The freedom to shrug.

Are gay statistics different from straight statistics? 

If I actually remembered anything from my stats class I'd aim for some sort of pun here. But I digress.

A piece by Guy Branum appeared last week in the Huffington Post accusing statistics deity Nate Silver of distancing himself from the gay community. Silver, who was named Out magazine's Man of the Year, apparently said something to the effect of not identifying a great deal with gay culture, and wanting to be known first and foremost for his statistical work.


"I don't want to be Nate Silver, gay statistician, any more than I want to be known as a white, half-Jewish statistician who lives in New York.'"

Nate could probably have chosen his words a bit better, but overall they seem relatively innocuous to me. Branum doesn't think so:

"So is identification with homosexuality dehumanizing to us? Does it turn us from individuals into a lumped-together mass of stereotypes? Not remotely. Silver's refusal to fully participate in gay identity is the real problem. I'm not saying he's a bad guy but that we must acknowledge the cultural forces that allow a person to participate in homosexual sex while feeling like the concerns, bigotries and culture that surround homosexuality do not apply to them."

and later:

"Nate Silver is participating in a continued construct of homosexuality as a behavior rather than a culture, perspective or neurological atypicality. It is not uncommon for people to say, "Gay is something I do, not who I am." We are able to conceive of race and gender as aspects of a person's identity without overwhelming it, but we, as a culture, persist in a terror that any cultural identification with homosexuality overwhelms and displaces all other aspects of one's being."

Branum argues that by distancing himself from gay culture, Silver does gay culture a disservice, by legitimizing efforts to prevent it from being defined as a culture. He needs to more fully embrace his gay identity, and show that you can embrace that identity and show that it can be an enriching part of your life. 

If queer theory made my head spin a bit less, I'd break down Branum's argument a bit more (which as an aside, is pretty rambling and could have been about half as long). I agree with parts of it. But what I mostly don't get is what Nate Silver is supposed to do. He hasn't been dishonest about his sexuality; he hasn't been hypocritical about it. He merely said that he doesn't identify with the dominant gay culture, and that he wants to be known for other things.

Branum says that he needs to have a solid identity to show people that you can be a gay man and a statistician, and not let it overwhelm your work. You should be the very best gay statistician you can be.

But isn't that what he's doing? He's gay, he's a good statistician. Nobody questions either of those things. What else is there?

Which brings me back to my initial question. Statistics are statistics. There is no particularly gay way to do statistics (well there probably is, but FiveThirtyEight isn't that kind of blog), and I think most rational, open-minded people don't think of his sexuality as being any sort of handicap.

The ultimate point (which Branum confusingly seems to approach) is that there are all sorts of gay men, but what unites us is certain common realities and difficulties. But the thing is, these are the sorts of realities that we can understand merely by understanding that another man is gay and has been through those same things.

Again: Nate Silver is gay. He has never explicitly denied it. So what else is there?

Gay culture is like a lot of other minority cultures in that it's often been crafted by necessity. Gay men have banded together and formed a culture in response to a majority culture that hasn't always welcomed them. Forty years ago, Nate Silver could have lost his job and been evicted (or arrested) for admitting even this much.

But what to do when the majority culture does start welcoming you in? Does the culture need to be abandoned or assimilated? 

Not entirely. There is beauty in that shared culture, even if it is a product of oppression. But it also means that people have the freedom to choose which parts of that culture they identify with. This choice — this choice to define yourself as an individual, to show that you can not only be gay, but in your own individual way—is the most essential thing that the rights movement has fought for the last several decades.

Progress takes a lot of forms. This year, it took the form of three states equalizing marriage, of thousands of happy couples lining up at courthouses.

But I also think it takes the form of gay men having the ability to say with a shrug "Yeah, I'm gay. But I'm also these other things. And they're also pretty interesting."

Here's the receipt.

"Freedom isn't free."

It's a bumper sticker we've all seen. A lot of them popped up about 10 years ago. The owners would probably explain the sticker by saying something about the sacrifices necessary to preserve our freedom.

Often enough, these people also have NRA bumper stickers.

It's almost 3 a.m. in Connecticut. In the morning, 28 families will wake up with a major part of their lives missing. 

We don't know what compelled this man to kill. We don't know where he got the guns. We don't know all the "what-ifs."

But we do know, more painfully than ever, that freedom isn't free. And this is the price.

Gun-rights advocates will argue about the Second Amendment, and about self-defense, and about protecting rights.

One of the things we do know about the shooting was that the gunman arrived in combat gear, brandishing a military-grade rifle capable of firing dozens of rounds. The New York Times notes that the rifle was "similar to a weapon used widely by troops in Afghanistan and Iraq."

