The Supremes and Gay Marriage: Mike Huckabee Talks Nullification, Ben Carson Wants Congress to Intervene, Jim Bakker Shouts Hallelujah

On same day #SCOTUS granted marriage cases, @HRC Mississippi flagged this hateful graffiti in downtown Jackson. pic.twitter.com/tPMs99DY14
— Chad Griffin (@ChadHGriffin) January 16, 2015

Rob Boston Eulogizes David Kuo: A Whistle-Blower Who Deserves Praise

At Talk to Action, Rob Boston eulogizes David Kuo, who died last week. As Boston reminds us, Kuo was a valiant whistle-blower who paid a high price for blowing the whistle on the phony faith-based initiative of the George W. Bush presidency (which President Obama has chosen to continue). Kuo came to D.C. under Bush as a true believer, but his experiences working with the faith-based initiative inside the administration deeply disillusioned him, and he later wrote a book, Tempting Faith, to share those experiences and expose the administration's manipulation of religiously conservative voters through the faith-based initiative.

Catholic Hospitals in Germany Refuse Rape Victim: Theocracy as Taking the Queen's Shilling While Flouting the Queen's Rules

I find it interesting to read Betty Clermont's essay on the Vatican and Africa, about which I've just posted, alongside the article on church and state by Frank Hornig, Barbara Schmid, Fidelius Schmid, and Peter Wensierski published yesterday in Der Spiegel. The article reports on a national controversy that has developed in Germany after St. Vincent Hospital in Cologne, run by the Cellitine Sisters, refused to treat a rape victim in mid-December.

Also in the News: Government Funding of Faith-Based Groups, Polarization of American Catholics

And in specifically religious news in the past week, here's what drew my attention:

Candace Chellew-Hodge on Fatal Flaws of "Religious Liberty" Exemptions in Rhode Island Civil Union Legislation

Candace Chellew-Hodge at Religion Dispatches on the fatal flaws hidden in the "religious liberty" exemptions afforded to faith-based groups by Rhode Island's recent civil unions legislation: as she notes, the legislation gives religious groups the right to discriminate against a partner of a gay spouse in health-care or hospital treatment: 

Catholic Charities of Rockford Ends Foster Care Services, Claims Right to Discriminate in Name of Faith

Now that the state of Illinois recognizes the civil unions of same-sex couples--granting those couples rights enjoyed by heterosexual citizens, from which gay folks are otherwise excluded--Catholic officials in one Illinois diocese have chosen, as Catholic officials have done elsewhere when similar laws are enacted, to retaliate.  Yesterday, Catholic Charities of the diocese of Rockford announced it will end foster care services rather than be required to place children in homes headed by same-sex couples.

D.C. Board of Elections Refuses to Put Human Rights to Vote: Statement of Faith Leader Rev. Cedric Harmon

I just blogged about a major news story that is being skewed by some media outlets with a vested interest in suppressing information that they do not intend to disseminate—to be specific, information that undercuts homophobia. I’d like to turn now to another major news story of the past week that further illustrates how such distortion of news undercutting homophobia takes place.

Tuesday, the Washington, D.C., Board of Elections rejected a proposed referendum that would have permitted citizens to put the right of marriage of gay citizens to a vote. The referendum was proposed by Stand for Marriage and Maryland clergyman Bishop Harry Jackson.

The D.C. Board of Elections rejected the referendum because it violates the Human Rights Act of the District of Columbia. As Michael Crawford, co-chair of D.C. for Marriage, noted in response to the Board’s decision, the equality of a particular group of citizens should never be put to a popular vote and decided by referendum.

What I really want to emphasize here is the reasoning offered by a member of a group of D.C. faith leaders to support the Board’s decision. Unfortunately—and this is something I also want to emphasize in this posting—the following statement by a member of D.C. Clergy United for Marriage Equality has, to my knowledge, appeared in absolutely no mainstream media outlets.

In fact, the decision of the D.C. Board of Elections has not been widely reported in the mainstream media at all (AP carried a brief statement, and the Washington Post and New York Times did stories), though it comes right after the Maine initiative, in which the right of gay citizens of that state to marriage was put to popular vote. And what happened in Maine has been analyzed and analyzed again by one media source after another, as a statement about the impossibility of implementing same-sex marriage in a nation resolutely opposed to it.

The only media outlet that I’ve found reporting on the following significant statement of Rev. Cedric Harmon of D.C. Clergy United for Marriage Equality is the 365Gay news site. Following Tuesday’s decision that putting the right of gay citizens of D.C. to a vote would violate the district’s Human Rights Act, 365Gay reported that Rev. Harmon made the following statement:

It is shameful when religious leaders fail to uphold the Christian teachings of our faith by trying to institutionalize a second-class citizenship on our neighbors. People of faith have worked for generations to achieve social justice for all people — regardless of race, creed, class, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. We serve our entire flock, and there is no justification under God that we should discriminate against any of God’s children.

The District of Columbia has not voted on the civil rights of a minority since the Civil War, when a majority prevented freed male slaves from gaining the right to vote. Today, the Board of Elections and Ethics reminded us that human rights should never be put to a vote. As members of the clergy who support equal rights for all citizens, and who struggle to achieve social justice in the District of Columbia, we applaud the BOEE for standing up for human rights in the face of discrimination.

It is shameful for people of faith to work to turn a minority group into second-class citizens. People of faith should work for justice for all people. The last time D.C. put the civil rights of a minority to popular vote was following the Civil War, when a majority vote withheld the right to vote from freed male slaves.

These are significant points, aren’t they? And pertinent points, in a nation with the soul of a church, where media coverage of issues like homosexuality is saturated with religious viewpoints. And where, with no historical memory at all about how popular referendums have been repeatedly used over the course of American history to deny rights to minority groups, many Americans are perfectly comfortable with the thought of voting away the rights of gay citizens today.

But Rev. Harmon’s statements entirely undercut one of the conclusions about religious affiliation that the mainstream media want to promote, when it comes to discussion of gay people and our place in American society today. The predominant meme is that to be church-affiliated is to be opposed to the human rights of gay folks. The predominant meme is also that to be African American and a member of a faith community is necessarily to stand in opposition to gay rights.

In the story unfolding in D.C., African Americans like Rev. Cedric Harmon and Michael Crawford stand on opposite sides of the fence from African Americans like Bishop Jackson. To be a person of color and a person of faith is not necessarily to stand against the human rights of gay persons.

In fact, the faith commitment of many churched people is precisely what compels them to stand in solidarity with their LGBT brothers and sisters. Whereas Rev. Bernice King, the new president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, says that her “sanctified soul” tells her to oppose gay rights, Rev. Eric P. Lee of the Los Angeles SCLC notes that his experience in the black church impels him to work for justice for his LGBT brothers and sisters:

While many disagree with same-sex relationships based on their respective faith-beliefs, it is those same beliefs that once justified slavery, segregation, legal discrimination and miscegenation laws. Our faith should not be used to discriminate, oppress or marginalize any group of people. Our faith should be used to affirm the dignity of everyone's humanity. Our faith should be used as a vehicle to justice, equality and freedom for all of God's people.

As African-Americans, we have long relied on the biblical stories of Israel's deliverance from oppression and slavery as our own story of deliverance from Western European slavery, segregation and discrimination. As civil rights advocates, and as bearers of the mantel left by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference must continue to advocate for justice for all people, regardless of social status, religious belief, gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity.

Rev. Cedric Harmon’s statement about the refusal of the D.C. Board of Elections to put the rights of a vulnerable minority to the vote deserves national attention—and it’s telling that this statement is being ignored by the mainstream media. Speaking out of the experience of historic oppression and reading the bible through the optic of this oppression, many African-American people of faith find it impossible to justify faith-based exclusion and faith-based oppression of other minority groups.

