Young people today drink and smoke much less than previous generations. The rates of teenage pregnancy and youth crime have fallen dramatically. New Statesman editor Jason Cowley talks to experts to find out what is shaping the attitudes and choices of young people today. He grew up in Harlow in Essex during a time of particular social unrest. He returns to his former sixth-form college where he meets a group of students who are markedly more conformist and disciplined than his generation, but more anxious too. So what accounts for this change in young people's behaviour? Is it economic pressures, government policy or the fear of transgressors being shamed on social media? Will we continue to see the rise of a generation of New Young Fogeys?
14 June 2016
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Some world leaders’ reactions to Orlando shooting prompt cries of hypocrisy on gay rights
“If you’re sincere about your prayers for the Orlando victims, maybe you will tweet a message of support for the millions of similar LGBT people back home,” journalist Dhrubo Jyoti wrote in an open letter to Mr. Modi in the Hindustan Times.
Majority-Muslim countries that are allies of the United States also rushed to express sympathy — including Saudi Arabia, where homosexuality is illegal under its sometimes-harsh interpretation of Sharia. Punishments for same-sex relations in the kingdom include execution and chemical castration. [...]
But experts noted that condolence statements from Arab states where homosexuality is criminalized — and widely seen as un-Islamic — were careful not to specify the nature of the Orlando club or who was targeted there. [...]
In the Pew Research Center’s major study of religions in 2014, American Muslims were split on homosexuality. The poll found that 45 percent of American Muslims thought homosexuality should be accepted, and 47 percent should be discouraged.
That means Muslims are less accepting of homosexuality than most religious groups in the study — 66 percent of mainline Protestants, 70 percent of Catholics and more than 80 percent of Jews and Buddhists say gay relationships should be accepted. But it puts Muslims ahead of evangelical Christians and Mormons, just 36 percent of whom say homosexuality is acceptable.
The Huffington Post: Here's What Happened When A Terrorist Attacked LGBT People In A Country With Strict Gun Laws
Like Florida shooter Omar Mateen, Yishai Schlissel was a homophobic extremist determined to kill gay people. But Schlissel, unlike Mateen, lived in a country with strict gun laws: Israel. When Schlissel attacked a gay pride parade in Jerusalem a year ago, he was armed with a knife, not an assault rifle.
He stabbed six people, killing a 16-year-old girl before he was apprehended. Mateen used a semiautomatic assault-style rifle to shoot more than 100 people in a Florida gay nightclub early Sunday, killing 49, before law enforcement officers shot him to death.
There is no such thing as a right to bear arms in Israel. To get a gun, an individual has to apply for a license, show a need for a firearm (either for work or personal safety), demonstrate an ability to safely use a gun, and pass a mental health check. Licenses are only granted to individuals who have been Israeli residents for more than three years and who are over 21 years of age if they served in the military, and 27 if they didn’t. Even after obtaining permission to buy a gun, the government limits the amount of ammunition an individual can purchase.
Vox: Donald Trump's pro-gay Islamophobia is straight out of the European right-wing playbook
But from an international vantage point, Trump’s maneuver here is totally predictable. While new to America, using gay rights as a smokescreen through which to advocate anti-Muslim policies is a favorite trick of the European far right, and has been for more than a decade. Trump’s innovation is taking advantage of the US’s pro-gay trajectory in recent years to adapt the technique for American audiences.
The first politician to master this line of argument was the Dutch activist Pim Fortuyn, whose just-founded political party took second place in the 2002 Dutch elections, nine days after Fortuyn himself was assassinated.
As Vox’s Zack Beauchamp notes, there are more than a few parallels between Fortuyn and Trump. They both rose to political power seemingly out of nowhere by exploiting anti-immigrant sentiment. Both proposed blanket bans on Muslim immigration. Each terrified the center-right establishment in his country. [...]
Frank Gaffney, another vocal anti-Muslim bigot and former adviser to Ted Cruz, has made similar comments, expressing bafflement at left-wing solidarity with Muslims: "the antipathy of the Islamists to homosexuality yet being supported by people who prize homosexual rights and have many of them in their ranks."
