Shallow Understanding, Lukewarm Acceptance

Tolerance and diversity: as I read the news today, I think I'd like a moratorium on those words, especially from church folks.

I'll take justice instead. I'll take breaking silence and speaking out when people are being killed. I'll take doing in remembrance that is really doing in memory of Jesus.

The Towleroad blog today (http://www.towleroad.com/) links to a Huffington Post article by Sara Whitman in which she states,

"In my LGBT community, we argue about who is more pro LGBT rights, Obama or Clinton. It's been days since Lawrence King was shot dead. Neither candidate has issued a statement or said a word. The national media has done a complete pass on the story. Both candidates make me sick...Don't worry. I get the message, loud and clear. Just one more dead faggot."

Give me Fred Phelps any day, Fred Phelps who actually speaks out, who articulates his distaste for gay people honestly, rather than the church people who mouth little driblets of mumbling pity for the pain that the poor gays suffer. Give me Phelps's God hates fags signs over the Social Principles of the United Methodist church, which profess to deplore violence against gay people--in a church that will not even ordain an openly LGBT person, in a church whose annual meetings discuss the fate of gay believers without even allowing gay people to speak for themselves, and in a church whose institutions often have no policies prohibiting discrimination and in which openly gay employees can still be fired simply for being gay.

As Martin Luther King, Jr., once said,

"Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."

Shameful, the silence from the media. Shameful, the closed mouths of the presidential candidates.

But far more shameful the silence--or worse, the faint maundering sympathy--of a church that is right at the center of this social problem, right at the engendering center of violence against LGBT youth, and which will not break silence to speak unambiguously against such violence, or to admit that its own hands are bloody with complicity in this crime.

The Struggle to Remember

Continuing to think today of the struggle to remember: the struggle to keep in memory. I think that the churches have not reflected sufficiently about all that is entailed when they proclaim that the heart of ecclesial vocation is to keep the memory of Jesus alive in the world.

Do this in remembrance of me: when I hear those words in light of the many victims of history—those who have died without voice, those not given a chance to make their contributions, those whose lives have been snuffed out by powers and principalities that do not wish for these voices to be heard—I think of the imperative verb “do” with which the statement begins.

Remembering is doing. It is doing something. It is doing something quite specific. Remembering, within the Judaeo-Christian theological context, is committing oneself and one’s commemorative community to keep alive the memory of those whose voices have been silenced.

By its very nature, remembering is a subversive act, since the ones who most demand to be kept alive in memory are those whose memory powers and principalities most wish to suppress. The Christian church draws together in daily worship to remember a man who died as a common criminal, executed on a capital charge at the behest of the power brokers of his culture. This was a man whose end was supposed to signify the end—the definitive, all-silencing end—of anyone whose life made people think that something else was possible. The Romans learned from the Persians to splay the lowest kind of criminals out for all to see, on hilltops outside cities, near city gates, to splay them out on a cross as warnings of the fate awaiting anyone who subverted the status quo.

Remembering those whom we’re supposed to forget engages us in struggle—both the struggle to keep alive a memory and a voice that is supposed to remain silent, and the struggle to eradicate all those social conditions that permit the classification of some people as throwaway people, the social decisions that justify crushing some people and forever silencing their voices.

It is easier to forget. It is easier to sanitize our religious consciousness of what we really imply when we speak the words, “Do this in remembrance of me.” It is more comfortable by far to allow Jesus to remain in the tomb, turning his command to remember into a comforting ritual of coziness, in which we gather around the table, our table, the table belonging to family and friends, and eat and drink—without doing anything else, without committing ourselves to do in remembrance.

This option is easier. It also betrays the fundamental significance of Christianity and its common table. It betrays the Jewish sense of commemoration-as-commitment that forms the theological foundation of the Christian eucharist: the Passover meal, at which the youngest child of the family, the least significant and most easily overlooked one, asks, “What happened to us on that night?” At Passover, the liberation from slavery is remembered not as a past event—what happened to them—but as a present event—what happened to us. We who are alive carry on exodus, moving in our own life journeys from slavery to freedom, committing ourselves to assist others in the same journey.

