Connections: UMC Hardening vs. Queer People to Catholic School Barring Child of Gay Couple to Failure of Utah Bill Outlawing "Conversion" Therapy to "Pro-Life" Administration Caging Children

I offer you today these selections from items I have been reading lately, because — to my way of thinking, and I am hoping you'll agree — there's a common theme here. These stories interlink:

Telling My Story (Follow-Up to OUTWORDS Interview) 2

As I think about the interview that OUTWORDS did with me on Saturday, it's impossible to disengage what I said in the interview from the attack my relative made on me on my Facebook page a few days before the interview, in which she said to me, "You queers make me sick," and then went on to talk about Jesus and the bible. As embodied beings, we think within a real-world, social context that involves human relationships, and our thinking is shaped by our interactions within that real-world context.

Campaign to Assist Lucie's Place and Mission for Homeless LGBT Youth Raises $25,000

And we turned an antigay temper tantrum into a fundraiser for homeless #LGBT kids. @Martina http://t.co/VXlvrgGvWo pic.twitter.com/mgvg7ULWMn
— Scott Wooledge (@Clarknt67) November 28, 2014

Thanksgiving As Giving: Recommending to You Today a Local Group Supporting LGBT Youth

You should rather open your hand, willingly lending enough to meet the need, whatever it may be (Deuteronomy 15:8)

For those celebrating a holiday centered on thanksgiving today (and I realize that much of the world isn't in that category), here's a story that may be of some interest — since giving thanks is about giving first and foremost. It's by giving to others that we open the spaces in our hearts and lives that enable us to be thankful, it seems to me.

Somebody Is Responsible: National Day of Silence to Combat School Bullying

And because today is GLSEN's annual Day of Silence to combat school bullying, I'm going to reissue this post from a few days ago, in observance of the Day of Silence:

Courtesy of Jim Burroway at Box Turtle Bulletin (here), an important CNN video by Anderson Cooper about school bullying . . . .

The video links to the horrific recent story of the suicide of 11-year old Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover in Springfield, Massachusetts, and to an earlier story about the suicide of another American school boy, Eric Mohat in Mentor, Ohio (here). Both were taunted by classmates with slurs about their perceived sexual orientation, called gay and effeminate. In both cases, their parents reported the problems to school administrators and begged for help, without being heard.

And each time a horrific, painful story like these hits the news, I ask myself,

1. Who's responsible? Where do schoolchildren learn to use language like this, to taunt a peer for being gay?

2. Who's teaching our children? Who teaches children that being gay is something to be made fun of, the basis for ostracism and ridicule?

3. Who legitimates this behavior? Where are parents, as this is going on? Where are teachers? Where are pastors? Where are churches?

4. What are our colleges and universities doing to produce teachers and school administrators that work vigilantly to produce a safe, tolerant, non-homophobic environment in our schools? What are church-owned colleges and universities, which speak of their commitment to healing social wounds, doing to address these problems in their formation of future teachers?

Behavior like this doesn't happen in a vacuum. The children doing the taunting, making the lives of some youngsters intolerable, come from homes. They have parents. They have brothers and sisters. They have aunts and uncles. They have grandparents. They go to church, in many cases.

They certainly have teachers. It's happening at school, after all.

Someone is teaching these children to bully. And that someone is responsible for the death of someone else's son or daughter. And someone is standing by in silence doing nothing as these lessons in bullying are being passed on within families and on the playground.

Someone is standing in front of a college classroom or running a college and turning her head away as story after story breaks of suicides of gay youths bullied in American classrooms. Someone is assuming it's somebody's else's problem, not hers, somebody else's child, not hers; assuming that someone else can take the political heat for standing up and doing what is right, making the hard decisions to teach future teachers that bullying based on sexual orientation is not okay.

Someone is standing in a pulpit and pounding that pulpit Sunday after Sunday and legitimating hatred of his brothers and sisters who happen to be gay. Someone standing in the pulpit is allowing his parishioners to go home with the message that it's not only okay, but holy, to persecute those who are gay.

This won't stop until all those someones own their responsibility for these unnecessary deaths of precious, talented young people. It won't stop until we follow the philosophy of Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, Bethune-Cookman University, and recognize that every youngster we meet on the street is a potential Mary McLeod Bethune, a young person of incalculable worth, who deserves an education and a future full of hope.

Gay or straight.

Wayne Besen: Words That Kill

Wayne Besen (here) on bullying of students identified as gay, and the suicides of some of these youth when schools do nothing to stop the bullying:

Equally tragic is that this problem is not considered a major story in the mainstream media. We are treated to countless hours of babbling baloney and blithering buffoonery ­ but the preventable suicide by an 11-year-old boy is considered an afterthought.

In my view, this tragedy should be on the front page of every newspaper in the nation.

And in the syllabi of college classrooms across the nation, particularly in education departments and especially in church-owned universities; and in the sermons delivered at every pulpit in the nation; and in the dinner-table discussions of families across the land . . . It is our problem, and we are responsible for its continued ugly intrusion into one life after another.

The Flaw in the Pottery: God's Entry Point

With this blog, it’s a daily challenge to stay focused. My focus is wide, and as a result, the blog seems to draw a disparate group of readers—for which I’m glad. As the list of topics I’m pursuing here (the list is on my profile page) indicates, I talk about spirituality and social activism, the religious right’s absurd pretense to own God, the injustice churches practice towards LGBT persons, bullying of LGBT youth in schools, and building a more humane society. I’m happy to talk with anyone and everybody about these and other topics.

The challenge I have in staying focused doesn’t have to do with the disparate topics I’m pursuing. It has to do with my commitment—to myself first of all, and then to readers—to focus on the truth. It’s so easy to get nudged away from that place inside ourselves from which any truth worth claiming springs. It’s easy to get drawn away from transformative truth, which is the only kind of truth worth writing about.

It’s easy to get disconnected. For a number of years, I meditated daily on one of my favorite phrases from E.M. Forster, his call to readers in Howard’s End to connect. To make myself hear that call, I painted Forster’s saying, “Only connect,” on the wall of my office, where I could see it scrolling like a rainbow above my computer every time I raised my eyes from the screen.

To me, the significance of the phrase has to do with inner life: we must connect inside ourselves. We must connect to ourselves. In a world of competing voices, each of which lays claim to our loyalty, we have to struggle to hear our own unique voice—which is, in the language of faith communities, the voice of God speaking in the depths of our conscience.

It’s not easy. It’s much easier to disconnect, to stop listening, to let the babble of voices all around us flow over us and lull us into complacency. In some ways, nothing in life is harder than listening to our own depths, connecting to them, living from them, speaking, writing, loving, ministering from them. But it’s worth the pain: the truth we offer others when we retain a vital connection to the voice that speaks truth in our own depths is uniquely powerful.

And we are lost when we stop connecting to our own depths, when we let other voices overpower the voice of conscience inside ourselves. Nothing has more claim on us than that voice of authenticity inside us—that is, we should never let anything establish a greater claim on us than the voice speaking in our depths.

