Story from My Own Backyard: Catholic School, Mount St. Mary, Fires Teacher Who Marries Same-Sex Partner

I just wrote, 

Moving Beyond Lies: Responding to "Ex-Gay" Lies by Claiming the Gay Place at Table

Another update to my recent postings about the American Family Association’s beefed-up outreach to youth through the internet. Pam’s House Blend reported last evening that WOOD-TV, a Grand Rapids news station, has decided not to air the video “Speechless.” This is the AFA video that claims Christians are being silenced in the United States today about which I blogged yesterday (www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=9447 and http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/02/targeting-youth-with-anti-gay-lies-afa_11.html).

Pam notes that the Human Rights Campaign issued an action alert yesterday about this video. The action alert notes that AFA intends to air this video nationwide, as an opening salvo in a battle against new Congressional pro-equality legislation, and, in particular, against hate crimes legislation to protect gay citizens from violence and discrimination (www.hrcbackstory.org/2009/02/take-action-afa-anti-lgbt-tv-program-could-air-saturday).

The HRC statement names the lies around which AFA is building this campaign to assault a vulnerable group of citizens. These include claims that “Christians” are being denied free speech and arrested for proclaiming the gospel. Linked to the HRC action alert is a video by HRC’s Religion and Faith Program Harry Knox. I find that the Central Valley Yes on Equality website links to my posting about AFA yesterday, with the same video (http://centralvalleyyesonequality.wordpress.com/2009/02/11/hrc-responds-to-afas-hate-crimes-lies).

Harry Knox’s statement about AFA’s campaign is powerful and unambiguous—he identifies the AFA initiative as one based on lies and distortions:

The truth is that the AFA and their allies have never been speechless when it comes to promoting their own agenda, and that’s driving a wedge in the very places where LGBT Americans work, live, and even pray. They claim to speak from a religious viewpoint, but they pervert the love and kindness that leads millions of Americans of faith to support common-sense hate crimes laws. As we gear up to pass a law that protects millions of Americans from hate violence, we must not allow these sixty minutes of lies and distortions to fuel more hate.

As my first posting today notes, German journalist Mario Kaiser has just published an op-ed piece discussing his reason for resigning from the Catholic church in the wake of Pope Benedict’s rehabilitation of anti-Semite Richard Williamson. For Kaiser, the straw that broke the camel’s back was the implication, in the Vatican response to the revelation of Williamson’s vile anti-Semitism, that Holocaust denial is one possible “position” among others.

Kaiser states, “But there are certain issues I do not want to discuss. I don't wish to discuss if Hitler had a lovely side to him. And I don't ever wish to discuss if the Holocaust really happened.”

Kaiser makes a very important point here, and it’s one that, in my view, applies both to Holocaust denial and to the “ex-gay” myth. Readers may have noted that, several times in recent days, Holocaust deniers have logged onto this blog to stir discussion of whether the Holocaust really happened, of details about what happened that have long since been settled by credible historians, and so forth. You may also have noticed how I chose to handle those attempts to gain a hearing for lies.

Rather than engage points of view that must not be engaged, if we wish to avoid giving them any semblance of legitimacy, I simply took these comments and their links to hate-filled anti-Semitic internet sites and used them as the occasion to tell the truth about the Holocaust. I countered lies with the truth. I blogged about what I have seen with my own eyes.

Arguing with Holocaust deniers about whether the Holocaust actually happened allows these purveyors of lies and hate to gain legitimacy for their lies. It allows them to represent their lies (and the agenda of hate underlying them) as one position among other possible, other thinkable, positions.

My strategy in dealing with those who pretend an interest in various “positions” when their real agenda is to promote noxious lies is simply to turn the tables of the conversation, and speak the truth back. I have learned not to engage arguments that claim to be all about fostering pluralistic discourse but are actually an attempt to shut the conversation down so that a false ideological position can be imposed in the name of truth.

This is a tactic I learned long ago in academic life. It’s a tactic about which I wrote back in the 1990s in an article entitled “Telling It Slant: American Catholic Public Theology and Prophetic Discourse,” Horizons 22 (1995), 88-103. That article takes its cue from Emily Dickinson’s insistence that we’re to tell the truth but tell it slant, since success in circuit lies.

And it’s more than a tactic, really: it’s a means of assuring that what really needs to be said and heard is said and heard, despite the attempts of those who want to control the conversation to keep the truth from being told. Right-wing interest groups have been adroit in recent years about pretending to use the structures of respectful pluralistic conversation regarding important issues to subvert any meaningful pluralistic conversation.

Those on the right with no commitment whatsoever to permit open conversation and a diversity of viewpoints about all kinds of issues—including the place of women in church and society, gender roles, homosexuality, evolution, and on and on—routinely charge anyone who challenges their lies (and names the lies as lies) with betraying the commitment to respectful dialogue. When their lies are identified, they shout about incivility and language that bashes others—even as they themselves engage in the most uncivil agenda of all, one seeking to deny human rights to others, and in ugly broad slurs about the character of those who do not fit the right-wing Christian norm.

As the masthead for this blog indicates, with Bilgrimage, I consider myself on a journey towards truth that needs to be spoken but doesn't get told. When I meet lies dressed as truth on this journey, I consider it important to undress them and deal with them for what they are. I do an injustice to myself and to others journeying with me if I allow lie to posture as truth and do not confront the lie hidden inside its nice clothes—even when I’m accused by those propagating the lie of being unkind or unfair in exposing a lie that is intended to have destructive social consequences.

My profile statement on this blog also says that I’m committed to challenging the religious right’s claim to own God. One of the premier ways in which those of us working to discover and speak the truth in those areas where the religious right insists on systemically distorting public discourse is simply to act as if the barriers imposed by the religious right are not there.

We who are gay are told, for instance, that we have no right to speak in the name of God, or about God, or about the scriptures. A number of websites are reporting today that a gay pastor was asked to give the opening prayer at the Oklahoma House of Representatives on Monday (www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2009/02/12/8743). At the end of the day’s legislative session, when a routine motion was made to enter the prayer into the minutes of the session, a legislator who objected to recording any mention of the prayer in the minutes called for a roll call vote.

