Everybody Has a Story: Updating You on Recent Events in My Husband Steve's and My Life

Weeks back, I alluded to a hard patch through which Steve and I have been walking, and told you readers of Bilgrimage that I would say more about this when the time was ripe. I am now free to talk. I shared the following statement on Facebook yesterday. I feel a certain ambivalance about making this story public, and I think the ambivalence arises from my concern that I not target the individuals who created this hard patch for Steve and me.

Story from My Own Backyard: Catholic School, Mount St. Mary, Fires Teacher Who Marries Same-Sex Partner

I just wrote, 

John Allen on Britain's Equaliity Law: Catholic Concerns about Violating Catholic Teaching

Reporting today at National Catholic Reporter on Pope Benedict's meeting yesterday with Harriet Harman, a British political leader, John Allen writes:

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.

Bush and Torture: What Does It Mean to Be Methodist Today?

I have been fighting with myself about this posting. Because, God help me, I cannot read the sickening memos about our recent legacy of torture that the government released yesterday (here), without reminding myself that George W. Bush is a Christian. And, to be specific, a United Methodist.

As I’ve noted previously on this blog, both of my grandfathers were Methodists, so I have always had a soft spot in my heart for Methodists. I cherish the Wesleyan traditions that call social structures to conversion, to the practice of justice and peace. When I read documents from my own family’s history, I am struck by the passion with which some members of my family engaged the slave system in which they were enmeshed, as plantation owners and slaveholders who also happened to be Methodists. I am struck by their struggles, that they cared enough about their church’s teaching to struggle—and often struggle hard—with the disparity between what their church proclaimed and what they did in their personal and economic lives.

In some cases, their Methodist convictions led them to manumit their slaves. In other cases, it urged them to assist freed slaves as they migrated to Liberia. In one case, it led a Methodist minister who was also a state representative in Alabama to buy slaves that were mistreated whenever he could do so and to set them free. In another case, it led a white planter-minister to challenge the laws against miscegenation and to form a marital union with a free woman of color, acknowledging her as his wife and his children by her as his lawful family, even when laws forbade such acknowledgment.

So when I read the memos about torture under the Bush administration, I take these personally. I ask how a United Methodist, with the historic legacy of commitments I have just sketched, could possibly countenance brutal torture of other human beings. And could work to set up a system for such torture sponsored by my own government.

I’m sickened by these memos. As I read them, I wonder what being a Christian—a Christian walking in the footsteps of John Wesley—means in the world today. What difference does it make, I have to ask myself, for the United Methodist church to issue noble proclamations deploring injustice, war, mistreatment of workers, homophobia and heterosexism, if those proclamations mean nothing, nothing at all, in the real world? In the lives of Methodists. In the behavior of Methodist institutions.

As I say, I have fought with myself about saying these things on this blog. I am an outsider to the United Methodist church, after all, albeit one with deep family roots in Methodism. It is always a touchy matter to criticize other families and their behavior. One can confidently skewer the pretensions and hypocrisies of one’s own family, but doing so with other families is tacky, and courts angry responses from the family under fire.

And still. Bush was president. He was my president, though I surely did not vote for him. I have a right to wonder about the disparity between what his church claims to cherish, and what Mr. Bush did as president.

I have also worked in United Methodist institutions and have seen at close range what goes on in those institutions, vis-à-vis the Social Principles. I have seen how the Social Principles of the church can be honored by effusive lip-service, but totally ignored in the labor practices of United Methodist institutions.

I have watched the United Methodist church pass resolutions condemning homophobia and heterosexism (here), while the United Methodist institution in which I worked did absolutely nothing to combat those sins within its own structures, and when it savagely punished anyone who called for dialogue about this. I’ve worked in a United Methodist institution that, even after the last General Conference passed a resolution decrying homophobia, not only does not have any policy forbidding discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation, but actively oppresses gay employees.

I feel I have to speak out. In this nation with the soul of a church, religion is more than a private matter, after all. Religions have a public face. The United Methodist church has a significant and powerful public presence in American life. I live in a city whose culture—whose civic and not just religious culture—is imbued with a Methodist ethos.

It matters to me when my Methodist brothers and sisters do not call their own brothers and sisters to accountability for making a mockery of core Wesleyan values and principles. It matters to me when I look at who is leading the fight to re-outlaw gay marriage in Iowa, and discover that the senator spearheading that movement, Christopher Rants, is a United Methodist (here).

I have been made sensitive to United Methodist dialogues and the powerful influence of the United Methodist church in American culture by my own horrendous experience of injustice in a United Methodist institution. It appalls and will continue to appall me that, when my partner and I were treated with gross indignity by a United Methodist institution, not a single minister on that institution’s governing board raised her or his voice in protest. It appalls me that it was a United Methodist minister who advised the leader of that institution when Steve and I were assaulted as human beings by that Methodist institution, had our livelihood removed from us without cause, and were placed in a precarious economic position that still burdens our lives.

I am sensitive to United Methodist issues as I read the torture memos, too, because I have been receiving reminders recently of the upcoming annual meeting of Reconciling Ministries Network, a group of courageous United Methodists working to call their brothers and sisters to accountability for their injustice towards gay persons. In its treatment of gay and lesbian human beings, the United Methodist church displays the same shocking insensitivity to its own best teaching that the Methodist president George W. Bush displayed towards Wesleyan principles in crafting techniques of torture.

