Manly Men, Homophobic Churches, and the Washing of Feet

Christians of late have invested a great deal of time and energy in making sure that men be men and women be women. The largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., the Southern Baptists, have considered the issue central enough to the core of Christian belief to create a confessional statement (a highly unusual step for Baptists, who believe in the independence of each church) requiring good Baptists to profess the subordination of women.

Catholics influenced by neo-conservative political ideas are also making much these days of the “complementarity” of men and women—which is to say, the “natural” subordination of women to men. For many such Catholics, the “theology of the body” of the late John Paul II, which elevates this purported natural complementarity to a quasi-mystical level, has become a rallying cry for men to be men and women to be women.

Theology-of-the-body Catholics see in the Holy Family a perennial example of right and proper male-female relationships. Joseph guards and defends, goes out to labor and bring home resources for the family. Mary stays home and nurtures their child, keeps the home fires burning. Joseph is all man—outwardly turned, scanning the horizon for threats to his woman and his son, standing in the breach between the cozy household and the external world of competition and conflict.

Mary is woman par excellence—inwardly turned, forever tidying the household, making it cheerful for her man and her child, finding utter significance in cooking, cleaning, and nurturing. And so should every Christian household be, theology-of-the-body Catholics maintain. And so should every man and every woman be.

Obviously, these politically driven theological interpretations of the roles of men and women have much to do with resistance to the rise of women’s rights, one of the most significant global political developments of the twentieth century. Many men have chosen to regard this development as so threatening, so portentous with maleficent possibility for their lives and roles, that, as they seek to stand athwart history and shout “stop!”, they simultaneously attempt to freeze male-female roles for all time.

For such men, many of whom have not previously had much invested in church-going or in churchy matters, the churches and what they preach have suddenly become all-important. It has become imperative that the churches be made to teach the subordination of women to men, the need for men to be real men and women to be real women. Neo-conservative reasoning sees tremendous significance in the churches' role here, the role of holding the gender line. For neo-conservative thinkers, allow the churches to transgress that line, and all hell will ensue. The future of civilization hinges on keeping men and women in their proper places, in using scripture and tradition to assure that men remain men and women remain women.

Unfortunately, the scriptures are forever subversive, when we try to use them to freeze history. The Jewish and Christian scriptures are far slyer than we like to imagine in very many respects. This is proven true when we try to force them to support our preconceived notions of what it means to be male and female. When we try to mine scripture for perpetual law about how proper men should behave and how proper women should comport themselves, the scriptures prove refractory indeed.

The scriptures begin, after all, with that breathtaking image of the Creator as a mother bird spreading her wings over the vast untamed cosmic nothingness, to brood it into being. The divine Mother, the Mater, brings matter into existence, in the first creation account of Genesis. All has its beginning in the womb of the divine.

This image is echoed by the prophets, who speak of God as a mother hen grieving for her flock to be gathered beneath her wings. Jesus himself uses the image in speaking of Jerusalem, identifying himself as one who would gather the city beneath his wings as a biddy her chicks, though the inhabitants of the city refuse to respond to his invitation.

For Christians today who wish to hinge all revelation on the need for men to be real men and women to be real women, the scriptures and the tradition of the churches will always disappoint, since they refuse to be beaten into submission. Scripture and tradition slip and slide from our grasp, when we try to shape them to fit our pet theories about social arrangements, and subordinate them to our need to stand astride history and shout stop.

A case in point: last night, churches around the world staged a liturgical celebration that commemorates the last supper. The gospel stories of this event begin with a striking symbol of Jesus’s choice to be a servant of all. Throughout the gospels, Jesus teaches and preaches in a kind of point-counterpoint style, alternately speaking the lesson he wishes to impart, and acting it out in symbolic deeds.

To illustrate to his followers what he means when he calls on them to become servants, at the final supper prefiguring his death, he takes water and kneels before each disciple, washing the disciple’s feet. This symbolic act had rich resonance in the culture of the ancient Near East.

It was an act normally relegated to slaves, to the lowest of the low. It was an act preferably undertaken by a female slave or female family member in households of substance. In bending to the floor to wash and dry the feet of the apostles, Jesus takes on “the” female posture, the posture of submission, of obedience, of humility, of self-abasement.

His doing so shocks the disciples. John’s gospel—which prefigures the footwashing of the last supper with the story of Lazarus’s sister Mary washing Jesus’s feet with her hair—has Peter blustering in protest at Jesus’s choice so to abase himself, to take on the role of a slave, of a woman, in order to illustrate what it means to be his follower. In John’s gospel, one cannot read the story of Jesus’s washing his disciples’ feet at the last supper without linking that story to the story of Mary washing the feet of Jesus: in kneeling before his followers at the last supper, Jesus adopts the posture of Mary, sister of Lazarus, kneeling before him in the house of Lazarus, to wash his feet.

Why do these stories, which are so central to the remembrance of the ritual that is at the very heart of Christian worship—the Eucharist or Lord’s Supper—appear to have so little import for Christians who are intent to freeze for all times the roles of men and women, of men as dominator and women as the dominated, in Christian thought and practice? They do so, I would propose, because we have chosen to forget the anthropological, sociological significance of the act of footwashing in the culture in which Jesus lived.

Though Christian iconography is replete with symbols that, if looked at dispassionately, would make it abundantly clear to us that Jesus’s washing of his followers’ feet is a gender-bending, gender-subverting symbol, we choose not to look, not to see.

It is easier for us to take our cultural presuppositions, our cultural givens, about what it means to be a real man and a real woman, and impose these on scripture and tradition, than vice versa.

In doing so, however, we lose the right to claim that we are defending tradition or the pure interpretation of scripture. And, unfortunately, that is a claim that is dear to the heart of Christians who live under the influence of neo-conservative political ideologies today. These Christians have practically developed a cottage industry around the claim that they are the unique defenders of an embattled orthodoxy that is being whittled away by modernity and secularity.

