"The" Catholic Vote and the Bishops' Pastoral Failure

The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal shows Barack Obama leading among Catholic voters by six percentage points (www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27297013).

And this at a moment when Bishop Joseph Martino of Scranton made a surprise appearance at a presidential election forum at St. John’s parish in Honesdale, PA, Sunday night to announce, “There is one teacher in this diocese, and these points are not debatable” (www.wayneindependent.com/news/x270972980/Bishop-stresses-abortion-view-at-political-forum).

The “points” to which Bishop Martino referred are those presented in the guideline for Catholic voters, “Faithful Citizenship,” issued by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2007. The forum at St. John’s parish made the document available to those attending. At his arrival, Martino brandished “Faithful Citizenship,” announcing, “No USCCB document is relevant in this diocese. The USCCB doesn’t speak for me. The only relevant document . . . is my letter.”

The letter to which Bishop Martino is referring here is a pastoral letter he issued to be read in all parishes on 28 September, instructing faithful Catholics to vote on the issue of abortion—alone—in the coming elections. As those who have followed Catholic political debate for some years now recognize, this is none-too-veiled codespeak for, “Faithful Catholics must vote Republican.”

As this is happening, Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City upped the rhetorical ante last night at a lecture at the Dole Institute of Politics at Kansas University (www2.ljworld.com/news/2008/oct/22/catholic_archbishop_gives_moral_guidance_election). Yes, that would be the Dole, as in Robert J. Dole, the retired Republican senator from Kansas who ran as the Republican candidate for president in 1996.

Yes, the Robert J. Dole whose wife Liddy is now senator from North Carolina, and who is in danger of losing her seat. So that she has now decided to stoop to the predictable and ugly tactic of gay baiting (www.fayobserver.com/article?id=307439).

In his Dole Institute lecture last night, Bishop Naumann suggests that bishops have an obligation to make their voices heard in this election, as abortion and gay marriage drive the nation to totalitarianism. He suggests an analogy with Nazi Germany, when—well, I’m not precisely sure I understand his point, since I have been led to believe that the Nazis executed gay citizens, and Bishop Naumann appears to be encouraging Catholics to vote for the most anti-gay party in the name of resisting what he sees as a Naziesque totalitarianism.

Whatever. In the big flurry of overheated rhetoric from people afraid that “the” “pro-life” party may not win this election, an eventuality they have apparently never contemplated before, some Catholic bishops are saying somewhat sensible things to offset the shrill voices of Republican theocratic dominionism.

Bishop Terry Steib of Memphis, for instance, recently called on Catholics to avoid one-issue politics, and to remember that “Jesus Christ…opposes violence of all kinds, from war, to revenge, to capital punishment, to abortion, to euthanasia, to the attempt to use force to bring about justice and God's will in any way" (http://ncronline3.org/drupal/?q=node/2238).

And Los Angeles bishop Gabino Zavala concurs, in a recent interview (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/20/AR2008102002290.html?hpid=opinionsbox1). Bishop Zavala notes that, though “Faithful Citizenship” urges Catholics to form their consciences by looking at candidates’ positions on a whole range of life issues, “that’s not always what comes out.” The impression most voters have is that the bishops, as a body, stand for one-issue voting tactics.

Bishop Zavala offers a countervailing position. He urges Catholic voters to take into consideration racism, torture, genocide, immigration, war and the impact of the economic downturn on the most vulnerable among us, the elderly, poor children, and single mothers, as they cast their votes.

Also, in what is clearly an oblique response to Bishop Martino’s dismissal of USCCB voter guidelines, Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia and Bishop William Murphy of Rockville Centre, have just issued a statement reminding Catholic voters that “Faithful Citizenship" notes the following: “Both opposing evil and doing good are essential obligations” (No. 24) (the statement is on today’s Whispers in the Loggia blog at http://whispersintheloggia.blogspot.com). One must take both/and into account in voting: voting is not merely an exercise in opposing, in saying no; it is also an exercise in saying yes to what is good, in helping to build a just society in collaboration with others.

It’s an . . . interesting time to be a Catholic voter. On the one hand, some bishops seem to be nearly apoplectic at the thought that their single-issue political tactics won’t yield “the” Catholic vote for “the” “pro-life” party in this election. Which is to say, some bishops have made such a decisive, unwise alliance with one political party that they have no feasible pastoral strategies or no contingency plans if their theocratic ambitions are finally, decisively rejected this election cycle.

On the other hand, there are at least faint stirrings among some bishops against the one-issue, one-party pastoral strategy that has dominated the thinking of far too many bishops, and which has come to characterize Catholic political thought in the minds of too many citizens.

