"...including a disturbing non-answer to the question of whether of being gay is a sin…"

Oh my.
That is disturbing.
So we're a little confused; does The Stranger believe anything is a sin?
Is the problem believing in sin at all or just if homosexuality is a sin.
Does The Stranger believe in sin?

The Stranger is guilty of tokenism. So is Erin Jones. And she seems to admit as much when she says, "We talked about others doing it, but we are just as guilty." I'm not seeing much of a controversy here.

@1) Your silly voodoo superstition does not work here. Let me re-phrase your attempt at wordage: "Does The Stranger believe in Santa Claus? What about the Easter Bunny? Leprechauns?"

@3) Yes, as soon as free candy she scarfed it right down, just like someone who will say anything s/he thinks her audience wants to hear from her. "Tokenism?" "OH YES, OF COURSE! (that helps me get sympathy!)" - "It bothers you, right?" "YES, OF COURSE!!! (more sympathy!) Do you like me now??"

"Promoting transgenderism." A classic case of hoisting yourself on your own petard.

Bullet dodged because we don't need evangelical religion influencing public education no matter how sweet sounding and professional looking the promoter. And it's faulty "religion" because Jesus didn't say being gay is a sin. In fact, He said nothing about homosexuality at all but he said a few other things that some people find inconvenient.

She, like Murray, is about identity politics and we see how well that's worked out so far. And she had such a bright career in front of her. But maybe she can start a mega church in Enumclaw.

@1:

People believe in concepts such as "sin" or "morality"; institutions, organizations, or companies, not being endowed with sentience, and therefore unable to possess a moral conscience, are incapable of believing in anything.

And FWIW, to believe in the concept of "sin" one must first believe in existence of the divinity that presumably hands down proscriptions against actions so designated. If one does not believe in the deity, then it must follow they do not also believe in that deity's particular slate of "thou shalt nots".

And of course it goes without saying that ascribing moralistic denotations either good or bad to conditions dictated purely by genetics and biology is not only irrelevant, but useless. Calling homosexuality a "sin" simply because one personally disapproves of it denotes a deliberate and frankly morally questionable subscription to the notion that natural biological processes themselves are somehow subservient to subjective human perceptions and prejudices, which is clearly not the case. Biology doesn't follow human law, morality, or bias; it follows only its own rules, and to suggest it should be otherwise is simply an acknowledgement that one doesn't possess even the slightest understanding of how biological processes function.

#7

The biological purpose of life is genetic recombination.

You have to let that one go.

Bottom line is, she's a fraud. She'll tell anybody anything she thinks they want to hear. Vote Reykdal.

It appears to me that she recognizes that she is the first black women, and that she is ok if people want to vote for her for that reason. But, she wants to be recognized for her record and ability. It seams to me that the Stranger is only interested in someone who wants to play the victim card which Erin Jones is not doing. The more I learn about her the more I like her.

7
thank you so much.

"The Stranger initially endorsed Jones, but last month, after Sydney reported troubling comments she'd made regarding LGBTQ youth—including a disturbing non-answer to the question of whether being gay is a sin—we rescinded the endorsement."

We just wondered if The Stranger;
the same The Stranger that endorsed and was disturbed and rescinded;
believes there is any such thing as sin.

It seems like Ansel doesn't understand what "tokenism" means at all.

Being the first minority member of this or that group isn't tokenism.

Tokenism is when a group or organization, like a newspaper or legislature, accepts or endorses only a single representative of a minority, while claiming to be inclusive.

Is The Stranger engaging in tokenism in its election endorsements? Honest question, I don't pay close attention to them, myself.

@8:

Ascribing rationality/purpose to life is irrelevant, since it presupposes some conscious intent or motivation where none such exists. One could instead suggest that genetic recombination is a function - albeit a very important one - of biological processes, which would be factually correct, while at the same time acknowledging that "function", as it is generally defined in the biological sciences, carries forward a process along a chain of causation to an object or goal; however, that goal is not intentional or predetermined, it is merely the result of the functions that precede it. And to that extent such a characterization doesn't preclude "gayness" as a function with some biological utility, since it appears in so many species and has not been eliminated over time by natural selection.

@12:

Glad I was able to clear that up for you.

Nope. You're the one bringing up an intelligence.

Homosexuality and natural selection are patently incompatible.

The entire basis of the theory is that some organisms in a given setting are better-suited to their surroundings, survive, and procreate.

I've been over this with others.
- Cool, a type of monkey gangfucks.
- Cool, birds have cloacas.
- Cool, if you're going extinct/enduring great stress spit out caretakers to take care of the lack of people.

This is not an issue of morality, disdain, theology - It's behavioral and social.

Is it mitosis or meiosis, pal?

Organisms, particularly those of a lower mind, exist to survive and procreate.

That's what they do.

Sure, you'll spend more time putting together pretty words, but those pretty words just told me that there is a goal that exists outside of the realm of rationality.

You're a mammal. You seem to have forgotten that.

NO BUT GOD MADE US.

@8: There is no real "purpose" in biology, and life certainly doesn't revolve around recombination. Maybe you're thinking of reproduction? Because those are two different things. But I suppose it's fair to say that life's purpose is to propagate itself...

@16: KIN SELECTION, PLEIOTROPY, ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS, INCOMPLETE PENETRANCE, HETEROZYGOTE ADVANTAGE. There are LOADS AND LOADS of reasons that a seemingly disadvantageous trait could arise and persist in a population through evolution. Just because YOU don't know of them doesn't mean they don't exist.
I study this shit. Don't play.

