Quickies: 03/14/2012
By HAPPY PI DAY \o/
To celebrate Pi Day and support marriage equality in their nation, perhaps our UK readers can crack a pint of Apple-y Ever After.
Speaking of marriage equality, hello, Denmark! While the country has had civil unions since 1989 (1989!), it makes me really happy that the Danish government is moving towards full equality.
What the hell is this: Rochester College student Kiah Zabel is being harassed by her Dean of Students and threatened with being thrown off campus for daring to come out on her facebook page.
Remember that bit I linked you about femme Doctor cosplayers? Courtney responds to some comments and criticisms here.
Probably a lot of you have heard about several major papers declining to run a series of Doonesbury strips about Texas ultrasound laws. If you haven't, Comics Alliance has a nice roundup of what all the fuss is about.
Good news, everybody! Rush Limbaugh will have zero national advertisers for the next two weeks.
More worrying stuff about KONY 2012 and Invisible Children.
Featured image from Doonesbury.
I think any blurb about the incident at Rochester College should mention that it is a private religious college run by Christian fundamentalists. Zabel has every right to call them out on their discrimination, but they are not exactly catering to an audience that values inclusiveness. I’m also well aware that students don’t always have much of a say in where they go to college for various financial and family reasons, so I won’t make that facile argument that she can leave if she doesn’t like it.
What should happen, in my opinion, is that major accrediting bodies should deny accreditation to institutions that systematically oppress minorities. It’s one thing for an unaccredited, bible-thumping, brainwashing institution like Bob Jones “University” to enforce religious doctrine on campus, but it’s quite another for accrediting bodies to tacitly approve of this kind of thing by refusing to acknowledge that any institution of higher learning that imposes religious ideology on its students and faculty is not really a place that fosters free inquiry.
I'm not particularly pleased with the whole Kony 2012 thing, but I have to say I find this link sort of tenuous. Some of these large fundamentalist meta-organizations will throw money at dozens or hundreds of organizations that they think are in line with their values. But it doesn't mean that Invisible Children supports all the same things, is anti-QUILTBAG, anti-evolution, or whatever. This guilt-by-association, follow-the-money kind of investigation can be useful, but it also produces a lot of red herring correlations between groups that just happen to be liked by the same people.