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What Is It That Keeps Everyday People Stuck in the Culture War Against Transgender People?

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Since right-wing religionists and politicians discovered the use of “culture wars” to scare people into voting for them and their pet causes back in the Moral Majority era, we can understand why the leaders of these so-called “wars” have pushed this idea on the country. Choosing human beings that already reflected cultural prejudices as scapegoats and stoking fear of them, has kept politicians, clergy, right-wing talk show hosts, and what we now call “influencers” in the limelight by fulfilling their desperate personal needs for attention, bringing in big bucks, creating personality cults around them, and increasing their political power. Whether these public figures are actually believers in anything but themselves or not, they’ve learned that right-wing religion is easily manipulated to sanctify their biases, fears, hypocrisies, moralistic attitudes, and violent rhetoric. But why do these things work to get everyday people who aren’t getting these personal benefits drawn in even when...
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If You’ve Been Doing Stuff Perfectly, Plan in Some Mistakes

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We have few good role models to show us how to clean up the messes everyone inevitably makes in life, love , and leadership. Our president, in well-conditioned masculine fashion, won’t even entertain the idea that he’s made any . Our public relations industry and social media accounts dominate our institutions with their ability to put a positive spin on anything, even if their mistakes are deadly. Our corporations can’t admit problems even to their stockholders. Cover-up and confusion, deception and denial are second-nature to a business model that produces numerous failures and bankruptcies, such as Trump industries . Back in 1993 M. Scott Peck in A World Waiting to be Born: Civility Rediscovered argued that there will never be true civility and community until our institutions, including our businesses, are willing to publicly speak of their mistakes and how they’ve corrected them, and to risk the vulnerability they fear such admissions would entail.   It's unlikely that we le...
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Why This Religion Prof Quit Calling Right-Wing Hypocrites “Hypocrites” Long Ago

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For as long as I’ve followed the news and its weekly examples of the latest clergy or politician who has professed what are often called “Family Values” – which everyone knows is code for anti-LGBTQ+ equality - it has become routine, even expected, to find that the more someone righteously protests, the greater the likelihood that they have related skeletons in their closets struggling to burst out. This past month has provided more examples. It’s a well-worn psychologist’s expectation that the louder people rail about it, the more likely it is that they’re covering up their own guilt. They’re easily, and rightly, labeled hypocrites. And preaching moral outrage against others while living and doing what they object to seems to be a necessary part of legalistic, moralistic right-wing religions.   Especially around sexual issues, on which right-wing religion (both its leaders and followers) and the politicians who take advantage of it have historically focused, their own sexual dysfu...
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Did This Year’s Pride Festivals Return to their Stonewall Roots?

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The standard explanation is that Pride Month commemorates the date of the Stonewall uprising in June 1969, but with time and hard-won successes, its celebrations became more like LGBTQ+ expos or commercial fairs than Stonewall-commemorating fights for acceptance and liberation . The larger ones not only touted their big corporate sponsorships but started charging admission fees in order for everyday people like those at Stonewall to be proud. People who’d fought so hard for acceptance for generations began to take these as signs of activism’s success – we must have made it because look at all those corporations taking our side. And look how we can put on a party that gets us mainstream attention and, maybe, their love and respect. But something was different about these events this past month.   First , so many big corporations who loved waving rainbow flags showed us their true colors (not those rainbow ones). We learned that their affirming talk and sponsorships had little to do ...
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