminate all chemicals banned in European products from the same items in the U.S.
For medical bags and tubes, Baxter International Inc. pledged in 1999 to develop alternatives to phthalate-containing PVC, as did Abbott Laboratories in 2003. (Abbott has since spun off its hospital-products unit.) In a June study by Harvard researchers of 54 newborns in intensive care, infants who'd had the most invasive procedures had five times as much of the phthalate DEHP in their bodies -- as measured in urine -- as did babies with fewer procedures.
Researchers aren't yet sure what this means. Another study by doctors at the Children's National Medical Center in Washington, published last year, found that 19 adolescents who'd had significant exposure to phthalates from medical devices as newborns showed no signs of adverse effects through puberty.
Kaiser Permanente, the big health-maintenance organization, promised in 1999 to eliminate phthalates in hospital supplies. Demand from the HMO has helped drive development of medical gloves that don't contain phthalates, as well as non-PVC carpeting and a new line of phthalate-free plastic handrails, corner guards and wall coverings.
In the early 1990s, the EPA set exposure guidelines for several types of phthalates, based on studies that had been done decades earlier. Since then, much more has been learned about them.
Consider dibutyl phthalate, which is used to keep nail polish from chipping and to coat some pills. The EPA did a risk assessment of it 15 years ago, relying on a rodent study performed in 1953. The now half-century-old study found a "lowest adverse-effect level" -- 600 milligrams a day per kilogram of body weight -- that killed half of the rodents within a week.
A 2004 study of the same chemical, published in the journal Toxicological Sciences, found far subtler effects, at far lower exposures. It detected gene alteration in fetuses of female rats that ingested as little as 0.1 milligram a day of the phthalate for each kilogram of body weight. That dose is one six-thousandth of the 1953 "lowest adverse-effect" level.
It's also an exposure level found in some U.S. women, says Paul Foster of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, a co-author of the gene study. So "now we're talking about 'Josephina Q. Public' -- real women in the general population," he says. "The comfort level is receding."
EPA Caution
Still, because researchers don't know the function of the genes that were altered in the rat study, EPA experts say it's too early to base regulatory decisions on such gene changes. "We're a long way, in my opinion, from considering changes in gene expression as 'adverse' for risk assessment," says the environmental agency's Dr. Gray.
Exxon Mobil Corp. and BASF dominate the $7.3 billion phthalates market. An Exxon Mobil spokeswoman says risk assessments by government agencies in Europe and the U.S. confirm "the safety of phthalates in their current applications."
Phthalates are cheaper than most other chemicals that can soften plastics. But a BASF press release says European manufacturers have been replacing phthalates with plasticizers designed for "sensitive applications such as toys, medical devices and food contact."
Makers of pills sometimes coat them with phthalates to make them easier to swallow or control how they dissolve. A case study published last year in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives said a man who took a drug for ulcerative colitis, Asacol, for three months was exposed to several hundred times as much dibutyl phthalate as the average American. The drug's maker, Procter & Gamble, says it coats the pill with the phthalate so it will stay intact until it reaches inflamed colon areas. P&G says a daily dose of the drug has less than 1% of the 0.1 milligram of dibutyl phthalate per kilogram of body weight that the EPA regards as a safe daily dose.
Sperm Count
Attributing health effects to specific industrial chemicals is a dicey business. Scientists often look for associations: statistical correlations that suggest, but don't prove, a possible causal link.
With phthalates, they've found a few. For instance, a 2003 study divided 168 male patients at a fertility clinic into three groups based on levels of phthalate metabolites in their urine. The study found that men in the highest third for one of the phthalates were three to five times as likely as those in the lowest third to have a low sperm count or low sperm activity. Men highest in a different phthalate also had more abnormally shaped sperm, according to the study, which was done by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and published in the journal Epidemiology.
The scientists now are extending the research to 450 men. In their next paper, they're also planning to discuss a separate Swedish study, of 245 army recruits, that found no link between phthalate exposure and sperm quality.
The latest human study, on 96 baby boys in Denmark and Finland, found that those fed breast milk containing higher levels of certain phthalates had less testosterone during their crucial hormonal surge at three months of age than baby boys exposed to lower levels.
Authors of the study, led by Katharina Main of the University of Copenhagen and published Sept. 8 in Environmental Health Perspectives, said their findings support the idea that the human testis is vulnerable to phthalate exposure during development -- possibly even more vulnerable than rodents' genitalia. They added, however, that "before any regulatory action is considered, further studies on health effects of [phthalates] are urgently needed" aimed at "verifying or refuting our findings."
Physical Differences
A human study of 85 subjects published in June linked fetal exposure to phthalates to structural differences in the genitalia of baby boys.
Researchers measured phthalate levels in pregnant women and later examined their infant and toddler sons. For pregnant women who had the highest phthalate exposure -- a level equivalent to the top 25% of such exposure in American women -- baby sons had smaller genitalia, on average. And their sons were more likely to have incompletely descended testicles.
Most striking was a difference in the length of the perineum, the space between the genitalia and anus, which scientists call AGD, for anogenital distance. In rodents, a shortened perineum in males is closely correlated with phthalate exposure. A shortened AGD also is one of the most sensitive markers of demasculinization in animal studies.
Males' perineums at birth are usually about twice as long as those of females, in both humans and laboratory rodents. In this study, the baby boys of women with the highest phthalate exposures were 10 times as likely to have a shortened AGD, adjusted for baby weight, as the sons of women who had the lowest phthalate exposures.
The length difference was about one-fifth, according to the study, which was led by epidemiologist Shanna Swan of the University of Rochester (N.Y.) School of Medicine and Dentistry and published in Environmental Health Perspectives. Among boys with shorter AGD, 21% also had incomplete testicular descent and small scrotums, compared with 8% of the other boys.
Does it matter? The researchers intend to track as many of the boys as possible into adulthood, to address a key question: Will they grow up with lower testosterone levels, inferior sperm quality and higher rates of testicular tumors, as do rats with phthalate syndrome?
When the boys are 3 to 5 years old, Dr. Swan plans to assess their play behavior to see if exposure to phthalates appears associated with feminized neurological development. She says such tests have shown that little girls with high levels of androgens, or male hormones, gravitate toward "masculine" play. But she says no one has studied whether boys' play is affected by fetal exposure to chemicals that block androgens.
"In rodents, the changes result in permanent effects. Future studies will be necessary to determine whether these boys are also permanently affected," Dr. Swan says.
She and others agree that a study of just 85 subjects needs to be enlarged and repeated. She notes that although boys' genitalia were affected in subtle ways, no substantial malformations or disease were detected.
Some endocrinologists call this the first study to link an industrial chemical measured in pregnant women to altered reproductive systems in offspring. "It is really noteworthy that shortened AGD was seen," says Niels Skakkebaek, a reproductive-disorder expert at the University of Copenhagen, who wasn't an author of the study. "If it is proven the environment changed the [physical characteristics] of these babies in such an anti-androgenic manner, it is very serious."
Ms. Stanley of the American Chemistry Council doubts that any study can "tease out" the cause of a human health condition, given the wide variety of chemical exposures in people's lives. She notes that some of the specific phthalates associated with reproductive changes in the two human-baby studies haven't been linked to such changes in rodents. So, she says, it's possible the changes in anogenital distance and hormone levels may merely reflect normal variability.
Dr. Tyl, the chemical-industry toxicologist, says her own rat studies confirm that AGD is very sensitive to phthalates. She says that in rats that had very high phthalate exposures, a shortened AGD at birth was closely associated with a number of serious reproductive disorders later in life. However, in rats exposed to much lower doses of phthalates, a shortened AGD at birth did not always lead to later troubles. Many of these rats grew up to breed normally, she says, despite their slightly altered anatomy.
Dr. Tyl suggests that the same may be true of humans. Dr. Swan's study is "potentially important," Dr. Tyl says, because it suggests that "at low levels of exposure, humans are responding" to phthalates. But it remains quite possible, Dr. Tyl theorizes, that the boys with shortened AGD will grow up normally. "At what point do changes like this cross the line" to become dangerous, she asks. "We don't know yet."
Write to Peter Waldman at peter.waldman@wsj.com
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Special Forces Commander Transitions from Man to Woman
Retired Officer Now Embroiled in Employment Bias Suit
In 25 years of military service, David Schroer reached the rank of colonel and commanded a Special Forces unit in the U.S. Army. (ABC News)
Oct. 21, 2005 ? For more than 25 years, David Schroer was a star in the U.S. Army, rising through the ranks to become a Special Forces Commander while leading a classified anti-terrorism unit involved in covert operations. Fellow soldiers described him as a classic military man.
That all changed two years ago when he abruptly retired from the military and made a shocking announcement that stunned his colleagues and family alike. He would no longer be Col. David Schroer, because he is now Diane Schroer, a transsexual.
In her first television interview, Schroer explains to "20/20" correspondent Deborah Roberts why, after decades of service in one of the most dangerous and macho lines of work, she became a woman.
"Does seem a bit of a disconnect," Schroer acknowledges. But, she says, she has struggled with her gender identity ? privately ? since childhood.
"Something was different since even before I can remember. I was always enthralled with things the girls were doing. ? Whenever my parents were gone, I would experiment with my mother's makeup. And wondered why I enjoyed doing that? Wondered why I couldn't carry a purse," Schroer tells Roberts.
Schroer's family has come to accept her decision, but she is now embroiled in a gender discrimination lawsuit against the Library of Congress, which, she claims, withdrew its offer of employment based on her sex.
A Painful Internal Battle
Her lawsuit may be precedent-setting, but Dr. George Brown, a military psychiatrist, said Schroer's story is not unique. He said he's treated hundreds of soldiers who are transsexuals. Brown described transsexualism as "a sense that there's been a biological mistake ? that the body doesn't match who you are as a person inside."
Schroer says it was apparent to her from the time she was a child, growing up in Oak Lawn, Ill., just outside Chicago. Her brothers Gary and Bill only remember a happy childhood with their little brother, however.
"I think it was probably very much?the typical American family, three boys growing up. We played baseball. We played in the neighborhood. We rode bikes. We pretty much did what other kids did in the 50s," said Bill Schroer.
Schroer's siblings Bill and Gary never knew their little brother was suffering quietly, never daring to mention the anguish inside.
Schroer says growing up as a boy left her feeling uneasy and deeply conflicted about who she really was. "When I hit adolescence, it was at times consuming. ? So I did everything I could to push that out of my mind," she tells Roberts.
When David Schroer entered Northern Illinois University, he was in full denial of his gender crisis. He worked as an auto mechanic, an electrician and joined ROTC. After graduation, he entered Special Forces and somehow thrived in the most dangerous of military careers. He even fell in love with a woman and got married.
"We had a normal sexual relationship," Schroer tells Roberts. "Although I would say that I would often think of myself being on the other side of the relationship."
Ending Years of Denial
Schroer managed to keep up the act, rising through the ranks of the military. By his mid-40s, he was a Special Forces commander leading a classified anti-terrorism unit and managing an $8 billion budget. He even briefed Vice President Cheney on secret missions.
Then, two years ago, he grew tired of denying what he believed was his true sexual identity.
"I think when I learned enough to understand what it was that I was really feeling ? I could either hide that, or I could acknowledge to the world that I was in fact a woman. And receive their acknowledgement back," Schroer says.
Schroer told his wife first, even hoping there might be a possibility they could stay together. But the couple decided to separate.
Schroer's marriage was over, but he was finding fulfillment for the first time. He began openly dressing as a woman and calling himself Diane. Schroer was retired at the time, and didn't have to break the news to Washington's top brass. But Schroer did begin telling his Special Forces buddies, including retired Lt. Colonel Dan Bernard.
"The way she explained it to me was by showing me some photos that had been taken of her as a woman in a business kind of setting, wearing makeup and with a big wig and women's clothes. ?And I didn't get mad and I didn't storm out," Bernard said.
"I explained to him about being transgendered and what that meant, and he sat back for a moment and said, 'You really had me scared. Wow, I thought you were going to tell me something bad.' ? It was a tremendous relief," Schroer recalls.
Now Schroer was confident enough to tell family, nervously breaking the news to brothers Bill and Gary ? still dressed as David.
Even though the news was, and continues to be, difficult to accept, Gary Schroer said there was never a question in his mind about being supportive to his younger brother. "It's still tough. But support and acceptance are two different things," he said.
Schroer then began the long and painful process of becoming a woman, undergoing intense therapy and taking female hormones under medical supervision. He also started wearing makeup, and underwent extensive cosmetic surgery.
In 12 hours of surgery, Schroer said, doctors gave him "a scalp advance, a forehead revision, nose reconstruction, upper lip revision, jaw and chin reshaping, and a tracheal shave." In a tracheal shave, the surgeon reduces the cartilage in the throat to get rid of a masculine-looking Adam's apple.
The genital reassignment surgery would come later. But in the meantime Schroer was already looking more feminine and beginning to envision a new relationship.
But Schroer wasn't envisioning a sexual relationship with any men. Schroer is interested in dating women. "I would say I am in fact a lesbian," she said.
Schroer's desire to be with women is not uncommon for transsexuals. Dr. Brown says gender identity and sexual preference are two entirely different things.
"If sex and gender were the same, then that would make no sense at all. Sexuality is who you're attracted to. Gender is who you are as a person, male or female. So, the surgery and the transition is all about matching the mind with the body. It has nothing to do with sexuality," Brown said.
While Schroer is grateful to have the acceptance of her family, she has encountered challenges in her public life. While still transitioning to become female, Schroer applied for, and was offered, a job as a terrorism analyst at the Library of Congress late last year.
Because she was still legally David Schroer, she did not reveal her plans to her prospective employer during the interview.
She decided to tell the woman who hired her that she would begin work as a woman, not a man. Schroer said it seemed as though the woman took the information in stride and that the hiring was going forward as planned.
But the following day, Schroer said she was told that she was no longer "a good fit" for the position. Schroer and her brothers were furious.
With her brothers' encouragement, she filed what many say will become a landmark law suit against the Library of Congress, charging gender discrimination.
She says she's protected under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. "She is the same exact person that the Library of Congress knew that they wanted when they first encountered the application. And so there's nothing about that that's changed, except her physical appearance," said American Civil Liberties Union attorney Sharon McGowan, who is representing Schroer.
The Library of Congress first agreed to an interview with "20/20," but then declined, citing Diane's lawsuit. In an e-mail, they wrote that they "acted appropriately and complied with the law" and that "claims such as those raised by Ms. Schroer ? are not covered under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act" or the U.S. Constitution.
While waiting for her day in court and looking for a full time job, Schroer's deepest fears concerned her family who had yet to see her as a woman. In July, Schroer allowed "20/20" cameras to film her first visit as a sister with her family in suburban Chicago.
The family was understandably surprised by the dramatic change in her appearance, but before long the brothers were reminiscing about their childhood. For Gary and Bill Schroer, the memories are bittersweet as they feel in a sense they've lost a brother while gaining a new sister.
For Schroer, the childhood memories have a far different meaning. She's always known that inside that little boy lived a little girl who longed to grow up and become a woman. "What's great about my life now is that it's unified, it's focused and this huge distraction that was in my life is now gone."
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What joy!
Boys wearing
nail polish
Glenn Sacks
? 2005 WorldNetDaily.com
:evil: I had to come back to this article because it really got me riled up. I have a serious personal issue with this topic (I didn't quote the whole article because I realized that it would take up too much space). The author of this article obviously has a problem with the so-called research that was done to prove that lesbian families are a better environment in which to raise boys than heterosexual families. I probably have a bigger issue with this than the author.
Drexler needs to be isolated on a deserted island so her disease of insanity can be isolated, contained and not allowed to be spread further. The lack of male role models in the household has been proven to have a negative effect on the emotional development of young males time and time again. This feminazi is obviously trying to prove (very subjectively and sloppily) that lesbian women are superior to raising young men than men. Just because lesbians have the same sexual preferences as men, doesn't make them better able to raise young men. They still aren't part of the team and have no idea what it is like to be a man.
You cannot raise a man if you don't know what it means to be a man. Conversely, you cannot raise a woman if you don't know what it means to be a woman. Newsflash for Drexler, women cannot do everything that a man can do, just like a man cannot do everything that a woman can do. If we could, we wouldn't need each other.
This psycho, Drexler, is also, in my opinion, trying to push the idea that constant testosterone influence in a young man's life is an unhealthy thing. That is not what is unhealthy. What is unhealthy is the LACK of testosterone influence in a young man's life. It's this lack that makes growing boys go out and do stupid things, like hook up with the wrong crowd for acceptance, that causes many problems. Testosterone is not evil! Every boy needs to have that testosterone influence, in the form of a father (or some man who decides to step in to that role), to grow up healthy, confident and secure in themselves.
I am all for political correctness when it applies to true respect for others, but when it comes to stupid things like this, it needs to go. Men should be men, with all of our good points and faults intact. Men should NOT be wussified, namby pamby, metrosexualized, feminized, castrated beings that just happen to have XY chromosomes. A true man can be civilized and primal at the same time. A true man can walk among polite society with the same ease as he can rock and roll on the battlefield of the day. Young boys cannot learn that from a woman.
Okay, I'm done with my rant for today.
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You've Got Male!
By LIONEL TIGER
December 17, 2005; Page A10
Male resentment of the self-righteous and automatic public support for women's interests and issues has been increasingly on the boil for some time. Civic celebrations of antipathy to men such as the Violence Against Women Act are finally generating specific and pointed responses by men fatigued, if still baffled, by the knee-jerk assumption that they suffer irredeemably from what I call Male Original Sin.
At my university as at countless others, one of the very first official greeting to students is a rape seminar predicated on the intrinsic danger which males carry with them. And in family courts, the presumption of male behavioral malefaction has yielded heartbreakingly numerous cases in which men are charged with domestic violence to which courts overwhelmingly -- often in brief hearings in which the male is not even present -- issue temporary "restraining orders." These frequently segue into permanence, and award women the dwelling they've shared, financial support and the all-important privilege of custody -- mothers gain custody in 66% of uncontested cases and 75% of contested ones. Less than a quarter of parents are awarded joint custody.
Judges issue such orders based only on the word of the alleged victim. It is small wonder the overwhelming majority of such actions are sought and achieved by women. It has been legitimately argued that there is a merciless post-marital racket of therapists, lawyers, judges and governmental advocates who prosper because it is so easy to define males as guilty.
Meanwhile, the publicly financed educational system is at least 20% better at producing successful female students than male, yet hardly anyone sees this as remarkable gender discrimination. While there is a vigorous national program to equalize male and female rates of success in science and math, there is not a shred of equivalent attention to the far more central practical impact of the sharp deficit males face in reading and writing.
There are countless thriving "women's studies" programs and only a paltry number of male equivalents. The graduates of such programs (which rarely pass the laxest test for gender diversity) staff the offices of politicians and judges, and assert the obligation of society to redress centuries of dominance by that gaseous overgeneralization -- "patriarchy."
When it comes to health status, the disparity in favor of women is enhanced by such patterns as seven times more Federal expenditure on breast cancer than on the prostate variety. And no one is provoked into action because vaunted male patriarchs commit suicide between four and 10 times more frequently than oppressed and brainwashed women. This isn't simply carping about invidious comparison, or reluctance to support legitimate social responses to the needs of women as workers, parents, citizens and virtuousi of their private lives. It is solely about inequity in law, funding and productive public attention. There is scant acknowledgment of the fact that we face a generation of young men increasingly failing in a school system seemingly calibrated to female rhythms.
A consequence is that male income falls and female income rises. Nothing wrong with that, except that men inexorably withdraw from domestic life: they become out-laws rather than in-laws. Legions of women despair of finding a mate compatible in function and vibrancy. So they go it alone: a third of babies are born to unmarried women, perhaps making a sage choice given the feckless, demoralized chaps from whom they must choose. We lead the world in fatherless families -- 40% of children fall asleep without a resident father regularly within reach.
* * *
Into this acrimonious climate has whispered a breath of spring air in winter -- an extraordinary document which may have surprising impact because of its severe countercultural implications and its almost sweet innocence of purpose. In early November, the New Hampshire Commission on the Status of Men issued its first report (www.nh.gov/csm). The commission was proposed in a 1999 bill by N.H. Rep. David Bickford. The House passed the bill, awarding a budget of $69,561. But months later, the state Senate stripped away funding. The commission was finally established in 2002. According to its report, the Senate's effort to defund it reflects "the inaction of good people who apparently have been led to believe that legislative activity designed to primarily benefit men is somehow not appropriate politically, financially, or otherwise."
To the contrary, the commission's report frontally accepts that there are intrinsic differences in how men and women cope with health, education, responsibility and violence. It concludes that social policies must not begin by denying differences. If you're running a zoo, know the real nature of your guests. This applies nationally, not only in New Hampshire. The clout of female voters has been transmuted into a strangely pervasive inattention to the legitimate needs of boys and men. While there remain grating sources of unfairness to women, the community is in the process of steadily creating a new legal and educational structure which generates new gender unfairness: 90% of the victims of Ritalin and similar drugs prescribed for schoolkids are boys; but even drugged they perform less well than girls. A 2005 study at Yale found nationally that even in prekindergarten boys are nearly five times more likely to be expelled than girls.
What is going on in this country?
Of course those who can do the work should receive the rewards. However, the broader question is: Who defines the work and evaluates it? The drastic occupational and familial situation of especially minority males suggests the urgency of a hard review of this issue. Were females the victims of such apparent sex-based unfairness, the legal paper attacking the matter would cloud the air like flakes of New Hampshire snow. But since it's only males . . .
The report is an innovative 44 pages focused on life in one state. It grips the macrocosm of stunning changes in American sociosexual and family experience. Like those which affect the terrain of a delta the changes are gradual and barely perceptible and yet suddenly it becomes clear there is a new barrier, a new channel, a new uncertainty. So with the issue of men in America. The New Hampshire report may not be a full map of the delta but its alerts us to the large reality of implacable changes. And we may not like them.
Mr. Tiger, Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers, is the author of "The Decline of Males" (St. Martin's, 1999).
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Second post of the evening:
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Note: Came to me without paragraphs and I have improvised the ones you see here.
National Review / Digital December 31, 2005
CULTURE WATCH
The Idea of the (Feminized) University
Coeds are one thing . . .
GEORGE GILDER
Why would any self-respecting boy want to attend one of America?s increasingly feminized universities? Most of these institutions have flounced through the last forty years fashioning a fluffy pink playpen of feminist studies and agitprop "herstory" taught amid a green goo of eco-motherism and anti-industrial phobia. They routinely showcase such trendy trumperies as The Vagina Monologues, while sacrificing thousands of men's athletic teams at the altar of Title IX. They happily open their arms to the recruiting efforts of gay and lesbian student centers, while banning the Reserve Officers' Training Corps and other military groups from campus. And, as they launch bidding wars for the few women who qualify for tenured appointments in math and science, they stint on male-oriented pursuits such as engineering and mechanics.
Perhaps this explains why American men have taken a demographic plunge in higher education. Men now constitute less than 43 percent of the U.S. college-student population, and receive only 41 percent of new bachelors' degrees. Similar figures appear throughout the Western world, implying that the emergence of an unschooled male underclass is not only an American problem. In a world where male talent in mathematics and engineering confers significant national advantages in wealth and power, these numbers are portentous indeed.
Disturbing as it is, this pattern is no mystery. Inferior male performance in school is chiefly associated with fatherless families. Among major industrial countries, only Sweden, Norway, and Denmark significantly surpass the U.S. in the female dominance of higher education; these Scandinavian countries also lead in female-headed families. In all of Europe, only Switzerland shows a drastically lower level of fatherlessness, with an 11 percent illegitimacy rate in 2001 as compared with 32 percent in the U.S. and 42 percent in Sweden. And, sure enough, Switzerland disp
lays continued male dominance of higher education, with men constituting around 60 percent of the college-student population.
The ill effects of fatherless families should come as no surprise. Around the globe and throughout human history, mothers left alone have foundered on the challenge of raising and disciplining boys. As I stated in my 1986 book, Men & Marriage, family issolution in the modern world leads to "a welfare state to take care of the women and children and a police state to handle the teenaged boys." I might add today that it also entails immigration or outsourcing to do much of society?s work and to support the childless in their old age.
On the police-state side, the decline of men in higher education relates to the 93 percent male composition of America?s world-leading prison population. As Bill Bennett has pungently observed, America's prisons are dominated by blacks from the fatherless families that make up close to 80 percent of inner-city households. The Department of Justice estimates that fully 32 percent of all black males will enter state or federal prison during their lifetimes, as compared with less than 6 percent of white males. More than a third of American black men between the ages of 17 and 35 are currently in jail, on probation, or on the lam. In Scandinavian countries, the police are similarly busy with truants. Prison populations there remain radically smaller, but, unlike in the U.S., crime rates are still soaring. Sweden leads Europe with a six-to-tenfold rise in various property crimes and sexual assaults since the 1970s.
Family breakdown drives the ever-expanding police state to extend its webs and ensnare men far beyond the prison population. Beadles from divorce courts, welfare agencies, child-support administrations, and child-abuse constabularies use massive computer surveillance to track the jobs and movements of so-called deadbeat or DNA dads. They treat unmarried or divorced fathers, in Bryce Christensen's words, as "quasi-criminals, perpetually under corrective supervision."
As Margaret Mead famously declared, the key social issue in every society is how to deal with the aggressiveness and competitiveness of males. The traditional solution is marriage, which ties men to the future through their children and channels their aggression into supporting their families through competitive success in both education and the workplace.
In families that are intact, boys tend to socialize upward toward their fathers and other adult men, such as teachers and coaches, rather than sideways toward the gang and the street. They also tend to readily accept the educational disciplines required by upward mobility. Even today in intact middle- and upper-class families, where fathers usually perform as chief providers, more boys than girls go to college. The sexual skew in American universities reflects a condition widely reported in anthropological studies: The nuclear family always must compete with polygyny (derived from the Greek for "many women"). Enabling the most powerful men (by whatever relevant measure) to dominate the nubile or childbearing years of several young women, polygyny can be pursued through harems and mistresses or extended over time through a series of divorces and remarriages. Monogamy is egalitarianism in sex; it means one to a customer. When this institution breaks down, it leaves behind an underclass of young men who cannot marry and who are prone to addiction to homosexuality and pornography. It also creates cohorts of abandoned women who are left to struggle with their sons and then grow old alone.
As Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck pointed out in the 1980s, the pattern of family breakdown is fed by the excesses of the welfare state. "Progressive" systems skewed to tax the so-called rich (the top 20 percent of earners) necessarily bear most heavily on intact
families with children who do the lion's share of society's productive work. Recent data show that the top fifth of households perform some 33 percent of the hours worked, earn roughly 50 percent of the income, and pay 68 percent of federal income and payroll taxes, all while raising most of the boys who pursue higher education. The progressive taxes
paid by these families finance programs and institutions such as child support, daycare, job quotas, affirmative action, divorce courts, foster homes, abortion clinics, nursing homes, and cradle-to-grave health care, all of which reduce the unique value of the personal-care functions provided by father-supported families. In this way, state-provided welfare provisions create an anti-family feedback loop in social policy, reducing incentives for families to stay together and creating what Allan Carlson has called a multi-trillion-dollar "lifestyle subsidy" for careerist singles and broken families. Yet despite the state-assisted breakdown of the nuclear family and the resulting dearth of young men in higher education, males continue to dominate the educational statistics in advanced mathematics (and the math-intensive fields of science and engineering) all around the world. The news may prompt the tenured ladies at Harvard and MIT to burst into tears and summon lawyers to sue God, but the evidence for a biological source of male mathematical superiority is overwhelming. Boys are better at math, and the harder the math the greater the male superiority. Indeed, throughout human history, female mathematicians and engineers have made almost no significant contributions to these fields. The absence of boys in colleges does not mean that women suddenly begin writing most of our leading-edge software programs or designing microchips for our missile defenses. The feminization of the universities simply deprives the economy of the technical skills and competitive energies of new generations of men.
In response, the powerful polygynists in charge of many large global corporations range the world to tap male talent wherever it may be. They tend to find it in Asian universities, such as India?s fiercely meritocratic IIT campuses, where males constitute at least 90 percent of the students. The visible results of this are high-tech outsourcing and immigration. But the roots are nurtured by the breakdown of families, the feminization of American universities, and the flight of boys from them.
Mr. Gilder is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute.
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I recently had a close encounter with radical feminists supporting jihadist ends by protesting military recruitment efforts. In light of stories like this, I wonder by what convoluted route they magange to arrive at their plans of action.
This is the first time I've encountered this source so I'm including their blurb about themselves at the end. I confess if it weren't for all the other henious news coming out of Iran, I'd have a hard to believing this.
Iran to hang teenage girl attacked by rapists Sat. 7 Jan 2006
Iran Focus
Tehran, Iran, Jan. 07 ? An Iranian court has sentenced a teenage rape victim to death by hanging after she weepingly confessed that she had unintentionally killed a man who had tried to rape both her and her niece.
The state-run daily Etemaad reported on Saturday that 18-year-old Nazanin confessed to stabbing one of three men who had attacked the pair along with their boyfriends while they were spending some time in a park west of the Iranian capital in March 2005.
Nazanin, who was 17 years old at the time of the incident, said that after the three men started to throw stones at them, the two girls? boyfriends quickly escaped on their motorbikes leaving the pair helpless.
She described how the three men pushed her and her 16-year-old niece Somayeh onto the ground and tried to rape them, and said that she took out a knife from her pocket and stabbed one of the men in the hand.
As the girls tried to escape, the men once again attacked them, and at this point, Nazanin said, she stabbed one of the men in the chest. The teenage girl, however, broke down in tears in court as she explained that she had no intention of killing the man but was merely defending herself and her younger niece from rape, the report said.
The court, however, issued on Tuesday a sentence for Nazanin to be hanged to death.
Last week, a court in the city of Rasht, northern Iran, sentenced Delara Darabi to death by hanging charged with murder when she was 17 years old. Darabi has denied the charges.
In August 2004, Iran?s Islamic penal system sentenced a 16-year-old girl, Atefeh Rajabi, to death after a sham trial, in which she was accused of committing ?acts incompatible with chastity?.
The teenage victim had no access to a lawyer at any stage and efforts by her family to retain one were to no avail. Atefeh personally defended herself and told the religious judge that he should punish those who force women into adultery, not the victims. She was eventually hanged in public in the northern town of Neka.
About Iran Focus
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By Loredana Vuoto
Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap ? And What Women Can Do About It, by Warren Farrell (Amacom, 288 pp., $23)
We?ve all seen the statistics that purport to show the raw deal women get in the workplace. But that raw deal simply doesn?t exist, writes Warren Farrell in this new book: It?s lifestyle choices, not gender identities, that determine salaries. If women choose more of the same professions as men, and follow similar career paths, they will earn salaries equal to those of their male counterparts.
Even within the limits imposed by their choices, women?s comparative wages have made great progress in recent years. According to a 2003 GAO report, women earn 80 cents for every dollar a man makes ? a significant increase from the 59 cents women earned compared with a man?s dollar back in the 1970s. But Farrell, author of such previous bestsellers as Why Men Are the Way They Are and The Myth of Male Power, focuses on the bigger sociological picture ? contending that women actually earn the same as men if they have equal experience and qualifications, and are doing a similar job in identical working conditions. In fact, he contends that ? despite the numerous lawsuits launched by women every year against their employers ? women are not being discriminated against in the workforce: They are being victimized not by their employers, but by their own bad professional choices.
Farrell?s extensive research is persuasive: Women generally earn less than men because they choose jobs that are more ?fulfilling, flexible, and safe.? These jobs usually pay less. For example, the librarian with a graduate degree will earn less than a garbage collector who dropped out of high school. The same applies to the educated art historian working in a museum versus the uneducated coal miner working in a mine. The garbage collector and the coal miner get higher salaries because their work involves greater risk and less pleasant working conditions. Few workers are willing to accept the conditions in these blue-collar, male-oriented jobs ? so employees willing to work in these fields are a more precious commodity than workers in lower-paying professions, including librarians and art historians.
Farrell suggests 25 ways women can level the salary playing field. Among his recommendations are that women choose careers in technology or science, work longer hours, accept more responsibilities, and take jobs that are more dangerous and in unpleasant environments. He notes, however, that these solutions ? instead of empowering women ? may leave them bereft of true power, which he defines as ?control over one?s life.? He believes that ?pay is about giving up power to get the power of pay,? and that by choosing to make more money, women limit their options. They forfeit the quality of life they enjoyed when they worked less and in better, non-stressful working environments. They risk relinquishing a profession they feel passionate about for one they dislike. They also will have less opportunity to have children, take maternity leave, or work flexible hours to take care of their children. If they do decide to have children and raise them, chances are they will lose their position and their high salary.
Farrell?s observations about women and the pay gap are bracing, but his proposed solutions are less than adequate for real-life situations. He suggests, for example, that a woman who wants children, or who already has them, should find a mate who is willing to stay home and be the primary caretaker. Such men, of course, are few and far between. And what about the single mother who can?t afford to relocate or work long hours since she must take care of her children? Or the woman who risks losing custody of her children if she pursues any of Farrell?s suggestions? Or the mother who is reentering the job market after a 15-year absence because she chose to raise her children? For them, Farrell has little helpful advice.
Farrell?s 25 solutions basically outline a philosophy of gender neutrality: To earn equal pay to a man, a woman must renounce the specifics of her sex. This is the ultimate goal of feminism, so we should not be surprised that Farrell is the only man to be elected three times to the board of directors of the National Organization for Women (NOW). His analysis reveals the fundamental contradictions at the heart of the modern feminist movement: Although appearing to champion the cause of women, Farrell finally sells them short by viewing them merely as units of production.
But he also lays bare the unpleasant truth about working women. For decades, feminists and Hollywood have perpetuated the myth that a woman can have it all ? a successful, high-powered career, with time for a loving husband and children, all the while looking glamorous, sexy, and carefree. The reality, however, is that working women today are more stressed, overworked, and underappreciated than they were prior to the women?s liberation movement. Pursuing a career carries trade-offs and costs, which usually come at the expense of family and children. A similar dynamic holds true for women wishing to spend more time at home: The result will be less time and less productivity at the office. This book poignantly illustrates why feminism?s war on human nature is destined to fail: Instead of chasing the chimera of perfect wage parity between the sexes, women will continue to harbor the natural desire to be devoted mothers and wives.
? Loredana Vuoto is a speechwriter to the assistant secretary for the Administration for Children and Families of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The views expressed in this review are solely her own.
http://www.nationalreview.com/books/vuoto200505200839.asp
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An academic controversy recently erupted over the decision of Science Magazine editors to refuse publication of an article about gender difference by British biologist Peter Lawrence. Though the prestigious journal had given Dr. Lawrence a publication date and article proofs, Science editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy abruptly notified the author that the piece could not be published because it did not offer "a strategy on how to deal with the gender issue." The article, in edited form, is reproduced below.
Some have a dream that, one fine day, there will be equal numbers of men and women in all jobs, including those in scientific research. But I think this dream is Utopian; it assumes that if all doors were opened and all discrimination ended, the different sexes would be professionally indistinguishable. Here I will argue, as others have many times before, that men and women simply are born different.
It is not easy to write about this subject. The Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen published research on the "male brain" in a specialist journal in 1997, but did not dare to talk about his ideas in public for several years.
Baron-Cohen makes one point clear: You cannot deduce the psychological characteristics of any person by knowing their sex. Arguing from the scientific literature that men and women typically have different types of brains, he nevertheless points out that "some women have the male brain, and some men have the female brain." Stereotyping is unscientific ? "individuals are just that: individuals."
Yet Baron-Cohen presents evidence that males on average are biologically predisposed to systemize, to analyze, and to be more forgetful of others, while females on average are innately designed to empathize, to communicate, and to care for others.
Many facts argue that these differences have their roots in biology and genetics. For instance, newborn infants (less than 24 hours old) have been shown a real human face and a mobile of the same size and similar colour. On average, boys looked longer at the mobile and girls looked longer at the face.
Autism spectrum conditions provide another example. People with these problems communicate poorly; they are unable to put themselves in another's place, and have difficulties with empathizing. They may treat others as objects. They often become obsessed and show repetitive behaviour. The less severely affected can become experts on recondite subjects, such as train timetables or ocean temperatures. Most relevant for our arguments is that autism spectrum conditions are largely sex-limited, being between four and nine times more frequent in males. From many studies, including psychology and neuroanatomy, Baron-Cohen argues convincingly that autism spectrum conditions are an extreme form of maleness.
It will not have escaped the notice of many scientists that some of their colleagues and maybe themselves have more than a hint of these "autistic" features. There is good evidence that this type of single-mindedness is particularly common in males. Indeed, we might acknowledge that a limited amount of autistic behaviour can be useful to researchers and to society. For example, a lifetime's academic concentration on a family of beetles with more than 100,000 species may seem weird, but we need several such people in the world for each family. And most of these specialists will be men.
It follows that if we search objectively for an obsessive knowledge, for a mastery of abstruse facts, or for mechanical understanding, we will select many more men than women. And if males on average are constitutionally better suited to be this kind of scientist, it seems silly to aim at strict gender parity.
However, in professions that rely on an ability to put oneself in another's place, at which women on average are far superior, we should expect and want a majority of women. For example, among current student members of the British Psychological Society, there are 5,806 women to 945 men; and among graduate psychologists, 23,324 women to 8,592 men.
Many who have turned their attention to explaining the fall out of women from the hard sciences have ascribed the phenomenon to a mixture of discrimination and choice. Regarding overt discrimination, in a lifetime in science, I have seen only little, and it has been both for and against women. Surely, gender discrimination cannot explain more than a tiny part of this trend.
But there is a different kind of discrimination that particularly damages creative pursuits such as science. There is good psychological evidence that aggression and lack of empathy are on average male characteristics, and we may agree with Baron-Cohen that for both sexes, "nastiness ? gets you higher socially, and gets you more control or power." In this struggle, men climb higher because they are on average more ruthless, and many women, as well as a gentle minority of men, shy away from competing with them.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Peter A. Lawrence "The article Science Magazine doesn't want you to read." National Post (February 16, 2006).
Edited version of the original article reprinted with permission from the National Post. The original article is referenced below.
Peter A. Lawrence, "Men, Women, and Ghosts in Science," Public Library of Science (January 17, 2006).
Republished courtesy of the Public Library of Science Biology. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The original article may be viewed here.
http://catholiceducation.org/articles/science/sc0081.html
THE AUTHOR
Peter A. Lawrence is at Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, United Kingdom. He is the author of The Making of a Fly: The Genetics of Animal Design.
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March 08, 2006, 7:54 a.m.
Witness to the Death of Feminism
Phyllis Chesler on her sisterhood at war.
Q&A by Kathryn Jean Lopez
Don't try to label Phyllis Chesler, because you're not going to confine this woman to a category. She's an American Jew who has worn a burka, while living, ultimately against her will, in Afghanistan. She's a liberal feminist second-waver who's the author of a book called The Death of Feminism ? who will tell you that for feminists today "reality has no defining role in determining their thoughts or their actions."
NRO Editor Kathryn Lopez recently talked to Chesler about where feminists fall short and what they have to offer.
Kathryn Jean Lopez: Are feminists feminism's worst enemies?
Phyllis Chesler: Yes and no. Feminists, as well as women, have some terrifying external enemies. For example, Islamists oppose the ideals of dignity and equality for women by their practice of gender apartheid. This is a system which includes some, if not all, of the following human-rights violations: female genital mutilation, veiling and hijab, purdah, normalized daughter- and wife-beating, arranged (child) marriage, often to first cousins, polygamy, honor murder, the imprisonment, torture, beheading, stoning to death, and hanging of rape victims, suspected prostitutes, and feminist dissidents ? especially in Iran today.
Such Islamist misogynists have many Western allies and apologists...
Among them are many academic and establishment feminists who are also apologists for Islamic religious and gender apartheid and for the international trafficking in women and girls. In this, they are feminism's worst enemies. For example, many academic feminists fear that any serious critique of veiling, purdah, or polygamy might be slandered as "racist." They are right. These days, telling the truth about indigenous Islamic barbarism towards women and men is quickly branded as "politically incorrect" and dismissed as "racist" and "imperialist" arrogance. It requires real courage and clarity to stay this particular course of truth-telling. While some feminists did sound the alarm about the Taliban, they did not rescue Afghan women physically, personally, militarily, or economically. In addition, feminists have not focused on the right to motherhood, but primarily on the right to abortion; they have not focused on creating a strong feminist foreign policy, but primarily on the rights of gays and lesbians. Personal sexual freedom and identity politics have trumped universal human rights.
I happen to support civil rights for gay people and women's reproductive freedom, but we are at war, and such rights will matter little if we are all bombed back to the tenth century. Iranian feminists have always marched for women's rights on International Women's Day. In the past, they have been roughed up, arrested, sometimes tortured. The fact that they are willing to march at all is heart-stoppingly brave. This year, they have been informed that if they march the police will shoot them down on the spot. Western feminists have been as shockingly quiet about this as they have been about the repeated gang-rapes in the Sudan perpetrated by genocidal ethnic Arab Muslims against black African Muslim and Christian women.
Lopez: What do you hate most about feminism today?
Chesler: I don't "hate" anything about feminism. Those feminists who work in the areas of violence against women (incest, rape, sexual harassment, domestic battering, prostitution, and pornography); those feminists who work within religion to further the cause of both God and humanity; and those feminists who fight discrimination against women in the workplace have my profound respect and gratitude: such feminists are both Republicans and Democrats, religious and secular, they are in all professions, and they exist everywhere in the world.
However, I mourn the Stalinization and Palestinianization of the feminist postcolonial and postmodern academy and media. Because such feminists refuse to "judge" Islamic gender apartheid, they and their institutions and organizations have become anti-activist, anti-American, anti-Israeli, isolationist, and, at best, tools of the Democratic party. At worst, they are apologists for Islamist jihad. To avoid the McCarthyite charge of "racism," such feminists have been willing to sacrifice the victims of Islamism on their "multicultural" altars.
Lopez: What's most infuriating about the "death" of feminism?
Chesler: The fact that a cowardly, conformist, and pale imitation of what feminism was meant to be is now touted as the "real thing." The fact that an aggressively secular and primarily narrow and intolerant feminism has driven away millions of women (and men) and that this fact does not give what is left of organized feminism the slightest pause. Also, the refusal of feminists to really grapple with woman's inhumanity to woman (the title of my tenth book) is saddening. Like men, women ? including feminists ? also internalize sexist beliefs. In addition, women are both hard-wired and socialized to compete mainly with other women, not with men ? and to do so through slander and ostracism. Thus, the mainstream feminist refusal to acknowledge that, like men, women are human beings, as close to the apes as to the angels, is sad and infuriating.
Lopez: What would you like every American to know about your Afghan captivity?
Chesler: When I was very young and twice as foolish, I married my college sweetheart who was, I thought, a very Westernized Muslim man from Afghanistan. When we traveled to Kabul on what I thought was merely a visit, my American passport was confiscated and I was put into[isolation]. This was not unique; it's what happens to all foreign brides. And much worse: Custody of children whose fathers are Muslim or Arab and whose mothers are American ? even if they are born in America ? belong to the father and his family; only mercenaries can get such children back to America. And yes, individual Afghans are charming, soulful, poetic, hospitable, and beautiful. But they are not Westerners. Thus, to my amazement, I discovered that my father-in-law had three wives and twenty-one children. I quickly discovered that my Westernized husband also had a strong Eastern side: He saw nothing wrong with how women were treated (sheeted, segregated on public buses, subjected to arranged marriages, denied minimal educations and medical care) and expected me to accept Islamic gender apartheid. Well, as a matter of fact, he did see something wrong, but was perfectly willing to accept a very slow pace of change, even if that meant that I was instantly consigned to the tenth century while he continued on in the 20th century without me. Such behavior is hardly unusual today, nor was it unique to me almost forty-five years ago. I nearly died there. I managed to get out. I write about this in my chapter about my "Afghan Captivity" in my latest book The Death of Feminism. [The chapter is excerpted here.
My experience taught me some important lessons that are currently of vital importance to Americans.
First, I learned that both evil and barbarism are indigenous to every culture and not caused by imperialism, colonialism, or Zionism ? as the Western intelligentsia would have it. Afghanistan had never ever been occupied by the British, who literally died in droves trying to invade. The refusal to enter the 20th century was an entirely Afghan and Muslim decision. I was there in 1961, long before the Taliban made things much harsher for girls and women.
Second, I learned that Muslims who can pass for Westerners often have multiple cultural personalities. In the West, they are like us; in the East, they are not. In a jihadic era, when jihadists are moving among us and have access to our most advanced ideas about tolerance and to our technology, it is important to keep this in mind.
Third, I also learned that America may not be perfect, but it is not the worst country in the world; rather, it is the best country. It is a perspective that I would like other Americans, especially our academics, to ponder. What we have here would constitute a revolution in any Arab and Muslim country.
Fourth, I am not a cultural relativist. I have seen the lives of poor people and of women in a third-world country and believe that they are entitled to the same rights and freedoms that Western people enjoy. We have a moral imperative to assist in the modernization of all human cultures; how to do so, and at what cost, remain unanswered, burning questions.
Finally, every day I lived in Kabul my mother-in-law tried to convert me to Islam. She eventually scorned me as the "Yahud" (the "Jew"). Thus, I became finely attuned to religious apartheid as well. I understood that, with some exceptions, Muslims do not have a history or a psychology of tolerating other religions very well; on the contrary. Islamic history is one in which Muslims have taxed, impoverished, jailed, murdered, or exiled all those who do not convert to Islam. Today, the level of anti-American and anti-Jewish propaganda in the Islamic world is lethal, toxic, and has unleashed a global jihad against both Israel and the West. We cannot afford to tolerate the intolerant nor can we afford to minimize the dangers to our civilization posed by Islamist fanatics who have successfully hijacked their religion and peoples. There were also "good" and moderate Germans during Hitler's reign. What matters is that they did not stand up to Hitler. What matters is that otherwise "good" people appeased him as well....
Lopez: Is it shocking to you that "feminism" can't give President Bush any credit, at least, say, for removing the Taliban from power?
Chesler: Yes. I published a letter in the New York Times congratulating him for doing so. I have also written about the powerful women's-rights language contained in many of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's speeches throughout the Muslim Middle East. It is also shocking that the same feminists who protected President Bill Clinton's sexual abuse of women have not congratulated President Bush for his appointment of Condoleezza Rice and for his Administration's attempts to craft and enforce legislation against trafficking, both domestically and internationally.
Lopez: Did you actually get grief from feminist for writing about the "gender cleaning" of women in Sudan?
Chesler: Yes, I did. When I sent one such piece around, certain left feminists told me that they did not even want to read what I had written because they did not "approve" of my writing for conservative publications. Not even if my pro-woman pieces were solicited and welcomed in conservative quarters and totally censored in left-liberal mainstream quarters. I had a similar problem when I wrote about the refusal of Lukas Moodyson, the brilliant Swedish filmmaker, to allow his film against trafficking (Lilya-4-ever), to be shown at a feminist anti-trafficking conference in Israel. While he allowed the film to be shown in every country on earth where brothels, pimps, and traffickers flourished, he refused to allow anti-trafficking Israelis to show the film once because he disapproved of Israel's military policies. I wrote a piece about censorship and prejudice and about the demonization of Israel which was immediately rejected by the New York and L.A. Times. I published it in Frontpage Magazine and within 48 hours Moodyson reversed his decision and allowed the Israeli feminists to show his film. The fact that my piece got some immediate positive results did not matter. All that mattered was that I had published it in a so-called "right-wing rag."
In addition, as I write in The Death of Feminism, the level of anti-American and anti-Israeli propaganda and intolerance towards all those who do not kow-tow to it is fairly monumental on many feminist list-serv groups. If one does not believe that America "deserved" 9/11; if one does not view America as the true "terrorist"; if one does not believe that Arabs and Muslims are being persecuted in America for "racist" reasons; and if one does not simultaneously believe that the Jews are "imagining" or "exaggerating" anti-Semitism ? then one is not welcome on such list-serv groups. In fact, I was literally "purged," Stalinist-style from one such group for my various pro-America and pro-Israel "Thought Crimes." It was a most instructive experience.
Lopez: What do you mean by "women's studies has been taken over by totalitarian thinkers?"
Chesler: The kind of closed-minded "political correctness" which I have just described above is typical of groupthink and totalitarian thinking. If someone thinks for herself in an independent and creative way and dares to come up with non-party-line conclusions, she or he is then, in classic Orwellian style, deemed the enemy, a traitor, a non-person. Their work will not be read or discussed. They will not be invited to debate or to debate in a civilized and honorable way. They will be called a "racist" and a "neoconservative." If a feminist dares raise the specter of Jew-hatred and the demonization of the Jewish state among leftists and feminists, she will quickly discover that she has become unwelcome in the mainstream media and among leftists (who actually think of themselves as liberals), and among feminists. Palestinianized Western feminists are more concerned with the so-called occupation of a country that does not exist (Palestine), than with the occupation of women's bodies worldwide under Islam. The fact that feminists and leftists still continue to call for boycotts of Israel and to actively demonstrate against a war-time president even after 9/11, 3/11, and 7/7 tells me that they have literally been brainwashed and that reality has no defining role in determining their thoughts or their actions.
Lopez: What's the "new feminism" you envision?
Chesler: I have no intention of leading a new feminist movement. Hopefully other, younger people might do that. For all the reasons mentioned above, I doubt I could work with feminists who are so anti-America, so anti-military, so anti-Israel, so depressingly left ? and so intolerant of intellectual diversity. I could work with feminists, especially religious, Republican, conservative, and Muslim feminists, who understand that totalitarian and terrorist Islam and jihad must be militarily defeated. If not, all our gains will be for naught.
I would very much like to see every American trade and peace treaties tied to women's rights. In addition, every micro-lending program should stipulate that girls in that particular village will not be genitally mutilated, forced to marry as children, and that they will be educated. I believe that there are feminists in the administration who are thinking similar thoughts. I could work with them, but I could also best work on such policies as part of a conservative think tank. The Western academy, as I know it, is no longer hospitable to non-politically correct thinking. See what happened to Larry Summers, the president of Harvard, when he crushed the divestment in Israel initiatives and dared to say aloud something that might be true about gender differences in math and science He was forced to resign. Also see how many distinguished and Saudi-funded universities feel that the concept of academic freedom exists solely to protect the hate speech of the Palestine Solidarity Movement and of other such hate groups.
Lopez: To what extent is there easy common ground on the Right and the Left as far as a new feminism goes?
Chesler: Perhaps such categories as "left" and "right" are no longer useful. I write about this at length in The Death of Feminism. On the other hand, the "Left" is aggressively secular and anti-religious; considers pornography to be "protected" hate speech; considers prostitution and trafficking to be forms of "sex work" which should be de-criminalized or legalized; views paternal sole-custody of children as the feminist solution to the problems that mothers have when they juggle child care and career responsibilities; believes that men and women are actually the "same"; has absolutely no foreign policy except that of opposing whatever President Bush and America do or ever have done ? they really might as well be French; and has no universal feminist policy vis-?-vis jihadic Islam and its Muslim victims. The "right" has opposite views on these subjects. Although some "right-wingers" have diverse views on abortion, civil rights for gay people, the role of multi-national corporations in a time of war, the importance of intellectual and ideological diversity; the dangers of appeasing the Islam, etc. there are few "left wingers" who are at all diverse on their issues. If I am wrong ? I hope they start saying so quickly, loudly, and proudly.
http://www.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/chesler200603080754.asp
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"Even with a fertility rate near replacement level, the United States lacks
the amount of people necessary to sustain an imperial role in the world,
just as Britain lost its ability to do so after its birthrates collapsed in
the early 20th century."
Perhaps "The Return of Patriarchy" may be the promise to stimulate a
discussion about demography. :-) In G. we can observe that coeducation and
the supression of male aggressiveness/belligerence in schools give a
decisive adantage to girls. Under these circumstances it is much easier for
girls to take advantage of educational offers offered by schools and
universities. Perhaps you remember that these days I wrote that young women
were the first to leave those shrinking cities in the east of G: They got
the best education, were the fastest moving part of the population. Are we
living these days in some sort of matriarchy?
Bob
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3376
<http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3376&page=0> &page=0
Foreign Policy
March/April <http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=220> 2006
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The Return of Patriarchy
By Phillip Longman
Across the globe, people are choosing to have fewer children or none at all.
Governments are desperate to halt the trend, but their influence seems to
stop at the bedroom door. Are some societies destined to become extinct?
Hardly. It's more likely that conservatives will inherit the Earth. Like it
or not, a growing proportion of the next generation will be born into
families who believe that father knows best.
"If we could survive without a wife, citizens of Rome, all of us would do
without that nuisance." So proclaimed the Roman general, statesman, and
censor Quintus Caecilius Metellus Macedonicus, in 131 B.C. Still, he went on
to plead, falling birthrates required that Roman men fulfill their duty to
reproduce, no matter how irritating Roman women might have become. "Since
nature has so decreed that we cannot manage comfortably with them, nor live
in any way without them, we must plan for our lasting preservation rather
than for our temporary pleasure."
With the number of human beings having increased more than six-fold in the
past 200 years, the modern mind simply assumes that men and women, no matter
how estranged, will always breed enough children to grow the population-at
least until plague or starvation sets in. It is an assumption that not only
conforms to our long experience of a world growing ever more crowded, but
which also enjoys the endorsement of such influential thinkers as Thomas
Malthus and his many modern acolytes.
Yet, for more than a generation now, well-fed, healthy, peaceful populations
around the world have been producing too few children to avoid population
decline. That is true even though dramatic improvements in infant and child
mortality mean that far fewer children are needed today (only about 2.1 per
woman in modern societies) to avoid population loss. Birthrates are falling
far below replacement levels in one country after the next-from China,
Japan, Singapore, and South Korea, to Canada, the Caribbean, all of Europe,
Russia, and even parts of the Middle East.
Fearful of a future in which the elderly outnumber the young, many
governments are doing whatever they can to encourage people to have
children. Singapore has sponsored "speed dating" events, in hopes of
bringing busy professionals together to marry and procreate. France offers
generous tax incentives for those willing to start a family. In Sweden, the
state finances day care to ease the tension between work and family life.
Yet, though such explicitly pronatal policies may encourage people to have
children at a younger age, there is little evidence they cause people to
have more children than they otherwise would. As governments going as far
back as imperial Rome have discovered, when cultural and economic conditions
discourage parenthood, not even a dictator can force people to go forth and
multiply.
Throughout the broad sweep of human history, there are many examples of
people, or classes of people, who chose to avoid the costs of parenthood.
Indeed, falling fertility is a recurring tendency of human civilization. Why
then did humans not become extinct long ago? The short answer is patriarchy.
Patriarchy does not simply mean that men rule. Indeed, it is a particular
value system that not only requires men to marry but to marry a woman of
proper station. It competes with many other male visions of the good life,
and for that reason alone is prone to come in cycles. Yet before it
degenerates, it is a cultural regime that serves to keep birthrates high
among the affluent, while also maximizing parents' investments in their
children. No advanced civilization has yet learned how to endure without it.
Through a process of cultural evolution, societies that adopted this
particular social system-which involves far more than simple male
domination-maximized their population and therefore their power, whereas
those that didn't were either overrun or absorbed. This cycle in human
history may be obnoxious to the enlightened, but it is set to make a
comeback.
The Conservative Baby Boom
The historical relation between patriarchy, population, and power has deep
implications for our own time. As the United States is discovering today in
Iraq, population is still power. Smart bombs, laser-guided missiles, and
unmanned drones may vastly extend the violent reach of a hegemonic power.
But ultimately, it is often the number of boots on the ground that changes
history. Even with a fertility rate near replacement level, the United
States lacks the amount of people necessary to sustain an imperial role in
the world, just as Britain lost its ability to do so after its birthrates
collapsed in the early 20th century. For countries such as China, Germany,
Italy, Japan, and Spain, in which one-child families are now the norm, the
quality of human capital may be high, but it has literally become too rare
to put at risk.
Falling fertility is also responsible for many financial and economic
problems that dominate today's headlines. The long-term financing of social
security schemes, private pension plans, and healthcare systems has little
to do with people living longer. Gains in life expectancy at older ages have
actually been quite modest, and the rate of improvement in the United States
has diminished for each of the last three decades. Instead, the falling
ratio of workers to retirees is overwhelmingly caused by workers who were
never born. As governments raise taxes on a dwindling working-age population
to cover the growing burdens of supporting the elderly, young couples may
conclude they are even less able to afford children than their parents were,
thereby setting off a new cycle of population aging and decline.
Declining birthrates also change national temperament. In the United States,
for example, the percentage of women born in the late 1930s who remained
childless was near 10 percent. By comparison, nearly 20 percent of women
born in the late 1950s are reaching the end of their reproductive lives
without having had children. The greatly expanded childless segment of
contemporary society, whose members are drawn disproportionately from the
feminist and countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s, will leave no
genetic legacy. Nor will their emotional or psychological influence on the
next generation compare with that of their parents.
Meanwhile, single-child families are prone to extinction. A single child
replaces one of his or her parents, but not both. Nor do single-child
families contribute much to future population. The 17.4 percent of baby
boomer women who had only one child account for a mere 7.8 percent of
children born in the next generation. By contrast, nearly a quarter of the
children of baby boomers descend from the mere 11 percent of baby boomer
women who had four or more children. These circumstances are leading to the
emergence of a new society whose members will disproportionately be
descended from parents who rejected the social tendencies that once made
childlessness and small families the norm. These values include an adherence
to traditional, patriarchal religion, and a strong identification with one's
own folk or nation.
This dynamic helps explain, for example, the gradual drift of American
culture away from secular individualism and toward religious fundamentalism.
Among states that voted for President George W. Bush in 2004, fertility
rates are 12 percent higher than in states that voted for Sen. John Kerry.
It may also help to explain the increasing popular resistance among
rank-and-file Europeans to such crown jewels of secular liberalism as the
European Union. It turns out that Europeans who are most likely to identify
themselves as "world citizens" are also those least likely to have children.
Does this mean that today's enlightened but slow-breeding societies face
extinction? Probably not, but only because they face a dramatic,
demographically driven transformation of their cultures. As has happened
many times before in history, it is a transformation that occurs as secular
and libertarian elements in society fail to reproduce, and as people
adhering to more traditional, patriarchal values inherit society by default.
At least as long ago as ancient Greek and Roman times, many sophisticated
members of society concluded that investing in children brought no
advantage. Rather, children came to be seen as a costly impediment to
self-fulfillment and worldly achievement. But, though these attitudes led to
the extinction of many individual families, they did not lead to the
extinction of society as a whole. Instead, through a process of cultural
evolution, a set of values and norms that can roughly be described as
patriarchy reemerged.
Population Becomes Power
In the primordial past, to be sure, most societies did not coerce
reproduction, because they had to avoid breeding faster than the wild game
on which they fed. Indeed, in almost all the hunter-gatherer societies that
survived long enough to be studied by anthropologists, such as the Eskimos
and Tasmanian Bushmen, one finds customs that in one way or another
discouraged population growth. In various combinations, these have included
late marriage, genital mutilation, abortion, and infanticide. Some early
hunter-gatherer societies may have also limited population growth by giving
women high-status positions. Allowing at least some number of females to
take on roles such as priestess, sorcerer, oracle, artist, and even warrior
would have provided meaningful alternatives to motherhood and thereby
reduced overall fertility to within sustainable limits.
During the eons before agriculture emerged, there was little or no military
reason to promote high fertility. War and conquests could bring little
advantage to society. There were no granaries to raid, no livestock to
steal, no use for slaves except rape. But with the coming of the Neolithic
agricultural revolution, starting about 11,000 years ago, everything
changed. The domestication of plants and animals led to vastly increased
food supplies. Surplus food allowed cities to emerge, and freed more people
to work on projects such as building pyramids and developing a written
language to record history. But the most fateful change rendered by the
agricultural revolution was the way it turned population into power. Because
of the relative abundance of food, more and more societies discovered that
the greatest demographic threat to their survival was no longer
overpopulation, but underpopulation.
At that point, instead of dying of starvation, societies with high fertility
grew in strength and number and began menacing those with lower fertility.
In more and more places in the world, fast-breeding tribes morphed into
nations and empires and swept away any remaining, slow-breeding hunters and
gatherers. It mattered that your warriors were fierce and valiant in battle;
it mattered more that there were lots of them.
That was the lesson King Pyrrhus learned in the third century B.C., when he
marched his Greek armies into the Italian peninsula and tried to take on the
Romans. Pyrrhus initially prevailed at a great battle at Asculum. But it
was, as they say, "a Pyrrhic victory," and Pyrrhus could only conclude that
"another such victory over the Romans and we are undone." The Romans, who by
then were procreating far more rapidly than were the Greeks, kept pouring in
reinforcements-"as from a fountain continually flowing out of the city," the
Greek historian Plutarch tells us. Hopelessly outnumbered, Pyrrhus went on
to lose the war, and Greece, after falling into a long era of population
decline, eventually became a looted colony of Rome.
Like today's modern, well-fed nations, both ancient Greece and Rome
eventually found that their elites had lost interest in the often dreary
chores of family life. "In our time all Greece was visited by a dearth of
children and a general decay of population," lamented the Greek historian
Polybius around 140 B.C., just as Greece was giving in to Roman domination.
"This evil grew upon us rapidly, and without attracting attention, by our
men becoming perverted to a passion for show and money and the pleasures of
an idle life." But, as with civilizations around the globe, patriarchy, for
as long as it could be sustained, was the key to maintaining population and,
therefore, power.
Father Knows Best?
Patriarchal societies come in many varieties and evolve through different
stages. What they have in common are customs and attitudes that collectively
serve to maximize fertility and parental investment in the next generation.
Of these, among the most important is the stigmatization of "illegitimate"
children. One measure of the degree to which patriarchy has diminished in
advanced societies is the growing acceptance of out-of-wedlock births, which
have now become the norm in Scandinavian countries, for example.
Under patriarchy, "bastards" and single mothers cannot be tolerated because
they undermine male investment in the next generation. Illegitimate children
do not take their fathers' name, and so their fathers, even if known, tend
not to take any responsibility for them. By contrast, "legitimate" children
become a source of either honor or shame to their fathers and the family
line. The notion that legitimate children belong to their fathers' family,
and not to their mothers', which has no basis in biology, gives many men
powerful emotional reasons to want children, and to want their children to
succeed in passing on their legacy. Patriarchy also leads men to keep having
children until they produce at least one son.
Another key to patriarchy's evolutionary advantage is the way it penalizes
women who do not marry and have children. Just decades ago in the
English-speaking world, such women were referred to, even by their own
mothers, as spinsters or old maids, to be pitied for their barrenness or
condemned for their selfishness. Patriarchy made the incentive of taking a
husband and becoming a full-time mother very high because it offered women
few desirable alternatives.
To be sure, a society organized on such principles may well degenerate over
time into misogyny, and eventually sterility, as occurred in both ancient
Greece and Rome. In more recent times, the patriarchal family has also
proved vulnerable to the rise of capitalism, which profits from the
diversion of female labor from the house to the workplace. But as long as
the patriarchal system avoids succumbing to these threats, it will produce a
greater quantity of children, and arguably children of higher quality, than
do societies organized by other principles, which is all that evolution
cares about.
This claim is contentious. Today, after all, we associate patriarchy with
the hideous abuse of women and children, with poverty and failed states.
Taliban rebels or Muslim fanatics in Nigeria stoning an adulteress to death
come to mind. Yet these are examples of insecure societies that have
degenerated into male tyrannies, and they do not represent the form of
patriarchy that has achieved evolutionary advantage in human history. Under
a true patriarchal system, such as in early Rome or 17th-century Protestant
Europe, fathers have strong reason to take an active interest in the
children their wives bear. That is because, when men come to see themselves,
and are seen by others, as upholders of a patriarchal line, how those
children turn out directly affects their own rank and honor.
Under patriarchy, maternal investment in children also increases. As
feminist economist Nancy Folbre has observed, "Patriarchal control over
women tends to increase their specialization in reproductive labor, with
important consequences for both the quantity and the quality of their
investments in the next generation." Those consequences arguably include:
more children receiving more attention from their mothers, who, having few
other ways of finding meaning in their lives, become more skilled at keeping
their children safe and healthy. Without implying any endorsement for the
strategy, one must observe that a society that presents women with
essentially three options-be a nun, be a prostitute, or marry a man and bear
children-has stumbled upon a highly effective way to reduce the risk of
demographic decline.
Patriarchy and Its Discontents
Patriarchy may enjoy evolutionary advantages, but nothing has ensured the
survival of any particular patriarchal society. One reason is that men can
grow weary of patriarchy's demands. Roman aristocrats, for example,
eventually became so reluctant to accept the burdens of heading a family
that Caesar Augustus felt compelled to enact steep "bachelor taxes" and
otherwise punish those who remained unwed and childless. Patriarchy may have
its privileges, but they may pale in comparison to the joys of bachelorhood
in a luxurious society-nights spent enjoyably at banquets with friends
discussing sports, war stories, or philosophy, or with alluring mistresses,
flute girls, or clever courtesans.
Women, of course, also have reason to grow weary of patriarchy, particularly
when men themselves are no longer upholding their patriarchal duties.
Historian Suzanne Cross notes that during the decades of Rome's civil wars,
Roman women of all classes had to learn how to do without men for prolonged
periods, and accordingly developed a new sense of individuality and
independence. Few women in the upper classes would agree to a marriage to an
abusive husband. Adultery and divorce became rampant.
Often, all that sustains the patriarchal family is the idea that its members
are upholding the honor of a long and noble line. Yet, once a society grows
cosmopolitan, fast-paced, and filled with new ideas, new peoples, and new
luxuries, this sense of honor and connection to one's ancestors begins to
fade, and with it, any sense of the necessity of reproduction. "When the
ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard 'having
children' as a question of pro's and con's," Oswald Spengler, the German
historian and philosopher, once observed, "the great turning point has
come."
The Return of Patriarchy
Yet that turning point does not necessarily mean the death of a
civilization, only its transformation. Eventually, for example, the sterile,
secular, noble families of imperial Rome died off, and with them, their
ancestors' idea of Rome. But what was once the Roman Empire remained
populated. Only the composition of the population changed. Nearly by
default, it became composed of new, highly patriarchal family units, hostile
to the secular world and enjoined by faith either to go forth and multiply
or join a monastery. With these changes came a feudal Europe, but not the
end of Europe, nor the end of Western Civilization.
We may witness a similar transformation during this century. In Europe
today, for example, how many children different people have, and under what
circumstances, correlates strongly with their beliefs on a wide range of
political and cultural attitudes. For instance, do you distrust the army?
Then, according to polling data assembled by demographers Ronny Lesthaeghe
and Johan Surkyn, you are less likely to be married and have kids-or ever to
get married and have kids-than those who say they have no objection to the
military. Or again, do you find soft drugs, homosexuality, and euthanasia
acceptable? Do you seldom, if ever, attend church? For whatever reason,
people answering affirmatively to such questions are far more likely to live
alone, or in childless, cohabitating unions, than those who answer
negatively.
The great difference in fertility rates between secular individualists and
religious or cultural conservatives augurs a vast, demographically driven
change in modern societies. Consider the demographics of France, for
example. Among French women born in the early 1960s, less than a third have
three or more children. But this distinct minority of French women (most of
them presumably practicing Catholics and Muslims) produced more than 50
percent of all children born to their generation, in large measure because
so many of their contemporaries had one child or none at all.
Many childless, middle-aged people may regret the life choices that are
leading to the extinction of their family lines, and yet they have no sons
or daughters with whom to share their newfound wisdom. The plurality of
citizens who have only one child may be able to invest lavishly in that
child's education, but a single child will only replace one parent, not
both. Meanwhile, the descendants of parents who have three or more children
will be hugely overrepresented in subsequent generations, and so will the
values and ideas that led their parents to have large families.
One could argue that history, and particularly Western history, is full of
revolts of children against parents. Couldn't tomorrow's Europeans, even if
they are disproportionately raised in patriarchal, religiously minded
households, turn out to be another generation of '68?
The key difference is that during the post-World War II era, nearly all
segments of modern societies married and had children. Some had more than
others, but the disparity in family size between the religious and the
secular was not so large, and childlessness was rare. Today, by contrast,
childlessness is common, and even couples who have children typically have
just one. Tomorrow's children, therefore, unlike members of the postwar baby
boom generation, will be for the most part descendants of a comparatively
narrow and culturally conservative segment of society. To be sure, some
members of the rising generation may reject their parents' values, as always
happens. But when they look around for fellow secularists and
counterculturalists with whom to make common cause, they will find that most
of their would-be fellow travelers were quite literally never born.
Advanced societies are growing more patriarchal, whether they like it or
not. In addition to the greater fertility of conservative segments of
society, the rollback of the welfare state forced by population aging and
decline will give these elements an additional survival advantage, and
therefore spur even higher fertility. As governments hand back functions
they once appropriated from the family, notably support in old age, people
will find that they need more children to insure their golden years, and
they will seek to bind their children to them through inculcating
traditional religious values akin to the Bible's injunction to honor thy
mother and father.
Societies that are today the most secular and the most generous with their
underfunded welfare states will be the most prone to religious revivals and
a rebirth of the patriarchal family. The absolute population of Europe and
Japan may fall dramatically, but the remaining population will, by a process
similar to survival of the fittest, be adapted to a new environment in which
no one can rely on government to replace the family, and in which a
patriarchal God commands family members to suppress their individualism and
submit to father.
Phillip Longman is Bernard L. Schwartz senior fellow at the New America
Foundation. He is the author of The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates
Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It (New York: Basic Books,
2004).
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Symposium: To Rape an Unveiled Woman
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 7, 2006
A Muslim rape epidemic in sweeping over Europe -- and over many other nations host to immigrants from the Islamic world. The direct connection between the rapes and Islam is irrefutable, as Muslims are significantly overrepresented among convicted rapists and rape suspects. The Muslim perpetrators themselves boast that their crime is justified since their victims were, among other things, not properly veiled.
What is the psychology here? What is the significance of this epidemic? And how do we face it when our own feminists, with a few exceptions, are deafingly silent about it?
To discuss this issue with us today, we are joined by:
Pierre Rehov, a French filmmaker who has filmed six documentaries on the Palestinian Intifada. His new documentary, Suicide Killers, explores the psychology of suicide bombers. It is based on interviews with the victims of suicide bombers, the families of suicide bombers, would-be bombers themselves, and experts on suicide killer mentality.
Nancy Kobrin, an affiliated professor to the University of Haifa, Arabist, psychoanalyst and author of the upcoming book, The Sheikh's New Clothes: Islamic Suicide Terror and What It's Really All About;
Peter Raddatz, a German scholar of Islamic Studies and the co-author of the renowned ?Encyclopaedia of Islam.? He is the author of many books, including From Allah to Terror? Jihad and the Western Deformation, Allah's Veil and The Turkish Danger. In a few months he will publish World Risk Iran.
and
Gudrun Eussner, a journalist with a Ph.D at Free University Berlin, specializing in mass communication and political science, and Iranian philology. She has experience working in numerous Muslim countries, including Bosnia, Indonesia, Kuwait, Malaysia, Morocco, Pakistan, Turkey, Usbekistan and others.
FP: Pierre Rehov, Nancy Kobrin, Peter Raddatz and Dr. Gudrun Eussner welcome to Frontpage Symposium.
Peter Raddaz let?s begin with you.
A man sees a woman and she is not veiled. He thinks to himself: ?Oh, I must rape her now.?
No matter how much I try to figure this out, I can?t. What?s the mindset here? If a person is upset that a woman is not veiled, it implies he wants some kind of supposed ?morality.? But if he is thirsting for purity, how does perpetrating a violent sexual atrocity against the ?immoral? one fit into moralizing her and the rest of society ? and himself?
Raddatz: Your questions concerning mindset and morals put us right into the middle of the problem. They are the terms any culture's collective psychology is basing on. In the case of prevailing orthodox Islam we are faced with a deep division between the sexes. With Allah's unlimited ruling license the males are entitled to be the masters of the females. The Koranic order says that the man has to "go to the woman" whenever he likes, to "enjoy her however he likes", and to discipline her in case she develops her own ideas like sexual self-determination.
Over the centuries this basic frame had been filled with a lot of "prophetic" instructions as to what disastrous role the woman could play if the man as Allah's deputy does not carry out this divine license of fertilizing control. Insofar the woman is looked upon from a "higher" biologistic viewpoint regarding her as "seed field" that - under strict male surveillance signaled by "Islamic correct" veiling - guarantees for the continued survival and expansion of Islam.
We are dealing here with premodern, partly archaic thinking that divides its world into two Manichaean halves. Irrespective of the usual statistical remnant of liberal "dissidents", the orthodox ideology bases on an Islamic half that accords to Koran and "prophetic" tradition and a non-Islamic half consisting of unbelievers and disobedient women. The religious war - known as "jihad" - against the latter two groups belongs, therefore, to the most prominent duties of the "believing" Muslim. Its "religious" dimension is boosted enormously by customary family "honor" installing male control from early youth on, often widening into brutal raping, sometimes incestuous punishing patterns. Here a complicated interaction between father, mother, son and daughter comes into play about which, I guess, Dr. Kobrin will give us quite interesting insights.
Thus, the ontological being in Islam is not defined by individual right but clearly as integral part of the community in terms of a whole and "holy" entirety. In this context the primary form of human being is seen in the male that assumes the right and duty to assist Allah in conserving and expanding his "umma", meaning his community.
Its biologistic "thinking" demands the "pure" man as the real human dominating the "impure" woman as a lower form, rather close to some animal-like existence. Therefore, sexuality cannot be sublimated and has to serve - aside from ramifications into homo-, paedo- and sodo-variants - a basic double function: fertilizing and punishing.
This paradigm expresses itself not only in highly standardized family patterns but also in an equally conformistic education system. All contents, in school and university of almost every Islamic country, are ultimately restricted and tied to Islamic purposes, thereby avoiding abstract thinking categories that could relativate and jeopardize the dogma's absolute uniqueness. By the same token, however, and this is the core of "modern" Islam's tragedy, the male controllers are confined to physical methods of "sublimation" whenever problems arise. Aside from the usual bombing "protest" against Western "arrogance" and "unbelieving morals", the current rape wave is the vital expression of an ongoing jihad against women who under Western influence may drift slowly out of the grip of male Muslim hands.
The war character of this behaviour may become clearer from its archaic punishment perspective that has come out of use generally but survived in Islam until present times. During the Algerian independence war the freedom fighters used to publicly sodomize French officers in order to achieve the enemy's maximum degradation. The same applies to the woman as a possible internal enemy containing even a double danger: her alleged disobedience is a bio-political security risk for the Islamic entirety and her independent "devilish" sexuality represents a religious blasphemy, contaminating male purity. Both have to be dealt with accordingly: beating, raping, torturing, stoning, and killing.
While some UN organizations keep on complaining about this, the Western feminists keep silent because they are not interested in the general problem but rather concentrate on clutching to their few elitarian privileges, mainly in business. Doing this they are simple part of a greater Western mainstream that has started to adjust to Muslim immigrant political "sharia" demands based on the growing radical Islamist influence as well as oil price pressure. And mind you: keeping Muslim women obedient through male "honor" might also sustain their "seed field" fertilization rate thereby compensating for the Western "morals" of pornography and weak reproduction. In this respect global elite ideology, anti-Semitic "new age" fascism and Islam are not so far apart.
FP: Thank you Dr. Raddatz. Dr. Eussner?
Eussner: Thank you, Jamie. I agree with Peter: The survival and expansion of Islam worldwide is the main goal of Islam since its invention by Mohammed. In this respect, the history of Islamic conquest is self-explanatory. The other aspect is the lack of appreciation for the individual as such. For both, men and women, it is true, that there are no individual rights, but for women it is even worse.
It may sound harsh, but the distinction between "fertilizing" and "punishing" a woman is evident. On the one hand you have sexuality as a tool serving the expansion of Islam, and on the other hand there is sexuality as a weapon against disobedient and non-Muslim women, both categorized as "unbelievers". Against them jihad is the duty, and what to do with women "conquered" in jihad, this may be read in the Qur'an: they become slaves to be used by the victors.
Why is the raping of unveiled women, either Muslim or non-Muslim, now spreading widely in our countries?
The conduct towards these women is due to the new developments initiated by Salafists like Tariq Ramadan. He has invented and introduced a new definition for the Western countries: they should no longer be seen the traditional way as Dar ul-harb, the space of war, but as Dar el-dawa?, the invitation to Islam, or Dar ash-shah?da, the space of testimony.
While orthodox Sunni Muslims, stuck to the unchanged application of the tradition are not at all in line with this "modern" interpretation, the "scholar" Tariq Ramadan has paved a soft way for Muslims to take possession of countries formerly belonging to the Dar ul-harb. When living in Dar ul-harb there are two alternatives for the Muslims: either conquer the land by force and rule it by Qur'anic law or, if not strong enough, keep quiet and wait, not touching the property of the enemy.
Dar el-dawa? and Dar ash-shah?da are two of the trickiest inventions ever to reach the goal of conquest: at a quick and superficial glance it means resigning from the conversion of the West to Islam, permitting everybody to keep on in his belief, but on closer examination that means what the French call "l'entrisme", unnoticed penetration.
The Muslims are not living any longer in a hostile surrounding; they are almost in Dar ul-Islam. Professor Nezvat Yal?intas, member of the Istanbul parliament, made an interesting statement. During the inauguration of the Murabitun mosque in Granada, Spain, in July 2003, he told the audience that Paris, Rome, Madrid now were components of the Islamic world due to the erection of new mosques.
But as Muslims are still obliged to wage a perpetual war against those infidels who refuse to submit, the jihad is continuing in Dar ash-shah?da, and people not behaving according to the Qur'anic laws have to be punished. The trick of introducing these new definitions has a severe impact on Muslims' consciousness, especially on young Muslim men. People not behaving according to the Qur'anic laws are to be punished even stronger now. The Muslims are not any more restricted by the laws of Dar ul-harb, that has evaporated without notice, merely by changing the definition. The inhabitants of our countries are to obey to Muslim male supremacy and Qur'anic laws. What better a justification for conduct towards women?
The jihad against the infidels is conducted on each and every level, not only as terror and suicide bombing. The jihad against women, who by their behaviour in the public sphere, are "asking for rape", as the Danish mufti Shahid Mehdi, a Qur'an teacher of young Muslims in Copenhagen, put it in 2004, and/or towards their husbands, by their alleged disobedience are challenging the survival and expansion of Islam, of the "Ummah", is a must for the Muslim men.
As far as the Western feminists are concerned, they seem to be hovering in other dimensions, in absolute arrogance, learned from ethnologues like Claude L?vy-Strauss. For them, freedom is that each "culture" may it be as inhuman as can be, is entitled to prosper even on our soil. The next act in this surrealistic piece of stage play is the unlimited understanding that Norwegian Professor Ms. Unni Wikan, shows for Muslims raping Western women: Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes, as they are not dressing and behaving according to Muslim understanding. The Norwegian women, in her view, are to realize that they live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it, as Mark Steyn reported already in 2002.
FP: Thank you Dr. Eussner. Mr. Rehov, your turn.
Rehov: There are very few observations that I can add to Dr Eussner?s and Dr Raddatz?s surveys on both the cultural and religious seeds of the phenomenon, although there is a personal dimension that I would like to explore.
Of course, in a cultural environment where women are undermined, not to say considered as second rate citizens or even dangerous to the dominant male, the temptation to rape as a result to ? provocation ? is great. Female ?provocation? in the Muslim society is usually a definition for the mildest behavior. Smiling, singing, talking, being alone for one minute in the same room as the rapist, having answered a question in an inappropriate way, wearing clothes which are not strictly in obedience with what is locally considered as the Muslim rules, all of these innocent behaviors are seen as a misconduct authorizing ?revenge.?
In a society where sex is absolutely forbidden, taboo, and where separation between males and females is absolute, where in most cases marriages are not the result of love but of a financial arrangement between two families, the sensual or erotic aspect of any relationship between genders is, de-facto, suspicious, considered evil, and therefore an act of aggression. Sexual ?revenge?, containing violence, can be naturally considered as the automatic answer to the ? provocations ? described above, and this for two reasons.
In Muslim society the male is dominant and almighty since he is made after God, when women have been created as a necessary evil to tempt males. In other words, the female body is the closest thing to the Devil, something which has to be dominated as a proof a faith. We go back to the sacrifice of Eros to Thanatos, as one of the basic sacrifices of all monotheisms, where, since the origins of the Bible, first inspiration to the Koran, women have been the carriers of the original sin.
In such a pattern, a male will not only consider any suspect behavior, including the mildest one, as an evil temptation, but he might look forward to experiencing one, as a religious challenge. Whatever will happen then won?t be the result of his own will, but he believes in having received absolution in advance for an act that, he knows, is against his own religion. During these minutes of deception and absolute power, he is not abusing a woman but fighting the Devil inside.
Of course, primitive chauvinism is the second reason. Again, since males in chauvinist societies are deprived of all natural pleasures resulting from what we consider a normal relationship between men and women, beside sexual ones, the level of frustration is very high and the fear of impotency even higher. A male tempted must react. The automatic result to frustration and fear is usually violence. In this case, sexual violence.
A friend of mine is a retired chief of police, who used to be in charge of the security of a major city in the south of France. He reported to me that his men had to face an average of 10 rapes a week, 80% made by Muslim young men. 30% being what we call, in French, a ? tournante ?, meaning that the victim is being raped by an entire gang, one after the other, often during an entire night. My friend reports that, in many cases, he was able to locate and arrest the rapists, often very young ones, and, as part of the investigation, call the families. He was astonished that, in most cases, the parents not only would back up their rapist children, but also would not even understand why they would be arrested. There is an instant shift in the notion of good and evil as a major component of culture. The only evil those parents would see, genuinely, is the temptation that the male children had to face. Since in most cases the victims were not Muslims, the parents? answer and rejection was even more genuine: how could their boys be guilty of anything, when normally answering to a provocation by occidental women, known for their unacceptable behavior?
Kobrin: Thanks, Jamie. So far I agree with everything the panel has said. There are several layers to this tragedy which will ultimately occur here in the United States, if it hasn?t already. Why? Because other aspects of Islamic practices in extremis, such as marriage under Sharia law but not civil law, polygamy and clan practices of female genital mutilation in the African Muslim immigrant populations persist even though FGM was outlawed in 1994.
I have it from first hand experience interviewing Muslim male immigrants that they hate it here in the United States because if they raise their hand, the women and children call the police. However, in the same breath, these same women will defend their men because it is part of the fused mentality and identification with the aggressor.
I interviewed Muslim women who justified wife beating because it is ?educational.? These women were probably brutalized as little girls and are unable to know NOT to blame the unveiled woman victim. Every Muslim male and female that I have interviewed has experienced being beaten as a child and have witnessed the beating of their mother.
Rape is learned behavior in the home. Peter is absolutely correct in describing the insidious sexual dichotomy of Muslim male supremacy over the lowly denigrated female. Pierre underscored the degree to which a family will defend its own rapist because of alleged ?honor.? Why should it surprise us that they have moved out into the streets and feel entitled to rape?
At the ideological level which Gudrun has so aptly introduced into this discussion, we encounter the classic practice of taqiya, lit. ?guarding one?s self? more commonly thought of dissimulation and its insidious behavior of orchestrating jihad by every possible means in a clandestine manner. Rape is just one more weapon in the jihadi arsenal for Dar el-dawaa and Dar ash-shahada. While the labels may change, Muslim male sexual inadequacies, to put it mildly, remain the same and their rage is inflicted brutally on the other. I do not recall ever reading in the literature on rape as a weapon of war that the underlying issue of child sexual abuse is probably the precursor for such despicable behavior. The sexual norms of the Arab Muslim world are totally different. As a psychoanalyst and trauma expert, if there is physical violence going on in the home, I always wonder about sexual abuse and the perpetrator parents.
These Muslim rapists are essentially babies, as they show us their pathetic need to target the most vulnerable because they are completely emasculated. They cannot control themselves sexually and they are sexually confused as well. Power, aggression, rage and sex yield a near lethal mix arising out of bizarre family dynamics which they experienced growing up.
They are directly attacking not only the venerable Western female but also the rape should be thought of as a kind of ambush on the Western male.
I never really bought the argument that Bouyeri murdered Theo van Gogh because of the film -- Submission. Sure that was part of it but the fact that Van Gogh called the Jihadis ? a fifth column of goat f--kers must have really hit Bouyeri where it hurt and he lost it ? I might add, shortly after his mother died. To be a goat herder is to be on the lowest rung. Male children are routinely treated as if they were goats. The pet goat is also slaughtered and eaten. Again the imagery goes hand in glove with the dissociated, denied behaviors and ideologies. Rape is a forced sexual fusion. The rapists remain erotically fused to their mothers upon whom they completely depend emotionally but hate it.
As for the Western feminists in academe who have completely sold out to political correctness, they too remain clueless as to what their behavior tells us about themselves. They function as another fused family who must go to extreme lengths to defend these male rapists as well. I would assume that at some level these feminists must really be terrified because if they were to take a hard look, they would have to admit to themselves that they might be next.
FP: I think you have hit the nail on the head, but I do not think the radical feminists are afraid of being next. From my study of the Left, they crave to be next and that is why they support these dark forces. They yearn to submit to the dark forces of totalitarianism and even to be devoured by them. It is the same death-wish virus that motivated many Western communists to go to Stalinist Russia to supposedly build communism, when they actually only went to their deaths, giving their lives for an idea that butchered them.
Dr. Raddatz, go ahead.
Raddatz: There seems to be a remarkable consent among ourselves on the subject, contrary however, to the official "Islamic correct" reception on Western elite level. Here we can register a very modest resonance to the rising wave of violence against Muslim women. In Europe, for instance, we have a whole species of literature at hand in which female authors from Islamic countries give us personal experience reports on their respective lives with male violence in their families. The public discussion on this was and still is close to zero and the current rape wave has not given much incentive to it.
In Germany in 1960, in words: sixty so-called scientists from all thinkable and unthinkable departments, foundations, institutes and what have you published an "appeal" in "Die Zeit", a renowned weekly paper. Here they warned against a "general suspicion" the Western societies may spread over all Muslims in case they keep on criticizing "the few" who act violently against their women. By the same token they themselves criticized a German-Turkish female sociologist for her book on her personal youth experience with family violence as well as the inability of the vast majority of Turkish immigrants to integrate into the German society. Here we see another case of the Western decadence game called "victim turning perpetrator" which is constantly gaining aggressive elements among European - male - "intellectuals".
Earlier in this discussion, Nancy Kobrin described the central role the mother-son-relation is playing in this cynical game, how rape is functioning as substitute measure punishing the mother for eternalizing the male dependence on her, irrespective of the usual imitation reflex following the parental violence behaviour. The personal literary reports and the official UN analyses on Islamic family dynamics concur in a somewhat disquieting aspect. They confirm not only the tendency to incest but also an even stronger attitude towards anal sexuality, meaning an unusually high percentage of males preferring anal intercourse to vaginal, especially in the framework of "normal" marital life.
Nancy certainly knows much more about this but the so far irrefutable Freudian theory, the "Anatomy of Human Perversion", offers en explanation which might give us some additional insight. According to this the phallic organization of infantile sexuality if kept from diversification, for instance by Oedipal defectiveness, develops into a general male dominance neglecting the female i.e. vaginal "specialty" altogether. In the adult phase neglect turns into semi-conscious contempt and hate for all female attributes forcing the pervert to physically prefer anus to vagina and verbally compare women with animals and even feces. All this is vastly manifest in the texts of Islamic tradition and daily confirmed in the regrettable practice of actual Islamic life.
If Western "elites" are not able to openly discuss these deficits they indicate their readiness to assume similar attitudes and possibly destruct the grown order. The growing aggression against women as well as the obvious sympathy for homo- and paedo-sexuality put them closer to Islamic preferences and may even signal a meta-social trend that could lead back into pre-modern i.e. totalitarian structures. Insofar we are not only dealing with a mere mode of the Left as Jamie implies, but also with a Neo-fascist thinking frame that wants to install Islam unchanged and incessantly demands "respect" for its adored wholeness.
FP: Dr. Raddatz, could you kindly, in simple terms, explain what you mean when you refer to ?the phallic organization of infantile sexuality? being kept from ?diversification?? What exactly is ?oedipal defectiveness? and why and how does it develop ?into a general male dominance? that neglects the female vagina, etc.? Break this down into simple terms for me and our readers. This is obviously crucial because it is the foundation to the pathology in the culture under examination.
Raddatz: I will at least try to put this matter into somewhat simpler terms, as it is a very complicated problem indeed. It gets even more complicated as the relativistic development of modern Western science often obscures the view into those contexts, especially if they concern other cultures. Take for instance what I refer to as "the phallic organization of infantile sexuality". Basically it means that the Koran and Tradition are the fundamentals of Islamic societies and are centered around the maximization of male potency. Upon certain festivities like circumcision and others all family members fondle and even kiss the "member" of male babies, speak respective magic formulas and donate money notes to activate Allah?s mercy for its future fertilizing power.
The term "infantile" in this respect does not stop at individual male dominance from juvenile age on. It also concerns an infantile society from the anthropological point of view. Western psychology has declared the Freudian theory of "penis envy" as obsolete. The Muslim theory represents the opposite. Since a millennium ago here the sex theologians circle around one and the same project: the optimized spreading and utilization of collective semen by elevation of man, repression of woman, polygamy, rape and marital law. Even Allah bows to the penis power: She, who wants to pray rather than to have sexual intercourse, is a sinneress. And Muhammad bowed to those who wanted to fornicate with prostitutes during pilgrimage, leading to the world famous tradition of "dripping penises in Mecca".
What do these practices tell us? Above all they lead us back into pre-modern if not pre-cultural times. Cave drawings show hunters killing big animals while their erected penises are connected through a power line with vaginas of the group' s women. In other words, without dominating women men cannot rule freely - i.e. neglecting the natural order - over the society. This is a very old, pre-modern truth, obviously still deeply rooted in Islam, thereby preventing this culture from sexual and ethical emancipation. Female existence is felt as being lower than the animal stage, and satisfying female sexuality is, therefore, psychotically feared as "devilish" temptation which leads us right into our second point, the "oedipal defectiveness".
Men who have been raised as omnipotent family monarchs, some sort of alpha males with a penis as irrefutable power instrument, things may get difficult in the adult age. As I pointed out before, and Nancy Kobrin has described so clearly, incest is one of the biggest social problems in Islam, and incest at last is also connected inseparably to the Oedipus complex. It is the meta-historical expression of breaking the world order by elevating the narcissistic omnipotence of man. As this obviously cannot find the basic fulfillment though reuniting with the mother, it "sublimates" its frustration by repressing, punishing and raping women. The male principle culminates in itself, thereby forced to destruct instead of construct, to express itself not in terms of products but in "disducts" - like feces - and to ultimately drift from vagina to anus. There is no "culture" in the world where more married people practice anal intercourse than in Islam. Individually it is again connected to a regression of the adult person into a childhood ego-idea closing the Oedipal circle of hating the female uniqueness one more time.
There can be no doubt that homosexuality is on a strong march forward, and there can be even less doubt that "disducts" like vomit and feces are also gaining popularity as means of expression on theater stages as well as in films and on television. Watch also the many other aesthetic aspects to this phenomenon like the diminishing degree of light in films, the growing majority of black clothing instead of bright colors, the spreading primitivity of "art" and so on. Not to speak of the biological regression into which a whole myriad of reasons against children has converged. Needless to say that the grown order and its society has to be replaced by an "order" that functions on a counter basis as opposite and alien as possible. The late Michel Foucault is the most efficient priest of this project.
What we are watching here is an ultra long-term, meta-historical process, which cannot be influenced on a short-term basis - one of the reasons why it is so difficult to explain and why I must apologize for having been quite academic again. This process simply exceeds the limits of human feasibilities and our lifetimes as well. It is the consequent inexorability of its "progress" that stuns everybody who observes it. All we can do is to be conscious of it and talk and write against it where ever our creator has put us.
Meanwhile we can enjoy people who recognize that the creation does not come from man but contains men and women as unity inside an order which is compatible with their minds. The goal of the non-system, however, is the abolishment of every known system, the break of the human mind, the total change from perpetrator to victim, from the old reality to a "New Age, the ultimate return into chaos where we - allegedly - come from. On its way there this "thinking" regards Islam as the most attractive companion as it has "achieved" the most important prerequisite already - the absence of "old" ethics.
FP: Dr. Eussner, your turn.
Eussner: Let me answer Pierre Rehov first. I agree in what you said about experiencing religious challenge, the proof of faith, Pierre. The religious task of fighting the Devil inside may be achieved in abusing unveiled women. But this is only half of the story, the religious side. The political side is even more important, as political Islam is using religion as a pretext, as a manipulating tool. The message given to the Muslim women in Muslim and in Western countries is: you don't ask for nothing, neither for equal treatment nor for liberty, otherwise you will be punished, i.e. beaten and raped.
A disobedient woman is outlawed. The high percentage of gang raping is due to the cowardliness of the young Muslim men, in France named "les jeunes", the youngsters. As their religion is never appreciating the individuum as such, but only as part of the Ummah, "les jeunes" are not strong enough on their own, so they are acting as representatives of the Ummah, fighting unbelievers, disobedient and unveiled women.
This is consented to by the families. You said it in mentioning your friend, the retired chief of police: the parents of the rapist children don't understand why their children were arrested. This is showing their close attachment to Islamic law, the sharia. In midst of our Western society they are living according to their law, which is not compatible to our values and laws.
Allow me to please comment on the very interesting comments you made, Nancy Kobrin. Your words support what Pierre said for Europe. The Muslim male immigrants hate it in the USA because they are not totally free to live according to the sharia. Women and children are entitled to call the police and sometimes do. But Muslim women are submitted to their law, they defend their men, they identify with the aggressor. They are afraid of the men. Islam rules by force and violence. And the young Muslim men, living somewhere at the end of a hierarchy of Muslim men, starting with Mohammed at the top and themselves at the bottom, they are indeed essentially babies who are not able to control themselves. Targeting the most vulnerable parts of the society is a typical sign of totalitarian regimes.
Political Islam, that is an Islam not only confined to the mosques and the private spiritual life but ruling through the sharia, leads to fear and submission. And we find today, that this fear is spreading into our Western society. Government authorities and offices, media, educational institutions, political parties, intellectuals and feminists are submitting themselves to Islamic claims and laws. The Islamization of our societies is in the making. Step by step we are pulling back. We are not defending our values, but we are submitting to the outrageous claims of dictatorial Islamic governments. What better an example as the handling of the publication of 12 Danish cartoons!
And, Peter, you said it: there is a very modest resonance to the raising wave of violence against Muslim women. Even worse: in Germany we are not only facing opposition by ignorant ministries, government authorities and media against the reality Muslim women are facing, but a whole bunch of social scientists are running down testimonies and reports by the victims.
Turkish female academics testifying about the situation of Muslim women in our society, talking about forced marriages, beating and rape, are torn down by multi-culti loving leftist social scientists. In my research work on the campaign against the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut I came across a feminist in favour of the head scarf, who is understanding fully the rioting Muslim youngsters, that is the Allah Houakhbar shouting mob of the French suburbs, and to round it off, cooperating closely with the Salafist Web Site Oumma.com and a so-called Third World Solidarity Center, supporting Tali Fahima and thanking Yasser Arafat for his valuable contribution: "Choukran Abu Amar!"
FP: Pierre Rehov?
Rehov: Answering first to Dr Raddatz, I'd like to stay a little bit away from any kind of Freudian approach to the problem. In some ways, I believe that Freudism is a tool to explain many problems and behaviors in an involved civilization, most of those problems being generated by the "taboos" of this civilization.
When talking about "rape" by young Muslims, I think that our usual approaches don't apply anymore. What builds a Muslim young male's ego is very far away from what we consider as part of the subconscious of any young male in a modern Judeo-Christian society. I am not sure, for instance, that a Freudian approach could explain the level of fear towards Witches, or the violence generated by Inquisition during the dark ages of Christianity. Freudian- in my opinion - is not a tool to understand behaviors connected to the irrational. Although, of course, I am not a psychiatrist, not an analyst.
Back to our rapists, I would make it simple by saying that genuine frustration, combined with a high contempt toward women, as a result of a culture in which women are classified way under men, leads to an instinctive - animal type - behavior, not censored nor punished by common cultural values.
Inside the Palestinian territories, I collected a lot of different stories involving raping of an innocent girl who later on was slaughtered by her own father or cousin, because she had lost her virginity.
This example to say that, in Muslim culture, values exist, but the line between good and evil is drawn somewhere else, far away from our understanding. Protecting women against themselves is considered a good action, even if this includes death penalty, as long as family's honor - which is paramount - is saved.
When Dr. Eussner adds to my previous comments that religion is only half of the explanation, and that we mustn't forget the political aims, I could not agree more. Although I'd like to emphasize that in the Muslim world, religion and politics is one single thing. There is no separation between powers in any Muslim society and the ideal Muslim society accepts the Shari'ah (Muslim law, written in the Koran ) as the basis for any civil society, including its rules of punishment.
In addition, I can see in any raping of a non-Muslim woman by a Muslim male as a racist action, and it is high time for us to acknowledge and condemn it. The level of contempt towards non-Muslim women is the reflection of the level of hatred towards the society which creates equality between men and women. We all know that there is a sexual component in any form of racism. I personally see primitive racism as the expression of a fear connected to the unconscious protection of the genes among the males. Raping women belonging to another cultural, religious group or race is an act of male domination not only against the woman herself, but against the entire group in which she belongs.
Therefore, we have to differentiate two types of rapings: the aims are different whether the victim is a Muslim or a non-Muslim. In the second case, hatred is added to contempt.
FP: Nancy Kobrin, last word goes to you.
Kobrin: People are more similar than they are different. However, the devil is in the details.
Everything is always already psychosexual. Rape by definition is psychosexual, obviously. It is one thing to have rape fantasies which is very common (cf. M. Bader. Arousal: The Secret Logic of Sexual Fantasies, Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin?s Press, 2002). It is quite another not to have any boundaries and to inflict rape, which is a forced sexual fusion. This concretely expresses the inability to be separate and independent. It is pure aggression, rage and severe separation anxiety. The Arab Muslim culture by definition promotes an incested family, a ?closed circle?, and their ?Freud? is Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, Sexuality in Islam, Saqi Books, 1998. If you read French, it?s been available since 1975 in the original.
[1] This brings me to Freud. He is not as western as people would like to think. In fact he held strong identifications with Sephardic culture since his adolescence as expressed by a significant body of correspondence (before e-mail) in Spanish with his childhood Rumanian Jewish friend Edouard Silberstein. Elsewhere I have argued that his romance with Spanish was his ?private Ladino? which served him better than Yiddish which was often stigmatized. The Sephardic culture of Andalusia and its over-idealized Golden Age provided a much-needed psychological refuge for the young Freud facing severe anti-Semitism in Vienna where he was growing up. He needed to cling to a fantasy of convivencia/ coexistence. He was also aware of the Ottoman Empire?s history of breathing down Europe?s neck. It has been western philosophical tradition which co-opted Freud to its various ends while at the same time never able to see this special emotional tie that Freud had. For Muslims Sephardic and Mizrahi cultures and their Jews are most especially threatening because they are so similar up to a point and the fear is one of merging with the Other and losing their fragile sense of self. The jihadis are terrified of them because they raise the question of imitation and inauthenticity. The radical Islamists and to a lesser extent the Ummah harbor such fears of being fraudulent. The identities are intertwined, even geopolitically.
[2] This brings me to the recent tragic death of 23 yr old Ilan Halima z?l, baited and tortured to death. We have seen this time and again before. This is yet another psychosexual tactic in the arsenal of terrorism along with gang rape and suicide bombing. These strategies to annihilate the Other which is always perceived as female should be read functionally and by this I mean, that imagery is key. The terrorists think visually. I recently read Dr. Temple Grandin?s Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism and her other book co-authored with Catherine Johnson, Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior, Scribner, 2005. I do not mean to say that terrorists are simply autistic. It is more complicated than that but their behaviors such as gang rape is terror-driven and similar to the rapist roosters who rape and murder hens when they have been bred incorrectly because this is not normal for roosters. ?There is no species alive in nature where half the males kill reproductive-age females.? (Grandin, Animals in Translation, p.70)
In my work on Islamic suicide terrorism, I have noted that the rage is really against the prenatal Muslim mother, misdirected to the infidels who represent her in the jihadi mind?s eye. Interestingly enough, Grandin also notes that ?humans have neotenized dogs: without realizing it, humans have bred dogs to stay immature for their entire lives.? (P.86) I would substitute the word "bred" for concepts like child-rearing practices, etc. And raise the question as can it be that Arab Muslim boys turned rapists have been "neotenized", that is raised to stay immature for their entire lives?
Finally, the scariest thing of all of this is when bad becomes normal. Quoting Grandin: ?The really bad thing was that the change happened slowly enough [talking about the rapist roosters] that the farmers and probably the breeder colonies, too didn?t realize they?d created a monster. Nobody noticed what was happening. As the roosters got more and more aggressive, the humans unconsciously adjusted their perceptions of how a normal rooster should act. It was a case of the bad becoming normal, . . . [emphasis mine].? (p.72)
Those who defend the rapists and their culture (no matter where they are located on the spectrum of politics) have unconsciously adjusted their perceptions of how Muslim males should act. They have done so because at some unconscious disavowed level they themselves are terrified. I am not advocating ?compassion? for them because they are terrified. That is their problem and I refuse to blame the victim. However, I am advocating understanding the problem at the deepest level possible for ourselves because it is crazy making and we need to stay grounded in what is predicted to be a very long marathon on terrorism. The Israelis say between 300 to 500 years and considering the transgenerational transmission of trauma, to my analytic ear that sounds just about right. Thank you Jamie and your staff at FrontPageMag.com along Dr. Raddatz, Dr. Eussner and Mr. Rehov as it has been for me a thought provoking exchange.
FP: Pierre Rehov, Nancy Kobrin, Peter Raddatz and Dr. Gudrun Eussner, thank you for joining Frontpage Symposium.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
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Victory! Anti-Father CA Bill Pulled
in Face of Huge Opposition
May 9, 2006
Anti-Father CA Bill Pulled in Face of Huge Opposition
In the face of over 4,000 opposition calls, letters and faxes, California Senator Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles) has decided to withdraw a bill which would have granted custodial parents an almost unlimited right to move children far way from their noncustodial parents. Romero pulled SB 1482 just before today's scheduled hearing on the bill.
SB 1482 would have weakened if not abrogated the California Supreme Court's 2004 LaMusga move-away decision, which affirmed that courts have the power to restrain moves which run counter to children's best interests.
The bill was supported by a wide array of feminist groups and state-funded pro-feminist organizations, including the California National Organization for Women, the California Commission on the Status of Women, the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence, the Coalition for Family Equity, Haven Hills, Inc., Marin Abused Women's Services, Business and Professional Women/USA, the National Council of Jewish Women Los Angeles, the Santa Clara County Domestic Violence Advocacy Consortium, and others.
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Opposition to the bill and unrestricted move-aways was led by the Alliance for Children Concerned About Move-Aways, an advocacy group endorsed by over 50 mental health and family law professionals, and Mike Robinson and the California Alliance for Families and Children. Several organizations of family law and mental health professionals also opposed SB 1482, including the California Judge's Association, the California Psychological Association, and the State Bar of California's Family Law Section.
This is the second time an attempt by misguided feminists to abrogate LaMusga has been defeated. From 1996 to 2004 move-away determinations were based on the Burgess decision, which was interpreted by California courts as conferring unlimited move-away privileges. Under Burgess the bonds between tens of thousands of children and their noncustodial parents were needlessly ruptured.
The California Supreme Court addressed the problem in the LaMusga decision in April, 2004 by making it clear that courts can prevent children from being moved when it is detrimental to their interests. Among the factors deemed important were the relationship between the child and the nonmoving parent.
In the summer of 2004 then Senate President John Burton, one of the most powerful people in California, introduced SB 730, a bill which would have granted custodial parents an almost unlimited right to move children far way from their noncustodial parents.
We organized opposition to SB 730, and thousands of you wrote and called Sacramento to oppose the bill. Our campaign gained widespread media attention and was endorsed by numerous mental health and family law professionals. Burton surprised Sacramento insiders by withdrawing the bill a few weeks later.
When SB 1482 was originally introduced in February, its language was innocuous. The bill's backers then made a sweeping, last minute amendment to the bill in order to slip it through committee on April 25 before opponents had a chance to organize. We quickly organized a deluge of calls and letters in opposition. The hearing on the bill was postponed to May 9 and then the bill was pulled.
As the Alliance for Children Concerned About Move-Aways noted in its position letter:
"SB 1482 will make it more difficult for children of divorce to retain the loving bonds they share with both parents.
"SB 1482 specifically prohibits a parent seeking to prevent his or her children from being moved far away from citing most of the evidence that could provide a basis for restraining the move. Under this bill, nonmoving parents are prevented from citing the move's impact on their children's relationships with them or the effects on the children of losing their schools and friends. This directly abrogates current California case law, which says that the children's relationship with their nonmoving parent must be considered when deciding a relocation case."
"The LaMusga move-away case, decided by the California Supreme Court in 2004, is a good example of the way [under Burgess] custodial parents were permitted to move children far away without justification. In that case the mother sought to move her two boys from the Bay Area to Ohio because, she claimed, she wanted to attend a law school there. Apparently none of the multitude of law schools in the Bay Area sufficed. Later she moved to Arizona because, she explained, her new husband needed work. His job? Selling cars...
"Part of the problem is that current policies provide strong financial incentives for moving. California has a high child support guideline, a high cost of living, and high wages. Thus custodial parents can often live better by moving to states which have a lower cost of living, because they will still collect child support awards based on California wages and support guidelines. This is a terrible injustice to noncustodial parents, who often must stay behind to work to pay child support for children who have been moved out of their lives."
Thanks again to the thousands of you who wrote or called Sacramento in opposition to SB 1482.
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Oh. My. Goodness.
'You're a woman, because you're not a man'
Karima's dual 'conversion'
by Karima Idrissi and Michel Hoebink*
03-09-2007
Karima Tieleman's first 'conversion' was from male to female; six years later she converted to Islam. However, the acceptance she hoped to find has also proved to be sadly absent among her fellow believers. She believes it is her fate to be misunderstood and rejected for the rest of her life. Although she says she's happy with her life, she also admits that she sometimes tires of having to fight all the time.
Karima Tieleman, her blushing Dutch face ringed by a black chador, speaks softly and is a little shy. It took her a while and much thought before she consented to tell her story.
Psychiatric clinic
Now aged 31, Karima realised she was a female in a male body when she was around eight years old, but waited until puberty to tell her parents. They were extremely shocked and took her to a doctor. In the 1980s, transsexuality was still a taboo in some circles. She was admitted to a psychiatric clinic at a hospital in Utrecht.
She then fell into the depths of misery. She failed at senior school - she wasn't accepted by her fellow students - and attempted suicide twice. The only person that understood her was her younger sister.
As a man
When she was 17, she decided not to fight the world any more and to go through life as a man. She went to work in the horticultural sector, going to discos in the evening where she'd gaze at girls who she didn't find at all attractive.
She managed to maintain this charade for three years before realising it wasn't going to work. Finally, she chose for her own truth. She went to the gender clinic at the Free University Hospital in Amsterdam and found the expertise and support she needed. It was here, that for the first time in her life, she heard that it was okay and that she could prepare to live her life as a girl. A couple of years later, now aged 24, she underwent the final operation to become a woman. She started working in a shoe shop in Rotterdam. "After that last operation, I really started living".
Always rejected
However, it wasn't an easy life. New friends disappeared as soon as they heard her story and she didn't have much luck with relationships either. Her greatest love betrayed her, and later turned out to have been married all along. Since then she's come to the conclusion that she will always be rejected and no longer wants to have a relationship.
Her second 'conversion' took place last year. Many of the customers in the shoe shop were Moroccan women and she got on well with them. Young headscarf-wearing women told her about Islam. She felt accepted by those women in a way that was totally new to her. That is exactly what makes Islam so attractive to her: "In Islam you are accepted just as you are". She eventually decided to convert. She went to a local mosque and said the Shahadah, or profession of faith.
Hijab
She now has an Arabic name, Karima and lives as a Muslim. In fact, she's become a woman who makes her choice of religion very clear indeed in her choice of dress. Her body - which, after so much anguish, she had altered to reflect the way she truly felt inside - is now fully covered by a black hijab, with only her face left exposed. Even her hands are covered with black gloves.
Rejection continues to follow Karima, only now she is regularly the target of verbal abuse because of her strict Islamic style of dress: "You wouldn't believe all the kinds of insults that get hurled at you", she comments.
However, she also faced resistance from her fellow believers. At the mosque where she first converted to Islam, neither the women nor the men wanted to pray together with her. The imam, who she had won over to a certain extent with her story, came up with a solution: he reserved a special place for her separate from both the women and the men. I kind gesture on his part, yet one that made Karima sad because the place he chose for her was only accessible through the male entrance to the mosque.
100 percent
She then decided to go to a different mosque and to keep her story to herself, but rumours about her were already flying after she had been going there for just a week. Then she was summoned by the imam who came straight out and asked her whether she still had male genitalia. "No", she exclaimed, "I'm 100 percent a woman, it even says so in my passport!."
The imam's response was to say that she was welcome in the mosque and to allow her to pray with the women. They, too, welcomed her in their midst. "You are a woman, because you are not a man," was their reasoning, and that was an end to the matter, or so it seemed. After a while, Karima noticed a growing absence of other women around her when she attended the mosque. It turned out that the women were staying away because their men folk had forbidden them to go to the mosque… because of her. Once again, she decided to stop going to the mosque.
Accepted
Karima embraced Islam because she felt that it was a faith that accepted her, but now she finds herself rejected and even hounded by her fellow believers. How is that possible? Karima has thought about it a lot and has come to the conclusion that there is a difference between Islam as a religion and Islamic culture. The Islamic faith forgives and accepts her, but when it comes to Islamic culture there's a great deal that's wrong.
When non-Muslim Dutch people speak to her about Islam and she's asked to explain terrorism carried out in the name of Islam, she follows the same line of reasoning: "You'll find rotten apples everywhere. But that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam. Islam in fact says that we are not allowed to do such things."Happy but tired
Karima now prays in a number of mosques in The Hague and Amsterdam, which means she can stay one step ahead of any opposition to her presence. Despite her problems with the faithful, her relationship with Allah continues to be a good one. Sometimes she spends hours in the mosque talking to Allah. She can understand that people may have a problem with her, but that doesn't make things any easier for her.
"I am - praise be to God - happy with my life. But sometimes it makes you tired; it's a daily battle."
http://www.radionetherlands.nl/currentaffairs/ned070903
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Feminists Say the Darndest Things
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, March 10, 2008
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Mike Adams, a professor at UNC-Wilmington. He is a popular speaker for Young America's Foundation and writes a column for Town Hall. He is the author of the new book, Feminists Say the Darndest Things: A Politically Incorrect Professor Confronts "Womyn" on Campus.
FP: Mike Adams, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Adams: Hi and thanks for having me. Please hurry up, though. There's are some feminists wearing "Hillary 2008" tank tops trying to turn my car over in the parking lot. I hate California.
FP: Right ok.
What inspired you to write this book?
Adams: I wrote a series of columns called "Why I don't Take Feminists Seriously" two years ago. They were so popular that readers asked me to write a whole book on the subject. So I did it - not because I generally do what people ask me to do. I did it because I thought I could make a lot of money and buy a lot of guns.
FP: Expand for us on why leftist feminists have so much hatred.Adams: They real aren't as full of hatred as most people think. Feminists often pretend to be angry and offended in order to win debates or, I should say, prevent debates from ever happening. If you can act angry and offended, especially on a college campus, you can shut down the other side using a speech code. I'm willing to bet that the average feminist is more likely to fake a temper tantrum than she is to fake an orgasm.
FP: Well, sounds like a subject for another book.
Tell us a bit about the leftist feminists' disposition toward communism as well as toward the First and Second Amendments.
Adams: Well, we all know that feminists are quite censorious, for the reasons I mentioned above. But feminist opposition to the Second Amendment is a little more perplexing. One would think that gun ownership would provide a good way to equalize physical differences between men and women and, hence, to reduce domestic violence and rape.
But feminists have no interest in using explicit constitutional rights to invoke personal responsibility. They prefer using implicit constitutional rights to avoid responsibility. If you want more elaboration, read Roe v. Wade, 1973.The feminist love of Marxism, like their constant "offense" at different ideas, is also fake.
If a feminist is reading a copy of The Communist Manifesto, you can bet she has a four dollar latte in the other hand. She will only occasionally invoke Marxist language when confronted with some statistic indicating unequal outcome for women.
Her goal then is just to invoke such language in order to win some temporary political victory. You will never see feminists boarding leaky boats and heading towards Cuba to escape their male capitalist oppressors in America. In Cuba, feminists can't afford four dollar lattes.
FP: Crystallize for us the leftist feminists' obsession with sex and abortion. And yet, when it comes to female genital mutilation, forced marriage, child marriage, forced veiling and segregation, honor killing and other barbarities that women suffer under Islamic gender apartheid, these same Western feminists are silent. What gives?
Adams: I support a woman's right to have equal opportunity. But I do not applaud a woman's right to be just like a man. That is different. Increasingly, college women are - under the guidance of feminists - acting more and more like college boys who just want to get drunk and have sex without commitment.
I believe that feminism has become a political movement that seeks to obtain unlimited rights for woman without corresponding responsibilities via the suppression of feminism.Under my definition, helping oppressed women in other countries falls outside the scope of the movement's interests.
FP: But still, if leftist feminists in the West really care about women you would think they would support their sisters who are brutalized and mutilated by Islam’s gender apartheid. Why don’t they take a stand?
Adams: I'm afraid that part of the answer is that feminists - like leftists in general - are afraid of Islamic terrorists. Look at what has happened to Van Gogh and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. That is why I think events like Islamic Fascism awareness week are so important. Do something on 100 campuses simultaneously and it's pretty hard to retaliate. Maybe the feminists can learn something from David Horowitz.
FP: I would be in disagreement with you here. I don't think this is a matter of fear. Leftist feminists, like radical leftists in general, support our totalitarian enemies because they have a kindred ideology with them.
They share the instinct for tyranny and destruction - and they are filled with self-loathing. In the end, leftist feminists yearn to submit to, and submerge themselves within, a despotic monolith. Because they despise their own society and are bent on its destruction, they cannot concede that adversarial cultures may be more evil, because that would legitimize their own host society - and they can't allow that. It would rob them of the moral indignation -- and the identity of being victims -- that lies at the foundation of their politics of hate. But in any case, a discussion and debate on this issue belongs in another time and place my friend.
Let's move on. What sense of humor do you find that leftist feminists have?
Adams: I haven't found any. I've only been looking for a few years, though. If I find an example, can we do another interview?
FP: Yes for sure.
The feminists of your study appear to be terrified to act as individuals. Why do you think?
Adams: I think that feminists today are shrinking in numbers. Hence the herd mentality. That is also why they speak of race and sexual orientation so often. They need coalitions to approach a majority. It is a classically Marxist tactic employed by feminists who are not necessarily true believers in Marxism.
FP: How do you think the whole Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas battle was influenced by feminism?
Adams: I think the whole Anita Hill controversy was brewing for years.
People fail to realize that feminists were beginning to craft "hostile environment" sexual harassment codes before the Hill/Thomas controversy. They just needed a big controversy to propel them into the implementation stage. Oddly, the campuses have been far more hostile ever since these codes have been put into place. Relations between men and women have never been so bad.
But, make no mistake about it; these codes hurt women worse than men. They give the false impression that women are easily "offended" and made to feel "uncomfortable." This exacerbates a false stereotype that women are emotionally inferior. The codes represent regress, not progress.
FP: What does Hillary Clinton's success say about feminists' contention that women are marginalized from positions of power by American institutions?
Adams: The Hillary "success" story sends a very bad message; namely, that an unqualified woman can go a long way, but only if she is perceived to be a victim of mistreatment by a man.
FP: What exactly do you mean that Hillary is unqualified? There are many negative things that could be said about her, but are you sure "unqualified" is fair?
Adams: Absolutely fair. No one can be Commander-in-Chief unless he/she is able to articulate one clear position on the Iraq War. In that sense, Hillary is unqualified as was John Kerry.
Rodham Clinton is not dumb. She is not confused. She is simply willing to change her position on the war depending on how well it is going - at least how well it is going at that moment in the minds of the American people. That makes her morally unqualified to hold the office.
FP: So what is the future of feminism in America?
Adams: In the closing pages of my book, I've tried to give some advice on where feminism should go. I believe feminism should become less self-absorbed. I believe feminists should recognize that America is not a "patriarchal" and "oppressive" nation. There is no better place to be a woman than the US. So, I think women should start to focus on global equality. They should stop tearing men down in the US and start lifting women up in places like Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.
FP: Mike Adams, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.
Adams: Thank you so much for having me.
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“In Thursday’s 4-3 decision legalizing same-sex marriage, the California Supreme Court stripped children of the right to be raised by a mother and a father. Most of the media coverage of the California Supreme Court’s decision has focused on the court’s declaration that there is a right to same-sex marriage. The ruling invalidated California’s Proposition 22, a state ballot initiative that passed with 61 percent of the vote in 2000, and which banned same-sex marriage in the state. But the California Supreme Court decision goes beyond simply giving same-sex couples the right to call their unions a ‘marriage.’ It also strips children of the right not to be artificially conceived or adopted by people other than a mother and a father. Indeed, the court does not recognize that children have any right whatsoever to a mother and a father. In the decision, the California court sees children primarily through the eyes of same-sex couples who want to secure custody and control of children. The court makes emphatically clear that it deems this to be a right of same-sex couples that is equal to—and identical to—the right of married mothers and fathers to adopt or conceive and raise their own children. In making this argument, the court addresses biological parenthood as an accident of nature that can be swept aside by the court in its pursuit of what the court understands to be justice.” —Terrence Jeffrey
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This doesn't seem like a very strong argument against gay marriage to me
"The nonmarital birth rate also rose sharply, from 47.5 births per 1,000 unmarried females in 2005 to 50.6 per 1,000 in 2006 -- a 7-percent 1-year increase and a 16 percent increase since 2002.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/07newsreleases/teenbirth.htm
The unmarried birthrate is over 50 percent in this county. GBLT population size is much smaller than that and not all members of that group are interested in marriage and even less are interested in being parents. If you biggest concern is more nuclear families why attack gay marriage ? Why not work to have more single parents married.
Lesbian woman don't necessary need adoption to have children. Gay man already have the right to adopt children. Children with two Moms or two Dads already exist and gay marriage would provide legitimacy and protection for them. It is possible that gay marriage would increase families without a man and woman but that is already very high and gaining every year.
Marriage benefits are about far more than the right to have children.
I definitely don't think biological parenthood is an accident of nature but I don think artificial insemination or adoption is wrong either. We already allow non-biological parents to be parents. I certainly don't have a problem with. I would hope that if G-d forbid I am unable to have biological children of my own I could adopt.
One of the most touching lines I ever read in the NYT was "That blood is thicker than water, but love can be thicker than blood".
http://relativechoices.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/pregnancy/?scp=1-b&sq=blood+is+thicker+than+water&st=nyt
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http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/?last_story=/mwt/broadsheet/2008/05/22/ellen/
"Just days after the California Supreme Court overturned the ban on gay marriage, Ellen DeGeneres invited John McCain to appear on her talk show and -- rather amazingly -- he agreed. At one point during the interview, which airs Thursday, DeGeneres said: "Let's talk about the big elephant in the room." She, of course, is that big elephant; DeGeneres recently made headlines by announcing her plan to wed longtime girlfriend Portia de Rossi, and McCain is anti-gay marriage. McCain responded: "I just believe in the unique status of marriage between a man and a woman and I know that we have a respectful disagreement on that issue." But DeGeneres didn't let him get away with his amiable "Let's pretend my worldview doesn't discriminate against you" attitude. She said:
I think that it is looked at and some people are saying that blacks and women did not have the right to vote. Women just got the right to vote in 1920. Blacks didn't have the right to vote until 1870, and it just feels like there's this old way of thinking that we are not all the same. We are all the same people. All of us. You are no different than I am. Our love is the same. To me, what it feels like, I will just speak for myself, it feels like when someone says, 'You can still have a contract and you'll still have insurance and you'll get all that' -- it sounds like you can sit there, but you can't sit there. That's what it sounds like to me.
Unwilling to debate the issue, McCain responded: "You articulate that position in a very eloquent fashion. We just have a disagreement." He then wished her "every happiness." DeGeneres thanked him and then, without skipping a beat, asked: "So you'll walk me down the aisle? Is that what you're saying?"
God, I love her.
-- Tracy Clark-Flory"
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More than anything, my biggest objection to so-called "gay marriage" is that it's been rejected by the voting public and must be forced upon them by judicial fiat.
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More than anything, my biggest objection to so-called "gay marriage" is that it's been rejected by the voting public and must be forced upon them by judicial fiat.
One of the roles of US Government and particularly judges has always been protection of minority rights.
The Federalist #10 and #51 #78 etc
"This independence of the judges is equally requisite to guard the Constitution and the rights of individuals from the effects of those ill humors, which the arts of designing men, or the influence of particular conjunctures, sometimes disseminate among the people themselves, and which, though they speedily give place to better information, and more deliberate reflection, have a tendency, in the meantime, to occasion dangerous innovations in the government, and serious oppressions of the minor party in the community"
The quote is harsh and does not totally fit this situation. I am not accusing anyone of having ill humors etc---
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Woof Rachel:
You seem like someone worthy of having an intelligent conversation wtih. The problem on my end is that I sense this to be a subject that once entered is likely to call for considerable and extended conversation-- and I have many demands upon my time. My random participation in the thread could be misinterpreted as meaning I couldn't handle the conversation or was being rude or something like that. If you can accept these limitations of mine in the conversation, I am game.
Also, I would like everyone to note the word "conversation". I have some strong opinions on the subject and they are incorrect. For anyone who cannot handle this, as my Tort professor in law school would say "too bad, so sad." That said, as strongly as we may disagree, we need to keep the spirit of conversation at all times.
With that said, let me see if I can sort my thoughts out:
First, my basic attitude is that gays/lesbians are free to be gay and others are free to make of it what they will. That includes thinking it is wrong, repulsive, condemned by God, something to avoid, whatever.
Flowing from the first thought, is the second, making anti-gay thoughts, feelings, employment practices, etc. illegal is liberal fascism. Government is force and contrary to the Orwellian liberal use of the word "progressive", progress is increasing the amount of voluntary human interaction. Increasing violence and coercion i.e. the role of the State in human interaction, is the opposite of progress.
Third, by definition marriage is between a man and a woman. It is not for the courts to redefine the foundational relationship of our society. Just like Roe v. Wade, the only basis for the CA S. Ct decision and the MA S. Ct. decision is liberal arrogance and judicial imperialism.
Fourth, liberal fascism does not seem willing to compromise. The offers of compromises such as "domestic partnership" and "Don't ask, don't tell" are disingenuous lies used simply to work towards imposing through the violence of government action an Orwellian thought crime.
Fifth, there are areas where discrimination probably is a pretty good idea. For example, a lesbian probably should not be taking a girls school group on an overnight outing. I don't want a gay scout leader in my son's cub scout troop. (I note that liberal fascism hounds the Boy Scouts for this very reason-- this fine, wholesome group faces litigation wherever it goes, particularly if it wants to use a facility with some sort of governmental qualities.) Because I have never served I defer to those that have, but it seems to me that the military is probably a good place for discrimination too. I would not want to be in a squad with a gay sargeant when it came to deciding who had to take lead the way through the minefield. It seems quite logical to me that in the close quarters of combat operations in particular, that disciplinary problems could result.
Sixth and last, and probably the most important, I think it should be a strike against someone who wants to adopt. We can squabble over the exact %, (I think it around 97%) but most children are straight and to place them in the care of "parents" who are not is profoundly wrong. Children are born to imitate, their parents most of all, and to have a hetero boy naturally and inadvertently absorb the mannerisms of a fairy father and the man who _______ him is to indulge narcisstic cruelty of the highest order. To have a hetero girl have to turn to lesbian mothers as she seeks to mature into the complexities and challanges of what it is to be a woman and think it does not matter that her "mothers" are at best clueless about men and at worst quite hostile to them is to be an intellectual coward.
Well, there it is. The Adventure is begun.
Marc
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More than anything, my biggest objection to so-called "gay marriage" is that it's been rejected by the voting public and must be forced upon them by judicial fiat.
One of the roles of US Government and particularly judges has always been protection of minority rights.
The Federalist #10 and #51 #78 etc
"This independence of the judges is equally requisite to guard the Constitution and the rights of individuals from the effects of those ill humors, which the arts of designing men, or the influence of particular conjunctures, sometimes disseminate among the people themselves, and which, though they speedily give place to better information, and more deliberate reflection, have a tendency, in the meantime, to occasion dangerous innovations in the government, and serious oppressions of the minor party in the community"
The quote is harsh and does not totally fit this situation. I am not accusing anyone of having ill humors etc---
**Where in the constitution might I find the right to "gay marriage" ? Do you believe the intent of the founding fathers of this nation was to have "gay marriage" as a right in this nation?**
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I am still working on my responses. It was a busy weekend and it will be a couple of days. I hope everyone had a good weekend and a meaningful memorial day.
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I am reposting Marc's original post with my responses in bold.
You seem like someone worthy of having an intelligent conversation wtih. The problem on my end is that I sense this to be a subject that once entered is likely to call for considerable and extended conversation-- and I have many demands upon my time. My random participation in the thread could be misinterpreted as meaning I couldn't handle the conversation or was being rude or something like that. If you can accept these limitations of mine in the conversation, I am game.
Thank you-- You have created one of the few places on the internet where people of different view points can have a respectful intelligent conversation.
Also, I would like everyone to note the word "conversation". I have some strong opinions on the subject and they are incorrect. For anyone who cannot handle this, as my Tort professor in law school would say "too bad, so sad." That said, as strongly as we may disagree, we need to keep the spirit of conversation at all times.
With that said, let me see if I can sort my thoughts out:
First, my basic attitude is that gays/lesbians are free to be gay and others are free to make of it what they will. That includes thinking it is wrong, repulsive, condemned by God, something to avoid, whatever.
My basic though that all human beings are created in the image of G-d have certain rights including a right to marriage. I also think all human beings be treated with respect at all times though I don't think that should be legislated.
Flowing from the first thought, is the second, making anti-gay thoughts, feelings, employment practices, etc. illegal is liberal fascism. Government is force and contrary to the Orwellian liberal use of the word "progressive", progress is increasing the amount of voluntary human interaction. Increasing violence and coercion i.e. the role of the State in human interaction, is the opposite of progress.
Is it okay to discriminate against Older people, Women, Jews, People of Color,etc because people don't want to voluntary associate with them? Why should gays receive less protection than any other group.
Third, by definition marriage is between a man and a woman. It is not for the courts to redefine the foundational relationship of our society. Just like Roe v. Wade, the only basis for the CA S. Ct decision and the MA S. Ct. decision is liberal arrogance and judicial imperialism.
We will have to discuss Roe v, Wade at a later date.
Marriage by definition has changed. Men used to have the right to beat and rape their wives. It some parts of the world the definition of marriage includes a man's right to marry multiple women. All of these things use to part of the fabric our society. There were Jews from Arab Countries that when they immigrated to Israel had multiple wives. I'm positive you don't t think any those things are okay. The definition of marriage has changed over time and it made the world a better place . Plenty of terrible awful things slavery etc used to be part of the fabric of our society.
Fourth, liberal fascism does not seem willing to compromise. The offers of compromises such as "domestic partnership" and "Don't ask, don't tell" are disingenuous lies used simply to work towards imposing through the violence of government action an Orwellian thought crime.
Why should someone have to compromise about their civil rights? I don't see the connection between a right to marry and a Orwellian thought crime. Would you please flesh that out.
Fifth, there are areas where discrimination probably is a pretty good idea. For example, a lesbian probably should not be taking a girls school group on an overnight outing. I don't want a gay scout leader in my son's cub scout troop. (I note that liberal fascism hounds the Boy Scouts for this very reason-- this fine, wholesome group faces litigation wherever it goes, particularly if it wants to use a facility with some sort of governmental qualities.) Because I have never served I defer to those that have, but it seems to me that the military is probably a good place for discrimination too. I would not want to be in a squad with a gay sargeant when it came to deciding who had to take lead the way through the minefield. It seems quite logical to me that in the close quarters of combat operations in particular, that disciplinary problems could result.
Historically there have been fierce gay warriors that lead men successfully into battle.
There are straight ( or straight enough to be married with children ) sexual predators that attack people of the same sex. I don't think the assault rate is higher for GBLT. It is very hard to get statistics in that area because I don't believe most sexual abuse cases are reported. If you want to protect your kids from of abuse never let them repeatedly be one on one with another adult or have nanny cam etc. Boy Scouts/Girl Scouts have troops of kids and many leaders so that it wouldn't worry me to have a Gay/Lesbian troop leader at all
Sixth and last, and probably the most important, I think it should be a strike against someone who wants to adopt. We can squabble over the exact %, (I think it around 97%) but most children are straight and to place them in the care of "parents" who are not is profoundly wrong. Children are born to imitate, their parents most of all, and to have a hetero boy naturally and inadvertently absorb the mannerisms of a fairy father and the man who _______ him is to indulge narcisstic cruelty of the highest order. To have a hetero girl have to turn to lesbian mothers as she seeks to mature into the complexities and challanges of what it is to be a woman and think it does not matter that her "mothers" are at best clueless about men and at worst quite hostile to them is to be an intellectual coward.
I don't think it is necessary or usually narcissistic to want a child. Children are not carbon copies of their parents. Do you think mixed race adoptions are also wrong? Is gender and sexuality the most important thing in human being. Is it more important than shared values, race, personality type, intelligence level or anything else? A straight male raised by two gay men might have some more challenges than a child raised in a traditional nuclear family. It would obviously depend on the traditional nuclear family. However children born in a nuclear family are in the minority and the divorce rate is over 50 percent . Are you for outlawing all non nuclear families and if you are what about if there is divorce or a death. I believe most kids raised with two loving parents or one loving parent turn out okay and of course some kids with terrible parent(s) turn out fine. Someone could refer to me as just the person my husband sleeps with. It wouldn't make me any less his life partner. All lesbians don't hate men. I happened to know a women who previously was married (to a guy)and who has currently been with her partner over 20 years and managed to marry off all thee of her daughters and one son to wonderful people.She now has perfectly normal grandchildren. I know another family where a gay man and his partner of over 20 years are both beloved uncles. Obviously one example doesn't it make it true in all cases but gay marriage hasn't really existed long enough in any country for there to be a lot of data. How does gay marriage even effect you personally? I have respect for the lessons and wisdom of the past but I won't let it dictate the present for me.
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More than anything, my biggest objection to so-called "gay marriage" is that it's been rejected by the voting public and must be forced upon them by judicial fiat.
One of the roles of US Government and particularly judges has always been protection of minority rights.
The Federalist #10 and #51 #78 etc
"This independence of the judges is equally requisite to guard the Constitution and the rights of individuals from the effects of those ill humors, which the arts of designing men, or the influence of particular conjunctures, sometimes disseminate among the people themselves, and which, though they speedily give place to better information, and more deliberate reflection, have a tendency, in the meantime, to occasion dangerous innovations in the government, and serious oppressions of the minor party in the community"
The quote is harsh and does not totally fit this situation. I am not accusing anyone of having ill humors etc---
**Where in the constitution might I find the right to "gay marriage" ? Do you believe the intent of the founding fathers of this nation was to have "gay marriage" as a right in this nation?**
It is the California Constitution because it is the California supreme court. I tried to examine the text but it is really long. I gave up because I am never going to live in that state. There is something very wrong with the weather there . I believe the founding fathers created a system of government to protect the rights of the people. I am more interested in the government they created than what particular rights they wanted people to have. After all some of them believed in slavery and they didn't give woman the right to vote.
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More than anything, my biggest objection to so-called "gay marriage" is that it's been rejected by the voting public and must be forced upon them by judicial fiat.
One of the roles of US Government and particularly judges has always been protection of minority rights.
**Not so. The role of the federal government is enumerated in the constitution, and nowhere will you find the phrase "minority rights". Although it's a popular, but corrosive idea that has been pushed by the left since the 60's, rights belonging to defined groups does not exist in the US constitution. Individuals have rights, not groups.**
The Federalist #10 and #51 #78 etc
"This independence of the judges is equally requisite to guard the Constitution and the rights of individuals from the effects of those ill humors, which the arts of designing men, or the influence of particular conjunctures, sometimes disseminate among the people themselves, and which, though they speedily give place to better information, and more deliberate reflection, have a tendency, in the meantime, to occasion dangerous innovations in the government, and serious oppressions of the minor party in the community"
The quote is harsh and does not totally fit this situation. I am not accusing anyone of having ill humors etc---
**Where in the constitution might I find the right to "gay marriage" ? Do you believe the intent of the founding fathers of this nation was to have "gay marriage" as a right in this nation?**
It is the California Constitution because it is the California supreme court. I tried to examine the text but it is really long. I gave up because I am never going to live in that state. There is something very wrong with the weather there . I believe the founding fathers created a system of government to protect the rights of the people. I am more interested in the government they created than what particular rights they wanted people to have. After all some of them believed in slavery and they didn't give woman the right to vote.
**Just because the CA. Supreme court recently issued a ruling doesn't alter the state's constitution. There is a big difference between caselaw and the constitution.**
Marriage by definition has changed. Men used to have the right to beat and rape their wives.
**Yes, and the laws changed by legislation, not by judicial fiat.**
My basic though that all human beings are created in the image of G-d have certain rights including a right to marriage.
**Does a pedophile have the right to marry a child then? Should laws against bigamy and incest be purged as well? If not, why are they different?**
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Crafty,
The reason homosexuality is prohibited by the US military is due to the issues of group cohesion, not worries about personal courage.
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Which is my point exactly-- sexual energies do not belong in military units, especially combat units, lest they sow doubt and discord.
Again, I have not served, so I leave this to those that have-- but I do note that civilian interventions, e.g. by President Hillbillary Clinton, puts at risk the careers of those with thinking similar to mine should they express that thinking.
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Woof Rachel:
I look forward to answering you in the thoughtful manner your post deserves, but at the moment simply do not have the time due to work matters.
So for the moment, I plant you an additional question:
If the courts can change the definition of marriage from being between a man and a woman, why not poligamy too? As the following article shows, this is not only a theoretical question.
Marc
===============
John Turley-Ewart: Sharia by stealth — Ontario turns a blind eye to polygamy
Posted: May 29, 2008, 4:07 PM by John Turley-Ewart
It’s an issue the Liberal government of Ontario, led by Premier Dalton McGuinty, doesn’t want to deal with — polygamy in the Muslim community. Last week the Toronto Star told the story of Safa Rigby, a 35-year-old mother of five children who recently learned her husband of 14 years had two other wives. Ms. Rigby’s life is in tatters. She followed her husband’s advice that she leave Toronto and live in Egypt for a year on the grounds that it would be better for their children to spend more time in a Muslim country. Now she knows it was a ruse. He used her time there to marry two other women.
Ms. Rigby does not support polygamy, which has been illegal in Canada for more than a century. But Toronto Imam Aly Hindy, who runs the Toronto Salahuddin Islamic Centre, does. He married Ms. Rigby’s husband knowing he already had a wife and counselled him to keep the marriage secret from Ms. Rigby for as long as possible. Hindy has by his own admission performed 30 ceremonies in which men were married who already had wives. When Ms. Rigby confronted Hindy his response was reportedly cold and unsympathetic: “You will have to stand beside him in these difficult times,” Hindy told her. “You should stop causing problems to (sic) him. You will not get anything by divorce except destroying your life” he went on to say.
For Hindy this is not about Ms. Rigby or her husband’s desire to marry another woman — but making a broader political point.
