San Francisco’s Frameline Film Festival: On the Negative Impact of the Castro’s Culture

Ideological intolerance may not be typically thought of as stemming from a psychological pathology from unresolved emotional problems, especially if the ideology is classified under “political speech.” Even so, the vehemence with which flashes of hostility are unleashed by an intolerant ideologue against people objecting to the person’s ideology and thus to it being imposed as if it were God’s eternal truth is plainly psychological. Volunteering at a film festival in San Francisco in late June, 2026, I was the receiver, or lightening rod, of such vitriol from two attendees and the festival’s manager who oversaw the volunteers because I had unwittingly made statements that violated the dominant ideology not only at the festival, but in San Francisco moreover. In business schools, it is well known (or should be well known) that an organizational culture can reflect a wider culture in the organization’s environment. A toxic local or societal norm, which reflects values, beliefs, and even assumptions held by a sufficient proportion of inhabitants to gain a “critical mass,” can infect organizational cultures within the locality or society. I contend that this dynamic applied to the Frameline (LGBT) film festival in 2026 and the wider the Castro (gay) district of San Francisco then, where the festival was based. The same overreaching ideology and hostile defense mechanism were salient both in the non-profit organization and, extending beyond the Castro neighborhood, in San Francisco itself as well as in at least some of the suburbs.

The full essay is at "San Francisco's Frameline Film Festival."

 

Transgendered (Male) Athletes in Women Sports

While the 2026 World Cup was underway in North America, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling, which is to say, a judgment rationally argued, siding with member-states that did not permit “Y chromosome” students in public schools to play in on “XX chromosome” sports teams. Not being a writer who fecklessly evades controversial topics for fear of turning away some readers, I will attempt to tackle the jurisprudence and ethics of male athletes who self-identify as women playing in women sports such as American football in public schools.

The full essay is at "Transgendered (Male) Athletes in Women Sports."

Turkey on Gay Obscenity

On 8 April, 2026, eleven leaders of a Turkish gay-rights group faced a judicial trial on charges of “obscenity” and “violating the protection of the family.”[1] These charges are of course heavily subjective and even controversial, especially well into the twenty-first century by which time gay and lesbian couples were raising children in family units so the issue in Turkey could be said to be which type of family warrants protection. The obscenity charge had to do with the fact that two men or two women kissing romantically in public still made a significant proportion of people uncomfortable in Turkey. Turkish authorities had deemed photos showing gay couples kissing and put on social media to be obscene. That homosexuality was not illegal there at the time rendered the trial perplexing to many in the gay community in Turkey and elsewhere in the world. Perhaps even more perplexing is the fact that the constitution of Turkey contained an article on protecting family values and that gay couples raising children were exempted from even being deemed families.

The full essay is at "Turkey on Gay Obscenity."

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1. Gavin Blackburn, “Turkey Puts 11 Leaders of LGBTQ+ Rights Association on Trial for ‘Obscenity,’” Euronews.com, 8 April, 2026.

Transcending Caritas in Romantic Love

During the High Middle Ages, Troubadour poetry composed primarily in southern Europe included themes including of courtly love, which became associated with marriage. Before then, that institution was associated mostly with property and progeny rather than with romantic love. Interestingly, it was just as love was becoming associated with marriage when the Roman Catholic Church ended its centuries-old gay-marriage liturgy, which, sans property and progeny, was uniquely associated with love (for why else would gays marry?). The irony is that “modern” gay marriage in the West in the twenty-first century may have more to do with sex than love in the sex-centric gay culture of today, though obviously gays are fully capable of genuine romantic love that transcends such superficialities as lust that can be prioritized too highly at the expense of romantic love. Fear of emotional intimacy can exascerbate such misordered concupiscence. Adventurous exuberance combined with this fear need not eclipse more meaningful intimate relations. Indeed, married gays in loving, committed relationships even raise children in loving homes. Although utterly obscene to more conservative folks, such “mixed families” grounded in love warrant respect and even admiration for being based in genuine love even though emotional intimacy can be scary. This is what should be preached from the pulpit. Antipodally, the sex-centric approach to “relationships” in the gay “culture” justly warrants condemnation for being superficial, short-sighted, and utterly self-centered. Yet, whether gay or heterosexual, romantic love need not be selfish. The distinction in Christian theology between caritas and agape is relevant in making this point.

The full essay is at "Transcending Caritas in Romantic Love."

