Asexual Taxonomy – Part Four of Four: Final Thoughts

January 21, 2016January 31, 2016 | briansabey

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I concluded Part Three by asserting that “society does and should take a hand in directing sexuality towards good results and away from bad ones”—but what counts as a “good” result, and how are good results to be encouraged? These are very important questions, but they are not the questions I am dealing with here. I will say only, in passing, that the authority to answer these questions is entrusted primarily to We the People (and not to the Supreme Court).

What I am dealing with here is not sexual morality, but sexuality simply as such: what is it? I have given no complete answer, but I have suggested that sexuality is NOT something that just happens to us. In particular, I have argued that (1) sexual orientation is not an immutable (i.e., unchangeable, inherent) characteristic of our natures, and (2) our culture should not impose on individuals a sexual identity based upon that orientation. Currently, our culture does impose such an identity by attempting to place everyone in one of four “immutable nature” boxes—homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, or asexual. Continue reading →

Questioning the Homo-/Hetero-/Bi-/Asexual Taxonomy – Part Three of Four: The Evidence of Your Personal Experience

January 21, 2016February 1, 2016 | briansabey

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I claimed, at the end of Part One, that “the potentiality for sexual interest in either gender is natural in nearly all people in some degree.” In Part Two I explained my own experience, which bears this out. Here I mean to appeal to more general experiences that I’m sure I share with almost all readers to prove this point. Continue reading →

Resolving gun violence with passionate polemics wont work

December 4, 2015March 10, 2016 | davidsabey

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I am sobered and frustrated by the news of recent shootings, and headlines cacophonic to the carols we sing at this time of year. And although I believe there are conversations to be had about gun control, I am also frustrated with the rhetoric from both sides of the debate because they so often employ alienation. Arguments laced with othering terms like “stupid liberals” and “clueless conservatives” may seem benign, but perpetuate the alienation that is epidemic in our politics and communities, which fertilizes seeds of hatred that eventually sprout in blossoms of bullets. Continue reading →

Freedom to force the artist’s hand

November 23, 2015November 23, 2015 | Adam Balinski

***Adam Balinski is a guest contributor and a friend of Brian’s from BYU Law School. This article was first posted on his blog, rethbo.org. Please visit his blog for more respectful, insightful commentary.***

Some people have jumped on what I think is an incoherent bandwagon that creates crazy consumer rights.

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Under federal law, public accommodations are places where consumers go to receive a service. Consumers can’t be kept out of or denied services at public accommodations because of their sex or other protected attributes. (It’s true that under many anti-discrimination laws, sexual orientation is not a protected attribute. But it should be. It’s fair to allow people to go and buy regardless of how they self-identify.) Continue reading →

Simplistic Sexuality and the Decline of Discourse

November 21, 2015November 21, 2015 | davidsabey

Discourse with Laptops

As a Mormon alumnus of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, two recent events happened to coincide on my Facebook wall, flooding my feed with passionate rhetoric about sexuality and gender normativity: 1. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon) has been the target of much vitriol because of their policy change that explicitly declares members of same-sex marriages to be apostates. Journalists happily report on the thousands of Mormons who have resigned from the church in protest of this policy change. 2. Landon Patterson, the first transgender (from male to female) homecoming queen from a school in Kansas City, spoke at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is being heralded for these cliché, but culturally resonant words: “Be You. Life is too short, and you’ve just got to embrace who you are.”

Here’s my beef: Issues of sexuality and culturally normative practices are complex, but the rhetoric around them is simplistic. Simplistic and passionate. There is nothing wrong with passion or simplicity per se; the problem is that the rhetoric does not correspond with the complexity of the issue itself. Continue reading →

Making Sense of Shooters: a Self Reflection

October 5, 2015October 6, 2015 | joshsabey

High profile shootings have surrounded my hometown. I grew up in Colorado ten minutes from Columbine, fifteen minutes from the Aurora theatre shooting, and then two years ago my little brother was at Arapahoe high school when Karl Pierson attempted another Columbine.

The first article I ever published on this blog dealt with the Arapahoe shooting. In that article I discussed these shootings as a metaphor for a more common problem our society suffers from at large: certitude. But now I believe these shootings may be more than a metaphor but an actual exhibition of this unhealthy mentality prevalent in our society. This certitude is a mental illness but not the kind of issue that can be dismissed by the words “crazy” or “insane.” Rather, it is very familiar and most of us suffer from the same or similar ailments. Continue reading →