Let’s hear your voice. Make a video, write a poem, song, or an essay — or even create an original work of art — and express your thoughts on these topics. If we feature your contribution on the site, we will send you a free VenusPlusX t-shirt to thank you.
By everyone’s estimation, last week was bad, in fact we are having many bad weeks piling up for sometime now. But, these horrible events distract us from all the good that is emerging at the same time. It’s not Pollyanna-like to see that this cauldron of world-wide strife is now bubbling over for all to see and evaluate and soundly reject.
Universal human rights, environmental protection, and self-determination, and all that they convey, will prevail, not just because of their rightness but because they represent survival. Science-denying, theocratic fundamentalists, here and abroad, simply have no future.
Previously I have asked the question, What would happen if there was an alien invasion? Whether the aliens were friendly or not, we as a planet would join together to respond irrespective of the nationalistic tendencies some hold dear. This nationalism (and the racism that underlies it) is a disease and is at the root of all of the world’s ills whether we are talking about America’s failed immigration policies or arms aggression across the globe.
Our manifesto written in connection with VenusPlusX’s relaunch in April offers more about how progress inevitably overcomes regress. Progress itself has its own natural ecology, although at times like this it takes a little thought to see it.
We’ve already talked about the right-wing theocracy destroying American democracy; their paper trail speaks for itself, but voters will ultimately reject the policies and laws wrought by these old, white, sexually sick hacks, from the Supreme Court to Congress to local school boards to seditious public officials calling for armed defense of their smallest ideas. Except for a dozen other countries, it’s mostly much worse in other places.
All together we have a relative small oligarchy enslaving us, and the more they do the more they hasten the inevitable populist revolution. They are anti-women, anti-voter, anti-gay, and anti-the-rest-of-everything. If nothing else, they will die, and their perverse ideas will die with them. Even if the hysteria about Obama should somehow lead for a time to more old, white theocrats, that will only force their insanity further out on display and, therefore, more rapidly diminished and dismissed.
Oligarchs like Putin, will be done in by their own recklessness. Right-wingnuts often do our work for us, fully repudiating their own ideas because they lack the connective tissue to make any sense at all.
Old, white men are pursuing an agenda of perversity touching hundreds of countries, not to make America the beacon of hope it once was, and can again, but instead to be ruler of the entire planet. Here’s one of the worst examples — there is a secret organization known as The Family (also know as The Fellowship) which sponsors anti-homosexuality campaigns abroad to establish christianists’ unholy stranglehold of entire populations with the sole purpose of seizing control of these countries’ natural resources. With the aid, complicity, and full participations of past and current senators, congressmen, attorneys general, military commanders, and just plain businessmen in it for a buck or two, The Family operates 10,000 cells worldwide, corporate white-collar terrorists who just pledge their loyalty to Jesus’s plan (their interpretation of it to be sure), and then do whatever the hell they want.
People won’t be able to stay silent much longer.
So the diffuse and asymmetrical bad is coming at a fast pace now, faster than in anytime in the future but we are comforted by all the good that is emerging just as fast. The transformation of the world may not take as long as you might think. And the populist revolution we so desperately need will not necessarily be cataclysmic in nature because we are making incremental but substantive progress everyday. But, like I said, it’s natural to focus on the negative and ignore the good.
So, off the top of my head today, I’m going to start an inventory of all the good that is happening, and hope you will send your own citations. We can look at this growing list every time we feel discouraged when face to face with our enslavers.
These are all examples of what we discuss in our Manifesto for a New Age of Sexual Freedom, wherein we posit that Sexual Freedom is the bedrock of all freedoms because it conveys the full end of racism, nationalism, and oppression by the few. Our treatise revives a long-held concept of what is needed: the gradual, hopefully not cataclysmic, end of old, inhuman, coercive systems run by governments, corporations, and religious hierarchies, while preserving from this history that which is old but also good, and building new, human, and entirely voluntary associations. A good example of something that is old and also good is reprinted below. Another is the gradual shift to local farming and food supply to replace hard-hearted, pesticide-infused agribusiness.
Send us samples of good popping up in your community and country that we can share with each other.
Flickr/creative commons
why it says in the manifesto.
We shall overcome. We shall overcome.
How Do We Respond to This Really Horrible Day?
“It’s too late to reverse the death and destruction, but it’s never too early to advocate for peace and life.” — Paul Brandeis Raushenbush
by Alfonso
Flickr/creative commons
Just 3 days ago, believing things are getting worse at a faster pace than ever before, we revisited Where Does of All This F*cking Evil Sh%t Come From? to offer up some explanation of why the world seems to be plummeting downward.
