Get Off the Cross, Honey. Somebody Needs the Wood

In a piece of news that I'm sure will surprise you, a Christian group (Christian Anti-Defamation Commission) is lying about persecution it claims to have faced during the year of 2009. Towleroad reports the group's "Top 10" instances of anti-Christian persecution.

10. Pro-life Pastor Reverend Walter Hoye of Oakland, CA was jailed for exercising peaceful, pro-life speech.

9. Rev. Fred Winters was murdered while preaching in his pulpit in Maryville, Illinois.

8. HBO's program "Curb Your Enthusiasm" aired an episode where the main actor urinates on painting of Jesus. When confronted HBO would not apologize.

7. The overt homosexual participation in Obama's presidential inaugural events by "Bishop" Vickie Eugene Robinson, the Gay Men's Chorus of Washington D. C., and a homosexual marching band.

6. Police called to East Jessamine Middle School in Lexington, Kentucky to stop 8th graders from praying during their lunch break for a student whose mother was tragically killed.

5. Pro-life activist Jim Pullion was murdered in front of his granddaughter's high school for showing the truth about abortion.

4. An activist judge ordered a home school mom in New Hampshire to stop home schooling her daughter because the little girl "reflected too strongly" her mother's Christian faith.

3. The Federal Department of Homeland Security issued a report entitled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate" that labeled conservative Christians extremists and potential terrorists.

2. President Obama's appointment of radical anti-Christians like homosexual activist Kevin Jennings as the "safe school czar;" pro-abortion advocate Kathleen Seblius made Secretary of Human and Health Services, and Chai Feldblum, pro-homosexual and anti-religious liberty judge nominated for Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

1. The Federal Hate Crimes Bill that attacks religious liberty and freedom of speech. For the first time in our history ministers are vulnerable to investigation and prosecution for telling the truth about homosexuality.

Right of the bat, #7, 2, and 3 are pure lies or exaggeration. I mean, come on, in #7 they're complaining that gay groups merely participated in Obama's inauguration. Apparently the mere acknowledgment of gay people as contributing members of society counts as Christian persecution. Cry me a river. (PS did you notice their inclusion of quotation marks around Bishop Robinson's title, and the inclusion of the name "Vickie" to make him sound more effeminate? How transparently patronizing.)

#2 is also an example of the mere inclusion of openly gay people as being seen as persecution. One might notice that the group makes no mention of Jewish, Buddhist, or atheist appointees as causing Christian subjugation (i.e. they really just don't like gay people). I have been following the actions of some of those appointees and to my knowledge they have done nothing that could be seen as anti-Christian other than advocate for the rights and safety of LGBT adults, children, and allies.

Finally, #1 is an affront to the reader's intelligence, since anyone with Google access knows that the 1st Amendment would make such a law unconstitutional. The Hate Crimes Bill does nothing other than provide federal funds to local authorities for investigating crimes that appear to be motivated towards a victims sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability. A violent crime has to have been committed in order for the law to come into play. It has nothing to do with speech. Also, these categories were simply added to the already existing categories including race and religion.

Aside from what follows, I leave the dissection of the other instances of "persecution" to you. It's quite possible that some of the others are true (and if so, should be condemned), but if I could find 3 out of the top 10 of 2009 without even trying...

I would though, like to briefly mention #8. When I first read it, I pictured some dude deliberately urinating on a Jesus painting to make a point, or to be deliberately insulting. I'll have to admit, I didn't really care. But then I tried to flip the situation, and so I wondered how I would have felt if the character had urinated on a pride flag, or a poster of a pink triangle. How would I feel if a deliberately anti-gay act of vandalism was portrayed on TV for millions to see?

Truth be told, I know that would hurt me. I know that that would make me anxious about the anti-gay sentiment it would help to propagate. Still...I'm not sure about hate speech laws, and I dislike the idea of censorship in any way. So in the end, I think I would have to side with the principle of free speech, and not try to take any action against HBO, as some Christian groups apparently did.

Of course, then I went and actually watched the clip, and in reality the character only accidentally urinates on the painting, and seems rather embarrassed about it. Showing someone feeling bad about accidentally peeing on a painting of Jesus isn't reeeeeally what I would call persecution...

