Boycott to end

The American Family Association has announced they will end their two-year boycott of Ford.

The group, headquarted in Tupelo and led by Don Wildmon, was upset because Ford had published ads in gay magazines and supported organizations, such as the Human Rights Campaign. (Volvo is technically a corporate sponsor of HRC, but it is owned by Ford.)

According to Wildmon, Ford has met enough of their demands to end the boycott. According to Ford, they haven't "met" any demands- they've just had less sales and less money to give out.

While Ford was ignoring the boycott, so was the rest of America, and probably most of the supposed 700K people who signed the petition.

Read about it in the Clarion-Ledger.

"Turning Homosexuality On and Off?"

John Tierney at the New York Times reports on new research:

To their surprise, neurobiologists have discovered that homosexuality can be turned on or off in fruit flies. They’d known that sexual orientation can be genetically programmed, but they didn’t realize it could also be altered by giving a drug that changes the way the flies’ sensory circuits react to pheromones.

Within hours of the treatment, previously heterosexual male fruit flies would be courting other males, and treatment could also cause flies who had been engaging in homosexual behavior to become exclusively heterosexual, the neurobiologists report in Nature Neuroscience. You can read a summary of it here from the University of Illinois at Chicago, the home of one of the researchers, David Firestone.

That's crazy wierd. I'm really uncomfortable with this for several reasons.

Tierney lists some possible problems and issues it could raise.

So let the discussion begin. I don’t think of homosexuality or heterosexuality as an “illness” to be “cured,” but I wonder how people would use the ability to control sexual orientation — to have a designer libido. Would some people, gay or straight, who weren’t having luck attracting one gender decide to switch to the other? Would some people casually switch back and forth?

Would some social conservatives (like Leon Kass), who normally object to biologists “playing god” and pharmacologists altering “human nature,” change their minds and urge the use of biotechnology to promote heterosexuality? Would some social liberals try to restrict the use of this biotechnology? Would parents, gay or straight, want to regulate their children’s sexual orientation — and should they or their children be allowed to do so?

What do y'all think?

Google Hot Trends / Trent Lott Gay Affair?

Google keeps track of newly popular searches excluding longtime popular terms such as "weather" and inappropriate content.

Yesterday two Mississippi topics were in the top 50 for searches in all of English speaking googledom.

27. Trent Lott Gay

32. Jeff Bower

I would understand why the firing/"mutual agreement" of longtime Southern Miss Coach Jeff Bower would be newsworthy. He was the 4th longest currently serving coach after all.

What I was curious about and what you've probably already clicked on is the search term Trent Lott Gay.

Apparently political website Big Head DC and Larry Flynt Both state that they have reason to believe that Lott's resignation might be for reasons other than those "other opportunities" he spoke of.

I doubt the claims are true so I don't anticipate writing further on the subject, but it is of interest so I thought I'd pass it along.