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1
Victory for Free Speech as Third Circuit Issues Ruling against Temple University

August 4, 2008

FIRE Press Release

PHILADELPHIA, August 4, 2008--Today, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued an opinion in DeJohn v. Temple University upholding a decision by a federal district court that Temple University's former speech code is unconstitutional. Temple's code prohibited, among other things, "generalized sexist remarks and behavior." In September 2007, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the Third Circuit to uphold the lower court's ruling.

"The Third Circuit's ruling today is a clear and crucial victory for freedom of speech at our nation's public colleges and universities," FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. "The court's decision serves as unequivocal notice to university administrators across the country that the First Amendment still applies on campus. Today's victory demonstrates, yet again, that public universities maintain unconstitutional speech codes at their peril."

The lawsuit against Temple University was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in February 2006 by attorneys from the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) on behalf of Temple student Christian DeJohn. DeJohn's complaint alleged both that Temple had engaged in actions that violated his rights and that Temple was violating the free speech rights of all of its students by maintaining an unconstitutional speech code.

Temple finally revised its speech code more than a year into the lawsuit, but had argued on appeal to the Third Circuit that its original policy was constitutional despite the District Court's holding to the contrary. In today's ruling, the Third Circuit held that Temple's speech code was unconstitutional because it restricted speech protected by the First Amendment.

In DeJohn v. Temple University, the District Court had declared Temple University's former speech code unconstitutional. On appeal, Temple argued that the Supreme Court's 2007 ruling in Morse v. Frederick--a decision upholding the narrow right of high school administrators to regulate student speech "reasonably regarded as encouraging illegal drug use"--permitted Temple to place broad and onerous restrictions on the free speech rights of college students. In response, FIRE's brief argued that Temple's policy contradicts both decades of legal precedent and the guidance of the federal Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, which is responsible for enforcing harassment laws on campus.

Today's ruling, authored by Judge D. Brooks Smith, unequivocally states that "[d]iscussion by adult students in a college classroom should not be restricted." In holding that Temple's former speech code "provides no shelter for core protected speech," Judge Smith found the policy to be facially overbroad.

"As adults, college students are entitled to the full protection of the First Amendment on campus," William Creeley, FIRE's Director of Legal and Public Advocacy, said. "Today's opinion makes clear that attempts to equate the rights of high school students with those of college students are without merit. Thankfully, the Third Circuit has dealt a devastating defeat to those seeking to infantilize our nation's college students."

FIRE's amicus brief was joined by a remarkable coalition of organizations including the ACLU of Pennsylvania, the Christian Legal Society, Collegefreedom.org, Feminists for Free Expression, the Individual Rights Foundation, Students for Academic Freedom, and the Student Press Law Center. The coalition was represented in the filing by attorney L. Theodore Hoppe, Jr.

FIRE is a nonprofit educational foundation that unites civil rights and civil liberties leaders, scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals from across the political and ideological spectrum on behalf of individual rights, due process, freedom of expression, academic freedom, and rights of conscience at our nation's colleges and universities. FIRE's efforts to preserve liberty on campuses across America can be viewed at thefire.org.

CONTACT:

William Creeley, Director of Legal and Public Advocacy, FIRE: 212-582-3191; [email protected]
2
Main / Article: How Dumb Can (Woman) Get?
Mar 05, 2008, 05:48 AM
This article in the washington post is under attack by feminists.  They're attacking both at the articles comment section and at the comments for an unrelated article at the Independent Women's Forum.

At the root of the attack is that this is a Larry Summers issue which has become a sacred cow with feminists.  Charlotte Allen takes the position that men and women have tendencies for different skill sets.  However, Allen's linguistic style makes her open for attack.  Since she also writes articles for IWF (but not this one) they are demanding a position statement from IWF.

We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?

By Charlotte Allen
Sunday, March 2, 2008; B01

Here's Agence France-Presse reporting on a rally for Sen. Barack Obama at the University of Maryland on Feb. 11: "He did not flinch when women screamed as he was in mid-sentence, and even broke off once to answer a female's cry of 'I love you, Obama!' with a reassuring 'I love you back.' " Women screamed? What was this, the Beatles tour of 1964? And when they weren't screaming, the fair-sex Obama fans who dominated the rally of 16,000 were saying things like: "Every time I hear him speak, I become more hopeful." Huh?

"Women 'Falling for Obama,' " the story's headline read. Elsewhere around the country, women were falling for the presidential candidate literally. Connecticut radio talk show host Jim Vicevich has counted five separate instances in which women fainted at Obama rallies since last September. And I thought such fainting was supposed to be a relic of the sexist past, when patriarchs forced their wives and daughters to lace themselves into corsets that cut off their oxygen.

I can't help it, but reading about such episodes of screaming, gushing and swooning makes me wonder whether women -- I should say, "we women," of course -- aren't the weaker sex after all. Or even the stupid sex, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial. Women "are only children of a larger growth," wrote the 18th-century Earl of Chesterfield. Could he have been right?

I'm not the only woman who's dumbfounded (as it were) by our sex, or rather, as we prefer to put it, by other members of our sex besides us. It's a frequent topic of lunch, phone and water-cooler conversations; even some feminists can't believe that there's this thing called "The Oprah Winfrey Show" or that Celine Dion actually sells CDs. A female friend of mine plans to write a horror novel titled "Office of Women," in which nothing ever gets done and everyone spends the day talking about Botox.

We exaggerate, of course. And obviously men do dumb things, too, although my husband has perfectly good explanations for why he eats standing up at the stove (when I'm not around) or pulls down all the blinds so the house looks like a cave (also when I'm not around): It has to do with the aggressive male nature and an instinctive fear of danger from other aggressive men. When men do dumb things, though, they tend to be catastrophically dumb, such as blowing the paycheck on booze or much, much worse (think "postal"). Women's foolishness is usually harmless. But it can be so . . . embarrassing.

Take Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign. By all measures, she has run one of the worst -- and, yes, stupidest -- presidential races in recent history, marred by every stereotypical flaw of the female sex. As far as I'm concerned, she has proved that she can't debate -- viz. her televised one-on-one against Obama last Tuesday, which consisted largely of complaining that she had to answer questions first and putting the audience to sleep with minutiae about her health-coverage mandate. She has whined (via her aides) like the teacher's pet in grade school that the boys are ganging up on her when she's bested by male rivals. She has wept on the campaign trail, even though everyone knows that tears are the last refuge of losers. And she is tellingly dependent on her husband.

Then there's Clinton's nearly all-female staff, chosen for loyalty rather than, say, brains or political savvy. Clinton finally fired her daytime-soap-watching, self-styled "Latina queena" campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, known for burning through campaign money and for her open contempt for the "white boys" in the Clinton camp. But stupidly, she did it just in time to alienate the Hispanic voters she now desperately needs to win in Texas or Ohio to have any shot at the Democratic nomination.

What is it about us women? Why do we always fall for the hysterical, the superficial and the gooily sentimental? Take a look at the New York Times bestseller list. At the top of the paperback nonfiction chart and pitched to an exclusively female readership is Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat, Pray, Love." Here's the book's autobiographical plot: Gilbert gets bored with her perfectly okay husband, so she has an affair behind his back. Then, when that doesn't pan out, she goes to Italy and gains 23 pounds forking pasta so she has to buy a whole new wardrobe, goes to India to meditate (that's the snooze part), and finally, at an Indonesian beach, finds fulfillment by -- get this -- picking up a Latin lover!

This is the kind of literature that countless women soak up like biscotti in a latte cup: food, clothes, sex, "relationships" and gummy, feel-good "spirituality." This female taste for first-person romantic nuttiness, spiced with a soupçon of soft-core porn, has made for centuries of bestsellers -- including Samuel Richardson's 1740 novel "Pamela," in which a handsome young lord tries to seduce a virtuous serving maid for hundreds of pages and then proposes, as well as Erica Jong's 1973 "Fear of Flying."

Then there's the chick doctor television show "Grey's Anatomy" (reportedly one of Hillary Clinton's favorites). Want to be a surgeon? Here's what your life will be like at the hospital, according to "Grey's": sex in the linen-supply room, catfights with your sister in front of the patients, sex in the on-call room, a "prom" in the recovery room so you can wear your strapless evening gown to work, and sex with the married attending physician in an office. Oh, and some surgery. When was the last time you were in a hospital and spotted two doctors going at it in an empty bed?

I swear no man watches "Grey's Anatomy" unless his girlfriend forces him to. No man bakes cookies for his dog. No man feels blue and takes off work to spend the day in bed with a copy of "The Friday Night Knitting Club." No man contracts nebulous diseases whose existence is disputed by many if not all doctors, such as Morgellons (where you feel bugs crawling around under your skin). At least no man I know. Of course, not all women do these things, either -- although enough do to make one wonder whether there isn't some genetic aspect of the female brain, something evolutionarily connected to the fact that we live longer than men or go through childbirth, that turns the pre-frontal cortex into Cream of Wheat.

Depressing as it is, several of the supposed misogynist myths about female inferiority have been proven true. Women really are worse drivers than men, for example. A study published in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins schools of medicine and public health revealed that women clocked 5.7 auto accidents per million miles driven, in contrast to men's 5.1, even though men drive about 74 percent more miles a year than women. The only good news was that women tended to take fewer driving risks than men, so their crashes were only a third as likely to be fatal. Those statistics were reinforced by a study released by the University of London in January showing that women and gay men perform more poorly than heterosexual men at tasks involving navigation and spatial awareness, both crucial to good driving.

