Dear Miss Sally, WWJD?

I have a confession to make. I’m feeling just a little bit sorry for Sally Kern.

Sally’s the Oklahoma legislator-cum-Baptist-minister’s-wife who recently found herself exposed worldwide after she went on an anti-gay tirade in a small closed meeting in Oklahoma. Unbeknownst to her, someone taped the tirade and has now uploaded it to youtube. For all the world to hear.**

This weekend, I watched clips of Sally listening and “responding” to her tirade. I’ve also watched a press conference at which she says her statements were taken out of context.

I feel sorry for Sally, because though she is among the Righteous Ones who believe they are The Found and the rest of us are the lost, she seems just so decisively lost now, as she tries to pick her way through the muck she threw in that secret meeting, now that the muck is apparent for all the world to see. She is lost because she has absolutely no intellectual or religious tools to deal with her current situation. The found should not find themselves in the land of the lost. It’s outrageous. It’s she who should be placing others there. She should not be forced to assess her actions, to ask about their consequences, to justify what she said. She’s among the saved, damn it!

But as I watch her trying to take in the reality of all the emails and letters she is now getting from the whole wide world, she strikes me as such a pitiful little lost lamb. And my heart goes out to her, my old sordid lost gay heart.

Sally is the whole religious right distilled into one rather pathetic little novella. Hers is the everywoman narrative of the religious right. In her media conference and the clip showing her trying to watch the youtube video of her tirade, she is the entire religious right—Pat Robertson to James Dobson, Phyllis Schlafly to Ann Coulter (yes, she does call herself a Christian)—condensed into one sad little soul. One sad little soul caught on tape and then forced to listen to that tape in front of the world.

From these clips, I gather that, along with some other Oklahoma legislators, Sally attended a conference sponsored by some radical wingnut activist group prior to her tirade. (Note to self: what group? And how much money do said legislators get from such groups? Does Oklahoma have laws governing contributions of such groups? Does Oklahoma have laws that make the contributions of such groups to its legislators subject to public scrutiny?)

She credits that conference with the astonishing array of “facts” she spews forth in her anti-gay tirade: that gays are going after our children; that gays want control of our schools, want to begin recruiting children as early as age two; that gays are diseased and don’t live long; that gays are a cancer spreading through our society; that gays cause the downfall of civilization; that gays are at the center of an organized cabal to destroy the family; and that gays are a bigger threat to America than terrorists.

You know the story. Substitute “Jews” for “gays” and turn the clock back a millennium, and you realize that Christians are old hat at this game. They’ve been playing it for centuries, after all: identifying some despised minority in their midst as the unique and solitary source of all evil, characterizing that minority as dirty, sly, child-killing, corrupt, infectious, and deserving of total exclusion, if not death. Jews = heretics = witches = women as daughters of Eve = people of color = gays. The cast may change, the robes vary, but the players are essentially the same. On one side is righteous Christian civilization, on the other is the threat that must, at all cost, be extinguished, even when the extinguishing means extracting confessions by dunking the corrupt agent of infection in water, pulling his arms from their sockets, breaking her back on the wheel, pulling out the bloody fingernails of the heretic one by one until a confession is obtained.

Even when the extinguishing means burning at the stake, disemboweling, hanging, expelling from Christian civilization (and leaving behind one’s property to enrich the good folks who have expelled you) . . . .

Even when the process of scapegoating, ritual humiliation, and expulsion violates everything Jesus ever said or did or stood for . . . .Even when one must lie in order to “prove” the case against the scapegoat . . . . A lie told in the service of a good cause (and Christian civilization is, ipso facto, a very good cause) is not really a lie. Is it?

As Sally watches her clip on youtube, she turns away her face. When asked why she does so, she explains that she just can’t watch. Nor does she intend to read or respond to all the communications she is now getting about her tirade. At one point, she expresses astonishment—shocked astonishment—that the words she said in that lil ole meeting behind closed doors are now winging their way around the world. That's not what she intended, when she kicked back and let her hair down entre nous, with the true believers in secret conclave.

I want so much to ask Sally at that point if Jesus ever said anything (that she can recall off the top of her head, being a “strong” Christian and all: she describes herself thus in her media conference) about homosexuals as dirty, cancerous, child-stealing and child-corrupting infectious low-lives destined for a short existence anyway. About homosexuality, period.

