Why we still need OWL, part II

The school newspaper controversy in nearby Mountain View, which I reported on in this post, got picked up today by the San Jose Mercury News in an article written by Sharon Noguchi: “Mountain View High School newspaper’s sex stories raise parents’ ire”.

The Merc tries to remain objective, but they’re obviously on the side of the student journalists who dared to report on some of the realities of teen life today. In her news article, Noguchi writes: “But the debate also illustrates the gap between adult and teen conversation and mores.” As a columnist, Scott Herhold was able to state his opinion boldly: “A group of parents crawled from their caves to protest that the student journalists had taken things too far — that the stories promoted unprotected sex and imperiled futures. In truth, the articles in the Oracle, the student newspaper, were fairly tame….”

Herhold goes on to point out the heroes of the story, the people who protected the rights of student journalists, and who stood up for what was right instead of caving to intolerant parents and religious views: “The heroes were the administrators and educators who stood up for the paper, led by Superintendent Barry Groves. At the meeting, Groves praised the journalism department and said, ‘There’s nothing I would have taken down.'”

Residents of Los Altos and Mountain View might want to take a moment and write a note of support to Barry Groves. You can find his email address on the school district Web site.

Further reading: You can read the Oracle online here. The Los Altos Town Crier published my letter to the editor on this topic, under the title “Minister supports sex education for teens” (“Look, Mildred, those crazy Unitarians are at it again”), and for the sake of the record I’ll include the full text below the fold.

Continue reading “Why we still need OWL, part II”

Keyboard table

I spend too much time typing, and have been getting little twinges in my hands and fingers. It was past time to pay attention to my typing position. So I made a keyboard table out of salvaged and scrap wood, to hold my keyboard at the correct height for typing:

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The top is salvaged Douglas fir that Carol got from one of the building material exchanges in the Bay area. The two side pieces are scraps of #2 common Western pine left over from bookcases I made fifteen years ago, which we have carted across the country two or three times. The spreader bar in the back is a short piece of moulding that I found in the basement of our building.

This is not a fine piece of furniture, nor did I want to hide the fact that it’s made by hand of salvaged materials. So I left nail holes, chips, dents, and rough patches visible on the salvaged Douglas fir top; and the top is screwed onto the base, with the black drywall screws left exposed. All cutting and joinery was done with hand tools, and I didn’t bother eradicating scribe marks or tool marks. I even left the grade marking on one of the uprights — it reads “212 STERLING WWP S-DRY IWP” — as well as a fluorescent orange lumber crayon mark.

This keyboard table might not be suitable for polite company. But it makes a good surface to work on and write on: imperfect, scarred, comfortable, with a wealth of associations you don’t get with something bought at a big-box store.

Below: a closer look:

Continue reading “Keyboard table”

May, 1980

The truck drivers at the lumberyard listened to classic rock, the yard foreman listened to Paul Harvey, and for all we knew the salesmen listened to Frank Sinatra or something. But a couple of us younger guys — me, the hardware stock clerk, the part-time stock clerk who worked in the paint department — we listened to WBCN, the progressive rock station that broadcast from downtown Boston. The morning DJ on WBCN was Charles Laquidara, known for his leftist politics, and one day he announced that there would be a big action to oppose the Seabrook nuclear power plant over Memorial Day weekend. I decided to go.

That day, I ran into John, an old friend from my church youth group, and he said he’d go up with me. I was working six days a week at the lumberyard, but somehow I managed to get that Saturday off. Charles Laquidara had given contact information for getting rides up to Seabrook, and John and I got a ride up. Several hundred of us camped out on an old farm owned by a Seabrook resident who was opposed to power plant. John and I strung a plastic tarp over our sleeping bags, nestled in among all the other tents in the woods on the farm. Continue reading “May, 1980”

Why we still need OWL

Every once in a while, I hear someone say that we Unitarian Universalists don’t need the Our Whole Lives (OWL) comprehensive sexuality education curriculum because “we live in a progressive community, and our kids can get adequate sexuality education in the public schools.”

