thoughts in and out of season
More on the “human rights” front: U.S. isolated at population conference over its anti-abortion stand. The “anti-abortion stand” consists in attempts to clarify language in existing UN agreements that UN bureaucrats and human rights professionals have read to require support for abortion. It appears that the U.S. is saying it won’t provide support for … More ...
I don’t know enough about French intellectual life to comment, but this seemed worth passing on: French Intellectuals take off the gloves in slugfest over `new reactionaries’.
The social construction of reality, chapter whatever: American Psychiatric Association issues statement endorsing right of gay and lesbian couples to adopt. According to the APA, “research over the past 30 years has consistently demonstrated that children raised by gay or lesbian parents exhibit the same level of emotional, cognitive, social and sexual functioning as … More ...
Since I’m on the topic, here’s more sex news: unreported triumph fighting AIDS in Uganda because of superior sex education. HIV prevalence there was 15 percent in 1991 but 5 percent by 2001, a dramatic decline that is unique worldwide.
Oddly, the superior education was the kind Human Rights Watch doesn’t like because it violates … More ...
Social construction, take two: in accordance with a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights, Britain will now allow transsexuals to apply for substitute birth certificates showing their “new gender”. As the responsible parliamentary official explained,
… More ...“Our legislation will enable transsexual people confidently to take up those rights which have been denied
More prophets of a freer and more open tomorrow: Couple launches attack on ‘Christmas hell’. “Hell,” for these purposes, means Christmas as such, partly because it’s commercialized, but more fundamentally because it’s religious and thus exclusive. “Children are taught to worship this white, heterosexual man [Santa] who overeats. I mean, it’s wrong.”
Good point! … More ...
“Free to be you and me,” or maybe “The Way of the Cross Goes Bad”: Man held for German ‘cannibal killing’. A follower of Jeffrey Dahmer decided the easiest way to get a victim would be to place an ad in the gay press, so he did. Someone volunteered, and after setting his affairs … More ...
Some readers might be interested in an essay of mine on human rights, or what passes for them, just published at FrontPage.
It’s not just libraries that have a problem with the “atypical behavior” of skid row types: in Northampton, Massachusetts it’s the whole town.
A reader sent in the following article by the dean of the library school at Indiana University. It was published in the November 15 Library Journal and gives a sense of how things work out today in public-service organizations. I rather liked the idea of seminars on how to deal with “atypical patron behavior” in … More ...