Do All the Good You Can: Strategies to Combat Institutionalized Homophobia in Churches

Julie, I asked your permission to respond to your testimony about this year’s United Methodist General Conference because your testimony powerfully stirred me. I appreciate your providing the link to it at www.7villages.com/post.asp?p=43967&i=1536, and also your giving me permission to respond to the testimony in a posting. I wanted to ask your permission in case this posting would cause you any difficulty in your connection to the church.

Before I focus on some specific statements in your testimony, I want to begin by thanking you from the depths of my heart for making solidarity with those of us who are LGBT and who believe the churches can and should include us as children of God. As a straight single parent, you don’t have to reach out in this way.

The fact that you are doing so, and that you are paying a price for doing so (as your testimony about General Conference indicates), moves me—to tears, actually. I am sorry for the pain of anyone put through some of the humiliating experiences those of us who are gay and who ask for fair and humane treatment receive from the churches on a routine basis. And I am impressed and heartened that others care enough to share some of the blows alongside us.

Several comments you make in your testimony leap out at me, because they closely parallel experiences I have had as a gay believer. I just finished reading Scott Pomfret’s book Since My Last Confession. I mentioned this book in a posting a day or so ago. In reading it, I find other parallels in his experience and mine. I am beginning to see that there are patterns in experiences that I have thought of previously as uniquely humiliating and hurtful.

Seeing the patterns helps me recognize that they are part of a systemic response of a homophobic church to LGBT believers and those who stand in solidarity with us. When an institution that preaches love and justice decides to hate and to practice injustice, it has no choice except to seek to diminish and even destroy those who witness to the disparity between what is proclaimed and what is lived. Seeing that this is systemic, that the patterns are part of a response that goes beyond personal dynamics, helps me discern how to combat the institutionalized homophobia at the institutional level at which it has to be fought, if we're to eradicate it.

Your testimony states, “The people: my closed minded delegates who turned away rather than look me in the eye; the ones who refused to shake hands; the ones who would not speak.”

Yes, I know exactly what you speak of here—the deliberate, intentional slight, the intent to reduce one’s humanity to the level of a thing, a despised object. The refusal to shake the hand offered in greeting, the refusal to look you in the eye. These are attempts to denigrate, to humiliate, to deny one’s humanity, to claim that the humanity of the one engaging in such shoddy behavior is at a higher level than that of the dirty gay or a dirty straight person in solidarity with dirty gays.

We see evidence of these same dynamics in the national presidential campaign now, and there, though the originating prejudice is different, it is equally ugly. When I saw Mr. McCain ignore Mr. Obama’s proffered hand after the debates two nights ago, and when I witnessed McCain point to Obama without looking at him and call him “that one,” I had an ah-ha! moment. I’ve been there. I know what these experiences feel like. I know why McCain is doing that to Obama, what he hopes to do to his soul and personhood by trying to demean him in that way.

I have been at gatherings of my partner Steve’s family in which some of his homophobic siblings—who are staunch traditionalist Catholics—have refused to shake my hand, when I extended it to them. I know how foolish one feels when this happens, how exposed. How belittled.

When it is done by people with whom you have just prayed, and when the prayers ask for “an increase in charity,” the experience is breathtakingly painful. How does anyone pray in one breath for an increase in charity and with the next breath deny connection to another human being? The implication is that the person being demeaned does not have the status of a full person: how else to reconcile the prayer for charity and the shunning behavior that utterly belies charity?

I’ve also had that experience of being spoken of in third person, as “that one,” and I know how the words wash like acid across one’s self-esteem. At a former United Methodist workplace, I once sat in the office of my supervisor and witnessed her assistant, who was sitting right in front of me, and in my earshot, speaking to her boss on the phone. She referred to me as “him” and to Steve as “the other one.” She apparently did not care that I heard this demeaning language. She is a lesbian and is studying for the ministry, though, like every other gay and lesbian employee of that campus, she is not out at work. Her ministerial background (which surely does not teach her to treat others this way!) and her lesbianism made her objectification of us even more hurtful.

So, sadly, I understand why those experiences from General Conference—the refusal to shake your hand, the refusal to look you in the eye, the refusal to speak to you—struck you, and why you mention them in your testimony. They are outrageous experiences in any human gathering, but in one dedicated to holy conferencing?! What can Christians be thinking, when they enter holy conferencing with murder in their hearts? Do they think that refusing to acknowledge another person’s presence as a fellow human and not a thing is anything less than a kind of spiritual murder?

Your testimony and Scott Pomfret’s book remind me that these are routine experiences of gay believers and those in solidarity with us in relation to the churches today. It helps—a tiny bit—to know that when I experience them, they are not designed as unique torments for me personally.

It also helps to know they are systemic: those engaging in these practices are doing the bidding of systemic homophobia. And certainly, gay and lesbian people within church contexts can act out institutionalized homophobia with all the fervor of any gay-bashing Christian anywhere. My experience of being depersonalized by a lesbian studying for ministry is not unique: some of the worst gay bashers in the Catholic church are priests and nuns who refuse to confront their own sexual orientations honestly, and who act out the institution’s homophobia against gay brothers and sisters (or those in solidarity with us) who mirror to them more healthy possibilities of being in the world.

One of my former bosses likes to surround herself with expendable "pet" gay folks, trick dogs who do the boss's bidding and allow the boss to preen and prentend gay-friendliness. But if those gay folks assert their humanity and refuse to perform the tricks ordered, the boss quickly becomes enraged and banishes the pets. The only gay people with which the boss will permit herself/himself to be surrounded are ones who hide their "lifestyles" and live in shame.

Your testimony also says, “The people: the Bishop who yelled at me for being ‘misquoted’ (not) in our newsletter; my own Bishop who would not speak to me in any of my three attempts to do so.”

Yes, I’ve been there, too. I know how this treatment by bishops shocks. I know how it hurts. When I received an unexplained one-year terminal contract at a Catholic college outside Charlotte, and when the school then lied to me about the contract and the abbot of the monastery who owned the college refused to speak to me about it, I turned to the bishop of Charlotte for support.

For pastoral support: my letters to the bishop made very clear that this was why I sought to meet with him. The experience of being lied to by a Catholic college and a community of monks shook me at the very core. It assaulted my faith. I needed the sense that someone who represented the church in an official pastoral way was willing to listen, to acknowledge, at the very least, that such behavior is incompatible with Christian teaching.

I requested a meeting with that bishop. I did so repeatedly. I wrote him numerous letters. In response, he sent an intermediary to me. The intermediary told me that the bishop was disturbed by the treatment I had received.

This was all I ever got. Finally, in response to my numerous letters asking for a meeting, the bishop’s young priest-secretary told me that the bishop considered my requests disrespectful—the request of a hurting member of the flock for pastoral guidance from the shepherd of the flock. When push came to shove, the bishop did nothing—absolutely nothing—to aid or comfort me.

When push came to shove, his solidarity was squarely with his brother clerics at the college that violated my rights. The bishop never saw my human face, never has seen my human face, though, if his intermediary was truthful, the bishop professed to be troubled by how I had been treated within a Catholic institution.

At the two United Methodist institutions at which I worked, I had the responsibility to interact routinely with the Methodist bishops who sat on the boards of both institutions. At meeting after meeting, one of those bishops never once looked me in the eyes. She behaved as if I were simply not in the room.

