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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Manly Men and Homophobic Churches

A disturbing story today out of Ft. Lauderdale, where a gay couple, Mitchell Mart and Melbourne Brunner, eating at a restaurant Saturday said good morning to a passerby, who turned on them and beat Brunner to a bloody pulp. The whole story is at www.towleroad.com/2008/02/gay-man-beaten.html.

This comes several days after a 17-year old gay teen, Simmie Williams, Jr., was shot and killed in the same city by two unknown young men. Police are trying to determine if this shooting was a hate crime because of Simmie Williams’s sexual orientation: www.towleroad.com/2008/02/gay-florida-tee.html.

The mayor of Ft. Lauderdale, Jim Naugle, has for some time now been leading a crusade against the city’s large gay community, in active collaboration with a group of right-wing religious leaders www.towleroad.com/2007/08/christian-hate-.html. Last year a gay couple visiting the city were dismayed (and frightened) to hear anti-gay scripture verses being read over the loudspeaker of the airport as they retrieved their luggage at the airport baggage terminal.

The news of the Ft. Lauderdale shootings comes on the heels of news that Janice Langbehn, whose partner Lisa Pond died suddenly in Miami last years as the Seattle couple prepared to take a cruise with their children, has filed suit against Jackson Memorial Hospital because of the treatment she received when Pond was dying. Langbehn was refused the right to provide medical information about Pond, was not allowed to see her until shortly before her death, and was told that she was in an anti-gay state with anti-gay laws: see www.365gay.com/Newscon08/02/022208fla.htm.

A posting on today’s Towleroad website (www.towleroad.com/2008/02/is-fort-lauderd.html) asks whether Ft. Lauderdale mayor Naugle is in part responsible for the increase in incidents of violent homophobia in his city. In my view, he definitely is—and so are the ministers and churches supporting him.

I can address the latter from my own personal experiences during Steve’s and my recent time in Florida. Unknown to us, on the day of our arrival to take jobs in a United Methodist college, the Florida United Methodist state conference of 2006 concluded. It did so after a bitterly divisive debate over the status of gay members of Methodist churches, which split the Methodist church of Florida down the middle.

We had absolutely no idea of any of this until months later, when promises made to us at the time of our hiring began to be revoked and we began to experience baffling persecution from the supervisor who had hired us as an openly gay couple. The issue at stake in the 2006 Florida UMC conference was whether gay members can even be admitted to Methodist churches in Florida—not whether gays living celibate lives can be admitted to churches, but whether gay persons should be admitted at all. About half of the churches in the state of Florida wanted, at the 2006 conference, to exclude gay members altogether.

Though we had been told that our being an openly gay couple would not present a problem at the college that hired us, we quickly learned that this was far from the case—at least, in the mind of our supervisor. Within a few weeks, she informed us that the UMC bishop of Florida, Bishop Timothy Whitaker, had told her that, if he had known we were a couple (as opposed to being openly gay but single), he would not have approved our hire. (The bishop sits on the board of the college that hired us.)

During our unhappy year working at this college, we were constantly hounded by the supervisor about appearing together—though we had only one car—about taking lunch together, and even about taking one another to the doctor, though married couples at the school never receive reprimands for such activities. Not a single minister on the college’s board sought to defend us against this unjust treatment.

All of this was baffling to us. Though many people have images of Little Rock as backwards and conservative, with respect to gay issues the churches here are in many ways light years ahead of where they are in Florida. The Episcopal bishop of central Florida has strong sympathies with the breakaway group that continues to protest the elevation of an openly gay priest, Gene Robinson, to the episcopacy. In the area of Florida in which we lived, Episcopal churches even post "anti-gay" scriptures on their websites.

By contrast, the current and former Episcopal bishops of Arkansas have maintained a welcoming space within Episcopal churches for the the gay community. The previous bishop signed a statement some years ago supporting the ordination of openly gay persons to the ministry, and permitted parishes that chose to do so to celebrate gay unions. The current bishop has continued this support for gay persons.

We went to a Catholic liturgy once in our whole time in Florida. The church would have been our parish church, had we attended regularly. On the day we went to liturgy there, the parish deacon employed a dialogue homily in which he asked parishioners to tell him any words of Jesus they could recall.

A woman behind us, who muttered, “Praise the Lord,” throughout much of the homily, shouted out, “Repent!” We did not return to this parish. We were, as far as we could detect, the sole gay couple in the parish that day.

The churches are clearly a large part of the problem in our society, when LGBT people are bashed, killed, disemployed solely because we are gay, prevented from seeing our partners in the hospital, denied healthcare benefits. Given Steve’s and my experiences in Florida, I can without any doubt at all say that the churches play a large role in fomenting homophobia in that state—both through their silence when LGBT people are assaulted or demeaned, and through their active attempts to make LGBT people unwelcome, as with the group with whom Naugle in Ft. Lauderdale has affiliated himself.

It disturbs me that among the ministers egging Naugle on are some prominent African-American church leaders. I am particularly dismayed by homophobia in the African-American community. It seems to me that people who have experienced severe historic oppression should understand the mechanisms of oppression in the present, and should stand in solidarity with other oppressed groups. We who are oppressed have strong reason to stand together. The same groups who now bash gays in the churches were promoting racism a half century ago. I know. I grew up with those Christians. I heard the bible used then to justify subordination and abuse of people of color, just as I hear it used now to justify oppression of LGBT people.

One of the most shocking instances of homophobia on the part of an African-American minister in recent days was a remark made by Rev. Ken Hutcherson of Seattle in a sermon a few weeks ago. After proclaiming that "God hates soft men" and "God hates effeminate men," Hutcherson went on to say, "If I was in a drugstore and some guy opened the door for me, I'd rip his arm off and beat him with the wet end”: see http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/352368_faith23.html.

Hutcherson is a representative of the “men’s movement” in the churches. This movement tries to retrieve the church for men—as in manly men. It quite commonly preaches that men are “naturally” superior to women and have been given authority by God to rule women. It places great stock in assuring that men behave like men and women like women—at least, according to manly men’s definition of how men and women should behave. It believes that “correct” gender behavior is mandated by scripture and by God, and that those who deviated from these mandates are to be scorned and punished.

For this movement at its most ludicrous (and for a demonstration that the same ugly attitudes are alive and well in white churches, too), I recommend (if readers can stomach it) a You Tube video of a recent sermon by Rev. Steven L. Anderson of Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona. Rev. Anderson is preaching on a biblical phrase, "him that pisseth against the wall": see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDxcyqeRc-4.

Anderson takes the text to mean—I’m not making this up!—that God intends for men to urinate standing up. His sermon mounts a bizarre diatribe against Germans for (so he claims) demanding that men urinate while sitting down. The sermon mocks men who are “male” and not real men. Anderson’s mincing tone of voice when he speaks of males as opposed to men suggests that males are soft men who have allowed themselves to be whipped into shape by women who demand that they pee sitting down.

This would be laughable, if such rhetoric and such attitudes did not translate into the kind of violence we are seeing all too often these days against LGBT people, including gay youth. Note to churches: I find nothing in the scriptures which states that having a penis elevates a person to the status of a demi-god, and nothing which permits penis-endowed manly men to demonstrate their manly entitlement by beating others to a bloody pulp or shooting them to death.