The Republic of T.

Buspar. Celexa. Cymbalta. Elavil. Effexor. Lexapro. Lithium. Luvox. Nardil. Normaprin. Pamelor. Parnate. Paxil. Prozac. Remeron. Wellbutrin. Zoloft.

Are any of these names on any of the bottles in your medicine cabinet? If so, you’re no different than fully one half of the Americans who take at least one antidepressant, according to a 2004 report by the CDC. And if that’s the case you’re one of the lucky ones. According to a study from the Medical College of Georgia, only about one third of Americans who need mental health care actually get it. That’s probably due, at least in part, to the huge amount of stigma attached needing mental health care. (Also, having health insurance helps.)

Why do mental illnesses continue to be stigmatized? For one thing, the term “mental illness” itself implies a distinction from “physical” illness, although the two are intimately entwined. In fact, neuroimaging studies show physical changes in the brain associated with mental disorders, suggesting a biological basis. Some mental health advocates propose switching to less stigmatized terms, such as behavioral health or brain disorders or brain illnesses.

To some, “mental” suggests not a legitimate medical condition but rather something that results from your own doing and your own choices. People may blame you and think your condition is “all in your head.” They may think that mental illness is an indication of weakness or laziness. That you’re a “moral failure” or simply “can’t cut it.” That you should just “get over it.”

That stigma is probably why, if you take one of the medicines mentioned above, you don’t advertise it. And you probably don’t want anyone nosing around your medicine cabinet for the very say reason.

But someone may have already poked through your prescriptions.

Technorati Tags: bush, depression, mental health, privacy

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This feels a bit like cheating as far as blogging is concerned, but it’s something that’s been on my mind since yesterday, when I saw Mike’s post at Questionable authority, about Chad’s post at uncertain Principles asking everyone to ease up on debate in the wake of the tragedy at Virginia Tech.

Of course, the bodies aren’t even cold yet, and already the blogosphere is a-flutter with people touting this as proof that the US needs to change its gun laws in one direction or another. I’m not going to link to them, but I’ve already seen three or four pieces using this to push one side or the other of the gun control debate, and I have a simple message for those people:

Stop. Please, just stop.

For the love of God, show a little tact, and shut up, at least until the families of the victims have been notified, and the community has had a chance to grieve a little. Next Monday would be a fine time to start– personally, I’d prefer “never,” but at a minimum, I’d say that while there are still families out there who don’t know whether their loved ones are alive or dead, you can sit on your hands, and spare us all your opinions.

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There are at least three political posts I want to write at the moment, but right now the personal is what’s on my mind. So, if folks will indulge me for a bit, I need to get this out. It’s been one of those months, so far, where I’ve swung between the extremes of the exhilaration of getting to combine my interests and talents in a meaningful way and the shame and embarrassment of letting down people who rely on me and whose respect I’d like to earn.

I’ve been here before. More times than I can count. I wrote back in November about my time/task management issues and my latest attempt at putting things in some semblance of order. I was wary then, about trying yet another organizing scheme.

There have been times throughout my life when this deficiency has been cast in very stark and unflattering light; usually those times when circumstances overwhelm my ability to compensate for it. And there are, in all those periods, events that send me scurrying for some sort of time management information (TMI, for short), the way a man aboard a sinking ship looks for something, anything, with which to bail out the water that’s rushing in. (A bucket would be great, but a teaspoon will do if that’s all I can find. When my first job in D.C. was going down faster than the Titanic, and happened to be riding down in the elevator with the Executive Director, she asked me how I was it was going. I said “Like I’m bailing water on the Titanic with a teaspoon.”) Never mind looking for a lifejacket. That’s somewhere under all the water.

Now — when I’m facing the intersection of work and (a growing) family and blogging and any number of other activities that I might want to engage in — is one of those times. So I find myself reaching for another bucket to bail with, and some trepidation given my track record with this sort of thing (more below). But at this point might worship as a demigod the person who can show me how to get organized and stay organized — to find time to do all the stuff I have to do, and maybe a fair amount of the stuff I want to do — if it will loosen or even completely banish the knot of tension that tightly winds itself between my shoulder blades on a daily basis now.

Six months later, I’m back in pretty much the same place; a little better in terms of the positive side of the scale but losing ground fast, and I’m not sure what to do.

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I promise I’m going to get back to some actual writing soon, but there’s something I’m still mulling over from the whole story about Kathy Sierra’s death threats.