And the two issues are connected. You can't undermine the witness of a church by ignoring its call to just treatment of gay human beings, without also undermining the witness of a church when it calls for an end to war and the social injustices that lead to war. The same United Methodists who work tooth and nail to keep gay human beings out of the Methodist church combat the church's teachings about just labor practices and about issues of war and peace. Homophobia is connected to militarism and exploitation of workers.

As Mel White notes in an interview with Brent Hartinger at today’s AfterElton website (here),

You know, religion isn’t changing that much. Here’s the most liberal church of all, the Episcopal Church, being divided down the center by it. And here’s the United Methodist Church pastors holding at the national assembly this last summer to allow pastors to deny membership to lesbian and gay people. Allowing them to deny membership, not ordination or marriage – membership.

And the United Methodists have this great tradition of progressive kind of stance with John and Charles Wesley and the Native Americans and all that kind of stuff – they’ve always been liberal – now they’re being taken over by these right-wing organizations within their church. And the Catholic Church, I mean when the Pope just a few weeks ago says it’s as important to save the world from homosexuality as it is to save the rain forests, I think we haven’t gotten very far with him either.

When I read this, when I read the torture memos and remember that George W. Bush is a United Methodist, when I read the noble UMC General Conference resolution against homophobia and heterosexism but look at how some Methodist institutions actually behave, I have to speak out. I have to ask my United Methodist brothers and sisters please to address the disparity between the words and the deeds within their institutions—to call their Wesleyan brothers and sisters to accountability.

And I certainly promise that I will continue to hold my Catholic brothers and sisters accountable for actions that betray what we claim to cherish—because God knows, there’s a lot of work to do on my side of the fence, too.

Inversion of Values and Gay Employees in Churches and Church Institutions: Ongoing Injustice

I want to add a brief coda to what I posted earlier today about the case of Ruth Kolpack (here). In that posting, I noted that it is typical for those in supervisory positions in Christian institutions to claim that gay employees are victimizing the person in authority, when challenged about their homophobic treatment of gay employees. Typically, in these situations, an inversion of values takes place, in which the church authority figure seeks to represent himself (or herself) as the real victim, even when s/he has taken away the livelihood and assaulted the vocation of a gay or lesbian brother and sister.

In my analysis of Ruth Kolpack's case, I did not want to mix that observation about the particular kind of cruelty many churches and church institutions reserve for gay employees in particular, and with my observations about the violation of the rights of lay ministers like Ruth Kolpack. I did not want to overlap the two lines of analysis because I thought some readers might conclude that I was suggesting that the diocese of Madison is trying to spin the firing of Ruth Kolpack as a dismissal of a gay church employee.

I know nothing at all of the background of Ruth Kolpack's case, and certainly do not want to imply that the diocese is involved in a smear campaign based on sexual orientation (though I would not be surprised at all to see a church institution try to spin the firing of any unmarried employee as really all about sexual orientation, though the church can't talk about its reasons . . . .). The point of my previous posting is to highlight the central principle at stake in Ruth Kolpack's case: before employees of church institutions are terminated, they deserve the same due process that employees of any workplace deserve before being fired.

Catholic teaching is clear on this point: workers are human beings and not objects, and they have human rights. The right to work is itself a basic human right, and taking away one's livelihood without a serious reason and in the absence of due process is a serious moral violation. This is all the more true for churches, who undermine their claim to believe--really believe--in the Bread of Life they offer all believers, when they shove human beings away from the table of daily bread.

At the same time, and as a coda to what I wrote earlier, I do want to underscore that it is not at all unusual for churches and church institutions to fire gay employees without any due process, while refusing to disclose any reason for the termination. It is also not unusual for churches and church institutions to state, in such cases, that they are keeping silence about the reason for the termination to safeguard the reputation of the one who was fired--even as the silence itself insinuates that there is an unsavory reason for the termination. And the silence is designed to do precisely that.

Churches and church-related institutions have destroyed the livelihood and reputation--and often the lives--of gay and lesbian employees for generations, by the use of these tactics. They have counted on their ability to use portentous silence to insinuate that the person they fired without disclosure of a reason is gay or lesbian, and also promiscuous or God knows what else, at points in history when LGBT human beings had no choice except to put up with such treatment, or damage themselves more. The churches--all of them, in my view--bear a great weight of guilt for behaving this way repeatedly towards gay and lesbian persons for generations.

This is typical behavior of churches and church institutions, when the person being fired is gay or lesbian. And as I have noted repeatedly on this blog, it is not confined to the Catholic church, though it may be more common in Catholic institutions, since, even more than many churches, the Catholic church makes no bones about its right to fire employees without due process, even as it preaches that such behavior is immoral in secular institutions.

But as I have noted in previous postings, I have found that institutions owned by other churches are also capable of this ugly behavior. I am increasingly convinced that it is tactical behavior developed by entrenched male heterosexist hierarches in many churches, and that it will continue as long as members of churches and the general public keep giving the benefit of the doubt to leaders of churches and church institutions, when they trample on gay human beings.

As I have noted, I have discovered that United Methodist institutions are just as capable as Catholic institutions of firing an employee with no due process at all, in the absence of any evaluation of the employee's work, without affording the employee any right to respond to criticisms of his/her work, and with ugly insinuations (and lies) about "personal" reasons for the termination.

