Moving Dialogue Forward: Church-Related Colleges and Homophobic Discrimination

Amanda and Jason,*

I hope that my choosing to post a reply on my blog doesn’t make you feel singled out. I’m doing that because I value your two replies so much, and because they raise important questions and make thoughtful comments that deserve more than a short reply in the comments section.

I’m grateful to you for your interest in the blog and for taking time to comment. Though I know I have a goodly number of steady readers in many places—my counter tells me so—I don’t always know who is reading, why they’re reading, whether my message is getting through.

It can be lonely, some days, a bit like talking to myself. Since I began this blog at a time when my teaching career had been ended precipitously without my consent, I regard blogging as a way of continuing my teaching.

And as a teacher, I have always found that I learn more from students than they do from me. I have always taught through dialogue, in which students are free to stop me at any time, ask questions, disagree with me. I don’t know any other way to teach, when you’re teaching human beings and not machines. And especially when you’re trying to teach values—and, as I’ve said on this blog, that’s the heart of the educational enterprise for me. If values aren’t internalized (and they won’t be unless people ask questions and challenge fuzzy thinking), then the process of trying to teach them will be ineffective.

I appreciate your response to my last posting, Amanda, since it helps me better understand where you and Jason are coming from. First, a huge thank you for your consistent defense of gay rights. It comes through in your passionate and well-chosen words (not intelligent enough to express yourself?: nonsense!).

I’m not sure if you have read my Thursday posting “Update on Churches of Main Street USA.” It recounts the stories of several courageous people who have defended the rights of their gay children when their own church (Methodist, in both cases) did not offer them support as they did so. In one case (that of Rev. Bill Taylor of Conroe, Texas), church members church actually made his and his wife’s lives living hell, when they refused to reject their gay son.

It is appalling that people who defend the human rights of others often end up paying a price for doing so. We who are gay sometimes have to watch our loved ones suffering some of the same crap we ourselves are put through, when they refuse to reject us. I have a nephew who was threatened with violence at a Catholic high school because he was outspoken in defense of gay rights.

So, thank you for caring and daring to express your solidarity in a world where those who do so sometimes pay quite a price. Any LGBT people in your life and Jason’s are lucky to have you as friends or family members.

And now to your comments. You say, “I think forcing religious groups to act in a way contrary to their teachings is a violation of their rights, too. I think it would be wrong, for example, for a legalization of gay marriage to lead to the government forcing churches to perform those ceremonies.”

I agree. And I welcome your reply, since it shows me I wasn’t clear enough in what I wrote previously.

I think that churches should not be forced to perform gay marriages if they have moral or religious objections to those ceremonies. Since marriage is both a civil and a religious institution, we who are gay and wish to marry can certainly avail ourselves of the former—if laws permitting this stand—even when our own churches refuse to bless or recognize our marriages.

Where I draw the line is when churches take their religious beliefs and use them to harm others, or to attack the fundamental human rights of others. There are a lot of cases that I think we might point to in a discussion like this.

I’ve focused on education, on the responsibility church-sponsored colleges undertake when they enter into a social contract to produce professionally trained citizens serving the common good. That covenant is implicitly sealed in our society by the fact that church-sponsored schools take federal (and state) funding.

I’ve focused on teacher training as one area in which church-sponsored schools have a strong responsibility (it seems to me) to prepare teachers who do not harm their students or do not impose religious beliefs on their students that impair students’ ability to be good citizens and serve the common good. How teachers treat LGBT young people is, in my view, one of those areas.

Teachers may well hold religious convictions about LGBT young folks that are condemnatory and judgmental. But even if I defend teachers' right to hold such beliefs, I would personally be in favor of prohibiting those teachers to act out these condemnatory and judgmental beliefs in the classroom. How teachers treat young folks can have a lasting effect on their psyches and hearts. Young people who are denigrated and abused by authority figures—particularly those citing religious warrants for their abuse—can be deeply scarred by such treatment.

I live in a state that has been struggling with these issues for some time now. I’ve blogged about a number of cases, cases in which not only were gay (or gay-perceived) youth assaulted in our public schools, but in which teachers facilitated the abuse, because they believed their religious beliefs required or permitted them to do so.

That’s where I’d draw the line: if you’re religious, believe what you want. But don’t harm others while proclaiming your beliefs. And, in particular, if you’re going to go into a profession in which you shape the lives of young people, don’t use your religious convictions to impair those young people and thwart their growth into confident and educated persons. (For instance, there actually are churches in parts of the U.S. which teach that people of color are “mud people” who do not descend from Adam. Though I find that belief alarming, dangerous, and totally false, I grant those churches the right to believe as they see fit. But I would be adamantly opposed to allowing members of those churches to spread that noxious “gospel” in any public school in which they taught.)

I may feel passionately about this because I grew up in a family of teachers. I had role models on both sides of my family, for generations, in the vocation of teaching. My mother’s two sisters who spent their lives teaching in the Arkansas school system often talked about their experiences in the classroom. I learned much from listening to them as I grew up.

Both constantly noted that other teachers in their schools “catered to” (that was their phrase) students from affluent and influential families. This disgusted my aunts. They made a concerted effort to bend over backwards to assist the children most in need of support.

One of the two taught in a school that had a high proportion of Jewish students. She was dumbfounded at the fact that many other teachers in the school did not want to teach those students. Sheer religious prejudice was at the heart of their refusal to welcome Jewish students. Because the principal knew my aunt was fair-minded (she actually preferred the Jewish students, since she found them intelligent and hard-working), the principal would place those students in her classroom.

Now back to the responsibility of church-sponsored schools. Personally, I agree strongly with the decision of accrediting bodies such as NCATE to require even church-affiliated schools to train teachers who do not display prejudice against gay students, and who try to appreciate and teach respect for diversity.

I also think NCATE is on the right track when it looks at the life of the university itself, to assure that the university has in place rules and regulations that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Even though the church sponsoring that university might well condemn homosexuality, it should not be producing teachers who go out into the classroom and use religion to harm gay or lesbian youngsters.

That’s where I draw the line.

Interestingly enough, there’s a discussion of this issue, from another angle, in today’s New York Times (www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/education/24evolution.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=evolution&st=cse&oref=slogin). In Florida, which tends in a very conservative direction religiously and politically, a decision was recently made at the state level to require evolution to be taught in public schools. The reason is simple: tests show that students are not being well-prepared when they are denied sound scientific education because of the religious scruples of some teachers and parents.

Again, this strikes me as one of those areas where a line has to be drawn between the personal religious convictions of a teacher, and what the teacher should be allowed to do or teach in the school system. Public schools are not there to inculcate the particular religious beliefs of anyone. They’re there to educate diverse constituencies, to instill values necessary for civil life, and to prepare good citizens.

In my view, if people’s particular religious beliefs prevent them from buying into those core values, in what they teach and how they treat students, then they should choose a profession in which they will not have to face that quandary. I would say the same about pharmacists who seek to deny access to birth control to customers, on the basis of their personal religious convictions. This is a growing movement in some evangelical and right-wing Catholic circles.

In this discussion, I think the approach of the church-affiliated university that prepares students for professional life can’t be over-emphasized. If I correctly understand NCATE’s point about preparing teachers to deal with sexual orientation as a diversity issue, attention has to be paid to the policies and behavior of a school with a teacher education program because students learn more from what they see around them than from what is said in the classroom.

It is impossible to teach students to understand and respect gay persons in an environment in which gay persons are not even permitted to be visible—and that often happens in church-related schools. It is also impossible to teach understanding and respect when a church-affiliated institution does not even have an institution-wide policy that prohibits discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation.

Even when some teachers in such a school urge students to understand and respect gay persons, the real message students often learn in these institutions is precisely the opposite: that gay people should be invisible; and that, if they seek to be visible and to claim their rights, they are fair game for discriminatory treatment.

These are, unfortunately, lessons I’ve had to learn the hard way, as someone who long ago decided it was important not to apologize for who God has made me, but whose vocational calling to teach theology pointed him to church-sponsored schools. As it happens, my own experiences have been within two denominations—my own Catholic church, and the Methodist church that has played a significant role in my family’s history.

On the whole, in both contexts, Steve and I have discovered that openly gay faculty and administrators can be treated with exceptional viciousness. And here’s a point that needs to be raised about permitting churches to adhere to their teachings.

What a church teaches is not always one set of values or principles, but a number of values and principles that have to be weighed against each other, in the decisions church members make. For instance, both the Catholic and the Methodist church teach that homosexual behavior is morally wrong. The Methodist position (and this is similar to the Catholic position) is that the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian life.