Hindy is using polygamy as a proxy for his fundamentalist version of Islam, something he wants to see legitimized in Canadian society as a whole. It is part of an attempt at empire building, a bid that if successful will enhance his influence within the Muslim and demonstrate that Ontario and Canada is too ignorant and too afraid of Islam to uphold its own laws. He has admitted as much, challenging Ontario’s government to dare stop him. “If the laws of the country conflict with Islamic law, if one goes against the other, then I am going to follow Islamic law, simple as that,” he told the Star. Interviewed after the Star story appeared on the John Oakley Show on AM 640Toronto, Hindy was not apologetic and argued that freedom of religion in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms trumped prohibitions against polygamous marriages.
When he and another Imam from Toronto, Steve Rockwell, were challenged on the appropriateness of polygamy by a Muslim caller to the Oakley Show, the caller was immediately attacked and his identity as a true Muslim questioned because he did not follow Hindy’s view that polygamy is a foundational pillar of Islam that grows out of Sharia Law. This speaks to a troubling absolutist interpretation of Islamic law, which runs against the reality that Sharia law is much more flexible that Hindy allows for, a fact well documented by Anver Emon, a specialist in Islamic law at the University of Toronto. Moreover, as noted in the Star article on Ms. Rigby, there is grave doubt that the Charter protects Islamic polygamy, as Hindy believes. Nik Bala, who teaches family law at Queen’s University, points out that “Islam permits polygamy, but doesn’t require it to be a practising Muslim.” This is key, and may mean Hindy’s attempt to find shelter behind the Charter will fail. Moreover, the impact polygamy has on women's equality and children could also sway the courts to uphold Canada's ban on polygamy.
But there is little chance at the moment that this will become a Charter issue down the road. Dalton McGuinty’s government has responded to the revelations about polygamy in the Muslim community by denying its existence. On Wednesday Liberal MPP Ted McMeekin responded to a question on the issue in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario saying:
“Polygamy is a serious crime in Ontario . It’s not something that’s tolerated. As you know, the best advice I can give the honourable member opposite is that if she has any evidence that someone is engaging in multiple marriages, she should report it, because our Registrar General and our official reporting mechanisms have no evidence that that’s happening. As you know, Mr. Speaker, marriage is a contract. A contract require a licence, and once a marriage occurs, it has to be registered. There are no multiple marriages being registered in the province of Ontario.”
Mr. McMeekin’s response is a shameful twisting of the law. The criminal code is clear. Section 293. (1) reads: “Every one who
(a) practises or enters into or in any manner agrees or consents to practise or enter into
(i) any form of polygamy, or
(ii) any kind of conjugal union with more than one person at the same time,
whether or not it is by law recognized as a binding form of marriage, or
(b) celebrates, assists or is a party to a rite, ceremony, contract or consent that purports to sanction a relationship mentioned in subparagraph (a)(i) or (ii),
is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years.”
There is no provision in the law, contrary to Mr. McMeekin’s assertion in the Ontario Legislature, that a polygamous marriage has to be registered before the government can act. The opposite is in fact true.
By turning a blind eye to polygamy, Premier McGuinty is giving licence to Sharia by stealth.
In 2005 Ontario’s premier rightly ruled out Sharia family courts, conceding that Muslim women may well fair poorly if such a system was allowed to be established. The same concern exists today, yet Ontario’s Liberals sit on their hands.
Muslim women like Ms. Rigby are being victimized as are her children. Imam Hindy has told her to put up with her husband’s desire for other wives. She has properly said no and has now obtained a divorce. When will Premier McGuinty’s government say no and enforce the law it is bound to uphold?
jturley-ewart@nationalpost.com
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Woof Rachel:
If the courts can change the definition of marriage from being between a man and a woman, why not poligamy too? As the following article shows, this is not only a theoretical question.
Marc
===============
It seems like we are discussing two different topics that could have two different answers
One -- Should gay marriage be legal according to the US Constitution and State Constitutions and various case law etc?
Two --- Is allowing gay marriage the right thing to do?
Obviously even when it was legal for a man to rape and beat his wife it was still wrong. An abolitionist who helped a slave escape was legally stealing someones property but they were doing the right thing.
What is legal and what is moral is not and should not be the same in all cases and I believe we should err on the side of personal liberty.
I believe many peoples problem with gay marriage is that they want push their religious views on others and they don't particularly want all that much separation between religion and state. I understand that when G-d created the universe in the Bible he did not created Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve. However G-d did create Adam and Steve today and it would be wrong for them them to try to marry women just so can have the same rights as everyone else.
Canada currently has laws on the books that make gay marriage legal and polygamy illegal . In that particular case they just weren't enforcing the polygamy part of it.
I believe polygamy is wrong ethically because it essentially turns women and children into property. I don't see a connection between treating women as object and the life partnership that I see in gay marriage
I do want clarify what I said about everyone should have a right to marriage. I believe marriage should be only for people over the age of 18 with some exception for teen pregnancy/ emancipated minors. This would stop the pedophile thing.
I find incest deeply disturbing and I am not sure how to deal with it. It would not be a healthy situation for children and could case genetic defects.
I wonder how attractive Cleopatra could have been since her family tree was a stick. I sort of feel like it should be illegal but what two consenting adults do behind close doors is their business. I don't see a connection between incest and gay marriage. An incestuous relationship is unhealthy a gay relationship can be very healthy.
I don't see a strong connection between legalizing gay marriage and legalizing the pedophilia, polygamy, etc. If you legalize absinthe you don't have to legalize crack cocaine .
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Woof Rachel:
If the courts can change the definition of marriage from being between a man and a woman, why not poligamy too? As the following article shows, this is not only a theoretical question.
Marc
===============
It seems like we are discussing two different topics that could have two different answers
One -- Should gay marriage be legal according to the US Constitution and State Constitutions and various case law etc?
Two --- Is allowing gay marriage the right thing to do?
Obviously even when it was legal for a man to rape and beat his wife it was still wrong. An abolitionist who helped a slave escape was legally stealing someones property but they were doing the right thing.
What is legal and what is moral is not and should not be the same in all cases and I believe we should err on the side of personal liberty.
I believe many peoples problem with gay marriage is that they want push their religious views on others and they don't particularly want all that much separation between religion and state. I understand that when G-d created the universe in the Bible he did not created Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve. However G-d did create Adam and Steve today and it would be wrong for them them to try to marry women just so can have the same rights as everyone else.
**Where is the right to "gay marriage" that you assert, to be found in any legal code? It's not to be found anywhere in the US constitution or in any other part of common law. Humans engage in a variety of sexual behaviors, yet western civilization recognizes heterosexual monogamy as having a special status and doesn't recognize other sexual behaviors as having the same status and has legally prohibited certain behaviors throughout modern history.**
Canada currently has laws on the books that make gay marriage legal and polygamy illegal . In that particular case they just weren't enforcing the polygamy part of it.
I believe polygamy is wrong ethically because it essentially turns women and children into property. I don't see a connection between treating women as object and the life partnership that I see in gay marriage
**So you believe polygamy is wrong, so that law should be enforced. Does this count as you imposing your beliefs on others? If not, why not?**
I do want clarify what I said about everyone should have a right to marriage. I believe marriage should be only for people over the age of 18 with some exception for teen pregnancy/ emancipated minors. This would stop the pedophile thing.
**Again, you wish to rewrite the concept of marriage to fit your personal moral perspective. Why do you wish to allow an arbitrary number like 18 to determine marriage? Again, you are engaging in discrimination and wanting the legal system to enforce your morals on others. Why is it wrong when others do it, yet right for you?**
I find incest deeply disturbing and I am not sure how to deal with it. It would not be a healthy situation for children and could case genetic defects.
**You wish to interfere in the private lives of others? Are you espousing some sort of genetic supremacism?**
I wonder how attractive Cleopatra could have been since her family tree was a stick. I sort of feel like it should be illegal but what two consenting adults do behind close doors is their business. I don't see a connection between incest and gay marriage. An incestuous relationship is unhealthy a gay relationship can be very healthy.
**How so? Both are taboo according to western social mores. If you wish to reshape our social structure, can you give more explaination of what you use to define as healthy vs. unhealthy?**
I don't see a strong connection between legalizing gay marriage and legalizing the pedophilia, polygamy, etc. If you legalize absinthe you don't have to legalize crack cocaine .
**If we are to throw out as marriage as solely between a single adult male and a single adult female who are not related, then why retain any limits? NAMBLA says that "intergenerational sex" should be recognized as just as valid as "gay marriage". They assert that their movement will become socially and then legally recognized just as the gay rights did. If judeo-christian morality should be thrown out, then what moral code should this nation have? If we have no shared code of morality, then anything is permissible, is it not?**
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Woof Rachel:
I am on the road at the moment and am reminded that I still owe you a more substantive answer to your previous post. For the moment though, I address this
"One -- Should gay marriage be legal according to the US Constitution and State Constitutions and various case law etc?
Two --- Is allowing gay marriage the right thing to do?"
The first question properly presented is whether the US Constitution or any of the State Consitutions compel the recognition of gay marriage-- as was just held by the CA Supreme Court.
To me the answer is clearly not. Marriage in our country and culture has always been defined as between a man and a woman, and the court simply imperialisiticaly misused and abused its power in our system to impose its believe that marriage should be legally redefined over the expressly stated views via initiative of the people of California.
I'm not trying to stop gays from living together and doing what they do. I AM saying other people are free to make of it what they will and that liberalism becomes fascism when it seeks to make "thought crimes" legal crimes.
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GM I owe you a response but I am not up to it right now
l
“You’ve seen him plenty of times on sitcoms; he’s the dumb, bumbling, idiot dad, husband and boyfriend who appears useless at everything but bringing home a paycheck. The message: Guys are dumb and women have to lead them around. This, of course, cues the laugh track. Yet a survey from an organization called Children Now found that two-thirds of kid respondents described men on TV as angry, while respondents from another group’s survey said men were portrayed as corrupt on TV by a 17 to 1 margin. Clearly, this is no laughing matter.
To highlight companies pushing anti-guy messages, we’ve compiled a list of the worst male-bashing ads from 2007 and 2008. Whether husbands are portrayed as useless, stereotypical men or absolute airheads, our list of worst male-bashing ads exposes them all.
Check out which worst male-bashing ads are the main offenders.”
http://www.askmen.com/toys/top_10_300/327_top_10_list.htm
In a slightly different vein
Sarah Haskins has three extremely funny and insightful video commentaries on women in the media
http://current.com/items/88941392_target_women_yogurt_edition
http://current.com/items/88988193_target_women_wedding_shows
http://current.com/items/89019993_target_women_suffrage
I'm curious to hear what other people think of Sarah
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Rachel:
The one Sarah clip that did play for me (the yogurt one) was funny, but very funny was the one about insuring only women :lol:
Anyway, lets see if I can take a stab at answering your post of May 29-- I hope my formatting is clear (MD-1 is my original post, MD-2 is my response to your response to MD-1):
MD-1:
First, my basic attitude is that gays/lesbians are free to be gay and others are free to make of it what they will. That includes thinking it is wrong, repulsive, condemned by God, something to avoid, whatever.
RACHEL:
My basic though that all human beings are created in the image of G-d have certain rights including a right to marriage. I also think all human beings be treated with respect at all times though I don't think that should be legislated.
MD-2:
What you think is all well and good, but please feel free to go through the necessary steps to modify the US Constitution and/or relevant state constitutions-- at present honestly read they do not compel gay marriage. I agree respect cannot be legislated.
MD-1: Flowing from the first thought, is the second, making anti-gay thoughts, feelings, employment practices, etc. illegal is liberal fascism. Government is force and contrary to the Orwellian liberal use of the word "progressive", progress is increasing the amount of voluntary human interaction. Increasing violence and coercion i.e. the role of the State in human interaction, is the opposite of progress.
RACHEL:
Is it okay to discriminate against Older people, Women, Jews, People of Color,etc because people don't want to voluntary (sic) associate with them? Why should gays receive less protection than any other group?
MD-2:
a) Whether/to what extent gay/lesbian is a matter of nature or nuture remains a matter of great debate. It most certainly is a matter of behavior. Why should it be illegal to think less of a man e.g. for confusing his intestines with a woman's uterus?
b)Given the relentless expansion of the logic of anti-discrimination law, I have experienced backlash in my own thinking. Now I am quite willing to entertain the notion that non-discrimination laws should be limited to governmental action.
MD-1:
Third, by definition marriage is between a man and a woman. It is not for the courts to redefine the foundational relationship of our society. Just like Roe v. Wade, the only basis for the CA S. Ct decision and the MA S. Ct. decision is liberal arrogance and judicial imperialism.
We will have to discuss Roe v, Wade at a later date.
RACHEL:
Marriage by definition has changed. Men used to have the right to beat and rape their wives. It some parts of the world the definition of marriage includes a man's right to marry multiple women. All of these things use to part of the fabric our society. There were Jews from Arab Countries that when they immigrated to Israel had multiple wives. I'm positive you don't t think any those things are okay. The definition of marriage has changed over time and it made the world a better place . Plenty of terrible awful things slavery etc used to be part of the fabric of our society.
MD-2:
a) As long as the woman has free choice, why do you seek to deny her the right to marry whom she pleases simply because the man is already married if he wishes to marry her too? Where does Wife 1 get her right to deny them their happiness-- especially if polygamy was part of the deal going in? The issue is who/what institution is to say what the rule is and say when the rule is to change. In our system of government, the special role of the judiiciary requires that it exercise its power only with rigorous intellectual honesty and humility. To say that our Consitution compels allowing fetuses to be killed is absurd. To say that our Constituion compels gay marriage is equally absurd.
MD_1:
Fourth, liberal fascism does not seem willing to compromise. The offers of compromises such as "domestic partnership" and "Don't ask, don't tell" are disingenuous lies used simply to work towards imposing through the violence of government action an Orwellian thought crime.
RACHEL:
Why should someone have to compromise about their civil rights? I don't see the connection between a right to marry and a Orwellian thought crime. Would you please flesh that out.
MD-2:
Well, here we go in a circle-- where do they get these alleged civil rights? The Orwellian thought crime consists of making discrimination against gays illegal. Again, gays are free to do what they do, and others are free to make of it what they will-- which includes being grossed out and looking to not have it around. Speaking for myself, I have no problem with plenty of gays, and some I find creepy and would rather not have them around. As a free man in a free country I see absolutely no role for government action in this.
MD-1:
Fifth, there are areas where discrimination probably is a pretty good idea. For example, a lesbian probably should not be taking a girls school group on an overnight outing. I don't want a gay scout leader in my son's cub scout troop. (I note that liberal fascism hounds the Boy Scouts for this very reason-- this fine, wholesome group faces litigation wherever it goes, particularly if it wants to use a facility with some sort of governmental qualities.) Because I have never served I defer to those that have, but it seems to me that the military is probably a good place for discrimination too. I would not want to be in a squad with a gay sargeant when it came to deciding who had to take lead the way through the minefield. It seems quite logical to me that in the close quarters of combat operations in particular, that disciplinary problems could result.
RACHEL:
Historically there have been fierce gay warriors that lead men successfully into battle.
There are straight ( or straight enough to be married with children ) sexual predators that attack people of the same sex. I don't think the assault rate is higher for GBLT. It is very hard to get statistics in that area because I don't believe most sexual abuse cases are reported. If you want to protect your kids from of abuse never let them repeatedly be one on one with another adult or have nanny cam etc. Boy Scouts/Girl Scouts have troops of kids and many leaders so that it wouldn't worry me to have a Gay/Lesbian troop leader at all.
MD-2
a) You miss my point about gays in the military-- it is that sexual energies can lead to favoritism that corrodes unit morale and cohesion.
b) Allow me to explain something to you about the human penis and those of us attached to it. There is a period in the human males life where the crack of dawn had better not bend over or he will try to nail it. :lol: If he is hetero, he will be looking for a vagina. If he is gay, he will be looking for a male anus. When my daughter hits puberty and goes on a school trip, if I think it better that she be chaperoned by a hetero woman than a hetero man, then IMO the government has no fcuking business getting in the way of that. Similarly, if my son is going on a Cub/Boy Scout camping expedition and he is scared at being away from home in the forest, I do not want to have him getting pestered by a gay troop leader-- whom during the day has been his authority figure.
This is such simple common sense-- how dare the government seek to get in the way of this!!! :x :x :x
MD-1:
Sixth and last, and probably the most important, I think it should be a strike against someone who wants to adopt. We can squabble over the exact %, (I think it around 97%) but most children are straight and to place them in the care of "parents" who are not is profoundly wrong. Children are born to imitate, their parents most of all, and to have a hetero boy naturally and inadvertently absorb the mannerisms of a fairy father and the man who _______ him is to indulge narcisstic cruelty of the highest order. To have a hetero girl have to turn to lesbian mothers as she seeks to mature into the complexities and challanges of what it is to be a woman and think it does not matter that her "mothers" are at best clueless about men and at worst quite hostile to them is to be an intellectual coward.
RACHEL:
I don't think it is necessary or usually narcissistic to want a child. Children are not carbon copies of their parents. Do you think mixed race adoptions are also wrong? Is gender and sexuality the most important thing in human being. Is it more important than shared values, race, personality type, intelligence level or anything else? A straight male raised by two gay men might have some more challenges than a child raised in a traditional nuclear family. It would obviously depend on the traditional nuclear family. However children born in a nuclear family are in the minority and the divorce rate is over 50 percent . Are you for outlawing all non nuclear families and if you are what about if there is divorce or a death. I believe most kids raised with two loving parents or one loving parent turn out okay and of course some kids with terrible parent(s) turn out fine. Someone could refer to me as just the person my husband sleeps with. It wouldn't make me any less his life partner. All lesbians don't hate men. I happened to know a women who previously was married (to a guy)and who has currently been with her partner over 20 years and managed to marry off all thee of her daughters and one son to wonderful people.She now has perfectly normal grandchildren. I know another family where a gay man and his partner of over 20 years are both beloved uncles. Obviously one example doesn't it make it true in all cases but gay marriage hasn't really existed long enough in any country for there to be a lot of data. How does gay marriage even effect you personally? I have respect for the lessons and wisdom of the past but I won't let it dictate the present for me.
MD-2
a) Of course we are discussing statistical probabilities, not certainties so of course one can point to this case or that to the contrary without it changing the larger point in the slightest.
b) In my opinion it is precisely narcisstic to think more of oneself than of the child. The overwhelming probability (98% is my understanding) is that the child will be straight. The human animal is an amazing organism-- one born to receive the culturization that nutures its nature. What a cruelty to take the wondrous ability to emulate and imitate and produce a heterosexual child with homosexual mannerisms!!! How vain! How cruel! How narcisstic! How clueless! You ask how gay marriage affects me personally-- to respect the privacy of the individuals involved I will say only that within my extended family I have seen exactly how it can affect people.
The Adventure continues!
Marc
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The UN with the help of Condi Rice finally does something right.
U.N. categorizes rape as a war tactic
Fri 20 Jun 2008, 3:39 GMT
[-] Text
By Patrick Worsnip
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The U.N. Security Council demanded on Thursday that warring governments and factions act to halt violence against women, saying rape was no longer just a by-product of war but a military tactic.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who chaired part of the session, told the council the world had now recognized that sexual violence during conflicts went beyond individual victims to affect nations' security and stability.
Echoed by a string of speakers, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the 15-nation council the problem had "reached unspeakable and pandemic proportions in some societies attempting to recover from conflict."
Maj. Gen. Patrick Cammaert, a former U.N. peacekeeping commander, told the meeting: "It has probably become more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in an armed conflict."
Speakers identified former Yugoslavia, Sudan's Darfur region, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Liberia as conflict regions where deliberate sexual violence had occurred on a mass scale.
U.N. officials have said the problem is currently worst in eastern Congo. But a recent survey of 2,000 women and girls in Liberia showed 75 percent had been raped during the West African country's civil war.
A U.S.-sponsored resolution adopted unanimously by the council called sexual violence "a tactic of war to humiliate, dominate, instil fear in, disperse and/or forcibly relocate civilian members of a community or ethnic group."
It said the violence "can significantly exacerbate situations of armed conflict and may impede the restoration of international peace and security."
It called on parties to conflict to take immediate measures to protect civilians from sexual violence, said such crimes should be excluded from amnesty after conflicts, and warned that the council would consider special measures against parties that commit them when imposing or renewing sanctions.
ABUSES BY PEACEKEEPERS
The resolution also called on Ban to submit a special report on the issue next year and tighten procedures for stopping abuses by U.N. peacekeepers, who have been accused of sexual offences in several countries.
Ban said he was "profoundly committed to a zero-tolerance policy" and would strengthen disciplinary procedures by holding not just individuals but their supervisors accountable.
The United States, council president for June, chose sexual violence as the theme of the month's debate on a general issue. As well as Rice, several government ministers replaced ambassadors as their countries' representatives.
Opening the debate, Rice noted there had long been dispute about whether the theme was a security issue and hence something the Security Council was authorized to address.
"I am proud that today we respond to that lingering question with a resounding 'yes'," she said. "This world body now acknowledges that sexual violence in conflict zones is indeed a security concern.
"We affirm that sexual violence profoundly affects not only the health and safety of women but the economic and social stability of their nations."
Rice focused on Myanmar, where she said soldiers regularly raped women and girls as young as 8 years old. Myanmar's envoy, Than Swe, later called the allegations unfounded. "We categorically reject them," he told the council.
Backers of the resolution had said that if the Security Council defined sexual violence as a security matter the text would give peacekeepers the high-level support they needed.
The resolution had been negotiated for weeks between council members and with human rights and women's groups. Diplomats said China and Russia, which both voted in favour, had watered down some language, including on sanctions.
Chinese Deputy Ambassador Liu Zhenmin told the council it should focus on preventing conflicts in the first place and that sexual violence "should not be treated as a stand-alone issue, nor should attention be given to its symptoms only."
http://africa.reuters.com/world/news/usnN19485901.html
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My responses are in bold
MD-2:
a) Whether/to what extent gay/lesbian is a matter of nature or nuture remains a matter of great debate. It most certainly is a matter of behavior. Why should it be illegal to think less of a man e.g. for confusing his intestines with a woman's uterus?
b)Given the relentless expansion of the logic of anti-discrimination law, I have experienced backlash in my own thinking. Now I am quite willing to entertain the notion that non-discrimination laws should be limited to governmental action.
I think it should be legal to think less of someone because they are Bisexual , Female, republican , Zoroastrian, etc. I just don’t think it is okay to discriminate against people for matters of gender, religion, political, sexual orientation and age (for those over the age of 18). We are talking about actions and government action specifically not thoughts so I don’t see it as thought crime.
Confusing intestine with uterus-- What is that Freudian? - I believe the latest thought is that homosexuality is related to brain development . Lesbian woman have brains more like straight males and gay men have brains similar to straight women.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-sci-gaybrain17-2008jun17,0,888962.story . I will post the whole article next.
.
MD-2:
a) As long as the woman has free choice, why do you seek to deny her the right to marry whom she pleases simply because the man is already married if he wishes to marry her too? Where does Wife 1 get her right to deny them their happiness-- especially if polygamy was part of the deal going in? The issue is who/what institution is to say what the rule is and say when the rule is to change. In our system of government, the special role of the judiiciary requires that it exercise its power only with rigorous intellectual honesty and humility. To say that our Consitution compels allowing fetuses to be killed is absurd. To say that our Constituion compels gay marriage is equally absurd.
Do you think prostitution should be legal? I have the same problem with Prostitution that I do with Polygamy -- The institutionalization of the objectification of women.
MD-2
a) You miss my point about gays in the military-- it is that sexual energies can lead to favoritism that corrodes unit morale and cohesion.
b) Allow me to explain something to you about the human penis and those of us attached to it. There is a period in the human males life where the crack of dawn had better not bend over or he will try to nail it. If he is hetero, he will be looking for a vagina. If he is gay, he will be looking for a male anus. When my daughter hits puberty and goes on a school trip, if I think it better that she be chaperoned by a hetero woman than a hetero man, then IMO the government has no fcuking business getting in the way of that. Similarly, if my son is going on a Cub/Boy Scout camping expedition and he is scared at being away from home in the forest, I do not want to have him getting pestered by a gay troop leader-- whom during the day has been his authority figure.
This is such simple common sense-- how dare the government seek to get in the way of this!!!
I have spoken with women and men who are in co-ed combat units in Israel and they said sexual tension was not an issue because are too dirty tired and busy. It is obviously not my area of expertise. Thanks for the anatomy lesson but it is a actually a lecture I heard from my Father multiple times growing up but not in those words. My friends and I used to call it the all men are evil speech. :-) I also went to a coed high school and college
And for life lessons there is always Buffy.
Cordelia: Well, does looking at guns make you wanna have sex?
Xander: I'm seventeen. Looking at linoleum makes me wanna have sex.
So the age range you are talking about it is would not be gay leaders but gay scouts who would be the biggest problem. There is no way you can judge sexuality for Scouts at that age accurately in all cases. My brother was in Scouts with boys who are now gay men and my neck of the woods is not exactly LA and is pretty old-fashioned and conservative.
MD-2
a) Of course we are discussing statistical probabilities, not certainties so of course one can point to this case or that to the contrary without it changing the larger point in the slightest.
b) In my opinion it is precisely narcisstic to think more of oneself than of the child. The overwhelming probability (98% is my understanding) is that the child will be straight. The human animal is an amazing organism-- one born to receive the culturization that nutures its nature. What a cruelty to take the wondrous ability to emulate and imitate and produce a heterosexual child with homosexual mannerisms!!! How vain! How cruel! How narcisstic! How clueless! You ask how gay marriage affects me personally-- to respect the privacy of the individuals involved I will say only that within my extended family I have seen exactly how it can affect people.
The Adventure continues!
I agree that is narcissistic to think more of oneself than a child but I don’t think it is narcissistic to want a child. I believe children growing up with two moms or two dads can grow up to be happy, moral, and productive adults.
I don’t think a heterosexual boy would grow up with gay mannerisms any more than a child raised by one parent of the opposite sex grows up less feminine or less masculine. It seems like some gay mannerisms have a genetic or hormonal basis or why would it be that gay men have them and straight men don’t
This doesn’t answer all the points you brought up. I am a slow writer and have more ideas than I have patience and time to write. I will write more on this topic later. I appreciate the opportunity to converse.
Thank you,
Rachel
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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-sci-gaybrain17-2008jun17,0,888962.story
From the Los Angeles Times
Gay men and straight women have similar brains, study says
The research suggests a basic biological link between sexual orientation and a range of mental functions.
By Denise Gellene
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 17, 2008
The brains of gay men resemble those of straight women, according to research published today that provides more evidence of the role of biology in sexual orientation.
Using brain-scanning equipment, researchers said they discovered similarities in the brain circuits that deal with language, perhaps explaining why homosexual men tend to outperform straight men on verbal skills tests -- as do heterosexual women.
The area of the brain that processes emotions also looked much the same in gay men and straight women -- and both groups have higher rates of depressive disorders than heterosexual men, researchers said.
The study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, however, found that the brain similarities were not as close in the case of gay women and straight men.
Previous studies have found evidence that sexual orientation is influenced by biological factors. More than a decade ago, neurobiologist Simon LeVay reported that a key area of the hypothalamus, a brain structure linked to sexual behavior, was smaller in homosexual men than in heterosexual men.
The latest study, led by Dr. Ivanka Savic of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, was significant in that it looked at areas of the brain that have nothing to do with sexual behavior, suggesting that there was a basic biological link between sexual orientation and a range of brain functions.
"The question is, how far does it go?" said Dr. Eric Vilain, who studies human sexual development at UCLA and was not involved in the study. "In gay men, the brain is feminized. Is that limited to particular areas, or is the entire brain female-like?"
Vilain said his hunch was that the entire brain was not feminized because "gay men have a number of masculine traits that are not present in women." For example, he said, men regardless of sexual orientation tend to be interested in casual sex and are stimulated by sexually suggestive images.
Savic and her colleagues used magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain volumes of two groups, each divided evenly between men and women: 50 heterosexuals and 40 homosexuals. They knew going into the study that in men the right cerebral hemisphere is larger than the left, but in women the hemispheres are of equal size.
The results showed that gay men had symmetrical brains like those of straight women, and homosexual women had slightly asymmetrical brains like those of heterosexual men. Symmetry is thought to favor verbal skills, the report said.
The differences were pronounced. For example, the right cerebral hemisphere in heterosexual men was 624 cubic centimeters -- 12 cubic centimeters greater than the left side. In homosexual men, the right hemisphere was 608 cubic centimeters -- 1 cubic centimeter smaller than the left.
In heterosexual women, there was no volume difference between right and left hemispheres. But in homosexual women, their right hemisphere was 5 cubic centimeters larger than the left.
Next, researchers used positron emission topography to measure blood flow in the amygdala, a brain area involved in processing emotions. The circuitry of the amygdala in gay men more closely resembled that of straight women than straight men, researchers said. The amygdalas of gay women looked more like those of straight men, the report said.
Savic said she thought the brain differences originated in the womb or infancy, probably as a result of genetic or hormonal factors. She said she could not explain why the differences were more pronounced in homosexual men than in homosexual women.
S. Marc Breedlove, a Michigan State University neuroscientist who studies sexual development, said that in his studies with rats, changes in prenatal levels of testosterone caused the sort of brain alterations that Savic observed.
denise.gellene@latimes.com
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This is an excerprt A Human Rights Campaign Foundation Report
April 13, 2004
http://www.hrc.org/documents/costkids.pdf
.. There are stark differences in how families headed by same-sex and opposite-sex couples are treated, both
financially and legally. As of this writing, the full and certain protections of marriage are available in no state.
This means that no same-sex parents or their children have access to the 1,138 federal protections that come
with marriage. 1 And only couples in Vermont and California have access to the hundreds of marital benefits
states provide.
Moreover, same-sex couples with children are not even guaranteed the right in most states to establish a joint
legal relationship to the children they are raising together. Nor may they enjoy the most basic protections that
come through such a legal relationship. In fact, protections are least available in precisely those parts of the
country that have the highest percentage of same-sex couples with children – namely, the South and Midwest.
More specifically, this report also finds these stark differences in the ways same-sex couples with children –
and their children – are treated in some of the most fundamental aspects of their family lives. For example:
- Health insurance. Same-sex couples with children are far less likely to have access to family health
insurance through their employer – and those who do pay far more for it than their married heterosexual
co-workers. For example, a gay or lesbian parent who earns $60,000 a year and receives health insurance
for his or her partner will pay $875 more in taxes each year than married heterosexual couples.
- Social Security benefits. When a gay or lesbian parent dies, the loss of Social Security benefits to
children and a surviving partner left behind can be staggering. For example, if a gay or lesbian parent who
earned $60,000 in the last year of his or her life leaves a partner and 10-year-old child behind, the family
could lose nearly $250,000 in Social Security survivor benefits that would otherwise be designated to the
care of the child – strictly because of the couple’s lack of access to marriage.
- Federal income tax. An analysis of federal income taxes reveals that a same-sex couple where one parent
stays at home with the children pays more in federal income taxes than a married heterosexual couple in
the same circumstances (based on parenting-related and earned income tax credits). On the other hand,
in a same-sex couple where both partners work outside the home, the family will pay less than a married
heterosexual couple in the same circumstances.
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Rachel,
**Have anything on the plight of polygamy in the US and how US laws and social mores oppress those who marry children in an attempt to follow god's laws?**
http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/2008/06/021478print.html
June 21, 2008
Polygamy and child marriage in the U.S.? It could happen
It could easily happen, given the prevailing multiculturalism and new court rulings on marriage. If marriage can be redefined once, it can be redefined again. And it will be, unless a sufficient number of people say no, they don't want polygamy, or child brides, or any other aspects of Sharia, in the United States.
"Polygamy, child brides coming to U.S.? Editor of Islam book says recent court rulings pave the way," from WorldNetDaily, June 21:
WASHINGTON – Polygamy and child brides may make a comeback in the U.S. as a result of recent court rulings and the simultaneous rise of Islam, says the editor of a book of stories about Muslims leaving the faith.
"In light of the recent California court ruling and the FLDS (Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints) legal fiasco in Texas, is the time coming when we in the U.S will be forced to tolerate child brides and multiple wives?" asks Joel Richardson, editor of the provocative new book "Why We Left Islam: Former Muslims Speak Out," published by WND Books.
The book is a compilation of the stories of 23 men and women who left Islam. The contributors are explicit about the danger that is posed by incrementally yielding traditional western moral and beliefs to Islamic tradition, a process that is called "soft sharia."...
And stealth jihad.
Posted at June 21, 2008 7:59 AM
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**Do we possess free will? What are the societal consequences of adapting very primitive neuropsychological research to further our political perpectives?**
Independent, The (London) > Mar 24, 2000 > Article > Print friendly
Science: Inside the mind of a killer
Jim Giles
Professor Adrian Raine has met more convicted murderers than most. As a neuroscientist interested in criminal behaviour, he has tested hundreds of violent criminals to investigate the murky relationship between brains and aggressive behaviour. And as with many in his field, he risks his work being appropriated by lawyers searching for a possible scientific explanation for their clients' crime.
Raine's latest study will be particularly interesting to lawyers. Instead of scouring prisons for his subjects, the participants were taken from the general community. All had been diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder (APD), a condition characterised by life-long antisocial and often violent behaviour. Although they had not committed the seriously violent crimes of his previous subjects, they had similar violent tendencies.
Controversy is never far away from the interpretation of Professor Raine's findings. His main claim to fame is that he detected physical differences in the front part of the brain above the eyes - the prefrontal cerebral cortex - in violent male offenders compared to other men.
"Our previous research has shown that convicted murderers - really violent offenders - have poorer functioning in the brain's prefrontal cortex," Raine says. Brain imaging techniques showed that just as with the more violent offenders, the APD sufferers had fewer cells in their prefrontal cortex. In this case, a deficit of between 11 and 14 per cent - equivalent to about two teaspoons of brain tissue.
But could Raine's subjects actually be suffering from something other than ADP? Previous studies have been criticised for failing to eliminate the possibility that subjects were, for example, undiagnosed schizophrenics. Raine and his colleagues believe that they have carefully controlled for possibilities such as these, and by doing so have actually strengthened the case for ADP being a disorder in its very own right.
Dr Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist at the University of Iowa, believes Raine's findings are remarkable. "The result identifies a potential neuropathological signature [for ADP]. If replications indicate that the finding is not present in other psychiatric populations, then we would be dealing with a notable advance in the understanding of mental diseases."
But Dr Damasio is quick to caution. Like all work using the technique functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the shadow of phrenology is never far away. "Normal or pathologic effects related to a given area are often the result of actions elsewhere in the brain. Whatever explanation we formulate for these disorders will have to take into account factors ranging from the level of molecules and neurons to cultural phenomena that impinge in the life of whole individuals."
So where does work like this leave our notion of personal responsibility for our actions? Next time one of Raine's APD patients commits a crime - as they often do - can we hold them responsible given that they appear to be at a physical disadvantage? Raine's work hasn't yet made it into America's courtrooms, but lawyers are seldom slow in making use of new science. And as the case of "Spydor Cystkopf" reveals, it can be difficult for the legal system to deal with.
In the winter of 1991 Cystkopf, a well off semi-retired advertising executive, had an argument with his wife in their New York apartment. During the argument she scratched his face. Given that Cystkopf's friends later testified that he is an extremely calm man, what happened next is hard to explain.
Cystkopf forced his wife to the floor and strangled her. He then threw the body from the window of their apartment in an attempt to make the death look like suicide.
Unlike most defendants, Cystkopf had the resources to explore any avenue of defence. His lawyer put them to good use. The sudden outburst of violence in a previously calm man pointed to the possibility of some brain dysfunction. A brain scan revealed a cyst (hence the pseudonym given to "Cystkopf" by the medical profession) underneath the left half of his frontal lobe which had been present since childhood.
This was enough for him to be referred to Dr Damasio, one of America's leading neuroscientists. Dr Damasio's report stated, "It is reasonable to assume that his inability to respond correctly is due to his long-standing neurological condition." Dr Damasio's evidence never made it to court, however. The prosecution uncovered evidence of heavy gambling debts and allegations that Cystkopf tried to persuade his former wife to commit suicide. He pleaded guilty.
So how should the courts deal with a case such as Cystkopf's? If the prosecution hadn't uncovered evidence of his debts should Dr Damasio's evidence have been used in court? Although the conditions Raine has studied are different from Cystkopf's, both involved dysfunctions in the frontal lobe. Should juries be expected to take into consideration damage to this area?
"We are talking of a predisposition to antisocial behaviour," says Raine of the effect of prefrontal damage. "Some people who have prefrontal deficits do not become antisocial, and some antisocial individuals do not have prefrontal deficits. It's important to make clear that biology is not destiny."
The question of biology and destiny is especially relevant in the case of Cystkopf. More than 4,000 people in New York state would be expected to be suffering from similar cysts. And despite the strong link between APD and the brain's frontal lobe, the existence of APD can be predicted equally well by a collection of 10 "psychosocial risk factors" as it can by the biological deficits. Because mild frontal lobe damage is only one possible cause of violent behaviour, it is unlikely it could be used to acquit someone of a crime. But should it somehow "explain" a crime and lead to a lesser sentence?
Despite the work of Raine and others, the mechanisms by which frontal lobe deficiencies influence criminal behaviour are still unclear. How could deficiencies in a person's frontal lobe predispose them to violence? Linking anatomy to behaviour is a difficult task in any area of the brain, but especially so in the frontal lobe. Neuroscientists know it plays a critical role in a range of abilities, including regulation of aggression, but because the frontal lobe has connections with so many parts of the brain it is impossible to ascribe a single function to it.
Raine is working on several theories, perhaps most the interesting of which concerns the need for an "arousal fix". Psychologists have wondered for a long time if the antisocial behaviour of APD patients was linked to low levels of arousal. Perhaps APD sufferers are unconsciously trying to compensate through stimulation-seeking? "For some kids," says Raine, "one way of getting an arousal-jag is by robbing stores or beating people up."
However Raine's work develops, the use of neurological evidence in a criminal court is always going to be controversial. But if a defendant can pay for it, stopping a neuroscientist testifying may be difficult.
The writer works on the Wellcome Wing Project at the Science Museum in London
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Rachel,
My state still has adultery in it's criminal code, though it's unprosecutable. In most every state, men face serious economic damage in civil court for having sexual relations outside their marriage, despite a wealth of research that demonstrates that heterosexual males desire multiple female sexual partners. Long term monogamy is a social construct, not biologically based. Should we alter our laws that affect not a small minority, but a MAJORITY of men in this country? If not, why not?
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GM,
I don't care whether homosexuality is a choice or not. I still don't think you should discriminate against people for it. Religion and political affiliation are a choice and I don't think you should discriminate against people for it. I was arguing more against Freud than the idea that homosexuality is biologically driven.Homosexuality may be biologically driven, it may be nurture, it may be a choice, and it may be constellation of all those factors.
I don't think polygamy or child brides should be legal so I wouldn't being looking for research that it is okay. Go right ahead and look for those studies.
I think adultery is morally and ethically wrong but I don't think it should be illegal. I have no problem with men losing money for adultery in a divorce . if your wife consents for you not to be monogamous she wouldn't divorce you if you cheated.
If I honestly believed that baring Gay Boy Scout troop leads would protect kids from sexual assault I wouldn't have a problem with it. I think that kids are much more at risk from someone the adults around them trust and someone who has private access to them. You could be protecting your kid from the bogeyman and the problem would be your next door neighbor.
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Rachel,
Interesting post (!st one)
I never thought about Federal benefits that Gays in States where homosexual marriage is legal.
But this statement seems a bit much - a little exaggerated for propaganda purposes:
"This means that no same-sex parents or their children have access to the 1,138 federal protections that come
with marriage."
I mean really?
While I not that opposed to gay marriage I am definitely opposed to gays adopting or having children by other means.
If two consenting adults want to do this that is one thing but..
Unless one of the gay "couple" already has a one or more children from previous life.
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GM,
I don't care whether homosexuality is a choice or not. I still don't think you should discriminate against people for it. Religion and political affiliation are a choice and I don't think you should discriminate against people for it. I was arguing more against Freud than the idea that homosexuality is biologically driven.Homosexuality may be biologically driven, it may be nurture, it may be a choice, and it may be constellation of all those factors.
I don't think polygamy or child brides should be legal so I wouldn't being looking for research that it is okay. Go right ahead and look for those studies.
**So, some discrimination is ok then?**
I think adultery is morally and ethically wrong but I don't think it should be illegal. I have no problem with men losing money for adultery in a divorce . if your wife consents for you not to be monogamous she wouldn't divorce you if you cheated.
**So those that act in a manner that you find morally unacceptable should face punitive acts by the legal system?**
If I honestly believed that baring Gay Boy Scout troop leads would protect kids from sexual assault I wouldn't have a problem with it. I think that kids are much more at risk from someone the adults around them trust and someone who has private access to them. You could be protecting your kid from the bogeyman and the problem would be your next door neighbor.
**Would a Boy Scout troop leader that engaged in heterosexual wife-swapping, group sex and sadomasochistic bondage and domination be more or less acceptable to you than a openly gay troop leader? If not, why not?**
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"I don't care whether homosexuality is a choice or not. I still don't think you should discriminate against people for it."
Rachel, forgive my martian linearity :wink: but this is not the question presented. The question presented is whether
a) the Consitution compels the State to make it a crime or civil offense
b) the State should make it a crime or civil offense
"If I honestly believed that baring Gay Boy Scout troop leads would protect kids from sexual assault I wouldn't have a problem with it. I think that kids are much more at risk from someone the adults around them trust and someone who has private access to them."
Right. And I am not going to give young somewhat older hetero males private access to my daughter as she gets older, and ditto gay males with my son. It makes perfect sense to me that if I want to allow my son to go on a Cub Scout/Boy Scout camping trip (the epitome of private access-- while dependant upon for safety to boot!) that I don't want a gay man as part of it.
There's other points you've made to which I would like to respond, but don't have the time at the moment.
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CCP I certainly didn't count all the rights married couples have compared to non-married couples' It is likely they were very generous in how they counted.
Another huge lack between partnership and marriage is immigrations rights for your partner. I have a friend that was thinking of leaving the country to be with his boyfriend but thankfully the boyfriend got a green card.
GM,
**So, some discrimination is ok then?**
I guess it has do with my definition of marriage. I think marriage is life partnership between two people. A child is not yet old enough to consent and polygamous marriage is not an equal partnership
.
GM
**So those that act in a manner that you find morally unacceptable should face punitive acts by the legal system?**
It has nothing to do with my finding it morally unacceptable. If a man or a woman makes a partnership with a spouse and he/ she does not live up to his/her end of it he/she should face punitive acts by the legal system in case of divorce especially in something so basic to the marriage as sexual fidelity.
GM
**Would a Boy Scout troop leader that engaged in heterosexual wife-swapping, group sex and sadomasochistic bondage and domination be more or less acceptable to you than a openly gay troop leader? If not, why not?**
I don't see the connection between homosexual sex and what you mentioned. Do you see the connection between those things and interracial marriage because that use to be common. http://www.vtfreetomarry.org/pfds/Arguments_Against_Interracial_Marriage_and_Equal_Marriage.pdf I personally have no interest in discussing the pros and cons of wife swapping, bondage, nambla, incest etc. If you think they are worth discussing go right ahead but I will not be participating.
Crafty_ Dog
Rachel, forgive my martian linearity wink but this is not the question presented. The question presented is whether
a) the Consitution compels the State to make it a crime or civil offense
b) the State should make it a crime or civil offense
A.I'm sorry -- I don't feel capable of answering that question
B. The short answer is yes for actions not thoughts ( sexual orientation should have the same protections for that we do for gender, age, disabilities, etc) but the long answer there would be exceptions. For example religious organizations should be able to discriminate. ( I didn't think that was a question I was avoiding -- I thought I had answered it ???
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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/23/europe/virgins.php?page=2
Sworn to virginity and living as men in Albania
By Dan Bilefsky
Monday, June 23, 2008
KRUJE, Albania: Pashe Keqi recalls the day nearly sixty years ago when she decided to become a man. She chopped off her long black curls, traded in her dress for her father's baggy trousers, armed herself with a hunting rifle and vowed to forsake marriage, children and sex.
Had she been born in Albania today, says the 78-year-old sworn virgin, who made an oath of celibacy in return for the right to live and rule her family as a man, she would choose womanhood.
"Back then, it was better to be a man because, before, a woman and an animal were considered the same thing," says Keqi, who has a bellowing baritone voice, sits with her legs open wide like a man and relishes downing shots of Raki and smoking cigarettes. "Now, Albanian women have equal rights with men and are even more powerful, and I think today it would be fun to be a woman."
Sworn virgins became the patriarchs of their families, with all the trappings of male authority, by swearing to remain virgins for the rest of their lives.
The ritual was a form of self-empowerment for rural women living in a desperately poor and macho country that was cut off from mainstream Europe for decades under a Stalinist dictatorship. But in Albania today, with Internet dating and MTV, the custom is all but disappearing. Girls no longer want to become boys.
The tradition of the sworn virgin can be traced to the Kanun of Leke Dukagjini, a code of conduct that has been passed on orally among the clans of northern Albania for more than five centuries. Under the Kanun, the role of women is severely circumscribed: Take care of children and maintain the home. While a woman's life is worth half that of a man, a virgin's value is the same - 12 oxen.
The sworn virgin was born of social necessity in an agrarian region plagued by war and death. If the patriarch of the family died with no male heirs, unmarried women in the family could find themselves alone and powerless. By taking an oath of virginity, women could take on the role of men as head of the family, carry a weapon, own property and move freely.
They dress like men, adopt a male swagger and spend their lives in the company of other men.
Some also took the vow as a means to avoid an arranged marriage. Still others became sworn virgins to express their autonomy. Some who regretted the sacrifice transformed themselves back into women and married later in life.
"Stripping off their sexuality by pledging to remain virgins was a way for these women in a male-dominated, segregated society to engage in public life," says Linda Gusia, a professor of gender studies at the University of Pristina in Kosovo. "It was about surviving in a world where men rule."
Taking an oath to become a sworn virgin should not, sociologists say, be equated with homosexuality, which has long been taboo in rural Albania. Nor do the women have sex changes. In the northern Albanian countryside, about 40 sworn virgins remain, according to researchers studying the custom.
Known in her household as the "Pasha," Keqi says she decided to become the man of the house at age 20 when her father was murdered in a blood feud. Her remaining four brothers opposed the communist regime of Enver Hoxha, who ruled Albania for 40 years until his death in 1985, and they were either imprisoned or killed. Becoming a man, she said, was the only way to support her mother, her four sisters-in-law and their five children.
Lording it over her large family in her modest house in Tirana, where her nieces served her brandy while she barked out orders, Keqi said living as a man had allowed her freedom denied other women. She could work construction jobs and pray at the mosque alongside other men. Even today, her nephews and nieces said, they would not dare marry without their "uncle's" permission.
"I was totally free as a man because no one knew I was a woman," Keqi said. "I could go wherever I wanted to and no one would dare swear at me because I could beat them up. I was only with men. I don't know how to do women's talk. I am never scared." When she was recently hospitalized for an operation, she recalled, the other woman in her room was horrified to find herself sharing close quarters with a man and requested a move.
Keqi said that being a woman made her a more compassionate man. "If the other men were disrespecting a woman, I would tell them to stop." She said being deprived of a life of sexual intimacy was a necessary sacrifice. She did not miss having children, she added, because she was surrounded by her nieces and nephews. "Once I made up my mind 100 percent, I had the strength to never turn back."
Being the man of the house also made her responsible for avenging her father's death, she said, including the Kanun's edict that spilled blood must be met with spilled blood. When her father's killer was released from prison five years ago, by then a man of 80, Keqi said she ordered her 15 year-old nephew to shoot him. Then the family of the man took revenge and killed her nephew.
"I always dreamed of avenging my father's death. My brothers tried to, but did not succeed. Of course, I have regrets my nephew was killed. But if you kill me, I have to kill you." In Albania, a majority Muslim country, the Kanun is adhered to by both Muslims and Christians, though the Ottoman Turks and successive governments have all tried to limit its influence.
Albanian cultural historians said the cleaving to medieval customs long discarded elsewhere was a byproduct of the country's previous isolation. But they stressed that today, the traditional role of the Albanian woman was changing.
"The Albanian woman today is a sort of minister of economics, a minister of affection and a minister of interior who controls who does what," said Ilir Yzeiri, a critic who writes about Albanian folklore. "Today women in Albania are behind everything."
Some sworn virgins bemoan this female liberation. Diana Rakipi, 54, a security guard in the seaside city of Durres, in west Albania, who became a sworn virgin to take care of her nine sisters, said she looked back with nostalgia to the Hoxha era. During communist times, she served as a senior army officer, training women soldiers in combat. Now, she lamented, women did not know their place.
"Today women go out half naked to the disco and do not know their limits," said Rakipi, who has cropped hair and wears a military beret. "I was always treated my whole life as a man, always with respect. I can't clean, I can't iron, I can't cook. That is a woman's work."
But even in the remote mountains of Kruje, about 50 kilometers, or 30 miles, north of Tirana, where long dirt roads snake through olive groves, locals say the Kanun's influence on gender roles is disappearing. They said erosion of the traditional family, in which everyone once lived under the same roof, had altered women's position in society.
"Women and men are now almost the same," says Caca Fiqiri, whose aunt Qamile Stema, age 88, is the last sworn virgin remaining in her village. "We respect sworn virgins very much and consider them as men because of their great sacrifice. But there is no longer a stigma not to have a man of the house."
Yet there is no doubt who wears the trousers in the family's one-room stone house in Barganesh, their ancestral village. There, on a recent day, "uncle" Qamile was surrounded by her clan, dressed in a qeleshe, the traditional white cap of an Albanian man. Her only concession to femininity were pink flip-flops.
Pointing to an old black and white photo hanging in the entrance - showing a handsome young man in his prime - Stema said she took an oath of virginity at age 20, after her father died, and she was left the eldest of nine sisters.
After becoming a man, Stema said she could leave the house and chop wood with the other men. She carried a gun. At wedding parties, she sat with the men. When she talked to women, she recalled, they recoiled in shyness.
Stema said becoming a sworn virgin was a necessity, and a sacrifice. "The truth is I feel lonely sometimes. All my sisters have died, and I live alone. But I never wanted to marry. Some in my family tried to get me to change my clothes and wear dresses, but when they saw I had become a man, they left me alone."
Stema said she would die a virgin. Had she married, she joked, it would have been to a traditional Albanian woman. "I guess you could say I was partly a woman and partly a man, but of course I never did everything a man does," she said. "I liked my life as a man. I have no regrets."
Go to iht.com/europe to listen to commentary from Dan Bilefsky and view additional photographs of the sworn virgins who live in Albania.
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CCP I certainly didn't count all the rights married couples have compared to non-married couples' It is likely they were very generous in how they counted.
Another huge lack between partnership and marriage is immigrations rights for your partner. I have a friend that was thinking of leaving the country to be with his boyfriend but thankfully the boyfriend got a green card.
GM,
**So, some discrimination is ok then?**
I guess it has do with my definition of marriage. I think marriage is life partnership between two people. A child is not yet old enough to consent and polygamous marriage is not an equal partnership
***So, you are falling back to this nation's moral and legal definitions when it suits your purpose.***
.
GM
**So those that act in a manner that you find morally unacceptable should face punitive acts by the legal system?**
It has nothing to do with my finding it morally unacceptable. If a man or a woman makes a partnership with a spouse and he/ she does not live up to his/her end of it he/she should face punitive acts by the legal system in case of divorce especially in something so basic to the marriage as sexual fidelity.
***Again, when it suits your purpose then legal discrimination is acceptable, right?***
GM
**Would a Boy Scout troop leader that engaged in heterosexual wife-swapping, group sex and sadomasochistic bondage and domination be more or less acceptable to you than a openly gay troop leader? If not, why not?**
I don't see the connection between homosexual sex and what you mentioned. Do you see the connection between those things and interracial marriage because that use to be common. http://www.vtfreetomarry.org/pfds/Arguments_Against_Interracial_Marriage_and_Equal_Marriage.pdf I personally have no interest in discussing the pros and cons of wife swapping, bondage, nambla, incest etc. If you think they are worth discussing go right ahead but I will not be participating.
***Because you can't defend your point. This is why you won't defend it. Homosexual conduct is commonly defined as sexually deviant behavior in traditions judeo-christian morality, as are the other sexual acts that you don't want to defend. "Gay marriage" is imposed on us by judicial imperialism by activist judges because it doesn't win in the legislatures and ballot initiatives. Your core argument seems to be "It should be legal because I know some gay people and they are nice."***
Crafty_ Dog
Rachel, forgive my martian linearity wink but this is not the question presented. The question presented is whether
a) the Consitution compels the State to make it a crime or civil offense
b) the State should make it a crime or civil offense
A.I'm sorry -- I don't feel capable of answering that question
B. The short answer is yes for actions not thoughts ( sexual orientation should have the same protections for that we do for gender, age, disabilities, etc) but the long answer there would be exceptions. For example religious organizations should be able to discriminate. ( I didn't think that was a question I was avoiding -- I thought I had answered it ???
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In recent times, some islamic apologists have tried to market islam as sharing core ethics with judeo-christian morality and tried to introduce the "Abrahamic faiths" meme. This is exhibit A on why that is not true:
http://hotair.com/archives/2008/06/25/saudi-marriage-advice-try-waiting-a-few-years-before-deflowering-your-infant-child-bride/
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CRAFTY DOG:
Rachel, forgive my martian linearity wink but this is not the question presented. The question presented is whether
a) the Consitution compels the State to make it a crime or civil offense
RACHEL:
A. I'm sorry -- I don't feel capable of answering that question.
MARC /CD:
But you HAVE answered it- in the affirmative- when you supported the CA SCT's decision!
CRAFTY DOG
Rachel, forgive my martian linearity but this is not the question presented. The question presented is whether
, , ,
b) the State should make it a crime or civil offense
RACHEL. The short answer is yes for actions not thoughts ( sexual orientation should have the same protections for that we do for gender, age, disabilities, etc) but the long answer there would be exceptions. For example religious organizations should be able to discriminate. ( I didn't think that was a question I was avoiding -- I thought I had answered it)
MARC/CD:
Yes you have begun to "answer" it, but my point was to define the question presented. So, lets explore a bit further. You now say that religious organizations should have the right to follow their beliefs and discriminate. What about religious individuals? And, why should atheists have lesser rights?
Which brings us to the next question presented:
Since when called upon the point you are unwilling to say that the Constitution compels redefining marriage, and you say that discrimination should be illegal, how can you argue that the judiciary is the branch to carry this out over the expressly voted wishes of the people of California? Why is this not a matter for the political process? (Executive and Legislative, plebecite (sp?) )
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Regarding the Albanian story, the point seems to be as thoroughly glossed over as possible, but this can be described a Muslim custom too, yes?
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Crafty,
It's an innovation in Albania, not mainstream islam, but obviously arose out of sharia law's influence on gender roles in that culture.
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Exactly.
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GM and Marc,
I owe you both a reply but I am leaving on vacation early tomorrow :-D and I have not finished packing so it will be a couple of weeks.
Take Care,
Rachel
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Have a wonderful time-- looking forward to continuing the conversation when you return.
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Marc,
Thanks for your well wishes on my vacation it was wonderful. I will respond to your questions in a couple of days.
Gm,
My religious views ( Conservative Judaism) have everything to do with my view on Gay rights. In my opinion Judaism and Christianity have very different view points on sex and sexuality. For example Judaism has laws related to family purity that Christianity does not. I often feel that when people say Judeo/Christian they really mean Christian.
In Judaism breaking sabbath and not keeping kosher are worse than homosexuality . Do you think it should be illegal for me to eat cheeseburgers or go to a movie on a Friday night ? Also, In my admittedly limited knowledge of Christianity Jesus himself had nothing to say about homosexuality. Both Judaism and Christianity specifically mention sodomy and not homosexuality woman are not explicitly included. So if it was just religiously based shouldn't you just exclude male gay marriage. Do you think adultery should be illegal? Are you interested in some sort of Jewish or Christian Sharia?
My point is gay people are human beings( including family members and friends of mine) therefore they should be treated well.
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Marc,
Thanks for your well wishes on my vacation it was wonderful. I will respond to your questions in a couple of days.
Gm,
My religious views ( Conservative Judaism) have everything to do with my view on Gay rights. In my opinion Judaism and Christianity have very different view points on sex and sexuality. For example Judaism has laws related to family purity that Christianity does not. I often feel that when people say Judeo/Christian they really mean Christian.
**I would take a slightly different position than Dennis Prager, but I like his point of view on most topics.**
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Jewish World Review March 30, 2004 / 8 Nissan, 5764
What does 'Judeo-Christian' mean?
By Dennis prager
The uniqueness of America
http://www.jewishworldreview.com | The United States of America is the only country in history to have defined itself as Judeo-Christian. While the Western world has consisted of many Christian countries and consists today of many secular countries, only America has called itself Judeo-Christian. America is also unique in that it has always combined secular government with a society based on religious values.
But what does "Judeo-Christian" mean? We need to know. Along with the belief in liberty — as opposed to, for example, the European belief in equality, the Muslim belief in theocracy, and the Eastern belief in social conformity — Judeo-Christian values are what distinguish America from all other countries. That is why American coins feature these two messages: "In G-d we trust" and "Liberty."
Yet, for all its importance and its repeated mention, the term is not widely understood. It urgently needs to be because it is under ferocious assault, and if we do not understand it, we will be unable to defend it. And if we cannot defend it, America will become as amoral as France, Germany, Russia, et al.
First, Judeo-Christian America has differed from Christian countries in Europe in at least two important ways. One is that the Christians who founded America saw themselves as heirs to the Hebrew Bible, as much as to theirs. And even more importantly, they strongly identified with the Jews.
For example, Thomas Jefferson wanted the design of the seal of the United States to depict the Jews leaving Egypt. Just as the Hebrews left Egypt and its values, Americans left Europe and its values (if only those who admire Jefferson would continue to take his advice).
Founders and other early Americans probably studied Hebrew, the language of the Jewish Bible at least as much as Greek, the language of the New. Yale, founded in 1701, adopted a Hebrew insignia, and Hebrew was compulsory at Harvard until 1787. The words on the Liberty Bell, "Proclaim Liberty throughout all the land . . . ," are from the Torah. Vast numbers of Americans took Hebrew names — like Benjamin Franklin and Cotton Mather (kattan in Hebrew means "little one" or "younger").
The consequences included a strong Hebrew Bible view of the world — meaning, in part, a strong sense of fighting for earthly justice, an emphasis on laws, a belief in a judging, as well as a loving and forgiving, G-d, and a belief in the chosenness of the Jews which America identified with.
The significance of this belief in American chosenness cannot be overstated. It accounts for the mission that Americans have uniquely felt called to — to spread liberty in the world.
This sense of mission is why more Americans have died for the liberty of others than any other nation's soldiers.
It is why those who today most identify with the Judeo-Christian essence of America are more likely to believe in the moral worthiness of dying to liberate countries — not only Europe, but Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. That is why America stands alone in protecting two little countries threatened with extinction, Israel and Taiwan. That is why conservative Americans are more likely to believe in American exceptionalism — in not seeking, as President Bush put it, a "permission slip" from the United Nations, let alone from Europe.
The second meaning of Judeo-Christian is a belief in the biblical G-d of Israel, in His Ten Commandments and His biblical moral laws. It is a belief in universal, not relative, morality. It is a belief that America must answer morally to this G-d, not to the mortal, usually venal, governments of the world.
That is why those who most affirm Judeo-Christian values lead the fight against redefining marriage. We believe that a pillar of Judeo-Christian values is to encourage the man-woman sexual and marital ideal, and to provide children with the opportunity to benefit from the unique gifts that a man and a woman give a child, gifts that are never replicable by two men alone or two women.
That is why those who most affirm Judeo-Christian values are unmoved by the idea that the war in Iraq is moral if Germany, France, China and Russia say so, but immoral if they oppose it. We ask first what G-d and the Bible would say about liberating Iraq, not what Syria and other members of the U.N. Security Council say.
That is why those who most affirm Judeo-Christian values believe that war, while always tragic, is on more than a few occasions a moral duty. Nothing "Judeo" ever sanctioned pacifism. Of course, the Hebrew Prophet Isaiah yearned for the day that nations will beat their swords into plowshares. But another Hebrew Prophet, Joel, who is never cited by those who wish to read the secular value of pacifism into the Bible, said precisely the opposite: "Beat your plowshares into swords and your pruning hooks into spears. Let the weakling say, 'I am strong!'"
And that is why those who want Judeo-Christian values to disappear from American public life affirm multiculturalism, seek to remove mention of G-d from all public life, and make Christmas a private, not a national, holiday.
The battle over whether America remains Judeo-Christian or becomes secular like Europe is what this, the Second American Civil War, is about.
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In Judaism breaking sabbath and not keeping kosher are worse than homosexuality . Do you think it should be illegal for me to eat cheeseburgers or go to a movie on a Friday night ?
**Nope, just as you are free to keep kosher, you are free not to keep kosher in this country.**
Also, In my admittedly limited knowledge of Christianity Jesus himself had nothing to say about homosexuality. Both Judaism and Christianity specifically mention sodomy and not homosexuality woman are not explicitly included. So if it was just religiously based shouldn't you just exclude male gay marriage. Do you think adultery should be illegal? Are you interested in some sort of Jewish or Christian Sharia?
**In my state, adultery is illegal, but not enforceable in the criminal justice system, a position I agree with. I like my government secular and constitutional, given that our collective moral paradigm is based on judeo-christian morality.**
My point is gay people are human beings( including family members and friends of mine) therefore they should be treated well.
**I've not seen anyone here deny the humanity of homosexuals, or advocating their mistreatment. My basic stance is I don't care what CONSENTING ADULTS do PRIVATELY. I do object to activist judges legislating from the bench.**
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Gays face same battle interracial couples fought
By Gail Mathabane
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2004-01-25-couples_x.htm
In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Bush hinted that a constitutional ban on gay marriage might be needed if "activist judges" continue to threaten the sanctity of marriage by "redefining marriage by court order."
Although I'm not gay, for 16 years I've been in a marriage that a group of nine "activist judges," led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, legalized in 1967. They did so by striking down the laws of 16 states, mostly in the South, that had considered marriages such as ours illegal, immoral and ungodly.
In other words, I'm white and my husband is black.
Before the U.S. Supreme Court delivered the landmark Loving decision, interracial couples were in the same boat that same-sex couples are in today. They were vilified, persecuted and forbidden to marry. Interracial marriage was considered a felony punishable by five years in a state penitentiary.
Critics of gay marriage point to polls that seem to support their position. In a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll last month, 65% said they oppose same-sex marriage. But mass opinion should not dictate judicial decisions. In 1948, when California became the first state to strike down a ban on interracial marriage, nine out of 10 Americans opposed such unions.
'Loving vs. Virginia'
In the Loving case, a Virginia judge had called for the imprisonment of Mildred Jeter, an African-American woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, after they were legally married in the District of Columbia and moved to Virginia, where their marriage was considered a felony.
The judge's ruling had religious overtones similar to those heard in the arguments of today's critics of same-sex marriage: God created the races and placed them on separate continents. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for them to mix.
On Wednesday, the Ohio Senate approved one of the nation's most sweeping measures against gay marriage. The bill, which passed 18-15, bars unmarried state employees — whether heterosexual or homosexual — from receiving benefits for domestic partners.
Ohio legislators passed the bill on the heels of a landmark ruling last November by Massachusetts' highest court granting gay couples the right to marry under the state's constitution. The court gave the Massachusetts Legislature 180 days to change state laws to make same-sex marriages possible.
Like interracial marriages, same-sex marriages are bound to become legal sooner or later, especially since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down state same-sex sodomy laws last June and California recently adopted a domestic partnership law that will give same-sex couples a status similar to marriage when it takes effect next year.
Difficult challenge ahead
In some ways, however, advocates of same-sex marriage face a tougher challenge than did advocates of interracial marriage. The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act and similar state-specific laws defining marriage strictly as a union between a man and a woman are on the books in 37 states; laws against interracial marriages were on the books primarily in the South.
Laws usually change long before public attitudes do. After I got married, a well-meaning North Carolina woman told me that "somewhere in the Bible" it says blacks and whites are not supposed to love each other "because they're different species." I responded that as a minister's daughter, I was quite familiar with the Bible and believed that God loves us all — regardless of race, creed or sexual orientation — and wants us to have happy marriages with faithful spouses of our own choosing.
Some conservatives argue that the government should keep its nose out of people's private lives. I agree. The government should have no role in dictating whether two individuals can marry. Gay marriage, like interracial marriage, is not a threat to the sanctity of marriage and will not upend America's social structure.
The Supreme Court's Loving decision stated that marriage is one of the "vital personal rights" protected under the 14th Amendment. It is time these rights were extended to same-sex couples so they can enjoy the many emotional, financial and social benefits offered by legalized marriage.
Gail Mathabane, a journalist, is the co-author of Love in Black and White: The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo.
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**I've not seen anyone here deny the humanity of homosexuals, or advocating their mistreatment. My basic stance is I don't care what CONSENTING ADULTS do PRIVATELY. I do object to activist judges legislating from the bench.**[/b]
I think not allowing someone who is gay the right to marry the person they love is mistreatment. How Do you and Dennis Prager decide what part of bible should be law and what part of the bible shouldn't?
If I was writing laws I would be more inspired by Rabbi Hillel “What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah. All the Rest is Commentary. Now go, and study " than "Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind it is abomination" Leviticus 18:22
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CRAFTY DOG:
Yes you have begun to "answer" it, but my point was to define the question presented. So, lets explore a bit further. You now say that religious organizations should have the right to follow their beliefs and discriminate. What about religious individuals? And, why should atheists have lesser rights?
I think organizations religious or atheist etc should have the right to hire people who believe in their mission and not hire people who don't. I see that as an organizational right not the right of a particular person. A Christian working for lets say BOA should not have the right to not hire an atheist just because they don't like atheists or the other way around. I do see churches/ other religious organizations having historically more rights than other groups and it doesn't particularly bother me because of the importance of religious freedom in this country.
CRAFTY DOG:
Which brings us to the next question presented:
Since when called upon the point you are unwilling to say that the Constitution compels redefining marriage, and you say that discrimination should be illegal, how can you argue that the judiciary is the branch to carry this out over the expressly voted wishes of the people of California? Why is this not a matter for the political process? (Executive and Legislative, plebecite (sp?) )
In my opinion discrimination should be illegal. The question being is that what the CA State Constitution says . I don't fell able to interpret the California State Constitution and various case laws. There are obviously lawyers and judges on both sides of the issue.
If according to the CA State constitution or case law etc discrimination is illegal it is a matter for judges not popular vote.
Hopefully Gay Marriage will pass by plebiscite in November. It on the ballot is CA correct ?
I had to look this up so I will share with others
plebiscite --- A direct vote in which the entire electorate is invited to accept or refuse a proposal
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/world/middleeast/29marriage.html?ex=1372392000&en=7915acb07161faf6&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
June 29, 2008
Tiny Voices Defy Child Marriage in Yemen
By ROBERT F. WORTH
JIBLA, Yemen — One morning last month, Arwa Abdu Muhammad Ali walked out of her husband’s house here and ran to a local hospital, where she complained that he had been beating and sexually abusing her for eight months.
That alone would be surprising in Yemen, a deeply conservative Arab society where family disputes tend to be solved privately. What made it even more unusual was that Arwa was 9 years old.
Within days, Arwa — a tiny, delicate-featured girl — had become a celebrity in Yemen, where child marriage is common but has rarely been exposed in public. She was the second child bride to come forward in less than a month; in April, a 10-year-old named Nujood Ali had gone by herself to a courthouse to demand a divorce, generating a landmark legal case.
Together, the two girls’ stories have helped spur a movement to put an end to child marriage, which is increasingly seen as a crucial part of the cycle of poverty in Yemen and other third world countries. Pulled out of school and forced to have children before their bodies are ready, many rural Yemeni women end up illiterate and with serious health problems. Their babies are often stunted, too.
The average age of marriage in Yemen’s rural areas is 12 to 13, a recent study by Sana University researchers found. The country, at the southern corner of the Arabian Peninsula, has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world.
“This is the first shout,” said Shada Nasser, a human rights lawyer who met Nujood, the 10-year-old, after she arrived at the courthouse to demand a divorce. Ms. Nasser decided instantly to take her case. “All other early marriage cases have been dealt with by tribal sheiks, and the girl never had any choice.”
But despite a rising tide of outrage, the fight against the practice is not easy. Hard-line Islamic conservatives, whose influence has grown enormously in the past two decades, defend it, pointing to the Prophet Muhammad’s marriage to a 9-year-old. Child marriage is deeply rooted in local custom here, and even enshrined in an old tribal expression: “Give me a girl of 8, and I can give you a guarantee” for a good marriage.
“Voices are rising in society against this phenomenon and its catastrophes,” said Shawki al-Qadhi, an imam and opposition member in Parliament who has tried unsuccessfully to muster support for a legal ban on child marriage in Yemen in the past. “But despite rejections of it by many people and some religious scholars, it continues.”
The issue first arose because of Nujood, a bright-eyed girl barely four feet tall. Her ordeal began in February, when her father took her from Sana, the Yemeni capital, to his home village for the wedding. She was given almost no warning.
“I was very frightened and worried,” Nujood recalled, speaking in a soft, childlike voice as she sat cross-legged on the floor in her family’s bare three-room home in a slum not far from Sana’s airport. “I wanted to go home.”
As she told her story, Nujood gradually gained confidence, smiling shyly as if she were struggling to hold back laughter. Later, she removed her veil, revealing her shoulder-length brown hair.
The trouble started on the first night, when her 30-year-old husband, Faez Ali Thamer, took off her clothes as soon as the light was out. She ran crying from the room, but he caught her, brought her back and forced himself on her. Later, he beat her as well.
“I hated life with him,” she said, staring at the ground in front of her. The wedding came so quickly that no one bothered to tell her how women become pregnant, or what a wife’s role is, she added.
Her father, Ali Muhammad al-Ahdal, said he had agreed to the marriage because two of Nujood’s older sisters had been kidnapped and forcibly married, with one of them ending up in jail. Mr. Ahdal said he had feared the same thing would happen to Nujood, and early marriage had seemed a better alternative.
A gaunt, broken-looking man, Mr. Ahdal once worked as a street sweeper. Now he and his family beg for a living. He has 16 children by two women.
Poverty is one reason so many Yemeni families marry their children off early. Another is the fear of girls being carried off and married by force. But most important are cultural tradition and the belief that a young virginal bride can best be shaped into a dutiful wife, according to comprehensive study of early marriage published by Sana University in 2006.
Nujood complained repeatedly to her husband’s relatives and later to her own parents after the couple moved back to their house in Sana. But they said they could do nothing. To break a marriage would expose the family to shame. Finally, her uncle told her to go to court. On April 2, she said, she walked out of the house by herself and hailed a taxi.
It was the first time she had traveled anywhere alone, Nujood recalled, and she was frightened. On arriving at the courthouse, she was told the judge was busy, so she sat on a bench and waited. Suddenly he was standing over her, imposing in his dark robes. “You’re married?” he said, with shock in his voice.
Right away, he invited her to spend the night at his family’s house, she said, since court sessions were already over for the day. There, she spent hours watching television, something she had never known in her family’s slum apartment, which lacks even running water.
When Nujood’s case was called the next Sunday, the courtroom was crowded with reporters and photographers, alerted by her lawyer. Her father and husband were also there; the judge had jailed them the night before to ensure that they would appear in court. (Both were released the next day.) “Do you want a separation, or a permanent divorce?” the judge, Muhammad al-Qadhi, asked the girl, after hearing her testimony and that of her father and her husband.
“I want a permanent divorce,” she replied, without hesitation. The judge granted it.
Afterward, Ms. Nasser, the lawyer, took Nujood to a celebratory party at the offices of a local newspaper, where she was showered with dolls and other toys. Nujood lived with her uncle for a time after the ruling but then insisted on returning to her father’s house. “I have forgiven him,” she said. She swears she will never marry again, and she wants to become a human rights lawyer, like Ms. Nasser, or perhaps a journalist.
Despite the victory, Ms. Nasser and other advocates say they are worried about the lack of legal means to fight early marriage. Nujood’s case only reached the court because she took such a wildly unusual step and happened on a sympathetic judge.
“We were lucky with this judge,” Ms. Nasser said. “Another judge might not have accepted her in court, and would have asked her father or brother to come instead,” and Nujood would probably still be married today.
A 1992 Yemeni law set the minimum legal age of marriage at 15. But in 1998 Parliament revised it, allowing girls to be married earlier as long as they did not move in with their husbands until they reached sexual maturity.
That change reflected the triumph of northern Yemen’s more conservative Islamic culture over the secular and Marxist south after North and South Yemen united in 1990. In South Yemen, the government had passed a law in 1979 setting the age of marriage at 16 for women and 18 for men. An extensive public awareness campaign, including songs and television spots with titles like “The Victimized Daughter of the Tribe” and “Traditions and Rituals” helped educate people about the dangers posed by early marriage and pregnancy.
But in Yemen, as in Afghanistan — another country where child marriage is common — the fight against Communism ended with the triumph of a hard-line form of Islam. After war broke out in 1994, Ali Abdullah Saleh, then North Yemen’s leader, sent jihadists to fight South Yemen. Critics say he has become politically indebted to conservative Islamists.
After Nujood’s case became public, Ms. Nasser said she received angry letters from conservative women denouncing her for her role. But she has also begun receiving calls about girls, some younger than Nujood, trying to escape their marriages.
One of them was Arwa, who was married last year at the age of 8 here in the ancient town of Jibla, four hours south of Sana. As with Nujood’s case, Arwa’s situation aroused a legal and social outrage.
Standing outside a relative’s house here, her hands clasped in front of her, Arwa described how surprised she was when her father arranged her marriage to a 35-year-old man eight months ago. Like Nujood, she did not know the facts of life, she said. The man raped and beat her.
Finally, after months of misery, she ran to a hospital. Employees there took her to a police station, she said. A local judge, on receiving her case, briefly jailed the judge who had approved the marriage contract. Arwa is living with relatives while her case awaits a resolution. But her relatives rarely let her out of the house, fearing that her husband, who has refused the judge’s demands that he appear in court, may take her again.
Asked what made her flee her husband after so many months, Arwa gazed up, an intense, defiant expression in her eyes.
“I thought about it,” she said in a very quiet but firm voice. “I thought about it.”
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In that the justification for the pedophilia is that Mohammed did it, I'm thinking that article about the brave little Yemeni girl belongs on one of the threads about Islam.
Concerning the gay marriage issue:
Marriage has always been defined as between a man and a woman. The laws that banned interracial marriage violated the equal protection clause of the US Constitution-- a black man could not marry a woman that a white man could and vice versa-- and as such were properly struck down.
Marriage has never been between two men or two women by definition. Furthermore the people of Califormia specifically voted to that effect. The CA Supreme Court simply imposed the personal political beliefs of a majority of its members. The initiative that presumably that will be on the ballot this fall will be to repeal this piece of judicial imperialism.
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http://uscode.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode01/usc_sec_01_00000007----000-.html
TITLE 1 > CHAPTER 1 > § 7
§ 7. Definition of “marriage” and “spouse”
In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word “marriage” means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word “spouse” refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Rachel, there is a biological definition of male and female. There is no clear biological definition of race. Marriage has always been defined as being a legal union between a single man and a single woman, who aren't close relatives.
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I posted the article about the Yemeni girls because I thought they were inspiring not necessary as criticism to Islam. Sadly getting married at 8 is not the wost thing that could happen to a girl/woman in an Islamic country. I can move it if you want.
Marriage has been changed before by allowing for divorce and the change in the status of woman going from property to a more or less equal partner that seems to me to be at least as big a change as allowing for two men or two woman to get married. At Birth the biological definition for male and female human beings is usually but not always clear.
I will probably take a break from the gay marriage topic for a little bit. I feel like we are starting to go in circles and no matter how many times you explain it to me I don't think I will see the light. Please have the last word.
Rachel
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"I posted the article about the Yemeni girls because I thought they were inspiring not necessary as criticism to Islam. Sadly getting married at 8 is not the wost thing that could happen to a girl/woman in an Islamic country. I can move it if you want."
Actually I was making a rhetorical point as I sometimes am known to do :-D
"Marriage has been changed before by allowing for divorce and the change in the status of woman going from property to a more or less equal partner that seems to me to be at least as big a change as allowing for two men or two woman to get married. , , ,"
I guessing that these changes were not held to constitutionally compelled. :-)
" I will probably take a break from the gay marriage topic for a little bit. I feel like we are starting to go in circles and no matter how many times you explain it to me I don't think I will see the light. Please have the last word."
Both wise and gracious of you-- thank you. I restate what I (and GM) have already said :lol:
I will have a real humdinger for this thread next week, , ,
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Sadly I may be the only one who finds these really entertaining but anyway
Nellie McKay - Mother of Pearl
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hU446HDtGv8
Feminists don't have a sense of humor
Target Women: Feeding Your F---ing Family
Sarah Haskins
http://current.com/items/89113716_target_women_feeding_your_f_ing_family
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Well, I got half way through the first one , , , :lol:
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Girls' math skills now equal boys'
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25836419/
Study finds no difference between boys and girls, even in high schools
The Associated Press
updated 2:23 p.m. CT, Thurs., July. 24, 2008
WASHINGTON - Sixteen years after Barbie dolls declared, "Math class is tough!" girls are proving that when it comes to math they are just as tough as boys.
In the largest study of its kind, girls measured up to boys in every grade, from second through 11th. The research was released Thursday in the journal Science.
Parents and teachers persist in thinking boys are simply better at math, said Janet Hyde, the University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher who led the study. And girls who grow up believing it wind up avoiding harder math classes.
"It keeps girls and women out of a lot of careers, particularly high-prestige, lucrative careers in science and technology," Hyde said.
That's changing, though slowly.
Women are now earning 48 percent of undergraduate college degrees in math; they still lag far behind in physics and engineering.
But in primary and secondary school, girls have caught up, with researchers attributing that advance to increasing numbers of girls taking advanced math classes such as calculus.
'Gender parity' in standardized tests
Hyde and her colleagues looked at annual math tests required by the No Child Left Behind education law in 2002. Ten states provided enough statistical information to review test scores by gender, allowing researchers to compare the performances of more than 7 million children.
The researchers found no difference in the scores of boys versus girls — not even in high school. Studies 20 years ago showed girls and boys did equally well on math in elementary school, but girls fell behind in high school.
"Girls have now achieved gender parity in performance on standardized math tests," Hyde said.
The stereotype that boys are better at math has been fueled, at least in part, by suggestions of biological differences in the way little boys and little girls learn. This idea is hotly disputed; Lawrence Summers, then the president of Harvard, was castigated in 2005 when he questioned the "intrinsic aptitude" of women for top-level math and science.
Joy Lee, a rising senior at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va., says she always felt confident about math, but remembers how it felt to walk into a science class full of boys. "Maybe I was a little bit apprehensive about being the only girl, but that didn't last for very long," said Lee, president of a school club that tries to get young girls interested in science and technology, along with engineering and math.
"I definitely do encourage other girls to pursue those interests and to not be scared to take those courses just because there are not very many girls or because they think they're not good enough to do it," Lee said.
More women in college
Still, while there are fewer women in science and technology, there are more women in college overall. To Hyde and her colleagues, that helps explain why girls consistently score lower on average on the SAT: More of them take the test, which is needed to get into college. The highest-performing students of both genders take the test, but more girls lower on the achievement scale take it, skewing the average.
For the class of 2007, the latest figures available, boys scored an average of 533 on the math section of the SAT, compared with 499 for girls.
On the ACT, another test on which girls lag slightly, the gender gap disappeared in Colorado and Illinois once state officials required all students to take the test.
As Hyde and her colleagues looked across the data for states' testing, they found something they didn't expect: In most states they reviewed, and at most grade levels, there weren't any questions that involved complex problem-solving, an ability needed to succeed in high levels of science and math. If tests don't assess these reasoning skills, they may not be taught, putting American students at a disadvantage to students in other countries with more challenging tests, the researchers said.
That might be a glaring omission, said Stephen Camarata, a Vanderbilt University professor who has researched the issue but was not involved in the study.
"We need to know that, if our measures aren't capturing some aspect of math that's important," Camarata said. "Then we can decide whether there's an actual male or female advantage."
'We can do a better job'
A panel of experts convened by the Education Department recommended that state tests be updated to emphasize critical thinking.
While some states already have fairly rigorous tests, "we can do a better job," said Kerri Briggs, the department's assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education.
"If we're going to be globally competitive, we need students who are able to do higher-level math skills," she said.
Back in 1992, Barbie stopped saying math was hard after Mattel received complaints from, among others, the American Association of University Women.
So far, while her current career choices include baby doctor and veterinarian — and Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, too — Barbie has not branched out into technology or engineering.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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R:
I knew you would see this and post it here :-D
TAC,
Marc
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Also, is the parity in scores between girls and boys math scores achieving parity due to girls scores increasing, boys scores decreasing or a combination of both? I tend to watch gender issues from the additional perspective of what has been happening to boys. I want to see both boys and girls in good shape and capable. There are some disturbing trends that I have mentioned in another post which I will reiterate here:
"THE BOYS PROJECT http://www.boysproject.net/
The mission of The Boys Project is to help young males develop their capabilities and reach the potential that their families and teachers know they have. The Boys Project seeks to accomplish for young men what the Girls Project so successfully accomplished for young women--- to increase academic skills, to increase college success, and to develop the confidence, drive, and determination to contribute to American society.
THE "BOY CRISIS"
Since the late 1970's, young women have soared in college attendance while young men have stagnated. Young men's literacy is declining. Many young men are disengaging from school. Young men are less likely to be valedictorians, to be on the honor roll, and to be active in organizations like student government. Young men are more likely to get D's and F's, to be suspended or expelled from school, to drop out of school, and to commit suicide.
We are losing young boys to a sense of failure that comes from schooling poorly adapted to their needs. We are losing adolescent males to the depression that comes from feeling neither needed nor respected. We are losing young men to life tracks that include neither college nor any other energetic endeavor.
A large, sullen, poorly educated group of men will not keep the nation vital in the twenty-first century. The nation needs the energy, initiative, and ambition of its young men as well as its young women. "
Some statistics about Boys that I think are important ...also from the Boys Project Website:
For every 100 girls that are conceived 115 boys are conceived.
http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-3840.html
For every 100 girl babies born there are 105 boy babies born.
http://www.census.gov/prod/2005pubs/06statab/vitstat.pdf
K-12 Education
For every 100 girls enrolled in nursery school there are 112 boys enrolled.
http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/school/cps2004.html
For every 100 girls enrolled in kindergarten there are 116 boys enrolled.
http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/school/cps2004.html
For every 100 girls enrolled in elementary grades there are 107 boys enrolled.
http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/school/cps2004.html
For every 100 girls enrolled in ninth grade there are 101 boys enrolled.
http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/school/cps2004.html
For every 100 girls enrolled in tenth grade there are 94 boys enrolled.
http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/school/cps2004.html
For every 100 girls enrolled in eleventh grade there are 109 boys enrolled.
http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/school/cps2004.html
For every 100 girls enrolled in twelfth grade there are 98 boys enrolled.
http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/school/cps2004.html
For every 100 girls enrolled in high school there are 100 boys enrolled.
http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/school/cps2004.html
For every 100 girls enrolled in gifted and talented programs in public elementary and secondary schools there are 94 boys enrolled.
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d04/tables/dt04_055.asp
For every 100 girls who graduate from high school 96 boys graduate
(NCES, unpublished tabulation.)
For every 100 girls suspended from public elementary and secondary schools 250 boys are suspended.
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d04/tables/dt04_144.asp
For every 100 girls expelled from public elementary and secondary schools 335 boys are expelled.
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d04/tables/dt04_144.asp
Special Education
For every 100 girls diagnosed with a special education disability 217 boys are diagnosed with a special education disability.
http://www.iteachilearn.com/uh/meisgeier/statsgov20gender.htm
For every 100 girls diagnosed with a learning disability 276 boys are diagnosed with a learning disability.
http://www.iteachilearn.com/uh/meisgeier/statsgov20gender.htm
For every 100 girls diagnosed with emotional disturbance 324 boys are diagnosed with emotional disturbance
http://www.iteachilearn.com/uh/meisgeier/statsgov20gender.htm
For every 100 girls diagnosed with a speech impairment 147 boys are similarly diagnosed.
http://www.iteachilearn.com/uh/meisgeier/statsgov20gender.htm
For every 100 girls diagnosed with mental retardation 138 boys are diagnosed as mentally retarded.
http://www.iteachilearn.com/uh/meisgeier/statsgov20gender.htm
For every 100 girls diagnosed with visual impairment 125 boys are visually impaired.
http://www.iteachilearn.com/uh/meisgeier/statsgov20gender.htm
For every 100 girls diagnosed with hearing impairment 108 boys are diagnosed as hearing impaired.
http://www.iteachilearn.com/uh/meisgeier/statsgov20gender.htm
For every 100 girls diagnosed with deafness 120 boys have deafness.
http://www.iteachilearn.com/uh/meisgeier/statsgov20gender.htm
For every 100 girls with orthopedic impairment 118 boys have orthopedic impairment.
http://www.iteachilearn.com/uh/meisgeier/statsgov20gender.htm
For every 100 girls with other health impairment 127 boys have other health impairment.
http://www.iteachilearn.com/uh/meisgeier/statsgov20gender.htm
For every 100 girls with multiple disabilities 189 boys have multiple disabilities.
http://www.iteachilearn.com/uh/meisgeier/statsgov20gender.htm
For every 100 girls that are deaf/blind 98 boys are deaf/blind.
http://www.iteachilearn.com/uh/meisgeier/statsgov20gender.htm
Higher Education
For every 100 women enrolled in college there are 77 men enrolled.
http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/school/cps2004.html
For every 100 women enrolled in the first year of college there are 79 men enrolled.
http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/school/cps2004.html
For every 100 women enrolled in the second year of college there are 71 men enrolled.
http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/school/cps2004.html
For every 100 women enrolled in the third year of college there are 75 men enrolled.
http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/school/cps2004.html
For every 100 women enrolled in the fourth year of college there are 94 men enrolled.
http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/school/cps2004.html
For every 100 women enrolled in the fifth year of college there are 65 men enrolled.
http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/school/cps2004.html
For every 100 women enrolled in the sixth year or more of college there are 78 men enrolled.
http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/school/cps2004.html
For every 100 women living in college dormitories there are 87 men living in college dorms.
http://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/phc-t26.html
For every 100 American women who earn an associateís degree from college 67 American men earn the same degree.
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d04/tables/dt04_262.asp
For every 100 American women who earn a bachelorís degree from college 73 American men earn a bachelorís degree.
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d04/tables/dt04_262.asp
For every 100 American women who earn a masterís degree from college 62 American men earn the same degree.
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d04/tables/dt04_265.asp
For every 100 American women who earn a first-professional degree 107 American men earn a first-professional degree.
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d04/tables/dt04_271.asp
For every 100 American women who earn a doctor's degree from college 92 American men earn the same degree.
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d04/tables/dt04_268.asp
Other Indicators
For every 100 females ages 15 to 19 that commit suicide 549 males in the same range kill themselves.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/dvs/LCWK1_2002.pdf
For every 100 females ages 20 to 24 that commit suicide 624 males of the same age kill themselves.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/dvs/LCWK1_2002.pdf
For every 100 girls ages 15 to 17 in correctional facilities there are 837 boys behind bars.
http://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/phc-t26.html
For every 100 women ages 18 to 21 in correctional facilities there are 1430 men behind bars.
http://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/phc-t26.html
For every 100 women ages 22 to 24 in correctional facilities there are 1448 men in correctional facilities.
http://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/phc-t26.html
For every 100 women living in military quarters there are 642 men living in military quarters.
http://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/phc-t26.html
For every 100 women ages 18 to 24 years living in emergency and transitional shelters there are 86 men living in similar shelters.
http://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/phc-t26.html
For every 100 women ages 18 to 24 years living in-group homes there are 166 men of the same age living in-group homes.
http://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/phc-t26.html
I believe that most of this information pertains to the USA.
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article4426139.ece
From The Times
July 30, 2008
Love, blackmail and rape – how al-Qaeda grooms women as ‘perfect weapons’
Deborah Haynes in Baladruz, Diyala
Read Deborah Haynes's blog: Inside Iraq
A woman pretending to be pregnant walks up to a hospital in one of Iraq’s most dangerous regions and blows herself up.
Minutes later a man, also laden with explosives, attacks the rescue workers who rushed to the scene in Diyala province, north of Baghdad. Thirty-two people are killed and 52 wounded.
The co-ordinated bombings that ripped through the town of Baladruz in May are one of twelve attacks involving thirteen women suicide bombers to strike Diyala so far this year – a huge jump, signalling a new tactic by insurgents. US officials suspect that al-Qaeda has built a network of cells that recruit women and turn them into killers.
Women are the perfect weapon in a country where it is frowned upon culturally for a man even to approach a woman without her husband or father in tow, let alone frisk her for weapons at one of the many checkpoints that are the bombers’ favourite targets. In addition, it is easy to hide a vest packed with explosives under the traditional Islamic robes worn by women in Iraq without drawing suspicion.
In total, there have been 24 attacks involving women suicide bombers since January, including four on Monday in Baghdad and the northern city of Kirkuk that left scores dead. Al-Qaeda is “a very adaptive enemy”, a US Special Forces captain based in Diyala said. “They will try to use whatever works best for them to attempt to exploit whatever political or cultural restrictions we have.”
In the past, al-Qaeda fighters have used mosques to hold meetings and hide weapons, knowing that the US military will not raid religious buildings. “Now they’ve adapted to try to use female suicide bombers.”
The military believes that al-Qaeda employs a variety of tactics to get women to become suicide bombers. Some are easy prey because their husband or children have been killed or detained by US forces, said Captain Matthew Shown, the intelligence officer for “Sabre Squadron”, 2nd Squadron, 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment, which is based in southeast Diyala.
Another method is for a member of al-Qaeda to marry a woman and then dishonour her in some way, such as letting someone else rape her. “This would leave her with no choice but to end her life,” Captain Shown, 34, said.
There are also reports of women being told that their husband or child will be killed unless they agree to become suicide bombers.
Eliminating the threat of female suicide attacks in Diyala is a priority for US and Iraqi forces, who began a large offensive yesterday across the province against al-Qaeda and pockets of Shia militias.
There have been a few successes. Last month Iraqi police arrested the alleged leader of the suicide cell that orchestrated the twin blasts on May 2 in Baladruz. Video footage of attacks on US forces was found at his home. Officers believe the material was used to indoctrinate female recruits.
The US military is also hiring women to stand alongside male guards at checkpoints to ensure that all women get a full body search.“It is not possible for males to search females. It is a cultural thing,” said Staff Sergeant David Schlicher, who works in civil affairs at Forward Operating Base Caldwell, a US camp in the middle of a much larger Iraqi army base in the desert in southeast Diyala. “So this closes that loophole.”
The woman guards will complement a workforce of about 80,000 men who are paid by the US military to protect their neighbourhood under a programme that encouraged many former Sunni insurgents to turn against al-Qaeda.
There are few female volunteers, however, just as there are not many women in the police and Army because it is not part of their culture.
The female bomb threat appears to be changing attitudes. In Baladruz, twenty-five women are due to start civilian guard duties this week, and an appeal has been made for another ten.
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http://www.city-journal.org/2008/eon0728hm.html
Heather Mac Donald
Math Is Harder for Girls
. . . and also, it seems, for the New York Times.
28 July 2008
The New York Times is determined to show that women are discriminated against in the sciences; too bad the facts say otherwise. A new study has “found that girls perform as well as boys on standardized math tests,” claims a July 25 article by Tamar Lewin—thus, the underrepresentation of women on science faculties must result from bias. Actually, the study, summarized in the July 25 issue of Science, shows something quite different: while boys’ and girls’ average scores are similar, boys outnumber girls among students in both the highest and the lowest score ranges. Either the Times is deliberately concealing the results of the study or its reporter cannot understand the most basic science reporting.
Lewin begins her piece with the mandatory mocking reference to former Harvard president Lawrence Summers’ suicidal speculations about why women are underrepresented on science and math faculties. She also manages to squeeze in a classic feminist trope for how our sexist society destroys girls’ innate abilities, invoking the infamous “talking Barbie doll [who] proclaimed that ‘math class is tough.’” Lewin implies that the new study blows Summers’ wide-ranging speculations on gender and math out of the water; all that holds women back from equal representation in MIT’s theoretical physics labs, it seems, is Mattel and other patriarchal marketers of gender myths.
On the contrary, Science’s analysis of math test scores only confirms the hypothesis that cost Summers his Harvard post: that boys are found more often than girls at the outer reaches of the bell curve of abstract reasoning ability. If you’re hoping to land a job in Harvard’s math department, you’d better not show up with average math scores; in fact, you’d better present scores at the absolute top of the range. And as studies have shown for decades, there are many more boys than girls in that empyrean realm. Unless science and math faculties start practicing the most grotesque and counterproductive gender discrimination, a skew in the sex of their professors will be inevitable, given the distribution of top-level cognitive skills. Likewise, boys will be and are overrepresented among math dunces—though the feminists never complain about the male math failure rate.
Lewin claims that the “researchers looked at the average of the test scores of all students, the performance of the most gifted children and the ability to solve complex math problems. They found, in every category, that girls did as well as boys.” This statement is simply wrong. Among white 11th-graders, there were twice as many boys as girls above the 99th percentile—that is, at the very top of the curve. (Asians, however, showed a very slight skew toward females above the 99th percentile, while there were too few Hispanics and blacks scoring above even the 95th percentile to compute their gender ratios.)
The Science researchers themselves try to downplay the significance of the two-to-one ratio for whites—the vast majority of students—on the grounds that it should produce a 67 percent to 33 percent disparity in male-to-female representation in math-dependent fields. Yet Ph.D. programs for engineering, they say, contain only about 15 percent women. Therefore, the authors conclude, “gender differences in math performance, even among high scorers, are insufficient to explain lopsided gender patterns in participation in some [science and math] fields.”
This reasoning is flawed, however, because the tests used in their study are pathetically easy compared with what would be required of engineering or other rigorous math-based Ph.D.s. The researchers got their data from math tests devised by individual states to fulfill their annual testing obligations under the federal No Child Left Behind act. NCLB has produced a mad rush to the bottom, as many states crafted easier and easier reading and math tests to show their federal overseers how well their schools are doing. The Science researchers analyzed the difficulty of those tests and found that virtually none required remotely complicated problem-solving abilities. That a gender difference at the highest percentiles shows up on tests pitched to such an elementary level of knowledge and skill suggests that on truly challenging tests, the gender difference at the top end of the distribution will be even greater. Indeed, between five and ten times as many boys as girls have been found to receive near-perfect scores on the math SATs among mathematically gifted adolescents, for example. Far from raising the presumption of gender bias among schools and colleges, the Science study strengthens a competing hypothesis: that the main drivers of success in scientific fields are aptitude and knowledge, in conjunction with personal choices about career and family that feminists refuse to acknowledge.
The same reality-denying feminists are itching to subject college science and math departments to gender quotas. They have already persuaded Congress to require university scientists to perform Title IX compliance reviews—a nightmare of bean-counting paperwork—covering everything from faculty composition to lab space. Misleading reporting like Lewin’s will only strengthen the movement to select cancer researchers and atomic engineers on the basis of their sex, not their abilities.
The Wall Street Journal, it should be noted, had no difficulty grasping the two main findings of the Science study: that “girls and boys have roughly the same average scores on state math tests,” as Keith J. Winstein reported on July 25, but that “boys more often excelled or failed.” That the New York Times, in an article over twice as long as the Journal’s, couldn’t manage to squeeze in a reference to the fact that boys outperformed girls at the top end of the curve should put its readers on notice: trust nothing you read here.
Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Her latest book, coauthored with Victor Davis Hanson and Steven Malanga, is The Immigration Solution.
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As I read the past few posts, including my own, I began to think about how "facts" and statistics are widely available these days and how it is not sufficient to produce large volumes of information in order to make a point. What is the point of the past few postings? Also when trying to figure out the truth amidst the piles and piles of second source information that abounds in the media...if I really want to know I generally always go to the source material upon which the information is based. To actually see the initial papers and to evaluate the methods directly is the only way to determine the efficacy of the secondary information that exists. Secondary information almost takes on the reliability level of heresay.
Christina Hoff Sommers wrote and important book called "Who Stole Feminism" where she returns to the source material and provides many examples of where the original source work is either inadequate or grossly miisquoted and yet false conclusions are widely disseminated throughout the media. This book really reminded me that you have to listen with a very critical mind to all things.
At any rate:
1. Rachel's post about girls achieving parity in math scores says something to the effect: "in this one recent study comparing math skills of girls and boys, the AVERAGE scores of girls and boys on certain fundamental skills tests that do not emphasize higher math skills very much are relatively equal. One implied fact is that this is different from before.
2. My post asked if the differences seen were due to boys average scores declining or girls increasing. I then went on to add additional statistical information from the census bureau comparing girls and boys across a variety of metrics. My implication is that there seems to be evidence that boys have significant problems that need to be addressed.
3. GM added that regardless of average scores in such tests, the spread of scores between girls and boys differs. So even if the average scores are the same, the spread of scores for boys is greater than for girls with more dunderheads but also more geniuses appearing at either end. This then would explain why there are still more boys in higher level mathematics and physics positions.
Have I summed this up correctly?
I need to check sources of this statement but it is true that in general there are fewer men in college and in graduate schools than women. Examining this in more detail seems to be important for many reasons. This goes above and beyond gender parity issues.
Personally I think that discussions around disparities between groups are interesting and useful but such information need not be divisive. For issues that I care about, I would rather keep trying to dig through the morass of secondary information to find original sources that drive the media hearsay.
What I want is to have all our kids in good shape. Gender is not an issue in this sense. Still it is useful to look at the differences between boys and girls so as to best provide for their needs.
Karsk
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Your summary of the recent discussion seems accurate to me.
I agree 100% that the trouble with so many things that so many people "know" is that they aren't so.
IMHO it is profoundly obvious that there are important differences between men and women. Notwithstanding this, the liberal- secualr humanist-PC-Democractic ideology seeks to impose parity in all areas via the coercive powers of the State.
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"Notwithstanding this, the liberal- secular humanist-PC-Democratic ideology seeks to impose parity in all areas via the coercive powers of the State."
Just out of curiosity, do you see such issues as a distinct and encompassing ideology? I do not in the sense that I might identify a "Fundamentalist Ideology" or a "Communist Ideology". Secular humanism ideology definitely extends throughout much of present day though and I think its expression is much more subtle. Is that ideology what you see as responsible for gender issues? In some ways I can see your point and particularly how governments can really muck things up however...
I need to think about this a bit. I think what troubles me about an ideological premise for such issues is that it always boils down to an us or them kind of package. I rarely fit into the supplied ideological packages. I can see people who adopt ways of thinking on both sides of the liberal/conservative fence that are ideologically based. I am not sure if you are presenting this way of thinking or not hence my question above.
What bothers me about any ideologically based thinking is that people abandon intelligent analysis in favor of just buying the whole package. Intelligent, thoughtful liberals have more in common with intelligent, thoughtful conservatives than either has with their ideological compatriots who just buy the whole program whatever it is.
In other words, any argument that is based on informal fallacies of logic or poor information bothers me. This is why I strongly believe in open discourse and freedom of speech and dislike PCness or any form of censure.
People tend to stop analyzing their own beliefs and thoughts way too early. This is a problem of education. For example, as a school teacher many moons ago, I would ask a question like "How does Natural Selection work?" and many student's responses would be one word game show answers like "DNA". In many classrooms kids actually manage to get away with such things with only a sigh and a head shake from the teacher. That to me is the beginning of ideologies and that peculiar kind of ignorance that can co-exist with lots and lots of facts.
I prefer an educational system that requires an intellectual "gathering of the pack" as a basis of combating ideologies of all sorts. Now wouldn't that be something?
Karsk
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Current mainstream feminist and/or post-modernist leftist thought teaches that sex/gender are just "constructs". To dare suggest that there are concrete differences in the male and female brain is very un-pc, despite the huge amount of neuroscience that demonstrates this to be the case.
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Current mainstream feminist and/or post-modernist leftist thought teaches that sex/gender are just "constructs". To dare suggest that there are concrete differences in the male and female brain is very un-pc, despite the huge amount of neuroscience that demonstrates this to be the case.
Yes, indeed. Just ask former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers.
Tom
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"I prefer an educational system that requires an intellectual "gathering of the pack" as a basis of combating ideologies of all sorts. Now wouldn't that be something?
Karsk"
ALL ideologies? Including the one upon this country was founded?
MD: "Notwithstanding this, the liberal- secular humanist-PC-Democratic ideology seeks to impose parity in all areas via the coercive powers of the State."
KARSK: "Just out of curiosity, do you see such issues as a distinct and encompassing ideology? I do not in the sense that I might identify a "Fundamentalist Ideology" or a "Communist Ideology". Secular humanism ideology definitely extends throughout much of present day thought and I think its expression is much more subtle. Is that ideology what you see as responsible for gender issues? In some ways I can see your point and particularly how governments can really muck things up however..."
How about this definition? "(T)he view that every nook and cranny of society should work together in spiritual union toward the same goals, overseen by the State. "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State." , , , No question about the role of government or its power (is) truly settled , , a "middle" or "third way" between capitalism and socialism , , , the State should be allowed to get away with anything, so long as it is for "good reasons". , , , It represents the triumph of Pragmatism in politics in that it recognizes no dogmatic boundaries to the scope of government power., , , (T)he federal government should use its power to do nice things wherever and whenever it can."
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"I prefer an educational system that requires an intellectual "gathering of the pack" as a basis of combating ideologies of all sorts. Now wouldn't that be something?
Karsk"
ALL ideologies? Including the one upon this country was founded?
This is a subject close to my heart.
The problem stems from the fact that there are so many different and conflicting claims to truth that it's hard to sort out genuine knowledge from opinion, religion, or propaganda. However, the act of separating knowledge from opinion or propaganda is the true mark of an educated person. It seems to me the goal should be to teach people how to think, as opposed to being told what to think. This could be achieved by acquainting students with the classics. I've seen high school literature books from the 1950s, and it stuns me how much education has been dumbed down in the last 50 years. I think it's a shame that the American education system does such a poor job educating students about the American Revolution. It's reduced it to "taxation without representation" and the Boston Tea Party. Students spend more time on the Civil War and slavery, but even that isn't done justice. It's unfortunate that you have to read a grad-student level book to find thoughtful and nuanced discussion about freedom. When I first read Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, I felt for the first time that I understood what America really meant. Why did it take that long? How many Americans live their whole life and never know, much less care? Is it possible to be ignorant and free?
Tom
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Crafty,
First response:
We probably have to define ideology more specifically or at least clarify what each of us means. When I refer to ideology or "being ideologically based" here, I mean specifically belief systems where the main justification for the belief is "that is what WE believe in". By definition, being ideologically based means that you first make a decision to believe a certain set of beliefs and THEN you go about justifying your beliefs and not the other way around.
The real definition of ideology is more broad than this. Wikipedias definition:
"An ideology is an organized collection of ideas. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things (compare Weltanschauung), as in common sense (see Ideology in everyday society below) and several philosophical tendencies (see Political ideologies), or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to all members of this society. The main purpose behind an ideology is to offer change in society through a normative thought process. Ideologies are systems of abstract thought (as opposed to mere ideation) applied to public matters and thus make this concept central to politics. Implicitly every political tendency entails an ideology whether or not it is propounded as an explicit system of thought."
So I am probably incorrect in using the term as I am using it....with a negative connotation. I like the way "being ideologically based" rolls off the tongue I guess.
I think that the ideology upon which the US was founded REQUIRES us to be responsible and intelligent individuals. What I grew up with was a requirement to look at our own beliefs directly and with a critical eye first before ever presuming to have the moral authority to judge someone else. So yeah, I think that we should constantly evaluate our own ideologies even to the point of starting over if necessary. First think for yourself and teach your children to think for yourself. THEN decide if you agree. Not the other way around. (Blindly agree then justify it with all manner of rationalization). I am not sure how well this concept is understood these days...
The Declaration of Independence actually requires us to evaluate our own behaviour and revolt if the government strays from the original concept. It requires us to be intelligent and critical of our own belief systems:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
Response to your second comment:
Where did you get that definition?
After thinking a bit and doing some reviewing I am pretty sure that your description of secular humanism is not accurate. My favorite quick and dirty source, Wikipedia states the following about secular humanism and this jives with what I remember from university:
"Secular humanism is a humanist philosophy that upholds reason, ethics and justice, and specifically rejects the supernatural and the spiritual as warrants of moral reflection and decision-making. Like other types of humanism, secular humanism is a life stance focusing on the way human beings can lead good and happy lives."
Secular humanism describes a world view with the following elements and principles:[2]
* Need to test beliefs – A conviction that dogmas, ideologies and traditions, whether religious, political or social, must be weighed and tested by each individual and not simply accepted on faith.
* Reason, evidence, scientific method – A commitment to the use of critical reason, factual evidence and scientific methods of inquiry, rather than faith and mysticism, in seeking solutions to human problems and answers to important human questions.
* Fulfillment, growth, creativity – A primary concern with fulfillment, growth and creativity for both the individual and humankind in general.
* Search for truth – A constant search for objective truth, with the understanding that new knowledge and experience constantly alter our imperfect perception of it.
* This life – A concern for this life and a commitment to making it meaningful through better understanding of ourselves, our history, our intellectual and artistic achievements, and the outlooks of those who differ from us.
* Ethics – A search for viable individual, social and political principles of ethical conduct, judging them on their ability to enhance human well-being and individual responsibility.
* Building a better world – A conviction that with reason, an open exchange of ideas, good will, and tolerance, progress can be made in building a better world for ourselves and our children.
A Secular Humanist Declaration was an argument for and statement of belief in Democratic Secular Humanism."
About religion and secular humanism: "Secular humanism is a broad philosophic position and not limited to be simply a statement about belief or non-belief in God. Accordingly, secular humanism can not be equated with nontheism, atheism, or agnosticism. Although many non-theists, atheists, and agnostics adhere to the tenets of secular humanism, this is not intrinsically the case.[5]"
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Just like any belief system, over time what starts out as being kinda simple, straightforward and reasonable gets morphed into something else if the critical mind is lulled into sleep. I think that you are referring to something that may have warped over time and got called secular humanism. But I know that modern psychology and counseling was strongly influenced by specific psychological theories that are probably more pertinent here. One was behavioral psychology (Skinner). Another was Humanistic psychology (Carl Rogers). Skinner believed that all behaviour could be explained as a function of stimulus, response and conditioning. Rogers espoused a way of counseling that was in some ways a reaction to Behaviorism and the prior psychoanalytic theory of Freud. Both eroded the idea that behaviour was built into us.
From Wikipedia again:
"There are several factors which distinguish the Humanistic Approach [Rogerian] from other approaches within psychology, including the emphasis on subjective meaning, a rejection of determinism, and a concern for positive growth rather than pathology."
These concepts of subjective meaning and rejection of determinism (no biological basis for behaviour) infused themselves into many aspects of counseling and education. These ideas strongly influenced feminism as well which is what GM was referring to I think. At one point any suggestion that there was a biological basis to behaviour was met with censure and resistance to the point where proponents of a biological basis of behaviour were at risk. I was there in the university environment at that time and saw this repeatedly.
The belief in a relativistic truth and the malleability of behaviour to social influence still influences lots of places but this is not nearly as strong as it used to be. With improved methods of analyzing the brain and genetics, the biological basis of behaviour has gained in strength as well as a more eclectic approach to helping people that accounts for cultural backgrounds, spiritual metaphor, and even a return to psychoanalytic approach in the guise of what is called self psychology.
In conclusion I am trying to make several points:
1. I don't think that secular humanism is the source of what our are objecting to.
2. Psychological theory in the 60s, rather than secular humanism per se strongly influenced people in education and this in turn influenced university teaching and opened the door for radical feminist ideologies.
3. I did not mention this earlier but Feminism was also strongly influenced by some specific philosophers...Foucault comes to mind as one. Somewhere in the philosophy influenced is a link to Marxist thought. Its too late for me to find references regarding this tonight so I may need to clarify or rescind point 3 later. Your last quote reminds me a little of this which is why I am mentioning it now.
Karsk
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Tom,
I agree.
Karsk
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Woof Karsk:
My intention for the moment is to ruthlessly focus on these words of yours "combating ideologies of all sorts".
I disagree.
I believe that we receive from our Creator the inaleinable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit, not the guarantee, of happiness. To pursue happiness, we have freedom of choice. To make our choices meaningul, we have freedom of speech to inform us and we have separation of church and state. And to make sure that the State remembers, we have the right to keep and bear arms.
I came to this things through education and through thought. In my opinion these things are right and those ideologies that oppose these things are wrong.
Do you agree or disagree?
TAC,
Marc
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I agree.
Too many words in my previous response eh? I can do that!
My point is simply that we cannot exclude a constant self evaluation of our own beliefs and ideologies, holding them up to an even more rigorous standard than we do when evaluating others.
I think that people forget to do this. Over time they begin to react out of well worn habit to different positions. Formalized this lack of self evaluation (or evaluation of our own ideas) is what allows rigid thinking such as fundamentalism, bureaucratic mindsets, martial arts that are theoretically based rather than reality based and so on to creep into being.
I think I am talking about the Knightly virtue of Humility, which must be infused as a glue throughout all the other virtues.
________
When I referred to "education that combats ideologies of all sorts " I really meant that I want to see kids taught to debate, question, and think for themselves. The more people are given the skills that they need to think through complex ideas and beliefs on their own to come to a conclusion that is based on the bedrock of their own understanding and the less they just buy into an ideology the better. Its probably idealistic to think that everyone is actually capable of doing this. But with this as the fundamental principle, folks not so inclined to think deeply will still be existing in a milieu where this is the accepted thing to do.
The cool thing about the foundation of the United States is that it is based on premises that ground us firmly in such bedrock.
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http://www.zombietime.com/up_your_alley_2008/
CONTENT WARNING! SF street fair.
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K:
I know what your point is :lol: I am just being relentless on my point that there are things which are right and things which are wrong-- and that it right to teach them as such.
yip!
Marc/CD
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Winkler Gets Kids Back; UK Law to Allow 'Women Who Kill in Cold Blood to Escape Murder Charge'
August 4th, 2008 by Glenn Sacks
Glenn's E-Newsletter/Week in Review, August 5, 2008
glennsacks.com
Mary Winkler--who shot her husband in the back and then refused to aid him or call 911 as he slowly bled to death for 20 minutes--walked away a free woman last year after serving a farcically brief "sentence" for her crimes.
Mary Winkler’s claims of abuse were largely uncorroborated during the trial. According to the testimony from Matthew Winkler's oldest daughter, Patricia, the dead father--who as he lay dying looked at his wife and asked "why?"--was a good man and did not abuse her mother.
Mary Winkler has been in a custody battle with Matthew Winkler's parents, who have been raising the three girls since the murder. The Winklers sought to terminate Mary Winkler's parental rights and adopt the girls, a position I've supported. Mary Winkler was granted supervised visits with her daughters last year. Now, sadly, she has gained back custody of the three girls, which is clearly not in the girls' best interests.
To learn more, see my recent blog post on it here, my co-authored column No child custody for husband-killer Mary Winkler (World Net Daily, 9/14/07), or click here.
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I will be posted over a few days some of my replies to the previous thread
Karsk,
I don't know for sure the answer to your question. I don't think so and I would like the difference in tests scores to because they are just testing everyone and more woman are taking math classes
Men are the top and bottom of IQ tests period =--- Do you feel superior now?
The article was about average skill in Math.
For better or worse, sex chromosomes are linked to human intelligence
by Ellen Ruppel Shell
Last January Harvard University president Lawrence Summers hypothesized that women may be innately less scientifically inclined than men. Not long after the ensuing uproar, researchers announced the sequencing of the human X chromosome. The project was hailed as a great leap forward in decoding the differences between men and women, at least from a biological perspective. While it did nothing to calm the maelstrom swirling around Summers, the new understanding of the chromosome revealed tantalizing clues to the role genes might play in shaping cognitive differences between the sexes. And while these differences seem to be largely to the female's advantage, permutations during the genetic recombination of the X chromosome may confer to a few men a substantial intellectual edge.
Considerations of this sort are mired in politics and sensationalism, but one fact is beyond dispute: Three hundred million years after parting ways in our earliest mammalian ancestors, the X and the Y chromosomes are very different genetic entities. The Y has been whittled down to genes governing a handful of functions, most entailing sperm production and other male-defining features. Meanwhile, the gene-rich X is the most intensely studied of the 23 chromosomes, largely because of its role in rendering men vulnerable to an estimated 300 genetic diseases and disorders associated with those mutations—from color blindness to muscular dystrophy to more than 200 brain disorders.
The sex chromosomes lay the foundation for human sexual difference, with women having two Xs, one from each parent, while men get an X from their mom and a Y from their dad. Only 54 of the 1,098 protein-coding genes on the X seem to have functional counterparts on the Y, a dichotomy that has led scientists to describe the Y chromosome as "eroded." This diminutive chromosome offers little protection against the slings and arrows of genetic happenstance. When an X-linked gene mutates in a woman, a backup gene on the second X chromosome can fill the gap. But when an X-linked gene mutation occurs in a man, his Y stands idly by, like an onlooker at a train wreck.
The brain seems particularly vulnerable to X-linked malfunction. Physician and human geneticist Horst Hameister and his group at the University of Ulm in Germany recently found that more than 21 percent of all brain disabilities map to X-linked mutations. "These genes must determine some component of intelligence if changes in them damage intelligence," Hameister says.
Gillian Turner, professor of medical genetics at the University of Newcastle in Australia, agrees that the X chromosome is a natural home for genes that mold the mind. "If you are thinking of getting a gene quickly distributed through a population, it makes sense to have it on the X," she says. "And no human trait has evolved faster through history than intelligence."
The X chromosome provides an unusual system for transmitting genes between sexes across generations. Fathers pass down nearly their entire complement of X-linked genes to their daughters, and sons get their X-linked genes from their mothers.
Although this pattern of inheritance leaves men vulnerable to a host of X-linked disorders, Hameister contends that it also positions them to reap the rewards of rare, beneficial X-linked mutations, which may explain why men cluster at the ends of the intelligence spectrum. "Females tend to do better overall on IQ tests; they average out at about 100, while men average about 99," Hameister says. "Also, more men are mentally retarded. But when you look at IQs at 135 and above, you see more men."
To understand his hypothesis, consider that during the formation of a woman's eggs, paternal and maternal X chromosomes recombine during meiosis. Now suppose a mother passes to her son an X chromosome carrying a gene or genes for superintelligence. While this genetic parcel would boost the son's brilliance, he could pass that X chromosome only to a daughter, where it could be diluted by the maternally derived X. The daughter, in turn, could pass on only a broken-up and remixed version to the fourth generation, due, again, to the recombination that occurs during meiosis. Odds are that the suite of genes for superintelligence wouldn't survive intact in the remix. "It's like winning the lottery," Hameister adds. "You wouldn't expect to win twice in one day, would you?"
The theory is controversial. Among its detractors is David Page, interim director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "Many claims have been made about gene enrichment on the X, and most look quite soft to me," he says. Nonetheless, he says that the attempt to link the enrichment of cognitive genes on the X to IQ differences "is a reasonable speculation."
Intelligence is a multifaceted quality that is unlikely to be traced to a single gene. Yet the link between gender and cognition is far too persistent for the public—or science—to ignore. Until recently sex differences in intelligence were thought to result chiefly from hormones and environment. New findings suggest genes can play a far more direct role. Working constructively with that insight will be a delicate challenge for the new millennium, one perhaps best avoided by college presidents
The Study" Math Is Harder for Girls"should have been called
" Small percentage of men better and worse than women in math" --- somehow it is just not as sexy as bashing women's math skills
If you want to talk about those who don't understand basic biology why not go after those who don't believe in evolution?
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Were you are getting your information about what mainstream feminists believe? Feminism is a pretty big umbrella and they don't make you recite a creed. Have you taken classes read feminist blogs etc?
There are some women who think gender is only a construct but that is not mainstream feminist belief.
It is the same nature/nurture argument all over again and the answer is both
Nature Only vs nurture only is not even an interesting question anymore. The interesting question is what combination of factors are the cause for gender etc ?
The definition of feminist is so broad it would probably include most of the people on the board. Don't worry I won't tell anyone. :-D
http://tomatonation.com/?p=677
Yes, You Are
feminism n (1895) 1 : the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes 2 : organized activity on behalf of women's rights and interests — feminist n or adj — feministic adj
Above, the dictionary definition of feminism — the entire dictionary definition of feminism. It is quite straightforward and concise. If you believe in, support, look fondly on, hope for, and/or work towards equality of the sexes, you are a feminist.
Yes, you are.
The definition of feminism does not ask for two forms of photo ID. It does not care what you look like. It does not care what color skin you have, or whether that skin is clear, or how much you weigh, or what you do with your hair. You can bite your nails, or you can get them done once a week. You can spend two hours on your makeup, or five minutes, or the time it takes to find a Chapstick without any lint sticking to it. You can rock a cord mini, or khakis, or a sari, and you can layer all three. The definition of feminism does not include a mandatory leg-hair check; wax on, wax off, whatever you want. If you believe in, support, look fondly on, hope for, and/or work towards equality of the sexes, you are a feminist.
Yes, you are.
The definition of feminism does not mention a membership fee or a graduated tax or "…unless you got your phone turned off by mistake." Rockefellers, the homeless, bad credit, no credit, no problem. If you believe in, support, look fondly on, hope for, and/or work towards equality of the sexes, you are a feminist.
Yes, you are.
The definition of feminism does not require a diploma or other proof of graduation. It is not reserved for those who teach women's studies classes, or to those who majored in women's studies, or to those who graduated from college, or to those who graduated from high school, or to those who graduated from Brownie to Girl Scout. It doesn't care if you went to Princeton or the school of hard knocks. You can have a PhD, or a GED, or a degree in mixology, or a library card, or all of the above, or none of the above. You don't have to write a twenty-page paper on Valerie Solanas's use of satire in The S.C.U.M. Manifesto, and if you do write it, you don't have to get better than a C-plus on it. You can really believe math is hard, or you can teach math. You don't have to take a test to get in. You don't have to speak English. If you believe in, support, look fondly on, hope for, and/or work towards equality of the sexes, you are a feminist.
Yes, you are.
The definition of feminism is not an insurance policy; it doesn't exclude anyone based on age. It doesn't have a "you must be this tall to ride the ride" sign on it anywhere. It doesn't specify how you get from place to place, so whether you use or a walker or a stroller or a skateboard or a carpool, if you believe in, support, look fondly on, hope for, and/or work towards equality of the sexes, you are a feminist.
Yes, you are.
The definition of feminism does not tell you how to vote or what to think. You can vote Republican or Libertarian or Socialist or "I like that guy's hair." You can bag voting entirely. You can believe whatever you like about child-care subsidies, drafting women, fiscal accountability, Anita Hill, environmental law, property taxes, Ann Coulter, interventionist politics, soft money, gay marriage, tort reform, decriminalization of marijuana, gun control, affirmative action, and why that pothole at the end of the street still isn't fixed. You can exist wherever on the choice continuum you feel comfortable. You can feel ambivalent about Hillary Clinton. You can like the ERA in theory, but dread getting drafted in practice. The definition does not stipulate any of that. The definition does not stipulate anything at all, except itself. If you believe in, support, look fondly on, hope for, and/or work towards equality of the sexes, you are a feminist.
Yes, you are.
The definition of feminism does not judge your lifestyle. You like girls, you like boys, doesn't matter. You eat meat, you don't eat meat, you don't eat meat or dairy, you don't eat fast food, doesn't matter. You can get married, and you can change your name or keep the one your parents gave you, doesn't matter. You can have kids, you can stay home with them or not, you can hate kids, doesn't matter. You can stay a virgin or you can boink everyone in sight, doesn't matter. It's not in the definition. If you believe in, support, look fondly on, hope for, and/or work towards equality of the sexes, you are a feminist.
Yes, you are.
Yes. You are. You are a feminist. If you believe in, support, look fondly on, hope for, and/or work towards equality of the sexes, you are a feminist. Period. It's more complicated than that — of course it is. And yet…it's exactly that simple. It has nothing to do with your sexual preference or your sense of humor or your fashion sense or your charitable donations, or what pronouns you use in official correspondence, or whether you think Andrea Dworkin is full of crap, or how often you read Bust or Ms. — or, actually, whether you've got a vagina. In the end, it's not about that. It is about political, economic, and social equality of the sexes, and it is about claiming that definition on its own terms, instead of qualifying it because you don't want anyone to think that you don't shave your pits. It is about saying that you are a feminist and just letting the statement sit there, instead of feeling a compulsion to modify it immediately with "but not, you know, that kind of feminist" because you don't want to come off all Angry Girl. It is about understanding that liking Oprah and Chanel doesn't make you a "bad" feminist — that only "liking" the wage gap makes you a "bad" feminist, because "bad" does not enter into the definition of feminism. It is about knowing that, if folks can't grab a dictionary and see for themselves that the entry for "feminism" doesn't say anything about hating men or chick flicks or any of that crap, it's their problem.
It is about knowing that a woman is the equal of a man in art, at work, and under the law, whether you say it out loud or not — but for God's sake start saying it out loud already. You are a feminist.
I am a feminist too. Look it up.
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Pointing out biologically based differences between men and women isn't bashing. On average, girls are much more skilled at language. They tend to speak younger, have larger vocabularies and demonstrate a greater sophistication in sentence structure. Speech pathologies are suffered by males to a much greater degree than by females. If I recall correctly, it's something like a 9 to 1 or 10 to 1 ratio. It isn't male bashing to point that out.
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I've read a lot of feminist writers and am familiar with the various "sects" of feminist ideology and have debated more than a few in academic settings.
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Equal is such a slippery word. 4+1=2+3 but they are not the same thing.
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Rachel:
What do you think of this sort of thing?
Marc
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WSJ
Anything but fairness
Shortly before it recessed, the House passed the inaptly named “Paycheck Fairness Act.” This bill so dramatically amends the Fair Pay Act of 1963 that it should be called “The Small Business Destruction Act.”
Under current law, it is permissible for an employer to give male and female employees different compensation so long as the difference is based on “a factor other than sex.” Not so under the scheme devised by House Democrats. Under the new law, an employer would be liable for any difference in pay between male and female employees, unless the employer can show that a “legitimate” business reason exists for the differential, and, furthermore, that no “alternative employment practice” could prevent the differential. Democrats don’t want the employer and the labor market to make compensation decisions. Instead, they prefer that plaintiffs’ lawyers, the courts and juries decide what compensation is proper.
It gets worse. This law applies to virtually all employers, even businesses with as few as two employees. Employers would be liable, even if they did not intend to discriminate. Moreover, they face unlimited compensatory and punitive damages. This legislation, which Pelosi calls a “common-sense” measure, is a dream come true for the radical feminists who think wrongly that all wage disparities between men and women are the result of sex discrimination. It’s also a boon for trial lawyers—and a nightmare for the rest of us. Thankfully, the bill faces substantial opposition in the Senate, and President George W. Bush has vowed a veto.
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Marc,
I don't think its drivel but it is honestly not high on the list of things I care about .I have mostly been ignoring all articles and blog post on this topic and I not going to start reading them now--sorry.
Bush is supposed to veto it anyway right? I really prefer not to comment on thing that I am less informed about ( at least in my opinion :-D) but anyway....
I don' think all pay inequity can be explained away by job choices,negotiation skills, etc. Most things are caused by a constellation of factors and I do believe sexism is a factor in pay inequity.
One of the things I would think would be very helpful is if companies were required by law to share salary information in way that could protect personal privacy. "Sunlight is the best disinfectant"
In terms of women( and men for that matter) being successful in in the work place good mentoring programs are very important. When I doing salary negotiation for my current job I was helped a lot by conversations with my older brother and my husband.
In my job search I have always made sure there are woman in upper management and that they promote from within.
Wage Gap currently increases as you get older so if that continues to be the case I might care more later.
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http://economicwoman.com/2008/07/29/the-math-wars/
If there is one figure who neatly divides feminism and economics, it is Larry Summers. The now ex-president of Harvard drew a great deal of criticism in 2005 after suggesting that women’s under-representation in science and engineering was due in part to differences in ability. Among most feminists, Summers’ name is synonymous with pseudoscientific sexism. But Summers is an economist, and many other economists seem to see him as something of an intellectual martyr.
This week, both sides of the debate have more or less claimed victory - and they are citing the same paper (gated), just published in Science. Compare Alex Tabarrok’s post at Marginal Revolution with Jessica Valenti’s post at Feministing. So how did this happen?
What the study actually says
The Feministing post, and most of the mainstream media’s coverage of the study, focus on its main finding: using 7 million students’ standardized tests scores from across the United States, Hyde et al have shown that the average girl is as good at math as the average boy. This holds for all ethnic groups, and for average students tackling difficult material as well as basic skills. This is an important finding, and I’m glad it’s getting some attention.
Most people who seriously argue that ability is at the root of men’s dominance in mathematical fields, however, are not talking about the average - they are talking about the variance. In layman’s terms, the variance measures how spread out data is, or how far most individuals are from the average. The Science study’s second finding is that the boys’ scores have a higher variance than the girls’ scores.
The studies’ authors note that the difference in variances is not very large, but as Tabarrok points out, it’s tough to discount when you focus on the very top of the distribution. In this study, if you look only at students in the 99th percentile of mathematical ability, white boys outnumber white girls two to one. (There is an imbalance among Asian and Pacific Islander children as well, though it is smaller, and there wasn’t enough data available for other ethnicities.)
In short, boys are more likely to be exceptionally bad at math, and more likely to be exceptionally good at math. Of course, we should ask what causes higher variance. It could be the product of nature or nurture.
What it means for women in economics
The Marginal Revolution comment thread has focused on this hypothetical:
If a particular specialty required mathematical skills at the 99th percentile, and the gender ratio is 2.0, we would expect 67% men in the occupation and 33% women. Yet today, for example, Ph.D. programs in engineering average only about 15% women.
First of all, I can’t believe that success in economics requires mathematical ability in the 99th percentile. Economics is not pure mathematics, and even if it was, getting through a Ph.D. program is more about perseverance than IQ. (And we know what hostile, sexist environments can do to perseverance.) I’d like to see some studies of mathematical ability among actual economics professors. I bet most wouldn’t be above the 90th percentile.
Second, notice that even in their example, undoubtedly more empirically challenging than economics, by this model the number of women in the profession should double. Fifteen per cent to 33 per cent is a significant gap. I’m reminded of debates over the wage gap, where 15 per cent becomes “insignificant” in some economists’ hands.
Third, let’s remember for a second that economics is a social science. Great economic theory draws on all sorts of skills, perspectives and experiences. To the extent that we want to answer questions about the real world, women’s perspectives are necessary.
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Marc-- Don't you think gender is something of a construct. Isn't that your argument against gay man adopting straight children?
I'm curious in what ways do you think men and woman should be treated differently?
GM,
It would be male bashing to imply that because men on average are less skilled at language they can't be good writers or great ones.
The article was titled in such to way to imply that Math is Hard for girls--- which is not true.
There are great women mathematicians who are very capable of higher level math.
http://www.agnesscott.edu/Lriddle/women/women.htm
http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/WOMEN/alpha.htm
http://womenshistory.about.com/od/sciencemath1/Mathematicians.htm
Don't you think it is possible that some women wouldn't take advance math classes or do as well on math tests because they and society believe woman are bad at math.
Don't you think it is possible that there are ways to increase women ( as well as keeping and increases men's ) participation in advanced math and science.
I am not necessary recommending quotas though I am a big fan of title 9
I am more interested in parents, teachers, and society encouraging both boys/men and girls/women to study both Shakespeare and advanced science
One of my favorite quotes about education is
Scott Buchanan
http://www.stjohnscollege.edu/about/donrag.shtml
"Under the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, have you persuaded yourself that there are knowledges and truths beyond your grasp, things that you simply cannot learn? Have you allowed adverse evidence to pile up and force you to conclude that you are not mathematical, not linguistic, not poetic, not scientific, not philosophical? If you have allowed this to happen, you have arbitrarily imposed limits on your intellectual freedom, and you have smothered the fires from which all other freedoms arise."
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Rachel, adding my two cents here - My mom is a sort of anti-feminist who earned a degree in Aeronautical Engineering and I noticed very few women in her graduating class from the Institute of Technology in the 1940s. She says it wasn't from discrimination but from lack of interest from the girls at the time. Thirty years later, my cousin's wife graduated from a technical college and she said they gave free tuition to get girls to go there. Regarding recent test scores, I find myself pulling for the girls as father of a daughter just entering high school.
Regarding gender differences and pay differences I don't have the answer but have these suggestions from a public policy point of view: 1) not all observed differences require a 'solution' and 2) not all solutions require government action.
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Marc-- Don't you think gender is something of a construct. Isn't that your argument against gay man adopting straight children?
I'm curious in what ways do you think men and woman should be treated differently?
GM,
It would be male bashing to imply that because men on average are less skilled at language they can't be good writers or great ones.
The article was titled in such to way to imply that Math is Hard for girls--- which is not true.
There are great women mathematicians who are very capable of higher level math.
**I can't cite the source, but if I recall correctly for every highly gifted female (in the realm of math) there are 8-10 males at the same percentile. Obviously in any population there are extremes at the ends of the spectrum. On average, males are bigger and stronger than females. This doesn't mean there aren't some women that are bigger and stronger than some men, but as group there is a discernable difference.**
http://www.agnesscott.edu/Lriddle/women/women.htm
http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/WOMEN/alpha.htm
http://womenshistory.about.com/od/sciencemath1/Mathematicians.htm
Don't you think it is possible that some women wouldn't take advance math classes or do as well on math tests because they and society believe woman are bad at math.
**It's very possible that it has some impact, though I doubt to the degree that it skews the statistics that dramatically.**
Don't you think it is possible that there are ways to increase women ( as well as keeping and increases men's ) participation in advanced math and science.
**As a nation we need to. If it weren't for the influx of immigration from east asia and the Indian subcontinent, we'd really be suffering in the tech sectors. Not near enough US citizens are getting undergrad and post grad degrees in the hard sciences.**
I am not necessary recommending quotas though I am a big fan of title 9
I am more interested in parents, teachers, and society encouraging both boys/men and girls/women to study both Shakespeare and advanced science
One of my favorite quotes about education is
Scott Buchanan
http://www.stjohnscollege.edu/about/donrag.shtml
"Under the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, have you persuaded yourself that there are knowledges and truths beyond your grasp, things that you simply cannot learn? Have you allowed adverse evidence to pile up and force you to conclude that you are not mathematical, not linguistic, not poetic, not scientific, not philosophical? If you have allowed this to happen, you have arbitrarily imposed limits on your intellectual freedom, and you have smothered the fires from which all other freedoms arise."
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My recollection of Larry Summers in his own words is that his questions had more to do with the long term choices of women being less likely to sacrifice family and personal life for decades or an entire career to reach the very top of their technical profession more than he was questioning their aptitude, ability or academic achievement.
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**Waiting for American feminists to get upset about this anytime now. Yup, anytime soon....** :roll:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-beauty17-2008aug17,0,6108880,full.story
Pakistani women burned by acid or fire rely on beauty of others
K.M. Chaudary / Associated Press
Saira Liaqat, 26, puts make up on a client at the Depilex beauty center in Lahore, Pakistan.
Women who say their husbands threw acid at them or burned them find help in becoming self-reliant through salon work.
From the Associated Press
1:14 PM PDT, August 16, 2008
LAHORE, PAKISTAN -- Saira Liaqat squints through her one good eye as she brushes a woman's hair. Her face, most of which the acid melted years ago, occasionally lights up with a smile. Her hands, largely undamaged, deftly handle the dark brown locks.
A few steps away in this popular beauty salon, Urooj Akbar diligently trims, cleans and paints clients' fingernails. Her face, severely scarred from the blaze that burned about 70% of her body, is somber. It's hard to tell if she's sad or if it's just the way she now looks.
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At work
"Every person wishes that he or she is beautiful," says Liaqat, 21. "But in my view, your face is not everything. Real beauty lies inside a person, not outside."
"They do it because the world demands it," Akbar, 28, says of clients. "For them, it's a necessity. For me, it isn't."
Liaqat and Akbar got into the beauty business in the eastern city of Lahore thanks to the Depilex Smileagain Foundation, an organization devoted to aiding women who have been burned in acid or other attacks.
About five years ago, Masarrat Misbah, head of Pakistan's well-known Depilex salon chain, was leaving work when a veiled woman approached and asked for her help. She was insistent, and soon, a flustered Misbah saw why.
When she removed her veil, Misbah felt faint. "I saw a girl who had no face."
The woman said her husband had thrown acid on her.
Misbah decided to place a small newspaper ad to see if others needed similar assistance.
Forty-two women and girls responded.
Misbah got in touch with Smileagain, an Italian nonprofit that has provided medical services to burn victims in other countries. She sought the help of Pakistani doctors. Perhaps the biggest challenge has been raising money for the cause, in particular to build a special hospital and refuge for burn victims in Pakistan.
Her organization has about 240 registered victims on its help list, 83 of whom are at various stages of treatment.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan found that in 2007, at least 33 women were burned in acid attacks, and 45 were set on fire. But the statistics are probably an undercount, since many cases go unreported out of fear.
The victims Misbah has helped need, on average, 25 to 30 surgical procedures over several years, but she soon realized that wasn't enough. Some, especially those who were outcasts in their families, had to be able to support themselves.
To her surprise, several told her they wanted to be beauticians.
"And I felt so sad," Misbah says. "Because beauty is all about faces and beautiful girls and skin."
She helped arrange for 10 women to train in a beauty course in Italy last year. Some have difficulty because their vision is weak or their hands too burned for intricate work. But several, including Liaqat and Akbar, are making their way in the field.
The salon in Lahore is not the usual beauty parlor. There are pictures of beautiful women on the walls -- all made up, with perfect, gleaming hair. But then there's a giant poster of a girl with half her face destroyed.
"HELP US bring back a smile to the face of these survivors," it says.
Working for the salon is a dream come true for Liaqat, whose mischievous smile is still intact and frequently on display. As a child she was obsessed with beauty. Once she burned some of her sister's hair off with a makeshift curling iron. She still wears lipstick.
Akbar, the more reserved one, also carries out many administrative and other tasks for the foundation. One of her duties is collecting newspaper clippings about acid and burn attacks on women.
Both say they are treated well by clients and colleagues, but Misbah says some clients have complained.
"They say that when we come to a beauty salon, we come with the expectation that we're going to be relaxed, in a different frame of mind," Misbah says. "If we come here and we see someone who has gone through so much pain and misery, so automatically that gives us that low feeling also. They have a point.
"At the same time, there are clients who take pride in asking these girls to give them a blow-dry, or getting a manicure or pedicure taken from them."
Sometimes they ask what happened.
According to Liaqat and a lawyer for her case, she was married in her teens, on paper, to a relative, but the families had agreed she wouldn't live with him until she finished school. Within months, though, the man started demanding she join him.
One day at the end of July 2003, he showed up at their house with a package. He asked her to get him some water. He followed her to the kitchen, and as she turned around with the water, she says, he doused her with the acid. It seared much of her face, blinded her right eye, and seriously weakened her left one.
Liaqat shakes her head when recalling how a few days before the incident she found a small pimple on her face and threw a fit.
After she was burned, her parents at first wouldn't let their daughter look at a mirror. But eventually she saw herself, and she's proud to say she didn't cry.
"Once we had a wedding in the family. I went there and all the girls were getting dressed and putting on makeup. So that time, I felt a pain in my heart," she says. "But I don't want to weaken myself with these thoughts."
Her husband is in prison as the attempted murder case against him proceeds. The two are still legally married.
Akbar says she found herself in an arranged marriage by age 22. Her husband grew increasingly possessive and abusive, she says. The two had a child.
About three years ago, Akbar says, he sprinkled kerosene oil on her as she slept and lighted it.