And Catholic voters are caught in the middle, confused, ill-instructed, prey to paranoid fears of apocalypse if we do not vote for the person our bishop or our priest instructs us to choose. Today, we received an email from Steve’s extended family network—from the fervent Catholics in his large family network, the ones who have consistently voted “right” in election after election.

They’re terrified this election time. The email tells us that scripture gives Christians “ownership of this land,” and that a scary choice is about to take place which will result in all kinds of wickedness in this Christian land, if Christians don’t pray and assert their voting rights.

Even as large numbers of “good” Catholics can contemplate the defeat of “the” “pro-life” party only in apocalyptic terms, the majority of American Catholics are simply shrugging their shoulders about the one-issue strategy of the bishops, and are voting their consciences—consciences informed by a much wider range of considerations than those one-issue bishops offer us for consideration.

This is the point to which the Catholic bishops have led American Catholics. And it is a sorry point to have led us to. Once again: in my view, the breakdown of the previous pastoral strategy of one-issue, one-party politics in this election points to the lack of wisdom and lack of pastoral acumen among many American bishops. The ignorance of many of us, the indifference of others of us: both point to a serious failure of pastoral leadership on the part of the American bishops.

People of faith should always be preparing for the future. And that means preparing for change. That means learning to say yes and not merely no, because Christian faith is centered on God’s yes to a world that God loves intensely.

People of Faith Speak for Justice

Today, an interfaith group of Arkansas leaders of communities of faith issued a joint statement encouraging Arkansans to vote against Initiated Act 1, which would prohibit couples cohabiting without benefit of marriage from adopting children in Arkansas.

The act is sponsored by the Family Council of Arkansas, an affiliate of James Dobson's Focus on the Family. It is overtly homophobic in its intent and is designed to drive right-wing religious voters to the polls to vote Republican in the coming elections.

It's heartening to hear faith leaders speaking out. The joint statement of Arkansas religious leaders notes that the act will hurt some of the most vulnerable members of society--namely, children--by making it harder to find adoptive homes. As written, the act would penalize family members seeking to adopt a child needing their care, if those family members are cohabiting with someone without marriage.

Signatories of the joint statement include the current and retired Episcopal bishops of Arkansas, Methodist, Baptist, Christian (Disciples of Christ), Presbyterian, and Unitarian-Universalist pastors, as well as a rabbi.

No Catholic pastors are represented among the signatories.

The joint statement, with a video produced by Arkansas Families First, an organization fighting this homophobic legislation (see http://arkansasfamiliesfirst.org), is on the website of Arkansas Times at www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog/2008/10/vote_no_on_initiated_act_1_8.aspx.

On the Failure of Repetition as a Political Stategy: Need for Creative Paradigms

Fascinating commentary these days on the feebleness of the tried and true strategy that has consistently worked for neoconservatives for some time now. This is the strategy of repeating rather than convincing, of restating rather than engaging in dialogue, of parroting instead of engaging minds.

As a blogger responding to my recent open letter to the U.S. Catholic bishops says, “This repetitious imprinting of an 'obvious reality' is symptomatic of the entire program of Conservative campaigning” (http://ncrcafe.org/node/2172; the blogger’s username is WOJO). Repetitious imprinting of an “obvious reality” as political strategy: saying something over again often enough to make it appear obvious, as if it is a reading rather than an interpretation of reality . . . .

Note that this approach has nothing to do with rational argumentation or with thought. It’s about convincing people by coercing them. It’s about framing social reality such that we make others see what we want them to see through sheer repetition of symbols until the repetition appears to be mirroring what is out there rather than imposing an interpretive scheme on it.

We make people begin to “see” that all poverty originates in the lazy venality of the “welfare queen” who rips off the system. We force people to begin noticing that all theft involves menacing black men wearing do-rags. Through repetition masquerading as reading of “obvious reality,” we impose blinders that deprive people of the ability to see that the vast majority of those ripping off the system work in white-collar venues (e.g., on Wall Street) and that those appropriating our earnings in underhanded ways normally wear top-end business suits.

Fortunately, political dialogue as the repetitious imprinting of an “obvious reality” is simply not working in this election cycle—not nearly so well as it has done for several decades now. In Sunday’s New York Times, Paul Krugman analyzes what is happening as a failed marketing plan (“The Real Plumbers of Ohio,” www.nytimes.com/2008/10/20/opinion/20krugman.html).

Krugman notes that Nixon invented a marketing strategy that has carried the day for neoconservative politicians up to this election. Nixon discovered that neocons could mask their plutocratic economic and social platform through a politics of distraction and division that channeled the resentment of angry white males fearful of change. By bombarding us with repeated symbols of those we are to resent, by shouting hate rhetoric at top volume on Fox news or right-wing talk radio programs until it pours out of our ears, neoconservative spokespersons have adroitly convinced us that they have our “real” needs at heart, even as those real needs go singularly unaddressed and, in fact, become more pronounced under neoconservative administrations.

