Monthly Archives: April 2013

My week to complain about news coverage

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I thought it was bad enough when a New York Times article asserted that authorities are looking into connections between the Boston Marathon Bomber and Al Qaeda because the bombs used a design which was once posted on an Al Qaeda website.

That is bad reporting. Or at least bad thinking. Spectacularly bad. The design was posted on line several years ago. That alone means that anyone in the world could have the design. They don’t need to have any connection to the people who posted it. Because it was posted online. But that isn’t the half of it. Pressure cooker bomb designs were being published long, long before Al Qaeda existed. A version is in the Anarchist’s Cookbook, for instance, published back in 1971 (and reprinted again and again).

But no, CNN couldn’t let NYT out-do them in thoughtless reporting. They had to report an unconfirmed rumor as if it were an absolute fact, spending well over an hour repeating the rumor, finding pundits who knew absolutely nothing about what was actually happening to speculate on what sort of person the allegedly identified suspect might be.

As sources such as CBS and NBC reported that the FBI was saying these reports were false, CNN just got more insistent, announcing that the FBI had already arrested the suspect, describing the suspect as “a dark-skinned male” and reporting other details which supposedly came from anonymous law enforcement sources who allegedly claimed that they had triple-checked the facts.

The FBI finally had to issue a very specific (and rather scolding) statement that there had been no arrest, reminding news media that reporting unconfirmed reports sometimes has rather devastating unintended consequences, and strongly suggesting that media personnel should confirm rumors themselves in the future.

In a less serious example, a South Florida gay newspaper published an editorial some call scathing (the word they are actually looking for is ‘petulant’) about pop singer Adam Lambert. The editorial isn’t really scathing about Lambert, rather, the editor turns his venom on his own associate editor for running a story on the pop singer while the chief editor was on vacation. The editor thinks that people who are interested in pop stars are shallow. Though he seems particularly angry at this specific pop star. Not only that, the editor is pissed off because his associate editor got the scoop that Lambert had broken up with his boyfriend, causing so many people to come to their web site to read the story, that it crashed their server.

Okay, let me get this straight: you make money selling ads on your web site and in your paper. You make more money the more people come to read your web site. You’re angry that your underling got an entertainment scoop that brought millions more readers to your web site than usual. Have I got that right? And your underling got that scoop because this pop star you don’t like was in your city performing as the headliner at the community’s Gay Pride Festival.

You’re a Gay Newspaper, and you’re upset that your employee wrote a story about the headliner for the city’s big annual Gay Festival?

I get it. He’s just a pop star. But sometimes people want to read about the people whose music they like. And sometimes they want to read about people whose music they dislike. And if a musician draws a really big crowd to a local event, people expect to read something about the event and the musician in the local paper, particularly when the event is thrown by the very community your publication claims to serve.

When I was editor at two different college newspapers, I often published stories about things that I was not the slightest interested in myself, because I knew some of the readers would be interested. That’s your job when you’re publishing a community paper.

Just like it should be your job, when reporting on a national network, to actually try to confirm your rumor with someone other than the original person who told you the rumor.

Just like it should be your job, when reporting about a specific news event, to apply a little bit of intelligence and logic.

Should be.

Not exactly a surprise

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I was laying half asleep the other morning, the clock radio playing one of the local NPR stations (we have three), when I heard a story about the special office within our state’s department of motor vehicles responsible for making driver’s licenses for undercover cops.

The licenses are real, valid licenses, it’s just the identity that’s fake. The reason officers going undercover need valid licenses is so that the identity “holds up.” Right? If it’s a fake, the number and name on the license won’t be in the system, or the number won’t match the fake name. It would be a bit too easy for the bad guy they’re hoping to take down to find the undercover cop just by running a license.

I was laying there thinking it was cool that we had such an office. Then the story took an odd shift, because the reporter was surprised to find out that federal agencies obtain licenses for fake identities of their undercover people from states that have these programs. Again, it makes sense, and in our system, it’s states that issue most driver’s licenses and IDs, right? You only get a federal ID if you are a federal employee or a dependent of a federal employee. Which would kind of give it away.

