Teaching Youth Not to Hate

News today that the American Family Association has announced a boycott of the April 25 “Day of Silence” being promoted by GLSEN—Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (see www.afa.net/). GLSEN organizes this event each year to enhance awareness in American classrooms of the prejudice endured by those who are gay and lesbian.

One of GLSEN’s primary objectives is to address the deeply troubling phenomenon of bullying of LGBT youth in American schools. This year’s Day of Silence observance is being organized in memory of fifteen-year old Lawrence King.

As the murder of this gay youth illustrates in the starkest way possible, it is imperative that schools educate our children not to hate. As a video just released by Fight Out Loud—“Hate in 2008 = A Call to Action”—concludes, in 2008, LGBT people are being murdered in the U.S. at the rate of one person every eight days (see www.fightoutloud.org/). And those are only the murders about which we know . . . .

The American Family Association identifies GLSEN as “an activist homosexual group,” despite the fact that, by AFA’s own admission, the GLSEN-sponsored Day of Silence is now observed in thousands of schools around the nation, and despite GLSEN’s status as an organization of highly regarded professional educators from many backgrounds, whose goal is to address school bullying. Shockingly, one of AFA’s action points vs. the Day of Silence is an appeal to supporters to “encourage your church leadership to follow the bold example of Pastor Ken Hutcherson who is vocally opposing ‘Day of Silence’ in his community in Redmond, Washington.”

It was Pastor Hutcherson who stated recently (as a previous posting of mine on this blog recounts) that if another man opened the door for him, he’d rip the man’s arm off and beat him to death with the wet end of the arm.

The AFA’s callous willingness to use children in right-wing political battles runs directly against the direction taken by the nation’s chief teacher accreditation organization, NCATE (National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education). NCATE accredits the education schools of colleges and universities according to a set of standards that include the college or university’s commitment to diversity (see www.ncate.org).

As the NCATE standard on diversity (standard #4) states,

One of the goals of this standard is the development of educators who can help all students learn or support their learning through their professional roles in schools. This goal requires educators who can reflect multicultural and global perspectives that draw on the histories, experiences, and representations of students and families from diverse populations. Therefore, the [teacher education] unit has the responsibility to provide opportunities for candidates to understand diversity and equity in the teaching and learning process. . . .Candidates are helped to understand the potential impact of discrimination based on race, class, gender, disability, sexual orientation, and language on students and their learning. Proficiencies related to diversity are identified in the unit’s conceptual framework. They are clear to candidates and are assessed as part of the unit’s assessment system.

NCATE guidelines for standard four note that units of education expecting to receive accreditation must produce teachers capable of understanding and teaching all students. As footnotes to standard four repeatedly state, “‘All students’ includes students with exceptionalities and of different ethnic, racial, gender, sexual orientation, language, religious, socioeconomic, and regional/geographic origins.”

Because of the imperative need for teachers today to reach increasingly diverse populations of students, on 13 November 2007, NCATE issued a call to action emphasizing the importance of teachers’ commitment to social justice. This call to action requires teachers to develop “professional dispositions” that enhance this commitment. NCATE’s call to action emphasizes that well-trained teachers must “understand the impact of discrimination based on race, class, gender, disability/exceptionality, sexual orientation, and language on students and their learning.”

The call to action adds to NCATE accreditation criteria the expectation that teachers exhibit the following Professional Dispositions:

Professional attitudes, values, and beliefs demonstrated through both verbal and non-verbal behaviors as educators interact with students, families, colleagues, and communities. These positive behaviors support student learning and development.

NCATE expects institutions to assess professional dispositions based on observable behaviors in educational settings . The two professional dispositions that NCATE expects institutions to assess are fairness and the belief that all students can learn. Based on their mission and conceptual framework, professional education units can identify, define, and operationalize additional professional dispositions.

NCATE expects institutions to assess professional dispositions based on observable behaviors in educational settings: this definition underscores that not merely education units or prospective teachers are now expected by NCATE to demonstrate fair and non-discriminatory behavior towards minorities, including LGBT persons. The entire university in which a unit of education is housed is now expected by NCATE to demonstrate such behavior.

The new NCATE social justice dispositions indicate that universities will be accredited based on their university-wide commitment to just and non-discriminatory behavior towards minorities (including LGBT persons)—e.g., presumably in governing statements forbidding discrimination, in policies and procedures that militate against discrimination, in hiring and firing decisions, and so on. NCATE will now examine institutions of higher education to see what “observable behaviors” towards minorities are displayed within an institution, its policies, its faculty, and especially its School of Education.

The murder of Lawrence King and the out-of-control assaults on LGBT citizens today—one person murdered every eight days!—underscore the importance of these educational goals both for American schools and for institutions of higher learning that produce teachers for those schools. As Pam Spaulding notes in her Pam’s House Blend (www.pamshouseblend.com) blog posting discussing the “Hate in 2008 = A Call to Action” video, something needs to be done in communities such as Ft. Lauderdale, where a tax-funded city newsletter by the city’s current mayor Mr. Naugle “spews . . . hate” against gay citizens.

Mr. Naugle has had vocal support from a group of African-American ministers. Pastor Ken Hutcherson is also African American. Yet, as the “Hate in 2008” video demonstrates, African Americans are well-represented among LGBT citizens now being murdered. They include seventeen-year old Simmie Williams, who was murdered recently right in Ft. Lauderdale.