Of course, I am thinking of all of this in light of what happened to Lawrence King. I am thinking of how easy it will be to forget—of how easy it will be for me to forget. It is easier to write a condolence check, shake my head in disbelief, and go on.

But that is not remembering. That is not doing in remembrance. Forgetting participates in the conspiracy of silence that requires us to be amnesiac, because otherwise, we would recognize that things might—that they must—be different. Otherwise, we would have to wake from our easy slumber and recognize that remembering involves us, implicates us, forces us to make choices to keep alive the memory of those whose voices the powers and principalities have sought to snuff out forever.

What shall we do, those of us who seek to remember Lawrence King? How will we keep memory alive?

Speaking Truth in Love

I've just posted a comment in response to Colleen, in reply to her response to the "Do This in Remembrance of Me" posting yesterday.

As that comment states, I continue to feel deep sadness as I ponder what has happened to Lawrence King. I also continue to commit myself not merely to remember, but to act: to keep memory alive by doing all I can to assure that no young person ever again endures what happened to Lawrence King.

As my comment to Colleen notes, a website has now been set up to remember Lawrence King. It allows one to leave messages for his family, as well as to make contributions to a memorial fund. The url is http://www.rememberlarry.com/.

As I tell Colleen, in meditating on the tragedy that has befallen this family, I am also pondering some experiences I have had in my career as a professional educator and theologian who struggles to be faithful to my calling to seek truth, to speak the truth in love, and to go beyond lip service in my commitment to social justice. In reflecting on what has happened to Larry King, I think of people I have met in my own calling as a professional educator who profess to be aware of the ravages of homophobia in our society, yet who are perfectly willing to engage in homophobic behavior when it assists them in achieving political goals that are more easily attained by bashing someone who is gay.

One of these people whose story I am now pondering is a woman whose son is gay, and who has held a position of responsibility within the leadership structures of a major Christian church.

Though this professional educator with strong church ties professes support for LGBT persons, she has a strange track record of hiring and then discarding gay employees. The gay-lesbian employees whom she has hired and then fired are far out of proportion to our numbers in the population at large, and out of proportion to the straight persons this educator has hired and fired.

I wonder how a mother of a gay son who claims to detest homophobia is capable of such behavior. This is a question my partner Steve and I have talked frequently about with his own mother, who has met this mother of a gay son. Steve's mother is a very faithful Catholic, but she finds it impossible to reject her own gay sons. In meeting the professional educator who has a gay son, she was struck by a sense of terrible conflict--terrible duplicity--in the soul of the other gay mother. She was struck by a sense that this is a mother whose conflicts about accepting her own gay son are so deep, she must lash out at the gay people with whom she surrounds herself periodically.

As I think about this story, what strikes me is how often family members of some gay persons must experience this tragic conflict in their hearts. It is easy to think of ourselves as affirming. It is much harder to affirm in reality. And the heart divided against itself is capable of inexplicable cruelty . . . .

I pray that, for those who find themselves in such a conflicted posture (and I certainly do feel compassion for them), the tragic death of Lawrence King will somehow reach into their hearts. I pray that, by remembering what has happened to some gay sons, such mothers may one day come to understand what LGBT people--and LGBT children, in particular--experience daily.

I hope this event will touch the hearts of family members of LGBT persons who have not yet found it in their hearts to accept, affirm, and, most of all, make solidarity with their gay family members (and gay co-workers and gay friends) to stand against all forms of abuse of gay people in our society.

I hope, in other words, that in remembering Lawrence King, more people whose lives have connection to gay persons will become activists--activists who work to prevent incidents like this happening ever again. I also hope that those who have gay family members, friends, and colleagues, and who have voice within the churches, will raise their voices to call on their churches to stop contributing to violence against LGBT persons.

For educators, in particular, it is keenly important to find ways to shape a new mentality among those we educate. It is urgent that we contribute to the healing of social attitudes and institutions that create violence against LGBT people.

