Tag Archives: politics

Hardly a first step

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So, Exodus International, the oldest of the so-called ex-gay/reparative therapy ministries announced last night that they are closing down. A few hours before the announcement, which they made at a conference full of their members, the current president of the organization, Alan Chambers, issued an apology to the gay/lesbian/bi/trans community.

Other religious conservatives are angry, calling them sell-outs and worse.

A lot of other people at the other end of the political spectrum seem to be very surprised that most of us gay people aren’t jumping up and down with joy, accepting the apology, and saying that all is forgiven because someone has said they’re sorry. They are disappointed that we don’t seem to understand that saying you’re sorry is only the first step in the type of redemption and forgiveness model that the people who work for Exodus International have been raised in.

I agree that an apology is only the first step—and it is an important step—in the process of making amends. Except, in order to be that first step, the apology has to be for the actual wrong that you have committed. This apology is not that in the slightest.

The bulk of the apology is about incidental things. He apologizes that some (many) of the counsellors used the so-called therapy as a way to gratify their own sexual desires. He apologizes because some people “found a message rather than mission”—which may qualify as the most convoluted way to say, “if people were offended” ever. He apologizes for neglecting to mention in his own personal story that the so-called cure has never actually made his own attraction to members of the same sex go away. He apologizes for “failing to acknowledge the pain some people experienced.”

It goes on and on. But he never apologizes for the actual wrong: he never apologizes for lying, living the lie, or pressuring other people to live the same lie. In fact, he explicitly says that he is not apologizing for his “deeply held biblical beliefs.” And that’s the heart of the problem. They may be deeply held beliefs, but they aren’t biblical. Don’t go quoting that tired verse from Leviticus at me unless you’re prepared for a long lecture about declensions in Hebrew, and unless you’ve been willing to stone someone to death for the abomination of wearing clothes made of more than one kind of fabric, okay?

In their long announcement at the conference of their decision to close down, one of the board members said, “We’re not negating the ways God used Exodus to positively affect thousands of people…”

Except that nothing positive has ever been accomplished by this group. Nothing. Guilting, coercing, and bullying people into denying their feelings, luring them in with the false hope (and they’ve known it was a false hope for well more than a decade or two) of a “cure,” then handing them instead a lifetime without love, affection, or intimacy are not positive things. Bullying people until they commit suicide is not a positive thing. Encouraging parents to kick their gay children who don’t change after going through the torture they call therapy out on the street is not a positive thing.

I admit that I am not impartial. While I have never been through any of these therapies, I have had friends and relatives who did give them a try. Most of them survived. One wound up killing himself outright. Another essentially drank himself to death over the course of a few years. One cousin who went through ex-gay therapy has lived his entire life since alone, never dating anyone. He’s dependent on antidepressants and some other drug he once called his “temptation dampener.” I have no idea what the second drug actually is, because among the bewildering array of rules and restrictions he has continued to live under for years is a prohibition against talking unsupervised with anyone who is openly gay or who was supportive of him when he was “in the lifestyle.”

Other relatives have refused to accept me for who I am, and/or refused to welcome my husband (either Ray when he was still alive, or now more than a decade and a half after Ray’s death, Michael), precisely because that one cousin has “been able to change.”

The god they claim to believe in promised not just life, but life abundant. Living alone, constantly afraid of talking to the wrong person, afraid that a little emotional intimacy might lead to forbidden acts, only getting through the day with the help of drugs to kill the libido, and other drugs to kill the very natural depression that comes from living alone, afraid of any intimacy, and a drug-neutralized libido is not abundant life.

The truth is that Exodus and their ilk have lost the fight on a society-wide level. All of these anti-gay organizations have seen their donor pools shrink dramatically in the last few years. Support is dropping off even among many traditional conservative religious circles. Support is practically non-existent among teen and early-twenties aged evangelical and fundamentalist Christians. Surveys indicate that a major factor in many young adults leaving the churches in which they were raised is all the anti-gay rhetoric. The writing is on the wall. These guys aren’t shutting down because they’ve had a change of heart. They are shutting down in hopes of re-grouping and finding a new way to attract donors and supporters.

