Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? Mormons Join Catholic Bishops' Discrimination Party in Minnesota

Guess who's coming to dinner?  The dinner being the discrimination-gala the Catholic bishops of Minnesota have been throwing the past few years, as they make combating the gays and the human rights of gay citizens their major priority.

Standing on the Promises: Mormons and Catholics Say, Mormons and Catholics Do

Remember how, in the wake of prop 8’s victory in California, leaders of the LDS church assured us (here) that, in blocking gay marriage, they did not want to roll back civil rights for gays? That they would even consider civil unions for gay couples?

On 5 November, the Salt Lake Tribune reported that Elder L. Whitney Clayton of the LDS Presidency of the Seventy had stated that Mormons wanted to reach out to their gay brothers and sisters battered by the LDS spearheading of prop 8 and “heal any rifts caused by the emotional campaign by treating each other with ‘civility, with respect and with love’” (here).

Around the same time, Cardinal Francis George, head of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote to the new president, Mr. Obama, saying, “We stand ready to work with you in defense and support of the life and dignity of every human person” (here). This despite the fact that the Catholic bishops had supported the initiative to remove the right to marriage from gay citizens of California . . . .

We also received reassurances in December from Catholic Archbishop George Niederauer, who actively solicited the involvement of the LDS church in the prop 8 battle in California, that his support for prop 8 did not represent “an attack on any group, or . . . an attempt to deprive others of their civil rights” (here). Archbishop Niederauer assured us that, even with the removal of the right to marriage, “same sex couples who register as domestic partners will continue to have ‘the same rights, protections and benefits’ as married couples.”

Well, guess what? It appears that something has gotten lost in the . . . transmission . . . of those church dignitaries' noble ideals regarding human rights, to those who make the laws respecting said rights. As of this week, every initiative to assure the rights of gay citizens of Utah has been turned back by the Utah legislature (here) and (here). The bills are not even making it out of committee—bills to prohibit discrimination against gay citizens in housing and employment, to allow adoption rights to gay couples, and so forth.

One more initiative remains in Utah: a bill to protect the right of same-sex partners to each other in the hospital, bequeath property to each other, and make medical decisions on each other’s behalf. Given the track record of these bills standing on the promises of Elder Clayton and the Mormon church, I don’t have strong hopes that this one will make it through, either.

What’s going on here? Well, as I’ve been writing for some time now, these promises by leaders of the religious right regarding respect for the human rights of gay persons are smokescreens. They’re lies. The ultimate goal of the religious right is not to outlaw gay marriage while respecting other rights of gay citizens. It is to roll back all human rights for gay citizens, everywhere in the nation, whenever this is possible.

As I wrote last November,

The goal of these initiatives against gay marriage is to roll back as many rights as possible from gay citizens. We who are gay would be foolish in the extreme if we did not recognize that this is the game plan of those using gay lives and gay human beings to make political points . . . . [T]he ultimate objective of those using gay persons in these ugly political battles is to tell us that we are unwelcome, and should return to the closet in order to make our fellow citizens comfortable (here); see also (here).

This is why, in my view, all American citizens concerned about the protection of the human rights of any of us ought to be interested in the recent ramping up of the assault on gay citizens by the religious and political right, about which I have been blogging. As Pam Spaulding reports today, the Washington Blade published an article about this development yesterday, noting that “[a]nti-gay conservatives are increasing their rhetoric and activities . . .” (here) and (here).

In my view, we haven't begun to see all that the political and religious right are capable of, in this regard, in 2009. Times of economic downturn are times in which toxic political groups seeking to undermine democracy adroitly fuel fires of social anxiety, and work up animosities against groups easily targeted to further their anti-democratic campaigns. It's time to keep our eyes wide open.

Standing Truth on Its Head: Archbishop Niederauer's Defense of Attacks on Human Rights

The Catholic archbishop of San Francisco, George Niederauer, issued a statement yesterday defending his role in depriving gay citizens of the state of California of a human right—the right to marry (http://www.blogger.com/www.sfarchdiocese.org/about-us/news/?i=1505). Niederauer has drawn fire because he actively solicited the assistance of the Mormon church in his battle. The Mormon church contributed more than 50% of the funds used to pass proposition 8 in California, though Mormons make up only 2% of the state’s population.

In some ways, Archbishop Niederauer’s misleading, shoddy statement does not deserve consideration. In other ways, it must be examined, because it tries to pass off disinformation that is often circulated on the religious right under the guise of a reasoned argument for depriving a minority group of human rights.