The theory that women are the dumber sex -- or at least the sex that gets into more car accidents -- is amply supported by neurological and standardized-testing evidence. Men's and women's brains not only look different, but men's brains are bigger than women's (even adjusting for men's generally bigger body size). The important difference is in the parietal cortex, which is associated with space perception. Visuospatial skills, the capacity to rotate three-dimensional objects in the mind, at which men tend to excel over women, are in turn related to a capacity for abstract thinking and reasoning, the grounding for mathematics, science and philosophy. While the two sexes seem to have the same IQ on average (although even here, at least one recent study gives males a slight edge), there are proportionally more men than women at the extremes of very, very smart and very, very stupid.

I am perfectly willing to admit that I myself am a classic case of female mental deficiencies. I can't add 2 and 2 (well, I can, but then what?). I don't even know how many pairs of shoes I own. I have coasted through life and academia on the basis of an excellent memory and superior verbal skills, two areas where, researchers agree, women consistently outpace men. (An evolutionary just-so story explains this facility of ours: Back in hunter-gatherer days, men were the hunters and needed to calculate spear trajectories, while women were the gatherers and needed to remember where the berries were.) I don't mind recognizing and accepting that the women in history I admire most -- Sappho, Hildegard of Bingen, Elizabeth I, George Eliot, Margaret Thatcher -- were brilliant outliers.

The same goes for female fighter pilots, architects, tax accountants, chemical engineers, Supreme Court justices and brain surgeons. Yes, they can do their jobs and do them well, and I don't think anyone should put obstacles in their paths. I predict that over the long run, however, even with all the special mentoring and role-modeling the 21st century can provide, the number of women in these fields will always lag behind the number of men, for good reason.

So I don't understand why more women don't relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home. (Even I, who inherited my interior-decorating skills from my Bronx Irish paternal grandmother, whose idea of upgrading the living-room sofa was to throw a blanket over it, can make a house a home.) Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts' content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are . . . kind of dim.

[email protected]

View all comments that have been posted about this article.
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Main / The Little Feminist Who Could
Feb 19, 2008, 07:59 PM
The Little Feminist Who Could
By Mike S. Adams
Monday, February 18, 2008

Dear Professor:

I want to thank you for writing to express interest in suing your feminist boss for sexual harassment. Before you move forward with a lawsuit, I want you to consider another case that happened just recently in another department on your campus.

A male professor who was receiving unwanted attention from a female student did the right thing and reported it to his Chairwoman - who happens to be a feminist. The feminist did the right thing by calling the woman and telling her to cease all efforts to contact the professor. Although the professor was no longer teaching the student it was simply inappropriate of her to call him repeatedly on his personal phone line.

Fortunately, the phone call worked and the student complied with the Chairwoman's request. That should have been the end of the matter. But it wasn't.

A week later when the problem had already been solved the assertive feminist - who stands about five feet tall - entered the professor's office to ask some follow-up questions about the incident involving the female student. Among them, she asked whether the male professor said anything that might have caused the woman to contact him. Questions included "Did you talk about your recent separation?" and "Did you say that you were ready to start dating again?" She concluded with this comment: "Because if you were talking about your personal life in class that would not have been good."

Three rather obvious points should be made here:

    1. The little feminist's comments were completely inappropriate because they amount to blaming the victim, which, according to feminism, is immoral. Imagine this were a female professor who was being contacted inappropriately by a male student. No feminist would accept a line of questioning that put the blame on the woman. Imagine the following coming from a Chairman, not Chairwoman: "Did you wear a short skirt that caused the man to call you at home? Were your boobs covered in class at all times?"

    2. There simply is no rule that prohibits professors from discussing their personal lives in class. A feminist in the political science department at your school once gave a lecture blasting her father for having an affair and leaving her mother after nearly forty years of marriage. So marital break-ups are obviously not forbidden topics. Another professor, this time in English, famously wrote a book chapter talking about losing her virginity. She assigned it to her classes. It included graphic sexual content far more revealing than the phrase, "I'm dating again."

    3. Finally, the professor interrogated by the feminist Chairwoman was not violating the supposed no-talking-about-your-personal-life-in-class rule. But the hypocritical little feminist was. In fact, she published an essay several years ago in which she talked about how her former lover beat her, starved her, and raped her. Her graphic account was followed by this revealing sentence: "I share my experiences with my students, many of whom are first generation in college and are also formerly battered women with small children."

This is typical feminist authoritarianism in academia. The feminist blames the male victim, invents a non-existent rule, and then violates the non-existent rule with a "do as I say, not as I do" attitude. In my view, the repeated application by feminists of double-standards for men is clearly sexual harassment.

I'll have more to say about this feminist authoritarianism and harassment in my new book, "Feminists Say the Darndest Things," which will be released in three days and is already available on www.Amazon.com. But, for now, get to work on an overview of the facts of your case. I'll get you a good attorney and we'll take her to the cleaners.

And then maybe we'll sue that other feminist for harassment. And, if they hear about our willingness to fight, it might help other men suffering from her-assment.

Finally, I hope you won't mind that I sent a note to Jane Fonda telling her about your case. I told her how we'll use it to empower men who are victims of matriarchal oppression. I wanted her to put her two c*nts in. Frankly, I c*nt wait to hear back from her.


Mike Adams is a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and author of Feminists Say the Darndest Things: A Politically Incorrect Professor Confronts "Womyn" On Campus.
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A Response to Feminists on the Violent Oppression of Women in Islam

By David Horowitz and Robert Spencer
FrontPageMagazine.com | 1/24/2008

The David Horowitz Freedom Center has succeeded in putting the feminists and Islamists on the defensive. As David Horowitz and Robert Spencer note in the article below, the DHFC's exposure of the feminist movement's lack of attention to women's rights in the Muslim world has caused many of the movement's most prominent activists to sign a letter protesting that they originated concern fro Muslim women. The letter, drafted by feminist writer Katha Pollitt, has been signed by such notables as:

    * Susan Faludi, the author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women, which argues conservatives are trying to suppress American womyn, and The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, which claims terrorism provided a handy excuse for the American Right to begin binding women's feet again;
    * Julianne Malveaux, who expressed her feelings about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on PBS' To the Contrary, "I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early like many black men do, of heart disease"
    * Jennifer Baumgardner, a Nation writer whose idea of fighting female oppression is staging productions of The Vagina Monologues;
    * Dana Goldstein, an employee of the Soros-funded Center for American Progress and a writing fellow at the Soros-funded The American Prospect; and
    * More than 700 more leftists.

The letter spread quickly, beginning on the website of the far-Left's flagship publication, The Nation. (The Nation's piece was also picked up by Yahoo News). Soon, it had been posted on Mother Jones, the Islamic Forum, the University of Maine, and many other sites -- including that of a woman named Heart who is running for president. Not all are pleased; at least one insists U.S. immigration laws and Israeli treatment of Palestinians are a more direct affront to women's rights than clitorectomies. (She asks, "Does Ms. Pollitt think that 'Muslim countries' are particularly hostile to women's rights for some reason?") Nonetheless, the very fact that the Left, so long silent about the crimes countenanced by its Islamic partners in the antiwar movement, now feels that it must mount a rousing defense is a vindication of our efforts. -- The Editors.

This week, seven hundred feminists signed an Open Letter complaining that "columnists and opinion writers from The Weekly Standard to the Washington Post to Slate have recently accused American feminists of focusing obsessively on minor or even nonexistent injustices in the United States while ignoring atrocities against women in other countries, especially the Muslim world."

We recognize this Open Letter as a delayed response to the Freedom Center's Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, which protested the silence of feminists over the "Oppression of Women in Islam" on campuses all over the country last fall, organized sit-ins at a dozen Women's Studies Departments to protest the absence of courses and department-sponsored events confronting the issue, and made this a matter of national discussion and debate. This is why the signers of the Open Letter complain that "'Women's rights are human rights' was not a slogan dreamed up by David Horowitz or Christina Hoff Sommers," two of our speakers for Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. (We never claimed it was.)

The signers of this Letter claim that, "contrary to the accusations of pundits," they support Muslim feminists in "their struggle against female genital mutilation, 'honor' murder, forced marriage, child marriage, compulsory Islamic dress codes, the criminalization of sex outside marriage, brutal punishments like lashing and stoning, family laws that favor men and that place adult women under the legal power of fathers, brothers, and husbands, and laws that discount legal testimony made by women."

Well, we welcome these avowals of support for the rights of Muslim women. However, forgive us for doubting their sincerity. As one of us pointed out in a speech given at the University of Wisconsin during Islamo-Fascism Week:

"One of our concerns ... is the failure of the Women's Studies Movement to educate students about these atrocities. There are probably 600 Women's Studies programs on American campuses, which focus on the unequal treatment of women in society. We have had a very hard time locating a single class which focuses on the oppression of women under Islamic law."

What was true last October is still true today. As recently as December 10, a Muslim teenager was strangled by her father for refusing to wear a hijab without a protest from the American feminist movement. And that is only one of many crimes committed in the name of Islam against Muslim women over which the feminist movement continues to be silent.

On New Year's Day, Amina Said, 18, and her sister Sarah, 17, were shot dead in Irving, Texas. Police are searching for their father, Yaser Abdel Said, on a warrant for capital murder. The girls' great aunt, Gail Gartrell, told reporters, "This was an honor killing." Apparently Yaser Said murdered his daughters because they had non-Muslim boyfriends.

The signers of the Open Letter say that they are against honor killing. Here is an honor killing in the United States. Where are these feminists on this issue? Why are they not supporting the hunt for Amina's and Sarah's killers and organizing a campaign in the Muslim community to stop such practices?

