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Sweden becomes 7th Country To Legalise Same-Sex Marriage!

April 2nd 2009 16:29

CNN reports:

Sweden's parliament on Wednesday approved same-sex marriage legislation, according to the parliament's Web site.

Previously, two people of the same sex could register their partnership, but with this vote, sex will no longer matter when two people want to get married.

The new "sex-neutral" law will take effect on May 1.

Couples who already had a registered partnership can now either stay in that union or transform it into a marriage if they wish, the Web site said.

The "yes" votes numbered 261, while 22 members of parliament voted "no" and 16 chose not to vote.

The Christian Democrats was the only party opposed to the new law.

"Unfortunately this is not an April Fool's Day joke, this is reality," Yvonne Andersson, member of the Swedish parliament for the Christian Democrats, wrote on the party's Web site following the vote.

The party had instead proposed a law that would remove the word "marriage" from Swedish law and replace it with a legally binding union between two persons, thus separating it from the Christian ceremony that the church conducts.

Asa Regner, secretary general of the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education, told CNN that Wednesday's vote meant a very important change in Swedish law.

"This was the last area where same sex couples were treated differently," she said.

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See, I knew that the rest of Scandinavia wouldn't be too far behind Norway...

Yay for Sweden!

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Posted By: Postmodern Critic - Category: No Category

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How should you respond to blatant and unrepentant displays of racism?

March 18th 2009 07:29

Consider this short film, called The Black Rider:

How do you feel about this short film, in particular, the young man's actions?

Did you consider the lady beyond redemption, and hence deserving of being punished for something she did not do? Is it poetic justice for her to suffer financially for her racism? The man might be said to be acting under the belief that desperate times call for desperate measures, but even though we can imagine him feeling better over a) getting rid of her and b) creating an undesirable situation for her, he isn't doing anything to make the situation better.

What are the various ways he could have acted instead?
Perhaps he could have informed her verbally that her comments are offensive and unwelcome instead of listening silently to her misgivings? How could he have done this? Could he have made a brisk but weighty statement to 'shut her up'? How about engaging her in conversation? Too unlikely considering how stubborn people can be in clinging to their prejudices in old age? And yet, are we really to believe that this woman is beyond redemption? Is it appropriate to write her off as too stuck in her ways to bother educating?

What might 'The Black Rider' have said to her, had he attempted to speak? Humanise his race for her by telling her some personal insights of his? Tackle big picture concerns instead? For those of you who are inspired, imagine you are the Rider and write a speech (of whatever length you like) in response to the lady.

Some thoughts upon the silence of others: It is said that it is apathy that allows societal ills such like racism to flourish, so next time you are witness to behaviour which you identify as inappropriate, state your disapproval in a safe but emphatic way. You will change not just your own mindset (for being proactive is inspiring and liberating), but, if you genuinely care about the person who is harming themselves with their inappropriate attitude, you will change them as well. And sometimes it's the realisation that the person on the street can see a better version of you that causes someone lacking better role models to change.

All these thoughts considering, the resolution of the film still makes me laugh.

Which makes them no less worthy of consideration - perhaps even more so, as it's quite an open-ended piece. It earned Pepe Danquart an Oscar for Best Short Film, I believe.

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Posted By: Postmodern Critic - Category: No Category

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Is Attempting To Research Possible Differences In IQ Based On Race Racist?

March 16th 2009 11:13

From here:

Q: Should scientists study race and IQ?
A: NO: Science and society do not benefit

In the first of two opposing commentaries, Steven Rose argues that studies investigating possible links between race, gender and intelligence do no good.

Are there some areas of potential knowledge that scientists should not seek out? Or, if they do, should they keep the knowledge secret, hidden from the hoi polloi? Certainly Francis Bacon, that great theorist of the birth of modern science, thought so. For with knowledge comes power — potentially dangerous power. In his utopian novel The New Atlantis, scholars determined which of their findings were too dangerous to be shared. Modern governments, obsessed with biosecurity, make similar decisions about what can be researched, how, and in what way disseminated. Private companies bind researchers with non-disclosure and confidentiality agreements. Genetic tests for disorders that have no treatment, such as late-stage Alzheimer's, are often not offered for ethical reasons. As Steven Shapin's book The Scientific Life documents, the idea of free, untrammelled and publicly-disseminated research, if it ever corresponded to reality, looks distinctly unrealistic today.
Darwin 200Should scientists study race and IQ? NO: Science and society do not benefit

Online collection.

To meet the canons of scientific enquiry a research project must meet two criteria: first, are the questions that it asks well-founded? Research based on the assumption that burning coal releases phlogiston fails this test. And second, are they answerable with the theoretical and technical tools available? As the eminent immunologist Peter Medawar pointed out, science is the art of the soluble. Further, given that our society already accepts a number of restrictions to the pursuit of knowledge, it is sensible to require that funded research also addresses questions that either contribute to basic scientific understanding, offer new beneficial technological prospects, or aid sound public policy-making. These criteria are, of course, those used by both public and private funding bodies.

