Ruth Krall, Historical Meandering: Ideologies of Abuse and Exclusion (2)

Vasily Polenov, Le droit du Seigneur (1874), in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow

The essay below is the second part of Ruth Krall's essay entitled "Historical Meandering: Ideologies of Abuse and Exclusion." The first part was published on Bilgrimage several days ago. As the introduction to the essay at the link I have just provided explains, the essay is one of a series of essays Ruth has published on Bilgrimage, under the series title "Recapitulation: Affinity Sexual Violence in a Religious Voice." Links to the previous essays in this series appear at the link I've just given you above. The common theme binding these essays together is the endemic natural of religious and spiritual leader sexual abuse of followers. The current essay explores this theme by arguing that clergy sexual abuse is a global public health issue whose noxious presence can be found inside multiple language groups and national identities. The secong part of Ruth's essay, "Historical Meandering," follows (note that footnotes begin with xiii because this essay is a continuation of the first part published previously):

GLSEN on Bullying of Gay Youths: Worse Where Education Levels Are Low

And last but not least today: the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) has just issued a media release about an important GLSEN study showing that LGBT teens are more likely to experience hostility and harassment in schools in rural communities and those marked by poverty and low adult educational rates than in urban areas and communities with higher education levels.

I've noted previously on this blog that, in my view, gay activists in major urban areas need to pay more attention to the lives and experiences of those of us who do not live in places in which laws and social attitudes curb overt anti-gay hostility and discrimination. In my view, it's particularly imperative that the needs of gay young people in rural parts of the country receive more attention from gay leaders in the U.S.

I'm not in the least surprised to find that GLSEN has discovered a correlation between lack of high adult education levels in various communities, and the harassment that gay teens experience in the schools of those communities. To me, it seems intuitively obvious that much of the overt homophobia displayed towards gay family members, gay citizens, and--saddest of all--gay young people in some parts of the country has to do with lack of education. And where education levels are low, there's also likely to be poverty to compound the problem.

I've also noted on this blog my concern as an educator regarding the role colleges and universities need to be playing in educating students--and, in particular, teachers-to-be--to combat such discrimination when they enter the workforce. As it happens, many of the communities with the lowest levels of adult education and the highest levels of poverty in which gay teens experience significant harassment in schools also happen to be in my part of the nation, the bible belt of the American Southeast.

Many of the schools and colleges in my part of the nation are church-sponsored. And many of them have a deplorable track-record when it comes to educating students to understand and deal with issues of sexual difference. They are part of the problem and not part of the solution, vis-a-vis harassment of gay teens.

I've taught in colleges and universities in Florida, Arkansas, and North Carolina, and have seen manifest, ugly homophobia in the institutions in which I taught in these areas. In several of them, I saw people fired simply because they were gay or lesbian. And as I have noted, I myself was punished in a Methodist-owned university in Florida when I was asked to coordinate a program to compile resources for faculty and students engaged in social action projects, and when I added GLSEN to the list of resources. I was told that encouraging students and faculty of this Methodist school to look at issues of harassment of gay youth was putting my "lifestyle" in the face of the campus community.

And as long as the churches that sponsor these schools and the national and regional accrediting bodies that oversee them permit them to get away with overt discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation (often, while they claim religious exemption) and with using discriminatory norms in hiring and firing employees, not much is going to change. The Southern Association of Colleges and Universities (SACS) needs to be much more vigilant about discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation among the colleges and universities it oversees--including the many church-owned institutions in its bailiwick.

So does the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), which, though it has rubrics forbidding discrimination among accredited teacher education schools, does little to enforce those rubrics. Until we come to terms with the role higher education plays in sustaining homophobia in some regions of this nation, we will not solve the problem of gay-bashing in our school system.

And it needs desperately to be solved.

(For those who have experienced discrimination at a SACS-accredited institution, a reminder that, as one of its schools comes up for re-accreditation, SACS invites formal third-party comments about the school. If you can document a school's discriminatory behavior or failure to conform to SACS accrediting standards in other areas, I encourage you to take advantage of your legal right to file a third-party statement here. I certainly intend to take advantage of my own legal right to do so, when the two SACS schools at which I experienced discrimination and saw flagrant violation of accrediting standards come up for re-accreditation.)

H/t to Pam's House Blend for information about the GLSEN study.

Continued Beating of Children in the South and Slavery: Making the Connections

A day or so ago, the Arkansas Times posted a piece about the continued use of corporal punishment for children in Arkansas schools. Yes, it does still go on all over the South (here and here), one of many vestiges of barbarism that we like to sanctify with hand-picked biblical passages that conveniently justify our barbarism, while we ignore the overweening weight of other biblical passages that expose our barbaric cultural norms as cruel, immoral, and unjustifiable.

