Society

Radical Education Reform: Exhibit A

| davidsabey

education football 2.png

This post, a follow up to my previous “opening remarks,” has been a long time coming, but I found myself thinking about the NCAA football championship game, and realized I had stumbled upon “Exhibit A.” Saying that I was thinking about the football game may be misleading: I didn’t know which teams were actually playing, or when the game was until I googled it a few days before it happened. Obviously, I am not really a football fan, but I am generally aware of my alma mater’s team (BYU), and I occasionally watch a game, but I usually stop caring about football when BYU is no longer playing, which tends to be rather early in the post-season schedule. Furthermore, I have never played organized football, but I do participate in “turkey bowls” and other recreational games, although I sometimes wish that we’d play soccer or ultimate frisbee instead. Continue reading →

Resolving gun violence with passionate polemics wont work

| davidsabey

bridge-path-straight-wooden

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

| 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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An uncontroversial wedding cake that the baker could’ve declined to decorate for dislike of flowers or the color pink. photo by tracyhunter

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

| 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 →

The privatization of privacy

| joshsabey

coed

In Illinois there has been a much publicized court case regarding a transgender female (physically male) student who is suing the school for limiting her access to the women’s dressing room. I have no doubt that many more cases like this one will soon be appearing in courts across the country. As I considered the case, I began Continue reading →

To my one-year-old daughter: Thoughts on Body Image and Beauty

| diadarcey

11960092_4308339073677_2314436844244038233_nMy daughter, you are no longer a baby. This is impossible to me. You are more than a year old right now and I marvel at how big you’re getting. You were trying to stand in an ice cream bucket the other day—giggling as it fell over again and again—an ice cream bucket that we could bathe you in when you were just born. Your growing feet and toes are the foundation for the past miracles of standing and your first, tottering steps—and now for running, jumping, climbing the stairs at the playground outside, and the endless enjoyment as we play “this little piggy” while you sit (and sit, and sit, and waaait) on the potty. Your increased size is paralleled by increased ability and comprehension. Dad and I are amazed every time you show some new understanding: a new sign, a new animal sound, a new mimicry. The other day I told you in pre-dinner end-of-day frustration, “I’m tired, too, but soon Daddy will be home and then we can bug HIM.” You looked at me seriously… and then signed “bug” (as in insect).

I’ve experienced the double blessing of watching myself grow next to you. People joke, “She’s getting so big! And so is Alsina!” Oh ha ha. I’m eight months plus two weeks pregnant, and things have definitely changed dramatically. Moving my bulk around is a huge commitment, and sometimes I wake up at two am half off the bed—having, apparently, decided halfway that it wasn’t worth the effort of getting all the way up to go to the bathroom. It’s not just a big belly added on to the front of my normal frame, either: I can’t even get pre-pregnancy pants up around my ankles, much less my now-herculean thighs, and pre-pregnancy blouses have the same issue around burgeoning… other places.

Why does “getting big” suddenly become a curse as we grow older? Continue reading →