The Connection Between ISIS and Lack of Education

I've noted often that to thrive extremist forms of religion require ignorant and uneducated populations.  Hence why Christianity's main growth area at present is in the most backward regions of Africa.  It's also the reason that American Christofascists seek to gut education programs in America and rewrite text books to support their poisonous belief system which begins to disintegrate in the face of scientific and modern knowledge.  But religious extremism is not limited to Christian extremists as demonstrated by ISIS (or ISIL as it is sometimes called).  To survive Islamic extremism also needs ignorant and uneducated populations.  Apiece in the New York Times makes the case that to defeat ISIS not only must America and its allies use military might, but they also need to over time  attack the underlying basis for religious extremism: lack of educated populations.  Here are excerpts:

As we fight the Islamic State and other extremists, there’s something that President Obama and all of us can learn from them. For, in one sense, the terrorists are fighting smarter than we are.

These extremists use arms to fight their battles in the short term, but, to hold ground in the long run, they also combat Western education and women’s empowerment. They know that illiteracy, ignorance and oppression of women create the petri dish in which extremism can flourish.

That’s why the Islamic State kidnapped Samira Salih al-Nuaimi, a brave Iraqi woman and human rights lawyer in Mosul, tortured her and publicly executed her last week. That’s why the Taliban shot Malala Yousafzai, then 15 years old, after she campaigned for educating girls. And that’s why Boko Haram kidnapped hundreds of schoolgirls in northern Nigeria and announced that it would turn them into slaves.

In each case, the extremists recognized a basic truth: Their greatest strategic threat comes not from a drone but from a girl with a book. We need to recognize, and act on, that truth as well.

For similar reasons, the financiers of extremism have invested heavily in fundamentalist indoctrination. They have built Wahhabi madrassas in poor Muslim countries like Pakistan, Niger and Mali, offering free meals, as well as scholarships for the best students to study in the gulf.

Shouldn’t we try to compete?

Shouldn’t we use weapons in the short run, but try to gain strategic advantage by focusing on education and on empowering women to build stable societies less vulnerable to extremist manipulation?

[W]e’re not playing the long game, as the extremists are. We are vastly overrelying on the military toolbox and underemploying the education toolbox, the women’s empowerment toolbox, the communications toolbox. We’re tacticians; alas, the extremists may be better strategists.It’s not a question of resources, because bombs are more expensive than books. The United States military campaign against the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS and ISIL, will cost at least $2.4 billion a year and perhaps many times that

Obama seems to have dropped his 2008 campaign promise to establish a $2 billion global fund for education. And the United States gives the Global Partnership for Education, a major multilateral effort, less in a year than what we spend weekly in Syria and Iraq.

[T]he historical record of the last half-century is that education tends to nurture a more cosmopolitan middle class and gives people a stake in the system.

Girls’ education seems to have more impact than boys’ education, partly because educated women have markedly fewer children. The result is lower birthrates and less of a youth bulge in the population, which highly correlates to civil conflict.

I support judicious airstrikes in the short term against the Islamic State, but that should be only one part of a policy combating extremism.
So let’s learn from the extremists — and from those brave girls themselves who are willing to risk their lives in order to get an education. They all understand the power of education, and we should, too.

The USA never seems good at playing the long game.  We need to think in the long term as well as short term military action.  We also need to recognize the threat that our home grown extremists of every faith represent and oppose efforts to dumb down education and fill our text books with religious based fairy tales.  It's no coincidence that overall belief in Bible inerrancy directly correlates with one's low level of education.

