Incredible levels of bad faith manufactured outrage here. What a dumb world we live in.

This headline would be hilarious if it weren’t so infuriating.

Since kiddo was really little, her aunt has been sending her “notable women,” “notable people of color,” “notable Indigenous people,” and “notable queer people” books, which has been good for just setting a background level of what we want our kid to be aware of as she grows up. When she came home with a “famous American” project, she was pretty clear up front that she was not going to choose a dude, and she turned to her little collection of books to come up with the three names that she needed to turn in to her teacher for approval before she could start the project.

Meta’s cynicism and groveling is pretty appalling.

See, this is the kind of content moderation we ought to worry about (and why “keep the kids safe” narratives can go horribly wrong).

Listen, The Onion is great, but sometimes McSweeney’s is where it’s at.

Some Sundays, you cancel your church plans so you can Zoom into a relative and her girlfriend’s spur of the moment “let’s at least get legally married now in case things get bad before our September wedding” service.

McSweeny’s strikes again.

After being ordained earlier this summer, I was added to my home congregation’s preaching rotation. Today was supposed to be the day that I gave my first sermon there, but once I started to make plans to attend a family funeral, I reached out to ask if someone could sub for me. Before getting the bad news, though, I’d already written most of the sermon, and so I figured I should post the text here so that I get some use out of it.

For the past few years, my family has been getting into the annual Eurovision Song Contest, which is a lot of fun. In the three years that we’ve watched it, at least one of us has always been cheering for Switzerland. This is perhaps because of my own personal bias toward Switzerland, having spent some time there, but it’s also that the songs stand out to (at least one of) us.

There’s a certain flavor of bizarre that makes for great fiction, and this comic is that. It’s a story about gender transition and transphobia, a critique of tech bros and libertarian business types, and… a science fiction story featuring a Cthulhuesque cult? There’s a bit more gore than I normally tolerate in comics, and the art style isn’t what I’d identify as my go-to preference, but everything fits together in a surreal but profound way.

There are a couple of weeks before the deadline to submit abstracts for the Mormon Social Science Association’s sessions at the 2024 meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, so I’ve been filling some nooks and crannies of my busy work week by looking at some Twitter data. Last year, I published with my colleague Amy Chapman a qualitative look at the #DezNat Twitter hashtag, which blends Mormon orthodoxy with far-right and anti-feminist thinking.

Glad to see action being taken against this law.

Look, I don’t know much about Hungarian politics, but it seems to me that it would take a hell of a lot of self-confidence to brag about an ally of Viktor Orbán visiting BYU. This feels like wading into the culture wars in a way that the LDS Church usually tries to avoid.

Solid post. I think it’s often helpful to ask whether Latter-day Saint logic applies to things that don’t get Latter-day Saint approval.

A friend of mine recently asked whether I had a list of books “that have been particularly impactful or interesting,” especially in the realm of spirituality and religion—and suggested that if I didn’t already have such a list, I could put one together for one of my next blog posts. It took me a while to actually put the list together, but it’s ended up being a really interesting exercise. Of the forty books that I’ve picked, some have been more influential than others.

Late last year, I announced the publication of a study I participated in with Dr. Evan Brody and UK PhD student Mehroz Sajjad where we examined LGBTQ+-friendly spaces on the Gab social media platform. Although that was the main focus of our research project, we also found as we were completing it that there were a number of LGBTQ+-friendly spaces that had been overrun by queerphobic activity and discourses. I’m happy to announce that our second paper, focusing on those specific spaces, has just been published in the Journal of Homosexuality.

Growing up Latter-day Saint, I knew that polygamy was part of our past, but I was so defensive about it not being part of our present that I often failed to understand just how important it was to my ancestors (both literal and figurative). About a month ago, I stumbled on a passage in RLDS missionary Charles Derry’s autobiography (which I recently finished) that reminded me that polygamy was a huge prority for 19th century Latter-day Saints:

This is disgusting and reprehensible. I refuse to watch the video myself, but it sounds like it wouldn’t be out of place on the Gab groups I’ve looked at for research projects.

