In Remembrance: Everybody Has a Story

Today is a day of remembrance. On this day in 1991, I stood beside a hospital bed and watched my brother Simpson die. He was 39.

This was the first death I had witnessed. To say that the experience completely changed my life would be understatement. I can still recall—though with no ability to enter that kairotic place again—the shock of seeing someone I loved suddenly no longer alive. Suddenly dead. To see someone who is one instant breathing and the next not.

This was a death we had all been expecting, though that expectation did nothing to minimize the shock of witnessing it. My brother had, for years, drunk himself into sodden oblivion—determined, consciousness-annihilating bouts of binge drinking, involving a closed bedroom door, bottles of whiskey, and himself alone in bed. As the drunken bouts became more frequent, my mother—who kept him with her—responded by doing what seemed the only possible thing to do: she left him alone until he sobered up again.

Those alone times must have been horrific. In the day and a half that we stood beside his hospital bed in 1991, I noticed that his toenails were broken and bloody, the result of stumbling about the house blindly drunk. His knees were blossomed over with red welts from days of lurching through the house alone. He looked like a veteran of a brutal hand-to-hand battle.

My brother and I had never had an easy relationship. We were close in age. Simpson had come a mere sixteen months after me, as my father completed a law degree that my mother always claimed to have earned, researching his papers, writing and typing them. My brother’s birth was too soon after mine for a mother whose emotional equilibrium was always fragile at best, who danced her whole life beside a fathomless dark chasm of self-loathing, of unquenchable thirst to have her worth affirmed by someone, anyone. All she wanted was to be loved. But no love was ever sufficient to satiate the thirst inside. My mother was clearly unprepared to deal with the demands of two children one after the other, along with those of a husband whom a neighbor once described as “a right nice man, if he would ever grow beyond twelve years old in his head.”

Early on, Simpson and I became playthings in bitter parental struggles over which we had no control, and which we could not begin to understand. These seemed to peak at night, when my father came home, as he fumbled at doorknobs and dropped keys, trying to sneak into the house drunk again, bright badges of red lipstick smearing the collar of his white shirt. Invariably, my mother would be waiting in the dark beyond the front door, the tip of her cigarette glowing angrily in the dark, her arms drawn tight about her body, ready to do battle: to confront, to rip, to tear and rage.

The predictable upshot of the nightly rows was that my father absented himself from us more frequently, eventually abandoning us for a good part of my seventh year. A year in which Simpson entered first grade, and I sought to continue what had become a parental ritual, walking him to school with my hand in his, teaching him when to doff his cap and when to keep it on his head, how to spot the playmates who would encourage him to roll his nickels into gutters where they might never be retrieved, and thereby attract the undesired attention of a principal who, I now realize, perhaps pitied the poor little semi-orphaned children of the absent father, the not-quite-composed mother.

Simpson quickly repudiated my in-loco-parentis guidance, as he entered the wider world of the schoolground and learned that there were possibilities other than family—our sad little family with its tight conspiracies of silence as we dealt with anyone outside our tortured circle. School made me more introverted, slower to disclose myself to anyone except a select few.

By contrast, it made Simpson the self-assured hero, the one who could tackle harder, run faster. I buried myself in books, Grimms’ fairy tales, tattered Victorian novels harvested by a teacher aunt from her school library as it weeded unread old books. Simpson played, and excelled at playing.

My father finally came home, bandaged from a near-fatal car crash in northern California. Within days of his return, I overheard him telling someone on his office phone that a woman had been with him in the wrecked car. Innocently (or not? Did I sense already that there were sides to be taken, that I could become an agent rather than a pawn in the games I did not understand?), I mentioned the conversation to my mother. Hell broke loose.

My father repudiated me, told me I was not his son (though, of his three sons, I look most like him). I belonged only to my mother. From that day on, Simpson became the anointed heir and model son, the one to whom footballs were lobbed, the one taken, when he was in college, on trips by my father to visit his mistress in south Louisiana.

I had long known, of course, that I was not the son my father wanted. As early as age three, I was keenly aware of how I disappointed him, when he took us on a ferris wheel ride in an amusement park, and I shrieked so uncontrollably that the carnival man had to stop the ride and let me off, while Simpson sat contented in my father’s arms. I was the proverbial sissy-boy son of the would-be-macho Southern father, the one whose face looked like the father, but in whom the father would not see his face mirrored.

And why remember any of this, now that my father and brother are both dead—now that both died drunk? In part, I remember because I have to do so. They are gone. I am left. It is the duty of those left behind to remember. To eulogize, but with an honesty that struggles to limn the faint outline of the one remembered, the one we shall never know as he knew himself, since we live in other skin. In remembering, we recreate the one re-membered; the most difficult, the most impossible, task of remembering is to transcend the very perspectives that make memory possible and imperative for us.

I remember, as well, because this first death, of a brother whom I loved despite the mine-pocked landscape between him and me, changed my life. Though by the time of Simpson’s death, I had come out as a gay man to my family and friends, Steve and I still kept silence in our professional lives. We saw no other way. As theologians in Catholic institutions, where silence about one’s sexual orientation was (and usually still is) mandatory, we believed that, in living discreetly, in doing our work punctiliously and fulfilling all of our duties, we would be accorded the same respect, the same circumspect refusal to inquire about domestic arrangements, accorded our unmarried but straight colleagues.

We were wrong, as it turned out. It mattered—more than anything else: more than our work, our commitment to the schools in which we taught, our personal and professional integrity. It mattered utterly and ultimately, the fact of our being gay, the fact of our living together without apology.

At the time of Simpson’s death, I was being offered tenure at Xavier University in New Orleans, where I had taught for seven more or less happy years. Steve, by contrast, had just gone through a brutalizing experience as the first lay theologian teaching at the local Catholic seminary. He had come up for tenure, been voted unanimously by the seminary’s students and faculty to receive tenure, and had then been unilaterally denied tenure by the seminary rector, who told him that the seminary could not afford to pay the salary he commanded as a lay theologian.

Said salary was $15,000, the same salary at which he had been hired in 1985. Steve was booted as the spring semester ended, long after most institutions had hired faculty for the fall. When he was denied tenure, he discovered that his retirement benefits—a pittance—were to be absorbed by the diocese, per the fine print of diocesan rules he had never thought to read when he signed his contract. The following year, the seminary hired two priests to replace him. A year or so down the road, it hired another lay theologian—an ostentatiously married one, with a new bride fresh from the Orient who lived with him in a suite provided by the seminary. The rector who denied Steve tenure was subsequently made a bishop and is now a rising star of the American bishops’ conference.

