Fairness - The Commentary

By now everyone should know that June is going to be celebrated as LGBTQ+ “Pride Month.” That’s well-established in cultures across the globe whether anyone else likes it or not. Anti-LGBTQ forces use the public celebration to their advantage - to raise more money in their fear-based fight to roll back equal rights and to turn public ire against almost anyone who doesn’t feel ashamed about LGBTQ people. Their gripe often comes down to the fact that if LGBTQ people have to be around they just can’t stand that those LGBTQ people look and act proud . A self-identified straight guy who’s proud of the fact that his whole career is one where he kicks footballs around for money and notoriety recently told a captive conservative Roman Catholic commencement audience about his kind of Catholic “pride” in contrast. He righteously boasted that his is: "not the deadly sin sort of pride that has an entire month dedicated to it, but true God-centered pride." Such well-worn claims are foist...

Every generation that has ever existed on the planet, it appears, has complained about its younger generations . In the 4 th century B.C.E., to cite one example, Aristotle wrote: “[Young people] are high-minded because they have not yet been humbled by life, nor have they experienced the force of circumstances.…They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it.” Psychologists have studied the why behind it. And at the heart of the phenomenon, they seem to agree , is flawed memory of what younger generations were like in the past, especially one’s own. As poet Adrienne Rich, put it: “Nostalgia is only amnesia turned around.” This creates divisive and unhelpful generational feuds. So, as one writer confidently predicts : “Today’s ‘OK boomer’ Gen Z will complain about the youth one day.” “It’s safe to assume this is an immortal aspect of human society: Young people always exist, and older people will always complain about them. Young people, in turn, always say, ‘Ugh, o...

Have you ever thought about the fact that “religious” people all over the world – I mean everyday people, not elite thinkers or those who use religion to push their career and political agendas – care about the same things when they practice their religions? I’ve been observing that in my formal studies and teaching as a historian of religion for over fifty years. The religious thinkers, philosophers, theologians, and organizational leaders can give us all the great theories, scriptural quotations, logical cosmologies, and great doctrines all they want. And when these experts talk about various religions, that’s usually what they tell us theirs is. Likewise when people refer to other religions they like to speak in terms of those doctrines when the majority of the people who visit their shrines, temples, mosques, and churches couldn’t care less. How many people think that Zen (Ch’an) temples are places where all that contemplative Zen philosophy we read about in books is being taught a...

How many of those supporting LGBTQ people thought that achieving marriage equality back in 2015 was the end of the struggle for equality? Not Michelangelo Signorile in his wisely skeptical warning It’s Not Over , written in that same year. He warned us that a resulting “victory blindness” seduces us into thinking that LGBTQ people have made it, pulling advocates back from what is merely another step while the enemies of equality were obviously continuing to plan to chip away at rights the way they slowly chipped away at Roe v. Wade . State by state, local election by local election, a backlash of forces of inequality slowly and with a long-term strategy worked to return the US to a culture that kept them in privileged positions they feared they were losing. While others responded by concentrating on building huge national organizations to rub shoulders with those at the top of the federal government, these radically right-wing forces knew that the real work and funding needs were at gr...

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...