THE CASE FOR ACCEPTANCE: An Open Letter to Humanity, Part VI

a work of fiction by Robin Reardon

FOREWORD

The only thing wrong with being gay is how some people treat you when they find out.

This blog entry is the sixth in a series of monthly installments that present the rationale behind Thinking Straight. The series is written from the point of view of a gay man—which I am not—so I'm labeling it as a fictional open letter to humanity, addressed to anyone who will read it and consider its points. My hope is that it will further understanding and acceptance.

The installments will be presented in logical order (Part I and the full list of installments was posted in April), and I encourage readers to start at the beginning and proceed through. The series will be highlighted each month on DREAMWalkergroup.com in the DREAMScene newsletter.

THE I-BEAM STRATEGY

So far I’ve spent a lot of time and used a lot of words to show that there are no rational reasons (is that redundant? if so, I think it was warranted, considering how much irrational, thoughtless blabber has been put forth by the homophobic world) to condemn or to fear gays or homosexuality. And, IMHO, I’ve accomplished a lot. But so far, only the condemnations that science, psychology, and – well, reason can destroy have been shredded. The most intractable condemnation is yet to come: religion.

I’m not against religion, per se. I’m just with The Reverend Lawrence Keene: “It’s okay to have a fifth grade understanding of God, as long as you’re in the fifth grade.”

But we can’t use reason alone to enhance a fifth grade understanding of God or religion. Religion is faith-based, not reason-based. We know this because even though a religion might insist on its absolute truth, it can’t prove that. And yet people believe it.

So just to get us started, let’s define.

A religion is a system of applying faith. It’s not faith itself, despite the fact that many people use the two terms as though they were the same. It would be tough to support a religion without faith (unless lip service is enough for you), but you can certainly have faith without religion. A religion is also a kind of blueprint for life. It’s based on identifiable doctrine, it establishes its own authority figures, and it contains rituals and, usually, dogma. The typical Judea-Christian religions all go on at great lengths about what you should and should not do to live the kind of life the God in question expects.

So a religion such as Christianity is a model for life.

I told you in the beginning that the model I’m going to show you is a kind of business model, but it’s also a life model. In fact, it’s an extremely useful life model. I put it together for the purposes of this discussion, but I have to say I’ve used it in many ways since then, to great success.

I’ve never seen anyone use it in the form I’m going to describe it here; I admit is simplistic, and on its own it wouldn’t do a project manager much good. But it really is the foundation of all project management disciplines that work. I’m going to apply it in a very creative way, if I do say so myself.

Here it is:

O B J E C T I V E
T
A
C
T
I
C
S
S I T U A T I O N

See? Really simple. I’ll bet you understand the relationships among the three components already. But let me go through it anyway. Humor me. You might be surprised. First, let’s define each component.

Objective is where you want to get to, or what you want to accomplish. It’s the reason you’re doing whatever it is you’re doing. It’s what must not fail. What happens if it fails? Kind of depends on what “it” is, but in all cases the goal, the dream, dies.

Situation (surprised that I didn’t go directly to tactics? Bear with me…) is where you are. It can also be what resources you have. It’s the place from which you’re going to take action in order to achieve your objective. This is where you make your plans. In Situation, you don’t take any action at all other than researching where you are or what you have to work with, and then making plans. If you don’t understand your situation well enough, especially in a complex project, you’re almost certainly going to fail.

Tactics are the actions you take—what you do and what you deliberately avoid doing, based on your situation, to accomplish your objective. The really interesting thing about Tactics is that they have to be firmly rooted in Situation. If a given tactic is not rooted, it’s going to be a waste of time and resources at best, or it’s going to jeopardize your objective at worst. The really puzzling thing about Tactics is how many people want to go there second. Right after Objective. Hell, a lot of people don’t even bother to understand Objective very thoroughly before they start applying tactics. That is, before they start doing things.

Now, if you’re normally-abled, getting out of bed in the morning as an objective will not require a whole lot of planning, and you probably won’t even think about it as an objective, let alone establish your situation or examine your tactics to see if they’re useful or dangerous. But what if you were quadriplegic? In that situation (that is, where you start from), achieving the objective of getting out of bed is more complex and will require some planning and some very specific tactics.

I know I told you I was going to apply this model creatively. I will, but we aren’t there yet. First I have to make sure that I’ve been really really really clear about how to use this model, because otherwise the chapters following it will be easy to misunderstand and even dismiss.