At the other institution, I recall having one single conversation with the bishop on the board of that particular college. When I found he was from Mississippi and recounted a story my cousin had just told me following a business trip to Mississippi, the bishop acted as if the inoffensive story was profoundly insulting.

He used the story as a pretext to vent his own personal disdain for me as a gay believer, a disdain about which I knew from the president of this school, who had told me of the bishop’s views about my partner and me. The bishop turned an inoffensive make-conversation dialogue into a pretext to treat me as less than human, as if I had offended his dignity, and to withdraw from conversation and human relationship with me.

Scott Pomfret’s book is full of vignettes about his similar interaction as a gay believer with the Cardinal Archbishop of Boston, Sean O’Malley. I remember when Cardinal Law resigned in the wake of revelations about how he had handled the crisis of clerical sexual abuse of minors. I remember the hope with which many American Catholics greeted the appointment of O’Malley—a hope that quickly turned to ashes as O’Malley proceeded to play ugly political games with the lives of gay and lesbian citizens of Massachusetts.

As a gay Christian living in Boston, Scott Pomfret has had to track O’Malley’s behavior towards gay people in Massachusetts. From his book, I learned more than I would ever like to have known about the petty, vindictive details of O’Malley’s behavior towards gay Catholics.

What I learned as well, however, is that my experiences with that Catholic bishop in Charlotte and those Methodist bishops, or your experience with your bishop, is not unique. It was not about me. It is about homophobia in the churches—homophobia as an institutionalized force within the churches, a kind of monster that has the churches by the neck and shakes them vehemently when it needs to show its power.

Scott Pomfret’s book suggests that bishops lie without any seeming remorse both to and about gay Christians because many bishops are swept up in the wave of institutionalized homophobia. Their complicity in that institutional force, which has such deep roots in the life of the church and the surrounding culture and a powerful financial grip on the churches, blinds them to the moral implications of what they are doing when they lie, when they betray fundamental Christian principles of justice, when they dehumanize and expel.

These Christian leaders, and all who are allied with them in the structures of churches and the institutions that churches own, are, God help them, apparently convinced that they are doing the work of God in treating us as less than human. After reading Scott Pomfret’s book, I have become aware that there is a kind of systemic moral numbing in the lives of homophobic Christian leaders. Begin with demeaning gay Christians, and you can end up lying to other groups, treating other groups of believers as if they have no rights and no humanity, or even, as in the case of some Catholic bishops, engaging in criminal behavior.

Is there hope? Strangely enough, though the picture Scott Pomfret paints in his book is bleak in the extreme, his book is full of hope. As I noted in a previous posting, Scott Pomfret pins his hope on the outrageous presence of the Spirit (the outrageous Spirit) among those Christians who are identified by the institutional church and by society in general as flawed.

The outrageous presence of the outrageous Spirit among dirty gays and dirty lesbians. Among the dirty straight folks who invite us to the table and share your food with us, becoming tainted by our sin. Among the kind of misfits who attend Scott Pomfret’s inner-city parish—mentally disturbed people who disrupt liturgies by moaning and shaking, discarded elderly folks, the plethora of the halt and lame that come to such parishes for comfort and affirmation of one’s fundamental humanity.

Your testimony stresses the invitation that brought you to your church and to General Conference. Those fellow Christians who refuse to shake your hand or speak to you in holy conferencing, and bishops who shout at you and make false accusations about you, would like to have make-or-break power over that invitation. But they do not have such power. They have only the illusion of such make-or-break power.

It is God who extends the invitation. It is God who decides who will open the door and who will shut it. It is God who flings wide the door that Christians try to keep shut.

As Scott Pomfret’s book reminds us, in Massachusetts, when Sean O’Malley and the other Catholic bishops of the state sought to throw their institutional homophobic weight around to coerce Catholic legislators to vote against gay marriage, they had an unpleasant surprise: Catholic legislators would not let themselves be coerced.

They chose to do the right thing instead of the thing the bishops ordered. They listened to the outrageous Spirit, who is the one who does the inviting and the including, not the bishops and their homophobic minions.

Your testimony reminds me of another reason for our hope, even as we deal with the slurs, the ugly rituals of exclusion, the lies about who we are and what we have done, coming out of the mouths of Christian leaders, bishops, university presidents, who maliciously twist their own lies and their own dehumanizing practices around to try to paint us as deserving of the humiliation they enact against us. You say, “The one who told me hearing peoples’ stories at a listening session had given her things to consider in ways she never had before.”

Yes. There is tremendous power in the stories, the real-life stories, of those who live faithfully in the face of oppression. This is why the need to keep the door shut is so ravening. This is why there is such ugly intent to refuse to acknowledge our humanity, by refusing to speak to us, to look us in the eyes, to shake our hands. There is a profound intent, on the part of systemic homophobia in the institutional church, to keep our stories and our voices at bay.

That is why we have to keep telling them, in season and out of season. When people hear them, they know that they hear in these experiences the voice of a truth that shatters the lies of systemic, institutionalized homophobia. Not because we are better people or more faithful people, but because even flawed people who are treated as we are treated by the church do not deserve what is heaped upon us.

Above all, the young are listening. You say, “The people: our young adults – what a stellar future we have in them! They are our Future With Hope.”

Yes. And we need to cherish these young folks, who listen with new ears, ears not yet attuned to the institutionalized homophobia. We need to take their dreams seriously.

In conclusion, I am pained to hear of what happened to you at General Conference this year. At the same time, I am powerfully moved by your testimony, and your willingness to endure such ill treatment from fellow Christians on behalf of others who endure this treatment routinely.

As church members like you continue to offer your hand even when it is shunned, as you keep standing at the door to hold it open to outcasts, as you use your own invitation as the basis to invite others in and let their stories be told, as you nourish the tender faith of the young, things will change. For the better. Thank you for caring.

HBCUs and Homophobia: A Brief Source Guide

As an aid to anyone using this blog today to research the historic contributions HBCUs have made to dialogue about social justice in America, as well as the challenge HBCUs face today in dealing with homophobia, I have prepared the following guide.

Section I lists Bilgrimage blog postings that have dealt with these topics, and that link to other research cited in these postings.

Section II is a brief listing of internet sites that specifically address the question of HBCUs and homophobia, and current attempts to deal with the problem of homophobia on HBCU campuses.

Section III links to official United Methodist Church statements forbidding discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation in Methodist institutions, and calling on United Methodist institutions to implement non-discrimination practices.

Section IV links to statements of various accrediting bodies in the field of higher education, requiring institutions of higher learning to address homophobia in order to retain accreditation.

Section I: Bilgrimage Blog Postings

1. http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/09/hbcus-and-cdc-data-about-new-hiv.html

2. http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/05/soul-work-holy-conferencing-in_05.html

3. http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/05/holy-conferencing-as-love-building.html

4. http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/06/barack-obama-and-post-homophobic-models.html

5. http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/hate-crime-in-daytona-beach-continuing.html

6. http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/06/and-pilgrimage-continues_03.html

7. http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/06/race-and-our-transformational-moment.html

8. http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/05/democracy-ongoing-battle-shifting-faces.html

9. http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/02/week-in-review.html

Section II: Brief Listing of Internet Statements re: HBCUs and Homophobia

1. “Gay and Black: They Don’t Mix at Too Many Historically Black Universities,” www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=1284

2. Human Rights Campaign’s “Historically Black Colleges and Universities Program” www.hrc.org/news/5087.htm: a network of HBCUs who have gathered with HRC to combat This homophobia on HBCU campuses following a wave of violence against LGBT students from 2002 forward.