The memory of oppression endured by Christians of color in the U.S. also comprises the bitter memory of having one’s rights repeatedly put to popular vote, always with the same deplorable outcome. When the rights of minority groups are put to popular vote, one can predict that the majority will, in all likelihood, deny or remove the rights of the minority. In a nation whose entire political system is grounded in foundational documents that assure rights to all human beings simply because they are human, it is obscene to permit the rights of any targeted minority to be put to a vote.

And it is particularly obscene when those pushing for such an action are people of faith who claim that they are acting in fidelity to scriptures that are all about love, mercy, and justice, and healing the wounds of the world. Not making them deeper.

An Open Letter to Senator Blanche Lincoln: I Elected a Democrat, Not a Republican

One of my Democratic senators, Blanche Lincoln, voted this week with Republicans to defeat both Senator Rockefeller and Senator Schumer’s amendments to the health-care reform bill. Both contained versions of the public option.

I emailed Senator Lincoln today to let her know my thoughts about her recent votes. Here’s the email, as a public statement to one Democratic senator from one Democratic voter who intends to hold his senator accountable when she votes against policies that serve the common good, and which voters elected her to defend.

Dear Senator Lincoln,

I'm emailing to tell you I strongly support the public option in health care. We have a moral obligation to provide access to affordable, quality, basic health care for all citizens.

If you continue to oppose the public option, I will definitely select another candidate when I vote in the next senatorial elections.

Please do what is right, and what a majority of those who placed you in office want, re: health care reform.

Senator Lincoln also voted this week to restore funding to abstinence-only education, despite solid evidence that this approach to sex education does not deter teen sexual activity. I do not support the failed faith-based abstinence-only approach to sex education in American schools.

And I happen to have a tiny bit of experience with that program, which convinced me even more than I might have been convinced by study, that this program is a waste of taxpayer money. Several years ago, I was hired temporarily to help a faith-based organization that depends largely on federal abstinence-education funds to sustain its ministry.

The organization was founded by a Catholic women’s religious community with the primary mission of offering support to unwed teen mothers. The group backed into abstinence education as its mission because, frankly, under the Bush administration that was the only show going. Funding was more or less lavishly available for abstinence education. It was not available for groups offering support for unwed mothers.

By the time I found myself associated with this ministry program, it had put all of its eggs into the abstinence-only basket—with seriously destructive results. Results that were destructive to the organization, both in terms of its primary mission and its funding base . . . .

Like many small faith-based non-profits (who do more and more of the grunt work of federal programs, as the government shifts responsibility for social assistance programs away from the government and to faith-based groups), this non-profit had permitted funding opportunities to drive its mission, rather than vice versa. And so the group was caught in a downward spiral when federal funding dried up, and when the process of obtaining abstinence-only funding became highly competitive and frankly political, with the governor’s office playing a key role in vetting groups that would be funded. (Guess which ones got the funding: those that happened to have strong ties to the Republican governor of the time.)

When the ministry group could not obtain a renewal of the one and only grant on which its life had come to depend—the abstinence-only grant—it tanked, or appeared to do so, though it does have the institutional and financial support of the Catholic women’s religious community that founded and sponsored the ministry. It went out of business for a period of time, only to re-emerge mysteriously with renewed funding from the religious community that had been strangely unable to find funding for the group when its abstinence-only funds dried up.

There are a number of subtexts to this story, clearly. One has to do with the folly of allowing funding sources to drive the mission, in small faith-based non-profits. The other is about the government’s (both federal and state) deliberate decision to use faith-based funding in overtly political ways to reward conservative groups and projects, and punish left-leaning groups and projects. Another is about the lack of conscience of many faith-based groups that seem willing to take government money at any price, even when it is a political bribe, so to speak, designed to tie that faith-based community and those it serves to a particular political party.

And yet another is about how hidden channels of influence in the Catholic church assure that who gets hired and what an organization tries to do will always be controlled by the hierarchy, whenever possible. I strongly suspect that the temporary dissolution of the non-profit for which I worked a short period of time had much to with behind-the-scenes pressures on the religious community in question, whose mother-house happens to be in St. Louis (where Archbishop Burke was commander in chief at the time)—pressures to toe the party line of right-wing Catholics and hold onto the abstinence-only focus, and get rid of dissenters who question that party line.

Once the organization had purged itself of those who appeared to be questioning the abstinence-only focus and/or to have nebulous Catholic credentials (namely moi), the organization came back to life, magically. With chatter from some of the religious women involved in this process about how blessed it is to follow their vows of obedience, when their consciences struggle with decisions that they know are motivated entirely by church politics and not the gospel . . . . I think if I ever hear a Catholic religious say again that he/she is blessed to follow the vow of obedience as he/she inserts the knife into someone’s back, I’ll seriously lose it, right on the spot.

During my period working with this group, I had many opportunities to observe close-up the effects of the abstinence-only program the group was operating. To my way of thinking, it was a dismal failure.

The young women in this program and their children did not need abstinence education. They needed education, period. They needed access to health care for themselves and their children. They needed good jobs to support themselves as they sought to complete their high-school education. They needed good educations to obtain those jobs.

They did not need silly lectures about the irresponsibility of sex outside wedlock. They do need and they enjoy Senator Lincoln’s support, but they do not need that support for abstinence education. They need her advocacy for all the things I have just listed.

The nuns who set up this ministry know all of this. It is not to their credit that they have let themselves be gulled by the abstinence-only approach, because it happens to be the only paying show in town. And it is decidedly not to their credit that they allow pressure groups within the church and hierarchical bullies to force them to silence and marginalize people of conscience who want to assist them in achieving the admirable goals for which they originally set up their ministry.

But that’s where we are, this 1 October AD 2009. It’s where years of neocon politics from both Republicans and Democrats like Blanche Lincoln have brought us. And I wanted to tell this little story to give testimony to what is happening in the real lives of real human beings—in this case, teen mothers, most of them African-Americans—as we waste money on the abstinence-only nonsense and kowtow to religious right groups who don’t really care about those real lives and real human beings, no matter how much rhetoric they spout about responsibility and hard work.

The Struggle for Health Care in the U.S. Today: A Personal Statement

It occurs to me to accompany the postings I’ve been making about the health care debacle and town hall meetings with some first-hand testimony about my own struggle with the American system of health-care provision. For readers who have followed this blog for some time now, these stories won’t be new. But for those who log in only occasionally or may be new readers, the personal angle I bring to my analysis of the health care debates may not be apparent.

Warning: personal testimony to follow. For readers who do not welcome such personally revelatory statements, please be forewarned that what follows is written from personal experience and from the heart, without a great deal of intellectual baggage to cover over the emotional depths the narrative discloses.

I write about these issues—and it’s important to acknowledge this—as one of millions of Americans who have no health insurance, and who, as a consequence, live in constant anxiety about what might happen if we need medical treatment. As those living in the U.S. know, having health insurance depends absolutely on having a job.

I don’t have a job—not a full-time paying job, that is. I have been out of work since the summer of 2007, when my job as the academic vice-president of a United Methodist university in Florida ended precipitously and unhappily, through no fault of my own.

Through no fault of my own: that’s an important qualifier to make here, one that applies to me as well as to millions of others who are out of work. There is a tendency among those who have secure jobs—a tendency rooted in the Puritan theological substratum that so powerfully informs the American imagination—to presuppose that those without jobs and health coverage deserve to be where we are. We haven’t worked hard enough. We haven’t tried. We can’t keep a job due to our lack of a strong work ethic and lack of righteousness. (We're black, we're lazy, we're immoral, we want to sponge off other hard-working Americans.)

