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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If not, what do you intend to do?