A district in my area did something really amazing earlier this week. On Monday, the East Aurora Board of Education voted — unanimously — to make things better for transgender students:

The new policy specifically states that transgendered and gender nonconforming students have the right use the restroom that corresponds to their gender-related identity that is consistently asserted at school. The student has the right to be addressed by the name they want to be called, too.

“A court-ordered name or gender change is not required, and the student needs not change his or her official records,” the policy states.

“In no case shall a transgender student be required to use a locker room that conflicts with the student’s gender-related identity,” the policy reads.

Doesn’t seem like a big deal at all… so, as you might expect, the conservative Christian group Illinois Family Institute is freaking out, urging parents to pull their kids out of the public school district before, I don’t know, the transgender kids smile and ruin Jesus for everybody?

The school board is now imposing non-objective, “progressive” moral, philosophical, and political beliefs — not facts — about gender confusion on the entire school. This feckless school board has made a decision to accommodate, not the needs of gender-confused teens, but their disordered desires and the desires of gender/sexuality anarchists who exploit public education for their perverse ends.

…

Gender confusion affects approximately .003 percent of males and .0001 percent of females. Aurora East High School is now accommodating the disordered impulses and unproven beliefs of a statistically miniscule segment of their population and in so doing ignores the beliefs of the majority. Some would argue that this policy also reflects a gross distortion of compassion and profound ignorance about what truly helps the few students who suffer from gender dysphoria or Gender Identity Disorder.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2012/10/17/christian-group-complains-after-school-board-adopts-policy-to-help-transgender-students/

Timothy Kurek, a graduate of the evangelical Liberty University, decided to ‘walk in the shoes’ of a gay man and emerged with his faith strengthened

Timothy Kurek grew up hating homosexuality. As a conservative Christian deep in America’s Bible belt, he had been taught that being gay was an abomination before God. He went to his right-wing church, saw himself as a soldier for Christ and attended Liberty University, the “evangelical West Point”.

But when a Christian friend in a karaoke bar told him how her family had kicked her out when she revealed she was a lesbian, Kurek began to question profoundly his beliefs and religious teaching. Amazingly, the 26-year-old decided to “walk in the shoes” of a gay man in America by pretending to be homosexual.

For an entire year Kurek lived “under cover” as a homosexual in his home town of Nashville. He told his family he was gay, as well as his friends and his church. Only two pals and an aunt – used to keep an eye on how his mother coped with the news – knew his secret. One friend, a gay man called Shawn – whom Kurek describes as a “big black burly teddy bear” – pretended to be his boyfriend. Kurek got a job in a gay cafe, hung out in a gay bar and joined a gay softball league, all the while maintaining his inner identity as a straight Christian.

The result was a remarkable book called The Cross in the Closet, which follows on the tradition of other works such as Black Like Me, by a white man in the 1960s deep south passing as a black American, and 2006?s Self-Made Man, by Norah Vincent, who details her time spent in disguise living as a man. “In order to walk in their shoes, I had to have the experience of being gay. I had to come out to my friends and family and the world as a gay man,” he told the Observer.

Kurek’s account of his year being gay is an emotional, honest and at times hilarious account of a journey that begins with him as a strait-laced yet questioning conservative, and ends up with him reaffirming his faith while also embracing the cause of gay equality.

Along the way he sheds many friends, especially from Liberty, who wrote emails to him after he came out asking that he repent of his sins and warning that he faced damnation. He does not regret their loss. “I now have lots of new gay friends,” Kurek said.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/10/13/why-a-bible-belt-conservative-spent-a-year-pretending-to-be-gay/

There’s an old phrase among critical thinkers: you’re entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts*. The idea is that these are two different things: opinions are matters of taste or subjective conclusions, while facts stand outside that, independent of what you think or how you may be biased.

You can have an opinion that Quisp cereal is, to you, the best breakfast food of all time. But you can’t have the opinion that evolution isn’t real. That latter is not an opinion; it’s objectively wrong. You can have the opinion that the evidence for evolution doesn’t satisfy you, or that evolution feels wrong to you. But disbelieving evolution is not an opinion.

The same can be said for many other topics of critical thinking.

Deakin University Philosophy lecturer Patrick Stokes makes just this case in a well-written piece called No, You’re Not Entitled to Your Opinion. For his basic example of this he uses the modern antivaccination movement, specifically Meryl Dorey and the Orwellain-named Australian Vaccination Network, or AVN.

Dorey’s name is familiar to regular readers: she spews antivax nonsense at nearly relativistic velocities, able to say more provably wrong and blatantly dangerous things than any given antiscience advocate after eight cups of coffee (just how dangerous the antivax movement is has been written about ably by my friend Seth Mnookin in Parade magazine). She never comes within a glancing blow of reality, and has been shown to her face that whatshe says is wrong, but stubbornly refuses to back down. She claims vaccines are connected to autism, that vaccines contain dangerous levels of toxins, that vaccines hurt human immune systems. None of these things is true. Reasonable Hank, who is outspoken about Dorey, has an exhaustive list of the awful things she’s said and done.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/10/09/vaccines-opinions-are-not-facts/

Cognitive inhibition is an important mental skill. Stopping or overriding mental processes, whether conscious or unconscious, is often needed – to suppress unwanted or irrelevant thoughts, to suppress inappropriate meanings of ambiguous words.

In other words, it’s a vital part of staying focussed.

