Good Gays, Bad Gays Continued: The Smack-Hug Violence of Churches

I’m trying something different today.

Yesterday, my friend Colleen (check out her “Enlightened Catholicism” blog, linked to mine) left a great comment on my posting about good gays, bad gays, and the churches of the radical middle.

In what follows, I want to engage Colleen’s comments. They are so thought-provoking that I can’t really do justice to them by replying in the comment slot. And maybe if this dialogue is in the main thread of the blog, it will bring some light for other readers who are struggling with the churches’ stances towards their LGBT brothers and sisters.

So here goes:

Colleen,

You address some key points in my perambulations yesterday. I value the incisive comments, which help me focus my own thinking.

You say,

I'm not so sure the hate isn't a product of jealousy, of an unstated sense of inadequacy. A number of the things gays seem to do very well are create artistically, love with no strings attached, and have definite spiritual gifts . . . . I think gayness is defined by much more than sexual attraction. It's defined best by the concept of balance between creation and chaos and male and female. That tension of that balance is very often expressed in creative or spiritual works.

These are significant points. They touch right on the heart of the dynamics I was trying to describe yesterday—better than I was able to do.

First, the hate issue. Yesterday, after posting, I asked myself, “Are you sure that hate is the word you really want?” Is what the churches do to us really hate, or is that word too strong to describe the antipathy, exclusion, and malicious dissemination of misinformation about us?

Asking these questions draws attention to the word “homophobia” itself, with its “phobia” root. That root can mean both fear and hate, or hate driven by fear.

Some people object to the term “homophobia” precisely on this ground: that hate is a word too strong to describe what is often going on when folks resist or despise gay folks.

I tend to think it’s accurate, though, in exposing the roots of homophobia. Like the various forms of violence, which I analyzed in a previous posting on this blog, hate can manifest itself in both hot and cold ways.

The hot form of violence or hate is not too hard to detect. It’s the kind that happened recently in Sacramento right after the gay marriage ruling in California, when three young men out to beat up a fag to protest the court decision asked a man sitting in a car at a gas station if he were gay.

When he said he was, they dragged him out of his car and beat him up (www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/05/16/state/n143918D86.DTL) And yet the social network webpage of one of the alleged gay bashers, Micah Jontomo Tasaki, at BlackPlanet.com (www.blackplanet.com/jontomo) has this young man saying, “CHILVARY DOES STILL EXIST. Im honest, open, and caring.... very compassionate, and a great listener.”

Jarring, isn’t it? Chivalry exists. I’m honest, opening, caring, very compassionate. And, oh, by the way, if I run across a fag sitting in a car minding his own business, I’m liable to kick the stuffing out of him while I’m going about my chivalry-compassion business.

What this story underscores for me is that the hot form of hate goes hand in hand with cold forms of hate, which are less easy to detect—and of which we may even be unconscious. I would submit that it’s the cold form of hate that inhabits so much of the thinking (and behavior) of church folks in Main Street USA.

This cold form of homophobia is what’s at work in so much that goes on with the churches. This is the behavior analyzed in Harry Knox’s article “Methodist Schizophrenia on Gays” at the Casting Stones blog on Beliefnet (http://blog.beliefnet.com/castingstones/2008/05/methodist-schizophrenia-on-gay.html?bt=polmashup).

Knox is a former United Methodist pastor from a family with deep Methodist roots. He now heads the Religion and Faith Program for Human Rights Campaign. His article is commenting on the recent UMC General Conference.

Knox characterizes the Methodist approach to LGBT persons as schizophrenic “smack-hug behavior”: we love you; we don’t want you; we welcome all sinners; we don’t welcome you; our doors are open; no gays need apply; we promote and defend your civil rights; don’t expect us to respect your rights if you work in our institutions.

Some folks have objected to the use of the term “schizophrenic” in this article. I think it’s a precise description of how the churches of Main Street USA actually behave towards us. Their behavior is insane. And they don’t even seem aware of it.

It’s unrecognized insanity because it’s masked in religious rhetoric about love that doesn’t permit those engaging in this abusive behavior (Knox calls it “spiritual violence” as well) even to admit or know that they are assaulting the very souls, the personhood, of a particular group of human beings. Hate masquerades as love in the way the churches of the radical middle think about and act towards LGBT persons, and it’s very difficult to tease out or address the hate for this reason. It’s disguised. It’s cold hate.

But I know your point here is not to challenge the use of the word "hate." You’re making a point that goes way beyond the analysis of this word, and it’s an excellent point. You say that hate—the cold form of homophobic violence in which the churches engage—may well be a form of jealousy or a sense of inadequacy.

And you go on to identify the psychological nexus from which the jealousy and sense of inadequacy often springs. You say, “Main stream churches understand they have a proportional misrepresentation of gays in their structures. They just can't deal with the underlying talent issues this represents so gays must be vilified.”

These are extremely insightful comments, it seems to me, ones that reflect your background as a therapist. If, as you say, gay people bring the churches talents that have everything to do with our accepting that we are gay—specifically, if our struggles to accept ourselves create a creative tension or balance inside us of male-female principles—then our very being there, with those talents, seems to threaten some folks, or make some folks feel inadequate.

The puzzle to me is your right-on-target conclusion that, because the churches can’t deal with the “underlying talent issues” that gay contributions to churches represent, “gays must be vilified.”

I think this is exactly right. It also seems insane to me—insane, that is, that churches would recognize an abundance of talent for spiritual insight and creativity in a particular group of people, whom they then expel! Precisely for offering talent, spiritual insight, and creativity to the churches . . . .

I know in my bones that you are right. I just find it hard to understand that human beings behave in such self-defeating ways.

I know you’re right, because what you say fits my own experience, my own spiritual journey. I’ve spoken of my brother’s death in 1991 as a kind of catalyst for my self-acceptance as a gay man.

But what happened in my journey in that part of my life is actually more complex. Prior to my brother’s death, I had a sabbatical semester to do research while I was on fellowship. I spent that semester writing a book and several articles, teaching a seminar, but, perhaps most significant of all, doing therapeutic work with a spiritual counselor.

The counselor was a Jungian analyst. Since I have always dreamed profusely and kept track of my dreams, his approach made sense to me.

From the start of my semester’s work with him, I told him I was gay, and needing to figure out what to do with that, given my vocational path to teaching theology in church-affiliated universities. I was some six years into my teaching career.

The tension of being someone inside that I had to disguise outside was eating me up. It was not the creative tension of holding something in balance. It was the deadly tension of living a public persona that doesn’t match the private self, so that you begin to fear you’ll simply lose your private self and become the walking, talking parody of the persona you’ve adopted.

I worked hard with the counselor in that semester. I can remember, towards the end of my time with him, he put his finger on something that helped me reframe the personal identity-vocational struggle in a creative new way. He noted that, again and again, in describing my dreams, I had used words like “upwelling,” “springing forth,” “streams,” “energy,” “light.”