I resist those judgments, though the leader of the United Methodist university that has put me in my current situation has sought to make several of them (e.g., the charge that I did not work hard and am incompetent) stick in my case. I resist them because they are untrue and I know they are untrue. People sometimes lose their jobs through no fault of their own, because of gross injustice, because of the malfeasance and lack of integrity of their supervisors. Or because of prejudice, simply because of who they happen to be. Not because they have failed to work hard and have not excelled at their work.

And when they lose their jobs, they lose health coverage—effectively speaking, in almost all cases—in the United States. It is hard for my European and Canadian friends even to imagine what happens to someone in the U.S. who is without a full-time job. The systems of almost every other developed nation in the world assure that for someone without work, the added anxiety and burden of not being able to seek medical treatment will, at least, be lifted from one’s shoulders as one copes with the indignity and pain of unemployment.

I happen to know the Canadian system, since I lived in Canada for six years as a graduate student and qualified—solely because I was a human being and happened to be living in that country on a student visa—for national medical coverage during my years as a graduate student in Canada. I did not pay a penny for this coverage. I could ill afford to pay for any medical treatment I received in Canada, in any case, because, like many other graduate students, I lived on a shoestring budget during my years of study.

I can say from first-hand knowledge what a relief it was during my years of study in Canada to be able to go to a doctor, knowing I would be seen and treated when I needed medical help, without anxiety about how I would pay. I never paid a single doctor’s bill in my years in Canada, though I had good, ongoing care all the years I was there. I did not pay for any medicine I took in those years.

That system spared me, as it spares millions of people in other developed nations, the kind of anxiety I now face on a daily basis while I am unemployed. Because Steve and I simply cannot afford for me to buy any health insurance on his salary—because, as I have noted previously, we are now saddled with mortgage payments for a house we bought in Florida solely because the “friend” who ended our jobs there in 2007 with specious and unjust reasons for her actions had promised us jobs up to our retirement—I live without health insurance.

Like many gay couples around the country, we live in an area in which few employers provide partner benefits. So I am unable to qualify for health insurance under the plan that covers Steve as a full-time employee.

The upshot is that I do anything possible to avoid seeing a doctor. In the two years I have been without health insurance, I have been to see a doctor twice, to the best of my recollection. Those were occasions on which I simply could not defer seeking medical treatment. I paid out of pocket on both occasions, and when one of those visits required me to fill a prescription for an antibiotic, I found that the pills were astronomically, prohibitively expensive. But I had no choice except to pay for them, out of my pocket.

I have been to the dentist twice in the same period, again, because I simply could not avoid going. I put off regular dental check-ups, and I have ignored calls reminding me of my need for a colonoscopy, as part of the ongoing care my previous doctor recommended for me as a man nearing 60, who suffers from mild high blood pressure and is at the borderline of diabetes. I cannot begin to think of paying for the kind of routine, ongoing exams men of my age need. I just don’t have them done. I pray a lot.

I’m told that, if some emergency did come up, I could surely obtain treatment at an emergency room. I like to think that’s probable. I’m also aware that anyone going to the emergency room at many American hospitals is likely to encounter all sorts of obstacles, and can also sometimes receive less than optimal treatment from the over-worked ER staff who do not know those they’re treating, and who haven’t followed the particular needs of these particular patients.

I’m also aware—and I live in great fear of this—that ongoing medical treatment, if I’m in a situation of calamity, could simply wipe out all of my savings, take my house, and destroy me financially. Again, my Canadian and European friends are baffled when I tell them this is possible. They cannot imagine sane, healthy societies in which such possibilities, such dire no-win options, can confront human beings.

I am not complaining. I am explaining, or trying to do so. I have, in some respects, a richer life than do many of the millions without health insurance. I at least have a house in which to live, though it's not yet paid for. I occasionally travel, when I can use my frequent-flyer miles and have invitations to stay with hosts who kindly offer me hospitality.

I am privileged, in that I am white and male. I do not share in all the privilege many white men take for granted, because I also happen to be gay. But I am aware that my pigmentation and my gender do play a role in my privilege, and I would be dishonest if I did not admit that society accords unwarranted power and privilege to people on the basis of skin color and gender—and so many of the millions of Americans without health coverage struggle with even more difficult burdens than those confronting me, simply because of their race and/or gender.

I am also aware that my education places me in a separate category from many of those who have no health coverage. Many of those without health insurance do not have the benefit of tools available to me simply because I have an education, or the status accorded to me in some circles because I have an education.

Even so, in the final analysis, I hope my story will also convince some readers that just about anything is possible, when it comes to finding and keeping a job and having access to medical treatment in the U.S. I’m a Ph.D. nearing 60 who has simply been unable to find full-time work that in any way fits my credentials and background, for two years now.

And I’ve tried hard. I’ve networked. I’ve sent out countless letters of inquiry. Admittedly, my own background makes it difficult to find a job that fits, since my education is in the field of theology, hardly a field for which employers are breaking down the door. And jobs for people in academic administration are extremely limited in number, and even harder to find when one ends a previous job under a cloud created by an unscrupulous, but powerful, supervisor.

I have good friends assisting me, and I appreciate their assistance. I’m aware that I could perhaps take a job flipping hamburgers at a fast-food restaurant, and as some readers might point out, if I were really desperate to have health coverage, I ought to consider such an option.

I have avoided that path so far not because I feel myself superior to any kind of honest labor. A saying drilled into me by my parents as I grew up is that all labor is worthy labor, if it is honest labor. I have avoided taking that path primarily because I think my talents—what I have to offer as a human being—lie in other directions. And I would hope to find work that uses those talents and allows others to benefit from them.

So this is the story of one American who has worked very hard all his life, who happens to have earned a Ph.D. and two M.A. degrees, who has written some four or five books and countless articles, who has excelled at teaching and scholarship, who has been urged to undertake administrative work in higher education against his own instincts because he was told that he has a talent for interacting with many kinds of people and getting them to work effectively together.

And who cannot now find a job, as he nears 60. And who, as a result, is unable to afford the kind of ongoing monitoring of his health that is recommended for a man his age, or even to purchase medical treatment except in situations of imperative need.

And, of course, who does also happen to be gay—and that fact has undeniably played a very strong role in placing me in the situation in which I now find myself. Employers—faith-based employers included, and perhaps predominantly—still find it possible in many parts of the U.S. to use sexual orientation as a convenient way to dismiss good workers who have, for whatever reason, run afoul of their bosses. And they are upheld in these actions by the legal systems in much of the country, and by the churches that sponsor the institutions they run.

In the final analysis, it has not really given me much joy to read recently that both of the church-owned colleges/universities at which Steve and I have experienced gross, life-altering injustice now find themselves in hot water due to their long track records of grossly discriminatory behavior. As I have read about what is happening at both of these institutions, one in North Carolina and one in Florida, I am not really heartened. I feel no Schadenfreude.

I feel, rather, disgust that people can continue behaving so badly, and be kept in power for years as they hurt first one person after another, while church leaders look on with blind eyes. I feel great sadness that people who treat others as objects, who engage in persistently immoral, unjust, and even illegal behavior, are not only frequently maintained in their positions of power in church institutions, but that they learn nothing—absolutely nothing—over the years.

As the Catholic school in North Carolina booted me out, it began a rumor campaign to destroy my reputation by insinuating that 1) I was gay (I had not yet come out of the closet at work), and 2) I was pro-abortion. I am, of course, gay and I chose to respond to that insinuation by battering down the closet door, thereby taking a moral high road that the Catholic institution had forfeited by its lying and rumor-mongering. They did me a favor by creating the conditions in which I could finally be open and public about myself, though taking that step ended my career as a theologian working in Catholic institutions.

The rumor about my being pro-abortion was simply baffling, since I had never taught or published a single thing on that subject up to this point in my career. It was, I realized, simply how this Catholic institution liked to deal with people it chose to destroy. The worst possible charge that the old boys running that institution, other than the charge that one was gay, was that one was an abortion promoter.

