Daddy, Papa and Me

President Obama said, among other things , that he would work this year to end “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”. He has the majority of the public (nearly 70%) with him, Secretary Gates with him, most of the congress with him, the side of equality with him, so let’s hope. He reiterated that in Tampa today and if this news: Pentagon To Announce Some “Dont Ask” Details Next Week, is in indication, it might actually happen.

Now, I’d like to see health insurance reform passed first (and soon) and some work on other problems (reducing the deficit, climate change, immigration reform), but this will be a good step towards equality.

I agree with the article mostly, but it’s this statement that I completely agree with:

Obama has been exactly the kind of President I expected him to be (and the kind of President I hoped he would be), namely rational, pragmatic, thoughtful, and even-tempered. But clearly many voters—even, oddly enough, some of those who didn’t vote for him—expected a miracle worker. When they got a problem-solver instead, one with little authority over Congressional Democrats and no authority at all over obstructionist Republicans, they were disappointed.

via One Year: Overpromises: The Balance Sheet : The New Yorker.

Like I said, I wasn’t a big supporter of the Prop 8 trial, but some interesting information and discoveries are stemming from it. For example, the LDS’s church organization’s (not just ‘members) major role in the Prop 8 campaign is being shown to the fact we already knew: The Mormon Hierarchy’s “Plausible Deniability” – The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan. Andrew Sullivan quotes another observer:

Perhaps the most interesting evidence presented so far were documents that detailed the coordination involved between the Catholic and Mormon churches and the Yes on 8 campaign. A letter from the Yes side’s leader thanked the Catholics for their “unusual” support and the Mormons for their “financial, organizational, and managerial contributions.” The Courage Campaign quotes a document between the Yes campaign and the LDS church as saying, the church will “… not to take the lead so as to provide plausible deniability or respectable distance so as not to show that church is directly involved.”

and as Sullivan states:

“Plausible deniability”. In other words, Prop 8 was a front organization for religious groups to strip others of their civil rights on doctrinal grounds.

Or that’s one conclusion you could take away from this recently published research I just thought was interesting.: A Predominantly Neolithic Origin for European Paternal Lineages.

I love how genomics is helping us figure out the migrations and movements of peoples.

Background: one of the ‘discussion points’ about early European history is the debate as to where most modern Europeans originated, genetically speaking. The debate has two extremes:

* Europeans are descended from Middle Eastern farmers, who brought their Neolithic cultural toolkit less than 10,000 years ago.

* Europeans are descended from Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, who acculturated to the farming way of life through diffusion of ideas.

“To us, this suggests a reproductive advantage for farming males over indigenous hunter-gatherer males during the switch from hunting and gathering, to farming – maybe, back then, it was just sexier to be a farmer. “

If you asked me this morning if this were true, as Emma and I battled over what she would not be wearing (pants that can’t buckle, a shirt that barely covers her shoulders much less her torso) and her dawdling around breakfast when I had a meeting to go to and a sick husband I was making take her to school and then her crying because I was yelling at her (really? if she thinks talking through clenched teeth is yelling, then I hope someday she realizes how lucky it is she has parents where that’s the extent of their ‘yelling’)…

Or if you asked me after yet another setback in the adoption process for a second kid…

well, I would have laughed.

Heard this on NPR, read the paper. Interesting: More children = lower blood pressure .

Ok, I have to admit, when I first saw the study was from Brigham Young University, I scoffed. Hey, I attended BYU and got _excellent_ educations from two departments (Humanities for my Art History degree, Biology for that one). But this is also the institution that has had some quite questionable stuff in the past. Still, bad studies and actions in one department don’t necessarily color another. I read the paper, it looks quite interesting. The sample size is a bit small, and frankly, I’ll just say what I’m sure a lot of people are thinking, the conclusion seems somewhat expected coming from an institution that promotes having lots of kids , but it seems solid.

So maybe having kids does lower blood pressure (or maybe people who have hypertension are less likely to have lots of children?).

I’ll remember that the next time I’m talking through clenched teeth.

Well sort of. Since the Supreme Court put a temporary stay on video, there is the live blogging: Prop 8 Trial Tracker.

Fascinating stuff. It seems that hundreds of years ago, the ancestors of today’s Malians in Timbuktu requested their families preserve the family libraries. Which they did. There is an article about the interest in ancient books which “could restore Timbuktu” in the Washington Post. I had a vague memory of Timbuktu being the center of an great civilization, but I knew nothing of it’s libraries. I think I might delve more into this region’s history, the region of Emma’s biological (and our family’s) ancestry.

The Long Now blog has an interesting take on why these small family libraries might be better at preserving ancient books than the Library of Alexandria and other such ancient, large and famous repositories of books

Something to possibly look forward to (or not): Jesus has Two Daddies: Careful what you wish for!.

Well, in reality, that is life. Every decision we make, when several options are available to us, not only change our life paths, but kill myriad possible futures. Of course that has been the subject of movies, books and one of my favorite poems.

And it definitely is something I can see in my own life. What would have been my future if I hadn’t joined the Mormon Church, or attended BYU, or joined the Army, or got my Ph.D. in molecular biology. What would the future have been if we decided against adopting our daughter. Definitely not the reality of my life today. There are a thousands futures I could have had, but my decisions ended those possibilities.

The adoption process is this. On hyperdrive. We give our parameters and preferences (girl, 2-6), ending possible futures, good and bad and in between. We make choices and decisions early on that put us on paths that will not allow us to return to other roads.

But more than that is the matching process. Where the possible futures come more in focus. You see and learn about specific children. You submit you profiles and homestudy for them, only never to hear from the social worker, or to be refused. In the meantime, though you know you should try hard not to, you can envision a possible future with them in your home. You start to mentally prepare for such futures. And then those futures die.

Or then you match. You go to the disclosure meeting where you learn every detail about a child, as we did this past summer. You agonize over the decision, you gather more information, you delve deep into your imagination to see what possible futures taking this child into your home could bring. And then you kill that future, the imagined one that makes you decide it won’t work, and the real ones whatever they could have been.

It is all so intense and jarring. It was when we adopted Emma. The decisions and failed matches and then the loss of the first match. An look at the future that happened. One that I would not change for anything, at all.

So now we have another possible future. We have been matched with a child. Thursday we go to the disclosure meeting. Matching means that no other parents will be considered for the child and no other children for us, till we’ve been through the disclosure meeting, learned all we can about the child and made a decision to meet the child and have them placed in our home.

We can not help but think about what future this child will bring to our lives, what possible future we might bring to theirs. Or not. This future is more real than any before.

We’ll see where it leads.

From a straight, Republican conservative who has served high positions under Reagan and George Bush.

The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage Newsweek.com.

Of course for me he makes a good case, but importantly, he convinces the conservative side of me (and yes, there is one, with a little ‘c’).

The Prop 8 case goes before the court today (link to discussion and more links). The anti-gay rights side wants the case private, the pro-gay rights side wants it transparent and seen by the public. The anti-gay rights side claims they will be persecuted for their views if they are shown publicly. The pro-gay rights side believes that a national discussion on something so important should be given the full light of day.

I find it interesting that the anti-gay rights side doesn’t understand the irony of the situation. For decades, centuries, gay men and women have had to hide in the closet for fear of being ostracized, hated, hurt or killed. Now they fear what? demonstrations and naughty words on the internet against them? They want to go into the closet they would seem to love to put us back into.

I say air their arguments and ours in the full light of day. Let the marketplace of ideas shake it all out.

I guess the Supreme Court will be deciding if that should be open or closed.