All this has come to light because the state DMV has never obtained official approval from the legislature for this program. And the program was set up many decades ago (presumably with the approval of whoever was governor at the time), and since the identities are supposed to be secret, it’s just kept going without all the subsequent governors being fully involved. They decided that they ought to have official legislative approval, so there’s a bill moving through the legislature now to authorize the office to continue to provide these false identities to law enforcement agencies.

The reporter seems quite worked up that one of the federal agencies that obtained IDs was the CIA. It seems that when the first public information request was made, that the person responsible revealed which federal agencies obtained how many licenses. Which was a violation of the agreement that the office had with the feds. So there is a bit of a kerfuffle about that.

But I’m not sure why the reporter is so breathlessly wondering why the CIA needs so many false identities. I think I’m particularly confused because I’ve been following this reporter for years. He’s been covering government affairs stories in Washington and Oregon for several different radio stations and the national NPR news organization for a long time, and normally he seems very savvy and informed.

What is the big deal that the CIA has agents who need false identities? Has this guy never watched Alias, or Covert Affairs, or even the original Mission: Impossible? Those shows are all dramatic exaggerations, but yes, some agents are going to need more than one cover in the course of a career. Sometimes more than one in a year.

And sometimes you’re going to need a cover ID for someone who isn’t an agent, someone who’s gotten into trouble and needs to be relocated. I know the CIA doesn’t handle witness protection, but sometimes there really are defectors in real life. Someone who knows valuable things and wants to leave his or her country, bring their family with them, but their home government isn’t letting them.

I think the story was worth doing. It’s interesting to know that there is a process for this sort of thing. And it’s even very slightly newsworthy that the agency mistakenly released the CIA numbers, and then had to retract.

But the rest of it isn’t news. If you have any sort of understanding of how the world works, it shouldn’t even come as a surprise.

Things out of our control, part 3

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A couple weeks ago I was refilling my coffee mug at work when a co-worker asked if I had heard the news about a former co-worker. I said “no,” expecting to hear something about a new job. Instead he told me that the guy’s 24-year-old daughter had committed suicide just a few days before.

“Oh, no!”

I had never met the daughter. I vaguely remembered pictures of a wife and a couple of kids at different ages on the guy’s desk. But the news immediately dissipated my good mood and left me feeling as if there ought to be something I could do to help. I immediately tried to remember the faces in those pictures on his desk.

But there wasn’t, really, anything I could do beyond offering condolences. When tragedy strikes in the family of someone you know well, you can offer to help run errands, offer emotional support, or maybe drop off a casserole. When I was a kid living in small towns, whenever tragedy struck anyone, you made a casserole and delivered it to the family, so they could eat without someone having to go to the trouble of making a meal. If you didn’t feel you knew the people well enough to deliver it yourself, you might get a group together from the church and a couple of people who knew the family better would be deputized to deliver the food.

It’s a bit different now in the city. People don’t expect that sort of thing, and if it’s a co-worker rather than a personal friend, you often don’t know where they live. I know which suburb this guy lived in, but that was it. And we were co-workers for only a bit over a year, he left for a job at another company almost three years ago. We never had any contact outside of the office. If I did track his address down and showed up with a dish of food, it would be weird and awkward.

Plus, now you have to worry about whether people eat meat, and if they don’t are they ovo lacto vegetarians, pescatarians, or full-on vegan? Maybe his wife had to have only gluten-free food. Or maybe someone has a food allergy.

It still leaves you feeling as if you ought to be able to do something to help.

That same impulse is what most of us feel when we see news such as the bombing at the Boston Marathon, or the shooting at the school in Newton, and so forth. We feel powerless, and if we don’t know anyone directly affected, we can’t even offer condolences or emotional support.

