Cardinal Dolan Blesses Pharoah on Behalf of the U.S. Catholic Hierarchy: Not in My Name

NEW: Early Christmas present for @realDonaldTrump? Sources say NY's Cardinal Timothy Dolan to participate in Inaugural.

— Kelly O'Donnell (@KellyO) December 24, 2016

Once again: No more. Not in my name any longer.

In the News: ACLU and Colleges Discriminating Against LGBT Students; Anti-LGBT Bills in State Legislatures; Pakistan Censors Gay Times Photo; Anglican Leaders Out of Touch; Dancing Priests and Nuns in Italy

Here's an omnium gatherum of stuff — related in my strange head, but perhaps it won't appear that way to you — that has caught my magpie's sharp eye in recent news: 

Another Quote for Day: "But if the Tetleys Had Lived in Oklahoma, That Sentence [of a British Husband for Raping His Sleeping Wife Over 300 Times] May Have Been Considerably More Difficult to Obtain"

Another quote to share with you as the day goes on, from Samantha Allen at The Daily Beast site:

Droppings from the Bilgrimage Birdcage: "When the Critical Moment for Cultural Change Is Reached, the Hate Becomes Intense"

I'm struck by a wise observation of Ruth Krall in response to my posting yesterday about how the actual behavior of some U.S. Catholics belies the claim that the Catholic church is shifting into welcoming-and-mercy mode today. I want to share Ruth's comment with you all, so that no one misses it while it's tucked away in a combox.

Quote for Day: Oklahoma Legislators Providing Signal That "It Is Open Season on Expressing Prejudice and Discrimination Toward Any or All Minorities"

Following the online circulation of the video to which I linked in my previous posting, in which members of a fraternity at University of Oklahoma chant racist taunts en route to a frat party, Faith in America has asked Oklahoma lawmakers to reconsider "legislation that gives a green light to discrimination when justified with religious teaching or belief." As I've noted here previously, the Oklahoma legislature is considering a slew of bills that deliberately target LGBT citizens of that state, with claims that those citizens represent a threat to the "religious liberty" of Christians in Oklahoma.

Jesuit Education and the "Band of Brothers" Back in the News: University of Oklahoma Race-Baiting Incident Has Link to Jesuit High School

Racism is alive at The University of Oklahoma. @President_Boren pic.twitter.com/eAvnPD8jxA
— Unheard (@OU_Unheard) March 8, 2015

(The video above is from an 8 March 2015 tweet of the University of Oklahoma group Unheard: warning — OFFENSIVE LANGUAGE).

Remember that posting I wrote at the end of January? It talked about how commentators on Pope Francis as a reformer seem oblivious to what a mixed bag his Jesuit heritage is, and, in particular, to the militarism with its attendant misogyny woven through much of that heritage. I told you a story about a graduation Steve and I attended in 2003 at a Jesuit high school in Texas from which the son of one of my cousins was graduating.

Henry Giroux on Politics of Disposability and Violence: Implications for the Orchestrated Attack Now Underway on Gay Citizens of U.S. after 2014 Elections

Henry A. Giroux writes, regarding the wild success of "American Sniper," the latest shoot-'em-up movie glorifying macho American exceptionalism and holy-war violence visited on our perceived enemies,

Islam, Christianity, and Barbaric Violence: Discussion of the Issues in a U.S. Catholic Forum, National Catholic Reporter

In response to an article by Sister Maureen Fiedler in National Catholic Reporter this morning about the bogus controversy following President Obama's statements that Christianity has its own history of violence to face, a Catholic regular at NCR who is ever ready to demonize Muslims, one Purgatrix Ineptiae, writes,*

As Southern States Call for "Secession by Another Name" in Response to Marriage Equality, Catholic Right-Wing Leaders Prepare to Issue Follow-Up to Manhattan Declaration

Two days ago, I commented on what's happening out in the U.S. heartland after the Supremes announced they'll take same-sex marriage cases in their upcoming session, and after judges in one state after another (most recently, the Deep South state of Alabama) knock down bans on same-sex marriage as unconstitutional. As my posting notes, Oklahoma state representative Sally Kern (whose husband is a Southern Baptist minister) has introduced what David Badash calls a "trifecta" of bills whose plain intent is to inform LGBT citizens of her state that they're unwelcome there.

As Marriage Rights Sweep U.S., Reaction in Heartland: Oklahoma, Alabama, Louisiana, Missouri, Etc.