A picture taken shortly afterward shows how her face melted onto her shoulders, leaving her with no visible neck.
Akbar has not filed a case against her now ex-husband. She says she'll one day turn to the law, at least to get her daughter back.
Both women were reluctant for a reporter to contact their alleged attackers.
Liaqat and Akbar have undergone several surgeries and expect to face more. They say Misbah's foundation was critical to their present well- being.
"Mentally, I am at peace with myself," Akbar says. "The peace of mind I have now, I never had before. I suffered much more mental anguish in my married life."
Bushra Tareen, a regular client of Liaqat's, praises her work.
"I feel that her hands call me again and again," Tareen says. She adds that Liaqat and Akbar remind her of the injustices women face, and their ability to rise above them.
"When I see them, I want to be like them -- strong girls," she says.
Liaqat is grateful for having achieved her goal of being a beautician. She worries about her eyesight but is determined to succeed.
"I want to make a name for myself in this profession," she says.
Akbar plans to use her income one day to support her little girl, whom she has barely seen since the attack.
"I'm independent now, I stand on my own two feet," she says. "I have a job, I work, I earn. In fact, I'm living on my own . . . which isn't an easy thing to do for a woman in Pakistan, for a lone woman to survive."
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http://www.ansamed.info/en/news/ME03.@AM14281.html
TUNISIA: HOME VIOLENCE, 1 OF 5 MARRIED WOMEN ABUSED
(ANSAmed) - TUNIS, AUGUAT 12 - In Tunisia, which mostly takes into consideration the women's role in the active life among the Arab countries, it might seem controversial but the statistics are merciless: 20% of the married women are victims of violence on the part of their spouse. According to the statistics announced by daily Le Temps, many of them become disfigured, handicapped, receive psychological traumas and in various cases end up committing suicide. And all this, or almost all this, happens in silence between the home walls. For fear of further retaliation, and in order not to allow showing that the marriage has been ruined, due to a psychological and physical subjection which have lasted for centuries, such as that for example which requires that the wife should always walk two steps behind her husband. Feminist organisations have been leading for a long time a campaign to raise the awareness aimed at convincing the victims of this violence to at least trust them and the social workers. However, the fact that the first step has to be made by both spouses in the family remains unchanged. The law, obviously, also punishes this kind of violence. However, the feminists observe that the law is totally dissatisfying. Because if the victim intends to file a complaint, they must present a medical certificate issued by a public hospital certifying injures curable in 21 days. In case the prognosis results lower, the complaint will not be accepted. (ANSAmed).
2008-08-12 14:29
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**Waiting for American feminists to get upset about this anytime now. Yup, anytime soon....** :roll:
."
GM,
I’m very upset about violence against woman in other countries. It bothers me greatly. If you want to give a practical suggestion about how I could personally make it better I would be happy to follow it
How can I help those women in India and Tunisia? A huge piece of Save Darfur (widely supported by feminists everywhere) is about the raping of women.
However, I believe if you want to change the world you start with yourself, your family, your community and your country. I am also very involved with Israel but for me that is a family and community issue.
When I judge the US, I don’t judge the US according to the standards of other countries. My expectations are not that US be slightly better than the rest of the world. I expect the US to best it can be, period.
Just because the US treats women better than many other countries doesn’t mean that its treatment of woman is acceptable.
I don’t judge my civil liberties in the US by the civil liberties I would have in India and Tunisia. Why didn’t you mention this argument in the law enforcement thread, for example, we shouldn’t worry about our civil liberties in the US after all it is way better than Tunisia.
Here are Feministe’s 364 posts on international issues.
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/category/politics/international/
Here is salon's broadsheet international issues
http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/tag/international_womens_news/index.html
Here is the top link currently at Feministing:
http://www.feministing.com/
In Syrian Refuge, Women Find Barest Survival
http://womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/3698/context/cover/
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This kind of old. I posted it on my facebook page a couple of weeks ago but decided not to here because I wasn't sure anyone would write.
This post was also at shakesville.
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2008/07/28/urgent-action-for-kobra-najjar/
I received an an urgent email this morning from Tyla at Equality Now, informing me of Kobra Najjar’s desperate situation:
Equality Now is urgently concerned about Kobra Najjar, an Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning for adultery who lost her final appeal for amnesty. Iranian women’s rights activists working on her case report that Kobra has exhausted all domestic legal remedies and that her execution by stoning could happen any time.
Kobra is a victim of domestic violence who was forced into prostitution by her abusive husband in order to support his heroine addiction. He was murdered by one of Kobra’s “clients” who sympathized with her plight. Kobra has already served 8 years in prison as an accessory to her husband’s murder. The man who murdered her husband also served 8 years in prison and is now free after paying blood money and undergoing 100 lashes, while Kobra faces imminent stoning to death for adultery - the prostitution her husband forced upon her.
Equality Now is also concerned about recent reports of seven other women and one man, all accused of adultery sentenced to death by stoning, whose executions are also reported to be possible at any time. In Iran, adultery is the only crime punishable by stoning.
[. . .]
Please write to the Iranian officials below, calling for Kobra’s immediate release, the commutation of all sentences of death by stoning and the prohibition by law of all cruel, inhuman and degrading punishments in accordance with Iran’s obligations under the ICCPR. Urge the officials also to initiate a comprehensive review of the Civil and Penal Codes of Iran to remove all provisions that discriminate and perpetuate discrimination against women, including those regarding adultery and fornication, in accordance with Iran’s own constitutional provision for equality before the law.
Equality Now has all of the relevant contact information, some of which I have reproduced below the jump.
His Excellency Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi
Head of the Judiciary
c/o Ministry of Justice
Park-e Shahr
Teheran
Islamic Republic of Iran
Email: iripr@iranjudiciary.org, irjpr@iranjudiciary.com and info@dadgostary-tehran.ir
Phone: +98 21 22741002, +98 21 22741003, +98 21 22741004, +98 21 22741005
Equality Now notes that you may receive delivery problems from the above addresses, but to keep trying. They also ask that you contact the Iranian embassy in your country. A full database of Iranian embassies can be found here. Equality Now provides a partial list of embassies on their own website. Those most relevant to readers of this blog appear below:
United Kingdom: Embassy of Iran in London
Tel: 02072253000
Fax: 02075894440
United States: Interests Section of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Washington, D.C.
Tel: 202 9654990
Fax: 202 9651073
Canada: Embassy of Iran in Ottawa
Tel: 613 2354726 Ext 225
Fax: 613 2325712
Tyla noted in her email that “mmediate action by the feminist community could be a crucial element in saving Kobra Najjar’s life.” Please take action now — and if you are aware of other ways to help Kobra Najjar, let me know and I will add that information to the post.
Here is an update from equity now
http://equalitynow.org/english/actions/action_2902_en.html
STOP PRESS, 7 AUGUST 2008: It has been reported recently that the Iranian authorities have decided to halt the execution of stoning sentences pending a review of cases. Judiciary spokesman Ali Reza Jamshidi is said to have stated that four people currently sentenced to stoning will have their sentences commuted: two will have their sentences changed to 10 years imprisonment while two others will be lashed following judicial review. The identities of the four people have not been revealed.
When contacting the Iranian authorities, do acknowledge this development but please continue to write and urge them to release Kobra Najjar, commute all stoning sentences and remove all provisions that discriminate and perpetuate discrimination against women, including those regarding adultery. Stoning still remains a part of Iran’s Penal Code.
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August 22, 2008, 0:00 p.m.
Olympian Political Correctness
In all the Olympic hype, you won't hear about performance differences between Venus and Mars.
By Todd Gallagher
‘Can Jamaica’s Sprinters Fight Crime?” That’s the tongue-in-cheek headline of a recent Time magazine article celebrating the remarkable Olympics performances of track stars from that Caribbean nation. In the space of a few days, Usain Bolt smashed world records in the men’s 100 and 200 meters, while three Jamaican sprinters swept the medals in the women’s 100 meters.
Time’s question is amusing, but for me, the incredible accomplishments of the Jamaican track team call to mind another question that isn’t so funny to a lot of people — as I learned the hard way.
You see, I wrote a book in which I worked with professional athletes and Olympic medalists to settle a series of long-running sports debates. The questions I heard most often had to do with gender: How big is the gap between the top male and female athletes?
One of my initial findings was jarring: the women’s Olympic record in the 100 meters, set in 1988 by superstar Florence Griffith-Joyner, is virtually identical to the U.S. record for 14-year-old boys — also set in 1988, by the less heralded Curtis Johnson. The winning time of 2008 women’s gold medalist Shelly-Ann Fraser? Well over a tenth of a second slower than Johnson’s.
Nor is the 100 meters an aberration. In sport after sport, evidence shows that the top female professional athletes in the world are on par with the best American 14- and 15-year-old boys. Nearly every female Olympic record in speed, strength, and endurance events falls between the records set by the best American 14- and 15-year-old boys:
Speed/Endurance Record Times:
Distance Men’s Boys’ 14 Women’s Boys’ 15
100M 9.69 10.64 10.62 10.42
200M 19.30 21.49 21.34 20.97
400M 43.49 47.16 48.25 46.55
800M 1:42.58 1:55.9 1:53.43 1:51.03
1500M 3:32.07 4:04.1 3:53.96 3:51.5
5000M 13:05.59 15:46.8 14:40.79 14:32.8
10000M 27:05.10 32:48.0 30:17.49 31:43.2
Leaping Records (in meters):
Event Men’s Boys’ 14 Women’s Boys’ 15
High Jump 2.39 2.04 2.06 2.18
Long Jump 8.90 7.21 7.40 7.49
Pole Vault 5.95 4.72 4.91 5.33
Triple Jump 18.09 14.74 15.33 14.98
Direct competition between women and boys tends to confirm the gap: the women’s Olympic hockey team has lost to boys’ high school junior-varsity teams; the women’s Olympic soccer team has lost to club teams of 15-year-old boys, the Colorado Silver Bullets professional baseball team has lost to American Legion squads — the list goes on and on.
I was surprised that this information had never been disseminated widely, since the data I researched and the interviews I conducted didn’t take long to put together. Obviously, I’m not suggesting that any slob off the street could outrun Shelly-Ann Fraser; but if she can’t beat the time that a 14-year-old boy set 20 years ago, surely that fact should inform a number of gender-and-sports discussions: Has Title IX done enough to level the playing field for female athletes — or has it actually penalized male athletes? Should golfers like Michelle Wie receive sponsors’ exemptions to compete against men in PGA tournaments? Should Wimbledon award men and women tennis players the same prize money?
Experts in the field of gender differences in sports emphatically argue that men’s superior performance is due primarily to societal factors — if they’re even willing to concede men’s superior performance, that is.
For example, in October 2007, Eileen McDonagh of Northeastern University and Laura Pappano of Wellesley College published Playing with the Boys: Why Separate Is Not Equal in Sports. “The premise of this book, and our work,” McDonagh says, “is that sex segregation does not reflect sex differences between men and women, rather it constructs them.”
I laid out the results of my research for Pappano and asked why male athletes outpace female athletes starting at 14 and 15. She answered: “Women are told around that time that they are athletically inferior to men and that they should start acting like ladies. That’s why we see the boys making such stunning gains at that age and the girls begin to suffer.”
While no one can deny that societal factors play some role, the research makes it pretty clear that there was a simpler explanation for the gap: puberty. The Centers for Disease Control publishes growth charts for the U.S. population which reveal that boys hit their major growth spurt between the ages of 14 and 15 — precisely when the best boy athletes begin to outperform the top adult female athletes.
My interviews with female professionals and others in the world of women’s sports confirmed the importance of boys’ physical development at that age. Aaron Heifitz, the publicist for the U.S. national women’s soccer team, described how the women’s squad performs against the best youth club players in Southern California: “The boys’ 13s we can handle pretty consistently, but when the boys start really developing at 14, and especially 15, that’s when you start to see real separation and they pass even the best women’s players. They’re just bigger, stronger, and faster.”
Eileen McDonagh has suggested that gender differences don’t matter in skill-based games that don’t place a premium on size, strength, and speed — pointedly asking, during a speech at Wellesley, “Why on earth are pool and ping-pong sex segregated?” Here again, even a little research reveals that the best female performers can’t compete consistently with the best males. Ping-pong actually relies heavily on physical attributes, and the difference between male and female competitors is almost as severe as it is in tennis — where the 203rd-ranked male player soundly defeated both Serena and Venus Williams in separate exhibition sets (6-1 and 6-2, respectively). In pool, Jean Balukas — possibly the greatest female player of all time — finished in the middle of the pack in men’s events in the 1980s; and Jeanette “The Black Widow” Lee — formerly the world’s Number One female player — told me, “You would not believe the amount of men, in my world, who can wax me.”
Cathy Young, the author of Ceasefire: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality, suggests that that failure to discuss research findings openly and honestly reflects a larger feminist agenda of “bio-denial” to promote the idea that there are no natural differences between the genders. “There’s a whole establishment that’s invested in perpetuating the notion that there are not inborn differences between the genders athletically, and that any differences can only be attributable to sociological circumstances and societal oppression. They have a clear agenda to empower women through a distorted notion of equality but these people are saying things that are completely out of touch with biological reality.”
Kurt Fischer, director of the Mind, Brain, and Education Program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, has seen this firsthand. “I’ve been at faculty meetings where the notion that there are differences in the genders is ridiculed,” Fischer says. He adds, “[T]he first woman dean at Harvard was my dean when she got here, and when I would try to bring up studies that showed inborn gender differences she wouldn’t even allow it.”
Anyone who saw what happened to Harvard president Lawrence Summers — for even suggesting that there could be inborn gender differences — might conclude that challenging the claims of the Laura Pappanos of the world is an unnecessary headache. “When you have a large group of people with a vested interest in maintaining an agenda,” Fischer observes, “they’re going to find ways to attack anyone or anything that threatens their existence.”
The media have also obscured the facts in this debate. Young suggests a reason for this: “At most newspapers, Title IX is gospel at this point. And anything that could be seen as an argument against it is going to be ignored, attacked, or ridiculed.”
Professor Fischer was not surprised when I told him of my difficulties getting traction with my own data. “I have a colleague here in town that has a biologically based view of gender differences. She’s done a whole lot of research that shows fairly large, important differences between boys and girls in their socio-relationships at an early age. And she was prevented from publishing that at several points from people who just didn’t want to hear that point of view, regardless of the evidence.”
We almost certainly won’t hear anyone discussing controversial gender issues in all the hype surrounding the closing days of these Olympic Games. But maybe if we keep laying out the data in a calm and rational manner, we can advance the discussion beyond the biased, politically correct, opinionated nonsense that passes for serious intellectual debate on this subject.
— Todd Gallagher is the author of Andy Roddick Beat Me with a Frying Pan: Taking the Field with Pro Athletes and Olympic Legends to Settle Sports Fans’ Greatest Debates.
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ODlmNmJhM2JhMGZmOWQxOTMzMGE1YWFmMzkzZDNlODM=
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A Response to Feminists on the Violent Oppression of Women in Islam
By David Horowitz and Robert Spencer
FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, January 24, 2008
The David Horowitz Freedom Center has succeeded in putting the feminists and Islamists on the defensive. As David Horowitz and Robert Spencer note in the article below, the DHFC's exposure of the feminist movement's lack of attention to women's rights in the Muslim world has caused many of the movement's most prominent activists to sign a letter protesting that they originated concern for Muslim women. The letter, drafted by feminist writer Katha Pollitt, has been signed by such notables as:
Susan Faludi, the author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women, which argues conservatives are trying to suppress American womyn, and The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, which claims terrorism provided a handy excuse for the American Right to begin binding women's feet again;
Julianne Malveaux, who expressed her feelings about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on PBS' To the Contrary, "I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early like many black men do, of heart disease"
Jennifer Baumgardner, a Nation writer whose idea of fighting female oppression is staging productions of The Vagina Monologues;
Dana Goldstein, an employee of the Soros-funded Center for American Progress and a writing fellow at the Soros-funded The American Prospect; and
More than 700 more leftists.
The letter spread quickly, beginning on the website of the far-Left's flagship publication, The Nation. (The Nation's piece was also picked up by Yahoo News). Soon, it had been posted on Mother Jones, the Islamic Forum, the University of Maine, and many other sites -- including that of a woman named Heart who is running for president. Not all are pleased; at least one insists U.S. immigration laws and Israeli treatment of Palestinians are a more direct affront to women's rights than clitorectomies. (She asks, "Does Ms. Pollitt think that 'Muslim countries' are particularly hostile to women’s rights for some reason?") Nonetheless, the very fact that the Left, so long silent about the crimes countenanced by its Islamic partners in the antiwar movement, now feels that it must mount a rousing defense is a vindication of our efforts. -- The Editors.
This week, seven hundred feminists signed an Open Letter complaining that “columnists and opinion writers from The Weekly Standard to the Washington Post to Slate have recently accused American feminists of focusing obsessively on minor or even nonexistent injustices in the United States while ignoring atrocities against women in other countries, especially the Muslim world.”
We recognize this Open Letter as a delayed response to the Freedom Center’s Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, which protested the silence of feminists over the “Oppression of Women in Islam” on campuses all over the country last fall, organized sit-ins at a dozen Women’s Studies Departments to protest the absence of courses and department-sponsored events confronting the issue, and made this a matter of national discussion and debate. This is why the signers of the Open Letter complain that “‘Women’s rights are human rights’ was not a slogan dreamed up by David Horowitz or Christina Hoff Sommers,” two of our speakers for Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. (We never claimed it was.)
The signers of this Letter claim that, “contrary to the accusations of pundits,” they support Muslim feminists in “their struggle against female genital mutilation, ‘honor’ murder, forced marriage, child marriage, compulsory Islamic dress codes, the criminalization of sex outside marriage, brutal punishments like lashing and stoning, family laws that favor men and that place adult women under the legal power of fathers, brothers, and husbands, and laws that discount legal testimony made by women.”
Well, we welcome these avowals of support for the rights of Muslim women. However, forgive us for doubting their sincerity. As one of us pointed out in a speech given at the University of Wisconsin during Islamo-Fascism Week:
“One of our concerns … is the failure of the Women’s Studies Movement to educate students about these atrocities. Our researchers looked at more than 600 Women’s Studies programs on fifteen American campuses, which focus on the unequal treatment of women in society. But they were unable to locate a single class which focuses on the oppression of women under Islamic law.”
What was true last October is still true today. As recently as December 10, a Muslim teenager was strangled by her father for refusing to wear a hijab without a protest from the American feminist movement. And that is only one of many crimes committed in the name of Islam against Muslim women over which the feminist movement continues to be silent.
On New Year’s Day, Amina Said, 18, and her sister Sarah, 17, were shot dead in Irving, Texas. Police are searching for their father, Yaser Abdel Said, on a warrant for capital murder. The girls’ great aunt, Gail Gartrell, told reporters, “This was an honor killing.” Apparently Yaser Said murdered his daughters because they had non-Muslim boyfriends.
The signers of the Open Letter say that they are against honor killing. Here is an honor killing in the United States. Where are these feminists on this issue? Why are they not supporting the hunt for Amina’s and Sarah’s killers and organizing a campaign in the Muslim community to stop such practices?
On Sunday, January 20, the New York Times published an article, “A Cutting Tradition,” which falsely described female genital mutilation practiced under Islamic law as “circumcision” and portrayed it in a generally positive light, and even warned against “blindly judging those who practice it.” The article made no mention of the physical effects of this barbaric practice, which affects 140 million Muslim girls who have their genitals sliced off yearly, and in some 15 million cases their vaginal tract sewn up. These effects, as enumerated by the British Medical Journal in 1993, are “Immediate physical complications include severe pain, shock, infection, bleeding, acute urinary infection, tetanus, and death. Long-term problems include chronic pain, difficulties with micturition and menstruation, pelvic infection leading to infertility, and prolonged and obstructed labor during childbirth.”
Where is the feminist outrage over the New York Times article? Where are the feminist demonstrations against this practice? Where are the campus teach-ins? Where are the candlelight parades? What Muslim organizations have been confronted for their complicity in this assault on female Muslim children? This is a horrific crime against the female gender -- global in extent -- and yet one would be hard-pressed to identify a single public event, protest or march organized by feminists to oppose it.
The Open Letter mentions the feminist “V-Day” organized to protest violence against women. We challenge the signers of this letter to identify the speeches given during “V-Day” that protested female genital mutilation in the Islamic world. We challenge them to identify the Vagina Monologue of Islamic misogyny.
We are encouraged by the fact that these American feminists feel the need to respond to our challenge over their silence as a movement on violence against Muslim women and to assert their opposition to these barbaric practices. We challenge them now to put actions behind their words.
Join us in sponsoring a campus tour on the Oppression of Women in Islam with speakers such as Nonie Darwish, Wafa Sultan and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Form academic committees to provide curricula on these subjects in Women’s Studies courses. Devote a major segment of your V-Day demonstrations to the plight of Muslim women. Join us during Islamo-Fascism Week II this spring in appealing to campus Muslim organizations to condemn these practices.
Then we’ll know you’re serious.
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Many themes here, amongst them gender issues:
Huckabee and Social Conservatives
By RYAN T. ANDERSON
August 18, 2008
WSJ
Reports last month told of a meeting of some 90 prominent evangelical leaders deciding to support John McCain for president. While noting disagreements between themselves and Mr. McCain, the group concluded that Mr. McCain shared their most important views, on life and marriage. Matthew Staver, the dean of Liberty University Law School and the organizer of the meeting, said that Mr. McCain "would advance those values in a much more significant way than Sen. Barack Obama who, in our view, would decimate those values."
The group also reached a consensus that they would send a letter to Mr. McCain asking him to pick Mike Huckabee as his running mate. Mr. Staver explained that "it's not a demand; it's a request."
Mr. McCain would do well to reject this request, and the evangelicals would do well to rethink their political strategies.
* * *
Consider the primary season. The losing campaigns of Rudy Giuliani and Mike Huckabee offer important political lessons for anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear. Just months ago, pundits were writing the obituary for social conservatism. Frank Rich claimed that the "political clout ritualistically ascribed" to social conservatives "is a sham." "These self-promoting values hacks," he continued, "don't speak for the American mainstream. They don't speak for the Republican Party. They no longer speak for many evangelical ministers and their flocks. The emperors of morality have in fact had no clothes for some time. Should Rudy Giuliani end up doing a victory dance at the Republican convention, it will be on their graves."
Of course, Rudy Giuliani won't be dancing at the national convention. He didn't win a single primary. To judge from his vote totals and delegate count alone, he was not even a top-tier candidate. Mr. Giuliani gambled that he could win without the social conservatives and lost big time. Score one for the "values hacks."
The unexpected relative success of the Huckabee campaign—sustained by a shoestring budget, a makeshift staff, and a policy platform that seemed to be thrown together overnight—showed just how big an impact the so-called values voters can have. Actually, it understated that impact, since many values voters went with other candidates (like Mitt Romney). So one lesson learned from the Giuliani and Huckabee campaigns was the continued political relevance of social conservatives.
Yet that shouldn't be the only lesson we take away, for Mr. Rich was right about one thing: The leaders of the social conservative movement do not speak for mainstream America. And they never will, so long as they follow the Huckabee model.
But they could. The American mainstream is, especially when compared to other industrialized nations, remarkably conservative on social issues. Lifestyle liberalism has always been a liability for the left in America, as witnessed by the fact that the more socially conservative candidate has won five of the past seven presidential elections. Social conservatives can speak for the mainstream but only if they move beyond the Huckabee approach.
To start with, he ran his campaign solely on religious identity politics. If Mr. Giuliani never effectively reached out to socially conservative Christians, Mr. Huckabee never effectively reached beyond them. He continually told evangelical Christian audiences to support him because he was one of them. Everyone else got the message, too. Mr. Huckabee ran his campaign in a way that would appeal only to conservative evangelicals and would offend—even scare—people outside his religious community.
One incident, in particular, illustrates how Mr. Huckabee narrowed the appeal of social conservatism. While stumping to a largely Evangelical audience in Michigan, Mr. Huckabee said: "I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that's what we need to do—to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other and how we treat the family."
Reaction to this was quick and fierce, even from generally sympathetic sources like National Review Online's The Corner. Lisa Schiffren quickly pointed out: "Mike Huckabee is going to force those of us who have wanted more religion in the town square to reexamine the merits of strict separation of church and state. He is the best advertisement ever for the ACLU, even if you share his ultimate views on the definition of marriage, or the desirability of abortion on demand." Andy McCarthy added that he usually contrasts America to Islamist nations: "Part of my usual response . . . focuses on the Taliban, their imposition of sharia (i.e., God's law), and the marked contrast to our system's bedrock guarantee of freedom of conscience. . . . Where has Huck been for the last seven years? Does he not get that our enemies—the people who want to end our way of life—believe they are simply imposing God's standards?"
On "Hannity and Colmes," Mr. Huckabee tried to explain what he meant. He wasn't talking about mandating that anyone worship on Sunday or tithe. He was talking about two things only: the human-life amendment and the marriage amendment. But these causes cannot effectively be defended in this way.
Arguing that "God said so" won't persuade anyone who doesn't already agree with you. Even though Americans remain a remarkably religious people, the Bible doesn't carry the authority it once did. And many of those who generally hold the Bible in high regard consider it "dated" and "out of touch" on certain controversial moral questions.
* * *
Luckily, social conservatism has resources for public argument besides the Bible. After all, on many of the day's most important issues—human cloning, embryo destruction, creating designer babies—the Bible offers little specific guidance. And our obligations to treat fellow citizens as equals—as well as the practical requirements for broad political consensus—demand that we rise above sectarian appeals to religious authority. If social conservatism is to win the day, social conservatives—especially those seeking and holding public office—must make public arguments using public reasons to defend human life and marriage.
Defending these moral truths with reason and campaigning on those same reasons shouldn't prove difficult. Mr. Huckabee argued that we should amend the Constitution to fit "God's standards," so we might consider what the Christian tradition has had to say about God's standards. St. Thomas Aquinas taught that "we do not offend God except by doing something contrary to our own good." If Thomas is right, then rather than claim that a debased practice offends God, politicians can—and, I would add, should—explain to the public what aspect of some immoral behavior is contrary to our own good, especially the common good—and why a just and decent society shouldn't accept it.
Rather than argue that abortion is contrary to God's law and that we need to bring the Constitution into conformity with God's law, social conservatives should argue that as a matter of scientific fact the child in a mother's womb is a whole, living human being, and that as a matter of moral truth the direct killing of any peaceable human being is gravely unjust.
John Paul II argued as much. If the universal pastor of the Catholic Church could speak publicly about abortion in a way that was intelligible to non-Catholic Americans, why shouldn't American Christian politicians do the same? This approach was natural for John Paul because of his understanding of divine commands: "The Ten Commandments," he said, "are not an arbitrary imposition of a tyrannical Lord. They were written in stone; but before that, they were written on the human heart as the universal moral law, valid in every time and place. . . . To keep the Commandments is to be faithful to God, but it is also to be faithful to ourselves, to our true nature and our deepest aspirations."
Similarly, social conservatives should ask whether America is being faithful to her deepest aspirations and commitments to human equality and dignity: People are valuable not in virtue of the talents they possess or the contributions they can make to society, but simply in virtue of their humanity. This is why we rightly emphasize that race, ethnicity, sex, intellectual ability, wealth and social status are all irrelevant to our fundamental moral worth. But if that is the case, does age, location or stage of development change one's moral status? After all, what can the newborn baby do to merit worth and protection that an unborn baby can't? Social conservatives should press the argument that if human beings really are equal in dignity, then abortion is inconsistent with our fundamental commitments.
Nor should social conservatives be afraid to argue for maintaining marriage's structure. If marriage isn't the union of one man and one woman coming together as husband and wife to become father and mother to any children their marital love may bring, then social conservatives should demand that their opponents explain what marriage is. Is it simply the union of any consenting pair of sexually active adults? If so, then why only two? And why does it have to be exclusive and permanent—why not open or temporary "marriage"? Indeed, if marriage isn't about a bodily union, then why limit it to sexual relationships at all? How about codependent relatives? How are marriage and children connected? Do children need mothers and fathers, or not? These debates can and, in fact, must be had at the level of reason.
* * *
These sorts of arguments—that the moral truths revealed in the Bible are also consonant with reason—are often associated with Catholicism. But it is not Rome's exclusive property by any means. Many scholars are arguing that natural law should be at home in the Protestant churches, where it has strong roots. Stephen Grabill says as much in his "Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics," and J. Daryl Charles makes a similar plea in his new book "Retrieving the Natural Law: A Return to Moral First Things."
The natural-law tradition is neither limited to Roman clerics and Protestant academics nor alien to American political life. The American Founding is largely based on natural law principles understood as "self-evident truths." And the American civil rights movement can serve as a template for how religious reasoning should be brought to the public square and how it can result in meaningful political change. Consider how Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" quotes St. Augustine's declaration that "an unjust law is no law at all." He delves deeper into the Christian tradition to explain his point: "A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. . . . To put it in terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law."
Underlying Dr. King's argument, and that of the Christian tradition, is the proposition that human reason can know the moral law, the natural law, because human reason participates in eternal reason, the eternal law. Rather than argue from God's commands down to human endeavors, social conservatives should place their emphasis on human flourishing and the moral principles that protect it. Dr. King put it best when he said: "Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust." Citing the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, he went on to argue that segregation "substitutes an 'I-it' relationship for an 'I-thou' relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things." This is the precise argument that social conservatives should be making when it comes to abortion, human cloning, and embryo-destructive research.
Of course, we need not make moral arguments alone. If Aquinas, Martin Luther King Jr. and John Paul II are correct to say that true morality is about protecting human flourishing, then when true moral norms have been eviscerated we can expect to find the social fallout. With abortion the results need no social-science research: the fetal corpse is evidence enough. Yet social science indicates that the widespread practice of abortion—initially to be used in only the most tragic and desperate of situations—has led to practices that truly devalue human life: abortion on demand as birth control, selective abortion to reduce the number of children when twins or triplets result from in vitro fertilization, eugenic abortion to do away with genetically "defective" children, and now the practice of embryo destruction for biomedical research, human cloning, and animal-human hybrids. These are the fruits of the abortion seed.
Likewise, the breakdown of family life—children being raised without mothers or fathers and outside of marriage—has spelled disaster for our nation's youth. The left-leaning research organization Child Trends has issued a research brief summing up the scholarly consensus:
Research clearly demonstrates that family structure matters for children, and the family structure that helps the most is a family headed by two-biological parents in a low-conflict marriage. Children in single-parent families, children born to unmarried mothers, and children in stepfamilies or cohabiting relationships face higher risks of poor outcomes. . . . There is thus value for children in promoting strong, stable marriages between biological parents.
The studies on children of same-sex parents have so far been inconclusive. Still, there is good reason to think that when Child Trends suggests that children raised by two married biological parents do best, part of the explanation may have to do with mothers and fathers bringing different gifts to the parenting enterprise. These social science findings can easily be multiplied. And their results need to be publicized.
* * *
Clarifying the relationship between reason and morality can help us even in our clash with jihadists. (Andy McCarthy was on to something.) This was among the points that Pope Benedict XVI made in his now-infamous Regensburg Lecture. Benedict argued that competing claims about revelation can, to a certain extent, be settled at the level of reason—that there are reasons why one should believe in the Christian God, and reasonsfor resisting aspects of the Muslim conception of God. Not just theology, though; Benedict argued that morality—public morality—can be objectively known, and reason's capacity for moral truth is the only reliable guide for modern pluralistic society. As Benedict noted, summarizing the argument of the 14th-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus: "Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. . . . The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature."
Amend the Constitution to be in accord with reason, then, is what Huckabee should have said. While Huckabee mobilized many social conservatives to show up at the polls, he did not persuade anyone outside their world to join them. This failure replicated that of social conservatism writ large. Adding Huckabee to the McCain ticket might get evangelicals to vote for McCain in November, but will it get anyone else to? Will it add anyone to the social conservative roster? To be successful, hearts and minds need to be changed. Minds are changed by rational arguments.
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What Mrs. Palin
Could Learn
From Mrs. T
By BARBARA AMIEL
September 5, 2008; Page A15
The glummest face Wednesday night might have been, if only we could have seen it, that of Hillary Clinton.
Corbis
Margaret Thatcher was a 49-year-old mother of two when she became Conservative Party leader in 1974.
Imagine watching Sarah Palin, the gun-toting, lifelong member of the NRA, the PTA mom with teased hair and hips half the size of Hillary's, who went ... omigod ... to the University of Idaho and studied journalism. Mrs. Palin with her five kids and one of them still virtually suckling age, going wham through that cement ceiling put there exclusively for good-looking right-wing/populist conservative females by not-so-good-looking left-wing ones (Gloria Steinem excepting). There, pending some terrible goof or revelation, stood the woman most likely to get into the Oval Office as its official occupant rather than as an intern.
Imagine Hillary's fury. The gnashing of teeth after all the years of sacrifice and hard work—a life of it—and then the endless nuisance of stylists, makeovers and fittings for Oscar de la Renta gowns for Vogue covers. And surely that gimmicky holding of the baby papoose style by Todd Palin after his wife's acceptance speech is sacrosanct left-wing territory! If only Chelsea had been younger of course, Bill could have done it and then, well, who knows what might have been forgiven him?
American feminists have always had a tough sell to make. To the rest of the world, no females on earth have ever had it as easy as middle-class American women. Cosseted, surrounded by labor-saving devices, easily available contraception and supermarkets groaning with food, their complaints have always seemed to have no relationship to reality.
Education was there for the taking. Marriages were not arranged. Going against social mores had no serious consequences. Postwar American women (excluding those mired in poverty or the odious restrictions of race) have always had the choice of what they wanted to be. They simply didn't decide to exercise it until it became more fashionable to get out of the home than to run it.
Sarah Palin has put the flim-flam nature of America feminism sharply into focus, revealing the not-so-secret hypocrisy of its code and, whatever her future, this alone is an accomplishment. As she emerged into the nation's consciousness, a shudder went through the feminist left—a political movement not restricted to females. She is a mother refusing to stay at home (good) who had made a success out in the workplace (excellent) whose marriage nevertheless is a rip-roaring success and whose views are unspeakable—those of a red-blooded, right-wing principled pragmatist.
The metaphorical hair stood up on the back of every licensed member of the feminist movement who could immediately see she was a monster out of a nightmare landscape by Hieronymus Bosch. Pro-life. Pro-oil exploration in Alaska, home of the nation's polar bears for heaven's sake. Smaller government. Lower taxes. And that family of hers: Next to the Clintons with their dysfunctional marriage, her fertility and sexually robust life could only emphasize the shriveled nature of the one-child family of the former Queen Bee of political female accomplishment.
Mrs. Palin's emergence caused a spasm in American feminism. Caste and class have always been ammunition in the very Eastern seaboard women's movement, and now they were (so to speak) loading for bear. Sally Quinn felt a mother of five had no business being vice president. Andrea Mitchell remarked that "only the uneducated" would vote for Mrs. Palin. "Choose a woman but this woman?" wrote Baltimore Sun columnist Susan Reimer, accusing Sen. McCain of using a Down's syndrome child as qualification for the VP spot.
The hypocrisy was breathtaking. Only nanoseconds before the choice of Mrs. Palin as VP put her a geriatric heartbeat away from the presidency, a woman's right to have a career and children was a shibboleth of feminism. One always knew that women with views that opposed those of official feminism were to be treated as nonwomen. To see it now out in the open was the real shocker.
The fact that this mom had been governor of a state was dismissed because it was a "small state," as was the city of which she had been mayor. Her acceptance speech, which knowledgeable left-wing critics feared would be effective, was dismissed before being delivered. She would be reading from a teleprompter. The speech would be good, no doubt, but written for her.
Had she been a man with similar political views, the left's opposition would have been strong but less personally vicious: It would have focused neither on a daughter's pregnancy, nor on the candidate's inability to be a good parent if the job was landed. In its panic, the left was indicating that to be a female running for office these days is no hindrance but an advantage, and admitting that there is indeed a difference between mothers and fathers that cannot necessarily be resolved by having daddy doing the diaper run.
All the shrapnel has so far been counterproductive. The mudslinging tabloid journalism—is Mrs. Palin the mother or grandmother of her Down's baby?—only raised her profile to a point where viewers who would never dream of watching a Republican vice-presidential acceptance speech tuned in.
Watching the frenzied reaction was déjà vu from my years as a political columnist in Margaret Thatcher's Britain. Modern history's titan of female political life suffered a similar hatred, fuelled to a large extent by her gender. Mrs. Thatcher overcame it magnificently, but in the end, the fact was that she was female and not one of "them"—a member of the old boys' club of the Tory establishment—played a significant role in bringing her down.
She was bound to be disliked vehemently by the left once she began to reveal her agenda of deregulation, sensible industrial relations, and tax reduction. Still among most of her enemies this had to do more with her ideas than her ovaries at the beginning. It was the aristocracy of her own Conservative Party that could not bear the notion of being led by "that woman." "Until she became leader," says Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph and authorized biographer of Mrs. Thatcher, "it was assumed she could not be it because of her sex."
Mrs. Thatcher was originally given the education portfolio by Prime Minister Edward Heath, though she wanted to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, the equivalent of the U.S. Treasury Secretary. Education was considered a woman's job, and regarded as far less important than it would be today. In the education portfolio she was excluded from higher counsels and out of the way. When she challenged Heath for the party leadership in February 1974, at age 49, she turned the tables and used her gender to appeal to the gallantry of disaffected Tory backbenchers. "She's a very brave girl," they would say.
Mrs. Thatcher, a good-looking woman, used her sexual attractiveness to its legitimate hilt. She was known to flirt both with caucus members and the opposition, her face tilted girlishly in conversation. She succeeded politically with those leaders with whom she could flirt—including Ronald Reagan, Francois Mitterrand and most unlikely of all, Mikhail Gorbachev. Her stylish, hint-of-Dr. Zhivago wardrobe for a 1987 visit to the Soviet Union became something of a national obsession.
Such attractiveness had the opposite effect on the Tory grandees. Books have been written on what it was that nurtured their contempt. After all, they were in the same political party, and their fortunes rested on her popularity.
No doubt part of the animosity arose from her origins as the daughter of a Grantham grocer, a woman whose home address was a street number rather than an estate with simply the house name. Lord Ian Gilmour of Craigmillar dismissed Mrs. Thatcher as "a Daily Telegraph woman"—code language for some ghastly suburban creature wearing a tasteless flowered hat. Winston Churchill's son-in-law, Christopher Soames, a man of much genuine intelligence, allegedly called her "Heath with tits"—an inaccurate and inelegant description, but one that captured exquisitely the contempt his class had for her. Both Gilmour and Soames were fired by Mrs. Thatcher in the housecleaning that took place during the late '70s and early '80s. But the core of High Tories remained active in the party waiting to bring her down.
The British feminist movement at that time was of little import. "I owe nothing to women's lib," Mrs. Thatcher remarked, thus assuring herself of a permanent place in their pantheon of evil. During her years in power, Mrs. Thatcher could and did use the rhetoric of home economics in a way a prudent male politician no longer dared do. Metaphors of kitchen and gender abounded in her speeches: "it is the cock that crows," she would say, "but the hen that lays the eggs."
Mrs. Thatcher would have recognized the guns aimed at Sarah Palin as the weapons of the left with feminist trigger-pullers. She also would have known that Mrs. Palin has less to fear from East-Coast intellectual snobs in egalitarian America than she had to fear from her own Tory base in class-prejudiced Britain. She would have told her to stand her ground and do her homework. Read your briefs, choose advisers with care, and, as she once said to me, my arm in her grip and her eyes fixed firmly on mine, "Just be yourself, don't ever give in and they can't harm you."
It wasn't quite true, of course. She did read her briefs, did stand her ground, and in the end they pulled her down, those grandees. But she made history. If a grocer's daughter can do it, a self-described hockey mom cannot be dismissed.
Ms. Amiel is a columnist for Macleans', the Canadian weekly newsmagazine, and a former senior political columnist for the Sunday Times of London.
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Let's Talk
About Palin's
Family Challenges
By KATTY KAY and CLAIRE SHIPMAN
September 6, 2008; Page A11
Gov. Sarah Palin's commando muscle-flex in St. Paul Wednesday night eviscerated the argument that she might not be capable of handling the vice presidency and five children at the same time. Indeed, we were left with the distinct impression that on a slow day, she could clean up America, balance our budget with a little help from eBay, and win the Iditarod -- all with 10 kids tied to her back.
What Sarah Palin did not do, however, is put an end to the latest national conversation about "trying to have it all." Because the question we're all asking isn't can she do it, but why is she doing it? Mrs. Palin, you see, happens to be bucking a new national trend. Even as most mothers across America chuckle appreciatively about pit bulls and lipstick and applaud her bravado, they are making choices that look very un-Palinesque.
This week we've heard our feminist foremothers argue that any sentence mixing the words woman, kids and work is inappropriate -- heretical even. "A man wouldn't face this sort of scrutiny," they grumble darkly.
But Mrs. Palin and her career aspirations are not falling victim to a secret cabal of men trying, once again, to impose an impossible standard on women. And this is not a redux of the old Mommy Wars -- that stale, red herring of a debate between "career" moms and their "stay at home" counterparts.
Mrs. Palin is actually putting a spotlight on a new women's movement we call "Womenomics." Thanks to women's fast-growing market value we can finally live and work in a way that wins us time and avoids that agonizing choice of career or kids. Today as never before women can define success on their own terms.
Fed up with 50- and 60-hour weeks and a career ladder we didn't build and don't want to climb, women are looking for jobs that demand fewer and freer hours. We want to work but we also want quantity time, as well as quality time, with our children. Most of us no longer buy the onwards-and-upwards drive to the corner office (or in Mrs. Palin's case, the West Wing) at the cost of a fragmented family life. More and more, women are choosing a tapestry of family and work in which we define our own success in reasonable terms -- even if we sacrifice some "prestige."
In 1992, 57% of women with degrees wanted more responsibility at work, but by 2002 that figure had plummeted to 36%, according to the Family and Work Institute. Four out of five women want more flexibility at work and call it a top priority; 60% of us want to work part-time. What we're saying is we'll trade responsibility, title -- even paycheck -- for more time and more control. And we have company. Increasingly men say they too want more flexibility at work. Gen X and Gen Y won't even talk about sitting at a desk for 10 hours a day.
What makes this revolution possible is that it's grounded in hard-core economics. Women are the hottest commodity in the hunt for talent.
We're 58% of college graduates, we get graduate degrees in greater numbers than men. Companies are waking up to the fact that women are more than a politically correct nod to diversity. We help the bottom line. A recent 19-year study of 215 Fortune 500 firms found that companies that have more women in executive positions make more money. Companies with more women in senior management get higher valuations on the American Stock Exchange.
Overwhelmingly, women are using this professional clout to redefine work, not chain themselves to it. And companies, eager to keep us and terrified of the cost of replacing us, are responding. They've discovered that offering work-life balance actually increases productivity. There are accountants who get home at 3 p.m. every day but remain on the fast track. Top New York Law firms have part-time partners who are still players. Can investment banks be far behind?
This isn't really about whether Mrs. Palin can do the job with five children. Will she do it all well? That depends on your yardstick, at least on the home front. How much time is "enough" with your children, or at work, is an extremely personal decision. The point is we now have reasonable options -- it's not all or nothing. Our mother's generation may bemoan the fact that there is still a dearth of female CEOs, but our generation knows a big part of the reason why isn't that we can't get there, but that most of us don't want to make the sacrifices necessary, as the jobs are now defined, to get there.
It's important to understand why, then, Mrs. Palin has hit a nerve. It's not because she's a woman with children trying to do a man's job. It's because she's actually pushing the combination of professional and personal ambitions beyond the sensibilities of this generation of working moms. As women, we may be awed by her, but she's not necessarily a role model for so many professional women who now say they want to do it differently, that they don't want to do 150% of everything all of the time.
So what you are hearing is less condemnation than a collective gasp of amazement -- and exhaustion -- at the thought of juggling five children, one of them an infant, and the most extreme example of a job with little or no flexibility. It would make supermom feel feeble. And we should celebrate the fact that all of this can now be discussed openly.
It is not sexist to have this conversation. It is sexist not to.
Ms. Kay is a BBC anchor and reporter. Ms. Shipman is an ABC News reporter. They are the authors of "Womenomics: The Workplace Revolution That Will Change Your Life," due out next spring by HarperCollins.
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September 9, 2008
Findings
As Barriers Disappear, Some Gender Gaps Widen
By JOHN TIERNEY
Correction Appended
When men and women take personality tests, some of the old Mars-Venus stereotypes keep reappearing. On average, women are more cooperative, nurturing, cautious and emotionally responsive. Men tend to be more competitive, assertive, reckless and emotionally flat. Clear differences appear in early childhood and never disappear.
What's not clear is the origin of these differences. Evolutionary psychologists contend that these are innate traits inherited from ancient hunters and gatherers. Another school of psychologists asserts that both sexes' personalities have been shaped by traditional social roles, and that personality differences will shrink as women spend less time nurturing children and more time in jobs outside the home.
To test these hypotheses, a series of research teams have repeatedly analyzed personality tests taken by men and women in more than 60 countries around the world. For evolutionary psychologists, the bad news is that the size of the gender gap in personality varies among cultures. For social-role psychologists, the bad news is that the variation is going in the wrong direction. It looks as if personality differences between men and women are smaller in traditional cultures like India's or Zimbabwe's than in the Netherlands or the United States. A husband and a stay-at-home wife in a patriarchal Botswanan clan seem to be more alike than a working couple in Denmark or France. The more Venus and Mars have equal rights and similar jobs, the more their personalities seem to diverge.
These findings are so counterintuitive that some researchers have argued they must be because of cross-cultural problems with the personality tests. But after crunching new data from 40,000 men and women on six continents, David P. Schmitt and his colleagues conclude that the trends are real. Dr. Schmitt, a psychologist at Bradley University in Illinois and the director of the International Sexuality Description Project, suggests that as wealthy modern societies level external barriers between women and men, some ancient internal differences are being revived.
The biggest changes recorded by the researchers involve the personalities of men, not women. Men in traditional agricultural societies and poorer countries seem more cautious and anxious, less assertive and less competitive than men in the most progressive and rich countries of Europe and North America.
To explain these differences, Dr. Schmitt and his collaborators from Austria and Estonia point to the hardships of life in poorer countries. They note that in some other species, environmental stress tends to disproportionately affect the larger sex and mute costly secondary sexual characteristics (like male birds' displays of plumage). And, they say, there are examples of stress muting biological sex differences in humans. For instance, the average disparity in height between men and women isn't as pronounced in poor countries as it is in rich countries, because boys' growth is disproportionately stunted by stresses like malnutrition and disease.
Personality is more complicated than height, of course, and Dr. Schmitt suggests it's affected by not just the physical but also the social stresses in traditional agricultural societies. These villagers have had to adapt their personalities to rules, hierarchies and gender roles more constraining than those in modern Western countries — or in clans of hunter-gatherers.
"Humanity's jaunt into monotheism, agriculturally based economies and the monopolization of power and resources by a few men was 'unnatural' in many ways," Dr. Schmitt says, alluding to evidence that hunter-gatherers were relatively egalitarian. "In some ways modern progressive cultures are returning us psychologically to our hunter-gatherer roots," he argues. "That means high sociopolitical gender equality over all, but with men and women expressing predisposed interests in different domains. Removing the stresses of traditional agricultural societies could allow men's, and to a lesser extent women's, more 'natural' personality traits to emerge."
Some critics of this hypothesis question whether the international variations in personality have more to do with the way people in different cultures interpret questions on personality tests. (For more on this debate, go to www.nytimes.com/tierneylab.) The critics would like to see more direct measures of personality traits, and so would Dr. Schmitt. But he notes that there's already an intriguing trend reported for one trait — competitiveness — based on direct measures of male and female runners.
Competitive running makes a good case study because, to mix athletic metaphors, it has offered a level playing field to women the past two decades in the United States. Similar numbers of males and females run on high school and college teams and in road races. Female runners have been competing for equal shares of prize money and receiving nearly 50 percent more scholarship aid from Division I colleges than their male counterparts, according to the N.C.A.A.
But these social changes have not shrunk a gender gap among runners analyzed by Robert Deaner, a psychologist at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, who classifies runners as relatively fast if they keep close to the pace of the world's best runners of their own sex. When Dr. Deaner looks at, say, the top 40 finishers of each sex in a race, he typically finds two to four times as many relatively fast male runners as relatively fast female runners.
This large gender gap has persisted for two decades in all kinds of races — high school and college meets, elite and nonelite road races — and it jibes with other studies reporting that male runners train harder and are more motivated by competition, Dr. Deaner says. This enduring "sex difference in competitiveness," he concludes, "must be considered a genuine failure for the sociocultural conditions hypothesis" that the personality gap will shrink as new roles open for women.
If he and Dr. Schmitt are right, then men and women shouldn't expect to understand each other much better anytime soon. Things could get confusing if the personality gap widens further as the sexes become equal. But then, maybe it was that allure of the mysterious other that kept Mars and Venus together so long on the savanna.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 10, 2008
The Findings column on Tuesday, about gender gaps, misidentified the educational affiliation of Robert Deaner, a psychologist who analyzed competitive runners. He is at Grand Valley State University, in Michigan — not Colgate University, where he received his bachelor's degree.
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Excellent find Rachel!
" But then, maybe it was that allure of the mysterious other that kept Mars and Venus together so long on the savanna."
Flipping this around, perhaps the other side of the coin is when we seek to minimize differences we decrease reproduction (see e.g. Europe) and increase homosexuality? :evil: :lol:
Seriously though, good piece.
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Just because somebody or someone screams the loudest doesn't make it true!!!!
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As I worked out (bad knee so I had time) this morning, I read the London "Financial Times" 9/27/08 edition (my gym has a good library). No online copy is available, but if you get a chance, it is a great newspaper; unbiased and objective and often has a different take on matters. In the Life & Art's section the front page (long) article is titled "The new class struggle". It talks about as Kofi Annan "calls girl's education", "the single highest returning social investment in the world today." Specifically, it talks of women in Zambia, one of the poorest countries in Africa. Zambia is a Christian nation, very poor, and the expectation for women was/is dismal. Very few women retain property rights, customary law supports both polygamy and child marriage and women walk in the shadow of men. Women are like chattel. Yet the article talks of the benefits and empowerment of education. While few would call Larry Summers a "women lib" kind of guy it was his seminal paper "investing in all the people" that showed with hard evidence that female education is the variable most highly correlated with improvements in social indicators. "The benefits of education have a multiplier effect because they empower women to bring about other necessary changes." Also, the article talks of Llyod Blankfein CEO of Goldman Sach's effort and money to make a difference. Religion is not the issue, note, it is not an "Islamic" problem, but one of poverty and ignorance. The article's point is that through education, women can rise and become equal. And make a difference for themselves and their nation.
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Interesting points. I would quibble with this though:
"Religion is not the issue, note, it is not an "Islamic" problem, but one of poverty and ignorance."
If the religion decapitates and otherwise kills those who teach the girls (as is the case in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere) those schools of Islam are very much the problem.
Were she still alive to speak for herself, I'm guessing this woman would disagree with you as well:
Taliban assassins kill ranking Afghan policewoman
By RAHIM FAIEZ
The Associated Press
Sunday, September 28, 2008; 2:50 PM
KABUL, Afghanistan -- Two Taliban assassins on a motorbike shot and killed a senior policewoman as she left for work in Afghanistan's largest southern city Sunday and gravely wounded her son.
Malalai Kakar, 41, who led Kandahar city's department of crimes against women, was leaving home Sunday when she was killed, said Zalmai Ayubi, spokesman for the Kandahar provincial governor. Her 18-year-old son was wounded, he said.
The Taliban claimed responsibility.
Militants frequently attack projects, schools and businesses run by women. The hard-line Taliban regime, which was ousted in the 2001 U.S.-led invasion, did not allow women outside the home without a male escort.
President Hamid Karzai condemned the assassination, as did the European Union, which said it was "appalled by the brutal targeting" of Kakar.
"Any murder of a police officer is to be condemned, but the killing of a female officer whose service was not only to her country, but to Afghan women, to whom Ms. Kakar served as an example, is particularly abhorrent," the EU said in a statement.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...=moreheadlines
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Zambia is a "Christian" (5% Islamic) nation yet problems persist. Perhaps I am naive, but I sincerely think that through education and opportunity women can and will become
equal regardless of their religion. I did not mean to denigrate the negative influence of radical Islam upon women in Afghanistan, Pakistan (although note, this woman was chosen and able
to be a policewomen in Afghanistan, an Islamic country), and elsewhere, only to mention (hope) that even in these countries through education and empowerment that they too will "evolve"
and demand equal rights and choice. They may choose the "old way" i.e. to "walk in the shadow of the man" (Japan for instance) but at least through
education, they have choice and as their numbers increase (more policewomen, businesswomen, and women teachers) their voice will be heard.
The point of this article is that a lack of ignorance, i.e. a good education gives the women a choice, and I think in in an Islamic environment,
education is the best road to choice. And through education poverty too can be beat and perhaps even religious bigotry. But it will take time.
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No one is challenging the idea that education for women is a very good thing and is a very good way out of ignorance and poverty.
I simply challenged your assertion that Islam has nothing to do with women (and men) being held in ignorance.
Are you asserting some sort of parity when you speak of Zambia? Are you saying that Christianity in Zambia is used to hold women down? :?
What communicates here is that you find it difficult to acknowledge what is simple fact-- that there are schools of Islam which kill those whom educate women.
And when you speak of the murdered woman policeman in Afg ("this woman was chosen and able
to be a policewomen in Afghanistan, an Islamic country") it seems to me that the thought is not complete without noting that she was chosen and became able precisely because of American (and a handful of allies) force of arms against the Taliban form of Islam and that she died because she was an educated woman because of the Taliban form of Islam.
Of course there are also the matters of women being lesser witnesses in Islam, and being beaten for not covering head to toe in 120 degree weather, being prohibited to drive, etc etc.
Islam in Iran, and elsewhere, is used to issue death sentences for those who write "offensive" books, and world wide riots kill and burn embassies because of cartoons. As is noted in the thread nearby on Islam vs. Free Speech, there are many expressions of Islam which are quite hostile to freedom of thought and expression which are the essence of education.
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Actually, I never said Islam had "nothing to do with women being held to ignorance." I believe in my second post I even acknowledged the
"negative influence of radical (Taliban) Islam upon women" in Islamic countries.
And, I never asserted nor referred to "Christianity in Zambia being used to hold women down" or any "sort of parity" between Christianity and Islam
regarding women being held down, although Christianity and Judism, in their traditional sense also are a male dominated religion. Yet they have evolved through
time and education to one of tolerance and near parity for women.
I did talk of ignorance and poverty as being the primary and the root core of women's oppression throughout the world.
And I talked of education as being the "best" solution.
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Your blithe equivocations get old. You stated:
"Religion is not the issue, note, it is not an "Islamic" problem, but one of poverty and ignorance."
Dance around it all you want, but on significant portions of the planet religion does indeed inform those who seek to keep women in poverty and ignorance.
Can't wait for the next circular deconstruction. . . .
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"Religion is not the issue, note, it is not an "Islamic" problem, but one of poverty and ignorance."
This indeed is what got me started :-)
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1874471.stm
Friday, 15 March, 2002, 12:19 GMT
Saudi police 'stopped' fire rescue
The Mecca city governor visited the fire-damaged school
Saudi Arabia's religious police stopped schoolgirls from leaving a blazing building because they were not wearing correct Islamic dress, according to Saudi newspapers.
In a rare criticism of the kingdom's powerful "mutaween" police, the Saudi media has accused them of hindering attempts to save 15 girls who died in the fire on Monday.
About 800 pupils were inside the school in the holy city of Mecca when the tragedy occurred.
15 girls died in the blaze and more than 50 others were injured
According to the al-Eqtisadiah daily, firemen confronted police after they tried to keep the girls inside because they were not wearing the headscarves and abayas (black robes) required by the kingdom's strict interpretation of Islam.
One witness said he saw three policemen "beating young girls to prevent them from leaving the school because they were not wearing the abaya".
The Saudi Gazette quoted witnesses as saying that the police - known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice - had stopped men who tried to help the girls and warned "it is a sinful to approach them".
The father of one of the dead girls said that the school watchman even refused to open the gates to let the girls out.
"Lives could have been saved had they not been stopped by members of the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice," the newspaper concluded.
Relatives' anger
Families of the victims have been incensed over the deaths.
Most of the victims were crushed in a stampede as they tried to flee the blaze.
The school was locked at the time of the fire - a usual practice to ensure full segregation of the sexes.
The religious police are widely feared in Saudi Arabia. They roam the streets enforcing dress codes and sex segregation, and ensuring prayers are performed on time.
Those who refuse to obey their orders are often beaten and sometimes put in jail.
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rticle 7: Right to equal protection by the law
Read this article in full
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/people/features/ihavearightto/four_b/casestudy_art07.shtml
Case Study: SHARIA LAW
Sharia law, the traditional Islamic law, is a far-reaching moral code that prescribes how Muslims should best conduct their lives.
It was originally conceived to regulate all aspects of life in Muslim societies, from the behaviour and habits of individuals to the workings of the criminal justice system and financial institutions.
In 2002, it came under intense international scrutiny when it was revealed that a young Nigerian woman had been sentenced to death by stoning for bearing a child out of wedlock.
One third of Nigeria's states have adopted a strict interpretation of Sharia law following the return to civilian rule in 1999.
Human rights advocates are charging that, in some countries, the Sharia law does not protect men and women or Muslims and non-Muslims equally and thus violates international human rights agreements.
A Moral Code
Long associated in the non-Muslim world with severe punishments such as stoning and amputations, the system of traditional Islamic law known as Sharia is often criticised but rarely understood.
It was originally designed to regulate all aspects of life in Muslim societies, from the behaviour and habits of individuals to the workings of the criminal justice system and financial institutions.
It stipulates, for instance, that men and women must dress modestly, refrain from alcohol and pray five times per day. It also prohibits banks from collecting interest.
The Sharia derives from the Koran, the Islamic holy book, and the teachings of the Prophet Mohammad, known as the Sunna.
Varying Interpretations
The implementation of Sharia varies tremendously in the world's predominantly Muslim societies.
In countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan, and in the Taleban-era Afghanistan, which are governed by Islamists who view Islam as a political ideology as well as a personal faith, a strict interpretation of the Sharia serves as the supreme law of the land.
In the majority of Muslim countries, however, the Sharia is applied selectively. Some countries adopt only a few aspects of Sharia law; others apply the entire code.
While some aspects of traditional Sharia law are still present, the legal systems of these countries have also been deeply influenced by European-style common and civil law.
Severe Punishments
Within Sharia law, there is a category of crimes known as the hudud (Koranic) offences, for which there are specific penalties for particular crimes. For example, fornication is punished by stoning, the consumption of alcohol by lashing, and theft by the amputation of limbs.
The penalties for hudud offences have not been adopted in all Islamic countries. Many predominantly Muslim countries, such as Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria, have not adopted the hudud penalties in their criminal justice systems.
Deterrent
Supporters of the hudud penalties argue that they serve as an effective crime deterrent.
Moreover, they also argue that the hudud penalties are rarely carried out. They are more symbolic as the fear of punishment promotes lawfulness.
Sharia Revival
In some parts of the Muslim world, a stricter interpretation of Sharia law appears to be making a return. In recent years, some Muslim leaders have advocated 'pure' Sharia law, complete with a reinstatement of the traditional punishments for the hudud offences.
In September 1999, several of Nigeria's predominantly Muslim northern states began to adopt a strict interpretation of the Sharia law. By late 2002, 12 out of Nigeria's 36 states had done so.
The new laws impose segregation of the sexes and traditional punishments for the hudud offences.
Women have been banned from working outside of the home and from sharing taxis and buses with men. Fornication outside marriage is now punishable by stoning and theft by amputation.
The sale and consumption of alcohol has also been prohibited, and is punishable by public lashing.
Equal Protection
Both non-Muslim and Muslim human rights activists have charged that the application of Sharia law in some countries has breached international human rights law as codified in numerous conventions and treaties.
They have argued that in some places, the application of Sharia law does not offer equal protection for men and women. Critics say it favours men.
In Saudi Arabia and Pakistan
For example, in Saudi Arabia, a women's testimony in court is worth half that of a man's testimony, according to a Human Rights Watch report in 2002.
Under the so-called zina (fornication) law in Pakistan, extramarital sex is punishable by public whipping or even stoning to death.
If a woman is raped, she runs a high risk of being charged with zina, particularly if she becomes pregnant. In order to prove an absence of consent, however, a woman is required to provide four witnesses to the rape, a near impossible task.
In Nigeria
In the northern Nigeria state of Katsina, Amina Lawal, a 30 year-old divorcee, was convicted by a Sharia court in March 2002 for bearing a child out of wedlock. The charges against the alleged father of Amina's baby, however, were dropped after he denied having had sexual relations with her.
With the help of several human rights and women's organisations, Amina filed an appeal against her death sentence. Despite this, her conviction was upheld in August 2002.
The court's ruling has renewed tension between Nigeria's Muslim and Christian communities. While Muslims make up 50% of Nigeria's population, Christians are a substantial minority that make up 40% of the population.
Christians in states that have reinstated Sharia law are worried that their rights will not be equally protected before Sharia courts. They argue that the new laws create an atmosphere of intimidation.
Human rights organisations all over the world have urged that Sharia law be interpreted in a manner that is in accordance with international human rights standards and the conventions of international law.
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http://islamweb.net/ver2/fatwa/ShowFatwa.php?lang=E&Id=87751&Option=FatwaId
A female witness is considered half of that of a man by the text of the Qur'an:
Allah says (interpretation of meaning): {… And get two witnesses out of your own men. And if there are not two men (available), then a man and two women, such as you agree for witnesses, so that if one of them (two women) errs, the other can remind her. …} [2:282].
Imam Bukhari reported from the Hadith narrated by Abu Said Al-Khudri, and Muslim from the Hadith narrated by Ibn Umar (Radiya Allahu Anhum) that the Prophet (Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam) said: “I have never seen before women who are weak in mind and religion who overcome the people who are more minded than yourselves.” A woman said: ‘O, Prophet of Allah (Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam), what is the weakness of mind and religion.’ The Prophet (Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam) replied: “The weakness of mind is that the witness of two women is equal to the witness of one man, this is the weakness of mind. And a woman spends several nights (or days) without praying, and she breaks the fasting in Ramadan (while she is in menstruation or after childbirth – while men are fasting), and this is the weakness of religion.”
However, she is not blamed for this weakness because she cannot do anything to avoid it. Allah, the Most-High, pointed out her weakness as a witness by saying (interpretation of meaning): {… so that if one of them (two women) errs, the other can remind her. …} [2:282].
She might forget when standing as a witness, and another woman would remind her. That’s why the Islamic jurisprudent could not take the testimony of one woman only, but of the two together.
Sheikh Zindani mentioned that modern science discovered that there are two focuses (in the brain) for each of the man and the woman, a focus for speech and a focus for remembering. When a man speaks, one-focus functions and the second remains for remembering. However, when the woman speaks, the two focuses function, that’s why she cannot completely remember what she is giving witness to, so the second woman would remind her, so that the purpose of witnessing will not be missed.
As regards the witness of one woman if she is the only witness on a murder, then her witness is considered as indication, not an evidence, because even if the witness is one man, his witness will not be considered as a sufficient evidence to prove the murder, because there must be two trustworthy witnesses to establish the evidence, but that would be considered as an indication that a given person is the murderer.
Allah knows best.
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Fareeda's fate: rape, prison and 25 lashes
Up to 80 per cent of women in Pakistan's jails are charged under rules that penalise rape victims. But hardliners have vetoed an end to the Islamic laws
Dan McDougall in western Pakistan
The Observer, Sunday September 17 2006
In the blinding white desert sunlight in a farm courtyard on the outskirts of the ancient town of Shekhupura, Fareeda nervously passes a green silk hijab between her fingers. Unusually for a young Pakistani woman, her fingernails are not pristine and carefully painted but chewed, cracked and grubby.
Fareeda says she feels safe here - a safe house for rape victims run by a local NGO. Littered with rusting motorcycle carcases and parts of discarded fridges and cookers, it feels like a scrapyard.
The story of this 19-year-old's journey here is horrifying. In spring 2005 she was raped by her family's neighbour, a postman, and his teenage son. She fell pregnant - and later miscarried - as a result. Her mistake was to tell her parents. With their consent, under Pakistan's orthodox Islamic laws, she was charged with fornication outside marriage and sentenced to 100 lashes, later reduced to 50 and then 25 because of her age, and sent to jail. After four months her prison ordeal ended when a family friend secretly paid a bribe. Her plight is not unique.
According to a recent report by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, a woman is gang-raped every eight hours in the country. However, because of social taboos, discriminatory laws and the treatment of victims by police, campaigners believe the real figure is far higher. Women who report their rapists remain more likely to go to prison themselves than see justice, so most cases are never reported. Women who are raped can face legal difficulties anywhere in the world, but human rights groups remain particularly concerned over Pakistan's record. Their alarm is centred on enforcement of the 'Hudood ordinances', a complex set of Koranic laws whose name is derived from hud meaning 'punishment'. Similar sharia laws have existed in Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan for centuries, but Pakistan's were enacted by former President Zia ul-Haq only in 1979, as part of his radical attempt to 'Islamicise' the country.
The legislation has always been full of legal ambiguities, and none more so than the Zina ordinance which deals with adultery, premarital sex and rape. The maximum punishment for adultery is stoning to death for married people and 100 lashes for the unwed.
For a rape trial to go ahead in Pakistan, four adult Muslim men, 'all of a pious and trustworthy nature', must have witnessed the attack and be willing to testify. Evidence from female and non-Muslim witnesses is considered worthless. A woman who can't produce those witnesses can be prosecuted for fornication and alleging a false crime, the penalties for which are stoning, lashings or prison.
Last week, despite claims by President General Pervez Musharraf that he was willing to reform the way rape is handled, as part of his much-trumpeted 'enlightened moderation', hardliners in the Pakistani parliament refused to sanction the introduction of a bill that would have ended the archaic laws. The vetoed legislation, the Women Protection Bill, proposed to transfer rape and adultery cases from the Islamic legal system to Pakistan's British-influenced secular penal code. The bill would have scrapped the most controversial element of the law, the need for four male witnesses. Women's rights campaigners, who marched in their thousands in Islamabad last week, claim that up to 80 per cent of women in Pakistan's jails face charges related to the Hudood ordinances and accuse the international community of ignoring the issue.
Yesterday Pakistan's government announced it would now ask a parliamentary committee to review the repeatedly delayed bill.
Lawyers who handle such cases say the legislation is mainly used as a means of revenge by parents whose daughters have refused arranged marriages, or by husbands in divorce cases. In conservative rural areas, where family honour is paramount, many parents file charges against children who defy tradition to choose their own partners.
'Violence against women is a universal problem,' said Kamila Hyat of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. 'Many governments have taken serious steps to deal with it, Pakistan hasn't. There are thousands of victims of rape and few of them have come close to getting justice; many have been punished for their plight. Simply bringing a rape case to court is widely considered in itself a confession of unlawful sexual intercourse outside marriage.'
But defenders of Hudood claim it is more of a deterrent than anything else, and the penalties are rarely invoked. 'We don't think Hudood laws are against human rights,' said Dr Mirajul Huda, from Jamaat-e-Islami, the biggest group in the six-party Islamist alliance that forced the legislative climbdown. 'They prevent people going to the limits. They put an obstacle on all types of obscenity and protect society.'
For Musharraf, who has survived several assassination attempts since his 1999 military coup and has repeatedly angered Muslim clerics by allying himself with the US, the climbdown is seen as an attempt to placate hardliners. But it plays to fears of what some commentators call a 'creeping Talibanisation' across Pakistan. His supporters claim that Musharraf, who heads a fragile coalition, has taken some action. Several months ago he issued a decree making 1,300 women awaiting trial on Hudood violations eligible for bail, but The Observer has discovered that fewer than 400 of those have been released.
'The ordinance is like a sword hanging over the heads of all the women of Pakistan,' said Dr Rubina Saigol, director of Actionaid Pakistan, which gives shelter and legal support to victims of violence. 'It is tragic that the government has reneged on the reforms. Women's rights are not negotiable.'
For Sharma Zia, another victim in the safe house, it is unlikely the fear of being raped again will go away. 'I know I can't stay here for ever,' she says. 'My home town isn't that far away, but I can't return. The men who raped me live close to my parents and even they took the side of my rapists. My allegations only brought them shame. Sometimes I feel like I only bring people shame. I wish I could leave, go abroad, but I know that will never happen.'
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"Religion is not the issue, note, it is not an "Islamic" problem, but one of poverty and ignorance."
This indeed is what got me started :-)
As I mentioned above, before GM as usual added his usual four posts with no comment or relevancy to the topic, i.e. a focus on AFRICA, poverty, ignorance and lack of education therein, I agreed Islam truly can and does have a negative influence on women. I do not dispute this fact. However, THIS article in the Financial Times that I referred you talked about women being treated as second class citizens focused on AFRICA. On another post regarding female genital mutilation, AND in this lengthy article, the primary cause of this subrogation of women in AFRICA was identified and confirmed as "poverty and ignorance". And in this article, the thrust of the article, education was the solution. No where in the very long article did it mention Islam as a primary (actually Islam was not mentioned at all) cause of women's problems. Although in no way way was Christianity or any other religion blamed, Zambia as I pointed out is a Christian nation - still, issues such as women having no property rights, polygamy is legal, child marriage is prevalent, etc. exist. Religion is not the primary issue; the article's point was that subrogation of women was prevalent in AFRICA and as proven on another post, the primary cause of such subrogation and abuse of women in AFRICA was/is poverty and ignorance. The reason I posted this article was to identify the truly amazing positive results of education to prevent abuse of women in AFRICA; that includes Islamic countries, Christian countries (Zambia and others) and in countries with other religions. Education has been proven to be the best way to beat poverty and ignorance, and through beating poverty and ignorance, women's abuse in AFRICA will and does decrease.
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"Religion is not the issue, note, it is not an "Islamic" problem, but one of poverty and ignorance."
This indeed is what got me started :-)
As I mentioned above, before GM as usual added his usual four posts with no comment or relevancy to the topic,
**It's pretty clear to most everyone that has a reading comprehension ability above a 4th grade level.**
i.e. a focus on AFRICA, poverty, ignorance and lack of education therein, I agreed Islam truly can and does have a negative influence on women. I do not dispute this fact. However, THIS article in the Financial Times that I referred you talked about women being treated as second class citizens focused on AFRICA. On another post regarding female genital mutilation, AND in this lengthy article, the primary cause of this subrogation of women in AFRICA was identified and confirmed as "poverty and ignorance".
**Because it's politically incorrect to point out the direct connection between islam and the various pathologies that stem from it's core theological beliefs.**
And in this article, the thrust of the article, education was the solution. No where in the very long article did it mention Islam as a primary (actually Islam was not mentioned at all) cause of women's problems.
**Just because the article glosses over islam's global role in oppression, doesn't mean it isn't so.**
Although in no way way was Christianity or any other religion blamed, Zambia as I pointed out is a Christian nation - still, issues such as women having no property rights, polygamy is legal, child marriage is prevalent, etc. exist. Religion is not the primary issue; the article's point was that subrogation of women was prevalent in AFRICA and as proven on another post, the primary cause of such subrogation and abuse of women in AFRICA was/is poverty and ignorance. The reason I posted this article was to identify the truly amazing positive results of education to prevent abuse of women in AFRICA; that includes Islamic countries, Christian countries (Zambia and others) and in countries with other religions. Education has been proven to be the best way to beat poverty and ignorance, and through beating poverty and ignorance, women's abuse in AFRICA will and does decrease.
**The Saudis are far from poor, yet they do all sorts of horrific things, why? The al qaeda leadership, and many of it's high/mid level operatives come from wealth and on average have post-graduate degrees and are multi-lingual. So where does this leave the "poor and uneducated" theory? Why do muslims buy islamic books advocating female genital mutilation while living in first world countries?**
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**The Saudis are far from poor, yet they do all sorts of horrific things, why? The al qaeda leadership, and many of it's high/mid level operatives come from wealth and on average have post-graduate degrees and are multi-lingual. So where does this leave the "poor and uneducated" theory? Why do muslims buy islamic books advocating female genital mutilation while living in first world countries?**
Sheez, GM, you're not paying attention. We're talking about AFRICA, and hence circumlocuting around the unpleasant fact that in many Muslim countries in AFRICA and elsewhere women are horribly treated as a religious tenet. You must therefor ignore sweeping statements made within posts about AFRICA and only heed the parts which don't dance around unpalatable realities. Near as I can tell, at least.
Clearly you need to spend more time on a college campus in an identity politics cloister lest you be nominated for reeducation.
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JDN:
"before GM as usual added his usual four posts with no comment or relevancy to the topic,"
Although his posted articles may not fit wtihin the logic of YOUR argument, the fit within the logic of HIS argument-- a logic the relevance of which I found easy to discern even with his tradition of not adding an explanatory sentence or three :wink:
Anyway, with the beginning of the Sharia thread nearby, I return to a subject which appears regularly in this thread:
http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/same_sex_marriage_lessons_from_canada/
Same-sex marriage: lessons from Canada
Where gay rights triumph, new rights battles begin.
In May this year the California Supreme Court ruled that Proposition 22, which affirmed opposite-sex marriage, was unconstitutional. To date, only Massachusetts in the United States allows same-sex marriage. So what are the Canadian lessons for California and other states that will, in time, face a debate about the redefinition of marriage?
Firstly, where gay rights triumph, new rights battles begin. One example is over the rights of children. Another is over polygamy, which soon involves freedom of religion. A third battle is over freedom of speech -- the right to publicly advocate traditional marriage can be challenged as homophobic. Secondly, where marriage is not understood as an institution, it cannot be defended adequately in the public square. In short, if North Americans are not educated on what marriage is, they will not, in the long term, support an exclusive definition, one that will appear discriminatory even if this is not the case or the intention.
Marriage as an institution is meant to constrain human behaviour, not liberate or grant rights. Put differently, where individuals have both rights and responsibilities, marriage falls more in the latter category; it is a responsibility, not a right.
In his book, The Future of Marriage, American family scholar David Blankenhorn says that "a social institution creates and maintains rules, including rules for who is, and is not, a part of the institution… [A] social institution creates public meaning… [Such institutions] exist to solve basic problems and meet core needs.”
Blankenhorn goes on to say this: “In nearly all human societies marriage is socially approved sexual intercourse between a woman and a man, conceived both as a personal relationship and as an institution, primarily such that any children resulting from the union are—and are understood by the society to be—emotionally, morally, practically, and legally affiliated with both of the parents.”
Keeping this definition in mind, any culture which sanctions same-sex marriage will place children’s rights at odds with adult desires. The January 2007 Ontario court ruling that a child could have three parents was inevitable because with same-sex marriage the concept of biological parenthood is immediately displaced. Same-sex reproduction immediately involves a third party. The idea of a "legal parent" replaced the idea of a “natural parent.”
And from three parents to polygamy: to date, our legislators have ignored the fact, revealed in February, that polygamous Muslim families are living in Toronto and claiming multiple Canadian welfare benefits in many cases. The logical and legal grounds to resist polygamy have been removed, making it difficult to prosecute.
Canadians, we are told, are laid back. But mention polygamy, and precisely the same cultural elites who sanctioned same-sex marriage become a little anxious. Will they accept that? Or will they trample religious freedom to prosecute polygamous families?
The right to practice religion freely has not fared well against gay equality rights. We see this most clearly through the human rights tribunals. In British Columbia, the Catholic Knights of Columbus were fined for declining to host a lesbian couple’s wedding reception. Chris Kempling, a teacher, was disciplined by the teachers’ governing body for a letter to the editor about homosexuality and in Alberta, on May 30, 2008, a pastor, Stephen Boissoin, was fined for the same, and ordered never to speak “discriminatorily” on the topic of homosexuality again.
Certainly, this is not the result of legalizing same-sex marriage. Many factors have combined to create an atmosphere in which marriage looks to be amorphous -- the introduction of no-fault divorce and increasing rights for cohabiting couples changed how we view the institution. Marriage now looks to be strictly religious and strictly private. That it is not purely religious or private at all is lost as equality discourse prevails.
On August 16, 2008, presidential hopeful Barack Obama told a California church audience that marriage was between one man and one woman. California is not a conservative state, yet polls there show support for traditional marriage. But the law also acts as a kind of teacher, which means that, in time, Californians could vote differently, given the recent Supreme Court ruling.
Since same-sex marriage became law, Canadians have been quiet. This is largely self-censoring, led by the real possibility that speaking out will result in public maligning, or worse. California is at a crossroads that Canada has already passed. But both north and south of the border, we need to begin to learn about marriage as an institution, and let those lessons lead public policy in the future.
Andrea Mrozek and Peter Jon Mitchell are staff members of the Institute of Marriage and the Family Canada, a social policy think thank based in Ottawa. This article first appeared in the IMFC's bulletin eReview.
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JDN:
"before GM as usual added his usual four posts with no comment or relevancy to the topic,"
Although his posted articles may not fit wtihin the logic of YOUR argument, the fit within the logic of HIS argument-- a logic the relevance of which I found easy to discern even with his tradition of not adding an explanatory sentence or three :wink:
Actually, as Body-by-Guinness succinctly pointed out, "Sheez GM, you are not paying attention. We're talking AFRICA..."
While GM's posts may fit with his "logic", there was no "logic of HIS argument" or "relevance" to this discussion of oppression of women
in AFRICA therefore...
But as you said, let's move on... :-)
GM in his post on the Sharia thread does make some interesting comments on same sex marriage and polygamy. While they are definitely relevant
to Sharia, they also may be germane to this Topic?
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As is often the case in Life, the boundaries are not clear. Play it as you will. :-)
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Actually, as Body-by-Guinness succinctly pointed out, "Sheez GM, you are not paying attention. We're talking AFRICA..."
I did indeed, JDN, and as is your custom you are misconstruing the point, which was "don't make blanket statements and then demand adherence to strictures identified after the fact."
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Hey JDN:
Is it OK to "marry" your ewe?
Yip!
========================
9-25-08
The Flint Journal
LANSING
Man involved with sheep will stay off registry
The Michigan Court of Appeals has ruled that a Battle Creek man who pleaded no contest to sodomizing a sheep does not have to register as a sex offender after his release from prison.
Jeffrey Haynes, 45, is serving 2 1/2 to 20 years for sodomy- a "crime against nature" under state law. Haynes was sentenced in 2006 after police said he had sex with a sheep at a Bedford TOWNSHIP FARM IN 2005.
The animal's owner caught him on the property, and the sheep was found injured. A DNA sample taken from the animal matched Haynes' genetic material.
A no contest plea is not an admission of guilt but is treated as such for sentencing purposes.
In a 3-0 opinion released Wednesday, the appeals court said the state sex offender registry is intended to track people who have committed crimes against humans, not animals.
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lol
And to think I ate lamb for dinner this week!!!
ps pretty funny, but 20 years? Now that's not funny.
I doubt if you raped a women if you would get 20 years...
Now that's a thread for the gender forum.
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http://img89.imageshack.us/img89/285/slipperyslopeel4.png
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Well, some folks think partial birth abortion (supported by BO btw) is infanticide, likewise leaving aborted fetuses to die outside of the womb (supported by BO btw) -- this apart from the general circular discussion about when life begins.
Furthermore, it does seem like polygamy is on the radar screen, see e.g. the beginnings of Sharia in the UK, Canada, as discussed in other threads.
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http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/10/23/women-leaders-politics-oped-cx_ee_1024eaves.html
Pandora
Women Don't Make Better Leaders
Elisabeth Eaves 10.24.08, 12:00 AM ET
A story in The New York Times on men who support vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin elicited some interesting quotes. An insurance agent from Indiana asked rhetorically, "Who can't trust a mother?" A former truck driver in North Carolina said, "They bear us children, they risk their lives to give us birth, so maybe it's time we let a woman lead us." He went on: "The sexual drives and big egos of male leaders have gotten in the way of politics in this country."
They may not know it, but these men are what academics call "difference" or "cultural" feminists, believing that women deserve equal rights not because, as humans, they are basically the same as men, but because of their differences--and even that those differences in some ways make women superior.
This idea that inherent female qualities make women better leaders has been kicked around many times by everyone from radical feminists, who argued that women were flat-out better, to the Catholic Church and its cult of Mary. In the 19th century, adherents of the so-called Cult of True Womanhood deemed women more pure and pious than men.
Back in 2000, when Elizabeth Dole ran for the Republican presidential nomination and we were all suffering from Clinton fatigue, some pundits suggested that, at the very least, having a nice old lady in charge would spare us another agonizing sex scandal. She was seen as someone who could bring a calming maternal propriety to the White House after the yahoo from Arkansas ran roughshod.
But is there really any reason to believe that we should prefer female leaders categorically? In tough times, it's tempting to think that there must be some whole class of people who wouldn't have screwed things up as badly. That a woman would have known better than to launch a gratuitous invasion, or that some instinct for fairness and generosity would have prevented the ladies from running Wall Street into the ground.
But other than the fact that we tend to have warm, fuzzy associations with our mothers, there's nothing whatsoever to suggest that this fantasy of better--or even qualitatively different--female leadership might be true. The only reason we don't have many examples of terrible female leaders is that we have had vastly fewer women in charge, period.
The examples we do have, meanwhile, suggest that autocratic tendencies and bad judgment appear to be distributed along a bell curve for women just as they are for men. Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi indulged in a period of dictatorial rule. Benazir Bhutto's femininity didn't make her immune to the nepotism and corruption of Pakistani politics.
Nor, as is sometimes supposed, is there evidence that female leaders as a group are any less martial or cutthroat in their approach to power. Catherine the Great put down the peasants and eliminated rivals. Margaret Thatcher invaded the Falklands and told George H.W. Bush not to "go wobbly" on Saddam Hussein, sending troops to back up her words.
Power attracts people who like power, and they share certain qualities with one another regardless of gender. There's no reason to imagine, for example, that if women ran Wall Street it would all be different, because you wouldn't work your way to the high reaches of high finance if you didn't possess a certain amount of greed and ruthlessness to begin with. If you are a woman driven to run for high office or make billions of dollars, you probably share leadership traits with men who have those same goals.
And while it makes for a nice ego massage to be told of one's superiority, women should be wary of attempts to categorize them as "better." For one thing, putting someone on a pedestal makes her followers that much more disappointed when she falls from grace. For another, those who obsess over inherent differences tend to do so as a springboard to something else: The Cult of True Womanhood served as a basis for the argument that a woman's proper place was in the home.
And having a greater virtuousness attributed to oneself is as much burden as privilege, saddling the bearer with a higher standard to uphold and be judged by. It's why, even in 2008, promiscuous girls are still sluts while promiscuous boys are just boys.
In the West, for adult women, this may amount to not much more than an annoyance. In cultures where it makes women the bearers of male "honor," it can be deadly. Globally, according to a United Nations estimate, more than 5,000 women a year are murdered by their own family members for perceived sexual improprieties.
Women do not make categorically better leaders, and it's no favor to them to suggest that they do. By all means, let's elect smart, judicious leaders who happen to be female--but don't expect them to do a better job than the men by reason of estrogen alone. As New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia noted, "There is no Democrat or Republican way to pick up garbage." For the vast majority of functions of leadership, there's no male or female way to do it either.
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I'd have voted for Margaret Thatcher for President of the United States in a flash.
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I'd vote for Sarah Palin in a flash. And Thatcher as well.
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http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2008/10/29/strip-club-holds-sarah-palin-lookalike-contest/
.....this story about a Sarah Palin lookalike contest held at Vegas strip club (oh, sorry, “gentleman’s club”). Lots of bikinis, sexualized use of guns and sexism abound.
The saddest thing is that it’s not the most offensive display of sexualized misogyny that has been directed a Palin. The sex doll came close, but I’d say that award goes “Naylin’ Paylin,” the Larry Flint pornographic film starring yet another Palin lookalike, the existence of which all of us should have seen coming.
There are two problems with both the porn film and this strip club contest, and neither one of them is about porn and stripping in general. The first issue is consent. Sarah Palin did not consent to having her image used in this way. Portraying her sexually like this without her consent is a violation — and contrary to what many people apparently think, existing as a woman in public is not the same as consenting to use of your body as public property. This isn’t satire or parody; it’s just sexist and degrading.
Which brings us to the next issue. The entire reason that anyone gets to hide behind the parody and “all in good fun” arguments is precisely because portraying Sarah Palin sexually is intended to be mocking towards her. It’s taking a powerful woman and working to make her non-threatening by turning her into a sexual object. And it’s the very opposite side of the coin as calling Hillary Clinton ugly and denying her sexuality. Both reinforce the ideas that women exist to sexually pleasure men, and that sexuality is the only power we have (or should be allowed). Whether revoking or affirming that “power,” the result is an attempt to render the woman inferior and powerless.
We still live in a world where women seemingly cannot be seen as sexual and at the same time be taken seriously. We still live in a world where sexuality itself is seen as degrading to women. That is the purpose of these types of exercises — to debase Palin by reminding everyone that she (presumably) has a vagina and is therefore only good for fucking. I truly believe that if sex was not still viewed as inherently degrading to women, we wouldn’t be seeing these sorts of displays at all.
The goal is to mock Palin’s intelligence not by engaging with her foolish beliefs and ignorant rhetoric, but by pointing and saying “look, boobs!” or “I’d sure like to hit that!” And making her non-threatening isn’t only dangerous politically when Palin is in fact in a position to potentially do a lot of harm; attempting to make her non-threatening in this way is dangerous to all women who hold power, who want to be taken seriously, and who dream of being able to be proud of their sexuality and brains all at the same time. An acknowledgment of female sexuality shouldn’t be seen as mocking — these portrayals of Palin only reinforce the idea that it is.
This is degrading to Sarah Palin, particularly as a woman, both because it ignores the right of consent and because the very intention is for it to be degrading. It’s in no way a celebration of sexuality (since in order for it to be, it would by definition have to be consensual), but a ridicule. And in the end, all women are the butt of the joke.
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Odd, I am the one to respond to you. Usually (nearly always) I agree with you and I have very high respect for your opinion.
First, I am not defending the lookalike contest at he "gentlemen's club" nor am I defending the "Naylin Paylin" film by Flint.
But, that's politics in America. I am not saying it's right, but... And what does "without her consent is a violation" mean?
She is in the public figure, therefore consent is not needed. I live in LA; the local "stars" know the law.
Also, (sorry) I disagree, "calling calling Hillary ugly and denying her sexuality" in my opinion does not "reinforce the ideas that women
(solely) exist to sexually pleasure men, and that sexuality is the only power we (women) have". I forget which forum post, but Crafty
and GM both admired Margaret Thatcher. I do too. Truly an outstanding woman; brilliant, innovative, etc. But, a sex pot she was not.
Yet, many men would and did vote for her. And in my opinion England should be grateful for her rule.
Also, I doubt if Ms. Tzipi Livini became Prime Minister solely on her looks or sexuality. Rather, it is simply her ability. To be fair,
I don't know Israel politics (You have forgotten more than I know), but my impression is that politics are tough in Israel; she survived
and won - and it is not a beauty contest. Just raw ability.
Palin problem (in my opinion) is that she is all show, but no substance and no brains. Most on this forum don't like Hillary, but I don't
think anyone has called her stupid and uneducated; she's tough and smart. Yet the job of VP is one heart beat away from being President (and McCain is old
plus he had cancer) so why Palin? It's insulting and pandering. Plus we don't have a parliamentary system; Palin will be President if McCain is medically incapable.
Bottom line, nothing wrong with Palin, she's just not qualified to be President. Good humor/satire in my opinion often has a basis for fact. Palin as a public
figure deserves the adoration of the far right Christian coalition and deserves the ridicule of men/women who demand excellence. The good with the bad. And
she seems to play up to and seek both sides.
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Liberals love to play the "If you don't agree with my liberal position, you must be stupid" game. Remember how stupid Reagan was supposed to be, while Teddy Kennedy was a real intellect. Palin is the new target of this game.
As far as Larry Flynt goes, it's to be expected. No one is more sexist, racist, classist and elitist than the left, who officially hate that sort of thing, thus give themselves full permission to engage in it to attack their opponents. Don't believe me? Just look at the things said about Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice by the left as an example.
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http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/03/pastor_wright_insulted_condole.html
March 20, 2008
Pastor Wright insulted Condoleeza Rice
Ed Lasky
Pastor Jeremiah Wright insulted, in a vile, sexist and racist manner, the Secretary of State. From ABC News’ The Blotter:
In April 2003, Rev. Wright told his congregation that "the United States government has failed the vast majority of our citizens of African descent."
"For every one Oprah, a billionaire, you've got five million blacks who are out of work," he said. "For every one Colin Powell, a millionaire, you've got 10 million blacks who cannot read. For every one Condoskeeza [sic] Rice, you've got one million in prison. For every one Tiger Woods, who needs to get beat, at the Masters, with his cap-blazing hips, playing on a course that discriminates against women. For every one Tiger Woods, we got 10,000 black kids who will never see a golf course."
Do you know what that means? Our friends at Urban Dictionary do:
whore, slut..
Dr. Rice is has achieved the highest position yet for an African-American woman in government, yet Barack Obama’s uncle-like mentor calls her a whore, a slut.
What happened to hope?
Pastor Wright seems to have a serious problem with African-Americans who make it: Tiger Woods, Colin Powell, Oprah (his former congregant), etc. I am surprised he did not throw Bill Cosby in there.
Yet Barack Obama’s success seems fine with him. I wonder why?
Hat tip: NRO' Media Blog
**This is where Obama got up and left this church because of such things being preached from the pulpit. Oh wait, he didn't, did he?**
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Below is some of the stuff hurled at Michelle Malkin:
http://michellemalkin.com/2008/09/15/race-traitor-card-playing-e-mail-of-the-day/
Race traitor card-playing e-mail of the day
By Michelle Malkin • September 15, 2008 04:25 PM
A race-obsessed journalist who works for Pacifica Radio tells me how I’m supposed to think, act, and write. “Don’t forget you’re brown,” she scolds.
Oh, thanks for reminding me, sister. I know you and “your people” won’t let me forget that skin color is supposed to dictate ideology. I’ve been hearing it for 20 years.
from Leilani Albano
to writemalkin@gmail.com
date Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 4:06 PM
subject don’t forget you’re brown
mailed-by yahoo.com
signed-by yahoo.com
i’ve read your stories throughout the years.
and i have to say, from one pinay journalist to another, you embarrass me and you embarrass our people.
i’m sorry the US media has used you, larry elders and other conservative drones of color to bolster their quota numbers.
what we need are more conscious journalists of color, not just another mainstream token acting as a cheerleader for the conservative right.
hopefully someday, you will find genuine connections with others and see how much damage you have done with your recklessly crafted pieces.
-leilani albano, kpfk radio los angeles
http://michellemalkin.com/2006/05/20/do-you-think-this-is-funny/
Do you think this is funny?
By Michelle Malkin • May 20, 2006 11:23 AM
Pat yourselves on the backs, you tolerant liberal bastards.
***
This is hardly
the first
time
liberals
have
made Asian whore ping-pong ball jokes about me.
But Wonkette has now mainstreamed it. And I’m sick of it. Are you proud of yourselves? Do you get a bonus from Nick Denton for scraping the bottom of the barrel?
***
The writer at Wonkette responsible for sliming me is Alex Pareene, who posted the supposed instant message conversation between himself and an “operative.” Here is his blog.
Here’s a bit about him from a recent profile, in which he is effusively praised by his hip, edgy bosses:
“I’m not nearly as good of a writer as Ana Marie Cox, so we’re just going to have to live with that,” he said. “But I think what catches people’s attention is that I’m a 20-year-old who writes like an old man. I have a sort of frame of reference that’s about 50 years behind the times. I basically have encyclopedic knowledge about very arcane information. And also, I’m very effective at cursing.”
Gawker’s former managing editor Choire Sicha discovered Pareene in the spring of 2004 when Gawker asked their readers to suggest what kind of skits Paris Hilton should be in when she hosted “Saturday Night Live.” Both Gawker and Wonkette are owned by Gawker Media.
“I randomly sent them off a suggestion, and Choire Sicha, their managing editor, wrote me back and said, ‘You’re really funny. Are you a writer? Should I have heard of you? Let’s find a way to use you,’ ” Pareene said. “I was originally sort of a guest editor on Gawker.com. There were two weeks in the summer when they were between editors so they brought me in to fill in.”
Sicha said he has never met Pareene in person, but thinks Pareene’s talent is undeniable.
“He’s definitely one of the brightest comic talents I’ve ever come across,” Sicha said. “What he’s got is wiles — preternaturally, for someone his age. He’s creepy-talented, really — kind of spooky. Maybe he’s a hoax perpetrated by a 40-year-old housewife.”
The summer after he dropped out, Pareene began a stint as a guest editor for Gawker. But this time, he would actually get paid for his blogging — something he considers fairly remarkable.
“I still can’t believe I’m getting paid for it,” he said with a chuckle.
Gawker’s current managing editor, Lockhart Steele, said Pareene’s use of language and the way he “cocks his eyebrow at the media” caught his attention.
“We’re looking for someone who can have a little fun at the media’s expense,” Steele said. “Different blogs are enjoyable for different reasons and Alex has his own personality as a writer. You know when you like it, and when you go back to it, you ask yourself what brings you back and for Alex, I think it’s his quality of writing.”
***
Greg Tinti on double standards.
Dan Riehl spots underlying irony.
***
From the Gawker Media “Terms of Use” page, which shows that commenters are held to a higher standard than Gawker Media sites’ editors and racist smear merchants:
Comments Terms of Use
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I think if you look carefully you see that the racist and sexual slurs and used on both sides of the aisle. Liberals participate; it is wrong. But I think conservatives in particular
are prone to use racial and sexual slurs. I think it is a reflection of their own inadequacy.
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Really? Please cite some examples JDN.
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The Four Stages of Conservative Female Abuse
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2008
There’s something about outspoken conservative women that drives the Left mad. It’s a peculiar pathology I’ve reported on for more than 15 years, both as a witness and a target. Thus, the onset of Palin Derangement Syndrome in the media, Democrat circles, and the cesspools of the blogosphere came as no surprise. They just can’t help themselves.
Liberals hold a special animus for constituencies they deem traitors. Minorities who identify as social and economic conservatives have left the plantation and sold out their people. Women who put an “R” by their name have abandoned their ovaries and betrayed their gender. As Republican officeholders and conservative public figures who are women have grown in number and visibility, the progression of Conservative Female Abuse has worsened. The astonishing vitriol and virulent hatred directed at GOP Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is the most severe manifestation to date.
The first stage of Conservative Female Abuse by the Left is infantilization. Right-wing women can’t possibly believe what they believe about the sanctity of life, self-defense, free markets, or foreign policy. They must be submissive little dolls of the White Male Hierarchy. Or, as a far Left (is there any other kind of Left in San Francisco?) San Francisco Chronicle columnist wrote of First Lady Laura Bush, they must be put in their place as “docile doormats” with no brains of their own. True to form, no sooner had John McCain announced Gov. Palin as his veep pick than jeers of “Palin = neocon puppet” sprouted across the Internet.
The second stage of CFA is sexualization. A conservative woman is not merely a sellout. She is an intellectual prostitute. Unable or unwilling to argue with them on the merits, detractors resort to mocking the physical appearance of their ideological opponents in skirts and denigrating them with vulgar epithets. MSNBC hosts insulted former GOP presidential candidate Fred Thompson’s accomplished wife and mother of two, Jeri Thompson, as working the stripper pole. Newspaper cartoonists Ted Rall, Pat Oliphant, and Jeff Danziger caricatured Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as a mammy, thick-lipped parrot, and Bush “House Nigga” armed with “hair straightener.” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd derided former GOP Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris for applying “her makeup with a trowel.”
True to form, Dowd was first out of the box to snicker at Gov. Palin’s beauty pageant past, ridicule her “beehive and sexy shoes,” and compare her path to the vice presidential nomination as a “hokey chick flick.” Joe Biden backhandedly praised her as “good looking.” And left-wing bloggers worked overtime on lurid photoshops of Palin as a bikini model and porn star. At the Democratic Underground, a highly trafficked liberal website raising money for Barack Obama, members held a contest to come up with nicknames and posters to slime GOP Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin — and then to “spread [them] all over the ‘net.” Among the “nicer” entries: “Cruella,” “Gidget,” “Governor Jesus Camp,” “VPILF,” “Fertilla the Huntress,” “Iditabroad,” and “KILLER PYSCHO FUNDIE BITCH FROM HELL!!”
The third stage of CFA is demonization. When the Left tires of hurling whore insults, it turns conservative women in the public eye into nefarious creatures. Bill Maher called Laura Bush “Hitler’s dog.” George Carlin attacked Barbara Bush as “the Silver douchebag.” A Huffington Post website member wrote of Nancy Reagan: “Like her evil husband, she has lived far too long. Here’s hoping the hag suffers for several weeks, then croaks in the tub.” Another added: “I feel no pity for the bitch who took delight in watching thousands die of a horrible disease and watching the poor having to eat out of dumpsters because of her husband’s political beliefs.”
True to form, rumors of Palin being a crypto-Nazi surfaced on the Internet and the fringe media. And liberal critics used her gun-rights record to smear her as bloodthirsty.
And the final stage of CFA is dehumanization. Conservative women aren’t real women according to the liberal feminist establishment’s definition. Remember when Gloria Steinem called Texas Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison a “female impersonator?” Or when curdled NOW leader Patricia Ireland instructed Democrats to vote only for “authentic” female political candidates? Or when Al Gore’s fashion consultant Naomi Wolf described the foreign-policy analysis of Jeane Kirkpatrick as being “uninflected by the experiences of the female body?”
Echoing the bottom-feeders in the liberal blogosphere, mainstream journalists and Obama water-carriers now question Palin’s commitment to motherhood and even challenged her pre-natal care decisions in an effort to destroy her. Forget about questioning their patriotism. I question their sanity.
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Really? Please cite some examples JDN.
Ahhh just for example, as Rachel indirectly pointed out, the right calling Hillary a "bitch" a "lesbian" and ugly doesn't sound
very professional to me. And the slurs get a lot worse...
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Any slurs that compare to what has been aimed at Condoleeza Rice, or Michelle Malkin?
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Oh you mean the "self described political conservative" radio announcer named Lenihan who called Dr. Condoleezza Rice a "coon" on the air? I think he got fired...
And rightfully so.
As for Michelle Malkin, I haven't read much, but do I really care what people say about a reporter/blogger who has zero credibility? Read her stuff; the woman is a racist and zealot.
I think she brings the attacks upon herself. She needs/wants the notoriety. It keeps her name in the news, otherwise she would have been forgotten a long time ago.
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I've never heard of "Lenihan.
What has Michelle Malkin said that would qualify her as racist?
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"the right calling Hillary a "bitch" a "lesbian" and ugly doesn't sound
very professional to me. And the slurs get a lot worse..."
Truth is a defense :evil:
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JDN,
Still waiting for you to back up your claim that Michelle Malkin is a racist.
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GM just Google "Michelle AND Malkin AND racist". The reasons and groups calling her a racist are too long to list including
even Asian groups among whom Michelle is a member. But then as I said before, I doubt if anyone really believes her.
She is a sensationalist craving attention and notoriety. Is she a racist; or is she just saying and writing those things to provoke
people and gain attention to herself? Either way, I have zero respect for her. Nor do most people. As Crafty posted,
"Truth is a defense". And I think she truly seeks the attacks otherwise absolutely no one would pay attention to her.
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Just a quick yip from Argentina:
JDN, please save us the time of wading through the flotsam that such a Google search would generate and give us a few examples of what YOU regard as good examples.
Yip!
Marc
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So many examples to choose from, but time is short;
Maybe her blatant support for white supremacy extremists?
or
Maybe her comments that the Japanese/AMERICAN population should have been locked up during WWII
or
Maybe the hypocrisy of her position of being against "anchor babies" (change the constitution?) yet she was born
here while her parents were in the US on a Visa? Good grief, she is an anchor baby a jackpot baby!
or
Her blatant and hypocritical dislike of immigrants. Even Lou Dobbs (whom I actually respect), a conservative and anti immigrationist
is careful not to use race as a basis for his arguments. Malkin seems to put race and her racist attitudes at the forefront.
or
Her unabashed dislike for all blacks.
or
Her support for racial profiling
or
Comments by even other Philippina's that "Michelle Malkin is selling out her own people."
or
How Asian women in general seem to despise her - Asian calling Asian a racist. Now that's really not good.
Good grief, the list goes on and on. I mean it's hard to find a group that doesn't think she is racist.
She's an Asian shock jockey looking for headlines to make a buck. That's fine, this is America,
but that doesn't mean I have to respect her nor does it mean I have to forgive her racist remarks. Nor does most of America.
And as I said, the list is so long, I thought it might be easier for GM to do a Google Search rather than me to begin
spoon feeding it to him.
I'll defend Rice. I will even defend Palin. But Michelle Malkin? She get's what she deserves... She has made her own bed.
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I was hoping for some citations, some quotes, things of that sort , , ,
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Sorry, I don't really think she is worth the effort; she is nobody and fading fast. On numerous topics/positions I referred to above
she is a blatant racist. Her positions are indefensible. It blocks out any logic or reasoning otherwise she may have.
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Ah, but is it worth it not to hear GM and me razzing that you made a charge that you can´t back up?+
.
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So many examples to choose from, but time is short;
Maybe her blatant support for white supremacy extremists?
**Really? What white supremacy extremists were these? What did she say or do to support them?**
or
Maybe her comments that the Japanese/AMERICAN population should have been locked up during WWII
**To be precise, she wrote a book defending FDR's policy in WWII. Which party did FDR belong to again?**
or
Maybe the hypocrisy of her position of being against "anchor babies" (change the constitution?) yet she was born
here while her parents were in the US on a Visa? Good grief, she is an anchor baby a jackpot baby!
**There is a difference between people who are here legally having children vs. illegal aliens having "anchor babies".**
or
Her blatant and hypocritical dislike of immigrants. Even Lou Dobbs (whom I actually respect), a conservative and anti immigrationist
is careful not to use race as a basis for his arguments. Malkin seems to put race and her racist attitudes at the forefront.
**Please cite an example.**
or
Her unabashed dislike for all blacks.
**Please cite an example of this.**
or
Her support for racial profiling
**You mean that the TSA searching an 80 yr. old grandmother of Norwegian ancestry while a 20-something male from Saudi Arabia moves unimpeded to his flight strikes you as good policy? **
or
Comments by even other Philippina's that "Michelle Malkin is selling out her own people."
**If Michelle Malkin is an American citizen, then who are her "own people? Are you saying that ethnic loyalty should trump national loyalty? Who determines what a minority should and shouldn't think?**
or
How Asian women in general seem to despise her - Asian calling Asian a racist. Now that's really not good.
**Really? Have your heard any asian women express this opinion to you directly?**
Good grief, the list goes on and on. I mean it's hard to find a group that doesn't think she is racist.
She's an Asian shock jockey looking for headlines to make a buck. That's fine, this is America,
but that doesn't mean I have to respect her nor does it mean I have to forgive her racist remarks. Nor does most of America.
And as I said, the list is so long, I thought it might be easier for GM to do a Google Search rather than me to begin
spoon feeding it to him.
**I just googled "Obama" and "antichrist" and got 885,000 hits. Does that make it true?** (This was SARCASM, I do not think Obama is the antichrist, got it JDN?)
I'll defend Rice. I will even defend Palin. But Michelle Malkin? She get's what she deserves... She has made her own bed.
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Ah, but is it worth it not to hear GM and my razzing that you made a charge that you can´t back up?+
.
Worth more than gold, I admit, :-D but just check it out; I made the key points above. And she is
not worth fighting or wasting time over. And I acknowledged that I like and respect Lou Dobbs; isn't that
enough of a bone for you wolves? And if I cut and pasted quote after quote, article after article, well, then GM could say
I am no different than him. And that would be no fun. :evil:
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Just googled "Lou Dobbs" and "racist" and got 406,000 hits. I haven't seen much of his show, but I doubt very much that he is. Funny enough, I'm not aware of any difference between his stance on illegal aliens and Michelle Malkin's. So please explain what the key difference is, JDN.
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"I made the key points above. And she is not worth fighting or wasting time over. And I acknowledged that I like and respect Lou Dobbs; isn't that enough of a bone for you wolves? "
Umm , , , no :lol:
T0 make a POINT, you would have to back up your ASSERTIONS, assertions of things which are quite ugly btw, which you simply have not done. While I agree she can enjoy playing the provocateur (so what?) I enjoy reading MM most of the time find her to be someone who goes after liberal lunacies and specious liberal thinking. So before I throw her under the bus :wink: as a racist bigot it is going to take more than what you´ve produced so far.
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"I made the key points above. And she is not worth fighting or wasting time over. And I acknowledged that I like and respect Lou Dobbs; isn't that enough of a bone for you wolves? "
Umm , , , no :lol:
T0 make a POINT, you would have to back up your ASSERTIONS, assertions of things which are quite ugly btw, which you simply have not done. While I agree she can enjoy playing the provocateur (so what?) I enjoy reading MM most of the time find her to be someone who goes after liberal lunacies and specious liberal thinking. So before I throw her under the bus :wink: as a racist bigot it is going to take more than what you´ve produced so far.
Gee GM constantly "backs up points" with cut and paste that have no basis of fact or relevancy... but lots of quantity...
And please do continue reading MM if she provides entertainment - there is no need to toss her under the bus; however
I just suggest that you read her with a jaundiced eye, but entertainment is important. :-)
You seem tenacious regarding MM? A nobody; a vociferous and particularly obnoxious blogger, albeit entertaining. It seems odd;
you usually go for substance. But this time :-(
White Supremacy - Numerous articles exist on Malkin and her affiliation with VDARE.com
Named for Virginia Dare, the first white person born in the New World, the site has been named by the anti-racist Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. And for good reason: the site is dedicated to pushing the kind of pseudo-science the Nazis could have only dreamed of using to support their racial fantasies. Forget phrenology: VDARE spends its time touting books that purport to prove that the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans is 67, below the accepted standard criteria for a diagnosis of mental retardation.
The Anti-Defamation League notes that the author of the review, J. Philippe Rushton, has been less than subtle about his racism. "During [a] 1996 conference... Rushton lectured at length about the sexual differences among various races, arguing that blacks, while possessing smaller brains, reproduce at a faster rate due to the larger size of their sex organs. 'Not to reinforce stereotypes,' he has said elsewhere, 'but it's a trade-off: more brain or more penis, you can't have everything.' ... He has also stated that Nazi Germany's military prowess was due in part to the purity of their gene pool."
Malkin's ties to the site are legion: it regularly prints her column, while she employs one of its writers, Juan Mann, as the principal writer of her "Immigration Blog" and lists the site on her blogroll. And it's not as if Malkin isn't well aware of the criticism, both of the site and her ties to it. . .in a post on her blog in September 2004, she noted that "my friend Peter Brimelow (founder of VDARE) observes that some people apparently think linking to VDARE is tantamount to a hate crime." What do you know. . .for once, he's right.
Or in 2002 MM wrote that interment of thousands of Japanese Americans was "wrong and abhorrent." Yet, in 2004 she wrote a book defending and saying it was great to put thousands upon thousands of innocent and loyal Japanese/Americans in these prison camps. Odd, my mother's family (German) was never rounded up. And yes, GM it was FDR a democrat who did that. So? In most elections I have voted Republican; does it matter which party commits a racist act? It is still wrong.
And I love the hypocrisy of her immigration policy. MM is suggesting "babies born to illegal immigrants, tourists, and temporary workers be ineligible for US citizenship". Yet her parents never had a Green Card. They came here on a temporary work visa, very quickly delivered MM and then they all claimed US Citizenship rather than go home to their native country. Why go back when I can get all those rights that go with it? Or was that planned before they arrived? She is an anchor baby just like those Mexicans she loves to hate. Seems a bit inconsistent to me.
She is a sensationalist with no substance; a shock jockey. Worse, she is a racist and a hypocrite.
Sorry, but I am done with Micelle Malkin; I have no interest in her. Continue to watch/read her for entertainment purposes, but for serious journalism I would find someone else. But no reason to dump her under a bus as I understand even O'Reily dumped her off his show.
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OMG! Substance!
I did not know that about her. Do you have a URL for what you would regard as a particularly sound description/discussion of MM and VDARE?
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"I made the key points above. And she is not worth fighting or wasting time over. And I acknowledged that I like and respect Lou Dobbs; isn't that enough of a bone for you wolves? "
Umm , , , no :lol:
T0 make a POINT, you would have to back up your ASSERTIONS, assertions of things which are quite ugly btw, which you simply have not done. While I agree she can enjoy playing the provocateur (so what?) I enjoy reading MM most of the time find her to be someone who goes after liberal lunacies and specious liberal thinking. So before I throw her under the bus :wink: as a racist bigot it is going to take more than what you´ve produced so far.
Gee GM constantly "backs up points" with cut and paste that have no basis of fact or relevancy... but lots of quantity...
**They are pretty clear to most.**
And please do continue reading MM if she provides entertainment - there is no need to toss her under the bus; however
I just suggest that you read her with a jaundiced eye, but entertainment is important. :-)
You seem tenacious regarding MM? A nobody; a vociferous and particularly obnoxious blogger, albeit entertaining. It seems odd;
you usually go for substance. But this time :-(
White Supremacy - Numerous articles exist on Malkin and her affiliation with VDARE.com
**Post one.**
Named for Virginia Dare, the first white person born in the New World, the site has been named by the anti-racist Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group.
**The SPLC is hardly a fair source on the topic. Anyone who is opposed to illegal immigration gets smeared by them, including Lou Dobbs.**
And for good reason: the site is dedicated to pushing the kind of pseudo-science the Nazis could have only dreamed of using to support their racial fantasies. Forget phrenology: VDARE spends its time touting books that purport to prove that the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans is 67, below the accepted standard criteria for a diagnosis of mental retardation.
**Please post that article.**
The Anti-Defamation League notes that the author of the review, J. Philippe Rushton, has been less than subtle about his racism. "During [a] 1996 conference... Rushton lectured at length about the sexual differences among various races, arguing that blacks, while possessing smaller brains, reproduce at a faster rate due to the larger size of their sex organs. 'Not to reinforce stereotypes,' he has said elsewhere, 'but it's a trade-off: more brain or more penis, you can't have everything.' ... He has also stated that Nazi Germany's military prowess was due in part to the purity of their gene pool."
**Please post a link to that.**
Malkin's ties to the site are legion: it regularly prints her column, while she employs one of its writers, Juan Mann, as the principal writer of her "Immigration Blog" and lists the site on her blogroll. And it's not as if Malkin isn't well aware of the criticism, both of the site and her ties to it. . .in a post on her blog in September 2004, she noted that "my friend Peter Brimelow (founder of VDARE) observes that some people apparently think linking to VDARE is tantamount to a hate crime." What do you know. . .for once, he's right.
Or in 2002 MM wrote that interment of thousands of Japanese Americans was "wrong and abhorrent." Yet, in 2004 she wrote a book defending and saying it was great to put thousands upon thousands of innocent and loyal Japanese/Americans in these prison camps. Odd, my mother's family (German) was never rounded up.
**And as I pointed out to you before, there were some Germans and Italians interned as well at that time. Also there was at least one incident I know of where ethnic Japanese aided and abbetted a downed Japanese fighter pilot in Hawaii. One of the nazi saboteurs captured and tried by a military tribunal was an American citizen. The FBI crushed the German-American Bund organization after the American entry into WWII. Was internment disproportianate? Probably. Were there legitimate concerns? Yes.**
And yes, GM it was FDR a democrat who did that. So? In most elections I have voted Republican; does it matter which party commits a racist act? It is still wrong.
**Funny enough, J. Edgar Hoover fought FDR's internment plan.**
And I love the hypocrisy of her immigration policy. MM is suggesting "babies born to illegal immigrants, tourists, and temporary workers be ineligible for US citizenship".
**Please cite your source for this claim.**
Yet her parents never had a Green Card.
**Please cite your source for this. Under most every condition, the path to naturalization requires a green card.**
They came here on a temporary work visa, very quickly delivered MM and then they all claimed US Citizenship rather than go home to their native country.
**I doubt very much this was the scenario, let's see your sources.**
Why go back when I can get all those rights that go with it? Or was that planned before they arrived? She is an anchor baby just like those Mexicans she loves to hate. Seems a bit inconsistent to me.
**From what is known, her parents entered the US LEGALLY. I don't know anyone that is opposed to illegal immigration that is opposed to LEGAL immigration**
She is a sensationalist with no substance; a shock jockey. Worse, she is a racist and a hypocrite.
**I have yet to see you post a single bit of proof demonstrating racism from Michelle Malkin. Show me in her own words.**
Sorry, but I am done with Micelle Malkin; I have no interest in her. Continue to watch/read her for entertainment purposes, but for serious journalism I would find someone else. But no reason to dump her under a bus as I understand even O'Reily dumped her off his show.
**As I understand, she quit after O'Reilly wouldn't dump Geraldo after he said he'd spit on her.**
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JDN, You made a few points and I don't mean to oversimplify by quoting back:
"Seems a bit inconsistent to me." re. her immigration opnion...
"saying it was great to put thousands upon thousands of innocent and loyal Japanese/Americans in these prison camps." - doesn't sound like a direct quote...
And some guilt by association, some bad people link to her column. Are we holding Barack to that standard?
I have only read some of her columns. I know she is highly respected by thoughtful conservatives that I respect such as John Hinderacker and Hugh Hewitt. I know you said you were done with her and I hate to pile on but could you please take one more shot by linking one column of hers with an excerpt at the top that illustrates the point you are alleging - racist, sensationalist, no substance, white supremist, etc. TIA. Are these conservatives I mentioned haters of no substance as well??
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Doug, "I am done" but to answer you question, (I like and respect your opinions) she wrote a book defending/stating that incarcerating the Japanese during WWII was good.
Mind you, this was two years after she said it was "wrong and abhorrent".
As for guilt by association, I disagree (for example, read this forum) people ARE trying to hold Barack to the same standard, "guilt by association" yet in MM's case, her association is ongoing and active
not with someone who was a "bad person" 20+ years ago.
As for the conservatives you mentioned, I am sorry, but I don't know them. I will check into them; perhaps I could learn something. Simply being "conservative"; well, there is
nothing wrong with that.
And while I am against illegal immigration, the hypocrisy of MM and her attitude towards immigrants is a bit too much for me. She is an anchor baby and yet she rants against them :?
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Being a leftist means never having to say you're sorry. Just accuse someone of "unabashed dislike for all blacks", then when asked for proof, then declare yourself "done" with the topic.
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Sorry to pile on here JDN, but you´ve made quite a list of accusations of some very ugly things and if the evidence is as vast and as clear as you represent here in the the time it has taken you to avoid the challenge to produce evidence, you could have produced the evidence.
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Alrighty then, moving right along, , , , :wink:
It appears that here in California we have rolled back the State Supreme Court's effort to impose gay marriage. If I have it correctly, the initiative that passed is an amendment to the CA Consitution and as such we are safe from further judicial activism.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/uselection2008/barackobama/3388430/Barack-Obama-may-have-helped-California-Proposition-8-gay-marriage-ban-pass.html
Barack Obama may have helped California Proposition 8 gay marriage ban pass
Gay marriage will be banned in California after voters turning out to back Barack Obama gave their assent to a motion known as Proposition 8.
By Matthew Moore
Last Updated: 6:47AM GMT 06 Nov 2008
Around 70 per cent of the African-American voters who overwhelmingly backed Mr Obama also approved Proposition 8, helping pass the controversial ballot measure despite a small majority of whites voting against the ban on same-sex unions. Hispanic and Asian voters were split on the issue.
The state's black turnout jumped to 10 per cent of the electorate, up from 6 per cent in 2004, as voters inspired by Mr Obama flocked to the polls for the first time. The Democratic candidate took the state with 61 per cent of the popular vote.
Although the president-elect opposed the gay marriage ban, it appears his supporters may have helped pass the measure that was vociferously opposed by many white Democrats.
The news is a blow to gay rights campaigners, who had hoped California would be the vanguard for the legalisation of same-sex marriage across the US. More than 18,000 homosexual couples have wed in the state since its supreme court allowed gay marriages earlier this year. The status of those unions is now in doubt.
On the day that Mr Obama swept to power, voters handed a number of defeats to gay campaigners.
Amendments to ban gay marriage were also approved in Arizona and Florida, and Arkansas voters approved a measure banning unmarried couples from serving as adoptive or foster parents
But gay rights campaigners, who spend tens of millions of dollars fighting to oppose Proposition 8, have vowed not to admit to defeat. A petition to dismiss the measure on the grounds that decision of such importance should be taken by state legislatures rather than voters has already been filed to the Supreme Court.
"We pick ourselves up and trudge on," said Kate Kendell, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. "There has been enormous movement in favour of full equality in eight short years. That is the direction this is heading, and if it's not today or it's not tomorrow, it will be soon."
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Somehow the "John" always gets off and the "prostitute" goes to jail.
Spitzer won't be charged in prostitution scandal
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
No evidence that Eliot Spitzer misused public or campaign funds, U.S. attorney says
Spitzer linked to service that authorities say was prostitution ring
Then-N.Y. governor resigned in March
Next Article in Crime »
NEW YORK (CNN) -- Former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer will not be charged in connection with the prostitution scandal that prompted his resignation, the U.S. attorney's office for the Southern District of New York said Thursday.
Eliot Spitzer resigned his post as New York governor in March.
"After a thorough investigation, this office has uncovered no evidence of misuse of public or campaign funds," U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia said in a statement.
The attorney's office also said it found no illicit activity related to Spitzer's withdrawal of funds for, and his payments to, the Emperors Club VIP, which authorities have said was a prostitution ring.
"In light of the policy of the Department of Justice with respect to prostitution offenses and the longstanding practice of this office, as well as Mr. Spitzer's acceptance of responsibility for his conduct, we have concluded that the public interest would not be further advanced by filing criminal charges in this matter," Garcia said.
Spitzer resigned in March after it was revealed that he was among the Emperors Club's patrons -- "Client 9," according to court papers detailing the service's workings. Court documents detailed arrangements for a nearly two-and-a-half hour rendezvous between Client 9 and a high-class prostitute -- identified as "Kristen" -- at the Mayflower hotel in Washington in February.
Spitzer was linked to the Emperors Club when when IRS and FBI officials noticed suspicious transfers of larger sums of money between several of the governor's personal accounts, sources told CNN.
Those sources say red flags were raised when the money ended up in the bank accounts of shell companies linked to the Emperors Club.
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California voters on Tuesday approved Proposition 8, which adds to the state constitution the following sentence: "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."
While the wording is simple, the situation quickly became complicated. For example, what happens to those same-sex couples who married before the ruling? Legal challenges filed Wednesday raised other questions: Was the referendum process itself lawful? Does the new language conflict with other parts of the state constitution? Separately, should Proposition 8 opponents have filed challenges saying the proposition violated the U.S. Constitution?
David Cruz, a constitutional-law expert at the University of Southern California, has some answers.
WSJ: Please explain the grounds upon which Proposition 8 is being challenged in court.
Mr. Cruz: The lawsuits challenge the procedure by which the referendum was passed. Under California law, there are two categories of changes that can be made to the state constitution: amendments and revisions. Amendments are more minor changes; revisions are larger in effect. This is important because each has its own process for taking effect, essentially different ways they go before the voters. An amendment can go in the form of a ballot initiative, which requires a certain number of signatures to make its way on. Constitutional revisions, however, have to have a two-thirds blessing from each house of the state legislature to make the ballot.
Now, the problem, at least from the point of view of Proposition 8 supporters, is that the legislature had previously indicated a willingness to support same-sex marriage. So the proposition's supporters were unwilling to treat this bill as a revision and send it to the legislature, opting instead to treat it as an amendment. So the Proposition 8 opponents are arguing that this change actually constitutes a revision, not an amendment, and therefore needed to go through the legislature.
WSJ: Were any other issues raised in the suits?
Mr. Cruz: Yes. A same-sex couple that was married before the election made another argument. Remember, the California Supreme Court in May ruled that bans on same-sex marriage were not allowed under the state's constitution. (That ruling prompted Proposition 8.) Now, in that ruling, the Supreme Court essentially said two things: that same-sex couples had a fundamental right to marry and that the underlying law violated the state's equal protection clause.
The suit filed Wednesday argues that while Proposition 8 squarely addressed the marriage half of the Supreme Court's ruling, it didn't address the equal-protection half. In other words, the couple argues that the state constitution is now in conflict with itself -- part of it says that same-sex marriage is flatly illegal, and the Supreme Court has interpreted another part to say that a ban on same-sex marriage violates the state's equal protection clause.
WSJ: And a constitution can't be in conflict with itself?
Mr. Cruz: Right. There's a common principle in constitutional jurisprudence called "harmonization," which says that no part of a constitution can conflict with any other.
WSJ: Provided that the state Supreme Court rejects all these arguments and the constitutional amendment is allowed, you still have this issue as to what happens to the marriages that took place before Proposition 8 was passed, right?
Mr. Cruz: On that question the state Supreme Court would likely look at what the intent of the voters was in passing the law.
WSJ: How would the court determine that? By asking voters?
Mr. Cruz: It would likely look at the language of the proposition itself, in addition to the title, official ballot literature, and to the advertisements that were run during the campaign. Supporters of Proposition 8 point to language on the ballot that explained that voters would be defining marriage as between a man and woman, "regardless of when or where performed." That seems to argue for invalidating the earlier marriages. But the attorney general, Jerry Brown, will likely raise the official title of the proposition, which mentions the elimination of the "right of same-sex couples to marry." Here, there's no mention of the earlier marriages, and it seems to indicate that it's the right to get married going forward that's being taken away.
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:cry:
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jQS-ctNhHXKGeh1xFYwBg2PqJ7qwD942VB400
ARACHI, Pakistan (AP) — A Pakistani man says his 17-year-old daughter was mauled by dogs and shot to death in front of him over a land dispute disguised as a so-called "honor killing."
Female senators staged a walkout from the federal parliament Monday to press for action on better protections for women after a national newspaper published details of Tasleem Solangi's death.
"How long will women be buried alive and made to face hungry dogs? Women are not given their rights," opposition lawmaker Semi Siddiqui said.
Ibrahim Solangi, 28, has been in custody ever since Taslim's death in March and is awaiting trial on murder charges, said Pir Mohammad Shah, the police chief of the Khairpur Mirs district in southern Pakistan. Taslim's husband was also her first cousin.
Human rights groups say hundreds of women are killed by male relatives every year in Pakistan for alleged infidelity or other perceived slights to the family name, and activists say many more cases go unreported.
In August, a Pakistani lawmaker drew fierce criticism after describing a case in which five women were allegedly buried alive for trying to choose their husbands as the product of "centuries-old traditions" that he would defend.
As in that case, the allegations surrounding the death of Tasleem Solangi remain unproven.
Speaking to reporters in Karachi on Monday, Taslim's father said he was locked up in his home and forced to watch from a window as dogs chased her and then mauled her when she fell down exhausted. She then was shot, he said.
Gulsher Solangi said the killing was the culmination of a land dispute. He said his nephew had beaten Taslim throughout the five months of their marriage to pressure him to hand over his small farm.
Faced with more threats, Gulsher Solangi said he had fled with his wife and another daughter and abandoned his home.
Zameer Hussain Solangi, the girl's father-in-law, claimed Monday that his son confessed to the killing under police torture and that the allegation regarding the dogs was "baseless."
He said a tribal council later declared the dead woman an adulterer and compensated the husband with her jewelry.
The girl's father claimed that the tribal council, chaired by a local chieftain, declared his daughter an adulterer in May to mask the land-grab and the involvement of others.
Shah, the police chief, said he knew nothing of the alleged land-grab or the dogs and promised to investigate further.
Pakistan's government, now led by the liberal party of slain former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, has vowed to improve women's rights in Pakistan. Former President Pervez Musharraf made similar moves, notably watering down rape laws that made it hard for victims to prove their case, despite opposition from hardline Islamic groups.
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Oh my, so many places this tidbit could be posted. Please note that the original piece links to a video of the primary source.
Female Egyptian Lawyer Promotes Sexual Harassment against Jews
by Hana Levi Julian
(IsraelNN.com) A female Egyptian lawyer has recommended that Arab men begin sexually harassing Jewish women as a means of forcing Jews to leave Israel. Egypt, which signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, is perceived among Western nations as a moderate Arab nation where secular Arabs are a majority.
In a video clip of the interview which aired on Al Arabiyah television on October 31, 2008, Nagla Al-Imam said, "In my opinion, they are fair game for all Arabs, and there is nothing wrong… this is a new form of resistance."
They [women] are fair game for all Arabs, and there is nothing wrong… this is a new form of resistance.
According to a translation provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which released the clip, Al-Imam specified, however, that her "resistance" plan did not include rape.
"No. Sexual harassment… In my view, the [Israeli women] do not have any right to respond. The resistance fighters would not initiate such a thing, because their moral values are much loftier than that. However, if such a thing did happen to them, the [Israeli women] have no right to make any demands, because this would put us on equal terms – leave the land so we won't rape you. These two things are equal," she said.
Al-Imam added that she did not want "young Arab men to be interrogated," but rather, she wanted "these Zionist girls with Israeli citizenship to be expelled from our Arab countries. This is a form of resistance, and a way of rejecting their presence."
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/128352
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It's my understanding that Israeli pornographic websites are viewed more frequently by arab nation based browsers rather than from Israel.
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FWIW I'd have put BBG's post in one of the Islam in Action threads.
Anyway, changing the subject completely :-)
“Coming out” puts adolescents at risk
Encouraging adolescents with same-sex attractions to identify as gay has no scientific or ethical justification.
How should schools treat students who self-identify as homosexual? Today entire school systems in a number of states and counties promote “acceptance”. The demand for acceptance is based on the premise that patterns of sexual attraction – to the other sex or to same sex are determined at birth and unchangeable; therefore, everyone – the affected students themselves, their parents, teachers, and classmates – should be educated and when necessary pressured into accepting same-sex attraction (SSA) as normal and as healthy as the love between a man and a woman in marriage.
There is, however, no evidence to support the claim that SSA is genetically determined and unchangeable. If it were, one would expect that identical twins would always have the same pattern of sexual attraction. A study led by J. Michael Bailey based on the twins registry in Australia found that among male identical twins, when one twin had SSA, in only 11 per cent of the cases so did the other. This research virtually precludes genetic determination.
There is also no evidence to support the claim that SSA is unchangeable. There are numerous reports of people understanding the emotional conflicts that led them to SSA, successfully addressing these weaknesses and then experiencing a new pattern of sexual attraction. A large study of sexuality led by Edward Lauman found the percentage of people self-identifying as homosexual declining over time. Lisa Diamond found that patterns of sexual attraction are particularly unstable among women.
Those who support acceptance might argue that even if SSA is not genetically determined and changeable it would still be better for those experiencing these feelings to “come out” and be accepted as homosexual by the school community. This view ignores the very real risks that accompany coming out, particularly for males.
Vulnerable boys
Over 40 per cent of males who self-identify as homosexual (“gay”) before age 18 have been victims of sexual abuse or sexual assault. (Doll et al, 1992) An even higher percentage has suffered from untreated Gender Identity Disorder. (Zucker, Bradley, 1995) A study of the sexual behavior of 239 homosexually active males, 13 to 21, found that 42 per cent had a history of sexual abuse/assault. (Remafedi, 1994; Osmond, 1994) A study of 425 homosexual males, ages 17 to 22, found that 41.4 per cent reported an occasion of forced sex. (Halkitis, Wilton, Drescher, eds. 2005; Wainberg 2006) Forced sex rarely involves “safe” sex practices. (Kalichman, Rompa 1995)
Sexual child abuse and sexual assault have been linked to long-term psychological problems, including depression, sexual addiction, drug addiction, involvement in prostitution, and suicidal feelings. Some of these young men see their victimization as proof that they were “born” homosexual. Programs directed to acceptance rarely acknowledge or address these problems. When these serious emotional conflicts are not uncovered and treated, these males often act out in ways that are dangerous to themselves and to others. It is important to address this highly prevalent problem in young males with SSA.
At high risk of infection
Even if an adolescent male with SSA was not the victim of sexual abuse and did not experience untreated gender identity disorder GID, engaging in homosexual activity as an adolescent carries a high and truly unacceptable risk.
New statistics from the Centers for Disease Control reveal that the epidemic among young men who have sex with men (MSM) is raging unabated. In August 2008, it was revealed that the CDC had underestimated the number of new cases of HIV by 40 per cent. The report found that while new infections among heterosexuals and injection drug users are falling, new infections continue to increase in younger MSM. In 2006, the number of MSM aged 13-24 diagnosed with HIV/AIDS increased by 18 per cent over the previous year.
A study of sexual risk behaviors of young MSM aged 17-22 found that 22 per cent reported beginning anal sex with men when they were ages 3 to 14; of these 15.2 per cent were already HIV positive. Of those who began sex when they were 15-19, 11.6 per cent were HIV positive, while of those who began sex with men when they were 20-22, only 3.8 per cent were HIV positive. (Lemp, 1994) It is clear that every year a male with SSA delays sexual involvement reduces his risk of HIV.
Vulnerable young men may use the internet to seek out sexual partners. Out magazine, a publication targeted to MSM, ran an article by Michael Gross (2008) on how MSM are using the internet, posting pornographic pictures of themselves, and becoming addicted to the process of cruising on the web. Gross worries about the “health risks” and “psychological dissociation that’s characteristic of online social life.” Men may be looking for love but, Gross suggests, “You might as well train for a marathon by doing sprints in a minefield.”
Once a young man has exposed himself on the internet, whatever he has put up becomes part of the public record forever. The 15-year-old boy who realizes at 20 that his SSA was just a phase of his life related to weaknesses in male confidence will have those pictures follow him for the rest of his life.
HIV/AIDS is not the only disease affecting MSM. The number of sexually transmitted infections (STI) transmitted by homosexual activity is staggering. They include syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes, hepatitis B and C, lymphogranuloma vernereum and human papillomavirus (HPV), which has been linked to genital warts and a number of cancers. (Carter, 2007) HPV is transmitted by skin contact and therefore condoms provide only minimal protection. The much-touted new HPV vaccine protects against only four of the 100 varieties of this disease.
In some areas the increase in syphilis infections has been traced to an increased use of crystal meth and “high risk sexual behavior at resorts or bath houses, or through meetings initiated over the Internet.” (Brian, 2004; Klausner, 2000)
Not only are MSM at high risk for infection with HIV and many other STIs, the problem compounds itself in that infection with another STI makes a man more vulnerable to HIV and an HIV-positive man is more likely to contract another STI. According to a recent study, “HIV positive men who have sex with men are up to 90 times more likely than the general population to develop anal cancer.” (Cranston, Ross, 2007)
Recently, doctors in San Francisco traced outbreaks in San Francisco and Boston of multidrug-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MSRA), the flesh-eating bacteria, to homosexual activity. It is also possible that a new, yet unidentified disease will find its way into this community. In 1980 before the first case of AIDS was identified, Dr. Selma Dritz, an expert on STI’s, looked at the behaviors of MSM and warned, “There are so many opportunities for transmission that, if something new gets loose here, we’re going to have hell to pay.” (Shilts, Randy, And the Band Played On). Her warning came too late; by 1980 the HIV virus was already spreading among MSM. Tragically, in spite of massive education the high-risk behaviors continue.
As treatment for AIDS has improved and life expectancy has increased, young MSM no longer fear HIV as they should. Many of those who start out planning to use condoms, fail to do so because they are drunk or are high on drugs or don’t want to send a message that they don’t trust their partner. If this is a pattern among adult MSM, it is not surprising that adolescent males who have sex with males ignore warnings.
Does education prevent infection?
A large study on the association of health risk behaviors and sexual orientation among adolescents concluded: “GLB youth who self-identify during high school report disproportionate risk for a variety of health risk and problem behaviors, including suicide, victimization, sexual risk behaviors, and multiple substance abuse use. In addition, these youth are more likely to report engaging in multiple risk behaviors and initiating risk behaviors at an earlier age than their peers.” (Garofalo, 1998)
Homosexual activists forced to explain why persons with SSA are at “elevated” risk for addictions, partner abuse, rampant promiscuity, anxiety, depression and suicidality usually blame the increased problems on the stress of living in a rejecting, “hateful and heterosexist” culture. (Cochran, Mays 2007) They then use these problems to justify pro-homosexual education in schools. However, if this view were true then one would expect to see lower levels of severe psychiatric illnesses in more accepting cultures such as the Netherlands, but this is not the case. (Sandfort, 2006)
The hope that identifying boys with SSA and providing them with HIV prevention education will reduce the risk of STI infections is not supported by the research. According to a review of studies of HIV prevention programs, “the efficacy of health education interventions in reducing sexual risk for HIV infection has not been consistently demonstrated…More education, over long periods of time, cannot be assumed to be effective in inducing behavior changes among chronically high risk males.” (Stall, Coates, Hoff, 1988)
Dr. Philip Alcabes, an epidemiologist, commenting on the latest CDC data to the New York Times said, “t looks like prevention campaigns make even less difference than anyone thought… HIV incidence did not decline as much from the 1980s to the 1990s as we believed despite the dramatic increase in condom promotion and so-called prevention education.”
He quoted an editorial in Lancet, a leading medical journal, that was even blunter: “U.S. efforts to prevent HIV have failed dismally.”
AIDS education, which provides children and adolescents with explicit information about the various forms of sexual behavior that spread the disease, may create curiosity and encourage experimentation among young men. Because AIDS education has also been used as a vehicle for promoting positive attitudes toward homosexuality, while at the same time ignoring the serious health risks associated with SSA, it is possible that the number of young men experimenting with homosexuality will increase.
As support groups in schools for males who think that they might be homosexual are being established, younger boys will be encouraged to "come out." This "coming out" will probably include engaging in sexual activity at an earlier age and more often. These young men may be attracted to the urban homosexual community, traveling to centers of homosexual activity where they are likely to encounter HIV-positive adults interested in engaging in sexual activity with attractive teenagers. This can lead to hustling (receiving money or compensation for sex) which is a high-risk activity.
A brochure, entitled Just the Facts about Sexual Orientation and Youth: A Primer for Principals, Educators, and School Personnel, was sent to school officials by a coalition of groups including the National Education Association. It claimed: “If school environments become more positive for lesbian, gay, and bisexual students, it is likely that their differences in health, mental health, and substance abuse will decrease.” This has not been born out by experience. Nothing could be more positive than the Harvey Milk school in Manhattan, which was set up to provide a safe environment for students with atypical sexual orientations and gender identities, yet in November of 2003, five male students were arrested. They had for some time been intimidating other students, working as prostitutes, blackmailing Johns, stealing from trendy stores, and involved with ecstasy and cocaine. (Cross, 2003)
Given the substantial, well-documented risks involved in engaging in homosexual activity as an adolescent and since a certain percentage of males who experience SSA in adolescence find that these feelings disappear in time, schools should not encourage adolescent males to “come out”, but, instead, offer positive support for addressing the serious emotional problems in these teenagers.
Girls
While adolescent females with SSA do not face the same risk for STIs as males, a significant number of these young women with SSA have been victims of sexual abuse or rape. (Bradford, 1994) SSA is even less stable among young women than among young men with some females finding themselves attracted to men and to women at different times in their lives. Many adolescent girls have crushes on female teachers or coaches. With time and growth in maturity these feelings resolve. Rather than assuming that every young female who ever experiences any SSA is permanently homosexual, schools should encourage young women to try to understand themselves and wait before identifying themselves as homosexual.
Finally, educators, like physicians and mental health professionals, have a serious responsibility to provide informed consent to their students and not advocate a lifestyle which has serious medical and psychiatric illnesses associated with it without warning students about such risks.
Dale O’Leary is a US writer with a special interest in psycho-sexual issues and is the author of two books: One Man, One Woman" and The Gender Agenda. She collaborated on this article with Richard P. Fitzgibbons, M.D., a psychiatrist and Director of Comprehensive Counselling Services in W. Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, and Peter Kleponis, M.S., a psychotherapist also based in Philadelphia.
