​One group or other at USU recently had a night dedicated to a thing called "body image". What is body image? As far as I can tell, it's a specialized subset of another thing called "self-esteem", referring specifically to how people feel about their bodies. I went to this event because it had food, some healthy, some not so much. And also because this was a topic I didn't consider myself super knowledgeable about and I believe in educating myself and stuff. This will be a fun topic for me to write about and not strange or awkward at all.

What always gets overlooked in any discussion about human bodies, the proverbial elephant in the proverbial room, is the fact that all human bodies - male, female, intersex, black, white, orange, young, old, thin, fat, weak, muscular, healthy, diseased, or whatever - are fundamentally the same: disgusting beyond all reason. For real. I don't understand people who claim that learning about human anatomy strengthens their faith in God, because personally it makes me lean toward nihilism. Maybe at some point you get desensitized, but I'm nowhere near that point. A body is basically a mobile odor factory that doubles as a galaxy for bacteria. Even innocuous little things like vocal chords are unnecessarily gross. In one class or other I had to see footage of vocal chords doing "vocal fry", an obnoxious thing that every teenage girl in America does to make her voice sound obnoxious. I could have died happy without seeing that. And it wasn't just me, because most of the class let out noises of shock or revulsion. Humans are grubs. I just needed to get that off my chest and thanks for tolerating me.

The presenters showed us some videos geared toward women but stressed a couple times that their research has shown that men have just as many negative views of their own bodies. Eating disorders, however, remain a predominantly female phenomenon. They didn't address this apparent discrepancy. If I had to guess, I would say it's because our society teaches men from a young age that they're not supposed to have feelings, so they're more likely to repress and ignore their negative ones until they kill themselves. Something like 85% of eating disorders are among females and something like 75% of suicides are among males. Or maybe body image really doesn't bother men as much because they know women don't tend to be as visually stimulated anyway. (Please don't send me death threats for making that generalization.) Personally, I hate every part of myself except my beautiful eyes and average ears, but I don't worry about it very often. I just figure this piece of junk is what God gave me and there's nothing I can do about it, so why stress? Besides, I know it's really my voice, mannerisms, and personality that make me unattractive.

Somebody needs to do a study, though - and maybe we could redirect a few billion dollars from Trump's stupid stupid wall to this far more important endeavor - on whether California girls have higher self-esteem than other American girls because of the songs by the Beach Boys and Katy Perry. Really, when you think about it, the Beach Boys song is unnecessarily cruel. They could have just been like "This is our personal preference in girls", but no, they had to be like "The girls in every region of the United States besides California all have their own positive qualities, but they just aren't good enough and we wish they were different." Really. It's kind of awful when you think about it. The good news, however, is that being a true "California girl" is more a state of mind than a geographical designation. If you like sunshine, heavy taxes, and getting cancer from literally everything, then you too can be a California girl. Even if you're a boy. But that's just my mansplanation and it could be completely wrong.

The group discussed the phenomenon of movies and advertisements manipulating people to an impossible standard of beauty, again stressing that this is done to men as well as women, though again, I can see how it would have a more negative psychological impact on the latter. This is one of those things that I'm well aware of but get angry about all over again every time I'm reminded. What I wasn't aware of was that the manipulators will sometimes actually mix and match parts - eyes, arms, legs, whatever - from different people. Why do they do this? Because many consumers are stupid enough to buy products that are advertised with attractive people who have nothing to do with them, and to throw money at whatever sewage Hollywood wants to pour down their throats. I will say that while I think Rian Johnson is a godawful writer and Rose Tico is an annoying and preachy character, I respect his decision to turn her attractive actress into a frumpy-looking nerd on purpose. Most directors' idea of a frumpy-looking nerd is a hot girl with glasses. Rose, for all her deficiencies as a character, is a real person fawning over her celebrity crushes and that's awesome.

I will say that I don't believe everyone is beautiful, let alone equally beautiful. I think that's a load of crap. "Beauty", at least in the physical sense, refers to traits that most humans are programmed by millions of years of evolution to find attractive because they signal reproductive fitness. ("Cuteness", though sometimes used interchangeably and able to serve a similar purpose, refers to specific kinds of imperfection, e.g. a disproportionately large head, that are meant to signal helplessness and trigger instincts of care and protectiveness.) Preferences differ between individuals and across cultures, but the basics are pretty universal. Most of us at first glance find certain people more attractive than others, but most of us are woke enough to know that looks don't really matter, so in order to resolve our guilt we tell ourselves and each other that "everyone is beautiful". We all know on some level that this isn't true but we try not to think about it too much because then we would feel guilty for having evolutionary instincts.

What if, instead of repeating this lie, we taught our children from childhood up that everyone has the same intrinsic worth independent of what they look like, how they talk, how they dress, who they vote for, and so on? Of course, most parents are already trying to instill this value in their children, but obviously we as a nation and as a world need to do a much better job of it. Society is no help. While preaching out one side of its proverbial mouth that "everyone is beautiful", it does all this airbrushing and Photoshopping and objectification crap that broadcasts the insincerity of its first message to anyone with half a brain. We're supposed to believe that plain and ugly people don't exist, so this frees us to guiltlessly dehumanize them. There was a viral meme on Facebook a few years ago where jerks shared pictures of people that most of the human race would consider ugly with captions like "Will someone please tag so-and-so, he left his whatever at my place last night". I think most people who did this never realized how mean-spirited it was. News flash: most people in photographs on the internet are/were real people. Momo is an exception. Probably.