Twenty legislators voted against recording the prayer. These included controversial Oklahoma legislator Sally Kern, a staunch ally of the religious right and wife of a Baptist minister, who has stated that gay citizens are a greater threat to the nation than terrorism. As Jim Burroway reports in the Box Turtle Bulletin article to which I’ve just linked, nothing about the prayer was controversial. One has to conclude, Burroway thinks, that the rhetoric of Christians on the right who claim to love the sinner while hating the sin is just that: rhetoric and and not an expression of what many in the religious right actually believe.

What this story says to me, loudly and clearly, is that many Christians on the right do not think that an openly gay person is qualified to pray. To use the name of God. To study and write about the scriptures. There is a claim of ownership of God running through the religious right that requires members of that movement to vilify, lie about, undermine, attack, smear, and annihilate gay human beings—in the name of the Lord, of course—and in particular, to do so when a gay human being claims the right to pray, to speak in God’s name, to read and interpret scripture.

As my postings on interpreting the holy stories of the world religions have noted (see, e.g., http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/12/gay-marriage-debate-and-ownership-of.html), I think that it is crucially important for those of us who are both LGBT and believers to claim our place at the table, as the scriptures are interpreted. The holy stories are our stories, too. They speak to us in ways they cannot speak to the comfortable and sated. We understand the joy of Mary, the mother of Jesus, at the thought of the mighty being cast down from their thrones and the lowly lifted up, and of the poor being filled with good things and the rich sent empty away.

It is important for us who are gay and Christian to claim our place at the center and act as if we have as much right to that place as any other Christian has. It is important for us to act as if the barriers are not there, as if the hedge of lies is not barring our entrance, and to speak as if our voice counts, to read and disclose the meaning of the scriptures as though we have as much right to this act of interpretation as any other believer.

As we do that, we begin to build up alternative discourse worlds that simply circumvent the roadblocks of the religious right, and alternative traditions of interpretation that challenge the dominant ones insofar as those bar voices from the margins such as ours. As we claim our right to speak in the name of a God whom we experience as grace in our life journey every bit as much as any other believer experiences that God, we also demonstrate in the most compelling way possible that the lies of the "ex-gay" movement are not one among several “possibilities” for believers, but are what they are: lies. Lies that should be ruled out of bounds every bit as much as Holocaust denial has been ruled out of bounds, and for the same reason: these are lies told to harm people, to diminish their humanity, to make people susceptible to scorn and violence. Such lies absolutely have to be exposed and weeded out in any civil society which seeks to allow everyone a place at the table.

We who are gay have an additional obligation to be concerned about stopping lies like these—noxious attacks on the humanity of others—because one of the groups in our society most susceptible to damage by the lies of the "ex-gay" movement are young folks. Young gay and lesbian folks, struggling to understand their identities in a society still frequently hostile to them. Young folks seeking what every young person seeks: affirmation, love, self-understanding, a place in the community.

The lies of the "ex-gay movement" are especially harmful to young people. They impose on youth a burden in addition to the many burdens the maturation process itself imposes. In fact, they can and do lead to suicide.

I will not “answer” the lies of the "ex-gay" movement here in any detailed way. What I want to note in passing here is simply the obvious: the movement is built around a fundamental lie from which all its other lies flow. That fundamental lie is that we can change our sexual orientations, and that sexual orientation is not an innate, God-given part of a human being’s make-up. On that basis, the "ex-gay" movement has built an entire house of cards, each depicting yet another lie about scripture and theology, the real lives of real gay persons, gay relationships: you name it.

Look through the screen of lies the ex-gay movement tells about gay human beings and you will not see a single recognizable face of a single recognizable gay human being you know. You will see human faces on which a screen of lies have been imposed to distort those faces for the pleasure of the "ex-gay" movement.

The way out? Journeying together towards the truth. Despite those who want to disrupt that journey, because it threatens them and their agendas. Seeking the truth together. Forming alternative communities of discourse and interpretation that claim the center even as we are told that we have no right to a place there. Changing the conversation so that lies appear for what they are and no longer determine the conversation or masquerade as one “position” among many.

Liliana Segura addresses these concerns today in a fascinating article at Alternet about the need to question authority (www.alternet.org/rights/126492). She notes that Jerry Burger of Santa Clara University recently replicated the findings of the classic Milgram experiment, in which it was found that an astonishing percentage of people of all walks of life will follow orders of an authority figure and inflict pain on someone else simply because they are told to do so.

Segura points out that though the media is interpreting Burger’s findings to mean that we have a thirst to torture inside us, the real message is about authority—about our unwillingness to challenge authority figures, and our willingness to place ourselves in the hands of an authority figure even when he or she tells us to do what is wrong. She concludes,

But while Milgram so effectively demonstrated the challenge of defying authority, he also showed that subjects were far more likely to do it when they saw other people doing it. He wrote in The Perils of Obedience, "The rebellious action of others severely undermines authority."

"In one variation, three teachers (two actors and a real subject) administered a test and shocks. When the two actors disobeyed the experimenter and refused to go beyond a certain shock level, 36 of 40 subjects joined their disobedient peers and refused as well."

Put in a political context, this is perhaps the most important lesson Milgram has to teach us. The best hope people have of resisting an oppressive system is to validate their experiences alongside other people. There is no more basic antidote to authoritarianism than support, solidarity and community.

Our hope to resist, to overturn lies designed to hurt and build a better, more humane society? Finding others who want what we want—a more humane society—who will no longer tolerate the lies, and who form community and solidarity with us in pursuit of something better.

Bob Herbert:: The Refusal to Submit Quietly and a Better Place

If op-ed columnists were ice cream flavors, Bob Herbert would be my rocky road, pistachio almond, and lemon ice all rolled into one: my three favorite flavors. I have long devoured every word of his I can get my hands on, and as a teacher and academic administrator, I circulated articles of his with such avidity that I suspect the recipients of his work eventually became thoroughly tired of reading it.

Bob Herbert speaks what this blog’s subtitle calls “truth that needs to be spoken, but never gets told.” He tells the kind of plain truth that few journalists these days seem capable of telling—the plain truth that reaches to the heart of the matter and transforms our understanding of it.

There is, in other words, a profound moral sensibility at the heart of Bob Herbert’s journalism, which is sorely needed in our current media. I suspect this moral sensibility has much to do with his experience as an African-American man in a racist nation. It has to do, too, with his relentless commitment to solidarity with all groups that are oppressed.

