The Celebration of the Death of DOMA

Taken from George Takei's Facebook Page

The caption to the left is similar to how I looked when I turned on my computer yesterday morning to see some of the best news I have seen in years. The Defense of Marriage Act or DOMA had been put down by the Supreme Court of the United States as unconstitutional. For those of you who are unfamiliar with DOMA, as I once was, it is a law that was signed by President Clinton. Simply it mandated that if a same sex couple got a civil marriage or a civil union that other states did not need to recognize that. Such as a same sex couple that got married in Massachusetts moved to New York the state of New York would not have to recognize that relationship as legal. Not only did DOMA make it difficult for same sex couples to be able to move where they pleased, it made it difficult for them to travel and retain their rights. Such as if a same sex couple would be on vacation in Florida and they were in a car accident the family of the injured party would have rights to visitation of the injured, but the spouse may not have rights of visitation and could even be asked by the family and the hospital to leave. These are the kinds of situations that make the end of DOMA worth celebrating.

However not everyone in the Union will see this as a matter worth celebration. Many people in California donated thousands of dollars to make certain that Proposition Eight passed. And when it did lawmakers were faced with a group of people who proposed that it may be unconstitutional. This is what made DOMA and Proposition Eight so controversial: the fact that people said they wanted X and the Bill of Rights said people should get Y. This is what the Supreme Court among others has been trying to sort out for years since all this began back in 2008. Now that it has been declared unconstitutional there are groups of people who are upset because the Supreme Court did not vote in favor of the people. Instead they elected to give the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender community their rights. This is why I celebrate.

However I need to make a confession to you. I am a Mormon. Mormons did much of the funding for Proposition Eight in California. I do not agree with their choice despite some of my beliefs being the same as theirs. I believe that religious marriage is meant to be between a man and a woman. The purpose of that marriage is to have a relationship that lasts longer than our lifetime here on earth and into the eternities before God. None of the doctrine I have read has ever led me to believe that God offers that same opportunity for those of the LGBT community. That is the primary reason why I am against religious marriage for the LGBT community. However civil marriage which is the legal form of the union which is recognized by the state and federal government I believe is crucial to the livelihood of this nation if we want to continue to brand our nation as the land of the free.

The United States of America was established to offer religious freedom to the puritans over two hundred years ago. During that time we have had to redefine freedom multiple times. First we had to figure out what it meant to give the natives freedom. We hurt them as individual nations by taking their lands, corrupting their culture, and expecting them to peacefully respond to our demands. I do not need to describe to you that this went poorly. Next we had to deal with the issue of slavery. This issue lasted much longer because of the belief that blacks were less than human at one point. With the Emancipation Proclamation we purchased a peaceless surrender of the slaves. Over the freedom of slaves we started a civil war, we instituted the Jim Crow Laws, and we oppressed blacks for another hundred years after they were granted their “freedom.” Today we face the issue of Gay Rights and we are responding to it in much the same way we did with same grace and sensitivity that we have with these other issues. We as a people are undereducated about it, fearful of it, and unwilling to recognize in what ways we may be wrong about how we are treating our fellow human beings. Same Sex Marriage is only one of a multitude of rights that the LGBT community is fighting for.

In my celebration of the Death of DOMA I am committing to becoming more educated on how to help support the rights of the LGBT community because I do not want to repeat the mistakes of our past. As a young black man, I still see discrimination towards me and I’ve seen it towards the LGBT community as well. And personally I hurt, because I know they hurt. Civil Rights isn’t about protecting the definition of a word that doesn’t need protection. The definition of marriage changed in the Oxford Dictionary already. And marriage in the context of what the LGBT community is working towards has everything to do with legal rights and nothing to do with trying to take the domestic comfort of the families of heterosexual couples. This is about making us as a people living according to the values that we state in our Constitution to stand by. If we are seeking the Life, Liberty, and Happiness of all the people in our nation then we by definition need to give to our people the same rights that they can be with those they love, take care of their families, and build our nation into the beacon of freedom that it claims to be.

I end this blog with one of my favorite songs. It is by Mackelmore and Lewis and it is called Same Love. I believe if we raise the rising generation to hate themselves, fear the judgment of others, and polarize themselves and others on the issues we face in our world we will fail them. We owe it to ourselves, and our children to educate ourselves that we may be full of love one for another and live in real freedom.

The Culture Blogs: a SmallSmall Thing

Howdy friends.  Sorry I've been away for a little bit.  Family comes before the blog, and I've spent most of this weekend with my wife.  We've been able to watch Hunger Games and participate in the events of the Holi celebration of the Hindu people.  I truly cherish the time I have to spend with my wife.