Yesterday, everything got much worse.
While the media was fixed on the passenger jet that was shot out of the sky by Russian-backed Ukrainian separatists, ground troops started rolling into Gaza with seeming impunity. Today, I am publishing in full Raushenbush’s thoughtful, 400-word call for action — we are fast losing our humanity but each of us must recognize that we are not impotent.
What a horrible day. Israel has begun a ground offensive in Gaza, the White House is on lockdown, and a plane has been shot down in Ukraine. Today’s news piles on an already shaking landscape of ISIS in Iraq, immigrant children suffering on the U.S. border, and still missing Nigerian girls. My Twitter feed has been raging with information and disinformation today, but underneath the diatribes I have been struck by a sense of despair and disbelief that the world can unravel this fast, and anger at our sense of impotence.
But we are not impotent, and this is not “happening to us.” We, the human race, are doing this to ourselves. These aren’t natural disasters, or “acts of God.” It’s just us, humans, having completely lost our humanity. We are warring, and hurting, and intentionally or unintentionally killing one another through direct assault or indifference and neglect.
We have forgotten that we belong to one another, that we are connected, that we are all sisters and brothers, that we need one another.
Today, right now, I want us to take back our power, and begin to mend together what has been ripped apart.
It is too late to bring back the innocent lives that have been lost so far in the Middle East, but it is not too late to stop the killing that is happening now.
It is too late to bring back the innocent plane passengers who died in Ukraine, but as a human race we can insist that this is unacceptable and not let the incident be a springboard for even more violence and hatred.
It’s too late to reverse the death and destruction, but it’s never too early to advocate for peace and life.
It is hard to know what to do, but, even within this dark day, we need to continue to insist on the possibility of peace — and to have that start with ourselves. If all I can do today is pray for peace and the well-being of both Israelis and Palestinians and refuse to accept that war is inevitable or hate is natural, that will be a start. If I can pray for the people in that plane and try not to be swept into a rage calling for revenge, if I can make myself open to being an instrument of peace, then that will be a start. That is one, very small, way that I can respond to this horrible day.
Each person who loses their life for no reason represents a tragedy. What would each person have done to contribute to a better world? There were 100 experts heading to an AIDS conference in Malaysia, for example. When will it end? What can you do to make the world better today by advocating for peace and life?
Religious myth has only degraded and inhibited human progress. Essentially all contemporary religions are myth based. Christianity fails the test of worth when it relies on Hebrew racial myth (the old testament) and Greek philosophical myth (the concept of the Christos and related ideas) as absolute truths. We know that nothing that draws on such ancient Sci-Fi can be either true, good, or beautiful, except by accident, and thus stands forever opposed to the power of love in the world.
There are, fortunately, many people (now and in the past 2000 years) who love others, serve others, do good to others, and make our world more beautiful by their efforts. Some of these people call themselves Christians or Jews or Muslims or Atheists or something else, which is their choice, but their lives have taken inspiration from the universal powers of love and truth in the human mind, not from religious myth or dogma.
Eddi van W
Flickr/creative commons
Transhumanists continue to debate the appropriateness of any kind of religious faith or behavior as a component of Transhuman life. My own post-transition perspective illuminates many ethical and moral concerns of the Transhumanists. Foremost, if we are to foster the emergence of a genuine Transhuman philosophy of life, we need to create an inspirational framework that justifies and motivates rational behavior. We should evaluate candidate inspirational frameworks according to their individual ability to satisfy essential requirements that must be met by any proposed framework.
In my view, a satisfactory transhuman rationally religious world view ought to address five basic requirements that bridge the gaps of sex and gender and merge the physical, psychic, and inspirational elements of joy into a total personal and socially transforming experience of reality. At the same time, we recognize that a genuinely operational inspirational framework, a true transreligion, can only emerge from the collective unification of individual joyful experience. This list is just a starting point for further thought and discussion.
1) Assure complete freedom from reliance on any myth or backstory. Our beliefs are based on plain observational knowledge and insights of personal wisdom.
2) Demonstrate open and informed attitudes, viewpoints, and experiential training for all of the many dimensions of sex and gender.
3) Practice group communion for collective psychic inspiration and empowerment, through the exploration and experience of sex and gender as acts of communion.
4) Fellowship every transhuman living on this planet. Empower them to know the joy of living, showing how love finds expression in true service to others by doing good and making beauty.
