Good reporting from the Kernel on a really disappointing set of changes at the university.

Love this so much.

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. That said, I don’t want to post the text as my last draft had it—while reading the news today, I came across a story about the 2024 U.S. presidential race that would have made a better addition to my sermon than what I had written at the time, and I want to think about that connection.

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. I was bummed in 2021 when Tout l’univers narrowly lost out (though Måneskin’s winning song has grown on me), and my kid was a big fan of 2023’s Swiss entry, Watergun, even if the rest of us (including the Eurovision judges and audience) weren’t huge fans.

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. There’s also a bias toward the recent, and I haven’t shied away from the idiosyncracies of my reading habits (that is, there are plenty of comics and plenty of French books on the list—not to mention at least one French-language comic). Nonetheless, I hope this is helpful to other folks looking for a book to read in these domains!

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. Here’s the abstract:

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:

I finally read this book weeks after picking it up from a local library and knowing I’d enjoy it. Viloria’s life story (like so many others’ stories) casually destroys sex and gender binaries. Reading about the experiences of intersex people was an important part of my beginning to reject those binaries several years ago, and I think anyone clinging to those binaries ought to hear from voices like Viloria’s. That’s not to say that other queerings of that binary are any less valid than being intersex, of course!

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. Instead, it flies a version of the flag with pink in it. I was so distracted by the pink that I didn’t count the other colors, but I’m guessing this is most likely the original eight-color flag designed by Gilbert Baker in 1978, as featured in that Forever Ago episode and as seen below.

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.