The reaction to Ellen Paige's announcement that she is gay

Actress Ellen Paige announced yesterday to a crowded Las Vegas conference hall that she was gay. Paige said she had "suffered for years, because I was scared to be out."

Of course, she had good reason to be scared, given the reaction of the Las Vegas crowd. Her announcement was greeted with insults and derisive catcalls from the crowd. Several members of the audience were taken out of the room by security police after they threw things onto the stage.

This is just one more incident that demonstrates the widespread homophobia in this country and the need for laws that protect gays from ...

... Wait a minute. Hang on. Now that I have read this story more carefully, I guess I need to clarify a few things.

As it turns out, Paige's announcement was loudly cheered by the crowd and that media reports were universally and lavishly glowing and that if there was anything thrown on stage, it would have been flowers. It also turns out that this happens virtually any time anyone announces he or she is gay anytime, anywhere, without exception and that if people aren't particularly excited about someone's announcement that he or she is gay they politely keep it to themselves and don't bother anyone and that negative public reactions to such news are virtually nonexistent.

Nevermind.

Are humans really different than animals?

In the light of new research into human intelligence, some animals have concluded that there simply is no profound difference between animals and humans. According to several recent books by prominent animals, no significant difference can be found in animal research (that is, we assume, research conducted by animals) that would justify the commonly-held believe that humans are somehow different.

“There is nothing special about being human," says Henry Gee (of a species unspecified) in The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution, "any more than there is anything special about being a guinea pig or a geranium ... humans are just one twig in the thicket, and they could easily have never sprouted at all."

The insensitive remarks about guinea pigs and geraniums is in part due no doubt to the fact that none of the books were written by guinea pigs or geraniums, which is understandable: Geraniums have been having a hard winter and the guinea pig community has never been very sympathetic toward scientific research (for obvious reasons).

According to Mark Bekoff, author of Why Dogs Hump and Bees Get Depressed: The Fascinating Science of Animal Intelligence, Emotions, Friendship and Conservation, humans are different from animals only to the extent that we are "the only animals who cook food, and no other species is as destructive of its own and other species."

Whatever species of animal Bekoff may happen to be, he clearly seems to have a chip on his shoulder (possibly some past run-ins with humans that went wrong), as does Gee. In fact, humans don't seem to fare too well at all in these books.

"Like Gee," says reviewer Stephen Cave, "Bekoff supports his case with examples of altruistic rats, toolmaking crows and evidence of the emotional lives of bees. Towards the end, there is even an account of what appears to be animal spirituality: one group of chimpanzees have been recorded participating in a “waterfall dance”, during which they would stand upright at the water’s edge, swaying rhythmically from foot to foot and stamping for up to 15 minutes.

According to recent research ... Uh, hang on a second.

Let me check these books again. Hmmm. Well, shoot. Actually the books are written by human, not animal scientists. In fact, there are no animal scientists. As it turns out animals don't conduct research or do science or even write books. They don't read them either. In fact, they are not even capable of asking the question of whether they are different from humans.

Only humans do these things, a fact so obvious that even a geranium could have figured it out.

If I couldn't do all these things, I too would be swaying rhythmically and stamping my feet in sheer frustration.

You'd have to be as dumb as a rock to think that humans really are no different from animals. Come to think of it, since we're no less the products of nature than rocks, why should we be any different from them either?

How to eliminate crime--and a few other things while we're at it

Economist Mark Perry points out that the Dutch are closing prisons because of a "prisoner shortage." This  "decline in crime" was caused by the legalization of drugs. Perry argues that we too could reduce prison populations here by calling a halt to the War on Drugs.

Perry's method for reducing prison populations has great possibilities. In fact, we could eliminate prisons entirely through the simple expedient of legalizing everything.

We could even use this method on other issues. We could increase learning by eliminating things we expect students to know; we could increase quality of life by eliminating qualitative considerations from our measurements of it; we could increase the number of marriages by calling things marriage that are not.

