Fairness - The Commentary

There are a number of reasons why Republican “culture wars” today are targeting transgender people (along with people of color in general). The right-wing, egged on by its radical right Christian adherents, is showing us how it’s fixated on transgender people as it struggles to hold onto the power it thought was assured with the election of the former president to protect itself from the progress of larger cultural forces. Hundreds of anti-transgender bills are appearing in state houses around the country because national right-wing think tanks are feeding them to Republican state legislators who’ve hitched their wagons to a regressive, radical, White, heterosexual male-supremacy agenda tied to the former president. And these bills aren’t going away because their assumption is that a radical right-wing Supreme Court Democrats won’t have the will or power to change will uphold anti-transgender laws. Their anti-transgender culture war agenda is, first of all , pretty much all that Repub...

This past month we’ve seen that while the Democrats debate policies, how they reflect their inclusive values, and how best to enact them, the Republican Party is obsessing about Dr. Seuss, Pepe LePue, the Potato Heads, discrimination against transgender people, preventing people who disagree with them from voting, demonizing immigration on the southern border, and locking in government control over women’s reproductive choices. They’re still trying, as well, to figure out ways they can demonize and marginalize all LGBTQ people after all those Court decisions that rejected such discrimination. The previous president was a useable egotist for the Republican Party “culture war,” and demonizing President Biden has become a centerpiece because he refuses to play their game of “Calvinball” with Republican spokespeople constantly and hypocritically changing the rules and moving the goalposts to appeal to their supporters. By his executive actions and appointments, Biden has defied their defi...

Let’s review what we’ve learned as we face 2021. The moveable middle is shrinking. This is both good and bad news. It means that more people are sympathetic with causes for equality, while it also means that others are stuck in the extremist right-wing and more immovable. We thus must recognize that there are some we cannot reach and that it’s not our fault or personal responsibility when we don’t.   For most of these, the best we can do is marginalize them societally by laws and practices that support the world as we want it to be and live our lives as models of what should be. For many nice people that’s a hard lesson to accept. It also means that we need to encourage and strengthen those who are already with us. As the old preacher said, “We’ve got to preach to the choir because so many of them aren’t singing.” There is little need to listen more closely to right-wingers (especially members of the previous president’s cult). It is more often a waste of time that keeps us from ...

T here’s something human beings possess that’s proven awfully important for progress in science and technology, and even for advancing human cultures. It’s the need to understand, to discover answers to the questions we ask, and to continue to ferret them out in the belief that if we can just understand, then our species will be able to conquer everything that confronts us. If it weren’t for that impulse - maybe an innate need - to understand, who knows where we’d be? It’s taken generations of people who’ve sought answers, after all, to get where we are today. Often that’s fueled by a basic desire to survive - to preserve our species by finding a new vaccine or cure for a deadly disease, for example. At times it’s led us to new and improved ideas that fuel more inclusive ways to understand societal concepts such as equality. At other times it’s made our war machines more deadly. But the results of those attempts to understand have also taken longer to gain wide acceptance because new u...

On January 15th we could remember what actually is the 91st birthday of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., but his celebrations this year are on the 18th. It’s one of those more convenient Monday holidays that make for three-day weekends. There’s so much about Dr. King and his work that we really could celebrate. But our nation seems to prefer to focus most of its attention on his words in his "I Have a Dream" speech delivered on August 28th in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial to the 1963 March on Washington. No doubt, those words are inspiring, passionate, prophetic, and hopeful. It's his most recited speech, while others are less familiar. Our culture has made it iconic, quite useful, and less threatening. By removing it from the context of King's total life and thought, we've woven it into a pattern that can actually conveniently inhibit real, structural change. In other words, we've popularized some lines and images so that King doesn't really threaten the...

Renowned theoretical physicist Albert Einstein in a 1929 magazine interview put it this way: “I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." If such a brilliant thinker, whose name has become synonymous with being a genius, recognized the priority of imagination, what’s happened to us to stifle and devalue our imaginings? Why is it that we live in a world whose leaders most often try unsuccessfully to solve the same old problems with the same old unimaginative solutions that hadn’t worked before? Why is it that the dominant ideas in politics are the same old ones that assume the rich can only exist by being dependent upon and ensuring that a class of people stay poor? For how many millennia have religious leaders been preaching at the world to stop the same old sinning - and yet, here we are, rife with the same old sins, especially those so-called “Seven Deadly” one...

We’re seeing symptoms of the fears among leaders of the Christian right-wing and their followers as they sense that they’re losing the power they’ve craved since the beginnings of the Christian Coalition in the 1960s and have placed their faith in for generations. Their reactions are neither surprising nor unprecedented. Down through history, religious organizations worldwide have thrived through the patronage of kings, caesars, rajas, emperors, and regimes that have helped members of versions of religions to feel that their relationship to political power proved that their beliefs were true. Governments officially confirmed and even helped define the orthodoxy of these faiths, patronized their religious institutions, and thereby enforced their will on everyone they could, faithful or not. Any threats to these relationships were met with often destructive and deadly responses. It was important to thoroughly squelch anyone and anything that they felt were a challenge to this relationshi...