Saturday, November 29, 2008

Moody Post-Election News

I had no idea that wikipedia was brought to us by a nonprofit organization. Turns out that they're called wikimedia and have other charitable wiki projects out there running on their open source wiki software. This is the kind of thing that helps cheer me up after the passage of Prop 8 here in California and all the other appallingly discriminatory propositions passed in other states this month.

Of course, knowing that wikipedia has a lot of good will for society behind it isn't quite as encouraging on the human rights front as the Florida court decision earlier this week. It really shouldn't be such a relief to hear this type of rational statement in a court of (supposedly separated from any church's pulpit) law:

“It is clear that sexual orientation is not a predictor of a person’s ability to parent.” --Judge Cindy S. Lederman, Miami-Dade Circuit Court

Sadly, the Flordia law banning homosexual couples or individuals from adopting children has been on the books for 30 years and the state will appeal the decision in the Florida Supreme Court. The idea of the state making a case that people like me have a "higher incidence of drug and alcohol abuse among same-sex couples, that their relationships are less stable than those of heterosexuals, and that their children suffer a societal stigma" (NYTimes article above), is chillingly reminiscent of 20th Century arguments made about the intelligence of black people and women based on cranial size. Using pseudo-scientific studies to justify racist/sexist/homophobic beliefs is the pathetic flail of the ruling class as they feel their means of oppressing the rest of us slip through their fingers. It's disgusting, but it's also extremely revealing of the unfair bias of the claim. Accepted scientific inquiries have that inconvenient attribute of objectivity and are not touted as facts but rather theories that are not only provable but also disprovable. Science allows itself to change and reminds its community to keep an open mind, to consider all possibilities, to think outside the given box. In this case, the sweeping, scientific-sounding claims made by the state's "experts" were refuted by studies of individual families showing "that children raised by gay parents fare just as well or better than children raised by straight parents” (same article). I don't know how much the experts vs. studies argument will bear on the Florida Supreme Court's decision when they are eventually obliged to hear this case, but it's good to see signs that the quality of life is improving and will continue to improve for unconventional families in this country. Just as the ability to score well on an IQ test will go up when one is no longer forced into manual labor or domestic servitude, the ability to create a safe, stable family life will increase when one is ALLOWED to have a family. Makes sense to me.

The scales are tilted and we all need to pull our weight in balancing them. The news that wikipedia's mission to allow free access to the sum of human knowledge to all and sundry is a hefty addition to the underserved side of the scales. They are running on donations and are about half way to their 2009 goals now. Maybe my money would be better spent by supporting literacy programs or by helping more poor people & communities gain access to computers, but wikimedia does a lot of good and every little bit of good helps.

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