Category Archives: Assignment 5

After a very long wait and quite a few fights in the Senate, the gays and lesians of New York as well as a few other states were all around the city getting married.  After years of having untitled relatonships and settling for civil unions, homosexuals were now granted what they have been waiting for. 

New York is now the sixth and the largest state allowing gay marrage.  Excited and victorious advocates are now stretching their arms out to Maryland in hopes it is alliwed there as well but in the mean time, everyone in favor of gay marriage is enjoying their victory.  And of course there would be many protestors in opposition to the new law allowing gay marriage, but apparently nobody seemed to pay them in mind, instead they celebrated their days of now being able to freely marry their partners and live out their rights as a couple.

There was a total of 659 couples who picked up their marriage licenses at the court houses and 484 who wed at city marriage bearues.  Totaling in 1,143 marrigaes in New York.

One thing I found interesting though was that when the judge was pronouncing their marriage, they said ‘I now pronounce you married’, instead of husband and husband or wife and wife.  I’m not exactly sure but maybe the entire has yet to being completely in favor of the passing of this new bill.

Regardless, there were a lot of happy married couples, and other New Yorkers who were definitely happy about this new victory and I’m sure feel they still have a long way to go when it comes to passing it in other states.

Consumerism is really bad to children. Also, advertisements trigger kids want to buy what they don’t need and parents are pressured to pay for it. Children are educated by advertisement that is ok to have nice things. Children want to be the most fashionable and they want to wear the most expensive clothing or high-end products. Children often want to but the products that are advertised and they will do anything to get their parents to buy by giving tantrums that their parents easily give in. Parents can no longer afford their Children demands. Consumerism has reached a new level of dangerous pursuits for children. The news outlet chinadaily.com.cn recently posted an article online that a 17 year old student who sold one of his kidneys to a dealer he met online to buy an iPad 2. His parents learned about it called the police on the dealer. As the article shows, children can put themselves in grave danger when their desire for certain items makes them act in ways that can create disastrous consequences. This is a phenomenon that if left unchecked it can cause tremendous damage to children growing up in today’s consumer society.

This article: “TV Contestants: Tired, Tispy and Pushed to Brink from The New York Times (August 2nd, 2009) is about how contestants are treated mainly off camera in different reality shows. There is definitley an injustice in how people who participate in these shows are handled. They are without a doubt, according to this article, treated poorly.

In this article it says, that contestants on reality shows find themselves having long workdays and “communication blackouts” (pg.#1 of this article by Edward Wyatt). These shows have “…. evolved arguably into Hollywood’s sweatshop” (pg. #1- of this article).

Most contestants recieve either no pay at all or very little pay. Also most contestants (of most shows) do not have any union representation.

In this article: “Makeover television, governmentality and the good citizen” (by Laurie Ouelette and James Hay) they talk about programmes that try to”…. transform floundering individuals into successful self- managers” (pg. #472- of this article). Supposedly, what comes with this — as the article says, is freedom and burdens that goes into changing the person with the help of coaches, lifestyle experts and motivators.

But to what length do these shows go to to try to intervene in in another human’s life or lifestyle? If these shows are getting a bad rap for how they treat contestants on their shows– then how is this contributing to the well-being of the actual person who is a contestant?  Is it so important for them to be their own self-managers that they must endure not getting paid and working too much. All of this for an outcome that may or may not be even good for them or have longevity?

In this article from the New York Times, it talks about how certain contestants are treated by producers. The object of these producers’ goals is to get people (contestants) into a state where they are tired, stressed and emotionally vulnerable. This makes them more easily manipulated.

How is this helping people to feel good about themselves? I think it does the opposite. Does this help people get away from the State and encourage them to help themselves? Even if in some ways if it does the tactics and strategies are all wrong, in my opinion. This says something unfavorable about human nature. These shows are overly aggressive in manipulating people and their ways of getting people to participate are discouraging in many aspects.

The whole concept of marriage is being lost. Getting a divorce has become so common that marriage doesn’t hold as much power as it used to. It’s not the sacred vow that once upon a time held so much power. Many people are now choosing not to get married. In some cases the only reason people do get married is solely for legal purposes and that’s where the advantage lies. Love is something that is and not many people find marriage necessary to bind that love.

The following article argues that because marriage is not as sacred as it used to be that it doesn’t really seem right to restrict some people who do desire it from marrying. The issue of raising children is also raised and it becomes apparent that there is no longer a traditional and ideal way that children are being raised. Many children are already being raised by single parents and if that so happened to be a gay couple then how could that be so different?

The traditional idea of marriage that so many are trying to keep alive is already being lost all over the world. Living together without being married is normal and even having a child out of wedlock is not so uncommon. Times are changing and people are beginning to see gay marriage as not that big of an issue. Its becoming a ‘why not?’ kind of discussion. People are becoming more open minded about marriage because its become a loose term and it’s not as serious as it once used to be.