And to top it all off, their deflecting, delusional, and self-serving announcement about why they are closing ended by quoting a bible verse that used to be my favorite, John 16:33. They quoted a different translation than my preferred one. I’m going to stick with mine: “In the world you will face tribulation, but be of good cheer! For I have overcome the world.”

That may be what has angered me most about their non-apology. They have not faced tribulation, they are the tribulation others have faced. They have institutionalized bigotry, and turned it into a process which does not spread love and joy and forgiveness, but rather grinds people down with shame, fear, and lies. They are the very thing that their lord came to overcome, not the other way around.

If they ever realize that, if they ever apologize for being so very, very wrong, I might be willing to consider it their first step in a process by which they may eventually earn forgiveness.

But so far, they aren’t even looking in the right direction.

Defending your right…

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Gay rights equal gun rights poster
Personal dislikes.
Some odd posters have been popping up around Seattle.

I first read about them in a local alt-weekly’s news blog. The story has slowly been picking up steam. The QR code on the posters lead to a gun-rights web site, but the owner of the web site denies any knowledge of the posters. Reporters tracked down the photographer who took the picture for a gun rights campaign, and he says no one asked his permission to re-use the work, but as a pro-gun person, he is delighted that the image is being used. Those reports describe the photo poster as a picture of one woman holding another, but the shorter girl looks youthful enough that I think a better description of the photo might be “young woman embracing a teenage girl.”

No one has been able to locate the artist of the cartoony image on the second poster. The image is credited to a “Dale Nixon,” but that’s a pseudonym that many artists have used over the years when they don’t want their name attached to a piece of work they did for hire. It is even more clear that the cartoon was drawn for a father-son campaign, originally.

That’s one of the things that annoys me about the posters, and which makes me think these are not created by someone who is terribly sympathetic to the gay rights cause.

Annoyed isn’t the right word. First I was disturbed, and as I thought about it a little longer, deeply creeped out that someone would think that a good way to pitch a political message at gay couples would be to include images that hint at pedophilia. Really? I’ve spent decades having to explain that gay people are no more likely to be pedophiles than straight people, decades explaining that I was not sexually abused as a child and why it’s offensive the people assume that, and so on, and you think a good way to make me sympathetic to your cause is to imply that all middle-aged gay men are dating teen-agers? Look at that male couple in the poster! Tell me in all seriousness that the guy on the right isn’t a “kid.”

Marriage rights equal gun rights poster
Arm yourself, especially if your partner is 20 years younger than you!
It could be simply a case of cluelessness, of course. Someone wanted some images to go on the poster, and was just trying to find something that might pass as a same-sex couple with a gun or three. It would certainly not be the first time someone armed with some page layout software did something incredibly dumb unintentionally.

And I’ve gotten into enough discussions with certain kinds of conservative-minded (though they always describe themselves as “libertarian”) gay men who can’t understand why so many out gay people are much more sympathetic to liberal causes. No matter how many examples you give them of how anti-gay most conservative organizations, policies, and politicians are (and how steeped in unconscious bigotry and entitlement most libertarian messages and casual conversations are), they don’t get it. And they’ve been in enough of these debates that they are paranoically defensive about any of their statements. Putting up anonymous posters would not be unexpected from them.

The neighborhood where these have popped up isn’t just well-known as the “gayborhood,” it is so incredibly deep blue politically, and known to be a hot bed of liberal activism, that it’s hard to believe anyone thinks there’s a significantly number of people who haven’t already thought about the issue of the right to bear arms. These posters use very tired, old arguments that everyone who has thought about either the issue of guns or hate crimes has processed and come to an conclusion on long, long ago. Neither the posters or the web site they lead to have anything there that is going to change anyone’s mind.