3. On Florida in particular, and the struggle to combat homophobia there, I recommend the new Bilerico Project blog focusing on Florida, http://florida.bilerico.com.

Section III: Official United Methodist Statements about Homophobic Discrimination*

1. The Social Principles of the United Methodist Church, § 162
http://archives.umc.org/interior.asp?mid=1753: “Certain basic human rights and civil liberties are due all persons. We are committed to supporting those rights and liberties for homosexual persons.”

2. Petition 80845, 2008 UMC General Conference, “Opposition to Homophobia and Heterosexism” (passed by vote of 544 vs. 369)
http://calms.umc.org/2008/Menu.aspx?type=Petition&mode=Single&number=845: “THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the United Methodist Church strengthen its advocacy of the eradication of sexism by opposing all forms of violence or discrimination based on gender, gender identity, sexual practice or sexual orientation.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the General Board of Church and Society develop resources and materials aimed at educating members of the local churches about the reality, issues, and effects of homophobia and heterosexism and the need for Christian witness against these facets of marginalization.”

3. UMC University Senate, “Marks of a United Methodist Church-Related Institution”
http://www.gbhem.org/site/c.lsKSL3POLvF/b.3871459/k.9279/Marks_of_a_United_Methodist_ChurchRelated_Academic_Institution.htm: “A Church-related institution recognizes the Social Principles of the United Methodist Church and seeks to create a community of scholarship and learning which facilitates social justice.”

Section IV: Higher Education Accrediting Bodies re: Homophobia

1. National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), Accreditation Standard 4, “Diversity”
http://www.ncate.org/public/unitStandardsRubrics.asp?ch=4#stnd4: “Candidates are helped to understand the potential impact of discrimination based on race, class, gender, disability, sexual orientation, and language on students and their learning. Proficiencies related to diversity are identified in the unit’s conceptual framework. They are clear to candidates and are assessed as part of the unit’s assessment system.” See http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/03/teaching-youth-not-to-hate.html for further information.


*These are included since the open letter published on this blog today calls on Mr. Obama to address homophobia at HBCUs as he speaks tomorrow at a United Methodist university, Bethune-Cookman. Similar statements are often available for other church-sponsored HBCUs.

The Kind of Place from Which Hate Comes: Discerning the Spirit in Political Decisions

In a previous posting on this blog, I noted a brilliant observation of Rev. Gilbert H. Caldwell from this year’s United Methodist General Conference (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/04/dirty-money-united-methodist-church-and_28.html). At a panel discussion sponsored by Soulforce, Rev. Caldwell spoke about the interconnected –isms by which social groups (including churches) engineer the denigration and exclusion of despised outsiders.

The Place of Gay Human Beings as a Church-Dividing Issue: Again

I’m thinking these days about a theme I discussed briefly back on 22 April in my posting entitled “The Church’s One Foundation” (see http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/04/churchs-one-foundation-homosexuality.html). This is the claim of some church groups that homosexuality should be placed on the back burner of church discussion, since the gay issue is not truly a church-dividing issue.

The Florida United Methodist Conference has just held a “Conference Table” to which anyone in the conference is invited. The headline announcing this conference table noted that this was a table at which everyone was welcome.

The topic of this roundtable public discussion was “In Defense of Creation.” A description of the conference table topic on the website of the Florida UMC Conference notes, “IDOC2, as it is called, is the church's attempt to engage public policy on issues that most affect the human race, according to Florida Conference Bishop Timothy Whitaker, task force chairman. The document addresses three areas: nuclear proliferation, global poverty, and environmental issues” (see http://flsite.brickriver.com/event_detail.asp?PKValue=1845).

Issues that most affect the human race: nuclear proliferation, global poverty, and the environment. From one standpoint, it’s hard to argue with the claim that this configuration of issues covers the terrain admirably well—these are, indeed, among the issues most affecting the human race, the ones churches most need to address in their preaching and ministry today.

From another standpoint, however, there’s something wrong with this picture. In the first place, search as one will through the entire Florida UMC Conference website for any mention at all of homosexuality, and one draws a complete blank. Scrutinize the program for the recent Florida UMC Annual Conference meeting for any mention of the term “gay” or “homosexual/ity,” and you’ll come away with the impression that any issues revolving around those terms must have been resolved.

Because the church is totally silent about them. The church is totally silent about issues relating to homosexuality as issues most affecting the human race today.

The implication of the church’s claim that nuclear proliferation, global poverty, and the environment are the key issues affecting the human race today is that the issue of homosexuality—the place of gay human beings within the human race and the churches—is a non-issue, a side issue, one beneath notice.

But if this is the case, why did the most recent General Conference of the United Methodist Church spend an inordinate amount of time discussing that very issue? Why have state conferences such as the Florida Conference almost come to blows about that issue, such that there are fears the church may split?

If the issue of where LGBT human beings fit into the human race and the churches is a non-issue, why has every UMC General Conference for almost a decade now battled through this issue? Why is the worldwide Anglican Communion in anguish over this issue? Why are almost all the churches in the world groaning through this critically important moment of human history in which, for the first time in history, LGBT human beings are claiming the right to a place at the table, as openly gay people affirming their own God-given identities and refusing to apologize for these identities as they approach the Lord’s table?

If the question of where gay human beings are to be “placed” within the human community and the churches is a non-issue, one about which churches can justifiably be silent while discussing issues of key importance to the human race today, why have some Anglican churches in the United States chosen to break communion with gay-affirming bishops, placing themselves under the episcopal jurisdiction of bishops far from their own dioceses? Why have bishops such as Peter Akinola in Nigeria bitterly resisted inclusion of LGBT people in the churches, while bishops such as Desmond Tutu have spoken out courageously about homophobia as the new apartheid of the human race and the churches?

If the issue of where gay human beings fit is a non-issue, one about which churches may justifiably be silent when discussing the important issues facing the human community today, what is one to make of the recent announcement of the president of Gambia that he wished to see all gay persons in his country sought out and beheaded?

If the question of how to fit LGBT human beings into human society and into churches is not a premier issue causing conflict within the human community today, why did the Human Rights watch send a letter to the president of Gambia—only days before the Florida United Methodist Conference held its discussion of “the” issues that most affect the human race—noting that the president’s violent rhetoric and actions towards gay human beings violates human rights covenants and “abdicates one of the most important responsibilities of political leadership: to respect, protect, and promote the human rights of all” (see http://hrw.org/english/docs/2008/06/10/gambia19088.htm)?

If the question of how our gay brothers and sisters are to be included in our human and church families is a non-issue, why did the Pope announce immediately before new year’s day that he considers the issue of protecting the family (read: of resisting gay marriage) to be one of the premier issues confronting the churches today, one to which he intended to devote primary attention in 2008?

I sense more than a bit of flim-flammery in the claim of many church folks today that the question of how to place our gay brothers and sisters is not a significant, crucial, noteworthy issue for discussion—not truly a church-dividing issue. What is really going on with this claim is a dishonorable attempt to keep gay people in the shadows—and to keep in the shadows, as well, the shameful way the churches continue to treat gay human beings.

It goes without saying that nuclear proliferation, poverty, and the environment are among the most significant issues facing the human community today. It goes without saying that churches which wish to be faithful to the example of Jesus and to the gospels should be discussing and trying to deal proactively with these issues.

