This past Friday and saturday I, and a few of my fellow bandmates, participated I the Durham High School All-County Band. This band is similar to the middle school All-Stars Band in which most of us participated in 8th grade year.

The premise of the All-County Band is to have musicians from every high school k the county (with the exception of Jordan, for some reason) and bring in a guest conductor to teach us a few songs in two days. Needless to say, this is not the easiest thing to do. Friday, everyone met at Riverside at 8am for the first day of practice, which lasted until 3:45. That’s nearly 8 hours of practice time, with about 1.5 hours for breaks.

Our conductor, Ed Keifer, has been a director for 20+ years at the high school and college level. He is also a published composer, and we even played two of his compositikns for our concert. It’s a very interesting experience to be taught a piece by its composer. It does, however, make is practice even harder, because he knows what the piece is supposed to sound like, and was relentless in having us play it correctly. Luckily his personality kept the mood light. I swear he has ADD, because he would start to count off for us to play, then randomly stop and remind us of something or write something on the board.

As I was looking around the room during practice, I realized just how big the band was. I heard that there was about 70 kids, compared with Riverside’s band of about 20. Curious, I asked my friends how many were in the band at their school. All of them said numbers much too low for a band. I overheard many people remarking about how they didn’t have certain instruments in their bands. It would be nice to have a bassoon, an F Horn, and more than one clarinet in our band.

The only problem with the Band were the incredibly uncomfortable chairs we had to sit in for 7 hours.

As part of the Motivation unit, our class had an activity today about homosexuality.  For the activity, we were given descriptions of people and their activities, and had to determine of they were gay, lesbian, bisexual, or straight.  The purpose of this activity was to make us think about what defines homosexuality: are you gay if you tell people you are?  What if you have had relationships with only women?  We came up with certain traits that homosexual people do or do not have or show, with behavior and attitude being the top tier ones.

One of our problems described a woman who calls herself lesbian, is active in civil and gay rights, but is happily married to a man.  If we only looked at her behavior, we probably would conclude that she is straight, since she is with a man.  If we looked only at her attitude, we would conclude that she is a lesbian, as she says she is.  However, if we take both, we would conclude she is bisexual because of her lesbian view of herself but her opposite-sex spouse.

So now, is she straight, bisexual, or lesbian?

I don’t believe we can answer that question with the information we have.  We don’t know if she is in a sexually active marriage, and if she is, how much she enjoys heterosexual sex.  We don’t know her feelings towards women.  This is why homosexuality is difficult to classify: because there’s no easy way to quantify it.  The closest we can get is to measure relative feelings towards each sex for attitude, and actual relationships for behavior.

Neither of these are very accurate.  The attitude because I doubt people feel the same for every member of each sex (there are some people you really want, and some people you really don’t).  The behavior because not everyone would get in experimental relationships to test their level of homo- or heterosexuality.  And if we measured behavior, then, as my teacher said, we would have to label every virgin as asexual, and that certainly doesn’t apply to everyone.

While I have absolutely no evidence besides personal experience for this, I believe that sexuality is measured on a scale from 0% homo/hetero to 100%homo/hetero, with the majority of people close to 100% heterosexual.  I can argue that most of those people have some degree of attraction to the same sex, but due to any vast number of reasons only have heterosexual relationships: someone who is 90% heterosexual doesn’t necessarily have 1 in 10 dates be of the same sex.  That is only my hypothesis, but if I ever wanted to research it, I could be able to.

I’m focusing mainly on times gay right have been put to a vote. Prop 8 last year in California and a referendum just passed yesterday in Maine reject the same-sex marriage, and the majority of the opponents of the same-sex marriage bills are religious in their reasoning. And with a near even split (53/47 in both cases), the results aren’t exactly majority opinion.

It is incredibly unjust to allow the majority to dictate the freedoms of the minority. It should be that the minority is protected from the majority, as Congress has just done by including homophobic threats as hate crime. Our government cannot survive on solely democratic principles, which is why the Electoral College was established: to offset the majority opinion. I agree that democracy is good, but only if it usable to provide equal protection to everyone, not just those with money, intelligence, or numbers.