Given this social reality, it is all the more heartening to remember Barack Obama’s several recent outspoken critiques of homophobia in the African-American community and African-American churches. This week’s Towleroad blog contains a video link to the most recent of these, about which I blogged last week—Mr. Obama’s statement to a group of supporters in Beaumont, Texas, that homophobia is not Christian.

There is much work to do in all of our communities. There is certainly much work to do in Florida, given the epidemic level of hate crimes against LGBT citizens of that state. Church-affiliated institutions of higher learning in that state—particularly African-American ones—have a premier opportunity to make a positive faith-based response to this social problem. If they will . . . .

The American Family Association certainly does not deserve the support of such institutions, given its longstanding positions espousing hate, including a statement in its AFA journal following Hurricane Katrina that the hurricane was “[an] instrument of God’s mercy” that “wiped out rampant sin.” One would like to think that something else was at work in the disruption of so many low-income African-American lives in that terrible event!

Among the Pots and Pans

I dreamt last night that I’m called on to give a sermon—an impromptu, on-the-spot sermon. I’m unprepared. In the dream, it’s not clear to me who is the audience. And why me? I don’t give sermons. All of this is somehow happening in a kitchen, a place in which I always feel at home, the center of the home, a place where I wile away the hours cooking for those I love, while meditating and dreaming without effort.

I decide immediately that the only possible sermon I can give is to repeat what Teresa of Avila once said about her own hours in her Carmel kitchen: El Señor anda entre los cucheros, the Lord walks among the pots and pans. I decide that the most honest sermon I can give is to point to Teresa—to tell the audience that I am not prepared to speak at length, that the really effective sermon is the life lived, not the words spoken.

The Lord walks among the pots and pans: Teresa said this to her sisters who imagined that the life of meditation is somehow removed from the everyday reality of the kitchen. Teresa said this to those who imagine that one removes oneself from the mess of everyday life in order to pray. Teresa demonstrated otherwise by remaining in the kitchen to cook for her sisters while they went to chapel to pray. It was reported of Teresa that they sometimes returned from their prayers to find her elevated from the floor in ecstasy, still holding the frying pan high over the stove as she prayed.

I’m no Teresa of Avila. The most elevated I ever get is when I climb my small kitchen stepladder to dust my own pots and pans on racks above the stove.

But like Teresa, I am one more pilgrim on the path, on the journey to make sense of a life in which it is often almost impossible to discern divine presence or even any meaning beyond absurdity. Like Teresa, I have to keep challenging myself to look for faith, hope, and love among the pots and pans of my daily existence—the sometimes dirty, unscrubbed pots, the pans into which burnt bits of food seem forever stuck.

This is a challenge that is especially acute for LGBT believers. It is made acute by the churches themselves. The challenge for LGBT believers is often to see any meaning at all in a life journey constantly interrupted by prejudice, particularly when the church both fosters and defends that prejudice.

For many of us, it’s simply easier to renounce the spiritual quest altogether, at least, to renounce it as a formal quest. The very terms used by churches—spirituality, journey, compassion, faith—become, for many of us, so blackened by the fires of constant rejection, that we rightly choose to turn our backs forever on institutions that preach tolerance while practicing hate. I completely understand the response of the many LGBT believers who turn their backs on churches that cherish the warm-fuzzy self-assurance that they love, tolerate, accept, heal, and affirm when what they practice is anything but love, toleration, acceptance, healing, and affirmation.

It is very difficult for us who are LGBT to maintain even tenuous ties to a church that keeps abusing and expelling us. It is not we who reject the church. It is the church that rejects us. It is the church that devises one stratagem after another to keep us in our place, and when we will not remain there (human beings are so refractory when told to keep to their demeaned places, aren’t they?), simply expels us. Out of sight, out of mind. It’s easier to maintain the fantasy that you really do love the alien you never have to face, than the one right beside you at the communion rail, Sunday after Sunday, raising disquieting questions about your real commitment to love and justice.

We remain on our pilgrim path. We remain on the path, putting one foot after another, because that is all that is given to us—that and the story we have no choice except to tell, no matter how lonely the telling is, no matter how isolated we make ourselves when we tell it, no matter how we open ourselves up to further abuse in the telling of our story. We have to tell that story because it is an assertion of our simple, our bare, humanity against forces that threaten to obliterate that humanity. We have to keep speaking out because that is what human beings do—especially when their humanity is at stake, particularly when the obliterating force is an institution that claims to represent a God who is open heart and open door for all human beings.

We remain on our path among our own little cucheros, trying to find threads of meaning in our interrupted existences. We are on that pilgrim path, regardless of whether the church will acknowledge that we walk along as pilgrims beside the church itself: we do so, we LGBT folk, whether we are churched or unchurched. The Lord who reveals himself among the pots and pans may, in fact, be revealing himself to the pilgrim church in some human existences that the churches regard as too dirty and too marginal—too mundane and too unelevated—to examine carefully.

More’s the pity. The church is the loser when it turns aside from those who might be bearers of divine presence, if only by holding up a mirror to the churches in which they can examine themselves, and decide whether the gospel of love they preach is truly all about love for each and every human being. No church can effectively proclaim God’s welcome while turning away God’s children from its “open” doors . . . . Perhaps the churches today need to stop looking for God in faraway, elevated places, and start looking at the pots and pans in their own kitchens. Who knows what they might find among those unscrubbed and ill-used vessels of everyday life?