I saw a lot of people on various media and forums admonishing anyone who seemed to be obsessing about the news. To be fair, it was usually admonishing people for repeating unsubstantiated rumor and speculation, but a lot of those admonishments certainly implied that there was something wrong with being anxious to learn more. In those discussions there were lots of references to fear: you want more information because at least subconsciously you want to assess the risk of how likely more people might be in danger, et cetera.

But I think another thing that fuels the need for more information is that feeling of wanting to help. When I heard about the suicide of the former co-worker’s daughter, during my urge to make a casserole, I tried to remember whether he had ever mentioned which neighborhood he lived in. Maybe we had enough information between several of us to at least have flowers sent, you know?

After the bombing in Boston, it was heartening to hear the news of how many people turned out to donate blood, to give money to a couple of funds to help with people who were stranded, and the set up a way for locals to offer places to stay for the stranded folks.

If feeling about this event leave you wanting to help, remember that you can always donate to the Red Cross. Even donating or volunteering at your local Red Cross can help make sure that resources will be available to help in the next disaster or crisis.

Mr. Rogers says to look for the helpers.

Not so recent

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Back in the early ’90s, when I was active with the Seattle Lesbian & Gay Chorus, we had some sort of social at a member’s house. Our host and his partner were showing us around, when someone commented on the photos hanging on the wall of an incredibly adorable kid. “Is that your nephew?”

“No,” our host said. “That’s my son. Here he is with his two moms. And here’s one of all of us.”

He proceeded to tell the story of how a friend he had known “since school” had one day asked him if he would donate the sperm so that she and her partner could have a child. “The next thing I knew, I was explaining to my boyfriend at the time about how in a couple months we’d have to go about a week or two without sex to maximum my sperm count.”

They were doing it without the help of a clinic. So, as he said, he had to “produce a sample” at the appointed time, and a friend who had been recruited for the purpose drove the container across town to where the lesbian couple were waiting. It all had to be timed around when she was most likely to be ovulating, of course. Then they had to wait for a number of weeks to see if it worked.

It didn’t.

So they tried again. And again.

“By this point I suspect we were driving all our friends crazy, because we were all paying attention to her menstrual cycle and talking about it in inappropriate places!”

Eventually, they decided that the problem was probably that the drive time was too long for the sperm to remain viable. So, he said, one night he and his boyfriend went over to their house. She and the friend who was assisting with the equipment were in one bedroom, and he and his boyfriend were in another—”He was getting a bit tired of all these bouts of no sex leading up to each try”—and the gal’s partner waited outside the door to take the specimen jar once it was ready.

“It wasn’t romantic for any of us!”

But that time it worked. And ten years later, the lesbian couple were still happily raising their son, with the occasional help of the friend who had donated the sperm.

I was reminded of this story while listening to this story on one of the local NPR stations.

It also made me think about those comments during the Supreme Court hearings a couple weeks back where a couple of the justices kept referring to gay parenting and gay-headed families as a recent development. One justice insisted that the very idea was “newer than cell phones.”

The first analog cellular network went active in 1979, but no one called the large, brick-like phones (some of them were closer to the size of a briefcase) a cellphone. The phones small enough to fit easily in a pocket came out in 1991. About nine years after the birth of the boy whose story I began this post with.

And that wasn’t when gay parenting began. The American Psychological Association published one famous peer-reviewed multi-year study on the outcomes of children raised by gay and lesbian parents in 1970, for goodness sake!

When I was first coming out of the closet, in the late ’80s, a rather large percentage of the lesbians I met had children. Some of my “lesbian aunties*” had children who were older than I was, and those children had children of their own. A slightly smaller percentage of the gay men I met at that time also had children, some of them with children of their own, as well.

Most of those gay and lesbian parents I knew back then had married young while they were still struggling with their sexual identity, and the children were the result of the marriage. Because of various inequities in child custody laws in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, the majority of those children were in the physical custody of their mothers. So I knew of a lot more kids who had been raised by lesbian mothers than those who had been raised by their gay fathers.

