Rainbow Spring: 2009

Monday, August 31, 2009

Case is a serious challenge to Florida's gay-adoption ban

BY CAROL MARBIN MILLER
The Miami Herald
August 30, 2009

An adoption case that is now before an appellate court case presents a significant challenge to Florida's law against gays.

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Sunday, June 28, 2009

Sex Without Intimacy: No Dating, No Relationships

by Brenda Wilson
Morning Edition
National Public Radio
June 8, 2009

The hookup — that meeting and mating ritual that started among high school and college students — is becoming a trend among young people who have entered the workaday world. For the many who are delaying the responsibilities of marriage and child-rearing, hooking up has virtually replaced dating.

It is a major shift in the culture over the past few decades, says Kathleen Bogle, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at La Salle University...

Friday, June 26, 2009

A Look at the Gay Rights Movement Beyond Marriage and the Military

DemocracyNow!
June 26, 2009

Forty years after Stonewall, where is the gay rights movement headed? What does the focus on marriage equality mean for the goals of gay liberation? We speak with activist, writer and historian, Lisa Duggan. “It remains to be seen whether a call for full civil equality can produce mass mobilization, or whether it might soon be reduced to a call for gay marriage only, or worse, to the production of just another commercially sponsored gay parade,” Duggan writes. “The devil will be in the details, which will be settled in the weeks to come.”...

Stonewall Riots 40th Anniversary: A Look Back at the Uprising that Launched the Modern Gay Rights Movement

DemocracyNow!
June 26, 2009

Commemorations are being held across the world this weekend to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising that launched the modern gay and lesbian rights movement. The uprising began in the morning on June 28, 1969, when New York City police officers raided a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. As the police began dragging some of the patrons out, members of the gay community decided to fight back, sparking three days of rioting. We play a documentary, Remembering Stonewall, with the voices of people who were there and speak with historian David Carter...

Friday, June 19, 2009

As Criticism of Obama Mounts Within Gay Community, Gay Rights Pioneer Cleve Jones Calls For March For Equality on Washington

DemocracyNow!
June 19, 2009

On Wednesday President Barack Obama signed a memorandum to extend some but not all benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees. Comprehensive healthcare for example, is not included. President Obama’s promise to work to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act or DOMA Wednesday came one week after his administration filed a controversial legal brief supporting DOMA, an action which greatly disappointed activists fighting for marriage equality. We speak with Cleve Jones, one of the giants of the gay rights and AIDS awareness movements. He is the founder of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt and the co-founder of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. In the 1970s Cleve Jones was a friend of the gay rights leader Harvey Milk...

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Queer liberation and the feminist connection

by Andrea Bauer
Freedom Socialist • Vol. 30, No. 3 • June-July 2009

Besides the profound connection to women's liberation, gay liberation is also bound up with every other struggle for justice.

The bigots certainly get this. Every far-right Web site and fundamentalist preacher foaming with hate offers up a laundry list of enemies: the gays, the immigrants, and the Jews; uppity women, Big Labor, and Blacks who demand too much...

Sunday, May 31, 2009

Where's the equal justice for gays?

By Joan Vennochi
Globe Columnist / May 28, 2009
Boston Globe

PRESIDENT OBAMA had much to say about the glass ceiling he is smashing on behalf of Hispanics and nothing to say about the glass ceiling the California Supreme Court is reimposing on gays.

Pastor: No Weddings Until Gay Marriage Ban Lifted

National Public Radio

All Things Considered, May 30, 2009 · The Rev. Art Cribbs, pastor of a church in San Marino, Calif., said with Proposition 8 "a boundary has been crossed" between religion and civil law. The state, he said, "failed to protect a vulnerable minority from the tyranny of a majority."...

Sunday, May 24, 2009

Gay U.S. diplomats to be given equal benefits

Statesman
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Sunday, May 24, 2009

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will soon announce that gay American diplomats will be given benefits similar to those that their heterosexual counterparts enjoy, U.S. officials said Saturday.

In a notice to be sent to State Department employees, Clinton says regulations that denied same-sex couples and their families the benefits that straight diplomats received are "unfair and must end," as they harm U.S. diplomacy...

In Civil War, Woman Fought Like A Man For Freedom

by Linda Paul
National Public Radio

..."A private in the Union Army made $13 a month, which was easily double what a woman would make as a laundress or a seamstress or even a maid," says Deanne Blanton, co-author of They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the Civil War. Blanton has documented hundreds of cases of women who masqueraded as men during the war. She says many joined for both patriotic and economic reasons.

