Today (3/25/10) the Pentagon announced what it calls a “more humane” way of enforcing the military’s “don’t ask/don’t tell” policy. That makes GLBTs sound like animals that are being put down. And I guess, in a way, that’s exactly what’s happening to those who are kicked out of the military for being gay. These individuals— these American citizens who simply want to serve their country— lose their retirement plans, their careers, possibly their homes and even families (some are probably not out to their own families) because some American’s have a problem with people who are gay. While this is being hailed by some GLBT groups as a step forward, the question still remains why is the rule necessary at all?

Originally, the ban on gays in the military was put into place because it was considered a security risk. And it probably was because back in those days, being gay was viewed as a mental illness. But times changed and in 1973, homosexuality was removed from the list of mental illnesses in the DSM (the “bible” of psychiatry/psychology). Thereafter, the ban on gays in the military should have been withdrawn. But it wasn’t. And part of the logic that the military used was that gays could be blackmailed for being in the military because gays were banned from the military. In other words, they used the ban to justify the ban!

Then in 1993, President Clinton signed DADT into law. It essentially said that GLBTs could serve in the military unless they engaged in homosexual activity. Officers could not ask about a service member’s orientation unless there was some reason, such as someone seeing him/her engaged in homosexual activity or hearing him/her making statements about being gay, etc.

Now, during the hearings regarding whether to implement DADT, Dr. Gregory M. Herek testified before Congress on behalf of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the National Association of Social Workers, the American Counseling Association, the American Nursing Association and the Sex Information and Education Council of America. In his testimony, he stated:

My written testimony to the Committee summarizes the results of an extensive review of the relevant published research from the social and behavioral sciences. That review is lengthy. However, I can summarize its conclusions in a few words: The research data show that there is nothing about lesbians and gay men that makes them inherently unfit for military service, and there is nothing about heterosexuals that makes them inherently unable to work and live with gay people in close quarters.

Yet despite the expert witnesses, the justification used in passing DADT was that homosexual activity would “create an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability.” (Source)

Let’s think about this for a minute.  We know that gays were serving in the military when it was legally forbidden that they do so. We know they’re serving in the military now under DADT. We just don’t know who they are. Now, the justification for implementing DADT was that allowing gays to be among the troops threatened moral and unit cohesion, presumably because some heterosexual service members would be worrying if their gay comrades were scoping them out in the communal showers or some such nonsense. So rather that allow gays to openly serve, thereby alerting those homophobic service members who not to shower with, they REQUIRE gays to not tell anyone that they’re gay so now these homophobic service members have to think that maybe ALL their comrades are gay! Now that’s a recipe for unit cohesion and good morale, huh? Don’t trust ANY of your fellow service members! Once again, the military is using the ban to justify the ban! They’re creating their own problem!

There is no logical, medical or military justification for not allowing gays to openly serve in the military. The only reason that DADT still exists is ignorance, prejudice and bigotry and we need to stop allowing those negative influences to continue to write our laws.

A little bit of “background” before I get to the main point of this post. The purpose of laws is to protect the right of each and every individual to live his/her life as s/he sees fit. That’s what “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” means. When people get together to form a society, if they all don’t choose to respect that right in everyone else, then governments create laws that either “compel” compliance (which they can’t really do) or gives society a means to remove the non-compliant member from society until such time as they are willing to respect everyone’s right to live as they see fit. In other words, the purpose of going to jail is not to punish but to rehabilitate, which is best done through education as to why it’s desirable to respect another’s right to live as s/he sees fit.

I’m aware that the legal system in this country is so messed up that it’s going to take a major concerted effort to change it. And right now, the entire country is so hell-bent on “revenge” and “retribution” and “eye for an eye” that it’s highly unlikely anyone would propose such a change. But here is a good example of why such changes are needed.

A man was convicted of killing another man in Montana. He was originally sentenced to hang after a rather quick trial in which issues were raised regarding the death penalty and  “frontier justice”. His sentence was changed to life in prison and after serving 15 years, he was released on parole. He apparently reported to his parole officer for three years and then simply vanished.

Just recently, this man was recaptured. In Arizona. Running a wedding chapel. He’d been living there for quite a while and had “blended into local society and even cultivated friendships with previous county sheriffs.” There’s no mention in the news story about any further scrapes with the law that this man might have had. And granted, he might be on the run from all kinds of other crimes in other states. But given the penchant for the news media to publish all the dirt about everyone they can, no matter how irrelevant it might be, given that there is no mention of further criminal history, it seems reasonable to assume it doesn’t exist.

