LGBT Visibility: Giving Witness

Today's AfterElton blogsite contains a posting by Christie Keith entitled "Inching Out of the Closet": see www.afterelton.com/people/2008/2/inchingout. Christie Keith makes an important point about visibility: she notes that studies indicate a strong correlation between the public's knowledge of a gay person--a real-life, flesh-and-blood human being--and increasing acceptance of gay people and support of our rights. As Keith says,

And that doesn't mean visibility to each other, but mainstream visibility. There is nothing more strongly correlated with increased support of gay rights among straight people, from marriage to adoption to opposing a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, than one simple thing: knowing someone who is gay.

Since this is a point I have made in a recent blog exchange at the National Catholic Reporter website, I'd like to lift part of a posting I made several days ago at that site to this blogsite. The person with whom I've been having a dialogue at NCR is a staunch Catholic. He argues that the best churches can offer LGBT people is tolerance, not acceptance.

He points to the "excesses" of the gay community, as exhibited in festivals like the Folsom St. Festival, as justification for the churches' judgment that openly gay folks are public sinners, and as justification for the disdain of mainstream America for LGBT people. Here's part of my reply to this blogger at http://ncrcafe.org/node/1337#comment-20878:

What I think I'd like to draw attention to as a way of moving the conversation beyond that kind of futile rebuttal is this: if we begin our examination of the place of gay folks in the church today with the preconceived notion that homosexuality is all about sex, is a notorious sin, and is a social problem whose public face is represented in carnivals, then we're going to see no problem at all in the church's bizarre (and, I argue, disordered) preoccupation with this notorious sin that is threatening social stability.

But there are a lot of other places we might begin the discussion. Rather than looking at clips of the Folsom St. parade, for instance, we might talk to some gay-lesbian family members or parishioners who have never been to a carnival parade in their lives. If we did that, we might find that the "public face" of homosexuality (to use your phrase) is no more salacious or wild than the public face of heterosexuality.

The majority of LGBT people in our society are leading the same rather mundane and boring lives as the majority of straight people. Most of us work, come home, watch t.v., have dinner, go to bed, and start the round the next day. We are no more concentrated in gay bars than straight people are concentrated in heterosexual watering holes. Many of us spend most of our time caring for family members. Indeed, most of us are actually married but living in the closet.

Which is to say, it's not all about sex. It's about love. It's about the everyday, about people right in my midst and yours who don't deserve to have "public faces" put on their lives--who don't deserve to be reduced to "lifestyle" tags, since we have lives. Get to know us--to know us as real human beings--and many of your preconceptions about our "lifestyles" may fall like scales from your eyes.

You say, "A gay couple is not comparable to a married couple, but to an unmarried one. Cohabitation between two homosexual men or women would be the same near occasion for sexual sin and the sin of scandal as between a heterosexual couple."

Why is this so, I wonder? If the church does not usually inquire into the living arrangements of unmarried straight people as a precondition to their receiving communion, and if it does not assume that two unmarried straight people of the opposite sex living together are necessarily having sex, why should it do so in the case of two gay people?

I would submit to you that right there is the heart of the problem: assumptions--and invidious ones--are being made about the lives and behavior of gay people that simply aren't made about the lives and behavior of straight people. What the church has wisely left to the private forum of the confessional in the case of single straight people, it does not do so today in its public utterances about and treatment of gay people.

This is unjust. And where there is injustice, people surely do have the right not merely to ask for but to demand acceptance.

To behave otherwise when one's basic human rights are violated and when one's very humanity is trampled on would be to collude with those who try to convince one that one's humanity is flawed or less worthy of respect than that of others. If one colludes with such forces, one undermines a very fundamental church teaching: namely, that all of us come from the hand of God as good, as worthy of respect, as having the same human dignity as anyone else, regardless of our skin color, our nationality, our income bracket, our gender, our educational level.

Increasing our visibility is all-important, if the churches and mainstream America are to “get it.” Making ourselves known as family members, neighbors, and friends is essential if the churches and mainstream America are to support movements to make the murder of gay youth unthinkable in the future. Precisely because the churches (and their mainstream supporters) continue all too frequently to reduce gay persons to stereotypes—homosexual sinners—it is crucially imperative that those of us who are LGBT and living in the midst of “ordinary” folks reveal ourselves, our lives, and humanity to those around us.

