If you ever wanted a perfect example of why government should be secular…

…just examine the logic and evidence behind this judge’s decision to deny a transgender woman to have a name change.

“A so-called sex-change surgery can make one appear to be the opposite sex, but in fact they are nothing more than an imitation of the opposite sex,” the judge wrote in a seven-page order last year.

“Here, petitioner has not even had the surgery by which his sex purports to be changed. Thus, based on the foregoing and the DNA evidence, a sex change cannot make a man a woman or a woman a man all of which, the Court finds is sufficient in and of itself to deny petitioner’s request for a name change,” Graves wrote.

“To grant a name change in this case would be to assist that which is fraudulent,” Graves wrote. “It is notable that Genesis 1:27-28 states: ‘So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth …’ The DNA code shows God meant for them to stay male and female.”

That is a scientifically and ethically bankrupt position, driven entirely by a fundamentalist interpretation of Biblical dogma. We do not determine gender by chromosome counts; what is this judge going to do to determine the Official Sex of individuals with androgen insensitivity syndrome (XY chromosomes, but physically female)? And how can he make the leap from the book of Genesis to the “DNA code”? The Bible verse he cites says absolutely nothing about the genetic basis of sex, or whether it is fixed and inflexible in any individual.

The Bible is silent on this subject. The science tells us that gender is far more fluid than Judge Black&White thinks it is. Yet that ignoramus is trying to use both to justify a cruel and stupid decision.

Maybe the problem isn’t so much religious people as it is idiots in our judiciary, who think the nonsense their preacher thunders at them from the pulpit is actually information of worth in making a reasonable decision.

Rick Santorum finally says something that is true

Give him credit, everyone: he actually gets it right. At the Values Voter Summit, he declares 'We will never have the elite, smart people on our side…our colleges and universities, they won’t be on our side'.

He claims that instead of intelligence and education being allies of the conservative movement, there are only two things that count: church and family. He can keep his church, but he doesn’t get to claim sole ownership of family. Family is whatever human beings bring to it; family evolves; what I consider family, Rick Santorum and his cranky cronies disparage and reject and deny. Family is greater and broader than the narrow, bigoted, and patriarchal version that he wants to promote.

And my ideal of family is not incompatible with intelligence and knowledge and expertise. My families can grow cooperatively and with love and affection while embracing the entirety of human knowledge, seeking more, and adapting to the truth rather than dogma.

My families can go to colleges and universities and come away richer and wiser. At least, those who can afford it…and I want to make that education reachable by more people, unlike Santorum, who wants to limit it and despise it because it undermines his ideology of ignorance.

Kanazawa pushback

I mentioned that Satoshi Kanazawa has a new column on Big Think. Now I’ve got two flavors of responses for you!

  1. Flavor #1 is spicy! Adam Lee, who is also on Big Think, is indignant that standards have dropped so low.

    I can only speculate as to the lapse in editorial judgment that must have occurred for Big Think to extend this racist, sexist, genocide-advocating pseudoscientific bigot a platform. Were they unaware of his views? Were they aware, but went ahead anyway because controversy is good for traffic? (Racism can’t be good for traffic, can it?)

    I don’t want to be accused of giving any extra publicity to Kanazawa, so I won’t be writing to criticize him again. However, I want to make it clear in the most emphatic terms that I think him utterly vile and contemptible. And rest assured, I intend to follow up with Big Think’s upper echelons to find out who made this decision and why, and I’ll update when I know more.

    Apparently, he did talk to the upper echelon at Big Think, because a nameless editorial source posted a response, which is Flavor #2.

  2. Flavor #2 is oleaginous, lumpy, and full of sugar — it’s a kind of lard-flavored ice cream, with bullshit chunks (Hmm, what would Ben & Jerry’s call that? “Fecal Globsplosion”?). The editors support Kanazawa with many adjectives.

    Having tracked his thinking for years, including having him appear for an interview on Big Think, we cannot help but admire Satoshi’s convictions to freedom of thought, even if sometimes we too have cringed at his missteps . At its best, it yields wondrous new perspectives on confounding aspects of modern life, such as the challenge of dating in big cities. At its worst, it yields the intellectual equivalent of shock-jock antics which serve as a call-to-arms for the legions of self-righteous self-promoters eager to decontextualize and oversimplify matters into stark injustices they condemn into oblivion across the cable news airwaves.

    Our support for his approach to thinking, and intellectual purview, should not be confused with an endorsement of his conclusions and prescriptions, to the extent that he actually argues on behalf of any specific outcome or conclusion in any given instance. The best and fairest criticisms of his work are truly academic in nature and involve just how far his cross-cutting postulates (one might call them intellectual mash-ups) can extend on the backs of the (current) consensus theories that underpin them and the empirical data he marshals alongside them (often circumstantially).

    Whoa. Read the whole thing. It reeks of desperate justifications, but it’s entertaining to watch this person twist themselves into knots trying to simultaneously praise Kanazawa while also trying to make sure they don’t get splashed with the slime from his certain eruptions.

Recommendations for cannibals?

Oh, please dear Gauss, not more of this hyper-adaptive crap.

