Mercy Ministries cont.

The SMH is not letting up on the Gloria Jean's/Hillsong/Mercy Ministries story. More coverage today, with the print edition also featuring a teaser for tomorrow's paper to the effect of "how Mercy Ministries and Hillsong claim they are able to 'cure' homosexuality".

Online articles are available. There is an examination of the ties between the 3 organisations by Ruth Pollard. Pollard also details the Australian Medical Association's concerns about Mercy Ministries' practice of requiring their members' medical visits to be monitored by a Ministries member. Corporations formerly listed as sponsors on the Mercy Ministries homepage - Rebel Sports, Bunnings Warehouse and LG - are denying any connection and their logos have apparently now been quietly removed from that section of the Mercy Ministries website. Other women have been contacting the Herald in the wake of the coverage. And finally, a former member of Hillsong has written an editorial about the issue.

That last one is hair-raising. Consider this:

The teaching when I was at Hillsong included the lesson that women are attached to their offspring eternally. All the miscarriages, terminations and stillbirths a woman has during her life time grow up in heaven, waiting for their mother to join them.

Probably the most serious allegation so far is the claim that women on Centrelink benefits in the program are "encouraged" to sign them over to Mercy Ministries for a period of one year. There's also the claim that women are "encouraged" to go on a disability support pension so that the organisation could claim carer's payments from the government.

Some brief fun with Google: the Darlene Zschech mentioned in the first article has a vanity site: darlenezschech.com. True to Pentecostal form, she's a singer-songwriter who uses her music to praise the Lord and evangelise for Hillsong. The SMH says she and her husband Mark are no longer affiliated with Mercy Ministries. They were both involved in another project called Hope Rwanda in 2006. The who's involved page for that site lists Mark Zschech as, among other things...Chairman of the Mercy Ministries International Board.

Hmmm....the Hope Rwanda page hasn't changes since mid-2007 from what I can see. It might just be out of date.

I'll be interested to see what comes out tomorrow.

Update: how the hell did I miss this right from Mercy Ministries' own site?:

In 2000, Mark and Darlene Zschech launched Mercy Ministries in Australia, a residential program for young women that was founded in America by Nancy Alcorn.

Today as the CEO of Mercy Ministries, Mark leads a team of 27 national staff and through his appointment to Mercy Ministries International Board in December 2004, Mark oversees the expansion and development of Mercy Ministries into the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Asia.

"No longer affiliated", huh?

Gloria Jean's, Mercy Ministries and Hillsong in the news again

In November 2007, local Australian coffee chain Gloria Jean's came under fire for its affiliation with an outfit named "Mercy Ministries", supposedly a sort of Christian live-in psychological counselling program. There was concern among the local gay press in particular about how "overcoming homosexuality" was one of the services it offered. As I recall Mercy Ministries said that they were going to stop treating people who had issues with homosexuality. They still continued their services in addressing other issues, though.

Today, Mercy Ministries made the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald. The online coverage is here and here. Far from offering the "professional support from psychologists, dieticians, general practitioners, social workers, career counsellors and daily education from program staff" that is described on their website, Mercy Ministries' actual "treatments" are described by the SMH as consisting merely of prayer readings, Bible study, exorcisms and speaking in tongues.

The SMH reports that Gloria Jean's has not reconsidered its affiliation with Mercy Ministries, and that donation box in Gloria Jean's stores which collects on behalf of Mercy Ministries is apparently going to stay there. Peter Irvine is listed in the SMH coverage as "former managing director, now director of corporate sponsorship" of Mercy Ministries. I think people should know that the original Crikey story from November 2007 linked above also lists him at that time as "executive director of Mercy Ministries" as well as "managing director of Gloria Jean's". Like many of the upper management of Gloria Jean's, he's also a Hillsong member.

I just bought coffee from there this morning, too, since the university's coffee place hadn't opened yet. Goddamn.

Obama, Rev Wright, McCain, Pastor Hagee, politics and religion

Interesting. We have the inflammatory statements of Reverend Jeremiah Wright, religious mentor to Barack Obama appearing in the news. I've been reading commentary on the American political blogs, and people are basically lining up on the sides you'd expect them to.

