A Modest Apology

Three suggestions for kinder, gentler, more accurate social media posts

Wise words from a man who never said them.

Did you know James Franco is dead? Or that Idaho Governor Butch Otter thinks poor people are genetically inferior? Or that British author Jonathan Swift thinks the solution to world hunger is to eat babies? None of these stories is true, but the first two fake articles from a satirical content producer called City World News made the Internet rounds in the past few weeks and baited more than a few readers. I was one of them. I made the very public and easily avoidable mistake of believing (and worse, tweeting) the story about Governor Otter.

Satire has a long and colorful history, one that has been particularly prominent in the discussion of the tragic terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo. While hardly anyone would defend shooting cartoonists, for a surprising number of people, the answer to the question, “Can’t you take a joke?” seems to be “no.” In the case of Governor Otter, I didn’t see the satire, perhaps because I spend a significant portion of my time trying to defend the rights of people that society just doesn’t care about. Many of the real news stories that cross my Twitter feed every day—people with mental illness shot and killed by police, or dying in solitary confinement, or being refused treatment in emergency rooms, or facing the death penalty for actions that were a result of their illness—are true.

Anyway, I screwed up. It was mea culpa, and a few of my friends very kindly pointed out my mistake. But one friend was a little less kind. She wrote: “People who blindly promote satire as truth risk diminishing their own validity.” 

At first, I thought her comment was a little harsh. I mean, I work full time, take care of four kids, and in my so-called “spare” time, I’m buried in dissertation research. You know, too busy to check my sources, right?

Wrong. My friend was right. And the thing is, validity and credibility really matter to me. So here are three suggestions I’ve come up with for myself to ensure that going forward, I tweet more responsibly.

1. Don’t send late night tweets. When I read the Otter story, it was at the end of a long day. Work was intense. The kids were fun—but exhausting. It’s entirely possible that I was unwinding with a glass of cabernet when I read the outrageous “article” I retweeted without checking my source. I should have turned the phone off when I got home and enjoyed a good book instead. Lesson learned: No more late night tweets.
2. Always check your sources. As Abraham Lincoln famously did not say, “The problem with Internet quotes is that you can’t always depend on their accuracy.” www.snopes.com is my favorite source for fact-checking urban legends. Lesson learned: It takes ten seconds to check a story on Snopes. But if you tweet something that isn’t true, you may look like a fool on the Internet forever.
3. Be charitable in correcting people who tweet inaccurate information. The challenge with information these days is that it’s moving so fast. My friend’s comment struck me as harsh—but it reminded me that I’ve made similar “You really should have checked your sources” comments in the past on other friends’ posts.  Lesson learned: You don’t always have to be right. Sometimes it’s okay to be kind—to yourself and to others.

We all make mistakes. And though I regret my inaccurate tweet, I don’t regret standing up for the rights of people who are treated unfairly. I’ll continue to tweet about social justice, while following my own advice about slowing down and checking my sources—and hopefully my followers will not feel that my validity and credibility are too tarnished by one mistake. 

(And with respect to Governor Otter and City World News, props to the person who got me to tweet a false story that points at a larger uglier truth! Jonathan Swift would be proud!).

Add the Words

Why sexual orientation and gender identity matter to me

#addthewords #Idleg pic.twitter.com/bFyO78Bn6Z
— Liza Long (@anarchistmom) February 17, 2014

Katie M. (not her real name) was my best friend in high school. Tall, blonde, and beautiful, she introduced her simple, unsophisticated Mormon classmate to foreign cinema and the Smiths, while I returned the cultural exchange with apricot Jello and Wednesday night Mutual activities. A gifted artist, Katie passed me notes that were illuminated manuscripts, masterpieces of satiric humor. Once a month on a Friday, we would skip school and pursue our own education at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts—my mom was more than happy to write a note stating (honestly): “Liza did not feel like coming to school on Friday.” At our Texas high school graduation ceremony, Katie was the only woman in a pants suit—in her muted yellow, wide-legged costume, she looked like a young Katherine Hepburn.

My Dad had already accepted a transfer to Bakersfield, California, and two days after I graduated, Katie and I watched as movers loaded up the contents of my parents’ two-story Tudor style home. I was sad to leave my boyfriend and Katie behind (the boyfriend and I broke up shortly afterward. Katie and I are friends to this day). Katie had already arranged to visit me in July; we had been planning a road trip to San Francisco during our senior year’s final semester.

A week later, I got her letter. Written on thick cream colored paper in her distinctive bold, backward-slanted hand, were words that would change how I felt about sexual orientation forever.

“I can’t keep this a secret from you any longer,” she wrote. “I am gay. I have always been this way. It is not a choice.”

“I know you probably will never speak to me again,” she continued. “I know how important your church is to you, and how they feel about homosexuality. But I have to tell you the truth.”