If their most central tenets do not hold water when examined in light of scripture and tradition, what will these neo-conservative defenders of orthodoxy do? When their political penchants have allied them with leaders whose social and economic platforms can hardly be justified in light of scripture and tradition, where will they turn for political heroes, as critical examination of the disconnects continues to show a large gap between neo-conservative politics and traditional Christian belief?

It seems to be back to the drawing board today for the religious right, if it really does want to take scripture and tradition seriously . . . .

History, Hope, Gospel: Politics in America Today

What’s that you say? Silence?

Well, yes, it does sometimes seem preferable—to talking that is just clamor, ships hooting at each other as they pass in the fog. Yes, that’s how I’ve been feeling lately, as Holy Week gets underway and what passes for discussion and debate in my nation’s political process becomes ever more clamorous hooting.

“And I say, ‘Oh for the wings of a dove to fly away and find rest.’ ” That line from psalm 55 has been constantly in my mind this week, as Good Friday and Easter approach.

And then there were the stuffed peppers. No, not at all—not any kind of Easter tradition I know about. But there they were, in the Kroger bins last Saturday, bags and bags of wizened smallish bell peppers, culled out from amidst the large, heavy, unwrinkled ones, marked down to a very modest price.

Given the cost of peppers these days, how could I pass them up? What’s a kitchen without a ready supply of bell peppers—for spaghetti sauces and chilis, Spanish omelets and creole dishes, lentil soups and baked beans, pepper slaw and stuffed squash, salade Niçoise and ratatouille . . . .

Naturally, then, when Penny and Philip invited us for Easter dinner, I proposed stuffed peppers. I had the peppers, and something about stuffed peppers as a counterpoint to ham, potato salad, deviled eggs, and ambrosia seems meet and right—piquant green tang to enliven traditional pastel Easter food.

Then there were those dratted pecans, local, organic ones, no less, that have been eyeing me reproachfully from the sideboard in the dining room ever since Christmas. Anything not eaten from the Christmas dessert table inevitably stays there, from Christmas day forward. On St. Pat’s day, as I rummaged in the sideboard for a bottle of Irish whiskey to make Irish coffee, I was surprised to find two tins of those stodgy molasses cookies I made this Christmas, which no one much liked unless they were dunked in coffee.

No, no better with age. In fact, the opposite. Even drier and mustier tasting. From Christmas to Easter, I haven’t wanted to look at a nut, a spice, a bar of baking chocolate, a dried fruit. My fast—at least from certain foods—begins far earlier than Lent (and in Lent, I never fast, anyway, or at least, not from food).

So. It was time to crack those pecans or discard them, and who can throw food away with a good conscience? Hence the vegetarian stuffed peppers that will now be my contribution to Easter dinner: basmati rice mixed with grated parmesan, coarsely chopped pecans, eggs to bind the forcemeat, a few spoons of tomato paste, and a mix of finely chopped celery, onion, parsley, and garlic sautéed in olive oil with touches of cinnamon and marjoram for seasoning. All done, mixed, stuffed into the peppers, baked and stored for re-heating on Sunday morning.

And I just haven’t felt like blogging. What’s there to say that hasn’t been said to death? And more to the point: what’s there to say that will really change anything? In a political process dominated by the gotcha politics of the religious right, what really can be said? When the parameters of conversation are so constructed that one must always be answering an accusation either overt or implied, never moving towards a hope-engendered vision of social life that comprises many more options than those permitted by the status quo, words become swords. Nothing more, nothing less.

Not instruments to forge new, more humane visions of how we might live together, but swords to lop off each other’s limbs, heads, hopes.

I grow weary of such political “discourse.” I sometimes wonder if the readers of this blog from places outside the U.S.—my statistics counter tells me there are such readers—can even begin to appreciate how narrow, claustrophobic, and ultimately devoid of hope our political conversations in the U.S. have become in the past few decades, under the controlling impulse of the right, and, in particular, of the religious right.

One doesn’t have to be a majority to control a conversation, and thus the future of a relationship or of a social contract. All one has to be able to do is shout no loudly enough to keep the conversation forever stalemated—to keep hope at bay. He who says no ultimately controls any relationship.

And saying no—stopping the conversation, keeping hope at bay—has been the raison d’etre of American conservatism for a number of decades now. As one of the chief spokespersons and ideological founders of neo-conservatism, William F. Buckley, once said, the quintessential neo-conservative impulse is “standing astride history, yelling ‘stop!’ ”

Neo-conservatism is not about building. It’s not about moving forward. It’s not about enlivening imagination. It’s not about spinning new ideas for better, more humane arrangements for communitarian life. It’s not about hope. It’s not even about respect for tradition and the past, since any such respect inevitably spots in previous human social arrangements ample reason for new social experiments that will carry forward the suppressed hopes of the past.

Neo-conservatism is about saying no. As Buckely himself said in response to Pope John XXIII’s brilliant encyclical of hope, Mater et magistra: Mater si, magistra no!

No, no, and no again: to change, to hope, to any social arrangement in which I and my tribe will not prevail. No to any vision of the future that will include others in a way that challenges my own dominance—as a white male, as a straight white man from the upper echelons of American society.

Neo-conservatism is about trying to stop history, because history inevitably means Something Else, and I do not want to imagine anything else, not in a world in which I am the primal link in the socio-economic chain, the pinnacle of social evolution. History is over and done with, as far as I am concerned. The most I will permit in the political and economic sphere is the kind of tinkering that keeps drastic change at bay, by balancing competing interest groups. As a neo-conservative, I am perfectly willing to work with liberals (since neo-conservatism is itself a variant of classic liberal ideology) to keep the status quo in place. If that means handing a crumb to this group here while denying the claims of that group there—all in the name of balancing interest groups and claims to justice—I’m happy to cooperate.

Just don’t expect me to entertain any nonsense about imagining other social arrangements in which conflict would be less omnipresent because more folks had access to the basic stuff of human existence. Don’t clatter on about human rights and justice. I’m not listening, not even if Jesus himself should walk through the door and announce the reign of God, or if the church claims that this was Jesus’s mission: mater si, magistra no!

