Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Journal Club: Does everyone have a gender? (January 27) "Gender detachment bears some similarity to agender, although we remarked on some differences."

2. 【分享】我真的很不錯 - 伍思凱 (2019) If you understand Chinese, this is really funny. The song and the dance are just so goofy, and the song lyrics are about "I'm really amazing."

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Clergy protesters in Minnesota. One is holding a sign that says, "'Are they legal?' is MAGA for 'Who is my neighbor?' Love your neighbor as yourself - Jesus" Image source.

Links related to the antichrist:

1. Inside the effort to organize clergy nationwide to resist ICE (January 23) "Do justice. Love kindness. Abolish ICE."

Timberwolves chaplain speaks out (January 26) "Peace isn’t what you ask for / when the boot is already on someone’s neck. / Peace is what the powerful ask for / when they don’t want to be interrupted."

Bondi’s injection of voter roll demands into Minneapolis ICE tensions draws claims of ‘ransom’ (January 27) "'They move into your neighborhood. They start beating everybody up, and then they extort what they want. This is not how America is supposed to work,' Fontes said in a social media post."

Image source.

2. Italian officials voice outrage at the presence of U.S. ICE agents at the 2026 Olympics (January 27)

3. Families of killed men file first U.S. federal lawsuit over drug boat strikes (January 27) "Neither man 'presented a concrete, specific, and imminent threat of death or serious physical injury to the United States or anyone at all, and means other than lethal force could have reasonably been employed to neutralize any lesser threat,' according to the lawsuit."

4. They ‘Had Done Everything Right.’ ICE Detained Them Anyway. (January 26) "As her 13-year-old son wailed and her older daughter produced paperwork proving her mother was in the United States lawfully, the agents shackled Ms. Mehari and took her away."

Blogaround

1. This tweet

veggietales taught me not to bow down to a giant chocolate bunny. which is why i’m not a christian nationalist

check out my new youtube video about christian nationalism! https://t.co/8ip94pkbX0 pic.twitter.com/zkdJe6n4jX

— Mason Mennenga (@masonmennenga) April 22, 2024

Also related to VeggieTales: ‘VeggieTales’ Co-Creator Phil Vischer Shares Sneak Peek of New ‘Phil & Mike Show’ Idea (April 23)

2. This thread from Amanda Held Opelt. It's been 5 years since Rachel Held Evans died. I still miss her writing. Her blog was a big influence on me.

May 4th will mark 5 years since Rachel died. That is the day her death certificate was signed, the day we started planning her funeral…

(A thread 🧵) pic.twitter.com/aTMUWMxuL6

— Amanda Held Opelt (@AmandaHeldOpelt) April 25, 2024

In 2019 I rounded up all the posts I could find that people wrote to honor Evans: Link Roundup of Posts Honoring Rachel Held Evans

3. Uncovering of mass grave at Gaza’s Nasser Hospital: What you need to know (April 24, via) [content note: genocide] Wow this is really bad.

4. Fare Game: Why China’s Ride-Share Boom Is Leaving Drivers Behind (April 25) "Another screenshot, this one from Shanghai’s Pudong International Airport the same month, showed an even starker disparity: 868 vehicles competed for just 39 passengers. 'Getting even one order feels like amazing luck,' he says."

Also from Sixth Tone: In China’s Array of Dialects, Emerging Writers Find a New Voice (April 19) "With over 10 million speakers, the Shanghainese dialect is widely used in the metropolis and surrounding areas, and has a unique vocabulary that led to the creation of the official Shanghainese dictionary in 2008." Please note, these Chinese languages are called "dialects" but they're actually different languages. I understand Mandarin but I don't understand Shanghainese. A few words here and there which are similar to Mandarin, but overall no I don't understand it.

