Prop. 8 proponent says he argued that gay marriage could lead to legalizing pedophilia

Prop. 8 proponent says he argued that gay marriage could lead to legalizing pedophilia: "

An official proponent of Proposition 8 testified today that he was involved in disseminating claims that same-sex marriage could cause children to become gay and spark legalization of sex with children, incest and polygamy.

William Tam, one of five official proponents for the 2008 ballot initiative, also testified about his personal views toward same-sex marriage.

"It is very important that our children won't grow up to fantasize or think about, 'Should I marry Jane or John?' " testified Tam, a chemical engineer and evangelical Christian.

He also was asked about a statement that the gay agenda included legalizing sex with children.

"And that is what you told people to try to convince them to vote yes on Proposition 8, correct?" asked David Boies, a lawyer for the challengers.

"Yes,"Tam replied.

Tam said he participated in weekly campaign conference calls for grass-roots organizers run by the official campaign and sought advice from the campaign. He said he also played a major role in the petition campaign to get the measure qualified for the ballot.

Tam testified that he was secretary of an anti-gay marriage website that carried statements saying homosexuals were 12 times more likely than heterosexuals to molest children.

Tam said he agreed with the statement "based on different literature I have read. " He was unable to recall where he read it.

He also testified that a flier for Proposition 8 predicted dire results if gays were given civil rights.

"If sexual orientation is characterized as a civil right, so would pedophilia, polygamy and incest," the flier read.

"That is what you were telling people to convince them to vote for Proposition 8, correct?" Boies asked.

"Yes," Tam replied.

Boies noted that another statement said the gay agenda includes legalizing sex with children.

"And that is what you told people to try to convince them to vote yes on Proposition 8, correct? " Boies asked.

"Yes," Tam replied.

A lawyer defending Proposition 8 tried to distance Tam from the campaign.

Under cross-examination, Tam testified that he did not submit his materials and statements to the official Proposition 8 campaign for approval, nor were some of the fliers mentioned approved by the campaign manager.

--Maura Dolan at the San Francisco federal courthouse

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Solar water heaters get a $350-million boost in California

Solar water heaters get a $350-million boost in California: "

California regulators approved a $350-million rebate offer today to encourage homes and businesses to install water-heating systems powered by solar energy.

The state Public Utilities Commission established the California Solar Initiative Thermal Program, which will use $250 million to replace natural-gas-powered water heaters, with $25 million set aside for low-income customers. An additional $100.8 million will be used to swap out water heaters powered by electricity.

The incentives will decrease steadily over eight years until Dec. 31, 2017, or until the funds run out. The rebates will begin retroactively in August 2009.

The program could result in systems that displace 585 million therms of natural gas, or the equivalent of placing a solar water heater on 200,000 single-family homes, according to the commission. It could also lead to systems that displace 275.7 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per year.

Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and San Diego Gas & Electric Co. will offer the deal to ratepayers whose solar water heaters displace either electric or natural gas use. Southern California Edison customers who displace their electric use with their new system and Southern California Gas Co. ratepayers who do the same with natural gas will also get a rebate.

Solar water heaters, which are usually placed on rooftops, absorb the sun’s energy to warm water, which is then stored in a water tank, according to Environment California. The advocacy group says the new rebate could mean more than 3,000 new jobs, a 5% reduction in natural gas demand and a 35% drop in wholesale natural gas prices.

Solar water heaters are already gaining popularity in Southern California.

-- Tiffany Hsu

Photo: Richard Braun with his storage tank, which holds the water heated by solar panels on top of his Encino home. He has used the system to lower his heating bill since the 1970s. Credit: Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times

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Doctors encourage depression screening during and after pregnancy

Doctors encourage depression screening during and after pregnancy: "

Pregnancy and the postpartum period are peak times for women to experience depression, and routine screening for the condition should be a priority, say the authors of an opinion paper issued today in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology.

