"Mommy, please call me she," says your little boy

The minute we are born, we know our gender—either either boy or girl. We immediately are saturated with blue or pink, and many of us don’t have a problem with this. We’re fine with the fact that girls wear dresses and play with dolls, while boys wear pants and play with trucks. But some children insist that they were born into the wrong body. Is it just a phase? (If you can't view the video below, go here)



There are many instances of this occurring, where a child is biologically male (or female) and feels that he is female (or male).

How would you deal with this? Should parents make them act according to appropriate gender norms? Should parents allow them to be what they say that they are?

Let’s hear what you have to say. I don’t think there is only one right answer here.

This post was taken from my blog: Notes on Parenting

Also, here is an additional ABC article on transgender children: Click Here

Gays Make Fine Parents, Psychologist Testifies

This article appeared on page C - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle

A psychologist took aim at one of the central justifications for California's ban on same-sex marriage in federal court Friday, saying researchers overwhelmingly agree that gays and lesbians make just as good parents as heterosexuals.

More than 100 studies have found that "children who are raised by gay and lesbian parents are just as likely to be well-adjusted," Michael Lamb, chairman of the department of social and developmental psychology at Cambridge University in England, testified at the San Francisco trial of a lawsuit seeking to overturn Proposition 8.

Lamb quoted the American Psychological Association's 2004 policy statement that gays and lesbians are "as likely as heterosexual parents to provide supportive and healthy environments for their children." Seven other nationwide professional organizations have taken similar positions, he said.

Prop. 8, a November 2008 initiative, amended the state Constitution to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman. The measure overturned a May 2008 state Supreme Court ruling that allowed gays and lesbians to marry.

The lawsuit by two same-sex couples and the city of San Francisco contends Prop. 8 discriminated unconstitutionally on the basis of sexual orientation and gender and had no justification except prejudice. The nonjury trial, the first in any federal court on same-sex marriage, began Monday before Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker.

Protect Marriage, the religious coalition that sponsored Prop. 8, argues that the measure was intended to promote traditional marriage because children are better off with their biological parents.

A document on the Protect Marriage Web site, quoted in court, said studies have found that same-sex parents are prone to "gender confusion" and are more likely than heterosexual parents to abuse their children and to raise daughters who become lesbians.

There is no evidence for those assertions, said Lamb, a child development researcher for almost 40 years and former head of a section of the U.S. government's National Institutes of Health.

"No research shows that kids need to be protected from gays or lesbians," he said, and studies also contradict the claim that children are better off with their genetic parents than with adoptive parents.

The only established differences, Lamb said, are that children of same-sex parents are more likely to be bullied by their peers and are less likely to have stereotyped attitudes about gender. For example, he said, they're less prone to thinking that girls should aspire to become nurses while boys should become doctors.

In cross-examination, Protect Marriage lawyer David Thompson labeled Lamb a "committed liberal," citing his membership in such organizations as the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Organization for Women, and his financial contributions to the Public Broadcasting System.

Thompson also said scientific research is not immune from political influence and that "history is littered with scientific theories universally accepted and proven to be wrong."

He said other studies called Lamb's conclusions into question - for example, research showing that children do better with biological parents than with stepparents.

Lamb said such findings wouldn't shake his view that sexual orientation makes no difference in parenting.

**We know the Proclamation teaches that children have the RIGHT to be reared by a Father and a Mother, and that both mothers and fathers bring unique qualities, specializations, and characteristics to parenting**

Little done to stop racism in Europe

Little done to stop racism in European soccer

By Butch Maier

February 07, 2009, 10:28PM

PARIS -- Ghanaian soccer player Solomon Opoku heard the Serbian fans screaming racist insults and turned around as they set upon him, hurling punches and abuse.

The attackers were supporters of Opoku's team, determined that a black player shouldn't take the field for their club.

Two days later, Olympique Marseille President Pape Diouf got a firsthand look at what his black players endure when he traveled to the team's UEFA Cup match at Zenit St. Petersburg in northern Russia.

"What we went through was hideous," Diouf, who is black, said in an interview with the Associated Press. "It was the classic stuff, the bananas thrown at black players warming up, the monkey chants, obscene gestures. Not only does Zenit not hide the fact that no black player could play for this club, the fans say so themselves."

Racism has become the scourge of European soccer stadiums. Whether the supporters are watching a minor league in Serbia or a major European competition such as the Champions League, matches are stubbornly plagued by prejudice from the Mediterranean Sea to the Ural Mountains.