Certainly I would prefer to live quietly, without fanfare and self-disclosure. Life has not afforded me that opportunity, however, and I now choose to see the repeated disruption of Steve’s and my life together by gross prejudice of church folks as an opportunity to give witness.

I, we, are called to give witness. We witness to the grace in our lives, the unmerited and unexpected gifts that make our journey possible. We witness to the power of our shared love and of the love we see shared in a multitude of LGBT lives. We give witness to the mere, plain, simple, precious humanity of gay people everywhere.

We must do so, for the sake of LGBT youth. They do not deserve to be bullied, taunted, and scorned. The churches will one day be held accountable at the judgment seat of history for their collusion with the social forces that make such heinous crimes possible, and for their silence in the face of violence against LGBT youth. The churches will be held accountable by a God who despises injustice and abuse of the least among us.

It is time that those of us who are LGBT and who continue to maintain some hope, however tenuous, that the churches will live up to their calling to walk in the footsteps of a Lord whose love embraced everyone he met, speak out and call the churches to accountability. It is time for us to break silence. It is time for us to demand that the churches do so as well.

Manly Men and Homophobic Churches

A disturbing story today out of Ft. Lauderdale, where a gay couple, Mitchell Mart and Melbourne Brunner, eating at a restaurant Saturday said good morning to a passerby, who turned on them and beat Brunner to a bloody pulp. The whole story is at www.towleroad.com/2008/02/gay-man-beaten.html.

This comes several days after a 17-year old gay teen, Simmie Williams, Jr., was shot and killed in the same city by two unknown young men. Police are trying to determine if this shooting was a hate crime because of Simmie Williams’s sexual orientation: www.towleroad.com/2008/02/gay-florida-tee.html.

The mayor of Ft. Lauderdale, Jim Naugle, has for some time now been leading a crusade against the city’s large gay community, in active collaboration with a group of right-wing religious leaders www.towleroad.com/2007/08/christian-hate-.html. Last year a gay couple visiting the city were dismayed (and frightened) to hear anti-gay scripture verses being read over the loudspeaker of the airport as they retrieved their luggage at the airport baggage terminal.

The news of the Ft. Lauderdale shootings comes on the heels of news that Janice Langbehn, whose partner Lisa Pond died suddenly in Miami last years as the Seattle couple prepared to take a cruise with their children, has filed suit against Jackson Memorial Hospital because of the treatment she received when Pond was dying. Langbehn was refused the right to provide medical information about Pond, was not allowed to see her until shortly before her death, and was told that she was in an anti-gay state with anti-gay laws: see www.365gay.com/Newscon08/02/022208fla.htm.

A posting on today’s Towleroad website (www.towleroad.com/2008/02/is-fort-lauderd.html) asks whether Ft. Lauderdale mayor Naugle is in part responsible for the increase in incidents of violent homophobia in his city. In my view, he definitely is—and so are the ministers and churches supporting him.

I can address the latter from my own personal experiences during Steve’s and my recent time in Florida. Unknown to us, on the day of our arrival to take jobs in a United Methodist college, the Florida United Methodist state conference of 2006 concluded. It did so after a bitterly divisive debate over the status of gay members of Methodist churches, which split the Methodist church of Florida down the middle.

We had absolutely no idea of any of this until months later, when promises made to us at the time of our hiring began to be revoked and we began to experience baffling persecution from the supervisor who had hired us as an openly gay couple. The issue at stake in the 2006 Florida UMC conference was whether gay members can even be admitted to Methodist churches in Florida—not whether gays living celibate lives can be admitted to churches, but whether gay persons should be admitted at all. About half of the churches in the state of Florida wanted, at the 2006 conference, to exclude gay members altogether.

Though we had been told that our being an openly gay couple would not present a problem at the college that hired us, we quickly learned that this was far from the case—at least, in the mind of our supervisor. Within a few weeks, she informed us that the UMC bishop of Florida, Bishop Timothy Whitaker, had told her that, if he had known we were a couple (as opposed to being openly gay but single), he would not have approved our hire. (The bishop sits on the board of the college that hired us.)

