Thought for the Day: Adrienne Rich on Living Split

It is an extremely painful way to live—split between a publicly acceptable persona, and a part of yourself that you perceive as the essential, the creative and powerful self, yet also as possibly unacceptable, perhaps even monstrous.

Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (NY: W.W. Norton, 1979), p. 175.

Three-Fifths of All Persons: An Examination of the Effects of Dehumanization

In the wake of the ruling by the California Supreme Court upholding the choice of voters in proposition 8 to amend the state constitution by removing from gay citizens the right to marriage, I asked myself on this blog, “I wonder what it feels like to be told that one is three fifths of all other persons?” When I asked that question on May 28, I noted that, at the time, I felt too raw to write about it.

I still feel raw, but I want to give a try to answering that question now. I’m asking the three-fifths question in light of the conclusion of the California Supreme Court that denying gay persons the right to marry represents only a “narrow” and “limited” exception to the full range of human rights that all other citizens enjoy. It strikes me that this conclusion is very similar to the “three-fifths” arrangement of article 1, section 2, paragraph 3 of the United States Constitution.

When the Constitution was ratified, there was controversy about how to apportion representation in states that held some citizens in bondage. As a compromise, a decision was made to apportion representation and tax burdens in slave states by counting slaves (which is to say, in most circumstances at the time, African Americans) as three-fifths of a person.

What does it do to human beings, I wonder, to be told that one is three-fifths of all other persons? That one’s humanity counts for something (particularly when it comes to society’s willingness to take the gifts one brings and use them for its own benefit), but that it counts for something less that that of other human beings?

What does it do to the psyches and souls of a group of human beings to be told that their humanity is less than that of other folks? That the group should be content with “narrow” and “limited” exceptions to the full range of human rights others enjoy, simply because of who one is? That the majority should have the right to pick and choose among the human rights it takes for granted, as it selects rights to accord you and your group, offering you some but not all of the rights the majority takes for granted?

This question remains pertinent. Yesterday, the president signed a memorandum granting a limited number of gay citizens rights that other citizens freely enjoy without question or fanfare. But even that action recognizing the rights of same-sex partners of federal employees made limited exceptions (and they are hardly narrow ones) to the rights those citizens could enjoy under the memorandum.

Though same-sex partners of federal employees can now enjoy some partner benefits, they will continue to be excluded from others that all heterosexual employees of the federal government take for granted. These include healthcare benefits.

As an editorial about this in today’s New York Times notes, it is “deeply unfair” to provide full benefits to one group of workers while denying them to another (on the basis of innate characteristics that have nothing to do with job performance). As the editorial states, this is tantamount to paying members of a stigmatized group less than their peers for the same work. The editorial concludes that Mr. Obama still has work to do in this and other areas to keep his promise of equal rights for gay Americans.

The exclusion of a group of citizens from the same rights others enjoy, without any rationale for that exclusion other than an innate difference that should make no difference when rights are allocated, affects not only individuals but families. I’ve been following an interesting discussion about this at the America blog lately. This is a discussion about the gay marriage debate in the American Catholic context.

Some of those contributing to the discussion have made an interesting point. This is that what we conclude about the morality of gay marriage has legal (and economic and social) implications for heterosexually-headed families with gay members as well as for gay families. And some of those implications demand attention from the standpoint of Catholic morality: in opposing gay marriage, Catholic pastoral leaders may also be undercutting heterosexually headed families that have gay members, as well as gay families. In doing this, Catholic pastoral leaders may be contradicting their own teaching about the economic and social justice that families deserve.

For instance, when a heterosexual couple decide to give guardianship of their children to a gay family member who is in a same-sex marriage, should the straight couple die, the children of that heterosexual couple will suffer all the disadvantages of the same-sex couple, as long as the marital unions of gay couples struggle with the “narrow” and “limited” exceptions that go along with denial of the right to marry.

No one has noted the following in the America discussion, but I think that one could also note that denial of marriage to gay couples—with all the other “narrow” and “limited” exceptions that flow from that denial, including exclusion from partner healthcare benefits—also affects large numbers of heterosexual elderly Americans. Gay couples often end up taking care of aging parents and other aging family members. We’re sometimes expected to do so. Studies suggest that an increasing percentage of elderly Americans are now being cared for by their adult children, and many of those children are gay—and some of them live in partnered relationships.

