A Reader Responds: Real Center Is on the Margins

Colleen Kochivar-Baker of Enlightened Catholicism recently left an outstanding response to my Friday posting “Reforming the Catholic Church from Margins to Center: A Response to Michael Sean Winters.” I want to lift Colleen’s comments from the discussion thread to a posting, so that readers can take full advantage of her insights.

Colleen says,

I guess I have a different take on this 'center' thing. It seems to me that the center is where one chooses to see the center. The real 'center', at least in terms of numbers of people, is on the margins. This is why it is so important for those of us who inhabit the margins to get beyond ourselves and recognize our commonality.

The sixties were a powerful statement of solidarity on many issues precisely because those on the margins believed passionately that they were the true center and the true voice of common human interests.

I'm not much interested in any longer in arguing with the right. One can't argue effectively from two distinctly different world views and spiritual formations. I am only interested in claiming the center for the progressive voice of love, compassion, and unity in diversity.

The Michael Sean Winters of the world only hold the center voice because we of the left have let them as we've passively bowed to the notions of power and authority employed by the right.

Real power exists in the sensus fidelium, that huge group of religious and laity who have effectively been cast to the margins. I think the real focus is not to form a new center of power but to look outward from our place on the margin, seeing that as the center. From that view the issue is to reach even further outward in order to create an even bigger circle. This is where the hope for the future of humanity and this planet resides.

The real 'center', at least in terms of numbers of people, is on the margins: I agree. That was the point, in fact, of my observation that centrists will have a hard sell defining authentic Catholic identity as fidelity to Humane Vitae, when the vast majority of the faithful in Western nations long ago rejected this encyclical.

The rejection of Humanae Vitae is, in my view, what I called a theological datum in the posting, a sociological phenomenon with significant theological implications that theologians (and the church’s magisterium) ignore at their peril. The widesepread rejection of Humanae Vitae’s teaching about artificial contraception—and, increasingly about magisterial sexual teachings in general, insofar as they are grounded in a biologistic understanding of natural law—is a theological reality. It is dishonest and self-defeating for Catholics of the right and center to rule this reality out of theological conversations.

The rejection of Humanae Vitae and of the biologistic foundations of magisterial sexual ethics is not fueled, as reactionary Catholics and many of their centrist allies like to propose, by self-indulgence or the collapse of Catholic ethics to culture. It’s fueled, instead, by an alternative reading of scripture and tradition among the faithful, which rejects the notion that the best way to measure and talk about sexual morality is by looking at the purported biological intent of human sexuality.

Lay Catholics have made a turn in their thinking about sexual morality based on their own lived experience of their faith, which draws on aspects of scripture and tradition that illuminate that experience in ways the magisterial teaching fails to illuminate it. For an increasing number of the Catholic laity in the developed areas of the world, the most significant question to ask about the sexual life is not whether isolated sexual acts fulfill the “natural” objective of sexuality.

The most significant question many Catholics want to ask about the sexual life today is about the quality of the relationship that sexual expression serves. Is this relationship, with its expression of physical intimacy, growing in generosity, in openness to others, in the ability to give more to others? Does it build, enhance, develop the persons involved in the relationship?

Increasingly, the lived experience of the faith of many Catholics convinces them that the reductionistic natural-law understanding of human sexuality misses the point: it looks at human relationships, and the sexual component of some human relationships, as if human beings are nothing more than mindless animals involved in the biological process of reproduction. It fails to touch on the relational aspect of human sexuality that, in the experience of most lay Catholics, is far more important, as we assess the morality of sexuality, than the biological reproductive aspect. And it overlooks the scriptural imperative to live our vocational lives in the world according to an ethic of stewardship that seeks to preserve and use wisely the gifts of the natural world placed in our hands.

I agree wholeheartedly with Colleen that the real “center” is on the margins—and that the most effective way in which the many of us who stand closer to the margins than the center will have our voices heard is through solidarity. The primary task of those who experience marginalization and are struggling to overcome that marginalization for themselves and for others is to build bridges of solidarity that span boundary lines separating marginalized groups.

