Reparative therapy's most alluring fiction is right there in its name: the idea of an Edenic reparation, a return to a Golden Age when life was much less complicated. It is a lie I've seen repeated in the latest string of anti-LGBT legislation passed in Tennessee, Mississippi, and most notably North Carolina. In order to protect us from complicated identities and shifting realities, politicians hide under the guise of safety, cleansing public spaces of all ambiguity. Bathrooms become either/or, and businesses operate under the personal beliefs of their owners. "Safe spaces" are reserved for those least in need of them. Instead of making room for all people, these states offer the same two options my parents once offered me: conform or move on.
10 May 2016
Polish government supports right to discriminate
Polish minister responsible for equal treatment said during a press conference that a business can, on the grounds of freedom to provide services, can refuse to provide a service on the bases of skin colour or sexual orientation of a client. Accoridng to the said official law cannot interfere into private transactions.
read the article (in Polish)
The New York Times: Is This the End of the Religious Right?
Deliberately or not, Mr. Trump may be the perfect candidate for an evangelical subculture that has increasingly become enamored with the prosperity, or health and wealth, gospel. In trying to build a singular religious faction that agreed on some core issues (like abortion), the Republican Party has courted that subculture, even though many evangelicals consider prosperity theology to be heretical. Mr. Trump acts more like a televangelist than an evangelical.
Although Ted Cruz used the traditional religious right playbook to win in Iowa, Mr. Trump’s subsequent successes in beating Mr. Cruz among evangelicals — including across wide sections of the Bible Belt — demonstrated that many Republican voters, and even many evangelical Republicans, were more swept up in Trump-style nativist culture wars than battles over abortion, marriage or, especially, bathrooms. Mr. Trump understood he could unite nativists and culture warriors using his diatribes against political correctness as an all-purpose code to stoke conservative resentments.
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Salon: Delusional, prudish, selfish, violent: This is how Americans compare to the rest of the world
It’s fairly common knowledge that Europeans, overall, are less religious than Americans. U.S. presidential speeches always end with a perfunctory “God bless America,” our athletes thank a god who apparently prefers rigging sports competitions to curing cancer, and there are odes to the lord on our money (America’s Real Highest Power™). A Pew survey released last year found that almost 75 percent of Americans across denominations say religion is at least “somewhat” important to them, with 53 percent calling it “very” important. That’s higher than in every European country polled, a list topped by Poland, where just 28 percent—close to half America’s total—answered in kind. France, in what we’ll see is pretty consistent, came in dead last in Europe, while Japan and China, to borrow a conservative phrase, are even more “godless.” [...]
No indicator exists in a vacuum, so it makes sense that America’s religiosity impacts its sexual mores—or its purported ones, anyway. In a 2013 survey, 30 percent of Americans said sex before marriage is “morally unacceptable.” Pretty much every country that placed a lower importance on religion found premarital sex less of an abomination, although Russia’s in a dead heat with us on this one. France, where just 6 percent held this opinion, tied for last place with Germany. [...]
Rags-to-riches stories do happen, but they happen less in the U.S. than in many other countries. A 2012 Economic Policy Institute study found there’s far less class mobility in America than in other wealthy European countries, as well as Canada, Japan and Australia. Business Insider cites a Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco study that concluded a lot us of are essentially walled in by the class barriers that surrounded us at birth. Researchers note that “45 percent of American adults who are in the bottom 20 percent in income were born to parents who were also in the bottom 20 percent; nearly half, 45 percent, of adults in the top 20 percent had parents who were also in the top 20 percent. Most Americans who were born in the middle 60 percent had parents who were also born in the middle 60 percent.”
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Reuters: China to relocate 2 million people this year in struggle to banish poverty
The mass relocation of people is a strategy targeted at lifting 10 million citizens out of poverty by 2020, state news agency Xinhua has said.
Some of the villagers will move to areas with better social services, such as schools and hospitals, while others in remote areas will move to places with better roads and water supply, the official, Liu Yongfu, told a briefing. [...]
China's poor, who make up about 5 percent of a population of nearly 1.4 billion, live mostly in the countryside, and earn less than 2,300 yuan ($362) a year, government and state media say.
In March Premier Li Keqiang promised a boost of 43 percent in funding for poverty relief programs. Last October, the cabinet said China aimed to lift all its 70 million poor above the poverty line by 2020.
read the article
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