Anti-racism campaigns aimed at fans have met with limited success at best, leaving the problem to FIFA, the sport's governing body, and the Union of European Football Associations to clean up.

Soccer officials have condemned fan racism and issued fines. But penalizing clubs or nations in ways that would hurt both them and their fans -- such as disqualification from tournaments, forfeiting points or stopping a match -- is something they have been reluctant to do.

"You have countries, [like] Russia today, where racism is a quasi-official doctrine," said Pascal Mignon, a French sociology researcher at the INSEP sporting institute. "In Russia, xenophobia is quite strong. So you will see it in a more powerful way, like you will in southern European countries like Spain or Italy."

Americans aren't exempt from the abuse.

Midfielder DaMarcus Beasley, a black player from Indiana, was taunted by fans who made monkey chants after he scored his first goal for Glasgow Rangers in a 2007 Champions League qualifier at FK Zeta in Bijelo Polje, Montenegro.

"It's something that shouldn't be in football," Beasley said. "You get it everywhere. You still get it in Spain. I got it in Belgrade. I got it Montenegro and the Netherlands as well."

During his successful bid to oust Lennart Johansson as UEFA president two years ago, Michel Platini earmarked anti-racism as a key priority in his election campaign.

"We're at a turning point in our sport," Platini said at the time. "My idea would be to stop the match completely. There should be no half measures when dealing with racism."

However, Platini has turned down multiple requests for an interview on the subject since last November, pledging to address racism in a speech next month at Warsaw, Poland.

The location is notable. The 2012 European Championship will be co-hosted by Poland and Ukraine, two nations with visible racist groups.

In Poland, sociologist Rafal Pankowski fights racism as a member of Nigdy Wieciej -- or Never Again.

"To a greater or lesser degree, this problem has come up at almost every club," Pankowski said, explaining that there have been anti-Semitic banners and chants at games, as well as monkey chants.

The BBC reported last year that Leszek Miklas, the president of Polish team Legia Warsaw, acknowledged up to 20 percent of the club's fans were neo-Nazis. Speaking to the AP, Miklas accepted that individuals at his club have extreme fascist views, but wouldn't estimate how many.

"Polish society is fairly homogeneous, we don't have a lot of foreigners," Miklas said in an interview. "So Poles are less accustomed to other races and people who look different than in countries like Britain or the United States."

London-based Amnesty International, meanwhile, warned in a November report of an "alarming rise" of hate crimes in Ukraine. Much of the violence has been blamed on ultra-rightist groups such as the Ukrainian National Labor Party.

The party leader, Evhen Herasymenko, once said attacking dark-skinned foreigners is like "the immune system -- the reaction of a healthy body to the infection that got into it."

Some players and team officials say they're fed up. But even they don't know what to do.

At England's 2010 World Cup qualifying match last September in Croatia, English forward Emile Heskey was abused throughout the match with monkey chants.

FIFA fined the Croatian FA 30,000 Swiss francs (about $32,700), a relatively small amount. England vice-captain Rio Ferdinand angrily told the BBC that "football authorities need to take a look at themselves."

Diouf was similarly outraged when UEFA fined Zenit about $58,000 for the fans' behavior last March.

"There is a gulf between declarations of intent and real actions. It's double-talk," Diouf said. "You can't scream from the rooftops and say that racism has to be eradicated ... and then when proven racist acts happen, the measures taken are always weak."

Some players, including Barcelona forward Samuel Eto'o, have threatened to walk off the field after being racially taunted. Yet others, such as Arsenal defender William Gallas, who is black, says making such a move is a complex decision.

So are other measures, such as taking points away from a team in league standings.

"You have to hit harder. With points, yes. But unfortunately ... taking points away from a team punishes the team" and not just the fans who support the team, Gallas said. "It might not be the team that's racist, it's the people in the stadium."

In the end, though, Gallas said, there's a point when enough is enough.

"If UEFA or FIFA do nothing, yes, leave the pitch" because "it's tough to be insulted when you're not able to react."

Some nations are better than others in prosecuting racist fans.

The situation in England has improved since the 1980s, thanks in part to aggressive anti-racism advertising campaigns and coverage of the problem by the British press.

So after Portsmouth defender Sol Campbell, who is black, was abused last September by Tottenham supporters -- whose insults included the image of Campbell "hanging from a tree" -- four fans involved were banned from attending soccer matches for three years after pleading guilty to indecent chanting.