UPDATE (07/01/2010): hehe, someone totally takes apart much of the rest of the "persecution" h/t Dispatches

UPDATE (10/01/2010): and now PZ Myers has covered it too.

Queer thoughts

Unsurprisingly, yet another team of researchers has found that gay people are more likely to seek treatment for mental health disorders. This is not exactly news (in that it's not new information) but it bears repeating for two reasons.

First, the plight of homosexuals with regards to mental health bears the double taboo of homosexuality and mental illness. Both of these topics tend to make people skiddish, particularly when speaking in public. But this issue needs to be discussed publicly, not least because LGBT people have higher rates of suicide and suicide attempts than the general population.

Secondly, the old mistake of equating correlation with causation plays into the hands of anti-gay activists. They consistently take these types of findings and twist them to make it seem as though being gay is inherently detrimental to one's mental well-being. This will likely also happen with this study, despite the authors' own statement that:

"The pervasive and historically rooted societal pathologizing of homosexuality may contribute to this propensity for treatment by construing homosexuality and issues associated with it as mental health problems."

The truth needs to be trumpeted, loud and clear.
Alvin McEwan does an excellent job of cataloging and dismantling these anti-gay attacks at his blog Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters.

In Totally Unsurprising News...

The APA has adopted a resolution declaring that sexual reorientation therapy (aka "ex-gay" therapy, "reparative therapy") is bunk. Colour me shocked. ;) You can find the press release here and the guidelines in PDF form here.

The short story is that the APA set up a task force to review the (admittedly scant and old) literature concerning efforts to change peoples' sexual orientation. They did manage to find about 80 old studies, and after reviewing them, found no evidence to suggest that sexual "reorientation" is possible. In fact:

"Contrary to the claims of SOCE practitioners and advocates, recent research studies do not provide evidence of sexual orientation change as the research methods are inadequate to determine the effectiveness of these interventions." Glassgold added: "At most, certain studies suggested that some individuals learned how to ignore or not act on their homosexual attractions. Yet, these studies did not indicate for whom this was possible, how long it lasted or its long-term mental health effects. Also, this result was much less likely to be true for people who started out only attracted to people of the same sex."

That paragraph made me smile ;)

This resolution is extremely important, because there are still a large number of organisations that run or support programs that claim to cure homosexuality.* If someone you know tells you that they're considering patronizing one of these types of programs, please direct them to this resolution, so they at least know what they're getting into.

Many of these programs cost thousands of dollars, not to mention the psychological trauma of being "treated" by someone with no psychological credentials and the guilt of being systematically told that you're sick in some way.

Another reason this resolution is so important is because it was recently found that many therapists in the UK are still under the impression that sexual orientation can be changed in some way, and many have actively helped their patients to try to become straight. Hopefully this consensus will bring an end to this ridiculous practice.


*Actually, a lot of these programs only claim to help you "leave homosexuality" or claim that "change is possible," whatever that means. It's probably just so they don't get sued for false advertising.

The Gay Gene?

I had a discussion with two friends recently about the genetic nature of homosexuality. This topic is often terribly misunderstood, so today I'll try to sum up all the information as concisely as possible.[1]

First, though, it's important to distinguish the difference between the terms "genetic," "developmental," and "in-born." When we say that something is genetically inherited, we mean that a quality is determined by one's genetic code. A good example would be sickle cell anemia. The hemoglobin (Hb)in your red blood cells is coded for by a handful of genes; a particular mutation in one of these genes results in misshaped Hb, which then deforms your red blood cells and makes you sick. Sickle cell anemia is entirely genetic in origin.

To say that something is developmental is to mean that a quality is determined by the the environment an organism is exposed to during development. Your height, for example, is partially determined by what kind of foods you eat while growing up, your level of exercise, and other factors.

However, we still refer to one's height as something that is "in-born;" that is to say, a personal quality that is outside one's control. Something determined by one's own nature. Keep this in mind for later in the post...

Now, homosexuality poses a bit of an evolutionary paradox. If evolution favours traits that improve a species' reproductive success, how could a trait like homosexuality become so common?[2] Surely any gene or genes for homosexuality would decrease the likelihood of its' possessor's reproduction, and be lost from the gene pool.