On the other hand, one of the adults I knew back then had been raised by an actual lesbian aunt and her aunt’s partner after her own parents had died when she was a baby.

Bottom line: gay, lesbian, and bisexual people have been raising children for many generations. It isn’t a recent idea.

And as to whether gay marriage is a recent idea? Well, the Roman Emperor Constantius II issued what was probably the very first legal ban on gay marriage back in the year 324 A.D. If they decided they needed to explicitly ban it, and then later add the death penalty to the punishment, then gay marriages had to have been happening before that, right?

* Not my actual aunts. These were older lesbian women who sort of adopted me when I was coming out.

Misdirect, don’t lie or withhold

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The are times, as a writer, when you want to surprise your readers or give them a puzzle to solve. That’s clearly a major part of a murder mystery, of course, but you do it in other stories as well.

Anyone who has ever aspired to write mysteries has read about the rule of not cheating the reader. Cheating is when you completely withhold information required to solve the mystery. All information has to be available to the reader. It is okay to obfuscate it, but leaving it out entirely is a no-no.

The classic example of the wrong way is describing your detective, perhaps despondent, looking down at his feet and seeing something. He bends down, picks the something up, and then smiles as he slips it in his pocket and the narration informs the reader that this thing is the vital clue that makes everything fall into place. But the writer doesn’t tell the reader what the something is.

The proper way to hide a clue is in plain sight. I remember one mystery once had three characters talking about something, when the father comments on his daughter’s dress the night before, saying it was a nice shade of green. One of the other characters tells him the dress was red. The father goes, “Oh, well, I guess it is.” The way the scene is written it seems that the father is simply not very attentive or perhaps distracted. Later in the story, it is revealed that he suffers from a form of color blindness, and that is an important clue about an aspect of one of the murders.

I’m currently wrestling with a version of this issue in a non-mystery. My current novel in progress (which is a light fantasy) includes a mysterious masked person who has appeared a couple of times, thwarting an assassination attempt directed at a princess, preventing a sorceress from getting some information, and a few other things. In the very first scene his mask is commented upon, and an explanation for why he is hiding his identity is provided.

So I wrote a scene last week where he confronts the man behind the assassination plot. I realized midway through that I could make the scene far more creepy than it already is, but I think I would be cheating if I did.

It occured to me that I could have the masked man reveal his face to the conspirator just before killing him, and show the conspirator reacting with shock at the identity… But withholding the identity from the reader. Certainly movies, television shows, and comics have used that particular cliche many times, so one could argue it’s acceptable. But even then, usually the reaction of the character to the revealed face provides an extra clue about some aspect of the story other than the identity of the mysterious person.

Besides thinking the technique is overused in those media, I’m not sure it makes any sense for the masked man to do it. The most obvious reason, “I want you to know who defeated you,” simply doesn’t apply to this character and his relationship to the conspirators. Besides being out of character, it would also be a bit too self-consciously coy. By this point the theoretical reader is either curious about the identity of the masked man or already has a theory. A melodramatic nonrevealing reveal is more likely to annoy than fascinate, I think.

And this little mystery isn’t the main plot. If I’ve done the rest of my job correctly, what I hope the reader is more worried about by this point in the book is: whether one grief-stricken character will go through with killing some innocents to bring another character back from the dead, whether one protagonist will clear his name and rescue his nieces, whether other characters will prevent a war, and whether one villain will be redeemed.

My mystery man is important to the plot, and why he’s attempting to act incognito is totally in keeping with his personality while moving the plot along, but it isn’t the main concern.

A puzzle as a subplot can be fun for the reader. Keeping the reader guessing about a few things without annoying them is a tricky balancing act. You want to provide enough information so that your reader can guess, while leaving some doubt. You want the reader to feel almost as if he is your accomplice–as if both of you are exploring this thing together.

Doing something such as having the detective find something which you blatantly label a clue which you withhold from the reader, or the unmasking without showing the reader, is the equivalent of a stage magician declaring, “Ha! Ha! I know something you don’t know! I know something you don’t know!”