But these issues do not exist in isolation from issues of gender, from issues of patriarchy. The militarism that is at the root of nuclear proliferation is rooted in male domination and exploitation of women, of anything regarded as feminine. Exploitation and destruction of the environment is intrinsically linked to patriarchal systems of social order that give men unmerited dominance over women.

As feminist theologians have long noted, the social issues demanding the critical attention of churches are all interconnected in a web, all interwoven. One cannot understand and deal with militarism, economic exploitation of minorities, or destruction of the environment without understanding and dealing with patriarchy, misogyny, and homophobia. As feminist theologians have long noted, societies that are racist are also not coincidentally almost always societies that are misogynistic and homophobic.

Nor can one understand and deal with the key issues confronting society today without confronting the unjust domination of the churches by white males who profess to be heterosexual.

Part of the silence—a big part of the self-censorship of bishops and other church leaders today, when it comes to gay issues—is a tactic of keeping at bay critique of the ways in which white males who profess to be heterosexual still control most everything in the world, including in the churches. Or perhaps particularly in the churches.

The issue of how to fit our LGBT brothers and sisters into the churches is neuralgic because it casts a spotlight on church leaders themselves—an unwanted spotlight. It casts a spotlight (an unwanted one) on how the churches treat LGBT people.

The discussion unmasks the claim that everyone is invited to the table as a false claim—a shamefully false, starkly false claim. A lie.

Churches must find ways to keep at bay the discussion of the place of their LGBT brothers and sisters at the table, because that discussion will open too many doors to questions about how the church pursues its ministries, how it deals with money, what kind of alliances with powerful people drive the churches and their rhetoric and actions.

The question of how or whether to provide a place at the table for gay human beings should, of course, never have become a church-dividing issue. No church can justifiably claim to be church, when it excludes any group from the table. Every sinner has a place at the table of the Lord. Period. No questions asked.

That is, every sinner has a place at the Lord’s table if the church setting that table wants to claim to be following in the footsteps of Jesus.

No, the question of the place of LGBT human beings at the table should never have been made a church-dividing issue. We who are gay did not choose to make this an issue. Other forces in church and society have done so, and have done so with a vengeance.

That being the case, no church today can flim-flam around the gay issue, claiming it is not and should not be a church-dividing issue, or an issue of key importance to the human community. Indeed, it might well be argued that this question of how to set a place for gay brothers and sisters is the premier issue facing all churches today—the one with the most potential to test the fidelity of churches to the gospel, the one with the strongest ability to test whether churches intend to be church at the most fundamental level possible, the only level that counts: whether churches intend to set the Lord’s table for all sinners.

The church and its bishops don’t pay any price at all, do they—really now—when they take a stand on nuclear proliferation, poverty, and the environment? But the church and its bishops do pay a price, and a steep one, when they resolutely and without qualification announce that their table is open to all, including their gay brothers and sisters, and that their institutions will demonstrate this praxis of discipleship by resolutely and without qualification discarding all forms of discrimination within church institutions against LGBT human beings.

Perhaps Bishop Whitaker and other church leaders who are flim-flamming around discussion of the place of gay brothers and sisters at the table will make the topic of their next roundtable discussion of key issues confronting the churches the following excerpt from a sermon that retired Catholic Bishop of Detroit, Thomas Gumbleton preached recently on what the Catholic liturgical calendar calls the 10^th Sunday in ordinary time. The gospel for the day was Matthew 9:9-13 (see http://ncrcafe.org/node/1907):

There are so many other ways in which we must become a welcoming community, a community that is like Jesus, that is ready to welcome sinners, to be with sinners, to be with those who others would think as not worthy. We have to become a church of great diversity, where we welcome everyone regardless of race, sexual orientation, poverty, wealth. We have to be a church of diversity. We have to share our Eucharist, we have to share our banquet, with all who are out there in the world with us.

When we can reach out as Jesus did and welcome tax collectors and sinners into our midst without making judgment, simply welcoming everyone as God does, God says, "I want mercy more than sacrifice; love more than ritual," this is what is very important and this is what we must try to make happen in our communities, in our church, and in our civil society, so that we really become one beloved community, one family of God where everyone is welcome and everyone gives thanks and gratitude for the God who shows them such love through those who follow his son, Jesus.

This is what is very important and this is what we must try to make happen in our communities, in our church, and in our civil society: to welcome everyone regardless, to share our banquet with all who are out there in the world with us.

Kudos to Hillary: Equality as a Moral Imperative

We all want an America defined by deep and meaningful equality, from civil rights to labor rights, from women’s rights to gay rights … from ending discrimination to promoting unionization, to providing help for the most important job there is: caring for our families.

Hillary Clinton’s speech endorsing Barack Obama today was a class act.

Commentators are already noting that a passion sometimes absent from her campaign speeches came through in the latter part of the speech, when she made the statements above.

Re: gay rights, I encourage Mrs. Clinton to use her influence now to press her United Methodist Church and the institutions it sponsors to put into practice—and not merely talk about—its Social Principles. In this church that has such disproportionate influence in Main Street USA, there is much work to do be done to deal with the ugly prejudice that manifested itself again at the latest General Conference.

Were you listening, bishops of the United Methodist Church? Were you listening, good layfolks in the United Methodist Church? Deep and meaningful equality: not lip-service equality, not equality that is printed on pieces of paper but violated in your institutional practice.

Deep and meaningful equality for gay human beings: equality is a moral imperative.

Keep the Door Shut!: Churches and the Threat of Gay Energy

Colleen,

Once again, you’ve left a comment that is so rich, I want to lift it from the comments section and reply to it in my blog proper, rather than in the comments box.

Your comment focuses on the creativity, spirituality, and energy for institutional transformation that self-accepting gay folks bring to our vocations in secular and ecclesial institutions. Using transpersonal psychology, you say, I'm talking about a kind of freedom from gender typing, and because of that, a freedom to explore and accept other realms of thought, creativity, and spirituality.

Your analysis notes that, because gay folks have to learn to negotiate complex questions about gender roles in accepting our God-given human natures, we develop the ability to move between various definitions of ourselves demanded by the rules of straight society. In the process, we often develop a balance of male-female principles inside ourselves, which can translate into creativity and spirituality:

This is a case of knowing you have what it takes to be competent and successful in non traditional gender roles. In this sense gays exhibit a kind of both/and rather than either/or. This is very different from the straight world, where gender roles are much more tightly defined. This tight definition manifests sexually as well.

The gay way of being in the world, at its best, involves a both-and rather than either-or. The balance—or, better, creative tension—that gay people can achieve in learning to negotiate conflicting demands of gender roles, a creative tension rooted in the ability to hold together male-female principles inside ourselves, results in a release of creative energy with the potential to transform institutions that welcome self-accepting gay people and our talents.

Key to this release of creative energy is learning to transcend the either-or thinking of hierarchical institutions that want to subordinate one group to another—in particular, female to male:

There's a school of thought currently being developed which explains spiritual, creative, and relational abilities as products of sexual energy. Sexual energy can be really polluted when a person fails to deal with dominance and submission issues.

Social and ecclesial institutions locked into dominance-submission ways of thinking thwart the release of creative energy, because they siphon off a huge amount of energy that could be expended in institutional transformation in the work of maintaining the status quo, and in particular, the dominance of one group over another (often, of males over females):

The problem with this is that if you can't get out of that system you can't experience transcendence in creative expression, spirituality, or sexual relationships. As you say, maintaining takes precedence over mission.