Oh, wait. We've already done these things. Never mind.

NEWSFLASH: Religion causes violence

In interviews promoting their new movie "The Unbelievers," scientists Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss assert that religious faith causes violence.

This made me think of all the violent things that religion has invented, such as the rack, the pillory, the strappado, waterboarding, the machine gun, grenades, mortors, bazookas, napalm, cluster bombs, torpedoes, carpet bombing, nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, drones ...

Oh, shoot. Hang on ... Whoops. Sorry. These things were all the products of science.

Nevermind.

People in Newtown, Connecticut flock to ... grief counselors?

Friends and families of the victims in the Connecticut school shootings flocked to psychologists and other mental health professionals seeking comfort and solace in the hours after the news of the deaths came. Mental health clinics were mobbed with the people and lines extended out the doors as people sought answers to questions like "Why did this happen?"; "What does it all mean?"; and "How can a loving God let evil happen?"

Additional mental health professionals had to be bused in in order to meet the demands of hundreds of people ...

No, wait. I might have gotten this all wrong. Hang on a second while I check something ...

Well, gosh. It turns out that it was churches people were flocking to for comfort and solace. While the media flocked to the grief counselors, and the grief counselors flocked to the people, the people themselves flocked to churches.

Nevermind.

Christian violence breaks out over claim that Jesus had a wife

A Harvard researcher has unveiled a papyrus fragment indicating Jesus may have had a wife, an announcement that has sent Christians into paroxysms of indignation, and setting off violent demonstrations at universities all over the country.

Much in the same way that they responded to the Monty Python movie, "Life of Brian," and Dan Brown's book the Da Vinci Code, crowds of angry Christians are reportedly rioting and the professor who turned the fragment up is being burned in effigy. Lutheran mobs at Northwestern and Catholic hordes at Georgetown University are burning school pennants in the street. At Harvard, Christian students set fire to the divinity school which housed the professor who revealed the papyrus.

In Lakewood, Texas, Joel Osteen, speaking to an angry crowd of non-denominational Christians, declared with a frightening smile, "These trials and tests are necessary to come up higher and become all that God has created us to be." His incendiary remarks sent the well-dressed mob in front of his church into a frenzy of smiles and handshakes.

They angrily chanted "May academic researchers only get 25 of the 31 promises to speak over their lives!" and "May it take them 10, instead of 7 steps to live up to their full potential!"

One particularly inflammatory sign warned, "I hope you become only a moderately better you!"

All across the country ... Wait a second. Let me check these reports again.  Hmmm.  I think I didn't read these right.

Turns out that there have been no Christian protests at all. They have been quietly responding like they always do whenever someone in opposition to their beliefs. And in the case of the sensationalist announcement about the papyrus fragment that appears to show Jesus referring to his wife, even the professor who released it admits it doesn't prove anything.

Nevermind.

The feminist argument for Todd Akin's position that pregnancy from rape is rare

***APPROPRIATENESS ALERT--READ AT YOUR OWN PERIL***

When Missouri Republican U. S. Senate nominee Todd Akin said that pregnancy from rape is "really rare," he was hammered from all sides, attracting the condemnation of the presidential nominees from both political parties. Part of the criticism was leveled at his reason for saying this, which was a cockamamie theory he probably got off the internet that a woman's body has some kind of defense mechanism against male sperm in such cases. However, a good part of it seemed to be that he was minimizing the changes of pregnancy resulting from rape.

But the congressman might just well have relied on what feminists have been saying for years about rape to bolster his position. As it turns out, feminists have been minimizing the chance of pregnancy from rape for years.

In my first week of college many years ago, we had (as students still do) to go through various forms of indoctrination about a number of things. One of the reeducation seminars we had to sit through was "rape awareness." It was conducted by a few of the grim feminist types who then only had partial control of colleges, but who, since then, have taken full control of them. In the case of this class, we had to learn why rape happens.