And yes, this must also be the charge of educators in church-based schools. It baffles me that church-based schools continue to seek to silence faculty and staff who call for open dialogue about LGBT issues. If church-based schools do not have a vocation to educate students who combat social violence in all its forms, who does have such a vocation? And how can a violence that cannot even be named be combated? How can educational institutions that enforce silence about LGBT people and their lives combat homophobia?

I have experienced inexplicable roadblocks in several church-based universities where I had the charge of leading faculty, whenever I sought to address these issues. I have encountered overt homophobia from faculty who speak of transformative leadership and civic engagement, and I have sometimes found myself punished by my superiors when I spoke out against such homophobia, while those using homophobia as a weapon against gay colleagues were protected by the same superiors. I have encountered underhanded homophobic tactics on the part of faculty who are training the teachers of the future, and I have been reprimanded when I sought to expose this underhanded behavior.

This has to stop, in colleges and universities. It has to stop in church-based schools. The leaders and teachers of the future will be working in environments in which more and more people are openly gay. If educational institutions--and, above all, church-based ones--do not shape genuinely understanding, accepting, and gay-affirming leaders, who will do so? If church-based colleges and universities demand that the leaders in their educational institutions keep silence about these issues, how can they produce teachers who will heal rather than contribute to homophobia?

We must go beyond lip service in combating homophobia. It is a social cancer, and it eats at the very core of our society. Tolerance that is only on the lips is not tolerance at all. Acceptance and affirmation that is only spoken, but not acted, is not acceptance and affirmation at all. As Josh Kilmer-Purcell noted recently, “By not hiding his repugnance under a bushel, Pastor Phelps is one of America’s most effective gay activists. Middle America finally gets to see what homophobia looks like when it’s stripped of such polite, compromising words as tolerance, and states’ rights activist judges. . . .I believe that each time Fred Phelps gets a little airtime, a fallen AIDS hero gets his wings” ("Donate to the Partridge Family of Hate,” Out [Feb. 2008], 40).

Do This in Remembrance

I've just read on the internet that churches prayed today for the victims of the school shooting in Illinois. And, of course, it's fitting that they do so.

I wonder, though, how often churches remember the victims of incidents such as the one that took Lawrence King's life this week. Have churches prayed today for those who lose their life in hate crimes against LGBT people? Did they pray for Lawrence King's grieving family? Did they pray for the young man who took his classmate's life?

Do churches pray to be cleansed of prejudice against LGBT people? Do they pray that God will move the hearts and souls of church members to combat this form of social violence? Do churches pray to be forgiven of the violence they incite when they misuse the Bible as a weapon of hate against LGBT people, or when they speak of gay persons as intrinsically disordered? Do churches pray for the gift of repentance when they drive LGBT people out of their midst?

Remembering is at the very core of the church's calling in the world: Do this in remembrance of me.

Forgetting is all too easy. We inhabit a throwaway culture, which treats some of its citizens as throwaway people. Out of sight, out of mind. . . . Remembrance is a daring act, an act of rebellion against the status quo, one that commits us not merely to hold a person or event in memory, but to do something that commemorates the one we remember.

Do this in remembrance of me. Lawrence King deserves to be remembered. Matthew Shepard deserves to be remembered. These and so many other young lives obliterated or malformed by homophobia deserve the attention of a Christian community called to combat violence and hate, as it remembers a founder executed for his willingness to sit at table with the outcasts of his culture.

In fighting to remember, when so much tempts us to forget (out of sight, out of mind), we fight to construct more humane societies that will eventually make the kind of violence we witness in gay-bashing unthinkable.

In memory of Lawrence King, I'd like to share the following poem that I wrote after the sudden death of a young Dominican priest I hired to teach theology at Xavier University in New Orleans when I chaired that school's theology department two decades ago:

I try to keep you in my memory,

Old friend,

But each day your photo fades

One color more,

A picture in the lake,

Fraught to pieces by the rising of the wind.

In my heart I've carved a shrine,

Where red carnations vie with daffodils

To chant you to your rest.

But no one that we know

Comes now to worship there.

Pilgrim feet forsake the path

That leads to you.

The shade beside the road

Invites foot-weary travelers

Grown tired of sun and rain along the way.

And I, yes even I:

That shrine within my heart

Holds one blossom fewer every day.