I think you’re absolutely right in these observations. Since our spiritual life calls on us to discern the movement of spirit within our daily lives and the experiences of daily life, I can’t help “processing” your rich reflections through the prism of Steve’s and my most recent experiences at a United Methodist university in Florida.

The Florida United Methodist Conference website has uploaded an article about the recent General Conference’s discussion of LGBT people, and the decision to hold the line against us yet again at this General Conference. This article by reporter Tita Parham focuses on the need for continued dialogue about the place of gay people in the Methodist church in Florida (www.flumc.info/cgi-script/csArticles/articles/000047/004774.htm).

A response to this article by a lay leader of First United Methodist Church in Orlando, Robert MacLeish, focuses on the role played by the Florida UMC bishop, Timothy Whitaker, at the 30 April deliberations that resulted in the vote to hold the line. Mr. MacLeish states,

My heart goes out to our good Bishop. He was in a bind with that abominable, counter biblical homosexuality issue. It's a shame it must be dealt with when addressing it as sinful should be so simple a matter. My heart goes out to him also for having to abide by Roberts Rules of Order.

There’s quite a bit to note about this response to the 30 April vote at General Conference. Again, I want to stress that I do so in light of Steve’s and my experience of being actively recruited in 2006 by a Methodist college in Florida under the pastoral jurisdiction of Bishop Whitaker.

I’d like to suggest that our experience is, in some sense, paradigmatic. It’s paradigmatic for gay people in general, insofar as our being self-accepting, open, celebratory of the love and grace in our lives and relationships, threatens the status quo of the very institutions that tell us they need our creativity, energy, and transformative potential.

This is not the first time Steve and I have experienced this invitation-expulsion dynamic. We have learned much about it in our professional lives as openly gay theologians working in church-affiliated colleges.

We have learned that the church and its institutions want (and need) our talents and creative energy. But they do not want our openness. They do not want our honesty. They don’t want our integrity. They don’t want our love.

In other words, they want our talents and creative energy without wanting the very pre-conditions for the release of creative energy in our lives as a gay couple.

This creates a horrible quandary for gay people, vis-à-vis the churches. It creates a terrible quandary for those of us who still feel called by the Spirit to live vocational lives that have some connection to the churches—which are capable of tremendous cruelty and deceit towards us as gay human beings. (And I have to say honestly that it grows harder and harder for me as a gay person to see anything but evil in many churches today, given the extremes to which churches seem willing to go to keep gay people at bay.)

On the one hand, we have inside ourselves—precisely as a result of our willingness to undergo the hard struggle to understand and accept our God-given natures—creative energy that needs to flow somewhere. Somewhere good. It’s creative. It issues forth in our lives and hearts as the desire to do good in the world, by helping to build a better world. We know it's good and creative energy because it has good and creative results in the lives of those around us with whom we interact.

This energy flows forth in our lives and hearts, as well, because, having learned to celebrate our unique natures as God’s gift to us (and to others), we then often form strong loving relationships that endure one assault after another, in a world that wants to reduce who we are and what we do to sex, and not love. Living together in long-standing committed relationships in a world that offers almost no reinforcement for such relationships, and many obstacles to them, takes miracles, on a daily basis.

We bring all of this—this history of struggle to understand ourselves, to accept ourselves, to love—to the church-affiliated institutions that tell us they want and need our talents. These church-affiliated institutions then use the talents gladly, but just as gladly discard us when it is convenient to do so—when powerful monied pressure groups “notice” that there are gay folks working in church institutions and not hiding themselves or lying about who they are; when a leader without guts and courage finds it useful to scapegoat the gays in order to save her own skin; when rewards flow to such spineless leaders from the church itself precisely because they are willing to lie to and about the despised gays and to expel them in vicious rituals of public humiliation.

I’m looking at these dynamics as a problem for those of us who have to live with them and with their aftermath in our lives. I’d like now to turn the analysis around and to examine how these dynamics affect not us who are the obvious victim of them. I'd like to look at the the churches who employ these dynamics against us and to analyze the increasing cost the churches are paying by victimizing gay human beings.

I’d like to begin by noting that the churches clearly need energy. They need creative energy. The churches of Main Street USA are aging. They are, in fact, dying. Fewer young people take part in church life, and there is every indicator that this trend will continue into this new millennium.

The response of churches to this process of internal decay has often been to engage in ever more glitzy media shows, to commercialize themselves and the gospel message, to pander to the lowest common denominator in their expectations of discipleship, by reducing what they have to say to media sound-bites. This response has been “successful” insofar as it allows the churches of Main Street USA to stay afloat.

It continues, above all, to bring money into the business of church life—and churches are businesses. It allows the churches to congratulate themselves about all those they bring to Christ—that is, to engage in self-congratulation as long as they don’t ask critical questions about what bringing people to Christ actually means. As long as we equate success with how much money comes into the coffers, how many new buildings we throw up, how many heads we count in the pews on Sunday . . . .

At their heart, in the depths of their souls, the churches of Main Street USA experience a certain soulnessness today, I would propose. Many of those hanging on with their fingernails through the happy-clappy media shows recognize that something is wrong, radically wrong, and know in their bones that more glitz and more media and more bearded pretend-macho men leading the shows are not really going to address the soulness at the heart of it all.

For many of us, church is about something else altogether. It’s about engaging in authentic community, community that affirms each of us in our uniqueness, and values and uses the gifts we each bring to the table. Community celebrated when we gather around the Lord’s table, as children of God who all have a place there, as sinners all in need of the medicine of mercy. Community that makes it unthinkable for any of us to kneel beside another brother or sister in the Lord on Sunday and then knife that person in the back economically, professionally, and interpersonally on Monday.

We long for community that embodies the gospel message. We long for authenticity in the message we first live and second proclaim. We long for authentic connection to our spiritual roots, whether they are Franciscan, Wesleyan, Protestant, Catholic, whatever. We long to find our way around commercialized sound-bite distortions of our tradition that translate into mindless acceptance of any nonsense we are told in both the religious and political spheres.

And so enter the gays. The churches of Main Street USA are in a mess. Youth—the brightest and best of this generation—want nothing to do with the happy-clappy media-driven babble about winning souls for Christ. Most youth today in the global North know and love some specific gay folks who put a human face on the stereotype the churches continue to maintain. They cannot understand the cruelty and deceit that are the price the church is willing to pay to keep gay people and gay voices and gay talents outside.

The church needs the gays. The youth of the church know this and are raising their voices. The energy and talent we bring to the institution are attractive. But who we are—our potential to rock the boat—is tremendously frightening to the same institution that recognizes the gifts we bring. And so the cruelty and deceit continue, even as they are increasingly unmasked for what they are by younger church members who recognize the violence being done to people whom they love, insofar as the church adverts to its LGBT brothers and sisters.

I continue to follow discussions about General Conference, in part, to continue trying to understand what happened to Steve and me at a United Methodist college in Florida. In many blog discussions of that fateful 30 April discussion of the place of LGBT brothers and sisters in the Methodist church, I find recurring concerns about several issues:

1. Since Bishop Timothy Whitaker of Florida is known to be one of the leading proponents of holding the line against gays in the Methodist church, how did it happen that he was chosen to preside at the fateful 30 April session on this issue?
2. Doesn’t the choice of a leading proponent of holding the line in itself represent an a priori attempt to skew the process of holy conferencing in an anti-gay direction?
3. Were Roberts Rules of Order misused by those trying to engineer another anti-gay vote in the 30 April session?
4. If so, do Roberts Rules of Order have much at all to do with holy conferencing?