So it really does not give me much satisfaction to read now, as this school is faced with public (and legal) censure for its well-entrenched patterns of discrimination, that it is using precisely those same insinuations to destroy the career of yet another faculty member, more than fifteen years after it did this to me. And, even though the school may well suffer some legal penalties for this behavior, it knows it can still get away with such behavior in the powerful, rich right-wing Catholic circles it inhabits. In fact, the school and its old boys' network count on this behavior to earn them good publicity and perks in the right-wing Catholic world. Even as I write this, the school is being lionized in the media of those circles, as a martyr for Catholic values experiencing unjust persecution for its fidelity to the magisterium.

And the other school? Same story in another church context. Same replication of utterly dysfunctional patterns by a wretchedly incompetent and morally challenged leader whose legacy has come to be consistent, every place she goes, because she is incapable of seeing those with whom she works and those who work for her as more than objects in some bizarre psychodrama going on inside her own mind. At her previous school, when she left, people rejoiced openly, and spoke of her as someone who leaves a trail of bloody bodies everywhere she walks.

The same pattern is now emerging at her next school, where she continues to be kept in power, even as things fall apart and she does precisely—almost as if she is following a script—what she did at her previous school, actions that led to her censure by an academic watchdog body and are now being discussed negatively in national scholarly publications about academic freedom.

Sad, how little we learn. Sad, how those who cannot learn and whose corruption leads them to damage others, can be kept in power even while they destroy the institutions they lead and the lives of many who work for them. Sad, how the churches in which some of these academic leaders find shelter continue to provide safe haven for them, even as they harm one person after another. Sad, that one of the constant patterns in these stories in church-related institutions is the willingness of churches to empower and give the benefit of the doubt, in particular, to known gay bashers.

And sad that for many of us who are their victims, and for many who are victims of incompetent and immoral bosses in other settings, or whose jobs have been cut for financial reasons, or who have lost employment due to a myriad of other factors beyond their control, there is the tremendous challenge of living without access to basic, ongoing health care even as we search for jobs. And sad beyond belief that many Americans are unable to see that leaving huge numbers of their fellow citizens in that boat affects all of us.

The Attack on Harry Knox Now Full-Fledged: Test of Obama Administration's Moral Foundations

Sometimes I don’t enjoy being right. It’s painful to look down a road and see what lies ahead, to realize that what lies ahead might be avoided if others saw and cared, and then to recognize that the pain will be inflicted, regardless. Seeing—and even speaking loudly and clearly—won’t change anything, until those with real power to change things decide to act. And I certainly do not have that power or anything approximating it.

Last Saturday, I posted here about the attempt of a particularly nasty group of right-wing Catholic political operatives to attack one of President Obama’s appointees to his President's Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Harry Knox is in the sights of this right-wing group seeking to embarrass and undermine the new president in any way possible. Simply because he is a Democrat and they are Republicans, and have had the blessing of the U.S. Catholic bishops for some years now, as they proclaim the Republican party as the party anointed by God, the only legitimate political option for Catholics.

As my posting noted, this attack began with a 7 May Cybercast News Service article by Fred Lucas that accuses Lucas of being anti-Catholic. Cybercast News was founded by L. Brent Bozell III, who happens to sit on the board of the Cardinal Newman Society, the organization mounting the protest against Notre Dame’s invitation of President Obama to its upcoming commencement.

In other words, the attack on Harry Knox is one facet of a broader political plan of a group of hardcore right-wing Catholics to drive wedges between Obama and the Catholic church in the U.S.—to smear the majority of Catholics who voted for Obama and continue to support him as unfaithful Catholics, and to continue to (mis)represent the Catholic church in the U.S. as solidly Republican.

I’m sorry to have to report today that the smear campaign continues and, after I posted on Saturday, has become open and even more vicious. Yesterday U.S. News and World Report carries an open letter of the right-wing Catholic group to President Obama, calling on Obama to fire Harry Knox and threatening him if he doesn’t do so. The threat? The group will vilify Obama as anti-Catholic if he does not get rid of Harry Knox.

The name at the head of the list of signatories? L. Brent Bozell III. Also on the list: Patrick J. Reilly, president of the Cardinal Newman Society. As the Good as You website notes today, Concerned Women of America has gotten in on the act, and has just issued a news flash lambasting Harry Knox for his purported anti-Catholic views and calling on Obama to remove Knox from his current position.

The position Concerned Women is taking would seem, on the face of it, to be a curious and even dangerous one for an organization founded and chaired by Beverly LaHaye to take, given the well-documented anti-Catholicism of her husband Tim LaHaye. The right-wing Catholics with whom LaHaye’s Concerned Women are allying themselves accuse Harry Knox of criticizing several of Pope Benedict’s statements.

But to my knowledge nothing Knox has said equals Rev. Tim LaHaye’s claim that Catholicism is a “false religion” and the pope a “false prophet”—claims well-researched in the Catholic.org article to which I have linked. In the 1970s, LaHaye pastored a church which sponsored an anti-Catholic group called Mission to Catholics which distributed pamphlets claiming that Pope Paul VI was the antichrist and the archpriest of Satan.

Strange, indeed, to find the anti-Catholic LaHayes now attacking President Obama for appointing an openly gay man to his Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and threatening to out that gay man and the president as anti-Catholic unless Obama removes the gay man from his advisory council! Do truth and consistency matter at all to these right-wing types, one wonders?

But, then, this attack on Harry Knox is clearly not about anti-Catholicism at all. It’s first and foremost about attacking Obama—by any means these folks can find, whether those means be fair or foul, based on truth or based on lies. And it’s about the usefulness of gays as political weapons.

Bozell et al. know that the new administration wants to tread very carefully in the area of gay rights. They know full well that gay people and gay causes are an embarrassment to the new administration, something that the administration wants to sweep under the rug as it pursues its "important" business. They understand that the verbal, but not-yet-demonstrated, commitment of the new administration to gay rights is the soft underbelly of the Obama administration and of its claim to stand for moral commitments that neoconservatives have trashed.

Bozell et al. also know that, though things are rapidly changing in the America of the Obama administration, a significant percentage of Americans—and a large percentage in churched circles—continue to resist the claims of their gay brothers and sisters to equal treatment under the law, and to full human status in the human community. Bozell et al. know that they can count on these Americans to view their resistance to gay persons as a moral enterprise, a moral obligation even, and to ignore the compelling moral claims of gay human beings to be treated as fully human.

And Bozell et al. are also counting on Mr. Obama’s willingness to compromise in this area, in order to appease these churched Americans who wish to justify oppression of a persecuted minority as a moral obligation, just as they wish to see torture as a moral act when the one being tortured has a face different from the one these churchgoers see every Sunday in their churches.

Bozell et al. want to undermine the new administration’s claim to stand on moral foundations with its agenda of change. And, with its silence and prevarication about gay issues and gay lives, the Obama administration has, unfortunately, done everything in its power to open itself to this ugly attack. As the new administration continues to cave in to the hard right in this area, I do not believe that a majority of American Catholics of the center—or of Americans of the center, in general—will speak out about this case, and will call on Mr. Obama to resist. Many Americans of the center are as willing as the new president is to choose silence rather than the moral thing to do, when it comes to gay issues and gay human beings.

Ultimately, they would prefer that we just go away, with our inconvenient questions and our inopportune expectations of justice and civility and our inconvenient gay lives.

My prediction? Sadly, I believe Mr. Obama will likely cave in on Harry Knox. I hope that this will not be the case. But as I have noted in previous postings on this blog, in my view, though things are getting better for gay Americans and are likely to continue to get better under the new administration (because the election of our first African-American president has released energies for progresssive change), the price gay Americans will in all likelihood pay for small cultural steps in the right direction is going to be one of several steps backward with each step forward.

