Fairness - The Commentary

Before we settle down with families to eat this Thanksgiving Day, let’s take the time on November 20 th  to remember those who’ve been killed as a result of what we’ve come to call  transphobia --  the fear and resulting violence about gender nonconformity that is directed at transgender and gender non-conforming people. The Transgender Day of Remembrance was founded in 1998 by Gwendolyn Ann Smith, a transgender woman, graphic designer, columnist, and activist, to memorialize the murder of Rita Hester in Allston, Massachusetts because Rita didn’t conform to culturally-conditioned gender expectations. Now we remember all those human beings harassed, abused and killed because of gender nonconformity. This year’s reported murders have hit an all time high: 24 deaths in the U.S. alone as of October 15. Something is very wrong above and beyond the tragic suffering that people who identify as transgender or otherwise gender non-conforming experience. And, as in most such fe...

In October we observe, among other things, Gay and Lesbian History Month. And in the past weeks a new movie about an iconic event in that history hit the theaters. Director Roland Emmerich’s film  Stonewall , a fictional story based upon real events of the Stonewall uprising in 1969, drew criticism as soon as its trailer appeared as “whitewashing” because it portrays white men led by Jeremy Irvine’s character, Danny, as central characters in inciting the fight against police brutality in those early morning hours of June 28, 1969. On-line petitions multiplied, one saying: “Do not support a film that erases out history. Do not watch Stonewall.” Though the events of those early morning hours in June 1969 outside a Greenwich Village gay bar called the Stonewall Inn are often called the “beginnings of the Gay Rights Movement,” we know that’s historically inaccurate. Organizations such as the Daughters of Bilitis, ONE, Inc., and the Mattachine Society were founded back in the 1950...

When the Supreme Court decided on June 26th in  Obergefell v. Hodges  that marriage could not constitutionally depend upon the gender of the partners in a married couple, it also affirmed that the gender of parents no longer legally matters. Children do not need both a father and a mother to be a part of an American family. Here’s another reality that drives the right-wing nuts about marriage equality. And notice that this too has to do with gender and gender roles, an issue that transcends the fight for equality for transgender people while transgender people remain the lightning rods for the broader issue of cultural gender limitations for everyone. The presumption that children need both a father and a mother for their health is widespread and has been used to argue against same-sex adoption as well as marriage equality all the way up though the judiciary to this Supreme Court decision. Right-wing religious organizations repeat this belief, manipulate data to claim ...

The right-wing has gone crazy since the Supreme Court sanctioned marriage equality in late June. What they’d been praying for didn’t come to pass – their angry, righteous, warrior deity didn’t intervene with fire and brimstone or floods and pestilence. Neither Pat Robertson’s senile predictions nor the other threats of impending Armageddon materialized. Chaos did not ensue and the heterosexual divorce rate has yet to spike. The American legal system moved on as if right-wing objections no longer mattered. And, believe me, that had to hurt the religious right-wing that’s been working for a generation to be taken seriously. Right-wingers responded as if not knowing what to say. But clearly  their responses  play to their bases, frightening them about everything that will now victimize them, including claiming that anti-gay pastors will be  punished for not marrying LGBT people . It was such a good issue to rile up the base for fund-raising and voter turnout. It w...

From  the Duggars  to the weekly examples of the latest clergy or legislator who has professed “Family Values” – which everyone knows is code for anti-LGBT 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. It’s been a psychologist’s expectation for generations that the louder people object, 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 is a necessary part of legalistic, moralistic right-wing religions. But labeling them hypocrites is too easy. It actually lets the religious views, and most of the people who endorse them, off the hook. Any right-wing religionist can agree that someone didn’t live up to the standards they blame on divinity. “We’re all sinners,” after a...

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...