Friday, June 24, 2011

Wax your Daughter, Save for College!

It must be confusing growing up in America these days. Sexting is illegal, yet waxing for preteen girls is now a trend. So girl-children's bodies have to look sexy, but they are not allowed to share this sexiness with anyone else in any way.

Why should a tween girl worry about primping an area of her body no one is supposed to see? Well, one salon owner informs us that "Virgin hair can be waxed so successfully that growth can be permanently stopped in just 2 to 6 sessions. Save your child a lifetime of waxing... and put the money in the bank for her college education instead!"

Eliminating future work while saving money? What American could pass on a chance like this?! After all, college IS ridiculously expensive. And it's not like there could be any downside to the procedure...

Teaching young girls that pain equals beauty and social acceptance, that's a great lesson. You're never too young to learn how to change your body to please men! Some prudes disagree, of course, like children's advocate Dr. Levin, who believes, "Girls shouldn’t be taught so early to focus on how they look and that things like money, makeup and looking good buy happiness, instead of the skills that they possess....Should parents feed into that negativity or create an environment to help girls resist it?"

But if parents learned to teach their daughters that we can be worthy of love without cosmetic procedures, how would the beauticians feed their own children?

Monday, June 20, 2011

America is Pro-Life...and Pro-Unplanned Pregnancy?

LifeNews has a wonderful way with statistics. They can take data that shows 76% of Americans support legal abortion, 50% of Americans favor the current legal status of abortion, and come back with a headline that says AMERICA IS PRO-LIFE.

How do they do this? Well, it's all based on a Gallup poll that can be viewed directly here. Originally Gallup asked people to support 1 of 3 categories; abortion legal in any circumstances, abortion legal in some, and abortion legal in none. When split this way, 27% favored legal in all, 49% favored legal in some, and 22% favored legal in none. So only 22% were for banning abortion.

Gallup then fixed the stats by splitting the middle category into those who wanted abortion legal in most circumstances, and those who wanted it to be legal in only a few. In this way they got 10% of voters wanting legal abortion "under most circumstances," and 39% wanting it to be legal in "only a few circumstances." So now they can say that 39% + 22% = 63% of Americans support no or severely limited abortion.

Does this mean America really is Pro-Life? Well, you can split the stats anyway you want. You can say that only 22% of Americans favor banning abortion completely. 50% of Americans DO want to allow abortion in "some circumstances." And this is what we already allow (our circumstance being abortions up until the third trimester.) So half the country wants NO change to our abortion policy.

Even when looking only at the extreme views, MORE (27%) Americans favor always allowing abortion rather than never allowing abortion (22%). So any way you cut it, most Americans don't favor a change to our abortion policy. But Gallup biased the results by splitting up the middle group. The lesson: If you split up the majority of a group, you can transform their consensus into a series of conflicting categories, hiding the true majority opinion.

So most Americans want to allow abortion under some circumstances. But most Americans also support severely limited abortion. Can all of this be true while America is still Pro-Life? Rest assured, it can all be true. It's just that we have to really think about what "Pro-Life" means.

Remember, we can hide the true majority opinion if we split up a group into conflicting categories. In America, we have "Pro-Choice" and "Pro-Life" categories. Both positive sounding terms. But they're not really that clear and distinct, because pro-choice people could also be pro-life in many circumstances. The difference is that pro-life on a political level means everyone has to be pro-life, all the time, or be criminally responsible and morally wrong. So really, we might rename the Pro-Life position "Pro-Forced Birth" or "Pro-Unplanned Pregnancy."

I wonder how THAT would bias the statistics? If Pro-Life means abortion is NEVER legal, under any circumstances, that would mean only 22% of America supports it (according to this poll). America is not THIS kind of pro-life. But if we allow pro-life to mean allowing abortion only under a few circumstances, without defining exactly WHAT those circumstances are, it's much easier to include the majority of Americans as pro-life.

So it seems no one really wants to have abortions, but most people feel it should be allowable in certain circumstances. There is our general consensus. Now if we could just leave the law to allow for that, American could move on from this whole issue.

Saturday, June 11, 2011

Gay Stipend Part of Giant Gay Conspiracy in Massachusetts

Cambridge, Massachusetts, has the rest of the state talking. "In a move that may be the first of its kind in the country, Cambridge will soon begin making payments to same-sex married public employees to defray the cost of what local officials have called a discriminatory federal tax." While certain companies (like Google) already pay their employees this sort of stipend, Cambridge is the first level of government to do so.

Why would Cambridge be the first place for this to happen? Previous mayor, E. Denise Simmons, pointed out that "Having marriage equality yet an unequal tax burden keeps [certain] married couples on the margins, and marginalization in a lot of ways is seen as a level of discrimination."

But why should the state or even a single city have to pay this difference? Current Cambridge Mayor, David Maher, explains that the "City of Cambridge once again stepped up as a leader in civil rights and took steps to mitigate this tax inequity...This action is the right and fair thing to do until the federal government addresses this issue." He also noted that he doesn't expect to see other cities follow suit soon, because it "requires the expenditure of funds."

So, why would the Mayors of Cambridge think this was worth spending funds on before anyone else? Could it be that, they support gay right because...both mayors mentioned in this article, are gay. Yes, it's true. E. Denise Simmons was the first openly lesbian African-American mayor in the United States. David Maher came out during his term last summer. Heck, even the Mayor before Simmons was gay; Kenneth Reeves was the first openly gay African-American mayor anywhere in the United States! (source)

So, you can see Massachusetts is only spending money on gay people because their government is gay. They don't care about the greater good of society at all, only helping gay people. Heck, probably everyone in the whole state is gay! That means all the other things in Massachusetts that we thought were great are probably just gay scams too. Like Harvard, that's totally gay. And having the lowest divorce rate in the nation? That's probably gay too.


P.S. I know some of you are looking at California and thinking, but isn't that a really gay state too? How come they don't have a low divorce rate? But remember, California is not nearly as gay as Massachusetts. California revoked gay marriage in 2008 (via Prop 8) because over 50% of that state did not support gay marriage. Meanwhile, Massachusetts' state motto is; "By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty." I mean, swords and liberty, what's more gay than that?