Quote for Day: Odd That No One Ever Asks Rubio and Others Employing a States'-Rights Argument about Marriage Equality, Was Loving v. Virginia Wrongly Decided?

In several postings in the past several days, I've zeroed in on the, well, odd tendency of many centrist religious commentators about religious freedom and gay rights to draw a sharp dividing line around the issue of gay rights, and treat it as entirely separate from other struggles of marginalized minority groups for rights. As I stated last week, for instance, though you can find many centrist Catholic commentators arguing that denying goods and services to LGBT folks under the rubric of religion is thinkable and should remain discussable, you don't find these same people defending the practice of denying goods and services to people on racial grounds, while claiming religious warrant for the discrimination.

Americans Talk Religion, Morality, Discrimination, Law: Commentary on Supreme Court Prop 8 and DOMA Hearings

A miscellany of articles (in addition to those to which I've already linked) that have caught my attention in the past several days, all spurred by the Supreme Court prop 8 and DOMA hearings, with brief excerpts:

Andrew Sullivan on North Carolina's 1875 Constitutional Amendment: Historical Lessons Not to Forget

And speaking of the long, hard struggle that has attended every human rights breakthrough in American culture; and speaking of the price that had to be paid by many people of conscience for many years to obtain equal rights for African-American citizens of the U.S., as principles-lite liberals sat on the fence and pontificated from their perches of "objective," "centrist," uncommitted superiority:

1967 or 2012? John Aravosis on NOM Response to Prop 8 Ruling in California

I like John Aravosis's take on the National Organization for Marriage's denunciation of the recent California court ruling finding proposition 8 unconstitutional.  Aravosis's headline reads, "Could Have Been Written in 1967."

Missouri Congresswoman Stuck in 1967, re: Marriage Rights

Republican Congresswoman from Missouri, Vicky Hartzler, told a conservative gathering in D.C. last month that permitting same-sex marriage is akin to permitting polygamy, incest, and three-year-old drivers.  And then she added: 

Anniversary of Loving v. Virginia Approaches: Joan Walsh on Marriage Equality

Joan Walsh represents the good face of American Catholicism, the face of the large majority of American Catholics who support the civil rights of LGBT people, including the right to marriage.  The lay face, as opposed to the hierarchical face.

DOMA, the Federal Administration, and the Rule of Law: Where's the Moral Imperative?

Joe Sudbay at Americablog, demolishing the argument that the Obama administration had no choice except to defend the Defense of Marriage Act with the brief it filed yesterday:

Yesterday, a Democratic President of the United States of America, in the year 2009, and an African-American child of inter-racial parents no less, gave his lawyers the go ahead to compare our marriages to incest on the same day that 42 years ago the Supreme Court ruled in his parents' favor in Loving v. Virginia. And these people, along with our President, are suggesting that the appropriate response is to shrug our shoulders and go home, since, after all, the law is the law?

Sudbay is dealing with a critique that has swept the internet since Americablog published its exposé yesterday of the Obama administration's brief in defense of DOMA. In a nutshell, this critique argues that no one should be either surprised or appalled at the administration's choice to file its brief. It was doing what it's sworn to do: defend the law of the land.

So, despite Candidate Obama's statements about his fierce advocacy for equal rights for gays and lesbians, and despite his statement that equality is a moral imperative, President Obama's administration should be applauded for its dedication to the law and its intent to uphold the law.

As Sudbay notes, this is an extremely naive approach to our legal system, one that overlooks the choices justices and attorneys have about how to apply the law in different ways in different situations, to find precedents that overturn commonly accepted interpretations of the law, and to mount legal battles against unjust laws. Legal codes did not fall down from heaven. They are produced by human communities--and most often by those with power and privilege within a human community to consolidate their power and privilege and to oppress those without power and privilege.

The logic of strict conformity to law that some commentators are now using to justify what the administration has chosen to do would have required this administration in 1860 to defend slavery, even if it had been elected on an anti-slavery platform; to defend Jim Crow in 1890, when a significant number of Americans wanted Jim Crow laws abolished; to uphold legal segregation in 1960, after the moral shortcomings of that system had been decisively exposed by civil rights activists, etc.