When our lives are made difficult due to prejudice and injustice, and when we are caring for aging parents or aging relatives, those family members suffer along with us. Steve’s and my experience of caring for my mother up to the time of her death in 2001 became a horror story due to legally permitted, legally protected prejudice on the part of the Arkansas judge who oversaw my guardianship of my mother.

This is a story that, I have reason to think, is replicated in many places, but which does not receive sufficient attention. I have been completely unable to get media attention for this story, insofar as Steve and I have lived it. It's apparently just not noteworthy.

Yet this story is part and parcel of the story of how “narrow” and “limited” exceptions to human rights targeting a particular minority also inevitably target, and trouble the lives of, other citizens who are not even in the targeted minority. What we permit to be done to gay citizens and gay couples affects many more citizens than gay ones.

What happened yesterday, with the presidential memo, puts the lie to the claim of some opponents of gay marriage (and of many Catholic bishops)* that gay civil unions are equal to straight marriages, and that gay couples in civil unions enjoy all the rights and privileges of heterosexual couples in “traditional” marriages). That’s just not the case. Gay citizens continue to experience three-fifths status in manifold ways in our society, and the erection of a separate category of marriage for gay citizens, with “narrow” and “limited” exceptions to the rights those who are legally married enjoy, compounds and does not solve this problem.

So, to return to my initial question, what is it like to be told by one’s fellow citizens that one is three-fifths of a person? What is it like to be told this by an administration one has elected, which has promised to level the playing field and combat discrimination, but is not doing so? What is it like to be told this by churches whose statewide meetings vote in huge majorities against welcoming you to their churches, even when those churches display signs saying that they have open hearts, open minds, and open doors?

What’s it like to be told that one is three-fifths of a person by a state supreme court which informs you that the rights from which you are excluded for no rational or defensible reason are merely “narrow” and “limited” exceptions? What’s it like to be told by court authorities as you and your partner of many years care for an aging mother suffering from dementia that you are not a fit caregiver, and that a court-appointed ad litem attorney needs to make visits to your home to supervise the quality of care you are providing—even when all of your mother’s siblings, your father’s siblings and their spouses, and your own siblings have written to tell the court that you are providing care of the highest quality for a family member they love?

What's it like to deal with such demeaning nonsense when you're working around the clock to care for an aging loved one who has to be supervised every moment, since she has no idea where she is or who she is? What’s it like to go through life being told in every way possible that you are three-fifths of all other persons, and should just get used to it?

As I think about that question, I think of what I have learned in a lifetime of reading African-American writers, who struggled with the Constitution’s legal definition (long upheld by popular consensus) of African Americans as three fifths of all other persons. I think of all I have learned from James Baldwin and Ralph Ellision, W.E.B. Dubois, Malcolm X, Jean Toomer, James Cone, Cornell West, Martin Luther King, Jr., Bayard Rustin, Eldridge Cleaver, Langston Hughes, and countless other writers.

I think also of what I’ve learned from Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Maya Angelou, Sojourner Truth, Phyllis Wheatley, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Mary McLeod Bethune, Lorraine Hansberry, Marian Wright Edelman, and many other courageous, deep-souled women of color.

Here’s what I hear gifted black artists and talented black writers saying over the course of American history, about the struggle of African Americans to cope with society’s definition of one group of citizens as three-fifths of all other citizens, because of the color of that group’s complexion:

▪ Only a: struggle, assert yourself, live with dignity, work hard, but in the end, you will find yourself only a fill-in-the-blank.

One of the most persistent effects of defining the humanity of one group as three-fifths of the humanity of all other groups is that the group so defined finds itself constantly tagged and dismissed as “only a.” Only a faggot, when all is said and done. What else do you expect from those people? That's how they are. That's how they behave.

As long as social groups are permitted to tag some groups in this way—permitted to do so by legal codes, by government leaders, by preachers expounding the bible from pulpits, by educational systems that disseminate misinformation, by media that invent texts and images to distort the real humanity of a stigmatized group—those who are members of the demeaned group will find themselves unable to move beyond the “only a” tag. No matter what they do. No matter who they are. No matter how hard they work or with what dignity they live.