And a vestige of slavery: when I saw the Arkansas Times article, what caught my eye immediately was the photograph of the paddle still used in Southern schools to beat children. This is exactly the kind of paddle used in schools in south Arkansas when I was growing up. And it’s apparently the kind of paddle that many slaveholders used to punish slaves in antebellum Arkansas.

I did not know of that connection between ongoing corporal punishment of Southern children and slavery until I recently read Grif Stockley’s Ruled by Race, surveying the racial history of Arkansas, a state in which race trumps everything, Stockley thinks. Stockley notes that the WPA slave narratives, transcripts of interviews that WPA workers held with former slaves in the 1930s, indicate a high level of violence against slaves in antebellum Arkansas. Approximately a third of the WPA slave narratives collected in Arkansas recount violence done to slaves by slaveholders and overseers (p. 3).

Arkansas was unique among slave states in that there is no appellate record at all of prosecution for excessive force used against slaves (p. 26). The record suggests that whites could abuse blacks with impunity in antebellum Arkansas, without any “interference” from a state government totally enmeshed in and supportive of slavery, and of churches totally captive to the slave system. Shortly before Arkansas became a state, its citizens succeeded in running off Jesse Haile, a Methodist preacher who followed his church’s teachings against slavery and advocated abolition (p. 38). By 1850, a large majority of Methodist ministers in Arkansas owned slaves themselves (ibid.).

And Stockley includes a detail about one of the ways in which slaves were punished in Arkansas that makes a light bulb go off in my head, one that illuminates the connection between slavery and corporal punishment of children which had previously eluded me. Stockley notes that, on many plantations, paddles were used to beat slaves, which had holes in them to raise blisters on the skin of those being beaten (p. 6).

As I say, this historical tidbit catches my eye, as does the picture of the paddle used in Southern schools today, because that same paddle with holes bored into it was used in the schools I attended as a child and a teen in south Arkansas in the 1950s and 1960s. I myself was never beaten—not in school, at least (home was a different story). I knew in my bones that I was “different,” and that whatever nameless thing defined my difference was likely to attract unwanted attention from older boys predisposed to violence.

So I kept my head down, went my way, and found myself in an uncomfortable spotlight only when my tendency to excel at schoolwork, joined to my refractory willingness to say honestly what I thought when asked my opinion, even when said opinion countervailed popular ideas, got me into trouble. I know about the paddle only vicariously.

But what I learned about it even vicariously was enough to make me know its power to inflict considerable pain, and to make me determined to avoid being the recipient of its pain. In junior high and high school, paddling was a privilege reserved for the most part to the coaches (though the male principal and vice-principal that ran the school were also known to beat boys in their offices).

Many gym classes were preceded by periods in which all of us in the class were required to sit in silence as one and then another boy got called outside into the hallway to be paddled, while the rest of us listened. All the male coaches who taught physical education in our school were burly, gruff men, heterosexual (or heterosexual-posturing) men prone to violence who stood at the top of the social pecking order of their world and intended to remain there, through force, if necessary.

When they beat boys, they really beat them. Sitting in the gym and listening to the beatings, we could hear the paddle with the holes bored in it whistling through the air. We could hear its solid splat on the naked buttocks of the boys being paddled. We could hear their yelps of pain.

These were normally tough boys, boys who wouldn’t whimper or cry out if their lives depended on it. We knew, as we listened to them being beaten again and again, and yelping after each thwack of the paddle, that the pain had to be considerable, to bring these toughs to any admission that they felt the beating.

And then, after they had been whipped and limped—often in tears—back into the gym, the coaches would appear. With the paddle they had just used. They’d swing it casually around so we all could see it. And then they’d put it away in their office, until it needed to be brought out again for another round of punishments.

These beatings were clearly designed to be public. They were about more than just the punishment of individual malefactors. They were about intimidating—terrorizing is not too strong of a word—the rest of us, showing us who had the power and who didn’t. And what was likely to happen to anyone who ran up against the power of those who owned the paddle.

Just as in the slave system: when slaves were beaten with the same implement, or forced to lie splayed on the ground as they were scourged brutally across their naked backs, or put into stocks, the point was not merely to punish an individual slave. It was to terrorize a whole group of people. It was to show those people that they did not count as human beings, and that if they decided to pretend they counted, swift, horrific reprisal would follow immediately.

And does the beating of children in schools (or at home) work, as many bible-spouting social conservatives like to tell us it does? Not in the schools I attended. Those beaten were beaten repeatedly. Their offenses (sassing teachers, violating school rules, and so forth) were repeat offenses. Beating did not deter them from continuing their refractory behavior. It even seemed to spur them on to acts of larger, more insouciant defiance.