In Memoriam

And, as a sad addendum to what I posted earlier today, I have just read that fifteen-year old Lawrence King has been taken off life support: http://365gay.com/Newscon08/02/021608life.htm.

This senseless violence against LGBT youth must stop.

It is time for Christian institutions, including Christian educational institutions, to break silence and challenge the hatred fueling this violence. Institutions that look to Jesus as their founder have no business siding with hate, no business remaining silent when children are assaulted for being considered gender-inappropriate, and no business silencing their members who wish to speak out against such hatred.

As the worldwide Anglican communion and the United Methodist church both prepare for meetings at which, yet again, members promoting homophobic agendas will be permitted to defend hate in the name of Christ, I hope that someone, somehow, will keep the memory of Lawrence King--and what we have all lost through his death--in the forefront of these church folks' minds.

The Week in Review: Combating Violence Against Gay Youth

As this week winds to a close, and I try to juggle multiple projects (what birthday gift do you give a connoisseur of chocolate who has every variety in the world?), it occurs to me to gather an assortment of articles that have impressed me in recent days. All are pertinent to themes discussed in previous postings.

As my profile for this blogsite indicates, one of the issues that most engages my passion is to stop bullying of LGBT children in school. This passion stems, in part, from my own experience of having been bullied for my conspicuous lack of gender “normativity” in childhood. I can recall being taunted in junior high school, called a queer, even before I had any inkling what that term meant. I remember coming home the first time I was called this, and asking my mother what the term meant.

Her answer was a variant of one she gave me when I learned the 10 commandments as a young child, and asked what “adultery” meant: “It’s when mommies and daddies do bad things.” “Queer,” she replied, means “when men do bad things.”

Not very enlightening, but enough to clue me in to the fact that this term had something to do with the forbidden area of sex, and that, as with everything falling into that murky shadowland, to be queer was to be shameful. So I was queer, then, even though I had no clear idea what this meant, and the area of sexuality itself was a complete shadowland into which I had never even ventured . . . .

Whatever being queer was, I soon learned, it evidently justified being knocked down by the vice-president of the school’s bible study club, whenever I missed a shot in volleyball (not an infrequent occurrence). It justified the coaches standing by and watching this happen and doing nothing to reprimand the boy who repeatedly assaulted me.

Being queer evidently also allowed other boys to grope what they called my breasts (my non-existent male breasts!) in gym class, again without any punishment by the coaches. It allowed the coaches to put me at the start of the line of boys on all fours over which the class vaulted when we did gymnastics, a position that allowed anyone vaulting over to kick the first person in line in the ribs or side—hard kicks excused as part of the launching process.

I sensed, without having full clarity, that being queer had something to do with being a sissy, another term with which I had contended in school (and at home, and at church) as far back as I could recall. I was a liability in most games boys played on the school ground, so that I was almost always chosen last for a sport. In baseball, I was put far, far into one of the fields, where I could usually find something that really interested me, like heads of clover to be woven into flower necklaces—thus confirming the poor opinion of my sporting skills when the ball that I wouldn’t have caught, anyway, flew over my head as I sat on the ground in the clover, oblivious to the game around me.

I remember the cheek-burning shame of being nominated for the position of captain of the safety patrol team in fifth grade (whatever can S. Gibbs have been thinking?), and the speech my nominator gave before the whole school: “Bill Lindsey may walk like a girl and talk like a girl, but I can assure you he’s all boy.” Most of all, I remember the howls of laughter that day from the sixth-grade classes who occupied the front rows of the auditorium.

I don’t recall these scenes to wallow in self-pity. I can laugh at most of them now. I recall them to remind myself and others that there are still children enduring this treatment in our school system—and with the full complicity of school officials and parents. What happened this week to Lawrence King in Oxnard, CA—a gay fifteen-year old boy murdered by a classmate after repeated taunts about his sexual orientation--should not happen again to any other child in an American school: http://www.towleroad.com/2008/02/gay-junior-high.html.