I say all this in part as a challenge to myself as I undertake a new project, one that grows out of this blog. For some time now, I’ve been encouraged by a number of friends to turn several stories from my own experience into books. These are stories that have fallen into my hands by “accident,” and which others consider it important for me to tell. They are stories that connect to my own life.

I have resisted the encouragement to write about these stories. I have not made time in my life to write. I’m frankly afraid to write—in the concentrated, depth-connecting way a book demands.

And yet, it seems I have no choice. The encouragement just doesn’t go away. In fact, the more I blog and the more others read this blog, the more the encouragement pours in. And there’s that inconvenient, nagging voice inside that tells me I have to listen, since the persistent call of others for us to do something surely lays claim to our attention.

So this is an important week for me, because one day this week, I’ll spend time with someone who has some crucial pieces of information about one of the two stories about which I am being urged to write. In fascinating ways, all kinds of pieces of the puzzle keep emerging and falling into place, to make it possible—well, to make it imperative—that I pursue this story and see if I can find a voice to tell it. Doors have opened, beyond my imagining or control, and I seem to have no choice except to make my way through them.

I will be grateful to readers for holding me in the light as I set forth on this journey.

Speaking of readers, of the disparate group of folks who continue to nudge me to think and write, I have been remiss in not noting the support of Jason and Amanda Gignac, both of whom have mentioned this blog on their own wonderful blogs in the past several weeks. My list of e-friends has links to Jason’s blog “Moored at Sea,” which discussed one of my postings a few weeks ago, and to Amanda’s blog “The Ramblings of a Hopeful Artist.” Amanda recently mentioned Bilgrimage in a family blog she maintains, “Gignacery.”

As best as I remember, Amanda and Jason got connected to my blog discussion when I happened to mention Emily Dickinson in a previous posting. I have found their feedback challenging and refreshing. When I taught, one of the things that I valued most about the teaching experience was being forced to listen to what students thought I had said, to hear my own words from an entirely different perspective.

For anyone who interacts with thoughtful and engaged younger folks, dialogue is a constant experience of having one’s feet put to the fire—and that’s a good experience for someone who thinks he’s the teacher and the one to whom he’s speaking is the taught. It’s seldom that way. In fact, it’s usually the other way around.

I’m thinking of this today after I spent over an hour last night chatting online with one of my nephews. We are much alike—prone to give ourselves to passionately to a smorgasbord of causes, prone to promote our passionate causes vociferously, quick to think others haven’t heard us clearly enough.

When I learned recently that my nephew had been bamboozled (what, me impose my worldview on someone else? Never!) into choosing a third-party candidate in the coming elections, I went on the warpath. Politely, you understand, in that sly way Southerners always do within the family circle.

I began to bombard his brother, who’s away at school with him, with articles about how the party that wants to neutralize student votes in the coming federal election is funding the campaign to seduce college students into voting for the third-party candidate. I asked said brother to convey the information to my nephew, in a way that wouldn’t make him feel I was attacking him.

We saw each other this past weekend, my nephew and I, and, in retrospect, the encounter had a certain tension attached to it. The gathering was a celebration of sorts of my aunt’s 80th birthday. My oldest nephew also had three friends from grade school visiting him, one Indian and the other two Korean, and the youngest two nephews had one of their African-American friends with them, so it was both a birthday party and a United Nations gathering with a number of folks I had never met. Talking to new folks across cultural boundary lines requires skill. It also requires energy.

By the time the youngest nephew arrived at the dinner table, I was talked out. I am a Meyers-Briggs INFJ who feels totally at sea in any large gathering—too many people to attend to carefully, too many signals and too much information pouring in through my intuitive-feeling filters. I often withdraw into a kind of shell and let the extraverts and sensates, who don’t have to contend with all that emotional and intuitive “stuff” pouring in, carry the day.

Steve’s a sensate, by the way, and a thinker, though we share the introvert and judging characteristics. It’s interesting to compare our takes after a gathering. I’m always amazed that so much that seems crystal clear to me—so much that has flowed into my psyche through the intuitive-feeling side—just goes right over his head: who’s fighting with whom; who’s unhappy and why they are unhappy; why X said that zingy thing to Y, etc. On the other hand, he sees thing—sensate things—that are right in front of me and which I completely miss, because I’m too busy fine-tuning the feeling and intuitive channels on my receiver.

My hour or so of talking online to my nephew last night was instructive. I needed this reminder that young people see things we older ones miss, and that young folks can perceive our distraction as a sign of disinterest in them. It was important that I have this discussion—which got heated on the political front as well as the interpersonal one—on the very day I blogged about the need of churches to reach out to searching youth.

Those younger folks keep us older ones honest. The process of ministry and the process of educating are two-way streets, in which the minister must be ready to become the ministered to, and the teacher must be willing to be the taught. Churches engaging in youth ministry ignore these dynamics at their peril.

As I thank readers who seem to come to this blog from a number of disparate paths, I also want to thank Julie Arms for her comments on yesterday’s “Camp Out” posting. I appreciate the information that there are United Methodist readers circulating my postings. I had suspected this might be the case.

I’m also aware of some ELCA readers, whose interest in the blog I appreciate as well. Knowing that people within the faith communities don’t find my critique of the churches unredeemingly harsh, and knowing that I am somehow tying into a theological dialogue within various communities of faith, keeps me thinking and writing.

Last week, I had another reminder of the significance of continuing to speak about the issues I enumerated at the start of this posting, when a mother of a boy bullied in a high school, who is reading this blog, contacted me to ask for support. And—if I needed further confirmation of the importance of this project—today when I opened my email, I found an invitation to support the Trevor Project, a national project dedicated to combating suicide of gay teens (see www.thetrevorproject.org/home2.aspx).

Since this is one of those “to speak of many things” postings, I want to add some notes on a number of stories that have come to my attention recently. This past Sunday, a Catholic priest at the Newman Center on the University of California campus at Fresno, preached a courageous homily about the initiative to withdraw from gay Californians the right to marry—Proposition 8.

I first read about Fr. Geoffrey Farrow’s homily—in fact, I read the homily itself—on Pam’s House Blend blog yesterday morning (www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=7392). Since that time, I’ve noticed links to the story on a number of other blogs, including www.afterelton.com/blog/brianjuergens/catholic-priest-comes-out-against-proposition-8-comes-out-gay?&comment=55467, www.towleroad.com/2008/10/fresno-priest-c.html, and the “Deep Something” blog of my e-friend John Masters at http://deep.mastersfamily.org/2008-10-06/courage-in-the-face-of-hate. These postings link to an ABC news report of the story at http://abclocal.go.com/kfsn/story?section=news/local&id=6431105.

Geoffrey Farrow’s homily focuses on the choice of the Catholic bishops of California to support the proposition to withdraw marriage rights from gays. Not only have the bishops made such a choice, they are also encouraging all priests in California parishes to read pastoral letters supporting the bishops’ decision. It was an act of courage for Fr. Farrow to announce publicly that his conscience forbids him to support the bishops’ political initiative against the human rights of gay citizens.

In his ABC interview (in which he also made public his own gay sexual orientation), Fr. Farrow notes that we have an ultimate obligation to listen to and obey our conscience, since we will one day die and will then be asked by the Lord whether we lived in fidelity to our consciences. It is highly likely that Geoffrey Farrow will be severely punished by the church for following his conscience in this matter; in fact, news reports indicate he had already cleared his belongings out of his rectory yesterday and was staying with friends.

