Making the Connections: Racial Harrassment, Violence against Gay Youth

The Arkansas Times is reporting today that some noble citizens of my state provided quite a welcome to electric workers from out of state who came to Arkansas last week, leaving behind their families, to help restore power to these citizens
(www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog/2009/02/good_samaritans_go_home.aspx). This happened in north Arkansas, in Madison Co. As they worked to restore power, crews of workers from Pennsylvania, many of them African-American, were harassed by local teens shouting insults, waving rebel flags, and, in some cases, weapons.

Charming behavior. It puts me in mind of what happened to Billy Wolfe in his high school in Fayetteville last year, close to where these electric workers were harassed (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/03/easter-church-welcome-spaces-and-school.html and http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/04/internet-and-school-bullying-billy.html). I’ve been thinking of Billy Wolfe these days because yesterday was the anniversary of the murder of Larry King, and new details are coming out about that murder which challenge a story that some reporters tried to push following King’s murder: namely, that King had elicited violence by flirting with the boy who killed him, Brandon McInerney.

Timothy Kincaid at Box Turtle Bulletin posted an article about this yesterday (www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2009/02/12/8766). He notes media reports and court documents that tell a very different story: one of repeated harassment of King by McInerney, with taunts about King’s sexual orientation and threats of violence.

Racism, homophobia: all part of a larger picture, in my view. As Beverly Wildung Harrison’s classic collection of essays Making the Connections (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985) powerfully demonstrates, there are compelling, unavoidable links between racism, militarism, homophobia, and misogyny. All derive from a worldview in which men—straight men—take for granted that they have the unquestioned right to rule everyone else and to punish those who will not submit to their rule.

And the social toxins we see at work in the threats issued against African-American workers in north Arkansas this week, and the repeated beatings of Billy Wolfe by classmates and the murder of Larry King last year, will not be expelled until we deal with that worldview and the price the entire world pays as long as it is permitted to prevail. I wonder why I imagine those teens waving rebel flags and shouting racial epithets in Madison Co., Arkansas, as male youths?

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.

Remembering Larry: National Day of Silence

Today is the national day of silence to combat bullying of LGBT youth in American schools. This year’s event centers on remembrance of Lawrence King, a fifteen-year old gay youth murdered in February by a classmate in their Oxnard, CA, middle school (www.rememberinglawrence.org).

In recognition of this day of silence, and in memory of Lawrence King, I would like to offer the following quotation from Mary Doria Russell’s book A Thread of Grace (NY: Ballantine, 2005):

The Holy One has made us His partners, the sages teach. He gives us wheat, we make bread. He gives us grapes, we make wine. He gives us the world. We make of it what we will—all of us together. When the preponderance of human beings choose to act with justice and generosity and kindness, then learning and love and decency prevail. When the preponderance of human beings choose power, greed, and indifference to suffering, the world is filled with war, poverty, and cruelty. Bombs do not drop from God’s hand. Triggers are not pulled by God’s finger. Each of us chooses, one by one, and God’s eye does not turn from those who suffer or those who inflict the suffering. Our choices are weighed. And, thus, the nations are judged (pp. 158-9).

“God’s eye does not turn from those who suffer or those who inflict the suffering”: this is an affirmation of Judaeo-Christian faith that I find almost impossible to believe. The world in which we live is so full of suffering, so much of it unmerited suffering inflicted on one human being by another human being, that it becomes a daring act of faith to believe that God sees, God hears, and God cares.

And yet we must believe this, if the world is to make any sense at all. And believing, we commit ourselves to making a difference, no matter how difficult the struggle against silence, ignorance, malice, the human propensity to dehumanize those who are Other.

Larry King, requiescat in pace. Your life has made and continues to make an incalculable difference.

Breaking Silence, Rolling the Stone Away

I’m thinking about silence today. My email this morning contains an announcement from Ashon Crawley of Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network (GLSEN) regarding the National Day of Silence that will be observed in American schools this year on 25 April in memory of Lawrence King.

This annual GLSEN-sponsored observance is an effort to address school bullying, particularly violence in schools fueled by prejudice against those tagged as LGBT or gender-inappropriate. As I’ve noted before on this blog, in conjunction with the LOGO network, GLSEN has produced an important video announcement about this year’s National Day of Silence and Lawrence King’s murder. For those who haven’t yet viewed this resource, it’s at www.dayofsilence.org/content/video.html.

Ashon Crawley’s email announcement notes that silence takes many forms. It can be the kind of silence that is golden, the moment when we let out a deep breath and relax to take in the beauty of a landscape.

