Walking Bo
I would give credit to the artist but I don’t know who it was, so I’ll just thank Ray for forwarding the email.
Month: May 2009
Gay Marriage Has Twice the Support Today That Interracial Marriage Had When It Was Legalized in the 1960s (Updated)
(Note: This article was updated on Feb. 19, 2010)
Four polls released over the last week show that the American public is slowly but steadily coming to support the idea that marriage equality should be the law of the land.
As meager as support for gay marriage is now — 49 percent in WashPost, 44 percent in CNN, 42 percent in the Times/CBS and 38 percent in Qunnipiac — it is still about double the 20-percent approval for interracial marriage in the country a few months after mixed marriages became legal.
The latest Washington Post/ABC poll shows the highest support, finding for the first time that more people (49 percent) are in favor of gay marriage than are against it (46 percent). That’s a whopping 17 point jump in support in the poll from five years ago.
In a CNN poll released yesterday, opposition to gay marriage was ahead, 54 percent to 44 percent, while 60 percent favored same-sex civil unions. (The most significant finding in the poll may have been the 58 percent support for gay marriage among young voters.)
The New York Times/CBS poll found that 42 percent supported gay marriage — the highest number ever recorded in that poll. And the Quinnipiac University poll reported that 55 percent opposed gay marriage while 38 percent favored it. On the other hand, by 57 percent to 38 percent, these same voters said they favored civil unions.
One factor behind the steady growth in support for marriage equality is that as fair-minded people delve into the arguments for and against gay marriage, the rationales promoted by anti-gay activists collapse under scrutiny.
In 1968, the year after the “activist” Supremes legalized interracial marriage in its decision on Loving vs. Virginia, a Gallup poll found that the vast majority of Americans still opposed the idea that blacks and whites could marry — 72 percent to 20 percent. Just 10 years earlier, in the wake of a California Supreme Court decision that overturned newly minted anti-interracial marriage laws in the state, Gallup found that 94 percent of Americans opposed mixed-race marriages.
As meager as support for gay marriage is now — 49 percent in WashPost, 44 percent in CNN, 42 percent in the Times/CBS and 38 percent in Qunnipiac — it is still about double the 20-percent approval for interracial marriage in the country a few months after mixed marriages became legal. (The average of support in the four new polls is 43.25 percent.)
In fact, it wasn’t until 1991, almost a quarter century after Loving, that opinion flipped on interracial marriage, 48 percent to 42 percent.
The most interesting number in the current round of polls comes from CNN, which found that 49 percent of Americans said they knew someone who is gay. It’s this factor that is likely prompting fair-minded people to apply more rigorous analysis to the flimsy excuses for opposing gay marriage.
The fact that half the people in the country say they have a gay friend or family member also proves that coming out works. Bigotry is a byproduct of ignorance. Nothing debunks stereotypes and popular misconceptions than actually knowing someone who is gay.
(The fact that 49 percent of Americans claim to know someone who is gay also appears to belie anti-gay activists’ assertion that only 1 or 2 percent of the population is gay. By comparison, about 1.5 percent of the country are Mormons, but it seems unlikely that half of Americans would say they personally know someone who is a Mormon. For example, I don’t.)
On “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” a few weeks ago, conservative columnist George Will warned Republicans that it was folly to continue to pin their party’s future on drumming up hatred for gay people to turn out votes. Young conservatives, he said, see being gay as no more controversial than being left-handed.
That statement from one of the Beltway’s leading expositors of conventional thinking was a sign of defeat for the dwindling army of homophobes and their anti-gay agenda.
The start of the “coming out” movement roughly coincides with the Stonewall Riots in June 1969 — just five years after the Loving decision. While there is a long way to go, this is a remarkable — and, yes, historic — turnaround in public attitudes in just 40 years.
Republicans Cheat Better than Democrats
Gail Sheehy has a great column in The Daily Beast about the differences between Republican and Democratic political candidates who commit adultery. She alleges that Republicans are better at it because they tend to “sleep with their own kind, while Democrats sleep beneath themselves. And those women can be counted on to sell their stories.”
Sheehy makes some valid points, but my favorite is her assertion that Newt Gingrich’s run for the presidency was averted when he got caught dallying with a staffer. Whew! That was a close one. Viva Viagra!
The Words On Obama
Pew Research has posted an interesting set of results about the words survey respondents used to describe President Barack Obama. As you scroll over the words, a graphic appears that gives you the change in the frequency of use of certain words since September, or pre-election.
Not surprisingly, the top word used to describe the president is “intelligent” and the second is “good.” The third is a bit of a surprise: “socialist” has been used to describe Obama more than 200 percent more often now than in September (from 6 to 20). Interestingly, “inexperienced” has seen a precipitous drop from 55 to 13, and “change” has dropped from 36 to 10.
While no deep conclusions can be drawn from this Pew pooh, it is mildly interesting to see how survey respondents, like rats in a lab, respond to the stimuli of the media in changing their opinions.