5 Signs That We Are Not Living in a Post-Racial Society

Despite the claims by some - typically white pundits who love to pontificate and hear their own voices - that America has transformed itself into a post racial society, the truth is that racism remains alive and well.  Indeed, the Republican Party and falsely named "Christian" family values organizations work diligently to keep it alive and to whip up fears among angry aging whites who are terrified of losing their so-called white privilege.  One need look no further than Ferguson, Missouri or sit a a criminal courtroom to see that minorities are not treated the same as their white counterparts.  A piece in Salon lays out additional signs that the pundit class has their heads up their proverbial ass.  Here are highlights:

In the wake of the Ferguson shooting, a recent Pew poll finds that 47 percent of whites believe that “race is getting more attention than it deserves,” with regards to the death of Michael Brown, while only 18 percent of African-Americans feel the same. Meanwhile, a similar Pew study found that whites are far less likely to see discrimination in the treatment blacks receive by the education system, the courts and hospitals. Such views are held by many Americans, who believe that “blacks are mostly responsible for their own condition.” Police killings of unarmed blacks are certainly the most visible manifestation of systemic racism, but data show that racism still manifests itself frequently in everyday life.

In America, race determines not just where someone lives and what school he or she attends, it affects the very air we breathe. Although many whites wish to believe we live in a “post-racial” society, race appears not just in overt discrimination but in subtle structural factors.

[A] cursory examination of major structural racial problems can give us a feeling for how far we still have to go

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1) Education

Education is an important key to fostering upward mobility and alleviating inequality. However, schools today are becoming more segregated, rather than less segregated. At the peak of integration, 44 percent of black Southern students attended majority white schools. Today, only 23 percent do. This is particularly worrying because recent research by Rucker C. Johnson finds that school desegregation benefited black students, because it “significantly increased both educational and occupational attainments, college quality and adult earnings, reduced the probability of incarceration, and improved adult health status.” . . . At the college level, the situation is little better. 

2) Wealth

There is a large racial wealth gap between blacks and whites in America, partially driven by income but exacerbated by racially biased housing policies (which will be examined below). A recent research brief by the Institution on Assets and Social Policy finds that the wealth gap between white families and African-Americans has tripled between 1984 and 2009. The recession has only exacerbated the gap, with whites losing 11 percent of their wealth between 2007 and 2010, while blacks lost 31 percent and Hispanics 44 percent.

3) Job Markets

Unemployment is particularly high among African-Americans, the result of both explicit discrimination and occupational segregation. . . . Occupational segregation, or the delegation of blacks to jobs with low upward mobility and wages, is rife.. . . . People of color are far more likely to rely on public infrastructure, and therefore suffer from cuts to public transportation. Decades of housing segregation have trapped African-Americans in jobless areas with badly understaffed schools.

4) Upward Mobility

Possibly the defining American attribute is the dream of upward mobility. Sadly, this tends to be more farce that fact — America lags behind other developed countries in measures of upward mobility. But recent research by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, Emmanuel Saez, shows that levels of upward mobility vary across the country — and is strongly predicted by income inequality and racial segregation. . . . . Specifically, they note the importance of segregation, “areas that are more residentially segregated by race and income have lower levels of mobility.”

5) The War on Drugs

The socioeconomic realities discussed above cannot be divorced from the war on drugs: It is a war that is primarily fought against people of color in the country. One in 12 working-age African-American men is incarcerated; and while whites and blacks use and sell drugs at similar rates, African-Americans comprise 74 percent of those imprisoned for drug possession.

The most disturbing fact is that in almost all of these areas, we have actually seen previous progress eroded, even while we proclaim ourselves a post-racial society. It’s time to take an honest look at race in America. We probably won’t enjoy it. But we need it.

What ultimately drives racism is the inability of people - usually white conservative Christians - to see anyone who is different be it in terms of skin color, national origin or sexual orientation, as equally human.

What’s So Scary About Smart Girls?

While I often disagree with his views, every now and then Nicholas Kristoff hits it out of the ball park.  In a column today he looks at why religious fundamentalists of all stripes - and, that includes American Christofascists - find educated girls and women so frightening.  Simply put, educated girls and women are harder to subjugate (by small minded males) and harder to keep in a barefoot and pregnant status.  Be it the Taliban, Islamic extremists in Africa or fundamentalist preachers in the Bible Belt, the common thread is that these male dominated groups want women kept as near chattel and forbidden from having rights and minds of their own.  Here are column highlights:

WHEN terrorists in Nigeria organized a secret attack last month, they didn’t target an army barracks, a police department or a drone base. No, Boko Haram militants attacked what is even scarier to a fanatic: a girls’ school.