* A complete version of this paper with footnotes can be found in the Backgrounders section of this website: Same-sex attraction in adolescents
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Saudi cleric favours one-eye veil
A Muslim cleric in Saudi Arabia has called on women to wear a full veil, or niqab, that reveals only one eye.
Sheikh Muhammad al-Habadan said showing both eyes encouraged women to use eye make-up to look seductive.
The question of how much of her face a woman should cover is a controversial topic in many Muslim societies.
The niqab is more common in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, but women in much of the Muslim Middle East wear a headscarf which covers only their hair.
Sheikh Habadan, an ultra-conservative cleric who is said to have wide influence among religious Saudis, was answering questions on the Muslim satellite channel al-Majd.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7651231.stm
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World Net Daily is not my idea of a very reliable site, but it seems hard to imagine how they could have gotten the essence of this piece wrong. What this article reports strikes me as profoundly wrong.
(Trivia: James Dobson once sat next to me on a transcontinental flight)
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QUEERLY BELOVED
eHarmony.com to match 'gays'
Dating site promoted by James Dobson bows to lawsuit, creates special service
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Posted: November 19, 2008
3:30 pm Eastern
By Chelsea Schilling
© 2008 WorldNetDaily
Internet dating service eHarmony has officially agreed to begin matching homosexual couples, beginning next year.
The popular California-based service has been known for focusing on long-term relationships, especially marriage, which has been said to align with founder Clark Warren's early work with Focus on the Family's evangelical Christian base and perspective.
Warren, a psychologist with a divinity degree, has had three of his 10 books on love and dating published by Focus on the Family. It was an appearance on James Dobson's radio program, in 2001, that triggered a response of 90,000 new referrals to the website, starting a climb of registered participants on the site from 4,000 to today's 20 million clients.
As WND reported, the company originally said it was " based on the Christian principles of Focus on the Family author Dr. Neil Clark Warren." It stood firm on its decision to reject homosexuals from its profiling and matching services. Its entire compatibility system is based on research of married heterosexual couples.
In 2005, Warren told USA Today the company's goal is marriage and that same-sex marriage is illegal in most states.
"We don't really want to participate in something that's illegal," he said.
But now the company has been compelled to changed its nationwide policy as part of a New Jersey lawsuit settlement.
On March 14, 2005, Eric McKinley filed a lawsuit against eHarmony, claiming the company discriminated against him when it refused to accept his advertisement for a "gay" partner.
McKinley's complaint triggered a state investigation into the dating service.
(Story continues below)
Last week, eHarmony agreed to begin providing an eHarmony-affiliated "Compatible Partners" service to gays and lesbians, with listings labeled "male seeking male" and "female seeking female" by March 31, 2009.
For complying, the New Jersey Division on Civil Rights has dismissed the complaint against eHarmony, and Warren is considered "absolved of liability." Also, the dating site has been ordered to pay the division $50,000 for investigation-related administrative costs and give McKinley $5,000. It has agreed to provide a free one-year membership to its "gay" service to McKinley, plus free six-month memberships to "the first 10,000 users registering for same-sex matching within one year of the initiation on the same-sex matching service," according to the settlement.
A new release by New Jersey's Office of the Attorney General reveals that eHarmony has also agreed to the following terms:
eHarmony, Inc. will post photos of same-sex couples in the "Diversity" section of its website as successful relationships are created using the company's same-sex matching service. In addition, eHarmony, Inc. will include photos of same-sex couples, as well as individual same-sex users, in advertising materials used to promote its same-sex matching services
eHarmony, Inc. will revise anti-discrimination statements placed on company websites, in company handbooks and other company publications to make plain that it does not discriminate on the basis of "sexual orientation"
The company has committed to advertising and public relations/ marketing dedicated to its same-sex matching service and will retain a media consultant experienced in promoting the "fair, accurate and inclusive" representation of gay and lesbian people in the media to determine the most effective way of reaching the gay and lesbian communities.
eHarmony's new logo for homosexual dating service
In addition to McKinley's complaint, a California lesbian also filed a lawsuit against the company in May 2007.
Linda Carlson submitted her complaint to Los Angeles Superior Court, alleging discrimination based on sexual orientation. Lawyers have attempted to turn it into a class-action lawsuit on behalf of homosexuals who wanted to use eHarmony's services.
Carlson's lawyer told Reuters the complaint was "about changing the landscape and making a statement out there that gay people, just like heterosexuals, have the right and desire to meet other people with whom they can fall in love."
Antone Johnson, vice president of legal affairs at eHarmony, said the new settlement could compel California complainants to drop their lawsuit.
"We believe that this case is now essentially moot, and we're confident that we will prove that in court," Johnson said. "Now that we're entering the same-sex matching market, we fail to see what the Carlson plaintiffs could achieve through further litigation."
Former U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson, outside counsel to the company, said, "Even though we believed that the complaint resulted from an unfair characterization of our business, we ultimately decided it was best to settle this case with the Attorney General since litigation outcomes can be unpredictable. eHarmony looks forward to moving beyond this legal dispute, which has been a burden for the company, and continuing to advance its business model of serving individuals by helping them find successful, long-term relationships."
An attorney for eHarmony told WND legal battles required a great deal of effort and resources from the dating organization.
"The company spent three years defending against this proceeding," he said. "It was a burden in terms of the high costs of litigation and the time and resources management devoted to it."
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Sheikh Muhammad al-Habadan said showing both eyes encouraged women to use eye make-up to look seductive.
That is hands down one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard in my life.
Sounds like someone is wound a little tight and in need of a good...uhm...backrub. :wink:
I can't imagine living in a society where seeing eye make-up would make you go plain bonkers. Wow...
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Agreed! Indeed one suspects a correlation between this and the beautiful sheep contests which are sometimes held in the mid-east. :-o :lol:
That said, does it not also bother you that a Christian dating service has been bullied into having to offer gay dating service?
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Sheikh Muhammad al-Habadan said showing both eyes encouraged women to use eye make-up to look seductive.
That is hands down one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard in my life.
Sounds like someone is wound a little tight and in need of a good...uhm...backrub. :wink:
I can't imagine living in a society where seeing eye make-up would make you go plain bonkers. Wow...
Having waded through a ton of islamic religious writing, I can tell you that the islamic world is the most fcuked up culture on the topic of sex, ever. IMHO, Muhammad had some serious psych issues, and as his thoughts are now islamic holy writ, they have become a meta-pathology.
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"Having waded through a ton of islamic religious writing, I can tell you that the islamic world is the most fcuked up culture on the topic of sex, ever. IMHO, Muhammad had some serious psych issues, and as his thoughts are now islamic holy writ, they have become a meta-pathology."
For some reason, this provoked me to laugh and laugh ,l , , I suppose the pithiness of it all :lol:
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Jennifer Roback Morse | Friday, 21 November 2008
Same sex marriage and its threat to religious liberty
Tactics used by gay marriage campaigners confirm believers’ worst fears.
As wildfires blazed in California last week, anger at the outcome of the state’s referendum on marriage blazed across the country. After a hard-fought campaign over Proposition 8, which defined marriage as the union of a man and a woman, a clear majority of California voters endorsed it, and the gay marriage lobby was enraged.
Now, as same sex marriage campaigners take the issue back to the courts, it is unclear what the outcome of this battle will be. Will their demands trump the democratic process? It has happened before.
What is clearer than ever is that same sex marriage threatens religious liberty. Disagreement over the extent of that threat played a key role in the debate over Proposition 8. As an independent consultant to the campaign, I must say that the post-election behaviour of the opponents of Prop 8 does not reassure religious believers.
The editor of a new book, Same Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty: Emerging Conflicts, summarizes the general issue this way: “All six contributors (to the book)—religious and secular, left, center and right—agree that same sex marriage is a threat to religious liberty.” The demand for same sex marriage brings in its wake a demand for identical treatment of same sex couples and opposite sex couples. Churches that resist this demand can have their tax exempt status challenged, can be investigated by “human rights commissions,” and can have parts of their operation shut down completely.
The Yes on Prop 8 campaign applied this argument in print and electronic ads. “Churches could lose their tax exempt status,” we said. “People could be sued for their personal beliefs.” The opponents of Prop 8 replied by calling us liars. Their argument was, “No church will lose its tax exempt status for refusing to perform same sex weddings.”
Note the sleight of hand: we made a general statement that churches could lose their tax exempt status, as well as have other legal problems. The opponents of Prop 8 brought up the one issue -- refusing to perform weddings -- which they knew the court had specifically exempted from legal challenge. On this basis, they accused us of misleading the public.
I personally was asked many times whether pastors would be forced to bless same sex unions. I told people the pastors were probably safe for now, but that the trend was not encouraging. The most likely outcome, I consistently said, was that the zone of religious freedom would become steadily more constricted. We cited many cases to support this prediction.
Catholic Charities in Boston shut down its adoption agency, rather than comply with the anti-discrimination requirement for the placement of children. A Knights of Columbus chapter in Canada was sued when it refused to rent out its hall for a same sex wedding reception. A Christian marriage counselor lost her job when she referred a lesbian couple to another therapist, rather than counsel them herself. A Christian photographer was fined by a Human Rights Commission in New Mexico because she refused to take pictures at the commitment ceremony of a lesbian couple.
The No on 8 forces claimed that the cases we brought up had nothing to do with marriage. Gays had used anti-discrimination law in these cases, not marriage law, to sue and otherwise harass churches and religious people. (In fact, marriage was an issue in some of the cases.) In effect the gay lobby argued: “We already have all the legal authority we need to do all sorts of Dreadful Things that You Don’t Like, so vote no on 8.”
Oddly enough, people of faith were not reassured by this message.
But refusal to take the religious liberty argument seriously was not the only way the No on 8 forces showed their hostility to religion. On the Sunday before the election, our opponents ran a truly despicable hate-filled ad against the Mormon church. The ad ran the day before the election, when it was almost impossible to respond to it.
Proposition 8 won the election. Over six million people voted for it for a whole variety of reasons. It is safe to say that the religious liberty argument played a significant role. People waved signs that said, “Proposition 8 = Religious Liberty” and “Proposition 8 = Freedom of Speech.” Even though no one could predict the exact form the legal harassment might take, many voters decided the risk to their own churches was unacceptable.
In the aftermath of the election, the No on Prop 8 forces have taken to the streets, attempting to de-legitimize the election. Their behavior toward religious people amply confirms our worst fears.
The gay lobby targeted the Mormon church. Thousands of protesters surrounded Mormon temples in Los Angeles and in Salt Lake City in an obvious attempt at intimidation. Protestors carry signs saying, “Mormon Scum,” a sentiment that would be widely condemned as bigoted if directed at anyone else. Envelopes with suspicious white powder arrived at the Mormon church in Utah and the Knights of Columbus headquarters in Connecticut.
People have called for the LDS church to lose its tax exempt status. An enterprising reporter found that the LDS spent a grand total of less than $3,000 in an in-kind contribution. The other “Mormon millions” were small contributions by thousands of individual members of the church. Gay activists are scouring the election law, looking for minor violations the church or its members might have made.
This attempt to enlist the government for intimidation actually illustrates the point that concerned us throughout the campaign. If you cross the gay lobby, they will use the legal system to go after you. By passing Prop 8, the voters declined to give the gay lobby any additional legal tools.
The authors of Same Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty were not exaggerating. The drive for same sex marriage really does clash with religious liberty. The nation-wide post-election outburst gives Yes on 8 voters all the evidence they need that they did the right thing.
Jennifer Roback Morse, PhD, is the Founder and President of the Ruth Institute. http://www.ruthinstitute.org/
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As the PRK already has domestic partnerships, why would they need "gay marriage" except to use to power of the state to force their beliefs on others?
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We have already seen litigation aimed at forcing the Boy Scouts out of the public sphere e.g. not being able to use city facilities because they don't want to have gay scoutmasters.
Just this weekend I went with my Cub Scout son on a joint camping trip with the Boy Scouts. Time will come when he is old enough to go on a Boy Scout camping trip. Frankly, I don't want any of the adult authority figures to be gay and more than I want hetero males taking my daughter on camping trips in the Brownies.
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This could probably go under privacy issues ---
There should definitly be some new laws if the current one does not cover it.
Porn in a flash
A troubling surge in creepy "upskirt" photography has lawmakers in a twist -- and the body parts of women posted all over the Internet.
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?action=post;topic=490.150;num_replies=197
By Tracy Clark-Flory
Nov. 25, 2008 |
On a warm summer day two years ago, a 16-year-old girl put on a skirt and headed to the SuperTarget in her hometown of Tulsa, Okla. As she shopped the air-conditioned aisles, a man knelt behind her, carefully slid a camera in between her bare legs and snapped a photo of her underwear. Police arrested the 34-year-old man, but the charges were ultimately dropped on the grounds that the girl did not, as required by the state's Peeping Tom law, have "a right to a reasonable expectation of privacy," given the public location. In non-legalese: Wear a skirt in public, and you might just get a camera in the crotch.
Locals were outraged. Most women slipping on a summer dress aren't hoping to star in an amateur -- or, worse yet, professional -- porno, just as most men don't expect strangers to take a snapshot of their package when they wear shorts in public. In response to the ruling, Rep. Pam Peterson, R-Tulsa, introduced a bill making it illegal in Oklahoma to take unauthorized photos of someone's private areas in public; it went into effect earlier this month. For the same reason, nearly half the states have had to enact similar laws.
When it comes to voyeurs who photograph or videotape up a woman's skirt (known as "upskirting") or snap a photo down a woman's shirt ("downblousing"), though, "there are not many practical, legal remedies available to people who find themselves the victim," says Anita Allen, a privacy expert and professor at Penn Law. That's if the woman even realizes she is a victim in the first place, which is unlikely, as the voyeur typically manages to go undetected. If the photo or video is published online -- which, increasingly, it is -- it would be difficult for the subject to ever come across the material. Even if she did, how could she recognize one underwear-clad rear as her own?
Privacy experts say the failure of the law to catch up with technology has allowed for a kind of Wild West online, a frontier of rogue pornographers from all over the world. It's such a craze in Japan that cellphone cameras now come with a shutter sound that alerts bystanders that a photo is being taken; in that country, even the iPhone 3G features an extra-loud anti-upskirt alarm.
A quick search of PhoneBin, an online gallery of photos submitted directly from cellphones, is enough to cause any woman to briefly contemplate hauling off her sundresses to the nearest Salvation Army. Photo after photo -- shot right between a pair of legs or at a distant, low angle -- shows women wearing skirts in public. It's easy enough to imagine how the photographer pulls it off: kneeling to the ground, pretending to tie his shoe, standing a few steps below on the escalator pretending to send a text message. Others are clearly failed attempts. For example, a user comments on a grainy photo of a woman's skirted rear: "Nice arse but you need to get closer to the ground and more upskirt if you want to be taken seriously." Yes, even pervs have strict aesthetic standards.
A keyword search for "upskirt" on the photo-sharing site Flickr turns up 36,368 hits. One user has taken 48 candid shots of women's stockinged rears walking up stairs in the Paris Metro subway station. The vast majority of these photos, however, are not upskirts at all, but close-ups of women's body parts taken in public places like the subway, parks and street corners. Some Flickr members specialize in these types of shots, many with a particular area of expertise: breasts, bums, nipple slips, whale tails (the top of a thong peeking over the waist of a woman's pants), camel toes, legs or feet. Amazingly, one user has amassed 1,455 photos of disembodied, hastily framed shots taken with a cellphone camera of various body parts -- feet, breasts, butt and legs -- that could belong to any woman, really. Similar shots can be found on many other popular photo-sharing sites, like Fotki and Photobucket.
Some gather in groups dedicated to all manner of candid photography to salivate over photos and engage in back-and-forths about their craft. In a discussion thread in the group "The Upskirt Arena," members wax poetic about their artistic preferences. The discussion becomes repetitive very quickly. One user writes: "Personally I love the unsuspecting one's [sic], but being a fan of upskirts I enjoy all of them." Another responds: "Yeah the unsuspecting ones are my favourites as well!!!" And another: "Its [sic] all so very sexy getting a flash of that forbidden public zone." Yet another: "I like either unsuspecting ones or accidental ones, not posed ones." And so on, and so on.
Susan Gallagher, a professor of political science at University of Massachusetts Lowell who teaches classes on gender, privacy and politics, points out, "One of the tricks in pornography is that the target is unaware, because then you have power." She says upskirting presents a lesser sexual challenge than, for instance, the "Girls Gone Wild" franchise, that indefatigable chronicler of the spring break rite of boobs and booze. The essential difference here is that candid photographers -- rather than the female subjects, in the case of breast-flashing coeds -- are able to be the sexual aggressor but without actually having to confront a woman.
These candid connoisseurs also swap technical tips (for instance, how to inconspicuously shoot from the hip), legal pointers and advice on how to avoid getting in trouble with the law or having their account deleted for violating Flickr's terms of service, which includes the directive, "Don’t be creepy. You know the guy. Don't be that guy." Director of community Heather Champ says that Flickr generally has a "high-water mark" for what constitutes a violation but adds, "I personally think that upskirting and downblousing are kind of forcibly invading someone's privacy in a way that is very disrespectful."
The question of where to draw a line between artistic street photography and fetishistic candids that reduce a woman to her toe cleavage is like that ever-unreliable definition of pornography: I know it when I see it. John Morris, general counsel for the Center for Democracy & Technology, puts the reality simply: "If you don't want to be photographed walking the street, don't walk down the street -- it's a public street."
There's a vast difference, though, between slipping a camera between a woman's legs and taking a poignant photo of the homeless man sleeping in a doorway; the vast majority of candid shots on mainstream photo sites fall within the latter category. But, then, there are candid shots that don't actually cross a woman's hemline or neckline. A friend of mine had a man obviously take a photo of her ass while she wandered around an art museum in London; a colleague living in New York City has twice had guys whip out a cellphone and blatantly snap a photo of her rack (if it happens again, she swears she's "going to go Kanye West on his ass"). Plenty more common is for women to have a cellphone camera pointed toward them, perhaps at an odd angle, in public and wonder: Wait a sec, are they writing a text message -- or taking a photo of me?
That we are using technology in this way is hardly anything new. "Almost immediately upon the invention of amateur photography there was the detective camera," said professor Gallagher. It could be concealed in your hat or tie, and "the idea of being able to record things without anyone knowing was a craze," she says. The development of technology, and its accessibility, however, is changing our culture: Not only are spy cams available on the cheap, but cameras are now a standard feature on cellphones. The federal Video Voyeurism Prevention Act of 2004 was enacted specifically in response to these high-tech developments, and outlaws virtual peeping that takes place "under circumstances in which the individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy."
Of course, that is just to speak of the noncommercial candid photography that can be found online. A quick Google search turns up 60 pages of links to sites like "Upskirt Hunters," "The Original Candid Upskirt" and "Upskirt Sniper." The latter greets the viewer with a presumably enticing warning: "CAUTION: YOUR GIRLS [sic] PANTIES COULD BE ON THIS SITE!" A series of panty shots are stacked one atop the other, with a woman's panty-clad ass in a gun's cross hairs. Lest the viewers' skepticism ruin the fantasy, the site promises: "These upskirt shots are 100% real. They are NOT STAGED and contain no models or actors at all. Every time we go to the mall, a restaurant or even church we have our camera with us rolling as many upskirts panties as we can get. These girls have no idea they we are filming them and probally [sic] never will."
Locations that smack of the everyday -- like public transportation, parks, malls, gas stations, movie lines and big box stores like WalMart -- are favorites. For the same reason, many sites attempt a photographic narrative that climaxes, so to speak, with the upskirt, like a striptease the woman never knew she was performing: a couple of shots of an everyday woman walking down the street, blissfully unaware, and then -- blam! -- you're this close to giving her a gynecological exam.
Nearly every upskirt site makes a similar promise of unaware and unwilling subjects; the essential erotic charge comes from the stealthy violation of a woman's privacy.
Of course, the intrusion doesn't always go unnoticed. Two years ago, on a scorching hot day in St. Louis, 22-year-old Karen Simoncelli wore a skirt to the local zoo. While checking out the lizard exhibit, she had a reptilian encounter of another kind. A toweringly tall, "weird-looking" man stood uncomfortably close to her, holding the long strap of a camera bag in his hand. She looked down and saw a camera lens pointing up her skirt. He saw her spot the camera and split. But she ran after him, screaming for bystanders to call 911 and hurling obscenities at him, while he made a beeline for the zoo's exit. After catching up with him and throwing her strawberry smoothie on him, he finally handed over the camera. By the time he reached the zoo exit, police were waiting for him.
The next day, Simoncelli, a college student, discovered that police had found footage shot up seven other girls' skirts. She chose not to look at the tape, but the police were able to identify her based only on the underwear she was wearing that day. Ultimately, though, he was released (and now has a warrant out for his arrest for an unrelated incident).
It wasn't just a creepy encounter -- like a lewd comment made on the street -- that she could shake off. "I had to have my fiancé for about a whole year walk me in and out of our house," she said. "I have had a loaded gun next to my bed ever since. I constantly think someone is following me." She says she'll stare at a small sliver of her bedroom window that isn't covered by the blinds and become convinced that "someone is watching me, someone is looking."
Just as with Simoncelli, 44-year-old Lori Boyd, of South Orange County, Calif., felt a man hovering uncomfortably close while she was on her lunch break at the local mall. She looked down and discovered a camera pointed up her skirt. Only, instead of chasing him through the mall, she froze, unsure of who he was, and whether he might get violent. She "felt violated and weirded out that someone would get off on something like this" but pretended she hadn't noticed it, and then, once the man had disappeared, reported it to the mall police. They said they had received a number of other complaints from women who had had the same experience.
Of course, not all subjects are entirely unwilling participants. Paris Hilton's and Britney Spears' pantyless crusade in front of paparazzi seemed intentional -- if not sober or clearheaded. In some ways, it appeared to be an aggressive acknowledgment of their utter lack of privacy as famous females. Indeed, name a female celebrity -- any female celebrity -- and she has likely starred in an accidental crotch shot. And it's hardly an issue of simply wearing panties and keeping one's knees primly pressed together -- just consider Alexandra Kerry, John Kerry's daughter, who appeared at Cannes wearing a beautiful black dress that, much to her surprise, was rendered see-through by paparazzi flashes. Sites like X17, Perez Hilton, Defamer and Egotastic have made their name (and their money) on these dishy candids.
Then there are the public figures who are knowing, although perhaps not always enthusiastic, participants in the genre -- for instance, female tennis players, who no doubt have come to expect tighty-whitey action shots to show up on fan message boards. It's been suggested that Wimbledon should be redubbed "the birthplace of the upskirt," and at last year's Australian Open, three men were arrested for attempting between-the-legs shots of female fans. Innumerable tributes to tennis panty shots can be found on YouTube, including one titled, "Anna Kournikova -- upskirt compilation." And, last year, artist Dmitry Bulnygin premiered a nine-minute video filmed up the skirt of an unidentified woman as she played a match, and a rumor quickly spread that the star was none other than Maria Sharapova. No matter their athletic abilities, female tennis stars have simply had to accept that their crotch's celebrity status could actually rival their own. And, as the Web threatens to turn us all into potential celebrities, we have had to make similar shifts in our own expectations of privacy.
It's such a recognizable phenomenon that artist Richard Kern recently took photographic perversions from the New York City subway to a Manhattan art gallery with an irreverent piece titled "Upskirts," featuring a total of 25 individual panty shots. But the piece lacks the shiver-inducing quality of real candids, because the subjects' legs are spread far enough apart to suggest willful participation --maybe even enthusiastic consent.
On the other side of this online trend are women who are also publishing photos of unwilling subjects -- only their subjects are the men who sexually harass them in public. The Web site HollaBack NYC encourages women to take quick cellphone photos of their harassers and send them in to the site for publication, along with their story about being groped on the subway, yelled at on the street or photographed by a stranger in a sexualized way. The message seems to be having a real effect: In August, a woman discovered a man taking a photo up her skirt with his cellphone as she walked up a set of stairs at a subway station in New York, and she yanked out her cellphone and snapped a photo of him. She sent the snapshot to police, which helped them to find and arrest the man within weeks. He currently faces charges of attempted sexual abuse, harassment and unlawful surveillance.
Upskirting cases are hardly the only recent challenges to our notions of privacy. Recently, three girls featured without permission on the Web site and companion book "Hot Chicks With Douchebags" -- which consists of pictures featuring … yeah, you guessed it -- filed a lawsuit, claiming violation of privacy. Similarly, "Girls Gone Wild" has been hit with a number of lawsuits from women featured in the series. Some have claimed that their privacy was violated, even though they voluntarily bared all in public.
These legal struggles -- as well as states' attempts to punish upskirting, downblousing and other ways of virtually getting inside a stranger's clothes -- seem to be just the start of a gradual cultural reimagining of what it means to be in public or private. As Gallagher put it, "The conventions that guide what is and is not a violation are currently under construction." But, she adds, "Privacy is based on an expectation and, in general, people don't have an expectation of privacy in public."
-- By Tracy Clark-Flory
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On a warm summer day two years ago, a 16-year-old girl put on a skirt and headed to the SuperTarget in her hometown of Tulsa, Okla. As she shopped the air-conditioned aisles, a man knelt behind her, carefully slid a camera in between her bare legs and snapped a photo of her underwear. Police arrested the 34-year-old man, but the charges were ultimately dropped on the grounds that the girl did not, as required by the state's Peeping Tom law, have "a right to a reasonable expectation of privacy," given the public location. In non-legalese: Wear a skirt in public, and you might just get a camera in the crotch.
**I'm surprized they didn't try to charge him with a "sexual exploitation of a child" crime. I don't know OK statutes, but given that she is under 18, i'd think there might be something applicable in their state laws.**
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BABY BOYS MAY SHOW SPATIAL SUPREMACY
Male superiority on mental rotation tasks may develop within a few months after birth By Bruce Bower Web edition : Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 Text Size NEW ANGLES ON BLOCKSHow long babies spent time looking at rotated blocks and the mirror images of blocks was a measure of the ability to mentally rotate an object.
IMAGE CREDIT: Robert M. Ditto
The gender gap in spatial abilities — charted for more than 30 years — emerges within the first few months of life, years earlier than previously thought, psychologists report.
Males typically outperform females on spatial-ability tests by age 4, especially on tasks that require mental rotation of objects perceived as three-dimensional. Yet,
two studies of 3- to 5-month-olds, both published in the November Psychological Science, conclude that a substantially greater proportion of boys than girls distinguish a block arrangement from its mirror image, after having first seen the block arrangement rotated. Babies who prefer looking at the mirror image are presumed to have mentally rotated the block arrangement, recognized it and chosen to gaze at the novel mirror image.
One investigation was conducted by David Moore of Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., and Scott Johnson of the University of California, Los Angeles. The other was directed by Paul Quinn of the University of Delaware in Newark and Lynn Liben of Pennsylvania State University in University Park.
Both sets of researchers suspect that sex differences in mental rotation develop shortly after birth due to an unknown mix of genetic, biological and environmental influences.
“The result we found was really somewhat of a shocker,” Moore says. He had expected to demonstrate no sex difference in infants’ mental rotation skills, laying the groundwork for pinpointing the age at which this spatial gap first appears.
“Simultaneous reports by two different labs using two different techniques are difficult to dismiss,” remarks psychologist Nora Newcombe of Temple University in Philadelphia.
Still, the new reports don’t confirm that baby boys perform mental rotation tasks better than baby girls do, comments psychologist Susan Levine of the University of Chicago. That’s because both studies first familiarized babies with a block arrangement oriented at specific angles but then presented it from a new angle for comparison with its mirror image, a process that may mask baby girls’ spatial insights.
By 3 months of age, girls — but not boys — may notice changes in a block arrangement’s angle, Levine proposes. If so, girls would regard both a newly oriented block arrangement and its mirror image as novel, spending roughly equal amounts of time looking at both. Scientists have yet to address this possibility, she says.
If infant boys don’t notice angle shifts, they would spend most of the time looking at novel mirror images, Levine suggests. Baby boys would thus falsely appear to be better than baby girls at mental rotation.
“Even if there is an early advantage in favor of males, there is ample research showing that mental rotation skill is malleable,” Levine says. Preschool activities such as block building, assembling jigsaw puzzles and playing certain video games have been linked to stronger mental rotation skill. In 2005, Levine reported that second- and third-graders from poor families, who receive little or no exposure to such activities, show no sex difference in the ability to mentally rotate an object.
Some parents play with their children and babies in ways that promote spatial thinking, such as naming the shapes of toys and guiding a child’s hand to rotate a toy, notes Penn State’s Liben. It’s not known whether parents target such behavior at boys, she says.
Researchers have yet to show that early proficiency on mental rotation tasks translates into an aptitude for spatially challenging subjects such as geometry, geography and science, Levine cautions.
Moore and Johnson showed 20 boys and 20 girls, all 5 months old, videos of a block arrangement rotating back and forth through a 240° angle. Each child sat in his or her mother’s lap as the mother kept her eyes closed. After tiring of looking at this image, infants saw alternating videos of the original block arrangement or its mirror image rotating through a 120° angle.
Video records of infants’ gaze and head movements revealed that 14 boys, or 70 percent of them, preferred looking at mirror images, compared with 9 girls, or 45 percent of them.
Quinn and Liben showed 12 boys and 12 girls, all 3 to 4 months old, a series of images of either a black number 1 or its mirror image, each drawn to appear three-dimensional and situated at a different degree of rotation. Each baby then saw presentations of both the number 1 and its mirror image in a new degree of rotation.
In the latter trials, 11 boys preferred looking at the image that they hadn’t seen before, compared with 5 girls.
It may be possible to study mental rotation in babies within the first few days after birth, Quinn says.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/38892/title/Baby_boys_may_show_spatial_supremacy
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http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2008/12/01/male_caregivers/index.html
I'm not a big fan of the "Men do traditional women's work; are shocked to learn it's hard" genre of human interest story, but John Leland's article in Friday's New York Times about men caring for elderly parents is actually pretty good. It acknowledges some of the unique problems men face with taking on this traditionally female role, without the usual implication that this means women are somehow "naturally" better suited to it, and thus the status quo is best for everyone. In fact, I'd say this article is a great argument for why men need feminism as much as women do.
For instance, Leland points out that men are less likely to use employee-assistance programs for caregivers because, as one man who looks after his mother puts it, "I think it would be looked at like, when they hire a male, they expect him to be 100-percent focused. I don't want to appear to be someone who has distractions that detract from performance." The idea that any employee should be "100-percent focused" on his or her job, to the exclusion of fully participating in domestic life, is something women have been working against for decades -- it's just that employers have too often taken that to mean women are lousy employees, not that everyone needs a decent work-life balance. The sexist assumption that men are more committed to their jobs and women are more easily "distracted" by petty concerns like ailing parents (or children) hurts both genders.
Similarly, the expectation that female children should be their parents' caregivers -- and men with no sisters, presumably, will hire help -- stands in the way of some men being as involved as they'd like to be. Amy Torres, helpline director at Fria, says, "Nursing homes have a very difficult time dealing with male caregivers. It's unusual for them. The male caregiver is made to feel their interest in their relative is inappropriate." As a woman, I can't imagine being told that my interest in my elderly father's health is "inappropriate," which goes to the root problem here -- the sexist assumption that women are "natural" caregivers, ergo men are not.
I think it's scandalous that a grown man being compassionate, nurturing and responsible is considered such an unusual sight that nursing home employees will be suspicious of his motives. But then, a couple of weeks ago, I listened to a friend of my boyfriend's talking about how his 5-year-old daughter just cries about everything -- due to "some kind of girl logic" -- while his son "naturally" understands that crying is to be reserved for especially devastating occasions. When people are still teaching their kids that only girls are supposed to have and express feelings, is it any wonder that middle-aged male caregivers are seen as weirdos?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/29/us/29sons.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&sq=men%20caregivers&st=cse&scp=1
November 29, 2008
More Men Take the Lead Role in Caring for Elderly Parents
By JOHN LELAND
When Peter Nicholson's mother suffered a series of strokes last winter, he did something women have done for generations: he quit his job and moved into her West Hollywood home to care for her full time.
Since then, he has lost 45 pounds and developed anemia, in part because of the stress, and he is running out of money. But the hardest adjustment, Mr. Nicholson said, has been the emotional toll.
"The single toughest moment was when she said to me, 'And now who are you?' " he said. "My whole world just dropped. That was the pinnacle of despair."
Mr. Nicholson, 53, is part of a growing number of men who are providing primary care for their aging parents, usually their mothers.
The Alzheimer's Association and the National Alliance for Caregiving estimate that men make up nearly 40 percent of family care providers now, up from 19 percent in a 1996 study by the Alzheimer's Association. About 17 million men are caring for an adult.
"It used to be that when men said, 'I'll always take care of my mother,' it meant, 'My wife will always take care of my mother,' " said Carol Levine, director of the families and health care project at the United Hospital Fund. "But now, more and more men are doing it."
Often they are overshadowed by their female counterparts and faced with employers, friends, support organizations and sometimes even parents who view caregiving as an essentially female role. Male caregivers are more likely to say they feel unprepared for the role and become socially isolated, and less likely to ask for help.
Women still provide the bulk of family care, especially intimate tasks like bathing and dressing. At support groups, which are predominantly made up of women, many women complain that their brothers are treated like heroes just for showing up.
But with smaller families and more women working full-time, many men have no choice but to take on roles that would have been alien to their fathers. Just as fatherhood became more hands-on in the baby boom generation, so has the role for many sons as their generation's parents age.
Mr. Nicholson said his family had not discussed who would take care of his mother, Bernice, if she became frail. But as the unmarried child among his two siblings, and the one who was most readily available, he had spent increasing time with her as she aged.
Still, he was not prepared for the isolation of full-time care. "There's absolutely no involvement in the outside world," Mr. Nicholson said. "When I finally get out to a Dodgers game, walking to the car, I say, Oh, this is what life is about. I forgot about this. I can't be doing myself any good by not getting out of here."
Isolation affects women as well, but men tend to have fewer lifelines, said Donna Benton, an assistant research professor of gerontology at the University of Southern California and director of the Los Angeles Caregiver Resource Network. Men are less likely to have friends going through similar experiences, and depend more on their jobs for daily human contact.
"That's the harder part for men, to find someone to talk to," Dr. Benton said. "It's the emotional side: the guilt, the sadness, the anger. For men it becomes more stressful because they can't talk about it. They feel cut off."
And then there is the inevitable question: What happens when I have to bathe her?
"That's where the rubber meets the road," said Donna Wagner, the director of gerontology at Towson University and one of the few researchers who has studied sons as caregivers.
For Mr. Nicholson, the whole experience has been a journey into the surreal, but especially at bath time.
Though he is not squeamish about it, he said: "The weirdness permeates our relationship. She doesn't know if I'm her husband or her boyfriend or her neighbor. She knows she trusts me. But there are times when it's very difficult. I need to keep her from embarrassing herself. She'll say things like, 'I adore you.' I don't know who she's loving, because she doesn't know who I am. Maybe I'm embarrassed about it — it's my mom, for Christ sakes. But it's weird how the oldest son becomes the spouse."
Matt Kassin, 51, said he had no role model for male caregiver in his family. His father had been distant; he, in turn, had been the rebellious son.
"I was the son who went through divorce, who needed to separate from my mom when I was teenager," Mr. Kassin said. "I'm the son that wanted distance. Now I'm the son who hears every morning, 'It's so nice to hear your voice.' "
On a recent evening, Mr. Kassin visited his mother, Doris Golden, in her Manhattan apartment. Ms. Golden, 82, is in the early stages of Alzheimer's and still lives independently, but relies on Mr. Kassin to arrange her schedule, pay her bills and make sure she remembers her daily tasks (his sister also helps).
His care has surprised his mother. "When he was young, I couldn't get him to raise a finger," Ms. Golden said. Her conversation looped repeatedly back to this point, and with each return, Mr. Kassin grew more irritated. That was when he was a teenager, he said, sharply; hadn't he been more attentive since?
Finally she looked at him tenderly and asked, "When did I start relying on you?"
Interviewed apart from his mother, Mr. Kassin said: "It's kind of like living my nightmare situation. But it's a great opportunity here. Here's the woman who nurtured me. She now is the child. You worry if you're up for the challenge. If I don't make this challenge, what kind of human being am I?"
In past generations, men might have answered this question by pointing to their accomplishments as breadwinners or fathers. Now, some men say they worry about the conflict between caring for their parents and these other roles.
In a 2003 study at three Fortune 500 companies, Dr. Wagner found that men were less likely to use employee-assistance programs for caregivers because they feared it would be held against them.
"Even though the company has endorsed the program, your supervisors may have a different opinion," Dr. Wagner said. "I had a man who worked for a large company with very generous benefits, and he was told that if he took more time to go with his dad to chemotherapy, he was at risk of losing his job. He ended up not going with his father."
Mr. Kassin said that although his employer had been understanding, he was reluctant to talk about his caregiving because "I think it would be looked at like, when they hire a male, they expect him to be 100-percent focused."
"I don't want to appear to be someone who has distractions that detract from performance," he said.
For many men, the new role means giving up their self-image as experts, said Louis Colbert, director of the office of services for the aging in Delaware County, Pa., who has shared care of his 84-year-old mother with his siblings since her Alzheimer's made it necessary.
"I've been a professional for 32 years," Mr. Colbert said, "but yet I remember the first time I was driving to my mother's house, being afraid because I didn't know if I knew what to do."
Once a year, Mr. Colbert organizes a get-together for male caregivers. The concerns they raise, he said, are different from those of women in support groups. "Very clearly, they said they wanted their role as caregiver validated, because in our society, as a whole, men as caregivers have been invisible," he said.
This invisibility can extend to hospitals and nursing homes, said Amy Torres, helpline director at Fria, a national nonprofit organization based in New York that represents family members and residents in long-term care facilities.
"Nursing homes have a very difficult time dealing with male caregivers," Ms. Torres said. "It's unusual for them. The male caregiver is made to feel their interest in their relative is inappropriate. Our male callers say they're made to feel what they're doing is unusual, that it's wrong."
She gave the example of a son who was the health care agent for his mother and wanted to be in the room when the staff changed her diaper because he was concerned about her skin condition. "The staff refused to allow it," Ms. Torres said. "They said the mother's dignity was at risk."
After two weeks of pressing, she said, he finally got his way. With a daughter, this would not have been an issue, Ms. Torres said.
And even when they are acknowledged, for many male caregivers, as for women, there is the lingering sense that whatever they do is not enough.
Mr. Nicholson said he knew this feeling too well. As a teacher, he could measure his contribution by the students' progress. But with his mother, he can only watch her decline.
"I'm always asking myself, Am I even qualified for this?" he said. "Just because I love her a lot doesn't mean that I have any idea if I'm doing the right thing, or doing what's best for her."
He sounded exhausted, rattled even.
"I don't know if this is just the musings of someone who's on the verge of tossing everything and putting her in a home," he said. "But this is a very revealing journey about who I am to me and my family, and what's important to me."
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http://current.com/items/89525657/fgm_in_sierra_leone.htm?xid=55
It is apparently a big money maker there.
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I thought this was interesting. I definitely remembering struggling with the decision of who should pay before I was married. I would have have preferred it be more egalitarian but at the I was just starting out in my career working for a non-profit and eating a lot of Peanut Butter and Jelly. I couldn't afford the restaurants my now husband wanted to eat at. I ended up planning a lot of free or very reasonable dates.
http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/feature/2008/11/20/dawinist_dating/index.html
Here are links to the Kay Hymowitz articles
Dudes try "dating Darwinism"
http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_4_darwinist_dating.html
http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_1_single_young_men.html
After Kay S. Hymowitz wrote an article about the alleged throngs of single young males "lingering in a hormonal limbo between adolescence and adulthood, shunning marriage and children, and whiling away their leisure hours with South Park reruns," she received a vitriolic response from some such young dudes. In response, she proposes a theory in City Journal for what is causing all that anger: "The dating and mating scene is in chaos" thanks to women's liberation.
Guys are resorting to "Darwinist dating" or, to put it another way, survival of the asshole-iest
Young men, she argues, are exposed to a series of "miscues, cross-purposes, and half-conscious, contradictory female expectations that are alternately proudly egalitarian and coyly traditional." They don't want you to open the door, but they do want you to pay for dinner; they want chivalry one moment and evolved egalitarianism the next. Young women just can't make up their minds about what they want from a man, Hymowitz writes: She "may be hoping for a hookup, but she may also be looking for a husband, a co-parent, a sperm donor, a relationship, a threesome, or a temporary place to live … In fact, young men face a bewildering multiplicity of female expectations and desire."
Then there's the fact that "men face a situation -- and I'm not exaggerating here -- new to human history," writes Hymowitz. "Never before have men wooed women who are, at least theoretically, their equals -- socially, professionally, and sexually." Retro dating manuals have been rendered obsolete, and feminism has failed to provide men with a guidebook for navigating courtship. So, "as middle-class men and women are putting off marriage well into their twenties and thirties as they pursue Ph.D.s, J.D.s, or their first $50,000 salaries," they are left with several years, perhaps even a decade or more, of this "heartbreak and humiliation."
As a result, she says, guys are resorting to "Darwinist dating" or, to put it another way, survival of the asshole-iest. It's appears to be a modern reimagining of that myth of the caveman clubbing a female over the head and dragging her back to the cave, and explains the "the litany of stories you hear from women about the troglodytes in their midst."
The pickup artist scene is one approach to "Darwinist dating" (or, more accurately, Darwinist screwing). While there is something to these theories of seduction, just as there is something to teaching someone basic social skills or training him or her to become a better public speaker, it's all about artifice. They are taught to suppress the nice guy by putting on the armor of the asshole -- but how fulfilling is that, ultimately? The essential message is: Toss out your feelings and don't be yourself -- act the part of your better self or, preferably, someone else entirely.
Nothing in the seduction community seems to prepare a guy to find himself, grow genuine and warranted confidence, or start a real, emotionally rewarding and lasting relationship. As Hymowitz ultimately points out, to my great relief, the problem with this approach is that it's "an uncompromising biological determinism that makes no room for human cultivation." Not to mention, "dating Darwinism" suggests that all young men want is to successfully spread their seed -- but something tells me that if they have to defensively put on the tough guy act in the first place, that isn't at all the case.
Every time I read articles about this alleged Menaissance (a rebirth of medieval-style masculinity, in case you aren't hip to the obnoxious buzzword) a few words come to mind: anxiety, insecurity, confusion and anger. But, get this, young women are feeling all those things, too. Those "miscues, cross-purposes, and half-conscious, contradictory female expectations"? They don't come from a place of total illumination and enlightenment on the dating front -- they are often a confused response to" miscues, cross-purposes, and half-conscious, contradictory" cultural expectations, whether they come directly from men in their life or the world at large. And men certainly aren't just reacting to women, but to similar contradictory cultural messages directed toward them.
Let's not make this a war between the sexes. As girls overturn traditional gender roles, boys are forced to do the same, leaving both sexes in scary, unscripted territory. This has, indeed, come as a result of feminist advancements -- but feminist advancements within a culture that is not yet egalitarian. I think many young women are still in search of an empowered and authentic sexual identity -- a way to be active participants in our sexual culture. Given that they are doing this within a culture than defines sexual power in male terms, is it any surprise that they -- as well as young men -- perform contradictions and make mistakes along the way?
― Tracy Clark-Flory
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http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2008/12/05/losing_jobs_in_unequal_numbers/?page=2
1,069,000 fewer men are working than a year ago. 12,000 more women are working.
By Robert Gavin, Globe Staff | December 5, 2008
The careers of Neal Boyle and Scott Hacker couldn't be more different. Boyle, whose education ended with high school, worked 20 years crushing rocks at the US Gypsum plant in Charlestown. Hacker, who holds an MBA, changed firms several times as he moved up the management ranks in New England's financial services industry.
But today they find themselves in the same place: laid off and looking for work. And together they represent the face of the current recession, one that is overwhelmingly male.
Men are losing jobs at far greater rates than women as the industries they dominate, such as manufacturing, construction, and investment services, are hardest hit by the downturn. Some 1.1 million fewer men are working in the United States than there were a year ago, according to the Labor Department. By contrast, 12,000 more women are working.
This gender gap is the product of both the nature of the current recession and the long-term shift in the US economy from making goods, traditionally the province of men, to providing services, in which women play much larger roles, economists said. For example, men account for 70 percent of workers in manufacturing, which shed more than 500,000 jobs over the past year. Healthcare, in which nearly 80 percent of the workers are women, added more than 400,000 jobs.
"As the recession broadens, the gap between men and women is going to close somewhat," said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. "But right now, the sectors that are really getting pounded are intensely male."
The divide is far starker than it was in last recession, when the technology crash battered professional and technical sectors in which women now hold more than 40 percent of jobs. From the beginning of 2001 to the beginning of 2002, the number of employed men declined by about 900,000, while the population of women with jobs fell by about 700,000.
The male-dominated construction industry held up much better then, too, as falling interest rates began to fuel the housing boom. This time, the housing bust that sparked the recession took construction with it. The downturn spread from the mortgage industry to the investment industry, leading to a credit crunch that undermined consumer spending and manufacturers of consumer goods, like auto makers.
Construction firms, in which 90 percent of workers are men, have cut more than 500,000 jobs, or nearly 7 percent of employment, over the past year. Men account for more than 60 percent of employment in investment firms, which through October had cut 1 percent, or 9,000 jobs.
That figure, the most recent available, excludes thousands of recently announced layoffs within the financial industry, including large cutbacks at two Boston companies: mutual fund manager Fidelity Investments and State Street Corp., which provides a variety of services for investment firms.
Hacker, 49, of Providence, worked for SS&C Technologies of Windsor, Conn., which also provides service to investment companies. When SS&C recently lost a client, it cost Hacker his job as manager of corporate governance. Several weeks later, he's talked to recruiters and staffing agencies, but all they have to offer are short-term contract jobs. And even so, he has yet to see a company hiring manager.
"I've been laid off before, but I've always managed to find work pretty quickly," he said. "But I've never dealt with this kind of financial meltdown."
Many analysts expect the investment industry that emerges from the financial crisis to be significantly smaller, with fewer jobs. Still, said David Autor, an economics professor at MIT, highly educated workers like Hacker are likely to fare well in an economy that values technical skills, analytical abilities, and advanced degrees.
"These guys will bounce back," Autor said. "But the job opportunities for less-educated males have declined substantially over the past 30 years, and there is a lack of alternatives for them."
Boyle, 54, for example, made about $70,000 a year, including overtime, at US Gypsum, and he's had no luck finding anything that will get him even close to that since getting laid off in March. He's tried manufacturers, construction firms, and sand and gravel companies. He recently completed training for a truck driver's license.
"You go to these places and they don't want to take on anyone else," he said. "It's really tough out there."
Finding jobs to replace the high-paying, blue-collar work that traditionally sustained men like Boyle and their families is among the greatest challenges facing the US economy, said the Center for Labor Market Studies' Sum. The erosion of these jobs has undermined both family income and family structure, he said.
Inflation-adjusted median income for young families has declined from $44,000 in 1979 to $38,000 in 2007, Sum said. During the same period, as jobs that allowed less-educated men to support a family have diminished, out-of-wedlock births to young women rose to 50 percent of births, from 20 percent in 1980.
"We lost a lot of jobs that used to be an opportunity for these young guys," Sum said. "But we haven't figured out how to create good-paying, blue-collar jobs for men who don't have a college degree."
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Two interesting posts there Rachel.
Turning to the Dating Darwin one, I commend the author for what seems to be a honest search for Truth.
She writes:
"As girls overturn traditional gender roles, boys are forced to do the same, leaving both sexes in scary, unscripted territory. This has, indeed, come as a result of feminist advancements -- but feminist advancements within a culture that is not yet egalitarian. I think many young women are still in search of an empowered and authentic sexual identity -- a way to be active participants in our sexual culture. Given that they are doing this within a culture than defines sexual power in male terms, , ,"
The word "egalitarian" is a slippery one. Properly understood, it simply means "equal in value" but in point of fact it is often used to mean "identical in all ways"-- which IMHO is foolishness.
As I see it, the underlying Darwinian question is presented by the interregnum between the onset of puberty and actual childbearing in the modern era. In many cases, this lasts for decades!!! The consequences of this separation of sex and reproduction, greatly enabled by technology (the various forms of birth control) and fetus-cide) are as profound as they are outside of Darwinian logic.
IMHO THIS is what drives the dynamic the author seeks to address.
What I sense feminists (even a lucid one such as this author) imply when they use the phrase "traditional gender roles" is that these traditions are simply some sort of arbitrary social construct with oppressive overtones-- one that can be replaced by the "identical in all ways" construct. Men and women are equal in value, but they most certainly are not the same, and the liberal PC feminazi ideology that says they are ultimately will fail.
A very simple and direct Darwinian example of this is the dramatic decline in birth rates below replacement rates. I submit the proposition that the more "egalitarian" the culture, the lower the birth rates. Look at Europe for example. In many major countries such as Germany, France, and Spain the birth rates are as low as 1.1- 1.4!!! In contrast, the Muslim birth rates (both Turkish and Arabic) are way above the replacement rate of 2.1. The net result is the pre-emptive dhimmitude chronicled in various nearby threads.
A large subject, but right now my day takes me elsewhere.
TAC!
Marc
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Marc,
Certainly birth control has had a large impact on the delaying of marriage and lowering the birthrate
However I would actually blame/credit capitalism for lowering the birthrate. I think it has had much bigger effect than feminism.
Women joined the work force not because of feminism but because of economic necessity.
I would credit feminism for encouraging woman to be doctors as well as nurses but not for getting them a job outside the home in the first place
Capitalism encourages people to wait before having a family. Longer schooling is necessary now for people to have good jobs. You are much more likely to be economically successful if you put off having a familyfor a little while. Don't get me wrong I like capitalism-- best economic system ever but it encourages people to be valued by how much money they make. A stay home parent is often not valued as much by society because they are not making money.
Israel has a fairly egalitarian society but is less capitalistic the the US and has a strong birthrate. Partly because in Israel people get married early and more women than in the US start and continue having kids while attending college/grad school.
Urban societies in general have a lower birthrates than rural. Kids are much more of an economic advantage on the farm.
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Hi all,
A correlation between more "advanced" society (capitalism, high tech, egalitarian work, and so on) has been documented before though I cannot for the life of me remember the really cool documentary that really emphasized the point to me (apologies). It would seem that birth rates do indeed decline as societies become more egalitarian due to feminist influence but also due the development of labor saving technologies that allow people to live differently than traditional cultures. Such societal developments are in turn a function of the availability of cheap energy. If energy is not cheap then people have to do more physical labor.
Karsk
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I have not read this book before and I didn't find this until after I had posted but I have read something similar to this before.
How Society Makes Itself
By Howard J. Sherman
bottom of page 178 and page 179
http://books.google.com/books?id=9OeV2FTeDcMC&pg=PA179&lpg=PA179&dq=capitalism+lowers+birth+rate&source=web&ots=D8V9YR_Evp&sig=3-2fqOQGq0hWTXww_k7l_kYKBpw&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=3&ct=result#PPA179,M1
Karsk --if you remember the information for the documentary at some point I would be very interested.
It makes sense that more capitalist societies are more egalitarians
Capitalism would encourages a more egalitarian less discriminatory society. If you hire the best person for job regardless of gender, race, religion, etc you are going to have better run business that someone who discriminates.
However it always annoys that economists think people always act rationally or in their best interest all the time, or wouldn't sacrifice themselves individually for what they see as the best for their group. I am not saying all problems have market solutions. Government should have a role in protecting against discrimination.
I was thinking that my Israel example might not be the best because obviously the role religion plays in that society and the fact that they are war would effect the birthrate.
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The bondage of matrimony
Dec. 11, 2008
Larry Derfner , THE JERUSALEM POST
On the way into his house in the Negev Beduin city of Rahat, Samir leads me quickly past a small, bare concrete hut. Inside I glimpse a haggard-looking woman sitting at a table. "That's her, that's where she lives," says Samir, embarrassed, speaking of his first wife.
A few steps further is the front door to his old, two-story house. We go in and sit on the cushiony, worn couches in the salon. The TV is tuned to the settler evacuation in Hebron. Soon his second wife - younger, more attractive, dressed in a black-and-gold Beduin robe - comes out of the kitchen and serves us a lunch of chicken stew and meat, rice, humous and pita. She smiles when I thank her, but doesn't say a word, disappearing back into the kitchen.
Samir, in his 50s, is a teacher, one of the "educated" Beduin, as he says - not the folkloric, primitive sheikh who keeps a harem for his ego. He took a second wife because his first one couldn't bear him more than one child. "If she'd been healthy," he says, "I'd say there's an 80 percent chance I wouldn't have thought of getting married again."
He has 10 children by his second wife - five grown and out of the house, five living upstairs. If he had it to do over again, he says he'd have only one or two. "The expenses are so high. I can't even afford a computer for them." Unshaven on a school day, he seems downcast. He takes his medicine for a chronic illness.
Photos of his elders line the patched-up walls. Samir was born in the house. His father had one child by his first wife, then 12 children, including him, by a second. "I grew up herding sheep and goats. In those days it didn't cost anything to raise kids. What did you have to buy them? The more children you had, the bigger your family, the bigger your tribe, the bigger your clan. But today, living in the city, things are different."
Rahat, the "capital" of the Beduin sector, is a raw, disordered, sprawling, dirty place filled mainly with poor people, many of whom still keep sheep and goats. In Samir's neighborhood, little children who can barely stand play in the middle of the street, with the cars veering around them.
His first wife "took it hard" when he told her he was going to marry again. She didn't want to get divorced - it's a terrible stigma in Beduin society, a ticket to economic ruin, and the Shari'a (Islamic law) courts that decide most Beduin family disputes grant custody of the children to the father, not the mother.
Samir felt bad for his first wife and daughter; he didn't want to divorce, either. "I felt that a little girl belongs with her mother." So he moved his second wife into the big house and, a few steps away, built the hut for his first wife and their daughter. That was more than 20 years ago.
According to the Koran, a Muslim can take up to four wives, but he is supposed to care for them equally. "At first I tried to spend time with both of them, to sleep some nights here and some nights there, but it didn't work out. Little by little I was spending all my time here," he says, sinking back in his chair, smoking.
Today his first wife lives alone, although her grandchildren often come over. Between the money Samir and one of his sons give her, plus a little welfare, she survives. The entrance to her hut allows her to come and go without passing through the house. Unlike in most polygamous families, the children of the two wives "all get along like brothers and sisters," says Samir.
He goes over to the hut from time to time to see his first wife. But she doesn't come into the big house. "The wives don't talk to each other," he explains.
ABOUT ONE out of four Negev Beduin live in polygamous families: some 45,000 men, women and children. Despite modernization, the rate has been going up in recent years, says Prof. Alean el-Krenawi, who researches Beduin society at Ben-Gurion University. "Maybe it's because some Beduin men have been doing better economically, so they can afford more than one wife," suggests the professor, a Negev Beduin himself.
At the other end of the economic scale, though, the culture of poverty also can lead to polygamy. "The men are married off very young by their families; they don't finish school, they're poor, they have no future, they fight with their wives, get frustrated and think that taking another wife will solve their problems. But the problems only get worse," says Krenawi in his office.
Polygamy among Israeli Beduin nearly always means two wives, not three or four. Typically, the first wife and her children live separately from the husband's new family, but very close by - in a hut next to the main house like Samir's first wife, or in a new floor built onto the house. It's an obvious recipe for domestic warfare, and that's what commonly happens. "I can't think of any instances of murder, but sure there's violence, there's every sort of fighting - between one of the wives and the husband, between the two wives, between the children of the two wives - every combination you can think of," Krenawi says.
As a rule, the enmity begins with the first wife's humiliation and resentment, which deepens as the husband favors the second wife and set of children with more affection, attention and money. It's almost inevitable: The second wife is sought out by the husband, not by his parents as is usually the case in first marriages. The second wife also tends to be younger than the first. The shame and anger, along with the material want, that fall to the first wife and her children result in a range of psychological and social grievances, beginning with depression.
Krenawi has found that in general, the more educated a Beduin is, the less likely he is to practice polygamy. "But there are school principals, engineers and other professionals with two wives, so that's not a hard and fast rule," he says. Samir says he knows many other teachers with two wives. He notes that his first wife is illiterate and his second only went to elementary school for a few years.
Polygamy is practiced in various parts of Africa and Asia, mainly in rural areas, and not just by Muslims. Beduin from the Negev who have some money are known to bring back young second wives from the West Bank, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco and other poor Muslim countries. Among the Beduin in Galilee, who are more integrated into Israeli society, polygamy is not so common.
Officially, the practice is illegal here, but the law has never been enforced because this is a tradition that's embedded in Beduin culture and religion; even activists in the community who oppose polygamy are against the idea of the police and courts coming in to stop it.
Beduin society is ultraconservative, traditional and insular; change takes an awfully long time. The keepers of community tradition - clan elders and Muslim imams - are not about to endorse a campaign against polygamy.
THAT WAS evident at a BGU conference on this matter that Krenawi organized in late October, drawing hundreds of Beduin from across the Negev. While academics, social workers and Welfare and Social Services Minister Isaac Herzog talked about what a disaster polygamy is for Beduin, there were other voices, too.
"Polygamy solves problems," declared Sheikh Hammad Abu Daabis, head of the Negev Beduin branch of the Islamic Movement, quoted at the conference by The Jerusalem Post. He acknowledged the anxiety and depression that polygamy often causes the first wives, yet he maintained that the arrangement offers a solution for men who've married infertile women or who are tempted to roam, as well as for older, single women who have no hope anymore of marrying a bachelor.
In a fairly brave presentation, Talal el-Krenawi (Alean's brother), a Kadima member who was mayor of Rahat at the time of the conference, didn't condemn polygamy, but he came pretty close. He stressed that the Koran compels polygamous husbands to give each of their wives equal financial and emotional support, then joked, "Who is able to treat three wives equally? [Polygamy] is allowed but even the prophet Muhammad did not recommend it."
Change is not only mighty slow in Beduin society, it doesn't necessarily mean progress, either. Last month, Talal el-Krenawi lost the mayoralty of Rahat, a city dominated by tall minarets, to Sheikh Fayez Abu Ziban, who headed the Islamic Movement's local election ticket.
A bright spot in the election, though, was the candidacy of Muna el-Habnin, a Beduin women's rights activist who had the fourth slot on the "Change and Reform" party's ticket. Although the party won only three city council seats, a rotation agreement gives one of those seats to el-Habnin later in the five-year term. If that agreement is carried out, she will be the first Beduin woman in elected political office in the country's history.
A divorced mother of six, el-Habnin, who wears the head scarf and robes of a devout Muslim woman, runs her "Princess of the Desert" organization out of a borrowed, bare office, without even a computer, in the little college next to the Rahat shouk. Among the impoverished, bewildered women who come to her for help are many second wives of polygamous husbands.
"Their depression is very severe," says el-Habnin, 37, in a quiet yet intense voice. "They have social workers, but the social workers don't have time to listen to them." She's brought two second wives to the office for me to interview, and they've brought along three of their children and a divorced woman friend.
The image of Beduin women is exotic and mysterious; they're typically portrayed with veiled faces or impassive expressions, trudging through the sand in flowing robes, often balancing a basket on their heads.
But in a setting where they're free to talk, they're not such severe still-lifes. The three women in head scarves and robes sitting on plastic chairs in el-Habnin's office were laughing and chattering nonstop. The divorced friend was the life of the party, handing out wedges of orange to everyone, including me, while waiting for the interviews to start.
Laila and Yasmin, both in their 30s, live well apart from their husbands. Second wives living in the same house or compound as their polygamous husbands are not likely to come to a place like Princess of the Desert, and they're even less likely to talk to a journalist. I asked Prof. Krenawi and four different Beduin activists if they could put me in touch with a wife living in a polygamous family who was willing to be interviewed - even anonymously - and none of them could.
Laila's story is that she was engaged at 15, then married and had six children, then left her husband after he met a 16-year-old girl (while he was under house arrest for theft) and married her. As for Yasmin, who has three children, she had an off-and-on relationship with her husband until he met a woman (while he was on parole for theft) and married her.
Today Laila and Yasmin work in low-wage factory and housecleaning jobs, which disgraces them further as women in traditional Arab society. Neither wants a divorce; they both want their husbands to come back to them.
"For the children," says Laila, a strong-featured, plain-spoken woman. I ask if she still loves him. "Yeah, I guess - but not like before. Just knowing that he's with her fills me with anger."
Yasmin, who is tall, black and shy, says her husband's second wife, with whom he has two children, won't let him visit his original family. "He never puts his arms around her," she says, looking at her young, quiet daughter. "One time he came over, and we made this," she says with an exasperated smile, indicating her infant boy playing on the floor. "I once loved him, but now it's just for the kids. I want him to come pay the electricity bill, pay the water bill, pay for food."
Yasmin starts to relinquish her shyness. "I've had enough with men," she says, smiling ruefully. "I see a lot of other women in the same situation I'm in."
I ask if, when her troubles began, she was able to go to her parents for help, at least for sympathy. Her father is a Beduin - wasn't this an insult to his pride? Yasmin says her father died a few years ago, but before that, "he had two wives. He did the same thing to my mother. My mother understands, but there's nothing she can do about it."
El-Habnin explains: "The men support each other. The father of a woman who's been betrayed by her husband could have been a polygamist himself - how's he going to object?"
One of the hardest things to understand about Beduin polygamy is that while it favors the husbands at the expense of their wives and children, the husbands end up suffering, too - not nearly as badly as the wives and children, to be sure, but still, they're usually not happy with the arrangement at all. "With all the trouble, the feuds, the envy, the financial responsibilities - a man with more than one wife typically regrets it," says Prof. Krenawi.
So why does this way of life go on? If the wives and the husbands and the children of polygamous marriages are so miserable, why don't the Beduin wise up? "Why?" wonders Krenawi. "I don't know. Tradition, I guess. It's a hard thing to break."
This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1228728151540&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
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Rachel:
I've been meaning to ask you about these words of yours:
"Women joined the work force not because of feminism but because of economic necessity. I would credit feminism for encouraging woman to be doctors as well as nurses but not for getting them a job outside the home in the first place."
If I understand you correctly, you are saying that given a choice, most women would rather have their work be their homes and their families. I'm OK with the concept, but am more than a little surprised to here it come from you. :lol:
"Capitalism encourages people to wait before having a family."
In that the dynamic we discuss was present in spades in the Russian population of the Soviet Empire, I'd quibble with the word "capitalism" and would suggest using "economically developed" instead.
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Marc,
I don't know if most women would rather home. However definitely some women and men certainly would rather be home full time or work part time so they could spend more time with their children.
If G-d willing we have children and we could afford it I would personally prefer to be home or only work part time. Though I would never say anything like that at work.
However I certainly don't think it wrong for woman to want to work outside the home even if she can "afford" to be home or that a working mother is necessary bad for the children.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-wave_feminism
"Third-wave feminism allows women to define feminism for themselves by incorporating their own identities into the belief system of what feminism is and what it can become through one's own perspective.
Third-wave feminism's central issues are that of race, social class and sexuality. However, they are also concerns of workplace issues such as the glass ceiling, sexual harassment, unfair maternity leave policies, motherhood—support for single mothers by means of welfare and child care and respect for working mothers and mothers who decide to leave their careers to raise their children full-time."
My point was the society change that brought women into the workplace was not the feminist movement alone but economic necessity. I (and other feminists) think it is wonderful that some mothers have the "choice to work" but I don't think feminism caused it.
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Though some may roll their eyes at her name, I think Dr. Laura Schlessinger is on sound ground when she says that at least one parent should be dedicated to the home and the children and that that one parent is usually the mother. I think a lot of the societal breakdown that we have seen in recent decades is due to children being raised by daycare, nannies, and TV instead of loving mothers.
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I don't think society has broken down. I would much rather live in the present that in the past. I do wish people would spend more time on what it truly valuable like their family and friends rather than making money and mindless entertainment.
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The average age of homicide perps has been dropping every year. Our murder rate would be much worse were it not for our medical technology.
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I'm sure this does not go here but I don't know where to put it. I will be happy to move it if someone suggests a better spot.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
In sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, "[T]he spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized." Today, such sadism would be unthinkable in most of the world. This change in sensibilities is just one example of perhaps the most important and most underappreciated trend in the human saga: Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth.
In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion.
Some of the evidence has been under our nose all along. Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution—all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.
At one time, these facts were widely appreciated. They were the source of notions like progress, civilization, and man's rise from savagery and barbarism. Recently, however, those ideas have come to sound corny, even dangerous. They seem to demonize people in other times and places, license colonial conquest and other foreign adventures, and conceal the crimes of our own societies. The doctrine of the noble savage—the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions—pops up frequently in the writing of public intellectuals like José Ortega y Gasset ("War is not an instinct but an invention"), Stephen Jay Gould ("Homo sapiens is not an evil or destructive species"), and Ashley Montagu ("Biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood"). But, now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler.
To be sure, any attempt to document changes in violence must be soaked in uncertainty. In much of the world, the distant past was a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it, and, even for events in the historical record, statistics are spotty until recent periods. Long-term trends can be discerned only by smoothing out zigzags and spikes of horrific bloodletting. And the choice to focus on relative rather than absolute numbers brings up the moral imponderable of whether it is worse for 50 percent of a population of 100 to be killed or 1 percent in a population of one billion.
Yet, despite these caveats, a picture is taking shape. The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years. It applies over several orders of magnitude of violence, from genocide to war to rioting to homicide to the treatment of children and animals. And it appears to be a worldwide trend, though not a homogeneous one. The leading edge has been in Western societies, especially England and Holland, and there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the early seventeenth century.
At the widest-angle view, one can see a whopping difference across the millennia that separate us from our pre-state ancestors. Contra leftist anthropologists who celebrate the noble savage, quantitative body-counts—such as the proportion of prehistoric skeletons with axemarks and embedded arrowheads or the proportion of men in a contemporary foraging tribe who die at the hands of other men—suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own. It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But, in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher. According to anthropologists like Lawrence Keeley, Stephen LeBlanc, Phillip Walker, and Bruce Knauft, these factors combine to yield population-wide rates of death in tribal warfare that dwarf those of modern times. If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million.
Political correctness from the other end of the ideological spectrum has also distorted many people's conception of violence in early civilizations—namely, those featured in the Bible. This supposed source of moral values contains many celebrations of genocide, in which the Hebrews, egged on by God, slaughter every last resident of an invaded city. The Bible also prescribes death by stoning as the penalty for a long list of nonviolent infractions, including idolatry, blasphemy, homosexuality, adultery, disrespecting one's parents, and picking up sticks on the Sabbath. The Hebrews, of course, were no more murderous than other tribes; one also finds frequent boasts of torture and genocide in the early histories of the Hindus, Christians, Muslims, and Chinese.
At the century scale, it is hard to find quantitative studies of deaths in warfare spanning medieval and modern times. Several historians have suggested that there has been an increase in the number of recorded wars across the centuries to the present, but, as political scientist James Payne has noted, this may show only that "the Associated Press is a more comprehensive source of information about battles around the world than were sixteenth-century monks." Social histories of the West provide evidence of numerous barbaric practices that became obsolete in the last five centuries, such as slavery, amputation, blinding, branding, flaying, disembowelment, burning at the stake, breaking on the wheel, and so on. Meanwhile, for another kind of violence—homicide—the data are abundant and striking. The criminologist Manuel Eisner has assembled hundreds of homicide estimates from Western European localities that kept records at some point between 1200 and the mid-1990s. In every country he analyzed, murder rates declined steeply—for example, from 24 homicides per 100,000 Englishmen in the fourteenth century to 0.6 per 100,000 by the early 1960s.
On the scale of decades, comprehensive data again paint a shockingly happy picture: Global violence has fallen steadily since the middle of the twentieth century. According to the Human Security Brief 2006, the number of battle deaths in interstate wars has declined from more than 65,000 per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 per year in this decade. In Western Europe and the Americas, the second half of the century saw a steep decline in the number of wars, military coups, and deadly ethnic riots.
Zooming in by a further power of ten exposes yet another reduction. After the cold war, every part of the world saw a steep drop-off in state-based conflicts, and those that do occur are more likely to end in negotiated settlements rather than being fought to the bitter end. Meanwhile, according to political scientist Barbara Harff, between 1989 and 2005 the number of campaigns of mass killing of civilians decreased by 90 percent.
The decline of killing and cruelty poses several challenges to our ability to make sense of the world. To begin with, how could so many people be so wrong about something so important? Partly, it's because of a cognitive illusion: We estimate the probability of an event from how easy it is to recall examples. Scenes of carnage are more likely to be relayed to our living rooms and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age. Partly, it's an intellectual culture that is loath to admit that there could be anything good about the institutions of civilization and Western society. Partly, it's the incentive structure of the activism and opinion markets: No one ever attracted followers and donations by announcing that things keep getting better. And part of the explanation lies in the phenomenon itself. The decline of violent behavior has been paralleled by a decline in attitudes that tolerate or glorify violence, and often the attitudes are in the lead. As deplorable as they are, the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the lethal injections of a few murderers in Texas are mild by the standards of atrocities in human history. But, from a contemporary vantage point, we see them as signs of how low our behavior can sink, not of how high our standards have risen.
The other major challenge posed by the decline of violence is how to explain it. A force that pushes in the same direction across many epochs, continents, and scales of social organization mocks our standard tools of causal explanation. The usual suspects—guns, drugs, the press, American culture—aren't nearly up to the job. Nor could it possibly be explained by evolution in the biologist's sense: Even if the meek could inherit the earth, natural selection could not favor the genes for meekness quickly enough. In any case, human nature has not changed so much as to have lost its taste for violence. Social psychologists find that at least 80 percent of people have fantasized about killing someone they don't like. And modern humans still take pleasure in viewing violence, if we are to judge by the popularity of murder mysteries, Shakespearean dramas, Mel Gibson movies, video games, and hockey.
What has changed, of course, is people's willingness to act on these fantasies. The sociologist Norbert Elias suggested that European modernity accelerated a "civilizing process" marked by increases in self-control, long-term planning, and sensitivity to the thoughts and feelings of others. These are precisely the functions that today's cognitive neuroscientists attribute to the prefrontal cortex. But this only raises the question of why humans have increasingly exercised that part of their brains. No one knows why our behavior has come under the control of the better angels of our nature, but there are four plausible suggestions.
The first is that Hobbes got it right. Life in a state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short, not because of a primal thirst for blood but because of the inescapable logic of anarchy. Any beings with a modicum of self-interest may be tempted to invade their neighbors to steal their resources. The resulting fear of attack will tempt the neighbors to strike first in preemptive self-defense, which will in turn tempt the first group to strike against them preemptively, and so on. This danger can be defused by a policy of deterrence—don't strike first, retaliate if struck—but, to guarantee its credibility, parties must avenge all insults and settle all scores, leading to cycles of bloody vendetta. These tragedies can be averted by a state with a monopoly on violence, because it can inflict disinterested penalties that eliminate the incentives for aggression, thereby defusing anxieties about preemptive attack and obviating the need to maintain a hair-trigger propensity for retaliation. Indeed, Eisner and Elias attribute the decline in European homicide to the transition from knightly warrior societies to the centralized governments of early modernity. And, today, violence continues to fester in zones of anarchy, such as frontier regions, failed states, collapsed empires, and territories contested by mafias, gangs, and other dealers of contraband.
Payne suggests another possibility: that the critical variable in the indulgence of violence is an overarching sense that life is cheap. When pain and early death are everyday features of one's own life, one feels fewer compunctions about inflicting them on others. As technology and economic efficiency lengthen and improve our lives, we place a higher value on life in general.
A third theory, championed by Robert Wright, invokes the logic of non-zero-sum games: scenarios in which two agents can each come out ahead if they cooperate, such as trading goods, dividing up labor, or sharing the peace dividend that comes from laying down their arms. As people acquire know-how that they can share cheaply with others and develop technologies that allow them to spread their goods and ideas over larger territories at lower cost, their incentive to cooperate steadily increases, because other people become more valuable alive than dead.
Then there is the scenario sketched by philosopher Peter Singer. Evolution, he suggests, bequeathed people a small kernel of empathy, which by default they apply only within a narrow circle of friends and relations. Over the millennia, people's moral circles have expanded to encompass larger and larger polities: the clan, the tribe, the nation, both sexes, other races, and even animals. The circle may have been pushed outward by expanding networks of reciprocity, à la Wright, but it might also be inflated by the inexorable logic of the golden rule: The more one knows and thinks about other living things, the harder it is to privilege one's own interests over theirs. The empathy escalator may also be powered by cosmopolitanism, in which journalism, memoir, and realistic fiction make the inner lives of other people, and the contingent nature of one's own station, more palpable—the feeling that "there but for fortune go I".
Whatever its causes, the decline of violence has profound implications. It is not a license for complacency: We enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to end it, and so we should work to end the appalling violence in our time. Nor is it necessarily grounds for optimism about the immediate future, since the world has never before had national leaders who combine pre-modern sensibilities with modern weapons.
But the phenomenon does force us to rethink our understanding of violence. Man's inhumanity to man has long been a subject for moralization. With the knowledge that something has driven it dramatically down, we can also treat it as a matter of cause and effect. Instead of asking, "Why is there war?" we might ask, "Why is there peace?" From the likelihood that states will commit genocide to the way that people treat cats, we must have been doing something right. And it would be nice to know what, exactly, it is.
[First published in The New Republic, 3.19.07.]
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Rachel:
May I suggest taking this over to the Evolutionary Psychology/Biology thread on the SCE forum? Once there I look forward to raising Konrad Lorenz's analysis of this issue (Jung too) -- which is completely to the contrary. He held that the 20th Century was the most brutal in human history.
TIA,
Marc
PS: Wright's book on "Non-Zero Sum" is brilliant.
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http://current.com/items/89614245/target_women_jewelry.htm
Another funny Sarah Haskins video
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/12/18/rapist-surprised-to-find-victim-is-ardent-second-amendment-supporter/
Too bad she didn't shoot him the first time.
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Gays angered by Pope’s stand on ecology
If we don't trash the physical environment, do we have a right to trash the moral environment?
If nominations for the best bright idea of 2008 are still open, I’m voting for Pope Benedict XVI’s “ecology of man”. It goes without saying that this will not pass unchallenged. His intriguing suggestion surfaced in a speech to his staff a couple of days before Christmas -- and instantly the gay lobby had conniptions.
An Anglican priest in London, Giles Fraser, founder of the pro-gay Inclusive Church movement, told the London Times: “I thought the Christmas angels said, ‘Fear not’. Instead, the Pope is spreading fear that gay people somehow threaten the planet. And that’s just absurd. As always, this sort of religious homophobia will be an alibi for all those who would do gay people harm.”
What did the Pope actually say?
He was discrete, but it doesn't take much to read between the lines. He said that the Church had a duty to “protect Man from destroying himself”. The Church “ought to safeguard not only the earth, water, and air as gifts of creation, belonging to everyone. It ought also to protect man against the destruction of himself” by gender-bending. True, it was a critique of homosexuality, but it was not based on the yuck factor or even primarily on the Bible.
He did not intend to insult gays, either. Even the gay Australian writer David Marr acknowledged that. Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, he scolded his over-sensitive buddies: “But poofs who love the planet more than themselves should acknowledge the pontiff was onto something here: not just saving homosexuals from their ‘own destruction’ but announcing a new role for the church defending ‘the earth, water, air, as gifts of the creation that belongs to all of us’”.
Marr’s reaction suggests that the notion that man is part of the ecological web could be fruitful and persuasive. It could, in fact, lead to a better understanding of why homosexuality is wrong and a violation of human dignity.
But to grasp why, you have to read the original text,not just scraps from jaded Vatican journos. These were not just off-the-cuff remarks. Instead, they represent a consistent theme in Benedict’s teaching: that because nature has been created by God, it is rational, orderly and ultimately comprehensible. Hence it is possible to carry on a rational dialogue with people like David Marr.
This is an idea that Benedict visits again and again, and it is very similar to his critique of Islam in his Regensburg address a couple of years ago. In that controversial speech he declared that "The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby."
In his Christmas speech, Benedict plays the same tune. Human bodies, having been created by God, are evidence for an authentic sexual morality: “The fact that the earth, the cosmos, mirror the Creator Spirit, clearly means that their rational structures which, transcending the mathematical order, become almost palpable in our experience, bear within themselves an ethical orientation.” If the biology of male and female sexuality are complementary, there must be an ultimate reason for it. A rational person searches for that reason and draws ethical conclusions.
He also appeals to a principle that now seems self-evident, at least in the Western world: that we trash the environment at our peril. Why? Because “the earth is not simply our possession which we can plunder according to our interests and desires. It is rather a gift of the Creator who has designed its intrinsic laws and with this has given us the basic directions for us to adhere as stewards of his creation.”
Man, even though he has a spiritual element, is part of this ecology. He may not – he cannot – reshape himself without risking his own destruction, just as abusing the atmosphere, the earth or the sea could lead to catastrophe.
“When the Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman and asks that this order of creation be respected, it is not the result of an outdated metaphysics. It is a question here of faith in the Creator and of listening to the language of creation, the devaluation of which leads to the self-destruction of man and therefore to the destruction of the same work of God. That which is often expressed and understood by the term ‘gender’, results finally in the self-emancipation of man from creation and from the Creator. Man wishes to act alone and to dispose ever and exclusively of that alone which concerns him.”
Admittedly, this will not be easy for supporters of homosexuality to accept. What they feel is that biology is less important than the longings of the heart, or the desire to conquer and manipulate nature. They are unwitting disciples of Francis Bacon, the English Renaissance philosopher who argued that the destiny of science and technology was to remake and triumph over nature. In his recent encyclical Spe Salvi, Benedict treated Bacon as an important figure, whose naïve enthusiasm for scientific progress ended up justifying the terrifying and destructive potential of modern technology. Not long ago Bacon was worshipped as a visionary thinker, but contemporary philosophers are less complimentary. They regard him as a forerunner of Western science’s continuing legacy of alienation, exploitation, and ecological oppression. Someday, the Pope hints, we will realise that the gay culture is just an extension of this.
The inescapable fact of human existence is that we are both rational and animal. As W.B. Yeats put it in one of his great poems, we live “sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal”. Even if our reason transcends it, we are as much part of the ecology as beetles and sea gulls. We can no more defy the laws of nature than they can.
Will the Pope's brief words, just a couple of dense paragraphs actually, convince people that homosexuality is “unnatural”? Absolutely not. But they could spark a realisation that it is inconsistent to demand respect for the laws of ecology with the single exception of man himself. When that philosophy was adopted by the Industrial Revolution, it turned forests into deserts, fields into wastelands and seas into stagnant ponds. Benedict wants us to see that the Sexual Revolution could do much the same.
Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet
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I would agree that our sexual attitudes effect the world we live in.
However-- um "some of my best friends are Catholic" and they do find great strength and a path to be a better person in the catholic church and if you find the popes comments helpful to you that is your business
Personally I don''t find the Catholic church attitudes towards sex to be particularly inspiring
Sex and shame seem to be very interconnected in Catholicism.
Sex is sort of a necessary evil. ..better to be married than to burn with lust--- procreation is the main point of sex--
Most Human being are designed to be a loving relationship and requiring you leaders to celibate is not healthful for them or for the church they lead.
Personally I have gotten most of the best relationship/marriage advice from Rabbis. I don't think it would have been quite as good or I would have been willing to listen if they were never married themselves.
Extremely Casual Sex would strike me as being bad for the world. Committed Gay Marriage I see as a positive event.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/01/opinion/01kristof.html?_r=1&em
January 1, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Evil Behind the Smiles
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia
Western men who visit red-light districts in poor countries often find themselves surrounded by coquettish teenage girls laughingly tugging them toward the brothels. The men assume that the girls are there voluntarily, and in some cases they are right.
But anyone inclined to take the girls' smiles at face value should talk to Sina Vann, who was once one of those smiling girls.
Sina is Vietnamese but was kidnapped at the age of 13 and taken to Cambodia, where she was drugged. She said she woke up naked and bloody on a bed with a white man — she doesn't know his nationality — who had purchased her virginity.
After that, she was locked on the upper floors of a nice hotel and offered to Western men and wealthy Cambodians. She said she was beaten ferociously to force her to smile and act seductive.
"My first phrase in Khmer," the Cambodian language, "was, 'I want to sleep with you,' " she said. "My first phrase in English was" — well, it's unprintable.
Sina mostly followed instructions and smiled alluringly at men because she would have been beaten if men didn't choose her. But sometimes she was in such pain that she resisted, and then she said she would be dragged down to a torture chamber in the basement.
"Many of the brothels have these torture chambers," she said. "They are underground because then the girls' screams are muffled."
As in many brothels, the torture of choice was electric shocks. Sina would be tied down, doused in water and then prodded with wires running from the 220-volt wall outlet. The jolt causes intense pain, sometimes evacuation of the bladder and bowel — and even unconsciousness.
Shocks fit well into the brothel business model because they cause agonizing pain and terrify the girls without damaging their looks or undermining their market value.
After the beatings and shocks, Sina said she would be locked naked in a wooden coffin full of biting ants. The coffin was dark, suffocating and so tight that she could not move her hands up to her face to brush off the ants. Her tears washed the ants out of her eyes.
She was locked in the coffin for a day or two at a time, and she said this happened many, many times.
Finally, Sina was freed in a police raid, and found herself blinded by the first daylight she had seen in years. The raid was organized by Somaly Mam, a Cambodian woman who herself had been sold into the brothels but managed to escape, educate herself and now heads a foundation fighting forced prostitution.
After being freed, Sina began studying and eventually became one of Somaly's trusted lieutenants. They now work together, in defiance of death threats from brothel owners, to free other girls. To get at Somaly, the brothel owners kidnapped and brutalized her 14-year-old daughter. And six months ago, the daughter of another anti-trafficking activist (my interpreter when I interviewed Sina) went missing.
I had heard about torture chambers under the brothels but had never seen one, so a few days ago Sina took me to the red-light district here where she once was imprisoned. A brothel had been torn down, revealing a warren of dungeons underneath.
"I was in a room just like those," she said, pointing. "There must be many girls who died in those rooms." She grew distressed and added: "I'm cold and afraid. Tonight I won't sleep."
"Photograph quickly," she added, and pointed to brothels lining the street. "It's not safe to stay here long."
Sina and Somaly sustain themselves with a wicked sense of humor. They tease each other mercilessly, with Sina, who is single, mock-scolding Somaly: "At least I had plenty of men until you had to come along and rescue me!"
Sex trafficking is truly the 21st century's version of slavery. One of the differences from 19th-century slavery is that many of these modern slaves will die of AIDS by their late 20s.
Whenever I report on sex trafficking, I come away less depressed by the atrocities than inspired by the courage of modern abolitionists like Somaly and Sina. They are risking their lives to help others still locked up in the brothels, and they have the credibility and experience to lead this fight. In my next column, I'll introduce a girl that Sina is now helping to recover from mind-boggling torture in a brothel — and Sina's own story gives hope to the girl in a way that an army of psychologists couldn't.
I hope that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will recognize slavery as unfinished business on the foreign policy agenda. The abolitionist cause simply hasn't been completed as long as 14-year-old girls are being jolted with electric shocks — right now, as you read this — to make them smile before oblivious tourists.
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http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/hotstories/6207551.html
GREENFIELD, Calif. — Greenfield Police Chief Joe Grebmeier said on Monday that his officers keep hearing rumors of arranged marriages between girls and older men.
Some of the rumored marriages involved girls as young as 10 years old being matched with men from their teens to their 60s, he said.
Until one case broke last weekend, Grebmeier said, it has been difficult for police to look into the stories. People didn’t want to talk about the subject.
“Knowing and proving something are two different things,” he said.
The case started when a Greenfield father reported his 14-year-old daughter as a runaway on Jan. 2. Police now believe the father actually agreed to sell his daughter into marriage to an 18-year-old neighbor, and he wanted the police to help return the girl because he hadn’t been paid.
The agreed-upon price was $16,000 in cash, 150 cases of beer, 150 cases of soda, several cases of meat and two cases of wine, Grebmeier said.
After the couple spent a week together in Soledad, Calif., they returned to Greenfield and police interviewed them, he said. Police are seeking charges of statutory rape against the 18-year-old, Margarito de Jesus Galindo, Grebmeier said.
But officers, after interviewing the father again last weekend, suspected there was more going on than simply a runaway teenager.
“He wanted us to pick up his daughter because the deal had been finalized, but the remuneration was missing,” Grebmeier said.
Grebmeier said arranged marriages are part of the custom in many countries, including parts of Mexico. All of the people involved in the case are Mexican immigrants from Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, many of whom have settled in Greenfield.
“From what I understand this doesn’t violate Mexican law or their customs where they came from,” Grebmeier said.
But the girl is four years under the age of consent in California, he said.
“We want to send a strong message with regard to the law on sex with minors and the sale of minors into marriage — that it’s illegal.”
The girl’s father was arrested Sunday and booked into county jail on a charge of accepting something of value in exchange for placing a person into cohabitation.
A man who acted as a broker in the would-be marriage was cooperating with police, Grebmeier said.
“This is the most evidence we’ve had on this type of transaction,” he said.
He said officers have heard rumors of arranged marriages involving sums of $2,000 to $40,000. He said police are concerned about cases involving underage victims and possible coercion.
“All societies have had arranged marriages at some time,” he said.
“Sometimes they may be a mask for prostitution, sex crimes, molestation and abuse.”
The girl was returned to her family, and police have reported the case to child welfare officials, he said.
Assistant District Attorney Stephanie Hulsey said her office had not yet received the police reports.
Hulsey said she was not aware of a similar case since at least 1999.
Sam Trevino, a spokesman for the county social services department, said child welfare workers haven’t dealt with any similar cases.
Grebmeier said the case has provoked strong community reaction.
“Some portions of the community are outraged, including the Mexican community,” he said. “Some portions feel, ‘What’s the issue?’”
“I’m trying to be culturally sensitive, but I also took an oath to enforce our law,” the police chief said. “We have to send a message to the entire community this behavior is illegal,” he said.
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Meredith Chivers is a creator of bonobo pornography. She is a 36-year-old psychology professor at Queen’s University in the small city of Kingston, Ontario, a highly regarded scientist and a member of the editorial board of the world’s leading journal of sexual research, Archives of Sexual Behavior. The bonobo film was part of a series of related experiments she has carried out over the past several years. She found footage of bonobos, a species of ape, as they mated, and then, because the accompanying sounds were dull — “bonobos don’t seem to make much noise in sex,” she told me, “though the females give a kind of pleasure grin and make chirpy sounds” — she dubbed in some animated chimpanzee hooting and screeching. She showed the short movie to men and women, straight and gay. To the same subjects, she also showed clips of heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a chiseled man walking naked on a beach and a well-toned woman doing calisthenics in the nude.
While the subjects watched on a computer screen, Chivers, who favors high boots and fashionable rectangular glasses, measured their arousal in two ways, objectively and subjectively. The participants sat in a brown leatherette La-Z-Boy chair in her small lab at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, a prestigious psychiatric teaching hospital affiliated with the University of Toronto, where Chivers was a postdoctoral fellow and where I first talked with her about her research a few years ago. The genitals of the volunteers were connected to plethysmographs — for the men, an apparatus that fits over the penis and gauges its swelling; for the women, a little plastic probe that sits in the vagina and, by bouncing light off the vaginal walls, measures genital blood flow. An engorgement of blood spurs a lubricating process called vaginal transudation: the seeping of moisture through the walls. The participants were also given a keypad so that they could rate how aroused they felt.
The men, on average, responded genitally in what Chivers terms “category specific” ways. Males who identified themselves as straight swelled while gazing at heterosexual or lesbian sex and while watching the masturbating and exercising women. They were mostly unmoved when the screen displayed only men. Gay males were aroused in the opposite categorical pattern. Any expectation that the animal sex would speak to something primitive within the men seemed to be mistaken; neither straights nor gays were stirred by the bonobos. And for the male participants, the subjective ratings on the keypad matched the readings of the plethysmograph. The men’s minds and genitals were in agreement.
All was different with the women. No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men. They responded objectively much more to the exercising woman than to the strolling man, and their blood flow rose quickly — and markedly, though to a lesser degree than during all the human scenes except the footage of the ambling, strapping man — as they watched the apes. And with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person. The readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren’t in much accord. During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much more. Among the lesbian volunteers, the two readings converged when women appeared on the screen. But when the films featured only men, the lesbians reported less engagement than the plethysmograph recorded. Whether straight or gay, the women claimed almost no arousal whatsoever while staring at the bonobos.
“I feel like a pioneer at the edge of a giant forest,” Chivers said, describing her ambition to understand the workings of women’s arousal and desire. “There’s a path leading in, but it isn’t much.” She sees herself, she explained, as part of an emerging “critical mass” of female sexologists starting to make their way into those woods. These researchers and clinicians are consumed by the sexual problem Sigmund Freud posed to one of his female disciples almost a century ago: “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is, What does a woman want?”
Full of scientific exuberance, Chivers has struggled to make sense of her data. She struggled when we first spoke in Toronto, and she struggled, unflagging, as we sat last October in her university office in Kingston, a room she keeps spare to help her mind stay clear to contemplate the intricacies of the erotic. The cinder-block walls are unadorned except for three photographs she took of a temple in India featuring carvings of an entwined couple, an orgy and a man copulating with a horse. She has been pondering sexuality, she recalled, since the age of 5 or 6, when she ruminated over a particular kiss, one she still remembers vividly, between her parents. And she has been discussing sex without much restraint, she said, laughing, at least since the age of 15 or 16, when, for a few male classmates who hoped to please their girlfriends, she drew a picture and clarified the location of the clitoris.
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In 1996, when she worked as an assistant to a sexologist at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, then called the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, she found herself the only woman on a floor of researchers investigating male sexual preferences and what are known as paraphilias — erotic desires that fall far outside the norm. She told me that when she asked Kurt Freund, a scientist on that floor who had developed a type of penile plethysmograph and who had been studying male homosexuality and pedophilia since the 1950s, why he never turned his attention to women, he replied: “How am I to know what it is to be a woman? Who am I to study women, when I am a man?”
Freund’s words helped to focus her investigations, work that has made her a central figure among the small force of female sexologists devoted to comprehending female desire. John Bancroft, a former director of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, traces sexological studies by women at least as far back as 1929, to a survey of the sexual experiences of 2,200 women carried out by Katharine Bement Davis, a prison reformer who once served as New York City’s first female commissioner of corrections. But the discipline remains male-dominated. In the International Academy of Sex Research, the 35-year-old institution that publishes Archives of Sexual Behavior and that can claim, Bancroft said, most of the field’s leading researchers among its 300 or so members, women make up just over a quarter of the organization. Yet in recent years, he continued, in the long wake of the surveys of Alfred Kinsey, the studies of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the sexual liberation movement and the rise of feminism, there has been a surge of scientific attention, paid by women, to illuminating the realm of women’s desire.
It’s important to distinguish, Julia Heiman, the Kinsey Institute’s current director, said as she elaborated on Bancroft’s history, between behavior and what underlies it. Kinsey’s data on sexuality, published in the late 1940s and early ’50s in his best-selling books “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” and “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,” didn’t reveal much about the depths of desire; Kinsey started his scientific career by cataloging species of wasps and may, Heiman went on, have been suspicious of examining emotion. Masters and Johnson, who filmed hundreds of subjects having sex in their lab, drew conclusions in their books of the late ’60s and early ’70s that concentrated on sexual function, not lust. Female desire, and the reasons some women feel little in the way of lust, became a focal point for sexologists, Heiman said, in the ’70s, through the writing of Helen Singer Kaplan, a sex therapist who used psychoanalytic methods — though sexologists prefer to etch a line between what they see as their scientific approach to the subject and the theories of psychoanalysis. Heiman herself, whom Chivers views as one of sexology’s venerable investigators, conducted, as a doctoral candidate in the ’70s, some of the earliest research using the vaginal plethysmograph. But soon the AIDS epidemic engulfed the attention of the field, putting a priority on prevention and making desire not an emotion to explore but an element to be feared, a source of epidemiological disaster.
To account partly for the recent flourishing of research like Chivers’s, Heiman pointed to the arrival of Viagra in the late ’90s. Though aimed at men, the drug, which transformed the treatment of impotence, has dispersed a kind of collateral electric current into the area of women’s sexuality, not only generating an effort — mostly futile so far — to find drugs that can foster female desire as reliably as Viagra and its chemical relatives have facilitated erections, but also helping, indirectly, to inspire the search for a full understanding of women’s lust. This search may reflect, as well, a cultural and scientific trend, a stress on the deterministic role of biology, on nature’s dominance over nurture — and, because of this, on innate differences between the sexes, particularly in the primal domain of sex. “Masters and Johnson saw men and women as extremely similar,” Heiman said. “Now it’s research on differences that gets funded, that gets published, that the public is interested in.” She wondered aloud whether the trend will eventually run its course and reverse itself, but these days it may be among the factors that infuse sexology’s interest in the giant forest.
“No one right now has a unifying theory,” Heiman told me; the interest has brought scattered sightlines, glimpses from all sorts of angles. One study, for instance, published this month in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior by the Kinsey Institute psychologist Heather Rupp, uses magnetic resonance imaging to show that, during the hormonal shifts of ovulation, certain brain regions in heterosexual women are more intensely activated by male faces with especially masculine features. Intriguing glimmers have come not only from female scientists. Richard Lippa, a psychologist at California State University, Fullerton, has employed surveys of thousands of subjects to demonstrate over the past few years that while men with high sex drives report an even more polarized pattern of attraction than most males (to women for heterosexuals and to men for homosexuals), in women the opposite is generally true: the higher the drive, the greater the attraction to both sexes, though this may not be so for lesbians.
Investigating the culmination of female desire, Barry Komisaruk, a neuroscientist at Rutgers University, has subjects bring themselves to orgasm while lying with their heads in an fM.R.I. scanner — he aims to chart the activity of the female brain as subjects near and reach four types of climax: orgasms attained by touching the clitoris; by stimulating the anterior wall of the vagina or, more specifically, the G spot; by stimulating the cervix; and by “thinking off,” Komisaruk said, without any touch at all. While the possibility of a purely cervical orgasm may be in considerable doubt, in 1992 Komisaruk, collaborating with the Rutgers sexologist Beverly Whipple (who established, more or less, the existence of the G spot in the ’80s), carried out one of the most interesting experiments in female sexuality: by measuring heart rate, perspiration, pupil dilation and pain threshold, they proved that some rare women can think themselves to climax. And meanwhile, at the Sexual Psychophysiology Laboratory of the University of Texas, Austin, the psychologist Cindy Meston and her graduate students deliver studies with names like “Short- and long-term effects of ginkgo biloba extract on sexual dysfunction in women” and “The roles of testosterone and alpha-amylase in exercise-induced sexual arousal in women” and “Sex differences in memory for sexually relevant information” and — an Internet survey of 3,000 participants — “Why humans have sex.”
Heiman questions whether the insights of science, whether they come through high-tech pictures of the hypothalamus, through Internet questionnaires or through intimate interviews, can ever produce an all-encompassing map of terrain as complex as women’s desire. But Chivers, with plenty of self-doubting humor, told me that she hopes one day to develop a scientifically supported model to explain female sexual response, though she wrestles, for the moment, with the preliminary bits of perplexing evidence she has collected — with the question, first, of why women are aroused physiologically by such a wider range of stimuli than men. Are men simply more inhibited, more constrained by the bounds of culture? Chivers has tried to eliminate this explanation by including male-to-female transsexuals as subjects in one of her series of experiments (one that showed only human sex). These trans women, both those who were heterosexual and those who were homosexual, responded genitally and subjectively in categorical ways. They responded like men. This seemed to point to an inborn system of arousal. Yet it wasn’t hard to argue that cultural lessons had taken permanent hold within these subjects long before their emergence as females could have altered the culture’s influence. “The horrible reality of psychological research,” Chivers said, “is that you can’t pull apart the cultural from the biological.”
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Still, she spoke about a recent study by one of her mentors, Michael Bailey, a sexologist at Northwestern University: while fM.R.I. scans were taken of their brains, gay and straight men were shown pornographic pictures featuring men alone, women alone, men having sex with men and women with women. In straights, brain regions associated with inhibition were not triggered by images of men; in gays, such regions weren’t activated by pictures of women. Inhibition, in Bailey’s experiment, didn’t appear to be an explanation for men’s narrowly focused desires. Early results from a similar Bailey study with female subjects suggest the same absence of suppression. For Chivers, this bolsters the possibility that the distinctions in her data between men and women — including the divergence in women between objective and subjective responses, between body and mind — arise from innate factors rather than forces of culture.
Chivers has scrutinized, in a paper soon to be published in Archives of Sexual Behavior, the split between women’s bodies and minds in 130 studies by other scientists demonstrating, in one way or another, the same enigmatic discord. One manifestation of this split has come in experimental attempts to use Viagra-like drugs to treat women who complain of deficient desire.
By some estimates, 30 percent of women fall into this category, though plenty of sexologists argue that pharmaceutical companies have managed to drive up the figures as a way of generating awareness and demand. It’s a demand, in any event, that hasn’t been met. In men who have trouble getting erect, the genital engorgement aided by Viagra and its rivals is often all that’s needed. The pills target genital capillaries; they don’t aim at the mind. The medications may enhance male desire somewhat by granting men a feeling of power and control, but they don’t, for the most part, manufacture wanting. And for men, they don’t need to. Desire, it seems, is usually in steady supply. In women, though, the main difficulty appears to be in the mind, not the body, so the physiological effects of the drugs have proved irrelevant. The pills can promote blood flow and lubrication, but this doesn’t do much to create a conscious sense of desire.
Chivers isn’t especially interested at this point, she said, in pharmaceutical efforts in her field, though she has done a bit of consulting for Boehringer Ingelheim, a German company in the late stages of testing a female-desire drug named Flibanserin. She can’t, contractually, discuss what she describes as her negligible involvement in the development of the drug, and the company isn’t prepared to say much about the workings of its chemical, which it says it hopes to have approved by the Food and Drug Administration next year. The medication was originally meant to treat depression — it singles out the brain’s receptors for the neurotransmitter serotonin. As with other such drugs, one worry was that it would dull the libido. Yet in early trials, while it showed little promise for relieving depression, it left female — but not male — subjects feeling increased lust. In a way that Boehringer Ingelheim either doesn’t understand or doesn’t yet want to explain, the chemical, which the company is currently trying out in 5,000 North American and European women, may catalyze sources of desire in the female brain.
Testosterone, so vital to male libido, appears crucial to females as well, and in drug trials involving postmenopausal women, testosterone patches have increased sexual activity. But worries about a possibly heightened risk of cancer, along with uncertainty about the extent of the treatment’s advantages, have been among the reasons that the approach hasn’t yet been sanctioned by the F.D.A.
Thinking not of the search for chemical aphrodisiacs but of her own quest for comprehension, Chivers said that she hopes her research and thinking will eventually have some benefit for women’s sexuality. “I wanted everybody to have great sex,” she told me, recalling one of her reasons for choosing her career, and laughing as she did when she recounted the lessons she once gave on the position of the clitoris. But mostly it’s the aim of understanding in itself that compels her. For the discord, in women, between the body and the mind, she has deliberated over all sorts of explanations, the simplest being anatomy. The penis is external, its reactions more readily perceived and pressing upon consciousness. Women might more likely have grown up, for reasons of both bodily architecture and culture — and here was culture again, undercutting clarity — with a dimmer awareness of the erotic messages of their genitals. Chivers said she has considered, too, research suggesting that men are better able than women to perceive increases in heart rate at moments of heightened stress and that men may rely more on such physiological signals to define their emotional states, while women depend more on situational cues. So there are hints, she told me, that the disparity between the objective and the subjective might exist, for women, in areas other than sex. And this disconnection, according to yet another study she mentioned, is accentuated in women with acutely negative feelings about their own bodies.
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Ultimately, though, Chivers spoke — always with a scientist’s caution, a scientist’s uncertainty and acknowledgment of conjecture — about female sexuality as divided between two truly separate, if inscrutably overlapping, systems, the physiological and the subjective. Lust, in this formulation, resides in the subjective, the cognitive; physiological arousal reveals little about desire. Otherwise, she said, half joking, “I would have to believe that women want to have sex with bonobos.”
Besides the bonobos, a body of evidence involving rape has influenced her construction of separate systems. She has confronted clinical research reporting not only genital arousal but also the occasional occurrence of orgasm during sexual assault. And she has recalled her own experience as a therapist with victims who recounted these physical responses. She is familiar, as well, with the preliminary results of a laboratory study showing surges of vaginal blood flow as subjects listen to descriptions of rape scenes. So, in an attempt to understand arousal in the context of unwanted sex, Chivers, like a handful of other sexologists, has arrived at an evolutionary hypothesis that stresses the difference between reflexive sexual readiness and desire. Genital lubrication, she writes in her upcoming paper in Archives of Sexual Behavior, is necessary “to reduce discomfort, and the possibility of injury, during vaginal penetration. . . . Ancestral women who did not show an automatic vaginal response to sexual cues may have been more likely to experience injuries during unwanted vaginal penetration that resulted in illness, infertility or even death, and thus would be less likely to have passed on this trait to their offspring.”
Evolution’s legacy, according to this theory, is that women are prone to lubricate, if only protectively, to hints of sex in their surroundings. Thinking of her own data, Chivers speculated that bonobo coupling, or perhaps simply the sight of a male ape’s erection, stimulated this reaction because apes bear a resemblance to humans — she joked about including, for comparison, a movie of mating chickens in a future study. And she wondered if the theory explained why heterosexual women responded genitally more to the exercising woman than to the ambling man. Possibly, she said, the exposure and tilt of the woman’s vulva during her calisthenics was processed as a sexual signal while the man’s unerect penis registered in the opposite way.
When she peers into the giant forest, Chivers told me, she considers the possibility that along with what she called a “rudderless” system of reflexive physiological arousal, women’s system of desire, the cognitive domain of lust, is more receptive than aggressive. “One of the things I think about,” she said, “is the dyad formed by men and women. Certainly women are very sexual and have the capacity to be even more sexual than men, but one possibility is that instead of it being a go-out-there-and-get-it kind of sexuality, it’s more of a reactive process. If you have this dyad, and one part is pumped full of testosterone, is more interested in risk taking, is probably more aggressive, you’ve got a very strong motivational force. It wouldn’t make sense to have another similar force. You need something complementary. And I’ve often thought that there is something really powerful for women’s sexuality about being desired. That receptivity element. At some point I’d love to do a study that would look at that.”
The study Chivers is working on now tries to re-examine the results of her earlier research, to investigate, with audiotaped stories rather than filmed scenes, the apparent rudderlessness of female arousal. But it will offer too a glimpse into the role of relationships in female eros. Some of the scripts she wrote involve sex with a longtime lover, some with a friend, some with a stranger: “You meet the real estate agent outside the building. . . .” From early glances at her data, Chivers said, she guesses she will find that women are most turned on, subjectively if not objectively, by scenarios of sex with strangers.
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Chivers is perpetually devising experiments to perform in the future, and one would test how tightly linked the system of arousal is to the mechanisms of desire. She would like to follow the sexual behavior of women in the days after they are exposed to stimuli in her lab. If stimuli that cause physiological response — but that do not elicit a positive rating on the keypad — lead to increased erotic fantasies, masturbation or sexual activity with a partner, then she could deduce a tight link. Though women may not want, in reality, what such stimuli present, Chivers could begin to infer that what is judged unappealing does, nevertheless, turn women on.
Lisa Diamond, a newly prominent sexologist of Chivers’s generation, looks at women’s erotic drives in a different way. An associate professor of psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah, with short, dark hair that seems to explode anarchically around her head, Diamond has done much of her research outside any lab, has focused a good deal of her attention outside the heterosexual dyad and has drawn conclusions that seem at odds with Chivers’s data about sex with strangers.
“In 1997, the actress Anne Heche began a widely publicized romantic relationship with the openly lesbian comedian Ellen DeGeneres after having had no prior same-sex attractions or relationships. The relationship with DeGeneres ended after two years, and Heche went on to marry a man.” So begins Diamond’s book, “Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire,” published by Harvard University Press last winter. She continues: “Julie Cypher left a heterosexual marriage for the musician Melissa Etheridge in 1988. After 12 years together, the pair separated and Cypher — like Heche — has returned to heterosexual relationships.” She catalogs the shifting sexual directions of several other somewhat notable women, then asks, “What’s going on?” Among her answers, based partly on her own research and on her analysis of animal mating and women’s sexuality, is that female desire may be dictated — even more than popular perception would have it — by intimacy, by emotional connection.
Diamond is a tireless researcher. The study that led to her book has been going on for more than 10 years. During that time, she has followed the erotic attractions of nearly 100 young women who, at the start of her work, identified themselves as either lesbian or bisexual or refused a label. From her analysis of the many shifts they made between sexual identities and from their detailed descriptions of their erotic lives, Diamond argues that for her participants, and quite possibly for women on the whole, desire is malleable, that it cannot be captured by asking women to categorize their attractions at any single point, that to do so is to apply a male paradigm of more fixed sexual orientation. Among the women in her group who called themselves lesbian, to take one bit of the evidence she assembles to back her ideas, just one-third reported attraction solely to women as her research unfolded. And with the other two-thirds, the explanation for their periodic attraction to men was not a cultural pressure to conform but rather a genuine desire.
“Fluidity is not a fluke,” Diamond declared, when I called her, after we first met before a guest lecture she gave at Chivers’s university, to ask whether it really made sense to extrapolate from the experiences of her subjects to women in general. Slightly more than half of her participants began her study in the bisexual or unlabeled categories — wasn’t it to be expected that she would find a great deal of sexual flux? She acknowledged this. But she emphasized that the pattern for her group over the years, both in the changing categories they chose and in the stories they told, was toward an increased sense of malleability. If female eros found its true expression over the course of her long research, then flexibility is embedded in the nature of female desire.
Diamond doesn’t claim that women are without innate sexual orientations. But she sees significance in the fact that many of her subjects agreed with the statement “I’m the kind of person who becomes physically attracted to the person rather than their gender.” For her participants, for the well-known women she lists at the start of her book and for women on average, she stresses that desire often emerges so compellingly from emotional closeness that innate orientations can be overridden. This may not always affect women’s behavior — the overriding may not frequently impel heterosexual women into lesbian relationships — but it can redirect erotic attraction. One reason for this phenomenon, she suggests, may be found in oxytocin, a neurotransmitter unique to mammalian brains. The chemical’s release has been shown, in humans, to facilitate feelings of trust and well-being, and in female prairie voles, a monogamous species of rodent, to connect the act of sex to the formation of faithful attachments. Judging by experiments in animals, and by the transmitter’s importance in human childbirth and breast feeding, the oxytocin system, which relies on estrogen, is much more extensive in the female brain. For Diamond, all of this helps to explain why, in women, the link between intimacy and desire is especially potent.
Intimacy isn’t much of an aphrodisiac in the thinking of Marta Meana, a professor of psychology at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. Meana, who serves with Chivers on the board of Archives of Sexual Behavior, entered the field of sexology in the late 1990s and began by working clinically and carrying out research on dyspareunia — women’s genital pain during intercourse. She is now formulating an explanatory model of female desire that will appear later this year in Annual Review of Sex Research. Before discussing her overarching ideas, though, we went together to a Cirque du Soleil show called “Zumanity,” a performance of very soft-core pornography that Meana mentioned to me before my visit.
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On the stage of the casino’s theater, a pair of dark-haired, bare-breasted women in G-strings dove backward into a giant glass bowl and swam underwater, arching their spines as they slid up the walls. Soon a lithe blonde took over the stage wearing a pleated and extremely short schoolgirl’s skirt. She spun numerous Hula-Hoops around her minimal waist and was hoisted by a cable high above the audience, where she spread her legs wider than seemed humanly possible. The crowd consisted of men and women about equally, yet women far outnumbered men onstage, and when at last the show’s platinum-wigged M.C. cried out, “Where’s the beef?” the six-packed, long-haired man who climbed up through a trapdoor and started to strip was surrounded by 8 or 10 already almost-bare women.
A compact 51-year-old woman in a shirtdress, Meana explained the gender imbalance onstage in a way that complemented Chivers’s thinking. “The female body,” she said, “looks the same whether aroused or not. The male, without an erection, is announcing a lack of arousal. The female body always holds the promise, the suggestion of sex” — a suggestion that sends a charge through both men and women. And there was another way, Meana argued, by which the Cirque du Soleil’s offering of more female than male acrobats helped to rivet both genders in the crowd. She, even more than Chivers, emphasized the role of being desired — and of narcissism — in women’s desiring.
The critical part played by being desired, Julia Heiman observed, is an emerging theme in the current study of female sexuality. Three or four decades ago, with the sense of sexual independence brought by the birth-control pill and the women’s liberation movement, she said, the predominant cultural and sexological assumption was that female lust was fueled from within, that it didn’t depend on another’s initiation. One reason for the shift in perspective, she speculated, is a depth of insight gathered, in recent times, through a booming of qualitative research in sexology, an embrace of analyses built on personal, detailed interviews or on clinical experience, an approach that has gained attention as a way to counter the field’s infatuation with statistical surveys and laboratory measurements.
Meana made clear, during our conversations in a casino bar and on the U.N.L.V. campus, that she was speaking in general terms, that, when it comes to desire, “the variability within genders may be greater than the differences between genders,” that lust is infinitely complex and idiosyncratic.
She pronounced, as well, “I consider myself a feminist.” Then she added, “But political correctness isn’t sexy at all.” For women, “being desired is the orgasm,” Meana said somewhat metaphorically — it is, in her vision, at once the thing craved and the spark of craving. About the dynamic at “Zumanity” between the audience and the acrobats, Meana said the women in the crowd gazed at the women onstage, excitedly imagining that their bodies were as desperately wanted as those of the performers.
Meana’s ideas have arisen from both laboratory and qualitative research. With her graduate student Amy Lykins, she published, in Archives of Sexual Behavior last year, a study of visual attention in heterosexual men and women. Wearing goggles that track eye movement, her subjects looked at pictures of heterosexual foreplay. The men stared far more at the females, their faces and bodies, than at the males. The women gazed equally at the two genders, their eyes drawn to the faces of the men and to the bodies of the women — to the facial expressions, perhaps, of men in states of wanting, and to the sexual allure embodied in the female figures.
Meana has learned too from her attempts as a clinician to help patients with dyspareunia. Though she explained that the condition, which can make intercourse excruciating, is not in itself a disorder of low desire, she said that her patients reported reduced genital pain as their desire increased. The problem was how to augment desire, and despite prevailing wisdom, the answer, she told me, had “little to do with building better relationships,” with fostering communication between patients and their partners. She rolled her eyes at such niceties. She recalled a patient whose lover was thoroughly empathetic and asked frequently during lovemaking, “ ‘Is this O.K.?’ Which was very unarousing to her. It was loving, but there was no oomph” — no urgency emanating from the man, no sign that his craving of the patient was beyond control.
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“Female desire,” Meana said, speaking broadly and not only about her dyspareunic patients, “is not governed by the relational factors that, we like to think, rule women’s sexuality as opposed to men’s.” She finished a small qualitative study last year consisting of long interviews with 20 women in marriages that were sexually troubled. Although bad relationships often kill desire, she argued, good ones don’t guarantee it. She quoted from one participant’s representative response: “We kiss. We hug. I tell him, ‘I don’t know what it is.’ We have a great relationship. It’s just that one area” — the area of her bed, the place desolated by her loss of lust.
The generally accepted therapeutic notion that, for women, incubating intimacy leads to better sex is, Meana told me, often misguided. “Really,” she said, “women’s desire is not relational, it’s narcissistic” — it is dominated by the yearnings of “self-love,” by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need. Still on the subject of narcissism, she talked about research indicating that, in comparison with men, women’s erotic fantasies center less on giving pleasure and more on getting it. “When it comes to desire,” she added, “women may be far less relational than men.”
Like Chivers, Meana thinks of female sexuality as divided into two systems. But Meana conceives of those systems in a different way than her colleague. On the one hand, as Meana constructs things, there is the drive of sheer lust, and on the other the impetus of value. For evolutionary and cultural reasons, she said, women might set a high value on the closeness and longevity of relationships: “But it’s wrong to think that because relationships are what women choose they’re the primary source of women’s desire.”
Meana spoke about two elements that contribute to her thinking: first, a great deal of data showing that, as measured by the frequency of fantasy, masturbation and sexual activity, women have a lower sex drive than men, and second, research suggesting that within long-term relationships, women are more likely than men to lose interest in sex. Meana posits that it takes a greater jolt, a more significant stimulus, to switch on a woman’s libido than a man’s. “If I don’t love cake as much as you,” she told me, “my cake better be kick-butt to get me excited to eat it.” And within a committed relationship, the crucial stimulus of being desired decreases considerably, not only because the woman’s partner loses a degree of interest but also, more important, because the woman feels that her partner is trapped, that a choice — the choosing of her — is no longer being carried out.
A symbolic scene ran through Meana’s talk of female lust: a woman pinned against an alley wall, being ravished. Here, in Meana’s vision, was an emblem of female heat. The ravisher is so overcome by a craving focused on this particular woman that he cannot contain himself; he transgresses societal codes in order to seize her, and she, feeling herself to be the unique object of his desire, is electrified by her own reactive charge and surrenders. Meana apologized for the regressive, anti-feminist sound of the scene.
Yet while Meana minimized the role of relationships in stoking desire, she didn’t dispense with the sexual relevance, for women, of being cared for and protected. “What women want is a real dilemma,” she said. Earlier, she showed me, as a joke, a photograph of two control panels, one representing the workings of male desire, the second, female, the first with only a simple on-off switch, the second with countless knobs. “Women want to be thrown up against a wall but not truly endangered. Women want a caveman and caring. If I had to pick an actor who embodies all the qualities, all the contradictions, it would be Denzel Washington. He communicates that kind of power and that he is a good man.”
After our discussion of the alley encounter, we talked about erotic — as opposed to aversive — fantasies of rape. According to an analysis of relevant studies published last year in The Journal of Sex Research, an analysis that defines rape as involving “the use of physical force, threat of force, or incapacitation through, for example, sleep or intoxication, to coerce a woman into sexual activity against her will,” between one-third and more than one-half of women have entertained such fantasies, often during intercourse, with at least 1 in 10 women fantasizing about sexual assault at least once per month in a pleasurable way.
The appeal is, above all, paradoxical, Meana pointed out: rape means having no control, while fantasy is a domain manipulated by the self. She stressed the vast difference between the pleasures of the imagined and the terrors of the real. “I hate the term ‘rape fantasies,’ ” she went on. “They’re really fantasies of submission.” She spoke about the thrill of being wanted so much that the aggressor is willing to overpower, to take. “But ‘aggression,’ ‘dominance,’ I have to find better words. ‘Submission’ isn’t even a good word” — it didn’t reflect the woman’s imagining of an ultimately willing surrender.
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Chivers, too, struggled over language about this subject. The topic arose because I had been drawn into her ceaseless puzzling, as could easily happen when we spent time together. I had been thinking about three ideas from our many talks: the power, for women, in being desired; the keen excitement stoked by descriptions of sex with strangers; and her positing of distinct systems of arousal and desire. This last concept seemed to confound a simpler truth, that women associate lubrication with being turned on. The idea of dual systems appeared, possibly, to be the product of an unscientific impulse, a wish to make comforting sense of the unsettling evidence of women’s arousal during rape and during depictions of sexual assault in the lab.
As soon as I asked about rape fantasies, Chivers took my pen and wrote “semantics” in the margin of my notes before she said, “The word ‘rape’ comes with gargantuan amounts of baggage.” She continued: “I walk a fine line, politically and personally, talking frankly about this subject. I would never, never want to deliver the message to anyone that they have the right to take away a woman’s autonomy over her body. I hammer home with my students, ‘Arousal is not consent.’ ”
We spoke, then, about the way sexual fantasies strip away the prospect of repercussions, of physical or psychological harm, and allow for unencumbered excitement, about the way they offer, in this sense, a pure glimpse into desire, without meaning — especially in the case of sexual assault — that the actual experiences are wanted.
“It’s the wish to be beyond will, beyond thought,” Chivers said about rape fantasies. “To be all in the midbrain.”
One morning in the fall, Chivers hunched over her laptop in her sparsely decorated office. She was sifting through data from her study of genital and subjective responses to audiotaped sex scenes. She peered at a jagged red line that ran across the computer’s screen, a line that traced one subject’s vaginal blood flow, second by second. Before Chivers could use a computer program to analyze her data, she needed to “clean” it, as the process is called — she had to eliminate errant readings, moments when a subject’s shifting in her chair caused a slight pelvic contraction that might have jarred the plethysmograph, which could generate a spike in the readings and distort the overall results. Meticulously, she scanned the line, with all its tight zigs and zags, searching for spots where the inordinate height of a peak and the pattern that surrounded it told her that arousal wasn’t at work, that this particular instant was irrelevant to her experiment. She highlighted and deleted one aberrant moment, then continued peering. She would search in this way for about two hours in preparing the data of a single subject. “I’m going blind,” she said, as she stared at another suspicious crest.
It was painstaking work — and difficult to watch, not only because it might be destroying Chivers’s eyesight but also because it seemed so dwarfed by the vastness and intricacy of the terrain she hoped to understand. Chivers was constantly conjuring studies she wanted to carry out, but with numberless aberrant spikes to detect and cleanse, how many could she possibly complete in one lifetime? How many could be done by all the sexologists in the world who focus on female desire, whether they were wiring women with plethysmographs or mapping the activity of their brains in fM.R.I. scanners or fitting them with goggles or giving them questionnaires or following their erotic lives for years? What more could sexologists ever provide than intriguing hints and fragmented insights and contradictory conclusions? Could any conclusion encompass the erotic drives of even one woman? Didn’t the sexual power of intimacy, so stressed by Diamond, commingle with Meana’s forces of narcissism? Didn’t a longing for erotic tenderness coexist with a yearning for alley ravishing? Weren’t these but two examples of the myriad conflicting elements that create women’s lust? Had Freud’s question gone unanswered for nearly a century not because science had taken so long to address it but because it is unanswerable?
Chivers, perhaps precisely because her investigations are incisive and her thinking so relentless, sometimes seemed on the verge of contradicting her own provisional conclusions. Talking about how her research might help women, she said that it could “shift the way women perceive their capacity to get turned on,” that as her lab results make their way into public consciousness, the noncategorical physiological responses of her subjects might get women to realize that they can be turned on by a wide array of stimuli, that the state of desire is much more easily reached than some women might think. She spoke about helping women bring their subjective sense of lust into agreement with their genital arousal as an approach to aiding those who complain that desire eludes them. But didn’t such thinking, I asked, conflict with her theory of the physiological and the subjective as separate systems? She allowed that it might. The giant forest seemed, so often, too complex for comprehension.
And sometimes Chivers talked as if the actual forest wasn’t visible at all, as if its complexities were an indication less of inherent intricacy than of societal efforts to regulate female eros, of cultural constraints that have left women’s lust dampened, distorted, inaccessible to understanding. “So many cultures have quite strict codes governing female sexuality,” she said. “If that sexuality is relatively passive, then why so many rules to control it? Why is it so frightening?” There was the implication, in her words, that she might never illuminate her subject because she could not even see it, that the data she and her colleagues collect might be deceptive, might represent only the creations of culture, and that her interpretations might be leading away from underlying truth. There was the intimation that, at its core, women’s sexuality might not be passive at all. There was the chance that the long history of fear might have buried the nature of women’s lust too deeply to unearth, to view.
It was possible to imagine, then, that a scientist blinded by staring at red lines on her computer screen, or blinded by peering at any accumulation of data — a scientist contemplating, in darkness, the paradoxes of female desire — would see just as well.
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This editorial from today's NY Slimes. Some things BO said on the campaign trail in this regard got my spider sense tingling-- and unless I miss my guess this is an absolutely Orwellian Liberal Fascist play to get the government, particularly the courts, in the business of determining the comparative pay for different lines of work because some lines of work are more male or more female.
Lets keep our eye out for this one!
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Editorial
Progress on Fair Pay
Published: January 27, 2009
Congress has given a significant boost to civil rights by approving legislation to overturn a notorious 2007 Supreme Court decision that made it much harder for employees to challenge unlawful pay discrimination based on gender, race, age and disability. Following its passage with a final House vote on Tuesday, the measure goes to the White House where President Obama is expected to sign it this week.
The 5-to-4 decision involved Lilly Ledbetter, a supervisor at a Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company plant in Alabama. She received much smaller raises over several years than men in comparable positions. Overriding longstanding legal precedents and government practice, the court’s conservative majority decided she was entitled to nothing. In doing so, it imposed an unrealistic deadline for filing claims that rewarded employers who successfully disguise their discriminatory pay actions.
After signing the corrective measure, Mr. Obama ought to press Congress to continue the fight for equal pay for equal work by passing a second bill — the Paycheck Fairness Act — that would further strengthen current laws against gender-based wage discrimination. Among other things, this bill, which Mr. Obama co-sponsored while in the Senate, would make stronger remedies available under the existing Equal Pay Act; ensure that courts require employers to show that wage disparities are job-related, not sex-based, and consistent with business needs; and protect employees who discuss salary information from retaliation.
These changes may not please some business interests. But women still make, on average, only 78 cents for every dollar earned by men for performing substantially the same work. To narrow that yawning wage gap, tighter rules are plainly in order. (actually once the numbers are screened for age variables, this 78 cents number is horse excrement-- Marc)
The House, to its credit, passed both bills. But Democratic leaders in the Senate peeled off the Paycheck Fairness Act after determining that pairing the two measures could jeopardize the chamber’s approval of the more familiar Ledbetter bill.
The new president can play a useful role in helping to rally Senate Democrats not to rest on their Ledbetter laurels and to persuade Republicans to come on board. In the House, only three Republicans voted in favor of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. In the Senate, five did. By now, Republican opposition to civil rights and pay equity is not surprising. That makes it all the sadder.
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The bill was signed today by Obama.
What is the objection?
Isn't equal pay for equal work fair? I mean why should a female be paid less if she is performing substantially the same job a male is performing?
And why shouldn't a female have 180 days to file suit from the date she first leaned of the transgression rather than
180 days of the first paycheck (she may never have known what her male co-worker
was making). I'm not a lawyer but in civil matters the clock often starts ticking from the date knowledge of the transgression is discovered.
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What is the objection?
Uhm, because women and men are in fact different, they make different sorts of vocational decisions that are then reflected in their pay checks, "comparable jobs" is often an apples and oranges assessment that elbows aside the impact of market forces, and bureaucracies do a poor job of replacing market forces while litigation drives up the cost of doing business and impacts everyone regardless of gender. Beyond that, demanding equal outcomes with disparate inputs is a really swell idea, as the piece below points out.
Comparable Worth
by June Ellenoff O'Neill
About the Author
Search CEE
Home | CEE | 1st edition | Comparable Worth
Should a truck driver earn more than a telephone operator, or an engineer more than a librarian? Questions like these are largely resolved in the labor market by the forces of supply and demand. Proponents of comparable worth, however, challenge the resulting pattern of wages by arguing that occupations dominated by female workers are paid less than comparable male-dominated jobs because of systematic discrimination against women. Under comparable worth, employers would be required to set wages to reflect differences in the "worth" of jobs, with worth largely determined by job evaluation studies, not by market forces. Advocates expect comparable worth to increase pay in jobs dominated by women and to sharply narrow the overall gender gap in wages.
The campaign for comparable worth policies has generated heated controversy. Advocates of the concept, who also refer to it as "pay equity," have won important political support. A policy that promises substantial pay increases for many women in the name of equity is bound to have popular appeal. Opponents, however, argue that comparable worth would reduce economic efficiency and would even reduce employment opportunities for women.
The issues are complex. Does the evidence on the male-female wage gap justify new and more radical methods for combating sex discrimination? How would a comparable worth policy actually operate? Would it ultimately benefit women and correct the inequities it is designed to remove?
The Wage Gap
In 1988 the ratio of women's to men's hourly earnings in the United States was around 70 percent. This ratio was close to 90 percent at 20 to 24 years of age and 80 percent at 25 to 34 years, but it was only 63 percent at 45 years of age and older. The extent to which these differentials reflect discrimination, and the form this discrimination takes, are issues central to the debate over comparable worth.
Proponents of comparable worth believe that most of the gender gap in wages is caused by discrimination. According to this view, employers, out of habit or prejudice, reduce the pay scale in traditionally female occupations to levels below the true worth of these jobs, even when the jobs are held by men. Discriminating against a whole occupation is not the same as unequal pay for equal work, or discriminatory hiring or promotion. The latter are widely considered unfair and are illegal under the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the view of comparable worth supporters, however, equal-pay legislation is inadequate or even irrelevant because women tend to work in different occupations than men. Comparable worth is intended to address discrimination against the occupations in which women predominate.
Critics of comparable worth question whether the type of discrimination the policy seeks to remedy is important or even exists in a meaningful way in our economy. If firms with a large fraction of their work force in traditionally female jobs held wages below the value of the employees' services to the firm, they argue, profits would be high. The prospect of high profits would attract other firms to the industry. To fill the new female jobs created, new firms would offer higher wages, raising wages industry-wide. The competition for workers could be thwarted only by collusion among employers. Most economists believe, however, that the prospect of collusion among literally thousands of firms is unrealistic because each firm has too strong an incentive to cheat on the collusive agreement by paying a little more in women's occupations. Moreover, critics of comparable worth point out that no evidence has been found that firms and industries with substantial employment in female jobs earn higher-than-average profits.
The critics question why workers in predominately female occupations do not leave the supposedly undervalued occupations to take the better-paid male or mixed-gender jobs if discrimination is the sole reason for lower wages. Some supporters of comparable worth have argued that women's mobility is limited because they are barred from entering nontraditional occupations. But this argument, which was valid in the past, has lost force over time as barriers have eroded. Moreover, if barriers to entry were the problem, the logical solution would be to remove the barriers, which are illegal under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Many comparable worth supporters, however, do not allude to barriers but instead simply argue that women who choose to work in traditionally female occupations should not be penalized for their choices.
Although pay in women's occupations is below pay in typically male occupations, many economists believe that this fact alone is not evidence of discrimination by employers. Other factors unrelated to discrimination can explain gender differences in occupations and in pay. One important factor is that women typically have primary responsibility for the care of home and children and, as a result, work outside the home for 40 percent fewer years than men. Anticipating a shorter and more uncertain career, therefore, women are less likely to invest in lengthy vocational schooling or training. Moreover, many women choose jobs that provide hours and other working conditions that are compatible with home demands.
The factors that limit their work reduce the wages women can earn in two ways. First, the occupations many women enter are paid less because they require less work experience and training and may impose costs on employers for providing the schedules and working conditions women value. Second, women are likely to earn less than men in the same occupation because they typically have less experience and, therefore, less skill on the job.
The situation described is by no means static, however. Younger women are working longer and taking shorter breaks for childbearing and child rearing. Because women expect to remain in the work force, they have greatly increased their representation in careers such as medicine and law, which require lengthy training periods. As a result the wage gap narrowed considerably during the eighties. The relatively high ratio of women's to men's earnings at younger ages partly reflects the increased experience and skill acquired by younger women.
Attempts by social scientists to measure the component of the wage gap accounted for by nondiscriminatory factors are inconclusive for two reasons. First, data on complete work-life histories are hard to obtain, and what economists call career attachment (basically, dedication to work) is even harder to quantify. Several studies have found that about half of the wage gap can be explained by fairly crude measures of years of experience and schooling, leaving the reasons for the other half of the gap unresolved. But when women and men with more similar backgrounds are compared—such as women and men with training in a particular field, or women and men who have never married—the pay gap tends to be much smaller than in the aggregate. For example, the pay gap between men and women with doctorates in economics is about 5 percent.
Discrimination almost certainly accounts for some of the gender gap. But the most likely form this discrimination takes is the restricted access of women to certain positions or promotions. Critics of comparable worth, who include most economists, argue that it would do nothing to address these problems.
Effects of Comparable Worth
Regardless of the sources of the gender gap, the proposed method for implementing comparable worth deserves attention in its own right. Under comparable worth, jobs within a firm or government would be rated, and points would be assigned according to characteristics such as necessary knowledge and skills, mental demands, accountability, and working conditions. Jobs scoring the same would then be paid the same, regardless of the pay differentials that might prevail in the market.
The evaluation procedure may appear objective, but it in fact is highly subjective. Although it makes sense for job attributes such as skills and working conditions to influence pay, there is no one correct method for determining the number of points to be assigned to each attribute, or for determining the weight each attribute should have in the overall worth of each job. Which takes the most skill, playing the violin, solving an engineering problem, translating a language, or managing a restaurant? How should skill be weighted relative to working conditions or accountability? Answers to these questions are bound to be subjective. Therefore, different job evaluation systems and different job evaluators are likely to assign different rankings to the same set of occupations.
Most economists would agree that the outcome is not likely to be efficient, since the procedure cannot incorporate the myriad factors that influence supply and demand in the market. One need only consider the economies of Eastern Europe to observe the results of replacing the market with administered and planned systems.
The imposition of comparable worth would likely raise pay in traditionally female jobs; appointing persons favorable to the concept to conduct the job evaluation would all but guarantee that result. But because the higher pay in female jobs would raise costs, employers would reduce the number of such jobs, by automating or by reducing the scale of operations, for example. Workers with the most skills would be more likely to keep their jobs, while those without the skills or experience to merit the higher pay would be let go. The ironic result is that fewer workers would be employed in traditionally female jobs. While the higher pay might induce more workers to seek these jobs, the reduced demand could not accommodate them. Less skilled women would lose out to more skilled women and, quite possibly, to men who would be attracted by the higher pay. What's more, some employers would respond to the higher wages by providing fewer of the nonmonetary benefits (like flexible hours) that help accommodate the needs of someone who dovetails home responsibilities and a job.
The few instances where comparable worth has been implemented in the United States tend to support those conclusions. Thus far, comparable worth has been almost entirely confined to the civil service systems of about twenty state governments and a number of local governments. When Washington State implemented comparable worth, according to one study, the share of state government employment fell in those jobs that received comparable worth pay adjustments. The largest relative declines in employment were in the occupations that received the largest comparable worth pay boosts. Other studies have found that Minnesota's well-known comparable worth plan has reduced employment growth in female jobs relative to male jobs.
Comparable worth has not fared well in the courts. It suffered its biggest setback in 1985 when the Ninth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals rejected a comparable worth job evaluation as evidence of discrimination. In a case involving the government employees' union (AFSCME) versus the state of Washington, the court upheld the state's right to base pay on market wages rather than on a job evaluation, writing, "Neither law nor logic deems the free market system a suspect enterprise." The judge who wrote the decision was Anthony Kennedy, now a member of the U.S. Supreme Court. The state of Washington, despite its victory in court, found the political heat too great and implemented comparable worth anyway. But the momentum toward comparable worth appears to have slowed since the Ninth Circuit's ruling.
About the Author
June Ellenoff O'Neill is Wollman Professor of Economics at the City University of New York's Baruch College, where she directs the Center for the Study of Business and Government. She has previously served as director of the Congressional Budget Office and as director of the Office of Policy and Research at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, as a senior research associate at the Urban Institute, and as a senior economist with the president's Council of Economic Advisers.
Further Reading
Aaron, Henry J., and Cameron M. Lougy. The Comparable Worth Controversy (on the fence; neither pro nor con). 1986.
Paul, Ellen. Equity and Gender (in opposition). 1989.
Treiman, Donald, and Heidi Hartmann, eds. Women, Work and Wages: Equal Pay for Jobs of Equal Value (the bible of proponents). 1981.
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Comparable Worth: Issue for the 80s, vol. 1 (a collection of 16 articles on comparable worth, pro and con). June 1984.
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/ComparableWorth.html
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Another piece that criticizes the recent pay equity legislation BHO signed. If the piece is indeed correct that the clock starts ticking from time an employee claims to have become aware of a pay issue, what's to keep 10 year old "awareness" from arising? Can you imagine the overhead that follows as companies seek to document equity lest they be bitten a decade down the road?
“Fair Pay Act” Will Only Further Damage Economy
Posted by Ilya Shapiro
When President Obama signs the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, he will be fulfilling a campaign promise but undermining the American economy. This bill is not about sex discrimination — paying men and women different wages for the same job has been illegal for nearly half a century — but rather about statutes of limitations. How long after an incident of discrimination should someone be allowed to sue? The Supreme Court ruled that an employee has six months after a company’s initial pay decision to file a discrimination claim. While this was a fair reading of existing law, critics legitimately questioned whether the law itself unfairly foreclosed redress for a decision made long before an employee discovered the pay discrimination. They correctly went to Congress to fix the law, instead of demanding that courts rewrite it themselves.
But the solution is not to eliminate statutes of limitations altogether, which is essentially what the Fair Pay Act does when it restarts the litigation clock with every new paycheck. No, the proper solution is simply to codify the common law “discovery rule” for these types of cases, making clear that the statute of limitations begins to run only when the employee discovers the wrong that had been committed against her way back when — a compromise that was proposed by Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison but rejected by the Senate. Instead, the new law introduces major uncertainty into business operations and gives every employee a Sword of Damocles to dangle over her employer’s balance sheet. Companies will all of a sudden be subject to decades-old discrimination claims they have no ability to defend.
At bottom, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act takes a bludgeon to an already reeling economy, acting as a stimulus only for the lawyers bringing and defending the coming avalanche of lawsuits.
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/01/29/fair-pay-act-will-only-further-damage-economy/
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Do you know what your co-worker makes? Well if your female, and the pay is unequal and you don't find
out within 180 days you've lost your right to sue. Does that make sense?
In most Civil litigation the clock starts upon discovery of the transgression. For example
Medical Malpractice; the clock starts upon discovery of the problem, not time of treatment.
Most litigation is based upon a time limit after discovery; doesn't that seem fair? Especially
when the employer has an incentive to hide any inequities.
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Do you know what your co-worker makes? Well if your female, and the pay is unequal and you don't find
out within 180 days you've lost your right to sue. Does that make sense?
In most Civil litigation the clock starts upon discovery of the transgression. For example
Medical Malpractice; the clock starts upon discovery of the problem, not time of treatment.
Most litigation is based upon a time limit after discovery; doesn't that seem fair? Especially
when the employer has an incentive to hide any inequities.
Yes, by all means ignore the responses and restate your gross simplification then expect the rest of us to pretend it's an intelligent argument. It's worked so well before. . . .
In a professional environment you should NOT know what your coworker(s) make as it invariably causes work place friction. Work places, moreover, respond to market forces, forces that, as stated above and then ignored, don't respond to egalitarian ideals. I've worked plenty of places where someone who has plodded in the trenches for many a year gets paid less than a young turk that comes in and proves to be highly productive. As I read it the plodding long time employee can now sue at any point she or he learns about the turk's salary. If said plodder has been employed for two decades it now appears they can demand 20 years worth of discovery to unearth market caused, prima facia inequities and then demand recompense. You claim fiscal responsibility as a value, yet you'd open this litigious can of worms?
Face it, this mess is a boon for lawyers, a strong Democratic constituency. The 800 however many billion dollar bailout is a boon for big government, another Democratic party specialty. The "Employee Free Choice Act," if passed, will be a boon for unions, who are, what do you know, another Democratic constituency. Gussy it up in whatever egalitarian huff you want to don, but slathered pork is slathered port, regardless of any "fairness" guise.
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**Yes, the dems are well on their way to doing for America what they've done for California.**
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123146294351966567.html?goback=.hom#
Trial Lawyer Bonanza
Off and suing with the 111th Congress.
Well, that didn't take long. Democrats are planning to kick off the legislative portion of the 111th Congress as early as today with two big donations to one of their most loyal retainers: the plaintiffs bar. Higher labor costs will result from a pair of bills designed to create new lawsuit possibilities in cases of alleged wage discrimination.
The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is an effort to overturn a 2007 Supreme Court decision, Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber. Lilly Ledbetter had worked for Goodyear for almost 20 years before retiring. Only in 1998, after she took her pension, did she sue and allege wage discrimination stretching back to the early 1980s. The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 against her, noting the statute clearly said claims must be filed within 180 days, or sometimes 300 days, of the discrimination.