I happen to be reading Scott Pomfret’s Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (NY: Arcade, 2008) as this news breaks. Interestingly enough, just after reading about Geoffrey Farrow’s homily, I came across a passage in Pomfret’s book that lists seven American priests who have come out publicly as gay men in the period 1987-2006 (pp. 88-89). As Pomfret notes, many gay priests refuse to come out publicly since, “For many, coming out costs them dearly” (p. 89).

In a church in which a significant proportion of priests are gay, priests are expected to support and actually preach in favor of political initiatives that cause misery to gay human beings. That same church quickly retaliates against a priest who states publicly that he is gay (or a woman who is ordained), while shielding priests who repeatedly molest minors.

Something is rotten here, clearly. It is an act of astonishing cruelty for an institution that proclaims that every human being has fundamental rights and fundamental worth in the eyes of God to require its ministers to violate their consciences (and their own personhood) to pursue morally ambiguous—if not outright evil—political goals.

And, while one would like to imagine that such cruelty is confined to one particular church, my experience in United Methodist institutions has led me to see that the special kind of cruelty the churches reserve for gay individuals is hardly restricted to the Catholic church: it is apparent in many churches, where people who proclaim themselves to be followers of Jesus do not think twice about humiliating and violating the rights of gay human beings in ways designed to scar us decisively, who are the objects of this behavior. What was done to Steve and me at one of these institutions, by a good Methodist leader, was designed to hurt and to humiliate. And it did hurt and humiliate. And not one of the Methodist leaders sitting on the board of that institution has ever raised his or her voice against the injustice done to us.

Since I’ve mentioned Scott Pomfret’s book about growing up gay and Catholic, I want to close with a brief notice of one of the important themes of his book. Throughout the memoir, Pomfret draws on a theme of native American spirituality: he notes that native American potters often deliberately introduce a flaw into their pots, since it is through the flaw that creative energy enters the world.

Pomfret’s story focuses on the assortment of misfits with whom he has been associated as a gay Catholic who has sought to retain some connection to a church that bashes him: people who seem to belong nowhere, who find a place nowhere other than in the church. It is among these believers, with their conspicuous flaws, that he finds grace and welcome.

Among those who aren’t flawed—or those of us who like to believe we have no flaws—not so much . . . .

"Camp Out": Churches and LGBT Youth

This weekend Steve and I watched “Camp Out,” a 2006 documentary by Kirk Marcolina and Larry Grimaldi. The film tracks the experiences of a group of upper Midwestern gay and lesbian teens at a summer camp sponsored by the ELCA—the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.

I found the documentary fascinating; I recommend it to anyone working with adolescents. At the same time, I found aspects of the story disturbing. I’ve spent the weekend trying to put my finger on what bothered me about this movie.

On the one hand, it is absolutely wonderful that any church is providing a safe space to teens coming to terms with their sexual identities—a sanctuary in which to learn to accept and celebrate themselves, a secure space in which to ask questions, including religious ones, about their lives and futures, an untroubled place in which to form bonds with other youth who share experiences similar to theirs.

Because my current situation removes me from the young adults with whom I interacted in college teaching (and, in fact, I haven’t ever taught at the high-school level), I have to stretch myself to remember what growing up is like. The film began with brief biographical vignettes focusing on several of the teens who took part in the summer camp.

In almost all of these, the young woman or man interviewed speaks of having come out of the closet in early adolescence—at the age of 13 or 14. To me, that’s unimaginably young. It’s unimaginably young to have a firm grasp of something so decisive to one’s personhood as one’s sexual orientation.

And yet the data are there, and they’re solid: early adolescents, even children, now have an inkling of being gay or lesbian. The age at which such awareness breaks through, and at which youth begin struggling with questions of sexual orientation, is younger and younger. It’s far younger than it was when I was growing up.

And as I think about the differences, I’m aware that this disparity in my generation’s experience of coming out and that of the current generation of youth has everything to do with information. There’s simply far more information available today to youth about sexuality in general, about the presence of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons in the human community.

But this information—the prisms it provides for someone questioning her/his sexual identity at an early age to frame her/his experience—does not necessarily make the coming out process simpler for youth today. It can, in fact, do the opposite.

When an early adolescent begins to recognize that her attractions are not “normal,” and has a name to affix to these alternative attractions, the burden of coming to terms with the recognition can be well-nigh impossible to shoulder. It is one thing to sense at an early age that one is not “right” in the eyes of mainstream society. It is quite another thing to have a specific name to apply to the non-normative aspects of one’s personhood, and to learn that this name makes one a despised object in the eyes of one’s peers.

And this is a recognition that contemporary LGBT youth come to at ever earlier ages, just as they come to the recognition of their sexual orientations at earlier and early ages: I’m speaking of the recognition that one’s orientation is despised. Just as gay and lesbian youth today have access to a much deeper pool of information about sexual orientation than previous generations have had, so do their peers.

And those peers can use the information to torment, to cut the questioning youth out of the herd and attack him, to exclude and punish. They can and they do.

In such a world, it’s imperative that the churches do something. It’s imperative that they do something for these youth. And it is profoundly disturbing that, for the most part, churches are doing absolutely nothing.

At worst, they are reinforcing the attacks by encouraging these youth to seek reparative therapy or to “repent.” At best, they observe a stony silence that murders the hearts and souls of youth needing to talk about their struggle for identity every bit as much as any adolescent needs such dialogue to form a healthy adult identity.

So I’m bowled over—as a gay adult, an educator, a believer, I’m profoundly grateful—that the ELCA has provided a venue for gay youth to examine and celebrate their sexual identities. This is a ministry all churches ought to beproviding today. But it is a ministry that, to their everlasting shame, hardly any actually provide.

As one of the camp leaders, Rev. Jay Wiesner, who is himself openly gay, says at one point in the film, pastors who have a heart for these youth are sick and tired of seeing gay youth try to kill themselves. Rev. Wiesner says he is passionate about ministry to gay youth because he does not want to see another gay teen commit suicide—not a single one more.

One of the most moving scenes in the documentary captures an evening fireside gathering at which the youth sing a hymn called “Sanctuary.” I have to admit I don’t know the song, though the film suggests it’s popular in churches today.

The lyrics speak of both church and the indvidual believer as sanctuary. As the group of gay and lesbian teens gathers singing this song, one breaks into tears. She weeps bitterly while clinging to her friends, who comfort and minister to her in her sorrow.

It is impossible to witness this scene without thinking painfully of how gay and lesbian teens (of how gay and lesbian persons in general) struggle to claim any place at all in a church that calls itself sanctuary for all wounded children of God. It is not possible to witness this young woman’s intense grief without recognizing how savage are the wounds inflicted by church and society on gay youth—of the struggle of gay youth to feel any sense of self-worth, any sense of belonging, above all, in the church context, any affirmation at all from the church that they can be sanctuaries for the divine presence, precisely as they are. As gay or lesbian human beings.

