The Republic of T.

J.W. Richard over at Mandrake Society Radio is running a series of Kwanzaa-related podcasts this week, in which he’s asked different black LGBT bloggers to speak about the principles of Kwanzaa. I was honored to be asked to reflect on the principle of ujima — collective work and responsibility.

To build and maintain our community together and make our brother’s and sister’s problems our problems and to solve them together.

It was December 1st, World AIDS Day, when I sat down to write what I wanted to say. So my mind naturally turned to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in African American communities. And in reflecting on that, I couldn’t help remembering some of the things I’d blogged about this year, like reading a great book about homophobia in black churches or reading about and responding to Keith’s experience at Central State University. I thought about Michael Sandy and Dwan Prince. I thought of ministers like Alfred Owens, Willie WIlson and Wellington Boone. I thought about how few African Americans are more like Leonard Pitts.

I thought about all of the above in relation to collective work and responsibility, and poured it into today’s podcast in the Kwanzaa series. I got a little long-winded, but I wanted to make sure I got all of the context in. I hope it’s a useful contribution. Also, check out the previous podcasts addressing Umoja (unity) and Kujichagulia (self determination).

Never mind that business that soy products my might make your kid gay. If junior’s chowing down on tofu and turning up his nose at meat, it might just mean you’ve got a bright kid on your hands, according to a study suggesting that bright children are more likely to become vegetarians.

It’s official - vegetarians really are smarter. But it is not because of what they eat. Bright children are more likely to reject meat and opt to become vegetarians when they grow up, a study has shown. Clever veggies are born not made.

The finding helps explain how a team of vegetarians won the BBC Test the Nation competition in September, when they beat off competition from six other teams including butchers, public school pupils and footballers’ wives to achieve the highest overall IQ score.

… Researchers from the University of Southampton who conducted the study agree. They suggest that vegetarians are more thoughtful about what they eat. But they say it is unclear whether bright children choose to become vegetarians for the health benefits or for other reasons, such as a concern for animals, or as a lifestyle choice.

The scientists began investigating the link between IQ and vegetarianism because people with higher intelligence have a lower risk of heart disease, which has long puzzled doctors.

There are a few other interesting bits of information, including a finding that vegetarians are likely to be better educated and of “higher social class.” If you ask me, I think that makes sense in part because those two factors make more likely to be able to spend much time thinking about what you eat, and to put more effort in buying particular kinds of foods. You probably have a grocery store in your neighborhood, maybe even a Whole Foods, and/or transportation to get you there and back home.

But, it’s easier to eat healthy if you live in the suburbs, where there are grocery stores and health food stores, and have the money to spend. In other words, it’s easier to make healthier choices when healthier choices are readily available. When they’re not, it’s not.

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This is probably one of those things we’re not supposed to talk about, particularly on World AIDS Day. But it’s been sitting in my inbox for a couple of days, and today seems like as good a day as any to address something that’s been an undercurrent in previous posts. So, there’s this new study from a Christian organization — Compassion International — which suggests that conservatives are somewhat less compassionate to people living with HIV/AIDS.

In the study commissioned by Compassion International, a ministry to poor children in developing countries, 1,004 telephone interviews with adults 18 and older were conducted by a Christian polling organization.

When asked if they “have more sympathy for people who have cancer than you do for people who have HIV or AIDS because you feel most of those with HIV/AIDS got the disease as a result of their decisions or lifestyles,” thirty-nine percent of the people polled agreed strongly or somewhat.

The study shows that political ideology plays a large role in the degree of sympathy Americans hold for victims.

“Demonstrating that these issues have been co-opted by political considerations, easily the most significant gap related to sociopolitical ideology,” the study says. “Political conservatives (50%) were twice as likely as liberals (23%) to say that they have less compassion for those with the ‘lifestyle’ disease.”

“Also, Republicans’ lack of sympathy outpaces that of Democrats (45% versus 34%, respectively),” the study adds.

Hey, I didn’t say it. I just quoted the study. Question is: Why the “compassion gap”?

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(Ed. Note: Today is world AIDS day, and while I’d like to write something about it, I can’t come up with anything better than what I wrote last year. So, if may be the epitome of lazy blogging, but maybe there are some people who didn’t read it last year. So I’m re-posting it today. More news posts to follow…)

There’s a t-shirt in my closet at home, black with white lettering, that bears the words above. It expresses the sentiment that’s in my heart today. It’s World AIDS Day, and a day on which I can’t help thinking about all the people who have been lost; the ones close to me and the people never knew but who meant something to someone.

It was on my mind this morning when I picked my son up and carried him downstairs, and it was on my mind when I kissed him and my husband goodbye and made my way out the door. It wasn’t until I was on the train that it truly hit me. I was sitting, reading and listening to music, and the next song that played was Warren Zevon’s “Keep Me In Your Heart for a While,” written before his own death from lung cancer.