The societal hypocrisy was even apparent in one of the well-intentioned videos the presenters showed us. It was that video that went around Facebook a few years ago where this forensic artist asks women to describe themselves and then he asks other people to describe them and the pictures he draws from the latter descriptions are more attractive. Even though this video says that "You are more beautiful than you think you are", it implicitly affirms that some features and some people are less beautiful than others. The first pictures are clearly meant to be less beautiful than the second, but they still look like women. One woman says something about the size of her jaw, indicating that she has low self-esteem and sees this feature differently than other people, but this only matters if some jaws are less attractive than others. And we all know that they are. The world is horrifically unfair. But I believe it's almost always better to acknowledge harsh truths than tell ourselves comforting lies. We need to cope with life as it really is, or spend as much time as possible escaping from it into sci-fi and fantasy worlds like I do.

Speaking of women, a federal court recently noticed that requiring men to register for Selective Service in order to be granted rights that women are granted by turning eighteen is constitutionally indefensible. I think a perfect solution to this problem would be to abolish Selective Service, but nobody asked me, and it's more likely that within a few years women will be required to register and then get drafted when North Korea bombs us. So now conservatives are rhetorically asking, "Is this what you wanted, you stupid feminists?" and the feminists are like "Uh, yeah, actually it is, thanks." If I cared about the future of the human race, I would point out that males are much much more expendable from a reproductive standpoint and that sending a more or less equal number of females to their deaths in the event of war would not prove beneficial to our species or society in the long run, but what's the human race done for me lately?

In conclusion, God - whom I still believe even though the nightmare-inducing hideousness of His alleged greatest creation poses a significant challenge to my faith - loves you the same as everyone else no matter what you look like. He doesn't care what you look like really at all. "[T]he Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart."

Today, because it resonated with me I decided to share a lengthy Facebook post from Ben Schilaty that he shared from someone else and then offer my own commentary and make it about me.

My friend Blake shared an analogy that is so good I wish I’d come up with it. The following are Blake’s words:

I always appreciate when people ask me sincere questions about LGBTQ+ & SSA (same-sex attraction) topics.
I’m often asked the following question by straight people who are trying understand better:

“Why do LGBTQ+ people feel like they have to label themselves, “come out”, or talk about their experience with sexuality? I mean I don’t go around talking about my sexuality all the time.”

There are many ways to respond to this question, but sometimes I use the following metaphor (let’s just say I’m sharing this metaphor with a straight man):

“Okay, imagine that you wanted to get away… just take a vacation by yourself. You decide to go on a 10-day cruise. You forget to read the fine print and you discover shortly after leaving port that you are, in fact, on a gay cruise. Wonderful married gay couples, dating couples, and single gay people are everywhere and they’re having a great time.

Many of these people see that you’re by yourself and come and talk with you, and yes, most of the time they assume you’re gay. They ask you if you’re interested in finding a nice guy on the cruise. They ask you about “type”, they even make assumptions about how you live your life, your interests, goals, political views, and religious beliefs. The group will make jokes about shared experiences, “we’ve all been there” they’ll say laughing (even though you’ve definitely not been there).

Single gay men keep approaching you and striking up innocent flirtatious conversations, some of them even ask you on dates. The married gay couples around you encourage you to go on these dates because they want you to be as happy as they are. You try to decline without hurting anyone’s feelings, or “outing yourself.” You join these wonderful people in all their activities and have a lot of fun with them, but in the back of your mind is the question, "Would my new friends still like me if 'they knew'" How would that fact change the relationships?

You realize how stressful it is when everyone’s assumptions about you, your life, your goals, and your perspective don’t match your actual experience. It would be so nice if they just actually had a full picture of your experience and who you are. You don’t define your whole life by your sexuality, but you begin to realize that it actually informs more of your choices and conversations than you previously thought. All the people around you talk about sexuality more than they probably realize, but being in the majority, they probably don't realize it.

What do you do?

Perhaps you could say you’re simply not interested in dating right now, but that doesn’t really address all the other assumptions made about your lifestyle, goals, perspective, religious views etc. Then you realize that the simplest thing to do would probably be to tell them you’re straight (you worry about which label to use).

"Wo, wo, wo… don’t throw your sexuality in our face!” they’ll say. “What you do in your bedroom is your business, the world doesn’t need to know your personal stuff.” You’re a little surprised and even offended when they assume you talking about your sexuality, goals, and experience is automatically connected to an agenda. "You're just wanting attention." What if the married gay couples even assumed that you being “out” as a straight man will actually lead their children to being straight (which would be THE WORST)? They say that they don’t go broadcasting their sexuality all the time and you think “well, yah… you don’t have to, everyone assumes you are gay, this whole cruise is designed with the assumption that you’re gay.” Some will even say, "You only THINK you're straight, you haven't event REALLY tried being gay... you'll see."

