If yesterday the solution to financial crisis seemed to be placing a ban on all ungodly behaviors and manners of the world, and instead of a bailout Wall Street needed more Bibles, today we woke up with the announcement that higher levels of testosterone lead to riskier investments. Once again, science proves to divorce from religion.
After some weeks of watching mostly drama and thriller movies, I was looking for a good comedy this weekend, just to relax from work, also from the political campaign in Spain (which has good points, for instance, as I'm following Spain's politicians I don't have time anymore to follow the candidates in the USA). The only movie I could find in theatres currently, a decent comedy (and I mean "decent" in the sense of "please don't play me another stupid American teen movie") was, of course, Juno. But this is Party for the Rights and Juno is not a comedy about homosexuality, eh? No problem, there's enough comedy worldwide. Would you believe, dear abominable readers, that YOU cause earthquakes "when putting your genitalia where they're not supposed to be put"? That's exactly the collegiate opinion of Schlomo Benizri, who declared in Israel's Knesset, this week, about the measures to be taken on Israel's readiness on earthquakes.
It must have been funny, a committee of lawmakers having experts stating about measures and all that blah blah, and then this guy comes up and says something like, "if you stop passing legislation on how to encourage homosexual activity in the state of Israel, which anyway brings about earthquakes", that's the best measure to be taken in order to prevent victims on earthquakes, and quakes themselves.
If one thinks carefully about the whole thing, it's obvious that religion, ultra-orthodox religion, is always behind such attacks. Those ultra-religious people, fanatics and fundamentalists, are quite similar to little children who aren't able to catch a good sleep without a good tale before switching the lights off. The problem, and I use "problem" here because they move towards creating a problem for us, the problem then, I say, is only that ultra-religious people do believe that their tale is true. Pastors, bishops and preachers in the USA oppose homosexual marriage saying "It's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve". Funny slogan, but it's not Adam and Eve unless you defend Creationism (which is lately labeled as Intelligent Design, as if it was some sort of Italian couch or a masterpiece of Rem Koolhaas). There was no Adam and there was no Eve, there is the Theory of Evolution and that's science. And some people will still go dreaming of Peanut Butter Jars after being read the Bible Fairy Tale before going to sleep.
At the Museum of Hoaxes there's a section called "The 20 Most Bizarre Experiments of All Time" which includes the one giving title to this entry, ranked at number 4:
In 1954 James Olds and Peter Milner of McGill University discovered that the septal region is the feel-good center of the brain. Electrical stimulation of it produces sensations of intense pleasure and sexual arousal. They demonstrated their discovery by inserting wires into a rat's brain and then showing that when the rat figured out it could self-stimulate itself by pressing a lever, it would maniacally bang on that lever up to two-thousand times an hour. (The image at the very top of this page, third from the right, shows one of Olds and Milner's rats banging on its lever.)
In 1970, Robert Heath of Tulane University dreamed up a far more novel application of Olds and Milner's discovery. Heath decided to test whether repeated stimulation of the septal region could transform a homosexual man into a heterosexual.
Heath referred to his homosexual subject as patient B-19. He inserted Teflon-insulated electrodes into the septal region of B-19's brain and then gave B-19 carefully controlled amounts of stimulation in experimental sessions. Soon the young man was reporting increased stirrings of sexual motivation. Heath then rigged up a device to allow B-19 to self-stimulate himself. It was like letting a chocoholic loose in a candy shop. B-19 quickly became obsessed with the pleasure button. In one three-hour session he pressed it 1500 times until, as Heath noted, "he was experiencing an almost overwhelming euphoria and elation and had to be disconnected."
By this stage of the experiment B-19's libido was so jacked up that Heath decided to proceed with the final stage in which B-19 would be introduced to a sexually-willing female partner. With permission from the state attorney general, Heath arranged for a twenty-one-year-old female prostitute to visit the lab, and he placed her in a room with B-19. For an hour B-19 did nothing, but then the prostitute took the initiative and a successful sexual encounter between the two occurred. Heath considered this a positive result.
Little is known of B-19's later fate. Heath reported that the young man drifted back into a life of homosexual prostitution, but that he also had an affair with a married woman. Heath optimistically decided that this showed the treatment was at least partially successful. However, Heath never did try to convert any more homosexuals.