Why do churches and church-related institutions keep behaving this way while preaching that behavior like in non-church related workplaces is immoral ? Quite simply, because they can do so. Because they pay only a tiny price for behaving this way.

Because the public and church members give the benefit of the doubt to churches and to the leaders of churches and church-owned institutions. Because laws to protect the basic rights of workers--including the right not to be fired simply because one is gay or lesbian--just do not exist in many areas of the country, and in those areas, churches and church-owned institutions are eager to take advantage of what they can do legally, even if their behavior violates their own ethical teachings.

When this is done to gay and lesbian employees, who will protest? In my experience, not many people will do so. Who will give the benefit of the doubt to the gay or lesbian employee in a conflict situation involving a church or church institution and its leaders, backed as they are by all the institutional power of the church?

Until our laws provide minimal protection from unjust termination for all workers as well as for gay and lesbian citizens, churches and their institutions will continue to engage in exceedingly unjust and exceedingly cruel behavior towards gay and lesbian employees. And the laws will not change until more and more citizens demand such protections for workers and LGBT human beings--and until more and more people of faith take seriously the witness of LGBT human beings who have been abused by the churches and church institutions. The churches will not stop behaving this way until church members demand better of their churches and church leaders, and until they make the men on top (of both genders) pay a price for such behavior.

It should be noted that it is typical for the men who run things in the churches to make common cause regarding such issues of employee rights, even across denominational lines. They do so because leaders of many churches have a vested interest in protecting their heterosexist male power centers from challenge and critique. The kind of behavior I'm describing in these two postings about the Ruth Kolpack case is is common in many churches because it is, in the final analysis, all about the reflex reaction of entrenched heterosexist male hierarchies in many churches to those they see as the primary threats to their power and privilege--women, first and foremost, as as fellow travelers of the women's movement, gay and lesbian brothers and sisters.

It will be interesting to see what happens in this case. Wisconsin has tougher laws governing labor practices than some states do, and this is why the Madison diocese is now expending energy in defending itself against the charge that it did not afford Ruth Kolpack due process before firing her. Had this happened in one of the "right-to-work" states like Florida (or Arkansas or North Carolina), where churches and church institutions can get away with murder (metaphorically speaking) in their treatment of workers, things would be different. But perhaps (one hopes) not in Wisconsin . . . .

Reissuing the Appeal: Open Letter to Barack Obama on HBCUs and Homophobia

The following is an open letter to Mr. Obama that I published on this blog on 19 September last year. Since I published this piece prior to his election and he has now been elected, I want to reissue it, as a way of keeping my appeal to the new president open, to find ways to address the homophobia that troubles our society in so many ways. My 19 September letter follows:

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.

Economic Downturn and Job Loss: Added Burdens for LGBT Citizens

The 365 Gay news site carried an interesting article yesterday on the extra burden that the economic downturn poses for many LGBT citizens (www.365gay.com/news/mounting-job-losses-pose-additional-problems-for-gays). As this article notes, when gay workers lose jobs, they often face challenges in addition to those that many other unemployed workers face.

Like other workers given pink slips, LGBT citizens who lose jobs must deal with the search for a new position in a tight job market and declining economy. Like others who are terminated, they often cope with excruciating questions about relocating and starting over in a place new to them, without familiar support networks.

But, as the 365 Gay article also notes, gay workers who lose jobs face as well the question of discrimination. In particular, in a tight job market, gay persons seeking employment have to scrutinize job leads to see if the new employer has any policies in place to protect gay workers from discrimination, or if partner benefits are offered.

This story is a reminder to me that many LGBT citizens of this country live in places that have no state-level protection against discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation. As my recent posting about the situation in Florida notes, a majority of our states permit employers to fire an employee simply because he or she is gay; they also permit someone to be turned away from renting a place to live merely because of his or her sexual orientation (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/01/florida-continuing-struggle-for-rights.html). In a majority of our states a partner of a gay person who is hospitalized may be barred from visitation of his or her partner or from making decisions about the partner's medical treatment solely because he or she is gay.

And for some of us, there's still the added burden of overt discrimination, of black-balling. This is particularly the case for gay employees who have run afoul of those who control church-based institutions.

Those of us who have worked for Catholic institutions, for instance, and who have chosen to acknowledge our sexual orientation and relationships openly, quite commonly find ourselves black-balled by all Catholic institutions after we lose a job in a Catholic institution. We also often discover that the institution that fired us and/or key Catholic leaders do everything in their power to interfere with our ability to find employment at church-related institutions that do not even belong to the Catholic communion.

I was reminded of these ugly dynamics that I have seen close up in my years as a Catholic theologian, but which are too little known to the public at large, when I read recently what has happened to Rev. Geoff Farrow, about whom I blogged several times last October (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/10/flawed-in-pottery-god.html and
http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/10/end-of-week-reflections-christian.html). He’s the Catholic priest of the Fresno diocese who stated in a homily that his conscience forbade him to support the initiative of the California bishops to promote proposition 8 in California.

As those postings noted, Geoff Farrow lost his job, his livelihood, his health insurance, as a result of his act of conscience. Recently, several blogs have updated Geoff Farrow's story (http://progressivemamablogger.wordpress.com/2009/01/24/the-latest-on-father-geoff and www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=9225). These report that when he applied for a position with the Los Angeles branch of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE), he found himself mysteriously blocked after an initial positive interview.