Shadows are falling and I’m running out of breath

Keep me in your heart for a while

If I leave you it doesn’t mean I love you any less

Keep me in your heart for a while

When you get up in the morning and you see that crazy sun

Keep me in your heart for a while

There’s a train leaving nightly called when all is said and done

Keep me in your heart for a while

Sitting there on the train I did something I almost never do. I wept. I closed my book, bowed my head, covered my face so that no one would see, and quietly wept. Sentimental, I know. But I couldn’t help it.

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I hate to say “I told you so” — especially in this case — but can we finally just admit this? It doesn’t fucking work. Can we go one step further and say that funding religious organizations to teach abstinence-only education and spread anti-condom propaganda in Africa is an act of genocide?

Remember a while back when I unpacked the rest of a post from Anderson Cooper’s blog, about a religious charity running a program in Africa for women with fistulas? Remember the rest of the story being the Bush administration’s suspension of funding for a UN program that served the same function, and leaving the door open for religious organizations to step in do do as they please. And how the faith-based organization featured in the post ran an HIV prevention program that focused on abstinence and little else?

Remember that the Bush administration has eliminated or weakened rules to protect the division of church and state, so that religious organizations can get federal money to “spread the gospel” on the taxpayers’ dime, while running health care operations that end up making treatment for serious diseases — like tuberculosis, AIDS and malaria — not just a matter of life and death, but a matter of faith as well? Remember that we’ve gone from funding the Great Society to funding the great commission?

Remember that I also included in that post mention of an HIV prevention educator who had the following experience while participating in a program in Uganda, run by a faith-based organization?

“Just remember, whatever you do, don’t mention condoms.”

I froze halfway inside the hot, dusty classroom in Kampala, Uganda. I turned to Crystal, the coordinator for ASK Africa, an initiative promoting HIV/AIDS awareness and education in Ugandan primary and secondary schools. I must have looked bewildered because she again made it clear that my impending speech about the ASK program could not include any shout-outs to the Trojan Man. Apparently the headmistress would be present, and as far as she is concerned, “safe sex” is an oxymoron.

…It’s bad enough that $1.3 billion has been spent domestically in the United States on these unproven and controversial abstinence-only programs, many of which are soiled with subliminal religious messages passed as scientific fact. But it’s criminal, even unpardonable, that we have forced our own policies on countries unable to deny them, undermining the potency of programs needing every resource at their disposal in their educational arsenal to adequately equip vulnerable populations against a virus that continues to purge their countries.

It gets worse as he goes on.

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This just in. States can now use their abstinence education grants to reach out to 20-somethings, and not just teenagers. Good news, because we know how well it didn't work with teenagers, and still doesn't. But let's not forget, it doesn't matter whether it works or not, as long as the states can win souls to Jesus on the taxpayers' dime.

I don’t want to harp on this too much. It’s just something that occurred to me a couple of times lately. First, a few weeks ago, after coming across a post about Whitney Houston’s split from her husband and her latest attempt at recovery, while standing in line at CVS I saw that Us magazine had a cover story that included a rather flattering picture of Houston. I couldn’t help myself. I grabbed the magazine and decided to buy it to read the article.

The magazine cover sparked a conversation once I got to the counter. Not one that included me, but rather one between two of the cashiers, who were both African American women. The first cashier rang up my purchases, and when she got to the magazine she looked at the cover and showed it to her coworker who was standing next to her. Their conversation went something like this.

CASHIER 1: Hhhhmph. Look at this. (Shows the magazine cover to her coworker.

CASHIER 2: Mmmm hmmmm.

CASHIER 1: Now see. When she was with Bobby, they put out the ugliest pictures of her they could find.

CASHIER 2: Mmmm hmmmm.

CASHIER 1: Now that she left Bobby, now they find nice picture of her.

Neither one addressed me, but as I left the store I wondered if it was possible I’d just heard a hint and affirmation of some kind of media conspiracy to break up the Houston-Brown marriage?

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I loves me some Anderson Cooper. Goodness knows I do. But, Andy, Andy, Andy. When I see stuff like this on your blog I begin to wonder why you aren’t telling the rest of the story, and if it’s because Tucker Carson has you tied up somewhere and has hijacked your laptop for nefarious right wing water-carrying.

“She never says anything to men,” one of the hospital counselors explained, and then she told us why.

The little girl was raped. Gang-raped. It was allegedly done by soldiers engaged in a complicated regional war that has claimed millions of lives. The war officially ended in 2003, but outbreaks of violence and rape continue. The girl is now five years old. She was raped when she was three.

I wish I could tell you this was an extraordinary event. I wish I could tell you she was the only child attacked. The hospital was full of rape victims, and the doctor had seen other small children victimized.

Because the rapes are so violent, women often develop fistulas — ruptures in their vaginas or rectums that make it impossible to control bodily functions. A charity called Heal Africa was running this hospital, and the doctor said he was able to fix about 70-80 percent of the fistula cases, but of course some wounds never heal.

Heal Africa has opened up a residence for women with fistulas that can’t be surgically fixed, at least not here in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The women can’t go home. Often they’ve been rejected by their husbands because they were raped. The stigma here is strong.