And that’s just annoying beyond belief!

The thinks you will think…

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We saw a musical last weekend.

Several years ago, when Michael and I had season tickets to one of the local theatres, we saw a national touring company of Suessical the Musical, with Cathy Rigby (former Olympic gymnast most famous since for playing Peter Pan in more than one revival on Broadway and numerous national tours) as the Cat in the Hat. It was fun.

This last weekend we saw the musical performed by a bunch of middle-school kids, one of whom happens to be my godson. It was also a lot of fun. And that isn’t just my prejudice as a doting godparent.

At least some of the fun is remembering what it was like being on stage around the age, and not feeling at all as fearless as these kids seemed to be. It was quite amazing to hear the voices on a few of those kids, who did not sound like “kids” at all.

It was also fun to remember all that Seuss. The musical takes elements from a bunch of Dr. Seuss books (most prominently Horton Hears a Who and Horton Hatches an Egg) and weaves them together to make one story.

It would be easy to be cynical and dismissive of the play, what with the themes of accepting yourself for who you are, loyalty, and respecting others. And since people usually accuse me of being the opposite of cynical, it should surprise no one that I’m not going to go there. In fact, what I found myself thinking about most during the drive home was how easy it was to fall into the imaginary world with very simple costumes and minimal props. You don’t need a lot of special effects to believe that a group of monkeys are trying to steal a clover with a dust spec from an elephant. Just a few hints and a bit of body language is all that’s required.

Which was a good thing to be reminded of while I’m slogging away on my novel, occasionally wondering how words on a screen can compete with animation and music.

It’s the story and the characters that matter. Everything else is window dressing.

A beach, a blanket, and a song

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I’m not quite old enough to remember the original Mickey Mouse Club. It was cancelled almost exactly a year before I was born. Three years after cancellation, the original hour-log recordings were edited down to half-hour segments that were shown in syndication for a few years, and my Mom said I watched it fairly faithfully. I don’t know how much of my memories of the show are from that exposure, because those edited episodes was re-re-released into syndication around the time I was in middle school. I watched some of those episodes, though if my friends caught me, I claimed that I was just watching it to humor my younger sister.

I was already an Annette Funicello fan before. I remember her most from the Beach Party movies co-starring her and Frankie Avalon. When I was in grade school, before modern cable systems, when most places had only three or four stations, there always seemed to be one of those stations that ran movies in the afternoons. Silly comedies were a staple of those afternoon movies, so Beach Party, Muscle Beach Party, Bikini Beach, Pajama Beach, Beach Blanket Bingo, and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini made frequent appearances.

The movies were extremely silly, with outlandish plots. Despite being movies about kids spending a summer at the beach and the ensuing romantic soap opera, a lot of them had at least one sci fi/fantasy element (the professor’s ability to paralyze someone by touching a “nerve-cluster” at the temple, the “improved” chimpanzee that could surf and dance better than a human, a Martian teen-ager sent to the beach as an advance scout for an interplanetary invasion, a mermaid falls in love with one of the surfers, and Frankie hires a witch doctor is to send a sea nymph to the beach to keep the other guys away from Annette while he’s in the Navy).

Not exactly high-concept, but probably a big part of the appeal to grade-school-aged me.

She was in a few of the sillier Disney films of the sixties, as well (The Shaggy Dog, The Misadventures of Merlin Jones, and The Monkey’s Uncle).

In all of those movies she played the wholesome good girl. The girl any boy would be lucky to have. Setting aside all the levels of sexism in that, it meant when I was a kid, I wanted to be her. I didn’t consciously admit it. I’m sure that to some of the adults in my life they assumed that I learned all the lyrics to all of her songs, et cetera, because I had a crush on her. (And for the record, I didn’t have a crush on Frankie; his pretty boy persona was totally not my type.)

