Are Gay Rights Civil Rights? It May Depend on Where You Live
How is the rights movement progressing for LGBTQ people? Initial progress was made more quickly than anyone imagined, but lingering inequalities continue to stunt that rapid growth.
Bennett Singer is the editor of Growing Up Gay/Growing Up Lesbian (a Lambda Literary Award finalist) and 42 UP, both published by The New Press. He co-directed Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin, a feature-length documentary that premiered at Sundance and won more than 20 international awards, including the GLAAD Media Award. Singer served for eight years as executive editor of the education program at Time magazine and has written curriculum materials for WGBH, HBO, and Teaching Tolerance. His latest book, co-authored with his husband David Deschamps, is LGBTQ Stats.
BENNETT SINGER: I think the question of acceptance of LGBT folks really does depend on geography. In some places on Earth I would say, when it comes to legal equality and cultural acceptance, absolutely there’s been this revolution, and progress has occurred at a pace that even in our own lifetimes was almost inconceivable in terms of how quickly things had evolved.
At the same time, just today, 2.8 billion people live in countries around the globe where being gay is a crime. And in some places like India, progress toward equality has actually been reversed. So back in 2013 India’s supreme court re-criminalized sodomy and same sex activity, which had become legal. So there are examples of countries where progress has actually been reversed.
When we talk about how have things changed in terms of equality or the movement toward equality for LGBTQ folks I think the biggest and most dramatic example is marriage equality which somewhat miraculously I think—and not inevitably—did become the law of the land, and all 50 states, thanks to the Supreme Court and the Obergefell decision, are now required to recognize same sex marriage.
But I think it’s important to remember that marriage equality does not mean or is not synonymous with full equality in terms of constitutional protections. And it is in fact true that a couple could get married on a Sunday and then one of the partners goes to work on Monday, puts a picture of his husband or her wife on the desk and gets fired, because in the majority of U.S. states it is still completely legal for people to be fired on the basis of sexual orientation.
And the Civil Rights Act of 1964 doesn’t cover sexual orientation or gender identity. There’s a movement among activists and gay rights organizations to expand the scope of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to go beyond race and gender and color and national origin, which are covered categories. But at this point sexual orientation is not covered by the 1964 legislation.
I guess the context is, it wasn’t until 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association came to the conclusion that homosexuality in general is not a mental illness, and that was the year when the APA voted to take homosexuality out of its diagnostic manual. Until that point every gay person, no matter how well adjusted or healthy or functioning, was considered mentally ill.
So that’s the background, and really that wasn’t so long ago that our most progressive doctors were under the assumption or were working on this theory that homosexuality was, in fact, a mental disease.
So I think conversion therapy is kind of the contemporary cousin to that belief that gay people are sick, and that they can be cured or that they need to be cured.
And certainly, you know, dozens of medical establishment organizations ranging from the AMA to youth organizations have condemned conversion therapy.
But this idea that people who are gay can be converted into not being gay is indeed still alive.
My sense is that at this point seven states have outlawed conversion therapy among minors, meaning that in the other 43 states it’s still allowed for parents to send their children, their minor children into this kind of therapy and to require that kids under 18 go through this process.
There have been studies of people who have undergone the therapy and consistently there’s this sense of finding that therapy not only doesn’t change people from being gay to straight but inflicts its own harm and trauma. And there is federal legislation being considered where there would be an national ban, which again I think is common sense.
And I hope that as we see a new generation of young people becoming more open and more accepting, and the sense of allies among teenagers and young people, I think that’s the key to ultimately ending conversion therapy.
It wasn't that long ago, says Bennett Singer, that our nation's most progressive doctors considered homosexuality a psychological disease. That goes to show how far we have come—in areas like gay marriage—to guaranteeing equal rights regardless of one's sexual preferences. But some rights initiatives have started to backslide in the United States and elsewhere. Conversion therapy is still met with approval by some government officials, and sexual orientation and gender identity remain excluded from the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbid discrimination against individuals on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Singer brings to light a fascinating and essential array of knowledge in his new book LGBTQ Stats.
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How New York's largest hospital system is predicting COVID-19 spikes
Northwell Health is using insights from website traffic to forecast COVID-19 hospitalizations two weeks in the future.
- The machine-learning algorithm works by analyzing the online behavior of visitors to the Northwell Health website and comparing that data to future COVID-19 hospitalizations.
- The tool, which uses anonymized data, has so far predicted hospitalizations with an accuracy rate of 80 percent.
