Print media reported McCain attacks on Obama for purported ties to Freddie and Fannie, but not McCain aides’ lobbying on their behalf
In articles about the presidential candidates’ responses to the economic crisis, several media outlets reported that the McCain campaign has attacked Sen. Barack Obama for what it says are his ties to lenders Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, without noting that several senior McCain campaign aides have lobbied for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, or both. Read more

Any questions Bob?

Rocky and pals are wrong

I have a message for Rocky Anderson and his loony leftist buddies: If President Bush were the dictator you think he is, you would be dead or worse. You still have the right to spout your liberal Bush-hating drivel. Other than airline passengers, no one has lost any rights in this country.

Garth Woolsey
West Bountiful

It’s not so much that Garth Woolsey is dead wrong (see ACLU), or that Garth Woolsey cares about the truth, its about all the uninformed idiots who read this crap and actually think its true just because its in the paper.

In the Deseret News’ defense, these are letter written by the public and represented as such, but that doesn’t justify printed something so patently false on its face.

If The Desnews wants or needs more thoughtful or interesting letters, they should consider raising the bar an inch or two.

I’m surprised at how soon I thought of a post that would (I hope) fit the tenor of OneUtah. Interestingly the topic was suggested in the original invitation to become an author. One of the things that has fascinated me here in the reddest of red states is that the liberal bloggers dominate the discussion here despite the decidedly conservative bent of our population as a whole. I don’t consider myself qualified to speculate on why this would be but it gnaws at me because I think that the blogosphere should ideally reflect reality, or else reality should shift to more closely match the blogosphere. In other words, in a conservative area the overall tenor of the blogs should be conservative. If the blogs are liberal in an area identified as conservative then either the liberal blogs should begin to be balanced with conservative blogs, or else the dominant liberal blogs should begin to have an effect on the conservatism of the community around them.

Here at OneUtah we are supposed to have an open forum with commentary from Liberals and Conservatives. Cliff recognizes that it is not very well balanced even though he has invited very conservative authors, such as Paul Mero, to participate. I have noticed at BNN/Utah that the most influential blogs each week are almost always liberal voices such as the Utah Amicus and JM Bell. Both are excellent blogs that I have followed for quite some time, but in a conservative state like ours I would expect some conservative voices to rise to the top of the influence rankings as often as the liberal blogs do.

I know that we have some good blogs in Utah with conservative perspectives. I would invite our conservative authors to find ways to make your voices heard within the online representations of the state. That might require some kind of organization, or else it might simply require an awareness that this medium is only growing in influence and should be cultivated if the conservative voices are to have the influence that would be expected in our bright red state.

I’ll tell you a bit about myself qua LDS person. I was born and raised in the church, served a mission to Germany, got married in the temple, paid my tithing, did all of the right things. Then one night as I was reading the Book of Mormon in preparation for teaching a Sunday school class, a realization hit me like a bolt out of the blue: “This is a modern book.” I described this experience years later (anyone interested can see the article at http://signaturebooks.com/apocrypha.htm) as a deconversion because it had all of the inscrutable suddenness of conversions TO Mormonism that I had seen on occasion in the mission field. That night my life changed forever. There was no arguing with this experience. It wasn’t the end of a years-long struggle with faith. I had no such struggle. The realization came unsought, and unwanted. But it happened, and it overwhelmed me. Sometime later, I was coming back from an evening in San Francisco (my wife and I were living in Berkeley at the time), and as I drove over the Bay Bridge and peered into the darkness, I felt like I was staring into the abyss. EVERYTHING about my life was up for grabs. My most cherished beliefs were shattered like Humpty Dumpty beyond any chance of repair. No sane person seeks such loneliness and emptiness, or such terror.

Now, if it makes this experience palatable to you, you can dismiss me as someone who simply gave into temptation. But I’ve had temptation, Paul, and sometimes I’ve yielded and sometimes I haven’t. This wasn’t temptation. This was being run over by a truck that you never saw coming.

