Universal

Universal human rights would be the same civil rights for every human being, no matter how they look or what they believe or whom they love or where they were born. Everyone, everywhere.

This requires a change in human perception. Rather than granting people respect based on their looks or how they sound, it requires granting all people the same respect on first look. This challenges an instinctual human tendency to classify. It is a survival instinct. Is this object safe or dangerous? Life experience shapes the form this instinct takes as people age. Education, ignorance, love or trauma can shape this instinct, for functional good or dysfunction.

For people old enough to have been shaped by life, learning to disregard the tendency to classify people as safe (good) or unsafe (bad), based on very superficial criteria, is nearly impossible. It requires tremendous practice and mindfulness. And, even then, the mind reverts to old habits easily.

Meditation in Buddhism is a tool to overcome the dysfunctional mind, the cluttered mind. As a humanist, I find meditation helpful. However, I find that I have been able to develop my own little instant-replay system. As I go through my day, I evaluate my responses to people and my interactions with them. I try to keep that more objective consciousness running, like a surveillance camera, which I can replay after an interaction or an experience.

I have learned a great deal from this practice. I have been able to use some of what I have learned for the better in my life. I have also learned how deeply judgmental and prejudiced I tend to be towards people. Decades of dyed-in-the-wool habits, which are exhaustively relentless, just under my conscious mind.

Prejudice is simply stupid. Judgment is not in itself a bad thing. As a nurse in an acute psychiatric ward, I was paid for my preformed understanding of certain dysfunctional behaviors. I was also paid to make professional judgments about dealing with these behaviors to avoid violence or unnecessary pain. I want an experience cop around if I am in a dangerous situation. His informed classification of a behavior, based on training and experience, could lead to a judgment which could save my life.

Universal judgments about racial, ethnic or sexual groups are counterproductive and unsafe. They lead to violence, war and social regression. Perhaps the current political correctness of certain social classes and arenas is a good form of behavioral therapy for nonconstructive prejudices and judgments. However, the tendency of the politically correct to condemn all judgment, even when based on experience and knowledge, as bad or wrong is simply stupid, in my opinion.

My practice as a humanist is to promote universal human rights in any way I can. I see this as a process that occurs with one situation or relationship at a time. I think the political advocacy of specific special-interest groups in the American political system is currently an anachronistic method to achieve universal human rights. I feel the process is in itself divisive. I would prefer to see all groups who feel disenfranchised joined in a universal human rights coalition, which could approach government and demand comprehensive legislation on human rights for everyone in society.

Opinion

I am concerned about a current tendency to confuse privately held opinions, shared between correspondents or confidantes, and public declarations. I am noticing frequent, slow-newsday pieces in the media about leaked emails, which were never meant to be public information. Usually, these emails have something to do with gender, race, ethnicity or sexuality.

A person thinks such-and-such about gay people, for instance, as expressed to a friend or colleague in a private message. Someone gets hold of this by someone else pressing "Reply All" when responding to the email or by some other thoughtless mistake or by some malicious intent to settle a score. Suddenly, the person who wrote the email or made the comment is subjected to public shaming by a press conference held by some anti-defamation group, to whom the email has been sent or comment repeated.

If we all start having the same opinion about everyone and everything, there will be no room for constructive criticism in our culture. Without constructive criticism, we will stagnate and get more stupid than we already are. This is the nightmare of political correctness, which seems to be endlessly encroaching upon society's tolerance for varied or eccentric opinion.

The issue which does not get addressed often enough in these instances is the total lack of ethical accountability on the part of the leakers of private information to public media. In an era when most people rail against privacy violations when it is inconvenient for them, I find it rather hypocritical that these same people salivate over the opportunity to throw stones at someone whose private correspondence is exposed and found to be politically (conformistly) incorrect.

This is all very immature and unconstructive. If you wish to encourage sound, progressive dialogue on issues of difference between people, this type of mob shaming through politically correct media press conferences, based on purloined documents which violate a person's right to privacy, is as offensive, in my opinion, as saying the "f" word or the "q' word or the "n" word. It is the adult form of school-yard, "gotcha" bullying. It accomplishes nothing positive.

Perversion

Sexuality, as an abstract concept or personal identity, is itself a perversion of a simple bodily process. Feeling the need to define oneself according to one's sexual needs or actions is a symptom of the loss of our humanity. It is, perhaps, symptomatic of population pressures, dehumanization of the industrial/electronic age, the new corporate fascism, the new resurgence of orthodox deity worship, and/or any number of other modern stresses combined.

People who are born at the ends of the sexual-preference bell curves are forced by the prejudices and hatreds of those in the middle to assert their difference politically as a form of self defense. In a post-Kinsey age, this speaks to the depth of the U.S. society's sexual dysfunction.

The need to have sexual stimulation and release is simply a human and an animal need. It is anatomic, biochemical, hormonal. If modern humans managed their bowels in the same way they manage their sexual organs, a vast portion of the human population would die of terminal constipation.

In short, sex of all kinds, like food, has been packaged and manipulated for profit and social control by capitalists and politicians. So, it is becoming increasingly difficult to have a sexually healthy life by rejecting myths and fears, fostered by media advertisers working for the powers who wish to control and/or sell sex.

In my own practice, I have grown to appreciate my sexual needs in concert with my other bodily needs. A central part of this process is the acceptance of responsibility for my own sexual needs and satisfaction of those needs. After all, do I require another person to attend to my adult needs to eat, to sleep, to digest, to eliminate? No. And, do I feel guilt when I eat to satisfy hunger, sleep to avoid fatigue, relax after a meal to digest, or lock the bathroom door behind me? No.

When we see ourselves as powerless to satisfy our basic physical needs by moderation, regulation and conscious practice, we lose our humanity and our freedom. When we deny ourselves healthy practices to satisfy the will of others, we shrink as human beings and sacrifice our own personal evolution. As with all areas of life, the person who is healthy in his/her own sexual practices has so much more to give to others when given the opportunity to share.