Creating Sacred Places: Barack Obama and the Legacy of Mary McLeod Bethune

With the eyes of the world on Bethune-Cookman University today as Barack Obama speaks there, I can think only of how different our nation would be now, if the insights of Mary McLeod Bethune informed our imaginations of the common good.

It’s frustrating in the extreme to wake today and read that an AP-Yahoo poll reveals a third of white Democrats expressing negative views of African Americans (http://news.yahoo.com/page/election-2008-political-pulse-obama-race). Now. A half century following the Civil Rights struggle, and race still matters. So intently.

Because race has always mattered and always will matter—as long as we choose to let it matter—Mary McLeod Bethune envisioned the school she founded as a place of reconciliation between the races (and the genders). A place in which everyone could gather around a table large enough to include all whose voices needed a hearing, all shoved from the table of participatory democracy in the culture at large. A sacred place, one in which the troubled waters of distrust, suspicion, and rancor—between races and genders, between one minority group and another—could be stilled by communion and dialogue.

Near the end of her life, Dr. Bethune sketched her dream for the college she had founded this way:

So I want this to always be kind of a sacred place—a place to awaken people and to have them realize that there is something in the world they can do; and if they try hard enough, they will do that thing….I think we need leaders now so much. I thought that we would hold conferences, interracial conferences with women of all classes and creeds that we might sit together, think together, and plan together how we might make a better world to live in (Bethune Papers, Bethune-Cookman University; in Audrey Thomas McCluskey and Elaine M. Smith, ed., Mary McLeod Bethune: Building a Better World [Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999], p. 271).

As the eyes of the world look today towards the sacred place Mary McLeod Bethune founded, the place in which she is buried, what better way to honor all she stood for than to seek, in every way possible, to create such spaces everywhere we can.

Places where people can sit together, talk together, work together, towards goals that transcend narrow self-interest. Places in which the races can begin the painful task of learning to trust each other.

Places that can model racial harmony for the rest of the world by bringing together black leaders and brown leaders and white leaders and red and yellow ones—just as Dr. Bethune sought to do in her lifetime. Places where we grant that, shamefully, naming people’s skin color does still matter, but work to make it matter less for the next generation.

With this prophetic African-American leader as his guide, Mr. Obama will work hard to build leadership teams and grassroots coalitions that bridge gaps of ugly racial separation. What else can he do? The problems of our nation are so deep, every voice needs to count. We cannot afford to exclude anyone from the table.

Not even our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered brothers and sisters. If Mr. Obama looks to Mary McLeod Bethune for guidance—and I surely hope he will, as he speaks at the sacred place she created—he will keep that in mind. And he’ll continue to talk about it and act on it.

Because it is certainly what she herself would have wanted for the sacred place where she struggled so hard to form leadership teams and grassroots coalitions that crossed racial lines.

It's hard work, creating trust where there is so much understandable reason for distrust. It's work that takes many hands and many voices. It's work that demands patience and sacrifice, lifetimes of patience and sacrifice.

But it's indispensable work, if we want to move forward. And we have no choice except to look forward, given the state to which we have now brought ourselves through our cultivation of distrust, greed, dishonesty, and preference for the glitzy and the shallow rather than the substantial and the true. Do we?

HBCUs and Homophobia: A Brief Source Guide

As an aid to anyone using this blog today to research the historic contributions HBCUs have made to dialogue about social justice in America, as well as the challenge HBCUs face today in dealing with homophobia, I have prepared the following guide.

Section I lists Bilgrimage blog postings that have dealt with these topics, and that link to other research cited in these postings.

Section II is a brief listing of internet sites that specifically address the question of HBCUs and homophobia, and current attempts to deal with the problem of homophobia on HBCU campuses.

Section III links to official United Methodist Church statements forbidding discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation in Methodist institutions, and calling on United Methodist institutions to implement non-discrimination practices.

Section IV links to statements of various accrediting bodies in the field of higher education, requiring institutions of higher learning to address homophobia in order to retain accreditation.