▪ The only thing that matters in the end: as I listen to gifted black artists and talented black writers describing the African-American experience, I hear a persistent refrain about how all that society sees, all that matters in the end, is that single stigmatizing characteristic society has chosen to see as the ultimate thing to recognize about the group.

They don’t see me. They don’t see inside me. They see only what they have chosen to see, that single external characteristic to which they attach ultimate significance, and on the basis of which they make other invidious assumptions about what’s inside.

All that matters in the end is that I am gay. Once you have that key, you have the key to my entire soul, to my nature, to my worth as a human being. You don't need to look further.

▪ Living split: the experience of being classified as “only a” whose definition hinges solely on one unchangeable fact about oneself, a fact irrelevant to one’s human worth, splits people. African American writers tell stories of the horrific struggle of a group of people to live with that split.

What do you do, when you find yourself defined as “only a” whose skin color is all that matters in the end? Do you fight? If so, how does one live decently while fighting constantly, particularly when almost everything in the legal and social structures of the society in which one is conducting that fight conduces to one’s disempowerment? How does one fight constantly when the fight itself will be used to confirm the stereotype that one is only a?

But how does one live with dignity and self-respect when one does not fight? Where does one go to find people and places that do not reduce one’s human nature to “only a”? Should one look for someplace that appears to be more humane where one does not have to fight continuously, where one can fulfill one’s multifaceted humanity that is about so much more than that one characteristic?

Social groups that turn one group of people into three-fifths of a person on the basis of differences that ought not to matter as we allocate human worth and human rights, produce horrible quandaries for those defined as less human than everyone else. Those quandaries run through the entire lives of members of that group, and through all that they do. These quandaries sometimes split the psyches and souls of those defined as less human than others. They hamper the ability of the group to contribute to the rest of society, even when the stigmatized group clearly has much to offer.

And these mechanisms continue today in American society, not merely in social attitudes, but in social institutions—in the workplace, the legal system, the government, our churches, and so on. And they will continue as long as they have legal sanction, and those charged to lead the country and safeguard its democratic structures do not address the institutional legitimation of such behavior.

* It should also be noted that, despite attempts of some apologists for behavior of the current leaders of the Catholic church in the gay marriage debate today, Catholic pastoral leaders have not supported or promoted civil unions anyplace in the world. The typical, unvarying stance of Catholic pastoral leaders to any and all civil rights for gay citizens is to oppose those rights whenever and wherever possible. Faced with a growing societal consensus in favor of gay marriage in some areas of the world, some bishops are now willing to entertain the option of civil unions. Given the history of most bishops and the Vatican in opposing all gay rights relentlessly, one has to wonder about the sincerity of this sudden willingness to support gay civil unions.

Reclaiming Moral High Ground: Human Means Human, Foundational Ideals of Democracy

Leah McElrath Renna at Huffington Post, re: President Obama's pending statements this evening, as he issues his memorandum about benefits for same-sex partners of federal employees:

This evening, when President Obama signs this memorandum, I will be listening for him to strongly convey the humanity of LGBT people, our relationships and our families. I will be listening for him to begin to lay the groundwork for making the case that the limitations imposed by DOMA are not only unfair but that they are in violation of the very ideals upon which our nation was founded. This is not about President Obama's personal feelings or purported religious beliefs about marriage - this is about the right of couples who are married at a state level to have those marriages recognized at a federal level. It is about the President's responsibility to state clearly that equal protection for all means for just what it says.

Yes. The humanity of gay people. A humanity equal to his humanity, so that when he talks about the golden rule as the center of world religions, he implicates himself: what he would want done to him, if he were a human being experiencing oppression, he ought to do to others experiencing oppression.

The limitations imposed by DOMA are not only unfair but they are in violation of the very ideals upon which our nation was founded, so that we cannot move ahead with any agenda to rebuild a viable democracy by violating those ideals in the blatant way we're now violating them, when it comes to the social place we accord those who are gay.

It's about humanity, about the moral claims the humanity of others makes on us, and the moral imperative that flows from those claims. And it's about the central ideals of our participatory democracy, which cannot be rebuilt if we continue casting those ideals to the wind in how we treat the group among us whose claim to equality and respect impinges most strongly on the nation's conscience at present.

These are the only places the administration can go, if it wants to retrieve the moral high ground. They're where it has to go, if it expects any aspect of its human rights-based agenda to succeed.