In the news: as German Lopez reports for Vox that same-sex marriage rights are sweeping the U.S., here's what's happening out in the heartland, especially in states heavily dominated by conservative white evangelical voters:

As Southern Baptists, Catholic Bishops, and Mormons Keep Gays in Crosshairs, Other Public Figures Talk of Bloody Revolution

While the men leading the Southern Baptists, U.S. Catholics, and Latter Day Saints are shoring up the battlements and notching their arrows for stepped-up war with the gays (and the culture at large, since it's caving in to the gays), this is what's going on at a broader level in our culture — and is not being addressed by the men leading the Southern Baptists, U.S. Catholics, and Latter Day Saints:

A Reader Writes: "I Wonder WHY the Murder Rate Is Higher in States That Allow Execution?"

Yesterday, in response to my posting about the botched (and barbaric) execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma several days ago, a_leah asked, "I'm opposed to capital punishment anyway, but I wonder WHY the murder rate is higher in states that allow execution?" I think that's a good question, one well worth pursuing: why is it that the murder rate is frequently higher in the U.S. in states that practice capital punishment, while it's lower in states that outlaw capital punishment? As it's lower in many nations that have abolished capital punishment, while higher in many nations that still permit the death penalty . . . ?

Brief Takes from Week's News: Oklahoma and "The Very Definition of Cruel and Unusual Punishment"

Brief takes from commentary in the past several days on the horrifying botched execution in Oklahoma:

David Gans on Hobby Lobby: Whose Rights Count--Owners' or Workers'? (and Hobby Lobby Folks Meet Pope as Contraception Skirmish Occurs in Oklahoma)

At the Balkinization blog, David Gans offers one of the clearest explanations I've read of the fundamental issue at stake in the Hobby Lobby case about religious freedom and corporations. As he notes, 

The Old Story, Contining Discrimination in the Heartland: The Case of Joseph Quigley and the Oklahoma City School Board

On Saturday, I wrote that, as we remember the Stonewall events and how far our nation has come since then, towards recognition of the full personhood of gays and lesbians and of the human rights that must flow from that recognition, we cannot allow ourselves to forget that in a majority of states in the U.S., there are no laws prohibiting discrimination against LGBT persons in the workplace, housing, healthcare provision, hospital visitation rights, etc.

I said, “In the large majority of states in the United States, someone can be fired solely because he or she is gay or lesbian, can be denied housing merely because he is LGBT, can be refused appropriate medical care or barred from visiting his or her partner in the hospital simply because of his or her sexual orientation.”

I urged those who are fighting for gay marriage and celebrating the achievements the gay community has made since Stonewall not to forget the reality with which many gay and lesbian citizens of the country live on a daily basis. I noted that Steve and I have experienced brutal, life-altering discrimination in Arkansas, Louisiana, Florida, and North Carolina, simply because we are gay, and that none of those states affords any legal protection to LGBT citizens.

A story on Pam Spaulding’s House Blend blog today is a reminder of why we cannot celebrate victory for human rights in New England, while ignoring the reality of places like Arkansas, Florida, Utah, South Carolina, or Oklahoma. Pam Spaulding reports that the Oklahoma City school board recently recommended the termination of Northwest Classen High School teacher Joseph Quigley.

The grounds of dismissal? School Superintendent Karl Springer says that he “wasn’t following plans for improvement and didn’t obey administrative directives.”

Quigley, who has been with the school district since 1994 and whose record as a teacher and employee has been stellar, says that something else is going on. He “advocated for better protections for gay and lesbian students.”

And when he did so, the legal counsel for the school district “relied on trumped up and exaggerated charges to make the case for his dismissal.”

Quigley notes that up to 2007, his evaluations were consistently high. In 2006, however, he advocated the inclusion of “sexual orientation” in groups listed in the Student Handbook to be protected from harassment and bullying.

At that point, Quigley maintains, his administrators “singled him out, applied a double standard, micromanaged him and . . . instituted a relentless scorched earth policy to get rid of him.” His supervisors appointed an evaluator for him who ranked him as substandard. And now he finds himself faced with termination.

This is precisely the kind of situation I had in mind when I wrote that we cannot let our celebration of LGBT progress since Stonewall obscure the reality with which many LGBT citizens live on a daily basis throughout our nation—and, in the case of Joseph Quigley, it appears, the reality with which even those who stand up for the rights of LGBT citizens though are not themselves gay live. I know this because I’ve been there. I find Quigley’s story easy to believe because I have lived my own versions of this story.

As I’ve noted in previous posting on this blog, in 1993, I found myself faced with an unexplained one-year terminal contract at Belmont Abbey College near Charlotte, North Carolina. I received the contract only days after I had been given a glowing annual evaluation by the Academic Vice-President, who told me that my teaching record was outstanding, I had published in a single year more articles than the rest of the faculty combined, I had performed valuable service to the university and community.

