The fight continues

September is Bisexual Awareness Month, which ironically I only became aware of on September 1.

I guess I must have known that at some point, but given that my entire approach to life has been one long tug-of-war between "please notice me" and "OH NO SOMEONE JUST NOTICED ME," I'm not sure how comfortable I am adding to my own visibility.

Be that as it may, and notwithstanding how many days and months are set aside to commemorate ridiculous stuff (January 21 is National Squirrel Appreciation Day?  Really?), overall I think Bisexual Awareness Month is a good thing.  When I was a teenager and first figured out that I was equally attracted to men and women, I had no idea there was even a name for that, much less that it was normal and okay.  The fact that we're now able to talk about this stuff will -- I fervently hope -- save the current generation of shy, scared, confused fifteen-year-olds from going through the hell I endured.

However, in the past ten years we've seen a staggering upsurge in anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in the United States, and as we queer people and allies have become more vocal, the bigots have, too.  Just last week Baptist minister Dillon Awes, of Watauga, Texas, said that another minister -- Andrew Stanley -- should be shot in the head for allowing two gay men to deliver a sermon at his church.  The fact that there was a single person in the congregation willing to sit there and listen to his vicious diatribe shows that we are far from eradicating homophobia.

When Awes is screaming his ugly invective into an empty room, I'll be satisfied.

However, we're also far from done as far as legislation goes.  Anti-LGBTQ+ bills are like the Hydra -- defeat one of them, and nine more spring up in its place.  Here are a few current battles:

• Arizona -- House Bill 2657, which forces school employees to out queer children to their parents -- even if that would put the child in danger.  Parents, the bill says, have "inalienable rights" to know everything about their children, including information given to school employees in confidence.
• South Carolina -- Senate Bill 3728 -- places all authority over the teaching of "morals, ethics, and civic responsibility" into the hands of parents, allowing them carte blanche for prohibiting undefined "certain concepts" from being mentioned in the classroom.  It doesn't take much imagination to guess what "concepts" they're talking about.
• Delaware -- Senate Bill 191 -- defines sex and gender as binary (contrary to known biological science) and restricts athletes from competing on teams split by gender according to "sex as determined at or near birth."
• Oklahoma -- House Bill 3120 -- prohibits any mention in public schools of "sexual activity that deviates from a traditional family structure" and "non-heterosexual orientation."
• Florida -- Senate Bill 1382 -- allows employers to use whatever names and pronouns they see fit, irrespective of the employee's request.

And so on and so forth.

I have to state for the record that there's a discussion to be had about age-appropriateness of any educational material surrounding sexuality (and anything else, honestly).  That is not what this is about.  No one -- no one -- is recommending placing sexually-explicit or age-inappropriate material of any kind into public school classrooms.  The characterization of legislation like South Carolina SB 3728 as "protect the children" is a smokescreen, designed to deflect criticism and re-marginalize queer people, returning us to the closeted, terrified environment I grew up in back in southern Louisiana in the 1970s.  If you doubt this, ask yourself seriously how long it would take for Oklahoma HB 3120 to be used to prevent a gay teacher from being out publicly.  Is having a photograph of him and his husband on his desk "promoting sexual activity that deviates from traditional family structure"?

Yes, we queer people have much to be thankful for.  We've come a very long way.  Had the general tolerance and acceptance we have now been present when I was a teenager, my life would have had a very different trajectory.  And if you look at the list of current and proposed anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, it's heartening how many of them are labeled "defeated."  Just the fact that I can post Bi Awareness Month stuff on my social media, and have nothing but positive responses, is encouraging.

But the fight isn't over.  

So buckle up, friends and allies.  We still have work to do.

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A moment of Judeo-Christian silence

Let me start out with a reality check: despite what the Religious Right and the pseudo-pundits on Fox News want you to believe, there is no law against students praying in public school.  Nor is it against the rules for any student in any public school in the United States to have, or read, a Bible.  Nor to cite it (or Jesus) as an influence in their lives in personal essays.  No school has stopped students from reciting the Pledge of Allegiance because it contains the words "under God."  Bible study and Christian fellowship groups are allowed to hold meetings on school property as long as attendance is completely voluntary.

Anyone who claims otherwise is wrong at best, and flat-out lying through their teeth at worst.

