Florida's Dismal Record on Gay Rights Continues: Langbehn Case Against Jackson Memorial Hospital Thrown Out

And another update to a story about which I have blogged in the past—this one less happy. This concerns the story of Janice Langbehn and Lisa Marie Pond of Washington State. As my previous postings about the story note, while they were on vacation in Miami in February 2007, Pond collapsed and was rushed to Jackson Memorial Hospital.

Where, she reports, neither she nor their children were permitted to see her dying partner (and their mother) for hours, though she had her power of attorney to make medical decisions for Pond faxed to the hospital. Langbehn maintains that Jackson Memorial staff told her she was in an anti-gay state with anti-gay laws, and had no right to see Pond.

Langbehn filed suit. This week, Judge Adalberto Jordon of Federal District Court for the Southern District of Florida threw the suit out of court, maintaining that a hospital trauma center has no legal obligation to allow anyone to visit one of its patients. As the headline to Tara Parker-Pope’s account of this story at her New York Times blog suggests, this decision ought to concern anyone who might anticipate having a loved one in a trauma unit, since it implicitly denies visitation rights to anyone in Langbehn’s situation.

And as Emma Ruby-Sachs notes, this transfer of emphasis from the ugly homophobia Langbehn experienced at the hospital to a question of visitor rights in trauma units is also “an amazing after-the-fact revision of events, permitting the court to uphold discrimination even when the law does not do so.”

Andrew Sullivan speaks from the heart about this decision, and in doing so, certainly reaches my heart:

A gay couple can be together for thirty years and still be regarded as total strangers by their own government and by their own president and their own Speaker. They can be denied access to hospitals, thrown out of shared apartments if one of them dies, barred from the funerals of their spouses, and denied over one thousand federal benefits. They can be forced to testify against one another in court, or be forced to leave the country in order to have a stable home if one of them is an immigrant.

Such couples have to disguise their relationships when entering through immigration (as well as concealing HIV medications in their bags) for fear of being split up by immigration officers and forced to live abroad as so many now do. Imagine a straight married couple having to hide their marriage from the American government in order to avoid the risk of it being torn apart.

One major political party regards this kind of cruelty and discrimination as something so vital it wants to enshrine it in the federal constitution - a position championed by the last "compassionate conservative" president. And his successor pays lip-service in small gatherings of gay activists, takes their money and work and support but will not lift a pinkie finger to help. All the time he is firing gay servicemembers for the crime of being gay.

He may believe it is prudent to wait. That is his prerogative. It is my prerogative to call the first black president missing in action on the vital matter of a minority's civil rights.

Amen. There is something particularly anguishing about seeing such legal decisions handed down in the Obama era. And that anguish ought to reach more than gay folks, since the price this Florida judge is willing to pay to sustain his state’s homophobia is to undermine a right of all citizens to hospital visitation in cases in which a patient may be seriously injured and dying.

Mr. Obama and the Golden Rule: Morality Depends on Moving Beyond Words to Actions

I have persistently suggested that (e.g. here and here), by remaining silent regarding one of the key human rights issues of his presidency—the denial of rights to gay citizens in many areas of American life in general, and the denial of the right to marry in particular—Mr. Obama is eroding the moral foundations on which his platform of progressive change needs to rest, if it’s to be successful. And so I’m interested to read a number of recent articles whose analysis moves in a similar direction.

Commenting at Huffington Post on President Obama’s important Cairo speech this week, Aaron Zelinsky cites the following statement by the president:

There is also one rule that lies at the heart of every religion - that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. This truth transcends nations and peoples - a belief that isn't new; that isn't black or white or brown; that isn't Christian, or Muslim or Jew.

And hearing that statement (with which I wholeheartedly agree), I have to ask, “As the president makes this statement, does he mean to say that he would have done to himself what he continues to permit to be done to gay citizens of the United States, simply because we are gay?” If the president happened to be gay, would he want to be denied the right to serve his country in the military? Would he like to be devoid of any legal protection against discrimination in employment, housing, healthcare, in most states in the nation?

Would he rest easy with the denial of his right to marry the person he loves, to enjoy all the privileges and protections pertaining to marriage in our society? Would the president like to be told, when he begged to visit his dying spouse in the hospital, what Janice Langbehn was told at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami: that he could not see that spouse, because he happened to be in a homophobic state with homophobic laws? Would he like to be susceptible to violence solely because he was gay, and without any federal laws combating that violence, while laws exist to protect other targeted minorities?