The first thing we were told--and we were told it again, and again, and again, and again--was that rape was more about power and dominance that it was about sex. This is part of feminist ideology. In fact, they not only believe that: many of them believe even voluntary sex during marriage constitutes rape. Anyhow, as evidence of this theory of rape as male dominance, we were told (this too was repeated multiple times, which is probably why I remember it now, some 35 years later), in most cases the rapist does not ejaculate during the crime.

They got the idea of rape as being about male control and dominance from books like Susan Brownmiller's 1975 Against our Will, in which Brownmiller stated that rape "is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear." "Rape is a crime not of lust," she asserts, "but of power." Her book is a systematic expression of contempt for the idea that rape is about gratification of sexual desire.

And just in case you think this is some marginal book, just consider that, in 1995, the New York Public Library listed it among the 100 most important books of the 20th century.

But they were just saying it then: They continue to say it--and they have now armed themselves with data.

In her 2003 book, Evolution, Gender, and Rape, Cheryl Brown Travis, the chair of "Women's Studies" at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, argues against a famous study done by Craig Thornhill and Randy Palmer in 2001 was flawed in its argument that rape has evolutionary origins. Travis thought it was, intentionally or unintentionally, a way to morally excuse male rapists.

One of Thornhill and Palmer's arguments was that rape was part of an evolutionary strategy to increase reproduction. Travis argued that if this were true, it "must result in pregnancies." But she calls this into question. Why?

Data indicate that rapists often do not have erections, fail to penetrate the vagina, or do not ejaculate. Medical studies report that these problems occur in 30 to 40 percent of cases (Bownes and O'Gorman 1991, Hook, Elliot, and Harbison 1992). During medical examination, traces of sperm may be found in only 50 percent of rape cases (Ferris and Sandercock 1998). Case reports note that rapists often have one or more of sexual dysfunctions and that these dysfunctions may precipitate additional violence, degradation, and brutalization of the victim (Groth and Burgess 1977). [p. 214]

In other words, Travis, a feminist, is downplaying the changes of pregnancy from rape. Travis isn't the only one saying this:

• "...studies have long shown that many rapists do not ejaculate." Wendy Murphy, WeNews
• "Research states that some men do not ejaculate during rape," Feminist Issues

Where is the outrage? Where is the condemnation from the media? Where are the Tolerance Police to put these women in their place?

Oh, wait. They're feminists. We can't do that.

Nevermind.

Jake gets his hate on over Chick-fil-A protest

Jake over at  Page One Kentucky has a problem with anti-gay haters. You know, all those people who went out and bought chicken at the local franchises all over the country who spewed venomous hate-filled rhetoric about gays, calling them names, insulting their family members, questioning their sanity, and attributing all kinds of false motives to them.

It was so bad that ...

Um, let's see. Let me make sure I've got my facts straight here... Oh. Gosh. I'm sorry. I've got this all turned around. As it turns out, it wasn't the people going to Chick-fil-A last Wednesday who were doing all these things.

It was actually Jake, at Page One, who was engaging in hate, calling State Rep. Kim King's husband her "puppet master," calling these people "homophobes," "obese white people," and "mouth-breathers." In fact, Jake frequently calls social conservatives he disagrees with "mouth-breathers," especially when he's trying to underscore how hateful they are and how loving and charitable he is.

Nevermind.

Chicken Queen

Gay rights groups are becoming very creative, in a galline kind of way. They have come up with an alternative to Chick-fil-A called "Fair Filet."

At "Fair Filet," gays can walk in and buy a chicken meal and eat it at your leisure. However, if you are heterosexual, believe in traditional marriage, and happen to be walking in the near vicinity of the restaurant, large "Fair Filet" security guards in uniforms and brown shorts are allowed to drag you into the restaurant and force you to eat their chicken while you watch sensitivity training videos on the restaurant monitors that explain that you are an intolerant bigot who, despite the fact that you were minding your own business just a few minutes before, needs to repudiate your traditional religious beliefs in favor of  ...

... Uh oh. Wait a minute. Let me study this for just a second ...

