Shake, Shake, Shake, Señora!

I enjoy the fact that my professional life is punctuated by new beginnings every few months. Each semester promises a new tableau of faces and perspectives against which my successes and failures will play out. This sort of continual change suits me well. At times, I've had difficulty in maintaining close relationships over long periods of time, but I thrive in new and uncertain social situations. It brings out the adaptive, improvisational, relatable parts of myself that are positively magnetic.

It should go without saying that there's a slight period of adjustment at the beginning of any new semester. I teach a lot of classes, eight this semester, and I have a variety of other self-imposed obligations to balance. That explains why I haven't posted in a while. It takes a few weeks to learn the routine. There's no obligation this semester to which that adjustment period applies to better than my fitness course.

Starting last summer, I've made a concerted effort to work a sort of fitness activity into my weekly schedule. I have a sedentary occupation, which involves a great deal of sitting on my b.w.a. I'm also not the healthiest eater, so it's important that I do something to resist my body's genetic tendency towards being "big and tall."

 You're not going to like the way you look. I guarantee it.

This semester, I signed up for a group cardio fitness course, but it was cancelled due to low enrollment. I don't have a lot of free time to work fitness into my schedule, so I signed up for a different class at the same time of day. That, dear readers, is how I ended up in a Zumba course with a throng of middle-aged women.

At first, I thought "How embarrassing could it possibly be?" There's going to be several other people like me who probably lack a natural sense of rhythm or shame, so I might just blend into a sea of sweaty, awkward, graceless bodies. Like I do with most things, I went to the internet to read and research more about being a man in a Zumba class.

As it turns out, there's a phenomenon in psychology known as the Spotlight Effect. Basically, we're each obsessed with ourselves and how we're perceived by others. We assume that our missteps, such as clumsily twirling while dancing, will be noticed and mocked by those around us. The irony of the Spotlight Effect is that research shows the opposite. Because most people are obsessed with their own perception, they pay less attention to our mistakes because they're too busy thinking of their own. This is compounded when one finds oneself in a room full of people dancing and twirling about like drunken giraffes with equilibrium disorders.

Armed with this knowledge, I went and danced bravely. The workout itself wasn't all that bad. My heart rate was up, I was sweaty, and I felt like I worked a variety of different parts of my body. Everyone, save the instructor, was as bad at the dance steps as I was. So long as I focused on extending my range of motion to get more out of the moves, this seemed like it might be better than I initially thought.

A few nights in, we were going through our usual steps. The instructor added a few steps, including a few pelvic gyrations and floor slaps. There's no such thing as a subtle pelvic gyration, but this step involved putting both hands behind my head and swinging my midsection left, then right, then back to the left, like I'm some kind of afternoon-shift reject at a ladies' club dedicated to reenacting The Full Monty, five days a week with five shows a day. Or even worse, I might have created a passing resemblance to this:

To compound the awkwardness, we were also meant to stop, mid gyration, bend over, and slap the floor with both hands. As I said earlier, I have no sense of shame. If I do, it's easily brushed aside like a tiny crumb on a my sweater, clinging to its last few moments of life as edible food. Like a good little student, I dutifully bent over, hung my butt out for everyone behind me to behold, and slapped the floor with all the style and lightheartedness that I could muster.

We went through this same series of steps a few times, giving me a chance to truly perfect my obscene thrusts, wiggles, and bodily flops. I was at the peak of my "dance like no one's watching" delusional delight. The world around me didn't matter and despite the fact that I'm a 6'0", 240 lb. man with a beard, I felt like I fit right in.

While bent over, slapping the floor demonstratively, I made the mistake of looking back between my legs at whatever was behind me.

Inverted and slightly dizzy, my eyes made contact with the face of the middle-aged woman behind me, who was staring straight at my abyss. She smiled and winked at me, just as the instructor directed us to fling our torsos back up into their full and upright positions. I felt the embarrassment sweep across my face and my eyes widen, unsure of what to make of what had just transpired.

Was she being friendly, confident, and platonic? Am I so ridiculous looking from behind, bent over and red-faced, that the only appropriate response is to flash an equally silly face back at me? Was I *gasp* being ogled?

The questions swirled through my mind as we prepared to complete the same set of moves one more time. I put both hands behind my head, thrusted my pelvis left-right-left, and decided to keep my face forward this time. No awkward second looks, no reestablished eye-contact, no problem.