That ruling put to rest Ms. Ledbetter's creative theory that decisions made decades ago by a former boss affected her pay all the way to retirement, so that each paycheck was a new discriminatory act and thus fell within the statute of limitations. Yet that is exactly the theory Congress would now revive with the Ledbetter bill. There would no longer be time limits on such discrimination claims. They could be brought long after evidence had disappeared or witnesses had died -- as was the case with Ms. Ledbetter's former boss.
For the tort bar, this is pure gold. It would create a new legal business in digging up ancient workplace grievances. This would also be made easier by the bill's new definition of discrimination. Companies could be sued not merely for outright discrimination but for unintentional acts that result in pay disparities.
Since these supposed wrongs could be compounded over decades, the potential awards would be huge. Most companies would feel compelled to settle such claims rather than endure the expense and difficulty of defending allegations about long-ago behavior. The recipe here is file a suit, get a payday. And the losers would be current and future employees, whose raises would be smaller as companies allocate more earnings to settle claims that might pop up years after litigating employees had departed.
The Democratic majority is also resurrecting the concept of "comparable worth" with the Paycheck Fairness Act. This idea holds that only discrimination can explain why female-dominated professions (teachers, secretaries) tend to command lower wages than male-dominated professions (plumbers, truck drivers). Yet most of these pay disparities are explained by relative experience, schooling or job characteristics. Teachers do tend to earn less than truck drivers, despite more education. Then again, truck drivers work long, hard, often unpredictable hours. The market -- not some secret patriarchy -- places different values on different jobs. And in the case of teachers, the main salary setter is the government.
The paycheck fairness legislation would nonetheless require labor officials to use comparable worth in creating "voluntary" wage guidelines for industries. Voluntary or not, these guidelines would become the basis for more litigation against companies that didn't follow them. Meanwhile, the bill strips companies of certain defenses against claims of sex-based pay discrimination. It also makes it easier to bring class actions, and it allows plaintiffs to claim unlimited punitive damages even in cases of unintentional discrimination.
House Democrats passed both bills in the last Congress, but they were blocked by Senate Republicans. With at least seven more Democrats in the Senate, they may be able to roll enough GOP Senators to pass both this time. Barack Obama supports both, notwithstanding that they would raise workforce costs in a recession. Elections have consequences, and one price of November's vote is going to be a more powerful, and much richer, plaintiffs bar. Whether or not the U.S. economy creates more income in the coming years, Congress is clearly determined to redistribute it.
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BbyB stated:
"In a professional environment you should NOT know what your coworker(s) make as it invariably causes work place friction. Work places, moreover, respond to market forces, forces that, as stated above and then ignored, don't respond to egalitarian ideals. I've worked plenty of places where someone who has plodded in the trenches for many a year gets paid less than a young turk that comes in and proves to be highly productive. As I read it the plodding long time employee can now sue at any point she or he learns about the turk's salary."
I agree; but I think the point of this law was whether a female, solely because she is female is being paid less. And if the answer is "yes" when she finds out that her employer has broken this long standing law (as you previously pointed out is already on the books) she will have six month from the date she finds out that her employer has acted illegally. Simple I think; treat women fairly and equally and there will not be an issue. But to hide behind a six month statue of limitation starting from date of employment when as you pointed out she often doesn't even know that her employer has acted illegally seems wrong to me. As I pointed out in most civil litigation the clock starts ticking from the date of discovery, not the date of occurrence. Imagine if your wife's physician made a gross negligent error, but the symptoms did not manifest themselves until six month had passed; that being the statue of limitations and therefore you had no recourse. Does that seem fair?
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Unless I'm missing something, missing from your discussion is the distinction between equal pay for the SAME work, and the government/courts/lawyers/bureaucracies deciding what is COMPARABLE.
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I understand and agree with your point; I am addressing the issue of SAME or at least approximately "SAME". I have no idea how you equate "COMPARABLE" but distinctly different jobs nor do I think the government et al should decide what is "COMPARABLE". Different jobs deserve different pay based upon supply and demand however one's sex should not enter into the decision.
Note, in the Ledbetter Case the matter concerned a woman doing "exactly" the same job as a man; of course she was discriminated against.
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Does that seem fair?
No.
I agree; but I think the point of this law was whether a female, solely because she is female is being paid less. And if the answer is "yes" when she finds out that her employer has broken this long standing law (as you previously pointed out is already on the books) she will have six month from the date she finds out that her employer has acted illegally. Simple I think; treat women fairly and equally and there will not be an issue. But to hide behind a six month statue of limitation starting from date of employment when as you pointed out she often doesn't even know that her employer has acted illegally seems wrong to me. As I pointed out in most civil litigation the clock starts ticking from the date of discovery, not the date of occurrence. Imagine if your wife's physician made a gross negligent error, but the symptoms did not manifest themselves until six month had passed; that being the statue of limitations and therefore you had no recourse.
You still fail to address the legal burden this puts on the employer and neglect to factor in both market forces and decisions made by individual employees that impact their marketability over time. Don't know what kind of management experience you've had; mine is extensive. How does an organization keep track of wage data over decades and track forces that create disparities without assuming a large administrative overhead? Answer is that turnover alone will make the task darn near impossible, so settling will indeed become the norm, as GM's piece points out.
Moreover, though you posit a situation where two people did identical jobs, how do you control for variables occurring over decades? At one point in time the market might teem with widget makers so you hire one cheap. Five years later there might be a shortage so you pay more. If you haven't found some way to document those market trends, how do you defend yourself 20 years later? Further, I've read several analyses stating when things like time taken off work for child rearing, amount of overtime worked, amount of travel taken for the company and so on are controlled for, apparent gender disparities significantly shrink. How does a company document that kind of calculus over decades without assuming costs that burden current employees, consumers, shareholder et al?
As for your medical analogy and it's implications, close consideration weakens rather than strengthens your side of the argument. Malpractice can be pursued whenever evidence of its occurrence emerges. Discrimination can be pursued whenever evidence of its occurrence emerges. You want to take multivariate pay scales emerging over years or more and then examine only a single variable to determine if something untoward occurred, often times long after mitigating documentation may be obtainable and staff has moved on. A more appropriate use of your analogy would be to take patient outcomes a decade after treatment and penalize doctors for negative ones. One person treated for pneumonia is perfectly fine, one has a chronic lung condition, while a third is dead and variables contributing to those negative outcomes are hard to find. Clearly the doctor should be penalized for the sick and dead, right?
You know, breaking this stuff down for you gets old. Whether its explaining why terrorists shouldn't be rewarded by providing them exactly what they seek, or pointing out burdening business with the probability of endless litigation is ultimately worse for the employees you claim to champion than the claimed disease, I've got better things to do than outline the obvious. Do your synapses truly have a hard time wrapping themselves around simple concepts or is the intent to bludgeon with inanities those you disagree with to the point they cease arguing against you?
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BbyG; best get your own logic in order first before you criticize.
There is no legal "burden" on employers IF they don't gender discriminate. The Ledbeter case was an example of SAME job;
she was obviously discriminated against and the employer was held liable; what's wrong with that? The facts proved it. The issue
was the timing of the filing.
You said, "Discrimination can be pursued whenever evidence of its occurrence emerges." Actually No, unlike Medical Malpractice until this law was passed
sexual wage discrimination could NOT be pursued whenever evidence of its occurrence emerges. The statue of limitations to file was 6 months from
the date of first paycheck, not knowledge of the transgression. That is the whole point of the new law.
Are you having trouble understanding the new law? It changes the date so that that discrimination CAN be pursued
after evidence of it's occurrence emerges just like my Medical Malpractice example. But really it is simple; just treat women fair and equal. Is that so hard?
Or do you seem to think women should be paid less for the same job? And that's ok?
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Restate the same shopworn thesis, ignore arguments that demonstrate how costly the new law will be, fail to grasp that there are many discrimination relief mechanisms out there that don't have ticking clocks attached, refuse to note the impossibility of two jobs remaining equal over 20 years, and clutch the mantle of logic while doing so.
I think you are a Zen koan for the short bus crowd. Alas, those of us unimpressed by amphiboly derive nothing from your convoluted constructions.
Bet I've taken more work issues to more mats for more employees both female and male than you and contended with more vocational opprobrium for my efforts, to boot, so imagine where I might suggest you stick the questions you ask in closing.
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Now, now, play nicely please!
"amphiboly"?
Please indulge my laziness in looking this up. What does this mean?
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"and contended with more vocational opprobrium for my efforts, to boot"
Perhaps over and over middle and upper management were trying to tell you something but you somehow simply didn't get it?
I understand their frustration. :-D
As for "how costly the new law will be" that remains to be determined. But then I am sure it was "costly"
to eliminate age discrimination, religious discrimination, race discrimination, gender discrimination, and I'm sure disability
laws are expensive too; yet I would like to think in the long run we are better off as a country with all of these protections.
Did you take time to even read my post? For your benefit, I will repeat myself. Before this law there were NO gender wage discrimination relief mechanisms if the claim was filed more
than 180 days after the first paycheck; please quit claiming that there was relief when non existed. And yet, as you pointed out, rarely does one know that they are being discriminated
against since salaries are not discussed. Logically then, isn't it only fair that only AFTER one finds out about the transgression that the six month clock
start to tick? Before you exhaust yourself writing responses not addressing this issue (the time of filing) you might want
to review the case. The EEOC and the Jury both agreed that Ledbetter was clearly discriminated against. Ignoring clear discrimination, the ruling however was reversed by the Court of Appeal and
upheld by the Supreme Court (5-4) solely based upon this 180 day rule. In a stinging minority rebuttal, Justice Ginsburg stated,
"In our view, the court does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination," she said.
Her opinion is now vindicated. And women hopefully will be treated fairly in the marketplace.
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Please indulge my laziness in looking this up. What does this mean?
Scrambled sentence structure/thought process. I had been hoping to make JDN look something up and respond to it, you see. . . .
With that said, I note I'm getting pretty darn snarky in this thread. Think some of the ongoing issues with the dynamic of the discussion should be clear, and accusing someone of sexism who doesn't embrace PC orthodoxy, or of racism when say discussing affirmative action, or of genocide when supporting Israel, et al ad nauseam gets on my nerves. Combined with non-responsiveness on other fronts, I go into verbal terminator mode.
I much prefer responsive, informed discussion and don't want to drive those who don't hold my views out of the discussion as the resulting homogeneity is boring. It'd be a lot easier for me to adhere to that path, though, if the restate your thesis ever more loudly and accuse your foe of PC improprieties while doing so circle jerk was avoided. If I sought that kind of sport I'd hang out at the Daily Kos where they have that down to an art.
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- Pajamas Media - http://pajamasmedia.com -
Hiding the Truth About the Pay Gap Between Men and Women
Posted By Michael J. Eastman On February 3, 2009 @ 12:00 am In . Column2 01, . Positioning, History, Legal, Money, Politics, US News | 27 Comments
The debate over pay equity is front and center on the Congressional agenda. The first bill signed into law by President Obama, the Lilly Ledbetter [1] Fair Pay Act, overturns a U.S. Supreme Court decision and vastly expands the opportunity to file pay and other discrimination cases. Another bill, the [2] Paycheck Fairness Act, has already passed the House of Representatives and is likely to be considered by the Senate in the spring.
Paying someone less because of their sex is illegal and two federal laws, the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, provide the framework whereby victims of pay discrimination can seek redress. However, some argue that these two laws are not effective at eradicating pay discrimination and that the laws must be changed. Central to their argument is the so-called “pay gap,” the difference between the average earnings of men and women.
In debate over the Paycheck Fairness Act, Rep. George Miller (D-CA), chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee, said that today women earn “78 cents for ever dollar that is earned by a man doing the same job with the same responsibilities.” Miller then went on to say “if we are serious about closing the gender pay gap, we must get serious about punishing those who would otherwise scoff at the weak sanctions under current law.” President Obama expressed similar sentiment as he signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law.
To close the wage gap, Miller and his colleagues support punishing violators of the Equal Pay Act with unlimited punitive and compensatory damages. They also seek to make it harder for employers to justify legitimate pay differences, make it easier for trial lawyers to create large class actions lawsuits, and effectively eliminate the statute of limitations for many types of claims, among other things.
The argument that the pay gap must be closed rests on the assumption that the pay gap is largely attributable to employer discrimination. However, if the pay gap is to be used to justify such significant changes in the law, it seems entirely appropriate to examine the pay gap itself. Does it really measure employer discrimination? Do other factors play a greater or lesser role?
Economists who have studied the pay gap have observed that numerous factors other than discrimination contribute to the wage gap, such as hours worked, experience, and education. For example, Professor June O’Neil has written extensively about how time out of the workforce, or years spent working part-time, can reduce future pay. Likewise, economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth, in her book Women’s Figures, has written about the decisions that women are more likely to make to choose flexibility, a friendly workplace environment, and other nonmonetary factors as compared to men.
Recognizing the importance of unbiased research on the pay gap, the Labor Department recently contracted with [3] CONSAD Research Corporation for a review of more than 50 existing studies as well as a new economic and statistical analysis of the pay gap. CONSAD’s Report, which was finalized on January 12, 2009, found that the vast majority of the pay gap is due to several identifiable factors and that the remainder may be due to other specific factors they were not able to measure.
CONSAD found that controlling for career interruption and other factors reduced the pay gap from about 20 percent to about 5 percent. Data limitations prevented it from considering many other factors. For example, the data did not permit an examination of total compensation, which would examine health insurance and other benefits, and instead focused solely on wages paid. The data were also limited with respect to work experience, job tenure, and other factors.
The Labor Department’s conclusion was that the gender pay gap was the result of a multitude of factors and that the “raw wage gap should not be used as the basis for [legislative] correction. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of individual choices being made by both male and female workers.”
The Labor Department’s new report is clearly an important contribution to the debate over pay equity. But where is it? Although it was posted on the Labor Department’s web site just days after it was finalized, it was apparently removed as the transition in power was occurring between former President Bush and President Obama. We don’t know why the report was taken down, but certainly the timing is suspicious.
If the debate over pay equity is to be at the forefront of the Congressional agenda, then the Labor Department and the new administration need to acknowledge that the overwhelming evidence is that the pay gap is not based primarily on employer discrimination. Disclosure of the Labor Department’s report would be a good first step.
Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/hiding-the-truth-about-the-pay-gap-between-men-and-women/
URLs in this post:
[1] Fair Pay Act: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/obama
[2] Paycheck Fairness Act, : http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h110-1338
[3] CONSAD Research Corporation: http://www.consad.com/
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Exactly so.
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Career choice: spouse first
Mr Right is unlikely to just turn up while a girl is getting on with her own life.
An interesting interesting article caught my eye this week with its catchy subtitle: "I should have ditched feminism for love, children and baking". In that article, Zoe Lewis writes about her regret at pursuing a career at the expense of relationships and children. Now nearly 37 and a successful playwright, she has woken up to the reality of an empty pot at the end of the feminist rainbow: "from what I see and feel, loving relationships and children bring more happiness than work ever can".
The article provides an interesting contrast to Guiomar Barbi Ochoa's wonderful story on MercatorNet of meeting the right man in a chance encounter at 33 years old. This was slightly ironic in that Ochoa had not been leaving things to chance but had pursued the matter of a spouse quite deliberately for some time -- unlike those of her peers who want to believe that you can do your own thing, pursue your career dreams and interests, and, at the right time the perfect man will simply pop into your life and sweep you off your feet. In my experience, however, this kind of dream encounter eludes many good women today who seem to be doing everything else according to plan -- that is, following their own careers, dreams and interests and "working on themselves" while trying to be happy and optimistic about their lives despite the continued lack of a partner.
Indeed, while a majority of young women still hope to get married, the statistics show that more and more women are remaining single into their thirties and beyond. This is perhaps especially true of women focused on pursuing their careers. In a Harvard Business Review article in 2002, economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett reported that in the 41-55 year age group, "Only 60 per cent of high-achieving women...are married, and this figure falls to 57 per cent in corporate America. By contrast, 76 per cent of...men are married, and this figure rises to 83 per cent among ultra-achievers." Moreover, Hewlett found that "between a third and a half of all successful career women in the United States do not have children", yet, "These women have not chosen to remain childless. The vast majority, in fact, yearn for children."
One explanation for this phenomenon was advanced by Danielle Crittenden in What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us (2000). There she writes that feminism, which launched young women on a quest for careers at the expense of children and family, overlooked a crucial difference between the sexes: the "disparity in sexual staying power". At a certain point an aging single woman will realize that "Men will outlast her. Men, particularly successful men, will be attractive and virile into their 50s. They can start families whenever they feel like it" while women's biological clocks are ringing in alarm by age 35. Crittenden concludes that for this reason, "it is men who have benefited most from women's determination to remain independent…moderately attractive bachelors in their 30s now possess the sexual power that once belonged only to models and millionaires. They have their pick of companions, and may callously disregard the increasingly desperate 30-ish single women around them".
Hewlett agrees with this conclusion: "Clearly, successful women professionals have slim pickings in the marriage department—particularly as they age. Professional men seeking to marry typically reach into a large pool of younger women, while professional women are limited to a shrinking pool of eligible peers. According to U. S. Census Bureau data, at age 28 there are four college-educated, single men for every three college-educated, single women. A decade later, the situation is radically changed. At age 38, there is one man for every three women."
While I was still in law school, I stumbled across Hewlett's book Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children. Two years later, while working long evenings as a junior lawyer in a large corporate law firm in Manhattan, I realized that her analysis was right. Around me I saw aging single women lawyers working side-by-side with mostly married male colleagues (often with stay-at-home wives). It's harder for women to meet and marry men and have families when they are trying to get ahead in what is still, in essence, a man's world. It is a man's world because the career trajectory is much better suited to men than to women, in that our prime career-building years also coincide with women's peak years of fertility. In that sense, women have a much harder time "having it all".
One solution to this problem was proposed last year by Lori Gottlieb, a 40-year-old single mother of a child conceived via sperm donation. She wrote in the Atlantic that although she still describes herself as a feminist, she now admits her desire for a traditional family: "ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life, and she probably won't tell you it's a better career or a smaller waistline or a bigger apartment. Most likely, she'll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child)." Gottlieb didn't seem to regret pursuing career and education, but she regretted holding out for a romanticized notion of true love. Her advice to younger women: settle while you're young, for "Mr. Good Enough".
Gottlieb's advice is certainly extreme and justifiably sparked much outrage, but there may be something to it, at least to the extent that she is asking women to be more realistic about men. Today, many women are so self-sufficient that they've in effect become their own men, providing for themselves and arranging for their own protection. They need men less than ever, which may also lead them to be more picky than they perhaps should be, holding out for a dreamy Hollywood version of "Mr. Romantic" while missing the good real men along the way.
But certainly, "settling" in one's search for a marriage partner can only be taken so far. Some criteria can perhaps be made more realistic, but I would not advocate for abandoning your core values and principles. Ochoa is right in that regard - marriage, as the most important partnership in life, has to be built on a solid foundation.
Yet perhaps there is another way that women may want to consider "settling", at least during their childbearing years. Today, there is a lot of pressure on women to be high achievers in every area – often, pressure they put on themselves. I can speak for myself: as a Harvard Law graduate, how could I not pursue a high-powered career? If I were to "settle" for a less demanding career path, if I were not to rise to the top in whatever field of work I chose, wouldn't I be wasting my brain and my education? On the other hand, as I laboured away my nights and weekends at the law firm, I also started to realize that my heavy-duty work schedule did not leave much space for a personal life. If I were to ever get married, I couldn't see how I would successfully juggle all my work demands while giving adequate time to a family.
In the end, something had to give. I knew within myself that work could never fulfil me as much as family and children. So I consciously chose my priorities: marriage and family first. At 27 years old, I quit the law firm and decided to pursue non-profit work, which was not only much more satisfying, but which also decreased my stress level and allowed me more free time.
I made conscious efforts to meet a future husband – not by compromising on his qualities, but by increasing the opportunities for meeting the right man. Incredibly, only three months after I quit the law firm, he ended up clicking on my photo on CatholicMatch.com. A year and a half later, we were married.
Now, nearly three years later, I am about to take a further step – becoming a stay-at-home mom to the baby we are soon expecting. While it's not always easy letting go of my own career for what may be either a short or long time, the truth is that I can't wait to be home with our baby, and I am the happiest I have ever been. I still agree with Crittenden and Hewlett, and I am so glad that I did not succumb to the pressure to focus on a career at this time in my life. Zoe Lewis is right, and the feminists got it wrong.
Lea Singh graduated from Harvard Law School in 2003. She works for a nonprofit organization in Ottawa, Canada.
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This gallery of woman and children murdered to appease Islamic "honor" could be posted numerous places. It is sad commentary both on the societies that condone it and those who provide them aid and comfort:
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/honor_killings_islam_misogyny/
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By MEGAN BASHAM
Around this time every year, we begin seeing state-of-motherhood reports that analyze how moms are faring. In our prosperous past, feel-good angles, like how much a mom's housework is worth, took center stage. But thanks to the struggling economy, this Mother's Day has seen a rise in more serious stories. Take, for example, the case of Eleanor Hemmert.
In a recent segment on how the country's rising unemployment is affecting moms, "Good Morning America" gave viewers a glimpse into the life of Ms. Hemmert. Because male-dominated industries like finance, construction and manufacturing have been the hardest hit by the economic meltdown, men have experienced nearly 80% of the layoffs in the current recession. Ms. Hemmert's husband, Rick, is among them. To compensate for his lack of income, she has started spending as many as 14 hours a day at the office trying to close deals. In contrast, Rick, now the at-home parent, has taken up most of the tasks that used to belong to his wife -- cooking dinner, doing the laundry, and caring for the couple's 7-year-old daughter.
The role reversal caused by men's job losses is one byproduct of the economic downturn that has many news outlets, if not outright cheering, at least tentatively applauding. In her online column for Forbes, Elisabeth Eaves likened stay-at-home mothers re-entering the workforce to more-permanent Rosie the Riveters, commenting, "thanks to the recession, we may be at just such another socio-sexual inflection point." New York Times contributor Lisa Belkin wondered if women might finally become the majority of American workers, suggesting that such a development would be a "silver lining" in these dark times. One Salon writer celebrated the possibility that the "long-awaited redistribution of domestic labor might prove crucial in finally evening the professional playing field," while another wondered whether the financial crisis could turn out to be "accidentally feminist."
It isn't just the media promoting the idea that increasing numbers of mothers putting in more hours in paid work represents progress for women. Left-leaning think tanks, as well as the Obama administration, are also undertaking efforts to further the trend the recession began.
In mid-April, the Center for American Progress announced that it is teaming with the University of Southern California and Time Magazine to explore the impact the recession has had on women. While acknowledging that being the family breadwinner may be a burden to some mothers, Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the center and project co-editor, said that it can also be "an opportunity." On April 22 she informed Congress that the rising unemployment of men has provided many working moms much-needed domestic help.
That may seem a rather callous perspective to out-of-work men, but Ms. Boushey's take is perfectly appropriate to "A Woman's Nation," a venture that John Podesta, the CEO of the Center for American Progress, promises will consider "the central question of the role government, business, and faith organizations, as well as individual women and men should play in supporting women's role now in the workforce…. " Given how many of the center's former employees work for the Obama administration, it's little surprise how closely the project dovetails with a March 11 executive order forming a White House Council on Women and Girls that aims to increase women's employment in various male-dominated industries.
There's only one problem with all these efforts to support mom in her new financial-provider role, and Ms. Hemmert presents a stark picture of it. However empowered the media, the think tanks and the White House tell her she should be, she is profoundly unhappy to have changed places with her spouse. "I don't like coming home and seeing him in my apron," Ms. Hemmert says while watching her husband make dinner. She reacts with outright revulsion to the phrase "Mr. Mom," and her mouth hardens into a thin line when her husband explains that it isn't necessarily a man's job to earn a living for his family, that a man can also be "the person who handles children and sets up play dates."
Ms. Hemmert admits that she sees her own parental job as something separate and different from her husband's, and she not only resents him for usurping her role but has lost some respect for him. "I'm a woman, and I want to be a mother first," she states simply.
To be fair, many women who found themselves in Ms. Hemmert's position wouldn't experience the same level of displeasure and disappointment in their husbands that she expresses. But research indicates that most do share her desire to be a mother first and an earner second. And they, too, prefer a husband who's more interested in bringing home the bacon than in cooking it.
Virtually every reputable poll taken on mothers and work reveals that a strong majority of moms prefer to work part time or fewer hours. Reflecting the results of many other polling organizations, the Pew Research Center's most recent survey found that only 21% of mothers with children under the age of 18 say full-time employment is the ideal situation for them. The rest prefer either part-time work or not working at all. In contrast, fully 72% of fathers say a full-time job is the best option for them.
But Ms. Hemmert isn't just an everywoman in wanting to work fewer hours; she's also an everywoman in wanting her husband to take the lead in providing. In 2006, a University of Virginia study found that contrary to many feminists' preoccupation with equal division of household tasks, dishwashing men do not happy women make. Along with a spouse who offers affection, attention and empathy, what really makes women happy is one who earns at least two-thirds of the family income.
The study's authors, W. Bradford Wilcox and Steven L. Nock, expressed surprise at finding that even self-described feminist women are happiest when their husbands do most of the breadwinning. Though the study resulted in a great deal of clamor among commentators who objected to its seemingly outdated conclusions, it differs little from the work of many evolutionary psychologists. David Buss, one of the founders of the field, conducted the largest investigation to date into the subject of human mating. After studying more than 10,000 subjects in 37 countries in the late 1980s, Mr. Buss and his team found that "women more than men in all 37 cultures valued mates with good financial prospects…."
Of course, this is one of those observations likely to elicit a "well, no kidding" from average people. The idea that most moms would rather not work full time and that most wives want their husbands to provide for their families is news only in the news business. Yet Capitol Hill continues to focus on women's employment. The House added a section to the Troubled Asset Relief Program that creates an "Office of Minority and Women Inclusion" to, among other things, ensure that companies receiving TARP money maintain an adequate (though unspecified) percentage of female workers.
If our media and our government really want to show support to mothers, they might consider actually listening to them. What they're saying is quite clear: If you want to help us, help the men we're married to.
Ms. Basham is the author of "Beside Every Successful Man: Getting the Life You Want by Helping Your Husband Get Ahead."
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Good thing we have paragons of virtue such as these involved in world government.
Sexual-Harassment Cases Plague U.N.
By STEVE STECKLOW
The United Nations, which aspires to protect human rights around the world, is struggling to deal with an embarrassing string of sexual-harassment complaints within its own ranks.
Many U.N. workers who have made or faced accusations of sexual harassment say the current system for handling complaints is arbitrary, unfair and mired in bureaucracy. One employee's complaint that she was sexually harassed for years by her supervisor in Gaza, for example, was investigated by one of her boss's colleagues, who cleared him.
Cases can take years to adjudicate. Accusers have no access to investigative reports. Several women who complained of harassment say their employment contracts weren't renewed, and the men they accused retired or resigned, putting them out of reach of the U.N. justice system.
"No matter which way the cases go, they mishandle it," says George G. Irving, a former U.N. attorney who now represents clients on both sides of such cases.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has acknowledged that the system is troubled. "I fully share your concerns regarding sexual harassment and sex discrimination," he wrote in February to Equality Now, a women's rights group that had complained to him. "This scourge remains a high priority issue for me."
On July 1, the U.N. plans to make changes to its internal justice system for handling all employee disputes, including harassment complaints.
Yasmeen Hassan, an Equality Now attorney and former U.N. employee who met with Mr. Ban in December to discuss the issue, says she has "no faith" that the new system will be better, in part because complainants apparently still won't have access to investigative reports to help them with appeals.
The Wall Street Journal examined the U.N.'s handling of five sexual-harassment cases, reviewing hundreds of pages of confidential U.N. documents and interviewing U.N. employees who brought the complaints, supervisors they accused, the lawyers involved and U.N. officials.
It is impossible to know whether sexual harassment is a bigger problem at the U.N., whose global staff numbers about 60,000, than at other large multinational organizations. Officials in the secretary-general's office say they don't know how many sexual-harassment cases are filed at the world body because each U.N. entity tracks cases separately, and confidentially. The secretariat, the U.N.'s main administrative body, says it handles between five and eight cases a year. But those figures include only cases referred to its human-resources department for possible disciplinary action, not complaints that have been dismissed.
A spokesman for the United Nations Children's Fund, or Unicef, said it has handled 15 complaints since 2004. Five alleged perpetrators in those cases have been dismissed, and two others were issued lifetime employment bans from Unicef because they resigned during investigations. Disciplinary proceedings are being initiated against another accused staffer.
In one important respect, the U.N. handles such problems differently than other large organizations, such as multinational corporations. Many U.N. managers have diplomatic immunity from criminal prosecution or civil litigation. Except when the U.N. lifts immunity, its internal justice system is the only one workers can turn to.
Bewildering System
The current system, which dates back to 1946, has a bewildering array of investigative channels and appeals processes. Many of the 10 U.N. agencies, programs and funds have their own investigative systems. A multilayered appellate process includes "joint appeals" boards that can review departmental decisions. The U.N. Administrative Tribunal is the final authority.
The system gives the secretary-general the authority to rule on appeals. Confidential U.N. records in two cases show that Mr. Ban rejected the recommendations of an appeals board and ruled against the women who brought those cases. A spokesman for Mr. Ban declined to discuss any specific cases. Under the new system, the secretary-general no longer will play a major role in the process.
Last year, Mr. Ban, a former South Korean foreign minister who became secretary-general in 2007, issued a bulletin stating that "any form of discrimination, harassment, including sexual harassment, and abuse of authority is prohibited." A spokeswoman for the secretary-general said in a statement that the U.N. has "zero tolerance for sexual harassment in the workplace. And we take seriously every single case."
In 2002, Joumana Al-Mahayni, a Syrian, was working as a secretary to Yusuf Mansur, then chief of the Kuwait office of the United Nations Development Programme, or UNDP, the U.N.'s global development network.
The following year, U.N. records show, she filed a complaint alleging that Mr. Mansur had made sexual advances, including grabbing and kissing her hands while saying "my darling, my darling" -- then refused to renew her contract when she didn't respond to his advances.
In an interview, Mr. Mansur, who now lives in Jordan, denied the allegations, calling them "baloney."
'Unnecessary Touching'
U.N. documents state that the UNDP's investigative report found evidence that Mr. Mansur had subjected Ms. Al-Mahayni to "physical assault," "verbal abuse," "unnecessary touching," "patting," "constant brushing against a person's body" and "pressure for sexual activities." The coordinator of the UNDP's investigative panel asked its human-resources director, Brian Gleeson, to take "appropriate action" against Mr. Mansur. In April 2004, 10 days after the investigative report was filed, Mr. Mansur resigned, U.N. records show.
Mr. Gleeson later told Ms. Al-Mahayni, in an email reviewed by the Journal, that the internal probe "vindicated your allegations and directly contributed" to Mr. Mansur resigning. Mr. Gleeson wrote that he "possibly" could have refused the resignation and pursued disciplinary action, "but advice from legal sources and past practice strongly suggested that it is better to get the person out of the office and the system asap" and avoid litigation. He also stated that "no further action can be taken after a staff member resigns." Mr. Gleeson declined to comment.
Mr. Mansur says he resigned because he was "disgusted" with the U.N., including its handling of the case. "The way the system deals with it, you become accused right away, the person becomes a monster right away," he says. He says he provided evidence that he wasn't in Kuwait when some of the alleged incidents occurred. "I should have hired a lawyer and sued back," he says.
Ms. Al-Mahayni requested compensation for being harassed and losing her job. UNDP rejected the request, saying, in part, that her contract had simply expired. She appealed. In April 2006, the U.N. Joint Appeals Board found that she had "no legal expectancy" that her employment contract would be renewed. But it unanimously recommended that she be awarded $10,000. Kofi Annan, then U.N. secretary-general, accepted the recommendation.
Ms. Al-Mahayni appealed the decision before the U.N. Administrative Tribunal. She argued the compensation was inadequate and she shouldn't have lost her UNDP job. She also requested reimbursement of $8,000 in legal expenses. On Jan. 30, 2009 -- more than five years after she first filed her complaint -- the tribunal rejected her appeal "in its entirety," arguing that the $10,000 award was "adequate in view of the harm caused to her."
Ms. Al-Mahayni, who in November 2006 got a job with the U.N. Department of Peacekeeping Operations in Sudan, didn't respond to a request for comment.
In a written statement, the UNDP said it regretted that Ms. Al-Mahayni's supervisor "was allowed to resign before disciplinary action could be initiated."
U.N. records detail other cases in which internal probes supported women's claims of sexual harassment, but the employees they accused went unpunished.
A French woman who worked as a legal officer in Gaza for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East shared records from a case she initiated.
According to the records, in November 2004 she complained that she was sexually harassed by Lionel Brisson, then director of operations for the Palestine Refugees unit. She alleged Mr. Brisson had used binoculars to spy on her while she was in her Gaza apartment, and repeatedly made sexually explicit comments and groped her buttocks, according to a subsequent report by the U.N.'s main investigative unit, the Office of Internal Oversight Services, or OIOS.
'Completely Ridiculous'
In a telephone interview, Mr. Brisson denied the allegations, calling them "completely ridiculous." He said he had tried to help the French woman advance her career, and "this is the kind of thanks you get."
At first, a probe by the Palestine Refugees agency cleared Mr. Brisson. An agency official says the man in charge of the investigation, the agency's health director, was a "colleague" of Mr. Brisson, and was assigned to investigate because he headed the agency's human-resources committee.
The French woman had also complained directly to the OIOS, which began its own investigation. Mr. Brisson reached his mandatory retirement age and left in December 2005, before that probe was complete. One month later, his accuser's employment contract ran out and wasn't renewed.
In February 2006, the OIOS reported that the evidence "tends to support a finding" that the complainant was sexually harassed. If Mr. Brisson "was still with the Organization," the report said, "we would recommend counseling."
Mr. Brisson, who is French, said the U.N. had rejected his requests for a copy of the OIOS report, and he hadn't seen it until one was provided to him by the Journal. He called its conclusions "very vague" and noted that it didn't recommend any disciplinary action. He said he had pressed the OIOS to investigate because "I wanted to clear my name."
In February 2008, Mr. Ban weighed in on the dispute. The French woman had appealed her case to the U.N. Joint Appeals Board, seeking an equivalent job and compensatory pay. It had urged Mr. Ban to allow her to pursue her case elsewhere in the U.N. system "to ensure both fairness and impartiality." Mr. Ban's office rejected that recommendation, saying that the secretary-general had no "competence" over the Palestine Refugee agency's internal justice system. Her appeal there is pending.
In another case, Fatima Moussa, a U.N. translator in Lebanon, had accused a U.N. security officer of raping her. A probe by the U.N. commission where she worked did not substantiate her allegations. She appealed, and calls the investigation a "travesty." The appellate board unanimously recommended that Mr. Ban extend her employment contract until her appeal was heard. On July 15, 2008, Mr. Ban rejected the board's recommendation and Ms. Moussa's contract expired. U.N. records show that Mr. Ban didn't accept the board's findings that Ms. Moussa would suffer "irreparable injury." The man she accused now works for the U.N. in Darfur.
Impetus for Change
Much of the impetus for the U.N.'s effort to change the way it handles sexual-harassment cases stems from a 2004 case. An OIOS investigation concluded that Ruud Lubbers, then head of the U.N.'s main refugee agency and the former prime minister of the Netherlands, had sexually harassed Cynthia Brzak, a longtime American staffer. The probe found that Mr. Lubbers engaged "in serious acts of misconduct" of a "sexual nature."
Mr. Annan, then secretary-general, didn't accept an OIOS recommendation that Mr. Lubbers be disciplined. He said at the time that the findings could not be sustained. Mr. Lubbers, who has consistently denied any wrongdoing, resigned in 2005. He couldn't be reached for comment.
Ms. Brzak said she faced retaliation, including threats to abolish her position. She filed a lawsuit in federal district court in Manhattan seeking damages from the U.N., Mr. Lubbers and others. Last year, a federal judge ruled that U.N. officials had diplomatic immunity, and dismissed the case. Ms. Brzak has appealed.
Diplomatic immunity also factored in a more recent case at Unicef in India. In October 2006, Archana Pandey, an assistant communications officer in New Delhi, accused Cecilio Adorna, then Unicef's top officer in India, of sexual harassment. She alleged he threatened not to renew her contract, which was due to expire at year end, if she didn't grant him sexual favors, according to U.N. records and Ms. Pandey, in an interview. She said she suffered an emotional breakdown and had to take sick leave. Mr. Adorna denied all the allegations. That December, Ms. Pandey's Unicef contract wasn't renewed.
Unicef investigated. On Jan. 16, 2007, the agency's top personnel officer sent her a letter stating that its probe failed to find "clear and convincing evidence" to support her claims. The letter, which was reviewed by the Journal, accused her of misrepresentation, and said "if you were still a staff member, Unicef could consider taking disciplinary actions against you."
U.N. records also show that the same Unicef personnel officer sent Mr. Adorna a written reprimand that same day. That letter, which was also reviewed by the Journal, stated that while nearly all the allegations couldn't be supported, the inquiry found that he "at times touched female staff in a manner they considered inappropriate" and had a tendency to tell jokes or make comments with sexual connotations.
"The Investigation Committee itself witnessed one of such comments during your interview when you stated that you would not have invited anybody for romantic drinks in your hotel room, because you 'can't do sex without food first,' " the letter said. "Such a comment is highly inappropriate, particularly in light of the fact that you were being interviewed on sexual harassment allegations." The letter threatened Mr. Adorna with disciplinary action for "any further misconduct."
In a written statement to the Journal, Mr. Adorna said Unicef later wrote to him stating that it couldn't find "clear and convincing evidence" to support Ms. Pandey's allegations. He said the Unicef letter also said: "Insufficient evidence does not necessarily mean that the allegations were found to be false." He accused Unicef of "negligence" for failing to defend him.
In 2007, Ms. Pandey, who is Indian, filed a criminal complaint with the New Delhi police that accused Mr. Adorna, a Filipino, of attempted rape, among other allegations, according to Indian court filings. The police declined to take action because U.N. employees have diplomatic immunity. She has continued to press her case in Indian courts. She also filed an appeal within the U.N. system.
In December 2008, the U.N. appeals board, while not addressing the sexual-harassment allegations, found that Unicef had "let go" Ms. Pandey "wrongfully" and "illegally" while she was on sick leave. It recommended that the secretary-general award her two years' pay, plus interest, or $76,800. In March, Secretary-General Ban accepted the recommendation.
Mr. Adorna retired from Unicef last month. He has filed an appeal with the U.N. seeking, among other things, a public statement of exoneration and monetary damages. He accuses Unicef of making him "its sacrificial lamb" and urging him to resign.
Unicef declined to comment on Mr. Adorna's appeal or his allegations.
Write to Steve Stecklow at steve.stecklow@wsj.com
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124233350385520879.html
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Feminists Betray Muslim Women
By: Robert Spencer
FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, May 21, 2009
A feminist professor has once again passed up an opportunity to stand up for the human rights of Muslim women. Recently Dr. Laura Briggs, Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and Head of the Department of Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona, welcomed new Ph.D. students to the department.
In the course of her address, Briggs, author of Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico, praised the work of other professors, including that of Saba Mahmood, Associate Professor of Social Cultural Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. Mahmood, said Briggs, “confronted one of the legacies of a long history of orientalism and the recent wars in the Middle East: the way we are invited to see Muslim women as hopelessly, painfully oppressed, without their own autonomy, will, or individual rights.” So apparently the oppression of Muslim women has nothing to do with Islamic law or culture; it is merely a byproduct of “orientalism and the recent wars in the Middle East” – in other words, it is the West’s fault. “If we sometimes notice other Middle Eastern women—women’s rights activists, for example,” Briggs continued, “it is only to reinforce the notion that the great mass of Muslim women are terribly oppressed by the rise of conservative religiosity, by their husbands, by the ways they are compelled to dress.”
Briggs has good news: Mahmood spent two years – two years! – in Egypt and discovered that that oppression is just a mirage: “But after two years of fieldwork in the women’s mosque movement in Egypt, Mahmood asks us to consider a new question: what if community, as much as or more than the notions of individual rights, is a route to living meaningfully? Perhaps we ought to rethink the idea that women’s agency and personhood spring from resistance to subjection, and attend to the ways that in conservative religious communities, the cultivation of virtue and of closeness to God, of certain emotions and of forms of embodiment, are challenging but hardly one-dimensional ways of producing the self.”
Clearing away the pseudo-intellectual gobbledygook, Briggs is apparently saying that if women feel fulfilled in being subjugated as inferiors under Sharia law, then their good feelings outweigh their oppression and subjection. One wonders what Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem might have said in the 1960s if this same argument-from-fulfillment had been posed to them regarding American women. But aside from being inconsistent with what has been the feminist view of women’s oppression for decades, Briggs’s words also represent a betrayal of the Muslim women whose suffering is objective, ongoing, and largely unnoticed.
To take just one of many available examples, wife-beating is largely tolerated, and even encouraged, in many Muslim cultures – largely due to the deleterious influence of Qur’an 4:34, which directs men to beat disobedient women. It is accordingly no surprise that the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences has determined that over ninety percent of Pakistani wives have been struck, beaten, or abused sexually — for offenses on the order of cooking an unsatisfactory meal. Others were punished for failing to give birth to a male child. Dominating their women by violence is a prerogative Muslim men cling to tenaciously. In Spring 2005, when the East African nation of Chad tried to institute a new family law that would outlaw wife beating, Muslim clerics led resistance to the measure as un-Islamic.
But to this – and to genital mutilation, honor killing, polygamy, and so much more that is sanctioned or tolerated by Islamic law – Briggs and Mahmood would apparently turn a blind eye, as long as the women involved were “living meaningfully.” And our concern for them? “Orientalism”!
Ironically, in her address Briggs also praised Saidiya Hartman, a professor of English and Comparative Literature and Women’s and Gender Studies at Columbia University. Hartman, according to Briggs, “sees everywhere around us and in us the legacies of slavery.” Briggs asks: “Can we exorcise these ghosts by calling into memory the Middle Passage, the rapes, the slave raids, the fortresses of the Gold Coast and the betrayals of the obruni, the stranger, that made the commerce of slavery possible?” And she concludes: “In her books, Scenes of Subjection and Lose Your Mother, Women’s Studies scholar Hartman writes brilliant prose that is full of heart and embodied, because she thinks that we as individuals and communities are not better off when we try to forget these things.”
Fair enough. But if we are not better off when we try to forget slavery, why are we better off when we try to forget the oppression of women in Islam?
It’s a question that Linda Briggs, and other feminists, would do well to consider.
Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of eight books, eleven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book, Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs, is available now from Regnery Publishing.
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I feel like the article should be called some feminists betray Muslim women but it made valid points.
However there is no feminist pope and those college professor do not speak for all feminists.
It seems like you mostly post critiques of 2nd wave feminists. There are women who believe those theories but it not an accurate description of mainstream feminism (whatever that is)
Third wave feminism is different
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-wave_feminism
Wikipedia has a somewhat helpful description of third wave feminism
Third-wave feminism seeks to challenge or avoid what it deems the second wave's "essentialist" definitions of femininity, which often assumed a universal female identity and over-emphasized experiences of upper middle class white women. A post-structuralist interpretation of gender and sexuality is central to third wave ideology.
Emphasizing discursive power and the ambiguity of gender, third-wave theory usually incorporates elements of queer theory, transgender politics and a rejection of the gender binary, anti-racism and women-of-color consciousness, womanism, post-colonial theory, critical theory, postmodernism, transnationalism, ecofeminism, libertarian feminism, and new feminist theory.
Also considered part of the third wave is sex-positivity, a celebration of sexuality as a positive aspect of life, with broader definitions of what sex means and what oppression and empowerment may mean in the context of sex. For example, many third-wave feminists have reconsidered oppositions to pornography and sex work of the second wave and challenge existing beliefs that participants in pornography and sex work cannot be empowered.
Third-wave feminists often focus on "micro-politics" and challenge the second wave's paradigm as to what is, or is not, good for women.[
Third-wave feminism allows women to define feminism for themselves by incorporating their own identities into the belief system of what feminism is and what it can become through one's own perspective. Third-wavers are proactive in issues, such as activism. Authors Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards wrote Manifesta, which introduced the idea of third-wave feminism well by making the connection that feminism can change with every generation and individual:
"The fact that feminism is no longer limited to arenas where we expect to see it-- NOW, Ms., women's studies, and redsuited Congresswomen-- perhaps means that young women today have really reaped what feminism has sown. Raised after Title IX and "William Wants a Doll," young women emerged from college or high school or two years of marriage or their first job and began challenging some of the received wisdom of the past ten or twenty years of feminism. We're not doing feminism the same way that the seventies feminists did it; being liberated doesn't mean copying what came before but finding one's own way-- a way that is genuine to one's own generation."
If you are interested in contemporary feminism( you may not be). I would check out places like
Double X
http://www.doublex.com/
Broadsheet
http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/
feministe,
http://www.feministe.us/blog/
feminising
http://www.feministing.com/
shakesville
http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/
I don't think you will enjoy their politics at all. Recently I have only been reading double X and broadsheet.
Int the twilight zone version of the world here is an article about this topic written by a Muslim woman. There is evidence to support that she has other goals that are much more important to her than equality for woman.
http://www.doublex.com/print/1331
Feminists Don't Understand Muslim Women
By: Fatemeh Fakhraie
Posted: December 31, 1969 at 7:00 PM
Western feminists don't understand Muslim Women
by
Fatemeh Fakhraie [1]
Posting Date:
05/20/2009 8:30am
In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan argued that American women suffered from a malaise she called "the problem that had no name." Her critique of domestic ennui helped launch the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s, leading to many of the advances women now take for granted. But not everything has changed. So we asked women to answer this question: If you had to pinpoint today's problem that had no name, what would it be? Read the other responses here. [2]
When Aasiya Hassan was murdered [3] earlier this year in Buffalo, N.Y., Marcia Pappas, head of the New York chapter of NOW, blamed the murder on Islam. She said it was a “terroristic version of honor killing, a murder rooted in cultural notions about women’s subordination to men.”
But Pappas had it all wrong. Around the country, Muslim women and Muslim feminists, along with Muslim men and domestic-violence organizations, rallied to spark a nationwide discussion on domestic violence within the Muslim community [4]. Pappas’ refusal to retract [5] or rethink her statements signifies a larger problem that Muslim feminists have [6] with non-Muslim feminists. We get no respect, I tell ya.
Many women just don’t get Muslim feminists. Some believe that you can’t be Muslim and a feminist or that Islamic feminism just doesn’t work. These assumptions minimize the importance of religion in many Muslim women's lives and deny women the right to incorporate faith into their lives. They also force Muslim women to choose between faith and feminism—a battle that faith usually wins.
Non-Muslim feminists look at Muslim women through a lens that ignores the historical reality of colonialism, occupation, and the importance of religion in public life. When they do so, they sometimes put women at risk. For example, take either of the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. Several Western feminist groups joined the call for battle: “It is our duty to spread freedom! And we must liberate the women of [insert predominately Muslim country here]! Look at how their men treat them!” And voilà: Rudyard Kipling’s “White (Wo)Man’s Burden” [7] is alive and well more than a century after it was written.
These wars actively undermined the work of feminist and women’s organizations within war-torn countries; in a time of conflict, everyone’s first priority is survival and winning, rather than concern about “women’s issues.” The Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan [8] was founded for the societal and political advancement of Afghan women in 1977, well before the United States aimed to “liberate” them in 2001. Yet few feminist organizations recognized that RAWA, or any other group led by Afghan women, was fighting its own battle against the Taliban.
Historically, calls for liberation have often created circumstances that are worse for women. Oxfam released a study [9]earlier this year reporting that Iraqi women’s conditions have qualitatively deteriorated since the U.S. invasion. While I’m sure this wasn’t in the grand feminist plan for Iraqi women, the reality is that sweeping numbers of them are widowed, unemployed, and subject to brutalities at the hands of sectarian gangs [10] and occupying forces.
Non-Muslim feminist misunderstandings don’t just affect women in predominately Muslim countries. They affect Muslim women living in the West, too. When France proposed a ban on religious symbols in schools, specifically targeting the hijab [11], French feminists were completely onboard, dismissing the hijab as a symbol of oppression that no Muslim girl would wear willingly. But the ban has systematically denied schooling to girls who wear hijab. Demanding a girl choose between her school and her traditions is a surefire way to keep her down. Many girls choose the latter.
The truth is, many feminist Muslim organizations are already hard at work. The global Musawah [12] movement is working to bring equality to Muslim family laws. The annual International Congress on Islamic Feminism [13], held in Spain, collects Islamic feminist thinkers and activists from all over the world to tackle international issues affecting Muslim women.
We have to have a little faith in Islamic feminism, Muslim feminists, and the work they do. These issues go past the regular feminist infighting—when feminism steamrolls over Muslim women’s choices and capabilities, Muslim women are the ones who get hurt
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"Emphasizing discursive power and the ambiguity of gender, third-wave theory usually incorporates elements of queer theory, transgender politics and a rejection of the gender binary, anti-racism and women-of-color consciousness, womanism, post-colonial theory, critical theory, postmodernism, transnationalism, ecofeminism, libertarian feminism, and new feminist theory."
Well, that went right over my head with nary a look back , , , :lol: :lol: :lol:
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Crafty,
Thats the expansion of the leftist academic holy trinity of race, class and gender.
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Rachel,
Notice how Fatemeh Fakhraie glosses over the brutal oppression of women across the muslim world then plays the "colonialism" card. Colonialism can, and was/is a force for good in some cases, especially for women. Part of the impact the Brits had on India was putting an end to "Suttee", where the living wife was thrown onto the deceased husband's funeral pyre. The Brits started hanging those responsible.
Western influence, along with many christian missionaries helped end foot binding in China. Tragic? No.
Slavery and then Jim Crow laws were part of the southern culture. Military and legal "imperialism" was used to end those things. So how would ending the sharia based oppression of women in "dar al islam" be different?
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"It bears emphasis . . . that our role is limited to interpreting and applying the principles and rules embodied in the California Constitution, setting aside our own personal beliefs and values." That sigh of judicial restraint was actually issued by the California Supreme Court, which yesterday upheld Proposition 8, last year's ballot initiative prohibiting same-sex marriage in the state.
The gay rights lobby is apoplectic, though we suspect the decision will eventually be seen as a victory for gay rights -- precisely because it respected the ordinary rhythms of democratic debate. That wasn't the case in 2008, when the same court created a right to gay marriage by reading it into the state constitution. Yet when moral and social disputes are "settled" by the judiciary, they inevitably become even more divisive than before, inspire a political backlash and in any case are denied the durability that comes from popular consent.
Gay activists appealed Prop. 8 on the arcane grounds that it was a "revision" to the state constitution requiring a two-thirds vote, not a constitutional amendment requiring the 52% majority it received. The good news is that they can still achieve their goals the old-fashioned way: by changing the laws through politics. (Alas, that is not now the case with abortion.) Next year's election will almost certainly see another ballot initiative to overturn Prop. 8. If California voters don't have a change of heart, gays will have to live with the compromises of democratic life -- which in most places means the legal benefits of marriage in all but name.
The California Supreme Court's bow to the ballot box still preserves the 18,000 gay marriages that were recognized before Prop. 8 passed. Meanwhile, states across the country are experimenting with civil unions and same-sex marriage, even if the latter has so far only emerged from a single legislature: Vermont's.
As this democratic evolution continues, a growing question is whether the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act -- which says that states need not adhere to same-sex marriage laws in other states -- violates the U.S. Constitution's Full Faith and Credit clause. This issue is probably headed to the Supreme Court, and it would not be to anyone's advantage if gay marriage were imposed by judicial fiat.
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What’s the difference?
Same-sex marriage does make a difference to wider society, especially when the force of the state is behind it.
"What difference,” goes the refrain from same-sex marriage supporters, “ does the marriage of two men or two women make in your life or your marriage?”
Well truth be told, very little because I am Roman Catholic. My marriage is a sacramental union; a union blessed in God’s eyes. The state has very little to do with it and a wedding between two men or two women is as valid in my eyes as a quickie wedding between two drunks at a Vegas love chapel; which means not at all.
Yet something tells me that answer would not satisfy homosexual activists pushing for same-sex marriage, because despite the cry of live and let live, the modus operandi appears to be, live like I say or feel the power of the state.
Earlier this week legislators in New Hampshire rejected a second attempt to pass a bill legalising same-sex marriage, not because the bill did not exempt religious groups from having to join in the celebration of gay marriage, but because it did. Radical supporters of the push for gay marriage joined with opponents to kill off amendments aimed at protecting religious freedom.
The New Hampshire House of Representatives had earlier passed a bill aimed at making same-sex marriage legal. Democratic Governor John Lynch said he would veto any bill that did not include additional protections for religious groups, their employees, and the services they offered, from having to perform, promote, or participate in same-sex weddings.
The New York Times reports on the actions of Republican Steve Vaillancourt, a homosexual member of the House, “During the floor debate on the amendment, Representative Steve Vaillancourt, a Republican who voted for the [original] same-sex marriage bill, accused Mr. Lynch of using bullying tactics, a House spokeswoman said. Mr. Vaillancourt then voted against the proposed changes.”
Vaillancourt is quoted by The Nashua Telegraph as saying, "This bill enshrines homophobia in statute, and I won't ever support something that does that.''
Vaillancourt wants anyone not okay with gay marriage to be out of the marriage business, it has already happened elsewhere. In Canada, private individuals who were licensed by the government to perform civil weddings were forced to hand in their marriage commissioner licenses if they would not perform same-sex weddings. The Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal order, was taken to a human rights commission for backing out of renting their hall for a lesbian wedding reception. The Knights say they didn’t know the wedding was for a lesbian couple and once they realized that fact, they returned the deposit and tried to help the ladies find a new venue. Unfortunately for the Knights, British Coloumbia, the province where the stand off took place, declared the Knights in violation of B.C.’s human rights code and fined the group.
It is situations like this that New Hampshire Governor John Lynch is trying to avoid and it is situations like this that gay activists like Rep. Vaillancourt want to provoke; he wants to ensure that Knights of Columbus halls in New Hampshire are open to him and his friends so they can celebrate their weddings in grand Catholic style.
Live and let live sounds nice; too bad it’s not true.
Meanwhile in Britain, the Labour government, not happy with having forced Catholic adoption agencies out of business (agencies which were running long before government became involved in the game), is now set to force churches to hire homosexuals, trans-gendered or anyone else feeling grieved by having those moralistic bastards in the church tut-tut their “lifestyle”.
According to The Daily Telegraph, deputy equality minister Maria Eagle broke the news to churches at a conference on religious matters, well, it was a religious conference in the extremely progressive “accept my sexuality” sort of religious sense. Speaking at the Faith, Homophobia, Transphobia and Human Rights conference in London, the minister said, “The circumstances in which religious institutions can practice anything less than full equality are few and far between. While the state would not intervene in narrowly ritual or doctrinal matters within faith groups, these communities cannot claim that everything they run is outside the scope of anti-discrimination law.”
Not content to simply foist her view of equality and human rights upon churches through the blunt instruments of the state, Ms. Eagle is also seeking members of what I am sure she would regard as “homophobic” and “transphobic” churches to speak out against discrimination against the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual and Trans-gendered) community. "Members of faith groups have a role in making the argument in their own communities for greater LGBT acceptance,” she says. “But in the meantime the state has a duty to protect people from unfair treatment."
So you can hire your homophobic priest or imam but if your organ master makes Liberace look like a country club Republican or your cantor wants to celebrate his sexuality in drag, you’ll have to take it or face charges.
Live and let live, huh?
I truly believe that when it comes to basic requirements of life, the Catechism of the Catholic Church is right regarding homosexuals, “They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.”
Is refusing to hire an active homosexual, engaged to his boyfriend Bill, to act as youth group leader for the local Catholic parish a form of “just discrimination?” You’d better believe it! While the activists in Ms. Eagle’s office obviously can’t wait to work for sub-par wages in the parish office in Lutton, something tells me they won’t be hiring Cardinal Arizne to work as co-ordinator for the next conference on Faith, Homophobia, Transphobia and Human Rights. Something also tells me that if a faithful Muslim was to apply for a job with the local branch of the Rainbow Coalition, his application would get lost in the files. This kind of discrimination is likely perfectly fine with Ms. Eagle.
What’s a traditional religious person to do? I don’t think recoiling into religious seclusion is an option, especially not for Christians called to live out a public witness. The idea that faith can be private and kept to the home just does not wash for Christians who are called to have their faith touch all aspects of their life. As the late Richard John Neuhaus wrote in his book The Naked Public Square, “Christ is Lord of all or he is Lord not at all.” Asking someone to act one way in public and another in private is asking them to lead contradictory and disjointed lives. Isn’t that what homosexual activists, until recently at least, had been saying they were fighting for, the ability to be themselves? Now they want us to be them as well.
Patrick Thompson teaches and writes near Buffalo, New York.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/5433917/Catholic-charities-breaking-law-on-homosexual-adoption.html
Catholic charities breaking law on homosexual adoption
Catholic charities who discriminate against homosexual couples who want to adopt children are breaking the law, the Charity Tribunal has ruled.
Published: 7:56AM BST 03 Jun 2009
Adoption: Catholic Care might face discrimination claims by same-sex couples it has turned away in the past.
The tribunal ruled that a "heterosexuals only" policy in the adoption field of the Catholic Church in England and Wales would fall foul of the ban on discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation brought in two years ago. The Tribunal's ruling leaves leading charity Catholic Care (Diocese of Leeds) facing a deep religious impasse and creates a fundamental conflict between the tenets of the Catholic Church and the law of the land.
If the charity now sticks to Church policy and continues to follow its "heterosexuals only" policy it could lose its charity status and public funding...
And more ...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/news...gay-staff.html
Law 'will force churches to employ gay staff'
Churches will be banned from turning down gay job applicants on the grounds of their sexuality under new anti-discrimination laws, a Government minister said.
And more ...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/5032...uble-room.html
Homosexual couple sue Christian hotel owners for refusing them a double room
A homosexual couple are suing the Christian owners of a seaside hotel for sexual discrimination after they were refused a double bedroom.
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Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced the Uniting American Families Act, which, according to The New York Times, "would allow American citizens and legal immigrants to seek residency in the United States for their same-sex partners, just as spouses now petition for foreign-born husbands and wives." Also this week, President Obama signed a proclamation officially declaring June "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month." One part of the proclamation stood out to us: "LGBT Americans ... have played a vital role in broadening this country's response to the HIV pandemic." It's also true that they have played a major role in spreading the HIV pandemic.
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June 29, 2009
Persistent Myths in Feminist Scholarship
By CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS
"Harder to kill than a vampire." That is what the sociologist Joel Best calls a bad statistic. But, as I have discovered over the years, among false statistics the hardest of all to slay are those promoted by feminist professors. Consider what happened recently when I sent an e-mail message to the Berkeley law professor Nancy K.D. Lemon pointing out that the highly praised textbook that she edited, Domestic Violence Law (second edition, Thomson/West, 2005), contained errors.
Her reply began:
"I appreciate and share your concern for veracity in all of our scholarship. However, I would expect a colleague who is genuinely concerned about such matters to contact me directly and give me a chance to respond before launching a public attack on me and my work, and then contacting me after the fact."
I confess: I had indeed publicly criticized Lemon's book, in campus lectures and in a post on FeministLawProfessors.com. I had always thought that that was the usual practice of intellectual argument. Disagreement is aired, error corrected, truth affirmed. Indeed, I was moved to write to her because of the deep consternation of law students who had attended my lectures: If authoritative textbooks contain errors, how are students to know whether they are being educated or indoctrinated? Lemon's book has been in law-school classrooms for years.
One reason that feminist scholarship contains hard-to-kill falsehoods is that reasonable, evidence-backed criticism is regarded as a personal attack.
Lemon's Domestic Violence Law is organized as a conventional law-school casebook — a collection of judicial opinions, statutes, and articles selected, edited, and commented upon by the author. The first selection, written by Cheryl Ward Smith (no institutional affiliation is given), offers students a historical perspective on domestic-violence law. According to Ward:
"The history of women's abuse began over 2,700 years ago in the year 753 BC. It was during the reign of Romulus of Rome that wife abuse was accepted and condoned under the Laws of Chastisement. ... The laws permitted a man to beat his wife with a rod or switch so long as its circumference was no greater than the girth of the base of the man's right thumb. The law became commonly know as 'The Rule of Thumb.' These laws established a tradition which was perpetuated in English Common Law in most of Europe."
Where to begin? How about with the fact that Romulus of Rome never existed. He is a figure in Roman mythology — the son of Mars, nursed by a wolf. Problem 2: The phrase "rule of thumb" did not originate with any law about wife beating, nor has anyone ever been able to locate any such law. It is now widely regarded as a myth, even among feminist professors.
A few pages later, in a selection by Joan Zorza, a domestic-violence expert, students read, "The March of Dimes found that women battered during pregnancy have more than twice the rate of miscarriages and give birth to more babies with more defects than women who may suffer from any immunizable illness or disease." Not true. When I recently read Zorza's assertion to Richard P. Leavitt, director of science information at the March of Dimes, he replied, "That is a total error on the part of the author. There was no such study." The myth started in the early 1990s, he explained, and resurfaces every few years.
Zorza also informs readers that "between 20 and 35 percent of women seeking medical care in emergency rooms in America are there because of domestic violence." Studies by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an agency of the U.S. Department of Justice, indicate that the figure is closer to 1 percent.
Few students would guess that the Lemon book is anything less than reliable. The University of California at Berkeley's online faculty profile of Lemon hails it as the "premiere" text of the genre. It is part of a leading casebook series, published by Thomson/West, whose board of academic advisers, prominently listed next to the title page, includes many eminent law professors.
I mentioned these problems in my message to Lemon. She replied:
"I have looked into your assertions and requested documentation from Joan Zorza regarding the March of Dimes study and the statistics on battered women in emergency rooms. She provided both of these promptly."
If that's the case, Zorza and Lemon might share their documentation with Leavitt, of the March of Dimes, who is emphatic that it does not exist. They might also contact the Centers for Disease Control statistician Janey Hsiao, who wrote to me that "among ED [Emergency Department] visits made by females, the percent of having physical abuse by spouse or partner is 0.02 percent in 2003 and 0.01 percent in 2005."
Here is what Lemon says about Cheryl Ward Smith's essay on Romulus and the rule of thumb:
"I made a few minor editorial changes in the Smith piece so that it is more accurate. However, overall it appeared to be correct."
A few minor editorial changes? Students deserve better. So do women victimized by violence.
Feminist misinformation is pervasive. In their eye-opening book, Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women's Studies (Lexington Books, 2003), the professors Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge describe the "sea of propaganda" that overwhelms the contemporary feminist classroom. The formidable Christine Rosen (formerly Stolba), in her 2002 report on the five leading women's-studies textbooks, found them rife with falsehoods, half-truths, and "deliberately misleading sisterly sophistries." Are there serious scholars in women's studies? Yes, of course. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an anthropologist at the University of California at Davis; Janet Zollinger Giele, a sociologist at Brandeis; and Anne Mellor, a literary scholar at UCLA, to name just three, are models of academic excellence and integrity. But they are the exception. Lemon's book typifies the departmental mind-set.
Consider The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World (2008), by the feminist scholar Joni Seager, chair of the Hunter College geography department. Now in its fourth edition, Seager's atlas was named "reference book of the year" by the American Library Association when it was published. "Nobody should be without this book," says the feminist icon Gloria Steinem. "A wealth of fascinating information," enthuses The Washington Post. Fascinating, maybe. But the information is misleading and, at least in one instance, flat-out false.
One color-coded map illustrates how women are kept "in their place" by restrictions on their mobility, dress, and behavior. Somehow the United States comes out looking as bad in this respect as Somalia, Uganda, Yemen, Niger, and Libya. All are coded with the same shade of green to indicate places where "patriarchal assumptions" operate in "potent combination with fundamentalist religious interpretations." Seager's logic? She notes that in parts of Uganda, a man can claim an unmarried woman as his wife by raping her. The United States gets the same low rating on Seager's charts because, she notes, "State legislators enacted 301 anti-abortion measures between 1995 and 2001." Never mind that the Ugandan practice is barbaric, that U.S. abortion law is exceptionally liberal among the nations of the world, and that the activism and controversy surrounding the issue of abortion in the United States is a sign of a vigorous free democracy working out its disagreements.
On another map, the United States gets the same rating for domestic violence as Uganda and Haiti. Seager backs up that verdict with that erroneous and ubiquitous emergency-room factoid: "22 percent-35 percent of women who visit a hospital emergency room do so because of domestic violence."
The critical work of 21st-century feminism will be to help women in the developing world, especially in Muslim societies, in their struggle for basic rights. False depictions of the United States as an oppressive "patriarchy" are a ludicrous distraction. If American women are as oppressed as Ugandan women, then American feminists would be right to focus on their domestic travails and let the Ugandan women fend for themselves.
All books have mistakes, so why pick on the feminists? My complaint with feminist research is not so much that the authors make mistakes; it is that the mistakes are impervious to reasoned criticism. They do not get corrected. The authors are passionately committed to the proposition that American women are oppressed and under siege. The scholars seize and hold on for dear life to any piece of data that appears to corroborate their dire worldview. At the same time, any critic who attempts to correct the false assumptions is dismissed as a backlasher and an anti-feminist crank.
Why should it matter if a large number of professors think and say a lot of foolish and intemperate things? Here are three reasons to be concerned:
1) False assertions, hyperbole, and crying wolf undermine the credibility and effectiveness of feminism. The United States, and the world, would greatly benefit from an intellectually responsible, reality-based women's movement.
2) Over the years, the feminist fictions have made their way into public policy. They travel from the women's-studies textbooks to women's advocacy groups and then into news stories. Soon after, they are cited by concerned political leaders. President Obama recently issued an executive order establishing a White House Council on Women and Girls. As he explained, "The purpose of this council is to ensure that American women and girls are treated fairly in all matters of public policy." He and Congress are also poised to use the celebrated Title IX gender-equity law to counter discrimination not only in college athletics but also in college math and science programs, where, it is alleged, women face a "chilly climate." The president and members of Congress can cite decades of women's-studies scholarship that presents women as the have-nots of our society. Never mind that this is largely no longer true. Nearly every fact that could be marshaled to justify the formation of the White House Council on Women and Girls or the new focus of Title IX application was shaped by scholarly merchants of hype like Professors Lemon and Seager.
3) Finally, as a philosophy professor of almost 20 years, and as someone who respects rationality, objective scholarship, and intellectual integrity, I find it altogether unacceptable for distinguished university professors and prestigious publishers to disseminate falsehoods. It is offensive in itself, even without considering the harmful consequences. Obduracy in the face of reasonable criticism may be inevitable in some realms, such as partisan politics, but in academe it is an abuse of the privileges of professorship.
"Thug," "parasite," "dangerous," a "female impersonator" — those are some of the labels applied to me when I exposed specious feminist statistics in my 1994 book Who Stole Feminism? (Come to think of it, none of my critics contacted me directly with their concerns before launching their public attacks.) According to Susan Friedman, of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, "Sommers' diachronic discourse is easily unveiled as synchronic discourse in drag. ... She practices ... metonymic historiography." That one hurt! But my views, as well as my metonymic historiography, are always open to correction. So I'll continue to follow the work of the academic feminists — to criticize it when it is wrong, and to learn from it when it is right.
Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She is the author of Who Stole Feminism? (Simon & Schuster, 1994) and The War Against Boys (Simon & Schuster, 2000), and editor of The Science on Women and Science, forthcoming from the AEI Press.
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
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Gender equity at close quarters
By mixing women and men on board, isn’t the navy asking for trouble?
It was a shock-horror story for a slow Sunday night, but the news of a sexual scandal on board an Australian Navy ship has drawn comment from the country’s Prime Minister and his deputy, serving to highlight problems surrounding women’s role in the military.
HMAS Success has a mixed crew, in line with a gender equity policy that has counterparts in the defence establishment of many countries. This mixing of men and women is supposed to be a great thing for them and for the military. Women who hanker after risk and adventure can fulfil their desires while putting their special talents at the service of their country.
But some of the men on board Success have grown ho-hum about the privilege of having women around and the opportunities for sex that it presents, so four of them devised a betting game in which they competed to see who could have sex with the most women crewmates. They kept a written record and there were extra points for taking advantage of female officers and lesbians.
Since an Australian television channel broke the story on Sunday, the Defence Department has confirmed that four men were sent home in May from Singapore, where the ship was stationed, and that a formal inquiry is under way. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has called the allegations “disturbing” and Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard has indicated she wants a full investigation.
Ms Gillard said that both the government and the nation had been saying for a long time that women should be able to join the army, the navy or air force. "We don't want to see anything that precludes women from having a good career in our armed forces if that is what they choose to do with their lives.”
According to Defence, the allegations came to light during “an equity and diversity health check” when women “raised a number of concerns”. If the details of the “game” are true, it showed utter contempt for the women being targeted, if not the whole female complement of the ship. Dismissal would be too good for these men; a spell in the stocks would be an appropriately shaming punishment.
But, what then? Is it a question of replacing a few bad eggs, drilling the others on the sexual harassment policy, upping the penalties -- that sort of thing? Or is there something fundamentally wrong with the military’s experiment with sexual integration?
Sexual harassment and assault have become a huge issue in the United States forces. According to an AP report last year, 15 per cent of women veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan who have sought help from a Department of Veteran Affairs facility have screened positive for military sexual trauma, and the VA has at least 16 inpatient wards specialising in treating of such women.
Military sexual trauma means that while they were on active duty they were sexually assaulted, raped, or were sexually harassed, receiving repeated unsolicited verbal or physical contact of a sexual nature. One woman, who now advocates with government on this issue, described how she was harassed while sharing a house with about 20 men while on service at an outpost in Iraq, and was traumatised by it.
One woman with 20 men? Doesn’t that illustrate how crazy this policy can get? Of course, she should have been safe with 120 men, especially men serving in what has traditionally been an honourable occupation, based on the ideal of defending what is right.
But there are strong forces working against the honour code. Military men come from the same cultural environment as other men (and women) -- one in which sex is debased to the level of personal recreation and public entertainment. Casual and short-term relationships are taken for granted, pornography is defended (by women as well as men) and consent is the only recognised rule.
It appears to be the only rule in the forces as well. There is nothing to suggest that the Australian sailors are being investigated simply for having sex with women crew members -- although US Defence surveys show that women marines are more likely than other servicewomen to experience unwanted sexual touching. Rather, the issue seems to be that the women felt demeaned when they discovered that they were the objects of a cynical game in which dollar amounts were placed on their heads and they would be material for bragging among the men.
Did the men know that their nasty little game would not only be offensive to the women -- they simply must have known that -- but would constitute a formal offence, sexual harassment, presumably? Maybe not.
If that is the case, the sexual equality policy means the authorities have put themselves in the ridiculous position of having to define a whole range of offensive sexual behaviour and/or arbitrate all the disputes that arise from the casual sex it allows to go on in its ranks. He will call it a game; she will call it harassment and an attack on her dignity. Or he will call it “having sex” and she will call it rape. And there will have to be an inquiry to sort it out. And then more time and resources may have to be spent on punitive measures, re-education and compensation.
Worse than that, in view of the fact that some personnel are married and some become pregnant, the institutions responsible for defending the homeland help to undermine the nation’s homes and families by condoning extra-marital affairs and unwed motherhood.
It is this high level stupidity, more than the low-level brutishness of the sailors in question in this particular dispute that makes one worry about the calibre of the forces and their defence readiness.
There is a place for women in a nation’s defence system, but it is not in close quarters with men on a ship. Nor is it in mixed quarters at the front line of battle. If that is what Ms Gillard and others of her persuasion mean by “a good career in the armed forces” they really are talking through their hats.
Carolyn Moynihan is deputy editor of MercatorNet.
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July 22, 2009
Are Men Obsolete?
By Robin of Berkeley
When I snapped out of my left wing trance last year, I was lost in space. I had no conservative friends and was clueless about web sites and books.
I had heard something vaguely about Talk Radio. So I scanned my AM dial and found Michael Savage. (It took several months, and a chat with a rather bemused new friend, before I even realized there were other hosts as well.)
Being a lifelong liberal, I'd never heard anybody like Savage in my life. He yelled; he called people "vermin." He was unbridled masculinity, not the touchy feeling kind I was used to. And he totally accepted himself: his moods, passion, temper.
But what shocked me the most was his saying that men have become "feminized." I'd never been so offended. "Well, what's wrong with men being more feminine?" I shouted back at my radio. "Is there something wrong with femininity?" Men being way more in touch with their yin and less with their yang sounded good to me.
I hadn't exactly been a big fan of masculinity. Like any good feminist, ranting and raving about men were two of my favorite pastimes. Men frightened me. Testosterone fueled types like Michael Savage scared the bejeezus out of me. I had good reasons, of course, given episodes of harassment and abuse.
I couldn't tune Savage out because he was the only game in town (or so I thought). Also, he was spot on about Obama, and his show was a rich tapestry of politics, philosophy, history, and religion. So I stayed glued.
What a difference a year makes. Now I see Savage as a seer warning us of the dangers we were in for if men went the way of the dinosaur. I had thought taming men's animal nature was a win-win for everybody. Now I realize it was tampering with Mother Nature.
And I have to wonder whether the feminization of men has been an unforeseen result of liberalism or some twisted scheme hatched by the left. In some ways, it feels paranoid to even go there, like I've watched too many sci fi flicks. But at the same time if Professor Bill Ayers and his ilk could plot infiltrating the schools with all things Marxist, why stop there? Why not engineer a designer man who would go along with the liberal flow?
Step one: loosen men up through psychotherapy where they can get in touch with their inner child. Have them exchange their arms for drums that they can pound in the woods with groups of brothers. Teach them to reject logic and lead with their emotions.
Idolize gayness, because after all, aren't gay men just XY versions of the superior women? Degrade anything masculine. Marginalize and vilify the macho types like Savage, by banning him from the U.K.
Hike up the costs of SUV's and trucks, and squeeze men into deracinated cars like the Prius (notice how prissy even the name sounds?) Even better, herd them to work in buses and trains to save the planet (and control them).
Ask the question, as Maureen Dowd did in her bestselling book, "Are Men Necessary?" Answer in the negative by glorifying single mothers and supporting sperm donors. Why bother with a bossy husband when the government can put moms on the dole? And anyway, with gayness being the next big craze, there may be fewer straight men out there.
On the horizon: making the notion of gender arbitrary anyway. Allow people free and easy access to sex change operations (I'll bet good money they will be readily available under ObamaCare.)
Allow children to choose their own sex. (By the way, the fad is already in vogue and called "gender neutrality." Parents don't inform their child of his or her or its gender and let the little mutant choose one.)
Even better, have your child be Bob one day and Becky the next, another hot trend called "gender fluid." It's already happening at a few San Francisco Bay Area schools, where bathrooms are unisex and children get to alter their gender as the mood strikes them.
The piece de resistance of feminization: wreck the economy. If you want to cripple men, rob them of their life spring: their ability to provide for their family. No worries: the government will step in as a worthy substitute.
And the final stroke of genius: disempower the true symbols of masculinity: the military, police, and intelligence officers. Investigate them, sue them, protest them with riots in the street. Make them feel intimidated about doing their jobs. Require them to attend plenty of sensitivity workshops.
So, after decades of my going along like an automaton with the liberal program, I finally got it. As people like Savage have warned us about for years, tampering with gender is a disaster. And not just for men.
Because society shrinks when we are forced to give up who we are, and we become shells of ourselves when we're robbed of our birthright: dignity, freedom, individuality. We become cloned people, with this part and that part, never discovering who we are.
We become what the Tibetans call "hungry ghosts:" tormented beings looking all over for happiness but never finding it because we've forgotten the only place it lives -- in our spirit, which is connected to forces Beyond. We lose forever the knowledge of our true nature that we first glimpsed when we were knee high.
Because the fact is that humans cannot, should not, fool with Mo Nature, shouldn't take nature in our hands and play God. To do so can unleash madness and danger as we know from every horror movie.
Because while we've been engineering a kinder, gentler man, much of the world has been doing the opposite. Countries like Iran and North Korea have been building nuclear weapons and poisoning their young men with hatred of the U.S. They have been making their men stronger, meaner, and better armed.
Liberals: be honest with yourselves. In the end, if the worst case scenario happens (God forbid) and we are attacked, who will you run to? Will you scream out for the Green Czar?
No; all of us, liberals and leftists, conservatives and feminists, we will go where we have always gone from the beginning of time; we will search desperately for the big, strong men to protect us, the ones who have always had the guts, the courage, and yes the cojones, to put their lives and limbs on the line.
The question is: by then, how many will be left?
A frequent AT contributor, Robin is a recovering liberal and psychotherapist in Berkeley.
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/07/are_men_obsolete.html at July 22, 2009 - 09:54:39 AM EDT
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The title is slightly false. I found the comments on learned helplessness fascinating .
http://www.doublex.com/section/life/how-i-learned-stop-being-girl-and-use-power-tool?page=0,2
For decades, owing to an incident in early childhood, I’ve been mildly ashamed of my interest in power tools. At my public elementary school in Dallas in the early 1970s, we had a class for art, my favorite subject. Although the class was co-ed, boys and girls were separated into different tracks. Boys got to work at a large jig saw table—the kind found in the “shop” classes of old—and cut balsa wood and build things. They got to wear cool plastic goggles. The saw was satisfyingly loud and dangerous. I wanted to build things, too. But in the early days of Title IX in Texas, girls weren’t supposed to enjoy such boyish pursuits. I was supposed to want to sit quietly and paint pretty bowls of fruit. But I didn’t want a still life.
So, I complained. Indeed, I recall making quite an unladylike stink about the whole thing. Until, one afternoon, the teacher grudgingly relented. She did this by halting the entire class and having everyone stand around in a circle and stare and gawk as I, freak of nature, fumbled (as the teacher refused to help) with the wood. The boys laughed. The girly-girls giggled. My face burned bright red. Needless to say, I learned my lesson. My career in woodworking was sawed short.
Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered had I, at the same time, been learning how to sew or cook. I loved any activity involving my hands. But the problem was, I wasn’t learning any traditional, female skills, either. The women of my generation came of age betwixt and between: at just the point where home economics had been discontinued in most schools, and mothers, even in conservative Dallas, were beginning to lay down their darning needles and wooden spoons, but before they had begun to make real inroads into traditional male pastimes and professions. My parents stressed a knowledge-based education. I studied hard, went to college, and fell in love with the poet Auden. But as Auden once wrote [2]: “Poetry makes nothing happen.”
I existed in a kind of practical No-Man’s Land between the sexes. Needless to say, I didn’t inhabit a conventional man’s role, but around the house in early adulthood, I often felt like I wasn’t much of a woman, either. I think the women of my generation purposely embraced a kind of learned helplessness. In my 20s, I recall how several female friends (all aspiring writers) confided they didn’t even know how to type. “Don’t become good at anything you don’t want to do,” one advised. In the early years of feminism, being incompetent became a way to avoid being typecast, as, say, a candidate for the typing pool. If you couldn’t cook or sew, no one could insist you be the stay-at-home spouse. There were, obviously, drawbacks to such liberation.
My sense of uselessness came to a head in the days immediately after 9/11. I lived in New York, and like so many of my compatriots, was desperate to help my beloved, grief-stricken city. On the Wednesday after the attacks, I managed to assist at the skating rink at Chelsea Piers, where I helped to set up a triage center for the wounded we imagined, in our awful naiveté, would soon be arriving. But my labors amounted to little more than ferrying around boxes of donations in anguished anticipation. So, I went to the Javits Center, where volunteers were signing up for longer terms of duty. There were welders and contractors and doctors and nurses and line-order cooks. As I went from table to table, I realized, with awful chagrin, that as a former English major, I didn’t have a single concrete skill to offer in an emergency, besides, maybe, reading a poem at Ground Zero (which no one wanted me to do). I finally found a table that had to do with psychological counseling, and told the woman manning it that I’d taught public school for several years. "Do you have an actual degree in child psychology?" she asked. No, I had to admit. She patted me on the back gently: "Sorry, honey, we're looking for professionals."
Motherhood only deepened my sense that something was amiss. Barbara Ehrenreich has noted [3] that one problem facing the modern mother is what to do with young kids underfoot. In the olden days, children followed their mothers around the house and learned real skills as their mothers worked. “The industrial revolution,” she writes, “removed productive work from the home.” Ehrenreich isn’t calling for a return of informal child labor. But short of teaching children how to send a text message, what expertise can the modern information worker readily share with her children? And in truth, I like the kinds of chores I’m supposed to disdain as a professional mother with ambitions. I enjoy making my daughter’s Halloween costume each year. I love to paint the house.
So, dear reader, I bought a power drill. For months I admittedly couldn’t figure out why it took so damn long to drill a hole. The bit would rotate for five minutes at full speed, my arm aching from the vibrations, and there wouldn’t even be a dent in the drywall. (Turns out I’d accidentally flipped the switch that causes the bit to rotate counter clockwise, for winding out screws). So, let’s just say there was some trial and error. The men in my life, most of them self-described “intellectuals,” viewed these labors with bemused detachment and were typically short on pointers. Yet every time I started a project, I had this odd self-confidence, often absent in other areas of my life, that if I just kept at it, I’d figure it out. And the funny thing was, I usually did. What Matthew Crawford has written about motorcycle repair in his Shop Class as SoulCraft [4]was true for me, too: I found the work particularly satisfying, intellectually. I was problem solving, and because the problems were concrete, success was immediate and palpable. The physical world delivered clear, unambiguous directions in a way that, say, my boss, who seemed forever uncertain of what he expected of me and my stories, never did.
It’s also true what they say about necessity being the mother (or at least the feminist sister) of invention. What drove me on, over time, was bad real estate (which I suspect may also be why D.I.Y. has flourished, oddly enough, in Brooklyn; during the boom years, people were trying to figure out creative ways to deal with bathtubs in their kitchens). My apartment in New York, while not quite that bad, was tiny by most Americans’ standards (roughly 600 square feet)—especially after my daughter’s birth forced the family bed into the living room. But by this point, I had become pretty adept with the drill. I could punch in a row of screws, in a few milliseconds, like a seasoned pro on a construction site. I was still too timid to take on a handheld rotary saw. But I found a lumber shop on the Upper West Side [5] that would cut wood to specification. With the shop’s help, and while five months’ pregnant, I enlarged the opening of a large closet—knocking out the dry wall, rebuilding the wood door frame, complete with molding—so as to accommodate a crib. I even hung the folding doors myself. Inspired by sites like apartmenttherapy.com [6] and Ikeahacker.blogspot.com [7], I became adept at repurposing used furnishings for my own devices. Why not just hire someone, friends would ask. Money was an issue. But the truth is, I loved the process: the problem solving, the setbacks, the eureka moments, the sense of self-reliance and accomplishment that comes from doing it yourself (even before D.I.Y became a hipster term).
So, this is where I proselytize about my newfound religion. As women, of course, we can’t do it all. Few can simultaneously be hard-charging CEOs and mothers and as adept at sewing and cooking as we are at carpentry and car repair. But as our lives become ever more abstract and floating in cyberspace, I think we women lose our sense of mastery over the physical world at our peril. For one, such mastery is genuinely useful—for us and our children—and not just during the occasional national emergency. (Do we really want to raise a generation who can’t so much as sew on a button or change a flat tire?) But in a far more profound sense, it is an essential part of what makes us human. What differentiates us from the rest of the species isn’t just our minds, but also our tools, our clothes, and, perhaps most importantly, as the Harvard biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham has recently argued [8], our cooking.
That’s not to say that every woman should take up her grandmother’s canning. But if we are going to give up such traditional competencies, then we should at least replace them with a few, less traditional, hands-on skills. Many men get to have jobs and families and still enjoy that makeshift shop in the garage, where they can lose themselves in a function and share their expertise with their kids. Whether knitting or wielding a welding torch, women should insist on no less. A thumb, after all, is a terrible thing to waste.
It's a small point... okay, it isn't small.
By: Murasaki | Thu, 08/13/2009 - 14:58
This whole article was satisfying, but what resonated for me the most was the brief aside concerning "learned helplessness," a phenomenon that's angered me about my generation more than anything.
In all the various jobs I've had doing some form of psychotherapy or casework, I've often build up an impressive amount of mission creep in my job description. This is thanks in large part to an upbringing that really didn't encourage or discourage any particular skills (except for my mother's unsuccessful attempts, for some inexplicable reason, to discourage me from learning to cook as well as she), but just as significantly a self-instilled willingness to see any practical skill in any sphere as useful and to cultivate it for my own enhanced self-reliance.
So, while I may have been the child mental health specialist in one job, I also kept the LAN up and running and swapped out the hardware on everyone's PCs when we could miraculously afford an update. I'm a trauma therapist in my current position, but I also reseat and flush the exhaust of the big standing air conditioner when it shuts down and pick open the file room lock for everyone when the only person in the building with the key is out sick. I was once a family case manager for the city, but spent hours of 'counseling' time teaching mothers hoping to enter the workforce how to format their paragraphs and use proper grammar in their resumes, and how to read a bus and subway map to get to prospective interviews. As Jacqueline Carey said, "all knowledge is worth having," period, end of story.
This was all brought into very sharp focus just a few weeks ago, when our office had finally gotten a pair of much-needed large bookshelves that, as you might expect, arrived unassembled. I volunteered to save our very spendthrifty agency the money of hiring a handyman for a second day by putting together one myself. As I worked, the other women I share the office with mutely peered over my shoulder. One remarked, "I used to be interested in building stuff like Rebecca but when I got older I realized it was easier to have a man do it for you."
Yes, this is an office of women dedicated to serving victims of violent and sexual crimes, most of whom are women. You know, women that are supposedly educated on the psychological and practical dangers of things like dependence and male dominance. Things like that.
There are aspects of the feminist backlash that are so brazenly, obviously self-destructive that it boggles my mind. I'm not afraid of being unpopular, rude, or accused of being judgmental, so I'll get straight to my thesis: forget the arguments of 'choice' feminism. People of any gender that actively avoid improving themselves in realistic, attainable ways to allow themselves to shift responsibility to others aren't externally disempowered, oppressed or choosing some different-but-valid path. They're lazy.
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Ironic to think of all the blue state women that loudly proclaim how they don't need men while clamoring for government to act as their supper-daddy while many conservative red state women actually have tangible skills and independent lives and yet are sneered at by blue state feminists. See Sarah Palin as a perfect example.
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The article was written by a blue state feminist complaining about her red state upbringing in Texas . In general women 30 and younger don't cook it has nothing to do with a red state blue state thing. I have friends who grew up on farms who's husbands do the cooking. I have not interest in discussing Palin but there are women with large families and very practical skills who I admire greatly. For example the local Chabad Rebbetzin ( Rabbi's wife) regularly has Shabbos dinners for 30 plus without getting an accurate count beforehand while juggling a house full of kids and providing spiritual leadership and counseling for the community . Interesting enough she never really learned to cook either growing up. She had a lot of sisters who handled that. She is a great cook now but she said it required a lot of prayer when she was learning :-D
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Well, I'm real glad my wife is a great cook , , , and she handles technology for us and the reality side of the DB business and is very active in our children's school (e.g. teaches "Hands on Art", for the Health program etc)
While people certainly are free to come up with whatever arrangements make most sense for them, I suspect that absent PC pressures most of the time the woman will be more home family oriented and the man more go out and bring home the bacon. IMHO in general when the more this paradigm is deviated from, the lower the birth rate; this creates a situation of contracting populations.
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Rachel,
Why wouldn't you want to discuss the high tech lynching of an uppity female that we saw last year? Why does the feminist mainstream celebrate the choice to abort but not allow a woman to chose to define her politics outside of leftism?
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http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/2009/06/11/why-the-left-ridicules-women/
Why the left ridicules women
Too many American liberals cannot handle a strong, good-looking, intelligent, independent woman who disagrees with them — and so they make the crude, cruel and sexist remarks — including those about raping them or their 14-year-old daughters.
From left, the women are Katharine Harris, Carrie Prejean, Sarah Palin, Michelle Malkin, and Michele Bachmann.
These five women are are not the only ones that American liberals ridicule without fear. They are like little boys who cannot handle a strong woman. These women dare challenge them intellectually, and so we get crude counterattacks.
So-called feminists stand on the sidelines like so many Silda Spitzers or Elizabeth Edwardses or Hillary Clintons, standing by their menfolk while the boys treat women like dirt. Heck, Mrs. Edwards even served as her husband’s attack dog against any critic — even as she knew he was sleeping with his mistress of many years.
Consider the lack of any reaction by the left to David Letterman’s crude remark that Gov. Palin is buying make-up for that “slutty flight attendant look” insulted not just her but every woman. How could any woman respect such a man?
And yet the left said nothing.
The next night, Letterman hid behind joking to fantasize about the statutory rape of Palin’s 14-year-old daughter. His later “apology” only underscored his perversion:
“We were, as we often do, making jokes about people in the news. These are not jokes made about her 14-year-old daughter. I would never, never make jokes about raping or having sex of any description with a 14-year-old girl. Am I guilty of poor taste? Yes. Did I suggest that it was okay for her 14-year-old daughter to be having promiscuous sex? No.”
Then this jerk had the nerve to invite Palin on his show, as if nothing was wrong.
Excuse me, he fantasized Alex Rodriguez knocking up Palin’s 14-year-old daughter when Palin and the girl went to a ballgame.
A new low was hit in America.
Letterman will get away with it because liberal misogyny is OK in America. It has the Seal of Approval of the National Organization For Women.
Hey, support abortion and NOW and its pseudo feminists will let you get away with murder.
[UPDATE: I was wrong. After I wrote this, NOW placed Letterman in its media Hall of Shame. I apologize. My analysis of this development is here.]
It is crude and it is wrong. But then, so were American newspaper editors for making Tina Fey their “entertainer of the year” for cruelly mocking Palin last year.
Small wonder Fey gets along so well with co-star Alec Baldwin, whose crude voice-mail to his 13-year-old daughter should have made him unemployable for life. But he supports abortion, so OK. The girl had it coming.
Perez Hilton calling Carrie Prejean the C-word and the B-word. Liberals said nothing.
Then there is the Playboy online article on 10 conservative women the author would like to rape. To its credit, Playboy deleted the online article. But if you want to see a perverted liberal mind, read it here.
This is what happens when you do not look at people as individuals, but rather as members of a group. Many liberals think all women must act a certain way, otherwise they are deviants and therefore, targets. The same with black people. This is why Clarence Thomas and Michael Steele face racism that is not visited upon the president.
Believe it or not, this post was triggered by Republican Congresswoman Bachmann’s declaration that the American economy is the Titanic. She made a good point, so good that it showed why liberals mock her. The truth is, they cannot handle a strong, independent woman. Watching her speak, I realized just what is wrong with the people who mock her: They cannot handle it. The video.
UPDATE: Linked by Glenn Reynolds. And linked by Michelle Malkin.
Oh and follow my adventures on Twitter.
UPDATE II: The Palins to Letterman: No way are we going on your misogynist show. Their spokeswoman said: “The Palins have no intention of providing a ratings boost for David Letterman by appearing on his show. Plus, it would be wise to keep Willow away from David Letterman.”
UPDATE III: Dice Clay was run out of town on a liberal rail for saying similar things.
UPDATE IV: Chris Muir draws and quarters “Dice Clay” Letterman in a cartoon.
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Marc,
One of things that I thought was interesting about the article was the point that refusing to learn how to cook and refusing to learn how to change a tire are two sides of the same coin. It is the same weakness just using a different excuse.
Everyone has a right to make their own deals in relationships and marriage should be 100/100 not 50/50, As long as it just as social acceptable( imo it is not now) for a man to stay home it doesn't bother me if many more woman want to handle the bulk of the childcare and many more men want to handle the bulk of the earning.
However today most families have two spouses working full time. If both spouses are working, men should be helping with the domestic chores . I think they are which is why the men are cooking. I also really grateful my husband is a good cook.
I also think it makes a healthier society for men to have a closer relationship with their kids then they did historically. I have an uncle who never changed any of his five kids diapers but has changed his grandkids diapers. His grandkids have a much closer emotional relationship with him than his kids.
We have discussed this before but while think it is great that there are more women in the workforce . I believe women returning to work and family size shrinking was cause by mostly by economic reasons not feminist ones. Also, why is it valuable that something is evolutionary successful anyway?.
GM,
Why are you asking why I dislike Sarah Palin? You already know the answer.
There were sexist attacks on Sarah Palin and other conservatives some of it done by feminists who did not live up to their ideals . She and other conservatives were correctly also defended by feminists http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2008/09/sarah-palin-sexism-watch-6.html
There is also a reason that feminism is a separate movement from the rest of the left. Both the left and right have been sexist. All women conservative, liberal, and non political should should be defended from sexist attacks.
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Rachel to GM: "Why are you asking why I dislike Sarah Palin? You already know the answer."
A little cryptic for any newcomer. Unless it was the wardrobe issue I think it means Sarah Palin (outrageously) believes human life begins at conception. That supercedes Palin's support for Israel, disregards a fact Rachel posted that Jewish Law forbids the 98% of American abortions that are done for reasons of convenience, and brushes off Crafty's point that the issue constitutionally belongs with the states.
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Doug,
Sorry for the long delay
I wasn't so much going for cryptic as obnoxious. I'm sorry if you or anyone else was looking for something with more depth. Marc at one point told me I could discuss whatever I wanted and not participate in conversations I didn't want to. I'm taking him at his word.It is highly probable I will never again discuss abortion on this forum. Sarah Palin is a slightly different issue I believe her actions speak for themselves and if you disagree that is fine. As for the new visitors to the forum it is probably good for them to know I have a habit of exiting conversations just when things get interesting.
Saturday, Sept. 5, 2009 03:30 PDT
Feminists face off over the veil
http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/feature/2009/09/05/veil_debate/index.html
Pull up a chair and grab some popcorn, because there's another battle royal raging over the veil. In one corner, we have Naomi Wolf, third-wave feminist heavyweight and author of "The Beauty Myth," defending Muslim garb. In the other, we have Phyllis Chesler, second-waver and author of "The Death of Feminism," attacking both the veil and Wolf for daring to defend it.
"I do not mean to dismiss the many women leaders in the Muslim world who regard veiling as a means of controlling women. Choice is everything"
The first shot was fired with the Sydney Morning Herald's publication of an article by Wolf headlined "Behind the veil lives a thriving Muslim sexuality." She recounts her travels in Morocco, Jordan and Egypt, and the time she spent with women in "typical Muslim households." She observes, "It is not that Islam suppresses sexuality, but that it embodies a strongly developed sense of its appropriate channelling -- toward marriage, the bonds that sustain family life, and the attachment that secures a home." There was "demureness and propriety" outside of the home, "but inside, women were as interested in allure, seduction and pleasure as women anywhere in the world."
Then, Wolf turns to the inevitable comparison with Western styles of dress. Many of the Muslim women she spoke with said that revealing get-ups cause men to stare at and objectify them. Wearing a headscarf or chador, however, leads people to "relate to me as an individual, not an object," they told her. When Wolf went to the local bazaar wearing a shalwar kameez and a headscarf, which hid her womanly curves and wild hair, she "felt a novel sense of calm and serenity" and even, "in certain ways, free."
She ends the essay, however, with a colossal caveat:
I do not mean to dismiss the many women leaders in the Muslim world who regard veiling as a means of controlling women. Choice is everything. But Westerners should recognise that when a woman in France or Britain chooses a veil, it is not necessarily a sign of her repression. And, more importantly, when you choose your own miniskirt and halter top -- in a Western culture in which women are not so free to age, to be respected as mothers, workers or spiritual beings, and to disregard Madison Avenue -- it's worth thinking in a more nuanced way about what female freedom really means.
Wolf isn't defending forced veiling or even the veil itself. She's arguing in defense of women's individual experiences of veiling. Much like any decent anthropology 101 professor, Wolf is trying to force a shift in the perspective of her Western readers so that we might seriously consider the possibility that some Muslim women truly and legitimately see dressing scantily in public as repressive and experience covering up outside of their home as freeing. Let's not forget whom we're talking about here: Wolf penned "The Beauty Myth," a book that indicts all of the culturally specific ways that women's bodies are controlled and manipulated in the West.
Chesler is horrified by Wolf's argument and doesn't pull any punches in a blog response titled "The Burqa: Ultimate Feminist Choice?" It bears the taunting subhead: "Naomi Wolf Discovers That Shrouds Are Sexy." Chesler hyperbolizes Wolf's argument, suggesting that she sees women in chadors as "feminist ninja warriors" and "believes that the marital sex is hotter when women 'cover' and reveal their faces and bodies only to their husbands."
She goes on to contend that "most Muslim girls and women are not given a choice about wearing the chador, burqa, abaya, niqab, jilbab, or hijab (headscarf), and those who resist are beaten, threatened with death, arrested, caned or lashed, jailed, or honor murdered by their own families" and asks whether Wolf is so "thoroughly unfamiliar with the news coming out of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan on these very subjects." (Never mind that Wolf is talking specifically about the experiences of women she encountered in Morocco, Jordan and Egypt, as well as those of women in France and Britain, where there is great political resistance to Muslim dress.) This caused Wolf to e-mail Chesler to ask that she correct "terrible inaccuracies" in the post. Chesler hit back, posting Wolf's e-mail along with a hostile response; yesterday, she posted a related item with the subhead, "The Hundred Year War Begins."
It's hardly the beginning, though. This feminist debate is long under way. The cultural relativists are firmly rooted on one side; the absolutists are on the other. We can agree on some common ground: It's appropriate, as Chesler suggests, to talk about, and fight against, the ways that the veil is used to control women.
(This article has been shortened )
I find this article really interesting because modesty is something I have mixed feelings about it. Judaism especially orthodox Judaism values it highly and I get the point but I would certainly never take part in something that wouldn't let me wear jeans and thinks novel reading is bad.
I do l believe that in a healthy marriage partners should have secrets that they only tell each other. For both there should be aspects of your personality and parts of body that you are only sharing with each other.
A women who did not touch men other than her husband or family members talked about the first time she held her husband's hand as being incredibly erotic. I do clearly remember the first time I held my husband's hand but since I regularly shake hands and hug my male friends and acquaintances it probable didn't quite have the same zing. I definitively think having the freedom to have male friends is worth it though.
Modesty often is only mentioned in relation to girls or woman and the idea is clearly used to control woman
I don't see my self as a moral relativist or an absolutist. I believe the veiling your hair could or could not be a healthy choice (assuming they have a choice) for a woman. I don't believe the burqa or the total elimination of a public persona for woman ever could be a health choice .
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"Marc at one point told me I could discuss whatever I wanted and not participate in conversations I didn't want to. I'm taking him at his word"
Absolutely!
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"Marc at one point told me I could discuss whatever I wanted and not participate in conversations I didn't want to. I'm taking him at his word"
Absolutely!
In other words, pin Rachel on a topic and she disappears in a puff of smoke. :evil:
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Woof GM:
Rachel consistently brings excellent contributions to this forum, often from different perspectives than our usual ones. The relentness nature of martian discourse is not where most venusians prefer to invest their energies. She's a woman. That's the way it works :lol: We're glad to have her here.
TAC!
Marc
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- Chesler Chronicles - http://pajamasmedia.com/phyllischesler -
The Burqa: Ultimate Feminist Choice?
Posted By Phyllis Chesler On August 31, 2009 @ 8:10 am In Uncategorized | 214 Comments
Naomi Wolf Discovers That Shrouds Are Sexy
Women in chadors are really feminist ninja warriors. Rather than allow themselves to be gawked at by male strangers, they choose to defeat the “male gaze” by hiding from it in plain view.
But don’t you worry: Beneath that chador, abaya, burqa, or veil, there is a sexy courtesan wearing “Victoria Secret, elegant fashion, and skin care lotion,” just waiting for her husband to come home for a night of wild and sensuous marital lovemaking.
Obviously, these are not my ideas. I am quoting from a piece by Naomi Wolf [1] that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald a few days ago. Yes, Wolf is the bubbly, feminist author who once advised Vice President Al “The Climate” Gore on what colors he should wear while campaigning and who is or was friendly with Gore’s daughter. Full disclosure: I have casually known Wolf and her parents for more than a quarter-century.
Wolf recently traveled to Morocco, Jordan, and Eygpt, where she found the women “as interested in allure, seduction, and pleasure as women anywhere in the world.” Whew! What a relief. She writes:
“Many Muslim women I spoke with did not feel at all subjugated by the chador or the headscarf. On the contrary, they felt liberated from what they experienced as the intrusive, commodifying, basely sexualizing Western gaze. … Many women said something like this: …’how tiring it can be to be on display all the time. When I wear my headscarf or chador, people relate to me as an individual, not an object; I feel respected.’ This may not be expressed in a traditional Western feminist set of images, but it is a recognizably Western feminist set of feelings.”
Really? If so, I’m the Queen of England.
Now that Wolf is no longer the doe-eyed ingenue of yesteryear, she sees the advantage of not being on view at all times. A Westerner, “playing” Muslim-dress up, Wolf claims that hiding in plain view gave her “a novel sense of calm and serenity. I felt, yes, in certain ways, free.” In addition, Wolf believes that the marital sex is hotter when women “cover” and reveal their faces and bodies only to their husbands.
Marabel Morgan lives! In the mid-1970s, Morgan advised wives to greet their husbands at the door wearing sexy clothing and/or transparent saran wrap with only themselves underneath. Her book, Total Woman, sold more than ten million copies. According to Morgan, a Christian, “It’s only when a woman surrenders her life to her husband, reveres and worships him and is willing to serve him, that she becomes really beautiful to him.”
Well, what can I say? Here’s a few things.
Most Muslim girls and women are not given a choice about wearing the chador, burqa, abaya, niqab, jilbab, or hijab (headscarf), and those who resist are beaten, threatened with death, arrested, caned or lashed, jailed, or honor murdered by their own families. Is Wolfe thoroughly unfamiliar with the news coming out of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan on these very subjects? Has she forgotten the tragic, fiery deaths of those schoolgirls in Saudi Arabia who, in trying to flee their burning schoolhouse, were improperly veiled and who were beaten back by the all-powerful Saudi Morality Police?
Most Muslim girls and women are impoverished and wear rags, not expensive Western clothing beneath their coverings. Only the pampered, super-controlled, often isolated, and uber-materialistic daughters of wealth, mainly in the Gulf states, but also among the ruling classes in the Islamic world, match Wolf’s portrait of well kept courtesan-wives.
Being veiled and obedient does not save a Muslim girl or woman from being incested, battered, stalked, gang-raped, or maritally raped nor does it stop her husband from taking multiple wives and girlfriends or from frequenting brothels. A fully “covered” girl-child, anywhere between the ages of 10-15, may still be forced into an arranged marriage, perhaps with her first cousin, perhaps with a man old enough to be her grandfather, and she is not allowed to leave him, not even if he beats her black and blue every single day.
Wolf claims that she donned a “shalwar kameez and a headscarf” for a trip to the bazaar. I suggest that Wolf understand that the shalwar kameez and headscarf that she playfully wore in Morocco are not the problem.
I wonder how Wolf would feel if she’d donned a burqa, chador (full body bags) or niqab (face mask) for that same trip; how well she would do in an isolation chamber that effectively blocked her five senses and made it difficult, if not impossible, for her to communicate with others?
And, by the way, the eerie effect, ultimately, of shrouded women is that they become invisible. They cease to exist. They are literally ghosts.
Wolf presents the West as anti-woman because it treats women as sex objects. Am I happy about pornography and prostitution in the West? Hell no and, unlike Wolf, I’ve fought against them–but to portray these vices as a “Western” evil, and one that the Islamic world opposes, is sheer madness.
It is well known that the Arabs and Muslims kept and still keep sex slaves–they are very involved in the global trafficking in girls and women and frequent prostitutes on every continent. You will find pornography magazines in every princely tent–those for boys as well as for girls. I am told that the Saudis fly in fresh planeloads of Parisian prostitutes every week. Perhaps they veil them before they conduct their all-night and all-day orgies. Or, perhaps they view them as natural, “infidel” prey.
Let me suggest that Wolf read a book that is coming out in September, written by a Christian-American woman, Mary Laurel Ross, whose American Air Force husband trained the Saudi Air Force. It is called Veiled Honor and is a timely, comprehensive, “nuanced” (Wolf calls for “nuance” in our understanding of “female freedom”) account of her approximately fifteen year sojourn in Saudi Arabia. I would also suggest that Wolf read the works of Ayaan Hirsi Ali [2] (Infidel) and Nonie Darwish [3] (Cruel and Usual Punishment) for starters.
Then again, I suspect that Wolf is not necessarily looking for any “nuanced” truths about “female freedom” but is, rather, fishing for Saudi gold and positioning herself within the Democratic Party. After all, what she has written in this brief article supports President Obama’s position vis a vis the Muslim world.
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Article printed from Chesler Chronicles: http://pajamasmedia.com/phyllischesler
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/phyllischesler/2009/08/31/the-burqa-the-ultimate-feminist-choice/
URLs in this post:
[1] Naomi Wolf: http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/behind-the-veil-lives-a-thriving-muslim-sexuality/2008/08/29/1219516734637.html
[2] Ayaan Hirsi Ali: http://www.amazon.com/Infidel-Ayaan-Hirsi-Ali/dp/0743289692/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251730420&sr=8-1
[3] Nonie Darwish: http://www.amazon.com/Cruel-Usual-Punishment-Terrifying-Implications/dp/1595551611/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251730466&sr=1-1
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http://www.phyllis-chesler.com/books/the-death-of-feminism
The Death of Feminism.
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Marc,
Thank your for the kind words. I really appreciate it. I find your posts and other others on this forum valuable to me even when I don't agree with them. You have done a really great job of creating a place where people of different belief systems can interact . I really enjoy the ability to have my own tiny soap box when I want it.
GM certainly has a right to think what he wants. I don't personally agree with his interpretation but he does have evidence to support his position. Your interpretation of my behavior doesn't entirely make sense to me either.
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It was an effort at humor, apparently unsuccessful :lol:
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Honor killing spreads when those whose who practice it emigrate to Western countries
The Muslim Wolf at Feminism’s Door
By Daniel Greenfield Sunday, September 6, 2009
More than 5,000 women are victims of honor killings each year. Most of those women are Muslim, and while most of them are killed in Muslim countries—more and more of them are being killed in Europe, Canada and America. A 2007 study by Dr. Amin Muhammad and Dr. Sujay Patel in Canada’s Memorial Hospital observed that honor killing spreads when those whose who practice it emigrate to Western countries.
Honor killings however are only the final act in the drama of a Muslim woman’s life. Before that she is expected to walk behind a man, to be a second class citizen, to cover herself as much as possible in order to deflect male desire and to take the blame for the sexual intentions that men have toward her. She knows that if she fails to deflect male desire, she may suffer a variety of penalties from imprisonment to death. In countries like Saudi Arabia or Iran, those penalties are imposed by courts. In countries like Afghanistan or Pakistan, they are imposed by rough tribal justice. In the West, where there is no Islamic court system or tribal courts, they are imposed by the family.
The burka, the chador, the hijab or any of the other covering garments are assigned to Muslim women to “protect” them from men, and to protect men from them. These garments are meant to cover their “Awrah”, which in Arabic means nakedness, fault or defect. While for a Muslim man “Awrah” is only the swimsuit region, a Muslim woman is entirely “Awrah”.
Al-Qadhi Ibn-Al-Arabi Maliki states: “And all of a woman is ‘awrah; her body, her voice, and it is not permissible for her to uncover that unless out of necessity, or need such as witnessing in court, or a disease that is affecting her body…” [Ahkam Al Quran 3/1579]
Imam Al-Qurtubi stated went even further stating; “It is forbidden for a woman to speak when non-related men are present and it is forbidden for men to hear the voice of a non-mahram woman as long as there is no need for that.”
What that means is that all of a woman is “a zone of shame” and obscene. Even the sound of her voice is a form of “nakedness” or “lewdness”. Various Muslim authorities claim that this applies to even a woman’s fingernails and eyes. A woman who fails to dress this way is behaving obscenely and is open to being assaulted, as the Koranic verse which orders Muslim women to cover themselves makes clear.
“O Prophet! Tell thy wives and daughters, and the believing women, that they should cast their outer garments over their persons (when abroad): that is most convenient, that they should be known (as such) and not molested.” -Al-Ahzab:59 (Qur’an)
The key word here of course is “that they shall be known as such and not molested”. Conversely the failure to fully cover up (a covering that Mohammed demonstrated by cloaking himself and leaving only one eye uncovered in order to see) leaves them open to being molested under the code of “she was asking for it.”
In the wake of the brutal Sydney gang rapes in which the perpetrators told the victims and exchanged messages among themselves making it clear that the attacks were motivated by the girls being Australian and Christian, Australia’s top Muslim cleric, the infamous Sheikh Hilaly delivered a sermon stating;
“When it comes to rape, it’s 90 percent the woman’s responsibility. Why? Because a woman owns the weapon of seduction. It’s she who takes off her clothes, shortens them, flirts, puts on make-up and powder and takes to the streets, God protect us, dallying. It’s she who shortens, raises and lowers. Then, it’s a look, a smile, a conversation, a greeting, a talk, a date, a meeting, a crime, then Long Bay jail. Then you get a judge, who has no mercy, and he gives you 65 years.”
“But when it comes to this disaster, who started it? In his literature, writer al-Rafee says, if I came across a rape crime, I would discipline the man and order that the woman be jailed for life. Why would you do this, Rafee? He said because if she had not left the meat uncovered, the cat wouldn’t have snatched it.”
The “uncovered meat” were girls as young as 14, whom the attackers brutalized for hours. Their crime was that they were meat, and they had left themselves uncovered by failing to wear Chadours or Hijabs to prevent themselves from being “molested”.
This is the Muslim wolf that now stands growling outside the feminist door. The wolf dictates that women in any country with a sizable Muslim population have two choices, to cover up or be assaulted. By covering up the woman accepts her inferiority to the male. Refusing to do that could get her raped or killed. There is no third option within Islam. In Iraq, in Kashmir, in Pakistan; women have had acid thrown in their faces for not wearing the appropriate Muslim garb.
But why speak of countries under medieval Islamic laws, when you can speak of the “Free West”. A French survey found that 77 percent of the women who wear Hijabs did so because of threats by Islamist groups. 77 percent. France. We are not speaking about some backward little Third World nation where the tribal elders decide what goes. We are speaking of Paris, the glittering city of lights, the capital of art and music. The birthplace of Republican Europe.
This is what Hijab feminism looks like in France,
More often the girls were under orders from their fathers and uncles and brothers, and even their male classmates. For the boys, transforming a bluejeaned teen-age sister into a docile and observant “Muslim” virgin was a rite de passage into authority, the fast track to becoming a man, and more important, a Muslim man…. it was also a license for violence.
Girls who did not conform were excoriated, or chased, or beaten by fanatical young men meting out “Islamic justice.” Sometimes the girls were gang-raped. In 2002, an unveiled Muslim girl in the cite of Vitry-sur-Seine was burned alive by a boy she turned down.
Jane Kramer, Taking the Veil, New Yorker
Despite that 77 percent number, American feminists insist on fighting for “the right” of Muslim women in France and America to wear the veil. They might as well be fighting for the right of women to be barefoot and pregnant, since they are one and the same.
Much as they might eagerly parrot the propaganda of the Muslim Student Association, itself an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, regarding the veil being liberating, the veil is a statement of female submission and degradation. There is nothing feminist about being inferior. The hijab is part of a larger agenda to force Muslims in the West, and even non-Muslims to live under Islamic law. A law which states that women are inferior to men.
In the process apologists for Islam like Karen Armstrong or Noah Feldman misrepresent key Arabic words, for example defining “Awrah” as beauty, or “Zina” as meaning only adultery, or seizing on whatever property Sharia law allowed women to hold as feminist, while completely ignoring the larger issue that women were considered inferior by Mohammed and his men, and are considered inferior under Islamic law today. Not simply in theory, but in fact. A fact that expresses itself in the rapes, beatings and murders of women, both Muslim and non-Muslim, by Muslim men on a regular basis.
Rather than confront the threat to women posed by Islamic law, feminist authors like Naomi Wolf are instead claiming that the wolf is really a misunderstood poodle. They have tried to transform the Hijab into a statement of Muslim feminism, while completing ignoring the fact that the Hijab only exists because Islamic law views all of a woman as obscene and treats the woman’s presence in the public sphere as a source of Fitna and Zina, Discord and Immorality, that incites men to do immoral things, including rape her. Under Islam the woman is a threat to men that can only be rendered safe for men by fully covering her up and keeping her apart from men as much as possible.
Unfortunately Naomi Wolf, like most modern liberal feminists had no interest in defending those women
What does Naomi Wolf think is an urgent issue? Based on her blog, it isn’t women, but Muslim men. Specifically defending the sort of Muslim men who kill women who don’t wear the veil. Wolf’s blog is filled with posts fulminating against Guantanamo Bay and the plight of the Taliban and assorted other Islamists imprisoned there. The same men who if given a chance would have a knife to her neck in minutes.
This spring in Pakistan’s Sindh province alone, 40 honor killings took place. One woman took refuge in a police station, only to be handed over to her brother who killed her. A 14 year old girl was burned to death. Two women had acid poured on them after being raped. Two women had their noses chopped off for violating family honor. The Sindh province had been overrun by the Taliban.
Rather than writing about any of these women, Naomi Wolf instead wrote demanding to know “What Happened to Mohamed al-Hanashi?” Her article describes Mohamed al-Hanashi as “a young man” who could shed light on many crimes. Not the crimes of Islamist terrorists, but the crimes of the US in detaining in Islamist terrorists. At no point in time throughout the article does Naomi Wolf mention that Mohamed al-Hanashi was a member of the Taliban. The same Taliban which mandated complete covering for women, forbade women to be treated by male doctors or to get an education.
In April 2009, Sitara Achakzai, a leading women’s rights activist in Afghanistan, was murdered by the Taliban because she supported rights for women. 3 days later, Naomi Wolf did not write about her. Instead she wrote an article claiming that the American people had “blood on their hands” over Gitmo and demanded that we hold Nuremberg Trials to determine who gave the order to “torture” captured Al Queda and Taliban terrorists in order to gain information about future attacks against America.
Unfortunately Naomi Wolf, like most modern liberal feminists had no interest in defending those women, only in defending their abusers. While women were being murdered by the Taliban, she sweated blood and tears to defend members of the Taliban. Finally in August, Naomi Wolf went to a Muslim country, put on a headscarf and described how it made her feel free. That seems like a reasonable preparation for the sort of environment that Naomi Wolf and much of the feminist movement are helping to create for women in the West.
In 1984 the Party’s slogan is “Slavery is Freedom.” The political use of such an idea is that it is easier to enslave people, if they believe that being enslaved makes them free. It is why every one party Communist dictatorship made sure to call themselves a “Democratic People’s Republic”. It is why the Muslim Brotherhood fronts understand that it will be easier to sell Westerners on subjugation to Islam, if they believe that this subjugation makes them free.
For almost a decade, Wolf and those like her, have been assailing the brave men and women who helped liberate women from the Taliban… while fighting for the Taliban. In the name of freedom of course. The freedom of those who shot up girls’ schools, who threw teachers down staircases and beat women in the streets. Now the Muslim wolf has its snout thrust into half of Europe, into Australia, Canada and America. The honor killings continue to rise. Bodies continue to show up in hospitals and morgues. The bodies of the victims of Islam.
Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and freelance commentator. “Daniel comments on political affairs with a special focus on the War on Terror and the rising threat to Western Civilization. He maintains a blog at Sultanknish.blogspot.com.
Daniel can be reached at: sultanknish@yahoo.com
Printed from: http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/14454
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I don't see France being a great example because France has surrendered years ago and doesn't t protect it citizens period from Muslim thugs period . Jewish students have been forced to leave certain public schools because they were at risk and the principal told the parents I can't protect your child.
France should police those who commit violet crimes.
I regularly see woman in grocery stores and on the train with their hair covered and there have not been any Muslim honor killings in the area. I have also not heard of any rapes for woman not wearing the veil though that could be unreported.
Are you against all religious head coverings for woman or just the Muslim veil? Is an Orthodox Jewish woman wearing a wig just as repressed? Is a hat okay but wigs aren't ? I don't think wearing a veil or a wig is particularly feminist but I see freedom of religion or even freedom to make unhealthy choices as very important.Obviously feminism and religion or freedom and religion do not always coincide.
I do actually think that Islam is worse than Judaism because of how aggressive it is. Muslims don't just want to wear the veil themselves they want wear all woman to wear it as well, Christianity though to a much much lesser degree also shares the fault with Islam of my way being the only right way, Also historically Christianity converted with the sword. Religion and Exteminism can go together easily but I don't believe all Muslims are extremists.
Obviously honor kipping and rape are bad but can't you prosecute harshly honor killings and rapes and still let woman veil their hair
Isn't it possible to believe religious freedom is okay but religious coercion is not.
Are you saying the veil is like marijuana a gateway drug?
All good vacations must come to an end and it is likely I won't have time to post anything i write myself until this weekend.
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I'm just posting a piece that caught my eye. I am agnostic leaning toward atheistic and find most outward religious manifestations silly, but if folks need to dress a certain way to please their imaginary omnipotent friend, that's fine by me as long as I'm allowed to shake my head. Do note that a lot of the young ladies I see being dropped off at the college where I work arrive in burkhas, then appear in regular college kid garb, and then re-don the burkha for the ride home. Can't help but assume those young ladies would skip the quick change if there wasn't a pressing reason for doing so.
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I do actually think that Islam is worse than Judaism because of how aggressive it is. Muslims don't just want to wear the veil themselves they want wear all woman to wear it as well, Christianity though to a much much lesser degree also shares the fault with Islam of my way being the only right way, Also historically Christianity converted with the sword. Religion and Exteminism can go together easily but I don't believe all Muslims are extremists.
**Not every muslim is a jihadist, but every jihadist is a muslim. When christians converted by the sword, it was in violation with of core christian concepts, when muslims convert by the sword, it is in keeping with core islamic concepts.**
Obviously honor kipping and rape are bad but can't you prosecute harshly honor killings and rapes and still let woman veil their hair
Isn't it possible to believe religious freedom is okay but religious coercion is not.
Are you saying the veil is like marijuana a gateway drug?
All good vacations must come to an end and it is likely I won't have time to post anything i write myself until this weekend.
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How to Defeat the Left
By: David Horowitz
NewsReal | Friday, September 04, 2009
Visit NewsReal
I’ve been following the Newsreal debate between Phyllis Chesler and Jamie Glazov on the one hand and Naomi Wolf, who thinks America, the most “liberated” country on the face of the earth by any — any — progressive standard (treatment of minorities, of women, of the poor, freedom of the individual), is a proto-fascist state and needs a revolution, while the Islamo-fascist enemy, the greatest oppressor of women and minorities ever, needs a wrist slap. Wolf’s moral blindness is just a one minor instance of the general moral vacuity of progressives which for a hundred years has put them on the side of the totalitarian enemies of freedom and inspired their assault against the West.
This led Moshe Ya’alon, Israel’s Minister of Strategic Affairs and former chief of Israel’s Defense Forces, to describe the left as a “virus.” Actually, as Aaron Shuster pointed out in an email which I am about to cite, one could also say the left is in the grips of a virus — a virus that attacks its brain cells and makes it incapable of ingesting real world facts and consequently of arriving at reasonable judgments.
Radical feminism is one form of the virus. It is an ideology grown out of Marxism whose enemy is the freedom of the individual from collective control, and the freedom of society from the totalitarian state. That is why radical feminists are incapable of seeing the anti-feminist monster in Islam: because Islam is now the center of the revolt against the feminists’ real enemy, which is us.
The progressive virus is a religious virus. Political radicalism is an expression of the inability of human beings to live without meaning; it is the replacement of the hope for a divine redemption in a redemption by political activists, which inevitably leads to a totalitarian state.
The consequences of infection by the virus are described in my email from Shuster, who quotes writer Mladen Andrijasevic:
“The virus totally blocks the person from the ability to access, let alone comprehend, any facts and evidence that contradict his or her beliefs. Mountains of data have zero effect on already established views, simply because the person flatly rejects considering reading anything that would go against their ‘truth’. The person is terrified to look beyond his established viewpoint. They behave like the Church at the times of Galileo. They refuse to look through the telescope. For instance, during the past eight years, on numerous occasions, I have recommended to my left-wing friends several books on Islam by Ibn Warraq, Ibn Ishaq, Robert Spencer and others. Many borrowed the books, but they were never read. The power of the virus was stronger. The results of my eight-year effort were meager. Two people have read Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali.”
The strength of the virus derives from the meaning it supplies to meaningless lives, and the consequent good feelings — intoxicated feelings of virtue and self-righteousness — experienced by the devoted. Here Shuster quotes Melanie Phillips:
“A vital part of leftist thinking is the assumption that to be on the left is the only sensible/decent/principled position to hold and therefore cannot ever be wrong; and that is because to differ from the left is to be of ‘the right’, and the right is irredeemably evil. (The idea that to be opposed to the left is not necessarily to be on ‘the right’ or indeed to take any position other than to oppose ideology and its brutal effects is something that the left simply cannot get its head round). And so the true nightmare is that if ‘the right’ turns out to be actually right on anything and the left to be wrong, by accepting this fact the left-winger will by his own definition turn into an evil right-winger. His entire moral and political identity will crumble and he will grow horns and a tail. So to prevent any possibility of this catastrophe occurring, the opponent has to be eliminated.”
This why the only argument that leftists have in their public encounters with others is not an argument at all but an indictment: racist, sexist, homophobe, Islamophobe. In the religion of leftists — in the fevered universe of the virus — the world is an endless plain of battle in which forces of Good (leftists) are ranged against the forces of Evil (the rest of us). At stake is the redemption of the world — or as the environmental totalitarians like to put it, the survival of the planet. No wonder they are deaf to any fact or argument that would bring them back to earth.
The only way to defeat the left — and I have failed in twenty years of arguing this to persuade conservatives — is to turn the table around and attack their moral self-image. Leftists are in fact the enemies and oppressors of women, children, gays, minorities and the poor, and conservatives should never confront them without reminding them of this fact. If Naomi Wolf and her radical friends had their way, America would be disarmed and radical Islam would be triumphant and women would be back in the Middle Ages, and the rest of us along with them.
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David Horowitz is the founder of The David Horowitz Freedom Center and author of the new book, One Party Classroom.
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The insanity of same-sex parenting
David van Gend | 14 September 2009
I was at Pizza Hut with my three primary-age sons just after an Australian children's program, Play School, aired its lesbian "two mothers" episode. My youngest son asked very seriously, "Daddy, can two boys marry?" and the middle son stepped in, "No, but two girls can marry. They were talking about it at school".
I do not like strangers messing with the minds of my children. I object to anybody inserting disturbing notions into their sanely happy understanding of marriage and family.
Yet the disturbance is becoming all-pervasive, with an Australian Senate enquiry into the Greens-sponsored Marriage Equality Amendment Bill 2009, and the launch this week of a national television campaign for gay marriage. From the commanding heights of culture come strange decrees that two women, or two men, are just as good as a mother and father when it comes to raising a child. Who are these surreal city-dwellers, so out of touch with nature?
In the northern state of Queensland it was Premier Anna Bligh who announced last month that two men will be allowed to get a baby of their own by surrogacy. In Western Australia two homosexual men have already been given a child by adoption. In the southern state of Victoria two women are allowed to obtain a child using a stranger’s sperm, and be named as that child’s "two parents" on the birth certificate.
Think from the child’s perspective. A little girl should not have to look up and see two erotically involved men posing as her "parents". No matter how competent and caring a lesbian partner may be, she can never be a Dad to a young boy. Little children must not be subjected, by the law of the land, to a prolonged and uncontrolled experiment on their emotional development.
Anger with such governmental child abuse is entirely consistent with neighbourly friendliness to those fellow citizens afflicted with same-sex attraction. All privacy and respect is to be given to adults who have to live with this profoundly complex condition, but no little child is to be made to participate in their affliction.
A baby needs the love of both her mother and her father! How can anyone with normal experience of life question that? Certainly there are tragedies of a parent’s death or desertion which destroy the foundation of many a child’s world -- but that is a tragedy nobody would ever wish upon a child. Yet here the state deliberately inflicts this tragedy upon an innocent baby by decreeing that he or she will enter the world without even the possibility of both a Mum and a Dad.
No politicians have the authority to so violate the primal needs of a child or mess with the deep sanity of nature.
In such a debate, evidence from social science has only a secondary role. Certainly the best-designed studies confirm the obvious -- that a child does best in every respect when raised by his or her own parents, or in the nearest equivalent context of an adopting mother and father. In the light of this research, the American College of Pediatricians in 2004 concludes: "The environment in which children are reared is absolutely critical to their development. Given the current body of research, the American College of Pediatricians believes it is inappropriate, potentially hazardous to children, and dangerously irresponsible to change the age-old prohibition on homosexual parenting, whether by adoption, foster care, or by reproductive manipulation. This position is rooted in the best available science."
However, nobody needs to resort to "the best available science" to defend the obvious insight that a little child needs both a mother and a father. The judgment of anyone who cannot see this as a self-evident fact of life, as the most commonsense and necessary condition of a child’s wellbeing, is suspect.
As for political strategy, pro-family activists sometimes forget that defending marriage is meaningless if they cannot defend the right of a child to a natural upbringing. If homosexual adults are disallowed from calling their union "marriage" but are still allowed to obtain children by artificial means, then marriage is a dead word.
That is because marriage is primarily a license to form a family, not merely a license for sexual relations. As atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in Marriage and Morals (1929): "It is through children alone that sexual relations become of importance to society, and worthy to be taken cognizance of by a legal institution." Homosexual acts cannot create children; therefore the State has no interest in regulating homosexual relationships.
The legal institution of marriage buttresses a biological phenomenon for the sake of social stability. It is society’s way of binding a feral-by-nature male to his mate and his child, in order that a child can benefit from the complementary nurture of both a mother and father.
As David Blankenhorn wrote in The Future of Marriage (2007): "Marriage is fundamentally about the needs of children… Redefining marriage to include gay and lesbian couples would eliminate entirely in law, and weaken still further in culture, the basic idea of a mother and a father for every child."
Nothing less is at stake than that an innocent child, first opening her eyes in this world, should see the faces of those two people, her own mother and father, who together gave her life, not the faces of two men who will be her technologically-contrived, State-decreed "parents".
Time is running out to restrain the social vandals who write laws in our land. As Blankenhorn warned: "Once this proposed reform (of gay marriage) became law, even to say the words out loud in public -- ‘Every child needs a father and a mother’ -- would probably be viewed as explicitly divisive and discriminatory, possibly even as hate speech."
For the sake of all children yet to be born we must despise threats of "hate speech" and say out loud that every child needs the love of a father and a mother.
Dr David van Gend is a family doctor in Toowoomba, Australia.
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That is one of the best arguments I have heard against gay marriage. He puts the emphasis right where it belongs, the root of our society, children.
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I doubt many here that would want the power of the state used to interfere in the intimate affairs of consenting adults, just that we would avoid having the homosexual political agenda forced on us by the power of the state as well.
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Exactly.
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http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet/feature/2009/11/02/kristof_fistula/index.html
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Women with fistula: "The lepers of the 21st century"
Millions of women worldwide suffer from incontinence, infection and resulting stigma that a $300 surgery could fix
Kate Harding
Nov. 02, 2009 |
Among the many dangers, miseries and horrors experienced by millions of women worldwide and highlighted in Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's new book, "Half the Sky," obstetric fistulas -- small tears between the bladder and vagina or rectum and vagina, most often created during childbirth, leaving the woman incontinent -- are one of the few problems with an obvious solution. They're also one of the most invisible problems to those of us who live in wealthy countries where giving birth has become a much safer process, and fistula repair is easily accessed when necessary. But the 3 million to 4 million women living with untreated fistulas worldwide, wrote Kristof in the New York Times this weekend, are "the lepers of the 21st century." A woman with the condition "stinks. She becomes a pariah. She is typically abandoned by her husband and forced to live by herself on the edge of her village. She is scorned, bewildered, humiliated and desolate, often feeling cursed by God."
In a 2006 essay for Salon, American writer Abby Frucht described the experience of living with a fistula for five months between the hysterectomy that caused it (the doctor accidentally cut a hole between her bladder and vagina during surgery) and the time when she was healed enough to go in for the repair. Frucht availed herself of the accessible luxuries of a developed country -- adult disposable diapers, catheters, doctors who knew what to do about the infections fistula typically causes. And still, her description of how this tiny hole came to restrict her movements, affect her relationships, ruin her possessions, and routinely frustrate and humiliate her is shocking. "There's no sense rushing [to the toilet], no sense in toilets at all," she writes. "There's only this upended pitcher that I struggle to maintain is ordinary." Having some control over the time and place of elimination, something most of us take for granted, begins to look like a priceless gift. After she gets soaked in urine while shopping for a new coat, Frucht says, "The girls at the counter wrinkle their noses, stifle their horror. I imagine them making their casual way to a bathroom, relieving themselves. I imagine them wiping, drying themselves. Every woman I see, I think of this."
Frucht had to live that way for five months, with the support of a loving boyfriend who, in response to her fear that she'd be incontinent forever, said, "If there's nothing they can do about it, we'll live with it, Hon." Dr. Lewis Wall, an OB-GYN at Washington University in St. Louis, told Kristof, "In Liberia, I saw a woman who had developed a fistula 35 years earlier. It turned out to be a tiny injury; it took 20 minutes to repair it. For want of a 20-minute operation, this woman had lived in a pool of urine for 35 years." Of that surgery, which costs about $300, he says, "this is life-transforming for everybody who gets it done. It's astonishing. You take a human being who has been in the abyss of despair and -- boom! -- you have a transformed woman. She has her life back."
Since 1995, when he founded the Worldwide Fistula Fund, Lewis "has been campaigning tirelessly year after year to build a fistula hospital in West Africa." Finally, one is going to be built -- next to a leprosy hospital -- in Niger, with the aim not only of repairing fistulas but "organiz[ing] outreach efforts to promote maternal health and reduce deaths in childbirth. It will also undertake education and microfinance efforts to empower women more broadly." Lewis has a plan to build 40 such hospitals in developing countries, with the goal of eradicating fistula across the globe, at a cost of $1.5 billion, which he hopes Congress will approve as an American foreign aid program. Says Kristof, "I can't imagine a better use of foreign assistance dollars -- or better symbolism than having the most powerful nation on earth reach out to help the most stigmatized, suffering people on the planet."
To create the will to help those people, though, more of us will have to acknowledge that the problem exists and overcome our squeamishness enough to think and talk about it, to imagine "suffering constant infection and dripping urine, or feces, wherever [you] roam," as Frucht put it. We'll have to imagine what it's like to be shunned by your family and community for an injury that could be repaired with a short, $300 operation -- but never will be if you don't live in an area with a hospital equipped to do it. Kristof and WuDunn have brought attention to a long list of agonies and atrocities faced by women around the world, which, taken together, are so overwhelming it's hard to know where to begin addressing them. But here is one that actually has a clear solution that would immeasurably improve millions of lives.
-- Kate Harding
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Wow. I had no idea. :-o
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Me neither. :cry:
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Of course, the best chance most women in the 3rd world have of getting treatment for this will be from those icky christian missionaries or US military personnel.
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Here is an non-profit that helps
http://www.fistulafoundation.org/
November 1, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
New Life for the Pariahs
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/opinion/01kristof.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=print
Perhaps the most wretched people on this planet are those suffering obstetric fistulas.
This is a childbirth injury, often suffered by a teenager in Africa or Asia whose pelvis is not fully grown. She suffers obstructed labor, has no access to a C-section, and endures internal injuries that leave her incontinent — steadily trickling urine and sometimes feces through her vagina.
She stinks. She becomes a pariah. She is typically abandoned by her husband and forced to live by herself on the edge of her village. She is scorned, bewildered, humiliated and desolate, often feeling cursed by God.
I’ve met many of these women — or, often, girls of 13, 14, 15 — in half a dozen countries, for there are three million or four million of them around the world. They are the lepers of the 21st century.
Just about the happiest thing that can happen to such a woman is an encounter with Dr. Lewis Wall, an ob-gyn at Washington University in St. Louis. A quiet, self-effacing but relentless man of 59, Dr. Wall has devoted his life to helping these most voiceless of the voiceless, promoting the $300 surgeries that repair fistulas and typically return the patients to full health.
“There’s no more rewarding experience for a surgeon than a successful fistula repair,” Dr. Wall reflected. “There are a lot of operations you do that solve a problem — I can take out a uterus that has a tumor in it. But this is life-transforming for everybody who gets it done. It’s astonishing. You take a human being who has been in the abyss of despair and — boom! — you have a transformed woman. She has her life back.”
“In Liberia, I saw a woman who had developed a fistula 35 years earlier. It turned out to be a tiny injury; it took 20 minutes to repair it. For want of a 20-minute operation, this woman had lived in a pool of urine for 35 years.”
Dr. Wall started out as an anthropologist working in West Africa, and he speaks Hausa, an African language. But he concluded that the world needed doctors more than it needed anthropologists, so at age 27 he went to medical school.
He has had a dazzling career as an academic, writing several books and scores of journal articles, but his passion has been ending the scourge of fistulas. In 1995, he founded the Worldwide Fistula Fund, and he has been campaigning tirelessly year after year to build a fistula hospital in West Africa. That has been his life, his dream.
Now it is a reality.
The West African country of Niger recently approved Dr. Wall’s plan for a fistula hospital, affiliated with an existing leprosy hospital run by SIM, a Christian missionary organization. Eventually, when $850,000 in fund-raising is complete, a new 40-bed fistula hospital, modeled on the extremely successful Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital of Ethiopia, will rise on vacant ground next to the leprosy hospital. (For information on how to help, please visit my blog, nytimes.com/ontheground.)
For the time being, an existing operating theater in the leprosy hospital has been renovated for fistula repairs. Dr. Wall has already shipped a container of medical supplies to Niger, and he expects to go with a team to conduct the first fistula repairs there in December.
The day the final approval came through, Dr. Wall sent me an elated e-mail message with the news. “There are tears in my eyes,” he wrote.
Aside from repairing fistulas, the hospital will also organize outreach efforts to promote maternal health and reduce deaths in childbirth. It will also undertake education and microfinance efforts to empower women more broadly.
It could be just the beginning. The new hospital is part of a grand vision to eradicate fistulas worldwide by building 40 such hospitals in the world’s poorest countries. The plan, drawn up by Dr. Wall, would cost $1.5 billion over 12 years and operate as an American foreign aid program.
I can’t imagine a better use of foreign assistance dollars — or better symbolism than having the most powerful nation on earth reach out to help the most stigmatized, suffering people on the planet. The proposal for the global plan is circulating in Congress, the State Department and the White House, as well as among religious and aid organizations that are lining up to back it. President Obama hasn’t signaled a position yet, but I hope he will seize upon it.
The new fistula hospital in Niger is a tribute to the heroic doggedness of Dr. Wall, and with luck it will be replicated in many other countries. Anybody who has seen a fistula patient after surgery — a teenager’s shy, radiant smile at something so simple as being able to control her wastes — can’t conceive of a better investment.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
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Frankly, a lot of this PC by Pravda on the Hudson, apparently the first of a series, strikes me as PC drivel. Liberals and women are shocked! absolutely schocked! to discover that men in combat zones makes "inappropriate passes", stalk, intimidate, and worse.
Maybe the traditional Army knew something when the idea of putting women into combat zones first arose?!?
I've never served and stand ready to be educated by those who have, but to me even the sub-title of the series "a trust betrayed" bespeaks an appeal to "damsel in distress" archetypes.
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Women at Arms
A Peril in War Zones: Sexual Abuse by Fellow G.I.’s
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
Published: December 27, 2009
BAGHDAD — Capt. Margaret H. White began a relationship with a warrant officer while both were training to be deployed to Iraq. By the time they arrived this year at Camp Taji, north of here, she felt what she called “creepy vibes” and tried to break it off.