In my recollection of the film, the preceding scene coalesces with another to form an inspirational diptych that is as central to the theme of sanctuary as is the scene I’ve just recounted. The second scene is a clip from the ordination of Rev. Wiesner to the Lutheran ministry in 2004.

As I compiled this blog entry, I discovered that there’s actually a website devoted to remembering this ground-breaking ordination: “The Extraordinary Ordination of Jay Alan Wiesner” at http://bethanyrev.home.att.net. As the website materials and “Camp Out” emphasize, the choice of Bethany Lutheran Church in Minneapolis to ordain an openly gay ministry candidate in 2004 was, indeed, extraordinary. This action contravened ELCA polity of the time; that polity forbade the ordination of an openly gay man who did not commit himself to lifelong chastity.

Not only was the choice of the church to ordain Pastor Wiesner extraordinary, but the ordination ceremony itself was equally exceptional. As the pastors gathered to lay hands on the ministry candidate surrounded him, the entire congregation got up and participated in the laying on of hands. To someone such as I, someone frequently disappointed by the churches’ inability to listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches today—particularly in the powerful voices of suffering brothers and sisters who stand outside church doors asking for bread when they have been given stones—the scene was engrossing. It brings tears to my eyes.

Obviously, this is a film I loved. I loved it because I celebrate the commitment of at least one church to live the church’s mission of providing a safe space to everyone in the world. I celebrate the commitment of one church to hear the Spirit speaking through the needs of LGBT youth today, and to offer sanctuary to these precious human beings who are so obviously in need of this particular ministry.

So what is the “on the other hand” that picks up on my train of thought in the second and third paragraphs of this posting? That’s harder for me to put my finger on. Obviously, part of what bothers me profoundly in this story is something I’ve already alluded to—the stolid refusal of churches to recognize the needs of LGBT youth, a refusal that has, as Rev. Wiesner rightly notes, life-and-death consequences for some gay youth.

How churches can think they are being church at all—in the most essential sense of that word—when they either shut out or remain silent about the gay and lesbian youth knocking at their doors, or about anyone in need knocking at their doors, is beyond me. I just don’t get it. I won’t ever get it.

But there’s more to my discomfort. That more has to do, I think, with the puerile way churches engage in youth ministry, period—ministry to both straight and (all too rarely) gay youth. Too much of the religious rhetoric in this film—the “official” rhetoric of ministers and counselors—was, frankly, cringeworthy. Amidst difficult adolescent struggles, youth, both gay and straight, are asking the churches for solid food. What the churches all too often offer is pablum, predigested sentimentality and wispy, vacuous theology.

I do recognize that it’s important to tailor religious (and other) messages to people’s maturity level. I’m not an expert in youth ministry, and I challenge myself, when I watch a film like “Camp Out,” to remember that some of the exercises that might strike me as a tad on the childish side may be effective ways of dealing with adolescents.

At the same time, I heard the youth in this film asking for more when they spoke outside the earshot of adults: for intellectually challenging and personally stimulating information, responses, dialogue sessions. All too often, they received, instead, canned, formulaic religious responses and encouragement to engage in meaningless diversionary rituals.

Why does this trouble me so profoundly? Both because it demonstrates the church’s inability to listen carefully to what a segment of its population—adolescents—really need, and because it suggests to me that churches in general are frozen in a kind of adolescence, in American culture. Working at church-owned universities, I’ve seen time and again how superficial ministerial initiatives to the young are—but also how superficial the church is in responding to all kinds of needs of the society in which it lives.

I have sat through session after session—particularly in United Methodist settings, but in Catholic ones, too—in which we sang, passed little notes with covenantal promises around, picked up special rocks and dropped them into bowls along with those promises. And nothing changed. Because the rituals were empty and meaningless, exercises in making us feel good when all of us knew darned well that they meant nothing and would change nothing.

Because those mounting these exercises in futility don’t intend for the exercises in futility to mean anything or to change anything. When the retreat is over, the same power will reside in the same hands (at the top, in the hands of the grossly overpaid church-affiliated administrator who makes life-and-death decisions about the lives of personnel under him or her, with no recourse at all to those little slips of covenant promises or those little rocks in the bowl). In retreats of this ilk, we knew not only that any covenant promises any of us made to one another meant not a hill of beans in the dog-eat-dog world of professional life: we also knew that the church-protected administrator at the top of the heap was perfectly capable of taking what we wrote on those slips of paper and using it against us, if we were not careful. With no regard at all for the covenant promises she or he had made in the retreat context.

Church needs to mean more. It needs to offer more. A big part of what youth in general are struggling through in adolescence—and gay youth in particular—is the recognition that adults are all too often phony, empty, hypocritical, ill-informed and yet oh so certain of what we think we know. For the church to offer these youth slips of paper to pin on crosses and burn them, fake baptisms in a lake to remind them of their official baptism, stones to pick up and put at the foot of the cross, is just insulting—as it is insulting for the same churches to offer those who work in their employ the same nonsensical smarm at retreats.

People—adolescents included—are hungry for authentic human encounter, in which those meeting each other at, say, a retreat, are encouraged and helped to let the guard down, to speak from the heart. People are hungry for meaningful dialogue about theological and moral issues, not insipid inspirational pap. People want to know that having something to do with church makes a real difference and not a pretend difference in every aspect of their lives, their economic and professional lives included. People want church and church-sponsored institutions to be safe places, sanctuary—not to promise sanctuary when they have absolutely no intention of offering it.

That’s my grousing about this movie. I love the fact that this particular church group is offering sanctuary for LGBT youth. I can’t overstate my praise for this courageous decision. At the same time, I’d very much like to see the offerings of churches in general to youth in general broadened and deepened. I’d like to see them be meaningful. And real.

I’d like to see churches be meaningful and real, for a change.

Remembering Larry King on Anne Frank's Birthday

I went to bed yesterday evening wondering what is happening with the story of Larry King. He’s the fifteen-year old boy shot in the head in Oxnard, California, on 12 February this year. Because Larry King was openly gay, the classmate who killed him has been charged with a hate crime.

And then today, when I awoke and perused several blogs, I noticed that Waldo Lydecker’s Journal (http://waldolydeckersjournal.blogspot.com) is reminding us that today would be Anne Frank’s 79^th birthday, had she not died in the Holocaust.

Remembering: I’ve talked previously on this blog about how many religious traditions, including Christianity, incorporate the theme of remembrance into worship. To remember is, in the literal etymological sense of the word, to “re-member,” to put back together, to keep alive by bringing the pieces back together in some living way that commemorates the person being remembered.

Do this in memory of me: the central Christian ritual of the Lord’s Supper focuses on re-membering Christ, on breaking bread and wine to bring back together the pieces of Jesus’s life and ministry, his life broken and poured out for others, his ministry of constant self-giving to others. The link I probed in a recent posting between Communion and communion, between the ritual sharing of the Lord’s bread and the daily sharing of bread with each others, holds true as well for re-membering: we cannot adequately remember Jesus and the significance of his life if we do not commit ourselves to re-membering the body of Christ. We commit ourselves to be in communion as we receive Communion. If we do not do so, we betray the fundamental meaning of Communion.

