Acting on absurdities

In C. S. Lewis's wonderful fantasy story The Magician's Nephew, he says, "The trouble about making yourself stupider than you really are is you very often succeed."  In the story, Uncle Andrew (the magician of the title) has convinced himself so completely that what he is seeing isn't real that in the end, he actually becomes unable to see it.

It's not so far off from what happens with conspiracy theorists.  When you have accustomed yourself to accepting an idea even if it has no evidence to support it -- or, in some cases, because it has no evidence to support it -- you're likely to fall for any damn fool claim that comes along.  And, if you'll allow me another quote, this one from Voltaire: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

We got an object lesson in these two principles last week when two men from Georgia, Michael Mancil and James Dryden, were arrested for plotting to go to Alaska with piles of weapons, with the intent of blowing up HAARP.  You probably know that HAARP -- the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Project -- has been blamed for everything from creating hurricanes to triggering earthquakes, when in reality all it does is study the ionosphere for the purposes of improving communication and navigation systems.  To be sure, it looks kind of creepy; a field of antennae sprouting up from the Alaskan tundra.

So the conspiracy theorists just love HAARP, and their fears were not assuaged a bit when the U. S. Air Force, which ran HAARP, basically turned it over last year to the University of Alaska - Fairbanks.  You'd think that people would say, "Okay, if HAARP really could be used as an ultra-powerful weather modification device, capable of spawning tornadoes on the other side of the planet, the Air Force would definitely not release their interest in it."

But that is not how the minds of conspiracy theorists work.  Of course HAARP is still being run by the government, and is still causing lightning strikes in Dakar, Senegal.  We couldn't be that far wrong, could we?

Of course not.

But as I pointed out before, people who (1) don't care about evidence and (2) are convinced that the government is in a huge conspiracy to wipe out the entire human race are very likely to do stupid stuff.  Witness Mancil and Dryden, who according to the Coffee County Sheriff's Department had amassed "[a] massive amount of arsenal seized [that] looked like something out of a movie, one where a small army was headed to war."

Apparently, besides HAARP's role in modifying the weather, Mancil and Dryden also thought that it was being used to "trap people's souls."  What the U. S. government would do with a bunch of souls, I have no idea.  Maybe they figured that there were some members of congress who could use a replacement, I dunno.  Be that as it may, Mancil and Dryden were apparently "told by god" that they were to go to Alaska, kidnap a scientist and steal his ID badge, and use that to gain access to the facility, after which they would blow it up and "release the trapped souls."

So here we have yet another example of why it's important for people to start paying more attention to facts, and less attention to crazy claims made by random wingnuts.  (Following this dictum would put Alex Jones out of business, which would be a step in the right direction.)  In any case, I'm glad the whole thing ended happily.  The would-be terrorists never made it out of their home county and are cooling their heels in jail, and the scientific facility is safe, at least for the time being.  So now we can turn our attention to worrying about other things, such as the outcome of next week's presidential election, which may well leave me wishing that HAARP could wipe out humanity.

Return to sender

Despite my daily perusal of the news and science sites for interesting topics, sometimes I miss stuff.  It's inevitable, of course, but sometimes a story is so absolutely tailor-made for this blog that I can't believe that (1) I didn't see it, and (2) a reader didn't send me a link.

That was my reaction when I ran into, quite by accident, an article from Scientific American nine years ago about a researcher in the Netherlands who did a psychological study of people who believe in reincarnation.  I've always found the whole reincarnation thing a bit mystifying, especially given that most of the people you talk to who claim past lives say they were Spartan warriors or Babylonian princesses when, just by the numbers, the vast majority of people should recall being Chinese peasants.  Or, if you allow reincarnation from other life forms, being a bug.

But no.  "Boy, life sure was boring, when I was a bug" is something you rarely ever hear reincarnated people say.

The Wheel of Life [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Be that as it may, there are some people who believe fervently that they were once someone else, somewhere else.  So Maarten Peters, a psychological researcher at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, decided to see if he could figure out what was going on.

