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
There is reason to doubt the veracity of our current taxonomy of sexualities: a person (we think) is by nature homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, or asexual. Admittedly, this system has an intuitive appeal: there are two genders (basically); one may be attracted to one, the other, both, or neither. There are no other possibilities. This satisfying quality of logical completeness is misleading, however.
The first and most important piece of evidence against our system is that people never thought of sexuality in this way prior to the 19th century. Continue reading
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
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
***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.
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
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 Brothers Sabey 