Can one credibly say that one cherishes the rule that lies at the heart of all religions—do to others what we would have done to ourselves—when one has the power to speak and to act on behalf of many brothers and sisters whose lives are constantly affected by unjustifiable prejudice, and one does nothing? As Aaron Zelinsky notes, the president also cited the golden rule and Luke 6:31 in his Notre Dame speech.

But Luke’s gospel connects saying and believing to acting. Moral insight is inauthentic, it is meaningless, when it does not issue in action:

Here, Obama references Luke 6:31: "Do to others as you would have them do to you," which he also referenced at Notre Dame. Luke 6:49 is less supportive: "But he that heareth, and doeth not, is like a man that without a foundation built a house upon the earth; against which the stream did beat vehemently, and immediately it fell; and the ruin of that house was great."

Rachel Sklar makes the same point in another HuffPo post this week, this one discussing the president’s visit to Buchenwald. As she notes, the president’s appearance at this Nazi death camp site, and his unambiguous condemnation of anti-Semitic lies and Holocaust denial, was an amazing moment.

Sklar adds, however: “But moments must be followed up by more moments, and action.”

As Sklar notes, the brilliant Jewish thinker Elie Wiesel, who accompanied the president on his visit to Buchenwald, told Mr. Obama, "Mr. President, we have such high hopes for you... because you, with your moral vision of history, will be able and compelled to change this world into a better place." And the president replied, "I will not forget what I have seen here."

But what do these profound moral insights have to do with the world in which we live on an everday basis? What do they mean; what do they mean in the world beyond mere rhetoric? How will they issue in action?

Great. Awesome. Done. But now what? The Wiesel speech was all over the cable nets, and is burning up Twitter. The image of the kindly-faced elderly man with snowy-white hair blowing in the wind beside the solemn-faced U.S. President and German Chancellor was a great TV moment. But moments must be followed up by more moments, and action.

It is not enough to talk about human rights. It is not enough to bow to the grand aphorisms of the moral life and of human rights traditions. When one has the power to change things—the power to speak out, the power to set legislation into motion and to influence it, the power to abolish grossly discriminatory regulations with the stroke of a pen—and one does nothing, one is not reaching the threshold of an authentic moral life.

The test of the moral life is not what we say. It is what we do. The longer the president remains silent about one of the key moral challenges facing his presidency, the more he erodes the moral foundations on which his entire platform of progressive change needs to rest, if it is to be effective.

And what to make of the promises the president made during his campaign, which he now appears willing to break without any explanation at all? David Sirota asks that necessary question in a probing commentary at Salon this week. As Sirota notes, “It's true that politicians have always broken promises, but rarely so proudly and with such impunity.”

But. But,

We once respected democracy by at least demanding explanations -- however weak -- for unfulfilled promises. Then we became a country whose scorched-earth campaigns against flip-flopping desensitized us to reversals. Now, we don't flinch when our president appears tickled that a few poor souls still expect politicians to fulfill promises and justify broken ones.

The worst part of this devolution is the centrality of Obama, the prophet of “hope” and “change” who once said that "cynicism is a sorry kind of wisdom." If that's true, then he has become America's wisest man -- the guy who seems to know my kids will laugh when I tell them politicians and voters once believed in democracy and took campaign promises seriously.

Suggesting that others break promises, or that your predecessors have done so, is not good enough, Mr. Obama. We elected you because we hoped for better from you. We are a nation hungry for positive change, which puts the politics of cynicism behind us and places hope in the foreground.

And you are disappointing us.

As Jenna Lowenstein notes in an article at 365Gay this week, we are disappointed on moral grounds:

But what if instead of worrying about politics and power, Obama worried about moral authority? How he gained moral authority, how he can hold on to it, and how he can refuse to cede it in the face of small-minded bigots. Twice in the last few weeks, Obama has given speeches on the importance of remaining steadfast in our American ideals. First, when he announced his nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, Obama emphasized a message of equal rights and social justice. Then yesterday, he delivered a speech to the Muslim world, much of which emphasized the necessity of holding on to moral authority at all cost.

President Obama is a smart guy. He knows what he’s doing is based on political calculation and not idealogy [sic], and he knows that’s not courageous. As Andrew Sullivan put it recently (and it drives me crazy to quote Mr. Sullivan), Obama seems to be acting on LGBT issues with “the fierce urgency of whenever.” And that’s just not good enough.

As the religious right has long told us, it’s about morality in the last analysis. It’s about the moral foundations of our society.

