Second Breakfast

So apparently there is a group of doctors in California who denied fertility treatment to a lesbian woman who had been in preparation for artificial insemination for many months, on the grounds that her “lifestyle” violated their fundamentalist Christian beliefs. And to top things off, the California Medical Association has weighed in in support of the doctors.

What’s next? Am I going to have to worry that when I go to the emergency room my doctor or nurse there, if my husband is present, may decline to treat me on the grounds that our relationship is immoral and “family-destroying” (the irony of the statement aside)? Maybe my dentist will refuse to clean my teeth given my moral degeneracy? I already can’t give blood, and apparently the FDA thinks I shouldn’t be a sperm donor too since by having sex with men means I must have HIV.

There is apparently a substantial number of people in this country who would pretty much prefer if their queer neighbors, co-workers, and family members would just fuck off and die in the corner somewhere. Sometimes they say it with baseball bats, and sometimes with press releases. Either way, its violence of the most personal kind.

And I’m fairly certain its not something that Jesus would do.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 23, 2005

CONTACT: Joel Ginsberg
Interim Executive Director: (415) 255-4547, jginsberg@glma.org

GLMA URGES CALIFORNIA MEDICAL ASSOCIATION TO WITHDRAW SUPPORT FOR
DOCTORS WHO DISCRIMINATE
CMA defends actions of physicians who refused care on basis of sexual
orientation

SAN FRANCISCO - The Gay and Lesbian Medical Association today strongly
urged the California Medical Association to withdraw its
friend-of-the-court brief from a case involving two obstetricians who
denied fertility care to a San Diego woman because she is a lesbian.

In the lawsuit, Guadalupe Benitez, represented by Lambda Legal, charged
that her doctors refused to inseminate her after she had received 11
months of preparatory treatment from the clinic. The doctors claimed
that because of their personal religious beliefs about gay people, they
would not administer the treatment and asserted that their
fundamentalist Christian beliefs exempt them from California’s civil
rights laws. In May, the California Medical Association filed an amicus
brief in favor of the doctors who discriminated against Benitez. A few
weeks later, the Christian Medical and Dental Association filed its own
amicus brief.

Joel Ginsberg, Interim Executive Director of the Gay and Lesbian Medical
Association stated, “Objecting to the morality of a procedure is one
thing. Objecting to the morality of a patient is another. Since 1990 the
American Medical Association Code of Ethics has stated, ‘Physicians
cannot refuse to care for patients based on race, gender, sexual
orientation, or any other criteria that would constitute invidious
discrimination.’ This is part of a disturbing trend we’re seeing across
the country to give legal cover to health care providers who want to
refuse care to people they don’t approve of.”

Jennifer C. Pizer, Senior Counsel in Lambda Legal’s Western Regional
Office in Los Angeles said, “The California Medical Association wants it
both ways-you can’t on one hand say that discrimination is bad then on
the other provide a road map for how to deny treatment for a particular
group of people. CMA’s decision to enter this case in support of
discrimination against patients is extremely distressing.” Lambda Legal
has filed legal papers urging the California state appeals court to
reject the arguments of the CMA’s brief.

Regarding the CMA’s decision to file a friend-of-the-court brief on
behalf of the doctors, Ginsberg said, “We feel that the CMA is deeply
misguided in supporting physicians who allow ideology to obstruct the
delivery of compassionate health care. The fact that the Christian
Medical and Dental Association-which calls homosexuality ‘destructive
to. healthy marriages, families and society’-has also filed an amicus
brief in support of the doctors which makes many of the same arguments
as the CMA’s brief is most telling. There is a documented, systemic
problem of homophobia in health care that has real consequences. The
American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology has just filed a document,
‘Special Issues in Women’s Health,’ that addresses this very subject.
Unfortunately, the CMA’s support of discrimination will only make things
worse.”

Ginsberg concluded, “Like most of the homophobia in medicine, the CMA’s
posture most likely comes not from a desire to discriminate, but from a
thoughtless disregard for the realities of people’s lives. We urge to
the CMA to immediately withdraw this amicus brief which has the
potential to be so intensely hurtful to LGBT persons everywhere.”

