Fairness - The Commentary

Social and mainstream media are abuzz about the rise of the “nones” and the decline of people identifying with religious institutions. A lot of the discussion reflects quite a bit about each writer’s hopes and dreams about religion’s future. Atheist and progressive writers are excited that more people are questioning religious beliefs while conservative Christians gleefully respond that the figures show only a rejection of liberal Christian alternatives. The lessons people are taking from the recent release of the  Pew Research Center’s second U.S. Religious Landscape Study , a follow-up to its first study of religion in America in 2007, are more enlightening than the actual poll results. That bastion of Evangelical Christianity, the magazine  Christianity Today , headlined  its analysis : “Evangelicals Stay Strong as Christianity Crumbles in America,” while  another headline  read: “Christianity in Decline and Atheism on The Rise in America.” The report...

The danger facing the movement for equality for LGBT people today isn’t just the furious backlash of the religious right-wing, but a response of the movement, which Michelangelo Signorile labels “victory blindness.” In fact, he writes in his new must-read   It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, and Winning True Equality , we are in a “dangerous moment” - in spite of great victories, “discrimination, violence and tragic horror stories – in addition to the daily slights that all of us who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender have experienced for years – have not only continued, they’ve sometimes become more blatant.” “It’s a moment in which all of us, LGBT and straight, who support equality risk falling prey to what I’ve come to call victory blindness. We’re overcome by the heady whirl of a narrative of victory, a kind of bedtime story that tells us we’ve reached the promised land, that can make everything else seem like a blur.” This victory...

How does someone credibly answer the question: “Have you quit beating your spouse?” It's the classic example of a question being the problem. It's a setup. The issue is in the question itself, before there's an answer. Such questions are part of the milieu of all cultures. They're just there. They've been so often and continuously repeated that people waste energy answering them, without thinking about questioning the question. In a political climate such as ours, using the high level of expertise in public relations and propaganda that we've perfected has been crucial to the political/economic/military/religious right-wing for the last forty-some years in order to frame issues so that we're comfortable with questions that in themselves promote a right-wing agenda. It's been a successful and self-conscious long-term movement. It's included the vast investment by conservatives in think tanks within and outside universities, the creation of c...

We're now in the throes of a backlash against equal rights for LGBT people that's in full swing while many think the fight is over. Its ferocity and meanness has been predicted not only in this column but elsewhere, with numerous warnings for us to prepare for this moment.  Anticipated in April is:  It's Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, and Winning True Equality ,  a new book by Michelangelo Signorile . In it he warns that it's a dangerous illusion to believe now that victory is inevitable. He writes of the bigotry of the current religious conservative backlash against LGBT rights while challenging the complacency and hypocrisy of supposed allies in Washington, the media, and Hollywood. I 'm looking forward to his insights. He's one of the strongest and most well-informed analysts in the LGBT community. But before his book appears, let's make sure we're equipped with an understanding of how to deal with the right-wing bac...

Over and over again we must remind ourselves that the right-wing dominating the Republican Party, has a “logic” of its own. We have to stop asking questions like: “Don't they understand?” “Don't they see that this doesn't make any sense?” “Why do so many vote against their self-interest?” If we're stuck in the kind of analysis these questions represent, we don't understand what's going on in right-wing and, more broadly, conservative politics today. And we'll spend a lot of time trying to get them to “understand” while they work to effectively manipulate the means of power. “Don't they understand the importance of a good education?” Wrong question. They see education as a means of liberalizing people. “The facts,” as  Rachel Maddow paraphrased Stephen Colbert , “have a liberal bias.” So their goal is to control education at all levels by defunding it so it fails and then moving it under the control of corporate forces that have a profits-over...

2014 ended with another child's suicide in the news. This time, it was a twelve-year-old boy who couldn't take the bullying anymore. Yes, it was in California, where all the right laws and policies are in place. Still, death seemed better to Ronin Shimizu than enduring his community. And what was he doing to bring what's known as gay-bashing on? Well, it wasn't about sexual orientation - whom he was loving or having sex with. He was only twelve. But the taunts from bullies at Folsom Middle School seemed overwhelming. This little boy who killed himself on December 3 rd , was taunted because he was a cheerleader. A cheerleader – oh, the horror! Because of the bullying, his parents had switched him to home-schooling in the sixth grade. And how did the school district's spokesperson respond? “Well, we were aware of allegations of bulling. I can’t speak to specific allegations, but like all allegations, we investigate them fully.” That's it. And those...

Ten years ago, my “Minor Details” column raved about the best book to come out of any political season before or since: “Stop whatever you’re doing. Drop whatever you’re reading – even if it’s one of my books. The most important political book of the year is out and it’s a $10 paperback of only 124 pages. (So, you know Bill Clinton didn’t write it.) “I thought Thomas Frank’s  What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America  (Metropolitan Books) was the most insightful book of 2004. It’s still number two, but the new book by well-known Berkeley Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics, George Lakoff, has trumped it. Entitled  Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate  (Chelsea Green), this popularly written manual with a forward by Howard Dean, is, as the cover says, 'The Essential Guide for Progressives.'” Ten years later, let me repeat: it was, and still is the essential guide for progressives, especia...

“The blood of martyrs is the seed of the church,” wrote second century Christian theologian Tertullian. And during his June 30 th  mass this year, Pope Francis agreed: “The Church grows thanks to the blood of the martyrs. This is the beauty of martyrdom.” There's a sense, then, in which Christianities have historically wavered between a persecution complex and the desire to dominate over and control the world's morality. Christian denominations have had as their goal, after all, the conversion of everyone to their own position as if the old saying is: “The more the truer. “ And they're not alone. Modern defenders notwithstanding, Buddhist religions have flourished most when they were embraced by governments as have multiple Islams. Confucian ethics became culturally Chinese when the Han dynasty enforced it as a political philosophy, and Shinto has always been tied to the status of the Japanese emperor. Even Hindu sects became strongest when the kings of India endowe...

In 2002, when Pulitzer Prize winner, Chris Hedges published  War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning , he wrote in depth about the warrior culture that is the USA. “The communal march against an enemy generates a warm, unfamiliar bond with our neighbors, our community, our nation, wiping out unsettling undercurrents of alienation and dislocation," he wrote. “It gives us purpose, meaning, a reason for living.” In 2014 the American military-industrial-media complex is still salivating for war to further line its pockets. And a president elected to get us out of two wars in which we were mired, displays caution but finds himself pressured on many sides to do something warrior-like. The drumbeat includes the usual: ramping up of fear against an enemy, claims of a threat to what's now called the “Homeland,” and images of cruelty that invoke the sense that “we can't let them get away with that, especially when they do it to Americans.” Few are interviewed in mainstream medi...