But I was to receive a terminal contract. When I asked why, in light of the evaluation he had just given me, he informed me that he had no obligation to provide a reason for recommending a one-year terminal contract. A few days later, the college president asked to see me, told me the same thing, and informed me that there was a reason he would not disclose, which legal and professional counsel had advised him not to disclose. He informed me he was ethically conflicted about proceeding this way, but chose to do what was legal if not ethical.

I then appealed to the college’s grievance committee, who upheld my appeal and asked that the president provide a written reason for the one-year terminal contract. The president responded with a letter telling me he had given me the reason and the case was closed. I was then removed as chair of the theology department, and when the abbot of the monastery that owns the college would not meet with me to hear my appeal to church authorities for support in a crushing, immoral situation in which all other authority figures seemed to be slamming the door in my face, I resigned.

And found myself without any support—at all—as I sought recourse, any recourse at all. Attorneys told me that right-to-work states like North Carolina don’t have to provide any reason for terminating anyone. Academic accrediting bodies told me that they could not enforce their guidelines regarding academic freedom by censuring a school that violated those guidelines, as long as that school had grievance procedures in place. LGBT advocacy organizations quickly dismissed my pleas for assistance, telling me they could not intervene in employment disputes—even though the president had told a student after I resigned that “lifestyle issues” played a role in my receiving a terminal contract, and did not deny having said this when my attorney wrote a warning letter to him about his statement.

This all took place in 1993. Down the road, in 2007, I relived the experience in Florida, at another church-related institution in another right-to-work state with no laws protecting LGBT citizens from discrimination. Though Steve and I were invited to take a job at a United Methodist college there by someone we considered a friend, who claimed to support gay rights, and though we met with the board prior to our hiring and were assured support as an openly gay couple, we quickly found ourselves in the hot seat, when the state’s United Methodist Conference split down the middle the very day we arrived in Florida, re: whether gays and lesbians can even join Methodist churches.

And though my “friend” had written a glowing evaluation of me as she left the school in Arkansas at which she had first hired me—an evaluation telling me I was the best academic dean she had ever encountered—when it became inconvenient for my “friend” to support openly gay employees at her new place of employment, I suddenly found myself informed that I had “served” her well at her previous institution, but not in Florida.

My work—the same hard work I had always done—was suddenly second-rate, sloppy. I was not “aggressive” enough, too laid-back. I spent time emailing—though that's precisely how academic administrators now communicate with the campus community on a daily basis, and though those emails were chock-full of precious documents on which I had labored nights, weekends, during vacation time, documents necessary to keep the university running and accredited.

And, oh, by the way, I had put my “lifestyle” in the face of the university community by recommending that faculty consider, among a large list of other organizations promoting civic engagement, GLSEN—Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.

Steve and I received written instructions not to take each other on doctors’ visits. We were told that we should not drive to school in the same car or take lunch together. A straight couple who were, it was widely reported on the campus, involved with each other though each was married to someone else, were permitted to travel together constantly, no questions asked. Steve and I were told we might not do so, not without jumping through hoop after hoop and being demeaned every time we asked to take a trip together to any academic meeting.

Prior to terminating me, my supervisor-“friend” brought in an outside evaluator to create a bogus, undocumented case against me. This young man is a Baptist Sunday School teacher who has written homophobic articles about the construction of black masculinity. Though I was told he was coming to advise me about preparation for accreditation, he sat with me for an hour, berating me and informing me (who am years older than he is, whom he had never met, about whose academic background he knew nothing) that I was not “aggressive” enough to be a good academic vice-president, and that I did not understand the culture of historically black colleges and universities.

When I told him I had taught at and worked in HBCUs for fifteen years at that point, he was surprised. He had not been informed. He was prepared to destroy the career of a man he had never met, about whom he knew nothing, without even seeking to inform himself about that man whose livelihood he was taking away.

I was terminated without having ever seen this “evaluation,” without having been given a chance to respond to it or to counter its damaging false charges about my work record. I learned of it only when a memo prepared by my supervisor-“friend” for her board, to justify my termination, fell into my hands. A secretary later told me the contents of the “evaluation,” and told me it was circulated—without my knowledge or consent, without my having even seen it—among some faculty and staff on the campus. She knew this because it passed through her own hands in that process; she and other secretaries read the “evaluation.”

And, when it came to my ability to defend myself against such grossly immoral and unprofessional treatment—at a church-owned institution—what had changed from my first experience of such treatment at a Catholic college in 1993, to my next experience at a United Methodist university in 2007? Nothing. Nothing at all.

Just as happened at Belmont Abbey College in 1993, just as Mr. Quigley is now experiencing in Oklahoma City, in 2007 in Florida, I found myself up against a battery of high-powered, well-paid attorneys who appeared to be utterly tone-deaf to the ethical dimensions of their defense of injustice premised on homophobia, and who appeared eager to participate in the gay-bashing, if gay-bashing is the price one must pay to protect the “right” of employers to terminate anyone at will, without providing a reason.