Hands up, legs out, bend over, slap floor, look forward. There should have been no problem, except that the woman in front of me also chose that exact moment to look back between her legs and make eye contact with me. Once again, I found myself in the crosshairs of group fitness faux-pas.

Did she think I was checking her out? Am I going to have to awkwardly apologize for making eye contact later? Will I have to look at the ground in front of me for the rest of the course, terrified that my male gaze will be horribly misinterpreted? Why do people keep looking at me, through legs or not?

As quickly as the questions came, new moves forced me to remember which foot should go forward, which leg should go out, which arm should go up, or which foot I should be bouncing on next. I had no time to obsess over my mistakes.

The class ended and, thankfully, there were no awkward conversations about eye contact or backsides. Yet, I had to ask myself if this was truly something I wanted to do. I have enough feminist friends that I'm now acutely aware of how much my maleness can affect a situation. I try to stay on this side of being a creepy, stereotypical male, but we're all subject to the vicissitudes of awkward moments and wild misinterpretations.

Awkward moments are sort of my specialty. I have them all the time. My humor is predicated upon them and I'm exceptionally good at causing them with my friends, acquaintances, and loved ones. They're going to happen. It's inevitable. What's important is how I respond to them. I haven't always done this well, mind you.

Because of the nature of my job, with all the seasonal reshuffling of faces and scenarios,  awkward moments pop up often. Each time, I try to remember how I responded the time before. If it worked well, then I go with that response. If it didn't, I'll try something different. Most of the time, I'm left with the realization that there are far more bad responses to choose from than good ones.

It can take time to figure out the best way to navigate the strangeness of human social interaction. I'm 35 and I should probably be a bit further down the road to being cool as a cucumber, but I'm not. I'm a work in progress. I'll always be a work in progress, trying to evolve into a better, less painfully awkward, more effective version of myself.

Perhaps you are as well. The truth of the matter is that no one pays as much attention to our missteps as we do. We're our own worst critics and we believe that the world around us is constantly watching our endless comedy of errors. They're not. They're all too busy starring in their own versions to notice every mistake we make. Enjoy your own performance. Try to make your short time on center stage a memorable performance. If you miss a line or miss a step, jump back in the line and try it differently the next time.

If you feel up to it, click "play" on the video below (sorry, not for mobile users), get up, and wiggle what the good lord gave ya. After all, what's the worst that could happen?

If You Blink, You Might Miss it

If you ever find yourself driving north out of Tulsa on U.S. 75, the last Okie town you'll see before crossing the Kansas state line is a tiny little hamlet called Copan. Copan is one of those much-maligned small prairie towns quickly being bled dry by population shifts and the aging of its citizens. There's nothing there to speak of, except for a few hundred good ol' folks and a dam-created lake. In fact, you can barely see Copan from the highway. As the old idiomatic expression goes, if you blink, you might miss it.

Beautiful downtown Copan, OK.

Personally, tiny little Copan has a few important memories for me. My mother taught there for a few years and my brother lived a few of his formative early years there. Though I don't remember it, my parents brought infant Kyle home from the hospital on a snowy January day to a small trailer park on the outskirts of Copan.

I find myself thinking about Copan today, not only because it's my birthday, but also because it's a time deep in my past, hard to remember and pieced together from incomplete recollections or yellowing photographs. 35 years isn't that long of a stretch of time though, relatively speaking. Many of my friends and colleagues are older than that and a few small decades are practically insignificant in the context of human history. 

With all that mind, it's still true that I don't have any meaningful recollection of living in Copan. There's a few photos reminding me that it happened, but that's the only link I have to that time and place. It's irrevocably in the past, ungraspable and increasingly hard to see clearly. It's like that because that's what time does to all of our memories. What seems unforgettable and overwhelmingly vivid at the time becomes as distant and muted as the snapshots of my infancy have become.

My childhood, once so easy to recall and ponder, grows a bit more dim with each passing January. My teen years, soaked in awkward coming-of-age regret, are less and less important to my current identity. Even my memories of my daughters as toddlers seem somehow less vibrant, which is more than a little depressing. For some, such feelings might bring with them a sense of dread. After all, we're nothing but a slowly degrading body containing a set of lessons and experiences. If those experiences fade, aren't we losing parts of ourselves?

