Remembering the Pulse Massacre: "Less Talking about LGBT Catholics; More Listening to Them"

LGBT Catholics & the church need a "bridge" only bc the church first deported & exiled them. https://t.co/DQKK7Rqr0v

— Katie Grimes (@KatieMGrimes) June 15, 2017

Some things I've been reading (and conversations in which I've been involved on social media) in the past two or three days, about the Catholic community's response (or non-response, as the case may be) to the Pulse massacre last year and its commemoration this year:

Remembering the Pulse Massacre: Or Why I'm Still Not Feeling the Love from Christians in Donald Trump's America

IVANKA TRUMP: There's a level of viciousness in Washington I did not expect. pic.twitter.com/7kRsGAtisn

— Mikel Jollett (@Mikel_Jollett) June 12, 2017

From the day that the massacre of 49 LGBTQ people (most of them Hispanic and African-American) happened at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando last year, I began blogging my heart out. I wrote, in particular, about the roots of violent homophobia in the attitudes of many people of faith. I wrote about the lethal tendency of people of faith to erase LGBTQ people and refuse to speak the names of LGBTQ people even as something like the Pulse massacre took place.

Pope Francis on Apologizing to the Gay Community: "Still Locates the Problem Firmly in the Land of Words" (and How to Move Forward with Bishops Like Wenski Dominating USCCB?)

Pope Francis is speaking about gays and lesbians in ways that would have gotten anyone else disciplined, censured or silenced ten years ago.

— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) June 27, 2016

A quick footnote to my posting earlier today commenting on the papal statement yesterday about the need of the Catholic church to apologize to gay folks for its abuse of them: some of you may have seen, that in my haste to post my previous piece, I started to include a label for the posting —  "Bishop Thomas Wenski." And then I realized I did not have time to write what I wanted to write about Archbiishop Wenski's recent statement taking to task his brother bishop in Florida, Bishop Robert Nugent, for stating after the Orlando massacre that Catholics and other faith communities should examine the way in which they have contributed to hatred of and vioelnce towards LGBTQ people.

The Human Rights Shell Game and the Churches: Gay Is the New Black

The Catholic world is abuzz today with interest in human rights.

Selective interest in selective human rights.

As John Allen points out in his latest column at National Catholic Reporter, “senior church officials” are now intent on using language about racism and slavery as they combat abortion (http://ncrcafe.org/node/2328). That is, they’re spinning the churches' resistance to abortion (and gay rights) as a new abolitionist movement akin to the 19th-century movement of a minority of prophetic Christians to overcome slavery.

This rhetoric comes on the heels of the Obama election, in which 1) the “official” political tactic of the U.S. Catholic bishops was resoundingly rejected by a majority of Catholics who refused to vote Republican, and 2) the role of African-American voters who supported Obama but voted against gay rights in California and Florida is eliciting international attention.

Having lost the election, so to speak—having failed to get Catholics to vote Republican—the bishops intend now to capitalize on what seems to be a neuralgic divide among progressives, the black-gay divide. The fundamental, recurring political tactic of the big men on top, their reflex action when they feel their power threatened or waning, is always to exploit division. It’s always to find and probe and widen any division they can successfully utilize in the ranks of those they need to conquer and control.

Case in point: on 11 December, Catholic bishop of Orlando, Florida, Thomas Wenski published a statement in the Lakeland, Florida, Ledger in which he argues that people of faith must change the mind of Americans about the human status of the unborn in the same way that a prophetic minority of believers did re: people of color in the slave period (www.theledger.com/article/20081211/COLUMNISTS/812110338?Title=Presidential_History__Roe_vs__Wade_Lurks). The Supreme Court upheld slavery in its Dred Scott decision by defining slaves as “less than persons.” Changing the nation’s mind about slavery required fashioning a national consensus that slaves are every bit as human as are all other human beings.

Bishop Wenski does not leave it at that. In his eagerness to compare himself to a contemporary abolitionist, he is intent on getting in a little dig—a malicious little divide-and-conquer dig—against those who deplore many believers’ resistance to gay rights. He notes that the same folks who elected Mr. Obama voted, in Florida and California, to “preserve in law the traditional understanding of marriage . . . .”