I put the letter down. And that’s when I realized that knowing what I knew now about Katie didn’t change how I felt about her. Not one bit. I loved her as one of my dearest friends before I knew she was gay, and I still loved her.

I also felt immediately ashamed as I remembered the Mutual activities she had attended with me at the LDS church. In one activity, a leader explained how AIDS (a new disease in those days) was God’s specific curse for homosexuals, a modern day scourge for our nation’s new Sodom and Gomorrah. Had Katie flinched? Had I noticed? We talked about that—and other things—on our road trip that summer. We talked about what it meant to be a gay teenager, about the prejudice and painful stigma. These were things I had never known. My worst experiences in high school had involved a toxic bout of highly visible acne in ninth grade. That was nothing compared to the anguish Katie felt as she realized how difficult her life path would be.

I still love Katie today. And I think she has just as much right to marry her life partner—a lovely, brilliant woman—as I have to marry mine (and he is all guy).

That’s why I spent my lunch hour at the Idaho State Capitol building today.

My state, along with many other states, is in the midst of a new civil rights war. State Senator Lynn Luker, a Mormon from Meridian, has proposed legislation that would allow people to deny services to other people on the basis of their religious beliefs. As Magic Valley Times reporter Kimberlee Kruesi reported:

Under the bill, doctors could deny providing medical treatment to gay people or even unmarried mothers and not lose their medical license. The same would be allowed for teachers to deny educating one of their students if they were gay.  

Meanwhile, the LDS church has joined other religious organizations in actively fighting against the legalization of gay marriage in Utah, claiming that it is not bigotry but concern for children’s welfare that drives their opposition as well as a defense of so-called "traditional marriage" between a man and a woman as the only type of marriage sanctioned by God. I’m sorry, but the whole “It’s not me; it’s my God who is a bigot” statement  just isn’t going to cut it as an argument against fairness, decency, and dare I say it, love.

The God I believe in is all about love. And love—transformational, all consuming, non-judging—is not present in Senator Luker’s bill.  In all fairness to my LDS friends, many of them disagree with Senator Luker’s hateful stance and support former Idaho State Senator Nicole LeFavour’s brave crusade to add the words—see Joanna Brooks’s Ask Mormon Girl, or pretty much the whole gang at Feminist Mormon Housewives.

But this isn’t just a religious or civil rights debate to me. Respecting and protecting people on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity is a mental health issue. Our children are dying. Suicide is the third leading cause of death for children and young adults ages 10-24. A disproportionate number of these young people are LGBTQ. 

Our refusal to love and accept our children for who they are is leading to their deaths, as In theParlor blogger and youth pastor Tyler Smither noted:

"We are now faced with the reality that there are lives at stake. So whatever you believe about homosexuality, keep it to yourself. Instead, try telling a gay kid that you love him and you don’t want him to die."

What kind of God would want a young person to take his or her own life because of persecution and rejection? Not the God who said, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

Another Christian, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin put it bluntly: ““Anybody who doesn’t show love towards gay and lesbian people is insulting God. They are not just homophobic if they do that–they are actually Godophobic because God loves every one of those people.”

When I was a Mormon (a phrase that increasingly feels like “once upon a time” to me), our Sunday School teachers told us that we already knew who would win the great war between good and evil. I can now extrapolate that lesson to this current fight to deny our friends and neighbors, our brothers and sisters, equal protection under the law. We already know how this fight will end; and fortunately, Senator Luker and his supporters are on the wrong side of history.

But I want to make history today. I never want any young person to feel like my friend Katie did, afraid to lose a friendship or a job or even her life, simply because of whom she loves.  Add the words, Idaho! And let there be love now, for all of us.

Bag that Mountain!

When pride goes before fall

I like to climb mountains. And at the base of all my alpine hikes is a single goal: to stand on the summit, muscles singing, lungs burning, head spinning with lack of oxygen, and survey the landscape from the highest point like a god assaying her creation. If I carried a flag with me, I would plant one at the top and make a little speech in my own honor. So when I work really hard to bag a mountain and find myself thwarted just 50 feet from my goal, I am, to say the least, nonplussed.

But there are all kinds of summits.

A few weeks ago, I climbed Timpanogos, a popular scenic day hike in the Wasatch range, with my 13-year old son. He was fine on the way up, but as we began to descend, the unfortunate effects of attitude sickness began to plague him. “I can’t go any further, Mom,” he gasped at Emerald Lake, more than 3,000 feet above the parking lot we had to reach before sundown.

I stared at him, puzzled. “Can’t go any further” wasn’t actually one of the choices on the menu. We had climbed the mountain—ascended past the tree line, hiked through verdant alpine meadows, traversed rock fields strewn with granite boulders, inched along the narrow switchbacks carved into the nearly sheer rock face to reach the summit. No one was coming to save us. We had to get down—altitude sickness or not. I let him rest, urged him to drink water…and we hiked.