An Open Letter to the United Methodist Church: Guidelines for Ethical Treatment of Gay Employees

Because societies around the world are only now beginning to recognize the claims of gay** human beings to full human dignity, the churches have not yet faced this social development honestly and carefully. Growing up in the American South during the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s, I became crucially aware that churches often bring up the rear in social movements to extend civil rights to marginalized groups. My recognition that my childhood church was responding hesitantly and often negatively to the important social development of desegregation led me to leave that church in the 1960s and to join one that seemed more keenly aware of racial justice.

I am writing this open letter to all the churches, since all churches today are forced by growing social awareness that gay people are fully human to struggle with the issue of recognizing the human dignity of gay persons and granting full human rights to gay persons. I am, however, writing out of a particular context: I am referencing my experience and that of my partner Steve as gay theologians who have spent much of our teaching and administrative career working in church-affiliated colleges and universities.

As my profile statement on this blog indicates, our history working in church-based institutions has been persistently interrupted by prejudice. Even when we tried to walk the fine line our own church (the Catholic church) requires gay employees to walk in its institutions—the line of wink-nudge, in which one never discloses one’s sexual orientation while that orientation is an open secret to one’s co-workers—we found ourselves susceptible to unjust and abusive treatment premised on our sexual orientation and shared life.

To be specific: we found ourselves demoted, denied tenure when colleagues and students voted unanimously for us to be tenured, hired at salaries much lower than those given to new hires with fewer credentials, refused written copies of glowing oral evaluations of our work, terminated on spurious grounds of financial exigency. We found ourselves lied to and treated as objects rather than persons.

These experiences convinced us that it was far better to be open and honest about our longstanding relationship, since we experienced discrimination even when we toed the line, so we began to live as an openly gay couple in our professional lives. We began to realize that we have a responsibility to give witness, by living honesty and openly within church institutions as a gay couple who claim our personhood and life together as a gift from God—indeed, as part of our calling as theologians. As this turning point occurred in our vocational lives, our work history comprised two periods of administrative work in United Methodist institutions where, we were told, our being openly gay and a couple would not cause us to experience prejudice.

The last of these experiences turned out, unfortunately, to be almost an exact replica of our experience within Catholic institutions: once again,

In treating gay human beings this way, church-based institutions undercut their most fundamental claims to be responsible ethical agents. They undercut their claims to be about healing of social ills. They undermine their social justice proclamations. Christian institutions that still treat gay human beings with such gross injustice forfeit the right to tell a fractured world that they are offering the healing love of Christ to that world—and, in particular, to its most wounded members.

The following observations draw on our experiences as gay theologians at several church-based institutions of higher learning, but, in particular, on our most recent experiences at a United Methodist university

These observations address an American church context, therefore, and they address quite specifically the behavior of United Methodist institutions in the United States.

I would argue, however, that the ethical reflections I am offering in this open letter to United Methodist church leaders have pertinence for other churches and their institutions. The problem of abusive treatment of gay employees at this transition point in society’s ethical awareness of gay issues is hardly confined to Methodists. It exists in church institutions everywhere, and may, in fact, grow more intractable as ugly political currents turn gay human beings into political footballs.

These problems can be effectively addressed only through open, honest discourse. Churches that try to silence those who seek to foster discussion of these issues—churches that use ugly legal threats to try to thwart first-amendment rights to free speech—do a profound disservice to the Christian community. The problem of injustice to gay employees in Christian institutions will be resolved only by open, honest dialogue about these issues, and that dialogue must include those most affected by the injustice of the churches towards gay human beings—gay people themselves. It is deeply unjust for the United Methodist church to invite "ex-gays" to its annual conferences, but to exclude openly gay members who also wish to address the assembly. To talk about people in the absence of those being discussed, when fundamental decisions are being made about their rights, is to reduce those persons to the level of objects.

In what follows, I want to offer some fundamental principles for churches that truly want to make headway in addressing the claims of gay people to human dignity and human rights. My first fundamental principle is as follows:

1. United Methodist institutions that claim to deplore discrimination against gay employees MUST have non-discrimination policies enshrined in the documents that constitute the institution’s official statements of policy.
   

The Social Principles of the United Methodist church state explicitly,

Certain basic human rights and civil liberties are due all persons. We are committed to supporting those rights and liberties for homosexual persons.

We see a clear issue of simple justice in protecting their rightful claims where they have shared material resources, pensions, guardian relationships, mutual powers of attorney, and other such lawful claims typically attendant to contractual relationships that involve shared contributions, responsibilities, and liabilities, and equal protection before the law.

Moreover, we support efforts to stop violence and other forms of coercion against gays and lesbians.

The preceding claim is meaningless unless United Methodist institutions adopt clear, forthright statements of non-discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation. Unfortunately, in the case of the last UMC institution at which Steve and I worked, the university catalogue—which is the official arbiter of university policies—contains no such statement.

We accepted verbal promises

We were, unfortunately, deceived in thinking that these promises afforded us safety against overt discrimination, when it became convenient for our supervisor



particularly hurtful, since I had previously considered both friends. Because they are African American and I always considered myself an invited guest in African-American institutions, I would not have dreamed of treating them in such a demeaning way. In fact, earlier in the year, when I found my salary was augmented by $20,000 from a state grant, I had split the augmentation in half and given half to the associate—though it was money Steve and I very much needed as we tried to recoup our expenses in moving to

a move for which the university had not paid.

2. Official policy statements forbidding discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation are particularly needed in areas in which local laws afford NO legal protection to gay employees, and permit at-will firing without any stated reason on the part of the employer.