This dig is significant. It is part of a wider strategy of the big men on top to deepen the division between people of color, whose rights are justified, these churchmen want to argue, and gay people, whose claim to human rights is illegitimate. As I’ve noted here in previous postings, for key religious leaders of central Florida—including Episcopal bishop John W. Howe, United Methodist bishop Timothy Whittaker, and Bishop Wenski himself—this is a clearly discernible divide-and-conquer strategy, one increasingly evident in national strategies of believers on the right: endorse the aspirations of people of color, elevate select and useful members of “good” minority groups such as African Americans and women to positions of power, while stepping hard on gay and lesbian persons (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/men-who-rule-us-assuring-clerical.html).

As I’ve previously noted, during the recent election, Bishop Wenski went so far as to state that he wants to keep the divisive culture wars of previous decades alive, as he appeals to people of faith to continue opposing the aspirations of gay persons to human rights, to full personhood (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/and-speaking-of-discrimination.html).

The divide-and-conquer strategy of Bishop Wenski and his cronies is a dangerous one, when one looks carefully at the historical analogy they want to push. First, there’s the inescapable fact that official Catholic teaching did not condemn, but supported, slavery. As John Allen notes, as late as 1866, the Vatican’s doctrinal office stated, “Slavery itself, considered as such in its essential nature, is not at all contrary to the natural and divine law.”

Second, there’s the eerie parallel between the Vatican’s behavior towards slaves then and its treatment of gays now. Note the basis of the Vatican’s argument on behalf of slavery: slavery is upheld by natural law, which divine law stamps with its seal of approval. In opposing slavery, one is setting oneself against the laws of nature, which are the laws of the Creator.

This is precisely the argument being used against gay persons and our appeal for rights today: nature condemns gay sex and gay marriage, and demonstrates that marriage is made for one man and one woman whose biological complementarity allows them to procreate. Divine law echoes nature in forbidding homosexuality and gay marriage.

The church sometimes appears to learn little over the centuries—little except to resist wherever the appeal for full human rights is most urgent in any given period of history. People of faith resisting gay rights today are not behaving in any shape, form, or fashion like new abolitionists. They are behaving precisely as the majority of believers, who resisted the human rights of people of color then as strongly as they resist the human rights of gay people today, behaved when confronted with arguments that slaves were fully human.

The abolitionists sought to claim rights for others, not deny them, as churchmen today are doing with gay persons. The abolitionists were a prophetic minority of believers opposing not only slavery but the consensus of the moral majority of their time.

Now, over a century and a half after the issue of slavery was resolved—in favor of the human rights resisted by the majority of believers—the big men on top in the churches that resisted abolition and then resisted integration want to tell us they have always been on the side of human rights? Human rights for everyone?

Now, when there is no price to pay, when fighting for the rights of a persecuted minority as the majority of our fellow believers condemn us no longer requires costly grace, we want to convince people that we stand for human rights? And have always done so?

Even as we do to gay people today what our forebears did to people of color—in the name of God—in the past? That argument of the Dred Scott decision—slavery is licit because slaves are less than persons: how is it any different from what the churches say to gay human beings today? How can the church claim that it stands for human rights everywhere while denying human rights to gay persons, without insinuating that gay human beings are an exception to the rule, as people of color were in the past?

Ultimately, the churches today believe that their animus against gay human beings is justified because leading churchmen and a large number of believers simply do not regard gay people as fully human. It’s that simple and that stark. The Vatican can claim to be a stalwart champion of human rights while opposing a U.N. declaration condemning homophobia only because the Vatican counts on people to understand that gay persons are not human in the same way everyone else is human (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/12/news-beat-catholics-mormons-gay.html).

Just as the Vatican and most other churches in the past counted on people to uphold slavery because people of color are less than human . . . . The battle lines may shift as history moves on, but the fundamental principle remains the same: the churches’ commitment to human rights is selective, non-universal, contingent on calculation at any given moment of history. And at the center of that calculation is the question of how high the price will be for supporting the human rights of a given group at a given time: at the center of the calculation is whether the church will choose costly grace when cheap grace is so much easier to attain.

And so it goes today: people who once stoutly resisted the claim to full humanity and full personhood of people of color now claim to be the sudden BFFs of people of color—many of whom, to their shame, are willingly letting themselves be used in this contemporary game of divide-and-conquer. A game in which their gay brothers and sisters are being subjected to precisely the same treatment people of color received in the past, for precisely the same reasons . . . . Because it is costly today for people of conscience to affirm the humanity of a group whose humanity is being demeaned—while it is not costly at all to pretend that we have always upheld the humanity of those now moving onto the stage of human history as subjects rather than objects.