During our unhappy year working at this college, we were constantly hounded by the supervisor about appearing together—though we had only one car—about taking lunch together, and even about taking one another to the doctor, though married couples at the school never receive reprimands for such activities. Not a single minister on the college’s board sought to defend us against this unjust treatment.

All of this was baffling to us. Though many people have images of Little Rock as backwards and conservative, with respect to gay issues the churches here are in many ways light years ahead of where they are in Florida. The Episcopal bishop of central Florida has strong sympathies with the breakaway group that continues to protest the elevation of an openly gay priest, Gene Robinson, to the episcopacy. In the area of Florida in which we lived, Episcopal churches even post "anti-gay" scriptures on their websites.

By contrast, the current and former Episcopal bishops of Arkansas have maintained a welcoming space within Episcopal churches for the the gay community. The previous bishop signed a statement some years ago supporting the ordination of openly gay persons to the ministry, and permitted parishes that chose to do so to celebrate gay unions. The current bishop has continued this support for gay persons.

We went to a Catholic liturgy once in our whole time in Florida. The church would have been our parish church, had we attended regularly. On the day we went to liturgy there, the parish deacon employed a dialogue homily in which he asked parishioners to tell him any words of Jesus they could recall.

A woman behind us, who muttered, “Praise the Lord,” throughout much of the homily, shouted out, “Repent!” We did not return to this parish. We were, as far as we could detect, the sole gay couple in the parish that day.

The churches are clearly a large part of the problem in our society, when LGBT people are bashed, killed, disemployed solely because we are gay, prevented from seeing our partners in the hospital, denied healthcare benefits. Given Steve’s and my experiences in Florida, I can without any doubt at all say that the churches play a large role in fomenting homophobia in that state—both through their silence when LGBT people are assaulted or demeaned, and through their active attempts to make LGBT people unwelcome, as with the group with whom Naugle in Ft. Lauderdale has affiliated himself.

It disturbs me that among the ministers egging Naugle on are some prominent African-American church leaders. I am particularly dismayed by homophobia in the African-American community. It seems to me that people who have experienced severe historic oppression should understand the mechanisms of oppression in the present, and should stand in solidarity with other oppressed groups. We who are oppressed have strong reason to stand together. The same groups who now bash gays in the churches were promoting racism a half century ago. I know. I grew up with those Christians. I heard the bible used then to justify subordination and abuse of people of color, just as I hear it used now to justify oppression of LGBT people.

One of the most shocking instances of homophobia on the part of an African-American minister in recent days was a remark made by Rev. Ken Hutcherson of Seattle in a sermon a few weeks ago. After proclaiming that "God hates soft men" and "God hates effeminate men," Hutcherson went on to say, "If I was in a drugstore and some guy opened the door for me, I'd rip his arm off and beat him with the wet end”: see http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/352368_faith23.html.

Hutcherson is a representative of the “men’s movement” in the churches. This movement tries to retrieve the church for men—as in manly men. It quite commonly preaches that men are “naturally” superior to women and have been given authority by God to rule women. It places great stock in assuring that men behave like men and women like women—at least, according to manly men’s definition of how men and women should behave. It believes that “correct” gender behavior is mandated by scripture and by God, and that those who deviated from these mandates are to be scorned and punished.

For this movement at its most ludicrous (and for a demonstration that the same ugly attitudes are alive and well in white churches, too), I recommend (if readers can stomach it) a You Tube video of a recent sermon by Rev. Steven L. Anderson of Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona. Rev. Anderson is preaching on a biblical phrase, "him that pisseth against the wall": see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDxcyqeRc-4.

Anderson takes the text to mean—I’m not making this up!—that God intends for men to urinate standing up. His sermon mounts a bizarre diatribe against Germans for (so he claims) demanding that men urinate while sitting down. The sermon mocks men who are “male” and not real men. Anderson’s mincing tone of voice when he speaks of males as opposed to men suggests that males are soft men who have allowed themselves to be whipped into shape by women who demand that they pee sitting down.

This would be laughable, if such rhetoric and such attitudes did not translate into the kind of violence we are seeing all too often these days against LGBT people, including gay youth. Note to churches: I find nothing in the scriptures which states that having a penis elevates a person to the status of a demi-god, and nothing which permits penis-endowed manly men to demonstrate their manly entitlement by beating others to a bloody pulp or shooting them to death.