An estimated 14% to 23% of pregnant women experience depression, while 5% to 25% will have postpartum depression. The illness carries serious repercussions for both mother and baby, noted the authors of the paper. During pregnancy, depression raises the risk of preterm birth and other adverse outcomes. After the birth, the mother is not only impacted by depression but infants can suffer cognitive, neurologic and motor skill delays because the mother's illness affects her interactions with her baby.

"We recognize that postpartum depression is a serious health issue that we need to direct more attention toward," Dr. Gerald F. Joseph Jr., president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said in a news release. "Screening for depression during pregnancy is also important to identify it early on and to help prevent a worsening of the condition after delivery."

-- Shari Roan

Photo credit: Louid Balukoff / Associated Press

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Maintaining a home that's clean and safe

Maintaining a home that's clean and safe: "

Information to help people avoid harmful substances in their homes is available online or in print form thanks to an alliance of health and environmental experts at UC San Francisco.

The material includes tips on reducing exposure to metals and synthetic chemicals used in everyday life at home and work. There are also recommendations on shopping for safe products and how various substances affect men, women, pregnant women and children. Recent research has shown that exposure to chemicals may impair reproductive health and that developing fetuses and young children are especially vulnerable to contaminants.

"We've identified key areas where exposures are constant and avoidable, and a means for individuals to contact government representatives to prevent impacts of environmental contaminants on future generations," Tracey Woodruff, director of the UCSF Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment, said in a news release. "Although certain groups are most vulnerable, toxic substances in the environment affect every person, every day and are the responsibility of all of us."

The brochure and links to further resources can be found on the PRHE website. A downloadable brochure is also available.

-- Shari Roan

Photo: A sampling of "green" household products. Credit: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times

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Intelligent Design, No. Darwinian "Exaptations" and More. Yes.

Intelligent Design, No. Darwinian "Exaptations" and More. Yes.: "

by Stuart Kauffman

Intelligent Design is either not science, or, if grudgingly taken as science, is disproved. More importantly, I think, those of us who fear evolution need not do so.

Around the globe, 3 billion of us believe in the Abrahamic God, a billion of us do not believe in God, and some 3 billion of us are members of Eastern Wisdom Traditions. The United States is known to be the most religious among first world nations, perhaps because of the religious backgrounds of our colonies.

A large faction of Americans do not believe in evolution. For those of us who are overwhelmingly convinced of the natural origin of life some 3.7 billion years ago and the gradual evolution of the stunning biosphere, it is deeply important to try to understand the resistance to evolution, and with it, a belief by some in the recently proposed 'Intelligent Design' arguments.

Some scholars of biblical history, (I don't remember who unfortunately), say, interestingly, that before Newton, Christianity often interpreted the Bible as largely allegorical. With Newton and Celestial Mechanics, there seemed nothing for a theistic God to do, and the Deistic God of the 18th Century, who wound up the universe and let it go to follow Newton's laws, became a new view of God. Others, believers in a theistic God that acts continuously in the universe, came to view the Bible as the literal word of God. If so, then there is the familiar struggle between science and religion where the two disagree. Evolution is a major case.

I suspect the fear of evolution is also based in the view of many that God is the author of our moral laws. Then if the Bible is God's literal word, and yet evolution is true, the Bible, hence the word of God is false, and our morality falls to the ground. Hence some of us hold to Intelligent Design, the idea that organisms are, as ID proponent Michael Behe wrote, 'Irreducibly complex', and, as ID proponent William Demsky says, vastly improbable, so are signs of Intelligent Design.

But evolution, in fact, is no enemy of morality. I tell of a story written in an Edmonton Alberta newspaper eighteen months ago. A six month baby was outside in a rocker with the family dog. A rattle snake coiled to strike the infant. The dog stepped between the snake and dog and took six strikes. Why? We cannot prove dogs are conscious, although I am convinced, having our dog Winsor, that dogs are conscious. I think this dog knew perfectly well what it was doing, and was trying to save the baby. Happily, the dog survived.