And to violence: the violence done to them by the coaches, the humiliation they endured at the hands of the big men? They simply passed it on to smaller, weaker boys, boys who needed to be shown that they were not big men and could never attain big-man status. The violence bred more violence, so that school became a torment for any child who stood out in some way that attracted the negative attention of the thugs.

Just as the violence of the right-wing thugs now seeking to shut down national debate about health care will inevitably breed more violence, as long as the bullies go unchecked and are afforded the luxury of believing that their tactics are productive, that they truly hold in their hands the unchecked power they believe they have. Thugs whose faces don't look a great deal different from those who wielded the paddle in my schools, or those whom they taught through their beatings to use violence as a tactic of social domination and control of the "weak." Thugs whose faces remind me and many others (here, too) of the faces we saw in mobs determined to roll back integration in the South of the 1950s and 1960s.

Thugs who surely look a great deal like those standing over slaves with whips and paddles in the South of the slave days, beating and beating and beating again, as they spouted bible verses to justify their savage behavior.

A Reader Writes: Vilification Never Stops with One Group

ADDENDUM: It occurs to me to add an important (to me, at least) addendum to what I wrote earlier today (the text below). This is a note about what people who make solidarity with gay human beings can expect today.

In a world in which those who are gay are still treated as despised objects rather than human persons, as bargaining chips in political power games that don't really have anything to do with us, except that we are here, and useful, and relatively powerless to defend ourselves, expect to share our fate, if you make solidarity with us.

Expect to find yourself demeaned and used, in turn. Don't expect rewards--that is, unless you choose to sell yourself to the many powerful figures in church and society who still need gay people as demonic figures in their power games. Then, you can certainly expect the titles, honors, appointments to roll in, if you can live with yourself, and if that pelf is worth something to you.

If you make solidarity with gay folks at this point in history, expect to be treated as Jesus was treated when he ate with outcasts. He was treated like one of them. And he ended up sharing their fate. But in doing so, he changed the world decisively--in ways that those who sell themselves to draconian and unjust power structures are absolutely incapable of doing. And my original text follows:

A reader of Bilgrimage left an astute observation about my posting yesterday (here) describing how a former employer finds it useful to continue attacking me (and my partner Steve) down the road from when we left her employment--because we are gay. And because she can get away with doing so. In a church-owned school that has no stated policies forbidding discrimination against people on grounds of sexual orientation. And in a cultural climate in which it is very easy to smear gay folks with all kinds of dirt, in order to deflect attention from one's own shortcomings and shore up one's faltering power.

I'm impressed by Carl's response, because he really gets what's going on. This is a scapegoating process (a vilification process, to use his phrase) that should concern everyone, because it involves everyone. It opens the door to vilification of others who cannot easily defend themselves from this process of ritual humiliation, abuse, and expulsion designed to protect (and cover over the sins of) those engineering the abuse.

As Carl points out, once innocent bystanders allow this to happen to anyone, they allow it to happen to everyone--including, ultimately, themselves. Carl writes,

What bothers me the most about vilification of a group of people, is the history of the human race. Historically, once a societal authority starts vilification, that process develops a life of its own and never stops.

Whether it is a country, a political party or a congregation is irrelevant. The process is the same and the ultimate outcome is predictable. Once the process starts, it never stops at one group. Once the first group is "vanquished", then the vilification is given to another group. And another, and another ad infinitim.

In the catholic church we are now seeing vilification of those who are not antiabortion, those who are not faithful orthodox, those who disagree with the leadership, those who are calling for greater accountability, women, protestants, muslims, buddhists, yoga practitioners and I'm sure we could find more that are now being vilified by the faithful orthodox of the catholic church (and other churches). . . .

And that is perhaps the most dangerous aspect of vilification - dialogue is impossible. Historically, the application of force and violence has been required to make the change. Let us pray that this time it will be different.

And here's my response: Carl, these are outstanding reflections, which set the issue in a broader context--the choice of human communities throughout history to demonize one group or another at any given moment in time.

You're right, that process should concern everyone, since it never stops with the targeted group. As Pastor Martin Niemöller famously noted in the Nazi period, we stand by in silence as they round up the Jews and the political dissidents. And then when they come to round us up, no one is left. And as others have noted, Niemöller's statement could equally have included those with physical and mental challenges, ethnic minorities like the Slavs or Gypsies, and gays and lesbians, all of whom were also rounded up and placed in concentration camps (and murdered) in Nazi Germany.

This process is, precisely as you say, sadly predictable. It goes on and on throughout history. And as you also note, once it is underway, it never stops with the group it orginally targets: it keeps working to draw in more and more people as victims to demonstrate the power and purity of those mounting the purge, because power built on dominating others is always insecure, and has no claim at all to purity.