Anyone at all. The only people who buy the arguments on the linked web site are people who already agree with them.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve pointed out many times that I sometimes confound my fellow liberals because I think gun control means hitting what you aim at, even though I’m in favor of universal background checks, holding gun owners responsible for what happens when they don’t secure a gun or “forget” to report a stolen gun. It’s not their opinion on the right to keep and bear arms I’m concerned with in these posters. I’m disturbed and creeped out by the use of father/son and mother/daughter images to represent gay couples. I’m annoyed at the implication that violence is an expected outcome of gaining equality. I’m annoyed and disappointed at the second poster’s implication that brandishing guns is the proper response to verbal harassment (“not going to take sh*t from the homophobes”). I’m irritated that the person drawing these false equivalencies hasn’t thought through to the obvious conclusion: marriage rights are like gun rights, and if marriage requires a license, why doesn’t gun ownership require one?

Some people think the posters are meant to scare people, to imply that hate crimes are rampant in the city. Instead of putting up anti-gay posters, such as the “no homo zone” posters in the news elsewhere last year, put up these things that on the surface seem to be pro-gay, but actually are meant to make gay couples feel less safe—a reverse-psychology form of intimidation. I don’t think that’s the most likely explanation.

As the adage says, never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Frothy!

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Ten years ago yesterday, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum gave his infamous “man on dog sex” interview.
Continue reading Frothy! →

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.

Skewed polls and secret money

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A few days after election night, when the leader of one of the local anti-gay groups conceded that voters had approved marriage equality, he groused about how the pro-gay groups had outspent them three-to-one. Just a week earlier he had been insisting that the polls which were all predicting passage of the referendum were skewed. “People are reluctant to say what they really feel to a pollster, because the pro-sodomy side has tricked the media into calling support of traditional marriage as bigotry. But when those voters are in the privacy of the voting booth, they will vote their true feelings.”

They did vote their true feelings. Fortunately for those of us who believe in equality, they had also been telling their true feelings to the pollsters. Surprise, surprise!

Sadly, I believe it was a complete surprise to the opposers. It shouldn’t have been. They had other evidence, and it was right there in that hypocritical comment he made about spending. It was hypocritical because it had only been four years before, during the Proposition 8 campaign in California that the anti-gay side had been doing the outspending. And for years before that, each ballot measure that came up in any state related to marriage equality or civil unions, it was the anti-gay side that always seemed to have the money advantage.

This time around, in Washington, Maine, Maryland, and Minnesota, the forces of hate came up short both in the ballot box and fundraising. And it wasn’t simply a matter that suddenly our side was better at raising money. No, the big story is that they have, in just the last few years, experienced a serious drop in donations.

It isn’t just the amount of money. What’s more significant is the number of donors. The national organizations have been very secretive about their funding. They have refused, again and again, to reveal their donor lists, even when they appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and lost, they have tried to keep that secret. Eventually, some details are beginning to emerge:

Each year, according to [the National Organization for Marriage]’s tax filings, two or three donors give NOM between $1 million and $3.5 million apiece; another two or three give between $100,000 and $750,000; and 10 or so others give between $5,000 and $95,000. In 2009 the top five donors made up three fourths of NOM’s budget; in 2010 the top two donors gave two thirds of the year’s total donations; and in 2011 the top two donors gave three fourths of NOM’s total income. But those funders’ identities are a mystery. Their names are redacted on NOM’s federal tax returns.

My emphasis added. Whoever those mysterious top two donors are, their donations have became a larger and larger proportion of the pot, as the thousands who gave less than $5000 dollars a year have dwindled to hundreds.

Statistics tell us the the most vehement opposition comes from the oldest voters, so a percentage of that drop off represents to reality of demographics. As elderly opposers die off, without a compensating proportion of supporters coming up in younger generations, some of that is just inevitable. But the drop off in support to the anti-gay cause in the last three or four years is far in excess of what could be accounted for by mere demographics.

People are changing their minds.

There will always be a hardcore group opposed to equal rights for gay, lesbian, bi, and trans people. Just a couple weeks ago at the big conservative conference a guy stood up and argued in favor of slavery because he believed it was a self-evident truth that whites were superior to blacks. He wasn’t an invited speaker, and to their credit, panelists and audience members challenged him on it, but during the ensuing back and forth he also made a comment to the effect the women shouldn’t have the right to speak up in public, either. So, just like that unrepentant racist and misogynist, there will always be homophobes among us.

