Suddenly Anything is Possible

Response to Washington Post “Diversity Training Ineffective” Article --Howard Ross

As someone who has been doing diversity work and delivering diversity training for almost 25 years, I feel compelled to respond to the recent article that appeared in The Washington Post on January 20 titled “Most Diversity Training Ineffective: Study Finds.” The study, the second in two years by Alexandra Kalev at the University of Arizona and Frank Dobbin at Harvard, claims to show that diversity training has failed to deliver on its promise. Specifically, the report states that diversity training is "ineffective and even counterproductive in increasing the number of women and minorities in management," and that the negative effects are particularly present when trainings are mandatory and "corrective" in nature: ergo designed to undo perceived injustices.

This study has given us an opportunity, once again, to look at whether or not diversity is effective, and at ourselves as diversity practitioners. While I haven’t had an opportunity to read the full study, which at this time has apparently not yet been published, I do have concerns about the implications of such a report. Not the least of which is the tendency to describe diversity training as a monolith and evaluate it accordingly, as if one could make an assessment like "Restaurants are. . ." without taking into account how different one restaurant might be from another. There are a wide variety of diversity trainings that are introduced and used in a wide variety of ways. In addition, the assertion in the study that mandatory trainings "are the problem" belies the fact that some of the most successful companies in the country have produced results using mandatory training as a tool for diversity. Clearly, for those who disagree, the study provides justification for what they already want to believe.

In fact, the rabid "I told you so!" reaction to the study on the part of respondents which can be seen on The Washington Post's blog site indicates that it has tapped into a profound reservoir of resentment, much of which has been generated by people who claim to have been forced to attend trainings in the past.

At the same time, however, I am concerned about the reactions by some in the diversity industry to the recent report. I have read reactions over the past few days that have denigrated every aspect of the study, and I have been struck by the knee-jerk, defensive responses, not only to the report, but even to its principal author who has been the victim of personal and petty attacks. Diversity supporters seem to have their own need to justify their already established point of view.

I almost feel like I am watching a political campaign.

As is so often in life, the truth may be in between. People have every right to hold those of us in the diversity industry accountable as to whether or not we have produced the results we have promised because, despite our best intentions, we often have not. The fact that so many people have strong resentment to diversity training can be easily dismissed as a result of their inherent bias and resistance to change. Nevertheless, if we are to be thoughtful in our attempts to demonstrate any of the introspection that we often teach in our trainings, we should not be afraid to ask the question, "If we are doing the right thing in the right way, why are we generating so much hostility?"

I believe that we have to acknowledge that despite our most noble of intentions, diversity training has at times been superficial, self-indulgent, even sanctimonious and self-righteous, and not always focused on the business needs of the organization provided for. As diversity practitioners we should not be above working on our own agendas and our own issues both inside and outside the classroom. Most of us know that when people are forced to do anything it brings up a natural resistance. The old saying goes, "If you expect somebody to really say 'yes' to something, they first have to have the freedom to say 'no'."

But that is no reason to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

If we are truly going to practice what we preach, we have to be willing to listen to and learn from research like the Kalev/Dobbin study; to winnow out the valid from the invalid aspects of what they have to say. And we have to avoid the tendency to react from our own attachment to an already determined point of view, especially one that is self-justifying and supports our own economic survival.

Despite assertions to the contrary, a lot of diversity work has, for the past couple of generations, been too driven by an adherence to several "pillars" namely: 1) a U.S. centric focus on race and gender issues; 2) the tendency, despite our occasional statements to the contrary, to focus on individual rather than cultural approaches in organizations, and, most of all; 3) a deeply ingrained "them vs. us" approach that makes it seem as though we are saying that those of us who support diversity are "good" and those who are perceived to oppose it, like the authors of this study are "bad", or even "evil". We, in our common vernacular, speak to helping people "get it." As if we have something that they need and should have. As if they need to be "fixed."