The particularity of the marginalized differs from group to group. But the experience of marginalization is the same, and it is there that all marginalized groups can, if they will, find solidarity. Along these lines—and as an illustration of how marginalized groups can find solidarity even when the center seeks to play them against each other—I found it heartening to read in the Denver Post yesterday that a Latino social action group in Denver has just refused to meet at a Catholic facility in Denver, after the Denver archdiocese told them they had to shun its gay and lesbian supporters as a prerequisite for meeting on Catholic grounds.

The Latino group is, interestingly enough, El Centro Humanitario. It has long collaborated with the Denver archdiocese in shared ministries to working families. But when the archdiocese discovered that a luncheon El Centro was to sponsor last Friday at the diocese’s Hispanic ministry building was sponsored by the Gay and Lesbian Fund among other donors, the archdiocese gave El Centro an ultimatum: repudiate the gay sponsorship and exclude the gays or move.

El Centro chose to move. Its director Minsun Ji stated, “We're not going to participate in singling out and discriminating against our gay and lesbian allies. It's a pretty simple matter of principle.”

And that’s, in my view, a brilliant statement of the challenge and the opportunity that lies before us, before those of us on the margins who have the potential to shift the center, if we make common cause around our shared experience of marginalization. (And as I say that, I wonder how many banquets the Denver archdiocese has shut down because they contained donations from, say, militarists, racists, or powerful economic groups that violate Catholic moral teaching by exploiting the poor.)

The one area where I would want to talk further with Colleen, I think, is about our response to the right. I agree wholeheartedly that ongoing argument with those on the right is futile, when the starting principles from which neoconservatives and progressive work are seriously at odds with each other.

But I would definitely urge continued ongoing scrutiny of the right—and continued pushing back against the right—by progressives. I agree with Chip Berlet’s analysis of these issues in his review of Max Blumenthal’s book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party (Nation Books, 2009) at Religion Dispatches today.

Berlet notes that discourse about the relationship between the center, the right, and the left has been heavily influenced by Michael Paul Rogin’s 1967 work The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter. Rogin applied a psychoanalytic paradigm to the discussion, arguing that the right and left are both dominated by an unbalanced extremism unpalatable to the “psychologically fit” center.

But as Berlet notes, both careful analysis of how the left and the right function in political debates and more rigorous scholarly analysis of this concept challenge the notion that either the left or the right exhibits signs of unbalanced extremism. Rather, the political movements that coalesce around these poles coalesce around strategic responses to particular issues of their time frame.

And it’s crucial to analyze and understand those strategic responses, even when we do not share the political assumptions of those formulating the responses at the political pole opposite to the one that attracts us. It is, Chip Berlet proposes, dangerous to dismiss the politics and positions of the religious right as manifestations of a psychologically aberrant extremism.

It’s imperative, instead, that any of us who recognize some of the political positions and strategies of the right as dangerous for our political future understand and engage those positions and strategies. Berlet concludes,

The death of the Christian Right has been greatly exaggerated. By the end of Republican Gomorrah, it is clear the leadership of the Christian Right is composed of many highly motivated and skillful people. Disagree with them as you wish, denounce them if you must, but dismiss them at your own risk.

I think he’s correct. And because I think that those who claim the center—though they may well not represent anywhere near the viewpoints of many of those shoved to the margins—also track to the right, and will continue to do so as long as the right has powerful ability to dismantle progressive programs and thwart the solidarity of those on the margins, I think our eye has to remain on the center, as well.

Commentary in Light of Holocaust Shooting: Chip Berlet on Our Responsibility to Address Roots of Violence, Gabriel Voiles on Hal Turner Case

In the wake of today's shooting at the Holocaust Museum, Talk2Action has just put up some articles that provide significant information regarding themes on which I've touched in recent postings.

Chip Berlet notes, as I've done in my last two postings, that when something like the shooting today occurs, it's not enough to focus exclusively on the right-wing hate groups fostering this violence.

We have to look at ourselves, too, and our moral obligation to make this kind of violence less and less possible by challenging the ideological roots from which it grows:

We need to stand up as moral people and speak out against the spread of bigoted conspiracy theories. That's not a police problem, that's our problem as people responsible for defending a free society.

