brethren priestess online

I have been so PROUD (sarcasm here) of my alma mater - the junior high school one - for all the national news coverage it’s been getting recently.  Why has it made the news?  For such uplifting progress in the eternal battle against hugging.

Yup.  Hugging.

Back in Oak Park, Illinois, Julian Middle School principal Victoria Sharts has banned “extreme hugging,” after long chains of kids hugging each other in the hallways started impeding the orderly procession of students getting to class during passing periods.  It’s not even about banning nonconsensual hugs, which of course are inappropriate.  It’s about limiting how much kids show affection for each other.  Sharts was quoted in Newsweek saying, “We know there are times that hugs are needed and welcomed, but every 40 minutes in the hallway, with large groups of students - then it’s not.”

Now, I am sure it was a big enough problem to warrant a response.  I don’t know all the details.  But don’t kids need more hugs as they group up, especially hugs from each other?

And couldn’t good ole Percy Julian be making news for something a little more inspiring?  Like, say, its talented, world-changing alumni?

So, if you wear a helmet while you bike, drivers are likely to drive closer to your prone body, riding around town at their mercy. If you don’t wear a helmet, your cranium will be crushed if one of those more-distantly-driving cars careens into you.

What are you to do? You’ve got to wear a helmet - who wants to be the doofus that parents warn their kids not to be like? But you certainly wish that drivers would be more respectful and safe. Is there any way to win? - besides giving in and joining the problem, by driving?

Are you a L.K. (Librarian’s Kid), too? Well, then, you need to read this article by Chip Ward, librarian for the Salt Lake City Library System: What They Didn’t Teach Us in Library School: The Public Library as an Asylum for the Homeless.

Although the public may not have caught on, ask any urban library administrator in the nation where the chronically homeless go during the day and he or she will tell you about the struggles of America’s public librarians to cope with their unwanted and unappreciated role as the daytime guardians of the down and out. In our public libraries, the outcasts are inside.

….

Ultimately, the indigent mentally ill are criminalized. If their presence in our libraries is a common and growing problem that we librarians would like the rest of society to be aware of, acknowledge, and commit themselves to helping us solve, here is a secret we would like to keep to ourselves: We are complicit. No matter how conscientiously and compassionately we try to treat our mentally disturbed users — and at the Salt Lake City Public Library we work very hard to be fair, helpful, and tolerant — librarians often have no good choices and, in the end, we just call the cops.

More can be found through National Public Radio (NPR.org), which interviewed Mr. Ward.

- talking about my gay lovers!

(See also the SF Chronicle article about the vigil.)

Back on February 17, I spent the lunch hour standing in vigil of dissent outside the Promised Land Fellowship, a storefront church with tall windows on Market Street downtown San Francisco. I joined about 30 of my GTU classmates, and another dozen community members, in protesting the conference being held at the church, the conference to ‘deprogram’ gay people and train others to do the same.

We lined up along the sidewalk holding signs that read various statements to support/enlighten the conference-goers as they came out for lunch (the only time they could see us, except when they peeked at us out the second-floor window).

“God loves gays.”
“God loves me just the way I am.”
“Anti-gay Therapy killed my friend.”
“I am openly Christian and openly gay.”

We got lots of support (and some confused comments) from folks on the street.

One of the most interesting points of the event was the debate a few of the folks around me got into with the pastor and members of the church who came out to confront us (calmly). When we explained that we were a silent vigil, one of the church pastors then scoffed, ‘Oh, I see, you just want a monologue.’ (Which is odd to say to the folks coming out to offer a countering voice to the monologue of the conference you are hosting.) A few folks eventually offered to talk with him.  Mostly the same old arguments, but a few had a new spin.

They kept returning to the point that they are not just about changing homosexuals around, but that they are about helping anyone struggling with their ‘brokenness.’ So we kept saying that we agree that all people are flawed, but that homosexuality is not one of the flaws; yes, we are all broken in some sense, but homosexuality is not brokenness.

The pastor also had an interesting spin on that whole Jesus not saying anything about homosexuality business, and what that implies for our ethical process. He said that, just because Jesus never said anything about homosexuality, doesn’t mean he wasn’t against it, because, I mean, come on, silly protestors, Jesus didn’t say anything about child porn but we know he’d be against that, too! Which seems like the wrong path for their side of the argument to turn down, because that opens us up to claiming a base for our ethical decision-making somewhere other than the Bible, and that little verse in Leviticus is really the only thing the homophobes have to support them (and that ain’t much).

The saddest part was seeing these folks spouting the same hateful rhetoric, sinsinsinsin, when it is themselves they are castigating. They have internalized the mantras (‘Bible says gay bad Bible says gay bad Bible says gay bad’) that everyone else falls back on. However, these folks are not acting out of ignorance of not knowing anyone who is gay, but out of ignoring their own lives’ teachings, out of ignoring God working through them just how they are.  Sad.  My prayers are with them.

I am still not fond of this random earthquake business.