TimG, on Nov 10 2008, 04:53 PM, said:
Codo, on Nov 10 2008, 04:14 PM, said:
TimG, on Nov 11 2008, 05:57 AM, said:
How does the role of a mother/wife/woman differ from the role of a parent/spouse/human?
Would you seriously argue that woman and man are the same? That their body/way of thinking/emotions etc. are equal?
I think that no two individuals are identical, that we all have different ways of thinking and different emotions. (There are obvious physical difference between men and women, but don't see how these come into play post child birth.) I believe the stereotypical differences between men and women are largely the result of society perpetuating those stereotypes rather than inherent differences in the emotional makeup of men and women.
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Or don't you think that gay parents have even more difficulties then straight parents?
I think that the difficulties are imposed by society. The problems you mention, two men experiencing difficulty adopting and judges preferring children be with their mother rather than their father, are not difficulties based upon any inherent qualities of parents of that particular sex, but based upon your society's traditional expectations for parents of that sex.
This view is the politically correct position, of course.
The problem is that we are, as a species, shaped by evolutionary pressures, and all of the wishful thinking in the world won't change that.
Communism was founded on the idea that human personality was malleable. Destroy the structure of the capitalist society.. eliminate the middle and upper classes... either literally or through re-education (The Cultural Revolution, anyone?), and we can build the ideal member of the proletariat. It didn't work, and, with hindsight, we can see that it was doomed to failure, because elements of the human psyche are genetically programmed... self-interest, kinship group loyalties, dominance seeking, etc.
Equally, it is naive to believe, without support from well-performed scientific study, that the males do not differ, intellectually or psychologically, from the females in a species such as ours. Nor, for the same reasons, that blacks do not differ, viewed as a group, from whites, and whites from chinese, etc.
Thus, there is (I understand) compelling evidence suggesting that blacks, as a group, are better fitted for most athletic endeavours. There may be some evidence (I am not able to express a meaningful opinion on its validity) that some ethnic groups exhibit higher average intelligence than others.
None of this has anything to do with rights, and very little to do with individuals.
The average black may be more athletic than the average white.. but this difference is tiny on an individual level.... there will be a very large percentage of the white population that will be more athletic than the 'average' black.. maybe 48-49%. Group differences of this kind have virtually no impact at the individual level. But, spread over a large population, this kind of information suggests that we will never see an all-white NBA championship team.
The same is true in terms of intelligence... I gather that there is some evidence that ethnic chinese tend to have better IQ scores than whites... altho what IQ measures is itself an interesting topic. But that has no impact when dealing with individuals... the statistical likelihood that any given chinese individual is smarter than any individual white person is extremely low...swamped by all kinds of other factors.
If this is so between members of the same sex, on expressions of genetics far less obvious than the differences between male and female, then suggesting that men and women are functionally the same, after the phsyical acts of conception, pregnancy and delivery are over, is silly...unless you have a lot of evidence in support.
As it is, the evidence is to the opposite effect. Women, as a group, have smaller brains than do men, and the brains are themselves configured differently.
Smaller does not mean weaker, slower etc. Different does not mean inferior.
And even if smaller tended, in some measurable manner, to mean weaker, or different was in some manner equal to inferior, we would again be looking at statistical differences that would (I strongly suspect) have negligible impact when considering individual comparisions.
And there appears to be solid reasoning for thinking that psychology is influenced by evolution as well.. the field of evolutionary psychology is relatively new, but already well-established. Males and females have, as best as we can tell, had different functions in societies going back to our ancestral species.. it seems silly to assume, absent evidence, that our own species has somehow shaken off these influences.
Refusing to believe that there are differences is just as dangerous, altho in a subtler way, perhaps, than the old-fashioned belief that differences in attributes justified differences in the way people were treated by society. The old-fashioned prejudices led to horrific injustices, but the politically correct view that all differences are culturally imposed led to the equally horrific killing fields of Cambodia.
'one of the great markers of the advance of human kindness is the howls you will hear from the Men of God' Johann Hari
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, noone want individual rights to be cut down. 