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LGBT news today

LGBT news today published on 1 Comment on LGBT news today

1. Lesbians sent to “forced confinement” clinics in Equador are being tortured. Change.org has a petition to the Ecuadorian Minister of Health to stop the practice.

2. The National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality’s (NARTH) annual conference this weekend will feature a speaker advocating for the imprisonment of gays around the world.

3. The Family Research Council is apoplectic about Conan O’Brien getting a mail-order ordination and presiding over the same-sex marriage of one of his staff.

The dangers of superstition coupled with despair

The dangers of superstition coupled with despair published on No Comments on The dangers of superstition coupled with despair

Best to skip this one if you don’t want to be depressed. Reuters reports:

Hundreds of girls raped, murdered in Tanzania for black magic AIDS ‘cure’Hundreds of albinos are thought to have been killed for black magic purposes in Tanzania and albino girls are being raped because of a belief they offer a cure for AIDS, a Canadian rights group said on Thursday. At least 63 albinos, including children, are known to have been killed, mostly in the remote northwest of the country. “We believe there are hundreds and hundreds of killings in Tanzania, but only a small number are being reported to the police,” Peter Ash, founder and director of Under The Same Sun (UTSS), told Reuters. “There is belief that if you have relations with a girl with albinism, you will cure AIDS. So there are many girls with albinism who are being raped in this country because of this belief, which is a false belief.” Around 1.4 million Tanzanians among a population of 40.7 million have the HIV virus that leads to AIDS. Albino hunters kill their victims and harvest their blood, hair, genitals and other body parts for potions that witchdoctors say bring luck in love, life and business. “(It is believed) a person with albinism is a curse. They are from the devil, they are not human, they do not die, they simply disappear,” said Ash. . . The Tanzanian government says it is determined to halt the macabre killings, but has been widely criticized for inaction. 

I wonder if the effort to halt these rapes and killings has included telling people that there are no such things as witches, that black magic doesn’t exist. That medicine is how sick people become well (if becoming well is possible), you can’t cure a disease by attacking someone, and albinos are people just like anyone else.

Even sadder is that this isn’t actually news– the report above is from today, but the slaughter of albinos in Tanzania for black magic purposes has been going on for years.  In 2009 the government instituted a “ban on all traditional healers,” but it doesn’t seem to have stopped the practice.

Religion going extinct? I doubt it.

Religion going extinct? I doubt it. published on No Comments on Religion going extinct? I doubt it.

The BBC reports on a paper recently presented at the American Physical Society meeting here in Dallas which makes claims about a decreasing level of religiosity in some parts of the world.  The paper, entitled “A mathematical model of social group competition with application to the growth of religious non-affiliation,” suggests that religion will effectively be extinguished in certain parts of the world just as certain languages die out due to lack of usage.  One of the paper’s authors elaborates:

“The idea is pretty simple,” said Richard Wiener of the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, and the University of Arizona. “It posits that social groups that have more members are going to be more attractive to join, and it posits that social groups have a social status or utility. “For example in languages, there can be greater utility or status in speaking Spanish instead of [the dying language] Quechuan in Peru, and similarly there’s some kind of status or utility in being a member of a religion or not.” Dr Wiener continued: “In a large number of modern secular democracies, there’s been a trend that folk are identifying themselves as non-affiliated with religion; in the Netherlands the number was 40%, and the highest we saw was in the Czech Republic, where the number was 60%.” The team then applied their nonlinear dynamics model, adjusting parameters for the relative social and utilitarian merits of membership of the “non-religious” category.

I’m skeptical.  The most obvious distinction that jumps out when comparing languages to religion is, at least to my knowledge, that at no point in history have people stopped using language.  They have stopped using specific languages in favor of other ones, just as they have stopped adhering to certain religions and converted to others.  But they haven’t cast religion aside. The study discusses how many people would answer that they are non-religious or have no religious affiliation, but that does not answer, as psychologist Bruce Hood points out, whether they have abandoned supernatural beliefs.  As I’ve mentioned before, there is a difference between being “non-religious,” being an atheist, and being a naturalist/materialist, and I don’t consider it accurate to say that religion has become “extinct” in a population unless its members fit the latter description.  Which, quite honestly, I don’t see ever happening.

Why be such a stickler about this?  Well, because when you talk to a person who says that she doesn’t consider herself to be religious (or worse, “non-affiliated”), digging a little deeper may reveal that she actually believes that the universe is God, that prayer and willpower cause wishes to come true, that everything happens for a cosmic reason, that casting spells works, and/or that everyone will be reincarnated after they die.  Her pantheism may disqualify her from being properly labeled an atheist, but the rest of it wouldn’t.  And even if she believes in none of those things she may well believe in ghosts, alien abduction, extra-sensory perception, Tarot-reading, and/or Reiki, which you might call secular supernatural ideas.  And to me, a god has more in common with a ghost than a cross has with a Tibetan prayer flag.  The latter two may both signify religious beliefs, but the former are both supernatural agents about which humans have a stunning number of intuitive beliefs in common.  That is, we use the same mental tools to conceive of and believe in them.

