Fairness - The Commentary

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...

It could be a discussion with a family member who hasn’t accepted what they call the “lifestyle.” It could be a discussion with anyone we hope will at least listen to what we have to say even though they’re not fully supportive. It could be a conversation with someone we lovingly hope for change. There are two responsible people in all such conversations. So, what do we need to do to take responsibility for our part in them with the realization that they are responsible for their own reactions, attitudes, openness or closed-mindedness, and, yes, their prejudices? We’ve written about such encounters and their pitfalls before , but, more than ever, thinking about what we can do in challenging conversations to keep our side gentle, understanding, and self-nurturing needs renewed reflection because it’s easy to lose track of ourselves in these days of renewed and more open and even threatening anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. We know that most of the prejudice we encounter isn’t based on facts or corr...