Does this make me an apostate? Perhaps, in the sense that I’m no longer active in the church. But apostate to me means someone who CHOOSES to leave, who deliberately turns his back on the church, someone who therefore by way of self-justification seeks to harm the church. I never did that. In fact, it may surprise you to learn that I’m still on the books as a member. So is my dad. I have never and will never ask to have my name removed. The church may choose to excommunicate me, but that will be their act not mine. I make this choice out of respect for my past. I did not EVER repudiate my church or my past. My world changed and I found myself removed as if by transporter to another place from which I could never return to meaningful fellowship based on shared belief.

But I owe my past something. I owe Brigham Young, my great-great-great grandfather something. On any number of points of doctrine, Brigham and I would probably be at odds. There is, for example, the question of the existence of God, which he affirmed and which I doubt. But on any number of other issues, he and I would have a lot in common. Brigham, for example, devoted his entire life to the notion of building the kingdom of God here in Utah. Not a doctrinal kingdom but a real-life, down-to-earth, practical kingdom. Strange as it may sound, I share that vision. My kingdom isn’t a religious one in the conventional sense, unless for you as for me religion is ALL about how we relate to each other and to the earth. I don’t give a rat’s ass about whether heaven is one kingdom or three or whether the three Nephites walk the earth or not. What matters is what effect our belief has on how we live in the here and now. Belief, it seems to me now in retrospect, is more often than not a distraction from the real business of life, which is what we make of it.

It’s for this reason that I still care about what the LDS church does. I happen to be in love with Utah. I love this place passionately, and it hurts me to see the mess of it that we are now making, with the church’s connivance or unawareness. Some time ago, I saw a documentary entitled The Power of Community  http://www.powerofcommunity.org/cm/index…), which tells the story of what happened to Cuba after the fall of the Soviet Union. We here in the U.S. have heard and seen some of the bad things, but few of us have heard about Cuba’s amazing transformation in positive ways. One of these was the refashioning of Havana into one of the greenest cities on earth. Because they had no oil with which to make artificial fertilizers and pesticides and because they had no oil to power industrial farm equipment and processing plants, Havanans had to reinvent how they grow and process food. Today, half of the food consumed in Havana is raised inside the city limits, and 80% of that food is organic. No city in America can touch these figures. All around Havana, every square inch of available space, from rooftops to patios to yards to empty lots has been converted into garden. People raise, process, market, and buy their own food, neighborhood by neighborhood. Similar transformations have occurred in education and health care. Despite their many problems, Cubans have a life expectancy equal to our own and a child mortality rate better than ours. Cuba is in fact an exporter of well-trained physicians and other knowledge workers. It is a pioneer in the development of phage technology, an alternative approach to antibiotics. And Cubans are reexperiencing what real community is about.

As I watched this documentary, I thought, why is this happening in Havana and not Salt Lake? Must we too go through disaster before we are willing to change, or can we muster again the sort of energy that enabled the early Mormon saints to build a viable, self-sustaining community here in the unlikeliest of places? Can we build such a community anew here?

We face problems greater than any the pioneers did. What’s at stake, although it isn’t yet our immediate survival, is nothing less than the survival of our civilization. I see an opportunity for the LDS church to play an undreamed-of role in remaking our society on sustainable grounds. Salt Lake is uniquely positioned because of its built-in social matrix and its history, however dusty and forgotten, in communal living. I absolutely believe that the LDS church can in deed change the world, by working to change Salt Lake City, along the lines now being pioneered by our communist rivals in Cuba.

When, therefore, I see the church squandering its real and political capital chasing gays when it should be building solar power installations, replanting ward gardens and farms, and urging the saints with all possible urgency to embrace conservation, I DO get angry. It’s not because I can’t leave the church alone. For twenty years after my deconversion, I wrote nothing and essentially did nothing in connection with the church. As far as I was concerned, the church was a non-issue. I have never attacked the church on doctrinal grounds, and I discussed my own story strictly as a personal memoir, not an agenda for apostates to gang-bang the church.

My isolation came to a self-imposed end when I began to realize how much my own life had to change in order to become sustainable. And I realized that however much I did on my own, it would probably come to nothing without a similar transformation throughout Utah, and indeed the world. Change must START with me, but it can’t end with me. That’s where Who Watches the Watchers and I part company. He’s a survivalist, I’m not.

So, I began my own underground, but now increasingly public, campaign to get the church off its ass and into the frontline, where it should be as an institution that claims prophetic leadership. If the church does not act now and we end up where climate scientists predict we’ll be, the membership of the church and the world at large will have reason to point the finger at the men downtown and say, “You frauds! How dare you talk to us about prophecy when you failed to act ten or twenty years ago on problems evident to anyone!”