What varies throughout history is the group targeted. And at this point in history, I think it's safe to say that among the groups most persistently and easily targeted are gay and lesbian human beings. The book of John McNeill's that I have just finished, Sex as God Intended, is magnificently hopeful about the possibility for human beings, under the guidance of the Spirit, to move to a new stage of consciousness about issues of gender and sexuality. McNeill thinks that this will happen as we recognize the terrible ravages that heterosexual male domination and its system of patriarchy have wreaked on all of us.

McNeill notes, however, that the more we approach the breakthrough point at which we begin to recognize and repudiate those ravages--as a human community, as a body of people slowly coming to awareness together--the stronger will be the backlash against gay and lesbian human beings. The more the human community becomes aware of the existence of LGBT people everywhere, and of the gifts LGBT people bring to the human community, the more likely it is that those same people will be targeted in ugly public rituals of humiliation, abuse, and expulsion.

Ironic, isn't it? And yet McNeill seems to be right. The story I've been telling of our latest job experience--and this is part of an ongoing story of Steve's and my reception as academic leaders in church-owned schools--is a story of such public humiliation, abuse, and expulsion. It is related to the churches that own the schools in which we have worked. They need us as victims whom they can humiliate, abuse, and expel in order to vindicate their power, might, and purity.

People are willing to believe almost anything of a person who is gay, simply because that person is gay. People overlook the shortcomings of the anti-gay messenger whose own life may shockingly belie the sexual norms he or she seeks to enforce by targeting gay people. People are willing to believe that, simply because a person is gay or lesbian, he may steal, lie, stab others in the back--engage in all sorts of sordid behavior--when there is absolutely no evidence of that gay person's lack of integrity. Indeed, when the record shows that the person being smeared in that way has lived with honor and generosity, and in no way deserves his or her vilification . . . .

As you so clearly describe, the process of vilification isn't about thought or truth or dialogue at all (and that's part of what makes it so scandalous when it takes place in academic institutions, which are dedicated to the pursuit of truth and to thinking and dialogue). It's about the susceptibilty of a particular group at a particular time to vilification. It's about the fact that can conveniently and easily use that group of human beings at this time; we can get away with it and pay a price for doing so.

It's about our ability to "tag" that group. They're dirty child-molesting homos. They're baby killers. They're socialists giving away my money. They're ragheads and gooks. They're (in my youth) n----r lovers.

They're whatever dirt we need to throw right now, at someone on whom we know that dirt will stick. Because it makes us feel clean to take our dirt and throw it onto someone else. Then we don't have to examine our own dirt or open our lives for inspection to those whom we claim to be leading, as a transformative, morally-grounded leader.

Because we consolidate our power when we can make it appear that our lapses in moral authority or in leadership are due to them, to their conniving ways, always worming their way into the structures of good, upright society and good, upright Christian institutions and undermining from within.

These are mechanisms of abuse that have a long genealogy. They have been used by Christians against Jews for millennia. They are used by men against women. They continue to play out in how white people treat people of color. And they are very much in evidence today--in a shocking way impossible to avoid, particularly if one is concerned about building a humane society--in how we who are gay and lesbian continue to be treated right to the present.

One would expect churches to be challenging this, wouldn't one? If one has that expectation, one will be sorely disappointed. Churches are at the forefront of the process of gay vilification--for one reason, primarily: the churches have foolishly (and sinfully) staked their future on the persistence of patriarchy, of the continued domination of everything by heterosexual males. Gay people threaten that ideology and that control in a profound way. We threaten it by our very existence, just by living and raising uncomfortable questions, through our lives, about the hard-fast allocation of power on the basis of gender in patriarchal societies. We have to be killed, literally or metaphorically, to permit that patriarchal system to remain in place.

I've been thinking through these struggles as I read about what is happening with that legislation to alter parish governance in Connecticut. I'm accumulating quite a bit of evidence to show that we're seeing, right now, in that event the outburst of a new round of very ugly homophobia, with some Catholic bishops--notably Chaput in Denver--right there at the head of the troops, spearheading it all. As usual, with her quick way of seeing right to the heart of what's going on in the Catholic world, Colleen Kolchivar-Baker has already blogged about this at Enlightened Catholicism a few days ago.

And so my latest troubles at a Methodist school, where the state's Methodist bishop has a national reputation for opposing more humane, more Christian treatment of gay and lesbian human beings, is indeed part of a larger story. I appreciate your reflections on this very much, Carl. They help me contextualize my own personal struggle, which has been intense these days and is likely to grow more intense.