I’ll give you a couple of examples, and I’ll demonstrate how this model can be applied to a project or goal as situation moves through time, and how it can be applied to a single slice of time.

Office Tower: Situation changing over time

You’re going to build an office tower. You’re a business person, not an architect or the owner of a construction company. You’re more like Donald Trump, only not quite as wealthy. And with better hair.

What’s your objective? Do I hear some people say “Build an office tower”? If you said that, you’re actually describing a tactic, not a goal. Because why are you going to build this tower? What will you do with it when it’s done? You’re going to lease out office space, right? So what you really want is to spend less money on your tower than you expect to receive through these leases over some period of time that you deem a good return.

So what’s your Objective? That’s right; making money. (It might also be to win Daddy’s approval at long last, or prove to your big brother that you’re cleverer than he is, but those goals are beyond my capacity to help you plan for.) If you forget that your objective is making money, if you lose sight of this goal and get distracted by how pretty the thing will be or how great it will feel to see your name so near the clouds, you could easily make some very foolish decisions about how to proceed each time the situation changes. Because guess what. The situation will change. It always does. Shift happens.

We’re ready to talk about Situation now, because we’re clear on our Objective: making money. How do we know we’re clear? Because trying to answer the question “Why?” isn’t bringing any more clarity. You may have your own personal reasons for making money, but again they’re personal and not something we’ll address here. For most people, making money is enough of an objective.

So first, what’s your situation today? Do you already own the real estate you want to build on? If you have to lease the land, have you figured enough expense into your financial plans to build your tower where it will bring in as much lease money as possible as quickly as possible? (Remember your objective.) Is there a building of any sort already on it? Will it need to be totally demolished, or can you use anything on the site?

Do you have storage facilities where you can keep materials for the construction, or will you need to rent space, and can you afford to do that? Or will you rely on just-in-time delivery, which can be risky? Whichever it is, plan accordingly.

Will you use union workers or hire people who will work for less but may have less experience and who may not speak English well enough for communication to be easy? Union workers (who also sometimes don’t speak English as a first language) are more expensive and may strike; non-union workers present different potential risks, like having unions picket you. Whichever it is, plan accordingly.

Will your contractor have access to enough heavy equipment to replace something quickly if it breaks down? Available redundant equipment will increase your cost, but there’s a risk to the lower cost; if some critical piece of equipment breaks down and takes time to fix, your entire schedule could be affected. What’s the result? A negative impact on your cash flow. What’s your objective?

Will you hire a known architect whose work is proven or a newby architect, partly because she’ll be cheaper and partly because you want to give her an opportunity? What’s the risk worth to you?

All this, and lots more, must be asked and answered and planned for before you take step one. That is, before you perform even one of your tactics. Because how will you know which tactics to do first if you don’t have a solid plan?

When you’ve planned as well as you can, knowing the kinds of hazards a project like this could entail, you need to think about what could happen over time. Like the possibility of a union strike. Or of a weather disaster, depending on what city you’re in. Earthquake? Hurricane? Tornado? Ice storm? You can’t predict, but you can anticipate. Shift happens. But no matter how thorough you are, you know there will be things you can’t plan for. Only when you’ve done all the planning and anticipating you can do will you begin the Tactics portion of your project. But keep in mind that over time, as the situation changes, you’ll have to change your tactics. Shift happens. That’s not an echo.

So. Tactics. Now’s the time you hire the architect, and make arrangements for materials storage, and clear the land. Here’s where you put one foot in front of the other, shift your weight, put the back foot in front of you, shift weight again, and move forward.

Time passes. You’ve hired union workers. There’s a strike involving electricians. What changed? Situation. What might have to change next? Plan, and tactics. You might decide to wait out the strike, but that’s money lost on everyone else you either have to keep paying or let go. If the strike begins to look intractable, you could decide to hire non-union workers. Be prepared for demonstrations, possible vandalism, violence. This is a change in tactics. And what brought it about? Did the objective change? No, not unless it has failed. What brought about a change in tactics was a change in situation.

If you don’t change your tactics to accommodate changes in situation, you could get into financial trouble. What will that mean for your objective? What’s your objective?

Serengeti Plain: Different situations, same slice of time

We’re on the Serengeti. It’s a rugged place for the animal inhabitants—in some cases kill or be killed, in others run or be eaten. So the objective for all of these animals is the same: survival. It would take too long to examine the situations of all these creatures, so I’ll select two with a basic difference in their respective situations.

On one hand, we have the lioness. What’s her objective? Survival.