That’s what extremists do. They target educated girls, their worst nightmare.

That’s why the Pakistani Taliban shot Malala Yousafzai in the head at age 15. That’s why the Afghan Taliban throws acid on the faces of girls who dare to seek an education.

Why are fanatics so terrified of girls’ education? Because there’s no force more powerful to transform a society. The greatest threat to extremism isn’t drones firing missiles, but girls reading books.

In that sense, Boko Haram was behaving perfectly rationally — albeit barbarically — when it kidnapped some of the brightest, most ambitious girls in the region and announced plans to sell them as slaves. If you want to mire a nation in backwardness, manacle your daughters.

So why does girls’ education matter so much? First, because it changes demography.

One of the factors that correlates most strongly to instability is a youth bulge in a population. The more unemployed young men ages 15 to 24, the more upheaval.

[C]urbing birthrates tends to lead to stability, and that’s where educating girls comes in. You educate a boy, and he’ll have fewer children, but it’s a small effect. You educate a girl, and, on average, she will have a significantly smaller family. One robust Nigeria study managed to tease out correlation from causation and found that for each additional year of primary school, a girl has 0.26 fewer children. So if we want to reduce the youth bulge a decade from now, educate girls today.

More broadly, girls’ education can, in effect, almost double the formal labor force. It boosts the economy, raising living standards and promoting a virtuous cycle of development. Asia’s economic boom was built by educating girls and moving them from the villages to far more productive work in the cities.

One example of the power of girls’ education is Bangladesh, which until 1971 was (the seemingly hopeless) part of Pakistan. After Bangladesh gained independence, it emphasized education, including of girls; today, it actually has more girls in high school than boys.

Boko Haram has a stronghold in northeastern Nigeria because it’s an area where education is weak and women are marginalized. Some two-thirds of women in the region have had no formal education. Only 1 in 20 has completed high school. Half are married by age 15.

Obviously, the situation in the United States is incomparably better. But we have our own problems. It’s estimated that 100,000 girls under 18 years old in the United States are trafficked into commercial sex each year. So let’s fight to #BringBackOurGirls in Nigeria but also here in the United States and around the world.

Rick "Man on Dog" Santorum Continues His Attack on Higher Education

Lunatic Opus Dei lover and religious extremist extraordinaire Rick Santorum continues to pander to the most ignorant and bigoted elements of the GOP's Christianist/Tea Party base by renewing his attacks on higher education. In his latest batshitery, Santorum claims that many of the colleges and universities in the University of California system “don’t even teach an American history course." Santorum may be correct if he's referring to a David Barton fictionalized/rewritten Christianist version of history, but if we are talking about REAL history, then once again Santorum appears to have his head up his ass. As much as I find Mitt "Etch A Sketck" Romney's calculating flip flopping distasteful, it's far preferable to Santorum's outright insanity. Here are highlights from Think Progress:

Rick Santorum has previously called colleges “indoctrination mills” that make students liberal and Godless, and labeled President Obama a “snob” for wanting kids to get educated. “Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image,” Santorum said.

Santorum continued his broadside against higher education (and the facts) today in Wisconsin, claiming that “seven or eight” of the ten schools in the University of California system “don’t even teach an American history course”:

SANTORUM: I was just reading something last night from the state of California. And that the California universities – I think it’s seven or eight of the California system of universities don’t even teach an American history course. It’s not even available to be taught.

The True Picture of Discretionary Spending

I saw this chart on Think Progress which shows the lie to some of the talking points of the GOP - particularly when the GOP continues to look out for the interests of the top 1% of income earners while the rest of us are kicked under the bus. Rescinding the Bush tax cuts, of course, would pay for roughly 55% of the discretionary spending set out in the chart above.