During the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, an argument was often advanced by Southern whites (and supported by most of our churches) that, in upholding segregation, we were only doing what the law mandated and permitted. Civil rights leaders such as Dr. King noted that what is legally permissible is not always what is ethically right.

In permitting themselves to do what is legally permissible while ethically wrong, United Methodist institutions bring shame on themselves and suggest that their commitment to their Social Principles is merely verbal—that these Principles have no bearing on how UMC institutions actually operate.

The UMC Social Principles state,

We reject the use of violence by either party during collective bargaining or any labor/management disagreement.

We support social measures that ensure the physical and mental safety of workers, that provide for the equitable division of products and services, and that encourage an increasing freedom in the way individuals may use their leisure time.

We believe that persons come before profits. We deplore the selfish spirit that often pervades our economic life. We support policies that encourage the sharing of ideas in the workplace, cooperative and collective work arrangements. We support rights of workers to refuse to work in situations that endanger health and/or life without jeopardy to their jobs.

Right-to-work laws do not even come close to meeting the ethical mark set by these statements from the Social Principles. When the employer is legally permitted to terminate an employee at will, without even doing an evaluation of that employee’s work, in what sense does the workplace protect the “physical and mental safety of workers”? In such an institution, what right do workers have to “refuse to work in situations that endanger health and/or live without jeopardy to their jobs”?

If those workers are part of an oppressed minority that does not have any legal protection under the law, but which is nonetheless recognized by UMC teaching as deserving of human dignity, how can that minority even make the discrimination it may experience in Methodist institutions known, if the employer has the unilateral right to terminate employment at any time, without even providing a reason for the termination?

Such questions became frighteningly real for us last summer, when our supervisor informed Steve

When he asked if

had informed the police or FBI of these threats,

stated that she had not done so. Nor did she offer him any substantial protection from violence—this in a state in which violence against gay people has reached almost epidemic levels.

3. When United Methodist institutions hire openly gay employees with the full acknowledgment and approval of the governing board of the institution, and when those employees are summarily dismissed without even having received an evaluation of their work, the governing board has an exceedingly strong responsibility to investigate what has happened in the dismissal.

Not to investigate when the employee in question is gay, and the community affords no legal protection to a gay person, and is also a right-to-work community, strongly undercuts the UMC claim to support the human rights of gay persons and “the simple justice in protecting their rightful claims” in the economic arena. Since the governing boards of most United Methodist institutions are comprised not only of a large percentage of United Methodists, but also of UMC ministers and bishops, there is an even stronger responsibility on the part of those governing boards to see that treatment of employees—especially employees belonging to an oppressed minority without legal protection—does not undercut core Methodist ethical principles.

When an openly gay employee in a Methodist institution where the local community affords no legal protection is suddenly dismissed for specious reasons (e.g., “failure to work with this administration”) and in the absence of any evaluation, the governing board has an exceptionally strong responsibility to interview the employee himself or herself, if the board wishes to adhere to UMC Social Principles. This is all the more the case when that employee played a significant role in the leadership team of the institution, and when there is strong reason to believe his or her work was positively received by the majority of those working in the institution.

When the employee has been demoted and then terminated without even having had his or her work evaluated, how else can the governing board assure that the information provided to the board about the employee’s work is accurate and not slanderous? Written evaluations of an employee’s work should be a mandatory requirement in any UMC institution that wishes to claim adherence to the Social Principles.

Without such evaluations (particularly when one has worked over a year and then been summarily terminated for a specious reason), how can a worker respond to or provide proof to counter unfounded misrepresentations of his/her job performance by the supervisor? Most accrediting bodies of professional organizations—and all accrediting bodies of institutions of higher learning—require that such a written evaluation process, which provides the opportunity for employee response, be in place.

It may be possible that workers summarily dismissed on specious grounds can even provide documents to governing boards which demonstrate clearly that they have been slandered—that information provided to the governing board regarding the employee’s job performance is incorrect. It may be possible that those documents show that the supervisor has placed in writing statements that are explicitly homophobic, and which demonstrate discrimination in the employee's firing.

It would seem that the ethical obligation of the governing board to investigate the sudden termination of openly gay employees in UMC institutions grows even stronger when 1) the employees are nearing retirement age, 2) have incurred strong financial burdens by accepting a position at a UMC institution, on the basis of promises that are then not honored, 3) have a history of hard, effective work in and sacrificial service to UMC institutions, 4) enjoy the esteem of colleagues in many places, 5) give to the institution at a level much higher than that of any other colleagues on the leadership team, and 6) are unlikely, given their age and the inexplicable circumstances of their sudden termination (as well as the threat of legal action if they speak forthrightly about what has happened to them), to find it easy to obtain further employment.

It also seems that the ethical obligation of the governing board to investigate such a sudden termination of openly gay leaders becomes stronger in a place such as

where these unfortunately events transpired. Recent developments in

indicate that this state strongly needs guidance and healing for homophobic violence. United Methodist institutions ought to be leading the charge with guidance and healing. The institution at which we worked prides itself on inculcating civic responsibility in students. It looks to a founder who urged universities to involve students in the social problems of their own community.

In trying to silence and bully openly gay leaders, in then dismissing them under humiliating circumstances, what message does this United Methodist institution give its local community and its students regarding its commitment to oppose homophobic violence?



This is shoddy treatment of people who have given much to UMC institutions for some years, and who made significant sacrifices to come to this particular UMC institution at the invitation of its president to assist her in leading the institution. It is disgraceful treatment from any ethical standpoint. It is underhanded and dirty treatment on the part of people claiming to be ethical agents and representatives of United Methodist values.

