Mexican bigotry OK

Miss USA, Rachel Smith, legally visiting Mexico City as a Miss Universe contestant, was greeted with boos and catcalls. Except when she slipped and fell. Cheers! But according to one wire service she deserved the hostility because of the country she represented.

In the days leading up to the final selection, Miss USA Rachel Smith endured boos from the public because of her country's attitude toward Mexicans living there.

Oh, so they weren't rude after all; the US is. But relax because according to another news report

The treatment of the Tennessee beauty queen was nothing personal. It had more to do with Mexico's sometimes tense relationship with its powerful northern neighbor.

U.S. athletes have sparked a similar response. In 2005, when the U.S. played Mexico during a World Cup soccer qualifier, the crowd booed the U.S. national anthem and a smattering of fans chanted "Osama! Osama!" during the game.

So four years after 9/11 our southern neighbors are cheering for the man who caused the deaths of 3000 Americans. But yet, by the millions they still want to move here. Nothing personal. During the interview segment of the pageant, as the Mexican audience raucously booed her, the ever gracious Miss Smith

smiled and spoke in Spanish. "Buenas noches Mexico. Muchas gracias!" which earned her some applause and some chuckles.

However, despite her polite guest attempt to learn the native language

Even an opening "hola" might not have helped Smith, who faced long odds for simply being a gringa

Gringa! Female white person! But that's not anti white racism or bigotry. In Mexico, that's understandable. Sanctioned. But of course.

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"Correct" parenting

Most parents, myself included, have become accustomed to living with a subtle sense of unease. It's there in the playground and at the schoolyard gate. It permeates the atmosphere of children's parties and sporting events, the doctor's office, the supermarket checkout. It is a sense of watching and being watched; most of all, it is a feeling of being judged that seeps into every area of our lives, undermining confidence and transforming parenthood from a straightforward part of life into an angst-ridden ordeal.

I know this because I serve on the advisory board of Park Slope Parents, the second-largest parents' group in the United States and certainly the most well-known. Day in and day out, I watch parents struggle together to overcome the effects of a parenting culture where one wrong move at the playground, one forgotten snack, risks incurring the wrath of fellow parents, non-parents and even the media. And that is why it was worth travelling thousands of miles to the UK to attend Monitoring Parents: Childrearing in the Age of `Intensive Parenting', an international gathering of social scientists at the University of Kent at Canterbury (1).

If parenting is a big issue in the US, it is possibly even more so in the United Kingdom where seemingly almost any aspect of parenting can be politicised and made the subject of public policy. The conference set out to inject some rigour and objectivity into the discussion. And though the halls of academia seem a long way from the playground, and parents weren't the intended audience, it would be hard to find anything more timely or relevant, or actually reassuring. The evidence is unequivocal: you aren't just imagining it - being a parent today is different than in the past.

Academics studying a wide range of topics, from family size and teenage motherhood to infant feeding and literacy, demonstrated how intensive parenting, with its assumptions about the vulnerability of children and imperative for a high degree of parental involvement, is the single most important factor shaping childrearing today. So much so that many delegates I spoke with had not set out to study parenting at all but had shifted their focus as their research made it impossible to ignore this issue.

What is intensive parenting? Ellie Lee, senior lecturer in social policy at the University of Kent and organiser of the conference, explained that parenthood has become `highly emotionally demanding, more and more child-centred, reliant on expert guidance and so increasingly medicalised. Parenthood has also become shaped by risk consciousness, in a context where parental actions are frequently deemed potentially risky for children.' Media historian Susan Douglas discussed how a culture of intensive parenting plays havoc with mothers' self-esteem, sets mother against mother, and undermines women's rights. Sociologist Frank Furedi, author of the influential critique Paranoid Parenting, argued that contemporary culture normalises parental incompetence, through its assumption that parents need ever-increasing amounts of advice and `support' in matters of everyday life, while at the same time promoting the notion that parents' actions determine everything about their child's life, from cradle to grave.

In practice, this means that parents are under constant scrutiny from other parents, professionals and policymakers. Everything from giving birth to what we feed our children to the risks we do or don't allow them to take in everyday life is considered a legitimate area for concern and intervention. So, Rebecca Kukla of the University of South Florida gave a critical appraisal of the notion that `you are now what your child eats', to the extent that even a single hotdog-of-convenience apparently risks ruining a child's palate and ultimately jeopardising their long-term health and mental wellbeing.

Public policy initiatives aimed at `supporting' parents almost never improve things and sometimes make them far worse by denigrating parents' ability to rise to the occasion. Young fathers surveyed described parenting classes they were compelled to attend as `problematic and sometimes embarrassing'. One study of teenage mothers, who have been singled out for `intensive support' by the New Labour government, found that they were strikingly positive, capable and far less in need of official intervention than policymakers believed.

Perhaps the most intriguing discussion of the conference and the most confounding aspect of intensive parenting is that so many people appear to choose to do it. At its most extreme, families adopt parenting lifestyles such as so-called `attachment parenting' that rely on close physical contact between mother and child for an extended period. And though physically and emotionally demanding, parents derive a sense of moral superiority from choosing what they believe is a more natural, yet scientifically enlightened way to raise their children. In fact, such practices are neither natural nor scientific but the logical conclusion of the view that individuals, good or bad, are simply extensions of how well they were `parented'.

