A Review of Dan Paul Roberts' The Make Up

Full disclosure: I know Dan Paul Roberts, the artist behind the new album The Make Up, and I love him to pieces. I first met Dan Paul when I got a job working on some websites he designed, and over the years that we worked together we became great friends. Dan Paul is always talking about magick, and a few years ago he moved to New York City to explore all the magick one man can handle.

When we first met, we both lived in Dallas, and even then Dan Paul declared that his ultimate dream was to become a pop star. With this new album, The Make Up, I can see that Dan Paul's sound is maturing while maintaining the fresh inventiveness that was his signature even way back then. One of the things that I've always loved about Dan Paul's songwriting is his ability to play with lyrics, even in the middle of seemingly serious songs about loss and heartache. You never know when Dan Paul will slyly arrange the words in such a way as to sound like he's referring to the "dirty" kind of "come..." right before finishing off the line with the word "clean" as he does on the opening track of The Make Up. You gotta listen to every line of this album to really get the playful nature of Dan Paul's inner child, a moniker that is usually kind of cheesy but in this case illustrates perfectly his general world view. Dan Paul likes to have fun, and you can feel that in his sound and his words.

The Make Up is a very pretty album. Beautiful undulating pianos move over drum machine beats and various sounds, holding the album together with a common thread of smooth pop sound. It's got dancey elements without being dance music, which just adds to the feeling of lightness that imbues even deep tracks about heavy feelings with a sense of peace. Knowing Dan Paul like I do, it is this juxtaposition of so many different feelings -- a smooth and beautiful piano line married with lyrics about having lied about loving someone, for instance -- that really is at the heart of Dan Paul's magick (with a "k," always). If you like to explore every nook and cranny of your own emotions, Dan Paul's The Make Up is definitely for you.

To learn more about Dan Paul Roberts and how to get your hands on The Make Up, visit his blog, Wonderful Mess. 

False Equivalencies: How Anti-Choicers Manipulate By Bending the Truth

On September 8^th, the Dallas Morning News published an opinion piece by local pastor Robert Jeffress. In this piece, Jeffress draws a comparison between the situation in Syria and what he calls the “infanticide” occurring in the United States, which is a reference to legal abortion. Despite his efforts to convince readers that legal abortions are the same thing as the killing of children in acts of aggression, he’s drawing a false equivalency and blatantly disregarding actual facts in order to make his case. These are common tricks amongst the anti-choice brigade – using emotional language to bend the truth and illicit responses while ignoring reality.

I’m not trying to make a statement about Syria with this piece. I am instead addressing the problems inherent in Mr. Jeffress’s arguments about abortion.

First of all, abortion is not infanticide. This word sounds terrifying, and I’m sure it plays well upon people’s fears, but it doesn’t properly illustrate what abortion in this country actually looks like. In fact, if you want to get technical, the definition of infanticide requires that the child have been born prior to being killed. But later in the essay, we see what Jeffress thinks abortion in this country looks like: “But if we laid side by side the remains of the millions of children who have been aborted in the last 40 years — many during the second and third trimesters with discernible features — I imagine there would be an even greater outcry from the American people.” And here we have the previously mentioned blatant disregard for facts. Eighty-eight percent of abortions occur in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, according to statistics from the Guttmacher Institute. That’s the first trimester, and that’s the vast majority of abortions. And only about 1.5% of abortions happen after the 21 week mark, with a number of these being medically necessitated abortions performed to protect the mother’s health or because of dramatic complications with the health of the fetus. This line alone pretty much blows Jeffress’s argument right out of the water. But he’s obviously interested in scare tactics, telling people these aborted fetuses have “discernible features” because only then can he make the connection between them and the children dying in Syria.

He then goes on to attack President Obama’s voting record on abortion by bringing up a vote on a partial-birth abortion ban in the Illinois State Senate in 1997, when Obama was a state senator. Here is Obama on his vote: "On an issue like partial-birth abortion, I strongly believe that the state can properly restrict late-term abortions. I have said so repeatedly. All I’ve said is we should have a provision to protect the health of the mother, and many of the bills that came before me didn’t have that." Obama is a pro-choice president, and there is no denying that. But the attempt here to use his voting record on a single piece of legislation with a scary name as a reason to paint him as a monster is clearly misguided, and Mr. Jeffress has to again keep certain facts to himself in order to make the reader gasp in horror.