4. United Methodist institutions should not hire openly gay employees who are couples if the institution is intent on treating the gay couple differently from other married couples in the same institution.

Within several weeks of our arrival at our last place of employment—where we had been assured we would be welcome as a gay couple, after board discussion of this issue—we were informed by our supervisor that

It is ethically insupportable to make distinctions between openly gay employees as welcome in UMC institutions, and openly gay couples as unwelcome in UMC institutions. To make such a distinction is blatantly discriminatory. Openly gay couples present no challenges to an institution that are unique to gay couples, no challenges that are not present as well when an institution hires a heterosexual couple—other than the challenges gay couples present when they must necessarily negotiate currents of discrimination that are there because they are gay, not because they are a couple.

The underlying reason church-based institutions that claim to welcome gay employees seek to prohibit gay couples is the fear of visibility on the part of gay employees when they are a couple. Asking gay employees to be closeted—not to be seen together or to support each other in the same way a married couple would do—is inherently homophobic and discriminatory. Such discrimination undercuts the claim of a United Methodist institution to welcome gay employees.

Once again, when members of a gay couple are treated with conspicuous disrespect by supervisors who target them specifically as a gay couple, and when they are terminated precipitously on specious grounds in the absence of any written evaluation, whisked away in the company of four security guards with their personal belongings locked into their former office, it is incumbent on a governing board to investigate. It is incumbent on a governing board in a United Methodist institution to investigate what has happened, because such treatment seems on the face of it grossly to undercut core principles of the UMC Social Principles. It is incumbent on the governing board to ask about the reception the gay couple received in the institution in question—that is, if the institution really does want to be an institution that lives up to the Methodist claim of having an open mind, open heart, and open door.

Perhaps if governing boards asked for the testimony of gay couples who have experienced such treatment, they would hear stories that would trouble their consciences greatly—for instance, they might hear what it feels like to be invited by a faculty friend to her Methodist church one Sunday, to kneel at the communion rail of that church with one’s supervisor, and the very next day, to have that supervisor tell you that she wants you gone from the campus, in the company of a retired UMC seminary dean who is a minister, and who will not likely experience the anguish of being without income and health coverage in his late middle age.

The governing board that takes seriously the stated concern of the United Methodist church not to harm, not to discriminate, might hear, if it inquires, what it feels like to listen to the church proclaim its message of open hearts, open minds, and open doors, and then to be terminated in a very humiliating way, three days after kneeling at the communion rail with the supervisor who crafts this bullying termination event.

Should those of us who are gay really believe that the United Methodist church is sincere about its claim to have an open heart, open mind, and open door, when its institutional representatives can behave in this way, and no one raises his or her voice in protest? After my experience at the communion rail of a UMC church on 3 June last year, followed by the outrageous 6 June termination, I have begun to understand a bit what Richard Allen must have felt when he and other African American Methodists were asked to wait for communion until white church members had preceded them at the communion rail . Like Richard Allen, I am now inclined simply to walk away, shaking my head at a church that can proclaim a gospel of love and inclusivity, and then behave with such savagery. What does communion mean to people who can kneel and receive communion with you one day, and then treat you like a despised, demeaned object, and not a human being, the next?

** In this document, I am using the word “gay” inclusively to refer to gay, lesbian, and bisexual employees. Churches should also extend the same moral recognition to transgendered persons, it goes without saying.

Love Comes of Its Own Accord

There are the days when spirit flags,

when I listen to a playlist of songs I’ve named Soul Songs—Pete Seeger singing “We Shall Overcome,” Joan Baez and “Guantanamera,” Sweet Honey in the Rock and that passionate political ballad “I’ve Got to Know,” “Nella Fantasia,” “How Can I Keep from Singing?” “Calling All Angels,” and, of course, Mercedes Sosa rendering “Gracias a la Vida” as if the song is welling from the earth’s depths.

Singing heals the spirit, when too many words threaten to wound it.

I suppose I’m down in a quite specific way because of the apparent futility of talking to church folks about the damage the churches do to gay hearts, minds, souls, and lives when the best pastoral responses churches seem able to provide us is to render judgment on us.

I should say “church folks” rather than “churches.” Churches are people, after all. The frustration is that people—other human beings—seem so oblivious to the harm done to fellow human beings when they are capable of interacting with us only insofar as they have tagged, controlled, and dismissed us.

My aborted conversations with some of these church folks in my own religious communion (but they’re in all churches) continue on threads at National Catholic Reporter. What strikes me as so curious about some of these folks is their ravenous need to tie everything in life up into neat little packages, to wrap those packages tight and then dispose of them—as they imagine God would have them do. Tie, wrap, dispose: the divine plan for salvation!

Several of these people talk always in binary opposites: Truth (always capitalized: they own it) as opposed to falsehood; true love as opposed to false love; natural as opposed to unnatural; the saved vs. the unsaved. It grows wearisome attempting to speak to anyone whose worldview is so neat, so contained, so . . . false.

Because life itself is not like that. Human beings are not like that.

Christianity speaks about the incarnation of God. To me, this means that God enters the human condition, becomes like us—beset with uncertainty, groping to find a path, seeking the best way possible in a world in which there are few best ways.

Last week’s Christian Science Monitor has an article on what constitutes good theology, in the religions of the world. The article cites Karen Armstrong, who notes that the heart and soul of the various religious traditions of the world is one simple and yet frighteningly complex concept: practical compassion.