It is time to Re-invent Diversity for the 21st Century; to understand that while we still have to be vigilant in addressing critical issues of discrimination and tragic situations that emerge (such as what took place in Jena, LA) it is time to realize that our expanding globalism calls for a change in our approach from the framing of all diversity work in the "them vs. us" conversation to a broader, more inclusive outlook. It is time for us to realize that most diversity challenges are not caused by evil people consciously trying to keep others down, but by normal people, including ourselves, reacting to a broad level of unconscious beliefs that create different world views and at times correspondingly different actions.

It is time to realize that we have to develop a greater sense of cultural flexibility to be able to study, work, and live in this increasingly multi-cultural world. It is time that the work we do focuses on the needs of the organizations that we are serving, not on our own personal agendas. And it is time to listen more and debate less if we are going to create a society that can truly inquire and dialogue about these important issues.

Examining Our Biases--Reinventing Diversity

For the past year on this blog, there have been a variety of articles that have discussed everything from athletes and steroid use (or denial of usage) (A Cheater is Just a Cheater 10/8/07) to political figures caught in scandal and our examination of them (Room for Compassion) to hate crimes and our often passive or indifferent attitudes towards them (Let's Stop Pretending). A common thread to all of these articles is the underlying question of:

How can we understand bias when we are unable to see it in ourselves?

It is in fact one of the critical questions that we are leading with as we stand, share, and deliver our work in 2008 and beyond; we are in the process re-tooling, re-framing, and Reinventing Diversity.

We are excited about sharing conversations about our personal/individual biases and those found within the organizations that each of us are a part of. We are in anticipation of exploring with our clients and others how organizational and individual unconscious biases intersect and interact with each other and the transformational possibilities and organizational growth potential that can be captured from thorough exploration of our underlying assumptions about the world, ourselves, our clients, and one another--our colleagues.

In 2008 we are Reinventing Diversity with you. We encourage and invite you to join us for one of our web seminars starting again in January. In all of our web seminars you will see examples of unconcious bias and we hope to share and expand our learning with you. Visit our website at CookRoss.com to register.

Thank you for a great 2007 from me, Amri, on behalf of the Cook Ross Team! We are looking forward to a transformational 2008. Make it a Great New Year!

Happy Thanksgiving--Don't eat too much if you ever want to live in New Zealand

New Zealand, who has a national healthcare system with financial health that has varied from moderate to questionable for the past 5-10 years, has the idea that allowing people who are obese to live in their country is bad for the budget. In this country, explicit acts like that would be unacceptable. However, implicitly we see biases against people who are overweight all of the time. The article made me think about the considerations we might have to make with a national healthcare system. For example, how do we address people with health habits that consistently lead to large expenditures? Do we tell them to shape up or get cut off or pay out of pocket? In an election year with candidates big on health care for all, there are a lot of questions to ask.

New Zealand Bans Woman for Being Too Fat

Posted Nov 20th 2007 10:08AM by Cenk Uygur
Filed under: World News, Young Turks, Strange

A British couple wanted to move to New Zealand after their wedding. They ran into one small problem, or actually it was one large problem. New Zealand told them they are too fat to immigrate to their country.

Robyn Toomath, a spokesman for New Zealand's Fight the Obesity Epidemic, said, "The immigration department can't afford to import people who are going to be a significant drain on our health resources ... You can see the logic in assessing if there is a significant health cost associated with this individual and that would be a reason for them not coming in."

No, I can't see that logic. Because under that rationale you would also ban people who smoke and sky dive and have unprotected sex. Are they going to be checking to see if people are using condoms during intercourse before they let them move to New Zealand? And how would they do that check exactly?

In the case of weight, they actually use Body Mass Index that compares your weight to your height and sees if you are within the prescribed limits or not. So, they physically weigh these people and tell them if they're too fat to live in the country. That's sick.

Meddling in people's private lives started with messing with smokers. I worried at the time that it would spread to other areas of our private lives where we made decisions that our companies or governments or insurers disapproved of. And now it has. This is a terrible trend and we have to make sure it's contained. So, I propose banning New Zealanders from coming here and spreading their discriminatory policies to us.

