In the News: ACLU and Colleges Discriminating Against LGBT Students; Anti-LGBT Bills in State Legislatures; Pakistan Censors Gay Times Photo; Anglican Leaders Out of Touch; Dancing Priests and Nuns in Italy

Here's an omnium gatherum of stuff — related in my strange head, but perhaps it won't appear that way to you — that has caught my magpie's sharp eye in recent news: 

Islam, Christianity, and Barbaric Violence: Discussion of the Issues in a U.S. Catholic Forum, National Catholic Reporter

In response to an article by Sister Maureen Fiedler in National Catholic Reporter this morning about the bogus controversy following President Obama's statements that Christianity has its own history of violence to face, a Catholic regular at NCR who is ever ready to demonize Muslims, one Purgatrix Ineptiae, writes,*

As Marriage Rights Sweep U.S., Reaction in Heartland: Oklahoma, Alabama, Louisiana, Missouri, Etc.

In the news: as German Lopez reports for Vox that same-sex marriage rights are sweeping the U.S., here's what's happening out in the heartland, especially in states heavily dominated by conservative white evangelical voters:

News of the Week: Sally's Baaack; Church of the Two Kevins, etc.

Strands that connect to topics I’ve discussed earlier this week:

There’s a lot more evidence of (and commentary about) the hate now bubbling around through the Palin-McCain rallies this past week. I won’t link to the articles, since readers can easily retrieve them through web searches.

In a way, I’m conflicted about even giving attention to them. A superstitious part of me feels that noticing rising social hatred, and pointing out its possibility to elicit actual violence, actually help feed the hatred.

On the other hand, when the sub rosa hatred that is always there in any society claims an open hearing in the rhetoric of people vying for the highest offices in the land, how can one justify not speaking out? There are too many clear historical precedents that show us how little it takes to produce actual physical violence, once such hate unmasks itself and comes out into the open,

If now is not the time to speak out, when will that time be?

+ + + + +

Connecticut legalized gay marriage yesterday. It is now the third state to recognize the right of gay citizens to marry. Commentary on the state supreme court decision to equalize marriage rights in Connecticut notes that the majority opinion recognizes that the decision to withhold marriage rights from gay citizens is inherently discriminatory (www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/10/connecticut-gay-marriage_n_133605.html). Withholding the right of marriage from gays continues historic structures of discrimination that turn gays into second-class citizens. The court notes that the tendency of American jurisprudence is to keep extending rights over the course of history to groups shut out of the structures of participatory democracy by unjust discrimination, including people of color and women.

I’m disappointed to hear that Republican governor M. Jodi Rell disagreed with her state’s supreme court decision, noting, "I do not believe their voice reflects the majority of the people of Connecticut.” In looking at Rell’s biography, I find she was born in Virginia in 1946. She was educated in Virginia.

She’s roughly my contemporary. Like me, Governor Rell came of age in a Southern state during the Civil Rights crisis. It cannot have escaped her attention that the majority of citizens in her state, as in mine, as in all Southern states, bitterly resisted the rights of African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s.

We had to be brought kicking and screaming into the land of liberty and justice for all. We had to be forced to do the right thing. It took the U.S. Supreme Court to make us begin to reconsider our longstanding history of discrimination.

Equal rights for all should not be determined by popular vote. They should be determined by fundamental principles that are essential to the constitution of a humane body politic. They should be defended by courts even when those rights are not popular with the majority—defended because it is right to defend equality in a society based on the contention that all people are created equal.

Governor Rell should know this, from her experience growing up in the South in the Civil Rights period. I am disappointed that she defends a denial of equal rights in the case of gay citizens that I doubt she would any longer defend in the case of African-American citizens.

+ + + + +

Two more U.S. Catholic bishops have come out this week. That is, have come out overtly for the Republican ticket in the coming election.

Whispers in the Loggia blog today reports on a joint pastoral letter released yesterday by the bishops of Dallas-Ft. Worth, Kevin Farrell and Kevin Vann (http://whispersintheloggia.blogspot.com). The two Kevins argue that a “vote for a candidate who supports the intrinsic evil of abortion or 'abortion rights' when there is a morally acceptable alternative would be to cooperate in the evil -- and, therefore, [is] morally impermissible."