So what should we make of the century-old but regularly-recycled call for research aimed at discovering whether there are group differences in intelligence?

These days the 'groups' under consideration are 'race' and 'gender'. But it has not always been so. A hundred and fifty years ago, when Darwin published The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, he regarded it as so self-evident that white Anglo-Saxon upper-class males were the most intelligent as not to need evidence. Half a century ago, at least in Britain, class was the more relevant grouping, leading to eugenic concerns that the genetically inferior workers were outbreeding their superiors. The issue of race and intelligence became prominent in the United States in the late 1960s, perhaps in response to the civil-rights movement. Arthur Jensen's How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement? (A. R. Jensen Harvard Educ. Rev. 39, 1–123; 1969) argued that the deficit in black IQ was too great to be explained by deprivation and must be genetic. Similarly, the sex/gender question, naturalized through most of western scientific history, was thrust into the public domain as part of a backlash against emergent feminism in the 1970s by publications such as The Inevitability of Patriarchy by Steven Goldberg, which argued that men, by grace of their physiology, were 'naturally' more successful than women at whatever society judged to represent success.

The categories judged relevant to the study of group differences are clearly unstable, dependent on social, cultural and political context. No one, to my knowledge, is arguing for research on group differences in intelligence between north and south Welsh (although there are well-established average genetic differences between people living in the two regions). This calls into question the motivation behind looking for such specific group differences in intelligence, sheds doubt on whether such research is well-founded, and begs whether answers could possibly be put to good use. As we shall see, a more thorough look at the field will prove that it fails all three of my criteria for justifiable science.

There is a difficulty in the first instance of measuring 'intelligence'. For around a century, this has been done with the IQ test, originally developed in France as a way of supplementing teachers' assessments of their pupils. In the hands of later psychometricians, the tests became increasingly reified, and seemingly made more scientific by the development of the term 'g' to encapsulate 'crystallized' or 'general intelligence'.

However, except to a small band of dedicated psychometricians, it seems obvious that to try to capture the many forms of socially expressed intelligent behaviour in a single coefficient — and to rank an entire population in a linear mode, like soldiers on parade lined up by height — excludes most richly intelligent human activities. Social intelligence, emotional intelligence, the intelligent hands of the craftsman or the intelligent intuition of the scientist all elude the 'g' straightjacket.
The flexibility of IQ

Group comparisons of IQ are even more problematic. Attempts have been made to make 'culture-fair' or 'culture-free' tests, as if such a thing were possible, to allow comparisons of 'g' between people from very different societies. But IQ is clearly a flexible construct — as amply demonstrated by decisions in the 1930s and 1940s in the United States and Britain to 'adjust' test questions to equalize the scores of boys and girls, because in previous versions of the tests girls had scored higher. When Lev Vygotsky tested Russian peasants back in the 1930s, he found that answers that seemed logical to an urbanite were responded to quite differently, but with parallel logic, by the peasants.

As for 'race', the problem is whether it is a biologically, as opposed to socially, meaningful category. Among geneticists interested in differences in gene frequencies between populations, there is increasing consensus that the word obscures more than it reveals, and should be replaced by the concept of biogeographic ancestry, which makes possible the study of subpopulations for relevant genetic and phenotypic characteristics. There are some well-recognized, meaningful genetic differences between groups, for instance between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews in terms of their risk to Tay–Sachs disease, and the study of such differences may reveal important clues with respect, for instance, to disease propensity. But such groups are not normally considered socially distinct races for the purposes of studies of group differences in intelligence. Broad divisions between 'white' or 'Caucasian' and 'black' or 'Asian', the groups generally discussed in the context of the IQ debate, especially in the United States, hide genetically important subpopulation differences within these groups. See box

This is partly why James Watson's ill-advised remark that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really" was recognized not merely as inflammatory, but as scientifically unacceptable in terms of its lumping together of all Africa.

'Gender', that inherently biosocial construct, presents even greater difficulties. In the context of the present debate, the crucial question is whether it is possible to identify a biological — presumably genetic or neurodevelopmental — cause to any difference in the way men and women think and act. The problem is that from the moment of birth, boys and girls are treated differently, which shapes both their growing bodies and brains and how they are expected to behave. It is not just that the biological is expressed through the social and cultural, but that the social and cultural in turn shape the biological. One only has to note how the understanding of what it is to be a man or a woman in Europe or North America has shifted over the past century, to say nothing of how gender relations vary in other cultures. Thus, although there are minor average structural and biochemical variations between Western men's and women's brains (such as the volume of some nuclei and the distribution of hormone receptors), speculations on their implications for how men and women may think or behave lack any empirical basis.

To conclude: the categories of intelligence, race and gender are not definable within the framework required for natural scientific research, failing my first criterion of being well-founded. They also fail the second criterion of being answerable: we lack the theoretical or technical tools to study them.