The threats against Kathy, the picture of her with a noose around her neck, appeared on someone else’s site, someone who defended his decision not to remove those comments, instead putting the responsibility on the commenters, and eventually removing the sites altogether rather than remove the comments.

I don’t know what standard of integrity includes allowing people to post death threats against other people in a forum you own, any more than I can imagine leaving comments on my blog containing the kinds of threats (throat slitting, etc.) and images that were directed at Kathy Sierra. Free speech? Deleting comments is no violation of free speech. First, no one has a “right” to threaten anyone. Second, no one has “right” to do so on my blog or anyone else’s. If I delete their comments, they can start their own blogs in about five minutes. They can take it to another forum where that’s tolerated. Obviously, those forums exist.

As I noted earlier, it’s not the first time that questions of censorship and freedom of speech have come up in relation to comments in online forums.

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Not sure whether I’ll get to do much blogging today, but there’s lots of great stuff elsewhere in the blogosphere.

Pam has a great post up about discussing racism and misogyny.

Let’s start off with some important observations and distinctions about why you’re seeing the defense of rap, even with it’s misogyny. When it comes down to it, they don’t like “Whitey” pointing it out — they leap to defending the right to self-defined cultural expression — not freedom of speech, mind you, but an ethno-centric form of expression, the black vernacular within that genre. That’s what you hear when people get defensive about why everyone is “picking on” hip-hop only.

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Over at MIrror on America, the Angry Independent has a post along the same lines as Pam’s.

Of course Rap music is not the direct cause or the only cause for the ills that plague Black America, but it plays a big role in reinforcing certain lifestyles that-when combined with other factors- contribute to conditions that hurt Black folks, especially Black youth. Rap is like a mental prison that has become a barrier for Black folks, making it hard for them to take the steps necessary to deal with their social, political, and economic conditions.

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Along those same lines, Jasmyne continues her “Can’t Sing That No More” series examining treatments of race and gender in hip-hop.

Why Mims Is Not Hot…

This track is again about how fly he is, how much money he has, how he will kill or hurt you, how we (ladies) want him, plus other questionable lyrics.

Violations

N-word = 6 times

B-word = 1 time

Jasmyne also has a clip of her Imus-related appearance on Dateline.

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Wired has a pretty comprehensive wrap up of the facts (or lack thereof) in the Kathy Sierra story.

Identifying these perpetrators has proven impossible because most of the evidence has been destroyed, including server logs, IP addresses and the threatening content itself. Although others have identified a prime suspect, he has an alibi, which is impossible to confirm or debunk.

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Nezua has this to say about the Kos v. Kathy saga. It short, and thus there’s no need to quote it here. Just go read it. Especially that paragraph just before the end.

I suppose I should cut Kos some slack. Normally, I’d say that it almost looks like he’s working really hard at not getting it. But having had the experience of being a new dad, I know having a newborn in the house means everything else takes a lower priority, and sometimes that includes things like sleeping, showering, eating, etc. So I’m tempted to excuse this slapdash follow-up to his original slapdash post in response to the death/rape threats against Kathy Sierra.

I don’t disagree with anything Lindsey wrote. I disagreed with using a bloggers threats as an excuse to foist upon us all a “Blogger Code of Conduct”.

That’s what I was saying. 1) There are assholes that will 2) email stupid shit to any public figure (which includes bloggers, but 3) that won’t be stopped by any blogger code of conduct.

You see, stupid asshole psycho threatening emailers don’t care about codes of conduct. That’s all.

Glad to know that he doesn’t disagree with what Lindsey said. But there’s a few points being missed here, and I would miss them too if I were blogging in between diaper changes, late night feedings, and suffering sleep deprivation.

Basically, the recommendations put forth aren’t for the “stupid assholes” leaving rape threats and death threats in comments — not emails, but public comments on blogs. They’re for the stupid assholes who allow those comments to remain on their blogs.

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Because the inquisition didn’t happen. Or if it did, there was good reason. At least that’s what I gather from this column that makes it sound like an episode of Law & Order.

The Inquisition was initiated to defend the Church against the revisionists of an earlier era. In short, it aimed to protect the truth against lies that claimed to be truer. In contemporary secular America we tolerate all sorts of heresies, preferring the freedom to hold opinions that are fashionable at the moment. Christendom held, on the contrary, that in the matter of salvation only the truth can make us free.