FiveThirtyEight: Be Wary Of Claims About How The Orlando Attack Will Affect The Election
But, as Nate pointed out at the time, it’s difficult to tease out exactly how much of a bounce Trump really got. Moreover, Trump’s support didn’t move much after the bombings in Brussels in March, which suggests the voters disposed to favor Trump due to the threat of terrorism may have already moved into his camp. That is, voters are now aware of Trump’s positions, and he may not have any more ground to gain.
This leads to a second point: The general election electorate is much different than a GOP primary electorate. Just because Trump gained support among Republicans after a terrorist attack doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll gain among voters at large. Trump, for instance, saw his favorability ratings among Republicans go up during the primary, while at the same time they went down among both Democrats and independents. You can see this split between the Republican and general electorate on specific issues, too. In the most recent ABC News/Washington Post May poll — which found Trump leading Clinton in the horse race by 2 percentage points — just 43 percent of Americans favored a temporary ban on Muslim immigration,1 compared with 64 percent of Republicans. In the same poll, Clinton was more trusted than Trump on immigration, 51 percent to 42 percent, while Republicans favored Trump on the issue 83 percent to 11 percent.
That brings up point No. 3: There are a lot of directions in which this debate can go. Orlando involved a lone gunman, who swore allegiance to ISIS but didn’t have strong ties to it. The attacks involved a legally purchased gun and occurred at a gay nightclub. This was a mass shooting, a terrorist attack and a hate crime, making it hard to predict how the American public will react. Clinton, for her part, will likely try to make this debate about who is best prepared for a crisis. Polls show Americans view Clinton as better prepared than Trump is to deal with an international crisis. In the ABC News/Washington Post poll from May, she led Trump by 19 percentage points on this question. She also led Trump on who was more trusted on “social issues such as gay marriage and abortion” by 33 percentage points in a Gallup survey conducted in May.
Politico: Mark Rutte regrets ‘disastrous’ Ukraine referendum
More than 60 percent of those who voted rejected the deal, but only 32 percent of eligible voters took part — just above the 30 percent threshold needed for the result to be valid. As the result was non-binding, the Dutch parliament was able to dismiss it, voting not to ditch the deal.
“I’m totally against referendums and I’m totally, totally, totally against referendums on multilateral agreements because it makes no sense, as we’ve seen with the Dutch referendum,” Rutte told a conference on the Dutch presidency in The Hague, attended by members of the national and European parliaments.
Quartz: Mongolia is changing all its addresses to three-word phrases
Mongolia will become a global pioneer next month, when its national post office starts referring to locations by a series of three-word phrases instead of house numbers and street names.
The new system is devised by a British startup called What3Words, which has assigned a three-word phrase to every point on the globe. The system is designed to solve the an often-ignored problem of 75% of the earth’s population, an estimated 4 billion people, who have no address for mailing purposes, making it difficult to open a bank account, get a delivery, or be reached in an emergency. In What3Words’ system, the idea is that a series of words is easier to remember than the strings of number that make up GPS coordinates. Each unique phrase corresponds to a specific 9-square-meter spot on the map. [...]
Even in the capital city of Ulaanbataar, not all streets are named. When people don’t have a street address, the current solution is for them to travel to a collection point to pick up their post, says Chris Sheldrick, the co-founder and chief executive of What3Words. People have to write a series of detailed directions, in addition to the address, so that mail-delivery people know where to drop off letters, Sheldrick says.
The Telegraph: Islam does have a problem with homosexuality. But so do western conservatives
Liberals, say the Right, must find themselves in a terrible quandary. As supporters of both gay liberation and multiculturalism, how do they process the fact that many Muslims believe homosexuality is a crime? Conservatives insist that their confident defence of Western history and philosophy is more gay-friendly than liberal multiculturalism. Jens Spahn, the gay German conservative tipped as successor to Angela Merkel, electrified a political convention two years ago when he said that there must be no compromise with Islamism because: “I don’t ever want to experience another attack or insults when I walk through Berlin hand-in-hand with my boyfriend.
Liberals listening to Trump and Spahn might choke on their tofu. When, they would counter, did Western conservatives suddenly become fans of sexual freedom? Haven’t they spent decades fighting gay rights? Marco Rubio, the Florida senator, was one of the first Republicans to say that Orlando was an attack on gay people – and good for him. But Left-wing critics argued that his outspoken opposition to gay marriage was part of the cultural environment in which Mateen’s bigotry grew. Islam wasn’t the only religious authority that Mateen would have encountered in Florida telling him that gay people are going to Hell. He could have tuned in to any evangelical radio show to hear that. [...]