Cancelled Classes: Harvard’s Far-Left Ideological Courses Take a Hit

I contend that the more courses that are heavily ideological and biased in advocating a particular ideology that a university has, the higher the chances that a university will eventually suffer from a lack of educational legitimacy and perhaps even have to close down for want of students. Even great American universities such as Harvard and Yale are not immune. Their huge endowments could even function as organizational slack enabling a particular ideological bent to percolate throughout the universities for a long time with impunity due to the sheer amount of money in the universities respective invested wealth. When I was a student at Yale, I worked part-time at the Development Office calling alumni to give to the already-wealthy university. I had no idea at the time that being rich could actually harm a university, or allow for educational decadence with impunity. At Harvard in 2024, there was some indication that the students’ freedom in selecting some of their courses was serving a good purpose in putting biased-ideological courses out of business for lack of sufficient enrollment. The student marketplace could substitute for compromised university administration in its educational oversight function. Adam Smith would be proud.

The full essay is at "Cancelled Classes at Harvard." 

The U.S. Supreme Court: Free Speech Trumps Public Accommodations Law

I contend as a matter of reasoned opinion rather than infallible fact that the Free Speech protection in the U.S. Constitution applies to not only human beings, rather than to non-human legal “persons” (e.g., corporations), but also to speech where the purpose is speech rather than something else. I have written elsewhere on the mistake in treating corporations as if they were human beings, so I treat only the second claim here. I reference the first claim only as context for my broader claim that the U.S. Supreme Court has tended to over-extend applications of the free-speech clause not only beyond its original intent, but also common sense. The latter violation is particularly astonishing. 

The full essay is at "Free Speech and Public-Accommodations Law"

Encroaching Political Consolidation: The Weakening of the U.S. Federal System

It is much easier to point out the sliver in the other person's eye than the plank in one’s own. Regarding the gradual political consolidation of power at the federal level in the U.S. at the expense of not only the member-state governments, but also the federal system itself, it is easier for a political party to dismiss its own contribution than to take a wider stance including the continued viability of the federal system, or federalism, itself. As a result, both of the major parties has contributed to the increasing political consolidation at the expense of the check-and-balance feature that a balanced federal system has.

The full essay is at "Encroaching Political Consolidation in the U.S."

Inconvenient Truths

When I was a post-doctoral student, I sat in on a course on German films during World War II. The instructor was an 80 year-old German man whose parents had been forced into sending him to a Hitler Youth camp. I asked him once whether he had seen Hitler in person, and, if so, did he look like how the documentaries have him pictured. Having the respect for knowledge that should be expected from a scholar, he told me that he had indeed seen Hitler in person. The brutal Nazi dictator was authentically smiling during his visit to the Hitler youth.  I was surprised, as I had been brought up with the image of the grizzled grins and terse glares.  To be sure, the victor’s history fits the horrendous crimes committed, but at the cost of objectivity, which any historian should value. The subjective historical portrayal and the German professor’s honest answer led me to wonder what Hitler was really like as a person. Even the epitaph of monster does not fit with the notion of the banality of evil visible at the Eichmann trial in 1961. Eichmann had been responsible for making the trains run on time to the concentration camps.

About a decade after my conversations with the German professor, I met a 92 year-old American veteran of World War II.  Did the American people know of the holocaust? I asked. Only after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, he answered. Before the U.S. went to war, the European war was something far away. When the U.S. was at war in Europe and Asia, Jewish leaders in Europe asked President Roosevelt to bomb the train tracks that were carrying the cattle-cars to the ovens. Roosevelt, the veteran said, told the Jews that he didn’t have time for that. “Wow, that’s a story!” I said in astonishment. One of the veteran’s daughters asked him how he knew this. “It was common knowledge at the time,” he replied. I had not even known that the American public knew of the gas chambers before the liberation of the camps. Even if Roosevelt wanted to be focused on military objectives because achieving them would mean winning the war, that he felt he didn’t have time to thwart the Nazis from transporting human beings to ovens astonishes me. I asked the veteran if the very language, cattle-cars to ovens applied to human beings shocked Americans during the war. He replied that “surprised” is not the right word for it. He did not characterize how he and other Americans had taken the news, which I found interesting.

The full essay is at "Inconvenient Truths."

A Gay Judge on California's Anti-Marriage Proposition in 2010: A Judicial Conflict of Interest?

In 2010, Chief Federal District Judge Vaughn Walker issued a ruling that declared Proposition 8 (against gay marriage) an unconstitutional violation of gay Californians’ civil rights. After retiring in February of the next year, the judge revealed that he was in a 10-year-old relationship with a same-sex partner. The question is whether a reasonable belief that the judge would stand to benefit from the ruling means that there was a personal conflict of interest sufficient to have the judge’s ruling vacated. Amid the emotions swirling around issues such as gay marriage that involve the uneasy mix of personal matters and public scrutiny, an urgent need exists for ethicists and jurispruds to isolate the pernicious problems inherent in the conflict of interest phenomenon so we all can have faith that such issues are decided impartially in substance as well as appearance.