Franz de Waal, in 'Good Natured', writes of a experiment with higher primates: Two were in facing cages, unable to see one another. A third 'observer' was in a cage able to see the other two. The experimenter fed one of the two well, and nearly starved the second, and fed the observer well. One day, the experimenter gave the observing primate lots of extra food. What happened? The observer gave the extra food to the starved primate. These, as de Waal says, are signs of the evolution of 'prosocial behavior', presumably due to group selection.

No evolution is not the enemy of morality, but its first source.

What then of Intelligent Design?

Intelligent Design argues that complex traits such as the famous flagellar motor in some bacteria enabling them to swim, are too complex to have evolved. The probabilities of achieving the motor are too remote to have remotely occurred, ID proponents say.

Now, if we take ID to be science, one would think that the next hugely pressing scientific questions would be: who or what is the Designer? And, how does the Designer manage to achieve the designs in organisms? It is no accident that ID proponents do not ask these questions. On the one hand, no one has any idea of a natural mechanism whereby this design and implementation might have occurred. On the other hand, the quiet premise of these ID proponents of what was earlier, as the Dover trial showed, Creation Science, is that the Designer is our theistic God. But to mention God as the Designer would put ID at odds with our separation of Church and State.

How do biologists explain 'irreducible complexity' such as the flagellar motor? Largely by our now well discussed Darwinian 'exaptations'. Other bacteria have been found, and presented in the Dover trial, that have parts of the flagellar motor. In these other bacteria, the parts of the flagellar motor play entirely different functional roles, unrelated to swimming via the flagellar motor. The transition, we believe, to the flagellar motor arose, like the swim bladder from the lungs of lung fish, via Darwinian exapatations. The flagellar motor was never selected for directly and ab initio. It arose by a succession of exaptations, like the three bones of our middle ears from three adjacent bones of an early fish. Furthermore, as I've described before, we can have no probability measure for the evolution of the biosphere into its Adjacent Possible, since we do not know all the possibilities, hence we do not know the sample space of the process, so cannot construct a probability measure. Therefore, the calculations of improbability that the ID proponents make are vacuous.

If ID were taken to be a science, it would make one prediction: Darwinian exaptations do not occur, hence cannot offer an explanation for 'irreducible complexity'. But exaptations arise in evolution all the time. The one testable prediction of ID that I can think of is false.

So: to all of us, those who believe in God and those who do not: We do not need ID. And to those of us who believe in our theistic God, perhaps the views of those before Newton have merit, the Bible may be partially allegorical, and we need not fear evolution.

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Obesity may factor into choosing bottle over breast

Obesity may factor into choosing bottle over breast: "

The health benefits of breastfeeding for mothers and babies are widely known -- studies have shown it may improve cognitive development among children and could reduce a woman's risk of getting breast cancer or cardiovascular disease. But new research suggests that very obese woman may not breast feed as much or for as long as their normal-weight counterparts.

The study, released in the January issue of the journal Obesity, looked at information about 3,517 white women and 2,846 black women who were part of the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System from 2000 to 2005.

Among the participants, 7.1% of the white women and 5.3% of the black women were underweight; 53.8% of the white women and 39.5% of the black women were normal weight; 20.9% of the white women and 28.3% of the black women were overweight; 10.5% of the white women and 15.6% of the black women were obese; and 7.7% of the white women and 11.3% of the black women were very obese.

Overall, a greater number of white women (67.2%) than black women (41.2%) initiated breastfeeding, and white women breastfed for longer periods compared to black women. Among white women, breastfeeding was highest among those who were normal weight and went down as their pre-pregnancy body mass indexes rose, with very obese white women having lower odds of beginning breastfeeding than normal-weight white women. Among black women BMI was not a factor in beginning to breastfeed.