As American Catholics have learned, this is codespeak for, “Good Catholics vote Republican.” I’ve long been appalled that Catholic bishops are willing to pimp for candidates who in key respects betray central Catholic values. The “pro-life” record of the candidates some bishops have promoted in election after election is abysmal. It completely contradicts the claim that the party being endorsed by the bishops is authentically pro-life.

Since we have sufficient evidence now that the candidates for whom some bishops have been pimping have absolutely no intent to be pro-life, why do bishops like the two Kevins keep up the pro-Republican game? Sadly, I’ve come to the conclusion that they do so because some of the “values” of the candidates they’re promoting—including some of the most dubious of those candidates’ “values”—are actually more in line with what bishops like the two Kevins really want than are gospel values. “Values” like the subordination of women to men. “Values” like the subordination of secular society to church control. “Values” like the racism that is at the dark heart of those screams to kill Obama at recent Palin rallies.

To say I am disappointed in bishops like the two Kevins would be an understatement. I’m repulsed by them. Ultimately, I am repulsed most of all because they are willingly informing a large number of good, conscientious Catholic voters that we are not welcome in the Church of the Two Kevins. That Church is Republican, thank you very much. Democrats need not apply.

+ + + + +

I reported earlier this week that the city of Orlando has just extended benefits to partners of city workers living in same-sex unions. I also reported (in my posting about “Camp Out”) about one church that is seeking to provide safe places, sanctuary, in which LGBT youth can deal with questions of sexual orientation without fear.

As a follow-up to both of those postings, I’m happy to note an article in today’s Daytona Beach News Journal which highlights a gay-affirming fraternity at Embry Riddle University (www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/News/Headlines/frtHEAD02101108.htm). The article reports that Delta Phi Lambda fraternity on the campus of this Florida aeronautical school welcomes gay members.

Embry Riddle’s decision to allow safe spaces for LGBT students is not without a price. As the report indicates, after news of the fraternity broke (as well as news that the school had begun a Gay-Straight Alliance and had celebrated National Coming Out Week), at least one angry parent called to say that he/she did not want “gay things” going on at the university.

Despite the anger of that parent, the school’s administrators continue to support these gay-affirming developments on the campus. I applaud their courage. During the Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s, it was often not easy to do the right thing. It is not easy today, in the midst of the struggle for equal rights for gay Americans. When university administrators defend the core values of civil society in the face of prejudiced pressure groups, they deserve our admiration and support.

The right thing remains right, even when people exert pressure to make us betray our instinct for fundamental human decency. Young people moving towards adult identity deserve safe spaces in which to claim their adult identity. They deserve good adult role models to guide and counsel them. This is a large part of what college education is about: adult role models helping emerging adults find their way in the world, their unique identities, their calling in life.

Just as universities provide countless support groups for students of every background imaginable, they have a responsibility to offer support and safety to LGBT students. After all, parents who do not want such support offered to their youth can always find universities that still engage in overt discrimination. Church-owned schools have tested their legal right to discriminate on religious grounds in the courts. Surely there are such schools around for those angry Embry Riddle parents to find, if an environment of discrimination is what they want for their young people.

+ + + + +

Speaking of discrimination, I haven’t mentioned Oklahoma state legislator Sally Kern in a while. As readers will recall, Kern was in the news earlier this year when someone attending a secret meeting she held with supporters leaked audiotape of the meeting to the media. The tape has Kern stating that gay people are a greater threat to America than terrorists.

Kern is back in the news. This week, she held a debate with opponent Ron Marlett, in which she sticks to her guns (www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=7500). She continues to promote her claim that gay citizens pose a greater threat to the United States than terrorists. She backs this astonishing claim with statistics: terrorists have 3,000 people in the U.S. in the last 15 years; gays have killed 100,000.

Kern is, readers will recall, the wife of a Baptist minister. And she’s an educator. Her opponent Ron Marlett finds her ideas “chilling.”

Indeed. Question for Governor M. Jodi Rell of Connecticut: after listening to Sally Kern, do you have second thoughts about wanting to submit the rights of some marginalized citizens to popular vote? Question for the bishops of the Church of the Two Kevins: is this kind of hatefulness—in the name of Christ—really what you want us to support by our votes?

As always, just asking.