He asked for people who believed they could recall past lives to volunteer, and an equal number of people who did not believe in reincarnation, and gave them a test called the false fame paradigm.  This test gives subjects a list of unfamiliar names to memorize, and then the next day those names are mixed in with new names and the names of famous people.  The question was: which of the names presented belong to famous people?

When he compared the results, an interesting pattern emerged.  The people who believed in reincarnation were, across the board, more likely to commit a source-monitoring error -- an error in judgment about the source of a memory.  They were far more likely than the control group to think that the unfamiliar names they had memorized the previous day belonged to famous people.  Evidently, they had a marked tendency to conflate their own (recent) memory of a name with (more distant) memories of hearing about celebrities in the news.

"Once familiarity of an event is achieved, this can relatively easily be converted into a belief that the event did take place," Peters said about his results.  "A next possible step is that individuals interpret their thoughts and fantasies about the fictitious event as real memories."

The implication, of course, is that the "memories" these people have about past lives are very likely to be an amalgam of memories of other things -- stories they've read, documentaries they've watched, perhaps even scenarios they'd created.  Whatever's going on, it's extremely unlikely that the memories these people claim to have come from a prior life.

Of course, there's a ton of anecdotal evidence for reincarnation, which in my mind doesn't carry a great deal of weight.  The whole thing has been the subject of more than one scholarly paper, including one in 2013 by David Cockburn, of St. David's University College (Wales), called "The Evidence for Reincarnation."  In it, he cites claims like the following:

On March 15th, 1910, Alexandrina Samona, five-year-old daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Carmelo Samona, of Palermo, Sicily, died of meningitis to the great grief of her parents.  Within a year Mrs. Samona [gave] birth to twin girls.  One of these proved to bear an extraordinary physical resemblance to the first Alexandrina and was given the same name.  Alexandrina II resembled Alexandrina I not only in appearance but also in disposition and likes and dislikes.  Stevenson then lists a number of close physical similarities and of shared characteristic traits of behaviour.  For example: Both liked to put on adult stockings much too large for them and walk around the room in them.  Both enjoyed playfully altering people's names, such as changing Angelina into Angellanna or Angelona, or Caterina into Caterana.   Most striking of all, however, were the child's memory claims: 'When Alexandrina II was eight, her parents told her they planned to take her to visit Monreale and see the sights there. At this Alexandrina II interjected: "But, Mother, I know Monreale, I have seen it already." Mrs. Samona told the child she had never been to Monreale, but the child replied : "Oh, yes, I went there. Do you not recollect that there was a great church with a very large statue of a man with his arms held open, on the roof? And don't you remember that we went there with a lady who had horns and that we met some little red priests in the town?" At this Mrs. Samona recollected that the last time she went to Monreale she had gone there with Alexandrina I some months before her death.  They had taken with them a lady friend who had come to Palermo for a medical consultation as she suffered from disfiguring excrescences on her forehead.  As they were going into the church, the Samonas' party had met a group of young Greek priests with blue robes decorated with red ornamentation.' 

Even though Cockburn is willing to admit reincarnation as a possible explanation of such claims, he sounds a little dubious himself; toward the end of his paper, he writes, "[E]ven if we did think in terms of some underlying common element which explains the similarities between these individuals we would still need to show that the presence of the common element justifies the claim that we are dealing with a single person: to show, that is, what significance is to be attached to the presence of that element."  I would add that we also need to eliminate the possibility of outright lying on the part of the parents -- there has been more than one case where a parent has attempted to hoodwink the public with regards to some purportedly supernatural ability their child allegedly has.

So anyhow.  My sense is that the evidence for reincarnation is pretty slim, and that any claims of past lives are best explained by fallible memory, if not outright lying.  But I'm guessing no one will be surprised that I'm saying that.  In any case, I better wrap this up.  Lots to do today.  Considerably more, I would imagine, than I'd have to do if I was a bug, although that's pure speculation because I don't have much of a basis for comparison.

Give me a break...