Shame

At last the mainstream media is picking up the Lawrence King story: NOT!

Huffington Post is reporting today that Anderson Cooper had announced that Monday night's CNN 360 show would run a segment on the murder of Lawrence King. In blog comments prior to the show, Cooper suggests that the bullying of this gay teen did not receive the attention it deserved from parents and school officials.

Cooper prepared a segment on the Lawrence King murder, which CNN then cut from last night's program, while running a segment on a boy singing in his underwear. More on this shameful story, along with a clip of the segment that was cut, may be found at

www.huffingtonpost.com/dipayan-gupta/cnn-cuts-gay-teen-killing_b_88595.html

In my blog discussions about gay issues at the National Catholic Reporter blogsite, I am learning quite a bit about some of the reasons underlying media avoidance of such stories, as well as underlying reasons for schools' refusal to address the problem and for the shameful silence of the churches.

One blogger with whom I've been in dialogue speaks of religious freedom--specifically, of the right of "Christians" not to accept LGBT people.

To which I wish to respond: religious freedom ends where hate begins. Religionists have a right to believe whatever nonsense they want, and that right should be respected. If members of a religious group want to believe that the moon is made of green cheese (and that God so made it 2000 years ago on the first day of creation), I'm all for the right to hold this belief.

What I resist and will keep resisting is the use of religion to support or foment hatred. In a civil society comprised of many different types of people, religion cannot be allowed to fray the threads of the civil social contract that holds us all together.

Another blogger at the NCR site resists the notion that youth can be identified as gay or lesbian at an early age in schools. In my view, this resistance is counter-intuitive. As the case of Lawrence King demonstrates, schoolchildren are often very quick to identify a classmate as gender-inappropriate and to harass that child precisely and solely for this reason.

Underlying the squeamishness of some citizens--and some church members--to entertain this possibility is, I would suggest, a fear that when those of us who are openly gay or lesbian report such experiences from our own younger years and ask for bullied youth to be protected in schools today, we're recruiting.

This strange fear on the part of the mainstream overlooks the reality that youth are, in fact, often identified as gay-lesbian or gender-inappropriate at an early age, and bullied for this reason. And when this happens, schools often do nothing at all to protect the tormented youngster. Parents sometimes even cheer the bullying, maintaining that they have a religious right to teach their children to oppose homosexuality.

And through it all, the churches remain silent. Children are being murdered in our nation, and the churches will not address the problem. This is shameful.

As I have testified in previous blog postings, as an openly gay educator, I myself experienced severe reprisal from a supervisor when I was charged with leading faculty in a project of preparing students for civic engagement. To be specific, I was punished for suggesting on a single occasion that faculty look at GLSEN--Gay, Lesbian, Straight Educational Network--as a resource for civic engagement. This was in a church-affiliated university that claims to deplore prejudice against gay people.

Why do I keep reporting this? Because it has to be said. Because mainstream media outlets collude with the churches in keeping silent.

Because children continue to be bullied and murdered.

And because, as a believer, I cannot remain silent and live with myself.

Needs of LGBT Cancer Survivors

Dear Readers,

As a follow-up to my posting earlier today, I want to lift a posting from the comments section. I'm doing so because, in blog threads, comments often disappear into the comments section, and are overlooked by subsequent readers of a posting. Please note the following appeal:

"LGBT Cancer survivors struggle every day. Please help us get the word out, about our national nonprofit LGBT cancer survivor organization, OutWithCancer . We have two websites, which we would be thrilled if you were to both post about and link to. http://www.outwithcancer.com and http://www.lgbtcancer.com Please email any questions you might have to me at darryl@outwithcancer.com Thanks!"

The Limits of Crozier Shaking

My attempt to engage members of my own religious communion in dialogue about LGBT issues continues on the blog threads of National Catholic Reporter.

And I must admit, I’m growing weary.

I’m growing weary of hearing the churches talk about homosexual sin, rather than gay people.

Sin, not people.