Alternatively, silence can be the deformative silence that is imposed on persons and groups of people by those who do not wish to hear the words a person or a group needs to speak in order to assert humanity, or to combat social norms that deform the person or group. As Crawley notes,

But there are times when silence is not sweet, times when silence isn’t chosen but when it is forced upon us. There are instances when silence bespeaks unhappiness. When a person or group is silenced, the choice to speak is stolen. Silencing of others is an act of coercion, making tangible inequitable distributions of power. So though there may be times when silence is golden, there are many other instances when silence is traumatic and terrifying. LGBTQ people are quite familiar with being silenced: having our lives questioned to the point that we fatigue from speaking; sometimes, literally lacking the words that convey our sense of being to the world; instances where our voices are effectively cut out of conversations.

LGBTQ people are quite familiar with being silenced. We are indeed. I’ve reported on this thread that at my last position as a professional educator in a church-based university, I was charged with the task of leading the faculty in developing a curriculum centered around civic engagement and social transformation.

In that capacity, I mentioned—on a single occasion—that GLSEN’s educational initiatives (among many other initiatives of other organizations addressing social problems) might be a resource for faculty to consider. I did so because the locale in which I was working was one in which violence against both homeless people and youth identified as gender-inappropriate was reaching epidemic proportions, both in schools and outside the school grounds.

Merely for mentioning GLSEN as a possible resource in the project I was charged to lead, I was severely punished. I was told to be silent. I was told I had “put my lifestyle into the face of colleagues.” LGBTQ people are quite familiar with being silenced, indeed.

This is silence that is intended to dehumanize those on whom it is imposed, to suggest that our humanity is less than that of those who are allowed to speak and to define social reality for themselves and the rest of us. It is the silence that is intended to keep our stories from being heard, because in coming to know us as human beings, others may come to see that our humanity is not inferior to theirs—that we offer another way to be human in a world that desperately needs many different models of humanity to match the diversity of the world’s population.

Silence never truly silences those who are oppressed—not when we continue to think, cherish our humanity against the blows of those trying to diminish it, love and dream. As Labi Siffre’s powerful anthem of liberation to which I linked in yesterday’s blog, “Something Inside So Strong,” says,

The more you refuse to hear my voice
The louder I will sing
You hide behind walls of Jericho
Your lies will come tumbling
Deny my place in time
You squander wealth that's mine
My light will shine so brightly
It will blind you
‘Cause there's......

Something inside so strong
I know that I can make it

This is the hope of the resurrection. This is the central message of the resurrection. Every power in the world in which Jesus lived sought to silence him, because his message that the reign of God had broken into the world was intolerable for those controlling the world in which he lived. This message of God’s preferential love for those on the margins, for prostitutes, for social outcasts, for the poor and the downtrodden, was unacceptable to those who profited from things as they were.

As a result, the powers that be in Jesus’s world sought to silence him definitively. They hung him on a cross and watched him breathe his last. They placed him in a tomb, and rolled a rock across the entrance. They left him there in a silence that, in their expectation, would be forever.

The Easter message is that Jesus remains alive beyond all attempts to silence and humiliate him, all attempts to stand athwart history and say “stop!” to movements of hope and progressive change. Far from silencing him, those who humiliated him by consigning him to the lowly fate of a common criminal made his voice louder, strong, universal.

I am not among those Christians who believe that only in Jesus is the voice of the divine accessible to the world. In my view, there are many ways to hear that voice, and followers of Jesus stand to gain much by listening for the voice of God in religious traditions other than their own—and in the lives and witness of those who may repudiate religion altogether, given their experience of the demonic face of religious groups, a face that every religion is capable of displaying.

I use the theological language of Christianity, of death and resurrection, of hope premised on this pivotal event in human history, because I grew up within a Christian culture, and that culture forms the framework of my religious imagination. In using this language, I make no claim that it is the unique, solitary way of talking about the intrusion of the divine into human history. To make such a claim would be to deny what is evident to anyone with eyes to see: that God manifests Godself in the world in many different ways, through many different religious traditions, and that, at the same time that religious communities across the globe sometimes show demonic faces to the world, all religious communities are also capable of being vehicles of salvation.

In my own Christian-framed religious imagination, part of the message of the resurrection is that one lives now as if the reign of God to which Jesus pointed—and for proclaiming which he was put to death—is already breaking forth in human history. Because of our witness to the resurrectional force of Jesus’s life and message, we live now as if the world has begun to change significantly, even when we recognize that our hopes point to dreams that have not yet come to pass.

We live for a more humane world at the same time that we are painfully aware that this world does not yet exist. We commit ourselves to making that world evident in our lives, to creating the conditions for making that world possible in the lives of others. We try to live as Rilke encouraged the aspiring poet to live in his Letters to a Young Poet: “Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

It is against this backdrop of the already here but not yet, of crucifixion-resurrection, that I keep seeking to address the social problems that reach my own tiny life, that call forth a concern in my own shriveled heart. It is against this backdrop that I struggle to keep talking in a world that seeks to silence those who speak from the margins, who insist on saying what others do not want to have said.

Only when such discourse can find a way to make itself heard beyond the margins, will the world will ever truly change for the better. As Ashon Crawley’s reflections suggest—as the National Day of Silence indicates—silence about school bullying and its root causes only reinforces the violence that will continue to repeat itself in our schools, unless we find ways to talk, to break silence.