To his credit, Rev. James Conn, a United Methodist minister involved in the interview process, has been willing to go public about what happened. Conn indicates that the Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles threatened to cut its funding to CLUE, if Farrow were hired. Geoff Farrow remains unemployed and without medical benefits at the age of 51, due to the intervention of church authorities who evidently want to prevent him from obtaining any employment, even in a non-Catholic institution.

I am deeply saddened but not surprised to read this story. It is a sorry series of events I have seen with my own eyes a number of times. It is one through which I have myself lived.

Despite their assurances of respect for human rights, Catholic officials will always hound anyone who threatens those who have had a place within Catholic institutions, and who then become public about being gay. There is a tremendous need to punish and destroy those of us who refuse to toe the official line about homosexuality in Catholic institutions--often because we know too much about what goes on in the seamy underbelly of the institution.

We know, for instance, that those who pursue openly gay Catholics and try to disrupt our lives and careers are themselves often closeted, self-hating gay men who occupy positions of power within the church . . . .

Church Employers and Firing of Gay Employees: It Does Continue to Happen

Sometimes real-life occurrences intersect with what people write about with uncanny synchronicity.

After posting today on workers’ rights and ethical guidelines for the workplace, I clicked on Pam Spaulding’s House Blend Blog to read a sickening story that perfectly illustrates points I made in my previous posting. And in other previous postings.

Pam’s story concerns Charles Philyaw, an openly gay organist at St. Andrew Catholic church in Verona, WI (www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=7126). That is, Philyaw was the organist at St. Andrew until this past June.

When he found himself fired. Because he’s openly gay and living in a long-term committed relationship. Which the priest who hired him in 2004 knew. Because Philyaw told him this when the priest hired him.

This is a story whose contours I know all too well. I know it both from harsh personal experience, and from having seen it play out in the lives of others.

In fact, I happen to know two church organists who are openly gay and living in a long-term committed relationship. I haven’t been in close contact with them for a few years, but during the period in which we were in touch, one worked as an organist for a Catholic church, and the other for an Episcopalian church.

Both informed their employers at the time of their hire that they were gay and living in a long-term committed relationship. The one who is an organist at a Catholic church tells me that, when he told the hiring committee this, the pastor turned to the rest of the committee and said, “You do understand what he’s telling us?” They nodded, and he was hired. To the best of my knowledge, he has not had any problems.

Unfortunately, his partner ran afoul of the Episcopal church in which he played the organ when a new pastor was appointed. Suddenly, he found that his selection of music for Sunday was always at odds with the choice of the pastor. Though he played anything he was told to play, the pastor eventually told him that the two had irreconcilable “artistic differences,” and fired him.

No evaluation. No notice. No forewarning. No provision for his future. Just fired him. As churches can do, and as they often choose to do, despite their moral teaching that workers are persons and not things, and are never to be treated as things.

It happens that Steve and I taught at a Catholic college in the same diocese in which this story took place. We did not tell the college we were gay when we were hired, though we knew that they knew this, because a cousin of Steve’s, who is a monk, told us that he had informed the monk who was administering the monastery that owns the college about our relationship when we were hired. We naively believed that, if we did our jobs well, kept our private lives private, as we had seen divorced people who were dating or unmarried straight couples living together doing while teaching at Catholic colleges, we’d survive.

We didn’t. Our being gay made a huge difference—the ultimate difference. When I suddenly got a one-year terminal contract with no explanation attached, I was informed by a colleague who had been on the committee that hired us that theologians have to be held to different moral standards than anyone else. She herself was, after all, divorced and dating a divorced Catholic man, who was also on the faculty, at the time—but that was apparently not scandalous, though (or because?) the two were staunch right-wing Catholics.

Double standards. Huge double standards. Ones that rest solely on homophobia. Ones that prove the real problem for church institutions is not violations of sexual morality in general, but gay violations of sexual morality.

And the double standards really don't go away even if, like Philyaw, you tell the church-owned workplace that you are openly gay when you are hired. In the absence of laws that protect you from termination simply because you are gay (or for any reason at all, in many states, with no explanation necessary), honesty will not protect you, we have found.

Nor will the belief that good church folks would never make promises and then retract them, or lie to you or about you, or mount smear campaigns about you. Or try to present themselves as the aggrieved party when they have cushy jobs and salaries after they have kicked you to the curb like human garbage. Or use the law—the homophobic law, the employer-weighted law—against you, violating all the ethical teachings of their churches, when it is expedient to do so.

In Charles Philyaw’s case, it appears five parishioners complained to the bishop about the church having an openly gay organist, and his termination was the outcome. In a rare show of candor, one of those parishioners, Jo Ellen Kilkenny, admits that "absolutely, Chuck lost his job because he's openly gay” (www.twincities.com/ci_10469058?IADID=Search-www.twincities.com-www.twincities.com).

Kilkenny says she is sorry about the loss to the church and the pain inflicted on Philyaw and his partner. But she maintains that he was a leader in the church and that leaders must be held to different standards.

Her involvement in the case began when she received communion from Philaw's partner James Mulder and felt “uncomfortable.” It appears that a factor in the “uncomfortableness” of Kilkenny and the four other parishioners who complained was that he and Mulder, both adult converts to the Catholic church, did not hide their identity as a couple. They attended parish events together and took a very active role in the life of the parish.