Perhaps. We might also lose the vibrancy of the past because there are fresh memories forming that are far more relevant to who we are now. Humans are always caught between cycles of decomposition and regeneration. Our bodies do it at the cellular level. It's only fitting that our minds dwell in the same narrow boundary zone.

Thinking about it doesn't make me sad, though. I feel lucky, actually. Lucky to have lived and experienced so much. I'm grateful that I remember the squeak of my bare skin against the long, oddly angled playground slide at the now-closed Will Rogers Elementary. I'm grateful that I vividly remember the unconstrained swell of pride I felt at winning the spelling bee in 5th grade. I remember the terrifying feeling of fist fighting one of my close friends in 9th grade over a girl because he told her to "drop the zero and get with the hero." 

I remember how badly my hands shook for hours and days after very nearly rolling my truck over a concrete guard rail on the I-40 crosstown bridge in 1998. Just one more half roll and I'd have fallen over a hundred feet to my inevitable death. I am grateful to remember the sinking feeling, ten years later, watching my best friend drive his truck away from a Marie Callender's in Norman, knowing that I might not ever see him again.

There are so many other more important moments that are seared onto my mind and so many other less relevant memories fading away into nothing. I'm grateful for every one of them, whether it stings to recall them or not. The memories I'm allowed to hold onto constitute an ever-evolving, ever-transforming identity and it's the only one I've got.

Each one that passes makes room for a new one to take it's place. One day, hopefully far in the future, there won't be any new memories being made. My mind will stop and so will my body. Everyone that knows me, has ever spoken to me, hugged me, or kissed me will also stop being. Those memories made will all eventually fade into nothing. This is natural and beautiful and there is never a reason to fear our collective, common fate.

This year, my birthday wish is to enjoy the memories I can make and not fear losing some of them to inevitability. I want to savor them while I can and allow them to come and go naturally. I want to enjoy the tiny parade of small, miraculous memories as they pass by and begin to yellow with age, however imperceptibly. I want to keep my eyes open as often as I can and allow them to take in as much light as they possibly can so that I miss very little that goes by.

Being grateful to be alive another year is a wonderful feeling and it passes far too quickly. It's just like that small town off U.S. 75. If you blink, you might miss it. Have a great week out there and be good to each other.

Aim Low, Shoot High

I used to love the first day of school after Christmas break. The cool, crisp winter days coupled with residual happiness from the holidays to inflate my optimism about the new year. I'd meticulously set out an outfit of new clothes and lie in bed, resisting sleep with all the excited anticipation of being dealt a new hand of good cards after having lost big with the previous one.

This time things would be different. This year, I'd transcend my inborn awkwardness with a previously untapped sense of savoir-faire. I'd walk through the hallways with new-found swagger, overcoming my oversized nose, ears, and mouth with unassailable cool. This year, I'd come out on top. Eventually I'd fall asleep, drifting away on a sea of baseless optimism and elevated expectation, only to soon run aground on the grim shores of the uncaring, unfeeling reality of the universe.

Today marks the beginning of my fourteenth semester as a college instructor. In a few days, I'll also turn 35. I'm fast approaching the midpoint of average life expectancy for an American male and I'm acutely aware of the fact that my most elastic and energetic days are probably behind me. Consequently, I've long since abandoned that heedless hopefulness that lulled me to the sleep of bright, expectant dreamers.

First days after Christmas break are now exercises in anxiety. I'll meet approximately160 new faces whose names I need to memorize for my classroom ethos. I'll go through the next round of conversations in which I explain how little I accomplished over the break and how delightful it was to do nothing at all. Because of my body's psychosomatic peculiarity, I'll perspire during the first few class sessions like I'm Miss Teen South Carolina on an episode of Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?

The new beginnings are now anxious affairs because I spend too much time thinking about how I can do better, be more organized, and achieve more than I did during the last go-round. Like most people, I wrap up this anxiety in a narrative of relentless self-improvement. The real truth has nothing to do with Jay Gatsby-eqsue plans for personal improvement. In all honesty, it's the accumulating weight of past disappointments that pushes me to strain harder against failure.

The problem isn't that I'm so deeply flawed that I can't meet the relatively unimpressive expectations I might set for myself. We're all guilty of feeling that way about ourselves from time to time. There's something to be said for having the appropriate discipline, but that rhetoric is as guilty of discouraging as many people as it motivates. The real problem lies in the foolishness of thinking that I can attain a perfect outcome or that I can even get close to perfection. I can't. You can't. None of us can. 