I’ll give you credit. It’s touching, and it’s great that Heal Africa is helping these women. But it’s not the whole truth.

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Anybody know an effective treatment for carpal tunnel syndrome? Because mine is flaring up again. I’ve got all the symptoms.

• Numbness or pain in your hand, forearm, or wrist that awakens you at night. (Shaking or moving your fingers may ease this numbness and pain.)
• Occasional tingling, numbness, “pins-and-needles” sensation, or pain. The feeling is similar to your hand “falling asleep.”
• Numbness or pain that worsens while using your hand or wrist, especially when gripping an object with your hand or bending (flexing) your wrist.
• Occasional aching pain in your forearm between your elbow and wrist.
• Stiffness in your fingers when you get up in the morning.

Well, it doesn’t wake me up at night, but the stiffness or numbness and tingling is is definitely there, and shaking my hand is becoming a habit. Picking stuff up is definitely getting to be a problem. When I pick Parker up lately, I tend to favor my left arm over my right (because that’s attached to my dominant hand, which is also used for mouse-clicking). And there’s definitely pain between my elbow and wrist more often these days.

This has happened before, and has gotten worse recently. So, it may be time to see a doctor. In the meantime, I’m going to restrict my computer use to work-related stuff and email for the next couple of days. That means little to no blogging (in part because the kind of blogging I do lately ends up requiring a lot of googling and a lot of writing), despite the frustrating fact that there’s a hot political story unfolding, and some other stuff I want to cover.

I’ve got a couple of posts in the hopper, so if I absolutely can’t resist, I may just cut back to one post a day. Alas, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. So, If you don’t see any action around here for a couple of days, you’ll know why.

Whoops. Wednesday was ADD Awareness Day. Seeing as how I’m loaded with it, I guess it’s appropriate that I’d find out several days later. It also took me about that long to come across the article in Tuesday’s Washington Post Express about possible links between smoking, lead exposure and ADD. We already know lead exposure isn’t good for the brain, so the connection to ADD isn’t much of a surprise. What jumped out at me from the Express article, though, was this blurb.

Now, I’m not going to dispute that number. I just want to add one fact that usually gets left out: some children with ADD grow up to be adults with ADD. About 70% to 30% of them, in fact. I won’t go into the experience of living with untreated ADD into adulthood, as I’ve explored it in archived posts. I just wish that it would get mentioned more often that adults can have it too. After all, children with ADD often grow up to be adults with ADD. Then it might be less common to run into someone who says they don’t “believe in” adult ADD (or ADD itself), and easier for those of us who didn’t get help as children to get it as adults.

There's probably a lot of joke potential in this story of the first ever penis transplant (surgically successful, but rejected for psychological reasons), but I'm not going to explore them. I have an honest question. Why a transplant? I'm not up on the latest surgical techniques in gender transition, but why did they need to transplant? Couldn't surgeons have done something for this guy similar to what they do for FTM transgendered people?

The FDA has approved spraying a backteria-eating viruses on lunchmeat, to fight listeria. Hmmm. I think I'll stick to Tofurkey. [Via Boing Boing]

My post about the teen sex club at a Texas high school caused quite a discussion over at Street Prophets. One of the commenters thought I was going a bit too far when I turned Pam Stenzel’s “AIDS is not the enemy” schtick around to show the flip side of her logic.

I couldn’t help thinking about that today when I was reading Time To Deliver, the activist blog from the 16th International AIDS conference. In particular, I was stuck by a post in which one activist relates her encounter with HIV-positive ex-gays and posts excerpts from the booklet they were handing out at the conference (and from which I borrowed the title of this post).

It’s called “He Intends Victory: Real-life stories of Christians living with AIDS” by Dan Wooding [Ugh! if only i could wash my hand in the dog poop Divine eats off the sidewalk in Pink Flamingoes! maybe that would clean it!!!].

1-800-HIV-HOPE heintendsvictory.com

The book is evil!!!

p.8 (Herbert Hall) – ”After I was discharged from the hospital, I went through counseling for three years and God completely changed my life,” said Herb, his face now alight with joy. “During those three years, I was completely delivered from the homosexual lifestyle…I fell in love with Pam, this wonderful woman at our church.”

p.104 (Mike Hylton) – “I acquired HIV through blood products. Herb got it through a particular action or accident. Herb and I are not innocent victims. AIDS is a product of sin, not a judgement from God. We must stop categorizing one person’s sin (e.g., homosexuality) and matching it to another’s sin (e.g., lying) and then trying to determine a level of innocence. Let God judge the sinner and the sin….Lying may or may not be as bad as homosexuality. Who’s to judge? Sin is sin!”

p.131 (Renee Austin) — Just as I could not blame God for my being HIV positive, how could I blame Tony? The issue is not whether or not he knew; the issue is I engaged in premarital sex, which is against God’s law.”

I’m not sure why it reminded me of Stenzel’s words, or my reading of them, but it did.