The Way Forward as the Way Backward: The Effects of a Leadership Vacuum as Societies Change Their Moral Minds

I'd like to add a brief autobiographical gloss to what I wrote earlier today. What may not be apparent in my analysis of how societies change their moral minds is a strong concern underlying that analysis: this is a concern about what happens when leaders block rather than facilitate necessary shifts in the moral mind of a group they’re charged to lead, and/or promote empty language about change as a cover for their passivity, qua leaders, in promoting necessary moral change in their society.

As I’ve noted previously, when leaders who profess moral vision and commitment abdicate their responsibility to spearhead necessary moral change in the groups they lead, those groups are likely to find themselves moving rapidly backwards rather than forwards, in terms of moral development. On many blogs and news sites that are discussing the Obama administration’s curiously passive (and even retrogressive) approach to the human rights of gay citizens in the past several days, I’ve noted this concern surfacing again and again.

If the administration continues to do nothing, people are saying, we’re likely to find ourselves moving backwards even in areas where we’re taken forward steps recently. We’re likely to find ourselves further back than we were before this ostensibly gay-affirming administration came into office.

I share that concern. This is why I am particularly disturbed by the attempt of the DOMA brief to undercut the claims of the gay rights movement to moral legitimacy. I consider that attempt not only misguided and downright nasty. I think it’s dangerous for our entire society.

And here’s why . . . . In our work life, Steve and I have lived through a number of experiences in which one or both of us were hired by an organization that wanted to make a progressive statement about gay rights, but had not yet counted the cost of that statement, and was therefore unprepared to deal with backlash when the organization did step forth and do what was right. Because of our training as theologians, which has often placed us in church-owned institutions, each of these experiences has occurred in a church-related context.

Invariably, each time we’ve walked into a situation like this, we’ve seen the organization regress rather than progress, once it encountered backlash due to its moral commitment, and once it had slammed the door on those gay folks it had courted as poster children to signal the enhanced moral awareness of the organization. Each of these organizations has become not merely more viciously homophobic after expelling the gay employees it had courted in an effort to appear morally enlightened. In each case, the organization has also ended up becoming more downright corrupt in general, in its overall treatment of all employees, in its leaders’ blatant disregard for the moral principles of the church sponsoring the institution, and in the leaders’ abdication of any commitment to fair, transparent, professional standards of leadership.

In one case, in fact, the organization simply dismantled after its leaders refused to deal with a church-grounded homophobic purge that targeted Steve. In another case, the organization has reverted to pre-1960 governance procedures and has embraced the far-right fringe of American Catholicism, after having announced (when it hired us) that it wanted to move in a Vatican II direction.

When a group begins the slow, painful process of moving towards a new moral consensus demanded by new moral perceptions among a critical mass within the group, and then steps back on its new moral commitments, it tends not just to move backwards, but to do so with a vengeance. It places itself in a worse, a more regressive, position than it found itself in before it ventured forth to do the morally right thing. It fulfills the biblical parable about what happens when people sweep out a house but leave it empty: seven spirits worse than the one they intended to sweep out return and occupy the house.

One particular work experience has been paradigmatic in showing me this. One of the principles of the Jesuit tradition of spirituality that has shaped my adult spiritual life is a caution against making important decisions of discernment when one is experiencing turmoil.

Jesuit discernment calls on one to avoid making important decisions in a time of turmoil because our vision is likely to be limited in such a moment, and good discernment requires that we seek to see as clearly as possible. This principle calls on those who set forth on a spiritual path to learn to hold together a number of different viewpoints in tension with each other. Spiritual growth is about learning always to see more rather than less. It’s about challenging ourselves to doubt and discard our peremptory judgments, since such judgments tend to be based on too little evidence and limited vision, and to wait a while until we see more clearly—and more broadly.

Because I value that approach to the spiritual life, and have found it promotes spiritual growth (resulting in greater peace and more ability to love, hallmarks of the presence of God’s Spirit in our decisions, according to the Jesuit tradition), I have sometimes walked into work situations in which I sensed that something was not quite right, but because whatever troubled me was not immediately apparent to me, I decided to work with the situation, listen, discern, and let my vision be made wider and deeper, as I trusted God’s call for me in that particular vocational moment.