The horrifying reality is that in either possible outcome, you're still going to asphyxiate and die. 

Take that, adorable little aphorism.

Year after year, the optimism of early January failed to translate into reality. Year after year, the disappointments stung a little more. I'd resolve to lose weight and fail to do so because of a lack of discipline or an abundance of delicious warm donuts. I'd make a resolution to be more organized and marvel at a new system of categorizing daily activities, only to forget to transcribe what was in my head onto the planner page. The inevitable let down consequently felt even more disappointing because I was likely on the third, fourth, or fifteenth attempt at achieving perfection.

This year, I want to stop cloud jumping. I want to set realistic, attainable goals that don't require anything approximating perfection. I don't want to inherit a new batch of stress from failing to succeed in running down perfection. I don't want to constantly beat myself up because I didn't put forth my best effort on a particular day.

I don't want to be afraid that I'm falling short of an ideal I could never have attained. I'm not even going to trick myself by aiming just below perfection and hoping that I'm satisfied with that result. Knowing you came close and fell short always feels worse than anyone admits.

I want to accumulate an entire bookshelf full of participation awards and be thrilled to have them. I don't want to make a goal to be a consummate professional at all times. I'm doomed to fall short of that on a weekly basis. Instead, I aim to dress a bit nicer, grade a bit more efficiently, and be more articulate than clever in my speech. I don't want to be the idealized wise and inspiring father. I'm instead aspiring to raise my voice less often and ignore a few more eye-rolls. I'm going slowly come to grips with the fact that my daughters are not only no longer my little girls, but that they also no longer want to be little girls at all.

You might say that I'm surrendering to mediocrity. You might think to yourself that I'm moving goalposts so that I can feel better about my feeble sense of personal discipline. You might be right.

I'm going to aim low and shoot high. I'm not going to to obsess about how I've fallen short of my goals. I'm going to set reasonable, attainable goals, maintain a reasonable level of effort, and enjoy knowing that everything above and beyond meeting my goal is a extra reward. I'm going to strive less and savor more. This year, I'm not going to wallow in the disappointment of falling short. I'm going to revel in the satisfaction of no longer fearing perfection.

You Don't Have to Drink to Have a Happy New Year's Eve, but Sometimes It Helps

I secretly hate New Year's Eve celebrations.

I usually don't let people know this about me, as it might affect their appreciation of certain moments in our shared lives, but there it is. The drinking, paper horns, and butchering of Auld Lang Syne are all celebratory of a moment that feels oddly similar to closing a coffin lid for the last time at a long funeral. You're glad the process is over, but there's a bittersweet moment where the passage of time hurts more than you'd like to admit and all you want to do is fall out of reality and never let anything pass from your life ever again.

In spite all that morbid heaviness, I celebrate every year with all the expected pomp and circumstance. I happily don pointy hats, count backwards from ten with unmatched revelry, and occasionally pop champagne party poppers at the night sky to remind the universe that no happy moment deserves to pass silently. In my head, it sounds a bit like this video.

Here's to you little, wonderful reminders of existential defiance.

As 2013 winds down, I'll watch as my little family busily readies themselves to yell at the television, bashfully kiss cheeks, and bellow out "HAPPY NEW YEAR!" to the entire block, whether the block cares that we're celebrating or not. In between all the fun, I'll also catch myself thinking back to a few other New Year's Eves and try to recover them from the oblivion of the past by dusting them off and rearranging them on the shelf of my mind.

When I was little, New Year's Eve was always spent with my family, much in the same way that my daughters spend theirs with me. On New Year's Eve on 1989, I set up a pathetic little refreshment table for my family of three to enjoy as we celebrated the moment. My brother, who had just turned 16 a few weeks earlier, was out and about with his car and overdue to return home.

I used my mother's brown glass dishware to set the festive mood. Nothing says the party is about to be a thrilling, rip-roaring affair like orange-brown glass tea cups. In fact, nearly every other kid I knew had a set of these dishes somewhere in the house, incomplete and almost unusable because of their fragility and almost certainly toxic level of glass tinting.

Aww yisssss. It just got real. It's party time!