Prejudice Is of a Single Bit: The Continuing Importance of Bayard Rustin

I had intended to blog today about the African-American leader Bayard Rustin, whose observation about angelic troublemakers forms the footer to this blog’s homepage. Rustin fascinates me for all kinds of reasons I’ve outlined in previous postings: he was an African-American civil rights leader who also happened to be gay, and who recognized the interconnections between the black quest for civil rights and the gay quest; his activism was fed by deep spiritual roots; along with Mary McLeod Bethune, whom he knew, he saw American democracy as an unfinished project that grows as we extend rights to groups currently deprived of rights; and he found a way to do his work and make his voice heard despite the atrocious opposition he attracted as both a man of color and a gay man.

With that nexus of thoughts in mind for today’s blog, I was delighted to click today on a blog I read each weekday—peterson toscano’s a musing—and to discover that Peterson Toscano blogged about Bayard Rustin yesterday. In fact, he incorporates some of the same material I had set aside for my posting today.

My blog is linked to Peterson Toscano’s blog in the links section. I recommend his blog because of its exploration of the connections between Quakerism and social justice—and, in particular, between Quakerism and an ethic of radical inclusion of LGBT people. That ethic is sorely needed at a time in which strong (and well-funded forces) within some churches, including the worldwide Anglican communion, are pushing hard to make the exclusion of LGBT human beings a centerpiece of what it means to be church in the 21st century.

I think it may even have been on Peterson Toscano’s blog that I first encountered Bayard Rustin and his thought. Though I spent a semester on fellowship in 1989 studying the work of Martin Luther King, Jr., I don’t recall running across Rustin in the abundant material I read by and about King in that semester. This is surely an indicator of how his significant influence on King’s thought has been muted by conscious and unconscious homophobia on the part of those of us who have studied King’s work over the years.

I noted on my comments on this year’s anniversary of Juneteenth (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/06/commemorating-juneteenth-yes-we-can.html) that I was reading John D’Emilio’s Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (NY: Free Press, 1993). I’ve been reading D’Emilio’s outstanding biography of Rustin with an eye to the debates about race and gender, models of leadership, and the influence of faith in the public sphere, which the current presidential campaign has stirred up.

Rustin is profoundly important at this juncture of American history because he offers us a vision of participatory democracy to which we need to pay keen attention as we struggle to save our own democracy. As I have noted previously, in my view, if those of us concerned to safeguard democracy in the United States do not work hard in the next few years to reverse the forces that have virtually eroded the legacy of the founding fathers and mothers, we may be facing the extinction of our democratic experiment.

Rustin also strikes me as worth studying carefully at this moment because, for the first time in our history, we have an African-American presidential candidate as a front runner. And, as I’ve noted in previous postings, Mr. Obama is a candidate who appears, thus far, to have the promise to craft new post-homophobic models of African-American leadership, which are sorely needed by the nation as a whole as well as by the African-American community (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/06/barack-obama-and-post-homophobic-models.html). Rustin points the way to those models.

In what follows, I’d like to offer some reflections on key themes of Rustin’s thought, using D’Emilio’s biography of Rustin to identify those themes:

As a civil rights leader, Bayard Rustin was sustained by a vision of democracy that presupposes democracy can and must be constantly extended to disenfranchised groups. D’Emilio notes,

He [i.e., Rustin] argued that out of the civil rights movement there could emerge a coalition of conscience capable of becoming a new progressive majority in the United States. His strategy rested on a bedrock optimism that the American political system was flexible and responsive enough to embrace change of revolutionary dimensions. He believed that peaceful democratic means were adequate to the task of remaking relations of power. Rustin also had faith that individual human beings themselves were just as flexible and that, over time, they could be moved to recognize the worth of every one of their fellows and act accordingly (my emphasis, p. 4).

Rustin’s thought is akin to Mary McLeod Bethune’s, in this respect—and the civil rights philosophy of both of these significant 20th-century African-American leaders may have been fed by some of the same spiritual currents. As did Bethune, Rustin assumed that democracy is a constantly unfinished project.

It grows as we survey the communities in which we live and identify those who are presently disenfranchised, shoved from the table. It grows as we abolish barriers to the inclusion and participation of these disenfranchised groups: as we bring them to the table. The vision of participatory democracy enshrined in our foundational documents assumes that no human being is incapable of making an important contribution to the democratic process, of being at the table, simply because of the color of his skin, her national origin, his social status, her gender, or his/her sexual orientation.

As I noted in a previous posting about Rustin, he was personally connected to Dr. Bethune; the carryover of certain themes in their understanding of participatory democracy may well be rooted in their personal ties to each other. D’Emilio notes that Dr. Bethune stayed with the Rustin family when passing through their area of Pennsylvania (p. 12, citing Gottlieb ms., August Meier Papers at Schomburg Library, New York, NY; and Rustin interview, Columbia Univ. Oral History Collection, New York, NY).