In this election, increasing numbers of us have stopped listening. Unfortunately, however, “John McCain’s strategy, in this final stretch, is based on the belief that the old formula still has life in it.” Repetition of the slogans of distraction and division has become so ingrained in the political movement that rose to power through this marketing strategy, that it is now well-nigh impossible to stop the repetition—even when it is failing.

In an article in today’s Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington characterizes this failed strategy of repetition as an ““antediluvian approach” (“The Internet and the Death of Rovian Politics,” www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/the-internet-and-the-deat_b_136400.html).

As with Krugman, Huffington notes the reliance of the McCain team on repetition of the failed marketing slogans: “And it seems that the worse McCain is doing in the polls, the more his team is relying on the same gutter tactics.”

In Huffington’s view, what has changed in this election cycle is our access to information that breaks the back of the misinformation fed to us in repeated hate slogans. As Huffington notes,

Thanks to YouTube -- and blogging and instant fact-checking and viral emails -- it is getting harder and harder to get away with repeating brazen lies without paying a price, or to run under-the-radar smear campaigns without being exposed. . . .

Back in the Dark Ages of 2004, when YouTube (and HuffPost, for that matter) didn't exist, a campaign could tell a brazen lie, and the media might call them on it. But if they kept repeating the lie again and again and again, the media would eventually let it go (see the Swiftboating of John Kerry). Traditional media like moving on to the next shiny thing. But bloggers love revisiting a story.

The internet—the rise of citizen blogging coupled with tools such as YouTube—has forever changed the way we do business politically in this nation. The strategy of coercion through endless repetition, of framing reality by shouting slogans over and over, can no longer work so well in a technology-driven political world where we can now see the faces, the actual faces, of haters at a political rally. Where can now hear those slogans coming out of the mouths of those faces, and can assess for ourselves, using our own eyes and our own ears, the worth of those hate slogans.

Unfortunately, institutions that have not anticipated these developments are marginalizing themselves in the world coming into being through these new technologies and the political realities they generate. This is among the reasons I have noted that the U.S. Catholic bishops’ continued reliance on simplistic sloganizing (“pro-life,” “baby killers,” “intrinsically evil”) is not merely ineffectual: it is a failed pastoral strategy. This way of doing business no longer conveys the values bishops claimed to want to convey to the faith community and the public at large through these slogans.

In fact, the repetition now does the opposite. It foreshortens thought, ethical analysis, and political responsibility. It draws people together around slogans now contaminated with the toxins of hate, since the same mouths shouting “baby killer” are also shouting “commie faggots” and “kill him.”

Because of my background in higher education, I’m interested as well in the failure of many educators with whom I’ve worked to foresee how quickly information technology would refashion the political playing field in postmodern culture, and how important it was to prepare for that cataclysmic shift, if we want to continue transmitting core civic values to a new generation.

In this regard, Shannon Rupp’s half-satirical, half-serious article “Could We Blame the Financial Crisis on Too Much Testosterone?” on yesterday’s Alternet blog captivates my attention (www.alternet.org/workplace/103502/could_we_blame_the_financial_crisis_on_too_much_testosterone_harvard_researchers_say_yes).

Rupp reports on the Excess Testosterone Effect theory (her phrase) developed recently by Harvard scholars Anna Dreber and Coren Apicella. In an article in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, Dreber and Apicella report research findings suggesting that men with high testosterone levels take greater risks than those with lower testosterone levels.

Rupp proposes that testosterone-driven risk taking may have served a useful function in the evolutionary process at one time, when social groups required “just enough practitioners of hormone-driven irrational acts to provide us with some regular protein.” Now, not so much.

Now, “male politicians trading on an appearance of strength are actually the guys who, in evolutionary terms, have outlived their usefulness.” Our current economic crisis indicates the downside of testosterone-driven risk taking for the human community as a whole. What we now need more crucially are thinkers, nurturers, people with talents to build teams, harness the energies of groups of people, work collaboratively, generate new ideas for a world on the edge of disaster.

I say that Rupp’s article sparked my thinking about the failed strategies of some educators (who have been under the spell of neoconservative political figures) for a very specific reason. As I have noted in previous postings, one of the astonishing experiences I have had in my academic career was being informed that I lacked the “aggressiveness” to be a successful academic leader.

To be specific: at one of my workplaces, I was repeatedly informed by my supervisor, an African-American female, that I was not “aggressive” enough to be an academic leader. This same supervisor brought in an African-American male to “evaluate” me—a much younger man who had never met me before, who did not know me or my work. A Baptist Sunday School teacher who writes homophobic articles about the social construction of black masculinity . . . .

