804 Irish Baker fined for refusing to bake 'Support Gay Marriage' cake

Irish Baker fined for refusing to bake 'Support Gay Marriage' cake

Newsletter published on 21 February 2016

(1) Irish Baker fined for refusing to bake 'Support Gay Marriage' cake
(2) Obama to Issue Order Barring Anti-Gay Bias by Contractors (2014)
(3) Interior Department to identify Gay & Lesbian historic sites
(4) Fear of imprisonment for being Gay in Africa is grounds for asylum,
EU court rules
(5) Androgynous public policy - Melanie Phillips
(6) Irish Referendum on Gay Marriage - NO case was demonised daily
(7) Feminism interview with Lionel Tiger

(1) Irish Baker fined for refusing to bake 'Support Gay Marriage' cake
http://australianmarriage.org/they-said-this-would-never-happen/

They Said This Would Never Happen

In May 2014, Gareth Lee ordered a cake featuring Sesame Street
characters Bert and Ernie and the motto 'Support Gay Marriage' from
Ashers Bakery in Belfast.  Ashers Bakery initially accepted the order,
but after further discussion amongst their team, they contacted Mr Lee
to say they couldn't fulfil the order because it went against their
sincere religious beliefs. Backed by the Equality Commission, Mr Lee
sued the bakery.

In May 2015, following a long, politically driven process, District
Judge Isobel Brownlie found that Ashers discriminated against Gareth Lee
on grounds of sexual orientation and political beliefs (despite their
pleas that they had no issue serving Mr Lee but rather with writing the
anti traditional marriage slogan on their cake), ordering Ashers Bakery
to pay £500 in damages to Mr Lee.

This week, their appeal has been halted after a dramatic intervention
from Northern Ireland's top legal adviser.

Attorney General John Larkin QC announced at the last minute that there
could be a potential conflict between Ireland's equality legislation and
European Human Rights laws.

The question is, will Australians heed the warnings from nations like
Ireland who are watching their civil rights being stripped away by the
SSM agenda? This is the future that awaits Australia if we cave into the
bullying tactics of SSM lobbyists.

(2) Obama to Issue Order Barring Anti-Gay Bias by Contractors (2014)
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/19/us/politics/obama-to-extend-protections-for-gay-workers-with-no-religious-exemption.html

By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS

JULY 18, 2014

WASHINGTON — President Obama plans to sign an executive order on Monday
that protects gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender employees from
discrimination by companies that do federal government work, fulfilling
a promise to a crucial Democratic constituency, White House officials
said on Friday. But the directive will not exempt religious groups, as
many of them had sought.

The order will also, for the first time, explicitly protect federal
employees from discrimination on the basis of gender identity, officials
said. Federal workers are already protected based on their sexual
orientation.

Gay groups stepped up their already intense campaign to persuade Mr.
Obama to sign the order after the Supreme Court’s decision last month in
the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores case. In that ruling, the court said
that family-run corporations with religious objections could be exempted
from providing employees with insurance coverage for contraception, and
there were fears that the case would have repercussions for gay men,
lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people.

"With the strokes of a pen, the president will have a very real and
immediate impact on the lives of millions of L.G.B.T. people across the
country," Chad Griffin, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, said
in a statement on Friday. "These actions from the president have the
potential to be a keystone in the arch of his administration’s progress,
and they send a powerful message to future administrations and to
Congress that anti-L.G.B.T. discrimination must not be tolerated."

Religious groups had sought the exemption to ensure that they would not
lose federal money or contracts if they could not meet the new
guidelines because of their beliefs.

Galen Carey, the vice president of government relations for the National
Association of Evangelicals, said he expected the president’s executive
order would lead to a lengthy and expensive legal fight.

"It would be better if the president could provide leadership that
promotes tolerance all the way around," Mr. Carey said, "rather than use
the force of the state."

He said the exemption would have protected the groups’ freedom and
"social harmony as our nation is working through these issues, on which
there’s a lot of disagreement."

The directive is the latest example of Mr. Obama acting unilaterally
after legislation on a domestic priority was stymied by Republican
opposition on Capitol Hill. His executive orders have angered
Republicans, and Speaker John A. Boehner is preparing a lawsuit to
protest the president’s moves.

Mr. Obama warned last month that he was prepared to act on his own to
extend the protections because the drive in Congress for a national
anti-bias law to cover nearly all employers, a bill known as the
Employment Nondiscrimination Act, had stalled.