Yet both churches also teach that discrimination against people on the grounds of sexual orientation is morally wrong, too. Both churches have strong traditions of social justice teaching that emphasize the need of Christians to reach out to those on the social margins. The Methodist church calls itself a church of open hearts, open minds, and open doors.

Even so, both churches still permit many of their colleges and universities to continue operating with no policy prohibiting discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation. In states that do not have any law prohibiting discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation (and this is the majority of states in our nation), an employee of such a university can be fired simply because he/she is gay. No questions asked. No legal recourse when that happens.

Many states that do not have laws protecting workers from discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation are also so-called “right-to-work” states. That is, they give the employer wide latitude to terminate any employee at will, without even providing a reason for the termination.

Unfortunately, many of those states—the ones that do not afford legal protection to gay workers and that give employers the right to terminate anyone at will without providing a reason—also just happen to be where many church-sponsored colleges are. These right-to-work states with no laws protecting gay workers tend to be in the South. It is in that area of the country that Steve and I have worked and have had our dismal experiences with church-sponsored colleges.

It’s an important educational challenge, I think, to help ordinary American citizens understand the vicious mechanisms by which institutions like church-sponsored colleges still use to boot gay human beings. These mechanisms are often hidden, and that allows churches and church-sponsored institutions to continue engaging in vicious behavior towards gay human beings which contradicts their own social justice teachings and their profession to be churches with open hearts, minds, and doors.

The fact is, few church-sponsored schools today would fire an employee outright because that person is gay. Even when this is simple to do—and it is, in many areas of the country—other, even more damaging, tactics are common, because the church or church-sponsored institution needs to preserve its public image of the good guy. Firing someone for being gay and stating that outright would lead to negative publicity that would damage many churches or church institutions. In addition, as I have noted, most accrediting bodies (including all the major accrediting bodies of colleges and universities in the U.S.) are moving to censure schools that engage in overt discrimination against gay and lesbian persons.

So how do church-sponsored schools accomplish the dirty work of booting someone because he/she is gay, while not admitting this? Here are some of the techniques I’ve seen used over the years of my work in church-owned colleges in the Southeast. And before I enumerate them, I should note that the question of sexual orientation is very often merely a side issue for college leaders who use it to clinch their dismissal of an employee. It's a convenient clinching argument to use when they want to get rid of the employee because they are threatened by that employee for other reasons, including the outstanding work or integrity of the employee. There are also economic reasons many church-affiliated colleges and universities will attack a gay employee, if he/she is open about his/her identity: this has to do with pressures from funders and alumni to withhold funding if the school doesn't ditch the gay employee.

Here are some of the techniques I've seen used to get rid of gay employees in church-related schools:

1. Work up a bogus case against the employee, claiming that he/she has not fulfilled his/her job duties.

2. When the evidence shows precisely the opposite, refuse the employee a written evaluation (in violation of accrediting standards and academic freedom), since that would give the employee a legal document to which he/she would have the right to respond, to disprove the bogus charge that he/she had not fulfilled his/her job duties.

3. If the employee raises any kind of fuss over being terminated for specious, dishonest reasons, then slander him/her.

4. Claim—as a post-factum justification for the unjust termination!—that the employee is vicious, dishonest, capable of molesting students. (Yes, that ugly old canard—gay men as child molesters—is still being used, and with effectiveness, in some church-related colleges, even against men whose professional and personal integrity is clear and impeccable.)

5. Create secret documents to place in the employee’s file, “substantiating” those “claims”—but do not permit the employee ever to see those documents and/or respond to them.

6. Bring in an outside “evaluator” known for his homophobic reputation, who has never met the employee and knows nothing about him/her, and instruct that evaluator to attack the employee in a meeting of an hour or so, then produce a bogus rationale for firing him/her.

7. Do not show that “evaluation” to the employee, while using it to justify your termination of the employee. Inform your board of trustees that the employee's termination is justified by this "evaluation" that he/she has never even seen.

8. Tell the employee that there is a “secret” reason you have been instructed by an educational supervisory agency to give him/her a terminal contract, but also tell him/her that you have been instructed not to disclose that reason.

9. If the employee appeals to a grievance committee and that committee votes for him/her to be given the “secret” reason in writing, claim that you have already told him/her the reason and the case is closed.

10. If you are in a supervisory position, encourage those reporting to the employee to undermine him/her, and then, if the employee seeks to make those reporting to him/her accountable, claim that he/she is harassing those who have harassed him,/her and remove them from his/her supervision.

11. Take work the employee has done and then give it to a subordinate to “do right.” When the original work is botched by the subordinate (with misspelled words and grammatical mistakes), and the employee notes that the problems in the “corrected” text will impede its effectiveness, allow the employee to restore it to its original form—but allow the subordinate who “corrected” it to take credit for having written it, when the text proves successful (e.g., in bringing grant funds to a university).

12. Set the employee up for failure by refusing to meet with him/her (if you are the supervisor), and then blame the employee for not meeting with you as supervisor. Tell the employee's subordinate, in whose presence you constantly berate the employee, that you refuse even to read emails from the employee, not even when the operation of the whole university depends on collaboration between you and the employee.

13. Destroy evidence of the employee’s good work, and then accuse the employee of having botched his/her assignments.

14. Inform the employee that “everyone on campus” is talking about him/her and his/her "lifestyle," even when you knew that he/she was openly gay at the time you hired him/her, and told him/her he’d be welcome.

15. If the employee seeks legal recourse against such abusive treatment, use the considerable economic and social power of the church-affiliated institution to threaten him/her legally and to destroy his/her career, to justify your abuse of him/her solely because he/she is gay, and you know you can get away with the abuse in the absence of any legal protections for the employee.

Painful stories? Yes. True ones? Yes. I’ve seen all this and more in church-sponsored institutions. And when they’ve happened and boards of trustees have every reason to know that something is radically wrong and that the behavior of the institution’s leaders violates core values of the sponsoring church (not to mention fundamental ethical values like respect for the truth), I’ve also seen the supervisory board sit by and do nothing. I've also seen one college at which the board sat by and did nothing slowly move towards chaos over a ten-year period, chaos centered on the ethical lapses I'm discussing, precisely because the board would not act on reports from gay faculty and staff expelled in an anti-gay purge.

I’m sorry to go on at length about these issues, Jason and Amanda. I do so because I think many citizens whose tax dollars help fund church-sponsored schools and many people who stand in solidarity with gay persons just don’t realize the depths of abuse still possible for gay people in some of these institutions. The stories need to be told, somehow.

I care deeply about these issues for three reasons. The first is that I care about the truth. Period. To allow lies to carry the day in our society leads to social decay. Telling the truth is fundamental to all the ties that bind us in civil society.

I care, too, because so much energy that could otherwise be spent constructively—in a world and in church institutions that desperately need talent and assistance—is spent in playing games, when people leading those institutions still insist on playing the homophobic card to get rid of employees who have proven inconvenient to have around, because they refuse to hide and pretend. Game playing tries my patience. It’s such a waste of time.

And finally, I care passionately because I care passionately about justice. At this point in history, the Christian churches are, on the whole, guilty of tremendous injustice towards gay and lesbian people. Those churches and their representatives often chide us for our anger when we are abused. They tell us we must forgive, without offering any apology for their ugly treatment towards us.

Yet as I read the Jewish and Christian scriptures, we are encouraged to hunger and thirst for justice—to clamor for it in our own lives and in the world around us—because God cares for justice. Passionately so.

And so I keep on trying, keep on talking, keep on thinking. Thank you for listening and bearing with such lengthy responses. And thank you, Amanda, for your congratulations on the length of Steve’s and my time together. ‘Twas grace that brought us safe thus far, and grace will lead us home.

*This is a reply to Amanda's comments about my posting yesterday. Jason, I'm only now seeing your own reply, as I log on to post this new text. I will read your comment with interest after I send this posting through--and I very much appreciate it.

Church-Based Colleges and Homophobic Discrimination

Jason,

I appreciate your response to my “Walking the Walk” posting yesterday. Since the questions you raise are important and complex, I thought I’d reply with another posting, rather than a brief comment.

First, thanks for visiting the blog. We share a love for Emily Dickinson, who is for me a secular saint. I still keep in one of my old journals a tiny wizened apple I plucked from an old tree in her yard in Amherst on a previous visit, and I’ve gone to her grave as though it were a saint’s shrine.