Finally, there is good news and bad news from the British couple trying to move to New Zealand. The groom lost two inches off his waistline and he has passed the health requirements. But unfortunately, his wife still hasn't made it. So she is stuck in England, still dieting.

Let’s Stop Pretending--Howard Ross

On Monday the FBI released its annual report and stated that hate crimes have risen nearly 8% in the past year. “Hate crimes” are criminal incidents that specifically are found to target victims or property as a result of bias against a particular race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnic or national origin, or physical or mental disability. Of course this list does not include gender, although the presence of misogynistic tendency in crimes such as physical and verbal abuse, rape, spousal abuse, etc. could arguably include those as part of this category. (Don Imus, for example, did not commit a crime.) They also don’t include behaviors that do not meet the standard of “criminal activity,” nor those that are not as obviously impacted by the group identity of the victim. The passing insult to a Muslim; the shadowing of the young African American shopper, but not the young white one; the enduring public statements of contempt towards gay and lesbian couples that their children hear from political and religious leaders on the nightly news, etc. Sadly, the list could be endless. When we take all of these into account as well, we can see a continuing pervasive challenge to our fundamental social order.

The rise of these incidents is appalling, and what is most appalling is that they are only the tip of the iceberg. Or, perhaps more appropriately stated: a snowball sitting on the tip of the iceberg. They stick up from under the surface to show us the underbelly; that what is seen is still persistent patterns of attitudes and behaviors that are driven by both our conscious and unconscious attitudes towards diversity.

Yet there are still many people, including intelligent, decent people, who seem to turn a deaf ear to the pain these kinds of incidents evoke, and to the larger dynamic in society that they display for all of us to see, if we were only willing to look. We minimize them. We seem to want to believe that discrimination is gone in society. After all, we passed the civil rights bills. Jim Crow is no longer around and public accommodations are legally restricted from preventing people access.

What makes us want to believe what is so obviously not true?

I think our overall insensitivity to the blinding reality of how difference still impacts our world view is driven my many different things: callousness and disregard for the concerns of others is certainly one aspect. Another is that we don’t want to feel responsible, or even guilty for what we see. It is easier to pretend they are not as prevalent or significant as they are.

But I maintain that these aspects are actually less of a threat than the more pervasive tendency of people to see the world through our own experience, and think it is the “real world” that we are seeing, rather than our own interpretation of the world around us. It harkens back to an ancient quote from the Talmud, often attributed to the writer Anais Nin: “We see the world not as it is, but as we are.”

What we don’t always understand is that we may have unseen motivation under this blindness. In other words, blindness about the blindness. Why? Because it makes us feel better to live in a society in which we believe that people are treated fairly. We have been told, perhaps even brainwashed to believe that that is what America is about. And so we ignore the reality around us because it is uncomfortable, and because we either don’t know what to do about it or simply are too busy with our own concerns to worry about it. It has been said that “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.” On the contrary, it can be a deft coping strategy that allows us to ignore things that we don’t want to believe about our society, or about ourselves. And none of us is immune to this blindness, no matter how “evolved” we think we may be.

People construct elaborate rationale for their denial. I recently had an exchange with a blogger who described himself as “libertarian,” and was critical of any legal code that protected people based on group identity, comparing these kinds of anti-discrimination or anti-hate crime legislations to Hitler’s attempts to identify and isolate the Jews. His point was that it really doesn’t matter if somebody is beaten up because they are gay, for example…what matters is that they were beaten up. And to some degree that is true. A person who is randomly assaulted is just as much in pain as one who is assaulted because of their group identity. However, what this view doesn’t take into account is that additional sense of fear, anguish, ongoing separation and current and past pain that nooses, foul pictures, insulting language, and abusive characterizations of people of any group leave in our social order.