Specialist Erica A. Beck, a mechanic and gunner who served in in Iraq, recalled a sexual proposition she called “inappropriate.” She did not report it, she said, because she feared that her commanders would have reacted harshly — toward her.
Women at Arms
A Trust Betrayed
In the claustrophobic confines of a combat post, it was not easy to do. He left notes on the door to her quarters, alternately pleading and menacing. He forced her to have sex, she said. He asked her to marry him, though he was already married. He waited for her outside the women’s latrines or her quarters, once for three hours.
“It got to the point that I felt safer outside the wire,” Captain White said, referring to operations that take soldiers off their heavily fortified bases, “than I did taking a shower.”
Her ordeal ended with the military equivalent of a restraining order and charges of stalking against the officer. It is one case that highlights the new and often messy reality the military has had to face as men and women serve side by side in combat zones more than ever before.
Sexual harassment and sexual assault, which the military now defines broadly to include not only rape but also crimes like groping and stalking, continue to afflict the ranks, and by some measures are rising. While tens of thousands of women have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, often in combat, often with distinction, the integration of men and women in places like Camp Taji has forced to the surface issues that commanders rarely, if ever confronted before.
The military — belatedly, critics say — has radically changed the way it handles sexual abuse in particular, expanding access to treatment and toughening rules for prosecution. In the hardships of war, though, the effects of the changes remain unclear.
The strains of combat, close quarters in remote locations, tension and even boredom can create the conditions for abuse, even as they hinder medical care for victims and legal proceedings against those who attack them.
Captain White said she had feared coming forward, despite having become increasingly despondent and suffered panic attacks, because she was wary of she-said-he-said recriminations that would reverberate through the tightknit military world and disrupt the mission. Despite the military’s stated “zero tolerance” for abuse or harassment, she had no confidence her case would be taken seriously and so tried to cope on her own, Captain White said.
A Pentagon-appointed task force, in a report released this month, pointedly criticized the military’s efforts to prevent sexual abuse, citing the “unique stresses” of deployments in places like Camp Taji. “Some military personnel indicated that predators may believe they will not be held accountable for their misconduct during deployment because commanders’ focus on the mission overshadows other concerns,” the report said.
That, among other reasons, is why sexual assault and harassment go unreported far more often than not. “You’re in the middle of a war zone,” Captain White said, reflecting a fear many military women describe of being seen, somehow, as harming the mission.
“So it’s kind of like that one little thing is nothing compared with ‘There is an I.E.D. that went off in this convoy today and three people were injured,’ ” she said, referring to an improvised explosive device.
Common Fears
By the Pentagon’s own estimate, as few as 10 percent of sexual assaults are reported, far lower than the percentage reported in the civilian world. Specialist Erica A. Beck, a mechanic and gunner who served in Diyala Province in Iraq this summer, recalled a sexual proposition she called “inappropriate” during her first tour in the country in 2006-7. “Not necessarily being vulgar, but he, you know, was asking for favors,” she said.
She did not report it, she said, because she feared that her commanders would have reacted harshly — toward her.
“It was harassment,” she said. “And because it was a warrant officer, I didn’t say anything. I was just a private.”
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Her fears were common, according to soldiers and advocates who remain skeptical of the military’s efforts to address abuse. A report last year by the Government Accountability Office concluded that victims were reluctant to report attacks “for a variety of reasons, including the belief that nothing would be done or that reporting an incident would negatively impact their careers.”
When Sgt. Tracey R. Phillips told a superior about an unwanted sexual advance from a private the night their unit arrived in Iraq in May, the accusations unleashed a flurry of charges and countercharges, an initial investigation of her on charges of adultery, a crime in the military justice system, and, according to her account, violations by her commanders of the new procedures meant to ease reporting of abuse.
In the end, she was kicked out of Iraq and the Army itself, while the private remained on duty here.
The military disputed her account but declined to state the reasons for sending her out of Iraq. Her paperwork showed that she received an honorable discharge, though with “serious misconduct” cited as the reason. The so-called misconduct, she said, stemmed from the Army’s allegation that she had had an inappropriate relationship with the private she accused. She denied that.
“If I would have never, ever, ever said anything, I wouldn’t be sitting here,” she said in an interview at her parents’ home near San Antonio. “I’d still be in Iraq.”
At bases around Iraq, many said that acceptance and respect for women in uniform were now more common than the opposite. In part, they said, that reflects a sweeping change in military culture that has accompanied the rise of women through the ranks and into more positions once reserved for men.
“It’s not tolerated — it’s just not,” said Lt. Brenda L. Beegle, a married military police officer, referring to sexual harassment and abuse.
In an interview at Liberty Base, near Baghdad’s airport, she said: “Everyone has heard stories about bad things that have happened. I’ve never had an issue.”
Although exact comparisons to the civilian world are difficult because of different methods of defining and reporting abuse, Pentagon officials and some experts say that the incidence of abuse in the military appears to be no higher than in society generally, and might be lower. It appears to be even lower in combat operations than at bases in the United States, because of stricter discipline and scrutiny during deployments, as well as restrictions on alcohol, which is often a factor in assaults, for example, on college campuses.
Complaints Increase
The number of complaints, though, is rising. Across the military, there were 2,908 reported cases of sexual abuse involving service members as victims or assailants, in the fiscal year that ended in September 2008, the last year for which the Pentagon made numbers available. That was an 8 percent increase from the previous year, when there were 2,688.
In the turbulent regions from Egypt to Afghanistan where most American combat troops are now deployed, the increase in reported cases was even sharper: 251 cases, compared with 174 the year before, a 44 percent increase. The number in Iraq rose to 143, from 112 the year before. Everyone agrees that those represent only a fraction of the instances of assault, let alone harassment.
“A woman in the military is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in Iraq,” Representative Jane Harman, a Democrat from California, said at a Congressional hearing this year, repeating an assertion she has made a refrain in a campaign of hers to force the military to do more to address abuses.
At least 10 percent of the victims in the last year were men, a reality that the Pentagon’s task force said the armed services had done practically nothing to address in terms of counseling, treatment and prosecution. Men are considered even less likely to report attacks, officials said, because of the stigma, and fears that their own sexual orientation would be questioned. In the majority of the reported cases, the attacker was male.
Senior Pentagon officials argued that the increase in reports did not necessarily signify a higher number of attacks. Rather, they said, there is now a greater awareness as well as an improved command climate, encouraging more victims to come forward.
“We believe the increase in the number of reported cases means the department is capturing a greater proportion of the cases that occurred during the year, which is good news,” said the Pentagon’s senior official overseeing abuse policies, Kaye Whitley.
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The military can no more eradicate sexual abuse than can society in general, but soldiers, officers and experts acknowledge that it is particularly harmful when soldiers are in combat zones, affecting not only the victims but also, as the military relies more than ever on women when the nation goes to war, the mission.
“For the military the potential costs are even higher as it can also negatively impact mission readiness,” the Pentagon’s annual report on sexual abuse said, referring to sexual violence. “Service members risk their lives for one another and bear the responsibility of keeping fellow service members out of harm’s way. Sexual assault in the military breaks this bond.”
Even investigations into accusations, which are often difficult to prove, can disrupt operations. In Sergeant Phillips’s case, she was relieved of her duties leading a squad of soldiers refueling emergency rescue helicopters and other aircraft at Camp Kalsu, south of Baghdad.
Cases like hers suggest that the vagaries of sex and sexual abuse, especially in combat zones, continue to vex commanders on the ground, despite the transformation of the military’s policies.
The majority of sexual abuse allegations end with no prosecution at all. Of 2,171 suspects of investigations that were completed during the fiscal year that ended in September 2008, only 317 faced a court-martial. Another 515 faced administrative punishments or discharges. Nearly half of the completed investigations lacked evidence or were “unsubstantiated or unfounded.”
The Pentagon, facing criticism, maintains that it has transformed the way it handles sexual abuse. In the wake of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as highly publicized cases and revelations of rampant abuse at the Air Force Academy in 2003, the Pentagon created a single agency to oversee the issue and rewrote the rules of reporting, treatment and prosecution. Beginning in October 2007, the Uniform Code of Military Justice expanded the provision that once covered rape — Article 120 — to include other offenses, like indecent exposure and stalking.
The Army, which has provided the bulk of the forces in Iraq, has increased the number of investigators and lawyers trained to investigate accusations. Most bases now have kits to collect forensic evidence in rape cases, which was not the case immediately after the invasion in 2003.
Larger field hospitals in Balad and Mosul now have the same type of sexual assault nurse examiners widely used in the civilian world, as well as a dozen other examiners who are not nurses but are trained to conduct forensic examinations.
The military has set up a system of confidential advisers women can turn to who are outside the usual chain of command — an avenue Sergeant Phillips said she had been denied.
If they want to, the women can now seek medical treatment and counseling without setting off a criminal investigation. And all the services have started educational programs to address aspects of a hierarchical warrior culture that some say contributes to hostility toward women. Posters for the campaign blanket bulletin boards in offices, chow halls and recreational buildings on bases across Iraq.
The military’s efforts, however well intentioned, are often undermined by commanders who are skeptical or even conflicted, suspicious of accusations and fearful that reports of abuse reflect badly on their commands. The Pentagon task force also reported that victims of assault did not come forward because they might “have engaged in misconduct for which they could be disciplined, such as under-age drinking, fraternization or adultery.”
Marti Ribeiro, then an Air Force sergeant, said she was raped by another soldier after she stepped away from a guard post in Afghanistan in 2006 to smoke a cigarette, a story first recounted in “The Lonely Soldier,” a book by Helen Benedictabout women who served in Iraq and elsewhere. When she went to the abuse coordinator, she was threatened with prosecution for having left her weapon and her post.
“I didn’t get any help at all, let alone compassion,” said Ms. Ribeiro, who has since retired and joined the Service Women’s Action Network, a new advocacy organization devoted to shaping the Pentagon’s policy.
The hardships of combat operations often compound the anguish of victims and complicate investigations, as well as counseling and treatment. The Government Accountability Office suggested that the “unique living and social circumstances” of combat posts heightened the risk for assault. Both the G.A.O. and the Pentagon’s task force found that, despite the Pentagon’s policy, remote bases did not have adequate medical and mental health services for victims. The task force also found that abuse coordinators and victim advocates were often ill trained or absent.
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As a result, victims often suffer the consequences alone, working in the heat and dust, living in trailers surrounded by gravel and concrete blast walls, with nowhere private to retreat to. In Captain White’s case, she had to work and live beside the man who assaulted and stalked her until their deployment ended in August and they both went home.
“You’re in such a fishbowl,” she said. “You can’t really get away from someone. You see him in the chow hall. You see him in the gym.”
The Danger Nearby
Captain White’s case is typical of many here, according to military lawyers and experts, in that she knew the man she said assaulted her, circumstances that complicated the investigation and prosecution.
She had dated the warrant officer when they arrived in Fort Dix, N.J., for predeployment training with the 56th Stryker Combat Team. The newly revised article of the Uniform Code of Military Justice says that “a current or previous dating relationship by itself” does not constitute consent.
Once at Camp Taji, a sprawling base just north of Baghdad, she grew troubled by his behavior. He cajoled her with presents and sent her e-mail messages. She said that for fear of running into him, she stopped drinking water after 7 p.m. so she would not have to go to the latrine at night alone.
She never came forward herself. Her case came to light only when military prosecutors questioned her about another investigation involving the warrant officer. He was ultimately charged with 19 offenses, said Lt. Col. Philip J. Smith, a spokesman for the division that oversaw operations in central Iraq. The charges included seven counts of fraternization and two of adultery, interfering with an investigation and, in Captain White’s case, stalking.
After their deployment ended in September, the officer pleaded guilty and resigned from the Army in lieu of prosecution, Colonel Smith said.
Captain White said that she was satisfied with the legal outcome of her case, though her account of it highlighted the emotional strains that sexual abuse causes.
“I’m not saying that I handled it the best way,” she said in an interview after her own retirement from the Army, “but I handled it at the time and in the situation what I thought was the best way, which was just to keep my head down, keep going — which was kind of an Army thing to say: Drive on.”
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I don't agree with everything in this article but I found it fascinating and I think most women and many men who don't self promote should read it. The comment section is excellent. I would say that part of the solution to woman not knowing how to sell themselves is education and mentoring. There is swearing in the article.
A Rant About Women
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/01/a-rant-about-women/comment-page-2/#comments
So I get email from a good former student, applying for a job and asking for a recommendation. “Sure”, I say, “Tell me what you think I should say.” I then get a draft letter back in which the student has described their work and fitness for the job in terms so superlative it would make an Assistant Brand Manager blush.
So I write my letter, looking over the student’s self-assessment and toning it down so that it sounds like it’s coming from a person and not a PR department, and send it off. And then, as I get over my annoyance, I realize that, by overstating their abilities, the student has probably gotten the best letter out of me they could have gotten.
Now, can you guess the gender of the student involved?
Of course you can. My home, the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, is fairly gender-balanced, and I’ve taught about as many women as men over the last decade. In theory, the gender of my former student should be a coin-toss. In practice, I might as well have given him the pseudonym Moustache McMasculine for all the mystery there was. And I’ve grown increasingly worried that most of the women in the department, past or present, simply couldn’t write a letter like that.
This worry isn’t about psychology; I’m not concerned that women don’t engage in enough building of self-confidence or self-esteem. I’m worried about something much simpler: not enough women have what it takes to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks.
Remember David Hampton, the con artist immortalized in “Six Degrees of Separation”, who pretended he was Sydney Poitier’s son? He lied his way into restaurants and clubs, managed to borrow money, and crashed in celebrity guest rooms. He didn’t miss the fact that he was taking a risk, or that he might suffer. He just didn’t care.
It’s not that women will be better off being con artists; a lot of con artists aren’t better off being con artists either. It’s just that until women have role models who are willing to risk incarceration to get ahead, they’ll miss out on channelling smaller amounts of self-promoting con artistry to get what they want, and if they can’t do that, they’ll get less of what they want than they want.
There is no upper limit to the risks men are willing to take in order to succeed, and if there is an upper limit for women, they will succeed less. They will also end up in jail less, but I don’t think we get the rewards without the risks.
* * *
When I was 19 and three days into my freshman year, I went to see Bill Warfel, the head of grad theater design (my chosen profession, back in the day), to ask if I could enroll in a design course. He asked me two questions. The first was “How’s your drawing?” Not so good, I replied. (I could barely draw in those days.) “OK, how’s your drafting?” I realized this was it. I could either go for a set design or lighting design course, and since I couldn’t draw or draft well, I couldn’t take either.
“My drafting’s fine”, I said.
That’s the kind of behavior I mean. I sat in the office of someone I admired and feared, someone who was the gatekeeper for something I wanted, and I lied to his face. We talked some more and then he said “Ok, you can take my class.” And I ran to the local art supply place and bought a drafting board, since I had to start practicing.
That got me in the door. I learned to draft, Bill became my teacher and mentor, and four years later I moved to New York and started doing my own design work. I can’t say my ability to earn a living in that fickle profession was because of my behavior in Bill’s office, but I can say it was because I was willing to do that kind of thing. The difference between me and David Hampton isn’t that he’s a con artist and I’m not; the difference is that I only told lies I could live up to, and I knew when to stop. That’s not a different type of behavior, it’s just a different amount.
And it looks to me like women in general, and the women whose educations I am responsible for in particular, are often lousy at those kinds of behaviors, even when the situation calls for it. They aren’t just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so. Whatever bad things you can say about those behaviors, you can’t say they are underrepresented among people who have changed the world.
Now this is asking women to behave more like men, but so what? We ask people to cross gender lines all the time. We’re in the middle of a generations-long project to encourage men to be better listeners and more sensitive partners, to take more account of others’ feelings and to let out our own feelings more. Similarly, I see colleges spending time and effort teaching women strategies for self-defense, including direct physical aggression. I sometimes wonder what would happen, though, if my college spent as much effort teaching women self-advancement as self-defense.
* * *
Some of the reason these strategies succeed is because we live in a world where women are discriminated against. However, even in an ideal future, self-promotion will be a skill that produces disproportionate rewards, and if skill at self-promotion remains disproportionately male, those rewards will as well. This isn’t because of oppression, it’s because of freedom.
Citizens of the developed world have an unprecedented amount of freedom to choose how we live, which means we experience life as a giant distributed discovery problem: What should I do? Where should I work? Who should I spend my time with? In most cases, there is no right answer, just tradeoffs. Many of these tradeoffs happen in the market; for everything from what you should eat to where you should live, there is a menu of options, and between your preferences and your budget, you’ll make a choice.
Some markets, though, are two-sided — while you are weighing your options, those options are also weighing you. People fortunate enough to have those options quickly discover that it’s not enough to decide you want to go to Swarthmore, or get money out of Kleiner Perkins. Those institutions must also decide if they will have you.
Some of the most important opportunities we have are in two-sided markets: education and employment, contracts and loans, grants and prizes. And the institutions that offer these opportunities operate in an environment where accurate information is hard to come by. One of their main sources of judgment is asking the candidate directly: Tell us why we should admit you. Tell us why we should hire you. Tell us why we should give you a grant. Tell us why we should promote you.
In these circumstances, people who don’t raise their hands don’t get called on, and people who raise their hands timidly get called on less. Some of this is because assertive people get noticed more easily, but some of it is because raising your hand is itself a high-cost signal that you are willing to risk public failure in order to try something.
That in turn correlates with many of the skills the candidate will need to actually do the work — to recruit colleagues and raise money, to motivate participants and convince skeptics, to persevere in the face of both obstacles and ridicule. Institutions assessing the fitness of candidates, in other words, often select self-promoters because self-promotion is tied to other characteristics needed for success.
It’s tempting to imagine that women could be forceful and self-confident without being arrogant or jerky, but that’s a false hope, because it’s other people who get to decide when they think you’re a jerk, and trying to stay under that threshold means giving those people veto power over your actions. To put yourself forward as someone good enough to do interesting things is, by definition, to expose yourself to all kinds of negative judgments, and as far as I can tell, the fact that other people get to decide what they think of your behavior leaves only two strategies for not suffering from those judgments: not doing anything, or not caring about the reaction.
* * *
Not caring works surprisingly well. Another of my great former students, now a peer and a friend, saw a request from a magazine reporter doing a tech story and looking for examples. My friend, who’d previously been too quiet about her work, decided to write the reporter and say “My work is awesome. You should write about it.”
The reporter looked at her work and wrote back saying “Your work is indeed awesome, and I will write about it. I also have to tell you you are the only woman who suggested her own work. Men do that all the time, but women wait for someone else to recommend them.” My friend stopped waiting, and now her work is getting the attention it deserves.
If you walked into my department at NYU, you wouldn’t say “Oh my, look how much more talented the men are than the women.” The level and variety of creative energy in the place is still breathtaking to me, and it’s not divided by gender. However, you would be justified in saying “I bet that the students who get famous five years from now will include more men than women”, because that’s what happens, year after year. My friend talking to the reporter remains the sad exception.
Part of this sorting out of careers is sexism, but part of it is that men are just better at being arrogant, and less concerned about people thinking we’re stupid (often correctly, it should be noted) for trying things we’re not qualified for.
Now I don’t know what to do about this problem. (The essence of a rant, in fact, is that the ranter has no idea how to fix the thing being ranted about.) What I do know is this: it would be good if more women see interesting opportunities that they might not be qualified for, opportunities which they might in fact fuck up if they try to take them on, and then try to take them on. It would be good if more women got in the habit of raising their hands and saying “I can do that. Sign me up. My work is awesome,” no matter how many people that behavior upsets.
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http://reason.com/blog/2010/01/17/shirky-women-need-to-strap-on
Reason Magazine
Shirky: Women Need to Strap On Some Balls
Tim Cavanaugh | January 17, 2010
World's Most Magnificent Supergenius Clay Shirky can extrapolate Women's Problems from a single data point: an overly pushy male grad student who bullied Shirky into giving him a better recommendation than he deserved. From this experience, Shirky propounds a General Theory of Maleness that is (we're happy to report) fully adaptable to the female subset of maleness:
The difference between me and [Six Degrees of Separation-inspiring con artist] David Hampton isn’t that he’s a con artist and I’m not; the difference is that I only told lies I could live up to, and I knew when to stop. That’s not a different type of behavior, it’s just a different amount.
And it looks to me like women in general, and the women whose educations I am responsible for in particular, are often lousy at those kinds of behaviors, even when the situation calls for it. They aren’t just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so. Whatever bad things you can say about those behaviors, you can’t say they are underrepresented among people who have changed the world.
Now this is asking women to behave more like men, but so what? We ask people to cross gender lines all the time. We’re in the middle of a generations-long project to encourage men to be better listeners and more sensitive partners, to take more account of others’ feelings and to let out our own feelings more. Similarly, I see colleges spending time and effort teaching women strategies for self-defense, including direct physical aggression. I sometimes wonder what would happen, though, if my college spent as much effort teaching women self-advancement as self-defense.
Fun, fun, fun -- and remember, it's daddy who takes the T-Bird away. I'm too much of a sniveling gamma/epsilon male to draw a conclusion as beefy as Shirky's, but I am surprised to see what levels of subordination some professional women remain willing to accept, at least in traditional office environments. But I would emphasize the some back there, and in fact the biggest self-promoter I ever met was a female of the opposite sex. Maybe things are different at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, but I'm not sure how representative of the private sector ITPANYU is.
Before addressing the issue of what women don't want, I note that narcissism has never in my experience added to the magnificence of any project, nor has self-aggrandizement created any wealth, nor has self-advancement achieved anything other than capturing a bigger share of an existing pie for the self-promoter. It may be true that these qualities are well represented among world changers, whoever they are. And I presume the majority of world changers have been men up to this point. But we don't have a counterhistory wherein some effort to protect equal rights for women has been in place since ancient Greek civilization (or I should say: the matriarchal civilization that the Greeks stole everything from!). So I'm not sure we should complain that the workforce might be seeing comparatively fewer of these male virtues in the future, or expect that the world will be changing any more slowly as a result.
As to whether women need to be more pushy, less pushy, or just right, I believe this falls into Cavanaugh's General Theory of 33.3. About a third of women are Daddy's Girls; another third are dominant, secure, self-confident, nasty, violent, selfish, independent, proud, thrill-seeking, free-wheeling, arrogant females; and the rest don't care enough to have an opinion. These percentages vary with events and movements, but regress to stability. There are mirror categories for men, and for the most part members of each group mate and procreate with members of their corresponding categories.
The recession has revealed more brittleness in the job market for men than for women. In school, girls are outperforming boys at rates that alarm the squares. Women's relative financial attainment continues to grow at a rate remarkable for an economy as advanced and sclerotic as America's. So I'm not sure we have a problem, other than the ancient problem that men continue to give women something they don't need: advice.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/opinion/04kristof.html?em
Divorced Before Puberty
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: March 3, 2010
It’s hard to imagine that there have been many younger divorcées — or braver ones — than a pint-size third grader named Nujood Ali. Nujood is a Yemeni girl, and it’s no coincidence that Yemen abounds both in child brides and in terrorists (and now, thanks to Nujood, children who have been divorced). Societies that repress women tend to be prone to violence.
For Nujood, the nightmare began at age 10 when her family told her that she would be marrying a deliveryman in his 30s. Although Nujood’s mother was unhappy, she did not protest. “In our country it’s the men who give the orders, and the women who follow them,” Nujood writes in a powerful new autobiography just published in the United States this week, “I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced.”
Her new husband forced her to drop out of school (she was in the second grade) because a married woman shouldn’t be a student. At her wedding, Nujood sat in the corner, her face swollen from crying.
Nujood’s father asked the husband not to touch her until a year after she had had her first menstrual period. But as soon as they were married, she writes, her husband forced himself on her.
He soon began to beat her as well, the memoir says, and her new mother-in-law offered no sympathy. “Hit her even harder,” the mother-in-law would tell her son.
Nujood had heard that judges could grant divorces, so one day she sneaked away, jumped into a taxi and asked to go to the courthouse.
“I want to talk to the judge,” the book quotes Nujood as forlornly telling a woman in the courthouse.
“Which judge are you looking for?”
“I just want to speak to a judge, that’s all.”
“But there are lots of judges in this courthouse.”
“Take me to a judge — it doesn’t matter which one!”
When she finally encountered a judge, Nujood declared firmly: “I want a divorce!”
Yemeni journalists turned Nujood into a cause célèbre, and she eventually won her divorce. The publicity inspired others, including an 8-year-old Saudi girl married to a man in his 50s, to seek annulments and divorces.
As a pioneer, Nujood came to the United States and was honored in 2008 as one of Glamour magazine’s “Women of the Year.” Indeed, Nujood is probably the only third grader whom Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has described as “one of the greatest women I have ever seen.”
Nujood’s memoir spent five weeks as the No. 1 best-seller in France. It is being published in 18 other languages, including her own native language of Arabic.
I asked Nujood, now 12, what she thought of her life as a best-selling author. She said the foreign editions didn’t matter much to her, but she was looking forward to seeing it in Arabic. Since her divorce, she has returned to school and to her own family, which she is supporting with her book royalties.
At first, Nujood’s brothers criticized her for shaming the family. But now that Nujood is the main breadwinner, everybody sees things a bit differently. “They’re very nice to her now,” said Khadija al-Salami, a filmmaker who mentors Nujood and who translated for me. “They treat her like a queen.”
Yemen is one of my favorite countries, with glorious architecture and enormously hospitable people. Yet Yemen appears to be a time bomb. It is a hothouse for Al Qaeda and also faces an on-and-off war in the north and a secessionist movement in the south. It’s no coincidence that Yemen is also ranked dead last in the World Economic Forum’s global gender gap index.
There are a couple of reasons countries that marginalize women often end up unstable.
First, those countries usually have very high birth rates, and that means a youth bulge in the population. One of the factors that most correlates to social conflict is the proportion of young men ages 15 to 24.
Second, those countries also tend to practice polygamy and have higher death rates for girls. That means fewer marriageable women — and more frustrated bachelors to be recruited by extremists.
So educating Nujood and giving her a chance to become a lawyer — her dream — isn’t just a matter of fairness. It’s also a way to help tame the entire country.
Consider Bangladesh. After it split off from Pakistan, Bangladesh began to educate girls in a way that Pakistan has never done. The educated women staffed an emerging garment industry and civil society, and those educated women are one reason Bangladesh is today far more stable than Pakistan.
The United States last month announced $150 million in military assistance for Yemen to fight extremists. In contrast, it costs just $50 to send a girl to public school for a year — and little girls like Nujood may prove more effective than missiles at defeating terrorists.
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Which is why little girls in Afpakia going to school and their teachers are often killed or have acid thrown in their faces. For the fcukers who do this, they need to be militarily assisted into meeting their 72 virgins and people need to see that this is what happens to such fcukers.
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March 14, 2010
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Driving Miss Saudi
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/opinion/14dowd.html?pagewanted=print
By MAUREEN DOWD
In other capitals of the world, it would not have been an extraordinary scene.
An opening at a hot new art gallery with men and women mingling and enjoying themselves.
But in this case, part of the frisson was nerves. Would the marauding religious police see unmarried — and some uncovered — women talking freely with men in the merry crowd of 600 and stage a raid?
It was an unlikely moment, SoHo comes to Saudi Arabia — the first mixed exhibition anyone can remember in Riyadh, the stultifying capital of a country that bans any exhibition of skin, fun or romance.
But the most astonishing part was that the Islamic purity enforcers failed to show up at Art Pure.
“I was worried, but the religious police just sort of disappeared,” recalled Mounira Ajlani, the mother of Noura Bouzo, a 27-year-old artist featured at the exhibition who painted the saucy “Saudi Bling.” “It was very relaxed, very normal. Everyone was saying, ‘Are we in Saudi Arabia?’ ”
Sarah, a young Saudi professional who was at the gallery that night, agreed: “It was remarkable. You saw women covered from head to toe. You saw women uncovered. You saw men of all different classes come, and they were extremely comfortable, and everyone looked at the art and left.”
Progress is measured by a sundial in this stunted desert kingdom. Sarah dryly refers to it as “Saudi time.”
As women nudge their way into the work force, they are still hampered by archaic tribal rules and patriarchal religious ones.
An American Muslim working here says there are hard adjustments, like hearing men use the occasional epithet “Dog” to address her, and not being able to leave the airport coming home from a business trip because she has no husband or male relative to pick her up.
She had to secure a letter from her employer stating that she could leave the airport on her own. When she wanted to buy a car, she had to use the subterfuge of having a male friend buy it for her, and even then, she can’t drive it except in one of the exclusive compounds with looser rules.
A recent article in The Arab News headlined “Working Mothers in a Double Bind” showed the growing pains of Saudi suffragettes. It told of a woman who secretly hired a cook to deliver meals and assuage her husband’s demand for home-cooked dinners. When her husband caught her, he divorced her — and Saudi divorces are easy as long as you’re male.
“He forgot his promises and left me just because of food,” said the woman, Huda.
Saudi Arabia is in the throes of differentiating between cultural customs for women — like wearing the abaya, not driving and not mixing with men — and actual dictates of the Koran. Many Saudis stressed that their mothers didn’t wear head scarves.
“Personally, I push the envelope,” Sarah said. “I don’t cover my hair.” If she is approached by the mutawa — the religious police — she’s willing to back chat.
“So if a guy is yelling at me, telling me to cover my hair, there’s something we say in Arabic that means, ‘You really shouldn’t be looking in the first place,’ ” she said. “And actually, Islam argues that men should keep their gaze down. So you can argue back to the mutawa, if you know how to do it properly.”
Sarah and others I talked to in the privileged, educated set preferred not to use their full names. Free speech can be costly. “You can’t push the envelope too much or you start alienating a part of our society,” Sarah concedes, “because a part of our society is very conservative, and you have to respect that.”
It is feminism played in adagio. Young women talk about wanting abayas in pastels or made of yoga materials, being able to go out with a group of male and female friends to chic restaurants, and being able to score visas for visiting pals.
“We’re allowed to invite friends now, which is a big thing,” Sarah said. “We’re at the stage where you still have to pull some strings, but in four or five years ...”
Her friend Reema said that Americans are sometimes shocked to see Saudi women and realize “we’re not cowering, we’re actually quite professional. Are there issues here? Absolutely. There isn’t a place in the world that doesn’t have issues.
“I’d like to live in a Saudi where the woman that chooses to cover from top-to-bottom is equally as respected as the woman who chooses not to cover her face, and people from the West can accept that it is a lifestyle choice, inasmuch as wearing a miniskirt or a long, flowing dress is a choice. I find a lot of people minimize the women’s cause in Saudi by how we dress, and that is actually offensive.”
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What drives female suicide bombers?
It's not just ideology that motivates women terrorists, a new book finds. It's physical, sexual and mental abuse
http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet/2010/04/05/female_suicide_bombers_open2010/index.html
BY JUDY MANDELBAUM
This post originally appeared on Judy Mandelbaum's Open Salon blog.
AP
Dzhennet Abdurakhmanova, one of the March 29 Moscow subway suicide bombers.
This news story practically wrote itself. Within less than an hour on March 29, two Islamist suicide bombers struck the Moscow subway, blowing themselves to bits and taking 40 commuters with them. Their motive: Revenge for Russia's oppression of their Muslim brethren in the Caucasus. Clearly they were driven not only by hatred but also by ambition, machismo, testosterone, and the dream of 72 virgins in paradise, right? Except that this time the killers were two young women, one of whom – a Chechen widow called Dzhennet Abdurakhmanova – was only 17 years old. The pair has since joined the swelling ranks of female suicide bombers in Palestine, Iraq and now Chechnya. How does this phenomenon fit the alleged Muslim stereotype of women as subordinate, veil-wearing, second-class citizens? A new book promises to shed light on a troubling – and accelerating – trend.
Israeli scholar Dr. Anat Berko has been studying female suicide bombers for years. A former lieutenant colonel in the IDF, she holds a PhD in criminology from Bar-Ilan University and is a research fellow at the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya. Her family is of Iraqi origin and she not only speaks fluent Arabic but is intimately acquainted with the Arab and Muslim outlook on life. Her new book, "Isha Ptzatza" ("The Smarter Bomb: Women and Children as Suicide Bombers"), will be published next week in Hebrew by Yedioth Books. She based it on hours of interviews with would-be suicide bombers held in Israeli prisons as well as on a close biographical analysis of Palestinian women who succeeded in their objective of killing as many enemy civilians as possible.
Berko's study, which is previewed in today's Haaretz, paints a disturbing tableau of the inner world of female suicide bombers, the vast majority of whom "were exploited by the terrorist organizations, by close friends or even by their own families, and were pushed into carrying out terrorist attacks." It appears that women's motives for such attacks are rooted less in ideology than in histories of physical, mental, and sexual abuse within their own families. Their motives rarely involve free will, but rather blackmail or the hope of redemption for sexual indiscretions through violence and self-sacrifice.
Berko cites the case of Palestine's first female suicide bomber, medic Wafa Idris, who blew herself up in downtown Jerusalem in January 2002, killing an 81-year-old Israeli man and injuring 100 bystanders. Berko focuses her attention on Idris's recent divorce: Her husband had divorced her after a miscarriage leaving her unable to conceive a child and married another woman, with whom he proceeded to father two children. Her spectacular suicide "redeemed" her from this perceived disgrace and inspired nine successful imitators during the Second Intifada. In Berko's view, female suicide bombings have as much to do with a sort of proactive "honor killing" as they do with classic (and stereotypical) "Islam vs. the West" terrorism.
But once captured and forced to justify their actions, these bombers consistently cite ideological motives. "n prison, since they are now part of a group, these women are expected to rewrite their personal stories and to reconstruct them as acts of heroism on behalf of the Palestinian homeland," Berko writes. "Yet, there is almost always a complex family history involved. For instance, a divorced woman is in a very weak position in Palestinian society, and it is thus easy to recruit her. Many of these women have an absent father -- that is, the father is either chronically ill, dead or has other wives. One of the terrorists told me that, given her father's absence, she needed a man to defend her; in return for his protection, she assisted him in his terrorist work."
While female bombers cannot expect a reward as such, Paradise does have its consolations. Once there, some of them expect to be restored to youth and to become virgins once more with a free choice of husbands. "One of the women I interviewed told me that women do not menstruate in heaven," Berko writes. "The men always claim that they will father children in heaven but the women say that in heaven, they will not have to pray for children and will not have to give birth."
Berko has been covering this ground for years. Her dissertation, published in English in 2007 as "The Path to Paradise: The Inner World of Suicide Bombers and Their Dispatchers," uses case studies and exhaustive interviews to show how suicide bombers are recruited as "smart bombs" – as "a tactic of war" – by ruthless operators who pull their strings from the shadows. This earlier book also examines female bombers and contains a number of surprises. For example, far from being a "weaker sex," women who have committed themselves to carrying out suicide attacks can be even more ruthless than men. "While men consistently emphasize that they wish to spare women and children, female assassins focus specifically on these groups. It is an emotional rationale: if I can't have children, the Jews shouldn't have any either."
Shortly after Wafa Idris's 2002 attack, the Egyptian Islamist weekly Al-Sha'ab proclaimed: "It is a woman who teaches you today a lesson in heroism, who teaches you the meaning of Jihad, and the way to die a martyr's death ... with her thin, meager and weak body ... It is a woman who blew herself up, and with her exploded all the myths about woman's weakness, submissiveness, and enslavement." But sadly for Palestinian women, not even suicide bombing can elevate their status in this profoundly sexist society. Not only prison but death itself is regarded as a scandal. "Sheikh Muhammad Abu Tir, a leading member of Hamas in the West Bank, told me explicitly that his organization strongly opposed women's participation in terrorist activities," Berko writes. "He said that he would never allow his daughter to carry out a terrorist attack. One reason is a religious one -- the lack of modesty. Female terrorists disguise themselves as Israeli women and sometimes wear revealing clothes; in the eyes of Hamas members, their innocence is thereby compromised."
One male suicide bomber Berko interviewed in prison told her that "he was very angry with his sister who had tried to carry out a suicide bombing after she got a divorce. 'A woman must not expose her body,' he argued. 'When a woman blows herself up, not all the parts of her body become tiny bits of flesh.'"
Berko concludes: "Even after they have died, these women do not have full rights to their own body."
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Yep, the Shia and other reactionary Muslim sects are as bad/ worse that Christian fundamentalists in this regard. The mindset in both cases is just plain Medieval and totally unenlightened.
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Britain on top in casual sex league
From The Sunday Times
November 30, 2008
BRITISH men and women are now the most promiscuous of any big western industrial nation, researchers have found.
In an international index measuring one-night stands, total numbers of partners and attitudes to casual sex, Britain comes out ahead of Australia, the US, France, the Netherlands, Italy and Germany.
The researchers behind the study say high scores such as Britain’s may be linked to the way society is increasingly willing to accept sexual promiscuity among women as well as men. They also believe that, among certain age groups and at certain times, men and women are equally liberal.
The researchers say that cultural developments have meant women are now as able to engage in no-strings sex as men. “Historically we have repressed women’s short-term mating and there are all sorts of double standards out there where men’s short-term mating was sort of acceptable but women’s wasn’t,” said David Schmitt, a professor of psychology at Bradley University, Illinois, who oversaw the research.
The study was conducted by asking more than 14,000 people in 48 countries to fill in anonymous questionnaires. Respondents were asked about numbers of partners and one-night stands, and their attitudes were assessed by asking them how many people they expected to sleep with over the next five years and how comfortable they were with the idea of casual sex.
The results were combined into an index of so-called “sociosexuality”, the term used by evolutionary psychologists as a measure of how sexually liberal people are in thought and behavior. Most individuals scored between 4 and 65.
The country with the highest rating was Finland, with an average of 51. Taiwan came lowest, with 19.
Britain scored 40, placing it 11th overall, behind countries such as Latvia, Croatia and Slovenia - but it was highest among the major western industrial nations. The first tranche of research was published in 2005 but analyses have continued and Schmitt described the latest in this week’s edition of New Scientist.
Britain’s ranking was ascribed to factors such as the decline of religious scruples about extramarital sex, the growth of equal pay and equal rights for women and a highly sexualised popular culture.
Schmitt says the ratio of men to women is one of the factors that determine a country’s ranking. The high scores in many Baltic and eastern European states might be linked, Schmitt said, to the fact that women outnumber men and so are under more pressure to conform to what men want in order to find a mate. In Asian countries, by contrast, men tend to outnumber women slightly, so it is men who have to conform.
Schmitt’s findings are reinforced by earlier research showing that the British are more likely than other nationalities to have “stolen” other people’s lovers. A third of British men are in relationships with women they have poached from other long-term relationships, he found. Among British women, 28% have apparently poached their other halves rather than formed relationships with single men. Only 17% of men in America had poached their girlfriends. In France only 10% of both men and women were poachers. In Germany the figures were 17% of men and 14% of women.
Schmitt said that in more liberal countries such as Britain women may even be becoming more promiscuous than men. Such trends are typified by the television series Secret Diary of a Call Girl, in which Billie Piper played a middle-class prostitute who relished her numerous sexual encounters.
One of the most intriguing ideas emerging from Schmitt’s and others’ work is that when women are at their most fertile they become even more willing than men to consider one-night stands.
There are, however, still key differences in the behaviour of men and women, especially regarding the ages at which they are most sexually liberated. Schmitt found that men tended to have the most partners, and to think most about acquiring new ones, when in their twenties. Women’s promiscuity and lustful thoughts tended to peak in their thirties.
PROMISCUITY RANKINGS OF MAJOR COUNTRIES*
*OECD countries with populations over 10m Source: David Schmitt, Bradley University
1 United Kingdom
2 Germany
3 Netherlands
4 Czech Republic
5 Australia
6 USA
7 France
8 Turkey
9 Mexico
10 Canada
11 Italy
12 Poland
13 Spain
14 Greece
15 Portugal
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Prisoners of the pill
Carolyn Moynihan | 14 May 2010
Mother’s Day in the United States (and some other countries) had an ironic twist to it this year: the powers that be chose to observe May 9 as the fiftieth anniversary of the public debut of the contraceptive pill, the twentieth century’s chief weapon against motherhood as a serious vocation.
Articles marking the occasion have been largely celebratory in tone, reminding women that their lives have been powerfully transformed -- for the better -- by the pill. We have been liberated from biology to extend our education, engage in paid work, carve out public careers and achieve financial independence. Hooray.
True, there has been the odd complaint about this wonder drug. “I hate the pill,” declares Geraldine Sealey at Salon. “Hormonal contraception, which covers birth control pills and nearly every other highly effective method on the market, murders my libido.” Still, she can’t stop herself patting contraceptive pioneers such as Margaret Sanger on the back.
The Wall Street Journal wonders why, at this late stage of the game, almost half of US pregnancies -- about 3.1 million a year -- are unintended. It turns out that a lot of people who are having sex but don’t want a baby are not responsible enough to use contraception. How surprising. Then there are all the women who miss taking their pill -- so many that Princeton’s birth control expert James Trussell says we should forget the pill and steer women towards long-acting contraceptives such as implants and IUDs. (Women may be liberated, you see, but they can be, er, not smart.)
Fail-safe birth control is not the only thing the era of the pill has not delivered. Elaine Tyler May, author of a new book on the pill, admits that ending poverty, curing divorce and eliminating unwed pregnancies were “promises the pill could never keep”. Indeed, all those things have flourished during the past 50 years and societies have stopped even trying to encourage marriage and discourage divorce. Poverty is the only thing that has not been rationalised, but then its link with contraceptive culture is not even recognised.
Still, we are meant to rejoice that women have the world at their feet, because, even if their contraceptive device or their willpower fails, there is always abortion to ensure that they can keep their job, if not their husband. All in all, then, women should be happier than they were when their energies were largely consumed by looking after a husband and three or four kids.
Declining female happiness
Are they? No. Much quoted research by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers of the University of Pennsylvania shows that there has been a marked decline in women’s happiness in the industrialised countries over the past 35 years. In an article last year they wrote:
The paradox of women’s declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging—one with higher subjective well-being for men.
Stevenson and Wolfers stress the power of this decline by equating it to the misery resulting from an 8.5 per cent rise in unemployment, or to having missed out entirely on the gains from economic growth since the 1970s.
A paradox? A mere coincidence that female happiness has been eroded at same time as the pill was bringing liberation? Denver economist Timothy Reichert does not think so. In a recent article in First Things (“Bitter Pill”, April, 2010) he says that, contrary to the rhetoric of the sexual revolution, contraception is deeply sexist in nature. It has shifted wealth and power away from women, and away from their childrearing years when they need it most. It has also, for that reason, made children on the whole worse off.
Reichert arrives at these conclusions by doing a market analysis of sexual relationships under the influence of what is still known as “efficient contraception”. To my mind, he makes a highly plausible case.
How women lose: a market analysis
Fifty years ago, he argues, there was a single “mating market”, populated by men and women in roughly equal numbers and who paired off in marriage. By lowering the cost of premarital and extramarital sex (pregnancy, shotgun marriage) contraception allowed a separate sex market (apart from prostitution) to form. That would not have affected either sex adversely if the numbers of men and women in both markets remained roughly equal, but of course, they did not.
Because of limits to their fertility, women have to move out of the sex market and into the marriage market earlier than men. This makes them relatively scarce in the former and abundant in the latter, able to negotiate better “deals” in the first but worse deals in the second where there is a scarcity of marriageable men.
(As an aside, this dilemma puts me in mind of Lori Gottlieb’s much-bruited willingness to give up the quest for romantic love in her forties and “settle” for a husband who will put out the garbage bin and fix the leaky taps. )
Under these conditions, says Reichert, men take more and more of the “gains from trade” and women take fewer and fewer. He comments:
This produces a redistribution of bargaining power and, ultimately, of welfare from the later childrearing phases of a woman’s lifetime toward the earlier, and in my view less important, phases. This redistribution has some very concrete, very undesirable consequences for women—and for the children that they bear.
What are these consequences? Reichert points out four.
More divorce. Striking “bad deals” in an imbalanced marriage market makes divorce more likely. Reduced commitment creates a “demand” for divorce even before the marriage begins (pre-nups). At the social level women allow the stigma of divorce to erode and they support no-fault
divorce laws. They compensate for these trends by developing relatively more market earning power, and invest less in family relationships, the moral formation of their children, and community activism. In doing so, they become more like men, and the couples become less interesting to one another. “Sameness begets ennui, which begets divorce.”
Inflation of household costs. As wealthier two-earner households bid up the price of homes, more women are forced into the labour market. With this comes a redistribution of welfare from younger to older generations, and from a family’s younger, child-rearing years to its later childless years (when they could sell the $500,000 house). This redistribution “rests largely on the backs of the women in the labour force who support the higher housing cost and, ultimately, on the children who otherwise would have had the benefit of their mothers’ time.” And perhaps another sibling.
Infidelity. This increases because the cost -- detection -- is lowered. The sex market provides the opportunity, and here married (successful, older) men are more attractive to younger women, than older women are to younger men. This, again, is to the detriment of women.
Abortion. Before the pill the cost of an unwanted pregnancy was often borne by the man in the form of a shotgun wedding. Now it is borne by the woman: contraception is her business and so, therefore, is the unintended pregnancy. If she keeps the baby she forfeits opportunities in the labour market; if she has an abortion (which around one million women in the US do each year) she usually pays the money cost and always the emotional costs.
To repeat Reichert’s conclusion:
Contraception has resulted in an enormous redistribution of welfare from women to men, as well as an intertemporal redistribution of welfare from a typical woman’s later, childrearing years to her earlier years.
Further, given that women’s welfare largely determines the welfare of children, this redistribution has in part been “funded” by a loss of welfare from children. In other words, the worse off are women, the worse off are the children they support. On net, women and children are the big losers in the contraceptive society.
And this fits with the Stevenson and Wolfers finding of declining happiness among women.
The big question is, then, why do they put up with it?
The prisoner's dilemma
Reichert explains it as a “prisoner’s dilemma” -- a concept from game theory. This posits a situation where all parties have choice between cooperation and non-cooperation, and where all would be better off if they chose cooperation. However, because the parties cannot effectively coordinate and enforce cooperation, all choose the best individual choice, which is non-cooperation.
Applying this to young women in a contraceptive culture Reichert suggests that those who don’t enter the sex market miss out on the “higher prices” paid there (presumably he means things like more attention from men, more likelihood of a partner, a sense of wellbeing and a “good” image) but they also remain at a disadvantage in the over-subscribed marriage market. Their “optimal decision” therefore is to “to enter the sex market and remain there for as long as possible, despite the fact that the new equilibrium may be worse, over the total life cycle, for women.”
Only very powerful social mores or laws can break prisoner’s dilemmas like this, and laws we are surely not going to get. Reichert, a Catholic, sees the church’s moral authority in this area being woefully under-utilised and calls for a movement of “new feminism”. But while the beginnings of such a movement can certainly be found in the Catholic Church and other religious groups, there seems to be no corresponding secular insight into the role of contraception in female misery.
In a piece in The Atlantic magazine this week Caitlin Flanagan, an enfant terrible of contemporary feminism, bewails the hook-up culture that girls reluctantly endure while they hope, like girls in every other era, for a real boyfriend and romance. She then talks about her mother and other “forward-looking” older women who helped Planned Parenthood promote birth control to teenage girls 20-something years ago.
As progressive as they were, says Flanagan, they would have been horrified by hooking up: "all of them, to a woman, believed in the Boyfriend Story. This set wasn’t in the business of providing girls and young women the necessary information and services to allow boys and men to use and discard them sexually."
Oh, but they were. That is exactly what they were doing, albeit unwittingly. And that is what continues to draw girls into the prisoner’s dilemma at ever younger ages. When are people like Flanagan going to stop groping around this elephant and take their blindfolds off?
Carolyn Moynihan is deputy editor of MercatorNet.
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http://www.mercatornet.com/sheila_liaugminas/view/7237/
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Child Brides Escape Marriage, but Not Lashes
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/world/asia/31flogging.html?hpw=&pagewanted=print
By ROD NORDLAND and ALISSA J. RUBIN
KABUL, Afghanistan — The two Afghan girls had every reason to expect the law would be on their side when a policeman at a checkpoint stopped the bus they were in. Disguised in boys’ clothes, the girls, ages 13 and 14, had been fleeing for two days along rutted roads and over mountain passes to escape their illegal, forced marriages to much older men, and now they had made it to relatively liberal Herat Province.
Instead, the police officer spotted them as girls, ignored their pleas and promptly sent them back to their remote village in Ghor Province. There they were publicly and viciously flogged for daring to run away from their husbands.
Their tormentors, who videotaped the abuse, were not the Taliban, but local mullahs and the former warlord, now a pro-government figure who largely rules the district where the girls live.
Neither girl flinched visibly at the beatings, and afterward both walked away with their heads unbowed. Sympathizers of the victims smuggled out two video recordings of the floggings to the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, which released them on Saturday after unsuccessfully lobbying for government action.
The ordeal of Afghanistan’s child brides illustrates an uncomfortable truth. What in most countries would be considered a criminal offense is in many parts of Afghanistan a cultural norm, one which the government has been either unable or unwilling to challenge effectively.
According to a Unicef study, from 2000 to 2008, the brides in 43 percent of Afghan marriages were under 18. Although the Afghan Constitution forbids the marriage of girls under the age of 16, tribal customs often condone marriage once puberty is reached, or even earlier.
Flogging is also illegal.
The case of Khadija Rasoul, 13, and Basgol Sakhi, 14, from the village of Gardan-i-Top, in the Dulina district of Ghor Province, central Afghanistan, was notable for the failure of the authorities to do anything to protect the girls, despite opportunities to do so.
Forced into a so-called marriage exchange, where each girl was given to an elderly man in the other’s family, Khadija and Basgol later complained that their husbands beat them when they tried to resist consummating the unions. Dressed as boys, they escaped and got as far as western Herat Province, where their bus was stopped at a checkpoint and they were arrested.
Although Herat has shelters for battered and runaway women and girls, the police instead contacted the former warlord, Fazil Ahad Khan, whom Human Rights Commission workers describe as the self-appointed commander and morals enforcer in his district in Ghor Province, and returned the girls to his custody.
After a kangaroo trial by Mr. Khan and local religious leaders, according to the commission’s report on the episode, the girls were sentenced to 40 lashes each and flogged on Jan. 12.
In the video, the mullah, under Mr. Khan’s approving eye, administers the punishment with a leather strap, which he appears to wield with as much force as possible, striking each girl in turn on her legs and buttocks with a loud crack each time. Their heavy red winter chadors are pulled over their heads so only their skirts protect them from the blows.
The spectators are mostly armed men wearing camouflage uniforms, and at least three of them openly videotape the floggings. No women are present.
The mullah, whose name is not known, strikes the girls so hard that at one point he appears to have hurt his wrist and hands the strap to another man.
“Hold still,” the mullah admonishes the victims, who stand straight throughout. One of them can be seen in tears when her face is briefly exposed to view, but they remain silent.
When the second girl is flogged, an elderly man fills in for the mullah, but his blows appear less forceful and the mullah soon takes the strap back.
The spectators count the lashes out loud but several times seem to lose count and have to start over, or possibly they cannot count very high.
“Good job, mullah sir,” one of the men says as Mr. Khan leads them in prayer afterward.
“I was shocked when I watched the video,” said Mohammed Munir Khashi, an investigator with the commission. “I thought in the 21st century such a criminal incident could not happen in our country. It’s inhuman, anti-Islam and illegal.”
Fawzia Kofi, a prominent female member of Parliament, said the case may be shocking but is far from the only one. “I’m sure there are worse cases we don’t even know about,” she said. “Early marriage and forced marriage are the two most common forms of violent behavior against women and girls.”
The Human Rights Commission took the videotapes and the results of its investigation to the governor of Ghor Province, Sayed Iqbal Munib, who formed a commission to investigate it but took no action, saying the district was too insecure to send police there. A coalition of civic groups in the province called for his dismissal over the matter.
Nor has Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry replied to demands from the commission to take action in the case, according to the commission’s chairwoman, Sima Samar. A spokesman for the ministry did not respond to requests for comment.
Forced marriage of Afghan girls is not limited to remote rural areas. In Herat city, a Unicef-financed women’s shelter run by an Afghan group, the Voice of Women Organization, shelters as many as 60 girls who have fled child marriages.
A group called Women for Afghan Women runs shelters in the capital, Kabul, as well as in nearby Kapisa Province and in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, all relatively liberal areas as Afghanistan goes, which have taken in 108 escaped child brides just since January, according to Executive Director Manizha Naderi.
Poverty is the motivation for many child marriages, either because a wealthy husband pays a large bride-price, or just because the father of the bride then has one less child to support. “Most of the time they are sold,” Ms. Naderi said. “And most of the time it’s a case where the husband is much, much older.”
She said it was also common practice among police officers who apprehend runaway child brides to return them to their families. “Most police don’t understand what’s in the law, or they’re just against it,” she said.
On Saturday, at the Women for Afghan Women shelter, at a secret location in Kabul, there were four fugitive child brides. All had been beaten, and most wept as they recounted their experiences.
Sakhina, a 15-year-old Hazara girl from Bamian, was sold into marriage to pay off her father’s debts when she was 12 or 13.
Her husband’s family used her as a domestic servant. “Every time they could, they found an excuse to beat me,” she said. “My brother-in-law, my sister-in-law, my husband, all of them beat me.”
Sumbol, 17, a Pashtun girl, said she was kidnapped and taken to Jalalabad, then given a choice: marry her tormentor, or become a suicide bomber. “He said, ‘If you don’t marry me I will put a bomb on your body and send you to the police station,’ ” Sumbol said.
Roshana, a Tajik who is now 18, does not even know why her family gave her in marriage to an older man in Parwan when she was 14. The beatings were bad enough, but finally, she said, her husband tried to feed her rat poison.
In some ways, the two girls from Ghor were among the luckier child brides. After the floggings, the mullah declared them divorced and returned them to their own families.
Two years earlier, in nearby Murhab district, two girls who had been sold into marriage to the same family fled after being abused, according to a report by the Human Rights Commission. But they lost their way, were captured and forcibly returned. Their fathers — one the village mullah — took them up the mountain and killed them.
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According to a Unicef study, from 2000 to 2008, the brides in 43 percent of Afghan marriages were under 18. Although the Afghan Constitution forbids the marriage of girls under the age of 16, tribal customs often condone marriage once puberty is reached, or even earlier.
It's not "tribal custom", it's islamic law that allows for child brides.
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GM,
Christianity, Judaism and Islam allow for child brides. Women are protected by civil law and modern custom. The biblical matriarch Rebecca (Rebecca and Issac) was said to be 9 when she preformed her act of kindness for the camels.
You don't need to go all that far back in my family's history to find brides of 13 or 14. Traditional Judaism and Christianity did a much better job of protecting women than traditional Islam does but they are not free from acts of horror.
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In 2010, judeo-christian civilization does not allow for child brides. In the islamic world it's sanctified because Mohammed's 3rd wife was six when he married her, although he waited until she was 9 before consummating the marriage, being the swell guy he was.
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http://www.usc.edu/schools/college/crcc/engagement/resources/texts/muslim/hadith/bukhari/062.sbt.html#007.062.088
Volume 7, Book 62, Number 88:
Narrated 'Ursa:
The Prophet wrote the (marriage contract) with 'Aisha while she was six years old and consummated his marriage with her while she was nine years old and she remained with him for nine years (i.e. till his death).
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http://abcnews.go.com/Health/International/yemeni-bride-11-hospitalized-genital-injuries/story?id=10362500
An average of eight women die each day in Yemen due to child marriage, many of them in childbirth, according to the Arabic Sisters Forum. The group runs a hotline for victims of domestic violence and has been lobbying in support of a minimum marriage age now under consideration by the Yemeni parliament.
Pushing against the proposed law is the strong hand of Islamic conservatives in Yemen. Clerics have declared women like Amal Basha apostates from Islam for opposing child marriage, which they see as divinely ordained. The government, she says, is intimidated by the religious and tribal customs.
"They say this is Islamic…and they declared jihad against... the UN treaty on women's rights," she said.
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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/03/13/IN5D1CD71L.DTL
Saudi Arabia has a serious child-marriage problem.
It's emblematic of the nation's struggle between modernity and traditional Islam. But the lives of thousands of little girls are being destroyed as the Saudi government ponderously debates a solution.
Child marriage has been acceptable, even encouraged, in many Islamic states since the religion was born. After all, among the prophet Muhammad's dozen wives was Aisha, who is believed to have been 6 or 7 years old when the two were married. But in Saudi Arabia, at least, the practice slammed headlong into modern values last spring, when a Saudi court refused to nullify the marriage of an 8-year-old girl from Unaiza to a man in his late 50s.
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http://www.torontosun.com/news/torontoandgta/2010/03/11/13201531.html
Federal immigration officials say there’s little they can do to stop “child brides” from being sponsored into Canada by much older husbands who wed them in arranged marriages abroad.
Top immigration officials in Canada and Pakistan say all they can do is reject the sponsorships of husbands trying to bring their child-brides to Canada. The men have to reapply when the bride turns 16. The marriages are permitted under Sharia Law.
Muslim men, who are Canadian citizens or permanent residents return to their homeland to wed a “child bride” in an arranged marriage in which a dowry is given to the girl’s parents. Officials said some of the brides can be 14 years old or younger and are “forced” to marry. The practice occurs in a host of countries including: Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and Lebanon.
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article5248224.ece
Northern Nigeria has one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world: nearly half of all girls here are married by the age of 15.
The consequences have been devastating. Nigeria has the highest maternal mortality rate in Africa and one of the world’s highest rates of fistula, a condition that can occur when the pressure of childbirth tears a hole between the vagina and the bladder or rectum. Many women are left incontinent for life. Up to 800,000 women suffer from fistula in Nigeria.
“They marry young, they get pregnant young, they deliver young and they pick up the fistula,” said Kees Waaldijk, the chief consultant surgeon at the Babbar Ruga hospital, the world’s largest fistula clinic, in the northern state of Katsina.
Most cases happen to young girls during their first pregnancy, and nearly half the patients at Babbar Ruga are under 16.
The smell of urine is overpowering and many of the women have been cast out from their communities. Some have been divorced by their husbands - it is estimated that up to half of adolescent girls in northern Nigeria are divorced. “If nothing is done the woman ends up crippled for life: medically, socially, mentally and emotionally,” Dr Waaldijk said.
The Nigerian federal Government has attempted to outlaw child marriage. In 2003 it passed the Child Rights Act, prohibiting marriage under the age of 18. In the Muslim northern states, though, there has been fierce resistance to the Act, with many people portraying it as antiIslamic. “Child marriage in Islam is permissible. In the Koran there is no specific age of marriage,” said Imam Sani, a liberal cleric in the northern state of Kaduna. He said that this was the root cause of the opposition among the more hardline mullahs, who believe that matters of Islamic “personal” law - marriage, divorce and inheritance - must be governed by the Koran, not the state.
“The Muslim clerics have a problem with this Child Rights Act and they decried it, they castigate it, they reject it and they don’t want it introduced in Nigeria,” Mr Sani said.
He said there would be serious repercussions if the federal Government attempted to impose a minimum age of marriage. “There will be violent conflict from the Muslims, saying that ‘no, we will not accept this, we’d rather die than accept something which is not a law from Allah’.”
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Now here's a surprising development. Who could have imagined that men and women together in a war zone would copulate?
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ia Verma and Richard Blackwell
Kabul and Toronto — From Monday's Globe and Mail
Published on Sunday, May. 30, 2010 10:35PM EDT
Last updated on Monday, May. 31, 2010 11:21AM EDT
.The reputation and morale of Canada’s military, still reeling from allegations that a base commander committed multiple murders, has suffered another blow with the dismissal of its top soldier in Afghanistan for breaking the rules on personal relationships in the field.
Brigadier-General Daniel Ménard was removed from command following allegations he had an intimate relationship with a member of his staff. The subordinate involved has been sent home, according to a military spokesman.
Brigadier-General Jonathan Vance, Gen. Ménard’s predecessor, will be returning to Kandahar this week to assume command less than a year after he left, arriving as coalition troops are poised to launch a major operation in Kandahar in June that is cast as the defining moment of the war.
While Canadian military commanders in Afghanistan sought to down play the controversy as a personal ordeal, military observers and former officers said Gen. Ménard’s dismissal could be damaging to the morale of the troops on the ground, and possibly taint Canadians’ image of the armed forces.
It will certainly “take away some of the glitter” that was associated with Canadian soldiers’ performance in Afghanistan, said Michel Drapeau, a professor of military law and a former armed forces colonel.
“ I’m encouraged by the fact that Ménard was removed from his post, since it suggests that the Forces are taking the rules, and the rights and interests of female soldiers, seriously. ”
— Michael Byers, professor of political science at the University of British Columbia
It is particularly unfortunate that it comes so soon after Colonel Russell Williams, the former base commander at CFB Trenton, was charged with multiple murders and sexual assaults, he said. While the allegations against Gen. Ménard are in no way similar, they will add to the public’s concern about the quality of leadership in the armed forces and raise worries within the Forces as well, he said. “People in the military [will say] ‘Here we go again,’”
However, the greatest impact, Mr. Drapeau said, will be on the morale of troops in Afghanistan who served under Gen. Ménard. “It’s devastating,” he said. “They [put] all of their trust and respect in him, and they were prepared to follow him into battle ... Their sense of confidence in leadership will take a hit.”
Military historian Jack Granatstein said it is important to note that the allegations against Gen. Ménard are “infinitely less serious” than those against Col. Williams. If proven, they will primarily demonstrate “stupidity on the part of a commanding officer who’s job it is to set an example.”
Gen. Ménard commanded 2,800 Canadian soldiers in southern Afghanistan, as well as a contingent of American troops serving under Canadian command.
The allegations against him caused military command to “lose confidence” in his “capacity to command,” the military said in a brief statement. Military rules strictly forbid any kind of intimacy on deployments, including relationships of an emotional, romantic or sexual nature.
Gen. Ménard, is 42 and married with two children. Major Daryl Morrell, senior public affairs officer with Joint Task Force Afghanistan, said it was “too early to speculate on the charges” Gen. Ménard could face, because they won’t be known until the military completes its investigation.
AP
Brigadier-General Daniel Menard, commander of Canada's task force Afghanistan, speaks to reporters in Kandahar on Jan. 30, 2010.
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Lieutenant-General Marc Lessard, commander of Canadian forces overseas, made a brief visit to Afghanistan several weeks ago, before Gen. Ménard went on a three-week leave, from which he has just returned. However, reporters at Kandahar Air Field were told the allegations were only revealed to Gen. Lessard on Saturday. Lt.-Gen. Lessard acted immediately to replace Gen. Ménard.
Colonel Simon Hetherington, previously Brig.-Gen. Ménard's second-in-command, is now acting commander until Gen. Vance arrives. He sought to down play any consequences the allegations could have on the military’s reputation.
“The allegations against Brig-Gen. Ménard are that – they’re allegations,” Col. Hetherington said. “It’s a personal thing, so I don’t see that as any sort of mark against the institution at all,” he added.
Defence Minister Peter MacKay declined to comment on the case while it was under investigation by the military.
Michael Byers, a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia, said that while it is clearly discouraging for troops to see a senior officer accused of breaking the rules, it also tells the public that those rules are being applied at all levels.
“I’m encouraged by the fact that Ménard was removed from his post, since it suggests that the Forces are taking the rules, and the rights and interests of female soldiers, seriously,” Prof. Byers said.
Retired major-general Lewis Mackenzie said the fact that Gen. Ménard was the commander in Afghanistan raises the situation above a minor issue, because he would be the one to make final decisions in other cases of inappropriate behaviour. “He’s the last level of authority in the theatre in disciplinary matters.”
Douglas Bland, the chair of defence management studies at the Queen’s University School of Policy Studies, said the military has moved quickly to deal with leadership issues since the Somalia inquiry, when problems in command were linked to the fatal beating of a teenager by two Canadian soldiers during a humanitarian mission in Somalia. “That is a sign of their sensitivity and seriousness about maintaining good order and discipline across the forces,” he said.
But Prof. Bland said the rules prohibiting personal relationships are essential, especially in combat zones, “where the integrity of the unit is supreme,” and must be followed, particularly, by the highest-ranking soldiers.
This is not the first time controversy has dogged Gen. Ménard.
Last week he was fined $3,500 for accidentally firing his rifle at Kandahar Air Field in March. He had failed to switch is C8 carbine rifle to the “safe” position before departing in a helicopter with his boss, General Walter Natynczyk.
Nobody was injured, but the incident qualifies as an offence under the National Defence Act, with a maximum penalty of dismissal from the military. At a military hearing into the incident, Gen. Ménard’s defence lawyer argued for leniency, noting the commander reported the mishap to investigators and discussed the incident openly with his soldiers.
Brig.-Gen Ménard joined the Canadian forces in 1984 and was posted to the Royal 22nd Regiment where initially served as a platoon commander.
He rose quickly through the ranks, serving in Great Britain, Berlin, Germany and Bosnia. He assumed command of Task Force Kandahar in November.
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The other story about same-sex parenting
Research showing the risks of lesbian and gay parenting is ignored in the race to make a political case.
http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/the_other_story_about_same-sex_parenting/
There is an inherent risk that anyone who has anything to say about gay male or lesbian parenting, no matter how cautious, will be misunderstood at best and vilified at worst. Nevertheless, the mission of a university professor includes seeking new ways to look at old issues, to resist all forms of intimidation, and to ensure that multiple sides of controversial issues are considered. Since there are more voices promoting the virtues of parenting by people defining themselves as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender (GLBT), I will present here an alternative, possibly minority, view that focuses on some of the possible risks associated with gay and lesbian parenting.
This is a challenging area. As one hint about the difficulties, consider this: when a group of authors published three articles (two even in the same journal) on data from the same set of lesbian parents about 1980, the two articles reporting favorable outcomes were cited 65 times compared to only two citations for the one article reporting unfavorable outcomes. In other cases, the worse the methodological quality of the research, the more likely it is to have been cited in major reviews of the literature.
The methodological quality of much of the literature is poor. Many studies have not controlled for parental educational and family per-capita income differences between lesbian and heterosexual families. Regardless, between February and June of 2010 no less than three articles have concluded that two lesbian mothers may, on average, tend to be better parents than heterosexual parents (Biblarz & Stacey, 2010; Gartrell & Bos, 2010; Biblarz & Savci, 2010) -- quite a controversial position. However, serious concerns remain.
Sexual Fidelity
Research is increasingly clear that many lesbigay partners enter into their versions of a committed relationship with expectations that cheating is acceptable. Some research suggests that gay men have more stable relationships only if cheating is permitted. Michael Bettinger (2006) reported: “An important difference between gay men and heterosexuals is that the majority of gay men in committed relationships are not monogamous”.
Dr. Esther Rothblum has reported that whereas women (lesbian or heterosexual) seldom permit sexual affairs, “40 percent of gay men in civil unions have an agreement that non-monogamy is permitted and over half have had sex outside their current relationship”. If gay marriage means accepting sexual non-monogamy within marriage, we must accept an inherent change in the intrinsic meaning of marriage and ultimately the meaning of responsible parenting.
Relationship Stability and Children
Another issue concerns the relationship between having children and staying together for the sake of the children. Though gay and lesbian couples in some studies appear to have higher quality, more satisfying relationships, they also appear less likely to remain stable when children are involved. Recent studies by Patterson and by Nanette Gartrell in the United States, as well as Scandinavian research, confirm this outcome, even when the GLBT subjects sampled had much higher levels of education than the heterosexual subjects.
Recently, Gartrell and Bos reported that over 56 per cent of lesbian parents had separated by the time their child was 17 years old. Based on the mothers’ reports of the children’s psychological adjustment, the adverse impact of that instability was not quite statistically significant. Comparable studies of heterosexual parents have found rates of separation ranging from 3 per cent to less than 30 percent over similar timeframes.
As yet, we have no published data on the stability of legally married LGBT parents. However, recent evidence indicates that very few GLBT individuals come together with the intention of having children and few, in fact, ever have children; if they do have a child, few spend the entire year with that child.
Effects on Children
Richard Redding, writing in a 2008 issue of the Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy, concluded that gay parents were more likely to have gay children. My meta-analyses of 26 studies and ten books on GLBT parenting concur with his findings (Schumm, in press). Furthermore, my research indicates that many literature reviews have systematically excluded information about negative child outcomes associated with gay parenting -- that is, greater levels of insecure attachment and drug abuse among daughters of gay fathers. The most recent review of literature on GLBT families did not mention Sirota’s (2009) research, even though I reported a summary of it two years ago.
Space does not permit an adequate treatment here, but some research suggests differential effects on sex role orientations of children and their views of non-monogamous sexuality. My hunch is that delayed gratification orientation may be an important intervening variable for understanding the influence of parental sexual orientation on child outcomes, but I am not aware of any studies on that variable.
Again, there appear to be differences in reporting of child outcomes, depending on the source of the data – whether parents, children, or teachers, for example. My sense is that maternal reports tend to be influenced by what the writers understand to be socially desirable outcomes, especially if the mothers sense the political purposes of the study.
Ends do not justify the means
One could probably write a book on the misuse of research regarding LGBT individuals and families. Even if the political goals of the researchers were laudable, the misuse of science would not be. In my view, the ends do not justify the means. Numerous legal and social science scholars have virtually sworn that the idea that GLBT parents might tend to have GLBT children was nothing but a myth; however, close examination of multiple sources of data suggests otherwise, as my forthcoming article will show.
Today, some would say, so what? That might be a plausible position, but it was not the position taken by most scholars between 1990 and 2005. Then, and now, I presume, most of the public would deem relationship instability to be unfavorable for the welfare of children, and would want to consider the evidence that lesbian parents have much less stable relationships than do married heterosexual parents.
As I noted at the beginning, it is risky to express such views about same-sex parenting, no matter how objectively based they are. But the public has a right to consider all the evidence in such an important matter, affecting as it does the welfare of children.
Dr Walter Schumm is a Professor of Family Studies in the School of Family Studies and Human Services at Kansas State University. He has published over 250 scholarly articles and book chapters and is co-editor of the Sourcebook of Family Theories and Methods: A Contextual Approach (Plenum, 1993; Springer, 2009). He is a retired colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, a former brigade and battalion commander. His views may not reflect the positions of Kansas State University or the US Department of Defense.
For further information, including a list of references for the above article, contact Dr Schumm at schumm@ksu.edu
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http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2010/08/01/8-ways-fascist-feminists-are-ruining-americas-women/
Feminist cultural destruction.
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http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2010/08/06/gays-and-blood-donation-sacrificing-public-safety-for-political-correctness/
Take one for the team?
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Heated debate and controversy swept across the Australian state of New South Wales last week when a bill granting same-sex couples the same rights under adoption laws as heterosexual couples was passed narrowly (45 votes to 43) in the Legislative Assembly (lower house) of its Parliament.
The message that permeated the media was this: that discrimination against same-sex couples has to stop, and that adoption is just one more frontier that needs to be conquered. Passionate letters condemning conservatives and religious beliefs reflected the same theme: one reader of the Sydney Morning Herald said that "[h]omosexuals are just as capable of, and entitled to, raising a child [sic]. The same-sex adoption bill goes some way towards the legitimate and continuing campaign to give same-sex couples the same legal and social rights... as enjoyed by mixed gender parents." While a campaign to stop discrimination against same-sex relationships clearly formed the underlying objective of this legislation and the undercurrent of debate, the justification for it was marketed by the slogan: "What matters is loving parents, not their sexuality."
Members of Parliament were allowed by their parties to have a conscience vote, and leaders of both parties voted in favour of the bill. The state premier and self-professed Catholic, Kristina Keneally, went so far as to attempt to reconcile her position to back the legislation with Catholic teaching. Keneally actually hails from Ohio where she attended the University of Dayton, a Catholic institution. Presumably she did not major in theology, judging from how she mixes snippets of Catholic doctrine on homosexuality and the morality of sex outside of marriage with quotes from scripture, mostly taken out of context, misunderstood and in any case, irrelevant. Needless to say, while Keneally may have convinced herself of the congruity between her faith and her stand on the placement of children with same-sex couples, she convinced neither those for nor those against the amendments.
In any event, what the NSW premier and the media have in common is this: they have missed the point. What should have been the crux of this debate -- the best interests of the child -- was lost in the strong tide of sentiment favouring the view that the rights of the prospective adopting parents are paramount and that discrimination against people of same-sex orientation must be eliminated in every way, shape and form.
The issue of whether same-sex adoption is in the best interests of the child is not, in fact, about homophobia or whether prospective same-sex parents have a "right" to adopt a child. One person who appears to have gotten this right is Mike Baird, the shadow treasurer of the Legislative Assembly, whose starting point was "the interests of children and their needs rather than adults and their rights". He went on to criticise the bill as one that puts "the rights of the adults at the centre... the interests of adults above those of children."
The central question to be addressed, said Baird, was not (as Keneally held) whether children needed a loving family; rather, the issue turned on whether it is in the child’s best interests to be "effectively barred" from having a mother and a father.
"f it is accepted that a child has a human right to a mother and a father," he said in the parliamentary debate, "this is a negative right in the sense that there is no claim that society or the state are obliged to provide this, but simply that they are obliged not to help deprive someone of them."
The question he raises is one that ought to make us pause: giving equal preference to same-sex parents and opposite-sex parents that wish to adopt means that the state has the arbitrary power to decide whether or not a child is going to have a father and a mother. Clothing the issue in questions of whether homosexual couples are capable of giving the child care, love and a stable environment, or whether homosexual couples could do it better than dysfunctional opposite-sex parents, and bringing in arguments about where religion stands on the debate -- all of this distracts from the main question.
What we need to ask ourselves is whether it is right that the state be allowed to deprive a child of the chance to have both a person who fulfils the function of a mother and a person who fulfils the function of a father, and all that the collaboration of two people of different genders potentially brings to the development of a human being. The opportunity to have a mother and a father is a very distinct and separate issue from discriminating against people of same-sex orientation, although admittedly and by its nature, it inevitably does.
While Baird acknowledged the complexity surrounding the debate and the need to abolish all unjust discrimination, he also pointed out that passing the bill would amount to a "deliberate decision... to negate one biological parent", which could only be justified if it is accepted that a child definitively does not need both a father and a mother.
Baird voted against the law change on the ground that there was insufficient depth of research to show that there was no long-term impact on children in same-sex families. Without such evidence he said he could not justify legislating against the "time-honoured practice of placing children with both a mother and a father".
"If we wish to make such a dramatic move," he said, "... we must be convinced that it is in the best interests of the child. From what I have read, we are not at this point. Going forward this should lead the debate, not the need to eradicate discrimination or address legal anomalies."
The Legislative Council, which is the upper house of the NSW Parliament and whose approval is required to make this bill law, is considering these issues this week. Let’s hope they get it right this time.
Susan Smithies is the pen name of a lawyer working in New South Wales.
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Crafty, I think you have nailed the direction of the gay rights issue of today with the Australia story. A short time ago gays were coming out with a plea that said: accept us, we are different from you. We are different but we still have a right to happiness, employment, housing, education, etc. So far, so good. Somewhere along the road it changed to a demand: accept us we are the same as you.
No one is a perfect father or mother and no married couple with children are perfect parents. Some hetero-marriages are not for the purpose of procreation such as when my grandpa re-married at age 80. But marriage is mostly I think about building a home and a family and married heteros in one bed commonly leads to having and raising children.
Children have the best chance at the good things in life if they are raised in a loving home with one mother and one father married to each other and complementing each other's traits and strengths and weaknesses. If you don't see that principle coming from God's creation and intelligent design, maybe you can observe it or measure it empirically.
Recently there was a study concluding that children of gay parents were just as happy or happier than children of hetero-parents. That story line ran for about one day until critics of the study pointed out that the data all came from self-reporting by the parents about the happiness of their children and was funded by a gay adoption advocacy group. The study was part of an agenda (IMHO) to lead toward no distinction between genders with parenting being the end they seek. (Gay parenting by definition involves adoption.)
Separate from gayness, does anyone think children in general would do better with 2 fathers in their household instead of one father and a mother in a loving marriage with each bringing different qualities in terms of toughness, nurturing, different sensitivities and different role models to the household? Would two women with two hyphenated mommy-someone names competing to out nurture each other give, in general, the full balance that children might receive with one mother and one father - each one the only mother and the only father, not one of two? I don't think so and as a single father raising a daughter the best I can I don't say that from some lofty perch of perfection.
The end of gender distinctions after we eliminate the terms like bride, groom, husband, wife, father, mother, will be to update our religious books to command us to: Honor your gender-neutral parent-one and honor your other parent-one.
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It's about deconstructing western civilization.
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Doug, you make some good points. I agree no one (in their right mind) would "think children in general would do better with 2 fathers in their household instead of one father and a mother in a loving marriage with each bringing different qualities in terms of toughness, nurturing, different sensitivities and different role models to the household?" Or two "mothers" in their household - I have a few lesbian neighbors.
However, for different reasons and varying circumstances I also know quite a few single parents. As an observer, it seems single parenthood is very rewarding but complicated and difficult. And the child is "missing" having "one father and a mother in a loving marriage...." It's really hard being a single parent (kudos to you).
I guess my question is whether being raised by two loving successful intelligent lesbians for example is that much worse (or better) than being raised by a single parent? I find it
a bit odd that a successful single man or single woman can adopt and/or have a child and be commended and applauded yet a successful lesbian couple adopting or having a child is frowned upon.
In both examples the child is missing a role model. Yet in both examples, the child will be loved and nurtured.
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But in one case, sexual role models modelled will be Darwinian errors and at variance with abouat 95% of the children in question.
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I don't applaud single mothers who are single by choice.
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JDN: "I guess my question is whether being raised by two loving successful intelligent lesbians for example is that much worse (or better) than being raised by a single parent? I find it
a bit odd that a successful single man or single woman can adopt and/or have a child and be commended and applauded yet a successful lesbian couple adopting or having a child is frowned upon."
GM: "I don't applaud single mothers who are single by choice."
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I agree with GM and lost a dear friend with that advice. I disclosed in my post "...as a single father raising a daughter the best I can I don't say that from some lofty perch of perfection." One of the keys to success that has worked for me taking custody virtually at birth was to make sure at least 6 loving adults to bond closely in her life, people she would see and spend time with at least every week of the year in the formative years, in particular having her experience the loving and nurturing hetero-marriage household of her maternal grandparents. I knew she needed a positive female role model to be close like a mother and needed also to witness and experience the relationship they have with each other. With some braggart I can say she is better off with me than aborted or abandoned, but I would never say this situation is preferable to having your one loving mother married to your one loving father married and with you in one loving household.
JDN, Your comparison of gay or lesbian adoption to single parenting or adoption is interesting. I would not want to judge one against the other - but will. Certainly having two is an advantage in some ways and there typically is some degree of femininity and masculinity distinction between the two. OTOH, with only one I can say that when times are difficult there no question in the mind of the parent or the child or anyone else who is the father (singular), not Daddy-Tom and/or Daddy-Bill, or who is the mother singular. With two of this or two of that; no one can stand up and say I am the father, or I am the mother (singular). I also don't like the first name familiarity required with the duplication.
I am not against gay parenting or gay adoption. I am simply against putting that concept alongside of hetero-marriage and hetero-parenting (a lot of hyphens are required) and saying that any combination is fine or equal. I don't believe God was wrong to make it so structured: "Honor your father and your mother".
Some kids are troubled, disadvantaged or otherwise not in demand for adoption. Similar to what I said for my situation, I would rather see a kid adopted by a gay or lesbian couple (or a single person) who sincerely want to take that on than have the kid aborted, abandoned or left without family.
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I would rather have a child raised by a gay couple than "raised by the state". I don't have a problem with homosexuals adopting if that's the alternative, but if there is a choice between a normal couple and homosexuals, then the default should be for normalcy.
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Intuitively that makes sense to me.
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I too agree; although I question what does "default" mean?
If we have a check list; one item, albeit an important item should be "normal couple" or whatever PC sounds better.
But a lot of other factors enter into determining the "best" home for the child. All need to be weighed, some more equally than others.
I bet one of my lesbian neighbors (One is the Head of ER at University Hospital and the other a serious $$$ Hollywood Agent) would offer a wonderful home.
Not a "normal couple" yet no question they are able to offer numerous advantages to a homeless child versus the average "normal couple" not to
mention significant advantages versus the average single parent. All factors need to be weighed.
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Default - a value that a program or operating system assumes, or a course of action that a program or operating system will take, when the user or programmer specifies no overriding value or action.
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Other things being roughly equal , , ,
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Th
Other things being roughly equal , , ,
Then we agree....
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/obama%e2%80%99s-safe-school-czar-admits-gay-curriculum-is-the-ultimate-goal/
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With exactly the political shadings that one would expect from the NY Times
In School Efforts to End Bullying, Some See Agenda
By ERIK ECKHOLM
HELENA, Mont. — Alarmed by evidence that gay and lesbian students are common
victims of schoolyard bullies, many school districts are bolstering their
antiharassment rules with early lessons in tolerance, explaining that some
children have “two moms” or will grow up to love members of the same sex.
Mary Decker, left, Michael Gengler and Tess Dufrechou are members of the
Helena High School Gay-Straight Alliance, which supported revisions to the
sex education and antibullying curriculum in the school district in Helena,
Mont.
The Curriculum
The school district in Helena, Mont., revised its new teaching guidelines on
sex education and tolerance, after parents criticized them as being too
explicit and an endorsement of homosexuality.
Among the original goals:
Grade 1: “Understand human beings can love people of the same gender and
people of another gender.”
Grade 5: “Understand that sexual intercourse includes but is not limited to
vaginal, oral or anal penetration.”
The final version eliminated those goals and added a vaguer one:
Grades K to 5: “Recognize that family structures differ.”
The final version also added language emphasizing that same-sex marriage is
illegal:
Grade 6: “In Montana, marriage is between a man and woman. Other states
allow marriage between adults of the same gender.”
A goal in the original and final plans:
Grade 6: “Recognize that acceptance of gender role stereotypes can limit a
person’s life.”
But such efforts to teach acceptance of homosexuality, which have gained
urgency after several well-publicized suicides by gay teenagers, are
provoking new culture wars in some communities.
Many educators and rights advocates say that official prohibitions of slurs
and taunts are most effective when combined with frank discussions, from
kindergarten on, about diverse families and sexuality.
Angry parents and religious critics, while agreeing that schoolyard
harassment should be stopped, charge that liberals and gay rights groups are
using the antibullying banner to pursue a hidden “homosexual agenda,”
implicitly endorsing, for example, same-sex marriage.
Last summer, school officials here in Montana’s capital unveiled new
guidelines for teaching about sexuality and tolerance. They proposed
teaching first graders that “human beings can love people of the same
gender,” and fifth graders that sexual intercourse can involve “vaginal,
oral or anal penetration.”
A local pastor, Rick DeMato, carried his shock straight to the pulpit.
“We do not want the minds of our children to be polluted with the things of
a carnal-minded society,” Mr. DeMato, 69, told his flock at Liberty Baptist
Church.
In tense community hearings, some parents made familiar arguments that
innocent youngsters were not ready for explicit language. Other parents and
pastors, along with leaders of the Big Sky Tea Party, saw a darker purpose.
“Anyone who reads this document can see that it promotes acceptance of the
homosexual lifestyle,” one mother said at a six-hour school board meeting in
late September.
Barely heard was the plea of Harlan Reidmohr, 18, who graduated last spring
and said he was relentlessly tormented and slammed against lockers after
coming out during his freshman year. Through his years in the Helena
schools, he said at another school board meeting, sexual orientation was
never once discussed in the classroom, and “I believe this led to a lot of
the sexual harassment I faced.”
Last month, the federal Department of Education told schools they were
obligated, under civil rights laws, to try to prevent harassment, including
that based on sexual orientation and gender identity. But the agency did not
address the controversy over more explicit classroom materials in grade
schools.
Some districts, especially in larger cities, have adopted tolerance lessons
with minimal dissent. But in suburban districts in California, Illinois and
Minnesota, as well as here in Helena, the programs have unleashed fierce
opposition.
“Of course we’re all against bullying,” Mr. DeMato, one of numerous pastors
who opposed the plan, said in an interview. “But the Bible says very clearly
that homosexuality is wrong, and Christians don’t want the schools to teach
subjects that are repulsive to their values.”
The divided Helena school board, after four months of turmoil, recently
adopted a revised plan for teaching about health, sex and diversity. Much of
the explicit language about sexuality and gay families was removed or
replaced with vague phrases, like a call for young children to “understand
that family structures differ.” The superintendent who has ardently pushed
the new curriculum, Bruce K. Messinger, agreed to let parents remove their
children from lessons they find objectionable.
In Alameda, Calif., officials started to introduce new tolerance lessons
after teachers noticed grade-schoolers using gay slurs and teasing children
with gay or lesbian parents. A group of parents went to court seeking the
right to remove their children from lessons that included reading “And Tango
Makes Three,” a book in which two male penguins bond and raise a child.
The parents lost the suit, and the school superintendent, Kirsten Vital,
said the district was not giving ground. “Everyone in our community needs to
feel safe and visible and included,” Ms. Vital said.
Some of the Alameda parents have taken their children out of public schools,
while others now hope to unseat members of the school board.
After at least two suicides by gay students last year, a Minnesota school
district recently clarified its antibullying rules to explicitly protect gay
and lesbian students along with other target groups. But to placate
religious conservatives, the district, Anoka-Hennepin County, also stated
that teachers must be absolutely neutral on questions of sexual orientation
and refrain from endorsing gay parenting.
Rights advocates worry that teachers will avoid any discussion of
gay-related topics, missing a chance to fight prejudice.
While nearly all states require schools to have rules against harassment,
only 10 require them to explicitly outlaw bullying related to sexual
orientation. Rights groups including the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education
Network, based in New York, are promoting a federal “safe schools” act to
make this a universal requirement, although passage is not likely any time
soon.
===============
In School Efforts to End Bullying, Some See Agenda
Published: November 6, 2010
(Page 2 of 2)
Candi Cushman, an educational analyst with Focus on the Family, a Christian
group, said that early lessons about sexuality and gay parents reflected a
political agenda, including legitimizing same-sex marriage. “We need to
protect all children from bullying,” Ms. Cushman said. “But the advocacy
groups are promoting homosexual lessons in the name of antibullying.”
The Curriculum
The school district in Helena, Mont., revised its new teaching guidelines on
sex education and tolerance, after parents criticized them as being too
explicit and an endorsement of homosexuality.
Among the original goals:
Grade 1: “Understand human beings can love people of the same gender and
people of another gender.”
Grade 5: “Understand that sexual intercourse includes but is not limited to
vaginal, oral or anal penetration.”
The final version eliminated those goals and added a vaguer one:
Grades K to 5: “Recognize that family structures differ.”
The final version also added language emphasizing that same-sex marriage is
illegal:
Grade 6: “In Montana, marriage is between a man and woman. Other states
allow marriage between adults of the same gender.”
A goal in the original and final plans:
Grade 6: “Recognize that acceptance of gender role stereotypes can limit a
person’s life.”
Ellen Kahn of the Human Rights Campaign in Washington, which offers a
“welcoming schools” curriculum for grade schools, denied such motives.
“When you talk about two moms or two dads, the idea is to validate the
families, not to push a debate about gay marriage,” Ms. Kahn said. The
program involves what she described as age-appropriate materials on family
and sexual diversity and is used in dozens of districts, though it has
sometime stirred dissent.
The Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, which runs teacher-training programs and
recommends videos and books depicting gay parents in a positive light, has
met opposition in several districts, including the Chicago suburb of Oak
Park.
Julie Justicz, a 47-year-old lawyer, and her partner live in Oak Park with
two sons ages 6 and 11. Ms. Justicz saw the need for early tolerance
training, she said, when their older son was upset by pejorative terms about
gays in the schoolyard.
Frank classroom discussions about diverse families and hurtful phrases had
greatly reduced the problem, she said.
But one of the objecting parents, Tammi Shulz, who describes herself as a
traditional Christian, said, “I just don’t think it’s great to talk about
homosexuality with 5-year-olds.”
Tess Dufrechou, president of Helena High School’s Gay-Straight Alliance, a
club that promotes tolerance, counters that, “By the time kids get to high
school, it’s too late.”
Only a handful of students in Helena high schools are openly gay, with
others keeping the secret because they fear the reactions of parents and
peers, students said.
Michael Gengler, one of the few to have come out, said, “You learn from an
early age that it’s not acceptable to be gay,” adding that he was
disappointed that the teaching guidelines had been watered down.
But Mr. Messinger, the superintendent, said he still hoped to achieve the
original goals without using the explicit language that offended many
parents.
“This is not about advocating a lifestyle, but making sure our children
understand it and, I hope, accept it,” he said.
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIvmE4_KMNw[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIvmE4_KMNw
'Girl Effect' Could Lift the Global Economy
Training and supporting young women can transform countries' economic development
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/apr2009/gb2009048_644459_page_2.htm
By Alyson Warhurst
There are 600 million adolescent girls in developing countries, but they are largely invisible to the world at large. Included among them are girls affected by armed conflict, domestic violence, HIV/AIDS, sex trafficking, and internal displacement, as well as girls in child-headed households or locked in early marriages. To ignore them is to miss the "girl effect," which could be an unexpected answer to the global economic crisis.
Here's why: When a girl benefits, so does everyone in society, including business. Girls as economic actors can bring about change for themselves, their families, and their countries. Conversely, ignoring the girl effect can cost societies billions in lost potential.
• When a girl in the developing world receives seven or more years of education, she marries four years later, on average, and has 2.2 fewer children.
• An extra year in primary school statistically boosts girls' future wages by 10% to 20%, and every additional year a girl spends in secondary school lifts her income by 15% to 25%. The size of a country's economy is in no small part determined by the educational attainment and skill sets of its girls.
• Young women have a 90% probability of investing their earned income back into their families, while the likelihood of men doing the same is only 30% to 40%.
• A girl's school attainment is linked to her own health and well-being, as well as reduced death rates: For every additional year of schooling, a mother's mortality is significantly reduced, and the infant mortality rate of her children declines by 5% to 10%.
• If educated, girls can get loans, start businesses, employ other women, and reinvest in their families—when they're ready to have them. That means their children can also have an education.
Consider the situation in Kenya. Some 1.6 million girls there drop out of high school every year. If they finished their secondary education, they would make 30% more money and contribute $3.2 billion more to the Kenyan economy every year. Instead, many take their place among Kenya's 204,000 adolescent mothers and cost the economy $500 million a year.
According to Your Move, a toolkit on the Web site www.girleffect.org, girls in Kenya could, over their lifetime, lift the nation's economy by $27.4 billion through additional education, $25 billion if they delay childbirth, and $1.6 billion if they stay free of HIV/AIDS. Yet without policy intervention, staying HIV/AIDS-free is extremely difficult, and as a result, in Nairobi's urban slums a girl is six times as likely to be HIV-positive than a boy.
RUNNING THEIR OWN BUSINESSES
The girl effect is the same the world over. Yet even though this is well known, girls as a group still receive less than 0.5% of official development assistance. To unleash the potential power of girls on economic development, further action is needed, including protecting their security and meeting their basic needs. When we do this, girls could have the opportunity to create a ripple effect of positive social and economic change.
Some groups are beginning to act. In Bangladesh, for instance, where in some regions nearly 90% of girls are married before 18, the Nike (NKE) Foundation is a partner in a program that trains girls to build solar panels for their villages. At the same time, nongovernmental organization BRAC has pioneered a microfinance program that by 2007 had provided 40,000 adolescent girls with the capital (as well as the confidence and skills) to run their own farming businesses. That, in turn, allows many to pay their own and their siblings' school fees.
In Paraguay, girls participate in schools that pay for themselves as functioning farms. And in Liberia, President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf recognized the potential of the girl effect, working with the World Bank, the Nike Foundation, and the government of Denmark to develop an innovative public-private partnership called the Adolescent Girls Initiative. The program ensures that adolescent girls—who suffered terribly in Liberia's past conflict—receive training and contribute to the country's reconstruction efforts.
A GOAT OF ONE'S OWN
In Ethiopia, if you are a 15-year-old girl, you have a 43% likelihood of being already married. A pilot program run by the Population Council gave families a $25 goat as an incentive to allow their daughters to go to school instead. Within two years, some 11,000 girls, or 97% of the participants, had stayed in school, gained confidence, and delayed marriage and childbirth.
The message about such successes is getting out. Girls were center stage at Davos this year in a plenary session that included Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, managing director of the World Bank; Ann Veneman, executive director of Unicef; Melinda Gates of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Mark Parker, the president and chief executive of Nike. And at the U.N. in March, around International Women's Day, the interagency task force on adolescent girls promised to increase efforts to include girls in development programs.
First, adolescent girls worldwide need to be identified and counted. With this in mind, the Nike Foundation, the U.N. Foundation, and Maplecroft (a global risk-analysis company, of which I am a director) are working together on global data sets of adolescent girls to map their whereabouts (at a subnational level, where possible) and to understand their development status and prospects. Once adolescent girls are tallied, it becomes more feasible to advocate for appropriate policy responses and set targets that promote their greater participation in society.
SMART ECONOMICS
Why does this matter to business? Organizations such as Nike, the Gates Foundation, and Jennifer and Peter Buffett's NoVo Foundation are behind a growing number of new initiatives that target the improved health, education, and economic opportunities of adolescent girls. These organizations have seen the sustainability potential of the girl effect on development.
At Davos, Nike's Parker explained: "By providing real economic-based opportunities for girls, the potential impact they have on their family, village, community, and, ultimately, their country is transformative. This has the ability to affect social stability, stimulate economic development, and really be one of the most powerful things we could be doing."
Helene Gayle, president and CEO of CARE agreed, adding that "educating girls yields some of the highest returns of all development investments." So did the World Bank's Okonjo-Iweala, who said: "Investing in women is smart economics. Investing in girls—catching them upstream—is even smarter economics."
The human rights and security of adolescent girls are also linked indirectly to supply chains, as electronic companies have recently recognized. The mineral tantalum, extracted from coltan ore in the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), is used in the production of portable electronic equipment, including mobile phones.
ELECTRONICS INDUSTRY INITIATIVES
Last week I attended a Women of Influence lunch at Britain's House of Lords. The topic was sexual violence against women and girls, used as a systematic means by rebels in the DRC to destroy local communities and gain control over natural resources such as coltan. Again, there are no reliable figures, but the U.N. estimates that 27,000 women were raped in DRC in 2006 and 45,000 in 2005. This is continuing despite the presence of a U.N. peacekeeping force.
The electronics industry, for its part, is working together through such organizations as GeSI (the Global e-Sustainability Initiative) and EICC (the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition), in collaboration with the DRC government, to support the establishment of a regulated Congolese coltan industry and prevent the unwitting purchase of illegal coltan associated with human rights violations.
The past decade has seen advances in commitments to action, but the measures are still insufficient. Here are five recommendations for global business:
• Assess the implications for girls of how you source raw materials and other supplies. Do not turn a blind eye to human rights violations of women and girls within your supply chain and sphere of influence.
• If girls are old enough—above the International Labor Organization's stated minimum age of 15—to work in your supply chains, ensure they have identification, fair and just conditions of work, support in education and training, mentors, and safe places to associate. Ask your social auditors to look out for their interests.
• Ensure health facilities and educational materials are close at hand to reduce preventable diseases, such as HIV (many more girls than boys are infected in sub-Saharan Africa), protect maternal health, and support adolescent girls in their unique health needs.
• Address trafficking and sex work in supply chains because girls are more vulnerable to infection by the highest-risk carriers of HIV, soldiers and truck drivers. Indeed, the Northstar Foundation and Maplecroft, supported by TNT (TNT.AS), have mapped HIV/AIDS prevalence over time and found infections increasing along transportation routes in Africa.
• Use your influence to convince the development agencies and governments you work with that girls should get increased focus in development assistance.
• Put girls at the heart of existing and new philanthropy efforts and social investment projects.
(You can find other ideas on www.girleffect.org in the Your Move toolkit.)
Girls and young women could be an important centerpiece of sustainable economic recovery—one that is worthy of innovative policy making on the part of business and governments alike. There are 600 million girls out there, after all. They just need to be seen, understood, and given a chance.
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18uDutylDa4[/youtube]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18uDutylDa4
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg looks at why a smaller percentage of women than men reach the top of their professions -- and offers 3 powerful pieces of advice to women aiming for the C-suite.
I don't agree with everything she has to say but I thought she made some really interesting points.
So for any of us in this room today, let's start out by admitting we're lucky. We don't live in the world our mothers lived in, our grandmothers lived in, where career choices for women were so limited. And if you're in this room today, most of us grew up in a world where we had basic civil rights. And amazingly, we still live in a world where some women don't have them. But all that aside, we still have a problem, and it's a real problem. And the problem is this: women are not making it to the top of any profession anywhere in the world. The numbers tell the story quite clearly. 190 heads of state -- nine are women. Of all the people in parliament in the world, 13 percent are women. In the corporate sector, women at the top, C-level jobs, board seats -- tops out at 15, 16 percent. The numbers have not moved since 2002 and are going in the wrong direction. And even in the non-profit world, a world we sometimes think of as being led by more women, women at the top: 20 percent.
We also have another problem, which is that women face harder choices between professional success and personal fulfillment. A recent study in the U.S. showed that, of married senior managers, two-thirds of the married men had children and only one-third of the married women had children. A couple of years ago, I was in New York, and I was pitching a deal, and I was in one of those fancy New York private equity offices you can picture. And I'm in the meeting -- it's about a three-hour meeting -- and two hours in, there kind of needs to be that bio break, and everyone stands up, and the partner running the meeting starts looking really embarrassed. And I realized he doesn't know where the women's room is in his office. So I start looking around for moving boxes, figuring they just moved in, but I don't see any. And so I said, "So did you just move into this office?" And he said, "No, we've been here about a year." And I said, "Are you telling me that I am the only woman to have pitched a deal in this office in a year?" And he looked at me, and he said, "Yeah. Or maybe you're the only one who had to go to the bathroom."
(Laughter)
So the question is, how are we going to fix this? How do we change these numbers at the top? How do we make this different? I want to start out by saying, I talk about this -- about keeping women in the workforce -- because I really think that's the answer. In the high-income part of our workforce, in the people who end up at the top -- Fortune 500 CEO jobs, or the equivalent in other industries -- the problem, I am convinced, is that women are dropping out. Now people talk about this a lot, and they talk about things like flex time and mentoring and programs companies should have to train women. I want to talk about none of that today -- even though that's all really important. Today I want to focus on what we can do as individuals. What are the messages we need to tell ourselves? What are the messages we tell the women that work with and for us? What are the messages we tell our daughters?
Now at the outset, I want to be very clear that this speech comes with no judgments. I don't have the right answer; I don't even have it for myself. I left San Fransisco, where I live, on Monday, and I was getting on the plane for this conference. And my daughter, who's three, when I dropped her off at preschool, did that whole hugging the leg, crying, "Mommy, don't get on the plane," thing. This is hard. I feel guilty sometimes. I know no women, whether they're at home, or whether they're in the workforce, that don't feel that sometimes. So I'm not saying that staying in the workforce is the right thing for everyone.
My talk today is about what the messages are if you do want to stay in the workforce. And I think there are three. One, sit at the table. Two, make your partner a real partner. And three -- look at that -- don't leave before you leave. Number one: sit at the table. Just a couple weeks ago at Facebook, we hosted a very senior government official, and he came in to meet with senior execs from around Silicon Valley. And everyone kind of sat at the table. And then he had these two women who were traveling with him who were pretty senior in his department. And I kind of said to them, "Sit at the table. Come on, sit at the table." And they sat on the side of the room. When I was in college my senior year, I took a course called European Intellectual History. Don't you love that kind of thing from college. I wish I could do that now. And I took it with my roommate, Carrie, who was then a brilliant literary student -- and went on to be a brilliant literary scholar -- and my brother -- smart guy, but a water polo playing pre-med, who was a sophomore.
The three of us take this class together. And then Carrie reads all the books in the original Greek and Latin -- goes to all the lectures -- I read all the books in English and go to most of the lectures. My brother is kind of busy; he reads one book of 12 and goes to a couple of lectures, marches himself up to our room a couple days before the exam to get himself tutored. The three of us go to the exam together, and we sit down. And we sit there for three hours -- and our little blue notebooks -- yes, I'm that old. And we walk out, and we look at each other, and we say, "How did you do?" And Carrie says, "Boy, I feel like I didn't really draw out the main point on the Hegelian dialectic." And I say, "God, I really wish I had really connected John Locke's theory of property with the philosophers that follow." And my brother says, "I got the top grade in the class." "You got the top grade in the class? You don't know anything."
The problem with these stories is that they show what the data shows: women systematically underestimate their own abilities. If you test men and women, and you ask them questions on totally objective criteria like GPA's, men get it wrong slightly high, and women get it wrong slightly low. Women do not negotiate for themselves in the workforce. A study in the last two years of people entering the workforce out of college showed that 57 percent of boys entering -- or men, I guess -- are negotiating their first salary, and only seven percent of women. And most importantly, men attribute their success to themselves, and women attribute it to other external factors. If you ask men why they did a good job, they'll say, "I'm awesome. Obviously. Why are you even asking?" If you ask women why they did a good job, what they'll say is someone helped them, they got lucky, they worked really hard. Why does this matter? Boy, it matters a lot because no one gets to the corner office by sitting on the side, not at the table. And no one gets the promotion if they don't think they deserve their success, or they don't even understand their own success.
I wish the answer were easy. I wish I could just go tell all the young women I work for, all these fabulous women, "Believe in yourself and negotiate for yourself. Own your own success." I wish I could tell that to my daughter. But it's not that simple. Because what the data shows, above all else, is one thing, which is that success and likability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women. And everyone's nodding, because we all know this to be true.
There's a really good study that shows this really well. There's a famous Harvard Business School study on a woman named Heidi Roizen. And she's an operator in a company in Silicon Valley, and she uses her contacts to become a very successful venture capitalist. In 2002 -- not so long ago -- a professor who was then at Columbia University took that case and made it Heidi Roizen. And he gave case out -- both of them -- to two groups of students. He changed exactly one word: Heidi to Howard. But that was one word made a really big difference. He then surveyed the students. And the good news was the students, both men and women, thought Heidi and Howard were equally competent, and that's good. The bad news was that everyone liked Howard. He's a great guy, you want to work for him, you want to spend the day fishing with him. But Heidi? Not so sure. She's a little out for herself. She's a little political. You're not sure you'd want to work for her. This is the complication. We have to tell our daughter and our colleagues, we have to tell ourselves to believe we got the A, to reach for the promotion, to sit at the table. And we have to do it in a world where, for them, there are sacrifices they will make for that, even though for their brothers, there will not.
The saddest thing about all of this is that it's really hard to remember this. And I'm about to tell a story, which is truly embarrassing for me, but I think important. I gave this talk at Facebook not so long ago to about a hundred employees. And a couple hours later, there was a young woman who works there sitting outside my little desk, and she wanted to talk to me. I said, okay, and she sat down, and we talked. And she said, "I learned something today. I learned that I need to keep my hand up." I said, "What do you mean?" She said, "Well, you're giving this talk, and you said you were going to take two more questions. And I had my hand up with lots of other people, and you took two more questions. And I put my hand down, and I noticed all the women put their hand down, and then you took more questions, only from the men." And I thought to myself, wow, if it's me -- who cares about this, obviously -- giving this talk -- during this talk, I can't even notice that the men's hands are still raised, and the women's hands are still raised, how good are we as managers of our companies and our organizations at seeing that the men are reaching for opportunities more than women? We've got to get women to sit at the table.
(Applause)
Message number two: make your partner a real partner. I've become convinced that we've made more progress in the workforce than we have in the home. The data shows this very clearly. If a woman and a man work full-time and have a child, the woman does twice the amount of housework the man does, and the woman does three times the amount of child care the man does. So she's got three jobs, or two jobs, and he's got one. Who do you think drops out when someone needs to be home more. The causes of this are really complicated, and I don't have time to go into them. And I don't think Sunday football watching and general laziness is the cause.
I think the cause is more complicated. I think, as a society, we put more pressure on our boys to succeed that we do on our girls. I know men that stay home and work in the home to support wives with careers And it's hard. When I go to the Mommy-and-Me stuff and I see the father there, I notice that the other mommies don't play with him. And that's a problem, because we have to make it as important a job -- because it's the hardest job in the world -- to work inside the home for people of both genders, if we're going to even things out and let women stay in the workforce. (Applause) Studies show that households with equal earning and equal responsibility also have half the divorce rate. And if that wasn't good enough motivation for everyone out there, they also have more -- how shall I say this on this stage? -- they know each other more in the biblical sense as well.
(Cheers)
Message number three: don't leave before you leave. I think there's a really deep irony to the fact that actions women are taking -- and I see this all the time -- with the objective of staying in the workforce, actually lead to their eventually leaving. Here's what happens: we're all busy; everyone's busy; a woman's busy. And she starts thinking about having a child. And from the moment she starts thinking about having a child, she starts thinking about making room for that child. "How am I going to fit this into everything else I'm doing?" And literally from that moment, she doesn't raise her hand anymore, she doesn't look for a promotion, she doesn't take on the new project, she doesn't say, "Me, I want to do that." She starts leaning back. The problem is that -- let's say she got pregnant that day, that day -- nine months of pregnancy, thee months of maternity leave, six months to catch your breath -- fast-forward two years, more often -- and as I've seen it -- women start thinking about this way earlier -- when they get engaged, when they get married, when they start thinking about trying to have a child, which can take a long time. One woman came to see me about this, and I kind of looked at her -- she looked a little young. And I said, "So are you and your husband thinking about having a baby?" And she said, "Oh no, I'm not married." She didn't even have a boyfriend. I said, "You're thinking about this just way too early."
But the point is that what happens once you start kind of quietly leaning back? Everyone who's been through this -- and I'm here to tell you, once you have a child at home, your job better be really good to go back, because it's hard to leave that kid at home -- your job needs to be challenging. It needs to be rewarding. You need to feel like you're making a difference. And if two years ago you didn't take a promotion and some guy next to you did, if three years ago you stopped looking for new opportunities, you're going to be bored, because you should have kept your foot on the gas pedal. Don't leave before you leave. Stay in. Keep your foot on the gas pedal, until the very day you need to leave to take a break for a child -- and then make your decisions. Don't make decisions too far in advance, particularly ones you're not even conscious you're making.
My generation really, sadly, is not going to change the numbers at the top. They're just not moving. We are not going to get to where 50 percent of the population -- in my generation, there will not be 50 percent of people at the top of any industry. But I'm hopeful that future generations can. I think the world that was run where half of our countries and half of our companies were run by women, would be a better world. And it's not just because people would know where the women's bathroom are, even though that would be very helpful. I think it would be a better world. I have two children. I have a five year-old son and a two year-old daughter. I want my son to have a choice to contribute fully in the workforce or at home, and I want my daughter to have the choice to not just exceed, but to be liked for her accomplishments.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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What this woman doesn't know is a lot.
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I had my own reaction to some of her points, but also wondering if Rachel might expand on: "I don't agree with everything she has to say", and Crafty's rather non-applauding reaction: "What this woman doesn't know is a lot."
Two people I know that would disagree with the thrust of her remarks are my mother and my daughter, both high achievers. Nothing holds either of them back, 70 years apart. One that might disagree that "women are not making it to the top of any profession anywhere in the world" is Margaret Thatcher.
This point is interesting: "success and likability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women. And everyone's nodding, because we all know this to be true."
What is the converse of that, women who are dull plain and going nowhere are more likable than those achieving, leading and accomplishing. I don't think so and perpetuating that stereotype doesn't seem helpful. I see it as very individual and personal more so than a gender matter. Certainly she sees herself as both, a 'c-level' exec and extremely likable - they invented 'friending', didn't they? I also think she wrote the 'everyone is nodding' in agreement line before seeing the reaction. I recall hard driving career women I've run across who seem to lack likability, but that is a choice or a personality, not something crucial or helpful to their success. In the world of girls sports where I spent a lot of my parenting time I run across up and coming players driving to be the best at their craft, in the state, or in the world. When they step out of the intensity of the competition, some are likable, some are not.
Her thrust seems to be that the numbers ought to be identical to men, even though she admits that is not the priority of most women. Her story of a tiny daughter who she 'drops off' at day care pulling on her leg and begging her not to go away on a plane makes you wonder if she is the one making the right choice and the other women putting family ahead of career at least for that part of their life, never reaching COO, made the wrong choice?
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In the medical profession it is well known that female doctors do aspire to achieve the same in their careers as the men. They want fewer hours, they want to spend more with family. Not all of course but more than with male colleagues. But that is their choice! No one is holding them back. I believe the numbers of females in medical school is over a third now. And aren't there more women in law school these days then men?
Aren't there also more women going to college?
We always hear how there are less women in science, engineering and so forth. And we get countless females with phDs telling us from their latest studies that it is due to the way we bring up our children, the culture, socialization, etc. Differences in male and female brains of course has nothing to do with it.
And in any case who in the world is stopping any female from becoming a mathemitician, a civil engineer, a hedge fund manager, coming up with their own internet company?
I guess it is the same people who are destroying the lives of all Muslims, gays, blacks and Latinos? We all know this to be true wink nod smiley face etc.
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"do aspire to achieve"
correction:
"do not aspire to achieve"
But I would add, that they can anytime they want.
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Doug read Women in meaningful numbers are not making it to the top. There are some female world leaders but I think there should be more.
Disagreements
She don't have the answer to work/life/family balance and avoids the question
I don't think the goal should be 50/50 equality because I don't think all women want the corner office. I do think there should be more woman politicians and more women in the C-suite. I don't believe the lack of women at the top is all personal choice for work/life balance.
I strongly agree with her point that as a society "success and likability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women which doesn't mean it is true for every person. I have read and seen lots of research and experiments supporting that point and seen it personally in how women leaders are treated.
I found Sheryl's speech and Clays Shirky's article something I needed to hear personally
I made a career change about a year ago because I was passed over for an internal promotion by a guy who was a better self promoter than me. Which actually makes sense because it was sales job and he sold himself better.
However I am now working in sales (sort of) and the job did not work out for him. He is bright,hard working, and a really nice guy who has been really helpful to me in my current job and at my previous one. The company kept neither of us. It actually ended being for the best for me because my job is better than the one I didn't get and I learned a very valuable lesson. I was upset at the time though.
I think both Sheryl and stay at home Mom's are making the right choice for their families but both choices have serious drawbacks. If the child was clinging to the Father's leg telling him not to get on the plane should he not go? Why are Dad's giving a free pass when they sacrifice family for thier job? Also if she had lots of kids the individual child would get less attention. Should all small children get all the attention they want?
I really like the advice especially don't leave before you leave because for some woman it way to avoid doing difficult things and the women and society as a whole loses on the making the best use of her talents.
Many woman who would like be stay at home mom's have to work to support their families. Paretns of both sexes often would like more time with their family. Also finding a husband and having children don't always follow your timetable. It is better for some women not to limit their choices before it is necessary. Jobs higher up on the food chain are ofter more flexible than jobs lower on the food chain.
It will be a few days before I can respond again
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Rachel, Thank you for expanding on that. I am happy to know your view and I agree wholeheartedly that women deserve fair treatment and opportunity. I would add my opinion that reaching the "c-level" in a big corporation is not the sweet spot in life or in business. I assume that term comes out of gender studies; I have never heard it in business. The heart of the economy (IMO) and the sweet spot for movers and shakers, innovators and leaders is entrepreneurship, and I think women measure up much better there. In that environment your abilities are judged less subjectively and rewards and accomplishments are more directly related to performance. A c-level executive is still an employee, not an employer. At CIO, CFO, COO, even CEO you still have a boss, the Board of Directors, ask Hayworth at BP about that. It is impossible to judge that statistic IMO because more of the best women than men work a partial career (by choice). She seems to respect the other choice but is advocating taking her path. But her path was not to work her way up the company; she came in the side door: (From Wikipedia)In late 2007, Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of Facebook, met Sandberg at a Christmas party and was impressed. He had no formal search for a COO but thought of Sheryl as "a perfect person for this role." (Only at Facebook is Chief Operating Officer a marketing position. An old boys network with a gender twist, lol.)
Her mentor at Harvard was Larry Summers who might have something to say about the heart of her subject that she skipped.
The best careers I think are obviously where you do something you love, but also where you can make not the most, but a boatload of money and success and still go home at a decent hour every night in my opinion. The next million has less utility.
I don't trust statistics on likability either. I would like to see the data on measurability first.
Your story (Rachel) of someone else being a better self-promoter is interesting as well as her advice to be a bigger self promoter. That is a very subtle skill or assignment. I remember how terrible I have been at that in job interviews. I rarely have been hired by someone who didn't already know my capabilities. I clam up and get humble while someone else with fewer or smaller accomplishments is in there telling them a great story. I am visualizing most of those successful people with the likability problem, any gender, as being excessive self promoters.
CCP wrote: "And in any case who in the world is stopping any female from becoming a mathematician, a civil engineer..."
That was my Mom's reaction when people see only one female in her I.T. class photo from 60 years ago. She claims no one then kept women out of aeronautical engineering, and she got hired right away after graduation without any preference program. It just wasn't something most women wanted to do.
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**Hey, it's just a lifestyle choice, right?
http://theothermccain.com/2010/12/10/palin-hating-columbia-professor-huffington-post-blogger-busted-for-incest/
**So, how long before the left adopts this as a political movement?
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"Why are Dads given a free pass when they sacrifice family for their job?"
"Free pass" exaggerates it quite a bit, but yes the standard is, and should be, different. It is built into both the philogeny and the ontogeny of the human species.
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http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2010/12/19/the-drunkards-progress/?singlepage=true
The Drunkard’s Progress
December 19, 2010 - by Richard Fernandez
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When Lady Gaga spoke at a rally in support of repealing the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy towards gays in the military, she said: “Our new law is called ‘If you don’t like it, go home!’” That kind of speech is described as a defense of tolerance. Today the New York Times narrates the case of a University of Nebraska astronomer who was denied a position at the University of Kentucky because he was “potentially evangelical.” The department voted to deny him the position because it would look bad for the university if it hired a religious nut. Both incidents highlight the new normal, whatever that is.
… the smoking gun is an e-mail dated Sept. 21, 2007, from a department staff member, Sally A. Shafer, to Dr. Cavagnero and another colleague. Ms. Shafer wrote that she did an Internet search on Dr. Gaskell and found links to his notes for a lecture that explores, among other topics, how the Bible could relate to contemporary astronomy.
“Clearly this man is complex and likely fascinating to talk with,” Ms. Shafer wrote, “but potentially evangelical. If we hire him, we should expect similar content to be posted on or directly linked from the department Web site.”
Just what is inappropriate in modern society is a matter of intense debate. Some people say that anything goes. Recently, Ann Althouse quoted Justice Scalia in connection with a case involving incest between a Columbia professor and Huffington Post blogger. She argued that morals legislation may effectively be dead. Scalia said where once there was a belief “that certain forms of sexual behavior are ‘immoral and unacceptable’… the same interest furthered by criminal laws against fornication, bigamy, adultery, adult incest, bestiality, and obscenity,” those views were in his view increasingly untenable in view of recent jurisprudence. Scalia wrote:
The Court today reaches the opposite conclusion. The Texas statute, it says, “furthers no legitimate state interest which can justify its intrusion into the personal and private life of the individual” … The Court embraces instead Justice Stevens’ declaration in his Bowers dissent, that “the fact that the governing majority in a State has traditionally viewed a particular practice as immoral is not a sufficient reason for upholding a law prohibiting the practice.” This effectively decrees the end of all morals legislation. If, as the Court asserts, the promotion of majoritarian sexual morality is not even a legitimate state interest, none of the above-mentioned laws can survive rational-basis review.
But a cursory glance around shows that moral judgments in some form refuse to go away. In fact, they are more pervasive than ever. Lady Gaga felt herself perfectly justified in asking those who objected to the repeal of DADT to “go home,” where they could presumably languish in their bigotry. And a university department believes that it may be unacceptable to hire someone who believes in the Bible as an astronomer. They were making moral judgments and felt perfectly entitled to do so.
Hate speech laws have been enacted by Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, the Council of Europe, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, India, Ireland, Jordan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Serbia, , Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. What you say and what you do, far from being your own business, is everywhere the public’s business. Recently, the head of the soccer federation FIFA warned homosexuals against engaging in sexual behavior in Qatr because they stood a good chance of running afoul of Islamic law. The FIFA head later apologized for offending gays. But whether that will help gays in Qatr is a different matter, because one may not criticize Islamic law either. So in all likelihood then, while Qatr may beat up the gays anyhow and not have any explaining to do, any European who simply mentions that Qatr might do it is engaging in offensive behavior.
Morals legislation appears to be as pervasive as ever. Nothing in the current environment suggests there exist opinions on which you may not be lectured. The extent of what is out of bounds is growing all the time. What has changed is the contents of that proscribed area. It may now be a crime to quote the Bible. For example, in May of 2010 a British preacher was arrested for handing out leaflets saying that homosexuality was a sin. A policeman appoached “to warn him they had received complaints and that if he made any racist or homophobic comments he would be arrested.”
I told him homosexuality is a sin, and he told me “I am a homosexual, I find that offensive, and I’m also the liaison officer for the bisexual-lesbian-gay-transsexual community”,’ he said yesterday. ‘I told him it was still a sin.’
Mr Adams last year represented Cumbria Police at the Gay Pride march in Manchester. On the social networking site MySpace, he describes his orientation as gay and his religion as atheist.
After the warning, Mr Mcalpine took over preaching for 20 minutes, although he claims he did not cover homosexuality. But while he talked to a passer-by the PCSO radioed for assistance and he was arrested by uniformed officers.
He was taken to a police station, had his pockets emptied and his mobile phone taken along with his belt and shoes, and was kept in the cells for seven hours where he sang hymns to keep his spirits up.
It is exactly the same process that might have occurred fifty years ago but with a policeman warning a homosexual he could not distribute leaflets advocating sodomy. What has changed isn’t that people are being warned off for their beliefs. What is different is which beliefs they are being warned against. The Ins and the Outs have changed places, but he door remains the same. Wikipedia writes that “views on public morality do change over time,” but whether public morality itself can ever be abolished is an open question.
One of the drivers of the new public morality is who can fight back. British policemen do not go around telling Muslim imams not to preach against homosexuality because such preachers may take strenuous exception to their warnings. But the rules of the new morality are often capricious, unstated or simply arcane.
The offenses ascribed to Julian Assange illuminate what some publics regard as offensive and inappropriate. He is facing complaints from two Swedish women; both appeared to be ideological supporters of Assange. They have sworn out a complaint against him. Neither had problems with Assange’s practice of revealing classified information. “A fellow activist, she had invited Assange to stay at her flat while he was in Stockholm to address her political party, the centre-left Brotherhood Movement.” No, what deeply offended them was welshing on his promise to use a condom when engaging in sexual activity with them. The Swedish police described the crimes of the Wikileaks supremo. Miss A complained that:
She tried to reach for a condom but Assange held her arms and pinned her legs, she stated to police. He then agreed to use a condom but, Miss A alleges, he did ‘something’ to it that resulted in it becoming ripped….
Two days later, he slept with Miss W. She was a twentysomething who had attended his seminar and hung around hoping to meet him. After lunch and the cinema, she invited him to her apartment in Enkoping, near Stockholm, and he stayed.
They used a condom the first time they had sex, but the next morning he allegedly had sex with her when she was still asleep, without protection. He maintains she was ‘half asleep’ and they joked about it afterwards.
Either way, it was not long before the two women had learnt of each other, and were swapping notes. After taking stock, they took the drastic step of going to the police.
The hard part of living under the new morality is understanding what the rules actually are. Is it uncool to steal classified documents which may result in the death of hundreds of Afghans who’ve cooperated with NATO? Apparently not. Is it OK for Julian Assange to use his status as a “fugitive” to become a “babe magnet”? Why of course. Who ever said that being a fugitive meant not telling people who you were? You can be a fugitive only for public purposes and not to actually conceal your whereabouts. But it is apparently not ok not to use a condom in Sweden. This point of punctilo is apparently inviolable, and if it is not clear why to all of us, it is nevertheless evident to members of the relevant set.
Nothing so demonstrates plebeianism as the inability not to even know the rules. The real hallmark of membership in the new aristocracy is knowing all the etiquette without even having to ask — easy enough because they make the rules. What’s right is what Keith Olbermann and Lady Gaga say. Why? Well if you have to ask then you must be immoral. The new morality is above all the art of speaking in code and part of the power of political correctness springs precisely from its vagueness. The art of correct behavior today consists largely in sensing the prevailing fashion. It is a survival skill the Old Bolsheviks knew well. The important thing was to always to have opinions, but never to have opinions that were out of date.
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["Why are Dads given a free pass when they sacrifice family for their job?"
"Free pass" exaggerates it quite a bit, but yes the standard is, and should be, different. It is built into both the philogeny and the ontogeny of the human species.]
Very interesting and I learned a couple of new words.
Separate from which gender does it, there is a time when a parent must leave the house to earn for the family and each family needs to figure that out how to do that and meet the needs of the children. Now there are times when two parents must leave to make a living. As that becomes more than full time and local for both I would start to question wisdom and priorities. As a single parent I quit full time work but I couldn't leave all work. Besides part time contracting and consulting I made it a point to keep up certain activities and sports that I treasured. I included my daughter as much as I could and now those activities are hers and as a teenager with colleges starting to contact her, she has no idea where she got those interests and skills from. I believed it important not to quit doing the things we love, to not let life become a completely child-centric universe, but also to not leave often or for long periods or without the care of a consistent loving family member. Other important people like grandparents started to also treasure my time away and their own rituals started that benefited everyone. Hired help of the highest quality still means a very young child is bonding and experiencing their first this and first that with someone who is not in the family and not a permanent bond. In the COO example, she is married to a CEO so I don't think they are reversing roles. Two careers are on steroids and neither gives up part of a career for the family (hypothetically, I don't know anything about them). Maybe that works for them but I don't hold it out as an advancement or breakthrough over more traditional, less ambitious choices.
Now I face the gender reversed career re-enty that moms more often go through. I am a complete expert in some very old technologies; I just need to find a great leading edge company still selling 1990s technologies. In other words my old jobs are gone and for the position I would have otherwise have attained, I am not ready or qualified. I will be fine financially and proud of my parenting work, but my corporate career won't compare evenly with someone who did not take the time off.
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Generally, but certainly not always, the work women do will tend towards allowing them to express and fulfill the maternal part of their being. This is sometimes known as "gathering". Men on the other hand, will tend towards analogs of going out on the hunt. A society not in overall harmony with the primal rhythms of human life will tend to reproduce little, and educate/transmit its culture poorly.
@GM, that was a fine piece. Would you post it in the Liberal Fascism thread as well please?
@Doug: I first ran across those words in a Konrad Lorenz book. If I remember correctly, "Ontogeny recapitulates philogeny". After I looked up the words to see what the hell he was talking about, I was left in a state of wonder at the meaning of the thought.
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I have part of a response written but it will be a while before I can finish it.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/07/AR2011010706741.html
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/01/07/passport-applications-soon-gender-neutral/#ixzz1Abs8dcgC
"Parent One, Parent Two to replace references to mother, father on passport forms."
- I still don't think this will 'recognize' all the 'different types of families'. Is anyone really ready to designate themselves as Mommy Two? Sounds like a first alternate in case the first string mommy is not available.
“We find that with changes in medical science and reproductive technology that we are confronting situations now that we would not have anticipated 10 or 15 years ago” - Brenda Sprague, deputy assistant Secretary of State for Passport Services.
- No. Males are not impregnating males and females are not impregnating females. Are they? http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/archive/ldn/2008/feb/08020103 Plumbing and electrical supply stores understand gender distinctions better than our all-knowing, all-caring government.
“Changing the term mother and father to the more global term of parent allows many different types of families to be able to go and apply for a passport for their child without feeling like the government doesn’t recognize their family,” said Jennifer Chrisler, executive director of Family Equality Council.
- Why are we so narrow and judgmental to limit the relationship to a child with up to two parents? Is this some outdated, animal/species tradition we are arbitrarily protecting? What if 3 or more or an entire community want to adopt a child (it takes a village) and there is no form to accommodate them. Not even a box to check and say 'additional parents listed on the attached pages? Discrimination! And the child gets stigmatized for not having a place to designate Parent Seventy seven like he/she is not a parent at all. If this is about medical possibilities, what about a designation for your up-line clone? That is not a parent. I try to be facetious but they probably have the rest of these possibilities already written for next year's form.
Are we still tracking gender of the applicant? Why? With only two choices? In 2011?? With medical 'advances' are there not more than two gender possibilities? Aren't 'stigmatizing' in-betweeners and gender neutral people?
We have so far to go to ever become truly inclusive, but getting away from sexist terms like of mom and dad is quite a start.
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OMFgG :x :cry:
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Not surprising.
This is the next step after gay marriage in the ascendancy of the gay lifestyle as a choice and simply an alternative and just as normal as heterosexual marriage, child rearing, etc.
I mean we already have the rich gay celebs having children and becoming parents. Elton John, the lesbian comedian (what's her name).
The MSM *celebrates* this as part of its progressive agenda.
Anyone opposed, is a homophobe, needs couseling, is mean spirited, a bigot and the rest.
It used to be gays told us what they do in the bedroom is none of anyone else's business. I agree. But now they tell us it is everyone's business.
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One of my 'moderate' friends always brings up gay marriage as the example to explain why he hates things the 'far right', the 'right wing' and 'Christian conservatives, though he is basically a conservative. He asks, how does gay marriage hurt his marriage, which is a pretty good question.
I have a few new friends through sports who are supposedly gay and we have thankfully not yet discussed preferences or politics.
The Tea Party Republican Senate candidate of Colorado had some weird view that gayness doesn't really exist or that these people can be retrained. People knew that was nonsense and it probably kept him out of a very winnable, crucial seat.
To my gay friends and all the others out there, you deserve all the rights of liberty and pursuit of happiness of anyone else. Westboro pretend church is wrong, God doesn't hate gays. Ken Buck is wrong. God created a predominantly hetero society with a minority of people with a gay orientation. Whether atheist or Jew/Muslim/Christian, it is an observable fact of human existence.
Procreation comes from heterosexual bonding, that is the norm and that is the survival of the species. That goes best for children,family and society when we strive for a lifelong bond. Some of us haven't married yet. Some never will. Some did and it didn't work out. A few are attracted to the same sex. If it is private and consensual, then it is your right to pursue happiness. Not so for attraction to children, animals or corpses because of the consent issue. We draw lines of morality and behavior hopefully for good reasons.
Everyone should be able to designate their sister, brother, neighbor or gay lover to inherit or handle their affairs if/when they are unable, if they don't have a spouse.
The problem arises when this gift or right of liberty for all or for some starts to take away something else of value and chipping away at our language, our meanings and the positive traditions of our society is a sign. When we can't recognize that a child has its best shot at life with a married, loving mother and father (gender terms used intentionally) all living under one roof (and I say that as a single father raising a teenage daughter). When we start muddying up or banning the terms man and woman, husband and wife, mother and father, intact family or the concepts of marriage and of parentage, then we have gone too far.
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http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/christianity_is_so_yesterday_says_uk_high_court/
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By CARRIE LUKAS
Tuesday is Equal Pay Day—so dubbed by the National Committee for Pay Equity, which represents feminist groups including the National Organization for Women, Feminist Majority, the National Council of Women's Organizations and others. The day falls on April 12 because, according to feminist logic, women have to work that far into a calendar year before they earn what men already earned the year before.
In years past, feminist leaders marked the occasion by rallying outside the U.S. Capitol to decry the pernicious wage gap and call for government action to address systematic discrimination against women. This year will be relatively quiet. Perhaps feminists feel awkward protesting a liberal-dominated government—or perhaps they know that the recent economic downturn has exposed as ridiculous their claims that our economy is ruled by a sexist patriarchy.
The unemployment rate is consistently higher among men than among women. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 9.3% of men over the age of 16 are currently out of work. The figure for women is 8.3%. Unemployment fell for both sexes over the past year, but labor force participation (the percentage of working age people employed) also dropped. The participation rate fell more among men (to 70.4% today from 71.4% in March 2010) than women (to 58.3% from 58.8%). That means much of the improvement in unemployment numbers comes from discouraged workers—particularly male ones—giving up their job searches entirely.
Men have been hit harder by this recession because they tend to work in fields like construction, manufacturing and trucking, which are disproportionately affected by bad economic conditions. Women cluster in more insulated occupations, such as teaching, health care and service industries.
Yet if you can accept that the job choices of men and women lead to different unemployment rates, then you shouldn't be surprised by other differences—like differences in average pay.
Feminist hand-wringing about the wage gap relies on the assumption that the differences in average earnings stem from discrimination. Thus the mantra that women make only 77% of what men earn for equal work. But even a cursory review of the data proves this assumption false.
The Department of Labor's Time Use survey shows that full-time working women spend an average of 8.01 hours per day on the job, compared to 8.75 hours for full-time working men. One would expect that someone who works 9% more would also earn more. This one fact alone accounts for more than a third of the wage gap.
Choice of occupation also plays an important role in earnings. While feminists suggest that women are coerced into lower-paying job sectors, most women know that something else is often at work. Women gravitate toward jobs with fewer risks, more comfortable conditions, regular hours, more personal fulfillment and greater flexibility. Simply put, many women—not all, but enough to have a big impact on the statistics—are willing to trade higher pay for other desirable job characteristics.
Men, by contrast, often take on jobs that involve physical labor, outdoor work, overnight shifts and dangerous conditions (which is also why men suffer the overwhelming majority of injuries and deaths at the workplace). They put up with these unpleasant factors so that they can earn more.
Recent studies have shown that the wage gap shrinks—or even reverses—when relevant factors are taken into account and comparisons are made between men and women in similar circumstances. In a 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30, the research firm Reach Advisors found that women earned an average of 8% more than their male counterparts. Given that women are outpacing men in educational attainment, and that our economy is increasingly geared toward knowledge-based jobs, it makes sense that women's earnings are going up compared to men's.
Should we celebrate the closing of the wage gap? Certainly it's good news that women are increasingly productive workers, but women whose husbands and sons are out of work or under-employed are likely to have a different perspective. After all, many American women wish they could work less, and that they weren't the primary earners for their families.
Few Americans see the economy as a battle between the sexes. They want opportunity to abound so that men and women can find satisfying work situations that meet their unique needs. That—not a day dedicated to manufactured feminist grievances—would be something to celebrate.
Ms. Lukas is executive director of the Independent Women's Forum.
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There Is No Male-Female Wage Gap
A study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30 found that women earned 8% more than men.
By CARRIE LUKAS
Tuesday is Equal Pay Day—so dubbed by the National Committee for Pay Equity, which represents feminist groups including the National Organization for Women, Feminist Majority, the National Council of Women's Organizations and others. The day falls on April 12 because, according to feminist logic, women have to work that far into a calendar year before they earn what men already earned the year before.
Video: More on Women
In years past, feminist leaders marked the occasion by rallying outside the U.S. Capitol to decry the pernicious wage gap and call for government action to address systematic discrimination against women. This year will be relatively quiet. Perhaps feminists feel awkward protesting a liberal-dominated government—or perhaps they know that the recent economic downturn has exposed as ridiculous their claims that our economy is ruled by a sexist patriarchy.
The unemployment rate is consistently higher among men than among women. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 9.3% of men over the age of 16 are currently out of work. The figure for women is 8.3%. Unemployment fell for both sexes over the past year, but labor force participation (the percentage of working age people employed) also dropped. The participation rate fell more among men (to 70.4% today from 71.4% in March 2010) than women (to 58.3% from 58.8%). That means much of the improvement in unemployment numbers comes from discouraged workers—particularly male ones—giving up their job searches entirely.
Men have been hit harder by this recession because they tend to work in fields like construction, manufacturing and trucking, which are disproportionately affected by bad economic conditions. Women cluster in more insulated occupations, such as teaching, health care and service industries.
Yet if you can accept that the job choices of men and women lead to different unemployment rates, then you shouldn't be surprised by other differences—like differences in average pay.
Feminist hand-wringing about the wage gap relies on the assumption that the differences in average earnings stem from discrimination. Thus the mantra that women make only 77% of what men earn for equal work. But even a cursory review of the data proves this assumption false.
The Department of Labor's Time Use survey shows that full-time working women spend an average of 8.01 hours per day on the job, compared to 8.75 hours for full-time working men. One would expect that someone who works 9% more would also earn more. This one fact alone accounts for more than a third of the wage gap.
Choice of occupation also plays an important role in earnings. While feminists suggest that women are coerced into lower-paying job sectors, most women know that something else is often at work. Women gravitate toward jobs with fewer risks, more comfortable conditions, regular hours, more personal fulfillment and greater flexibility. Simply put, many women—not all, but enough to have a big impact on the statistics—are willing to trade higher pay for other desirable job characteristics.
Men, by contrast, often take on jobs that involve physical labor, outdoor work, overnight shifts and dangerous conditions (which is also why men suffer the overwhelming majority of injuries and deaths at the workplace). They put up with these unpleasant factors so that they can earn more.
Recent studies have shown that the wage gap shrinks—or even reverses—when relevant factors are taken into account and comparisons are made between men and women in similar circumstances. In a 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30, the research firm Reach Advisors found that women earned an average of 8% more than their male counterparts. Given that women are outpacing men in educational attainment, and that our economy is increasingly geared toward knowledge-based jobs, it makes sense that women's earnings are going up compared to men's.
Should we celebrate the closing of the wage gap? Certainly it's good news that women are increasingly productive workers, but women whose husbands and sons are out of work or under-employed are likely to have a different perspective. After all, many American women wish they could work less, and that they weren't the primary earners for their families.
Few Americans see the economy as a battle between the sexes. They want opportunity to abound so that men and women can find satisfying work situations that meet their unique needs. That—not a day dedicated to manufactured feminist grievances—would be something to celebrate.
Ms. Lukas is executive director of the Independent Women's Forum.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704415104576250672504707048.html#printMode
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Ummm , , , ahem , , , have you read the previous post in this thread? :lol:
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Dang, see what happens when I spend some time wandering around the woods in the rain.
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Federal authorities last week arrested and charged a Tennessee pastor with aiding in the “international parental kidnapping” of a girl who has been missing since late 2009 and is at the center of a lengthy custody battle between her two mothers — a onetime lesbian couple who were in a civil union.
Lisa Miller and the child disappeared in 2009.
The two had a bitter falling-out after one became an evangelical Christian and denounced the other’s continued “homosexual lifestyle.”
Their legal battle over visitation rights and custody, carried out over the last seven years in Vermont and Virginia courts, received wide publicity because of the clashes over sexual orientation and religion, and because it raised questions about the rights of nonbiological parents in same-sex unions that are not recognized in many states.
Lisa Miller, the girl’s biological mother and a newly fervent Baptist, was championed by conservatives for her efforts to shield her daughter from homosexuality. A Vermont court had granted her primary custody of the daughter, Isabella Ruth Miller-Jenkins, after Ms. Miller split with her partner, Janet Jenkins, in 2003. But the court also declared Ms. Jenkins to be a legal parent with liberal visiting rights, and Ms. Miller, who had moved with the girl to Virginia, defied repeated orders to permit the visits.
The case took a turn in late 2009, as the Vermont family court, citing Ms. Miller’s noncompliance, shifted primary custody to Ms. Jenkins. Ms. Miller and Isabella, who is now 9, disappeared. A warrant was issued for Ms. Miller’s arrest, and they have not been heard from since.
According to an F.B.I. affidavit unsealed in Vermont on Thursday, the pastor, Timothy David Miller of Crossville, Tenn., helped arrange in September 2009 for Ms. Miller and Isabella to fly from Canada to Mexico and travel on to Nicaragua, where he worked as a missionary for Christian Aid Ministries. (The F.B.I. said it had no evidence that Mr. Miller and Lisa Miller were related.)
Ms. Miller and Isabella stayed in a beach house in Nicaragua that is owned by a conservative businessman with close ties to Liberty University, an evangelical school in Lynchburg, Va., and whose daughter works at the university’s law school, according to the affidavit.