So, Paul, that’s my story. If it helps you to sleep at night, call me an apostate. But our dialog is more than a debating contest. We face life and death problems to whose scope and nature the church has yet to awaken. Forget about me. Consider what YOUR role could be toward the church. If you, as a faithful member, think that things here in SLC are just fine, that the air we breathe is OK, that the fate of our snowpack and of our rivers is in good hands, fine. If not, what are YOU doing about it? Why aren’t YOU demanding action from the church? For let’s not kid ourselves, you and I and Who Watches the Watchers can build as nice a little survivalist kingdom as we want behind our domestic barricades but without the church’s cooperation Salt Lake City as a whole will remain untransformed. And untransformed, it is a bomb waiting to go off.

Cue background music, William Tell. Cue White House spokesman.

We shall fight gays on the seas and oceans.
We shall them on the beaches.
We shall fight them in the fields and in the streets.
We shall never surrender, and even if this government were subjugated, then our Empire in the West, guarded by men in blue suits, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, Zion, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the world.

Lord be praised. The LDS are on the way. Hasten, Zion.

Not since the days of Joe McCarthy has the U.S. so narrowly escaped destruction from the imaginary forces of evil. And not since Joe McCarthy has our savior been more ridiculous.

We are in fact teetering on the brink, the brink of financial collapse due to outrageous overspending in Washington and the greed of Wall Street, the banks, and the real estate developers. We teeter on the brink of WW III in the Middle East, due to the war that Slinky and Stinky have foisted on us. We teeter on the brink of glacial meltdown. Nowhere in these real crises is the invisible hand of gay America at work. And nowhere in these real crises is the LDS Church coming to the rescue.

Half a million Americans sit in jail for smoking a plant, while the criminals who brought us Iraq and Afghanistan roam the streets free. What does the LDS Church have to say about this?

Over 90% of western America’s rivers and streams have dangerously high levels of mercury, a deadly neurotoxin and, worse, a genotoxin capable of altering our very genes. Our descendants will forever bear the consequences. What does the LDS Church have to say about this?

One in 79 Utah boys is born with autism, twice the national average. The leading suspect of this epidemic is environmental mercury. What does the LDS Church have to say about this?

2,000 Utahns die prematurely each year due to the effects of Utah’s dreadful air pollution. Nonetheless, Utah has yet to take a single meaningful step toward limiting pollution or controlling growth. What does the LDS Church have to say about this?

By mid-century, according to a Colorado university report, Utah’s snowpack will have been reduced by 85% if present warming trends continue. What does the LDS Church have to say about this?

One could go on at length about the many REAL threats to our way of life that might prompt concerted action by the LDS Church. Every one of these is also of the greatest moral import. Is not the well-being our children, for example, a moral issue? Is not our relationship to the planet, whose species are disappearing at a rate not seen since the extinction of the dinosaurs, a moral issue? On these, the most important issues not just of our time but of all time, the Church says NOTHING.

The true measure of the LDS Church in our time, and the canon by which history will judge it for all time, is that instead of addressing the unprecedented moral challenges to civilized society it chose to chase ghosts. Those gay ghosts who purportedly will bring the moral order to its knees.

What a long way prophecy has come since the days of Hosea, Amos, and Jeremiah! The thunder of courageous men speaking truth to power rumbles far off. Here at home there is only deafening silence.

Will the lions of the Lord ever roar again?

But I think Paul, with that reticence that is his trademark, is too restrained. The implication of Scripture (”if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out”) and hard-nosed, Malthusian capitalism alike is that we need to GET RID of unproductive units and more aggressively reward the productive, especially the White Anglo-Saxon Productive. America for WASPs! The trickle down theory of sex triumphs! Here, then, are a few modest proposals to keep America in the reproductive running (up there in the lead next to such societal luminaries as the Sudan, Iran, and my personal favorite, Pakistan).

First, build concentration camps for gays. If they misbehave, gas them and cremate their bodies in industrial ovens. These people are a menace to society. Not just their way of life but their LIFE threatens not only marriage but the very fabric of society itself. It’s not clear yet exactly how they do this, but we know that they do. Our Gruppenfuehrer, known locally as GAs (Mormon speak for “General Authorities,” “the Lord’s anointed,” etc.), tell us so.