I mention the racial context because I had naively thought, before running into this web of prejudice and deceit, that many African-American women might share the interest of gay men to critique and overcome the oppression worked in the lives of women, people of color, and gay folks by "aggressive" men. I had naively assumed that African-American women might understand (and so shun) the harm done to the souls of another human being when we employ demeaning phrases like “not aggressive” to control those we supervise.

As I noted in several meetings with this supervisor, “not aggressive” was a code term for “gay” when my supervisor used the phrase. It is a term designed to marginalize, to bash, to demean a person's dignity. The real core of my supervisor's objection to me was clearly that I was a gay male who would not hide my identity.

I put my objection to my supervisor's use of this term into letters that I asked to have placed in my personnel file. As these noted, I objected as well to her “evaluator’s” characterization of me as “not aggressive.” My letters noted that no best-practices manuals for an academic vice-president emphasize aggression as a desirable quality in an academic leader.

In fact, the opposite is the case. Successful academic leaders (those successful in contexts not poisoned by homophobia, as this university was, through its president) deliberately work against aggression and towards collegiality. Successful academic leadership takes place when an academic vice-president gets people working together in a synergistic way that releases the better angels of their nature.

Why bring this up now? Because it’s related to what’s going on in our political life. Those who have invested everything in failed paradigms—models of masculinity centered on males as aggressive risk-takers, for example—are not seeing the pronounced cultural and political needs of this moment of our history. When those who are failing in this way are educators and self-professed transformative leaders in educational life, our future is imperiled.

The old paradigms aren’t working any more. Shouting slogans that divide us has waning power to move us to build a better world. Merely repeating ideas or symbols that once appeared to work but no longer demonstrate effectiveness is not going to solve the problems we face now. They’re real problems, and they’re complex. They require the best energies we can all give them collaboratively.

Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

Steve and I went to the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival with friends on Saturday, and saw an outstanding film that continues to haunt me. As the subtitle of “Faubourg Tremé” indicates, it’s an exploration of the untold story of black New Orleans (www.tremedoc.com).

I’m trying to think through what so captivated me at a visceral level in this documentary. Part of it is that we once lived in Tremé. We bought a house there in 1986 and lived in it until our move to North Carolina in 1991. The house was an 1884 shotgun that had been partially renovated by its previous owners. We (as in Steve) completed the renovation process, turning it into a single dwelling that a colleague at Xavier once characterized as an paramount example of “simple elegance.”

But there’s more to why “Faubourg Tremé” so powerfully grabbed me. We have not been back to New Orleans since Katrina. I have not wanted to go back. We know from Steve’s cousin that our house is now “gone.” The shell of it stands, but it appears to be unrecoverable after the flooding.

In fact, it had already been cannibalized before the flood, we’d been told: the beautiful finials on the wrought-iron fence forged for the 1884 world’s fair were stolen, the shutters on the house (many of which we’d replaced, buying them from vendors of antique architectural details) were also carted off. Apparently the people to whom we sold the house defaulted on loans and lost it to the bank, and it was empty and boarded up even before the hurricane.

Both the sadness of that house, which for generations sheltered prosperous middle-class black Créole families, and the destruction caused by Katrina, have deterred me from returning. My bond with the city runs deep, so deep that I had a series of dreams about the flooding of New Orleans prior to Katrina. Pictures I saw on the news when the city flooded were familiar to me: they replicate what I had seen saw in those prescient montages of a horror that baffled me, as I saw it dreamt about it in several memorable dreams prior to the hurricane.

Indeed, the few vivid future-foreseeing dreams I have ever had in my life have almost always centered on New Orleans and its environs. My soul is linked to that magical, mystical place near the mouth of the Mississippi.

I went to college there, after all. My parents honeymooned in New Orleans, and we spent many vacations in the city as I grew up. I can remember my parents taking us to the booth of a cartoon artist outside St. Louis Cathedral on one vacation. I must have been about twelve at the time.

They did not like how the artist fussed over me. He told them that I was not, well, I can’t avoid saying it, though it sounds immodest (I want to write truth on this blog): he told them I wasn’t ordinary.

They didn’t like hearing that. I can remember my mother doing that Southern-lady freeze-out thing, drawing herself up stiffly and looking down her nose at the artist as if he were not quite her sort of people. My father grumbled, something about paying the artist to do sketches of his children and not prophesy.

At some level, I knew even at that early age that what caused the reaction was, in part, their parental fear that a gay man might recognize something in me and take advantage of it. But it was more than that: he told them—he instructed them—to pay attention to my needs for intellectual and emotional nourishment.

They did not like that. They did not intend to comply. Children should not be made to feel special, should not be fussed over—especially not a boy who refused to embrace “the” male role.