Because TV is awash with the liberal values of its producers, it can appear as if our entire hemisphere has embraced sexual liberty. That’s a conclusion that many conservative Muslims resent – but they’re quite wrong: not everyone in the West sees homosexuality and heterosexuality as equal. The average Dominican friar has far more in common with a typical Imam than he does with a liberal Conservative MP. And so long as neither Christian nor Muslim breaks the law, we probably wouldn’t expect the state to go out of its way to challenge them. Sexual privacy is now widely regarded as a Western principle – but so is freedom of religious conscience.
BBC: Prayers for Orlando 'shallow' without religious LGBT support, says bishop
The Bishop of Cork, Cloyne and Ross has condemned people of faith who don't support the LGBT community, in the wake of the shootings at a gay nightclub in Orlando. [...]
Leaders in both Pakistan and Qatar have condemned the shootings and expressed sympathy for those affected.
Homosexuality is a crime in both of these countries. [...]
"Whatever about my personal views and solidarity as an individual to gay and lesbian people, it is undeniable that I am part of a religion, and indeed institution, that all too often, over the centuries, has caused deep hurt and tangible damage to gay and lesbian people," he said in a speech he gave at Cork LGBT Awareness Week last year.
CityLab: Violence Against LGBT People in America Is Astoundingly Common
In a 2011 analysis of FBI hate-crime statistics, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that “LGBT people are more than twice as likely to be the target of a violent hate-crime than Jews or black people,” said Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the center. Because the population of LGBT Americans is relatively small, and the number of hate crimes against that group is significant, LGBT individuals face a higher risk than other groups of being the victim of an attack. “They are more than four times as likely as Muslims, and almost 14 times as likely as Latinos,” Potok added. Sexual orientation motivated roughly 20 percent of hate crimes in 2013, according to the FBI; the only factor that accounted for more was race.
The vast majority of those crimes are not carried out by Muslim extremists, Potok said. “It’s a mix of white supremacists and their ilk and people who would be considered relatively normal members of society,” Potok said. “The majority of attacks on gay people do not come from people who are members of organized hate groups. [...]
This kind of attitude is not only held by one particular group, religious or otherwise. In 2014, a majority of Americans said they believed gay sex is morally unacceptable, and 14 percent of Americans said they believed AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behavior, according to the Public Religion Research Institute. There is of course no causal relationship between disapproval of homosexuality and mass murder. But anti-LGBT sentiments and rhetoric, which are not uncommon, are part of the broader U.S. social context in which more than half of LGBT-identified people say they’re concerned about being the victim of a hate crime.
The New York Times: A Brief History of Attacks at Gay and Lesbian Bars
From the 1969 police raid at the Stonewall Inn in New York City that set off riots and helped touch off the modern gay-rights movement to the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard to near-epidemic levels of violence against transgender women, the community has been marked by flashes of trauma.
After the massacre at a gay club in Orlando, Fla., that left 49 dead and 53 others injured, Richard Kim, the executive editor of The Nation, wrote on Sunday that gay bars and clubs have often been sanctuaries. And sometimes those sanctuaries have come under siege.
Here are a few significant examples.
Salon: Overcompensation Nation: It’s time to admit that toxic masculinity drives gun violence
Every time feminists talk about toxic masculinity, there is a chorus of whiny dudes who will immediately assume — or pretend to assume — that feminists are condemning all masculinity, even though the modifier “toxic” inherently suggests that there are forms of masculinity that are not toxic. [...]
For obvious political reasons, conservatives are hustling as fast as they can to make this about “radical Islam,” which is to say they are trying to imply that there’s something inherent to Islam and not Christianity that causes such violence. This, of course, is hoary nonsense, as there is a long and ignoble history of Christian-identified men, caught up in the cult of toxic masculinity, sowing discord and causing violence in our country: The gun-toting militiamen that caused a showdown in Oregon, the self-appointed border patrol called the Minutemen that recently made news again as their founder was convicted of child molestation, men who attack abortion clinics and providers.
Toxic masculinity aspires to toughness but is, in fact, an ideology of living in fear: The fear of ever seeming soft, tender, weak, or somehow less than manly. This insecurity is perhaps the most stalwart defining feature of toxic masculinity.
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