One expects better of people of faith. And of those who know full well what it is to be treated as sub-human. And who should know that they are being used in a disreputable political battle by people who have, in their heart of hearts, as little respect for the humanity of people of color as they do for gay human beings.

Gay Partner Benefits in Orlando: Richard Florida's Gay Index and Quality Employees

An interesting story from Orlando. Two evenings ago, the Orlando city council voted to extend partner benefits to city employees living in same-sex unions.

As readers know, I follow news from central Florida because Steve and I unexpectedly own a house there. (Well, to be precise, the bank owns it and we do our level best to make payments on it monthly.)

We went to Florida to take jobs a couple of years ago on the basis of promises that vanished after we arrived. Though we were reluctant to relocate, we believed those begging us to take new jobs when they assured us that our talents were needed and that Florida is a much more gay-accepting area than Arkansas.

Sadly, we found the latter claim not to be at all accurate. Though Arkansas as a whole is far from gay-friendly, the city in which we live is, as New Jersey-born Arkansas columnist Gene Lyons likes to say, “an island of civility in a sea of fundamentalism.” Our neighborhood, in which my family has deep roots, also happens to be the most gay-accepting community in the entire state, a place in which neighbors bear with one another, help each other out, and don’t give a hoot about each others' sexual orientations.

In Florida, by contrast, we found that neighbors were capable of shouting hate slurs as we rode our bikes past their houses. We were harassed by a neighbor who had signed the petition for a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. She somehow got hold of our phone number and would call to berate us if we left garbage by the side of the street and the city failed to pick it up on its weekly round. Though we never left such detritus out more than the day of the city’s garbage rounds, if we had not picked it up immediately after the trucks left, we got a call. Other neighbors (heterosexually married ones) who did the same never got similar calls.

Nor did we find sanctuary from such hateful treatment at the church-owned institution at which we worked. In fact, we found our employer outright vicious towards us, though we had been assured we would be welcome as an openly gay couple. Soon after our arrival, we were informed that people were “talking” about our arriving at work together and taking lunch together. We had a single car.

We never had any evidence of such “talk” except from our supervisor, who seemed—for reasons the supervisor did not deign to share with us—to have a strong interest in letting us know that our openness about ourselves and our lives posed a problem, and primarily to the supervisor. In other words, it was apparent soon after our arrival that our supervisor had decided to try to make us actively unwelcome. In fact, colleagues assured us that they heard no such “talk” anywhere in the entire workplace.

Within a few months, the supervisor presented us with written mandates not to accompany each other on doctors’ visits. The many opposite-sex married couples working at this workplace never received such mandates.

The supervisor raised objections to our traveling together, though opposite-sex couples at the same workplace who happened to be married, but not to the colleagues with whom they were traveling, routinely traveled together and the supervisor never lifted an eyebrow. Plans Steve and I had made to travel that had been approved by the supervisor before our hire suddenly became problematic, and we found ourselves subject to (false) charges that we had taken a trip without the supervisor’s permission—though we had that permission in writing, and had been intent on securing it even when we took the job, when we were assured that these plans made prior to our hire did not pose a problem.

Central Florida turned out to be far less gay-accepting, in our experience, than central Arkansas. We met some wonderful people in the short time we worked in Florida, but, on the whole, our experience there turned out to be dismal—and entirely due to the rabid homophobia of the person employing us, a prejudice promoted and protected by the church to which the employer belongs.

For this reason, I’m delighted to read that Orlando has taken the step to extend partner benefits to same-sex couples employed by the city. As an editorial in yesterday’s Orlando Sentinel notes, this is, first of all, the right thing to do—a matter of “basic fairness,” as Orlando mayor Buddy Dyer has argued (www.orlandosentinel.com/community/news/ucf/orl-ed0708oct07,0,4991185.story).

Mayor Dyer’s stand for basic fairness is courageous, too, in light of the powerful (and well-funded) homophobia in the region. As a WESH (NBC Orlando) news report on the city council decision notes, several days before the city initiative passed, a group of local and national African-American ministers spoke out in strong support of the amendment to ban gay marriage in Florida (www.wesh.com/news/17618683/detail.html).

Orlando is also the home of the powerful Matthew D. Staver of the Liberty Counsel, which funds battles to fight gay rights initiatives across the nation (www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/orange/orl-domestic0308oct03,0,3797886.story?page=2). In fact, Staver actually wrote the anti-gay marriage amendment now on the ballot for the upcoming elections in Florida.