Interestingly enough, after the New York Times posted its article yesterday about the bullying of Billy Wolfe in the Fayetteville, AR, school system, a blog discussion of this story developed on the website of the statewide free newspaper, Arkansas Times. This discussion was fascinating—more for what bloggers did not want to say or discuss, than for what they actually said.

The discussion began with a blogger reporting that he himself was bullied in an Arkansas school in the 1950s. Predictably, those bullying him tagged him as a “fag,” though he is heterosexual. Building on that account, another blogger noted that the same theme is present in the story of Billy Wolfe: though he identifies himself as straight, the Facebook site set up by his bullies (to which I referred in yesterday’s blog) refers to Billy Wolfe as “a little bitch” and a homosexual that no one likes.”

This theme of identifying boys as gay, and then abusing him because they are gay, is omnipresent in patterns of school bullying in American schools. We cannot address—we cannot solve—the problem of school bullying, without confronting this issue head on. In order to address school bullying, our schools have to address homophobia.

And yet, they do not want to go there. The churches do not want them to go there. Parents influenced by the churches often fight tooth and nail to keep any discussion of these issues out of our schools.

The blogger who brought up the omnipresent pattern of homophobia underlying bullying of boys in our schools was met by silence yesterday, on the Arkansas Times blog. Though discussion of the Billy Wolfe story continued throughout the day, other bloggers obviously did not wish to engage the homophobia issue.

This is the sadly typical response to analysis of school bullying as homophobia-incited: silence. Until we break this silence and move beyond it, until we discuss these issues honestly and openly, we will not resolve the problem of school bullying. And that means that more youth will be bullied in American schools. It means, sadly, that we are likely to see more incidents such as the Lawrence King incident in the future.

And, in a country that historian Martin Marty has called “a nation with the soul of a church,” there is no way to discuss the endemic problem of school bullying premised on homophobia without engaging the churches in the discussion. The churches are at the heart of the problem.

As a fine blog posting on the Bilerico Project website last week—Terrance Heath’s “Apology Accepted”—notes, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of American (ELCA) recently issued an apology to the LGBT community for the way in which historic Lutheran teachings have been used to wound, rather than welcome, gay people (see www.bilerico.com/2008/03/apology_accepted.php).

But as Heath also notes, the very way in which the announcement is framed—as part of a validation of the historic teaching that the only acceptable form of marriage is between one man and one woman—continues the wounding and unwelcoming process. Heath insightfully focuses on the way in which Christian teachings about marriage, and about the “natural” order of human sexuality, implicitly diminish the full humanity of gay human beings:

[B]eing gay means that I have to expect less and accept less from life. Being gay means I deserve less from life. I don’t deserve love, I don’t deserve family . . . . Of course that means understanding that as queers we must accept less and expect less from life than our heterosexual brothers and sisters, because we are less than our heterosexual brothers and sisters.

Churches cannot become welcoming spaces for LGBT persons as long as their teachings frame gay humanity as somehow less than the full humanity of straight human beings. And the problem of violent assaults on young people tagged as gay or gender-inappropriate will not be successfully addressed until the churches examine their own homophobia, and call on their members to cope with the homophobia that is inside all of us and is all-pervasive in American life.

There is hope. In this Easter season, I celebrate the prophetic witness of people like Sister Jeanine Gramick, on whom a Clerical Whispers blog posting focused last week (see http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2008/03/supporters-of-latin-mass-will-use.html).

Jeanine Gramick has been a longstanding fighter for gay rights in the Catholic church. She has suffered for standing up and speaking out. The Vatican has sought to silence her. Fortunately, it has not succeeded.

As Jeanine Gramick notes, her conscience does not permit her to remain silent. As the Clerical Whispers interview notes, Jeanine Gramick agrees with the observation of a Catholic bishops’ conference which says, "Prejudice against homosexuals is a greater infringement on the moral norm than any kind of sexual activity.”

Yet Jeanine Gramick wants to push the conversation further. As she notes: “Well, let's put this into practice. Instead of the Vatican making all these pronouncements about homosexual activity, let's make the pronouncement about the evils of prejudice and violence against the gay community. That's what we should be teaching."

Amen. Thank God for those who refuse to remain silent when the powers that be choose to silence them. Thank God for those like Jeanine Gramick, who choose to speak truth to power within the churches in which they remain active.

Easter Church, Welcome Spaces, and School Bullying

So. Easter leaves us with the obligation of returning to the everyday.

No easy task, that. The precise obligation is to live the everyday as if it is more than ordinary. If Easter has any meaning, that’s its central message: transfiguring the everyday, so that it is shot through with significance transcending the “mere” ordinary.

Such highfalutin’ language. Poor chatty little Christianity, E.M. Forster said. Always relying on one more word to limp along, to try to get its message across to a new group of believers.