In 2007, I found myself with the same lack of any legal basis at all to challenge the action of this church-related school in a right-to-work state with no laws forbidding discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation. I was told in 2007 as I had been told in 1993 that juries are not likely to be sympathetic to anyone experiencing clear, provable discrimination—no matter now gross—on grounds of sexual orientation. Not in places like Charlotte, North Carolina, or in Florida.

Employers know this in places like Charlotte or Florida, and they are absolutely, unscrupulously willing to play the gay card to destroy someone's career and reputation, even in (and perhaps especially in) church-related institutions in such places. Because they can do so. Because doing so is effective. It works. It still works.

The second time around, I knew better than to take my case to accrediting bodies. I did contact one of the leading LGBT legal advocacy groups, and learned that they considered the case meritorious—but would not promise any help, if I entered into an expensive legal battle that I was unlikely to win. A battle I could not risk undertaking without any support, when my “friend” had promised Steve and me jobs up to our retirement, causing us to take out a second mortgage that we could not afford, without the jobs she offered us.

To add insult to injury, my supervisor and former friend hired as my replacement someone who had taught at the very school in North Carolina that kicked me to the curb in 1993, though that hiring didn’t work out at all well when my replacement found herself subject to treatment similar to the kind I had received, though without the sexual orientation component.

As I say, I understand Joseph Quigley’s story. It’s an old story. It’s a story about the ways in which institutions—school boards, churches, employers, and so forth—in a majority of the states in this country have long treated and continue to treat LGBT citizens. And get away with it.

Because there are no laws—no federal laws, laws like the ones that finally afforded legal protection to women and people of color—to prevent such discrimination in the large majority of states in this nation. And because many LGBT advocacy groups choose to write off their brothers and sisters who experience heinous, constant discrimination in many places in the land. Our stories are not the ones that command the headlines. And what are we doing, in any case, living in places like Oklahoma, Arkansas, Florida, and North Carolina? Don’t we have the sense and the initiative to go to places more enlightened?

And most of all, because people do not want to stand up to the churches, which determine much of what happens in these homophobic places, and which are powerful institutions. And this includes not merely the defiantly, brutally homophobic churches, but those whose homophobia is more subtle and refined—the churches that tell you their hearts and doors and minds are open, but do not want to know that you are gay, so that if you attend these churches or work in their institutions, you’d be advised to keep your “lifestyle” to yourself.

These are the churches that profess to be “compassionate” and “tolerant,” but which are quick to blame you if you find yourself crosswise with them or their institutions or any powerful social institutions, and happen to be gay. Then, you discover, you’re “angry” and have merited the treatment dished out to you. Then, you find that even your friends in those churches will often turn their back on you and refuse to listen to your critique of the gap between their inclusive rhetoric and the excluding mechanisms of their congregations and institutions.

These churches do not want to hear gay voices and gay stories or to encounter real-life gay lives. They want the luxury of thinking of themselves as loving, healing presences in society, when they make no effort at all to create forums in which to permit their gay members to speak out, or to make their presence in the church known.

Not much has changed, from 1993 to 2007. Not in places like Kansas or Texas or Utah or Idaho or Arizona—or Arkansas, Florida, the Carolinas, and so on.

And not much is going to change, until 1) those who claim to be allies of and advocates for gay people stand up and make themselves heard, and stop defending, protecting, and collaborating with those who make our lives miserable; 2) the federal government does what it did in the 1960s with civil rights for African Americans, and what it has done to protect and promote women’s rights; and 3) LGBT communities and their organizations stop ignoring their brothers and sisters in the heartland.

We are indeed everywhere, we who are gay and lesbian. But for some of us, there is not much of a “there” there, and that's not going to change until folks stop talking about doing unto others and start really doing.

Mirror, Mirror: Sally Kern, the Churches, and Some Mother's Children

Sigh. Sally Kern has chosen to go brittle. Rather than using the exposure of her vile prejudice as an occasion for fruitful self-examination, Sally has issued a press release in which she paints herself as the victim of nasty homosexual activists who want to shut down her free speech. In her media statement, Sally has the unmitigated chutzpah to say that in holding forth about homosexuals as social cancer, she was merely involved in a debate in which she was exercising her first-amendment rights.

Sally. Sally. Not feeling so sorry for you anymore. Do you mean to tell me that you really think your back-room rant to other true believers was some kind of public debate? Come on now, Sally: let’s reason together, as LBJ used to love to say (quoting the psalms; but you knew that, since you’re a bible believer). That rant the world is now listening to, Sally? It wasn’t an attempt to defend your indefensible views in a public setting, was it now? You weren’t providing “facts” about the homosexual agenda and devious homosexual activists to a public audience that might ask you to verify said facts, were you? You weren’t speaking to your constituents in a public meeting that allowed for give and take and exchange of opinions, were you? No, you were rallying the troops, pumping up the true believers behind the scenes, when you thought no one but you and said true believers were listening.