He told me that, in his view, the hard work I was doing to try to bring together the gay self and my public life as a theologian in a church-affiliated school had much to do with releasing springs of creative energy. The more I was able to hold these two together, to claim my identity as a gay man while continuing on my vocational path as a theologian, the more the creativity was springing forth.

And he was right.

Within months after my return home, my brother died. It was the combination of my own Spirit-led journey to self acceptance as a gay man and my brother’s death, a life-changing event for me, that brought me to that decision I described yesterday: that I would never again do my work as a theologian while denying my personhood (and gifts) as a gay man.

This bringing together the pieces I hadn’t been able to bring together as long as I played the game of don’t ask, don’t tell released tremendous energy in me. Not only had I just written one book, but out of the blue, I suddenly got requests to publish another, as well as articles based on my research. I wrote an essay that got selected for publication in a national essay contest. I got several job offers totally unsolicited, because of my publications.

But here’s the kicker: when I turned down tenure at my home university and took another job following my brother’s death, with the intent of expressing my new-found creativity in a new setting where I was told I was wanted and needed, the experience proved to be disastrous.

My experience has been that the resistance we encounter as self-accepting gay persons with much to offer in church institutions is in direct proportion to our self-acceptance, and to the talents we bring to the table. We’re welcome as long as we are self-hating, silent, dismissable: good gays.

The minute we claim our identities as God-given, and acknowledge that the love inside ourselves and in our relationships also springs from God, we become personae non gratae in the churches: bad gays The hard struggle (in a homophobic society) to accept ourselves as God’s good gifts to ourselves and others, a struggle that releases in us creative energies the churches sorely need, disqualifies us from a place at the table in the churches.

In fact, in my last disastrous experience, where Steve and I were told that we were welcome as an openly gay couple in a United Methodist institution that sorely needed our talents (hug), and then were constantly upbraided for coming to work together and "putting our lifestyle into the face of colleagues," the experience was even grimmer (smack).

You’re painting a totally accurate picture. And yet something is so wrong with this picture. I need your further reflections, Colleen, to help me figure out precisely what is at work in such smack-hug behavior on the part of the churches of the radical middle.

Good Gays, Bad Gays: Gay Love and the Play Book of Churches of Main Street USA

These days, people are afraid of Ellen. And her love.

Let me back up. People are afraid of Ellen. Ellen Degeneres.

Yes, that Ellen. The one with the talk show, who laughs at anything with uproarious delight, raises money for victims of Hurricane Katrina. America’s gal pal. The BFF we all wish we had had in high school, particularly us gay men. The one without a mean-girl bone in her body, whose humor is never at anybody else’s expense, who makes a place for everybody at her table.

That Ellen. And her love.

It’s the love thing that’s the problem. First of all, she talks about it, not in a showy or combative way, but as if it’s just there, a fact, as solid as the table she limbos over every afternoon on her show. What’s talked about might exist, and that’s an intolerable thought to those who don’t want gay love to exist.

It’s the love. Not Ellen. It’s Ellen, America’s gal pal, claiming that her love counts, that it’s love just like George’s love for Martha or Laura and Rob Petrie’s love for each other.

Love is the problem. It’s the problem the love police handle constantly these days. The religious right, people who profess a religion centered on the claim that love is what it’s all about, the path to heaven, the very nature of God: they seem to be spending an amazing amount of time these days fighting love.

The love of others, that is to say, their own being divinely sanctioned and stamped with ecclesial approval. The love of others they want—need—to keep in subordinate positions. One wonders how they find the time to love, these love police of the religious right—to love as their religion enjoins them to do. How can those fixated on 24-7 policing of others’ love have time left over to keep love alive in their own relationships?

The problem with love, the kind of love Ellen has for Portia, is that it trumps the rabid need of right-wing movements in church and society to reduce being gay to sex—to reduce gay human beings to something instrumental and sordid, something useful in games over which those being used have no control, games played for political goals that go far beyond controlling sexual morality.

As long as we can get a majority of people to think sex (in all the lurid manifestations we plant in people’s minds) when they think of gay and lesbian human beings, we can continue playing those games with impunity, no matter how many people are hurt by them. But when people begin to think love, to see faces of people they love (BFFs, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters) when the words “gay” or “lesbian” pop up, the game is over.

When people think love as they see a gay or lesbian person, they will also inevitably end up thinking hate when they see the faces of many key players of right-wing politics in church and society. And they’ll wonder how those committed to increasing love in the world and its families could, for so long now, have sought to effect precisely the opposite in so many human lives and the lives of so many families.

When I think of playing games with other people’s lives, I can’t help thinking of the churches. Throughout these blog postings, I keep (broken record, one-song repertoire) calling the churches to accountability.

I keep calling on church members to take responsibility for the manifold ways in which hate dresses as love in church rhetoric, to examine not the words but the effects of the words. It’s there that we find whether love or hate is at work, in the effect our statements and creeds and books of discipline have.

Do the words churches speak engender respect for LGBT persons? Do they foster a desire on the part of church members to get to know LGBT persons? Do they lead to a commitment by congregations to hear real-life stories of real-life LGBT human beings?

Do they lead to an attempt on the part of churches to understand the love manifest in gay lives, even when that love differs from the kind of love we take for granted as normative?

If what the churches say (and do) doesn’t lead to these embodiments of love, then perhaps the churches need to ask themselves if they are, in fact, involved in something other than love, when it comes to the gay community today. In particular, perhaps the churches need to examine whether they are involved in the same noxious game-playing with gay lives that is now being exposed as hate masquerading as love in many political circles.

Readers of my blog may have concluded that I think the churches of Main Street USA don’t include many gay members. I don’t think that this is the case, at all. In fact, I think the churches of the radical middle are full of gay members.

But those gay members are bound by both spoken and unspoken rules in many churches to keep their presence hidden, to disguise themselves, to become different people than who they are the rest of the week, once they walk through the church door. The price they pay for “inclusion” in the Christian community and its institutions is to comport themselves on church premises as good gays, rather than bad gays.

If my previous postings have given the impression that I think churches don’t want gay members, let me correct that impression. Many churches of Main Street USA would stop functioning immediately if they expelled their LGBT members. Gays are everywhere in the church: singing in the choir and directing it; teaching Sunday School; ushering and organizing hospitality ministries and ministry to the sick and shut-in; playing the organ. Gays are everywhere in the churches: standing in the pulpit preaching on Sunday, and at the altar celebrating the eucharist.

It’s not gays the churches of the radical middle don’t want—not precisely. It’s bad gays that they want to keep at bay. The good gays, the ones that are everywhere, but silent, hidden, apologetic, meek and mild: these the churches want, need, can’t do without.

I’ve learned this lesson the hard way, working in church institutions. I’ve learned it teaching and doing academic administrative work in church-affiliated colleges and universities.

