Same sex marriage

I imagine they'll follow the lead of all other migrant communities: first generation holds onto homeland ideals, the second warms to the embrace of the new country.

It ain't hard to follow, the demography has stayed true since post-WWII.

Give the communities in those electorates fifteen years and it'll be a different story.

In terms of child development the research is conclusive and from numerous areas. Love, security and stimulation are what matter. If the people sprouting their sudden concern for child welfare issues were sincere, they would be campaigning for massive increases in the availability of high quality, affordable pre-school care. Being of that generation, I can understand how hard it is for people to give up the prejudices they grew up with, but to make mischievous and misleading comments to bolster that prejudice, is evidence of a lack of character.

I'm surprised they're using the Stolen Generation as an example. Not only are they now acknowledging it happened but they're also awfully apologetic for it.

Devious opportunism wherever you look.

Growing up without, say, a father figure is cause for concern, something worth thinking about, however single mothering is hardly fucken new and none of the suddenly concerned citizens have ever intervened before, so why now?

More opportunism, perhaps?

I know a few same sex parents in our community, all mothers, and they're kids are great. They know their biological dads, and all have 'father figures', close family friends etc living in surrounding streets. Takes a village to raise a child and all that...

On the other hand, I also know a few guys in same sex relationships and they're the first to admit kids would only be an imposition on their footloose lifestyle, and so they choose not to. Wonderful, eh?

"Let's wallpaper over that mess and continue pushing the barrow that it's the Australian anglosphere that's letting the progressive team down , what do you reckon ?"

Yeh, maybe time to stop blaming white males for everything

But maybe time to stop bagging christians for their beliefs too

Peak identity politics don't work no more, it just make the arguments look dumb

We should all Keep bagging dastyari though, he's a fucking worm

"But maybe time to stop bagging christians for their beliefs too"

Thanks sypkan ... noted

Sypkan and his identity politics bandwagon.

Quick question: Who do you think foists an 'identity' on a group, the oppressor or the oppressed?

I think indo and blindboy are both right.

Please tell me blindboy what do you think of gender theory?

You being a science guy and all

Id say both stunet

Identity politics isnt neccessariy left right up down. Its infiltrated the venacular so much it just how we speak now

And it seems now, the arguments barely stack up as groups vote outside assumed alliances

??

The point is best made by Nick Giannopolous, "If they call me a wog then that's what I am!". 

The people calling them wog, wop, nigger, coon, towelhead, or fag, are the ones drawing the identity lines, and by exluding them from the dominant group, outsiders will band together - strength in numbers - and bolster each others confidence - proud to be gay etc.

Identity politics is a product of exclusion and oppression, and not as newcomers to the buzzword like to think, liberal exotocism.

I dont dispute any of that stunet

But some would argue it has developed into a kind of "liberal exoticism"

....Identity politics was created with all good intentions in the 1970s following a series of cultural revolutions in the prior decade. The civil rights movement of the late 1950s and '60s had targeted racial segregation and the disenfranchisement of African-Americans in the South. Its strategies of organized protest and civil disobedience, modeled by Martin Luther King, Jr. on Mahatma Gandhi’s campaign to free India from British imperialism, were later adopted in the U.S. by antiwar protestors, second-wave feminism, the gay liberation movement, and Native American activists.

During the mid to late 1960s, when I was in college and early graduate school, it felt amazingly exhilarating to assert ethnic pride after the oppressive conformism of the 1950s and early '60s, when genteel WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) values and style dominated American business, education, religion, and politics. (I have repeatedly attacked that time as the “Doris Day-Debbie Reynolds era”, when chirpy blondeness ruled.) Many of my fellow students at Harpur College (the State University of New York at Binghamton) were progressive, boldly outspoken Jewish-Americans from metropolitan New York who were wrangling with their parents (as I was with my Italian-American family) about our proper adult persona. We categorically refused to adopt the WASP style to “pass.” We rejected the bland politesse, subdued, passionless voices, and stiff, repressed body language of the WASP elite. Indeed, to this day I go out of my way to be loud and abrasive—which is why the fearless Joan Rivers would be such a role model for me.