In extending the new protections, Mr. Obama is building on two
longstanding executive orders. He is adding sexual orientation and
gender identity to the list of protections that apply to federal
contractors and that were approved by President Lyndon B. Johnson in
1965. And he is adding gender identity as a protected category to a 1969
directive by President Richard M. Nixon that applies to federal
employees, which was later amended by President Bill Clinton to include
sexual orientation.

The issue of how to treat religious groups under any new order was a
divisive one — among gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender people and
religious leaders.

Some gay rights groups were angry that the Obama administration had
accepted the inclusion of a religious exemption in anti-bias legislation
that passed the Senate — but not the House — last fall, but others saw
it as the political price of securing the Republican votes necessary to
enact it.

Religious groups that have contracts with the federal government already
have a limited exemption from existing anti-bias rules, based on a 2002
executive order by President George W. Bush. That directive allows them
to factor their religious beliefs in their employment decisions.

The directive will not change under the new rule. Michael Wear, who led
the religious outreach during Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign and had
joined calls for a religious exemption, said he was "encouraged" by that
move.

Mr. Wear said the new order provided "a path for the administration to
both advance protections for L.G.B.T. Americans and continue to respect
the religious identity of organizations serving our nation in
partnership with the federal government."

But some groups wanted Mr. Obama to go further to protect religious
groups in carving out an exception. One example of such protections
would allow a Catholic charity that believes sex outside heterosexual
marriage is a sin to keep its government financing if it declined to
hire a gay man.

Not all religious groups called for an exception.

"Those of us who really care deeply about both the sanctity and the
necessity of religious freedom have grieved to see people use that as a
cover for overt discrimination, and the president is not going to allow
that to happen," said the Rev. C. Welton Gaddy, the president of the
Interfaith Alliance.

Mr. Gaddy — who helped organize 100 liberal religious leaders to write
to Mr. Obama to oppose the exemption — said the Supreme Court’s decision
in the Hobby Lobby case "shined a bright light" on some groups’ efforts
to use religious freedom as an excuse for violating the rights of others.

On Thursday, members of GetEqual, a gay rights group, stood up in
silence during a speech by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in Detroit
to protest the inclusion of a religious exemption. On Friday, they were
celebrating.

"We’re so proud today of the decision made by the Obama administration
to resist the calls by a small number of right-wing conservatives to
insert religious exemptions into civil rights protections," Heather
Cronk, the group’s director, said.

A version of this article appears in print on July 19, 2014, on page A13
of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Set to Bar Federal
Contractors From Anti-Gay Discrimination.

(3) Interior Department to identify Gay & Lesbian historic sites

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2014/05/30/Interior-Department-to-identify-significant-gay-and-lesbian-historic-sites/5561401477941/

Interior Department to identify significant gay and lesbian historic sites

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell says study of gay historic sites part of
a larger initiative to bring minority history into National Park Service.

By Frances Burns   |   May 30, 2014 at 4:21 PM

NEW YORK, May 30 (UPI) --Interior Secretary Sally Jewell used New York's
Stonewall Inn as a backdrop as she announced a plan Friday to identify
important sites in gay and lesbian history.

Jewell said the study is part of a larger initiative to include other
minority groups in the National Park Service's historic sites. The 1969
riot against police harassment at the Stonewall Inn kickstarted the
modern movement for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights.

The Stonewall, still a bar, was designated a National Historic Site in
2000. It remains the only one associated with LGBT history.

"We know that there are other sites, like Stonewall Inn, that have
played important roles in our nation's ongoing struggle for civil
rights," Jewell said. "The contributions of women, minorities and
members of the LGBT community have been historically underrepresented in
the National Park Service, and the LGBT theme study will help ensure
that we understand, commemorate and share these key chapters in our
nation's complex and diverse history."

Jewell said the Park Service will work with a panel of scholars over the
next 12 to 18 months. The first meeting is set for June 10 in Washington.

(4) Fear of imprisonment for being Gay in Africa is grounds for asylum,
EU court rules

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/fear-of-imprisonment-for-being-gay-in-african-countries-is-grounds-for-asylum-eu-court-rules-8927557.html

Fear of imprisonment for being gay in African countries is grounds for
asylum, EU court rules

The ruling follows a request for advice from The Netherlands about three
gay refugees seeking asylum from Uganda, Sierra Leone and Senegal

Thursday 07 November 2013

The European Union’s highest court has ruled that the fear of
imprisonment for homosexuality in African countries is grounds for
asylum in the EU.