Mr. Herbert’s “Savor the Moment” column in today’s NY Times hits me between the eyes. He speaks of our need to celebrate the historic event that has happened this week—the nomination of a person of color to the presidency of the U.S (www.nytimes.com/2008/06/07/opinion/07herbert.html?th&emc=th).

But, in doing so, Mr. Herbert reminds us, we also have an obligation to remember and celebrate those countless millions of courageous human beings who have helped open the door for Mr. Obama. These are those who kept on demanding justice in the face of outrageously oppressive forces—forces that had the command of the law and could and would use it ruthlessly to have workers demanding better wages beaten by police, or to have fire-station hoses and dogs turned onto crowds of African-American youths asking for the right to be served at a “white” lunch counter.

As my students in HBCUs have always said to me, Lady Justice has that blindfold on only when she thinks we’re not looking. Wave some green bills in front of her, and it comes off quickly.

I’ve blogged elsewhere about my education in the aberrant ways of “justice” as I came of age in the household of an attorney who ran several times for judgeships. I quickly learned, as a boy, that judges have biases. I learned to my chagrin when my father ran for judgeships that candidates for such positions are capable of striking deals with the devils, when—on one occasion—he took me to a place where I later discovered he had secretly met with the Klan to ask for its support.

My parents’ circle of friends as I grew up included many judges. I knew these folks to have penchants and preferences, including, in most cases, deep-rooted ties to churches. Those ties had everything to do with many judicial decisions these judges made, even when the decisions could not (in my view) be justified morally or legally—except that they were legal, because those making the decisions represented those who owned the law.

In my adult life, I have tangled with one such judge, in the years in which I served as my mother’s guardian. My complaints about her biased treatment of me did not result in any disciplinary action against her. I have reason to think that they did, however—and I say this with an admitted smidgeon of pride—result in a heightened awareness at the level of the state judicial disciplinary commission of how gay citizens are often treated by the court in Arkansas. This year, the commission has issued a new disciplinary code for judges that prohibits expressions of discrimination by judges on the ground of sexual orientation.

When I began my battle with this judge, I was warned time and again that I would not win. Friends told me you can’t fight the court. The judge is an African-American woman with very strong ties to the leadership of many black churches in Arkansas. Her homophobia is rooted in her beliefs.

I knew that I was fighting a losing battle. One doesn't fight the churches, any more than one fights the judiciary. But that did not stop me from fighting. It did not stop me from fighting because I also knew that I had right on my side. What this judge did to me was morally wrong, if legally permissible. I was determined to speak out over and over, no matter how many people sought to silence me, in the hope that someone, somewhere, would listen, and it would be just a tiny bit harder for the court system in my state ever again to mistreat a gay son or daughter caring for an aged parent in his/her final years of life.

And eventually I made inroads . . . .

(This is not to deny that many, many judges and courts do their work without prejudice. It is to recognize, though, that more frequently than should be the case, judges can be swayed by considerations beyond fair application of the law—and that has been perhaps all too common in the American South over the course of history.)

This dynamic of keeping on keeping is what Bob Herbert addresses in his column today—the dynamic about which Labi Sifre sings:

The more you refuse to hear my voice
The louder I will sing
You hide behind walls of Jericho
Your lies will come tumbling.

We citizens of the world who want to build a more humane society must never allow our voices to fall silent, even when those threatening us appear to have all the power in the world on their side: wealth, institutional privilege, high titles, the command of the court and the police, the appearance of having the church on their side.

The more those who want us silenced rely on this kind of worldly power, the more they undermine their claim to have moral right on their side. If they are in the right, why do they need to resort to oppressive techniques to silence those who call for open, free dialogue, for the free flow of information? Why do they not wish to bring the questions they seek to suppress into the public forum, for fair-minded citizens to discuss in the kind of open forum that is essential to the health of a democratic society?

We must speak out. We must continue speaking out.

There are already ominous signs, as the election gears up, that those with the power to oppress—and I include here the churches, many of them, unfortunately—will use that power to the hilt to try to silence those calling for transformational change in our society. I have heard in the last several days of someone who blogs frequently about progressive social issues receiving threatening emails seeking to shut his blog down. The emails include threats of physical violence against him.

I have a friend who has had the police threaten him—with no basis at all!—because of something he has written calling churches to accountability for their inhumanity to gay human beings. These bullying tactics, this misuse of the law to try to curb free speech, is part of a wider dynamic in our society today, in which our civil liberties have been so radically eroded under the current administration, that even the churches will apparently avail themselves of their “right” under law to try to stop open discussion of their behavior—especially as it concerns gay human beings.

As Bob Herbert says in today’s column,

So a victory lap is in order. Not for Senator Obama (he still has a way to go), but for all those in every station in life who ever refused to submit quietly to hatred and oppression. They led us to a better place.

From Thoreau to Sojourner Truth, from Rosa Parks to Martin Luther King, from Helen Prejean to Harvey Milk: the journey to a better place begins when those told to shut up and accept the way things are, since we are powerless in the face of money, unjust manipulation of the law, the clout of the churches—whatever—refuse to shut up.

And keep on speaking out, claiming our right to do so as a human right.

Question for the Day: Gay Rights as Barometer of Human Rights

Just now catching up on my daily internet news reading.

I find H. Alexander Robinson’s “A Cause of Celebration: Reflections on Our Progress” at today’s Bilerico blogsite fascinating.

Robinson focuses on Bayard Rustin, African-American gay Quaker activist and associate of Martin Luther King, Jr.

According to Robinson, “A year before his death in 1987, Rustin said, ‘The barometer of where one is on human rights questions is no longer the black community, it's the gay community. Because it is the community which is most easily mistreated.’

Does this remain true, I wonder? Twenty years down the road, is the gay community the community most easily mistreated in our society?

What does “most easily mistreated” mean? What does that phrase translate into, in terms of concrete attitudes and actions towards gay human beings?

It’s interesting that this insight comes from a man who writes about spending time on two crosses—the cross of racism, and the cross of homophobia. He writes, in other words, out of the experience of double discrimination (as does H. Alexander Robinson, who is also a black gay man).