One of these situations involved working with a supervisor who professed, on the front end, a strong commitment to gay rights, from the time I began working with her. She is one of several women under whose supervision I worked in my academic career. And she is one of several female supervisors who also happened to be African American. I mention this because her background plays a significant role in the story I want to tell—as will be apparent shortly.

In the years in which I worked with this ostensibly gay-affirming supervisor, I came to recognize (at least in part) what was not quite right, what I couldn’t quite identify as I began to work under this person’s supervision. Part of what was not quite right was that the profession of a commitment to respect for gay persons and gay rights was only rhetorical. It was a smokescreen.

In fact, this supervisor had (and continues to have) a history of hiring gay employees only to terminate them, one after another, without affording them any due process as she targets them, and with conspicuous malice towards them precisely as gay persons, when she decides to fire them. Several of us who have experienced this supervisor’s twisted managerial approach to her gay employees have concluded that her malice is rooted in some autobiographical experiences of her own that make her want to deal with the fact that people she loves are gay, but which also prevent her from permitting those family members to be close to her.

And so the tortured push-pull, slap-hug way in which she deals with gay employees reporting to her, ultimately shoving them decisively away from her in the end in each and every case. As she has done with those gay family members in her own life . . . .

Part of what was not right, as well, in this person’s approach to leadership is, as it turns out, that she is completely unbalanced mentally and emotionally, but most of all morally. And that lack of balance is rooted in her complete lack of any moral center. She is willing and able to remake herself on a daily basis, as needed, in order to remain on top.

And remaining on top is her sole goal, as a leader and personnel manager. While spouting language about moral commitments and caring communities that derives from the church that owns the institutions in which she works, she belies that language in everything she does as a leader and personnel manager. The religious-moral rhetoric is a cover for her moral emptiness, and because her church does not regard the claims of gay people as legitimate moral claims, she is able to get away with what she does to gay people (and to other employees) again and again.

I did not, of course, see all of this when I began working under this person’s supervision. Though I knew from the outset as I worked with her that something was not right, I could not place my finger on it. And I wanted to suspend judgment, to listen, to discern, to remain open to the possibility that my own vision of this workplace was constricted and inaccurate.

And this is where the question of this supervisor’s background comes into the picture, and why I have to mention it: because this supervisor was both a woman and African American, I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, over and over again, as she made decisions and engaged in behavior that shocked me. I told myself that I did not live within her cultural universe, and therefore might be perceiving her decisions and behavior in an inaccurate and prejudiced way.

I wanted this person to succeed—I wanted her to succeed because she is an African-American woman, and I stand in solidarity with women and people of color as they struggle for rights. I am committed to promoting the rights of these groups who experience marginalization as I do, because of inborn characteristics that ought not to be the basis of discrimination, but that are used to marginalize.

I put up with behavior from this supervisor that I ought never to have tolerated, because she is a black woman. I found, in the end, that what I was trying to see and excuse as cultural particularity in her behavior is simply dysfunction, and dysfunction of the most dangerous sort—dysfunction rooted in moral vacuity.

I hope I will not make that mistake again. I am reminded of that mistake over and over these days, however, as I struggle to understand and respond to the Obama administration’s approach to gay rights and gay persons. Just as I did in my work with the supervisor described above, I find myself in recent days bending over backwards to try to imagine the push-pull, slap-hug behavior of the current administration toward gay citizens as a manifestation of some higher reason, some pattern I don’t quite understand yet: the hurtful but not intentional oblivion to my needs that comes from being focused on other issues, which are perhaps more important than mine; the cultural limitation that comes from not living life in a gay skin, and therefore not being able to see what one sees through gay eyes, etc.

Until recently, I have tried to understand and to excuse, and I have wanted to do so because my understanding of the spiritual life requires me to do that, before I make judgments. I would hope others do that for me, and I am obliged to do it for them, to treat others as I would hope to be treated myself.

Now, however, I’ve moved to another stage. I’ve decided that we may be dealing with dysfunction rather than higher reason, and that, at the center of that dysfunction there may be lack of moral commitment. I’m not yet ready to decide where that lack of moral commitment lies.

