“Everything that we think God has in his mind necessarily proceeds from our own mind; it is what we imagine to be in God’s mind, and it is really difficult for human intelligence to guess at a divine intelligence. What we usually end up with by this sort of reasoning is to make God the color-sergeant of our army and to make Him as chauvinistic as ourselves.”
– Lin Yutang

So it turns out that the House military spending bill won’t have any statutory restrictions on women in combat. It will just require notification of Congress before such policies are implemented. But why is this such an issue to begin with? What’s the hangup over letting women serve in combat positions? I’ve been doing some reading of various people’s opinions on this issue and some of them are laughable.

One argument cites the physiological arguments about relative upper-body strength issues.

“To pretend that women would have an equal capability of doing that is a dangerous philosophy, and lives could be lost as a result of it,” says Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness and one of the most outspoken critics of current military policy on women in war zones.

Regardless of the legitimacy of the underlying facts, this line of argument doesn’t justify a blanket ban on women in forward combat positions. I’m 5′2″ and back when I was in relatively good shape I weighed 120. The military would be idiots to put me in a position where my upper-body strength was an issue of life-or-death necessity. The decisions about who to put in such positions it best left to training personnel who are most intimately familiar with the trainees’ skills and abilities. You know, ‘by the content of their character’ and all that? Blanket prohibitions such as this based on broad generalizations don’t promote sound policy: they promote stereotypes and bigotry.

I’ve even heard some rather left-sounding logic along the lines of “it promotes violence against women”.

“If we as a nation endorse the idea of women in combat that engages the enemy deliberately, we would be saying that violence against women is OK as long as it happens at the hand of the enemy,” says Ms. Donnelly. “That would be a setback for our civilization.”

That made me laugh the hardest. The practice of male-on-male destruction and murder is just one of those things, but to get a woman involved endangers society? To let women volunteer for jobs in which men we’re trying to hurt might be able to hurt them back is a setback? I cringe at the raw, unadulterated sexism that underlies that statement.

If a woman wants to serve as a front-line soldier, it seems to me that they should be allowed to, provided that they meet all the requirements that men must meet to fill the same position. I can only describe any other conclusion as bigoted, sexist, or poorly thought out.

From the “Did this judge find his law degree in a cracker jack box?” Dept:

An Indianapolis father is appealing a Marion County judge’s unusual order that prohibits him and his ex-wife from exposing their child to “non-mainstream religious beliefs and rituals.”

The parents practice Wicca, a contemporary pagan religion that emphasizes a balance in nature and reverence for the earth.

Cale J. Bradford, chief judge of the Marion Superior Court, kept the unusual provision in the couple’s divorce decree last year over their fierce objections, court records show. The order does not define a mainstream religion.

[...] “When they read the order to me, I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ ” said Alisa G. Cohen, an Indianapolis attorney representing Jones. “Didn’t the judge get the memo that it’s not up to him what constitutes a valid religion?”

Constitutional arguments aside, how is keeping a child ignorant of his parents’ religious beliefs in his best interest? Are they hoping that keeping this child as clueless of non-Abrahamic religions as most of his peers is going to make him more normal and thereby benefit him in the long term? I’m honestly having trouble trying to come up with a reason for this order that doesn’t make the judge out to be hateful, ignorant, or both. Luckily this decision is so obviously wrong that it ought to be overturned with little difficulty.

Bruce Campbell playing a sadistic gym teacher for a high school full of budding superheroes? I’m there!

Slate reports on a new book which argues that the evolutionary development of the female orgasm was just a happy accident.

Why the fuss? Lloyd’s central claim is not new. But her study of evolution and orgasm offers the most thorough and serious treatment of the subject to date—and strongly rejects the claim that orgasm in women serves an evolutionary purpose. Lloyd has scrutinized 21 evolutionary accounts of female orgasm and makes a convincing case for the single account that treats orgasm as a happy accident, a byproduct of the role that male orgasm plays in reproduction and the sharing of early embryonic tissue by the male and female genitalia. The other 20 theories she dismisses as illogical or incompatible with data on women’s sexuality. This time the press has it right. Lloyd’s analysis is worth all the attention. She hasn’t definitively settled the debate: One new line of inquiry could pose a challenge to her thesis. But it probably wouldn’t be a fatal one, so score one for the orgasm as pure pleasure.

Interesting. My personal study of the female orgasm has always been more oriented towards its activation, rather than its evolutionary development, so I don’t have a lot to say on the issue. However, given the fact that there appears to be a good argument that it’s development is unrelated to evolutionary adaptation, I’d say that its existence remains the most plausible argument for the existence of God.

As today is my birthday, posting is likely to be light today. And for the record, that’s 26 down, and around 527 to go…

“It is some fundamental certainty which a noble soul has about itself, something which is not to be sought, is not to be found, and perhaps, also, is not to be lost. The noble soul has reverence for itself.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche

I have a tendency to ignore claims that those who are opposed to abortion but support the death penalty are guilty of hypocrisy. That’s because the two arguments are very different. The pro-life claim is that a fetus is a person, and is therefore undeserving of death. However, arguments for the death penalty take a very different tone–it’s a punishment for a crime committed. And besides, that’s not really hypocrisy anyway. Pro-life hypocrisy would be being pro-life and then either having or encouraging someone else to have an abortion.

That being said, William Saletan may have scored some good and cheap rhetorical points against Bush, but they don’t expose him as a hypocrite. Saletan tries to show this by demonstrating that Bush’s stated position against stem cell research is that it’s wrong to destroy one life to save others, but that his stated position in favor of the death penalty is to save lives. That’s not really hypocrisy, nor does it show much inconsistency of thought. There’s a distinct moral difference between say, killing someone to harvest their organs, and killing someone because they’ve demonstrated that they’re a threat to other people as long as they’re alive.

Now, personally, I find the idea that a human embryo is a human being to be patently absurd. However, just because Bush holds this position and also supports the death penalty doesn’t make him a hypocrite, nor does it expose him as holding contradictory opinions.

“Nature, like a woman, will seduce you with its sights and its scents and its touch, and then it breaks your ankle, also like a woman.”
– Oliver Babish (Oliver Platt) on The West Wing

I saw the trailer for the Chronicles of Narnia last week . It looks kind of interesting, but I confess that I’ve never read the Chronicles. Indeed, the absolute limit of my knowledge about them is that the lion is Jesus, right?

So, I’m just curious–are the books worth reading? Or are they overrated?