No church that claims to be motivated by pastoral concern talks about sin before people. No church that professes pastoral intent reduces a group of human beings to some nifty, disposable stereotype—like notorious sinner (one of the labels used by a blogger at the NCR threads), or intrinsically disordered human beings, or the homosexuals with their sinful lifestyle.

In reducing gay human beings to a tagged and stigmatized mass, the churches undercut all of their claims to be motivated by pastoral concern for homosexual sinners. This is not about pastoral concern: it’s about using a group of people for base political purposes. Pure and simple.

It’s despicable. It’s as despicable as the church’s use of the Jews throughout history—the dirty, devious, child-killing Jews who infect pure, clean, honest, child-loving Christian cultures, in order to undermine and destroy.

The churches have rightly been resoundingly criticized for the anti-semitism that led them to be largely silent about the evils of Nazism in the first half of the 20^th century, all over Europe. There will come a time in which they are similarly resoundingly criticized for the homophobia that leads them to be largely silent about violence towards LGBT people at this point in history.

Is it any wonder that Europeans have increasingly refused to affiliate themselves with—or participate in the liturgical life of—the churches after World War II? And is it any surprise that, according to the latest Pew report, a third of American Catholics have now dropped their Catholic identity? Catholicism would be dying on the vine in the U.S. now, if immigrants weren’t filling the pews being vacated by millions of Catholic who have grown weary of the sound and fury that signifies nothing.

Sound and fury, as in a constant clerical bleating about abortion and homosexuality as though these are the sole moral issues demanding attention at this point in history—at this point, when the United States is in an end-game war in the Middle East, which we entered on the basis of government lies; at this point, when many of our citizens cannot afford healthcare; at this point, when the tiny minority of our citizens who own most of our resources have enriched themselves even more grossly in the last decade.

Sound and fury: I have grown weary of hearing my church talk about abortion and homosexuality as the most pressing ethical issues about which I should think, when the same church officials talking to me about those issues have not cleaned their own houses following revelations of widespread clerical abuse of minors. It is no secret that Catholic officials have routinely and systematically covered up this abuse for decades, have paid out millions of dollars given to them by unsuspecting layfolks to silence families that have experienced this abuse, have lied, destroyed evidence, and obstructed justice.

It is no secret that the cover-up goes right to the Vatican.

And yet we’re still expected to listen, when the pope and bishops shake their croziers at us and command us to vote solely on the basis of candidates’ positions re: gay marriage and abortion?

What’s clear to me is that these issues aren’t primarily about morality, in the real mind of church officials, in the mind that informs their political calculations. They are primarily about political utility. They’re useful galvanizing issues to call the faithful to stand in solidarity—in solidarity against, rather than for; in opposition to rather than in support of efforts to build a more humane culture. These are issues that are supposed to stop all questions, to cut off all critical discourse and critical thinking. Abortion = killing babies = unthinkable evil = stop asking pesky questions.

The intent interest the Vatican has recently taken in the political life of both Italy and Spain suggests this utilitarian political intent to me. In Italy, the Vatican has helped bring down the center-left government by colluding with some very disreputable political characters whose hands are far from clean. The ostensible concern of the church has been the previous government’s intent to sanction gay unions, and its liberal position on abortion.

In Spain, the Vatican and many Spanish bishops continue to try to herd the faithful to the polls to vote against the current Socialist government in the upcoming March 9 election. There again, the abortion and gay marriage issues loom large in Catholic rhetoric. As I reported in a previous posting, the Vatican and the bishops organized a mass pro-family demonstration at the end of last year to fire a warning shot against the current government. In both countries, an American-style politics of religious-right opposition is being tested, with the abortion and gay-marriage issues as the centerpoint of the opposition.

Never mind that the current abortion policy in Spain pre-existed the Socialist government, and that abortion does not have the political traction in Europe that it does in America. Gay marriage is a new phenomenon, however, and it appears that the mindset of the Vatican in using both issues as rallying points for right-wing Catholic opposition is to use the gay issue (which is to say, gay persons) as its primary wedge issue in the European context, with the abortion issue tagged onto that issue to galvanize rich American Catholics, who are helping to fund these right-wing movements in European Catholicism.

One suspects that the real heart of all this political action—the heart of darkness—is a growing sense on the part of the Vatican that it is losing control. To be specific, there is a growing sense that it is losing control of the political life of the West—a control that it held more securely in a period of Republican dominance of the White House.

