A Vallejo teenager allegedly shot himself in the testicles Thursday afternoon, police said.
Police said the 17-year-old, whose name is being withheld because he's a minor, walked into Kaiser Permanente Vallejo Medical Center at about 5:45 p.m. with a gunshot wound.
This is just horrible! And given the homophobia in this country, I sincerely doubt if he were straight, he would have taken this desperate measure. Such desparate acts are usually due to homophobia internalised so deeply, one must mutilate or even kill one's self, in order to "overcome" one's homosexuality.
Awhile back I noted here of the case of this one gay man who pimped his five-year-old adopted son out to creepy pedophiles. Although this sort of thing absolutely should never, ever happen anywhere, I recalled a case back in the 80s where a South Boston, Mass. mother pimped her own adolescent son out to creepy pedophiles as well. And did an internet search for it. And I found this instead. A lot of heterosexual trafficking going on, and no homosexual trafficking present.
You are a Reality-Based Intellectualist, also known as the liberal elite. You are a proud member of what’s known as the reality-based community, where science, reason, and non-Jesus-based thought reign supreme.
The Defense-Intervenors' Attorney Nicole Moss, who, according to various livebloggers watching the proceedings, was utterly snotty and condescending, cross-examines Dr. Peplau. Ms. Moss gets Professor Peplau to acknowledge that there are hardly any empirical studies which show that same-sex couples benefit from marriage or benefit more from marriage than from domestic partnerships and later on that we don’t have enough years of experience with marriage in Massachusetts to know empirically whether same-sex couples’ marrying has had an effect on heterosexual marriage. In standing her ground, Professor Peplau replies that researchers know enough about stigma and discrimination against LGBT people and how they affect relationships to predict confidently that same-sex couples would benefit from having our right to marry recognised. Responding to questions about monogamy, Professor Peplau notes that a lower proportion of gay men report valuing it than the proportions among lesbians and married heterosexual couples, although she stresses that some studies were snapshots of gay men in particular places and past times (like L.A. in the 70s / early 80s). Ms. Moss drags Professor Peplau through a drudgery of an "analysis" of complicated numerical hypotheticals about marriages of same-sex couples in Belgium and the Netherlands, though Professor Peplau insists on her lack of foreign jurisdiction expertise and notes that rates of marriage of same-sex couples in Massachusetts are much higher than Moss’s hypotheticals from Belgian data. Echoing arguments from New York State and Washington State cases rejecting same-sex couples’ right to marry, Ms. Moss secures Professor Peplau’s agreement that same-sex couples don’t accidentally get pregnant and have kids the way heterosexuals do. Professor Peplau suggests that the influence of individualism on some decline of marriage has nothing to do with gay and lesbian people -- but of course! Heterosexual couples divorce because the individuals end up having irreconcilable differences with each other, usually over money.
On redirect examination by Plaintiffs' Attorney Christopher Dusseault, Professor. Peplau observes that she knows nothing suggesting gay and lesbian people are more individualistic than heterosexually identified people or less concerned about the welfare of their children. The day then closes with a little discussion about broadcasting the trial or not -- I believe they ended up deciding not to, thanks to certain Justices at SCOTUS.
San Francisco City and County Attorney Therese Stewart wraps up the re-direct examination of the Plaintiffs' expert witness Professor George Chauncey.
Plaintiffs’ attorney Christopher Dusseault then begins direct examination of Letitia Anne Peplau, a Harvard educated social psychologist on the psychology faculty at UCLA, an expert on close personal relationships, sexual orientation, and gender. Ms. Peplau adds to the plaintiffs’ story by testifying that Proposition 8 hurts gay people who would benefit from marriage. She also testified that Proposition 8 does not harm opposite-sex marriage, which strips the defendants of their only "good" reason for passing Proposition 8, HAHAHA.
She testifies, based on her own research and other experts’ work, that for those adults who choose to marry, marriage is often associated with a wide range of important material, emotional and spiritual benefits, partly due to the revered status of marriage in society; that there are remarkable similarities between same-sex couples and heterosexual couples in respects such as relationship satisfaction, commitment, and stability; that same-sex couples will likely enjoy the same benefits from civil marriage that different-sex couples currently enjoy, consistent with self-reports from same-sex couples who married in Massachusetts (only more so when same-sex marriage is legal nationwide); and that allowing same-sex couples to marry will not harm heterosexual marriage, neither causing fewer different-sex couples to marry nor causing more of them to divorce. She explains that same-sex couples married when it became legal in Massachusetts at higher rates than they had entered civil unions or domestic partnerships. She concludes her direct testimony by noting that the existence of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts for four years has had zero affect on opposite-sex marriages.