On Sunday, January 20, the New York Times published an article, "A Cutting Tradition," which falsely described female genital mutilation practiced under Islamic law as "circumcision" and portrayed it in a generally positive light, and even warned against "blindly judging those who practice it." The article made no mention of the physical effects of this barbaric practice, which affects 140 million Muslim girls who have their genitals sliced off yearly, and in some 15 million cases their vaginal tract sewn up. These effects, as enumerated by the British Medical Journal in 1993, are "Immediate physical complications include severe pain, shock, infection, bleeding, acute urinary infection, tetanus, and death. Long-term problems include chronic pain, difficulties with micturition and menstruation, pelvic infection leading to infertility, and prolonged and obstructed labor during childbirth."

Where is the feminist outrage over the New York Times article? Where are the feminist demonstrations against this practice? Where are the campus teach-ins? Where are the candlelight parades? What Muslim organizations have been confronted for their complicity in this assault on female Muslim children? This is a horrific crime against the female gender -- global in extent -- and yet one would be hard-pressed to identify a single public event, protest or march organized by feminists to oppose it.

The Open Letter mentions the feminist "V-Day" organized to protest violence against women. We challenge the signers of this letter to identify the speeches given during "V-Day" that protested female genital mutilation in the Islamic world. We challenge them to identify the Vagina Monologue of Islamic misogyny.

We are encouraged by the fact that these American feminists feel the need to respond to our challenge over their silence as a movement on violence against Muslim women and to assert their opposition to these barbaric practices. We challenge them now to put actions behind their words.

Join us in sponsoring a campus tour on the Oppression of Women in Islam with speakers such as Nonie Darwish, Wafa Sultan and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Form academic committees to provide curricula on these subjects in Women's Studies courses. Devote a major segment of your V-Day demonstrations to the plight of Muslim women. Join us during Islamo-Fascism Week II this spring in appealing to campus Muslim organizations to condemn these practices.

Then we'll know you're serious.
5
I find it hard to believe this is contriversial, but I still run into people who don't believe feminism is bigotry.

Does Feminism Discriminate Against Men? A Debate
(Oxford University Press, 2007)
BOOK FORUM
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
12:00 PM (Luncheon to Follow)

Featuring the coauthor, James P. Sterba, Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame, with comments by Carrie Lukas, Vice President, Independent Women's Forum.

The Cato Institute
1000 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20001

Watch the Event Live in RealVideo
Listen to the Event in RealAudio (Audio Only)

Does feminism give a much-needed voice to women in a patriarchal world? Or is the world not really patriarchal? Does feminism support equality in education and the military, or does it discriminate against men by ignoring such issues as male-only draft registration and boys lagging behind in school? This book offers a sharp debate on the impact of feminism on men between bestselling author Warren Farrell and the acclaimed philosopher James P. Sterba. Join us for a wide-ranging exchange on issues from love, sex, dating, and rape to domestic violence, divorce, and child custody, as well as systemic issues, from the school system to the criminal justice system, the media to the military, and health care to the workplace.
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Main / Stone Age feminism?
Nov 14, 2007, 07:13 AM
Here's a theory: equality in the hunting party caused the extinction of Neanderthals


Stone Age feminism?
Females joining hunt may explain Neanderthals' end

By Colin Nickerson, Globe Staff  |  November 10, 2007

The Neanderthal extinction some 30,000 years ago remains one of the great riddles of evolution, with rival theories blaming everything from genocide committed by "real" humans to prehistoric climate change.

But a recent study introduces another explanation: Stone Age feminism. Among Neanderthals, hunting big beasts was women's work as well as men's, so it's a safe bet that female hunters got stomped, gored, and worse with appalling frequency. And a high casualty rate among fertile women - the vital "reproductive core" of a tiny population - could well have meant demographic disaster for a species already struggling to survive among monster bears, yellow-fanged hyenas, and cunning Homo sapien newcomers.

A spate of recent discoveries has yielded intriguing clues about humanity's closest cousin. Neanderthals and humans split from a common ancestor some 500,000 years ago. Neanderthals had Europe to themselves until Homo sapiens started swarming out of Africa about 45,000 years ago - the beginning of the end for these archetypical cave dwellers, although they hung on for 15 millennia.

No other prehistoric people had quite the same kinship with humans: just 2,000 generations ago, the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms, Neanderthals walked among us and we among them. They might have been our lovers. Almost certainly they were our rivals, competing for the same giant elk and reindeer.

Then they were gone.

But these relatives are still rooted in our consciousness. Look at the Geico commercials, with the not-quite-human character taking offense at a car insurance company's offer of website access "so easy a caveman could do it." The gag, of course, is that Neanderthals are enough like humans to deserve respect - a sensitivity not many people would extend to more apelike members of the family tree.

"If Lucy were alive, we'd put her in a zoo," said Daniel E. Lieberman, professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University, using the nickname of a primitive hominid forebear who lived 3.2 million years ago.

"If a Neanderthal were to come along, we'd think he was kind of weird. But we might also wonder whether to admit him to Harvard," Lieberman said. "They remain this touchstone species that evokes strong emotions."

It's only in the past few years that scientists have reached broad consensus on what Neanderthals were - and weren't. "Neanderthals were a species of archaic humans that evolved in Europe separately" from modern humans, he said. "They were very much like us . . . But they weren't us."

Among the new findings:

In addition to immense noses, elongated skulls, and barrel chests, some Neanderthals boasted flaming red hair, according to an international research team led by Harvard's Holger Roempler. This suggests they might have been pale-skinned, not the swarthy knuckle-draggers of the popular imagination. But they were still likely very hairy.

Neanderthals possessed a gene known to underlie speech. The presence of the FOXP2 gene in two skeletons uncovered in the El Sidron cave in northern Spain suggests Neanderthals were capable of human-like language.

The range of Neanderthals was much greater than scientists had previously imagined, extending to the heart of Asia.

Svante Paabo, head of genetics at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, last month identified mitochondrial DNA taken from bones found in Siberia's Altay mountains as belonging to Neanderthals. The location lies 2,000 miles beyond what was previously regarded as the eastern limit of their territory. That find was a surprise because scientists have long thought that Asia of that era belonged solely to another archaic human species, Homo erectus.

"This puts Neanderthals on the doorstep to Mongolia and China," said Paabo. "So perhaps we will some day find evidence of a Neanderthal Marco Polo," who met and mingled with those vanished inhabitants of the Far East.

Meanwhile, Paabo is working on an audacious scheme to reconstruct the full Neanderthal genome from DNA recovered from fragments of bone. "This would be the first time that anyone has sequenced the entire genome of an extinct organism," he said.

On other fronts, scientists are searching for proof that Neanderthals and humans interbred. So far, there's no genetic evidence that these cousins, if they kissed, produced offspring.

"If they did do it, as everyone wonders, it didn't have an evolutionary effect," said Lieberman. "The question really says more about human's prurient interests."

Almost as provocatively, a husband-wife anthropological team has raised the possibility that female derring-do may have contributed to Neanderthals' demise.

The University of Arizona's Steven L. Kuhn and Mary C. Stiner, use archeological evidence to argue that Neanderthal females - unlike Homo sapien women of the Upper Paleolithic period - joined men in hunts at a time when stabbing giant beasts with a sharpish stone affixed to a stick represented the cutting edge of technology.

That's courageous, but probably bad practice for a population that never numbered much more than 10,000 individuals. The loss of a few males to a flailing hoof or slashing antler is no big deal, in the long run. But losing females of child-bearing age could bring doom to a hard-pressed species.

"All elements of [Neanderthal] society appear to have been involved in the main subsistence pursuit" of hunting large animals, Kuhn said. "There's not much evidence of classic female roles.

"Putting the reproductive core of the population - pregnant women, mothers of infants, children themselves - at such danger could have put Neanderthals as a whole at serious demographic disadvantage," he said.

Not only would women suffer casualties, Kuhn said, their full participation in the hunt would mean they were not harvesting wild grains and other foods that could sustain their roving bands when game was scarce.

What finished off the Neanderthals is still bitterly disputed by paleoanthropologists and others in the field.

On one side are those who think Neanderthals were "culturally" overwhelmed by modern humans who just happened to possess better tools and weapons - throwing spears, for example, not jabbing spears - or adopted customs more appropriate for the Ice Age. From early days, human women appear to have sewed hide clothing, tended fires, and gathered vegetables rather than risking their lives on the hunt.

On the other side are those who believe modern humans were inherently superior, possessing "cognitive advantages" - read: more smarts - that made their ascent and Neanderthal decline inevitable. Cavefolk simply couldn't compete effectively with the more clever new kids on the block.

"Neanderthals were smart, sophisticated. They mastered fire. They made tools. But modern humans had selectively advantageous [genetic] traits that gave them an edge," said Richard G. Klein, a Stanford University paleoanthropologist. "Even tiny advantages in cognition, communication skills, and memory would have had huge downstream effects over time."

There are other plausible explanations for the Neanderthal extinction. Warming at the end of the Ice Age surely wasn't easy for robust people built for the cold. Or an epidemic could have so depopulated Neanderthal bands that the survivors couldn't replenish the species. A more sinister idea is that early humans wiped them out in a prehistoric genocide.

"On the other hand, humans and Neanderthals coexisted for thousands of years, so I think talk about genocide says more about how modern humans think," said Paabo. "What finally happened could be really boring. Maybe Neanderthals ran out of reindeer to hunt. So they dwindled and died. Species can disappear without us killing them."



© Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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If we can get enough women veterans to join the ranks of the homeless maybe someone will give a crap.  :bawl:

Veterans make up 1 in 4 homeless in US

By KIMBERLY HEFLING, Associated Press Writer

Veterans make up one in four homeless people in the United States, though they are only 11 percent of the general adult population, according to a report to be released Thursday.