But that’s another story. At the time of my brother’s death, a resolve formed inside me—a bright and shining one, an obdurate one as hard as coal turned to diamond by raging fires—never again to pretend, deny, disguise who I was. I would continue to maintain the professional code demanded of Steve and me as theologians in Catholic institutions. I would keep my “lifestyle” at home, a personal matter. I would walk that thin line that the professional code of conduct, wink-nudge conduct, required in church institutions.

But I would never again allow the hard-won insights derived from my experience as a gay man who no longer apologized for his identity to sit idle as I wrote or taught. Those insights were me: they were the substance of what I had to offer as a theologian. I would allow them not merely to intrude into my discourse, but to weave themselves throughout anything I thought and wrote and taught.

My brother’s death taught me that life ends. Through the kairotic exchange that anyone undergoes, as she stands beside the death of a loved one and watches him stop breathing, I learned what books could not tell me: that life is there, one minute, and gone the next.

Witnessing such an exchange forces one to re-examine everything. Why live at all, why write about God or love or justice or peace, if one cannot risk everything to bear witness to the one life, the unique life, the singular vocation, that has been granted to oneself?

These are the recognitions to which my brother’s death brought me, as a gay man and a theologian, in 1991. They are recognitions on which I have continued to build—because I must: because I continue living and life is a gift given for some purpose—recognitions by which I keep him alive in some way. They are recognitions by which I give his too-brief and tormented life some meaning.

Patrick Simpson Lindsey, requiescat in pace.

And, as I remember today, I also look down the road to the next generation of my family, my nieces and nephews who, in so many ways, provide wonderful reminders of my brothers, of myself, of our parents, and who carry our lives and their own into the future. I want to acknowledge and celebrate in this reminiscence my nephew Luke, particularly. Luke successfully defended his thesis in South Asian Studies two days ago. I am very proud of him.

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Everybody Has a Story

It's always the same 1950s motel tricked out with shopworn kitchen

Where hungry American mouths have downed a thousand baloney sandwiches;

Sand in the mossy shower, saltwater pooling and staining

Faded green and white linoleum squares.

Outside in the sea breeze picnic tables adjacent Fords and Chevys

So spiffy you can see your face glowing back from inside the bright paint.

Enter wife, kids, dreams galore.

Daddy sits on the table's bench blowing smoke through his nostrils

And pulling beer with practiced lips from longneck bottles,

Enjoying Dagwood's sharp retorts to Blondie,

Wind lifting tiny hairs at the neck of his undershirt.

Mommy sorts clothes, pats curlers tight against her head,

While her eyes endlessly sweep the ocean waves,

Moat lips pulled secure to lock thought

Into the stronghold where she really lives inside.

Bubba plays loud war games to tell us he'll grow up to drink like Daddy,

Die gasping like a fish on shore,

While his family stands waiting for what they always knew

Would come one day, sooner than we thought.

By then Daddy will be many years dead himself, of course,

And Mommy's lips no looser, her hair grayer and more skittish,

Her hungry eyes no more satiated with anything at all.

And I?

The story's hole, dark light seeking shine amidst despair.

My funnies lie vacant in my lap

As their inhabitants, black-shrouded folk,

White faces gleaming under farfetched purdah veils,

Roam the sea on raven skiffs.

Silence broken only by a crow,

And night descends.

The F-Word, the N-Word, and the Men Who Rule Us

It’s already starting. Not just the mudslinging. Not just the use of the N-word (on which, more below).

No, it’s the F-word that’s now starting to intrude—yet again, oh so predictably—into what passes for intelligent political discourse in these United States. And not only among the Republicans, where the word has become a lame and tired slur about Democratic candidates and their supporters. Now the F-word’s being whispered, insinuated by Democrats about other Democrats.

Specifically, it’s being mouthed by Hilary supporters against Obama and his supporters. Not out in the open. Not yet. But it’s there, nonetheless, lurking behind the campaign stage props, as a kind of subliminal discourse crooking its finger to us and wooing us aside to take in an earful. The seductive subliminal F-word insinuation in intra-Democratic political discourse is inviting us to think twice before we cast our votes for a man who may betray our hope—our hope to bring a real man to the White House, someone who will take firm command of the nation and wrest it to some semblance of respectability again.

Maureen Dowd—that tart-tongued doyenne of op-eddom who can be counted on (inevitably) to speak the words others are too timid to blurt right out—used it last Sunday in her Times piece “The Monster Mash”: “But his impassioned egghead advisers have made his campaign seem not only out of his control, but effete and vaguely foreign — the same unflattering light that doomed Michael Dukakis and John Kerry.”

Effete: the F-word. In case you failed to catch the drift, Dowd’s talking about Obama here. Obama: effete. Effete Obama. At a subliminal level, through internet chatter with its constant low-level framing of discourse that eventually issues in media verdicts, Obama and his supporters are being tarred with the F-word brush. And by other Democrats.

The Clinton campaign has already made the F-word subtext explicit, with a Clinton aide claiming last week that Obama tends to attract “boutique” states. The aide observed, “Obama has won the small caucus states with the latte-sipping crowd. They don’t need a president, they need a feeling.”

A feeling. As if feeling is a bad thing? As if good political decisions are made by people who never count the cost of said decisions—the human cost? Who can’t make moral decisions because they lack the ability to imagine in some empathetic, feeling way (a fundamental moral impulse) the effect of their decisions on others?

And sipping: you know, what ladies do. At tea parties. Or after a day of exhausting boutique shopping. Real men gulp and swig. Women and girly men sip, as they sink with a contented sigh into the plush café banquette (preferably velvet-covered, and in an unobtrusive pattern) after a hard morning of shlepping bags from boutique to boutique.

What’s fascinating about this F-word text is not that it’s being used in the current campaign. What’s fascinating is that supporters of one Democratic candidate are trying it out on another: Clinton supporters suggesting that Hilary really does have the brass ones that effete Obama lacks. When the phone rings, count on Hilary to do the right thing—the manly thing. She’s tough. Little matters like feelings aren’t going to get in her way, nosireebob. Mr. Obama can’t best her in the late-night-crisis-match because, presumably, he’ll be too busy kicking back in his ergonomic t.v. lounger, nibbling dark chocolates and sipping lattes while he scans online boutique ads for organic lavender air fresheners and more fetching window treatments (puddles of raw silk? something light and airy for a change?) for the Oval Office.