In my experiences, phrases like "the rule of law" or "law and order" are seldom the rallying cries of fierce advocates of equality. It's surprising to hear them now circulating around the internet as defenses of an administration that purportedly represents a progressive stance. I think the last time I heard them used so loudly was perhaps in the 1950s and 1960s by Southern political leaders intent on upholding the then law of the land, segregation, and then later by Governor Wallace in Alabama and by Republican leaders as they swept to dominance through their Southern strategy.

I haven't had the luxury of believing that justice is blind or that law and order are value-free legal terms, having grown up in the American South during the Civil Rights movement. And in an attorney's household, where I saw at close hand how the legal system really worked when it came to keeping a subjugated minority in its place . . . .

What apologists for the decision of the administration to defend DOMA are overlooking is the moral dimension that, I keep insisting, has to be in the forefront of this debate. We have come to a moment in our history at which a critical mass of citizens now recognizes that laws excluding gays and lesbians from equal rights are immoral laws, and need to be changed or abolished.

The administration came to office telling us it represented that critical mass and intended to spearhead progressive change--because, those we have now elected told us, it is a moral imperative to make the changes for which this critical mass is appealing on moral grounds.

And what do we now have? An administration not only defending DOMA, but defending it fiercely, advocating fiercely for positions that the religious right has been promoting for some time now in its ugly and immoral crusade to stigmatize and dehumanize gay persons. Not only does the brief link gay marriage and incest, it also seeks to drive a wedge between African Americans and their "legitimate" aspirations to rights and gay Americans and their "illegitimate" aspirations to rights.

This is ugly. It is cynical. And it is immoral. Sudbay is right to point to the ways in which the president's own history and experience should cause him to deplore the immoral cynicism of how his administration is now treating those for whom it claims to be a fierce advocate. He's right also to point to the terrible irony of the administration's choice to release the brief on the anniversary of Loving v. Virginia.

In fact, reading the brief's argument about the difference in the legitimacy of the moral claims of African Americans and gay persons, one has to wonder, God help us, if the decision to release this statement on the anniversary of Loving v. Virginia was a deliberate, cynical choice, one designed to play to churched supporters of the president, both black and white, who will greet the brief with joy because it underscores an invidious (and false) comparison between "legitimate" African-American rights and "illegitimate" gay rights many of them have been making.

The administration most certainly had a choice not to defend legislation it knows is immoral. There are sound historical precedents for choosing not to defend outmoded and/or immoral laws. And even if it felt compelled to do so in the name of upholding law, it had a choice about how to defend the legislation--either faintly and with obvious disdain, or strongly and with relish.

It has chosen the latter tack. It has chosen to relish the pain and marginalization of a group of citizens stigmatized for an innate characteristic that they cannot change and should not be asked to change, as a precondition to being granted rights. And that choice is morally corrupt and will not bring honor to an administration a majority of Americans elected because it promised us hope and progressive change.

Gay Rights and Black Rights as Essentially Different: New Neocon Meme

Ali Frick reports today on Alternet re: the “newly popular conservative trope” echoed by Rev. Mike Huckabee, Baptist minister and former governor of Arkansas, on “The View” (ABC) earlier this week (www.alternet.org/blogs/video/107698). As Frick notes, when asked about gay rights, Huckabee stated that gay rights are a different set of rights—that is, a different set from the bona fide civil rights of African Americans.

Huckabee goes on (astonishing move on his part, about which more in a moment) to endorse some civil rights for gay Americans, while setting those rights aside as special rights essentially different from the rights enjoyed by African Americans. Gay rights are different, he argues, because they involve a request to redefine a social institution, the institution of marriage:

People who are homosexuals should have every right in terms of their civil rights, to be employed, to do anything they want. But that’s not really the issue. I know you talked about it and I think you got into it a little bit early on. But when we’re talking about a redefinition of an institution, that’s different than individual civil rights.

When Pat Behar responds that segregation was, after all, also a social institution, one that had to be redefined by the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Huckabee responds that there is still an essential difference between gay civil rights and the rights of African Americans. He locates that difference in a violence test: gay Americans have not endured the same levels of violence that African Americans have withstood:

But here is the difference. Bull Connor was hosing people down in the streets of Alabama. John Lewis got his skull cracked on the Selma bridge.