What’s her situation? She lives on the Serengeti, she has access to food and water most of the time, she must sleep, she feels compelled to help maintain the pride so she’ll have to submit from time to time to the attentions of that mangy thing who seldom hunts for himself, and once he’s had his way she has cubs to care for, but this is necessary for the survival of her species, so she’ll have to do it.

What are her tactics? She submits to the mangy thing, she bears and raises her cubs, she scouts out watering holes and moves with the water in dry times if necessary, she drinks, she eats, and she does all the other biological necessities of life that we don’t need to go into in detail. The most basic thing she does is eat. She eats to survive. Survival makes all the other things possible. (Interestingly, it’s also her objective.) And to get food, she hunts. That’s a tactic based on her situation (a carnivore on the Serengeti Plain), and it supports her objective.

On the other hand we have a Thompson’s gazelle. What’s his objective? Survival. What’s his situation? He actually has a lot in common with the lioness, and with a few exceptions (like submitting to the mangy thing) their tactics are also the same. However, the most important tactic, eating, is performed in a different way. If the gazelle were to chase the lioness, what would happen to his objective? In fact, in order to support his objective of survival, he has a tactic that trumps eating: running.

For both these animals, the objective is the same; the situation is the same in many places but different in a few critical ones; and wherever the situations are different, the tactics must be correspondingly different.

I want to be very clear about something before going on, so I’m going to say it again: a Tactic that is not firmly grounded in Situation will not support Objective. For any given objective, situation almost always changes (shift happens). When situation changes, the tactics that depended on the changed aspects of the situation must be revisited and, probably, changed.

Clear?

Next time, we’re moving on to the biggest Card of them all. I all it the God card, but what it really says on it is “DAMNED.”

THE CASE FOR ACCEPTANCE: An Open Letter to Humanity, Part V

a work of fiction by Robin Reardon

FOREWORD

The only thing wrong with being gay is how some people treat you when they find out.

This blog entry is the fifth in a series of monthly installments that present the rationale behind Thinking Straight. The series is written from the point of view of a gay man—which I am not—so I'm labeling it as a fictional open letter to humanity, addressed to anyone who will read it and consider its points. My hope is that it will further understanding and acceptance.

The installments will be presented in logical order (Part I and the full list of installments was posted in April; see Archives to the right), and I encourage readers to start at the beginning and proceed through. The series will be highlighted each month on DREAMWalkergroup.com in the DREAMScene newsletter.

THE CARDS, continued: THERE’S NO NEED TO THINK; I FEEL INSTINCTIVELY THIS IS WRONG

Yeah, I know, this one’s kind of long for a card. But it covers so much ground that it will be worth it. Promise.

How much of this do we need to define? More than you might think. In fact, let’s start with that word: think. Thinking requires the use of our gray matter. Thinking is something most humans believe sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. There may be a few species we see as capable of thought on some level, but we’re sure we leave them in the dust. Our cerebral cortex is without peer. At least on this planet.

Thinking also requires reason. Reasoning. Rationality. It involves the progression of logical ideas, reflection, consideration. It’s necessary for analysis and synthesis. It raises the understanding of consequence above mere pattern recognition. It makes planning possible.

I could stop right here and point out that as long as we want to consider ourselves at the top of the food chain, we do need to think, and say that settles it. But there’s more thinking to be done about this. So let’s keep going, and let’s think.

Next we examine the phrase “feel instinctively.” Did you ever try to instinct? Can’t do it, can you? An instinct is something you react to, because it causes you to have some sort of feeling. Instincts are unlearned, unemotional, non-verbal and non-cognitive. There is some debate among scientists and others studying this phenomenon about just how many distinct instincts exist—the number seems to be somewhere between one and five—but there’s no debate at all that the most important one, the one to which all others yield, is survival.

An instinctive reaction typically causes us to feel something; that’s where the emotion comes in. Fear is the most common, given the priorities of our instincts. Being non-cognitive, instincts don’t live in our cerebral cortex. In fact, the seat of instinct is said to be the R-25 complex. The reptilian brain. I like to call it the lizard brain; it’s easier to say and to type. Our lizard brain is essentially not different from that of other creatures in the animal kingdom, which means that when we’re not thinking, we’re basically lizards. If we don’t want to be lizards, I suggest we think.

But thinking takes time and energy and focus. It’s a lot of trouble. It can be painful and complicated and frustrating. So much easier to be a lizard, isn’t it? Besides, caution is safer. If we think there’s a danger and there isn’t, that’s not likely to harm us. But if we think there isn’t and there is—you do the math. So Lizardhood is seductive.