A couple of years ago I wrote a piece about the Mandela Effect, which is the idea that when you remember some major event differently than other people, it's not because your memory is wrong, it's because you have side-slipped here from an alternate universe where the version you remember actually happened.  The phenomenon gets its name from the fact that a lot of people "remember" that Nelson Mandela died in jail decades ago, which of course didn't happen.  These same folks are the ones who make an enormous deal over "remembering" that the Berenstain Bears -- the annoyingly moralistic cartoon characters who preach such eternal truths as "Your parents and teachers are always right about everything" -- were originally the Berenstein Bears.

Why their name would be different in an alternate universe, I don't know.  From watching Star Trek and Lost in Space, I always assumed that the major differences you'd find in an alternate universe is that all of the good guys would be bad guys, and because of that, many of them would be wearing beards.

But the Mandela Effect isn't going away, despite the fact that if you believe it you're basically saying that your memory is 100% accurate, all of the time, and that you have never misremembered anything in your life.  The whole thing has become immensely popular to "study" -- although what there is there to study, I don't know.  Witness the fact that there is now a subreddit (/r/MandelaEffect) with almost thirty thousand subscribers.

The most recent thing to be brought to light by this cadre of timeline-jumpers has to do with the "Kit Kat" candy bar.  Apparently many people recall the name from their childhood as being "Kit Kats" (with an "s"), even though that doesn't really work with the candy's irritating ear-worm of a jingle, "Give me a break, give me a break, break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar."  So once again, it's more likely that you're in an alternate universe than you just aren't recalling the name of a candy bar correctly.  And now we have someone who has proposed an explanation as to why all of this is happening.

You ready?

The Mandela Effect is caused by...

... CERN.

Yes, CERN, the world's largest particle accelerator, home of the Large Hadron Collider, which became famous for not creating a black hole and destroying the Earth when it was fired up last year.  CERN has been the target of woo-woo silliness before now; back in 2009, projects had to be sidelined for months while the mechanism was repaired after a seagull dropped a piece of a baguette onto some electrical wires and caused a short, and the woo-woos decided that the seagull had been sent back in time to destroy the LHC before it destroyed the entire universe.

So I guess there's no end to what CERN can do, up to and including vaporizing specific letters off of candy bar wrappers.  But you know, if CERN can alter our timeline, don't you think there's more important stuff that it could accomplish besides changing the spellings of candy bars and cartoon bears?  First thing I'd do is go back in time and hand Donald Trump's father a condom.

But I might be a little biased in that regard.

What baffles me about all of this is that not only is there abundant evidence that human memory is plastic and fallible, but just from our own experience you'd think there would be hundreds of examples where we'd clearly recalled things incorrectly.  The fact that these people have to invent an "effect" that involves alternate universes to support why they're always right takes hubris to the level of an art form.

So anyway.  I'm not too worried about the possibility of my having side-slipped from another timeline where I was a world-famous author whose novels regularly rocket to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List.  I'm more concerned at the moment over how the hell I'm going to get the "Kit Kat" jingle out of my head, because that thing is really fucking annoying.

The haunting of Hinton Ampner

On her mom's side, my wife is descended from English nobility, a fact of which she reminds me periodically when I get uppity.  Her great-great grandfather, one William R. Hylton, was born in Jamaica to a family of British sugar planters, and the line (if you extend it back far enough) includes not only the Mad Baron Hylton (about whom I should write another time) but a woman named "Benedicta de Shelving," a member of the Norman gentry named "Marmaduke de Thweng," and best of all, an illegitimate daughter of King Edward IV.

One of her ancestors on the maternal side of her Hylton lineage is a Rachel (Ricketts) Johnson, who would have been (if I'm counting correctly) the aforementioned William R. Hylton's great-great grandmother.  I found out quite by accident that Rachel is related to the central figures in one of Britain's creepiest ghost stories -- the tale of the haunting of Hinton Ampner, a mansion in Hampshire.

