Years ago I attended a meeting encouraging junior employees to increase “business development” — i.e. sales.

“Your clients are all around you!” exclaimed one up-and-coming manager. “Start with your friends and family. Make sure they know what services you offer. Last Thanksgiving I was surprised to discover my brother-in-law, who is a soccer coach, needed my expertise!”

“Or start with your hobbies,” interjected a senior rainmaker. “Like you!,” he targeted someone at random. “What are your hobbies?”

“Uh…walking my dog?” answered the startled employee.

“Great. And where do you walk your dog?”

“Near my apartment? — up by American University.”

“Wrong answer. You now walk your dog in Georgetown at 6:30 am.”

*stunned silence*

“Dogs are great icebreakers,” the rainmaker continued. “If you want to build a book of business, you need to meet D.C.‘s wealthy powerbrokers where they are.”

I’ve been absentee from the blog for a while, mostly because my family has been preparing for and welcoming our first child. Little baby David was born a month ago and has captured my heart, my sleep, and any remaining semblance of personal hobby time.

A few nights ago, David insisted on being wide-eyed and gurgly at midnight — despite being clean, warm, and fed. In an attempt to lull him to sleep I started signing. Now, I think most nursery tunes are trite. So I skipped “rock-a-bye-baby” and started crooning my favorite hymns about love, comfort, and joy.

When I got to the John Rutter version of For the Beauty of the Earth, I started crying. Tears of joy, yes, because I’m grateful for my precious baby and I want to give him all “the love which from our birth over and around us lies.”

I hate statues.

Not just Confederate statues.  Not just slave trader statues.  All statues.  Queens.  Presidents.  Generals.  Prophets.  Take them all down.

No person should be a permanent symbol of public adoration.  And that’s what statues are:  they freeze people in faux-perfect time.  If commissioned during a leader’s lifetime, they’re often exaggerated ego trips.  If created after death, they’re expensive icons to a fabricated mythology.  Statues celebrate wealth, conquest, or other worldly success while implying perfection and eliding flaws.  Pedestals are cages.  I hate them. [Read more…]

I live outside D.C.  I work blocks from the White House.  I have protested in Lafayette Square.  St. John’s Episcopal Church is a historic establishment.  It provides feeding ministries, holiday gift drives, and refugee assistance.

Five blocks away from St. Johns is a sister parish within the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, the Church of the Epiphany.  Every Friday it transforms the chapel and multi-purpose room into a Jummah service for Muslims.  I have prayed there.

The D.C. Episcopal church embodies true Christianity.

What we’ve seen in the last 24 hours is profanity.  It is blasphemy.  In the words of Bishop Mariann Budde: it is an “abuse of sacred symbols.” [Read more…]

This afternoon the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued a statement opposing the proposed federal “Equality Act.”

BACKGROUND ON THE EQUALITY ACT

I read the entire Equality Act this afternoon.  The Equality Act’s principal purpose is to amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and other federal civil rights provisions, to clarify that sex discrimination includes sexual orientation/gender identity discrimination.  This effort is timely.  Whether “discrimination on the basis of failure to conform with gender stereotypes” constitutes “sex discrimination”  is a question courts have wrestled with for decades.  The U.S. Supreme Court last month agreed to decide it.  Like legislatures often do, Congress is trying to solve any ambiguity surrounding the interpretation with explicit clarification. [Read more…]