5. This thread [via] about the Passover sedar at the pro-Palestine protest at Columbia University:

Explaining the seder plate at the Columbia encampment. These students truly embody the meaning of Passover in their provisional seder and their commitment to liberation. pic.twitter.com/5dOT46IeF1

— Arielle Angel (@ArielleLAngel) April 22, 2024

6. Ohio May Soon Jump On Hot Trend Of Making It Illegal To Rape Your Spouse! (April 25) "I’m sorry if any of this sounds flip, but I really am just trying to pull my jaw up off the floor here as I try to imagine the thought process that went into carving out those exceptions in the first place."

Also from Wonkette: That Nex Benedict Died By Suicide Doesn't Let Anyone Off The Hook (April 25) [content note: anti-trans violence, suicide] "Prominent Oklahomans have chosen again and again and again and again and again to spread the lies that trans children are morally inferior, lying about who they are, or less valuable, or constitute a threat to fellow students."

Blogaround

Merry Christmas everyone!

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1. Power Banks: How Businesses Are Leading the Charge (December 20) An article about the little vending-machine-type things where you can rent power banks from, to charge your phone, at various little stores in Shanghai. I live in Shanghai, and yeah I think it's great how power banks are available to rent everywhere. And very cheap too- I can charge my phone for an hour or however long, for just a few yuan (about 1 dollar).

Also from Sixth Tone: As China Shivers, a Hot Debate Over Risks of Food Delivery (December 22)

2. Most people don’t realize how much progress we’ve made on climate change (November 27, via) "On the one hand, that’s not yet good enough to meet the target set in the Paris agreement. On the other hand, climate policies and clean technologies deployed over just the past eight years have already erased a full degree Celsius of global warming from the future world in 2100."

3. Journal Club: Gender Detachment (December 21) "Almost all of them, when asked, provided a specific gender identity label, but when prompted, described feeling detached from their gender."

4. Love Songs (December 20) Very useful graph from xkcd!

5. Missions, Race, and Me (November 14) "White American Christians were organizing and raising money and literally building corporation-like entities and taking months-long ship voyages and even dying of malaria in some places—oh and seriously abusing their own children but I’m not even going to get into that—to go and “serve” non-white people elsewhere in the world while AT THE VERY SAME TIME, IN THEIR VERY OWN COUNTRY, LITERALLY THEIR VERY OWN FOLK were lynching black people and generally doing everything they possibly could to disenfranchise and pillage and steal and discriminate against people of color of all kinds and generally behaving like really sh*tty human beings with very few exceptions."

6. Christian College Recovers After Campus-Wide Sex Week (December 19) "Those of you who don’t have personal life experience within the white evangelical subculture might think that the phrase 'Holy Sexuality' is a little bit cringe-y, but let me assure you that for those who have lived within this subculture, that’s not the case. It’s incredibly cringe-y."

One thing I will say, though, is that in this article and in a lot of other articles I've seen criticizing Christopher Yuan, Yuan's statement that "the opposite of homosexuality is holiness" is being misrepresented. (I have seen him speak in person, a loooong time ago, and even back then he was using this catchphrase. Back when I was an evangelical I thought it was very profound.) I've seen people on the internet assuming that he means "straight people are holy" and being mad about that- but that's not what he means. What he means is, for people who "struggle with same-sex attraction", the point isn't to become straight (because being straight also leads to sexual sin!), the point is to become holy. Like, it's okay if you're still not straight- but you definitely can't ID as gay! If you're not straight, you just have to repress your sexuality and try to be "holy" instead.

So, uh, I very much disagree with Yuan. But also I just wanted to point out that criticizing him for saying that straight people are automatically holy is a misinterpretation of what he's saying.

7. Finally, The EU Is Banning Fashion’s Dirty Secret: Destroying Unsold Goods (December 7, via) "The question of what happens to these unsold goods if they are not destroyed is yet to be answered. 'Will they be shipped around the world? Will they be reused as deadstock or shredded and downcycled? Will outlet stores have an abundance of stock to sell?' asks Grogan."

8. We were personally victimized by James Somerton (December 13, via) "So a combination of the fact that the projects you pitched to us that were allegedly in process, that allegedly had two Asexual characters, are just gone — you’re not working on them — you’re supposedly working on something else new and shiny, but the only thing you’ve actually done that you’ve told us that costs money is you’ve moved to a big city? What on earth?"