He survived, just like I did when I had to hike down from the top of Mount Whitney with a torn calf muscle. Of course, I hiked up Mount Whitney with a torn calf muscle as well—which tells you everything you need to know about my relationship with my mother. I tore the muscle on the very first step of the hike. Admittedly, I was showing off when I injured myself—testing my new hiking shoes’ Vibram rubber soles without warming up first. As I sprinted up a nearly vertical granite boulder, I felt the pop, then the agonizing flood of pain, and I knew.

“I can’t hike, Mom,” I told my 64-year old mother when I made it down.

“But we have permits,” my mother replied. That settled the matter. I hiked 22 miles on a calf muscle roughly the size and color of a county fair-prize winning eggplant—then didn’t walk again for four months. (In case you are wondering, I credit the liberal topical application of cayenne pepper mixed with mudwort, coupled with the fact that climbing typically relies on the quadriceps—for my physical ability to make the hike. And yes, it hurt worse than natural childbirth).

On my first backpacking trip to the Sawtooth National Wilderness in Idaho, I found myself in a similar predicament. And when faced with the opportunity to make a decision that could adversely affect my life and the lives of my four children, this time, I made the right choice. I chose not to climb the last 50 feet of a mountain. It was a whole new kind of hurt—and it opened up vistas of possibility hinting at a new kind of freedom.

At 10,190 feet, Mount Regan is not the highest mountain in Idaho—or even in the Sawtooths—but it presents a challenge worthy of the most experienced climbers. My hiking buddy Nate and I braved seemingly sheer metamorphic cliffs to reach the point of no return—a rope anchored into the side of the mountain at the edge of a 25-30 foot deep crevasse that separated us from our summit goal. We had unwisely chosen the North Ridge route; at a 5.3 rating, we would need ropes and other equipment to access those last 50 feet(according the Yosemite Decimal System for rating hikes, a 5 or higher is described as “technical free climbing involving rope, belaying, and other protection hardware for safety. Un-roped falls can result in severe injury or death”). And you don’t even want to know what the previous 50 feet were like. Let’s just say that death was definitely an option on the menu.

Nate was all ready to make the jump (We had left one more sensible member of our party behind on safer ground). I am not going to even pretend I wasn’t tempted—a sudden picture of Jesus standing on a mountain top with Satan, surveying the world, flashed through my mind. But my confidence factor was a mere 25%--in other words, I was only 25% sure that I could cross the space beneath me and cling to the other side. Nate started playing with his rope, putting a few “Man vs. Wild” moves into practice as he swung the teal nylon cord across the abyss, catching it on the opposite side. I had already made my decision when I said to him, with utter calmness, “Crossing that crevasse is a selfish act. If you want to do it, I will stand here and take your picture when or if you reach the summit. But it’s selfish. And I will not follow you.”

I was speaking to myself. But Nate heard me. For several minutes. he thought about what I said, and in the end, he too decided not to cross. I knew exactly how courageous that decision was.

“Why do we do this to ourselves, Mom?” my son had asked a few weeks before, as he moved with aching slowness down the back face of Timpanogos.

Why do we climb mountains? I think there are two reasons. We climb because we want to push ourselves to the limits of our physical endurance; we want to see just how far these sacks of skin and bone can take us. And we climb because there simply isn’t any other way to experience what we feel when we stand on the summit, feeling for a brief moment what the gods feel. No photograph, no mere description, can do it justice—that sense of absolute awe and wonder and pure freedom that assaults your every sense when you are quite literally on top of your world.

Why then do we choose not to summit a mountain? That question is more difficult for me. We choose because when we reach the moment of decision, we find ourselves insufficiently aware, informed, prepared. We choose not to succeed at some things because the risks outweigh the benefits. To give up something that you value greatly for those you love is to know the meaning of sacrifice in the Biblical sense. As I turned back from Mr. Regan’s taunting summit, as I wedged my body between sheer rock faces with vertical drops of more than 30 feet, as I scavenged for handholds in flaking granite, I thought of Abraham, knife poised above the body of his innocent son. Why does God give us these urges, then tell us not to act on them?

Every major religion on earth eschews desire, in all its forms. If I can free myself of the desire to conquer this mountain, if I can surrender my will to God’s, only then can I discover what it means to be truly free. I will not attain the summit that I seek in this life, constrained as I am by the limits of human desire, by the fallibility that pits my hubris against God’s will. But I can try. Faith can move mountains. It can also move climbers to abandon unworthy summits and seek new heights. And as I learned on Mt. Regan, to give up your pride might be the greatest sacrifice of all.

Next time I go up there, I’ll have rope, rappelling equipment, and a flag.