Gay Sex

Judges  Who Are Elected Like Politicians Tend to Act Like Them :
The Gay Sex Photo Demonstrators for and against same-sex marriage gathered on Wednesday in front of the Montgomery courthouse as Chief Justice Roy S. Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court testified in the case against him. Credit Dustin Chambers for The New York Times WASHINGTON — “Judges are not politicians, even when they come to the bench by way of the ballot,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote last year in a case from Florida that took a small step toward insulating elected judges from political pressure. Judges in 39 states face elections, and it is only natural that they might find it hard to take an unpopular position. But Chief Justice Roberts wrote that both appointed and elected judges must ignore public sentiment. “Politicians are expected to be appropriately responsive to the preferences of their supporters,” the chief justice wrote. “A judge instead must ‘observe the utmost fairness,’ striving to be ‘perfectly and completely independent.’” He was quoting Chief Justice John Marshall, and it is a fine aspiration. But any number of studies have found that elections can affect judicial behavior. One released last week, for instance, found that elected judges are less likely to support gay rights than are appointed ones. The effect was most pronounced in cases decided by judges who ran in partisan elections. That seemed the case on Friday, when Roy S. Moore, chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, was suspended for the rest of his term for ordering the state’s probate judges to defy federal court orders on same-sex marriage. Appointed judges who must face retention elections also have reason to be sensitive to public opinion. In 2010, voters in Iowa removed three State Supreme Court justices who had joined a unanimous opinion allowing same-sex marriages. Earlier studies have shown that judges facing re-election are more likely to impose harsh criminal sentences, including death sentences. “Proximity to re-election makes judges more punitive — more likely to impose longer sentences, affirm death sentences and even override life sentences to impose death,” a report from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law concluded last year. It is not hard to see why. Most negative advertisements in judicial elections attack candidates as soft on crime. The new study was commissioned by Lambda Legal, which litigates cases on behalf of lesbians, gay men and bisexual and transgender people, and was conducted by Anthony Michael Kreis, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law, and two colleagues. They looked at 127 decisions from state Supreme Courts since 2003, when the United States Supreme Court struck down a Texas law that made gay sex a crime. That is not a particularly large number of decisions. They addressed various legal questions, and they gave answers at various times in a period of rapid change in public attitudes on gay rights. And methods of selecting judges are not evenly distributed around the nation. But the results lined up predictably: the more political the selection mechanism, the less support for gay rights. State Supreme Courts whose justices were elected in partisan elections supported gay rights 53 percent of the time. The number grew to 70 percent for nonpartisan elections, to 76 percent for retention elections and to 82 percent for appointed systems. The difference between systems that relied on partisan elections, where judges run as Republicans or Democrats, and all others was statistically significant, the study’s authors wrote. In an interview, Professor Kreis said the findings concerning partisan elections may reflect the added element of political primaries, which can reward candidates who take positions that are more attractive to a party’s base than to the general electorate. Timing matters, too. Other studies have shown that judges seeking re-election start ruling differently as Election Day approaches. They issue harsher sentences for serious crimes, studies in Pennsylvania and Washington State have found. “All judges, even the most punitive, increase their sentences as re-election nears,” Gregory A. Huber and Sanford C. Gordon wrote in the Pennsylvania study, finding that judges there added as many as 2,700 years of additional prison time, or 6 percent of total prison time, in aggravated assault, rape and robbery sentences over a 10-year period. In Alabama, where judges can override jury recommendations of life sentences in capital cases, they are more likely to do so in election years. “What could explain Alabama judges’ distinctive proclivity for imposing death sentences in cases where a jury has already rejected that penalty?” Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked in a 2013 dissent. “The only answer that is supported by empirical evidence,” she wrote, “is one that, in my view, casts a cloud of illegitimacy over the criminal justice system: Alabama judges, who are elected in partisan proceedings, appear to have succumbed to electoral pressures.” Judicial elections are essentially unknown in the rest of the world. In the federal system, judges are appointed for life, shielding them from political pressure. Electing state-court judges, on the other hand, ensures a measure of popular accountability. That is a conscious choice, rooted in Jacksonian populism. It does what it was intended to do: make judges more responsive to the will of the people. That choice has consequences that may be in tension with Chief Justice Roberts’s wish for “the utmost fairness.” Continue reading the main story What Is ‘Let’s Talk About Gay Sex & Drugs’? Patrick Cash writes candidly for PinkNews about bringing gay men together to