Shoot. Turns out it's just a fake publicity campaign that lies about what Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy said and is supporting a hate campaign against traditional values.

Nevermind.

Anderson Cooper, Victim ... or, maybe not

Anderson Cooper has come out of the closet. That's right. Cooper is gay. And we all know what had to ensue. Cooper has been attacked from every quarter. Anti-gay voices chimed in from all over the country criticizing the CNN anchor for his homosexuality.

He had his masculinity called into question, had doubt cast on his competence as an news anchor, and had a multitude of personal epithets hurled at him from every direction. The approbation was withering, underscoring the need for anti-discrimination laws. Reports were that he feared for his ...

Oh, wait. Hang on. Let me check these stories again.

Well, shoot. I don't know how I read them wrong. It turns out that there was not a single negative story on a Google search of the terms "Anderson Cooper coming out." In fact, all of them were positive. Many of them were not only positive, they were gushing.

The only danger was that Cooper would be smothered under the accolades.

Nevermind.

Atheist to rally at "Reason Rally" in Washington next spring

A bunch of atheist organizations have decided to sponsor a "Reason Rally" in Washington next spring. Thousands of people are expected to descend on the nation's capital where they will all take part in logical exercises like formulating valid syllogisms, identifying fallacies, and engaging in contests to see who can reduce syllogisms of the second, third, and fourth figure into first figure syllogisms.

Participants will also practice backing in to missing premises and performing reductio ad absurdums ...

... Wait a second. Oh, shoot. Sorry, let me correct that: They will be chanting slogans on the lawn.

Nevermind.

Ann Rice: "I quit being a human"

Anne Rice who became famous for her vampire novels before announcing she had become Catholic, now says she simply refuses to perpetuate the charade of being human:

It's simply impossible for me to “belong” to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group.

She is now seeking other species with which she can join in solidarity (preferably herbivores) to promote peace and tranquility, and teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.

Oh, wait ... Hold on.

Actually, Rice announced that she is renouncing Christianity because it is quarrelsome, hostile, and disputatious. I don't know how I could have become so confused.

Nevermind.

Is Europe driving itself off the socialist cliff?

From the Washington Post:

ATHENS -- The massive emergency fund assembled to defend the value of the euro is backed by a political gamble with an uncertain outcome: that European governments will rewrite a post-World War II social contract that has been generous to workers and retirees but has become increasingly unaffordable for an aging population.

The trillion-dollar program, to be underwritten largely by the 16 nations that use the euro and by the International Monetary Fund, represents a virtual discarding of Europe's rule book.

In other words, socialism in Europe may be failing. Hey, I've got a great idea: now that Europe is about to go financially belly-up because of socialism, let's try it here and see if we can get it to work!

Oh. Wait. Somebody has already thought of that.

Nevermind.

HT: Gene Edward Vieth

Just in case you were worrying about drowning in melted Himalayan glaciers...

GLACIERS IN HIMALAYAS WILL ALL BE GONE BY 2035! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!

Oh, wait a minute ... No they're not. Nevermind.

Read the rest here.

HT: Climategate.

Will the federal courts rewrite the Constitution on same-sex marriage?

This just in from the Decline of Western Civilization desk:

SAN FRANCISCO -- The first federal trial to determine if the U.S. Constitution prohibits states from outlawing same-sex marriage gets under way Monday, and the two gay couples on whose behalf the case was brought will be among the first witnesses.

And we all know, of course, what the Constitution says about same-sex marriage. Why there's that passage in Article ... let's see ... I thought I saw it here. Well, regardless of that, it says in the section toward the end ... hmmm ... try to find it ... Shoot. I could have swore it was there.

Oh, nevermind.