Before I set forth on my vocational path, I had never dreamt of myself as a bad gay. I was quite decidedly good. My whole self-image depended on being the good small-town Sunday-School boy of Main Street USA whom I was raised to be. Heck (I couldn't say "hell"), I wasn't even sure I was gay. It was probably just a phase I was going through. I'd outgrow it when I met the right woman, sat down to a table spread with tea and sympathy.

I was deferential, mild-mannered, intent on pleasing others, constantly fearful of hurting the feelings of others. I was also closeted, tormented by self-doubt and guilt about the inclination of a love that I really could not deny in my heart of hearts. I lived in a state of constant debilitating panic about being exposed.

I was a good gay. I was the kind of gay churches of Main Street USA, and their institutions, want and need.

As I’ve noted in previous postings, a number of pivotal life experiences, beginning with my brother’s death in 1991, catapulted me into a different universe altogether, right as I was offered tenure by the Catholic university at which I had taught for seven years in New Orleans when my brother died.

After this life-changing event, I was still willing to play the game church institutions dictated that I play—the don’t ask, don’t tell game. I was still willing to be the good gay, but with one crucial new proviso: I would not lie, dissimulate, live in fear, give signals that I was not equal to my colleagues. This decision, a resolute one, one that I believed to be inspired by the Spirit who calls us to live in love and truth, was one I carried into my first disastrous job experience as a bad gay, when I turned down the offer of tenure and took a job at another institution.

This experience happened at a Catholic college in North Carolina. I won’t slog through all the sordid details of my reception there in this posting. I’ve written about them elsewhere.

What I want to home in on here is the written-unwritten game book governing gay lives in church institutions in Main Street USA. At the Catholic college in North Carolina, after I had received a one-year terminal contract on the heels of a glowing evaluation, and had not been given any reason for the termination (or any written copy of the evaluation), I resigned. I did so rather than allow myself to be humiliated any further.

When this happened, a recent graduate of the college whom I had taught, a theology major with a sharp intellect and a distinguished career in the college (he has subsequently come out as a gay man), came for a visit. We did not discuss the issue of sexual orientation and the key role it played in what had happened to me at the college. Don’t ask, don’t tell required that we, well, not ask and not tell, either one of us.

Even so, my former student said something extremely illuminating, which I have thought about constantly over the years as I have sought to dissect and deal with the good-gay, bad-gay play rules in church institutions. My student told me, “You know, when you arrived here, the good old boys were out to do you in from the moment you set foot on the campus. Without saying a word, you gave a signal that you wouldn’t take any b.s. from them. You did your job, you excelled, you stood on your merits. And they hated that, and hated you for it.”

I had become a bad gay. And I didn’t even see it happening. All I did was insist on my right to be respected for the work I did, for who I was, for my integrity, for my excellence in teaching, scholarship, community service, and service to the college.

That was too much for the good old boys’ network in this Catholic-affiliated college of Main Street USA to handle. It was too much for the leaders of the United Methodist university in Florida who fired me last year (without providing any evaluation of my work at all) to handle. When gay people insist on being equal, when we insist on making sexual orientation irrelevant to our right to be at the table, we become (I have learned through painful experience) threats to those who absolutely have to see us differently, in order to use us in political games they need to play with our lives to benefit themselves.

Good gays are non-assertive, hidden, willing to let ourselves be used as doormats. I know. I have lived in that posture. It’s not a happy place to live.

Bad gays can be assertive without even trying to be. We can be tagged as assertive when we insist on what everyone else takes for granted in the church-related workplace—the simple right to be who we are, unapologetically, within all rubrics of professional decorum governing our particular vocations. When we are public about our identity, when we claim our lives and insist that they are lives and not lifestyles, we become extreme threats to the churches and church institutions of Main Street USA. We become uncontrollable.

And that is something the churches of the radical middle will not permit. They and their institutions cannot permit this, because the next step in the process of our emergence from oppression is to claim that our love counts, that it is equal to the love of heterosexual persons.

The next step is to claim that it is love, period, our gay love.

And this is, in the rule books of the churches of the radical middle (and in the institutions these churches sponsor), an intolerable step for gay people to take. It is so for all kinds of reasons, about which I plan to write in further postings on this theme.

But it is so for one central, critical reason I want to note here, a reason that has everything to do with the credibility of churches today: when gay people’s love is accepted as love, period, then what the churches do and say to gay brothers and sisters today in the name of love will eventually be revealed to be hate. Hate masquerading as love.

The churches cannot have this hate unmasked. That is, they can’t do so, and continue doing business as usual.

This is the serious, key, intolerable threat that the mere presence of gay people—bad gays who are bad simply because we refuse to apologize and hide—poses to the churches of Main Street USA today. This is why we must be driven from the table.

Pansies and Caladiums and the Sanctity of Marriage

It’s that time of the year.

My life is marked by seasons within seasons. There’s the winter shift to something green, something Christmas, in the planters surrounding the two lions at the entrance to the front porch. This winter, I put rosemary topiaries there, which now live behind the old-fashioned flags in the back garden, helping to create a green backdrop to a statue of Francis of Assisi we brought from Florida to remind us of our garden there.

In February, when hints of spring begin with the occasional spray of forsythia and japonica popping into bloom, I usually remove the greenery and put in pansies for color. They don’t hit their peak until late March, but they bravely endure the freezes that we can get even into May, providing a welcome splash of color as the silver maple in the front yard leafs out and covers the front of the house in shade.

Now is the new season, the time in which the pansies are spent. To be precise, when the violas have done all the blooming they intend to do, since I planted violas this year in place of pansies, to honor Steve's grandmother, who grew them in her garden. They’ve become leggy and will soon succumb to the scorching heat of an Arkansas summer.

Yesterday, I bought several trays of caladiums. I wanted green and white, to continue the cool theme of the shaded front—an important theme for us living on the same latitude as Cairo to enunciate in summer. The nursery had only pink and green. One makes do. The color will be pleasant, echoing the muted rose tints in the house’s color, along with the deep green-brown trim color.

This morning, the violas bit the dust. I hate to pull up any plant, even a weed. Everything seems to me to have use, potential. Who am I to say that my life and whims trump the right of any other living thing to its place on the earth?

But the violas were soon to die anyway, and one must have something in those planters, or why have them there? I came, I saw, I uprooted. And I now have handsome small caladiums living in the planters that up to today hosted leggy violas.

What I’m winding around to in this garden story is composting, nature’s talent for taking what’s already there and giving it new life in new forms. Once I’d shaken the uprooted violas of as much root soil as I could and had bunched them in a basket to shlep around to the compost pile, it struck me: the caladiums need some kind of mulch to keep the soil from splashing about when it rains. Mulch also keeps our gardens alive in the hot months of June, July, August, and September, when temperatures can soar over 100 and no rain falls for weeks.