Section I: Bilgrimage Blog Postings

1. http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/09/hbcus-and-cdc-data-about-new-hiv.html

2. http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/05/soul-work-holy-conferencing-in_05.html

3. http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/05/holy-conferencing-as-love-building.html

4. http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/06/barack-obama-and-post-homophobic-models.html

5. http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/hate-crime-in-daytona-beach-continuing.html

6. http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/06/and-pilgrimage-continues_03.html

7. http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/06/race-and-our-transformational-moment.html

8. http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/05/democracy-ongoing-battle-shifting-faces.html

9. http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/02/week-in-review.html

Section II: Brief Listing of Internet Statements re: HBCUs and Homophobia

1. “Gay and Black: They Don’t Mix at Too Many Historically Black Universities,” www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=1284

2. Human Rights Campaign’s “Historically Black Colleges and Universities Program” www.hrc.org/news/5087.htm: a network of HBCUs who have gathered with HRC to combat This homophobia on HBCU campuses following a wave of violence against LGBT students from 2002 forward.

3. On Florida in particular, and the struggle to combat homophobia there, I recommend the new Bilerico Project blog focusing on Florida, http://florida.bilerico.com.

Section III: Official United Methodist Statements about Homophobic Discrimination*

1. The Social Principles of the United Methodist Church, § 162
http://archives.umc.org/interior.asp?mid=1753: “Certain basic human rights and civil liberties are due all persons. We are committed to supporting those rights and liberties for homosexual persons.”

2. Petition 80845, 2008 UMC General Conference, “Opposition to Homophobia and Heterosexism” (passed by vote of 544 vs. 369)
http://calms.umc.org/2008/Menu.aspx?type=Petition&mode=Single&number=845: “THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the United Methodist Church strengthen its advocacy of the eradication of sexism by opposing all forms of violence or discrimination based on gender, gender identity, sexual practice or sexual orientation.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the General Board of Church and Society develop resources and materials aimed at educating members of the local churches about the reality, issues, and effects of homophobia and heterosexism and the need for Christian witness against these facets of marginalization.”

3. UMC University Senate, “Marks of a United Methodist Church-Related Institution”
http://www.gbhem.org/site/c.lsKSL3POLvF/b.3871459/k.9279/Marks_of_a_United_Methodist_ChurchRelated_Academic_Institution.htm: “A Church-related institution recognizes the Social Principles of the United Methodist Church and seeks to create a community of scholarship and learning which facilitates social justice.”

Section IV: Higher Education Accrediting Bodies re: Homophobia

1. National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), Accreditation Standard 4, “Diversity”
http://www.ncate.org/public/unitStandardsRubrics.asp?ch=4#stnd4: “Candidates are helped to understand the potential impact of discrimination based on race, class, gender, disability, sexual orientation, and language on students and their learning. Proficiencies related to diversity are identified in the unit’s conceptual framework. They are clear to candidates and are assessed as part of the unit’s assessment system.” See http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/03/teaching-youth-not-to-hate.html for further information.


*These are included since the open letter published on this blog today calls on Mr. Obama to address homophobia at HBCUs as he speaks tomorrow at a United Methodist university, Bethune-Cookman. Similar statements are often available for other church-sponsored HBCUs.

Caged Birds and Songs They Sing

Thinking of cages as this day goes on.

Specifically, of Maya Angelou’s autobiographical statement about why the caged bird sings. From the moment I first read Angelou’s memoir, I fell in love with it, and with her metaphor of social stigmatization and marginalization as a caging of the human spirit.

As a gay man, I understand a bit about what it means to be placed in a cage. Because I also challenge myself continuously to understand and push against the social tendency to place people in cages solely because of innate characteristics such as skin color, gender, or sexual orientation, I find a place inside myself where I can form solidarity with others who are placed in cages for reasons different from my reason for being caged.

I believe—and I know from my own experience—that it is possible for us to project our hearts, minds, and souls into the experience of others, not so that we completely understand the unique experience of others, but so that we can empathize. And in empathizing, begin the process of assisting others to break their cage bars. Because we ourselves know how painful it feels to be shut into a cage against our will.

