Author Archives: Kathryn Brightbill

Why did you tell us if we were never supposed to believe it?

It’s been hard watching so many disparate parts of my past that I’d hoped would remain in the past intersect over the last few weeks as the Roy Moore story unfolded. Harder than I thought it would be. Aside from dredging up everything about courtship culture and then watching as sites like The Federalist proved […]

The Nashville Statement and the Moral Bankruptcy of Evangelicalism

I’m not going to dignify the CBMW’s Nashville Statement with any kind of point by point response, the whole thing is a tiresome rehash of what evangelicals have been saying about LGBT people for years. I already did a point by point breakdown of the SBC’s anti-trans resolution a few years ago, it basically covers the same things I would say here, so consider that my response to the statement itself. What I’d rather talk about is what evangelicals aren’t issuing joint statements condemning, namely, white nationalism. Their silence in the face of the rising tide of fascism and white supremacy in this country is deafening.

On privilege and respectability at protests

This past week the confederate monument fight came to my hometown of Bradenton. I’m planning on writing more about what happened in a day or so when I’ve processed what was a stressful few days, but I wanted to talk for a minute about using respectability and privilege as an intentional protest tactic.

Guilt By Association: The Injunction Hearing

Well kids, this week’s installment is at the end of the week instead of the beginning because my body decided that having a food allergy attack so I had to be doped up on Benadryl was a good way to keep me away from this barely readable novel. As I keep mentioning by calling our hero lawyer variations on, “Author Avatar Peter,” the character is a pretty obvious self-insert author avatar, down to the character matching an idealized depiction of his physical characteristics, and while Farris has mixed some things up so it’s not a one-to-one match, he’s not a good enough writer that it’s not obvious that he sees the character as an especially heroic version of himself. It’s time to soldier on, because as unreadable as this book is, it’s a glimpse into the mind of Michael Farris and this stuff needs to be documented so it’s out there.

You really should be paying attention to hip hop

If you’re not paying attention to hip hop right now you’re missing kind of an important cultural moment. The Tyler, The Creator album, Flower Boy, that just debuted at #2, barely behind Lana Del Ray’s new album? It’s basically a coming out album, where he stopped with the fictional narratives and vulgar alter egos of his earlier albums and put the real, vulnerable side of himself out there. People have picked apart specific lines and verses from the album ad nauseam, but it suffices to say that one of the big, overarching themes of Flower Boy is the loneliness and isolation of the closet, and it’s got the best début of any hip hop album that dropped last week.

Guilt By Association: The series returns

It’s time to dust the series off because in the intervening two years the changes in the political climate and Michael Farris’s recent hire as president of Alliance Defending Freedom makes this especially relevant. When I started writing this series in 2015, it was an experiment in the serial book review format, and the book was only relevant to a small niche of people researching the religious right and the Christian homeschool movement. Today, Michael Farris is no longer the fringe religious right figure who I used to describe as the most influential man in the religious right that no one ever heard of […]

Sarasota County School Board has police usher trans alumnus out of school board meeting

As background to this, Nate Quinn is a Sarasota County public school graduate who has fought for trans rights in Sarasota public schools since he came out as trans in high school. Sarasota’s current policy is to deal with trans students on an individual case-by-case basis, with school principals and administrators deciding whether or not to let each individual trans student use the correct facilities and have their names and pronouns respected.