The ruling follows a request for advice from The Netherlands about three
gay refugees seeking asylum from Uganda, Sierra Leone and Senegal.

According to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) the existence of laws
that could lead to the imprisonment of homosexuals, "may constitute an
act of persecution per se" if they are routinely enforced.

The Luxembourg-based court stated that it was unreasonable to expect gay
people to hide their sexuality in their home countries in order to avoid
persecution. Concealing their sexuality would amount to renouncing a
"characteristic fundamental to a person's identity," the court said.

In the case of the three men seeking asylum in The Netherlands the
application was initially denied on the grounds that the men could
"exercise restraint" to avoid persecution. The Dutch Council of State,
an advisory body to the government, subsequently took the case to the
ECJ for a ruling.

Despite the ruling it is up to the authorities in sovereign countries to
decide "whether, in the applicant’s country of origin, the term of
imprisonment…is applied in practice".

The ECJ says laws specifically targeting homosexuals do make them a
separate group, however, a ban on homosexual acts alone is not grounds
to grant asylum.

International law says that a social group with a 'well-founded' fear of
persecution can claim asylum status if the persecution amounts to a
severe violation of human rights.

Homosexual acts are considered unlawful in most African countries and
Amnesty International has said homosexuality is "increasingly
criminalised across Africa," with 36 nations there having laws against
same-sex conduct.

Nations that consider homosexual acts illegal include Nigeria, Kenya,
Botswana and Uganda.

Amnesty has also said that homophobic attacks have reached dangerous
levels in sub-Saharan Africa and that this relates to the "toxic
message" that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are
criminals. A number of the continent's leaders have said homosexuality
is un-African.

In 2010 the Supreme Court in the UK ruled that two gay men from Iran and
Cameroon have the right to asylum in the UK, after they were initially
told by the Home Office that they could safely return home if they were
"discreet" about their sexual orientation.

(5) Androgynous public policy - Melanie Phillips

http://www.melaniephillips.com/the-sex-change-society

The Sex-Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male

The Sex-Change Society issues a devastating attack on androgynous public
policy, arguing that feminism has distorted its own agenda of equality
by replacing it with sameness. The results are startling. Men have been
demonised through a distorted view that they are intrinsically violent
and feckless while all women are essentially ‘saint-like’. At the same
time, women are being encouraged to work at all times, whether they want
to or not. In this timely critique Melanie Phillips tells the disturbing
story of the attempt to feminise the state, to reverse the roles of men
and women and to run masculinity out of town altogether. The result has
been an anti-family policy in which everyone has become a potential loser.

(6) Irish Referendum on Gay Marriage - NO case was demonised daily

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/from-ireland-to-indiana-the-spread-of-gay-marriage-groupthink/16852

 From Ireland to Indiana, the spread of gay-marriage groupthink

Why the campaign for same-sex hitching is so censorious and intolerant.

8 April 2015

To see how straitjacketed the debate about gay marriage has become, look
no further than Ireland.

There, on 22 May, there will be a referendum, with voters asked to say
Yes or No to amending the Irish Constitution so that marriage will be
redefined as a union between 'two persons without distinction as to
their sex'. Sounds good, right? An opportunity for an actual electorate
to have a debate and have its say on the future of marriage? Not so fast.

The run-up to the referendum has been about as far from a fair or open
debate as it's possible to get. One side in the debate - the side that
is critical of gay marriage - is demonised daily, treated virtually as
heretics, almost as criminals. It's accused of causing psychological
harm, branded as 'hate speakers', and frequently forced to make public
apologies simply for expressing its belief that marriage should be
between a man and a woman. And as a writer for the Irish Independent
says, 'It's not a debate if one side can't speak'. The public discussion
before the Irish referendum has not been a debate, she says - it's been
'a Two Minutes Hate' against anyone who doesn't think gay marriage is
the greatest idea ever.

Pretty much the entire establishment in Ireland, aside from the
increasingly uninfluential bishops and priests, backs gay marriage
(giving the lie to the gay-marriage movement's depiction of itself as a
beleaguered minority bravely battling The Man for its civil rights).
 >From the prime minister, Enda Kenny, to the vast majority of Dail
Eireann, to pretty much the whole media - most notably the Irish Times,
voice of the minuscule cultural elite in Dublin that sets the moral and
political agenda in Ireland - every person with power is rallying for
gay marriage. And barely a week passes when they don't demonise the
other side, the smaller, less powerful side, the side which, in opposing
gay marriage, is apparently harming citizens, causing violence and,
worst of all, jeopardising Ireland's political future.