Interestingly enough, earlier today I had read the tributes to Robert Kennedy by his children in the NY Times, and learned of the website “Speak Truth to Power” that Kerry Kennedy has set up to commemorate her father and continue his work for human rights.

The website has a human rights statement that made me stop and think (www.speaktruth.org). The statement insists that those who struggle against oppression for their own human rights have an obligation to struggle for the same rights for anyone who is oppressed. It states:

Another definition for human rights is those basic standards without which people cannot live in dignity. To violate someone's human rights is to treat that person as though she or he were not a human being. To advocate human rights is to demand that the human dignity of all people be respected. In claiming these human rights, everyone also accepts the responsibility not to infringe on the rights of others and to support those whose rights are abused or denied.

Is that statement true, I wonder? Does any group that experiences oppression have an obligation to struggle on behalf of others who also experience oppression? Do I, as a gay man, have an obligation to work for justice for people of color? For women?

I have always thought so. I believe so. I believe that my own claim to human rights cannot be taken seriously if I do not extend that claim to every other group that is unjustly marginalized.

Bayard Rustin’s thought stresses the obligation of African Americans to stand in solidarity with LGBT persons.

Is there such an obligation? Is Rustin correct, I wonder?

The Dream: One Table for All, All at the Table*

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

4 June 2008: what an amazing day. I could not be more delighted to wake today to the historic news: our nation has finally brought an African American to the table of the presidential electoral process.

All of us who dream of a day in which our nation (and its churches) will finally bring everyone to the table, permit everyone a voice, give everyone a hearing, and give everyone a chance to fulfill his or her destiny, all of us who share Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune’s dream of a participatory democracy that is actually lived in our social and ecclesial institutions and not merely talked about, cannot fail to rejoice today.

This happens to be an important day of memory for me, on which I had already intended to meditate about themes of exclusion and inclusion, of racial justice and justice for LGBT human beings, and of the propensity for those of us who have suffered marginalization to turn around and inflict on others the same kind of injustice we ourselves have suffered.

At a personal level, I am delighted to have my meditation “interrupted” by an announcement that intersects so wonderfully with it on this day of personal remembrance. Life has amazing patterns, if we only stop to notice them: ups and downs, experiences of cruel injustice turned into their opposite through unexpected reversals of injustice.

For those who believe, these patterns make sense as part of a larger framework in which karmic principles govern the ebbing tides of injustice, the surging tides of justice throughout the cosmos. Our sense that there is woven into the very fabric of the cosmos a pattern of death being transformed to life, of radical and unexpected reversals of cruelty and injustice, is rooted in a belief that all life occurs against the backdrop of divine justice. Built into how the universe functions, we find, flow moral currents that eventually expose and thwart perpetrators of injustice, that bring liberation to those to whom the unjust have done injustice. For those who believe, these moral tides move in response to the divine energy of love. The cosmos contains a moral arc that bends always in the direction of justice.

We who believe know that there is never a time when we can sit down and say that everyone has been brought to the table, that our work for liberty and justice for all has ended. We know that we cannot separate those who strive for a place at the table into “good” and “bad” minorities. We know that we cannot play one excluded group against another, such that the rightful claims to justice of, say, people of color and women receive a hearing, while the claims of gay human beings do not.

We know that, even if we ourselves happen to belong to one (or several) of those historically excluded groups, we would place ourselves on the wrong side of the moral arc of the universe if we did not stand in solidarity with all of our brothers and sisters in the struggle for full inclusion at the table of life and the table of the Lord. With Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, we keep working to name each and every group shoved from the table in our own community and churches. We keep striving to bring those groups to our public meetings, so that we can hear their stories and find a place at our capacious table for yet another group whose determined persistence in the face of radical injustice will enrich us, as we set one more place at the table of our churches, our church institutions, and our social structures.

I am thinking through these themes today, as well, in light of a story that has reached into my life and grabbed me in the last several days. This is soul-wrenching story.

It is also a story I am hesitant to tell—in part, because it is not precisely my story (though it is my story, for reasons that will be apparent as I tell it). But it is a story that some of my relatives have actually lived, while I recount it at a distance. I do not want to take a story that more closely involves the lives of others and represent it as my own.

Those who have brought the story to me commission me to tell it, and in that commission is an obligation, one of those callings within a calling that happen to us as we walk along the way of faith and vocational pilgrimage. And in a quite interesting way, this story intersects with the announcement of Mr. Obama’s nomination, as well as with the memories I am mulling over today.

This is a story about which I have already written briefly on this blog. The story began with distant cousins in the upper Midwest contacting me a few years ago. They wanted to share information about our mutual ancestors. The cousins have a wealth of family resources—letters, pictures, Civil War uniforms and weapons. They have opened their family archives to me freely and generously.

Last week, some of these cousins came to visit. I had never met them, and was happy to make their acquaintance. They proved to be interesting, thoughtful, socially engaged—the kind of cousin with whom one is instantly proud to claim kinship.

Prior to meeting my new cousins, as I read the historical documents they shared, I discovered a story totally new to me, one unlike any I had yet documented in my family’s history. The story is a heart-breaking one.

At the same time, it is a story about the triumph of love and persistence in the face of injustice. It also happens to be a story about a family who took very seriously the social teachings of their church, which happens to have been the Methodist Church, and whose lives were profoundly transformed by these church teachings about justice.

Here is the story as I have pieced it together from letters my cousins have shared with me, as well as from their own commentary on their family history. In the 1830s, a white man of a prominent Methodist family divorced his wife, who had abandoned him, and began to live with a free woman of color. This occurred in Mississippi. The man’s siblings and parents lived in Alabama at this time. This new spouse (whom he was never permitted legally to marry) bore him six children, all of whose names appear (along with his new spouse’s name) in his father’s bible. The father is our mutual ancestor.

In the 1840s, the family moved to the new frontier of south Arkansas. They settled in the county in which I myself was raised when my family moved to south Arkansas as I was a boy. This is where I graduated from high school, where my father was a lawyer and where, after my father’s death, my mother worked as a clerk in the courthouse. My father’s parents lived with us and are buried in this county with my father.

I knew nothing of these cousins as I grew up. My mother did not know of them. They descend from a brother of her great-great grandfather. The precise place in which these cousins lived, my father's family also lived when they moved from Louisiana to south Arkansas as he grew up.