A political landscape dominated by those whose only and ultimate word to history is no quickly becomes scorched earth. We in the U.S. occupy such a political landscape today. This landscape is the deliberate construction of the naysayers of the right—and the religious right—for several decades now. It is a landscape deliberately constructed to make hope (and history) impossible.

Declining empires always end up occupying such landscapes before their final demise, with court theologians to advise the emperor about how to negotiate the process of decline, so that he remains, as long as possible, at the top of the heap. The leaders of the religious right, churches that have not decisively distanced themselves from the religious right in this period (and few have): these are all part of the process of decay, of decline, of last-gasp imperialism, of the glozening lies of court theologians.

Insofar as our churches have implicated themselves in the social arrangements of declining imperialism—arrangements in which spying on citizens becomes routine, in which growing inequities between rich and poor become not shocking but taken for granted, in which the practice of torture of innocent people meets with shrugs, in which police and civil authorities are permitted to taser even school children, in which unjust war and carnage of despised Others is not merely justified but celebrated in our media—insofar as our churches accept these social arrangements, and never raise their voice against them, they lose the right to proclaim the gospel.

They have stopped doing so. The gospel is good news. The very center of the gospel is hope. Hope for history: the gospel is about a vision of human existence in which history is always possible, always mandated, because hope has not yet had its day. Hope has not yet been fulfilled. There is more to be done. History cannot be stopped, from a gospel-oriented standpoint, because there is more to hope for.

I have been heartsick this week as I have watched the mainstream media and many liberal Democrats participate in the pillorying of Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama. I am heartsick for a quite specific reason: there is a shocking, clear, undeniable double standard in how we have chosen to treat this African-American preacher of the gospel, and how we choose to treat the court theologians.

Who are everywhere, but whose influence is never acknowledged or discussed by the mainstream media. The Alternet blog today carries a posting from Cenk Uygur at Huffington Post on the double standard the media applies to Rev. Wright and to the white preachers who are the court theologians of our declining empire—see www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/80253.

As Uygur notes, Rudy Giuliani’s priest has been accused in grand jury proceedings of having abused children and covered over the abuse of other children, but no one has ever asked Mr. Giuliani to denounce his pastor or disavow any relationship to him. Mitch Romney belongs to a church that, into Romney’s thirties, actively discriminated against people of color. Romney never disavowed his church then or now. The media have not hounded him to make statements about the racism of his church.

John McCain has accepted the endorsement of Jerry Falwell, who blamed the 9/11 attacks on America’s purported acceptance of gays, feminists, and liberals. Is Mr. McCain being savaged by the media for accepting this endorsement, or asked to address the warped theological views of Rev. Falwell?

Brent Childers of Faith in America released an open letter this week about Mr. Obama’s speech re: his relationship to Rev. Wright. The letter is at http://faithinamerica.info/blog/religious-wright-a-stomach-virus-for-the-religious-right.

As it notes,

How many talking heads are made sick when the Religious Right, day after day, condemns America for its anti-discrimination laws for gay and lesbian Americans or its policy on abortion?

Week after week, right-wing religious organizations work to shore up the Republican Party base and use America’s pulpits to condemn not only America but good, decent patriotic Americans. It’s not just religious leaders spreading a message of religion-based bigotry. Many elected officials and candidates are doing the same.

No one sought to give any context that Wright’s words were spoken from an interpretation of Holy Scripture. Poor presentation of the story, indeed. Even less context.

A nation where corporate greed holds sway over hard-working Americans? A nation that goes to war under false pretense? A nation in which political forces cater to prejudice and racial division? A nation in which gay and lesbian teenagers are being sacrificed on the alter of religion-based bigotry.

Would Wright’s God frown on such practices?

What hope is there for a nation in which hope itself is held at bay by the court theologians, by the preachers that advise (and support and excuse) the powerful of the land? What hope is there for a nation in which hope itself has become a dirty word, a taunt in the mouths of those left and right who want to stop history?

Not much, I think, until someone, somewhere, begins to expose the treachery and lies of the court theologians. Not much, until churches that really want to proclaim the good news openly, decisively repudiate the treachery and lies of the religious right.

We will, in coming weeks, see more and more treachery and lying. The ultimate intent of those engaging in these underhanded political games is to stand astride history and shout, “stop!”

The only hope to stop the games is for those with connections to faith communities to call for an end to the political games, to the treachery and lying, to the attempt to stop history by saying no rather than yes (which is God’s word to the created world). For the faith communities that claim to speak in the name of Jesus, hope lies in remembering that the crucified one was not the success all court theologians claim to be.

He was, instead, a dismal failure, hung to die upon an instrument of torture reserved for the lowest, most powerless of criminals in his society.

His resurrection is premised on his death, on his failure, on his humiliating death. The failure and death are, in fact, the precondition for the resurrection. Anyone who preaches otherwise—who preaches the bizarre "gospel of success" of which the court theologians are so enamored, who allies the Christian church with wealth and power—departs from the very warp and woof of the gospel, the good news that it is in dying that we rise.

What’s that you say? Well, you did ask. And I did tell.

Evangelical Catholicism: Who's at the Table?

Today’s my nephew Patrick’s name day, so a celebration is in order. Steve and I cooked an enormous pot of stew yesterday—enough to feed armies. I would have written "Irish stew," but it’s not precisely that. Though it does contain lamb, onion, and potatoes (as well as carrots and celery, a bit of thyme and parsley), I’ve added whispers that would be out of place on a traditional Irish table: tomatoes and paprika, for instance, to enrich the sauce and give it deeper color.

We’ll enjoy the stew with my Southern-American Irish (and English, Scottish, Welsh) family’s version of soda bread, aka cornbread, along with cole slaw and a cake and pie my aunt Billie has baked for the occasion. My brother Philip, his wife Penny, and sons Luke, Colin, and Pat will be with us. Beautiful, brilliant Kate is, alas, pursuing her fortune in the big cities in which she’s interviewing for jobs—and may she be offered all of them!

