The Republic of T.

It’s been a while since I did a round-up based on the “What I’m Reading” column. With work stacking up to fill out the rest of my day, now seems like as good a time as any. And there’s plenty of great stuff out there. Like this post by Aundi over at QueerCents on small towns and “big religion.” I’m planning to include it in a post I’m writing about religion and politics.

There’s a sentence in Aundi’s post that I think I’ll be returning to and quoting again and again, as I return to the topic of religion and politics, religion in politics, religious politics, political religion, etc. You can guess which one it is.

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Well, if my own life serves as any indication, the answer to the above question for some kids with ADD/ADHD is no. Some kids won’t outgrow ADHD.

New findings that attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder may stem from a developmental delay that children could outgrow, rather than a cognitive deficit, have raised questions for parents of the 4.4 million children diagnosed with the disorder.

The findings from a National Institute of Mental Health study, published online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, compared brain scans of 446 children with and without the disorder. The brains of children with ADHD appeared to develop normally but more slowly, lagging on average about three years behind other children.

We spoke with several experts about what the findings might mean for parents.

It means that a certain percentage of their kids will grow up with ADD and that the condition (I so hate the word “disorder” applied here) will persist into adulthood.

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Rachel and Jill were appalled by this. I found myself somewhat bemused, and experiencing vague feeling of deja vu.

Hard figures are difficult to come by, but local people on the coast estimate that as many as one in five single women visiting from rich countries are in search of sex.

Allie and Bethan — who both declined to give their full names — said they planned to spend a whole month touring Kenya’s palm-fringed beaches. They would do well to avoid the country’s tourism officials.

“It’s not evil,” said Jake Grieves-Cook, chairman of the Kenya Tourist Board, when asked about the practice of older rich women traveling for sex with young Kenyan men.

You see, I had a feeling I’d heard this story before; about the lengths some (white) folks will go to and the distances some (white) folks will travel to satisfy a racial fetish, and the (non-white) folks who are more than happy to help them scratch that itch for a price. I not only heard the story a while back, I blogged about it. But then it was merely the domestic version of the above: the phenomenon of the Mangindo Party.

africa, culture, current events, gay rights, gender, masculinity, race, sexuality

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I’m tempted to make some joke about how a local  chicken fat spill could be avoided if more people were vegetarian. But just to be sure I Googled  “vegetable oil spill.” It turns out they happen, and they’re bad for the environment too. But I’m willing to bet they don’t smell quite as bad as gunked-up chicken fat, mixed in with a little motor oil from the road.

When Chanelle Pickett was working at NYNEX in Brookline, MA, I was working at HRC in Washington, DC. While Chanelle Pickett was being harassed and fired for being transgender, I was working on ENDA, among other things. While Channelle Pickett was unable to find work and turning to prostitution as a means of survival, I was working at HRC, trying to pass a version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act that did not include gender identity. But that’s a historical matter now.

That was over 10 years ago. I don’t know what I was doing on November 19, 1995, the night that Pickett met with her killer, William C. Palmer. They already knew each other, and Pickett’s sister said Pickett liked Palmer, and thought of him not just as a “trick” but as potential relationship material. I don’t know what I was doing the moment Palmer strangled Pickett death, apparently consensual sex that resulted in Pickett’s semen and Palmer’s saliva being found on his jeans afterward. Do the math and you’ll probably guess that Palmer clearly knew Pickett was transgender.

I don’t know what I was doing the exact moment that Palmer “sat on” Pickett for 10 minutes, strangled and struck her, and stuffed part of a comforter down her throat (no doubt to stifle her screams). I don’t know what I was doing that exact night, while Palmer slept for six hours with Pickett’s body in his bed before he called his lawyer, who then called the police; or what I was doing the morning after, when the police arrived to find Pickett lying in a pool of blood.

Whatever I was doing, it wasn’t enough to help protect Pickett from the workplace discrimination that helped put her on the path to Palmer’s fatal embrace. I don’t know what I was doing, either, on May 3, 1997, when a jury acquitted Palmer of murder and merely convicted him of assault and battery. Nor do I remember what I was doing on May 15, 1997, when the judge sentenced Palmer — after acknowledging the brutality of the “beating” meted out to Pickett — to 2 1/2 year in prison, and then suspended the last six months of the sentence.