For instance, Archbishop Niederauer seeks to convince us that proposition 8 was “not . . . an attack on any group, or . . . an attempt to deprive others of their civil rights.” That’s an astonishing counterfactual argument to make—an astonishing lie to tell. I seriously doubt that citizens and families that went to bed one day assured of their right to marry and woke up the next day without that right did not notice that they had been deprived of a civil right.

I also suspect those deprived of that right by religious fiat acting as political clout felt anything but attacked.

Niederauer also argues that “same sex couples who register as domestic partners will continue to have ‘the same rights, protections and benefits’ as married couples.” It is difficult to believe that the archbishop is unaware of studies showing that domestic partnerships rarely accord those in such partnerships all the rights accorded a legally married couple.

It is also difficult to believe that the archbishop can be unaware that the Catholic church has fought against domestic partnerships for gay couples everywhere in the world whenever this has been possible. Or that the Catholic church has repeatedly fought against recognition of any civil rights for gay persons, including the right to protection from discrimination in employment or housing. Or that the Catholic church rarely affords employees of its institutions any of those rights, if they happen to gay. Or that the majority of gay Americans lack not only the right to marry or enter civil unions, but have no legal protection at all—and this largely due to the efforts of churches including the Catholic church to prevent legislation protecting the civil rights of gay Americans.

It is hard to believe, in other words, that the archbishop does not know he is lying.

Archbishop Niederauer also speaks unconvincingly of the church’s solicitude for all human beings, and of its respect for the “spiritual and pastoral rights” of all Catholics. The archbishop must know that it is theologically inappropriate, theologically false, to divide human beings into spiritual and material parts. Where people’s human rights are trampled on, one cannot speak convincingly of a respect for people’s spiritual rights. Those trampling on the human rights of others speak of their concern for people’s spiritual lives with very ill grace. Such rhetoric is a grotesque attempt to paint cruelty and injustice as pastoral concern.

These misleading statements are bad enough. But perhaps the most audacious falsehood the archbishop seeks to pass off in his statement about proposition 8 is the following:

Indeed, to insist that citizens be silent about their religious beliefs when they are participating in the public square is to go against the constant American political tradition. Such a gag order would have silenced many abolitionists in the nineteenth century and many civil rights advocates in the twentieth.

It has become common in the circles of the religious right to depict some Christians’ opposition to gay marriage as a manifestation of a new abolitionism—that is, as an expression of churches’ concern for the moral life of culture akin to that of the abolitionist movement. This false analogy stands the truth on its head in a very ugly way. It inverts values in an attempt to depict what is morally indefensible as noble.

Since the archbishop appeals to history, he should perhaps inform himself about history—about the history of the abolitionist and civil rights movements in particular. The movement to deprive gay human beings of human rights is grounded in widespread consensus of many Christians and many churches today.

Similarly, the determination to defend slavery and to deny civil rights to African Americans up to the middle of the 20th century was grounded in widespread consensus of American Christians and their churches. Just as large numbers of Christians today are oblivious to the appeal to respect the human rights of gay citizens, the overwhelming majority of Christians and their churches were solidly opposed to the abolition of slavery up to and even following the Civil War. In like manner, the majority of Christians and their churches supported segregation and opposed efforts to change the laws mandating racial segregation.

In the abolitionist movement and in the civil rights movement, a prophetic minority of engaged believers challenged the status quo, and at the same time, challenged their fellow believers, who were comfortable maintaining the status quo and giving it divine sanction. Unlike the Mormon church and the Catholic church in the proposition 8 battle, these prophetic believers did not use financial clout and political power to deprive citizens of human rights. These prophetic minorities lacked such clout.

And they worked to claim rights for citizens, not to remove rights.

What those prophetic Christians and churches of the minority did in American culture during the periods of slavery and segregation was noble and admirable. What Archbishop Niederauer and his allies are doing is ignoble and despicable. Their attack on the human rights of a marginalized minority group undermines their claim to be concerned about the human rights of anyone anywhere.

And it will be judged that way by history—every bit as much as history has passed judgment on the immoral, corrupt, enculturated religiosity of the majority of American Christians who resisted the human rights of slaves and the civil rights of people of color in the period following the abolition of slavery.

Niederauer's Catholic Church: Searingly Familiar with the Battle for Civil Rights

Good news from the meeting of the U.S. Catholic bishops! They intend to help Mr. Obama.

And challenge him, of course. You know. The way they challenged Mr. Bush. And all the Republican politicians they’re bullied their flocks to elect and re-elect lo these many years.