As you ranted and raved, you never imagined in your wildest dreams that your words would soon vault around the world. Why, you even said so yourself as you listened to the youtube video of your hate-filled tirade.

What we whisper in secret will be shouted from the rooftops. A corollary of that gospel statement is that it might behoove us not to whisper in secret what we don’t want to have shouted from the rooftops. If we believe the words of the gospels (and you’ve told us you do, Sally: you’re a strong Christian!), then we can’t really try to claim that spouting hatred behind closed doors is not an incitement of others to practice hatred when they leave the closed room, can we? The people we have targeted in our closed meeting? Those people really exist; they have flesh and blood lives. They are not “the homosexual agenda.” They are gay human beings, some mothers’ children. What you said in that closed room has implications for their lives—for them and for their mothers.

And you know that, Sally. It’s not becoming to claim, as your press release tries to do, that you were dissecting an agenda in a closed meeting. You were fanning the flames of hatred in our political process in that meeting. You intended for those who caught your fire to go out of that room and spread those flames.

There’s a lesson here for you, Sally—and for the churches—if you could only hear it. Self-righteous stubbornness is never a becoming response when one’s ugly back-room secrets have broken forth to light. When we stiffen our spines, make ourselves belligerently brittle, in response to revelatory events like suddenly having our inmost thoughts bruited worldwide, it might just be the divine itself that we’re belligerently shutting out. No one owns God, Sally. Don’t for a minute believe the lie of your religious right puppet masters when they try to convince you that they have God under wraps, all neatly tied up, niftily disposable and available to use in their base political war against some mothers’ children.

That can’t be God they’re talking about—not the Judaeo-Christian God. That God, the God of Moses and Miriam, Isaiah and Jesus, Mary and Elizabeth is the one who can’t be wrapped up by human beings. The God of the Jewish and Christian scriptures is the one who always makes us profoundly uncomfortable rather than cozily self-righteous. The God we meet in the bible is always breaking through when we least expect to meet the divine— showing the divine face to us in someone we simply don’t want to recognize, the bag lady on an Oklahoma City street, or the child with his belly swollen from marasmus in Africa whom we glimpse on television as we down our McDonald’s, or the real-life flesh-and-blood homosexual doctor who carefully tends our injuries in the emergency room after we’ve crashed our car.

God’s everywhere—not just in those nifty, convenient places where we want to keep God confined, so we can pull God out of our hat when it’s useful to have a divine reference to substantiate a prejudice we want to promote in a culture-war jihad. We don’t own God. No one does, not you, not the religious right, not the churches. No one. For believers—for “strong” Christians like yourself—it’s God who does the owning. Brittleness, self-righteous belligerence, and false claims to victimhood are not only unbecoming when revelatory events threaten to tear through our brittle barriers of self-righteousness. They actually impede our conversion, our deeper immersion in the life of the spirit.

Why am I harping on this story? Sally Kern will not last. I’ve seen her brittle defiance come and go in my own lifetime. It always vanishes with the wind. I saw it all around me in the white South in which I was raised, as the civil rights movement swept over the land: hell, no, not ever going to change; no one going to force me to send my child to school with no n----r; no n----r is my brother or sister, nosiree! And no one’s going to make me think otherwise.

Sally and her ilk are fighting a losing battle, just as they were when segregation ended, and at some place deep inside her she knows that. The defiance she displays in that press release is all bravado. Sally has been used by the puppet masters of the religious right—those who funded her trip to an anti-gay indoctrination conference (at what cost, Sally; and what perks did you get from attending?)—and they’ll drop her like a soiled rag now that she has been exposed. Mark my words, down the road, Sally will be the contemporary incarnation of her sister Oklahoma bigot, Anita Bryant, tearfully admitting that she was used in her hateful crusade against some other mother’s children.

So why give Sally any mind room at all? Because Sally Kern is the American church, insofar as it ever “thinks” about LGBT people. Sally is the churches face to face with gay human beings. The mirror Sally now holds up is not just the mirror of self-revelation for herself: it’s for herself as a church mother. It’s for the churches in general.

What Sally noised about in that private meeting of true believers is what the churches in general say and do daily (but never admit) to real-life flesh-and-blood children of somebody’s mother. What Sally voices is what the church really thinks about and really does to gay human beings on a daily basis—when it refuses to speak unambiguously against the murder of children considered gender-inappropriate in American classrooms; when it imposes ordination requirements on single LGBT clergy candidates that are not imposed on single heterosexual candidates; when it claims that gay couples should be treated differently in its institutions than straight couples are treated; when it refuses to provide any protection from unfair termination of gay people in its institutions; when it excludes LGBT members from its general conferences, while inviting “ex-gays” to those conferences; when it turns gay people away from its communion rails.