Berlet notes (as I've done in my postings on these themes) the intent of this violence to subvert democratic process, its tendency to target scapegoat Others (so that racism, anti-semitism, homophobia, misogyny, etc., coalesce in these groups fomenting violence), and its frequent success at stopping progressive change in its tracks:

Demagogues and conspiracy theorists use the same four "tools of fear." These are as 1) dualism; 2) scapegoating; 3) demonization; and 4) apocalyptic aggression. The tools of fear are a connected constellation of frames, narratives, and processes used by demagogues to mobilize resentment and undermine the democratic process.

The basic dynamics remain the same no matter the ideological leanings of the demonizers or the identity of their targets. Meanwhile, our ability to resolve disputes through civic debate and compromise is hobbled. It is the combination of demagogic demonization and widespread scapegoating that is so dangerous. In such circumstances, angry allegations can quickly turn into apocalyptic aggression and violence targeting scapegoated groups like Jews or immigrants.

And in the same edition of Talk2Action, note Frederick Clarkson's follow-up on Scott Roeder's assassination of Dr. George Tiller, which links to an article by Gabriel Voiles at the FAIR blog discussing the recent arrest of white supremacist Hal Turner in Connecticut.

As I noted this weekend, Turner was arrested after issuing threats against the same two openly gay Connecticut legislators targeted by Connecticut Bishop William J. Lori and Colorado Archbishop Charles J. Chaput earlier this year. Voiles reports that Turner has been closely associated with FOX news pundit Sean Hannity, though Hannity is trying to deny that connection.

And he points out that, on the same blog on which he issued threats of violence against Connecticut legislators Michael Lawlor and Andrew McDonald, Turner also states that Scott Roeder's murder of Dr. George Tiller was a "righteous act."

And so the circle of violence connecting one act of violence to another and one fomentor of violence to another circles back around to some of the bishops of the Catholic church in the U.S., and for that reason, I reissue the appeal with which I concluded my posting this weekend discussing Hal Turner's case:

Strange bedfellows, Bishop Lori and Archbishop Chaput—shameful bedfellows for Catholic bishops to climb into bed with. I continue to call on the U.S. Catholic bishops to challenge the noxious use of homophobia by some bishops to achieve political ends, and to exercise fraternal correction by calling to accountability their brother bishops who continue stooping to such low and dangerous tactics.

Otherwise, somebody’s going to get hurt—really hurt—and those who fomented the violence will have blood on their hands, as will those who stood by in silence and said or did nothing as the ugly words poured forth.

Frederick Clarkson and Chip Berlet: Is the Religious Right Really Dying?

Yesterday, as I summarized Frank Rich’s analysis of the timidity that seems to govern the Democrats’ approach to gay rights issues at present, I noted that Rich finds the stalling of the Obama administration on gay rights hard to understand at a time in which “the power of the religious right to undermine the new administration seems especially limited.”

What Rich says, to be exact, is the following:

It would be easy to blame the Beltway logjam in gay civil rights progress on the cultural warriors of the religious right and its political host, the Republican Party. But it would be inaccurate. The right has lost much of its clout in the capital and, as President Obama’s thoughtful performance at Notre Dame dramatized last weekend, its shrill anti-abortion-rights extremism now plays badly even in supposedly friendly confines.

It is important to note Frederick Clarkson’s countervailing view about the waning power of the religious right. Several days ago, in a posting at Talk to Action, Clarkson offered some compelling reasons to doubt the imminent demise of the religious right. Clarkson notes that, though some younger evangelicals appear to be be softening the hard-right religious stance on gay issues, this demographic group remains, on the whole, stridently anti-abortion.

In Clarkson’s view, it would be premature for progressives to conclude that the religious right’s power to skew the political and cultural direction of the country has vanished. Clarkson and Chip Berlet note that some progressives’ strategy of outreach to moderate evangelicals runs the risk of importing into the progressive agenda positions on reproductive rights that may move that agenda to the right. In Clarkson and Berlet’s view, a thoroughgoing commitment to human rights demands that progressives not mute their appeal for rights in one area while celebrating forward movement in other areas.