And homelessness is not just a problem among middle-age and elderly veterans. Younger veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are trickling into shelters and soup kitchens seeking services, treatment or help with finding a job.

The Veterans Affairs Department has identified 1,500 homeless veterans from the current wars and says 400 of them have participated in its programs specifically targeting homelessness.

The Alliance to End Homelessness, a public education nonprofit, based the findings of its report on numbers from Veterans Affairs and the Census Bureau. 2005 data estimated that 194,254 homeless people out of 744,313 on any given night were veterans.

In comparison, the VA says that 20 years ago, the estimated number of veterans who were homeless on any given night was 250,000.

Some advocates say such an early presence of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan at shelters does not bode well for the future. It took roughly a decade for the lives of Vietnam veterans to unravel to the point that they started showing up among the homeless. Advocates worry that intense and repeated deployments leave newer veterans particularly vulnerable.

"We're going to be having a tsunami of them eventually because the mental health toll from this war is enormous," said Daniel Tooth, director of veterans affairs for Lancaster County, Pa.

While services to homeless veterans have improved in the past 20 years, advocates say more financial resources still are needed. With the spotlight on the plight of Iraq veterans, they hope more will be done to prevent homelessness and provide affordable housing to the younger veterans while there's a window of opportunity.

"When the Vietnam War ended, that was part of the problem. The war was over, it was off TV, nobody wanted to hear about it," said John Keaveney, a Vietnam veteran and a founder of New Directions in Los Angeles, which provides substance abuse help, job training and shelter to veterans.

"I think they'll be forgotten," Keaveney said of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. "People get tired of it. It's not glitzy that these are young, honorable, patriotic Americans. They'll just be veterans, and that happens after every war."

Keaveney said it's difficult for his group to persuade some homeless Iraq veterans to stay for treatment and help because they don't relate to the older veterans. Those who stayed have had success -- one is now a stock broker and another is applying to be a police officer, he said.

"They see guys that are their father's age and they don't understand, they don't know, that in a couple of years they'll be looking like them," he said.

After being discharged from the military, Jason Kelley, 23, of Tomahawk, Wis., who served in Iraq with the Wisconsin National Guard, took a bus to Los Angeles looking for better job prospects and a new life.

Kelley said he couldn't find a job because he didn't have an apartment, and he couldn't get an apartment because he didn't have a job. He stayed in a $300-a-week motel until his money ran out, then moved into a shelter run by the group U.S. VETS in Inglewood, Calif. He's since been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, he said.

"The only training I have is infantry training and there's not really a need for that in the civilian world," Kelley said in a phone interview. He has enrolled in college and hopes to move out of the shelter soon.

The Iraq vets seeking help with homelessness are more likely to be women, less likely to have substance abuse problems, but more likely to have mental illness -- mostly related to post-traumatic stress, said Pete Dougherty, director of homeless veterans programs at the VA.

Overall, 45 percent of participants in the VA's homeless programs have a diagnosable mental illness and more than three out of four have a substance abuse problem, while 35 percent have both, Dougherty said.

Historically, a number of fighters in U.S. wars have become homeless. In the post-Civil War era, homeless veterans sang old Army songs to dramatize their need for work and became known as "tramps," which had meant to march into war, said Todd DePastino, a historian at Penn State University's Beaver campus who wrote a book on the history of homelessness.

After World War I, thousands of veterans -- many of them homeless -- camped in the nation's capital seeking bonus money. Their camps were destroyed by the government, creating a public relations disaster for President Herbert Hoover.

The end of the Vietnam War coincided with a time of economic restructuring, and many of the same people who fought in Vietnam were also those most affected by the loss of manufacturing jobs, DePastino said.

Their entrance to the streets was traumatic and, as they aged, their problems became more chronic, recalled Sister Mary Scullion, who has worked with the homeless for 30 years and co-founded of the group Project H.O.M.E. in Philadelphia.

"It takes more to address the needs because they are multiple needs that have been unattended," Scullion said. "Life on the street is brutal and I know many, many homeless veterans who have died from Vietnam."

The VA started targeting homelessness in 1987, 12 years after the fall of Saigon. Today, the VA has, either on its own or through partnerships, more than 15,000 residential rehabilitative, transitional and permanent beds for homeless veterans nationwide. It spends about $265 million annually on homeless-specific programs and about $1.5 billion for all health care costs for homeless veterans.

Because of these types of programs and because two years of free medical care is being offered to all Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, Dougherty said they hope many veterans from recent wars who are in need can be identified early.

"Clearly, I don't think that's going to totally solve the problem, but I also don't think we're simply going to wait for 10 years until they show up," Dougherty said. "We're out there now trying to get everybody we can to get those kinds of services today, so we avoid this kind of problem in the future."

In all of 2006, the Alliance to End Homelessness estimates that 495,400 veterans were homeless at some point during the year.

The group recommends that 5,000 housing units be created per year for the next five years dedicated to the chronically homeless that would provide permanent housing linked to veterans' support systems. It also recommends funding an additional 20,000 housing vouchers exclusively for homeless veterans, and creating a program that helps bridge the gap between income and rent.

Following those recommendations would cost billions of dollars, but there is some movement in Congress to increase the amount of money dedicated to homeless veterans programs.

On a recent day in Philadelphia, case managers from Project H.O.M.E. and the VA picked up William Joyce, 60, a homeless Vietnam veteran in a wheelchair who said he'd been sleeping at a bus terminal.

"You're an honorable veteran. You're going to get some services," outreach worker Mark Salvatore told Joyce. "You need to be connected. You don't need to be out here on the streets."
8
The Coming Academic Title Wave
By Allison Kasic
Wednesday, October 31, 2007


If the October 17th House hearing is any indication, a full-scale assault on the academy is coming. The target: STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields. The charge: wide scale discrimination against women.

Witnesses, Congressmen, and a crowd of over 100 people gathered last Wednesday on Capitol Hill for a hearing on women in academic science and engineering. No Committee Member or panelist challenged the presumption behind the hearing--that discrimination is the primary cause of women's underrepresentation among science and engineering academics--they turned right to consideration of government-mandated solutions to the perceived problem.

Several panelists, including former Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala, spoke of the need for massive "institutional transformation." Chairman Brian Baird (D-WA) asked what sort of "hammer" the government could use to enforce this transformation. A popular answer was Title IX.

Normally associated with gender equity in athletics, Title IX (and the strict gender quotas that come along with it) could also be used to increase female participation in STEM fields. Rep. Vernon Ehlers (R-MI), the ranking Republican on the subcommittee, went so far as to joke that the sciences should be designated as a sport. This would have two advantages: "NCAA rules would apply" and the sciences would "share in the football revenues."

Shalala complained that, as a university president, she hears from a variety of government agencies and organizations about gender equity in sports, but rarely hears anything about gender equity in science. She went on to stress the need for an organization similar to the NCAA to hold schools accountable for Title IX enforcement.

Another way to force change is pulling Congressional purse strings. The message from panelists was loud and clear: money talks and the government should leverage its funds to "ensure results."

Gretchen Ritter from the University of Texas at Austin also envisioned university provosts holding STEM department chairs accountable for their hiring practices with strict financial consequences, such as a year-long hiring freeze. Translation: hire more women or else.

But before Congress or universities embrace drastic measures to attempt to increase the percentage of women in these fields, they should begin with an unbiased look at the root causes.

A National Academies of Sciences report detailing bias in academic science is taken as gospel, but critics allege that the NAS report glosses over contrary findings and downplays alternative explanations for the discrepancies.

Unfortunately, in many circles, including the academy and apparently now Congressional committees, the topic is too taboo to challenge. You'll recall that not long ago, Harvard President Lawrence Summers was swiftly kicked out the door for asking if innate biological differences between the sexes might be a factor in the disproportional representation in the STEM disciplines.

Shalala may confidently conclude, "women opt out of careers in academic science because of the hostile environment,"   :pino: but what if Summers is right and other factors are at play? Leading experts go back and forth on the issue of innate differences between the sexes and the significance of stereotype threat as they relate to women and science. There is a very real possibility that biology, personality, ability, and several other factors are at play here. All of these deserve honest exploration. Universities and colleges should examine their practices and consider ways that they can encourage talented women to explore and remain engaged in these fields. But they should do so not in a desire to reach some government quota, but because women have much to offer in terms of research and other contributions. We shouldn't assume that the optimal make up of any department or field will be equal numbers of men and women: our goal should be to ensure that men and women both are welcomed to pursue study and careers in any area they choose.

The October 17th hearing was the first in a series. Hopefully the upcoming hearings will show more of a commitment to honest debate. It's foolhardy to jump straight to solutions without considering first if there's a problem and its nature. Let's hope that Congress gets back to the basics and takes a fresh, unbiased look at the subject at hand.


9
Hoff Sommers on the gender/science debate:

COMMENTARY 
 

Academic Inquisitors
By CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS
October 16, 2007; Page A20


As if losing the presidency of Harvard for hinting that there might be a biological explanation for the preponderance of men in academic science wasn't enough, Lawrence Summers now appears to be persona non grata elsewhere too.

A few weeks ago the University of California, Davis rescinded an invitation for him to speak. More than 150 faculty members signed a petition protesting his appearance, saying Mr. Summers "has come to symbolize gender and racial prejudice in academia." Davis ecology Professor Maureen Stanton was "appalled and stunned that someone like Summers would be invited to speak."

Ms. Stanton and her allies want pariah status for anyone who dares to suggest a biological basis for difference. Yet the scientific literature on why men and women enter different fields is legitimate, robust, complex and fascinating. What is appalling is that leading academic institutions would try to shut down the discussion and get away with it. Almost.