Some of the gay people would say, “Oh, we ‘still’ love you, this doesn’t change anything.” and then they proceed to talk about gay things, rarely taking time to ask you about your experience. The lesbians on board find out you’re a straight man, and they assume you’re attracted to ALL of them, you know, because they’re women.

And, of course, there would be many of the gay people who would be great about you coming out as straight (or opposite-sex attracted... your choice), they’d apologize about some of the assumptions they made, and they would be excited to learn more about your life, your perspective, and your goals. They would see if there is anything they could do to make your cruise more comfortable. You don’t talk exclusively about sexuality with them, but when it seems pertinent, you feel comfortable talking about it. Awesome.

Once and a while you get a little tired of navigating false assumptions or explaining your sexuality to people, so you think it could be nice to find some other straight people on the cruise to connect with. The “wo, wo, wo-ers” are pretty critical of this decision. They assume you are just looking for other straight people so that you can have sex and showcase your relationship. When you’re with your straight friends, the gay majority on the boat can’t help but notice, observe, and even comment. Part of you wonders if there are other straight people around you who are keeping quiet, feeling a little lonely. You talk about your sexuality a little more, just in case it could help a “closeted” straight person feel less alone and know where they could find some empathy.

You wonder if it would have been easier just to continue to pretend you’re gay. BUT you remember how frustrating it was to have so many false assumptions made about you, to be set up on dates, to be hit on, and to feel like the people around you didn’t see the whole picture of your life (including sexuality)… it can be really lonely. Thank heaven for the cool gay people on the cruise who are okay with you being straight (and talking about it).”

The End.

So why do LGBTQ+ and SSA individuals feel like they want to talk about their experience or “come out”?

There are MANY reasons (many not addressed in my analogy), but sometimes straight people can understand a little better when they try to imagine if everything was switched (and it could be argued that straight person on a gay cruise would still experience more advantages… and dare I say… privileges, than a gay person in a straight majority culture – a conversation for another time).

There are also many reasons someone may choose NOT to talk about their sexuality… and that’s fine too. I have generally noticed that people become a lot healthier when they can talk to people about their complete experience.

Being at BYU feels like being on a straight cruise all the time. Being in a singles ward feels like being on a straight cruise. Being a member of the Church… being in Utah… and honestly being an LGBTQ or SSA person in this world can feel like being on a straight cruise… all the time. (Do you feel yourself reacting with, “well only if you made it a big deal”?... just curious?) Is feeling like you’re always on a straight cruise a bad thing? Not necessarily, but it has its complications... and some empathy makes all the difference.

Anyway… this metaphor is clearly imperfect and has a lot of holes, but hopefully it was a little thought provoking… and maybe it gives a little insight about why some people “come out”. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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Warning: the next part of this post mentions sex a few times. Leave now if that will upset you. Ben's part of the post that I plagiarized is far more important anyway, and from here on I'm just going to talk about my own similar but less significant experience.

Another reason I would add for LGBT people taking pride in their labels is as a backlash against thousands of years of abuse from straight people. LGBT people have a right to feel loved, worthwhile, and good enough the way they are. Being open about one's sexuality is a way of telling society As a young idiot, I didn't understand gay people and shared in the prejudice against them - ironically, I suppose, since I was also on the receiving end of said prejudice. I was called "faggot" four or five times a day throughout elementary school. I had to ask my parents what that word meant. They said, "A boy who has a boyfriend." Even at that young age, it occurred to me to wonder why a boy would choose to have a boyfriend when I personally never felt the slightest inclination to do so, but I suppressed that thought. My ignorance didn't really start to unravel until a close friend privately said that he was bisexual - and later on I guess he realized he was just gay, but even at that time the issue was that he liked boys and didn't want to. As he cried, I felt awkward. I thought, but fortunately didn't say, If it bothers you that much, why don't you just... not be gay?

I make no claim to know what it's like for gay men, let alone lesbians, but since realizing that I'm not heterosexual either I do feel a kinship and some similarity of experience. I can say without hesitation that in ways large and small like those mentioned in Ben's post, heterosexuality has been shoved in my face and down my throat 99.9% more than homosexuality. I try not to take offense from well-meaning people but I do roll my eyes sometimes. Like one time I invited this friend to watch Star Wars with some other friends because she likes Star Wars, and one of these other friends who was also female kept asking me questions about how well I knew her and what she was like or whatever, and she announced that "Christopher brought a girl" and it was obvious that she thought there was or should be something between us, because she wouldn't have said "Christopher brought a boy" if I had brought a boy. I just feel like there's this implicit assumption that I must be in desperate search for a girlfriend, and also that I must really want to have sex and think about it constantly because male.

Of course I realize there's nothing malicious here. Most people are heterosexual and that's why our species still exists and "heteronormativity" is just the natural default view, not a conscious choice to exclude people. And I don't want to overstate how pervasive the straight cruise stuff in Ben's post is for me personally. Because I'm not at BYU, almost nobody cares about my nonexistent love life, which is fine with me. Because women in our culture are taught to let men do all the work in dating instead of taking initiative to get what they want, any woman who for some unfathomable reason may be interested in me is not asking me out. Don't get me wrong, if she did I would totally say yes and give her a chance. I have been asked to two "ladies' choice" dances in my life, and each of those instances was

And it wasn't my fault neither of them went anywhere. I'd bet my life that I don't get flirted with very often, but it could be happening every day and I wouldn't notice. I only realized in hindsight that the one girl in the campus library in 2013 was either flirting with me or being an idiot because she started a conversation by asking me something she could have just looked up on the computer she was using. She was nice. I would have gone out with her if she had asked me out.