Hinton Ampner was built in the 1620s, during the reign of James I, by one Sir Thomas Stewkeley.  Sir Thomas's great grandson Hugh had no male heirs; his daughter, Mary, married Edward Stawell, a nobly-descended young man who was also apparently a little loose on the morals side.  Despite this, Stawell was appointed as Sir Hugh's heir.

After his father-in-law's death, Stawell apparently decided that he could get away with whatever he wanted, and he invited his wife's beautiful young sister, Honoria, to come live with them at Hinton Ampner.  Mary Stawell died shortly afterwards -- an eventuality that many of their neighbors found convenient -- and he lived there with Honoria (carrying on, sources say, in "a scandalous manner") until her death in 1754.  Stawell himself died the following year, and some claimed that the couple's demise was "divine retribution" for their having done away with an illegitimate child born to the union -- perhaps more than one.

Be that as it may, the house was purchased and then rented out to William Henry Ricketts (cousin to Carol's forebear Rachel (Ricketts) Johnson) and his wife, Mary (Jervis) Ricketts.  William was frequently away for long periods of time -- as I mentioned earlier, he and his family had ties to Jamaica, and voyages across the Atlantic were dangerous and drawn-out affairs -- but Mary was a no-nonsense, down-to-earth type who was quite up to the task of running a household (including their three children and a bevy of servants) by herself.

Whether she was up to dealing with ghosts remains to be seen.

The haunting, if such it was, started out slowly.  Mr. and Mrs. Ricketts both heard noises at night, prompting them on more than one occasion to awaken the servants for a thorough search of the house, which turned up nothing.  Then the nurse to the Ricketts's infant son saw a "man in drab clothes" walk into "the Yellow Room" -- Mary Ricketts's own bedroom.

Once again a search found no one.

Events accelerated.  Servants saw not only the apparition of the drab-clothed man, but a woman in a silk dress.  "Dismal moans" were heard at night, and doors opened and quietly shut by themselves.  Mary Ricketts, at first scornful of the claims of the servants, began to experience them herself -- especially when the disturbances intensified while her husband was away in Jamaica in 1769.  She was terrified one night to hear heavy, plodding footsteps near her bed, and in the days following began to make inquiries in the neighborhood regarding the history of the house.  She found only one curious story -- an elderly man who said that a long-time friend of his, who was a carpenter, had been summoned to the house while old Sir Hugh Stewkeley was still alive to pull up some of the floorboards in the dining room.  The carpenter saw Stewkeley and his son-in-law, the depraved Edward Stawell, place something in the space underneath.  The carpenter was ordered to replace the floorboards -- and not to tell a soul what he'd seen, on pain of death.  (A threat the carpenter either didn't believe, or didn't break until Stewkeley and Stawell were both dead themselves.)

Oddly, Mary Ricketts didn't have the floorboards pried up to determine the truth of the claim.  She was apparently reluctant to ascribe the occurrences to ghosts.  But even she began to have second thoughts when the haunting continued to worsen.  A strange murmuring could be heard in several rooms in the house, which sometimes resolved itself into intelligible words.  Not only did Mary hear it, but so did her brother, the famous British Navy officer Captain John Jervis, who wrote about it in his journal (a document that still exists today in a museum in London).  They also heard a tremendous "rushing sound," like a great wind, that would "fall with infinite velocity and force" upon a room, without a breath of air stirring.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Mary wrote about the entire story herself in a narrative that was given for publication to The Gentleman's Magazine by her descendants in 1872.  Throughout the tale, Mary strikes you as sane, calm, and collected, always looking for rational explanations, and not immediately leaping to the conclusion that ghosts were to blame.  One passage reads as follows:

Thoroughly convinced there were persons in the lobby before I opened the door, I asked her [Mary's servant Elizabeth Godin] if she saw no one there.  On her replying in the negative, I went out to her, examined the window that was shut, looked under the couch, the only furniture of concealment there; the chimney board was fastened, and when removed all was clear behind it.  She found the door into the lobby shut, as it was every night.  After this examination, I stood in the middle of the room, pondering with astonishment, when suddenly the door that opens into the little recess leading to the yellow apartment sounded as if played to and fro by a person standing behind it.  This was more than I could bear unmoved.  I ran into the nursery and rang the bell there that goes into the men's apartment.

