prejudice

Here is a great discussion on why heterosexuals can be threatened by the idea of gay marriage.  It is presented by Dr. Michael Schmitt, Associate Professor at Simon Fraser University and Director of the Self in Social Context Lab (SISC).

This video has some background info, so if you're impatient or don't like academic presentations - skip to 30 minutes in and dig the phat tracks he lays down.

Opposition to Same-Sex Marriage: The Role of Heterosexual Identity

h/t to LGBT Latest Science

By Simangele Mzizi (Behind The Mask)

Yesterday, as I walked home, I passed the statue pictured above.

How could this be any more wrong?

1. It's a white male.

Is this what Americans look like? Is this what represents fire fighters? Do not fire fighters, and all Americans, come in all shapes, sizes and colors?

For those who don't know me, my name is Christina Engela and I am a transwoman - or if you will, a transsexual woman. What does that mean exactly? Now that we have the support-group greeting out of the way, let me explain.

Once upon a time there was a little boy who always felt that - somehow, inside, he was actually a little girl...

To the world I was a little boy, who liked dolls and girly things and who was awfully confused by the way girls were treated differently to boys - and who clearly did not want to be included with the boys. I learned very early on that little boys who were soft and effeminate were frowned upon - and were given a very hard time. The world didn't understand who I was, and quite honestly, for some time, neither did I. And that is the really sad part - because the subject of gender and transgender is so taboo in conservative society that the only way to find out who you are as a transgender person is to figure it out for yourself. I was 26 before I even really fully understood who and what I was. And when I learned the truth, I grabbed onto it with all that was in me.

Imagine a pandemic which claims a death toll so high it staggers the mind. Millions upon millions dead, suffering and dying from a plague which knows no cure. Every single human being touched personally by the hand of death, suffering and tragedy. Everyone who survives, perhaps the last remaining member of a large and happy family, standing alone and wondering where to go from here? Far fetched?

Not really. It already happened once in recorded history. In Medieval times, bubonic plague took nearly half the population of Europe, some scholars postulate up to two thirds. And what could medicine do about it at the time? Nothing. They couldn't even ease the suffering of the victims. The contemporary art reflects the ever present um, presence - of death in the conscious and sub-conscious, particularly in portraits and other art of the day. The fabled Dans Macabre is just one example. At the time, the science of medicine was in its infancy. With hardly any contrast at all, the prognosis for such a massive and virulent outbreak of some new or resilient disease today is not much better.

A week or so ago I watched an interesting doccy about the Black Death. It was pretty relevant, considering that if anything similar were to happen today, the global medical capacity to handle such a crisis would be nil anyway. Hospitals would be swamped. Handling capacity would be overwhelmed. In recent weeks, medical testing to confirm such cases as "swine flu" or H1M1 blah, blah, blah take anything up to a week - and some cases were even misdiagnosed completely. The death toll today even in so-called advanced countries stands at a total in excess of 1000. Oddly enough, the spread of this disease seems to have affected modern countries more - where transportation is far more effective than in rural non-urbanized places.