Fairness - The Commentary

The political and religious right-wing tries its best to sidetrack us so that we’re living in terms of their agenda, not ours. And they’ve got national think tanks to tell them how to take charge of the discussions. They count on distracting us, and it often works. Yet, there’s really only one issue to discuss. Put simply in a sound bite manner that we need to repeat again and again to our culture and its media: it’s the right to express our diversity and our love for whomever anyone wants to love. Period. Why is that so hard for people to get? Maybe the better question is: Why is it so hard for us to stay on task and keep something as important as self-definitions and love in the forefront? Why is it so easy to get caught up in other discussions that sap our energy instead of just saying that this is about the freedom to be who we are and to love whom we want? It’s not about whether it’s a choice. In fact, why do we care whether we can or can’t help being LGBTQ+ or not? The issue is i...

Among right-wing Christians there seems to be a real psychological compulsion to “make America a Christian nation.” It looks to outsiders as more than just wanting everyone to be “saved” but as a driven emotional need to religiously justify themselves and their world-views and feel their worth through a vindicating retribution over those who, even religiously, don’t accept their zealous compulsion. In many ways, it’s been a key to their agenda since the days of the “Moral Majority” in the 1960s in reaction to civil and human rights movements and victories for those who challenged the prejudices of the times. They’ve even rewritten their own American history to claim that the country was founded to be a “Christian nation” by its Deistic, Transcendentalist, and other more liberal Christian founders. That compulsion became popular over generations through a political program pushing for what at the end of the last century came to be called federal “faith-based initiatives” with both polit...

The Democratic Party is in the midst of arguments about whether some of them should identify themselves as “democratic socialists.” Without getting into all the perceived or real political, personal, and strategic issues involved in this, the results of recent elections indicate that the label of their candidates is less important to voters than whether the candidates are fighters or folders when representing those voters and their concerns in these precarious times. We know that how one labels one's enemies and opponents is often a conscious political strategy that is used to demean them. Political strategists, particularly in one party under the influence of someone like right-wing consultant Frank Luntz, intentionally impose negative labels on their political enemies. We also know from psychologists that when children are given a label in childhood or tracked in school through some such judgement, they eventually internalize the label and begin to live as if it has some influenc...

Whatever the cause – whether it’s a No Kings Rally or a display of LGBTQ+ Pride – there are numerous personal reasons to march, protest, and demonstrate. Some are based upon our own self-worth and personal values while others are guaranteed to produce frustration, burn-out, and bitterness in the long run. Further, if we take on leadership roles – particularly for demographics with a history of being marginalized and demeaned in a culture – various conscious or unconscious expectations we’ve attached to leadership, whether healthy (for us) or unhealthy, are likely to eventually surface.   Sociological observers can almost predict the problems that result when anyone takes on activist leadership of oppressed groups who have a history of hurt and pain. So many movements and institutions seem to run into leadership issues when they're at their greatest strength. And the result is many of those issues cripple the very movements.   People aren’t used to examining their own past unhe...