Cocktails With John Waters and Weekend Reflections

My frequency in posting has been down this week largely because I've had something going on every evening: Hampton Roads Pride board meeting on Monday; dinner with a client of the boyfriend on Tuesday; HRBOR board meeting on Wednesday; ODU Gay Cultural Studies private reception after John Waters' presentation at Old Dominion University on Thursday. Last night was finally a free night and the boyfriend and I simply chilled, watched the this week's Glee episode and afterwards fell asleep on the sofa. Tonight we are attending a black tie fundraiser for the An Achievable Dream Foundation, a charity founded by one the boyfriend's clients that describes it's vision as follows:

AAD is a nonprofit, year-round, extended day public school borne out of its founder’s belief that all children can learn and succeed regardless of their socioeconomic backgrounds; and that education can break the cycle of poverty. We strive to close the achievement gap that currently exists in American education and to ensure our students become productive citizens contributing positively to society.

An Achievable Dream offers healthcare for our students' families through the Achievable Dream/Riverside Health Improvement Center located at the school. In addition, An Achievable Dream offers adult education classes and seminars for parents and families to help them achieve their dreams, as well.

It's a vision that I whole heatedly support because education is the great equalizer. At AAD's school, locate in one of the worse parts of neighboring Newport News, miracles do happen. Donations to the effort can be made here. In an Inside Business article earlier in the year, AAD's founder described his motivation for starting teh foundation as follows:

That desire, he said, comes from his Jewish faith and his father. "The Jewish faith teaches us that if I save one life, then I have saved the world," he said. The teaching has convinced Segaloff that everyone has an opportunity to make such a difference.

The courage to create such a bold program came from his late father, Charles, who felt strongly about judging people on their character rather than their color or religious beliefs.

"My father was building a new store in downtown Newport News. Back then it was the law that there had to be segregated sets of restrooms - one for blacks and one for whites. Even though it was jeopardizing his business, he refused. This held up his building permit. The building commissioner said it was the law. So finally they reached a compromise. My father put a set of restrooms on the first floor and on the second floor. However, he never labeled them black or white.

"It all comes down to, if you know something is right, would you have the courage to do it?" he said.

Just imagine if all of the money utilized by NOM and other "pro-family" organizations used to demonize gays, immigrants and those they deem "other" was used for programs such as AAD. Frankly, it's no small irony that Segaloff is Jewish. Nowadays, it seems that conservative Christians ignore the Gospel message while others are the ones to put the principles into action.

Back to John Waters. His lecture entitled "Filthy" was hysterically funny and he did not hold back on his gay rights positions. Most in the packed audience seemed to love his wit and wild sense of humor. At the small private reception afterwards in a fellow ODU Gay Cultural Studies board member, it was a unique experience talking to Waters about everything from politics to travel, and a number of other topics. Better yet, the reception raised several thousand dollars for the endowment that we are building.

Secretary of Education: Gay-Straight Alliance Groups Protected

The minions of the Christian Taliban and self-enriching professional Christians like Maggie Gallagher and Tony Perkins to name just two will go to any lengths to bar public schools from hosting gay straight alliances ("GSA") based on disingenuous claims of threats to "religious freedom" or parental rights. As is typically the case with Christianists, the rights of others - including LGBT students who deserve a safe and non-threatening learning environment - mean nothing. Instead, it's all about allowing self-congratulatory Christianist to run rough shod over the rights of everyone else. They want special rights, plain and simple. A letter released by the U. S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, will surely have the anti-gay Christianists in convulsions and the spittle will be flying by the bucket full. Duncan (pictured at has taken the position that GSA's are protected under the 1984 Equal Access Act, which requires that public secondary schools receiving federal funds ensure equal access for student extracurricular groups. In other words, if schools refuse to allow GSA's, they risk the loss of all federal funds. Talk about hitting them where it hurts. Here are highlights from The Advocate:
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“Gay-straight alliances (GSAs) and similar student-initiated groups addressing LGBT issues can play an important role in promoting safer schools and creating more welcoming learning environments,” Duncan wrote in the "Dear Colleague" letter.

“But in spite of the positive effect these groups can have in schools,” he continued, “some such groups have been unlawfully excluded from school grounds, prevented from forming, or denied access to school resources.”