In 13th century France the Cathar sect created new requirements for being a faithful Christian _ forbidding marriage, commerce, and bloodshed, and confining themselves to a vegan diet, insisting that this was the only way of life worthy of salvation. The Inquisition originated to defend ordinary Christians against these purer-than-thou puritans.

In subsequent centuries the Inquisition’ power was abused, but more by politicians than by the Church. Still, during the ages of Faith, the civil penalty for stealing a sheep was to be hanged, whereas the inquisitors were typically content to give a penance to a repentant heretic.

The era of Inquisition has not passed. Congressional hearings demand the truth under threat of imprisonment. When we try terrorists, we do so because their violence is based on a revisionist reading of their religious faith. Fortunately, most Christians remain immune to the revisionists.

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Steven at Booman Tribune has some very important questions for some bloggers, in the aftermath of the death threats against Kathy Sierra and the callous response of a prominent progressive blogger.

Will he do the right thing?

So, what should you do now? You could ignore the criticism, or make excuses for your error, like Don Imus and his loyal gang of sycophants have tried to do in the case of the racial slurs the I-Man directed at the Rutgers women’s basketball team. You could claim you were misunderstood, or that people took your words out of context, or employ any of a number of other rhetorical devices to obfuscate and obscure that what you wrote about Ms. Sierra was fundamentally wrong. In other words, you could act like Hillary Clinton has done regarding her vote to give Bush the authority to invade Iraq.

But that wouldn’t be right, and I think in your heart you know that. So do the right thing.

Will they?

So, let me appeal to you. Maybe you’ll have better luck that we have had. Maybe you can get Markos to see that admitting his mistakes makes him a bigger man, not a smaller, weaker one. Maybe if you speak up against the reprehensible and uncalled for comments he leveled at Kathy Sierra, and by extension, at all other women online who’ve ever received threats, or been demeaned and belittled by sexist and sexually harassing comments, he will see the light, and come clean.

Really, all it would take on his part is a simple apology, and an admission that he was wrong, and a lot of the anger and outrage he has generated among his fellow liberals and progressives, both men and women, would be forgotten, or at least forgiven. Not that big a deal, you would think. It’s what we teach our children when they are still in diapers. When you’ve done something wrong, when you’ve hurt someone, say you’re sorry.

So, will you help us, and even more important, will you help Markos, by speaking out? You have the big soap box, not us. Many of you know him personally, not us. And isn’t it the duty of his friends to tell him that he’s screwed the pooch on the Affaire le Sierra? Isn’t it more likely that if he hears from the people he considers his “peers” that he needs to make amends, the message might actually get through to him?

Will they? Dunno. The handful that I still read haven’t seen fit to mention it yet.

I remember the first time I participated in a Take Back the Night march. I was in college. It was a “no brainer,” to participate in the march. I had female friends and relatives who were vulnerable. I’d heard some of my female friends refer to a poorly-lit parking lot on campus as the “rape lot.” Some of the women I knew had been followed, stalked, threatened, etc. Some had been sexually assaulted. Some had been raped.

I was out by then, publicly so, as I’d started writing editorials on gay issues for the student run newspaper and had come out in my first column. (Nothing says “point of no return” like going to bed knowing that in the morning some 25,000 people will open up the newspaper and see your name, your face, and the words “I am gay.”) Since then, I’d received a few threats myself, had the occasional beer bottle land somewhere near my feet as I made my way back to my dorm at night, felt the fear of realizing that someone who’d uttered as slur in my direction earlier appeared to be following me

Like I said. Joining in taking back night was a no brainer. So is joining in Take Back the Blog.

As announced, this page will host the April 28, 2007 Take Back the Blog! Blogswarm in support of the rights of women to participate fully in all aspects of our society, including specifically online in the world of blogging but indeed everywhere and at all times, day and night, without fear of harassment, intimidation, sexual harassment, online stalking and slander, predation or violence of any sort. This page will be modified without notice during the next several weeks to accommodate the incoming structure and content for this Blogswarm.

Bruce at Crablaw will be updating the Take Back the Blog! page on his site between now and then. I’m definitely in.

Have you ever had a stalker? Have you ever had someone threaten to kill you? Someone who knows what you look like and where you live? Maybe even your phone number? I have. And the whole story about the death threats against Kathy Sierra this week took me back years and years, to the time when I opened an email with a death threat in it and that ended with “I know where to find you,” and when got phone calls from a man saying what he was going to do to me when he found me.