Sally Kern is the church. She’s the church that puts right-wing money above gay people’s humanity, choosing to be silent about prejudice or wishy-washy and ambiguous in its statements against homophobia, simply to avoid losing donations from conservative donors.

In what has happened to Sally Kern, the churches themselves have a revelatory opportunity. This event has the potential to be a moment of grace for the churches, a moment when what is really said in all those back-room meetings and whispered calls of church leaders and administrators of church institutions finally reach the ears of the public.

Churches, that’s your face in Sally’s mirror. Do you like what you see? That’s you speaking in Sally’s tirade. Do you enjoy what you hear?

If not, what do you intend to do?

Dear Miss Sally, WWJD?

I have a confession to make. I’m feeling just a little bit sorry for Sally Kern.

Sally’s the Oklahoma legislator-cum-Baptist-minister’s-wife who recently found herself exposed worldwide after she went on an anti-gay tirade in a small closed meeting in Oklahoma. Unbeknownst to her, someone taped the tirade and has now uploaded it to youtube. For all the world to hear.**

This weekend, I watched clips of Sally listening and “responding” to her tirade. I’ve also watched a press conference at which she says her statements were taken out of context.

I feel sorry for Sally, because though she is among the Righteous Ones who believe they are The Found and the rest of us are the lost, she seems just so decisively lost now, as she tries to pick her way through the muck she threw in that secret meeting, now that the muck is apparent for all the world to see. She is lost because she has absolutely no intellectual or religious tools to deal with her current situation. The found should not find themselves in the land of the lost. It’s outrageous. It’s she who should be placing others there. She should not be forced to assess her actions, to ask about their consequences, to justify what she said. She’s among the saved, damn it!

But as I watch her trying to take in the reality of all the emails and letters she is now getting from the whole wide world, she strikes me as such a pitiful little lost lamb. And my heart goes out to her, my old sordid lost gay heart.

Sally is the whole religious right distilled into one rather pathetic little novella. Hers is the everywoman narrative of the religious right. In her media conference and the clip showing her trying to watch the youtube video of her tirade, she is the entire religious right—Pat Robertson to James Dobson, Phyllis Schlafly to Ann Coulter (yes, she does call herself a Christian)—condensed into one sad little soul. One sad little soul caught on tape and then forced to listen to that tape in front of the world.

From these clips, I gather that, along with some other Oklahoma legislators, Sally attended a conference sponsored by some radical wingnut activist group prior to her tirade. (Note to self: what group? And how much money do said legislators get from such groups? Does Oklahoma have laws governing contributions of such groups? Does Oklahoma have laws that make the contributions of such groups to its legislators subject to public scrutiny?)

She credits that conference with the astonishing array of “facts” she spews forth in her anti-gay tirade: that gays are going after our children; that gays want control of our schools, want to begin recruiting children as early as age two; that gays are diseased and don’t live long; that gays are a cancer spreading through our society; that gays cause the downfall of civilization; that gays are at the center of an organized cabal to destroy the family; and that gays are a bigger threat to America than terrorists.

You know the story. Substitute “Jews” for “gays” and turn the clock back a millennium, and you realize that Christians are old hat at this game. They’ve been playing it for centuries, after all: identifying some despised minority in their midst as the unique and solitary source of all evil, characterizing that minority as dirty, sly, child-killing, corrupt, infectious, and deserving of total exclusion, if not death. Jews = heretics = witches = women as daughters of Eve = people of color = gays. The cast may change, the robes vary, but the players are essentially the same. On one side is righteous Christian civilization, on the other is the threat that must, at all cost, be extinguished, even when the extinguishing means extracting confessions by dunking the corrupt agent of infection in water, pulling his arms from their sockets, breaking her back on the wheel, pulling out the bloody fingernails of the heretic one by one until a confession is obtained.

Even when the extinguishing means burning at the stake, disemboweling, hanging, expelling from Christian civilization (and leaving behind one’s property to enrich the good folks who have expelled you) . . . .

Even when the process of scapegoating, ritual humiliation, and expulsion violates everything Jesus ever said or did or stood for . . . .Even when one must lie in order to “prove” the case against the scapegoat . . . . A lie told in the service of a good cause (and Christian civilization is, ipso facto, a very good cause) is not really a lie. Is it?