As with all heretics in history, Ireland's opponents of gay marriage
stand accused of directly harming the public. So last month, the
Psychological Society of Ireland issued a dire warning that the
propaganda of the anti-gay marriage camp could 'impact detrimentally on
people'. PSI said it is 'seriously concerned' that this lobby's claim
that traditional marriage is better than gay marriage, on the grounds
that a mother and father make better parents than two people of the same
sex, could have 'far-reaching implications'. It chastised opponents of
gay marriage for promoting ideas that 'run contrary to the positions of
professional bodies' - that is, for daring to defy the new priests: the
expert class - and said their words could wreak mental and moral havoc.
Must-reads from the past week What do we want? To be treated like children!

As one news report summed it up, PSI thinks that 'the debate itself [my
italics] carrie[s] the potential to have detrimental effects, both
psychological and emotional, on adults and children'. So discussion is
dangerous; positing a view that runs counter to the elite's outlook
could cause emotional damage. It's remarkable how much the authoritarian
boot has shifted: once it was those who denied Biblical truths who were
accused of doing moral harm to citizens; now it is those who cleave to
Christian views and doubt gay marriage whose words, whose desire to have
a debate, are depicted as dangerous, warping things.

The PSI is not alone in demanding that the anti side watch its words, or
better still, stop saying them. An Irish government minister has urged
antis to 'refrain from confrontational and offensive language'. The
Irish Times has gone further, publishing a piece calling for the
establishment of a 'homophobia watchdog' in the run-up to the
referendum, so that the authorities can 'monitor the inevitable
destructive rhetoric that will colour one side of the debate'. And to
those who cry 'what about free speech?', the Irish Times has a simple
answer: '"Free speech" is not a free pass to inflict psychological
trauma.' That is, your words, your very thoughts, are traumatic, even
socially destabilising, and thus they must not enjoy liberty; they
should not be expressed.

Echoing those eco-illiberals in the UK and elsewhere who slam media
outlets that offer a 'balanced' view in the debate on climate change,
the Irish Times has also called into question the need for media balance
on gay marriage in the run-up to the referendum. Too much of the media
have 'a skewed view of what balance is', it says, feeling the need to
offer a platform to 'Middle Ireland', 'the silent majority', 'the
mainstream', when the only consequence of such 'polarised conversations'
is that 'facts and reason are drowned out by emotional arguments and
inaccuracies'. 'It's pointless', it concludes. It means, amazingly, that
debate is pointless. Gay-marriage activists see themselves as 'factual
and reasoned' and anyone who criticises them as emotional, inaccurate,
traumatising, psychologically harmful. Who needs to hear from 'Middle
Ireland' when the well-educated inhabitants of Dublin 4 know exactly
what the nation needs? As it happens, the Irish media do not need
lectures from the PSI about trauma or from the Irish Times about 'skewed
balance', and nor is there a need for a speech-monitoring homophobia
watchdog - for the media in Ireland have already dutifully fallen in
line behind gay marriage. Indeed, the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland
has recently ruled that too many broadcasters are showing a bias in
favour of gay marriage. (There's no need for rulings like this either,
of course; can't we just let debate flow freely?)

Experts' and observers' depiction of gay marriage's opponents as
emotionally harmful is having a direct impact on how the debate is, or
rather isn't, panning out. It is strangling discussion, stifling the
expression of what are increasingly depicted as deviant views. In the
words of Eilis O'Hanlon at the Irish Independent, the increasingly
shrill proponents of gay marriage seem less interested in 'finding the
truth' than in 'identifying [themselves] as members of an enlightened
elite', so that the whole referendum run-up is 'reduced to a case of
kindly metropolitan liberals versus nasty Catholic conservatives'.

A writer for the Sunday Independent admitted to feeling reluctant to
express her concerns about the behaviour of the pro-gay marriage lobby.
Her friends warned her to 'be careful' because 'anyone who sticks their
oar in risks attack'. There is a 'chilling effect' on public discussion
as a result of the treatment of one side as wicked and corrupting, she
said. The bishop of Kildare, Denis Nulty, had a point when he recently
warned against 'the danger of groupthink' on gay marriage. As O'Hanlon
says, through groupthink 'outsiders are demonised and hounded'.
Referring to the Twittermobs that formed during a heated debate on gay
marriage last year, she says 'anyone who expressed the slightest
reservations about same-sex marriage was howled down as a homophobe and
pelted with hashtags and slogans until they either submitted to the mob
or were driven offline'.

