Fairness - The Commentary

It’s a habit people get into – they encounter a person and make judgements about how they look. To them it’s as if there’s a universal standard of what a beautiful man or woman looks like. . This judgement not only affects how many critique cisgender people but how they critique those who’ve chosen to present themselves as nonbinary, or those who have realized that to be themselves they must identify as transgender in the variety of ways that people identify with that reality. Such judgements of who is good looking go beyond just saying that the looks of that person are not my personal idea of beauty by becoming absolute statements that those people ARE not beautiful or pretty or handsome in the way the critic thinks someone should be. With the coming out of some as transgender, these ideas of “beauty” can also be challenged by new presentations, but they’re ideas that should be challenged anyway because of the usually unhealthy cultural gender roles they represent .   Definitions...

How much longer do we have to pretend that it matters when we hear people justify their prejudices by claiming: “The Bible says”? It’s such an easy excuse for sanctifying any position, that people who’ve never even opened the Bible use it. It’s saying something like: “The books in the library say,” for the Bible is historically a collection of stories composed by different authors from different cultures in three different languages written over thousands of years. Yet the claim is commonly brandished about and indicates that the person who touts it has already decided what the whole collection must say. There are religious assumptions, of course, to justify doing this. There are those who believe that their god was the author of all of those books, and therefore they must somehow - no matter how hard it is to make the variety of its claims sync - make it all agree. It’s why no one takes all of what’s there literally . They instead come up with some inventive methods to interpret passa...

It continues to be one of the major crises for religious believers today. What should we do with “these people” whom our denomination has marginalized for centuries?   For some it’s LGBTQ people. The United Methodist Church, for example, continues to lose congregations for which anti-LGBTQ discrimination is as comfortable as sitting in the same pew every Sunday morning. For others, such as the Roman Catholic Church or the Southern Baptist Convention, it’s not only their affirmations of continued bigotry toward LGBTQ people but their refusal to allow women to be equal partners in the leadership of their well-ensconced patriarchies. The Southern Baptists just reaffirmed their historic male-dominated hierarchy. The Catholic Church is under pressure from its membership to do something about both . Some denominations, such as the Christian Reformed Church or conservative Lutheran groups such as the Missouri Synod, have just kept their anti-LGBTQ stands. A breakaway American right-wing...

Of course we want to believe that everyone means what they say. We’d love to believe that more educating and presentations of the facts convinces people. We think that explaining ourselves over and over again and spending a lot of energy to understand the right-wing and their beliefs (religious or not) will help us get along. We might even be invested in the idea that showing them how much we care about their views – even claiming we “respect” their irrational and bigoted views – will win them over. And when these things don’t work, we blame ourselves, our lack of listening skills, our lack of empathy, our neglect to spend enough time, or our failure to articulate clearly what we mean. We treat ourselves as the guilty party in the debates and actually, though we’d never admit it to ourselves, end up looking down on right-wingers and their dupes in our explanations - as if they’re helpless victims of ignorance, misinformation or illogic, not capable actors who make choices and cling to ...