What the hell is going on here? It’s one thing when Squeaky Chris Matthews or I-Am-So a Real Man! Tucker Carlson use these slimy slurs against the Democratic candidate. Both of those shining exemplars of real man mid-American political “thinking” are predictable in their insinuations about who’s The Man and who’s not: if for no other reason, they have to pull out all the stops with the F-word discourse to try to convince themselves that yes they are real men: Gimme another, make it a Bud!

But Democrats vs. Democrats? One Democrat trying to out-macho the other? This is . . . unseemly. This is idiotic. This low, ugly use of the F-word, of insinuations about masculinity, needs to stop. It gets us nowhere: precisely nowhere. Look at where we have ended up, when we let this discourse dominate our political life. Look at what we elect when we let dim-witted subliminal hints about what constitutes a real man drive our voting decisions. And I do mean what:

George W. Bush climbing out of an airplane, strutting down an aircraft carrier in a crotch-enhanced uniform, informing us we’ve just won a war that’s nowhere near “won,” while Squeaky Chris fans himself and gushes, "He looks great in a military uniform. He looks great in that cowboy costume he wears when he goes West. We're proud of our President. Americans love having a guy as President, a guy who has a little swagger, who's physical, who's not a complicated guy like Clinton.... Women like a guy who's President. Check it out."

Are we proud, Chris?

Look at what we elect, when we let the bigger-phallus-better-leader fantasy determine our political choices: George W. Bush; David Vitter; and now Eliot Spitzer.

Yes, Eliot Spitzer. And that’s where the N-word comes in. I don’t mean the totally reprehensible playing of the race card—by Democrats against other Democrats!—in the current presidential campaign. I’d like to draw attention, instead, to the N-word that never quite speaks its name.

I’m talking about entitlement. The moment the Spitzer story broke, the Internet was abuzz with stories about how the likes of Tucker Carlson were immediately speaking out in defense of Mr. Spitzer: everybody does it after all. Real men do it. Bogus pseudo-scientific articles began to flood cyberspace about how males are just hard-wired to philander, to take what’s there for the taking, while women stay home and grind the grain, dandle the babies, keep the fire burning in the cave to welcome home their roving, hunting warriors.

Interesting, but I don’t recall any of that talk when Larry Craig was caught with his pants down, so to speak, in that men’s room in Minneapolis. Not that what Larry Craig did is in the slightest bit defensible—any more defensible than what Diaper Dave did with his ladies of the night in New Orleans, or what we now know Eliot Spitzer has done.

What I’m trying to draw attention to, however, is the discrepancy in the way “mainstream” culture and the “mainstream” media are treating Spitzer, and how they treated Larry Craig. Remember Tucker Carlson’s giggles when Larry Craig got caught—the endless musing about how the gays signal each other in men’s rooms, the giddy confession that he once bashed a man in the head for coming on to him in a restroom?

Here’s what Carlson had to say immediately after the news about Eliot Spitzer broke: “Getting all high-handed that a grown man went to a prostitute is nauseating . . . . A lot of us are like him, frankly . . . . Now just because he goes to a hooker they're going to be getting all high handed on him . . . I just think this is one of the least sleazy things he's done."

The N-word: what Eliot Spitzer did (and Bill Clinton, and David Vitter, and countless others) is not about grunting cavemen chasing bison and booty while the little woman stays home with the children. It’s about E-N-T-I-T-L-E-M-E-N-T.

It’s about what we allow “real men” to do. We. Allow. We allow. We have formed a cultural consensus, with pseudo-religious warrants propping it up, that allows real men to get away with things. With a lot. With robbing, pillaging, raping, bashing. And with telling us that they set, interpret, and enforce the moral standards for the rest of us.

Real men are all about entitlement. Entitlement is what being a real man is all about. This is why the phallus-challenged will forever clamor to prove to us that they are real men, whether the price they have to pay to do so is to down another Bud, enhance the crotch of their fake military uniform, slap the little woman around a bit, shake their croziers and wobble their wattles at us as they define the moral rules that apply to everyone else.

Real men have an astonishing sense of entitlement, a sense those of us who knew from early in our lives that we weren’t real men—not in that sense, at least—can only look at from the sidelines and wonder about in baffled amazement. Who died and made the phallus God? Specifically, who died and made their phallus God?

Entitlement: the world is there for the picking—women; cars; women; money; women; plum jobs; women; cigars; women; CEO positions; women; the presidency; women; the pilot’s seat; women . . . . This is the message with which real men grow up. This is the message that bombards them constantly from the time they are old enough to observe the world around them. Real men get perks. F-word men don’t. Real men are entitled. No one else is so entitled, not in the astonishing sense in which real men are entitled.

Enough. It’s time for us, as a human community, as a nation, to imagine some other way of doing business, if we expect to have any business to do at all in the future. The astonishing entitlement of real men has royally screwed up the world, the planet, and just about anything human beings have touched. It’s time that someone besides real men begins to re-think all the warrants in all the world religions that have enabled this behavior of total entitlement.

It’s time for women and gay men, for instance, to read the scriptures and discover the abundant evidence there that, despite the claims of the real men who purport to own the scriptures, God does not dispense blessings or curses on the basis of who does or does not possess a phallus, or a phallus larger than anyone else’s. It’s time to say enough to the crude male-entitlement assumptions that run all through our religious traditions.

And, in case you don’t still know where I stand on these issues after reading the preceding, I’ll end with a poem I wrote several years ago after having endured a good portion of my purgatorial allotment (or so I devoutly hope) on an airplane with some of the men who rule us. The poem’s called “The Men Who Rule Us”:

You see them everywhere.

They straddle airplane seats

Casting words from lips bonetight and cutting,

Aimed to whip and cow

With illusions of power unspeakable.

Outside the plane the wet Louisiana clay

Secretes its honeyed humors,

Mists that wreathe the grass in light

And seduce the eye to inward grace.

The girls, they say.

I had three girls typing all day

Stewardess honey give me real magazines

Success, something I can sink my teeth into

Ate too many damn steaks

Sat around the bar and drank too many damn drinks

Gotta lose weight.

The world's enchained in power

By men who talk slantwise, crosswise,

And not at all,

But shoot words out like missiles

To spin their meaning into nothingness.

Redemption?