I think if it'd been me, "not unmoved" would have been putting it mildly.  I think I would have fallen more into the "pissing my pants and then having a stroke" category.

Eventually, however, even Mary's stalwart patience was tried to the limit.  During his stay, her brother -- who is certainly a credible witness if anyone is -- heard groans, banging, dragging footsteps, and (on one occasion) a gunshot.  None of the noises seemed to have a corporeal source.  Jervis pressed his sister to leave the mansion, which she did in 1771.  Its owners were understandably unable to find anyone else who would rent the place, and shortly afterwards Hinton Ampner was demolished.

Okay, I know, you can't put much weight into anecdote, but this story to me has some characteristics that have the ring of truth.  I think it's the open-endedness of it that is the most persuasive, and the most creepy as well.  A lot of ghost stories have predictable endings -- the haunting ends when a skeleton is unearthed and reburied in hallowed ground, when the guilty party is arrested for a murder, when well-deserved revenge is taken against a killer.  Here, we have two seemingly reliable people recounting experiences that have no easy wrap-up.  In the end, Mary Ricketts and her family moved away, John Jervis went on to win the Battle of St. Vincent, and the haunted house itself was torn down.

So I find this a pretty cool story, even though I wouldn't call myself a true believer by any stretch.  Cool, too, that we have a family connection to the main characters; in fact, Captain John Jervis had no children of his own and chose as his heir Mary's son Edward Jervis Ricketts, who spent his childhood in Hinton Ampner, and who would be Carol's third cousin several times removed.  But whether it's true or not, and whether the explanation is supernatural or entirely rational, I still think it's a good tale for a particular day in late October.  And with that, I'll wish you all a happy and dismal-moan-free Halloween.

Trip to the stars

Because the news down here on Earth in the last few days is making me angry, frustrated, depressed, or all three simultaneously, in today's post I'm going to go to my Happy Place, which is: outer space.

This all comes up not only because of the goings-on I'm exposed to every time I read the news, but because of a loyal reader of Skeptophilia who sent me a link to a wonderful article by Nola Taylor Redd in Astronomy magazine online entitled, "The Outer Solar System Keeps Getting Weirder."  In it we find out that recent research has shown that our home system is not nearly as orderly or predictable as we thought it was back when I was in grade school and remembering the mnemonic "My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pies" gave you all of the planets in order, and that was pretty much that.

First, we have the discovery of a small icy planet (or dwarf planet; the astronomers aren't exactly sure yet) called L91, which has a highly elliptical orbit varying from 50 Astronomical Units (an AU is the average distance from the Sun to the Earth) to 1,430.  Not only does L91 have an odd orbit, the orbital trajectory isn't stable.  "Its orbit is changing in quite a remarkable way," said astrophysicist Michele Bannister of Queen's University Belfast at the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences Conference in Pasadena, California.  "There are minute changes in the object’s orbit that could come from the passing gravity of other stars or interactions with the hypothetical Planet Nine."

Artist's conception of the Sun as viewed from Sedna (a dwarf planet three times more distant than Neptune) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I remember when the whole Planet Nine thing first was proposed, right around the time I was an undergraduate student of physics at the University of Louisiana.  Two of my teachers, Daniel Whitmire and John Matese, had proposed the periodic disturbance of comets in the Oort Cloud by a large planet outside the orbit of Pluto as a mechanism for periodic mass extinctions (the idea being that the planet, as it passes through the Oort Cloud, interacts gravitationally with the comets, slingshotting some of them in toward the inner Solar System, and increasing the likelihood of an impact with the Earth and a resultant catastrophe for us Earthlings).  Apparently, Whitmire and Matese are still at it, and have been vindicated at least so far as the existence of Planet Nine; earlier this year Konstantin Batygin of the California Institute of Technology announced independent evidence of a large planet that was perturbing the orbit of dwarf planets in the distant reaches of the Solar System.