BMI was also relevant in breastfeeding duration. Very obese white women had on average the shortest period of breastfeeding while normal-weight white women had the longest. Among white women the odds of breastfeeding at 10 weeks decreased as their BMIs increased.

The authors point to other studies that show overweight and obese women may have a harder time breastfeeding than women of normal weight and they urge that overweight and obese women as well as black women may need more guidance to start breastfeeding.

-- Jeannine Stein

Photo credit: Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times

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Prop. 8 opponents seek to show link between religion, anti-gay discrimination [Updated]

Prop. 8 opponents seek to show link between religion, anti-gay discrimination [Updated]: "

Challengers of California's ban on same-sex marriage are trying to show at trial today that discrimination against gays and lesbians is rooted in religion and that churches have contributed to anti-gay violence.

Opponents of Proposition 8 called to the stand Ryan Kendall, who grew up in an evangelical Christian family in Colorado and was forced to submit to Christian therapy as a teenager to change his sexual orientation.

"I was just as gay as when I started, " Kendall testified.

U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker, who is presiding over the marriage trial, permitted Kendall to testify over objections by Proposition 8's defenders, on the grounds they had argued sexual orientation was changeable.

Kendall, now a resident of Denver, testified tearfully about how his mother abused him after learning of his sexuality from reading his journal. He said he was called slurs and that his glasses were smashed while attending an evangelical school.

The therapy and his parents' reaction to his sexuality led him to contemplate suicide, and at 16 he went to a Colorado social service agency to ask for protection, he testified. His parents' custody was revoked.

Attorneys challenging Proposition 8 also presented videotaped testimony from two experts on religion who had been retained by the measure's defenders. They have since withdrawn from the case.

The experts agreed under questioning that gays and lesbians have experienced discrimination and that some religions have contributed to that discrimination. They also acknowledged that religion has been used to justify discrimination against African Americans and women.

[Updated at 2:09 p.m.: Challengers of the Proposition 8 presented documents this afternoon that the Catholic and Mormon churches were closely tied to the campaign to pass the measure.]

-- Maura Dolan at the San Francisco federal courthouse

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NASA: 2009 tied for second-warmest year

NASA: 2009 tied for second-warmest year: "

Parts of the northern hemisphere may have had an extremely cold December, but nevertheless, last year tied for the second-warmest in 130 years of global instrumental temperature records, according to the latest surface temperature analysis of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). The analysis finds that global temperatures were so similar in 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2007, and 2009, that they are all tied for second place. In the Southern Hemisphere, 2009 set the record as the warmest year, according to this report.

James Hansen, head of NASA's GISS, and his team have released their end-of-year summary for 2009, initially posted on the Real Climate blog. It's pretty dense, but here are some additional highlights:

- The scientists offer an explanation for an apparent data discrepancy over whether 1998 or 2005 was the warmest year. In short, it comes down to the difference in the way GISS and HadCRUT (Hadley Centre/University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit) assign or do not assign temperature data for areas without observing stations. (HadCRUT leaves them out of the analysis, while GISS assigns values based on various factors outlined in the summary.) GISS maintains that 2005 was the warmest year.

- According to the report:

'There were strong negative temperature anomalies at middle latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere, as great as ‐8°C in Siberia, averaged over the month. But the temperature anomaly in the Arctic was as great as +7°C.'

In other words, 2009's cold December in certain areas of the planet, as well as an unusually cold 2009 summer in the United States and Canada, do not reflect overall global temperatures nor signal a cooling trend:

"It is obvious that in December 2009 there was an unusual exchange of polar and mid‐latitude air in the Northern Hemisphere. Arctic air rushed into both North America and Eurasia, and, of course, it was replaced in the polar region by air from middle latitudes. The degree to which Arctic air penetrates into middle latitudes is related to the Arctic Oscillation (AO) index, which is defined by surface atmospheric pressure patterns…"

According to GISS data, December 2009 was the most extreme negative Arctic Oscillation since the 1970s.