Curious lead in the linked article: "Barack Obama was forced to distance himself yesterday from his former pastor and religious mentor", with the editorial implication perhaps being that Obama's only publicy disagreeing with Rev Wright's views out of political necessity. Can't say I agree with that interpretation.

The full text of Barack Obama's most recent condemnation of his Reverend's statements is available online. I'm not that thrilled with Reverend Wright's statements, don't particularly think that Obama's demonstrated any kind of sympathy with such statements to date (quite the opposite in fact), but do feel that any statement from Obama on the issue should offer an explanation for how he feels about the Reverend.

Obama's explanation is one I find satisfactory. One sentence in particular I find eminently satisfactory: "he [Reverend Wright] has never been my political advisor; he's been my pastor". In fact, I think that sentence goes even deeper than the current issue, and strikes at the core of a severe problem with American politics today: the conflation of religion and politics.

Is it possible to separate spiritual and political statements from a pastor? I believe that is. So, if I accept this statement as a true indicator of his feelings, does Barack Obama. It has pained me to read the comments of so many Americans, inhabitants of the nation that basically invented the laudable notion of separation of Church and State, who are unwilling or unable to make such a distinction between the spiritual and the political.

Yet it is the importance given to that distinction which contrasts, say, the relationship between Obama and Reverend Wright with the relationship between John McCain and Pastor John Hagee. One is, if we accept Obama's comments, a matter of shared religious affiliation that does not intrude into Obama's personal politics, while the other is an explicit political endorsement of a political candidate by a religious figure.

Certainly there are people in America who would disagree that Obama's approach is better. I've read plenty of people who write about "the myth of the separation of Church and State in America". I personally feel that if America does not have such a separation, then it should. I hope that Obama is sincere in his apparent effort to honour that division. I feel no compunction or double standard in applauding Obama for that effort while condemning McCain for his efforts, through seeking the political endorsement of Pastor Hagee, in breaking it down.

Are opponents of homosexuality working against freedom?

Claim: statements made against homosexuality by anti-gay activists sometimes encourage their followers to believe that they themselves will personally suffer for the actions of homosexuals, and for the beliefs of those who have no moral qualm against homosexuality. Such people are therefore compelled by their own sense of self-preservation to deliberately interfere with the actions and beliefs of others by any means necessary. This goes completely against the ideals of self-governance and self-responsibility that characterise a free, open society.

Exhibit A: Pastor John Hagee's statement that Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment on everyone in New Orleans, regardless of their personal viewpoint towards homosexuality, because a gay pride march was going to be held there.

Exhibit B: Sally Kern's statements, specifically "Studies show no society that has totally embraced homosexuality has lasted for more than a few decades" and "If you have cancer in your little toe, do you just say that I'm going to forget about it since the rest of you is fine? It spreads! This stuff is deadly and it is spreading. It will destroy our young people and it will destroy this nation."

"Live and let live" means either punishment by God or the complete destruction of the society in which you live? No wonder some people can't leave gay people alone.

The benefits of free speech illustrated: Rep Sally Kern(R)

I'm a strong supporter of freedom of expression. I believe that expressing even the most vile, hateful idea serves an important purpose in allowing the rest of us to see for ourselves just how vile and hateful an idea it is. This puts me at odds with people who support putting restrictions on "hate speech" and "villification".

Much buzz has accompanied the public airing of a tape of Oklahoma Representative Sally Kern saying some truly appalling things about homosexuality and gay people in general. Her subsequent two-pronged defense is interesting in what it reveals about free speech issues.

In the first instance, she insists in an interview with a local Oklahoma news outfit called news9.com that she
is just exercising her right to free speech:"What is wrong with me as an American exercising my free speech rights on a topic that is a very big issue today?" she asks. Absolutely nothing, says I. Everyone should have the opportunity granted by her free speech rights to hear what she has to say if she thinks that it's such an important issue for her to comment upon.

Yet funnily enough, Rep Kern herself doesn't see it that way. In fact she's very unhappy that her statements have been given the wide audience that such a "very big issue" would presumably deserve: "Shame on the person who didn't have the courage to come and say, 'I'm going to tape you and put it out on YouTube,'" she opines.