Anne Frank was fifteen when she was murdered, just as Larry King was. We are able to remember her, to put the pieces of her life back together and allow that life to continue to move generations of people who live after her, because she refused to succumb to the verdict of those who told her that, as a Jewish girl, she was worthless.

Anne Frank defied that verdict by writing. Her diary says, “Who would ever think that so much can go on in the soul of a young girl?” When we read her diary and think of what happened to her—of a brilliant young intellect snuffed out by hate—it is impossible not to wonder about all the others whose voices we do not hear, since we do not have artifacts by which to remember those young lives. This recognition compels us to try to remember young people like Anne Frank and Larry King, since in their cases, we at least have something to go on in re-membering the pieces.

In the case of Larry King, we have some very precious pictures, the testimony of friends and family members, who remember him as a loving, creative young man of great promise. We commit ourselves to keep remembering. And in doing so, we commit ourselves to follow the advice of Anne Frank, who noted, “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”

To remember Larry King, to remember Anne Frank, is to commit ourselves to building a world in which hate is a less alluring option than struggling together in solidarity for the good of all.

School Bullying: We Have Met the Bully; He Is Us

“Truth that makes a difference,” I wrote in my last blog entry. That’s the kind of truth I’m interested in discovering on this blog pilgrimage. That kind of truth requires doing battle—with oneself, first and foremost, so that one keeps pushing to expand one’s horizons when the human impulse is to close in on oneself and become comfortable with the familiar, with the well-worn little truths that comprise one’s grab-bag of certainties.

Discovering truth that makes a difference also requires collaborating with others who are battling for the truth. Truth is not just out there, to be plucked, like a fruit ripening on a tree. Truth has to be searched for and found. It has to be made. It has to be struggled for. Truth that makes a difference is the goal of dialogic exchange in which a community of truth seekers struggle together for the truth. Truth that makes a difference is agonistic: it is found at a certain cost, the cost of challenging the purveyors of misinformation that passes for truth in any society, the cost of struggling with oneself, and the cost of forming bonds of trust and collaboration with others.

Finding that kind of truth in the world in which we live is not easy. For one thing, many forces collude to rob us of the power of solidarity. Believe it or not, there are those—many “those”—who do not wish for us to find the truth. There are many power brokers for whom the solidarity of truth-seekers, the formation of communities of discourse seeking together the truth that makes a difference, is extremely threatening.

These power brokers do all they can to distort plain truth, so that the quest for truth is always fractured, always across a terrain full of crevices and boulders, never simple. They do all they can to sow seeds of suspicion among those who would, in the natural course of things, benefit from seeking together the truth that makes a difference. The power brokers who wish for the world to remain the same (since they benefit from how things are currently arranged), who try to stand astride history and shout stop—these power brokers do everything in their power to thwart the formation of communities of solidarity that band together to engage in a shared quest for truth that makes a difference.

I have been thinking about truth, solidarity, community, and social transformation lately, against the backdrop of questions about how to address school bullying. Even that conversation, about what seems such an obvious need, an urgent need, is fraught with complexity because of the inability of many of us to find common ground regarding issues of gender and education. The plain truth—that children ought not to be beaten into submission or to have their futures mortgaged because they do not conform to preconceived societal expectations about gender behavior—even this plain truth is not plain to many folks, because of political currents that have twisted and distorted our social lenses about gender roles and about the goals of education.

To be specific: I have been listening to responses of people in my own area to the bullying of Billy Wolfe in the Fayetteville, Arkansas, school system. And I have been dialoguing with e-friends who share my concern about school bullying. As I listen and engage in dialogue, I notice some key issues surfacing, which ought not to demand attention, but which have to be discussed, because the right-wing talk machine has been so successful for so long now in distorting the consciousness of Americans about gender issues and the education of our youth, that we cannot see plain truth, and cannot discover the truth that makes a difference, as we look at the phenomenon of school bullying.

Some of those to whom I have been listening lately are asking whether the phenomenon of school bullying really is any different now—any more pronounced—than it was in the past. After all, as they point out, in schools all over the world, bullying of the “weaker” by the “stronger” has been going on from time immemorial. Are things really any worse now? Isn’t the process of taking boys who are prone to wear their feelings on their shoulders and toughening them up good for everyone concerned—for society, which needs men to be men, and for the bullied boys themselves, since they will live in an adult world that expects men to be men?

It’s not that these assumptions are always vocalized outright in discussion of what happens to boys such as Billy Wolfe. But they are the kind of strong unexamined social assumptions that make addressing school bullying difficult in American culture today. These are the unvocalized justifications that many school administrators and some parents use to shrug off school bullying: it goes on all the time; it has always gone on; it’s salubrious practice for real life, particularly for the “too sensitive” boy. Lighten up. Boys will be boys. Don’t intervene in the benign social Darwinism of the school playground, unless you want to tip longstanding scales that keep our social mechanisms functioning, and cause social chaos.

My own take on the bullying problem is that it probably has always been there, but is more serious today for a number of reasons. First, there's the rise in violence in schools (and society at large), and the ready availability of weapons. Grudges that used to be settled by a fistfight are now settled with knives and guns. The growing tacit social acceptance of violence as a way to resolve disputes in adult life, as well as in the lives of the young, when combined with the availability of weapons and the willingness of school children to use them, raises school bullying to an entirely new level at this point in history.

Then, too, the Internet has made communication—including communication in which bullies egg each other on and organize to target an individual—frighteningly easier. As the story of Billy Wolfe (and other recent stories of school bullying) indicates, websites, email, and other tools of e-communication are now being used to make school bullying more “effective” by far than it ever could be in the pre-Internet age. Posting a child’s picture on a website and goading others to hate him allows more and more people to join in the blood-sport of chastising the “weak” link in social chains of power. It allows the bullying to become organized, to extend beyond schools into every area of a youth’s life. It produces a new level of refined cruelty, in which a taunt can pop up in an email at any time, or leap out from a webpage on which the bullied person clicks.

And, finally, I think that there's a heightened awareness of gender and sexual orientation issues, again, partly due to the Internet. Youth today are more aware of their sexual orientation or more willing to explore gender variance at ever younger ages. To a degree almost unimaginable to us who grew up in a world in which the flow of information was confined to print media or the relatively localized media of television and radio, the Internet allows for instant worldwide communication about issues of gender and sexuality that permits ready access to information unavailable to youth in the past.

For many of those who have a vested interest in seeing rigid societal thinking about gender roles shift, this heightened information flow has seemed promising. What I think many of us have not anticipated, however, is the effect of that information flow on the lives of youth exploring gender identity, in a world in which the same information flow permits those opposed to questioning of traditional gender roles to organize.

LGBT youth, and youth questioning traditional gender roles, are now in a double bind. In a way previously unimaginable, they have access to information regarding sexual orientation and gender issues never before so readily available to youth. They also have ready access to information about others who have fought through these issues and become role models for LGBT youth today.

But their bullies also have access to information that permits them to organize, to target, to extend the taunts and threats to every area of a youth’s life. LGBT youth today experience increasing backlash precisely because there is, at one level, increasing ease about coming out. The easier the process of coming out becomes—on the surface—the more difficult it simultaneously becomes, because of the intent of organized groups full of hate to counteract the easy transmission of information about gender and sexual orientation in the Internet age.