Duncan wrote that GSAs are protected under the 1984 Equal Access Act, which requires that public secondary schools receiving federal funds ensure equal access for student extracurricular groups.
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The law, Duncan wrote, applies “to groups that address issues relating to LGBT students and matters involving sexual orientation and gender identity, just as they apply to religious and other student groups."
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Department of Education general counsel Charles P. Rose issued guidelines in conjunction with the letter that "[affirm] the principles that prevent unlawful discrimination against any student-initiated groups,” Duncan wrote.
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Eliza Byard, executive director of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, called Secy Duncan’s letter “a clear signal to schools and school districts that they may not discriminate against students who seek to form Gay-Straight Alliances.”

Memorial Scholarship In Memory of My Parents.

The last five and one half years have been a financial Hell for me beginning with being forced from a larger local law firm for being gay, followed by a divorce from Hell where an anti-gay judge - who actually note that being gay was a "choice" - stripped me of pretty much everything I owned, and finally ended with me being forced into bankruptcy because of the former happenings. With the loss of my mother earlier in the year, I will soon - hopefully within a week or two - come into enough of an inheritance to clear up the last of the debts plaguing me and pay off in full amounts owed to my former wife under the divorce decree and finish repaying loans made to me by the boyfriend without whom I would not have survived in more ways than purely financially. It will also allow me to do something to permanently honor the memory of my parents (pictured at right on their wedding day): establishing a scholarship fund in their names. The scholarship will benefit graduating LGBT high school students in Virginia seeking to continue their education at a college or university.
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I am working with the Hampton Roads Community Foundation which will manage investing the scholarship fund (HRCF currently administers 55 scholarship funds) and the application administrative process. I hope to promote additional future contributions to the scholarship fund through HRBOR (HRBOR's name will also be attached to the scholarship) and other organizations as a tax deductible charitable vehicle to provide assistance to LGBT youth who often face difficulties in backward states like Virginia and who may have lost family support because of their sexual orientation. With the support of others, it is my hope than the scholarship can grow to eventually serve multiple students each year in perpetuity.
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Education was always important to both of my parents and played a role in the lives of myself and my siblings. As I have written about in the past, both immediately and unwaveringly supported me when I came out my often turbulent coming out journey. With this scholarship perhaps it will be a vehicle for youth who were not as lucky as I was in terms of parental acceptance.
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The HRBOR - Hampton Roads Business OutReach - name will also be attached because founding HRBOR has been a labor of love and did much to replace the supposed circle of "friends" who largely abandoned me when I came out nearly a decade ago. Attaching the HRBOR name will also underscore that members of the LGBT business community - even in generally reactionary areas such as Hampton Roads - can and do make a difference and improve the community, one of HRBOR's goals.
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Once the scholarship is fully in place - the first award should be in May/June, 2012 - I will do a follow up post with details and how tax-deductible contributions can be made to the fund.

Church Hierarchy: Educated Catholics A Problem

I have maintained for some time now that the Roman Catholic Church's ability to convince Catholics to blindly follow the pronouncements of the senile, anti-gay and anti-woman members of the Church hierarchy (including the Nazi Pope, Benedict XVI) is a direct function of how ignorant and uneducated the members of the laity in the audience. Hence, the Church's growth in Africa and other uneducated areas of the world while church attendance declines in the developed and educated portions of the world. Science and education are the enemies of today's Roman Catholic Church which more and more preaches to the Catholic equivalents of the backwoods evangelicals. The concept that the Church is swimming against the tide of history and scientific knowledge apparently never enters the minds of Neanderthals in the hierarchy. Now, the Rev Patrick O'Donoghue, the Bishop of Lancaster, has more or less conceded as much in recent statements. Here are some highlights from the Telegraph:

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The Rt Rev Patrick O'Donoghue, the Bishop of Lancaster, has claimed that [university] graduates are spreading scepticism and sowing dissent. Instead of following the Church's teaching they are "hedonistic", "selfish" and "egocentric", he said. In particular, the bishop complained that influential Catholics in politics and the media were undermining the Church. While not naming names, he suggested that such people had been compromised by their education, which he said had a "dark side, due to original sin".