The artist drew little symbolic tokens in each of our ears. For my brother Simpson, there were dollar signs. And the prophecy turned out to be accurate. As alcoholism took his life, my mother spent a fortune trying to keep him alive, most everything she had saved for her old age. What she didn’t spend, he carted off when she was away from the house and sold to buy liquor.

Philip had a tic-tac-toe game in his ear. I’m not sure if even he knows why the artist chose to mark him with that token. Perhaps it was a recognition that, as the youngest of three rambunctious boys, Philip had to learn early on to evade, hide, outsmart, in order to survive.

In my ear, the artist put crosses.

New Orleans is the lodestone of my spiritual life. Not only was I educated there, it was in New Orleans that I met Steve. He had dropped out of St. John University in Minnesota to hitchhike south, with a vague plan to make his way to a mission in Mexico where a Benedictine relative of his was pastor.

We met at a prayer meeting sponsored by Loyola campus ministry. We soon moved in together, and have been together ever since. I persuaded Steve to return to school and complete his degree in philosophy. He did so at Loyola.

So it was in New Orleans that we began to come to terms with being gay, a long, drawn-out process that took many years and was not complete until we lived in the Tremé house. It was in New Orleans that I went to confession and had a priest hiss at me so loudly other penitents could hear, as he told me I had committed the sin that draws God’s wrath down on the world.

It was at the Jesuit church on Baronne St. in New Orleans that a priest who had taught me math at Loyola tried to spot me through the confessional grate, as he warned me that if I didn’t repent, a bus could run me down when I was not in a state of grace and send me directly to hell.

It was also in New Orleans that a Jesuit chaplain told me that God does not bully or lust to damn us, and that sexuality is a gift of God to bring us into communion with God and others. It was there that the pastor of our parish church told me in confession that he had just spent some time hearing confessions in the Rio Grande valley of Texas, and heard many German farmers tell him of sleeping with Mexican women whom they coerced into relationships. They did not feel guilty for a sin that broke their marriage vows (or for the coercion), the priest said. Why was I so weighed down by guilt at my transgressions?

New Orleans kept drawing me back. As I’ve noted previously on this blog, when I was finishing my dissertation, I was offered a good job at a prestigious “white” university, and a much more modestly paid (and demanding) position at Xavier University, an historically black university.

The choice was obvious to me: my life journey, my struggle to understand and address the racism inculcated in me from the time I was tiny, my commitment as a theologian to give voice to those on the margins, my history as a white Southerner whose ancestors owned slaves: all of these pointed me to Xavier. Xavier was a calling, an opportunity to serve. It was a place to learn, to continue learning even as I taught.

This vocational decision—this blessing of being called to serve—was confirmed when, the following year, Steve was offered a job at the Catholic seminary in New Orleans. That was what led to our buying the house in Tremé in 1986. I was 36 at the time, Steve 35. We had never been homeowners.

In fact, we didn’t have the resources to buy a house, after years of graduate studies and work in a “poor ministry” sponsored by Loyola’s chaplain’s office, which paid us only our living expenses. Steve’s aunts, Benedictine sisters, had inherited some money from their parents’ estate, which their community generously allowed them to lend to family members. They loaned us the down-payment for the house.

At the time we moved there, Tremé was well over 90% African American. Historically, it had always, from its beginnings at the end of the 18th century, been a majority black neighborhood, dominated by Créole free people of color, many of them descended from white men and their mixed-blood mistresses in the New Orleans system of plaçage, which encouraged young French and Spanish men to choose a mistress of color prior to marriage.

By the time we moved into Tremé, the Créole population had largely dispersed to suburbs on the east side of New Orleans. The neighborhood was in deep trouble by the 1980s, full of crime and drugs. In the years we lived there, we came home twice to find our house ransacked. In the second robbery, the vandals broke a hole through the floorboards and entered the house that way.

We had a beer bottle thrown through our window at night, our car windows smashed. I was once writing at my desk facing the street and looked out to see an elderly neighbor being held up at gunpoint. A teen was shot and killed half a block from our house; the teens who shot him wanted his tennis shoes. Our neighbors, a Créole Catholic family, lost their son first to drugs and then to a gunshot wound in a drug deal.

The house across from us was a crack house. It was owned by a white gay man who lived outside the neighborhood. When almost every house in the block was robbed after the occupants of that house moved in, the police told us that everywhere the group settled, this happened. We, all of us in the block, contacted the owner. He laughed. As long as he was paid his rent, what did he care?

Our neighbors on one side were also a gay couple, equally disdainful. They lived as though in a fortress, interacting with no one, walking each Sunday to Mass at the parish church a few blocks away. They were the meanest, stingiest human beings I have ever had the misfortune to live beside.