It appears that men’s preference for more curvy women has quite a lot to do with the fact that curvy figures historically have possessed more of the healthy omega-3 fatry acid DHA, which is essential for proper brain development in children.

An article in the August 2012 issue of Psychology Today explains that men “know” something significant about women’s bodies that women don’t. And it all has to do with nature’s mandate to produce children with great survival skills. In fact, women are usually more like men’s ideals than they realize, and losing weight to meet the standard set by the fashion and modeling industries may not make them any more attractive to men.

Well, gosh then…if I were still trying to raise my kids and feed them a healthy diet, I guess I now know which of the herd to cull out and put on the dinner plate! At least, that’s where the first paragraph was leading me.

Look: if you are a woman eating a reasonable diet, if you aren’t abusing yourself with an eating disorder on either end of the spectrum, your kids will probably be fine. If you’re getting standard dietary supplements, vitamins and cofactors, that are routine in almost all standard pregnancy care situations (but unfortunately not routine for the poorest of the poor), your fetus is getting what it needs no matter whether you are slender or curvy. There is a broad range of tolerance here.

Also, in a normal, healthy relationship, men should not and are not judging you by either a conscious or unconscious assessment of how much DHA is available in your blood supply — if they are looking at you like a cut of meat rather than as a fellow human being who would make a good partner in living, you really don’t want to associate with them.

And this — this bullshit — is rank idiocy.

American children rank 31st out of 64 nations in tests of academic ability. The highest scores are in places like Japan, where women have slender hourglass figures and have four times the amount of DHA in their blood.

So…much…wrong. Not only the racism of categorizing an entire nation of women as possessing “slender hourglass figures”, but reducing academic ability to the product of your mother’s sexual desirability and biochemistry…jebus, let’s forget about tests and ability and background education and just let the children of MILFs into Hahvahd.

Also, guess who he cites as the source of this splendid information about men’s ability to assay DHA levels with a glance? Psychology Today. What, not Cosmo?

That’s a new one

Apparently, I am now a whore. I can’t be insulted by the accusation, though, since it seems to be applied in the same way as the frequent accusations that I’m gay and Jewish — neither true nor particularly offensive to me, although it does say a lot about the person trying to do the insulting.

Also, it comes from the awful Paul Elam, who seems to use “whore” as every other word. He has…issues.

But atheists can be secularists

Jacques Berlinerblau just really dislikes atheists. I don’t know how else to account for this bizarre article in which he announces that Secularists are not atheists. Oh, yeah, I say? We know. I’m a big fan of Americans United…and I know full well that it is not an atheist organization. I also know that the history of church-state separation in the US, and that it was driven not by atheists (who were nearly nonexistent until the last century), but by diverse religious interests.

So why is Berlinerblau complaining? Because of two factors: fundamentalist Christians who want to make secularism synonymous with atheism to demonize the cause, and because atheist organizations have risen in strength and numbers enough to have built lobbying organizations that fight for secularism. Who is the villain Berlinerblau will chastise? Guess what: it’s not the Christian fanatics who abuse the term. It’s atheists who dare to speak up in support of secularism.

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Crown Clade of Creation

I’ve been writing at Coyote Crossing/Creek Running North for nearly a decade, and in the decade’s worth of archives there are a handful of posts that really seem like they ought to live here. So every month or two I’ll dust one of them off, if it’s not too horribly outdated, and put it here for your delectation or dissection.

This one is a 2006 review of the abysmal “biology” “textbook” Biology: God’s Living Creation, published by the creationists at A Beka Books.

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I can learn more from an ant than I can from Christianity

Answers in Genesis gets email, and they recently published a critical message which they then thoroughly rebutted. Not.

Their critic pointed out the absurdity of believing the earth is only 6000 years old and that dinosaurs and humans lived together, and also made the point that an indifferent nature is not influenced by biblical beliefs. AiG answered, and it’s actually rather interesting as a condensed summary of their fallacies.

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Some days, it doesn’t pay to read the blogs

OK, I’m neck deep in work, and I browse Freethoughtblogs for a little light relief, and what do I find? Cuttlefish tells me this ghastly (but familiar) story about a man who murders his ex-partner and children because she spurns him. Then Stephanie has another horror story about the nightmare a woman suffered when she dared to tell a man “no”.

I think I’m motivated to go back to the books now.

Justicar: liar

This is rather outrageous. The ever dishonest Justicar has created a video that claims PZ Myers Hates Faggots, an assertion he supports by making stuff up. His two pieces of evidence are:

  1. That I called Chris Stedman an “Uncle Mary”, a derogatory term for a gay person who works against the interests of the gay community; it’s a counterpart to “Uncle Tom”. Justicar flat out says I used the term. I did not. A gay man in the comments did.

  2. He then claims that I called Stedman a “tinkerbelle”, a belittling term for a “fairy”. Again, and this is completely predictable with Justicar, I did not. I was talking about how in interfaith efforts “it doesn’t matter what BS you believe, as long as you really, really believe”, and suggested that they promote “tinkerbellism”. I was not talking about Stedman at all. It was a reference that had nothing to do with homosexuality, and everything to do with fairy tales.

I am astounded at how blatantly that dishonest jerk will lie.