From a Christian theological standpoint, when God took flesh, Love took flesh. For Christians, God is to be found in the world not through clutching a scrap of paper that contains The Truth, not through sweeping the churches clean of contaminating presences and drawing insider-outsider lines, not by defining everything in the world as we vs. them.

God is to be found by love. And the love that is God is enfleshed. There is no separating line between loving God and loving human beings. Rather than splitting all of reality into binary opposites (controllable opposites, hierarchical opposites), in taking flesh, God unites the opposites: to love humans is to love God; to love God is to love humans.

And so the very deep wound church folks inflict on gay persons: in telling us that what we do is separated from “real” love, in telling us that who we are is not about love in the divinely approved sense, church folks not only deny our love: they deny our humanity.

When the experience of love opens one’s heart to further love; when the love of one person disposes one to love all persons; when love makes one more generous rather than more closed; when the love of the beloved sharpens one’s vision of the many hungers of the world (for food, for water, for knowledge, for freedom from oppression): then one is experiencing the kind of love that is redemptive, liberating, divine.

Rumi says, “Remind those who tell you otherwise that love comes to you of its own accord, and the yearning for it cannot be learned in any school.” To me, this speaks volumes about the vocation of gay believers: to witness to the authenticity of the divine love that we find in our lives and relationships.

Against all odds, no matter what the deniers of love wish to say, we must keep on loving. To do otherwise is to die. When words fail us, when friends betray us, when political allies prove not to be worthy of our hopes, we still have the strongest resource possible: we love, and no one can take this from us.

A Sunday Poem: On Remembrance

It's Sunday, which means a slower than usual day for me. I've spent too much time preaching and writing this week, writing and preaching.

Time for a poem, which says more in a few words than most sermons say in many.

I've talked a lot recently about remembering. For many gay folks who lived through the bitterest years of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s--years in which we saw friend after friend die--remembering has a special significance.

My closest friend from grade school through high school died in those years. He has no grave marker anyplace. His ashes were scattered in a faraway place he loved. For his funeral program, his parents chose to print the text, "The wages of sin is death," prominently on the front cover.

When so many people die so quickly, and often so young, the challenge of remembering is enormous. In those years, I began to challenge myself not to let a single one of my friends go unremembered. This is the same challenge I am putting to myself regarding the gay youth who have been killed lately.

The following is an epitaph I wrote for a friend who died of AIDS in 1994:

Epitaph for L.

No silence

Falls so strong

Across the warm brick of my fireplace

As this sun,

Today,

Gilding and fretting the wrinkled chilies

I've hung upon the firescreen

To dry.

I here,

And you there,

Watching the same sun rise,

Loop its splendid arc

Against the sky,

Then sink with wounded things

Into the pool of night

To nurse its strength

Until the coming day.

Before you died,

You told me of the different life

Your fate had made for you.

I pictured you

Cat-indolent, hunched

Athwart your garden seat,

Lapping milky sun

While butterflies fought flowers round you,

And mockingbirds played morning chase

Across New Orleans rooftops.

What you saw then,

I only glimpse.

Where you've gone now

Is dark to me.

But this day's sun,

Its shaggy mane standing

Stark against my walls:

This sun I see new-eyed

Because you did not live in vain,

Old friend,

My dear departed heart.

A Question for Liberal America: If Not Now, When?

Still thinking about the postings on yesterday’s Arkansas Times blog, in response to Mr. Obama’s clarion call for Americans to recognize that equality is a moral imperative when it comes to how the nation treats its gay citizens.

I read on yesterday’s Towleroad blog that Obama spoke out clearly again in Beaumont, Texas. As he addressed a crowd about the evils of discrimination—against people of color, against women—he received loud acclaim. When he included gays and lesbians, the audience fell silent. He then told the crowd that homophobia is unchristian, and got at least a few cheers.

Homophobia: the prejudice that dare not speak its name—as in being identified squarely and unambiguously as prejudice, as discrimination that is just as evil as racial or gender discrimination. It takes courage to name this prejudice in American culture today, particularly when one is a political leader seeking to win a national election. It takes courage for an African-American leader to name this ugly prejudice, since it continues to be far too acceptable among African Americans who rightly decry racial prejudice to discriminate on grounds of sexual orientation.

And on today’s Bilerico blog, I read that the vigil to remember African-American gay teen Simmie Williams in Ft. Lauderdale on Wednesday addressed “what many see as a growing war on gay and transgendered people in Florida.” Bilerico’s report calls for a frank, open conversation in Florida and nationwide about homophobic violence:

“It is time that Florida, and all of America, begin to have the conversation about hate-based violence and the terror that hate crimes inflict. We demand that EVERY official from every level of government needs to speak out and say we will not tolerate this violence in our communities.”

Reading that statement leaves me with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach—primarily because of the senseless waste of gay youths’ lives, but also because of experiences that I’ve recounted in previous postings. I went to Florida in 2006 to take a job at a United Methodist institution that prides itself on its civic engagement initiatives. I was charged with leading faculty to develop a curriculum to enhance civic engagement on the part of students and faculty.

On one occasion, I made reference to GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network) as an organization whose model of civic engagement faculty might wish to examine, as they crafted civic engagement initiatives for students. For citing that organization as one among many models of civic engagement, I was punished, told that I had “put my lifestyle into the face of colleagues.”

