It must be OK to be who we really are

Violence against transgender individuals must stop now. Do you have any idea what it's like to be told you must be one way even though you know you are another? Of course you do. Society tells each of us every day that we must be this or that, even though we know we are something else entirely. 

We are told we "must" be "housewives" or "breadwinners" or "good Christians" or "patriots," whatever those things mean. (Like so many other sweeping generalizations, their meanings are open to an endless number of interpretations). Yet we are unique individuals, not cookie-cutter caricatures, and dignity demands that we be acknowledged for who we are, whether that involves gender identity, as it does for some of my friends, or artistic identity, as it does for some others.

I often hear people say, "Put yourself in another person's shoes." But we're already there. We wear those shoes today, at this very moment. Perhaps our lives aren't being threatened because of it. But we're there nonetheless: just a heartbeat away from disapproval or marginalization by those who may decide, at the drop of a hat, we don't fit their status quo. Our lives and livelihoods might not be threatened now, but there but for the grace of God - or the luck of the draw - go we.

Who among us can say that no one ever demanded that we be something or someone we're not - that we MUST "get with the program" or be alienated and demeaned? If we're honest, none of us can say that. That's why I stand with LGBT individuals, and that's why I will continue to stand with them. They pose no threat to me. The true threats are spoken by those who say, "You're not allowed to be 'that way.' That “you must conform to our preconceived notions.”

How many times have I been told this? Too often. Yet not as often as many others.

It's easy to make fun of people who aren't like us. It seems to make us feel superior. But that feeling is a mirage bought at great cost: the cost of our own honesty, self-respect and, worse still, at the cost of innocent lives not fully lived. Should we not invest instead in something real: the right of self-expression and the freedom to be who we truly are? That's not too much to ask. Indeed, it's the most fundamental thing most of us ever ask for. And we, each and every one of us, deserve nothing less.

Independence Day: The Perfect Time for Independent Thought

As a child, Independence Day was my favorite holiday – because of the fireworks, of course, and because it meant that, the following day, I’d get to blow out candles, eat cake and open presents for my birthday.

Now that I’m an adult, it’s still one of my favorites. I don’t get as many presents these days, fireworks won’t light up the sky in many places because of the fire danger caused by the drought, and I shouldn’t eat cake because of my diabetes. (Shhhhh. Don’t tell anyone, but I’m going to do that anyway. I’ve given myself permission to indulge once in a blue moon.)

These days, the reason I like the holiday is what it stands for: not just the birth of my nation but even more than that, as the name indicates, independence.

It marks the date of publication for the Declaration of Independence, a document that begins memorably by naming three “unalienable” rights: Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Independence meant, according to those who penned this document and the 56 men who signed it, the ability to exercise these “self-evident” rights.

Almost half the Declaration is a laundry list of grievances against the British Empire, the authors’ justification for declaring their freedom from what they described as “an absolute Tyranny over these states.” Each of those grievances, these men felt, denied them one or more of those three basic rights they spelled out in their introduction.

They made their case to the world in this document, published on July 4, 1776.

This happened before the adoption of the Constitution, which wouldn’t even be drafted until more than a decade later. It happened long before two major parties came to dominate the nation’s politics. It was before the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, before greenbacks and the Red Scare, before the “liberal media” and “conservative talk radio.”

The Declaration’s authors were writing on a clean slate, and the first three principles they highlighted were Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Philosophically, everything else the nation, and we as citizens of that nation, stand for rests on that – even the Constitution. Whereas the list of grievances in the Declaration set forth the founders’ ideas of what freedom wasn’t, the Bill of Rights laid out what they thought it was: specific rights to such things as a public trial, free assembly and expression, freedom from the establishment of religion by law, and so on. But again, all were based on those three self-evident, founding principles set forth in the Declaration.

If we interpret the Constitution in such a way that infringes upon Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, we may not be breaking the letter of the law, but we’re violating its spirit. Its inspiration.

As an author, I can tell you that, without inspiration, there would be no story, let alone a happy ending.

Independence was meant to be not only the beginning for these United States, but the mechanism by which we endured from one happy ending to the next. Not just independence as a nation, but independence as people.