The pro-life ones. The ones who have brought us the war on Iraq. Who stood by as Katrina devastated New Orleans. Who blocked the CHIP program to provide healthcare for needy infants.

Yes, those pro-life leaders. The ones the bishops have talked endlessly about, as they challenged and re-challenged the disparity between pro-life rhetoric and anti-life actions in their anointed candidates of the party of life and not the one of death.

And look at who’s talking about civil rights! None other than Archbishop George Niederauer of San Francisco, who, according to an article published in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle, wrote the Mormons in June to solicit their help in the fight against the right of gay Americans to marry (www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/10/MNU1140AQQ.DTL&hw=niederauer&sn=001&sc=1000).

You know, to marry in civil ceremonies over which churches don’t preside. Just like millions of other Americans choose to do.

Yes, that civil right, which the good archbishop of San Francisco depicts as a “right,” as he does the “marriages” that result from that “right.”

But, thankfully, the good archbishop of San Francisco is not against civil rights. Oh, no, not at all.

Because at the same time that he rejoices in the removal of the “right” to “marry” from gay human beings, he also praises God that “on the same day and at the same polling places,” African Americans voted in strong numbers both for the first African-American president and against the “right” of gay human beings to “marry” (http://ncrcafe.org/node/2262).

As the good archbishop of San Francisco puts the point,

For months we were told that this is a civil rights issue. Yet the group most searingly familiar with civil rights battles in America voted in favor of the proposition by 70 percent. They did not see the issue as conservative/liberal, but rather the way we presented it – as a defense of traditional marriage.

Searingly familiar: you know, as the Catholic church has been searingly familiar with the African-American community and its aspirations for generations. As it has unstintingly fought discrimination, opposed slavery, combated racism, and created a vibrant and welcoming space in its midst for people of color.

Well, sort of. When it wasn’t actually practicing slavery. And defending it as one of those “natural” institutions that has existed from time immemorial and therefore must have been blessed or instituted by God, or it wouldn’t have existed from time immemorial.

And when it wasn’t using the scriptures to prop up its defense of slavery. Since the bible does presuppose and even endorse slavery, don’t you know.

And if the church is anything, it’s faithful to the bible—every word, as it is written. All of them entrusted, thank God, into the hands of those men at the top who are searingly familiar with human rights and intent on safeguarding said rights.

Ask Mother Henriette DeLille, who founded the Sisters of the Holy Family. Born to a white father and a mother who was a free woman of color under the system of “marriage” that did not in any way trouble Catholic pastors in pre-emancipation New Orleans—the system called plaçage—Henriette DeLille recognized that she had a vocation for religious life as she became a young woman.

But when she sought to enter a “white” religious community of sisters—any white community of sisters—she found that having a slight proportion of African blood prevented her from doing so. Religious life was, well, for white ladies, not black women. DeLille was told that women of color could not live the vow of chastity required of religious women.

So she decided to found her own community, a community of women of color. In that welcoming, racially progressive church that is searingly familiar with the hunger and thirst of despised human beings for basic human rights. The church that has unfailingly promoted human rights. The church that now applauds the legitimate rights of African-American human beings while gleefully removing the illegitimate “rights” of gay ones.

The church that fostered and protected plaçage in south Louisiana for over 150 years—a “marriage” in which a white man took a woman of color as his “wife” until, well, until he got tired of her and was pressured by his family to marry. To have a real marriage, a Catholic one, in a church.

At which point the woman of color and the children she had borne the white man were usually kicked to the curb as the father of the family began to live with his real wife and to pay attention to his real children.

In one of those good old-fashioned forever-and-ever marriages that have existed from the beginning of human history, according to the Catholic church. And which would be seriously undermined if we allowed any other kind of “marriage” to gain a toehold in our society. The kind the church has always defended as it has sought to stamp out bogus “marriages” to which no one has a “right.”

About the good archbishop’s glee at the fine behavior of those searingly familiar with civil rights battles: look for a lot more of this rhetoric—a whole boatload of this crap—to be unloaded in coming months. By religious people in cross-church alliances defending marriage across the nation, doncha know.

Just as they have always consistently and valiantly defended the civil rights of African Americans, whom they are now happy to use as blunt instruments with whom to beat gay Americans over the head. While talking about Christian love, healing, human rights.

Since the Catholic church (and the LDS church) has always been on the side of human rights. Ask Mother Henriette DeLille. She'll tell you. You'll get an earful if you ask her and most other Catholics of African heritage whose roots run deep in the Catholicism of places like south Louisiana. They'll tell you in a hearbeat how searingly familiar Catholic pastoral leaders have been, on the whole, with the human rights of African Americans and the aspirations of African-American Catholics to dignity.

