Category Archives: society

Anti-trans bigot demonstrates that bullies are cowards… (duh!)

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Click to embiggen. (I have found this image on dozens of articles and blog posts about trans issues, but never with an art credit. If you know who made this, please let me know so I can at least credit them!)
Click to embiggen. (I have found this image on dozens of articles and blog posts about trans issues, but never with an art credit. If you know who made this, please let me know so I can at least credit them!)
So, professional bigot Travis Weber (spokesperson for the Family Research Council) was on Chris Matthews’ show on MSNBC last week to speak in favor of the North Carolina law that makes it a crime for trans people to use a public bathroom that doesn’t match the gender on their birth certificates. The other guest was Jennifer Boylan, an English professor and writer who happens to be trans.

No matter how hard Matthews tried, he couldn’t get Weber to say which bathroom Boylan should use. He’s there to defend this law that insists Boylan shouldn’t use the women’s room, but Weber can’t bring himself to say it while she’s sitting right there. It’s almost funny.

I was going to say a lot more about this, but another blogger already hits all the points I want to make:

…[he] can’t bring himself to answer the question. Not with Boylan sitting there—not with Boylan empowered to respond to him directly, personally, publicly, and immediately. Watch as Weber’s bigoted “convictions” and “sincerely held religious beliefs” wilt in the presence of one of the people he’s trying to stir up bigotry against.

And:

Those ridiculous lies [they told about same-sex marriage] won ’em some battles — they carried the day before the Washington State Supreme Court — but they didn’t win ’em the war. Because their lies couldn’t survive us. They couldn’t survive us getting out there and speaking for ourselves, they couldn’t survive the scrutiny of decent and reasonable people, they couldn’t survive our lawyers, and they couldn’t survive satire and ridicule…. The [anti-trans] haters are winning some battles right now, and that sucks, and their hateful rhetoric makes an already dangerous world for trans people even more dangerous. But their “wins” are putting trans people in the spotlight. Trans people are speaking for themselves, disproving the lies, and joining in or leading the joyful mocking of the haters — just as the fight against same-sex marriage put same-sex couples (some half or wholly trans) in the spotlight. We spoke for ourselves, we mocked the haters, we gathered supporters, and we won the war.

I’m not arguing for complacency—we won the fight for marriage equality because we got out there and fucking fought it. We’re gonna have to fight this fight too. And we are fighting it and we are going to win. We are winning.

I didn’t identify the blogger before the quote because a lot of trans people of my acquaintance believe (incorrectly) that Dan Savage is anti-trans.

Regardless of what you think of Dan, this time he is definitely right on this one. The anti-trans bigots are using exactly the same arguments they have used against queer people before to justify denying us marriage rights, to justify sodomy laws, and so on. They claim we are monsters and predators and a threat to children. They raise false alarms and generate panic over things that have never actually happened. And yes, they are winning some battles. North Caroline is one place they have won.

But at the same time, they are losing the war. This bills are bringing more trans people forward. And as the panicked cis-hets see and meet real trans people, see the stories of real trans kids and their families, they are realizing the rhetoric is all lies. A CNN/ORC poll published today found that 57% of Americans disapprove of the North Carolina anti-trans bill. But even more important, only 48% of Republicans support such bills. Now, only 48% disapprove, and somehow 4% aren’t sure, but think about that: less than half of all Republicans approve this latest Republican hot-button issue. Wow.

Oh, and the same poll found that only 49% of North Carolina residents support the law.

It reminds me of one of the most telling stories that happened during the marriage equality fight. Before the Supreme Court ruling, one of the states was debating a marriage equality bill. And the relevant committees of both the upper and lower house of the state legislature scheduled public hearings that same day. So many people showed up wanting to speak and both hearings, that the committee chairs decided it would best to combine the hearings. So they moved both committees to a bigger room.