The full essay is at "Are Judges above Personal Conflicts of Interest?"

The U.S. Supreme Court: Too Much Ideology in Jurisprudence?

Should the electorate in a republic be able to remove Supreme Court justices due to their past decisions on particular cases? Can this basis be distinguished from removing a justice for judicial incompetence? One thing is clear: the general public does not have the technical expertise to perform a “supervisor’s evaluation” on a judge. Obviously, anyone can see that someone who skips work on a regular basis is not fit for the job, but this is different than evaluating a job by the technical criteria of the profession. Distinguishing between a particular decision and general judicial approach, for example, is more difficult. Moreover, it can be difficult to balance the rights of popular sovereignty (i.e., rule by the people) against the rule of law without respect to majority opinion.

The justices of the U.S. Supreme Court in 2012.

The full essay is at "Ideology Twisting Legal Reasoning."

Off Target: Corporate Spending as "Speech" against Gay Rights

In a 5-4 decision on January 21, 2010, the US Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United that federal restrictions on corporate spending in elections constituted a violation of free speech. Critics called it wrong to equate corporate “speech” with individual speech and said the ruling would allow special-interest money to flood election campaigns. The bipartisan nature of the opposition to this ruling is striking in these largely partisan times. The court’s ruling is opposed, respectively, by 76, 81 and 85 percent of Republicans, independents and Democrats; and by 73, 85 and 86 percent of conservatives, moderates and liberals. Majorities in all these groups, ranging from 58 to 73 percent, not only oppose the ruling but feel strongly about it. Even among people who agree at least somewhat with the Tea Party movement, which advocates less government regulation, 73 percent oppose the high court’s rejection of this particular law. In addition to overwhelming opposition to the decision, there’s also bipartisan support for Congress to try to reinstate restrictions on campaign spending by corporations and unions.

The full essay is at "Target's 'Free Speech'." 

Westboro Church's Anti-Gay and John Galliano's Anti-Semitic Opinions: The U.S. and E.U. Contrasted

The First Amendment protects free speech in the U.S. even if it is as hurtful as signs at a Marine funeral proclaiming "Thank God for Dead Soldiers," the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on March 2, 2011. The Westboro Baptist Church celebrated the death of Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder in Iraq with signs such as "God Hates You," along with anti-gay messages at his funeral in Maryland in 2006. The late Marine's father sought damages for emotional distress. An appellate court had reversed the $5 million award granted by a district court, and the U.S. Supreme Court concurred with the appellate court's decision.  The Wall Street Journal notes that "Chief Justice Roberts nodded to the wrenching set of facts in the case, writing that 'the applicable legal term— 'emotional distress'—fails to capture fully the anguish Westboro's choice added to Mr. Snyder's already incalculable grief.'"  Crucially, however, the justices of the majority opinion would not fall to the temptation of acting on the emotion that naturally follows hearing of such harm.

Interestingly, on the same day as the American high court's decision, the designer John Galliano was being fired by Dior's CEO and investigated by the French police (for inciting racial hatred with anti-Semitic statement, which is illegal in at least the French and German states of the EU) for having made anti-Semitic insults to a couple with whom he was arguing late at night in a trendy bar (cafe) in Paris. There, the emotions got the best of both the designer and those who reacted to the video posted of his comments (albeit showing only a part of the argument). Perhaps a grieving father at his son's funeral reading signs that thank God for dead American soldiers can be likened to a Jewish couple at a bar hearing that they are lucky their grandparents or parents were not exterminated by the Nazis. It is difficult for the rest of us to know how either feels, or how to compare the pain.

In any case, that any human being would want to hurt another so much is truly a sad commentary on our species that otherwise vaunts itself as being in the image of God. Perhaps the question is what kind of God is being envisioned here. A vengeance is mine, sayth the Lord sort, which Nietzsche condemns in his writings as already discredited on account of having such a sordid divine attribute as vengeance?  The deed is done, according to Nietzsche.  So too, the pain has already been inflicted on the grieving parents and the Jewish couple.  The rest is merely mopping up. 

I contend that the impulsive reaction in Europe to the fashion designer's drunken anti-Semitic slurs is inferior to the majority opinion of the American court in the Westboro case because the tolerance of reason is more in keeping with a free society than is vengeance or retribution against a disliked opinion. 