Things will in all likelihood often get worse even as they are getting better. We are in a period of whiplash reaction now in which every victory for gay rights in our culture will be followed by one or more defeats at the hands of those who know they can continue to use gay people as objects in ugly political games, and that the majority will not speak out as this happens, will not grant the moral legitimacy of gay lives and gay rights, and will not definitively and decisively reject the claims of the hard right to be pursuing moral goals by bashing gay human beings.

And through it all, silence at the top. Silence in the one place where even the softest word of support would make a world of difference. Silence that translates into consent—consent for the most draconian and immoral uses of power against gay human beings by those representing themselves as moral agents even as they engage in patently immoral behavior.

And a willingness to compromise, which, even through the silence, speaks volumes about how the new administration really regards the moral claims—and the lives—of gay human beings. Because Bozell et al. are watching carefully, they know precisely where to strike now. Because they have, to a certain extent, been checked in their attempt to blow the Notre Dame commencement into a full-blown embarrassment for the new administration, they are out for blood now. They know where to strike to draw that blood—and they know full well whose human lives are dispensable, in their atrocious political games.

I predict they will succeed, in the case of Harry Knox. I predict he will be unseated, and will be the first in a string of gay martyrs produced by the new administration, as the administration continues to do what it regards as expedient, even if not right, in the case of gay human lives.

More on Mr. Obama's Record with the Gay Community: Remembering the Moral Center of Leadership

And the discussion of President Obama’s silence about gay and lesbian people and issues, and failure to deliver on his promises to the gay community, continues, with a response today by Jenna Lowenstein to the Richard Socarides article that I discussed yesterday (here and here).

Lowenstein argues that Obama’s silence and inaction undermine his moral force as a leader. She notes that silence in the face of injustice is complicity in injustice, particularly when one has in one’s hands the power to challenge injustice.

A key quote:

We need a President who understands that observing continued injustice is as hateful as participating in it, and who will stand up and be a moral leader, willing to educate his constituents, rather than fear their judgments.

And as I read Lowenstein and her forceful critique of the politics of prevaricating, “pragmatic” calculation that overlooks the moral dimensions of sound leadership, I think back to an important conversation that Steve and I had over the weekend. The conversation took place at the house of friends of ours, friends who are among the few people we’ve met in our area who seem interested in and well informed about the larger world, and able to carry on probing conversations about that world and its future.

These friends happen to be African-American, he a minister and judge, she a person who wears a number of important professional hats (and one of my favorite people in the world). We were talking about our disappointment at the number of Arkansans (including some of my own relatives) who signed the petition to place the ugly anti-gay adoption bill on our local ballot in the last election (here and here).

Our minister friend noted frankly the pronounced support for anti-gay initiatives like this that continues in both the African-American and the Latino community. In his view, during the period of neoconservative dominance in American politics with which the 20th century ended, the political and religious right worked very hard to consolidate its ties to these communities through programs such as the federal faith-based social service programs.

Our African-American minister friend thinks that, having drunk deeply of the kool aid offered by these programs, communities of color are finding it hard to break their dependence on their “friends” of the right—that is, on the dollars that have come to communities of color insofar as they have tied themselves to the political and religious right, and, more significantly, the empty promise of more dollars, since what the right has offered communities of color for its allegiance is a pittance thus far.

Our friend does see hope, but that hope lies, he suggests, not in the ministers of black churches, too many whom have become closely allied with homophobic politics. It resides in those within the African-American community who remember that the bible has been used in the past as it is being used now. Selected verses that contradict the entire thrust of the Jewish and Christian scriptures (which is oriented first and foremost to justice and mercy) have been chosen in the past to denigrate a despised group of human beings. The African-American community forgets this to its peril, our minister friend thinks.

For centuries, as slavery was practiced by Christians, the bible was quoted selectively to justify that abhorrent practice. When slavery was abolished, those same Christians who had found biblical warrant for subjugating people of color to slavery continued to cite the bible as a basis for their “right” to demean people of color and treat them as second-class citizens.

In our friend’s view, hope for the future in African-American communities and churches lies in the ability of some members of those communities and churches—and these will not likely be ministers, he believes—to retrieve the prophetic strands of African-American Christian thought which stand against the constant tendency of the wealthy and powerful to misuse the scripture to justify their oppression of others. To illustrate his point, our friend told us of a scene he witnessed during a recent lection, when some members of the local African-American community were out in force at the polling places to steer people to vote for an anti-gay amendment.

As these folks grabbed hold of an elderly woman headed to the voting booth, who needed assistance, they whispered their homophobic instructions in her ear. She replied to them loudly, so that everyone in the polling place heard her: “No, baby. I believe that it’s between two people and God if they want to marry. It is not my business to judge.”

That statement, our friend believes, points the way to hope in his community, hope that his community will stop drinking the kool aid and stop expecting those who have provided the noxious brew of prejudice to inundate African-American churches with dollars. That statement points to the strong moral center of African-American Christianity that has enabled generations of African Americans to endure and prevail over intense oppression.

Mr. Obama would, in my humble opinion, do well to remember that moral center as he leads the nation.

The Fly in the Ointment: Faith-Based Programs and Discriminiation against Gays

Evangelical leader Tony Campolo has an interesting reflection today at Alternet about Barack Obama’s choice to continue the Bush faith-based social service programs (here). Campolo’s take? These programs may seriously impair the “religious distinctiveness” of the faith groups sponsoring them.

Campolo notes criticisms of the faith-based programs that I have outlined in previous postings (here and here). As he points out, the faith-based social service programs were almost immediately politicized by the Bush administration. The money provided to faith groups operating these programs was used as a bargaining chip to pull faith-based groups into the Republican fold.

Moreover, this initiative was seriously underfunded, resulting in a loss of social services crucially important to many Americans in need who had previously been assisted by the federal government. And many of the programs were abysmally managed, with little accountability or supervision, with a dearth of solid data to verify that they were meeting their goals, and with holes in accounting procedures, so that the money given to many groups was not clearly accounted for.

Campolo notes,

It wasn't long before there was talk about how this office was being subverted by the likes of Karl Rove to serve political purposes. Certain leaders of African-American denominations complained that government dollars for faith-based ministries were being used to lure pastors from black churches into loyalty to the Republican Party. The resignation of John DiJulio as the Director of the White House office lent substance to the rumor that faith-based programs were being politicized. Then J. David Kuo, the deputy director of the President's program, not only resigned, but wrote an exposé of how the faith-based programs supported by the White House were underfunded and were more propaganda than substance. Yet religionists, and especially Evangelicals, failed to raise a ruckus over what was happening, probably because they still were hoping that crumbs, in the way of grants, might fall their way from the White House table.

His primary concern has to do, however, with the effect of these programs—with the effect of the choice of faith groups to take federal funds—on the religious distinctiveness of churches. He notes that the money comes with strings attached.

And as he also observes, particularly troubling to many evangelicals has been the hint that Mr. Obama might revise the Bush presidency’s decision to permit faith-based discrimination in these faith-based programs. The big fly in the ointment? The expectation that religious groups receiving federal funds to provide social services might not be permitted to discriminate against gays and lesbians:

Evangelical groups immediately saw the fly in the ointment. Religious organizations would have to be open to hiring persons who were not necessarily in accord with their beliefs and sexual behavioral expectations. They decried the requisite that they would have to provide equal opportunities for the employment of gays and lesbians if they were to receive federal grants.

Apparently church leaders' horror at the thought that they might have to forfeit gay-bashing in order to receive federal money led to big behind-the-scenes powwows between Obama’s team and his evangelical constituents in the period before the election, confabs about which I knew nothing until I read Campolo’s article. Campolo says that the upshot of these powwows (in which Rev. Rick Warren seems to have been involved) was that word was “sent down” that “the policies that were in place on these matters during the Bush Administration would be continued.”

