Realism and Sacredness

The last couple of months have opened up a world of experiences involving pregnancies and births, including the birth of my own son, whom we adopted a month ago. It's been an experience of overwhelming love and compassion. And it has made me think that the pro-life, pro-choice rhetoric debate is an impoverished and shallow perspective on abortion and sentience. The experience of abortion among people I know, love, and respect, has not been a monolith. Some think of it as a liberating experience that saved their lives from the trappings of poverty, abuse, bad relationships, toward opportunities. Others experienced it as a horrible trauma. Both of these experiences, and any shade in between, are valid and worthy, and neither receives the kind of supportive validation we would hope for across the political spectrum. It is absolutely possible and valid to make a philosophical case for and against sentience before birth, and both sides make good, valid arguments. I have no problem w...

Like pretty much every decent person I know, I was outraged to find out--via tweet, no less--that our president has decided to ban transgender people from military service. This is one more example of the casual afterthought with which this administration erases civil rights and is an absolute outrage. I also agree with those who commented this morning that simultaneous occurrence of bad things (efforts to deny healthcare to millions of Americans and efforts to marginalize trans people) does not imply that one is a "distraction" from the other. It is pouring bad news, and these are just two of those. And yet, I always find myself uneasy when our civil rights struggle revolves around military service. My discomfort stems, I imagine, from having grown up in an extremely militarized country, in which two massive fictions govern the idea of service: that everyone must serve (i.e., that the army is moral and ethical and is busy defending a small democracy in a sea of hostile c...

At the corner of Castro and Market, facing the grand Castro Theater, flies our flag, high and proud, featuring all colors of the rainbow, vibrant and alive against the blue skies. Just a month and a half ago we lost Gilbert Baker, the artist who created the Rainbow Flag. Baker’s original design was to have eight stripes: pink stood for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for the sun, green for nature, turquoise for magic, blue for harmony and purple for spirit. The pressures and costs of mass production led Baker to drop two colors—pink and turquoise—and the resulting flag is now a recognizable symbol of our community. And when I look at your smiling faces today, even though you are all clad in blue and gold, I see all colors of the rainbow flag. I see an appetite and zest for life, which kept you going for three years in law school; I see a passion for healing through advocating for others; I see the desire to help everyone stand proudly under the sun; I see true commitment...

If you're anything like me, it has been difficult to get things done in the last few months, as the Russia probe slowly unraveled. Like roadside drivers slowing down because they can't take their eyes off a disastrous wreck, I have followed the newspapers, the posts, the tweets, and even been to the studio a couple of times to comment on key moments of the scandal (the Comey testimony had me holed up at KTVU for four hours.) Glee and furor about the discoveries turns into despair at the slim prospects that some of our Republican lawmakers will grow a backbone and strip the Emperor of Trumpistan of his new clothes. A couple of months ago I had some friends over for lunch and a viewing of Coppola's terrific All the President's Men with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. The intrigues on screen are absorbing and evoke a feeling of paranoia and a chase. But the movie also left me dismayed at how our naiveté has evaporated. In the seventies, a president who spies on his op...