Apparently there are some people who believe that pedophilia is now a legitimate sexual orientation rather than a social aberration to be cured:
California Congresswoman, Rep. Jackie Speier CA (D), wants to federalize a state law to prohibit counseling to change a person’s sexual orientation.
Under the bill’s language, a mental health counselor could be sanctioned if there was an attempt to get a gay individual to change his or her behavior or speak negatively about their behavior as it relates to sexuality. Read more »
Vice has an interesting article about asexual people…or as I prefer to describe them…dud roots:
Minerva isn’t gay. A fluid conversationalist, the Massachusetts native has been artfully rehashing this point for the last three hours.
“I have been told I could easily be mistaken as a lesbian,” she says, gesturing to her cropped, copper hair as evidence. “Which is not a bad thing.”
Minerva isn’t a lesbian, she says, but she certainly isn’t straight. At 29 years old, Minerva, who asked that she be identified by the name of her Tumblr, has never had a romantic relationship. She calls herself “asexual,” meaning she doesn’t experience sexual attraction. To anyone.
To the deep chagrin of some members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, Minerva also uses the word “queer” to define her sexuality. A re-appropriated term of endearment for sexual minorities, “queer” is as emotionally charged as it is oddly exclusive, and there is an ongoing, online debate about whether she should feel comfortable using it to self-identify. In some corners of the internet, that debate has turned to all out war.
In October 2011, an outreach organization called Asexual Awareness Week released a “Community Census” that polled data from over 3,000 asexual-identifying people. In the survey, more than 40 percent of respondents said they consider themselves members of the LGBT community, and another 38 percent said they consider themselves “allies,” or supporters of the community.
The community isn’t so quick to oblige.
“Practicing sex/sexuality slightly differently, or not at all, does not make you queer,” “Aria” wrote in a Tumblr post earlier this year. “People don’t shout ‘queer’ at an asexual person on the basis that they are not (sexually) attracted to anyone.”
Even the poofs think they are dud roots…basically if they aren’t rooting then they are duds. The gays aren’t having a bar of dud roots muscling in on their spot. Read more »
Four years ago, LGBT advocates were devastated by the voter approval of Proposition 8 in California, which reversed a state court ruling allowing same-sex marriage. In that fight, the political consultant Frank Schubert, who led the anti-gay forces there and in the four statesthat voted on marriage this week, created a deadly ad campaign that played on lingering fears that gay equality threatens kids. In his advertisement, a schoolgirl returns home and cheerfully announces what she learned in school—that a prince can marry a prince, and she can marry a princess! In 2009, Schubert used the identical playbook to win a ballot measure in Maine invalidating the legislature’s decision to let gays wed.
Just three years later, the people of Maine did an about face, and along with Maryland voted Tuesday to let gay couples marry. (We’ll update about Washington and Minnesota when results are in.) Until this election, every state that had held a popular vote on the question—32 in a row—had rejected same-sex marriage. Maine and Maryland not only ended the losing streak but may have turned the war, depriving defenders of straight-only marriage of their latest talking point: that the people don’t want gays to marry. (And let’s not forget that Wisconsin elected Tammy Baldwin, the nation’s first openly gay senator!)
Smart poofs. Turning the tactic around. But how did they do it?
After the losses in Maine in 2009 and California a year earlier, LGBT advocates knew they needed to craft an effective response to Schubert’s false message that gay equality harms kids. Enter Freedom To Marry. The umbrella group was founded in 2003 by the civil rights lawyer Evan Wolfson, who has consistently preached about winning hearts and minds in between elections rather than in the frenzied lead-up to them. While gay groups had spent millions of dollars on public opinion research before and after the Prop 8 loss in California, no one had ever stopped to pull it all together.
Within weeks of the Maine loss, Freedom To Marry helped assemble a coalition of state-based gay groups, polling experts and academic researchers to centralize and share information so that each campaign didn’t have to start from scratch for each new battle.