As did Mary McLeod Bethune, Bayard Rustin developed a technique of social activism that depended on sponsoring workshops and town-hall meetings in every community in which he worked. These workshops brought together as many local constituencies as possible. They intentionally brought everyone to the table, so that every perspective could be heard. As did Bethune’s town-hall meetings, the workshops focused on (and tried to model) a communal process of consciousness-raising (pp. 140f).

Bayard Rustin’s philosophy of civil rights arose out of his combined Methodist and Quaker roots. Rustin was raised in a home over which his mother Julia, an African Methodist Episcopal church member, presided. However, Julia Rustin had grown up in a culture imbued with Quaker influence, and both she and Rustin himself often noted the significance of this influence on their lives (p. 9, citing Daily Local News, West Chester, PA, 17 June 1941 and 29 April 1957, in Rustin clipping files at Chester Co. Hist. Soc., West Chester; and Rustin interview, Columbia Univ. Oral History Collection, New York, NY). Julia Rustin’s influence led to her son becoming a Quaker, with the “socially engaged spirituality” of the Friends (see pp. 25-6).

At a crucial point early in Rustin’s career as an activist, he came into contact with Abraham Johannes Muste, the executive secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. This contact brought him into association with the National Council of Methodist Youth, the most politically engaged Christian youth group of the 1930s (p. 44). Sadly, however, Muste was later to repudiate Rustin when it became apparent that he was gay and would not dissimulate about his identity as a gay man.

Bayard Rustin’s spiritual formation caused him to view his civil rights work as not a job, but a vocation. As D’Emilio notes, “His work was a calling, not a job” (p. 197). The spiritual bedrock on which his vision of civil rights activism rested grew even more solid (and ecumenical) when he encountered the thought of Gandhi. Rustin was one of the primary interpreters of Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent action for American social activists, and for Martin Luther King in particular (pp. 52-3).

In some key respects, in fact, it was Bayard Rustin who brought the concept of satyagraha to the civil rights movement in the U.S. The attempt to wed Gandhian nonviolence to American civil rights activism brought him into contact with a leading Methodist thinker of his day, J. Holmes Smith, a former Methodist missionary to India, who founded an ashram in Harlem to model satyagraha in an American context (p. 53).

The combined Quaker and Gandhian roots of Rustin’s civil rights thought (as well as the Methodist emphasis on social justice) caused Rustin to challenge the come-to-Jesus theology of some black churches. In interviews late in his life, Rustin notes that he and King struggled constantly against the attempt of many black church leaders to confine civil rights activism within a stifling theology of soul saving, which was tone-deaf to the need for social transformation (p. 238, citing Rustin interview, Columbia Univ. Oral History Collection, New York, NY).

As a Quaker, Rustin insisted that any path to social change that would effect lasting change within the culture at large had to begin with the change of institutions, and not of hearts (p. 400). His experience as a Quaker led him to note that relying on moral appeal to change institutions like slavery did not work: laws outlawing slavery had to be enacted first. If people’s hearts were to change eventually, they would do so only when legislative, judicial, and institutional attempts to build a more just and humane society preceded that change.

The diverse roots of Bayard Rustin’s spirituality and philosophy of civil rights reflect broad catholic interests and a refusal to accept conventional lines in his own life and in his calling as a civil rights leader. Rustin was always transgressing lines, crossing lines, building coalitions beyond the safe confines of any particular community:

Throughout his life, Bayard maintained a catholic set of interests. He refused to honor the lines that marked and separated individuals and that stratified American society. Gay worlds and straight, black worlds and white, spiritual communities and secular political ones, artistic expression and grass-roots activism all appealed to him (p. 33).

Bayard Rustin believed that the primary role of a transformative leader is to be a moral exemplar of the changes she is trying to effect as a leader. Along with Gandhi—and in line with his Quaker roots—Rustin constantly emphasized that a transformative leader cannot violate the principles he is preaching, in his own life, if he expects to be effective in leading a movement of social change. Rustin stressed the “special responsibility” of leaders to model the moral values of social change as he worked with Dr. King to develop a compelling strategy for social change in race relations (pp. 231, 239).

Bayard Rustin believed that it was profoundly self-defeating for African-American civil rights activists to confine their struggle for human rights to the issue of race alone. As did Dr. King, Rustin held that that “the uplift of all poor people is part of the struggle of Negroes for justice” (p. 266, citing King Papers, Boston University, box 5, folder 29; Bayard Rustin Papers, reel 3, Martin Luther King folder).

Rustin struggled against the NAACP’s attempt to confine civil rights activism to racial issues alone (p. 295), as well as against the gradualist philosophy of the NAACP, which trusted in a top-down approach to racial change, rather than a grassroots approach (p. 293). Rustin saw this approach as not merely self-defeating, since it isolated black Americans from other groups of the poor (that is, the marginal and disenfranchised) struggling for civil rights; he also saw it as self-serving, as an approach that benefited primarily key black ministers and other leaders of the civil rights movement, at the expense of the African-American community as a whole.

