equality

Some poor young girl, deeply miseducated and misled, wrote into a newspaper with a letter trying to denounce homosexuality with a bad historical and biological argument. She's only 14, and her brain has already been poisoned by the cranks and liars in her own family…it's very sad. Here's the letter — I will say, it's a very creative argument that would be far more entertaining if it weren't wrong in every particular. I've transcribed it below. I couldn't help myself, though, and had to, um, annotate it a bit. Homosexuality, including same sex marriage, is not an enlightened idea [But…
“One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.” -Joan of Arc Regardless of what intrinsic differences any person or group of people have from another, everyone deserves to be treated as an individual, afforded the same opportunities to pursue their passions, goals and dreams, and evaluated on the merits of their performance. Although this is not yet the way the world works, I am confident that many strides are consistently being made in the right direction, and I was…
I had never heard of the Women in Space Program before, but apparently, after the Soviets sent Valentina Tereshkova into space, there was actually an effort to train American women as astronauts. The participants of the Women in Space Program experienced tremendous success. "Nineteen women enrolled in WISP, undergoing the same grueling tests administered to the male Mercury astronauts," Brandon Keim wrote in 2009. "Thirteen of them -- later dubbed the Mercury 13 -- passed 'with no medical reservations,' a higher graduation rate than the first male class. The top four women scored as highly as…
"Each generation goes further than the generation preceding it because it stands on the shoulders of that generation. You will have opportunities beyond anything we've ever known." -Ronald Reagan Earlier today, Sally Ride, the first American woman ever to fly in outer space, passed away at the age of 61 from pancreatic cancer. To many different people, her life, her achievements, and her death means a great diversity of things. To anyone with a love of outer space, human exploration, and achieving your dreams, her story will likely resonate with you, too. I'd like to share with you what are,…
You've probably heard this story many times before: there's some kind of glass ceiling in the world of science and math that hinders women's ability to progress. The latest data confirms that something is going wrong. The United States ranks 31st on the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Index and is tied for 21st on Social Watch's Gender Equity Index. Still, the test scores of U.S. high school girls have reached parity with those of boys, and half the undergraduate math degrees awarded in this country go to women. But after that, something goes off the rails. Just 27% of math Ph.D.s go to…
This video has been going around — it's a group of women talking about the importance of evolution to the biological sciences. I confess to cringing in a few places — there's too much ready equation of evolution with natural selection — but I certainly wouldn't question the competence of these accomplished scientists, even if I might argue with them a bit. But now the clowns at Uncommon Descent have discovered it and given their assessment. It shows sixteen female academics or science writers, mostly young, whose enthusiasm for evolution is so overwrought that they turn themselves into…
In this TED video, Philip Zimbardo talks about an ongoing concern, the opting out of boys from academically and socially — boys are more likely to drop out of school, girls outperform boys at all academic levels, boys are 5 times more likely to be diagnosed with ADD. The difference also leads to many man-boys who can't interact with women except on the most superficial and cartoonish level. He's talking about a real problem, but I was not convinced by his explanation. He attributes it to a phenomenon called arousal addiction, where people are hooked on constant stimulation of any kind,…
Or is it? I've just been introduced to the work of Tim Wise, and it's fabulous stuff: all about how we view race through the distorting lenses of denial and privilege and class. He's a terrific speaker, I guarantee you that it's worth your time to take an hour and listen to this lecture. Oh, yeah, a white guy lecturing on race…shouldn't we be listening to a person of color on these issues? Of course we should, but if you just listen to the first five minutes you'll get his confession: there's an esthetic to who people will listen to, and the neatly groomed white man is right at the top of…
I cringed reading this woman's lament that evolutionary biology is responsible for the oppression of women, starting with Darwin. It's one long colossal failure of logic. The argument has some genuinely true facts embedded in it, which then get spun out into a series of false conclusions. It is true that the Victorian gentlemen who formulated and expanded upon the theory of evolution tended to be 19th century chauvinists who made up stories about the inferiority of the feminine mind, and Darwin was right among them. It is also true that there are contemporary biologists who still make up…
There's nothing wrong about being pretty, or sexy, or shopping, or being interested in traditionally girly things—but there is a big problem when that's the only option you're given. I know I'd be stressed if I were constantly told I'm less of a man if I'm not playing football or working in a manly occupation that involved large wrenches and heavy industrial tools, so I can sympathize with the limited choices given women: oh, you aren't wearing a bikini on your lithe body with the large breasts? Then you're an ugly dyke. You aren't planning a career as a homemaker and mother? You just want to…