The Internet brought me an unexpected St. Patrick’s gift early today: a clip on the Towleroad blog of Rosie O’Donnell talking to young Danny Noriega on the cruise to which she invited him after “American Idol” dumped him. People have strong feelings about Rosie, pro and con. Mine are decidedly pro

Seeing her talking to Danny Noriega today, no make-up on, face plain as an ungarnished potato, made me warm to her all the more. That, to me, is the face of the Irish at their best: free-handed, open-hearted, lacking in pretense, capable of subtle cutting irony or the grandly embellished verbal wallop that will knock the offending party off his feet. Even when Rosie says what is clearly outrageous, I admire her for the honesty that sears through every word she utters. I’ll take such honesty any day, over the mealy-mouthed liberalism that calculates every word to assure that the speaker ends up always on the winning side—about which more in a moment.

As I listen to James Galway’s heart-rending ballad of the perpetual exile that attracts the Irish imagination so powerfully—“Steal Away”—I’m thinking through an account I read this weekend of a recent session at which three luminaries of American Catholicism discussed evangelical Catholicism. Evangelical Catholicism is a phrase coined by reporter John Allen to describe the restorationist tendency of the last two popes: the assertive, in-your-face retrieval of a supposedly waning Catholic identity, which imagines the modern world as antithetical to Catholic identity, because its secularism and pluralism erode the distinctives of said identity.

I’m not buying: either the restorationism (which is not restoring a beleaguered Catholic identity, at all, not seeking to restore the tradition, but trying to revitalize the sectarian, highly clericalized ecclesiology of Trent and Vatican I), or the various justifications of it provided by people such as the Catholic gentlemen who recently discussed the rise of evangelical Catholicism at an American Catholic university.

Reading the discussion makes me itch: with unanswered questions; with discomfort about the unvarnished shilling for restorationism under the guise of objectivity that runs through not a few reportorial and theological presentations of evangelical Catholicism today. I’m itchy with thought about where really innovative and promising currents of new theology come from: the centers of power, or the margins?

The three distinguished Catholic gentlemen discussing evangelical Catholicism at an American Catholic university recently are, well, all gentlemen, all men. All married men. All heterosexual males. All white men.

Yet, in their comments about the rationale for evangelical Catholicism, several of these men apparently focused on the wild, free-wheeling pluralism that is threatening Catholic identity in American culture today! Three white, heterosexual, married (middle-class) American men talking about the unfettered pluralism that fritters away Catholic identity?

What pluralism, dare I ask? Where is that pluralism, when the official (officious) voices for Catholicism continue to be men—ostensibly straight men, white men?

Would the discussion of evangelical Catholicism have been any different if the wives of the gentlemen discoursing ponderously about Catholic identity had been on stage? What would women say about Catholic evangelicalism—if asked!—I wonder? What might they say about their lives of stirring pots and cleaning bathrooms, while their husbands pen weighty articles? What might women throughout history have said about Catholic identity and its retrieval—if asked?

And what might people of color say, if they were invited to the table? Or some of the people Catholic Worker houses feed each week? Or gay and lesbian Catholics?

It is really difficult to convince me that pluralism is eroding Catholic identity today—such that we need an assertive movement to retrieve that supposedly fragmenting identity—when the official spokespersons for Catholicism continue to be, overwhelmingly and without a whisper of apology, men, straight men, men who come from the power centers of world cultures.

Is the pluralism of which the clerical centers of the church and its spokesmen are so afraid primarily the pluralism that would result from inclusion of the voices of women—or males imagined as feminized, which is to say openly gay men? One surely has to wonder . . . .

I’m also impatient with the pretense to objectivity running through these analyses of evangelical Catholicism. I’m impatient because I have strong reason to suspect that the Catholic gentlemen who are supposedly describing what is merely happening—the triumph of the restored clericalized church—have something vested themselves in that triumph. They have their own male power vested in the clerical system of the church.

I question the objectivity of presentations of evangelical Catholicism such as the one that recently took place at a roundtable discussion at an American Catholic university. While the Pew Foundation’s report on the state of religion in America recently reported that a vast number of American Catholics—including many younger Catholics—are walking away from the church, some of the advocates of evangelical Catholicism who expounded on that theme at this recent workshop speak as if a majority of young American Catholics are buying into restorationist Catholicism today.

Really. Where? Who are those young American Catholics? And why do they not show up as a significant trend in the Pew report’s statistics? Is what is being objectively described really a fantasy of those describing it—the church they would like to see restored, in which male (straight male) power is never questioned in any way that threatens the dominance of that power?

In the interest of full disclosure, I do have to say that I am writing here out of my own experience—as a gay, and thus marginal, Catholic. In fact, I know one of the gentlemen who expounded at the workshop. When I came out of the closet in a public way as a gay theologian, I became curiously invisible to this gentleman. Where before we would greet each other at academic conferences, after my coming out, I found that when I walked past him, his eyes would suddenly glaze. I was no longer there.

To those in the center, I no doubt write and think as I do because I am bent on destroying.

From where I stand, I write and think as I do because I am intent on listening to voices that promise hope—hope for the truly new, for the novum, for tendencies in history that move toward the reign of God. I care deeply about the church. I want to see it thrive in the future. I want to see it capable of speaking a truly evangelical word to the world—a convincing, transformative, affirming, redemptive word.

The voices for which I am listening come not from the center, though, but from the margins. They are not the voices that continue to define (and represent) the center of American Catholicism in such roundtable discussions. They are not yet at the table. They have not been invited.

Week in Review: Catholic Bishop Denies Holocaust

In this week’s news review, I’d like to draw attention to two stories I haven’t yet mentioned. One is the Holocaust denial—statements denying the execution of gays by Nazi Germany—this week by a Scottish bishop. The other is the astonishing appeal of a Vatican official to the re-elected Socialist government of Spain for the Spanish government to mend fences with the church—after the church itself attacked the Spanish government prior to the 9 March election.

On 11 March in Glasgow, the Catholic bishop of Motherwell, Joseph Devine, used the occasion of Holocaust Memorial Day to lambast the gay community for claiming that gay people have been or are persecuted (see blogs linked to this blog, especially Clerical Whispers).