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Bishop O'Donoghue, who has recently published a report on how to renew Catholicism in Britain, argued that mass education has led to "sickness in the Church and wider society". . . . . The bishop said that Catholic graduates had rejected the reforms made in the second council of the Vatican, which introduced fundamental changes in issues such as liturgy and doctrine.

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"The Second Vatican Council tends to be misinterpreted most by Catholics who have had a university education -- that is, by those most exposed to the intellectual and moral spirit of the age," he said. "These well-educated Catholics have gone on to occupy influential positions in education, the media, politics, and even the Church, where they have been able to spread their so-called loyal dissent, causing confusion and discord in the whole church."

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The bishop said that influential Catholics had set a bad example and corrupted the faith of those who had not gone to university. "This failure of leadership has exacerbated the even-greater problem of the mass departure from the Church of the working-class and poor," he said. "For example, the relentless diatribe in the popular media against Christianity has undermined the confidence of the ordinary faithful in the Church."

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Meanwhile, what are psychologists saying about the Nazi Pope's edict that seminary candidates must be screened for homosexual tendencies? Nothing good. Here are some highlights from the Los Angeles Times:

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[E]ven many Catholics will be horrified by the idea of the church employing psychologists to "out" prospective priests. Nor is it much comfort that the psychological scrutiny will be voluntary. What young man who feels called to the priesthood will feel free to object?

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[T]he role of psychologists in screening applicants raises troubling ethical questions, as even psychologists who approve of such cooperation admit. Aiding the church in weeding out homosexuals is hard to reconcile with these guidelines of the American Psychological Assn.:

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"Psychologists are aware of and respect cultural, individual and role differences, including those based on age, gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, culture, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, language and socioeconomic status, and consider these factors when working with members of such groups. Psychologists try to eliminate the effect on their work of biases based on those factors, and they do not knowingly participate in or condone activities of others based upon such prejudices."

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If the church -- or a diocese within the church -- takes the Vatican decree literally, it's hard to see how a psychologist could lend his or her expertise to the thwarting of a young man's aspiration to serve God simply because he happens to be gay. In our view, that's not just cruel; it's unprofessional.

My Closet Years - Part Five

In telling my story, I left off with my return to Virginia and private law practice. We moved to Virginia because I was already admitted to the Virginia Bar and, at the time, neither my wife nor I wanted to raise children in New York City. Returning to private law practice meant putting up again with the office politics of a reasonably large law firm and the self-identified “macho” types that are all too prevalent in the legal profession. This unfortunately included being compelled at times to participate in the bar association soft-ball league games. Not being good at the sport, I naturally went on high alert with fears that somehow my secret might become obvious based on my lack of playing ability. The only plus was that there were a couple of hot guys in the firm who looked great in shorts and shirtless, although I made studied efforts to never be caught looking.

Soon we had settled into a typical suburban pattern, with my wife staying at home with my oldest daughter, who was joined by her brother in September of 1985. He was born as Hurricane Gloria was sweeping towards a direct hit to Hampton Roads, making for tension in the labor and delivery room. The storm at the last minute veered out to sea, saving the area from huge devastation. (We had lived in Mobile when Hurricane Frederic scored a direct hit, so we knew well the type of damage that would have occurred - the best part of Frederic had been the almost communal living that had gone on with ML and our wives). Pat Robertson, of course claimed he had “prayed the storm away.” Subsequently, my younger daughter was born in 1989, fortunately with no impeding hurricane off the coast.

Being with a good size law firm meant a number of things, including (1) getting involved in civic and other organizations, not because it was the right thing to do, but to make contacts, (2) originating business, (3) treating the secretaries and paralegals as somehow something less than human, and (4) always watching your back against back stabbing by one’s supposed friends. While we would have several functions for the entire staff and their families each year where feigned camaraderie by the partners was the norm and statements were made that the most important assets of the firm were its employees, the real story was quite different. In actuality, everything was about money and the bottom line and all civic activity involvement was cynically calculated. In short, even after I made partner, I had to sell my soul and “play the game” to get along. It's ironic that immoral - although not illegal conduct - was acceptable, while being gay was not and as a result, I was trapped in the closet.

