Quick Hit: Hospital Visitation Rights

President Obama has finally taken a significant, positive step on LGBTQI rights.  And he’s done it in a way that benefits everyone who goes to a hospital.  The news coverage I’ve seen so far (Washington Post, New York Times) emphasizes that the new rules Mr. Obama has directed HHS Secretary Sebelius to implement will ensure that people in same-sex relationships will be able to visit and, if necessary, make decisions for their partners in hospitals.  But the actual memorandum specifies this not in terms of recognizing same-sex relationships, but in terms of respecting patients’ rights to designate who should be able to visit and/or make decisions for them.

This applies to people who would prefer that their closest platonic friend make decisions if they’re incapacitated, rather than their family; to people trying to escape abusive familial or spousal relationships; to people like me in different-sex relationships who choose not to marry; and, of course, to people in same-sex relationships who aren’t able to marry yet.  The memorandum also includes language explicitly stating that hospitals “may not deny visitation privileges on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability,” which is, sadly, probably necessary.  But the conceptual framework it applies is not one of slightly expanding the allowed relationships to include not only blood relation and marriage, but “marriage-equivalent” relationships; it’s a more drastic change, which rejects the assumption that blood relation and marriage are always the best proxies for patient wishes, and instead respects patient autonomy.

This is in line with the approach favored by Nancy Polikoff, who hasn’t written about it yet but, I would guess, probably will soon: it makes marriage as a cultural formalism matter less, and instead tries to do a better job of accommodating what patients’ lives are actually like.

So I’m very glad to see this — although I’m still not extending much credit, this is an excellent move, and I’d like to hope that it’s the start of better things to come.

Update: Sure enough, Dr. Polikoff has a post up now about the memo.

Gamer Culture, Rape Culture, CNN and Japanese Culture: Followup

Kyung Lah at CNN has written a followup article to the story I wrote about on Wednesday.

However, the video segment — from CNN’s Prime News program on their HLN (formerly Headline News) channel — has very little to do with Lah’s article itself, and is sensationalist and overblown, particularly on the part of the anchor, Mike Galanos.  His guest, Dr. Cheryl Olson, seemed to be trying to put the brakes on his (not to put too fine a point on it) scaremongering.  In short, I don’t recommend watching the video (though since I’ve already transcribed it, I’ll still include the text below the fold; WordPress doesn’t appear to let me embed the video).

Lah’s article, on the other hand, is much more thoughtful.  I think it does a pretty good job of presenting the complexity of the cultural issues involved, given its limited space and an audience that can’t be presumed to be very familiar with video games, feminist theory, Japanese culture in general or otaku culture in particular.

It’s not without some faults — for example, this paragraph

It is terribly easy to condemn Japan as a sexist and repressed culture with a government that chooses to look the other way. Part of that would be true, but the reason hentai continues to thrive in a country as progressive as Japan is a complex cultural issue.

seems either self-contradictory, or reliant on some oddly contorted sense of the word “progressive,” and the quotations from the sociology professor, Kyle Cleveland, seem troublingly close to suggesting that this is “just how it is” in Japan, and outsiders ought not judge such things.  That can, admittedly, be a fine line to walk: Cleveland is entirely correct when he says

What provokes people about Japan is the cultural distance which inclines people to see Japan as exceptionally lurid or perverse simply because it expresses sexuality in ways outside of Western norms. Japan is in some ways not that different than other cultures, including the United States, which has its own gender problems that are quite apparent.

but the implication that the very real structural misogyny in US culture invalidates American critiques of misogynist elements of other cultures is quite wrong.  Yes, we have to look to the beam in our own eye.  But provided we are willing to do so, and work to extract it, it is not hypocrisy to also mention the mote — or, as in this case, beam of comparable size — in our sibling’s.

Quick Hit: CAFE Standards

This is good news: the Obama administration has announced updated CAFE standards, which not only require (according to the story I heard on the radio, though the text I can find on NPR’s website doesn’t include these numbers) that new passenger cars get an average of 39 miles per gallon and new light trucks and SUVs average 30 mpg by 2016, but also specify the regulations, for the first time, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.  The shift in focus is important.  I don’t know how much more good work we can expect on environmental issues, after President Obama’s troubling decision to open offshore drilling, but it’s heartening to see at least some parts of the government taking the threat of climate change somewhat seriously.

Quick Hit: Not About Video Games

I just heard on the radio on my way home that Scott Roeder, who murdered Dr. George Tiller in cold blood last May and was convicted of first-degree murder in only 37 minutes in January, was today sentenced to a “Hard 50” — Kansas imposes a mandatory life sentence for Murder 1, but the judge had to choose whether Roeder would be eligible for parole after 25 years, or after 50.  It’s excellent news that the judge imposed the harsher of the two possible sentences in this case; as the prosecuting attorney explained, Roeder is a domestic terrorist, and it’s right that the full force of the law be brought to bear.  Our justice system must take right-wing Christian terrorism every bit as seriously as it takes right-wing Islamic terrorism, and this is a good step.

Quick Hit: Minibosses!

(While I’ve got PAX and games on the brain…)

I’m way behind the times on this.  Apparently, awesome 8-bit rockers Minibosses — whose performances were, I am assured, highlights of the already spectacular PAXen 2003 through 2008, and whose albums all tragically appear to be out of print — put up the entirety of their album Brass as free MP3 downloads on their above-linked website…about two years ago.

If the 8-bit NES was as big a part of your childhood as it was mine, the dulcet strains of their arrangements will have approximately this effect on you, with a healthy dose of \m/ thrown in for good measure.

Update: Minibosses’ Mega Man 2 medley, via YouTube, below the fold.