What came out of this tightly coordinated effort was the key to dismantling the anti-gay myths of the last 40 years. For decades, gay advocates had framed their arguments in terms of equal rights and government benefits, often using rhetoric that was confrontational (“We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it”) and demanding (“We deserve equal rights now!”). Third Way, a centrist think tank working in the coalition with Freedom To Marry, began to unpack exactly how straight people reacted to such tactics. The group found that when straight people were asked what marriage meant to them, they spoke of love, commitment and responsibility. But when asked why they thought gay people wanted to marry, they cited rights and benefits. Tapping into anti-gay stereotypes, they suggested gay people wanted marriage for selfish reasons while they themselves wanted to express love and commitment.
The gay rights coalition’s response was the “Why Marriage Matters” campaign. Its message was “love, commitment, family,” with no mention of rights or benefits. On the surface, it looks like any garden-variety public education campaign, a little vague, a little sappy. But this message was the result of several years and millions of dollars of research. It signaled a sea change in the way gay advocates pled their case. This was a way to invite straight people to empathize with gay people, to reassure the majority that gay people wanted the same things that they did, and to shift focus from minority rights to points of commonality. The year Why Marriage Matters rolled out, 2011, was also the year that a slew of polls first showed majority national support for same-sex marriage.
“Why Marriage Matters” is a brilliant campaign, and avoids all the stereotypical shrieking poofs that puts off most people from reasonable thought processes. That was the central tenet of the campaign…to speak truth to viewers:
Schubert’s misleading “princess” ads implied that schools could usurp the role of parents in teaching pro-gay values, but that was wrong. As Zepatos and her team pored over the research, they watched conversations in which voters spoke among themselves and kept circling back to the same insight: Parents are the parents, and they teach their kids values at home. The challenge, Zepatos and her colleagues determined, was to reassure voters about this conclusion. Parents knew they had the control, but the Schubert ads—which in the past have killed a pro-gay lead in the polls at the last minute—made them anxious about losing it.
The first step to combatting that fear were ads that showed (among other story lines) a mom who was also a teacher speaking at home with her husband. “What we do in a school is no substitute for what happens at home,” she says. Her husband chimes in: “No law is going to change the core values we teach our kids here at home.” The takeaway: No one would force parents into uncomfortable conversations when their own child returned home from school.
Jackie Bell doesn’t like sex. But she does enjoy a good snuggle.
The 43-year-old attends monthly “cuddling” sessions in Wellington, where up to 20 clothed people consent to hug and touch. Sexual contact is forbidden.
“It’s like being at a sexless orgy,” Bell says.
If experts are right, about 40,000 New Zealanders are “asexuals” who feel no sexual attraction at all.
So Colin Craig has shown his truly homophobic colours and said on The Nation yesterday that (according to him): “homosexual men, they are statistically far more likely to have suffered child abuses as a child.”
He uses this ‘evidence’ to show that people choose to be homosexual because they suffered abuse as a child, and weren’t born that way.
A few questions for dear Colin:
What sort of child abuse causes men to choose to be gay?
Does being smacked as a child make you gay? How hard would the smack need to be to make you gay? How often?
Does emotional abuse by adults cause homosexuality? Like being marginalised, teased for being a fag, for being too ‘femme’ or being interested in other boys?
Is it sometimes ‘abuse’ at the hands of adults or even other children because you were a little bit gay already?
Could you have the most wonderful upbringing (by your definition) with heterosexual parents and still be gay? Hmmm, but surely something went wrong along the way? God forbid they were Born that way – I guess that might make them in God’s image. Oh, that’s right God is a man and heterosexual… probably white too?
Colin, you were very specific that only homosexual men are ‘that way’ because they were abused as children… what makes lesbian women?
Why would anyone choose to be gay?
Even if it as you say that blokes are “turned gay”…then can they be “turned back”?
Even if it as you say that blokes are “turned gay”…then why are you still opposed to them being able to marry?
Doesn’t that victimise then further?
Can gay really be prayed away?