Even with all the struggles, we suffered when we finally decided to leave that house of simple elegance. What tipped the scales was my brother’s death in 1991. I could see as though it were a fortune written in capital letters on a wall that I would soon end up needing to provide care for my mother. I knew that doing this in a troubled marginal neighborhood would be doubly difficult.

When a Catholic college in North Carolina announced two jobs in its theology department, and when, even more miraculously, the college told Steve and me that our applications were far and away the best they had gotten from some hundred applicants and they wanted to hire us, we left. The community there was more like the one in which my mother had grown up. I knew she’d find it easier to live there than in Tremé as her mind slipped away.

Homophobia definitely played a role in all of this—a big one. Part of that journey to self-acceptance—the spiritual journey on which New Orleans placed us—was learning how vicious and how entrenched homophobia was in the academy.

When I went to New Orleans to apply for the job at Xavier, a priest in the seminary who had taught me when I took classes there prior to heading to Toronto to do the Ph.D. did all he could to out me to the Xavier hiring committee, in the nastiest way possible. This was a priest who, whenever a gay rights ordinance came before the city council, would beg the archbishop to be permitted to go and speak against it. He touted himself as the archbishop’s personal theologian.

When the seminary rector unilaterally denied Steve tenure (ignoring the recommendation of faculty and students), homophobia played a key role, we knew and were told. Later, when a permanent position opened at Xavier and one of my colleagues blocked Steve’s hire, I came face to face with homophobia all over again. This was a former nun married to a former priest. They had both had their educations paid for by the church, while Steve and I struggled extremely hard as lay students to scrape together funds to get through graduate school. When she left the convent and he the priesthood, doors opened immediately for both to get jobs at Catholic universities.

Despite this, my colleague was fond of saying the church persecuted married people like her and her husband while it protected and defended gays. When Steve was ditched by the seminary and applied for an opening at Xavier, she made certain he would not get the job—precipitating our need to move if we could find jobs outside New Orleans.

“Faubourg Tremé” provided me with a context in which to understand these spiritual struggles. The documentary does an outstanding job of uncovering the rich black history of the neighborhood—its association with Plessy v. Ferguson, its importance as one of the largest and first free black communities in the nation, its seminal role in the development of jazz. The film shows how the citizens of Tremé have repeatedly worked against the odds to build lives (and a marvelous culture) full of dignity, self-respect, intelligence, and creativity.

In the final analysis, watching “Faubourg Tremé” moved me because the film encapsulated key aspects of my own spiritual journey: the struggle against the odds for dignity; the call to give voice to those on the margins and to learn from marginal communities. The decisive and painful homophobic experiences through which Steve and I lived in New Orleans did not go away as we left New Orleans for first North Carolina, then Little Rock, then Florida.

In fact, we encountered them in a particularly brutal way all over again in an African-American churched community in Florida, and the film opened unhealed wounds we both have after those experiences. We certainly never expected the journey to be easy, both when we came out of the closet and also when we committed ourselves to work in marginal communities.

We also did not expect the cruelty practiced against us by an African-American Christian leader at a university in Florida. We did not expect to be repaid for years of gifts and sacrificial work at HBCUs, as well as loyalty to and sacrifice for that leader, with the deceptive byzantine maneuvers this African-American leader, who had previously called us friends and who knew how to hurt in the deepest way possible, used against us—the way in which she assaulted our dignity at the soul-shattering level only a former friend can touch, if she or he chooses to assault you.

Curiously enough, though, even when the film opened wounds I still bear from those experiences, watching “Faubourg Tremé” restores my faith in the African-American community that has called me to itself throughout my spiritual journey. Even when some tender part of me now wants to repudiate an entire community after the cruel treatment we experienced in Florida, I refuse to do so, and the film helps me to understand why.

After our experiences in Florida, I struggle as I struggled when our house was broken into in New Orleans by African-American neighbors, and after African-American teens broke our car windows and threw a beer bottle through our window. It would be so easy to give up, to pass judgment on an entire group of people on the basis of the shoddy behavior of a few—just as it would be easy for someone observing the behavior of our gay neighbors in Tremé or the gay man who owned the crack house across the street to conclude that all gay people are debased.

But observing the dignity, the creativity, the humanity of the citizens of Tremé—through monumental historic struggles that have gone on for centuries—reaffirms my belief in the rightness of keeping on keeping on. If a people who have been beaten, lynched, lied to and lied about, deprived of basic rights, can continue to struggle for dignity, who am I to give up? Even when members of a group that contains such magnificent representatives of humanity happen to be the ones oppressing me and assaulting my dignity, I refuse to allow those experiences to deter me from seeking solidarity with that group as it continues to struggle for freedom.