How,

Save through a language

That drives clean

And homes the heart to wonder

Like a fog-enshrouded field?

In this world,

The only coming God

Is one who walks in haze

Outside the plane.

Lawrence King: Resources for Remembering and Actng

Time moves on. It has been one month since Lawrence King was murdered.

The resolve of the world community to remember, and to act in remembrance of, this young life cut far too short, remains strong. Yesterday, Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education (GLSEN) network released a public service announcement in remembrance of Lawrence King: http://www.glsen.org/cgi-bin/iowa/all/news/record/2277.html.

The announcement calls on us to work to eradicate hate from our schools. It challenges us to make the murder of any child identified as gay in any school unthinkable.

GLSEN’s website links to rich resources for educators seeking to address school bullying, particularly of children identified as gender-inappropriate. Among these resources is an enlightening article providing new details of events preceding the murder of Lawrence King. Paul Pringle and Catherine Saillant’s “Taunts, Family Lives Emerging as Factors in Gay Teen’s Killing” (http://www.mercurynews.com/crime/ci_8512111) notes that Larry had been routinely tormented in school even before he identified himself to others as gay:

The anti-gay taunts and slurs that Larry endured from his male peers apparently had been constant, as routine for him as math lessons and recess bells. The stinging words were isolating. As friend Melissa Reza, 15, put it, Larry lived much of his life "toward the side ... he was always toward the side."

She and others recall that the name-calling had begun long before he told his small circle of confidants that he was gay, before problems at home made him a ward of the court and before he summoned the courage to further assert his sexual orientation by wearing makeup and girls' boots with his school uniform.

This information is important for “mainstream” America to hear. It is already apparent that the murder of Larry King will be framed in some circles as a gay-panic murder: that is, it will be claimed that Larry King “hit on” the boys who taunted him, and that violence ensued as a result of his flirting.

For that reason, it’s extremely important for the mainstream media, for parents, educators, and churches, to hear what Pringle and Saillant are reporting: Larry King was already being tormented even before he came out as a gay youngster. Larry turned to “flirting” in self-defense, as a way of countering the taunts. He was pushed by his tormentors to a point at which he sought to turn the tables by “flirting.”

It would be grotesque if this all-too-common story is dismissed as a tale of deserved punishment, as a morality narrative about how a gay boy who flirts with other boys gets his just desserts. Of course, given the heinousness of this crime, no one will make that text explicit. And it goes without saying that the fourteen-year old boy, Brandon McInerney, who shot Larry King deserves compassion. McInerney is, in many ways, himself a victim--of a disturbed family life; of a culture that links machismo to violence, and which suggests that the appropriate response to another male who exhibits "feminine" characteristics is violent assault.

To say this, however, is not to justify the subtextual gay-panic discourse already lurking in some media accounts of Lawrence King’s murder.

The churches, our schools, and the media, must honor Lawrence King’s memory by examining far more closely what actually goes on in our schools. The real narrative that must not be missed here is one of undeserved torment of countless youngsters identified as gay by their peers, who have nowhere to turn when this happens. The true story is a story of parents, school officials, and churches turning a blind eye to bullying of children deemed gender-inappropriate.

In behaving in this fashion, churches, schools, and the media become facilitators of violence, collaborators in hate. It is time for this collaboration to stop.

As an educator and theologian who was punished in the past year for citing GLSEN in a single meeting of faculty leaders in a church-based institution of higher learning, I call on all churches, all teachers, all schools, to think more carefully about what goes on in the lives of children taunted for being gay. I challenge the churches to make hate rhetoric and hateful actions premised on homophobic prejudice unthinkable.

I urge churches which sponsor schools that train teachers for American classrooms to address this serious social problem pro-actively, appropriately. In choosing faculty for your education programs, make a strong commitment to educating for diversity a key characteristic of the faculty you recruit. Do not aid and abet homophobia by turning a blind eye to instances of homophobic prejudice among your own faculty, among your administrators, among the church officials who sit on your boards.

Do not punish faculty and faculty leaders who call for open dialogue about the destructiveness of homophobic violence. Do not reward faculty who use homophobia to undermine or silence faculty leaders who try to promote such dialogue.

In behaving in this way, you undercut the social justice statements of the churches that sponsor your colleges and universities. In behaving in this way, you become part of the dynamic that issues in violence against gay youth. In behaving in this way, you make null and void statements such as the declaration of the United Methodist Social Principles, "We support efforts to stop violence and other forms of coercion against gays and lesbians."

No other American child needs to meet the fate of Lawrence King. We can stop this violence. It will not be stopped until we decide to make it unthinkable: the key to ending this violence is in our own hands. We simply have to commit ourselves to end it.

Mirror, Mirror: Sally Kern, the Churches, and Some Mother's Children

Sigh. Sally Kern has chosen to go brittle. Rather than using the exposure of her vile prejudice as an occasion for fruitful self-examination, Sally has issued a press release in which she paints herself as the victim of nasty homosexual activists who want to shut down her free speech. In her media statement, Sally has the unmitigated chutzpah to say that in holding forth about homosexuals as social cancer, she was merely involved in a debate in which she was exercising her first-amendment rights.

Sally. Sally. Not feeling so sorry for you anymore. Do you mean to tell me that you really think your back-room rant to other true believers was some kind of public debate? Come on now, Sally: let’s reason together, as LBJ used to love to say (quoting the psalms; but you knew that, since you’re a bible believer). That rant the world is now listening to, Sally? It wasn’t an attempt to defend your indefensible views in a public setting, was it now? You weren’t providing “facts” about the homosexual agenda and devious homosexual activists to a public audience that might ask you to verify said facts, were you? You weren’t speaking to your constituents in a public meeting that allowed for give and take and exchange of opinions, were you? No, you were rallying the troops, pumping up the true believers behind the scenes, when you thought no one but you and said true believers were listening.

As you ranted and raved, you never imagined in your wildest dreams that your words would soon vault around the world. Why, you even said so yourself as you listened to the youtube video of your hate-filled tirade.

What we whisper in secret will be shouted from the rooftops. A corollary of that gospel statement is that it might behoove us not to whisper in secret what we don’t want to have shouted from the rooftops. If we believe the words of the gospels (and you’ve told us you do, Sally: you’re a strong Christian!), then we can’t really try to claim that spouting hatred behind closed doors is not an incitement of others to practice hatred when they leave the closed room, can we? The people we have targeted in our closed meeting? Those people really exist; they have flesh and blood lives. They are not “the homosexual agenda.” They are gay human beings, some mothers’ children. What you said in that closed room has implications for their lives—for them and for their mothers.