In a June 2008 paper, Andrea Ciani et al.[3], propose an evolutionary mechanism called "sexually antagonistic selection" that could account for the prevalence of homosexual behaviour. To sum up (to the best of my abilities), their paper suggests that sexuality is determined by two genes, one of which is located on the X chromosome. Having the "gay" version of these genes (we could say "gay alleles") makes males gay but makes females more likely to reproduce. The gay alleles could be said to simultaneously decrease male fitness but increase female fitness. This provides a solution to our paradox, assuming that the advantage for females outweighs the disadvantage to males.[4] Indeed, this genetic model is also compatible with other data, such as the fact that homosexual males' maternal aunts and grandmothers are found to be more fecund than baseline. [3]

This model adds to the growing data that support a natural cause for homosexuality. Previous studies have shown that homosexuality is at least 35% genetic in origin, and various other theories are being researched to understand the developmental components (handedness, brain anatomy, and hormonal exposure in the womb, for example).

However, as my friend and I agreed, while all this information is interesting from a basic sciences perspective, it serves almost no purpuse in terms of informing public opinion or policy concerning homosexuality. ...Or, rather, it shouldn't.

Public interest in the genetic/developmental origins of homosexuality center around the debate about whether or not being gay is a choice. While all the evidence so far points to a substantial "in-born" component to sexual preference, it doesn't matter anyway. There is nothing unnatural, immoral, or harmful about homosexual behaviour, so there should be no public recourse against it. And even if it were a choice to be gay (can you imagine choosing to be gay!?), lots of other life choices (such as religion, most notably), receive widespread public support. People who advance the "it's a choice" argument are either lacking integrity or honesty.

1. My apologies for the long time since my last post.

2 It is, in fact, quite common. See here for some examples of homosexuality observed in the Animal Kingdom.

3. Camperio Ciani A, Cermelli P, Zanzotto G (2008) Sexually Antagonistic Selection in Human Male Homosexuality. PLoS ONE 3(6): e2282. doi:10.1371/
journal.pone.0002282

4. This paper uses a LOT of wacky mathematics that make my head spin. I leave it to my more "numbered" readers to judge the merits of the authors' work.

My Latest Article

Here's a transcript from an article I just wrote. It's a last-minute addition to the upcoming copy of our med student newsletter. Enjoy, and please feedback with your ideas and opinions. :)

In the world of public health, the goal is to benefit the greatest possible number of people. When it comes to blood donations, that means getting as many people to donate as possible, without compromising the safety of the blood supply. To this end, Canadian Blood Services not only screens the blood it receives for pathogens, but also screens out at-risk donors from giving blood in the first place.

In the 80’s, when HIV first burst into the public health scene, little was known about it except that the infection was endemic among gay men. This prompted a blood-donor ban, not just on sexually active gay men, but on any man who had ever had sex with another man (MSM) since 1977. This policy is still in place today. Potential donors are screened via questionnaire.

The obvious purpose of banning MSM from donating blood is to prevent iatrogenic transmission of HIV and other STI’s. However, the donor questionnaire doesn’t ask potential donors if they’ve had unprotected sex recently, nor does it inquire about anonymous sexual partners more than 6 months prior.

To clarify, this means that some guy who got “curious” (yes, including oral) at college once in 1981 but now has been straight and monogamous for 25 years and has 4 kids can’t donate blood. Meanwhile, another guy who had unprotected sex with 3 strangers in Vegas last year can. Somehow, I don’t feel like our blood supply is made safer by this policy.

Think of it this way: since, in Canada, men have a higher prevalence of HIV than women, we should ban men from donating blood, right? Of course not, that’s a ridiculous overgeneralization. The at-risk group can be narrowed down, as it has been. But limiting the at-risk group to MSM is still overly general. There are lots of sexually active gay men who use condoms intelligently with every partner, who get tested regularly, or who have been monogamous for years. These men are no more at risk of contaminating the blood supply than heterosexuals—and are less likely to do so than some!