And it is critical to note that our blindness to all of these “feelings” leads to a blindness to suffering. Last week I had the privilege of conducting a planning session for the American Dental Association on the Tamaya Pueblo reservation in New Mexico. The ADA, the Indian Health Service, Dental School educators and people who serve or are members of 50-60 Native American or Native Alaskan tribes came together to create a plan to reduce dental disparities for Native peoples. Why? Because Native peoples suffer from 400-500% of the dental problems that others do. Just like health disparities impact communities of color throughout the nation. Just like our legal system convicts more dark skinned Black men to die in criminal cases than lighter ones.

How many people realize that disparities like this exist?

Anybody who thinks that diversity is no longer an issue in our society is simply not looking.

Every day we all…all of us, of all races, ethnicities, sexual orientations, both genders, etc….all of us walk out into the world and have an opportunity to see what is going on around us. We have an opportunity to see the pain and fear in the faces of people walking by us on the street; or working across the desk from us; or walking into our stores and places of business; or living next door; or even, sometimes in our own houses. We have a choice: we can either look at each other’s faces and see what is really there, and look into our own hearts and see what is really there, and be responsible for it. Or we can ignore it.

It’s time to stop pretending.

Cultural Competency and Prevention

I review Google news regularly to see what is going on in the world of diversity and cultural competency. Thus, often you will see that I post an article that illustrates where we are and the importance of the dynamics that we strive to share with hopes for organizational and personal transformation

This example about children in foster care as a result of being taken from their parents for various reasons illustrates a great opportunity for prevention of long-term harm of a child's mental and emotional health. Now, I am not saying based on the content of this article that children aren't in harm's way many times when a social worker or child services steps into an abusive or dangerous home situation. What I am saying is that when social services personnel (including law enforcement) are not trained to understand culture, generally or archetypically vs. specifically and stereotypically, the results can lead us to the same place that implicit/unconscious biases that are in many cases labled racist, sexist, homophobic, prejudiced do.

If we see disparities and they are consistently showing up and not being reduced, do we just assume that this is just how things are going to be? or Do we question our methods and make deliberate attempts to understand what we need to understand to change the dynamic that keeps repeating itself?

If our intention is to provide service and care that gives the receiver of care and services (most of us who live in cities and towns in most of the world) and those connected to them the best possible short and long-term outcomes, we have to choose the later of the above questions. Then we have to be vigilant in our efforts to understand why we are making the decisions we make and what information or mis-informaiton those decisions are based on.

Racial Bias Seen in Foster Care

By STEVE LeBLANC – 6 days ago

BOSTON (AP) — The white social worker looked at the dark spots on the black child's body and assumed the youngster had been beaten. The family denied it, but the social worker insisted.

It turned out the child had "Mongolian spots" — harmless skin blotches common among black children. The social worker's mistake was discovered before the parents got into trouble.

But researchers and policymakers say such episodes help explain why black, Hispanic and other minority children in the United States are far more likely than white youngsters to be taken from their homes and placed in foster care.

Racial or ethnic prejudices — conscious or unconscious — can lead social workers to see abuse or neglect where none exists, these experts say.

The experts caution that stereotyping on the part of social workers is just one factor in the racial gap, and probably a small one at that. Other factors — higher rates of poverty, inadequate housing and child care, for example — are believed to be major contributors to abuse and neglect among minorities.

For more go to:
Racial Bias in Foster Care Continued

Democracy’s Root: Diversity, from Thomas Friedman

A very interesting op-ed piece by Thomas Friedman, Pulitzer Prize Winning, New York Times columnist and author of The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century speaking on diversity and democracy. . .I found it worthwhile especially as religious diversity has been a part of global dynamics for more than 3000 years; as religious founders and their followers interacted with one another and lived peacefully together or otherwise. Mr. Friedman paints a picture for us to think about the dynamics of religious diversity and what the promotion of diversity vs. democracy could engender in the on-going Middle East-U.S. conversation.

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: November 11, 2007

Last Tuesday, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia met Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican — the first audience ever by the head of the Catholic Church with a Saudi monarch. The Saudi king gave the pope two gifts: a golden sword studded with jewels, and a gold and silver statue depicting a palm tree and a man riding a camel.