As Frick notes (and as I’ve been predicting on this blog), this hateful gay-vs.-blacks argument is in line to become the new neoconservative meme following the recent elections. Republicans are working fast and furious to reposition themselves as the party advocating for people of color vs. gay Americans, hoping to drive a wedge between the two minority groups and recapture the loyalty of American swing voters in the process.

Frick notes (as I have done) how quickly right-wing Christian Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council has jumped on the blacks-vs.-gays bandwagon, maintaining that the rights of the two groups are “totally different.” As has African-American journalist Tara Wall, who maintains in an op-ed piece in the Washington Times on 18 Nov. that “[t]here is no comparison” between the struggle of the two communities for rights, because gay Americans have not endured stoning and lynching, and have always had a seat at the table if they are white (http://washingtontimes.com/news/2008/nov/18/a-marriage-mandate).

As Brent Hartinger notes today on Afterelton.com, gay bashing is essentially all the Republican party has left, following the recent elections (www.afterelton.com/biggaypicture/11-20-2008). Hartinger identifies compelling parallels between the GOP’s rapidly developing cynical strategy of targeting gay citizens to regain heartland voter loyalty, and the Southern Strategy by which the Republican party captured white Southerners from Nixon forward.

As he points out, the Southern Strategy deliberately capitalized on seething discontent among white Southerners as African Americans claimed rights in the 1950s and 1960s. South Carolina political activist Lee Atwater, the primary architect of the Southern Strategy, explicitly notes this as he describes the ongoing strategy used to gain white Southern GOP loyalty:

You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N*gger, n*gger, n*gger.’ By 1968 you can't say ‘n*gger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff (as cited by Hartinger).

As Hartinger notes, “Just as with the Southern Strategy, the Republicans will be completely disingenuous on the issue.” Completely disingenuous: Hartinger is absolutely correct.

Rev. Huckabee’s argument could not be more disingenuous. It incorporates layer after layer of duplicity. It is designed to mislead. It is designed to distort the real situation in which gay Americans live today. It is cynically fashioned to capitalize on resentment of people of color against their gay brothers and sisters—to manipulate African-American voters by using social resentment in precisely the way the Southern Strategy exploited white resentment of black people.

Astonishingly, people who a half century ago flocked en masse to the Republican party because of their resentment against African Americans now wish to paint themselves as the allies of African Americans, as they play people of color against gay people. And as they do so, using duplicitous arguments such as the following:

§ Huckabee states: People who are homosexuals should have every right in terms of their civil rights, to be employed, to do anything they want.

The truth is: gay citizens of Arkansas have no legal protection against discrimination in areas such as housing, unemployment, healthcare, estate benefits, hospital visitation rights, etc. In this respect, they are like millions of other gay Americans in similar places throughout the land.

As governor of Arkansas, Rev. Huckabee did nothing to promote or protect the civil rights of gay Arkansans. To the extent that he could, he combated those civil rights in every way possible. And he did so in collaboration with his political party, which has followed a path of resistance to gay rights consistently for decades now.

It is disingenuous in the extreme for Rev. Huckabee to claim now, when he and his allies want to remove the right of marriage from gay Americans, that he suddenly supports “every right” of gay Americans “in terms of their civil rights.” Those resisting gay marriage also oppose every other civil right for gay citizens, when it is possible for them to do so. Their strategy is to continue using gay marriage as the focal point of a movement of resistance to every right possible for gay citizens, and to use gay human beings in cynical battles to consolidate their political power.

§ Huckabee states: But when we’re talking about a redefinition of an institution, that’s different than individual civil rights.

The truth is: the civil rights of African Americans were gained only at the cost of redefining numerous social institutions, including slavery itself. The extension of civil rights in our nation has demanded the redefinition of institutions that actively thwarted the extension of rights to various marginalized groups.

Opponents of gay marriage like to maintain (falsely) that marriage is a social institution from time immemorial, which has always involved marriage of one man to one woman, and which has never changed. Slavery itself was, until its abolition, a social institution from time immemorial.

It had biblical sanction. Apologists for slavery in the South consistently argued that those trying to abolish slavery were undermining the authority of the bible, attacking biblical institutions and biblical morality. The bible (and religion) were used as long as possible to bolster the enslavement of people of color in the United States. A war had to be fought to redefine our institutions in order to prevent this malicious misuse of longstanding social tradition and of religion to support the denial of human rights to a whole group of citizens.