In his remarks, Bishop Devine decried a “huge and well orchestrated conspiracy” operating through an “ever-present” “homosexual lobby” intent on undermining the church. In the good bishop’s considered opinion, “It is all about a lifestyle alien to the Christian tradition. There is a giant conspiracy against Christian values, an agenda here."

Bishop Devine further opined that gay people are riding on the coattails of Holocaust remembrance, seeking to give “the impression . . . . that they have been equally persecuted” and to “create for themselves the image of a group of people under persecution." In an apparently nostalgic hankering for a time when gay people could be thrown into jail in the British Isles merely for being gay, Devine also offered the following bizarre aside, as he spoke in remembrance of Holocaust victims: “I saw actor Ian McKellen being honoured for his work on behalf of homosexuals, when a century ago Oscar Wilde was locked up and put in jail.”

What to make of such arrant nonsense?

First and foremost, it’s evil. Cutting words designed to cow and whip. Ignorant words. Words hurled like missiles by a man of God at a group of people who do, in fact, still face oppression, regardless of whether the bishop chooses to recognize this oppression or not.

Words hurt. Words cut deep. Words rationalize and gloss over and foment hate. Words incite people to do more than throw more words at others: they incite violence that goes beyond mere verbal violence.

In speaking as he did at this Holocaust remembrance, the good bishop places himself where a minister of Christ should never place herself: at the center of the circle from which violence emanates.

The church should hold its pastoral representatives accountable for inciting violence.

Second, the bishop has apparently not learned his catechism. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “They [i.e., gay persons] must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.”

The church should hold its pastoral representatives accountable for inciting violence.

Finally, the bishop is apparently ill-informed. Before addressing Holocaust remembrance groups, he should perhaps make it his business to learn what actually occurred in that horrendous event. An undetermined but not insignificant number of gay persons—estimated at between five and fifteen thousand—were executed by the Nazis during the Holocaust. The system used to classify those targeted for extinction in Nazi Germany included a designation for gay persons: just as Jews were required to wear yellow stars of David, gay people were forced to wear pink triangles.

Gays need not give the impression that we were persecuted in the Holocaust. We were persecuted during the Holocaust. We were put to death because we were gay.

No man of God should hanker for the days in which it was possible to jail (or otherwise abuse or torment) a human being simply because she is gay. If headlines about Bishop Devine’s talk are to be accurate, they should read, simply, starkly, “Catholic Bishop Denies Holocaust.”

The church should hold its pastoral representatives accountable for inciting anti-gay violence.

And in that ever-astonishing category of victimizer seeking to paint himself as victim, this week, in comments to the Italian newspaper Il Messaggero, the undersecretary of the Pontifical Council for Culture, Msgr. Melchor Sanchez de Toca, called on the newly re-elected Socialist government of Spain to “work to restore serenity” with the Catholic church.

I’ve blogged before about the attempt of some Spanish bishops and of Pope Benedict to influence the 9 March Spanish elections. As I’ve noted, on the Feast of the Holy Family at the end of December, some of the Spanish bishops organized a mass demonstration in Madrid, to which the pope was beamed by satellite. The pope spoke on wide-screen t.v. about “the” Christian model of family—one man, one woman married for life—as the crowd cheered. This “pro-family” demonstration, along with subsequent remarks of some Spanish bishops, was widely understood as a signal to the Spanish electorate to repudiate the Socialist government, which has legalized gay marriage, in the March election.

The church now finds itself in an awkward position, following the elections, in which the Socialist government was returned to power by a comfortable majority. Now the church is seeking to depict itself as the victim rather than the aggressor in the electoral process. Msgr. Sanchez de Toca reproaches the Socialist government of Jose Luis Zapatero as “excessively harsh” towards the church, confrontative in its stance regarding the church. He denies that the Spanish bishops sought to instruct the people in their voting choices, but “offered a reflection” on the choices confronting the Spanish electorate in March. He states that the pope and bishops routinely offer such political “reflection” everywhere in the world, but thinks that “in Spain, there was a disproportionate response on the part of the government.”

Umm, I don’t think so. The obtrusive attempt of the church to influence the Spanish election goes quite a bit beyond the church’s attempt to wield political influence on other governments. This was a direct attempt to get the Socialists thrown out of power in Spain. It was overt political meddling. It represents a last-ditch effort of some sectors of Catholicism that have not repudiated the medieval model of Christendom to hang onto that model in one of the last European countries in which the church has recently had more or less direct control over the government.

The attempt to influence the Spanish election was a rather despicable attack on a fragile democracy whose human rights record is already vastly preferable to that of the Franco regime, to which the church was long wedded.

It’s time for the Catholic church to refrain from such meddling—to stop hankering for the days of Franco or jailing gays in England. As the world moves toward postmodernity, the church is still struggling to accept and interact with the modern world.

And in the process, it’s losing adherents right and left.

The church should hold its pastoral representatives accountable for inciting violence. And if it wishes to retain the respect of its followers and the world at large, it also must refrain from crying foul and playing the victim, when its hands get burned as it plays political games.

In Remembrance: Everybody Has a Story

Today is a day of remembrance. On this day in 1991, I stood beside a hospital bed and watched my brother Simpson die. He was 39.

This was the first death I had witnessed. To say that the experience completely changed my life would be understatement. I can still recall—though with no ability to enter that kairotic place again—the shock of seeing someone I loved suddenly no longer alive. Suddenly dead. To see someone who is one instant breathing and the next not.

This was a death we had all been expecting, though that expectation did nothing to minimize the shock of witnessing it. My brother had, for years, drunk himself into sodden oblivion—determined, consciousness-annihilating bouts of binge drinking, involving a closed bedroom door, bottles of whiskey, and himself alone in bed. As the drunken bouts became more frequent, my mother—who kept him with her—responded by doing what seemed the only possible thing to do: she left him alone until he sobered up again.

Those alone times must have been horrific. In the day and a half that we stood beside his hospital bed in 1991, I noticed that his toenails were broken and bloody, the result of stumbling about the house blindly drunk. His knees were blossomed over with red welts from days of lurching through the house alone. He looked like a veteran of a brutal hand-to-hand battle.