There were the uprooted violas in a basket, ready to compost. There was the planter full of caladiums in bare soil. I took the violas, quickly shredded them with my hands, and now they provide mulch and green top dressing for their successors, the pink and green caladiums.

I don’t by any means claim to have invented some remarkable new system of mulching with uprooted weeds. I’m sure many gardeners must do this routinely, as I do in the garden proper.

What I want to draw attention to, though, is nature’s way of making what seems to be on the way out new again, with new adaptations, new uses, new survival techniques.

This is a useful theme for meditation now that the religious right is screaming at top decibel about how gay marriage imperils “traditional” marriage. It’s no secret to note that marriage itself—“traditional” marriage—is “on the way out.” It is and has been on the way out for some time now, insofar as those to whom it has traditionally been consigned have done a lamentably poor job of keeping it alive and well.

So much that one reads and hears from the bleating mouths of the marriage police these days is just wrong-headed, and in many cases, downright false. There has never been one traditional form of marriage or family either in Western cultures over the centuries of Christian history, or in other cultures around the world, with their varying religious traditions.

Family (and marriage) have historically taken many different forms. Marriage and family are social institutions that have reflected the penchants of the individual cultures in which they are practiced, and have adapted to the shifting needs of those cultures, as the cultures have changed.

The contemporary model of middle-class nuclear family—mama, papa, and a circumscribed number of children—has very shallow roots in Christian history. It reflects shifts in our economic and social patterns in the twentieth century, when a majority of people in developed nations no longer lived in agricultural settings where the coerced free labor of many children was required. It reflects the increasing mobility of a society in which people now live in urban areas, often at a distance from their parents and siblings.

“Traditional” families, prior to the 20^th century, were—at least in my neck of the wood—decidedly extended families. It was unthinkable, until the mid-20^th century, not to know and spend abundant time with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, if those family members were still living. Households normally contained more than the nuclear family unit. In my family, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents in need of assistance lived with those able to provide the assistance, often in a rotating pattern in which one family would have Cousin So and So for several months of the year, at which point Cousin So and So would move on to another family for a period of time.

In many of these traditional pre-20^th-century extended families, children were actually raised by someone other than the mother and father. Grandparents, aunts, and uncles often played a key role in child-rearing, as did members of other families attached to the extended family by various kinds of bonds, including economic ones.

The point of this brief survey of "traditional" family being: the religious right is playing a shell game with the consciousness of the American people, when it speaks of marriage as some fixed institution in which one man and one woman have, forever and ever, raised and cared for a family consisting primarily or exclusively of their own progeny.

At the base of the religious right’s rhetoric about “traditional” marriage is, of course, the intent to keep alive in our minds the assumption that marriage is “really” all about procreation, and has always been about procreation. People marry to have children, the religious right wants us to fix in the forefront of our minds. Marriage as biological imperative . . . . Since gays cannot procreate, they ought not to be marrying.

This overlooks, of course, some screamingly obvious facts that the deceptive rhetoric of the religious right wants to conceal: namely, that marriage is a social and economic institution that has always been about far more than procreation. It’s about joining and protecting property. People throughout history have married to ally their family to another family, such that the wealth of one family flows together with that of the other family.

People marry as well for companionship. to support and cherish one another, to build love in their lives and the lives of others. If marriage is all about procreation (which is, at its crudest and starkest, what the Catholic church wants us to believe), why do we permit the marriage of heterosexual couples that we know full well cannot procreate: those who are unable to have children, those beyond child-bearing age?

And the obverse of the marriage-for-procreation argument is, of course, the obvious recognition that people can procreate very well, thank you very much, apart from the institution of marriage. In fact, those straight people lamenting the demise of “traditional” marriage seem to have been doing a jolly good job of such non-maritally sanctioned procreating for quite a few years now . . . .

What’s at the very center of the religious right’s hysterical, unconvincing arguments about “traditional” marriage, what the religious right wants to fix in our brains, rather than any careful reflection on the institution of marriage, is, quite simply, resistance to and disdain for gay people. No matter how loudly the religious right shouts this, the battle’s not about the defense of “traditional” marriage. It’s about the continued right of society to bash gay people with impunity.

More precisely, it’s about the continued right of society to use gay people. We have been very handy pawns in the political games of the political right around the world. We are proving less useful in that regard these days, for a number of reasons. And this recognition produces panic and increasing shrill desperation among those who have found gay human beings exceedingly useful political tools for several decades now.

First, there’s the sociological fact that, as more and more people—particularly in the next generation—come to know gay people as individual human beings and as part of their everyday lives, the ability to project scorn onto gay people as a class of citizens wanes. The religious right is unhappy about this. That scorn (fear, distaste, outright hatred) has worked for a long time. It has driven voters to the polls to vote “right” on the issues about which the leaders of the religious right (and their funders, above all) really care: about safeguarding and increasing the wealth of the most wealthy, for instance.

Now, the religious right has to walk a very fine line, because of its recognition that overplaying the gay card may well not drive voters to the polls to vote "right," but may lead to voters characterizing the religious right as a hate group. Racism worked for a time in right-wing politics. Homophobia took its place. Xenophobia still has play. As the effectiveness of one scapegoated group wanes, the right constantly looks around for another to take its place.

Second, the right wing hasn’t been doing conspicuously well, frankly, in maintaining its image as the defender of traditional family and of family values. Notice that few voices in the contemporary religious right point to what is really “the” traditional model of marriage, if we are going to be scrupulously faithful to Judaeo-Christian tradition: one man, one woman, yoked for life.

It is only very recently that “traditional” marriage has comprised models that permit a man to have several wives in a row, or a woman to divorce and remarry. Marriage today is more often practiced as a form of serial monogamy than monogamy per se. The arguments against polygamy among advocates of “traditional” marriage are undermined far more by how heterosexual people have been practicing marriage than by gay marriage. And this is not even to mention the increasingly normative practice of straight couples living together without the benefit of marriage, often in several trial-run arrangements, prior to actual marriage, or without ever marrying at all.

I don’t bring all of this up to decry the moral decay of our society. I bring it up to note the lacunae in the argument of the religious right against gay marriage, the many realities about marriage as it is currently practiced in our society that the religious right does not want us to recognize, to think about, to talk about, as it tries to make gay marriage the bugbear fraying the last bonds of poor pitiful little Christian civilization.

And so back to recycling, composting, mulching: when institutions are breaking up under the weight of their own rottenness, their own inconsistencies and internal contradictions, there’s a powerful argument to be made that it’s time to rethink the institution itself, and not keep replicating and defending what no longer works very well. Gay marriage provides an opportunity for Western “Christian” cultures to think much more carefully about what marriage is all about in the first place, about the increasing glaring discrepancy between how we talk about marriage as an ideal and how we actually live it.