It should not be this way. It was evident to me from the time I arrived at this church-based college that there was a real, a serious, problem with homophobia among students and in the community at large. Since the college’s civic engagement curriculum is based on the belief that students must be taught to involve themselves in every social ill found in their community, it never occurred to me in my wildest dreams that a church-based, civic-engagement oriented college would punish faculty leaders who called for open, honest discussion of homophobic violence—or, for that matter, of youth violence against homeless people.

We have a long way to go: Equality is a moral imperative. And even the churches and their educational institutions cannot skirt that moral imperative. Churches fail dismally in their moral responsibility to educate when they remain silent about homophobic violence. Churches make themselves part of the problem and not the solution, when they punish those they empower to deal with social problems, when those punished have sought to include homophobic violence among the social problems to be addressed.

These reflections lead me to wonder again about those bloggers on yesterday’s Arkansas Times forum about Obama’s moral imperative statement. I wonder, in particular, about all the “liberals” across the nation who seem to believe, as quite a few bloggers stated yesterday, that now is not the right time for the nation and its leaders to decry homophobia.

What can they be thinking, I wonder? I’d like to ask these liberals: What precisely is ambiguous to you about that statement, Equality is a moral imperative?

What do you imagine those of us who are gay and living beside you should do? What is your advice to your gay children, parents, brothers, sisters, neighbors, co-workers?

Do you want us to stand and wait for the crumbs you are willing to dole out, as you sit at the table and feast?

Is this the best you are willing to offer your gay children, parents, brothers, sisters, neighbors, co-workers?

Would you accept this humiliating treatment for yourselves?

Should we simply leave your communities, so that you can live comfortably without confronting your prejudice?

Is this the best you are willing to offer your gay children, parents, brothers, sisters, neighbors, co-workers?

Would you accept this humiliating treatment for yourselves?

Should we hide and be silent, or engage in bogus and totally ineffectual conversion therapies, to make you more comfortable?

Is this the best you are willing to offer your gay children, parents, brothers, sisters, neighbors, co-workers?

Would you accept this humiliating treatment for yourselves?

Would you prefer that we apologize for being gay, and agree that we deserve only what you are willing to offer us by way of the crumbs of justice, when you decide it is time for us to have those crumbs?

Is this the best you are willing to offer your gay children, parents, brothers, sisters, neighbors, co-workers?

Would you accept this humiliating treatment for yourselves?

Would you like for us to stand up and claim our rights, but have you sitting on the sidelines clucking your tongues and saying, “Oh, but now is not the right time”?

Is this the best you are willing to offer your gay children, parents, brothers, sisters, neighbors, co-workers?

Would you accept this humiliating treatment for yourselves?

If not now, when, liberals of America—those of you who profess to value tolerance, those of you churchgoers who claim to have open hearts, open minds, and open doors?

For those denied justice, for those whose basic human rights are being trampled on, is there ever any right time to accord justice except right now? How many more young lives need to be destroyed before you are willing to hear this moral imperative?

Week in Review: Equality Is a Moral Imperative

Another Friday. And wow. When I gathered material last night for my weekly Friday news round-up, little did I know how much the news sites and blogs would be popping this morning with fresh items worth mentioning.

Above all, the open letter Barack Obama issued yesterday to the LGBT community (and to all Americans, since we all suffer when any of us are oppressed) deserves attention. The full text may be found at today’s Bilerico Project Blog at http://www.bilerico.com/.

This statement is significant. It centers on one simple, stark claim: Equality is a moral imperative. The beloved community that constitutes America at its best is a community, rather than a collection of disparate individuals with competing interests, precisely because it regards equality as a moral imperative. The vision of American democracy at its best centers on the astonishing moral claim that all human beings are made equal by the hand of God and have an equal claim on the right to pursue their destiny without being fettered by the prejudice of others.

It’s interesting to me how this moral imperative seems to fall on deaf ears not merely among Americans to the right of the political spectrum, but also among Americans who identify as liberal. That is, it falls on deaf ears among liberals when the moral imperative involves LGBT Americans. It is still difficult for many liberals to hear the moral imperative to accord full human rights to gay human beings. It is still hard for many liberals to understand that standing in solidarity with LGBT Americans and working with us to eradicate the many barriers we experience to equality is a moral imperative involving all of us—not just gay people.

A case in point: the lively blog at my statewide “liberal” weekly newspaper the Arkansas Times. Yesterday, the paper’s editor Max Brantley excerpted Mr. Obama’s statement in a posting entitled “Today I Am an Obamaist": see www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog. The responses of bloggers to Obama’s statement have been astonishing. They’ve been deeply saddening.

There are, of course, the predictable wing-nut rantings and ravings: if you think Katrina was a disaster, just wait for what God will do to the nation when we let the mire and cess of queers rise to the top. What’s shocking to read, though, are not these predictable comments: what's shocking are the postings of self-professed liberals who say they had planned to vote Democratic in the coming election, no matter which candidate is chosen.

One poster says he will now change his vote to McCain. Many others chide Obama for having miscalculated politically. Some of these say that making this statement—that is, enunciating the clear moral imperative that binds us together as a beloved community—will drive centrist voters into the Republican fold.

The subtext of these comments is worrisome to me. For these "liberals," gay human beings are obviously still the Other. We who are gay are not the children, the brothers, the sisters of those who are content to see us still denied full human rights. We are clearly the poor unfortunates who should stand beside the table while they sit to feast, and be grateful when a crumb is dropped into our outstretched hands.