I see your point about Dorothy Parker. She was acerbic, but at least she told the God’s honest truth, when so many of us use language to conceal and deny—and, in my view, that’s a saintlike virture, plain honesty. I don’t know if you realized it when you left your reply, but you did so on Dorothy Parker’s birthday. Waldo Lydecker’s Journal had a tribute to her yesterday, with some entertaining (and moving) clips of her reading her poetry (see http://waldolydeckersjournal.blogspot.com/2008/08/oh-life-is-glorious-cycle-of-song.html).

And now to address the issues you raise: if I understand your primary point correctly, you’re concerned about my insistence that faith-based colleges/universities fulfill their part of the social contract by teaching and upholding values necessary for the proper functioning of civil society. You’re nervous about attempts to impose on these faith-based institutions the values of other groups, including civil society at large. You want to defend the right of any religious group to hold its own unique religious beliefs.

And I don’t disagree at all with that right. I’m all for defending the right of any religious group to maintain its own unique religious beliefs, no matter how loony or noxious those seem to me.

What I don’t support, though, is the right of religious groups to impose those beliefs on other groups, including civil society. And I don’t support the right of religious groups to insist that civil society allow them to extend their peculiar religious or moral views to society at large, when those views contradict fundamental values of civil society.

And that’s where (in my view) the role of church-based colleges and universities comes into the picture, and deserves to be examined very carefully. Despite the wall separating church and state, church-based institutions of higher learning i benefit—and largely so—from our tax dollars. And so, all of us as citizens have a vested interest in seeing that these institutions serve the common good and respect (and teach and foster) the values essential for the proper functioning of civil society.

As an example, I’ve just read on the website of a faith-based university a big announcement of a major federal grant to that university. The announcement is a bit peculiar, in that this is a grant the university receives routinely, though the website is showcasing it as some kind of fundraising coup. I have a personal interest in the story, because a close friend of mine wrote this grant, and I seriously doubt she will receive any credit for its being funded.

I bring her story up because it illustrates the point I want to drive at. When the president of this church-based university began to engage in vicious homophobic behavior towards several administrators at the university, my friend resigned in protest. She could not stomach the behavior. She could no longer work for a leader who exhibited such profound, toxic homophobia towards employees, even in (or particularly in?) a church-sponsored university.

And that’s really the heart of the story, in my view. As with public universities, faith-based universities have long made a social contract with our civil society to produce citizens who help to build a more humane society, in accord with the democratic values we profess to cherish. We give lavishly of our tax funds to church-based universities for that reason: they produce leaders, teachers, good citizens, professional folks who embody (we hope) the core values we need in order to keep participatory democracy alive, and extend it to those who are pushed away from its table.

For this reason, would argue strongly that church-based institutions should be permitted to cherish any and all religious beliefs unique to their sponsoring church, no matter how strange those may seem to me. But they should not be permitted to instill those beliefs and values in graduates who are going to serve the common good, if those beliefs and values undermine or conflict with core values of our civil society.

In my view, how church-based colleges and universities treat gay human beings is a litmus test—perhaps the litmus test—of this distinction today. I keep recurring to the case of the National Council for Teacher Education (NCATE) for this reason. As with many public institutions, many faith-based colleges and universities produce a huge number of teachers for our public schools.

Teaching in a public school demands respect for diversity. It does so because we live in a society that is increasingly diverse, and teachers cannot educate diverse groups of students without understanding and respecting diversity.

One of the diversities with which schools are now having to deal—for all kinds of obvious reasons—is diversity in sexual orientation. Youth are coming to terms with their gay/lesbian orientation at ever earlier ages. There is no way to avoid this public discussion in the classroom.

In my view, while teachers may justifiably hold peculiar religious or moral views that condemn gay people and gay behavior, they ought not to be permitted to impose those views on their classrooms, in a public school. A fundamental, a core, value of civic society is respect for difference and otherness, the desire to understand those who are tagged as different in a demeaning way and to protect them from prejudice. Our participatory democracy depends on that core value.

And it depends on educating teachers who understand this. This is why NCATE has added to its criteria for all teacher education programs, whether in faith-based or public colleges, the expectation that teachers are taught to respect diversity in the area of sexual orientation, and the expectation that the college itself has regulations in place requiring such respect institution-wide.

All accrediting bodies for American colleges and universities have been moving in this direction, as a matter of fact. It is not possible, increasingly, for colleges and universities to engage in open homophobia in hiring and firing procedures, in evaluation procedures, or in curricular decisions, and to use religion as an excuse for doing so.

I don’t want to maintain that the accrediting bodies do a very good job of enforcing these regulations. I have had a close association with several faith-based colleges/universities whose teacher education programs were run by deans and faculty who are deeply and overtly homophobic, and who are willing to use homophobic slurs to destroy the careers of valued colleagues who happen to be gay and to win political points with homophobic top administrators. In one sickening case, one of these educators is the daughter of a minister in a church whose teaching about sexual morality is very strict, and which definitely forbids homosexual behavior. But it also looks askance at multiple marriages, and this faculty member has been married three times--and reports to a homophobic dean who carried on an open relationship with a married colleague while she herself was married, while she used homophobic slurs to destroy the careers of several gay colleagues.*

I haven’t seen any action on the part of any accrediting bodies to remove accreditation from those colleges/universities. Several of them don’t even have institutional non-discrimination policies in place to prohibit outright discrimination in hiring, firing, evaluation, etc.—and this despite the fact that all are sponsored by churches that profess to deplore homophobic discrimination, while condemning homosexual behavior.

I’m glad you brought up the issue of slavery, because, in my view, it’s an historical illustration of the very point I’m making. There was a time when many American churches and the colleges they sponsored would, indeed, have claimed religious exemption to defend and promote (and teach) slavery. Prior to the Civil War, most churches in the South made explicit statements about this. They noted that slavery had always been upheld by biblical norms; they argued that the South was simply holding to the tried and true traditional Christian morality in defending slavery.

And they were dead wrong. Today, it would be unthinkable for us to permit any church-based college or university to teach students that slavery is morally or scripturally warranted. It would be unthinkable for us to produce teachers, even in church-based institutions, who are permitted to go into the classroom and promote slavery, and punish students who challenge them for doing so.

Yet we still allow church-based colleges and universities to practice homophobic discrimination, and to produce graduates who will engage in that form of discrimination in their civic and professional lives.

In my view, homophobic behavior is just as destructive to the bonds of civil society and to participatory democracy as defending slavery on biblical grounds used to be. In my view, churches which teach that people of color are an inferior form of humanity (there are such churches) have a right to teach and believe what they want.

But they do not have a right to try to impose that teaching on civil society or to sponsor colleges and universities that produce teachers, citizens, and professional leaders who espouse this teaching for the body politic and who try to impose this teaching on the body politic.

Maybe Emily Dickinson was wise when she simply absented herself from church life altogether. I sometimes think this when I see the damage that church communities do to our civil society when they use their religious beliefs to attack marginalized groups including LGBT persons.

Something that made me fall in love with Emily Dickinson long ago was when I discovered in her biography that she had been taken as a girl, along with her entire class at an Amherst school, to a revival. Where all those attending were leaned on to confess their sins and receive Jesus.

Emily refused. She was one of the very few in her class who stood apart when the altar call came along. As you know, she later simply stopped going to church, and wrote poems about how she encountered God walking in the woods more than she did in church.

Religion does some wonderful things. It’s capable of tremendous good. But it’s also capable of tremendous evil, and throughout history, all religious bodies have done horribly destructive things to some folks, in the name of God.

As they are often doing today to gay human beings . . . .

Again, thanks for writing. If I have misread your comment, and/or you’d like to continue discussing these issues, I invite further comments.

*It's not my business to pass moral judgment on these folks. I couldn't care a fig about how they live their personal lives, as long as they don't harm others. My point in referencing their own stories in the context of this story about the special status accorded to gay folks in many church-related institutions is this: there's a huge double standard. While their own behavior violated the ethical norms of the church sponsoring this college, they were never called on the carpet for that behavior. And I wouldn't advocate that any college begin to monitor and punish sexual transgressions of faculty and staff.

Even so, however, these faculty members willingly participated in a vicious campaign to destroy the careers of several colleagues solely because those colleagues were gay. And they were permitted and even encouraged to do this by the president of the university in question. The church that sponsors the university teaches that engaging in homosexual acts is incompatible with Christian life. At the same time, it also teaches that adultery is morally wrong. In its university, however, it would be unthinkable for a married faculty member engaging in an affair to be punished for that behavior. It would not be unthinkable for a faculty member in a committed gay relationship to be punished.

