Friday, June 29, 2007

Wikipedia time warp mystery

Interesting:

An anonymous user operating a computer traced to Stamford, Conn. — home to World Wrestling Entertainment — posted an entry to pro wrestler Chris Benoit‘s biography on Wikipedia.org announcing the death of his wife Nancy at least 13 hours before police in suburban Atlanta said they found her body along with her husband’s and that of their 7-year-old son, FOXNews.com has learned.

Reporters informed the Fayette County district attorney’s office of the posting Thursday, and the agency forwarded the information to sheriff’s investigators, who are looking into it, a legal assistant said in an e-mail to the AP.

Via Cory Bergman.

LATER: the vandal has confessed, saying that the murder accusation an unfortunately timed joke.

Homo homophobes (again)

No mention in Faye Flam’s piece of the “amazing not surprising” research from The University of Georgia. Done in 1996, it showed up again one year ago in the Know + Tell section of Details magazine.

It’s not available online, Augusto provides the page scan and comments:

The quote I like: “In tests conducted by Prof. Henry E Adams of the University of Georgia, homophobic men who said they were exclusively heterosexual were shown gay sex videos. Four out of five became sexually aroused by the homoerotic imagery, as recorded by a penile circumference measuring device - a plethysmograph.  Prof. Adams says his research shows that most homophobes “demonstrate significant sexual arousal to homosexual erotic stimuli”, suggesting that homophobia is a form of “latent homosexuality where persons are either unaware of or deny their homosexual urges.”

There’s more here.  We were both sorry to learn that Professor Adams passed away in 2000. Too bad too. I’m not finding any more recent research, though there’s no reason to believe things have gotten anything but worse.

Bigotry and bias dressed up as wisdom

The Philadelphia Inquirer looks at what fuels homo hatred:

University of Pennsylvania psychologist and disgust expert Paul Rozin says it’s particularly a guy thing - most heterosexual men are disgusted by the thought of touching other men. Rozin recalls experiments in which researchers asked subjects how disgusted they’d be if a Q-tip that had been in the mouth of either a man or a woman was subsequently touched to their own various orifices.

Women didn’t care much whether the swab had touched the mouth of a man or a woman. But it mattered to men, who - surprise! - were not at all disgusted by the Q-tip that touched a woman but totally grossed out if they thought it had touched another guy’s tongue.... The moral compass of the religious right factors in that additional dimension of sanctity/purity, which is driven by disgust as well as religious teachings. [...]

“People used to think it was revolting when two people of different races got married,” Caplan says. Letting your sense of disgust guide your views on gay marriage, he adds, “is just bigotry and bias dressed up with the clothes of wisdom.”

Via Stephen H. Miller.

Tango on the nature/nurture question

The NY Magazine Science of Gaydar piece made mention of the breakup of the penguins featured in the most banned book in America:

But for most in the animal kingdom, same-sex pairing is either fleeting or situational. Even Silo and Roy, for six years the poster-penguins for same-sex love in the Central Park Zoo-they famously raised a daughter together-were not destined to last forever. Silo waddled off with a female named Scrappy in 2005, says zoo director Dan Wharton, adding that we shouldn’t worry about Roy’s hurt feelings. “Penguins are matter-of-fact about these things.”

The religious right made sure that I knew that long ago. What I didn’t know was this:

Of course, biology doesn’t determine everything. And some critics of sexual-orientation researchers blame them for minimizing the role of experience in determining our affectional course in life. The feminist biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling has waged a constant battle against their research, which she calls “a big house of cards” that ignores the power of environment in creating personality. Nurture, she argues, can and should be studied as a link to sexual orientation. The baby penguin raised by her two dads [Tango] is a potential case study-though genetically unrelated to either parent, in the last few mating seasons she has mated with another female.