Still, it hasn't stopped such incidents from happening. Egyptian forward Mido played for Middlesbrough against Newcastle in November, he was subjected to Islamophobic chanting.

Opoku was attacked while he was having a trial with the Serbian club Borac Cacak last year.

"I turned 'round to see a few Borac fans screaming they did not want blacks," Opoku told the Ghana Football Association. "They hit me a few times, but I ran, scaled a wall."

Opoku left Borac shortly afterward, and four of the attackers wound up sentenced to prison for a total of four-and-a-half years. It wasn't the first case involving Serbian fans and non-white players.

Three years ago, police arrested more than 30 Borac fans for abusing Zimbabwean striker Mike Temwanjira. A year later, UEFA fined the Serbian FA after England's black players were abused during an under-21 match played in the Netherlands.

If it's hard to protect players at the top level of game from racism, what hope is there for the likes of Opoku?

"We can worry about the lesser-known players," Diouf said. "They could actually be killed on a street corner. ... That is why it's time for the international authorities to tackle this problem full on."

Black. White.

Here is a clip of the video we watched in class.  Does racism exist in the United States?  If so, how prevalent is it?  As Bruno mentions, is Brian just looking for racism?

Want more responses from social networking sites? Just change your race!

COURTESY OF OKCUPID.COM:

http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/10/05/your-race-affects-whether-people-write-you-back/

Your Race Affects Whether People Write You Back

October 5th, 2009 by Christian

Welcome back, dorks. We’ve processed the messaging habits of over a million people and are about to basically prove that, despite what you might’ve heard from the Obama campaign and organic cereal commercials, racism is alive and well. It would be awesome if the other major online dating players would go out on a limb and release their own race data, too. I can’t imagine they will: multi-million dollar enterprises rarely like to admit that the people paying them those millions act like turds. But being poor gives us a certain freedom. To alienate all our users. So there.

When I first started looking at first-contact attempts and who was writing who back, it was immediately obvious that the sender’s race was a huge factor. Here are just a handful of the numbers that illustrate that:

The takeaway here is that although race shouldn’t matter in messaging, it does. A lot.

. . .

First of all, how do we know that race shouldn’t matter? Are we just making some after-school-special assumption that “true love is colorblind?” more compatibility usually
means more repliesNo, we’re not: we know race shouldn’t matter to replies because the races all match each other more or less evenly, and reply rate correlates to matching. That is, more compatibility generally means more replies.

On OkCupid you create your own unique matching system, and that means your better matches are people you actually want talk to. Below is a graph showing match percentages vs. reply rates for a random sample of 500,000 people.As you can see, in general, the better you match someone, the more likely you are to reply to a first message from them.

We can see this principle in action when we look at our trusty control, the Zodiac. Here are the match and reply rates side-by-side, with similar rates colored yellow. There’s no real need to inspect the numbers; just observe the similar colors.

• Throughout this post, yellowish colors are short-hand for “neutral” and red and green indicate “strong preference.”

People of the various Zodiac signs match each other all at roughly the average rate, and, as we would expect, they reply to messages similarly. In general, the correlation between match percentage and reply rate means that whenever we compare the match/reply charts for a given breakdown of the population, they should look about the same. However, this, like so many other fine assumptions, totally breaks down when race gets involved:

Again, don’t bother squinting, just check out the colors. We’ll soon look very closely at these tables.

. . .

So here’s last week’s compatibility by race table (I explained how we can confidently measure “compatibility” in that post). This is a blow-up of the leftmost table above:

As you can see, the races all match each other roughly evenly: good news. It means all other things being equal, two people, of whatever race, should have the same chance to have a successful relationshp. But now let’s look at the table of how individuals actually reply to each other’s messages. First we’ll examine messages sent by men to women (I know our gay readers are interested in same-sex versions of these tables, there’s a link to them hereand at the end of this post):

The numbers on the perimeter of the table are the weighted average ratesfor each column/row. Here’s what we can know:

• Black women write back the most. Whether it’s due to talkativeness, loneliness, or a sense of plain decency, black women are by far the most likely to respond to a first contact attempt. In many cases, their response rate is one and a half times the average, and, overall, black women reply about a quarter more often that other women.
• White men get more responses. Whatever it is, white males just get more replies from almost every group. We were careful to preselect our data pool so that physical attractiveness (as measured by our site picture-rating utility) was roughly even across all the race/gender slices. For guys, we did likewise with height.
• White women prefer white men to the exclusion of everyone else—and Asian and Hispanic women prefer them even more exclusively. These three types of women only respond well to white men. More significantly, these groups’ reply rates tonon-whites is terrible. Asian women write back non-white males at21.9%, Hispanic women at 22.9%, and white women at 23.0%. It’s here where things get interesting, for white women in particular. If you look at the match-by-race table before this one, the “should-look-like” one, you see that white women have an above-average compatibility with almost every group. Yet they only reply well to guys who look like them. There’s more data on this towards the end of the post.