This is a huge double standard. And it is present in the life of the church itself. A significant number of churches within this denomination are resisting even allowing gay people to join the church. The same churches would not dream of asking heterosexual members if their sexual behavior makes them fit to be church members.

Numbers Game or Values: The Heart and Soul of Higher Education

And speaking of the numbers racket in higher education (see my posting earlier today on this): US News & World Report has just released its latest ranking of American colleges and universities.

As the influential journal Inside Higher Education reports, this year, more than half of American institutions of higher learning chose to participate in this particular numbers game (www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/08/22/usnews). The rate of participation this year is, in fact, only 46%.

Participation by liberal arts colleges and universities has, in particular, declined significantly this year. As the Inside Higher Education report also notes, an organization called Education Conservancy has challenged the validity of the (self-reported) data on which US News & World Report bases its yearly ranking of colleges/universities, as well as the usefulness of this revenue-making survey as a means of choosing a good liberals arts college or university (on the Education Conservancy and its critique of the ranking system, see www.educationconservancy.org/presidents_letter.html).

In response to Education Conservancy’s critique of the US News & World Report ranking system, a significant number of university presidents have pledged to work with the organization. Presidents signing represent quite a few institutions of higher education with church roots, including Drew, Hendrix, and Philander Smith (all Methodist schools), as well as St. Mary’s College and Holy Cross (Catholic).

As an educator who has seen up close the mechanisms by which colleges groom themselves to rank well in this numbers game, the most significant question I would raise about this survey is in what way it measures the heart and soul of liberal education: that is, the extent to which a college or university inculcates values in its students. As a contributor to a discussion of these issues on the Arkansas Times blog notes today, the university now attracting so much attention in our state, about which I blogged earlier—UCA—announced today that it has risen two points in the report’s rankings of America’s best colleges (see www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog/2008/08/bloom_off_college_rankings.aspx#comments and www.uca.edu/web/weblog/index.php?itemid=2045&catid=10).

When a school can have serious publicly evident problems with leadership, problems centered on questions of values, and still rise in the rankings of America’s best colleges, one has to wonder . . . .

Nonetheless, as Inside Higher Education notes, university presidents of participating institutions began releasing press releases at 12:01 today, as the rankings came out. As the report also observes, “Generally, those releases don’t come from those on the top of the lists, but from those wanting reporters to know that the colleges were at the top of some subcategory or made a top 100 list.”

Numbers game or values? Which is really the heart and soul of American higher education? It’s well worth asking.

A Pietà from the "Lower" Animal Kingdom

Earlier today, I could not think where to fit this news tidbit.

So I am giving it a posting of its own.

The photo heading this posting has been circulating at various news and blog sites all week. It's a picture of a mother, Gana, holding her dead baby, Claudio, who died in her arms last Saturday at a zoo in Münster, Germany.

Until today, Gana would not part with the body of her dead son.

Other pictures of Gana with the body of Claudio are at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/2604546/Gana-gorilla-who-guarded-dead-baby-finally-parts-with-her-son.html and www.herald.ie/world-news/heartbreak-at-the-zoo-as-gorilla-mum-gana-continues-to-cradle-her-dead-son-1460479.html. Since I believe these two are copyrighted, I am linking to them rather than placing copies on my blog.

I have seen few more moving pietàs.

And, of course, I know that one can find pictures equally soul-wrenching of human mothers around the world clinging to the bodies of children that ought not to have died due to hunger or illness that could easily be treated, if medical resources were more equitably distributed worldwide.

Even so, these don't diminish (for me) the tragedy of an animal many of us humans like to regard as "lesser" than ourselves mourning the untimely death of a baby.

Walking the Walk: Values Education, In Memory of Stephanie Tubbs Jones

TGIF. One of those weeks (I feel sure many of us have them) when you ask, at the end, how you got through. No real reason for the despondency, and no major crises—just (but a big “just”!) the noonday devil, which for me, seems to prance all the more through the dog days of summer.

I was thinking earlier in the week of some of my methods of powering through, when spirit flags. Increasingly, I find spiritual sustenance less in scripture (in any of the officially sanctioned holy books of the world religions) than in things like poems.

Poems reach places inside that scripture can’t, sometimes. The words of holy books are so familiar, so overworn and overused, that they have lost their potent surprise. Their coinage has been so debased by those who sling them around like formulaic answers to complex questions or weapons to decapitate others with, that it’s hard not to read bibles some days without seeing the faces of those who debase their words—and being repulsed at the very thought that these words can be holy, misused as they are by some believers.

So I turn to poetry. Which condenses complex thought into few words. Words that evoke rather than dictate, that lead outward (to the natural world and the world of human community) or inward, to self-examination. Words that fire rather than cripple imagination, as so many scriptures do, given how they have been abused.

In times like this, I read (as if they are scripture: and they are) Rumi. Emily Dickinson. Mary Oliver. Rilke and Garcia Lorca. I do have to admit that reading Emily Dickinson often makes me ask, “What the hell did she just say?” Then I read the same poem again—and perhaps another time—and ask again, “Now what the hell did she just say?”

A wonderful e-friend of mine, the emerita dean of a Methodist seminary, who is also an ordained Presbyterian minister, sent me a clipping this week from the Christian Century, in which John M. Buchanan notes how psalm-like Mary Oliver’s poems are, in their minute observation of nature, where Oliver never fails to find revelatory possibility. It gave me heart to learn 1) that somehow my dog-day doldrums were evoking a thoughtful response in the heart of a friend with whom I haven’t really discussed them, and 2) that I’m not the only person in the world who sits down in a rocker early in the morning to read Mary Oliver side by side with a psalm from scripture.

(I also learn from Buchanan that, after the death of her partner of 40 years, Molly Malone Cook, Oliver published a collection of Cook’s photos. I have now added Our World to my must-read list).

And now for a continuation of yesterday’s end-of-week news summary, catching up on items about which I’ve previously blogged.

Continuing the Florida Story

Yesterday’s posting alludes to my reasons for following news from Florida with particular keenness. Besides seeking to work out the traumatic experiences we had in our period of work in Florida, and to integrate those into our professional and spiritual lives, Steve and I also have a house in Florida. Which we bought as a result of promises made to us by a devout Methodist who then broke those promises, and who has never sought to repair the breach of friendship and mere humanity she effected when she did this.

As an aside (but it’s not really an aside, is it?—it’s the marrow of gay life lived in the shadow of the churches), it strikes me as interesting that gay human beings are among the only people the churches feel no obligation to apologize to, when they abuse us. When they break promises to us. When they lie to us. When they lie about us. When they issue statements of “teachings” that they know full well will result in terrible suffering for gay human beings and anyone who loves us. When they make glib statements about justice, equality, and welcome, that obviously apply to everyone but us.

What’s going on with this dynamic, I wonder? I do have some ideas, lots of them . . . .

So, with a house in Florida, we follow Florida news. We don’t have any other choice, as responsible citizens and unwilling owners of Florida property.

Florida continues in the news as a battleground state for gay rights, in part, due to polls that indicate Florida may be shifting away from the Republicans and towards the Democrats in the upcoming elections, and in part, because, once again, vicious right-wing Christian special interest groups who have found it useful to demonize gays in previous elections, in order to bring out “Christian” voters for the Republican ticket, are trying to amend the Florida constitution to “protect” marriage.

A reflection of the keen interest with which many voters (including those of us in the gay community) are following Florida stories today is the choice of the Bilerico blog to add a Florida-specific blog to its site. The new blog is at http://florida.bilerico.com.

Today’s Florida Bilerico contains a wonderful posting by Bishop Mahee entitled “What Are Black Conservatives Conserving?” Mahee does an outstanding job of exposing the vicious politics of right-wing “Christians” who are now trying to exploit tensions between African Americans and gays in battleground states like Florida. She also calls onto the carpet those African Americans who are willing to participate in this politics of demonization and hatred. She asks,

When did we as Black folk get the revelation of homosexuality as the new sin and join forces with the same people who just yesterday wanted to keep their race pure and made intercultural marriages illegal? Now they come to our churches, developed in part because we could not even sit next to them in their churches, spewing more divisive politics.

Florida remains in the news as well because of a story about which I blogged some time ago—the attempt of David Davis, principal of Ponce de Leon High School, to outlaw any show of solidarity with gay people on the part of the school’s students (see http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/05/democracy-ongoing-battle-shifting-faces.html). Davis’s ban against solidarity extended even to a ban on display of rainbows, which, he maintains, lead students automatically to think of dirty sex.