Marriage as an official church-sanctioned institution is, after all, something that developed in the Christian church only over the course of centuries. Marriage as a rite of the church—as a sacrament—was not “codified” in Christian history until several centuries into the “Christian era.”

Even in Catholic theology, which is often used by right-wing political thinkers as the last bastion of traditional marriage, a couple marry themselves: they marry each other. The priest is there as a witness to the sacrament the couple themselves perform. The sacramental sanctioning of marriage builds on the reasonable recognition that marriage is a decision of two people to commit themselves to live together in a way that builds the community in which they live and work. Sacramental marriage is an outgrowth of civil marriage: the church does not marry people; it recognizes their choice to marry each other.

The debate about gay marriage—and gay marriage itself—may well be the compost that the institution of marriage, which is falling apart under the weight of the anomalies it incorporates in postmodern culture, needs in order to survive. Churches of Main Street USA, who provide hospitality to the religious right while excluding your LGBT brothers and sisters: marriage is already falling apart.

It has been falling apart for some time. We now live in a postmodern culture in which, if you except to command people’s attention when you talk about the sanctity of marriage, you need to begin talking to those who are trying to live marriage and family in all its bewildering variety in the culture in which we now live, move, and have our being. Insofar as your preaching addresses an ideal culture that exists only in your imaginations and in t.v. sitcoms from the 1950s, it won’t be effective in the world now coming into being.

Gay marriage may ironically prove to be the revival of marriage as an institution. If so, perhaps gay people are a gift to the churches and not the enemies you keep trying to imagine?

Health Coverage for All Citizens: A Moral Imperative

One reason today’s posting is later than usual (in addition to my need to vote today and then get a brother-in-law to the airport) is that I have been trying to track down some information to verify it before I post.

I haven’t been able to do all the research I’d like to do before posting. But, since the day is going on and I want to post something, I’m posting the following reflections with the proviso that there may be unfinished research to do on this subject. (And I always welcome any input readers want to provide, to give a more complete picture of any topic I discuss.)

Yesterday as I read the news, I noticed an interesting announcement on the 365Gay news site. This article states that a national survey released Monday indicates that nearly one in four gay and lesbian adults lack health insurance, and are nearly twice as likely to be without health insurance coverage than their straight counterparts (http://365gay.com/Newscon08/05/051908health.htm). The data for these conclusions were apparently gathered in an online survey conducted by Harris Interactive, in conjunction with Witeck-Combs Communications.

When I first read this article, my ears perked up for a number of reasons. (A discussion of the article is also on today’s Pam’s House Blend blog at (www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do;jsessionid=3304E73FFF3A5622924B890EFD41D9F8?diaryId=5448).

First, I myself am without any health insurance. Finding a job after Steve’s and my gruesome experiences of injustice at a United Methodist University--

hasn’t been easy.

After my termination there and Steve’s resignation, we had the option to go with COBRA benefits. But they were prohibitively expensive. Since the betrayal of promises made to us

health insurance was a luxury we frankly couldn’t afford.

Because Steve worries about my health (as I do about his), he insisted that we buy some calamity-type coverage for me. We did so. The price was outrageous. After getting this insurance, we found it didn’t even cover any medical expenses or prescriptions, so that we were paying a huge amount for nothing.

Steve has now gotten a job, and we’re deeply grateful for this. I keep looking. He has good health coverage at his new workplace. Unfortunately, the workplace doesn’t provide partner benefits.

So I remain uncovered, and we are still trying to calculate the amount we can live on with one salary, while paying both the mortgage on our permanent house as well as on the temporary house we bought in Florida because of promises made to us

The downturn in the housing market has, of course, locked us into a mortgage for a house we cannot now sell, and are renting at a loss each month.

What we don’t yet know is how much wiggle room the take-home pay for the new job will give us, with two mortgages, to buy health insurance for me. As a result, I keep deferring any doctor’s or dentist’s visits, though I do have to watch some typical health challenges of members of my family as we age, including high blood pressure and cholesterol, as well as diabetes that now seems to have moved beyond the incipient stage.

I apologize for all the personal details. In recounting them, I am crucially aware that others have much harder struggles to attain even minimal health coverage. And those others are far from being exclusively gay or lesbian. There are racial and socio-economic (and gender) indicators that assure some people in our society never have access even to minimally good health care.

What makes my situation anomalous, in a sense, is that I am a white male with graduate degrees and a professional background, and am stuck, near retirement, without health coverage. Hence my interest in any research that shows a trend for gay and lesbian adults to be less provided for in the area of health coverage than our straight counterparts . . . .

Another reason I am particularly interested in this study at this time is that an e-friend, Shannon, posted a response yesterday to my 13 May blog posting entitled “Healthcare Equality Index for LGBT Americans” at http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/05/healthcare-equality-index-for-lgbt.html. I encourage readers of this blog to pay attention to Shannon’s testimony about the very serious struggles trans people encounter, in seeking health care in our society.

There definitely does seem to be a challenge for LGBT people in general in this area. And it’s not merely the challenge I described in the 13 May posting of dealing with a health-delivery system in which people continue to feel free to vent anger or hostility towards LGBT persons.

It’s also the challenge of attaining health coverage at all. Obviously, this challenge would be diminished if partner benefits were widely available. Unfortunately, they just aren’t, particularly for those of us living outside major coastal urban areas with large LGBT populations.

Just as being without work does, being without health coverage impact’s a human being’s self-esteem. You feel that your life doesn’t have a great deal of worth, when you realize that you can’t obtain treatment for illness easily. The sense of worthlessness can then spiral into a self-fulfilling prophecy, in which you don’t take care of your health as you should.

Again, I don’t want this posting to sound plaintive. I have privileges that go way beyond those many people, both straight and LGBT, have in our society, and I have less reason to complain than many people.

Still, there is something to be considered here, by anyone who is concerned about better health coverage for all citizens. I’m describing psychosocial dynamics that, in my view, are part and parcel of the experience of marginalization for many people in our society. And I would call on the churches of Main Street USA and the good people of Main Street USA to think about those dynamics, and how they affect the lives of the marginal.

I became aware of these dynamics in a more acute way in my years doing graduate study in Toronto. There, even as an American citizen without a visa or work permit (but with permission to study in the country), I was covered by the Ontario health system.

This meant that, as a student with very little money, I could go to the doctor and be treated for illness, and never pay a penny. I could fill a prescription, and not pay for the medicine. If I needed, I could go to a hospital and be treated, without having to pay.

People feel more human when they know that they have access to basic health coverage, regardless of their income. Systems that premise access to basic health coverage on one’s economic worth are barbarous. Churches that talk about justice and human rights without pushing hard for basic health coverage for all citizens undermine their credibility—and even more so, when their own institutions create quandaries such as the one I now find myself in, due to their discrimination against LGBT human beings.

