Rachel’s Musings

On Sunday, July 27, two people were murdered during a service at the Unitarian Universalist congregation in Knoxville TN (a timeline of the event is here - start at the bottom, right before the comments section). As freethinkers and secular humanists, I think it is important to support UUs everywhere in this difficult time. The national UU association has set up a Knoxville Relief Fund and many UUs are holding vigils and services. Although I don’t feel comfortable attending a church service, I have made a donation to the Fund indicating my support.

(Hat tip to Dan for the idea of Freethinker Solidarity)

Aside from Nancy Polikoff’s recently published book Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage, there is also an online statement calling for activists, especially in the LGBT movement, to move beyond marriage, which goes back to July 2006. It is an encouraging affirmation of all forms of relationships and families.

Marriage is not the only worthy form of family or relationship, and it should not be legally and economically privileged above all others. While we honor those for whom marriage is the most meaningful personal ­– for some, also a deeply spiritual – choice, we believe that many other kinds of kinship relationship, households, and families must also be accorded recognition.

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It depends. It depends on what’s going on in the black box also known as voting machine. And the problem isn’t just with the touch-tone screens. There are also issues with the grand counters - those machines that add up all the votes from memory cards from all precincts. Or at least that’s what they’re supposed to do.

I have heard about problems with voting machines before. Computer scientists, especially, are leery about them. I didn’t realize how extensive the problem really is. The HBO documentary Hacking Democracy shows, there are good reasons to distrust those machines. They are black boxes: Nobody except the manufacturers can look at the code - unless a grandmother stumbles on the code on a non-secured FTP site. Fortunately for us, that grandmother, Bev Harris, didn’t close her eyes and click somewhere else. She downloaded everything and got computer scientists to look at the code. Aside from using unsecured FTP sites, which in itself is a major security no-no that everybody who handles any kind of sensitive data knows about, the security experts uncovered major amateurish security flaws. Harris proceeded to create Black Box Voting to shed more light on irregularities and security flaws, hoping to get some answers for all of us.

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An interesting commentary at AlterNet made me realize how destructive the influence of the Religious Right really is (hereafter I call them the Wrong - they might be on the right-side of the political spectrum but they are dead wrong in their positions). The topics where their influence plays a role are ever expanding in my awareness. Here are some of them:

• Evolution: This is the most obvious one. Their attempts to derail science and teaching nonsense range from creationism, via creation “science,” to intelligent design.
• Global climate change: Here they try to cast doubt on the fact that we humans are influencing the weather patterns for the worse and are the major culprits behind climate change.
• Marriage: Not only are they opposing gay marriage but by imposing their standards of the heterosexual marriage as the only healthy family, they are attacking family diversity.
• Child rearing: Through ignoring research, they were able to perpetuate the myth that marriage is necessary for healthy child development.

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As the mother of a teenage boy, I was eager to read the article Lost Boys in the June 2008 edition of the Monitor. I was rather disappointed. The article ignores that despite the supposed educational gap, men still earn more than women. The last sentence even implies that the opposite is the case. The reasons given for losing boys are based on anecdotal evidence and do not reflect any changes in schools. Teachers have long been predominantly female, for example, so this cannot explain this trend. One of the suggested solutions sounds like the good-old-boys network resurrected, which is contrary to Dr. Kleinfeld’s claim that “we can design schooling where both boys and girls do well.” Nothing in the article presents even a hint of such designs.

The most disturbing comments came in the last two paragraphs, though. Starting with “helping boys succeed helps girls,” I excitedly expected to finally find out how schools can be designed to serve both boys and girls. But this is far from what Dr. Kleinfeld and the author of the article had in mind. No, these programs for boys help women find better partners! What a sexist and singlist statement! As if the only thing women are interested in is finding a partner, and a male one to boot. How about helping both girls and boys succeed in education without assuming that girls just get an education so that they can marry well or that boys should be better educated to make better partners?

(This is a copy of the letter to the Editor I sent to the Monitor on Psychology.)

True Majority asks activists to sign a letter to the governors that calls for marriage equality. The call is framed as marriage equality being bigger than all other issues: “Marriage equality comes down to human rights.” I took issue with that and wrote them the following:

Thank you for your actions regarding marriage equality. As a single by choice, I take issue, though, with your framing marriage equality as a human rights issue: what human rights are we exactly defending by asking for marriage equality? The right to discriminate against other forms of relationships? Marriage is an institution; not a human right. People have human rights simply by being human, not by their relationship status. By expanding who can marry, we are perpetuating the inherent discriminatory policies that are endowed on people because they “tie the knot.” As a single by choice, I find it frustrating that people ignore that many of the 1,100+ benefits have nothing to do with human rights or protecting anybody. They simply privilege those who are in a state-sanctioned relationship, aka marriage. This discriminates against all of us who are in relationships other than marriages.

While I think that everybody who wants to marry should have the right to do so, I do not appreciate that this private commitment comes with a huge package of rights and benefits that are not available outside of marriage. I would love to see True Majority fight against singlism (the discrimination of singles) and marital status discrimination in all forms. We should fight for human rights for all people, regardless of their marital status, relationship style, sexual orientation, race, or gender.

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