My brother and I had never had an easy relationship. We were close in age. Simpson had come a mere sixteen months after me, as my father completed a law degree that my mother always claimed to have earned, researching his papers, writing and typing them. My brother’s birth was too soon after mine for a mother whose emotional equilibrium was always fragile at best, who danced her whole life beside a fathomless dark chasm of self-loathing, of unquenchable thirst to have her worth affirmed by someone, anyone. All she wanted was to be loved. But no love was ever sufficient to satiate the thirst inside. My mother was clearly unprepared to deal with the demands of two children one after the other, along with those of a husband whom a neighbor once described as “a right nice man, if he would ever grow beyond twelve years old in his head.”

Early on, Simpson and I became playthings in bitter parental struggles over which we had no control, and which we could not begin to understand. These seemed to peak at night, when my father came home, as he fumbled at doorknobs and dropped keys, trying to sneak into the house drunk again, bright badges of red lipstick smearing the collar of his white shirt. Invariably, my mother would be waiting in the dark beyond the front door, the tip of her cigarette glowing angrily in the dark, her arms drawn tight about her body, ready to do battle: to confront, to rip, to tear and rage.

The predictable upshot of the nightly rows was that my father absented himself from us more frequently, eventually abandoning us for a good part of my seventh year. A year in which Simpson entered first grade, and I sought to continue what had become a parental ritual, walking him to school with my hand in his, teaching him when to doff his cap and when to keep it on his head, how to spot the playmates who would encourage him to roll his nickels into gutters where they might never be retrieved, and thereby attract the undesired attention of a principal who, I now realize, perhaps pitied the poor little semi-orphaned children of the absent father, the not-quite-composed mother.

Simpson quickly repudiated my in-loco-parentis guidance, as he entered the wider world of the schoolground and learned that there were possibilities other than family—our sad little family with its tight conspiracies of silence as we dealt with anyone outside our tortured circle. School made me more introverted, slower to disclose myself to anyone except a select few.

By contrast, it made Simpson the self-assured hero, the one who could tackle harder, run faster. I buried myself in books, Grimms’ fairy tales, tattered Victorian novels harvested by a teacher aunt from her school library as it weeded unread old books. Simpson played, and excelled at playing.

My father finally came home, bandaged from a near-fatal car crash in northern California. Within days of his return, I overheard him telling someone on his office phone that a woman had been with him in the wrecked car. Innocently (or not? Did I sense already that there were sides to be taken, that I could become an agent rather than a pawn in the games I did not understand?), I mentioned the conversation to my mother. Hell broke loose.

My father repudiated me, told me I was not his son (though, of his three sons, I look most like him). I belonged only to my mother. From that day on, Simpson became the anointed heir and model son, the one to whom footballs were lobbed, the one taken, when he was in college, on trips by my father to visit his mistress in south Louisiana.

I had long known, of course, that I was not the son my father wanted. As early as age three, I was keenly aware of how I disappointed him, when he took us on a ferris wheel ride in an amusement park, and I shrieked so uncontrollably that the carnival man had to stop the ride and let me off, while Simpson sat contented in my father’s arms. I was the proverbial sissy-boy son of the would-be-macho Southern father, the one whose face looked like the father, but in whom the father would not see his face mirrored.

And why remember any of this, now that my father and brother are both dead—now that both died drunk? In part, I remember because I have to do so. They are gone. I am left. It is the duty of those left behind to remember. To eulogize, but with an honesty that struggles to limn the faint outline of the one remembered, the one we shall never know as he knew himself, since we live in other skin. In remembering, we recreate the one re-membered; the most difficult, the most impossible, task of remembering is to transcend the very perspectives that make memory possible and imperative for us.

I remember, as well, because this first death, of a brother whom I loved despite the mine-pocked landscape between him and me, changed my life. Though by the time of Simpson’s death, I had come out as a gay man to my family and friends, Steve and I still kept silence in our professional lives. We saw no other way. As theologians in Catholic institutions, where silence about one’s sexual orientation was (and usually still is) mandatory, we believed that, in living discreetly, in doing our work punctiliously and fulfilling all of our duties, we would be accorded the same respect, the same circumspect refusal to inquire about domestic arrangements, accorded our unmarried but straight colleagues.

We were wrong, as it turned out. It mattered—more than anything else: more than our work, our commitment to the schools in which we taught, our personal and professional integrity. It mattered utterly and ultimately, the fact of our being gay, the fact of our living together without apology.

At the time of Simpson’s death, I was being offered tenure at Xavier University in New Orleans, where I had taught for seven more or less happy years. Steve, by contrast, had just gone through a brutalizing experience as the first lay theologian teaching at the local Catholic seminary. He had come up for tenure, been voted unanimously by the seminary’s students and faculty to receive tenure, and had then been unilaterally denied tenure by the seminary rector, who told him that the seminary could not afford to pay the salary he commanded as a lay theologian.

Said salary was $15,000, the same salary at which he had been hired in 1985. Steve was booted as the spring semester ended, long after most institutions had hired faculty for the fall. When he was denied tenure, he discovered that his retirement benefits—a pittance—were to be absorbed by the diocese, per the fine print of diocesan rules he had never thought to read when he signed his contract. The following year, the seminary hired two priests to replace him. A year or so down the road, it hired another lay theologian—an ostentatiously married one, with a new bride fresh from the Orient who lived with him in a suite provided by the seminary. The rector who denied Steve tenure was subsequently made a bishop and is now a rising star of the American bishops’ conference.

But that’s another story. At the time of my brother’s death, a resolve formed inside me—a bright and shining one, an obdurate one as hard as coal turned to diamond by raging fires—never again to pretend, deny, disguise who I was. I would continue to maintain the professional code demanded of Steve and me as theologians in Catholic institutions. I would keep my “lifestyle” at home, a personal matter. I would walk that thin line that the professional code of conduct, wink-nudge conduct, required in church institutions.

But I would never again allow the hard-won insights derived from my experience as a gay man who no longer apologized for his identity to sit idle as I wrote or taught. Those insights were me: they were the substance of what I had to offer as a theologian. I would allow them not merely to intrude into my discourse, but to weave themselves throughout anything I thought and wrote and taught.

