Friday in the wild - Mar. 11, 2005

Once again: whutz been goin on around the blog that wasn't here.

Two weeks ago I reported on a legislator in Maine that had introduced a bill to make it a hate crime to abort gay fetuses, should homosexuality be discovered to have a genetic cause. Joe Carter posted an interesting analysis of this situation this week, coming to a different conclusion than myself:

The question then is what will happen to gays and lesbians when homosexuality becomes “preventable?” My guess it that it won’t be long before "being gay" is once again classified under the disease model of behavior and is considered a treatable condition. After all, it was only recently that psychiatry let go of its hold on this "disorder." (Until 1987, “ego-dystonic homosexuality” was still classified as a pathology in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-II).)

The fact that the vast majority of gay people will not feel a corresponding desire to be “treated” will be deemed irrelevant. When alcoholism became a “disease” the onus was put on the individual to “get help” whether it was desired or not. If an alcoholic says that she can live and function just fine with her “condition”, she is considered in denial. If she won’t seek help for herself, the family and friends are encouraged to participate in an “intervention” to persuade her. Likewise, homosexuals may be compelled to seek treatment for their condition. Failure to do so might allow insurance companies to legitimately deny coverage for any illnesses that can be traced back to this “preventable” condition.

[Read Pre-Born Discrimination: Can Abortion Be Classified as a Hate Crime?]

The Conservative Grad Student ought to post more often, but when he does, his anecdotes of experiences in graduate studies in the humanities are usually worth a good chuckle. This week:

So, we're discussing St. Augustine for whatever reason (I'm not sure, as no one in the class understands any of the scriptural allusions he makes and all they want to do is insult him for not being clever enough to see through the sham of Christianity),

and

I quote a verse from the Bible from memory. One that Augustine alluded to but didn't fully quote.

Someone actually said "I didn't think there were people who could quote the Bible at the drop of a hat. At least not among educated people, anyway."

[Full Post]

There wasn't a full moon this week (quite the opposite, in fact) so the searches were relatively sane. Nonetheless, there were some interesting queries that brought surfers to this site:

• ringworld bloggers. What's to blog? It's big. It's round. It's fiction.
• It's started again, only now, ironically, I'm the fourth most relevant Google search on camilla parker cleavage only because I've spent the last five weeks complaining about being googled for Camilla Parker cleavage. Sigh.
• moonbats crusty curmudgeon: That you Rand?
• "steve bell" ottawa police: What, was he smuggling drugs in his guitar case, or something?

Oh - and Google searches for "crusty" still rank this blog as #4, only now they've discovered that the site has a name again, and all is back to normal. The ways of Google are mysterious.