I didn’t watch this entire interview conducted by Piers Morgan, just the clip below.   In this particular segment, Kirk Cameron manages to talk his way out of Piers’ attack on his belief system regarding homosexuality.  He stays calm, and he doesn’t get aggressive.  His position on homosexuality makes me crazy and I worry for his children’s well-being, but he does appear to have thought his position through, unlike many other people who subscribe to this kind of rhetoric.

My colleague, Chris Stipeck, who I’ve worked with for 5+ years, sent me an article by Ian Parker that appears in the February 6, 2012 edition of The New Yorker entitled “The Story of a Suicide.”  The article outlines in great detail the incidents leading up to the death of Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi in September 2010.  Clementi’s roommate Dharun Ravi is currently on trial for a slew of charges pending from an incident where he videotaped Clementi having a sexual encounter with another man. After Clementi discovered this invasion of his privacy and the supposed broadcasting of his encounter into cyberworld, Clementi jumped from the George Washington Bridge, killing himself, and igniting a firestorm of national attention around bullying, or what some have come to call social combat, a term that I prefer because of its weight and scope.

Today ABC News began releasing excerpts of an interview with Newt Gingrich’s second wife, Marianne, who alleges that Newt asked her to allow him to have a mistress while they stayed married.  When the interviewer asked her what she thought Newt was trying to say to her, Marianne, replied, “Oh, he was asking to have an open marriage, and I refused.” 

I started this blog in January 2011 because I wanted to develop a writing practice.  The experience of keeping the blog has been gratifying for me, and I almost met my goal of writing at least once a week.  At the end of 2011, while I lost a bit of momentum, I still had a sense that I understood my writing process a bit more because of the blogging, and I also appreciated the ability to share my thoughts and ideas with an audience and get feedback from people on the ideas that I was working out through the writing process.

Working on a new play for the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.  Working title is Project | Hope, although I’m “hoping” (ha ha) that changes by the time the play is presented in April.  It might not, which will be fine, but the working title describes a concept, and I’m hoping that soon it will be more of an actual story, rather than simply a concept.