However, a recent controversy in the relatively progressive communities of Los Altos and Mountain View show that school systems are always subject to the pressure of popular opinion and loud voices in the community. Recently, the student newspaper at Mountain View High School (which also serves Los Altos) ran a spread on sex and relationships that aimed to supplement and fill out what is not taught in health classes — and some very vocal parents objected:

The paper recently ran a two-page feature, “Sex & Relationships,” including the piece “What they teach you in health and what you really need to know.” The article upset many parents, who attended the Feb. 11 Mountain View Los Altos Union High School District board meeting to voice their objections.

Mountain View High parent Nathan Sandland described the article as “too forward” and said it “counteracts parental advice.”…

Daniel Ledesma, whose four children are not yet in high school, said he was concerned with the content being “too explicit” and that he didn’t want his children exposed to it.

“It sends the wrong message,” he said. “It approves sex before marriage.”

Superintendent Barry Groves acknowledged that the article contained content that should not have been published and apologized for it.

— “Parents sound off over Mountain View High newspaper content,” Los Altos Crier, 27 Feb. 2013

My read on this is that the opposition is religious in nature — the key quote above is “It approves sex before marriage.” Of course we Unitarian Universalists would like to see sex happen within committed relationships, but since gays and lesbians can’t get married in this state marriage is not an option for them. Those who demand that people have to be married before they have sex is probably against same sex marriage, and that kind of attitude is typically linked with conservative religion.

Since that article, the school board and superintendent have had to backtrack. Fortunately, California has laws in place that protect student journalists:

As objectionable as the articles may have been to some parents, there is little school officials can do to prevent the Oracle from publishing such articles in the future, according Adam Goldstein, attorney advocate for the Student Press Law Center.

“Very, very little can be censored in California,” Goldstein said, explaining that while the Supreme Court precedent set in the 1988 case “Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier,” dictates that districts can censor school publications, laws have since been passed in the state which supersede that ruling. The only way a school administration could legally exercise prior restraint on an article in a student newspaper, Goldstein said, would be if that article incited students to act in way that presented a “clear and present danger” to the operations of the school, or if the articles were defamatory, libelous or obscene.

While Robinson and other parents have said that they felt certain articles printed in The Oracle met the criteria for obscenity, Beare pointed out that U.S. courts have had trouble defining exactly what “obscenity” means.

There is a good reason behind California’s strong legal protections for journalists, no matter their age, Goldstein said. “Whenever you have a question to err on the side of fewer rights or more rights,” he mused, “you always produce better citizens by giving them more rights.”

— “Calmer heads prevail in aftermath of sex discussion: Support for student journalists who wrote controversial articles,” Mountain View Voice, 1 March 2013.

But in this instance, the dissemination of information on sexuality is allowed by protections for student journalists — not because it’s inherently good to give adolescents comprehensive information and education on sex and sexuality. Those protections would not apply in the classroom, and given their initial response, the school board might well give in to any demands made by religious conservative parents who objected to comprehensive sexuality education in the public schools.

This helps explain why we continue to need OWL programs in our congregations, even in relatively progressive communities like Mountain View and Los Altos. Too much pressure can be brought to bear on school boards for us to certain of comprehensive sexuality education in the public schools. Indeed, I would argue that we need to expand our OWL programs so we can offer them at no charge to people outside our congregations — and doing so might be the most important social justice effort we could take on right now.

Dusk

I like the contrast between colors that occurs at dusk when the sky turns a deep blue at about the same time that yellow-orange sodium vapor and incandescent lights turn on. I was enjoying this phenomenon a couple of evenings ago when I noticed that a nearby traffic light periodically turned some of the shadows red:

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Anniversary

Back on February 22, 2005, I wrote the first post on a blog I called “Yet Another Unitarian Universalist Blog.” And here I am, eight years later, still writing.

The online world has changed drastically in those eight years. In 2005, blogging was still cutting edge social media, Facebook was still restricted to users with a .edu email address, and the big social networking site was MySpace. In the first few years of this blog, there were so few UU bloggers that we’d go out of our way to visit one another so we could have face-to-face meetings, and there were even UU blogger picnics.

For a few years, a lot Unitarian Universalists paid a lot of attention to the few Unitarian Universalist blogs. There were only about fifty of us, and we all had a wide audience. I still remember a meeting at General Assembly where members of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) Board of Trustees sat a bunch of us bloggers down and asked how they could get their message out on our blogs.