She wants to speak out on an important issue, but she compains when people actually hear what she says?

The idea of free speech in JS Mill's formulation of the concept is that it is a free people themselves, not their government representatives, that is best suited to judging the merit (or lack thereof) of an idea, through ongoing public discussion amongst each other. Good ideas will tend to rise up, bad ideas will tend to be discarded. It doesn't take too much thought to view something like "homosexuality is more of a threat than terrorism" as a bad idea.

It is very telling that Rep Kern, for all her protestations about free speech, is unhappy with her statements being subject to the scrutiny of that marketplace of ideas. It tells me that she knows her statements won't stand up to that scrutiny. She might view this as evidence of a "homosexual agenda" working against her, but I would say that it is an example Rep Sally Kern rejecting the belief that the benefits of freedom of expression are valid ones: the principle of freedom of expression allows noxious and paranoid ideas like the ones held and promulgated by Rep Kern to be publicly seen for what they are, and publicly rejected. That can't sit well with her.

It is the broad distribution of this speech, not the restriction of it, that has best served the cause of gay rights here. It is a commitment to the principles of freedom of expression through public exposure and condemnation of noxious ideas, not a commitment to the restriction of freedom of expression through banning of "hate speech" and "villifying" speech, that best serves the cause of gay rights in general. Or so I believe.

Examples of Christian "persecution"

Far be it from me to let a list composed in comments go to waste. Forthwith:

A small compendium of four examples of "christians being persecuted for their views on homosexuality" which on closer examination proved to be anything but:

1)In Massachussetts, self-described "pro-family" group MassResistance claimed that "gay activists" had encouraged children to beat up the son of David Parker for Mr Parker's stance on homosexuality. But Mr Parker later admitted to the Boston Globe that "there was no evidence that an adult had directly incited students to bully his son", and everything that the superintendent had said about it being a small scuffle over lunchroom seating, unrelated to Mr Parker's political activities, has never been formally disputed by anyone. This backdown by Parker and Massresistance from their false and hurtful accusations didn't occur until AFTER Superintendent Paul Ash and principal Joni Jay had received hundreds of vitriolic and threatening e-mails and phone calls from "loving" Christians telling them what they really thought of them, by the way.

(2)At Arlington Fair, the anti-gay group PFOX made grandiose claims about being the victim of a "hate crime" (a concept which they completely oppose, by the way). Yet when other people at Arlington Fair asked if events transpired the way PFOX claimed, the answer was unequivocal: It did not happen, according to Vice President of the Arlington County Fair, Jackie Abrams. John Lisle of the Arlington County Police Department have "no records, reports or recollection of any incident at the Arlington County Fair as described by PFOX."

(3) Most telling of all is the incident at the Falls Church Community Center. In this case, all that happened is that a person tried to take a picture of a PFOX activist and this was immediately slammed as "causing an altercation" by the person involved. When the person being threatened by this anti-gay activist merely asked "Do I have to call the police?", the anti-gay activist then said that this amounted to "accosting him".

(4) In New York, Christian protestors were arrested and fined for nothing more than "praying silently", if you believe the anti-gay version of events. A mainstream news report which names the actual charges paints a very different picture: they disobeyed a police order to stop blocking the event, and when they refused, were fined. The horrible, horrible tally of this fine for disobeying a police order and obstructing the stage? $100, plus $95 costs. Gosh, however would the saints of yesteryear cope with the terrible, terrible persecutions suffered by "Christians" (or more accurately, Christianists) today?

Day of Silence, its opposition, and information leakage

The things you find online...

The Day of Silence has an opponent in the US, in Snoqualmie Valley school district to be exact, calling itself the Coalition to Defend Education. Someone's apparently figured out that objecting to the Day on the basis that it's "pro-homosexual" isn't working out. This group bases their opposition to the day on the claims that "it creates unsafe conditions for students, disrupts teaching, and contributes to a biased environment at MSHS[Mount Si High School]."

Since I've yet to see a group that objects to this Day that doesn't have an anti-gay agenda tucked away somewhere, I decided to have a look at what was out there on this group. Besides their love affair with the man who proudly advocates that "God hates effeminate men", Pastor Ken Hutcherson, I haven't found a great deal about them.