And even now, the “mainstream” media remains shamefully silent about this event, and about the problem of bullying of LGBT children in schools (on media silence, see www.bilerico.com/2008/02/wheres_the_outrage.php). At my last job, where I was repeatedly reprimanded (in a church-based institution!) for bringing up issues having to do with LGBT concerns, I remember being told—by a supervisor whose son is gay, no less—that it was inappropriate and unacceptable for me to mention GLSEN, Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, in a discussion of the school’s mission to educate students to address social ills.

Never mind that the school prides itself on having a founder who linked liberal education to civic engagement, and who stressed that the scope of a college’s civic engagement should be as wide as the needs of the community it served. Or that the university’s Education Department is accredited by an institution that requires the Department to assure that it does not discriminate on grounds of sexual orientation, and prepares teachers who can respect diversity and teach tolerance . . . . Or that my charge was to lead the faculty in preparing a major project that would highlight the school’s commitment to civic engagement of all kinds . . . . Or that violence towards gay students is a serious problem on many historically black college/university campuses (HBCUs)—a group to which this university belongs—where a culture of silence feeds violence and leaves LGBT students with few role models to help them navigate currents of shame and self-loathing.

I was also told by the same supervisor that bringing up attacks on homeless people was unacceptable, because the faculty leaders who reported to me weren’t interested in hearing about this problem. Interestingly enough, just this past week, the NY Times reported that the community in which the university is located has been identified as the key city in the nation in which educational networks must address the problem of violence against the homeless. This is an epidemic problem in the community in which this civic engagement-oriented HBCU is located; and it is youth, youth who need education, who are primarily responsible for the problem.

When I proposed that GLSEN, among many other organizations helping youth address social ills, should be looked at as a possible resource for our school’s civic engagement project, I was told by my supervisor that I was “putting my lifestyle into the face of colleagues.” My response—that I have a life, and not a lifestyle—was not well-received, to say the least. When the powers that be decree that LGBT people have lifestyles rather than lives, it evidently behooves us to accept the demeaning social location we’ve been assigned, and to be silent—even when we are educators charged with leading civic engagement projects on behalf of the youth we are educating.

So my concern with LGBT bullying has deep roots. For that reason, an article in today’s Bilerico blog caught my eye: www.bilerico.com/2008/02/the_way_we_raise_our_gays.php. Erik Leven asks what happens when we leave LGBT children to fend for themselves as they are bullied and shamed. He calls the churches to accountability for their silence about this endemic American problem. A choice quote:

“If a child is particularly beaten down--by their church, their parents, their school or their peers when they come out--the baggage is that much heavier. As they approach adulthood it would be common and understandable if they carry feelings of worthlessness, self-loathing and general depression. Is this what we want? All you Christians who believe you're speaking FOR Jesus--do you really think Jesus himself would want this? Whole populations of unhealthy, unhappy kids who go on to lead unhappy and unhealthy lives. This is not because we're gay. It's because YOU can't accept it. Wouldn't you suppose this world would be a better place if children were to feel comfortable with who they are and then approach adulthood in that way?”

On a related, but separate, theme, this week’s news carries many articles noting that the Vatican’s attack on the Spanish government, which has legalized gay marriage and teaches tolerance for LGBT persons in its schools, continues. On this, see especially two postings on the Clerical Whispers blog at http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com, entitled "Rift Between Madrid and Vatican" and "Spanish Opposition Leader Targets Gays." It strikes me as particularly reprehensible that the Vatican-backed opposition party is using the issue of gay adoption as a wedge issue to gain votes.

And on the continuing use of that wedge issue in our own political context, I recommend Brynn Craffey's www.bilerico.com/2008/02/my_give_a_damns_busted.php.

"God’s got my back,” indeed.

For a humorous look at how gay marriage is responsible for every possible calamity in the universe, see the second video on Peterson Toscano’s a musing blog under the entry “Friday Night Ex-Gay Entertainment” at http://a_musing.blogspot.com/.

And as a reminder that gay artists and activists are interested in issues transcending those of the gay community, see Sam Harris’s new anti-war song at www.samharris.com/waronwar/.