Really all of this quest for me to learn how to be a better writer, to eventually publish fiction, and even this blog has everything to do with being able to spend time with my family.  It is an investment of time and effort now to do everything I really want to be able to do with my life later.

One of the things that I want to do with my life is support causes that genuinely deserve it.  On my Google Plus account, I came across a post from Chuck Wendig (You know him as the vulgar writing comedian that I happen to like for his shock value, and the fact that he makes good points).  He was supporting funding of this documentary on Kickstarter, and I wanted to do my part to help.  So instead of sitting here giving you my opinion on culture in Africa, I thought I would enlist your support on a documentary on some good people who are trying to change the culture of Liberia that women may have more rights.  The film they are creating is called, "Smallsmall Thing."

Smallsmall Thing on Kickstarter

I'm not going to say that I have a lot to offer them, but anything we can give to them will make a difference.  I believe in being the change that I want to see in the world.  I hope that you'll take this opportunity to possibly begin a change for these people.  Corruption and evil doesn't thrive in an environment where it has been exposed, and it is my prayer that by supporting this documentary that we'll be better able to make the kind of world that we would feel safe to raise children in.  Thank you for your time.

Rather than share about my contest for the month, I'll leave it off here.  There is plenty to look into on their Kickstarter project.  Hope you give a little to them, it is a worthy cause.  I'm still Jayrod Garrett, the First OG.  My question for you tonight is: What is the change that you want to see in the world?

The Culture Blogs: Left Brain vs Right Brain

“I am the left brain.  I am dependent on denotative language and abstraction.  I yield clarity and power to manipulate things that are known, fixed, static, isolated, decontextualized, explicit, general in nature, but ultimately lifeless.  I love the familiar.  Principles.  Segregation.  I am black and white.  I am organized reality.  I am your world and your views.    Morals.  Hatred.  Values.  Love.  I am the rational mind.”

                                    Versus

“I am the right brain.  I yield a world of changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate, living beings within the context of the lived world.  I am Diversity.  An open mind.  Connection.  Intertextuality.  I am so many sounds you can't comprehend them all.  So many colors you can't tell where one ends and the next begins.  And more tastes than you can bear to examine.  I am boundless imagination.  I am everything and everyone.  Art.  Mathematics.  Music.  Noise.  Infinity.  I am the intuitive mind.”

You've probably seen this picture before.  If so you are likely saying that's not what the captions beside the picture say.  And you would be right.  But when I saw this picture I immediately decided to do a little bit of research on the matter.  What I found completely blew me away.  I discovered this RSA Animate on the Divided Brain and it sparked all sorts of new ideas for me.  From why we tend to polarize in politics, religions, and in education.  It has all to do with how our brains work and the society we have developed around ourselves.

It's kinda long, but I promise its worth it!

For those of you who didn’t watch it, I’ll give ya a short recap.  Basically it shares about how we have lost sight of what the mind actually does for us.  It is entirely designed to inhibit information from one side to the other so that we can correctly interpret it.  And as we have grown as a society we have begun to focus more on the power of the left side of the brain, the rational side as opposed to the intuitive side, and we effects of that in our society are interesting.

Here’s three examples of this culture that can be used in your writing:

1. Left Brain thinking in Politics

In politics there is a great deal of hero worship and demonizing that goes on.  I see it among my friends, neighbors, and those people that I try to ignore sometimes.  President Obama is a great example of these types of thoughts.  Those who support Obama think that he is amazing and that he has been good for America.  On the other hand those who don’t support him tend to say everything he has done has been bad, and there are even those who go as far as to call him the Anti-Christ.

Now is one end the truth or the other?  Personal opinion is that he’s probably somewhere in the middle.  But if you want to be able to write fiction that is balanced and referential to our current day, you wouldn’t go wrong by using this in your political climate. 

2. Left Brain thinking in War

As a soldier allow me to tell you that this is a crucial matter for a soldier.  I was trained to seek out and destroy the enemy back in basic training.  There were times I said kill as I performed an attack so much that I hated what I was doing.  But as a soldier I cannot have right brain thinking on the battlefield about the enemy’s family: their spouse, children, and pets.  I cannot afford to humanize them, or else when it comes down life or death I might hesitate.  And then the person dead is me.

However encompassing right brain thinking into the mourning process afterwards I think is important.  Because for me it forces me to recognize the importance of human life, and how people can be on opposite sides of a conflict and still fighting for the same basic values: Government, Freedom, Family, and Religion.

3. Left Brain thinking in Education

Math is the most hated class in high school and university classes hands down.  Often folks say that Math Teachers can’t teach.  Others say Math is useless.  And the iron gates of the Left Brain shut off to Math because it is hard.