What is not legal is mandating prayer in school, or using Christian membership or affirmation as a qualification for... well, anything.  Schools cannot legally force students to follow the precepts of any religion.  The upshot is that public schools are simply not the venue for generating religious adherence, or (for that matter) preventing it.  It is no more teachers' place to alter their students' religious views in either direction than it is for churches to teach their congregations algebra.

As a personal case in point:

• I responded to questions about my own religious beliefs with "that isn't relevant to the discussion" -- even while we were studying fraught topics like evolution.
• I had a Bible on the bookshelf in my classroom.  I was given it by a student many years ago, and saw no reason it shouldn't be there.
• I saw students praying before exams and saying grace before lunch, and no one ever stopped them or had any problem with it.

As a brief aside, there is an explicit conflict in the "under God" part of the Pledge, in my opinion, because if it's recited by students -- which it still is, in public schools across the country -- it pressures non-religious students to affirm something they don't believe it (i.e., to lie).  I find that people who argue against taking out the words "under God" (which, by the bye, were not original to the Pledge but were added in the 1950s) often can't come up with a cogent reason why the words should be recited in a public school where (1) attendance is compulsory, and (2) there are students (and adults) of all different gradations of belief and disbelief.

But of course, that "live and let live" (or, as my mom used to put it, "your rights end where my nose begins") attitude isn't enough for the sanctimonious spokespeople of the Religious Right, who will stop at nothing to inject religion back into public schools.  And not just any religion, of course:

If there was any doubt about this, it should be put to rest by what happened in Florida (of course it was in Florida) last week.  A new law was signed by Governor Ron DeSantis that will mandate a sixty-second "moment of silence" that must be observed in all public schools.  The proponents gave some lip service to a broad-minded sentiment behind this -- that students need to have time to engage in meditative self-reflection -- but the real reason was given away by the bill's sponsor, Representative Randy Fine, who tweeted triumphantly, "Just joined Governor DeSantis to sign my fourth bill of the 2021 Legislative Session, allowing prayer back into schools via a moment of silence for all our schoolchildren.  I won't stop fighting against woke radicals who which [sic] to drive out Judeo-Christian values from every aspect of our lives!"

You'd think that anyone with any sense would recognize that saying this explicitly is just asking for the filing of lawsuits to invalidate the new legislation, but DeSantis, who certainly wouldn't be in contention for the "smartest governor in the United States" award, not only didn't contradict Fine but immediately agreed.  "The idea that you can push God out of every institution and be successful," DeSantis said, "I'm sorry, our Founding Fathers did not believe that."

"Students are free to believe what they want" isn't enough for these people; Fine and DeSantis make it clear that the "moment of silence" bill is just a foot in the door for reinserting prayer -- Christian prayer, of course -- back into public school classrooms.  And call me a "woke radical" if you like, but no compulsory prayer of any kind belongs in publicly funded institutions.

And for fuck's sake, it's not like public school teachers have time to do some kind of subversive anti-religious indoctrination.  I was a teacher for 32 years, and never once did I say, "Okay, kids, we've got an extra twenty minutes today, I will now teach you how to blaspheme!"  I had enough on my hands trying to get high schoolers to understand the Krebs Cycle and Mendel's Laws and the reactions of photosynthesis, I definitely didn't have the space in the curriculum to devote to undermining students' dearly-held religious beliefs.

Nor, might I add, did I have the desire to.  I may be a staunch atheist myself, but I am firmly of the opinion that everyone arrives at their understanding of how the universe works in their own time and fashion, and while I may disagree with someone's worldview, it's not my place to criticize it -- or honestly, even to make a judgment about it at all.

Unless that worldview involves compelling others to alter their own beliefs and actions.  It's all very well to say, "I do this because it's required by my religion;" when you start saying "you have to do this because it's required by my religion," you're going to have a fight on your hands.

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One of the most devastating psychological diagnoses is schizophrenia.  United by the common characteristic of "loss of touch with reality," this phrase belies how horrible the various kinds of schizophrenia are, both for the sufferers and their families.  Immersed in a pseudo-reality where the voices, hallucinations, and perceptions created by their minds seem as vivid as the actual reality around them, schizophrenics live in a terrifying world where they literally can't tell their own imaginings from what they're really seeing and hearing.

