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What’s Our Next Move as Citizens, Not Politicians?

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LGBTQ people for millennia have known what a version of PTSD feels like. Even when it looked safe, they still felt as if they needed to look over their shoulder and be wary as if more discrimination was inevitable. They’ve had to watch those who even claimed they loved them vote against their equality. A nation-wide PTSD might explain many reactions to the very overall positive news represented by the November election results. So many Americans for the last ten years have felt as if the nation was going in the wrong and very dark direction. But now, with hope in the future somewhat restored, the question is how do we all approach the new political possibilities. With a new Congress, what is our role as citizens? Clarity means understanding that there are fundamental differences between being an American citizen and being a politician. As citizens, our civic duty is to make sure that those we elect to represent us know exactly what our positions are on issues they will grapple with tha...
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Every Question Doesn’t Deserve an Answer

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There’s something for many people about being asked a question that makes them feel as if they have to answer it. More liberal people can even feel as if all questions are somehow “honest” ones that give them a chance to profitably educate the questioner.   Put a microphone in front of even a seasoned politician and it’s as if their being asked any question by a reporter or anyone else holding that microphone is some sort of honor or special recognition. Even the usually astute Texas senatorial candidate when asked about transgender athletes in women’s sports felt he had to answer the question like this : “As a former public school teacher, I care a lot about our student athletes, I care a lot about our students. And so I will oppose trans athletes playing in girls’ sports if it risks safety or fairness.”   He could have merely answered with just the first two sentences and moved on. But he took the questioner’s bait on a well-worn, over-hyped right-wing culture war issue. So,...
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Now Is Not The Time to Let Anything Else Distract Us

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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...
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How the Push for Christian Nationalism Is an Act of Unbelief

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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...
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Is Labeling People a Barrier to Understanding Them?

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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...
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