And you know that, Sally. It’s not becoming to claim, as your press release tries to do, that you were dissecting an agenda in a closed meeting. You were fanning the flames of hatred in our political process in that meeting. You intended for those who caught your fire to go out of that room and spread those flames.

There’s a lesson here for you, Sally—and for the churches—if you could only hear it. Self-righteous stubbornness is never a becoming response when one’s ugly back-room secrets have broken forth to light. When we stiffen our spines, make ourselves belligerently brittle, in response to revelatory events like suddenly having our inmost thoughts bruited worldwide, it might just be the divine itself that we’re belligerently shutting out. No one owns God, Sally. Don’t for a minute believe the lie of your religious right puppet masters when they try to convince you that they have God under wraps, all neatly tied up, niftily disposable and available to use in their base political war against some mothers’ children.

That can’t be God they’re talking about—not the Judaeo-Christian God. That God, the God of Moses and Miriam, Isaiah and Jesus, Mary and Elizabeth is the one who can’t be wrapped up by human beings. The God of the Jewish and Christian scriptures is the one who always makes us profoundly uncomfortable rather than cozily self-righteous. The God we meet in the bible is always breaking through when we least expect to meet the divine— showing the divine face to us in someone we simply don’t want to recognize, the bag lady on an Oklahoma City street, or the child with his belly swollen from marasmus in Africa whom we glimpse on television as we down our McDonald’s, or the real-life flesh-and-blood homosexual doctor who carefully tends our injuries in the emergency room after we’ve crashed our car.

God’s everywhere—not just in those nifty, convenient places where we want to keep God confined, so we can pull God out of our hat when it’s useful to have a divine reference to substantiate a prejudice we want to promote in a culture-war jihad. We don’t own God. No one does, not you, not the religious right, not the churches. No one. For believers—for “strong” Christians like yourself—it’s God who does the owning. Brittleness, self-righteous belligerence, and false claims to victimhood are not only unbecoming when revelatory events threaten to tear through our brittle barriers of self-righteousness. They actually impede our conversion, our deeper immersion in the life of the spirit.

Why am I harping on this story? Sally Kern will not last. I’ve seen her brittle defiance come and go in my own lifetime. It always vanishes with the wind. I saw it all around me in the white South in which I was raised, as the civil rights movement swept over the land: hell, no, not ever going to change; no one going to force me to send my child to school with no n----r; no n----r is my brother or sister, nosiree! And no one’s going to make me think otherwise.

Sally and her ilk are fighting a losing battle, just as they were when segregation ended, and at some place deep inside her she knows that. The defiance she displays in that press release is all bravado. Sally has been used by the puppet masters of the religious right—those who funded her trip to an anti-gay indoctrination conference (at what cost, Sally; and what perks did you get from attending?)—and they’ll drop her like a soiled rag now that she has been exposed. Mark my words, down the road, Sally will be the contemporary incarnation of her sister Oklahoma bigot, Anita Bryant, tearfully admitting that she was used in her hateful crusade against some other mother’s children.

So why give Sally any mind room at all? Because Sally Kern is the American church, insofar as it ever “thinks” about LGBT people. Sally is the churches face to face with gay human beings. The mirror Sally now holds up is not just the mirror of self-revelation for herself: it’s for herself as a church mother. It’s for the churches in general.

What Sally noised about in that private meeting of true believers is what the churches in general say and do daily (but never admit) to real-life flesh-and-blood children of somebody’s mother. What Sally voices is what the church really thinks about and really does to gay human beings on a daily basis—when it refuses to speak unambiguously against the murder of children considered gender-inappropriate in American classrooms; when it imposes ordination requirements on single LGBT clergy candidates that are not imposed on single heterosexual candidates; when it claims that gay couples should be treated differently in its institutions than straight couples are treated; when it refuses to provide any protection from unfair termination of gay people in its institutions; when it excludes LGBT members from its general conferences, while inviting “ex-gays” to those conferences; when it turns gay people away from its communion rails.

Sally Kern is the church. She’s the church that puts right-wing money above gay people’s humanity, choosing to be silent about prejudice or wishy-washy and ambiguous in its statements against homophobia, simply to avoid losing donations from conservative donors.

In what has happened to Sally Kern, the churches themselves have a revelatory opportunity. This event has the potential to be a moment of grace for the churches, a moment when what is really said in all those back-room meetings and whispered calls of church leaders and administrators of church institutions finally reach the ears of the public.

Churches, that’s your face in Sally’s mirror. Do you like what you see? That’s you speaking in Sally’s tirade. Do you enjoy what you hear?

If not, what do you intend to do?

Dear Miss Sally, WWJD?

I have a confession to make. I’m feeling just a little bit sorry for Sally Kern.

Sally’s the Oklahoma legislator-cum-Baptist-minister’s-wife who recently found herself exposed worldwide after she went on an anti-gay tirade in a small closed meeting in Oklahoma. Unbeknownst to her, someone taped the tirade and has now uploaded it to youtube. For all the world to hear.**

This weekend, I watched clips of Sally listening and “responding” to her tirade. I’ve also watched a press conference at which she says her statements were taken out of context.

I feel sorry for Sally, because though she is among the Righteous Ones who believe they are The Found and the rest of us are the lost, she seems just so decisively lost now, as she tries to pick her way through the muck she threw in that secret meeting, now that the muck is apparent for all the world to see. She is lost because she has absolutely no intellectual or religious tools to deal with her current situation. The found should not find themselves in the land of the lost. It’s outrageous. It’s she who should be placing others there. She should not be forced to assess her actions, to ask about their consequences, to justify what she said. She’s among the saved, damn it!

But as I watch her trying to take in the reality of all the emails and letters she is now getting from the whole wide world, she strikes me as such a pitiful little lost lamb. And my heart goes out to her, my old sordid lost gay heart.

Sally is the whole religious right distilled into one rather pathetic little novella. Hers is the everywoman narrative of the religious right. In her media conference and the clip showing her trying to watch the youtube video of her tirade, she is the entire religious right—Pat Robertson to James Dobson, Phyllis Schlafly to Ann Coulter (yes, she does call herself a Christian)—condensed into one sad little soul. One sad little soul caught on tape and then forced to listen to that tape in front of the world.