The Defense-Intervenor's Attorney David Thompson completes his cross-examination of the Plaintiffs' expert witness Professor George Chauncey on discrimination against gay men and lesbians in the history in the United States. The SF City and County Attorney Therese Stewart, redirects the witness.
As the day opens, Attorney David Thompson confronts Chauncey with all manner of evidence, including his own work that things have not changed for the better for gays and lesbians in the United States and trying to get him to concede on the stand that gay men and lesbians have amassed significant political power in the US. Chauncey stoutly tries and succeeds to limit the effect of his prior statements by insisting that the improvements are incomplete due to political polarisation. THANK YOU, CLINTON. THANK YOU, ROVE. THANK YOU, BUSH. He also asserts that the process of integrating gays into American social life slowed or stopped in 2004, when a bunch of states passed Proposition-8-like initiatives to utterly ban gay and lesbian marriage, and sometimes civil unions, explicitly in their state constitutions. Chauncey resists and insists that such these ballot question setbacks and other forms of antigay discrimination is based on a view that same-sex relationships are unequal and inferior. Thompson makes the big mistake of not restricting Chauncey to simply saying yes or no.
Chauncey scored a very important point against the D-I Team, disputing their claim that being taught about same-sex marriage is bad for children. As revealed during the trial's first day, the Yes On 8 Campaign included a TV commercial relating how a Massachusetts grade school now includes fairy tales that end with the prince marrying the prince. Cross-examining gay plaintiff Paul Katami on Day One, defense lawyer Raum backed him up into a corner and managed to get him to waffle on whether or not parents could legitimately object to that, cleverly conflating the meaning of “morality,” and implying that any mention of homosexual marriage is tantamount to sex education! Again, Thompson makes the strategic error of trying to back Professor Chauncey into the same corner! Describing the Massachusetts fairy tale ad: “Is it reasonable for parents who morally disapprove of homosexuality to want to wait until the fifth or sixth grade for those sorts of issues to be taught in public school?”
Instead of being derailed by the red herring about sex, Chauncey immediately sees through the question: “Well, would you say that people who morally disapprove of racial equality or racial marriage should be able to insist that no books showing black and white people as equal or black and white people in relationships should be kept out of the schools?”
And then Chauncey drives the point home, skewering the old magical thinking that exposure of children to even the mention of LGBT people will automatically make the little tykes gay: “And in this case the child is simply being exposed to the existence of gay people. And I take note that the parents don't express concern just about marriage, but about homosexuality at all.”
On Therese Stewart's redirect, Chauncey reiterates that the Proposition 8 ballot question itself said nothing about children or what parents can teach them or what they’re taught in school. He clarified that there have long been people whose attractions today might lead them to be identified as gay; that there had been African Americans who questioned integration as a goal; that the progress made by lesbigay people in quarters such as academia has been only partial; that the majority of religious institutions and their congregants still oppose same-sex couples’ marrying and even “homosexuality”; that such religious views can be affected by anti-gay stereotypes, which were dredged up by Yes on 8 and other antigay campaigns before and since. He further stressed that these sorts of campaigns invariably reduce LGBT people to the sex act, essentially turning us into animals and "unnatural" ones at that!: "It focuses entirely -- it suggests the focus on homosexuality entirely as a matter of sexuality, not love, not relationships. This is actually a book about two princes falling in love and it's a fairy tale. It doesn't talk about sex. It's another fairy tale that seems appropriate to that age."
This is critical! Reducing us gay men and lesbians to absolutely nothing but sex and then invoking the sexual innocence of children has been a very effective strategy for the opponents of gay marriage, who prey on the magical thinking of misinformed people! Chauncey reveals what is really going on: libel, slander, and defamation of character in a smear campaign worthy of Goebbels! Would Thompson say that people who disapprove of interracial marriage should be allowed to pull their children out of school when they study the civil rights movement? HAHAHA.
Thompson’s cross-examination of Professor Chauncey continues today. He is trying to get Professor Chauncey to concede that LGBT people have amassed significant political power, but the professor stands his ground that LGBT people are still relatively powerless because of the severe polarization caused by the continuous and ongoing backlash from "Religious Right" groups. At several points the D-I's attorney gets to be pretty damn annoying!