Perhaps the most audacious statement comes next: “Many progressives would counter that while they are not “pro-abortion,” they see “choice” as a fundamental human right. But why are they not willing to extend that same freedom of choice to Assad to exterminate the children of his nation?” This is the crux of the argument, and it’s also an indefensible argument. One has to make quite a leap in logic to liken the legal abortion of a 10 week fetus with the killing of a 10 month old child. And in this argument we see what Mr. Jeffress and other anti-choice activists think of the women involved in the unintended pregnancies or experiencing health complications: they’re non-existent. In fact, nowhere in the essay do you see him mention women at all.

Unfortunately, scary language works. But we can counter scary language with facts. Mr. Jeffress ends his essay by saying that the only support available for a moral code of any kind is God’s law, but that’s not even true for many who believe in God. When a case can only be made by lying and using manipulative language, what does that tell you? 

Men in Crisis? It's Not Even a Bad Hair Day.

Today I read yet another piece about men in crisis. This time, it was David Brooks with the New York Times. He started out with a story about men who've been on the wrong side of history in times of transition, just like John Wayne's character in the movie The Searchers. He then used this interesting intro to take me right into the tired old argument that society has somehow come to favor girls and is leaving boys behind.

While I do understand the argument that the definition of masculinity is changing (or, some might say, the role of concepts like "masculinity" is diminishing), I trust no one who promotes this as a symbol of men in crisis. However, there are certain arguments that I see repeatedly that I simply don't understand.

Boys are seemingly doing worse in school, and so something must be very different and wrong about our schools now. We regularly hear about how the classroom environment is bad for boys. Boys are ACTIVE! They're RAMBUNCTIOUS! They like to MOVE and RUN and DESKS AND SITTING ARE DESTROYING THEM IN SCHOOL! I'm sorry for the all caps, but that's how these alarmist pieces about the "crisis" men are facing read to me. But I'd like to know when schools were giant playgrounds where kids just ran around playing all the time and never had to sit in desks? When was this golden age of the boy-oriented school house, where teachers didn't demand silence, stillness, and attention? I'd think that the average classroom today is a freer environment in many places than it ever was in, oh, 1950, when boys supposedly (and certainly did) have it so good. When I see pictures of the ideal classroom of that time, I see...rows of desks. Where children sit. Still. And face a chalkboard and get in trouble for making noise or getting up from their desks without permission. And while some point to the diminishing role of recess in school, as of 2011 only 7% of American schools had cut our recess -- but that doesn't mean they'd cut out physical education. And that also doesn't take into account higher grades in which students still have access to sports programs.

I'm not sure this constitutes some major shift in the level of physical activity children are getting when compared with decades past. And 7% is definitely not a "crisis." School of today looks an awful lot like...the schools of always?

That argument was merely hinted at in the David Brooks piece. The main thing that caught my attention was:

In 1954, 96 percent of American men between 25 and 54 years old worked. Today, 80 percent do. One-fifth of men in their prime working ages are out of the labor force.

As Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute has put it, “The situation here is basically a disaster, a crisis far worse than most commentators and policy makers seem to recognize, and with no clear prospects for appreciable improvement over the near-term horizon.”

A CRISIS?! A while back, I was discussing my PIE theory. Resources are not infinite. So imagine there's a pie. And imagine that white men for a very long time had, oh, 95% of the pie. That leaves 5% of the pie for everyone else to split. So when those who are sharing 5% start to get more of the pie, those getting 95% start to get...less. It's simple math. A white man who listened to the podcast on which I shared my theory said he was intrigued by my ideas. He'd always been taught in school that if you worked hard enough, you could have anything you wanted! It's an interesting concept that resources are finite? I'm embarrassed for American education that someone was so able to believe some elementary school clap trap for so long in the face of sheer physical reality, but it's also because he's a white man that he was able to believe this without question well into adulthood.

In 1954, only 23% of the overall workforce was made up of women. Today it is nearly half. Assuming there are only so many jobs to go around, this would obviously precipitate a dip in the number of jobs held by men -- and I don't see anything remotely crisis-like about that. So the employment rates between men and women have simply become more even. And I would assume that some of that 80% of men not participating in employment today are supported by those working women. We don't see it as a crisis when men support women -- why would we see it as so in the reverse?

But if you want to talk about a crisis, let's look at this: the latest employment numbers (June, 2013) show an unemployment rate of 6.6 percent for whites, and 13.7 for blacks. Blacks are unemployed at more than double the rate of whites. THAT'S a crisis. Also, it calls the numbers David Brooks brings to the conversation into question. The unemployment rate for adult men in June 2013? Seven percent.

OMG THAT IS A CRISIS!

I am very over these men in crisis pieces. They're derailing for dummies 101 level bullshit. Men are not in crisis (at least not the kinds of men these pieces are talking about). Heck, they haven't even given up enough of the pie yet.