5) Be open to alliance with any cosmic government that may make its presence or influence felt in human affairs, with a willingness to facilitate transhuman emergence. In the meantime dedicate your life to the highest principles of love, truth, goodness, and beauty.
To summarize, we help one another by starting with baldfaced mythless truth and showing each other the joy that is really important and gives meaning to life. A universal acknowledgment of the possibility that some external force will intervene keeps us mutually focused on progression towards our ideals of truth and love, regardless of what the future brings. And our intent to combine free and open acceptance of all forms of sex and gender expression with equally free and open communion, joy, and fellowship guarantees our ability to lead the destined evolution of human affairs.
Transhumans may find something like this just fine as the basis for a way of life and be finally able to leave the god talk to the past. But a religion, the social expression of a community of individuals who share common ideals, is not designed, so much as grown through the social customs of the community. Setting aside old, incorrect beliefs, the inherent truth of principles like these will emerge and cause focused will actions. Through trial and error, the community will gradually discover convenient and innovative ways of serving these principles to more and more people. And that will be the emergence of true Transreligion.
Now is the time for a new inspirational framework to replace the outdated and overly interpreted ideas of our pastfathers. I do not know what will emerge, but I trust that it will necessarily be true to ideals and principles such as those stated here.
Editor’s note: This was published a few years ago to offer a framework for a new non-religion incorporating the ideas of sex and gender freedom. It is re-issued today to help spur the coming together of many diverse points-0f-view who are striving for a humane world unified with shared ideals.
For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…
Evil is not itself a reality. Rather, it is the absence of meaningful reality.
By Danny O’Connor
Flickr/creative commons
Believers, Atheists, and Humanists alike are asking questions, trying to rationalize evil in the world. It seems like civilization is in retrograde when it appears to us that right-wingnuts are making more progress than they should. So what’s the answer? We tried to address this a couple of years ago, and feel it is worthy of reprinting here. Let us know what you think.
***
También en español It is undeniable that there is often a lot of pain and suffering in a human lifetime. While individual experiences vary widely, over the course of a lifetime most people will experience instances when they are confronted with the reality of an apparently genuine evil. And this inevitably starts the discussion, “Why me? What did I do to deserve this? If God loves me, why is he doing this to me? How can we love a God that would let something like this happen to anybody (not just me)? I refuse to accept the religious proposition that there is a God because I see only evidence of universal randomness, filled with constant strife between good and evil partisans! And even if there were one single personal God of the universe, he’d be way too busy to pay attention to the crap going on down here.”
But there are fundamental assumptions in this line of questioning that often go unappreciated. First and foremost are the implied assumptions about the nature of God. If one assumes that the God referenced is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent throughout time and space, then why isn’t the universe perfect? Surely a universe under the total control of a God of Love would never tolerate the amount of human misery and grief that surrounds us on all sides. Therefore, since the observed world does not match my prediction of what the world would be like if there were an omni-cube God, either such a God does not exist or my predictive method about what the world should be like is wrong. Sounds bad for my predictive methods—what man dare attempt to compass the purpose of God? Well, men have minds that, if you are God-oriented, are surely gifts of God. And my mind tells me that simplistic faith contrary to reason is most definitely NOT what any God I could personally respect would ever require of me. Therefore, if I believe the workings in my mind are True, I must perforce reject the concept of the omni-cube God. There simply is no such deity active anywhere I’ve been in the universe because his existence is refuted by the reality of my own experience.
And from this line of reasoning flows the faith of many devout atheists. It’s not so much that they reject the general idea of some sort of Supreme Being, but they can’t figure out what it would be good for because it doesn’t seem to even try to put things right in the world around us. If it’s out there, we obviously mean nothing more to it than an ant does to the automobile that ran over it in the road. Let’s try looking at this situation from a very different and more hopeful viewpoint.
Suppose that the universe is destined to be a perfect place of light and life—a universe of continuous unbridled joy in loving service, living truth, doing good, and making beauty. By our actions, our relationships, we are building small parts of this great universe of constructed perfection. But the perfect universe is not here today. Only portions are in evidence—the areas where love predominates over the primal emptiness of original space-time—where evil is merely the region into which love has yet to penetrate. Evil is not itself a reality. Rather, it is the absence of meaningful reality.
So evil is not something inflicted on us by an angry God, who abandons us to the vacuum of space-time devoid of Love. Rather, evil is the state of being where there is a weakened or nonexistent presence of Love. Since we are the creatures in the universe who are equipped with the ability to sense the presence or absence of Love, and with the tools of Truth guided reason that enable our will to effectively direct our loving actions, it is necessarily our responsibility to fill the gaps in finite reality where Love does not adequately penetrate.
