Today's vocabulary word: balance

balance, v.t. to tilt toward my side. We must balance our newspaper's coverage when we quote someone pro-gay, but not when we quote Bishop Harry Jackson.

Today's vocabulary word: need

need, v.t. to want, and to have the clout to get.

Traditional family values, but not of the right

Yet another area in which the P.C. left comes across as a parody of the religious right is its obsession with relationships. We've all surely had them try to beat into our heads the notion that a long-term relationship should be our number-one priority. Is that really the best advice to give to someone who may well be in an abuse relationship? Then again, no cost is too high for ideological rectitude, at least when someone else is bearing that cost.

Your own personal Jesus

While Wiccans may have originated the term "fluffy bunny," nominal adherents of more mainstream religions, particularly Christianity, are often fluffy bunnies as well. While they may have rejected anything resembling the theology of their chosen religion, or may not have bothered learning it in the first place, they believe with perfect faith in their self-identification with that religion, as well as in their homemade God who backs up everything they say.

For example, on another site, I have encountered many self-identified Christians who believe that the Bible is only partially God's Word; by some odd coincidence, the parts that they like are both Divinely inspired and Divinely preserved, whereas the rest of it isn't. They know this because "God" speaks to them and tells them which parts to follow and which to ignore. If you know such people, you know that it does no good to point out that "God" speaks to many other people, including other people on the same board who hear from "God," and tells them mutually exclusive things. They either don't understand or don't care that any "God" that so consistently contradicts both itself and its own holy book isn't God at all.

Quote of the week

“I am incapable of saying what people want to hear” - Kang Zhengguo

Today's vocabulary word: hypermasculine

hypermasculine, adj. failing to conform rigidly to my preferred the only conceivable way to be a gay man

"I watched one episode of Glee and didn't care for it."

"Then obviously you're putting up a hypermasculine front as a way to compensate."

Related entry

Is sexual orientation a choice? Does it matter? Should it matter?

In light of the Proposition 8 decision and of recent media accounts of fluidity of female sexuality, people are discussing the significance of the question of whether people choose their sexual orientation. I will ignore the ignorant conflation of fluidity with choice and will instead give my views on whether it should matter and whether it does matter.

For multiple reasons, it should not matter whether people choose their sexual orientation. It is undeniably true that people can choose to convert to a different religion or to abandon religion altogether, yet no one claims that that freedom to convert makes people having politically unpopular views on religion fair game for discrimination. Also, in libertopia, people would have the freedom to choose their sexual orientation insofar as they could do so, unless in doing so they somehow initiated force or fraud against someone else.

Nonetheless, "should not" does not mean "does not." While libertopia is a long way off, the 14th Amendment is the law now, and immutability of a characteristic has a lot to do with the level of scrutiny that courts will give to discrimination on the basis of that characteristic. We must also consider political reality; if we can use that reality to our advantage without committing intellectual dishonesty, why should we not?