One Republican legislator who had been staunchly opposed to the bill switched his vote after that hearing. He said because they were in a different auditorium, he wasn’t in his usual spot up near the center of the front, but was off to the side, where it was easy to become distracted by the crowd and not pay attention to the citizens speaking. He said watching the gay and lesbian couples who were waiting their turn to speak interacting with each other and their children was a revelation to him. His whole life, he said, he had thought of gay people not as people, but as sexual acts. He didn’t believe they were actually in love. Watching them, he finally realized that queer people are just people. And that the couples were in love just the same as he and his wife. That they weren’t asking for special privileges. They just wanted the same legal protections for their families that straight people take for granted.

Just from watching them interact with their partners and children in the audience seats of an auditorium. That’s all it took.

We must fight. Make no mistake. And those of us who happen to be cis have to fight just as hard for the rights, dignity, and visibility of our trans brothers and sisters as we fought those previous battles. We have to remember that no one is free until everyone is.

But if we fight, we can win. We will win.

http://mediamatters.org/embed/210426

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here to watch the clip from Matthews’ show.)

Not all illness is visible

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May is Mental Health Awareness Month - National Alliance on Mental Illness (www.nami.org)
May is Mental Health Awareness Month – National Alliance on Mental Illness (www.nami.org)
May is Mental Health Awareness Month, so you can find a lot of blog posts recounting various experiences trying to get diagnosed, find a treatment or method of coping that works for that person, and so on. I read a couple of those posts on Sunday and thought, “I should write a post linking to the National Alliance on Mental Illness’s awareness page.”

But you know me, I have to give it some personal context. So I started a blog post that was supposed to be a brief overview of some of my experiences watching a few loved ones try to get diagnosis and treatment, and the varying levels of support they found. The next thing I knew, I had nearly a thousand words ranting about some of my own bad experiences with the inappropriate application of therapy, beginning with the time in middle school I was threatened with expulsion unless I went to therapy because I was continually the victim of bullying.

Which is exactly the opposite of what I wanted to write about, since this is Mental Health Awareness Month, not Gripe About Homophobic School Administrators Month, right?

So, here’s a great (and more appropriate) post by a musician I follow: My Medicated Case for Psychiatrics, to read instead.

When you can get the treatment you need, it’s wonderful. Perhaps equally wonderful is have friends and loved ones who support you along the way.

So let’s all try to be the kind of friend who helps, supports, and affirms, okay?

A Day of Pink and the Stupidity of the Transgender Bathroom Argument

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A t-shirt proclaiming, "It's time to talk about bullying, homophobia, transphobia. Day of Pink, April 13, 2016."
Today is the Day of Pink, an International Day against Bullying, Discrimination, Homophobia, Transphobia, and Transmisogyny across the world.
I’ve been noticing a theme in the search terms bringing people to my blog lately—many variations of “stupidity of transgender bathroom argument.” Which is understandable. We have certain states falling all over themselves to pass anti-gay and anti-trans laws in the wake of the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling, and the argument which seems to get the most traction with voters (or will get a certain type of person who isn’t a reliable voter to turn out) is the argument claiming that laws protecting trans people leads to sexual predators lurking in public bathrooms. So the laws that are getting passed include specific language demanding that people use the bathroom that corresponds to the gender listed on their birth certificate, or that “matches their genitals” and so forth. Which in turn means a lot of people who want to figure out how to debunk those arguments are searching the web for an answer.

And it makes sense that some of those searches will land here, since I’ve written about this topic at least once or twice before:

Setting aside some of the other ludicrous claims, the one take away that we need to return to, again and again, is that many states and cities have had laws that specifically allow transgender people to use the bathroom that corresponds to their gender identity, and in none of those places as there been a single documented case of someone using that law in order to try to commit a sexual assault. Not one. Which is summed up nicely in the chart below.

mediamatters.org
None of those bathroom or locker room horror stories have a basis in fact. (Click to embiggen)
This chart (which was included in one of those previous posts) is a bit over a year old. Now, in addition to the original Media Matters nice compilation of statements from law enforcement officials and other experts from the 12 states that have had laws protecting transgender people on the books for year (some going back to 1993!) showing that there has never been an assault in a bathroom because of them, we have even more! Media experts, law enforcement, and real live trans people explain why the fear of men “pretending” to be trans to attack women and children in bathrooms has no basis in reality, and More Republican Lawmakers Arrested For Sexual Misconduct In Bathrooms Than Trans People.

