I — I don't know what to say.

We're concerned about the effort [within the public schools] to capture youth through indoctrination into the homosexual lifestyle. Students are a captive audience, and they are being targeted by groups with that as an agenda.

Mathew D. Staver, president and general counsel of the conservative advocacy group Liberty Counsel, quoted in a 9 June article in The New York Times.

Younger and wiser

My eleven-year-old sister not too long ago was listening to a discussion between my mom and me about a certain genderqueer college student back home who had received hate mail from a conservative group on campus. She asked why they would do that. I gave her an honest but a little flip answer, and she pressed the issue. She was not asking a rhetorical question. She seriously wanted to understand why anyone would be bothered by someone who was not a boy and not a girl. I ended up providing a fairly long discussion of privilege, power, and threatening the status quo, and I think she started to intellectually understand. But this kind of ... not homophobia exactly, nor classical sexism or misogyny ... bigotry just didn't really make sense.

My sister also continues to find baffling the idea that anyone would be bothered by the idea of two men or two women being married. This bafflement, also, is not rhetoric: the idea simply doesn't make sense to her.

Her middle school includes in its curriculum a number of books about what it was like to be Black in the South under Jim Crow. I think she sort of understands institutional racism, and she was reading one of these emotionally challenging books around the time that she asked about this genderqueer college student. In our discussion we compared that racism to modern institutional homophobia and sexism, and that bigotry to modern bigotry. I do feel like it's important for her to know and understand these things, and yes, she's fully capable to doing so as a precocious eleven-year-old, but it's almost a shame to introduce such issues to her. Wouldn't it be wonderful if everyone shared her innocent bafflement?

To her credit, my sister is bothered by immediate things, and understands that they're problematic. She has often complained about a certain response from many of her friends: "Yes I support same-sex marriage," these eleven- and twelve-year-old girls say, "but it's not like it matters to any of us." My sister doesn't quite articulate the problem with this attitude yet, but she recognizes that there's a problem, and I've tried to suggest both a way to understand it and a way to counter it.

My sister, as I said, doesn't seem to mind that there is college student who is neither a boy nor a girl. It seems that in my sister's world-view there are a number of distinct genders, including:

• boys. Boys are weird, annoying, and sometimes have cooties.
• girls who are older than my sister. Girls who are older than my sister are cool.
• girls who are younger than my sister. Girls who are younger than my sister can be fun to play with, especially when my sister can pretend that she has a younger sister, but sometimes they get annoying.
• big brothers. Big brothers are boys, my sister reluctantly admits, but they aren't as bad as _boys_, and only very rarely have cooties.
• friends. My sister's friends are all smart, all come from upper-middle-class families with educated parents, and all play basketball. And some of them are starting to notice my sixteen-year-old brother (who is objectively cute, a star debater, sings, and has a steady girlfriend).
• grownups. It's not clear whether grownups are actually real people or if, like teachers and her friends' parents, grownups are just there to make snacks and discuss homework.
• Daddy.
• Mommy.

In the abstract there are "boys and men", "girls and women", and "people who aren't either boys or girls", and in the abstract most grownups fit into the first two categories. But in practice they are all in the third category, and even the definitions of "Mommy" and "Daddy" have more to do with the actual people and less to do with their genders.

There used to be other categories. "People with beards," if my memory is correct, was one of them, and "babies!" might still be another. My sister knows that girls and boys can't play in the same sports leagues because boys are weird and annoying. My sister is also fully aware of other gender-based segregation or specific integration, and generally approves of the affirmative-action kind and disapproves of the classical sexism kind. We live in a pretty white town, one with a not-entirely-positive record on institutional racism, but I think the only role that race plays in my sister's actual life (almost all her classmates are white) is that they have some sort of Native American cultural appreciation programming each year in school.

I wish gender and race played less of a role in my life. Instead, I regularly enjoy laughing with my Indian and Latino friends about spicy food, and Jewish jokes are not uncommon around here (gay jokes are even more common). I often make comments about how "boys are weird", and even though my gender distinctions are accompanied by informed feminist commentary, I wonder whether they need to be made.