There is a growing sense of alarm at the inability of the church to use abortion, in particular, as the rallying point for oppositional right-wing politics in the U.S. In the current American elections, the religious right is in total disarray. All the old shibboleths, all the well-tried rallying cries, are falling on deaf ears. Too many revelations in the past several years have shown Americans that the leaders of the religious right do not have their own moral houses in order.

Conservatives are not very good at generating new ideas. When pressed, they quite commonly resort to the same old same old, the same tried and true tactics that have worked in the past. When those fail, the reflex action of the right is then to remove the velvet glove and show the iron fist: to try to coerce where it cannot cajole.

This, I fear, is what the Vatican hopes to do now, both in Europe and in North America. There is a hardening of the lines everywhere in American Catholicism in particular, as the old oppositional politics fails to yield the same predictable results.

In my home diocese of Little Rock, the diocesan administrator Msgr. Hebert has just announced that Catholics may not participate in this year’s Race for the Cure, on the ground that this anti-breast cancer event supports Planned Parenthood (in some places, but not in Arkansas), that it supports stem-cell research (not true), and that it refuses to publicize that abortion causes breast cancer (not even worthy of comment). Never mind that Komen for the Cure donates lavishly to Catholic hospitals in Arkansas. On this, see today’s Arkansas Times blog at www.arktimes.com.

In a similar move, tiny Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina has recently announced that it has canceled healthcare benefits that provide for abortions, sterilization, and contraception for faculty and staff. Eight faculty members are threatening a lawsuit. The decision to cancel these provisions of their healthcare plan were made unilaterally by the college president Dr. Thierfelder and the abbot of the monastery that owns the college, Abbot Solari.

These gentlemen claim that consultation is not incumbent on them, when Catholic moral teaching is at stake. The faculty threatening suit reply that the majority of faculty and staff are not Catholic and should not be expected to abide by peculiar Catholic moral teachings. They also note that the college receives state and federal funding, and that in doing so, it is required not to engage in religious discrimination.

Evidently Belmont Abbey is intent on keeping this funding in place, while maintaining its right to cancel provisions for contraception in its healthcare plan, without consulting those affected by the decision. In Spain, similarly, the bishops have resoundingly rejected a suggestion of the Socialist government that, if the church wants to go on the warpath against the current government, it should forego the ample state support it now receives.

All of this is sound and fury. All of this signifies nothing. It represents a desperate attempt of the Catholic hierarchy to use these political wedge issues (and gay human beings) to deflect attention from its own egregious wrongdoing in the sexual abuse crisis. At the heart of the current political offensive emanating from the Vatican is the fear that if the political makeup of the American government changes significantly, the pope and bishops will not be granted the immunity from prosecution they enjoy under the current administration.

There is a tremendous fear that, if legal action forces dioceses to open their files, the ugly story of the church’s obstruction of justice, misuse of funds, and protection of pedophile priests will be made public. There is also an overriding concern not to permit disclosures of the central role that the Vatican has played in the obstruction of justice.

For further information on the Spanish situation, see the Clerical Whispers blog at www.clericalwhispers.blogspot.com. In a posting last week entitled “Church-vs.-State: Militant Catholics Try to Sway Spanish Elections," this outstanding Irish blog notes that militant ultra-right Catholic groups with strong ties to the Vatican have organized themselves and are trying to sway the upcoming elections, using abortion and gay marriage as their wedge issues.

That excellent blog also has several postings about the Belmont Abbey situation. Others by yours truly are to be found on the blog of the National Catholic Reporter at http://ncrcafe.org/node/944. Note there the collusion of church officials with well-heeled right-wing political groups in the U.S. The same collusion is evident in the political activities of the church in Spain and Italy. The interest of these groups in the Spanish election is evident, for instance, in a recent editorial of the Wall Street Journal attacking the Spanish government: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120354690556281099.html?mod=googlenews_wsj.

If it’s not ultimately about money, why else would Wall Street be taking an interest in this election (and implicitly supporting the Vatican-endorsed attempt of ultra-right Catholic groups to topple the Spanish government)?