I prefer—perhaps because I cast my vote for him and found him inspiring as a candidate—to continue thinking, for now, that the president himself remains committed to human rights for gay citizens, on moral grounds. I prefer to think that he is perhaps being very badly advised by some of his key advisors. I suspect that I know who some, at least, of those advisors are, but I do not know enough to be certain of any judgment I might want to form in that regard.

I also suspect that the president has imbibed from various religious communities—including some African-American ones—a perception that gay rights are not really as pressing as some other issues that demand his attention now, on moral grounds. I suspect his religious outlook and religious associations afford him the illusion of skill at sorting and classifying the various moral issues that now face him as president, and that he imagines that gay rights are at the bottom of the list, because the religious culture on which he depends makes that deceptive judgment about gay people and our rights.

In my fifteen years working in church-sponsored historically black colleges and universities, I heard over and over a litany of rationales that many churched African Americans use to deny moral validity to the movement for gay rights and the moral claims of gay human beings. I could recite that litany in my sleep.

Though I would like to believe that the president's remarks about the need to combat homophobia in the African-American community mean that he is aware of the speciousness of these rationales, I also do not doubt that his outlook has been shaped in some respects by that litany. And he knows that it remains significant to some of his strongest supporters, to many African Americans.

I also think that as these games are being played out, the clock is quickly ticking, and there will soon be no time left to address gay rights issues—because we will have started on the backwards path. At which point, I fear, things will become much worse for gay and lesbian persons in the United States, because of the lack of leadership we are now seeing from our president despite his claims to be a fierce advocate for LGBT people.

Worse, in fact, than they have been for a long time . . . .

When Pragmatic Calculation Overrides Moral Imperatives: The Demise of Fierce Activism (and Fraying of the Moral Claims on Which It Rests)

Reports indicate that, in an attempt to address discontent among progressive supporters due to its inaction on its promises to address gay rights and its choice not only to defend DOMA but to do so vigorously (and with malice towards gay persons), the White House intends to make an announcement today. It will offer some—but strictly limited—benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees. And these will be in place only as long as Mr. Obama is president.

According to Jeff Zeleny in the New York Times, the president will sign a “memorandum” today that provides things like relocation expenses for same-sex partners of gay federal employees, but not health insurance benefits. Not the health insurance benefits provided to heterosexual spouses. DOMA itself—the 1996 federal legislation that the president tells us he opposes and has promised to repeal, but which his administration is now defending—is apparently a stumbling block in that regard.

As I read this interesting news about shiny baubles dangled before a group of citizens experiencing discrimination in the apparent expectation that those citizens will be too dull to recognize that we're being offered bright trinkets in place of the respect and rights we keep demanding, I’m wondering if the administration even realizes how insulting this gesture is—how it compounds rather than addresses the core problem.

It’s about respect. It’s about recognizing that my human rights are equal to yours, that my humanity is on the same level as your humanity. It’s about realizing that what would wound you deeply also wounds me deeply, because my human nature feels pain as keenly as yours does.

If you would be outraged when I suggested that, because you are heterosexual, you do not deserve the same respect that I do as someone who is homosexual, then your expectation that I should be satisfied with the shiny bauble you offer me instead of respect and rights is curious, indeed. If you would find it insulting (and hurtful) when I decided not to offer your wife health benefits, while I offered those benefits to all same-sex partners, then on what grounds do you imagine I will be content with crumbs that would not be sufficient for you?

It’s about respect. And recognizing that my human rights are equal to yours. The gesture the administration is making today only drives the knife deeper, because under the guise of addressing my concerns as a gay citizen experiencing discrimination, the administration reminds me through its very gesture of “concern” that it regards my humanity as less than that of all heterosexual citizens.

I’m trying to get my mind around this . . . ham-handed and morally obtuse . . . behavior on the part of this administration. I’ve been trying to get my mind around this behavior. How does one put together the claim that equality for gay human beings is a moral imperative, and the behavior of this administration towards gay citizens?

I find it impossible to justify the Obama administration’s behavior towards gay human beings because of my experience with moral imperatives during the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. I’ve written previously on this blog about my experiences during those years. I've noted that my experiences in those years led me to break with the church of my family, because of that church's hesitancy about moving to welcome African-American members. I've also noted that what I experienced in those years led me to commitments that have run through my academic life, to teaching in historically black colleges and universities for fifteen years.