The ACLU sued the school district on behalf of student Heather Gillman, who was specifically targeted by Principal Davis. At the end of July, Judge Richard Smoak of the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of FL handed down an order in this case (see www.aclu.org/lgbt/youth/36150lgl20080724.html). Smoak finds that Davis engaged in a “witch hunt” and “relentless crusade” against gay students at the school, holding “morality assemblies” to try to enforce conformity to his own religiously based moral views about homosexuality. The ruling protects the rights of students to engage in free speech and assembly, even when a principal has peculiar religious views that contest this right in cases such as Gillman’s.

Subsequent news reports indicate that Davis has widespread support in Ponce de Leon (see http://florida.bilerico.com/2008/08/remember_the_anti-gay_florida_principle.php). Citizens interviewed about the controversy stress their religious views that homosexuality is morally wrong, and depict the community as gentle, peaceful, and Christian—that is, for those who aren’t openly gay, it would appear.

As I’ve noted before, Florida is clearly a place where churches like the United Methodist Church—which claims many influential adherents in Florida and has prestigious educational institutions there—have their work cut out (see http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/hate-crime-in-daytona-beach-continuing.html, http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/05/democracy-ongoing-battle-shifting-faces.html, http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/05/holy-conferencing-as-love-building.html). Something seems awry when a community sees itself as gentle, peaceful, and Christian, but targets a despised minority group in witch hunts and crusades.

With its policy of non-discrimination against gay persons, with its stress on churches that have open doors, open minds, and open hearts, the United Methodist Church could make an important pastoral impact on Florida. And, since teaching people in a pluralistic democratic society to respect the fundamental rights of others is also clearly an educational challenge, the important United Methodist institutions of higher learning in Florida have the opportunity to make a significant educational contribution to the state by addressing these issues.

I’ve noted previously that the premier accrediting body for teacher-preparation programs, the National Council of Accreditation for Teacher Education (NCATE), has added to its accrediting expectations stipulations that teacher education programs must address issues of sexual orientation in the formation of prospective teachers, and that NCATE-accredited colleges must demonstrate respect for diversity around issues of sexual orientation in their institutional life (see http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/05/umc-university-senate-historic.html, http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/03/teaching-youth-not-to-hate.html). With its highly regarded universities in Florida and its Social Principles forbidding discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation, the United Methodist Church can do much to address social divisions that are resulting in outright violence against gay and lesbian human beings in this state.

Once again, I call on Bishop Timothy Whitaker of the Florida United Methodist Conference to consider very seriously the ways in which his church and his educational institutions can address this important social issue in Florida. Silence is not sufficient.

Continuing the University of Central Arkansas (UCA) Story

Since I have also blogged previously (see http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/08/spin-spin-spin-citizen-blogging-and.html) about a story from Arkansas higher education that has attracted national attention—a controversy surrounding the current president of the University of Central Arkansas (UCA)—I want to update readers about the latest developments in this story.

Yesterday, our statewide free weekly Arkansas Times reported that the faculty senate at UCA has met to address the issues, which include allegations that UCA President Lu Hardin has acted imperiously as president, that he and his board of trustees inappropriately awarded him pay raises without sufficient public notice, and that Hardin has produced documents with the electronic signatures of vice-presidents who did not write or sign the documents (see www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog/2008/08/post_22.aspx#comments).

As an educator with a particular interest in values education, I’m most interested in two aspects of this story. As I noted in my previous posting about the story, higher education is driven these days all too often by numbers. It has become a numbers game, a game in which presidents who can produce higher figures (showing increasing numbers of students and increased revenue) are rewarded by boards of trustees.

Many boards of trustees in higher education today give the impression that the numbers game is all they care about. The ethical lapses, the moral corners-cutting of presidents, seem too often to be winked at, as long as the figures look good.

That is, until something breaks open—as has happened at UCA—and the underbelly of the numbers-driven institution begins to appear for public inspection.

As the lively discussion on the Arkansas Times blog to which I link above demonstrates, citizens are intently interested in the disparity between the values that institutions of higher learning profess, and the values they actually live. There is a strong awareness among the educated public that colleges and universities exist to serve the common good of civil society, by inculcating the core values needed for good citizenship in civil society.

Two aspects of the UCA story—and its dissection by citizen bloggers at the Arkansas Times website—interest me, therefore. One is the disservice boards of trustees do to the institutions they govern when they ignore the values questions and focus solely on the numbers game.

Trustees have an important responsibility to ask whether a president, in her or his leadership of a college, embodies and encourages the core values the institution seeks to teach students. Trustees have a weighty charge to look behind the veil of the numbers and see what is really going on at the institution they govern—not to mention whether the glowing figures presented to them are accurate and not cooked.

UCA has been booming: more students, more income, new this and that. Now the boom looks, well . . . otherwise . . . given what this story is revealing about apparent lapses of ethical and managerial responsibility on the part of the institution’s board of trustees.

The other aspect of the story that interests me is something I discuss above, when I look at the potential contribution of church-related institutions of higher learning in Florida, to that state’s cultural and political life. This is the significant role colleges play through teaching values.

In the social contract institutions of higher learning have traditionally made with the public at large in American society, values are right at the core of a liberal arts education. Within the framework of that social contract, it is impossible to claim to be educated unless one has been educated to understand and embody values. Among the core values that drive both our institutions of higher learning and society at large are concern for the common good, respect for diversity, understanding of and willingness to dialogue with those deemed other than ourselves, concern to reach out to those marginalized within the structures of participatory democracy—and, of course, those solid core values necessary for any society to function well, including fidelity to one’s word, fair play, a sense of justice, and so on.

When leaders of higher institutions—including presidents and governing boards—do not seem conspicuously to care about these core values, to embody them, to inculcate them throughout the curriculum (and the life) of the institutions they lead, then it is impossible to teach these values to students. We teach what we live, first and foremost.

UCA is a public institution. Citizens hold it to accountability because our tax dollars support it. We have a vested interest in seeing it fulfill its part of the social contract—educating students who respect and live core values essential to civil society—because our money translates into its mission.

Even though church-related colleges and universities do not rely wholly on public funding, they, too, benefit largely from tax dollars. And because American higher education is blessed with an abundance of faith-based colleges and universities, citizens have another reason to look to these institutions to fulfill their part of the social contract to produce values-oriented graduates. So many of our citizens are educated in these institutions, that we all suffer if these institutions fail to do their job.

Unfortunately, while public institutions are held legally accountable by state and federal laws to teach (and embody) core values such as respect for diversity, many church colleges and universities still seek to claim religiously-based exemption, when the particular form of diversity at stake is respect for gay and lesbian persons. In the interest of the common good, of building a viable participatory democracy, it seems to me imperative that church-affiliated colleges and universities no longer be permitted to engage in discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation.

How do we produce citizens who serve the common good and build a participatory democracy when we allow church-affiliated institutions of higher learning to betray such a core value of pluralistic society as respect for diversity? What happens at places like Ponce de Leon high school—and there are many such places throughout the nation—is an illustration of the kind of society we are building, when we do not inculcate the celebration of difference and otherness, across the board, through our educational institutions and in our churches.

And because I often carp, I want to end this posting with praise. I want to praise an outstanding citizen who demonstrates what we can accomplish when we reach across the barriers that separate us by race, religion, gender, sexual orientation.

This week, Stephanie Tubbs Jones, the first African-American woman to represent Ohio in Congress, died suddenly. Though Jones was not a member of the LGBT community, gay internet news and blog sites are overflowing this week with statements of praise of Jones for her consistent stands in support of gay rights, and for her willingness to defend gay persons even when such support might have endangered her professional career and when it drew fire from other African Americans.

Stephanie Tubbs Jones was a great American, one who exemplified the core values of the civil society we claim we want. In her willingness to reach across social barriers, and in her concern to bring everybody to the table of participatory democracy, she has often reminded me of Mary McLeod Bethune. I hope (and believe) that she will be remembered with as much gratitude as Dr. Bethune is now remembered for her contributions to building a better society and living the values necessary to make democracy work.

Update on Churches of Main Street USA: Better Angels of Our Nature?

I talked and talked yesterday (and then talked some more). I’m tired of hearing my own voice, and I feel sure many of you must be, too.

Today, I want to shift gears and provide some tidbits from recent news stories that follow through on items about which I’ve previously posted on this blog.

