jenk

[The legislative blitz] wasn’t only a bathroom bill, though. That was the pretext — state legislation to override Charlotte’s city law protecting LGBT civil rights. But the effect — explicitly written into this new law — reaches far beyond just this immediate anti-LGBT pretext. The law claims for the state the right to overrule and override any local or municipal regulation — specifically mentioning local minimum-wage laws and child-labor laws.

So this isn’t just about prohibiting Charlotte from protecting the civil rights of LGBT residents. It’s also about preventing Charlotte from raising the minimum wage. Or preventing Charlotte — or any other municipality — from, say, requiring better water-safety standards than whatever state lawmakers might decide. It’s a centralized, top-down, Raleigh-knows-best power-grab by the capital. Because, again, small government conservatism.

zoethe

The collapse of the WTC towers shocked the whole country, and much of the world. It staggered us. It deserved outrage and grief and anger.

But a staggered USA should not have stopped at that stage. This is not the worst loss of innocents, the worst destruction at the hands of enemies the world has ever known. In World War II The Blitz killed over 43,000 Brits, half of them Londoners. They lived under a reign of terror that wasn't just an abstract possibility. It was repeated night after night.

And when it was over, they rebuilt. Because that's what you do. Or what you should do.

Instead, we have been so paralyzed by this one attack, and so willing to believe that our grief is unique in the history of the world, that [...] we have turned the damaged site into a continuing monument to fear.

Stop worrying about the mosque three blocks away being some kind of victory for the jihadists; the gaping hole of Ground Zero is the best victory monument we could possibly build for them.
[...]
We do not honor the fallen dead by surrendering the heart of New York City to the effects caused by the hijackers. We instead hand victory to the jihadists by fostering that wound into a cultural stigmata. It's time to defy them by rebuilding and refusing to live in terror.

siderea

What was taught in the psychiatry classrooms of the US -- what had been taught since the mid-1940s [...was...] that same-sex sexual desire was not an ordinary human experience, but necessarily a symptom of a grave and disabling insanity. You could not desire members of your own sex, they taught, without also being a sociopath who would lie, cheat, steal, and rape (anything or anyone) at the slightest opportunity. Homosexuality -- for those of you who are clinicians -- was a personality disorder.
[...]
And this was, they insisted, necessarily so. You couldn't have the symptom of same-sex desire without this attendant whole personality illness, that pervaded every aspect of your life, the total of your personality. You could not be a person of character, could not have close human relationships, could not control your impulses or appetites in any way, they said.

This is what was taught. This was what was taught to psychiatrists. All of them, pretty much. For thirty years.

Among that research the most astonishing was Evelyn Hooker's 1956 "The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual". It was a gold-standard, double-blind experiment. Psychiatry claimed that homosexuality could not exist without all sorts of other debilitating effects throughout the personality. Very well, said Hooker: let's test that hypothesis. She recruited thirty gay men who had never had therapy and thirty controls who were matched for them on age, socioeconomic status and intelligence. Each was given the standard, most esteemed, tests for psychopathology then in use. Their anonymized results were shipped to three highly esteemed experts on those measures, to be graded.

And what was returned was that the very best experts in psychological testing for psychopathology, using the best tools of the day, could not tell the gay from straight respondants on the basis of pathology -- or at all. The rate of psychopathology in the two populations was almost identical, with the gay subjects being just a tad better adjusted.

This research made an enormous splash in psychology, but psychiatry wasn't ready to hear it in the 1950s.

Psychiatry was ready to hear it in 1973.

cooncat

Overall, the religious vote for Obama did not reflect a massive shift in ideology and priorities among evangelicals but rather muscle-flexing by a coalition of others of faith--including and especially African-American churchgoers and Latinos who tend to be both more religious and more socially conservative than the population at large. The pro-Obama faithful represent a wild diversity of the American religious experience, including mainline Protestants, church-shoppers, the curious, the spiritual but not religious, the heterodox (those who subscribe to several traditions), the intermarried, the community-minded, the intellectually provoked but skeptical, and the traditionalists. Indeed, it includes almost every committed person of faith except those whose church culture insists on a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
— Lisa Miller: A Post-Evangelical America?

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