The BBC reported that the pope “admired the statue but merely touched the sword.” I think it is a great thing these two men met, and that King Abdullah came bearing gifts. But what would have really caught my attention — and the world’s — would have been if King Abdullah had presented the pope with something truly daring: a visa.

For more click on the following link:
Thomas Friedman on Diversity and Democracy, New York Times Op-ed

Women in STEM - Howard Ross

The USAToday, in an editorial entitled “First, Dispel all the Myths” on Friday, October 12, suggests that the gap in women’s success in science, math, engineering, and technology (STEM) does exist, but that “girls lag in math and science degrees, but bias isn’t the reason.”

On the surface, their justification makes sense. “The suggestion of a conspiracy coordinated by engineering department chairmen scattered among hundreds of campuses defies common sense.” This point may be viable, if one is looking for examples of conscious attempts to exclude the participation or success of women, but what the perspective does not take into account is the systemic unconscious bias that undermines women’s success in STEM, both because of the impact it has on people in the field already, and people potentially aspiring to success in the field, both men and women. The distinction between conscious and unconscious bias in this case is a good example of how the difference in looking at these two kinds of bias can fundamentally impact how diversity affects aspects of our day-to-day life.

The gap between men and women’s performance in these fields is indisputable. As the editorial reports, while almost 60% of college graduates are now women, only about 42% of science and engineering students are women. Why is this the case? On the surface one might the case that schools and organizations are actively recruiting women to come into these fields, and there is some evidence to suggest that this is, in fact happening. I know that in the case of our clients who are hiring in these fields, many of them are, aggressively in some cases, affirmatively attempting to bring in more women. Active and open attempts to discriminate against them, on the other hand, are clearly less apparent than in the past.

So why then, do the results continue, albeit less so than before?

The reason may exist in the story under the surface. Unconscious patterns of bias against women in STEM are a deeply ingrained pattern in our consciousness. It is a pattern that impacts men, in that we often have intuitive and deeply ingrained beliefs about what a scientist or an engineer looks like, act like, and sound like. We may not actively or consciously discriminate against someone who doesn’t fit that model, but we may look at a woman who looks, acts, or sounds different from that model and just not feel like they are “the kind of person” who would be successful in the field. These beliefs and reaction may exist on a deeply buried subconscious level, and our conscious mind may then create a justification that allows us to live with a belief that may be directly contrary to our conscious ones.

A study conducted by researchers at Harvard and Yale, for example, shows that men generally are less likely to see women as being successful in math. (The Power of the Immediate Situation: Gender Differences in Implicit Math Attitudes, Mahzarin Banaji, Brian Nosek) The important thing to understand in interpreting these results is that they are almost certainly less as a response to individual prejudices as they are to institutional and implicit messages that people have received from their societal experiences and messages. Who are our STEM role models? Who have we seen (and clearly continue to see) in leadership in these fields?

Another interesting aspect to the study, however, is that it also shows that women tend to unconsciously experience low levels of implicit assessments of themselves in math, even when they explicitly know that they are successful. They also tend to have decidedly less positive attitudes of their own competency, and that of other women, when there are mostly men working around them. Where do these attitudes come from? From the same societal messages that women get from the time they are very young. They become part of the deeply imbedded, unspoken value systems that we all hold. It is critical for us to understand that this kind of “internalized oppression” can discourage women from developing successful careers.

This may be the most insidious kind of discrimination…the kind that is so deeply ingrained in our unconscious societal structure, our values and beliefs, that it is “concealed by its obviousness.”

So in looking at the USAToday editorial, we can see that conscious discrimination or “conspiracy” may not be present, but the effects of generations of discrimination might still live under the surface, implicitly impacting people and organizations, every day.

A Cheater is Just a Cheater--Howard Ross

I am a sports fan…always have been. I am particularly a baseball fan, and so I watched with special interest as Barry Bonds approached Hank Aaron's homerun record this summer, and noted the constant media and fan derision he received. (For example, I read one column by USAToday’s Christine Brennan, after the homerun was hit that she began with, “Our long national nightmare is over…a bit of hyperbole, I think, when our soldiers are dying in the battlefield.)