In my view, Clarkson and Berlet deserve serious consideration—though I am undermining the argument I made yesterday in noting this. I would like to second Frank Rich’s contention that the power of the religious right is waning. But I suspect that Clarkson and Berlet may be quite correct in their caution about the continued potential of the religious right to exert strong influence in the political sphere.

That potential resides, I think, in the ability of the religious right to impede rather than to determine. Though the numbers of its adherents may be waning, and though demographic trends do not bode well for its future, the religious right has created a well-oiled propaganda machine, and that machine still has tremendous power to crank out disinformation on a daily basis. It seems naïve to imagine that the political and religious right will avail itself of the resources of that disinformation machine whenever possible, as it seeks to probe weak spots in the new administration and craft pain for the new president. And it seems equally naïve to imagine that a significant number of citizens will remain unmoved by that disinformation, as it pours forth.

I sometimes suspect that those who are confident that the religious right is dying have never lived in places in the United States in which this movement is strongly represented, and therefore do not appreciate its tenacious hold on the lives of many Americans. From the standpoint of New Haven or San Francisco, the religious right may well look like a behemoth heading for extinction. From the vantage point of Amarillo or Topeka, Spartanburg or Little Rock, however, it looks like a vital critter still very much alive and kicking.

And that’s to say that it does continue to have the power to make the lives of many gay and lesbian Americans intently miserable, on an ongoing basis, in some places in our land. It continues to do so through disinformation campaigns designed to stir hatred against them among their fellow citizens which have great cultural power in some areas of the coutnry. As I noted yesterday, many of us who happen to be gay and lesbian also happen to live in places in which there are almost no legal protections against discrimination—places dominated by the religious right.

I noted, as well, that in such dark places in the land in the 1960s, it would have been impossible for hatred to be unchecked and a new course to be set, had the federal government not intervened decisively through the Civil Rights act of 1964. While there may have been widespread revulsion against racism in much of the country in the early 1960s, in the heartland of the religious right—in the American Southeast—the will to discriminate remained exceptionally strong, and plebiscites to challenge that will repeatedly confirmed the majority’s intent to deny rights to a minority.

The critical factor that tipped the scales, as many Americans repudiated racial discrimination while many others clung bitterly to their “right” to discriminate, was the decision of the president to intervene and to exert strong leadership. Certainly that decision did not end racism forever. What it did accomplish was very significant, however. It began a process of confining the “right” to discriminate, of exposing that “right” as indefensible prejudice, and of marginalizing those intent on clinging to this “right” so that the culture as a whole could move beyond the vise in which an angry, defensive minority wished to place it, while claiming religious sanction for its noxious agenda.

At tipping point moments, when strong indicators suggest that a growing number of citizens are changing their minds about deep-seated cultural practices of discrimination, whether on grounds of race, gender, or sexual orientation, and when powerful religious movements do all they can to resist such cultural shifts, decisive leaders with morally cogent platforms can make a world of difference.

Or they can choose not to do so, and allow some scapegoat groups within their culture to remain the object of derision and prejudice. But in making such a choice, they also ask an entire culture to pay a high price for their inaction, when circumstances have placed in their hands the ability to effect positive change. Even when savage, overt discrimination is confined to select geographic areas within a nation, it tears at the soul of the entire nation.

Ideas Have Consequences: Progressive Pragmatists, Idealists and the Future of Obama Administration

In my wrap-up posting about Mr. Obama’s commencement address at Notre Dame, I concluded,

If there is going to be a resurgence of progressivism under this administration, that resurgence is going to have to come from the public itself, insofar as citizens become fed up with the cultural, political, and religious stalemates the right has produced for us for too many years now, while liberals appease the right and refuse to stand up, or to imagine a truly democratic society.