I’ve also reflected at length on those experiences in a published article in Religion in a Pluralistic Age: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Philosophical Theology (NY: Peter Lang, 2001). In that article, I apply insights from a religious-theological movement in 19th- and early 20th-century America to my experiences during the Civil Rights period. That movement was the social gospel movement.

The social gospel spoke (among other things) about what it called the “social mind” of societies. Social gospel thinkers and churches influenced by social gospel theology believed that, just as individuals can change their moral minds about social practices like slavery or the subordination of women to men, so can societies do so. And the process by which societies change their moral minds is akin to—it’s linked to—the process by which individuals change their moral minds.

Social gospel thinkers noted that individuals can live comfortably with pre-moral ideas about all kinds of social practices like racism or misogyny. We can tolerate and even endorse those practices because we take them for granted: we’re conditioned to do so, by formative experiences in our families, churches, schools, and so on. We may not even see some of the institutions and practices around us, which to others’ eyes demand probing moral analysis, as moral (and so our view of institutions and practices that clearly need moral examination is “pre-moral”).

We see them as taken-for-granted, handed-down, church-blessed and society-founding practices and institutions that have no moral meaning at all. They are just there, given to us by divine fiat and by nature.

Then, as social gospel thinkers noted, in some of our lives, something happens to provoke reflection and new insights. An ah-ha moment comes along that permits us to see these institutions and practices in an entirely new light, and we find, to our dismay, that what we have taken for granted as divinely ordained and naturally given is a social construct that serves the needs of one group of people while subjecting another to discrimination.

Developmental psychologists like Lawrence Kohlberg think that this process of distancing ourselves from our taken-for-granted childhood assumptions about the world around us is part and parcel of growing up, of developing into adulthood psychologically—if we do, indeed, develop an adult psychological awareness. And that’s a big if.

Kohlberg and other developmental psychologists think that not all adults, by any means, develop adult psychological frameworks for analyzing the world around them. Many adults remain stuck in pre-adult stages of psychological and moral development, insofar as we continue, in adulthood, to rely on the absolute authority of those groups and institutions that shaped our formative years—e.g., church, family, and so forth.*

The social gospel applied these insights about individual moral awareness to society at large. This movement argued that societies can experience breakthrough moments about taken-for-granted institutions and practices, every bit as much as individuals can. In fact, as more and more individuals experience such ah-ha moments regarding the moral dimensions of practices and institutions previously taken for granted—e.g., the “natural” and divinely stamped right of light-skinned people to dominate dark-skinned ones, or of men to dominate women—societies comprising such practices and institutions have no choice except to begin confronting their taken-for-granted assumptions.

They have no choice except to do so because a critical mass has grown in their midst with a critique of what is taken for granted and of the injustice enfolded in the handed-down practice or institution that has become persuasive for a significant number of citizens who had not previously thought of this practice or institution in a moral light. When such a critical mass has developed in a society, and when a society has begun to reframe how it sees what it has taken for granted, the moral mind of society shifts. And moral imperatives flow from that shift.

I am drawn to this social gospel analysis of how societies change their moral minds (following on changes in individual moral minds) because it so perfectly captures the process I myself went through, growing up in the segregated South of the 1950s, and then having to confront the claims of my African-American brothers and sisters on my life during the Civil Rights movement. What I saw and heard around me in those years forced me to begin reassessing what I took for granted about the “natural” and God-given social order in which I was growing up.

I had no choice. Once begin to see, and one cannot stop seeing. Once one’s eyes are open—once one begins to glimpse what one has taken for granted not as natural and ordained by God but as socially constructed instead—one has no choice except to keep on seeing. Eyes that have opened will not willingly shut themselves and willfully choose self-inflicted blindness again.

Once my eyes were opened to the moral claims of my African-American brothers and sisters—and that is to say, to the full humanity of my African-American brothers and sisters, on which those moral claims rested—there was no going back. If people are human as I am human, and if I see this clearly, moral imperatives naturally flow from that recognition.

Those moral imperatives demanded, for instance, that I turned a deaf ear to all those voices around me in the 1950s and 1960s which told me that changes in longstanding social institutions would not happen overnight, that it would be better if African Americans stopped pressing for changes, that “we” would do the right thing and accord rights to our brothers and sisters in a timely, mannerly, orderly way if only they would stop making a fuss. If only they'd give us time to study, to build a consensus, to move ahead with all deliberate speed.