Also related: This 1-hour-42-minute video from Todd in the Shadows, I Fact-Checked The Worst Video Essayist On YouTube (December 4) Wow, I am very impressed by how much time Todd spent fact-checking. 

Blogaround

1. My 2023 Reader Survey is open until June 19~

2. How Mae Martin Is Reshaping the Way Trans/Non-Binary Individuals Are Viewed in Comedy (April 21) Cool!

3. The Politics of Nothing: Visualizing Wasteland and Restoration in Terra Nil (June 4) "As I wrote about in Who Gets To See The Future, arid lands have long been viewed by colonizers as 'wasteland,' and this is a view with devastating ecological implications. To see land as 'wasteland' is to see it as worthless and disposable. In practice, this means viewing it as an always-appropriate site for everything from uranium mining to nuclear detonation."

4. How Scooters Caught China’s Urban Planners Off Guard (June 6) "In 2022, there were 350 million scooters in use in China, compared to approximately 230 million private cars. Some industry insiders believe that the true number of scooters may be much higher, as smaller cities rarely bother to register the vehicles even though they are one of the main forms of local transportation in the country’s vast interior."

5. Stack Overflow Moderators Are Striking to Stop Garbage AI Content From Flooding the Site (June 5)

And also these posts, on the Stack Exchange site itself:
Moderation strike
Moderation Strike: Stack Overflow, Inc. cannot consistently ignore, mistreat, and malign its volunteers "Content posted without innate domain understanding, but written in a 'smart' way, is dangerous to the integrity of the Stack Exchange network’s goal: To be a repository of high-quality question-and-answer content."

6. Pat Robertson, broadcaster who helped make religion central to GOP politics, dies at 93 (June 8)

7. “Love is love” (June 8) "In my experience, some of the most passionate haters of 'love is love' are aromantics. After all, all the stereotypes of loveless people are laid directly on their doorstep. 'Love is love' is used to legitimize queer love, but at the cost of tying legitimacy to love."

Blogaround

1. Oklahoma sheriff, commissioner, accused of discussing killing a reporter and returning to Black hangings (April 16) [content note: violent racist language] WTF.

(That link and several others in this post I got via the Slacktivist's Postcards from the class & culture wars (4.17.23))

2. A Good Friday funeral in Texas. Baby Halo's parents had few choices in post-Roe Texas (April 6) [content note: child death/ pregnancy loss] "'Where is the state of Texas to provide the safety net for her, after forcing her to give birth to a child that didn't survive and never would?' she asks."

3. Doctors Warned Her Pregnancy Could Kill Her. Then Tennessee Outlawed Abortion. (March 14) [content note: explicit medical details about pregnancy complications] "ProPublica spoke with 20 Tennessee medical providers about life under the ban, on condition of anonymity because they feared professional and personal repercussions; some said that they had witnessed a new trepidation in their ranks. 'I’ve seen colleagues delay or sit on assessing the clinical data longer when they know the diagnosis is probably ectopic,' one said, referring to pregnancies that implant outside the uterine cavity, which are always life-threatening. 'People were like, 'I don’t want to be involved because I don’t want to go to prison,'' said another. 'It’s crazy — even assessing the patient or having a role in their care makes people scared.'"

4. City leases property to 'Safe Ground Sacramento' for a self-governing 'safe parking shelter' (March 31, via) "The cost of the lease is $0, and its length is 120 days, renewable in increments of 120 days until all the residents obtain permanent housing." An agreement between the city of Sacramento and a group advocating for the rights of homeless people.

5. Recovery of Black teen allegedly shot by White homeowner after ringing wrong doorbell is a miracle, attorney says (April 19) "A Black teenager who authorities say was shot in the head by an 84-year-old White homeowner after going to the wrong Kansas City address received a positive prognosis but still faces a long road to recovery, according to his attorneys."