What African Americans have learned as they have sojourned in this land and sought to craft decent lives under the most inhumane conditions imaginable has the potential to teach all of us about the amazing resilience of the human spirit. This is what makes "Faubourg Tremé" such an important documentary to watch, such a valuable contribution to the study of our nation's history.

Demonization, Distraction, the Rise of Fascism, and the Shameful Silence of Bishops

Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor of the Nation, appeared on MSNBC’s “Hardball” Friday to address remarks made by Minnesota Representative Michelle Bachmann earlier on the same program (www.alternet.org/blogs/video/103600). Bachmann’s observations got a lot of press this weekend.

As many news sites reported, Bachmann stated her concern that Barack Obama has “anti-American views,” and called on the media to investigate “anti-American liberals” in Congress. Various news commentators have compared Bachmann’s call for a congressional witch hunt with the platform of Joseph McCarthy.

I find Katrina Vanden Heuvel’s critique of Michelle Bachmann illuminating. It intersects with the analysis I have been developing of the proliferation of hate rhetoric in this nation and the implications of such rhetoric for our future, if it goes unchallenged.

The preceding Alternet citation links to a video of Vanden Heuvel talking to Chris Matthews on the "Hardball" program. Here’s a transcript of selected remarks from her response to Michelle Bachmann:

I fear for my country. I think what we just heard was a congresswoman channeling Joe McCarthy, channeling a politics of fear and loathing and demonization and division and distraction. Not a single issue mentioned. This is a politics at a moment of extreme economic pain in this country that is incendiary, that is so debased that I’m kind of almost having a hard time breathing, because I think it’s very scary. . . . .

I think Barack Obama’s going to win, and he’s going to have a lot of work, because there is an extremism unleashed in this nation which you’ve just heard on this program which could lead to violence and hatred and toxicity. And against the backdrop of the great depression we’re living through could lead, and I don’t use this word lightly, to a kind of American fascism which is against the great values of this nation and which people like that are fomenting.

And again—I have to say this, at the risk of beating a drum that others grow tired of hearing—as the politics of division foments hatred that, in the view of sober political analysts, could well lead to violence, the pro-life bishops of the American Catholic church remain silent.

Fear. Loathing. Demonization. Division. Distraction. Extremism. Violence. Hatred. American fascism. Backdrop of extreme economic pain.

Hard words. But the realities to which they point are hard. Just as they were as the Nazis rose to power in Germany and Austria. And the German and Austrian bishops remained silent.

And as these harsh realities begin to cast dark shadows across our national political life, the same bishops who claim to stand for life as the ultimate value not only keep their mouths shut about the spike of hatred and the violence to which it threatens to lead. They not only remain silent.

They actually tell us to side with those fomenting the hatred.

Shame. What shame they are bringing on their heads these days, the U.S. Catholic “pastoral” “leaders.”

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While the U.S. Catholic bishops remain silent—as a body—except when individual bishops choose to speak out on behalf of “the” “pro-life” party whose top leaders are fanning the flames of hate, one of their brother bishops in the Lutheran tradition has chosen to speak out.

Last Thursday, Mark Hanson, Presiding Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, issued a pastoral letter to the ELCA (www.elca.org/Who-We-Are/Our-Three-Expressions/Churchwide-Organization/Office-of-the-Presiding-Bishop/Messages-and-Statements.aspx). This letter calls for the presidential candidates to stop personal attacks and focus on the issues that concern all of us, chief among which is the economic crisis that disproportionatey affects the marginal.

Bishop Hanson encourages Lutheran voters to recall the core values of the ELCA social statement “The Church in Society.” That document focuses on building a humane society held together by a notion of the common good that crosses ethnic, racial, class, and gender lines. It states,

Jesus frees Christians to serve others and to walk with people who are hungry, forgotten, oppressed, and despised. The example of Jesus invites Christians to see people near and far away, people of all races, classes and cultures, friends and strangers, allies and enemies as their "neighbor."

The ELCA encourages church members to “be critical when groups of people are inadequately represented in political processes and decisions that affect their lives.”

One would like to think that Lutheran churches and bishops have learned an important lesson from the silence of Christian pastoral leaders when extremist forces, using hate rhetoric and tactics of demonization, distraction, and division, seized control of Germany in the 1920s at a time of economic crisis. I have no choice except to see Bishop Hanson’s pastoral letter in that historic light.

And, of course, that same historic perspective makes the continued silence of the U.S. bishops—as a body—and the choice of many individual bishops to endorse “the” “pro-life” party yet again, even more shameful. If history teaches us anything, it teaches us how much is at stake, when people of faith keep their mouths shut as forces of hatred, division, and demonization gain control at a moment of economic crisis.