Second, institute a Frequent Fuckers program bankrolled by the state. This is the flagship program of my proposed new Sexcare system (the necessary and inexcusably overlooked counterpart to the present, post-productive Medicare–overlooked, probably due to insidious queer influence). To clarify, this benefit isn’t just for casual, recreational fucking, which the state will aggressively punish, but productive fucking, fucking with a purpose, fucking on a mission. We want more KIDS, billions and billions of them, googleplexes of them. We want an assembly line of kids rolling out of their mothers. Sadly we haven’t yet invented a less organic way of producing them, but Craig Venter and the geneticists are working on this.

There are three levels in this program, Gold, Silver, and Bronze (local variant: Celestial, Terrestrial, Telestial).

Gold-Level Fuckers, who produce more than twelve children per woman, who constitute a quorum wherever they go, receive the following benefits:

-A free starter palace in an American suburb of your choice, paid for by the sale of confiscated gay properties (several of them). Why wait for the kingdom which is to come when you can have it here? Palaces come complete with walls, drawbridge, armed guards, imported slave labor (will require optional Spanish translator). Many such palaces are on display on the Sandy bench where Paul lives.

-A free Chevvy Suburban, known locally as the Brigham Brougham, every seven years throughout your reproductive life or age 55, whichever comes last, paid for by the sale of even more gay vehicles (it takes about 2.5 Priuses to pay for one Suburban).

Silver-Level Fuckers, who produce six or more kids per woman (you’re in luck, Paul!) get:

-A one-time get out of jail free card from the IRS. Can be used if your reproductive success threatens to overwhelm you in debt.

-A quiver full of school vouchers, courtesy of Overstock.com’s Patrick Byrne (where he gets his money, with Overstock where it is, is a wonder to us all). You CAN have productive sex and send your kids to Harvard! Mitt Romney has also agreed to chip in to insure that every future GA has a chance to see the edyacated world before returning to Utah, the latter being in but not of the former.

-Lifetime membership in the Sutherland Institute, and a no-risk visit from Mormon missionaries, who will instruct you in ways of eternally increasing your productivity. Imagine it, men, eternal growth! Quality and quantity! Eternal male enhancement! One dizzies just thinking of it.

Bronze-Level Fuckers (this, unfortunately, is the farthest I’m likely to get toward that palace, Paul), who produce four or more kids per woman, earn:

-A free copy of Celestial Fucking. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, forthcoming. In this inspiring, exhaustively correlated and field-tested book, the author, a GA yet to be determined, reveals how patriarchal legends such as Abraham became the fathers of nations and took their first steps on the path of eternal increase.

-A free copy of Mastering Masturbation: Increasing Productivity through Self-Discipline, another Deseret Book masterpiece by the always-inspiring Sheri Dew, who draws on her own experience.

-A free Men on a Mission calendar by Chad Hardy (for her) and a Women Serving Under the Lord calendar (for him), to inspire continued progress in reproductive success. To be used only when you’re together. Publisher’s note: Please never take one of these into the bathroom alone. This is advanced eroticism, for happily married couples only!

-A signed and numbered reprint of Ezra Taft Benson’s famous “Precious Husband” speech that had so many LDS women talking!

-A free copy of the new LDS comedy hit, There’s Something About Martin, a hilarious sendup of gay life. Has audiences in Provo rolling in the aisles (quite a feat given the way some of them are wedged into their seats).

The message to People of Bronze is, “Don’t be discouraged. You are our bread and butter fuckers; we need you!” Fuck for your country! The idea of a new vision for the Peace Corps suggests itself here, but that will have to await another post.

For years, I’ve been wondering how the world would deal with its downward-spiraling population. Paul has the solution. We can no longer afford to leave sex to private enterprise. It needs government regulation. The days of laissez-fuck are over.

Vive l’etat! Sieg Heil! Ad maiorem Dei gloriam!

P.S. Paul, while I have you online, I wanted to remind you that our next Brown Shirt meeting is this coming Thursday. Auf Wiedersehen. Stay hard for your country, man, and your country women.

