January 25, 2026

By Steve Stofka

In cities across the U.S. emergency shelters are preparing for the Arctic front descending from Canada. The first effects of the front were felt in the Rockies. Denver’s temperatures dropped 30° from Thursday to Friday. Plains states are preparing for crippling ice storms before the snow blanket. There are routinely many challenges to being homeless. Severely cold temperatures make it doubly uncomfortable to live outdoors. This week I want to explore the idea of comfort, our internal weather map.

We understand the adjective comfortable as a gradient word, not an on-off switch. We can be more or less comfortable. We can grow less comfortable in a situation until our level of discomfort prompts us to take some action. We are emotional capacitors, similar to how an electrical capacitor works. A certain level of charge must build up in a capacitor until it acts to close or open an electrical circuit. Throughout our lives, we experience this sequence where a gradual process prompts a yes/no decision. We speak of being “fed up” or we “just couldn’t deal with it anymore.” Then we did something. In the American form of government, policy changes are often incremental. Public sentiment gradually becomes disaffected with some policy but it takes a great deal of dissatisfaction before voters usher in a change.

When we are comfortable, we are satisfied and less likely to want change. That is why advocacy groups sometimes use tactics that make the general population uncomfortable. They want voters to notice, to care. Caring is the second axis I want to explore. We care more about an issue when we are uncomfortable because we care a great deal with our comfort. From our first days outside our mother’s womb, we care about our comfort. That level of caring is instinctual. Caring about the comfort of others is not instinctual. We are social animals who develop that type of caring. We are especially drawn to the plight of children whose natural dependence exposes a universal vulnerability that we can relate to.

In a complex society, we are often faced with the tricky task of balancing comfort and care. Naturally, we care for our own comfort more than that of strangers. People who own property in urban districts zoned for single family homes may resist rezoning efforts to permit more dense housing in their district. These owners, called NIMBYs, are often blamed for the housing affordability crisis, writes Roberta Gratz in the Nation magazine (Source). She argues that private equity investors support multi-family rezoning in order to build megaprojects that give them the most return on their investment. They erect functional apartment boxes that rise five to eight stories above the ground. In Denver, these ugly boxes block any enjoyment of the mountain landscape that borders the city. When homeowners vote to preserve single family zoning, they vote against ugly, not against multi-family housing. Gratz cites several examples of homeowner groups who rejected larger projects that were out of character with the neighborhood, but did approve of a less ambitious project. Homeowners do care about affordability, the value of their homes and the character of their neighborhood. People are accustomed to caring about several conflicting issues at once. Some of us are better at juggling our priorities than others.

The AIDS crisis in the 1980s illustrates how comfort and caring intersect. Beginning in the 1950s, Greenwich Village in Manhattan was a gathering place for folks who belonged to the counterculture. These included beatniks, later hippies, then gays. St. Vincent’s Hospital, closed in 2010, was four blocks away from the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street. In the summer of 1969, a routine police raid at the Stonewall Inn led to several days of riots by gay people protesting their marginalization by mainstream society. These Stonewall Riots, as they were called, were probably the spark of the gay rights movement.

In the 1980s, St. Vincent’s treated many gay men for a mysterious disease, later identified as AIDS, that often proved fatal even to young people. After several years, the hospital devoted a floor to those afflicted with the disease.  Gay men were only a small percent of the population and were thought to have brought this on themselves by their immoral behavior. Gay lovers were not considered family and were refused visitation. Early on, there was little understanding of how people got the disease. Did it spread through casual kissing or sexual contact only? Gay rights groups struggled to get funding for medical research from policymakers. A group called Act Up conducted several demonstrations at St. Vincent’s Hospital, then organized a “kiss-in” in 1988 near the hospital that blocked all four lanes of busy 7^th Avenue (Source). The demonstration was one of many in cities across the country (Source).

Unlike the instinctual cry of a baby, these were planned demonstrations organized without the use of cellphones or social media. Even local phone calls on a landline telephone could be expensive in some areas so the main form of spontaneous communication was face-to-face at work, school, and places of shared interests. Everyone became aware of public events through a few highly regulated public media channels on TV and radio. The kiss-ins made a lot of people uncomfortable but they got the public’s attention.

In 1993, just five years after the 1988 kiss-ins, the Hawaiian Supreme Court ruled that laws prohibiting marriage on the basis of sex violated Hawaii’s constitution (Source). In 1996, Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) prohibiting federal recognition of same-sex marriages (Source). Whether comfortable with gay marriage or not, many people now cared about an issue that had received little attention two decades earlier. The AIDS crisis helped people became aware that the institution of marriage conveyed legal and medical privileges that were not available to gay partners. Voters who were uncomfortable with gay marriage were even more uncomfortable with hospital policies that banned visitation by a gay partner. Within a decade after the passage of DOMA, 36 states had passed laws recognizing gay marriage. In its 2015 Obergefell v Hodges decision, a narrow majority of the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that all states must recognize same-sex marriages (Source).

Roberts, Thomas and Alito, three of the four justices who dissented in Obergefell, are still on the court. Justice Thomas has publicly urged the Supreme Court to revisit Obergefell. Roberts and Alito have expressed a greater respect for the court’s precedent than their own misgivings about the decision (Source). All three justices are Catholic and have now been joined on the court by three more Catholics – Justices Gorsuch, Barrett and Kavanaugh.

Neither the Catholic Church nor conservative Catholics are comfortable with change. Catholic doctrine has long prohibited same-sex marriage just as they prohibited the teaching of heliocentrism for many centuries. In1822 the Church finally lifted its ban on heliocentrism, and in 1992, the Pope admitted the Church’s error in jailing Galileo for teaching heliocentrism (Source). The Supreme Court may have issued its decision in Roe v Wade but it was never settled law and the court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization overthrew Roe. While those six justices are not likely to overturn Obergefell on purely religious grounds, their sense of faithfulness to church doctrine competes with their respect for court precedent. Like the rest of us, the conservative justices are motivated to reduce their discomfort but they have not yet found a rationale. Advocacy groups like Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council continue to lobby against gay marriage. Don’t underestimate the power of persistent political action.

Comfort and caring work together. Knowing the limits of our discomfort helps us better understand ourselves, but we don’t act on that discomfort until we care enough about an issue that we trip the action switch and do something. Stay warm and I hope to see you next week.

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Photo by Artur Solarz on Unsplash