Straight Men, Gay Women Have Similar Brains

Swedish researchers have found that the brains of straight men and lesbians display many of the same characteristics. What do you think?

Kevin O’Malley,
Systems Analyst
“Great—I’m going to start asking my straight male friends to cat-sit.”

Chelsea Carter,
Home Theater Installer
“Though one group’s inclination to fetishize the other is highly disproportionate.”

Sam Glaumann,
Beer Vendor
“So which group is defective?”

Can you guess this one hit wonder? (If you already know, don’t spoil it for everyone else!)

Today’s video of the day comes from the comedic genius George Carlin, who passed away yesterday at the age of 71. A disciple of Lenny Bruce, Carlin is widely regarded as one of the greatest comedians of all time. This video, “Seven Words,” caused Carlin to be arrested for obscenity. The case, which went all the way to the Supreme Court, helped change the nation’s legal and entertainment history. R.I.P.

Sure, black people need to celebrate winning their freedom, but is this really the right day for the picnic?

Why Juneteenth’s Not My Thing
By John McWhorter

I am John Hamilton McWhorter, the fifth. The first John Hamilton McWhorter was a slave. This Thursday is Juneteenth, when I might be inclined to celebrate the emancipation of John Hamilton McWhorter, the first.

Or not. Truth to tell, I have never quite gotten the hang of Juneteenth.

I suppose I should. What could be wrong, after all, with celebrating slaves in America being freed? Technically, Juneteenth arose to mark the day slaves in Texas were freed, but over the years it has been embraced nationwide as a celebration of emancipation.

But at the end of the day, I just can’t wrap my head around celebrating the fact that someone else freed my ancestors. It puts too much focus on a time when we were so starkly in the down position. Juneteenth seems to be about what someone else did.

Whites had been crucial to keeping the Abolitionist movement going. Certainly blacks worked alongside them: The career of Frederick Douglass is Exhibit A. And there were more slave revolts than we are often aware of.

However, we cannot say that blacks in America made their freedom happen. Freedom happened partly as the result of whites making other whites see the error of their ways. And Abraham Lincoln’s commitment was to preserving the Union as a political arrangement, which inherently included abolishing slavery. And even then, the Emancipation Proclamation did not free all slaves, just slaves in the Confederacy, over which Lincoln had no jurisdiction.

So, yes, blacks played a part—but if for some bizarre reason blacks had not participated in the Abolitionist movement and had never revolted, it is thoroughly plausible that emancipation would have happened anyway.

Think about it: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was something that happened because we made it happen. As we have recently revisited in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s famous comment, Lyndon B. Johnson was the one who pushed it through Congress. However, he wouldn’t have done what he did absent the ferocious tenacity of Dr. King, his black comrades and the countless black people who gave their time, energy and sometimes their lives to battling Jim Crow to its knees and changing the nation’s mind on bigotry.

Juneteenth has also always left me a little cold because of what happened after slaves were freed.

For the rest of the story, click here. 

All around the world, abortion rights are increasingly seen as an individual choice, not an area for government intervention.

Criminal Penalties for Abortion Rejected Across the Globe
Jill Filipovic

When you live in a country where abortion rights remain a contentious issue in every election and anti-choice activists are emboldened enough to demonstrate against the birth control pill, there are a lot of reasons to be pessimistic about the future of reproductive freedom. But internationally, there’s a glimmer of good news: Around the globe, individual citizens support abortion rights, even when their own governments criminalize abortion.

The Program on International Policy Attitudes surveyed men and women in 18 countries that collectively make up 59 percent of the world’s population. In 17 out of the 18 countries, a majority of respondents rejected criminal penalties for abortion. In nine of the 18 countries, majorities said that abortion is an individual decision that governments should butt out of. Of those nine countries which thought the government should intervene in abortion rights, only a majority in one — Indonesia — supported criminal sanctions for women who terminate their pregnancies.

Have pro-choice values been embraced ’round the world? No. But the effects that anti-choice policies have on public health and family life around the world are difficult to deny. It’s also clear that the legal status of abortion has no correlation with the abortion rate in any given country — that is, outlawing abortion doesn’t mean that it’s less common. In fact, some of the countries with the highest abortion rates in the world are places where the procedure is totally outlawed. By contrast, the countries with the lowest abortion rates in the world have a few things in common: Safe, legal and accessible (often free, covered by national health care systems) abortion and contraception, plus comprehensive sexual health education and a culture that treats sex as both a pleasure and a responsibility, not a shameful act. Other things that correlate: The fact that lack of access to contraception jacks up the abortion rate, and the fact that illegal abortion often means unsafe abortion, which leads to significantly higher rates of maternal injury or death.

It’s not hard to see why an increasing number of people would support abortion rights.

For the rest of the story, click here.