Because They Can: Lying Politicians and the Morality of Churches

MATILDA

Who told Lies, and was Burned to Death

I’m thinking these days of morality. A dreary subject, admittedly, but one that has fascinated me from childhood, when (as I have mentioned in a previous blog), my first primers consisted of a peculiar mish-mash of tattered Victorian books culled from the library of the school in which one of my teacher aunts taught.

One of my favorite of these books was Hilaire Belloc's Cautionary Tales for Children, with its dire warnings against immoral behavior such as lying:

For every time she shouted "Fire!"
They only answered "Little Liar!"
And therefore when her Aunt returned,
Matilda, and the House, were Burned.

To be specific: I’m thinking these days of the morality of because-I-can, and how it relates to the morality of bending the truth.

Questions about people’s adherence to the truth have run through the U.S. presidential campaign in the past week. I don’t want to turn this blog into a political advertisement for any candidate, though I have probably made it plain which candidate I prefer. I’d like to use the blog, in fact, to probe questions about how we pursue, find, and speak the truth in a world that systematically distorts plain truth, and thwarts the proclamation of truth that makes a difference.

But that’s fodder for a different posting—for many different postings.

Meanwhile, without pointing this posting in any specific political direction (as an endorsement or critique of a particular candidate), I’d like to think further about distortion of the truth, and its relationship to the morality of because-I-can.

The because-I-can morality has been getting under my skin more and more lately. This is a moral position I suspect we all find ourselves in, quite a bit of the time. We do what we can get away with, because nothing makes us aware that we are even doing wrong—that we are trampling on the rights and sensibilities of others, that we are using others as objects to pursue our desired ends, that the Other has a mind, heart, and soul as rich and complex as our own, but we are not even seeing that complexity in our approach to the Other.

Once made aware that we are behaving this way, I would hope that many of us then begin to modify our behavior. This is how, after all, human groups grow in moral awareness, and accord moral status to behaviors that were previously viewed as morally neutral. As many of the social gospel theologians noted, throughout history, the moral awareness of societies shifts—for example, such that slavery, which was once regarded as a morally neutral practice, begins to be seen as immoral—as we gradually accord personal status to what was previously depersonalized. Aldo Leopold argues in his ground-breaking foundational study of the ethics of ecology, Sand County Almanac, that an ecological ethics is founded on precisely this extension of quasi-personal status to the environment itself.

Growth in moral awareness, period, is growth in being able to separate our own individual viewpoint and individual needs from those of others: it is growth in beginning to be aware of the Other as a person. Conscience and consciousness are not merely etymologically related. In many languages, particularly the Romance languages, these are not two separate words: conscience is consciousness. We cannot grow in conscience unless our consciousness grows. If our consciousness of the world around us remains at an infantile level, so will our conscience.

Studies indicate that what provokes the growth of conscience-consciousness is awareness of disjunction between what we have previously thought or taken for granted, and what may actually be the case. Which is to say, anything that makes us imagine the world in terms bigger than those we have previously used to frame reality induces a leap in our conscience. We grow in moral awareness by grappling with moral complexity, by dealing with values conflicts that were not apparent to us previously—in many cases, because we saw our behavior as value-neutral, when nothing in the world in which we lived made us think of our behavior in any other terms.

People could live for centuries with slavery, live comfortably with this social practice, because “the” slave was depersonalized. He/she had no voice, no legal standing except as an object. Since an object cannot speak, cannot argue on his or her behalf any more than a chair can do so, nothing in the world in which slavery was taken for granted forced those who saw slavery as morally neutral to think about this practice from a moral standpoint. Scripture, the Judaeo-Christian scriptures, not only presupposes slavery as an acceptable cultural practice, but actually endorses slavery.

When scripture and tradition underscore our moral blindness, and make it seem consecrated, it becomes even harder to examine our practices in a new light that raises our consciousness and expands our conscience.

I don’t want to turn this into an extended essay about the development of conscience. What I do want to reflect on is the ease with which some of our political leaders who profess strong church ties seem able—still—to bend and distort the truth, even or particularly when doing so allows them to trample on the humanity of others. This is baffling behavior, particularly when those Others have begun to challenge their status as objects, as pieces of furniture, and are developing the ability to speak, in unique voices, to describe the world from the viewpoint of those objectified and reduced to the status of objects.