Case Background

Benitez’s lawsuit was thrown out of state court initially, but Benitez
won an appeal two years ago which said patients can sue health care
providers who discriminate against them based on their sexual
orientation, and federal law does not exempt health care providers from
state civil rights laws. That unanimous state appeals court decision set
an important precedent as the first ruling of its kind in the nation.
With that ruling allowing her to proceed, Benitez’ case returned to the
trial court.

Last fall, Benitez won a legal ruling in the trial court saying that
doctors in a for-profit medical group must comply with California’s
antidiscrimination laws and treat all patients equally, whatever the
doctors’ personal religious beliefs may be. The doctors asked the Court
of Appeal in San Diego to review that ruling before trial and the court
ordered both sides to submit briefs. The parties’ briefs can be found at
www.lambdalegal.org.

For more than 20 years, the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association has
worked to ensure equality in health care for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and
transgender patients and health professionals. For more information,
call 415-255-4547 or visit www.glma.org.

I have not read anything by Bryson before, but he is apparently well-regarded as a travel writer. So in a strange way it is not surprising to have him pen this book, which attempts to tell, in about 500 pages, the entire history of our universe, solar system, planet, and all life on it — mostly from the point of view of the science and scientists that have over the past several hundred years in particular helped us to understand the rather insignificant place that we occupy in an increasingly vast and strange universe. Instead of traveling in place, Bryson takes us on a whirlwind tour of time (our time), and the very wierd and tenuous journey of life on this planet, and our understanding of it.

I like reading popular science and “history of ideas” books. While this is Bryson’s first attempt at science writing, I think it is quite successful, and Bryson is above all else a masterful stylist and humorist. In fact I suspect that it really takes a non-scientist to understand the story behind the science, and tell it in a way that preserves both the factual essence of the science and the human stories that always exist just under the covers of scientific activity. What you come away with most strongly is a sense of how utterly wrong (and confident in our wrongness) we have been about our understanding of the world, and how amazingly unpopular most of the correct (as far as we understand them) ideas have been when first proposed. Or, as Richard Feynman famously said: “Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts.” Bryson draws upon some 250 “experts” in the reading that supports this book.

Although those literate in the sciences will probably find little new here, Bryson provides an extraordinary wealth of anecdote (for example, the rarest element on Earth is Francium [Fr] according to Bryson’s source who suggests that only twenty francium atoms exist in the earth at any given time [although a quick Google search suggests that Astatine [At] may be rarer, but there is still something like an ounce of Astatine extant in the earth’s crust at any given time]. Or the story of the Yellowstone park employees who went “hot-potting” in the warm pools at the park, and having left their flashlight behind, took a leap of faith right into a boiling pool, which none survived.

Many of Bryson’s quips are laugh-out-loud funny, particularly in the first two-thirds of the book. He tells about Thomas Midgley, Jr., an Ohio inventor with a penchant for inventing things with the most regrettably noxious side-effects. Midgely became famous as the inventor of leaded gasoline, which reduced engine knock, and in the process helped deliver tons and tons of lead into the environment and human nervous systems. Bryson writes:

Buoyed by the success of leaded gasoline, Midgely now turned to another technological problem of the age, refrigerators. [...] Midgley set out to create a gas that was stable, nonflammable, noncorrosive, and safe to breathe. With an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny, he invented chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs [..] which may ultimately prove to be just about the worst invention of the twentieth century.

Midgley never knew this because he died long before anyone realized how destructive CFCs were. His death itself was memorably unusual. After becoming crippled with polio, Midgley invented a contraption involving a series of motorized pulleys that automatically raised or turned him in bed. In 1944, he became entangled in the cords as the machine went into action and was strangled.

If you’re a fan of good science writing and enjoy dry, Python-esque humour, then you may enjoy Bryson’s foray into explaining just about everything there is.

