Category: Society

Even in the EU, not all countries support equal rights for gay people. Witness this report from Poland.

Two more gay men have apparently been publicly executed in Iran for the ‘crime’ of being gay. As I’ve said before, I have a lot to be thankful for about the accident of my birthplace.

I see that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has finished the script of Submission II – the followup to the film that caused outrage in the Muslim community last year. She doesn’t seem to have relented in her efforts to point out what she views as failings in Islam, this time the script explores Islamic attitudes towards homosexuals. And they’re not a bundle of fun. Good luck to her, it will be interesting to see if she manages to get the film made. And if it is, doubtless it will act as a lightning rod in the same manner as the first. All the pus of anti-gay hatred will probably come to a head. I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Sometimes boils are better lanced.

The shortfall in pensions continues to be an issue in the news. I see that the UK government is proposing to raise the retirement age from 65 to 67. I’m sure that some people might well think well, it’s only a couple more years… Maybe so, but data from the UK government’s own actuary department shows that one in five men and one in eight women who reach the age of 65 will die before they are 67. And that adds up to nearly a million people who will never be able to enjoy their retirement. A sobering thought, I feel.

There was a documentary on BBC this week about the London bombs of 7/7/2005. I didn’t see it. Rachel did though. She was caught up in the bombings, and watching the documentary made her relive the experience. Read it.

And talking of ID cards, I see that Dame Stella Rimington, ex-head of MI5, has let the cat out of the bag. She has made the obvious point that ID cards would "only be of some use if they could be made unforgeable – and all our other documentation is quite easy to forge".

 

Quite. There is no such thing as a totally secure system. Still, that didn’t stop the UK minister for ID cards, Andy Burnham from popping up and dismissing Dame Stella’s observation. And how did he do this? He said: "the system will make it almost impossible to forge an identity". Er, tricky word that "almost", Andy. It actually negates the word "impossible". So in fact, Dame Stella’s right then… Clearly Andy, being the minister in charge of this scheme has to be gung-ho in favour of it, no matter how unworkable and expensive it will become. Wouldn’t it be nice if politicians were prepared to be honest, and recognise and speak the truth? As usual, CuriousHamster puts his finger squarely on the reasons why Andy Burnham is a twit.

Sometimes I think that the human psyche can’t get any weirder. Then I read this. Oh well, at least he’s won some sort of Darwin award and taken himself out of the gene pool…

 

(hat tip to Kameron at Brutal Women)

As I get older I find myself reading obituaries more and more. Marking one’s time on the tree of life by seeing who’s fallen off the neighbouring branch, I suppose. Two obituaries in The Guardian today caught my eye.

 

The first is for Gladys Tantaquidgeon (what a glorious name!) – a matriarch of the Mohegan tribe – who has died aged 106. Gladys obviously was able to cling to the branch for longer than most of us will ever be able to do. She sounds to have been quite a character.

 

The second is for Eva Svankmajerova, wife of the filmmaker Jan Svankmajer, and an accomplished artist in her own right. She has died at 65 (only nine years older than me; damn, that branch is close!). I see that she was responsible in part for the animation and puppetry of Little Otik, a creepy little jewel of a film.

The Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics reports today on the state of queer couples in The Netherlands. It states that, in The Netherlands, there are almost 53,000 couples of the same sex living together: 29,000 gay male couples and 24,000 lesbian couples. 

 

That 53,000, by the way, represents more than 1% of all couples living together in The Netherlands. Most of the couples simply live together (perhaps with some form of legal agreement, the research doesn’t make it clear). Just over 5,000 couples have a "registered partnership", while about 6,000 have a full civil marriage. Thus, taken together, the percentage that have entered into a partnership bound by civil law is almost a quarter.

 

About 9 percent of gay couples have one or more children – often from a previous relationship. Just one percent of the gay male couples have children; 18 percent of the lesbian couples have children.

 

About a quarter of the gay couples live in one of the four largest cities in The Netherlands (Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam and Utrecht). That still leaves 75% who live outside of these cities. We’ll be one of those, and even more so when we go to live in the middle of nowhere in Gelderland next April. 

