Fairness - The Commentary

Are you as tired as I am of all the hocus-pocus used to attack LGBTQI+ people by those who are just plain prejudiced? Are you sick of all the pseudo-science bigoted people spout to project their own issues on LGBTQI+ human beings? Then you’re not alone. All the major psychological, counseling, psychiatric, educational, and medical professional organizations have been for years. That’s because science progresses as it learns more, gains new information, and continues to question its previous assumptions. When doctors get more information from their patients' further tests, they change their diagnoses to fit those new facts. That’s how any social or hard science differs from people who cling desperately to religious beliefs that might by objective measures not even work for their own health. It’s no wonder that it took the Roman Catholic Church 350 years to admit it was wrong in condemning Galileo for determining that the earth orbits around the sun. Even though religions usually e...

Something that to us might seem small, maybe even picky, is one of the most crucial, yet easiest, things we can personally do to change the discourse in our country. The right-wing learned to do this long before more progressive people.   It shouldn’t be a new idea for us because for a quarter of a century, well-known linguist George Lakoff has been crusading for its importance and explaining scientifically why it’s crucial . Why it hasn’t caught on among people with progressive agendas is beyond me. Yet the right-wing continues to use it to commandeer the mainstream media into enforcing its frame of reference as it has for generations now. Think of how they like to call the Democratic Party “the Democrat Party” in what seems to be only a silly but intentional misnomer. But you hear the right-wing’s ideals enforced anytime anyone uses words like “tax relief,” “pro-life.” “entitlements,” “school choice,” “parental rights,” “the homosexuals,” “the gay lifestyle,” “sexual preference,”...

We continue to see both the religious right-wing’s obsession with sex and sexuality and the fact that its addictive use of religion makes its sexual sickness a destructive force in everyone's lives. The weekly examples of hypocrisy in these matters make any new revelations hardly surprising and even predictable. And now they’re using gay slurs against each other in the Republican Party’s internal battles . In a 2019 expose by University of Oklahoma sociology of religion professor Samuel L. Perry entitled Addicted to Lust: Pornography in the Lives of Conservative Protestants he goes beyond the usual unsurprising studies that show that anti-porn red states use more porn than blue ones. He explores how pornography messes up the lives of those caught up in right-wing Christian ideology. Without making any moral claims about pornography in general, Perry concludes that pornographic use “seems to be uniquely harmful to conservative Protestants’ mental health, their sense of self, the...

It could be a discussion with a family member who hasn’t accepted what they call the “lifestyle.” It could be a discussion with anyone we hope will at least listen to what we have to say even though they’re not fully supportive. It could be a conversation with someone we lovingly hope for change. There are two responsible people in all such conversations. So, what do we need to do to take responsibility for our part in them with the realization that they are responsible for their own reactions, attitudes, openness or closed-mindedness, and, yes, their prejudices? We’ve written about such encounters and their pitfalls before , but, more than ever, thinking about what we can do in challenging conversations to keep our side gentle, understanding, and self-nurturing needs renewed reflection because it’s easy to lose track of ourselves in these days of renewed and more open and even threatening anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. We know that most of the prejudice we encounter isn’t based on facts or corr...