Most of us don't set out to go to these extremes but the same basic principles influence everything we do. Canadian academic Stephanie Knaak explained that we don't so much make decisions as choose within ever-narrowing parameters of what is acceptable. As an example, she pointed to the question of bottle-feeding versus breastfeeding in several editions of Dr Spock's childcare manual. In early editions of Dr Spock, breastfeeding and formula feeding are both treated as acceptable alternatives that take the needs of the parents into account. In contrast, the most recent edition makes it clear that breastfeeding is the morally superior choice and the needs of mothers are no longer part of the equation. Sure, you can formula feed, but you'd better have a good excuse.

The inescapable conclusion of all of this is that parenting culture today is bad - and bad on many levels. Reducing parents to the passive recipients of expert advice not only squelches parents' creativity, spontaneity and resourcefulness; it also destroys what intensive parenting purports to celebrate: the rich, complex relationships we have with our children.

What can we do? According to Frank Furedi, many parents do instinctively resist `intensive parenting'. They make the `wrong' choice, they lie to professionals about what they do, and some simply tell the truth and face the consequences. But no one can resist intensive parenting all the time without some cultural counterpoint to back them up. The sociologists at this conference, many of them parents themselves, have taken the first steps toward creating this counterpoint by holding up the culture of intensive parenting to critical scrutiny and challenging its underlying assumptions. And for those of us caught up in it? Let this conference serve as validation: don't believe the hype, trust your instincts, and know that you are a better parent than the `experts' could possibly know.

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eHarmony Sued In California For Excluding Homosexuals

The popular online dating service eHarmony was sued on Thursday for refusing to offer its services to gays, lesbians and bisexuals. A lawsuit alleging discrimination based on sexual orientation was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on behalf of Linda Carlson, who was denied access to eHarmony because she is gay. Lawyers bringing the action said they believed it was the first lawsuit of its kind against eHarmony, which has long rankled the gay community with its failure to offer a "men seeking men" or "women seeking women" option. They were seeking to make it a class action lawsuit on behalf of gays and lesbians excluded from the dating service.

eHarmony was founded in 2000 by evangelical Christian Dr. Neil Clark Warren and had strong early ties with the influential religious conservative group Focus on the Family. It has more than 12 million registered users, and heavy television advertising has made it one of the nation's biggest Internet dating sites.

The company said the allegations of discrimination against gays were false and reckless. "The research that eHarmony has developed, through years of research, to match couples has been based on traits and personality patterns of successful heterosexual marriages," it said in a statement. "Nothing precludes us from providing same-sex matching in the future. It's just not a service we offer now based upon the research we have conducted," eHarmony added.

According to the lawsuit, Carlson, who lives in the San Francisco Bay area, tried to use the site's dating services in February 2007. When she was denied access, she wrote to eHarmony saying that its anti-gay policy was discriminatory under California law but the company refused to change it. "Such outright discrimination is hurtful and disappointing for a business open to the public in this day and age," she said.

Carlson's lawyer Todd Schneider said the lawsuit was "about changing the landscape and making a statement out there that gay people, just like heterosexuals, have the right and desire to meet other people with whom they can fall in love." Carlson's lawyers expect a significant number of gays and lesbians to join the class action, which seeks to force eHarmony to end its policy as well as unspecified damages for those denied eHarmony services based on their sexual orientation.

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Philly City Council Ends 79-Year Boy Scout Lease Over Refusal to Accept Homosexual Leaders

This is probably contrary to Federal law protecting the Scouts

Philadelphia City Council voted yesterday to end a nearly 80-year-old lease held by the Boy Scouts local branch over the group's adherence to a national policy banning actively homosexual leaders. The ongoing dispute pitted the Scouts' Cradle of Liberty Council against homosexual activists over the organization's refusal to adopt an official policy welcoming homosexuals into leadership. The City, under pressure by activist groups, wants the Scouts to either alter the organization's policy or start paying market rent for the use of the historical Beaux Arts building, where the Scout headquarters has been housed since 1928 for a nominal rent.

The resolution permitting the city to end the lease was introduced unexpectedly, according to coverage by the Philadelphia Inquirer, and passed 16-1 with no debate. City councilors stated their hope that the resolution would generate leverage for the city by and open the door to talks resolving the dispute.

Homosexual activist organization Equality Advocates Pennsylvania pushed the city to act on the scout's lease, the Inquirer reported. Executive director Stacey Sobel said yesterday that the Boy Scouts should not be able to use taxpayers' dollars to discriminate against homosexuals.

Scouts take an oath of duty to God as part of their membership, and actively homosexual individuals are not permitted as leaders. Although the Supreme Court ruled in 2000 that as a private organization, scouts could restrict homosexuals from leadership, scout groups have faced opposition from local officials revoking privileges where they have refused to alter policy based on the demands of homosexual activists.

The American Family Association of Pennsylvania said the city was caving to the pressure of homosexual activists, in a press release earlier today.

"With an alarming number of children facing violent deaths on the streets of Philadelphia, the city's answer is to target one of the few organizations that offer purpose and meaning to these children. Of the 64,000 members the Cradle of Liberty Scout Council serves, 40,000 are in Philadelphia alone," said Diane Gramley, president of the AFA.

"The Scouts' policy banning open homosexual leaders is the right policy. Would the parents of Girl Scouts want a man to be their daughter's Scout leader? No and neither do parents want a man who is sexually attracted to other males to be Boy Scout leaders. Common sense should prevail here, but it's not."

"Efforts to appease never work. Homosexual activists want a pro-gay policy expressly stating that the Cradle of Liberty Scout Council will accept open homosexuals. They are not concerned with the well-being of the children of Philadelphia and surrounding counties, but instead choose to use them in an effort to make an example out of the Boy Scouts," Gramley said.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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