Midlife Meditation

One of these people is gay. I had no idea. Correction time: I said in my last post that I didn't really befriend a gay person until I was in my 30s, and serving a gay-friendly Reconciling Congregation. That was only partly true. In fact, I did have a close gay friend, but I was completely ignorant of his orientation. In fact, I only learned he was gay at our 25th college reunion, in 2008. It's not that strange that I didn't know this about him when we were classmates, living in the same dorm, part of a clique we called The Group. Scott dated women, belonged to a fraternity, and was, the last time I saw him before that reunion, engaged to a woman. Then he moved to North Carolina, and I heard nothing from him for about fifteen years. Then came the reunion. We met at an alumni mixer at which we only knew each other, got out of it as quickly as we could, and went out for a beer. There, Scott just mentioned in the conversation that he had a partner, and call...

It's a beautiful sunny morning in Portland, Oregon, but my thoughts are elsewhere. The good news is that, in Idaho and Kansas, cooler heads prevailed. That may still happen in Arizona, as well: Gov. Jan Brewer has already vetoed one law like this one. That bit of good news is cold comfort, though, when held up against the fact that people can be elected to a legislative office, take an oath to uphold the Constitution, and then with a straight face insist they have a constitutional right to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, and that to question such discrimination is to deny them free exercise of their religion. That's the essence of all three of these latter-day Jim Crow laws: if my religion teaches that some aspect of your personhood is sinful, I have a right to deny you service at my establishment--even if, in the case of the Idaho bills, that establishment provides vital medical services. You may already have seen the sign posted by Rocco's Pizza ...

Is all-star college football player Michael Sam gay by choice, or by birth? Slate writer Will Saletan makes the convincing argument that, considering all the difficult choices Sam had to make to become the athlete he is, being gay is hardly something he would've picked; and by extension, coming out is certainly something he could have elected not to do. This point has been in my arsenal since at least 1992, when my opinions about gay rights were first confronted by a well-meaning homophobe. The impetus for this conversation was the 1992 General Conference of the United Methodist Church, which was making national headlines for its quadrennial struggle over whether to relax its rules against  ordaining gay pastors. In that conference, as at every time the battle has been joined, the church came down conservative, tightening rather than relaxing restrictions. Even so, the very fact that Methodists were having this debate, that it wasn't a simple given that homosexuality alw...

Until recently, the Pacific Northwest lacked cities big enough to support boutique retail outlets. Most municipalities relied on a single store for most of their purchasing needs, and in many of those towns, that store was Fred Meyer. I first encountered a Fred Meyer store when I was in high school, and my family would drive into Corvallis to do our shopping. If we just needed groceries, we'd hit the local IGA or Safeway, but if we needed groceries, clothing, hardware, pharmaceuticals, electronics, toys for the kids, and so on, and wanted it all under the same roof, the place to go was Fred Meyer. At first I loved shopping there, but as I became an adult and my needs became more specialized, I found myself frequently frustrated at the limited selection available at whichever Fred Meyer I was visiting. They simply couldn't afford to stock shoes for my extra-wide feet, records of obscure classical works for my esoteric tastes, or books by even more obscure science fiction auth...

  I'm an Eagle.   In October 1978, my mother pinned a badge like this one to my uniform. It was the culmination of a ten-year journey, an accomplishment and honor achieved by only a small percentage of Scouts. My father became an Eagle sometime around 1940, and there was never any doubt in my mind that, as difficult as it proved to be, I would someday attain this rank, as well. All four of my younger brothers became Eagles, too. There was no way any of us was going to be the lone standout. And who wouldn't want to be an Eagle Scout? A paragon of honesty, reverence, and service? I bore this distinction with pride for a quarter of a century.   Until, that is, Scouting went south.   I mean that quite literally. In my youth, Scouting was a center-left organization, honoring diversity of creed and ethnicity, promoting global citizenship, responsible membership in the commonweal. Scouts were environmentalists, diplomats, public servants. Yes, there was a c...