Yes, I’m aware that it’s technically Sunday morning. Deal with it.

Baseball has taken over FOX (meaning that I can’t watch COPS on Saturday nights) so I was surfing around and found “Harry’s Law” to be an acceptable substitute. The main case of the episode was involving a girl who was being held criminally liable for a classmate’s suicide. The blogger (Sela) had posted that her classmate was gay, had called her names, and had called on her classmates to be “tuna helpers” and nod to let this girl know that they knew that she was lesbian. Said girl killed herself by car exhaust poisoning. The jury finds Sela not guilty of being criminally liable for the death but it takes Harry (Kathy Bates) pointing out that the lesbian girl had pretty much had to keep her sexual orientation a secret from everyone including her family/friends/church. Harry also points out that it’s the mean people in media who get the attention.

It was interesting casting because Camryn Manheim played the prosecuting attorney. She’s known for playing characters that aren’t the norm. She’s a huge advocate for gay rights, fat acceptance, and generally the rights of women. (She’s also a UC Santa Cruz alum. Go banana slugs!) Given her work on “The Practice”, she was the perfect choice.

One of the main issues was cyber-bullying and the fact that there have been a rash of suicides resulting from it. Nobody can say that Sela was out of line in what she posted and the Camryn Manheim character accuses her of recruiting her classmates to torment this girl. She has a snark blog and by being a snark, she gains some popularity. It’s kind of a reminder that our words have consequences and we can unintentionally cause someone’s life to fall apart by what we write.

My first inclination as my blog is a form of therapy is that I should be able to dump all my feelings here and people need to suck it up. I may criticize people in the media (example: my intense dislike of our former president) but I never go after people in my real life. There are several reasons for this: in order for this blog to be therapeutic, there has to be somewhat of a disconnect between it and my real life; and in many of the places Jon served, what I wrote could have been influential or it could have really screwed him as things did in 2005 when people got together and cut-n-pasted my blog entries together. (I don’t even want to think about what would have happened if they could have gotten into the passworded stuff.) Basically, things work better when my readers aren’t living in my community and part of my every day life.

Having said all that, I would never advocate the kind of things that Sela did on her site. My faith would preclude that kind of thing and honestly, it would really ruin things for Metanoia and their community outreach. Being a pastor’s wife, I do represent the church whether I like it or not and whether I’m intentionally trying to represent or whether I’m being my usual hermit self. If I was still living in Montana or Minnesota, the kind of stuff that Sela did would be a BIG DEAL because it dealt with someone’s sexuality and identity. In northern California, being gay is not a huge deal (even in the smaller town in which I life) and I can’t see that someone coming out or not coming out would be a big deal. (I can think of five or six things that rank higher on people’s minds.)

Truthfully, I’m also just not that popular or widely read. It isn’t like what I write is stirring people to political action or causing people to vote a certain way. The only thing I might do is increase advocacy about a cause or issue.

/ranting and reflection