Concern troll no friend to gay community

One of the editorialists who often leads me to wonder about standards in the editorial industry is at it again, layering a new bit of supposed concern over a rehash of many of the same tired and flawed arguments he was pushing three years ago, all while still claiming his bigotry isn't. This time, Chris Freind has taken it upon himself to offer branding advice to the gay community, advice that just so happens to play into the hands of transphobic (and homophobic!) groups. Who'd have guessed?

Languages aren't codes for each other

One of my facebook friends whom I don't actually know is a native English speaker living in Japan who was recently (well, recent when I started writing the draft of this post months ago, anyway) vexed by a school worksheet. It had a series of example phrases written in both Japanese and English that included the following:

"Don't use Japanese. Speak English."
「日本語を使わず、英語で話しなさい。」

"How do you say this in English?"
「これは、英語で何と言いますか。」

The teacher instructed the students to cross out "in" in the second example, and when pressed on the issue, explained that since both examples contain 「英語で」, it can't be right for one to have "in English" when the other just has "English". Which, though it makes sense, simply isn't correct.

A Lament for the Once-United Methodist Church

Background

It's been brewing for decades. In 1972, the United Methodist Church added a declaration that it "does not condone the practice of homosexuality and considers this practice incompatible with Christian teaching" to its rulebook, the Book of Discipline [1]. Such sentiments were unfortunately typical of the time, though by no means universal. Homosexuality, some argued, arose from demonic influences, or was a communist plot, or was at best a step removed from rape and pedophilia, or if nothing else was unnatural and disgusting.

This language, and related language barring LGBTQ+ people from holding leadership positions, have lingered in the rules ever since. Enforcement, on the other hand, has been inconsistent. This upsets those who have an attachment to these rules, and such people often insist that the rules must have teeth.

In the meantime, though, the position enshrined in the Book of Discipline has become increasingly controversial, as heterosexist attitudes have over and over proven to be unjustified. And so some within the United Methodist Church have participated in or outright performed gay weddings, in defiance of the Book of Discipline, even before the United States Supreme Court affirmed marriage as a civil right for all consenting adults, regardless of sex or gender, in 2015. There are openly LGBTQ+ clergy, too, including a lesbian bishop in the Pacific Northwest Conference of the Western Jurisdiction. In everyday life, more and more people within the church, even if not gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or whatever else themselves, have found that they have friends, neighbors, and family members who are. Many feel, too, that the attitude of exclusion embodied in this policy runs contrary to the very nature of Christianity.

Who cares about qualifications when there's winning to be had?

What can I even say about Brett Kavanaugh that hasn't already been said a thousand times in a thousand ways?

The allegations of sexual assault and attempted rape are getting all the attention, by no surprise, but there's another important thing that his supporters seem to be completely overlooking. The man displays an alarmingly Trump-esque aversion to telling the truth. On a wide range of subjects from whether he got legacy preference when applying to Yale, to what a Devil's Triangle is, to the legal drinking age when he was a high school senior, to whether he was involved in the nomination of another controversial judge, to the stolen documents he received while working as a White House lawyer years ago, his evidently favorite approach involves evading, misleading, and outright lying. It doesn't matter how irrelevant the topic is or how easily the facts can be confirmed, he'd apparently just rather not acknowledge reality.

As vulnerable by any other name

I like to do a lot of reading about issues and topics that I find interesting or relevant... articles, blog posts, editorials, whatever. Sometimes even vitriolic pieces, if only so that I have some idea of what truth and decency are up against. Usually, though, I prefer more informative pieces, or those that try to explore various questions or psychological aspects of things.

When the comments on a piece aren't too noxious to bother with, they're sometimes more interesting than the piece itself. Which brings us to one of the commenters on an older post about Internalized Trans-Phobia, who remarked that "while technically I'm a 'trans girl' according to my medical record I don't identify as trans, I don't even see it as part of me; it's just something on my medical record." She objected to the way that people sometimes tell her that she has internalized transphobia and shouldn't be so ashamed of who she is.

Status Quo Does Not Make Right

Although the plaintiffs are expected to keep fighting, for now, it's official. The U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that there's nothing wrong with the Boyertown Area School District policy that treats transgender boys (those boys designated female at birth) as boys and transgender girls (those girls designated male at birth) as girls. There is nothing "hostile", "threatening", or "humiliating" about it, much less illegal or unconstitutional, and the judges seemed unimpressed by all attempts to argue otherwise. Judge Theodore McKee rejected repeated appeals to the status quo in particular, referring to Brown v. Board of Education and retorting, "These types of cases wouldn't happen if the answer was always, 'Go back to the status quo.'"

When Humanity is Disregarded

There was something familiar about a comment in a recent sermon that touched on the Valentine's Day shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, about the problem being less one of guns, or of mental health, or of whatever else, than of a lack of respect for people and for human life. It reminded me of some of the musings of Ken Corbett in A Murder over a Girl: Justice, Gender, Junior High, his account of the criminal trial for a shooting that took place in a school a decade ago, and of related events in the aftermath. That particular murder happened ten years ago this month, at E. O. Green Junior High School in Oxnard, California, so perhaps this is as good a time as any to revisit the case.