As the Civil War approached, the parents made the heart-rending decision to send their three living children to Oberlin, Ohio, a terminus of the Underground Railroad. Letters about the move to Ohio make it clear that the parents believed this step was necessary to protect the children from harm in the period of heightened racial tension preceding the war.

The three children were all teens at the time. Two were very young teens. Letters of their father show him transferring large sums of money to send them, with which they could buy land. He had the money sent through various banks in Baltimore and New York, so that if one transaction failed, another might come through.

From this point forward, the three children never returned home to their parents. They could not do so. Letters indicate that, after the death of their mother, the younger two children were finally able to come back and spend limited time with their father. The oldest son was en route to his father when news of the father’s death reached him about thirty miles from his father’s home.

Despite the physical distance separating the parents and the children, their father wrote a constant stream of affectionate letters to them—as did aunts and uncles in Alabama and Louisiana. The letters speak tenderly of his and their mother’s love for their children, of how their mother sighed for her children, of how her heart was heavy at the thought of not being able to see and embrace them and their children.

When his wife died, the father wrote his daughter in Ohio, telling her that his faith remained strong, but his reason to live had gone. He died within the year. His will stipulated that his land was to go to his youngest son. That son returned to Arkansas to care for the land and was shot in the back while riding horseback there in 1899. In the same week that he was killed, the statewide newspapers report a string of lynchings of black men all across the southern counties of Arkansas.

A black man was blamed for the death of this bi-racial son of a white plantation owner. I do not yet know the fate of this black man, but I suspect he was executed.

From the time that the three children went north, the oldest son quickly relocated to Iowa, where he married a white woman and appears on all censuses as a white man. His descendants lived as white people from that generation forward. The new cousins who have come to visit me are descendants of this son.

The other two siblings remained in Ohio, where the younger son appears on some censuses as white and on others as mulatto. His sister is listed consistently on censuses as a mulatto. Both married white spouses, and their descendants “passed for white,” as the old Southern phrase has it. But they did so with some difficulty—and this is part of the story I have just heard from my newly met cousins, part of what wrenches my soul.

The story my cousins tell me is one of generations-long struggle with racism, even among families that had “crossed over” the racial line after they had gone north. Within the family of the oldest brother, the tradition of mixed racial ancestry had gone underground even for family descendants, who have family tales about a native American ancestor (they identify her as the wife of the plantation owner in Mississippi and Arkansas) who accounted for the features of some descendants.

Within the families of the two other siblings—pictures show those siblings as more identifiably bi-racial than their older brother—the memory of mixed racial ancestry was more alive, and the experience of racism more overt.

The descendants of the oldest brother tell of decisions made by family members for several generations not to have children when they married, for fear of having a “black baby.” Secrets were kept and closely guarded, and often produced turmoil in the family. Despite the treasure trove of documents they have managed to save, the cousins once found their grandfather, near his death, burning whole stacks of old letters and documents.

Their grandfather’s parents once gave him a birthday party. A neighbor child brought him a black doll as a gift. When relatives of the two siblings who had been less successful at “passing” visited, they were asked to sit in the back of the church.

On their recent trip to Arkansas, these cousins went to south Arkansas. They found there an elderly woman who grew up on land adjoining their family’s land. She knew very well the son of the sibling who had inherited the land and been assassinated on it.

As they visited, the elderly lady approached the subject of family history tentatively. She did not know what they knew about their family’s background. She told them, “I don’t want to offend you, but you do know that he was rather dark, don’t you? He lived in California and came back only to check on his property, and we children loved him.”

When the cousins told her they were aware of the mixed racial ancestry of their family, the elderly woman was able to relax a bit. She told them that her understanding had always been that the family had gone north to “cross over.”

Their elderly informant put them in touch with an African-American woman who also remembers the family. This woman, as well as African-American neighbors whom their grandfather visited when he came to Arkansas in the 1960s, told my cousins of the high esteem in which their white ancestor was held in the black community for generations. They indicate that he built a Methodist church for black families living in the community, and often preached in that church. He also bought and set free slaves as often as he was able to do so.

Why care about this story?

How can I not do so? It’s my story—a story from my own family. I am implicated in it by history and genes.

It’s also a story that happened to unfold right in the place in which I was brought up, right under my nose, and I was completely oblivious to it. But it was in that place that I first began to be troubled mightily by racial injustice, as I saw it perpetrated in various ways around me.

It was there that I took fateful steps to leave my family’s church due to its addiction to “the tranquilizing drug of gradualism,” to cite Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech again. It was there that I first learned that when churches talk about justice deferred, what they really stand for is justice denied.

When injustice stares us in the face in the person of a human being knocking at our door and asking for our open heart, open mind, open door sign to mean something, and when we tell that human being to come back for his or her helping of justice later, after we have assured that our table is large enough, what we really proclaim to the world is that our Social Principles are merely words on paper.

What I saw of racial inequality as I grew up—the unpaved roads and tar-paper shacks in black parts of town, the sacks of entrails of fish white folks had caught and cleaned and chucked in ditches in those parts of town, the black boy shot in cold blood by classmates my senior year of high school—turned my stomach. And it turned my stomach even more to find that my church did not wish to address this injustice as long as there was a price to be paid.

My decision to find a church that had at least the appearance of being more inclusive led, on my vocational pilgrimage, to my study of theology—when what I really love is literature, classical languages, the scholar’s life rather than that of the ditches where people struggle with religious ideas and issues. And it led as well to my decision to take a job in an historically black university (HBCU) as I finished graduate school, and was offered both that job and a much more financially alluring (and scholarly-oriented) one at a prestigious “white” university.

Which in turn led to my work at two other HBCUs, where I continued the struggle against racial injustice and continued writing about the need for solidarity between all marginal groups struggling for a place at the table . . . .

So, indeed, the story I have been commissioned to tell is my story, and there is no way to avoid it. Like all divine callings when they intrude inconveniently into our lives, it demands that I respond.

And it makes that demand on my life just as our nation continues the negotiation of treacherous racial currents that have never adequately been dealt with. Overt racism is seeping out of fissures in the underbelly of our culture again, in this election. It is there because it has been there, while we talk about what wonderful strides we have made towards its eradication. The story my cousins tell is a story of persistent racism experienced even by a family identified as white, solely because that family has discernible African blood. The wound of racism will be healed only when we face and lance it—through honest, open exchange in public forums and "safe places" set aside for meaningful encounters to deal with this issue.