But as more of the moderates and non-hateful conservatives come around, that view will be limited to the lunatic fringe where it belongs.

In the months since the vote in Washington, Maine, Maryland, and Minnesota went our way, the opposers’ spokespeople have gone from saying that they were outspent 3-to-1 (which turned out to be a small exaggeration in our state) to claiming they were outspent 4-to-1, then 5-to-1… the last quote I read was “more than 7-to-1.” I believe their exaggerations get worse due to desperation. They hope that skewing their claim of victimhood will prompt more people to donate more money, which they think can turn the tide.

What they don’t understand is that the only skewed “polls” were their own. They fell into the common trap of thinking that because most of the people they know and like agree with them, that it absolutely must be the case the most people, period, do so. They think that since they still manage to raise a lot of money that there is still a lot of support, ignoring the fact that it’s a smaller and smaller number of people sending in the money. Because they are convinced of the truth of their cause, they believe that the only reasons polls and voting can be going against them is some kind of chicanery. They think that calling us pedophiles, comparing our relationships to bestiality or incest is “civil discourse,” but if we call them bigots we’re being bullies.

Most of all, many of them believe all the lies and distortions that they tell about us. Lies that other people can no longer believe once they get to know us:

Forgotten or Unknown?

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Our collective memory can be frightfully shallow.

Take, for instance, an on-line discussion I was in recently where there were people who weren’t aware that not that many years ago it was illegal to be gay. By which I don’t just mean that the notion of gay marriage didn’t exist, but that if the authorities found out you were gay, they could send you to prison. I had to tell them of an acquaintance who had been arrested for indecency back in 1970 for kissing his boyfriend in the wrong neighborhood. That meant that he didn’t just have a criminal record, but a sexual offense (albeit a misdemeanor).

Note that he was not arrested for rape, attempted rape, or anything like that. Chris was 21 years old, his boyfriend was 24, they were consenting adults who had just left a gay bar together. It was late at night, and they were making out in the boyfriend’s car near Chris’s dorm at the University of Washington. Yes, they were here in a city with a reputation as being ultra liberal. But they were two men kissing, and that was something society could not abide in 1970!

If I recall correctly, Chris said his boyfriend lost his job because of the arrest, and had a difficult time finding a new one. Chris didn’t begin to run into problems getting hired himself until a few years later, after he graduated and started looking for more substantial jobs than the starving-student-type of employment he’d had before.

He wound up working as a hair stylist, saved up his pennies, and eventually opened his own shop. It hadn’t been what he’d meant his career to be, but he made do.

Contrast that with something I witnessed during my own college days (some years later): one of my dormmates convinced a bunch of us to go with him one night to a park that was near the school. I have completely forgotten what the purpose of the excursion was, now, but we got a bit lost and stumbled upon a guy and a gal who were having sex under a tree.

It was long after dark, they were off of any paths, behind some bushes, and they were clearly trying not to be seen or heard.

We hurried away before the angry guy could do more than yell at us.

Not much further, we encountered a cop, who stopped us and asked us what we were doing in the park after dark. There was a point where I thought we were all going to be showing him our student IDs or something, but something one of the guys said made the cop grin and ask us if we had run into anyone doing something they oughtn’t. And then he made a reference to the size of the girl’s breasts.

It was clear he had seen them, as well, but had decided not to do anything about it. I think he implied that he had been sent to the park because of complaints about such activity, and he thought it was a waste of time, since no one was being hurt.

I suspect the cops reaction would have been very different if it had been two guys.

I’ve been running into a lot of people, when discussing issues such as marriage equality, the Violence Against Women Act, or wage disparity, who are completely unaware of just how recently things that they currently think of as mere fruatrations were either mandated or at least aided and abetted by the law.