Twitter came along. Youtube took off. Facebook got big, then huge, then ridiculously ginormous. Many of the conversations that were happening on blogs went over to other social media platforms. These days, the best bloggers are typically paid, or they’re professional writers blogging for exposure on commercial or paid sites. The transformation of Chris Walton, perhaps the best UU blogger ever, can be taken as a representative case: he wound up running UU World, the UUA’s official periodical; moved UUWorld into blogging; dropped his long-running personal blog “Philocrites”; and now he posts his personal thoughts on Facebook.

While the social media field has grown ever larger, ever more dominated by bigger and bigger players, I have kept on with this tiny little blog, with its tiny readership of ten thousand unique visitors a month (the Huffington Post gets more than three times that many unique visitors in one hour), many of which appear to be meaningless visits from questionable IP addresses in Russia and China. While more and more people turn to social media to carry on their online conversations, I stick with the outdated blogging format.

But then, I started my publishing career back in the 1980s, writing a fanzine that had a circulation of less than twenty people. I’m still a zine writer who wound up writing a religion blog by mistake. A zine writer is always looking for readers beyond his or her narrow social circle, which means Facebook will always feel restrictive. A zine writer is, by definition, long-winded, which means that Twitter will never offer enough space. A zine writer feels fondness towards outmoded publishing techniques, like cut-and-paste photocopying and hectographs, and by contrast feels little fondness for the newest and shiniest social media platform.

Finally, a zine writer publishes because he or she is expecting readers to write back. And you, dear readers, do write back — you write comments, you send email, sometimes you send me notes and books and dogtags and old magazines with interesting articles. Blogger and author John Scalzi sneers at tiny blogs like this (he really does; I went to a presentation he gave and heard him do so). Whatever. You, the readers, make this all worth while. Thank you for eight great years.

UU kid on Obama’s Facebook page

One of the middle schoolers from our congregation went to a gun control rally, and a photo with him in it appeared on Barack Obama’s Facebook page. How cool is that?

Obama's Facebook page

Click on the image above to see the caption inserted by Obama’s social media staff: “Harrison Frahn listens to a speech on reducing gun violence at a candlelight vigil in Palo Alto, CA.” I’m sure Obama never even saw this post; I’m sure Obama has forgotten the year or two he spent in a Unitarian Universalist Sunday school; I’m sure that Obama’s social media team merely posted this because it’s a good photo to further their political goals. Nevertheless, it’s really fun to see a UU kid recognized in this way — recognized for taking a public stand on something he cares about.

Marriage as a religious act

I received an interesting and thoughtful comment via email on a sermon titled “Marriage as a Religious Act” which I recently posted on my main Web site. I realized that this sermon relates to some issues you, dear readers, and I have addressed on this blog — most importantly, the sexual revolution within Unitarian Universalism, and the theological basis (if any) for marriage in our tradition. Since this is something we have talked about here, and since I greatly value the comments I get from you, I decided to post this sermon and see what you might have to say about it. The sermon beging below the fold.

Continue reading “Marriage as a religious act”

Blog makeover

I’ve revamped the appearance of the blog. It will display equally on well on tablets and smart phones as on a desktop or laptop. I’ve cleaned up the navigation, and moved it to the header. Links have been moved to a separate page.

These changes in appearance has mostly been prompted by outside factors. Tablets are rising in popularity, and I should have long since optimized this site for tablet users. WordPress has greatly improved its menu management, so I no longer have to rely on sidebar navigation. And search engines don’t like to see a blogroll on every page of your blog (because that’s what spammers do), so all links have been moved to a single page.

I hope you find the new design easy to use. As always, I welcome your comments or suggestions for improvement.

In the Holbrooke

In room 2 of the Holbrooke Hotel, supposedly California’s oldest hotel in continuous operation, there is a bookcase. In the bookcase there are a number of old books. In one of the old books (I won’t say which one) there is a dollar bill. On the lower edge of the front face of the dollar bill is written: “THE Beginning (1) Russ and Sue 8-5-12 (2)”. Don’t ask me what it means; I’m just telling you what I’ve seen.