My brother’s death taught me that life ends. Through the kairotic exchange that anyone undergoes, as she stands beside the death of a loved one and watches him stop breathing, I learned what books could not tell me: that life is there, one minute, and gone the next.

Witnessing such an exchange forces one to re-examine everything. Why live at all, why write about God or love or justice or peace, if one cannot risk everything to bear witness to the one life, the unique life, the singular vocation, that has been granted to oneself?

These are the recognitions to which my brother’s death brought me, as a gay man and a theologian, in 1991. They are recognitions on which I have continued to build—because I must: because I continue living and life is a gift given for some purpose—recognitions by which I keep him alive in some way. They are recognitions by which I give his too-brief and tormented life some meaning.

Patrick Simpson Lindsey, requiescat in pace.

And, as I remember today, I also look down the road to the next generation of my family, my nieces and nephews who, in so many ways, provide wonderful reminders of my brothers, of myself, of our parents, and who carry our lives and their own into the future. I want to acknowledge and celebrate in this reminiscence my nephew Luke, particularly. Luke successfully defended his thesis in South Asian Studies two days ago. I am very proud of him.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Everybody Has a Story

It's always the same 1950s motel tricked out with shopworn kitchen

Where hungry American mouths have downed a thousand baloney sandwiches;

Sand in the mossy shower, saltwater pooling and staining

Faded green and white linoleum squares.

Outside in the sea breeze picnic tables adjacent Fords and Chevys

So spiffy you can see your face glowing back from inside the bright paint.

Enter wife, kids, dreams galore.

Daddy sits on the table's bench blowing smoke through his nostrils

And pulling beer with practiced lips from longneck bottles,

Enjoying Dagwood's sharp retorts to Blondie,

Wind lifting tiny hairs at the neck of his undershirt.

Mommy sorts clothes, pats curlers tight against her head,

While her eyes endlessly sweep the ocean waves,

Moat lips pulled secure to lock thought

Into the stronghold where she really lives inside.

Bubba plays loud war games to tell us he'll grow up to drink like Daddy,

Die gasping like a fish on shore,

While his family stands waiting for what they always knew

Would come one day, sooner than we thought.

By then Daddy will be many years dead himself, of course,

And Mommy's lips no looser, her hair grayer and more skittish,

Her hungry eyes no more satiated with anything at all.

And I?

The story's hole, dark light seeking shine amidst despair.

My funnies lie vacant in my lap

As their inhabitants, black-shrouded folk,

White faces gleaming under farfetched purdah veils,

Roam the sea on raven skiffs.

Silence broken only by a crow,

And night descends.

The F-Word, the N-Word, and the Men Who Rule Us

It’s already starting. Not just the mudslinging. Not just the use of the N-word (on which, more below).

No, it’s the F-word that’s now starting to intrude—yet again, oh so predictably—into what passes for intelligent political discourse in these United States. And not only among the Republicans, where the word has become a lame and tired slur about Democratic candidates and their supporters. Now the F-word’s being whispered, insinuated by Democrats about other Democrats.

Specifically, it’s being mouthed by Hilary supporters against Obama and his supporters. Not out in the open. Not yet. But it’s there, nonetheless, lurking behind the campaign stage props, as a kind of subliminal discourse crooking its finger to us and wooing us aside to take in an earful. The seductive subliminal F-word insinuation in intra-Democratic political discourse is inviting us to think twice before we cast our votes for a man who may betray our hope—our hope to bring a real man to the White House, someone who will take firm command of the nation and wrest it to some semblance of respectability again.

Maureen Dowd—that tart-tongued doyenne of op-eddom who can be counted on (inevitably) to speak the words others are too timid to blurt right out—used it last Sunday in her Times piece “The Monster Mash”: “But his impassioned egghead advisers have made his campaign seem not only out of his control, but effete and vaguely foreign — the same unflattering light that doomed Michael Dukakis and John Kerry.”

Effete: the F-word. In case you failed to catch the drift, Dowd’s talking about Obama here. Obama: effete. Effete Obama. At a subliminal level, through internet chatter with its constant low-level framing of discourse that eventually issues in media verdicts, Obama and his supporters are being tarred with the F-word brush. And by other Democrats.

The Clinton campaign has already made the F-word subtext explicit, with a Clinton aide claiming last week that Obama tends to attract “boutique” states. The aide observed, “Obama has won the small caucus states with the latte-sipping crowd. They don’t need a president, they need a feeling.”

A feeling. As if feeling is a bad thing? As if good political decisions are made by people who never count the cost of said decisions—the human cost? Who can’t make moral decisions because they lack the ability to imagine in some empathetic, feeling way (a fundamental moral impulse) the effect of their decisions on others?

And sipping: you know, what ladies do. At tea parties. Or after a day of exhausting boutique shopping. Real men gulp and swig. Women and girly men sip, as they sink with a contented sigh into the plush café banquette (preferably velvet-covered, and in an unobtrusive pattern) after a hard morning of shlepping bags from boutique to boutique.

What’s fascinating about this F-word text is not that it’s being used in the current campaign. What’s fascinating is that supporters of one Democratic candidate are trying it out on another: Clinton supporters suggesting that Hilary really does have the brass ones that effete Obama lacks. When the phone rings, count on Hilary to do the right thing—the manly thing. She’s tough. Little matters like feelings aren’t going to get in her way, nosireebob. Mr. Obama can’t best her in the late-night-crisis-match because, presumably, he’ll be too busy kicking back in his ergonomic t.v. lounger, nibbling dark chocolates and sipping lattes while he scans online boutique ads for organic lavender air fresheners and more fetching window treatments (puddles of raw silk? something light and airy for a change?) for the Oval Office.

What the hell is going on here? It’s one thing when Squeaky Chris Matthews or I-Am-So a Real Man! Tucker Carlson use these slimy slurs against the Democratic candidate. Both of those shining exemplars of real man mid-American political “thinking” are predictable in their insinuations about who’s The Man and who’s not: if for no other reason, they have to pull out all the stops with the F-word discourse to try to convince themselves that yes they are real men: Gimme another, make it a Bud!