"But once they were in the pants and earning more money and spending their money," Blanton says, "they seemed to greatly enjoy the freedom that came with being perceived as a man."

At the time of the Civil War, women couldn't vote. They mostly depended on men to survive. In return, they were supposed to devote their time and talents entirely to husbands, children and their extended families. That was the Victorian ideal.

That ideal was mostly aimed at middle- and upper-class women. Blanton says they're not the ones who went off to war...

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Tuesday, April 28, 2009

BRAZIL: Pilot Project Helps Men Abandon Violence

By Fabiana Frayssinet
Inter Press Service

RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 22 (IPS) - Some men interpret an overly long glance from another man as "a gay thing," others as "a provocation" to fight - ideas that are part of the "machista" mindset that a government initiative in Brazil is trying to break down.

Monday, April 20, 2009

American Idol’s Big Tease

by GUY TREBAY
Published: April 10, 2009
New York Times

Adam Lambert, a favorite on “American Idol,” dyes his blond hair black, has a fondness for Cher and is in touch with his inner Maybelline girl.

Sunday, April 19, 2009

The Bigots’ Last Hurrah

by Frank Rich
New York Times
April 18, 2009

WHAT would happen if you crossed that creepy 1960s horror classic “The Village of the Damned” with the Broadway staple “A Chorus Line”? You don’t need to use your imagination. It’s there waiting for you on YouTube under the title “Gathering Storm”: a 60-second ad presenting homosexuality as a national threat second only to terrorism.

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Testimony of 12-Year-Old with Two Moms Moves Some Vermont Legislators to Support Gay Marriage Bill

DemocracyNow!
April 8, 2009

We speak with a young advocate for legalizing gay marriage. Evann Orleck-Jetter testified at the public hearings on gay marriage last month before Vermont’s Joint Senate and House Judiciary Committees.

Many legislators later told Evann and her parents that her testimony had moved them to support the bill. Evann Orleck-Jetter joins me now from Burlington, Vermont.

Published Wednesday, April 8 with: In Historic Vote, Vermont Legislature Legalizes Gay Marriage

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

The Meaning of Iowa's Gay-Marriage Decision

...When the Iowa Supreme Court ruled on Friday that gays can marry in the Hawkeye State, gay marriage became not just a coastal thing. Deep in the rural heartland, a straightforward opinion — written by a justice appointed by a conservative Republican governor — methodically eviscerates one argument after another that for decades has been used to keep marriage the sole preserve of straight couples. "This class of people asks a simple and direct question: How can a state premised on the constitutional principle of equal protection justify exclusion of a class of Iowans from civil marriage?" Justice Mark S. Cady asked.

The answer? It can't....

Thursday, April 2, 2009

Girl Soldiers Used Up, Then Thrown Away

To be a teenager and female is bad enough in the midst of a war zone, but it is often little better when the guns fall silent. Caught in a sort of limbo between childhood and adulthood, when it comes to peace and reconciliation, former girl combatants are often treated as invisible, advocates say.

Monday, March 9, 2009

Taking the Gender Apartheid Tour in Saudi Arabia

Run Date: 03/07/05
By Rita Henley Jensen
WeNews editor in chief

Women's eNews Editor in Chief Rita Henley Jensen traveled to Saudi Arabia, to attend an economic forum. She was aware of the many restrictions on women, but once there, appreciated for the first time that the nation practiced gender apartheid.

Deconstructing gender, sex, and sexuality as applied to identity

Humanist , July-August, 2002 by Whitney Mitchell

...What we must understand is that, just because an individual doesn't fit one set of standards, the individual doesn't then automatically fit the opposite standards. Specifically, the female/ male binary is constructed as a natural occurrence and presumed to be unchangeable. However, intersexuality, by definition, offers clear evidence to the contrary. It serves as an opportunity to disprove the concepts of what is "natural" and to disrupt the heteronormative systems of sex, gender, and sexuality. It presents the possibility of proving gender to be nothing more than something abstract and conceptual. Analyzing intersexuality therefore provides greater opportunities for individual liberty and social understanding....

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1374/is_4_62/ai_89431091

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Thank you, Saker!