Which is to say that the moral backbone of progressive change in the Obama era is going to have to come, I believe, from progressive groups themselves, and not from the president and his advisors. I believe the president himself has that backbone, though I also believe he is, in many respects, a classic liberal who is willing to ignore strong moral considerations as he engages in pragmatic balancing acts. And it seems increasingly evident to me that he has surrounded himself with advisors who, to an even greater extent, are tone-deaf to the moral underpinnings of the agenda of change they talk about, and willing at every turn to ignore those underpinnings as they tinker, try to anticipate the winds of change, and seek to remain on top through it all.

And in a subsequent posting on the same theme, I noted that the power of the political and religious right to play unholy culture-war games remains strong. I pointed to the continuing ability of economic elites who benefit from the culture wars to disseminate lies through the mainstream media. And I noted the concern of those elites “to combat the emergence of a new coalition of progressive people of faith at this point in our nation's history.”

As a follow-up to these observations, I’d like to note some significant recent discussion about the diverging strategies of progressive pragmatists and progressive idealists (or, as Frederick Clarkson’s critique of centrist orthodoxy notes, using Mark Silk’s terminology, priests and prophets) in the Obama era. The pragmatist-idealist distinction is Chip Berlet’s, in an important recent article entitled “Common Ground: Winning the Battle, Losing the Culture War.” Frederick Clarkson highlights this essay in his latest posting at Talk to Action.

Berlet centers his analysis on the concept of “frames.” He argues that the fundamental struggle going on among progressives who support the new president, but who divide along pragmatist-idealist lines, is the question of how to frame the debate for the progressive agenda.

Progressive pragmatists are persuaded that progressive movements have no choice except to reach out to evangelical voters of the center and moderate right at this point in history. In the view of pragmatists, poll numbers demonstrate that Obama won the elections—and will continue to enjoy success as a leader—by forming a coalition that joins progressives and evangelical voters. The decision to give a high profile to Pastor Rick Warren at the inauguration reflected the intent of the new administration to follow a pragmatist course with outreach to the evangelical community.

Berlet agrees that outreach to evangelical voters is important, if progressives expect to use the mandate for change represented by the presidential election to move their agenda forward. However, in his view the pragmatist stance concedes too much to the religious right: it allows the right (and its centrist-to-moderately right evangelical supporters) to frame the discussion.

In Berlet’s view, before we talk about building a progressive coalition that holds together evangelicals and progressive groups, “we need clearer criteria to determine who we seek to work with”:

If one wants to work in coalition with Christian evangelicals, perhaps it would be better to start by talking with Progressive Idealists, the religious left, and a variety women’s rights and gay rights activist groups to line up our support. Then together we can analyze the source of the ideological opposition (in this case the Christian Right) and develop a counter-frame. Finally, we can reach out to moderate and mildly conservative evangelicals using our counter-frame in a way that emphasizes common interests.

A counter-frame: as Berlet notes, social thinkers including Erving Goffman, Charlotte Ryan, and George Lakoff have argued persuasively that, when we allow our opponents to frame a discussion, we lose. We lose more than we gain when we permit the opposition to provide the terms that frame how we see our challenges and what we decide to do about those challenges. In Posner’s view, “[t]hat’s what the Christian Right has foisted on Democratic centrists—a rigged frame.”

Posner notes several debilitating consequences of the progressive pragmatist move to the center. One is that many liberal Democrats have allowed themselves to be convinced that “there is something inherently unseemly about advocating for reproductive or LGBT rights,” because continued advocacy for these causes in the face of fierce opposition from the Christian right prolongs the culture wars.

Another consequence of permitting the Christian right to provide the frame within which progressives approach issues like reproductive and gay rights is that we are led to see these issues as “problems” to be solved, rather than as challenges in which human rights are at stake. The alliance with evangelicals results in a weakening of the rhetoric of rights—human rights—in the Democratic party, such that progressives begin avoiding the very phrase that provides moral underpinning to their progressive causes.

As in a pre-election Huffington Post article on this theme, Berlet notes that people who expect to be taken seriously as moral agents cannot reduce human rights to political commodities. When we submit human rights issues to pragmatic considerations that diminish the force of our commitment to rights, we yield valuable moral ground—moral ground necessary to any viable program of progressive change:

. . . [I]it is clear that strong Democratic Party positions that stress community values as intertwined with social justice trump Christian Right campaigns against abortion and gay rights, even within the evangelical community. There is no need for Democrats to compromise on issues that reflect basic human rights. And to do so is morally wrong, even if it is pragmatically expedient.

