Admittedly, I'm feeling better tonight than I have been in the past few days. Which isn't to say that I'm bubbling over with mirth (I doubt I'd be that joyous even if I sold a story -- still waiting on those rejections from Playboy and Ideomancer...), but I'm not as down as I was this time last night. (more...)

In hindsight, I'm thinking I should've called that last post "mein kampf". 🙂

Wendy writes some of her thoughts on "race" in response to my previous post (click there or scroll down, as necessary), so read those first if you haven't already. While hopefully this post would be an interesting and illuminating solo read, I write it with intent to clarify the views I put forward in last night's offering. It seems that I've already been misunderstood in one instance, so I'm worried that the anecdotal elements confound my point (which is often the case with arguments). Hence the clarificatory entry. (more...)

Well, this one's a pretty long and disjointed piece -- try to follow along. Took me a while to write, and you're missing out on a handful of anecdotes that I wrote down and excised from the version below. The essay's an odd mix of anecdotes and commentary, so hopefully the pound breaks will be helpful. Suffice it to say that if you understand even half of this essay -- particularly the latter half -- you'll know me better than my own mother ever will.

Here we go. (more...)

I'm still feeling a little drained, and I'm not sure I have a ton to say about the subject, but here goes.

Contrary to what some people have argued, I have no doubt whatsoever that the words of the Bible explicitly disapprove of homosexual relations -- and Judaism and Christianity are clearly not the only religions that view homosexuality as sinful in nature.

However, the topic of gay marriage is not properly an issue of religion, but an issue of state. (Perhaps these two forums -- state and religion -- are not ultimately so easily divorced, as the laws must appeal to, in the end, some conception of the good, which, I think, must be transcendent if it is to mean anything. However, there is supposed to be a marked separation of church and state, and, in any case, we are not discussing these subjects on the meta-level at which they converge.) (more...)

Given the discussion that's raging on in Amanda's blog -- and given that I'm really averse to writing a new and lengthy essay on the subject -- I figured I'd post a few older articles with related content. So here we go. The more recent of these is "On Diversity.", which I wrote shortly after last summer's Supreme Court decisions regarding race-based affirmative action. The older one, "E-mails & Diversity & Assumptions -- Oh My!", was written during my time as a staff writer for The Voice, an upstart student publication at Yale. It seems to be defunct now. I should e-mail the guys who ran it just to say hi, but I probably won't. 😉

(Note: Unlike most of my links, the editorials won't open in a new window, because they're only one page and link directly back to the blog. Just a heads up!)

This topic is filling me with frustration, which means I may end up working on my story in a bit. Fingers crossed!