Just a little over a week ago, the regional theocracy more widely known as the LDS Church announced changes to Handbook 1, the guide for its lay leaders, not that the LDS Church has any other kind, since a degree in theology is not required for any of its “bishops” or other church functionaries. The changes state that same-sex couples who are married are “apostates” and are unwelcome in the church. This is essentially an official affirmation of a long-standing unofficial policy.

But that wasn’t enough. In addition, the new policy states that the children of same-sex couples cannot be baptized in the church until they are eighteen – and then only if they repudiate their parents’ marriage.

This is little more than a power play on the part of church authorities, using the children as weapons against the parents. Unfortunately, most people who live outside of the unofficial but very real theocracy of Deseret [i.e., Utah and sizeable chunks of the adjoining states of Nevada, Idaho, and Arizona] will likely not understand the ramifications, since, if this policy is followed by local bishops and congregations, it will isolate children of such marriages. That’s because the vast majority of socializing, politics, and most after-school activities in LDS communities revolves around the church. This becomes especially important once children reach middle school age and continues through high school, as well as college in Utah and in LDS affiliated colleges and universities.

In effect, the LDS Church has now officially declared that openly LGBT people must leave the LDS church and take their children with them, whether or not the parents or the children wish this. Personally, it’s hard for me to imagine wanting to belong to such a faith, but I know and have known enough LGBT individuals who desperately want to remain part of the LDS faith to see what a difficult choice this is for them.

It’s also incredibly hypocritical, given that the LDS faith has always portrayed itself as a loving, family-centered, and kind religion, but apparently that love and kindness only extends to those who totally disavow the existence of those whose sexual/gender orientations are not hardline heterosexual.

What also makes all of this even more hypocritical is the recent discovery that sexual orientation is at least partly determined by two human genes, which follows earlier evidence clearly indicating that the physical brain structure of LGBT individuals differs from that of heterosexuals. This evidence invalidates the entire LDS/religious argument that human sexual/gender orientation is a choice. Thus, this policy would punish people and their children for the fact that they are different, and punishing people, especially when that difference in itself harms no one, except possibly those individuals, is the last thing that a purportedly kind, family-centered, and loving faith should be doing… especially by using children as a weapon in the process.

Most of the past week I spent at the World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, New York, not only attending panels, but also meeting with my editors, and my publisher, as well as being a panelist and giving a reading. It’s also one of the few times in the year when I can meet with other professionals in the field, given that my home town has exactly one other professional in the field, and she’s an artist who specializes in dragons, something that hasn’t exactly been a staple in in my fantasy. It’s also why there wasn’t a post last Friday.

More and more, however, I get tired of the same pattern in air travel. While occasionally I do get decent flight connections, more often than not, my connections fall into one of two patterns. Either I have to almost run, if not sprint, to make them, or I spend hours waiting for the next flight. On the flight out from Cedar City, a half hour before the flight was due to take off, the temperature dropped below freezing, and it started to snow. The plane was already a few minutes behind schedule, but when the de-icing time was added, when we reached Salt Lake, the airline was already boarding my flight to Detroit – two concourses away. I hurried and made it, but it wouldn’t even have been a problem if the scheduled time between flights had been even fifty minutes, rather than thirty five. Then when I got to Detroit, I had a four hour layover before the flight to Albany took off. I finally arrived in Saratoga Springs at 11:15 p.m.

On the return leg, my flight from Albany was delayed, and the gate agents told me I’d likely miss the flight from Detroit to Salt Lake. The pilot and ground crew made heroic efforts, and once more a great deal of hustle sufficed to get me aboard with even a few minutes to spare… so that I could wait for almost three hours in Salt Lake for my last flight home.

Now… these connections weren’t made in search of the least expensive fares. They were the only connections possible that would get me from Cedar City to Albany in one day, one very long day. I realize that creating airline schedules is a near-impossibility, but…

I really am getting tired of either worrying about whether I’ll make connections [because a few times I haven’t] or spending endless hours waiting, all of which are reasons why I don’t travel as much as I once did.

Economics has been called the “dismal science” by many people for many reasons. Personally, I’d like to think that it’s because, when employed properly, it reveals the aspects of human behavior very few people want exposed. One of the fundamental and simple principles of economics is that scarce goods are more highly valued and plentiful ones are less valued, and certainly human history continually shows that.

In fact, in that vein, if one applies basic economic principles to religion, the inescapable conclusion is that the wealthy and the privileged benefit disproportionately from religions and cultures that encourage the less fortunate to have lots of offspring.

Am I crazy in saying that? Or anti-religion? Hardly. It’s just the dismal science revealing what too many religions won’t or can’t admit. A few lessons from history might be instructive. After the Black Death ravaged Europe in the 14th century, killing well over a third of the population and possibly as much as sixty percent in some areas, a strange thing happened. Over the following centuries, life got a whole lot better for the working classes. Why? Because there was a shortage of labor, and even laborers became better paid. The higher cost of labor eventually led to the development of more innovations that were labor-saving and resulted in higher productivity and less brute manual work.

While China also suffered from the Black Death, the majority of the deaths were in the west of China, in the area dominated by the Mongols, as well as across the steppes, where in some areas as much as seventy percent of the population perished. This led to the collapse of Mongol rule, and the return to more traditional Chinese social and class structures… and continued reliance on a great deal of low-paid labor, of which there continued to be a great numbers… and no real incentive for the upper classes to build on the innovations that China developed centuries before the west, such as blast furnaces, gun-powder, and ocean trading.

Why did so many immigrants flee Europe for the United States? The ostensible and often-given answer is “for a better life.” But behind that answer lies economics – the fact that there was a shortage of labor in the United States, enough of a shortage that even unskilled workers could do better here than elsewhere.