Decreased cognitive inhibition is associated with creativity, but also with with anxiety and neuroticism, feelings of threat and uncontrollability, altered states of consciousness, intuitive thinking and biases in logical reasoning. And this led Marjaana Lindeman, at the University of Helsinki, Finland, to wonder whether a lack of cognitive inhibition also plays a role in supernatural beliefs.

So, along with her colleagues she took a group of 23 sceptics and believers in the supernatural, and put them in an MRI scanner (AKA brain scanner). While in there, they were given some short stories to read, and then a picture to look at – you can see some examples in the graphic on the right.



http://www.secularnewsdaily.com/2012/10/sceptics-subconsciously-repress-supernatural-thoughts/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SecularNewsDaily+%28Secular+News+Daily%29

Interesting.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A seven million-year-old South American fossil from a species known as Arrhinolemur scalabrinii – which translates literally to “Scalabrini’s lemur without a nose” – has long been a curiosity because there is only one specimen in existence and it is unlike most other primates.

There is a reason for that, scientists have discovered. The lemur without a nose is actually a fish.

Classified as a mammal since it was first described in 1898, Arrhinolemur scalabrinii will at last take its rightful place among its piscatorial brethren following a detailed analysis by scientists from Argentina, Oregon State University and the Smithsonian Institution. Results of their analysis have just been published in the professional journal, Neotropical Ichthyology.

“The name given to the fossil back in 1898 should have given a clue that something was wrong,” said Brian Sidlauskas, a fisheries expert in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at Oregon State University and co-author of the study. “It isn’t unusual to see a species reassigned to a different genus, but you don’t often see one moved to an entirely different class.”

Here is the unusual tale of Arrhinolemur scalabrinii, or the lemur without a nose… (at the link)

http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2012/oct/that%E2%80%99s-no-primate-it%E2%80%99s-fish

Mormons for Marriage Equality was surprised to hear Elder Dallin H. Oaks condemn same sex parenting during the 182nd Semiannual General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Just three weeks ago, Dallin, who is a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, appeared to support California’s recent ban on so-called “ex-gay” or “reparative” therapy. At a conference in Utah, Dallin warned of “unprofessional therapy practices on marriage and family concerns” and said the Mormon Church “accept[ed] professional counseling because it is subject to legal regulation, stands or falls on the principles of science, peer review, and competition.”

“Lots of Mormons interested in LGBT matters took his broader statement as affirming the recent ban against ex-gay therapy in California, and against ex-gay therapy in general,” Sara Long, the executive director of Mormons for Marriage Equality, told Raw Story in an email. “So naturally we figured that science and peer review should be consulted to see how children do in diverse families — because science and peer review show that children of same-sex couples do as well as the children of opposite-sex couples.”

At the General Conference in Salt Lake City on Saturday, however, Dallin said children raised by single parents or same sex couples were at a “significant disadvantage.”

“For children the relative stability of marriage matters,” he explained. “We should assume the same disadvantages for children raised by couples of the same gender. The social science literature is controversial and politically charged on the long term effect of this on children. Principally because, as a New York Times writer observed, ‘same sex marriage is a social experiment and like most experiments it will take time to understand its consequences.’”

Raw Story (http://s.tt/1pCmH)

NEW YORK — For the first time in its history, the United States does not have a Protestant majority, according to a new study. One reason: The number of Americans with no religious affiliation is on the rise.

The percentage of Protestant adults in the U.S. has reached a low of 48 per cent, the first time that Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has reported with certainty that the number has fallen below 50 per cent. The drop has long been anticipated and comes at a time when no Protestants are on the U.S. Supreme Court and the Republicans have their first presidential ticket with no Protestant nominees.

Among the reasons for the change a spike in the number of American adults who say they have no religion. The Pew study, released Tuesday, found that about 20 per cent of Americans say they have no religious affiliation, an increase from 15 per cent in the last five years.

Scholars have long debated whether people who say they no longer belong to a religious group should be considered secular. While the category as defined by Pew researchers includes atheists, it also encompasses majorities of people who say they believe in God, and a notable minority who pray daily or consider themselves “spiritual” but not “religious.”

Still, Pew found overall that most of the unaffiliated aren’t actively seeking another religious home, indicating that their ties with organized religion are permanently broken.

http://life.nationalpost.com/2012/10/09/protestants-no-longer-majority-in-u-s-report-says/

As an atheist, I was dismayed and disgusted by the flippant tone of Dana Milbank's Thursday column, "A cause for nonbelievers." He seems to think we are a group of silly children, making much ado about nothing.

Does it really surprise him that we may not appreciate the constant and pervasive references to religion in all aspects of daily life? Or that the phrase "in God we trust" excludes us, as though we are not also law-abiding, patriotic taxpayers who have fought for our country, given to charities and established homes and businesses?

Identity politics aside, studies have shown atheists to be among the most distrusted and despised minorities in the United States. No wonder it has only been in recent years that more of us have decided enough is enough, and declared to the public: "You know, I'm an atheist."

By identifying myself as an atheist, I am not robbing anyone of their religious freedom, or their right to free expression. I would hope that by so doing, I can share my essential humanity, dignity and self-worth.

We are your neighbors, your teachers, your financial advisers, your physicians, your friends and your family. We are often bewildered not only by the hatred and vitriol directed at us, but by the condescending attitudes of people like Milbank.

— Elizabeth Mannering, Madison

Read more: http://host.madison.com/news/opinion/mailbag/elizabeth-mannering-milbank-s-flippant-tone-toward-atheists-offensive/article_803c72d8-1252-11e2-940e-001a4bcf887a.html#ixzz28uGRBhZl