That is, faith-based groups could continue business as usual, discriminating against gay and lesbian citizens, who are among those providing the tax dollars that fund these programs, while receiving funding for social services under the Obama administration. Campolo says that he is given to believe this “word” came down directly from Mr. Obama himself.

Now, it seems, a reversal is taking place, and there are hints from the new administration that discrimination will be frowned on in groups receiving federal funding for faith-based social service programs. To Campolo, this presents a challenge: if churches have to sacrifice their beliefs and practices in order to receive federal funds, then perhaps the price for such federal support is too high.

I’m not surprised by Campolo’s analysis. Though he is on the moderate end of the evangelical spectrum when it comes to gay issues, he is still of the hate-the-sin-love-the-sinner mindset. A mindset that we sinners who find our sin hated by followers of Christ notice all too often translating itself into hate, period.

What strikes me as curious about Campolo’s argument (and it captures the outlook of many Christians of the center-right today) is that it pays no attention at all to the way in which discrimination against a group of demeaned human beings is in itself an abdication of all that faith groups claim to hold most dear. The problem Mr. Campolo should be facing, and calling on his co-religionists to face, is not how to take federal funds while continuing to engage in faith-based discrimination.

It is to repudiate discrimination altogether. Most faith-based groups have apologized for and repented of their discrimination against people of color. Many faith-based groups are en route to doing the same re: women, though most still have a long way to go in that regard.

Why not continue the process with the group now in the sights of maleficent believers who think they must always have an enemy, in order to be the church militant? Why not grant that if the churches were wrong in the past about their conviction that scripture and tradition require discrimination on grounds of pigmentation or gender, the churches might be equally wrong today about their certainty that discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation is biblically mandated and in line with the best of Christian tradition?

Why not give up discrimination altogether? And recognize that it damages the churches far more than taking federal funds while expecting to discriminate does?

Faith-Based Funding: Back Step on Human Rights by New President

A New York Times editorial today catches my eye. It’s entitled “Faith-Based Fudging” (here).

As the editorial notes, the order that President Obama signed recently to extend Bush’s faith-based social services program contains no prohibition of discrimination by federally funded faith-based programs. This despite a campaign promise that any renewal of the faith-based initiative would prohibit discrimination in these programs.

As my previous postings about this have noted, discrimination has gone on in faith-based groups funded by this initiative, and I have no reason to doubt that it will continue now (here, with links to previous postings about this issueon this blog). I share the dismay of the Times editorialist that the new president has backed away from his promise to prohibit religious-based discrimination as he continues the Bush program of giving tax dollars to religious groups that provide social services.

In my view, this is another concession by Mr. Obama to religionists of the right, who did not support his campaign and are unlikely to be wooed by such concessions, even as they are eager to take handouts from the federal government. This willingness to compromise on such a key issue—religious groups engaging in discrimination while receiving tax dollars should stop discriminating or stop being funded—does not bode well for the new administration’s commitment to human rights.

Those of us who are LGBT, in particular, should monitor these programs carefully. We are, after all, the primary targets when these faith-based groups choose to discriminate.

The Faith-Based Social Service Initiative Reconsidered: John DiIulio's Testimony

After the announcement by Mr. Obama last year that he would continue Bush’s faith-based social service programs in his new administration, I blogged a number of times about the faith-based programs (see http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/obamas-faith-based-announcement-faith.html, http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/06/barack-obama-and-post-homophobic-models.html, http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/faith-based-social-programs-ending.html, http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/continued-dialogue-about-faith-based.html).

As those postings note, I have some experience with these programs both as an administrator in universities that stress civic engagement education, and as a grant-writer for a federally funded faith-based program. As the postings also indicate, I have very serious reservations about the Bush faith-based initiative for the following reasons:

1. It transfers the burden of providing much needed social services from federal and state programs to faith-based communities that do not have the resources to provide adequately for all those they serve through these programs.

2. It provides only a pittance—a token pittance—for these programs, which now do the grunt work of social outreach that was previously done by well-funded and well-administered government programs.

3. It actively encourages abuse of funds on the part of some administrators and church officials, who are sometimes totally incapable of administering the programs for which they have received funds.

4. The program has permitted faith-based groups to accept money without demonstrating solid results for the monies they received, and without accounting adequately for their use of these federal funds.

5. The program permits and even encourages faith-based groups to discriminate, as they apply these funds; LGBT persons, in particular, are targeted by some faith-based groups receiving federal funding, and are actively discriminated against.

6. The program has been highly politicized. In some states (including my own), governors have had final veto power over funding requests as they are sent to the federal level, even when the governor has no expertise in the area being funded and when the program has no statewide implications. This vetting method has allowed governors to r punish faith-based programs that do not toe the line of the governor’s party, and to reward cronies.

These are my first-hand observations about what has been going on with the faith-based social service programs under the last administration. They are observations I made while working at historically black universities (HBCUs), and while working for a faith-based program that provided services to an inner-city African-American community.

They are observations that many black ministers with whom I interact also share. In the view of some of these ministers, the faith-based initiative has been largely a failure, an attempt by the federal government to deny its responsibility to create a social network for the least among us, while shifting that burden to faith communities—many of them African-American—ill-equipped to deal with this burden.

In key respects, some of my ministerial friends in black churches tell me, this program has functioned as a political arm of the Republican machine reaching out to the African-American community in the hope of obtaining more black voters. It throws a smattering of money at many black churches and their pastors, with the goal of tying these communities to the Republican party, and without seeking assurance that the funds given to these communities have been properly used. This program has been, in the view of some of my friends, damaging to many African-American communities.

Given my experiences with the faith-based initiative, I’m interested to read John DiIulio’s take on the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, in the latest issue of America magazine (http://americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=11400). DiIulio is an authoritative voice: he was the first director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives when the program was formed. He resigned within his first year as director of this program after having seen that too many Bush programs were staffed by what he called “Mayberry Machiavellis” who lacked even basic knowledge of the programs they were directing (www.esquire.com/features/dilulio). In his view, the primary interest of this Mayberry crowd was in “steering legislative initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible.”

DiIulio knows whereof he speaks, in other words—particularly when he addresses the faith-based initiatives. Because of his background with the faith-based programs, and because he continues to applaud President Bush (whom he respects) for implementing these programs, DiIulio’s testimony about these programs should be taken seriously.

DiIulio’s America overview of these faith-based programs is, for the most part, a scathing critique. He notes that they have passed to many nonprofits an impossible expectation of providing social services that they cannot provide, given the level of funding they are receiving under the faith-based programs. He also notes that the data about these programs have been “stretched” by the Bush administration in reports full of “self-congratulatory semi-truths” and “pseudo statistics.”

DiIulio continues to support the faith-based initiative. I, by contrast, am highly skeptical about its ability to meet social needs that should not be passed on to faith groups by a government that should lead the way in providing social safety nets for the least among us.

But if the program is to succeed under President Obama, DiIulio thinks, it must stop engaging in discriminatory behaviors, refrain from overt politicization of social services, and pay attention to research, sound data, and accurate reporting:

To succeed, Obama, a former Catholic Charities community worker in Chicago, must insist that all grantees serve all people in need without regard to religion. He must keep the faith-based effort fact-based, bipartisan and open to corrections. And he must honor all campaign pledges to create or expand programs that benefit low-income children and families.

I hope that if President Obama continues these programs, as he has promised to do, he listens to DiIulio’s recommendations. People are in need, and the program as it is now configured is failing woefully to meet all the social needs it purports to serve. All of us concerned about those who are falling through social safety nets need to keep our eyes on these programs, and demand that they actually serve the needs they target—and provide proof of their results, along with careful records regarding their expenditures of our tax dollars.