And I understand that critique, and share it, so that I don’t belong—not on the churched side of the line, not among the respectable. I can’t be there, because I don’t see a lot of transfiguring going on. I completely understand—and agree with—Nietzsche when he says that if anyone is going to buy the Christian message of salvation, Christians need to look more saved. Or with Gandhi, when he observed that he found Christ exceedingly attractive, but did not find Christians attractive.

I write, think, live out of a specifically gay perspective and gay experience with the church. That experience is, brutally and frankly, one of unwelcome. There is no other word to describe what happens to us who are gay, vis-à-vis the churches.

I know that many churches have sought to create welcoming spaces in their midst for gay believers. The Episcopal church in the U.S. has ordained an openly (emphasis on “openly”) gay bishop.

And yet that bishop is not being invited to the coming Canterbury Conference. The mere acknowledgment that some priests and some bishops and many believers are openly gay (emphasis on “openly”) is intolerable for some members of the Anglican communion. A communion in which a leader of a ministry, Changing Attitudes, in Nigeria to build bridges of acceptance between the church and the gay community was savagely beaten last week: see http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2008/03/anglican-groups-leader-condemns.html. News reports indicate that violence such as this towards LGBT people and their supporters in Nigeria is actively being encouraged by some Anglican church leaders in Nigeria, including Archbishop Peter Akinola.

The churches are, at their best, tolerant. They are not welcoming. Not yet. They are not affirming, accepting, capable of blessing gay people and our lives and our relationships. They are not transfigured. They are not places in which gay people can experience transfiguration—the Easter experience or the Easter message.

And so we live our spiritual lives on the outside, those of us who care to salvage any vocabulary of spirituality from our brutal encounters with the churches. And, ultimately, it’s not precisely the brutality, the savagery of the churches towards gay persons that is the all-determining factor in my inability to commune: it’s the stolid refusal of church people even to admit that the inability to welcome—to welcome anyone at all—undercuts everything about church, everything about its message.

A church that is unable to welcome—anyone at all—is simply not church. A church that is incapable of becoming a welcoming space for anyone in need of compassion and healing is not truly church: such a church is not living the gospel message in a sacramental way which allows that message to be understood and accessed through the life of the church itself.

I say all of this today against the backdrop of ongoing conversations with some of my co-religionists at the National Catholic Reporter blog café—conversations that leave me extremely frustrated. The struggle to establish some common ground for dialogue with people who appear to share one’s conviction that our culture desperately needs ways to talk about becoming a more humane society—that struggle seems impossible when one of the dialogue partners refuses to occupy that common ground, that shared dialogic space.

When people already have all the answers (and some Christians persist in thinking this way), there is no point in dialoguing. From the standpoint of the catechizer, conversation becomes an act of imparting nuggets of truth to the poor soul who needs those nuggets. It is not an exchange in which each dialogue partner offers insights from her own life experience, in a shared journey towards a truth that transcends both conversationalists.

And for those who have all Truth in their hands and are intent on dispensing nuggets of The Truth to the rest of us, it is fatally simple to arrive at an imagination of one’s dialogue partner as fundamentally defective. In my “dialogues” with my co-religionists at the NCR café, I find myself continuously up against the brick wall of others’ definition of me as less than human.

Again, this is the persistent experience of gay human beings in relation to the church. The churches, at their best, imagine us as rather pitiful objects of charity, who need those nuggets of truth to make us more stalwart followers of the Lord. If only we could understand that there is a plan for the world, God’s plan, and that it’s premised on getting everything in its place: men here, women there; male and female God created them; men as guardians and protectors, women as homebodies and cheerfully obedient servants. If only we could understand the basic plumbing of human sexuality, that everything fits in its proper place—at least, from God’s perspective.

How simple life would be for us poor misguided gay souls, and for the church itself, if people would just understand The Truth, remain in their places, cooperate and believe—and submit and obey.

This is the approach of some of my co-religionists with whom I have sought to talk about our shared interest in a more humane society. It is an approach that demeans me, an approach that—ultimately—reduces me to silence by reducing me to an object, something these conversation partners imagine, rather than a complex human being with human depth, intense human feelings, human questions.

It is so easy to “place” the other when we imagine him as Other, when we reduce her to a stereotype, to an object. And placing the Other is what Christianity seems all about, in the application of its truest adherents today.

In taking that path, the churches are forfeiting the chance to become real agents of change in postmodern culture. In taking the path of making placement of the Other the central task of Christianity, the churches forfeit the claim to be places of a welcome that makes any real difference in the lives of their members, places in which real transfiguration of the ordinary and every day occurs.

In taking this path, the churches cause many LGBT persons simply to shrug our shoulders and reject the language of spirituality altogether, because that language has become so tainted with disdain for our gay humanity that it is toxic for us.