Unfortunately, the religious right’s claim to speak with moral authority has been definitively exploded, and its pretense to be the moral voice of our society has been resoundingly rejected by the American voters, who recognize that the moral center of our society lies not in stigmatizing minorities but in building a humane society for all.

One centered on recognizing the rights of all—because that is what people do, when they do unto others as they would have done to themselves. In continuing to belie this central principle of the moral life through silence about discrimination to gay and lesbian Americans, and in continuing to do nothing at all to combat that discrimination when he has the power to do a great deal, the president is eroding the moral foundations of his platform of progressive change, and is setting his presidency on a precarious footing.

An Update to Janice Langbehn's Story: Seeking a Hearing for Justice in an Anti-Gay State

I have been following the latest developments in the story of Janice Langbehn and Lisa Marie Pond with great concern. I blogged about this story almost a year ago (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/02/manly-men-and-homophobic-churches.html).

In February 2007, Langbehn and Pond were in Miami from Washington State with three of their children, headed for a cruise vacation. Pond collapsed and was rushed to Jackson Memorial Hospital. When Langbehn asked to see her life partner, she was, she reports, refused that right. Hospital staff told her she was in an anti-gay state with anti-gay laws. The hospital did not relent even after she had her power of attorney to act on Pond’s behalf faxed to them. Langbehn was allowed to see the comatose Pond only as a priest administered last rites.

Langbehn has filed a federal suit against Jackson Memorial, claiming emotional distress and negligence. Last week, a number of websites reported that the hospital is now fighting to have the suit dismissed on the ground that the hospital has no obligation to allow patients’ visitors (www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2009/02/07/8652#comments and www.miamiherald.com/277/story/892447.html).

This story grabs my heart-strings for a number of reasons, all rooted in my own personal experience. I state that disclaimer here, in case there are readers who find it off-putting when bloggers comment on a case like this by reference to their own experiences. For readers with such a penchant, please beware: much that I say from here on out in this posting will reference my own experiences.

As I have noted in a previous posting (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/05/healthcare-equality-index-for-lgbt.html), in my years with Steve, he and I have had a number of eye-opening experiences dealing with hospitals and care facilities as a committed openly gay couple. Since I have recounted those experiences previously (in the posting just cited), I will not rehash them again.

What I do want to say here, though, is that these experiences have made me extremely leery of medial professionals in general. Most medical professionals I encounter are marvelous human beings without a drop of prejudice in them. I know from first-hand experience, though, that it is possible to encounter troubling, demeaning, life-disrupting prejudice as a gay person seeking medical treatment, or supporting a partner or a family member who is receiving medical care. And that makes me live in fear of precisely the kind of thing that happened to Janice Langbehn and Lisa Marie Pond.

It should not be this way. But it is. And it remains this way in far too many places in this nation. What happened to Langbehn and Pond can happen to other couples. No one who is gay and/or who supports gay persons and their rights can afford to be oblivious to the possibility that a gay person or gay couple will receive second-class treatment by the medical profession, in many places in the United States. We need to work to make this possibility impossible in the future.

I also connect to the story of Janice Langbehn and Lisa Marie Pond at another level. As I have noted in several postings on this blog (including the one cited at the start of this entry), Steve and I lived in Florida for a year and own a house there. We bought that house on the basis of promises of job security made to us by an employer who then broke those promises, leaving us with a second mortgage that we can afford to carry only by depleting our savings, since we do not have sufficient monthly income to cover a mortgage we assumed solely because we believed promises made to us that turned out to be false.

Again, I have told that story previously, and won’t repeat it here. What I do want to note, though, is a troubling pattern of the use of courts and legal tactics to bully gay people who challenge unjust treatment—a pattern of revictimization in which the very protest of an individual who has received grossly unjust treatment is then used as the basis for further grossly unjust treatment. That is a component of the Langbehn-Pond story. It was also a component of Steve’s and my story in Florida. It is perhaps not accidental that both of these stories played out in Florida.

I am struck by the fact that, having already violated Langbehn’s human rights, and having trampled on her very humanity, Jackson Memorial is now turning around and seeking to use court power to have her suit dismissed. It also concerns me that Jackson Memorial is a teaching hospital for the University of Miami. What kind of example does the behavior the hospital exhibited towards Langbehn in a serious personal crisis set for the students it teaches? And what kind of example—what kind of ethical example—does the attempt to use the courts to bully her into silence now teach its medical interns?