Like Ben, who also recently posted about his experience with relatively benign but nonetheless disturbing conversion therapy, I've had the very uncomfortable experience of people trying to explain that sex is beautiful or sacred or something. Only one tried to convince me personally that it isn't actually weird and gross, using logic, perhaps unaware that interest in sex is the literal opposite of logic. It literally comes from hormones that literally override the logical part of one's brain to convince one that sex isn't weird and gross even though it is. Years ago in my poetry class I had a classmate, now a good friend, who wrote a poem describing sex in explicit, thorough detail with the purpose of making normal people realize for the first time that it's weird and gross. But I was just like, "Yeah, I didn't know all these details, nor did I want to, but this is how I've always thought about sex because this is literally what sex is, so thanks for making me not feel like the only person on the planet who isn't blind." This clued me in to the possibility that others like me existed. Soon I discovered their community and felt understood and supported for a change and it was nice.

It turns out these people also used the label "asexual". I had picked that label for myself just because the prefix a- means "not", so it seemed straightforward. "Hetero"sexual people want to have sex with the opposite sex, "homo"sexual people want to have sex with the same sex, so an "a"sexual person would want to have sex with nobody. The only time I heard the word used in this context growing up was at Youth Conference when my friend Mike didn't dance with any girls and he said "I'll probably hate myself tomorrow, but I'm just feeling pretty asexual tonight." And I don't remember if I remembered that when I chose the label but thanks either way, Mike. This orientation was of course no more a choice than being straight or gay, and would persist whether I chose to label it and make myself more comfortable or not. The simple fact of the matter is that I never once at any point in my development from birth to this moment have felt the slightest hint of an inclination toward thinking that sex could be something I might possibly consider ever wanting to try. And I'm very cognizant that this makes me highly abnormal.

​​I "came out" in a blog post on the previous incarnation of my blog, and I've come out more personally with various friends either because it was relevant to something or I was just feeling frustrated with the world, and I've mentioned it around Facebook whenever it was relevant to something or I was just feeling frustrated with the world. I've gotten a positive response from everyone except my parents that I've talked to about it. Even when they had never heard of asexuality, which was often, I just explained that I don't have raging hormones in my brain telling me to want to have sex with literally anybody, and they grasped and accepted that simple concept very quickly. So there isn't a lot of stigma against asexuals. Others have reported getting comments like "You just haven't found the right person yet" but those comments, while insensitive and usually wrong, are not born of prejudice. But a lot of people don't know that we even exist. For me that's the most frustrating thing. As the world around me flaunts its obsession with sex and assumes I'm a part of that, I kind of just want to flip it off with both hands.

I guess proclaiming my sexuality or lack thereof - I honestly don't know or care which way to classify it - is a way of doing that. It's like saying to the world, "Your assumptions about me are wrong. You don't get to tell me what I'm supposed to like. I don't appreciate you constantly shoving sex in my face. Bite me." Of course I can't literally say "Bite me" to people because I want to be a good Christian. But freely acknowledging this one quirk as a significant part of my identity is very cathartic and I want to do it more often.

Bernie Sanders is light-years ahead of Donald Trump in class and intellect, and I didn't bother watching the State of the Union address because when I want to be lied to I'll try dating again, but I saw this going around Facebook and it made me laugh.

Trump: America will never be a socialist country.

​Bernie:

Of course, Trump's words ring a little hollow. Because he's a Republican, some people are gullible enough to actually think he's a proponent of limited government and restrained spending even though he's not. He just has his priorities of where to use government and spending completely wrong. Still, I thought this picture was funny and I sympathize with the sentiment. Every conceivable human economic system is inherently evil, but since we've got to have one, I think capitalism is the most tolerable evil. It's evil because it revolves around the acquisition of money and by definition motivates any behavior leading to that result, no matter how wrong it is. Now of course some people in this system would do the right thing regardless of profits because they're good people. But experience has borne out time and again that others will only do the right thing if the government forces them to. Pure capitalism was and is a nightmare for everyone at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy.

It's absurd to think that while the government is corrupt and power-hungry, corporations are purely good and benevolent. For all its failings, we depend on the government to stop corporations from making children clean dangerous machinery, feeding us E. coli, dumping sludge in our waterways, and lying to us about the health benefits of cigarettes, to name just a few not hypothetical examples. There are plenty of other things it should be stopping. I saw firsthand how insurance companies still get away with screwing (mostly elderly) customers because they can, by refusing to cover things they're blatantly required by their policies to cover and then counting on many of these people to lack the patience or knowledge to appeal these decisions through a court system that's required by law to resolve the issue within three months but, because of the obscene backlog of these cases that never should have happened, actually takes closer to three years. Why isn't the government stopping this crap? I hope these insurance companies burn in hell. Also, it should be illegal for oil companies to lie about climage change.