For instance, up until the mid 70s, a married women did not have a legal right to withhold sex from her husband. Even if they were living separated, in the midst of divorce proceedings, and he had been witnessed physically abusing her many times, if he forced her to have sex she couldn’t get him convicted of rape. Heck, most of the time she couldn’t get him charged. Finally, a woman who had attempted to get the rape included in the assault charges against her husband (ex-husband by the time it went to trial), managed to appeal the decision not to include the charges up to a federal judge who agreed: if she says “no,” it’s rape.

That didn’t cause a sudden change in the law or practice in this regard, but it was the very first recognition that in the U.S. legal system that a wife’s body wasn’t literally and entirely the property of her husband to do with as he pleased. And that only happened a mere 36 years ago.

There are still laws on the books related to that notion. My favorite are the “alienation of affection” laws. If you look up the topic online now, all you will find are articles that refer to the versions of the laws as they have been altered in response to legal challenges. So wikipedia, for example, says that the laws allow a spouse to file a lawsuit against a third party alleged to be responsible for the failure of the marriage.

The original laws allowed only the husband to file a lawsuit against another person for “malicious conduct that contributed to or caused the loss of affection.” The most common malicious conduct was, of course, seducing her into having an affair. For a long time a wife could not file a similar lawsuit against someone she believed she could prove had acted to alienate her husband’s affections. In the last several decades, most of these laws that have remained on the books have been revised to be gender-neutral, which I suppose is an improvement.

The problem is that while the original justification of the laws was assumption that a wife’s body (and affection, et cetera) were the property of the husband and he could expect the legal system to protect his property rights, the gender-neutral versions still assume a property rights relationship. If you need the law the force your partner to love you, that is not love. Okay, successful lawsuits under these laws don’t end up with orders to anyone to go back to loving their spouse, but when the law is able to inflict punishment because someone has fallen out of love, the principle is the same.

There’s going to be a lot of talk on the news and around the web this week where people are emphatically insisting the marriage has been an unchanging institution for all of human history, and that’s pure nonsense. In the last five decades alone in this country we have redefined marriage in several ways:

  • so that it includes interracial couples,
  • so that it includes persons previously considered less than full citizens because of certain mental and medical conditions,
  • so that even prisoners on death row must be allowed into the institution if they want, and,
  • so that a wife’s body is not treated as the legal property of her husband.

Over the course of five decades before that we have legally redefined it so that a couple who have realized the marriage was a mistake could end it without having to prove that one spouse was abusive, or go through other legal hoops to satisfy society that the marriage was over.

In the century before that we have legally redefined it so that people didn’t have to get the approval of a church (and before that, the official state church) in order to get married, allowing people who were raised in different faiths to get married, as well as allowing those of no faith at all in.

In the last few centuries we’ve redefined marriage in a way that almost no one realizes was never an integral part of the institution: we made marriage about love. For most of human history marriage has been a matter of creating/reinforcing family alliances, securing the orderly inheritance of property, and/or politics. The notion that two people would meet, fall in love, and decide all on their own to get married has only been around for a few centuries.

So any so-called defenders of traditional marriage who mention a relationship of mutual love and respect is not talking about a very old tradition, at all.

Yes, the notion that two people of the same gender might be the ones who fall in love is new for a lot of people, but when looked at in comparison to all the other ways that marriage has changed, it’s actually only a very minor refinement.

Awkward topics

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In fiction, I have a wide array of tools for addressing sensitive topics. Writing a double-wedding scene recently, where one couple was male-female, the other male-male, set in the 36th Century on a star ship during an interstellar war was easy. The plot of the story was about how people will find ways to make normalcy and community in any circumstances. The casualness of a pair of best friends one—who happens to be gay and one not—who want to have their weddings together is the point, not legalities or cultural expectations.

Or a series of gags I wrote in a fantasy novel that was centered around an impending apocalypse. I kept introducing weirder and weirder religious groups, all engaged in pilgrimages because of the impending doom. None of them were overtly based on any existing religious group. I wasn’t attacking any doctrine. Each group, instead, was a manifestation of the various ways that real people react to a looming danger, and how they organize themselves into social institutions. It helped that I was writing in a cartoony talking-animals universe, so some of the groups could have names such as “the Predation Congregation” or “The Omnivoral Free Fellowship.”