Conservative Christians have long had a subculture with Christian book stores, schools, bands, TV stations, programs, movies, and even their own list of celebrities. There are Bible based diets, perfumes, action figures and the whole schlemiel. FWIW, the Christian subculture has a pervasive and well-deserved sense of inferiority to mainstream culture which is by almost ever standard more creative and more interesting. Christian subculture often comes across as a homogenized and sanitized version of mainstream culture - complete with swear free comedians and rappers.

Minority groups face an ongoing struggle between establishing and maintaining a subculture or integrating within the mainstream, a struggle made doubly difficult when group members are increasingly instrumental in creating mainstream culture. Why should we be separate when we’re being represented in the mainstream?

I believe the gay community has reached a crossroads and the choice will be difficult. Huge chunks of American culture are the creation of glbt people. More importantly, the debate about gay marriage has, paradoxically, resulted in legal defeats but cultural victories. The more conservative bitch, moan whine and carry about gay marriage, the more it appears in the awareness of Americans who are growing more and more accepting. The self-aware separateness of glbt people is, as more and more establish long term relationships and lead “normal” lives is becoming less and less viable. Quite frankly, gay marriage - win or lose the short term electoral fights - is a long term victory in which the very ordinariness of being gay is simply being accepted.

Andrew Sullivan - three years ago - wrote:

week after week this summer, couple after couple got married–well over a thousand in the year and a half since gay marriage has been legal in Massachusetts . . . .The heterosexuals in the crowd knew exactly what to do. They waved and cheered and smiled. Then, suddenly, as if learning the habits of a new era, gay bystanders joined in. In an instant, the difference between gay and straight receded again a little.

But here’s the strange thing: These changes did not feel like a revolution. They felt merely like small, if critical, steps in an inexorable evolution toward the end of a distinctive gay culture. For what has happened to Provincetown this past decade, as with gay America as a whole, has been less like a political revolution from above than a social transformation from below. There is no single gay identity anymore, let alone a single look or style or culture. Memorial Day sees the younger generation of lesbians, looking like lost members of a boy band, with their baseball caps, preppy shirts, short hair, and earrings. Independence Day brings the partiers: the “circuit boys,” with perfect torsos, a thirst for nightlife, designer drugs, and countless bottles of water. For a week in mid-July, the town is dominated by “bears”–chubby, hairy, unkempt men with an affinity for beer and pizza. Family Week heralds an influx of children and harried gay parents. Film Festival Week brings in the artsy crowd. Women’s Week brings the more familiar images of older lesbians: a landlocked flotilla of windbreakers and sensible shoes. East Village bohemians drift in throughout the summer; quiet male couples spend more time browsing gourmet groceries and realtors than cruising nightspots; the predictable population of artists and writers–Michael Cunningham and John Waters are fixtures–mix with openly gay lawyers and cops and teachers and shrinks.

Slowly but unmistakably, gay culture is ending. You see it beyond the poignant transformation of P-town: on the streets of the big cities, on university campuses, in the suburbs where gay couples have settled, and in the entrails of the Internet. In fact, it is beginning to dawn on many that the very concept of gay culture may one day disappear altogether. By that, I do not mean that homosexual men and lesbians will not exist–or that they won’t create a community of sorts and a culture that sets them in some ways apart. I mean simply that what encompasses gay culture itself will expand into such a diverse set of subcultures that “gayness” alone will cease to tell you very much about any individual. The distinction between gay and straight culture will become so blurred, so fractured, and so intermingled that it may become more helpful not to examine them separately at all.

For many in the gay world, this is both a triumph and a threat. It is a triumph because it is what we always dreamed of: a world in which being gay is a non issue among our families, friends, and neighbors. But it is a threat in the way that all loss is a threat. For many of us who grew up fighting a world of now-inconceivable silence and shame, distinctive gayness became an integral part of who we are. It helped define us not only to the world but also to ourselves. Letting that go is as hard as it is liberating, as saddening as it is invigorating. And, while social advance allows many of us to contemplate this gift of a problem, we are also aware that in other parts of the country and the world, the reverse may be happening. With the growth of fundamentalism across the religious world–from Pope Benedict XVI’s Vatican to Islamic fatwas and American evangelicalism–gayness is under attack in many places, even as it wrests free from repression in others. In fact, the two phenomena are related. The new anti-gay fervor is a response to the growing probability that the world will one day treat gay and straight as interchangeable humans and citizens rather than as estranged others. It is the end of gay culture–not its endurance–that threatens the old order. It is the fact that, across the state of Massachusetts, “gay marriage” has just been abolished. The marriage licenses gay couples receive are indistinguishable from those given to straight couples. On paper, the difference is now history. In the real world, the consequences of that are still unfolding.