This family story also engages me as our nation struggles with an idea that remains exotic to some, including many churchgoers: this is the proposition that gay people, too, deserve full civil rights, even that gay people have human rights. This discussion, in turn, twists around public and ecclesial discussions of racism in our culture today, both because racism and homophobia are both social ills involving human rights claims, and because power centers in church and society have sought adroitly to manipulate resentment against gay persons among racial minorities.

Yesterday, I saw a prominent billboard for a “reformed” Episcopal church in my neighborhood, one I often walk past as I walk my dogs. The billboard provided a website for the church.

I visited it this morning. It contains happy-clappy pictures of African children lined obediently in front of a white Episcopal priest. The picture looks very much like ones I have seen on the state websites of some United Methodist conferences following the last General Conference, places where “good minorities” are played against “bad”ones.

I cannot look at those pictures without visceral repulsion, both at the overt, dishonest playing of one marginal group against another, and at the patronizing colonialist use of black children that these pictures employ. Are the white men who run these churches really oblivious to how they are using “approved” minority groups against “inappropriate” minority groups primarily to assure their continued control of the churches—not out of any real commitment to racial justice or global socioeconomic justice?

Our work continues. As I have noted in previous postings, one of the tragedies of this moment of history—a time when we have no choice except to keep talking about and dealing with misogyny, racism, and homophobia—is the propensity of some churched women of color to pit African-American civil rights against gay civil rights. I have cited some recent news stories about this in previous postings.

This discussion is ongoing, and demands attention—even more so in light of Mr. Obama’s courageous insistence that equality is a moral imperative, and his willingness to challenge homophobia in the African-American faith community. On 22 May, the Los Angeles Times published an article by Richard Faussett entitled “Morehouse College Faces Its Own Bias—Against Gays” (see www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-morehouse22-2008may22,0,1504077.story).

This article was followed on 27 May by an article written by Rev. Irene Monroe on the Bilerico Project blog. Rev. Monroe is an African-American minister. She notes that national Pew Foundation studies show support for gay rights dropping in the African-American community, particularly among people of faith (see www.bilerico.com/2008/05/can_a_morehouse_college_man_be_openly_ga.php). She notes, “With homophobia running as rampant in historically black colleges and universities as it is in black churches, there are no safe places to openly engage the subject of black sexuality.”

We have work to do, those of us committed to the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and of Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune—a dream of a place for everyone at the table of participatory democracy. I have continued work to do as a theologian, since the claim of the church to embody mercy while it practices injustice and exclusion is an insupportable claim.

And I have work to do as a story that has just reached out and grabbed my soul comes to me at the historic moment of Barack Obama’s clenching of the presidential nomination, underscoring the present unavoidability of discussions of race, homophobia, the role of churches and their institutions in addressing these dynamics.

In light of Mr. Obama’s nomination, if we struggle to create those “safe places” to engage these issues openly, there will come a day when Dr. King’s dream will be fulfilled: a day in which the sons and daughters of former slaves and the daughters and sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood and sisterhood.

*Disclaimer: In writing in this blog about either white or black persons, males or females, black males or white males, black females or white females, churches and church institutions, it is not my intention to embarrass, harass, adversely affect, or work either directly or indirectly to the detriment of any unnamed person, whether black, white, male, or female, or unnamed institution. I write solely as a theologian and scholar seeking continued dialogue about issues of importance to church and society, as my blog profile states. This disclaimer remains in effect for any future postings I may write on this blog.

Good Gays, Bad Gays Continued: The Smack-Hug Violence of Churches

I’m trying something different today.

Yesterday, my friend Colleen (check out her “Enlightened Catholicism” blog, linked to mine) left a great comment on my posting about good gays, bad gays, and the churches of the radical middle.

In what follows, I want to engage Colleen’s comments. They are so thought-provoking that I can’t really do justice to them by replying in the comment slot. And maybe if this dialogue is in the main thread of the blog, it will bring some light for other readers who are struggling with the churches’ stances towards their LGBT brothers and sisters.

So here goes:

Colleen,

You address some key points in my perambulations yesterday. I value the incisive comments, which help me focus my own thinking.

You say,

I'm not so sure the hate isn't a product of jealousy, of an unstated sense of inadequacy. A number of the things gays seem to do very well are create artistically, love with no strings attached, and have definite spiritual gifts . . . . I think gayness is defined by much more than sexual attraction. It's defined best by the concept of balance between creation and chaos and male and female. That tension of that balance is very often expressed in creative or spiritual works.

These are significant points. They touch right on the heart of the dynamics I was trying to describe yesterday—better than I was able to do.

First, the hate issue. Yesterday, after posting, I asked myself, “Are you sure that hate is the word you really want?” Is what the churches do to us really hate, or is that word too strong to describe the antipathy, exclusion, and malicious dissemination of misinformation about us?

Asking these questions draws attention to the word “homophobia” itself, with its “phobia” root. That root can mean both fear and hate, or hate driven by fear.

Some people object to the term “homophobia” precisely on this ground: that hate is a word too strong to describe what is often going on when folks resist or despise gay folks.

I tend to think it’s accurate, though, in exposing the roots of homophobia. Like the various forms of violence, which I analyzed in a previous posting on this blog, hate can manifest itself in both hot and cold ways.

The hot form of violence or hate is not too hard to detect. It’s the kind that happened recently in Sacramento right after the gay marriage ruling in California, when three young men out to beat up a fag to protest the court decision asked a man sitting in a car at a gas station if he were gay.

When he said he was, they dragged him out of his car and beat him up (www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/05/16/state/n143918D86.DTL) And yet the social network webpage of one of the alleged gay bashers, Micah Jontomo Tasaki, at BlackPlanet.com (www.blackplanet.com/jontomo) has this young man saying, “CHILVARY DOES STILL EXIST. Im honest, open, and caring.... very compassionate, and a great listener.”

Jarring, isn’t it? Chivalry exists. I’m honest, opening, caring, very compassionate. And, oh, by the way, if I run across a fag sitting in a car minding his own business, I’m liable to kick the stuffing out of him while I’m going about my chivalry-compassion business.

