My Life

Today the Supreme Court of the United States is hearing arguments in the case Obergefell v Hodges .  In this case, the court will decide two questions. 1. Does the Fourteenth Amendment require a state to license a marriage between two people of the same sex? 2. Does the Fourteenth Amendment require a state to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out-of-state? I can't describe how excited I am.  I've been following along on the live blog .  I plan to listen to the audio of the argument later today when I have time.  Tears started to well up in my eyes as I thought about it.  This will definitely be an historic case, at least if it is decided in favor of equality. I think that perhaps some of my heterosexual friends will understand, but I doubt many will, just how much this means to me.  It's thrilling.  It's invigorating.  To think that we're this close to seeing the day when marriage eq

I've been very quiet on my blog recently.  And I've even had long stretches of time when I've been relatively quiet on Facebook as well.  One of the reasons is that I find that sometimes I learn more when I talk less.  Often I find that being vocal about certain things only makes me angry and causes conflict with other people.  So in some ways I've tried to reduce or eliminate that by being less vocal, by reading and listening more and talking and writing less. One of my favorite people to follow is David G McAfee.  He is a skeptic.  He's an atheist.  He's made it his career to promote critical thinking and skepticism.  He addresses not just religious ideas, but all sorts of superstitions and other unfounded claims.  The thing that I admire most about him is his ability to admit that he's wrong.  He does not seem to be emotionally connected with his views, which helps him to abandon a view if he finds it to be incorrect. One very simple example was that

So, apparently this story ran in the Knoxville News Sentinel the other day.  My immediate reaction was awe at the stupidity of some people for letting such a small thing as skin color affect the way they treat people.  I've never personally understood racism.  I can't look at people of different skin colors differently simply because their skin cells have more or less melanin than mine.  I don't understand why that's such a big deal to some people.  But it clearly is a big deal even today.  Yes, that year at the top of the page says 2015, not 1915. But as I thought about it more, I realized that there are two counts of bigotry that are glaringly obvious in this article.  Not only are non-white people unwelcome, but so are non-females.  It made me wonder if we, as a society, will ever reach the point where sexism is as repugnant as racism currently is (at least among professionals). We have a very sexist society.  Aside from the points that are often discussed (whi