Bibliographic record
Abstract
Books discussed:Irshad Manji.The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2005.Irshad Manji.Allah, Liberty and Love: The Courage to Reconcile Faith and Freedom. New York: Free Press, 2011.Karima BennouneYour Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism New York: W. W. Norton, 2013.Two important cases regarding the constitutional right to same-sex marriage are being brought to the United States Supreme Court for decision in 2013. Whether the court will choose to hear them, and what decisions may be made are not known at the time of writing. I do not think, however, that the ultimate outcome is in much doubt. Despite plaintive cries from religious fundamentalists and other cultural conservatives, I am confident that same-sex marriage will become the law of the land ... though maybe not quite yet. Enthusiasts of such legislation as the Defense of Marriage Act and traditional arguments that marriage be limited to a union of one man and one woman are adamant in their opposition, but public opinion polls show that as many as four out of five young Americans favour reform. Time will tell which side prevails and time certainly seems to be on the side of those who favour a more inclusive definition of marriage.The winds of change are blowing, but the deep currents are strong and hard to turn. Immediate predictions about both moral and legal judgements on the matter of same-sex marriage will, therefore, turn on whether you prefer an atmospheric or an oceanic metaphor. That is, whether you believe that recent changes of opinion will be strong enough to prevail over well entrenched beliefs. Despite reluctance in some cultural and religious quarters, however, the future of gay and lesbian, as well as bisexual and transgender (GLBT) people looks much like the future of women and African-Americans looked a century or so ago, at least in the United States of America.The same cannot be said about those parts of the world in which the dominant religion is Islam. There is, of course, no monolithic Muslim culture. The religion itself is, like its sibling Abrahamic religions of Judaism and Christianity, internally divided. A great schism between Sunni and Shi'ite factions and all manner of other sectarian distinctions ensures that no one speaks with uncontested authority for Islam (though many claim the authority to do so). Nonetheless, there is a perceptible difference-overlaps and innumerable exceptions notwithstanding-between what may conveniently be called Western Civilization on the one hand and Islam on the other. While there may be a robust debate among Christian leadership and laity alike, for example, an apparent agreement among Muslims on the matter seems relatively stable and, in many places, open discussion of the issue is almost unthinkable.To help its readers understand how the issues of sexual orientation and same-sex marriage play out globally, my local newspaper recently published a map of the world. On it, three features were graphically displayed for each country. They were:persecution of homosexuals (official sanctions from none to the death penalty);legal recognition of same-sex unions (from none to full marriage equality);civil protection (from none to civil and criminal laws against discrimination).The results revealed few surprises. The countries where gays and lesbians are subject to the least persecution, enjoy full recognition and receive the most legal protection are: Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Iceland, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Spain and Sweden. They are closely followed by Australia, Austria, Brazil, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, New Zealand, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.On the other hand, those countries in which gays and lesbians suffer the most official persecution with the least recognition and protection are Iran, Mauritania, (northern) Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, (southern) Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".