One obvious remedy to this problem is to ask donors pertinent questions, rather than use a criterion that’s both over-inclusive and under-inclusive. Such questions could include “Have you had unprotected sex or a new sexual partner in the past year?” or “When was the last time you were tested for HIV?” These types of questions would weed out potential donors are at genuine risk for infectious diseases, but allow healthy, monogamous gay men to help their fellow Canadians by donating blood.

Other solutions include improving the reliability of testing and removing monetary incentives. However, the latter has already been implemented in Canada, and current blood screening is already so reliable that only one HIV-positive sample in a million would fail to be detected, according to the US FDA. Surely the best way to solve today’s shortage of donors is to add to the donor pool. The question is: how do we weed out those people who are truly at risk, without turning away healthy donors? Whatever the best answer is, the current policy is certainly not it.

Note: image from slapupsidethehead.com--a wonderfully humourous gay-centric Canadian blog.

Progressive advertizing

I posted this on my FB page, but I thought I'd double it here. It features a trans-woman. In a positive way. That's pretty forward. But I really can't imagine this kind of ad being used in North America. But I certainly hope that someday it will be.

Guilt

So I'm here sitting with the loverly BF, and he brought up a very interesting point. We were talking about some people's inability to accept homosexuality as a natural part of the human experience/existence, and he mentioned this: Once realizing that being gay is not wrong, anyone (e.g. a priest) who had, in the past, condemned a gay person for their feelings or attractions, would have to look back on that experience and realize that they had made a huge mistake. Maybe a very grave mistake, depending on their reaction and how often they did it. And for a lot of people, that would probably result in an astronomical amount of guilt. So maybe it is a little easier to understand why "homophobic" people are so reluctant to give up their views--because to do so would make them the evil ones.

Born gay?

I have been reading too many articles and comments online about whether a person is born with TEH GAY. Everyone's talking about whether or not there's a gay gene ("No, there's NO gay gene!" "But I've always KNOWN I was gay!" etc...). So please, puh-leeeeeez, allow me to set the record straight (....haha...."straight") and follow it up with my opinion.

People who don't consider a gay medical student with an honours degree in human physiology talking about the nature/nurture hypotheses of homosexuality should tune out. Right about...now.

So, much to your dismay/pleasure/utterly-unphasedness, homosexuality isn't entirely genetic. In fact, genetics explains only about 35% of a person's tendency to turn out gay. But does that really surprise you? So many aspects of your life are goverened by your environment and development; even those that are genetically-based!

For example, you have the genetic potential for a certain height. BUT!!! if you, say are raised in a famine-stricken country for the first 15 years of life, chances are you'll be a little shorter. OR if you eat foods with a bunch of anabolic steroids (no, I can't think of a real life example--so sue me!) you'll be bigger (and "bacne"-er).

The interesting thing you'll notice if you follow the link above is that an additional 64% of homosexuality can be accounted for by environmental factors. Just to be clear, that excludes having an overbearing mother or distant father, being exposed to Madonna rather than Mozart while in the womb, and being born in the Castro in 1980. Oh, right, and also that means...

PEOPLE ARE, INDEED, SOMETIMES BORN GAY.

Of course, "born gay" in the sense that someday they will likely be sexually attracted to the same sex, not in the sense that there are a bunch of baby boys out there who think that JT "is, like, so totally hawt!" That would be too weird...

Maybe someday I'll get around to talking about what those "environmental" factors could be...

But for now, I'll just say this: it doesn't matter anyway. Who cares if it's biological or not? Because then it would be a choice? So what? People are religious (or not) by choice, and we still protect religious minorities with hate crimes laws, we allow people of all religions (and none) to marry, to assemble, to equal treatment under the law. And why? Because a person's religion has no direct negative effect on anyone else. So there's no reason to discriminate against someone for how they identify themselves religiously.

And the same goes for sexual identity.

Science time! Are bisexuals real?

It's been a while since we've looked at some peer-reviewed gay, so let's have at it.

