Quickies
Skepchick Quickies, 3.15
- Mississippi school sued for canceling prom over lesbian student. (From Lauren.)
- Dirty space news from Astropixie. (Via Izzy.)
- Checking out Kirstie Alley’s new diet program.
- Addressing tokenism.
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I feel for Constance McMillen, but her opponents haven’t a leg to stand on except prejudice. I suspect that at some level they realize that. Her life will be hell for a while, but her stand will smash a lot of cheap crockery. Good will ultimately come of it.
Here’s an excellent follow-up to the Constance McMillen saga:
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-21239-Oakland-Skepticism-Examiner~y2010m3d13-In-response-to-Mississippi-schoolboard-Humanists-pledges-20000-for-LGBT-friendly-prom?cid=sharing_facebook:21239
Wow, I have never seen anyone put this quite so perfectly. I foresee myself using this quote in the future.
I think you should have let Maria or Sam talk about the tokenism thing.
The McMillen story has had me pissed off since I first saw it a few days ago. How much of a bigoted pigfucker do you have to be to ruin an important social event for the whole school just to avoid being inclusive? and their “interruption of the educational process” excuse for cancelling it is a massive load of bullshit. As for the Kirstie Alley diet program, I’m not surprised in the least. It’s not the first time the CoS has tried to recruit people to their dangerous nonsense using shell companies like this. There’s narcanon, for one. And they regularly hold “self improvement seminars” for businessmen, doctors, and other well paid professionals in which scientology isn’t even mentioned until you get to the meeting itself.
Before touting a weight loss program, shouldn’t Kirstie Alley successfully use it first?
[feign=ignorance]Is Mississippi some sort of conservative backwater?[/feign]
@Bjornar: The mother of a friend of mine refers to Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Arkansas as “A third world nation, brought north just for us.”
@Mark Hall: I can agree with that. I was born and raised in Mississippi. Please don’t hold that against me.
As I’ve said elsewhere that the prom canceling story came up;
This isn’t anything new. This is actually a pretty old play out of the right-wingnut/bigotry playbook.
Know where else it got use?
During the Civil Rights movement.
When segregation was taken out of schools. The counties said, “Oh no, we can’t fund these schools anymore!” and cut their funding/shut them down, then the white upper crust said, “Well, we can’t have that! We’ll pool our money together and build a nice private school!”
If you look down a list of private schools in Mississippi, you’ll notice virtually all of them were founded in the late 60s. This is why.
And it’s the same play they’re doing here; they aren’t canceling prom, they’re canceling the publicly funded prom, with the blatantly spoken expectation that some generous private backers will pick up the tab for their own little prom, with their own rules.
And they will.
But fuck Itawamba county. They wouldn’t have batted an eye if it was someone trying to bring their pet pig to prom.
“Anti-Scientology campaign group Anonymous…”
This line amused me. I like that Anonymous has somehow built up an air of legitimacy, at least to people who don’t know what 4chan is.
Anyway, yeah, Kirstie Alley’s weight loss program probably is a scam, but then, so are most weight loss programs. I’m less concerned about the efficacy of the program than the possibility that the money people spend on it could be funneled to the church of Scientology, or that the weight loss program itself could be used to recruit people. That’s just a dirty trick.
As someone from Mississippi, I apologize. Lately I’ve had to do this a lot because of highschools – there was that bit earlier in the year where a girl wanted to wear a tuxedo in her yearbook photo, and the school flipped out.
In 2008, Charleston, Mississippi had it’s first non-segregrated prom, thanks only to a documentary film and 17 grand from Morgan Freeman, who called it “the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
And Lt Storm, a couple of humanists put up 20 grand for an all-inclusive prom, so while you’re right, I think it’s a win regardless – And a New Orleans hotel operator has given free transportation and lodging. Which sounds like a kickass prom.
Me, I wish they’d have let lesbians go to my prom. That would have taken away some of the pressure from the fact that none of the girls wanted to go with me. Then I could have blamed it on lesbians and not my hyperactive desire to discuss Star Wars and Ultima Online.
I misread tokenism as tolkienism and thought the link was going to be way geekier.
Yea, where I used to work they had to hire one tolkien elf. I always thought she was eavesdropping with those big pointed ears.
Avoiding tokenism is tricky, and it requires some actual monitoring and evaluation. Collect data to see if your selected candidates are as representative as you would expect from a random process. If so, then you’re good for now, but keep checking.
If not, then you need to work out why. Is is bias in the selectors? If so, then how about blinding procedures? Is it some part of the application process that discourages some people, if so stop doing that thing.
Like so many worthwhile endeavours, it’s not an easy thing to do.
@lexicakes: It’s a good bet that at some time, the program will recommend auditing.
The lawsuit against Itawamba County is on despite the cancellation. We’ll see how it rolls.