The origins of schizophrenia are still poorly understood, and largely because of a lack of knowledge of its causes, treatment and prognosis are iffy at best.  But much of what we know about this horrible disorder comes from families where it seems to be common -- where, apparently, there is a genetic predisposition for the psychosis that is schizophrenia's most frightening characteristic.

One of the first studies of this kind was of the Galvin family of Colorado, who had ten children born between 1945 and 1965 of whom six eventually were diagnosed as schizophrenic.  This tragic situation is the subject of the riveting book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker.  Kolker looks at the study done by the National Institute of Health of the Galvin family, which provided the first insight into the genetic basis of schizophrenia, but along the way gives us a touching and compassionate view of a family devastated by this mysterious disease.  It's brilliant reading, and leaves you with a greater understanding of the impact of psychiatric illness -- and hope for a future where this diagnosis has better options for treatment.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

 

The Tennessee don't-say-gay bill

Have you heard of Tennessee's House Bill 0800?

Its summary describes it thusly: the bill "prohibits the state textbook and instructional materials quality commission from recommending or listing, the state board of education from approving for local adoption or from granting a waiver for, and LEAs and public charter schools from adopting or using textbooks and instructional materials or supplemental instructional materials that promote, normalize, support, or address lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, or transgender issues or lifestyles."

It just passed the Education Subcommittee two days ago, and stands a good chance of passing the remaining steps as well.  What Governor Bill Lee will do with it if it gets to his desk is unknown, but given his support for denying LGBTQ couples the right to adopt children, I'd say the chances of his signing it into law are pretty good.

To say this makes me livid is an understatement of sizable proportions.  I can't even read words like "normalize" in the context of LGBTQ people without seeing red.  And for fuck's sake, "lifestyles?"

Choosing to go to square dances every Friday night is a lifestyle.  Filling your house with aquariums so you can raise tropical fish is a lifestyle.

Being queer is who you are.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Benson Kua, Rainbow flag breeze, CC BY-SA 2.0]

The insidious nature of this bill is horrifying.  It's implying that somehow, you become LGBTQ because you read a book about it, as if some sixteen-year-old straight guy picked up a copy of Rainbow Boys and suddenly his sex drive took a 180-degree about face, or that gay teens wouldn't be gay if they never heard the word.  

To believe this, you honestly have to be an idiot, and also never talk to an actual LGBTQ person.  I grew up in a culture that didn't so much demonize queerness as much as ignoring it into oblivion.  I knew I was attracted to both males and females when I was in high school, but I didn't even know the word "bisexual" existed until I was about twenty.  By then, the sense of secrecy and shame surrounding the whole thing stopped me from admitting, even to myself, who I was, and I ended up closeted.

For forty years.

The psychological damage this does is devastating.  Queer kids in Tennessee will now be blocked from having access to information that might help them understand and accept themselves, to be open about their identities, to be confident enough to speak out against the homophobia that is still all too common.  The only possible justification for this, besides outright prejudice, is the biblical prohibition against male/male sex (in the entire Bible there is not a single mention of female/female sex).

But let me make something clear, Tennessee politicians, and I'll speak slowly, because some of you seem to be lacking in the IQ department:

The laws of the United States are based upon the Constitution, not the Bible.

With bullshit like this, is it any wonder that the suicide rate amongst queer teens is through the roof?  Suicide is the second leading cause of death of people between the ages of ten and twenty-four, and LGBTQ youth are five times more likely to attempt suicide than heterosexuals are.  Forty percent of transgender adults report having made a suicide attempt.

If this bill passes into law, the blood of every queer teenager who commits suicide in Tennessee from then on will be on the hands of the legislators who voted for it.

EVERY.  SINGLE.  ONE.

It appalls me that in 2021 we are still fighting the same fucking battles that we've fought for as long as I can remember.  To convince people that we were born this way, that it's not a choice or a sin or a "lifestyle."  To prove that we can be loving, caring, faithful partners and parents.  To make it illegal to discriminate against anyone on the basis of sexual orientation.

I do have some hope that there might be a sea change coming, however.  I recently listened to an episode of the NPR show Hidden Brain, originally aired in April 2019, which looked at the fact that attitudes toward queer people have changed at a rate that is completely unprecedented.  Previous anti-LGBTQ bills in Georgia and South Carolina resulted in the pullout of businesses, investors, and sports teams, costing the states millions of dollars in lost revenue, a move that never would have happened even twenty years ago.