I would rather be proactive, intentionally finding male friends to dance with to remind everyone that social dance need not be gendered, or intentionally supporting female friends who want to be math or CS majors. We still need to be sensitive to race, to whether and how it correlates with other social and economic dimensions. But it's been years since I've attended an anti-racism, or even an anti-sexism, workshop, and I'm feeling behind. And there's something very attractive about a romanticized eleven-year-old outlook: race doesn't exist, boys have cooties, girls are either cool or little-sister material, and no one else has a gender.

Or maybe I just like the part where grownups' only job is to provide for kids.

Entries to write

So much political bullshit recently, so much to explain why it's bad. But I still have a week or two more of term, so such essays will have to wait. Hold me to writing on some of this, though:

• Benevolent sexism and the military: Restricting what jobs women may hold in the military should be illegal, not required by law (women, like gays and rich kids, are already restricted from certain posts; Congress wants to restrict them further).
• Democrats should not have caved on the judicial nominee fight. As argued over at Balkinization, the Right is trying to effect a radical shift in Constitutional law, and they're doing it in the most effective way: by packing the courts. Democrats need to take a hard line. We've allowed too many conservative justices already, and should not have compromised on Justice Owen. We could have simply halted Parliament Congress for the rest of Bush's term. And the Left needs to find some judges of our own and start pushing back.
• All the many dumb anti-gay things that various republicans are doing. Today, for instance, Wisconsin decided against providing domestic partner benefits to university employees
• I have a lot to say about the sorry state of the current general American gay male community. Much of it is summed up in the a article about crystal meth and AIDS in The New Yorker.
• Lastly, I will sometime soon talk about child abuse, Hamlet, and social ills.

Giuliani for President?

Let's say, for a moment, that it's a few years from now, and the moderate former New York City mayor Rudolf Giuliani is about to wrap up the Republican nomination for President. What should the Democrats do? Granted, I'm not sure the Republicans will nominate someone that moderate, but conservative televangelist Pat Robertson says he likes him, so it's possible. And we should have a game plan.

Certainly we should not run Senator Hillary Clinton against him. Clinton is great, and I would love to vote for her for President, but the only way she would win against Giuliani for the Presidency is if Giuliani embarrasses himself in the 2006 race for New York Senator. (Clinton, of course, absolutely must win reelection in New York if she is to stand a chance in '08.) No, Clinton is out, and in fact I don't think anyone the Democrats could nominate would actually win against Giuliani in the general election, unless he has scandals that I don't know about.

Instead, the Democrats shouldn't even try. Giuliani winning the Republican nomination would be the best thing for liberals and progressives, because it would move the center to the left. We should, indeed, facilitate this move with a radical leftist candidate. One of the things that's been really hard in the last few cycles is that the Republicans keep nominating and promoting hard-core conservatives, and the Democrats try to compensate with moderate candidates. Perhaps this is the right strategy to win the Office --- and even of this I am unconvinced, since a liberal can better muster the troops, although Kerry achieved incredible voter turnout even without Dean's charisma --- but it's a terrible long-term strategy. I'll never vote third-party if it means losing to someone like Bush, but the Democrats can afford eight years under Giuliani if it means pulling the debate back towards progressive and liberal ideas.

Imagine: a high-profile leftist, a Carol Moseley-Braun, for instance, versus a moderate New England Republican. Sure the Republican wins. That's not the point. We get the stamp of the Democratic party on a liberal agenda, and save our resources. Moseley-Braun, if it is she, will be on ballots, and will make the motions of a campaign, but that's not where the Democrat's considerable energy should be focussed. Instead, we forgo an expensive Presidential bid and focus on the Senate, the House, the Governorships, and maybe most importantly, the State Legislatures. We could do it too: the DNC makes it clear that it's Legislature and Senate campaigns that they care most about, they direct money that way, and they encourage people to donate towards those races. By spending many fewer resources on the Presidential campaign, we could instead reverse the current trend towards a single-party government, and reinstate a system of different parties controlling the different branches of government.