Now I have to say that my inclination is to think that Bonds used steroids. I have no proof of that, of course, as does anybody else yet, but I have been convinced, perhaps by the press, that he probably did juice up over the past few years.

However, I have noticed a pattern in the relentless way that Bonds has been berated about this that strikes me as inconsistent, particularly in light of how others seem to be treated for infractions that would appear on the surface to be analogous.

It particularly struck me this morning as I was watching the report of the New England Patriots victory yesterday and the excitement with which their 5-0 start has been greeted. Noticeably absent was any mention of the fact that just a few short weeks ago Patriots Head Coach Bill Belichick was found to be spying on opposing teams, a direct violation of the rules. And just before that it was Rick Ankiel, the feel good baseball story of the year when he came back to the St. Louis Cardinals, just before he was found to have used Human Growth Hormone; and before that the celebration of Sammy Sosa’s 600th homerun…you remember Sosa, of steroid allegations himself, as well as corked bat fame.

Now as much as I like sports, I also know that a game is a game. So who really cares about all of this in the grand scheme of more serious issues? But sports has had an unwavering ability to cast a light on some of our core issues over the years.

Why Bonds for this level of recrimination and not the others? I know that people have many explanations…it was baseball’s, (and maybe sport’s) biggest record; he never has admitted juicing (but, of course neither has Sosa); Belichick said he was sorry and took his punishment….etc.

I’m sure all of these are factors, but is there another? When Donovan McNabb suggested recently that Black quarterbacks are under greater scrutiny he was quickly greeted with denial. But is it possible that, without even realizing it, we do hold African American athletes (particularly those, like Bonds, who are deemed to have “attitude”) to a different standard…that their failure is more disappointing; their violations more appalling?

Everything we have been learning about unconscious bias tells us that sort of thing can happen to good people all of the time. That we can be swayed in our determinations by hidden judgments and perceptions that we not only don’t know are there, but that may be counter to our conscious beliefs about ourselves.

Yet, as I hear people respond so defensively to the inquiry about these kinds of questions, as they have with both Bonds and McNabb, I can’t help but muse, “Me thinks thou doest protest too much.”

After all, a cheater is just a cheater.

But are you sure?

Who Are We Really? – Howard Ross

A recent survey, published in the USA Today (9/12/2007), has shown that a majority of Americans believe that the United States is, by law, a Christian country. The survey, conducted by the First Amendment Center (firstamendmentcenter.org) a non-partisan group, and designed to measure attitudes toward freedom of religion, speech and the press, found that 55% of Americans believe that the founders of the United States wrote Christianity into the Constitution when it was drafted in 1789. In addition, the survey shows that half of the people surveyed believe that teachers should be able to use the Bible as a history text and, perhaps most troubling, “only 56% believe that freedom of religion applies to all groups regardless of how extreme their beliefs are.” The survey, of course, does not ask people to clarify who should be able to define “extreme.”

In fact, the Unites States Constitution does not make any designation of the Unites States as a Christian country. On the contrary, religious freedom was at the heart of the democratic movement and at the core of the reasons why many of our early ancestors came to this country. Many people who assert the primacy of Christianity refer to statements and writings by founders that seem to consistently use Christian terminology, and there is no question that they were, overwhelmingly Christian and probably had limited exposure to other faiths. However, the same mindset that led to the absence of rights for women or African Americans can also explain these limited texts.

The larger issue for me is how much we identify with our religious affiliation. So often our religious identity seems to go beyond our basic principles of living. What does it mean to be a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew, a Hindu, a Buddhist, etc.? Does it transcend what we believe about life? And, perhaps most perplexingly, who does it link us to?

For example, is the radical, right-wing Christian group that advocates bombing abortion centers closer, by identity, to more reasoned and open-hearted Christians, or are they more aligned with the mindset and beliefs of Al Qaeda and the Jewish extremists who machine gunned Mosques in Israel several years ago? What does it mean to be part of a religion?