Areas with high birthrates generally have lower living standards and an aristocracy of sorts that continues to live well and pay labor poorly. They’re generally also areas where women have fewer real rights and opportunities. There may be exceptions, but they’re very few and don’t last long. In such lands, the poor need to have large families just to survive, and the great numbers of the poor insure that wages for the poor remain low. With low wages, education is hard to come by, and that means only a small percentage of the poor ever rises above poverty. It also means that there are plenty of cheap servants, and most services are inexpensive.

When anyone talks about “right-to-life,” they’re really talking about a very selective “right.” They’re talking about the right to be born. The problem here is that these people’s “right-to-life” doesn’t extend to the right to live a decent life, and the higher the birth rate in any area, the more depressed wages tend to be and the fewer opportunities available to women.

So the “sacred” right-to-life really means that whatever divine being is behind it essentially supports misery and oppression. That’s sacred?

In all the hassles and kerfuffles involving the issue of education, it seems to me that one critical aspect of the problem has been totally overlooked, and that is the difference between the “right” to an opportunity as opposed to an outright right. All “rights” come with conditions, whether those are legal or physical or mental, or financial, or some combination thereof. One has to be a certain age to vote. One cannot exercise his or her second amendment rights under certain conditions… or if one has exercised those rights unwisely and ends up in jail.

Likewise, the “right” to an education is really the right to have the opportunity to gain that education. Not all individuals have the ability to become engineers, lawyers, physicists, or other professionals. Some individuals do not have the intellectual ability or the temperament to persevere through college and or graduate school. Saying that anyone has the unequivocal “right” to any particular kind of advanced education is either wistful dreaming or delusion. Saying that they should have the right to pursue education as far as their abilities may permit is far more accurate, although that still doesn’t address who will fund those studies and by what means. Nor does it address, as I’ve noted earlier, whether that education will lead to a job in that field.

The reason why the distinction between the right to an opportunity for education and the right to the education itself is vitally important is that if legislators insist on an unqualified right to a specific course of study that course of study will be dumbed down (while grades are inflated) in all but the most elite institutions, which is what has already occurred in U.S. public education, and which is why many parents mortgage their futures and everything else to pay to live in elite school districts and to send their children to the best colleges possible [or the best ones that they can afford].

Once upon a time, the vast majority of students who graduated from high school could write coherent sentences and understandable paragraphs and had a solid basis in fundamental mathematics, history, and science. Today, almost two thirds of all U.S. high school students have never written a paper exceeding five pages, and three quarters of them cannot write anywhere close to proficiently. Sixty percent cannot read with enough comprehension to effectively handle college level work, yet surveys show that over seventy percent of parents believe that public high schools are adequately preparing their children for college.

Those statistics are also another reason why more and more employers are requiring at least two years of college, not because the students need the college courses, but because only students who can complete two years of college are likely to have the basic reading, writing, and mathematics skills for most jobs.

So… if you want to finish destroying secondary and undergraduate education in the United States, by all means insist on every student’s “right” to higher education.

A week or so ago my wife and I went out to dinner at our favorite local Italian restaurant, a modestly upscale establishment, and as such, one of perhaps three in our entire geographic area.

We enjoyed the meal, as always, but I have to say that I was definitely distracted by the couple at the adjoining table, given that the male of the pair was wearing a tee-shirt of the type I usually reserve for exercise and yardwork, complimented by non-matching shorts that looked more like those worn by basketball players, and sandals. The woman with him was dressed very slightly more suitably.

Now, I know why the restaurant didn’t turn them away on grounds of attire – simply because it’s newish and is still running on the bare edge of profitability – and, in fact, one of the reasons we frequent it, in addition to the excellent food and setting [disregarding the attire of some patrons], is because we want it to survive and prosper and to continue to provide a higher level of food and service than all the fast-food outlets and mid-scale chain restaurants that proliferate in a regional university town.

Nonetheless, I am frankly baffled and astounded by what so many people wear out in public in the name of comfort(?) or convenience (?). The Italian restaurant is not exorbitant in its pricing, but it’s anything but bare-bones cheap, either, and I’m certain those thankfully few of its all too casually dressed patrons could certainly afford better attire than tee-shirts and running/basketball shorts, although from what I’ve seen advertised some of that sort of attire actually costs more than clothing that would seem more suitable to public appearances and dining in restaurants.

I understand the supposed lure of comfort, but what I don’t understand is why so many people wear “outfits” (for lack of a better term) that make them look their worst. There are plenty of clothes that are comfortable, affordable, and enhance the wearer’s presence – or at least don’t worsen his or her appearance. One fashion designer was reputed to have said that his clothes were designed to make a woman look more attractive than if she were stark naked, and as I unfortunately age, I know that my clothed appearance is definitely more attractive than my unclothed appearance.

The same general observation goes for men’s and women’s grooming. Why are hair “styles” and beard styles seemingly designed to make the wearer look worse? Or have people gotten so narcissistic that they can’t tell what does look good? And don’t tell me it’s for convenience… beards so unkempt that they get into everything including food, and that everything gets into, aren’t exactly convenient. I’m not against facial hair per se, and I have several acquaintances who look far better in their well-trimmed beards than they would bare-faced, but what’s with the growth of slovenly clothing and grooming that seems to be spreading? Is it just another aspect of the “shock culture? If so, I’ll admit I find it shocking, shockingly stupid and ill-mannered. But then I’m an anachronistic troglodyte who believes in wearing in public clean clothes that are actually clothing, as opposed to excessive skin-exposing exercise gear, and at least vaguely match, and grooming that doesn’t make people want to move away in fear and disgust.