As a previous posting on this blog notes, Staver has considerable influence in central Florida, where he and his organization try to keep the lid on attempts of gay citizens to secure basic rights (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/06/faith-based-institutions-ceasing-and.html). In February 2006, Staver and Liberty Counsel sought to bully a blogger, Justin Watt, who had parodied a campaign of Exodus International to promote “conversion” “therapy” in various cities. As my posting cited above notes, Staver sent Watt a cease-and-desist letter demanding that he take down blog postings parodying Exodus billboards.

Watt refused, arguing that the request violated his constitutional right to free speech. The ACLU assisted him, and he successfully resisted the bullying of Staver and Liberty Counsel. It is hard to imagine that groups with a strong interest in resisting gay rights will now fail to target Mayor Dyer and the Orlando city council, after their recent vote.

A common tactic of such groups is to threaten to undermine fundraising attempts of any group that does the right thing and supports gay rights. And this tactic can work—that is, it can do so if an organization targeted by such groups is led by someone who lacks character and transformative leadership ability, and is willing to cave in to immoral bullying and sacrifice principled commitment to basic fairness for self-protection and financial expediency.

There is increasing evidence, in fact, that organizations which do not provide protection for the rights of gay employees and do not have statements forbidding discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation are actually shooting themselves in the foot economically. One of the reasons that Orlando chose to grant benefits to same-sex couples in the city’s employ is that studies show highly successful local companies like Disney, Universal, and the Orlando Sentinel already providing such benefits (http://florida.bilerico.com/2008/10/orlando_to_offer_benefits_to_same-sex_co.php). Studies indicate that companies and other organizations that do not guarantee the rights of gay employees are economically less successful, in an increasingly diverse culture, than are companies that protect gay rights.

In fact, as Richard Florida’s highly acclaimed work on the role of the “creative class” in American culture today demonstrates, areas that are overtly welcoming to gay people are also likely to be areas that are growing economically (see The Flight of the Creative Class [HarperCollins, 2005], Cities and the Creative Class [Routledge, 2005], and The Rise of the Creative Class [Basic Books, 2002]). There is empirical evidence that areas that welcome gay people also attract creative and well-educated workers in general, along with talented young people who build a local economy.

The obverse also seems to be true, according to Richard Florida. Communities, businesses, or organizations that resist gay rights shoot themselves in the foot economically. They run talented people away. They do not attract educated young people, the kind of creative new citizens any area or organization needs in order to remain competitive. Those citizens avoid environments that are unwelcoming towards gay folks. Their energies flow into more welcoming communities or organizations, while unwelcoming communities and organizations stagnate.

As Orlando city commissioner Patty Sheehan has noted, re: the recent initiative to extend partner benefits to gay couples employed by the city, "I'm glad to see that it's finally happening. We want to be able to attract quality employees."

There’s certainly still a great deal of work to do in central Florida, for those wanting to attract “quality employees” to institutions in this region. Orange, Osceola, Lake, Volusia, and Seminole counties still do not offer domestic-partner benefits for employees who are unmarried couples. Even more surprising, there are still institutions of higher learning in this region—church-owned ones, it goes without saying—that have no official policy prohibiting discrimination against gay employees.

For such communities and such institutions, the handwriting is on the wall: welcome diversity, and you will not only be doing the right thing; you will also benefit yourself. The willingness to celebrate diversity—and, in particular, the contributions of gay citizens and gay employees—is a very strong indicator of a viable, creative future.

And Speaking of Discrimination . . .

And speaking of discrimination: in so many ways, this shoddy little piece of special pleading doesn’t deserve notice.

But it affects people. It affects voters. It’s designed to affect voters. And for that reason, I want to take note of the article.

It also happens to be a story from a diocese in which I have lived and continue to own a house—in an area in which homophobia has made my life and that of my partner miserable, and in which gay citizens are frequently subjected to harassment extending to physical violence.

It’s an op-ed piece by Orlando diocese Catholic bishop Thomas Wenski from last Sunday’s Ocala Banner (see www.ocala.com/article/20080629/opinion/513926224). In the article, the good bishop argues—without a hint of apology—that the culture wars need to continue.

Yes, the enervating culture wars of the 1990s, which got us precisely nowhere. Those culture wars. The ones that have consumed millions of dollars in resources that might better have been spent in meeting human needs, while we battled over issues like abortion and gay rights and same-sex marriage.