So there's a new paper in Developmental Psychology (produced by the American Psychological Association--oooouuuu, faaaancy) that discusses bisexuality in women; namely, are bisexual women really bisexual, or is it just a transition between being gay and being straight, or is it just an artifact of everyone's ability to..."adapt" to social situations. ;)

So Lisa Diamond, of the University of Utah, got about 80 women who identified as lesbian, bisexual, or unlabeled, and asked them questions about their sexual identities, their past (growing up, socio-economic situation), and their sexual attractions. She then followed up with them every two years for the next ten years. This is UBER-cool, because most studies released up until now haven't followed participants that long.

Her idea was that the womens' identities could fall into 3 patterns:
1. Bisexuality as a "transitional phase": this would be suggested if it were found that women tended to drift from bisexual or unlabeled identities to either lesbian or heterosexual identities as time passed.
2. Bisexuality as a 3rd orientation: this would be suggested by finding that women tended to keep their bisexual/unlabeled identities and their relative attrations to males versus females.
3. Bisexuality as an example of sexual fluidity: would be suggested that as women mature and become more in touch with their sexuality, there would be a shift of participants to the bisexual/unlabled identities.

So, interesting findings? Um, YEAH! So get this: the women's identities did change (quite often actually--67% of the women had changed sexual identities by the end of the 10-year study), but the interesting thing is that the majority of the transitions were to or within the bisexual or unlabeled identities. Further more, the transitions tended to reflect the womens' sexual activity over the past year (i.e. previously "unlabeled" women who were in a long term relationship with a man or a woman tended to change to a heterosexual or lesbian identity).

HOWEVER (and this part is SO cool) despite the women's change in identity, they reported much less actual change in sexual attraction! Basically even those women who initially identified as bisexual/unlabeled and then changed to a lesbian identity STILL reported attraction to men. I think that this is the most important finding of the whole study, because it validates an idea that I have had for a while.

That idea being that people adopt heterosexual or gay identities, despite actually having bisexual orientations or tendencies. Why would anyone do this, you ask? Because our society is less receptive to the idea of bisexuality than it is to homosexuality! And just imagine how un-receptive THAT must be! ;)

I, in fact, do consider myself to have some attraction to women (I must, since I was in a number of long-term heterosexual relationships, none of which were "for show"), but that is outweighed by my attraction to men. However, it's difficult to even explain that to people that I meet, let alone expect them to accept the idea as valid (and not assume that I was just lying or trying to "pass" as straight). So I identify as gay, even though I know that it's not 100% true.

Reading between the lines, this study says a lot about how even now, "sexually liberated" people still have a difficult time being completely honest when presenting their sexuality to other people. There are limitations to the study (the participants were mostly white; can the results be extrapolated to males; are 80 women really a representative population) but all in all it's a great springboard for future studies.

On Obama/Warren

I had a brief discussion with a friend yesterday about Obama's choice to have Rick Warren, the leader of a huge mega-church in California, to deliver the prayer at his inauguration yesterday. Apparently this is a position of prestige and generally considered to be an honour, which miffed the queer community (Warren was a strong advocate for passing Prop8 in November, has said some rather inflammatory things about the nature of queer relationships that he later downplayed, and his church supports programs to help "change" gays).

Some people support Obama's decision to invite Warren as his way of truly being "inclusive." Others point to the invitation of Gene Robinson, an openly gay Anglican Bishop, to give a prayer earlier as a counterpoint to Warren. There are also people who see Robinson's invitation, and the invitation of the Lesbian and Gay Band Association to the parade, as an affront to "family values" folks.

I think that the opposition to Warren and Robinson come from two different angles, and that the opposition to Robinson's presence isn't merited, while opposition to Warren is. This is because Warren himself has said extemely insulting, demeaning things about gays; he, himself, is a person who does NOT accept all Americans as being equal, under the law or in the eyes of "God." On the other hand, opposition to Robinson's presence comes not (necessarily*) from specific things he has said or done, but simply because he is gay. Opposition to this man comes from a stigmatization of all gay people, but opposition to Warren does not come from an opposition to all evangelicals.

There are, of course, exceptions to all these points, but this is by and large how the arguments are going, and I think that valid points are being made to suggest that Warren does not fit the spirit of "inclusion" that was supposed to be the theme of this inauguration.

*Some people do specifically have a problem with comments that Robinson has made in the past about homophobic religious types not being true to their religions.