In Rustin’s view, civil rights for African Americans makes sense only when viewed within the context of a much broader progressive movement for social change on many fronts in the United States: he characterized the movement for racial equity as the “spearhead” of a much broader movement (pp. 362-3). As Rustin maintained, “We need a political and social reform program that will not only help the Negroes but one that will help all Americans” (p. 363, citing NY Times, 6 Dec. 1963). Indeed, Rustin maintained that the civil rights movement would eventually die out if it did not reach across narrow boundary lines and make common cause with other movements for progressive change—its future depended on a progressive coalition that transcended racial concerns alone (p. 401, citing “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement,” Commentary [Feb. 1965]).

Bayard Rustin’s broad vision of a coalition for progressive change in the United States included gay human beings and gay civil rights. It is incontrovertible that Rustin’s experience as a gay man led him to recognize the significant connections between the black struggle for civil rights and the struggle of gay Americans for civil rights. Rustin’s experience as a black civil rights activist and as a gay man convinced him that African Americans undermined the moral legitimacy of their claim to full human rights if they denied those same rights to other groups—and, notably, to gay brothers and sisters.

Rustin’s experience as a gay man working in the civil rights movement was made exceedingly painful due to the vicious homophobia of some of his friends and allies. In alliance with Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Roy Wilkins so brutally attacked Rustin (slandering him in public forums and seeking to destroy his reputation) that Rustin almost decided to withdraw altogether from the movement for black liberation (pp. 297-300). And, though King himself repudiated Rustin repeatedly because of Rustin’s sexual orientation—while relying on him as a key advisor and strategist—on one occasion in 1964 Rustin helped to shield Dr. King’s entourage, including King’s brother, from morals charges in Oslo when the entourage had brought white prostitutes to their hotel room (p. 396).

Rustin’s experience as the despised, dispossessed, unacknowledged prophet of human rights for all in the black liberation movement led him to note, at the end of his life, that gay rights had become the barometer of civil rights as the 20th century neared its close. In this context, he observed that prejudice is of a single bit:

There are very few liberal Christians today who would dare say anything other than blacks are our brothers and they should be treated so, but they will make all kinds of hideous distinctions when it comes to our gay brothers . . . . There are great numbers of people who will accept all kinds of people: blacks, Hispanics, and Jews, but who won’t accept fags. That is what makes the homosexual central to the whole political apparatus as to how far we can go in human rights (p. 490, citing George Chauncey, Jr. and Lisa Kennedy, “Time on Two Crosses: An Interview with Bayard Rustin,” Village Voice, 30 June 1987, pp. 27-29).

Rustin spoke those prophetic words in 1987. It is now 2008. Twenty years later . . . .

Do Christians still “make all kinds of hideous distinctions when it comes to our gay brothers” in 2008? If so, Rustin’s voice may be just as pertinent now—or perhaps even more pertinent—than it was in the 20th century.

Commemorating Juneteenth: Yes, We Can

Today is the day on which we celebrate the announcement of Emancipation in Texas--and, by extension, everywhere in the United States. It is the day on which slaveholders were instructed to inform "their" slaves that these human beings had been unjustly held as chattel, and were henceforth free to live their lives as human beings, free to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.

I am celebrating Juneteenth by reading John D'Emilio's biography of the visionary civil rights leader Bayard Rustin--Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (NY: Free Press, 2003).

D'Emilio notes that, from his combined Methodist and Quaker roots, Rustin derived a strong belief that people--the American people, people across the globe--could build a participatory democracy true to the fundamental principle of democracy: a place at the table for everyone. Rustin was not a starry-eyed optimist. He was a realist seasoned by struggle to claim his own rights as an African American (and as a gay man).

Despite his constant struggle against those who sought to relegate him to second-class citizenship, to deny him a place at the table, and to suppress his voice, Rustin continued to believe that democracy was possible. As D'Emilio notes,

He [i.e., Rustin] argued that out of the civil rights movement there could emerge a coalition of conscience capable of becoming a new progressive majority in the United States. His strategy rested on a bedrock optimism that the American political system was flexible and responsive enough to embrace change of revolutionary dimensions. He believed that peaceful democratic means were adequate to the task of remaking relations of power. Rustin also had faith that individual human beings themselves were just as flexible and that, over time, they could be moved to recognize the worth of every one of their fellows and act accordingly (p. 4).