Because I believe in the possibility of such solidarity of heart, mind, and soul with the caged Other, I find it difficult to understand those who have every reason to know what it feels like to be unjustly caged, but who find it impossible to muster solidarity with Others different from themselves.

When I encounter, for instance, African Americans and/or women who do not intend to make solidarity with gay-lesbian persons, I am baffled. I can never fully understand what it means to live life in the skin of someone who is African American, or in the body of someone who is female. It would be pretentious and false for me to claim that I do understand those experiences, or the particular kind of marginalization people of color and women endure.

Nonetheless, I have the ability to understand in my heart, mind, and soul what being put in a cage against one’s will feels like. And that ability compels me to do everything in my power to open the cages of those unjustly imprisoned due to innate traits over which they have no control.

People shut up in tight little prisons; people treated as if they do not have intellect and capability to feel deeply when their dignity is assaulted; people lied to and lied about solely because of their denigrated innate characteristics; people lied to cynically as though they cannot discern a lie from the truth; people susceptible to manifold forms of social violence because of how they were born; people against whom others use the law as a tool of oppression rather than a tool to effect justice: these people know what it feels like to want out of the cage.

And because they know, because their own souls have been seared by the injustice of being treated as non-persons, they commit themselves to the liberation of others from cages. That is, they do so if they do not want to diminish their own humanity.

Because in the final analysis, when we blame others for finding themselves unjustly imprisoned in tiny cages, and when we cruelly use their own attempts to batter down the cage bars as justification for keeping them caged, it is ourselves we diminish.

Not the one we’re trying to keep in a cage. Those folks usually know in their souls that their humanity is the same kind of humanity everyone else shares. And even in prison, even as caged birds, they can still sing to assert their humanity against the bars of their cages.

And, of course, given even the slightest chance, they fly out of the cage the moment the door springs open.

An Open Letter to Barack Obama: HBCUs and Homophobia

Dear Mr. Obama:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectfully yours,

William D. Lindsey.



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For me. For all of us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Economic Crisis: Hard Come, Easy Go

WARNING: The following interconnected postings may contain adult material and hard language. Parents are counseled to take this rating very seriously.

So today when I open my email, I see a Yahoo headline announcing that Americans are feeling anxious about the economy. Now we’re feeling anxious. We’re anxious now, weeks after we were presented with the most insultingly ill-prepared team of candidates for the presidency and vice-presidency in the history of our nation. We have suddenly become anxious after weeks of letting ourselves be lied to in the most bold-faced way possible by said ill-prepared candidates.

Now we’re anxious.

I’m trying to understand the anxiety (and, yes, I share it). My outlook on the ups and downs of the stock market and of the banking system is probably non-normative. It’s skewed by my experiences as a gay man struggling to be open about his life and relationship within church-related academic institutions that find it impossible to welcome and affirm openly gay personnel.

As I follow the economic news this week, I’m sometimes struck by the fact that, due to our checkered careers, the fluidity of Steve’s and my financial status actually makes me a bit less anxious than I should be, as markets tank and banks go under. It’s not as if we’ve ever had much, after all. It’s not as if we have actually been able to save much, anyway.

Here today, gone tomorrow. Or as my Poor Clare friend Courtney used to say when one of her pots exploded in the kiln, Hard come, easy go.

I’m not saying that this attitude is ideal or desirable. I’m just saying it is: it’s there. I have it, after years of working in church institutions in which my being gay and in a long-term committed relationship has made all the difference. Well, being gay and in a long-term committed relationship and refusing to hide these facts that count more than anything else in the eyes of many church leaders and leaders of church-owned colleges.

So if there’s blame to apportion—for the economic place in which Steve and I find ourselves, that is—then we must share some of it, mustn’t we? After all, it’s not as if we didn’t know, when we chose our vocations, that our own Catholic church and many other churches are, shall we say, somewhat less than civil to gay people. What did we expect, after all, when we knocked at the door and asked not only to be let in, but to be let in as we were, without apologizing for our outrageous dishabille?

Well, I suppose it’s safe to say we didn’t expect what we got: kicks in the teeth, when carved in big letters over the door on which we knocked was the inscription, “Let every guest be received as Christ.” Stones instead of bread.