Unfortunately, identity politics became institutionalized on college campuses in the 1970s—and that would become the principal source of our present scourge of political correctness, which has spread to Canada, the U.K., and now even Brazil. Bureaucracy always leads to authoritarianism. Bureaucracy is inherently mechanical, stupid, parasitically self-replicating, and outrageously wasteful. True progressives should hate bureaucracy and not, as has been happening with baffling regularity, embrace it as an instrument of their political goals. In the 1970s, college administrations, embarrassed by the lopsided over-representation of white males on their faculties, abandoned any pretense of scholarly principles and simply created women’s studies and African-American studies departments virtually overnight. It was a naked public relations ploy—just throw money at those important new subjects, and who the hell cares what happens? The administrators were off the hook.

Camille paglia

Getting edgemicated academic debate now. As Neil from the young ones would say "heavy man"

The science is pretty clear. However you define it, gender is far from binary, so while most people are clearly male or female and have no problem identifying as such, many do not fit neatly into either category. The reasons for this are as complex as human biology. All very interesting, but only relevant in so far as it highlights the profound ignorance of those opposing same sex marriage. It's not about the biology, people should be free to establish loving relationships with those who take their fancy. End of story except for the ignorant or bigoted, there really isn't any other valid explanation for opposition to such a basic human right.

I don't have issue with any of that

And, fwiw, I aren't against ssm.

However I might be against teaching kids gender theory, as it is just that, theory

A theory that says you can be a girl if you 'identify' as one.

Thats a little loose for me.

Identify. Interesting term, leaves the door wide open, and does not consider biology at all, when many would argue there is a biological component.

If its proven Im cool with it, but Im cautious about rearing and teaching a whole generation of kids around a dubious theory that discounts science all together.

Thought you might be too

sypkan there a number of situations in which the gender assigned at birth does not match the the individuals physical and psychological reality. In some cases the genitalia at birth may not fit easily into male or female. If this persists the infant or child may be subject to surgery so they fit more neatly into one or other category. As they develop they may realise that they have been misassigned and wish to change their identity. Even when the genitalia do fit neatly into male or female the person may grow up feeling that they actually belong to the other sex. This is not something they decide, this is who they are at the deepest level of their identity. Even genetics are unreliable. One of the rarer causes of female infertility is that the woman has the XY genetic make up of a male. So this is a complex area and no-one has the right to insist that people conform to some narrow, profoundly ignorant concept of gender just because they are uneasy about such realities.

Its incredibly complicated

We just dont know enough to be teaching it as gospel, which seems to be the push at the moment

Stu - Do you define yourself as Australian due to oppression ?

Also it's a false parallel to assume that immigrants will continue to assimilate as they did 60 years ago . A lot more emphasis is placed on the benefits of diversity. People are actively encouraged to retain their own culture as opposed to adopting the Australian culture.

Some people claim there is no Australian culture and that any alternative is a step in the right direction.

But then again , they probably don't believe they talk with an accent either.

Assimilation is now a dirty word.

"Stu - Do you define yourself as Australian due to oppression ?"

With all due respect, that's a weak question.

Clearly we were talking about the identity of minorities, those defined in identity politics, I didn't outline that because I figured it was obvious.

Just to be clear I'm also a male, a surfer, an editor, a father, an Aquarius, and oppression didn't make me those either.

It is so hard to wrap your head around Gender to be honest I'm not totally sure how i feel about it or not even convinced it's real.

Sex we know is real, you are either biologicaly male, female or intersex.(which is basically a medical condition/birth abnormality)

And there are biological differences that influence behaviour of the sexes, for instance most males are naturally more masculine and things like this is influenced by physical and biological traits like higher levels of testosterone than females.

But there can also be males that are very feminine.