(Note: had they hidden their relationship, despite having told the pastor they were a gay couple, when the bishop turned on the heat, Philyaw might well have been fired for having been inactive in the parish. Openly gay couples working in church institutions routinely find themselves in double binds, in damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situations where their lack of presence can be held against them as disinterest in their job, but where appearing together can be called “getting in the face” of the community.)

Do Philyaw and Mulder have any recourse? Nope. As an article by Doug Erikson entitled “Wisconsin Church Music Director Fired for Openly Gay Life” (url provided above) states,

Wisconsin added sexual orientation to its anti-discrimination statutes in 1982. However, churches are allowed to hire or fire without regard to discrimination laws if an employee's main duties are ecclesiastical or ministerial, said Tamara Packard, a Madison lawyer whose primary area of practice is employment law.

Philyaw now works a part-time temp job without benefits. He and Mulder face foreclosure in two months unless he can land a full-time job soon.

And this from a church that teaches workers should be treated as persons and not things. And from a church that teaches that everyone has a right to work at a living wage. And from a church that teaches that everyone has a right to basic health coverage. From a church that teaches that we should show justice and mercy to everyone with whom we deal. And from a church that teaches that anyone who approaches the communion rail is a sinner in need of God’s mercy, who is being invited there by a Christ who invites all sinners to the table.

Philyaw and Mulder say that their faith is now shaken, but they have not given up. They have found a welcoming community in a nearby United Church of Christ.

An old story. A tragically sad old story—sad most of all because two human lives are being so disrupted, and their relationship put through fire simply because of who they were made by God.

But sad, too, because so common that people are tempted to shake their heads at this behavior on the part of churches and church institutions, and do nothing to challenge it. When Steve and I first encountered such treatment and I naively believed that the media would take an interest in the story and colleagues would be up in arms at the injustice, I met a stone wall. A national Catholic newspaper told me that such stories of injustice to gay employees are so common in church institutions that they are not newsworthy.

Which is one reason I keep telling them. If I don’t, if citizen bloggers like Pam Spaulding don’t, who will? Those of us in the gay community who continue trying to interact with the churches often meet scorn from other gay people who think we are foolish or masochistic to keep trying.

But if we who are gay and encounter injustice first-hand from churches and the institutions they sponsor don’t try to hold the churches accountable, who will? And in a nation with the soul of a church, where what the churches do and think affects our entire political process, shouldn’t the churches be called on to walk the walk that they talk?

Moreover, if injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, those who see an injustice done in their midst and walk by without raising their voice court the possibility of being the next victim of the bullies. If the bullies start with the gays, where will they turn next?

Those who stand by in silence have a way of finding themselves on the bullies’ hit list eventually.

Economic Crisis and Workers' Rights: Ethical Reflections

*The current economic crisis positively begs for ethical analysis. And yet, if that analysis had been part and parcel of our approach to economic life all along, we wouldn’t be finding ourselves in the mess we’re in now.

To note this is to point to one of the glaring shortcomings of American religious and cultural life: we tend to regard economic life as somehow outside the purview of moral analysis. When people talk about morality—when churches and politicians lament moral decline—they frequently focus mono-maniacally on personal morality, above all on pelvic morality.

It’s as if one of the most significant areas of all of our lives—the workplace, the work world, the economic sector—is value-free.

Much ink has been spilt in analyzing why this is so, why we make such a bizarre assumption about economic life. At heart, much has to do, I suspect, with Adam Smith’s hidden hand: with the belief (and that’s what it is, every bit as mystical and counterintuitive as any religious belief) that, left to itself, the market sorts things out.

Those who deserve to prosper will prosper. Those who deserve to fall by the wayside will fall. The go-getter will prevail. The slacker will fail.

These are not faith-based assumptions. They are assumptions that fall short of even the threshold of morality as articulated by all the world’s religions. And yet they are deeply woven into our cultural perspectives on economic life. When it comes to economics, we—this nation with the soul of a church—are radical individualists who not only gleefully watch many of our brothers and sisters fall to the bottom of our society, but who actively justify their demise by attributing to them moral shortcomings, lack of a sound work ethic, dissolute habits, extravagant tastes, lack of intellect and will to defer pleasure in the present in order to reap future rewards.

In the workplace, the assumption that the hidden hand somehow magically works things out so that greed becomes righteousness and callousness to our fellow human beings becomes virtue translates into the lordship of the employer and the servitude of the employee. In our attitudes towards workers’ rights, we are positively feudal, and have been moving even more in that direction in the past several decades of neoconservative political domination.

As someone who spent his academic career in what might be called the middle-management sector of academic life—as a department chair and academic dean/v-p in a number of different institutions—I have been able to see both sides of this lord-servant dynamic. The person in the middle has to interact with those at the top, in whose hands make-or-break power ultimately resides: the president and trustees of universities. She also is a faculty member, an employee, who mediates between the lords at the top and those who do the actual work of teaching, and who are seldom rewarded as they deserve for their hard work. Deans are doubly servants: the English word derives from the Greek word diakonos, which means “servant.”

This is an unenviable position to be in—a middle-management servant—a crucifying one, frankly. If you try to do your job right, you will always be damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Defend faculty members’ rights, and you may well find yourself slapped hard by the lords in whose hands make-or-break power ultimately resides. And yet, merely because you work with those lords, you are often accused by faculty members of being anti-faculty, a traitor to the workers’ cause.