The grievances in the Declaration might be summed up in the simple, defiant statement, “No one’s going to tell us (or U.S.) what to do.”

That’s why the Fourth of July is more than a celebration of our nation’s independence. It’s an affirmation of our independence as individuals, of our freedom to assert those three unalienable rights.

We can’t do that without independence of thought, without the willingness to stay off the bandwagon. The willingness to question the dogmatism of our politicians, religious leaders, buzzwords, sound bites and ad campaigns – those professed “truths” that seek to pass themselves off as self-evident when they may not even be true at all.

We can argue until we’re red, white and blue in the face - wrapping ourselves in the language of patriotism as much as we want - over how to interpret the Constitution.

But unless our interpretation upholds those three unalienable rights that undergird the Declaration, we do ourselves and our country a grave disservice.

That may not be a matter of law, but it’s essential to spirit.

The spirit of 1776.  

Same-sex marriage: Traditional values are no longer an exclusive club

Justice Antonin Scalia is right.

"One would think Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage. Ask the nearest hippie," Scalia wrote in his dissent to Friday's announced 5-4 decision overturning same-sex marriage bans nationwide.

What Scalia did was identify marriage as a conservative value. A family value. And he acknowledged that Friday's ruling gave same-sex couples the right to participate in that conservative institution. What self-described conservatives against same-sex marriage won't like about the court's latest ruling is that people they perceive as "the other" have been given the freedom Friday to become part of "their" tribe - as if marriage were somehow exclusively theirs. That's not conservatism, it's elitism.

Opponents of same-sex marriage don't tend to like the "hippies" Scalia ironically quoted as authoritative in this matter, viewing them as promiscuous, irresponsible, pot-smoking layabouts. That is, of course, a grossly unfair stereotype, but it's one that has persisted in right-wing circles for decades. And that's the point: Some self-described hippies don't smoke pot, some are extremely responsible and socially active, and some are just as committed to the idea of monogamy as those who are likely to vote for Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum or Mike Huckabee.

For decades, gays and lesbians were forced to undergo the indignity of whispered exchanges and secret rendezvous in bathhouses or highway rest stops. Like anyone else, they had a strong drive to experience sexual intimacy, but they were forced to pursue that intimacy in settings that encouraged "one-night stands" or what society would label "promiscuous behavior." Society at large came to view promiscuity as a natural part of the gay experience, when in fact it was just the opposite: Gay and lesbian individuals had to settle for such behavior because they couldn't speak openly, court openly, develop long-term intimate partnerships openly. Sure, some enjoyed having multiple partners - just as some "straight" individuals do.

The point is that promiscuity wasn't some kind of "side effect" of being gay, it was a situation enforced upon the gay and lesbian community by a then-majority view of people who "didn't want to see that put in their face." Then, because same-sex partners went underground with their relationships - out of necessity - the members of that same majority mocked them: "See, we told you so! They're a bunch of promiscuous bed-hoppers." Talk about a no-win situation.

What the Supreme Court did Friday ended that. It validated that everyone in the United States has the right to embrace a conservative tradition, regardless of what the self-described conservative "elite" would prefer. Folks with similar views tried to keep African-Americans from eating at certain establishments - and thereby participating in another conservative institution: capitalism.

The opposition to gay marriage, like the opposition to racial equality, isn't about defending conservative principles, it's about keeping others from exercising those principles themselves. Justice Scalia's words Friday ripped the pretense off that motivation and exposed it for the world to see. He also exposed it as the constitutional affront such opposition embodies: a brazen reassertion of the long-discredited "separate but equal" doctrine. 

Most courts across the country had already recognized this. Now, it's writ large for the nation to see in Scalia's own dissent.

Thank you, Mr. Scalia, for showing your true colors. And thank you, Justice Kennedy, for allowing the rest of us to show ours.

Sincerely, a monogamous, straight, white male ally 

How a Notebook Changed My Perspective on Bullying

A couple of years back, I wrote a book titled Undefeated to illustrate a simple principle: that the abuse of power is wrong. Period. No one person or group has a monopoly on cruelty, and those who dole out abuse in one culture or time period might wind up on the receiving end of abuse under different circumstances.