I believe socialism is okay, even necessary in moderate doses. It's silly for any non-libertarian who has no problem paying taxes to build roads, libraries, schools, hospitals, etc. to assert that taking money from people to benefit society is inherently wrong. The only logically consistent position for an avowed socialism-hater to take here is that all taxation is theft. But I think Social Security was a great idea in theory, before the government ruined it by stealing Social Security funds so that now I can count on receiving nothing after a lifetime of paying into the system. Obamacare is a train wreck but its ideas aren't all bad, considering that the United States has had one of the worst healthcare systems in the developed world for a long time. When Taiwan became a developed nation and built their healthcare system they literally used ours as an example of what not to do. And I'm not going to lose one bit of sleep if billionaires have to start paying 70% taxes when they hit eleven billion dollars. I really could not care less if they could now only afford to buy four dozen of everything they could conceivably want.

Obviously full-blown socialism like Venezuela's is awful. No sane person will deny that. There are, however, the counterexamples of most European nations, which have wedded capitalism and socialism in an interesting way (and on this point some American socialists are ignorant or dishonest by overlooking capitalism's role in their prosperity, while others say that's exactly the point and the difference from Venezuela). On the one hand, they have pretty high taxes, but on the other hand, they're actually paying for worthwhile things that benefit society. I would much rather pay taxes for someone else's antidepressants or college degree than for Trump's stupid stupid wall. In fact, I'd rather flush my money down a liberal toilet than pay for Trump's stupid stupid wall. Currently, I would hate to pay higher taxes simply because I know they'd be wasted, and a government that spends money it doesn't have and never has to pay its debts doesn't need mine anyway, but if things were different I would tolerate it.

Why is it no longer taboo for Americans to admit they support socialism? A very short time ago when conservatives accused Obama of being a socialist, liberals vehemently denied it and accused the conservatives of being racist Now they vote for actual self-proclaimed socialists. Millennials in particular are outspoken about their widespread support for socialism. Old capitalists generally assume it's because they're lazy and entitled. Those old capitalists are uncharitable, arrogant, and wrong. Here are a few of the actual reasons why millennials support socialism (and I will mostly say "they" even though I'm a millennial and most of these things apply to me because I don't consider myself a socialist, and I recognize that there are undoubtedly a few exceptions because no generation is a monolith regardless of what old people who don't even know there's a difference between millennials and Generation Z try to pretend):

*Because they're tired of working their butts off, often at two or three jobs, for less money and a lower quality of life than their parents. Incidentally, they're the first generation in American history to have less money and a lower quality of life than their parents. So they get blamed for "killing" various luxury industries they can't afford.

*Because they're tired of watching capitalism fulfill its promise for only a select few, enriching the people who are already rich, while their own paychecks are devoured month after month by rent, groceries, utilities, and the other various penalties for being alive. Money they do manage to save is periodically devoured by emergency expenses.

*Because they're burdened for decades by record-setting debt from pursuing the secondary education that they were told their whole lives was necessary for them to get decent jobs and accomplish anything, which cost astronomically more than ever before and in many cases turned out to actually be useless.
​
*Because they're sickened, as any decent human being would be, that citizens of this country have to set up GoFundMe campaigns and hope for the best when they get chronic illnesses or injuries they can't afford to have treated. Ambulance rides alone, which are free in many countries, can cost thousands of dollars here.

An article that may be of interest to some: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

Sure, maybe capitalism isn't even the cause of these problems. Maybe the government caused these problems. I wouldn't be surprised. But these legitimate gripes need to be recognized whatever their source. Pretending millennial socialists as lazy and entitled instead will do nothing to win them over. I mean, it just seems to me like maybe you old capitalists would want to find common ground and try to persuade them of your point of view, especially since all millennials are old enough to vote, but that's just my opinion. Feel free to ignore me and keep calling them snowflakes instead. Let's pretend that will accomplish anything besides making you sound stupid.

I set a goal to publish a blog post every week, and this de facto ended up being on the weekends, and that format means that sometimes I'm really late to the party discussing current events. But while this storm may have mostly blown itself out, it hasn't ceased to be an issue, and even if it had it would deserve to be recapped in detail so that we could, theoretically, learn from our stupidity. So sorry not sorry for bringing this up after all the cool people have stopped talking about it.

Wanting to be the bigger person and forgive their occasional lapses of integrity (like their refusal to cover Kermit Gosnell), ​I initially trusted the media accounts of the so-called incident at the March for Life (which for some reason doesn't merit media coverage unless an incident happens or it disrupts traffic). I had no reason to doubt the claims that a group of white teenagers wearing "Make America Great Again" hats surrounded elderly Native American Vietnam War veteran Nathan Phillips and taunted him with chants of "Build the Wall". There was nothing particularly implausible about such a story. Trump's rhetoric and actions have created a climate where droves of formerly ostracized white supremacists are comfortable being loud and proud about their white supremacy, and that the vast majority of said white supremacists, not coincidentally, voted for him and continue to support him.

Nick Sandmann in particular, appearing to be the ringleader, went viral for having the racist audacity to smile at Phillips. If "smiling while white" isn't officially classified as a hate crime, it should be. Naturally, many liberals throughout the country demonstrated their moral superiority by threatening to harm and/or murder him and his family, just like Martin Luther King would have wanted. But don't worry, they had plenty of hatred left over for the other students involved, so much that Covington Catholic High School had to close for safety concerns. This one, though probably meant to be funny somehow, is my favorite because the total lack of consequences really shows where Disney's priorities are (besides murdering the second biggest franchise of all time, of course).

