On Josh Weed

So this past weekend a guy named Josh Weed outed himself to the world via blog post. The neat thing about this particular exit from the closet is that Weed is a committed Mormon with 10 years of marriage to the proverbial girl-next-door, and three kids to boot. A few quotes:

I was 13 when I told my dad (a member of the Stake Presidency—which is a lay leader in the Mormon church—at the time). My parents were incredibly loving and supportive, which is part of why I believe I’m so well adjusted today. They deserve serious props for being so loving and accepting—I never felt judged or unwanted or that they wished to change anything about me. That’s part of why I have never been ashamed about this part of myself.

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7. Why do you not choose to be “true to yourself” and live the gay lifestyle?

First of all, I understand that when people refer to a “gay lifestyle” they are talking about a lifestyle that includes gay romantic and sexual relationships. But I want to point out that because I am gay, any lifestyle I choose is technically a “gay lifestyle.” Mine just looks different than other gay peoples’. My hope is that other gay people will be as accepting of my choices as they hope others would be of their choices.

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If you know and love somebody who is gay and LDS (or Christian), your job is to love and nothing more. Let go of your impulse to correct them or control them or propel them down the path you think is right for them. Do what you need to do to move past that impulse.  Do not condemn the choices your loved one makes. Love. Only love. Show your love in word and deed. Embrace them, both literally and figuratively. I promise they need it—and they need to feel like they can figure out this part of themselves in a safe way without ridicule and judgment. It’s what Christ would do. It’s what your loved one needs. Accept them. Love them. Genuinely and totally.

I happen to be a mirror image of Josh in a lot of ways (wants to marry a girl/have kids, is religious, has thought about being a therapist, male) and a polar opposite in others (straight, believes homosexuality is compatible with Christianity) and I think the post is really helpful and useful because it lives in a space of privileged heterosexuality (a strong belief of many Americans) and acceptance of homosexuality (a belief often not held in common with the former). How many people do you know that truly believe its ok to be gay, but that straight marriage is still better?

The most frustrating thing about this post is that it still seems biased against same-sex marriages. It's always seemed a little silly to me for straight-marriage-only proponents to jump on that bandwagon, when straight-marriage has been so diseased as an institution for so long, given high divorce rates and so on. Same-sex marriages are much better family units than broken homes, but somehow they are seen as the "threat" to the American family.

The other interesting thing for me is this quote, from a reader of Andrew Sullivan's:

But I don’t quite agree with your assessment of Josh. While he certainly makes, by FAR, the most clear-headed, honest and endearing appeal I’ve ever heard from an ex-gay (I know he doesn’t use that term, but that’s essentially what he is), I don’t think his story is benign. In a perfect world - one with no homophobia or religious intolerance towards gay people - gay men who want to marry women should be free to do so without criticism.

But we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in a world where rampant homophobia means that millions of gay couples are desperately fighting for the right to marry and protect their children, where young gay kids are killing themselves at astonishing rates and where far too many young gay men and women are torturing themselves in therapies that promise conversions to straightness. Taking stories like Josh’s at face value hurts all of us.

Josh seems like a nice guy who may not intend to use his story to influence other men in similar situations, but rest assured, his story WILL be used as fodder by the anti-gay industry. Every homophobic Mormon (or Catholic or Protestant or Jew or Muslim) who reads this will now have at least one more story where a gay man was able to overcome his desires ("see, just because you’re born that way doesn’t mean you have to act on it!"), only helping to cement their intolerance.

This is one of the big struggles between liberalism and conservatism - in a world where the tide flows in one direction, is it ok to judge testimonials like Josh's with a handicap? I don't think so. We should be able to say that this is honest account is helpful and a useful window to someone's life, and decry a culture that would twist and abuse it. I don't think Josh is responsible for how his story is used, any more than the leaker that blows the cover off of a scandal and ruins an otherwise healthy political career. Yes, your leak has "harmed" the political agenda of your party, but is that your fault? Or when others cast blame on the accusers of rape, because the visible source of discord is the speaking victim, not the attacker (who is often known and respected). Sometimes speaking truth creates discord, or allows it. The only people who should be judged for that are those who do it professionally - Rove, etc.

We aren't more creative, but we do have powerful computers

Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit | David Graeber | The Baffler: Might the cultural sensibility that came to be referred to as postmodernism best be seen as a prolonged meditation on all the technological changes that never happened? The question struck me as I watched one of the recent Star Wars movies. The movie was terrible, but I couldn’t help but feel impressed by the quality of the special effects. Recalling the clumsy special effects typical of fifties sci-fi films, I kept thinking how impressed a fifties audience would have been if they’d known what we could do by now—only to realize, “Actually, no. They wouldn’t be impressed at all, would they? They thought we’d be doing this kind of thing by now. Not just figuring out more sophisticated ways to simulate it.”

The Top Ten Strangest Self-Experiments Ever

The Top Ten Strangest Self-Experiments Ever: On 15 February 1921, as the American surgeon Evan O’Neill Kane lay on a table in a hospital waiting to have his appendix removed, he decided to conduct an impromptu experiment — to find out whether it would be possible to remove his own appendix. So he sat up and announced that everyone should step back because he was going to perform the operation himself. Since he was the chief surgeon at the hospital, the staff reluctantly obeyed his strange command.

Kane propped himself up with pillows in order to get a good view of his abdomen. He injected cocaine and adrenalin into his abdominal wall, and then he swiftly cut through the superficial tissue, found the swollen appendix, and excised it.

The entire procedure took thirty minutes. There was only one slight moment of panic when part of his intestines unexpectedly popped out of his stomach as he leaned too far forward, but he calmly shoved his guts back inside his body and continued working.