Last week, the American Enterprise Institute brought together top researchers on sex differences, ranging from the strongly feminist Brandeis women's studies scholar Rosalind Barnett to AEI scholar and co-author of "The Bell Curve," Charles Murray. The discussions were heated, but civil. No one got mad, fled the room weeping, or nearly fainted.

Ms. Barnett opened by reminding the conference of the history of prejudice against women in the sciences. Though significant gains have been made, she pointed out that there are still "invisible walls" that hold women back. Another speaker, Richard Haier, professor of psychology at the University of California, Irvine, acknowledged the long history of prejudice, then presented slides that must give pause to even the most fervent biology denier.

Using the latest and most advanced MRI brain imaging technology, he demonstrated that male and female brains have strikingly distinct architectures and process information differently. Mr. Haier reminded us that "there is so much we do not know and so much yet to discover about brain biology and sex differences, and perhaps even career choices."

Simon Baron-Cohen, a professor at Cambridge University and one of the world's leading experts on autism, had an intriguing hypothesis. Autism is far more common in males than females. Those afflicted with the disorder, including those with normal or high IQ, tend to be socially disconnected and clueless about the emotional states of others. They often exhibit an obsessive fixation on objects and machines.

Sound like anyone you know?

Mr. Baron-Cohen suggests that autism may be the far end of the male norm -- the "extreme male brain," all systematizing and no empathizing. He believes that men are, on average, wired to be better systematizers and women to be better empathizers. He presented a wide range of correlations between the level of fetal testosterone and behaviors in both girls and boys from infancy into grade school to back up his belief.

Harvard cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Spelke, another speaker, noted that Mr. Baron-Cohen's theory is not settled science. She is right, of course.

Yet the current configuration of the workplace fits Mr. Baron-Cohen's theory: Women dominate in empathy-centered fields such as early childhood education, social work and psychology, while men are over-represented in the "systematizing" vocations such as car repair, oil drilling and electrical engineering.

Others debated the pros and cons of research on "unconscious bias" and the effects of stereotypes on test takers. So it went. No one present could doubt the importance of the debate or the significance of the evidence from both sides. The audience was captivated as experts played with the politically incorrect notion that male and female brains may be markedly different.

Unfortunately, the deniers of differences between the sexes are on the march with powerful allies. In the fall of 2006, the National Academy of Sciences released a recklessly one-sided study, now widely referred to as authoritative, titled "Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering." According to the report, differences in cognition between the sexes have no bearing on the dearth of women in academic math, physics and engineering. It is all due to bias. Case closed. The report calls on Congress to hold hearings on gender bias in the sciences and on federal agencies to "move immediately" (emphasis in original) to apply anti-discrimination laws such as Title IX to academic science (but not English) departments. "The time for action is now."

No it is not. Now is the time for scholars in our universities and in the National Academy of Sciences to defend and support principles of free and objective inquiry. The chronically appalled must not have the last word.

Ms. Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

10
I don't know who these authors are but there results are very unlikely.  I question whether the subjects are self-identified feminists, or if the authors ascribed feminism to them based on survey questions about their values regarding equality of the sexes.

Feminism And Romance Go Hand In Hand
Web address: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071015102856.htm


Science Daily -- Contrary to popular opinion, feminism and romance are not incompatible and feminism may actually improve the quality of heterosexual relationships, according to Laurie Rudman and Julie Phelan, from Rutgers University in the US. Their study* also shows that unflattering feminist stereotypes, that tend to stigmatize feminists as unattractive and sexually unappealing, are unsupported.

It is generally perceived that feminism and romance are in direct conflict. Rudman and Phelan's work challenges this perception. They carried out both a laboratory survey of 242 American undergraduates and an online survey including 289 older adults, more likely to have had longer relationships and greater life experience. They looked at men's and women's perception of their own feminism and its link to relationship health, measured by a combination of overall relationship quality, agreement about gender equality, relationship stability and sexual satisfaction.

They found that having a feminist partner was linked to healthier heterosexual relationships for women.  Men with feminist partners also reported both more stable relationships and greater sexual satisfaction. According to these results, feminism does not predict poor romantic relationships, in fact quite the opposite.

The authors also tested the validity of feminist stereotypical beliefs amongst their two samples, based on the hypothesis that if feminist stereotypes are accurate, then feminist women should be more likely to report themselves as being single, lesbian, or sexually unattractive, compared with non-feminist women.

Rudman and Phelan found no support for this hypothesis amongst their study participants.  In fact, feminist women were more likely to be in a heterosexual romantic relationship than non-feminist women. The authors conclude that feminist stereotypes appear to be inaccurate, and therefore their unfavorable implications for relationships are also likely to be unfounded.

* Reference: Rudman LA & Phelan JE (2007). The interpersonal power of feminism: is feminism good for romantic relationships? Sex Roles (DOI 10.1007/s11199-007-9319-9)
11
 :laughing6:  Check out the description for this Deep Feminism Yahoo Group.  Notice each feminism defines itself as a relationship with men.


Equity Feminism -- recognizing that male domination is wrong.
Radical Feminism -- recognizing that male domination is the root of all social problems.
Ecofeminism -- recognizing that male domination is the root of all ecological problems.
Feminist Spirituality-- recognizing that sacralized male domination (God) is the archetypal cornerstone of patriarchy.

Deep Feminism -- God died [Remember: God is "sacralized male domination " -rmm], as Nietzsche noted in the 19th century. He meant that God was no longer a driving force in western civilization. I note that western civilization died around 2000. The emerging system of global corporate feudalism is in no way driven by God -- it is driven exclusively by Greed -- but it will happily use fear of God or Jesus or Judgment Day or Terrorists or anything else that will cow people into obedience.

Even the neocons are no longer pretending there are no resource limits -- they grabbed control of the largest military machine in the history of male domination and are blatantly using it to steal every last scrap of wealth and property on Earth for themselves. This phase cannot last very long, and they will begin fighting among themselves very soon - since they are men [now waitaminute, didn't they just say male domination is dead?   :confused2: -rmm], and each one has to try to be God the Top One. Social order will be held together by naked force through much of the 21st century, but we now have a global kleptocracy, sustained by force and fear alone, and the thieves will try to cut each other's throats. There will be localized breakdowns, and in a few decades the global order will collapse. There may also be a nuclear war between Islam and the US. This is the death of patriarchy -- the End of the World as we have known it for the past 5,000 years.

If the seeds of the Mother are well planted, and there are enough of them, they will grow into the post-patriarchal world.

Deep feminists are those who will plant the Mother's seeds and tend them. We are the agricultural revolution of the soul.

Deep Feminism is a group for women only.

-http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DeepFeminism/ :bs:
12
A little levity from the gender wars:
This is an old blog enter dated 9/05 but I just ran across it.  This is to answer the "Ophelia" feminists, with a tribute to heart-throb Amy Lee"

Dear Ladies

Quote
I'm sick of the view of the world - and although the women blame it on the men, that's bullshit, it's all fucking women - that men only find you attractive if you're straight up, big titted and blonde hair. [More]
13
There are mounting publications on both side of the nature vs. nurture issue regarding the influence of genetic predetemination in the social expression of individual identity.  On the one hand there is neurocognitive and neurophysiology showing the sexes having distinct brain functions.  On the other, there in sociology and feminist gender studies arguing social differences are culture driven.  Most people recognize a combination of the two, but gender studies increasing argues environment as the dominating, if not exclusive, factor.

While there are many studies that claim they've measured so-called gender differences the fact is they don't know how much is biologically determined and how much is socially influenced. They simply declare it a gender difference and they have a self-fulfilling hypothesis. This is the rule in gender so-called science:

   
Quote
It is therefore more common to use gender differences as a blanket term for sex and gender difference when speaking about people because you can't separate them from their environment. The generic rule of thumb must therefore be:

    If you know that the difference is 100% biological it's a Sex Difference,

    Everything else must be considered a Gender Difference.

    http://www.med.monash.edu.au/gendermed/difference.html


How do you know if a difference is 100% biological? You never do, so you declare it a gender difference - abracadabra you have evidence of gender discrimination all over the place!

A practical upshot of this is that regardless of the definitional distinction between gender and sex, gender is increasingly used as a synonym for sex. For example, a military friend of mine was given a survey to fill out by one of his headquarter offices. One of the questions "What gender is your supervisor?" (well her sex is female, but our "don't ask, don't tell" policy precludes an honest answer about her gender). This is not just anecdotal story but part of an actual trend. Here's how it's playing out in scientific literature:

 
Quote
Cursory inspection revealed that the increased use of 'gender' in SCI titles does not reflect an equally dramatic shift in scientific interest from understanding the biological determinants of sex to understanding the cultural determinants of gender. Rather, the rise of 'gender' appears to be the result of well-meaning attempts to signal sympathy with the ideas and goals of feminism. This has had the paradoxical outcome of undercutting and blurring the distinction which feminists sought to emphasize by distinguishing sex from gender.

    http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v25/n4/full/ng0800_373a.html


The author is being polite in the above quote. What it is doing is supplying feminists with a body of junk-science evidence (or advocacy research if you will) to support an otherwise unprovable tenet of their ideology.

In short, the neurophysiological evidence showing sex differences is science; feminist gender-studies are currently fashionable nonsense.

In general see: P. R. Gross, N. Levitt and M. W. Lewis, "The Flight from Science and Reason," ed. B. M. Boland, New York Academy of Sciences, New York, 1996, vol. 775, 593.
14
Main / Tal Bachman: The Yarn Spinners
Jul 02, 2007, 07:14 AM
Starts off addressing Mormonism, but continues to include feminist ideologues.