I might add two more questions based on my own experience

I am putting these questions in very personal terms because those personal terms indicate how acute is the crisis the churches of Main Street USA face today, re: gay people and gay energy. The churches want our energy and talent.

They do not want us.

Not us, insofar as we are open, honest, living lives of integrity and love—all of which is the precondition for our having the very energy we bring to church institutions.

This is a serious problem, one the churches can no longer avoid or gloss over, no matter how hard they try, by uploading to their institutional website one more happy-clappy article about "approved” minorities, or by electing to positions of power and authority members of “approved” minorities who do the dirty work to gay brothers and sisters on behalf of the white male power center of the churches.

It is a problem the Spirit will not allow the churches to avoid any longer, because the Spirit is creative energy. The Spirit wills creation, ongoing creation. The Spirit wishes to see the churches alive with profound transformative energy. The Spirit speaks to the churches of Main Street USA today through the voices of young members in whose hands the future of the churches lies.

The Spirit calls gay brothers and sisters to the churches, gives us creative energy for our vocations in the churches, and is grieved when the church slams its doors in our faces.

In conclusion, to return to your analysis, Colleen, I see two wellsprings of this creative energy in gay lives, following your transpersonal psychological analysis. One is the hard struggle we who are gay go through to see ourselves as God’s children, when the churches insist on calling us spawn of the devil or “abominable, counter-biblical” sinners.

You locate the wellspring of that energy, once we accept ourselves, in freedom, “freedom from gender typing, and because of that, a freedom to explore and accept other realms of thought, creativity, and spirituality.” I think this is absolutely right.

A study was done some years ago (and I can’t place my fingers on it now) of the moral development of priests. The study used the Defining Issues Test to identify levels of moral maturity among priests.

The priests studied were asked to identify themselves as gay or straight. The study found an interesting correlation between sexual orientation and moral development. On the whole, gay priests scored higher on scales of moral development than did straight priests.

The author of this study and others who commented on it at the time noted that coming to moral maturity requires that one struggle with issues that test the boundaries of our moral assurances, of our givens about what is “obviously” right and wrong. We develop conscience (and the moral maturity to use conscience correctly) not by being provided all the answers, but by encountering disjuncture between what we take for granted and other worldviews that have different ways of viewing the world.

The author of this study noted that straight priests often do not have to struggle in the same way gay priests do to come to terms with their sexual orientation, with profound questions about gender identity and gender roles, and with the inadequacy of formulaic answers (in bible or church teaching) to all moral dilemmas. This struggle—when one undergoes it with honesty and integrity (and obviously not everyone, gay or straight, is ready to undergo such struggle)—yields higher moral sensitivity, ability to negotiate difficult moral questions in one’s own life and that of others, and compassion for others in their struggles.

You also put your finger on another wellspring of creative energy in the lives of many gay people which demands a whole other blog posting: this is the creative balance of male-female principles within ourselves, which gives us the potential to bring such creative balance to the churches.

And the churches definitely need that balance, along with the wisdom to move beyond paradigms of female subordination that idolize masculinity in its cheapest, rawest forms. Look at the pictures of those sitting at the presiding podium and on the stage, as the churches pass laws to keep gay people and our energies out. They are essays in the problem the churches need to overcome today, if they wish for authentic transformation.

When the rule of white males in the churches must be protected even at the cost of lying, deceit, manipulation of rules for holy conferencing, overt violations of the social principles of the churches, the price begins to seem simply too high. And when the energy being kept at bay demands that we use such devilish tools to keep that energy at bay, then what is the church doing to itself, by refusing the gifts of its gay brothers and sisters?

Good Gays, Bad Gays Continued: The Smack-Hug Violence of Churches

I’m trying something different today.

Yesterday, my friend Colleen (check out her “Enlightened Catholicism” blog, linked to mine) left a great comment on my posting about good gays, bad gays, and the churches of the radical middle.

In what follows, I want to engage Colleen’s comments. They are so thought-provoking that I can’t really do justice to them by replying in the comment slot. And maybe if this dialogue is in the main thread of the blog, it will bring some light for other readers who are struggling with the churches’ stances towards their LGBT brothers and sisters.

So here goes:

Colleen,

You address some key points in my perambulations yesterday. I value the incisive comments, which help me focus my own thinking.

You say,

I'm not so sure the hate isn't a product of jealousy, of an unstated sense of inadequacy. A number of the things gays seem to do very well are create artistically, love with no strings attached, and have definite spiritual gifts . . . . I think gayness is defined by much more than sexual attraction. It's defined best by the concept of balance between creation and chaos and male and female. That tension of that balance is very often expressed in creative or spiritual works.

These are significant points. They touch right on the heart of the dynamics I was trying to describe yesterday—better than I was able to do.

First, the hate issue. Yesterday, after posting, I asked myself, “Are you sure that hate is the word you really want?” Is what the churches do to us really hate, or is that word too strong to describe the antipathy, exclusion, and malicious dissemination of misinformation about us?

Asking these questions draws attention to the word “homophobia” itself, with its “phobia” root. That root can mean both fear and hate, or hate driven by fear.

Some people object to the term “homophobia” precisely on this ground: that hate is a word too strong to describe what is often going on when folks resist or despise gay folks.

I tend to think it’s accurate, though, in exposing the roots of homophobia. Like the various forms of violence, which I analyzed in a previous posting on this blog, hate can manifest itself in both hot and cold ways.

The hot form of violence or hate is not too hard to detect. It’s the kind that happened recently in Sacramento right after the gay marriage ruling in California, when three young men out to beat up a fag to protest the court decision asked a man sitting in a car at a gas station if he were gay.

When he said he was, they dragged him out of his car and beat him up (www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/05/16/state/n143918D86.DTL) And yet the social network webpage of one of the alleged gay bashers, Micah Jontomo Tasaki, at BlackPlanet.com (www.blackplanet.com/jontomo) has this young man saying, “CHILVARY DOES STILL EXIST. Im honest, open, and caring.... very compassionate, and a great listener.”

Jarring, isn’t it? Chivalry exists. I’m honest, opening, caring, very compassionate. And, oh, by the way, if I run across a fag sitting in a car minding his own business, I’m liable to kick the stuffing out of him while I’m going about my chivalry-compassion business.

What this story underscores for me is that the hot form of hate goes hand in hand with cold forms of hate, which are less easy to detect—and of which we may even be unconscious. I would submit that it’s the cold form of hate that inhabits so much of the thinking (and behavior) of church folks in Main Street USA.

This cold form of homophobia is what’s at work in so much that goes on with the churches. This is the behavior analyzed in Harry Knox’s article “Methodist Schizophrenia on Gays” at the Casting Stones blog on Beliefnet (http://blog.beliefnet.com/castingstones/2008/05/methodist-schizophrenia-on-gay.html?bt=polmashup).

Knox is a former United Methodist pastor from a family with deep Methodist roots. He now heads the Religion and Faith Program for Human Rights Campaign. His article is commenting on the recent UMC General Conference.