(An illustration of the crucifying reality of being put in the middle: at one school at which I was academic dean, I fought for a raise for a faculty member who alleged that he was discriminated against, and denied a raise, because of his race-ethnicity. I could not find sound evidence of the discrimination. On the other hand, I did find that he had not received a raise for many years when other members of his department got one. I made a value judgment based on the principle of doing no harm, and against the will of his department and division chairs, I put through a raise for him, which the president approved.

After I left this school, I happened to see this faculty member on the street. This was in a period in which Steve was suffering severe deterioration of his hip, such that he could hardly walk. With the kind assistance of a friend who owned a car dealership, and with a bit of money my aunt had just left us in her will, we bought a used car that was nicer than any we had ever owned—one whose carriage was high enough for Steve to sit in it with relative comfort, and one that did not bump around as we drove.

The faculty member saw the car when I encountered him on the street. Now that I was gone from the college and its dean’s office, he could slap at me with impunity. And slap he did. He said with a sneer, “Deans must make good money for you to buy a car like that.” I told him I was no longer a dean. I felt I had no obligation to tell him how we had acquired the car. He repeated the slur, to make sure I knew that he had no respect for me. Whether he knew how hard I had fought for his raise, and what slaps I endured from others to obtain it for him, I did not know and probably will not ever know.)

Though being in this uncomfortable middle place is sometimes crucifying, it’s a place that yields valuable insights into the dynamics and moral implications of how workers are treated. In what follows, I want to take some of my experiences trying to work as a middle-manager in one kind of workplace—an academic one—and make some ethical observations about workplaces in general. Because my experiences have been generally within academic life, I will make some observations that specifically refer to the unique needs of the academy. Nonetheless, I believe that, as ethical principles, the following principles apply to workplaces in general.

And I’d go further: I’d say that if we are ever to find our way out of the economic mess we are now in, we have to engage in ethical analysis akin to this, re: our economic life in general. We have to find ways to implement ethical principles in economic life—that is, if we want out of the mess and don’t want simply to accept that we now have a quasi-feudal economic system in which lords have make-or-break power over those of us who have been reduced to economic servitude.

And so two fundamental principles for ethical analysis of economic life, drawn from my own work experience:

1. Workers are human beings and not things.

This is an absolutely fundamental principle. And yet, it’s one almost totally overlooked in how we actually do economic life in this country. Almost everywhere, our laws are radically loaded on the side of the employer/lords, allowing them to do whatever they want to and with workers: allowing them precisely to treat workers as things and not as persons.

No major religion of the world is comfortable with the assumption that people should ever be treated as things and not as persons. Most world religions, and many churches in the U.S., have made glowing statements about the rights of workers to be treated with personal dignity. Few of these statements ever translate into practice in workplaces, including (and perhaps especially) workplaces owned by churches—e.g., colleges or universities sponsored by churches.

2. Because workers are human beings and not things, their personal dignity and human rights must always be safeguarded in hiring and firing decisions, and in evaluation procedures.

In any workplace that wants to reach even the threshold of ethical behavior, workers can never be dismissed at the will of the employer, even when local laws permit at-will termination. The most rudimentary moral principles of all faith communities require the following:

▪ Ongoing evaluation in which the supervisor apprises the worker, preferably in writing, of her or his strengths and weaknesses, giving the worker the right to respond (preferably in writing);

▪ In cases in which a worker is failing to meet the mark, a set of remedial guidelines (preferably in writing), with clear goals and a timeline for the guidelines to be accomplished;

▪ Feedback (preferably written) by the supervisor as the employee seeks to meet the goals and timeline provided for remediation, with the right of the employee to respond to the feedback (preferably in writing);

▪ In cases in which a worker fails, after the remedial period, to meet the mark, a final written evaluation noting the worker’s failure as measured by the remedial plan, with the worker’s right to respond in writing;

▪ In cases in which the worker contests the final written evaluation, the right of the worker to appeal to a grievance committee that is not dominated by or answerable to the same supervisor who issued the final evaluation pointing to termination;

▪ Termination only when the above conditions have been met.

Interestingly enough, faith-based workplaces lack the preceding guidelines far more frequently than do secular ones. There are a number of reasons for the absence of such basic moral procedures in church-related institutions.

Among these are an unexamined assumption on the part of many leaders in church-related institutions (and this is often shared by society at large) that anything a church-affiliated leader does is automatically ethical. This assumption persists in the face of massive amounts of evidence that church affiliation does not necessarily or automatically translate into ethical behavior.

In some cultural settings, leaders of faith-based institutions even enjoy quasi-theocratic status. I have worked in faith-based institutions in which the leader of the institution routinely uses religious language to bolster his/her claim that he/she is divinely appointed to lead the institution, and in which the community colludes in this theological interpretation of the leader's role (at least on the surface, since who can resist a divinely appointed tyrant with impunity?).

Faith-based communities also often actively resist any curbs on the right of the employer to fire at will when prejudicial beliefs of the churches are at stake—and the right of churches to act on these beliefs has often been upheld by courts, so that faith-based institutions are emboldened to use the court system to reinforce their right to discriminate. For instance, many religious institutions that condemn homosexuality fight for the right to refuse to hire openly gay employees, and/or to fire gay employees at will, either simply because they are gay, or while offering specious reasons that disguise the fact that the real reason for the termination is sexual orientation.