Gender to me is more just about behaviours and society norms or social expectations, culture, even fashion, IMO it's largely just a social construct.

I mean it was popular in the 80's for hair metal bands to grow their hair get perms, pierce their ears, wear face make up, and tight leggings etc but i don't think it meant they indetified as another gender or some new made up gender.

From anthropology to sociology to biology ...... who would have thought Swellnet attracted such intellectual thought!

sypkan we act on the evidence and the evidence is over whelming. Unless you are the type who wanted to sit until the tobacco companies had stopped lying about cancer before giving up ciggies. On this issue religion is playing the same dirty games the tobacco industry used, lie, obfuscate and confuse.

indo

i ask you to provide evolutionary proof that a mother and a father was the best way to "bring up" a child...."bring up" - your words not mine mate.

you respond with :

"Um Happy never in the existence of the human race in any culture anywhere has a same sex couple ever been able to produce a family without the help of a third party."

so your evolutionary proof is that because a man and a woman is required biologically to conceive (produce in your words) a child that it is the best way to raise the child, and that evolution prooves all this.

at worst this is a logical fail....at best you just made it up

still if you can provide a link to a paper proving it then go ahead. non-catholic would be preferred since they lost all credibility on the matter evolution some time ago.

Blindboy, the terms 'evidence' and 'evidence based' are thrown around way too loosely on this topic

Id say the topic is far from settled

More from camille

....Feminists have clashed with transgender activists much more publicly in the United Kingdom than here. For example, two years ago there was an acrimonious organized campaign, including a petition with 3,000 claimed signatures, to cancel a lecture by Germaine Greer at Cardiff University because of her "offensive" views of transgenderism. Greer, a literary scholar who was one of the great pioneers of second-wave feminism, has always denied that men who have undergone sex-reassignment surgery are actually "women." Her Cardiff lecture (on "Women and Power" in the twentieth century) eventually went forward, under heavy security.

And in 2014, Gender Hurts, a book by radical Australian feminist Sheila Jeffreys, created a heated controversy in the United Kingdom. Jeffreys identifies transsexualism with misogyny and describes it as a form of "mutilation." She and her feminist allies encountered prolonged difficulties in securing a London speaking venue because of threats and agitation by transgender activists. Finally, Conway Hall was made available: Jeffrey's forceful, detailed lecture there in July of last year is fully available on YouTube. In it she argues among other things, that the pharmaceutical industry, having lost income when routine estrogen therapy for menopausal women was abandoned because of its health risks, has been promoting the relatively new idea of transgenderism in order to create a permanent class of customers who will need to take prescribed hormones for life.

Although I describe myself as transgender (I was donning flamboyant male costumes from early childhood on), I am highly skeptical about the current transgender wave, which I think has been produced by far more complicated psychological and sociological factors than current gender discourse allows. Furthermore, I condemn the escalating prescription of puberty blockers (whose long-term effects are unknown) for children. I regard this practice as a criminal violation of human rights.

It is certainly ironic how liberals who posture as defenders of science when it comes to global warming (a sentimental myth unsupported by evidence) flee all reference to biology when it comes to gender. Biology has been programmatically excluded from women's studies and gender studies programs for almost 50 years now. Thus very few current gender studies professors and theorists, here and abroad, are intellectually or scientifically prepared to teach their subjects.

The cold biological truth is that sex changes are impossible. Every single cell of the human body remains coded with one's birth gender for life. Intersex ambiguities can occur, but they are developmental anomalies that represent a tiny proportion of all human births.

In a democracy, everyone, no matter how nonconformist or eccentric, should be free from harassment and abuse. But at the same time, no one deserves special rights, protections, or privileges on the basis of their eccentricity. The categories "trans-man" and "trans-woman" are highly accurate and deserving of respect. But like Germaine Greer and Sheila Jeffreys, I reject state-sponsored coercion to call someone a "woman" or a "man" simply on the basis of his or her subjective feeling about it. We may well take the path of good will and defer to courtesy on such occasions, but it is our choice.