It was when slaves began to speak that people began to challenge slavery. It was when Sojourner Truth asked ain’t I a woman that people began to think about the fact that slaves were human beings, with complex interior lives, with feelings akin to those of other human beings, with families just like the families of those buying and selling human chattel.

It is when the sons and daughters of somebody’s mother speak back to the Sally Kerns of this world and remind her that they are somebody’s sons and daughters, with complex interior lives, with blood as red as Sally’s, with skin that smarts as much as Sally’s does when the whip lashes it, that we must begin to question the objectification of gay human beings, the reduction of gay human beings to the status of furniture.

This is why, I think, the because-I-can morality, with its attendant ease at lying, is getting under my skin so much these days. It’s not as if, after all, the process of gay people making our humanity apparent to others is just getting underway.

The churches have had ample opportunity to hear our voices for some time now.

How can it be, then, that churches and church institutions continue to permit themselves to act as if what they say about gay people has no real effect on our real lives? How can the churches continue to collude in lies about us that cause real lashings to the real backs of real children of real mothers?

Because they can do so. Because they can do so with impunity. Because they can get away with doing so. Because those who represent the churches pay no price for doing so. Because they would pay a price if they behaved otherwise, if they called on their church communities to begin listening to gay voices and thinking about gay humanity.

In behaving this way, the churches take the path of least resistance, morally. In behaving this way, they behave as pre-moral agents, like children who have not yet become sufficiently mature to distinguish their own self-centered view of the world from the view of others around them.

In behaving this way, the churches really do forfeit their right to address any moral issues effectively.

In behaving this way, the churches operate at the same moral level as do politicians who lie simply because they can do so, with impunity. When churches, and the leaders of churches, and the representatives of church institutions, operate at the same level of morality as do politicians for whom bending the truth is no big deal, I wonder how long it can be before the churches are voted out of office, as it were, just as lying politicians often are repudiated by a disgusted public?

Mirror, Mirror: Sally Kern, the Churches, and Some Mother's Children

Sigh. Sally Kern has chosen to go brittle. Rather than using the exposure of her vile prejudice as an occasion for fruitful self-examination, Sally has issued a press release in which she paints herself as the victim of nasty homosexual activists who want to shut down her free speech. In her media statement, Sally has the unmitigated chutzpah to say that in holding forth about homosexuals as social cancer, she was merely involved in a debate in which she was exercising her first-amendment rights.

Sally. Sally. Not feeling so sorry for you anymore. Do you mean to tell me that you really think your back-room rant to other true believers was some kind of public debate? Come on now, Sally: let’s reason together, as LBJ used to love to say (quoting the psalms; but you knew that, since you’re a bible believer). That rant the world is now listening to, Sally? It wasn’t an attempt to defend your indefensible views in a public setting, was it now? You weren’t providing “facts” about the homosexual agenda and devious homosexual activists to a public audience that might ask you to verify said facts, were you? You weren’t speaking to your constituents in a public meeting that allowed for give and take and exchange of opinions, were you? No, you were rallying the troops, pumping up the true believers behind the scenes, when you thought no one but you and said true believers were listening.

As you ranted and raved, you never imagined in your wildest dreams that your words would soon vault around the world. Why, you even said so yourself as you listened to the youtube video of your hate-filled tirade.

What we whisper in secret will be shouted from the rooftops. A corollary of that gospel statement is that it might behoove us not to whisper in secret what we don’t want to have shouted from the rooftops. If we believe the words of the gospels (and you’ve told us you do, Sally: you’re a strong Christian!), then we can’t really try to claim that spouting hatred behind closed doors is not an incitement of others to practice hatred when they leave the closed room, can we? The people we have targeted in our closed meeting? Those people really exist; they have flesh and blood lives. They are not “the homosexual agenda.” They are gay human beings, some mothers’ children. What you said in that closed room has implications for their lives—for them and for their mothers.

And you know that, Sally. It’s not becoming to claim, as your press release tries to do, that you were dissecting an agenda in a closed meeting. You were fanning the flames of hatred in our political process in that meeting. You intended for those who caught your fire to go out of that room and spread those flames.