Strange what I have found, though:
Here [UPDATE: I have voluntarily removed the actual hyperlink to this page as a gesture of goodwill to the Garding family, after someone complained about me "publishing that family photo on my site"] is a fairly cheesy photo of what may or may not be the members of this CoDE organisation, courtesy of a family website maintained by the Garding family.
Here is a public listing of when CoDE has booked out a Meeting Room at North Bend library on March 12th, from 6pm to 8:30pm.

Nothing particularly useful. But it is kind of personal. I know it's standard among heavy net users to view all information that a person or organisation chooses to make world-readable as fair game for the rest of the world to read, but still..

The whois data comes back with a private registrant called Oneandone private registration. No leads there.

Not much more I can say unfortunately, except I'm impressed that a day intended to highlight the problem of anti-gay harassment is successfully attracting so much public harassment. Kind of proves the point I think.

Does the American Family Association think anti-gay violence is acceptable?

A few weeks back, the ever-insightful Box Turtle Bulletin questioned the supposedly "loving" attitude that anti-gay groups claim to have towards gay people, noting that in the wake of the murder of 15-year old Lawrence King, any suggestion of compassion from these "loving" groups towards a person who was killed for being gay was nowhere to be found, anywhere.

On April 25th, many high school students in the US will be participating in the Day of Silence, a day that seeks to draw attention the dangers that many gay high school students, such as Lawrence King, face.

This really upsets a lot of "loving" Christian organisations. The American Family Association, for instance is urging parents to keep their children home from school on April 25th. It appears that they are unable to conceive that a day intended to oppose anti-gay violence can entail anything other than, as they put it, being "taught that homosexuality is a worthy lifestyle, homosexuality has few or no risks, and individuals are born homosexual and cannot change".

What message does this send? Is there any form of opposition to anti-gay violence that does not somehow "promote the homosexual lifestyle" in their eyes?

If not, can it not reasonably said that an organisation which opposes "promoting the homosexual lifestyle", and which thinks that opposing anti-gay violence is "promoting the homosexual lifestyle", is opposed to the idea of people thinking that anti-gay violence is wrong? In other words, does the American Family Association think anti-gay violence is acceptable?

Some people might think this is hyperbole. I would point them to the fact that the AFA is praising the "bold example" of Pastor Ken Hutcherson in opposing the Day of Silence. Here is what he has had to say on how to treat gay people:

“God hates soft men” and “God hates effeminate men.” Hutcherson went on to say, “If I was in a drugstore and some guy opened the door for me, I’d rip his arm off and beat him with the wet end.”

Lawrence King was killed because "he began to act in an effeminate way".

Political heresy on terrorism

Just a thought:

The goal of terrorism is to terrorise people and make them afraid. The actual killing of people is the means of achieving this goal. It is not the goal itself.

Most if not all of the wrong-headed thinking on terrorism today stems from viewing deaths caused by terrorism as the goal rather than the means.

Pastor John Hagee, homosexuality and collective punishment

John Hagee, Christianist pastor, whose endorsement John McCain was "very honored" to receive, has stated, among many other things, that in regards to the destruction of New Orleans

there was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came.....and I believe that the Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans.

Plenty has been said by others about Hagee's many statements, but I think it's worth highlighting this particular one and how it influences thinking on homosexuality.

Why do some Christianists insist on interfering in consensual sexual practices that don't affect them? The standard answer is that they're doing it out of concern and love for the "poor" homosexual caught up in their "destructive" "lifestyle". Yet if you accept Pastor Hagee's comments as a valid statement of how God works, another answer becomes apparent: they interfere because they fear that the actions of homosexual people will affect them, and in a very bad way.

Believing that God would level an entire city, everyone there regardless of the inhabitants' own individual attitudes towards homosexuality, means accepting that God judges people for actions that they did not themselves perform. It isn't possible for a Christian to believe that this judgement is wrong since the judgement is being made by the entity who Christians believe is the One actually responsible for setting out what is right and what is wrong. So Christians who accept Hagee's comments as valid would view themselves as, for the sake of their own safety from God's wrath, personally responsible for stopping the homosexuality of others.