Perhaps there are some other helpful questions that Colin has all the answers to. Feel free to add them to the comments. I will see if we can get some answers.
According to the latest Roy Morgan Research “State of the Nation” Report, New Zealanders increasingly agree that homosexual couples should be allowed to adopt children. This has grown steadily over the past eight years from 38% to 56%. During the same period, New Zealanders who believe homosexuality is immoral has decreased by nine percentage points (from 35% to 26%). New Zealanders views on homosexuality
One of the arguments that opponents of same-sex marriage use is that it will destroy the sanctity of marriage…hmmm:
FOUR in ten same-sex couples are Christians, according to a detailed snapshot of the nation’s gay community based on the latest census data.
Christians represent a smaller proportion of same-sex couples than heterosexual couples, of which more than two-thirds affiliate with the religion.
Same-sex partners are more likely than heterosexual partners to be Buddhists, but less likely to be Hindus or Muslims, according to a portrait of the 33,714 same-sex couples counted in last year’s census.
Same-sex partners are more likely to report no religion (48 per cent) than heterosexual partners (21 per cent), according to a paper released yesterday by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
As in previous censuses, there were more male than female same-sex couples, although the gap between the number of male and female same-sex couples has narrowed since 1996, when the bureau began collecting data on same-sex couples. Then, there were 137 male couples for every 100 female couples. In 2011 there were 109 male couples for every 100 female couples.
If marriage is a stablising force for families and society, then why can’t gay people have stability too?
Surely those who say they don’t support the concept of gay marriage because they think children should have a mother and a father are missing the whole point? (No names, no pack drill, but I am talking about my dear friend Joe Hockey and his otherwise strong appearance on Q&A last Monday night.) For what has the one got to do with the other? Gay families are already everywhere, and good luck to them. That has happened – ”evolved” as both Barack Obama and Magda Szubanski might have it – completely without recognition of gay marriage, and Penny Wong and her partner, with their child, are a prime example. Marriage, as we all know, is a stabilising force on society, an institution that helps keep families together, even through tough times. So why should the kids of gay parents be denied that stabilising force? Supporting gay marriage is not hurting kids, it is helping them.
Many people who oppose marriage equality like to suggest that it is the end of the institution of marriage. That isn’t true:
Marriage has, in the past, been about one man/one woman, just as Gallagher says; it’s been an assertion that gender and gender roles are as important as, or even more important than, what you feel in your heart.
Gay marriage is a final, absolute refutation of that logic. If two men can get married, or two women, then marriage must really be not about power, but about love. Gay marriage, then, is radical in the best sense, in that it offers equality and hope not just to gay people, but to children, women, and men of every orientation—even to Gallagher, resist it as she will. Gay marriage is not just about straight people accepting gays into our institutions. It’s about gay people teaching us what those institutions mean. The gay community has given straight people a lot over the years, but surely gay marriage is one of the greatest gift it has offered us.
Apparently our gaydar is more accurate for lesbians than gays.
College students in the US find it easier to tell whether a woman is gay or straight from a glance at her face, than they do determining the sexuality of a man from a quick look, researchers have found.
But for both genders, the report said the students’ “gaydar” was right more times than it was wrong based on a viewing of just 50 milliseconds – about a third the time of an eyeblink – for each face.
In the study, 129 college students viewed 96 photos of young adult men and women who identified themselves as gay or straight. Photos were only used of people without facial hair, glasses, makeup or piercings to reduce the risk they might provide easy clues. The pictures were cropped so hairstyles could not be seen.
For women’s faces, participants were 65 per cent accurate in telling the difference between gay and straight faces when the photos flashed on a computer screen. Even when the faces were flipped upside down, participants were 61 per cent accurate in telling the two apart.
They were 57 per cent accurate in picking the gay men, dropping to 53 per cent when the men’s faces appeared upside down.
The difference in accuracy for men’s and women’s faces was driven by more false alarm errors with men’s faces – that is, a higher rate of mistaking straight men’s faces as gay.