Ireland's opponents of gay marriage have also been subjected to the kind
of tabloid exposes normally reserved for social deviants. And such is
the debate-allergic climate that even bishops, people who should surely
be expected to hold a traditionalist view on marriage and the family,
have felt pressured to make public apologies. For expressing his view
that gay people who adopt children are 'not necessarily parents' and
that 'children need a mother and a father', Bishop Kevin Doran was
slammed and hounded, until he agreed to say sorry. He said he 'regrets
any hurt' his words caused. Even the Primate of All Ireland indulged in
a mea culpa: 'I think that sometimes when we say things we can be
insensitive, we can hurt.' It seems the old bishops have heeded the
warnings of the new secular bishops that make up Ireland's expert and
chattering classes, and have agreed to genuflect at the altar of safe,
stultified discussion on gay marriage.

What is striking is the extent to which the critics of gay marriage are
now treated in a similar way that gays were treated for decades.
Homosexuality wasn't decriminalised in Ireland until 1993 - making you
wonder where the Irish state gets off now posing as super-gay-friendly -
and before that gays were seen as a blot on the moral landscape. They
were seen as psychologically disordered (not just in Ireland, but across
the West) and their words and culture were often censored for fear that
they would traumatise young people and tear the moral fabric. Sound
familiar? Yes, the same is now done to those who hold traditional views
on marriage and the family. In Ireland, as elsewhere, the illiberal,
intolerant tactics once used against homosexuals have been turned
against those who dare to criticise homosexual lifestyles.

Around the world, the institutionalisation of gay marriage has been
attended by authoritarianism, whether of the violent state variety or
what John Stuart Mill called 'the tyranny of prevailing opinion'. From
French riot police's tear-gassing of protesters against gay marriage to
American activists' witch-hunting of corporate bosses or small-town
restaurants that refuse to cheer gay marriage, this supposedly great
civil-rights issue of our age has a powerful intolerant streak to it.
(The recent fiftieth anniversary of the Selma march really exposed
gay-marriage activists' claims to be the new civil-rights movement: far
from mirroring the blacks who marched for their rights, the gay-marriage
movement, most notably in France, looks a lot more like the Montgomery
cops who batoned those marchers off the streets.)

Why is the gay-marriage movement so intolerant? Despite winning the
backing of almost every powerful figure in the West, from Barack Obama
to David Cameron, from Apple to Goldman Sachs, and despite being turned
by the media into the great unquestionable, almost sacrilegious cause of
our age, still gay-marriage activists hilariously fancy themselves as
underdogs and, worse, seek to shush or shame out of existence anyone who
opposes them. In the words of the American journalist Damon Linker, the
gay-marriage movement seems curiously hell-bent on 'stamping out rival
visions'. Or as Reason magazine said in relation to recent intolerant
activism by American gay-marriage campaigners, it seems some are 'not
merely content with the revolutionary step of removing state
discrimination against same-sex couples', but also want to 'use state
power to punish anyone who refuses to lend their business services to
wedding ceremonies they find objectionable'.

What's this all about? Why the illiberalism, the intolerance, the
ugliness? It's because gay marriage is not really about expanding
freedom at all. Rather, it represents the emergence of a new,
post-traditonalist morality, an attempt by at-sea elites across the West
to redefine themselves and their moral missions through the gay issue.
Gay marriage has become the favoured means through which our rulers,
feeling ever-more detached from their old moral worldview, are
institutionalising a new, pseudo-progressive, seemingly consensual
morality, based, not around the old ideals of family, commitment and
privacy, but around the new po-mo values of relativism (all
relationships are the same), non-judgementalism (who are we to say that
a mum and dad are better than two mums?), and illiberal liberalism, the
central political outlook of our times, which under the guise of
building a new liberal consensus seeks to censure and punish anyone who
deviates from that consensus. The reason the elites, from the political
classes to the influential opinion-forming set, are so instinctually
hostile to criticism of gay marriage is because they have invested their
very moral rehabilitation, their future political and moral legitimacy,
into this issue more than in any other. And thus no ridicule of it can
be tolerated. For if you knock gay marriage you are not only knocking
gay marriage - you are upsetting Western elites' efforts to establish a
new morality that simplistically distinguishes between Us (good, kind,
liberal backers of gay marriage) and Them (the old, the religious, the
outdated, the Other).