The Spanish political blogosphere is a bit revolted today especially on the leftist side because some woman named Cristina Lopez Schlichting pointed out on her radio space that "homosexuality can be cured". Nothing more, nothing less, this Spanish Ann Coulter wannabe has simply voiced in Spanish what many others have been doing in the USA for years. Nacho Escolar links Dos Manzanas about the issue in a simple single sentence which says more or less: "Cristina Lopez Schlichting's got the answer (to the question: How to cure homosexuality). Neuroscience is back".
The most interesting part of Escolar post is not on Cristina, but on the Neuroscience side, which links to the transcription of a short interview aired by COPE radio station in 2005 during a demonstration by Family Forum (yes, even in the names Spaniard neocons copy Americans), originally published in Microsiervos. Among some other pearls, the woman interviewed stated her capabilities to give an opinion on homosexuality by saying that back when she was studying psychology, on the subject of Neuroscience there were texts making clear that "when animals have a gland injured, called tonsil, they develop homosexual tendencies, which are of course unnatural because when the seminal fluid enters the anus it can't procreate because all it finds is poopoo" — a more or less bad translation of her point against homosexuality (apart of her 8 children of course, and her blatant bigoted ultracatholicism that she failed to mention). For those of you understanding Spanish, don't miss the original links.
In Austin, Texas, the very "buckle of the Bible belt," friends of Soulforce turn their sanctuary into a courtroom for one last time. Before a judge and a jury, the anti-gay charges are presented by more than a dozen public figures who have attacked God's gay children in television specials and on nationally distributed video tapes.
"If church leaders can't decide about us," says Dr. Mel White, Producer of the "Verdict" video, "then we'll decide about ourselves."
"When this trial ends," Dr. White adds, "we hope viewers will join us in saying proudly: 'Never again will we allow our sanctuaries to become courtrooms. No longer will we sit still while our lives and loves are studied and debated as though we weren't even in the room. Our rights are no longer up for grabs. It's settled at last.'"
The most recent biblical, medical, psychiatric, psychological, and scientific evidence is presented to combat the myths and lies often used against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons by anti-gay religious leaders and institutions. Come and hear the evidence and decide for yourself!
Altering a gene in the brain of female worms changed their sexual orientation, U.S. researchers said on Thursday, making female worms attracted to other females. The study reinforces the notion that sexual orientation is hard-wired in the brain, said Erik Jorgensen, scientific director of the Brain Institute at the University of Utah. "They look like girls, but act and think like boys," Utah researcher Jamie White, who worked on the study published in the journal Current Biology, said in a statement. Researchers in Jorgensen's lab switched on a gene in female worms that makes the body develop male structures, but they only activated the gene in the brain. As a result, the female worms still had female bodies, but they behaved like males. "It suggests sexual behavior is encoded in our genes" and not caused by extra nerve cells specific to males or females, Jorgensen said in a telephone interview.
Animals such as nematodes, fruit flies and mice share many of the same genes as humans and are often used as models to understand human genetics. But Jorgensen said the study is not likely to resolve the burning question about the genesis of sexual orientation in humans. "A human's brain is much more complex than a worm's brain," he said.
Many scientists think a host of factors such as genetics, hormones and environment may play a role in determining sexual orientation in humans, but this has not been proven. Jorgensen said the study is interesting because it suggests rather than being caused by extra, sex-specific nerve cells, attraction behaviors are part of the same brain circuit.
The finding was part of a study looking at areas in the worms' brains involved in sexual attraction. The study was funded by the National Science Foundation.
© Reuters
Associated Press informs that Dr. Sanders from the Evanston Northwestern Healthcare Research Institute has undertaken a study involving 1,000 pairs of gay brothers aimed at finding genetic clues for homosexuality. Previous studies haven't been taxatively concluding about any, so to call, "gay gene" but previous research showed that homosexual brothers shared certain genetic markers in their X chromosome, obviously transmitted by their mother. Sanders and other researchers believe that it's more likely to be several genes interacting together, while some scientists say that homosexuality could possibly depend on activation of some genetic markers via mother-supplied hormones around the 3rd month of pregnancy.
Homosexuals have a double stand towards genetic causes of homosexuality, proven or imaginary: on one hand, there would be much easier that courts and laws be issued against discrimination if homosexuality is eventually proven to stem from genetic causes; in the same way that skin, eye, or hair color. But on the other hand, some foresee that if such causes arise and are acutely determined, people would be able to choose whether to raise or not raise a foetus that would become a homosexual person.
