The students at Wesleyan College want to be treated respectfully and as adults and to have the government respect and support organizations like Planned Parenthood which help them manage their sexual activity safely and responsibly: Their Facebook page. via Your Thoughts?
Fantastic, insightful, and intuitively correct stuff about why we bother to use innuendos and other forms of indirect language where the literal meaning of what we are saying is undisguisedly clear: Thanks to Shane. Your Thoughts?
I have been inspired to introduce a new series on Camels With Hammers which I am entitling “Poe or No Poe?” and which will run however frequently or infrequently as proves necessary. In “Poe or No Poe?” posts, I will offer you lunacy riddled statements from apparent fundamentalists and other extremists around the internet and [...]
Many a homophobic religious person has infamously claimed that when it comes to gays he “loves the sinner but hates the sin” and many a defender of the full dignity and ethical lives of gay people has judged such a compromised offer of love inadequate (if not insincere). This cannot be because it is impossible [...]
Jeff Dale’s ‘Nuff Said Award is for his reply to the following passage from Drew Dyck in which Dyck accuses young defectors from Christianity of being motivated to leave their faith because of their “sinful” sexual behavior: So 20- and 30-somethings are leaving—but why? When I ask church people, I receive some variation of this [...]
Drew Dyck has written a book called Generation Ex-Christian: Why Young Adults Are Leaving the Faith. . .and How to Bring Them Back. I want to focus on just a few passages from his interesting five page article from last fall in last November’s Christianity Today. Unlike many Christians who, despite living in a culture [...]
Recently a University of Illinois adjunct professor in a course on Catholicism got into unfairly lost his job over expressing his philosophical opposition to homosexuality in an e-mail to his student in what seems to me like a pretty clear violation of academic freedom. As to the substance of his arguments though, PZ Myers does [...]
Tinfoiler interprets current events for her son: Blessed Bristol Palin is back in the news discussing her wonderful love child. When my son Hunter asked me why it was okay for Bristol Palin to have a baby before she was married, I told him that God has special rules for special people. God knew that Bristol [...]
Tushnet’s moral choice for herself and for other gays is celibacy or gender reassignment. Of course for some people, specifically some of the transgendered, a sex change is entirely appropriate and preferable to gay sex because from a gender(rather than a sex) perspective, those who are pre-op transgendered and are attracted to members of their [...]
In the New Yorker, Mike Huckabee recently used the phrase “ick factor” in describing responses to homosexuality and when attacked for it, claimed he was taking it from the LGBT movement and from the work of philosopher Martha Nussbaum. Huckabee’s self-defense comes from his website: The reaction over a reported quote from my most recent [...]
I am a bit late on this story but wanted to offer a contrary viewpoint to the dominant one of the outraged blogosphere. Though I have never seen the show, I was interested in the controversy over the show Modern Family which apparently features a gay couple among its lead characters. The controversy centers not [...]
“The sex trade now accounts for 14% of Thailand’s economy.” Your Thoughts?
The American Academy of Pediatrics had proposed permitting American doctors to ritually “nick” the clitorises of girls whose parents want to maintain their customs in America. The thinking was that this compromise would prevent such parents from going underground to have a fuller mutilation of the clitoris carried out instead. Ayaan Hirsi Ali argues that [...]
Roger Friedland finds an interesting correlation between the two kinds of belief and examines its possible causes and implications: We found that belief in God has no impact on young people’s sex lives. College virgins are no more likely to believe in God than non-virgins. Even those who took a virginity pledge are not sexually [...]
One of Andrew Sullivan’s readers has an interesting and accurate seeming account of the effects of conservative American Christianity’s obsessive and draconian opposition to all premarital sex and its implications for contributing to the hysteria about children learning about same sex couples: I teach at a large university in a conservative part of the country, [...]
Robin Hanson notes that as sensitized as we are to various marginalized groups there are other categories of people who suffer from huge inequalities but for whom there are no sympathies to be found. Hanson writes: There is no social pressure whatsoever against maligning these groups. Especially striking are inequalities in attractiveness as a friend, [...]
Francis Collins trots out a familiar old argument against atheism. The argument is that if there is no God then our morality is an illusion. Collins’s presentation of this argument features an unusual and suspicious spin. Collins knows that arguments can be made from evolutionary psychology that broadly moral thinking seems to have evolved in [...]
In the first part of this series, I explored the reasons for rejecting “unconditional” love as a candidate for the ideal essence of love since as a concept it is riddled with numerous problems as a recommendation for human psychology it is hopelessly unrealistic. In this part of the series, I sketch out a theory [...]
Greta Christina specifically addresses the meaning of sex from within a materialist’s mindset but her points can extend to more aspects of our experience as well, I think. The transcendent aspect of sex and of numerous other aspects of our experience can be derived from our meditative realization that we are participating in processes that [...]
Michael Cholbi thinks he has some: First, the lie is not meant to advance the happiness either of the liar or of the potential murder victim, but to thwart the abuse of the victim’s autonomy that her murder would represent. Hence, if lying to the murderer is manipulation at all, it is manipulation in the [...]
Greta Christina attacks what she calls “the myth of sexual spontaneity,” defined as the idea that “for sex to be good and meaningful, the desire has to strike both partners out of the blue and be acted on immediately” on the grounds that arises from and implictly reinforces negative views of sex: Our culture tends [...]
Feministing breaks down Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Twilight, and True Blood for their implicit (and explicit) views on sex. While comparing and contrasting True Blood and Twilight, Latoya Peterson drops this tidbit, which is the first thing to make me curious to peek at Twilight (though I’m 99% sure I still won’t): In both series, [...]
Go to Psychology Today for solutions for dealing with this bit of bad news: Only 25 percent of women are consistently orgasmic during vaginal intercourse.
Teeth Sometimes people disagree about what makes for a horror film. As far as I’m concerned, the definitive feature of the genre is that it deals with frightening transgressions of nature and of morality. Mitchell Lichtenstein’s Teeth is horror that situates itself purely in terms of this defining characteristic. The horror is not in the [...]