The response of the finite universe to the force of destiny, the necessity of evolution towards a perfect state of light and life, requires the participation of many beings working together and dedicated to the ideals of Love, Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.
If you see evil in the world and have sufficient resources of Love, you can make the repair yourself. Our planet seems to have been shortchanged on loving service in the past, so we have a lot of gaps in our Love coverage. Many of these will require the cooperation of many people of goodwill, even entire communities and nations, to bridge vast gaps of lost communication and long misunderstanding.
So let’s get with it. Is there evil in the world? Then let’s work together in Unity to Love it out of existence. It’s our job to do this and this is how destiny is realized. Fear not to act. With Love and Truth you can only do Good and make Beauty.
For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…
Make a video, write a poem, song, or an essay — or even create an original work of art — and express your thoughts. If we feature your contribution on the site, we will send you a free VenusPlusX t-shirt to thank you.
A few years ago around July 4, we wrote about the fallacy of the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in the Citizen’s United v Federal Communications Commission case opened the door to giving personal rights to corporations by prohibiting the government from restricting political expenditures. These same fallacies underpin the recent ruling in Burwell v Hobby Lobby newly bestows on corporations the right to assert religious freedom when considering their employees birth control. Neither were good decisions. They were irrational and false because they are devoid of any valid national vision.
As Congress waves its arms trying to rectify the impact of these two decisions, I thought it would be interesting to revive our previous analysis.
Our national constitution was designed to provide a process for managing collectives and overarching rights to limit their operation against the individual and personal choice. By according individual citizen rights to collectives, the court destroyed this balance. The result was the creation of an irremediable failure within the foundation of balanced decision making in the Constitution, resulting in the final destruction of any voice from the people at the ballot box.
Kenneth Arrow
Collectives are not and can never be functionally equivalent to individuals. The critical difference is in the quality of decision making. Individuals make choices based on their own sense of truth and their will to act upon it (or not). Collectives aggregate the opinions, true and untrue, fantastic and incomplete, of their members by various means, but never as an individual. The essential unfairness of this was conclusively demonstrated in the 40’s by Kenneth Arrow, in a PhD thesis that foreshadowed a lifetime of work for which he later received the Nobel Prize in Economics. In brief, Arrow showed that, given a group of three or more people, all expressing preferences according to their own desires, there was no possible way to combine their individual judgments to achieve a collective decision that would be non-dictatorial, representative, decisive, and fair, among necessary qualities. The main difference is that the individual decides, but the group decision making process, even conducted with perfect transparency, necessarily diffuses the inevitably illogical and irrational way the conclusion was reached, protecting the guilty within the group by spreading moral responsibility across the whole body of participants, both innocent and guilty. Of course, Arrow’s Paradox may also be taken as a proof of the inevitable inadequacy of any collective form of government to achieve all the ideals one might reasonably expect of it.
The Constitution elaborates a mechanical government and gives it force, while the Bill of Rights offers a set of vague and unenforceable promises to protect the individual from the depredations of government and the mob or horde. What can we possibly do to rescue our communities from the global plan of legalized slavery that is now sliding into place with the surety born of an alien invasion of overwhelming might? Old-style humans increasingly organize to own and control all property and, since property is essential to life, all living things as well. They have conspired to take control of all aspects of government, including the ability to define what government is and is to be. They have announced loudly their intention to make our presently oppressive government a refined instrument of total social and economic control, to accelerate the attrition of the weak by deliberately increasing the death rate through destruction of social and medical services and infrastructure, and to trap a planet in their incredible solipsistic delusions of personal grandeur. Such is the legacy of our pastfathers.
For over two centuries the worst of such bullies progressively gained greater control over the Federal government, the US military, and the know-nothing cults displaying their self-generated delusions and ignorance under false-flag Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, which, as “religions of the book,” are peculiarly susceptible to such spiritual derailment when subjected to ignorant literal reading of their largely irrelevant and obsolete texts.
And what has all this social terrorism of the meek and powerless achieved for our nation? The US has the poorest performance among all advanced economies in income inequality, food insecurity, prison population, and mathematics education. At the same time, US life expectancy is significantly worse than other advanced nations.