Sullivan, probably one of the worst commentator on American politics, is perhaps the most insightful around on issues of orientation. The differences between Salt Lake City circa 1985 and Salt Lake City 2005 is almost unimaginable. The shock of gayness in Salt Lake in the grimness of the Reagan era has been replaced by a boring normalcy. Gay Pride is just another summer festival.

Sullivan again:

So, as one generation literally disappeared and one generation found itself shocked to still be alive, a far larger and more empowered one emerged on the scene. This new generation knew very little about the gay culture of the ’70s, and its members were oblivious to the psychically formative experience of plague that had shaped their elders. Most came from the heart of straight America and were more in tune with its new, mellower attitude toward gayness than the embattled, defensive urban gay culture of the pre-aids era. Even in evangelical circles, gay kids willing to acknowledge and struggle publicly with their own homosexuality represented a new form of openness. The speed of the change is still shocking. I’m only 42, and I grew up in a world where I literally never heard the word “homosexual” until I went to college. It is now not uncommon to meet gay men in their early twenties who took a boy as their date to the high school prom. When I figured out I was gay, there were no role models to speak of; and, in the popular culture, homosexuality was either a punch line or an embarrassed silence. Today’s cultural climate could not be more different. And the psychological impact on the younger generation cannot be overstated.

and

. . . Black children come into society both uplifted and burdened by the weight of their communal past–a weight that is transferred within families or communities or cultural institutions, such as the church, that provide a context for self-understanding, even in rebellion. Gay children have no such support or burden. And so, in their most formative years, their self-consciousness is utterly different than that of their gay elders. That’s why it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between gay and straight teens today–or even young gay and straight adults. Less psychologically wounded, more self-confident, less isolated, young gay kids look and sound increasingly like young straight kids. On the dozens of college campuses I have visited over the past decade, the shift in just a few years has been astounding. At a Catholic institution like Boston College, for example, a generation ago there would have been no discussion of homosexuality. When I visited recently to talk about that very subject, the preppy, conservative student president was openly gay.

Sullivan muses that gay culture in the US will remain in the more conservative places where the screaming hostility of fundamentalist religion makes it necessary but even that will dissolve as more and more places make gay marriage legal and real, as the media treats being gay as just a way of being no different than being straight.

The raving lunacy of a Gayle Ruzicka or Chris Buttars exists precisely because gay folks dare to live openly as themselves in Utah. Ironically, that ancien regime of gay life, The Sun, was destroyed by nature at about the time the gay community matured. The separate and unequal world of the gay community is dissolving as more and more gay people expect to be treated equally and lead their lives that way. The Gay Men’s Health Summit - not so many years ago a four day event packed with workshops and with hundreds of participants - is down to one day of programming, a friday evening social and sunday morning breakfast.

Even the reliably conservative readership of the D-News is showing an increasing tolerance for glbt people. A letter opposing gay marriage appeared this week and drew over 200 comments, a huge number of them attacking the letter and defending glbt people using the common sense argument that it is bigotry not being gay that causes problems. It’s just becoming a non-issue.

Opposition to glbt people will, I suspect, grow increasingly strident and venomous over the next few years, its viciousness in direct proportion to its irrelevancy. Even young evangelicals - who could be reasonably expected to be anti-gay - are increasingly adopting a live and let live attitude. Again and again, Christian pollster the Barna Group finds that young fundagelicals are all but indistinguishable in their attitudes and values from their peers. These young believers look at raging hypocrites like Ted Haggard and want nothing to do him and his ilk. They’d rather accept gay people than force themto become liars who destroy their families and damage their churches. The deaths of several notorious homophobes in recent years - including the vile Jesse Helms - feels like the end of an era in more ways than one.