When the need for words that place Christians on the side of love and not hate is so great, silence is even more shameful that it usually is, when love needs to be emphasized, and not hatred.

Bishops, Still Silent?

An effigy of Barack Obama is hanged in a yard in Ohio with a star of David on his head: www.americablog.com/2008/10/obama-with-star-of-david-on-his-head.html.

Good Shepherds?? Silent Shepherds??

Colin Powell has just announced his endorsement of Barack Obama (www.americablog.com/2008/10/breaking-colin-powell-endorses-obama.html).

And to the discredit of the U.S. bishops as pastoral leaders, I hear far more wisdom--more pastoral wisdom--in Colin Powell's words about his reasons for endorsing Mr. Powell than I have yet to hear from the shepherds of the American Catholic flock.

I am scandalized. This election is turning out to be a referendum on the failed pastoral leadership of the U.S. Catholic bishops. And they are losing the referendum.

Colin Powell directly addresses the polarizing hatred of his party--"the" "pro-life" party bishops are still trying to bully us into electing. He addresses it while the U.S. Catholic bishops remain silent, or, if they speak at all, while they continue promoting "the" "pro-life" party without a word about its tactics of polarizing hatred at this critical juncture in the life of our nation.

Mr. Powell uses words and phrases like "inclusive," "reaching out," and "crossing racial and ethnic lines" to characterize Barack Obama. Catholic words; Catholic-value words; words the bishops are failing to speak as they instruct us about our political decisions and inform our consciences.

Mr. Powell calls Mr. Obama a "transformational figure," a representative of a "new generation coming onto he world stage and the American stage."

Some direct quotes from Mr. Powell's endorsement of Mr. Obama:

I think this [i.e., the drift towards polarizing hatred] goes too far . . . . It’s not what the American people are looking for. And I look at these kinds of approaches to the campaign and they trouble me. And the party has moved even further to the right, and Governor Palin has indicated a further rightward shift. . . .

I’m also troubled by not what Mr. McCain says, but by what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said. Such things as, “You know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.” . . .

Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion that he’s a Muslim and he might be associated with terrorists. This is not the way we should be doing it in America. . . . .

We have got to stop polarizing ourself in this way . . . . I am troubled about the fact that within the party, we have these kinds of expressions.

And while this eminently wise pastoral response to the political choice facing Americans today comes from the lips of a secular leader, and while the pastoral leaders of the American church are silent when they are not telling us to side with the polarizing hatred, take a look at what continues to spew out of the mouths of the polarizers: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHrExRHZnm0. These are supporters at a rally of "the" "pro-life" party that the U.S. biships continue to tell good Catholics us to support (http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2008/10/bishop-reminds-catholics-to-remember.html).

Listen to the shouts of hatred: "gay fairies," "communists,", "socialists," "go back to Africa," and the predictable "pro-life" capstone, "Baby killers!"

I am sick of the hate, frankly. I am sick of the silence of the bishops.

At the time of Hurricane Katrina, I had a fantasy about the bishops. I wanted, oh so strongly, to have the magic power to put them all into a room with texts of all their fervent pro-life speeches on behalf of the party they drove us to elect last go-round. I wanted them to re-read those texts.

Then I wanted to force them to sit and watch the footage of real life human beings in New Orleans, when the pro-life leaders we were told to elect did absolutely nothing to aid those human beings as a devastating hurricane arrived. No food. No water. No shelter. No medicine for people dying in hospitals. No nutrition or hydration even for medical personnel working in sub-human conditions, 100+ degrees, to attend to the dying. No burial for corpses on the street.

Poor faces. Black faces. People with no way to escape the destruction of the city, as the hurricane approached.

I am sick. I am sick of being told by the leaders of my church that their primary interest for lo these many years now has been to assure that we elect people who respect life.

And now, when the abysmal record of the "pro-life" leaders we were told to elect is so stunningly apparent, and when the slogan "baby killer" comes out of the same mouths shouting "gay fairies," "go back to Africa!" "kill him!" and "off with his head," all the shepherds of the church have to offer is silence, or threats of eternal damnation if we fail to vote "right"?

Shameful. Scandalous. I do agree with Bishop Robert Herman of St. Louis when he says, in the Clerical Whispers article to which I link above, that we must remember Judgment Day as we go to the polls.

I will definitely be thinking of Judgment Day as I vote. But I suspect I won't be voting for the same candidate that Bishop Herman will be voting for. And as a member of the flock, I have to ask him respectfully (and Archbishop Chaput, and Cardinal George) if they will also be thinking of Judgment Day as they vote--and of Katrina, and the people in Iraq, and the countless Americans that have no healthcare after years of pro-life leaders?

Judgment Day comes for all of us, after all.