As Sally watches her clip on youtube, she turns away her face. When asked why she does so, she explains that she just can’t watch. Nor does she intend to read or respond to all the communications she is now getting about her tirade. At one point, she expresses astonishment—shocked astonishment—that the words she said in that lil ole meeting behind closed doors are now winging their way around the world. That's not what she intended, when she kicked back and let her hair down entre nous, with the true believers in secret conclave.

I want so much to ask Sally at that point if Jesus ever said anything (that she can recall off the top of her head, being a “strong” Christian and all: she describes herself thus in her media conference) about homosexuals as dirty, cancerous, child-stealing and child-corrupting infectious low-lives destined for a short existence anyway. About homosexuality, period.

I want to ask her that because, while I don’t recall Jesus saying a single word about homosexuals or homosexuality, I do seem to recall him talking about measuring others with measures we’d like to have used when we ourselves are measured, and about the beam in our own eye and the mote in the other’s eye. I remember him talking a lot about justice and mercy. I quite specifically recall recall Jesus saying very clearly that the secrets we whisper in the dark will be bruited from the housetops.

As a bible-believing strong Christian, Sally remembers that text, I feel quite sure. And perhaps that is at the heart of her discomfort now—the recognition that the bible she takes literally does sometimes prove itself to be true, quite literally, but in some mighty discomfiting ways. Sally spoke out against the dirty gays. And she was heard. Loud and clear. Around the world.

What makes people act this way, when they clearly have grace enough to feel at least a tiny bit ashamed as they listen to their ugly secrets, secrets whispered in the dark and then broadcast around the world? People act this way, I submit, because they believe they are right. And no one or nothing has ever forced them to think otherwise.

When we are oh so assured that our worldview is the worldview, when we surround ourselves with other true believers who see the world through our lens, who parrot our truisms, who do not offer the slightest resistance to what we believe even when our beliefs verge on cruelty: when we live in such a universe, nothing compels us to ask whether we might simply be far off the track of sanity, decency, right-thinking and right-believing, with our untested, taken-for-granted certainties.

Sally’s a teacher. In her rant, she prides herself on sticking to the facts. She claims she wants the gays out of her schools because the gays promote ideologies that try to get children to look at the world differently—not through the lens of facts such as those she gleaned from the wingnut conference that indoctrinated her about the refined subtleties of the gay agenda, but through the lens of ideology. In other words, Sally resists the process of education, period, insofar as it asks those being educated to look at the world through various frames of reference, to think about the truth claims implied by each frame, to measure those truth claims, and then to make sage choices about the worldview one wishes to adopt.

Sally is ignorant. And Sally is a believer, a strong one. Ignorance + true belief is a noxious receipt, a prescription for a dangerous and volatile compound. When one really and truly believes with all one’s heart but is untroubled by fact or thought, one can justify just about anything: garroting of witches, burning of Jews, shoving the handicapped and homosexuals into ovens and burning them to cinders.

One of the surprises I myself have repeatedly had in dealing with the church at its ugliest—the church untroubled by fact or thought as it bashes gay human beings—is the willingness of the Sally Kerns of the church to try to claim victim status when they themselves are the victimizer.

Of gay employees. Of gay people. A typical response of church folks in supervisory positions in Christian institutions, when challenged with evidence of their homophobic ill-treatment of gay employees, is to claim that the evil gay is victimizing them! This inversion of values, the attempt of the oppressor to turn the tables and try to identify the oppressed as the victimizer, is typical in any twisted relationship in which a privileged party abuses a party placed in a subordinate position, in which that person cannot easily defend himself or herself.

Sally Kern depicts herself as a victim in the clips in which she confronts the evidence of her hate rhetoric. After terminating my employment in a particularly dirty, underhanded way, my last supervisor in a United Methodist institution wrote me a letter in which she implied that I had somehow attacked her—by letting her fire me. She has her high salary, her dignity, her health coverage; I have no income now, no health coverage. My reputation has suffered because of her unjust actions toward me. But she is now, in her telling of the story, the victim and I the victimizer . . . .

When this supervisor told me I was to be demoted, without no evaluation preceding this demotion and sharp cut of my salary, I asked her how she intended to handle the negative publicity that would surely ensue from such an outrageously unjust action. She waved away the question with a sweep of her hand. "Let them talk," she said. "People will talk. Just ignore them."

After that, when she went a step further and terminated me out of the blue, as word of the circumstances of the termination got out, the supervisor's attorney told me that I had created negative publicity for my supervisor in being terminated. My partner Steve was there when the termination occurred. When I was denied the right to call an attorney as I was terminated, I called Steve, instead, so that I would have a witness (and moral support) as I was locked out of my office on the UMC campus by four security guards.