James Gruber from the University of Michigan-Dearborn and Susan Fineran from the University of Southern Maine interviewed a sample of 522 middle and high school and found out that just over half the students had been bullied and just over a third were sexually harassed. Almost a third had been subject to both behaviors. Straight girls were bullied or harassed as frequently as straight boys, but lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, intersex, queer and questioning youths were submitted to greater levels of both.
Gruber and Fineran found that sexual harassment causes greater harm than mere bullying in both boys and girls. Straight girls and LGBT(etc) youths appeared to be the most affected by sexual harassment, suffering from lower self-esteem, poorer mental and physical health, and more trauma symptoms (that is, thoughts and feelings arising from stressful experiences) than straight boys.
One would think the religious right would be on board with preventing sexual harassment. But once they catch wind that LGBT youth would be protected.....
In a nation wide study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, it is reported that kesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and other sexual minority youths are bullied two to three times as often as heterosexual youths are. LGBT(etc.) youth are also more vulnerable to mental stresses such as suicidal thoughts. It is also interesting to note that older adolescents are also bullied. So the problem is in both Junior and Senior High, all the way up to senior year.
Which shows that work still needs to be done to create school environments that are supportive and accepting of all students regardless of the students' sexual orientation. At the very least, schools need to lay down rules that bullying will not be tolerated, period.
Take a look at this photo and compare the brains. HeM means heterosexual man, HeW means heterosexual woman, Hom means Homosexual man and HoW means homosexual woman. If we were using these photos of brains to tell us gender, instead of our genitalia, who would you call a boy or a girl?
See the red and yellow areas? In the left amygdala, the heterosexual male brain looks very similar to the homosexual female brain. The heterosexual female brain looks very similar to the homosexual male brain. The right amygdala does not show this clear cut pattern but it is clear that there is a difference between heterosexual and homosexual men.
So where did this picture come from and what does it show?
Researchers in Sweden studied the symmetry and connectivity of the brains of straight men, straight women, gay men and lesbians. This work was published in April 2008 in the very prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. The original reference is:
PET and MRI show differences in cerebral asymmetry and functional connectivity between homo- and heterosexual subjects.
Authors Ivanka Savic* and Per Lindstrom
Stockholm Brain Institute, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institute, 171 76 Stockholm, Sweden. PNAS April 2008.
The study itself is highly technical and not easy reading for us every day folks without this level of training. However, it can be translated into terms we can all understand. The researchers asked two main questions. Are the two halves of the brain symmetrical or asymmetrical with respect to volume? Are there differences in functional connectivity between the two halves of the brain?
The researchers chose to measure connections in the amygdala because that section of the brain has a high density of estrogen and androgen receptors. Androgens are testosterones and related hormones. A receptor allows the hormone to enter into the cells. They also chose the amygdala because of earlier research that shows this area correlates to sex and sexual orientation.
The study used ninety subjects. 25 heterosexual men, 25 heterosexual women, 20 homosexual men and 20 homosexual women. The difference in the number of subjects is not statistically significant.
The brains were analyzed using PET measurements of blood flow to measure functional connections between the two halves of the brain. In this case, a picture is able to replace a lot of words.
The researchers also looked at the volume of each half of the brain using MRI. The paper shows the variation in the data and the statistics proving the differences. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll just include the result.
Left Half
HeM 25 624 612 These are significantly different.
HeW 25 581 581 These are not significantly different.
HoM 20 608 609 These are not significantly different.
HoW 20 548 543 These are significantly different.
Again, we see the same pattern. Heterosexual men and homosexual women have significantly different brain volumes from one side of the brain to the other. The heterosexual women and the homosexual men have equal brain volumes.
In other words, gay men have brains that are more like straight women than straight men. And lesbians have brains that are more like straight men than straight women.
The authors concluded that “The present study shows sex-atypical cerebral asymmetry and functional connections in homosexual subjects. The results cannot be primarily ascribed to learned effects, and they suggest a linkage to neurobiological entities.”
Now, does this study prove that these differences are the cause of sexual orientation? One study alone doesn’t do that. But it is very clear that the brains of straight people and gay people are different. Not only different, but straight men and lesbians share similarities and straight women and gay men share similarities.
Let’s think about this from a different angle. If people choose to be gay, how could their brains change by making this choice? That doesn’t make any sense – and I don’t think you have to be a scientist to understand that logic.
Of course, the religiously right-winged propagandists will say, "See? God gave them over to a reprobate mind!" Those guys need to hang it up. They are on the wrong side of history!