The Sounds of Silence

“I have never heard a sermon that offered wisdom as to how a gay man should live his life in a faithful Christian manner. All I have heard is silence, or when there was something other than silence, the words have been condemning" ~ Rev. Paul Capetz.

Presbyterian News Service for Jan. 28 carries an interesting article by Duane Sweep, entitled "Twin Cities' Presbytery Restores Capetz' Ordination (www.pcusa.org/pcnews/2008/08063.htm).

The story concerns a Presbyterian (PC USA) minister Paul Capetz, who renounced his ordination in 2000 after the PC USA added to its Book of Discipline a 1997 statement requiring ordained ministers to practice “fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and woman or chastity in singleness.”

As many commentators noted at the time the policy was implemented, it was primarily aimed at lesbian and gay ministers living with partners--that is, lesbian-gay ministers who potentially might reveal their sexual orientation to the public, rather than living silent, closeted lives. Commentators in the Presbyterian church and other churches that have adopted similar policies note that they tend to be used almost exclusively to weed out openly gay-lesbian ministers. Straight (or straight-identifying) ministers who are unmarried are not normally subjected to such stringent scrutiny re: their "celibacy" as are lesbian-gay ones.

Capetz recently decided to ask for reinstatement to ordination, on the ground that the implied "vow of celibacy" that the PC USA requires of non-married clergy represents a theology of "works righteousness" antithetical to Reformed theology. His appeal was upheld on Jan. 26 by the presbytery of Minneapolis-St. Paul.

What strikes me in Capetz's testimony to the presbytery, as reported in the article cited above, is the pronounced theme of calling and witness running through it. Capetz reports that it was the church which, from childhood forward, nurtured his life of faith. It was within the church that, as a young man, he discovered a strong sense of vocation, a calling to follow in Jesus's footsteps and minister to his flock.

And it was the same church--the church that had nurtured him and provided a context within which he heard the calling to ministry--that then attacked him when he sought to integrate the experience of being gay with his vocation. It was that church that told him to live in silence about his very personhood, or incur penalties.

It is out of this painful exclusion that Capetz addresses his experience (and that of other openly gay-lesbian believers) in the church: either silence or condemnation; either the injunction (tacit or spoken) to remain hidden, defined the shameful member of the family who is never spoken of, or direct assaults on his personhood, from the very community that nurtured his faith and vocation.

Capetz's testimony strikes me powerfully, because his story could be mine. It is also the story of countless other LGBT members of Christian communities around the world, whose entire experience of grace and vocation is framed by our natures, by who we are, by what we have experienced as LGBT children of God. We experience the divine as LGBT persons. We cannot experience God in any other way. To ask us to deny our natures or pretend to be who we are not is to ask us to forfeit the experience of a God who comes to each person just as that person is....We experience God through the mediating structures of our own personhood, of our personalities, predispositions, our unique way of being in the world.

The ultimate cruelty of the churches' assault on us as LGBT persons--specifically and precisely because we are LGBT--is the churches' denial that we lead graced lives. In telling us that our nature is malformed, or that our love is inauthentic, the churches tell us that we have no witness of grace to offer the Christian community.

Yet the powerful testimony of LGBT Christians everywhere--there is a veritable cloud of witnesses--repudiates the validity of the church's judgment of us. Not only can we live lives of grace, vocational lives within the Christian community, we do live such lives.

To their shame, the churches are unable to recognize this. The loss is surely the churches' loss. In behaving so savagely, by excluding LGBT members who refuse to live in quiet shame, not only do churches undercut their claims to be church: the family of God in which everyone is welcome. In behaving thus, the churches also diminish the significance of their many ministries to heal, make whole, right the wrongs of society.

The churches cannot stand to claim for love, inclusion, healing, and justice, when they conspicuously deny those ideals by their shameful treatment of their gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered members.

Silence is never an adequate response to persons in need of love, affirmation, and healing. The Jewish and Christian scriptures show prophets and holy people, as well as Jesus, consistently reaching out to anyone in need, to speak words of healing and consolation. God is forever speaking....

A church that employs silence as a way of avoiding speaking words of healing and blessing to one group of human beings can hardly speak effective words of healing and blessing to others. Silence is an indefensible response on the part of churches to anyone in need.

Between silence and condemnation: this is not a place in which human beings can live and thrive.