What is different—essentially different, as Rev. Huckabee maintains—about the situation of gay human beings today? About the use of religion and the bible? About illicit use of “venerable” tradition? About the application of misleading slippery-slope arguments which declare that if you depart from the bible and tradition in this area, all hell will break loose in other areas?

§ Huckabee states: But here is the difference. Bull Connor was hosing people down in the streets of Alabama. John Lewis got his skull cracked on the Selma bridge.

The truth is: As Ali Frick notes, “To suggest that a civil rights movement must meet some sort of violence threshold is an incredibly dangerous argument — not to mention blind to the serious violence gay people have already suffered” (my emphases). Frick notes that FBI reports for last year indicate 16.6% of hate crimes in the U.S. were due to sexual orientation, and a study by University of California (Davis) in the same year found that 4 of 10 LGB Americans reported violence or crimes against their property due to their sexual orientation.

John Lewis got his skull cracked: has Rev. Huckabee really never seen a documentary about the murder of Matthew Shepard a decade ago? Has he read no news reports about this murder? If he had, surely he would have thought twice about using the skull-cracking argument, when Matthew Shepard’s skull was so badly crushed from repeated blows that doctors were unable to operate on him, as he died from injuries to his brain and brain stem from the smashing of his skull.

As I’ve noted before on this blog, there’s plenty of suffering to go around. Tragically, enough LGBT Americans are assaulted every year—solely because they are lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgendered—that one could easily mail Rev. Huckabee a picture a week of these battered and murdered citizens and still have plenty to dispense, if he wanted to educate himself about violence to gay citizens.

As someone who grew up in Arkansas at the same time I did, he should know that the mainstream media always underreported—and, often, covered up—acts of violence against black citizens. This has been a longstanding practice of the media throughout the South, and in much of the rest of the nation, as well. There is still a troubling inequity in how the media cover, say, the disappearance of a little girl from a white family of means, and the disappearance of an African-American girl from a family without means.

And it is no different with gay citizens. Our situation is exactly like that of people of color, in this regard. Citizens like Rev. Huckabee can profess ignorance of the numerous acts of violence perpetrated against LGBT Americans only because they do not trouble to educate themselves by going beyond mainstream media reports to sources that care to report these crimes.

In the final analysis, what Rev. Huckabee is doing is so draconian—so anti-Christian—because it seeks to elicit anger on the part of people of color by playing horrendous violence done to one group of citizens against horrendous violence done to another group of citizens—in both cases, due to inborn characteristics that ought not to set the groups apart as stigmatized others. Violence is violence, whether it is done to people of color or to gay Americans.

There is violence aplenty in our society to go around. The authentic response of people of faith to unmerited violence imposed on a stigmatized social group is to challenge and seek to halt such violence. Not to play the violence of a “moral and deserving" group against an “immoral and undeserving" one. Not to stir ugly social resentments based on unfounded stereotypes.

Mildred Loving had it right when she noted, not long before her death:

Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don't think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the "wrong kind of person" for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people's religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people's civil rights.

I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard's and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That's what Loving, and loving, are all about (my emphases).

One would expect Rev. Huckabee as a minister of the gospel to be preoccupied with loving. And to listen to Mildred Loving, an African-American who, out of the crucible of her own struggle for civil rights—for the human right to marry—intuitively recognized the equivalence of her struggle for human and civil rights, and that of gay Americans.

Faith In America: Challenging Bigotry Masquerading as Religious Truth

A recent email announcement from the organization Faith In America (see the list of links for this blog) contains some heartening news about how our justice system is continuing to connect the dots between racial and homophobic bigotry. Faith In America notes that California attorney Shannon Minter, legal director for the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), recently praised Faith In America for helping to connect the dots through a June 2007 press conference featuring Mildred Loving.

Mildred Loving was a plaintiff in the 1967 case Loving v. Virginia, which led to the abolition of laws forbidding interracial marriage. In June 2007, at a press conference sponsored by Faith In America, Mildred Loving issued a statement in which she said gay and lesbian Americans should not be denied the right to marry the person they love.

