GAY TRUTH

Rainbow flag. Symbol of gay pride. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) David Blankenhorn posted some comments about me, and Maggie Gallagher has asked me to respond. Here are my two cents in italics: Here is my response: I do not know much of David Blankenhorn's life, even less of his deeper motives. The issues on which he has asserted a stake in the conversation are, I would remind him, not leisurely and slow for all of us. For some of us, engaging in a polite conversation would mean passively turning away from the danger posed to others. The striking words he uses are that he finds in in my voice nothing that reminds him of shared humanity or the complexities of experience. Much of what I write, especially of late, is about the experiences of people other than myself: the activists in France , the forgotten people in the US who write to me, the surrogate mothers in India , poor students in Belgium , etc. By contrast, his comment below revolves entirely about himself. The only thi...

I am going to break two of my own sacred rules right now. One rule, which I decreed a year ago, was never to to do end-of-year posts. They can be trite and annoying. Anyway the events summarized are still fairly fresh in our memory, so the first reaction is often, "what else is new?" The second rule is that I don't respond to Snarky Gay Bloggers. There are so many of them. They say so many things that are untrue. For the most part they are uneducated savages who know very little beyond what they find on the first two pages of a Google search. And generally they have no lives aside from revisiting the high school emotional manipulations that left them wounded, only this time, with them in the position of the Mean Girls , shielded by their pseudonyms and Internet anonymity . I don't respond to them typically, because I honestly don't have time. I teach a full load as a professor and spend a lot of my writing time collating information about children's rights. I...

Bullying has always been a problem. I faced it in school as did most people. It is a very common occurrence, but it is not amiss to seek to at least lessen it. In its extreme forms it can lead victims to attempt suicide, so it is well worth dealing with. And there have been all sorts of victims of bullying: -if you are an ugly kid you likely will be bullied; -if you are a fat kid you likely will be bullied; -if you are a skinny kid you likely will be bullied; -if you are an acne-ridden kid you likely will be bullied; -if you are a kid from the wrong side of town you likely will be bullied; -if you are an ungainly kid you likely will be bullied; -if you are a very bright kid you likely will be bullied. -if you are a very nerdy kid you likely will be bullied. The point is most kids have been bullied for all sorts of reasons. Such bullying is of course wrong, but it tends to be quite normal. But a major concern is when one special interest group seeks to politicise this issue, and hijac...

At the heart of the current debates about same-sex marriage are three crucial questions: What is marriage, why does marriage matter for public policy, and what would be the consequences of redefining marriage to exclude sexual complementarity ? Marriage exists to bring a man and a woman together as husband and wife to be father and mother to any children their union produces. It is based on the anthropological truth that men and women are different and complementary, the biological fact that reproduction depends on a man and a woman, and the social reality that children need both a mother and a father. Marriage predates government. It is the fundamental building block of all human civilization . Marriage has public purposes that transcend its private purposes. This is why 41 states, with good reason, affirm that marriage is between a man and a woman. Government recognizes marriage because it is an institution that benefits society in a way that no other relationship does. Marriage i...