Let’s see what happens when it’s the women writing the messages to men.

• Men don’t write black women back. Or rather, they write them back far less often than they should. Black women reply the most, yet get by far the fewest replies. Essentially every race—including other blacks—singles them out for the cold shoulder.
• White guys are shitty, but fairly even-handed about it. The average reply rate of non-white males is 48.1%, while white guys’ is only 40.5%. Basically, they write back about 20% less often. It’s ironic that white guys are worst responders, because as we saw above they get the most replies. That has apparently made them very self-absorbed. It’s interesting that white males do manage to reply to Middle Eastern women. Is there some kind of emergent fetish there? As Middle Easterners are becoming America’s next racial bogeyman, maybe there’s some kind of forbidden fruit thing going on. (Perhaps a reader more up-to-date on his or her Post-Colonial Theory can step in here? Just kidding. Don’t.)

. . .

Finally, here are a couple tables that shed further light on our discussion. These are site-wide answers to a couple user-written match questions. They barely need any explanation: one comments on the other, really. Together they shed more light on the theory/practice schizophrenia of people’s racial attitudes.

. . .

It’s probably not just OkCupid users that are like this. I don’t want anyone walking away from all this thinking that OkCupid users exceptionally horrible people. It’s likely that any dating site (and indeed any collection of people) would exhibit messaging biases similar to what I’ve written up. Any dating site probably
has these biasesAccording to our internal metrics, at least, OkCupid’s users are better-educated, younger, and far more progressive than the norm, so I can imagine that many sites would actually have worse race stats. But like I said at the beginning, we’ll probably never know. See you next week.

Has Obama acted too slow on his promises?

We have just passed the one year mark when President Obama was sworn into office. Reflecting over our President's past year in office, I came across this video with Keith Olbermann. In general, I think the younger generation has really shown us where we have come and how our society has progressed over time and President Obama is a reflection of that progression composed of new ideas and policies and perspectives. Still, the number of approval ratings have declined, but even with some sustained popularity, has he stayed true to his agenda during his presidency? What do you think, reflecting over the past year?

Take a look at this link to the video:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes

In 1968, an Iowa teacher, Jane Elliott, conducted an experiment with her third-grade class. She divided the group into blue-eyed kids and brown-eyed kids. The first day, she praised the blue-eyed kids and discriminated against the others. The next day, she reversed roles, favoring the brown-eyed children and criticizing the blue-eyed ones.

When I first read a brief synopsis of the experiment, I didn't buy it. I thought, there's no way third-graders would fall for something like that- they can't be brainwashed in just two days. I was very wrong. Initially, the children laughed at the idea that one group was superior because of eye color, but as the teacher continually praised the blue-eyed kids, the children really started to buy into the idea. The teacher told the blue-eyed kids that they were better, gave them extra time at recess, and explained that they were smarter. As they worked, she encouraged them and told them they'd be able to finish faster because they were more intelligent. Surprisingly, they actually were able to finish their assignments faster than the brown-eyed kids, who were discouraged because they were being told they were slow and dumb. The kids truly believed that their eye color made them innately superior or inferior, and their performance began to reflect their pride or insecurities, respectively.

The next day, the teacher told the children that she had lied the day before, and that the brown-eyed kids were in fact smarter than the blue-eyed ones. The brown-eyed children's faces lit up as they began to feel superior and powerful. The roles completely reversed; as the brown-eyed students were praised for their natural intelligence, they began to preform better and faster than they had the day before. The blue-eyed kids had trouble with the same tasks they had excelled in the day before. These were the exact same groups of children, with the same intelligence as they'd had the day before, but because they felt different about their "natural abilities," their performance actually changed.