At the end of the day, where gay folks and issues are concerned, it’s difficult not to look around and realize it’s all over but the shouting. The stridency, the bitterness, the venom of Gayle Ruzicka her ilk are the death rattle of worldview that is increasingly incapable of offering and effective means of organizing society.

The first - and a slightly unusual one - is House 24 - formerly Ralph Becker’s seat. Rebecca Chavez-Houck took Ralph’ spot back in January and is running for re-election this fall. She’s discovering a strange dynamic - that voters still think Ralph is in the seat. Rebecca is a great representative for Utah and for our district. We need to raise her name recognition and keep her in the seat.

Salt Lake County mayor Peter Corroon has had an interesting and eventful first term. Remember back in 2004 - Nancy Workman dropped out amidst a series of scandals. Corroon eventually beat home developper Ellis Ivory in a complicated four way race (perennial candidate Merrill Cook won 6.4% of the vote). Corroon’s first term has been relatively scandal free but has been marked by some fairly unhappy relations with the state’s Republican infrastructure. As a result, Corroon has been targeted by the Republican leadership. They want to take him down. Corroon has name recognition and has raised serious money. Now, I will say this for Corroon’s opponent - he and his wife are really decent, nice people. I had a chance to meet them on Wednesday and they really struck me as fundamentally decent, good people; it’s going to be a tough race.

I’m excited that Christine Johnson is running for re-election. She’s a great asset to our state legislature - a sane and witty voice in an institution not known for its sanity or wit. I volunteered some days with Christine last year on Ralph’s campaign and she’s a huge asset for Utah.

That’s it for today.

It seems we can reliably expect the good people of Utah to have some sort of meltdown about sex on a relatively regular basis but without any actions to distinguish between the real and imagined, between serious problems and unserious concerns. There’s a tendency to believe that if the speaker in question (one thinks here of the woman who complained about the Victoria’s Secret window display or the woman who proclaimed that the Blue Boutique’s customers would rush to Sugar House Park and assault small children upon leaving the establishment) means what she says in all seriousness that we are required to treat it seriously. But some claims are simply unserious. Treating them as if they are meaningful or serious does not make them so. It also makes it difficult to sort out what to in response to the truly serious - i.e. teens in Davis county texting each other nude pictures of themselves. It also makes it difficult to figure out the appropriate response.

The idea, often expressed, is that we must treat all moral concerns equally. But the parents who were so concerned about the Blue Boutique’s new location were fundamentally unserious - their arguments were absurd and overblown. That JT Martin got caught up in the hysteria reflects badly on him as well as on Utah’s inability to engage in a public discussion about matters of sexuality. The Tribune’s LTE deploring the window display at Victoria’s secret brought over 200 responses, many brutally mocking the letter’s author, but many others defending her. Sexuality, it seems, cannot be discussed in Utah absent some sort of moral panic. The resulting hysteria often brings calls to man the barricades and fight against immorality for all we’re worth. These calls for defending “values” are so common they have little or no lasting effect outside our knee-jerk elected officials who so fear appearing to “advocate” immorality that they rush to the Hill to pass laws.

Not all concerns about morality are of equal value or weight. That an adult would be so offended by a window display in a shopping mall that she feels she must write a letter to the editor is laughable. Like the people who were mortally offended at Janet Jackson’s boob during the Super Bowl (and who demanded that such family entertainment not be besmirched by boobs) the complaint does not deserve to be treated with any seriousness.

Paradoxically, in the Super Bowl “boob gate” and Victoria’s Secret and the Blue Boutique there are serious questions we can explore. Victoria’s Secret, as my female friends avow, has the best quality and best fitting bras available; you pay more for them, but they last longer and are more comfortable to wear. However, rather than rely on the quality of their product to generate sales, Victoria’s Secret commodifies sexuality and portrays female sexualty in ways that are not representative of real people. We can and should be asking questions about VS’s means of portraying sexuality and the effect it has on people.

The parents in Herriman have overreacted. They have been thrown into a moral panic over the mere concept that their children might know something about oral sex, masturbation and homosexuality. Unable to face that their kids might know something all on their own, the parents have declared war on a health teacher. These parents are definitely teaching their kids about sexuality but the kids are learning sexuailty is shameful, scandalous and shocking. Sounds to me like a recipe for teenage rebellion.

