Tolerance // Current

Local artists spread a message of hope all over the world!

The Blend the World community is a feet-on-the-street movement that is grounded in the... more

PurpleLight
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Muslim Prayers at Capitol Today Stir Protests

designed to show how Muslims can coexist with fellow Americans; day of prayer attacked... more

ryan8566
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Priests Embracing Islam ( Free Book & Movies )

********** Priests Embracing Islam ********** Exciting Stories of the Researchers... more

baspren
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United Kingdom Talk Video Thursday 3rd September 2009

Thursday's edition of my three times a week talk show.Watch the show here on CURRENT... more

ChrisReardon
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'Burquini' wearer burdened by French ban

Officials banned woman's use of the Islam-friendly suit at a local pool because of... more

zero123
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4 months ago
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Lady Gaga 'I told Kanye my music is gay'

Lady Gaga refused to tour with Kanye West until he agreed to camp-up their live show... more

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LA’s Best Unknown Museums: Trip on a Deal Ep. 32

http://www.triponadeal.com Far from boring, these five Los Angeles museums aren’t... more

triponadeal
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Islam in the NYPD

Khalid Latif is the Imam, or Muslim leader, for the NYPD. He is the youngest police... more

kmcq55
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7 months ago
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Arab Anthropologist Discusses Islam and the Modern World

Anthropologist Sa'd Al-Sowayan discusses how the academic institutions in the Arab... more

middle_east
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9 months ago
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El-Baradei: "The Arab World Has Sunk to the Lowest Depths"

Dr. Mohamed Mostafa El-Baradei, General Director of the International Atomic Energy... more

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Liberal Bahraini Author Expresses Amazing Views

Finally, someone with brains that should propagate his knowledge all over the East.

petarro
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Study: Tolerance Can Lower Gay Kids' Suicide Risk

From NPR: All Things Considered, December 29, 2008

Gay, lesbian and bisexual teens and young adults have one of the highest rates of suicide attempts — and some other health and mental health problems, including substance abuse. A new study suggests that parental acceptance, and even neutrality, with regard to a child's sexual orientation could have a big impact in reducing this rate.

The study, published in the journal Pediatrics, found that the gay, lesbian and bisexual young adults and teens at the highest risk of attempting suicide and having some other health problems are ones who reported a high level of rejection by their families as a result of their sexual orientation.

"A little bit of change in rejecting behavior, being a little bit more accepting," says lead researcher Caitlin Ryan, "can make a significant difference in the child's health and mental health."

Ryan, director of Adolescent Health Initiatives at the Cesar Chavez Institute at San Francisco State University, and her researchers conducted lengthy interviews with more than 200 gay, lesbian and bisexual young adults. Ryan tried to judge whether, as adolescents, they had faced low, moderate or high levels of rejection from their families.

They found that kids who, by Ryan's measure, experienced high levels of rejection were nearly 8.5 times more likely to have attempted suicide. They were nearly six times more likely to report high levels of depression and almost 3.5 times more likely to use illegal drugs or engage in unprotected sex. That was compared with adolescents whose families may have felt uncomfortable with a gay kid, but were neutral or only mildly rejecting.

Acceptance Can Go A Long Way

Because the level of rejection is hard to measure, Ryan looked at things like whether the parents tried to get their children to change their sexual orientation, or tried to stop them from being with other gay kids.

"Parents thought that by trying to change them, that would make them happy. But actually it put their children at great risk," Ryan says. "When we shared that with parents, they were shocked."

The study shows that just a little bit of acceptance can go a long way. That's what has other health researchers excited about Ryan's work, says Effie Malley, a senior prevention specialist at the federally funded Suicide Prevention Resource Center in Newton, Mass.

Malley has done her own research and released another study this month that shows that gay teens have very high rates of suicide attempts. She says parents matter — and so do peers, teachers and society in general.

"What I'd like to see down the road," she says, "is that parents and people who work with families counseling them would really take to heart Ryan and her co-authors' research about not trying to change who the parents are or their beliefs, but just to help them to recognize the words they use and the actions that are harmful to their kids and to stop using those behaviors."

[more at link....]From NPR: All Things Considered, December 29, 2008 Gay, lesbian and bisexual teens... more

edbr
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11 months ago
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Prostitution spreads to Aberdeen city centre

A change in the law has meant that a tolerance zone has been abandoned, resulting in... more

ClareW
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1 year ago
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Where Have All the Bigots Gone?

If, as some social scientists have been telling us, 88 percent of whites have an “implicit bias” against blacks and in favor of whites, and if, according to exit polls, whites made up 74 percent of the voters on Tuesday, why is Barack Obama going to be the next president?

I’m afraid I can’t make that math work out, so I’ve got another question: Was this election a landslide defeat for the researchers labeling most Americans as “unconscious” racists? They’ve done this using tools like the Implicit Association Test, which has shown that whites more quickly associate whites with “good” attributes and and blacks with “bad” attributes.”

But do these split-second reaction times really tell us anything useful about how people think and behave? As my colleague Ben Carey points out today, there’s also evidence that people’s prejudices can be reduced quite quickly when they spend time with someone from another race. And the notion that the computer tests of implicit bias are measuring meaningful prejudice has been disputed in articles like this one in Psychological Inquiry by Hal R. Arkes of Ohio State University and Philip Tetlock of the University of California at Berkeley.

“Obama’s candidacy is in itself a major embarrassment for the unconscious-bias crowd,” Dr. Tetlock told me. “They’ve argued that unconscious bias is pervasive but will influence judgments only when people have an ostensibly non-racial rationale to discriminate. Of course, the Clinton and McCain campaigns showered the American public with non-racial rationales to oppose Obama. But people did not seize on these rationales in anywhere near the numbers they should have if unconscious bias were as pervasive and potent as typically implied.”

In the exit polls on Tuesday, only 19 percent of voters said that race played a factor in their decision. As my colleagues Kate Zernike and Dalia Sussman note, Mr. Obama’s margin of margin of victory was “about the same among voters who said race had been a factor as it was among those who said it had not been at all.” Although a majority of white voters supported John McCain, a larger fraction (43 percent) of the white voters voted for Mr. Obama this year than for John Kerry in 2004.

In their Psychological Inquiry article, Dr. Tetlock and Dr. Arkes argue that people’s split-second reactions on implicit-bias tests can be explained by factors other than prejudice, and they point to the abundance of survey data showing a decline in racial prejudice in recent decades. They conclude:

If the decades of representative-sample surveys . . . are correct and racism is in steep decline, then hunting for its vestiges using the millisec precision of modern computers appears in a different light: a project that requires attaching increasingly tendentious interpretations to implicit associative measures that are well-suited for answering precisely formulated psychological questions about the working of human memory but that are less suited for tackling political questions about the tenacity of prejudicial behavior.

Do you agree that these implicit-bias reports are “increasingly tendentious”? Is there any social benefit in using these tests to telling the public that racism is still rampant? After Mr. Obama’s victory, should social scientists reconsider their research — and their image of the bigoted American?If, as some social scientists have been telling us, 88 percent of whites have an... more