And if I’m right about that, then we will probably will carry on in these beliefs for as long as we have the kinds of minds that find them appealing.  I’m also not convinced that religious violence is fundamentally different in kind from any other violence which is rooted in a notion of a transcendent force which unifies one’s own group against whatever group(s) it views as threatening.  I don’t believe that it takes religion to make good men do bad things– or, for that matter, for bad men to do good.  I don’t see the extinction of religion specifically, even on a completely voluntary basis, as some kind of goal toward which we should all be striving.  Which is a good thing, considering that it probably won’t come to pass.

Unlike Hood, however, I do think we should strive toward rationality always, identify and eliminate bias wherever it can be found, and in general try to always have our skeptic’s hats on.  I consider supernatural thinking a mistake even if it’s an adaptive one. That doesn’t mean I have to single out people who think supernaturally as sui generis irrational, because we all do it occasionally.  And it certainly doesn’t mean I have to single out people who consider themselves religious as essentially thinking differently from, and/or worse or better than, everyone else.  

12-year-old girl beaten after Christian youth meeting for “having a boy’s name.”

12-year-old girl beaten after Christian youth meeting for “having a boy’s name.” published on No Comments on 12-year-old girl beaten after Christian youth meeting for “having a boy’s name.”

From Change.org:

What’s in a name? A 12-year-old girl at Hernando Middle School in Mississippi was beaten by five fellow students — reportedly because they said her name, Randi, was “a boy name.”
“They started talking about me like I was a man,” she told local news station WREG. “That I shouldn’t be in this world. And my name was a boy name.” The four girls and a boy surrounded her after a Fellowship of Christian Students meeting, and, she said, kicked her in the rib and leg, hit her in the face, sat on her, pushed her face into the floor, and threw her onto a cafeteria table.
Apparently, the incident was caught on surveillance camera, but in order to maintain student privacy, the film has not been released. A school administrator issued a statement, said WREG, that “fighting is not tolerated and that disciplinary action will be taken to the fullest extent of the law.” No charges were filed, however, because the police were not called. Whether the attack was an isolated incident or part of ongoing bullying remains unknown.
The student in question was not said to be LGBT — but whether she is or not doesn’t matter. She was beaten because she was perceived to be in some way not conforming to her gender. That is yet another reason schools need to include discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity and expression in diversity and anti-bullying programs. It is not just LGBT students at risk, but potentially others as well. Students, teachers, and staff must learn that even characteristics some people might view as “deviant” or “sinful” are still no excuse for violence and bullying.

The part in bold is what is most important to me.  I’m not going to blame the kids’ Christian youth group for this, much less Christianity as a whole, much less religion as a whole.  For all we know, the timing of this attack is irrelevant to the motivation.  The only reason I think it’s worth mentioning at all is that perhaps in the future, the Fellowship of Christian Students could emphasize that beating the crap out of a girl because you think her name is boyish is not exactly loving behavior. 

My continuing suspicion is that at the root of homophobia, misogyny, transphobia, and any other gender-role-based hatred you will find a rigid belief in the necessity of conforming to gender roles– a belief that there are ways that men and women should behave, look, and apparently even be named, and there is something wrong with people who do not conform to these standards.  This suspicion first occurred to me while being assaulted and called a dyke for having short hair in middle school, and has pretty much developed and strengthened from that point on.

The more complex problem is where this fervent desire to maintain gender conformity comes from, and everybody seems to have a different answer to that.  Some people are willing to chalk it up entirely to religion, and indeed it certainly seems like most religious systems on the planet have some kind of prescriptions about how men should be and how women should be, but I think it’s more likely that those prescriptions became codified in religion because they existed prior to it.  That because people already thought that such conformity was necessary, they decided that that’s what God/the gods/the universe want as well.  There are even (even?  I guess this is not surprising at all) people who use evolutionary psychology to make the argument that men and women have evolved to be certain things and therefore that’s how they should be.  I have no issue with arguments that there are male and female behavioral tendencies that have evolved, but once you start getting normative with that stuff, I will whack you soundly over the head with the Mallet of Naturalistic Fallacy. 

I’m guessing the parents of the kids who beat this girl up didn’t specifically tell them that people who diverge from tightly prescribed gender roles have something wrong with them and should be punished.  But there are a lot of ways to convey that message less explicitly and most people don’t seem to see anything wrong with doing so.  No, you’re not going to catch me saying that kids should only be given gender-neutral toys or toys intended for the opposite sex, boys should be enrolled in ballet and girls signed up for the baseball team whether they like it or not, etc.  But while I know full well that kids like to have things simple and categorized while they’re young, I can’t help but think that accommodating that urge when it comes to gender is going to serve them poorly later on, and certainly that actively providing and enforcing views about gender conformity when they’re at any age is encouraging them to become like the students in this story.

Of course, maybe these kids just hate Randi and were using any excuse to go after her.  “You have a boy’s name” is such a stupid reason to go after anyone that it’s entirely possible.  But the gender role conformity thing shouldn’t be dignified by calling it anything other than stupid.