Fairness - The Commentary

There are couples and friends who get along well when they disagree about politics. This political season, however, has even strained some of those relationships. Again and again we hear how arguments over especially the presidential candidates in both the primaries and the general campaigns have actually destroyed friendships and driven couples into silence when it comes to discussing how they’re voting just among themselves. Whether or not a relationship can survive political disagreements depends upon what isn’t actually the political disagreement. It depends upon both why someone holds the political positions they do and what being right about ones politics means to their ego. We’ve heard that if we want to get along we should never discuss politics or religion. Yet it’s these two things we need to discuss with each other - not to convert our friend or partner to our position but to get to know them better. Just as relationships can work when members hold different...

No, all our boys and men don’t talk like this. But, when anyone thinks that  the justification for offensive remarks about women  that amount to sexual harassment and are uttered by a presidential candidate is that they’re merely the “locker room” banter boys indulge in regularly, it’s clear that they believe that it’s an effective excuse expressing their view of American culture. Even Pat Robertson who claims to represent Christianity  dismissed the words as “macho” talk . If this justification is even used for lesser banter, it abandons our boys to the untruth that this is just how they are – “boys will be boys.” It surrenders our girls to having to just cope with a macho gender role that treats them as less than human. If this were how things just are or must be, it would mean giving in to the meme that to get their man, women will have to live down to such objectifying expectations. It would mean that our boys must forgo their humanity to get in line with trea...

What must a woman endure to become president of the United States? The office of president has been defined for generations in terms of white, male gender roles. That definition requires someone to live their gender as if they’re members of America’s repository of manhood expectations, the military. “Commander in Chief,” a title applicable only to the president’s role over the military, not the citizenry in general, is now used far beyond the duties of president as leader of the armed forces. Though he’s our president, not our commander, we succumb to its use in acceptance of the expectation that he be a male warrior, for we define ourselves as a warrior state with teamwork defined as a group of men ready to beat, defeat, or kill other men. What this national model does to our young boys is itself inhuman. When my fifth grade son began his first season of football, he hadn’t yet been fully conditioned in masculinity. He came up to me before his first game and said: “Dad. The ...

Who’s actually setting the agenda for this election cycle so that even those who oppose them spend most of their time responding to their agenda and actions? It’s the authoritative personalities, the religiously addicted, and the politicians who court them. Approximately 20-23% of Americans fit the definition of being authoritarians according to researchers who’ve studied these personalities since World War II.  Authoritarians value obedience to authority as the most effective way to deal with their fears, can’t live with ambiguity, need clear structure and certainty, perceive threats all around them, and believe that domination of others is a way to control reality. In addition, the overwhelming conclusion of 70 years of research is that authoritarians are consistently followers of right-wing, but not left-wing, ideology. Those who score highest on  its authoritarian scale  are by and large right-wing conservatives because authoritarian personalities are those who subm...

The Republican Party is in trouble and LGBT people will continue to be targeted as symbolic sufferers for it.  As argued here in February  , no matter how the country is going in a more accepting direction, the right-wing is going to use discrimination as long as it works to rile up the funders and voters that make up their base. It doesn’t conform to the Republican gay group’s, the Log Cabin Republicans,’ ongoing fantasies about the Party and its presidential nominee treating LGBT people as equal human beings. Instead it provides the Log Cabiners with what they value more - the comfort of continuing their economically privileged status. So these gay loyalists must watch as their beloved Party continually rejects them in front of the world.  Tellingly, in July it approved what even the Log Cabiners call “ the most anti-LGBT platform in the Party’s 162-year history .” In an email from Log Cabin President Gregory T. Angelo, he explained - as if shocked that Republic...

America’s most deadly mass shooting at an Orlando LGBT nightclub on another American day that will live in infamy almost half way through Gay Pride month was a national tragedy at so many levels. And the responsibility for it falls at the feet of every right-wing religious and political leader who has publicly spoken out in their nationally orchestrated campaign to demonize, dehumanize, and threaten LGBT people with punishment in this life and the next.  Words matter, and words spoken publicly echo and reecho in the hearts and minds of those who will act on them.  In this case  they may have produced the kind of self-hate LGBT people internalize so they come to despise who they are and those who remind them of it. And of all people, right-wing preachers and televangelists who spend their time minutely parsing every word in their bibles because what they say it means is so important in confirming their prejudices, know what the impact of their words is. They’re respo...

The Republican Speaker of the House and failed vice-presidential candidate met ceremoniously in early May with a volatile, narcissistic reality TV star who is the presumptive Republican presidential candidate. The forty-five minute meeting produced hype, not information, and exhibited the gamesmanship central to many political campaigns. It evoked another round of the questions that people pose during political posturing. But the key to understanding it is that it involved two very different politicians who both must maintain their image of power within the same political party. There are political season questions that are regularly asked about both major parties, with the expectation of rational answers. How could someone support that guy? Why would someone support one candidate or another? In another conversation, the questions might be: why isn’t someone condemning discriminatory laws? Don’t they understand that those laws won’t hold up in court? Or: do you think someon...

There are now over 100 anti-LGBT bills under consideration around the country,  according to a recent Huffington Post compilation . They represent a national radical right-wing industry creating laws that give conservative politicians symbolic causes to convince their bases that they’re still leading the fight against the evil of LGBT equality. Many of these bills are unnecessary, even repeating what’s already in the law. Mississippi’s recent notorious contribution  adds nothing to its already existing law . But their purpose isn’t legal or rational; it’s political. Constantly championing new  “God, Guns, and Gays” measures  is the way to maintain elected office by demonstrating to politicians’ right-wing and Evangelical bases that they’re Davids fighting heroically against the big bad Supreme Court Goliath. While younger generations find little interest in this fight, older right-wingers are most likely to vote and engage in political activities. And portray...

By the second week of March, the discourse (using that word very loosely) of the Republican presidential candidates had sunk so low that to call it “juvenile” would be an insult to our children. Just when we thought that the personal attacks had lowered to a senior high level, they descended further to something like the tauntings of junior high kids. Whether it was about one candidate or another being accused of  peeing in his pants ,  eating boogers ,  over-sweating , or having to run to the bathroom for one reason or another, it was actually the fully-on-display latest in the circus that GOP bosses are racking their brains to ring-master. Those Party leaders who created each of the caricatures on the Republican platform and encouraged their rabid fans, now seemed flailing about to know what to do with the performers except either just to embrace them as if any of the candidates were presidential material or to enlist a previous presidential loser to attack the bigg...