Let’s try some application and see if we can get away with as little thinking as possible. Your lizard brain, the seat of instinct, has your survival as its prime directive; therefore, the more paranoid it is, the better it’s doing its job. Let’s give it a test.

Say I’m visiting London, where they drive on the wrong side of the street. I’m in the middle of a city block, and there’s traffic going in both directions in front of me. Directly across from is me is a sex toy store I’ve been hearing about. It would be a gas to bring back a certain item to a friend of mine, and all that fun stuff is in my head when I decide not to walk to the corner and press the button for a “walk” signal. I’m not thinking. Or, I’m not thinking about what I’m actually doing. So I look rather automatically to my left (not instinctively, since this is learned behavior; if I were merely following instinct, I wouldn’t look only to my left) to see if anything’s coming at me, and nothing is, so I step out.

Instantly there’s a blaring horn and the squeal of brakes coming from the red double-decker bus hurtling toward me from my right. My lizard brain, with immediate access to my adrenaline system, responds so fast that my body is back on the sidewalk before my cerebral cortex has any idea what happened. The R-25 didn’t waste time explaining to my human brain what was happening or what it was going to do about it. In fact, it had no way to do that. It just forced my body to react. It saved my life.

So now I’m back on the sidewalk, a little breathless from all the adrenaline, and my human brain scrambles to explain what just happened. I might say something like, “Holy crap. That stupid bus driver nearly hit me!”

Was the driver stupid? Maybe, maybe not. But my immediate need is to confabulate something that explains why I got into such a dangerous spot and justifies whatever I needed to do to get out of it. You might call this thinking, but it doesn’t go very deep. If I jay-walk again, will my lizard brain save me? It will do its damnedest, but maybe I’ll be farther out into the street before the horn sounds. Maybe I’ll trip before I can make it back to safety. Maybe the next bus’s brakes won’t be as good. Aside from never jay-walking again, which isn’t likely to be a reform I’m prepared to make for the rest of my life, what can I do to help avoid death in this way?

Well, I’m might think. Really think. I shouldn’t stop at blaming the bus driver. I need to apply my human brain, at which point I will realize that I’m in London where they drive on the wrong side of the street, and I’ll make a plan that as long as I’m here, I’ll take extra precautions. Maybe I won’t jay-walk until I’m home again. Maybe I’ll look both ways no matter what I expect from the traffic. But I need to think.

Was my lizard brain right? Absolutely. Can it do the task alone? Not as well as it can do it if I think.

Here’s another scenario. Let’s say I’ve never seen a little person (I’m talking about dwarves; apologies to anyone I’ve offended using that word). I’m half-walking, half-running along a city street in a great rush to get someplace. I round the corner of a building with no windows I can see through, and I nearly collide with a little person (LP). My wordless lizard brain screams bloody murder and force-feeds me adrenaline, just like with the London bus—much, much more adrenaline than if that person had looked like people I was used to seeing. The bus was about to kill me. Is the LP? If he’s not carrying a knife or a gun or leading a pack of wolves, is he a threat to me?

I hope I would have the grace to apologize, make sure he was all right, maybe explain that I was in a huge rush, and go on my way. Adrenaline is still coursing through my system. I won’t feel normal again for nearly an hour. I could dine out on that story for a month.

Was my lizard brain right this time? You know the answer; you have a cerebral cortex.

Here’s a scenario that actually happened. A few years ago, when the Massachusetts Supreme Court was debating whether or not the state constitution prohibited legal same-sex marriage, there was a lot of bru-ha-ha about it. One enterprising journalist took a microphone out onto the street and asked people what their position was, and why. I’ll never forget one answer given by an unidentified woman. She said she was against same-sex marriage, because—this is a direct quote—“If we allow men to marry men and women to marry women, pretty soon there won’t be enough children in the world.”

When I heard that, I began sputtering even more helplessly than our homophobic friend when I grilled him about what made sex natural. There are so many flaws in this absurd statement that it’s hard to know where to begin. I’ll start with the most obvious.

Children. How many children are on the planet today? How many of them are unwanted, or starving, or neglected, or all three? How many people would have to become suddenly barren for us to be in any danger whatsoever of running out of children? Whatever the number is, you can bet your ass it’s a hell of a lot higher than the number of gay people in the world.