We were naïve, you see. We believed that we had not chosen the vocation of theologians: it had chosen us. We had no choice except to respond. It was a calling rather than an employment choice. We were naïve.

to be continued . . . .

Blog Disclaimers and Free Speech: More Legal ≠ Ethical

Wow. I open my stats counter this morning to find that nearly 400 people read my blog yesterday (correction: I have re-checked, and the figure was actually 513)—a frightening discovery, frankly. And then when I look at the comments section, I discover the reason for the spike in readership.

Andrew Sullivan* kindly linked to my posting yesterday on his Daily Dish blog, which has an immense readership compared with my much more modest daily readership (http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/09/intimidating-th.html). I am certainly grateful to Andrew Sullivan for the publicity (and, yes, well, perhaps a bit flattered to discover a journalist of his stature has read my blog), but also abashed by the sudden discovery.

It makes knowing what to say today harder than usual. I feel I am writing more for an audience in today’s posting, and less for myself. And given the size of the audience, it's important that I say something important.

Perhaps the most important thing I can do in today’s posting is address the question of a respondent yesterday about why my blog contains a disclaimer, when I’m advocating free speech.

That’s a good question. The answer has everything to do with what I said in my second posting yesterday, about the distinction between legality and ethicality. As that posting notes, even churches and institutions they sponsor—or especially churches and church institutions?—are not above using the law to try to curb free speech, and to trample on the rights of those who have far less economic clout and capability to engage in spin control and image management than churches and their institutions have.

Unfortunately, in saying this, I am writing from grim personal experience. In fact, only yesterday, the day on which I blogged about free speech issues, I received a legal threat from an institution—a church-owned one—that has repeatedly sought to curb my free speech on this blog.

The letter demanded that I remove a posting from my blog (actually, it demands “the immediate removal of his above-referenced blog”), or legal action would be taken against me. The demand that I remove something I have posted on my blog is based on the claim that I have violated a legal covenant that forbids me to post anything that has even an indirect adverse effect on the organization with which I have entered this covenant.

I have received previous threats from this institution. In a previous letter from the institution’s legal counsel, I was informed, to my astonishment, “We paid for his silence”(!!). This letter demanded “the immediate removal of his above-referenced blog.”

I have not violated a legal covenant with the institution in question, and have no intention of doing so. Even so, I have bent over backwards to accommodate reasonable requests from the institution. I have gone so far as to delete material from my blog when the institution has demanded that I do so—even when that material in no shape, form, or fashion violates any stipulation of any legal covenant into which I have entered.

I have done so solely because I am trying to avoid legal action that would be financially ruinous to Steve and me at this point in our lives. The church-owned institution in question knows that we do not have the economic wherewithal to fight a protracted legal battle. In fact, this church-owned institution helped create the precarious economic situation in which we find ourselves, by making promises to us on which we acted, indebting ourselves, and then violating those promises and leaving us with the debt we incurred because we were foolish enough to believe that good church folks are bound to be people of their word.

I have, however, adamantly refused the demand to suppress my entire blog, and I have rejected the claim of the institution that is harassing me that it can censor my blog on a routine basis. As I put the point in a letter to my attorney when the harassment began,

There is a significant issue of freedom of speech at stake here, and I am surprised that [Church-Owned Institution’s legal counsel] apparently does not seem to see that issue clearly. [Church-Owned Institution] has not bought my right to free speech. Nor has [Church-Owned Institution] bought the right to censor me or my writings, insofar as nothing I publish violates the discrete terms of my separation agreement.

And if something I publish does violate the discrete terms of the agreement, the burden of proof is on [Church-Owned Institution] and/or [its president] to show how what I have written or may write violates the terms of the agreement. Merely stating that I have violated the agreement does not constitute proof.

Bullying me will not influence me to stop doing what I have a legal right (and ethical obligation) to do: to continue writing, as a theologian, about issues that concern me. I am not impressed by and do not let the behavior of bullies sway decisions I make about my vocation.

