Fairness - The Commentary

What are you up to this election season? Are you paying any attention? Are you working for your favorite candidates? Are you planning to vote and maybe even bring someone with you to the polls? Or have you given up on politics? Have you fallen for right-wing mind-game attempts to suppress your vote by convincing you to embrace ideas such as: “They’re all the same.” “They’re all crooked.” “My vote doesn’t matter.”   If any of those things were true, political action committees wouldn’t be spending millions to get you to stay home from the polls. They’re investing in the idea that your vote really matters. In each current election we hear it's “the most important in our lifetime.” But of all targeted groups, LGBTQI+ people should be struck by the fact that the stark contrast of the sides in this one brings real, life-determining, relationship-determining, consequences.   There are groups of people who occupy and benefit from such a privileged position in life, whether it’s heter...

If there’s anything that’s really traditional, even a part of many historically “traditional family values,” it’s prejudices and the accompanying bigotry.   Of course, bigots are really, really offended when someone points out their bigotry. And their hope is that by showing how offended they are, liberal guilt and the accompanying navel-gazing will kick in and get the critic to feel bad so they don’t have to. They take that response as proof that they’re right. People are told that it’s not nice to call someone names, and so we don’t, no matter how openly bigoted they are. And women in our culture have been taught that it’s more appropriate to be nice than honest anyway.   The famous psychologist/minster/writer John Bradshaw spoke of the personally destructive forces of the “Price of Nice,” and Angelina Castagno collected together a group of scholars in an edited volume entitled The Price of Nice: How Good Intentions Maintain Educational Inequity to explain h ow being “nice...

When those rich, white males turned the Declaration of Independence’s “All men are created equal” into the original U.S. Constitution, they took “men” quite literally. Their constitution made landed, white men equal. They denied the vote to everyone else. “Taxation without representation” ended – for them. Freedom in its fullest form was limited to them. When we immortalize these founding fathers, let’s be realistic: they didn’t include most of us in the American dream. It took “radical” and “disruptive” people who were willing to give blood, sweat, and tears to change that constitutional discrimination so that freedom would be something legal regardless of gender, race, skin color, or sexual orientation. We white males, even if we’re gay, might hate to admit that we’ve had historical privileges others haven’t. Change to all this came about often because women, often those who today would identify as lesbians, forced that change upon us against the odds. There were courageous, subversi...

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...