Now I’m okay at Math, not great.  But I think it is because I approach it from the perspective of a Right Brained person.  Math is a language like Spanish, Russian, or German.  And so it requires me to study like it is a language.  Meaning I have to do study groups, find applications in everyday life, and spend copious amounts of time learning it.  I suffered from the Left Brain thinking for years before I realized that.  I passed Math once I discovered that.

If you spend some time thinking about it, I’m sure there are some plots or subplots to a novel you can use this concept in.  Or perhaps you can apply it to your own life, like I did to be able to get through my Math courses.  Either way using both sides of our brain to process what we are given each day is crucial to a correct understanding of the world around us.

Think about what issues you are decided on, and then spend time listening to the arguments of the other side.  Allow both sides of your brain a chance to use everything they have.  You may stay right where you are in your opinion, but you may experience a revolution of the mind where you discover not that you are wrong, but that there are other opinions that are just as valid and right as your own.

As we are drawing close to the end of February I would love for everyone who visits my blog to leave a comment.  For every person that comments on my blog this month I am putting an entry into a hat for an opportunity to win a copy of N.K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.  I plan on giving three of these away.  It was nominated last year for both a Hugo and a Nebula award.  And it has been a fascinating read thus far.

That’s all for now folks, my name is Jayrod Garrett and I am the First OG.  How do you use both your rational and intuitive minds together?

Freedom: Do we actually know what it is anymore?

I often find myself asking people, what is freedom.  The responses to this question are interesting and range from: being able to do whatever I want, to being able to live however I want.  And it really is true.  In our republic today we have people who have taken freedom to concepts that thirty years ago we would never have been able to imagine.  The fight for LGBT rights, gun control, and healthcare have been incredible to watch.  But why are we fighting for anything if we are truly free?

So in any question I ask I turn to the dictionary to get definitions.  According to Merriam Webster freedom is defined as:

A: the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action.

B: liberation from slavery or restraint or from power of another: independence.

C: the quality or state of being exempt or released usually from something onerous (freedom from care)

H: unrestricted use (gave him the freedom of their home)

I’ve always found this definition to be lacking because in the dictionary you find the technical meaning, but you miss the spiritual meaning of the word.  Freedom cannot be separated from responsibility and anytime they are parted you have no freedom, instead you have suffering.

For instance if there were the dictionary’s definition of freedom in gun control then the only person who would have “freedom” is the person who had the best gun and gun skills around.  They would make the law according as they saw fit for they would have the power necessary to do so.

So freedom for one equals slavery for others.  This is otherwise known as lawlessness.  We have laws in place to protect our individual rights so that we are not taken over by the man with the big gun.

Well what happens when the society themselves adopts the guns for themselves for protection to the point that nobody can really do anything with the gun?  They barely can protect themselves or their rights?  Or they simply elect that nobody can have the guns anymore?  This is known as slavery.  

Slavery and lawlessness are two heads of the same coin of unrestricted freedom.  And as a result these forces tend to destroy not just people, but societies, and worst of all worlds.  We can see it in the very struggles for freedom within America.  Gay rights are not about a woman marrying a woman or a man marrying a man, but being treated as every other citizen is to be respectfully treated.  Gun control shouldn’t be about disarming the people who want to protect themselves, but about teaching people about how to thoughtfully handle a weapon.  And we need a healthcare system in place so that we may have peace of mind about our families.

Liberty without Security is lawlessness,

Security without liberty is slavery,

Only when both are balanced and in harmony can there be freedom.

So please ask yourselves as you read this, what do you really want for freedom?  Are you trying to create the world you want to live in, or a world for all of us to live in?  I for one want a world with as much diversity and beauty as there can be.  A world where freedom is unrestricted because the people care too much about each other to live without law or enslave another.  Is that too much to ask?  Probably, but if we don’t ask for it, how can we ever achieve it?

You might wonder why I’m writing this when I’m reporting about my writing goals.  It has to do with an addiction I have to video games.  If I start playing the right one I have a very hard time stopping even to do things that I want to do, such as write.  I’ve spent most of this week playing The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword and it has been awesome.  But my writing has suffered to the point of having written nothing for goals since Wednesday.  So in order to free myself from the self imposed bondage I’ve put myself into, I’m staying away from playing it for the duration of today and making a new ROW80 goal.  I will only play video games up to twelve hours a week from now on.  Perhaps this doesn’t seem like it is working for that goal of the world I want, but that world begins inside of me.  If I am not unfettered of what powers I allow to enslave me, how can my writing ever help anyone to free themselves?

My other goal is to catch up on what I have missed out on writing by the time of the next check in.  Which is not only possible, but exactly what will happen.  That I promise.

Thanks for reading.  Feel free to leave your comments below.  I love reading them and enjoy the opportunity to communicate with our community.  Peace.