So that's pretty cool.  I mean, not the comets striking the Earth and obliterating everything part, but the odd stuff in the far reaches of the Solar System part.

To further explore my Happy Place, I then went to the Hubble Telescope image gallery, and found the following extremely cool photographs, further emphasizing that although things can get ugly down here on Earth, we live in a gorgeous universe.  Here are a few of my favorites.  All images are courtesy of NASA/Hubble Space Telescope and are in the public domain.

A supernova in the galaxy NGC3021

The Helix Nebula

A supernova remnant in the constellation Cassiopeia

The Sombrero Galaxy, NGC 4594

The Whirlpool Galaxy, M51

There.  I don't know about you, but I feel much better now.  The idea that there are billions of stars out there, many of which probably host intelligent life, is a real source of comfort to me.  Especially considering that just by the law of averages, some of them must get by without doing the stupid stuff we do down here on Earth.

A trio of straw men

I had three interactions in the last 24 hours that left me wanting to bang my forehead against the wall.

I was going to call them "conversations," but "conversation" implies "exchange of ideas," which is not what this was.  This was more "one person ranting at the other, followed by the target of this rant trying unsuccessfully to find some way of responding other than shouting 'Are you a moron?  Or what?'"

The common thread in all of them was the straw-man fallacy -- mischaracterizing an argument, and then arguing against that mischaracterization.  Honestly, it's a way of saying "ha ha, I win" without doing the hard work of finding out what your opponent actually believes.

The first of these interactions was over a piece I posted here at Skeptophilia a while back on the evolution of bills designed to block the teaching of evolution.  I thought the academic paper I was writing about was absolutely brilliant, but evidently not everyone does, because I received the following comment:

I don't understand how anyone can believe in the fairy tale of evolution.  You honestly expect us to believe that one animal can just morph into another by magic?  It's so easy for you to believe that a chihuahua would become a race of large sea creatures?

 So against my better judgment, I actually responded.  The whole time, my brain was shouting at me, "You doofus.  Why are you bothering?  What do you think you're going to accomplish?"  But I wouldn't listen to me.  So I wrote:

Of course evolutionists don't think chihuahuas turned into orcas.  The very fact that you can't come up with an actual example of what evolutionists are saying indicates that you're not really all that interested in the discussion, you're just looking for an opportunity to make foolish statements and then pretend you've won the argument.

He then did something kind of sneaky; he set out bait for me.

Okay, then, tell me something evolutionists do believe.

And like an idiot, I fell for it.

I responded:

Here's just one example.  Birds are clearly descended from dinosaurs, especially the deinonychid dinosaurs (including the famous Velociraptor).  They show a lot of homologous bone structure -- and in fact, some members of this dinosaur group had feathers.  Recent protein sequencing of soft tissue preserved in dinosaur bones has also supported a close relationship to modern birds.

And he responded:

Oh, okay.  So it's not chihuahuas morphing into orcas, it's a T-rex morphing into a hummingbird.  That makes so much more sense.

So I gave up...

... only to get caught again shortly thereafter by someone who posted the following image on Twitter:

And not having learned from what had happened only two hours earlier, I responded:

So the fact that they were also both crazy homicidal dictators had nothing whatsoever to do with it?

At which point the original poster called me a "sheeple," which in my opinion is a word whose use should immediately disqualify you from rational discourse in a public forum for a year, unless in that time you can show evidence of your successful completion of a college-level logic course.

But since I never make the same mistake twice -- I make it five or six times, just to be sure -- I then got into a snarl with a Facebook friend who posted an article saying that all of the polls are wrong, that Donald Trump is going to win in a landslide.  By this time I was completely fed up with counterfactual nonsense, and I said, "How can making up reality as you go along be comforting to you?"

She immediately unfriended me, which I guess I deserved, if not for the message, for the snarky way I said it.