One of kiddo’s favorite podcasts is the delightful Forever Ago, each episode of which dives into the history of something specific, such as the weekend, Black cowboys, etc. Kiddo often listens to podcasts in the morning while waiting for (or eating) breakfast, and on Saturday morning, knowing that we were visiting Lexington Pride later that day, she pulled up the episode on the history of the rainbow Pride flag. With that history fresh in our minds, I noticed something different about the rainbow flags that fly in downtown Lexington during hte month of June: Lexington does not fly the common six-stripe rainbow flag.

Student monitoring software is gross to begin with, but monitoring for LGBTQ+ content makes it even grosser. Love it when EFF tackles ed tech.

This comic memoir of (same-sex) marriage has excellent art, tells a good story, and hits on very important points for the time we’re in. I picked it up on a whim and really enjoyed it.

I am not normally a fan of the comic strip genre of comics, but this was a good and important read.

This just makes me like Andy more. Shame on Cameron and everyone else using queerphobia to influence an election.

One of this week’s lectionary readings in Community of Christ (and presumably elsewhere) is in 1 Peter 3. As I was reading the NRSVUE rendering of this passage this morning, verses 13-17 stood out to me: 13 Now who will harm you if you are eager to do what is good? 14 But even if you do suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed. Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated, 15 but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord.

This is indefensible, and no amount of spin from a comms director can change how harmful this is.

I was disappointed this morning to see this article in the Salt Lake Tribune. The article reports that BYU professor Sarah Coyne “became the target of online bullying and hostile emails” after discussing “her child’s years of wrestling with gender dysphoria, including suicidal thoughts and agonizing mental health issues” in a class she was teaching. According to the article, this is something that she has done for several semesters, but this time, her action “made it into a critical article in a conservative off-campus newspaper… which was retweeted by Utah Sen[ator] Mike Lee on his personal Twitter account.

There’s no such thing as dressing according to one’s biological sex. Gender-based dress expectations are perhaps the best possible example of the social construction of gender. What inanity.

Even if the Kentucky GOP is right and this is what loses Beshear the election, it it was clearly the right thing to do. I want Beshear to stay in office, but I don’t know if I could vote for him if he didn’t resist the queerphobia coming out of the General Assembly. Shame on our legislature for passing this bill—and for so clearly acknowledging here that it’s to score political points at the expense of Kentucky children.

I’ve felt a lot of appreciation for Wil Wheaton recently, but for him to come to Kentucky to praise our libraries and speak against dumb laws passed by our legislature makes me just love the guy.

Good for Andy. One thing I personally appreciate about Governor Beshear is that he so often invokes his faith as a Democrat. Granted, it’s probably a calculated decision in such a red state, and I’m still uncomfortable with how faith and politics are intertwined in the U.S., but it shows that faith doesn’t have to be queerphobic.

This is a frank, vulnerable memoir that I learned a lot from; I’m glad for Kobabe’s willingness to share eir story. I also appreciated the art style. I’d been meaning to read this in print a while ago but had checked out too many books from the library and had to return it before I got to it. I’m glad it was available on Hoopla so I could read it on my phone instead of mindlessly scrolling through TVTropes.

What a dumb world we live in.

I hated this project when I read about it in The Verge 5 years ago. I hate it even more now.

I’m pleased to share that a study I contributed to—Gayservatives on Gab: LGBTQ+ Communities and Far Right Social Media—is now available (open-access!) through the Social Media + Society journal. Dr. Evan Brody is the lead author on the study, and we were lucky enough to have support from PhD student Mehroz Sajjad. Here’s the abstract for the study: In the United States, LGBTQ+ individuals are often imagined as inherently politically progressive, but this assumption overlooks the experiences of self-identified LGBTQ+ conservatives.

I’m pleased to share the publication of a new chapter of an edited volume. The chapter in question is “I’m a French teacher, not a data scientist”: Culture and languages across my professions, and it’s part of a volume called Cultures and languages across the curriculum in higher education. According to the CLAC Consortium, Culture and Languages Across the Curriculum (CLAC) is a: a curricular framework that provides opportunities to develop and apply language and intercultural competence within all academic disciplines through the use of multilingual resources and the inclusion of multiple cultural perspectives.