One of my primary points in what I wrote yesterday is that, whether we like it or not, we are living through a civil war today, regarding where (or whether) to fit gay and lesbian human beings into our world. Into our social and our ecclesial worlds.

The right has made this an issue, and the battle is underway. As with any civil war, there is no option of standing on the sidelines and refusing to take a stand. Neutrality is an illusion, which benefits those with most power in the social or ecclesial worlds we inhabit.

Neutrality benefits those who want to target gay people, to use our lives as pawns in political games we cannot control. Church people who profess love while doing nothing and saying nothing to stop the spiritual violence being enacted by both many social and many ecclesial forces today are aiding, abetting, siding with, and doing the dirty work of those targeting gay human beings.

As the American Civil War began, Abraham Lincoln appealed to us to decide whether we want to listen to the better angels of nature, or to other angels that would continue pandering to the lowest instincts of humanity. In civil wars such as the one underway now in church and society about where (or whether) to fit gay human beings in, we can listen either to those better angels or to the others—to those who want to continue savage structures of demonization and exclusion of gay brothers and sisters, and of spiritual and physical violence towards gay human persons.

In the stories that follow, I leave it up to you to decide which angels are being heard by those who appear in the stories, and the churches they represent. The better angels of our nature? Or the other ones?

Following Up on The United Methodist Church Story

The following two stories are from the latest newsletter of the Reconciling Ministries Network (RMN) (www.rmnetwork.org/Flashnet_show.asp?FlashnetID=171#5).

The first story excerpts comments of Helen King, winner of this year’s RMN Hilton award, which is given annually to members of the RMN parents’ network for exemplary service to the RMN mission of inclusion. The award is given in honor of Rev. Bruce and Rev. Virginia Hilton, UMC ministers who worked for years (Rev. Bruce Hilton died this year) on behalf of justice and against racial, gender-based, and homophobic discrimination.

Helen King’s words are poignant. I hope the churches can hear these words, since they are words that thousands and thousands of churched family members of LGBT persons might say today. They are words both of pain and of hope—a hope that cannot be fulfilled until the churches first hear the pain and choose to stop inflicting it. In her acceptance speech at the Hilton banquet, Helen King stated:

I am a native of North Carolina and a life long Methodist raised in the Wesleyan culture of love, acceptance, nurture of faith that began in the cradle. I married the son of a Methodist minister and our son is a United Methodist minister. However, when our daughter came out to us 15 years ago, I knew instinctively that the United Methodist Church would be the last place that I could go for understanding. So for a year and a half, after a lifetime of active service in the church, my husband and I stopped attending church.

I knew instinctively that the United Methodist Church would be the last place that I could go for understanding. What a profound indictment of any church.

These are words that might be said about many churches today, in how they and their members treat gay and lesbian human beings and those who stand in solidarity with us.

Is this the future we want to build together, in church and society? Better angels? Or the other ones?

Helen King’s words are echoed by a Methodist minister in Texas, who also spoke at the RMN Hilton banquet this year. Like Helen King, Rev. Bill Taylor has found his life turned upside down due to his refusal to repudiate a gay son.

And those turning his life upside down are fellow Christians, those who kneel at the communion rail with him, who read scripture with him, who pray for an increase of charity right beside him in church. In his address to the Hilton banquet, Rev. Taylor noted his joy and his wife’s when they were sent by the United Methodist Church to minister in Conroe, Texas, after he had served on the Bishop’s Cabinet.

His ministry was successful beyond all his dreams: the church grew in membership; numbers of those attending church leapt; the church’s budget doubled and its debt dwindled.

And then, Rev. Taylor notes, “the wheels came off.” His oldest child, Dawson, told his parents that he is gay. On hearing this announcement, Rev. Dawson followed time-honored Wesleyan tradition: he took the matter to God in fervent prayer:

For a year I prayed fervently that God would change Dawson and make him “normal” – a heterosexual like his parents – or I asked God to change me to be fully accepting of him, his sexuality, and his life. My prayers were answered. Slowly, not even realizing that I was changing, I began to be accepting, not only of Dawson, but of all who are a part of the LGBT community.

And then things began to fall apart. Rev. Taylor and his wife began to taste the cup prepared for gay and lesbian persons by many Christians today. Rumors circulated in his congregation that he did not believe the bible. Gatherings at which he spoke became occasions for some church members to spy on him, to twist and circulate his words in malicious ways among his congregation.

As a result, he has experienced severe health problems and has asked for a sabbatical. But his hope and courage remain undaunted. As Rev. Taylor informs the RMN audience, “They may destroy my career, but not my soul. And the truth must be told. So it’s in that spirit that I share with you some of our story.”

Is this the future we want to build together, in church and society? Better angels? Or the other ones?

Following Up on the Catholic Church Story

As I noted in a previous posting, plans are underway to exhume John Henry Cardinal Newman from the grave he shares with his lifelong companion and fellow priest, Ambrose St. John. The ostensible reason the Vatican has given for this exhumation is to facilitate veneration of Newman as his cause of canonization is being considered by Rome.

Some advocates of gay and lesbian rights see a murkier motive in this action, however. As Bess Twiston Davies reported in the Times (London) this week, Peter Tatchell has accused the Vatican of engaging in “an act of moral vandalism” in overturning Newman’s explicitly stated final wishes, and separating him in death from St. John (www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article4566639.ece). In Tatchell’s view, “The re-burial has only one aim in mind: to cover up Newman's homosexuality and to disavow his love for another man. It is an act of shameless dishonesty and personal betrayal by the gay-hating Catholic Church.”

A spokesperson for Catholic Action UK responds to Tatchell’s charges by stating that Tatchell’s position represents a typical “trick of homosexual activists.” Catholic Action UK is a right-wing political activist group that purports to represent “the” Catholic position on issues moral and political. Like its counterparts in the United States, it issues so-called Catholic voters’ guides urging Catholics to vote solely on the basis of a handful of “non-negotiable” issues including gay marriage and abortion. It has called for boycotts of the largest Catholic charity in the UK, Catholic Agency for Overseas Development, and of Amnesty International. According to groups monitoring its political activities (including Catholics for a Free Choice), the organization has been less than forthcoming about its funding sources (see www.catholicsforchoice.org/topics/international/documents/2005catholicactiongroupfactsheet.pdf).

Where are the better angels in the preceding story, I wonder? Those of us who continue to claim some connection to the Catholic church—despite its clearly demonstrated record of spiritual violence towards its gay children at this point in history—have no choice except to try to discern, and to choose where we stand.

In another posting recently, I noted that the Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic men’s organization, recently came perilously close to endorsing the Republican presidential candidate at the international meeting of this organization in Québec. A news story that broke yesterday is that the Knights of Columbus have donated $1 million to groups supporting Proposition 8 in California—the proposition intended to overturn gay marriage in that state (http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2008/08/prop-8-post.html).

To which angels of our nature are the good Knights appealing, I wonder? I have serious doubts about whether it's to the better angels.

Following Up on the Story of the Anglican Communion

In a number of postings, I have noted the adroit use by the right of the tactic of race-baiting in the Anglican communion, to try to drive a wedge between people of color in worldwide Anglicanism and supporters of LGBT human beings. Because this tactic has been highly successful in drumming up resistance to gay persons among some African Anglicans, I was heartened to read Daniel Burke’s “Raising Issues of Race in Anglican Rift” recently in the Washington Post (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/08/AR2008080803256.htmla report).

Burke notes that eight African-American Episcopal bishops attended the recent Lambeth Conference, and spoke out eloquently against the attempt of right-wing groups to drive a racial wedge within the Anglican communion in order to further an anti-gay agenda. As Bishop Eugene T. Sutton of Maryland notes, it is ironic in the extreme that American Episcopalians now turning to Africa as a bulwark against gay rights have historically had almost no connection to African Americans in the U.S.: "It's something that I like to point out, the historical anomaly of dioceses that have nothing to do with the black community going all the way to Africa to make these relationships.”

Sutton notes that Episcopal groups in the U.S. turning to Africa to demonstrate their diversity, while working to exclude gay people from Episcopal churches, are “looking for black faces to give them legitimacy because they can't find them at home.” The African-American bishops at Lambeth also note that the abuse of Scripture by some Episcopalians to bash gay people brings to mind the use of the bible in previous eras to support slavery and racism.

Who stands with the better angels of our nature in the Anglican communion today?

Following Up on the Presbyterian Church Story

I blogged some time ago about the decision of Presbyterian General Assembly this past June to overturn that church’s ban against the ordination of openly gay ministry candidates. This decision must be ratified by two-thirds of the nation’s presbyteries, and various indicators suggest that it will not receive sufficient votes to be enacted—particularly among presbyteries of the South.