I want to ask her that because, while I don’t recall Jesus saying a single word about homosexuals or homosexuality, I do seem to recall him talking about measuring others with measures we’d like to have used when we ourselves are measured, and about the beam in our own eye and the mote in the other’s eye. I remember him talking a lot about justice and mercy. I quite specifically recall recall Jesus saying very clearly that the secrets we whisper in the dark will be bruited from the housetops.

As a bible-believing strong Christian, Sally remembers that text, I feel quite sure. And perhaps that is at the heart of her discomfort now—the recognition that the bible she takes literally does sometimes prove itself to be true, quite literally, but in some mighty discomfiting ways. Sally spoke out against the dirty gays. And she was heard. Loud and clear. Around the world.

What makes people act this way, when they clearly have grace enough to feel at least a tiny bit ashamed as they listen to their ugly secrets, secrets whispered in the dark and then broadcast around the world? People act this way, I submit, because they believe they are right. And no one or nothing has ever forced them to think otherwise.

When we are oh so assured that our worldview is the worldview, when we surround ourselves with other true believers who see the world through our lens, who parrot our truisms, who do not offer the slightest resistance to what we believe even when our beliefs verge on cruelty: when we live in such a universe, nothing compels us to ask whether we might simply be far off the track of sanity, decency, right-thinking and right-believing, with our untested, taken-for-granted certainties.

Sally’s a teacher. In her rant, she prides herself on sticking to the facts. She claims she wants the gays out of her schools because the gays promote ideologies that try to get children to look at the world differently—not through the lens of facts such as those she gleaned from the wingnut conference that indoctrinated her about the refined subtleties of the gay agenda, but through the lens of ideology. In other words, Sally resists the process of education, period, insofar as it asks those being educated to look at the world through various frames of reference, to think about the truth claims implied by each frame, to measure those truth claims, and then to make sage choices about the worldview one wishes to adopt.

Sally is ignorant. And Sally is a believer, a strong one. Ignorance + true belief is a noxious receipt, a prescription for a dangerous and volatile compound. When one really and truly believes with all one’s heart but is untroubled by fact or thought, one can justify just about anything: garroting of witches, burning of Jews, shoving the handicapped and homosexuals into ovens and burning them to cinders.

One of the surprises I myself have repeatedly had in dealing with the church at its ugliest—the church untroubled by fact or thought as it bashes gay human beings—is the willingness of the Sally Kerns of the church to try to claim victim status when they themselves are the victimizer.

Of gay employees. Of gay people. A typical response of church folks in supervisory positions in Christian institutions, when challenged with evidence of their homophobic ill-treatment of gay employees, is to claim that the evil gay is victimizing them! This inversion of values, the attempt of the oppressor to turn the tables and try to identify the oppressed as the victimizer, is typical in any twisted relationship in which a privileged party abuses a party placed in a subordinate position, in which that person cannot easily defend himself or herself.

Sally Kern depicts herself as a victim in the clips in which she confronts the evidence of her hate rhetoric. After terminating my employment in a particularly dirty, underhanded way, my last supervisor in a United Methodist institution wrote me a letter in which she implied that I had somehow attacked her—by letting her fire me. She has her high salary, her dignity, her health coverage; I have no income now, no health coverage. My reputation has suffered because of her unjust actions toward me. But she is now, in her telling of the story, the victim and I the victimizer . . . .

When this supervisor told me I was to be demoted, without no evaluation preceding this demotion and sharp cut of my salary, I asked her how she intended to handle the negative publicity that would surely ensue from such an outrageously unjust action. She waved away the question with a sweep of her hand. "Let them talk," she said. "People will talk. Just ignore them."

After that, when she went a step further and terminated me out of the blue, as word of the circumstances of the termination got out, the supervisor's attorney told me that I had created negative publicity for my supervisor in being terminated. My partner Steve was there when the termination occurred. When I was denied the right to call an attorney as I was terminated, I called Steve, instead, so that I would have a witness (and moral support) as I was locked out of my office on the UMC campus by four security guards.

Not having signed any document forbidding him to speak about what he witnessed, Steve then sent an email to a campus committee several days later, describing what he had witnessed. He did so because, knowing it had terminated me, the university continued using my name and my credentials as though I remained on campus. Both of us, in fact, still appear as employees of this Methodist institution in its university catalogue, some nine months following our departure from the campus; the catalogue still lists us by titles we no longer hold. The listing of faculty with terminal degrees contains our names and degrees.