There’s an interesting series of programmes (Dubai Dreams) on the BBC at the moment that centre around the building boom currently underway in Dubai. Today’s entry on BLDGBLOG is a pair of "before and after" photos that really bring home the scale of the building boom. There’s also a pointer to the Pruned blog, where the "is it all going to end in tears" question is raised. In some ways, Dubai is only Shanghai, but with the volume control turned up even higher. But I can’t help feeling that the whole edifice is constructed on the notion of cheap oil. I see no evidence that the skyscrapers and other buildings are being constructed to be energy efficient. What are the air-conditioning bills like now, and what happens when the cost of energy rises as it inevitably must?

I see that the Vatican is about to release its document that will explicitly bar gay men (women obviously can’t apply anyway) from entering the priesthood. Apparently it will also bar those who "support ‘the so-called gay culture’" as well. Um, what is this ‘gay culture’ of which they speak? It seems to me that it is one of those silly phrases that apparently has meaning, but which, when examined closely, disappears up its own rhetoric. It’s like that other fabulous beast: the ‘gay community’. Both phrases conjure up an image of a monolithic club to which all gay people are automatically members. Message to the Vatican: gay people come in all shapes and sizes, with all sorts of beliefs and behaviours. In short, we are indistinguishable from the rest of humanity because, shock, horror, we are humans too.

 

No-one in their right minds talks about "the left-handed culture" or the "redhead community" as though the group of people that are left-handed or the group of people that are redheads share anything other than the attribute that defines their group. A group is not the same as a community or a culture – but this is clearly a concept that has escaped the authors of the Vatican’s document.

I never got to know this young man, and now it’s too late. Life is a lottery, and some draw the short straw through no fault of their own. If life was fair, there would be a special circle of Hell reserved for his health insurance company.

…between reality and virtual reality. This story, about someone who has bought a virtual space station inside of an online game, simply proves to me that I was born in another age, where fantasy was fantasy, reality was reality, and never the twain should meet.

Through a chance posting on Usenet, I came across a site that I had not seen before: the Homocaust. It’s a site that collects together the history of the gay victims of the Holocaust. It’s a good site, full of information and links to further resources, and appears to have been a labour of love by Lewis Oswald, who has his own site here.

I usually have a lot of time for Giles Fraser, team rector of Putney and lecturer in philosophy. His occasional columns in the Guardian often contain a lot of common sense (which, as everyone knows, is not very common these days). However, his latest column seemed to me to fall below his usual standard. He seems to be claiming that us atheists are not self-critical enough, and even worse, we are somehow not trendy and fashionable enough.

 

Being the dilettante that I am, I was wondering whether I should comment on the column, but Ophelia, over at ButterfliesAndWheels, has come thundering into the fray with a vitriolic response. Over to you, Ophelia…

It is exactly one year ago that Theo van Gogh was murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri. At the moment, there is a remembrance event going on in the Linnaeusstraat in Amsterdam. In a typically satiric touch, in place of a bunch of flowers there is a pot with a cactus plant on the spot where van Gogh was shot and had his throat cut by  Bouyeri. There will be further events throughout the day.

 

Van Gogh was no saint, but no-one deserves to die in the manner that he did. Bouyeri has no remorse.

 

 

Danah Boyd, over at Apophenia, comments on an emerging phenomenon: the use of social networking services to act as sites for mourning and remembrance. What struck me about the example she uses (the online social profiles of Christine Dao, who has just died in a car crash), was the tone and the manner of Christine’s friends when leaving their messages of remembrance on her profiles. Not that they addressed her directly, as though she still lived – that’s a fairly common thing – but the casual, almost flippant, tone of most of the messages. These are young adults, for the most part (Christine was 20), but the comments seem to me like the equivalent of children’s finger-paintings. Are young adults really this immature these days?

I don’t know if you’ve been following the Operation Eden blog, but if not, please go and read Clayton James Cubitt’s entry for today. It’s a story that shows how simple acts of kindness can do good. It makes a pleasant change when at times it seems that the only stories I hear are of man’s inhumanity to man.

Interesting item about Mumbai over at the WorldChanging blog. As Suketu Mehta writes in his book: "Bombay is the future of urban civilization on the planet. God help us."

… because Ophelia over at ButterfliesAndWheels is in a foul mood. And you know what? I agree with her 100%. I really am beginning to wonder whether the legacy of the Age of Enlightenment is well and truly dead, and we are rushing pell-mell into a new Dark Ages.