But this kind of mindless, ugly bigotry is not gone, not yet.  Tennessee is hardly the only place it still exists.  We queer people, and LGBTQ allies, can not afford to stop speaking out.

The stakes are way, way too high.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is a bit of a departure from the usual science fare: podcaster and author Rose Eveleth's amazing Flash Forward: An Illustrated Guide to the Possibly (and Not-So-Possible) Tomorrows.

Eveleth looks at what might happen if twelve things that are currently in the realm of science fiction became real -- a pill becoming available that obviates the need for sleep, for example, or the development of a robot that can make art.  She then extrapolates from those, to look at how they might change our world, to consider ramifications (good and bad) from our suddenly having access to science or technology we currently only dream about.

Eveleth's book is highly entertaining not only from its content, but because it's in graphic novel format -- a number of extremely talented artists, including Matt Lubchansky, Sophie Goldstein, Ben Passmore, and Julia Gförer, illustrate her twelve new worlds, literally drawing what we might be facing in the future.  Her conclusions, and their illustrations of them, are brilliant, funny, shocking, and most of all, memorable.

I love her visions even if I'm not sure I'd want to live in some of them.  The book certainly brings home the old adage of "Be careful what you wish for, you may get it."  But as long as they're in the realm of speculative fiction, they're great fun... especially in the hands of Eveleth and her wonderful illustrators.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The evolution of the anti-evolutionists

Sometimes I see a piece of scientific research that is so brilliant, so elegant, all I can do is sit back in awestruck appreciation.

Such was my reaction to Nicholas J. Matzke's paper in Science this week entitled, "The Evolution of Antievolution Policies after Kitzmiller v. Dover."  And if you're wondering... yes, he did what it sounds like.

He used the techniques of evolutionary biology to show how anti-evolution policy has undergone descent with modification.

I read the paper with a delighted, and somewhat bemused, grin, blown away not only by how well it worked, but how incredibly clever the idea was.  What Matzke did was to analyze the text of all of the dozens of bills proposed since 2004 that try to shoehorn religious belief into the public school science classroom, and generate a phylogenetic tree for them -- in essence, a diagram summarizing how they are related to each other, and how they have changed.

In other words, a cladistic tree of evolutionary descent.

"Creationism is getting stealthier in the wake of legal defeats, but techniques from the study of evolution reveal how creationist legislation is evolving," Matzke said in an interview.  "It is one thing to say that two bills have some resemblances, and another thing to say that bill X was copied from bill Y with greater than 90 percent probability.  I do think this research strengthens the case that all of these bills are of a piece—they are all ‘stealth creationism,’ and they all have either clear fundamentalist motivations, or are close copies of bills with such motivations."

"They are not terribly intelligently designed," Matzke added.  "Some of the bills don’t make sense, they’ve been copied from another state and changed without thought."

He linked the bills to each other by doing statistical analysis of patterns in the text, much as evolutionary biologists use patterns in the DNA of related organisms, and arranged them into a cladistic tree using the "principle of maximum parsimony," which (simply put) is the arrangement that requires you to make the least ad hoc assumptions.

So without further ado, here is Matzke's tree linking 65 different, but related, pieces of legislation:

In particular, he was able to show where the documents incorporated language from a 2006 anti-evolution proposal in Ouachita Parish, Louisiana, and how subsequent generations had pieces of it remaining, often -- dare I say -- mutated, but still recognizable.

"Successful policies have a tendency to spread," Matzke said. "Every year, some states propose these policies, and often they are only barely defeated.  And obviously, sometimes they pass, so hopefully this article will help raise awareness of the dangers of the ongoing situation."

So when there are iterations that are better fit to the environment, in the sense that they went further in the court systems before being defeated or (hard though this is to fathom) were actually approved, the anti-evolutionists passed those versions around to other states, while less-successful models were outcompeted and become extinct.

There's a name for that process, isn't there?  Give me a moment, I'm sure it'll come to me.

Okay, it's not that I think this paper will make much difference amongst the creationists and supporters of intelligent design.  They don't spend much time reading Science, I wouldn't suppose.  But even so, this is a coup -- using the techniques of cladistic analysis to illustrate the relationships between bills designed to force public school students to learn that cladistic analysis doesn't work.

I can't help but think that Darwin would be proud.