From these clips, I gather that, along with some other Oklahoma legislators, Sally attended a conference sponsored by some radical wingnut activist group prior to her tirade. (Note to self: what group? And how much money do said legislators get from such groups? Does Oklahoma have laws governing contributions of such groups? Does Oklahoma have laws that make the contributions of such groups to its legislators subject to public scrutiny?)

She credits that conference with the astonishing array of “facts” she spews forth in her anti-gay tirade: that gays are going after our children; that gays want control of our schools, want to begin recruiting children as early as age two; that gays are diseased and don’t live long; that gays are a cancer spreading through our society; that gays cause the downfall of civilization; that gays are at the center of an organized cabal to destroy the family; and that gays are a bigger threat to America than terrorists.

You know the story. Substitute “Jews” for “gays” and turn the clock back a millennium, and you realize that Christians are old hat at this game. They’ve been playing it for centuries, after all: identifying some despised minority in their midst as the unique and solitary source of all evil, characterizing that minority as dirty, sly, child-killing, corrupt, infectious, and deserving of total exclusion, if not death. Jews = heretics = witches = women as daughters of Eve = people of color = gays. The cast may change, the robes vary, but the players are essentially the same. On one side is righteous Christian civilization, on the other is the threat that must, at all cost, be extinguished, even when the extinguishing means extracting confessions by dunking the corrupt agent of infection in water, pulling his arms from their sockets, breaking her back on the wheel, pulling out the bloody fingernails of the heretic one by one until a confession is obtained.

Even when the extinguishing means burning at the stake, disemboweling, hanging, expelling from Christian civilization (and leaving behind one’s property to enrich the good folks who have expelled you) . . . .

Even when the process of scapegoating, ritual humiliation, and expulsion violates everything Jesus ever said or did or stood for . . . .Even when one must lie in order to “prove” the case against the scapegoat . . . . A lie told in the service of a good cause (and Christian civilization is, ipso facto, a very good cause) is not really a lie. Is it?

As Sally watches her clip on youtube, she turns away her face. When asked why she does so, she explains that she just can’t watch. Nor does she intend to read or respond to all the communications she is now getting about her tirade. At one point, she expresses astonishment—shocked astonishment—that the words she said in that lil ole meeting behind closed doors are now winging their way around the world. That's not what she intended, when she kicked back and let her hair down entre nous, with the true believers in secret conclave.

I want so much to ask Sally at that point if Jesus ever said anything (that she can recall off the top of her head, being a “strong” Christian and all: she describes herself thus in her media conference) about homosexuals as dirty, cancerous, child-stealing and child-corrupting infectious low-lives destined for a short existence anyway. About homosexuality, period.

I want to ask her that because, while I don’t recall Jesus saying a single word about homosexuals or homosexuality, I do seem to recall him talking about measuring others with measures we’d like to have used when we ourselves are measured, and about the beam in our own eye and the mote in the other’s eye. I remember him talking a lot about justice and mercy. I quite specifically recall recall Jesus saying very clearly that the secrets we whisper in the dark will be bruited from the housetops.

As a bible-believing strong Christian, Sally remembers that text, I feel quite sure. And perhaps that is at the heart of her discomfort now—the recognition that the bible she takes literally does sometimes prove itself to be true, quite literally, but in some mighty discomfiting ways. Sally spoke out against the dirty gays. And she was heard. Loud and clear. Around the world.

What makes people act this way, when they clearly have grace enough to feel at least a tiny bit ashamed as they listen to their ugly secrets, secrets whispered in the dark and then broadcast around the world? People act this way, I submit, because they believe they are right. And no one or nothing has ever forced them to think otherwise.

When we are oh so assured that our worldview is the worldview, when we surround ourselves with other true believers who see the world through our lens, who parrot our truisms, who do not offer the slightest resistance to what we believe even when our beliefs verge on cruelty: when we live in such a universe, nothing compels us to ask whether we might simply be far off the track of sanity, decency, right-thinking and right-believing, with our untested, taken-for-granted certainties.

Sally’s a teacher. In her rant, she prides herself on sticking to the facts. She claims she wants the gays out of her schools because the gays promote ideologies that try to get children to look at the world differently—not through the lens of facts such as those she gleaned from the wingnut conference that indoctrinated her about the refined subtleties of the gay agenda, but through the lens of ideology. In other words, Sally resists the process of education, period, insofar as it asks those being educated to look at the world through various frames of reference, to think about the truth claims implied by each frame, to measure those truth claims, and then to make sage choices about the worldview one wishes to adopt.

Sally is ignorant. And Sally is a believer, a strong one. Ignorance + true belief is a noxious receipt, a prescription for a dangerous and volatile compound. When one really and truly believes with all one’s heart but is untroubled by fact or thought, one can justify just about anything: garroting of witches, burning of Jews, shoving the handicapped and homosexuals into ovens and burning them to cinders.

One of the surprises I myself have repeatedly had in dealing with the church at its ugliest—the church untroubled by fact or thought as it bashes gay human beings—is the willingness of the Sally Kerns of the church to try to claim victim status when they themselves are the victimizer.

Of gay employees. Of gay people. A typical response of church folks in supervisory positions in Christian institutions, when challenged with evidence of their homophobic ill-treatment of gay employees, is to claim that the evil gay is victimizing them! This inversion of values, the attempt of the oppressor to turn the tables and try to identify the oppressed as the victimizer, is typical in any twisted relationship in which a privileged party abuses a party placed in a subordinate position, in which that person cannot easily defend himself or herself.

Sally Kern depicts herself as a victim in the clips in which she confronts the evidence of her hate rhetoric. After terminating my employment in a particularly dirty, underhanded way, my last supervisor in a United Methodist institution wrote me a letter in which she implied that I had somehow attacked her—by letting her fire me. She has her high salary, her dignity, her health coverage; I have no income now, no health coverage. My reputation has suffered because of her unjust actions toward me. But she is now, in her telling of the story, the victim and I the victimizer . . . .

When this supervisor told me I was to be demoted, without no evaluation preceding this demotion and sharp cut of my salary, I asked her how she intended to handle the negative publicity that would surely ensue from such an outrageously unjust action. She waved away the question with a sweep of her hand. "Let them talk," she said. "People will talk. Just ignore them."

After that, when she went a step further and terminated me out of the blue, as word of the circumstances of the termination got out, the supervisor's attorney told me that I had created negative publicity for my supervisor in being terminated. My partner Steve was there when the termination occurred. When I was denied the right to call an attorney as I was terminated, I called Steve, instead, so that I would have a witness (and moral support) as I was locked out of my office on the UMC campus by four security guards.