I declare this thread hijacked.

I didn't mean for it to be.

All I ask is that they explain to my simple little mind how genes that do not create progeny exist.

Throwing all of your terms at me does not solve this conundrum.

@19:

Not that we should have to do the work FOR you, but you should probably start here...

#17 is telling me that he survived for hundreds of millions of years by hitching a ride on the fem-gravy train.

He is also expected to marry a Jew. The same type.

I can't argue that going sideways is always, or even most of the time, the best option.

So yes, that was a subjective statement, and on a macro scale, so was his. What are you going to do.

Just so you know.

I guess after tonight we'll see if the dialogue about these two candidates actually returns to the nuts-and-bolts of EDUCATION. Let's pretend one of these two is head of OSPI in a year (not hard to do) AND the legislature has finally satisfied its court-mandated proper funding of public education. Well, then one of these two needs to oversee some Major shit, as far as implementing use of that funding. How would they get started?

@19: Let's start with penetrance. Penetrance is the fraction of individuals bearing a particular allele (say, a hypothetical "gay gene") that manifest the phenotypic trait associated with that allele (in this example, homosexuality). There are loads and loads of alleles at all sorts of loci that work this way. For example, mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes (which code for tumor suppressors) are associated with breast and ovarian cancer, but only around half of women bearing such mutations will actually develop cancer. This explains how a genetic trait that causes no progeny to be produced can be passed on: the genes associated with that deleterious trait don't always cause the trait!

Of course, such low-penetrance deleterious alleles will still vanish from a population over time (because even a 1 in 10 chance of producing no offspring still reduces the overall fitness of the allele compared to the wild type), absent some other mechanism. Let's assume that the rates of mutation are too low for the trait to continually arise spontaneously to make up for its lesser propagation, since that's really a cop-out explanation.

One common way that deleterious traits are propagated is through pleiotropy. Maybe the hypothetical gay gene makes 10% of its carriers homosexual, but gives ALL of its carriers increased resistance to some disease, or otherwise improves their fitness. The seemingly unrelated benefit can under certain circumstances outweigh the disadvantage. A related concept is linkage, in which a beneficial mutation arises near a deleterious gene. Due to their physical proximity, they're unlikely to be separated by recombination, and so they're inherited together, and the beneficial mutation can outweigh the deleterious one.

And then of course there's heterozygote advantage. Since we are diploid, we have two copies of each (autosomal) gene. Some mutations are deleterious if two copies are present, but confer a benefit (over either homozygous condition) to individuals possessing one mutant copy and one wild-type. An example would be the gene associated with sickle-cell anemia, which grants resistance to malaria to its heterozygous carriers.

With kin selection, a seemingly deleterious trait can be beneficial overall. Since close relatives share much of their genomes, one can achieve "indirect fitness" by increasing the number of progeny of a sibling, ensuring that one's genes are propagated (albeit from a different source). To continue with the example, suppose a "gay" gene causes 10% of its carriers to be homosexual, but those non-reproducing individuals help care for the offspring of their heterosexual relatives. If the increase in progeny survivorship is greater than the number of offspring the non-reproducers would have produced had they mated, the trait is actually beneficial. (This is actually seen in wild turkeys, among others, in which some males forgo their own reproduction to help their brothers attract mates.)

And then there are some traits which aren't associated with genes, or which can only arise from the interaction of a certain genotype with a certain set of influences from the outside environment. A lot of allergies are the result of environmental effects such as these. And in fact, it's looking like sexual orientation has a lot less to do with genes than a lot of people think, and a lot more to do with hormone fluctuations in utero, making it dependent in part on what's called a "maternal effect".

So now you know a little more. And I advise you to be wary of such "argument from incredulity", in which the claim is "I cannot understand how X could be true, therefore X is false". This reasoning fails by assuming implicitly that one is able to understand all things that are. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio...

Jones isn't the only one trying to have it both ways. Has The Stranger decided they'll try to pretend they didn't initially endorse Jones simply because she was black?

Im ambling about town six in. I was going to say that you should inform me when you never find the gene, but you've shown that it was eventually found completely fucking impossible and that you have begun exploring other avenues.

Please do forgive me if I am out of date, but you've still thrown nothing but improved theory my way.

You're blindly hurling determinism to and fro.

My stance is none other than cold hard science, of which you are still lacking.

I understand, little boy. I understand.

@1: Right and wrong exist, sin is an artificial concept created by religions.

@Everybody else: Erin's a mealy-mouthed so-and-so who has different answers depending on what room she happens to be in. I'm voting for the white guy.

@27) In middle school history books in several decades, a version of what you wrote will be part of the chapter on the invention of the Internet.

@29) There will be a subsection on inadequately-equipped comments formats, kind of like how the paragraph on 1970s technology maybe mentions 8 tracks.

@25: We've got the Pentagon's top cryptologists working 24/7 trying to figure out what the fuck you just said.

@27: It helps to stay in practice at explaining this sort of thing to laymen. And idiots.

"I'm the first black woman to run for statewide election." Hmm. Nona Brazier (a 'black woman') ran for Washington State governor in 1996. If Jones doesn't know that, I'd be pretty concerned about her leading our state's education system.

@14 I think it's actually Jason Rantz and Erin Jones who don't know what tokenism means. Ansel is simply reporting what they said. The Stranger endorses a lot of people of color. If you really believed these people were not qualified (although that hard to argue - whatever you think of Pramila Jayapal's positions, for example, you have to admit she is very, very qualified), you could accuse them of favoritism towards POC because they endorse so many, but not tokenism.