And meanwhile, the task of creating truly welcoming spaces in our culture continues: today’s New York times reports on a boy, Billy Wolfe, who is being bullied on an ongoing basis in a school in Fayetteville in my state (see www.nytimes.com/2008/03/24/us/24land.html?th&emc=th). This is a school system in which, a decade ago, William Wagner was bullied for being gay, and beaten so viciously that he still suffers from the aftermath of that beating.

Not much seems to have changed in a decade. Though Billy Wolfe is not gay, his attackers—who have now assaulted him repeatedly—use the gay tag as an excuse to assault him. The NY Times reports that one of the bullies created a Facebook site several years ago entitled “Every One That Hates Billy Wolfe,” on which a picture of Peter Pan was superimposed over Billy’s face, with the statement, “There is no reason anyone should like billy he’s a little bitch. And a homosexual that NO ONE LIKES.”

This is a persistent problem in American schools. It should not be happening. The pattern repeats itself over and over: a boy is identified as gay or gender-inappropriate, or he himself identifies as gay. He is then assaulted. The response of the school system and of parents is all too often faint-hearted. Sometimes the boy himself is blamed for “causing” the bullying.

The violence escalates. The beatings continue. Murder is sometimes the outcome.

This must not happen again. The churches lose all credibility when they provide the conditions for such violence in any shape, form, or fashion. The churches in places where such school bullying occurs must stand against violence and for acceptance. Churches that take seriously and live the Easter message must commit themselves to becoming welcoming places in which social divisions are healed and social wounds are staunched.

If the Easter message means anything at all, it has to mean that Lawrence King did not die in vain. Churches, are you listening?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And for those of us who stand outside, but still sing Easter songs, an anthem for this Eastertide, Labi Siffre singing his powerful "Something Inside So Strong":
www.youtube.com/watch?v=otuwNwsqHmQ&feature=related.

Lawrence King: Resources for Remembering and Actng

Time moves on. It has been one month since Lawrence King was murdered.

The resolve of the world community to remember, and to act in remembrance of, this young life cut far too short, remains strong. Yesterday, Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education (GLSEN) network released a public service announcement in remembrance of Lawrence King: http://www.glsen.org/cgi-bin/iowa/all/news/record/2277.html.

The announcement calls on us to work to eradicate hate from our schools. It challenges us to make the murder of any child identified as gay in any school unthinkable.

GLSEN’s website links to rich resources for educators seeking to address school bullying, particularly of children identified as gender-inappropriate. Among these resources is an enlightening article providing new details of events preceding the murder of Lawrence King. Paul Pringle and Catherine Saillant’s “Taunts, Family Lives Emerging as Factors in Gay Teen’s Killing” (http://www.mercurynews.com/crime/ci_8512111) notes that Larry had been routinely tormented in school even before he identified himself to others as gay:

The anti-gay taunts and slurs that Larry endured from his male peers apparently had been constant, as routine for him as math lessons and recess bells. The stinging words were isolating. As friend Melissa Reza, 15, put it, Larry lived much of his life "toward the side ... he was always toward the side."

She and others recall that the name-calling had begun long before he told his small circle of confidants that he was gay, before problems at home made him a ward of the court and before he summoned the courage to further assert his sexual orientation by wearing makeup and girls' boots with his school uniform.

This information is important for “mainstream” America to hear. It is already apparent that the murder of Larry King will be framed in some circles as a gay-panic murder: that is, it will be claimed that Larry King “hit on” the boys who taunted him, and that violence ensued as a result of his flirting.

For that reason, it’s extremely important for the mainstream media, for parents, educators, and churches, to hear what Pringle and Saillant are reporting: Larry King was already being tormented even before he came out as a gay youngster. Larry turned to “flirting” in self-defense, as a way of countering the taunts. He was pushed by his tormentors to a point at which he sought to turn the tables by “flirting.”

It would be grotesque if this all-too-common story is dismissed as a tale of deserved punishment, as a morality narrative about how a gay boy who flirts with other boys gets his just desserts. Of course, given the heinousness of this crime, no one will make that text explicit. And it goes without saying that the fourteen-year old boy, Brandon McInerney, who shot Larry King deserves compassion. McInerney is, in many ways, himself a victim--of a disturbed family life; of a culture that links machismo to violence, and which suggests that the appropriate response to another male who exhibits "feminine" characteristics is violent assault.

To say this, however, is not to justify the subtextual gay-panic discourse already lurking in some media accounts of Lawrence King’s murder.

The churches, our schools, and the media, must honor Lawrence King’s memory by examining far more closely what actually goes on in our schools. The real narrative that must not be missed here is one of undeserved torment of countless youngsters identified as gay by their peers, who have nowhere to turn when this happens. The true story is a story of parents, school officials, and churches turning a blind eye to bullying of children deemed gender-inappropriate.

In behaving in this fashion, churches, schools, and the media become facilitators of violence, collaborators in hate. It is time for this collaboration to stop.