How are we supposed to have equal rights if they’re not enstilled and enforced by government. If rights are left to the majority, there is a high chance tha only the right the majority group believes in will be enforced, and the rights of the minority will be ignored. This plain in corrupt homophobic police forces who don’t investigate abuse against a gay person, or even contribute to the abuse.

Yesterday, I got a notification from the Poll application asking me to vote in the poll “Which do you trust more?  Science or the Bible?” Naturally I put science, and it took me to the results.

The first time it was split about 53%/47% in favor of Science.

At the time of this writing it’s moved to 51%/49% in favor of Science.

I do not like these results at all, and for many reasons.  The poll asks people for their belief, and nearly half of the people who responded say they believe that the Bible is more trustworthy than the science.  I’m sure they have reasons for believing that, but that is not the basis for them to tell other people what to believe.  If you say you believe that everything in the Bible is true, and there’s nothing I can do to change that, I’ll reply, “Fine, but it’s your fault for being ignorant of scientific advances that prove the Bible wrong.”  I’ve heard this argument many times: “You should believe what I believe because it’s what I believe.”  That’s great that you believe that, but if you can’t give me good reason to believe it, then it’s your own fault when I don’t.

Most of the comments I’ve seen are based on “The Bible is the word of God (or GOD, if you like caps lock) and therefore true.”  I’ve posted a comment based on that type of logic, called circular logic, which can be found visually here.  Circular logic is what it sounds like: there is no beginning or end, and no way to prove that one part is true without using other parts of the cycle.  Some people can easily see circular logic and believe it as true, but it’s then up to them to prove it to others, not simply state it as true.

There have also been many people trying to disprove science by saying that it changes, and the Bible does not, ergo science is wrong.  True, science can and probably will be wrong, but scientists have the humility to admit that their theories are wrong, and will work to find a better theory.  Since the Bible never changes, it goes on the assumption that everything it says is true.  Which it’s not.  It only takes one counterexample to prove something fallible, and there are many, but I’ll use the geocentrist (earth-centered) vs heliocentrist (sun-centered) views of the solar system.  The geocentrist view comes from a literal reading of the Bible, where the Earth is described as fixed and unmoving, which makes sense because the sun rises and sets, not the Earth.  This is false, however.  Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo all made observances to prove that the Earth orbits the sun, not the other way around.

I just looked at the poll now, and it’s 50/50.  At least majority views ≠level of truth.

According to an article on Pat Robertson’s site, at least.

Halloween is the holy celebration of Lucifer and the unholy trinity.  Most candy given out has been prayed over by witches, and demons are released in these rituals.  Demons are also released when good Christians light a fire in their fireplace.

Lawrence Krauss is the Physics professor at Arizona State University, and he is speaking at the 2009 Atheist Alliance International (http://www.atheistalliance.org/) conference.

Today while I was reading, I overheard the tv from downstairs showing something with Obama and lots of cheering, so I went down to check it out.

When I got there, I saw that the president was speaking at a Human Rights Campaign dinner thing, and was talking about the new hate crimes bill that passed.  Then he started talking about DADT.  For those who don’t know, DADT makes it illegal for people to be gay while in the military.

I am so glad that this policy is finally being repealed, because it’s probably one of the most insulting policies I know.  It keeps people shut up in the closet for fear of being dishonorably discharged, and makes it’s goal of keeping unit cohesion much harder to reach.

NPR published a story earlier today which says that the House extended the Hate Crimes Law to include attacks based on someone’s sexual orientation.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113631396&ft=1&f=1014

I was personally elated when I first saw it pop up on my twitter feed (@musicmancz).  This extension was passed along with a defense bill, which was signed into law by President Obama.  The article states that the bill won with a, 281-146 vote, with 131 of the 178 Republican members against the bill, saying it would enable “thought crime” against anyone who says negative things about gay people.

The bill was also named for Matthew Shepard, who was beaten and murdered because of his sexuality.