I learned that lesson early.

When I was a child, I was bullied. They say middle school (aka junior high) is hell, and I can attest to that. But, to be candid, there was a time when I was a bit of a bully myself. In sixth grade, some "friends" and I started giving another friend a "hard time" by knocking his notebook out of his hands when he was walking down the corridor to his next class. It was all in fun, supposedly. That's what I told myself to justify it. In reality, it was vicious and cruel.

Then, one day, everything turned on its head, and for some reason I became the target. Suddenly, it wasn't so much fun anymore.

Initially, I took it as a challenge. I'd outsmart them. I asked my parents to take me to the store and buy a "bully-proof" notebook. I thought I'd found one: one with a zipper to keep everything safely inside so that, the next time they knocked it out of my hands, none of my homework would come spilling out onto the pavement.

Except it did. Because the first time they knocked that slick new forest-green, zippered notebook out of my hands, they picked it up off the concrete, unzipped it and proceeded to shake out the contents until they were strewn all across the canopied corridor of A.E. Wright Middle School. Game, set and match. I was beaten. And to this day I remember how I felt when it happened: utterly defeated.

It wasn't because of anything I'd done (unless you believe in karma). The reason they knocked that notebook out of my hands wasn't because of who I was or what I'd done; it was because of who they were - and who I'd been when I did the same thing to the other kid in the first place. Mean. Selfish. Brazen. Willing to rationalize doing something hurtful by saying we were "giving someone a hard time"  or that it was all just "good, clean fun." It may have been fun for the notebook-knockers, but it wasn't fun for the person on the receiving end. It wasn't clean, and it certainly wasn't good for anyone.

There wasn't anything special about me or the other kid who wound up on the receiving end of these "pranks." We weren't minorities in any sense of the word; we weren't bad kids or layabouts or troublemakers. We were just there. A couple of years later, after I'd put on a bit of weight, some of the bullies took to calling me the "great white whale." It seems I had committed an unpardonable sin by being out of shape and pale as a scoop of vanilla ice cream (my Danish ancestry) in sunny, surf-obsessed Southern California. But that was just an excuse. If it hadn't been that, it would have been something else.

Because it wasn't about me. It was about them.

"It" is never about the victims. It's never about their sexuality, their gender, their race, their religion, their ethnic background or any of that. The bullies would like everyone to believe that it is, because they're under the warped impression that it will justify their abusive behavior. If something is wrong were their targets, it would mean something must be right with them. And this argument, if we accept it, blinds us from realizing that the wrong lies wholly with the perpetrators. 

There's nothing wrong with being gay, straight, bisexual, transgender, cisgender, lesbian, asexual, Asian, Native American, white, Pacific Islander, Aboriginal Australian, black, Indian, Ainu, Inuit, Latino, Norse, Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, an atheist, a polytheist, a woman, a man, a child, a senior citizen, a monotheist, a pantheist, a deist, an agnostic, a Gnostic, a poet, a scientist, an artisan, a cultivator, a merchant, a musician, an author, an engineer, a mathematician, a philosopher, a historian, a teacher, a chef, a healer, an advocate, a tailor ...

There is something terribly wrong with treating anybody as inferior because they belong to any of these groups, any one of which might be on giving or receiving end of abuse. Christians have been persecuted, and they've also been persecutors. So have atheists (remember the Soviet Union?). Name any ethnic group, and chances are they've been on each end of the stick at one time or another during their history. Power can be abused by anyone for any "reason," and the so-called "reasons" are never rational. 

The abuser-victim dynamic can flip in very short order, just as it did with me in middle school, as it did with the Christian church in the fourth century, or as it did with the Soviet Union in the early part of this one. Race, ethnicity, gender, etc. are never more than excuses for abusers to inflict their cruelty - and they're always bad excuses, at that. Regardless of the differences that we use as a foundation to build up barriers, one person's life is intrinsically no more and no less important than anyone else's. Human dignity recognizes none of these barriers and demands to be recognized despite all of them. Anything less is unacceptable.