I voted today. Indiana’s May 8 primary gave me a convenient opportunity to feel pretty good about myself by completing my civic duty a second time, after skipping out on the 2010 mid-term elections.

But this self-affirming American found himself swallowing an ounce or two of phlegm-like pride twice when he visited his polling station at a senior living apartment complex.

Upon entering the complex, I greeted an elderly gentleman as he supervised caged birds, and I passed a congregation of walkers and canes as I quietly walked by a dining hall full of adorable old people and their guests enjoying an early dinner.

Then I saw the sign. It cited Indiana’s P.L. 109-2005 to inform me that I was required to prove my identity with a specific form of government-issued identification.

In 2008, Indiana won a battle over voter ID legislation that made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Without violating the constitution, Indiana could lawfully require voters to produce government-issued photo ID at polling stations across the state. Good for them, I guess. On the surface, they’re trying to preserve the integrity of America’s voting procedures, a valid goal.

But if we’re not careful, requirements like this one become a new form of poll tax because, though the state provides free ID cards to those who request them for the purpose of voting, the identification required to obtain said free ID, such as a birth certificate, are neither free nor automatically provided to authorized voters.

I believe the law unfairly disenfranchises certain minority groups, including the poor, elderly and racial minorities, not to mention Indiana’s thousands of transgendered residents, 31 percent of whom do not have photo identification that correctly identifies their gender, according to The Williams Institute, a branch within University of California Los Angeles Law program that focuses on public policy regarding sexual orientation and gender identity.

In January, NPR reported and explained the findings of the Brennan Center for Justice, which stated that 11 percent of Americans – that’s 3.2 million citizens – lack photo identification, including 25 percent of all black citizens and 18 percent of senior citizens.

Indiana should address this disparity before requiring something so many minorities lack.

Only four other states have laws as strict as Indiana’s in place for the 2012 election, though legislatures of nine states in total have passed strict photo ID measures that have either been challenged or simply not yet taken effect.

So back at the geriatric homestead, I begrudgingly whipped out my Indiana state driver’s license and handed it to the courteous Hoosier election officials.

I chuckled to myself when I remembered how the novice political activist within me renewed his license in December 2009 to avoid the state’s new “SecureID” measure that took effect in January 2010. I see the SecureID system is a preliminary step toward a national ID system, which would be especially unfortunate in a state with legislation in the vein of Arizon’s S.B. 1070 – a state like Indiana.

But I handed the man my non-SecureID, and he found my name on the list before asking, “Are you a Republican or a Democrat?”

I swallowed my pride a second time when I suppressed the impulse to simply respond, “No,” proof that the truth-telling mechanism ingrained in me by my Pentecostal parents hadn’t completely died off. Instead, I said, “Republican,” and the man handed me an “R” card.

In reality, I’ve been registered as an Independent since 2008, when I was first eligible to vote. I justified today’s lie by reassuring myself that Ron Paul, like me, isn’t reeeeeally a Republican either. Besides, I voted for Wayne Seybold, the Republican mayor of Marion, Ind., in his bid to fill the U.S. Representative shoes left by Dan Burton.

I guess today’s phlegm-swallowing just reinforces the political lessons I’ve been learning while coming of age in alternatively conservative and liberal contexts: the two-party system is a false dichotomy idolized by politicos on both extremes, making it all-the-more difficult for left-leaning centrists like me to respectfully sort through the issues at hand.

My decidedly evangelical alma mater, Indiana Wesleyan University, positions itself as a bastion of Christian higher education. But the university gets caught in a web of incongruencies when its self-promotion campaign fails to acknowledge the social mechanisms inherent to certain mass media.

The school’s public relations personnel regularly exploit traditional marketing strategies, such as print and Web advertisements that tout the university’s status as “unapologetically Christ-centered” and “evangelical.” Meanwhile, IWU’s Society of World Changers honors notable Christians and draws attention to the university, providing an auxiliary depiction of what it means to be a part of the IWU community.

Sometimes, the two definitions don’t line up.

Some faculty seem acutely aware of IWU’s occasional self-contradiction. Perhaps that’s why they selected Gods Behaving Badly: Media, Religion, and Celebrity Culture as the school’s 2011 “summer read,” a required text for all incoming students.

I read the book in 2010 and had the opportunity to interview its author, Pete Ward, senior lecturer in youth ministry and theological education at King’s College in London, when he visited IWU’s campus in March 2011. Prior to that interview, I falsely believed that Ward wanted his readers to view celebrity culture as the enemy of religion. The jet-lagged scholar brusquely corrected my misreading: Christians should not be afraid of celebrity, he told me. They should seek to understand it as a formative influence on individuals and society.

