The Prodigal Sheep

I can't say I'm surprised by recent revelations concerning Ted Haggard.

Who knows what 'dark' secrets and goings-on plague the lives of many religious right leaders? I suspect that the 'moral' issues that so obsess many of these (mostly) middle aged men wield such a unique and powerful fascination that often they find it impossible not to blur the lines between concern and involvement.

What is strange, but also perhaps less than surprising, is Haggard's apparent reluctance to part with the full truth of the story. Why not lay all his cards on the table? What is it about powerful men when they fall that they still have to hedge their confessions with statements like "I didn't inhale" or "It was just a massage"?

I'm sure the psychologists have better answers than me to that question.

Posted by Mark Poole at 5:01 PM in Ethics, Religious Right
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A few weeks ago an AOL researcher mistakenly posted three months of search results for 658,000 users to the internet. While the data was not linked directly to user account, the 36 million search records contained very revealing details about AOL members' search habits and private obsessions.

The search queries themselves did, however, contain personally identifying information such as names and addresses and even, in some cases, social security and credit card numbers. Copies of that data are all over the internet and there is even a searchable database.

The Washington Post reports that the researcher, his supervisor and a higher ranking executive have now been terminated over the affair. The whole issue highlights just how much information is being accumulated about us without our realizing it, and how increasingly transparent our lives have become. What a brave new world we live in. Somewhere in cyberspace is a record not only of who we are, what we earn, our credit history and purchasing habits, but also now our innermost private thoughts, fears and desires.

Consider, for instance, the life of a couple in Baytown, Texas as intimately revealed in their AOL search history for March through May:

She has missed her period and realizes she is pregnant. She is 37 and concerned about the risk of multiple births.

He apparently is diabetic and has bipolar disorder. He likes to keep violent dogs in the house. He is cruel to her and the dogs, probably because of alcohol, methamphetamine and cocaine abuse.

As a born-again Christian she believes fasting and intercessory prayer may help her to obtain healing for her spouse. But is fasting safe with an unborn child? She already worries that her partner's history of drug abuse has harmed the fetus.

She has ideas about becoming an actress. She is looking into opening her own business, perhaps a grocery store and gas station franchise. They are planning to buy a new set of living room furniture, preferably beige.

She needs to start thinking about maternity clothing. He's more interested in finding naked pictures of Beyonce and other 'fine black girls'...

This is somebody's life laid bare... Does she know he searches the internet for girls while she's praying for his healing? Will she get an abortion? Will she leave him or stay? Does she know her life is exposed, even if anonymously, for all to read on the internet?

The data leakage by AOL is not really the problem, only a symptom of a far more complex issue. It's hard to comprehend where this connected world of information is taking us. According to Technology Evangelist,

The privacy violation was extraordinary, but I think the leak may have a positive side effect by helping web searchers understand just how much information search engines know about them. This may also help people understand why it's a big deal when the government asks search engines to hand over search records.

As a security professional I'm aware of the increasing value of 'open source' intelligence gathering. I'm also aware of the incredible potential today's data universe provides for creating a totalitarian society where 'total information awareness' is not just a bureacratic buzzword, but a reality. Whether we care or not, we are being watched.

Posted by Mark Poole at 2:57 PM in Ethics, Internet, Privacy, Psychology
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A friend forwarded an interesting piece from Friday's New York Times concerning the recent appointment of Rev. Alvin O'Neal Jackson as senior pastor of the Park Avenue Christian Church in Manhattan.

Today is the deadline for an essay due for one of my courses. I've written two pages of a 10-15 page reflection paper. Not so good I suppose. I've been under a lot of pressure lately and have found it hard to concentrate on much more than my nine-to-five job. I'm not going to make the deadline which means I'm not going to get credit for my courses. At least not this year.

I suppose if I had no scruples I could have just cheated and copied someone else's work. Except I have never cheated on a test or assessment in my life, and would never contemplate starting now. Better to accept failure and move forward. Try again and do better next time.

In my day job one of my major responsibilities is to protect computerized testing programs against cheating. So I know something about the psychology of cheating. How people justify it, cover it up, say everyone else is doing it, blame the game rather than themselves.

It's nonetheless shocking however, when someone you love and hold in high esteem betrays himself in this way.

I discovered a couple of months ago that my pastor had downloaded every sermon I'd ever heard him preach from a website and presented them as his own. Every Sunday going back for more than two years...

Continue reading "Deadlines and dead lies" »

Posted by Mark Poole at 10:57 PM in Ethics, Personal
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Today was the last day of our course. This is going to be a brief reflection, not because the content wasn't stimulating and thought provoking, but because it's late on Friday night and I need to finish this off before getting to bed so I can catch my flight home in the morning!

We discussed the difference between beliefs, morals/values and ethics. In my view each informs the other, moving from the abstraction of beliefs through specific moral or cultural values through to specific actions as they occur in community. For instance:

BELIEF: God requires that all men obey His will

MORAL: Homosexuality should not be tolerated by society, as it against the will of God

ETHIC: Actively working to deny equal rights to my homosexual neighbor

Although it was agreed that there is generally a lot of confusion between the three in social discourse.

A few key points Penny wanted us to take away, with regard to what might constitute the kernel of a queer ethic:

1. If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred (Whitman)
2. The ethical battleground is the human body
3. All bodies matter (this is the meaning of the incarnation)
4. We need to make sex (not just sexuality, but sex) sacred again
5. Ethics need to deal with the essence of relationships, not with their form
6. Ethics must involve truth-telling about our lives and our bodies

Now, to get home and put all of this into practice.

Posted by Mark Poole at 10:32 PM in Course Reflections, Ethics, Queer, Theology
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The assigned reading for today's class was from Eric Rofes' Reviving The Tribe: Regenerating Gay Men's Sexuality and Culture in the Ongoing Epidemic. What I really took away from this book was an understanding of some of the ways in which queer activism was coopted by the dominant discourse as a result of AIDS. After the gay liberation of the seventies, there has been a repathologization of queer sex under the guise of medical expertise and safe-sex education.

One example is the way safe-sex education and HIV prevention campaigns often prresent gay male sexuality as a force that needs to be brought under control (for our own good and for that of society). We are "transgressive bad boys." Heterosexual resistance to and ignorance of safer sex practices are winked at (after all, unprotected vaginal sex is only natural, and necessary to the reproduction of the species), while unprotected anal sex (between men) is treated with moral opprobrium.

Tied up in all of this is the fact that even queer men, especially younger men who never experienced the political activism of the sixties and seventies, have a tendency to substitute "love" for sex in their political discourse. Queer rights and queer marriage are not about the right to love one another — we have been loving one another for centuries and no system of powers can stop that. They are about our right to fuck, about the unchaining of our erotic power. Endless prattle about equal love (of which I am myself guilty) obscures what it is we are really fighting for, and what it is that heteronormative discourse so virulently seeks to suppress.

We began the class itself, however, on an entirely different note. Jim Mitulski and Penny Nixon shared stories concerning their recent visit to the Mother of Peace AIDS orphanage in rural Zimbabwe. An interesting and powerful juxtaposition of issues and images... The cultural apartheid brought about by AIDS in post-Reagan America, contrasted with the physical apartheid of gender and poverty in post-revolutionary Zimbabwe.

Continue reading "Thursday reflection: Theo-ethical queer activism" »

Posted by Mark Poole at 5:08 PM in Course Reflections, Ethics, HIV/AIDS, Queer
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