I began this posting by noting that there was a bit of research I hoped to complete before posting, but that I hadn’t been able to do it. This research is a follow-up to another blog discussion of the 365Gay news article. On yesterday’s Bilerico Blog, Alex Blaze discussed the Harris Interactive Survey (see www.bilerico.com/2008/05/health_care_poll.php).

Blaze raises some critical questions about the accuracy of Harris Interactive polling, and I don’t want to overlook those questions. Even with those critical provisos, Blaze notes, however, that since access to health insurance is normally through jobs and marriage, it is entirely possible that further research would corroborate the conclusion of this poll that LGBT people get the short end of the stick when it comes to health coverage.

Questions for those of us who are Americans to ponder as our nation continues its current federal election cycle . . . .

When Doing the Right Thing Means Not Playing It Safe: Christians of the Radical Middle and LGBT Human Beings

I continue to read blog discussions dissecting what happened at the United Methodist Church General Conference. I find the “voice” of these discussions much more compelling than the news accounts (and essays) about General Conference appearing on UMC websites, both at the international level and at the level of various regional conferences.

These official news accounts are glitzy. They skim the surface—of what happened, of thought itself. They bruise gospel meaning with lots of breezy (and ultimately vapid) rhetoric about global connections, concern for women and people of color.

On many UMC websites, side-by-side with the gut-wrenching announcement of the 30 April decision to hold the line on homosexuality—that is, against our LGBT brothers and sisters—are happy-clappy news releases showing beaming natives smiling and singing.

I use the term “natives” deliberately. I know it’s condescending. The approach of the UMC to people of color and women is itself condescending. The approach of all churches of Main Street USA to the peoples of the global South and to women is condescending. People of color and women are being used today in disreputable games, in which the white male power structures that still determine the conversation in the churches of Main Street USA play preferred outcasts against disdained outcasts.

This is despicable. It is hurtful. How can our LGBT brothers and sisters not feel pain, when they read these self-congratulatory news stories about how the UMC is full of such compassion towards the suffering, the outcast, the poor and despised: except, “No gays need apply”?

How can our LGBT brothers and sisters look at the pictures of smiling and singing people of the global South and not remember what happened on 30 April with gnawing hurt in the pit of the stomach? How can the church itself—its white male leaders—not see that the game they are playing with talk of globalization and of promoting the rights of women and people of color is transparent and ugly? It is a game that will bring shame on the heads of these leaders of the churches of Main Street USA down the road, when society at large eventually recognizes how cruel is the accepted treatment of LGBT people in much of our culture at present.

Better to admit, frankly, that there’s no strong intent to bring anyone to the table except white men and representatives of approved minorities who have been vetted to assure that they’ll play the white-male power game and not upset the apple cart.

There is, in other words, not just a tiny bit, but a large helping, of prevarication in what the churches of Main Street USA say and do today to our LGBT brothers and sisters, and what they say and do to other sanitized minority groups. To get the real picture beyond prevarication, one has to set aside the glitzy self-congratulatory news stories, the official Comintern-like rhetoric of essays on local UMC conference websites (the two that have appeared on the Florida Conference website, authored by

are especially illuminating), and listen to authentic testimony on blogs.

To get the real picture, one has to delve into first-hand accounts, particularly reflections by those who were actually there and whose lives were yet again determined, without their input, by what one blog has characterized as acts of hate and deceit on the floor of General Conference.

Strong words, hate and deceit. But words I’m inclined to believe. I’m inclined to give credence to these words because I know some of the key players in the 30 April actions that told our LGBT brothers and sisters they aren’t welcome in UMC churches (yes, that’s what the action meant; that’s what it said, beyond the glitzy rhetoric about happy-clappy inclusion). And I know these players are capable of all kinds of deceit, in the name of Christ, to keep our LGBT brothers outside, to hold the line.

I also know this deceit is a manifestation of hate, even when the face speaking the official Comintern words to an LGBT believer is the face of a smiling white man who vaunts his achievements at bringing women and people of color to the table of power and privilege. Hate is hate, and those who feel its cutting edge know what it feels like, even when it’s enshrouded in rhetoric and hidden inside chatter about the power of the Holy Spirit and conversion and campaigns to revive the church.

An interesting recurring theme in the blog accounts of some General Conference delegates who voted to hold the line against our LGBT brothers and sisters is how “tough” the decision was, how “anguished” they felt in making it.

I don’t doubt this testimony in the least. But I’d like to expose it to some analysis, to ask some critical questions about what it really means, about what it means at the level of fundamental reality to say that decisions to keep our LGBT brothers and sisters away from the table are tough and anguishing.

The first critical questions I'd like to ask are, Really? Why? If we know that what we are doing is right, then why anguish? If we have listened for the voice of the Spirit in holy conferencing and have discerned that it is the Spirit Herself who moves us to exclude brothers and sisters, then why do we find the decision tough?

I’d like to propose that these admissions of how tough and anguishing the decision to exclude our LGBT brothers and sisters was contain a revelatory nugget of truth about just what really is at stake in the continued shoving of LGBT people away from the Lord’s table in the churches of Main Street USA.

What’s really at stake is not, as many delegates want to propose, a tough, anguishing decision to hold the line of doctrinal and moral purity, of orthodoxy, of biblical inerrancy. What’s really at stake is exclusion, pure and simple: stark, hate-fueled, fear-filled, Spirit-denying decisions to keep LGBT brothers and sisters outside, to define LGBT human beings as people whose humanity doesn’t count—at least, not the way my own humanity counts.

One blogger (again, someone I know, in that I grew up in the same town as did this General Conference delegate: flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood) who speaks of the tough, anguishing decision she had to make on 30 April actually notes that the focus of concern has shifted in recent years in the UMC from excluding openly gay people from ordination, to excluding openly gay people. Period.

That's quite an admission. I find it a refreshing admission, an honest one, all the more so because it is coming from a theologically trained United Methodist who proclaims herself to be a feminist theologian, but who represents what she clearly sees as the radical middle of the church. This admission has the ring of authenticity about it.

I can appreciate, then, that this delegate’s decision to hold the line was tough and anguishing, because she knew precisely what she was doing in holding the line: she was holding the line against LGBT brothers and sisters, not against doctrinal error or heterodoxy. She was telling these brothers and sisters that, sorry, the door is closed just for now. Come back later. Perhaps we’ll have a crumb or two for you then, when we've fed everyone else and assessed our resources. Only one table—can't feed everybody, you know.

In fact, how about coming back four years from now? Perhaps by then, we delegates will pay a less taxing price if we rethink the tough, anguishing decision to exclude you. Maybe then our fellow church members will no longer punish us so severely if we finally decide to stand up for inclusion.

Because the churches of Main Street USA are, at heart, culture churches, this is really the underlying logic of what is going on in the exclusion of LGBT persons, isn’t it? It’s too risky right now to stand against the radical middle. Many of us have careers to make, after all. We don’t get to one of the big “first” churches of urban areas—the power pulpits where our voice is beamed out across an entire state as "the" Methodist voice of the area—except by playing it safe.