And clearly, since I have been willing to write in places like this blog about topics such as marriage equality or bullying in a non-fictional way, there are other ways to broach awkward topics.

But it is harder to write or talk about some topics without offending someone—and sometimes not the people you expect. For instance, an amazing number of people will nod along sympathetically while reading a gay person’s opinions on gay rights in the abstract, but get angry if that same person has the temerity to support a political candidate who actively supports gay rights (and not support the candidate who actively opposes those rights).

The worst case was a former friend who, it turned out, firmly believed that all gay people are fundamentally mentally and spiritually broken. Which was why she had voted in favor of an amendment to her state’s constitution defining marriage as between a man and a woman exclusively, had voted in favor of a ban an gay people adopting children, and had voted for a candidate who had openly talked about shipping gay people to camps (not prison camps, no, they were health camps! You can never leave, but it isn’t prison).

She didn’t understand how that made her not my friend (Hint: friends don’t vote for people who want to ship their friends off to concentration camps; that’s not a difference of opinion, that’s conspiracy to commit crimes against humanity). She was really upset, too, because she had been spouting her (always very polite) opinions on certain forums, and then when she was accused of being a bigot, mentioned me and a lesbian that she knew as friends to prove she wasn’t a bigot.

So, for instance, I get really, really tired of people referring to Barack Obama as liberal. He isn’t. His foreign policy is nearly identical to Bush’s. His health care reform was lifted almost in every detail from the 1996 Republican party platform (seriously!). He didn’t make a move to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell until after more than 70% of the general population thought gays should be able to openly serve in the military. I could to on and on, but the upshot is, he’s moderate, when compared to the population as a whole. On a few things he is slightly left of center, but on many he’s actually slightly conservative-leaning.

Bill Clinton was less liberal than Obama. He and is policies were all on the conservative side of centrist.

See, when a policy position is held by more than 50% of the population? That is the mainstream position, not liberal or conservative.

Polls say a majority oppose the health care reform law. Yet, in poll after poll, solid majorities approve of every single individual provision of the plan. Even the individual mandate, if the full description is given. Which means there’s a bunch of people who don’t know what the plan actually does, they’re just afraid of a vague charge of socialism. And none of them even understand what socialism actually is — remember the cries of “keep your government hands off my medicare?” Hint: Medicare is socialised health insurance for the elderly and disabled. Social security is socialized income for the elderly and disabled. Police, courts, and the jail system are socialised justice. The army, navy, air force, and marines are socialised national defense, for goodness sake!

My point, if you think Obama is liberal, and you think your positions are moderate or conservative in comparison to him? Well, since most of his positions are supported by between 60 – 70% of the population as a whole, that means that, at most, 20% of the population is more conservative. You’re somewhere over in the 15-20% of the population. Welcome to the extreme. And yes, I’m aware that the other guy got 47% of the vote, but please scroll back up at the paragraph about people saying they are against healthcare reform, yet they’re in favor of all its components. Same holds true for a lot of other things.

My other point: while Obama isn’t liberal. I am. My political opinions are to the left of his. If you’re the sort of person who thinks that Obama is left-wing and that left-wing is a bad thing? My positions are going to scare you spitless.

And I think I need to stop censoring myself for fear that awkward topics will scare people off.

This time it’s (not so) personal

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When I wrote about how people process history and, more specifically, how believable character motivation in fiction is when based upon distant historical events, a few people pointed to ethnic conflicts which have gone on for generations as a counterexample. I had almost talked about that in the original post, but decided that might be one digression too many.

It’s certainly true that such conflicts have raged on for many generations, sometimes spanning centuries. The key here, I think, is that word “spanning.” People aren’t just holding a grudge about the injustice visited upon an ancestor 11 centuries ago, they are holding a grudge about indignities and atrocities they have witnessed themselves (or experienced the aftereffects of themselves), which they perceive to be a continuation of hundreds of other injustices going all of the way back to that original one.