That was a long time ago. I was a single gay man, living alone. All I’d done was go online to chat and meet men. I met the wrong one, realized it and quickly dropped him. My guess is that there are some people who would say that I “had it coming” and “brought it on myself” by going online. The death threats, that is. And some people would probably say the same thing if my stalker had found me and made good on his promises. “The faggot brought it on himself.” Sounds an awful lot like “The bitch brought it on herself.”

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It saddened to learn yesterday of Kurt Vonnegut’s passing. He was one of those writers whose work cast a spell on me when I stumbled across it at a young age. I don’t know where it came from, but when I was about 10 years old I came across a copy of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater on a bookshelf in our house, and since I was already an avid reader by then, I picked it up and took it along to read on a family trip. My next trip was to the library to pick up Cat’s Cradle.

Now I think Vonnegut’s writing was probably more than my brain could handle then, but that didn’t stop me from trying. (In fact, the only book that did stop me was Ulysses, and I still haven’t attempted that one again.) So, it wasn’t until few years ago that I picked up Slaughterhouse-Five, inspired by reading Vonnegut’s thoughts on the Iraq war and his assessment of George W. Bush.

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I understand, or at least I think I do, where Ed and Chris that the potential overuse of the word “theocracy” to describe religious conservatives’ efforts to move church and state closer together. Goodness knows I’ve been a frequent user of the term on this blog. But I can’t think of a single instance in which I’d take back any application or implication of the term on my part. I’ve listed story after story here that I think qualifies at least for consideration as part of a creep toward some degree or form of theocracy, or some amalgamation of the U.S. government and a particular flavor of Christianity.

But, for the sake of argument, when is it appropriate to describe the efforts and aims of religious conservatives as “theocracy”?

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I went on about Sanjaya Malakar and American Idol last week, drawing some parallels between the show and American politics, and I didn’t expect to be blogging about it again, but I just read that the show’s music director says Sanjaya could actually win the whole thing.

“Not only did “American Idol’s” little-contestant-that-could impress Simon Cowell and Jennifer Lopez this week, but the show’s musical director Rickey Minor now says it’s possible that Sanjaya Malakar can win the entire competition.

“You know what? I think that he could win the show,” Minor told The New York Post. “He’s gotten this far because he really is what he is – he’s got this huge smile, he’s a handsome guy and is really likable. People are pulling for him – and people really care about him.”

For the first time since the show entered the final 12 phase, folks got a glimpse of the pipes that impressed the judges during auditions during Tuesday night’s performance of a song in Spanglish.

“I can tell you he can sing,” says Minor, now in his third season as “Idol” musical director. “I think there are people who are naysayers, but I’ve run into a lot of credible people who really enjoy his voice. He has a connection to the lyrics and people are pleasantly surprised.

“This isn’t a singing competition alone. It’s for a star to emerge,” he says. “Sanjaya has a huge likability factor. I think it’s possible for him to win based on the way he’s moving through the competition.”

That alone did my heart good, then I heard Sanjaya sing “Besame Mucho.”

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I’d intended to write this back when there’s was a lot of discussion about the Washington state initiative to require heterosexuals to prove they can reproduce, or face having their marriages annulled. I hadn’t intended to post about it again, As I read some recent . One of them was Jim Wallis’ post at God’s Politics, about “Covenantal vs. Recreational Sexuality.”

At first, I couldn’t think of why his post reminded me of the Washignton state initiative.

The divinely intended purposes of sexual intimacy are of course very sacred and deeply satisfying in the context of committed relationships. And the degradation and commodification of sexuality in the media, for purposes of advertising, and in exploitative or manipulative relationships is indeed sin, because it can be so abusive and destructive to the human spirit.

The real question is whether sexuality should be regarded as basically covenantal or just recreational.

Sexuality is meant to be enormously enjoyable and fulfilling, but the context of the relationship and the commitment or lack of commitment it contains is of obvious religious importance. And that religious importance is because of how fragmenting or integrating sexual intimacy can be for human beings – dependent on the context of the relationship.

What struck me was that Wallis wrote in term of “committed relationships” and not marriage specifically, but then I remembered that even though Wallis doesn’t support same-sex marriage he supports civil unions for same-sex couples, and has written that he thinks it would be good to encourage committed, monogamous relationships among gays and lesbians.

