Sacred Disorder

Writer Ernest Hardy takes down Dan Savage and exposes the lie behind blaming African-Americans for the success of Proposition 8 here. It’s a very long post but deserves reading. He provides a summary of his analysis via another blogger:

1) This [70%] number comes from *one* exit poll of 224 black voters.

2) Of the hundreds of polls done on Prop 8, not a single one showed black support above 50%.

3) Exit polls are notoriously unreliable because the sampling procedure is flawed. These are the same polls that predicted that Kerry would win in 2004.

4) I think we need to discuss the issues of race and sexuality separate from this “black people hate gay people” garbage. As I said, people believe this 70/30 stuff because it is a number that validates what they believe.

5) Why isn’t anybody talking about the hundreds of polls that showed black support for Prop 8 was *below* 50%, and very close to other ethnic and racial groups? Because those polls don’t support the hypothesis that black people have a “homophobia problem”. I think we need to discuss the issue of homophobia in the black community, but not because of a flawed poll.

Ah, the good ole days — the Reagan years. I ran into this Fishbone video on Crooks and Liars. It will make you nostalgic for the original Ground Zero, when the US was doin’ the mayhem and, 40 years later, we were still thumping our chests with the Gipper.

I’ve been checking in with the Daily Beast, the new Salon/HuffPo/TPM-type website from Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker.

Brown, who has refined the art of self-promotion to the degree that she’s become completely oblivious to her own obnoxiousness, is a buddy of John McCain. The new site’s political writing is suffused with a whiff of neo-con apologetics. Check out this piece by the over-exposed McCain lover, Ana Marie Cox. Or read Tina’s own paean to Hillary Clinton.

You can almost hear the sigh of relief that Obama is appointing longtime Washington insiders to his cabinet. That means that Ana Marie and Tina won’t lose their own power base. (The Obama presidency is going to be much more business-as-usual than lefties want to admit.)

Last summer, Tina was interviewed on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” Besides confessing her long friendship with John McCain, she gushes repeatedly about how her new site can make people feel well informed, even if they’re not. It’s another argument for telegraphic writing that blends news and entertainment. Of course, Tina has long been famous for her abbreviation of New Yorker pieces.

Watch the video here.

A teenager commits suicide before his webcam.

So says a study reported in The New York Times.

I won’t be surprised if some “good explanation” for this turns up, but it remains a perfect expression of the world’s regard for our lame-duck president.

Last Saturday was the “National Day of Protest.” Gay men and women all over America demonstrated against California’s adoption of Proposition 8, which makes gay marriage in that state illegal again.

I’m not going to discuss the idiocy of permitting majorities to restrict the rights of minorities through referenda. It may take a while, but I think the courts will set things right.

What has amused me — in a bitter sort of way — is the screeching by many gay bloggers and journalists about the ineffectiveness of the Human Rights Campaign in fighting Proposition 8. I’m also amused by their excited observation of grassroots activists bypassing the HRC and seizing attention that the organization, with all its dollars, could not.

I’m not going to name names, because I see no need for a personal battle over this. But several new critics of the HRC were among those who trashed me repeatedly when I was making the identical observation about the organization in a biweekly column I wrote for ETC, a now-defunct weekly magazine, during the ’90s.

In fact, the local head of the HRC wrote probably the most personally vicious letter to the editor ever published about me. She later claimed that the national office had “forced” her to write the letter.

The HRC has never been a particularly effective organization. It has been a tireless fundraiser whose principal appeal has been to middle-class white men and women who like to attend its annual banquet and exhibit the normality of homosexuality….to one another. But it has accomplished very little besides raising lots of money.

The real work for gay rights has always been done by volunteer activists like members of ACT UP and Queer Nation, who were not afraid to get noisy in the streets and, at the same time, exerted pressure through conventional means like the courts and meeting with government officials.

The same people who are praising the new activists and cursing the HRC are of course also the people who demonized ACT UP and most other public displays by uppity gay men and women. I was repeatedly criticized for writing positive things about ACT UP in particular. Even now, some revisionists refuse to acknowledge that ACT UP saved many lives by convincing the FDA to revise its testing protocols.

I’m glad, of course, to see these people “come around,” although they would doubtlessly (a) deny their earlier opposition to these political tactics, (b) claim they have always questioned the HRC and (c) nitpick the differences between the street behavior of marriage advocates and ACT UP folks.

Ironically, I kind of like Joe Solmonese, the current president of the HRC. I admired, for example, his stand against supporting ENDA after Barney Frank excised trans people from its protections …. but I was disappointed when he backed down.

In any case, blaming the HRC for the adoption of Prop 8 is absurd. What it reveals is an expectation about the organization that was totally ungrounded in reality.

I’ve been a longtime critic of mainstream psychotherapy. You can read several articles I’ve written on the subject on my original site, Soulworks.net (click on the “writings” button).

Today I received an email from Christopher Lane, an English professor and author of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness, alerting me to his column in today’s Los Angeles Free Press. It’s about the latest insanity regarding the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

The DSM is the “bible” by which a committee of the American Psychiatric Association classifies mental health disorders. Decisions about what is included in the manual are made in secret, but a former editor of the volume, Robert Spitzer, has called for full transparency in the process.

The reason in part has to do with the way psychiatry seems devoted to turning symptoms into full-blown disorders, whose treatment in turn enriches the profession, along with Big Pharma. Lane mentions a few of the more ludicrous “disorders” being considered for inclusion in the next edition of the DSM:

Hanging in the balance is whether, four years from now, a set of questionable behaviors with names such as “Apathy Disorder,” “Parental Alienation Syndrome,” “Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder,” “Compulsive Buying Disorder,” “Internet Addiction” and “Relational Disorder” will be considered full-fledged psychiatric illnesses….

Behind the dispute about transparency is the question of whether the vague, open-ended terms being discussed even come close to describing real psychiatric disorders. To large numbers of experts, apathy, compulsive shopping and parental alienation are symptoms of psychological conflict rather than full-scale mental illnesses in their own right. Also, because so many participants in the process of defining new disorders have ties to pharmaceutical companies, some critics argue that the addition of new disorders to the manual is little more than a pretext for prescribing profitable drugs.

I suggest recognition of another disorder — compulsive pathologizing.

Today’s New York Times features a story about a widely quoted McCain surrogate. Problem is, he doesn’t exist.

It’s yet another example of the way journalism has abandoned the usual source checks in order to keep up with the 24-hour news cycle.

The hoaxer has a website and the reporters and pundits who made use of it must have lost their sense of humor along with their ethics. It’s such conspicuous satire, it’s hard to believe anyone made even half-hearted checks of the site’s claims before reporting them.

I suppose, though, that this is, first, a natural outcome of the blogosphere’s routine conflation of fact and fiction. However, “real journalists” have repeatedly claimed that their ethical standards set them far apart from “citizen journalists.” So this is also a textbook example of the mainstream media’s adopting the same sloppy reporting habits for which it criticizes bloggers.

As more media devote more of their resources to websites, we’re likely to see more of this kind of thing until, eventually, all media turn into online games.

Yawning at a memorial service for Yitzhak Rabin gets an Israeli soldier 21 days in jail.

If you fall asleep at a funeral in Israel, I guess you never wake up.

True story!