Filed under: Oregon, ethics, family, gay marriage, gay rights, gender, heteronormativity, homosexuality, legislation, same sex marriage, sexuality, transgender
Concerned Oregonians seem to be, well, concerned (warning: Obnoxiously enough, their concerns are only expressed on a pdf, not in the web’s standard html format…) about Oregon’s Senate Bill 2, which creates protections against discrimination based on a person’s sexuality. They claim that “[t]his legislation creates a new “protected class” of persons to be protected from discrimination, defines this new category, authorizes enforcement of its provisions through various state agencies and courts; adds other provisions regarding real estate transactions, religious institutions, schools; and prevents dress codes under most circumstances.”
The bill (also a pdf, but that’s standard for the publication of bills and proposed bills) defines sexual orientation, the basis of the new “protected class”, as “an individual’s actual or perceived heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality or gender identity, regardless of whether the individual’s gender identity, appearance, expression or behavior differs from that traditionally associated with the individual’s sex at birth.” Now, this is a particularly broad “protected class” to claim, as Vision Action America has apparently done in a mass email, that “[i]f we [conservative Christians] fail to submit sufficient signatures, both this bill [Oregon House Bill 2007 (again, a pdf), which grants civil unions to same-sex couples with all the rights, privileges, and benefits granted by marriage, which, by the way, I also oppose, though on a technicality] and a bill to grant special rights, privileges and protections to homosexuals, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendereds and the gender confused, will become law on January 1, 2008.” Note, also, that they fail to mention that the bill in question also protects heterosexuals from denial of jobs or housing, etc.
Concerned Oregonians takes particular issue with the bill’s use of the word ‘perceived’. Now, when I read the bill, I took it to mean that if some straight guy is denied a job because an employer thinks that he is gay, he is just as protected as someone who is actually gay, which seems a reasonable enough clause. Concerned Oregonians reads this in the opposite way, assuming that ‘perceived’ refers to an individual’s own perceptions of his or her own sexuality or gender, and issues the following warning: “There is no provision that there must be any continuity to this stated ‘perceived sexual orientation’ is; that is it may change as often as a person wishes or states it to.” They later claim that this will lead to an absurd case where “a witness in court, under oath denies he is a man capable of rape because on that day, he perceives himself to be female”. Ignoring for a second their backward interpretation of the word ‘perceived’ here, their flat-out denial of the possibility of a woman committing rape is alarming.
I used to subscribe to similar, though more liberally-oriented “action alerts”. I stopped in part because of tactics like this, which I know are used by conservative groups and suspect are also used by liberal groups (I haven’t seriously looked into the claims of liberal action groups mostly because, admittedly, I agree with their goals even if not perhaps their methods), tactics which either include outright lies or subtle manipulations of speeches, legislation, etc. Tactics such as Vision Action America’s exclusion of the bill’s explicit mention of heterosexuality or Concerned Oregonians’ twisting of the word ‘perceived’. These tactics always rely on mobilizing a particular group based on their prejudices and ignorance, on the hope that no one will actually bother to read the bill or speech in question. My advice to anyone who does receive this sort of email, whether you’re conservative or liberal: Read the bill before you decide. It may not be as bad as you think.
After reading this article, I was fairly struck by how the researcher was facing some of the same problems with which philosophers have had to deal for the past 300 years or so, and how their solutions could be informed by philosophy.
Anyone who has poked around here probably knows that I hate Kant, but there are interesting parallels to the problems Kant faced and one of the problems faced by AI researchers concerned with embodied AI: How the AI perceives the world. Kant argued that we don’t actually see the world as it is, that such things as space, time, and causation are not in the world so much as they are imposed on the world by our minds. One lesson to take from that, if you buy this story, is that the representation of the world that we make to ourselves has no necessary relationship to the world as it actually is. The lesson for AI (which it seems AI researchers are already well aware of): An embodied AI does not need to perceive (where ‘perceive’ should be taken to indicate any structure that represents the world, whether mathematical, spatial, geometrical, or even in terms of semantics) the world as it actually is (or even as we perceive it), but in whatever way facilitates its accomplishing of its goals.
The film 40 Days and 40 Nights culminates in a rape scene. The protagonist, Matt Sullivan (Josh Hartnett), having gone nearly 40 days without masturbating or having sex, is tied to his bed in the hope that he can make it through the final, difficult hours. His ex-girlfriend enters, mounts him, and as he deliriously mutters “no!”, has sex with him. Two quick points: First, for most people, this doesn’t seem to register as rape, despite the fact that if the characters’ genders were reversed its classification as such would be unarguable. Second, the scene was intended to be, and for most people seems to be, funny. Having failed in his goal, Matt then is forced to apologize to his current girlfriend, for getting raped.
To backtrack, Matt’s goal is, effectively, to temporarily remove himself from the heteronormative order, to step back from our society’s near-compulsory, near-constant obsession with heterosexual sex. And this is continually reinforced in the film, with references to his upsetting the “natural” balance of power, with his friends’, coworkers’, and even his brother’s (who is a priest) constant attempts to reintegrate him into the sexual order. And just at the point where he has nearly reached his goal, he is raped, forced to apologize for it, and immediately reintegrated into society as a fully-fledged, though now perhaps monogamous, heterosexual.
The only interesting thing about this film is the reversal of gender roles, which effectively translate what would be a drama about rape and our society’s treatment of women into a romantic comedy about a man who finds himself and a new girlfriend. What is curious, and a little scary, is the ease with which this translation was achieved.
