Tying Up Loose Ends

1. Monsters:

A while ago I mentioned our monster infestation and got some advice. Fortunately, they seem to have migrated south for the winter. Thanks for the advice, those who gave it. We tried the smelly monster spray and keeping dog in Allan's room and that helped but he just soon stopped worrying about it altogether and suddenly I get to sleep without a small foot sticking in my ribs, now every night. I still lay with him for about a half hour each night as he goes to sleep, but it's more out of habit now than his fear of the dark. Last night he even told me to leave his night light off. Brave boy.

Now if I could just get Senator Buttars out from under my bed.

2. Implicit Association Tests:

Remember those? These are the tests put together by a Harvard researcher where, supposedly, your subconscious reaction to people and groups can be measured. I think I said I'd plot all those graphs to see where the subconscious biases rank.

Seems gays, the overweight, and those with dark skin all rank about the same, showing a significant bias against them in these tests. There is slightly less bias found towards Arabs and the disabled, and, interestingly, there's some slightly positive association with Judaism (but that was comparing Judaism to a couple other religions. I'm sure the majority in the US, being Christian, are more comfortable with the Old Testament than the 6-armed Dancing Shiva).

I took one more test there today for the Obama/McCain category. It didn't have a graph of the bulk results., but my result:

"You show a slight automatic preference for Obama..."

At least my subconscious is voting the same way my consciousness will most likely be voting. If only they each got a ballot.

3. Going to Jail.

Well, this has been more complicated than it seemed and it seemed complicated. I can't get too much into it; on the up side we were able to help the sheriff's office with their training program, but mainly regarding the Muslim community, and that is nothing to shake a stick at (is that the saying, shake a stick?).

Implicit Association Test

On Talk of the Nation yesterday they had a segment on hidden racial biases. They had a sociologist on who was measuring them by what they call Implicit Association Tests (IAT).

I'll not explain how they are thought to work as I don't want to bias your results. Give it a shot, maybe before you read the rest of this post. The tests can be found here:

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/

I took 3 of them. I took the one for skin color, black vs white, and was more than relieved to read:

Your data suggest little to no automatic preference between European American and African American.

Great, right? 1 for 1. But...

I saw they had a gay/straight test and I ended up with:

Your data suggest a slight automatic preference for Gay People compared to Straight People.

At least it's "slight". I was worried I may have negative subconscious biases against gays, due to my reflex regarding promiscuity.

Let's see, how to rationalize this?.. I don't want to be biased in favor of "my kind", even (or particularly) in my local anti-gay political arena. I think this might go back to my idea of moral orientation. There is an undeniable moral reflex component to my orientation built deep inside. I know this even though, rationally, on the surface I know it's not right. Heck, some of my best friends are straight ;-). It's something for me to keep in mind and watch for.

Finally, I took the Arab/Other test:

Your data suggest a slight automatic preference for Other People compared to Arab Muslims.

I know it's just a test and could certainly be wrong for all sorts of reasons, but this worried me. Did I maybe pick up bias after 9/11? Another bit of evidence may be in some overcompensation. Most of the charity my family has done recently has been involving the local refugee community, most of whom are Muslim, though not Arab. One of my good friends now is a conservative Muslim woman. Some people on the radio program talked about realizing their bias and then, in reaction, surrounding themselves with its target to work on that part of themselves they can't stand. Could I have subconsciously began involving myself with Muslims in recent years because I somewhere felt that bias and a need to exorcise it down?

It's complicated being human, conscious and still not privy to all that goes on between the ears, but I regret it could make sense to me now that I've this bias in me. I will be on the lookout.

Anyway, I recommend you take the tests (and share the results, please). Also, at the end they give you the distribution of others who've taken the same test (click on the image to get the detailed breakdown). Could you e-mail me the images of those distributions if you take a test I have not? I'm graphing them together out of curiosity:
I find it interesting how similar the reactions to black/white are to gay/straight, and I wonder how other groups compare.

If you get a unwanted result, I'd try to keep in mind (as I am trying :-)) it's not the subconscious bigotry that speaks to your character. It doesn't matter if a person feels nauseated at the sight of two men kissing, or an interracial couple, or whatever. It matters how they regard their reflex and how they act, how they treat their neighbor, or how they vote.