I speak deliberately of “organized groups full of hate.” The real bullies, the real villains in the school bullying tragedy, are not first and foremost the youth who kick, hit, taunt, or shoot. The real bullies are the parents, school administrators, church groups, bogus therapists, ex-gay ministries, the media, and manifold right-wing think tanks that disseminate ugly, false information about the gay “lifestyle” and about gender roles to youth inclined to bully.

The problem of school bullying won’t be resolved effectively until the real bullies are exposed and addressed. As Alice Miller’s stunning reflections on how Western culture treats youth note, we are a culture saturated with belief in our extraordinary concern for our youth, who at the same time constantly murder the souls of our young people. Miller’s life-long study of the societal issue of violence towards the young convinced her that the flip side of our sentimental belief that we do everything to protect the young is that we ultimately care very little about the well-being of youth. The too-much protestation in which we engage hides the sordid reality that we do not truly care a great deal about the well-being of our youth.

As a society, we have long been callous about acts of violence perpetrated against the young right in the family circle—the key locale in which young people suffer assault. We do very little to protect young people from what Miller calls “soul murder”—the death of hope, of belief in oneself and one’s potential, the belief that one’s life counts and will make a difference in the world. Miller concluded, after years of exhaustive psychotherapeutic research, that even when youth are not physically assaulted in our culture, their souls are often subjected to murder, because we do so little to safeguard and cultivate the souls of the young.

As an educator, I have become increasingly convinced that something is very awry in our educational system, and that this dislocation of the goals of our educational system is intimately related to the murder of the souls of our youth. We do a decent enough job (in some cases, in some areas, depending on income levels and social status) of educating young people’s heads. We do a dismal job of educating their hearts, of cultivating their souls.

We cannot, in fact, cultivate the souls of youth when we do not cultivate our own souls. I am not talking about the soul here in classic religious terms. I am talking about what is inmost in a human person, what makes that person tick, about what shines forth inside a human being to make that person different from any other human being.

Though for some people this language has specific religious reference, for others it is a useful way to describe humanistic goals without reference to a specific religious tradition or any religious tradition at all. The language of soul need not be left out of our school system and our educational objectives on the ground that it has religious roots. It is a language that is also spoken by those who want to build a better world without necessarily adverting to religion at all.

Our educational system cannot speak the language of soul, or address the murder of the souls of our youth, or stop the problem of school bullying, because our educational leaders themselves too often lack soul. I have thought this for a long time, as an educator. I thought about this problem of lack of soul with a renewed interest yesterday, as I read Patrik Johnson’s article “Rise of the ‘Rock Star’ School Superintendent" in the Christian Science Monitor at
www.csmonitor.com/2008/0331/p01s03-usgn.html.

Johnson reports on a troubling phenomenon in American education today: the ascendancy of a generation (and class) of highly paid bureaucratic “educators” who administer schools, but who have little apparent interest in or understanding of education itself, and of the classic humanistic goals of education. The name of the game in American education today is, frankly, to beat the testing game. Schools—at every level, from kindergarten through higher education—must demonstrate tangible results in the form of test scores.

This impulse in American higher education has resulted in a system of scamming by which schools do all in their power to up test scores, without caring much about what students actually learn—or about who students become, in the educational process. Even worse, the need to scam results in the hire of more and more educational administrators who are, frankly, simply, appallingly soulless.

These administrators thrive in climates in which they can balance fiscal account books, even when doing so requires the same scams that delude people into thinking that test scores are rising. They thrive in climates of obfuscation of the truth, of half-truths, of deliberate lies to governing boards that are, increasingly, comprised of hard-nosed business leaders and not educators.

These “educators” are also highly paid, disgracefully so. The Monitor reports on one candidate for a position in a suburban Atlanta school system, whose demands prior to hire include not merely a very cushy salary (many times more than a teacher is paid), but a Lincoln town car, a chauffeur, and a personal bodyguard.

I speak of what I know. I speak of what I have seen and heard with my own eyes and ears.

I know these “educators.” I have had to interact with them. I have tried to talk to them about educating youth, about shaping the character of future leaders, about cultivating the soul of youth. I have had no success in reaching these “educators.” Their interest is not in the soul. They are tone-deaf to the language of soul and character.

The increasing prevalence of these “rock-star” educators throughout the American system of education points to problems with the system itself—which is to say, problems with us. The Monitor article quotes Walter Fluker, executive director of the Leadership Center at Morehouse College in Atlanta, regarding what I am identifying as a loss of soul in American education today. Fluker says, "Leadership always is symptomatic, a warning sign of what's happening at deeper and more fundamental levels.”

I conclude from this observation that if the scam artists who are increasingly the rock-star “leaders” of our educational institutions thrive, it is because we allow them to thrive. The problem is us. We are the problem. We do not value our own souls or the souls of our youth.

Until we do so, we will not successfully make our schools places in which the souls of children—and the bodies of youth deemed gender-inappropriate—are safe from murder. We have met the enemy: he is us.

Week in Review: Equality Is a Moral Imperative

Another Friday. And wow. When I gathered material last night for my weekly Friday news round-up, little did I know how much the news sites and blogs would be popping this morning with fresh items worth mentioning.

Above all, the open letter Barack Obama issued yesterday to the LGBT community (and to all Americans, since we all suffer when any of us are oppressed) deserves attention. The full text may be found at today’s Bilerico Project Blog at http://www.bilerico.com/.

This statement is significant. It centers on one simple, stark claim: Equality is a moral imperative. The beloved community that constitutes America at its best is a community, rather than a collection of disparate individuals with competing interests, precisely because it regards equality as a moral imperative. The vision of American democracy at its best centers on the astonishing moral claim that all human beings are made equal by the hand of God and have an equal claim on the right to pursue their destiny without being fettered by the prejudice of others.

It’s interesting to me how this moral imperative seems to fall on deaf ears not merely among Americans to the right of the political spectrum, but also among Americans who identify as liberal. That is, it falls on deaf ears among liberals when the moral imperative involves LGBT Americans. It is still difficult for many liberals to hear the moral imperative to accord full human rights to gay human beings. It is still hard for many liberals to understand that standing in solidarity with LGBT Americans and working with us to eradicate the many barriers we experience to equality is a moral imperative involving all of us—not just gay people.

A case in point: the lively blog at my statewide “liberal” weekly newspaper the Arkansas Times. Yesterday, the paper’s editor Max Brantley excerpted Mr. Obama’s statement in a posting entitled “Today I Am an Obamaist": see www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog. The responses of bloggers to Obama’s statement have been astonishing. They’ve been deeply saddening.

There are, of course, the predictable wing-nut rantings and ravings: if you think Katrina was a disaster, just wait for what God will do to the nation when we let the mire and cess of queers rise to the top. What’s shocking to read, though, are not these predictable comments: what's shocking are the postings of self-professed liberals who say they had planned to vote Democratic in the coming election, no matter which candidate is chosen.