So I ask, what’s the sense in putting this man back in jail? So he violated parole. But only after three years of staying out of trouble. And it appears he continued to stay out of trouble.  Even became a contributing member of society. An apparently law abiding one. Therefore, one can say that he has been rehabilitated! So what purpose is it going to serve to stick a 78 year old man in jail after 38 years on the run for simple parole violation?

I was on one of the social networking sites tonight and there’s one of those “copy and paste this if you agree with it” type messages circulating about the health care bill. It goes something like this:

The health care bill was written by a committee whose chairman said he didn’t understand the bill, passed by a Congress who exempted itself from it, signed by a president who smokes, underwritten by the treasury department whose head didn’t file his taxes, supported by a surgeon general who is obese and financed by a country that is broke.

OK. Let’s examine this for a sec.

First, it’s okay if the chairman of the committee doesn’t understand the whole bill. That’s what he’s got staff for. To actually study what is being written and tell the congressman whether or not he should vote for the bill. Our elected officials can’t be geniuses about every subject. They don’t have time to read every bill. (Hell, the Republican Congress under the Bush-Cheney regime passed the 700 page “Patriot” Act within six weeks of 9/11. Now how did they even have TIME to write a 700 page bill in less than six weeks let along read it and debate it? It passed on pure fear: everyone was afraid to vote against it for fear of looking like they were “unpatriotic” when the bill is the worst piece of legislation ever passed and places limitations on the freedoms we’re guaranteed in the Constitution.)

Congress exempted itself from the health care bill not because they thought it was a bad bill but because they have had for years some of the best health care available anywhere. Their plan is a lot better than what we can get. They don’t pay social security either because their retirement plan is much better as well. It has nothing to do with whether or not the health care bill is a good one. NOTHING would be as good as what they have now.

Yes, the president smokes. He’s trying to quit. But you know what? There’s a lot of doctors and nurses who smoke too. They know better than most the dangers of smoking and yet they continue to smoke. Does that mean their doctoring skills are in question? Absolutely not.

As for the treasury department head not filing taxes, well, in the end, it comes back to him, but many people who are in positions of power or importance or just plain famous have accountants to handle routine matters like taxes. Maybe his accountant forgot or maybe he switched accountants and forgot to about his taxes. Whatever the reason, he’s paying them now. And whether or not he has paid his taxes has nothing to do with whether it’s a good health care bill or not!

The surgeon general’s weight. Seems to me C. Everett Koop was overweight too but his weight was never mentioned. It’s the old double standard: men can be overweight (look at some of the newscasters and weathermen on television stations) but women cannot. When was the last time you saw an overweight female reporter or weatherman? And you know what? Her weight has nothing to do with the bill either!

As for this country being broke, you can thank the Republicans for that. Reagan more than tripled our national debt in his stay in office with his “trickle down” economics. Bush Sr. continued the trend. Clinton at least passed a balanced budget and then Bush Jr. gets into office and gets us involved in an illegal invasion of a foreign nation that costs us billions of dollars a day to just keep the status quo let alone try to win the damn war! And guess who is REALLY profiting from this war? Dick Cheney and Haliburton. Gee. Imagine that.

I’m so tired of the fear-mongering being put out by the right wing pundits. (Hopefully, if Limbaugh keeps his promise, there will be one less when he leaves the country.) I don’t know as much about the health care bill as I should. But I do know that NONE of the stuff in the above “message” has any relevance whatsoever to whether or not it’s a good bill. But it sure does inflame the emotions when you first read it and that’s what it’s meant to do. It’s meant to make you act on emotional impulse than logical reasoning. It’s meant to make you behave in a certain way. It’s meant to control you and your emotional state of mind. To get you to act with mob mentality rather than think for yourself. It’s meant to imply that you can’t think for yourself so they have to do it for you and trick you into agreeing with them with all their talk of “death panels”, etc.

So are you gonna fall for it or are you gonna think for yourself?

