"They Were Trying to Erase Me from Existence": The Unfinished Task of Humane Societies

This video is exceedingly painful to watch.  I can't watch it, of course, without thinking of the concerns Steve and I have long had, and have increasingly as we age, about what might happen to us in the final stages of our lives, even with the legal protections we've tried to set into place.  We have filed explicit end-of-life documentation, drawn up wills, created a string of legal documents that try in every way possible to recognize each others' spousal rights and to protect each other.

But we live in a state in which none of these protections has real legal status, because 1) this is a state that does not permit same-sex marriage or unions, and 2) it's also a state without a scrap of law protecting people from discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation in areas like employment, housing, or hospital visitation rights.  It's a state, as well, dominated by a "Christian" mentality hostile to any such protections.  And neither of us has ever felt entire ease about the way in which our families treat us as a gay couple--in particular, about the overt hostility some of Steve's über-Catholic siblings display towards us, quoting church teaching as they do so.

And so we live with anxiety.  That anxiety deepens when I listen to a Christian pastor in the heavily Christian state of North Carolina in which the historic roots of many people in my own state lie, as he preaches to his congregation and calls for lesbians and "queers" to be rounded up, put into pens, and permitted to die.  Or as he applauds a period of history in which, bless God, queers could be hanged with impunity from white oak trees--charged words in the Southern context, since less than a century ago, black men were still being rounded up and hanged from white oak trees in horrific acts of racial violence, to teach any black person uppity enough to imagine his or her life matters just what he or she might expect as a result of uppityness.

When I listen to Reverend Worley talking in the 1978 clip about hanging gays from white oak trees, bless God,  I flash back to the Christmas season 1975, when my grandfather was in the hospital for treatment for the kidney problems that would end his life in February the following year.  As families sat in the waiting room of the hospital expecting news of their loved ones' condition, a woman in the waiting room went onto a rant about how things have changed, fallen apart, as people no longer read the bible and do what it says.

Blacks just totally out of control these days, the tired old rant went.  And the sissies, the queers, my God a'mighty!  Used to, she moaned, we could take them out into the woods and beat them to a bloody pulp when they wore pink shirts to school.

Now we have to be careful.  Never know when the federal government's going to cram some new laws down our throats like the ones that don't let us do that to the blacks any longer.  Except that she didn't use the word "blacks."

And from flashback to flashback: that scene immediately brought to mind the summer of 1969, same small town in south Arkansas, when I spent the summer working for a plumbing contractor in our town, to earn spending money for college--a job my father had arranged for me.  (A long story: I had already earned a full-tuition scholarship to college, but my father insisted I needed toughening up--"He needs to be made a man"--by being forced to do manual labor during the summer after my first year at college, in which I had earned a 4.0 GPA while carrying my full-tuition dean's scholarship.  My brother a year younger, headed off to his first year of college that same year with a bare C average in high school, was given a car, something never offered to me, and not expected to work.  Because he already was a man, according to my father's lights.)

And as I was working for the plumbing contractor that summer of 1969, one of the jobs we were called to do was to snake out the toilets in the county jail.  They had gotten clogged.  They were clogged by two African-American boys who, to my eyes, looked no more than 14, but were in the county jail.

As we arrived with our equipment at the jail, the jailer hooked his thumb at the two young men and said, "Look at them.  Animals.  Used to, we could beat them up when we wanted to.  Now, we have to take them into a dark corner and turn the radio up loud when we beat them."

That's the world in which I grew up.  It's the world I hear still alive and well in parts of North Carolina (and Mississippi, and Arkansas, and Wyoming, and New York, and Indiana, and on and on) when I hear Pastor Worley preaching.  And his Christian congregation hooting and hollering with Christian delight as he talks about hanging gays or penning queers up in concentration camps.

Bless God.

And so I wholeheartedly agree with Andrew Sullivan when he writes vis-a-vis the story of Tom Bridegroom and Shane Bitney Crone told in the video clip at the head of the posting, 

But as this video shows, we are not close to the end yet. And that churches - churches - should be in the vanguard of brutalizing these people in this way - and justifying it -  fills me with oceans of sadness. And grief again.

We have a lot of work to do in this country to make ourselves merely human.  Let alone Christian, in the case of those of us who claim to be followers of Jesus.  We have a lot of work to do when the kind of obscenity represented by Pastor Worley's words and the bigoted vote of his fellow citizens of North Carolina recently sum up what it means to be Christian today.