As an educator and theologian who was punished in the past year for citing GLSEN in a single meeting of faculty leaders in a church-based institution of higher learning, I call on all churches, all teachers, all schools, to think more carefully about what goes on in the lives of children taunted for being gay. I challenge the churches to make hate rhetoric and hateful actions premised on homophobic prejudice unthinkable.

I urge churches which sponsor schools that train teachers for American classrooms to address this serious social problem pro-actively, appropriately. In choosing faculty for your education programs, make a strong commitment to educating for diversity a key characteristic of the faculty you recruit. Do not aid and abet homophobia by turning a blind eye to instances of homophobic prejudice among your own faculty, among your administrators, among the church officials who sit on your boards.

Do not punish faculty and faculty leaders who call for open dialogue about the destructiveness of homophobic violence. Do not reward faculty who use homophobia to undermine or silence faculty leaders who try to promote such dialogue.

In behaving in this way, you undercut the social justice statements of the churches that sponsor your colleges and universities. In behaving in this way, you become part of the dynamic that issues in violence against gay youth. In behaving in this way, you make null and void statements such as the declaration of the United Methodist Social Principles, "We support efforts to stop violence and other forms of coercion against gays and lesbians."

No other American child needs to meet the fate of Lawrence King. We can stop this violence. It will not be stopped until we decide to make it unthinkable: the key to ending this violence is in our own hands. We simply have to commit ourselves to end it.

Teaching Youth Not to Hate

News today that the American Family Association has announced a boycott of the April 25 “Day of Silence” being promoted by GLSEN—Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (see www.afa.net/). GLSEN organizes this event each year to enhance awareness in American classrooms of the prejudice endured by those who are gay and lesbian.

One of GLSEN’s primary objectives is to address the deeply troubling phenomenon of bullying of LGBT youth in American schools. This year’s Day of Silence observance is being organized in memory of fifteen-year old Lawrence King.

As the murder of this gay youth illustrates in the starkest way possible, it is imperative that schools educate our children not to hate. As a video just released by Fight Out Loud—“Hate in 2008 = A Call to Action”—concludes, in 2008, LGBT people are being murdered in the U.S. at the rate of one person every eight days (see www.fightoutloud.org/). And those are only the murders about which we know . . . .

The American Family Association identifies GLSEN as “an activist homosexual group,” despite the fact that, by AFA’s own admission, the GLSEN-sponsored Day of Silence is now observed in thousands of schools around the nation, and despite GLSEN’s status as an organization of highly regarded professional educators from many backgrounds, whose goal is to address school bullying. Shockingly, one of AFA’s action points vs. the Day of Silence is an appeal to supporters to “encourage your church leadership to follow the bold example of Pastor Ken Hutcherson who is vocally opposing ‘Day of Silence’ in his community in Redmond, Washington.”

It was Pastor Hutcherson who stated recently (as a previous posting of mine on this blog recounts) that if another man opened the door for him, he’d rip the man’s arm off and beat him to death with the wet end of the arm.

The AFA’s callous willingness to use children in right-wing political battles runs directly against the direction taken by the nation’s chief teacher accreditation organization, NCATE (National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education). NCATE accredits the education schools of colleges and universities according to a set of standards that include the college or university’s commitment to diversity (see www.ncate.org).

As the NCATE standard on diversity (standard #4) states,

One of the goals of this standard is the development of educators who can help all students learn or support their learning through their professional roles in schools. This goal requires educators who can reflect multicultural and global perspectives that draw on the histories, experiences, and representations of students and families from diverse populations. Therefore, the [teacher education] unit has the responsibility to provide opportunities for candidates to understand diversity and equity in the teaching and learning process. . . .Candidates are helped to understand the potential impact of discrimination based on race, class, gender, disability, sexual orientation, and language on students and their learning. Proficiencies related to diversity are identified in the unit’s conceptual framework. They are clear to candidates and are assessed as part of the unit’s assessment system.

NCATE guidelines for standard four note that units of education expecting to receive accreditation must produce teachers capable of understanding and teaching all students. As footnotes to standard four repeatedly state, “‘All students’ includes students with exceptionalities and of different ethnic, racial, gender, sexual orientation, language, religious, socioeconomic, and regional/geographic origins.”

Because of the imperative need for teachers today to reach increasingly diverse populations of students, on 13 November 2007, NCATE issued a call to action emphasizing the importance of teachers’ commitment to social justice. This call to action requires teachers to develop “professional dispositions” that enhance this commitment. NCATE’s call to action emphasizes that well-trained teachers must “understand the impact of discrimination based on race, class, gender, disability/exceptionality, sexual orientation, and language on students and their learning.”

The call to action adds to NCATE accreditation criteria the expectation that teachers exhibit the following Professional Dispositions:

Professional attitudes, values, and beliefs demonstrated through both verbal and non-verbal behaviors as educators interact with students, families, colleagues, and communities. These positive behaviors support student learning and development.