Yas, It really is a mysterious combination of psychology, sociology and biology.

I just find it most interesting that some people are willing to put so little weight on biology in this case

Thanks sypkan, an interesting post. I will have to go back to some of the research but my first response is that "feelings" are no less biological than genitalia. I will come back to the issue when I have done the reading.

indo writes:

"If it was an advantage or just as good, we would have evolved to be able to reproduce alone or with the same sex."

again your conflating the issue of reproduction with the matter at hand, which is raising the child.

indo writes:

"but one thing we do know from scientific and biological fact is it's reason is not to bring up children as a [gay] couple."

again conflating the issue of reproduction vs bringing up.

its simple indo, just post something on the matter...anything mate....the topic is "a man and a woman being the optimal primary care givers for children".....balls in your court. im always open to reason.

A close family member is xxyy and most definitely a man, explain that god

Happy If you don't get it, it's not my problem, papers or studies or peoples opinions mean squat, the evidence is in biology and the history of man kind, it's not even something that you can even debate or argue about.

I will try to make it simple for you, from an evolutionary point of view if it was an advantage or even just as good that same sex couples produce and bring up a child, evolution would have allowed this to happen naturally, it hasn't because it's not ideal, the ideal situation is to have a father and a mother.

PS. to be honest I'm kind of over this subject, lets just agree to disagree...im more interested in the gender topic.

A study with a sample size of 500 concluding that children raised in same sex relationships are in fact better off than children raised in traditional families. Da science is in!

nah.

.

indo nature and evolution do not create ideal forms or processes. Organisms are a messy conglomerate of characteristics inherited directly from ancestral forms and the random mutations that have been selected for in that particular lineage. In humans for example, one hypothesis is that the genes related to homosexuality increase the fertility of women and so have been preserved in the population. The suggestion that evolution could have selected for fertile offspring from same sex couples is simply absurd. There is no genetic history of anything resembling this in the human lineage going back to the most primitive mammals.

indo, im not going to argue further on it. except I will just once here :). ha ha. anyhow, you keep conflating the concept of procreation with parenting suggesting that the ideal for one is by necessity the ideal for the other as if choice in heterosexual evolution could have had the latter any other way. it couldn't for obvious reasons as we were clearly chosen to procreate heterosexually millions of years ago. its that logical leap about the step towards optimal primal parenting that you take without enough consideration IMO.

in the real world the reality of "growing up" is more than just parents....we live in communities, and ancients lived in tribes with multiple male/female figureheads. fact is my kid spends more time at school than I see him awake, and I would hazard a guess that 10,000 years ago tribal mothers spent as much of their waking hours with other mothers nursing the kids as they did with the childs father, maybe more, and maybe fathers were killed young and then mothers often banded together in a non-sexual way.. so that itself already possibly challenges the concept of what is right and what is optimal IMO. "optimal" is in itself a really funny word when it comes to humans.

evolution is a complex thing, and i would challenge anyone to prove that homosexuality has not become an increasingly desirable trait over thousands of years. is it a dying trait, or an increasing trait? fact is, we know very little. im not an evolutionary scientist and neither are most on here, so i stay away from such wild claims.

anyhow indo, i agree, lets leave it. this post took too much out of my life and now my kids have been put to bed by mum ;) we had a good crack at it. if you post a reply I promise I will not post back :) seriously i promise.

Well blow me down with a feather overnight we moved onto history.

Its all here at the University of Swellnet .... anthropology, sociology, biology, history.

A day after strenuously arguing that families need a Mum and a Dad, five Coalition members move a motion to make it harder for women to have an abortion.

These are the people who run our country.

Yep, its what you get when your political ideology is bankrupt.

We digress, the real action today at the Swellnet University is likely to be on the topics of the UN refugee convention, foreign affairs and coalition sending a new positive signal to the "people smugglers".