talk about the real issues facing their community. Can you remember when you first hit puberty? I was ten-years-old and the other side of the world. Some of my Mum’s family had emigrated to Australia and, after my grandfather died, she’d taken us to visit. It was the end of their summer, and still very hot. We were advised to nap through the strong afternoon sun, and so I was put in a room with closed shutters, lying in a bed beneath mosquito nets. I couldn’t sleep. Whether it was the libido-enhancing sunshine, or if it was being thousands of miles away from home, a box inside my mind had been unlocked and a deluge of men had begun. Tanned, muscular, and all with that 90s ‘curtains’ haircut the Backstreet Boys popularised. I didn’t know how to wank, but rubbing against the mattress felt great, as I guiltily imagined the unzipping of blue jeans. To give credit to my rigidly Catholic upbringing, I valiantly tried to transform the men into beautiful women. Only then the rubbing didn’t feel as good. Over the next couple of years puberty would hit in with a cock-filled vengeance. It was a difficult mental health plateau to navigate for a child who had no concept of ‘gay’, other than the subject of laughter in the playground, and who had been brought up to fear God. I remember making a deal with my own mind that if I allowed myself to temporarily indulge these thoughts about David Beckham, then I would grow up to marry a woman. The idea of telling anybody was terrifying. Throughout the manic masturbation of my teens, and into the ‘wicked’ beginnings of my sex with men, I publicly performed an accepted lust for girls. Gay sex was intertwined with being ‘wrong’. I became extremely depressed. I’d walk into school with my head hanging down. At age fifteen I’d indulge in vivid, non-sexual fantasies about somebody turning up, maybe sitting down next to me on a park bench, and I’d be able to speak to them my truth. Because homophobia was absolute, widespread and socially normalised: for friends, gay was ‘disgusting’, at school it was invisible, and in family it was a sin. This ‘hiding away’ of the self during our most formative years is not uncommon for gay men. Sadly, even for gay children hitting puberty now, I fear it’s the normalised reaction against a societal expectation to be straight. It means growing up with vast amounts of trauma, from which mental health issues may arise: commonly, low self-worth, internalised homophobia, substance abuse, and an over-emphasis on the physical body. I am not trying to cast aspersions on all gay men. But I know I’ve been through a number of these issues myself in my twenties. I’ve felt bad about myself and so put other gay men down, in order to give myself an illusory boost of self-esteem. For years, I hated everything camp about gay culture. I’m still working out my alcohol intake. And when I was using substances for sex, they made what was ‘wrong’, right. Matthew Todd writes eloquently about these issues in his recent book Straight Jacket, and chemsex expert David Stuart has a number of enlightening clips on Youtube. If there are lingering issues with self-esteem from growing up feeling ‘wrong’, then it’s far easier to go to the gym, or buy the latest clothes, or fake tan, and make the outside beautiful, rather than try and untangle the web inside. Here lies the Peter Pan complex too. I went through my period of making the gym my church. It paid off and I’d go into clubs, whip off my top, and know that I’d pull. Yet I rarely saw those guys again, and I began to realise that my whole value to them was based in my body. My thoughts and fears and dreams were not necessary. And I feel that may be true across swathes of the gay scene, from chillouts to Heaven; that we often weigh each other’s worth upon how we look. That’s why we’ve set up a night devoted to simply speaking and listening within the gay community. It’s called Let’s Talk About Gay Sex & Drugs. It’s an open-mic where everyone who wants to speak gets five minutes, but nobody gets more than five minutes. And anybody is welcome to just listen. Ultimately it’s an opportunity to speak what’s inside, to celebrate our true worth, and connect over what we’ve shared. ‘Let’sTalk About Gay Sex & Drugs – Arts’ is on Thursday 6th October from 6.30pm at Ku Klub, 30 Lisle Street, WC2H 7BA, just above Leicester Square tube. Free entry, all welcome. Is Dr Ben Carson Right When He Says a Lot of Men Go into Prison Straight but Come out Gay? My answer to this question on Quora: No, endless studies done over many years have shown that it is impossible to turn truly gay men straight. Not only that, but after age 15, men cannot even be moved on the sexual orientation scale. So you can’t even turn a 10-90 gay man into a 20-80 gay man (first number is heterosexual response as a percentage of maximum and second number is maximum). Obviously if gay men cannot be turned straight, then the opposite is also true. If it works one way, it must work the other way. If gay men can’t turn straight, straight men can’t turn gay. This has been a lot harder to test out because men hardly ever show up in sex clinics wanting to turn from straight to gay. However, there is at least one case in the literature of a straight male college student who desperately wanted to turn gay but nothing was working, so he showed up for therapy. What is not known is if male sexual orientation can be changed before age 15. This would require studies on the sexuality of children, which as you can imagine might be pretty problematic. But science seems pretty clear now that male sexual orientation is fixed at least by age 15. Anecdotally, reports say that straight men who go into prison and have gay sex in prison abandon gay sex when they leave prison and go back to a straight lifestyle.