It's a viable approach. I'd rather have Giuliani (or even McCain, although I'm less fond of him) sitting in Washington than Jeb Bush, Newt Gingrich, or Rick Santorum. And a more left-leaning country, with more Democrat Senators and Legislatures, gives a better position from which to run for President to Hillary Clinton, Bill Richardson, or younger candidates like Barack Obama.

So let's keep our fingers crossed: Giuliani for President, and Democrats in the Senate.

The Times' coverage of the Pope; a policy proposal in Science

One of the publications and commentators that I regularly read online is the New York Times' Public Editor, an ombudsperson and "reader's representative". This Sunday's column is on the Times' coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict. It's nice, if not particularly deep; I'm hoping that he discusses soon the more newsworthy issue of the Times' coverage of the Pope. To this end I sent him the following e-mail:

I would love to read your views on the recent coverage of the death and election of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. In particular, I've found it very amusing comparing the Time's coverage of John Paul II, which was relatively glowing, discussing his work against communism and for peace, with that of, say, 365gay.com, an online gay daily newspaper, which uniformly condemned the Pope's homophobia (see, for example, <http://www.365gay.com/newscon05/04/040105popeDies.htm>, their lead story announcing his death). The coverage of Pope Benedict, on the other hand, began with a number of articles describing various reactions from American and international Catholics. He is very conservative (I've seen the word "fascist" attached to his name in a discussion of his recent career as Cardinal Ratzinger), and the Times did not let its readers forget this, nor that many Catholics are concerned that he is too conservative.

It is extremely unlikely that the Pope will live for very many years. Will the Times then remember him as a great man, a well-educated polyglot who travelled the world encouraging Christianity and good spirit, and reaching out to Secularists and Jews, or as a misogynist and homophobe, theologically conservative even for a Catholic leader, who restricted (if there's any room to restrict) the role of women within the Church, and spoke out even more strongly than his predecessor against homosexuality, feminism, and religious tolerance?

We'll see if he picks up the story.

---

Science Magazine on Friday published a one-page Policy Forum piece (the weekly Policy Forum is, by design, read by congressional staffers) on child sexual abuse. In it the authors outline our society's present failure at addressing issues of child abuse, and suggests, among other things, that the NIH should introduce a new Institute (these come along every five years or so) on Child Abuse and Interpersonal Violence.

I'm hoping that Congress follows the suggestions, and more generally that consciousnesses are raised about this public health issue. The article is available through the Science Website, to which many universities subscribe:

Freyd, J.J., Putnam, F.W., Lyon, T.D., Becker-Blease, K. A., Cheit, R.E., Siegel, N.B., & Pezdek, K. (2005). The science of child sexual abuse. Science, 308, 501.

SUMMARY: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/308/5721/501
FULL TEXT: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/308/5721/501
PDF: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/308/5721/501.pdf

Sexism in taxes and Harvard presidential remarks

I would like to direct your attention to two recent writings by other people on gender and sexism.

(1) In an editorial in The Register-Guard, Sandra Morgen and Linda Basch argue that Bush's tax cuts are specifically unfair to women.

(2) Like most e-mail lists, that of my house at school had a flury of e-mails when Harvard President Summers made his inflamatory comments about women in math and science. That flury died down, but a recent e-mail from a housemate asking for comments for a Women-in-Science-conference preview article prompted the following response from another housemate:

While I agree with [one resident, who suggested that we should investigate the possibility of innate differences rather than ruling them out due to a worry that they are un-PC] that ignorance should be avoided rather than sought, I think that it's high time for nativism to give up the ghost. Darwinian process-oriented thought should long ago have driven nature-vs.-nurture debates into obsolescence. There is no such dichotomy. What traits individuals possess are conditioned by the constraints of genetics as well as by social/environmental influences, and differences in either can significantly affect the results, especially in the case of such things as high-level cognitive processes. There is no benchmark, no zero state of social conditioning against which to measure the effect of genetics; if it weren't for our intensive social conditioning, we would all be pre-symbolic wild beasts. Nature selects for pathways that lead to certain ultimate phenotypic results, and it makes no difference whether these pathways rely more or less on genetic determinism rather than on given environmental circumstances to constrain their trajectories to the selected-for result.