- The report underscores that monthly temperature anomalies tend to be greater than seasonal anomalies and that the the mean temperature of a particular month might not be the best way to identify global warming. Instead, one needs to look at measurements over the long-term, which, according to GISS data, indicate general warming over at least the last 50 years, just about everywhere on the planet.

The summary concludes with a sort of admonishment:

'The bottom line is this: there is no global cooling trend. For the time being, until humanity brings its greenhouse gas emissions under control, we can expect each decade to be warmer than the preceding one. Weather fluctuations certainly exceed local temperature changes over the past half century. But the perceptive person should be able to see that climate is warming on decadal time scales.'

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A new test to reveal a baby's gender revives an old ethical dilemma

A new test to reveal a baby's gender revives an old ethical dilemma: "

For couples trying to have a baby, the No. 1 question that can be answered with a simple test is, Am I pregnant? No. 2 may soon be, Is it a boy or a girl?

For years, reliable answers could only be provided by invasive tests such as amniocentesis and chorionic villus sampling. Entrepreneurial genetic testing companies have sought an easier alternative. They claim they can identify a baby’s gender just weeks after conception by looking for signs of the male-only Y chromosome in a pregnant woman’s blood (if they find it, the baby must be a boy; if not, it’s a girl).

The problem is that such direct-to-consumer tests – which aren’t regulated by the Food and Drug Administration or the Federal Trade Commission – are frequently wrong. As we reported in a 2008 story, the biological principle behind the tests is sound, but the ability to actually find evidence of a Y chromosome in maternal blood varies widely. For example:

In a 2004 study, five medical centers in a National Institutes of Health consortium received identical blood samples from 100 women who were 10 to 20 weeks pregnant.

The centers used the same method to look for Y chromosomes in the maternal blood, but none was able to detect all of the 35 fetuses known to be male. According to the study, the detection rates ranged from 31% to 97%.

Now a team of Dutch researchers reports a new method for screening maternal blood and reports 100% success in determining a baby’s gender as soon as seven weeks after conception.

The study included 201 pregnant women whose blood was drawn between 2003 and 2009. The test produced conclusive results in 189 cases, and all of those results were correct. The findings were published in the January issue of the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology.

The idea behind the test isn’t simply to give parents extra time to start painting the nursery pink or blue. It’s to help screen for genetic disorders that are sex-linked. For instance, Duchenne muscular dystrophy and the blood clotting disorder hemophilia are tied to problems with the X chromosome and thus are almost always seen in males (since they only have one copy).

The blood test results made a difference for some of the women in the study. According to this report from Reuters:

Among the 156 women who underwent testing because of the risk of an X-linked disorder, the results allowed 41 percent to avoid further, invasive procedures to test for the disorder.

Another 27 women in the study were at risk of giving birth to babies with a genetic disorder called congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which causes girls to develop like boys. To prevent that from happening, the women began taking a steroid called dexamethasone as soon as they knew they were pregnant. But they were able to stop once the gender test revealed that their fetuses were male, according to Reuters.

But just because the test is accurate doesn’t mean it’s risk-free. Some prospective parents might take the results into account in deciding whether to continue a pregnancy, especially if they were hoping for a baby of a particular sex.

Bioethicist Arthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania said such tests are fraught with ethical problems. Even if doctors recommend the test to screen for a legitimate medical condition, it could “lead to abortions for non-medical reasons,” he told MSNBC.

With such concerns in mind, the Dutch researchers emphasized that “the test should be applied carefully in a clinical setting upon medical indication."

-- Karen Kaplan

Photo: Boy or girl? A blood test can tell you just a few weeks after conception, according to a new study. Credit: Los Angeles Times

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Science Teacher With a Bible Divides an Ohio Town

Science Teacher With a Bible Divides an Ohio Town: "Officials say a teacher should be fired for pushing religion in class. Supporters say he is being unfairly punished.


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