srparedon – editorials (archive)

December 2007

The Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) is infamous for their anti-gay vitriol. At pride rallies, legislative hearings, and cultural events, WBC members — often led by Westboro’s founder Fred Phelps — have protested any and all things gay, carrying placards proclaiming “God Hates Fags” and similar, designed-to-offend slogans.

Phelps and the WBC (whose members are almost all Phelps’s children and extended family) garnered national attention after picketing the funeral of Matthew Shepard, a gay man brutally murdered in Wyoming in 1998. Picket signs then read, “Matt Shepard Rots in Hell.”

And most recently, the WBC… Continue reading →

November 2007

All 50 states now have sex-offender registries (SORs), agencies with multi-million dollar budgets mandated to track every move of “sexually dangerous persons” and “sexual predators.” Though created only in the last few years, SORs have been retroactively registering those convicted of sex crimes decades earlier, people who had served their time and thought they were now free. And the U.S. Supreme has okayed SOR legislation permitting lifetime incarceration of people who aren’t serving time for any conviction, but who are deemed to have a “personality abnormality” that makes them likely to become a “sex offender.”

 … Continue reading →

October 2007

Read the gay community’s responses to news of U.S. Sen. Larry Craig’s arrest in a Minneapolis airport toilet and you will find three levels of political understanding.

First, there are those gleeful that a politician who has opposed measures to outlaw anti-gay discrimination as well as gay marriage was himself evidently caught looking for man-on-man sex. As with the similar “scandals” involving Ted Haggard and Mark Foley, it is indeed tempting to take pleasure at the unmasking of evident hypocrisy. But hypocrisy amongst politicians is hardly news, and sanctimonious gay clucking does not change the… Continue reading →

September 2007

The last few decades of American presidential politics sorely test those eager to find an arc of social progress in history’s unfolding.

In 1972, candidates debated a guaranteed national income; in today’s new über-Gilded Age, concerns of the poor are rarely even mentioned in national policy discussions.

In 1978, sitting President Jimmy Carter could — and did — urge decriminalization of marijuana; today, candidates vie for who can sound toughest and endorse ever-harsher penalties for all drug “crimes.”

And while JFK could enjoy White House sexual dalliances confident that his sex life… Continue reading →

August 2007

Upon taking the oath of office after the resignation of the disgraced Richard Nixon, President Ford assured a Watergate-weary nation, “our long national nightmare is over.” Unfortunately, our next president, saddled with Bush’s on-going calamities abroad and at home, will not be able to offer such easy reassurances. Nixon’s subversion of the Constitution seems petty compared to Bush’s thuggish despotism. Indeed, it seems inevitable that many aspects of the Bush nightmare will long remain American realities.

We can hope, though, that the next administration will shed the mendacious fear-mongering that has so poisoned the recent… Continue reading →

July 2007

What do we mean when we say that someone is gay or that someone is straight?

The popular model of sexuality contends that sexuality is

· generally binary (either one is straight or gay, with few truly indeterminate “bisexuals”)

· determined early in life (perhaps even genetically coded)

· immutable.

Most modern scientists, jurists, and even philosophers embrace a view of sexuality wherein the population can be divided into heterosexuals and homosexuals (and a very few bisexuals). While the relative sizes of these categories might be debated, the prevailing model holds that individuals end… Continue reading →