What are licenses for anyway?
The slow pace of progress
I’m sure by now you’ve all heard that North Carolina passed Amendment 1 on Tuesday, taking a statutory ban on same sex marriage and enshrining it in their state constitution. A sad truth is that change is slow. In some cases this is good since hasty changes can be disastrous, but this isn’t one of them.
As more and more states legalize same sex marriage and with our current post-DADT military, it won’t be long until a gay or lesbian couple who was legally married in one of the handful of states that allows it sues the government over DOMA so as to secure spousal benefits (like health insurance), or moves to a state that has a ban on even recognizing same sex marriages, is denied a legal spousal right, and sues that state over the full faith and credit clause in the constitution. Whether or not these suits could be won would be questionable, but the likelihood will increase as time progresses and people’s attitudes continue to change.
Progress could come from the democratic processes, but it would be very slow. Legal equal rights for blacks took 100 years and the right to vote for women took more than 40 (with full legal equality for women having still not been attained). Also, considering the number of states that already have constitutional bans on same sex marriage, even a act of congress would challenged in the courts, right where it belongs. Sure, democracy is a nice thing, but as North Carolina just demonstrated, the rights of a minority should never be put up to a popular vote.
Lighthouses > Churches – Invalidated & Unaccepted
Invalidated & Unaccepted
Keaton Fuller sounds like a good kid. He is just about to graduate from the Prince of Peace Catholic school. Even earned the highest award given by the Matthew Shepard Scholarship Foundation (MSSF). Keaton is an out, gay teenager and his academic and civic accomplishments have been a great example for everyone.
In what seems to be a standard event in high schools, there is a ceremony where all the graduating class get scholarships presented to them. High dollar awards are usually presented by the foundations that gave them to students. School Board President Edward O’Neill and the rest of the Board approved a written request from the MSSF to present the award to Keaton.
Everything was set to go until Bishop Martin Amos, the head of the diocese that controls the Prince of Peace school, caught wind of the MSSF attending. Amos was quick to tell Keaton’s parents that the MSSF would not be allowed to attend. Quoting Amos, “We cannot allow any one or any organization which promotes a position that is contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church to present at a diocesan institution.”
Ed O’neill (Not Al Bundy), voiced genuine support for Keaton and sadness for the way this is being handled, saying:
We preach tolerance and acceptance but then we turn around and we don’t practice what we preach. If the bishop says we’re not going to do it, I can voice my objection to it, but there’s not a whole lot I can do.
Needless to say, Keaton was very hurt by the diocese actions feeling overall invalidated & unaccepted. He even wrote an open letter and petition to allow the presentation which had hundreds of signatures within hours.
This whole ordeal has been incredibly hurtful, and I am even sadder that this will be one of my last experiences to remember my high school years by.
In past years casinos and the military have given awards so I’m guessing thou shall not kill (Thou shall do no murder?) doesn’t bother Amos. This kid has achieved great things and been accepted by his peers and the faculty. Is this really necessary? The MSSF is only out there helping to spread tolerance for everyone. How is that an evil? How is that really worse than the death of another person?
Penny Arcade
~Wesley
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Intermittent issues
When I started using CloudFlare I was very pleased to find that I have a much larger readership than I previously thought, turns out it’s around 1000 visitors a day. Unfortunately around the same time I started noticing some intermittent issues. It’s taken a while for my hosting provider to get back to me since I reported the issue, but it’s related to the increased traffic. I’ll be working on some site optimization and if that doesn’t take care of it, I may have to upgrade the account. Hang in there and I hope to have this resolved soon.
Update 05/10/12 12:41 AM: I have made a few of the recommended changes as far as plugins go. Next up will be optimizing the database….this should be fun. If you notice any new problems, let me know. If further availability issues occur you should be able to get the site by refreshing the page after 5 or 10 seconds and again, please let me know if you continue to experience this. The preferred method of contact for both issues at this time would be to comment to this post.
Update 05/11/12 11:12 PM: I’ve installed and configured WP Super Cache and WP Widget Cache, optimized the database, and removed unused plugins. I have also checked access logs and made sure the high resource utilization isn’t due to attacks. The performance improvements are quite noticeable and the stability seems to be improving. Please continue to watch for issues and report any and all issues you find here.
A pastor speaks the truth about marriage!
Black people, especially in the south, know a thing or two about discrimination and the dangers of the tyranny of the majority, so listen to to the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber tell it how it is:
We need more preachers sharing that message for sure.