Since I detest Donald Trump and consider it a patriotic duty to speak out against him, this story was convenient for me in a certain sick sense, as it was for many others who believed it. I didn't become consumed with rage or make any threats, but I passed the information along in the naive hope of weakening Trump's influence among decent people in some small way. If I were the average American voter, I would have tried to persist in believing said information when it turned out to be an SJW fairy tale. But unfortunately I have this peculiar, un-American mental disorder that I like to call "being honest enough to change my opinions when I know they're wrong". So instead I redirected my former anger toward the ones who actually deserve it, and I apologize for sharing the lie, and I would apologize far more profusely if I thought I'd actually influenced literally anybody.

Because, as everyone should be aware by now, there turned out to be many more minutes of footage than the one we got worked up over. Nathan Phillips' account of events falls apart even before the students share their side of the story which actually matches the video. Yet I'm still seeing people trying to pretend his account is accurate and he's some kind of hero or victim. The actual facts (remember those things?), which naturally didn't go as viral by a long shot as the original mindless outrage, turned out to be that:

*Prior to this encounter, a group of black protesters was yelling racially charged insults and threats at the students. Of course this wasn't newsworthy or outrageworthy because racism against white people is okay.

*The students, with permission from their chaperone, started chanting school spirit chants to drown out the aforementioned racism they were being bombarded with. Instead of, I don't know, retaliating in any way.

*The students did not approach or "surround" Phillips. He walked into the spot where they had been standing for some time and played his drum in Nick Sandmann's face for no adequately explained reason.

*Literally nobody during this encounter chanted "Build the Wall". Literally. Nobody. You. Lying. Sacks. Of. Crap. One of Phillips' Native American protesters did yell at the students to "go back to Europe", though.

*Phillips is not a Vietnam War veteran. He never set foot in Vietnam. He was a refrigerator mechanic who only served in the US, was frequently AWOL, and never got promoted past Private in four years.

CNN, to their credit, published a statement by the one smiling student who's received most of the American Left's special brand of tolerance. He seems to have more maturity in his pinky finger than all his haters possess together. Twitter, to their credit, suspended the fake account that posted the original deceptively edited (remember that phrase?) video. But this account can hardly shoulder the blame for everyone who believed the story or continues to do so.

Yes, I was one of the many who believed it, because I had these crazy notions that Nathan Phillips was an decent honest guy and  mainstream news outlets were reasonably trustworthy sources, but since I never got involved in the unwarranted vitriol toward these students and have since changed my mind in response to additional information, I have a clean conscience. I posted a thing about the original false account, and when I realized I was wrong I posted a thing about the truth, and one of my liberal friends went ballistic about how the truth doesn't matter because these teenagers are still unforgivably bad people for not moving aside when an old man walked into them. And that obviously still warrants viral news coverage and death threats. A couple days later - I'm not making this up - she shared a derogatory post about how sensitive white males on the internet are.

​There's also this unsurprising little irony:

I don't remember perfectly, but I do know for a fact that I could count the number of social media posts I saw about the torture on one hand, all of them from conservative sources complaining about the lack of coverage from liberal sources. The attack wasn't very newsworthy or outrageworthy for a couple reasons: because it was black-on-white, and because the black men and women said things like "F--- Trump" while they were torturing the white boy. Awkward. In fairness, CNN did give the story a bit of coverage that failed to go viral, during which Don Lemon refused to denounce the torture as "evil" because "I think these are young people, and I think they have bad home training." I mean, every single one of the black torturers was a legal adult and older than the white students that liberals thought deserved to die for literally no reason, but nobody asked me.

​In fairness, with the trivial exception of grossly misrepresenting his military record and allowing others to do so, maybe Nathan Phillips isn't actually the belligerent lying scumbag he appears to be. Maybe this was all a big misunderstanding, and he's a decent honest guy who was simply mistaken about the boys' intentions and somehow got every verifiable detail of the encounter wrong. But since he followed up the next day by loudly trying to barge into a Catholic Mass with a group of his activists, which I don't need to tell you isn't newsworthy or outrageworthy because reasons, I doubt it very much.

Why is it that the people who are obsessed with shaming other people are incapable of feeling shame themselves when they should? The worst of the haters are either still defending Phillips and bashing the students, or trying to quietly move on as if nothing happened and they didn't just screw up innocent people's lives with their stupid witch hunt. Delusion or cowardice, respectively. What if we all had the humility of Dr. Robert P. George, one of the few prominent conservative figures I still respect, who wrote:

​And (like me) he wasn't a part of the irresponsible media or the liberal hate machine, so he doesn't even have that much to apologize for. Guess who does?

But then the real problem, according to some other nobody on Twitter, is that these boys "were in D.C. for the sole purpose of promoting male control of women's bodies", having been "bussed in to demand adult women be subjected to forced childbearing". Okay, I grant that would be pretty bad and would definitely warrant death threats for teenagers and their families if it were true instead of being the stupid straw man (no pun intended) that it actually is. Somebody would need to mansplain to all the poor stupid women who participated in the March for Life that they've been duped by men into promoting male control of their bodies, but nobody could because that would be sexist, so it's a good thing that isn't necessary.

