My Gay Life

The Ninth Circuit Appeals court today ruled that Prop 8 was unconstitutional in a 2-1 ruling. This will undoubtedly be appealed so the legal battle is far from over, possibly going to the Supreme Court later this year. Go to your favorite news site for more reaction and stay tuned for my full reaction later.

Full decision

I am trying out my new GoPro Hero2 camera. So here is a brief view of my hike this morning on the Palmer Red Rocks Loop in Colorado Springs. A great reminder to myself of why I choose to live in Colorado Springs. You can find these type of trails up into the mountains within 5 miles of downtown.

All I have to say is hilarious.

I have a friend with a son who was just suspended from school last Friday. He was suspended because after a year of verbal bullying he took matters into his own hands and got into a physical fight with this bully.

My friend’s reaction was “I am happy for him. I am happy that he finally stood up for himself. I do not care that he got suspended. This has been going on too long.” From most people this type of reaction would have surprised me, but in this particular case it was what I expected. This was an interesting perspective that I had never really considered before, but the more I think about it the more I believe that her reaction is a disservice to her son.

Her son is different. He meets all of the stereotypes of being gay and has always sent my gaydar off, even before I actually knew him. Granted whether or not he is gay, has no actual bearing on this situation. As everyone knows being different in middle and high school will get you bullied, whether it is because you are gay, short, fat, have too high of a voice, or any distinguishing characteristic.

My friend is very naive. She sees her perfect image of her kids even when confronted with a preponderance of proof that they are not perfect. Her older son was a pot addict, and it took 3 years of all of her friends saying he is smoking pot, before she finally accepted that it might be true. I think this naivety gets her sons into trouble.

Her son complained his Freshman year that he was being bullied too much. So rather than trying to address the problem, give her son the tools to deal with bullying, and work with the school administration on the issue, she transferred him to a new school. As both you and I know transferring to a new school is not going to stop bullying, although in some cases it is truly necessary. Even working with the school administration will never truly stop the problem.

We need to equip kids with the tools to deal with bullying, and stop it if necessary. Avoidance is not a solution as bullying at that age is something that can never be completely avoided. And this is where I was disappointed with my friend. I wish she would have had a different reaction.

I wish her reaction would have been “I understand why he did it, I am happy he stood up for himself, but it was the wrong way to deal with the problem. Here is what he should have done.” This would have been a much better message and have helped provide him with some of the tools he needs to deal with the constant bullying.

As anyone who used the internet on Wednesday quickly learned, there was a massive online protest against SOPA/PIPA. First, click here to answer what is SOPA/PIPA?

This site and other including reddit, Wikipedia, and Bilerico shut down for the day showing pages urging you to contact your elected representatives. Now, many are claiming success as both the House and the Senate have postponed voting on the bills.

I did not take the decision to shut down lightly. Many had reservations about shutting down as they were going to lose a day’s worth of advertising revenue. My advertising revenue is so small, one day’s loss honestly is not even noticeable. I hesitated to shut down my site as this is a form of protest that can only be done rarely. If a bunch of sites shut down next month to protest something else it would not be nearly as effective or dramatic. It would be overused. However, I feel strongly that SOPA and PIPA are significantly flawed and had to be stopped.

However, now that the protest is over, was it successful? I would argue it was only modestly successful in accomplishing what it needed to accomplish. First, the bills are not gone, and there is no way to know that the problems in the bills will be resolved before congress decides to act on them again. When the bills come back in a month, how do we know that the problems are going to be fixed?

Additionally, these bills originally had broad support in D.C. Our representatives either truly believed that fundamentally changing the structure of the internet and using “The Great Firewall of China” to stop piracy is a good thing, or they had no idea what they were supporting as they did not bother to do their research. So either your representative wants to censor your access to information or your representative is willfully ignorant and not doing their job.

Finally, despite these massive protests the corporate backers of these bills see nothing wrong with it. These corporate backers believe that your access to the internet should be censored. These corporate backers believe that if I post a link to a site that contains even a single piece of copyrighted material that they should be able to shut this site down as I did not do enough to ensure I was not providing you information on how to get copyrighted material. Even if these companies lose this fight this year, they will be back next year and every following year until they get what they want, or go out of business.

So despite this initial victory the war is not over. Continue to contact your representatives about these issues. Consider who the corporate backers of these bills are and limit the money you give them. Some of the backers are so big you likely have no idea if you are giving them your money or not when you buy something, and that is understandable, but when you do know buy an alternative if possible.

This was too good not to post today. Comic from XKCD.