6. Parler shuts down as new owner says conservative platform needs big revamp (April 15) "'No reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone just for conservatives is a viable business any more,' the acquisition announcement said, promising a revamp."

7. BMW’s Mini apologizes after meltdown over ice cream at Shanghai auto show (April 21) So, there was a car expo in Shanghai this week, and apparently the BMW booth was handing out ice cream, and there's a video of the BMW employees telling Chinese people that all the ice cream is gone, and then a white guy shows up and they give him ice cream. (The news articles say "foreign" or "western" or 外国人 but let's just call it what it is, whiteness.)

Umm. Okay. I'm white, I live in Shanghai, and the first thing I wanna say about this is it rings true. In this kind of business-event context, Chinese people definitely do give preferential treatment to white people. I've experienced that.

BMW issued an apology and said that actually the reason the white guy got ice cream is he's a BMW employee. Who knows if that's true. I don't think the Chinese internet masses are buying it.

8. UMC clergy reportedly face complaint, church trial after marrying nonbinary couple (April 19) When people get married, the correct response is "congratulations!" Rejoice with those who rejoice. But the church is butting in and making it into a problem instead.

9. This whole twitter thread about why abortion care is very important for people who are struggling with infertility and trying to have a baby. It's common for people to have miscarriages when they're having these problems, and they need to have access to health care that can handle miscarriage in a reasonable way, instead of "pro-life" health care which doesn't connect to reality.

I liberalized two college age girls last night.

Two students were told by their teacher to shadow a support group. I run an infertility support group.

They mostly observed with a few questions. They were visibly floored when I told them how abortion care was critical to us.

— Angel of the Ozarks (@AngelSSMO) April 21, 2023

10. Religious Authorities Are Not God (March 10) "In more cynical terms, I remember feeling suspicious that the ministry organization was trying to frame something as a call from God on Grace’s life that was really just their own best attempt at having enough staff at all the different schools."

11. P!nk - F**kin' Perfect (Lyric Video) I know I've posted this several times before, but I'm ex-evangelical so I need to post this song a lot.

Blogaround

1. ASCII art by chatbot (March 31) "The use of slashes and backslashes to represent the shape of the shark is effective, and the bold letter 'O' for the eye is a nice touch. The overall composition feels well-balanced and the shark's menacing presence is conveyed effectively." I laughed SO HARD.

2. Sharing Space - Episode 1: Daniel Radcliffe (April 1) "The first episode of 'Sharing Space' features six trans and nonbinary young people who sit down with Radcliffe to have a candid, vulnerable, and illuminating conversation about their unique lived experiences."

3. The swagged-out pope is an AI fake — and an early glimpse of a new reality (March 27) I saw that image shared on Twitter- the pope in a giant puffy white coat- and I thought it was real. A few days later, I saw a comment online that said it was AI-generated. Yeah, it's not real.

4. Solitary Confinement: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) (April 3) "Solitary isn't something we do to people behind bars. It's something we do to them forever." Having flashbacks to the Shanghai lockdown now- and wow, obviously solitary confinement is even worse than that.

5. Heaven’s ATM: How Chinese People Have Been Sending Money to the Afterlife For Centuries (April 4) "In rural China, these forms of ghost money are still in use today as people continue to wish their deceased loved ones a good life that is free from hunger and cold in an underworld with sky-high inflation."

Blogaround + Happy Chinese New Year!

Chinese-style art with a tiger. Image source.

Happy Chinese New Year everyone! Today (February 1, 2022) is the first day of the Year of the Tiger.

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1. The Miracle Sudoku (posted 2020) It's a 25-minute video of a British sudoku expert solving an incredible sudoku, and the best part is his reactions, how he gets more and more delighted and amazed by the puzzle as he goes along. This is fantastic.

2. Don't know if you all saw Christianity Today's article "‘They’ Is Not a Pronoun for God" (it's not worth reading, but here's the link). I just... like why even bother responding- I've moved so far past this, and the world has moved so far past this. You don't need to sit around with people who believe exactly the same things as you and study ancient documents to make rules for how everyone else should live- "Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!" Come into the big queer kingdom of God, where trans and nonbinary people can experience how life-giving it is to be called by their correct name and pronouns.