The fairer sex is also more focused in school, which is why they do better

Here's more information that someone in the Amazon Section of the Bureau of Gender Equity needs to squelch right away. It suggests once again that males and females are ... and I will try to put this in the most gentle way I can so as not to disturb the tender sensibilities of those among the our intellectual classes who get all upset and weepy when such things are suggested ... different:

Gender differences in the distributions of cognitive and non-cognitive abilities might be important in explaining gender differences in the propensities to go to and graduate from college. Gender differences in the means of cognitive measures like IQ are minor, but the degree of variability in cognitive abilities appear to be greater among men than women.

However, the main ability differences between men and women are in the non-cognitive arena. Non-cognitive abilities affect grades and test scores by affecting how much attention students pay to instruction from their teachers, how organized they are in doing homework and preparing for exams, whether they get disciplined for inappropriate behavior at school, and in various other ways.

Oh wait, this reflects well on women. Nevermind.

Friendly advice for the slots lobby

Napoleon is reputed to have once said of something that was "worse than a sin; it was a mistake." I thought of that line as I was trying to fathom the political calculations of Kentucky's slots lobby.

Despite all the money this seemingly hard hit industry has to throw around, they are all but tone deaf on the politics of their situation. The errors they have made in pursuing their agenda are simply breathtaking.

First of all, there is the matter of the Governor. As has been pointed out in several news stories, had he been serious about this he would have stumped the state to ensure the passage of the slots bill. Instead, he did virtually nothing for it other than tag along for the ride. Okay, he put it on the call, but only hesitatingly, as an amendment the next day. What kind of signal does that send?

If I'm in the horse industry, I'm not looking to do anything to David Williams, I'm going after the Governor. David Williams has always been against expanded gambling. For him to fight it as he has is a no-brainer. That's what he's supposed to do. But to have the guy who's supposed be the leader of the slots effort hedging and hesitating is a far worse problem for slots than David Williams.

With friends like the Governor, the slots lobby doesn't need any enemies.

Second, let's talk about David Williams. The horse industry has blundered their way into an impossible situation with the Senate. From the start, KEEP has done nothing but alienate the one person would could have helped them. When they should have been trying to endear themselves to Williams so he at least wouldn't dislike them, they instead dumped money into Senate races to defeat Republican members. What is that?

When they added sleazy tactics to the mix and now ugly rhetoric, they really did themselves in. If I'm Williams (and I'm not), I'm now not only opposed to slots, I'm their mortal enemy. It's one thing to have an opponent who disagrees with you in principle, which Williams does with the slots lobby, but to do everything but spit in his face and poke him in the eye is just simply an inept political strategy. Why in the world would you do that? What is it going to get you?

The old Klingon proverb is appropriate here: "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer." Instead, the slots lobby fumbles along, keeping friends it can afford to do without, and making enemies it can't afford to make.

I don't know who the commanding general is over there, but if I were running the slots effort, I'd send the guy to the Eastern front.

Wait, what am I saying? I hope they just keep on making the same mistakes.

Nevermind.

Politicians being political: Oh my!

Democrats are accusing the Fletcher administration of being political. And they are shocked, so shocked. Why, this is unprecedented. It's unheard of for a governor to be political. And during an election season too! Isn't there some law barring politicians from being political during an election season?

In fact, one wonders why, if the Democrats are so shocked by politicians being political in an election season, they are not shocked at themselves for publicly expressing shock about a Republican governor being political, since such an action is itself political.

Maybe legislators could take up this issue--the issue of politicians being political--during the special session, which the Democrats insist is being convened by the Governor for political reasons. But wait: that would be political too, wouldn't it? And the Republicans could point that out--that taking up the issue of politicians being political is political. But that action too would be political, and then...

Oh, nevermind.

It just goes to show: it's a dangerous thing to apply logic to politics.

Nevermind

An actor has been fired from a popular television show because of his beliefs. This is outrageous. This is McCarthyism all over again. For Hollywood to do this is the height of intolerance. This just shows how opposed they are to diversity that Hollywood is now effectively blacklisting people again. And now that Isaiah Washington has been fired from Gray's Anatomy for ... oh, wait.

He said bad things about gays. Well, now, that's completely different.

Nevermind.