It also seems clear that the variables in question are (in our current set of historically determined genetic-environmental circumstances) particularly sensitive to minor changes in social conditions, well beyond the range of what is considered significant, as evidenced by such facts as that presently much higher proportions of Eastern European women are very successful in hard sciences than are women from other areas. Innateness is a useless category, an illusion. It seems to me that the fire behind every nature-vs.-nurture debate arises entirely from the desire to avoid responsibility for the trait in question (or, reciprocally, to assume (or at least pin) such responsibility). But whether something is natural does not determine whether it is ethical. Besides, in the near future genetics themselves are likely to increasingly become a matter of conscious choice, as we gain the ability to manipulate them (assuming we avoid major apocalyptic catastrophe), which will further destabilize the effectiveness of nature-based arguments at eliminating responsibility. The only relevant aspect of reality plausibly affected by such a classification of attributes is how difficult they are to change, not whether we should try to change them.

In summary, (i) NOTHING is immutable; (ii) the fact that something may be very difficult to change does not in any case morally justify it; (iii) the only ethical action is to choose desired states of the world (locally & globally), & use whatever abilities we possess to try to achieve these goals. The question, in the final analysis, cannot be whether a dream is "natural", but only whether it is good; & if so, how it may be attained.

Well said.

We Should Promote Same-Sex Marriage

I would like to direct your attention to Galois, a New York-based mathematician who blogs about same-sex marriage. In particular, his most recent post, titled Encourage, Not Just Permit, Same-Sex Marriage raises some good points. I think, however, that it is not radical enough. Gabriel continues to focus more on individual health than on broad trends in gender and sexuality in society, and in my response to his post I outline a much more radical argument as to why encouraging same-sex marriage is so important.

I will certainly have future posts in this space on the same topic. For my records, as much as your laziness, I will reprint all but the first two paragraphs of my response here (the first two paragraphs are directly addressed to Gabriel, and the third paragraph could be a first). I encourage your comments; they will help me develop this into a full essay.

Conservatives worry that SSM will threaten the institution of marriage, and they're right. Same-sex marriage does threaten the institution: specifically, it threatens the patriarchal, oppressive regime that is traditional heteronormative marriage. By legitimizing female-female and male-male romantic and sexual couples as the same as married female-male couples, SSM suggests that traditional marriages, with well-defined gender roles in which the women are regularly subordinate, are unneeded. A world with gender-neutral marriage is a world with gender-liberated and empowered marriages, in which women need not stay in their place and men can behave in manors traditionally feminine (and hence inferior). Many arch-conservatives are smart, and they know exactly what's going to happen. They're simply wrong about whether it's a good thing or a bad thing.

I support marriage equality primarily because it helps women. Perhaps, as an added benefit, it will discourage gay men from the kind of unsafe sex that continues to spread STDs even fifteen years after the AIDS epidemic became big news. There are many positive things about queer subcultures that should be adopted into mainstream culture and many things (like male promiscuity) that should not.

There has always been, in every culture, some form(s) of homosexuality, and most of them were/are tolerated, since they don't particularly threaten the patriarchy (e.g. Classical Greek and modern Catholic Bishop male-male pedophilia). Women and men have always been intimate with people of the same and different genders. The culture wars now center on a new, pernicious homosexuality that purports to establish gender as irrelevant.

That's the radical gay agenda, and that, not some concern over whether an individual homosexual has the best and healthiest family life, is why we should support same sex marriage.