Given the cut throat reality of my job environment, being gay was obviously nowhere remotely among things “The Firm” would have approved of or condoned. (In this regard, little seems to have changed: for the recent HRBOR launch, I contacted five of the area’s largest law firms and no one was interested in being a sponsor, and only one had the courtesy of responding at all). Therefore, I continued living my life as an actor, playing the role that was expected. While it seems crazy in retrospect, at this point I still did not think of myself as gay. After all, I had never done anything with another guy, and, therefore, I couldn't possibly be gay notwithstanding the crushes on and attraction to guys over the years since I was about age 12.

Over the years, I changed law firms and found better and more moral atmospheres but never to a point that being gay was acceptable. It turned out that the last large “established” firm I was a member of was more like the first firm in this area I had joined back in 1983. I did in time come out at work in 2003 on a very discrete basis, but I kept a very low profile in terms of my sexual orientation. Ultimately, it merged with another firm at the end of 2004 and, in my opinion, I was one of the partners excluded from the merger because members of the other firm involved in the merger held political grudges against me (I had publicly asked one to resign from office when an illegal $12 million deficit was experienced by the Virginia Beach school division and opposed another in the firing of the head of the gifted education department). Now, I have my own law firm where I can follow my own political and activist objectives and be 100% out. None of my straight clients seem to care, and I have acquire a good number of gay LGBT clients too.

During these years I was joined and/or was involved in a number of civil organizations, including PTA’s, being a member and officer of my civic league, being a board member and two term president of the neighborhood pool, four term president of a local gifted and talented education advocacy organization, board membership on the local committee to prevent child abuse, eight terms on the City Committee for the Republican Party for the City of Virginia Beach, and a run for school board in 1994 (I lost by a small margin because the local teachers’ union candidates labeled me as “Christian Right”). At the neighborhood pool, I even was a regular participant in the adult volley ball games - not because I enjoyed it, but because it was the "guy" thing to do (surprisingly, I was a half way decent player).

I enjoy being a father and tried to spend weekend time with my kids (since private law practice involves long hours), including going to the beach, visiting my parents who lived fairly close by with the kids, hiking in a beautiful state park, going to movies, and numerous surf trips to the Outer Banks with my son and his friends. Between figure skating competitions for my oldest daughter, swim meets for the summer swim league, and numerous other kids sporting events, I spent countless hours hanging out with other parents. I guess stereotypically, I always got along better with the moms as opposed to most of the other dads (most of whom were NOT hot). Sadly, my inner struggle to suppress my true self, struggle with my self hate, and the need to keep up the act of being straight and father in a perfect suburban family often made me short tempered and tense. Looking back, perhaps I’d have been a better father if I had come out of the closet long before I did. It’s one of those things I will never know for certain.

I joined the GOP originally because of education issues. In Virginia Beach and most of Virginia, the affiliates of the National Education Association are allied with the Democrat Party. As the father of three academically gifted children, my wife and I were continually confronted with the problem of our children not being challenged in school. What gifted education differentiation that did exist was not adequate, especially for my son who has never been “a teacher pleaser” even though he is highly intelligent. The main opponent for the expansion of gifted education services was the local NEA affiliate. Since the Democrats did not want to antagonize the NEA affiliates whose members overwhelmingly supported them at the polls, the GOP was the natural place to find a home in Virginia Beach if one was pushing for more rigorous education standards, fiscal responsibility in the school division, etc. I felt this was especially true after the 1994 school board election where I was continually labeled “Christian Right” by the NEA affiliate and made to feel almost like a criminal. Moreover, NEA affiliates from 17 other states had sent money to influence the 1994 school board elections in Virginia Beach. The local NEA affiliate had needed an enemy and eminent danger to raise funds and I and several others who were candidates for other seats on the school board unknowingly furnished them with an enemy.

On the religion front, I continued to go to weekly mass and silently hope for a miracle cure that would end my attraction to guys. I even joined the Knights of Columbus and attained 4th Degree membership. Alas, no cure occurred. Thus my life continued up until late summer of 1999 when family crisis struck and my closet began to shatter.