Not having signed any document forbidding him to speak about what he witnessed, Steve then sent an email to a campus committee several days later, describing what he had witnessed. He did so because, knowing it had terminated me, the university continued using my name and my credentials as though I remained on campus. Both of us, in fact, still appear as employees of this Methodist institution in its university catalogue, some nine months following our departure from the campus; the catalogue still lists us by titles we no longer hold. The listing of faculty with terminal degrees contains our names and degrees.

The catalogue contains an online errata file I myself set up, into which any changes in the catalogue are to be entered immediately, so that the online catalogue is a constantly up-to-date version of this crucial university document. That errata file has not been updated in almost a year. A reliable source tells me that, some time after we both were gone from the campus, a grant was submitted to which our c.v.'s were both attached. The grant proposal contained information about the role we both would play in the implementation of the grant, if it were awarded—though we were both gone from the campus when the grant proposal was submitted.

(It was awarded. Steve wrote the grant prior to his resignation. When the grant for $150,000 came through following his resignation, the supervisor—who knew he had authored it—gave credit for it to another employee. My last act on campus was to take it on myself to write a grant that brought the university $15,000, for which someone who had no role at all in writing the grant has been allowed to take credit. My first assignment when I arrived on campus was to write a grant that brought the university $500,000.)

Note to self: Christian institutions seem perfectly capable of taking the talents of gay people, using them to the fullest, and then rewarding these gay human beings with conspicuously ugly treatment as a boon for their hard work, sacrifice, and dedication to the ideals of the institution. Who is the victim, and who the victimizer, in the relationship between gay believers and the church?

This ugly tactic—an inversion of values by which the victimizer tries to claim victim status—is possible in Christian institutions in their dealing with gay persons, because the churches have decided a priori that they are right and gay people are wrong. Churches have decided in advance that gay people have a humanity that is somehow twisted or diminished, by comparison to the humanity of “normal” people.

Hence the astonishment on the part of church institutions, on the part of the Miss Sallies of the world, when gay people fight back against abuse and injustice—when we claim our humanity in the face of oppression. Gays who insist on telling our inconvenient stories of abuse suddenly become “homosexual activists,” professional pot-stirrers trying to create trouble for good Christian people—the kind who think they can say hateful things about us behind closed doors, or boot us out of jobs without any defensible cause for our termination, and never be exposed.

I’m astonished by this reaction, by Sally’s (and my former supervisor's) attempt to claim the victim’s role. Do people—good church people—really think that we will sit on our hands when our rights are denied and our humanity violated? Do they really think that we will ask to be bashed again, please sir or please ma'am? I didn’t get enough the first time around . . . .

News flash to Sally Kern and other mothers (and fathers) of the church: every hateful word you utter about the gays negatively affects a gay person, which is to say, some other mother’s son or daughter. Would you want your sons or daughters reduced to subhuman status, to the status to which you reduce other mothers’ sons and daughters when you engage in hateful rhetoric or hateful acts in the name of Christ? Would you want your own children relegated to the subliminal, marginal, despised social place into which you seek to put someone else’s sons and daughters, by your words and deeds?

I don’t think Sally Kern is a particularly bad person. She strikes me as far less cynical about the hate agenda she is promoting than, say, a Pat Robertson, a Ralph Reed, an Ann Coulter, or a James Dobson. I think Sally truly believes.

But true belief is not good enough. Not when it issues in hateful actions. Not when it promotes lies. Not when it covers over the violent assault of children in our schools, if those children are identified as gender-inappropriate.

Somewhere deep inside, Sally perhaps hears the voices of those children. If she does read her mail in the coming weeks, I suspect she’ll be hearing from the parents, siblings, aunts, uncles of such children. Many of those parents, siblings, aunts, and uncles may well identify themselves, as Sally does, as strong Christians.

When their voices reach the true humanity inside the hard shell of true belief compounded by ignorance—and I hope they will do so—what will Sally do? Will she drive more nails into the hard shell to cobble it back together, so that the pleading voices can’t get inside?

Or will she listen, and respond? Like a human being, and not a strong Christian?

On that response truly does depend the future of an authentically Christian culture. On that response the future of the churches themselves depends. No more gay-identified children need to be killed in the schools of “Christian” lands. No more adult gay children who have mothers somewhere need to have their lives tormented by the lies and unjust treatment of other fathers and mothers who claim to speak and act in the name of Christ.

If Sally and her ilk really want to hear the facts they claim so desperately to value, I know a boatload of gay folks willing to tell our stories to them—stories full of facts that just don’t seem ever to get a hearing in church circles or the mainstream media that are so quick to pander to the religious right. We’re at the door, knocking. Let us in, invite us to your table, and we’re prepared to talk.

If you care to listen . . . .

**Several blogs linked to my blog have postings this past week about Sally Kern; they include Towleroad, Pam's House Blend, and Bilerico Project.