Thank You, Judge Walker.

As most everyone will have heard by now, Judge Vaughn Walker of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (first nominated by Ronald Reagan, blocked over Democratic concerns he would be insensitive to gay and lesbian issues, and later confirmed after renomination by George H. W. Bush) issued his ruling (available as a PDF here, among other places)in Perry v. Schwarzenegger today, striking down the infamous Proposition 8 same-sex marriage ban on the grounds that California had no legitimate interest in preventing same-sex marriage, that to do so was a violation of the due process and equal protection guarantees of the U.S. Constitution, and that sexual orientation was a “suspect classification,” meaning approximately that almost any state or federal law or government act which discriminates on that basis is more or less presumptively invalid.

This is an enormously important decision, no less so for the fact that it should always have been self-evident.  The celebrations going on tonight in California, and around the country, are well-deserved; I’m raising a glass to toast the victory, myself.

The question now, however, is how this ruling will fare on appeal.  Its next stop is the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which in recent history has been known for leaning left; there’s no completely reliable way to predict what they’ll do, but it seems most likely they’ll affirm Judge Walker’s decision.  Then — a year or two from now — it goes to the Supreme Court.

SCotUS is, of course, the real question.  I haven’t read the entirety of the Perry decision, and I’m not a lawyer, so take this with a grain of salt, but to me it seemed airtight; and at least some of the lawyers I know have agreed with me on that.  But there is a solid bloc of four Justices who are staunchly opposed to GLBT rights in any form, and airtight reasoning by a lower court may not be sufficient to keep them from finding a pretext on which to oppose the ruling, so as many important things seem to, it will likely come down to Anthony Kennedy’s swing vote (assuming, of course, that by the time the case reaches the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan is on the bench but the composition of the court has not otherwise changed).

What The Hell Is Wrong With You People?

Shorter Switzerland:

Raping a child and spending thirty years as a fugitive from justice is punishment enough, especially for a Great Artist.  Plus, America’s not the boss of us.

Shorter New York Times:

Ho-hum, Switzerland decides that the rule of law doesn’t apply to Famous People…who cares about that?  But Polanski’s a director, so I guess we’ll stick it in the “Movies” section along with the reviews and fluff pieces.

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: 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.

Et In Penny-Arcadia Ego

I was very happy to be able to attend PAX East in Boston this past weekend. I had a great time, despite missing Wil Wheaton’s keynote and some of the panels I hoped to see. Penny Arcade is a remarkable phenomenon, and one I don’t think could have been possible at any historical moment other than this, or more precisely other than 1998 to 2003: that first half-decade in which, with a combination of timing, talent and luck, Jerry “Tycho” Holkins and Mike “Gabe” Krahulik turned a hobby webcomic into a successful business venture and into a focal point for the nascent gaming community — until it had reached a sort of critical mass, and Gabe and Tycho were able to use it as a springboard for additional projects.  In 2003, they launched the Child’s Play charity, which to date has provided nearly $7 million worth of toys, books, movies and of course video games to children’s hospitals around the country; and a year later, when it was announced that E3 would no longer be open to the public, they decided to launch their own convention, the Penny Arcade Expo.  In 2005, after noted anti-video-game crackpot and public nuisance Jack Thompson (this was back before he was disbarred) offered $10,000 to a charity to be chosen by the head of the ESA, and reneged, claiming it was “satire,” Gabe and Tycho gave the $10,000 in his name.

What I’m saying is, they’ve built a hell of a thing, and they’ve done some real good in the world, in the process of doing it.  They have managed to become sort of a nucleus around which gamer culture, or at least a subculture of it, is starting to coalesce.  The first PAX, in 2004, had some 3300 attendees; PAX 2009 was over 60,000, and it’s my understanding that this first east-coast incarnation of the convention was of a similar size.  Watch Wheaton’s keynote, and the sense of love for and pride in gamer culture is palpable; watch exchanges like these two (from just a single panel I happened to attend) and also easy to understand.

Dr. Margo Seltzer [Ada Lovelace Day]

Last year I didn’t have a post idea for Ada Lovelace Day, so I just put up a small link roundup.  I wanted to do a little better than that, this year.