So now I find myself at long last at the only truly serious issue of sexuality that has emerged in Utah this year - the issue of teens using their cell phones and webcams to send nude photos of themselves and their peers to one another. Like many issues of teenage sexuality, this practice strikes terror into the hearts of adults. It provides undeniable proof that teens are sexual beings. The teens in question have faced criminal charges under child pornography laws. Such responses defy logic but feed into adult fears about adolescent sexuality by defining teens as children no different than two year olds.

The seriousness with which we as adults should treat adolescent sexuality must be tempered by humor, love, and the kind of honesty that adults find almost impossible when dealing with teenage sexuality.

So how should we as adults and as communities respond to our teens who texting nude photos of themselves around. First, and this is the landmine, we have to be clear that while many people (adults as well as teens) engage in such behaviors, they are fraught with risks and we must work with our teens to sort out and managet those risks. Having worked with adolescents (as well as some 20 somethings) very often when we are young we tend to not realize that what we put out sexually isn’t just seen by the objects of our affection. To put it another way - you may be dressing to appeal to the hottie sitting two rows over, but the stoner sitting two rows behind you can see you too. A few years ago, the receptionist at my office was trying to attract one of our coworkers. She wore her sexy best for days and was almost constantly in tears as the grubby fifty something electricians kept trying to hit on her, as the skanky warehouse guys kept hitting on her. Fortunately someone sat down and explained the reality to her; it may not be right but you need to know how it works. So we need to explain - sure this photo may be going to one person, but there’s no reason to think that’s the only person who will see it, and it will probably end up with people you don’t want seeing it.

Second, we need to engage adolescents in conversations about healthy sexuality. We should encourage them to explore what it means to express their sexuality in healthy, life-enhancing ways. To do that we as adults need to engage with one another about what it means to express our sexuality in healthy, life-enhancing ways. What does it mean to be a sexually healthy person and what means of expressing our sexuality are healthy? We as adults need to learn how to be honest about sexuality, to learn how to discuss both the good and the bad of sexuality, to be able to talk about our regrets without making it seem all of sexuality is regretful and to talk about the good without making it seem all of sexuality is a celebration. Building these skills will remove the stigma from sexuality and will reduce sensational aura around sexuality. Treating it matter of factly will help not only adults but teens to deal with sexuality in healthy, natural ways. It will free us to talk about moral agency and decision making with regard to sexuality without moralizing.

Finally, we need to provide adolescents with safe, trusted adults with whom they can discuss sexuality in addition to their parents. There are questions that teens simply don’t feel free to ask their parents. They are afraid of the responses, afraid they will be judged or conversely just aren’t ready to share with their parents. The parents in Herriman have made the mistake of seeing the health teacher as enemy rather than ally. This attitude underlies Utah’s restrictions on teaching about sexuality where our legislators and parents have defined information as the enemy and information giving as a dangerous act. They’ve left few avenues for young persons to get information and they have guaranteed that young persons will get the wrong information.

The challenge we face a culture is the challenge of looking at the parents in Herriman and the group opposed to the Blue Boutique and the woman who complained about Victoria’s Secret and helping them get a grip on their fears. The fear of parents that their children will be damaged by information is a very real fear, but the thing being fears is unrealistic. Helping these parents identify their concerns and manage them will go a very long way toward helping us end these constant moral panics over . . . nothing. Or more correctly, over the wrong things.

The parents in Herriman are worried their children can’t understand or will be harmed by knowing about sexuality. The very fact that the students were asking the questions should tell the parents that their kids need the information. Trust me, it takes a lot for a young person to trust an adult enough to ask those questions. The parents unrealistic fear of harm from information comes because the parents themselves haven’t figured out sexuality. Just because you’ve had it doesn’t mean you get it. The parents protesting the Blue Boutique believed their children would be endangered but like the “stranger danger” nonsense from a few years ago, such fears are about the one in twenty danger. Your kid is in danger of being sexually abused, but its far more likely by a scout master than some person who just bought a dildo at the Blue Boutique. The fear itself is real, but not realistic.

When it comes to sexuality, it seems so often in Utah, the unserious drive the debate with their very real but completely unrealistic fears. Its past time to stop being unserious and unrealistic and start being serious and realistic about sexuality.

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