Resolution on Culture and Gender Awareness in International Psychology

http://www.apa.org/international/resolutiongender.html

Adopted by the Council of Representatives July 28, 2004

WHEREAS an estimated 60 percent (or more) of the world's psychologists now live outside the US (Hogan, 1995);

WHEREAS psychologists outside of the US have generated perspectives, methods and practices that correspond to the needs of the people in their societies and data that are relevant to the development of a more complete psychology of people (Bhopal, 2001; Espin & Gaweleck, 1992; Martin-Baro, 1994; Weiss, Whelan & Gupta, 2000; Winslow, Honein, & Elzubeir, 2002);

WHEREAS US leadership in world psychology is sometimes perceived as disproportionably influential, partly because of access to research funds, an abundance of US publication outlets and the wide acceptance of the English language (Kagitcibasi in Sunar, 1996; Sloan 2000);

WHEREAS US psychology needs to more fully consider the ramifications of national and cultural perspectives and indigenous psychologies (Castillo, 2001; Frank & Frank, 1991; Sue & Zane 1987) in its research, practice and educational efforts (Best & Williams, 1997; Draguns, 2001; Segall, Lonner, & Berry, 1998);

WHEREAS US grounded, normed, and structured measures dominate US empirical psychology, while internationally based, qualitative methods such as community action research are less known or valued in the US (Denzin & Lincoln, 2001; Murray & Chamberlain, 1999; Robson, 1993);

WHEREAS US assessment procedures, tests and normative data have been used extensively in other countries, some times without consideration of cultural differences that affect reliability and validity (Dana, 2000);

WHEREAS people of other cultures have adopted US methods of clinical diagnosis and intervention and US psychology has also exported these methods based on US norms and values to other cultures (Foa, Keane, & Friedman, 2000; Mezzich, 2002; Nakane and Nakane, 2002; Thorne & Lambers, 1998];

WHEREAS there is a need to develop and disseminate materials that will facilitate the training of psychologists to conduct culturally-appropriate research and practice around the world as well as within the culturally diverse United States (diMauro, Gilbert, & Parker, 2003; Friedman, 1997; Hays, 2001);

WHEREAS universities and colleges have called upon faculty and departments to internationalize their courses and curriculum, given the increasing number of international students at North American institutions (Marsella & Pedersen, 2002; Woolf, Hulsizer, & McCarthy, 2002);

WHEREAS most individuals from the United States, including psychologists, do not speak a second language or read journals or books in another language other than English, and therefore are unlikely to be familiar with firsthand sources of international research in other countries other than English speaking countries;

WHEREAS research focused on immigration and discrimination against immigrants and undocumented immigrants is sparse (Esses, Dovidio, Jackson & Armstrong, 2001; Evans, 2002; Martin, 1994);

WHEREAS decades of psychological studies have demonstrated that scientifically sound practice requires taking into account issues of gender and culture at all stages of the research process (Bem, 1993; Brodsky & Hare-Mustin; 1980; Harding, 1987; Schmitz, Stakeman & Sisneros, 1996; Sherif, 1979; Spence, 1987; White; Russo & Travis, 2001);

WHEREAS psychologists have demonstrated how privilege and oppression affect the lives of women and men across sexual orientations, disabilities, social class, age, ethnic and religious memberships (APA Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Older Adults, 2003; Banks, 2003; Eberhardt & Fiske, 1998; Gershick, 2000; Sidanius, Levin, Federico & Pratto, 2001; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999;

WHEREAS women world wide experience discrimination in terms of resources and access to food, health care, inheritance, credit, education, vocational training, hiring, fair compensation for paid work, family and public rights, individual mobility and travel and religious education and participation, and they also may face legal, societal, cultural and religious practices which justify and endorse this discrimination (Bianchi, Casper & Peltola, 1999; Goode, 1993; Hauchler & Kennedy, 1994; Smeeding & Ross, 1999; United Nations, 2000; United Nations Population Fund, 2000), and psychology could address these global problems internationally (United Nations, 2000; United Nations Population Fund, 2000);

WHEREAS, as a result of gender discrimination, women internationally constitute a majority of the poor, and female headed families are the lowest income groups in many countries around the world (Blossfield, 1995; Duncan & Edwards, 1997; Goldberg & Kremen, 1990; McLanahan & Kelly, 1998); moreover, educational achievements and opportunities and literacy rates for women are significantly less than for men (United Nations Department of Public Information, 1995; UNESCO, 2002);

WHEREAS, as a result of gender discrimination, women experience violations of their body integrity, interpersonal violence and physical abuse (Center for Policy Alternatives, 1998; European Women's Lobby, 2000; Nylen & Heimer, 2000); and under repressive systems, in wars, and in postwar conditions, women are targeted for violence (Comas-Diaz & Jansen, 1995);