But it’s important to note that in the 200 cities and 17 states with laws like this [allowing trans people to use the bathroom that matches their identity] already on the books, there are no examples documented of someone using it for nefarious purposes, of a transgender person who is this sex predator in the bathroom. It’s got no factual foothold. If anything, the irony in this is that it actually would require — and North Carolina now requires transgender men who have beards, who are muscular, to use the women’s restroom. So it actually creates the very problem that it claims to solve. —Dominic Holden, speaking on PBS’s Newshour

Why have I chosen today, the Day of Pink, which is supposed to be a day to raise awareness of bullying to come back to this topic? Because any time a law criminalizes or otherwise penalizes people because of their real or perceived sexual orientation or gender, it encourages bullying. Businesses, school officials, hospital workers, and so on will reference the law as justification when they discriminate against someone who is queer or gender-non-conforming. The laws foster the notion that it is okay to mistreat, demean, and bully some people.

Ironically, these bathroom bills increase the likelihood that there will be assaults in bathrooms. It’s just that the victims will be the queer kids (or kids who are perceived by their peers as being queer). And it’s not as if school bathrooms aren’t already a place of terror for kids who are perceived as gender non-conforming, let along openly gay or trans children! In my early elementary school days, most of the teachers were women, and so the boys’ bathroom was a place where other boys could gang up on the class sissy or freak (usually me) with impunity. It got so bad for me at one school, that I simply stopped going to the bathroom at school. I avoided drinking anything all day, to try to stay out. My mom kept asking why I was running home from school and rushing straight to the bathroom.

So you can imagine the horror I felt when I read the headline: Kansas Bill Would Pay Students A $2,500 Bounty To Hunt For Trans People In Bathrooms! Geeze, talk about dehumanizing children!

"More United States Senators have been arrested for sexual misconduct in bathrooms than trans women."
It’s not just a meme…
I quote Dominic Holden (who used to write for one of our local weekly alternative papers, so I’ve been a fan for years) for his appearance on PBS’s Newshour above, and I’ve embedded a Youtube video of a snippet below (the link after the embed leads to a longer video and transcript, by the way). And while I agree with most of Dominic’s points, I think he gets one little bit slightly wrong. “…it’s really put LGBT advocates in a difficult place because they haven’t figured out how to respond to this. And for the most part, they have not taken it on directly.”

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)

The part I disagree with is where he says that these laws have put advocates in a difficult place. No, we put ourselves there.

We were so giddy at the Supreme Court ruling, that we allowed ourselves to think the battle was won. I say “we” even though I was raising this concern back then. I raised the concern, but what did I do about it? Most of our official advocacy groups have been avoiding taking the issue on directly. They responding half-heartedly, if at all, to some of the earliest instances of backlash. They deployed a really generic fairness response in the Houston equal rights repeal, for instance.

And to imply that we don’t know how to respond is simply wrong. The current trans bathroom bill arguments are not substantially different than the arguments they have always made against queer people. The bigots have always claimed we are delusional—our orientation or gender identity is a choice we’ve made for sinful or other nefarious reasons, not an inherent characteristic. They have always claimed that we are dangerous sexual predators. They have always claimed that acknowledging our existence will cause confusion and harm to children. Exactly how they couched those arguments has changed. Which segment of the non-heterosexual population they were demonizing has changed, but the essence of the arguments are the same.