And: “. . . [S]ince Reagan, the numbers do not suggest that compromise with the Christian Right even makes pragmatic sense—much less moral sense.”

And so, where to go with this analysis? Not to the White House, it appears: as I have repeatedly argued on this blog, even if Mr. Obama is attuned to the moral dimensions of these human rights struggles (and I continue to believe he is), the president is clearly persuaded by his pragmatist advisors that taking the moral stand in the struggles will hurt him politically. And, as I’ve noted, nothing compels someone who has made promises to combat injustice done to others to deliver on those promises. Other than that person’s conscience that is . . . .

No, as the opening section of this posting notes, I have come to the conclusion that the moral backbone of progressive change in the Obama era is going to have to come from progressive groups themselves, and not from the president and his advisors. Chip Berlet ends up at the same point:

This is more than just a squabble over who among the religious gets to claim the name progressive, it’s a struggle over whether or not the Obama administration will follow the path blazed by community organizers seeking social, economic, and gender justice. This will not happen unless there is sufficient pressure on them to do so. Social movements pull political movements toward them, not the other way around.

As Jacob Weisberg recently noted at Slate, Mr. Obama “sees the middle ground as high ground.” But this is a pre-moral conviction, when the moral insight one attains through listening and dialogue does not translate into solid moral commitment—commitment to do something in the face of injustice, when one can do something:

This is a wonderful instinct that is bettering America's image and making domestic politics more civil. But listening is not a moral stance, and elevating it to one only highlights the question of what Obama really stands for. The consensus-seeker repudiates torture but doesn't want to investigate it; he endorses gay equality but not in marriage or the military; he thinks government's role is to do whatever works. I continue to suspect him of harboring deeper convictions.

We are at a tipping-point moment in the framing of issues like the human rights of gay human beings as moral issues. For a number of decades now, neoconservatives and their religious apologists have succeeded in capturing the term “moral,” particularly when it comes to issues of gender, sexual orientation, and reproductive rights.

Now, the right’s exclusive ownership of the term “moral” is being hotly contested not only by progressives, but by the center itself. In the case of human rights for gay persons, two cultural developments in the waning part of the 20th century and the opening of the 21st century have radically shifted our culture’s perception of where the moral frame should be placed.

The first of these is the growing awareness of the public at large of the humanity of—and thus, the indefensible brutality of discrimination against—gay and lesbian persons. Too many of us have made our lives and stories public now, for the right to continue its malevolent depiction of us as sub-human and perverse—to continue that depiction successfully, that is. We are brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, co-workers, those sitting in the pew next to everyone else: we have a face, and that face does not correspond to the demonic one the right wishes the public to see, when it smears homosexuals.

The second important development shifting the center’s perception of the moral frame in discussions of gay people and gay human rights at this point in history is the increasingly evident moral bankruptcy of the political and religious right. People who have exposed themselves as immoral agents have a hard time convincing others, when they claim to be spokespersons for morality.

As Stuart Whatley notes in a HuffPo discussion today, conservatives' current strategy of making same-sex marriage the centerpiece of their challenge to Obama is not without significant risk—and that risk lies precisely in what the public at large, the center, may well come to think of the morality of this political strategy:

If conservatives wish to elevate their fight against same-sex marriage to primus inter pares without a smarting backlash, they will have to somehow justify this exclusive denial of rights as something other than hidebound bigotry. Indeed, a mis-tackle of this issue could very well transform the soi disant “moral majority” into an immoral minority, considering that an increased percentage of people will consider such a position to be driven more by social sadism than personal righteousness.

Ideas have consequences, as neoconservative thinkers have never tired of reminding us, echoing Richard M. Weaver. Faced with the waning power of the religious and political right to define the moral center, progressives may well decide to continue yielding moral ground to the right by “reaching out” and broadening the progressive center—even if this means muting progressive rhetoric about and commitment to human rights.