For instance, a young man may grow up hearing tales from a very young age about how his father was killed by those evil Freedonians when he was just a babe, just as a couple of uncles, great-aunts and great-uncles, and so on where unjustly arrested, or tortured, or raped, or killed previously. The Freedonians have always hated the Sylvanians, he is told. Since he is a Sylvanian, they must hate him, too. Everything bad that happens to him in his life, he blames on the Freedonians, either directly because a Freedonian is present, or indirectly because he believes his hardships would be fewer if they hadn’t taken his father from him.

The historical narrative of the many past conflicts between Freedonia and Sylvania provide a context to his personal frustrations and disappointments. Tales of particularly egregious atrocities from the past serve as a rationalization for any actions against Freedonians he takes. Or excuses for any atrocities that others may point out Sylvania inflicted upon Freedonia.

There is also a sort of compound-interest effect. The young man was raised by people who had internalized their own victimization until it metastasized. People brimming over with hatred are not very good at nurturing. The more generations in a row this happens, the less likely each new generation is going to be to empathize with people they perceive as “other.”

The problem is that anyone who has not been raised in the same culture, has not witnessed similar injustices, has not experienced first hand the animosity between the two groups, has a very hard time understanding what the fuss is all about. I can’t count the number of times I’ve read or heard someone ask about troubles in the Middle East, or Subsaharan Africa, or Eastern Europe, “Why can’t they just come to a reasonable settlement?”

Which gets us back to the author’s difficulty.

In order to make a reader care as much about the injustices inflicted by the Freedonians as your Sylvanian protagonist, you have to put the reader in your protagonist’s shoes. It’s not enough to have one of your characters lecture another, “As you know, Bob, the Freedonians are a merciless, hateful people.” You have to show them being merciless. You have to show your protagonist suffering at their hands.

That requires telling the story of how these sorts of age-old hatred are perpetuated because they are renewed again and again with each new generation. Even then, most readers are going to see all those past actions as abstractions. They may sympathize with your protagonist, but they’ll also wonder why he can’t see how odd it is to hold a person living now responsible for actions that took place hundreds of years before that person was born.

Which is a good question to raise. There’s a lot of good drama you can wring out of that sort of situation. If that’s the kind of story you want to tell, go for it! But that means going all in. No half-measures. No long expository dump where one character lectures another about the 1200 year history of mutual failed (but not for lack of trying) genocide between Freedonia and Sylvania.

Show it, don’t tell it.

The cooing of turtledoves fills the air

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Reporter Marissa Bodnar took this video of the first same-sex couple to be married in Maine stepping out of city hall a bit after midnight:

Crowds greet first same-sex married couple

That was a big crowd to be standing outside at midnight on a snowy night, waiting for a few hours to congratulate some of their fellow citizens. News reports indicated two protestors standing some distance away, singing religious songs. Apparently they kept fleeing the reporters and cameras. One talked briefly to a print reporter and said, “This is a wicked thing,” but wouldn’t say anything more.

I would be the first to defend the right of the protestors to make their beliefs known in a public space. But if you are going to do that, have enough strength of your convictions to stand up for those beliefs. If you don’t have the courage to be photographed protesting in public, why bother? It must be a very, very fragile world you live in if the thought of two women being in love will utterly destroy it. If two middle-aged men (who have been building such a life together for nine years) showing up at city hall (with their four grown children to cheer them on) to get a marriage certificate threatens your whole belief system, it can’t be a very robust faith. No wonder they’re so afraid of everything!

When people find love and build a life together, living and working within their community, that’s a good thing. Accepting your neighbors for who they are strengthens society, it doesn’t weaken it.

Shared fear erodes all that is good in us. Shared joy uplifts and strengthens.

So, share the joy.

Oh, lord, the leaping!

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Within minutes of the news of the horrific shooting at an elementary school, the voices of inaction started spreading across the social networks:

  • “Even if you ban all the guns, people can still be killed with other things!”
  • “Why do people start talking about mental health care whenever there’s a violent event?”
  • “Now is not the time to talk about political action. People are just starting to mourn this senseless tragedy.”
  • “Why does the media put so much attention to these things? It only encourages other people to do this so they’ll become famous!”
  • “If only there were more armed citizens, this could be prevented.”