One poster says he will now change his vote to McCain. Many others chide Obama for having miscalculated politically. Some of these say that making this statement—that is, enunciating the clear moral imperative that binds us together as a beloved community—will drive centrist voters into the Republican fold.

The subtext of these comments is worrisome to me. For these "liberals," gay human beings are obviously still the Other. We who are gay are not the children, the brothers, the sisters of those who are content to see us still denied full human rights. We are clearly the poor unfortunates who should stand beside the table while they sit to feast, and be grateful when a crumb is dropped into our outstretched hands.

These “liberals” just haven’t yet gotten the message. They haven’t yet heard the moral imperative. The concerns—the lives—of gay human beings are somehow at a remove from their lives. Whereas they have no difficulty at all hearing the imperative for women or African Americans to be given a chance at a full human life, they have yet to hear that moral imperative when it comes to LGBT people.

And this in a state in which, a half century ago, most white people responded to the moral imperative to treat black citizens as fully human with the same timid truculence they now apply to that moral imperative in the case of their gay children, brothers, and sisters. Fifty years ago, it was politically unpopular—politically disastrous—to stand up and speak forthrightly about the full humanity of African Americans in Arkansas.

Today, we celebrate and admire those who had the courage to speak out. Those who vacillated, who sat on the fence, who calculated the political odds and did the expedient thing: their names are all but forgotten. They did not make the choice that moved our society closer to the vision of a beloved community. They deserve not to be remembered, frankly, because they obstructed rather than participated in history in the making, in the realization of the vision of the beloved community.

Speaking of remembering, a theme I have stressed repeatedly regarding gay youth like Lawrence King or Simmie Williams, whose lives were recently tragically cut short by hate crimes, this week’s Arkansas Times carries a story that has touched the depths of my soul. Leslie Newell Peacock’s “Stirring the Ashes” at www.arktimes.com discusses a horrendous event that occurred just outside Little Rock on 5 March 1959.

On that day, 21 African-American youth aged 13 to 16 died at a fire at the Negro Boys Industrial School. These teens were sleeping in a dormitory whose doors were padlocked on the outside. When a fire broke out in the adjacent chapel, they burned to death. Fourteen of the young men were so badly burnt that their bodies could not be recognized. They are buried together in an unmarked grave at a cemetery in Little Rock.

A number of these young men were placed in the Industrial School—a correctional institution for wayward black youth—on outrageously slim charges: e.g., for soaping windows at Halloween time, or for riding the bike of a white friend (with the friend’s permission). This story is a reminder of where we have come from in places such as Little Rock, when it comes to the rights of African Americans.

Just as we should not forget the names and lives of Lawrence King or Matthew Shepard or Simmie Williams, we must challenge ourselves to remember the names of Lindsey Cross, Charles L. Thomas, William Loyd Piggee, and the other young men who died in this horrible fire in 1959. The Arkansas Times article prints those names, and I, for one, will do my best to keep them in memory, as a reminder that the life of every human being counts, that the life of no one who dies tragically young due to prejudice deserves to fall into the darkness of forgetting: Equality is a moral imperative.

As I read this article side by side with the Arkansas Times blog regarding Mr. Obama’s statement yesterday—with the Cassandra-like moanings of liberals because Mr. Obama has chosen to do what is right if not politically expedient—I call to mind the Pete Seeger commemorative that Steve and I watched this past week on PBS. Since that special aired, we’ve been playing Pete Seeger’s protest songs over and over.

In a Carnegie Hall performance of that stirring anthem of the Civil Rights movement, “We Shall Overcome,” Seeger noted how much the youth of the Civil Rights struggle taught their elders. He notes that the verse, “We are not afraid,” was inspired by youths’ willingness to demonstrate fearlessly for equal rights, when their elders, both white and black, cautioned prudence and political calculation.

PBS’s choice to air this special now strikes me as fortuitous. We are at a similar turning point in our history today, with regard to the fundamental direction our nation will take. We are at a crossroads at which we must either choose to accord fundamental rights to LGBT Americans, or frankly admit that we have given up on the vision of a beloved community.

What I wish desperately to say to my “liberal” fellow citizens who are now wringing their hands about the unwisdom of Mr. Obama’s statement yesterday is, Equality is a moral imperative. I want to tell these fellow citizens that another death of any gay youth—the killing of a single other gay youth because he or she is gay—is unacceptable. We must make this a nation in which such deaths are no longer thinkable. These youth are not just the children of the biological parents who gave birth to them: they are all of our children; they are the children of you liberals who still hear the call to equality for LGBT citizens with deaf ears.

Today’s Towleroad blog contains a posting entitled “Ellen Degeneres on Lawrence King: We Must Change Our Country”: see http://www.towleroad.com/. This posting notes that on her show today, Ellen will issue an appeal for us to remember Lawrence King and to make what happened to this youth unthinkable in our nation in the future. Ellen will appeal to us to vote in the coming elections with this moral imperative in mind. The posting links to a clip of that segment of today’s “Ellen.”

And finally, I want to leave readers with a thought-provoking quote from today’s Christian Science Monitor. The Monitor carries an editorial today entitled, “What Is ‘Good Theology?’ ” The editorial excerpts a statement from Karen Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase, in which Armstrong defines what constitutes authentic theology in the religious traditions of the world. Armstrong states:

The one and only test of a valid religious idea, doctrinal statement, spiritual experience, or devotional practice was that it must lead directly to practical compassion. If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express this sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology.

The one and only test of a valid religious idea . . . is that it must lead directly to practical compassion. If only all of us could hear that moral imperative today. And, in particular, would it not be inspiring if the churches examined themselves on this point, and asked whether their proclamations about LGBT human beings lead directly to practical compassion. If they lead in some other direction—if, for instance, they foster ignorance or distortion of the real lives of gay persons, or if they fuel violence in any form towards LGBT persons—it seems the conclusion is inescapable: the churches are misrepresenting the authentic Christian tradition, when they use it to support callous or destructive attitudes towards gay human beings.

LGBT Visibility: Giving Witness

Today's AfterElton blogsite contains a posting by Christie Keith entitled "Inching Out of the Closet": see www.afterelton.com/people/2008/2/inchingout. Christie Keith makes an important point about visibility: she notes that studies indicate a strong correlation between the public's knowledge of a gay person--a real-life, flesh-and-blood human being--and increasing acceptance of gay people and support of our rights. As Keith says,

And that doesn't mean visibility to each other, but mainstream visibility. There is nothing more strongly correlated with increased support of gay rights among straight people, from marriage to adoption to opposing a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, than one simple thing: knowing someone who is gay.

Since this is a point I have made in a recent blog exchange at the National Catholic Reporter website, I'd like to lift part of a posting I made several days ago at that site to this blogsite. The person with whom I've been having a dialogue at NCR is a staunch Catholic. He argues that the best churches can offer LGBT people is tolerance, not acceptance.