Lawyers from Liberty, including the dean of the law school, Mathew D. Staver, represented Ms. Miller in court appeals on the custody issues. They argued without success that Ms. Jenkins had no parental rights and that laws in Virginia, which ban same-sex unions, should prevail over those in Vermont.
On Friday, Mr. Staver said the legal team has had no contact with Ms. Miller since the fall of 2009 and had always advised her to obey the law. He said he knew nothing about the accusations involving a law school office assistant, Victoria Hyden, and her father Philip Zodhiates, the beach house’s owner.
Mr. Zodhiates runs Response Unlimited, a Christian direct-mail company in Waynesboro, Va. He did not respond to requests for comment, but on Friday he told The Advocate magazine that the pair were not living at his house in Nicaragua and called the accusations “absurd.”
Ms. Miller and Ms. Jenkins were joined in a civil union in Vermont in 2000 and planned to raise a child together. Isabella was conceived by artificial insemination and born to Ms. Miller in 2002, with Ms. Jenkins present at the birth. But the parents’ relations soured over the following year. Ms. Miller moved with Isabella to Virginia, became deeply involved with a Baptist church and renounced homosexuality. A Vermont court dissolved the civil union but treated Ms. Jenkins as a full parent with visitation rights.
Over time, Ms. Miller began refusing to allow the required visits, among other things objecting that Ms. Jenkins’s “homosexual lifestyle” would offend Isabella’s religious beliefs. At one point, a court in Virginia, which does not recognize same-sex unions, agreed with Ms. Miller’s claim to be the sole legal parent, but the Virginia Supreme Court eventually confirmed that the Vermont rulings should prevail.
Last June, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation affidavit, an unnamed person called one of Ms. Jenkins’s lawyers, Sarah Star, and told Ms. Star that the mother and daughter were hiding in Mr. Zodhiates’s Nicaraguan house. Much of the evidence in support of the criminal charges and other accusations, the affidavit said, was obtained through court-approved, covert searches of e-mail accounts, uncovering messages from Mr. Miller that appear to arrange the mother and daughter’s 2009 flight to Nicaragua and from Mr. Zodhiates arranging to send them supplies.
On Friday, Ms. Jenkins issued a statement through Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, a rights group in Boston that has also represented her in court.
“I know very little at this point, but I really hope that this means that Isabella is safe and well,” it said. “I am looking forward to having my daughter home safe with me very soon.”
The United States attorney for Vermont, Tristram Coffin, told the Rutland Herald newspaper that Mr. Miller had been arrested on Monday night in Virginia and was scheduled to appear in Federal District Court in Burlington on Monday. Officials declined to say whether others may be arrested or what measures they are taking to find Ms. Miller, who faces criminal charges, and Isabella, who under current rulings should be in the primary custody of Ms. Jenkins, with visitation rights for Ms. Miller.
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Next is gay adoption and as noted on this board the eradication of terms like mother and father to be replaced with parent. I am not interested in hurting homosexuals but this is over the top to me.
***By MICHAEL GORMLEY, Associated Press Michael Gormley, Associated Press – 18 mins ago
ALBANY, N.Y. – After days of contentious negotiations and last-minute reversals by two Republican senators, New York became the sixth and largest state in the country to legalize gay marriage, breathing life into the national gay rights movement that had stalled over a nearly identical bill here two years ago.
Pending any court challenges, legal gay marriages can begin in New York by late July after Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed his bill into law just before midnight Friday.
At New York City's Stonewall Inn, the Greenwich Village pub that spawned the gay rights movement on a June night in 1969, Scott Redstone watched New York sign the historic same-sex marriage law with his partner of 29 years, and popped the question.
"I said, `Will you marry me?' And he said, `Of course!'" Redstone said he and Steven Knittweis walked home to pop open a bottle of champagne.
New York becomes the sixth state where gay couples can wed, doubling the number of Americans living in a state with legal gay marriage.
"That's certainly going to have a ripple effect across the nation," said Ross Levi, executive director of the Empire State Pride Agenda. "It's truly a historic night for love, our families, and democracy won."
"We made a powerful statement," Cuomo said. "This state is at its finest when it is a beacon of social justice."
The leading opponent, Democratic Sen. Ruben Diaz, was given only a few minutes to state his case during the Senate debate.
"God, not Albany, settled the issue of marriage a long time ago," said Diaz, a Bronx minister. "I'm sorry you are trying to take away my right to speak," he said. "Why are you ashamed of what I have to say?"
The Catholic Bishops of New York said the law alters "radically and forever humanity's historic understanding of marriage."
"We always treat our homosexual brothers and sisters with respect, dignity and love," the bishops said Friday. "We worry that both marriage and the family will be undermined by this tragic presumption of government in passing this legislation that attempts to redefine these cornerstones of civilization."
Legal challenges of the law and political challenges aimed at the four Republicans who supported gay marriage in the 33-29 vote are expected. GOP senators endured several marathon sessions, combing through several standard but complex bills this week, before taking up the same-sex marriage bill Friday.
The bill came to the floor for a vote after an agreement was reached on more protections for religious groups that oppose gay marriage and feared discrimination lawsuits.
"State legislators should not decide society-shaping issues," said the Rev. Jason McGuire of New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms. He said his organization would work in next year's elections to defeat lawmakers who voted for the measure.
The big win for gay rights advocates is expected to galvanize the movement around the country after an almost identical bill was defeated here in 2009 and similar measures failed in 2010 in New Jersey and this year in Maryland and Rhode Island.
Jerry Nathan of Albany, who married his partner in Massachusetts, called the vote "an incredible culmination of so much that's been going on for so many years it doesn't seem real yet."
Ultimately, gay couples will be able to marry because of two previously undecided Republicans from upstate regions far more conservative than the New York City base of the gay rights movement.
Sen. Stephen Saland, 67, voted against a similar bill in 2009, helping kill the measure and dealing a blow to the national gay rights movement. On Friday night, gay marriage supporters wept in the Senate gallery as Saland explained how his strong, traditionally family upbringing led him to embrace legalizing gay marriage.
"While I understand that my vote will disappoint many, I also know my vote is a vote of conscience," Saland, of Poughkeepsie, said in a statement to The Associated Press before the vote. "I am doing the right thing in voting to support marriage equality."
Also voting for the bill was freshman Sen. Mark Grisanti, a Buffalo Republican who also had been undecided. Grisanti said he could not deny anyone what he called basic rights.
"I apologize to those I offend," said Grisanti, a Roman Catholic. "But I believe you can be wiser today than yesterday. I believe this state needs to provide equal rights and protections for all its residents," he said.
A huge street party erupted outside the Stonewall Inn Friday night, with celebrants waving rainbow flags and dancing after the historic vote.
Watching the festivities from across the street was Sarah Ellis, who has been in a six-year relationship with her partner, Kristen Henderson. Ellis said the measure would enable them to get married in the fall. They have twin toddlers and live in Sea Cliff on Long Island.
"We've been waiting. We considered it for a long time, crossing the borders and going to other states," said Ellis, 39. "But until the state that we live in, that we pay taxes in, and we're part of that community, has equal rights and marriage equality, we were not going to do it."
The bill makes New York only the third state, after Vermont and New Hampshire, to legalize marriage through a legislative act and without being forced to do so by a court.***
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:cry:
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:cry:
At least it was passed by the NY state legislature, rather than judicial fiat.
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Woof,
I have long thought that hate crime laws would do more harm than good when it comes to serving justice by adding more confusion and political grandstanding in the courts. This case here, I feel is an example of it.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A judge on Thursday declared a mistrial in the case of California teen who shot a gay classmate in the back of the head during a computer lab class as stunned classmates looked on.
Jurors were unable to reach a unanimous decision on the degree of Brandon McInerney's guilt for killing 15-year-old Larry King. The nine-woman, three-man panel said they took a series of votes — the last one with seven in favor of voluntary manslaughter and five jurors supporting either first-degree or second-degree murder.
Prosecutors now have to decide whether to re-file murder and hate crime charges against McInerney, now 17, who was tried as an adult. They had offered a plea deal of 25 years to life if he pleaded guilty, but his lawyers passed. A first-degree murder conviction carried a maximum sentenced of more than 50 years in prison.
King's family rushed out of the courtroom after the judge declared a mistrial. They looked horrified and confused and declined comment as sheriff's deputies escorted them to an elevator.
McInerney's friends said prosecutors tried to sensationalize the case by calling it a hate crime by a budding white supremacist.
"This should have never gone to trial," family friend Craig Adams said outside of court. "The fact they pushed him to try him as an adult was the real crime."
One juror, who identified himself only as juror no. 10, told The Associated Press that several members of the panel thought McInerney should never have been tried as an adult.
"I don't think so," the juror said, when asked if the district attorney should have pursued an adult prosecution. "He was 14. Just trying to get in the head of a 14 year old (is hard.)"
Ventura County prosecutor Maeve Fox contended McInerney, then 14, embraced a white supremacist philosophy that sees homosexuality as an abomination. Police found Nazi-inspired drawings and artifacts at his house, and a white supremacist expert testified the hate-filled ideology was the reason for the killing.
Fox also argued the attack was premeditated, noting at least six people heard McInerney make threats against King in the days leading to the shooting.
She said McInerney told a psychologist hired by defense lawyers that he wanted to kill King after he passed McInerney in a school hallway and said, "What's up, baby?"
"He's basically confessed to first-degree murder in this case," Fox said during her closing argument.
Defense attorneys acknowledged McInerney was the shooter but explained that he had reached an emotional breaking point after King made repeated, unwanted sexual advances. McInerney snapped when he heard moments before the shooting that King wanted to change his name to Latisha, the lawyers said.
The defense psychologist said he was in a dissociative state — acting without thinking — when he pulled the trigger at E.O. Green Junior High School in Oxnard, a city about 60 miles northwest of Los Angeles.
McInerney's lawyers also said he suffered physical abuse at home from his father, who has since died, and didn't receive the proper supervision that would have kept him out of trouble. They said the Nazi imagery was part of a school project on tolerance.
"He is guilty and he should be held responsible, but he is not a murderer. He is not a white supremacist," defense attorney Scott Wippert said during his closing argument. "He is a 14-year-old child who didn't know what to do and had no one to guide him."
Outside court, Wippert said jurors had told him they weren't convinced by prosecutors' assertions the killing was a hate crime.
"We are quite confident that none of the jurors believed this was a hate crime," he said. "This was a difficult decision for all of them."
McInerney did not take the stand during the nine-week trial. To find McInerney guilty of voluntary manslaughter, jurors had to find him not guilty of first- and second-degree murder. They began deliberating last Friday.
The school administration has been accused of being more concerned about defending King's civil rights than recognizing that his behavior and what he wore — high heels, makeup and feminine clothing — made other students uncomfortable.
The shooting roiled gay-rights advocates and parents in Oxnard. They wondered why school officials hadn't done more to stop the harassment against King by students, including McInerney.
The case labored in the court system for more than three years as McInerney's lawyers sought numerous delays. Campbell was eventually persuaded to move the trial from Ventura County to neighboring Los Angeles County because of extensive news coverage that threatened to bias jurors.
King's family sued the school district for failing to protect their son. The lawsuit is pending.
___
Associated Press writer Greg Risling contributed to this report.
This guy should never see the light of day again if what he is alleged to have done happened but he might actually be turned loose in what should have been an open and shut case. He allegedly got a gun, hid it on his person, sat down behind his intended victim and shot him in the back of the head. That's a "big boy" crime folks and he should get life in prison for that if those are the facts of the case. Nothing else really matter's. It was cold blooded murder and it doesn't matter why he did it or what was in his head at the time unless there is somekind of insanity plead. When juries are asked to make a decision based on what hate may have been in this kid's heart at the time of the shooting you're asking them to be psychic's. The only questions and answers that should be considered in this case should be based on evidence that can be weighed. How can you weigh the emotion of hate? This is what happens when political correctness seeps into every aspect of our society. Murder is murder no matter who the victim is or the reason it was committed. It's murder. By trying to give special protections to certain members of our society these hate crime laws are making it more likely that they will not receive the justice they deserve. Hate crime laws are nothing but political ploys to pander votes and have nothing to do with providing safety or justice in my opinion.
P.C.
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So are you suggesting that we do away with "hate crimes" laws?
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I am.
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So you think we should do away with all "hate crimes" charges, i.e. charges based upon because it was partially or wholly motivated by race (blacks, et al), sexual orientation (gay), and religion (Jew et al) etc.?
Hate Crime definition in CA; "Any act of intimidation, harassment, physical force or threat of physical force directed against any person, or gamely, or their property or advocate, motivated either in whole or in part by hostility to their real or perceived race, ethnic background, religious belief, sex, age, disability, or sexual orientation, with the intention of causing fear or intimidation, or to deter the free exercise or enjoyment of any rights or privileges secured by the Constitution or the laws of the United State of California whether or not performed under color of law."
For my two cents, I probably agree, we should do away with all hate crime charges. We already have laws against "intimidation, harassment, physical force or threat of physical force". These laws should be equally enforced regardless of the motivation for the crime.
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Didn't Federal hate crime law evolve from racial issues wherein the Feds were trying to insure that local judicial systems could not easily allow an injustice due to local prejudices?
For example, white murderers getting a not guilty verdict because the jury judge and local law enforcement/justice system was inherently racist?
Extrapolating that to gays, etc is in probably most people's minds has been ridiculous/unnecessary and indeed become abuse of those accused.
For example the Rutgers student who is charged with a hate crime because his video of the gay college student fellating another student and he than goes and commits suicide because of the exposure. Most people would agree making this into a Federal issue hate crime is overboard and an injustice to the accused. Isn't this really double jeopardy? Overlap to insure that someone accused of a politically incorrect act has another layer of prosecution stacked on top of him/her.
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We, even JDN! :-D, are agreed 8-)
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That was quite a story posted by P.C., perfect example of why to do away with 'hate crimes'. It reminds me of the lung cancer ad - when you cannot breathe it does not matter who you are. We live in a system that has a strict requirement of equal protection under the law. (True??) If so, once that trigger was pulled it should not matter who the shooter is or who the victim is. While we are out investigating the one person's alleged gayness and the other person's alleged hatred of that, those LE resources are not being used to prevent or solve the next crime. Social scientists, not detectives solving crimes can later study the hatred. The families of the gay and not-gay victim deserve equal justice for their loss; the shooter of the gay and non-gay victims deserves equal punishment. The issue comes down to prosecuting the right person and establishing premeditation. This case was also confounded by the 14 year age falling into an area where reasonable people disagree about trying him as an adult. There again IMO the penalty for something that drastic should be the same, adolescent or adult, if mental competence to comprehend is present. The wrongness of taking a life and the severe consequences for doing that are both concepts they better comprehend before we let them move past about kindergarden IMHO.
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http://www.myfoxdfw.com/dpp/news/education/092111-student-suspended-for-saying-gay-is-wrong
Student Suspended for Saying Gay Is Wrong
Published : Wednesday, 21 Sep 2011, 4:48 PM CDT
Lari Barager
FOX 4 News
Adapted for Web by Tracy DeLatte | myFOXdfw.com
FORT WORTH, Texas - A Fort Worth high school student was sent to the principal’s office earlier this week for telling another classmate he believes homosexuality is wrong.
Fourteen-year-old Dakota Ary spent most of the day Tuesday serving an in-school suspension. It was punishment for discussion in his German class at Fort Worth’s Western Hills High School.
“We were talking about religions in Germany. I said, ‘I’m a Christian. I think being a homosexual is wrong,’” he said. “It wasn’t directed to anyone except my friend who was sitting behind me. I guess [the teacher] heard me. He started yelling. He told me he was going to write me an infraction and send me to the office.”
An assistant principal called Ary’s mother at work to let her know he was in trouble.
“At first I was in disbelief. My son is on the honor roll with great grades. I don’t have any problems out of him,” Holly Pope said.
After hearing Ary’s explanation of what happened, the assistant principal reduced the original suspension from two days to one. But Pope was not satisfied with that.
“He was stating an opinion. He has a right to do that. They punished him for it,” she said.
Read more on myFOXdfw.com: http://www.myfoxdfw.com/dpp/news/education/092111-student-suspended-for-saying-gay-is-wrong
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Utlimately liberal fascism (a.k.a. progressivism) is a violent philosophy because it seeks to expand government and government is force.
True progress is the opposite of this. It is to expand human interactions being handled through voluntary interactions.
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"“He was stating an opinion. He has a right to do that. They punished him for it,” she said."
The same crowd that screams about first amendment rights (think Larry Flynt) are also the smae crowd who will turn around and add, "but it has to be PC correct speech"
There really is a "gay infatada" in this country. I say leave gays alone but they got to start leaving the rest of us alone.
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A good day is when Luc wakes up and wants to be a tractor for Halloween. Or a helicopter. Or Hercules. Or anything other than a princess, bounding door-to-door in tiara and tulle.
A few weeks ago, the 4-year-old boy's desire to trick-or-treat as a princess sparked a dilemma for his two moms, Anna and Louisa Villeneuve: Which do you honor and protect, your child's independent spirit or tender feelings?
"My first reaction was 'He wants to be a princess? We're there!' " said mama Anna. But almost everybody she talked with about Luc's intention told her, "Whoa; that's a bad, bad, bad idea."
For a girl who grew up wanting to dress like a boy, Luc's choice felt like a blow against stereotyping. "But I'm trying to leave my inner activist at home," she said, "and just do what's best for my son. It's one thing to say 'Son, you can be anything you want. Our society needs to be less uptight.' "
It's another thing entirely to consider how a boy in a princess dress will be treated when all the other boys are trick-or-treating in Superman or Power Rangers costumes.
"I want to encourage him to stand up and be himself," she said. "But my 4-year-old is too little and too fragile to know where the social boundaries are. And I don't want his feelings hurt on what should be one of his happiest nights."
Luc is dreamy-eyed, with lush brown hair and a tentative smile when I meet him after a nap, curled up on mommy Louisa's lap. The toys stacked in neat piles along the wall range from building blocks to trucks to baby dolls. All year long, he's been donning princess garb in the dress-up corner at his preschool. The adults in his life are fine with that. The little girls, however, have a problem with it. "Boys can't be princesses," they tell Luc, designating him a "wizard" instead.
Still, it's one thing for a little boy to play princess at school, and another to parade in a ball gown before a crowd on the annual Halloween march through the business district in the family's hometown, Glendora. Anna and Louisa remember the sea of "Yes on 8" signs that sprouted around them in 2008, when the measure banning gay marriage was on the ballot. Gay marriage was rejected that year by voters, just months after the couple officially wed on June 17, the first day gay marriage was legal in California. Now, Anna envisions those folks snubbing her trick-or-treating princess-boy.
"I imagine that when those Glendorans shut their doors, they're going to say 'See, that's why lesbians shouldn't raise children.' "
She doesn't think that having lesbian moms has influenced Luc's costume choice. Two years ago, he was a Jedi. Last year, he was a purple bat.
"I think he likes the bling, the accessories," she said.
But Anna knows that others see costume as commentary.
"My grandma was horrified when we posted pictures on Facebook of Luc in a princess dress with a tiara" after a visit last year to the dress-up exhibit at the L.A. County Fair.
"She's already anticipating that this is early-onset gayness. 'How could you be encouraging this? It's just not right!' she says."
Her grandmother is 87. But she got a similar response from students in the literature class she teaches at Citrus College.
"My colleagues said, 'Go for it. Support him.' My students said, 'Tell Luc that they are out of princess costumes' or find some other excuse not to let him."
That's exactly what my college daughter said when I shared Luc's dilemma with her. When did young people become such closet conformists? "We're not," she said. "We're just closer to Luc's age. And we remember how mean kids are."
Anna imagines Luc at 15 looking at old pictures with his friends and thinking, "Moms, I was only 4. Why didn't you look out for me?"
Even a child development professor at the college agreed: "Let him be a princess at home, but encourage him to pick out a boy costume for the neighborhood."
The message has come through loud and clear: You're lying if you tell your son: "You can be whoever you want." You can't. At least not until you're old enough to spend Halloween in West Hollywood.
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Things began to break the moms' way last week, when they took Luc to a Halloween fair and steered him toward the prince costumes.
"He was like 'Wow.' The sword, the helmet, the armor." At home, they fashioned a shield and sword out of cardboard and duct tape, and Luc played prince all day. "He was thrilled," Anna said.
A few days later, he'd backtracked a bit: He talked about dressing as a pitchfork. And by Friday, he was planning to be "a cannon with a big ball firing out of his face." Now that's something that might have me tracking down the child development expert.
Anna and Louisa haven't yet decided what to allow and what to rule out. The thought they are putting into the choice is a testament, in my eyes, to what good and loving mothers they are. I imagine they've learned a few things from this about in-the-trenches parenting — including the fickle factor of Halloween.
A typical kid's desires might shift a dozen times in the holiday run-up. My daughter once changed from witch to black cat in the car on the morning of Halloween, as the first-grade parade was about to begin. That's not about gender identity, but the lure of multiple fantasies. What Anna and Louisa care about most is not what costume Luc wears, but how the strangers he encounters treat him.
"What I don't want is for somebody to open up that door and say 'Dude, what are you doing in a princess dress?' " Anna said. "It might just be confusion, not disapproval. But that's the comment that will make my child feel like he's done something wrong."
So here, after all the soul-searching, is the very simple message she wants me to share: Remember the tenderness of children's feelings if you open that door on Halloween and find a boy in a princess dress among the innocent trick-or-treaters.
sandy.banks@latimes.com
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DEBUNKERY
BY ALASDAIR WILKINS DEC 12, 2011 3:00 PM 18,232 68 Share
http://io9.com/5867401/
There really is no difference between men and women’s math abilities
There's a longstanding myth of a gender gap between boys' and girls' math performance, suggesting some basic biological difference in how the two genders approach math. It's deeply controversial and widely discredited. And now, a new study has completely debunked it.
Until now, there was maybe a sliver of statistical data to support the existence of this gender gap — nothing remotely convincing, mind you, but just enough that the idea couldn't be entirely dismissed out of hand. While most who studied the issue pointed for cultural or social reasons why girls might lag behind boys in math performance, there was still room for biological theories to be proposed.
The best-known of these is the "greater male variability hypothesis", which basically says ability among males varies more widely than that of females, which means you'll see more males at the extreme ends of the spectrum, good and bad. Then-Harvard president Larry Summers infamously put forward this idea back in 2005 as a way to explain the lack of great female mathematicians, and this was one of about a dozen different factors that ultimately cost him his job.
Now, researchers Jane Mertz of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Jonathan Kane of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater have performed the most comprehensive exploration yet of math performance. They took in data from 86 different countries, many of which had not previously kept reliable records of math performance and so their addition allowed for much stronger cross-cultural analysis. So what did they find?
First, in many countries, there's no gender gap at all both at the average and very high levels of performance. Some countries, including the United States, do show a gender gap, but that gap has decreased substantially over the last few decades, and some test scores suggest American girls have already caught up to their male counterparts.
The researchers looked at one measure of young people with extremely high math abilities - namely, those who scored a 700 or higher on the math section of the SAT before the age of 13. In 1970, boys in this category outnumbered girls 13 to 1, while today the ratio is just 3 to 1 and still falling. Similarly, while just 5% of math Ph.D.s in the United States in the 1960s were given to women, today that figure stands at 30%.
All of these findings argue strongly that the apparent gender gaps are really just disparities in education and cultural expectations, not evidence of some deeper biological mechanism. If there really is a "math gene" or something like it that males have and boys don't, we simply wouldn't see such vast changes over time or indeed in different countries, many of which show no gender gap at all.
And what about the greater male variability hypothesis? Well, there's a bit of evidence to support this - provided you blatantly cherry-pick certain countries. Kane and Mertz compared the variability of male and female math scores in different countries and found that the variability ratio in Taiwan is 1.31, meaning boys there do have substantially more variability than girls.
However, the ratio in Morocco is 1.00, meaning there is absolutely no difference in the genders' variability. You can go even further by looking at Tunisia, which has a ratio of 0.91, which means it's actually the girls there who show greater variability. For this hypothesis to be correct, it would have to hold true for all countries — the fact that the ratios vary so much means it's just the result of different cultural factors, or it could simply be random statistical noise.
Mertz and Kane were also able to debunk a couple other hypotheses about math performance, specifically the "single-gender classroom hypothesis" and "Muslim culture hypothesis", both of which were argued for by Freakonomics author Steven Levitt. The idea here is that the gender inequity found in many Muslim countries actually benefits girls, perhaps because they are generally educated in gender-separated classrooms and that helps somehow.
It's an interesting, counter-intuitive idea, but it also appears to be completely wrong. The authors say that, upon close examination of the data, girls in these single-gender classrooms still scored quite poorly. The boys in these countries, such as Bahrain and Oman, had scored even worse, but Kane suggests that's because many attend religious schools with little emphasis on mathematics.
Also, low-performing girls are often pressured to drop out of school and so don't appear in the statistics, which falsely inflates the girls' overall performance. The point, says Kane, is that these differing scores don't point to benefits of gender-separated classrooms or speak to features of Muslim culture as a whole - rather, they're due to social factors in play in a few countries, and the single-gender classrooms are just a confounding variable.
Indeed, Mertz and Kane were able to demonstrate pretty much the exact opposite of those hypotheses: as a general rule, high gender equality doesn't just remove the gender gap, it also improves test scores overall. In particular, countries where women have high participation in the labor force, and command salaries comparable to those of their male counterparts, generally have the highest math scores overall. The researchers comment on this finding:
Kane: "We found that boys — as well as girls — tend to do better in math when raised in countries where females have better equality, and that's new and important. It makes sense that when women are well-educated and earn a good income, the math scores of their children of both genders benefit."
Mertz: "Many folks believe gender equity is a win-lose zero-sum game: If females are given more, males end up with less. Our results indicate that, at least for math achievement, gender equity is a win-win situation."
As for how to close the gap even further and generally increase math scores, Mertz says the study argues strongly against the proposal to create single-gender classrooms. Instead, the researchers point to fairly common sense solutions: increase the number of math teachers in middle and high schools, decrease the number of children currently living in poverty, and take greater steps to reduce gender inequity.
Those may all seem fairly straightforward, but that's pretty much exactly the point - this isn't about tricking our brains or creating some perfect conditions to unlock children's hidden mathematical aptitude. As Mertz explains, this is all about culture, not biology:
"None of our findings suggest that an innate biological difference between the sexes is the primary reason for a gender gap in math performance at any level. Rather, these major international studies strongly suggest that the math-gender gap, where it occurs, is due to sociocultural factors that differ among countries, and that these factors can be changed."
Read the original paper at the American Mathematical Society.
http://www.ams.org/notices/201201/rtx120100010p.pdf
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Bryce J. Christensen | Monday, 23 January 2012
tags : same-sex marriage
The new outlaws: how same-sex marriage suffocates freedom
Advocating gay marriage as a way of enlarging the American sphere of liberty are profoundly—and deceptively—misrepresenting their aims.
Those advocating the radical social innovation, which they label “same-sex or gay marriage,” typically claim that they are fighting for freedom, championing a basic liberty. “Freedom to Marry” is indeed the name of a national organization devoted to the advocacy of same-sex marriage. Established in 2003 by civil-rights advocate Evan Wolfson and headquartered in New York City, this group takes “We All Deserve the Freedom to Marry” as its slogan. So effective has it promulgated this perspective that even former First Lady Laura Bush endorsed homosexuals’ right to marry as a matter of basic freedom when she appeared on the Larry King Show in May 2010.
But those who advocate homosexual marriage as a way of enlarging the American sphere of liberty are profoundly—and deceptively—misrepresenting their aims. Their real aim came to light in the public controversy over remarks attributed to Queen Sophia of Spain in criticizing her country’s invention in 2005 of a homosexual right to “marry.” “If those people [homosexuals] want to live together,” commented the Spanish monarch, “dress up as bride and groom and get married they can do so, but that should not be called marriage because it is not.” Widely reported by the media, the furor over these remarks forced representatives of the Queen to issue a statement claiming that the published remarks “do not exactly match the opinions expressed by Her Majesty the Queen” and apologizing for the “ill-feeling and upset” her comments had caused. The pressures compelling this semi-retraction and apology prompted one media commentator to ponder the “interesting question” of whether on the issue of homosexual marriage, the Queen still had “the right... to express her opinion like any other citizen.”
This commentator had glimpsed the fundamental aim of those advocating homosexual marriage: it is not at all about giving homosexuals a new freedom to participate in ceremonies that they regard as weddings. It is entirely about denying freedom of public speech to anyone who would criticize such ceremonies or the sexual behaviors such ceremonies legitimize. The muzzle that homosexual activists tried (largely successfully) to put on an outspoken monarch represents only the beginning. Homosexual activists in this country deeply desire to place first thousands, and then millions, of even tighter muzzles on all who disagree with them about the nature of homosexual behavior. They well understand that enactment of laws authorizing homosexual marriage will give them sweeping powers to bind those muzzles very tightly on their fellow citizens.
In this environment, attempts to legalize same-sex marriage are not chiefly about enlarging homosexual couples’ freedom: they are free now in every state of the union to say that they are married. They can claim anything they want about their “unions”: they can affirm that those relationships are life affirming and emancipatory; they can even assert that their partnerships are actually superior to natural sexual unions traditionally called marriages. In almost all states, Americans are also still perfectly free to reject such claims and to voice their rejection as forcefully as Queen Sofia did—before being cowed by activists and media commen-tators wielding Spain’s homosexual-marriage law as a cudgel.
Homosexual activists may plausibly assert that they were advancing the cause of freedom when opposing anti-sodomy laws, even if many Americans view the freedom advanced as morally and even medically problematic. However, when these same activists claim that they are still advancing the cause of freedom in advocating laws that grant same-sex unions the status of marriage, their arguments quickly lose all plausibility. For those trying to enshrine the notion of same-sex “marriage” in law are not primarily trying to enlarge the freedom of homosexuals; they are primarily striving to diminish the freedom of skeptics who would deny that the union of homosexuals is—or can ever be—a legitimate marriage. The aim of those trying to inscribe the novelty of homosexual marriage in law is actually that of making an outlaw out of anyone who would question the moral substance of this new social construct and the sexual behaviors it legitimates.
Americans with little invested in the issue may suppose that their freedom to oppose homosexuality is secure in the wake of the 2011 Supreme Court ruling in Snyder v. Phelps that opponents of homosexuality can legally express their views through funeral protests. But the freedom the Court upheld in the Snyder case is actually very marginal. It is the freedom of a self-discrediting sideshow, a freedom that matters only to a radical fringe.
More important, but now deeply imperiled, is precisely the kind of freedom that Queen Sophia briefly tried to exercise in publicly resisting the notion of homosexual marriage and the behaviors it represents. This is the freedom of individuals in positions of public trust to voice their opposition to homosexual behavior. It is this freedom that homosexual advocates hope to make disappear through enactment of homosexual marriage. Enshrining this radically innovative construct in law will not so much enlarge the sphere of freedom for homosexuals as it will shrink the sphere of freedom—in the workplace, legislative chamber, classroom, mainstream media, civic and student club, and marketplace—for those who in any way find homosexual behavior wanting.
Anti-Anti-Homosexual Bullying
The ex-nihilo creation of homosexual marriage as a legal notion serves, above all, to give coercive power to those Justice Antonin Scalia has identified as “homosexual activists . . . [intent on] eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.” The success of these activists, as Scalia notes, has helped foster an “anti-anti-homosexual culture.”1 Some Americans may wonder how a private sexual behavior became the basis for an unassailable public identity guaran-teeing coercive state protection from critics. However, those who have created the “anti-anti-homosexual culture” understand well how they can use the notion of homosexual marriage to silence their opponents and to drive them from the public square. With good reason, syndicated columnist John Leo has complained that in recent homosexual activism, “a line is being crossed”: “The traditional civic virtue of tolerance (if gays want to live together, it’s their own business) has been replaced with a new ethicrequiring approval and endorsement” (emphasis added).
Homosexual activists know that if they enshrine same-sex relationships in the legal category of marriage, they will find it far easier to impose this new requirement for approval and endorsement on other Americans. As homosexual activists and their allies press this new requirement, Americans who resist the normalizing of homosexuality are seeing their freedom shrink. Indeed, when homosexual activists claim the “freedom” of same-sex couples to marry, we see yet another instance of what cultural historian Robert Nisbet has labeled “the ingenious camouflaging of power with the rhetoric of freedom.”2
Americans have seen more than a few instances in which anti-anti-homosexual power has flexed its muscles in suppressing the freedom of those who dare resist their agenda for normalizing homosexual behavior. That power was manifest in March 2011 when homosexual activists successfully pressured Apple to withdraw from its iTunes store an app developed by an evangelical Christian group that works with individuals trying to overcome homosexual impulses. That power was manifest again a month later when the prominent law firm King & Spalding announced that, despite its previous commitment to doing so, it would not defend the constitutionality of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which acknowledges marriage as the union of a man and a woman. But Americans have perhaps seen homosexuals’ power most often and most nakedly in the one institution that is supposed to provide a free and open forum for all points of view: the university.
A prime case of how the university suppresses any resistance to homosexual behavior is that of University of Illinois professor Ken Howell. Howell was dismissed for informing students enrolled in a class on Modern Catholic Thought that “the Catholic Church holds that homosexual acts are immoral” and further suggesting that homosexual acts violate the natural moral law, though he freely allowed that there are other viewpoints. Though the outcry at the dismissal of this very popular professor ultimately proved sufficient to force the university to reverse itself, the university administration capitulated only reluctantly and without any public acknowledgement that it had violated Howells’ academic freedom.3
In other episodes of anti-anti-homosexual zealotry, university officials show no signs of backing off. In 2008, a biology professor at San Jose City College was dismissed for indicating—in answer to a student’s question about how heredity affects sexual orientation—that environment might be a cause of homosexuality. In 2010, Hasting College of Law denied official recognition and funding to the Christian Legal Society as a student organization (the first time it had ever denied a student organization recognition) because the group required officers (not its members) to affirm Christian sexual ethics, including the scriptural proscription against homosexuality. In 2009, a student was expelled from a counseling program at Eastern Michigan State University for refusing to affirm that homosexual behavior is normal and acceptable. In 2005, a student in a counseling program at Missouri State University found that the university had filed a grievance against her for refusing to fulfill a class assignment requiring her to write a letter to the state legislature advocating the legalization of homosexual adoption. And in 2011, a counseling student who dared to voice her opinion in class that homosexual acts are immoral learned that Augusta State University would not let her continue her academic program unless she successfully completed diversity-sensitivity training. The list goes on, with reports of similar anti-anti-homosexual bullying at Washington State University, Georgia Tech University, and the Ohio State University.
The Academy as Surrogate State Church
Perhaps no one should be surprised that university administrators and professors have increasingly become thought police on the issue of homosexuality. In a 2007 survey of professors at 927 American institutions of higher education, sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons from Harvard and George Mason Universities, respectively, found that liberals dominate the campus world: 44.1 percent of survey respondents characterized themselves as either “liberal” or “very liberal,” compared to only 9.2 percent who described themselves as “conservative” or “very conservative.” Even these numbers fail to fully reflect the “very liberal attitudes toward sex” which pervade the university: the Harvard and George Mason scholars report that about 70 percent [68.7 percent of the professors surveyed] think that homosexuality “is not wrong at all.”4
The freedom of students and professors who oppose homosexuality can survive in such an environment only if professors are deeply committed to maintaining a campus neutrality that fosters free exchange of all viewpoints. Unfortunately, when Harvard scholar Louis Menand analyzes the Gross and Solon data, he sees evidence that “neutrality, or disinterestedness,” is declining as a university standard because there is now apparently “less aversion to weighing political views in evaluating merit than would have been the case thirty or forty years ago.” In fact, though not a conservative, Menand concedes that the Gross and Solon study provides “data . . . useful to anyone claiming that colleges and universities discriminate against people with conservative views.” Menand goes so far as to raise the question of whether “holding liberal views has become a tacit requirement for entry and promotion in the academic profession.”5 In an academic world such as this, it is entirely predictable that top university professors of law openly argue—in direct riposte to Scalia’s complaint against judicial endorsement of the homosexual agenda—in favor of measures aimed at “eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.”6
Only the complete hegemony of anti-anti-homosexual dogma within the university renders comprehensible the blog comment recently posted by Stanford student Gregory Hirshman. Hirshman asserts that in an academic world governed by a “strict, if informal, rule against speaking negatively of homosexuality,” it now requires “more strength and conviction on the Stanford campus to come out as an outspoken conservative than as a homosexual.” The strict enforcement of the academic orthodoxy on homosexuality also harmonizes with critic and former University of Maryland professor George A. Panichas, who reports that in the university world “opponents of liberal ideas are increasingly treated as outlaws.”7
Just how much the outlaw status of those who oppose homosexuality on the university campus should matter to the broader American community is clarified by the prominent philosopher Richard Rorty’s assertion, “The university has replaced the church as the center of morality.” This assertion, of course, would strike millions of church-going Americans as patently untrue, even bizarre. However, for the cultural, political, and judicial elite who shape much of national life, it is all too true: the university has become the new surrogate church, laying down the moral imperatives guiding judges, policymakers, executives, and media moguls. The outlaws who oppose homosexuality will find no right of sanctuary in this church. Far otherwise. They will find that that new church regards them not only as outlaws but also as dangerous heretics.
Outlaw-heretics have reason to fear inquisitorial persecution from the priests in the surrogate church, one of whom has candidly admitted that he and his anti-anti-homosexual colleagues are “sometimes self-righteous . . . and sometimes too dismissive or snotty toward those who disagree with us.”8 At a minimum, outlaw-heretics have reason to fear that the new priests—for all their professed commitment to freedom for all—will actually lock them out of the democratic process. It is this real abridgment of political liberties that legal scholar Ronald J. Krotoszynski Jr. has in view in his analysis of how “religious minorities” face discrimination:
To the extent that religious minorities position themselves in opposition to progressive understandings on issues of race, gender and sexual orientation, they increasingly face the prospect of being silenced by government officials who have come to embrace the progressives’ value structure.9
Many of America’s religiously devout citizens would strenuously object to Krotoszynski’s characterization of them as “minorities,” pointing to survey data showing that most Americans profess a belief in Christianity (and the Bible, which condemns homosexual acts as incompatible with a knowledge of God [cf. Rom. 1:18-28]). According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 78.4 percent of all adult Americans are Christian, with more than half of adult Americans affiliated with a Protestant denomination and almost one quarter of adult Americans belonging to the Roman Catholic Church.10 Those Americans can also point to election results on ballot initiatives in thirty-one states across the country defining marriage in ways consonant with religious belief, but not in alignment with the progressive homosexual-affirming agenda.
Diminishing Political and Religious Liberty
But the fact that silenced and marginalized church-goers actually constitute a majority only makes the process by which they are denied their full democratic liberties all the more insidious. For those in doubt as to how this process works, California has provided a prime illustration: through a costly and bruising electoral fight, defenders of natural marriage passed a measure (Proposition 8) acknowledging marriage as the union of man and woman—only to have a single unelected federal judge, Vaughan Walker, strike down the voter-approved measure because he, a “now-outed” homosexual, disapproved of the moral and religious impulses of those who championed it! In this fashion, a progressive anti-anti-homosexual elite dramatically diminishes the political liberties of those who wish to affirm an understanding of marriage consistent with reality as affirmed by nature, history, biology, reason, as well as religion. It is this kind of assault on religious liberty that legal scholar Matthew J. Franck has in view when he remarks, “The freedom to participate fully in civic life, to offer oneself to others in civil society, conscientiously on one’s own terms as a religious person professing one’s beliefs, may be jeopardized by this new dispensation.”11
It is precisely that liberty-denying process that elite activists are trying to advance through the legal notion of same-sex marriage. For outlaws, enforcement of the law can mean only punishment—usually loss of freedom. That contraction of freedom is exactly what those advocating same-sex marriage seek: they want to lock those who oppose homosexuality into as small a box as possible. Just how terribly small that box can be is illustrated by the case of the fertility specialist in California who in 2001 declined to artificially inseminate a lesbian, though he referred that woman to a colleague who would perform that service for her. When the doctor, who happened to also be a devout Christian, later lost a discrimination suit filed by the offended lesbian woman, he found no relief upon appeal to the California Supreme Court, which found—unanimously—that this doctor’s religious convictions did not afford him even the very, very minimal freedom of declining to perform a medical procedure that violated his convictions!
The same kind of liberty-abridging legal logic worked against the religious convictions of a New Mexico photographer who in 2006 declined to take pictures of a same-sex couple’s “commitment ceremony” because of her religious objections to homosexuality, only to find herself fined $6000 by the state Human Rights Commission for having discriminated against the couple. Predictably enough, this logic now works to constrain the consciences of chaplains in the new gay-friendly military that Obama and his allies have created: credible reports now indicate that military chaplains must “embrace the new openly homosexual military, resign from service, or face court-martial for their ‘religious, conscience’ objections.”12 All these assaults on religious liberty have occurred in jurisdictions without the legal innovation of same-sex marriage. That the enactment of same-sex marriage multiplies such assaults is evident in the way that justices of the peace in Massachusetts have been forced to resign if they decline, on moral or religious grounds, to perform homosexual weddings. Similar legal coercion compelled Catholic Social Services to suspend its handling of adoptions in the Bay State because of its refusal to violate its religious principles by placing children with homosexual couples.
This disturbing pattern of hostility to religious freedom should leave little doubt as to the consequences of broader enactment of homosexual marriage: it can only mean fewer freedoms for men and women of religious conviction. “Both freedom and the desire for freedom,” Nisbet sagely remarks, “are nourished within the realization of spiritual privacy and among privileges of personal decision.”13 But it is precisely personal decision—in expression and in conduct—which homosexual activists wish to eradicate, whenever such decisions draw inspiration from religious or moral principles at odds with homosexual emancipation. In this context, Franck warns, “We are in danger of telling many millions of our fellow citizens that they may not act as their conscience guides them in exercising the fundamental right of self government.”14 As the fertility specialist in California, the photographer in New Mexico, the justices of the peace in Massachusetts could all testify, when anti-anti-homosexual principles triumph, Americans asked to engage in acts that would violate their conscience by implying acceptance or endorsement of homosexual acts cannot even respond with that precious shred of self-preserving liberty that Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener claims with the simple words, “I prefer not to.”15
Individual freedom seemed to be uppermost in the minds of the High Court justices who struck down Texas’s anti-sodomy law. In justifying their decision, Anthony Kennedy invoked a concern for “the liberty of all,” and then elaborated in elevated language: “Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct. The instant case involves liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions.”16 But Americans may increasingly wonder why this spatial and transcendent liberty and autonomy of self do not extend to those Americans who want to distance themselves from homosexual acts, to stand apart, as it were, from those who engage in such acts. Why is that autonomy of self, that transcendent dimension of liberty, not protected by law or court proceedings?
Dubious Claims of Homosexual Activists
Make no mistake: homosexual activists do, in fact, know that advancing their agenda means reducing the liberty of Americans. They hide that reality behind rhetoric of freedom, just as they hide their exclusion of religious Americans from the public square behind rhetoric of inclusion, and their extirpation of every deviation from the approved attitude toward homosexuality behind the rhetoric of diversity. But at bottom, these activists know that they are denying their fellow Americans a sizable measure of freedom. They justify this denial in two ways, both dubious.
First, advocates of gay rights—including the right to marry—manifest a surprising eagerness to believe a “genetic basis of homosexuality,”17 despite clear scientific refutation of the very notion of “a gay gene.”18 Apparently, homosexual activists follow this line of logic: since genes have made homosexuals “what they are,” they are not free to be otherwise. Since homosexuals are not free to be otherwise, the government is justified in denying liberty of those who would discriminate against them. This surrender to genetic determinism is stunning, especially coming from a segment of the political spectrum known for its resistance to genetic determinism in other contexts, such as those involving questions of racial or gender characteristics.19Apparently, homosexual activists do not want anyone to notice that all the arguments that their political allies have made against the decidedly illiberal and dehumanizing logic of genetic determinism in other contexts tell against their reliance upon genetic determinism in advocating restrictions on the liberty of those who would criticize homosexual conduct.
The second justification for restricting the freedoms of those who oppose homosexuality is that of asserting that this freedom has no content except that of hatred and bigotry, or that this freedom amounts to nothing but the equivalent of racism. So those who deny this freedom are not denying a freedom that has any real substance anyway. This line of justification will not bear scrutiny. In the first place, surveys reveal that, as a group, African Americans—who should be the very first to recognize a fundamental kinship between racial bias and resistance to homosexuality—are actually more resistant to homosexuality than are whites,20 while polling data indicate that African Americans support measures such as California’s Proposition 8 significantly more than whites.21
But further weaknesses emerge in the argument that opposition to homosexuality amounts to nothing but bigotry and hatred and that therefore denying Americans the freedom to oppose homosexuality does not constitute a serious infringement of their liberty. The long list of those who have expressed opposition to homosexuality has included some intelligent and gifted individuals. With his brilliant poetic masterpiece The Divine Comedy culminating in a vision of “the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars” (33. 146, Ciardi translation), Dante seems like something other than a hate-filled bigot. Yet he opposed homosexuality, placing homosexuals in the Seventh Circle of the Hell he depicts in his Inferno. As one of the architects of quantum physics, Edwin Schrödinger would seem to be more than a dull conformist. Yet he lamented the increasing ubiquity of homosexuality in higher education.22 As a brilliant opponent of “all the smelly little orthodoxies” of the twentieth century, George Orwell would not normally be classed as an unthinking exponent of bias. Yet he opposed homosexuality, and as a twenty-first-century critic has remarked, “Orwell’s anti-homosexual position (definitely not ‘homophobia,’ which would suggest irrational fear) flowed naturally from beliefs and values about which he was quite forthcoming.”23
Surprisingly, even the homosexual poet W. H. Auden—famous both for his insistent honesty and his astonishing prosodic talents—said some very negative things about homosexuality. “I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s wrong to be queer,” Auden said. “In the first place, all homosexual acts are acts of envy. In the second, the more you’re involved with someone, the more trouble arises, and affection shouldn’t result in that. It shows something’s wrong somewhere.”24 And then there is Stephen Spender, another great twentieth-century British poet who was homosexual as a young man, but who, after renouncing homosexuality went on to marry two women (not at the same time!). Spender said, “I find the actual sex act with women more satisfactory [than the sex act with men] . . . To me it is much more of an experience.”25
Opposition to homosexuality took a more intriguing form in the life of the great German novelist Thomas Mann, who felt the pull of homoerotic impulses (as any reader of Death in Venice will recognize). For religious reasons, Mann chose not to act on those impulses and to live a life of abstinence. As Mann’s biographer explains, for Mann, “Homosexual courtship . . . is from the Devil,” while “His chastity is love for the purity of God” 26
When Law and Morality Collide
Americans have every reason to ask what is left of an intellectual freedom that does not include the freedom to examine and to affirm the views expressed by great poets and novelists. They may also wonder about the authenticity of an intellectual freedom that does not allow full and frank discussion of research limning a troubling pattern of co-morbidity linking homosexuality to a wide array of both psychological27 and physical illnesses.28 Nor would a genuine intellectual freedom prohibit candid public discussion of the remarkable promiscuity that researchers have documented within the homosexual population.29
Of course, for most Americans opposed to homosexuality, the freedom that matters most is not the freedom to endorse the views of Dante or Auden, Orwell or Mann. Nor is it the freedom to probe the latest research in homosexual epidemiology or sexual conduct. The freedom that matters most—and the freedom most imperiled by the legal definition of a homosexual liaison as a marriage—is the freedom to affirm a religiously grounded sexual morality. Religiously committed Americans regard this as a very important freedom indeed. As Franck has explained, “For the religious person who holds a traditional view of sexual morality, the holding of that view is not accidentally related to his religious faith. It is inseparable from it.”30
Consequently, it can only gall these Americans when homosexual activists use the law—particularly in the radical redefinition of the marital law—to deny them the freedom to express and to act on their convictions about sexual ethics. No doubt, homosexual activists expect everyone to accept the legal redefinition of marriage they are promoting. But they forget how many Americans recognize a divine law transcending and standing above merely human law. As Aquinas observed, “Human laws are either just or unjust. If they are just, they have the power to bind our conscience because of the eternal law from which they are derived.” But, quoting Augustine’s assertion that “an unjust law does not seem to be a law at all,” Aquinas reasons that unjust laws “do not bind the conscience.” In fact, Aquinas goes so far as to assert that if laws are unjust because they are “opposed to the divine good,” then “such laws must never be observed, because ‘one must obey God rather than men’ (Acts 5:29).”31
Even Americans who do not draw their legal philosophy from Aquinas should recognize that when the law sets itself in opposition to the moral convictions held by a great many citizens, it puts those citizens in a difficult and painful circumstance. That circumstance is well described by legal theorist Frederick Bastiat: “When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.”32Disrespect for the law may become particularly intense among parents who see the law using tax revenues to pay for “gay-friendly curricular materials” in public schools increasingly hostile to the sexual ethics they want to instill in their children.33
Since survey sociologists have recently established that America’s religiously devout citizens are the nation’s most generous, selfless, honest, civic-minded, and community-spirited,34 the nation’s cultural and legal elite may want to pause before using homosexual marriage as a legal weapon for limiting the religious freedoms of those citizens. Do they really want to undermine respect for the law among tens of millions of Americans? Do they really want to imbue in Americans who are, by nature, selfless, civic-minded and community-spirited a new feeling of alienation from and resentment toward their government?
Of course, millions of Americans who oppose homosexual acts for religious reasons will not want to simply wait while the elite decide what restrictions to impose on their liberties. They will want to vigorously protest every incursion upon those liberties, and they will want to lend their full support to lawmakers sympathetic to their concerns. Americans with a mature religious faith will understand the need to avoid hateful or spiteful references toward homosexuals. They will indeed recognize that their witness for truth will be most effective when it is expressed with empathy and compassion, including especially a merciful compassion for those who are suffering from AIDS or other diseases often found among homosexuals. But devout Americans can express genuine love for homosexuals without accepting or endorsing their sexual behavior. An authentic faith indeed requires both firm opposition to homosexual acts and unfailing love for those who commit such acts.35
Americans motivated by religious faith will be zealous to protect the liberty to express and to act on that faith. That will mean vigorously opposing same-sex marriage whenever possible. Where such opposition appears—at least in the short run—futile (as in Massachusetts, Iowa, New York, and Washington, D.C.), perhaps it is time for sympathetic law-makers to start enacting “conscience clause” protections—comparable to those that protect medical professionals from being compelled to perform abortions—for justices of the peace, fertility doctors, wedding caterers and photographers, and others who will find themselves forced to choose between their careers and their convictions. If they cannot prevent the enactment (often by judicial fiat) of same-sex marriage laws, lawmakers should at least be able to give an opt-out to citizens who object to homosexuality for religious reasons. Bartleby would understand.
Dr. Christensen teaches composition and literature at Southern Utah University. This article has been republished with permission from The Family in America.
Notes
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1.Antonin Scalia, with William Rehnquist and Clarence Thomas, dissenting, John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner v. Texas, June 26, 2003.
2.Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order & Freedom (1953; rpt. San Francisco: ICS Press, 1990), p. 141.
3.Cf. Meghan Duke, “Fired, In a Crowded Theater,” First Things, October 2010, pp. 24–29.
4.Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, “The Social and Political Views of American Professors,” Working Paper, September 24, 2007, http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~ngross/lounsbery_9-25.pdf.
5.Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), pp. 139–40.
6.Naomi Cahn and June Carbone, Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 164.
7.George A. Panichas, Growing Wings to Overcome Gravity: Criticism as the Pursuit of Virtue (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1999), p. 37.
8.Michael Bérubé, What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and ‘Bias’ in Higher Education (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), p. 287.
9.Ronald J. Krotoszynski Jr., “Dissent, Free Speech, and the Continuing Search for the ‘Central Meaning’ of the First Amendment,” review of The Dissent of the Governed: A Meditation on Law, Religion, and Loyalty, by Stephen L. Carter, and Dissent, Injustice, and the Meanings of America by Steven H. Shiffrin, Michigan Law Review 98.6 (2000): 1673.
10.“Religious Affiliation: Summary of Key Findings,” U.S. Religious Landscape Survey (Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 2010), http://religions.pewforum.org/reports.
11.Matthew J. Franck, “Religion, Reason, and Same-Sex Marriage,” First Things, May 2011, p. 51.
12.“Army: Court-Martial Chaplains for ‘Religious, Conscience’ Objection to Homosexuality,” Catholic Citizens of Illinois, March 24, 2011, http://catholiccitizens.org/press/pressview.asp?c=52791.
13.Nisbet, The Quest for Community, p. 220.
14.Francky, “Religion, Reason, and Same-Sex Marriage,” p. 50.
15.Herman Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853), American Literature: The Makers and the Making,ed. Cleanth Brooks, R. W. B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren (New York: St. Martin’s, 1973), 1:842–59.
16.Anthony Kennedy, with John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer, John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner v. Texas.
17.Cahn and Carbone, Red Families v. Blue Families, pp. 65 and 226, 22n.
18.Cf. Ian Stewart, The Mathematics of Life (New York: Basic, 2011), pp. 118–19.
19.Cf. Leonard A. Cole, review of Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature by R. C. Lewontin, Leon J. Kamin, and Steven Rose, Politics and the Life Sciences 4.2 (1986): 200–201.
20.Cf. Gregory B. Lewis, “Black-White Differences in Attitudes toward Homosexuality and Gay Rights,” The Public Opinion Quarterly 67.1 (2003): 59–78.
21.Cf. Patrick J. Egan and Kenneth Sherrill, “California’s Proposition 8 and America’s Racial and Ethnic Divides on Same‐Sex Marriage.” Working Paper, January 2010,http://as.nyu.edu/docs/IO/4819/marriagedivides.pdf.
22.Cf. Jim Baggott, The Quantum Story: A History in 40 Moments (New York: Oxford, 2011), p. 150.
23.David Ramsay Steele, “My Orwell Right or Wrong,” review of Why Orwell Matters, by Christopher Hitchens, Libertarian Alliance, 2003, http://www.la-articles.org.uk/orwell.pdf.
24.Arthur Kirsch, Auden and Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 172–73.
25.John Sutherland, Stephen Spender: A Literary Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 168.
26.Hermann Kurzke, Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art. A Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 412–14, 486.
27.Theo G. M. Sandfort et al., “Same-Sex Sexual Behavior and Psychiatric Disorders,” Archives of General Psychiatry 58 (2001): 85-91; Michael King et al., “A Systematic Review of Mental Disorder, Suicide, and Deliberate Self-Harm in Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual people,” BMC Psychiatry 8 (August 18, 2008): 70.
28.Compared to men who do not, men who have sex with men are more than 46 times more likely to contract syphilis, and more than 44 times more likely to contract HIV. “Gay Men Still More Likely to Contract HIV,” BC Medical Journal 52.4 (May 2010): web.
29.M. A. Bellis et al., “Re-Emerging Syphilis in Gay Men: A Case-Control Study of Behavioural Risk Factors and HIV Status,” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 56.3 (2002): 235–36.
30.Franck, “Religion, Reason, and Same-Sex Marriage.”
31.Thomas Aquinas, “Aquinas on Law,” Medieval Source Book, ed. Paul Halsall. Fordham University Center for Medieval Studies, 2006. Web.
32.Frederick Bastiat, The Law (1850; rpt. New York: Cosimo Classics, 2006), p. 11.
33.Cf. Charles J. Russo, “Same-Sex Marriage and Public School Curricula,” What’s the Harm? Does Legalizing Same-Sex Marriage Really Harm Individuals, Families, or Society? ed. Lynn D. Wardle (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2008), pp. 355–73.
34.Cf. Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).
35.Cf. Ron Sider, “Bearing Better Witness,” First Things, December 2010, pp. 47–50.
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From Santorum thread, I'm not sure why that got copied to race thread?
Crafty wrote: "Of course state consitutions cannot go against the rights guaranteed by the US Constitution, so the real question is the meaning of the equal protection clause. I think it safe to say that gay marriage was not on the mind of those who passed the equal protection clause; of course it need not to have been for the clause to be applicable-- but Santorum I think is on the right track here: Judicial Imperialism and arrogance.
Surely a certain degree of humility is called for when the people of a state amend their consitution-- especially when this step is to reverse a judicial creation of a right! My point of view is that gay marriage is not required by the equal protection clause. A man can marry a woman, and vice versa.
I think the real solution here is for people to be free to be gay and other people to be free to be grossed out by it, with or without God's blessing.
Yes, I am saying that people should be allowed to discriminate.
Anyone wanting to discuss this further, please take it to a relevant thread (e.g. Gender; Gay and Straight)"
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My evolving view. People with an agenda I think exaggerate the numbers, but if you are gay, you are gay. If you are American, you have a right to pursue happiness.
It is bad business to discriminate against major groups unless there is good reason. What the laws should be, I don't know exactly.
Marriage is a unique relationship where a man and a woman become husband and wife and make certain lifelong promises to each other. Heteros screw it up badly enough, breaking promises etc but that is not reason to abandon it or change its meaning. Marriage is the foundation of family, a man and a woman under one roof is the formula also for continuation of the species. My grandfather got re-married at 80 so I understand it is not only about procreation, but in their case they did both keep their first marriage promises of until death do we part and chose that if they were to live together the rest of their lives it would be in marriage.
If marriage is a cross gender union, husband and wife, particularly aimed at family structure for child rearing, gays are entitled to their own form of commitments and choices. I have no idea what those should be just that that other forms of commitment are different, not the same. What role the government needs to play, I don't know. They deserve all rights I presume they already have have of being able to will to each other, designate each other for power of attorney on crucial matters etc. just the same as single people deserve rights, but not the right of a spouse of the opposite sex unless he or she consents.
The key difference in marriage is that the agenda seems to be aimed at saying a mother and a mother, or a father and a father, is the same as a mother and a father. It isn't and flaws in hetero-marriages don'[t change that.
In housing, a landlord would be crazy to discriminate against great tenants, or a seller to discriminate against a class of buyers.
In business, same. You are crazy to eliminate people from employment for something private that has nothing to do with work performance. OTOH, it should be perfectly legal to discriminate in a private business against people who outwardly make other people, co-workers or customers, uncomfortable, no matter the reason. Right? 'Don't ask, don't tell' was strangely a perfect solution. You keep your private life out of the workplace and only then is it none of our business.
Discriminate, not the legal word but to make choices, is what we do all the time. JDN (who asked the question) discriminates against other states and climates to live in California. Discriminates against other neighborhoods to choose yours. Discriminates against other restaurants to choose the one you will take your wife to tomorrow, discriminate against other golf courses for the one you choose, against all other barbers except the one you trust and feel most comfortable with, etc.etc. What are your reasons? I don't know. Those are YOUR reasons.
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"My point of view is that gay marriage is not required by the equal protection clause. A man can marry a woman, and vice versa."
For a gay or a single person, the law regarding marriage is the same for straight people or couples in similar circumstances. If you fall in love with a person of the opposite gender, no matter who you are, you have the same rights as a heterosexual individual or couple under the law. If that is unconstitutional then so is our entire, complex, progressive tax system that treats people differently that are in different circumstances.
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Agree with the arguments posted. Also the gay infitada has a powerful ally in the MSM. Since much of the opposition to legalizing marriage and with it the "normalization" of homosexuality comes for religion and of course religious groups have been aligned to a large extent with the Republican party the gays have become probably almost as strongly identified with the Crat party as Blacks and 75% of Jews.
So it is quite natural they have big support in the MSM notwithstanding much prominence in the entertainment industry and now with cable news - Maddow, Cooper, etc.
In a way I find my rights as an American citizen to speak out against overwhelming immigration abuse, and to speak out as a taxpayer my resentment that I be taxed up the behind while 50% pay no federal income tax, and the very rich have numerous loopholes, as very much the same type of muzzling of ALL opposition to this progressive wave that is overwhelmiing America.
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From Santorum thread, I'm not sure why that got copied to race thread?
Crafty said, "e.g" e.g. = exempli gratia = for the sake of example. Another "example" of discrimination is race; the subject of "discrimination" and "saying that people should be allowed to discriminate" is not only limited to gays. My question I raised or merely asked for clarification was Crafty's comment, "Yes, I am saying that people should be allowed to discriminate." That statement is not limited to "gay", therefore I thought it belonged in the "race" thread. Crafty's opening race thread sentence provides an excellent summary;
Crafty:
All:
This thread is for discussion and articles treating the question of "Can't we all just get along?"
Yes, I am saying that people should be allowed to discriminate.
Anyone wanting to discuss this further, please take it to a relevant thread (e.g. Gender; Gay and Straight)"
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Doug:
If you are American, you have a right to pursue happiness.
I agree; but the same sentence could could/should apply to women, gays, lesbians, blacks, jews, any sex, ethnic or religion group.
Marriage is a unique relationship where a man and a woman become husband and wife and make certain lifelong promises to each other. Heteros screw it up badly enough, breaking promises etc but that is not reason to abandon it or change its meaning. Marriage is the foundation of family, a man and a woman under one roof is the formula also for continuation of the species. My grandfather got re-married at 80 so I understand it is not only about procreation, but in their case they did both keep their first marriage promises of until death do we part and chose that if they were to live together the rest of their lives it would be in marriage.
I agree with you summary; but marriage provides unique rights that a contract cannot. Further, like you Grandfather chose, marriage is special.
Discriminate, not the legal word but to make choices, is what we do all the time. JDN (who asked the question) discriminates against other states and climates to live in California. Discriminates against other neighborhoods to choose yours. Discriminates against other restaurants to choose the one you will take your wife to tomorrow, discriminate against other golf courses for the one you choose, against all other barbers except the one you trust and feel most comfortable with, etc.etc. What are your reasons? I don't know. Those are YOUR reasons.
Again, I agree, my private choices are my private choices - where I play golf for example. However, public a choice that discriminates, affecting others, e.g. refusing to serve a black or a jew, refusing to hire or promote a woman, etc. is discrimination, IMHO an evil that has no place in America.
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"My point of view is that gay marriage is not required by the equal protection clause. A man can marry a woman, and vice versa."
But a man can't marry a man. Or a woman a woman. Where is the equality?
For a gay or a single person, the law regarding marriage is the same for straight people or couples in similar circumstances. If you fall in love with a person of the opposite gender, no matter who you are, you have the same rights as a heterosexual individual or couple under the law.
Actually, the law is NOT the same for a gay versus straight person. Numerous issues exist, some insurmountable that in contrast are automatically resolved in marriage.
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"refusing to serve a black or a Jew, refusing to hire or promote a woman, etc. is discrimination, IMHO an evil that has no place in America."
I moved the question out of race/religion for a reason. There is no income or housing difference between gay and straight. Aren't you making up a problem that doesn't exist? Gays that I know are competent and conscientious in their work, and well-paid. Employers I know are in need of and appreciative of competent and conscientious employees. Businesses I know now accept (Jews, blacks and) gays as customers. Where is a sign in America that we don't serve gays? Again, where is the problem that is in need of a government solution?
"...A man can marry a woman, and vice versa."
"But a man can't marry a man. Or a woman a woman. Where is the equality?"
You are missing a point, not just disagreeing with it. A gay man can (under the law) fall in love and marry a woman, he just doesn't. Some heterosexuals never marry the opposite sex either, not just gay people. Equal protection, different circumstances. Again, it is a concept in law that the entire tax code and government is built on. I don't see why you support it wholeheartedly with taxes and refuse to accept it here. It may be a bad idea in your estimation, but hardly unconstitutional unless all of our government is set up exactly that way, not just taxes but government payments and services too.
Expanding on that point: Estate tax applies to some people not others. the 39.6% tax rate will apply to some and not others. Double federal taxation applies to some and not others. Food stamps, Medicaid, Pelle grants, they all go to some and not others. Equal protection, different circumstances. 3.1 million households get Section 8 housing vouchers, the rest get none - and for VERY arbitrary reasons. Even voting, some and not others. Everyone gets to vote when they turn 18? Not everyone lives to 18, therefore are/were never legal to vote, yet the law is considered equal protection. Solydra, Chrysler, General Motors: millions of dollars in subsidies. Dog brothers and JDN Inc: Nothing. That is equal protection or the President should be impeached. You make the call.
What I don't get is that you are arguing my political viewpoint and against yours (IMHO). Most of these things are NOT equal protection. The government is clearly favoring and discriminating in almost everything that it does. Read page 1 of any IRS form, 'who has to file this form?' Some yes, some no. It depends on your circumstance.
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Doug, no offense, but I think YOU are missing the point.
You said, "Businesses I know now accept (Jews, blacks and) gays as customers. Where is a sign in America that we don't serve gays?"
Businesses now accept Jews and blacks as customers because it's the law. Otherwise, some would discriminate. You don't need a sign; but discrimination does exist. Just ask a Jewish person
or a black person.
Your point that estate taxes applies to some, not to others, food stamps, Medcaid, pell grants, etc. is interesting, but NONE of them are conditioned upon race, religion or sexual preference. No matter your
sex, color or religion, or sexual persuasion, IF you turn 18 you are able to vote; that is how it should be.
That Solydra, Chrysler, GM, banks, and others got millions has what to do with discrimination? The employees of these companies got money to keep people employed and/or to promote alternative energy. You and also I may disagree with that logic, but it has nothing to do do with discrimination.
Equally protected mean equal opportunity whether you are black, jew, christian, a woman, or gay.
Or are you saying that you if you discriminate against a black man, a jew, a woman, or a gay person; it's ok huh? Deny them service in a restaurant? Housing? A job? A promotion. Maybe a law that says
blacks can't marry whites? Or Jewish people can only marry within their own faith? Of course you are not! So why pick on a particular group? Gays. Only because you don't like their particular choice? Or color? Or sex? Or preference? Frankly, I have gay and lesbian friends. They are nice people; good Americans. Among my neighbors, two lesbian couples have the nicest looking yard on the street. What's the problem? If they love each other, like your Grandfather, and they want to marry, I repeat, what's the problem?
Regarding a much broader question, I'm waiting for Crafty's explanation as to why he said, "Yes, I am saying that people should be allowed to discriminate."
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JJDN ,I wish you would answer my point regrding different circumstancex.
Laws against "marrying" same sex apply equallly to all.
That you can"t make a husband and wife out of any combinatikon other than one man and one woman without chanvging the meaning of the words is a fact not an issue.
What is it in law they are denied that a single person is not also denied?
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Those that wish to marry blood relatives are the subject of criminal penalties, as are those that wish to marry more than one spouse or those underage. Are those laws unjust as well?
What if they are nice people with really great lawns?
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Doug, I'll try to answer you question, however my point, the reason I responded and posted to Crafty here and on the race thread was not the issue of gay marriage, but Crafty's statement,
"Yes, I am saying that people should be allowed to discriminate."
Maybe I'm missing you point, or you are missing mine, but different circumstances, or circumstancex as you typed (I like yours better for this topic) really don't or shouldn't apply when
it comes to race, religion, color, sex, sexual preference, etc. I individually can choose to invite a black man or not choose to invite a black man to play golf with me. But the public golf
course, and I would argue the private golf course, should not be allowed to refuse a black man. In the same vein, I may disagree with gay marriage, I would
never participate, but if two people are gay and want to get married, well..... why not let them? How does it hurt me? Or them? Where is the harm?
"Laws against marrying same sex apply equally to all." I'm not sure it does apply equally to a gay person...
I'm not debating the words husband and wife; even I get rather confused in assessing a gay relationship. Rather I look to your Grandfather who simply wanted companionship and wanted it to be a legal marriage. He could have just lived with his new found love, but he chose to marry at 80. I bet there were some in the family, or at least would be in many families, who were against it.
But there are lots of laws that a contract, no matter how well drawn, that cannot be overcome without marriage. And like your Grandfather, why not do it the simple way and just allow them
to marry.
Personally, I'm ambivalent on the subject; yet I know gays and lesbians and I am sympathetic.
More important, is the issue of general "discrimination". I'll wait for Crafty's response.
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Sex is behavior, where as race/ethnicity is an immutable physical characteristic.
If a job applicant arrives wearing a leather mask and ball gag, can you discriminate against his/her lifestyle?
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That seems a reasonable starting point to me.
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JDN, My attempts at typing on the new handheld are not going very well.
"Rather I look to your Grandfather who simply wanted companionship and wanted it to be a legal marriage. He could have just lived with his new found love, but he chose to marry at 80."
He married at 80 in my estimation not to form a new family and procreate but to pass on that respect for that institution to the next generation. (Shame on those of us who did not follow.) Still his later life marriage was a marriage because a man and a woman became husband and wife and pledged the rest of their lives together (and kept that promise). He did not seek to redefine anything. As an aside in a world a few decades ago where one had respect for their elders not just for the traditions of our society, he did not say 'what do you think', he said "meet your new grandmother".
As our conversations go, unanswered is what rights in law (inheritance, tax advantages, spousal privilege in law, etc.) is a gay person or couple denied that a single heterosexual person possesses. (None that I know of.)
Having the government involved in race was both controversial and based on righting a past wrong known as slavery. For women it is partly the same although it is a myth that women were kept out of professional fields like engineering when my mom became an aeronautical engineer in the 1940s. We do business with Jews, Mormons, Scottish people and even Green Bay Packer fans because their money spends the same as any other, not only because of a law against discrimination.
When snowboarding really began, nearly all ski resorts banned them. Copper mountain was first in Colo to cater to them. We joked that they were all gang members. Also a sideslipping intermediate boarder wastefully wipes off the untracked powder for everyone else. Now all resorts except Alta, Utah accept them. Why? Because of a federal mandate? No. Because they are half the market and their money looks just like skiers' money. The same reason LA Times should try to sell newspapers to conservatives too. Their money looks the same and it would expand their potential market. If they don't, we can address that through freedom of competition or we can pass a law.
Not every problem has a government solution.
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Sex is behavior, where as race/ethnicity is an immutable physical characteristic.
If a job applicant arrives wearing a leather mask and ball gag, can you discriminate against his/her lifestyle?
Actually, many would argue that being gay/lesbian is also "an immutable physical characteristic."
Instead, religion is behavior/choice. Is it ok to discriminate against Jews? Hindus? Buddhists? Etc.
Of course not.....
Discrimination IMHO is wrong.
Crafty, I'm still looking forward to your clarification/expansion on your comment.
"Yes, I am saying that people should be allowed to discriminate."
That broad statement encompasses race, color, and creed.
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Actually, many would argue that being gay/lesbian is also "an immutable physical characteristic."
They might argue that. So?
Instead, religion is behavior/choice. Is it ok to discriminate against Jews? Hindus? Buddhists? Etc.
Of course not.....
Freedom of religion is a protected constitutional right, same sex marriage is not.
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JDN, My attempts at typing on the new handheld are not going very well.
I understand. :-)
He married at 80 in my estimation not to form a new family and procreate but to pass on that respect for that institution to the next generation. (Shame on those of us who did not follow.) Still his later life marriage was a marriage because a man and a woman became husband and wife and pledged the rest of their lives together (and kept that promise). He did not seek to redefine anything. As an aside in a world a few decades ago where one had respect for their elders not just for the traditions of our society, he did not say 'what do you think', he said "meet your new grandmother".
Good for your Grandfather! He sounds like a great guy. I too have a deep respect for my elders; and as I get older I appreciate the kindness shown to my by the young.
As our conversations go, unanswered is what rights in law (inheritance, tax advantages, spousal privilege in law, etc.) is a gay person or couple denied that a single heterosexual person possesses. (None that I know of.)
Just off the top of my head. Unless specific documents are drown up, a partner has very few if any rights. If you are sick they can't visit you. They can't make major decisions for you if you are incapacitated, etc. It costs money, time and effort; something that automatically given to a heterosexual married couple.
More specific, they cannot file a joint return. At this time, Immigration Law does not recognize a gay marriage, therefore you cannot obtain rights through your "spouse". I married a legal alien. After marriage, she immediately was given a green card. Now she is citizen. IF I had been gay, even though I loved the person dearly, merely having me as a partner would not have entitled him to a green card, etc. We would have been broken up. Many/most employers will not cover a gay partner on the corporate insurance plan. Numerous other issues exist.
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Freedom of religion is a protected constitutional right, same sex marriage is not.
We will see...
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I note you don't want to address laws against bigamy, incest JDN. Why not? If same sex marriage is to be allowed, why not end all other restrictions on the definition of legal marriage. If a man in his 50's wants to marry a 6 year old girl, why should society stop it? Hey, it's the beauty of shariah, right?
If a brother and sister want to marry, and they have a nice lawn.....
Right?
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a) Actually in context it was limited to gays, but the question presented does raise questions for the whole edifice of anti-discrimination law.
b) GM is right, it is NOT at all clear that gay is always an inmutable characteristic or what the ratio is between environment and genetics in producing gay results.
c) Regarding religion, to be precise the First Amendment says that CONGRESS shall make no law-- which needs to be ready in the context of the King of England also being the head of the Church of England-- not that others may not make of it what they will.
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Freedom of religion is a protected constitutional right, same sex marriage is not.
We will see...
Really, you think the founding fathers had same sex marriage in mind when they penned the bill of rights? Or the constitution means whatever we want it to mean on any given day?
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Crafty, if you want to comment, why don't you answer and explain your general broad statement,
"Yes, I am saying that people should be allowed to discriminate."
I didn't respond to your comment because I am necessarily a proponent of Gay Marriage, that's why I put my response in the Race thread, although I believe the founding fathers in their wisdom believed in "due process" without specifically identify what that means. I do think the Supreme Court will rule on this matter in the next few years. Whatever they decide in their wisdom is fine with me. But if I was a betting man, I think they will approve Gay Marriage.
But the basic subject, the point you raised and I addressed, that being people being "allowed to discriminate" is much much more important. I look forward to your response.
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Still avoiding the hard questions?
If a 50-something Mohammed wants to marry a 6 year old Aisha, is that constitutionally protected?
If not, why not?
If a brother and sister wish to marry, is that constitutionally protected?
If a male wants 4 wives at the same time, is that constitutionally protected?
If not, why not?
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JDN:
It is a large question requiring a composed answer. At the moment I do not have the time-- but in the meantime feel free to take on GM's questions to you.
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JDN:
It is a large question requiring a composed answer. At the moment I do not have the time-- but in the meantime feel free to take on GM's questions to you.
I agree; it is a large question; I look forward to your thoughtful answer.
In the interim, since I don't find GM's questions relevant, I will merely wait for your answer.
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In the interim, since I don't find GM's questions relevant, I will merely wait for your answer.
Meaning that as usual, you are stumped by any question that demands more of you than parroting the usual leftist talking points.
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JDN:
Sorry, but I find GM's questions quite on point-- their purpose being to pin you down to stating what your logic is in addition to your conclusions :-)
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My question was, how is that different from what single people not gay who never marry someone of the opposite sex experience, not how is not married different that married.
"Just off the top of my head. Unless specific documents are drown up (yes you can draw up papers), a partner has very few if any rights. If you are sick they can't visit you (Yes you can designate that.). They can't make major decisions for you if you are incapacitated, etc. (Yes you can designate that too.) It costs money, time and effort; something that automatically given to a heterosexual married couple. (No, they had to draw up papers.)
More specific, they cannot file a joint return.(I'm sure that will change.) At this time, Immigration Law does not recognize a gay marriage, therefore you cannot obtain rights through your "spouse". I married a legal alien. After marriage, she immediately was given a green card. Now she is citizen. IF I had been gay, even though I loved the person dearly, merely having me as a partner would not have entitled him to a green card, etc. (Nor are there any special immigration entitlements for a single person straight not in a relationship.) We would have been broken up. (You would be back to the same rights single people have.) Many/most employers will not cover a gay partner on the corporate insurance plan. Numerous other issues exist."
Add gay marriage to marriage and the proposal still discriminates against (single) people based on marital/family status - but you appeased one constituency. The only real 'fix' (assuming the system that worked thousands of years is broken)is for government to end all acknowledgement of couples and family relationships, and based on your corporate insurance example ban all private sector acknowledgement of these relationships too. A nation only of individuals so everything is completely fair. One collective family. That would fit the liberal dream - it takes a village.
Let's get gender off the license information next. It is sooo outdated. What business is it of the government what gender we are? That alone could solve it. Gay couples only need to designate one of the genderless persons as husband and one as wife. We don't do a chromosome or pants check anyway. If they want to be parents, then they need to designate one as the mom and one as dad. But eliminate gender, open up gay marriage and we still are discriminating, single people, polygamists and categories I haven't thought of. Make private insurance companies recognize all designated spouses, attach additional pages if necessary. Of course the determinant of where to draw the line is only the size and strength of the constituent group, not equal protection under the law.
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One of my newest friends through sports is a gay man who is in a committed relationship. We don't know each other's politics and we likely don't want to hear anything about each other's sexual life or thoughts. He is a great guy. He is one of God's creatures, like me and you He didn't choose his orientation IMO, I don't agree with that theory at all. He does not choose to participate in a sham heterosexual marriage as people like Billie Jean King used to do to gain legal benefits and acceptance that comes with that - so we have come at least that far in a short time. I wish for him (and everyone) all the pursuit of happiness possible in the world, not discrimination. I think my political views overall offer him more freedom and pursuit of happiness than the state-based opposing view even if that does not include a re-definition of marriage. Ours is a gay friendly town adn he can choose a gay friendly or private life neutral place of employment, maybe not work for a sole owner homophobe but so what. At work he is judged by his work and in our sport we are judged by attitude and competence.
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"I didn't respond to your comment(Crafty's) because I am necessarily a proponent of Gay Marriage"
Then you must have some reservations too. Probably the same ones as the rest of us.
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"What business is it of the government what gender we are?"
What business is it of government what gender race ethnicity age or anything else? A human being is a human being.
What business is it what "country" we are from? Denmark, Kansas, New Zealand, Nigeria, Mongolia. Obviously we are all one race - humankind. (notice "man"kind is out!)
Look one world government with all of us exactly the same.
Don't forget it is the right of this same government to tell us what is politically correct to say AND think.
They can also tell us what we can and can't eat. How many times we can flush the toilet. What kind of light bulbs to use. What kind of car to drive. How much money we are allowed to make and certainly how much we can keep and must give them.
We are not allowed to display certain symbols on our lawn. They can send a letter to our house telling us we are in the way and must move to make way for a busines that has given someone high up a donation or a piece of the real estate.
We cannot ask people who move here to speak our language but we must speak their language.
The government has NO business questioning what gender we are despite the laws of nature but they have all the business in the world to tell us and do to us all the above.
Make sense to you? Not to me.
(It gets worse every day. No end in sight.)
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CCP, The biggest reason we can't drop race, gender or orientation from our awareness is because it would end gender-based lawsuits. We already have people between categories that don't know which restroom to use.
The first question on the mortgage application to prevent discrimination based on race is to ask you your race.
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In recent years, many conservatives have begun to acknowledge the inevitability of gay marriage, even as they continue to strongly oppose it. In March 2011, Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said on a Christian radio program that "it is clear that something like same-sex marriage … is going to become normalized, legalized and recognized in the culture."
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-klarman-gay-marriage-and-the-courts-20120212,0,7285590.story
"What is the purpose of denying the use of one word — "marriage" — to a class of people deemed by the state itself fully capable of taking on all of the child-raising and other responsibilities associated with the word?"
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-carpenter-proposition-eight-ruling-20120213,0,4830988.story
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In recent years, many conservatives have begun to acknowledge the inevitability of gay marriage, even as they continue to strongly oppose it. In March 2011, Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said on a Christian radio program that "it is clear that something like same-sex marriage … is going to become normalized, legalized and recognized in the culture."
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-klarman-gay-marriage-and-the-courts-20120212,0,7285590.story
"What is the purpose of denying the use of one word — "marriage" — to a class of people deemed by the state itself fully capable of taking on all of the child-raising and other responsibilities associated with the word?"
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-carpenter-proposition-eight-ruling-20120213,0,4830988.story
The parrot strikes!
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It the Parrot named Michael J. Klarman a professor at Harvard Law School or Dale Carpenter a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School or Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary OR is just anyone who disagrees with you opinion a "parrot?
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It the Parrot named Michael J. Klarman a professor at Harvard Law School or Dale Carpenter a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School or Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary OR is just anyone who disagrees with you opinion a "parrot?
Your inability to defend your ideas and answer hard questions makes you the P.C./LA Times parrot.
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I'm not quoting the LA Times; I'm quoting a Harvard professor of law, a University of Minnesota professor of law and a respected, conservative, seminary president. Don't shoot the medium (I mean the "parrot") when it is merely delivery the message. Even if you don't like the message.
In contrast you don't quote authority or logically present your ideas; just cockamamy personal opinions/questions out of left field with no relevance; you prefer the technique of throwing shit against the wall. You hope some sticks. But there is no substance.
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It used to be: Accept us, we are different.
We did, pretty much. that was not good enough. Quickly it became: Accept us, we are the same as you.
But gay people are not the same in the context of family structure, procreation, child rearing. Gay people are God's creatures, citizens, Americans - they live among us, work hard, serve our country, pay taxes and vote in our society. They are entitled to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness and equal protection under the law. That does not mean they are entitled to special accommodations - such as the changing the meanings of our words or our accepted institutions.
If marriage results in a bond between a husband and a wife, gays have, as every other person has, the liberty to choose to enter that institution, also the liberty to choose not to. (Contrast that with other places in the world where today they still have pre-arranged marriages!)
A bond between a mother and a son or a father and a daughter is special. A bond with a close grandparent can be special, or between siblings Teo unmarried siblings might decide to look after each other for the rest of thier life..That's great. It's not better or worse than marriage, but it is something different than marriage.
LA Times: "What is the purpose of denying the use of one word — "marriage" — to a class of people..."
Yes, that is the nut of the deal. You are asking us to change an institution that you choose to not join. Accept marriage for what it is, and do something different. Gay Unions was an idea call it something different. Attach a meaning such as designating end of life decisions, shared bank accounts etc. No one is threatening your private or public freedom of association. Just don't tell me you are husband and wife when you chose a different path.
LA Times continued: "...fully capable of taking on all of the child-raising..."
Right. Do you see how that keeps creeping!? We went from ending the concept of husband and wife to ending the distinction that having a mom and a dad is what families strive for.
Gayness by definition is the opposite of choosing to procreate and populate the planet. If we should choose as a society to put children with gay couples that they obviously born to (or adoption to singles) is a public policy question, not a pre-existing right. Gay people are not banned from being a part of forming families that lead to children, they are choosing a different path.
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Frankly I old enough and old fashioned enough that I too prefer marriage be reserved for a man and a woman. But I wish there was some way to give ALL legal rights enjoyed by married couples to gays. I don't care what you call it. Otherwise, out of fairness, I feel obligated to support gays right to marry.
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Frankly I old enough and old fashioned enough that I too prefer marriage be reserved for a man and a woman. But I wish there was some way to give ALL legal rights enjoyed by married couples to gays. I don't care what you call it. Otherwise, out of fairness, I feel obligated to support gays right to marry.
What of polygyny or polyandry? Do they deserve the same "fairness"?
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Why can't Hugh Heffner marry all of his live in girlfriends? Is that fair? If two men could marry, why not three? Why not eight?
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In contrast you don't quote authority or logically present your ideas; just cockamamy personal opinions/questions out of left field with no relevance; you prefer the technique of throwing shit against the wall. You hope some sticks. But there is no substance.
You are even more detatched from reality than I thought. I deconstruct your idotic posting with such ease, one regular here compares it to watching the Harlem Globetrotters vs. the "Generals".
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Ummm , , , gentlemen , , , lets see if we can do better than this please.
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Actually, you haven't deconstructed anything; you just post dribble.
Speaking of dribble, I like watching the Harlem Globetrotters. They used to be a very good team. All black of course. Then in 1950 The Celtics drafted the first black player. After that,
the Globetrotters were never the same. Blacks had finally broke through the discrimination wall. Now momentum is building for gays.
"Reality" is that gays are gaining more and more equal rights. "Reality" is that IMHO gays will be given the right to marry unless somehow they are given all the same rights that heterosexual couples have,
but you can call it something different. It may even be too late for that.
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Everyone has the right to marry a single person of the opposite sex who is of legal age. That's marriage. Anything else is another part of the left's campaign to destroy society from within.
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Everyone has the right to marry a single person of the opposite sex who is of legal age. That's marriage. Anything else is another part of the left's campaign to destroy society from within.
You must have had a few beers? You seem quite reasonable tonight. :-) I absolutely agree with your first sentence. I too agree marriage should be between a man and a woman. However, your second sentence (or I guess your third) is complicated. I don't think their intent is to destroy society. They love each other; don't ask me to even try to explain. And I believe intention, in this and most matters, intention is important. So how do we resolve this issue fairly? Ignoring it is not a solution. Better to come up with a compromise.... Before it's too late. Although maybe it is. But just my suggestion. Personally, if it came to a vote, I would abstain. That's because either way, I would accept and understand the outcome.
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As was the case with Prop 8 in CA:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/16/us/maryland-gay-marriage-faces-black-skepticism.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha23
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JDN: "I too agree marriage should be between a man and a woman. "
What the hell were we arguing about?...............
If we could all agree that, legally and constitutionally, gays already have all the pre-existing rights, endowed by their Creator, self-evident, unalienable, just like the rest of us including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. What we are arguing (IMO) is whether or not it is good public policy to choose to make special accommodations for gays, not whether their pre-existing rights have been violated.
By all means, make a special accommodation. Make it easy to get those other recognitions (end of life decisions etc.) if so desired. Make it binding on no one else, private insurance companies etc. And LEAVE THE CHILDREN OUT OF IT.
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The problem is always in the details..... either it's absolutely equal and binding on everyone, or it doesn't work.
Studies show children raised by gay parents are just fine, but I too have my doubts. I only knew one gay couple (nice guys) who had a child. Frankly, I felt sorry for him. Nice boy, he didn't know mom or dad really. For lack of a better idea, I told him to join the military in a couple of years. He thought it might be a good idea too.
It's always the kids who get hurt. Straight parents get divorced and again, it's the kids who get hurt the most.
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"Studies BY PROGRESSIVE SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS show children raised by gay parents are just fine"
Fixed it for you.
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"Studies BY PROGRESSIVE SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS show children raised by gay parents are just fine"
Fixed it for you.
Actually nearly all the national medical groups agree (I wouldn't call them "progressive special interest groups") supported by study after study confirm that children raised by gay parents show no adverse effects. That said, it seems to me the studies are relatively new and subject to sampling size discrepancies.
IMHO, much better to have a heterosexual mom and dad. But, is it better to have two loving lesbians raise a child than a struggling single parent (divorce is quite common)? I'm not sure what the answer is to that question.
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"Actually nearly all the national medical groups agree (I wouldn't call them "progressive special interest groups")"
Ummm , , , my general impression is that they are.
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"Actually nearly all the national medical groups agree (I wouldn't call them "progressive special interest groups")"
I am not sure who does these kinds of studies but it is more likely they are gay researchers with an agenda than conservatives trying to advance their conservative values.
That said I don't know whether it is harmful or not.
I am not sure why anyone would care enough to spend time and money unless gay and that would bias the study.
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"Actually nearly all the national medical groups agree (I wouldn't call them "progressive special interest groups")"
I am not sure who does these kinds of studies but it is more likely they are gay researchers with an agenda than conservatives trying to advance their conservative values.
That said I don't know whether it is harmful or not.
I am not sure why anyone would care enough to spend time and money unless gay and that would bias the study.
Whether the individual doing the research is gay or or not (does it matter anymore than a biased straight guy doing the research?), respected national medical (experts) groups reviewed the findings and concurred that there is no harm. I doubt if they had a bias or agenda any more than the Orthopedic society has an agenda or bias on how to fix your broken leg.
As to why they even did the study, well science seems to find excuses to study anything. I'm sure there is a study on the sex habits of the fruit fly. Given that approximately 5% of the world's population is gay,
it would seem like a reasonable study.
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For those of you who want to spend time reading 29 pages of this "study" which has a lot diatribing in it while in the same paper admits that actual research looking into the this is "scant" one can knock yourself out here:
http://www.psychology.org.au/Assets/Files/LGBT-Families-Lit-Review.pdf
So the authors blab and blab and blab at some points saying certain things are "well established" and later contradicting the whole thing with there is scant evidence.
It reminds me of "field" of graphology wherein people claim to be ble to determine a person's personality from their handwriting.
A retired FBI documents examiner explained that he reviewed the books written on the subject and concluded there was no scientific continuity. They all used different criteria and had different conclusions.
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Thank you for that CCP; exactly the sort of Orwellian thing of which I was thinking.
In a different vein, I would point out that there are a two different questions involved which often get blurred:
1) Is gay marriage constitutionally compelled bu the US consitution? I would submit that the answer clearly is not. Is gay marriage compelled by a given state constitution? I cannot say with certainty, though I confess to a strong suspicion that liberal judicial imperialist courts will say yes even when not so.
2) If no, then is gay marriage a good idea? I say no AND that this is a matter for the democratic process.
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Is gay marriage constitutionally compelled bu the US consitution? I would submit that the answer clearly is not.
For diversity of opinion on this forum (I really don't care one way or another) I disagree. Note, I am not an attorney like Crafty and others on this forum.
The due process clause says that states may not deprive persons of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. And over the past century, the Supreme Court has spent a great deal of time itemizing the specific liberties protected by this guarantee. Among these, the Court has included a series of guarantees regarding marriage. Most importantly, in Loving v. Virginia (1967) the Court held that states could not ban interracial marriage since "the freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men." To "deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as racial classifications," Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, was "directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment." In short, "under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State."44
Beyond this explicit guarantee regarding interracial marriage, the Court has been building a more extensive zone of privacy around marriage since the 1920s. Today, that zone includes a guarantee that personal questions—such as who to marry, whether to have children, whether to use contraception, whether to terminate a pregnancy, or how to raise and educate children—are left largely inviolable by government action.
It may be that the incorporation of an unqualified right to decide who to marry as a liberty guaranteed under the due process clause may be the shortest route to a constitutional protection for gay marriage.
Some think that the Court hinted as much in its 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas. In striking down the state's "Homosexual Conduct" law, the Court relied primarily on the rational basis test; it could find "no legitimate state interest" in this law so directly impacting one classification of people. But in the fine print, the decision referenced a more fundamental right to privacy and marriage established in earlier abortion cases. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy cited Planned Parenthood v. Casey and its affirmation of a "constitutional protection to personal decisions relating to marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, child rearing, and education." He dwelled on the precedent long enough to explore the more abstract elements within this protection:
"These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State."
Justice Kennedy closed by noting that, "persons in a homosexual relationship may seek autonomy for these purposes, just as heterosexuals do."45
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Relevant but distinguishable.
Freedom to sodomize and related behaviors does not mean that the law must treat a man's intestines and a woman's uterus as the same thing.
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Actually, I liked that the Court struck down a ban on interracial marriage and the accompanying words of Chief Justice Warren (see post).
Therefore, if it's constitutionally not ok to ban interracial marriage, "pursuit of happiness....." why is ok to ban gay marriage?
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Umm , , , because marriage by definition is between a man and a woman.
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Umm , , , because marriage by definition is between a man and a woman.
I don't see where the constitution or anywhere in this ruling they refer to marriage "between a man and a woman". In contrast, the Loving v. Virgina ruling mentioned an "individual". One could argue that gays are included...
But as I said, I'm not an attorney, nor frankly, do I have a strong opinion one way or another.
Well, we will see how the Court rules.....
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http://hotair.com/archives/2012/02/16/in-kansas-a-bill-to-protect-religious-freedom-angers-gays/
In Kansas, a bill to protect religious freedom angers gays
posted at 4:55 pm on February 16, 2012 by Tina Korbe
The Department of Health and Human Services has states spooked. At least, legislators in Kansas cited the administration’s contraception mandate as a reason to expedite passage of a bill to protect religious freedoms:
Supporters of a proposal in Kansas that’s described as an attempt to protect religious freedoms told state legislators Tuesday that President Obama’s ill-fated mandate for insurance coverage of birth control is a compelling example of why the measure is needed. …
The state House Judiciary Committee had a hearing on the proposed Preservation of Religious Freedom Act and is expected to vote on it by Monday. State Rep. Lance Kinzer, a Republican who is committee chairman, contends the measure simply writes into state law language from past Kansas court decisions for determining when government policies place too much of a burden on practicing religion. …
The bill would declare that state- and local-government policies shall not “substantially burden” people’s right to exercise their religious beliefs without showing a compelling interest and imposing the burden in the least restrictive way possible. It also would declare that people have the right to sue state and local government agencies if they feel their religious freedoms have been abridged.
Liberal activists in the state are not happy about this statute — but not because they support the president’s mandate (although they probably do). No, they’re worried that the Preservation of Religious Freedom Act will be used to nullify local and state laws to prevent bias — not just discrimination, but bias — against gays. The bill specifically says that the prevention of discriminatory practices — as outlined by Kansas state law and the Kansas and U.S. Constitutions — is a compelling interest for which the state might burden the free exercise of religion. It says nothing about local anti-bias ordinances that seek to make up for the fact that Kansas state law does nothing to prevent discrimination in employment, housing or public accommodations based on sexual orientation.
The response of these gay activists is instructive. It’s a further indication that some gay advocates think the free exercise of religion — when it reveals a bias against gay behavior — should itself be construed as discrimination. It underscores that an overlap exists between the purported rights of gays to marry and the long-acknowledged, constitutionally-enshrined right to religious freedom. Someday, for example, might the state not compel churches to perform gay wedding ceremonies or compel landlords to rent to gay couples even if they’re religiously opposed to gay behavior? I know a landlord who won’t rent to cohabiting couples because she’s religiously opposed. Should she not have the right to rent her property to whomever she wishes? The battle for state-recognized same-sex marriage is thorny precisely because of the way in which it eventually touches on religious freedom.
Incidentally, this Kansas statute sounds a little like the 1993 federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which passed the House of Representatives unanimously, passed the Senate by a vote of 97-3 and was signed into law by Bill Clinton. That statute says the federal government may “substantially burden” a person’s “exercise of religion” only if it “is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest” and “is the least restrictive means of furthering” that interest. The existence of the federal law doesn’t obviate the need for similar laws at a state level, but it is worth noting in this post that the federal law exists — and the HHS contraception mandate is in clear violation of it.
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"One could argue that gays are included..."
Yes, if you change or ignore the meanings of the words involved: marriage, husband and wife. I now pronounce you individual and individual. - ?
"we will see how the Court rules....."
Yes, then we will know what 5 people think. This wasn't written or settled in the constitution and I can't figure out why in the Declaration of Independence they chose the phrase 'consent of the governed' if they meant governed by the dictate of 5 chosen people. (
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"One could argue that gays are included..."
Yes, if you change or ignore the meanings of the words involved: marriage, husband and wife. I now pronounce you individual and individual. - ?
"we will see how the Court rules....."
Yes, then we will know what 5 people think. This wasn't written or settled in the constitution and I can't figure out why in the Declaration of Independence they chose the phrase 'consent of the governed' if they meant governed by the dictate of 5 chosen people. (
To my knowledge, the Constitution never addressed the issue of "marriage, husband and wife". And the expression, "I now pronounce you husband and wife" doesn't mean you have to be male/female. :-)
As to how 5 people think, those five+ in their wisdom, are the final word on what our Constitution means....
In their wisdom, that's how our constitution was set up....
Our constitution also said the pursuit of liberty and pursuit on happiness for all individuals; equality is a basic premise. Why not gays?
As I said, let's see what the court says. I don't care either way.
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"As to how 5 people think, those five+ in their wisdom, are the final word on what our Constitution means....
In their wisdom, that's how our constitution was set up"
That is the conventional wisdom, but there is that pesky language about Congress being able to restrict the jurisdiction of the courts-- Newt Gingrich made some interesting points a few weeks ago about federal courts exceeding the bounds of their powers. Perhaps Big Dog could weigh in here?
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http://www.mercatornet.com/Newsletterv0810/view_txt/should_government_be_involved_in_marriage
Should government be involved in marriage?
Thomas Patrick Burke | 17 February 2012
The debate over same-sex marriage has prompted a lot of thinking about the nature of marriage itself. One solution to the current crisis has been mooted by libertarian writers: privatise marriage. Here Patrick Burke, a libertarian, explains why marriage is special and governments still have a role.
Libertarians believe in having as little government as possible and for this they have good reasons. The chief role of government, in libertarian eyes, is to protect its citizens from harm. First, from aggression by other nations, which government can do by having an effective foreign policy and military. Second, from aggression by criminals, which government can do by having a just and effective system of justice: police, courts of law and prisons. When all this has been done—not exactly a small item—libertarians believe government has pretty much finished its job. The rest should be left to the free agreements of individuals with one another. For every action of government uses, or threatens to use, physical force, and to use force on people when they have not done any harm is contrary to human dignity. It also makes everybody poorer than they need be, as Adam Smith demonstrated long ago. The happiest and most successful society is the one that leaves people what Smith called their “natural liberty.”
Marriage does not seem to fall under any of the aggressive activities that people need to be protected against. If a man and a woman want to get married, that is their own affair because it does not harm anybody else. It belongs to the most intimate sphere of life, the bedroom, and we do not want government in our bedroom. This is why for many centuries marriage was regulated by the church, not by government. For a thousand years in mediaeval Europe marriage disputes were settled in church courts under church rules. Reasoning along such lines, some libertarians—notably Ron Paul—are now calling on government to take itself completely out of marriage.
This reasoning is not entirely wrong, but it leaves out something essential. Marriage is a contract. No doubt it is much more than a contract. In the Christian view it is also a sacrament: a visible sign of an invisible grace. But whatever else it may be, it is at least a contract. It is a solemn public agreement. When we get married, we pledge to share our life with another person. As in any contract, we lead the other person to rely on us to carry out our promise. In any contract, if we break our promise, we cause harm to the other person because we cause them to lose everything they have invested in it. This is why government is involved in all contracts, and rightly so. Marriage creates rights.
In marriage especially, more than in any other kind of contract, we can cause immense, lifelong harm beyond any possibility of repair. Marriage creates the most intimate of human relationships, making us most vulnerable to one another. We have led the other person to give up her or his life alone, relying on us to share our life with them in place of that, so that the two of us can build up a new life together. If we break that promise, we can easily destroy the other person’s life. But that life is just as valuable as mine. If I break the other persons’s life, I deserve to have my own broken. Of course, if a marriage is irretrievably broken, there must be some provision for that. The message of the New Testament is that the provision should be compassionate.
Marriage is especially for the sake of the children. They have been brought into the world through the unity of their parents, and they need that unity to continue. If their parents break up, many children never recover. It mars their whole life. Children have rights, and it is the task of government to protect those rights.
Marriage involves property. Every family needs to have family property, property that belongs to them not as individuals but as members of the family. Children especially need this. But property always must be governed by rules. If one spouse dies, what provision is made for the other, and for the children? Disputes can arise, which need to be settled authoritatively, and therefore by government.
All societies we know of have had definite rules about marriage, usually presupposing a definition of marriage. There are some kinds of theoretically possible “marriages” that all societies have rejected. None give legal recognition by government, which would involve distinct property rights, to “marriages” between fathers and their sons, or between mothers and their daughters. The action of government is needed to set these rules.
The jurisdiction of the church over marriage during the middle ages did not remove marriage from the purview of government but was a result of the traditional union of church and state. As the Roman civil authority collapsed in the face of the barbarian invasions, the Christian bishops, already officials of the state since the emperor Theodosius, remained and took responsibility for what was left of civil society. The subsequent feudal states in effect gave authority to the church, as they also gave the universities certain rights of self-government. But they always retained the power to take it back, which the modern state has done.
The theory that marriage does not need government is foolish and irresponsible. It is related to the even more foolish and irresponsible theory that society itself does not need government. Some libertarians argue, with Murray Rothbard, that all the responsibilities of government can be carried out by the market. It is true that many of them in our day can be, because government has claimed authority in so many areas of life where it does not belong. But a true market is always only a free one, and is not compatible with the unjust use of force. The fact is, however, there will always be people who use unjust force, including in marriage. In the face of them, the market is helpless. Only government can ensure a free and true market. As John Locke argued, true freedom is always freedom under law. Likewise, marriage needs to be protected by the law.
In the Western world marriage has fallen into relative disfavor. Couples now often live together without marriage and have children without marriage, or deliberately have children without a spouse. It is not clear that this is a great benefit either to them or to the society, for a successful marriage is by far the most satisfying of all human relationships. If we ask why marriage is currently in decline, an important reason is undoubtedly that government has abdicated its responsibility for protecting it. Divorce should be possible, but it should not be easy, just as marriage should not be easy. By making divorce easy, even frivolously easy—usually a unilateral breaking of the contract—government has emptied marriage of its most basic value, which is the guaranteed and dependable sharing of a life together. Although government is needed, then, that is not to say its role has always been benign. The current attempts by members of the legal profession to label same-sex unions “marriages” testifies—if we needed any more testimony—to the foolishness and cupidity of the legal and political class to whom we have entrusted our laws, who are willing to have the society they govern pay any price if only it will reelect them.
Like other valuable institutions in our society, marriage and the family have been systematically weakened over the last fifty years, especially by the current obsession with equality. Many people have come to view marriage and the family, no longer as treasures to be protected but as haunts of oppression and exploitation, a’ la Marx. But libertarians are not Marxists. You cannot love freedom and also love Marx who wanted to abolish it. Libertarians are not anarchists. Libertarians believe in law and government, because without law and government there is no freedom. For the same reason libertarians should also believe in marriage and the family.
Thomas Patrick. Burke, president of the Wynnewood Institute, is the author of The Concept of Justice: Is Social Justice Just? and No Harm.
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Crafty says “That is the conventional wisdom, but there is that pesky language about Congress being able to restrict the jurisdiction of the courts-- Newt Gingrich made some interesting points a few weeks ago about federal courts exceeding the bounds of their powers. Perhaps Big Dog could weigh in here?”
This is largely correct. Article III gives the USSC original jurisdiction is some areas, but most of the cases that the Court hears each year are appellate. The Supreme Court has said that Congress cannot alter original jurisdiction (see Marbury). Congress has, and no doubt will again, alter the Court’s appeallate jurisdiction. It is important to note that these alterations can be either because the Court requests it OR because Congress feels as though it should be done. Also, it is difficult to alter the jurisdiction, like many other policy changes. For example, the conservative led push to remove flag burning cases from the Court’s jurisdiction, largely in the 1980’s and early 1990’s on the heals of Texas v. Johnson, did not work.
Doug says “But gay people are not the same in the context of family structure, procreation, child rearing. Gay people are God's creatures, citizens, Americans - they live among us, work hard, serve our country, pay taxes and vote in our society. They are entitled to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness and equal protection under the law. That does not mean they are entitled to special accommodations - such as the changing the meanings of our words or our accepted institutions…. A bond between a mother and a son or a father and a daughter is special. A bond with a close grandparent can be special, or between siblings Teo unmarried siblings might decide to look after each other for the rest of thier life..That's great. It's not better or worse than marriage, but it is something different than marriage.”
This was the point at which I decided I wanted to chime in on this topic. Doug, with all due respect (and, as always, I mean this literally, not in the snarky tone it is often used), much of this argument strikes me as silly. First of all, much of the language of your point here is similar to the reasons given by whites in the South for decades if not longer. “Changing the meanings of our accepted institutions”… like education? Travel? Medical care? Jim Crow was an institution, and it needed to be changed. Moreover, in some areas of civil rights, such as handicapped, special accommodations are exactly what they are entitled to. Ramps, tutors, Braille books, sound emitting cross walk signals? Gay rights, like race and handicapped, are civil rights questions. When you make arguments like the ones you made, I think you run head first into an area with serious legal and moral implications.
Moreover, you singling out the bonds of mother and son, and father and daughter is silly… and to me, a father with only male offspring, pretty frustrating. I think I know what you meant, but the idea somehow that fathers and sons, or mothers and daughters don’t/can’t/shouldn’t (here is where I am not sure I understand the point of the argument) have a strong, or special, relationship is pretty crappy.
Crafty says “1) Is gay marriage constitutionally compelled bu the US consitution? I would submit that the answer clearly is not. Is gay marriage compelled by a given state constitution? I cannot say with certainty, though I confess to a strong suspicion that liberal judicial imperialist courts will say yes even when not so.
2) If no, then is gay marriage a good idea? I say no AND that this is a matter for the democratic process.”
Gay marriage does NOT have to be compelled by the Constitution for it to be accepted by the Constitution. There are many, many examples of this in American political institutions. Moreover, as I know you know, the 9th Amendment leaves open the possibility that there are other, unenumerated rights. Privacy, of course, is one that has been recognized. I know, from prior discussions with you (Crafty), that you acknowledge the right to privacy. As JDN states, there could be an argument made that gay marriage could be allowed, based on privacy precedent. But, there could be, at least in theory, a stand alone right found in the 9th. As for “liberal judicial imperialist courts,” there are certainly conservative activist jurists. Moreover, there is a line of legal theorists, realist/positivist who argue that law is not law until judges lend their interpretation to it. There are many legislative acts that are passed and the intention/meaning is murky, which lends some weight to the argument.
Crafty says, related to Loving and Lawrence and the present issue of homosexual marriage “Relevant but distinguishable.”
Of course it is distinguishable. But then, theoretically, all cases that follow anything could be said to be distinguishable. No two cases have exactly the same fact pattern. It is the job of the jurist to find the “right” fact pattern, in an effort to find the “right” precedent. This is a hard job. To give you a sense of the difficulty, there are cases in which both a majority and dissent will use the same case.
Crafty says “…marriage by definition is between a man and a woman.”
OK. But, only sort of. I have MANY relationships with many women. Only of those is my wife. So, defining marriage as between a man and a women is shade overbroad, don’t you think? However, definitions change. Many words have different meanings. Some words have contradictory meanings. It not be all that hard to make a legal definition of marriage which incorporates implications of love, respect and monogamy but allows for marriage between two people of the same gender.
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Bigdog, Thanks for joining in. I am answering only for my part. Father and son, absolutely! My list was not intended to single out, just tried not to drag it out too far since my attempted point was lost anyway!
"the idea somehow that fathers and sons, or mothers and daughters don’t/can’t/shouldn’t (here is where I am not sure I understand the point of the argument) have a strong, or special, relationship is pretty crappy."
No, no, no, I meant exactly the opposite. I don't love anyone in the world more than my own father nor regret anything in the world more than not having a son. I was trying to say ALL those relationships and many not named can be special, extremely special and private, and better and stronger than many marriages, and half of them may be opposite sex relationships as with your examples other than with your wife, but none of them are marriage. So we already discriminate in law between all these relationships and marriage, not just gay relationships. Seems to me we should strike down marriage if unconstitutional like slavery or if not try to agree on some special accommodations for gay unions over on the legislative side of the government.
I find the comparison to race and America growing out of slavery to be quite uncompelling even if some of the same words or phrases were used.
Where is the similar evidence that gays are similarly abused by our laws. Gay incomes are equal or higher to straights and housing is already protected and widely available. I don't know a restaurant or drinking fountain that asks orientation before allowing service. And single people don't receive spousal privilege.
Is marriage as we know it wrong? Is it unconstitutional? In 200+ years, was it ever struck down? Why not? Marriage only applies to a select group of people, restricted by age, gender and circumstance, not just orientation. If marriage as we know it is a violation of pre-existing rights, as with slavery, end it, not extend it to one more group still at the exclusion of others.
In what way is a gay person who does not choose to be a part of husband-wife marital union denied any right that a single heterosexual person who does not have a heterosexual partner willing to marry is not similarly denied?
If you already answered that, sorry I missed it.
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On the point of 5 people deciding gay marriage, the constitution couldn't be more silent about couple's rights IMHO but has always included a mechanism for adding to or changing the text. If people of different circumstances must be treated exactly the same in law, we have a whole lot of programs ready to fall. Public policy wouldn't come down to 5 chosen people if the path written into the constitution to change it was followed. Slavery was ended in war but it was also ended in the constitution in the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Five people didn't decide that.
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Bigdog says,
"Moreover, in some areas of civil rights, such as handicapped, special accommodations are exactly what they are entitled to. Ramps, tutors, Braille books, sound emitting cross walk signals? Gay rights, like race and handicapped, are civil rights questions."
Specifically,
"special accommodations are exactly what they are entitled to"
Wow. We are forced to accomodate to disabilities because of laws passed for compassionate reasons. Yes all of us can become disabled at any time. The problem is the word "entitlement". There is NO end to extrapolation of using this word to endless areas of our society our culture.
The left has used this word in no small way to ever increase entitlements (and the government to enforce it - and the costs of others to pay for it) endlessly.
There is still no end in sight. And there will not be. Not unitl the entire world all 7 billion of us are exactly the same.
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So, defining marriage as between a man and a women is shade overbroad, don’t you think? However, definitions change. Many words have different meanings. Some words have contradictory meanings. It not be all that hard to make a legal definition of marriage which incorporates implications of love, respect and monogamy but allows for marriage between two people of the same gender.
Why discriminate in the area of monogamy? Why not polygamy/polyandry as well?
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"Why not polygamy/polyandry as well?"
GM,
Why stop there? Why not just take it to the end game -
Why even have marriage altogether?
Just abolish it. We have divorce at over 50%. We have all these people fooling around. We have children of single or unmarried parents all over the place.
Now gays are hoisting their agenda on the rest of us.
Perhaps we could tax individuals more and stop deductions, so the State would be happy to rid of marriage.
Just get rid of it. It is nealy meaningless or going in that direction every day anyway.
We celebrate celebrities who have kids out of wedlock. We celebrate gays having children. We see everyone and their uncle so to speak having affairs (JFK with a teenager and running the WH like a Damn personal brothel)
I can go on.
Just get rid of the antiquated and fast becoming worthless institution.
So a few "chapels" on the Vegas strip will go out of business.
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"Why not polygamy/polyandry as well?"
GM,
Why stop there? Why not just take it to the end game -
Why even have marriage altogether?
Just abolish it. We have divorce at over 50%. We have all these people fooling around. We have children of single or unmarried parents all over the place.
Now gays are hoisting their agenda on the rest of us.
Perhaps we could tax individuals more and stop deductions, so the State would be happy to rid of marriage.
Just get rid of it. It is nealy meaningless or going in that direction every day anyway.
We celebrate celebrities who have kids out of wedlock. We celebrate gays having children. We see everyone and their uncle so to speak having affairs (JFK with a teenager and running the WH like a Damn personal brothel)
I can go on.
Just get rid of the antiquated and fast becoming worthless institution.
So a few "chapels" on the Vegas strip will go out of business.
CCP, that's pretty much the left's endgame. When everything is marriage, nothing is. Another piece of western civilization down the drain. Just as they want it.
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Well, let's see: why stop with monogamy? Um, because we can. You gents don't seem to get that marriage laws, like any other laws, can be changed. There are places where a 14 year old can be married. Cousins can be married. We might look askance at that, but it can be done. And when those people ARE married, their marriage is recognized in other states. Why should a marriage legally recognized in one state not be recognized in another? You guys keep asking hypotheticals. Should a marriage of cousins in a state that legally allows this marriage NOT be recognized in another state? What about a person who is too young in the state where I reside? Can my "sophisticated" state legally prevent those legally recognized marriages? Oh, sorry fifteen year old. Hey... what about a marriage that took place in a whole different country? Those probably aren't real either.
It USED to be that marriages only were legal if you were free. Slaves couldn't marry. It USED to be the case that we defined marriage as only between members of the same race. Blacks and whites couldn't marry. The divorce rate since these changes has sky rocketed. Do you blame interracial marriage for this?
Also, it pretty much pisses me off when you insinuate that those who disagree with you don't value marriage. Gays value marriage. That's WHY THEY WANT TO GET MARRIED. Oh, and I am married. Happily. So tell me how, because I disagree with you, I don't respect the institution of marriage.
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Also, it pretty much pisses me off when you insinuate that those who disagree with you don't value marriage. Gays value marriage. That's WHY THEY WANT TO GET MARRIED.
Try again. The homosexual activists want the force of law to impose their "values" on the unwilling. Look at the sociologically documented sexual behavior of homosexual men, it's anything but monogamous.
I'm sure you value marriage, but you also value a tenue track that would be swiftly derailed were you to make public statements contrary to the party line on homosexual marriage, right?
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Also, it pretty much pisses me off when you insinuate that those who disagree with you don't value marriage. Gays value marriage. That's WHY THEY WANT TO GET MARRIED.
Try again. The homosexual activists want the force of law to impose their "values" on the unwilling. Look at the sociologically documented sexual behavior of homosexual men, it's anything but monogamous.
I'm sure you value marriage, but you also value a tenue track that would be swiftly derailed were you to make public statements contrary to the party line on homosexual marriage, right?
And then look at the sociologically documented sexual behavior of homosexual women, and you'll notice that it is more monogamous than hetero couples. Then again, you could look at the evidence of college age people, in general, and notice that they can marry.
I do appreciate you dodging the question, though, by changing the subject.
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I do appreciate you dodging the question, though, by changing the subject.
GM is good at that! :-)
But it would be nice to hear GM or others address bigdog's points....
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If you had an IQ above room temp, you'd have noticed that I raised those points to you, JDN. You couldn't answer them, as all you can do is parrot leftist talking points.
I'm against cousins marrying, as I am against polygamy or the underaged marrying, but those behaviors don't have the force of political correctness pushing those agendas. Marriage is a legal contract, and should only be legally valid when done by legal adults of the opposite sex. Cousins and those even closer related shouldn't be allowed to marry. I'm not sure this is much of an issue in the US, outside of immigrants from the wonderful world of sharia.
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Also, it pretty much pisses me off when you insinuate that those who disagree with you don't value marriage. Gays value marriage. That's WHY THEY WANT TO GET MARRIED.
Try again. The homosexual activists want the force of law to impose their "values" on the unwilling. Look at the sociologically documented sexual behavior of homosexual men, it's anything but monogamous.
I'm sure you value marriage, but you also value a tenue track that would be swiftly derailed were you to make public statements contrary to the party line on homosexual marriage, right?
And then look at the sociologically documented sexual behavior of homosexual women, and you'll notice that it is more monogamous than hetero couples. Then again, you could look at the evidence of college age people, in general, and notice that they can marry.
I do appreciate you dodging the question, though, by changing the subject.
My point is, there are very few homosexual men that want to marry to live in a long term monagamous relationship, it's about using the force of law to force the militant homosexual agenda on the public at large. Usually through leftist judges legislating from the bench. I'm sure you get that, but you don't risk admitting it. Academics that do face serious consequences, do they not?
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Careful GM. :-) I was in Palm Springs last summer by the pool and it was over 120 degrees. Not brilliant, but adequate for this forum. :-)
Bigdog pointed out that it is Legal in some states to marry at 15; some states allow cousins to marry. If you search, you will find that I listed the states by age (we had this same discussion some time ago). To my knowledge, it's a LEGAL contract enforceable wherever they go in America. As bigdog pointed out, laws can be changed. The trend today is to change the laws to support gay marriages.
Further, in LA we have quite a few open gays; probably in your community too, but they perhaps hide it more. Too bad. Anyway, from what I've seen, gay couples stick together and split apart about the same
as straight couples.
And what does academics facing serious consequences have to do with the issues raised? Maybe you should raise that issue on the free speech thread? Or is that, as you usually do when you are losing an argument, merely an attempt to change the subject or to make it personal?
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It's a simple question, what happens to an untenured academic who might take a public stance against homosexual marriage? I'm sure it's just pure happenstance that BD takes the party line. It's not like there is a political correctness structure in academia that destroys those who question any part of the leftist narrative, right?
As far as you, JDN, you are the living embodiment of everything wrong with this country. An effete douche with delusions of adequacy. You can only parrot what you SoCal lefty echo chamber would approve of.
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I
As far as you, JDN, you are the living embodiment of everything wrong with this country. An effete douche with delusions of adequacy. You can only parrot what you SoCal lefty echo chamber would approve of.
GM; I am growing weary of your inadequacy to address the issues when you don't have an answer. Or when you post half a dozen irrelevant posts because you don't have an answer. Quantity no quality. But I understand. That's you. Other times you have good input. I learn something. However, have you ever thought about being quiet when you have nothing intelligent to say? Or posting just one succinct piece and argue the merits thereafter? Or even kindly acknowledging someone's point, although you don't necessarily agree with it?
But why, when you don't have an answer, do you change the subject and try to make it personal rather than addressing the issues? Further, I personally am growing very tired of your very personal insulting comments. Far worse, I am growing weary of your personal comments regarding Japan (God knows they have problems); but you know my wife is Japanese. Therefore your introductory pointed sarcastic barbs are insulting her; not me. Why do you do that? I mean I don't care about Japan; I was born here and I'm as white as they come. A midwestern boy. But you choose just to focus and insult my wife? Why?
Should I start talking about the Philippines? Perhaps absurd bs disability pay? Government employees receiving money/entitlements for nothing - simply because they can't cut it? Frankly, I'm surprised you take the position on issues that you do.... I would think you would be in favor of unions and excess pay/benefits for government employees.
So how about if you and I stick to the subject and leave the personal issues out of it....? I mean if we were having dinner or a drink together, would you make your arguments personal and antagonistic?
It's fine if we agree on some issues and disagree on others. Nothing wrong with that. But let's do it nicely.
So let's drop the personal comments and merely argue the subject; ok?
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I mean if we were having dinner or a drink together, would you make your arguments personal and antagonistic?
In your case, absolutely.
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I'm against cousins marrying, as I am against polygamy or the underaged marrying, but those behaviors don't have the force of political correctness pushing those agendas. Marriage is a legal contract, and should only be legally valid when done by legal adults of the opposite sex. Cousins and those even closer related shouldn't be allowed to marry. I'm not sure this is much of an issue in the US, outside of immigrants from the wonderful world of sharia.
On point 1: "No State shall enter into any ...Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts...."
On point 2: Connecticut, Georgia, Maine, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, Rhode Island, Tennessee, New Mexico a least all allow cousins to marry. One note: I only looked at 25 states. Nine allowed it. That is more than on thid of the states I looked at (source here: http://usmarriagelaws.com/). Even if this all the states, it is nearly 20% of the states in the union. Your point above holds water like a sieve.
And, by the way, I got tenure. And, since I am an avowed 2nd Amendment supporter, your claims about political correctness in academia and my need to toe the line wouldn't have been accurate before the tenure decision.
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On point 1: "No State shall enter into any ...Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts...."
To the best of my knowledge, no minor child can enter into a legal contract. Is that the case?
On point 2: Connecticut, Georgia, Maine, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, Rhode Island, Tennessee, New Mexico a least all allow cousins to marry. One note: I only looked at 25 states. Nine allowed it. That is more than on thid of the states I looked at (source here: http://usmarriagelaws.com/). Even if this all the states, it is nearly 20% of the states in the union. Your point above holds water like a sieve.
Is there any caselaw where the validity of cousin marriages was questioned? Are states that forbid cousin marriages violating core civil rights? What of the laws against bigamy? Are those unjust, BD?
And, by the way, I got tenure. And, since I am an avowed 2nd Amendment supporter, your claims about political correctness in academia and my need to toe the line wouldn't have made any sense even before the tenure decision.
Are you telling me that if you were a vocal opponent of homosexual marriage, that it wouldn't have harmed your or another academic's career?
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To the best of your knowledge, do you know that the age at which individuals can participate in legally sanctioned behavior differs for the behavior? 16 years olds or so, depending on the state, can drive. 18 years old are no longer a minor. Of course they still can't legally drink.... There are states that allow people as young as 14 (that I know of) to marry, which as YOU noted is a legal contract. Are you trying to argue that those marriages are less legal than others?
Do you think that the US is headed toward a norm of sanctioned incest because cousins can marry in some states?
I am telling you that your blanket statement about me and your perception that I must be "politically correct" is something that you knew to be false when you said it.
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Home from a wonderful day one of the DBMA Winter Camp. Impressive stuff from Kaju Dog on trauma care and from GM Art on , , , reality.
Quite a contrast to come home to , , , this. GM, please put a muzzle on the personal comments. JDN, unless I missed it, you have yet to answer the questions about polygamy. (BD feel free to weigh in too) What basis is there for limiting marriage to two? After all, consenting adults and all , , ,
Concerning marriage of the very young-- if I am not mistaken, parental consent is required, yes?
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Home from a wonderful day one of the DBMA Winter Camp. Impressive stuff from Kaju Dog on trauma care and from GM Art on , , , reality.
Quite a contrast to come home to , , , this. GM, please put a muzzle on the personal comments. JDN, unless I missed it, you have yet to answer the questions about polygamy. (BD feel free to weigh in too) What basis is there for limiting marriage to two? After all, consenting adults and all , , ,
Concerning marriage of the very young-- if I am not mistaken, parental consent is required, yes?
I am glad to hear that went well, Guro. I think I have addressed polygamy. And, as for the "very young," it depends on the age and the state.
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To the best of your knowledge, do you know that the age at which individuals can participate in legally sanctioned behavior differs for the behavior? 16 years olds or so, depending on the state, can drive. 18 years old are no longer a minor. Of course they still can't legally drink.... There are states that allow people as young as 14 (that I know of) to marry, which as YOU noted is a legal contract. Are you trying to argue that those marriages are less legal than others?
Do you think that the US is headed toward a norm of sanctioned incest because cousins can marry in some states?
To the best of my knowledge, they don't have the militant advocacy groups the homosexuals do. My question is, do blood relatives have the right to marry? Are incest laws unconstitutional? Are bigamy laws unconstitutional?
I am telling you that your blanket statement about me and your perception that I must be "politically correct" is something that you knew to be false when you said it.
I know that academia, especially in the social sciences is very PC and anyone who doesn't tow the line pays. Ask Larry Summers about even asking questions deemed un-pc.
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You know from the outside. You get all kinds of crappy when anyone from outside law enforcement tries to make, what to them, is a credible point that goes against something that you know from experience. Shall I post all articles which paint LEOs poorly, and then decide I know something?
Again, you make blanket statements. I am in the social sciences, I support the 2nd Amendment very publicly, so you deciding that "anyone who doesn't tow the line pays" is not true. Why don't you ask me? Or rather, when you do ask me, and I have evidence to contradict your blanket claim, why can't you see that it is erroneous?
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You know from the outside. You all kinds of crappy when anyone from outside law enforcement tries to make, what to them, is a credible point that goes against something that you know from experience. Shall I post all articles which paint LEOs poorly, and then decide I know something?
Again, you make blanket statements. I am in the social sciences, I support the 2nd Amendment very publicly, so you deciding that "anyone who doesn't tow the line pays" is not true. Why don't you ask me? Or rather, when you do ask me, and I have evidence to contradict your blanket claim, why can't you see that it is erroneous?
I might have some direct experiences from inside academia you aren't aware of.
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And I, or others, might have experience inside the world of law enforcement that you aren't aware of, so that sounds like a cop out. Now, back to the thread subject at hand, I am sure.
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And I, or others, might have experience inside the world of law enforcement that you aren't aware of, so that sounds like a cop out. Now, back to the thread subject at hand, I am sure.
Ok, back to it.
Are laws against incest and bigamy constitutional?
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I'm off to work boys and girls. Play nicely now (ahem, GM).
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/report-sex-change-treatments-on-the-rise-among-children-teens/
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/report-sex-change-treatments-on-the-rise-among-children-teens/
Welcome to post-modern, post-moral America.
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Wishing to drop the cultural issues for this election cycle, but so many questions are unresolved. Jumping around with some quotes/excerpts here, hopefully keeping the original meaning as posted.
bigdog wrote: "You gents don't seem to get that marriage laws, like any other laws, can be changed."
This is a good point. It is separate from the question of whether existing marriage laws are unconstitutional.
bigdog wrote:
"Gay marriage does NOT have to be compelled by the Constitution for it to be accepted by the Constitution."
Very true. My question: is it compelled by the constitution?
bigdog continued: "... the 9th Amendment leaves open the possibility that there are other, unenumerated rights. Privacy, of course, is one that has been recognized. I know, from prior discussions with you (Crafty), that you acknowledge the right to privacy. As JDN states, there could be an argument made that gay marriage could be allowed, based on privacy precedent.
Public recognition of a gay union is the opposite of a right to privacy, is it not?
bigdog: "But, there could be, at least in theory, a stand alone right found in the 9th."
This is a good point. Some certainly see it that way. Depends on which 9 people you ask. It seems to me that if a standalone right is found for any citizen to be offered the designation of married, not just gay couples, isn't that the same as ending the public designation of married?
I still fail to understand what rights are denied to a gay American who is in a loving, committed gay relationship that are also not denied to a single person who does not have a heterosexual partner consenting to marry. In all cases you have the right to marry one person of the opposite sex with certain conditions applied, if and/or when those specific circumstances apply to you.
I asked JDN to no avail, but why does the 'equal protection under different circumstances' concept apply to all other areas of public policies including taxing, spending and regulating (see 2012 SOTU), but not apply to marriage?
bigdog: "in some areas of civil rights, such as handicapped, special accommodations are exactly what they are entitled to."
Very true, but they are entitled to certain accommodations because a federal law was passed by the people's representatives and signed by the President. It was not an unenumerated right found in the constitution.
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"but they are entitled to certain accommodations because a federal law was passed by the people's representatives and signed by the President. It was not an unenumerated right found in the constitution"
Exactly. Accomodations that the majority now have to make for disabled minority is only because of laws passed by laws intended for compasionate reasons.
A law can thus be passed that makes virtually anything an entitlement by people's "representatives".
In a way however this law does make the majority actually have ot make way for SPECIAL accomodations for the disabled.
I suppose laws that held for racial considerations in say college admissions could be also thus categorized.
I suppose that passing gay marriage into a law is not 'special' per se but allowing that minority the same government recognized privilege as non gays.
The gay marriage thing is a movement that will continue on ithrough infinity till they get what they insist on.
The majority can argue forever it is just a matter of time before the mority says al right we have had enough.
Here is what you want now will please stop the "reverse harrasment".
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Doug said;
"I still fail to understand what rights are denied to a gay American who is in a loving, committed gay relationship that are also not denied to a single person who does not have a heterosexual partner consenting to marry. In all cases you have the right to marry one person of the opposite sex with certain conditions applied, if and/or when those specific circumstances apply to you."
I think you are missing the point. "Pursuit of happiness....." As a heterosexual you have right to marry the person you love. If you stay single, that too is your choice. A gay person can stay single of course, but they do not have the right to pursue their happiness and marry the person of their choice. It's like black and white. And by not being able to marry the person of their choice, besides the personal issues, they are denied numerous other benefits of a married couple.
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"A gay person can stay single of course, but they do not have the right to pursue their happiness and marry the person of their choice. It's like black and white. And by not being able to marry the person of their choice, besides the personal issues, they are denied numerous other benefits of a married couple."
JDN,
You are missing the point. They do have the right to live with whomever they want and persue their happiness.
But you hit the nail on the head about the benefits. A lot of this is all about money.
It is not "black and white" which of course is always used as the argument. It is not race.
I guess we could say it is gender. Certainly exact gender equality IS an agenda with liberals.
The family structure is suffering from all this. That is a price we are paying.
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bigdog: "in some areas of civil rights, such as handicapped, special accommodations are exactly what they are entitled to."
Very true, but they are entitled to certain accommodations because a federal law was passed by the people's representatives and signed by the President. It was not an unenumerated right found in the constitution.
This is only sort of true, DMG, not "exactly" as ccp asserts. Please see the link for several cases in which the Supreme Court clarified the meaning of the federal law. Also, please note that these cases have actual policy impact. This does not mean that they are legislating from the bench, it means that they are applying the law as it is written.
http://www.wnylc.com/resources/courts/supct.htm
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Doug, I for one think gender should b equal. No more but no less. R u implying gender equality is bad?
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BD, Thank you. I will read.
To JDN: We all may be pursuing happiness but we all might face limits on our choices. Your circumstances coincided with a definition of marriage, but individuals do not always either fall in love or marry get the person of your choice, only of mutual choice. Without the other person's consent and all other conditions required, the opportunity in law is simply not available, hetero or gay. A single person perhaps would confide their innermost thoughts to a closest sibling, but never will be granted spousal privilege for that relationship, no matter how close, and no matter the outcome of the gay marriage question. Yes, we discriminate. I don't know how to explain any further or better that marriage laws still discriminate even if you add same gender relationships to it. The choices we make in policy that affect different people differently. Ending the special, government recognition of marriage has drawbacks too.
"...gender should b equal. No more but no less. R u implying gender equality is bad?"
One meaning of "equal" is "same". Do I think both genders (are there only two?) are the same and we should ban all distinctions? ... No! How can you ever put woman and children first if all are defined as equal, same, comparable, identical, indistinguishable, matched, matching, one and the same, uniform, unvarying. *
You really don't get it that I (like Obama) think marriage involves a husband and wife (extremely gender specific distinctions terms) and that all kids in a perfect world deserve a shot at a mom and a dad (gender specific, even if some of them are lousy), married and in love with each other all under one roof.
The only good I can see coming out of a gender neutral society is that maybe we could have saved 163 million baby girls from gender selection killings in Asia.
Is there no situation where you would protect women and children first?
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* equal from thesaurus.com
Definition: alike
Synonyms: according, balanced, break even, commensurate, comparable, coordinate, correspondent, corresponding, double, duplicate, egalitarian, equivalent, evenly matched, fifty-fifty, homologous, identic, identical, indistinguishable, invariable, level, look-alike, matched, matching, one and the same, parallel, proportionate, same, same difference, spit and image, stack up with, tantamount, to the same degree, two peas in pod, uniform, unvarying
Antonyms: different, not alike, unequal, unlike, unmatched, variable, varying
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CCP: Yes, there is FAR more to the activist agenda than the private pursuit of happiness.
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I had to go before I had a chance to reply to all of these issues. Apologies. And thanks, Doug, a nice synopsis of the discussion.
Wishing to drop the cultural issues for this election cycle, but so many questions are unresolved. Jumping around with some quotes/excerpts here, hopefully keeping the original meaning as posted.
bigdog wrote: "You gents don't seem to get that marriage laws, like any other laws, can be changed."
This is a good point. It is separate from the question of whether existing marriage laws are unconstitutional.
Agreed. It does not, by it self, answer the question.
bigdog wrote:
"Gay marriage does NOT have to be compelled by the Constitution for it to be accepted by the Constitution."
Very true. My question: is it compelled by the constitution?
It might be, at least in some ways. As GM and I (and I think Guro)noted elsewhere, for different reasons, but you did not take up here, there is a constitutional understanding that marriage is a contract. If so, there is a strong argument to be made that states must recognize homosexual marriages performed in other states (in the same way that cousins are married everywhere if they are legally married somewhere).
bigdog continued: "... the 9th Amendment leaves open the possibility that there are other, unenumerated rights. Privacy, of course, is one that has been recognized. I know, from prior discussions with you (Crafty), that you acknowledge the right to privacy. As JDN states, there could be an argument made that gay marriage could be allowed, based on privacy precedent.
Public recognition of a gay union is the opposite of a right to privacy, is it not?
Not necessarily. Part of the rights of privacy are the rights of married couples to do as they will sexually (assuming consent, etc. etc.). To this end, homosexual marriage rights and homosexual sexual rights are intertwined, though there may be a public component to their privacy... if that makes any sense.
bigdog: "But, there could be, at least in theory, a stand alone right found in the 9th."
This is a good point. Some certainly see it that way. Depends on which 9 people you ask. It seems to me that if a standalone right is found for any citizen to be offered the designation of married, not just gay couples, isn't that the same as ending the public designation of married?
I still fail to understand what rights are denied to a gay American who is in a loving, committed gay relationship that are also not denied to a single person who does not have a heterosexual partner consenting to marry. In all cases you have the right to marry one person of the opposite sex with certain conditions applied, if and/or when those specific circumstances apply to you.
There are many, if I understand your point. Insurance, legal visitation rights, and several other types of rights that are assumed by the legally wed man and wife. These are, and have been, withheld from gay, committed life partners.
I asked JDN to no avail, but why does the 'equal protection under different circumstances' concept apply to all other areas of public policies including taxing, spending and regulating (see 2012 SOTU), but not apply to marriage?
bigdog: "in some areas of civil rights, such as handicapped, special accommodations are exactly what they are entitled to."
Very true, but they are entitled to certain accommodations because a federal law was passed by the people's representatives and signed by the President. It was not an unenumerated right found in the constitution.
See earlier post.
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The readings referred by bigdog regarding the Disabilities Act remind of why it is much better top make private and charitable accommodations than to attempt to solve individual problems through an act of congress. One example, the court became the governing body of the PGA Tour. Even in professional sports they are no longer free to make and enforce their own rules.
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Bigdog,
There is no end to the situations that can arise.
One aspect of the the disability situation is the requirement for disabled parking places mandated. And wheelchair access.
I was thinking a lot about this. While it is a "nice" and compassionate I still don't get why everyone else is required to circumnavigate these accomodations and business entities must pay for all this for the minority disabled.
Yes, if I ever get stuck in a wheelchair I will think differently due to emotion...
I don't get the "entitlement" adjective to this. Why are there so entitlements that cost many people money to pay for?
Why are not the payers entitled to their money?
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As a physician I know we are not loved. Now we are part of the 1% (thanks to Columbia Univerity professor Jeff Sachs - who I am sure has donated every cent from his books, magazine writings, salary and MSNBC appearances to starving children all around the world).
I don't complain much about malpractice and there are many excellent ethical attorneys. But this?
http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2009/01/05/prca0105.htm
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ccp (and Doug),
I hope you know that I am not trying to offend either of you. I am also not saying, necessarily, that gay marriage is "right" or "wrong." What I do want to say it that to understand "the Constitution" you need to understand the Constitution, and also that it has holes, and also that there has to be interpretation. I do not think that the USSC has the only word, or even the last word... and not the best word, even. But, if you ignore the interpretations of the Court, and that fact the Constitution must be interpreted you miss much of the necessary information. Why is it the case that these entitlements are present? Because the law, writ large, has said that they... and people and political institutions have accepted and acquiecsed.
Bigdog,
There is no end to the situations that can arise.
One aspect of the the disability situation is the requirement for disabled parking places mandated. And wheelchair access.
I was thinking a lot about this. While it is a "nice" and compassionate I still don't get why everyone else is required to circumnavigate these accomodations and business entities must pay for all this for the minority disabled.
Yes, if I ever get stuck in a wheelchair I will think differently due to emotion...
I don't get the "entitlement" adjective to this. Why are there so entitlements that cost many people money to pay for?
Why are not the payers entitled to their money?
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Bigdog,
No offense taken and your posts are very informative.
"law, writ large, has said that they... and people and political institutions have accepted and acquiecsed."
My only question would be have the "people" really accepted and acquiesced.
The people don't have a say in Court decisions. Most don't even know what is going on. And I don't recall ever being asked if it was OK to hoist on the "majority" requirements for wheelchair parking spots and wheelchair ramps.
As for the disabilities thing I guess it is part legislative and part judicial.
As for the gay marriage issue I suppose it is part "the squeaky wheel" - gay infatada, mass media opinion, demogaguery, party politics.
I do not beleive most people in the US believe in gay marriage or adoption. I do believe that most probably don't care about bothering gays otherwise. A poll that is announced that most believe gay marriage is ok? Oh comon!
But that is media manipulation.
I am rambling here.
"the Constitution, and also that it has holes, and also that there has to be interpretation"
Back to your point - agreed.
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Thank you for the kind words. I think "the people" do have a say. First, they elect (sort of, at least ) the president who nominates. Second, they elect the senators who confirm. Third, they have the ability, especially through interest groups or other bodies, to file amicus briefs with the Court. Fourth, federal judges are appointed for life... with good behavior. There is an impeachment mechanism in place, if "the people" were willing to push it. Fifth, as noted elsewhere, Congress can change (appellate) jurisdiction. The people could push for that. This is a list off the top of my head. I am sure I am missing something(s).
There is a difference in not paying attention and not having a say. People don't care. I realize that we, the participants of this forum, care a great deal. That is the best part of coming here. But, no matter our views or ideologies, we are decidely anomolous.
Bigdog,
No offense taken and your posts are very informative.
"law, writ large, has said that they... and people and political institutions have accepted and acquiecsed."
My only question would be have the "people" really accepted and acquiesced.
The people don't have a say in Court decisions. Most don't even know what is going on. And I don't recall ever being asked if it was OK to hoist on the "majority" requirements for wheelchair parking spots and wheelchair ramps.