So I’ve always had very fond memories of Annette and was sad to read that she died. I’m a bit miffed that news of her death has been overshadowed by reporting about the death of a certain former British Prime Minister. I certainly understand why the latter is considered more newsworthy.

Good-bye, Annette. I hope that somewhere you’re strolling along a beautiful beach, surrounded by love and music.

“I’m looking for pie”

life,

In the middle of the day Wednesday, my mom sent me a picture of a plant she’d found growing in front of her house and asked if I knew what it was.

Mom's mystery plant
Mom’s mystery plant
I replied “Rhubarb?” Because that’s what it looked like, right?
A reference image from the web of one variety of rhubarb.
A reference image from the web of one variety of rhubarb.
There are other things it could be, but rhubarb seemed a reasonable guess.

At about the same time I was looking at the picture Mom sent, my husband sent me a text, explaining that he had come home from work sick. Somehow, my reply to Mom went to Michael instead. I didn’t realize it until sometime later when Michael replied, “Heh. Sure, I guess!”

So I had to re-send my answer to Mom, and send an explanation to Michael that I had actually been answering Mom.

During my walk home from work, I kept thinking about the rhubarb. I felt as if I had raised Michael’s hopes for some pie, only to dash them when I explained that I’d been talking to Mom. So I stopped at one of the grocery stores near our house, one that often carries pies which are made without added sugar (most fruit actually doesn’t need it) and with a whole grain crust. I had been thinking it was still a little early in the year to be finding rhubarb pies, but, lo and behold, there was a no-sugar added strawberry-rhubarb pie. So I grabbed it and a container of vanilla non-fat frozen yogurt and headed home.

I also picked up a few different options of the comfort-food variety for dinner. Though when I showed Michael what I’d picked out, I pointed out that depending on how much comfort he wanted, we could just split the pie for dinner. Instead, he picked mac and cheese, with pie for dessert.

All day at work I’d been feeling inexplicably grumpy. At home that night, I tried to get some writing done, but just couldn’t string words together. Thursday morning when the alarm went off, I felt as if I hadn’t slept in days and my stomach was hurting. A lot. I checked my temperature and I had a low-grade fever. So I called in sick and crashed back into bed.

When I woke up a few hours later I felt less awful. Not better, but less awful. I stumbled into the kitchen, looking for some juice. I saw the pie we’d cut into the night before, and the sudden realization that I could have pie for breakfast made me feel that life might just be worth living, after all.

So, pie for breakfast, then pie again for dessert that night. And I picked up a couple more small pies (different flavors, this time), because we both seemed to be enjoying it so much.

When we were next in the grocery store together, Michael headed into the bakery section after we’d gotten other things on our list. I asked him why.

“I’m looking for pie.”

When I pointed out that we hadn’t, yet finished off all the pie we had, he said, “I know. But we will, and we’ll want some more, after.”

Of course, he was right. He almost always is.

Taxes

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We once again put off doing our taxes.

I don’t mind paying taxes. Really. Unlike some people, I recognize that we’re generally safe in our homes and can count on our money being useful to purchase goods and services because of government functions ranging from the local police and fire departments all the way out to federal reserve and the armed forces. That’s not the grumble.

For most of my life (with a couple of exceptions), my taxes have been fairly simple. Unfortunately, for the last three years that hasn’t been the case. Because when voters in my state approved “everything but the name marriage” domestic partnerships a few years ago (and full-fledged marriage last year), they granted community property rights to us, but the federal Defense of Marriage Act forbids the IRS from calling it a marriage, we’re required to file as Single, but we’re also required to report each other’s income.

The first year this was true caught everyone by surprise (a lot of IRS employees didn’t understand why these strange returns were coming in, and sent back letters threatening fines for “frivolously false” filings), so none of the usual free online services (nor the paid software) knew how to handle it. It took Michael and I several hours to sort things out. And if some gay rights organizations hadn’t posted instructions and links to the correct obscure IRS documents, it would have taken a lot longer.