Dutton is going all jelly backed on NZ's offer to take the Manus refugees ......

http://www.theage.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/peter-dutton-op...

If NZ takes refugees off PNG I will be pissed off.
There are young families with young children on Nauru far more deserving of escape than those males from Manus.
How the media is sidestepping the plight of those people on Nauru is fucking appaling.

Im going to be totally pissed off is NZ take refugees from the closed centre that are just out to make trouble and play games.

To be honest id be happy to see the 77 (or was it 177?) refugees that moved to the new centre on day one and the 34 that were happy to live in the community.

IMO these people need to be rewarded for not following the peer pressure from the trouble makers

@Happy, over it, agree to disagree.

"A day after strenuously arguing that families need a Mum and a Dad, five Coalition members move a motion to make it harder for women to have an abortion."

Stu, is this what you really meant?

"A day after strenuously arguing that families need a Mum and a Dad, five Coalition members move a motion to make it harder for women to dispose of unwanted children."

It isn't complete but I guess you can frame it that way.

Do you think it's acceptable that women - and it is almost always the women - should be forced to raise unwanted children by themselves?

And why is a single mother acceptable in the eyes of religious nuts but two mothers aren't?

@stu, if your 7.19 post today was referring to what happened in the Senate re: the Bernardi motion I understand (if it was reported correctly) it was dealing with the removal of Medicare funding of late term abortions where the woman was raped. I guess the spiritually pious amongst us expect the woman to give birth to the baby and to either raise it herself or give it up for adoption .... of course this does nothing for the physical and mental health of the woman.

Stu I don't think that's a view held by just religious people (Christian or Muslim or whatever) millions of people that voted no would have had no religion (like me) and many very religious people would have voted yes.(like a friend of mine)

But the big difference between a single women forced to raise a child by herself and two same sex mothers is the single womens situation is generally not intentional, it's something that has come from a situation beyond their control, break up of relationship or one night stand or father died or whatever. (yes there is exceptions to that)

While two mothers can't accidentally have a child without a third party.

I do feel sorry for any kids though that don't have both male and female parents.

The most important job in the world is being a good parent. We need a licence to drive a car, but any old fuckstick can breed.

indo, your summary:

"""the single mothers situation wasnt intentional. but the same sex couples having a kid is intentional.""""

and yet the homosexuality of the same sex couple wasn't intentional. they were born that way.

so why penalise a homosexual on the basis of intention? it appears an arbitrary ruling dependant upon which way you look at it.

And ain't life grand.

Chicks that dig chicks getting a sweet baby to love.

Guys that would rather just stick with fellas being able to live the life that they were born to live .

Babies being born to a world that doesn't guarantee any favours. But if theyre lucky they'll have a parent - or even two - that loves them as they deserve to be loved.

And I get to wake up next to an incredible lady each day .....yes , even me.

What a great world we live in.

Hope you're getting some love.

If not , don't begrudge those that are . We all get our time at the top and our time underneath in the big wheel of life .

Make the most of every opportunity.

Love the life you live.

Never trust Whitey.

ah the disposable age if you don't want it , get rid of it !

blowin. are you a poet? great words. fucken whitey....that was gold.

ha ha happy, you have a very weird way of looking at things i regard to this issue.

so you agree that homosexuals are born that way, or not?

Nature AND nurture , Happyass.

The either / or is a false proposition.

Some were made , some were created.

They're ALL who they were meant to be .

Just like you and I .

Deal with it.

Hey Sharkman ....don't let your crutch lead you !

Religion is a stepping stone to acceptance. Don't let the scripture become the script. Take solice and shelter , heal the wounds of the soul then move on. As it is intended.

The bottle or the bible....both offer a temporary sanctuary.

Neither was intended as a home.

do worry indo, forget it. we are in completely different worlds on this issue. and its rather pointless to discuss it in any aspect. you will find anything I write weird just as I do you.

have a good weekend anyhow. cheerio.