Ireland captures this perfectly. The reason so many in the political and
media classes want, or rather need, the amendment to the Constitution to
pass is because they think legalising gay marriage will help rejuvenate
Ireland in the twenty-first century. The minister for children said that
if Ireland doesn't legalise gay marriage, it would 'send out a bad
message internationally'. Or as prime minister Kenny put it, passing gay
marriage will 'send out a powerful signal internationally that Ireland
has evolved into a fair, compassionate and tolerant nation'.

All this talk of 'sending signals' to the world shows how absolutely
central gay marriage has become to the project of Western elites making
themselves over in these post-Cold War, post-traditionalist,
post-political times. The Irish state needs gay marriage for the same
reason Obama and Cameron need it - to fashion a new moral worldview and
'send a signal' about its elitist progressivism, its decency in
comparison to the old world, the old people, the old outlook. That so
many gay-rights campaigners are going along with this politicisation and
exploitation of their lifestyles by elites on the lookout for a new
sense of purpose is remarkable. That those who hold a divergent view on
gay marriage are being silenced is a scandal.

Brendan O'Neill is the editor of spiked.

(7) Feminism interview with Lionel Tiger

http://masculineheart.blogspot.com.au/2010/05/lionel-tiger-decline-of-men-and-need.html

Here is the whole Big Think interview with Tiger:

Lionel Tiger
Emertus Professor of Anthropology, Rutgers University

May 20, 2010 Interview with Lionel Tiger

Here are some of the relevant sections from the interview for those who
would rather read them than watch the video:

Question: Are males in decline in our society?

Lionel Tiger: If you look at the educational system it's doing about 30
to 40 to 50% better with females than males, so college enrollments are
overwhelmingly more female than male and the question is why is that.
There is some feeling that the introduction of a kind of women's studies
cast of characters has tended to make males feel somewhat out of sorts
or not fully wanted and in my Decline of Males book I described males as
having been born with a male original sin, that is if you're born a guy
you have to work it off. You have to express your feelings. You have to
do all those things that will be **** with the current sexual fashions,
which can't be machismo-ish, can't be too draconically male, can't watch
football as much. You have to articulate a different path. Now that's
relatively trivial. I'm not trying to make a point about it, but the
fact is that in the school system we see boys don't work well and
overall and there is a political question if a taxpayer funded entity is
producing a better result for one part of the population than the other.
A, that is not fair and B, it constitutes a social problem.

So for example, I discovered that... and this was after I wrote the
Decline of Males, that four out of five kids expelled from kindergarten
are boys. Now my first question is how the hell do you get expelled from
kindergarten, but the second is why this differentiation and then we see
for example in the use of drugs to drug kids that 90% of the victims of
Ritalin are boys and I know a case at the moment of a woman who has got
a child that speaks three languages, is in a school where most of the
kids speak one and the child is very bouncy and very active and very
energetic and the mother was told that perhaps the child could be
brought to a medical practitioner for an evaluation. That word was used.
And you can be certain that they're thinking let's drug the kid, let's
calm him down with Ritalin or some other substance and that's very
serious because we don't know what the long-term impact of those
powerful drugs might be on a small organism. So the issue of what
happens to males I think is now resurfacing in an interesting way and I
think it offers us the opportunity to begin to review the matter, to
begin with the basic biology, to begin the notion of humans as primates
and to assume that male primates and female primates will act
differently, in many cases the same, but also in many cases differently
and we should understand that better and with warmth and not hostility
and so the male original sin problem I think has to be avoided because
the results are poor. Fifty years of women's studies for example and I'm
not singly out women's studies. I think it's a general issue. Fifty
years of that since the first program was established in 1970 has
yielded a system which is very biased it appears functionally against
males and after all who wants that? When my book the Decline of Males
came out the warmest response I had was from the mothers of boys who
wrote and called and whatever to say, "You have no idea what goes in
schools." "My son has his hand up all the time." "Nobody recognizes him
because they're supposed to favor girls." Well that may be an
exaggeration, but that was the response I had and I thought that was
very interesting.

Question: Are psychoactive drugs feminizing?

Lionel Tiger: I'm not sure that they're feminizing. I think they have
impacts and we don't know for sure what those impacts are. We know some
impact. A kid is quieter. Maybe learns more, learns better. On the other
hand, we have very good reason historically to be very suspicious of
drugs that cause behavioral changes because the changes they cause are
never the ones that are explicitly indicated on the package and so one
wants to be very, very careful and I would if I were a medical
practitioner, which I'm not and I don't have any expertise in the
matter, I would be very, very hesitant to drug a kid who is three
because we have no idea what the long term implications might be on that
child's development, a boy or a girl, but since most of the victims of
these drugs are boys we have to assume that essentially they are being
feminized in the sense that they're behavior is supposed to become more
female like.