Feelings, Facts, and Faith

Last night, as I listened to the testimony of Texans who showed up to speak both for and against HB2, the abortion legislation of which by now I’m sure you’ve heard, I noticed a pattern. Those who argued against the restrictions brought up scientific and medical facts and information. Meanwhile, those in favor of the legislation mostly shared very personal stories and overwhelming emotions about their own choices.

The fact that they were talking about their own choices seemed to be lost on them.

One theme that continuously surfaced was that of the woman who regrets her abortion. When a woman shares that she regrets her abortion, I feel genuine compassion for her. Who among us doesn’t know the sting of regret? I know what it is to regret a decision, and that pain can be intense. I don’t want to mock her testimony or her feelings. However, her regrets over her own life choices have nothing to do with whether or not a piece of legislation should pass. If the government exists to protect me from regret, then we need laws against my saying certain kinds of things because it’s my mouth that most often leaves me feeling regret. I’m sure we can all see the problem with the logic behind such laws, and that same logic applies to the regret standard that some try to apply to abortion legislation. Your regrets are not the governments business.

This argument in particular stuck out to me because I used to kind of believe it. I’ve never been opposed to abortion because of strong religious conviction. While I’m a Christian, I don’t feel that my spiritual beliefs have much to do with this type of legislation. No. I used to say that “abortion isn’t even necessarily good for women” because “most women don’t feel good about having abortions.” We all have things we said in our youth that cause us to shake our own heads in shame years later, and I can’t believe I ever thought that women needed to be protected from their own choices by their government. Put that way, it makes me shudder.

Luckily, I’ve learned from my own experiences.

I’ve learned that a woman can have an abortion and experience no regrets – and that this doesn’t make her a “bad person.” I’ve learned that a woman can have an abortion, feel regrets, but still believe she ultimately made the right choice. I’ve learned that people’s lessons are myriad and complicated and we’re here to learn, not to experience pain-free lives. In fact, I’ve learned that “pain is the touchstone of spiritual growth,” and I’ve learned to be grateful for my own pain because it’s my greatest teacher. And I’ve learned that I don’t get to rob others of the chance to make their own choices because it is those choices that lead them to their own ultimate destinies.

There’s a lot of God in all of that for me.

If a woman who regrets her abortion wants me to sit and weep with her, I will gladly do so. I’m not blind or deaf to her pain. But I also cannot support the idea that her pain is proof that women need to be “protected” from their own choices.  

In the end, I have enough faith in both women and my God to know believe that they don't need me or anyone else to be in charge. 

Under the Issue

Earlier on Facebook, I saw a comment posted by a young woman on a picture of Leticia Van de Putte, Wendy Davis, Senfronia Thompson, and Jessica Farrar. The comment said, "I have sex willingly and I don't need abortions. It's called responsibility." I sighed. You see a lot of this kind of commentary in these kinds of conversations, and while part of me just wants to write it off as trolling, I have no doubt that she really believes that to be a logical argument against the need for safe, legal abortions.

I kinda wanted to comment simply, "...yet," but I find it's best not to get into it with people who post glib comments about complex political issues. That's an instance in which someone could justifiably accuse me of asking for it.

When you're talking about politics -- when you're considering your political stance -- you're talking about the governance of a group of people, not just yourself. I have sex willingly, too. My husband and I are really, really diligent in our condom use. I'm hopeful that I won't ever again need an abortion. But even if I never do, other women might, and that's why I oppose the abortion legislation that's about to be reconsidered in a second special session in Texas. Because it's not all about me.

It's very easy to take a position of looking down on people you do not feel are like yourself. A friend was recently telling me about someone she knows who posted some disparaging remarks about LGBT people in the wake of the DOMA and Prop 8 decisions -- a person who lives in a different kind of glass house and should probably not be throwing stones. But she's not gay, and so it simply feels good to look down on "those people." It's always easier to do what feels good than it is to do what's right -- and it's very easy to convince oneself that looking down on others is right. It's so sneaky, and sometimes, even when we're doing what's right, we're only doing in wherein it might directly effect us.

I just read another quote from a white gay man who said, "Now that we have gay marriage there is nothing else to fight for." At an event for gay undocumented immigrants. There's a little bit of this stuff inside all of us, not just the Rick Perrys of the world. 

I have very strong views on the abortion issue and what's happening in Texas. I'm speaking up and out and showing up and calling my Senator. I'm not here to say, "OMG GUYS CAN'T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG?!" Mostly I'm just thinking about the instinct to base beliefs only on one's own experiences and how dangerous this kind of thing can be. Throughout the course of the special session, I'm likely to run into more comments like the one at the beginning of this post -- comments that don't bring any compassion, factual information, or consideration to an issue that is extremely complex and even emotional.