It's a statement that compels a True Believer to interfere in the personal lives of others. It seems to me also to be an exhortation to behave in a way that is completely at odds with a free society.

I actually can't fault True Believers for doing what they sincerely believe they have to do in order to avoid God's punishment on their lives. I'm not nearly so understanding towards Pastor Hagee, though.

Good site for free speech issues in Australia

Here's a useful resource for censorship issues of all kinds in Australia: libertus.net. At the time of writing, their What's new page is linking to some fairly hefty-looking documentation about continuing steps to implement a mandatory ISP filtering scheme in Australia.

There's no RSS feed for when new links are added, which is a pity because it looks like a page worth checking frequently.

Freedom of speech and the cartoon controversy

In my Media, Information and Law tutorial at uni I managed to get some fairly intense heat directed at me from people on both sides of the Mohammed Danish cartoon controversy. I don't know whether that indicates my independence of thought from all entrenched interests or if it just means I'm an irritating and argumentative bastard who annoys people of any political persuasion.

I did feel extremely defensive at one point when a guy in favour of publication was complaining about what I suggested was an inconsistency in his believing that publishing the cartoons was okay but publishing a phrase like "jews are the new nazis" should be illegal. His response was that talking about Nazis was an order of magnitude worse than mere publishing of caricature.

My response to that was incredibly poor: I thought not rationally, but combatively. My remark in retrospect was incredibly lame as I said something stupid about that being a subjective judgement. It's not. Or I don't think it is. Yet my response was motivated more by a desire not to let the other guy "get one over me" rather than any reasonable attempt to get at the truth.

I'm tempted to let myself believe that I did nothing wrong and that it was the other guy's combative approach that's to blame for me refusing to concede a point. But I don't think I should. And I think that the question of who's to blame for not adopting a reasonable attitude is extremely relevant to the question of the Danish caricature, and it's a question that's completely neglected by most commentators.

I wrote one of my essays last year on freedom of speech in an attempt to challenge my own extremely favourable attitude to free speech and see if there was something wrong with it. I came away from it still being extremely pro-freedom of speech, but I've gained a few insights along the way.

The first one is that in order for freedom of speech to have any meaning at all, there must be an audience for the speech. If a tyrant claims his subjects have freedom of speech because they can say whatever they like in the privacy of their own homes, is that really giving people the benefit of the freedom? Speech that no-one can hear is not really free speech at all.

Accepting that freedom of speech requires an audience immediately shows another way of looking at the cartoon issue: stop looking so much at the opinions and actions of the publishers and start looking at the opinions and actions of the audience.

This is where the dispute really lies when it comes to whether or not to publish the Danish cartoons: on the extreme pro-publication side, it is axiomatic that the members of the audience who feel offended by the cartoons are themselves responsible for "taking it too personally", with no real responsibility for the publisher. On the extreme anti-publication side, it is just as axiomatic that the audience members who feels offended and hurt can justly place the responsibility for that hurt, and for subsequent reactions to that hurt, on the publishers for "deliberately attacking Muslims".

I suspect that most people wouldn't be found on either extreme, and would only lean one way or the other. But I think that's a better starting point for the discussion of the issue: who is responsible for the feeling of harm and/or offense caused by the publication of the cartoons, and why? The answer may not be as straightforward as people think. My own experience above, where I was tempted to think it reasonable to blame my own poor actions on somebody else's speech, makes it harder for me to come down on the pro-publication position of believing the Muslim audience is "taking it too personally" than it otherwise would. I still strongly lean in favour of publication, though.

From uni: thoughts on online activism

At my university tutorial today we managed to get onto the subject of social activism, particularly online activism. I was curious to hear an opinion that online activism was a reason for a reduction in physical, more visible, one might even say "real", activism. I can understand the reasoning: the ability to pop up a "Causes I support" application on Facebook or put an e-mail address onto an online petition is much easier and, in theory, has much less impact than a person actually showing up to a protest or putting their verifiable name and address onto an offline petition. The argument seems to be that such actions aren't an indication of real commitment, but a shallow, insufficient one which gets mistaken as sufficient commitment because, hey, at least we're doing something. Consequently no actual sufficient commitment is made.

