When people arguing for gay rights make analogies to the civil rights movement of the '60s, there are some who will invariably snarl that gays are hijacking the civil rights movement. In reality, of course, they're the ones hijacking it, and its history. They try to paint civil rights as something only belonging to black people--never mind all the other minorities that have been oppressed over the centuries. No, if they weren't enslaved and they don't have famous court cases that everyone recognizes like Dred Scott v. Sanford, then they don't deserve any rights at all.
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Whenever you hear people rail against homosexuality because "the Bible says it's wrong", there's often a rebuttal laying out some of the other things the Bible says that people conveniently ignore. The inevitable response is "Well, I'm a Christian, so I don't believe in the Old Testament."

So I have to wonder: how many of these people are the same ones clamoring for the ten commandments to be erected in public areas?

And on a related note, you have people upset with The DaVinci Code because it dares intimate that Jesus did something so dirty and profane as, gasp, wed Mary Magdalene.

How many of these people will turn around and announce that marriage is a "sacrament" and something holy that we cannot allow gays to defile with their monogamous, loving relationships?
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Y'all have probably heard already about the pedophiles in the Netherlands trying to form a political party, proposing to lower the age of consent from 16 to 12, the legalization of bestiality, and the broadcasting of porn on daytime television.

I'm sure the religious in this country will sputter indignantly about this, at the least, and probably find a way to pin this on the gays. But before all that happens, I'd like to recall a story from March:

The [Kansas] Senate took up a bill last week that sets a minimum age for marriage at 16 with parental consent. The bill was prompted by a case in which a 21-year-old Nebraska man came to Kansas to marry a 13-year-old girl pregnant with his child. Kansas currently has no minimum marriage age.

Before the Senate approved the bill, Sen. Kay O'Connor, an Olathe Republican, pushed through an amendment to allow those under 16 to marry if a judge agrees it’s in their best interest. O'Connor, a supporter of last year’s ban on gay marriage, said she would rather not set any minimum.

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[A]n act, passed on January 25, 1806, ... provided that "all slaves emancipated after May 1, 1806, must leave the state within twelve months after the act of emancipation, or be sold for the benefit of the literary fund." ... Because of its passage hundreds of petitions were addressed to the legislature by Negroes asking to be exempted from the penalty of the law. In these documents individuals were forced to show that their residence would not be injurious to the state... .

--Race Relations in Virginia and Miscegenation in the South, 1776-1860, James Hugo Johnston, pg. x
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Scientists ponder invisibility cloak

Imagine an invisibility cloak that works just like the one
Harry Potter inherited from his father. Researchers in England and the United States think they know how to do that. They are laying out the blueprint and calling for help in developing the exotic materials needed to build a cloak.

The keys are special manmade materials, unlike any in nature or the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. These materials are intended to steer light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation around an object, rendering it as invisible as something tucked into a hole in space.

...

Scientists not involved in the work said it presents a solid case for making invisibility an attainable goal.

"This is very interesting science and a very interesting idea and it is supported on a great mathematical and physical basis," said Nader Engheta, a professor of electrical and systems engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Engheta has done his own work on invisibility using novel materials called metamaterials.

Pendry and his co-authors also propose using metamaterials because they can be tuned to bend electromagnetic radiation — radio waves and visible light, for example — in any direction.

A cloak made of those materials, with a structure designed down to the submicroscopic scale, would neither reflect light nor cast a shadow.

Instead, like a river streaming around a smooth boulder, light and all other forms of electromagnetic radiation would strike the cloak and simply flow around it, continuing on as if it never bumped up against an obstacle. That would give an onlooker the apparent ability to peer right through the cloak, with everything tucked inside concealed from view.

Wouldn't that mean that the wearer couldn't see anything, if it were completely enshrouding him?

More information available here.
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The Universe Before It Began:

Using a theory called "loop quantum gravity," a group led by Penn State professor Abhay Ashtekar has shown that just before the Big Bang occurred, another universe very similar to ours may have been contracting. According to the group's findings, this previous universe eventually became so dense that a normally negligible repulsive component of the gravitational force overpowered the attractive component, causing the universe to "bounce" apart. This big bounce is what we now know as the Big Bang. The group published its analysis in the April 12th issue of Physical Review Letters.

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Loop quantum gravity also predicts a small repulsive component of gravitational force, which is a non-factor in other theories. At most densities, even the extremely high density of an atom's nucleus, this component has no significant effect. But as density increases, approaching 10⁷⁵ times the nuclear density, this repulsion begins to dominate. According to the Ashtekar's equations, this appears to be what happened to the universe before ours: As it collapsed, it became so dense that gravity started to, in a sense, work backwards, birthing our universe.

Singh, Ashtekar's postdoc, noted that the group's conclusions are eerily similar to findings published by Princeton researcher Paul Steinhardt two weeks ago. Using string theory, Steinhardt concluded that the universe may be cyclic, with each crunch leading to a bounce.

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Wow.

After 34 years of college teaching, I thought I had heard just about every imaginable student complaint. Last week, however, a freshman in my 300-seat US History Since 1865 course came in to discuss her exam with one of the graders and proceeded to work herself into a semi-hissy over the fact that we had spent four class periods(one of them consisting of a visit from Taylor Branch) discussing the civil rights movement.

"I don't know where he's getting all of this," she complained,"we never discussed any of this in high school." One might have let the matter rest here as simply an example of a high school history teacher's sins of omission being visited on the hapless old history prof. had the student not informed the TA in an indignant postcript, " I'm not a Democrat! I don't think I should have to listen to this stuff!"

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Y'know, the irony of the phrase "Virginia is for lovers" only just occurred to me.
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During Day of Silence, two teachers apparently passed out the following mock questionnaire that attempts to put straight people in the shoes of gays:



And now, a comic!


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According to Yahoo! Breaking News e-mails,

ATLANTA (AP) A Fulton County Superior Court judge has struck down Georgia's constitutional ban on same-sex marriages.

[Edit] Ah, dagnammit. It was overturned on a technicality, not because Georgia suddenly realized that gays are people too:

A judge has struck down Georgia's ban on same-sex marriages, saying a measure overwhelmingly approved by voters in 2004 violated a provision of the state Constitution that limits ballot questions to a single subject.

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Russell said the state's voters must first decide whether same-sex relationships should have any legal status before they can be asked to decide if same-sex marriages should be banned.

"People who believe marriages between men and women should have a unique and privileged place in our society may also believe that same-sex relationships should have some place -- although not marriage," she wrote. "The single-subject rule protects the right of those people to hold both views and reflect both judgments by their vote."

And the governor, of course, is already saying that this is counter to the will of the people. Which may be true, but is still completely irrelevant.
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