The catalogue contains an online errata file I myself set up, into which any changes in the catalogue are to be entered immediately, so that the online catalogue is a constantly up-to-date version of this crucial university document. That errata file has not been updated in almost a year. A reliable source tells me that, some time after we both were gone from the campus, a grant was submitted to which our c.v.'s were both attached. The grant proposal contained information about the role we both would play in the implementation of the grant, if it were awarded—though we were both gone from the campus when the grant proposal was submitted.

(It was awarded. Steve wrote the grant prior to his resignation. When the grant for $150,000 came through following his resignation, the supervisor—who knew he had authored it—gave credit for it to another employee. My last act on campus was to take it on myself to write a grant that brought the university $15,000, for which someone who had no role at all in writing the grant has been allowed to take credit. My first assignment when I arrived on campus was to write a grant that brought the university $500,000.)

Note to self: Christian institutions seem perfectly capable of taking the talents of gay people, using them to the fullest, and then rewarding these gay human beings with conspicuously ugly treatment as a boon for their hard work, sacrifice, and dedication to the ideals of the institution. Who is the victim, and who the victimizer, in the relationship between gay believers and the church?

This ugly tactic—an inversion of values by which the victimizer tries to claim victim status—is possible in Christian institutions in their dealing with gay persons, because the churches have decided a priori that they are right and gay people are wrong. Churches have decided in advance that gay people have a humanity that is somehow twisted or diminished, by comparison to the humanity of “normal” people.

Hence the astonishment on the part of church institutions, on the part of the Miss Sallies of the world, when gay people fight back against abuse and injustice—when we claim our humanity in the face of oppression. Gays who insist on telling our inconvenient stories of abuse suddenly become “homosexual activists,” professional pot-stirrers trying to create trouble for good Christian people—the kind who think they can say hateful things about us behind closed doors, or boot us out of jobs without any defensible cause for our termination, and never be exposed.

I’m astonished by this reaction, by Sally’s (and my former supervisor's) attempt to claim the victim’s role. Do people—good church people—really think that we will sit on our hands when our rights are denied and our humanity violated? Do they really think that we will ask to be bashed again, please sir or please ma'am? I didn’t get enough the first time around . . . .

News flash to Sally Kern and other mothers (and fathers) of the church: every hateful word you utter about the gays negatively affects a gay person, which is to say, some other mother’s son or daughter. Would you want your sons or daughters reduced to subhuman status, to the status to which you reduce other mothers’ sons and daughters when you engage in hateful rhetoric or hateful acts in the name of Christ? Would you want your own children relegated to the subliminal, marginal, despised social place into which you seek to put someone else’s sons and daughters, by your words and deeds?

I don’t think Sally Kern is a particularly bad person. She strikes me as far less cynical about the hate agenda she is promoting than, say, a Pat Robertson, a Ralph Reed, an Ann Coulter, or a James Dobson. I think Sally truly believes.

But true belief is not good enough. Not when it issues in hateful actions. Not when it promotes lies. Not when it covers over the violent assault of children in our schools, if those children are identified as gender-inappropriate.

Somewhere deep inside, Sally perhaps hears the voices of those children. If she does read her mail in the coming weeks, I suspect she’ll be hearing from the parents, siblings, aunts, uncles of such children. Many of those parents, siblings, aunts, and uncles may well identify themselves, as Sally does, as strong Christians.

When their voices reach the true humanity inside the hard shell of true belief compounded by ignorance—and I hope they will do so—what will Sally do? Will she drive more nails into the hard shell to cobble it back together, so that the pleading voices can’t get inside?

Or will she listen, and respond? Like a human being, and not a strong Christian?

On that response truly does depend the future of an authentically Christian culture. On that response the future of the churches themselves depends. No more gay-identified children need to be killed in the schools of “Christian” lands. No more adult gay children who have mothers somewhere need to have their lives tormented by the lies and unjust treatment of other fathers and mothers who claim to speak and act in the name of Christ.

If Sally and her ilk really want to hear the facts they claim so desperately to value, I know a boatload of gay folks willing to tell our stories to them—stories full of facts that just don’t seem ever to get a hearing in church circles or the mainstream media that are so quick to pander to the religious right. We’re at the door, knocking. Let us in, invite us to your table, and we’re prepared to talk.

If you care to listen . . . .

**Several blogs linked to my blog have postings this past week about Sally Kern; they include Towleroad, Pam's House Blend, and Bilerico Project.