Not having signed any document forbidding him to speak about what he witnessed, Steve then sent an email to a campus committee several days later, describing what he had witnessed. He did so because, knowing it had terminated me, the university continued using my name and my credentials as though I remained on campus. Both of us, in fact, still appear as employees of this Methodist institution in its university catalogue, some nine months following our departure from the campus; the catalogue still lists us by titles we no longer hold. The listing of faculty with terminal degrees contains our names and degrees.

The catalogue contains an online errata file I myself set up, into which any changes in the catalogue are to be entered immediately, so that the online catalogue is a constantly up-to-date version of this crucial university document. That errata file has not been updated in almost a year. A reliable source tells me that, some time after we both were gone from the campus, a grant was submitted to which our c.v.'s were both attached. The grant proposal contained information about the role we both would play in the implementation of the grant, if it were awarded—though we were both gone from the campus when the grant proposal was submitted.

(It was awarded. Steve wrote the grant prior to his resignation. When the grant for $150,000 came through following his resignation, the supervisor—who knew he had authored it—gave credit for it to another employee. My last act on campus was to take it on myself to write a grant that brought the university $15,000, for which someone who had no role at all in writing the grant has been allowed to take credit. My first assignment when I arrived on campus was to write a grant that brought the university $500,000.)

Note to self: Christian institutions seem perfectly capable of taking the talents of gay people, using them to the fullest, and then rewarding these gay human beings with conspicuously ugly treatment as a boon for their hard work, sacrifice, and dedication to the ideals of the institution. Who is the victim, and who the victimizer, in the relationship between gay believers and the church?

This ugly tactic—an inversion of values by which the victimizer tries to claim victim status—is possible in Christian institutions in their dealing with gay persons, because the churches have decided a priori that they are right and gay people are wrong. Churches have decided in advance that gay people have a humanity that is somehow twisted or diminished, by comparison to the humanity of “normal” people.

Hence the astonishment on the part of church institutions, on the part of the Miss Sallies of the world, when gay people fight back against abuse and injustice—when we claim our humanity in the face of oppression. Gays who insist on telling our inconvenient stories of abuse suddenly become “homosexual activists,” professional pot-stirrers trying to create trouble for good Christian people—the kind who think they can say hateful things about us behind closed doors, or boot us out of jobs without any defensible cause for our termination, and never be exposed.

I’m astonished by this reaction, by Sally’s (and my former supervisor's) attempt to claim the victim’s role. Do people—good church people—really think that we will sit on our hands when our rights are denied and our humanity violated? Do they really think that we will ask to be bashed again, please sir or please ma'am? I didn’t get enough the first time around . . . .

News flash to Sally Kern and other mothers (and fathers) of the church: every hateful word you utter about the gays negatively affects a gay person, which is to say, some other mother’s son or daughter. Would you want your sons or daughters reduced to subhuman status, to the status to which you reduce other mothers’ sons and daughters when you engage in hateful rhetoric or hateful acts in the name of Christ? Would you want your own children relegated to the subliminal, marginal, despised social place into which you seek to put someone else’s sons and daughters, by your words and deeds?

I don’t think Sally Kern is a particularly bad person. She strikes me as far less cynical about the hate agenda she is promoting than, say, a Pat Robertson, a Ralph Reed, an Ann Coulter, or a James Dobson. I think Sally truly believes.

But true belief is not good enough. Not when it issues in hateful actions. Not when it promotes lies. Not when it covers over the violent assault of children in our schools, if those children are identified as gender-inappropriate.

Somewhere deep inside, Sally perhaps hears the voices of those children. If she does read her mail in the coming weeks, I suspect she’ll be hearing from the parents, siblings, aunts, uncles of such children. Many of those parents, siblings, aunts, and uncles may well identify themselves, as Sally does, as strong Christians.

When their voices reach the true humanity inside the hard shell of true belief compounded by ignorance—and I hope they will do so—what will Sally do? Will she drive more nails into the hard shell to cobble it back together, so that the pleading voices can’t get inside?

Or will she listen, and respond? Like a human being, and not a strong Christian?

On that response truly does depend the future of an authentically Christian culture. On that response the future of the churches themselves depends. No more gay-identified children need to be killed in the schools of “Christian” lands. No more adult gay children who have mothers somewhere need to have their lives tormented by the lies and unjust treatment of other fathers and mothers who claim to speak and act in the name of Christ.

If Sally and her ilk really want to hear the facts they claim so desperately to value, I know a boatload of gay folks willing to tell our stories to them—stories full of facts that just don’t seem ever to get a hearing in church circles or the mainstream media that are so quick to pander to the religious right. We’re at the door, knocking. Let us in, invite us to your table, and we’re prepared to talk.

If you care to listen . . . .

**Several blogs linked to my blog have postings this past week about Sally Kern; they include Towleroad, Pam's House Blend, and Bilerico Project.

Week in Review: Letting Sunshine In

A rare March snowfall (the second in several days) put me into contemplative mode yesterday, so this weekly news wrap-up is a day late. As I type, the snow is still lying on the ground, with the new season’s daylilies and Louisiana iris beginning to spike through it. A bright scarlet spray of flowering quince bravely fights against the cold, to herald a spring that now seems impossibly far away.

The stillness of yesterday’s snowfall also allowed me to finish Kevin Sessums’ wonderful memoir Mississippi Sissy (NY: Saint Martin’s, 2007). Though Sessums grew up in a neighboring state, and is seven years younger than I am, I can certainly relate to much of his experience of growing up a sissy in a Southern state in which fathers expect to have their masculinity mirrored to them by their sons. Sessums notes that the sense of being identified as different—in an unacceptable way—when one is too young even to understand the mechanisms of prejudice, induces a watchfulness, a tendency to listen and observe, in young gay boys: “That’s what most sissies do when we are children: We sit apart and listen” (preface, unpaginated).

Indeed. The experience of being identified as (and shamed for) being less than the ideal man-in-the-making places one on the sidelines from early on—listening, pondering, trying to put pieces together: above all, trying to foresee the next inexplicable blow, to stay out of its way, when the chastening rod can descend so suddenly and unexpectedly, simply because one is not who one is expected to be. As Sessums notes, “…the one-word condemnation all little sissies must deal with at some point, the one that reverberates in the echo chambers of our collective memory. ‘Shame,’ came the utterance, ‘shame…’ ”(p. 135).