This damnable post-truth fake outrage society I'm forced to live in makes me yearn for an early death. (Insert your own quip about also yearning for my early death here.) And pardon the cliche, but if the American Left is really serious about combating bigotry, it needs to take a long look in the mirror.

Do you want to read a school assignment that I wrote last night while so sleep-deprived that I yearned for death just so I could finally get some rest? Good, because that's what you're getting. An additional four hours of sleep between 10:30 last night and 9 this morning hasn't prepared me to write anything else, and besides, multitasking with school work is just smart. I will add a few annotations of additional insights in bracketed italics, though. You can skip these if they disrupt the flow of my poetry for you. Conveniently, the assigment was defined as a 600 word "blog post" despite not being a blog post, but now it is a blog post and I've made an honest man out of Dr. Dengah.



The evangelical movement covers many different Christian denominations with their own theologies. It has no centralized leadership, though there are several well-known preachers and scholars. As recently as last spring, Andrew T. Draper referred to a growing “lack of consensus among evangelicals about their own identity” and laid out a detailed proposal for “a more robust theological, biblical, and Christological account of hope” based on a syncretism of various past theologians. (Draper 345) There's a lot of wiggle room for different beliefs and interpretations – I once saw it explained in a little cartoon of a train where each train car represented a different denomination, separate from each other but all going to the same place. One scholar summarizes, “As an international, trans-denominational fellowship of some one-half billion believers around the world, evangelicalism is in its very existence an amazing ecumenical fact.” (George 100)

[I had to use three academic sources. So these are my first two. I enjoy deep theological stuff so much that I might even read them someday if I ever get sufficient sleep. Unfortunately, because I was so tired I didn't think to find the cartoon and include it as my third source.]

There are of course some unifying doctrines or concepts that virtually all evangelicals would agree on, and I'll get to some of those in a moment. First, let me get the controversial stuff over with. Evangelical Jay Green writes, “A populist impulse fueled by deep suspicions of secular elitism is baked into evangelicalism. Evangelicals have long drawn strength from feelings of marginalization and embattlement.” (Green 337) He hastens to add, however, that this is not without reason, as evangelicals are often looked at with contempt and negative stereotypes about their beliefs, politics, and intellects.

[Of course, one of the first things I learned in college was that most stereotypes exist because they're true. Just not in every instance. I've seen evangelicals who are living embodiments of every negative stereotype, and in my opinion, the "Christian Right" of American politics is kind of an abomination against God. But I'll be the first to acknowledge that all religions including my own have their share of jerks, morons and/or hypocrites as well. For example, me.]

Although I have a few evangelical friends, I've struggled with some prejudice of my own, in large part because evangelicals are historically at the forefront of Christian attacks on my own church (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which, some regard as a “cult”, believing in a “different Jesus”, etc.). In recent years, though, their own space in Western culture has become so marginalized that atheists now fill this role and see one religion criticizing another as laughable hypocrisy. I've been hanging out with LDS apologists for years and been increasingly frustrated that most continue to devote their time to arguing with evangelicals who pose very little threat to the Church anymore, and sometimes their noble intentions bleed over into actual mockery of beliefs they perceive as silly compared to ours. They become the evil they swore to destroy, and that environment rubs off on me sometimes.

[Okay, but you know what really grinds my gears? When Latter-day Saints don't know there's a difference between trinitarianism and modalism. Most evangelicals do not believe that the Father, Son and Holy Ghost are one person who prays to Himself. You look like an idiot if you think they do. I looked like an idiot when I thought they did. The Trinity is three distinct and separate persons who are each God - and honestly, no matter how many times it's explained to me, I won't understand how that differs in any significant way from the LDS doctrine of the Godhead.]

I also have a great deal of animosity toward creationism, which many or most evangelicals embrace, because I spent a few years as a creationist myself and now I resent the people who lied to me about evolution. At least because of this experience I recognize some of the psychological reasons for belief in creationism and try to remember that (most) creationists aren't stupid. Incidentally, for a few months I participated on a creationist message board with several like-minded Christians, mostly evangelicals. They were staunch allies in a war against science – until they found out that I and another guy were Mormons, after which they devoted all their posts to explaining why our religion was false.

[This was on Facebook, back in the day when Facebook pages had message boards. I'm very old. The other Mormon, or Latter-day Saint as I now have to call him, and one of the evangelicals who managed to establish a respecful dialogue with us miraculously haven't unfriended me eight years later. In hindsight, maybe I owe an apology to the atheist trolls who frequently stopped by to mock us and must have been very frustrated by my displays of scientific illiteracy. But they were jackasses, so nah.]

Recently I've tried to root out my prejudice as I've gotten to know and admire my evangelical classmate [Redacted McRedactedton]. She accepted Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior at age twelve and was baptized as a Christian the next year. Though she doesn't go around preaching at people, external signs of her devotion include two tattoos – a cross behind her right ear that's visible when she ties her hair back and a peace sign on her toe that I've heard about but never seen – and a quote from Proverbs on her Facebook wall: “Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.” Coming from someone with an abundance of charm and beauty, such humility is impressive.