And, finally, for a heartening reminder that some church folks do get it, see the following article about a Catholic Chinese ministry to the gay community at Clerical Whispers:
http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2008/02/sister-fabians-pro-gay-crusade.html.

Since this is Black History Month, I want to close this week in review blog entry with a quote from one of my African-American heroes, who worked intently (as did Bayard Rustin, the black gay Quaker activist whose quote about angelic troublemakers forms the footer for this blog page) to develop strategies of social analysis that recognize the interconnection of problems such as racism, sexism, poverty, and homophobia. This hero is Mary McLeod Bethune.

Bethune once spoke of seeing a small girl cross the street and thinking to herself that this child could one day be a Mary McLeod Bethune. Mary McLeod Bethune saw everyone’s child as a child to be nurtured, educated, taught self-respect. Her philosophy of educating students through requiring them to be involved in civic engagement is based on a strong conviction that colleges and universities should be involved in addressing the social ills of their own communities.

If Mary McLeod Bethune were alive today, I have absolutely no doubt that she would be intently concerned about incidents such as the murder of Lawrence King. I have no doubt that she would be strongly supporting the coalition of HBCUs who have banded together under the auspices of the Human Rights Project to address anti-gay violence on black college campuses. And I can well imagine she would applaud Barack Obama for his heroic speech in a black church in Atlanta several Sundays ago, in which he spoke courageously and forthrightly about the need of the African-American community to confront homophobia.

Bethune’s last will and testament speaks eloquently of her commitment to build a better world for youth. During Black History Month, wouldn’t it be wonderful if black churches and white churches—all churches alike—realized that some of the youth to whom we are handing over the world are gay and lesbian youth, or youth who will choose new gender identities? Those youth are often, as people are reporting about Lawrence King, sensitive, kind, gentle, gifted human beings whose gifts are sorely needed to build a more humane world.

They do not deserve to live in shame. They certainly do not deserve to be bashed, taunted, or murdered. I call on the churches to listen to Mary McLeod Bethune’s last will and testament and to imagine some of the youth Bethune envisages here as gay youth:

"The world around us really belongs to youth for youth will take over its future management. Our children must never lose their zeal for building a better world. They must not be discouraged from aspiring toward greatness, for they are to be the leaders of tomorrow. . . .We have a powerful potential in our youth, and we must have the courage to change old ideas and practices so that we may direct their power toward good ends."

Keeping On Keeping On

Home again, with some lines from a book I read on my 2005 pilgrimage across southern England and Wales running through my mind. These are from Ellis Peters, Ellis Peters' Shropshire (Guernsey: Sutton Publishing Co., 1999):

"Have you ever noticed how, if you set out on a definite quest, at the next meeting or parting of ways there are three to choose from, and either no signpost at all, or one that fails to mention the place you are seeking?" (107).

Indeed. Part of learning to live life as daily pilgrimage is learning that the way on which we think we're setting out may often not be the path down which spirit ultimately nudges us. And perhaps one of the hallmarks of the path spirit chooses is always that the signposts are either non-existent or impossible to decipher. The point is simply to keep walking . . . .

And as soon as we got home this afternoon and walked through the door, in quick succession, four phone calls, all promising interesting new avenues for us to walk down, as if taking a short trip--a diversionary one--shakes up what has seemed stuck in one's life, so that new and interesting possibilities emerge.

And the dialogue continues, on the National Catholic Reporter "Intrinsic Disorder" thread (http://ncrcafe.org/node/1337) to which I keep linking some of these blog postings. This is a posting I have just placed there in response to another poster's statement, '[L]ooking back over my post, I realize I should make it clear that I know that it is a vocal minority among homosexuals that pushes the agenda and events that I and others find so offensive":

"H.T, I've fought with myself not to reply to your posting. I have the impression that the conversation on this thread has reached a kind of dead end, and the more I keep trying to plead for the churches to understand the truly evil place in which they have put gay believers, the more I confirm the analysis you're offering here: 'vocal minority' 'push[ing] the agenda.'

This is part of the catch 22 that social structures create for minority groups, when they assign to a denigrated group a tightly confining box as the only acceptable social location for the group. The box is so designed that, as the walls close in ever tighter and the more those inside shout about the injustice of being straitjacketed, the more they confirm the stereotype used by social structures to justify entrapping and tormenting them in the first place!