- Machine-learning tools are helping health-care professionals worldwide better constrain and treat COVID-19.
The value of forecasting
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Credit: Northwell Health
<p>One unique benefit of forecasting COVID-19 hospitalizations is that it allows health systems to better prepare, manage and allocate resources. For example, if the tool forecasted a surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations in two weeks, Northwell Health could begin:</p><ul><li>Making space for an influx of patients</li><li>Moving personal protective equipment to where it's most needed</li><li>Strategically allocating staff during the predicted surge</li><li>Increasing the number of tests offered to asymptomatic patients</li></ul><p>The health-care field is increasingly using machine learning. It's already helping doctors develop <a href="https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/early/2020/06/09/dc19-1870" target="_blank">personalized care plans for diabetes patients</a>, improving cancer screening techniques, and enabling mental health professionals to better predict which patients are at <a href="https://healthitanalytics.com/news/ehr-data-fuels-accurate-predictive-analytics-for-suicide-risk" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">elevated risk of suicide</a>, to name a few applications.</p><p>Health systems around the world have already begun exploring how <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7315944/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">machine learning can help battle the pandemic</a>, including better COVID-19 screening, diagnosis, contact tracing, and drug and vaccine development.</p><p>Cruzen said these kinds of tools represent a shift in how health systems can tackle a wide variety of problems.</p><p>"Health care has always used the past to predict the future, but not in this mathematical way," Cruzen said. "I think [Northwell Health's new predictive tool] really is a great first example of how we should be attacking a lot of things as we go forward."</p>Making machine-learning tools openly accessible
<p>Northwell Health has made its predictive tool <a href="https://github.com/northwell-health/covid-web-data-predictor" target="_blank">available for free</a> to any health system that wishes to utilize it.</p><p>"COVID is everybody's problem, and I think developing tools that can be used to help others is sort of why people go into health care," Dr. Cruzen said. "It was really consistent with our mission."</p><p>Open collaboration is something the world's governments and health systems should be striving for during the pandemic, said Michael Dowling, Northwell Health's president and CEO.</p><p>"Whenever you develop anything and somebody else gets it, they improve it and they continue to make it better," Dowling said. "As a country, we lack data. I believe very, very strongly that we should have been and should be now working with other countries, including China, including the European Union, including England and others to figure out how to develop a health surveillance system so you can anticipate way in advance when these things are going to occur."</p><p>In all, Northwell Health has treated more than 112,000 COVID patients. During the pandemic, Dowling said he's seen an outpouring of goodwill, collaboration, and sacrifice from the community and the tens of thousands of staff who work across Northwell.</p><p>"COVID has changed our perspective on everything—and not just those of us in health care, because it has disrupted everybody's life," Dowling said. "It has demonstrated the value of community, how we help one another."</p>What can Avicenna teach us about the mind-body problem?
The Persian polymath and philosopher of the Islamic Golden Age teaches us about self-awareness.
The incredible physics behind quantum computing
Can computers do calculations in multiple universes? Scientists are working on it. Step into the world of quantum computing.
- While today's computers—referred to as classical computers—continue to become more and more powerful, there is a ceiling to their advancement due to the physical limits of the materials used to make them. Quantum computing allows physicists and researchers to exponentially increase computation power, harnessing potential parallel realities to do so.
- Quantum computer chips are astoundingly small, about the size of a fingernail. Scientists have to not only build the computer itself but also the ultra-protected environment in which they operate. Total isolation is required to eliminate vibrations and other external influences on synchronized atoms; if the atoms become 'decoherent' the quantum computer cannot function.
- "You need to create a very quiet, clean, cold environment for these chips to work in," says quantum computing expert Vern Brownell. The coldest temperature possible in physics is -273.15 degrees C. The rooms required for quantum computing are -273.14 degrees C, which is 150 times colder than outer space. It is complex and mind-boggling work, but the potential for computation that harnesses the power of parallel universes is worth the chase.
Octopus-like creatures inhabit Jupiter’s moon, claims space scientist
A leading British space scientist thinks there is life under the ice sheets of Europa.
- A British scientist named Professor Monica Grady recently came out in support of extraterrestrial life on Europa.
- Europa, the sixth largest moon in the solar system, may have favorable conditions for life under its miles of ice.
- The moon is one of Jupiter's 79.
Neil deGrasse Tyson wants to go ice fishing on Europa
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Could medical detection animals smell coronavirus?