It's just so obvious to me that God is genderqueer and nonbinary. They/them.

3. What Does John Locke Say? (The Fox Parody) - @mrbettsclass (posted 2013) This is AMAZING.

4. One Chaste Marriage, Four Kids, and the Catholic Church (posted November 17) Well this is totally fascinating, especially from an asexual perspective.

5. ‘Are You All Right?’ (posted January 26) "Well, if you’re in Hamtramck, Michigan, you’re in luck. Officials in that city are keeping careful track of neighbors in need. Those officials don’t understand that this is what they’re doing, mind you — they don’t seem to understand what they’re doing at all. Those befuddled officials seem to think, instead, that what they’re doing is keeping careful track of which of your neighbors are in violation, threatening the sick and distressed with various punishments rather than offering to provide them the neighborly assistance they require."

Blogaround

A cat tree that's green and shaped like a Christmas tree, with 3 cats enjoying it. Image source.

1. How Blind People See With Sound… feat. Molly Burke! (posted August 10) Wow this is amazing! People can learn to use echolocation to map their environment. I thought only bats could do that.

2. Do Kids Really Learn Languages Faster Than Adults? (posted November 29) "This all adds up to not just the perception but the reality that adults who attempt to learn new languages often fail while their kids succeed, despite studies showing conclusively that adults are actually better at learning new languages when they actually put the effort in."

Highly recommend this video. I am fluent in Mandarin Chinese, which I started studying when I was about 20. At the beginning I genuinely believed that perhaps no matter how hard I worked, I might never be able to speak Chinese, because I had always heard white Americans talking about "I tried to learn a new language, but I guess my brain just can't" or "if you're not exposed to it as a baby, you can never ever learn to understand it." That's total nonsense.

Yes, learning a language is hard. It requires a lot of time and effort. You need to practice speaking, and that means you need to accept that you're going to make mistakes, and just learn to laugh at yourself rather than be too scared to try.

Because it's so hard, I completely understand if you choose not to do it. That's totally fine. People who speak multiple languages aren't superior; people who speak 1 language shouldn't feel ashamed. But I want people to accept the reality that the reason they only speak 1 language is because they have other, higher-priority things going on in their lives, and therefore they don't spend time on studying, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Don't go around spreading myths like "my brain just can't" and discourage those of us who really want to learn a second language.

3. ICE arrests 90 more students at fake university in Michigan (posted November 27) What on earth? The Department of Homeland Security made a fake university and then arrested the international students who came? For real?

4. 'Star Wars' Billy Dee Williams Uses Both Male and Female Pronouns (posted November 30) Cool~

The Bible, Trans People, and Names

Book cover for "Transforming: The Bible and the Lives of Transgender Christians" by Austen Hartke. Image source.

I just read Austen Hartke's book Transforming: The Bible and the Lives of Transgender Christians. I loved it, and I recommend this book for anyone who is interested in how trans Christians read the bible. There were a lot of fascinating biblical interpretations that I had never thought about before.

For example, chapter 6 is called "What's My Name Again?" and it's about how the common trans experience of choosing a new name can be related to bible stories where a person gets a new name. I find it so interesting how, for many trans people, changing their name is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT, and therefore the bible stories where someone gets a new name have special meaning for them. I never paid that much attention to that when I read the bible. Yes, of course I know "Jesus gave Simon the name 'Peter' to show he would be the rock on which the church is built," but I had never considered how a name change can be so emotional and important.

This is why it's so important for Christians to read theology and bible interpretations from many diverse sources. There are so many things in the bible that I would hardly pay attention to at all, but someone from a different background would find incredibly important and meaningful.

In this chapter, Hartke introduces us to a nonbinary person named River, who shares their story about how they chose the name "River", and their experiences with family, Christianity, mental health, etc. The chapter touches on many different aspects of trans people and names- different sources that trans people might use when brainstorming a new name, how it feels when people use your correct name, how family members might refuse to use it, and so on. Hartke also gives many examples of bible passages where a person gets a new name, and talks about what it meant in each situation.