Next, children. Even if this ridiculous person were correct about running out of children, her conclusion makes sense only if no gay people ever have children. Wrong. Very wrong.

Finally (though there are many more, I’m going to expose only three fallacies), no—not children this time. Nature. Her conclusion implies that if the law refused to recognize the union of the lesbians who brought the suit to court in Massachusetts, those women would wave wistfully at each other and go and find eligible men with whom to settle down and procreate. WRONG AGAIN! Why? Because although we could choose to live straight lives, that won’t make us straight. It would be unnatural. For us. Sure, there are those who make this decision, and in my experience some succeed better than others, but for most of us it would mean a life of lying. Lying to our spouses. Lying to our birth families and our families-in-law. Lying to our friends. Lying to our co-workers. Lying to our children (and weren’t children the most important thing?). Lying to ourselves.

Was that woman thinking? She thought so, but she wasn’t. (Even worse, she votes.) She got about as far as “That stupid bus driver nearly hit me!” Which is to say that she reacted to what her lizard brain dictated, confabulated desperately to try and make sense out of what fear drove her to conclude, and came up with something that makes no sense whatsoever when exposed to actual thought processes. To reason.

If you don’t have to make sense (and your lizard brain doesn’t expect sense), you can say anything at all. And that’s what she did.

You might be wondering about now what her lizard brain has to do with this particular example. After all, it’s not like the bus, or even the LP.

Her lizard brain sees her as the center of the universe. Its primary job is her survival, and it’s more efficient at this if it presumes that anything that’s different from her is a threat until and unless it’s proven otherwise.

Gay people are not forced to wear arm bands (this year). Therefore, many straight people are likely to say, “Oh, I don’t know any gay people.” Absurd. They just don’t know who the gay people are. That is, until something happens that forces them to acknowledge it. Take the example of me in the corporate conference room, answering questions about Hawai’I (see Part I). It could be that no one in that room knew I was gay, and they wouldn’t have known, if I hadn’t said that I had a male domestic partner. Then it’s WHAM! And suddenly they have to deal with it.

What I’m saying is that very often, when someone like this woman finds out someone is gay, either it comes as a surprise, or it is suddenly something she must deal with (like having an opinion about current events), or both. To her lizard brain, because this orientation goes against what’s natural for her, this phenomenon is a threat. It’s dangerous. It’s wrong.

This woman, for personal reasons I’m not privy to, evidently decided against going the religious route. She didn’t say anything about God or the bible or even morality. She based her entire response on something she obviously believed to be vitally important: children. No argument from me, in principle. But her lizard brain’s profoundly negative and fear-inspiring reaction to me sends her cerebral cortex into panic mode, screaming at it to do something QUICKLY! And that’s when confabulation begins. Her lizard brain forces her to react in a way that her cerebral cortex feels obliged to try and make sense out of. But it can’t make sense out of it, because I’m not a threat to her. Really. So she failed to make sense; she just didn’t know it.

Some of you may be demanding to know why homosexuals’ lizard brains don’t scream when we are surprised by heterosexuals, or when we suddenly have to deal with them. The fact is, we aren’t surprised, ever; not only are there more straights than gays in the world, so we’re used the encounters, but also most gay people spent some portion of our lives thinking of ourselves as straight because we weren’t presented with any other option. So our cerebral cortexes have already calmed our R-25 complexes out of a knee-jerk Eeeewww reaction to heterosexuals.

But back to the lizard in Massachusetts. While all of us, at some point or points in our lives, do and say things that are foolish or that don’t make sense, the worst possible times are when our foolishness has detrimental effects on others. This woman, voting as her lizard brain dictates, wanted to take away my civil rights. While I would agree that she’s as entitled to her opinion as I am to mine, I would insist that she not be allowed to deny me my civil rights without a damned good reason. As a start, she could try thinking. How would she react if I told her that what she does in bed is so awful that she shouldn’t be allowed to marry because the last thing I want to do is encourage that behavior, and that I was casting a vote to take that right away from her?

Once upon a time, white people reacted to black people in much the same way as many heteros react to gays today. Many white people still do. Something in their lizard brains goes berserk at this creature that is different from what is normal and natural for that particular lizard brain’s host, and all hell breaks loose. Don’t think it was hell? Ask a black person.