Faith-Based Homophobia and Second Class Americans: A Test of the Mandate for Change

In light of continued media/blog discussion of divisions between the African-American and gay community after the passing of proposition 8 in California, I want to revive this posting from October 3.

Dear Mr. Obama:

To address this open letter to you, I am interrupting a thread on this blog that touches on painful personal experiences of homophobia in my professional life. Those experiences have resulted in my being unemployed and without health insurance at age 58—despite my proven track record of hard, productive, successful work.

My unemployment and lack of access to health care have everything to do with the fact that I have chosen not to hide that I am openly gay, and have lived my entire adult life in a committed relationship with another openly gay man.

Despite my lack of income and the dwindling of the scant retirement funds I’ve been able to save while working in church-owned universities (most of them HBCUs), I have donated repeatedly to your campaign. I have done so because I support your policies. I am working hard in every way I can to assist your election.

I have been particularly impressed by your willingness to address the unconscionable stigmatization and marginalization of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons in our democratic society. I have noted with delight your willingness to speak truth about the ugliness of homophobia to your own African-American brothers and sisters.

When you challenged homophobia at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta last January, I was moved profoundly—as I was also moved by your courage when you addressed these issues again before an audience not likely to share your views in Beaumont, Texas, in February. I have been equally impressed with your wife’s clarity and courage about these issues. I appreciate your support and that of your wife. This is among the reasons you have my vote, as well as that of many members of my family.

For this reason, I am respectfully asking you to think about your opportunity and responsibility, as you speak at HBCUs, to continue calling your own African-American brothers and sisters, and our nation at large, to recognize and address the ugly phenomenon of homophobia. I note that you will speak tomorrow at an HBCU in Daytona Beach—Bethune-Cookman University. I feel certain that you will be speaking at a number of HBCUs during this campaign.

This is as it ought to be. HBCUs have played a significant and often unrecognized role in the educational life of our nation. They have historically graduated, and they continue to graduate, the majority of African Americans who go on to earn doctorates in the U.S.

However, as I am sure you are aware, many HBCUs lack policies prohibiting discrimination against gay faculty, staff, administrators, and students. I have addressed these issues repeatedly on this Bilgrimage blog. A search of the blog for the term “HBCU” will link anyone who wants to examine this issue to numerous studies and statements about the track record of HBCUs, vis-à-vis homophobic discrimination.

I believe I have a right (and an obligation) to address the issue of anti-gay discrimination in HBCUs for a number of reasons. First, I’m a citizen who has long worked for equal rights for everyone in our democratic society, and, in particular, for those shoved away from the table of participatory democracy.

Second, I am a theologian whose vocational life has been centered on calling churches and religious groups to greater awareness of the mechanisms by which social structures stigmatize and exclude scapegoated groups. In my view, faith communities do not have the right to expect to command attention as credible moral guides, when, in their own practices, they violate key moral principles including the obligation to reach out and include the marginalized, or the obligation to refrain from harming those already harmed by structures of social exclusion.

Third, at the beginning of my career as a theologian, I deliberately chose to work in HBCUs. At the outset of my career, I had the opportunity either to take a highly paid position at a prestigious majority-culture university, or a modestly paid position at an HBCU, Xavier University in New Orleans.

I chose Xavier, and did so gladly, though my starting salary was $15,500 (to the best of my recollection) in 1984. The impulse to serve and give to those in need that brought me to the vocation of theology in the first place, as well as my history as a white Southerner who came of age in the Civil Rights period, made it obvious to me that I had an important obligation (and graced opportunity) to offer my talents, such as they are, to HBCUs.

In the narrative I am interrupting to address this letter to you, I am speaking forthrightly about the economic effects my choice to work in HBCUs has had on my life and that of my partner Steve Schafer. We both knew when we accepted jobs at HBCUs that we would never enjoy lives of economic luxury.

I spent almost two decades teaching and doing administrative work in HBCUs. During those two decades, from 1984 up to my last year in an HBCU (2006-2007), I never earned a salary in excess of $60,000 until my final year as academic vice-president at an HBCU. At Philander Smith College in Little Rock, I had the honor of serving as academic dean for a number of years. Even in that position—one that involved intense work—I drew a salary of only $29,000 for several years, until the president told me that she considered it an embarrassment to the college that it was paying its dean such a salary.

I am not complaining. I am not seeking to embarrass or adversely affect any particular HBCU, in writing this letter. I knew when I began working at HBCUs that I would not enjoy economic comfort. It was a privilege, an honor, to work in HBCUs, to have the opportunity to give something to a community that has suffered historic marginalization. I gave without expecting thanks.

What I did not expect, however, was to be slapped in the face because I am openly gay. That, unfortunately, was my experience at one HBCU, where, when the harassment began, I discovered, I had no legal recourse to protect myself against misrepresentation of my work record, and deeply personal vilification of my character.

At this institution, I had again been honored to accept the position of academic vice-president, though I was told that the salary I was being offered was some $30,000 less than that offered to my predecessor. It was enough to be wanted, to be needed, to be allowed to serve.

It was a delight, too, to have a salary that permitted me to give more than I had ever been able to give in the past. When I found that my salary included an augment from a state grant program in the amount of $20,000, I divided the augment in half and gave half of that amount to my associate, who, in my view, worked as hard as I did and deserved as much reward. In the year in which my partner Steve Schafer and I worked for this HBCU, together we donated more to the school than all other members of the university leadership team combined.

I will not rehearse the full story. Due to legal threats on the part of the same HBCU that has rewarded my hard work and that of my partner with such shameful and ugly treatment for our years of hard work and sacrifice in HBCUs, I am not even permitted to tell the whole story.

And I know that as a presidential candidate, you can do nothing about a situation of conflict between a former employee and an employer. What you can do, however, and what I believe you must do, to be true to your principles, is to call each and every HBCU at which you speak to accountability regarding issues of sexual orientation.

May I respectfully ask that, if an HBCU at which you speak has no policy forbidding discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation, you call the HBCU to accountability about its obligation to forbid such discrimination through official policy statements? Please also call on HBCUs to implement support groups for faculty, staff, and students dealing with issues of sexual orientation. Please ask HBCUs to form task forces to educate their own constituencies, as well as the public at large, about the damage that homophobia does in our society.

Please challenge HBCUs not to harass openly gay employees or students, not to issue written demands that openly gay employees refrain from traveling or making doctors’ visits with their partners, when such demands are not issued to married couples working for the same institution. Please call on HBCUs and their leaders not to demean gay employees and students, and not to punish gay employees and students who promote dialogue about homophobia in the campus community.

The state in which you will be speaking tomorrow is one with an alarming record when it comes to recent incidents of gay-bashing. Historically, HBCUs have been a part of the solution and not a part of the problem, when it comes to significant social issues affecting minorities. The prophetic African-American leader Mary McLeod Bethune, who founded the institution at which you will speak tomorrow, asked that HBCUs create town-hall meetings in which those shoved from the table of participatory democracy could gather together to discuss solutions to the problems they experienced.

Please continue Dr. Bethune’s legacy as you speak at Bethune-Cookman and other HBCUs. Please continue to remind HBCUs of their commitment to include, to refrain from discrimination, to refrain from harming those already harmed by social stigmatization. Please assist all of us who are working for justice within the faith communities of this nation, as we call on those who talk the talk to walk the walk. Faith-based institutions, including HBCUs and their leaders, should not have the luxury of representing themselves as opposed to discrimination, while they practice discrimination towards their LGBT brothers and sisters.

Thank you for hearing my plea. It comes from the heart.

Respectfully yours,

William D. Lindsey.

Anderson Cooper, 360, 6 November 2008: "Was this [i.e., addressing support for proposition 8 prior to the election] the first test for Barack Obama of his real support for gays and lesbians in America and if so, did he fail that test?"