I remember anxiously waiting for his arrival, along with a group of his friends. When they finally pulled into the driveway like a rough gust of wind, I had long since abandoned my post at the spread. The ungrateful teenagers didn't even care to notice my elaborate snack table as they walked to to the kitchen to procure nacho cheese chips and soda. Knowing that my brother would soon graduate and move on to his own life, I realized that night that New Year's Eve, in addition to celebrating new beginnings, also sadly commemorated the inevitable passage of time. My little family, much like the universe itself, was in constant motion outwards away from its center.

Several more years passed in which New Year's Eves were passed by yelling at the television,  at chaperoned church lock-ins, or underwhelming get togethers where I had no particular quarry to catch by midnight. Going to college had yet to deliver a truly memorable New Year's Eve until 1999. The mass hysteria surrounding Y2K had driven people underground or into disarray at the terrifying anticipation of the moment when the twentieth century and human civilization might have passed into history, permanently.

Having absolutely no plans, I found myself tagging along with a friend to his half-sister's house on the outskirts of tiny Harrah, OK. I wasn't yet 21 and I hadn't really ever been three sheets to the wind drunk before, but it seemed like that night would be as good as any to test my limits. No one knew me, save my friend, and he was drinking as fast as I was. With the courage of anonymity and a total lack of shame, we poured the better hours of the night into glasses and down our throats.

Finally, the long-awaited moment of truth neared. I could barely stand without wobbling, but everyone got up from their seats, gathered their glasses for the toast, and as usual, started yelling at the television. As soon as midnight hit, one comedic genius in attendance flipped the circuit breakers in a back room, sending the house into total darkness.

In hindsight, that practical joke was a stroke of genius. At the moment, a room full of drunken twenty-somethings was suddenly plunged into a pitch black swirl of confusion. Bodies fell over bodies. Glass flutes dropped to the floor with shattering reports. A full-figured woman with big Aqua Net hair and a neon green blouse fell onto me and pinned me on the sofa, while another person fell back onto her. Madness descended and just for a moment, I thought the world was ending. I wondered if anyone would tell my mom that I had died heroically and not as collateral damage underneath the suffocating bulk of a back page model from the 1988 Lane Bryant clothing catalog.

I didn't die, thankfully. Power was restored quickly, bits of glass were picked up, and I ended up throwing up my night into a hedge on the backside of the house. New Year's Eve, despite my best efforts, had yet to be anything but an exercise in awkwardness. Every year, it's the same thing: trying to muster up excitement for midnight in the Central time zone when I had just watched a much bigger and better moment an hour earlier in Times Square, hosted by Zombie Dick Clark.

R.I.P., America's Oldest Teenager.

Better New Year's Eves were to come in future years, as I formed my own little family. We built gingerbread houses, blew paper horns, and yelled at the television at the duly appointed time. Yet, every succeeding year took on the same final, funereal quality. Another year gone by in which I missed a few opportunities, met a few new people, and kept moving closer towards death. Another year that will not seem that far in the past when future generations marvel at the fact that I was alive and aware of my surroundings in 1989.

I suppose I'll never really get the hang of New Year's Eve. I'm probably far too introspective and hypersensitive to let the moment pass any way but mournfully. I hate saying goodbye and I hate it even more when I see glittering, brightly lit reminders that time is marching forward without ceasing. I'm still holding out hope, though. Maybe this year will be different. Maybe not.

As 2013 passes into memory, we'll all probably spend the last few seconds like most Americans do: counting backwards from ten while yelling at the television. We'll mark off another year and another trip around the sun. Some people will be very proud of the year they've had and others will be glad such a long, difficult year is in the rear-view mirror.

In a moment like this, where the passage of time is beheld with more anticipation and reverence than at almost any other time, I'm reminded of one of my favorites lines from one of my favorite novels. In The Sound and the Fury, when given his grandfather's watch, Quentin's father tells him that "I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it." Time catches us all in the end, even if we break the hands off the clock like the ill-fated Quentin Compson tried to do. There will be a New Year's Eve in the future that passes with one less familiar voice yelling at the television. This will continue on until all of tonight's festive voices eventually fall forever silent and a wholly new throng of voices are yelling happily in their place.

Perhaps this year will be different, though. Perhaps this year we could surrender more of our precious minutes in an effort to forget about time. Perhaps by falling out of time's endlessly clicking, mechanical grasp for a moment, we could stop trying to conquer the unconquerable. Perhaps, instead of yelling at the television, we could relish the unmeasured spaces without worry and yell joyously into the face of the indifferent universe that we not only lived, but lived well.