The Yarn Spinners   

http://www.mormoncurtain.com/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DATE POSTED: Jun 29, 2007, at 08:11 AM

ORIGINAL AUTHOR: Tal Bachman
(Tal Bachman is an internationally recognized singer-songwriter from Vancouver, Canada.  His official website is talbachmanmusic.com )

What kind of world do we live in, when well-intentioned lunatics have more influence over how we think, feel, and act, than anyone else?

Joseph Smith was a wonderful storyteller - clearly, so wonderful that even in 2007 many people are so enchanted with his stories, that the fact that they could not possibly be true means nothing to them. Their belief in his stories, to them, gives their lives meaning; so why should they ever part with them? Meaning is enough. What difference then can it make then that, contrary to JS's assertions, the human family pre-dates two Missourians who lived only five millenia ago? Or that there wasn't a global flood 4000 years ago as JS claimed? Or that the Native Americans aren't the blood descendants of all, as JS and his BOM claim? Or a hundred other things? Clearly, none at all. These false teachings, which even many members know are false, to borrow a phrase, are simply instantly relegated to "not essential to our salvation" (though of course JS said just the opposite). In the (not necessarily conscious) opinion of the believers, what is essential to the salvation of our psyches, our self-images, senses of safety, perhaps our marriages, etc., is to continue believing in Smith's silly, self-aggrandizing stories, and the authority claims of his successors.

Mormons may enjoy remembering that it is not only they who have found great meaning in wonderful (untrue) stories. Decades after almost all of his most important theories have been identified as either untrue or inherently untestable yarns, Sigmund Freud continues to inform the worldviews of millions of people. Humans don't actually wish to have incestuous relationships with their parents, and in fact possess an overwhelmingly powerful innate instinct against it? No problem. No evidence that our minds erase all memory of traumatic episodes? No problem. Therapists in the 80's, taking their cues from Freud, actually "creating" false traumatic memories in trying to "recover" these non-existent "repressed memories", and in so doing, tearing families apart, ruining the very lives they're supposed to be helping? No problem. Nothing seems to be a problem to those who like Dr. Freud's stories. After all - the stories give their lives meaning: incest, penis-envy, patricidal fantasies, fictitious anal fixations and all. In truth, it is nonsense, just like Mormonism - but not to the believers. For them, it has become crucial to life itself.

And what of Marx? It is no exaggeration to say that virtually all of Marx's "scientific" predictions about capitalism failed. No problem for his adherents; just like any other ideologues, his followers simply invented post hoc rationalizations to make it okay. To this day, a look at any university department faculty in the humanities or social sciences will reveal professors examining this or that "through the prism of Marxism" - after 80 years of TOTAL MARXIST FAILURE. After all the failed predictions, after MILLIONS DEAD because of the premise that human nature is infinitely malleable (a premise shared also by Mormon theology, hence its own experiments in Utopian collectives), and the desire of "knowers" to realize heaven on earth. It just doesn't matter. All that matters is that Marxism has given them meaning in their lives. Untruth has become "my truth" for the Marxist, "the end".

What about Betty Friedan and other founding mothers of modern feminism? Crucial to most modern feminism "thought" has been that "sex" does not exist; only "gender" does. ("Gender", the word, itself is a claim that all differences observed between males and females are a result of environment, rather than biology.) Now, 44 years after "The Feminine Mystique" came out, many dozens of studies confirm the fact (which, suspiciously, never seems to have been doubted prior to 1963) that the survival of our species has depended on the evolution of certain important differences in male and female human brains, just as is the case in other mammal species. (As it happens, quite a bit of the most important research in this area has been conducted by women themselves [and why not, since women have as much to gain from understanding humanity as men do?] See, e.g., the work of Doreen Kimura, or Louise Brizendine's new "The Female Brain") . Yet, there are still millions of people running around claiming that any observed differences between men and women are the result of social conditioning, and that "gender is a social construct". (No, dear - sex is real, and "gender" is largely a figment of your imagination.) The studies, the proof, the terrible effect on societies and personal relationships of positing identically hard-wired brains...none of it matters to the ideologues. Nothing can matter, by definition, to the ideologue, but his or her ideology. It's the story, stupid. Not the truth.

Translation-facilitating rocks, entirely fanciful "interpretations of dreams" (Freud's magnum lunatic opus), the superiority of central economic planning to free markets, innately identical boys and girls...all are nonsense, and demonstrable nonsense at that. Yet it seems to make hardly any difference to millions. It seems sometimes that we live in a world shaped not so much by what we know, but what we would most like to believe, damn the truth, "whatever 'truth' might mean anyway, as Nietszche taught us...".

Thank God the Bacons, Galileos, Newtons, Humes, Voltaires, Einsteins of the world have cared less about stories, even wonderful stories, and focused more on the business of trying to gain real knowledge about the world. After all, the story of Adam and Eve, which includes women through Eve being cursed by God with pain in childbirth, might be life-giving and appealing to some women - but probably far more life-giving and appealing are safe, emergency C sections and epidural blocks. (And to think there are still some feminists out there who claim that science is inherently patriarchally oppressive...what unspeakable ignorance.)

I like stories as stories, too - but I'm not sure they ought to be favoured over reality itself.

Just my two cents. 

15
Boy complaining of illness found dead at center
The Salt Lake Tribune
Article Launched: 06/29/2007 01:48:49 AM MDT
http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_6258780

Draper police are investigating the Thursday morning death of a 14-year-old resident of a center for troubled teens, said Sgt. Gerald Allred, a police spokesman.
    About 3 a.m., the boy fell ill and complained about having stomach and bowel problems, Allred said. Center staff placed the teen in a separate room to prevent other children from getting sick.
    Staff tried to wake the boy around 7 a.m. and found him dead.
    "We are interviewing everyone involved who was in the unit at the time," Allred said. "We are not ruling out anything at this point." Police are awaiting an autopsy.
    In February, the boy entered the private facility, which counsels teens needing special attention or help with learning or personality issues, Allred said.
    "[Teens] are put in there by their parents, to teach them the extra skills they need," Allred said.
    The Division of Child and Family Services licenses the facility but will not review the case until after the police investigation is concluded, said division spokeswoman Carol Sisco.
    - Nathan C. Gonzalez
16
David R. Usher
On MND Comments
May 28, 2007 at 1:13 am · Filed under Vox Populi

As a leader of the men's movement for the past 19 years, I feel it is important to continue my work in this piece teaching the men's movement how to cooperate and work with itself -- that it might achieve national recognition and become a successful political force.

As an Executive-board officer of an early men's rights organization, I learned one thing: there are a lot of powerless and very hurt men in this movement. Their biggest problem is that they want to get some power back. They want it now. Their goal is to be president of the group -- or to be in full command of something -- and they will viciously attack anybody who gets in their way. The one remarkable thing about most of these guys is this: they have no ideas worth pursuing and no political plan to execute on.

The group could agree on nothing. It accomplished nothing. Having finally given up on the group, I quietly organized the first major protest in the history of the men's movement with a little help from Stu Miller. I just 10 days, we held informational protests in 25 cities around America, inviting people to come see the movie "First Wives Club", a movie in which women abuse men who have done nothing wrong in every possible manner, and who are blamed for everything anyway. We told everyone to come see it not as a comedy, but as the best documentary ever filmed about sexism in America.

The protest was a smash with the media. I ended up in the Washington Post and Time Magazine for it. HardCopy flew to St. Louis to film a segment that was cancelled by Universal just before airtime (the female producer called me in tears because she said it was the best segment she had ever done). This was a thrilling result back in 1996, because the men's movement had never been heard of before in the national media.

The "First Wives Club" protest proved the two theorems I was testing: men were ready to do something together, but somebody must give them something brilliant to do. And, America was ready to hear it, if we just do it right. The only thing lacking was leadership.

This event moved the movement forward. Everyone became aware that the national Men's organizations back then were little more than insane asylums. The above organization fell apart immediately when I and about 2/3 of the board resigned. It strikes me as quite stupid that men would wipe each other out so thoroughly while feminists sit around and laugh at them.

A few months later, the sane members of the former organization came together to start the American Coalition for Fathers and Children -- which to this day organizes events and initiatives quite well. Others have adopted this approach.

Now, lets look at where our power went: The problem is radical feminism -- and that is what we must work together to overcome politically. We cannot win by grabbing "power" from each other or playing games of one-upsmanship. The power is "out there". If we want control of our lives, and the simple right to be fathers and husbands, we have to go "out there" to get it back.

MND has some of these angry, power-hungry guys reading it religiously. They justifiably want change and seem to think that knocking others down and playing games of one-upsmanship accomplishes something. They do not have the political seasoning to understand what should be done, nor the maturity to accomplish it, and are oblivious to the possibility that they are hurting both themselves and the movement.

A Brief History of Major Men's Movement Mistakes

In the early 1990's, the angry minority in the movement insisted that forcing "sole father custody" on America would fix the problem. How this might be accomplished was, of course, an impossible issue to resolve. Daniel Amneus, who wrote the first great analysis of divorce in "The Garbage Generation", presented this as a solution. Dan was a great friend of mine -- and admitted privately that sole father custody was an impossible goal. He agreed we were doing the right thing to seek joint custody.

But Dan Amneus was not the problem. There was a completely irrational pack of very noisy sole-father-custody advocates lead by Victor Smith, who kept the men's movement in bellicose bedlam. It took several years of bloodbaths to sort this useless discussion out, during which time the men's movement went nowhere.

Then there were the Christian Patriot types -- who insisted they could somehow fix America by returning it to a "Book of Genesis" model. Most of these guys ended up dead or in jail, after nearly destroying the legitimate men's movement.

