Adventures with Dr. Lady Cutie Troublemaker

I TiVo’d Morgan Spurlock’s 30 Days. Looks really interesting. Will let you know how it is.

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Just watched it. The premise of the show is that each episode is him putting himself in another person’s shoes for 30 days. This first episode was really good. Morgan Spurlock and his fiancee Alex try to live on minimum wage for 30 days. Of course, they are educated, White, and articulate. They don’t have many of the barriers that many people have living on such little money, and they also don’t have the time to build up alliances with other people going through the same thing, so they don’t have time for interdependence. Still, I can forgive that because they do a really good job of sticking to the parameters they set for themselves enough to make the important points about how minimum wage and the American health care system are sub-adequate for basic subsistence. I will definitely be watching this again.

Morgan would have gotten an A+ in my Multiculturalism class. Their major project was a Resistance Project. Here is a section of the guidelines I gave my students at the end of the semester before writing their final paper on the project:

Your Resistance Project is the culmination of all of the work you have done this semester on your resistance group. For this project, you began by completing an approved reading on the group that you feel resistant towards. This prepared you for an interview with a member of that group. In that interview, you had a chance to hear their personal story about being a member of this group. Hopefully, you were able to listen to their story on its own terms and recognize the filters that you yourself had as you listened to their story. Your background and upbringing… in other words, YOUR cultural experiences have caused you to feel some judgments towards this group. That is normal and expected, but hopefully, through this project, you understand just a little bit better than your way of seeing the world is only one of of countless ways of seeing the world. Your last experience was to attend a "happening" related to this group. You may have attended an OUT Meeting or attended a worship service that was different from the type of service you grew up attending. You may have volunteered at a soup kitchen, or gone somewhere else that, prior to this project, you never would have before experienced. I hope that you really challenged yourself and stepped out of your comfort zone.

I see this project as a model for how you address resistance in your life. It is my hope that now, when you encounter difference, your will be aware of your judgments and what it is about you that leads you to have them. I am not naive. I know that you will always continue to judge people who are very different from you. We all do it, but this project has asked you to question your judgments and to place them in the proper context. Your judgments about another person are not truth. You have them for a reason. When you analyze them, you learn a lot more about yourself and your personal comfort zone than you learn about the person you have judged…

You may have noticed (f you’ve read for a while) that my Dad is a regular writer of letters to the editor when it comes to issues of social justice. This morning, he sent me an e-mail he wrote to Love in Action, the group that is saving poor Zach from his homosexuality:

TN Mental Illness Law

"Press Conference: LIA will be hosting a press conference on Thursday, June 16, 2005 at 11 a.m. at our facility at 4780 Yale Road. "

At your press conference, please bring the evidence to show that  Zach has been involuntarily committed to treatment at your facility for a mental illness as defined above under the laws of the State of Tennessee, and that your facility is licensed to manage such cases. We’re not interested in what you "think."  We’re interested in the legality of what you "do."

Abby’s Dad, M.D.

Go Dad! Stick it to the homophobic man!

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Update: Zach article

Pictures from the last several days of Love in Action protests. Thanks for the link, Pesky Fly!

I do hope you are all still reading EJ’s blog. He’s doing a stellar and responsible job covering the story of Zach, the 16 year-old boy whose parents have sent him to Love in Action, a place where they are trying to take the gay out of him. Seriously, EJ has every other media source beat on this story. Blogs so often do a better job than the local or national media, because bloggers are on the ground. They are involved. We don’t go looking for stories (at least most of us don’t). The stories come to us, and we’re only writing about them when we’re passionate about them.

Anyway, EJ’s blog, Cherry Blossom Special. Go now. 

I was asked to remove all identifying information about Zach. Now see, I just used his real name, but no last name. See, people cache web pages, so anyone who wants to find out his information can find that out if they really want, but I don’t think that anything that he had on his blog is likely to put him in any danger. I really don’t. And anyway, he hasn’t even been able to be online because he’s off where people are trying to get the gay out of him. It isn’t going to work, and we all know that, but his parents are a bit confused. They think they are helping. I’m sure their motivation is that they want to help him, but what they are doing isn’t helping.

Once again, I ask you to write him a supportive message. I logged on to the GMail account I created for him just now, and there are 43 messages there. I didn’t open the messages to read them, because they belong to Zach, but I can see the first line, and the messages look supportive. I want him to find hundreds of these messages from people who care: people who know that gay isn’t a choice, and people who know that being gay doesn’t mean your life is a waste. People who are gay themselves, or who have wonderful gay people in their lives. Just anyone who cares.

The address is zach.inbartlett@gmail.com. I hope you’ll use it.

For more info, keep checking here and here and here.