It’s about money. Open those files re: clerical abuse, and the money will stop pouring in. The faithful are continuing to give only because they remain uninformed about the full parameters of the abuse story.

This is the church at its worst: protecting clerical sexual abusers, meddling in the political life of nations trying to build healthy pluralistic societies that respect the civil liberty and full humanity of all citizens. This is the church at its worst, caring more about money, power, and privilege than human beings, particularly human beings experiencing oppression.

This the church at its worst, bashing gay human beings to score political points, to deflect attention from its leaders’ dirty secrets.

Is it any wonder that a third of American Catholics are now walking away, shaking their heads, shaking the dust from their feet? And will this trend diminish, in the next generation, if the hierarchy remains obdurate?

And as a final footnote, I wonder as I think through all these issues why an African-American educational leader I know and once respected, a woman who heads a church-based university and who professes support for gay persons, is willing to dirty her hands by playing political games with people who represent such malice to the LGBT community. This is a question I ponder repeatedly these days, as the campaign of Mr. Obama lifts to national attention questions about homophobia in the black community.

Do people who rise to positions of power and influence inevitably sell out? Does power truly always corrupt? And does it corrupt the more absolutely, the more absolute its claims become? Do people with such power inevitably decide that it really is, in the final analysis, all about the money?

I hope that if Mr. Obama is elected, we will not find that to be the case with him. We desperately need the change about which he keeps talking, if we are to safeguard a future worth living for the next generation.

An America as Good as Its Promise

And now Barack Obama has addressed the murder of Lawrence King. According to today's Bilerico blog, Mr. Obama released the following statement yesterday:

It was heartbreaking to learn about Lawrence King’s death, and my thoughts and prayers go out to his family. King’s senseless death is a tragic example of the corrosive effect that bigotry and fear can have in our society. It’s also an urgent reminder that we need to do more in our schools to foster tolerance and an acceptance of diversity; that we must enact a federal hate crimes law that protects all LGBT Americans; and that we must recommit ourselves to becoming active and engaged parents, citizens and neighbors, so that bias and bigotry cannot take hold in the first place. We all have a responsibility to help this nation live up to its founding promise of equality for all.

Kudos to Mr. Obama.

And now, as someone who has donated** to Mr. Obama's campaign, I challenge Barack Obama to continue to distance himself from "ex-gay" proponents such as Rev. Donnie McClurkin, who performed in the Obama campaign in South Carolina. The damages done to tender human psyches by bogus reparative "therapies" purporting to change sexual orientation are too well-documented to be dismissed easily. "Ex-gay" ministries are especially damaging to young people finding their way through the maze of gender issues in adolescence, youth whose families sometimes place them in "Christian" reparative therapy programs such as Love in Action in Memphis.

This weekend, there has been a conference of survivors of ex-gay ministry in Memphis, in which speakers and artists explore and publicize the damages of this spurious form of psychotherapy which has been soundly repudiated by all psychotherapeutic organizations of any standing. Peterson Toscano's a musing blog, to which my blog is linked, reports on this conference.

I also call on Mr. Obama to support the courageous stand his own church, the United Church of Christ, has taken on LGBT issues. This denomination was the first mainstream denomination in North America to ordain openly gay pastors. The UCC also supports gay marriage. Mr. Obama has stated that he is not in favor of gay marriage--that he has not yet found himself able to come to the place at which his church has arrived re: this issue.

Yet an editorial in today's NY Times reports that studies in New Jersey are showing that legalized gay unions result in a second-class status for gay couples. Gay couples in New Jersey report meeting obstacles in dealing with inheritance questions, in making medical decisions on behalf of one's partner or even in being permitted visitation rights when the partner is in the hospital. A horrific story from Miami last year, which is now resulting in legal action, reported that a woman whose partner collapsed and died when they were visiting Miami from Washington State was told that she might not see her partner in the hospital, since they were in an anti-gay state with anti-gay laws.

The NY Times editorial notes that gay couples of color are especially prone to meeting obstacles under gay union laws, since they often do not have the financial resources to hire lawyers to fight discrimination, or to prepare estate documents to protect inheritance rights. The editorial calls on Gov. Corzine of New Jersey to demonstrate courage in addressing these issues.