This is not about self-defense. These are not defensive weapons. These are weapons designed for militaries, with the sole designed purpose of killing large numbers of people. No freedom is being protected here, except for the freedom to do just that.

Some will argue that gun control won't help. Guns don't kill people, the old slogan goes, people kill people. If you take away guns, they'll just kill in other ways. And, after all, the other old slogan goes, if you make guns criminal, only criminals will have guns.

Hell, some people will argue (and already have argued), this just means we need more guns, so that more Good People are there to protect us from the Bad People. If those teachers only had guns...

Never mind the evidence. Never mind that despite increasingly loose gun laws, our homicide rate is higher than essentially all of the developed world (and much of the undeveloped world), and that we have twice as many gun deaths per year as in Canada, and more than 10 times as many as in Britain.

And never mind common sense. There will always be bad people doing bad things. But mass killings are a lot easier when civilians can readily buy military weapons, when you can buy hundreds of rounds of ammunition without so much as a raised eyebrow, when even restrictions for people suspected of terrorism are shut down by the NRA and its ever-vigilant allies.

Ah, but at least we have freedom.

Nobody (or at least relatively few people) wants to take away everyone's guns. But something has to change. Or at least we could take a look at our gun laws and see  how we could tweak them. At least we could talk about it.

But we're not supposed to talk about this right now. 20 children are dead. We shouldn't take advantage of a tragedy.

And so this mass killing, the 19th in five years, will pass like every other. People will sigh, put up a sympathetic Facebook status about how their thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. They'll avoid talking about guns, because now is not the time. 

Then the moment will pass, people will forget, and go back to their normal lives until the next tragedy happens.

Or at least most people will. Those 28 families might have trouble with this.

"Freedom isn't free."

Well, no, it's not. Today it cost us 20 children. Here's the receipt.

The Need to be Right.

(I'm assuming most people reading this follow me on Facebook, so please pardon the redundancy.)

As has been their custom for the past few years, the American Atheists have put up their annual Christmas display, this year taking the form of a billboard in Times Square, imploring us to "keep the merry" while walking away from religion.  Like the Atheists' previous holiday messages, I have a hunch that its main motivation is pissing off the Catholic League, but that's probably not relevant for now.

Religious disputes aside, I have a few smaller quibbles with the sign:

• Jesus = myth, but Santa ≠ myth? Or does Santa = okay myth and Jesus = bad myth?

• Even if you reject the religious accounts of Jesus, don't most scholars agree that, unlike Santa Claus, he actually walked the Earth?

• Even if both of them are myths, don't they basically serve the same function (be good, or else you won't get X)?

• It's Christmas; why are you using a Good Friday picture of Jesus? Not particularly merry.

I'm also a bit confused as to what parts of Christmas these folks want us to retain. I know plenty of people who celebrate Christmas in secular terms, and that's fine. A lot of the stuff we do for Christmas is hardly religious anyway (the Gospel is notably bereft of references to dead evergreens), and I think there is some value in setting aside a season to recognize the value of peace, charity, and family. But by using Santa Claus as the preferred symbol for the season, the sign seems to be uplifting some of the season's more negative qualities —namely, consumerism—over its nobler ones.

But the ultimate problem with this sign, I think, is not its argument's substance but rather its utter lack of substance; in short, its insistence that all that matters is being Right.

We can argue until kingdom come (or don't come) about religion's veracity, and we can argue in more concrete terms about whether or not religion benefits society. It would be another thing entirely if the American Atheists were arguing, as Richard Dawkins and others do all the time, that religion is inherently poisonous to society and must therefore be phased out.

That's not what they're doing here, though. The message here is that religion has produced/influenced positive cultural traditions, and that you should keep those. Just don't believe in the crazy stuff.

In other words, we are right, they are wrong, therefore you should believe us. Got it?

Sound familiar? This is the same self-assuredness, the same intolerance of belief, and the same obsession with being Right that has long characterized institutional religion—undoubtedly one of religion's worst qualities. If, as you seem to argue, there's nothing wrong with the cultural practice of Christmas, why does it matter to you that people don't think about it the same way you do?

It's annoying when people don't agree with you. And yes, I know that the American Atheists have plenty of concerns with religion's societal effects. It would just be nice if their messaging had a bit more nuance.

And, ultimately: the spirit of the season has been dragged down enough in recent years by the aforementioned consumerism, the overshadowing of Thanksgiving, the never-ending bickering over municipal displays, and Fox's timeless War on Christmas television marathon.

I want to keep the merry too. Maybe we can start by making merriness more important than rightness.