I love this because I've read the bible so many times and never really thought about this before. For mental health reasons, it's been a very long time since I've done any kind of "daily devotions" or sat down and read the bible... it's stuff like this that makes me want to read the bible again.

The whole book is like this. Very cool bible interpretations, along with stories from real trans people about their lives and their experiences with religion. I think it's especially good how Hartke included stories from nonbinary people, and from trans people of color, talking about how their trans identity intersects with their racial identity.

So in summary, I recommend this book if you want to read about how trans Christians can find meaning in the bible. I also recommend Hartke's youtube channel where he posts a lot of videos about queer/trans theology and the bible. Makes me love the bible again.

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Remember, it's so important to call trans people by their correct name and pronouns! (That is, the name and pronouns they told you they want you to call them.) One study found that when trans people are able to use their correct name, their risk of attempted suicide drops by 65%. Wow.

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Related:
Trans Theology on Binaries and Genesis 1

Blogaround

Three big fluffy shiba dogs. Image source.

1. The Harrowing Of Hell, and All Its Works (posted April 2) "This is a bit like someone reading Nietzsche’s references to the “superman” and interpreting that as him talking about Clark Kent."

2. Crossing Lines (or What I Mean When I Say, “I’m Genderqueer.”) (posted April 18)

3. Inside the Memorial to Victims of Lynching (posted April 8) [content note: photos of lynching]

4. Chilling Study Sums Up Link Between Religion And Suicide For Queer Youth (posted April 18) "In fact, lesbian and gay youth who said that religion was important to them were 38 percent more likely to have had recent suicidal thoughts, compared to lesbian and gay youth who reported religion was less important." The ax is already at the root of the tree, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.

5. Purity Culture Can Ruin the Sex Life of Christian Couples: A Therapist’s Perspective "It is also easy to be taken advantage of because it is hard to consent to sex when you don’t know what your sexual needs/desires are."

And also: How Depression & Sexless Sleepovers Got Me Run Out of My Church [content note: church being horrible about handling depression] "No one asked me about my depression, no one asked me how they could be supportive." Yes. This. When Hendrix and I started living together, I was still terrified of sex. But Christians think every couple who's living together/ sleeping together is by definition having sex. It's not okay.

6. Chase rarely lends to people of color in DC – and it’s probably legal (posted March 22) "The bank turned away 26 percent of African Americans and 18 percent of Latinos who sought conventional home purchase loans in 2015 and 2016. It denied 7 percent of applications from white homebuyers."

7. Watch Beyonce's Full Set at Coachella 2018 (posted April 15)

8. What is Genesis About? The Big Idea that Cleared it Up for Me (posted 2017) "The Judah and Tamar story, which seems so out of place in Genesis, is a way of addressing indirectly a topic that the writer felt could not be whitewashed: David’s unjust treatment of Bathsheba and her husband Uriah."

And the follow-up post: More On What Genesis is Really About (If You Keep One Eye Focused on the Monarchy) "Isaac has exhausted his good blessing by giving it to Jacob, and so he has to scrounge up a blessing for Esau." Wowwwww mind-blowing.

9. Stopping the Deportation of Immigrants Injured on the Job (posted February 9) "Some workers were detained by federal immigration agents and deported without getting proper medical treatment for serious injuries."

Blogaround

Data and Stephen Hawking, on the set of "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Image source.

1. Non-binary teen celebrates ‘b’nei mitzvah’ (posted March 2) "A synagogue has held the first known gender-neutral “B’nei Mitzvah” in the UK for a non-binary teenager."

2. Stormy Daniels Is Not a Punchline (posted March 10) "By treating her as trashy or tainted or inherently ridiculous because of her job, we send the message that none of Trump’s flaws are worse than being a “porn star.” We make it seem like her mere existence is somehow more embarrassing than his worst offenses. This enormous gap between how we judge women and men is sexist, and bad men rely on it to get away with their actions."