NCATE expects institutions to assess professional dispositions based on observable behaviors in educational settings . The two professional dispositions that NCATE expects institutions to assess are fairness and the belief that all students can learn. Based on their mission and conceptual framework, professional education units can identify, define, and operationalize additional professional dispositions.

NCATE expects institutions to assess professional dispositions based on observable behaviors in educational settings: this definition underscores that not merely education units or prospective teachers are now expected by NCATE to demonstrate fair and non-discriminatory behavior towards minorities, including LGBT persons. The entire university in which a unit of education is housed is now expected by NCATE to demonstrate such behavior.

The new NCATE social justice dispositions indicate that universities will be accredited based on their university-wide commitment to just and non-discriminatory behavior towards minorities (including LGBT persons)—e.g., presumably in governing statements forbidding discrimination, in policies and procedures that militate against discrimination, in hiring and firing decisions, and so on. NCATE will now examine institutions of higher education to see what “observable behaviors” towards minorities are displayed within an institution, its policies, its faculty, and especially its School of Education.

The murder of Lawrence King and the out-of-control assaults on LGBT citizens today—one person murdered every eight days!—underscore the importance of these educational goals both for American schools and for institutions of higher learning that produce teachers for those schools. As Pam Spaulding notes in her Pam’s House Blend (www.pamshouseblend.com) blog posting discussing the “Hate in 2008 = A Call to Action” video, something needs to be done in communities such as Ft. Lauderdale, where a tax-funded city newsletter by the city’s current mayor Mr. Naugle “spews . . . hate” against gay citizens.

Mr. Naugle has had vocal support from a group of African-American ministers. Pastor Ken Hutcherson is also African American. Yet, as the “Hate in 2008” video demonstrates, African Americans are well-represented among LGBT citizens now being murdered. They include seventeen-year old Simmie Williams, who was murdered recently right in Ft. Lauderdale.

Given this social reality, it is all the more heartening to remember Barack Obama’s several recent outspoken critiques of homophobia in the African-American community and African-American churches. This week’s Towleroad blog contains a video link to the most recent of these, about which I blogged last week—Mr. Obama’s statement to a group of supporters in Beaumont, Texas, that homophobia is not Christian.

There is much work to do in all of our communities. There is certainly much work to do in Florida, given the epidemic level of hate crimes against LGBT citizens of that state. Church-affiliated institutions of higher learning in that state—particularly African-American ones—have a premier opportunity to make a positive faith-based response to this social problem. If they will . . . .

The American Family Association certainly does not deserve the support of such institutions, given its longstanding positions espousing hate, including a statement in its AFA journal following Hurricane Katrina that the hurricane was “[an] instrument of God’s mercy” that “wiped out rampant sin.” One would like to think that something else was at work in the disruption of so many low-income African-American lives in that terrible event!

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.

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.

An America as Good as Its Promise

And now Barack Obama has addressed the murder of Lawrence King. According to today's Bilerico blog, Mr. Obama released the following statement yesterday:

It was heartbreaking to learn about Lawrence King’s death, and my thoughts and prayers go out to his family. King’s senseless death is a tragic example of the corrosive effect that bigotry and fear can have in our society. It’s also an urgent reminder that we need to do more in our schools to foster tolerance and an acceptance of diversity; that we must enact a federal hate crimes law that protects all LGBT Americans; and that we must recommit ourselves to becoming active and engaged parents, citizens and neighbors, so that bias and bigotry cannot take hold in the first place. We all have a responsibility to help this nation live up to its founding promise of equality for all.

Kudos to Mr. Obama.

And now, as someone who has donated** to Mr. Obama's campaign, I challenge Barack Obama to continue to distance himself from "ex-gay" proponents such as Rev. Donnie McClurkin, who performed in the Obama campaign in South Carolina. The damages done to tender human psyches by bogus reparative "therapies" purporting to change sexual orientation are too well-documented to be dismissed easily. "Ex-gay" ministries are especially damaging to young people finding their way through the maze of gender issues in adolescence, youth whose families sometimes place them in "Christian" reparative therapy programs such as Love in Action in Memphis.

This weekend, there has been a conference of survivors of ex-gay ministry in Memphis, in which speakers and artists explore and publicize the damages of this spurious form of psychotherapy which has been soundly repudiated by all psychotherapeutic organizations of any standing. Peterson Toscano's a musing blog, to which my blog is linked, reports on this conference.

I also call on Mr. Obama to support the courageous stand his own church, the United Church of Christ, has taken on LGBT issues. This denomination was the first mainstream denomination in North America to ordain openly gay pastors. The UCC also supports gay marriage. Mr. Obama has stated that he is not in favor of gay marriage--that he has not yet found himself able to come to the place at which his church has arrived re: this issue.