Thank God many of us white folks have done our best to quell this knee-jerk reaction to the “different” among us, and there are now laws to help us (though the work’s far from over). And although I’m sure there are some bigoted whities out there who feel otherwise, it would have been a stupid, narrow-minded, horrible thing if in the 1950s we had amended our Constitution to forbid a person of color to marry a person of—well, of what? Of no color? White people aren’t really white. Black people are seldom really black. What we all are is people. But it would not have been out of the question, not so long ago, to forbid a lawful marriage between, say, Isaiah Washington and Sandra Oh. Except that she—well, is she white?

Goodness, this is difficult, isn’t it? My point is that it would have been a huge mistake to have passed a law like that. But many fewer people would have thought so in 1955 than now. Many things seem less threatening if we just give ourselves a little time to get used to them. And when you consider that the gay rights movement didn’t even get started until June of 1969 (remember the Stonewall riots?), there hasn’t been a lot of time for heteros to get used to gays. But given time and frequent exposure to things that seem different from us, our cerebral cortex has a chance to influence the knee-jerk reaction of our lizard brains and calm the fear that it inspires. “It’s okay,” we can say to the reptile, “it’s just an LP.” “It’s just Isaiah Washington.” “It’s just a gay person.”

So in summary, there was the bus scenario. Would your lizard brain save you in that case? Maybe, but a second dangerous situation could be avoided if you apply enough brain power to figure out what really happened. There was the surprise encounter with the LP. Would your lizard brain save you there? From what? There was the blithering idiot in Massachusetts. If nothing else, she needs to be saved from blithering idiocy, at least in public. Her lizard brain not only didn’t save her from that, but it actually caused it.

Do we need to think? I’m going to say yes. And that’s the fifth one down.

Card Summary

Unnatural: shredded. It would be just as unnatural for me to force my unwilling physiology to have a sexual response to a woman as it would be unnatural for my homophobic friend to force himself to respond sexually to me. Plus, there’s the 1,500+ animal species with gay individuals among their populations.

Abnormal: shredded. The word is a statistical term, not a moral judgment, and it’s normal for some percentage of the human race (and other animal species) to be homosexual.

Promiscuous: shredded. If I’m gay, and I’m promiscuous, it has a lot more to do with the fact that I’m male than the fact that I’m gay. Being gay just makes me more successful at it—if I want to be.

Pedophile: shredded. There’s nothing about the definition of a homosexual that makes him any more likely to abuse children sexually than for a heterosexual to do so. Neither I nor my homophobic friend can have a biological, sexual response to a child. Pedophilia has no basis in sexual orientation.

No need to think when we feel instinctively about something: shredded. Shredded for so many reasons I’m not going to go over them again. If you need to, re-read that section. Trust me; it’s shredded.

Now it’s your turn. Here’s one way to go about it, if you don’t have a real live faggot-bag to work with. Take a piece of lined paper, the kind with a vertical line down the left to leave a small margin. Use a legal size—you’ll need the room. Go someplace quiet with your paper and a pen, and to the right of the margin on each line write something different that you’ve heard about how terrible it is to be gay. All those assumptions that some people try to use to support the conclusion that gay is wrong. Want me to get you started? How about “twisted” and “sick” and “just wrong” and “perverted” and “selfish” and “deluded” and “dangerous” and and and do I need to spell them out for you? You know what they are, whether you hurled them or had them hurled at you. Write down everything you can think of. When you get to the end, go ask a homophobe, and you’ll get a few more.

Now, go back to that quiet corner with your list and your pen. Start at the top with the first one—or any one, it doesn’t matter—and go through our process. Define it. Break it down to the teeniest pieces you can. Apply known facts and rational tests to it. See if you can reconstruct that assumption again so that it supports the fallacy that gay equals bad.

The last thing is to examine gay people in light of this thing. For each line, ask yourself, “Does this apply to any gay people that I know of?” Maybe the piece you’re examining is promiscuity. Does it apply? If not, leave the left margin on that line blank and go to the next line. If it does, ask yourself a second question: “Does it apply to them because they’re gay?” You already know the answer to that one. Again, leave the left margin blank and go on to the next line. When you’re finished, you shouldn’t have any check marks in the left margin. If you do, go back. Define again. Break it down again, and be creative in how you do that. Do some research. Apply science, apply psychology, apply anything that’s reasonably provable. Now try and reconstruct it again. I’ll bet you can’t. I’ll bet you’ll have to cross out that check mark.

The next installment will describe and demonstrate a system that we’ll need when we begin to examine cards that can’t be deconstructed with reason alone. It’s a system that underpins all accepted project management methodologies. It’s also a model for life. Think it sounds boring? Wait until you see how I apply it.