Question: Do some of them benefit from the drugs?

Lionel Tiger: Sure, I've been told by parents that their children under
these drugs are much better off in school. However, I was talking with a
French doctor who teaches at the University of Paris Medical School and
he said that... now this was four, five years ago, that in all of France
there are 4,600 people, kids taking Ritalin. That is probably as many as
there are in a high school in a local suburb. They regard this drug as a
highly suspicious drug, very, very powerful and it's on the restricted
list along with cocaine, heroin and all of that, so nobody can get it.
In this country school nurses just hand it out and so I think we have
sold ourselves a very shabby bill of goods which may cost us a lot of
human competence in years to come.

Question: Did male aggression contribute to the financial crisis?

Lionel Tiger: That is undoubtedly true. The question though is also, why
weren't there more women involved in those systems and will women ever
be involved in the same way. The evidence we have is that women seem to
not want to compete at that level with that kind of violence over a
lifetime. There was just a study done of women in Silicon Valley and
about a third of the women leave very quickly from the competition,
another third have babies and they never go back and the ones who
persist are relatively more modest in their activities than the males
are and I think we have to acknowledge the fact that males tend to be
somewhat more bellicose and aggressive whether it is good for them to
generate these collateralized debt obligation instruments that have
caused us such tremendous grief. I'm not sure that is gender specific,
but the idea of making all that money and being of high status and
having the money to give for your kids and so on, all of those things
are associated with the male career by and large, so a lot of those
people who made those huge salaries had two or three kids in private
school and they had a whole array of expenses, which were really high
and in general I think it's the case that females don't go for that kind
of money because they don't want to.

There is a lot of talk about a glass ceiling and so on, but for example
Harvard Business School did a study some years ago and I'm afraid I
can't remember the details, but it turns out that a large, large
percentage of the graduates don't do business at all. They go into the
labor force for awhile and then they leave. They either quite because
they don't like fighting for the corner suite or they have kids and they
have a priority and they serve that priority. So we're not going to
repeal biology and so long as you have a tournament area called Wall
Street or whatever else you want to call it where a whole lot of really
eager males can get together and fight over sources then you have to
really regulate I think and this is what President Obama is concerned
about. In fact, he is New York City as we speak to talk to people about
that issue and speaking primo dialogically I think he has got an
interesting challenge, but also a good point.

Question: Is masculinity still necessary?

Lionel Tiger: Overwhelmingly when we look at say sexual want ads in
newspapers, it's decreasing now because of the internet, but when these
things first came out women... men would always ask for women who were
affectionate, warm, etc., fertile, good looking. Women invariably asked
for men who were reliable and to quote, unquote, professional. By
professional they meant somebody who is going to provide a general and a
genuine and a predictable stream of income for me and for our children
and women look for that all the time. Women are always trying to find
guys who are slightly older and slightly richer than they are and that
is not being mean. It makes a lot of sense because women do have babies.
Most women still do and when they have babies they have needs. There is
a lot of discussion about the so called 77 cents on the dollar that
women earn and President Obama has repeated this nonsense himself. It's
true women earn 77 cents on the dollar, but the reason is that they're
out of the labor force for five to eight years and if you assume a 3%
increase per annum for 8 years there is your difference and so the
reason is that women make choices that men don't make, don't have to
make and the consequence is that males will be in the tournament in Wall
Street. However, it's now changed because of the credential problem that
I mentioned that is that guys are not graduating from desirable schools
to the extent they used to and so now in big cities such as New York,
Toronto, Chicago, L.A., etc. women between 20 and 35 earn more money
than men in that age group. Now there is a good reason for that. Again
not only are women better at the school system which favors them it
seems, but any woman who is at college now or who is coming to maturity
in the modern world knows that not only has she to study to support
herself, but she is studying for two because she may well have a child
and she may well have no provider to take care of that child and her, so
she better get a good job, good credential so she'll be in shape to do this.

40% of babies born in the United States and in Europe are born to women
who are not legally married. Now some of the mare living with guys and
connections may be made and they may be durable, but the fact is that
the idea of so many women having babies on their own, risking that they
may have to do this by themselves is I think very revealing and it
suggests a great deal about what they think of the guys. They just don't
trust them.