I zero in on that question of the example we give to those we teach, because it is one of the many unanswered questions Steve and I also have following our experience with a church-sponsored university in Florida. There, too, the violation of our humanity was a stark example for any of the school’s students to see—an example of unethical behavior that totally contradicts what the school says it stands for. It was a lesson in what the institution really believes, despite its rhetoric about social justice and compassion for the downtrodden.

And there, too, the initial assault on our humanity was compounded by the use of legal threats designed to silence us. Within days after I had signed a severance agreement from the university, I received a letter from a law firm in San Francisco, informing me that the agreement had been canceled.

The law firm specializes in defending corporations and universities when these institutions have given the appearance of discrimination. It strikes me as . . . interesting . . . that law firms exist solely to defend institutions that have engaged in prejudice from being held accountable for their prejudice. It seems bizarre to me that there are lawyers willing not only to defend institutions that engage in gross prejudice, but to help those institutions then turn around and use bullying tactics to silence those calling the institution to accountability for its injustice.

The letter I received from this law firm made an interesting (and very malevolent) claim. Because that claim has pertinence to Janice Langbehn’s story—and to the situation of all gay people living in Florida—I want to discuss it here.

The letter informed me that the severance agreement I had made was being canceled because I had informed my spouse—namely, Steve (he was named, and the term “spouse” was used)—of the circumstances of my termination. Because he had told others of those circumstances, and he had the legal right to do so since he had not signed a termination agreement, my severance payments were being canceled. Never mind that Steve was actually present when I was terminated, and reported what he saw with his own eyes—e.g., the use of four armed security guards to lock me out of my office and escort me off-campus. By a Christian institution, one that claims to live according to United Methodist Social Principles.

Note what this letter was doing: as hospital staff told Langbehn at Jackson Memorial, Florida is an anti-gay state with anti-gay laws. Florida is, in fact, a state in which there is no recognition of gay marriage or even of civil unions, except where (in rare cases) local communities or employers recognize such relationships.

But in that anti-gay state with anti-gay laws, it is perfectly possible for a discriminatory employer to twist the relationship of a committed gay couple—a relationship afforded no legal rights and protection at all—against the gay couple and use that relationship as the basis for an action that compounds one discriminatory act with another. This twisting of the situation in which we found ourselves as a gay couple in Florida—a situation with no rights at all—as the basis for attacking us further, after we had been kicked to the curb, was particularly malicious and cruel. It was designed to hurt at a deeply personal level.

I am harping on this experience because it points to one of the primary challenges that gay folks discriminated against in states like Florida face, if they seek legal recourse. As the laws are now set up in states like Florida, they make it almost impossible for gay people to obtain a hearing when they seek basic justice after they are treated inhumanely by employers, hospitals, etc. All power is in the hands of the employer or the institution, and if the employer or institution happens to be homophobic, it is entirely possible to twist the law to compound the very discrimination about which a gay person who has experienced discrimination is complaining.

Steve and I did not succeed in finding any legal way to challenge what was done to us, because we were advised by more than one credible counselor that, in a state in which the power is totally in the hands of an employer and a person can legally be fired for being gay, and in which homophobic prejudice is deeply entrenched, we would likely find ourselves even further bloodied after a futile court battle. We were told that, if the institution for which we had worked had shown no qualms about using homophobia to justify its firing of us, and had gone to the length of having a law firm accuse us of being spouses who had violated a legal agreement binding on spouses, we could expect even stronger assaults from that institution in court.

With juries who would almost certainly side with anyone attacking a gay couple . . . . And with no assurance of legal or financial support from any organization defending human rights or the rights of gay couples, as we struggled to pay an extra mortgage we had assumed because of false promises made to us by this institution, whose top executives knew of our financial dilemma—had, indeed, created it for us . . . .

In such situations, nothing will change until the laws themselves change. And that will not happen until those who make the laws and use them to justify discrimination are challenged by citizens who want to build a more just and humane society. I admire Langbehn for fighting. She deserves our support. She deserves the support of anyone in this nation who believes that every human being deserves fair and unbiased treatment by medical professionals. She deserves the support of anyone who sees that it is completely inhumane to keep a life partner from spending the last moments of her partner’s life with that partner.

But she is fighting an uphill battle in an anti-gay state with anti-gay laws. Until those of us concerned about horrible injustices like this work to see that gay people and gay couples have legal protection from the kind of discrimination Janice Langbehn and Lisa Marie Pond endured in Florida, these situations will continue to happen in the many places in our country where prejudice is not only celebrated but legally enshrined.