Alternatively, church-based institutions may choose to fire openly gay employees because they have decided that these employees are undesirable for some other reason, but easy targets for at-will termination in areas where their rights are not guaranteed, precisely because they are gay.

The official policies of many faith-based institutions resist even the most basic description of the human rights of workers (unless these descriptions are imposed by federal or local law), because they want to reserve the right to fight court battles to permit the faith-based institution to continue discriminating in cases in which its religious beliefs permit or encourage such discrimination. In cases in which churches’ professions of ethical principles for the workplace conflict with the churches’ wish to control workers—in cases in which money and/or the image of the institution are at stake—ethical principles often take a back seat to the legally defended right to discriminate and to fire at will.

In academic life, of course, there is an added layer of reasoning to support the evaluation procedures I have outlined above, as a prerequisite to any termination of those who hold faculty status. This is to safeguard academic freedom.

In the U.S., all accrediting bodies for institutions of higher learning require that colleges/universities safeguard the academic freedom of faculty. Accrediting bodies also require, as a fundamental safeguard for academic freedom, clear guidelines for evaluation of faculty, use of those guidelines in ongoing evaluation of faculty, and demonstration that those guidelines have been followed when anyone with faculty status is terminated.

Failure to follow such guidelines in terminating anyone with faculty status is regarded by accrediting bodies as serious business, because at-will termination of faculty places in the hands of those with make-or-break-power the power to terminate those who have stated or published opinions or research that the make-or-break-power may wish to suppress.

For those outside academic life today, it is difficult to appreciate the extent to which governing boards of colleges and universities often fail to understand this basic principle of academic freedom, which is the lifeblood of academic life. Without it, scholars are intimidated into hiding research that is not flattering to received opinion, or that exposes powerful people to critical analysis. Without it, there is no way to teach critical thinking to students. Critical thinking can develop only in a context of free inquiry in which no question is off limits, no authority figure beyond criticism, no idea beyond careful analysis and discussion.

Because the governing boards of many institutions of higher learning are increasingly from the business sector, and because they often choose presidents for whom the bottom line is money (and image management), many governing boards are weak in defending academic freedom, if not downright antithetical to academic freedom. If they had their way, many governing boards would abolish all safeguards to academic freedom and would permit at-will termination by the president, with no evaluation process at all prior to termination.

I know this, because I have sat with governing boards to defend academic freedom for faculty. I know it, because I have fought to develop clear faculty-generated guidelines for faculty evaluation that permit faculty to respond to supervisors’ evaluations of them. I know it because I have been punished for fighting for such evaluation procedures, and for involving faculty in the development of the guidelines by which they are evaluated.

I have fought for such guidelines because my conscience tells me I must. I have fought for these guidelines because I believe in academic freedom and in the fragile possibility that the academy can keep thought and critical discourse alive in our culture.

Why should those who are not in academic life care about these issues? Because we live in a society in which it is all too easy to suppress free discourse. Because we live in a society in which there are powerful forces at work to make us all think and act one and only one way. Because we live in a society in which there are powerful forces at work to make us stop thinking and stop acting, to turn us into passive drones.

The academy is one among several imperfect institutions in our culture that hold out against increasingly powerful forces to protect open discourse and respectful analysis of differing ideas and opinions. Certainly the academy often sells out. It often fails to hold up its end of the civil contract universities have made with the culture at large.

But when it works, it performs an invaluable service to society at large, in keeping thought and critical thinking alive. We all have a vested interest in seeing that the academy does what it claims it wants to do. Now, above all, when our social problems are so complex, and we’re being offered buffoons and knaves as the “solution” to those problems, what else can we do?

*A note about the narrative I had begun on this blog last Thursday: in my open letter to Mr. Obama on Friday, I said pretty much what I had intended to say in the last part of that narrative. The proviso with which I opened the posting on Thursday, re: strong or offensive language, had to do with the fact that I was going to discuss m-o-n-e-y in explicit terms, something I was brought up never to do. As I did in my open letter to Mr. Obama . . . . Re: that letter, profound thanks to all those who contacted me to offer suggestions about how to disseminate it, and/or who helped me see that it got circulated. I made some very valuable contacts through networking with the assistance of blog readers, and am deeply grateful for the assistance.

An Open Letter to Barack Obama: HBCUs and Homophobia

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.



Note to readers: once again, I would like to call on readers of this blog for any assistance you may be able to offer. I intend in every way possible to circulate this letter and to see that it reaches the attention of Mr. Obama. If blog readers can assist in this task, I will be deeply grateful. My counter shows that 546 people from around the world read this blog the second day after Andrew Sullivan kindly mentioned it on his Daily Dish blog. My hope is that among those readers, someone will have the ability to see that this letter reaches Mr. Obama. Thanks!

The Economic Crisis: Hard Come, Easy Go (2)

And as I prepare to stitch the next piece into this narrative, I realize that something that happened over the lunch hour today offers a diversionary piece that absolutely must be sewn in here, because it’s not really a diversion at all. It’s more of a narrative frame (to shift metaphors wildly) within which I need to set everything that follows.

Steve picked me up for lunch after I had posted my initial blog statement earlier today. He wanted to go to a Mexican restaurant he likes, and where he’s liked in return.