What this story underscores for me is that the hot form of hate goes hand in hand with cold forms of hate, which are less easy to detect—and of which we may even be unconscious. I would submit that it’s the cold form of hate that inhabits so much of the thinking (and behavior) of church folks in Main Street USA.

This cold form of homophobia is what’s at work in so much that goes on with the churches. This is the behavior analyzed in Harry Knox’s article “Methodist Schizophrenia on Gays” at the Casting Stones blog on Beliefnet (http://blog.beliefnet.com/castingstones/2008/05/methodist-schizophrenia-on-gay.html?bt=polmashup).

Knox is a former United Methodist pastor from a family with deep Methodist roots. He now heads the Religion and Faith Program for Human Rights Campaign. His article is commenting on the recent UMC General Conference.

Knox characterizes the Methodist approach to LGBT persons as schizophrenic “smack-hug behavior”: we love you; we don’t want you; we welcome all sinners; we don’t welcome you; our doors are open; no gays need apply; we promote and defend your civil rights; don’t expect us to respect your rights if you work in our institutions.

Some folks have objected to the use of the term “schizophrenic” in this article. I think it’s a precise description of how the churches of Main Street USA actually behave towards us. Their behavior is insane. And they don’t even seem aware of it.

It’s unrecognized insanity because it’s masked in religious rhetoric about love that doesn’t permit those engaging in this abusive behavior (Knox calls it “spiritual violence” as well) even to admit or know that they are assaulting the very souls, the personhood, of a particular group of human beings. Hate masquerades as love in the way the churches of the radical middle think about and act towards LGBT persons, and it’s very difficult to tease out or address the hate for this reason. It’s disguised. It’s cold hate.

But I know your point here is not to challenge the use of the word "hate." You’re making a point that goes way beyond the analysis of this word, and it’s an excellent point. You say that hate—the cold form of homophobic violence in which the churches engage—may well be a form of jealousy or a sense of inadequacy.

And you go on to identify the psychological nexus from which the jealousy and sense of inadequacy often springs. You say, “Main stream churches understand they have a proportional misrepresentation of gays in their structures. They just can't deal with the underlying talent issues this represents so gays must be vilified.”

These are extremely insightful comments, it seems to me, ones that reflect your background as a therapist. If, as you say, gay people bring the churches talents that have everything to do with our accepting that we are gay—specifically, if our struggles to accept ourselves create a creative tension or balance inside us of male-female principles—then our very being there, with those talents, seems to threaten some folks, or make some folks feel inadequate.

The puzzle to me is your right-on-target conclusion that, because the churches can’t deal with the “underlying talent issues” that gay contributions to churches represent, “gays must be vilified.”

I think this is exactly right. It also seems insane to me—insane, that is, that churches would recognize an abundance of talent for spiritual insight and creativity in a particular group of people, whom they then expel! Precisely for offering talent, spiritual insight, and creativity to the churches . . . .

I know in my bones that you are right. I just find it hard to understand that human beings behave in such self-defeating ways.

I know you’re right, because what you say fits my own experience, my own spiritual journey. I’ve spoken of my brother’s death in 1991 as a kind of catalyst for my self-acceptance as a gay man.

But what happened in my journey in that part of my life is actually more complex. Prior to my brother’s death, I had a sabbatical semester to do research while I was on fellowship. I spent that semester writing a book and several articles, teaching a seminar, but, perhaps most significant of all, doing therapeutic work with a spiritual counselor.

The counselor was a Jungian analyst. Since I have always dreamed profusely and kept track of my dreams, his approach made sense to me.

From the start of my semester’s work with him, I told him I was gay, and needing to figure out what to do with that, given my vocational path to teaching theology in church-affiliated universities. I was some six years into my teaching career.

The tension of being someone inside that I had to disguise outside was eating me up. It was not the creative tension of holding something in balance. It was the deadly tension of living a public persona that doesn’t match the private self, so that you begin to fear you’ll simply lose your private self and become the walking, talking parody of the persona you’ve adopted.

I worked hard with the counselor in that semester. I can remember, towards the end of my time with him, he put his finger on something that helped me reframe the personal identity-vocational struggle in a creative new way. He noted that, again and again, in describing my dreams, I had used words like “upwelling,” “springing forth,” “streams,” “energy,” “light.”

He told me that, in his view, the hard work I was doing to try to bring together the gay self and my public life as a theologian in a church-affiliated school had much to do with releasing springs of creative energy. The more I was able to hold these two together, to claim my identity as a gay man while continuing on my vocational path as a theologian, the more the creativity was springing forth.

And he was right.

Within months after my return home, my brother died. It was the combination of my own Spirit-led journey to self acceptance as a gay man and my brother’s death, a life-changing event for me, that brought me to that decision I described yesterday: that I would never again do my work as a theologian while denying my personhood (and gifts) as a gay man.

This bringing together the pieces I hadn’t been able to bring together as long as I played the game of don’t ask, don’t tell released tremendous energy in me. Not only had I just written one book, but out of the blue, I suddenly got requests to publish another, as well as articles based on my research. I wrote an essay that got selected for publication in a national essay contest. I got several job offers totally unsolicited, because of my publications.

But here’s the kicker: when I turned down tenure at my home university and took another job following my brother’s death, with the intent of expressing my new-found creativity in a new setting where I was told I was wanted and needed, the experience proved to be disastrous.

My experience has been that the resistance we encounter as self-accepting gay persons with much to offer in church institutions is in direct proportion to our self-acceptance, and to the talents we bring to the table. We’re welcome as long as we are self-hating, silent, dismissable: good gays.

The minute we claim our identities as God-given, and acknowledge that the love inside ourselves and in our relationships also springs from God, we become personae non gratae in the churches: bad gays The hard struggle (in a homophobic society) to accept ourselves as God’s good gifts to ourselves and others, a struggle that releases in us creative energies the churches sorely need, disqualifies us from a place at the table in the churches.

In fact, in my last disastrous experience, where Steve and I were told that we were welcome as an openly gay couple in a United Methodist institution that sorely needed our talents (hug), and then were constantly upbraided for coming to work together and "putting our lifestyle into the face of colleagues," the experience was even grimmer (smack).