Our religious identity is so many things to us. It provides recognition of our historical heritage; it is a remembrance of our ancestors; it is a statement of our beliefs; and a guide to life practices. For many of us, it is a haven for our connection to something deeper, more meaningful, and, perhaps, safer and more peaceful than what goes on around us in our everyday lives.

And yet, as we live in this increasingly multi-cultural country, and this increasingly multi-cultural world, our exposure to each other on a daily basis, and even through increases in religious intermarriage and engagement call us to look more deeply at what it means to identify with a religion. Are we going to allow ourselves to be separated by these identities (they say, for example, that Sunday morning is the most segregated time in America), or are we going to ground ourselves in a true understanding of what our core identities mean about our core beliefs.

At their core, almost every religion professes profound and universal love. Is that the message that we will allow our religions to teach us? Or will it be a message of separation and hatred?

In this diverse world, our survival may depend on that choice.

Room for Compassion – Howard Ross

Over the past couple of weeks I have been watching the mini-drama unfolding around Larry Craig, the Idaho Republican Senator accused of attempting to solicit an undercover officer in a Minneapolis airport bathroom. There are so many levels to this event that it is hard to know where to start, but several bear reflection.

On a societal level, how do we deal with issues like these? Clearly there is a moral dimension that impacts some people. What was his “crime?” Was it that he supposedly solicited somebody, or was it that he supposedly solicited another man? The contradiction between the way he has been treated, especially by his Republican colleagues, and the way Louisiana Senator David Vitter was treated just weeks before, after having been listed as one of the clients of the “DC Madam,” is obvious, and striking. As a society we seem to so easily excuse sexual behavior on the part of men towards women. “Boys will be boys” you know. Embarrassing? Yes. Inappropriate? Yes. Cause for dismissal? Apparently not. And lest those of us who fall more on the Democratic side of the fence gloat too much, let’s not forget the ease at which President Clinton’s indiscretions were rationalized away. Beyond that, can we even imagine the shame that would befall a woman politician who was supposed to have solicited a male partner?

Our righteousness is inherently selective. We filter the things that bother us without even realizing the incredible inconsistency, even irrationality, of our points of view. At a deeper level, we are often driven by elements of our own psyches that we don’t come close to seeing, let alone understanding. Is Larry Craig gay? I certainly have neither the ability, nor any right to speculate. But that too has become fodder for activists who now gloat openly at the contradiction between his recent actions and his anti-gay political stances. Personally I couldn’t disagree more with the political positions he has taken. I think they are unjust. Yet, if he is indeed gay or bi-sexual (which, again, I make no assumption of) would he be the first person you know who might be reacting against things that they find troubling within themselves? Don’t we all, at times, live in that realm of self-denial and self-justification? I know that, despite all efforts, there are times when I have. We each seem to find our own justification in the way we see issues like this; in fact, in the way we see the world.

Where sexual orientation is concerned, it is easy to understand how somebody who might have feelings that they don’t understand, that are branded as “criminal,” “immoral,” “insane,” “disgusting,” or any number of other ways might bury those feelings so deeply that they don’t understand the feelings themselves. It is called survival. If Larry Craig is gay or bi-sexual, has he brought the derision he is now being treated with on himself? Perhaps. But when we, as a society, brand people as pariahs for fundamental ways that they are, and that they feel, we share some of the responsibility for the impact that our condemnation has on them. Larry Craig may represent thousands, maybe millions of people who suffer because they are gay; or they think they may be gay; or may not understand that they are gay; or are simply accused of being gay. Their suffering results in untold levels of human destruction…suicide, family splits, drug abuse, etc.

Senator Craig will decide whether to resign or not. Others will decide whether he should still represent their interests, or not. But what lies underneath all of this is a sad story. A person has been publicly humiliated. He is suffering. His family is suffering.

Has our polarization, our morality, and our righteousness so taken us over that there is no longer room for compassion?