I'm not sure I agree. Online activism, as opposed to what one might (inaccurately) call "real" activism, has a much lower barrier to entry in terms of participation. What that means is that while the effect might not be as great per person, there is a much greater chance of getting more people onside. Any offset in people's willingness to actually get away from the computer to do some sort of offline activism has to be weighed against the people who wouldn't otherwise be particularly engaged in any kind of activism but can be persuaded to display your little "Cause" app, sign your petitions, join your mailing list, and from there perhaps even become an offline activist as well as on online one. You might actually gain a body at a physical protest rather than lose one.

There were other reasons put forward for what seems to be a decline in offline activism as well, such as the increased competitiveness of everyday economic life leaving people less time and effort away from the rat-race that they can put towards a non-economic agenda. An opportunity for a less time-consuming form of activism is helpful under such circumstances, if admittedly not as appealing to the especially dedicated.

But overall, I think that the decline in offline activism has mostly been from a perception that it isn't working anymore. The signature example is the Iraq war. The mobilisations against that invasion were some of the most impressive protests that I can remember, but the invasion wasn't stopped. In the wake of the US government's intransigence on the issue, people I think have been forced to working at the most basic level of person to person to try and keep people engaged on the issue. The less imposing, lighter form of activism that is online activism is I think a response to the inability of offline activism to readily effect the social change desired.

It remains to be seen whether this form of activism is definitely abetter or worse at that goal than more traditional forms. But I think that in the context of the current Western social milieu, it is necessarily a better choice.

Gay marriage:The Australian Christian Lobby on Lateline

Lateline last night had some reporting on same sex marriage and civil unions last night as the ACT government once again presses ahead with its plan to introduce civil unions in that Territory. Jim Wallace from the Australian Christian Lobby was on, arguing that gay people did not deserve to be married because their relationships did not compare to heterosexual relationships in the slightest.

As so frequently happens from people opposing homosexuality, he spouted a lot of incredibly precise-sounding statistics, not a single one of which can be readily verified by anyone ("Various studies show that..." was the phrasing he used to avoid anyone noting his dearth of real evidence,if I recall correctly). I have from time to time managed to track down some of these wayward statistics to find that they are distorted, misunderstood, and one occasion outright made up (and yes, I can provide sources for that accusation if asked). Other people have also tried to expose this deceptive practice, but it's hard going. For one, most people are statistically illiterate. For too many people, numbers that sound exact, references that appear voluminous and charts that look professionally created count for far more than statistics that are actually accurate. For another, even when the actual reality is presented, it's all too easy for people to ignore the evidence by discrediting the person presenting the evidence on the basis that they're a homosexual who "has an agenda".

I've tried to track down the sources for Wallace's scientific-seeming numbers, with very little success. I've only found one. It's a statistic that occurs relatively frequently in anti-gay propaganda. Anti-gay activist frequently claim that a study in Holland showed that homosexual relationships only last an average of 18 months. The usual tactic when quoting the study is to then compare this to a study which grotesquely overinflates the average duration of heterosexual marriages (note: not heterosexual relationships, heterosexual marriages. I leave it to the reader to figure out why any such comparison between homosexual relationships and only those heterosexual relationships that are heterosexual marriages is inherently dishonest). Jim Wallace in this case spouted the unsourced statistic that Australian marriages last an average of 33 years. I can't find that one at all, unfortunately.

The "Dutch study" in question, though, is called "The contribution of steady and casual partnerships to the incidence of HIV infection among homosexual men in Amsterdam", and is available online. Jim Wallace of Box Turtle Bulletin has already done a fairly good job of demolishing the idea that this is a representative sample of homosexual couples:

We have a study population that was heavily weighted with HIV/AIDS patients, excluded monogamous participants, was predominantly urban, and under the age of thirty. While this population was good for the purposes of the study, it was in no way representative of Amsterdam’s gay men, let alone gay men anywhere else.

Perversely, Wallace went even further than most anti-gay activists in his denunciation. He didn't just say homosexual relationships only last an average of eighteen months, he said homosexual marriages only last an average of eighteen months. From the Lateline transcript last night

JIM WALLACE: And our experience is, that where homosexuals are given marriage, for instance as in Holland, that the average length or duration of those relationships has been eighteen months between two gay men. Now that's not marriage.