You’re painting a totally accurate picture. And yet something is so wrong with this picture. I need your further reflections, Colleen, to help me figure out precisely what is at work in such smack-hug behavior on the part of the churches of the radical middle.

Health Coverage for All Citizens: A Moral Imperative

One reason today’s posting is later than usual (in addition to my need to vote today and then get a brother-in-law to the airport) is that I have been trying to track down some information to verify it before I post.

I haven’t been able to do all the research I’d like to do before posting. But, since the day is going on and I want to post something, I’m posting the following reflections with the proviso that there may be unfinished research to do on this subject. (And I always welcome any input readers want to provide, to give a more complete picture of any topic I discuss.)

Yesterday as I read the news, I noticed an interesting announcement on the 365Gay news site. This article states that a national survey released Monday indicates that nearly one in four gay and lesbian adults lack health insurance, and are nearly twice as likely to be without health insurance coverage than their straight counterparts (http://365gay.com/Newscon08/05/051908health.htm). The data for these conclusions were apparently gathered in an online survey conducted by Harris Interactive, in conjunction with Witeck-Combs Communications.

When I first read this article, my ears perked up for a number of reasons. (A discussion of the article is also on today’s Pam’s House Blend blog at (www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do;jsessionid=3304E73FFF3A5622924B890EFD41D9F8?diaryId=5448).

First, I myself am without any health insurance. Finding a job after Steve’s and my gruesome experiences of injustice at a United Methodist University--

hasn’t been easy.

After my termination there and Steve’s resignation, we had the option to go with COBRA benefits. But they were prohibitively expensive. Since the betrayal of promises made to us

health insurance was a luxury we frankly couldn’t afford.

Because Steve worries about my health (as I do about his), he insisted that we buy some calamity-type coverage for me. We did so. The price was outrageous. After getting this insurance, we found it didn’t even cover any medical expenses or prescriptions, so that we were paying a huge amount for nothing.

Steve has now gotten a job, and we’re deeply grateful for this. I keep looking. He has good health coverage at his new workplace. Unfortunately, the workplace doesn’t provide partner benefits.

So I remain uncovered, and we are still trying to calculate the amount we can live on with one salary, while paying both the mortgage on our permanent house as well as on the temporary house we bought in Florida because of promises made to us

The downturn in the housing market has, of course, locked us into a mortgage for a house we cannot now sell, and are renting at a loss each month.

What we don’t yet know is how much wiggle room the take-home pay for the new job will give us, with two mortgages, to buy health insurance for me. As a result, I keep deferring any doctor’s or dentist’s visits, though I do have to watch some typical health challenges of members of my family as we age, including high blood pressure and cholesterol, as well as diabetes that now seems to have moved beyond the incipient stage.

I apologize for all the personal details. In recounting them, I am crucially aware that others have much harder struggles to attain even minimal health coverage. And those others are far from being exclusively gay or lesbian. There are racial and socio-economic (and gender) indicators that assure some people in our society never have access even to minimally good health care.

What makes my situation anomalous, in a sense, is that I am a white male with graduate degrees and a professional background, and am stuck, near retirement, without health coverage. Hence my interest in any research that shows a trend for gay and lesbian adults to be less provided for in the area of health coverage than our straight counterparts . . . .

Another reason I am particularly interested in this study at this time is that an e-friend, Shannon, posted a response yesterday to my 13 May blog posting entitled “Healthcare Equality Index for LGBT Americans” at http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/05/healthcare-equality-index-for-lgbt.html. I encourage readers of this blog to pay attention to Shannon’s testimony about the very serious struggles trans people encounter, in seeking health care in our society.

There definitely does seem to be a challenge for LGBT people in general in this area. And it’s not merely the challenge I described in the 13 May posting of dealing with a health-delivery system in which people continue to feel free to vent anger or hostility towards LGBT persons.

It’s also the challenge of attaining health coverage at all. Obviously, this challenge would be diminished if partner benefits were widely available. Unfortunately, they just aren’t, particularly for those of us living outside major coastal urban areas with large LGBT populations.

Just as being without work does, being without health coverage impact’s a human being’s self-esteem. You feel that your life doesn’t have a great deal of worth, when you realize that you can’t obtain treatment for illness easily. The sense of worthlessness can then spiral into a self-fulfilling prophecy, in which you don’t take care of your health as you should.

Again, I don’t want this posting to sound plaintive. I have privileges that go way beyond those many people, both straight and LGBT, have in our society, and I have less reason to complain than many people.

Still, there is something to be considered here, by anyone who is concerned about better health coverage for all citizens. I’m describing psychosocial dynamics that, in my view, are part and parcel of the experience of marginalization for many people in our society. And I would call on the churches of Main Street USA and the good people of Main Street USA to think about those dynamics, and how they affect the lives of the marginal.

I became aware of these dynamics in a more acute way in my years doing graduate study in Toronto. There, even as an American citizen without a visa or work permit (but with permission to study in the country), I was covered by the Ontario health system.

This meant that, as a student with very little money, I could go to the doctor and be treated for illness, and never pay a penny. I could fill a prescription, and not pay for the medicine. If I needed, I could go to a hospital and be treated, without having to pay.

People feel more human when they know that they have access to basic health coverage, regardless of their income. Systems that premise access to basic health coverage on one’s economic worth are barbarous. Churches that talk about justice and human rights without pushing hard for basic health coverage for all citizens undermine their credibility—and even more so, when their own institutions create quandaries such as the one I now find myself in, due to their discrimination against LGBT human beings.

I began this posting by noting that there was a bit of research I hoped to complete before posting, but that I hadn’t been able to do it. This research is a follow-up to another blog discussion of the 365Gay news article. On yesterday’s Bilerico Blog, Alex Blaze discussed the Harris Interactive Survey (see www.bilerico.com/2008/05/health_care_poll.php).

Blaze raises some critical questions about the accuracy of Harris Interactive polling, and I don’t want to overlook those questions. Even with those critical provisos, Blaze notes, however, that since access to health insurance is normally through jobs and marriage, it is entirely possible that further research would corroborate the conclusion of this poll that LGBT people get the short end of the stick when it comes to health coverage.

Questions for those of us who are Americans to ponder as our nation continues its current federal election cycle . . . .