That is what they are claiming now. We’ve dealt with those arguments before. We have won battles in the court of public opinion against those arguments before. We can do it again. We just have to actually try. Marriage equality was only one touchdown out of a very long game. And it directly benefits only some of us, and only in some situations. The fight still belongs to all of us.

Which part of ‘love thy neighbor’ confuses you?

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Billboard that went up in Jacksonville, Mississippi this week after the new anti-LGBT law was signed. “Guys, I said I hate figs and to love thy neighbor.”
Billboard that went up in Jacksonville, Mississippi this week after the new anti-LGBT law was signed. “Guys, I said I hate figs and to love thy neighbor.” (click to embiggen)
Lots of us have been predicting that there would be many, many more of these so-called “religious freedom” laws passed with an intent to discriminate against queer people, and that there would be more of the anti-trans bathroom bills passed in states since the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling. Some people thought that the swift backlash from both regular citizens and the business community which prompted the repeal of the Illinois law and then a similar Arizona law’s governor’s veto last year would put a damper on the anti-gay legislation fervor. I was not one of the latter. I knew that the bigots would keep doing this for years to come. The war for equality isn’t over. We’ve made a few touchdowns, we’ve stymied a few of the other side’s scoring drives, but there is a lot of struggle still ahead.

Mississippi’s governor signed a bill this week that is pretty awful. It protects any individual, business, or organization (including hospitals) that want to refuse service to gay people due to a sincerely-held religious belief or moral conviction that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, that sexual relations should take place only inside such marriages, and that the terms male or female refer to individuals’ immutable biological sex. So it specifies which “religious beliefs” are protected. That is not religious freedom, that is religious imposition. That’s not protecting someone’s right to a belief, that is forcing a very specific set of so-called religious convictions upon everyone.

Yes, the law later has specific language that says that it shouldn’t be construed to imply that anyone can be refused emergency medical treatment, but it will be construed that way, and people will die. We’ve had situations like this before. A lesbian couple was vacationing in Florida some years ago, one member of the couple was in an accident, her partner had their medical power of attorney paperwork, but was refused admittance to the hospital room, was not allowed to give consent to her partner’s medical treatment, and the partner died while the hospital was trying to track down a blood relative. There was no legal basis for the hospital to refuse the power of attorney. Personnel at the hospital refused because they thought that Florida’s ban on same sex marriage invalidated the power of attorney (it did not). Florida courts subsequently ruled that the hospital had been wrong to do that under the law, however they also ruled that the hospital and employees weren’t liable for the death or any sanctions, fines, or lawsuit because they had thought they were acting in good faith.

And that is part of the reason that these “religious freedom” laws are so dangerous. People will decide that their bias is more important than the life of a “sinner”—and other people will be harmed and sometimes even die. Often the person who let them die will get off despite those caveats in the law because it will be decided that they were acting in good faith.

The idea that the law will protect you if you discriminate against certain types of people will encourage people to take it further. As Justice John Paul Stevens noted in his famous dissent of the Supreme Court case that upheld sodomy laws, the mere existence of such laws, even when it was shown that they were largely unenforced, creates the notion that certain types of people are less than human. The existence of even a narrowly-focused law used to justify a plethora of other types of discrimination against people who the law is aimed at. A few years later, when the Supreme Court reversed that ruling and invalidation all sodomy laws, Justice Kennedy quoted Stevens’ earlier dissent in explaining the reason the court had changed course.

The most galling part of all of this is that these people are claiming to be following Jesus when the propose withholding medical care from queer people,  refusing to sell food to queer people, refusing the rent to queer people, et cetera. No matter how many times I read the gospels—especially the Sermon on the Mount—I can’t find anything that Jesus said that could be construed to condone such action, let alone command it! In fact, Jesus said that if someone sues you for the shirt off your back, give them your shirt and your coat, also. He doesn’t say change the law so you can shun and be cruel to some of your neighbors and be immune to being sued or legally punished for any of the consequences thereof!