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Unbelievably, the discussion of the blogroll purge continues far beyond anything I expected when I wrote my initial post. Yesterday evening I came across this interesting exchange on Bloggingheads.tv between Bill Scher of Liberal Oasis and Conn Carroll of the Blogometer. It’s an interesting conversation that left me thinking about a few things I read before and after my initial post.

The first was came about halfway through the clip, when Bill Scher talks about how blogroll links don’t drive as much traffic as when a popular blogger links to a second or third tier blogger in a blog post. My experience is that he’s pretty much right about that, but that doesn’t quite deal with the question of google ranking, though skippy pointed out that Google ranking may not be all it’s cracked up to be. But the point about linking to other blog in posts being more effective brings up something that’s alluded to in the conversation between Sher and Caroll and which Clay Shirky addressed a long time ago.

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Around this time last year I posted about reports that Adoption.Com discriminated against gays seeking to adopt, and a lawsuit filed by one couple. Well, it looks like the discrimination suit against Adoption.com is moving forward.

More than three years after an Internet adoption site refused to allow a gay couple to post their profile, a federal judge allowed the pair’s discrimination lawsuit to go to trial.

U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton rejected arguments that Adoption.com had free speech rights to exclude same-sex couples from its paid listings, which are designed to match birth mothers with qualified parents.

“Plaintiffs are not seeking to place any restrictions on what defendants are permitted to say or to compel them to say anything,” Hamilton wrote in an 81-page ruling issued March 30. “It is the discriminatory conduct that is at issue here — defendants’ refusal to do business with the plaintiffs.”

In allowing the lawsuit to go to trial in June, Hamilton also dismissed the company’s claim that California anti-bias policies did not apply because Adoption.com is based in Tempe, Ariz., where state laws don’t bar discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or marital status.

Around the same time last year, the ACLU issued a report on just how restrictions against gay adoptions harm children

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I’m not sure which of these stories I like better. First there’s the kid who came to school dressed as a pirate, got kicked out, and claimed the school violated his religious beliefs as a pastafarian.

Bryan Killian says that he follows the Pastafarian religion, and that as a crucial part of his faith, he must wear ‘full pirate regalia’ as prescribed in the holy texts of Pastafarianism.

The school, however, say that his pirate garb was disruptive

Pastafarians follow the Flying Spaghetti Monster (pictured), and believe that the world was created by the touch of his noodly appendage. Furthermore, they acknowledge pirates as being ‘absolute divine beings’, and stress that the worldwide decline in the number of pirates has directly led to global warming.

Pastafarianism gained wide attention when its key prophet, Bobby Henderson, wrote to the Kansas School Board during the height of the controversy over ‘Intelligent Design’ being taught in science classes. His letter, also published on his website, demanded equal time be given to the teachings of the Flying Spaghetti Monster as was given to ID and evolutionary theory.

Then there’s the kid who made this “coming out” video. [Via Pharyngula.]

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Last year we went to the White House Eggroll with lots of other gay families organized by Family Pride. It was supposed to be kept quiet, at least until after the eggroll, I think, with a statement issued afterwards about our families’ participation. Unfortunately, it got leaked. I think Drudge posted it, and from there the usual right wing groups picked up on it, and it was all over the news.

Well, we did it again this year, and for the most part it was a quiet event. Aa I said to the Washington Post, that’s a good thing.

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Still recovering from the day, but via Corpus Callosum here’s an interesting “Visual DNA” meme.

Not entirely sure how accurate it is. The “New Wave Puritan” is definitely not me. Strict, organized, and neat are not words that have ever been used to describe me, even by myself. I think that’s because I picked the bedroom I’d like to have. Everything else, though, is pretty much spot on.

I forgot to mention that we’ve got an appointment to roll eggs on the White House lawn, just like we did last year. So, there won’t be much posted here today. In the meantime, check out some of the stuff I’ve been reading.

I doubt she’ll be at the Easter Egg Roll with Rainbow Families, but word from Mombian is that Mary Cheney is having a boy.

Mary Cheney will be having a boy when she gives birth next month, said her father, Vice President Dick Cheney. He also said he’s “delighted” to be a grandparent for the sixth time, but reiterated that he thought same-sex relationship recognition should remain a state matter. “I obviously think it’s important for us as a society to be tolerant and respectful of whatever arrangements people enter into,” he added.

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