Last year, which was the second year this was required for citizens of a bunch of states, the software services (and some of the walk-in-and-pay-us places) still couldn’t handle it. But since we’d done it once before, and had saved copies of everything, we were able to do it ourselves with much less hassle.

This year, the third year (and with even more states qualifying), I had been pleased to read some reviews that indicated at least one of the common software solutions could handle it.

The reviews lie.

Once I did figure out what the misleading instructions actually meant (both the software interface and the instructions extremely poorly designed), the software would literally not let me back to the dialog box where I needed to change the number unless I deleted the entire form and started over.

Fortunately, they have a simple form on their website to request a refund.

If I had just set out to do it ourselves as before, I would have had a much less cranky afternoon.

The really dumb thing is that most of the reason why I would like to use the software is because both of us have atrocious handwriting. With any luck, the Defense of Marriage Act will finally be gone next year, and we’ll be able to just do the simple “Married Filing Jointly” form.

Wouldn’t that be nice?

Damage control

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A few years back a church bought a recently vacated big box retail building about 8 or 9 blocks from my house and converted it to a worship center. The church was a regional megachurch, not affiliated with an existing denomination. I had heard a little bit about it, but wasn’t terribly familiar at the time. I’ve since learned a bit more.

Although they try to wrap their message in language that sounds hip and liberal, and they clearly aim their marketing at a younger demographic, it is anti-gay, anti-women’s rights, and anti-all-the-other-usuals. The head pastor drives a couple of Mercedes-Benzes. His sermons each week are broadcast on giant screens in the neighborhood worship centers. Dissenters in the congregation are kicked out and all church members who wish to remain in good standing (included the kicked-out person’s spouse, if applicable) are instructed to shun the person.

There is a beautiful historic church building in downtown Seattle, with a gorgeous doomed main building. The building is on the eastern edge of downtown, close to Capitol Hill, which has long been known as the city’s gay neighborhood. Years ago the Seattle Lesbian & Gay Chorus (of which I was a member) was one of about a dozen community musical groups that rented space in the church for weekly rehearsals. Every year they asked all the groups that rehearsed to participate in a Christmas concert. It was wonderful to sing under that big beautiful dome. But also sad to see how small the audience was. The congregation had been shrinking for decades, finding it increasingly difficult to even keep the lights on, let alone maintain the structure. The big beautiful building is on a prime piece of downtown property, and it seemed inevitable that the building would be torn down.

A few months ago, the megachurch announced that it would be leasing the property, moving its downtown neighborhood worship center from a converted warehouse space to the building. Their announcement included the statement, “being closer to Capitol Hill is a blessing as we are serving and ministering to those who are infected with AIDS on the hill.”

There were so many things wrong with that sentence. I’m not sure where to begin.

First, it is literally not possible to be infected with AIDS; you can be infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, but not AIDS itself. AIDS is a specific constellation of symptoms which are a late-term manifestation of an HIV-infection. It is a common misperception, but no one who was actively involved in any serious program to serve or care for HIV-positive people would not be aware of the distinction.

Second, it isn’t the 1980s. AIDS has not been cured, but thanks to the various new drugs, most people in the U.S. who are infected with the HIV virus do not have AIDS. Further, thanks to the drugs, a person can live thirty or more years without experiencing any symptoms. People do still die from the disease, and being on the drugs for decades is no picnic, but there are no longer thousands of people in every gay neighborhood living in near-hospice-care situations counting down the days (and T-cells) until they move into an actual hospice. Some studies, in fact, are beginning to indicate that a person infected with the virus living in a first world country, who begins treatment early, doesn’t even have a statistically significantly shortened lifespan because of it.

Third, while a higher proportion of white people infected with HIV are gay or bisexual than are straight, it is by no means a majority of gay people who are infected. Most gay people, like most straight people, don’t have the virus. In many places in the U.S., one’s ethnicity is a better predictor of HIV infection than whether one is gay and out of the closet.