The study he's misrepresenting had absolutely nothing to say about homosexual marriages in the Netherlands whatsoever. Why does he think he can get away with such dishonesty? It appears to me that the depressing answer is: because he can. Anti-gay activists spout too many lies, and it takes too long to explain why they're lies, to ever be able to effectively catch them all.

There are reasonable questions to go into here about not just gay marriage but marriage itself - whether longevity is necessarily the best measure of a relationship's quality, whether marriage has any effect on the longevity of a relationship, whether this kind of collectivist reasoning about "average duration of a relationship" for a part of the population is a valid reason to deny relationship recognition to all members of that part of the population, including those who fall outside the average - but it is impossible to reach those points of argument when the debate is forever being poisoned by so-called Christians who see nothing wrong with basing their entire worldview about homosexual people and homosexual relationships on a foundation of lies.

Obama and the "we" generation

I've been struggling to articulate the question of Barack Obama's alleged lack of policy detail and how this actually makes him more favourable to some people, including myself, but found that Henry Jenkins has already explained it, and more besides.

Jenkin's posts tend to be long (academics, huh?), but I think this one is worth reading in its entirety. Here's the section dealing specifically with how I, and assume many others, view Obama's less than fully-detailed policy plans:

...the fact that the vision is blurry and not yet well defined is a virtue rather than a limitation: it is a virtue if we set up processes which enable us to collaborate to find further solutions. I look on Obama's more vague statements as something like a stub on wikipedia -- an incitement for us to pool our insights and to work through a range of possible solutions together.

After eight years which have sought to revitalize the once discredited notion of an Imperial President, it is refreshing to imagine a more open, participatory, and bottom up process. In such a model, the experience of the leader is less important than the ability to channel all of those voices and the commitment to make sure that everyone is heard. This is like the difference between older notions of expertise (based on monopoly and control of information) and newer notions of collective intelligence (based on creating a self-correcting and inclusive process by which we collect, evaluate, and distribute knowledge.) This may be what commentators are groping towards when they talk about a generational shift or discuss Obama as the candidate of the future.

In which gay marriage opponents appear confused on the issue

I can't be the only person who's noticed this...

In California, the State Supreme Court has scheduled a hearing on whether the state's ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional. One of the arguments in favour of the ban is that

the domestic-partner laws [of California] satisfy California's constitutional requirement of equal treatment for gays and lesbians.

That gets argued a lot, that a domestic partnership, civil union or something similar which gives the same legal rights and responsibilities as marriage should be good enough, even if it isn't specifically called marriage. Many supporters of gay rights find it persuasive, even. Who thinks that a "domestic partnership" is different from a "marriage" in anything except name?

Well, as it turns out, gay marriage opponents do - but only if it's heterosexual relationships at issue. In Maryland, US legislators introduced a Bill that

would abolish civil marriage ceremonies now confined to heterosexual unions in the state and replace them with domestic partnerships for all couples.

"Marriage" would be a label applied by religious institutions only. In secular law

The word "marriage" would be replaced with "valid domestic partnership" in the state's family law code.

The opposition's response? Derision.

"What they're talking about is an even more radical departure from traditional marriage than even advocates for gay marriage are talking about," said Del. Christopher B. Shank (R-Washington), the minority whip. "They're creating a situation for one special interest group that basically diminishes the value of marriage for everyone else."

So, an arrangement that for gay people is supposedly so similar to marriage that it makes gay marriage itself unnecessary is for straight people a departure from marriage so "radical" that it's demeaning for straight people to be limited to it.

Conclusion? "Separate but equal" never is.

The weirdness of US politics: Obama and abortion

One of the charges that came out early in the US Democratic Primaries was that Barack Obama was insufficiently pro-choice. The issue just resurfaced on the eve of Super Tuesday. It's based on votes made in the Illinois Senate where Obama took advantage of a voting rule which allows a person to vote "present" rather than "yes" or "no" on something, and voting "present" rather than "no" on several bills put forward in the Senate that were pro-life rather than pro-choice.