The culture wars that have led to such ideological fragmentation in our nation that we cannot begin to work together, because we are so busy shouting at each other across our ideological party lines. The culture wars that have led to precisely no cashing in of promises by “pro-life” politicians to end abortion—because these politicians never intended to end abortion. What they wanted and needed was for good bishops like Wenski to whip up a frenzy of anger and fear among their flock, so that they would go to the voting booths and vote “right.”

The culture wars that have demonized gay folks in the name of protecting “traditional” marriage, which have brought us that diaper-clad friend of prostitutes David Vitter and wide-stance Larry Craig as sponsors of the latest attempt to amend the constitution in favor of “traditional” marriage.

Yes. Those culture wars. These are the ones that Bishop Wenski wants to continue. In the name of God, you understand.

Bishop Wenski argues that we have to do all in our power to protect poor, embattled “traditional” marriage (which appears to be embattled due to those nasty gays wanting to marry, and not because of folks like Vitter and Craig) because children “seem to be” “hardwired” to be raised by a father and a mother married to each other.

The good bishop also argues, without a whisper of irony or any apparent concern regarding the glass palace he occupies, that, “Of course, in America, we value our privacy and that of others, and so today most agree that one's sexual orientation shouldn't necessarily be anyone else's business.”

Really? Try telling that to the many LGBT employees who have found themselves suddenly without a job in Catholic institutions, when the institutions made it their business to focus on the sexual orientation of the employee they fired.

I’m frankly appalled at articles like this—at the waste of time and energy, the naked politicking on behalf of politicians and programs that don’t deserve church support, at the mendacity and the refusal to see the beam in the episcopal eye. I'm appalled at the continuing attempt of some Catholic bishops to drive their flocks to the polls so that they will vote Republican, when the current administration, whom they clamored for the faithful to elect, has done such a conspicuously horrible job of exhibiting values consonant with those the Catholic church claims to defend.

As to the beam in the episcopal eye, do bishops not have enough business of their own to mind these days, given what we now know about the widespread abuse of children by Catholic clergy? And what we are learning about the filching of parish and diocesan funds by priests all over the nation, including in Florida?

Along those lines, get a gander at the faces of two Florida priests (from the diocese just south of Wenski’s) against whom grand-theft charges have just been refiled in Florida. These two gentlemen (whose pictures are at the head of this posting) were pastors in Palm Beach. They are alleged to have stolen some $6.6 million in parish funds over the years.

With clerical problems like this, Bishop Wenski, do you and your brother bishops really need to be attacking the gays? Really?

Please, sir, get your own (glass) house in order first. Then I might listen to you.

But not as long as you continue participating in discriminatory actions against gay employees of institutions sponsored by your church and other churches.

Faith-Based Institutions, Ceasing and Desisting

As readers of this blog know, I see the development of blogs as forums for free discussion of political and religious issues around the world as an extremely positive development. For some time now, the traditional media have been selling us short, when it comes to telling all the stories we need to hear. The media (which are increasingly corporate-owned and corporate-dominated) decide who will or will not come to the table of public discourse—who has an official voice, and whose voice simply will not be heard, because it is not “official.”

Stories and voices we all need to hear, in order to be a more healthy human community, just don’t make it to the table, because of media censorship. As Scott Ritter’s dissection of the role of the traditional media in shoring up the government on today’s Alternet site indicates, the mainstream media all too often engage in self-censorship, when it comes to digging for stories that place the media crosswise with powerful political and corporate interest groups (see http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/87625/?page=entire).

Blogs serve an extremely important function in a human community seeking to foster participatory democracy. Blogs permit the airing of stories—of truths—that won’t be told in the mainstream media. They also elicit free discussion of information and decisions crucial to all of us, as we seek to build a more inclusive society, a society in which everyone has a place at the table.

As a question I asked on this blog on 3 June indicates, I’m interested not merely in political and corporate censorship of such free speech, but also in censorship emanating from religious bodies (see http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/06/and-pilgrimage-continues_03.htmlContinues). As that question notes,

And, finally, a question: if any readers anyplace know of instances in which churches or church organizations have ever sought to use legal threats to shut down blogs discussing theological issues and issues pertaining to social justice, I’d appreciate hearing about this attempt to suppress free speech. I’m gathering information about the claim of churches or church institutions that they have the right to buy the free speech of scholars, theologians, or citizens in general, and in doing so, to censor what a scholar, theologian, or citizen might write on a blog.

Given my research into these issues, I find a report on yesterday’s AMERICAblog both interesting and alarming (see http://www.americablog.com/2008/06/blogger-arrests-increasing.html). This posting cites a recent University of Washington annual report which indicates that since 2003, 64 people have been arrested for publishing their views on a blog.