Once my eyes were opened—once I saw that human beings with a humanity equal to mine were pressing for what I took for granted, for the same human rights I enjoyed by accident of birth because I had a white skin—I could not play pragmatic games with those demands for justice. Justice is either justice or it is not justice at all. There is no halfway justice, because there is no halfway humanity.

And that means that justice is justice now, not justice deferred to an indefinite future by specious arguments. Justice like that is not justice at all. It is the antithesis of justice. It is my intent to keep in place a social system that demeans your humanity and denies the moral (and legal and social) claims your humanity makes on me.

I could not go back, once I saw the moral issue clearly, and once I saw that it rested on the merest, simplest, and yet most foundational insights of our social order: that all human beings are made equal, and because they are made equal, each human being deserves the same human respect and same human rights as every other human being.

I could not go back. And so I wonder—intently, daily—how someone who has spoken of equality as a moral imperative, who once endorsed gay marriage and then retracted that morally-based insight about human rights for reasons of political expediency, manages to go back. Or so it seems to me, with my outsider’s perspective . . . .

It seems to me that Mr. Obama and many of his supporters, who appear to believe that one can build a platform of progressive change around silence about and denial of the fundamental rights and full humanity of a stigmatized group of citizens, have a selective and flawed understanding of what the phrase “equality is a moral imperative” means. It seems to me that Mr. Obama and many of his supporters are seeking to advance today arguments I heard, and recognized as fallacious and deceitful in the 1950s and 1960s, arguments that were about keeping moral insight at bay, not cultivating it.

And I don’t know how one does that. I don’t know how one becomes aware of the full humanity of a group whose humanity one has previously though of in demeaning terms, and then steps back from that moral insight and the moral imperatives that flow from it. I don't know how one speaks of the moral imperative of equality, and then offers the nation, as its leader, a document that seeks to undercut the moral claims of those whose equality you recognize as a moral imperative.

I could not step back once my eyes were opened in the 1950s and 1960s. How can Mr. Obama and those who support him do so today, I wonder?

* For a recent application of Kohlberg's developmental theory to discussions of churches divided today by moral questions like gay marriage, see Colleen Kochivar-Baker at Enlightened Catholicism.

Thought for the Day: President Barack Obama on Human Rights as Foundation of Society

The United States was founded on the idea that all people are endowed with inalienable rights, and that principle has allowed us to work to perfect our union at home while standing as a beacon of hope to the world. Today, that principle is embodied in agreements Americans helped forge -- the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions, and treaties against torture and genocide -- and it unites us with people from every country and culture.

When the United States stands up for human rights, by example at home and by effort abroad, we align ourselves with men and women around the world who struggle for the right to speak their minds, to choose their leaders, and to be treated with dignity and respect. We also strengthen our security and well being, because the abuse of human rights can feed many of the global dangers that we confront – from armed conflict and humanitarian crises, to corruption and the spread of ideologies that promote hatred and violence.

President Barack Obama, Human Rights Day, 10 Dec. 2008 (emphasis added)

Emma Ruby-Sachs: Not a Penny More for the Obama Administration

Emma Ruby-Sachs on now as the time to withdraw funding from the DNC, and to send a letter to President Obama explaining that we won't be sending future donations:

Well, I hate to be the one to explain a rights struggle to the first Black President, but the equality movement is not a grab bag of rights. You don't get to reach in and see which prize you've won. Each of the rights discussed above - the right to benefits for your partner, the right to serve openly in the military and the right to access the same tax breaks and immigration privileges given to heterosexual couples - should be granted. Immediately. Granting one does not absolve trespass over the other rights.

Obama has made it clear that he will do only the minimum necessary to avoid a gay revolution. Gay rights are consistently moved to the bottom of the political barrel. He thinks extending benefits to a few federal employees is sufficient.

It's our job to let him know that is not enough.

Now is the time to pull the funding you have given to the DNC (like some of the most high-profile gay leaders in this country). Now is the time to send a letter explaining why you won't be directing any future donations to the Obama administration no matter how many nice emails they send you. Now is the time to blog, argue and get angry.

If it takes national outrage to explain to Obama that rights aren't optional consolation prizes to be granted when his administration does something wrong, then we must deliver national outrage.