An address

The Chumbawamba Principle: A Commencement Address : Krulwich Wonders... : NPR: You can't always name the thing you're going to be.

For most people it doesn't work that way. You have to back into it. Designing yourself isn't like being a conqueror. It's not Genghis Khan screaming "Charge!" thundering across the steppes, seizing his prize — no. It's more like you are nearsighted. You like salty snacks, and one day, fumbling along, you knock over a pretzel dish and think, "What's this?" You take a bite and think, "Hmmm! Do I like pretzels?"

It's more like that.

The Wisconsin Recall

Quoth my fellow Williams grad Emily:

When Barrett conceded, I started crying. Not because I necessarily will be affected by Walker’s horrible excuses for policies, but because my students will be. My students depend on BadgerCare and WHEDA. Their parents are overwhelmingly either a) unemployed, b) on a fixed income, or c) working in jobs that benefit from union support (i.e. janitors, factory workers, etc.). 

This morning, my 3rd graders (3rd graders are 8-9 years old, FYI) had an intense discussion about Walker and Barrett. They decided unanimously that if they could vote, they would vote for Barrett. I had to pretty much sit out this discussion due to my AmeriCorps restrictions on discussing politics while on the clock. One student said, “Walker doesn’t care about anyone but rich white people.” Another student asked me, “Will you lose your job if he gets reelected?” Then they decided it didn’t matter, they didn’t need to worry - Walker would be recalled.

They believed in the democratic process. Believed. I doubt that they will still believe tomorrow morning. And for this reason, among many others, I cry for them.

 I don't agree with a lot of the above, but it is true that Walker's strategy wasn't about uniting anyone, but instead the cold calculus that he would win the battle against public sector unions. That sort of choice has a cost - seen in these 3rd graders.

Marina Keegan: A Yale grad made the most of her short life. - latimes.com

Marina Keegan: A Yale grad made the most of her short life. - latimes.com: News briefs can be cruel. Not because of what they say, but because of what they don't.

The Boston Globe ran an item Saturday headlined “Wayland woman dies in Dennis car crash.” It was breaking news, but not unusual. The Globe’s metro desk regularly runs tragedies in brief: struck pedestrian, fatal motorcycle accident.

This one told of Marina Keegan, 22, who died when the car she was riding in drifted off the road, hit a guardrail, veered back over the road and rolled over at least twice. The driver of the 1997 Lexus ES300 survived.

The accident backed up traffic for nearly a mile, the Globe noted. This was the news.

What the Globe didn’t mention, what wasn't news at the time, was that Keegan was a writer. A pretty good one. She had just graduated from Yale University. And one of the last things she ever wrote was about the importance of living life to its fullest.

Let's get one thing straight

"Internal deliberations of the executive branch" do not constitute due process. Particularly when it comes to ordering someone killed. Shame on Obama.

Two Thoughts

While in Chicago this weekend, I realized two new things:

1. We often talk about how stereotypes can damage or harm a person's ability or potential, but the reverse of that happened to me: I was the nerd who was "supposed" to succeed. It's a very strange kind of privilege, because that sort of praise is also isolating, but I hadn't fully realized it until this weekend.
2. I think churches need to start to explicitly welcome "friends" in addition to "members." Spirituality is a difficult topic, but churches do far too many wonderful things that go beyond embracing a creed. Some of the most loving people I know aren't explicitly religious, though I think their love of fellow man makes them more Christian than others who wear their faith on their sleeve.

Confusing Me

Why is the SEC investigating JP Morgan Chase for losing a bunch of money? That happens sometimes; part of capitalism, right?

Why Google Isn’t Making Us Stupid…or Smart - Chad Wellmon

IASC: The Hedgehog Review - Volume 14, No. 1 (Spring 2012) - Why Google Isn’t Making Us Stupid…or Smart - Chad Wellmon: As historian Ann Blair has recently demonstrated, our contemporary worries about information overload resonate with historical complaints about “too many books.” Historical analogues afford us insight not only into the history of particular anxieties, but also into the ways humans have always been impacted by their own technologies. These complaints have their biblical antecedents: Ecclesiastes 12:12, “Of making books there is no end”; their classical ones: Seneca, “the abundance of books is a distraction”8; and their early modern ones: Leibniz, the “horrible mass of books keeps growing.”9 After the invention of the printing press around 1450 and the attendant drop in book prices, according to some estimates by as much as 80 percent, these complaints took on new meaning.

The Avengers: A Review

Robert Ebert ends his review of this movie as follows:

"The Avengers" is done well by Joss Whedon, with style and energy. It provides its fans with exactly what they desire. Whether it is exactly what they deserve is arguable.

In the immediate aftermath of watching the movie, with all of the amazement and awe at the sheer scale of it all, I wanted to throw this back into Ebert's face: "How dare you question this movie?" It's remarkable what Whedon did - he took a bunch of different characters and made them interact and fight in a way that cinematically gelled. The movie is full of moments - Hulk providing many - and will doubtlessly be remembered for many of them, from arcade games to the ship they were played on to an AMAZING tracking shot of the heroes united.

This movie could have been a massive screwup - the script might not have worked, and the was substantial opportunity to fail in a work that combined so many type-A characters and their A-list. (Joss Whedon apparently mollified Downey by following his suggestions and showing Downey that they wouldn't work.) It's not a screw-up; in fact it is an entirely solid and entertaining film, but in retrospect I miss a few things:

1. The music isn't memorable. See Iron Man got that right. What about musical motifs for each character?
2. All of the characters are basically invincible, espeically the two "normal" humans that never seem to be injured. There's no arc of "damage," possibly because all of the other films involve that.
3. I could have been more clever than a split up > ship> city structure.

One World Trade Center 2004-2012