So apparently, I'll never learn.  Not only does engaging in arguments on the internet piss off all of the participants, it's completely futile.  And trying to reason with someone who didn't come to their conclusion using rational evidence is a losing proposition right from the get-go.  It reminds me of the quote -- attributed to several different sources -- "You can't logic yourself out of a position you didn't logic yourself into."  Or, as Thomas Paine put it, "To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead."

Hiding from reality

I have never understood the inclination on the part of some folks to pretend that if you just don't talk about something it will go away.

This has been the approach of a lot of politicians vis-à-vis climate change (at least among those who actually acknowledge that it exists).  Let's not even talk about our role in wrecking the planet, nor (especially) what changes we'd have to make in our own cultures and lifestyles to have a prayer of a chance of altering what is now increasingly looking like the outcome.

Which is the adult equivalent of a little kid pulling his blanket over his head because that makes the monster go away.

The latest in the "la-la-la-la-la-la, not listening" department are the states wherein teachers are not allowed to discuss homosexuality in public school classes.  There are currently eight states that have such laws: Alabama, Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, and Utah.  The general attitude seems to be that if kids don't hear about homosexuality, it'll stop happening, as if there are 100% straight kids sitting around in high school health class one day, and the teacher mentions homosexuality, and all of a sudden the kids go, "Holy shit!  I never thought of that!  I think I'll go have sex with a member of my own gender right now!"

Some states go even farther than that. Take, for example, Alabama State Code § 16-40A-2(c)(8):

Classes must emphasize, in a factual manner and from a public health perspective, that homosexuality is not a lifestyle acceptable to the general public and that homosexual conduct is a criminal offense under the laws of the state.

And South Carolina State Code Statute § 59-32-30(5):

[T]he program of instruction provided for in this section may not include a discussion of alternate sexual lifestyles from heterosexual relationships including, but not limited to, homosexual relationships except in the context of instruction concerning sexually transmitted diseases.

And Arizona AZ Revised Statute § 15-716(c):

[N]o district shall include in its course of study instruction which…(1) promotes a homosexual life-style…(2) portrays homosexuality as a positive alternative life-style…(3) suggests that some methods of sex are safe methods of homosexual sex.

So yet another way that LGBT kids are systematically marginalized and stigmatized. Is it any wonder the suicide rate among LGBT teens is so high?

In Utah, however, we may be seeing the first sign of a sea change.  Last week, Equality Utah sued the state over its so-called "No Promo Homo" law.  Troy Williams, president of Equality Utah, said that the law "sends a message that our lives are something shameful, something that must be censored and erased... the time has come to end the stigma."  The lawsuit itself states that such laws "create a culture of silence and nonacceptance of LGBT students and teachers... They  leave LGBT students at risk for isolation, harassment and long-term negative impacts on their health and well-being."

Which is it exactly.  It also, of course, is a fine example of ideologues pretending that if they only close their eyes tight enough, everything they don't like in the world will vanish.  The evidence is incontrovertible at this point that homosexuality is not a choice -- it is either inborn or else wired in so early that it may as well be.  (You straight readers, when did you decide to be attracted to members of the opposite sex?  And if you say, "Well, I didn't decide to, it just happened that way," why in the hell do you think it would be different for homosexuals or bisexuals?)

So what this amounts to is institutional discrimination against people for something over which they have absolutely no control.  Explain to me again how this is fair?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Most appalling of all is the fact that the majority of the people of this stripe justify their beliefs using religion.  Isn't there also something in the bible about "judge not lest ye be judged" and "love thy neighbor as thyself" and "do unto others as you would have them do unto you?"  I seem to remember those were pretty important parts.

In any case, it's heartening that people in Utah may be taking the first steps toward repealing these idiotic laws.  It can only be hoped that this will spread to other states that have similar statutes.  And that the supporters of such legislation are forced to take their hands from over their eyes and look squarely at reality -- not only that LGBT individuals exist, but what the years of bigotry, intolerance, bullying, and systemic marginalization has done to them.