Most of us probably don’t remember what we were doing that long ago. But we’re still debating ENDA and gender identity, ten years later. Are we we much closer now to preventing stories like what happened to Chanelle Pickett from happening today.

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I guess it was the combination of Parker’s fifth birthday and Thanksgiving that brought this series back to mind. After all, it happened that this year Thanksgiving fell on the fifth anniversary of the say we first saw our son and walked out of the hospital with him. (As well as he fifth anniversary of the day I changed my first poopy diaper, which four-day-old Parker presented to as soon as we arrived at the hotel that would serve as our home for our first two weeks as a family, perhaps as my initiation to parenthood.)

Of course, we didn’t conceive him. We couldn’t. Nor did either of us deliver him. But we’ve loved and cared for him for the five years since he was born, as well as protecting and guiding him through his world we didn’t bring him into. According to the Maryland Court of Appeals, though, loving and raising him for the last five years, and being committed to doing so as he grows into adulthood, is nothing compared to being able to make a baby.

Or maybe it was stumbling across an update to a case I filed away as a potential part of this series when I first heard about it. When I first heard about the little girl called Baby Grace, police were releasing sketches and asking for help to identify the little girl whose remains were found in a box.

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My prediction: an  $8 million advance for Ted Kennedy memoirs, means that he’s not going to run in 2008. Because a Kennedy memoir would probably be worth $8 million, but if he’s running again he can’t spill $8 million in dish. But if he’s not running, he can really make it good. So, between now and November 2008 my guess is that he’s going to announce that he’s not running.

I can only imagine what marriage equality opponents will make of this.

Soldiers manning a checkpoint near Baghdad stopped a wedding convoy to find that the purported bride and groom were wanted terror suspects, an Iraqi Defense Ministry official said Monday….The soldiers became suspicious of the convoy because its members — save the “bride” — were all male and because one of the cars in the convoy did not heed orders to stop, the official said.

Also, soldiers said, the people in the car seemed nervous and the groom refused to lift his bride’s veil when soldiers asked him to, according to the official.

I don’t know why the bride wouldn’t lift the veil. From where I sit, he’s kinda cute. Of course, that’s easy to say from a distance. Especially given what happens to gays in U.S. occupied Iraq.

Technorati Tags: iraq, marriage, gay rights, same-sex marriage, marriage equality

Someone should tell this conservative blogger the difference between illegal and unrecognized. After all, same-sex marriage may not be legally recognized, but there’s no legal penalty for performing a same-sex wedding ceremony. So it’s not illegal. Not yet anyway.

Wouldn’t it be better, and wouldn’t life be easier if — so long as they aren’t hurting anyone — we accepted people as who they are or choose to be, and encouraged them to do the same? Why do we insist on forcing people into ill-fitting molds — “ex-gay” or now “ex-transgender” –  that only end up making them miserable?

The Pope and the Dalai Lama, that is. Ratz recently announced that he will not meet with the Dalai Lama next month, even though a Vatican official secretly told reporters that the pontiff would meet with Tenzin Gyatso, a/k/a the Dalai Lama.

No biggie. After all they met a year ago. But there were some details I missed when I blogged about it then.

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 But I do them anyway. At least numbers 1, 2,  4, 5,  and 7. I wonder how many more things I do every day that I don’t have to.

I don’t even know what to say when I hear news like this. What’s there to say when a body basically gays gays are lower than dogs by offering health benefits to pets but not domestic partners?

When trustees of Palm Beach Community College reached a tie vote in August on a proposal to offer health insurance for the domestic partners of employees, the measure failed and advocates for gay professors and other employees were disappointed. Because the college only pays for employees’ benefits, the proposal wouldn’t have cost the college a penny, but would have opened up quality insurance at a lower cost for the partners of gay and lesbian employees.

Now — in a move that is seen as adding salt to those wounds — the college has added a new health insurance benefit for some (unmarried) household members of employees: pet health insurance. All employees were told that they would get a 5 percent discount and group rates on a health insurance plans for their pets. A range of plans are offered, covering wellness care, vaccinations, X-rays, surgery and hospitalization (although pre-existing conditions may not be covered).

“Your pet is a member of your family — his quality of life is important to you,” says the promotional material from the veterinary insurance company.

Your pet is a member of your family, but your partner is not? Basically, yes.

current events, family, gay marriage, gay rights, health care, marriage, politics, same-sex marriage

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