The standard approach of population biologists to estimating the potential genetic contribution to a trait is to make a heritability estimate. Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of this measure within a population, it is essentially just that: a within-population measure, only valid for a given environment. The nature of the equations means that if the environment changes, the heritability estimate changes too. Moreover, the measure relates to a randomly interbreeding population — useful for agricultural purposes such as estimating optimal genotypes for crop yields or milk production — but not for people. Even if reliable correlations were found between some intelligence test score and a measure of brain physiology or activity held by a specific group, such a correlation says nothing about the direction of causation.

As for the third and final criterion, if attempts to answer these group-difference questions are fraught with scientific fallacies, might there nonetheless be some public-policy implications making investigation worthwhile? The answer sometimes advanced is that if there were such differences, and their causes were understood, the less well-endowed groups could be 'compensated' by some form of differentiated education. But in practice, claims that there are differences in intelligence between blacks and whites, or men and women, have always been used to justify a social hierarchy in which white males continue to occupy the premier positions (whether in the economy in general or natural science in particular). Using pseudoscience, based on concepts as ill-founded as was phlogiston, to justify preordained conclusions should not serve as the basis of sound policy-making.

In a society in which racism and sexism were absent, the questions of whether whites or men are more or less intelligent than blacks or women would not merely be meaningless — they would not even be asked. The problem is not that knowledge of such group intelligence differences is too dangerous, but rather that there is no valid knowledge to be found in this area at all. It's just ideology masquerading as science.

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A Few More Reasons To Support Gay Marriage

February 20th 2009 02:48

The fight for Marriage Equality continues... From Connecticut to Norway, people who have just won the right to marry the person of their choice are saying

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Good News for African Women is in the Making: Clitoris Restoration!

February 4th 2009 11:57

Restoring your clitoris might not take away the psychological pressure of having your body violated by people of your own gender, but it will give you the chance to experience sexual pleasure on a new level!

Whether you are a gay man who has no idea what a clitoris looks like in person, you've been circumcised and have reason to believe that you deserve all the sexual satisfaction you can get, or are merely a sympathetic onlooker, and are looking to get involved in the Clitoraid clinic in some way, here's a video which will help you understand this latest, promising chapter of medical history and give you an idea of how your contrbution to Clitoraid might help women who have been mutilated and deprived of an important part of their anatomy

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Standing Up For Same-Sex Marriage: Jon Stewart Interviews Mike Huckabee

December 13th 2008 11:52

Dear PADSOC Readers,

We are part of a human rights struggle no less dramatic than that which went on in the 1960s when it comes to non-heterosexual rights. Some may feel that so many rights have been afforded to GLBTI people already (in Australia recently a number of alterations were made to legislation to more fully adapt to a climate of people not accepting institutionalised homophobia anymore - but this does not include gay marriage, a very important stop!), but that's only what homophobic people think and try to promote so that they don't have to question their prejudices. Before the 21st century we were all living in a world where notions of heteronormativity were informed by the selective sanctioning of a certain kind of relationships at the expense of others. I didn't realise that I could have been living in a very different world until a few years ago when Spain decided to legalise same-sex marriage and adoption. You can increase my capacity to dream of a world informed by full marriage equality... with every individual you have potentially uncomfortable conversations with about what so many people already agree should already be a 'fundamental right'. Legalising same-sex marriage is the modern day equivalent of legalising interracial marriage - we don't even think about the latter as unusual anymore, it's made our cultural landscapes so much more interesting, rich and varied, creating new cultures based on love and acceptance. In a way I am thankful that I will never take same-sex marriage for granted. It's a beautiful thing to witness history in the making, and know that I am part of it

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Posted By: Postmodern Critic - Category: No Category

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Why you should not call a black person 'tanned', Mr Berlusconi

November 27th 2008 02:17

I know that there's only a very small percentage of black people in Italy, Mr Prime Minister, but as the leader of a culturally prominent nation you should know better.

That's like a black person trying to be 'cute' (Silvio B's defense of this statement which sadly doesn't sound like it's been untouched by racist thinking, and is at best grossly inappropriate) about how incredibly different a white person looks by calling them 'bleached'. No doubt you had some magnanimous intent, were somewhat appreciative of Mr Obama's skin colour, and it is true that race should not be ignored at a time when Obama's black African heritage stands out in its singularity (for the country he represents, and the company he is in as President of the USA, that is - unless you're in Africa, chances are you will not see a lot of black leaders in the media

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Somalian Rape Victim, 13, Stoned To Death

November 5th 2008 16:52

By Chris McGreal
Africa correspondent
The Guardian

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Posted By: Morgan Bell - Category: No Category

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Lesbian Rape Epidemic

October 25th 2008 15:30

The practice of "corrective rape" has become commonplace in South Africa.

Men are attempting to "convert" lesbians to heterosexuality through a series of systematic and gang rapes

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Posted By: Morgan Bell - Category: No Category

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Norway Becomes the 6th Country to Legalise Same Sex Marriage!

August 13th 2008 12:11

So here I was, thinking how long it would take for Australia and USA (all of it, not just Cali and Mass) to give gays and lesbians the right to get married to their same sex partner of choice, when I got notice that Norway has now legalised same sex marriage!

How fabulous is that

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April 2009

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March 2009

2 Posts