As a head of a minority family I know subconscious bias, regrettably held, is nothing compared to unabashed bigotry, felt without shame, felt even with surface self-righteousness and entitlement over the minority. One is a forgivable weakness of the pattern-seeking human brain; the other, though, is one of the most prolific fonts of human cruelty. Simply, there are the bigots and then there are bigots. We all probably have work to do and strict attention to pay to how we see the other, even if such a test means nothing.

When I'm not sick of it, I'm going back to do the JFK/GWB test. I know if that one comes off in a way I don't expect there's not much credence to them ;-).

Day 5, Bigots, Conch Fritters, and Key Lime Pie

Growing up gay in Utah, I’m no stranger to hostility from strangers. People there have called me names, spread generalizations and lies about my “lifestyle”, threatened my life, and worked hard up on our capital hill to make living in our home state difficult for my family and to be sure we would have fewer rights than they enjoy. I’m also no stranger for such hostility to be done with a frustrating and self-aggrandizing veneer of religious “love,” in the comfortable belief that they are acting on behalf of God. Heck, I’m pretty used to it, maybe so much so that I’ve come to see it as less malevolent than I should.

My point is we woke up in Key West today. We weren’t supposed to. We were supposed to wake up in Bermuda. But we aren’t in Bermuda because a host of churches were planning to meet our families at the port with protest.

We weren’t on the first rfamily cruise, but on that cruise they visited Nassau, in the Bahamas, and were met with this sort of treatment. It was the typical anti-gay protest by the accounts of those who were there: yelling, calling us names, and holding up grammatically questionable signs with insults purportedly from God. All this was done for a bunch of families just wanting to relax and visit their island and maybe buy a coupe t-shirts. I guess about ten times the number of churches that had done so in Nassau had threatened our cruise in Bermuda, and so the owners of rfamily decided to divert us to Key West.

Now, we’ve been to about 10 ports on rfamily cruises, and each one has been very welcoming. Heck, in Juno, not only were we not met by protesters, we were met by a surprisingly large group of friendly supporters. In fact, all through our Alaska trip the gay flags were waving in town, and the same, of course, goes for the North East. But we were about to hit a hostile port today and instead changed course.

I don’t know how I feel about this. I don’t like the idea that we ran, that we didn’t just go where we were scheduled to go, because of such people. Nothing for the better was changed for the people of Bermuda, gay and straight, by our caving into their bully. It made the news and despite their government's appreciated effort to bring us to their island, Bermuda is now unfairly anti-gay in many minds. Furthermore, our children were not given the opportunity to learn a valuable lesson in dealing with such. I don’t want to teach them to change their plans to avoid upsetting people who have no moral business being upset about their family.

On the other hand, these people are obsessed enough to protest families on vacation, and it’s our children. I’m used to it, but they are not, and I reflexively want to spare them from seeing that hostility, and from feeling how it felt when I first experienced it. Now we live where everyone in our lives is great. Our boys have no idea about the controversy in the minds of strangers. But to get off our ship and to see all those angry faces yelling slurs at us and the families of their friends… That’s a scenario the protective side of parenting wants to avoid, even though I know it would be a good learning opportunity and possibly a chance to avoid more pain in the long run. I just don’t know; it’s short term relief and long term regret that about equal out. Thankfully, the choice was far from mine and so I can just complain either way :-).

Anyway, today we split up. Given a choice, and after our descriptions, Alan was set on going kayaking and Brian was set against it. We actually like to split them up about once a week anyway; we’ve found, though they play well together and get along, they also like the one on one time. So Rob and Alan went off to paddle through the mandrake groves of the keys. They saw turtles, sharks, and many other bits of sea life. It was right down Alan’s alley.

Brian went with me and the grandparents, on the more tame Key West experience.

A local GLBT group was handing out those sun glasses to our kids for free as we got off the ship. Nice of them, huh?

Brian endured a tour of the city well, by sleeping through it (he has little interest in the architectural influences on Hemingway's home, I guess). But after that we visited the aquarium where we saw all the stuff Alan and Rob did, but in a more tame environment. He loved it. We also visited the wreaking museum, which was surprisingly interesting to him as well.

After that we met up for a lunch consisting of conch fritters and the most delicious key lime pie I’ve ever had. It was another wonderful day, and being diverted from Bermuda was easily forgotten, until writing this ;-).

Oh, and when we got back to the ship, Rob and Alan got matching tattoos. They're tough that way, for the kayaking I guess ;-).

Alan, got to pick the tat... a dinosaur, of course.