Meanwhile, I would like to share some heartening news from my own community. I’ve noted the protest by Westboro Baptist church at the funeral of Bill Gwatney this week. This funeral took place at Pulaski Heights Methodist church, near which I live.

On the day of Bill Gwatney’s funeral, as I drove in the direction of that church, I passed another church that also has the name Pulaski Heights—Pulaski Heights Presbyterian church. This is a church about which I know little, though its church hall is my voting precinct and a cousin of mine was once a member of this church.

When I passed the church, I noted a new banner across the columns that form the church’s porch. It stated in huge letters that the church is welcoming and affirming.

As every church should be, no questions asked, if it hopes to be any kind of church at all—any kind of church that can appeal to Jesus as its originator. Since this story is right in my own back yard, I’ll answer the question about which angels I believe this church is reflecting: the church’s decision to advertise itself as a welcoming and affirming church reflects the better angels of its congregation’s nature, and of the churches of Main Street USA in general.

And at a very personal level, I'd like to add the following observation. Vis-a-vis the churches, we in America are all consumers. We choose our church communities based on their ability to meet our needs, just as consumers of material goods shop among various purveyors of those goods to find the most effective suppliers. Key among those needs when we look for a church home are affirmation, acceptance, support, community, and access to spiritual resources. These are what church is all about, when it truly acts as church.

I grew up, as it were, between the Methodist and the Presbyterian church in question. Both are a block from my grandmother's house, which was the center of my life from infancy up to the death of the last family member who lived in that house, a few years ago.

I know the Methodist church particularly well, because it has a vibrant community that was very helpful to Steve and me as we provided care for my mother in the final years of her life. The church sponsors an eldercare respite program.

Given the choice today, however, I would not ever attend a service in that Methodist church willingly, though I have been encouraged by friends who go there to accompany them. Why?

The answer is starkly simple. It's one churches need to hear, if they want to attract religious "consumers."

For me, the "brand" of Methodism will now forever be tainted by Steve's and my horrific experiences at a United Methodist university in Florida, under the pastoral supervision of Bishop Timothy Whitaker. What we experienced there was outright discrimination of the most vicious sort, discrimination premised on our sexual orientation.

Bishop Whitaker has strong reason to know this. The United Methodist ministers who sit on the board of the university in question have strong reason to know this.

Yet, to my knowledge, not a single one of these men of the cloth has raised any critical question about the violation of United Methodist principles in how Steve and I were treated. The president of the university in question has strong ties to the United Methodist church, at an institutional level. (S)he has been allowed to represent herself/himself as the better angel of this ugly story, and Steve and me as fallen angels--though the facts demonstrate otherwise. (S)he has even been rewarded by the church through an honorific appointment after what (s)he did to us. What this president did was done with the active complicity of an ordained Methodist minister who is a retired president* of a seminary.

I have seen nothing, heard nothing, which indicates that any minister on the board of the university in question has challenged that minister's extremely unethical and savage behavior to two employees of a Methodist university with which he is associated, who were vilified solely due to their sexual orientation.

I hope that the churches of Main Street USA can understand: this is how it is. Kick people in the teeth, and you will not attract them to your church. Treat them like human refuse, and never apologize or ask forgiveness, and you will not convince them to listen to your preaching. How can they hear, when they are kicked to the gutter and treated as garbage?

I am now as alienated from the Methodist church by my experiences at this university in Florida as I am from my own Catholic church, due to my very similar experiences with my church.

But I will definitely consider going to the Presbyterian church I have identified. I will definitely send donations to it. I have friends who have been inviting me to their Presbyterian churches, and I intend to show my gratitude to the church near me for its courageous action, by attending its services in the future.

No church is perfect. I do not expect perfection from any church. What I do expect is simple, mere humanity, mere honesty, just treatment, bread rather than stones. That is what anyone expects from any church that seeks to appeal to the better angels of our natures. Just as I would not return to a restaurant or a shop in which I receive discourteous or disrespectful treatment, unless the establishment in question addressed my critical concerns and apologized for its lack of service, I will not go to churches that preach about better angels but do not live the message they preach.

I know of and am deeply impressed by many Methodists, and I do not wish to do these good people an injustice. Even so, given Steve's and my experiences at a Methodist institution--and, above all, the total lack of any Methodist pastoral response to us in and following those responses--I completely understand lifelong Methodist Helen King's statement, I knew instinctively that the United Methodist Church would be the last place that I could go for understanding.

Yes. That is my judgment, too, based on my experiences with the Methodist church, just as it is my judgment about my own Catholic church based on my eerily similar experiences with my own church.

We are ineluctably affected, by better or for worse, by our experiences with any community, whether it be a workplace or a church. And we choose to affiliate with that community based on those experiences. It's as simple as that, in the consumer society we inhabit . . . .

*In several previous postings, I have referred to this gentleman as the retired dean of a seminary. I was incorrect in doing so. My research has led me to realize that he was president of the seminary from which he retired.

We Have Met Fred Phelps and He Is Us: Reflections on the Gwatney Shooting

I ended Monday’s posting with the following statement,

And, though many church folks profess to deplore the Phelpses of the world, is their ultimate position regarding me and my life, my brothers and sisters and their lives, all that different from the position of the Phelps family—in its effect on us? And in what they actually believe and say about us? And how they treat us?

That statement may astonish—and, indeed, anger—many church folks. What can I mean, when I claim that the churches in general are implicated in the horrific behavior of the Westboro Baptist church crowd who appear at funerals of dignitaries and soldiers, urging their children to hold aloft vile cartoons designed to elicit hatred of gay folks by equating gay people with anal sex? How are churches in general in any way implicated in the outright violence the Phelps clan practices (and encourages) towards gay persons?

On the day I wrote the preceding comments, the blog of the statewide free weekly Arkansas Times had a lively discussion of the presence of the Phelps family at the funeral of Bill Gwatney, the state Democratic Party chair who was recently gunned down in his office (www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog/2008/08/gwatney_service.aspx#comments). What interested me in the blog was the determination of every poster—of all political stripes—to distance himself/herself from the Phelpses. One poster informed those reading the blog that he is a Republican Baptist who “would no more condone the Phelps Gang and thier [sic] actions than I would Hitler’s.”

Unfortunately, none of those posting such adamant disavowals of any sympathy for the Westboro Baptist gang spelled out their own views about gay persons in these disavowals. That in itself is rather interesting, isn’t it? It’s the gay thing that got the Phelps group going, isn’t it?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but at the funerals of dignitaries and soldiers where they now shout and carry their hate-filled signs—in the protests that have finally attracted the attention and opprobrium of mainstream America and its churches—they still focus on the gay thing, don’t they? Even at these funerals at which no one else sees a gay connection, the Phelps family sees that connection. They’re there for one sole purpose—to make sure we get it: God hates America because we have become a fag-loving nation.

You’d think that anyone who seriously expects us to be convinced he is horrified at the ideology and behavior of the Phelps gang would feel it necessary to take the next step and condemn the homophobia that is the entire raison d’être of the Phelpses. Wouldn’t you? Unless I’m mistaken, their website still says it all: godhatesfags.com.

I will not hold my breath until those anti-Phelps churchgoers on the Arkansas Times blog repudiate homophobia. I won’t wager much on their willingness to speak out against the current anti-gay adoption initiative facing Arkansas voters in the fall election, an initiative designed solely to target gay people and bring out religious right voters on behalf of the Republican ticket.

My point is, quite simply, this: we are all implicated in the violence that Westboro Baptist church preaches and hopes to foster. It is too easy to point our fingers at Fred Phelps and identify him as our scapegoat, the crazed vulture picking at the entrails of violence in our predictably violent society.

Make no mistake about it: Phelps is that. He’s a scavenger. He feeds with sickeningly apparent gusto on the violence of our violent society. But he does not produce that violence. Not unilaterally. We produce it. We enable it. We stand by in silence as it is produced and fomented, traded and reveled in. If Fred Phelps is the consumer of social violence, we are the ones producing the violence on which he and his ilk feed. We and the Westboro Baptist crowd are bound together in a cycle of production-consumption that needs us to make the violence as much as it needs the Westboro folks to eat it.