I must say frankly that I am perturbed by the bullying in [Church-Owned Institution’s legal counsel’s] letter, and in how the letter characterizes the claims of [Church-Owned Institution] and [its president] vis-à-vis my human rights and my rights as a scholar-theologian.

In this attempt to shut down my blog, there is an implication that a [Church-Owned Institution] has a right to censor me as a theologian blogging about [name of church in question] issues or [name of church in question] events. This implication depends on a dangerous and entirely insupportable extension of discrete, simply limited terms of a separation agreement to my entire right to free speech.

I will not stand for further bullying of this sort. I do not intend to stop writing, thinking, or dialoguing as a scholar-theologian. If anything is unethical in this story, it is what [Church-Owned Institution’s president] and [Church-Owned Institution] have done to Steve Schafer and me.

Hence the disclaimer. An institution that has placed my life partner and me in a difficult economic situation by making promises to us and then violating them now claims a legal right to censor my blog on an ongoing basis, and threatens to file suit against me on the ground that, though I have never named this institution in any posting it is claiming to find offensive, even what I say that can be construed as indirectly affecting the church-owned institution in a negative way will be the basis for legal action.

To my way of thinking, this situation underscores the problem I tried to identify in yesterday’s posting about legality and ethicality. In areas in which gay citizens are not legally protected from firing simply because they are gay (and the church-owned institution in question is in such an area), churches and their institutions know full well that they can take full advantage of the law, as well as of homophobic prejudice, when they proceed against openly gay people who annoy them. They are willing to use homophobic prejudice to their advantage, to smear the reputations and destroy the careers of gay folks. Church people are willing to do this, members of churches that profess to deplore homophobia . . . .

And they often still get away with it. Those of us who fight back in these areas often pay a steep price—unless organizations dedicated to defending human rights offer us assistance, and unless our allies in the gay community help us to publicize our stories.

Otherwise—and churches and their institutions know this very well—in areas where homophobia still sways the decisions of juries (and where homophobia is legally enshrined), we who stand up and fight very often find ourselves fighting a losing battle, with ruinous consequences to us personally and little to show for the battle.

What we do have going for us, of course, is our story—when others are willing to listen to it carefully and sympathetically. I have refrained from telling the story because I want to avoid legal action. I am, however, prepared to tell it if the harassment continues. As my letter to my attorney when the harassment began notes,

This is a story in which I believe accrediting bodies for institutions of higher education,** churches, legal rights watchdog groups, and groups assisting gay and lesbian persons to fight against discrimination will all be interested.

I do not intend to make the story public, because doing so would violate the terms of my separation agreement. I must state, however, that if [Church-Owned Institution’s president] and/or [Church-Owned Institution] continue to harass me, make unfounded accusations against me that bear on my character, and seek to shut down my right to free speech, I will fight these actions in any legal arena in which I can fight.

And that will mean making the story public. At that point, I will be prepared to share the story and all its details as widely as possible, and will contact every agency I can think to contact, which might have an interest in the story.

So there it is: the reason for this blog's disclaimer. Even saying what I have said in the preceding posting may well result in legal action on the part of this church-owned institution—though nothing in what I have said identifies the institution in question.

And saying that leads me to issue a plea, something I find difficult to do, since I tend to be a self-reliant sort of person: if any readers of this blog know of organizations that might offer assistance to someone who finds herself or himself in the predicament in which Steve and I now find ourselves, we’d surely like to know of those organizations.

For those of us living in the heartland, it can be difficult to obtain support and publicity when we fight our battles against homophobia. The power centers of the media are elsewhere. Our voices, the voices of those of us in middle America, just don’t reach far.

We need allies. We need assistance. The battles we are fighting in the places in which we are seeking to live with dignity and respect because our roots are in these places are every bit as important as those fought in the big-city bicoastal venues of the nation. Perhaps even more important, since, unless homophobia is defeated in the heartland, it will continue to warp our entire political life, to the detriment of people everywhere in the country . . . .

*P.S. A personal note of thanks to you, Mr. Sullivan, in case you happen to read this posting. I appreciate the link very much.

**I am disclosing nothing damaging about the identity of Church-Owned Institution in noting that my career has been spent in the academy.