I'd like to probe the point you make about the church's responsibility to turn away from the altar any public sinner, including (your words) 'a heterosexual couple who got married outside the church after years of secretly living together.'

Perhaps this is a pastoral responsibility of the church. If so, I would submit that the church is doing a lamentably bad job of exercising its pastoral responsibility. Do you know of any parish throughout this country or anywhere, for that matter, where heterosexual couples living together 'in sin' are routinely turned away from the altar?

Or other public sinners? Those who profit from bleeding the poor of their resources? Those who charge extortionate interest rates? Those who engage in shady business deals, known to the public at large? Those who promote war? Those who engage in racism? Married couples practicing birth control? Divorced Catholics who have remarried or may be living together with someone of the opposite sex without benefit of sacramental marriage?

Perhaps I'm agenda-driven, but I hear only of gay people being turned away from the altar as public sinners.

Doesn't the extraordinary interest the church takes in the pastoral care of its gay members seem just a tiny bit misplaced to you--as if some other agenda is going on here, rather than pastoral concern?

I'd like to propose, once again, that the real agenda is exclusion, pure and simple. It's a question of drawing insider-outsider lines, of creating an insider group whose purity is bolstered and demonstrated by scapegoating an outsider group and then expelling it in rituals of public humiliation.

When I read your final comment a day or so ago, I was at first rather angry. The anger has now turned into grief. Your statement about agenda-driven vocal minorities that 'I and others find so offensive' really does grieve me.

It's a line-drawing statement, a we-vs.-them statement. It's a statement that implicitly puts everyone who is gay and speaks out honestly about this on one side of a line, and everyone inside the church (really inside, as in scrupulously observing every possible jot and tittle of the law) on the other side of the line.

This viewpoint turns the church into what I believe the church is not meant to be: a gathering of rabid purists for whom drawing lines of exclusion is a driving force and an overwhelming preoccupation. And it's rather ironic that those who follow this line of thinking (e.g., restorationist Catholics of the JPII generation) don't seem to recognize that they themselves are a vocal minority pushing an agenda as hard as they can. There are many Catholic viewpoints, and in some of the Catholic countries in which the hierarchy is now fighting hard against gay rights, the large majority of Catholics support gay rights--because they value Catholic teaching on social justice and inclusion.

Enough said. I feel as if I have really not made much of an inroad in challenging this thinking by pursuing this thread, when someone with your acuity of mind keeps framing the issues this way. I respect your right to hold your opinion, and I admire you for defending it. But I find it, in the final analysis, hurtful to many of us who stand on the outside looking in--and hurtful in a particularly cruel way, since it seems so unreflectively assured of the divine stamp of approval and so unthinkingly certain of its rightness even when it is causing pain to others."

I've begun to feel rather hopeless about the project of addressing the church, as an out, honest, gay person on a pilgrimage that I know to be graced--and the grace is evident to me precisely because I have claimed all the gifts that have come to my life through my sexual orientation and my relationship. The person I am addressing in the NCR posting strikes me as intelligent and caring.

It baffles me that churchgoers--including (and perhaps most of all) the "best" churchgoers--just don't seem to get it. They just don't seem to understand the injustice in which they are implicated when they create such cruel and self-defeating social locations for despised minorities, when they don't seek actively to abolish or open up those denigrating social places, rather than confirming them with scripture and tradition.

I can completely understand why a huge number of gay people with church backgrounds have simply given up on the churches, avoid the churches like the plague. Who needs to go through life (changing metaphors wildly here, but it seems right to do so, given the point I want to make) constantly opening his/her veins to let a group that claims divine sanction drip poison daily into one's veins? And in the name of God? And within the sanctuary itself, right in the worshiping community?

And as these interminable one-sided "discussions" with the churches continue, gay people are assaulted all over the world, still. One of the latest horrifying stories is the shooting of a fifteen-year old boy in a California school yesterday, with strong suggestions that he was shot because of his perceived sexual orientation. He has now been declared brain-dead.