Fourth, this specific church is anti-gay. Gay members are not allowed. Anyone is welcome to attend, but gay people are not allowed to become members until they become ex-Gay. No one wants to be “ministered to” by someone who thinks you are an abomination. And in the year 2013 if you are the kind of person who thinks that a gay neighborhood is filled with AIDS patients, you are the kind of person who thinks gay people are an abomination. You may not say it aloud, and you may deny it if confronted, but that level of ignorance is only achieved by assiduous avoidance.

Fifth, the statement is in the present tense. In other words, the church claimed to already be involved in some sort of service ministry to people with the disease. The fact that they are obviously unaware of my first, second, and third points shows the statement was a lie. Furthermore, not one single news article or press release in which the church had touted its various charity activities which mentioned anything about AIDS or HIV service could be found before this one statement. Not one.

Sixth, while that building is located close to one part of Capitol Hill, to the extent that the hill remains a gay neighborhood (more on that in a bit), most of the gayborhood is centered on the Broadway business corridor, about a mile walk (most of it uphill), from the church’s location. The church is not really conveniently located close to most of the homos on the Hill. And the Hill isn’t quite the great gay village it once was. The majority of queer people living in the Seattle metropolitan area live outside the Hill. The Hill is still very queer, don’t get me wrong, but one of the reasons the Pride Parade had to move off the Hill is because the neighborhood literally can’t hold all the gay people who want to attend the parade. I don’t live on the Hill, and I almost never go there, for instance.

Seventh, during my years of observation of their worship center in my neighborhood, the attendees drive in from somewhere else, attend the events on their property, and then leave. They aren’t part of the local community. They don’t seem to make the slightest effort to even get to know the local community. This last point may not be entirely fair. I’m a flaming homo, after all, and I don’t really want to get into any meaningful conversation with them. But from what I’ve read on other neighborhood blogs, it seems to be the case there, too. So I don’t see how moving the downtown meeting place a few blocks closer to Homo Hill is going to foster much in the way of interaction, constructive or otherwise, with the locals.

When the news broke, a lot of neighborhood blogs and the snarky, ultra-liberal alternate weekly newspaper raised similar points.

When contacted to explain at least in what way the church was “serving and ministering to those infected with AIDS” the church spokesperson became flustered and said someone would have to get back to the news people. They then issued a statement that claimed they were in “beginning stages of volunteering with the Lifelong AIDS Alliance.” Except the Lifelong AIDS Alliance has policies against proselytizing, which the church stated explicitly as its intention in its answer. Also, the Lifelong AIDS Alliance had received only one phone call from the church months before with no follow-up, and a second one less than an hour after the newspeople started asking questions. Volunteer applications had never been submitted from anyone identifying themselves as a church member.

When this was pointed out, the church backtracked. They made excuses. They bobbed and weaved, saying that they intend to help and repeating that bit about being in the beginning stages.

It’s not nice to laugh, but really, the sheer transparency of the lies, let alone the ludicrous depth of ignorance, demands it. I know, they don’t think they were lying. Someone had made a phone call, right? They planned to do something, right? I bet some of their members have even donated money to the charity. Or, at least went out to dinner at one of the restaurants participating in the annual Dining Out for Life fundraiser. That’s the same thing as serving and ministering to those poor AIDS victims, right?

It has been months, now, and there has been no further talk of any such ministry by the church. I’m not sure whether they were embarrassed about the whole thing, or just realized that there was nothing to gain from any effort. I know that people will say that at least some of them had their hearts in the right place. Jesus said to take care of the sick, right? But see, when the first thing that springs to mind when you find out your church is moving closer to a gay neighborhood is AIDS, that right there says all that needs to be said about how ignorant, bigoted, and self-deluded you are. If you feel god calling you to minister to people suffering and dying from AIDS, don’t move around an affluent city on the west coast, go to Africa, or south/southeast Asia.

This megachurch isn’t the only institution having a hard time grappling with its own ignorance and bigotry, as Stephen Colbert explained in this clip (click on Stephen’s name to watch):