We celebrate our nation’s birthday and honor the vision of what our nation might have been had we been a truer and wiser people, less inclined to reliance on imagined history and other myths of the past, and more willing to replace fear with love. Now that we have witnessed the cycle of our old nation, like Greece, Rome, and other false social constructs, cycling to an ignominious end in a convulsion of greed, bullying, and imperialism, we know better for the future. It is now our task to build new ways of living on the remaining working parts and reusable structures of that which we now transcend.
Our own transhuman destiny calls those of us who understand and have experienced the full dimensions of complete freedom of sexual orientation and gender identity to accept our role as teachers and leaders in the founding of a new social order. We shall move forward in time with the future, at last to build that great and fabulous society of which we have always dreamed.
There’s mighty work afoot. Let us begin to prepare for the second great North American federal republic—the nation that is to be, that will realize the ambitions of humanity to be safe and at peace, where all can grow into the fullness of their abilities.
by Alice Popcorn
Flickr/creative commons
Transhumanism has a very simple definition, so you may be a transhuman without realizing it: Transhumans translate their ideal visions of what the world can become into actions they can accomplish in the here and now. For example, transhumans envisioned new technology for driverless cars, decades ago. What was once considered fanciful is now recognized as inevitable as we now see some of these cars on our highways and local streets. It began with an idea a long time ago and then brought into reality.
It is the same with social issues such as civil rights, economic justice, and free immigration. The radicalization that gives birth to an activist takes place suddenly, when their vision of how things should be reaches critical mass in both the heart and mind. A transhuman point of view is what propels progress because the vision of a better future never fades, even though human society is intentionally organized and maintained to inhibit such growth and allows social bullies who manipulate unearned privilege to enslave the masses through religious hierarchies, governments, and corporations.
Becoming Transhuman carries with it the personal assumption of responsibility for the consequences of your actions. It implies that you love and serve every person as you are (or wish to be) loved and served by others. It implies that you are committed to vigorous development and ethical exploitation of human technical and artifactual ingenuity on all levels of literal reality—physical, mental, and motivational.
Transhumans serve humanity in this way because their reasons for being and acting are completely removed from typical human concerns. The characteristic difference between a human and a Transhuman viewpoint is that, in contrast to the human, whose behavior is based on mythic memes imparted by family and society, the Transhuman sets aside all such myth in favor of direct engagement with reality guided by personal dedication to the realization of love.
Humans who increasingly dedicate themselves to the honest demonstration of loyalty to the idea and values of a better possible future for our world transition to a Transhuman state, and fundamentally connects each of us to become part of the emerging collective consciousness of a joyful universe.
Ultimately, people will be distinguished by who is for improvements to the whole versus those who still cling to their very pedestrian and entirely self-centered attitudes, notable only for their complete lack of compassion, and (fortunately) destined for extinction.
So, are you transitioning to be a transhuman? The future hopes you are.
For more: Can I transition to be transhuman
Photo of central panel of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights by Will
Flicker/creative commons“Women like sex. Stop making ‘health’ excuses for why we use birth control”
— Jessica Valenti, author, Guardian columnist, and founder of Feministing.com (@JessicaValenti)
Once again, Valenti has focused her laser-sharp analysis to challenge popular arguments on behalf of free access to reproductive health. She urges everyone to stop saying that birth control is necessary for the small percentage of women who use it for medical health reasons, and deal with the reality that 99% of women use birth control, mostly because they like sex, and shouldn’t have to make excuses for it.
It’s amazing that in 2014 conservatives (men mostly but some of their womenfolk too) are pressing the idea that any sex beyond purposeful reproductive sex is dirty, bad, and slutty. A recent study in the Journal of Sexual Behavior, highlighted today at Think Progress, exposes the underlying conservative myths that drive bad outcomes, such as the US Supreme Court’s devastating Hobby Lobby decision last month.
First, if women don’t have “paternity certainty,” they will not know who they need to rely on to support them and their future child, a notion from last century that disqualifies women as masters of their own destiny.
Second, conservatives believe that the very availability of birth control leads to promiscuity, a notion completely dispelled by actual research. Women are no more likely to have multiple partners with free access to birth control.
It’s important to recognize that the fear of women’s promiscuity in many countries causes their murders, and activism to stop this behavior should be of paramount importance. In the US, these conservative theocrats just want to curtail women by keeping alive the idea that women are meant to home and in their place, wholly dependent on men.
Women like sex (a lot) just as much as men do is a fact that modern society must deal with in order to progress out of the 1800s by embracing this reality and the forever changed moral landscape.