Yet an editorial in today's NY Times reports that studies in New Jersey are showing that legalized gay unions result in a second-class status for gay couples. Gay couples in New Jersey report meeting obstacles in dealing with inheritance questions, in making medical decisions on behalf of one's partner or even in being permitted visitation rights when the partner is in the hospital. A horrific story from Miami last year, which is now resulting in legal action, reported that a woman whose partner collapsed and died when they were visiting Miami from Washington State was told that she might not see her partner in the hospital, since they were in an anti-gay state with anti-gay laws.

The NY Times editorial notes that gay couples of color are especially prone to meeting obstacles under gay union laws, since they often do not have the financial resources to hire lawyers to fight discrimination, or to prepare estate documents to protect inheritance rights. The editorial calls on Gov. Corzine of New Jersey to demonstrate courage in addressing these issues.

I call on Mr. Obama to show the same courage. I was heartened by the speech he gave in an Atlanta church some weeks ago, in which he challenged the African-American community to deal with its homophobia. As someone who has worked within historically black colleges and universities, as an openly gay employee, I can testify about this: homophobia is alive and well in the African-American community (as in the white community). And it needs to be addressed. Silence about this issue contributes to the HIV epidemic in the African-American community. The failure to admit that black men can be living on the down-low and spreading AIDS to female partners, the silence about the presence of LGBT African Americans in the black community, contributes to the alarming rise in HIV cases among black women.

The black churches have historically been silent about these issues and about issues of sexuality in general. It is time for honest, open conversations. It is time to forge a new, safer social space for LBGT youth of color. The black churches should play a significant role in this regard. They--and Mr. Obama--would do well to listen to the courageous testimony of African-American athlete Charles Barkley about these issues.

Thank you for speaking out, Mr. Obama. Please keep on keeping on. And as you do so, please remember the inspiring words of a powerful African-American woman (and a lesbian), who helped pave the way for your success today. As Barbara Jordan once said, “What the people want is very simple--they want an America as good as its promise.”

This is what many of us in America--gay, straight, black, white, male, female--long for today. Please do not disappoint those who have pinned their hopes on you.


**I certainly don't want to imply that I am a major donor to Mr. Obama's campaign. I have given the bit I can as someone who is unemployed and without health insurance. But what I have given is given with strong hope that the changes Mr. Obama promises will actually be enacted, should he be elected. For those of us who are LGBT Americans, whose vocational lives have often been disrupted by prejudice, who have no federal protection when we are discriminated against in the workplace, it is crucially important that laws be enacted forbidding discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation in the areas of employment, housing, benefits, medical care, and so on. When our jobs are ended due to a discrimination we can't challenge in the absence of laws protecting us, we lose access to healthcare benefits which, without an income, we cannot afford. For those of us in committed relationships, if one partner is lucky enough to obtain another job when discrimination interrupts both partners' lives, there is often no chance of carrying the other partner on the new health insurance plan, since the majority of employers do not provide partner benefits. All of this needs to be part of any serious platform of change in contemporary America. We all lose, when the gifts of some cannot be realized due to prejudice. When those being impeded by discrimination are talented young people beginning their careers, the nation as a whole stands to lose very much, if those youth cannot achieve their goals due to insupportable discrimination.

God Knit LarryTogether

Since I’ve complained repeatedly about the silence of both the mainstream media and the major presidential candidates re: the murder of Lawrence King, I want to give credit today to one candidate and one significant media outlet for speaking out.

Today’s NY Times has an article by Rebecca Cathcart reporting on yesterday’s memorial service for Lawrence King. The article quotes a wonderful excerpt from the sermon given at this event by Rev. Dan Birchfield of Westminster Presbyterian Church:

“God knit Larry together and made him wonderfully complex. Larry was a masterpiece.”

And, according to today’s Bilerico blog, yesterday Hillary Clinton spoke out about the death of Lawrence King, stating (www.bilerico.com/2008/02/statement_from_hillary_clinton_on_the_me.php):

“I was deeply saddened by the recent death of 15-year old Lawrence King, who was killed at his school in Oxnard, CA. No one should face intimidation or violence, particularly at school, because of their sexual orientation or the way they express their gender identity. We must finally enact a federal hate crimes law to ensure that gay, lesbian and transgender Americans are protected against violent, bias-motivated crimes. We must send a unified message that hate-based crime will not be tolerated.”

Kudos to Hillary Clinton.

And now, when will the churches speak out? I call on Hillary Clinton to challenge her own United Methodist church to make its stand against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and its opposition to homophobic violence more than rhetorical—particularly in the personnel policies and procedures of its own institutions.

Hillary, can we talk? I’d be interested in hearing how you can energize your own church and call it to accountability. The churches--all the "mainstream" churches--are at the heart of the problem of homophobia in American society.

And that needs to change. And it will change only when church members make it unthinkable for their churches to talk the talk without walking the walk. It is time for church members to call their churches to accountability. It is not too much to ask that churches accord the same simple justice to LGBT members that they ask church members to practice in their dealings with society at large.