In 2007, arrests of bloggers increased dramatically: in the last year, three times as many people were arrested for blogging about political issues than in the preceding year. These bloggers exposed government corruption or human-rights abuse. The University of Washington report sees the rising number of arrests as “testament to the ‘growing’ political importance of blogging.”

The majority of these arrests have taken place outside the global North—in nations without a strong history of democratic ideals or democratic institutions. I would like to submit, however, that the fact that such arrests aren’t frequent in “democratic” societies cannot give us cause to relax our vigilance about the free speech of citizen-journalist bloggers.

I remain particularly concerned about the attempts of religious groups in North America to seek to control or shut down open discourse about the intersection of religion and politics. In our nation with the soul of a church, such discourse is vital not merely for church life, but for our political life, as well. Churches and other faith-based groups wield an inordinate amount of influence on our political sphere. For that reason alone, churches and faith-based groups require careful monitoring—especially when they use covert legal tactics to suppress free speech.

If anyone believes that such attempts by faith-based groups to suppress bloggers’ free speech are not possible in our democratic society, I recommend a series of postings on Justin Watt’s Justinsomnia blog. In September 2005, Mr. Watt published a parody of a billboard that was then being placed in major American cities (Houston, Orlando, etc.) by the faith-based group Exodus International.

The website of Exodus International notes its religious affiliation. The website’s organizational purpose statement says, “Exodus is a nonprofit, interdenominational Christian organization promoting the message of Freedom from homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ” (italics in original; see http://exodus.to/content/category/6/24/57/).

In February 2006, Mr. Watt received a cease-and-desist letter from one Matthew D. Staver, Esq., of Orlando, representing Liberty Counsel. This legal organization is affiliated with Liberty University, founded by Rev. Jerry Falwell. Anyone who doubts its deep ties to the religious right need only consult the homepage of the organization, and look at the glowing endorsement of the organization by “great Christian leaders” (see www.lc.org/index.cfm?pid=14096).

Liberty Counsel’s cease-and-desist letter demanded that Mr. Watt immediately take down his blog parody of Exodus International’s billboards inviting people to leave the gay lifestyle. Fortunately—for all of us who believe in free speech and who are monitoring any attempt of faith-based organizations to censor free speech about religious and political issues—Mr. Watt resisted.

In fact, he contacted ACLU, who assisted him in combating the threat from Liberty Counsel. And he prevailed. The story drew quite a bit of media attention that shone a spotlight on covert attempts of faith-based organizations to seek to suppress free speech about political and religious issues. For a summary, see http://justinsomnia.org/2006/03/my-first-cease-and-desist-letter/. Mr. Watt’s postings indicate that his was not the only blog to receive such a threatening cease-and-desist letter from Liberty Counsel at this time: Ex-Gay Watch also received one.

Why focus attention today on a story that is now several years old? I am doing so, in part, because Mr. Staver and Liberty Counsel are surfacing again, now that California is permitting gay marriage. On 12 June, Liberty Counsel filed a petition with the California Court of Appeal to stay same-sex marriage licenses in California. The petition was denied (see Jesse McKinley, “Same-Sex Marriages Begin in California,” NY Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/us/17weddings.html?scp=1&sq=liberty+counsel&st=nyt).

In my view, in the wake of yesterday’s re-implementation of gay marriage in California, we are likely to see more and more attempts of faith-based groups to use any means possible—including threats to suppress bloggers’ free speech—to try to turn back the California Supreme Court decision. It is a time for vigilance, particularly for those living in battleground places like Florida, the state in which Liberty Counsel is now based. Florida is a state in which the lives of gay human beings are still being used as political tokens by the religious right, which has succeeded in placing an anti-gay initiative on the Florida ballot this election cycle.

It is a time in which churches should also be vigilant, since the suppression of free speech is never really in the best interest of churches. What must be protected at the cost of chicanery and thuggery is of dubious value. One would hope that the churches’ formulation of their beliefs and values would be compelling enough on their own merits, and would not require unethical bolstering by the legal system to compel others to endorse these beliefs and values.

Churches should also be concerned about these initiatives, particularly in battleground states like Florida, because—well, isn’t it obvious?—human beings should never be used as a means to an end. When gay human beings are being used as political bargaining chips in political games, something is wrong.

And churches should be speaking out about that, not participating in it.

Shouldn’t they?