A friend linked me to this article posted today on CNN.com. I read it. It’s not terrible. It’s not great. It’s typical pseudo-news, skimming the surface of a complex issue and designed specifically to provoke extreme reactions. It irritates me that this multi-faceted issue that affects my life so strongly is clearly being used as an attention grab by CNN. You can see that in the comments, which range from the usual “HEATHENS OMG WTF WHAT ABOUT THE CHILLLLDREEENNNN??” to (a few) thoughtful remarks on the nature of monogamy and whether it’s a sustainable social construct.

After reading each of the comments (OK, I admit it, I skipped over the worst of the fundie doggerel) I’m left with the thought that I’m not really doing or feeling anything much different than the majority of mono people out there. I have relationships outside my marriage. Whoop de do. So do more than 50% of mono people. The difference?

I’m honest about it.

My husband and I refuse to embrace the self-flagellating dogma that you can only have an affair if you feel really, really bad about it afterwards. We refuse to allow the societal expectation that loving more than one person at a time is wrong to destroy the beautiful thing that is our marriage. And despite what some people have intimated, our marriage is not diminished by this. It’s nurtured by our ability to accept one other. Our marriage is as strong as it is precisely because we freely admit that neither of us can be each other’s everything all of the time, nor do we want to.

The media will persist in using fluffy human-interest stories about polyamory to rile up their subscribers and drive people to their content. Therefore, those of us who practice must fearlessly persist in telling the truth from our point of view as well.

I happened to be watching the Today Show this morning (which I virtually never do) and heard that they’re doing a special report on the state of women in America. All well and good, I think as I’m watching the anchors describe what they’re going to be covering.

But then they mention something about the ways modern working wives and mothers’ lives differ from their own mothers. To illustrate the mothers we are supposedly so different from, they showed a bit of stock video of a June Cleaver-style, 1950s era mom.

There’s a demographic problem with this. Any woman born and raised in the 1950s would now be retirement-age and therefore, not the purported focus of the story. I’m 42 and when I think of my mother, I think of the 1970s when she, herself, was working as were many of her generational cohort. The silliness of the stereotype gets worse as you go down in age. I seriously doubt that very many 20-something women in 2009 had moms who wore a frilly apron daily, let alone who would have been filmed in black and white.

Our lives are certainly different from our mothers’, but it’s simplistic to say that it’s because we work and our mothers didn’t. That’s a ridiculous fallacy and it completely ignores the subsequent generations of women to enter the workforce. By doing this, the Today Show is perpetuating an image of women that should have died a natural death a long time ago. They’re presenting a dangerously idealized image of women that simply has no relevance in the 21st Century. Not only that, but they’re denigrating my mother’s generation, mine, and anyone else’s who could have grown daughters by implying that this is the image people should have of us.

My mother was *not* June Cleaver and neither am I.

I’m enormously frustrated with the willful ignorance that’s manifested itself in both my life and in the larger world this week. It’s mainly been focused on two things: flu shots and the economy.

People have always made decisions and formed opinions based on their personal experiences and knowledge. I get that. It’s the easiest way to decide most things. “Based on what I know, how will this action effect me and my family?” It’s how people have come to define what they know that’s driving me crazy.

More credible information is available more easily today than at any point in history. A solid internet search can turn up dozens of credible studies, journals, blogs written by experts, articles, etc. (I’ll get to defining credible in a moment.) Yet more people seem willfully determined to ignore verifiable, proven and tested evidence in favor of crackpot theories and unproven hypotheses than ever before. It’s a dichotomy that honestly puzzles me.

It’s not hard to learn how to tell a credible source from a non-credible source. I teach my students to do it in a week’s worth of instruction. It doesn’t take a rocket-scientist to figure out that Glenn Beck, a pseudo-journalist, is not a credible source of information on, oh, let’s say swine flu. The first lesson I teach my students is the closer you get to the primary source, the more credible the information is likely to be. This is why, in the old days, journalists were taught to get two independent sources before publishing a story. (The second lesson is that credibility doesn’t necessarily equal ironclad truth, but that’s another blog.)

Unfortunately, we can no longer trust the media, social or traditional, to provide unbiased information, if they ever did. It’s become incumbent upon us to do our own fact finding, form our own opinions, and make our own decisions based on those facts and opinions. Too many people never even bother to ask themselves, “Is this posting on an internet forum about someone’s Aunt Martha getting the flu from a flu shot more credible than this scientific study that says that’s not possible?” or to delve further, “Who funded this scientific study and how does that affect its credibility?” They never even bother to *try* to access the amazing wealth of credible information that exists on the Internet and elsewhere.

Yes, there’s an overload of information out there. Yes, it’s intimidating. It’s no wonder that many people willfully choose to remain ignorant or blindly follow the Glenn Becks of the world. But these are our lives and our families lives we’re talking about. Isn’t it worth it to wade in and become informed, if only about the things that affect us most closely? Next time you express an opinion or make an important decision, stop for just a minute and ask yourself, what am I basing this on? A message-board post? A friend-of-a-friend? A self-diagnosis? A talk show heard on the way to work? Do you believe these to be truly credible sources?

If so, there’s not much I can do about it. People are going to believe what people are going to believe and I must respect their right to believe it, frustrating though it might be for me. There is, however, one thing I can and will do. If someone brings their opinions and decisions into my public spaces (my home, my blog, my Facebook, etc.) without credible evidence to back them up, they should expect to be politely questioned about their rationale and possibly presented with evidence to the contrary. And for the record, getting butthurt when these things occur will not score them points in the debate, believe me.

I respect my own intellect too much to silently acquiesce to willful ignorance without question. My public spaces give me the platform to question, and question I will. (Actually, if you know me, you know that last sentence should read: question I *must*.)