Posts

Why We Need Local PFLAG Chapters More than Ever

Image
How many of those supporting LGBTQ people thought that achieving marriage equality back in 2015 was the end of the struggle for equality? Not Michelangelo Signorile in his wisely skeptical warning It’s Not Over , written in that same year. He warned us that a resulting “victory blindness” seduces us into thinking that LGBTQ people have made it, pulling advocates back from what is merely another step while the enemies of equality were obviously continuing to plan to chip away at rights the way they slowly chipped away at Roe v. Wade . State by state, local election by local election, a backlash of forces of inequality slowly and with a long-term strategy worked to return the US to a culture that kept them in privileged positions they feared they were losing. While others responded by concentrating on building huge national organizations to rub shoulders with those at the top of the federal government, these radically right-wing forces knew that the real work and funding needs were at gr

Don’t Fall for Any Anti-LGBTQI+ Psychological Malarkey

Image
Are you as tired as I am of all the hocus-pocus used to attack LGBTQI+ people by those who are just plain prejudiced? Are you sick of all the pseudo-science bigoted people spout to project their own issues on LGBTQI+ human beings? Then you’re not alone. All the major psychological, counseling, psychiatric, educational, and medical professional organizations have been for years. That’s because science progresses as it learns more, gains new information, and continues to question its previous assumptions. When doctors get more information from their patients' further tests, they change their diagnoses to fit those new facts. That’s how any social or hard science differs from people who cling desperately to religious beliefs that might by objective measures not even work for their own health. It’s no wonder that it took the Roman Catholic Church 350 years to admit it was wrong in condemning Galileo for determining that the earth orbits around the sun. Even though religions usually e

Resolve Now to Make 2024 the Year We Take Back the Language

Image
Something that to us might seem small, maybe even picky, is one of the most crucial, yet easiest, things we can personally do to change the discourse in our country. The right-wing learned to do this long before more progressive people.   It shouldn’t be a new idea for us because for a quarter of a century, well-known linguist George Lakoff has been crusading for its importance and explaining scientifically why it’s crucial . Why it hasn’t caught on among people with progressive agendas is beyond me. Yet the right-wing continues to use it to commandeer the mainstream media into enforcing its frame of reference as it has for generations now. Think of how they like to call the Democratic Party “the Democrat Party” in what seems to be only a silly but intentional misnomer. But you hear the right-wing’s ideals enforced anytime anyone uses words like “tax relief,” “pro-life.” “entitlements,” “school choice,” “parental rights,” “the homosexuals,” “the gay lifestyle,” “sexual preference,” and

Sexual Sickness Remains Central to the Right-Wing’s Self-Destructive Addictions

Image
We continue to see both the religious right-wing’s obsession with sex and sexuality and the fact that its addictive use of religion makes its sexual sickness a destructive force in everyone's lives. The weekly examples of hypocrisy in these matters make any new revelations hardly surprising and even predictable. And now they’re using gay slurs against each other in the Republican Party’s internal battles . In a 2019 expose by University of Oklahoma sociology of religion professor Samuel L. Perry entitled Addicted to Lust: Pornography in the Lives of Conservative Protestants he goes beyond the usual unsurprising studies that show that anti-porn red states use more porn than blue ones. He explores how pornography messes up the lives of those caught up in right-wing Christian ideology. Without making any moral claims about pornography in general, Perry concludes that pornographic use “seems to be uniquely harmful to conservative Protestants’ mental health, their sense of self, the