And what’s not to like? He speaks Spanish with the staff, smiles, tips generously. He knows how to joke, while I sit in stifled self-conscious silence, though I can speak passable restaurant Spanish. He has a heart for working people, and his heart shows. He’s from Minnesota, for goodness’ sake. And as everyone knows, it’s impossible to dislike anyone from Minnesota.

We were escorted today into a kind of backroom where, I felt, we were being given a seat of honor. Alongside us was a table of about twenty Hispanic working men, a cena-style arrangement in which ten or so men sat across from ten others, at a long, narrow, rectangular table.

For the purposes of this narrative about our current national economy—and Steve’s and my place in it—it was important that I see this group of working men today. It was crucial.

Here I am, preparing to go on at length about how being openly gay can affect one’s economic status in professional life, particularly when that professional life unfolds in a church context. And yet, my economic circumstances are in no way comparable to those of the men beside whom I ate lunch today.

I know it. I have eyes to see. These men work harder than I have ever worked a day in my entire life. And they have less to show for their work than I do. I can see the frayed clothes, the sun-darkened skin, even, in some cases, the fatigue of a morning’s labor.

In saying this, I don’t mean to demean or to caricature a group of people I don’t know personally. What I do want to do, however, is to insert into my narrative an important recognition—one that’s important for me to remember, first and foremost—and one that frames everything I am going to say in my subsequent autobiographical statements.

This recognition is that, despite my insistence that my perspective on the national economy is unique in some respects, due to my experiences as an openly gay theologian, the outcome of what I have experienced in my professional life links me to millions of other Americans. Who struggle to make ends meet. Who are, like me, without health coverage, and who worry about not having easy access to adequate healthcare. Who worry about dwindling savings.

Or who, as I suspect is the case with the men beside whom I ate lunch, can only dream of having savings about which to worry. Almost all the Mexicans and Central Americans whom I know in this area, or about whose lives I have more than passing knowledge, send as much as possible of their weekly paycheck home, to help their families get by. To help them prepare to come here eventually.

The troubled circumstances of our current economy affect millions of people who have no choice except to live at the margins, eking out a living on a paycheck that barely covers the week’s or month’s expenses, unable to put savings aside. And the downturn in the economy affects those millions of Americans disproportionately. It is on their backs that the wealth raked in by a minority at the top rests: that wealth is due to their labor.

And, in the case of workers coming to this country from south of the border, largely unacknowledged labor. This is labor we need, all of us. It oils the machinery of big cities and small towns across the nation. This is labor we cannot do without, even as we decry “immigrants” and “illegal aliens” who are taking away “our” jobs (jobs we do not want and would not have if they were offered to us).

I’m doubly sensitive to these recognitions this week because I have spent the last two days working (or "working" might be more accurate) in a home office that looks out on the back yard of our neighbor to the north. When Ike passed through last weekend, a huge oak tree fell in her yard, crushing her back porch and the truck of a friend, and taking out the power lines running to her house.

The local energy company could not restore the power until the tree had been removed. Two days ago, a crew of some eight or ten Latinos arrived early in the day to begin the removal process. I spent two days listening to them work—non-stop. They sawed up the tree, cut it into manageable hunks, loaded the hunks into a truck bed, and hauled them off, a long day’s work in which the same process had to be repeated the next day.

The work went on from daylight to dark. I never saw these working men take a break either day except at lunch. They sometimes sang as they worked, at other times shouted and joked, warning each other of possible danger as they handled the huge chunks of wood.

And now the yard is quiet. The tree’s gone, neatly divided and hauled away. I have no doubt the men who did the work have moved on to a similar project somewhere else in the city. I also have no doubt that they are not paid nearly what they are worth for the work they do skillfully and quickly.

For me. For all of us.

I want to remember that work as I continue with my narrative about Steve’s and my experiences as gay theologians. Our experience surely does have elements of uniqueness, and to the extent that many people do not know or think about such stories, it constitutes a story that needs to be heard.

But the result of the experience—the constant dispossession, the labor taken for granted and unrewarded, the inability to achieve economic security: nothing about this experience is unique. It is the lot of millions of Americans, perhaps of the majority of working people in this nation. I want to bind these words upon my heart as I resume the interrupted narrative of our interrupted vocational lives.

With a final note that—at least to my convoluted narrative sense—binds this “diversionary” piece back to the main narrative line. I want to point out that it’s Steve who has heightened my awareness of the price working people pay in our country.

Steve grew up doing hard work on a farm. Between college and high school, he earned money for college by working on a crew that built silos across Minnesota, the Dakotas, into Montana. At St. John’s in Collegeville, where he began college, he paid his tuition and room and board by digging graves in the monastic cemetery, lighting fires on the ground to be dug when it had become so deeply frozen that digging was otherwise impossible.

Steve spent the winter break of his first year at school working with a company running power lines to reservations of native people in northern Minnesota. When I first met him in New Orleans, he was working—again, to try to make his way through college, now Loyola—to weld and install wrought-iron balconies on apartment buildings being put up along Lake Pontchartrain. He has worked hard all of his life, and understands something of what those who work with their hands feel.

Long-term relationships, when they work (and God knows they don't always work), involve give and take in which the better angels of our partners’ nature sometimes overshadow our own souls. And that’s as true for gay marriages as for straight ones. It’s something I need to say, as I resume my story of how it happens that we approach retirement wondering what the future holds for us economically, even apart from the impending depression—though we have, to our way of seeing things, worked as hard as we can at the jobs we've been given to do.