We don't get the power pulpit unless we become skilled at calculating the next step in the radical middle and assuring that we're in line with that step. That's what the radical middle means, for goodness' sake! It means walking lockstep and never stepping out of line, baptizing our conformity as a holy tactic for holding the church together.

We don’t get those coveted episcopal appointments if we step out of line. We would have headaches to deal with if we came back to Main Street USA and told the folks of the radical middle that we had let the gays inside: battles to fight, letter-writing campaigns to combat, dwindling donations, threats of power mongers to make our lives miserable.

Now that the Supreme Court of California has knocked down that state’s ban on gay marriage, it’s interesting to compare the underlying logic of this civil rights decision with the logic underlying the choice of churches of the radical middle to continue excluding our LGBT brothers and sisters.

Yesterday, Maura Dolan of the Los Angeles Times published an interview with California Supreme Court Chief Justice Ronald M. George (www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-gay18-2008may18,0,4272300.story). George, a Republican who voted with the majority in the recent gay-marriage decision, speaks about how tough and anguishing the decision was for him to make.

Dolan notes that, as George pondered the decision, he kept returning in his memory to a trip he and his parents made to the segregated South years ago:

As he read the legal arguments, the 68-year-old moderate Republican was drawn by memory to a long ago trip he made with his European immigrant parents through the American South. There, the signs warning "No Negro" or "No colored" left "quite an indelible impression on me," he recalled in a wide-ranging interview Friday.

George’s conclusion about his decision to grant gay Americans civil rights, just as African Americans have been granted civil rights, is fascinating: "I think there are times when doing the right thing means not playing it safe."

“I think there are times when doing the right thing means not playing it safe.”

Churchmen (and churchwomen formed in the churchman's image) of the radical middle, do you hear what the California Supreme Court Chief Justice is saying? When African Americans were told that they were unwelcome at your table in the Jim Crow South, what did you do then?

Did you provide prophetic witness about how the church of Jesus Christ always welcomes everyone to the table, and most of all those who are excluded, demeaned, outcast?

Or did you play it safe? Did you play it safe while talking about the power of the Holy Spirit and conversion and bringing new life to the church?

Now that you have another opportunity to provide prophetic witness, how will you behave? How will you behave now, when you have confessed to the world the sin of your previous racism and misogyny?

Will you continue talking about the power of the Holy Spirit and conversion and bringing new life to the church, while belying that rhetoric with your ugly treatment of your LGBT brothers and sisters? Will you reverse the discrimination you currently practice only when society itself makes such discrimination unthinkable?

Or will you demonstrate the power of the Holy Spirit, conversion, and how new life is brought to the church by welcoming everyone to the table, and most of all those who are excluded, demeaned, outcast? Will you demonstrate this now when it still not entirely safe to make such courageous (Spirit-inspired) decisions?

Or will you once again repent only when it’s safe to do so?

What would Jesus do?

Democracy: Ongoing Battle, Shifting Faces

Interesting today to read Adam Liptak’s news analysis article about the California Supreme Court decision this week. The article is entitled “Same-Sex Marriage and Racial Justice Find Common Ground” (www.nytimes.com/2008/05/17/us/17marriage.html?th&emc=th).

Liptak notes the many strong parallels between the struggle for African-American civil rights (including the right of interracial marriage), and the struggle for LGBT civil rights. As he notes, the chief justice of the California Supreme Court, Ronald M. George, quoted repeatedly from Perez v. Sharp (1948) in the oral-argument phase of the recent hearing. Perez struck down California’s ban on interracial marriage.

As Liptak concludes, “The chief justice seemed to be accepting arguments for same-sex marriage that were consciously rooted in the struggle for equal rights for blacks.”

When Perez lifted legal denial of the possibility of interracial marriage in California, 29 other states still had laws barring interracial marriage. These include almost all of the states that have now passed laws forbidding gay marriage, and/or constitutional amendments defining marriage as the marriage of one man and one woman.

In other words, just as interracial marriage was stoutly contested by legal means in the American South through the middle part of the 20^th century, gay marriage is just as fiercely rejected in the very same area as the 21^st century begins. The same defenders of Christian values in the churches of Main Street USA who today combat gay marriage fought against interracial marriage in the preceding century.

Bans on miscegenation were not finally eradicated in the U.S. until 1967, when Loving v. Virginia struck down the 16 remaining antimiscegenation laws still on state books in the U.S. I will leave it to readers to discover which states still carried these laws on their books in 1967.

When California abolished its prohibition of interracial marriage in 1948, no other state supreme court followed suit. The Perez decision preceded the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which called for the integration of public schools “with all deliberate speed.”

Democracy takes work. It requires vigilance, determination to keep enfranchising those who are disenfranchised. Such enfranchisement doesn't happen quickly or easily, when groups have historically been disenfranchised. Moving democracy forward—making it fully participatory, bringing everyone to the table—requires strong sacrifice and strong courage on the part of those who care about the ideals for which our nation was founded.

The story I tell in yesterday’s blog—my experience growing up in Arkansas in the 1950s and 1960s—happened in that “deliberate speed” time frame, a period in which we white Southerners kicked and screamed against speed, did all we could to resist integration, and would not ever have willingly gone into that good night without pressure from the federal government, from both the executive and the judicial branches. We bitterly resented those activist judges of the Supreme Court who told us that our Christian customs and Christian culture were insufficiently democratic.

Had civil rights for African Americans been left up to popular consensus, to a majority vote, I have absolutely no doubt that the majority of Southern states—and, indeed, of the nation—would have voted against abolition of segregation in the middle of the 20^th century. The democratic ideals of the founding fathers and mothers have worked themselves out only slowly over the course of history, and have required stringent defense by a watchful minority of concerned citizens and journalists, as well as by conscientious judiciaries and legislators.

This is a point Bill Moyers makes in his new book Moyers on Democracy (Doubleday, 2008). Today’s Alternet website carries and excerpt from the book.

What Moyers has to say about journalists is music to my ears. As readers of this blog may have noted, one reason I celebrate the internet’s development of alternative news sites (and blogs) is that this development finds ways around the traditional media’s control of the news. I am alarmed at the ways in which the mainstream media today appear to have sold their souls to money and power.

Moyers argues that democracy is seriously imperiled when journalists have allowed themselves to be bought by wealthy power mongers. He notes:

I wish I could say that journalists in general are showing the same interest in uncovering the dangerous linkages thwarting this democracy. It is not for lack of honest and courageous individuals who would risk their careers to speak truth to power -- a modest risk compared to those of some journalists in authoritarian countries who have been jailed or murdered for the identical "crime." But our journalists are not in control of the instruments they play. As conglomerates swallow up newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, and networks, and profit rather than product becomes the focus of corporate effort, news organizations -- particularly in television -- are folded into entertainment divisions. The "news hole" in the print media shrinks to make room for advertisements, and stories needed by informed citizens working together are pulled in favor of the latest celebrity scandals because the media moguls have decided that uncovering the inner workings of public and private power is boring and will drive viewers and readers away to greener pastures of pabulum. Good reporters and editors confront walls of resistance in trying to place serious and informative reports over which they have long labored. Media owners who should be sounding the trumpets of alarm on the battlements of democracy instead blow popular ditties through tin horns, undercutting the basis for their existence and their First Amendment rights.