Pensito Flu Update: Role of Bacterial Infection
You know what we’re not getting from the mainstream media coverage of the H1N1 flu? Insights like this one from ProMed:
I have been following the ProMed “swine flu” updates and noticed an interesting omission. I am a virologist who works on RNA viruses
(including flu), and I feel that the reports are “viro-centric,” i.e., heavily biased towards blaming everything on influenza and not enough speculation about co-infections. I certainly agree that there should be more funding for basic respiratory disease research and am pleased that President Obama asked for an additional USD 1.5 billion to help out, but I do not think spending it all on influenza vaccine trials is wise.Three observations make it highly likely that the “flu” fatalities are due to bacterial co-infections. First, a study from Baylor (Ramilio et al, Blood, 2007) profiling humans with flu symptoms found that greater than 30 percent of the fatalities were in people with bacterial-influenza co-infections. Knowing the inadequacy of the diagnostics, I would assume the number of co-infections is much higher than 30 percent, possibly even 90 percent in fatalities.
Second, the index case in Mexico was a small boy who got severely sick, but his doctor gave him an antibiotic (usually for bacterial infections) and he survived. The fact that he got better two days after an antibiotic may indicate that he had a bacterial infection in addition to a flu infection.
Third, one of the earliest Mexican deaths was a diabetic woman in her 40s. A lung biopsy contained influenza. Several people around her had respiratory diseases, but none of them were positive for influenza! This means that it was possible she too had both flu and bacterial infections that led to her death.
Quote du Jour
You simply MUST be vocally and passionately on the side of REFORM. The status quo is no longer acceptable. If the dynamic becomes ‘President Obama is on the side of reform and Republicans are against it,’ then the battle is lost and every word in this document is useless.
— Excerpt from a memo from pollster Frank Luntz to House Republicans that offers a road map for opposing President Obama’s health-care plan.
Think H1N1 Flu Is Bad? Dengue Fever’s a Bitch
While the number of confirmed cases of H1N1 influenza remain in the hundreds in Mexico and the scores in the United States, the number of confirmed cases of dengue fever numbers in the many thousands in several states in Brazil. In late April the Brazilian government released statistics on confirmed cases of dengue fever and dengue hemorrhagic fever (a worse version).
The rapid increase in cases was attributed to heavy rains and large amounts of trash accumulating in cities.
The most recent totals released by the Ministry of Health in early April 2009 said that throughout the country dengue virus infected 161,414 people, which many believe is lower than the true number of infections. The state secretariat statistics are typically higher and more accurate that the ministry’s.
One example is Bahia. In the totals of the federal government were 41,093 dengue cases. The government of Bahia said that it reached 55,483 cases in Bahia through April 17, 2009, which represents a 220 percent increase compared to the same period in 2008. Of that total, 47 people have died of dengue.
The municipalities of Jequie, Itabuna, Porto Seguro, Ilheus, and Salvador had nearly half of the confirmed dengue cases in Bahia. Of that total, 389 people were victims of dengue hemorrhagic fever (DHF). According to the bulletin, 82 percent of the municipalities in Bahia recorded dengue cases.
Quote du Jour
Do you realize that under our dynamic leadership of our leader, we have gone from 55 and probably to 40 (Senate seats) in two election cycles, and if the tea leaves that I read are correct, we will wind up with about 36 after this election cycle. So if leadership means anything, it means you don’t lose … approximately 19 seats in three election cycles with good leadership.
— Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY), quoted by the Louisville Courier-Journal , blasting fellow Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY).
Pensito Flu Update: Understanding the True Risk of Infection
This is a very good article from the Harvard Business Review’S editor’s blog titled “On Your Way to Get a Flu Shot Don’t Trip” that provides some badly needed perspective on the current H1N1 influenza outbreak.
Risk is hard to understand.
For example, if I said that we should be more worried right now about dying from a slip, trip or stumble on level ground than about dying from swine flu, you might think I’m nuts. But I’m not. Statistically, at this moment, we’re about 700 times more likely to die stumbling than from getting swine flu. If swine flu fatalities were a quart of oil, then stumbling fatalities would be about 3 oil drums.
Even if it’s true that tripping is more lethal than swine flu, it’s hard to fathom. H1N1 just seems much scarier right now. Why is that?
Mainly, it’s our brains. They’re not wired to be objective. The analytical response to risk–the part when we come to understand how likely or unlikely something is to occur–is subsequent and sometimes subservient to our emotional response to risk–the part when we’re scared out of our wits.
That is, first we fear, then we figure. Evolutionarily speaking, this makes sense. For the species to survive, we had to meet every uncertainty with caution.
Unfortunately, we didn’t evolve in the presence of mass media, and mass media really messes with our brains. Images, sounds, access to rare but spectacular events–and the ability to instantly share all of that with each other–actually reinforces our emotional response to risk. It makes it harder for us to analyze the risk objectively, to put it in a realistic perspective.