WHEREAS, as a result of gender discrimination individuals with differently gendered identity and gender expression experience violence and discrimination within many societies from both the populace and from those in authority (Dworkin, & Yi, 2003);

WHEREAS psychologists strive to promote international peace and understanding and to decrease ethnic and gender violence;

WHEREAS, in contrast to the United States where professional practices and policies generally are in concert with and support governmental structures, in many other countries, psychologists must advocate for social justice and oppose unjust governmental structures and policies (Fox & Prilleltensky, 2001; Martin-Baro, 1994; Moane, 1999; Moler & Catley, 2000; Nandy, 1987);

WHEREAS knowledge management, production and dissemination of information are also affected by global politics and economics in ways that maintain social inequality (Capra, 1996; Fox & Prilleltensky, 2001; Giddens, 2000; Harding, 1993; Wallerstein, 1992);

WHEREAS the field of psychology could benefit significantly from the expansion of its knowledge base through international perspectives, conclusions and practices (Bronstein & Quina, 1988; Gielen & Pagan, 1993; Marsella, 1998); Nandy 1983, Pareek 1990;

WHEREAS the opportunity for mutual benefit and greater effectiveness in solving global problems is at hand in research partnerships across nations and cultures if psychologists proceed with critical awareness and a commitment to gender, cultural, social, economic and religious justice (Sloan, 1996);

WHEREAS psychologists have a responsibility to better understand the values, mores, history and social policies of other nations and cultures that affect generalizations and recommendations about best practices (Schmitz, Stakeman & Sisneros, 1996);

WHEREAS psychologists are committed to culture fair and gender fair competent unbiased practice (APA Guidelines on Cross Cultural Education and Training, Research, Organizational Change and Practice for Psychologists, 2002; APA Guidelines for Practice with Girls and Women (Draft), 2002; APA Guidelines for Psychotherapy with Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Clients, 2000; American Psychological Association, A New Model of Disability, 2003);

WHEREAS psychologists are ethically guided to "recognize that fairness and justice entitle all persons to access to and benefit from the contributions of psychology" and to "respect the rights, dignity, and worth of all people" (American Psychological Association, Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct, 2002);

WHEREAS the International Committee for Women Task Force of Division 52, International Psychology, has developed an important position paper on “Cultural And Gender Awareness in International Psychology” that identifies critical areas of consideration for psychologists to consider in cross-cultural research (Rice and Ballou, 2002);

THEREFORE LET IT BE RESOLVED that the American Psychological Association will:

(1) advocate for more research on the role that cultural ideologies have in the experience of women and men across and within countries on the basis of sex, gender identity, gender expression, ethnicity, social class, age, disabilities, and religion.

(2) advocate for more collaborative research partnerships with colleagues from diverse cultures and countries leading to mutually beneficial dialogues and learning opportunities.

(3) advocate for critical research that analyzes how cultural, economic, and geopolitical perspectives may be embedded within US psychological research and practice.

(4) encourage more attention to a critical examination of international cultural, gender, gender identity, age, and disability perspectives in psychological theory, practice, and research at all levels of psychological education and training curricula.

(5) encourage psychologists to gain an understanding of the experiences of individuals in diverse cultures, and their points of view and to value pluralistic world views, ways of knowing, organizing, functioning, and standpoints.

(6) encourage psychologists to become aware of and understand how systems of power hierarchies may influence the privileges, advantages, and rewards that usually accrue by virtue of placement and power.

(7) encourage psychologists to understand how power hierarchies may influence the production and dissemination of knowledge in psychology internationally and to alter their practices according to the ethical insights that emerge from this understanding.

(8) encourage psychologists to appreciate the multiple dilemmas and contradictions inherent in valuing culture and actual cultural practices when they are oppressive to women, but congruent with the practices of diverse ethnic groups.

(9) advocate for cross national research that analyzes and supports the elimination of cultural, gender, gender identity, age, and disability discrimination in all arenas—economic, social, educational, and political.

(10) support public policy that supports global change toward egalitarian relationships and the elimination of practices and conditions oppressive to women.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the American Psychological Association

(1) recommend that Boards and Committees consider the impact of the globalization of psychology and the incorporation of international perspectives into their activities, and (2) charge the Committee on International Relations in Psychology, in collaboration appropriate APA Boards and Committees, to implement any directives from the Council of Representatives that result from the adoption of the resolution.