But Democrats vs. Democrats? One Democrat trying to out-macho the other? This is . . . unseemly. This is idiotic. This low, ugly use of the F-word, of insinuations about masculinity, needs to stop. It gets us nowhere: precisely nowhere. Look at where we have ended up, when we let this discourse dominate our political life. Look at what we elect when we let dim-witted subliminal hints about what constitutes a real man drive our voting decisions. And I do mean what:

George W. Bush climbing out of an airplane, strutting down an aircraft carrier in a crotch-enhanced uniform, informing us we’ve just won a war that’s nowhere near “won,” while Squeaky Chris fans himself and gushes, "He looks great in a military uniform. He looks great in that cowboy costume he wears when he goes West. We're proud of our President. Americans love having a guy as President, a guy who has a little swagger, who's physical, who's not a complicated guy like Clinton.... Women like a guy who's President. Check it out."

Are we proud, Chris?

Look at what we elect, when we let the bigger-phallus-better-leader fantasy determine our political choices: George W. Bush; David Vitter; and now Eliot Spitzer.

Yes, Eliot Spitzer. And that’s where the N-word comes in. I don’t mean the totally reprehensible playing of the race card—by Democrats against other Democrats!—in the current presidential campaign. I’d like to draw attention, instead, to the N-word that never quite speaks its name.

I’m talking about entitlement. The moment the Spitzer story broke, the Internet was abuzz with stories about how the likes of Tucker Carlson were immediately speaking out in defense of Mr. Spitzer: everybody does it after all. Real men do it. Bogus pseudo-scientific articles began to flood cyberspace about how males are just hard-wired to philander, to take what’s there for the taking, while women stay home and grind the grain, dandle the babies, keep the fire burning in the cave to welcome home their roving, hunting warriors.

Interesting, but I don’t recall any of that talk when Larry Craig was caught with his pants down, so to speak, in that men’s room in Minneapolis. Not that what Larry Craig did is in the slightest bit defensible—any more defensible than what Diaper Dave did with his ladies of the night in New Orleans, or what we now know Eliot Spitzer has done.

What I’m trying to draw attention to, however, is the discrepancy in the way “mainstream” culture and the “mainstream” media are treating Spitzer, and how they treated Larry Craig. Remember Tucker Carlson’s giggles when Larry Craig got caught—the endless musing about how the gays signal each other in men’s rooms, the giddy confession that he once bashed a man in the head for coming on to him in a restroom?

Here’s what Carlson had to say immediately after the news about Eliot Spitzer broke: “Getting all high-handed that a grown man went to a prostitute is nauseating . . . . A lot of us are like him, frankly . . . . Now just because he goes to a hooker they're going to be getting all high handed on him . . . I just think this is one of the least sleazy things he's done."

The N-word: what Eliot Spitzer did (and Bill Clinton, and David Vitter, and countless others) is not about grunting cavemen chasing bison and booty while the little woman stays home with the children. It’s about E-N-T-I-T-L-E-M-E-N-T.

It’s about what we allow “real men” to do. We. Allow. We allow. We have formed a cultural consensus, with pseudo-religious warrants propping it up, that allows real men to get away with things. With a lot. With robbing, pillaging, raping, bashing. And with telling us that they set, interpret, and enforce the moral standards for the rest of us.

Real men are all about entitlement. Entitlement is what being a real man is all about. This is why the phallus-challenged will forever clamor to prove to us that they are real men, whether the price they have to pay to do so is to down another Bud, enhance the crotch of their fake military uniform, slap the little woman around a bit, shake their croziers and wobble their wattles at us as they define the moral rules that apply to everyone else.

Real men have an astonishing sense of entitlement, a sense those of us who knew from early in our lives that we weren’t real men—not in that sense, at least—can only look at from the sidelines and wonder about in baffled amazement. Who died and made the phallus God? Specifically, who died and made their phallus God?

Entitlement: the world is there for the picking—women; cars; women; money; women; plum jobs; women; cigars; women; CEO positions; women; the presidency; women; the pilot’s seat; women . . . . This is the message with which real men grow up. This is the message that bombards them constantly from the time they are old enough to observe the world around them. Real men get perks. F-word men don’t. Real men are entitled. No one else is so entitled, not in the astonishing sense in which real men are entitled.

Enough. It’s time for us, as a human community, as a nation, to imagine some other way of doing business, if we expect to have any business to do at all in the future. The astonishing entitlement of real men has royally screwed up the world, the planet, and just about anything human beings have touched. It’s time that someone besides real men begins to re-think all the warrants in all the world religions that have enabled this behavior of total entitlement.

It’s time for women and gay men, for instance, to read the scriptures and discover the abundant evidence there that, despite the claims of the real men who purport to own the scriptures, God does not dispense blessings or curses on the basis of who does or does not possess a phallus, or a phallus larger than anyone else’s. It’s time to say enough to the crude male-entitlement assumptions that run all through our religious traditions.

And, in case you don’t still know where I stand on these issues after reading the preceding, I’ll end with a poem I wrote several years ago after having endured a good portion of my purgatorial allotment (or so I devoutly hope) on an airplane with some of the men who rule us. The poem’s called “The Men Who Rule Us”:

You see them everywhere.

They straddle airplane seats

Casting words from lips bonetight and cutting,

Aimed to whip and cow

With illusions of power unspeakable.

Outside the plane the wet Louisiana clay

Secretes its honeyed humors,

Mists that wreathe the grass in light

And seduce the eye to inward grace.

The girls, they say.

I had three girls typing all day

Stewardess honey give me real magazines

Success, something I can sink my teeth into

Ate too many damn steaks

Sat around the bar and drank too many damn drinks

Gotta lose weight.

The world's enchained in power

By men who talk slantwise, crosswise,

And not at all,

But shoot words out like missiles

To spin their meaning into nothingness.

Redemption?

How,

Save through a language

That drives clean

And homes the heart to wonder

Like a fog-enshrouded field?

In this world,

The only coming God

Is one who walks in haze

Outside the plane.