The full essay is at "Anti-Gay and Anti-Semetic Statements."

Transgender Europeans: Activated by Political-Correctness or Human Rights?

The European Court of Human Rights issued a ruling on April 6, 2017 “in favor of three transgender people in France who had been barred from changing the names and genders on their birth certificates because they had not been sterilized.”[1] I submit that the use of the term sterilization is misleading. Such a framing gives the erroneous impression that human rights are at issue. In other words, it is possible for a human-rights activism to go too far.

The full essay is at "Transgender Europeans."

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[1] Liam Stack, “European Court Strikes Down Required Sterilization for Transgender People,” The New York Times, April 12, 2017.

Aimee & Jaguar

Aimee & Jaguar (1999) is a film based on a true story centering on Felice, a Jewish woman who lived in Berlin until 1944 and belonged to an underground lesbian, anti-Nazi (spying) organization. To be a Jewish lesbian in Nazi Germany cannot have been an easy life, with possible catastrophe just around the corner on any given day.  In the film, Felice becomes romantically involved with Lilly, a mother of four and wife to a Nazi solder who is fighting at the eastern front. The film is essentially a love story between the two women. I want to draw out some of the ethical issues raised in the film—with the love story serving as my critique of two ethical theories—utilitarianism and duty-based ethics—that are implied in the film.  

The full essay is at "Aimee & Jaguar."

Starbucks Takes a Hit for Supporting Gay Marriage

In January 2012, Starbucks joined Microsoft and Nike in publicly supporting the same-sex marriage bill in the U.S. state of Washington. Two months later, the National Organization for Marriage began a “Dump Starbucks” boycott as a result of Starbucks' support of gay marriage. David Barton, whose sermon on May 19, 2013 on “pious caffeine consumption” was posted on the internet, said, “The question is, ‘Can a Christian give money to a group he knows will use it to attack what God supports?’ . . . You can’t drink Starbucks and be Biblically correct on this thing. It’s just a real simple principle.”[1] Barton had earlier likened being gay to smoking and gay marriage to dogs marrying horses. In spite of these rather extreme claims, the boycott gained some traction. At the next Starbucks’ stockholder meeting in March 2013, Tom Stauber, a stockholder, suggested that the company’s sales and earnings were a “bit disappointing” in the quarter after the boycott had begun precisely because of the issue. Whereas the stock and dividends had risen 38% from October 2011 to September 2012, the rise was only 7.6% from March 2012 to March 2013.[2]  If indeed the causal attribution is correct, then it can be asked whether the management (and/or board) of a company taking a political stand on a controversial societal issue that is not expected to save the company money and in fact could result in lost revenue breaches the fiduciary duty to the stockholders unless a majority of shares are voted in support of the position.

Starbucks typically relies on young adults to both work in and manage the stores. Even an excellent vetting process in hiring does not mean that effort is not needed to fortify the mechanism of accountability.  Source: wikimedia.  

The full essay is at "Starbucks: A Shaky Management Wades into Social Issues."

See also, Bucking Starbucks' Star, available at Amazon.

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[1] Meredith Bennett-Smith, “Christians Can’t Drink Starbucks Because Company Supports Gay Marriage, Evangelical Says,” The Huffington Post, June 3, 2013.

[2]Aaron Smith, “Starbucks CEO Holds His Ground on Gay Marriage,” CNN Money, March 28, 2013.

Gay Marriage in New Jersey

Just after New Jersey’s legislature passed a law legalizing gay marriage, Gov. Chris Christie followed through on his promise to reject the bill by quickly vetoing it and renewing his call for a ballot question to decide the issue. In returning the bill to the Legislature, Christie reaffirmed his view that voters should decide whether to change the definition of marriage in New Jersey. "I am adhering to what I've said since this bill was first introduced – an issue of this magnitude and importance, which requires a constitutional amendment, should be left to the people of New Jersey to decide," Christie said in a statement; "I continue to encourage the Legislature to trust the people of New Jersey and seek their input by allowing our citizens to vote on a question that represents a profoundly significant societal change. This is the only path to amend our State Constitution and the best way to resolve the issue of same-sex marriage in our state.”[1] Why stop at issues requiring a constitutional amendment? Although technical legislation requires representatives to wade through and discern specific ramifications pro and con, broad policy questions could also be subject to binding referendums. That is to say, representatives could be seen as doing only what the electorate cannot viably do.

The full essay is at "Gay Marriage in New Jersey."

1. Angela Santi, “New Jersey Gay Marriage Bill Vetoed By Chris Christie,” The Huffington Post, February 17, 2012.