This is why people are fleeing the churches, particularly young people. These folks have redefined Christianity, replacing Jesus’s teachings with condemnation of gay people. You can ignore any and all of Jesus’s actual commandments, but if you’re anti-gay enough you’ll be the hero of the Christian Right.

When laws like this are enacted, they don’t just hurt the people who get the services denied. They scare other people. They send a message that people who don’t conform to one group’s religious precepts are less than human, that they are not safe, that they cannot count on the police to help them if crimes are committed against them, that they aren’t welcome, that they won’t be treated fairly before the law. And that’s why businesses speak out against these laws. It isn’t because they are beholden to some mythic ally power queer lobbying force. It’s because employees—not just queer employees—don’t feel safe being sent to those states to work.

The truth is, no one should feel safe in places that have laws like this. Because the law gives judgmental people a license to punish anyone they think might be queer, or might be supportive of queer people. That makes these laws a form of terrorism—they are intended to scare queer people back into the closet, and with that stuff about biological sex and sex outside of marriage, all sorts of other people to lie and hide and pretend to be something they aren’t—and I can’t find any definition of love that condones that.

Confessions of a recovering evangelical

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Click to embiggen.
Click to embiggen.
Not only was I raised in very evangelical fundamentalist Southern Baptist churches during the time period when they were unapologetically racist, I was a teen-ager attending those churches when the so-called Moral Majority rose to political prominence.

The official Moral Majority organization wasn’t founded until 1979 (when I was 19 and only just barely still a teen), but it was merely a culmination of the efforts of several conservative Christian organizations which had been fighting against de-segregation, legalized birth control, interracial marriage, and the decriminalization of homosexuality since at least the late 1960s. The leader of the Moral Majority, Jerry Falwell, was a Baptist whose radio show (The Old-Time Gospel Hour beginning in 1956) was extremely popular with people who attended the churches in which I was raised, so I was very familiar with his work long before he launched the Moral Majority. I was intimately familiar with a lot of people who supported him.

So my reaction when I saw the headline, “GAMERS HAVE BECOME THE NEW RELIGIOUS RIGHT,” wasn’t surprise, but rather, “it took you long enough to notice!”… Continue reading Confessions of a recovering evangelical →

Oppressed Oppressors, part 4

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The percentage of Americans with no religious affiliation has grown since 2007 in both political parties. Source: Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2015.
The percentage of Americans with no religious affiliation has grown since 2007 in both political parties. © Wall Street Journal (Click to embiggen)
I always regret giving in to the emails, pokes, not to mention questions directly from some of my relatives about looking at Facebook1. The most recent example of why I shouldn’t look at Facebook wasn’t the crazy anti-immigrant meme that one of my cousins was sharing, it was the commentary he made along it: that it’s wrong to let these foreigners into the country, especially while treating good Christian white guys like him as a minority in his own country. There are so many ways to unpack that that I don’t even know where to begin2.

I didn’t begin, by the way. I’ve stopped attempting to communicate with him at all ever since the conversation a year or two ago while he was ranting about the War on Christmas where I tried to point out that not everyone who objects to manager scenes and the ten commandments in courthouses are foreigners who refuse to “learn our ways.”

So when I saw a news story today about a Pew poll showing that White Christians now make up less than half of the U.S. population, I realized this sort of irrationality is going to get a lot worse. Studies have already shown that people who are members of a privileged class start feeling as if something is being monopolized by another group when that group achieves 30% of the screen time or talk time, et cetera7. So now that White Christians actually do make up a minority, well, it’s not going to be pretty.

Of course many of them have felt that they were in the minority for a long time. I remember a few years back when the percentage of people who identified as non-Catholic Christian went below 50% that folks in the religious rightwing went bananas, claiming that Christians were now in the minority. This reveals a tiny piece of one of the major issues, here. Which is that a lot of the sorts of people who will non-ironicly talk about “taking back our country” don’t think that everyone (a lot of everyone) who claims to be a Christian actually is.