Knox characterizes the Methodist approach to LGBT persons as schizophrenic “smack-hug behavior”: we love you; we don’t want you; we welcome all sinners; we don’t welcome you; our doors are open; no gays need apply; we promote and defend your civil rights; don’t expect us to respect your rights if you work in our institutions.

Some folks have objected to the use of the term “schizophrenic” in this article. I think it’s a precise description of how the churches of Main Street USA actually behave towards us. Their behavior is insane. And they don’t even seem aware of it.

It’s unrecognized insanity because it’s masked in religious rhetoric about love that doesn’t permit those engaging in this abusive behavior (Knox calls it “spiritual violence” as well) even to admit or know that they are assaulting the very souls, the personhood, of a particular group of human beings. Hate masquerades as love in the way the churches of the radical middle think about and act towards LGBT persons, and it’s very difficult to tease out or address the hate for this reason. It’s disguised. It’s cold hate.

But I know your point here is not to challenge the use of the word "hate." You’re making a point that goes way beyond the analysis of this word, and it’s an excellent point. You say that hate—the cold form of homophobic violence in which the churches engage—may well be a form of jealousy or a sense of inadequacy.

And you go on to identify the psychological nexus from which the jealousy and sense of inadequacy often springs. You say, “Main stream churches understand they have a proportional misrepresentation of gays in their structures. They just can't deal with the underlying talent issues this represents so gays must be vilified.”

These are extremely insightful comments, it seems to me, ones that reflect your background as a therapist. If, as you say, gay people bring the churches talents that have everything to do with our accepting that we are gay—specifically, if our struggles to accept ourselves create a creative tension or balance inside us of male-female principles—then our very being there, with those talents, seems to threaten some folks, or make some folks feel inadequate.

The puzzle to me is your right-on-target conclusion that, because the churches can’t deal with the “underlying talent issues” that gay contributions to churches represent, “gays must be vilified.”

I think this is exactly right. It also seems insane to me—insane, that is, that churches would recognize an abundance of talent for spiritual insight and creativity in a particular group of people, whom they then expel! Precisely for offering talent, spiritual insight, and creativity to the churches . . . .

I know in my bones that you are right. I just find it hard to understand that human beings behave in such self-defeating ways.

I know you’re right, because what you say fits my own experience, my own spiritual journey. I’ve spoken of my brother’s death in 1991 as a kind of catalyst for my self-acceptance as a gay man.

But what happened in my journey in that part of my life is actually more complex. Prior to my brother’s death, I had a sabbatical semester to do research while I was on fellowship. I spent that semester writing a book and several articles, teaching a seminar, but, perhaps most significant of all, doing therapeutic work with a spiritual counselor.

The counselor was a Jungian analyst. Since I have always dreamed profusely and kept track of my dreams, his approach made sense to me.

From the start of my semester’s work with him, I told him I was gay, and needing to figure out what to do with that, given my vocational path to teaching theology in church-affiliated universities. I was some six years into my teaching career.

The tension of being someone inside that I had to disguise outside was eating me up. It was not the creative tension of holding something in balance. It was the deadly tension of living a public persona that doesn’t match the private self, so that you begin to fear you’ll simply lose your private self and become the walking, talking parody of the persona you’ve adopted.

I worked hard with the counselor in that semester. I can remember, towards the end of my time with him, he put his finger on something that helped me reframe the personal identity-vocational struggle in a creative new way. He noted that, again and again, in describing my dreams, I had used words like “upwelling,” “springing forth,” “streams,” “energy,” “light.”

He told me that, in his view, the hard work I was doing to try to bring together the gay self and my public life as a theologian in a church-affiliated school had much to do with releasing springs of creative energy. The more I was able to hold these two together, to claim my identity as a gay man while continuing on my vocational path as a theologian, the more the creativity was springing forth.

And he was right.

Within months after my return home, my brother died. It was the combination of my own Spirit-led journey to self acceptance as a gay man and my brother’s death, a life-changing event for me, that brought me to that decision I described yesterday: that I would never again do my work as a theologian while denying my personhood (and gifts) as a gay man.

This bringing together the pieces I hadn’t been able to bring together as long as I played the game of don’t ask, don’t tell released tremendous energy in me. Not only had I just written one book, but out of the blue, I suddenly got requests to publish another, as well as articles based on my research. I wrote an essay that got selected for publication in a national essay contest. I got several job offers totally unsolicited, because of my publications.

But here’s the kicker: when I turned down tenure at my home university and took another job following my brother’s death, with the intent of expressing my new-found creativity in a new setting where I was told I was wanted and needed, the experience proved to be disastrous.

My experience has been that the resistance we encounter as self-accepting gay persons with much to offer in church institutions is in direct proportion to our self-acceptance, and to the talents we bring to the table. We’re welcome as long as we are self-hating, silent, dismissable: good gays.

The minute we claim our identities as God-given, and acknowledge that the love inside ourselves and in our relationships also springs from God, we become personae non gratae in the churches: bad gays The hard struggle (in a homophobic society) to accept ourselves as God’s good gifts to ourselves and others, a struggle that releases in us creative energies the churches sorely need, disqualifies us from a place at the table in the churches.

In fact, in my last disastrous experience, where Steve and I were told that we were welcome as an openly gay couple in a United Methodist institution that sorely needed our talents (hug), and then were constantly upbraided for coming to work together and "putting our lifestyle into the face of colleagues," the experience was even grimmer (smack).

You’re painting a totally accurate picture. And yet something is so wrong with this picture. I need your further reflections, Colleen, to help me figure out precisely what is at work in such smack-hug behavior on the part of the churches of the radical middle.

When Doing the Right Thing Means Not Playing It Safe: Christians of the Radical Middle and LGBT Human Beings

I continue to read blog discussions dissecting what happened at the United Methodist Church General Conference. I find the “voice” of these discussions much more compelling than the news accounts (and essays) about General Conference appearing on UMC websites, both at the international level and at the level of various regional conferences.

These official news accounts are glitzy. They skim the surface—of what happened, of thought itself. They bruise gospel meaning with lots of breezy (and ultimately vapid) rhetoric about global connections, concern for women and people of color.

On many UMC websites, side-by-side with the gut-wrenching announcement of the 30 April decision to hold the line on homosexuality—that is, against our LGBT brothers and sisters—are happy-clappy news releases showing beaming natives smiling and singing.

I use the term “natives” deliberately. I know it’s condescending. The approach of the UMC to people of color and women is itself condescending. The approach of all churches of Main Street USA to the peoples of the global South and to women is condescending. People of color and women are being used today in disreputable games, in which the white male power structures that still determine the conversation in the churches of Main Street USA play preferred outcasts against disdained outcasts.

This is despicable. It is hurtful. How can our LGBT brothers and sisters not feel pain, when they read these self-congratulatory news stories about how the UMC is full of such compassion towards the suffering, the outcast, the poor and despised: except, “No gays need apply”?

How can our LGBT brothers and sisters look at the pictures of smiling and singing people of the global South and not remember what happened on 30 April with gnawing hurt in the pit of the stomach? How can the church itself—its white male leaders—not see that the game they are playing with talk of globalization and of promoting the rights of women and people of color is transparent and ugly? It is a game that will bring shame on the heads of these leaders of the churches of Main Street USA down the road, when society at large eventually recognizes how cruel is the accepted treatment of LGBT people in much of our culture at present.