It's a nice thought, anyway. Happy New Year, everyone! Don't drive drunk if you've been drinking.

On Weighing More Than a Duck

If there was one particular attribute I possessed as a college student, it was a propensity to weigh in too often. I would have much rather been the best writer, the most insightful, or the most well-read, but those weren't my strengths. I'm a talker. I think quickly and I form conclusions with considerable speed, which inevitably led to sharing those conclusions if no one else wished to speak up. I couldn't really help it. After a professor asked a discussion question, most of my classmates would sit quietly, even in certain grad school seminars. The silence hanging in the air would electrify my mind into voicing a position.

Sometimes, I wouldn't even actually support the position I presented. Being a competent devil's advocate was as exciting as being the voice of insight. When a free exchange of ideas occurs, I'm irresistibly inclined to join in the discussion. I used to become embroiled in facebook discussions, laced with bluster and ignorant fallacy. I've learned my lesson there and now most of mpackaged but fierce exchanges take place with strangers on Reddit. Now that I lead a great many discussions with unwilling, captive participants, I've learned to better obscure and mute my own personal position of a topic when necessary.

I've been reticent to weigh in on the fracas surrounding Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson and his candid comments in an interview with GQ. Over the last week, I've watched unproductive arguments unfold between politically-opposed friends and passive-aggressive status updates appear about knowing who to unfriend or unfollow because of the controversy. I enjoy listening to a vibrant debate as much as I used to enjoy classroom discussions as a student,  yet there's something troubling about this controversy and, by extension, these contemporary conceptions of free speech.

Before I go any further, I'm going to take a page from the book of an earlier incarnation of myself and explicitly state my position on the issue. I simultaneously support both gay equality and Phil Robertson's right to consider homosexuality immoral. In fact, I support a strong set of protections for freedom of thought, speech, and association. I believe that a secular, democratically-oriented republic should have a permissive and inclusive attitude towards individual freedom and the free exchange of ideas. I believe the same constitutional protections for the free practice of religion are philosophically analogous to the same proposed protections for sexual orientation.

I also believe that Phil Robertson's inability to delicately articulate his point of view is more indicative of passive bigotry on his part than it is a lack of polish and refinement. That being said, accusations of hate speech should be saved for the egregious offenders, not those who are simply unvarnished or unaware of the effect of their words on others. 

The new Pope's overtures towards relatively progressive political perspectives is a clever masking of the fact that, all other things being equal, the Pope still believes that atheists and gay folks are in desperate need of spiritual rehabilitation. He's better at covering his iron-fisted morality with a velvet glove than Phil Robertson, but they live on the same planet in the solar system of ideologies.

It's an unresolved problem for modern Christians to consider that love, but with ulterior motives, isn't an inherently insincere point of view. Proclaiming to love everyone while demanding rehabilitation is a recipe for isolation, whether it is from others or imposed on others. Conditional, contingent expressions of love aren't ethically acceptable simply because they're packaged with a big red heart on the envelope. There's still an explicit assertion that goes something like this: "I love you because I'm obligated to do so by religious authority. You're broken and I won't respect or accept you unless you admit that you're not only broken, but that I also know what's better for your life than you do. If you do both of those things and then conduct yourself according to my standards, I'll consider seeing you as someone worth sincerely loving."

That's not "loving the sinner but hating the sin." That's christofascism with a valentine, desperately trying to not be exposed for what it truly is.

On the other hand, Phil Robertson's world view and unrecognized white privilege inform his morality in such a profound way that there's no perceived tension between loving the sinner and hating the sin. From another perspective, expecting the people we love to continually improve themselves isn't insincere. A parent wants their child to be better, do better, and eventually fulfill all the promise that parent believes they hold. That parent's love isn't insincere simply by virtue of it being partially composed of expectations.

It isn't unreasonable to believe that a meth addict can't flourish without admitting their dependence and then working to purge its poisonous influence from their life. There's no ethical inconsistency to demanding that one's relationship partner be sexually and romantically exclusive to you. A partner's tendency to be unfaithful isn't a lifestyle one should be forced to accept if one believes that the only valid relationship to have is one where fidelity and respect are expected. So it goes that if an individual's moral precepts foundationally predispose them to see a certain set of behaviors as unacceptable, that individual is free to not engage in those acts.