As I read this assessment of the bedrock assumptions underlying Rustin's thought and his social activism, I'm struck by how closely it parallels the thought and activism of another prophetic 20th-century African-American leader, Mary McLeod Bethune. I've blogged about Dr. Bethune and the college she founded a number of times previously.

As did Bayard Rustin, Mary McLeod Bethune regarded democracy in America as an unfinished project. Both of these critically important black civil rights leaders maintained that, until we make a place at the table for everyone, our democracy has not fulfilled its promise. Both called on their followers to keep analyzing the needs of the social groups around them, to identify who was, at any given time, being shoved from the table, and to work to bring that excluded group to the table.

Both argued strongly that the movement for civil rights for people of color had to be connected to the movement of for civil rights of every excluded group, because it is in the very nature of democracy to demand an extension of rights to every group shoved from the table.

As Dr. Bethune noted on 12 Jan. 1939 in her opening statement to the Second National Conference on the Problems of the Negro and Negro Youth, “But we recognize that no such ‘united democracy’ can possibly exist unless this ‘common opportunity’ is available to all Americans regardless of creed, class, or color” (Bethune Papers, Bethune-Cookman University; in Audrey Thomas McCluskey and Elaine M. Smith, ed., Mary McLeod Bethune: Building a Better World [Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999], p. 233).

In Dr. Bethune's view, the essence of democracy--its genius--is the recognition that we need everyone at the table, because everyone has something to contribute. No individual or no single group can provide all the gifts a participatory democracy needs in order to be vital, creative, humane. Hence, Bethune argued that educating youth to respect those who are different is not merely essential if democracy is to flourish: such education also opens the one being taught tolerance to a much wider range of ideas, viewpoints, and perspectives than that afforded him or her by his own culture of origin:

The essence of Democracy is the concept that no one group or individual is all-wise or has a monopoly of all the virtues. Training ourselves and our children to have both tolerance and respect for opinions diverging from our own, is one of the best possible ways to promote brotherhood—among the peoples of the world, and among our neighbors in our block! (“The Lesson of Tolerance,” June 16, 1952, Bethune Papers, Bethune-Cookman University; in McCluskey and Smith, p. 267).

This vision of the unfinished project of participatory democracy led Bethune to the conclusion--central to her mission as an educator--that we have an obligation to train the generations that will inherit the world after us to "remake the world," to struggle, within new cultural contexts and new historical settings, to identify who is being shoved from the table, and to work to remove barriers of exclusion that vitiate the democratic process:

I listened to God this morning and the thought came to me, “Any idea that keeps anybody out is too small for this age—open your heart and let everybody in—every class, every race, every nation.” We must remake the world. The task is nothing less than that “(Address to a World Assembly for Moral Re-Armament,” in McCluskey and Smith, p. 58; emphasis in original).

Mary McLeod Bethune and Bayard Rustin sound so much like soul mates in their view of the unfinished project of participatory democracy, that it is tempting to look for connections between them. And such connections are there.

They are there in that both were seminal thinkers of black (and human) liberation in the 20th century. But they are there in other respects, as well: both were strongly influenced by Methodism and its belief in the need for followers of Christ to work against social injustice wherever it was found. And Dr. Bethune knew Bayard Rustin and had close connections to his family. D'Emilio points out that Mary McLeod Bethune stayed with Rustin's family as she passed through their area of Pennsylvania on repeated occasions.

Given these connections, one must ask whether Dr. Bethune would have agreed with Bayard Rustin when he argued in 1986, a year before his death, at an interracial gathering in support of gay civil rights,

Indeed, if you want to know whether today people believe in democracy if you want to know whether they are true democrats, if you want to know whether they are human rights activists, the question to ask is, "What about gay people?" Because that is now the litmus paper by which this democracy is to be judged. The barometer for social change is measured by selecting the group that is most mistreated. To determine where society is with respect to change, one does not ask, "What do you think about the education of children?" Nor does one ask, "Do you believe the aged should have Social Security?” The question of social change should be framed with the most vulnerable group in mind: gay people (as cited from speech transcript; "Introduction," in Bayard Rustin, Time on Two Crosses, ed. Devon W. Carbado and Donald Weise [San Francisco: Cleis, 2003], xxxix).

I'm inclined to answer my question with a resounding yes: if Mary McLeod Bethune had lived to 1986--if she were living today--she'd be working for gay civil rights as ardently as she did for the civil rights of other marginalized groups. She'd be standing with her brother Bayard Rustin.

She'd be standing against the churches and church leaders who say, "No, we can't." To these, she'd be saying, "Yes, we can." She'd be standing against church-based institutions of higher learning whose response to gay rights is "No, we can't." Mary McLeod Bethune would be saying, "Yes, we can."

Yes, we can. Because we have to. That is what being a democracy is all about.

That is what being a humane society is all about. And that is what being a follower is Jesus is about.