Dr. Margo Seltzer‘s [Wikipedia entry, personal website] is not necessarily a well-known name in most computer science circles — I know I hadn’t heard of her until late 2007, when she encouraged my partner to come to the Harvard PhD program as her advisee — but her influence in the field is significant.  She was an original codeveloper of Berkeley DB, the ubiquitous embedded database, and cofounder and CTO of Sleepycat Software, the company formed to provide commercial support for BDB in 1996.  (Sleepycat and BDB were acquired by Oracle in 2006, and BDB remains available under either a commercial or an open-source license.)

Seltzer also helped break ground at Harvard — her undergraduate alma mater — for gender equality in the sciences, beginning as an associate professor a year after receiving her PhD at UC Berkeley, and winning tenure in 2000.  She conducts systems research, serves as Vice President on the USENIX Board of Directors, and works to encourage more women to study computer science.  On a personal note, as I mentioned, she is my partner’s PhD advisor, and has been incredibly helpful and supportive both with courses and research, and with various personal, family and health related issues my partner has had to deal with in the past couple years.

See also:

• Wikipedia’s listing of women in computer science
• The Border House
• Geek Feminism
• Adafruit is doing 24 posts, one every hour!  (And a 10% off sale on their awesome kits.)
• The Hathor Legacy
• Twenty-Something Science

Quick Hit: Health Care Reform

Well, it’s done.  The House has passed the Senate bill, and the package of reconciliation fixes.

There are a bunch of good things that kick in quickly, and that’s a big plus.  Some thirty-odd million more people are going to have health care coverage, and insurance companies will (at least in theory, though I expect they’ll find whatever ways around this they can) be prohibited from denying coverage to or retroactively rescinding coverage from sick people.

There’s no long-term solution to rising costs, and the Democrats’ — from the President on down — betrayal of their own party platform, which says “The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to choose a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay, and we oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right,” is craven, disgusting, and disheartening in the extreme.  And this is an absurdly industry-friendly bill, carefully tailored to maintain insurance company profits, and to not introduce any measures, such as genuine competition from a public option, optional earlier Medicare buy-in, removing their anti-trust exemption, or new, robust regulation, that would come close to bringing American per capita health care costs in line with the rest of the developed world, who spend much less for care as good or better than ours because single-payer systems are more efficient.

So in short, the Democrats remain a party largely under the influence of corporate money and the inbuilt misogyny of our social structure, while the Republicans are not only completely and happily under those influences but actively seeking at all times to expand them.  D. Aristophanes’ graph, thus, applies pretty well both to the HCR bill and to the parties themselves.

In other news, as Paul Krugman notes, Newt Gingrich is now attacking the HCR bill by comparing it to LBJ’s civil rights legislation.  Hey Newt, your mask is slipping.

Quick Hit: And Here I Thought…

…that dumping Lou Dobbs indicated CNN was starting to take their middle initial seriously.  As it turns out: Nope!  They were just looking for someone even more objectionable. (One wonders why they didn’t just keep Glenn Beck, really.)

I don’t really see what further comment I could add.  Erickson is vile.  He’s certainly as vile as Limbaugh or Beck.  He makes much of the rest of the conservative blagoweb look measured and reasonable, and that’s no mean feat.

Yet, somehow, the fact that people say “fuck” on Daily Kos is constantly held up as evidence that liberal bloggers are hateful and meanspirited and unserious — and I have no doubt that we’ll also continue to see right-wing bloggers and Fox News blasting CNN for being an exemplar of the “liberal media.”

(Previously, previously. Via.)

Quick Hit: I've Got My Story and I'm Sticking To It!

Yesterday on my way to work I was listening, as is often the case, to the BBC World Service NewsHour program on my local NPR station, and one segment in particular caught my ear.  They were discussing the aftermath of the Chile earthquake, including President Bachelet sending thousands of troops into Concepción to “restore order.”  Starting at minute 39, presenter Robin Lustig talks with Frank Furedi, a professor of sociology, about “the morality of looting.”

What struck me about this was Lustig’s dogged insistence on established narrative — people who take food and supplies from stores in the aftermath of a disaster are “looters,” selfish criminals out for their own benefit who don’t care about anyone else; post-disaster urban areas (especially those populated by non-white people) devolve into Hobbesian nightmares; it’s correct for governments’ primary response to be “restoring order” by sending in police or troops — in the face of Furedi’s patient explanation that the evidence doesn’t support that narrative.  People act more altruistically after a disaster, crime rates are lower, and those who “loot” food and supplies tend to then distribute them among the population.  But Lustig would be damned if he’d let silly little things like facts interfere with the preferred story.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p006czxs#p006q1fw