According to Shannon Minter, this statement had a significant influence on the thinking of the majority of California Supreme Court justices who recently struck down the state’s laws forbidding gay marriage. In one of the concurring opinions supporting the California Supreme Court decision, Justice Joyce L. Kennard echoed the logic of Loving v. Virginia to permit interracial marriage, as she argued:

The architects of our federal and state Constitutions understood that widespread and deeply rooted prejudices may lead majoritarian institutions to deny fundamental freedoms to unpopular minority groups, and that the most effective remedy for this form of oppression is an independent judiciary charged with the solemn responsibility to interpret and enforce the constitutional provisions guaranteeing fundamental freedoms and equal protection.

Mitchell Gold, founder of Faith In America, states,

We were most pleased to learn that the Loving statement played a role in helping the justices connect the dots between the injustice of bigotry and discrimination against minorities in the past and the injustice that exists today from the deep-seated hostility and prejudice toward gay and lesbian individuals that is so often justified by misguided religious teaching and tradition with religious institutions.

The plaintiffs' arguments in the case appealed to the most fundamental aspect of not only this case but for all efforts to allow gay and lesbian people to enjoy the same human dignity that all Americans have an inalienable right to enjoy. Nothing should be allowed to stand opposed to such a basic human right. And without doubt, the bigotry and prejudice behind opposition to just a basic human right should never be allowed to masquerade as religious truth.

The bigotry and prejudice behind opposition to just a basic human right should never be allowed to masquerade as religious truth: simple logic. Profound truth.

For more information on the connections between the struggle for the right of gay persons to marry, and the previous struggle for the right of interracial couples to marry, see www.faithinamerica.info/loving.php. The resources on this weblink of Faith In America include a video clip of civil rights leader Julian Bond speaking about the Loving decision and its connection to gay marriage.

Democracy: Ongoing Battle, Shifting Faces

Interesting today to read Adam Liptak’s news analysis article about the California Supreme Court decision this week. The article is entitled “Same-Sex Marriage and Racial Justice Find Common Ground” (www.nytimes.com/2008/05/17/us/17marriage.html?th&emc=th).

Liptak notes the many strong parallels between the struggle for African-American civil rights (including the right of interracial marriage), and the struggle for LGBT civil rights. As he notes, the chief justice of the California Supreme Court, Ronald M. George, quoted repeatedly from Perez v. Sharp (1948) in the oral-argument phase of the recent hearing. Perez struck down California’s ban on interracial marriage.

As Liptak concludes, “The chief justice seemed to be accepting arguments for same-sex marriage that were consciously rooted in the struggle for equal rights for blacks.”

When Perez lifted legal denial of the possibility of interracial marriage in California, 29 other states still had laws barring interracial marriage. These include almost all of the states that have now passed laws forbidding gay marriage, and/or constitutional amendments defining marriage as the marriage of one man and one woman.

In other words, just as interracial marriage was stoutly contested by legal means in the American South through the middle part of the 20^th century, gay marriage is just as fiercely rejected in the very same area as the 21^st century begins. The same defenders of Christian values in the churches of Main Street USA who today combat gay marriage fought against interracial marriage in the preceding century.

Bans on miscegenation were not finally eradicated in the U.S. until 1967, when Loving v. Virginia struck down the 16 remaining antimiscegenation laws still on state books in the U.S. I will leave it to readers to discover which states still carried these laws on their books in 1967.

When California abolished its prohibition of interracial marriage in 1948, no other state supreme court followed suit. The Perez decision preceded the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which called for the integration of public schools “with all deliberate speed.”

Democracy takes work. It requires vigilance, determination to keep enfranchising those who are disenfranchised. Such enfranchisement doesn't happen quickly or easily, when groups have historically been disenfranchised. Moving democracy forward—making it fully participatory, bringing everyone to the table—requires strong sacrifice and strong courage on the part of those who care about the ideals for which our nation was founded.

The story I tell in yesterday’s blog—my experience growing up in Arkansas in the 1950s and 1960s—happened in that “deliberate speed” time frame, a period in which we white Southerners kicked and screamed against speed, did all we could to resist integration, and would not ever have willingly gone into that good night without pressure from the federal government, from both the executive and the judicial branches. We bitterly resented those activist judges of the Supreme Court who told us that our Christian customs and Christian culture were insufficiently democratic.