…and so on.

An internet meme is one of the least nuanced ways to discuss anything, but I have to admit that sometimes they raise a good point. Thanks to one failed clownish attempt to take out a jet with a shoe bomb, millions of us are forced to take off our shoes when we go through security at airports. Meanwhile, over 30,000 people are killed by gun violence every year in the U.S., but we can’t even talk about changing any gun regulations?

The air travel security processes that have been imposed on us are a horrific overreaction, don’t reduce the odds of a disaster by a significant amount, and are therefore a colossal waste of time and money. So we shouldn’t duplicate the thinking over there.

But doing nothing after decades of these mass shootings is an even more colossal waste.

The good news is, there are options between the extremes of overreacting and doing nothing.

Will banning assault weapons end violence? Of course not. But think about this: last week, a man went on a rampage and stabbed 22 school children in China, but no one died. Yes, it was a horribly traumatic event. Yes, it is certainly possible to kill someone with a knife, but it is much harder for a single person to inflict deadly wounds on a whole bunch of people in a short time with knives than with an assault rifle. So regulating the sale of certain types of weapons, offering gun buy-back programs, and so forth might save a few thousand lives a year.

Will better mental health options end all violence? No. And the usual argument people make on this point is that most mass shooters have fallen through the cracks of the mental health system. The problem with that argument is that currently, the mental health care system has cracks the size of the Grand Canyon. Nearly everyone falls through the cracks. Let’s get a functioning system together, first, shall we?

The variant on the mental health argument I was quite amused with recently is that, since so few of these shooters survive to be diagnosed, we can’t assume they are mentally ill. One person making this argument insisted that mentally ill people are no more likely than the non-ill to be violent. And as proof said, “Of the 61 mass shooters of the last five years, only 38 exhibited signs of mental illness before the crime, but none had been diagnosed.” Thirty-eight out of sixty-one is 62%. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, only 26% of the population suffer from a diagnosable mental or mood disorder at any time. So 62% seems at least a bit disproportionate.

The “now is not the time” argument is beyond infuriating. If anything, talking about it after a tragedy is too late, certainly not too soon. And silencing the discussion by saying we’re trying to politicize a tragedy? That is politicizing a tragedy. So, stop being a hippocrit, man up, and debate the issue.

The “media creates these events” argument is very tempting. And in more than a few of the cases there is evidence that the person was trying to make a statement, having left behind videos or notes. But you know who else does that sort of thing? Terrorists. And no sane person believes that the guys who flew those planes into the World Trade Center thinks that if only the news hadn’t revealed their names, that they would have never done it.

The “more guns argument” overlooks a few facts. First, there are already more privately owned guns in this country than there are people. We have no shortage of guns available for citizens to defend themselves. Second, one need look only at incidents such as the Lakewood shoot a couple years ago in my state: four armed cops, all experienced, all having been in shooting situations before hand, were at a cafe when an armed guy walked in and started shooting. He wasn’t even armed with an assault rifle, but none of the officers was able to draw and fire back in time to stop him from killing all four. There are dozens of similar cases, and statistics galore that indicate that just having responsible, trained, armed people there doesn’t put a stop to these crimes. In the majority of the cases, even after a large force of armed police arrive, it’s the shooter killing himself that ends the massacre, not the police killing him.

And all of these leaps to unsupportable conclusions are keeping us from tackling any of the sources of the problems that lead these guys (and they are almost all men, usually young men) to do these things. We aren’t willing to talk about our society’s toxic expectations of what masculinity means. We aren’t willing to discuss the correlations between the economic and romantic frustration that many of these mass murderers express before these things happen, and how many of them form alliances with gun-stockpiling, paranoid communities.

We have to stop leaping to conclusions, stop following our gut reactions, and look at the facts. We have to be willing to start seriously implementing multiple changes. We have to be willing to get past the bumper sticker/internet meme rhetoric and talk about the difficult problems.

Otherwise, the senseless deaths are going to just keep happening.