He points to the "excesses" of the gay community, as exhibited in festivals like the Folsom St. Festival, as justification for the churches' judgment that openly gay folks are public sinners, and as justification for the disdain of mainstream America for LGBT people. Here's part of my reply to this blogger at http://ncrcafe.org/node/1337#comment-20878:

What I think I'd like to draw attention to as a way of moving the conversation beyond that kind of futile rebuttal is this: if we begin our examination of the place of gay folks in the church today with the preconceived notion that homosexuality is all about sex, is a notorious sin, and is a social problem whose public face is represented in carnivals, then we're going to see no problem at all in the church's bizarre (and, I argue, disordered) preoccupation with this notorious sin that is threatening social stability.

But there are a lot of other places we might begin the discussion. Rather than looking at clips of the Folsom St. parade, for instance, we might talk to some gay-lesbian family members or parishioners who have never been to a carnival parade in their lives. If we did that, we might find that the "public face" of homosexuality (to use your phrase) is no more salacious or wild than the public face of heterosexuality.

The majority of LGBT people in our society are leading the same rather mundane and boring lives as the majority of straight people. Most of us work, come home, watch t.v., have dinner, go to bed, and start the round the next day. We are no more concentrated in gay bars than straight people are concentrated in heterosexual watering holes. Many of us spend most of our time caring for family members. Indeed, most of us are actually married but living in the closet.

Which is to say, it's not all about sex. It's about love. It's about the everyday, about people right in my midst and yours who don't deserve to have "public faces" put on their lives--who don't deserve to be reduced to "lifestyle" tags, since we have lives. Get to know us--to know us as real human beings--and many of your preconceptions about our "lifestyles" may fall like scales from your eyes.

You say, "A gay couple is not comparable to a married couple, but to an unmarried one. Cohabitation between two homosexual men or women would be the same near occasion for sexual sin and the sin of scandal as between a heterosexual couple."

Why is this so, I wonder? If the church does not usually inquire into the living arrangements of unmarried straight people as a precondition to their receiving communion, and if it does not assume that two unmarried straight people of the opposite sex living together are necessarily having sex, why should it do so in the case of two gay people?

I would submit to you that right there is the heart of the problem: assumptions--and invidious ones--are being made about the lives and behavior of gay people that simply aren't made about the lives and behavior of straight people. What the church has wisely left to the private forum of the confessional in the case of single straight people, it does not do so today in its public utterances about and treatment of gay people.

This is unjust. And where there is injustice, people surely do have the right not merely to ask for but to demand acceptance.

To behave otherwise when one's basic human rights are violated and when one's very humanity is trampled on would be to collude with those who try to convince one that one's humanity is flawed or less worthy of respect than that of others. If one colludes with such forces, one undermines a very fundamental church teaching: namely, that all of us come from the hand of God as good, as worthy of respect, as having the same human dignity as anyone else, regardless of our skin color, our nationality, our income bracket, our gender, our educational level.

Increasing our visibility is all-important, if the churches and mainstream America are to “get it.” Making ourselves known as family members, neighbors, and friends is essential if the churches and mainstream America are to support movements to make the murder of gay youth unthinkable in the future. Precisely because the churches (and their mainstream supporters) continue all too frequently to reduce gay persons to stereotypes—homosexual sinners—it is crucially imperative that those of us who are LGBT and living in the midst of “ordinary” folks reveal ourselves, our lives, and humanity to those around us.

Certainly I would prefer to live quietly, without fanfare and self-disclosure. Life has not afforded me that opportunity, however, and I now choose to see the repeated disruption of Steve’s and my life together by gross prejudice of church folks as an opportunity to give witness.

I, we, are called to give witness. We witness to the grace in our lives, the unmerited and unexpected gifts that make our journey possible. We witness to the power of our shared love and of the love we see shared in a multitude of LGBT lives. We give witness to the mere, plain, simple, precious humanity of gay people everywhere.

We must do so, for the sake of LGBT youth. They do not deserve to be bullied, taunted, and scorned. The churches will one day be held accountable at the judgment seat of history for their collusion with the social forces that make such heinous crimes possible, and for their silence in the face of violence against LGBT youth. The churches will be held accountable by a God who despises injustice and abuse of the least among us.

It is time that those of us who are LGBT and who continue to maintain some hope, however tenuous, that the churches will live up to their calling to walk in the footsteps of a Lord whose love embraced everyone he met, speak out and call the churches to accountability. It is time for us to break silence. It is time for us to demand that the churches do so as well.

Shame

At last the mainstream media is picking up the Lawrence King story: NOT!

Huffington Post is reporting today that Anderson Cooper had announced that Monday night's CNN 360 show would run a segment on the murder of Lawrence King. In blog comments prior to the show, Cooper suggests that the bullying of this gay teen did not receive the attention it deserved from parents and school officials.

Cooper prepared a segment on the Lawrence King murder, which CNN then cut from last night's program, while running a segment on a boy singing in his underwear. More on this shameful story, along with a clip of the segment that was cut, may be found at

www.huffingtonpost.com/dipayan-gupta/cnn-cuts-gay-teen-killing_b_88595.html

In my blog discussions about gay issues at the National Catholic Reporter blogsite, I am learning quite a bit about some of the reasons underlying media avoidance of such stories, as well as underlying reasons for schools' refusal to address the problem and for the shameful silence of the churches.

One blogger with whom I've been in dialogue speaks of religious freedom--specifically, of the right of "Christians" not to accept LGBT people.

To which I wish to respond: religious freedom ends where hate begins. Religionists have a right to believe whatever nonsense they want, and that right should be respected. If members of a religious group want to believe that the moon is made of green cheese (and that God so made it 2000 years ago on the first day of creation), I'm all for the right to hold this belief.

What I resist and will keep resisting is the use of religion to support or foment hatred. In a civil society comprised of many different types of people, religion cannot be allowed to fray the threads of the civil social contract that holds us all together.

Another blogger at the NCR site resists the notion that youth can be identified as gay or lesbian at an early age in schools. In my view, this resistance is counter-intuitive. As the case of Lawrence King demonstrates, schoolchildren are often very quick to identify a classmate as gender-inappropriate and to harass that child precisely and solely for this reason.

Underlying the squeamishness of some citizens--and some church members--to entertain this possibility is, I would suggest, a fear that when those of us who are openly gay or lesbian report such experiences from our own younger years and ask for bullied youth to be protected in schools today, we're recruiting.

This strange fear on the part of the mainstream overlooks the reality that youth are, in fact, often identified as gay-lesbian or gender-inappropriate at an early age, and bullied for this reason. And when this happens, schools often do nothing at all to protect the tormented youngster. Parents sometimes even cheer the bullying, maintaining that they have a religious right to teach their children to oppose homosexuality.

And through it all, the churches remain silent. Children are being murdered in our nation, and the churches will not address the problem. This is shameful.

As I have testified in previous blog postings, as an openly gay educator, I myself experienced severe reprisal from a supervisor when I was charged with leading faculty in a project of preparing students for civic engagement. To be specific, I was punished for suggesting on a single occasion that faculty look at GLSEN--Gay, Lesbian, Straight Educational Network--as a resource for civic engagement. This was in a church-affiliated university that claims to deplore prejudice against gay people.

Why do I keep reporting this? Because it has to be said. Because mainstream media outlets collude with the churches in keeping silent.

Because children continue to be bullied and murdered.

And because, as a believer, I cannot remain silent and live with myself.