We’ve all heard the saying that kids can be cruel. They call each other names, they taunt those who are different from them, they laugh at those who are too short or too fat or have too many pimples or whose parents are gay or…

The cruelty of kids is “rising” to new heights— or sinking to new lows, depending on how you look at it. Kids are taking to bullying other kids on the computer. Cyberbullying, it’s been dubbed in the media. It’s when a kid or group of kids gets on the victim’s social networking page and leaves post after post demeaning the victim. Getting other people to post and demean them as well. It’s mob mentality in the cyberworld and it’s costing kids their lives.

Perhaps the most famous case of cyberbullying was the mother who allegedly created a false persona of a young man to get a young girl to become interested in him so that she could publicly humiliate the victim online. Apparently there was some bad feelings between the woman’s daughter and the victim. But the victim ended up taking her own life. This case led to many laws that prohibit cyberbullying but there are those who argue that these laws are impinging on an individual’s right to freedom of speech.

Cyberbullying has led to other deaths as well. But the question that needs answered is why do kids bully other kids? And, in my humble opinion, the answer is because they learn that such behavior is acceptable and even often rewarded.

The “rewards” are the laughs of their peers or the smiles of their parents or the chuckles of strangers when they make a joke about someone being fat or gay or short. And when one peer laughs, they all laugh so as to not feel left out or “different” because they just witnessed someone who is different being made fun of by others.

These kids here their parents or their friends’ parents talking in derogatory terms about someone of a different race. They hear them talking about how they’d like to smash someone’s face in or how they’d like to see their “enemy” get what’s coming to them. They see them reading “newspapers” that specialize in embarrassing celebrities and they learn there’s good money to be made from that— another reward.

Kids learn that it’s an “us or them” world and that in order to succeed, they need to, at least metaphorically, snuff out the thems. And once they start, they see how other kids defer to them. They see how they’re not questioned or not challenged and to a child, who often feels so helpless in the world, there is a sense of security and safety in knowing that others are not challenging them. So they may up the ante and actually get into physical intimidation.

The crux of the whole problem is the self-esteem of the child. Unfortunately, it takes someone with positive self-esteem to teach a child how to develop positive self-esteem and far too many adults in this world don’t have a positive self-esteem. They may have a  good ego, but that’s not the same as positive self-esteem. In fact, in many cases, what’s good for the ego is bad for the self-esteem. For example, do you feel flattered when someone gives you a cheesy pick-up line? It may boost your ego, but it’s telling your self-esteem that this person says you’re cheap and easy and willing to sleep with whomever flatters your ego.

Until we recognize our own complicity in the cyberbullying and bullying in the real world as well, we’re not going to solve the problem.

There’s still a lot of debate over what the second amendment of the US Constitution means with respect to gun ownership. I’m of the opinion that the 2nd Amendment allowed for the formation of armed citizen militias because one of the issues presented in the Declaration of Independence was the billeting of soldiers in the homes of private citizens without their consent. I don’t believe that the founding fathers ever intended for citizens to be privately armed (except for perhaps a hunting rifle) and they certainly never foresaw a period of time when guns would shoot bullets at more than 10-20 per sec as some automatic weapons do. But that is neither here nor there.

I’m a strong advocate of banning handguns because the purpose of a handgun is simply to shoot another human being. (I know, you can frighten them without shooting or target practice, etc. but when it comes right down to it, if you’re using it for protection, you’re willing to shoot another human being.)

Far too many people say that “Guns don’t kill people: people kill people.” Yes, people kill people using guns. Guns make it far easier to shoot and/or kill someone. You don’t have to deal with them struggling. You don’t have to see their eyes. You don’t even have to see them in some cases. You just pull the trigger and the bullets come flying.

I want someone who supports owning personal guns to demonstrate for me how 8 teenage boys could have ended up in the hospital with the kinds of wounds they had if personal handgun ownership were banned and the shooter had to use a knife or his bare hands. Yeah, I know, the supporters are going to say if they were allowed to carry a concealed weapon, they’d have shot the shooter dead before he killed or shot someone else. It’s not as easy to shoot someone as you think (ask any cop whose been trained to shoot to kill and has actually had to do it). And carrying a concealed weapon only works if a) you’re nearby b) you can see what’s happening and who’s shooting in the chaos c) that you can think clearly in a crisis situation and d) you’re not too terrified for your own safety that you don’t dive for cover and forget you have your concealed weapon.

The simple fact of the matter is that these 8 teenage boys would probably not be lying in a hospital if handgun ownership were banned or at least much more tightly controlled.