3. How the Activists Who Tore Down Durham's Confederate Statue Got Away With It (posted February 21)

4. Take The Words "Judeo-Christian" Out Of Your Damn Mouth (posted March 1) "No Jew has ever used the term “Judeo-Christian,” because like the Sinbad movie Shazaam, it does not actually exist."

5. Police Officer Wins Settlement From City That Fired Him for Not Shooting a Black Man (posted February 12)

6. This scene from Star Trek: The Next Generation:


We will miss Stephen Hawking <3

7.  Can ‘Black Panther’ Change Chinese Attitudes Toward Race? (posted March 9) "Many job postings specify that only white or “native European” teachers may apply, or demand that candidates submit copies of their passport pages at the very start of the recruitment process in order to screen out people with dark skin."

8. Scott Kelly: NASA Twins Study Confirms Astronaut's DNA Actually Changed In Space (posted March 9) Wow!

Blogaround

"Love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love, cannot be killed or swept aside." Lin-Manuel Miranda at the Tony Awards. LGBTQIA and allies have been preaching the gospel all week.

1. Bible Verses Where “Behold” Has Been Replaced With “Look, Buddy” (posted June 6) "Listen, buddy, you shall conceive and bear a son."

2. How Stories Told Of Brilliant Scientists Affect Kids' Interest In The Field (posted June 7) "Growing up in China, David, she told me that she learned about scientists but mostly about how hard people work to make discoveries. When she came to the United States, she found that people tend to think of scientists as being naturally brilliant."

3. 5 Things Trans Allies Say That Mean Well But Miss The Point (posted June 9)

4. The Truth About: A Bugs Life & ANTZ (posted June 9) This video will probably only be interesting to those who, like me, are obsessed with animated movies from the 90's.

5. things not even tolerated by the world: Christians and hypocrisy (posted June 8) [content note: covering up rape and abuse] "at this point I’d be shocked if there’s any conservative Christian university that hasn’t spent decades retaliating against rape victims."

6. 'Three black teenagers' Google search sparks outrage (posted June 9) Hmm. This article kind of comes across like "Google's algorithm is racist, they need to change it" but that's not really the point- it's a sign of the racism that exists in US society, which goes way deeper than Google's search algorithm. We could talk about what Google could or should do about this, but the problem is much bigger than just Google.

7. Untold millions are still untold (posted June 4) "Was this person simply shopping there in paint themselves, or did they imagine that paint was where the sinners were likeliest to be shopping?"

8. 'Nonbinary' is now a legal gender, Oregon court rules (posted June 10) Great!

9. It’s This Drowning Dog’s Lucky Day When a Sikh Samaritan Disobeys His Religion (posted June 7) Great! Actually, some of the comments say that the Sikh religion totally says its followers can break the rule about turbans if there's a good reason- so it's not necessarily true that he was "disobeying his religion."

About the Orlando shooting:

1. How to Fight Hellfire (posted June 13) "And yet even still, there are some whose consciences are so seared that they cannot express grief for the victims without the caveat that they 'disagree with their lifestyle.'"

2. Why Does Dr. James Dobson Pretend He’s Sad About Dead LGBTQ Folks? (posted June 13) "I’ve already seen several false, hypocritical expressions of sympathy from people who wanted LGBTQ folks dead merely days ago."

3. China's LGBTIQ Organizations Issue Joint Statement on Orlando Gay Nightclub Attack (posted June 14) Scroll down for English. And that massive list at the bottom of the Chinese section is a list of Chinese LGBT organizations expressing their support for the victims.

4. You'll Need to Come Through Me (posted June 13) "ISIS isn’t the ones boycotting companies that advocate for policies of equality."

5. Orlando Shooter Was Reportedly a Regular at Pulse and Had a Profile on Gay Dating App (posted June 13) Whoa.

6. A Statement On Donald Trump’s Statement (posted June 13) "If Donald Trump, after this attack, still cannot say the words “I am using a terrible tragedy to incite ethnic and religious hatred for personal gain,” he should get out of the race for the presidency."