Today, the lunatic fringe demands revocation of the 19th amendment. This is just as impossible to accomplish as previous "nuclear option" manifestos. Like their one-track minded predecessors, these guys shout it out everywhere and ceaselessly harass everyone who won't buy into their agenda. This is causing a lot of reasonable people out there to avoid the men's movement like the bubonic plague.

The common factor in the destructive fringe of the men's movement is this: they would all replace one form of gross inequality for another. They all are seeking things that are absolutely not possible to accomplish in the political world.

A Chronic, long-term problem of the men's movement

Now, I will discuss a major chronic problem of this movement that needs to be fully understood by all: The men's movement is comprised of two entirely different kinds of divorced or marriage-rejected men.

The majority of men in this movement are reasonable men who did their best, went to work every day, and treated their wives well. We worked on personal growth, went through marriage counseling, and went the long mile cowtowing to feminism. We did not do anything to deserve being sent into deadbeat peonage. Reasonable men often come into the movement shocked, angry, and horrified (which is quite normal). But normal men get off the pity pot fairly quickly and turn all that energy and extra time into service helping advance the cause.

Then, there is a small minority of completely irrational men who are unable to do anything except criticize the movement. They are clinically addicted to anger. They never get off the pity pot. They spend all day arguing viciously with others over trivialities, and insulting anyone that does not lay down before them. They do not respond to reason. They are not capable of rational discussions of fact or history.

These are the men who truly deserved the divorces they were served. They are incapable of maintaining a close relationship. To them, everything is a power play. Cooperation is something that only women do. These guys think they can hang out in the men's movement and hide among the good guys without being noticed.

If you are one of the jerks who did deserve your divorce, experienced leaders can spot you immediately. We fall over backwards to help good guys. But if you are a lurker in the movement, you are wasting your time.

If you are one of the guys who think that revoking the 19th amendment is the answer, I guarantee you that no leader in this movement will give you the time of day. Replacing one form of inequality with a previous one will not fly in the men's movement or anywhere else. The men's movement necessarily has to be very careful about who it associates with, who it defends, and who speaks for the movement, because it will take only one backfire to set the men's movement back a decade.

We will distance ourselves at least 1000 miles from you -- because feminists maintain their superior position by telling America that the men's movement wants to kill the 19th amendment -- and they quickly point to jerks posting on MND and elsewhere to prove it.

Recently, I stopped permitting comments in my blogs due to chronic abuse by a handful of extremely loquacious and persistent individuals -- who think it their right to assault the work of others and make nutty insulting remarks. I regret this makes it impossible for the good guys to make comments. The truth is that I don't have time to sit around all day deleting 30 or 40 comments by a few people who really have no business being in this movement. Turning off comments is the only way to keep my columns above-the-groin and on-topic.

A lot of people in Washington and elsewhere read Mens News Daily. It is vastly important that MND present the legitimate men's movement as it truly exists -- a forward-looking movement with positive solutions to improve the lives of men, women, and children; to end divorce by returning to marriage as an expectational norm, and to concurrently resolve America's great budget-busting social problems. Those looking at the men's movement for the first time will not find an insane asylum in my columns.

I am published on many websites in the conservative, libertarian, and more recently liberal websites. Most of them do not permit comments -- perhaps for the same reason I have turned mine off.

It seems that a lot of people out there are starting to "get" the men's movement and to listen to us. I get many great ideas and comments from readers on other websites -- and rarely an irrational response. What is truly bizarre, and what requires serious contemplation (particularly by those who think they know it all), is that I get far more grief from the few disagreeable jerks my own movement than I do from all the other websites combined (including comments from feminists).

Let it be fully understood that this movement will not be presentable to the rest of America until it is presentable to itself. If you want the men's movement to succeed, take your anger out and refine your thinking privately in a discussion group. Do not post anything on MND that will set the movement back, or alienate new blood coming into the movement. Help grow the movement, and never shoot it in the foot in a moment of anger or misunderstanding. If you do not understand something, ask a good question. Never respond with knee-jerk attacks.

If you don't have something constructive to say, don't say anything at all. Mike LaSalle has gone to great personal expense and invested thousands of hours building a great platform for the men's movement to work from. You should be helping him accomplish the goals of the men's movement, not trying to kill it.

People follow leaders because they have ideas worth following. Leaders show the path, and teach others how to do that too. Leaders (and organizations) often work just one issue -- and other leaders know that it is wise to let them work their specialty while collaboratively magnifying each other's work. By working many different issues, and building upon each other's work, we win.

Seasoned leaders of today's men's movement learned from the mistakes of the early men's movement. We will not repeat them. You will never see a leader in this movement destroy the work of another for this very reason. We have worked very hard for many years to get the men's movement to where it is today -- often with no compensation. We will not let a few nuts queer the doo.

I have always encouraged others to take what they know, add it into the mix, and take this movement to the next level. The men's movement needs more great leaders, writers and spokespeople. In fact, the person who has the magnetism to become the "Martin Luther King" of the movement could land on MND any time.

If you are a go-getter with a mission, and truly believe you have the talent, the guts, the wisdom, and the vision to make a difference, I urge you to seize the opportunity. But if you are not willing to patiently and studiously go the long mile over a long time period, and to spend some time learning the ropes, it is best to just pitch in and do what you can given the time, skillset, and resources you have available to you.

-------------------------------------------------

David R. Usher is Senior Policy Analyst for the True Equality Network and President of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, Missouri Coalition
17
Main / RADAR criticized in Wisconsin paper
May 02, 2007, 08:22 AM
the article hangs its hat on the fact that studies of false accusations are all small pilot studies.   The assertion is that 2 - 8 percent figure is from "reliable sources,"  but 40 - 50% results are not.   The question remains that given the result of these limited studies, why is there no funding for a larger, more definitive study?  Answer: no one really wants to know.  Obviously there, in spite of objections to these studies conclusions, no one is confident enough that the frequency of false reports is low to support funding for a broader study to prove their point.


Wrong lessons from the Duke case
Bill Lueders on Monday 04/30/2007 03:04:04,
http://www.thedailypage.com/daily/article.php?article=6469

Do women lie all the time about being raped?

That's what one detective in Madison, Wisconsin, told a legally blind woman named Patty who reported being raped by an intruder in her home in 1997. Using pressure and lies, the police got Patty to recant, then had her charged with a crime when she returned to her original account.

The consequences were tragic, not just for Patty but for the city of Madison. Patty fought the charges, which were eventually dismissed, and for nearly seven years she fought police and prosecutors who continued to insist she lied about being raped -- right up to when her rapist was convicted and sentenced to 50 years behind bars.

This case, which I covered as a newspaper reporter and is the subject of my recent book, Cry Rape, has been cited as being "the exact opposite" of the case that led to charges against three members of the Duke University lacrosse team in Durham, North Carolina.

Patty's story was discussed at length at a recent international conference on sexual assault in Houston. A former law enforcement officer has given a talk called "Duke vs. Cry Rape" to groups of other cops.

Actually, I think both cases exemplify the same dynamic: Police and prosecutors reaching conclusions based on preconceived notions and political agendas, irrespective of the facts.

In Patty's case, the Madison police department and local district attorney's office were looking for a case of false reporting to prosecute, to make an example of someone who would abuse the justice system in this way. They stuck to this theory despite mounting and ultimately overwhelming evidence that Patty had indeed been raped.

In the Duke case, Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong made a public show of his prosecution of privileged college kids, launched at a critical moment during his bid for reelection. He then reportedly rebuffed repeated attempts by the players' lawyers to present evidence that poked holes in these charges.

But instead of putting the blame where it belongs -- on Nifong and the justice system's almost pathological reluctance to admit when it's wrong -- many commentators are seizing on the Duke case to allege that false reporting of sexual assaults is occurring at epidemic levels.

"Half of Rape Claims are False," screams a recent press release from a group called RADAR, which stands for Respecting Accuracy in Domestic Abuse Reporting. The group backs up this astounding claim with a quote from Linda Fairstein, formerly a prosecutor with the sex crimes unit in New York County.

Feinstein's quote, which has been repeatedly endlessly throughout the blogosphere, holds that half of the rapes annually reported in Manhattan "did not happen." RADAR and others attribute this quote to Feinstein's 1993 book, Sexual Violence: Our War Against Rape.

But Feinstein disclaims the quote: "I don't believe that and don't know where they got it." Recently, in connection with the Duke case, Feinstein said prosecutors "have to acknowledge that false accusations do happen, though they are less than 10% of reported rapes."

This quote has not found its way into RADAR's press releases.
Other claims bandied about by RADAR are similarly unreliable. The group cites studies based on absurdly small samples (109 reported rapes over nine years in a single small community), isolated and extreme cases (a woman who used false allegations to blackmail victims and who was, as a matter of fact, caught and convicted), and meaningless measures of opinion ("73% of women and 72% of men at the military service academies believe that false accusations of sexual assault are a problem").

These tidbits and anecdotes are presented to buttress this blatantly false assertion: "While researchers and prosecutors do not agree on the percentage of false allegations, the consensus is that approximately 40% to 50% of charges are clearly false."

In fact, reliable numbers from law enforcement place the incidence of false reporting for sexual assault at between 2 percent and 8 percent. The incidence of rape victims being doubted and disbelieved is a lot higher than that.

Just ask Patty.



Bill Lueders is news editor of Isthmus, a weekly newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin. His book, Cry Rape: The True Story of One Woman's Harrowing Quest for Justice, was published last fall by the University of Wisconsin Press.
18
Main / Duke Chronical: What about the men?
Feb 02, 2007, 07:37 AM
What about the men?
By: Brian Kindle

Shame on you, Duke University. You position yourself as an illustrious center of higher education, an institution on the bleeding edge of academic progress and advancement. And yet you don't even have a program in Men's Studies.