It’s interesting to go further back into our history to understand the true genesis of these ideas, as we did a few years ago, and ask the question: When will men, women, and everyone in between, recognize they are enslaved by women-hating ideas and instead embrace true liberation through the wholehearted the embrace of erotic freedom?
To answer this question we start by making the distinction between anarchy, a legitimate and proven approach to governmental organization, and terrorism, a deliberate technique of chaotic social disorganization. We’re not talking about anarchism which is by its nature is chaotic and destructive. Anarchy is something different, used to connote simply a world comprised of humane and entirely voluntary associations without the need for interference by governments, religious hierarchies, and corporations.
A chief tool of hierarchical governmental violence directed against its citizens is sexual repression through false religions, failed ideas of government, and corrupt concepts of commerce. Every aspect of organized human endeavor is corrupted at its origin by the universal practice of sexual and erotic repression, worthless superstition reinforced by ignorance and compelled by violence.
In From Why Privileged Elites Cynically Oppose Erotic Freedom we pointed out that erotophobia is real, a deeply seated, invisible but all-pervading, blind, screaming, and insanely raging fear to embrace the one thing in your material life that can actually save you from meaninglessness and give power and value to your life experience.
Erotic engagement is the first real step from the purely material-physical-sensory into the domain of spirit. The joy one experiences is indeed a gift from the cosmic source that leads us onward to higher levels of inspiration. By denying the legitimacy of this first step on the “highway to heaven” the historic oppressors of society would make it virtually impossible for most people to ever engage the path of love and truth, the path of light, their own personal pursuit of happiness, which is unacceptable to the oppressors because it this is the only true path to personal and societal freedom which necessarily dilutes the power of the elite. By trapping humanity in such darkness, religions, governments, and commerce have conspired to destroy all human hope of progress by harnessing human effort for the advantage of a greedy few.
Thus we see that erotic freedom, the foundation of all freedoms, is also the most direct entry for modern humans to the pathways of love, truth, goodness, and beauty. Free love, pan-eroticism, and collective social reversion—the continuing experience of comprehensive personal joy, apart from social and economic duty—are keys to human activity celebrating truth, the active gift of love. And this unity of experience eventuates in the emergence of the brotherhood of all people, and leads to the kind of social network that eventually stabilizes the most desirable form of anarchy.
Erotic experience is the simplest inspiration of awareness of transcendent love that erases all conscious objection. Personal and shared erotic experience demands trust and rejects violence. Anarchy requires that there exist no need for government violence against citizens. The balance required for successful and stable anarchy can only be maintained when society is pervaded by the atmosphere of mutual love and trust between all people.
So the question remains: When will men, women, and everyone in between, recognize they are enslaved by women-hating ideas and instead embrace true liberation through the wholehearted the embrace of erotic freedom?
Study: Children Raised by Same-Sex Couples Healthier and Happier
Photo by Beth Lofgren
Flickr/creative commons
Our children are now 28 and 32 after being raised in what we originally called a post-gender family, in keeping with our world view that post-genderism is part of everyone’s future.
As their parents, Dan and I may have appeared to them, and most of the world at large, as a “straight” couple, but we both considered ourselves true androgynes, wishing since our youth to encompass everything available to males, females, and everything in between. It’s why we fell in love and stayed in love, and eventually founded VenusPlusX to usher in what we call A New Age of Sexual Freedom.
While they were growing up, Dan and I consciously overrode any social constructs that might be limiting to our children’s own self-expression, encouraging them to find their own path, what felt right to them. We let them make their own decisions at family meetings, and left to their own devices, they always (or almost always) chose a path of their own that we agreed with. We didn’t have to superimpose our views over their own minds, something too many parents do when they view their children as extensions of themselves rather than distinctly sovereign in their own right. We never asserted parental power, and instead put ourselves as their equal, asserting that it is the power of Love that is greater than all of us. We didn’t do everything right but we always strived to and this kept our attitude pointed in the right direction.
They turned out great, both now in meaningful relationships, each seeking what Dan and I shared, true love. They are the most wise people I know.
Still yet another longitudinal study has come along, this time from Australia, that seems to surprise many people in showing that children growing up with same-sex parents have just as much and by some measure more happiness, self-confidence, and family cohesion, and better health and school performance.
As queer parents are simultaneously finding their own way in a world currently filled with discrimination, they are more humble about their roles as parents, and this helps children discover their role on their own. Opposite sex parents who see themselves as the ultimate authority over their children’s’ lives, should take note, and start aspiring to see themselves similarly, as trustees in service for their children’s safe and healthy passage into adulthood.
