Word: sex
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...brain tells you nothing about the characteristics of social species, particularly when the species in question are primates. Studies from the 1990s that have stood up over time showed that among social apes like gorillas and chimps, brain and behavior evolve in ways peculiar to an individual's sex. Males have more bulk in the region of the brain connected with aggression and competition and less in the region that tempers those tendencies - which better equips them for the socially competitive world into which they're born. Females have more heft in the neocortex, a higher-order region that wires...
...marriage supporters who want to restore California's place at the head of a growing number of states welcoming same-sex marriages are going to have to do it the hard way: by persuading the same neighbors who voted to ban such marriages last fall to change their minds. They aren't going to get any help from the state's supreme court, never mind that Chief Justice Ronald George's historic opinion last May ruled that any discrimination against gays is no less outrageous - and illegal - than discrimination based on race or religion. Despite the sweep of that ruling...
Besides, George wrote, Prop. 8 - the initiative that reinstated the ban on same-sex marriages - hardly eviscerates the sweeping opinion he wrote last year. Gays, he said, are still entitled to the highest level of protection against discrimination afforded in the land, except in the instance of marriage...
That view got one vote on the court - that of lone dissenter Justice Carlos J. Moreno. "The rule the majority crafts today not only allows same-sex couples to be stripped of the right to marry that this court recognized [in last year's opinion], it places at risk the state constitutional rights of all disfavored minorities," Moreno wrote. "It weakens the status of our state Constitution as a bulwark of fundamental rights for minorities protected from the will of the majority...
...wasn't until the 12th century that formal rules were established forbidding clergymen to have sex. According to the Gospel of Matthew, Peter himself had a mother-in-law (which would usually imply a wife as well). The ban had theological roots--abstaining from pleasures of the flesh to demonstrate one's commitment to the church--but there was a practical reason too: celibacy meant no offspring vying to inherit church property. That's not to say the rules were always followed, however. Many priests' spirits proved weak and their flesh willing--notably the sybaritic Pope Alexander VI, who installed...