Question: Why are you supporting the idea of "male studies" as an
academic discipline?

Lionel Tiger: There has been in the whole women's studies world a notion
that sex roles are the result of which magazines you read and which
sitcom you watch and that it's all confection. It's not indigenous out
of the organism and so that and the idea of patriarch is if there were a
bunch of guys sitting around and doing their very best to keep women
down. Again, possibly true and certainly true in a whole series of
events, but the fact is that I think that it hasn't worked, that that
approach, the call it women's studies approach, men's studies approach,
which is basically a branch plant of the women's studies programs that
hasn't worked to yield for us a society of equal men and women equally
enjoying, equally profiting from their educational experience and so it
seemed to a number of us it was actually time to start again. When you
have a situation in which two-thirds of the graduates of an institution
are female and it's supposed to be for everybody you're entitled to ask,
why is this trip necessary? How did it get this way? And so we were
rather innocently saying just let's review the matter. We're not content
with the result. It hasn't worked.

Question: How much of human behavior do we actually have choice over?

Lionel Tiger: We have endless choice, but we also are hardwired in
certain ways to make certain choices, so for example, as we learned from
language through Noam Chomsky's work kids are programmed to learn
language. A two year-old kid can learn Chinese. I could never learn
Chinese and I'm a reasonably smart applicable character who could apply
myself to it. I couldn't do it. It is not in my wiring any longer. As
Chomsky showed there is a program for learning language which is
associated with being a kid. There are programs for a whole series of
things in us. The kid may learn Chinese. The kid may learn Arabic, but
he is going to learn something and so the issue is what is in the system
and what is easy for us to learn and it appears that some of things that
we find easy to learn are tricky like my group is better than your group
or I want to have access to as many females or males as I can
independent of what the consequences are of that or a series of other
things, but basically this is a massive question and the history of
recent biological science shows that we have really not well handled the
problem. For example, most universities and colleges in North America,
England, the rest of Europe are divided in two, two science faculties if
you will. There is the natural sciences and then there are the social
sciences with the heavy implication that social behavior is not natural.
It's inescapable that that would be the conclusion, but in fact, social
behavior is natural and we have very, very little synthetic analysis of
behavior from both the evolutionary and the contemporary point of view
in many ways and that has become, I'm afraid, highly politicized and
consequently generates a lot more heat than light.

Question: How much conscious choice do we have in who we pick as a mate?

Lionel Tiger: Well first of all, location, location, location is very
important as we know. Secondly, people will have... Well there is
something called in sociology assortative mating. It happens to be a
cruel fact of high school that the quarterback gets the girl who is
regarded as the prettiest. It's regarded as a cruel fact of nature that
Katherine Zeta Jones ends up with Mike Douglas. People make choices
depending on what they think they can get if you will, out of the
reproductive system and so a lot of people fail. They don't have any
partner and there is a huge issue for example in the African-American
community in America where so many of the males are imprisoned. If you
have 20 females and 20 males and one, just one male is in prison then
the 19 other females have to really chop and change to make a proper
connection and it puts pressure on everybody and so in that particular
community we see the cost and so one remembers Terry McMillan's book
Waiting to Exhale. So here we have an indication of the fact that yes,
we have a lot of free choice, but it is usually within a kind of
marketplace of humans if you will, to be crass about it, and that
continues to exist and so you have women who will decide never to date
some guy who doesn't have X or Y characteristics, who doesn't have a
professional, quotes, job. You have a lot of ... For example, there was
a study done of medical students a Syracuse by a man named John Thompson
and he said that there were...

Yeah, there was a study done of medical students, male and female in a
university in New York and the males were quite ruthless in how they
evaluated the females. They said for example about one of them, "Why is
she studying to be a doctor?" She is good looking." "She should just
marry one." And they had very, very rigorous statements that they made
about they would only go out with two of the ten women who were in their
class because of physical attraction of whatever their metric, but it
was real. It was harsh and that goes on all the time. It's the story of
high school and it's real and it's painful and it happens and the
consequences are that individuals have to sort of figure out how to
present themselves. If you look at female reading habits any magazine
"612 Ways to Make Yourself Look Better for 5 Cents" on the cover or "200
Things That Will Please Him" or various ways of trying to attract a male
in a very competitive environment and not just a male, a good one. That
is the problem. Males have a different metric and the problem is many
males realize that they can't really hack it. They're just not going to
end up doing this very well in terms of their fantasies or their dreams
or even their ambitions.