Another revelatory bit is an amusing string of posts that have been going around Tumblr. The original post talks about how sometimes the sheer cruelty of some homophobes makes them wish you could set them up with a blindfold, a stick, and a hornet’s nest, but tell them it’s actually a piñata. Someone else responded by commenting how casually anti-Christian most liberals are, and how they (the Christian commenter) are once again being demonized for their beliefs. The original poster then points out the the post said absolutely nothing about Christians, “but you chose to put yourself in there.” It isn’t liberals who define Christianity as anti-gay, it’s all the anti-gay people who call themselves Christians and claim that Christianity is anti-gay who have defined Christianity as anti-gay. The part that doesn’t often get acknowledged even on the liberal side, is that those folks refuse to accept anyone who doesn’t share their anti-gay views as part of their faith.

And I’m not just saying this because of a few Tumblr posts. During the lead-up to the 2012 Presidential Election, as Mitt Romney seemed poised to sew up the nomination, he met with the Rev. Franklin Graham, son of evangelist Billy Graham, (and the current head of Billy Graham Ministries). After Romney promised to fight marriage equality tooth and nail, a large section the the Graham Ministries website which had been there up until that meeting that went into great detail “proving” that the Mormon Church is a cult, rather than a legitimate part of Christianity, simply vanished. Literally deleted without comment. And suddenly Franklin Graham and all of the rest of the rightwing evangelicals were endorsing Romney.

A similar thing happened with Graham Ministries and Liberty University and the Moral Majority and such a couple of decades before when they all stopped referring to the Catholic Church as a cult (which they often described as ‘the whore of Babylon”) and the pope as the antichrist. It was 1994, after two years of the Clinton presidency, and it was becoming clear that popular sentiment was become less explicitly anti-gay. There was even a big conference that resulted in a bunch of evangelical leaders and Catholic leaders signing a document that supposedly outlined common doctrine. Except the document was mostly focused on a list of political goals, not least of which was overturning gay rights laws where they existed, and opposing any expansion of anti-discrimination laws by adding sexual orientation or gender identity.

So, while they like to claim that the word of god is inerrant and unchanging, they certainly are more than willing to forget all sorts of doctrinal differences in the name of preventing queers from having equal rights, or women from having control over their own bodies, or mega rich people having to pay taxes.

Because clearly when Jesus said to welcome foreigners, feed the hungry, visit the sick, clothe the naked, and so on, what he really meant was that god only helps those who help themselves… and happen to be white, and claim to be Christian, and never do anything foolish such as being born in poverty or in another country.

tumblr_lq0mwkRaHA1qzq52eo1_500

Footnotes:

1. What’s the joke? “If I wanted to listen to my rightwing relatives most racist opinions I’d call them more often”?

2. First, there is the explicit notion that it’s perfectly okay to treat minorities poorly…3

3. It would be petty of me to also ask why a guy who hasn’t set foot inside a church in 30-some years except to attend someone’s funeral or wedding describes himself as Christian4.

4. And while church attendance doesn’t necessarily equate to belief, let’s just say no one in their right mind would describe his lifestyle as being even vaguely Biblical.

5. Note that it is not that Christians no longer make up a majority (They’re still about 70% of the population), nor even that Whites are no longer a majority. It’s that particular combination of being both White and a Christian. I think the more interesting statistic is that White Christians still make up about 70% of all Republican-leaning voters. While Democratic-leaning almost exactly one-third White Christian, a bit less than one-third non-White Christian, and then a bit more than one-third people of all races who either identify with another religion or none at all6.

6. Note that this still means that 64% of Democrats are Christian. So the Democratic Party is hardly the bastion of godlessness that some would have you believe.

7. Those same studies show that folks in the dominant group think that other groups are getting “equal time” when their representation or recognition amounts to 15%.