OK. This ticks me off. I was just looking at my Hubpages profile because I updated some info and underneath my profile pic I see an ad that says “Do You Want Men Dressed as Women Teaching Your Kids?” (In the ad as seen on my browser, the words I have in bold are actually in yellow print.) Beneath this question is a yellow bar with the words “Learn More” written inside. Down in the bottom, in small print, almost invisible because of the background picture are the words “Paid for by Traditional Values Coalition”.

Well, that answered the question that popped into my mind as soon as I read it: what ignorant ass created this ad? (Yes, I know I shouldn’t call other people names.) TVS is another organization in the radical religious right who believes that supporting and condoning religious bigotry, exclusiveness and discrimination is part of the same message of “Love your neighbor as yourself” that Jesus taught during his time on earth.

I’ve yet to find an organization or spokesperson for the radical religious right who is not a hypocrite and my research has been quite extensive. Right after the 2004 elections, I created a website called “Exposed! Unmasking the Agenda of the Radical Religious Right” that was extensively researched and has literally thousands of links on it to articles demonstrating the fact that the religious right is out to dismantle the US Constitution. Their goal as they stated it is to make this a Christian nation and you cannot do that as long as the Constitution is in effect. So they have no option but to dismantle it and they’re slowly doing their best to do just that.

Of course, the TVC doesn’t understand transgenderism anymore than they understand homosexuality, so their ads will demonstrate their ignorance of the topics. But of all the ads to show up on the profile page of an out bisexual omnidenominational minister, this has got to be the most ironic, not to mention irritating. But it did inspire me to write another post so I guess it can’t be all bad.

Children are very much like the subconscious mind: they take in everything around them as fact and build or change their internal views based on these facts. They don’t understand sarcasm or humor very well and so humorous insults are taken as fact. The more they hear something, the stronger they believe it.

As time marches on, children change how they perceive the world, but the subconscious doesn’t. And if you’re not aware of how the subconscious perceives the world, then chances are your view of the world is going to be strongly influenced by the subconscious facts you learned as a child.

Every time someone calls a child a brat, that child’s subconscious stores it as fact. And that child’s self-esteem, once they learn what a brat is, is eroded a little bit for every time they were called a brat. (Or any other derogatory name for that matter.)

Some parents tell their children what good boys or girls they are when they do something nice or helpful or well, thinking they’re helping the child’s self-esteem. But the problem is that when the parent doesn’t say “Oh, you’re such a good boy/girl” when the child does something that’s NOT nice or helpful or well, then the child thinks that they’re bad and they get conflicting messages about themselves.

Rather than tell the child that s/he is good, make the distinction between the child and his/her actions. “What you did was very nice!” “What you did was so helpful!” This allows you to correct a child’s behavior without making the child feel that s/he is bad. “What you did was mean and hurt my feelings!” That way the child learns that s/he is more than just the sum of all his/her actions. They can change how they act, but it’s much harder to change their core personality.

A child’s self-esteem will fluctuate as the child grows up. When they go through puberty and all the physical changes start to happen in their body, most kids’ self-esteem goes down because they feel awkward in their own bodies. If they’re “different” in any way from their peers, their self-esteem may go down. They may be heavier or shorter or taller or skinnier or have more acne or too many freckles or have a lisp…the list is virtually endless. This is often true of minority children as well since, by definition, they are different than the majority. Television and the movies have been slow in portraying healthy role models and healthy relationships involving minority individuals and families.

Many gay children have low self-esteem because of the messages sent to them by society that simply being gay is wrong or disgusting or sick. There are very few healthy gay role models for kids (although those are increasing) and very few healthy gay relationships portrayed on television or in the movies (again, this is changing slowly.)

One of the most damaging things parents do for their kids in today’s society is to try to “fix” everything for their kids. They’re not trying to do any harm to their children, but the message the kids get is “You can’t fix anything yourself. I have to fix it for you because you’re incompetent.”

It also prevents kids from learning to think on their feet. To think outside the box. It slows the development of their critical thinking skills because there is no need to think critically if mom or dad will fix anything that goes wrong.