No, it's not a joke, nor is it the end part of a rhetorical question meant to sass Women's Studies (as in, "How come there's no Men's Studies?"). Men's Studies is real; as a movement it's been limping around since at least the late 1970s, half-heartedly attempting to gain credibility and be recognized as its own academic discipline.

I know I'm obligated to make some cracks about how Men's Studies involves watching guys cheer for football teams and drink beer, but I'm just not feeling up to it. If you're really hurting for humor about the observation that some men like watching sports a lot, and some women don't like sports as much (HILARITY), please consult any TV sitcom with Ray Romano.

According to the American Men's Studies Association, the organization that seems to be nominally in charge of the field, more than 40 colleges and universities currently feature some kind of Men's Studies program. As far as content goes, it's what you'd expect: post-modern male identities, post-structural performances of masculinity, post-intelligible mushy language that makes me feel tired and unfortunate, as if these words are somehow stealing my luck.

Absurd? Probably yes. There are thousands of reasons to ridicule Men's Studies, many of them completely valid. Ahead of its time? Maybe yes to that as well. Men's Studies, in its own sloppy way, has at least been trying for a while now to respond to a question that until recently got short shrift from nearly everyone else: how to give some account of the current state of the American man, to figure out what to do with men now that manhood's been run through the cultural shredder.

It's a question with increasingly high stakes. Mounting evidence suggests that American men are crashing and burning compared to their female counterparts, at all levels. In the K-12 years, according to the U.S. Department of Education, boys are four times as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD as girls, and men constitute a comfortable majority of those with learning disabilities. In high school, boys are much more likely to be suspended or expelled, to drop out or to commit suicide.

Male under-performance has carried over to higher education, as well. The "gender gap" continues to widen nationally (only 42 percent of American college students are male), and per the 2005 National Survey of Student Engagement, men in college typically spend less time studying than, and skip or come to class unprepared more frequently than, their female counterparts.

At Duke, the situation is not so dire; like other top-tier universities, the school's huge applicant base and selectivity have kept the gender balance even and the quality of the male student high. Even so, Trinity College is 52 percent female, and it has been for a while.

If trends continue, even the fanciest institutions will be forced to make tough choices: accept the imbalance, or accept less-qualified men. It's a decision that schools like UNC-Greensboro, where women outnumber men three to one, are already facing.

And it's not just that women have made gains relative to men. In education, at least, the best that can be said is that men's academic achievement has remained static for 30 years. At worst, men are backsliding, and fast.

Like any social phenomenon, there are a million competing explanations, some intriguing, some strident and irrelevant, some completely insane. I'm less interested in a definitive diagnosis than in the overall portrait that's being painted here, one of a culture (campus and otherwise) that's abandoning its men.

By all accounts, we gave up a long time ago on trying to mold boys into a generally accepted vision of manhood. The social and political movements of the '60s and '70s were great at ripping up the (admittedly flawed) traditional masculinities and really terrible at leaving anything coherent in their place. I can't say whether older, traditional versions of "being a man" were right or wrong. I do know I grew up without one, as did most of my peers.

One of the only coherent articulations of manhood I received was from advertising executives, who unsurprisingly have been very adept at creating a masculinity based on buying things, an eternal adolescence populated by big-screen TVs, big engines and chicks with big boobs who belch, fart and like beer and football (Just like you, guys! How hot is that?).

It's a de-fanged, dumb-fun image of being a man, sure, but it's also pretty infantile and unsatisfying. If the most prevalent male identity we can offer is embodied by Spike TV or Maxim magazine, it's no surprise that so many men are totally lost.

And no, I don't honestly believe that a Duke Men's Studies program (or a Duke Men's Initiative, for that matter) would be a valid solution to this male vacuum, although I do believe that a huge number of persistent campus problems-misogyny, self-destructive drinking, the replacement of dating with casual sex-have to do with the fact that the freshly minted men of the student body simply have no idea what we're doing.

I'm not going to throw up some masculine ideal we can all aspire to. Mostly I just want recognition that leaving men to chance or marketing is a pretty poor strategy. "Do it yourself" isn't working anymore.

---------------------------------------
Brian Kindle is a Trinity senior. His column runs every Friday.
19
Main / Why Bad Beliefs Don't Die
Aug 09, 2005, 08:41 AM
I stumbled on this article while looking into the nature of cults.  I think it explains a lot about the resilience of feminist lies in our social and legal institutions, and also the resistance of feminists when confronted with factual evidence.

Why Bad Beliefs Don't Die

Quote

Why Bad Beliefs Don't Die

Because beliefs are designed to enhance our ability to survive, they are biologically designed to be strongly resistant to change. To change beliefs, skeptics must address the brain's "survival" issues of meanings and implications in addition to discussing their data.

Gregory W. Lester

Because a basic tenet of both skeptical thinking and scientific inquiry is that beliefs can be wrong, it is often confusing and irritating to scientists and skeptics that so many people's beliefs do not change in the face of disconfirming evidence. How, we wonder, are people able to hold beliefs that contradict the data?

This puzzlement can produce an unfortunate tendency on the part of skeptical thinkers to demean and belittle people whose beliefs don't change in response to evidence. They can be seen as inferior, stupid, or crazy. This attitude is born of skeptics' failure to understand the biological purpose of beliefs and the neurological necessity for them to be resilient and stubbornly resistant to change. The truth is that for all their rigorous thinking, many skeptics do not have a clear or rational understanding of what beliefs are and why even faulty ones don't die easily. Understanding the biological purpose of beliefs can help skeptics to be far more effective in challenging irrational beliefs and communicating scientific conclusions. (more...)
20
Main / Feminist display targeted by vandals
Jun 27, 2005, 10:21 AM
I love how the feminist rep plays the innocent victim here.  

This is another sign that feminism is not only becoming known for its hatred and just general BS, and also decreasingly accepted at face value.


Feminist display targeted by vandals

Quote


A display board in the southeast corner of the Social Sciences building contains an obscene message left by vandals. Faculty was notified and the board has since been restored to its original format. SOURCE: DEBI SHERIDAN.




By MARIA VILLASENOR | editor in chief
Weber State University Signpost
June 21, 2005

A display in the third floor of the Weber State University Social Sciences Building was defaced in late April to read "S--- at FEMINISW." The culprits are unknown and the display was soon restored to its original "What is it? FEMINISM" saying.

"I was angry that someone would be that immature to change that to something like that," said Lisa Schultz, Feminist United Network president. "In college, we have different ideas, we have different theories and things like that. And college is a place to hear those."

Schultz said campus police was involved, but with no surveillance cameras in that area nothing could be done. The possibility the vandalism was done by high school students at a debate tournament hosted at WSU wasn't ruled out, either. The display was fixed and it is still at the southeast corner of the floor.

The display was an evolving feature Schultz and other WSU students put up. It first included quotes about feminism with the words "feminism" or "feminist" removed and a question of "What is it?" The answer was later put up, but on April 25, Schultz and others found their work was changed over the weekend.

"By itself, people are afraid of the word 'feminist' or 'feminism,'" said Schultz, a senior majoring in social work. "They have this connotation that it's very negative and they don't understand what it is at all. To me, feminism is basically saying 'Women deserve the same respect that men get.'"

She said the people who altered the display are ignorant.

"They don't want to know," Schultz said. "They already think they know, so they are going to disagree with it without looking in to it."

"S--- at FEMINISM" was not the first vandalism incident against the WSU Women's Studies Department or FUN. Maria Parrilla de Kokal, women's studies coordinator and FUN advisor, said flyers in the building's hallways are often taken down the same day they are put up.

Parilla de Kokal said the flyers are not radical, especially those mentioning courses offered in women's studies.

"There isn't anything that ever said 'We hate men,' or 'Men are not welcome' or 'Men are responsible for the ills of women' or 'Women should never have children,'" Parrilla de Kokal said. "There was nothing that would indicate anything that was contrary to family values."

Parrilla de Kokal and Schultz attribute the antagonism against things involving women's studies or feminism to fear and lack of knowledge.

"They think feminists hate men and are anti-motherhood," Parrilla de Kokal said. "They don't realize that there are women and men who are feminists."

She said a woman can be a traditional homemaker -- have children, stay at home and cook meals -- and still be a feminist if she believed in the right to choose her path.

Feminism flyers aren't the only documents being taken down: Some professors say the papers they put up on their office doors were removed, a practice one professor calls "a violation."

"There's a tradition in academia that what's posted on a faculty's door, stays on the faculty door," said Kathryn MacKay, WSU history associate professor. "So when people take it down, I'd much rather have them go ahead and comment on it rather than take it down. Because, as I said, taking it down ends the public discussion and I posted it because I want to have a public discussion or a public expression."

MacKay said a couple of times a semester she finds a sign removed or what are sometimes obscene comments on her door about a particular sign she's taped up. She said the flyers that receive the attention tend to deal with women's or economic issues. Those signs allow ideas and concerns to extend beyond the classroom and further a discussion, MacKay said.

"That's where I think the frustration is, when those discussions are not allowed to flourish, are cut off," she said. "And I think it's that people lack a rich understanding about democracy as a dialogue, as a negotiation, as a series of compromises."

Schultz said she was surprised to see that sort of behavior.

"Especially in college because that's the place where learning takes place, " Schultz said. "Our minds are exposed to diverse subjects -- are supposed to expand. We're supposed to be accepting of other cultures and learn about other cultures and society and all of those types of things and be able to at least respect them without agreeing with them."

You can reach reporter Maria Villasenor by calling 626-7121.