The choice of the Phelps family to show up at Bill Gwatney’s funeral on Monday, a few blocks from my house, reminded me of how little things have changed in some essential ways since the Civil Rights period. For anyone growing up in the American South of the 1950s and 1960s—for any white person growing up with eyes beginning to see what African Americans have had no choice except to see—the civil rights period provided a painful schooling that will forever frame our outlook on the social world and how it functions. We learned in those years lessons—about ourselves, our parents, our families and friends, our churches and communities—we’d rather not have learned, but which, once learned, we will not unlearn.

And forever after, we will have the burden of coping with those lessons, of making sense of them and what they tell us about the world in which we live. Once our eyes are opened, we can do no other than see. And we have to determine how to deal with what we now see, eyes wide open. What we learn implicates us. It frames every choice we make, once a lesson has been instilled.

And one of the lessons we learned in those years, one that, now learned, will not be unlearned, is this: violence is not the act of a few. Violence requires a social network to produce and support it. Violence is endemic in our society. It is woven through our society. We are all implicated in it, and it will not disappear until we all face our implication in it and work to eradicate it from our souls, as well as from the social networks in which it is enmeshed.

In some respects, the obscene rhetoric and antics of the Westboro Baptist church at the funeral of Mr. Gwatney within days after he was gunned down are part of an ongoing narrative whose plot we know only too well. We in the South are used to acts of “inexplicable” violence about whom no one seems to know anything at all, acts quickly covered up, as if a stone is thrown into a pond and quickly sinks in it, never to be thought of again after the ripples have subsided.

The Civil Rights period was a period of one atrocity after another in which no one seemed to know anything—anything about who was committing the atrocities, why it was impossible to discover the agents of violence and bring them to justice, why the attempt to dig into identities and motives led only to more violence, and so on.

The one thing that was clear was the why of these acts: terror. These were terroristic acts designed to stop the forward movement of history. They were acts committed, we all knew without being told specifics, by white men attempting to stand astride history and shout stop.

The very secrecy surrounding the acts—the hidden identities, the whispered confidences that never reached public ears, the scent of conspiracy so thick in the air it was like smoke billowing strangely all around, though there was no fire—made them all the more frightening. Anyone might have been committing them, for all we knew. Our neighbors could be involved. Our own family might know more than they said.

In such a social environment, it is best to keep one’s head low and toe the line, unless one is inclined to courage (and martyrdom). “Good” people, white families who thought of ourselves as the decent sort, would not speak up. Because we were afraid. An uncle of mine informed me darkly—this was in the latter part of the 1960s—that if I continued to talk about racial justice and to quote the bible to that end, I’d no doubt end up in some bayou east of Little Rock with concrete around my ankles.

When I once—foolishly, defiantly, never thinking of the real price my friend might pay—invited a black friend to my house in the same time frame, neighbors subsequently paid quiet, emphatic little visits to my family. We’re not against civility, you understand. We don’t like all this hoopla, dogs and firehoses and church burnings. But we don’t want a cross burned in our yards. Please control your son.

In what I am saying here, I am not claiming to know anything at all about the motives of Timothy Johnson in shooting Bill Gwatney last week. I know no more than the media have revealed, and that’s precious little. I know that a classmate of his at Arkansas State University (Beebe) has spoken to the media, noting that Johnson routinely surfed the internet for news of the deaths of Democrats, at which he would laugh (www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog/2008/08/post_21.aspx#comments).

I know that the police have stated that a sticky note with Gwatney’s name on it found in the house of the alleged shooter has a cell phone number that is not Gwatney’s number. The police have issued a subpoena to find the identity of the phone owner—a process that may take two to three weeks. They have also sent his computer to a laboratory for analysis—another process that may take several weeks (www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog/2008/08/gwatney_investigation.aspx#comments).

Like everyone else, I’m awaiting further information. As I do, I keep pondering the theme of inexplicable social violence within my own culture—violence that implicates me—and how long it often takes to get at the truth. The stones all too often sink into the pond, the ripples subside, and that’s it.

That’s how it has long been among us.

That’s how it was in Mississippi when Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman were murdered in 1964 near Philadelphia. The stone sank. Silence.

The three young men were murdered on 21 June 1964. Edgar Ray Killen—Reverend Edgar Ray Killen—was not convicted of the murder until 21 June 2005. Justice—to the extent that the verdict may be called justice—came forty-one years after the murders.

And here’s the thing, the thing that slays me, the thing that puts the lie to all those disavowals of complicity with the Phelps gang made by churchgoing Republicans: everyone knew. You understand that when I say “everyone,” I mean the community at large, many movers and shakers, law enforcement officials, judges. Preachers and church members.

The identity of the perpetrators, what they had done and how they had done it, was known. Far more widely than anyone dared say.

That’s how it is, when such things happen in the South. It’s how it has always been. We “good” whites who came to this narrative only in the 1950s and 1960s are latecomers to a history that has been going on right in our midst for generations, which was completely apparent to our black neighbors, and of which we chose to remain ignorant. Lynchings, rapes, acts of ritual abuse and expulsion of any “uppity” black human being on whose skin we wanted to carve the message that history better not change—not for the better, not for their betterment: this is an old, tired, ugly story known far longer to African Americans than to Americans privileged due to the color of our skin.

Several years ago, when I read Diane McWhorter’s magnificent history of the Birmingham civil rights struggles, Carry Me Home (NY: Simon and Schuster, 2003), I had the itchy, uncomfortable feeling of watching some nightmare I myself had endured, scrolling through a text written by someone else. The centerpiece of, the driving force behind, McWhorter’s narrative is her quest to find out the extent to which her own father was involved in the violence inflicted by Birmingham’s white community on its black community in those years.

McWhorter’s father was from Birmingham’s social elite. He was from the sector of Birmingham society that watched the violence unfold with horrified disclaimers of responsibility—the folks who sat at the country club talking in disdainful whispers over their Manhattans about the poor whites who could always be counted on to shame all of us Southerners by bombing churches and setting dogs on black children.

I know these people, because I have lived among them. I know the trope of good (affluent) Southern white vs. bad (trashy) Southern white. It began to be carved into my psyche before I even began to walk.

I have learned that the trope is as false as any officially approved narrative always is. It disguises the true nature of things. It conceals the complicity of those telling the narrative in the bloody events they recount. To be precise, it pretends that the racial violence white people have historically practiced against people of color in the American South (and, let’s be honest—all over the nation: the Duluth lynchings were in 1920; slave artifacts are still being excavated in New York; those beautiful houses in old Massachusetts towns display wealth gained through the slave trade) has nothing at all to do with those dominating Southern society. It was solely produced by whites at the bottom of the social scale.

This is a lie. As I think I have noted in a previous posting on this blog, one of the skin-searing experiences of my own coming of age in the Civil Rights period happened when I accompanied my father on a campaign in which he was running for a judge’s seat in south Arkansas. At a barbershop where we stopped one afternoon, he went behind a curtain separating the shop itself from some nether parts of the establishment.

When he came out and we got into the car, I asked him what he had done back there. He told me that he had made promises to the barber, who was a Klansman, that, if elected with Klan support, he’d make judicial decisions favoring Klan interests. He was not elected. And I was jubilant that he failed.

McWhorter’s search? It led her to conclude, without absolute proof, that her father and those sipping Manhattans with him at the country club were almost certainly far more involved—and directly so—in the violence they deplored than any official account of the Birmingham violence ever revealed.

We are all involved. Every one of us. We are all implicated. We are all ensnared in the web of violence.

To be specific: we are all of us, every one of us, part and parcel of the homophobic violence on which the Fred Phelpses of our nation feed. Churches and church members that never lifted their voices in the past to protest, when gay human beings were the sole target of such violence, now tut-tut, now that the targets include soldiers and political or religious dignitaries.

Churches all across the land are complicit in the production of the social violence that Westboro Baptist church exploits. Without the churches of Main Street USA and all that they represent to gay human beings, there would be no Fred Phelpses. Churches are involved in the production of the violence on which the Phelpses feed. By their silence. By their rhetoric, their teachings, their practices of exclusion, their distortion of biblical texts. By their unwillingness to speak out explicitly against the roots of the violence—roots that run right to the church doors and up to the altars and pulpits.

Until the churches of this country repudiate all homophobic readings of scripture, all unjust practices of demonization, subordination, and exclusion in their own structures and the societies in which they live, all the manifold ways in which people of faith continue to permit gay teens to be assaulted in our schools, no church can justifiably deplore Westboro Baptist church and what it stands for.

We are all involved. We are all care of one another (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/05/we-are-all-care-of-one-another.html). And until we recognize that and live that way, we have no right to point the finger at those who gobble up the garbage we produce in our disordered lives and dishonest relationships.