Additionally, when mom/dad fixes all their problems, it often means that the child doesn’t get to feel disappointment or hurt feelings. I remember when my youngest son was in kindergarten, I asked his teacher to put invitations to his birthday party in the backpacks of the kids he wanted to invite when the kids weren’t looking. I couldn’t afford a birthday party for the entire class and I was new to the area and didn’t know the parents of my son’s classmates. Well, I got a scathing call from mother of a child who was not invited saying that her son was so upset not to be invited. He’d overheard the other kids talking at school about the party and she was so angry that her son was excluded. I told her that even if I had mailed the invitations, her son wouldn’t have received one  and he’d have still heard about the party at school and he’d still have been upset. This mother wasn’t doing her son any favors by not allowing her son to feel disappointment. We have almost an entire generation of kids who don’t know how to deal with negative emotions because their parents tried to make sure they never felt any negative emotions.

Another way to help your child improve his/her self-esteem is to admit your mistakes. Show your child it’s okay to make mistakes and that making mistakes doesn’t’ make you a bad person. Show them how to not take themselves so seriously all the time.

Children are born with wonderful self-esteem. They think they’re always right and they think that they’re so important that the world revolves around them. Over the years, that self-esteem is slowly torn down, often by well-meaning parents and a society that stresses conformity yet often rewards uniqueness. Rebuilding self-esteem is much harder than helping to build and maintain a healthy self-esteem the first time around.

These are guaranteed to work.  Check out the link. It may be easier to read it if you highlight it with your mouse. The background is a bit busy.

A young Muslim girl working for a popular clothing store in San Francisco was recently terminated because the corporate office said that the wearing of a hijab, or head scarf, did not fit the company image. Yet for six months, the girl was “allowed” to wear the hijab at long as it matched the store’s color theme.

Now, let’s examine this. The store’s parent company is Abercrombie and Fitch. Their “image” is bordering on soft porn and their ads have in the past been pulled because of their overt sexuality and the apparent young age of the models in the ads. A&F has already been sued for discrimination against minorities and has paid out more than $50 million in settlements.

But here’s the real kicker for me. The girl works in the stockroom. Mind you, I’m not putting down people who work in stockrooms. But she has very little interaction with the public— which is totally irrelevant except that it undermines corporates claims about “image” since the girl is hardly ever seen by anyone and therefore can have very little impact on the “image” of the store!

I hope this girl sues the pants off the corporate big wigs and wins. And let’s all stop buying A&F products as long as they continue to discriminate.

It seems in some areas, budget shortfalls for fire departments are being made up for by billing victims of automobile crashes and house fires for the services rendered to them by fire departments. One family received an itemized bill for the hours worked by the firefighters and for use of the firetrucks, totaling almost $28,000.

Some departments charge per minute for the use of the trucks. How is a victim of a fire or accident to know how many minutes a truck was at their home when they’re watching it go up in smoke.  Where is the accountability? More importantly, where is the humanity? Can you imagine a parent receiving a bill for an extrication fee for their child that later died from the accident? Some states have already banned the practice of charging for services from police and fire departments, but most have not.

Many fire departments who engage in this practice don’t actually do the billing themselves. They contract with a bill collection service who writes up the bill and takes a cut of any monies received. One such billing service justifies these fees saying that house fires are ecological disasters and that the person responsible should be charged, not all taxpayers. And how do you determine who is to blame? What if it was a lightning fire? Or a forest fire of unknown causes? What if it was arson and police never find the arsonist? Should the homeowner still be forced to pay?  What isn’t said is that the billing company gets a percentage of what they bring in, so inflating the costs only lines their pockets with more money.

This really hit home for me because just about two years ago, five volunteer fire companies spent about five hours putting out a fire that destroyed our home and took the lives of our eight cats. If I had received a bill less than a month later for the kind of charges those in this story had received, I’d have had a mental break down. It was hard enough losing almost everything you’d ever owned, losing eight dearly loved pets and having your child escape certain death by a matter of two seconds. But to then be charged for the services?

I get that in hard economic times, volunteer fire departments, who rely on donations and grants and gifts to meet their budgets, may have budget shortfalls. But there are other ways of innovative fundraising that won’t cause such negative reaction not only from the victims but from the community in general.

When people hear stories like this, they often get angry because it feels like you’re kicking someone when they’re down. It’s bad publicity for the fire department and does nothing to foster community good will. It may, in fact, work against the fire department in the long run. People may start to ask “Why should I donate to the fire department if they’re going to charge me/my insurance company for their services anyway?”

I hope this trend stops or that all states ban the practice.