I just hope I can refrain from driving myself crazy arguing with them.

Come and Take It

Tonight, the Texas state Senate is quiet. At 10 a.m. tomorrow, they'll reconvene to hear a smattering of bills on the last day of the special session -- one of which is SB5. There is a ton of information out there from people who know better than I what is going on. I can say this about the last few days: I've learned much more than I ever thought possible about parliamentary procedure. In fact, I'm kind of getting really into it. I'm thinking about running for office so I can raise points of order and shizz. You probably think I'm kidding, but I listened to TWO HOURS of blank noise on the Texas House live stream this morning before the body was called to order. 

Like I kind of felt like a person who just purchased a pair of dirty underwear out of a vending machine and was smelling them -- if one were into that thing. 

I've said too much.

That said, if you've come here for up-to-the-minute info on what's happening now, the current state of affairs is that nothing is happening now. Things will get going tomorrow. And God willing, the Texas state Senate Democrats will be able to hold the line and run out the clock on SB5. This is a conversation that's been going on for a long time, and I really just want to add my voice to the din of others who are rumbling that these aggressive measures attacking women's rights will not stand. On Thursday night, 700+ people showed up, most of whom where there to testify against the anti-choice bills that were at that point making their way through the House. And then 1,000+ pro-choice activists showed up at the Capitol in Austin on Sunday to show opposition as the bill hit the House floor. And they stayed through the night as Texas Representatives kept the debate going for as long as possible. Eventually the bill passed the House. But that was never in question. 

What was in question was how many people were going to show up to fight the good fight, and the answer we got was, "DROVES!" 

People say, "What difference does it make?" I still have hope that a filibuster will kill this thing, but even if it doesn't, I'm still heartened by what I've seen over the last five days. Rep. Jessica Farrar of Houston pointed out that we can't get this level of involvement during regular session on anything. People who thought the Texas Democratic party was down for the count are feeling inspired, and inspired people actually get out and vote. When you stand up and say something, you empower all the other people who think like you do to stand up, too. 

So if you ever wonder whether or not you should stand up, I hope you err on the side of YES. And no matter what happens tomorrow, I'm so very proud of my pro-choice Texans who've stood up and said something. No matter the outcome tomorrow, we've won the power of knowing that we didn't just let them have our rights 

They had to come and take them. 

That's What SHE Said

Apparently Paula Deen said some racist things. And so we all tweet and status update about it, pointing and laughing and patting ourselves on the back for not being so racist. Am I the only one who feels like this is kind of missing the point? It's not exactly shocking that she said what she said -- and I don't say that because she's a southerner or because she says, "Y'ALL!" or because she likes to cook with a lot of butter or whatever. I say that because it's just not that shocking that people say racist things. A lot of us like to pretend that we live in a post-racial time, but we do not. And most of the people pointing, laughing, and calling Paula Deen a P.O.S. harbor hate in their hearts. This kind of, "Yay us! We're not that racist!" rubbernecking doesn't actually accomplish anything.

I'm not saying that we all say really ridiculous things like, "OMG I wish I could have slaves for real at my next big event!" That kind of overt racism is -- well, obvious racism is obvious, as the internet kids might say. But what about that racism where you get nervous when you see a black man on the street (which is partially about race, partially about gender, and partially about class -- but let's face it, black men make you more nervous than white men). What about the little jokes you tell in the office that are a little bit racist but you don't think it's a problem because "we're all friends!" and "people shouldn't be so sensitive and P.C.!?" What about the systemic racism you're not even seeing? Look around your office and take note of the racial diversity. Go for a walk in your neighborhood and do a little math on the percentages of people who look like you vs. people who don't.

The real important conversation we need to be having isn't, "How could someone say those things in 2013?" We need to each individually consider what we think, how we act, what we say. We need to look around and assess the real situation on the ground where we work and where we live. I live in Dallas, Texas, a place where liberal-minded white people live in neighborhoods surrounded by other white people -- myself included. We go out to clubs and bars where the people around us are mostly white. And we never think about this and we never talk about it and it's not national news. It's the daily reality. We're not horrible, awful people saying horrible, awful racist things. But what can we do to continue to encourage change? Spending a lot of time calling out Paula Deen and getting her show cancelled isn't the answer to that question.

Look, it's great when we DON'T talk like Paula Deen. Good for us. But these are no laurels to rest upon.