7. The Orlando Massacre Is About LGBT People No Matter What the Media Says (posted June 13) "Parts of the British media are struggling with how to report this atrocity and the extent to which it deserves coverage at all."

8. Trump's Tweets After Tragedy Often Strike Self-Congratulatory Notes (posted June 13)

Blogaround

A man sleeps in a recliner. 3 cats are laying on top of him. Because they are cats. Image source.

1. The Single Blogpost New Testament Commentary (posted March 22) "The real take-home point in all this, by the way, is that God’s standard for you is impossibly high, which further means you are in a lot of trouble because of all your filthy shenanigans. Denying this only makes you a Catholic." LOLOLOLOLOLOL

2. safe spaces and competing access needs (posted 2014) "If we pick one norm and stick to it (like 'people rejecting the oppressive environment they grew up in is a good thing, and that process can make them emotionally vulnerable and in need of a community, we should welcome that in our safe space!’ or 'criticizing other faith communities makes you a jerk, no doing that in our safe space!’) then we’re inevitably hurting one of them." YES. This is a really important post. Something I've thought a lot about is the idea of a "safe space" for people who have anti-LGBT beliefs but genuinely do desire to love LGBT people- where they can ask their possibly offensive questions and actually get educated about why they need to support LGBT rights. They're never going to learn if their questions are always treated like "holy crap, I can't believe you would say something so offensive, this is NOT OKAY." BUT obviously, LGBT people should have the right to live their lives without being subjected to other people's ignorant questions and misconceptions about them. (And having a safe space for LGBT people is far more important than having a safe space for educating anti-LGBT people.) But some spaces like that should exist.

3. There Is Nothing Accidental About School Segregation (posted April 12) "In the South it’s easy to picture how racism operated—colored drinking fountains and white drinking fountains. The system of Jim Crow segregation was so visible. It was still incredibly difficult to overturn that system, but it was easier to visualize. For Northern white citizens and white politicians, the way their schools and neighborhoods were structured was just normal, they didn’t know or chose not to understand that it wasn’t just a matter of white families choosing to live in white neighborhoods and black families in black neighborhoods. There was a whole history of mortgage redlining, zoning decisions, public housing discrimination, and real estate discrimination that created those separate neighborhoods. But the subtlety of that allowed white people to just see it as common sense, just how our neighborhood and schools should be."

4. surviving complementarianism (posted April 13) "Each of these books is, ultimately, an attempt to convince women that all men are inherently abusers." Tell me again about how feminists supposedly "hate men"?

5. People Who Are Not Disabled Need To Check Out #AbleismExists Right Now (posted April 22) "#ableismexists random folks come to me and say that Jesus will heal me in heaven. Hey man, if heaven ain't ADA compliant. I don't wanna go."

6. BBC pledges women will fill half of on-air roles by 2020 (posted April 22)

7. The National Weather Service decides to stop yelling at us (posted April 12) lol

8. It Sure Sounds Like Donald Trump Has Paid for an Abortion or Two in His Life (posted April 2)

9. Children’s Cowboy Chaps and Big Government (posted April 19) "We can walk into a grocery store confident that there is nothing for sale there that will cause us to sicken and die upon eating it because of the government."

10. panic at the dentist: on moral neutrality (posted April 22) "There wasn’t a single aspect of our lives that wasn’t evaluated for whether or not it was a “Christian” thing to do or be or think or say. Including, apparently, brushing your teeth."

11. The Historical Context of Cruz’s Anti-Trans Bathroom Bill Ad (posted April 22) "Cruz’s fear-mongering is aimed explicitly at men, despite the fact that it’s women’s safety he’s claiming is being threatened."

12. I Am Nonbinary and I Am So Frustrated When Masculinity is Considered the Default (posted March 14) "Every time in my life I’ve gotten a free t-shirt, from clubs in high school to my dorm in college to a work event, it has been a men’s shirt labeled as 'unisex.'"