“At its heart, celebrity culture facilitates the negotiation of the self through processes of representation, identification and disidentification,” wrote Ward in a section of the book I did not understand until the second time through. “The religious is therefore (unwittingly) connected up with an ongoing dialogue about the possibilities of the self and how identity is to be formed and maintained in contemporary Western culture.”

Individuals gain notoriety when they accomplish something, whether positive or negative. Those notorious individuals become celebrities when they represent something beyond their accomplishments, such as an Olympian arousing a sense of national pride or a Hollywood starlet embodying a strong sexuality.

Children who identify with a superhero or star athlete and adults who roll their eyes at the name Lindsey Lohan or Sarah Palin all participate in the identification and disidentification of celebrity. This idolization and vilification is part of the same process of identity formation, or as Ward puts it, of negotiating possibilities of the self.

I am left scratching my head, then, when IWU administrators think being contra-Hollywood places them outside celebrity culture. By assigning metaphoric significance to Hollywood, IWU participates in celebrity culture. Nowhere is this oxymoron more evident than in the university’s promotion of its own celebrities in the Society of World Changers, a hall-of-fame for loud evangelicals.

IWU President Henry Smith made at least two disconcerting statements, in public, regarding the selection of actor-evangelist Kirk Cameron as the Society’s 2012 inductee.

“We’re not bringing him here because of his theology, by the way, OK?” said Smith during a town hall meeting Feb. 9, 2012. “We’re bringing him here because he’s a light for Christ in Sodom and Gomorrah in our world.”

Hold up.

Smith just likened Cameron’s workplace to the ancient cities destroyed by God with burning sulfur as punishment for their total depravity.

I think it’s safe to assume Smith was not calling Hollywood power players “sodomites,” in the attempted same-sex gang rape sense of Genesis 19. (Past experience tells me the metaphor is thrown around all-too-flippantly in Christian circles.) Even so, I would expect a prepared statement by a university president to be more thoroughly thought-out.

Smith overlooked more apt biblical metropolitan metaphors for Hollywood, such as ancient Corinth, a city-state known as a cosmopolitan center for free thought, or Ninevah, a horribly sinful locale in need of redemption. Cameron could’ve even been depicted as a modern-day Jonah.

But I take theological pause when someone defines one region or workplace as more innately sinful than another. The church in Corinth may not look quite like the church in Jerusalem, but the Christian gospel is alive and well in Hollywood as much as it is in the Bible belt.

In fall 2011, I completed a “World Politics” course with Prof. Kris Pence at Indiana Wesleyan University. For the course, I researched the intersection of international relations, mass media and social trends to write “Queer Politics in the Global Civil Society: Film’s Relevance in the International Political Discourse Concerning LGBTQ Issues.”

This excerpt comes from the beginning of the paper and serves as a rough summary of the 10-page paper’s contents:

Few debate whether or not globalization has accelerated in the past two-to-three decades. Scholarly debates tend to focus, rather, on precisely how the proliferation of international businesses and non-government actors affects society globally. John Keane calls Global Civil Society a “new world-view” and designates the phrase “a neologism of the 1990s,” saying it has grown in popularity among communication scholars and politicians, alike – not to mention those who study international relations.

Keane acknowledges that no concrete definition exists for the expression, but for our purposes, the Global Civil Society is comprised of the collective trends manufactured and sustained by transnational corporations (TNCs), international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), and any interest group or transnational actor not directly tied to a state. These civilian organizations have an effect on large populations and traditional hard power institutions to an unprecedented degree, influencing the information and values held by virtually every people group in the world with access to mass media.

In this study, we will focus on three components of the Global Civil Society: film, race relations, and queer politics. Film is arguably the dominant medium for contemporary values-transmission, prompting skepticism from hard power institutions and proving that films are relevant in discussions of IR. Following World War II, film was used to normalize Blacks into civilized American society, promoting a shift in public opinion and legislation concerning racial segregation. Similarly, film is currently being used as a transnational vehicle challenging sub-societies to reconsider their opinions and laws directed toward the queer community, also commonly called the LGBTQ community. Regardless of their political and religious inclinations, policy-makers should not ignore the cinematic discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation because it could be a major force shaping the Global Civil Society of tomorrow.

If you’d like to read more of this paper or have any questions for me, shoot me an email at stevenporterproductions@gmail.com.