As for the disabilities thing I guess it is part legislative and part judicial.
As for the gay marriage issue I suppose it is part "the squeaky wheel" - gay infatada, mass media opinion, demogaguery, party politics.
I do not beleive most people in the US believe in gay marriage or adoption. I do believe that most probably don't care about bothering gays otherwise. A poll that is announced that most believe gay marriage is ok? Oh comon!
But that is media manipulation.
I am rambling here.
"the Constitution, and also that it has holes, and also that there has to be interpretation"
Back to your point - agreed.
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I would add that the more and more the courts overrule the vot of the people (e.g. Prop 8 here in CA) the less motivation there is to participate.
I would add that the more and more the fourth branch of government, the burueaucracy, determines what the rules are either quasi-legislatively or quasi-judicially the less people can keep vote on what they do.
I would add that the more bureaucracies are beyond the reach of even Congress (e.g. the new Consumer Finance Protection agency the exact name of which I forget but which is now funded by the Fed instead of Congress!!!) the less even truth there is to the idea of a government of for and by the people.
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The point, asserted by some at least, is that the judiciary is an institution for minoritarian protection. As I've noted previously, I think that care has to be made in assertions, such as your first one, in particular, because it ignores history. The push for civil rights in the 1950's and 1960s was extremely unpopular. But, in cases such as Brown, Loving, Heart of Atlanta and many others, there was a devotion to racial equality not seen in the populace at large.
I think that it is important to dispell the myth, that I know you do not adhere to based on previous discussions elsewhere, that this country has "majority rule." That is patently absurd and falseafiable on its face. For example, there are many elections, in particular elections where there are three or more parties involved, in which someone is elected with less than 50% of the vote. In the current GOP primaries, how many times has the "winner" won 30% or so?
I do agree with your larger point, however. I would add when the legislature does the same. In my home state there was a ballot inititative whish was lawfully on the ballot, which recieved more than 50% of the vote, and was promptly overturned by the state legislature. Given the signage on the roads leading to the capital city, people are still mad about this over a year later.
I would add that the more and more the courts overrule the vot of the people (e.g. Prop 8 here in CA) the less motivation there is to participate.
I would add that the more and more the fourth branch of government, the burueaucracy, determines what the rules are either quasi-legislatively or quasi-judicially the less people can keep vote on what they do.
I would add that the more bureaucracies are beyond the reach of even Congress (e.g. the new Consumer Finance Protection agency the exact name of which I forget but which is now funded by the Fed instead of Congress!!!) the less even truth there is to the idea of a government of for and by the people.
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I agree whole-heartedly that we have a Republic, not a Democracy and amend my comments to more clearly reflect that. That said, in the Prop 8 case IMHO the result was and is not constitutionally compelled and is more accurately seen as a matter of a gay jurist who wanted to bypass the political process.
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http://www.whitehorseinn.org/blog/2012/05/11/same-sex-marriage-makes-a-lot-of-sense/
Both sides trade Bible verses, while often sharing an unbiblical—secularized—theological framework at a deeper level. If God exists for our happiness and self-fulfillment, validating our sovereign right to choose our identity, then opposition to same-sex marriage (or abortion) is just irrational prejudice.
Given the broader worldview that many Americans (including Christians) embrace—or at least assume, same-sex marriage is a right to which anyone is legally entitled. After all, traditional marriages in our society are largely treated as contractual rather than covenantal, means of mutual self-fulfillment more than serving a larger purpose ordained by God. The state of the traditional family is so precarious that one wonders how same-sex marriage can appreciably deprave it.
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"The state of the traditional family is so precarious that one wonders how same-sex marriage can appreciably deprave it."
And why is it that the state of the traditional family is so precarious?
The massive propagandaziation of progressive values seems to me to be the major variable-- and the dilution of the definition of marriage is but another step along that road-- so for me to use the decline which it has caused as a reason to do even more of the same is not a persuasive argument.
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(http://media.hotair.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/ramirez-ssm-lg.jpg)
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Fantastic comic, GM. Good to hear from you!
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http://hotair.com/archives/2012/05/16/video-new-sba-spot-skewers-obamas-war-on-women-meme/
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I don't agree with every single point made herein, but I find it thoughtful, and a number of passages to be quite on the mark.
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http://patriotpost.us/alexander/2006/12/29/gender-identity-the-homosexual-agenda-and-the-christian-response/
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and, from more recently, here's this:
Alexander's Essay – May 17, 2012
Obama's Gay Political Play
The "Stupid Female Voter" Strategy
"Marriage is ... in its origin a contract of natural law... It is the parent, and not the child of society; the source of civility and a sort of seminary of the republic." --Justice Joseph Story
Gay Days at the White House
There was much gayety among some political constituencies this week.
In advance of his annual proclamation of June as "National Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Pride Month," or more accurately, "Gender Confusion Month," Barack Hussein Obama ceremonially announced his support for so-called "gay marriage." I note "ceremonially" because while this purely political announcement had no effect on the legal status of homosexual relationships, it certainly moved the needle to the left in regard to the moral status of such "unions."
This proclamation came on the heels of North Carolina joining 29 other states by resoundingly approving a state constitutional amendment affirming the natural definition of marriage. Obama barely won North Carolina in 2008, and Democrats are holding their national convention there this year as they endeavor to retain that state's electoral votes and pick up some around it. Thus, one would think his announcement was ill-timed, unless there is a larger strategy in the works -- and indeed there is.
So why did Obama really go public with his support for the gay marriage agenda?
Certainly not to win the votes of homosexuals -- Obama already has them kowtowing in reverence, particularly after repealing the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" ban, and refusing to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act as duly passed by Congress and signed into law in 1996 by none other than Bill Clinton.
Most certainly not to win the votes of his sycophantic socialist cadres -- they will vote for Obama regardless of his position on social issues as long as his political platform is bent on redistributing wealth from income earners and delivering it to his most loyal constituents, those enslaved on the Democrats' government welfare plantation.
The calculus behind Obama's endorsement of "gay marriage" is twofold. First, he genuinely supports and identifies with homosexuals, and they with him -- indeed one in six of Obama's big-money "bundlers" is homosexual. He first signaled his desire to redefine this building block of human civilization back in 1996. But his identification with homosexuals is subordinate to his second motive, a political calculation that he believes will ensure his 2012 re-election -- and that re-election is critical to his macro agenda of "fundamentally transforming the United States of America."
Let's analyze Obama's reasoning on both counts.
Regarding his personal motive for promoting the homosexual agenda, Obama is an archetypal case study of Narcissistic Pathology Disorder, the almost universal underlying pathology of Leftist political leaders. Obama most certainly has a dominant though closeted homosexual predisposition, the ultimate expression of his unmitigated narcissism.
This psychological profile would surprise only those who are blinded, either by their cultish devotion to Obama or their shared pathology.
Newsweek Magazine certainly affirmed this diagnosis with its cover this week "outing" Obama's homosexual proclivity. It featured a photo of BO sporting a rainbow halo and the caption, "The First Gay President." In reality, however, there is nothing "gay" about gender disorientation.
Attempting to explain his rationale, Obama said, "[Michelle and I] are both practicing Christians and ... you know, when we think about our faith, the thing at root that we think about is not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it's also the Golden Rule, you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated. ... I was sensitive to the fact that for a lot of people, the word 'marriage' was something that evokes very powerful traditions, religious beliefs and so forth."
He continued, "But I have to tell you ... when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together -- when I think about those soldiers or airmen or Marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf, and yet feel constrained even now that 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' is gone because they're not able to commit themselves in a marriage ... it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married."
Responding to his first rationale, I'd be negligent if I didn't challenge Obama's incredibly narcissistic assertion that "soldiers or airmen or Marines or sailors [are] fighting on my behalf," rather than correctly understanding that they are fighting in accordance with their solemn oaths to "support and defend" our Constitution. Obama, of course, has affirmed the same obligation by oath but has vigorously refused to honor it.
But the core problem with Obama's "golden rule" reasoning is that his "faith" as a "practicing Christian" was mentored by another pathological narcissist, Jeremiah Wright, with whom Obama identifies most closely as "a father figure." Wright inculcated Obama with the "Marxist social gospel of hate, the antithesis of genuine Christianity. Thus, Obama's understanding of Christianity assumes that Jesus was a socialist.
Moreover, as with all narcissists, the faith expression of Wright and Obama is self-centered -- nothing more than a manifestation shaped by their own deity.
Not only is Obama's faith deeply flawed in regard to homosexuality, but many people of authentic Christian upbringing are also confused about this issue. For a brief but comprehensive perspective on how Christians should respond to the notion of "gay marriage," read Gender Identity, The Homosexual Agenda and The Christian Response.
Regarding Obama's second and more important reason for announcing his support for the homosexual marriage agenda, Leftist Sen. Dick Durbin (D-ILL) concluded, "I don't think it was a political calculation. ... I think it was a matter of conscience." Of course, Durbin knows that this was both "a matter of conscience," as outlined previously, and "a political calculation."
The Obama campaign's internal polling numbers are not looking good, especially with the one group of voters who have represented more than half of all votes cast since 1960 -- women. The female vote will determine the victor in the 2012 presidential election.
Though a female majority elected Obama in 2008, the Democrats' gender advantage is declining. In the 2010 midterm elections, for the first time in recent history, a majority of women voted Republican. Given the estimate that women drive more than 60 percent of financial decisions in the home, Obama's dismal approval ratings on issues related to economic recovery may cost him the election. That is, unless he can regain a majority of women voters by diverting their focus to other issues -- especially what he sees as a "winning" issue among women, homosexual advocacy.
Thus, Obama's gay political play, at its core, cynically assumes that a majority of women are too stupid to rise above their emotive compassion for, and identity with, effeminate men -- like Obama. This assumption is the overarching political strategy behind Obama's announcement, and it is confirmed beyond reasonable doubt by Demo-gogue Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who fallaciously insists that "there's no political calculus" behind Obama's gay marriage endorsement.
How important is the "stupid women" strategy to Obama's long-term political objective?
The transformation of our nation into a Socialist state is predicated on the success of Obama's effort to destabilize the three pillars of Essential Liberty: Constitutional Liberty, Economic Liberty and Individual Liberty.
The Obama administration has done more to undermine constitutional Liberty than any Leftist since Woodrow Wilson.
The Obama administration has done more to undermine Economic Liberty than any Leftist since Franklin Roosevelt, with a plethora of policies designed to break the back of free enterprise and replace it with Democratic Socialism.
As for the third pillar, Obama knows that the most effective method of undermining Individual Liberty is to erode the integrity of faith and family. To the degree that our nation's faith foundation is undermined, the principle that Liberty is "endowed by our Creator" is enfeebled. To the extent that the "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" are abjectly violated by redefining marriage, which in turn upends the basic building block of a free society, the family, the consequence is the decay of individual Liberty.
The notion that marriage and family are the foundation of society is older than Christ's teaching on the subject. In the words of Marcus Tullius Cicero (circa 50 B.C.), "[T]he first principle of society consists in the marriage tie, the next in children, the next in a family within one roof, where everything is in common. This society gives rise to the city, and is, as it were, the nursery of the commonwealth."
The bottom line for Obama and his Leftist cadres: Female voters will determine the outcome of the 2012 presidential election. Beyond all the topical rhetoric about redefining marriage, if Obama is correct in his calculation that a majority of women voters can be distracted from critical issues like Liberty and economy, his gambit on the gay political play will be a winner. Don't take that bet.
Pro Deo et Constitutione — Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis
Mark Alexander
Publisher, The Patriot Post
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I'm not sure that I get the logic of why the study was so wrong-- how to achieve the desired levels measurabiilty given the nature of the subject matter-- or trust the source (POTH), but FWIW here it is:
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/19/health/dr-robert-l-spitzer-noted-psychiatrist-apologizes-for-study-on-gay-cure.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120519
PRINCETON, N.J. — The simple fact was that he had done something wrong, and at the end of a long and revolutionary career it didn’t matter how often he’d been right, how powerful he once was, or what it would mean for his legacy.
Dr. Robert L. Spitzer, considered by some to be the father of modern psychiatry, lay awake at 4 o’clock on a recent morning knowing he had to do the one thing that comes least naturally to him. He pushed himself up and staggered into the dark. His desk seemed impossibly far away; Dr. Spitzer, who turns 80 next week, suffers from Parkinson’s disease and has trouble walking, sitting, even holding his head upright.
The word he sometimes uses to describe these limitations — pathetic — is the same one that for decades he wielded like an ax to strike down dumb ideas, empty theorizing and junk studies.
Now here he was at his computer, ready to recant a study he had done himself, a poorly conceived 2003 investigation that supported the use of so-called reparative therapy to “cure” homosexuality for people strongly motivated to change.
What to say? The issue of gay marriage was rocking national politics yet again. The California State Legislature was debating a bill to ban the therapy outright as being dangerous. A magazine writer who had been through the therapy as a teenager recently visited his house, to explain how miserably disorienting the experience was.
And he would later learn that a World Health Organization report, released on Thursday, calls the therapy “a serious threat to the health and well-being — even the lives — of affected people.”
Dr. Spitzer’s fingers jerked over the keys, unreliably, as if choking on the words. And then it was done: a short letter to be published this month, in the same journal where the original study appeared.
“I believe,” it concludes, “I owe the gay community an apology.”
Disturber of the Peace
The idea to study reparative therapy at all was pure Spitzer, say those who know him, an effort to stick a finger in the eye of an orthodoxy that he himself had helped establish.
In the late 1990s as today, the psychiatric establishment considered the therapy to be a nonstarter. Few therapists thought of homosexuality as a disorder.
It was not always so. Up into the 1970s, the field’s diagnostic manual classified homosexuality as an illness, calling it a “sociopathic personality disturbance.” Many therapists offered treatment, including Freudian analysts who dominated the field at the time.
Advocates for gay people objected furiously, and in 1970, one year after the landmark Stonewall protests to stop police raids at a New York bar, a team of gay rights protesters heckled a meeting of behavioral therapists in New York to discuss the topic. The meeting broke up, but not before a young Columbia University professor sat down with the protesters to hear their case.
“I’ve always been drawn to controversy, and what I was hearing made sense,” said Dr. Spitzer, in an interview at his Princeton home last week. “And I began to think, well, if it is a mental disorder, then what makes it one?”
He compared homosexuality with other conditions defined as disorders, like depression and alcohol dependence, and saw immediately that the latter caused marked distress or impairment, while homosexuality often did not.
He also saw an opportunity to do something about it. Dr. Spitzer was then a junior member of on an American Psychiatric Association committee helping to rewrite the field’s diagnostic manual, and he promptly organized a symposium to discuss the place of homosexuality.
That kicked off a series of bitter debates, pitting Dr. Spitzer against a pair of influential senior psychiatrists who would not budge. In the end, the psychiatric association in 1973 sided with Dr. Spitzer, deciding to drop homosexuality from its manual and replace it with his alternative, “sexual orientation disturbance,” to identify people whose sexual orientation, gay or straight, caused them distress.
The arcane language notwithstanding, homosexuality was no longer a “disorder.” Dr. Spitzer achieved a civil rights breakthrough in record time.
“I wouldn’t say that Robert Spitzer became a household name among the broader gay movement, but the declassification of homosexuality was widely celebrated as a victory,” said Ronald Bayer of the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia. “ ‘Sick No More’ was a headline in some gay newspapers.”
Page 2 of 3)
Partly as a result, Dr. Spitzer took charge of the task of updating the diagnostic manual. Together with a colleague, Dr. Janet Williams, now his wife, he set to work. To an extent that is still not widely appreciated, his thinking about this one issue — homosexuality — drove a broader reconsideration of what mental illness is, of where to draw the line between normal and not.
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The new manual, a 567-page doorstop released in 1980, became an unlikely best seller, here and abroad. It instantly set the standard for future psychiatry manuals, and elevated its principal architect, then nearing 50, to the pinnacle of his field.
He was the keeper of the book, part headmaster, part ambassador, and part ornery cleric, growling over the phone at scientists, journalists, or policy makers he thought were out of order. He took to the role as if born to it, colleagues say, helping to bring order to a historically chaotic corner of science.
But power was its own kind of confinement. Dr. Spitzer could still disturb the peace, all right, but no longer from the flanks, as a rebel. Now he was the establishment. And in the late 1990s, friends say, he remained restless as ever, eager to challenge common assumptions.
That’s when he ran into another group of protesters, at the psychiatric association’s annual meeting in 1999: self-described ex-gays. Like the homosexual protesters in 1973, they too were outraged that psychiatry was denying their experience — and any therapy that might help.
Reparative Therapy
Reparative therapy, sometimes called “sexual reorientation” or “conversion” therapy, is rooted in Freud’s idea that people are born bisexual and can move along a continuum from one end to the other. Some therapists never let go of the theory, and one of Dr. Spitzer’s main rivals in the 1973 debate, Dr. Charles W. Socarides, founded an organization called the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, or Narth, in Southern California, to promote it.
By 1998, Narth had formed alliances with socially conservative advocacy groups and together they began an aggressive campaign, taking out full-page ads in major newspaper trumpeting success stories.
“People with a shared worldview basically came together and created their own set of experts to offer alternative policy views,” said Dr. Jack Drescher, a psychiatrist in New York and co-editor of “Ex-Gay Research: Analyzing the Spitzer Study and Its Relation to Science, Religion, Politics, and Culture.”
To Dr. Spitzer, the scientific question was at least worth asking: What was the effect of the therapy, if any? Previous studies had been biased and inconclusive. “People at the time did say to me, ‘Bob, you’re messing with your career, don’t do it,’ ” Dr. Spitzer said. “But I just didn’t feel vulnerable.”
He recruited 200 men and women, from the centers that were performing the therapy, including Exodus International, based in Florida, and Narth. He interviewed each in depth over the phone, asking about their sexual urges, feelings and behaviors before and after having the therapy, rating the answers on a scale.
He then compared the scores on this questionnaire, before and after therapy. “The majority of participants gave reports of change from a predominantly or exclusively homosexual orientation before therapy to a predominantly or exclusively heterosexual orientation in the past year,” his paper concluded.
The study — presented at a psychiatry meeting in 2001, before publication — immediately created a sensation, and ex-gay groups seized on it as solid evidence for their case. This was Dr. Spitzer, after all, the man who single-handedly removed homosexuality from the manual of mental disorders. No one could accuse him of bias.
But gay leaders accused him of betrayal, and they had their reasons.
The study had serious problems. It was based on what people remembered feeling years before — an often fuzzy record. It included some ex-gay advocates, who were politically active. And it did not test any particular therapy; only half of the participants engaged with a therapist at all, while the others worked with pastoral counselors, or in independent Bible study.
Several colleagues tried to stop the study in its tracks, and urged him not to publish it, Dr. Spitzer said.
Page 3 of 3)
Yet, heavily invested after all the work, he turned to a friend and former collaborator, Dr. Kenneth J. Zucker, psychologist in chief at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto and editor of the Archives of Sexual Behavior, another influential journal.
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“I knew Bob and the quality of his work, and I agreed to publish it,” Dr. Zucker said in an interview last week. The paper did not go through the usual peer-review process, in which unnamed experts critique a manuscript before publication. “But I told him I would do it only if I also published commentaries” of response from other scientists to accompany the study, Dr. Zucker said.
Those commentaries, with a few exceptions, were merciless. One cited the Nuremberg Code of ethics to denounce the study as not only flawed but morally wrong. “We fear the repercussions of this study, including an increase in suffering, prejudice, and discrimination,” concluded a group of 15 researchers at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, where Dr. Spitzer was affiliated.
Dr. Spitzer in no way implied in the study that being gay was a choice, or that it was possible for anyone who wanted to change to do so in therapy. But that didn’t stop socially conservative groups from citing the paper in support of just those points, according to Wayne Besen, executive director of Truth Wins Out, a nonprofit group that fights antigay bias.
On one occasion, a politician in Finland held up the study in Parliament to argue against civil unions, according to Dr. Drescher.
“It needs to be said that when this study was misused for political purposes to say that gays should be cured — as it was, many times — Bob responded immediately, to correct misperceptions,” said Dr. Drescher, who is gay.
But Dr. Spitzer could not control how his study was interpreted by everyone, and he could not erase the biggest scientific flaw of them all, roundly attacked in many of the commentaries: Simply asking people whether they have changed is no evidence at all of real change. People lie, to themselves and others. They continually change their stories, to suit their needs and moods.
By almost any measure, in short, the study failed the test of scientific rigor that Dr. Spitzer himself was so instrumental in enforcing for so many years.
“As I read these commentaries, I knew this was a problem, a big problem, and one I couldn’t answer,” Dr. Spitzer said. “How do you know someone has really changed?”
Letting Go
It took 11 years for him to admit it publicly.
At first he clung to the idea that the study was exploratory, an attempt to prompt scientists to think twice about dismissing the therapy outright. Then he took refuge in the position that the study was focused less on the effectiveness of the therapy and more on how people engaging in it described changes in sexual orientation.
“Not a very interesting question,” he said. “But for a long time I thought maybe I wouldn’t have to face the bigger problem, about measuring change.”
After retiring in 2003, he remained active on many fronts, but the reparative study remained a staple of the culture wars and a personal regret that wouldn’t leave him be. The Parkinson’s symptoms have worsened in the past year, exhausting him mentally as well physically, making it still harder to fight back pangs of remorse.
And one day in March, Dr. Spitzer entertained a visitor. Gabriel Arana, a journalist at the magazine The American Prospect, interviewed Dr. Spitzer about the reparative therapy study. This was not just any interview; Mr. Arana went through reparative therapy himself as a teenager, and his therapist had recruited the young man for Dr. Spitzer’s study (Mr. Arana did not participate).
“I asked him about all his critics, and he just came out and said, ‘I think they’re largely correct,’ ” said Mr. Arana, who wrote about his own experience last month. Mr. Arana said that reparative therapy ultimately delayed his self-acceptance as a gay man and induced thoughts of suicide. “But at the time I was recruited for the Spitzer study, I was referred as a success story. I would have said I was making progress.”
That did it. The study that seemed at the time a mere footnote to a large life was growing into a chapter. And it needed a proper ending — a strong correction, directly from its author, not a journalist or colleague.
A draft of the letter has already leaked online and has been reported.
“You know, it’s the only regret I have; the only professional one,” Dr. Spitzer said of the study, near the end of a long interview. “And I think, in the history of psychiatry, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a scientist write a letter saying that the data were all there but were totally misinterpreted. Who admitted that and who apologized to his readers.”
He looked away and back again, his big eyes blurring with emotion. “That’s something, don’t you think?”
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Coming from a former female CNN news anchor (most if not all of whom apper to me are usually left wing) this is a bit of a surprise:
Obama: Stop Condescending to WomenBy CAMPBELL BROWN
Published: May 19, 2012
WHEN I listen to President Obama speak to and about women, he sometimes sounds too paternalistic for my taste. In numerous appearances over the years — most recently at the Barnard graduation — he has made reference to how women are smarter than men. It’s all so tired, the kind of fake praise showered upon those one views as easy to impress. As I listen, I am always bracing for the old go-to cliché: “Behind every great man is a great woman.”
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Peter Foley/European Pressphoto Agency
A Barnard graduate during President Barack Obama's commencement address.
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Some women are smarter than men and some aren’t. But to suggest to women that they deserve dominance instead of equality is at best a cheap applause line.
My bigger concern is that in courting women, Mr. Obama’s campaign so far has seemed maddeningly off point. His message to the Barnard graduates was that they should fight for a “seat at the table” — the head seat, he made sure to add. He conceded that it’s a tough economy, but he told the grads, “I am convinced you are tougher” and “things will get better — they always do.”
Hardly reassuring words when you look at the reality. According to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, about 53.6 percent of men and women under the age of 25 who hold bachelor’s degrees were jobless or underemployed last year, the most in at least 11 years. According to the Pew Research Center, if we broaden the age group to 18- to 29-year-olds, an estimated 37 percent are unemployed or out of the work force, the highest share in more than three decades.
The human faces shouldn’t get lost amid the statistics. I spent last weekend with a friend who attended excellent private schools and graduated from Tufts University two years ago. She’s intelligent, impressive and still looking for a full-time job.
The women I know who are struggling in this economy couldn’t be further from the fictional character of Julia, presented in Mr. Obama’s Web ad, “The Life of Julia,” a silly and embarrassing caricature based on the assumption that women look to government at every meaningful phase of their lives for help.
My cousin in Louisiana started a small company with a little savings, renovating houses. A single mom, she saved enough to buy a home and provide child care for her son. When the economy went belly up, so did her company. She was forced to sell her home and move in with her parents. She has found another job, but doesn’t make enough to move out. Family, not government, has been everything to her at this time of crisis. She, and they, wouldn’t have it any other way.
Another member of my family left her job at an adoption agency just before the economy crashed. Also a single mother, she has been looking for a way back to a full-time job ever since. She has been selling things on eBay to make ends meet. Friends and family, not government, have been there at the dire moments when she has asked them to be. Again, she, and they, wouldn’t have it any other way.
This is not to say that government doesn’t play a role in their lives. It does and it should. But it isn’t a dominant one, and certainly not an overwhelming factor in their daily existence.
It’s obvious why the president is doing a full-court press for the vote of college-educated women in particular. The Republican primaries probably did turn some women away. Rick Santorum did his party no favors when he spoke about women in combat (“I think that can be a very compromising situation, where people naturally may do things that may not be in the interest of the mission, because of other types of emotions that are involved”); when he described the birth of a child from rape as “a gift in a very broken way”; and how, if he was president, he would make the case for the damage caused by contraception.
But Mitt Romney will never be confused with Rick Santorum on these issues, and many women understand that. (I should disclose here that my husband is an adviser to Mr. Romney; I have no involvement with any campaign, and have been an independent journalist throughout my career.) The struggling women in my life all laughed when I asked them if contraception or abortion rights would be a major factor in their decision about this election. For them, and for most other women, the economy overwhelms everything else.
Another recent Pew Research Center survey found that voters, when thinking about whom to vote for in the fall, are most concerned about the economy (86 percent) and jobs (84 percent). Near the bottom of the list were some of the hot-button social issues.
Tiffany Dufu, who heads the White House Project, a nonpartisan group aimed at training young women for careers in politics and business, got a similar response when she informally polled young women in her organization. “The issues that have been defined as all women care about are way off — young women feel it has put them further in a box they don’t necessarily want to be in,” she told me. “Independence is what is so important to these women.”
I have always admired President Obama and I agree with him on some issues, like abortion rights. But the promise of his campaign four years ago has given way to something else — a failure to connect with tens of millions of Americans, many of them women, who feel economic opportunity is gone and are losing hope. In an effort to win them back, Mr. Obama is trying too hard. He’s employing a tone that can come across as grating and even condescending. He really ought to drop it. Most women don’t want to be patted on the head or treated as wards of the state. They simply want to be given a chance to succeed based on their talent and skills. To borrow a phrase from our president’s favorite president, Abraham Lincoln, they want “an open field and a fair chance.”
In the second decade of the 21st century, that isn’t asking too much.
Campbell Brown is a former news anchor for CNN and NBC.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on May 20, 2012, on page SR4 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama
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There is a N. Carolina preacher rant in the news saying to round up and kill off gays. It should go without saying, I condemn that. We all do. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/21/north-carolina-pastor-gay-rant-starvation_n_1533463.html
Over the past year or two I have come into acquaintance and friendship/respect with gay men and lesbian women as I have at other times in the past. This reinforces my belief that all are entitled to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
The above does not change the fact that words and institutions have meanings, such as that marriage is when a man and a woman become a husband and a wife, no matter how government chooses to treat that relationship. Gay people have the same right as everyone else to pursue or decline an opposite gender relationship or to create a new institution of their own.
Somewhere unspoken in the LGBT movement is the strangeness of including Bisexual-Transexual while trying to say we are just like you, except for same sex attraction. What is to be celebrated about bisexual if the argument is about committed, monogamous relationships? We don't accept hetero-polygamy. And what about trans-gender; what is the political issue there? Can't we agree that is a dysfunction, not something in need of special accommodation. Can't we, at some point, just ask people to keep their private life private?
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The mind boggles , , ,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9Z0DB2XOoHc
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http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/a_thought_experiment_about_marriage
A thought experiment about marriage
A world in which sexual intimacy could not produce children would never have come up with the idea of marriage.
In previous articles, I have asserted that if sex did not naturally lead to children, no one would ever have conceived the idea of marriage. My claim may be obvious to most people, but we live in a world in which people who never intend to have children get married; so, of course, do some people who want children but are infertile. In generations past, we felt compassion for those who married but did not have children, because it was presumed that they wanted children, since, after all, they married one another. No longer can we presume this. The era of contraception and surgical sterilization has altered the face, so to speak, of the childless couple, and consequently the face of the married couple.
The quest for same-sex marriage begins here. In a world where seeking marriage is seeking a community-endorsed way to have sex and bear children, the idea of same-sex marriage is like the idea of a square circle. The very idea of same-sex marriage is conceivable only in a world that is using the term “marriage” in a completely different way, to refer to something of a completely different nature.
Allow me, then, to make a case for my assertion about sex, children, and marriage through a “thought experiment”—a scenario in which human beings have no word for, no concept of, marriage.
CONTINUED
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Marc - very thought-provoking article indeed - with entirely valid conclusions in one respect - the concept of marriage most probably arose among humans as a result of the special importance rightly placed on children and their welfare. "Among humans" is the operative clause here, as clearly other species have no similar ritual recognition of such a union. Such is the consequence of our ability to reason and contemplate abstract ideas.
I've never been passionately in favor of the idea of same-sex marriage, because from where I stand, the only advantage to it being recognized is that certain legal and inheritance rights flow from it in our society. But the same could be accomplished - if a society wanted to confer those benefits on same-sex couples - by calling the arrangement a "civil union" or something else to recognize it, but simultaneously distinguish it from marriage. It's certainly true that the civil society has a vested interest in promoting marriage, less so -if at all - in promoting same-sex unions. It therefore becomes a matter of equal treatment under the law by my reasoning. This equal treatment could be accomplished by revising laws that restrict visitation and inheritance rights to blood relatives or spouses in the traditional sense.
And here lies the crux of the problem (and really the only problem) I have with the author's argument: It is very clear, in fact it has been observed and documented in hundreds of animal species to date, that same-sex couplings, though a definite minority - do form and often exist in a sexually-monogamous state. It's also been the case throughout recorded history that about the same percentage of homosexual individuals have existed in human societies. Clearly therefore - it is not simply a matter of a "thought error" on the part of human beings that some of us desire such couplings and the societal accommodation/recognition/respect which ought to logically accrue to same.
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Objectivist:
You express yourself very well. Though I oppose gay marriage, I would regard the "civil unions" you propose a reasonable compromise. However, I wonder if this compromise be a lasting compromise, or would it be seen like the military's DADT policy-- a step towards gay marriage.
Perhaps the true and deeper question presented is this: "Throughout recorded history" that some people find homosexual behavior , , , off-putting. Does the State have the right to make this thought illegal?
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Marc:
Thank you for the compliment. I'm sure among some gay activists civil unions would be seen as only a step toward gay marriage. I know individuals who believe that nothing less than extending the same nomenclature to the same-sex union would be acceptable. I disagree strongly with that position. My only concern is that I have equal protection under the law without being forced to spend thousands of dollars to have an attorney draft contracts to secure certain rights that still might not be recognized by the state.
I don't understand your question "does the state have the right to make this thought illegal?" No one - certainly not I - is proposing that any thought be made illegal. There are plenty of people who believe today that blacks and Jews, for example, are inherently inferior in certain respects and/or evil, and such opinions are not illegal. What IS illegal is violating another's right to life, liberty and property - racist opinions notwithstanding. I have always strongly opposed the concept of "hate crimes" legislation for exactly this reason - it creates a "thought crime," making the identical crime more serious because it is committed against a member of a privileged group. This is in direct opposition to the idea of equal justice under the law. I might add that "some people" will always find certain behaviors objectionable. I'm not proposing outlawing opinions.
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This is really quite something. I look forward to reading this man's book. Be sure to click on the video "trailer" where he explains his reasoning:
www.theblaze.com/stories/jesus-in-drag-this-is-why-a-straight-christian-lived-as-a-gay-man-for-one-year/
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From Calif thread:
"This bill allows a child to have more than two legal parents."
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1897.msg65956#msg65956
The Federal Financial Student Aid App (FAFSA) already changed old words like mother and father to parent one and parent two. Now even that is too narrow minded - non-inclusive bigotry. After parent one and parent two, the next question needs to be: how many other parents, please attach additional pages if necessary.
Extremists in the gay agenda do not just want inclusion in marriage, but apparently the destruction of the traditional marriage and traditional family. Gone are the words husband and wife, mother and father, and the desirability of a child having the opportunity to grow up in a house with a loving mother and father living together married under one roof.
In what way in God's natural creation could a newborn baby have chosen to live in a gay or multi-partner household?
Gay, like celibacy, deserves life, liberty and pursuit of happiness but includes the reality of not bearing offspring.
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http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/iowa-court-bosses-fire-irresistible-workers-18038838#.UNXDgXd4G_I
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"In a comparison of unmarried and childless men and women between the ages of 35 and 43, women earn more: 108 cents on a man's dollar."
http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2013/06/18/women_and_the_unequal_pay_myth_100407.html
President Glibness: "The day that the bill was signed into law, women earned 59 cents for every dollar a man earned on average. Today, it's about 77 cents," the president said. "Over the course of her career, a working woman with a college degree will earn on average hundreds of thousands of dollars less than a man who does the same work."
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Nonsense. The 77 percent figure is bogus because it averages all full-time women, no matter what education and profession, with all full-time men. Even with such averaging, the latest Labor Department figures show that women working full-time make 81 percent of full-time men's wages. For men and women who work 40 hours weekly, the ratio is 88 percent.
Unmarried childless women's salaries, however, often exceed men's. In a comparison of unmarried and childless men and women between the ages of 35 and 43, women earn more: 108 cents on a man's dollar.
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All we are going to hear about in the liberal mass media is about women this and that until 2016 setting it up for Hillary. I don't think Republicans can get their act together.
I have zero confidence in them.
Let's see. If Bill says something like, "you know a woman can never get elected in the US" maybe the babes will turn to another female (C)rat.
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US govt removed the terms mother and father from FAFSA (college financial aid), replaced the discriminatory terms with new discriminatory terms Parent 1 and Parent 2. Now this. Good grief.
Third Gender Option Introduced by Germany for Birth Certificates
Germany will permit parents to select a "third gender" on birth certificates for their children, should the child want to identify with a certain gender in the future.
http://m.christianpost.com/news/third-gender-option-introduced-by-germany-for-birth-certificates--102868/
Although some in Germany, including the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, have heralded the new legislation, others have argued that it poses complications to other state-issued documents, such as passports and marriage licenses. Currently, passports require a "male" or "female" gender option, and some groups argue that travel will become difficult if a German's passport simply has a blank space under gender;
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WTF? Oy fg vey!
Please post this in Politically (in)Correct as well.
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We have a similar law in CA too.
http://freepatriot.org/2013/10/15/colorado-high-school-transgender-boy-uses-restrooms-accused-harassment-school-threatens-girls/
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Bringing this forward. It doesn't seem like people are aware of it:
"In a comparison of unmarried and childless men and women between the ages of 35 and 43, women earn more: 108 cents on a man's dollar."
http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2013/06/18/women_and_the_unequal_pay_myth_100407.html
http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=23317
In a comparison of unmarried and childless men and women between the ages of 35 and 43, women earn more -- 108 cents on a man's dollar.
Comparing unmarried, childless women under 30:
"the median full-time salaries of young women were 8% higher than for men in their peer group. In two cities, Atlanta and Memphis, the median salary for women was 20% more than for men. In New York City, it was 17% more.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2013/04/09/are-women-catching-up-in-pay/
It's Time That We End the Equal Pay Myth
By Carrie Lukas
http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/04/16/its-time-that-we-end-the-equal-pay-myth/
WSJ: There Is No Male-Female Wage Gap
A study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30 found that women earned 8% more than men.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748704415104576250672504707048
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EXCELLENT commentary by Pamela Geller below:
‘Kill the Gays’ Law Called for by Muslim Association in Malawi
Posted By Pamela Geller On February 17, 2014 @ 12:04 pm In Gay under Islamic law (sharia) | 18 Comments
[1]AFDI ad in Washington, DC
‘Kill the Gays’ Law Called for in Malawi… [2]
It’s interesting to observe the selective outrage of the left and the LGBT community when it comes to, say, Russia’s anti-gay laws and anti-gay sharia. Russia is not calling for the execution of gays, as is required under Islamic law, but that hasn’t stopped the gay community and leftwing leaders (as powerful as Obama) from condemning and loudly speaking out against Russia’s largely toothless legislation.
Russia has been harshly criticized across the world for enacting a law that bans the distribution of “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations” to minors. Leaders of foreign governments have condemned the law, as have 27 Nobel Prize winners [3]from the fields of science and the arts.
The idea that the banning of pitching homosexuality to children is somehow so much more heinous and egregious than the death penalty for homosexuality best illustrates the hypocrisy and phoniness of the left and the LGBT community. That and their condemnation of my ads highlighting Muslims oppression of gays.
The Muslim world calls for the murder of gays. Where is the worldwide outcry?
Gay organizations in America say nothing, but loudly condemned my ad campaign highlighting Muslim oppression of gays under the sharia. Why haven’t we heard from SF City Council [4], the Human [5]Rights Commission [5], SFHRC head Theresa Sparks [6], and the enemedia [7]? They called my ads [6] hate and issued a resolution against my organization for merely quoting Muslim political leaders, spiritual leaders and cultural voices in the Muslim community who call for the torture and death of gay people.
No, instead, I was denounced by gay and transgender leaders [6] in the US for our work to highlight the Muslim oppression of gays. The San Francisco [7] City council issued a resolution condemning [8] our AFDI ad campaign (the first of its kind) focusing on the vicious oppression and subjugation of gays under Islam.
Where are those “human rights” hypocrites now?
[9]
Malawi’s Muslim Body Calls for Death Penalty for Homosexuals, Dr. Salmin Omar,
By Malawi Muslims [10], February 13, 2014 (thanks to Religion of Peace) [11]
As the debate on whether to decriminalize homosexuality in Malawi or not rages on, Muslim Association of Malawi (MAM) has suggested the need to revise the penalty of those found guilty of homosexuality to be condemned to death.
This suggestion comes at a time as some Civil Society Organisations (CSO) are pushing for the country to abolish the statute that penalise the act. Currently the maximum jail term sentence for those found guilty by the courts is 14 years.
MAM Secretary General Dr Salmin Omar Idrussi in an interview said that ‘‘ though Malawi is regarded as a secular state but the country is blessed with God fearing citizens who can’t afford to deviate from God’s commandments for the sake of pleasing others who practice the act.’’
‘‘Even animals like goats don’t do this, what more with Human beings like us who were blessed with wisdom by the Almighty God? The offenders need to be handed death penalty as a way of making sure that the issue is curbed.
Apparently some religious groupings are calling for the government to call for a referendum for Malawians to make a choice on the matter.
Sheikh Idrussi said that much as his organisation is supporting the appeal of holding the referendum, but citizens should be asked whether to increase the penalty or not since the law is already there which is in line with the citizenry’s religious ideology.
‘‘The majority obviously is against legalising this sinful act. Therefore it will be necessary for People to be asked whether they are happy with the current law which attracts a maximum penalty of a 14 year jail term.
Meanwhile Malawi’s Supreme Court of Appeal has granted Government a stay order stopping proceedings in which the High Court in the city of Blantyre was set to commence reviewing convictions of three men involved in homosexuality.
High court Judge Dustain Mwaungulu on January 20 this year threw out an application the Attorney General AG filed to halt the proceedings on the basis that the applicants did not get certification of the matter from the Chief Justice.
The presiding Judge argued it was not a mandatory and went on to set March 17, 2014 as a date for a panel of Judges to start hearing the case.
The three men convicted in 2011 by a Magistrate’s court in Blantyre are Amon Champyunu, Mathews Bello and Mussa Chiwisi .All are serving long jail term ranging from 10 to 14 years.
Gay activists want the court to declare the laws criminalising homosexuality unconstitutional.
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Uganda’s Anti-Gay Laws and Leftist Silence
Posted By Arnold Ahlert On February 28, 2014
On Monday, President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda signed into law harsh, anti-gay legislation. The law includes provisions that would jail repeat offenders for life, outlaw any promotion of homosexuality, and require the Ugandan people to denounce it. In the face of genuine persecution of gay people, of course, the LGBT community and their supporters are conspicuously silent. And while the Obama administration has released a statement criticizing the law, most black activists remain completely MIA as well, including the man leading the charge against the anti-gay marriage agenda in America, Eric Holder.
This largely non-reaction to the far more serious developments in Uganda stands in stark contrast to the efforts by both entities on the home front. Holder, who wholeheartedly embraces the selective law enforcement agenda that has become the trademark of the Obama administration, has extended that agenda to the gay marriage debate. Speaking to the National Association of Attorneys General on Tuesday, Holder advised his state counterparts that they needn’t defend the laws of their states they consider discriminatory.
Holder cited his own experience with the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) as the template state attorneys general should apparently follow. ”Any decisions — at any level — not to defend individual laws must be exceedingly rare,” Holder said at the meeting. “And they must never stem merely from policy or political disagreements–hinging instead on firm constitutional grounds.” He then added that his own view is that “we must be suspicious of legal classifications based solely on sexual orientation.”
One is left to wonder how those constitutional grounds are determined if a state attorney general can simply refuse to defend a challenge to any law they themselves deem to be discriminatory before a trial takes place. Moreover it is hard to see how the refusal to defend the rule of law would be anything but a political act.
Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange of the Republican Attorneys General Association eviscerated this dangerous nonsense. ”A state attorney general has a solemn duty to the state and its people to defend state laws and constitutional provisions against challenge under federal law. To refuse to do so because of personal policy preferences or political pressure erodes the rule of law on which all of our freedoms are founded. A government that does not enforce the law equally will lead our society to disrespect the rule of law,” he said in a statement.
Political pressure is a specialty of the LGBT community whose most recent focus has been a religious protection law proposed by the state of Arizona, which was recently vetoed by Gov. Jan Brewer in light of an enormous public outcry. The purpose of pointing out what happened in Arizona is not to evaluate the pros or cons of Brewer’s recent veto. It is to demonstrate the enormous power of a mobilized LGBT community that apparently feels no similar compulsion to mobilize against Museveni in Uganda. Even as they remained focused on Arizona, the Red Paper, a Ugandan tabloid, published a list of 200 people it accused of being gay under the headline “Exposed!” ”Uganda’s 200 top homos named,” the paper declared. “In salutation to the new law, today we unleash Uganda’s top homos and their sympathisers,” it added, compiling a list of those who had declared their sexuality and those who hadn’t. The list included activists, priests and music stars.
Frank Mugisha, director of the group Sexual Minorities Uganda, illuminated the implications of the new law. ”We’re going to see people getting beaten on the streets, we’re going to see people thrown out by their families, we’re going to see people being evicted by their landlords, we’re going to see people losing jobs, we’re going to see people thrown out of school, because they are perceived or not as homosexuals,” he warned. “Even the suspicion will get someone in trouble.”
It is trouble welcomed by Uganda’s Muslim leaders. “It takes a courageous leader to defy all the western powers who have gone as far a threatening to cut off aid to Uganda in case the president signs the anti-gay bill,” said Hajji Nsereko Mutumba, the Uganda Muslim Supreme Council (UMSC) Public Relations Officer, in a statement.
Perhaps it takes no courage at all, either for Museveni or the LGBT community and Eric Holder. Forbes Magazine contributor Cedric Mohammed explains that geo-political concerns take precedence over human rights issues. “Despite the strong rhetoric coming from the Obama administration over the signing of an anti-Homosexual law by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, there is no way President Obama will allow the issue to compromise long-standing American military interests in the region and there’s little chance the LGBT political establishment will ask him to….Militarization trumps everything else as evidenced by the influential LGBT-rights group, The Human Rights Commission’s lack of lobbying on the issue,” he writes.
No doubt that decision is made easier by the left’s general contempt for Christian values and Western civilization. Yet the outpouring of vituperation against the “cartoonish” bigotry or “vile” exclusivity of Christians opposed to endorsing the gay agenda stands in odious contrast to the LGBT calculated silence surrounding Uganda’s unquestionably reprehensible — and possibly deadly — treatment of homosexuals. That hypocrisy goes double for Eric Holder, whose sense of outrage for any injustice directed at homosexuals and people of color apparently fails to extend itself beyond the borders of the United States.
Thus, barring a sudden change of heart, the genuine persecution of gays in Uganda will not be impeded by the self-professed champions of tolerance and human rights. In short, if the LGBT community and Eric Holder didn’t have double-standards, they’d have no standards at all.
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"Political pressure is a specialty of the LGBT community whose most recent focus has been a religious protection law proposed by the state of Arizona, which was recently vetoed by Gov. Jan Brewer in light of an enormous public outcry. The purpose of pointing out what happened in Arizona is not to evaluate the pros or cons of Brewer’s recent veto. It is to demonstrate the enormous power of a mobilized LGBT community that apparently feels no similar compulsion to mobilize against Museveni in Uganda."
Exactly so. Pair this with the Jonah Goldberg piece I just posted in the rants thread.
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"It is truly vile and disgusting that the LBGT “activist” organizations in this
country and abroad (such as Human Rights Campaign) are SILENT about these
atrocities…"
http://pamelageller.com/2014/03/gay-executions-iran-today-cafetheresa.html/
Edited to reflect that the words above are not mine, but ones with which I agree.
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It is truly vile and disgusting that the LBGT “activist” organizations in this
country and abroad (such as Human Rights Campaign) are SILENT about these
atrocities…
http://pamelageller.com/2014/03/gay-executions-iran-today-cafetheresa.html/
Lefty activists respect those that will kill them.
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You are exactly correct, G M - gay activists, many black race-mongers, and sadly, many liberal Jews, including those in leadership positions at organizations like the ADL - are frankly - SUICIDAL.
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Just a mass contagion of vaginitis , , ,
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LOL!! Now THAT is something a snarky gay man would say, Crafty! :lol:
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And here I was thinking I was riffing with what we say when someone comes up with a lame excuse for backing out of a day of stickfighting. :-)
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http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/california-gov-signs-law-mandating-pro-gay-curriculum/
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I don't care about sexual orientation but do we have to glorify sodomy? Do we really need a history courses about the greatest butt @#$$%%% or cock@#$%^ in history?
Mandating this?
What the hell is going on?
God almighty - enough.
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They have to throw a little variety into the endless bashing of America and western civilization.
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I think our side needs to come up with a pithy statement that reaches the majority of the people and is able to stand up to the "collective militant enthusiasm" (the term comes from Konrad Lorenz and has meaning) of liberal fascism.
Coincidentally enough, I think I have one. LOL
"You are free to do what you like, I am free to make of it what I will-- and vice versa."
Or, more-longwindedly:
"As long as people are free to do and be responsible for whatever they like. Equally, others are free to make of it what they will."
"The free to make of it what your will" gives a way for those who self-identify as "tolerant" (seeing this as being offered by the other side at present they are on the other side) to self-identify as tolerant on our side (we tolerate both sides). Whereas as those who do discern/judge can find room within our tent as well.
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second post
http://www.gopusa.com/news/2014/03/05/transgender-student-recants-story-made-up-assault/?subscriber=1
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http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/anti-gay-group-buying-from-small-businesses-that-dont-discriminate-is-bullying-christians/news/2014/04/28/86464 (http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/anti-gay-group-buying-from-small-businesses-that-dont-discriminate-is-bullying-christians/news/2014/04/28/86464)
I don't usually post here, but I know theres a variety of opinions and viewpoints here that I respect.
Earlier this month, Republican Gov. Phil Bryant signed into law the Mississippi Religious Freedom Restoration Act that lets Christians — or anyone of any faith — off the hook. As of July 1, they will be able to say, “We don’t serve gay people here,” and the subject of their anti-gay hate will have zero legal recourse except to turn around and walk away. They can’t sue, because the person of faith is merely exercising their right to practice their faith as they see fit.
Okay, its a law now. Fine and dandy. Now you can turn someone away from a public business/discriminate according to your beliefs.
So in responce to this, we see some business do this:
(http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/We-dont-discriminate.jpeg)
Awesome. Great. Good marketing point also.
Then we hear this:
Buddy Smith, American Family Association’s executive vice president, told the AFA that customers who do business with stores that have the stickers in their windows “are agreeing with these businesses that Christians no longer have the freedom to live out the dictates of their Christian faith and conscience.”
“It’s not really a buying campaign, but it’s a bully campaign,” he added, “it’s being carried out by radical homosexual activists who intend to trample the freedom of Christians to live according to the dictates of scripture.
“They don’t want to hear that homosexuality is sinful behavior – and they wish to silence Christians and the church who dare to believe this truth.”
Annnnndddd reality has left the building. How, in any certain terms , does this constitue bullying when the other thing is backed by the force of LAW!!!??? How is this bullying when all it says is, "those guys over there won't serve you, but we will."
are agreeing with these businesses that Christians no longer have the freedom to live out the dictates of their Christian faith and conscience.”
Patently false. You still have the freedom live your life and run your business according to your faith...what you can't do is force another business to NOT serve someone because of your faith. Or impose your faith on others to the detriment of their business.
Or is part of Christianty to force your beliefs on everyone around you? Is there some Shiara type law system in the New Testament I managed to miss?
“it’s being carried out by radical homosexual activists who intend to trample the freedom of Christians to live according to the dictates of scripture.
By what, not letting you dictate who someone else can and can not serve at their establishment?!
and they wish to silence Christians and the church who dare to believe this truth.
How exactly? By putting up stickers saying they will serve people you won't. Are they putting them over your mouth or something?
Its like these people are saying "We don't want your business....but we don't want you going anywhere else to do business either."
If thats not some form of bullying and non-sense I don't know what is.
One of the best examples of double-think, martyrdom and victimhood I have seen. Not only are they now allowed to discriminate...by law...but they somehow see other people continuing to do business as usual as somehow an attack on them?
Wow...just wow. Drowning in the absurdity.
(FYI,. I don't think anyone should have to serve anyone they don't want to[exception being basic utilities and necesseties, IMO]. Its a free market. That should be the law.
I can't wait for a Muslim to refuse service to a Jew or Christian at some point and see how that works out.....)
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http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/12/12/Christian-Baker-Willing-to-Go-to-Jail-for-Declining-Gay-Wedding-Cake
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ccp: "Hillary is about to continue the trend with this men vs women thing.
Did you see the article about Pepsi's CEO lamenting how women cannot still "have it all". As though choosing between motherhood, wifehood, and a career is a tragedy, or a conscious effort to suppress women.
Don't men have to choose between a career, fatherhood, and husbanhood?
I have cousins, the wife works a professional career and the husband stays home and is a Dad and husband. The kids seem wonderful and as far as I know happy.
So Ms CEO of Pepsi:
I congratulate you on your truly astonishing accomplishments. But I don't feel sorry for you. You have no gripe."
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My Dad's biggest regret on his death bed was that he could not spend more time with us growing up (because he had to work so much). Women who choose career and daycare to raise their children might feel some of that regret too. I was with my daughter almost everyday growing up with no regret but have big regret for the neglect that put on my career.
The number of hours in the day to do everything we wish we could do is a limiting factor that affects everyone equally. Make your choices and quit griping. Better yet with free speech, gripe all you want but we don't want to hear it.
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First world problems. Waaaahh!
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I'm sure the women in the muslim world with masses of scar tissue where their genitals used to be would be very sad to read about the difficulties faced by middle and upper class women of the first world. Luckily, most aren't allowed to learn to read, thus sparing them the discomfort of learning how tough life can be for a female CEO.
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http://dcgazette.com/11-year-old-boy-being-changed-into-girl-california-change-procedures-on-children/
http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/27/health/transgender-kids/
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This piece offers a particular point of view:
http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/does_sex_have_a_purpose
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Mormon leaders tried to stake out a middle ground in the escalating battle between gay rights and religious freedom on Tuesday, demanding that both ideas, together, be treated as a national priority.
At a rare news conference at church headquarters in Salt Lake City, leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints forcefully condemned discrimination against gays and vowed to support nondiscrimination laws — like one proposed in Utah — to protect people from being denied jobs or housing because of their sexual orientation.
But they also called for these same laws, or others, to protect the rights of people who say their beliefs compel them to oppose homosexuality or to refuse service to gay couples. They cited examples of religious opponents of same-sex marriage who have been sanctioned or sued or have lost their jobs.
“Such tactics are every bit as wrong as denying access to employment, housing or public services because of race or gender,” said Elder Dallin H. Oaks, a member of a group of church leaders known as the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. “It is one of today’s great ironies that some people who have fought so hard for L.G.B.T. rights now try to deny the rights of others to disagree with their public policy proposals.”
The church’s announcement, an attempt to placate all sides of a divisive issue, astonished some lawmakers in the halls of Utah’s Capitol, who called it a watershed moment that could reconfigure the debate over gay rights in their socially conservative state. With the church now backing nondiscrimination laws, a bill offering such protections to those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender now appears more likely to pass after years of being stalled in the Legislature.
The church had already supported such legislation in Salt Lake City and other local Utah jurisdictions, but had held off endorsing it statewide.
“This was a major event for the Mormon Church, a major event for Utah and the L.G.B.T. community,” said State Senator Stephen H. Urquhart, a Republican who has tried unsuccessfully to pass an anti-discrimination law. “This changes the dynamic.”
The Mormon leaders at the news conference, three of the church’s male apostles and one woman, made it clear that their church does not intend to change its doctrine, which says that marriage can be only between a man and a woman, and that gay sexual relationships are prohibited.
This doctrine “comes from sacred Scripture, and we are not at liberty to change it,” said Sister Neill Marriott, a leader in church women’s organizations.
The church is now trying to position itself as a champion of both gay rights and the conservative religious opposition to gay rights. But the approach announced on Tuesday by Mormon leaders is unlikely to do much to help calm this front in the culture wars. Gay rights advocates have long maintained that denying service to gays on the basis of religious belief is no different from the discrimination against blacks that was outlawed during the civil rights movement.
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story
The Human Rights Campaign, a leading gay rights organization, said the Mormon leaders’ endorsement of nondiscrimination laws may be “deeply meaningful” to gay Mormons and their families, but is “deeply flawed” as a matter of public policy.
“Doctors would still be allowed to deny medical care. Pharmacists would still be allowed to refuse to fill valid prescriptions. And landlords, as well as business operators, would still be allowed to reject L.G.B.T. people. All in the name of religion,” the Human Rights Campaign said in a statement.
Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s ethics and religious liberty commission, called the move “well intentioned but naïve.” Proposals to address discrimination against gay people in employment or housing “inevitably lead to targeted assaults on religious liberty,” he said.
Mormon leaders have in recent years joined Roman Catholic bishops, Southern Baptist pastors and other conservative evangelicals in what they have framed as a “religious liberty” campaign to defend their freedom of conscience.
But Tuesday’s announcement again shows that the Mormon Church has been trying to change its tone on homosexuality since 2008, when it faced widespread condemnation for mobilizing members and raising money to help pass Proposition 8 in California, which outlawed same-sex marriage.
In 2009, the church threw its support behind a local law in Salt Lake City protecting gay and transgender people from job and housing discrimination. But it remained largely silent on efforts to pass statewide anti-discrimination laws.
With the Legislature back in session, Mr. Urquhart is again trying pass a law that would ban housing and employment discrimination based on someone’s sexuality or gender identity.
“I think the bill, now, will pass,” he said.
But conservative lawmakers were still skeptical. Representative Jacob Anderegg, a Republican from Lehi, Utah, said the church’s change in position cleared some “potential stumbling blocks,” but he said he still had fundamental concerns.
“I can’t say definitively right now that I’m on board,” he said. “The devil’s in the details.”
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U.S. Supreme Court Won’t Stop Same-Sex Marriages in Alabama
The United States Supreme Court said early Monday that it would not stop same-sex marriages in Alabama, as gay couples gathered outside courthouses across the state.
Justices on Monday morning denied a request by the Alabama attorney general to extend a hold on a judge’s ruling overturning the state’s ban on gay marriage. The attorney general, Luther Strange, had asked the Supreme Court to halt the weddings until the justices settle the issue nationwide when they take it up this year.
Judge Callie V. S. Granade of Federal District Court ruled in January that the Alabama ban was unconstitutional, but she put a hold on her order until Monday to give the state time to appeal. Gay couples are lining up at courthouses seeking marriage licenses.
But in a dramatic show of defiance toward the federal judiciary, Chief Justice Roy S. Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court on Sunday night ordered the state’s probate judges not to issue marriage licenses to gay couples on Monday.
According to reports early Monday, probate judges in Birmingham and Montgomery had defied Chief Justice Moore and were issuing licenses.
READ MORE »
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/10/us/alabama-supreme-court-same-sex-marriages.html?emc=edit_na_20150209
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What is your current age? What is your current gender?? Is there some way we could have fairness and equity without having to turn our whole world upside down?
http://nypost.com/2015/01/30/birth-certificates-ask-parents-if-woman-giving-birth-is-female/
Birth certificates ask parents if ‘woman giving birth’ is female
“To be clear, it is possible for a person who has given birth to a child to identify as male,” said Susan Sommer, a lawyer for Lambda Legal, an advocacy group for lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgender people. "Given various transgender stages, there is room for the person who gives birth to check the male box."
“What is your DATE OF BIRTH, current AGE and SEX?” the form asks in the section clearly marked “Mother/Parent (Woman Giving Birth).”
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNxYLgUgO1Y
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/03/06/woman-complains-about-transgender-person-in-locker-room-gets-scary-response-back/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Firewire&utm_campaign=Firewire%20-%20HORIZON%203-7-15%20FINAL
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/418965/british-columbias-human-rights-tribunal-consider-eliminating-gender-birth
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http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2015/04/14905/
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https://www.facebook.com/cbnnews/videos/10155830768900393/
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Just what every parent wants their child learning. I wonder if this is part of common core. *end sarcasm*
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OTOH there is this , , , http://shoebat.com/2015/06/29/russian-government-now-wants-to-ban-the-gay-flag-saying-that-gay-delirium-is-threatening-the-entire-civilized-world/
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Quite exciting that gay couples now have a constitutional right to divorce.
"It's all about love", it says in our local paper. No. Love was already legal. It's all about benefits.
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""It's all about love", it says in our local paper. No. Love was already legal. It's all about benefits."
I suspect that is why many get married literally the day it becomes legal. Start the process to get the checks or write the deductions. Not about "LUV".
Nothing wrong with that as everyone else would do the same thing.
I still think it not a good idea for the State to sanction gay marriage. And I have larger problem with male gays using surrogates to have children or female gays using sperm donors to have children, or gay adoptions unless in extenuating circumstances.
And I very strongly suspect MOST people agree with me. I don't believe the veracity of polls that purportedly show a MAJORITY of Americans think gay marriage or adoption or having children is ok. I just don't believe it. I think it is the herd mentality and fear of being crucified as insensitive or a homophobe that makes people cover up their true feelings.
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""It's all about love", it says in our local paper. No. Love was already legal. It's all about benefits."
I suspect that is why many get married literally the day it becomes legal. Start the process to get the checks or write the deductions. Not about "LUV".
Nothing wrong with that as everyone else would do the same thing.
I still think it not a good idea for the State to sanction gay marriage. And I have larger problem with male gays using surrogates to have children or female gays using sperm donors to have children, or gay adoptions unless in extenuating circumstances.
And I very strongly suspect MOST people agree with me. I don't believe the veracity of polls that purportedly show a MAJORITY of Americans think gay marriage or adoption or having children is ok. I just don't believe it. I think it is the herd mentality and fear of being crucified as insensitive or a homophobe that makes people cover up their true feelings.
There is so much in there. We jumped from private love to public benefits to removing the words mother and father (as the US govt did in FAFSA years ago) and replacing them with "Parent 1" and "Parent 2" (with room for more), also offensive to gays - who wants to be Parent 2?
There are gender differences with gays too. Male gays don't bond for life at the same frequency as females. Who knew?! Heteros screwed up the bond for life argument all on their own.
Is it still legal to "discriminate" in adoption placement? Does a kid have the chance statistically with a single mom, with a lesbian couple, with 2 gay men, with 2 reverse gender trans-sexuals, with some other future combination that I won't make facetiously but is imaginable?
Don't kids have the best chance to succeed in American when they grow up with one mother, one father, in love, married, and under one roof?
Who is denying the science here?
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http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2567925#.VZ-jNJK-0Oc.facebook
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And I, or others, might have experience inside the world of law enforcement that you aren't aware of, so that sounds like a cop out. Now, back to the thread subject at hand, I am sure.
Ok, back to it.
Are laws against incest and bigamy constitutional?
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/10/german-thought-leaders-move-to-legalize-incest/comment-page-1/#comments
Still waiting for a response from bigdog.
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http://www.patheos.com/blogs/publiccatholic/2015/07/oregon-allows-15-year-olds-to-get-sex-change-operations-without-parental-consent/
:cry: :cry: :cry: :x :x :x :x :x :x
http://m.snopes.com/oregon-teen-sex-change-law/ Reads like some Clintonesque evasions to me but , , ,
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http://www.reviewjournal.com/trending/the-feed/man-arrested-arizona-after-traveling-have-sex-horse
Is this a constitutional law, bigdog?
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Reminds me of the Tom Leher song about the man who "majored in animal husbandry until they caught him at it."
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Johns Hopkins Psychiatrist: It Is Starkly, Nakedly False That Sex Change Is Possible
By Paul McHugh | June 17, 2015 | 9:56 AM EDT
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Bruce Jenner during the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympics (left) and last April (right). (AP Photo)
The idea that one’s sex is a feeling, not a fact, has permeated our culture and is leaving casualties in its wake. Gender dysphoria should be treated with psychotherapy, not surgery.
For forty years as the University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School—twenty-six of which were also spent as Psychiatrist in Chief of Johns Hopkins Hospital—I’ve been studying people who claim to be transgender. Over that time, I’ve watched the phenomenon change and expand in remarkable ways.
A rare issue of a few men—both homosexual and heterosexual men, including some who sought sex-change surgery because they were erotically aroused by the thought or image of themselves as women—has spread to include women as well as men. Even young boys and girls have begun to present themselves as of the opposite sex. Over the last ten or fifteen years, this phenomenon has increased in prevalence, seemingly exponentially. Now, almost everyone has heard of or met such a person.
Publicity, especially from early examples such as “Christine” Jorgenson, “Jan” Morris, and “Renee” Richards, has promoted the idea that one’s biological sex is a choice, leading to widespread cultural acceptance of the concept. And, that idea, quickly accepted in the 1980s, has since run through the American public like a revelation or “meme” affecting much of our thought about sex.
The champions of this meme, encouraged by their alliance with the broader LGBT movement, claim that whether you are a man or a woman, a boy or a girl, is more of a disposition or feeling about yourself than a fact of nature. And, much like any other feeling, it can change at any time, and for all sorts of reasons. Therefore, no one could predict who would swap this fact of their makeup, nor could one justifiably criticize such a decision.
At Johns Hopkins, after pioneering sex-change surgery, we demonstrated that the practice brought no important benefits. As a result, we stopped offering that form of treatment in the 1970s. Our efforts, though, had little influence on the emergence of this new idea about sex, or upon the expansion of the number of “transgendered” among young and old.
Olympic Athlete Turned "Pin-Up" Girl
This history may clarify some aspects of the latest high-profile transgender claimant. Bruce Jenner, the 1976 Olympic decathlon champion, is turning away from his titular identity as one of the “world’s greatest male athletes.” Jenner announced recently that he “identifies as a woman” and, with medical and surgical help, is busy reconstructing his physique.
I have not met or examined Jenner, but his behavior resembles that of some of the transgender males we have studied over the years. These men wanted to display themselves in sexy ways, wearing provocative female garb. More often than not, while claiming to be a woman in a man’s body, they declared themselves to be “lesbians” (attracted to other women). The photograph of the posed, corseted, breast-boosted Bruce Jenner (a man in his mid-sixties, but flaunting himself as if a “pin-up” girl in her twenties or thirties) on the cover of Vanity Fair suggests that he may fit the behavioral mold that Ray Blanchard has dubbed an expression of “autogynephilia”—from gynephilia (attracted to women) and auto (in the form of oneself).
The Emperor’s New Clothes
But the meme—that your sex is a feeling, not a biological fact, and can change at any time—marches on through our society. In a way, it’s reminiscent of the Hans Christian Andersen tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes. In that tale, the Emperor, believing that he wore an outfit of special beauty imperceptible to the rude or uncultured, paraded naked through his town to the huzzahs of courtiers and citizens anxious about their reputations. Many onlookers to the contemporary transgender parade, knowing that a disfavored opinion is worse than bad taste today, similarly fear to identify it as a misapprehension.
FILE - In this June 19, 2014, file photo, Laverne Cox arrives at the Critics' Choice Television Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on Thursday, June 19, 2014, in Beverly Hills, Calif. President Barack Obama during his first year in office became the first chief executive to say "transgender" in a speech, the first to name transgender political appointees and the first to prohibit job bias against transgender government workers. He also signed hate crime legislation that represented the first federal civil rights protections for transgender people in U.S. history. (Photo by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, File)
I am ever trying to be the boy among the bystanders who points to what’s real. I do so not only because truth matters, but also because overlooked amid the hoopla—enhanced now by Bruce Jenner’s celebrity and Annie Leibovitz’s photography—stand many victims. Think, for example, of the parents whom no one—not doctors, schools, nor even churches—will help to rescue their children from these strange notions of being transgendered and the problematic lives these notions herald. These youngsters now far outnumber the Bruce Jenner type of transgender. Although they may be encouraged by his public reception, these children generally come to their ideas about their sex not through erotic interests but through a variety of youthful psychosocial conflicts and concerns.
First, though, let us address the basic assumption of the contemporary parade: the idea that exchange of one’s sex is possible. It, like the storied Emperor, is starkly, nakedly false. Transgendered men do not become women, nor do transgendered women become men. All (including Bruce Jenner) become feminized men or masculinized women, counterfeits or impersonators of the sex with which they “identify.” In that lies their problematic future.
When “the tumult and shouting dies,” it proves not easy nor wise to live in a counterfeit sexual garb. The most thorough follow-up of sex-reassigned people—extending over thirty years and conducted in Sweden, where the culture is strongly supportive of the transgendered—documents their lifelong mental unrest. Ten to fifteen years after surgical reassignment, the suicide rate of those who had undergone sex-reassignment surgery rose to twenty times that of comparable peers.
How to Treat Gender Dysphoria
So how should we make sense of this matter today? As with any mental phenomenon, what’s crucial is noting its fundamental characteristic and then identifying the many ways in which that characteristic can manifest itself.
The central issue with all transgender subjects is one of assumption—the assumption that one’s sexual nature is misaligned with one’s biological sex. This problematic assumption comes about in several different ways, and these distinctions in its generation determine how to manage and treat it.
Based on the photographic evidence one might guess Bruce Jenner falls into the group of men who come to their disordered assumption through being sexually aroused by the image of themselves as women. He could have been treated for this misaligned arousal with psychotherapy and medication. Instead, he found his way to surgeons who worked him over as he wished. Others have already commented on his stereotypic caricature of women as decorative “babes” (“I look forward to wearing nail polish until it chips off,” he said to Diane Sawyer)—a view that understandably infuriates feminists—and his odd sense that only feelings, not facts, matter here.
For his sake, however, I do hope that he receives regular, attentive follow-up care, as his psychological serenity in the future is doubtful. Future men with similar feelings and intentions should be treated for those feelings rather than being encouraged to undergo bodily changes. Group therapies are now available for them.
Most young boys and girls who come seeking sex-reassignment are utterly different from Jenner. They have no erotic interest driving their quest. Rather, they come with psychosocial issues—conflicts over the prospects, expectations, and roles that they sense are attached to their given sex—and presume that sex-reassignment will ease or resolve them.
The grim fact is that most of these youngsters do not find therapists willing to assess and guide them in ways that permit them to work out their conflicts and correct their assumptions. Rather, they and their families find only “gender counselors” who encourage them in their sexual misassumptions.
Those with Gender Dysphoria Need Evidence-Based Care
There are several reasons for this absence of coherence in our mental health system. Important among them is the fact that both the state and federal governments are actively seeking to block any treatments that can be construed as challenging the assumptions and choices of transgendered youngsters. “As part of our dedication to protecting America’s youth, this administration supports efforts to ban the use of conversion therapy for minors,” said Valerie Jarrett, a senior advisor to President Obama.
In two states, a doctor who would look into the psychological history of a transgendered boy or girl in search of a resolvable conflict could lose his or her license to practice medicine. By contrast, such a physician would not be penalized if he or she started such a patient on hormones that would block puberty and might stunt growth.
What is needed now is public clamor for coherent science—biological and therapeutic science—examining the real effects of these efforts to “support” transgendering. Although much is made of a rare “intersex” individual, no evidence supports the claim that people such as Bruce Jenner have a biological source for their transgender assumptions. Plenty of evidence demonstrates that with him and most others, transgendering is a psychological rather than a biological matter.
In fact, gender dysphoria—the official psychiatric term for feeling oneself to be of the opposite sex—belongs in the family of similarly disordered assumptions about the body, such as anorexia nervosa and body dysmorphic disorder. Its treatment should not be directed at the body as with surgery and hormones any more than one treats obesity-fearing anorexic patients with liposuction. The treatment should strive to correct the false, problematic nature of the assumption and to resolve the psychosocial conflicts provoking it. With youngsters, this is best done in family therapy.
The larger issue is the meme itself. The idea that one’s sex is fluid and a matter open to choice runs unquestioned through our culture and is reflected everywhere in the media, the theater, the classroom, and in many medical clinics. It has taken on cult-like features: its own special lingo, internet chat rooms providing slick answers to new recruits, and clubs for easy access to dresses and styles supporting the sex change. It is doing much damage to families, adolescents, and children and should be confronted as an opinion without biological foundation wherever it emerges.
But gird your loins if you would confront this matter. Hell hath no fury like a vested interest masquerading as a moral principle.
Paul McHugh, MD, is University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School and the former psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He is the author of “The Mind Has Mountains: Reflections on Society and Psychiatry.”
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second post
This one seems to make a sincere effort to be lucid and fair.
http://transascity.org/the-transgender-brain/
OTOH, there's this
http://www.bu.edu/news/2015/02/13/review-article-provides-evidence-on-the-biological-nature-of-gender-identity/
"The researchers conducted a literature search and reviewed articles that showed positive biologic bases for gender identity"
Ain'`t that special :roll: :roll: :roll:
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http://dailycaller.com/2015/07/21/gay-pride-event-bans-drag-because-it-offends-transgendered/
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Bwahahahahahaha:
http://popehat.com/2015/09/09/omg-broad-flexible-plaintiff-friendly-law-used-in-unanticipated-manner/
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http://www.mercatornet.com/conjugality/view/the-pain-of-transgender-regret/16982
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Bwahahahahahaha:
http://popehat.com/2015/09/09/omg-broad-flexible-plaintiff-friendly-law-used-in-unanticipated-manner/
I love it!
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Second post of day
http://www.mercatornet.com/conjugality/view/once-again-a-cloud-over-the-gay-gene/16984
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9 years old and already on track to be transgender. Why because he likes dresses and dolls? How does anyone know this?
http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/transgender-ill-girl-scout-sells-1000s-boxes-cookies-article-1.2518263
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response to my own post:
http://gazette.com/experts-gender-awareness-comes-at-early-age/article/151590
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I confess to being incoherent in the face of all this.
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response to my own post:
http://gazette.com/experts-gender-awareness-comes-at-early-age/article/151590
Lunacy. Another symptom of our decadent and crumbling society.
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http://pamelageller.com/2016/03/saudi-government-to-execute-gay-people-who-show-their-sexuality-in-public-online.html/
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http://pamelageller.com/2016/03/saudi-government-to-execute-gay-people-who-show-their-sexuality-in-public-online.html/
Cue the crickets, as the left will studiously ignore this.
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http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2016/04/01/california-man-dressed-woman-busted-videoing-womens-bathroom/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social
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http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2016/04/01/california-man-dressed-woman-busted-videoing-womens-bathroom/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social
:roll: My shocked face.
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http://www.acpeds.org/the-college-speaks/position-statements/gender-ideology-harms-children
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Wow. Heads of a medical organization that publishes a position paper that is NOT politically correct!
Thank God there are others like me who do not like the encroachment of all this political correctness into medicine.
Why just a few days ago I read the American College of Physicians position paper on guess what - a topic very relevant to providing health care to people - "climate change".
Political correctness is metastasizing throughout the medical literature. Like I have posted before the CDC who I had the privilege of doing some part time work with is all over the political correctness map. They do spectacular work and provide the world with needed control of disease. But for the life of me some of their ventures are out of their bounds and sound very politically motivated - surely coming down from the present White House.
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http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/06/03/repentant-transsexual-warns-jenner-the-hangover-is-coming/
http://thefederalist.com/2016/04/21/drop-the-t-from-lgbt/
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http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/06/03/repentant-transsexual-warns-jenner-the-hangover-is-coming/
http://thefederalist.com/2016/04/21/drop-the-t-from-lgbt/
Let's drop the B (and Q) too. Being confused, undecided, inconsistent, questioning, indiscriminate or promiscuous is not a gender. Look at your genitals and use the right bathroom.
Can't we drop the L too? Aren't lesbians gay? Or no? And when did we lose the meaning of the word gay from our language? Can we have that word back? If you are homo-sexual, you can say so or keep your private life private. Same sex attraction is not a synonym for happy. Some are less happy. What word to heteros get? Straight? Who gave us that label? Do we teach our language from Meriam Webster or from the 'urban dictionary'?
For the record, we on the right want more privacy, personal freedom, and liberty to pursue happiness for (all people including) gay people than do those on the left. The right to keep the fruits of your labor and investment, the right to choose your own healthcare, the right to opt in or out of a union, the right to NOT be asked 300 personal questions on the census, personal property rights and the right to have the government off of your land, the right to choose your own charities and not have your social causes forced on you by the government, the right to bear arms and defend yourself and your household, and on and on. Too bad no one ever makes that point to Democrat constituent groups.
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Doug, this is one discussion of the evolution of the word "gay":
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/517/how-did-gay-come-to-mean-homosexual
I don't buy this part below. Of course the word became mainstream in part because of a push from homosexuals so to deny this (and it is "no big deal" rather exposes the writer's agenda)
"This is more the result of the squeamish attitude of the straight world than any organized campaign on the part of gays, and in any case it's no big deal;"
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...http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/517/how-did-gay-come-to-mean-homosexual...
Imagine if heteros labeled themselves a positive name for being heterosexual along the lines of 'lighthearted and cheerful', implying that others are not. You would face lawsuits and criminal charges.
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Kind of ironic for a group prone to clinical depression and suicide.
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It's 2016, peak ISIS, Boko Harem on the rise, droughts, floods, collapsed economies around the world and the lead story is bathroom attendance. Is this a media issue?
How did gender become a political issue. Gay bi or otherwise, you are man or you are woman. No? What has changed since Adam and Eve in the world of gender?? Is this really that complicated?
I've got an idea, let's have government impose a burden on the private sector every time 0.0% of the people are suddenly up in arms about the way things have always been with no problems..
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All-gender bathroom bill passes California Assembly
http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article76595197.html
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North Carolina Governor is looking for a federal government solution (PBS News Hour). Left and right both need to unzip and determine whether or not they have a penis. A clue to the clueless, most males have an awareness of theirs almost every hour of the day. We could go on with more clues. If your erection is measured in inches, you're probably a male. If you were born as a Gene and now identify as a Jean, you are probably still a guy unless you had work done. If you think constantly all day about eating p*ssy, you're probably a lesbian, the symbol with the skirt even if you're wearing pants.
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"Breaking with Republican-led states and cities that have moved to restrict bathroom use, the California Assembly on Monday passed legislation requiring all single-stall bathrooms to be open to people of any gender."
From now on we could piss off all the women and leave down when we urinate and leave it up when we exit the bathroom.
Nothing like scorned women to get things changed back to NORMAL.
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LOL.
They took the urinals off the walls in our hockey locker rooms a few years ago as the sport became more co-ed and now we have to look both ways before showering after playing because of unisex locker rooms. Eventually we will get sued for exposing in front of young girls or just drive home all sweaty from now on because people can't figure out a bathroom assignment.
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Dunno if this is coherent or not
http://review.antiochcollege.org/sacred-androgen-transgender-debate-daniel-harris
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The Padres and all of baseball should be ashamed. Time to get everyone to not go to a baseball game any more this season. This is micro aggression on a macro scale:
https://www.yahoo.com/sports/blogs/mlb-big-league-stew/padres-under-fire-after-humiliating-gay-men-s-chorus-during-anthem-181903586.html
this should also become a campaign issue!!! :wink:
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The feminist legislative onslaught has begun. This is really what the transgender thing is about. It is the feminist warriors at least as much and probably more then gays.
Sadly majority of Mass legislatures voted in favor. My god!:
https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/06/massachusetts-house-overwhelmingly-passes-bill-legally-abolishing-biological-sex
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http://www.womenofgrace.com/blog/?p=50706
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"In a statement, she said that the ACLU has become “a special interest organization that promotes not all, but certain progressive rights.”
The “hierarchy of rights” the ACLU chooses to defend or ignore, she wrote, is “based on who is funding the organization’s lobbying activities.”
?dNc ? SoRoS? all about the money.
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http://www.ktva.com/high-school-runner-brings-spotlight-to-alaska-transgender-policy-432/
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http://www.ktva.com/high-school-runner-brings-spotlight-to-alaska-transgender-policy-432/
Crafty has this right I think. Follow the penis. If you have one, they have a restroom and a team for that. If you have a vagina, there is a team and a restroom for that. This isn't that complicated. If you have something else or some other combination of features, maybe you need a family court judge or psych warden to advise on which shower room is yours.
If you hang your penis out in a no-penis area, they have a criminal charge for that.
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Doug,
Where does one go if they are Q?
You know. Now it is LBGTQ!
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Doug,
Where does one go if they are Q?
You know. Now it is LBGTQ!
31 Genders recognized in NYC and I don't think they're making fun of an ice cream store.
I can name 2 of them and neither starts with L,B,G,T or Q.
https://heatst.com/culture-wars/here-are-the-31-gender-identities-new-york-city-recognizes/
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Deviation of sexual activity from normal is somehow now gender identity?
Have you seen how obama signed a spot across from a NYC gay bar into national monument status?
From Conservative review on Target:
https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/06/how-conservatives-got-upper-hand-in-target-bathroom-policy
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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/05/obama-to-name-stonewall-inn-national-monument.html
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http://www.breitbart.com/sports/2016/06/08/nba-raises-money-for-gay-organization-that-instructed-hs-students-on-fisting/
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Something is going on with professional sports.
They are all being intimidated somehow.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/436567/islam-homosexuality-muslims-gay-rights-westernization-gay-times-magazine
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/436505/mass-shooting-florida-anti-gay-violence-rooted-muslim-law
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http://dailysignal.com/2016/06/09/i-wish-i-had-been-told-about-these-risks-before-i-had-gender-surgery/?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Top5&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTmpFNU16VTNabU14TURVMiIsInQiOiIrWEg4YUVnZWlHMk5DdXhXdTVmNzZMQVhhMzRrdEszXC9BdkZ0Z3pOTFpBR1FxXC9BXC9rd0tJdUJvVW5aYWJza2grdEE5QzJyejhOWUoxZFZkcWVxWDhmWk40RFZrMVp1ZWg5OEtsXC9mYkN4elU9In0%3D
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https://www.buzzfeed.com/amphtml/davidmack/trans-woman-arrested-in-target
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https://www.buzzfeed.com/amphtml/davidmack/trans-woman-arrested-in-target
Surprising exactly no one on the right.
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http://www.rawstory.com/2014/08/wife-of-top-texas-anti-gay-crusader-divorces-him-to-be-with-lesbian-partner/#.V7VM0tBVLlY.facebook
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https://patriotpost.us/articles/44470
Born This Way'? New Study Debunks LGBT Claims
Correcting the record on the homosexual agenda's junk science.
Louis DeBroux · Aug. 25, 2016
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Among leftists, it is at convenient times an accepted fact (“settled science,” you might say) that homosexuals and transgendered people are “born that way” — that their sexual attractions or gender identities are not the product of choice, but a matter of genetics. (When that’s not convenient, of course, it’s a perfectly acceptable “life choice.”) A new report, instantly controversial, torpedoes that understanding of homosexuality and gender dysphoria, the medical term for transgenderism.
The report, entitled “Sexuality and Gender: Findings from the Biological, Psychological, and Social Sciences,” is co-authored by two of the most well respected experts on mental health and human sexuality. Dr. Paul McHugh, described as “arguably the most important American psychiatrist of the last half century,” is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the prestigious Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and served for 25 years as psychiatrist in chief for Johns Hopkins Hospital. And Dr. Lawrence Mayer, Psychiatry Department scholar-in-residence at Johns Hopkins University, is a professor of statistics and biostatistics at Arizona State University.
While, not surprisingly, many on the Left and in the LGBT “community” immediately raged against the report as anti-LGBT, it should be noted that Johns Hopkins was the first medical facility in the U.S. to perform sex-reassignment surgery, and did so for decades until a growing body of peer-reviewed studies, including an analysis of how Hopkins' own transgendered patients fared over time, led the hospital to end those types of surgeries. Furthermore, McHugh is no far right-wing ideologue or Bible-thumper; he’s a self-described “politically liberal” Democrat.
Yet it was his long-term experience with patients who suffer from gender dysphoria that led him to his conclusions, summarized in a report that analyzed more than 200 peer reviewed studies. McHugh and Mayer are also very up front about what the science does and does not show. They freely admit the gaps in the available research, which they argue underscores the need for more research before establishing medical standards, public policy guidelines, and laws, based on “settled science” that is not at all settled.
So what did the study find? A few excerpts:
“The belief that sexual orientation is an innate, biologically fixed human property — that people are ‘born that way’ — is not supported by scientific evidence.
Likewise, the belief that gender identity is an innate, fixed human property independent of biological sex — so that a person might be a ‘man trapped in a woman’s body’ or ‘a woman trapped in a man’s body’ — is not supported by scientific evidence.
Only a minority of children who express gender-atypical thoughts or behavior will continue to do so into adolescence or adulthood. There is no evidence that all such children should be encouraged to become transgender, much less subjected to hormone treatments or surgery.
Non-heterosexual and transgender people have higher rates of mental health problems (anxiety, depression, suicide), as well as behavioral and social problems (substance abuse, intimate partner violence), than the general population. Discrimination alone does not account for the entire disparity.”
One of the most shocking findings in the report is that not only do people who suffer from gender dysphoria experience far higher rates of social pathologies (depression, substance abuse, suicide) than the general population, but sex-reassignment surgery does not offer the relief those on the Left claim. One study finds that “compared to [the general population], sex-reassigned individuals were about five times more likely to attempt suicide and about 19 times more likely to die by suicide.” The study finds a staggering 41% of transgendered individuals will attempt suicide in their lifetime.
The duo investigated the underlying causes of these tragic statistics, and found that while “stressors like stigma and prejudice account for much of the additional suffering observed in these subpopulations … [this theory] does not seem to offer a complete explanation for the disparities in the outcomes.” Even in social environments where transgendered people are accepted, they still suffer from above-normal rates of these social pathologies. McHugh and Mayer encourage additional research be done to study the correlation between childhood sexual abuse and sexual orientation (studies have shown non-heterosexuals to be two to three times more likely to have experienced childhood sexual abuse as compared to heterosexuals).
Far from offering condemnation or judgment, they stress the need for greater understanding of the science behind gender dysphoria, and a more thoughtful, science-based approached to treating it. “More research is needed to uncover the causes of the increased rates of mental health problems in the LGBT subpopulations,” McHugh and Mayer say, calling on society to work to “alleviate suffering and promote human health and flourishing.”
All the more reason to base medical treatment and public policy on sound science, which is not currently the case. The authors declare they are “disturbed and alarmed by the severity and irreversibility of some interventions being publicly discussed and employed for children. … We are concerned by the increasing tendency toward encouraging children with gender identity issues to transition to their preferred gender through medical and then surgical procedures.” The pair notes, “There is little scientific evidence for the therapeutic value of interventions that delay puberty or modify the secondary sex characteristics of adolescents.”
The Obama administration has used (and abused) its vast power to dismiss the concerns of parents, policymakers and medical professionals in implementing policy in the furtherance of its ideological goal — forced social acceptance of gender dysphoria as normal, all under the guise of medical science.
Part of that effort was Obama’s announcement earlier this year that schools receiving federal funding were prohibited from requiring students to use the restroom and shower facilities of their birth sex, while threatening a loss of funding for any school that didn’t comply with his imperial decree. Essentially, this meant boys who think they are girls would get to shower with female classmates.
Luckily, U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor has injected some sanity into the debate, issuing an injunction against implementation of this policy, stating that Obama exceeded his authority in his attempt to reinterpret Title IX. As O'Connor said, “It cannot be disputed that the meaning of the term ‘sex’ [in Title IX] meant the biological and anatomical differences between male and female students as determined by their birth.”
Gender dysphoria is a real and debilitating problem for a tiny minority of the population, and we should treat those who suffer from it compassionately. At the same time, we do not show true compassion by pretending it is not an illness, or by encouraging those who suffer from it to embrace and celebrate it.
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http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_CALIFORNIA_PRISONS_SEX_REASSIGNMENT?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2017-01-06-14-46-34
:x :x :x
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http://thefederalist.com/2017/02/03/audi-steps-rake-new-superbowl-ad-retracts/
Women are still paid 21% less than men. As a brand that believes in progress, we are committed to equal pay for equal work. #DriveProgress
9:17 AM - 1 Feb 2017
11,092 11,092 Retweets
What do I tell my daughter?” a male narrator asks in the commercial as the camera pans to a father watching his daughter compete against a bunch of boys in a go-kart race. “Do I tell her that despite her education, her drive, her skills, her intelligence, she will automatically be valued as less than every man she meets?”
“Or maybe I’ll be able to tell her something different,” the narrator concludes as the father leads his daughter towards their Audi sedan. The screen tuns black, and across it are the words in white: “Audi of America is committed to equal pay for equal work. Progress is for everyone.”
Gross. Gross. Gross Gross.
I’m not going to parse how psychologically damaging this advertisement is to all the young girls who will be watching this ad and consequently subjected to the deceitful victimhood rhetoric that “you matter less because of your chromosomes.” Instead, let’s focus on what happened after the luxury car company responded to a question on Twitter. All of the “equal pay” nonsense their ad espouses totally falls apart when faced with the realities of economics.
Here’s the question and response.
@Audi You pay your female employees less than males? You know that's against the law, right?
Follow
Audi ✔ @Audi
@TueborFrog When we account for all the various factors that go into pay, women at Audi are on par with their male counterparts.
5:37 PM - 1 Feb 2017
So, it seems that Audi admits their female employees’ paychecks are not as fat as those of their male employees. Yet this doesn’t mean female employees aren’t being paid equally. Yes, if you compare the overall income of women versus the overall incomes of men, women make 79 cents on the dollar of what a man earns.
But this statistic is misleading, as women often choose occupations that generally pay less than the jobs men chose. For example, fewer women take jobs in science and math fields, which generally pay more. Women do not like taking physically risky jobs, which also often have pay premiums. That’s why very few women work as frackers or linemen. (On the flip side, women die less often on the job then men.) Women also prefer jobs that give them greater flexibility, allowing them to stay home with their children, and they tend to work part-time more often than men do.
When hiring a female employee, employers have to take into account the possibility their worker may become pregnant and need to take a significant amount of time away from her job to recover and take care of a newborn. It’s not sexist for an employer to take that into consideration when hiring a female employee, or for her paycheck to reflect the aggregate of all of these factors. Audi should stop virtue signaling and spreading the false narrative that women are less valuable because of a dumb, long-debunked statistic.
Bre Payton is a staff writer at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter.
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Speaking of the danger premium, what does the most recent data say? Working from memory, something like 19 of 20 work deaths are male.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/highschools/meet-the-texas-wrestler-who-won-a-girls-state-title-his-name-is-mack/2017/02/25/982bd61c-fb6f-11e6-be05-1a3817ac21a5_story.html?utm_term=.a818301b3ba8&wpisrc=nl_wemost&wpmm=1
http://www.espn.com/espnw/sports/article/18767310/transgender-wrestler-mack-beggs-euless-trinity-wins-texas-state-girls-wrestling-title?addata=espn%3Afrontpage&sf58680308=1
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http://thefederalist.com/2016/11/17/psychiatry-professor-transgenderism-mass-hysteria-similar-1980s-era-junk-science/
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http://thefederalist.com/2017/02/28/child-sex-common-among-gay-men-okay/
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-4274396/Man-spends-50-000-transform-genderless-ALIEN.html
I have to ask what kind of doctor would deform someone?
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-4274396/Man-spends-50-000-transform-genderless-ALIEN.html
I have to ask what kind of doctor would deform someone?
The same ones that do m to f or f to m reassignment surgery.
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Supreme Court Tells Lower Court to Reconsider Transgender Bathroom Case in Light of Trump Move
Previous court decision deferred to Obama interpretation of antidiscrimination law, which Trump rescinded
By Jess Bravin
Updated March 6, 2017 11:28 a.m. ET
242 COMMENTS
WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court on Monday canceled March arguments over a transgender student’s bathroom access, the latest aftershock of Trump administration moves to undo the legal and policy legacy of former President Barack Obama.
The court’s one-sentence order directed a federal appeals panel to reconsider its ruling from last year requiring a Virginia school board to let Gavin Grimm, a transgender boy, use the boys’ bathroom. The Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in Richmond, Va., had based its decision on legal guidance from the Education Department under Mr. Obama, which advised that federal antidiscrimination law required public schools permit transgender students to use facilities corresponding to their gender identity.
After the Trump administration withdrew that guidance last month, the court asked the Gloucester County school board and the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents Gavin, for their views on how to proceed. Although both parties said they would prefer to proceed with the case, the justices instead asked the lower court to reconsider the issues.
No longer able to defer to the federal government’s views on the question, the Fourth Circuit likely will be required to confront directly the unresolved issue of whether and how the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in education, known as Title IX, applies to transgender individuals.
President Donald Trump called together top advisers, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions and strategist Steve Bannon, as the White House faced a furor over the president’s claims he had been wiretapped by his predecessor.
President Trump’s preference for business and military leaders has marginalized a group long at the capital’s levers of power: lawyers. Just three of his 16 cabinet picks have law degrees, a sharp drop from the four previous administrations.
“Nothing about today’s action changes the meaning of the law. Title IX and the Constitution protect Gavin and other transgender students from discrimination,” said Joshua Block, an ACLU attorney representing Gavin. “This is a detour, not the end of the road, and we’ll continue to fight for Gavin and other transgender people to ensure that they are treated with the dignity and respect they deserve.”
The Gloucester County school board said in a statement, “On remand to the lower courts, the board looks forward to explaining why its common-sense restroom and locker-room policy is legal under the Constitution and federal law.”
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The other day she was wearing white for women's suffarge now it is red for some other women's thing.
Am I the only one getting tired of this "s":
https://www.yahoo.com/style/the-hidden-meaning-behind-hillary-clintons-pantsuit-162553615.html
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http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/03/gender-reversal-teaches-uncomfortable-lessons.html
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Transgender Wins International Women’s Weightlifting Title
"Laurel Hubbard, a 39 year-old transgender who was born male, won her first international women’s weightlifting title in Australia breaking four national records in the process.
Hubbard beat the competition by 19 kilograms.
The New Zealand Herald reported:
Kiwi weightlifter Laurel Hubbard has dominated her first major competition, taking out the Australian International in Melbourne on a night she made history as the first transgender athlete to represent New Zealand.
Hubbard, 39, won the women’s over 90kg division at the Melbourne event, setting four unofficial national records in the process. Hubbard lifted a combined total of 268kg – 19kg better than silver medallist Iuniarra Sipaia of Samoa.
Australia’s Kaitlyn Fassina claimed the bronze medal with 223kg.
Hubbard looked visibly emotional as she lined up behind dais awaiting the official medal presentation. But she kept the tears at bay, smiling and waving as she stood atop the podium.
Earlier this month the Herald revealed Hubbard had been selected to make her international debut at the competition after usurping Rio Olympian Tracey Lambrechs at the top of the division."
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/03/transgender-wins-international-womens-weightlifting-title/
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He also won the peeing for distance women's championship.
Transgender Wins International Women’s Weightlifting Title
"Laurel Hubbard, a 39 year-old transgender who was born male, won her first international women’s weightlifting title in Australia breaking four national records in the process.
Hubbard beat the competition by 19 kilograms.
The New Zealand Herald reported:
Kiwi weightlifter Laurel Hubbard has dominated her first major competition, taking out the Australian International in Melbourne on a night she made history as the first transgender athlete to represent New Zealand.
Hubbard, 39, won the women’s over 90kg division at the Melbourne event, setting four unofficial national records in the process. Hubbard lifted a combined total of 268kg – 19kg better than silver medallist Iuniarra Sipaia of Samoa.
Australia’s Kaitlyn Fassina claimed the bronze medal with 223kg.
Hubbard looked visibly emotional as she lined up behind dais awaiting the official medal presentation. But she kept the tears at bay, smiling and waving as she stood atop the podium.
Earlier this month the Herald revealed Hubbard had been selected to make her international debut at the competition after usurping Rio Olympian Tracey Lambrechs at the top of the division."
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/03/transgender-wins-international-womens-weightlifting-title/
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"He also won the peeing for distance women's championship."
:lol: :lol: :lol:
-
He also won the peeing for distance women's championship.
Transgender Wins International Women’s Weightlifting Title
"He also won the peeing for distance women's championship."
:lol: :lol: :lol:
The lunacy is far from over.
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http://dailycaller.com/2017/04/11/ruth-bader-ginsburg-refers-to-lindsey-graham-as-one-of-the-women-of-the-senate-video/
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http://dailycaller.com/2017/04/11/ruth-bader-ginsburg-refers-to-lindsey-graham-as-one-of-the-women-of-the-senate-video/
She gets something right every so often. This would be one of those times.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/02/water-changing-sexuality-says-lib-dem-candidate/
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https://pjmedia.com/parenting/2017/06/07/parents-horrified-by-drag-queen-performance-at-grade-school-talent-show/
The left's new "normal".
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"The mother explained that "the school district told me the performance was about LGBT awareness," but her problem is not with the LGBT movement."
A performance that would make the National Geographic magazine proud!
Just think of the wonderful role model this was for all those children who do not know what sex they are.
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http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2015/06/15145/
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https://www.theodysseyonline.com/no-dont-have-to-tell-you-im-trans-before-dating-you
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http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2725601-paulie-malignaggi-tells-conor-mcgregor-to-post-full-video-from-sparring-session?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=mma
https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/20294134_1544062402281222_5572175229840374916_n.jpg?oh=f15a7e3352b98bc9e4cb3b91a3d460d1&oe=59F13F1B
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http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/08/04/planned-parenthood-wants-to-preschoolers-to-know-gender-and-sex-arent-same.html
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http://www.bizpacreview.com/2016/03/25/american-college-of-pediatrics-reaches-decision-transgenderism-of-children-is-child-abuse-321212
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"http://www.bizpacreview.com/2016/03/25/american-college-of-pediatrics-reaches-decision-transgenderism-of-children-is-child-abuse-321212"
We will not see one iota of this in MSM.
I am sure the psychological association would disagree, but they are run by progressives and gays. From the apa webiste:
" A psychological state is considered a mental disorder only if it causes significant distress or disability. Many transgender people do not experience their gender as distressing or disabling, which implies that identifying as transgender does not constitute a mental disorder. For these individuals, the significant problem is finding affordable resources, such as counseling, hormone therapy, medical procedures and the social support necessary to freely express their gender identity and minimize discrimination. Many other obstacles may lead to distress, including a lack of acceptance within society, direct or indirect experiences with discrimination, or assault. These experiences may lead many transgender people to suffer with anxiety, depression or related disorders at higher rates than nontransgender persons.
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), people who experience intense, persistent gender incongruence can be given the diagnosis of "gender dysphoria." Some contend that the diagnosis inappropriately pathologizes gender noncongruence and should be eliminated. Others argue that it is essential to retain the diagnosis to ensure access to care. The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is under revision and there may be changes to its current classification of intense persistent gender incongruence as "gender identity disorder."
Using their definition Josef Stalin would not have been someone who could be diagnosed with any kind of mental disorder.
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http://freebeacon.com/national-security/average-transgender-soldier-unable-deploy-238-days/
Average Transgender Soldier Unable to Deploy for 238 Days
White House military ban to be based on deployability
BY: Elizabeth Harrington
August 24, 2017 1:20 pm
The average transgender soldier will spend 238 days recovering from sex change surgeries and unavailable to deploy, according to an Obama administration study.
The Trump administration's transgender ban places deployability as a determining factor into whether to admit transgender individuals into the military. The White House outlined guidelines to implement the ban within six months in a memo to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
The ability to be deployed to war zones or bases around the world is an issue for transgender soldiers who undergo taxpayer-funded sex change operations, according to a study by the RAND Corporation.
The 2016 study was commissioned by the Obama administration, which favored opening the ranks to transgender individuals, and funded by the office of former secretary of defense Ash Carter.
The study found that, on average, transgender troops seeking basic sex-change operations would be nondeployable for 238 days, or 34 weeks out of a year. The figure amounts to 65 percent of one year.
"These constraints typically include a postoperative recovery period that would prevent any work and a period of restricted physical activity that would prevent deployment," the RAND study states.
"We note that these estimates do not account for any additional time required to determine medical fitness to deploy," the RAND study added. "Army guidelines, for example, do not permit deployment within six weeks of surgery."
The RAND study reported that male-to-female surgeries would cost 210 days of nondeployability, including medical leave and medical disability periods.
Breast augmentation and mammoplasty, which can include breast implants, would result in troops being unable to work for one week, up to six weeks of restricted physical activity, and up to 60 days of medical disability. The RAND study said breast augmentation would result in 75 days a servicemember could not be deployed.
Genital surgeries require a longer recovery period. RAND reported that a transgender person getting an orchiectomy, the surgical removal of the testicles, or a vaginoplasty, the construction of a vagina, would be nondeployable for 135 days.
Nondeployable time for male-to-female genital surgeries includes four to six weeks of no work; eight-plus weeks restricted physical activity; up to 45 days medical leave; and up to 90 days medical disability.
Sue Fulton, the former president of Sparta, a military organization for LGBTQ individuals, told the Wall Street Journal that transgender individuals are "just as deployable as other service members," and compared the time off to undergoing a gall bladder surgery.
"Other service members may undergo procedures when they are at home base, just as other service members schedule shoulder surgery or gall bladder surgery," she said.
Most people return to normal activities 7 to 10 days after undergoing gall bladder surgery.
The RAND study also notes some individuals undergoing sex-change operations "experience postoperative complications that would render them unfit for duty."
The study states that between 6 to 20 percent of biological males receiving a vaginoplasty, or the construction of a vagina, have complications. Up to 25 percent of biological females receiving phalloplasty surgery, or the construction of a penis, have medical complications, RAND said.
RAND found female-to-male transitions on average take longer recovery times, on average 267 days where they cannot be deployed.
The RAND study reported chest surgery, removal of the breasts, results in 75 days of nondeployability, and a hysterectomy leads to 111 days of nondeployability, including three weeks of medical leave and three months of medical disability.
Genital surgeries for female-to-male, including metoidioplasty, a surgery that enlarges the clitoris to surgically create a penis, and phalloplasty, the construction of a penis, result in 81 days of nondeployable time.
Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R., Mo.), who supports President Donald Trump's action to ban transgender individuals in the military, says the RAND Corporation estimates are low, because they do not take into account other surgeries that transgender advocates say are "medically necessary."
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health deems other medical procedures, including scrotoplasty, surgery to create a scrotum, facial hair removal, facial plastic reconstruction, hair removal, and voice therapy or surgery, as medically necessary for Gender Dysphoria.
Using the RAND study estimates, Hartzler's office found a significant period of total nondeployable time based on the estimates of how many transgender troops would seek sex reassignments.
As the Washington Free Beacon previously reported, transgender surgeries would cost the Pentagon $1.3 billion over 10 years, assuming roughly 8,200 transgender troops undergo taxpayer-funded sex-change operations.
By taking the low estimate from the RAND study of nondeployable time of 210 days, the 8,213 surgical transitions would lead to a total 1,724,730 days of nondeployable time, or 4,725 years.
RAND recommended that the military allow transgender individuals to serve openly and estimated that transgender surgeries would only cost between $2.4 million to $8.4 million per year.
Given that transgender surgeries cost an average of $132,000, according to CNN, the RAND study assumes only 18 to 63 transgender troops would seek taxpayer-funded surgeries.
The RAND cost estimate is significantly lower because it does not account for actual costs of transgender surgeries, but only the cost increase in private health insurance premiums for plans that cover transgender services. The military does not have private health insurance.
The White House directive to Secretary Mattis mainly applies to new recruits and gives the Pentagon the discretion of expelling current transgender service members based on deployability. The memo also instructs the Pentagon to stop paying for transgender medical treatment for those currently serving.
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Well they could all be re-assigned to be the security detail for Obama and his family.
Of course after the tax payers pay for their surgery.
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http://dailysignal.com/2017/10/30/ugly-truth-sex-reassignment-transgender-lobby-doesnt-want-know/?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MorningBell%22&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTW1Sa1pUaGlaV1poWmpWaSIsInQiOiJwZXFRcWtHekVFTGdYdmVSRk1CQTJVa3psSEtGcHNlWFF1R1h6Z3Y4dWlPVHdCOG5MN2h6V1wveFg4Q2UyKzlWelo3c0RISG4xZDE0SUpFNmtJWkczZ3JQaFZVNXppU3UxellPVEtsZ2JISEdpVTNqbUgwYVNjQlZmSFVDUUlDRDIifQ%3D%3D
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http://dailysignal.com/2018/02/08/transgender-ideology-riddled-contradictions-big-ones/?%20%20utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MorningBell%22&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTXpBNFlXVmpZV1pqTkRRdyIsInQiOiJtQTcrVFEydFRsWTNTRFVRb3lRdXY3SkJ6Y0t4R3lSa1FMazhwb01QV3R1c25RS2duYjVQMWNZcXdjd01sMVJOR0xmWlwvVWNRa2djb1N0b0l4QzZhRll0VGJxTUlGOFV6UkdKYU1uNVhYZHR1N3BmejFkYXdMbUVISHBtRE9peWoifQ%3D%3D
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for doctors to oppose parents refusing to go along with recommended treatment now it has morphed into giving estrogen and the rest. Lord, couldn't this wait one more yr till this kid is 18 and he or she or whichever could give own consent ? If I were a parent I don't know if I could go along with this either.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/02/19/parents-lose-custody-of-daughter-for-opposing-transgender-medical-treatments/
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(http://ace.mu.nu/archives/gender%20fluid%2003.jpg)
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGqITiXK42M
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https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/executive-summary-sexuality-and-gender
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Vote now. Should we take the L out of LBGT
(or LBGTQ and several other add on letters?
https://www.wnd.com/2018/07/lesbians-demand-l-be-removed-from-lgbt/
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Vote now. Should we take the L out of LBGT
(or LBGTQ and several other add on letters?
https://www.wnd.com/2018/07/lesbians-demand-l-be-removed-from-lgbt/
The left always devours it's self.
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"Lesbians argue they are women attracted to women and there’s no room for men who claim they are women."
It's a coalition of the intolerant, men-haters joining with men, women haters with women, the Sharia law crowd with Jews and gays, jihadis with atheists, could possibly go wrong? It's the bi's I don't understand. They need to make up their mind before they join the group.
We lost the word gay to the movement, now we lost the word proud /pride. Do we have to rename electrical and plumbing parts next? Calling one part that fits inside another part male and female is from another century. Try explaining that's the only way they fit together to a gay customer at the hardware store . That isn't even how people reproduce anymore.
Was it Spangler writing about NATO, don't throw away all these institutions that got us where we are. Made me think of the old days when marriage was when a man and woman became a husband and wife and parents had monosyllabic names like Mom and Dad. Just putting those memories on the internet will probably get me kicked off the vice presidential finalist list.
Love the One You're With.
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"Lesbians argue they are women attracted to women and there’s no room for men who claim they are women."
It's a coalition of the intolerant, men-haters joining with men, women haters with women, the Sharia law crowd with Jews and gays, jihadis with atheists, could possibly go wrong? It's the bi's I don't understand. They need to make up their mind before they join the group.
We lost the word gay to the movement, now we lost the word proud /pride. Do we have to rename electrical and plumbing parts next? Calling one part that fits inside another part male and female is from another century. Try explaining that's the only way they fit together to a gay customer at the hardware store . That isn't even how people reproduce anymore.
Was it Spangler writing about NATO, don't throw away all these institutions that got us where we are. Made me think of the old days when marriage was when a man and woman became a husband and wife and parents had monosyllabic names like Mom and Dad. Just putting those memories on the internet will probably get me kicked off the vice presidential finalist list.
Love the One You're With.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6Ybkd_beUU
It's not about the truth, it' about power.
How many fingers?
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Lets teach children to be gay before they even hit puberty! Sorry this is outrageous:
children don't know they are gay .
https://www.westernjournal.com/gay-couple-create-sex-doll/
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https://www.theblaze.com/news/gay-man-impregnates-transgender-partner-who-identifies-as-male-but-alas-was-born-a-female?utm_content=bufferc443e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=glennbeck
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https://pjmedia.com/trending/a-transgender-hero-breaks-ranks/?fbclid=IwAR2Ronz8OrZKHb700lmFD8jfsTKVSIBKEQM8R4HrnVQDdOPezYzh4a-Qc3Q
A Transgender Hero Breaks Ranks
By Bruce Bawer February 13, 2019
chat 162 comments
(Shutterstock photo)
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
– T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”
Even though it’s still young, the transgender movement has occasioned many bizarre and horrific stories. But even in that company, the saga of Jamie Shupe stands out.
Born in 1963, Shupe has been married to his wife, Sandy, for three decades; they have a daughter. He spent eighteen years (1982-2000) in the U.S. Army. In 2013 he began identifying as a transgender woman, claiming that he had struggled for years with a deep sense of being different and had been harassed in the military because he was perceived as gay. After declaring that he was a woman, he “lived for a year in Pittsburgh, got hormone treatments and a name change,” but never had a sex-change operation. Finding Pittsburgh inhospitable for a trans woman, he relocated to Portland, Oregon, where he continued living as a woman for another two years. In 2015, the New York Times profiled Shupe as part of a splashy, upbeat series celebrating “transgender lives.”
“I have effectively traded my white male privilege to become one of America’s most hated minorities,” Shupe lamented in the full-page Times testimony. “I now live in a world where radical, conservative politicians and religious groups routinely attack my very existence with legislation to deny me basic human rights such as a bathroom that matches my gender-identity….I am a transgender woman. My civil rights are fragile. I live in daily fear in a country that claims world leadership. And my trans brothers and sisters are forced to serve their nation in silence.”
The next year, however, Shupe made another change. Now rejecting the idea that he was a woman, he petitioned the Oregon courts to be officially recognized as non-binary. In a June 2016 ruling, a Multnomah County judge, Amy Holmes Hehn, declared that Shupe’s sex was “hereby changed from female to non-binary.” The ruling made international news because Shupe was the first person in the U.S. to be legally recognized as non-binary.
Sponsored
In reporting this breakthrough, USA Today said that according to Shupe, his “three years of living like a woman were nearly as painful as those spent as a man.” Shupe told the newspaper that as a trans woman he had felt pressured “to maintain a hyper-feminine appearance 24-7”; otherwise, “you were back to getting called sir.” A year later Rod Kackley, writing at PJ Media, reported that Shupe planned “to be at the front of the line to apply for a new Oregon driver’s license” on which his non-binary status would be officially recorded. Kackley quoted Shupe as telling NBC News: “I've trembled with the fear of failure and cried tears until I had no more tears to cry, because of the magnitude of what's been at stake — and now won.”
Shupe’s journey from male to female to non-binary made him a darling of the mainstream and gay media and of the trans and gay establishments. (Since same-sex marriage became the law of the land, many gay-activist groups have focused almost entirely on carrying water for the trans lobby.) Following the Oregon court ruling, the Guardian ran a piece by Shupe in which he declared that the U.S. “desperately needed a third sex classification of non-binary for all of the people such as myself that simply do not fit into the existing binary system of just male or female. As a transgender person who was forced to live as a male for nearly 50 years, and who then electively lived as a female for the following three years to alleviate my gender dysphoria, I have discovered that I am healthiest and best served by not being forcibly classified as either male or female against my will.”
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But that wasn’t the end of Shupe’s story. In a July 2017 article, he expressed concern about the potential impact of his court ruling on “the future of transgender children.” He argued that such kids need “societal change,” not “surgical procedures” or “cross-sex hormones” or sterilization. In an radio interview at about the same time, Shupe supported a bathroom-privacy ballot initiative. Trans activists who had been his allies began to think twice. And Lambda Legal, the nation’s premier gay-rights law firm, which had agreed to help him obtain a gender-neutral passport, dropped him as a client. In a letter, which I have seen, dated August 1, two Lambda lawyers explained to Shupe that he had “taken a position contrary to, and irreconcilable with, Lambda Legal’s organizational interests, the transgender clients we currently represent in other legal matters, and members of the transgender community at large,” and that the firm had therefore concluded “that it is necessary for us to terminate our relationship.”
This didn’t silence Shupe. Writing in August 2017 for the Federalist, he stated that while he was a “staunch advocate for open transgender military service,” he opposed “all the nutty elements of transgenderism that insist on cutting off healthy body parts, claiming they’re ‘confirming their genders.’” In April 2018, he reaffirmed his view that the military was right to ban people who’d had sex-change surgery or wanted to. He admitted that even as the media had been patting him on the back for his brave proclamation of trans identity, the hormone treatments and other procedures he’d undergone as part of his M-to-F transition had not made him more psychologically whole but had accomplished the opposite.
“As the patient and recipient of these unscientifically proven treatments, and as a guinea pig for the toxic ideology that one can change his or her sex,” Shupe wrote, “I’ve come to believe the whole transition process is tragically and fatally flawed. The proof is in the suicide statistics and the rampant suicidal ideation.” Last September he again bucked the trans party line, this time by expressing support for a Brown University study that attributed the relatively new phenomenon of Rapid-Onset Gender Disorder to “social contagion” (e.g. peer pressure or media influence); in a December piece he argued against permitting male-to-female transsexuals to use ladies’ rooms.
Obviously Shupe was a non-binary person with a difference. So it didn’t come as a total surprise when, on January 26 of this year, he posted the following statement on his website: “I believe that gender identity is a fraud perpetrated by psychiatry, the likes of something the United States and other nations hasn’t experienced since the lobotomy era. As a result, I have returned to my male birth sex.” He announced that he had lived in Ocala, Florida, since July of last year and that, on the previous day, he had been issued a Florida driver’s license identifying him as a male. “In my thirty plus year marriage,” he went on to say,
I am the husband. To my daughter, I am her Father. I no longer identify as a transgender or non-binary person and renounce all ties to transgenderism.
I will not be a party to advancing harmful gender ideologies that are ruining lives, causing deaths and contributing to the sterilization and mutilation of gender-confused children.
My history-making and landmark sex change to non-binary was a fraud based on the pseudoscience of gender identity. I am and have always been male. There should be no social or legal penalty for others to state that.
In addition to supporting the President’s ban on gender dysphoria in the military, I also support President Trump’s policy of recognizing and enforcing that there are only two biological sexes, male and female.
Whereas Shupe’s declaration that he was trans and, later, non-binary had earned him widespread media attention, the response to his renunciation of trans ideology has been met, he told to me by e-mail the other day, with “[t]otal silence” from the mass media. “When I won that court decision,” he recalled, “I had ten days of nonstop media frenzy from every big media company. It tapered down over 18 months.” But now, although he had contacted some of the same major outlets that had previously been so eager to tell his story, he had not gotten a nibble of interest: “As long as you're advancing transgenderism, they want to talk to you. The second you say something negative, they disappear.”
But Shupe isn’t disappearing. He’s posted an extensive online archive of articles, by himself and others, that challenge transgender ideology. (In our e-mail exchange, he told me that he’d “had to rebuild” the archive and move it to another site because “[a] trans activist got it shut down.”) This month, moreover, he began posting an autobiography serially at the Medium website. It’s a truly remarkable document, revealing the story behind the story.
And what a story! Countless media, along with a parade of therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists, had bought readily into the claim that Shupe was really a woman in a man’s body – and, then, that he was non-binary. The plain truth is that Shupe is a married man who was sexually active with a great many women before his marriage and who, while in the Army, discovered that he was turned on by cross-dressing and by fantasies of being a woman sexually penetrated by a male. When, after leaving the military, Shupe experienced paranoia and engaged in compulsive and destructive behavior, he and his wife recognized that he had urgent psychiatric issues; but when he sought out help, he received incompetent treatment and wasn’t given “a firm diagnosis.” Desperate for answers, he looked online, “scouring mental health articles and related websites.” And what happened? He stumbled upon material about “gender identity disorder, gender dysphoria, and transsexualism” – and decided he was a “trans woman.”
Thus began his path of self-reinvention. Forget the pretense that patients don’t get approved for transsexual treatment until after they’ve been through extensive psychological evaluations: when Shupe presented himself for the first time at a clinic, a doctor there “immediately affirmed my new identity as a woman” and wrote a hormone prescription. Shupe later met with his share of psychiatrists and therapists, but his account of their interactions mostly confirms my own view of these professions at their worst. To be sure, one gutsy psychiatrist – who supervised Shupe’s therapist – dared to venture the opinion that Shupe was not really a woman; but all Shupe had to do was get up, leave the room, and find some other practitioner who was prepared to give him the instant confirmation – and meds – he believed he needed. Meanwhile VA doctors compliantly prescribed drugs that scrambled his emotions and harmed his body.
Eventually, however, Shupe agreed with that defiant psychiatrist: he wasn’t a woman. He recognized that he’d been “equating femininity with being female” and that he’d felt obliged to put on constant displays of “hyper-femininity” in order to affirm his ersatz femaleness. Yet instead of reclaiming his male identity – and thereby admitting he’d made a mistake – he came up with the “non-binary” stratagem. Telling the two doctors who were then treating him – one at the VA, and the other at the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) – that he had no expectation of “ever resembling a cisgender female,” he asked them for letters affirming his “non-binary status.”
Both came through with flying colors. His VA doctor wrote a letter affirming that “Jamie’s gender identity and expression does not fit the current simplistic binary model of male or female. Therefore, I support Jamie in deciding for themselves [sic] what gender identity most closely reflects their [sic] reality.…To force Jamie into identifying as male or female soley [sic] is not only limiting and inaccurate but is also detrimental to Jamie’s self-expression and pursuit of happiness which is a basic human and constitutional right.” Shupe’s OHSU doctor, for her part, wrote a letter declaring that Shupe had “had appropriate clinical treatment to the new gender of non-binary.” In a private note to Shupe, she assured him that “[g]ender identity is your identity, not society's, and I'm happy to support you in this.”
Of the two doctors, Shupe now says: “These two would have let me transition into being a cat.”
Shupe wanted to have the letters to buttress his case for being declared “non-binary.” But Judge Hehn, according to him, didn’t even bother to look at them before making her historic ruling. Shupe shared with me an e-mail, purportedly sent to him by his lawyer prior to the court appearance, telling him that Hehn is the mother of a transgender child. Shupe believes to this day that this is why she ruled as she did. He also says that in the months before and after the ruling he was psychotic, suffering from both visual and auditory hallucinations. As evidence, he shared with me an e-mail about paranormal experiences that he wrote at the time to one journalist who had covered his case. “They all knew I was nuts,” he now says about these media people, “and hid it.” Did his doctors know it, too, when they wrote those letters?
In any event, “non-binary” proved not to be a good fit for Shupe, either. On January 25 of this year, he finally threw in the towel, deciding that he could “be a feminine male and wear women's clothing as a male” without having to “hide behind a female or non-binary identity.” In short, after that years-long, emotionally exhausting, and financially costly roller-coaster ride through Transworld, Shupe finally faced up to the fact that he’s just neither a female nor a non-binary person – or, for that matter, a cat, a duck, or an armoire – in a man’s body. He says he’s probably bisexual; it sounds to me as if he’s a straight guy with a couple of kinks.
Whatever he is, he could have kept this ultimate revelation to himself and remained an LGBTQIAPK hero. But – bravely, in my opinion – he felt a need to spill the beans about the truth behind the media story, in large part because he didn’t want to continue sending a misleading, destructive message of triumphant transformation to gender-confused children. While he was still identifying as non-binary, he was giving lectures to kids who thought they were trans, and was telling them to embrace that identity but not to leap into surgery. He now feels, as he puts it, that “these kids should be celebrated for persevering against gender dysphoria rather than be celebrated for succumbing to it.”
At first denied “a firm diagnosis,” Shupe has since been given several: in addition to gender dysphoria, he’s been told at various times that he has bipolar disorder, PTSD, and borderline personality disorder. It’s painful to reflect that Shupe could had been spared all this turmoil and notoriety, and all these visits to clinics and courthouses, if he’d ever been treated by one competent and courageous psychiatrist who went below the surface in search of a solid diagnosis, initiated appropriate treatment, and put the brakes on all the reckless, destructive medical procedures. And, of course, if it had not been so easy for Shupe, when confronted with an uncooperative practitioner who did question his self-diagnosis, to find some quack who’d play along. But in these days when all too many members of the mental-health professions are desperately eager to affirm that a patient is indeed a case of wrong-mind-in-the-wrong-body – and who needs invasive surgery stat – that’s obviously too much to ask.
Some readers may fault Shupe here. Indeed, he faults himself, feeling guilty about the expense he’s put taxpayers to and the pernicious ideology he helped promote. I don’t agree with him here. Shupe was a man – a veteran! – who needed serious professional help and who was failed by a medical-care system that’s embraced an inane, deadly trend with little or no basis in scientific fact. Here’s hoping that his story makes it past the MSM censors and gets out there where it can do some good. If it manages to persuade just a few doctors and therapists not to move so fast when approving of trans treatment – including the crimes of prescribing puberty blockers to perfectly healthy children, and taking a scalpel to perfectly healthy genitalia and gonads – it may well save lives.
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https://ricochet.com/597254/breasts/
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http://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=381711
Predatory business practices.
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wait till we start seeing bills making Pride day a National Holiday. It is coming.
people will love it . another excuse not to work for a day and to stuff hotdogs and ribs in one's face while
Retail will have another day of 15 % off sales and every other employer gets screwed.
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http://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=381711
Predatory business practices.
https://pjmedia.com/parenting/cartoon-network-promotes-pride-month-because-the-powerpuff-girls-are-gay-or-something/
I'm so old, I remember when homosexuals recruiting children was a right wing myth.
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https://www.dailywire.com/news/48969/gallup-americans-still-greatly-overestimate-us-gay-james-barrett?utm_medium=email&utm_content=062919-news&utm_campaign=position5
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Come to think of it , surprised we haven't seen recruiting gays from around the world to come to Us and claim asylum
so as to increase the numbers .
they could hit two birds with one stone . - more gays and democrats.
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Come to think of it , surprised we haven't seen recruiting gays from around the world to come to Us and claim asylum
so as to increase the numbers .
they could hit two birds with one stone . - more gays and democrats.
Gays won't be Democrats after they learn to read the genetic code of the unborn and liberals start aborting them.
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ccp: from the comments
" cheetah who [identifies as] human sets world record in the 100 yr dash!"
maybe you "had to be there" but I thought this a riot . :-D
-----------------
There are real victims in their policies, but when will the Left notice people are laughing at them.
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https://theintercept.com/2020/07/14/cancel-culture-martina-navratilova-documentary/
Long, don't read the whole thing.
Many of the great women athletes are lesbians. Women's sports are potentially destroyed by new, non-binary thinking, what we might call men identifying as women. Non-binary identifying binary. Speak out against the destruction of women's sports and face cancel culture. Left against left dissonance and war. Where does it end?
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-8673141/Mother-realized-gay-time-husband-came-transgender.html
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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2001/sep/09/gm.food
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That is from 2001. What has happened in the last 20 years?
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That is from 2001. What has happened in the last 20 years?
Exactly.
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https://nypost.com/2021/07/11/the-details-of-barkevious-mingos-indecency-with-child-charge/
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/394732.php
Had enough of this?
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https://archive.fo/yVDDf
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Greatest female? swimmer:
(https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd98052be-4c19-46fc-9670-42a24982df05_5568x3712.jpeg)
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/watching-lia-thomas-win?utm_source=url
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https://populistpress.com/u-s-soccer-caves-agrees-to-24-million-equal-pay-settlement-womens-team/
does woman's soccer bring in more money?
maybe yes
and maybe due to they have won more then the men according to this quick google search
though the details are described as complicated:
https://firehydrantoffreedom.com/index.php?action=post;topic=490.600;last_msg=142978
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https://populistpress.com/u-s-soccer-caves-agrees-to-24-million-equal-pay-settlement-womens-team/
does woman's soccer bring in more money?
maybe yes
and maybe due to they have won more then the men according to this quick google search
though the details are described as complicated:
https://firehydrantoffreedom.com/index.php?action=post;topic=490.600;last_msg=142978
If it's all equal, meaning same, why don't these women play in the men's league? Are they not equal?
Pass the ERA and having separate leagues or keeping men out of women's leagues or any gender distinction will be illegal unconstitutional.
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/398378.php
I thought the science was settled.
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https://www.conservativereview.com/f-you-school-district-staffers-reportedly-middle-school-guidance-counselors-on-leave-after-apparently-flipping-off-anti-lbgtq-folks-in-video-2657041325.html
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I am so far from being able to understand this story that I should not comment. The smartest people in the world don't know what a woman is. Good grief.
What is trans or female or even in question about a dude with male genitalia? He identifies the other way, so what? While you were identifying, the biologists and sports judges deem you male. Have penis, no uterus, done. I thought he was a former male and still didn't see how that makes him her eligible for women's sports. What did I miss?
Coach says get over it.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/04/father-claims-upenn-told-female-swimmers-to-get-over-seeing-lia-thomas-male-genitalia-in-the-locker-room/
At some point aren't the identify people going piss off the lesbians, who like straight women deserve the right to play women's sports, if there still is such a thing.
Or is all this unspeakable?
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I'm so old, I remember when we'd arrest guys who exposed their penises to women/girls in a women's locker room.
I am so far from being able to understand this story that I should not comment. The smartest people in the world don't know what a woman is. Good grief.
What is trans or female or even in question about a dude with male genitalia? He identifies the other way, so what? While you were identifying, the biologists and sports judges deem you male. Have penis, no uterus, done. I thought he was a former male and still didn't see how that makes him her eligible for women's sports. What did I miss?
Coach says get over it.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/04/father-claims-upenn-told-female-swimmers-to-get-over-seeing-lia-thomas-male-genitalia-in-the-locker-room/
At some point aren't the identify people going piss off the lesbians, who like straight women deserve the right to play women's sports, if there still is such a thing.
Or is all this unspeakable?
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https://www.history.com/news/stonewall-riots-timeline?cmpid=email-hist-inside-history-2022-0627-06272022&om_rid=&~campaign=hist-inside-history-2022-0627
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https://konstantinkisin.substack.com/p/review-what-is-a-woman?s=r
The more "schooling" they have in "gender studies", the less they know about gender.
Perfect example of where yesterday's kindergartner knows more than today's PhD.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/sen-hawley-debating-berkeley-law-professor-pregnant-men-blows-up-twitter
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it seems in both examples above the
liberal response when they cannot answer with logic is
to then fall back and say
if you do not agree, people will commit suicide! thus you are a murderer by default
this totally illogical but logic never has stopped a lib before.
I am so frustrated and frankly disgusted with seeing all these MDs just jumping on this nutjob band wagon like baby ducks following a hen .
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https://townhall.com/columnists/johnullyot/2023/06/04/time-to-end-gay-pride-month-n2624038
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https://hotair.com/david-strom/2023/10/12/the-true-story-of-matthew-shepard-it-wasnt-homophobia-that-killed-him-n584404
It was a gay lover and a meth motive that killed him, not homophobia.
For all the biggest problems the Left thinks we face, they have to make up examples to support them.
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wow , I did not recall the *true story*
thank you Doug for clarification
Funny how LEFT gay mob still trying to celebrate the anniversary for a totally bogus reason
Even the dope in chief is playing (the audience are fools ) game :
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/joe-biden-had-this-to-say-on-the-25th-anniversary-of-the-murder-of-matthew-shepard/ar-AA1iajg3
definitely FAKE NEWS!
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I generally dislike this source as they reliably embrace most “Progressive” tropes and embrace a frothing case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. I follow ‘em nonetheless primarily for their counterpoints as they can at least aptly articulate their beliefs, which is more than I can say about most “Progressives.”
And, unlike most “Progressives,” Just Security condemns in no uncertain terms the “gender apartheid” imposed on women by Islamic regimes. Here they take Iran to task over its Orwellian imposition of sanctioned garb and chastity upon women, complete with a “police” force and network of informers focused on the enforcement of these ridiculous edicts:
Iran’s Hijab and Chastity Bill Underscores the Need to Codify Gender Apartheid
Just Security / by Shadi Sadr / Apr 11, 2024 at 9:08 AM
The United Nations Sixth Committee has just concluded deliberating on the draft convention on crimes against humanity. Several states have underscored the necessity of incorporating “gender apartheid” into the list of crimes against humanity outlined in the draft. As the Islamic Republic of Iran intensifies its gender apartheid policies and laws, it serves as a stark reminder of the urgent need to criminalize such gender-based violations under international law.
Iran’s Newest Gender Restriction
The 70-article Hijab and Chastity Bill is nearing its final steps to become law in Iran. It targets not only women who defy mandatory Islamic veiling rules but would also impact import companies and the textile, fashion, tourism, and hospitality industries, which provide goods and services to such women. According to the bill, by doing so, these industries promote a culture of ‘nudity, unchastity, being without hijab, or with a loose hijab’ and shall be subject to punishment ranging from monetary fines to the loss of their licenses.
The bill was a reaction from the authorities to the popular uprising known as the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, sparked by the death of 22-year-old Kurdish woman Jina Mahsa Amini while in the custody of the morality police for not properly wearing the Islamic veil. Despite a brutal crackdown, women’s widespread defiance of the veiling rules has persisted.
Initiated by the government, the bill passed through parliament in an extraordinarily expedited process and has encountered some back-and-forth with the Guardian Council. This body ensures that legislation aligns with Islamic rules and the Constitution. As soon as the Guardian Council is satisfied with the revisions currently being made by Parliament, the bill will become part of Iran’s laws and be enforced.
The bill will increase gender-segregated spaces and surveillance resources. Punishments for women not wearing the Islamic hijab in public will escalate to five to ten years in prison. It criminalizes actions from posting unveiled photos on social media to protesting hijab rules or collaborating with foreign media and governments against mandatory hijab laws. Celebrities breaking the law face severe penalties, and business owners could face fines, closure, and license revocation. The bill also allocates a significant budget to establish a central hub within the Ministry of Interior, to which ministries, state organs, and law enforcement agencies must report their compliance with the Hijab and Chastity regulation.
Security forces and police would be charged with identifying those without hijab in public or online, forwarding their cases to judicial authorities. Surveillance will expand through both human and artificial intelligence, with ‘Hijab Watchers’ and CCTV cameras monitoring public spaces. The watchers’ reports, along with CCTV footage, would be matched with government databases to identify women. Surveillance would extend to vehicle registrations and fines for unveiled women would be automatically deducted from their bank accounts,with text notifications and appeal options provided. Women’s bank accounts could be easily discovered through an inquiry to the Central Bank.
Even before the bill’s official enactment, many of these measures are already employed against women challenging the veiling rules. A notable recent incident involved a young woman in Qom being filmed by a cleric for her loosely worn hijab. The video capturing the tense confrontation between her and the cleric has gone viral, sparking nationwide outrage. Yet, authorities arrested four people for distributing the video. The U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Iran has described the new measures imposed on women and girls by the government, and the ‘Hijab and Chastity Bill’ in particular, as a form of gender apartheid. He stated: “authorities appear to be governing through systemic discrimination with the intention of suppressing women and girls into total submission”.
Applying the Parameters of Gender Apartheid in Iran
Gender apartheid has not yet been recognized as an international crime against humanity, nor have its constituting elements. However, by applying the legal framework of racial apartheid to gender apartheid, the End Gender Apartheid‘ campaign suggests the crime of gender apartheid is defined as “inhumane acts…, committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination… by one gender group over another gender group or groups, and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” This definition encapsulates the situation in Iran, where every facet of women’s lives, bodies, and autonomy is affected.
The institutionalized regime of systematic oppression is marked by state-sanctioned control over women’s bodies and agency based on gender, regardless of their other identities such as religion or nationality. Central to this regime are the mandatory hijab and gender segregation. Article 638 of the Islamic Penal Code, which criminalizes defiance of Islamic hijab rules and breaches of gender segregation as sinful or indecent public acts, serves as the cornerstone of this gender-based systematic oppression.
These rules, along with other regulations, empower various entities in workplaces and educational, healthcare, and cultural settings to enforce a broad spectrum of disciplinary actions and restrictions on women who flout mandatory hijab and gender segregation directives. In doing so, they infringe upon women’s human rights, including the rights to personal liberty, security, freedom of movement, and protection from torture and mistreatment, while also undermining their ability to enjoy human rights equally with men. This encompasses rights to education, employment, the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, freedom of movement in public spaces, and participation in recreational and sports activities. Manifestations of these violations include university expulsions, dormitory exclusions, job terminations, and public space bans for improper veiling or for entering male-only spaces.
Inhumane acts, including arbitrary arrests and detention to enforce mandatory hijab and gender segregation, have been widely and persistently employed by authorities in response to resistance against exclusionary policies. These incidents often involve excessive force, humiliation, intimidation, and both verbal and physical abuse, alongside court-ordered fines. In certain cases, women have faced lashing as a cruel punishment after unfair trials. The Iranian authorities’ treatment of women detained for improper hijab has included torture, such as rape and other sexual abuses, sometimes resulting in fatalities. The violence against women for resisting mandatory hijab and gender segregation has inflicted significant suffering and serious injury to their mental or physical health.
Systematic domination by one gender group over another is applied through laws and policies which are deliberately designed to substantiate a hierarchy between men and women and perpetuate structural gender discrimination. These rules control and restrict the behaviour of both men and women and are firmly grounded in ideals of male ‘superiority’ and ‘female inferiority’ along stereotypical gender roles. The Constitution bars women from top political positions, allowing them limited judicial roles requiring male endorsement. Marriage laws set the legal age at 13 for girls and 15 for boys, with children marriagable below these ages with father or paternal grandfather guardian application and court approval. Virgin women need their male guardian’s permission to marry, and only men can pass Iranian nationality to children. Men may have multiple wives and hold absolute authority in the household, including over wives’ residence, employment, and travel. Marital rape is not criminalized, and wives face alimony loss for disobedience of husbands’ sexual desires. Divorce rights heavily favor men and custody laws privilege mothers only for children under 7, shifting to fathers thereafter. Inheritance laws also disadvantage women, granting them significantly smaller shares than men. The Penal Code sets different criminal responsibility ages for boys (15) and girls (9) and values women’s blood money —financial compensation for murder and bodily injuries— and court testimony at half that of men’s.
Intentions of maintaining the apartheid regime against women are evident from the Iranian authorities’ actions and statements. High-ranking officials have repeatedly emphasized that the Islamic Republic’s identity is founded on a dystopian view where gender dictates one’s position within the family, society, and politics, along with access to certain rights. This is enforced through oppressive regulations over women’s bodies and autonomy, and deeply discriminatory laws and practices ensuring male dominance over women.
Furthermore, the development of the Hijab and Chastity Bill by the government, in consultation with the judiciary and passage by Parliament, serves as clear evidence of the Islamic Republic’s commitment to upholding gender apartheid as a governance system. This bill introduces even more restrictive measures and severe penalties for those who challenge the gender-biased laws and segregation policies.
Conclusion
The Islamic Republic of Iran has pursued a Handmaid’s Tale style dystopian Sharia-based system, turning women’s bodies into ideological battlegrounds both privately and publicly. This was aimed at instituting a regime where gender determined one’s status as ‘superior’ or ‘subjugated’. The enforcement of mandatory hijab rules, along with laws deeply discriminatory towards women, was the key strategy used to push women into a ‘second-class position.’ At the same time, gender segregation policies reinforced a social order that, while ensuring male dominance, subjected both men and women to strict control and compliance.
Since the early years after the 1979 revolution, Iranian women have used ‘gender apartheid’ or ‘sexual apartheid’ to describe their plight, drawing parallels with South Africa’s apartheid regime. This comparison emphasized the gravity of their oppression and the need for international intervention similar to that against South African apartheid. Yet, despite global readiness to combat racial oppression, gender-based discrimination in Iran has been largely ignored. The international criminal law and its gatekeepers, who have historically overlooked women’s rights violations, must acknowledge Iran’s oppression, codify gender apartheid as a crime against humanity, and lead the international community to undertake its obligations to end such practices by the Islamic Republic.
IMAGE: An activist displays a placard inscribed with the words “Women, Life, Freedom”, during a demonstration in support of demonstrators in Iran, in front of the Brandenburg Gate lit up with the words “Woman, Life, Freedom” in various languages including Kurdish and Persian, in Berlin on December 13, 2022. (Photo by JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP via Getty Images)
The post Iran’s Hijab and Chastity Bill Underscores the Need to Codify Gender Apartheid appeared first on Just Security.
https://www.justsecurity.org/94504/iran-hijab-bill-gender-apartheid/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=iran-hijab-bill-gender-apartheid
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200205132404.htm#:~:text=But%20even%20with%20roughly%20uniform,with%20time%20and%20with%20purpose.
"Acccording to new research from the University of Utah. Males' upper bodies are built for more powerful punches than females', says the study, published in the Journal of Experimental Biology... For years, Carrier has been exploring the hypothesis that generations of interpersonal male-male aggression long in the past have shaped structures [as if there was no Designer] in human bodies to specialize for success in fighting... It's already known that males' upper bodies, on average, have 75% more muscle mass and 90% more strength than females'. But it's not known why. ... "
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/lifestyle-buzz/i-m-a-bisexual-woman-married-to-a-man-people-questioning-my-sexuality-caused-me-to-come-out-queer-instead/ar-AA1i2bvA?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=ecddb5ed64174b8493751a44c88420ce&ei=17
my own feelings on this:
I don't give a damn.
I don't care to read this endless shit.
Do what you want but I am so tired of endless headlines about this personal crap.
God almighty - we get it already!
Thank you all for listening.... :-D
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Yes, wouldn't it be nice if they would fully exercise their cherished right of privacy.
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Help me think this one through.
There are two SEXES: Male and Female.
When the Woke substitute the word "GENDER" for "SEX" then the camel nose is in the tent for all kinds of verbal misdirection, obfuscation, and sleight of hand.
So maybe our efficient tactic is to reassert the word SEX as in what SEX someone is and not use terms related to whether someone is a "pitcher" or a "catcher"?
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For one thing, it seems that National Review read your post.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/bidens-attack-on-womens-sports/
Is the 'woman' vote paying attention to this. Suburban Moms, Dads too, do you want your daughters' opportunities taken away by boys, men in 'transition'?
At my daughter's high school, 100 girls went out for the tennis team. Maybe more for soccer. Girls' and women's sports are not small matters affecting very few.
The controversy isn't new:
https://search.brave.com/search?q=rene+richards&source=desktop
My question, if there are more than two genders, why do the transition people think they can be in one that isn't theirs? Start your own.
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https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/health/uks-national-health-service-declare-sex-biological-fact-major-shift-gender
[Doug] Rishi Sunak is starting to show signs of positive leadership.
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Hallelujah!
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" Rishi Sunak is starting to show signs of positive leadership."
smarter than many college presidents, at least one Supreme Court Justice, the US President, Head of HHS
and too many more on the crat side.