I was shocked to see how easily these children could be persuaded about their supposed inherent value. And it didn't merely affect the "superior" group; the inferior group really believed that they were inferior to the other children. It made me curios about how each group of people felt during the Holocaust and slave trade, and how different groups of people feel today. Not only did the Aryan race feel naturally superior, but many of the Jews and other people who were discriminated against must have felt that they actually were inferior. Similarly, blacks during the slave trade and civil rights movement (maybe even still today) may have believed what whites were feeding them- that they were naturally dumb or primitive. I find it incredibly interesting how quickly people can begin to believe what their leaders tell them, especially regarding "inherent status" in association with things like skin color, eye color, race, etc. It also makes me wonder what stereotypes I carry without even knowing it.

Here's the link to the video. What do you guys think about it?
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/

A Tribute to Martin Luther King Jr.

Today is a good day to listen to Martin Luther King Jr's "I Have a Dream" speech in its entirety:

Hate and Haiti

It's hard to believe some of the stuff that people have said about Haiti after the earthquake left their country in ruins and has the whole world mourning. Here are two examples:

1. Pat Robertson



"True story..."

2. Rush Limbaugh

This will play right into Obama's hands. He's humanitarian, compassionate. They'll use this to burnish their, shall we say, "credibility" with the black community -- in the both light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country. It's made to order for them. That's why he couldn't wait to get out there, could not wait to get out there.

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/mehdi-hasan/2010/01/rush-limbaugh-haiti-obama

Justice Department Intervenes In Gay Rights Suit

This is an interesting story I hear on NPR's All Things Considered today:

For the first time in a decade, Justice Department lawyers have moved to intervene in a lawsuit on behalf of a gay high school student who was beaten up for being effeminate.

The case marks a novel interpretation of the Title IX statute, which prohibits discrimination against students on the basis of gender.

Gay and lesbian groups see it as a bold statement about the Obama administration's priorities.

 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122620723

Harry Reid: Racism or poor choice of words?

Harry Reid has caused quite a controversy over what he is quoted as saying in a book:

A new book quotes Reid, D-Nevada, as saying privately in 2008 that Obama could be successful as a black candidate in part because of his "light-skinned" appearance and speaking patterns "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one."

http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/01/11/reid.obama/index.html



Here is some interesting commentary on his remarks:

Obama's rise to the American presidency is a complicated and unlikely story full of smart strategy, extraordinary execution and inspiring coalition building. It feels tacky and false to reduce these accomplishments to a mere assessment of skin color. It degrades the strength of sacrifice and commitment that so many white voters, volunteers and donors made to the Obama candidacy.

Still, the primaries were hard-fought, and every little factor mattered. Reid was awkward but not wholly inaccurate that complexion may have helped Obama with white voters.

Once the furor dies down, there will be a few lessons that future politicos can learn from Reid. First, it offends white voters when you suggest their support of a black candidate was determined by his complexion. Second, referring to African-Americans as "Negroes" in the 21st century is an exceedingly bad idea. Finally, for a candidate of any race to be viable in our complicated, diverse nation, that candidate better be multilingual.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/01/11/harris.lacewell.reid.wrong/index.html

OK, so he shouldn't have said that. To his credit, the majority leader issued a statement apologizing for "offending any and all Americans, especially African-Americans, for my improper comments."

African-Americans, like everyone else, are more concerned with what politicians do than with what they say. And on that measure, Harry Reid is second to none.


When it comes to issues that matter -- affordable, quality health care; good-paying jobs with benefits; safe schools and communities; more middle-class tax cuts; less government waste -- Reid gets it right.

He has a 100 percent rating on the NAACP's legislative report card. As for Jon Kyl and John Cornyn, the two Republican senators who have called for his head? An F for each of the past six years.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/01/11/coley.reid.gop.reaction/index.html



What do you think?  Which comments do you agree or disagree with?

Tolerance and Acceptance

Tolerance and acceptance.

For a while I have been contemplating the question of ‘When does tolerance become outright acceptance?’ I feel that this is especially pertinent to issues going on currently with regards to same-sex rights. Members of the LDS Church have often used the adage “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” I wonder if this is even possible. When does the sin overcome the purported sinner? Some say that being attracted to a member of your same gender is wrong—be it a choice, be it biological—it is still wrong. Be kind to that person, but try to help them learn the error of their sexual orientation. While some agree that being a homosexual is wrong, the same argument has been used over time with regards to race.