If progressive pragmatists choose to continue down that road now, under the Obama administration, however, there will be some pragmatic consequences to their decision. While it may be true that nothing can compel me to behave morally even when I see clearly the moral thing to do in a situation, persistent morally obtuse behavior on the part of leaders who claim to be all about progressive change siphons off my energy for progressive change, when pragmatist politicians finally declare the time is now right to move ahead.

Though my moral commitment to change in a number of important areas of contemporary culture—including the areas of gender and race—will not wane even when I detect moral betrayals and moral waffling in leaders in those areas, my energy for solidarity and for commitment does shift. Moral betrayal and moral waffling among leaders committed to change grounded in moral values impede my willingness (and, I suspect, that of others) to commit myself and act.

Ideas have consequences. Not very long ago, a friend of mine looked for the second time in a few years at an opening with the Sojourners organization founded by Jim Wallis. Wallis is at the center of the movement to join the energies of progressives and evangelicals. Wallis has also been notably resistant to gay rights, for much of his career.

My friend happens to be gay and in a long-term relationship. Before he looked at this job seriously, I advised him that, were I in his shoes, I would find out what Sojourners says and does about gay people and gay rights. Does Sojourners, for instance, have a policy of providing partner benefits for a gay spouse or gay partner?

On both occasions when a position at Sojourners opened, my friend took my advice. He asked. He was told both times that there are no partner benefits. The first time my friend approached Sojourners was before Obama’s election. The second time was after the election.

It appears that nothing has changed at Sojourners following Mr. Obama’s election—not, that is, for gay people. And, as a result, I find my energy for an organization in whose goals I wholeheartedly believe, and to which I have offered support in the past, significantly diminished.

Ideas have consequences. Lack of commitment to human rights for everyone on the part of groups claiming to stand for progressive moral change siphons off energy for the very changes those groups advocate. My second story has to do with the Notre Dame events last week.

Shortly before the president came to Notre Dame, I received an email request from Catholics United for the Common Good, asking if I would give financial support for an ad to appear at the time of the Notre Dame speech, which would underscore the widespread support the president has among Catholics.

Normally, I would have clicked through the menu of choices and made a donation—strait as our financial circumstances are now. After all, I am passionately committed to broadening the Catholic witness about issues of justice and peace. But I am committed to doing so precisely because I believe that groups committed to human rights deserve my support. It is that very same passionate commitment that compels me to distance myself from the Catholic church today, insofar as it betrays its clear witness to human rights in its teachings and its behavior.

When I got the recent appeal from Catholics United, I ignored it. I did so after deliberation. In moral decisions, one must think things through and weigh choices carefully. I do not break solidarity lightly with groups to whose causes I’m committed. I try to build into my moral decision-making checks and balances, including checks against my own rash judgment or propensity to act out of pique when I’m angry, hurt, off-kilter.

After careful reflection, I decided to ignore this appeal from an organization whose goals I support, for a cause very important to me. After all, only last Friday—a day before the Catholics United ad reached me—I noted in a posting on this blog that Frances Kissling recently called Catholics United to get their statement on the Harry Knox story, and was told they would get back to her.

I noted then that the Catholics United website contained no statement I could find about the attack of the Catholic right on Harry Knox. I’ve just visited it again. If any such statement is there—or has been made—I have not found it.

Ideas have consequences. Groups, including political coalitions, that claim to be acting on moral principle, but which have conspicuous blind spots about some key moral principles (e.g., the claim to human rights of gay persons), undermine my energy for collaborative action. In a world full of needs and causes, I decide to commit myself selectively. I have to do so. I have only so much energy and so much passion.

The energy and passion feeding the election of Barack Obama to the presidency have been extraordinary. The energy level behind the new president remains high.

I predict, however, that it will gradually diminish and slowly wane—and not only among gay citizens—if the president continues to listen to his progressive pragmatist advisors to the exclusion of his progressive idealist supporters. In coming months, we may see an increasing selectivity among the president’s supporters about offering support to his platform—particularly as he continues to back-step on his promises to address injustice to gay and lesbian Americans.