Every child deserves to live free of harassment

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Some facts about bullying. SOURCE: GLSEN's 2013 National School Climate Survey (Click to embiggen)
Some facts about bullying. SOURCE: GLSEN’s 2013 National School Climate Survey (Click to embiggen)

Go purple on October 15, 2015 for #SpiritDay

Spirit Day began in 2010 as a way to show support for LGBT youth and take a stand against bullying. Following a string of high-profile suicide deaths of gay teens in 2010, GLAAD worked to involve millions of teachers, workplaces, celebrities, media outlets and students in going purple on social media or wearing purple, a color that symbolizes spirit on the rainbow flag.

Spirit Day now occurs every year on the third Thursday in October, during National Bullying Prevention Month, and has become the most visible day of support for LGBT youth.

This year GLAAD will celebrate Spirit Day on October 15 where we will all stand together; communities, corporations, celebrities, landmarks, faith groups, sports leagues, schools and so much more, to send a message of solidarity and acceptance to LGBT youth.

I certainly felt powerless as a kid in school (back in the 60s and 70s) against the bullies, and I’ve already written way more than anyone needs to read about it. But one of the reasons I felt powerless was because I thought I was alone. Not that no one else I knew was getting bullied——many of my classmates were. But we never felt that anyone cared. Part of that was because back then, at least, some teachers hurled insults such as “pussy” and “faggot” at us. But another reason was because no one was taking our side.

That’s why we should all Pledge to go purple for #SpiritDay 2015, which is tomorrow!

Come out, darlings, the world is fine!

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keep-calm-and-come-out-21Today is National Coming Out Day. If Ray were still alive, it would also be the day we’d be celebrating the twenty-second anniversary of our commitment ceremony (he promised to stay with me for the rest of his life, and he did).

Since I am still occasionally surprised to learn that someone I know or work with hasn’t figured out that I’m gay: my husband (Michael) and I are both men, and we’re very much in love with each other and happy together.

My husband and I.
My husband and I.

But while I’m (re-)stating what I think ought to be obvious, I would like to announce that I am a card-carrying liberal gay man who thinks:

Continue reading Come out, darlings, the world is fine! →

“I can’t be a bigot, because…”

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When this tweet showed up in my twitter timeline (‘”How can someone be racist if they have friends who are Black?” The same way serial killers can have friends who are alive.’), I nearly spit my coffee all over my keyboard. It’s flippant, and an overly pedantic sort of person will try to argue about how bad an analogy it is, but it’s a brilliant way to encapsulate the idea that people are more than capable of contradictory behavior. And it’s funny—sometimes we need a little gallows humor to struggle with big, horrific events.

Those of us who are queer have to deal with the classic deflection from homophobic people all the time, “I don’t hate gay people, I have gay friends!” Just as a lot of us who have been caught up in the Hugo/Sad Puppy wank have been rolling our eyes about one of the leaders of said homophobic, misogynist, racist group who claims he can’t be racist because he’s married to a person of color. As if there has never been a male chauvinist who was married to a woman… Continue reading “I can’t be a bigot, because…” →

Yes, I know that many dads are great…

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I linked to my post from a couple years ago about why some of us don’t feel like celebrating Father’s Day. But my particular reasons are exactly why I do think that people who have great dads need to tell their fathers (whether it’s their biological father, step-father, adoptive father, single-mom who had to be all the parents, or two mommies, or two daddies) how much you appreciate the great things that they did for you.

Because bad dads like mine are proof that being great isn’t automatic, it isn’t easy, and it isn’t guaranteed. So, here are a couple of appreciations:

I Am The Man My Father Built.

5 Things My Husband Teaches Our Daughter About Working Parents.

Daddy Issues – After years of thinking my father couldn’t understand his gay son, I was surprised to find he accepted me in ways I never could have imagined possible. (Yes, this was in Friday links already, still good!)

Chad And Jeff’s Story From The Let Love Define Family Series.

The Correct Spelling Of Father:

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here

Honest Conversations: Fathers and Their Gay Children:

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here