I’ve been meaning to write this for a while, but I’m still not sure what to do with it. I just finished Master and Margarita, and one of the things that really caught me about it, well, the beginning at least, is the continual discussion of things that aren’t present (or are supposed not present but are, or are supposed present but in fact not). In the opening scene (all text taken from here), Bulgakov marks the strangeness of the day of Woland’s entrance by an absence, an especially curious absence because the absent people are described in a fair amount of detail (the absent people are “too exhausted to breathe”, they are not walking under the limes, they are not sitting in benches, nor are they at the kiosk or in the avenue):
There was an oddness about that terrible day in May which is worth recording : not only at the kiosk but along the whole avenue parallel to Malaya Bronnaya Street there was not a person to be seen. It was the hour of the day when people feel too exhausted to breathe, when Moscow glows in a dry haze as the sun disappears behind the Sadovaya Boulevard–yet no one had come out for a walk under the limes, no one was sitting on a bench, the avenue was empty.
Immediately following, the first Russians known to meet Woland are treated to yet another absence, as above, in the form of two expected presences:
‘A glass of lemonade, please,’said Berlioz.
‘There isn’t any,’replied the woman in the kiosk. For some reason the request seemed to offend her.
‘Got any beer?’ enquired Bezdomny in a hoarse voice.
‘ Beer’s being delivered later this evening’ said the woman.
‘ Well what have you got?’ asked Berlioz.
‘ Apricot juice, only it’s warm’ was the answer.
‘ All right, let’s have some.’
The third major absence, of a sort, reverses this trend: Nearly every character in the book makes near-constant references to the devil, in whom they supposedly don’t believe, and who supposedly doesn’t exist. Bulgakov and the reader, of course, know better. And so should Berlioz, the first of many to use the expression “the devil!”, the first occurrence, in the book, of which coincides with the first, supposedly illusory, sighting of the one of Woland’s henchmen:
Just then the sultry air coagulated and wove itself into the shape of a man–a transparent man of the strangest appearance. On his small head was a jockey-cap and he wore a short check bum-freezer made of air. The man was seven feet tall but narrow in the shoulders, incredibly thin and with a face made for derision.
…
‘ The devil! ‘ exclaimed the editor. ‘ D’you know, Ivan, the heat nearly gave me a stroke just then! I even saw something like a hallucination . . . ‘
Before returning to the issue of either the devil’s presence or absence, Bulgakov’s characters discuss Jesus Christ, his supposed absence in history and presence in Bezdomny’s (Homeless’ – Bezdomny’s patronymic suggests another absence) poem:
It was hard to say exactly what had made Bezdomny write as he had–whether it was his great talent for graphic description or complete ignorance of the subject he was writing on, but his Jesus had come out, well, completely alive, a Jesus who had really existed, although admittedly a Jesus who had every possible fault. Berlioz however wanted to prove to the poet that the main object was not who Jesus was, whether he was bad or good, but that as a person Jesus had never existed at all and that all the stories about him were mere invention, pure myth
The discussion goes on to mention Jesus’ absence in the writings of ancient historians, and the supposed forgeries that constitute Jesus’ presence in history and then, curiously, the presence of Jesus-like figures in nearly all “Oriental religions”, ending with Berlioz’ declaration that “the Christians, lacking any originality, invented their Jesus in exactly the same way. In fact he never lived at all. That’s where the stress has got to lie.”
Upon the pair’s confession of atheism to Woland, we are treated to another expected-presence-but-doubly-actual-absence:
This valuable piece of information had obviously made a powerful impression on the traveller, as he gave a frightened glance at the houses as though afraid of seeing an atheist at every window.
In Bulgakov’s Soviet Union, Woland should indeed expect to see atheists in every window. However, as we see later, these supposed atheists are often enough anything but. Not only are the atheists not present in the windows Woland supposedly expects them in (and there may even be some issues with the actual presence of Woland’s expectation), but were they present they wouldn’t even be atheists.
The five-now-six proofs of God’s existence constitute the next instance of shifting presence:
‘ But might I enquire,’ began the visitor from abroad after some worried reflection, ‘ how you account for the proofs of the existence of God, of which there are, as you know, five? ‘
And after Berlioz’ rejection of these five proofs:
‘ Bravo!’ exclaimed the stranger. ‘ Bravo! You have exactly repeated the views of the immortal Emmanuel on that subject. But here’s the oddity of it: he completely demolished all five proofs and then, as though to deride his own efforts, he formulated a sixth proof of his own.’
This discussion of things that exist or don’t culminates in Woland’s frustrated response to the pair’s disbelief in the devil:
‘ Well now, that is interesting,’ said the professor, quaking with laughter. ‘ Whatever I ask you about–it doesn’t exist! ‘ [the original translation I read had "Whatever I ask about - you haven't got any!"]
Like I said in the beginning, though, I’m not sure I have anywhere to take all this.
Filed under: gay rights
Just a quick note: We all know that senator Larry Craig was caught trying to get it on in a public restroom. I’m shocked, though, at our responses to it. We’re gleeful, giddy, titillated, sarcastic, and obnoxious. But seriously: We’re rooting for police stings targeting gay men in public restrooms? And I can understand wanting to see another Republican hypocrite crash and burn, but really, the guy did nothing illegal. He peeked in a stall (for two minutes, sure), tapped his foot, set his briefcase down, and rubbed his hand on the bottom of the stall. All weird things to be sure, but not illegal. This whole case reeks of entrapment, and that’s something that I, for one, am not at all giddy about.