These “liberals” just haven’t yet gotten the message. They haven’t yet heard the moral imperative. The concerns—the lives—of gay human beings are somehow at a remove from their lives. Whereas they have no difficulty at all hearing the imperative for women or African Americans to be given a chance at a full human life, they have yet to hear that moral imperative when it comes to LGBT people.

And this in a state in which, a half century ago, most white people responded to the moral imperative to treat black citizens as fully human with the same timid truculence they now apply to that moral imperative in the case of their gay children, brothers, and sisters. Fifty years ago, it was politically unpopular—politically disastrous—to stand up and speak forthrightly about the full humanity of African Americans in Arkansas.

Today, we celebrate and admire those who had the courage to speak out. Those who vacillated, who sat on the fence, who calculated the political odds and did the expedient thing: their names are all but forgotten. They did not make the choice that moved our society closer to the vision of a beloved community. They deserve not to be remembered, frankly, because they obstructed rather than participated in history in the making, in the realization of the vision of the beloved community.

Speaking of remembering, a theme I have stressed repeatedly regarding gay youth like Lawrence King or Simmie Williams, whose lives were recently tragically cut short by hate crimes, this week’s Arkansas Times carries a story that has touched the depths of my soul. Leslie Newell Peacock’s “Stirring the Ashes” at www.arktimes.com discusses a horrendous event that occurred just outside Little Rock on 5 March 1959.

On that day, 21 African-American youth aged 13 to 16 died at a fire at the Negro Boys Industrial School. These teens were sleeping in a dormitory whose doors were padlocked on the outside. When a fire broke out in the adjacent chapel, they burned to death. Fourteen of the young men were so badly burnt that their bodies could not be recognized. They are buried together in an unmarked grave at a cemetery in Little Rock.

A number of these young men were placed in the Industrial School—a correctional institution for wayward black youth—on outrageously slim charges: e.g., for soaping windows at Halloween time, or for riding the bike of a white friend (with the friend’s permission). This story is a reminder of where we have come from in places such as Little Rock, when it comes to the rights of African Americans.

Just as we should not forget the names and lives of Lawrence King or Matthew Shepard or Simmie Williams, we must challenge ourselves to remember the names of Lindsey Cross, Charles L. Thomas, William Loyd Piggee, and the other young men who died in this horrible fire in 1959. The Arkansas Times article prints those names, and I, for one, will do my best to keep them in memory, as a reminder that the life of every human being counts, that the life of no one who dies tragically young due to prejudice deserves to fall into the darkness of forgetting: Equality is a moral imperative.

As I read this article side by side with the Arkansas Times blog regarding Mr. Obama’s statement yesterday—with the Cassandra-like moanings of liberals because Mr. Obama has chosen to do what is right if not politically expedient—I call to mind the Pete Seeger commemorative that Steve and I watched this past week on PBS. Since that special aired, we’ve been playing Pete Seeger’s protest songs over and over.

In a Carnegie Hall performance of that stirring anthem of the Civil Rights movement, “We Shall Overcome,” Seeger noted how much the youth of the Civil Rights struggle taught their elders. He notes that the verse, “We are not afraid,” was inspired by youths’ willingness to demonstrate fearlessly for equal rights, when their elders, both white and black, cautioned prudence and political calculation.

PBS’s choice to air this special now strikes me as fortuitous. We are at a similar turning point in our history today, with regard to the fundamental direction our nation will take. We are at a crossroads at which we must either choose to accord fundamental rights to LGBT Americans, or frankly admit that we have given up on the vision of a beloved community.

What I wish desperately to say to my “liberal” fellow citizens who are now wringing their hands about the unwisdom of Mr. Obama’s statement yesterday is, Equality is a moral imperative. I want to tell these fellow citizens that another death of any gay youth—the killing of a single other gay youth because he or she is gay—is unacceptable. We must make this a nation in which such deaths are no longer thinkable. These youth are not just the children of the biological parents who gave birth to them: they are all of our children; they are the children of you liberals who still hear the call to equality for LGBT citizens with deaf ears.

Today’s Towleroad blog contains a posting entitled “Ellen Degeneres on Lawrence King: We Must Change Our Country”: see http://www.towleroad.com/. This posting notes that on her show today, Ellen will issue an appeal for us to remember Lawrence King and to make what happened to this youth unthinkable in our nation in the future. Ellen will appeal to us to vote in the coming elections with this moral imperative in mind. The posting links to a clip of that segment of today’s “Ellen.”

And finally, I want to leave readers with a thought-provoking quote from today’s Christian Science Monitor. The Monitor carries an editorial today entitled, “What Is ‘Good Theology?’ ” The editorial excerpts a statement from Karen Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase, in which Armstrong defines what constitutes authentic theology in the religious traditions of the world. Armstrong states:

The one and only test of a valid religious idea, doctrinal statement, spiritual experience, or devotional practice was that it must lead directly to practical compassion. If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express this sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology.

The one and only test of a valid religious idea . . . is that it must lead directly to practical compassion. If only all of us could hear that moral imperative today. And, in particular, would it not be inspiring if the churches examined themselves on this point, and asked whether their proclamations about LGBT human beings lead directly to practical compassion. If they lead in some other direction—if, for instance, they foster ignorance or distortion of the real lives of gay persons, or if they fuel violence in any form towards LGBT persons—it seems the conclusion is inescapable: the churches are misrepresenting the authentic Christian tradition, when they use it to support callous or destructive attitudes towards gay human beings.