Semantics are important
While marriage equality is a worthy goal, it’s an uphill battle due to the perception a lot of people have about what marriage is. Unfortunately, a person’s perception is their reality. To atheists (and a lot of other people to) it’s a legal contract that brings certain rights and responsibilities. To a Mormon it’s an eternal bond for the sake of creating a family, for Catholics it’s one of their eight sacraments, and for many conservative Christians (including Mormons and Catholics) it’s all about making babies.
The whole marriage is about family argument fails on two counts. First is that there are a lot of children in need of adoption and same sex couples can provide them with very happy and loving homes and same sex couples also have the option of sperm donation or surrogacy. Next is that conservative religious groups who campaign against same sex marriage aren’t also campaigning to require fertility tests for opposite sex couples or making them vow that they will have children.
I used to be in favor of simply eliminating marriage from the legal books, thus removing the religious baggage that the “M” word has for a lot of people and making equality to enter into what ever kind of legal union replaces it more attainable. I’ve recently changed my mind on that. Conservatives claim that we are trying to destroy marriage. If we were to actually remove marriage from the books they would be right, well, kind of.
Since changing the language to get away from the battle would probably be an even harder fight, we have to continue working to get rational religious people (yes, they do exist) to recognize that while they can hold what ever beliefs they want about marriage or family, they have no right to impose their beliefs on anyone else by force of law. If they’re willing to let elderly couples get married, then they can’t argue it’s about making babies, if they’re willing to let opposite sex non-Christian couples (Jews, Muslims, Hindus, atheists, etc) get married then it’s not a religious dogma, and if they want marriage to continue to have legal recognition then they need to view the base definition as lowest common denominator, and when you’re just looking at a legal contract between two people there’s no good reason to exclude people consenting adults from being able to enter it.
A schedule change
I’ve decided to stop specifically covering science topics on Tuesdays. The multi-story science news posts like I’ve done for almost a year and a half (although not very regularly lately) will not be happening any more. It started off being a lot of fun, but it’s become a tedious chore. Now I’ll write about cool sciency stuff when I find it and when I feel like it. Expect more like I did today.
I’ll still try to get content up on Tuesdays, it just won’t have a focused theme.
A new kingdom in the tree of life?
No, I’m not talking about about the Garden of Eden or heaven, scientists have found a four flagella eukaryote that doesn’t fit with the five known eukaryote kingdoms (plant, animal, fungus, alga, and protist) in a Norwegian lake. These solitary algae eaters have features that fit best with protists and amoebas, but genetically don’t fit with either group, of course they also have double the flagella.
As awesome as identifying a species that split off from all other known genetic lines a full billion years ago is, I’m more interested in some of the language used in MSNBC’s article. Sure, it’s written for a much more general population than even Scientific American and Popular Science, but I’ve seen the “tree of life” plenty of times and it’s useful as a metaphor to describe the branching of different genetic lines (although a spreading and branching vine would be more accurate), but it carries with it some serious religious baggage. I kind of like it since it’s a nice jab at the Genesis creation myth, but due to some of the baggage it also rubs me the wrong way.
There’s also a quote in this article from Kamran Shalchian-Tabrizi, one of the University of Oslo researches that studied this creature, saying,
The microorganism is among the oldest currently living eukaryote organisms we know of. It evolved around one billion years ago, plus or minus a few hundred million years. It gives us a better understanding of what early life on Earth looked like.
I have to give him some some slack since English is not his first language and there’s always the chance that he was misquoted, but it is not “among the oldest currently living eukaryote organisms we know of” those are plants (many of them trees) that are thousands of years old, single celled organisms don’t live very long. We also have no idea how long that current species has been around, but since they don’t fossilize well we don’t know how many iterations it’s evolved through to get to it’s current form from it’s last common ancestor with a known species.
There’s another inane line, this time from the article author, Jennifer Welsh, saying,
Because it has features of two separate kingdoms of life, the researchers think that the ancestors of this group might be the organisms that gave rise to these other kingdoms, the amoeba and the protist, as well. If that’s true, they would be some of the oldest eukaryotes, giving rise to all other eukaryotes, including humans.
No shit. Their ancestors would be the oldest eukaryotes who in turn would have given rise to all other eukaryotes, just like some of our ancestors would include the same exact eukaryotes who gave rise to this new eukaryote kingdom.
An awesome story about a really cool microbe has been ruined by shoddy science reporting. I hate it when that happens.
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