Thinking about creating and maintaining a democracy that is really participatory—one that allows all to be at the table of public life—brings me back to the example of that exemplary African-American leader of the early 20^th century, Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune. At a time in which some African-American women seem unwilling to recognize the obvious strong parallels between the struggle of people of color (and of women) for a place at the table, and the similar struggle of LGBT Americans, prophetic African-American women like Mary McLeod Bethune deserve renewed attention.

Dr. Bethune recognized that marginalization of any group of citizens—whether on the basis of gender, class, economic status, or any other stigmatized difference—frayed the fabric of a participatory society. The town-hall meetings she innovated at the school she founded, Bethune-Cookman College, brought together different groups for dialogue not only because she believed that institutions of higher education can play a significant role in assuring the health of civic societies, but also because she viewed these meetings as an enactment of her social analysis, which stressed the interconnections of all those who are shut out of the process of participatory democracy.

At the very center of Dr. Bethune’s understanding of social transformation was a belief that, in a viable democracy, there must be an ongoing process of extending inalienable rights to all disenfranchised groups. In Dr. Bethune’s view, the concept of inalienable rights enshrined in the United States’s foundational documents requires that, over the course of time, as democratic society recognizes that any group is being unfairly disenfranchised on grounds of race, gender, or other accidental characteristics, this group must be brought into full participation in the structures of the society.

As a student of Dr. Bethune’s thought, Elaine Smith, notes, Mary McLeod Bethune did not confine herself to pursuing civil rights for either African Americans or for women. She recognized the interconnections between the struggle of all disenfranchised Americans for access to the table of participatory democracy. Smith notes that, both as an educator and a political activist, Dr. Bethune “confronted issue layered upon issue” (see Audrey Thomas McCluskey and Elaine M. Smith, ed., Mary McLeod Bethune: Building a Better World [Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999], “Introduction,” p. 201).

Mary McLeod Bethune concerned herself (and her students) with civil rights for blacks and women, but also with issues of education, job placement, housing, health care, the military, and civilian defense—all in a central quest to extend full civil rights to all disenfranchised minorities.

Thinking about Dr. Bethune in light of this week’s baby-step attempt to bring LGBT Americans to the table of participatory democracy—thinking about the prophetic role that some African-American women, including Coretta Scott King and Barbara Jordan, have played in the struggle for LGBT civil rights—brings me back to a question I raised in a previous posting.

This is a question about the role of the United Methodist Church and its institutions in addressing key issues of social need. This week, Wayne Hudson reports on the Bilerico blog that, yet again, the state of Florida is in the news for heated resistance to gay civil rights.

Hudson’s report is entitled “Florida Bully Principal Loses His Case, But May Win His Battle” (www.bilerico.com/2008/05/florida_bully_principal_loses_his_case_b.php). He reports on a case in which students at Ponce de Leon High School in Panama City who wore symbols supporting solidarity with gay students were forced to remove these symbols, while students wearing Confederate flags were allowed to continue displaying those overtly political symbols.

The students contacted the ACLU, and a Florida federal court ruled in their favor.

Thinking about this case reminds me of some imperatives the recent UMC General Conference developed for United Methodists. Legislation passed at General Conference calls on United Methodists to educate—to teach people how to understand and prevent mechanisms of social violence including homophobia.

General Conference specifically calls on United Methodist Churches and UMC institutions to combat homophobia, and to educate communities and churches about homophobia and heterosexism.

In a state where battle lines are drawn, where violence against LGBT citizens is becoming routine, where a homophobic bill is on the ballot for the coming election, what better place to launch the educational initiatives for which General Conference calls than Bethune-Cookman University? As the welcome statement of the university’s current president, Dr. Trudie Kibbe Reed, on the Bethune-Cookman website, notes,

Founded in 1904 by Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, Bethune-Cookman College is an outstanding liberal arts college with a rich legacy. Through her pursuit of lifelong learning and social equity for all people, Dr. Bethune demonstrated that education was capable of democratizing society through civic engagement and academic excellence. Today, this legacy lives on in our students as they engage in volunteerism projects, service learning, and civic engagement projects that enhance effective citizenship.

The rich legacy of Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune and of the university she founded makes that United Methodist university a perfect location for the United Methodist Church to begin putting into practice its concern to combat discrimination in all forms, to educate for tolerance in a culture where violence is rearing its ugly head. The fact that Bethune-Cookman University is a United Methodist HBCU (an historically black university) makes it a perfect location for UMC-sponsored educational initiatives to build bridges between the African American and the gay communities—both of whom struggle with persistent discrimination about which the United Methodist Church professes to be concerned.

In a November 1941 letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dr. Bethune notes that she believed it was imperative that the school she had founded thrive, because Bethune-Cookman College had become a “community center” for discussion and civic engagement in its region.

As I continue to reflect on the statements made by the United Methodist Church at its recent General Conference—and as the United Church of Christ launches its Sacred Conversation on Race—I encourage the UMC bishop of Florida, Bishop Timothy Whitaker, to give serious consideration to the legacy of Dr. Bethune as a foundation for serious educational work at the "community center" she founded, Bethune-Cookman University, around issues of homophobia, racism, heterosexism, and other forms of discrimination in American society.

What more splendid countercultural witness could the United Methodist Church offer in a state so divided over these issues today as the state of Florida, than carrying on Dr. Bethune’s dream of educating through civic engagement to continue the democratization of American society?

Talking about General Conference reminds me to summarize the three discourse rules I developed for holy conferencing in previous postings. As I do this, I’m reminded, too, to express my gratitude to several United Methodist websites—including UMNexus—that have linked to this blog’s discussion of UMC issues. I have received quite a few new blog visitors because of those links, and am grateful for the new readers.

Here, in one list, are my three discourse rules for holy conferencing:

1. In effective holy conferencing that aims at the practice of faithful Christian discipleship, truth claims need to be backed by evidence and sources that are accessible to all, and capable of being evaluated by all.

2. Effective holy conferencing requires policies and procedures to create transparency and accountability among all participants about organizations other than the church that they may be representing in holy conferencing. In particular, effective holy conferencing requires policies and procedures that create transparency and accountability about funding sources for delegates who represent organizations other than the church, as they engage in holy conferencing.

3. Effective holy conferencing that aims at the practice of faithful Christian discipleship will give a privileged place at the table to those whose voices are least powerful in mainstream culture.