Power to the People: Citizen Journalism and the UCA Story

Since I’ve blogged a number of times about the unfolding saga at the University of Central Arkansas (UCA), I think it’s important to provide updates to that story as they come along. The Arkansas Times reports last evening and again today that UCA president Lu Hardin has chosen to resign with a buy-out contract of $1 million (www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog/2008/08/hardin_to_resign.aspx#comments, www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog/2008/08/hardin_to_resign.aspx#comments).

The chair of the UCA board of trustees has confirmed that the board will meet today, noting that Hardin has the votes to remain as president if he so chooses. Max Brantley, editor of the Arkansas Times, suggests that the board of trustees has been, well, less than scintillating in its handling of a matter in which the president’s integrity appears to patently compromised in a very public way. Brantley writes,

The Board of Trustees has not distinguished itself in this matter. If Hardin resigns in recognition of his inability to credibly lead, would it be wrong to suggest that the Board should make a similar gesture? (emphasis added)

On the whole, bloggers at the Arkansas Times website wholeheartedly agree. Comments of bloggers about the role the board has been playing in the UCA story include the following (emphasis added):

▪The Board, with their handling of this just sent a terrible--really a horrible lesson and message to anyone paying attention to this. Shame on them all. They never got out in front of this. Not once. Even know. I'm sorry, I just have absolutely no respect for their handling of this.

▪If Hardin needs to resign then surely a majority of the board does too.
▪Sad as this is to say, the reality is that what is right and fair is irrelevant. Only the politics of the possible. It is really disturbing to think that the board will pay him the full buyout when he could have, should have been removed for cause.

▪I just sent the governor an e-mail asking him to exercise some control over the BOT.

▪Go back and look how the whole affair has unfolded. Early on the Board was in denial and defensive of the facts. If Hardin is REWARDED for his actions with severance pay, then say adios to the Board for wasting TAXPAYER dollars in awarding severance pay for the SECOND time. The UCA episode has evolved into the likes of a Greek tragedy with Lu Hardin playing lead. It is time to end the tragedy by not only releasing the lead player but the supporting cast as well.

▪The Board still doesn't get that their role is stewardship of the institution. Again, shame on them for blowing it here. Thankfully, and I think this was a large part of it, the ArkTimes Blog kept this in play long enough and to the degree necessary for the issue to be kept alive until the full weight of what happened here was fleshed out. Once again, evidence that the power is shifting from the hands of the mass media to the masses.

As I’ve noted before, I have a twofold interest in this story. One is, of course, that I’m a citizen of Arkansas and my tax dollars help fund this school (to which, by the way, two of my aunts went to do graduate work as they prepared for teaching careers).

But I’m even more intently interested in this story because of the questions I’ve raised in this blog about the significant role higher education plays in imparting to students civic values essential to the successful maintenance of a democratic society. As I’ve noted, when the example set at the top of an educational institution—from the board of trustees and the president—is one that contradicts core values necessary to build a sound participatory democracy, we all have reason to be concerned.

My experience in higher education has been solely in faith-based universities. Though these institutions cannot be held directly accountable by citizens and by state governments in the same way that UCA can, our tax dollars also help to fund church-owned universities. And we therefore have a vested interest—all of us, as citizens—in calling for the tax dollars also help to fund church-owned universities.same degree of public accountability, transparency, and integrity on the part of boards of trustees and presidents of church-owned universities that we expect from state-sponsored ones.

In fact, I would go further and argue that the church sponsorship of church-owned universities gives those institutions an added responsibility to exemplify the highest level of integrity on the part of their leaders—starting with their governing boards and presidents. Precisely because these institutions proclaim that their mission is grounded in the ethical teachings of their sponsoring churches, leaders of church-based universities have an exceptionally strong responsibility

▪to value and speak the truth

▪to be transparent and accountable to the various publics they serve

▪to entertain open discourse about the core values of their institutions by members of those constituencies, even (and especially when) that discourse exposes disparities between the values an institution proclaims and the behavior of its key leaders

▪to defend those most susceptible to abuse within the power dynamics of the university

▪and to refrain from doing harm—as in ignoring the rights of vulnerable minorities who have no legal protections, and then using legal threats to silence members of minority groups who protest such immoral treatment.

As someone who has had the unpleasant experience of watching university boards of trustees operate up-close, I have to say that I have seldom been overwhelmed by the degree of competence and—above all—commitment to core civic or religious values among many members of boards of trustees. As with boards of state institutions, boards of church-sponsored universities too often value impression management and protection from legal action above respect for the core values of their institution (and, in the case of church-sponsored universities, of the sponsoring church). Most will bend over backwards to protect a president even when they have strong reason to suspect that the president is either incompetent or venal, or both. Hardly any will take the trouble to investigate—and to hold open forums—when it is patently obvious from many credible reports that a president’s behavior is dangerously close to violating core ethical principles of the institution.

The blogger who notes (above) that, sad to say, “the reality is that what is right and fair is irrelevant” to many boards of trustees, is right on target. As that blogger concludes, many boards—and I include boards of church-sponsored universities here; my experience has been solely with those—are interested only in the politics of the possible.”

And so what does that communicate to students and to the public constituencies served by any university about its values? That they don’t mean much at all, when push comes to serve. That values are something to be paid lip-service in a classroom, but discarded when students enter the real world.

Holding faith-based institutions accountable for the services they provide the public, and for the ways in which they either exemplify or betray core civic values: this is an exceptionally important task of the American public, since we are a nation with the soul of a church that invests billions of dollars in these institutions precisely because we believe they serve the common good.

And as long as church leaders, and the leaders of church-owned institutions, resist transparency and public accountability (as they often do)—and as long as they use their financial clout and institutional image-management capital to resist transparency and accountability and attack those who call for integrity on the part of their leaders (as they continue to do)—the most significant tool we have today to accomplish this task is, as one of the comments cited above note, the ability of citizen journalists to keep significant issues in the public eye.

If readers will forgive my citing once again something I have written (but collaboratively so, with a leading scholar in the field of values-based education and transformative leadership, Dr. Trudie Kibbe Reed), I would like to conclude with several reflections from the document I cited earlier this week on transformative leadership, which is used as an introductory text the master's program in leadership at Bethune-Cookman University:

▪Abundant literature suggests that a key challenge facing higher education in the 21st century is to produce leaders for a rapidly changing postmodern cultural context. The cultural context within which students are now growing up and in which they will pursue careers is marked by change (technological, social, political, and economic) of an ever increasing pace, a communications and information explosion, new fusions of regional cultures throughout the world, increasing interaction of people from various cultural backgrounds due to advances in transportation technologies and migrations of people, and profound ethical shifts concomitant with the preceding developments.

▪If educational institutions fail to assist students in dealing with these developments—above all, to assist them to acquire the ability to think critically about and respond with ethical sensitivity to them—they will abdicate one of their chief responsibilities. This is to shape leaders who help to promote civic cultures in which more and more constituencies are drawn into participation, and in which the voices of groups historically marginalized (and those presently marginalized through lack of access to information) are heard and valued in processes of participatory democracy.

▪Because they are often looking solely at economic trends and focusing only on skills rather than internal and affective ethical change, organizations that fail are usually entrenched in maintenance forms of leadership that value preservation of the status quo above responding creatively to change.

To my way of thinking, this says it all: educational institutions, including (and perhaps particularly) church-owned ones, which value maintenance of the status quo and entrenched forms of leadership above the imperatives of mission, which ignore the centrality of values to the educational process, which abdicate their responsibility to inculcate values that build participatory democracy, are failing—even when, as at UCA, the numbers game allows them to claim that their "brand" is appreciating in value in publications such as US News & World Report.