I remember loving Leiber’s fantasy writing as a young boy. The “Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser” sword and sorcery books were enormously entertaining (if mildly racy for ten year old boys) with good doses of adventure, intrigue, and mystery. Leiber is probably one of the most underappreciated writers in the genre, and definitely worth a look if you like your fantasy fast, fresh, fun, and uncomplicated by lots of moral hand-wringing.

This slim volume, which I picked up at Afterwords in Ann Arbor sometime back, was apparently written, lost, and recently re-discovered in Leiber’s writings. It is in a very different style than the fantasy books, and while it takes a while to get itself in motion, it is quite effective and entertaining by the time the tale draws to its close. I was reminded of Lovecraft in the creeping sense of dread and inevitability as Leiber develops this little tale of time travel and its unintended consequences.

I have been rediscovering books that I enjoyed as a child, and I definitely need to put Leiber on the list.

C. S. Lewis famously writes about MacDonald that “I have never concealed the fact that I regarded George MacDonald as my master; indeed, I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him.” So I figured if I was to have a more than passing acquaintance with Lewis and his friends that I should probably read something of MacDonald.

In the introduction to this edition, which incorporates an abbreviated version of an introduction that Lewis wrote for an anthology of MacDonald’s work in 1946, Lewis acknowledges his enormous debt to MacDonald, despite the fact that the two men had never met, and Lewis himself had only ever met one person who knew him. He writes “What [reading] it actually did to me was to convert, even to baptise [...] my imagination. It did nothing to the intellect nor (at that time) my conscience. [...] But when the process was complete [...] I found that I was still with MacDonald and that he had accompanied me all the way…”. This is high praise from someone whose conversion to Christianity resulted in what some argue are the most important set of Christian apologetics in the twentieth century.

“Lilith” is a Victorian fantasy somewhat in the mode and style of Poe (indeed Auden is quoted as comparing MacDonald to the “best of Poe”) — the narrator (the didacticly-named Mr. Vane) comes to inherit an estate featuring a large house with many books. After some time there he encounters a strange bird-like man named Mister Raven, who takes him through a looking glass in the attic of his house to a strange land where he takes part in a cosmic drama of sin and redemption.

The novel is mostly successful. The style at times is a little florid and a little overwrought (Lewis himself says in his introduction “If we defined Literature as an art whose medium is words, then certainly MacDonald has no place in its first rank, or even its second.” But despite this, MacDonald’s gift for description and myth-making redeem his writing, and you can see how profoundly MacDonald’s approach to engaging fundamental human issues through mythic means could have impacted Lews so strongly. And in thinking about Lewis’ fantastic writings, one can see how MacDonald’s ideas and devices are incorporated into them.

I haven’t experienced a fundamental change in consciousness by reading this novel as Lewis did, but it did help me understand the context into which Lewis and others were bringing their work, and its those works I think that have impacted me in the same way.

Ken at HomeFries.org did this survey from quizfarm.com, and being the unquestioning sheep that I am, I took it as well. I’m feeling rather wishy-washy today and unwilling to commit to strong theological positions today, so I probably look a little more conservative than I actually feel most days.

You scored as Emergent/Postmodern. You are Emergent/Postmodern in your theology. You feel alienated from older forms of church, you don’t think they connect to modern culture very well. No one knows the whole truth about God, and we have much to learn from each other, and so learning takes place in dialogue. Evangelism should take place in relationships rather than through crusades and altar-calls. People are interested in spirituality and want to ask questions, so the church should help them to do this. Emergent/Postmodern 86% Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan 64% Neo orthodox 61% Modern Liberal 61% Roman Catholic 57% Classical Liberal 50% Charismatic/Pentecostal 39% Reformed Evangelical 18% Fundamentalist 0%

What's your theological worldview?
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On a lighter note, despite my attempt to be a nice guy who likes to make things out of metal, I’m apparently really an evil, nasty guy at heart according to the Which D&D Religion Are You? quiz:

What D&D Religion Do You Worship?
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