[I had to interview someone from a faith other than my own and use that as the main basis of the assignment. But I wrote all this? I don't remember writing all this.]

“There is only one crucial basic for Evangelical Christians,” she told me. “It is by Grace that we are saved. Nothing else. Every human has sinned, and the punishment for sin is death, therefore every human deserves death. Every single one. Jesus is the only exception. But God loved us enough that he didn't want heaven without us, so he sent his son to live a perfect, sinless life and die a sinner's death so that we can be saved. The only way to heaven is to accept this gift of Grace. All the most wonderful and charitable works are nothing, baptism is nothing, going to church is nothing without accepting God's Grace.” This is one of the points of tension between Latter-day Saints and evangelicals. We also believe in Christ's grace and agree that works can't get us into heaven, but we believe that works are necessary to accept grace into our lives. Evangelicals believe that works are a natural product of having already accepted grace. Tomato, tomahto.

[Literally nobody says tomahto.]

[My friend] says that her faith affects her everyday life. “When you're truly Christian, it bleeds into every action, religious or not.... The one that leaks into my life the most is loving your neighbor as yourself. That is so hard to do, but it changes the way I act around people all the time. I find myself often living by a quote that Abraham Lincoln said, 'I do not like that man. I must get to know him better.' As a result, I have always been a peacekeeper. I believe in walking in peace and spreading peace on others.” I can vouch for that in personal observations. She is very sweet, friendly and kind, and while I'm absorbed in my own thoughts she'll reach out to someone else that I barely noticed. She's the sort of Christian that I wish I was.

[I have nothing more to say here.]

Knowing the prejudice that evangelicals face, I offered [my friend] a chance to dispel any misconceptions or stereotypes about them, but she seemed less concerned about how others might perceive her as a believer than about their understanding of her actual beliefs, which of course carry weighty eternal implications. She said, “I would like to dispel the belief that good people will go to heaven and sinners go to hell. That's not true. Good people will go to hell if they don't accept the gift of salvation and sinners go to heaven if they do. I would also like to dispel the belief that Christians hate sinners. That's not true (not for real Christians). We are taught to love the person but not the sin.”

[Well, actually, believing that sin is even a thing makes you automatically hateful. Haven't you heard? Silly Christians. This is where another point of tension comes in, which I didn't ask about because I didn't want her to think I was challenging her beliefs: what about the billions of people who never heard of Jesus before they died? I hope at some point we'll be comfortable enough with each other for me to get her thoughts on this issue.]

I have to admit that my initial reaction to a couple of her responses was that she sounded dogmatic and like she was reciting from a script. I quickly realized, however, that Latter-day Saints often come across the same, even to me and I'm sure especially to outsiders. We have our own lexicon and most Saints borrow liberally from it to sprinkle their testimonies with heartfelt cliches. I know from my interactions and observations with [this friend] that she's very intelligent, sometimes intelligent enough to make me feel stupid when she makes incredibly thoughtful comments about things that go right over my head. Not just intelligent, but thoughtful and open-minded, best friends with an atheist and able to objectively interact with secular culture and (in our Magical Realism class) literature from Muslim or Hindu backgrounds. She isn't the type to look down on anyone or attack their beliefs or tell them they're going to hell.

[Okay, but you know what's literally the worst? When sacrament meeting has already gone five minutes over and the last speaker decides to conclude her talk by bearing testimony of every principle of the gospel she can think of, one by one. She was like, "I know... I know... I know..." And I was like, Do you know how to read a clock? Not out loud, of course.]

I have a more favorable impression of evangelicals now, which I want to continue improving. I believe that people of faith should focus more on their commonalities and their differences, now more than ever, as we increasingly face mockery of our beliefs. I admire [this friend]'s devotion to God and I'm very interested and hopeful to continue religious discussions with her well into the future. In my interview with her I found that I agreed wholeheartedly with some of her statements and kind of agreed with some others from a different point of view that I'm sure isn't what she had in mind. I think that's fertile ground for discussion and respectful disagreement with this “amazing ecumenical fact.” I'm trying to work up the courage to ask how she feels about evolution.

[I actually made an attempt to broach the topic once in a subtle, roundabout way. I was like, "Have you ever been to Science Unwrapped?" And she was like, "No, I hate science." And I was like, Oh ----. Not out loud, of course. Desperately trying to get an exegesis of this statement that didn't mean what I didn't want it to mean, I asked why. She said she just doesn't understand science. She only understands art and literature and math. Fair enough, by that definition I hate science too and that's why I stopped majoring in it. But I implored her, "Dinosaurs? Don't you like dinosaurs? Everybody likes dinosaurs." She said, "I like 'The Land Before Time'." So there's hope.​]

Draper, Andrew T. “Christ the Center: An Evangelical Theology of Hope.” Christian Scholar's Review, vol. 47 no. 3, Spring 2018, pp. 345-352.

George, Timothy. “Toward an Evangelical Ecclesiology.” Evangelical Review of Theology, vol. 41 no. 2, April 2017, pp. 100-118.

Green, Jay. “On the Evangelical Mind and Consulting the Faithful.” Christian Scholar's Review, vol. 47 no. 3, Spring 2018, pp. 335-339.