Had civil rights for African Americans been left up to popular consensus, to a majority vote, I have absolutely no doubt that the majority of Southern states—and, indeed, of the nation—would have voted against abolition of segregation in the middle of the 20^th century. The democratic ideals of the founding fathers and mothers have worked themselves out only slowly over the course of history, and have required stringent defense by a watchful minority of concerned citizens and journalists, as well as by conscientious judiciaries and legislators.

This is a point Bill Moyers makes in his new book Moyers on Democracy (Doubleday, 2008). Today’s Alternet website carries and excerpt from the book.

What Moyers has to say about journalists is music to my ears. As readers of this blog may have noted, one reason I celebrate the internet’s development of alternative news sites (and blogs) is that this development finds ways around the traditional media’s control of the news. I am alarmed at the ways in which the mainstream media today appear to have sold their souls to money and power.

Moyers argues that democracy is seriously imperiled when journalists have allowed themselves to be bought by wealthy power mongers. He notes:

I wish I could say that journalists in general are showing the same interest in uncovering the dangerous linkages thwarting this democracy. It is not for lack of honest and courageous individuals who would risk their careers to speak truth to power -- a modest risk compared to those of some journalists in authoritarian countries who have been jailed or murdered for the identical "crime." But our journalists are not in control of the instruments they play. As conglomerates swallow up newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, and networks, and profit rather than product becomes the focus of corporate effort, news organizations -- particularly in television -- are folded into entertainment divisions. The "news hole" in the print media shrinks to make room for advertisements, and stories needed by informed citizens working together are pulled in favor of the latest celebrity scandals because the media moguls have decided that uncovering the inner workings of public and private power is boring and will drive viewers and readers away to greener pastures of pabulum. Good reporters and editors confront walls of resistance in trying to place serious and informative reports over which they have long labored. Media owners who should be sounding the trumpets of alarm on the battlements of democracy instead blow popular ditties through tin horns, undercutting the basis for their existence and their First Amendment rights.

Thinking about creating and maintaining a democracy that is really participatory—one that allows all to be at the table of public life—brings me back to the example of that exemplary African-American leader of the early 20^th century, Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune. At a time in which some African-American women seem unwilling to recognize the obvious strong parallels between the struggle of people of color (and of women) for a place at the table, and the similar struggle of LGBT Americans, prophetic African-American women like Mary McLeod Bethune deserve renewed attention.

Dr. Bethune recognized that marginalization of any group of citizens—whether on the basis of gender, class, economic status, or any other stigmatized difference—frayed the fabric of a participatory society. The town-hall meetings she innovated at the school she founded, Bethune-Cookman College, brought together different groups for dialogue not only because she believed that institutions of higher education can play a significant role in assuring the health of civic societies, but also because she viewed these meetings as an enactment of her social analysis, which stressed the interconnections of all those who are shut out of the process of participatory democracy.

At the very center of Dr. Bethune’s understanding of social transformation was a belief that, in a viable democracy, there must be an ongoing process of extending inalienable rights to all disenfranchised groups. In Dr. Bethune’s view, the concept of inalienable rights enshrined in the United States’s foundational documents requires that, over the course of time, as democratic society recognizes that any group is being unfairly disenfranchised on grounds of race, gender, or other accidental characteristics, this group must be brought into full participation in the structures of the society.

As a student of Dr. Bethune’s thought, Elaine Smith, notes, Mary McLeod Bethune did not confine herself to pursuing civil rights for either African Americans or for women. She recognized the interconnections between the struggle of all disenfranchised Americans for access to the table of participatory democracy. Smith notes that, both as an educator and a political activist, Dr. Bethune “confronted issue layered upon issue” (see Audrey Thomas McCluskey and Elaine M. Smith, ed., Mary McLeod Bethune: Building a Better World [Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999], “Introduction,” p. 201).

Mary McLeod Bethune concerned herself (and her students) with civil rights for blacks and women, but also with issues of education, job placement, housing, health care, the military, and civilian defense—all in a central quest to extend full civil rights to all disenfranchised minorities.