As explained in the article linked above, other people have defended this voting record on the basis that it was part of a specific strategy requested by pro-choice advocates in the state. Nevertheless it seems that this still gets brought up as a way of trying to show that Obama is more pro-choice than pro-life.

So it was a bit weird to see people on the other side of US politics trying to tell me that Obama is gung ho in favour of baby killing. And they're doing it based on his voting record in the Illinois senate, too.

Here is the location of one of several almost identical screeds online saying that his opposition to something called the "Induced Infant Liability Act" means "his radical stance on abortion puts him even further left on that issue than even NARAL Pro-Choice America" (what NARAL stands for I have no idea, but I'm guessing that they're like the Gold Standard of pro-choice activism).

I've been entertaining myself chasing down the Senate Bill they're talking about (it was actually called the Induced Birth Infant Liability Act and far be it from me to suggest that someone's making it harder to Google the full text of the Bill) and checking for other factual inaccuracies besides the name. The most obvious one is that the author is conflating this Bill with a federal Bill called (supposedly) the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, and trying to pass off support for one as automatic support for the other. But that's just garden-variety hyperpartisanism.

What really amazes me is that it's possible for one person to find himself attacked by partisans on both sides of the same issue for supposedly being too far in the other side's camp. How does that work?

The promise and problems of OpenID

Playing around with an OpenID provider and something bothers me.

The idea behind OpenID of course is to try and get past the problem of having lots of different accounts on lots of different websites. The existence of a site like Useless Account is testimony to the problem.

OpenID, as I understand it, gets you to sign on to a single OpenID provider site, like My Open ID, which you can then use to sign into other sites rather than having to explicitly create a new user/password combination for each and every site you want to use.

The main obstacle at the moment seems to be a lack of major sites that will authenticate using OpenID. There does appear to be some recent momentum, with web2.0 site aggregator Plaxo and the Blogger.com comment system now being accessible through OpenID authentication. But that's not what's bothering me.

What's bothering me is that I already have a lot of accounts on a lot of sites which aren't tied to my OpenID account, and I don't see any way to tie those accounts to my OpenID account. Worse, plenty of existing sites like LiveJournal also act as OpenID providers: you can sign onto an OpenID-compatible site using your LiveJournal details. As a result I now not only have multiple accounts around the place, but two of those multiple accounts are both OpenID accounts. This doesn't bode well for a system aimed at reducing the number of superfluous user/password combinations I have to keep in mind.

Maybe there's something I missed in the protocol, but to my knowledge there's no way to associate my previously existing accounts with my OpenID accounts. Nor do I know any way to make my existing accounts on disparate OpenID providers aware of each other so that I could easily alternate between them, or even subordinate one to the other.

Perhaps someone could point out whether this is currently possible? If it isn't, then I fear OpenID will go down the road of things like the DVORAK keyboard: a technological improvement that is superior, useful and fails because it desn't take entrenched social realities into account. To succeed, OpenID needs to be able to assimilate existing accounts somehow.

US politics: the Obamaniacs vs the Clintonistas

For the last few weeks I've been scouting about the blogosphere, reading opinions and comments about the US Presidential Primaries, particularly as regards the two Democratic front-runners, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The last day or two things seem to have gotten really ugly between their online supporters. There was much less disagreement over principle and much more name-calling, mud-slinging and disgust at the alleged negative traits of all the followers of the opposing candidate.

I'm trying not to get sucked in, but I have two observations to make based on the existence of this acrimony, and on the candidates involved:
1. it seems Hillary Clinton is living up to her reputation as a polarising and divisive figure.
2. It seems Barack Obama is not living up to his reputation as a unifying and transcendant one.

Child Wise CEO distances herself from government filtering scheme

Child Wise CEO calls for government re-think on ISP filtering.

Good for her. And it's pleasing also that Ms Mcmenamin seems willing to engage online critics. I wish I had more time to write out my own response to her right now.

I've been meaning to write out some thoughts on Barack Obama's candidacy as well, particularly in the light of some harsh criticisms from John Cole at Balloon Juice. I was hoping to write a lot here over the uni break, but I never seem to make the time. Oh well. Maybe I'll try harder in future