Wednesday, June 18, 2008 - Posts
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Dana, I love that you were moved by that picture of Del and Phyllis. They're revered as foremothers of the LGBT movement. In 1955, at a time when people were arrested and lost their jobs (and lives) for being gay, when police would rape women arrested for being lesbian (honest, I'm not making this up), this couple launched the Daughters of Bilitis, the first American lesbian activist organization, and founded The Ladder, a samizdat publication that was passed from hand to hand. They risked their lives back then by using their real names.
That's the reason that Kate Kendall, who runs the National Center for Lesbian Rights, nominated this couple to be the first same-sex spouses in California—and everyone agreed. Phyllis and Del deserve the aliyah, the honor of being called to the Torah in front of the entire congregation. They've helped transform the country during the past 50 years—from what was probably the worst period in American history for lesbians and gay men, to what may now be the best.
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I think I like weddings only when they’re an act of civil disobedience. When my straight friends announce their engagements, there’s always a faint sense of dread at the impending rites of veil-lifting and glass-stomping and Pablo-Neruda-poem-reciting (coupled, of course, with a sincere wish for their lifelong happiness—but I’d wish them that whether they got married or not). But those images of the San Francisco lesbian couple, 84 and 87 years old, who were wed Monday at 5:01 p.m. after 50 years together (and after a California Supreme Court decision invalidated their marriage performed in 2004) had me tearing up like a fond aunt at a rehearsal dinner. It doesn’t get any more romantic than that: Overturn our union, will you? Great, we’ll just line up and get married again the first minute—literally—that state law allows. I love imagining the two of them, frail and bent, walking out of City Hall to a mixed crowd of supporters (both women are well-known S.F. gay rights activists) and jeering protesters with placards reading “Homo Sex Is Sin.”
I honestly think that in a matter of years, this kind of image will look to us like the 1963 photographs of George Wallace blocking the schoolhouse door as two black students attempted to enroll at the University of Alabama. Good Lord, we’ll say, can you believe it was just a generation ago that people were debating the pros and cons of institutionalized bigotry and publicly protesting the right of two octogenarian women to love each other? I just hope that shift will take a lot less than 45 years and that, when Obama gets asked about gay marriage in the fall (and you know that wedge is being sharpened by the McCain campaign as we speak), he won’t fall back on that cowardly (and tautological) dodge about how “marriage is between a man and a woman.” No duh—and it’s high time we did something about it.
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So over at Ars Technica there's a link to a really interesting study that came out the other week in Science. It suggests that the much-discussed "math gap" between boys and girls in American may stem more from social factors than from biology. The study looked at more than 275,000 students in 40 countries who took a particular exam. As the Ars Technica summary puts it:
Girls scored about 2 percent lower than boys on math on average, but nearly 7 percent higher on reading, consistent with previous test results.
The researchers, noted, however, that the math gap wasn't consistent between countries. For example, it was nearly twice as large as the average in Turkey, while Icelandic girls outscored males by roughly 2 percent. The general pattern of these differences suggested to the authors that the performance differences correlated with the status of women. The authors of the study built a composite score that reflected the gender equality of the countries based on the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index, data extracted from the World Values Surveys, measures of female political participation, and measures of the economic significance of females. countries such as Norway and Sweden score very high on gender equality measures; in these nations, the gender gap on math performance is extremely small.
So what do you make of that, Lawrence Summers? Now, to be fair, the study may not have tested for variance—I haven't read through it fully—which would mean that the gap between boys and girls in performance may still be larger at the ends of the bell curve. But the findings still are remarkable.
If you click on the study, too, you'll note an irony: It suggests that while the math gap correlates to gaps in social equality, boys' lagging reading skills don't. Of course, as the summarizer at Ars Technica puts it, that doesn't mean some other social factor isn't at work. I'm sure one is—or even many.
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Emily, if you are still awake and reading novels after tucking in the tender shoots, then you are so far ahead of the game that I see a best-seller along the lines of How To Be an Awesome Mummy and Still Read Great Literature in your future, and I'll pre-order my copy right now. Here's what puzzles me, though, and I'd really love to hear back on this: When did guilt become de rigueur? No kidding, I almost feel guilty that I don't feel guilty; though I definitely make my share of mistakes, I feel pretty good about myself as a mom, and I don't hear a lot of women willing to admit that about themselves. Was the bar always so high?
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