Thinking about Dr. Bethune in light of this week’s baby-step attempt to bring LGBT Americans to the table of participatory democracy—thinking about the prophetic role that some African-American women, including Coretta Scott King and Barbara Jordan, have played in the struggle for LGBT civil rights—brings me back to a question I raised in a previous posting.

This is a question about the role of the United Methodist Church and its institutions in addressing key issues of social need. This week, Wayne Hudson reports on the Bilerico blog that, yet again, the state of Florida is in the news for heated resistance to gay civil rights.

Hudson’s report is entitled “Florida Bully Principal Loses His Case, But May Win His Battle” (www.bilerico.com/2008/05/florida_bully_principal_loses_his_case_b.php). He reports on a case in which students at Ponce de Leon High School in Panama City who wore symbols supporting solidarity with gay students were forced to remove these symbols, while students wearing Confederate flags were allowed to continue displaying those overtly political symbols.

The students contacted the ACLU, and a Florida federal court ruled in their favor.

Thinking about this case reminds me of some imperatives the recent UMC General Conference developed for United Methodists. Legislation passed at General Conference calls on United Methodists to educate—to teach people how to understand and prevent mechanisms of social violence including homophobia.

General Conference specifically calls on United Methodist Churches and UMC institutions to combat homophobia, and to educate communities and churches about homophobia and heterosexism.

In a state where battle lines are drawn, where violence against LGBT citizens is becoming routine, where a homophobic bill is on the ballot for the coming election, what better place to launch the educational initiatives for which General Conference calls than Bethune-Cookman University? As the welcome statement of the university’s current president, Dr. Trudie Kibbe Reed, on the Bethune-Cookman website, notes,

Founded in 1904 by Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, Bethune-Cookman College is an outstanding liberal arts college with a rich legacy. Through her pursuit of lifelong learning and social equity for all people, Dr. Bethune demonstrated that education was capable of democratizing society through civic engagement and academic excellence. Today, this legacy lives on in our students as they engage in volunteerism projects, service learning, and civic engagement projects that enhance effective citizenship.

The rich legacy of Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune and of the university she founded makes that United Methodist university a perfect location for the United Methodist Church to begin putting into practice its concern to combat discrimination in all forms, to educate for tolerance in a culture where violence is rearing its ugly head. The fact that Bethune-Cookman University is a United Methodist HBCU (an historically black university) makes it a perfect location for UMC-sponsored educational initiatives to build bridges between the African American and the gay communities—both of whom struggle with persistent discrimination about which the United Methodist Church professes to be concerned.

In a November 1941 letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dr. Bethune notes that she believed it was imperative that the school she had founded thrive, because Bethune-Cookman College had become a “community center” for discussion and civic engagement in its region.

As I continue to reflect on the statements made by the United Methodist Church at its recent General Conference—and as the United Church of Christ launches its Sacred Conversation on Race—I encourage the UMC bishop of Florida, Bishop Timothy Whitaker, to give serious consideration to the legacy of Dr. Bethune as a foundation for serious educational work at the "community center" she founded, Bethune-Cookman University, around issues of homophobia, racism, heterosexism, and other forms of discrimination in American society.

What more splendid countercultural witness could the United Methodist Church offer in a state so divided over these issues today as the state of Florida, than carrying on Dr. Bethune’s dream of educating through civic engagement to continue the democratization of American society?

Talking about General Conference reminds me to summarize the three discourse rules I developed for holy conferencing in previous postings. As I do this, I’m reminded, too, to express my gratitude to several United Methodist websites—including UMNexus—that have linked to this blog’s discussion of UMC issues. I have received quite a few new blog visitors because of those links, and am grateful for the new readers.

Here, in one list, are my three discourse rules for holy conferencing:

1. In effective holy conferencing that aims at the practice of faithful Christian discipleship, truth claims need to be backed by evidence and sources that are accessible to all, and capable of being evaluated by all.

2. Effective holy conferencing requires policies and procedures to create transparency and accountability among all participants about organizations other than the church that they may be representing in holy conferencing. In particular, effective holy conferencing requires policies and procedures that create transparency and accountability about funding sources for delegates who represent organizations other than the church, as they engage in holy conferencing.

3. Effective holy conferencing that aims at the practice of faithful Christian discipleship will give a privileged place at the table to those whose voices are least powerful in mainstream culture.