In Nazi Germany, Jews facial characteristics were used to portray them in a negative light; in the United States of America, a nation founded on equality, women were denied the right to vote, Blacks were denied equal rights, Native American Indians were moved onto reservations—land which was supposedly of no worth, yet when gold or natural resources were discovered, land was taken from them once again—and the list goes on and on. Seemingly every minority, be it based on religious affiliation, race, class, or gender has had some discrimination imposed upon it by the dominant group.

Back to my question, and I may be grasping at straws in drawing a comparison, but at one point, both race and gender were looked upon as being a “sin.” One may argue “But someone cannot choose their race or gender, and homosexuals can choose their sexual orientation.” I wonder if this is the case, is it merely a mental illness, something that can be treated akin to alcoholism? (This was, by the way, the stance the LDS Church held for years).

Elder Dallin H. Oaks of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles stated that, “The Church does not have a position on the causes of any of these susceptibilities or inclinations, including those related to same-gender attraction. Those are scientific questions — whether nature or nurture — those are things the Church doesn’t have a position on.” (see http://newsroom.lds.org/ldsnewsroom/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=27f71f1dd189f010VgnVCM100000176f620aRCRD&vgnextchannel=726511154963d010VgnVCM1000004e94610aRCRD&vgnextfmt=tab1)

So, why does the Church feel it can get involved with political proposals, such as Prop 8, regardless of if it is a moral issue or not, and want non-LDS American citizens to join the cause? When it was a situation of polygamy, the Church wanted the American citizens, and the American government, to basically leave them alone. So should a church which has had, historically, a history of being oppressed, and acts of violence incurred upon it, seek to put down another oppressed group? Is this action tolerance? And if your answer is to “follow the prophet,” what do you say when a fellow co-worker, friend, or family member doesn’t even believe in the prophet?

Is it tolerance when men, Black men, such as Elijah Abel, are conferred the priesthood by Joseph Smith, only to be told later they cannot practice it? Regardless of the reason you feel it was implemented—personally, I feel it was a practice of policy and not prophecy, the revelation which President Spencer W. Kimball received came because someone who was in a position of authority high enough finally decided to address the issue, after all, the revelation on harmful substances came after men had been using them, showing that either it wasn’t that big of a deal to the Lord, OR the Lord feels that men really must learn for themselves, line upon line—be it policy or prophecy, some still did hold the priesthood, and then had it revoked, not due to worthiness, but do to their race? Is this restriction tolerance?

In my ward, I have a friend who we shall call Spence. Spence has a brother named Brian, and Brian served his mission in an eastern states Black populated inner-city. (Both Spence and his brother Brian are White.) When Spence and Brian’s new roommate’s father came down to help him move in, upon finding out about where Brian served his mission, asked, “So are you a fan of Obama? Is he one of your people?” For a Western states LDS member to posit the question opens up a myriad of questions…namely, asking a White person if a mixed-race person who is regarded as a symbol of Black America is one of his people? Does Brian even understand, or can he understand, what it is like to be Black in America? Does the question “Is he one of your people?” hold within it some kind of tolerance of the race, or does it show acceptance of equality? Could this statement be regarded as racist? Can we fully understand what it is like to be a member of another race or gender without actually being that race or gender? Sure, with economic conditions, you could take upon yourself a vow of poverty, or work to achieve wealth, but other conditions you cannot change…even if one was to do as, say, Eddie Murphy did on an old Saturday Night Live sketch in which he “painted” himself White through makeup, and then lived as a White man, is it still only a White man’s life as perceived through a Black man? Can an Asian really understand what it is like to be of European descent? Can a Native American Indian really comprehend what it is like to be of African descent? And so on…

I digress, the original question I posited was “When does tolerance become acceptance?” I do not know the answer. I do, however, think that we all need to begin to use our reason, coupled with our faith, and delve into deeper issues, such as, When do I follow my church leaders? When my local priesthood leaders say there is a train of emigrants passing through Southern Utah, and it is our responsibility to go wipe them out, do we participate in the massacre of 120 men and women? When we hear baptized Jews sitting outside a church building weeping, do we take the church’s typewriter and distribute anti-Nazi paperwork, even though it is against the counsel of local church leaders? When do we stand up and say, join me at the front of the bus, regardless of the color of your skin, even though we might end up in a worse position than before?

Do we tolerate people, or do we accept them? When do we believe a sin is really a sin—when our priesthood leader tells us so? When the dominate culture tells us so? When have we merely tolerated someone? When have we actually accepted them as one of our own? And will this ever occur in regards in those with same-gender attraction?

I would be interested in hearing any comments regarding this.