There’s a lesson here for you, Sally—and for the churches—if you could only hear it. Self-righteous stubbornness is never a becoming response when one’s ugly back-room secrets have broken forth to light. When we stiffen our spines, make ourselves belligerently brittle, in response to revelatory events like suddenly having our inmost thoughts bruited worldwide, it might just be the divine itself that we’re belligerently shutting out. No one owns God, Sally. Don’t for a minute believe the lie of your religious right puppet masters when they try to convince you that they have God under wraps, all neatly tied up, niftily disposable and available to use in their base political war against some mothers’ children.

That can’t be God they’re talking about—not the Judaeo-Christian God. That God, the God of Moses and Miriam, Isaiah and Jesus, Mary and Elizabeth is the one who can’t be wrapped up by human beings. The God of the Jewish and Christian scriptures is the one who always makes us profoundly uncomfortable rather than cozily self-righteous. The God we meet in the bible is always breaking through when we least expect to meet the divine— showing the divine face to us in someone we simply don’t want to recognize, the bag lady on an Oklahoma City street, or the child with his belly swollen from marasmus in Africa whom we glimpse on television as we down our McDonald’s, or the real-life flesh-and-blood homosexual doctor who carefully tends our injuries in the emergency room after we’ve crashed our car.

God’s everywhere—not just in those nifty, convenient places where we want to keep God confined, so we can pull God out of our hat when it’s useful to have a divine reference to substantiate a prejudice we want to promote in a culture-war jihad. We don’t own God. No one does, not you, not the religious right, not the churches. No one. For believers—for “strong” Christians like yourself—it’s God who does the owning. Brittleness, self-righteous belligerence, and false claims to victimhood are not only unbecoming when revelatory events threaten to tear through our brittle barriers of self-righteousness. They actually impede our conversion, our deeper immersion in the life of the spirit.

Why am I harping on this story? Sally Kern will not last. I’ve seen her brittle defiance come and go in my own lifetime. It always vanishes with the wind. I saw it all around me in the white South in which I was raised, as the civil rights movement swept over the land: hell, no, not ever going to change; no one going to force me to send my child to school with no n----r; no n----r is my brother or sister, nosiree! And no one’s going to make me think otherwise.

Sally and her ilk are fighting a losing battle, just as they were when segregation ended, and at some place deep inside her she knows that. The defiance she displays in that press release is all bravado. Sally has been used by the puppet masters of the religious right—those who funded her trip to an anti-gay indoctrination conference (at what cost, Sally; and what perks did you get from attending?)—and they’ll drop her like a soiled rag now that she has been exposed. Mark my words, down the road, Sally will be the contemporary incarnation of her sister Oklahoma bigot, Anita Bryant, tearfully admitting that she was used in her hateful crusade against some other mother’s children.

So why give Sally any mind room at all? Because Sally Kern is the American church, insofar as it ever “thinks” about LGBT people. Sally is the churches face to face with gay human beings. The mirror Sally now holds up is not just the mirror of self-revelation for herself: it’s for herself as a church mother. It’s for the churches in general.

What Sally noised about in that private meeting of true believers is what the churches in general say and do daily (but never admit) to real-life flesh-and-blood children of somebody’s mother. What Sally voices is what the church really thinks about and really does to gay human beings on a daily basis—when it refuses to speak unambiguously against the murder of children considered gender-inappropriate in American classrooms; when it imposes ordination requirements on single LGBT clergy candidates that are not imposed on single heterosexual candidates; when it claims that gay couples should be treated differently in its institutions than straight couples are treated; when it refuses to provide any protection from unfair termination of gay people in its institutions; when it excludes LGBT members from its general conferences, while inviting “ex-gays” to those conferences; when it turns gay people away from its communion rails.

Sally Kern is the church. She’s the church that puts right-wing money above gay people’s humanity, choosing to be silent about prejudice or wishy-washy and ambiguous in its statements against homophobia, simply to avoid losing donations from conservative donors.

In what has happened to Sally Kern, the churches themselves have a revelatory opportunity. This event has the potential to be a moment of grace for the churches, a moment when what is really said in all those back-room meetings and whispered calls of church leaders and administrators of church institutions finally reach the ears of the public.

Churches, that’s your face in Sally’s mirror. Do you like what you see? That’s you speaking in Sally’s tirade. Do you enjoy what you hear?

If not, what do you intend to do?

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.