Phil Robertson's views on homosexual inequality and harmonious, prelapsarian racial coexistence emerge from a cultural specificity that shouldn't be excluded from any evaluation of his personal moral principles. A&E knows exactly who Phil Robertson is and to claim that his personal intolerances are somehow suddenly unacceptable is flatly disingenuous, at best. This is the same network that willingly edited, approved, and aired the following segment earlier this year.

I'm not going to make any inferences beyond what the obvious dry humor attempts to exhibit, other than to say that A&E knows exactly who they're dealing with. They have from day one, as well. Having grown up around socially conservative backwoods-folks, there's nothing surprising about Robertson's views. In fact, I'm surprised they haven't been more of an issue or have been more crudely presented. There's something fishy about this whole fiasco. It's likely as not that this whole thing is a clever method for A&E and the Robertsons to part ways and boost the value of the syndication rights to the show.

That being said, his suspension isn't a free speech issue in any constitutional sense. There's very clearly no state or government pressure to censor Robertson's speech. In fact, his state's own governor, Bobby Jindal, defended Robertson's right to speak his mind. Jindal's defense was a faulty resemblance argument, but the underlying principle of tolerating uncomfortable content isn't unreasonable. A&E isn't even prohibiting Robertson from speaking his mind as often as he likes, to whoever will listen. They're simply not allowing him to use their show, which is a private business entity, as a platform upon which to air his beliefs.

Philip Nel wrote a blog explaining how academics should expect more protections for unpopular speech than Phil Robertson, due to the unique nature of their occupation. The argument could explain itself to a greater degree, but it's a blog post and it does a suitable job of explaining the difference in public pressures and production expectations between a reality TV show star and a college professor in a politically hostile state. It's the same protection of unpopular academic speech that guides part of my teaching.

I have ongoing arguments with colleagues about allowing students to make certain arguments on sensitive issues. I know several colleagues who have chosen to disallow essays on certain topics like abortion or gay marriage. That's their pedagogical choice and they're free to choose what they wish, but I allow students to write essays from their own cultural specificity. I receive essays attacking the practice of abortion, promoting gay marriage, comparing taxation to enslavement, and asserting that Obama is a villain.

I allow these topics, not because I find common ground with their premise, but due to the fact that my primary goal is to help a student articulate their own political views to a greater degree. More often than not, this directly involves an uncomfortable recognition that one's personal beliefs are hard to defend, inherently bigoted, misinformed, or are based on logical fallacies.That's not the stated purpose, though. It does happen and I'm happy to guide a student through the process of the scales falling off their eyes.

I believe that the solar system of ideologies needs socially conservative and socially progressive voices. I believe these voices need to learn to evaluate and use evidence effectively. I believe that a rich field of perspectives creates a more thriving, representative democracy. I not only want a socially conservative student to explore their views against gay marriage in an essay, I also want them to engage with another student's views in favor of abandoning the institution of marriage altogether.

I want their writing to become more articulate and thoughtful and I want them to see that there is validity in other perspectives across a wide spectrum of ethical positions. In fact, I want them to forget that ethical positions exist on a spectrum at all. They're in constant, multidimensional movement in relation to all other perspectives, just as celestial bodies are both constantly in motion and constantly affected by their proximity to other celestial bodies.

So, while I think that Phil Robertson's views are unsurprisingly conservative, I don't think that he shouldn't be allowed to express them. I do think that anyone with similar views should look at Robertson's statements as an example of inarticulate expression and I also believe that Robertson's critics shouldn't forget  that his inability to acceptably articulate his point of view is rooted in his cultural specificity. 

When we discuss historical revision and idealizing the past, I want to point to Robertson's views on Louisiana race relations as an example of how different people might not even possess the same foundational, seemingly elementary view of history. The awareness of such a perspective ideally makes us all more acutely aware of the limitations of our own perspectives.

Free speech is best wielded skillfully. Those who wield it like a crude club or a misused semiautomatic assault rifle risk undoing the protections that we're fortunate to have. Yet, the answer is not to enforce inoffensiveness through a panopticon, where everyone is afraid to truly speak their mind. We want weighty, substantive arguments that can be comprehended by a wide swath of the populace.

The way to acquire that is not by overreacting to folks like Phil Robertson. We acquire those sought-after perspectives by helping others refine their ability to articulate their own point of view, so that civil discourse is elevated enough to rise above the influence of political demagogues,  reality television personalities, and sensationalist magazine writers.