Remember when Facebook started censoring the pages of breastfeeding women? They were removing photos that showed…nipple. It was a violation of the TOS! If they didn't hold the line on nudity, they were on a slippery slope to open pornography. Think of the children! And most importantly, they were enforcing a consistent policy that simply banned all nudity without judgment about its purpose or context. The situation has a apparently changed in 2011. Now there are crass Facebook pages filled with crude jokes about rape, and that's all right despite the fact that they do plainly violate the TOS…
There is a severe and disturbing disconnect in the minds of the fanatics behind the animal rights groups. First there's NIO, harassing and threatening students. Now look at what PETA is up to: they plan to launch a porn site to benefit their cause. The nonprofit organization, whose controversial campaigns draw criticism from women's rights groups, said it hopes to raise awareness of veganism through a mix of pornography and graphic footage of animal suffering. "We're hoping to reach a whole new audience of people, some of whom will be shocked by graphic images that maybe they didn't…
We're finally rid of Jerry Lewis and his smarmy, condescending sponsorship of a telethon for muscular dystrophy. I think he meant well, but he had the wrong ideas: this article celebrating his absence makes a significant point. There are many diseases for which there can be no cure short of magically rebuilding entire bodies and brains — that is, no cure short of changing essentially the entirety of who the person is. All that money was supposed to find what Jerry called "a cure." Every year he said "We're closer than ever to a cure." But every doctor and nurse will tell you the same thing:…
I'm glad I've got one, and I'm so proud that my worth is enhanced by my testicles, as this report from Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce shows. The findings are stark: Women earn less at all degree levels, even when they work as much as men. On average, women who work full-time, full-year earn 25 percent less than men, even at similar education levels. At all levels of educational attainment, African Americans and Latinos earn less than Whites. I have to thank Carl Zimmer for bringing that to my attention — when he isn't writing about parasites and viruses, he…
Scum of the earth. Parts of Michele Bachmann's district contain the most smug, pious, conservative rat-buggering jerks on the planet (like Marcus Bachmann and his anti-gay "clinic", for instance). And the symptoms are beginning to show: the Anoka-Hennepin school district, part of Bachmann's domain, home of the Elmer Gantry-wannabe Bradley Dean, is also the epicenter of an epidemic of teen suicides, 9 in the last two years. These are kids who were bullied for being gay, or suspected of being gay, or not fitting in to the their inbred little community (and who would want to?), and the school…
Ah, the subtle ways we can discriminate. An Arkansas school decided a black woman just wasn't the right kind of person to stand up at their graduation ceremony. A high school southeast of Little Rock would not let a black student be valedictorian though she had the highest grade-point average, and wouldn't let her mom speak to the school board about it until graduation had passed, the graduate claims in Federal Court. Kymberly Wimberly, 18, got only a single B in her 4 years at McGehee Secondary School, and loaded up on Honors and Advanced Placement classes. She had the highest G.P.A.…
We could be gamers. Oh, wait … some of us are! If you want to see the very worst of raging, testosterone-poisoned sexism, look to nerd-dominated gaming culture; I wouldn't be surprised to learn that a significant part of the current conflict in the skeptical movement comes from our large overlap with that segment of the tech-savvy, rather clueless collection of man-children who see all women as aliens who are fat, ugly, or slutty. I'm not heavily into gaming, but I do play a little World of Warcraft, poorly (it's easy, though, so my old-man reflexes can mostly cope). Mostly, I find the…
We could be Christians. Answers in Genesis distributes a little quiz about modesty: I took it and failed. Most of the questions assume clothing is defined by God, that the purpose of clothing is to hide sexuality, and the focus is almost entirely on women — look at questions #9 and #10, for instance. That could have come straight from a Muslim handbook. The Style Quiz Take the following True/False quiz to discover what you really believe about clothing, and then compare your responses with the answer key below. 1. According to the Bible, the primary purpose of clothing is to cover the body. 2…
You heard me. Now. She summarizes the state of sexism in the skeptical movement, with suggestions for change. It's freakin' excellent. And she uses this comic: Read her four-point manifesto for change. If you can't see the value of it, you are the problem.
The UK has been having a debate about Sharia law in the House of Commons. Why, I don't know; it's so regressive and oppressive, such a step backward, that it ought to be simply dismissed out of hand. Maryam Namazie gave a speech opposing Sharia law, and here's a small piece of it. After all, Sharia law is based on the Koran, the hadith (sayings and actions of the prophet Mohammad), and Islamic jurisprudence. They all agree that a woman's testimony is worth half that of a man's, a women can't sign her own marriage contract, men have the unilateral right to divorce whereas a women have limited…