I call on Mr. Obama to show the same courage. I was heartened by the speech he gave in an Atlanta church some weeks ago, in which he challenged the African-American community to deal with its homophobia. As someone who has worked within historically black colleges and universities, as an openly gay employee, I can testify about this: homophobia is alive and well in the African-American community (as in the white community). And it needs to be addressed. Silence about this issue contributes to the HIV epidemic in the African-American community. The failure to admit that black men can be living on the down-low and spreading AIDS to female partners, the silence about the presence of LGBT African Americans in the black community, contributes to the alarming rise in HIV cases among black women.

The black churches have historically been silent about these issues and about issues of sexuality in general. It is time for honest, open conversations. It is time to forge a new, safer social space for LBGT youth of color. The black churches should play a significant role in this regard. They--and Mr. Obama--would do well to listen to the courageous testimony of African-American athlete Charles Barkley about these issues.

Thank you for speaking out, Mr. Obama. Please keep on keeping on. And as you do so, please remember the inspiring words of a powerful African-American woman (and a lesbian), who helped pave the way for your success today. As Barbara Jordan once said, “What the people want is very simple--they want an America as good as its promise.”

This is what many of us in America--gay, straight, black, white, male, female--long for today. Please do not disappoint those who have pinned their hopes on you.


**I certainly don't want to imply that I am a major donor to Mr. Obama's campaign. I have given the bit I can as someone who is unemployed and without health insurance. But what I have given is given with strong hope that the changes Mr. Obama promises will actually be enacted, should he be elected. For those of us who are LGBT Americans, whose vocational lives have often been disrupted by prejudice, who have no federal protection when we are discriminated against in the workplace, it is crucially important that laws be enacted forbidding discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation in the areas of employment, housing, benefits, medical care, and so on. When our jobs are ended due to a discrimination we can't challenge in the absence of laws protecting us, we lose access to healthcare benefits which, without an income, we cannot afford. For those of us in committed relationships, if one partner is lucky enough to obtain another job when discrimination interrupts both partners' lives, there is often no chance of carrying the other partner on the new health insurance plan, since the majority of employers do not provide partner benefits. All of this needs to be part of any serious platform of change in contemporary America. We all lose, when the gifts of some cannot be realized due to prejudice. When those being impeded by discrimination are talented young people beginning their careers, the nation as a whole stands to lose very much, if those youth cannot achieve their goals due to insupportable discrimination.

God Knit LarryTogether

Since I’ve complained repeatedly about the silence of both the mainstream media and the major presidential candidates re: the murder of Lawrence King, I want to give credit today to one candidate and one significant media outlet for speaking out.

Today’s NY Times has an article by Rebecca Cathcart reporting on yesterday’s memorial service for Lawrence King. The article quotes a wonderful excerpt from the sermon given at this event by Rev. Dan Birchfield of Westminster Presbyterian Church:

“God knit Larry together and made him wonderfully complex. Larry was a masterpiece.”

And, according to today’s Bilerico blog, yesterday Hillary Clinton spoke out about the death of Lawrence King, stating (www.bilerico.com/2008/02/statement_from_hillary_clinton_on_the_me.php):

“I was deeply saddened by the recent death of 15-year old Lawrence King, who was killed at his school in Oxnard, CA. No one should face intimidation or violence, particularly at school, because of their sexual orientation or the way they express their gender identity. We must finally enact a federal hate crimes law to ensure that gay, lesbian and transgender Americans are protected against violent, bias-motivated crimes. We must send a unified message that hate-based crime will not be tolerated.”

Kudos to Hillary Clinton.

And now, when will the churches speak out? I call on Hillary Clinton to challenge her own United Methodist church to make its stand against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and its opposition to homophobic violence more than rhetorical—particularly in the personnel policies and procedures of its own institutions.

Hillary, can we talk? I’d be interested in hearing how you can energize your own church and call it to accountability. The churches--all the "mainstream" churches--are at the heart of the problem of homophobia in American society.

And that needs to change. And it will change only when church members make it unthinkable for their churches to talk the talk without walking the walk. It is time for church members to call their churches to accountability. It is not too much to ask that churches accord the same simple justice to LGBT members that they ask church members to practice in their dealings with society at large.