Better to admit, frankly, that there’s no strong intent to bring anyone to the table except white men and representatives of approved minorities who have been vetted to assure that they’ll play the white-male power game and not upset the apple cart.

There is, in other words, not just a tiny bit, but a large helping, of prevarication in what the churches of Main Street USA say and do today to our LGBT brothers and sisters, and what they say and do to other sanitized minority groups. To get the real picture beyond prevarication, one has to set aside the glitzy self-congratulatory news stories, the official Comintern-like rhetoric of essays on local UMC conference websites (the two that have appeared on the Florida Conference website, authored by

are especially illuminating), and listen to authentic testimony on blogs.

To get the real picture, one has to delve into first-hand accounts, particularly reflections by those who were actually there and whose lives were yet again determined, without their input, by what one blog has characterized as acts of hate and deceit on the floor of General Conference.

Strong words, hate and deceit. But words I’m inclined to believe. I’m inclined to give credence to these words because I know some of the key players in the 30 April actions that told our LGBT brothers and sisters they aren’t welcome in UMC churches (yes, that’s what the action meant; that’s what it said, beyond the glitzy rhetoric about happy-clappy inclusion). And I know these players are capable of all kinds of deceit, in the name of Christ, to keep our LGBT brothers outside, to hold the line.

I also know this deceit is a manifestation of hate, even when the face speaking the official Comintern words to an LGBT believer is the face of a smiling white man who vaunts his achievements at bringing women and people of color to the table of power and privilege. Hate is hate, and those who feel its cutting edge know what it feels like, even when it’s enshrouded in rhetoric and hidden inside chatter about the power of the Holy Spirit and conversion and campaigns to revive the church.

An interesting recurring theme in the blog accounts of some General Conference delegates who voted to hold the line against our LGBT brothers and sisters is how “tough” the decision was, how “anguished” they felt in making it.

I don’t doubt this testimony in the least. But I’d like to expose it to some analysis, to ask some critical questions about what it really means, about what it means at the level of fundamental reality to say that decisions to keep our LGBT brothers and sisters away from the table are tough and anguishing.

The first critical questions I'd like to ask are, Really? Why? If we know that what we are doing is right, then why anguish? If we have listened for the voice of the Spirit in holy conferencing and have discerned that it is the Spirit Herself who moves us to exclude brothers and sisters, then why do we find the decision tough?

I’d like to propose that these admissions of how tough and anguishing the decision to exclude our LGBT brothers and sisters was contain a revelatory nugget of truth about just what really is at stake in the continued shoving of LGBT people away from the Lord’s table in the churches of Main Street USA.

What’s really at stake is not, as many delegates want to propose, a tough, anguishing decision to hold the line of doctrinal and moral purity, of orthodoxy, of biblical inerrancy. What’s really at stake is exclusion, pure and simple: stark, hate-fueled, fear-filled, Spirit-denying decisions to keep LGBT brothers and sisters outside, to define LGBT human beings as people whose humanity doesn’t count—at least, not the way my own humanity counts.

One blogger (again, someone I know, in that I grew up in the same town as did this General Conference delegate: flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood) who speaks of the tough, anguishing decision she had to make on 30 April actually notes that the focus of concern has shifted in recent years in the UMC from excluding openly gay people from ordination, to excluding openly gay people. Period.

That's quite an admission. I find it a refreshing admission, an honest one, all the more so because it is coming from a theologically trained United Methodist who proclaims herself to be a feminist theologian, but who represents what she clearly sees as the radical middle of the church. This admission has the ring of authenticity about it.

I can appreciate, then, that this delegate’s decision to hold the line was tough and anguishing, because she knew precisely what she was doing in holding the line: she was holding the line against LGBT brothers and sisters, not against doctrinal error or heterodoxy. She was telling these brothers and sisters that, sorry, the door is closed just for now. Come back later. Perhaps we’ll have a crumb or two for you then, when we've fed everyone else and assessed our resources. Only one table—can't feed everybody, you know.

In fact, how about coming back four years from now? Perhaps by then, we delegates will pay a less taxing price if we rethink the tough, anguishing decision to exclude you. Maybe then our fellow church members will no longer punish us so severely if we finally decide to stand up for inclusion.

Because the churches of Main Street USA are, at heart, culture churches, this is really the underlying logic of what is going on in the exclusion of LGBT persons, isn’t it? It’s too risky right now to stand against the radical middle. Many of us have careers to make, after all. We don’t get to one of the big “first” churches of urban areas—the power pulpits where our voice is beamed out across an entire state as "the" Methodist voice of the area—except by playing it safe.

We don't get the power pulpit unless we become skilled at calculating the next step in the radical middle and assuring that we're in line with that step. That's what the radical middle means, for goodness' sake! It means walking lockstep and never stepping out of line, baptizing our conformity as a holy tactic for holding the church together.

We don’t get those coveted episcopal appointments if we step out of line. We would have headaches to deal with if we came back to Main Street USA and told the folks of the radical middle that we had let the gays inside: battles to fight, letter-writing campaigns to combat, dwindling donations, threats of power mongers to make our lives miserable.

Now that the Supreme Court of California has knocked down that state’s ban on gay marriage, it’s interesting to compare the underlying logic of this civil rights decision with the logic underlying the choice of churches of the radical middle to continue excluding our LGBT brothers and sisters.

Yesterday, Maura Dolan of the Los Angeles Times published an interview with California Supreme Court Chief Justice Ronald M. George (www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-gay18-2008may18,0,4272300.story). George, a Republican who voted with the majority in the recent gay-marriage decision, speaks about how tough and anguishing the decision was for him to make.

Dolan notes that, as George pondered the decision, he kept returning in his memory to a trip he and his parents made to the segregated South years ago:

As he read the legal arguments, the 68-year-old moderate Republican was drawn by memory to a long ago trip he made with his European immigrant parents through the American South. There, the signs warning "No Negro" or "No colored" left "quite an indelible impression on me," he recalled in a wide-ranging interview Friday.

George’s conclusion about his decision to grant gay Americans civil rights, just as African Americans have been granted civil rights, is fascinating: "I think there are times when doing the right thing means not playing it safe."

“I think there are times when doing the right thing means not playing it safe.”

Churchmen (and churchwomen formed in the churchman's image) of the radical middle, do you hear what the California Supreme Court Chief Justice is saying? When African Americans were told that they were unwelcome at your table in the Jim Crow South, what did you do then?

Did you provide prophetic witness about how the church of Jesus Christ always welcomes everyone to the table, and most of all those who are excluded, demeaned, outcast?

Or did you play it safe? Did you play it safe while talking about the power of the Holy Spirit and conversion and bringing new life to the church?

Now that you have another opportunity to provide prophetic witness, how will you behave? How will you behave now, when you have confessed to the world the sin of your previous racism and misogyny?

Will you continue talking about the power of the Holy Spirit and conversion and bringing new life to the church, while belying that rhetoric with your ugly treatment of your LGBT brothers and sisters? Will you reverse the discrimination you currently practice only when society itself makes such discrimination unthinkable?

Or will you demonstrate the power of the Holy Spirit, conversion, and how new life is brought to the church by welcoming everyone to the table, and most of all those who are excluded, demeaned, outcast? Will you demonstrate this now when it still not entirely safe to make such courageous (Spirit-inspired) decisions?

Or will you once again repent only when it’s safe to do so?

What would Jesus do?