When we survive—and Sessums has done so magnificently; he has not merely endured but prevailed—we hope to give something back. We hope to make it just that much easier for those coming after us, when we tell our stories—easier to know that one is not alone in the world; and easier to identify and avoid cruelty and violence. We hope that, by telling one more story of unmerited pain endured by children identified as gender-inappropriate, the back of homophobic cruelty and violence may be broken in the future.

And so to the news of the week:

I’ve blogged in past days about the recent spate of anti-gay violence in Ft. Lauderdale. As I’ve noted, the violence is fueled by a group of ministers supporting Ft. Lauderdale mayor, Jim Naugle, in what Pam Spaulding calls a campaign of “homo-hate”
(www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=4671).

The good news this week is that spotlighting Naugle’s inappropriate use of his office to channel fundamentalist homophobia has resulted in a curtailing of his activities. The organization Fight Out Loud recently led an action alert campaign to make Naugle accountable for the violence he was inciting (www.fightoutloud.org/actionalerts.html).

This week, several blogs have reported that Ft. Lauderdale has decided to remove Naugle’s bi-monthly column from the city newsletter. Since the column had become a forum for Naugle to “spew homo-hate,” shutting down the column will provide one fewer venue for the dissemination of such hate that is fueling violence in this part of Florida.

Among the blogs reporting on this update of the Ft. Lauderdale story week are Bilerico (www.bilerico.com/2008/03/a_victory_in_fort_lauderdale.php#more) and Pam’s House Blend (www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=4695). For those interested in more information about the ministerial alliance supporting Naugle, several blogs have linked to the following 2007 local news article at the time Naugle began targeting the LGBT community: www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/broward/sfl-0904naugle,0,7179279.story.

Since I cite Pam’s House Blend blog so often and have included her in my links list, I’d like to say a few words about this blog. I don’t know Pam Spaulding personally; have never met her. But I read her blog daily, because I find it one of the most level-headed and yet politically daring commentaries on news today—news affecting the LGBT community, to be sure, but news in general as well.

Pam (who is African American) has been relentless in calling for open dialogue about homophobia in the African-American community. As she noted in this 20 Jan. posting about Obama’s remarks at Ebenezer Baptist church in Atlanta challenging homophobia in the black community (www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=4223), even though this critique is focused on a segment of the American population, homophobia in the black community is everybody’s problem, and sunshine is the best disinfectant.

Pam continues letting the sun shine in this week, reporting on a recent talk by Mayor Denise Simmons of Cambridge, Massachusetts, the nation’s first openly lesbian black mayor, and City Councilman Ken Reeves, the first openly gay black mayor, at Harvard (www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=4705). According to Pam, the Cambridge Chronicle reports “most of the homophobic sentiment they've [i.e., Mayor Simmons and Councilman Reeves] incurred as politicians and as people has been at the hands of black clergy and religious leaders.” Pam concludes, “This is a tragic disservice to the black community, and further proves how pathological and deep a problem this is. I'm glad that Simmons and Reeves are speaking out and it's being covered in the media.”

Pam Spaulding’s blog this week also reports on an appearance of Rev. Ken Hutcherson—whom Pam characterizes as a “raging homobigot activist”—on TBN’s “Praise the Lord” show on Thursday (www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=4707). Pam transcribes some of Pastor Hutcherson’s remarks, and comments on them. Among them is the following eerie observation: “Love hurts! Love hurts! My love hurts my kids sometimes. Hurts 'em good!” Indeed.

Why do I, a white gay man with Southern roots, believe that it’s important to engage homophobia in the African-American community? After all, it’s not as if there’s not homophobia in abundance right within my own community to engage.

I’m interested in addressing this phenomenon—and homophobic violence anywhere it occurs—because I agree with Pam Spaulding: homophobia in any community is the problem of all communities. It happens that the pastors supporting Naugle in Ft. Lauderdale are African American. It also happens that the young gay man buried last week after being murdered in Ft. Lauderdale was an African-American teen. It also happens that Rev. Hutcherson is African American.

Homophobia is a problem in the black community—as it is in the white community. It affects African Americans; it tragically ended Simmie Williams’ life. It affects all of us. We all lose, when anyone dies through unmerited violence; we all lose when gifted young people have their lives snuffed out, and never have a chance to contribute to the community.

African Americans are a churched people, by and large. African-American churches have been marvelous instruments of progressive social change. It grieves me to see any churches siding with oppression, particularly when this oppression issues in violence—whether the “soft” violence of discrimination, or the “hard” violence of actual physical assault. As a theologian, I have always considered it part of my calling to explore the roots of social violence, to expose them, to try to address and contribute to the healing of such violence.

When I began my teaching career in 1984, I had two job offers, one from a prestigious “white” university, the other from an historically black university. The choice was, for me, a no-brainer. I took the position at the HBCU. Though most of my grad-school classmates could not understand why I would turn down a much more lucrative and high-profile job at a mainstream university, I saw the choice as one between the vocation to serve, to make my voice count, to give back, and the choice to live a cloistered scholar’s life that would not have an impact on the world around me. I chose the HBCU.

As Kevin Sessums notes throughout his book Mississippi Sissy, the roots of white Southerners are intertwined with those of black Southerners. There is no way to talk about our future except by talking about a shared future. Sessums’ experience of marginalization as a sissy boy growing up in the American South sensitized him to the ugly oppression of African Americans. He heard the bible used to justify discrimination and violence against black citizens, just as he heard it used to justify discrimination and violence against gay people. The mechanisms of oppression were the same, in both cases. The people promoting the oppression were the same. The white churches bore tremendous responsibility for fostering racism, just as they did for fostering homophobia.

I saw the same picture, growing up as a young white gay boy in Arkansas. My experience of coping with homophobia led me, early on, to question and then oppose racism. I find it extraordinarily painful now to be susceptible to prejudice on the part of African Americans, who have much to gain by remaining in solidarity with others experiencing unmerited oppression. I find it difficult to understand how anyone marginalized by the power centers of society cannot see that those power centers play one marginalized group against another, to maintain their unjust control. In fighting among ourselves, we play into the hands of those who wish to oppress all of us.

This is why I speak out. This is why I call on the African-American churches to renounce homophobia, just as I call on my own and other “white” churches to do the same. This is also why I have been heartened at Mr. Obama’s clear witness against homophobia in the African-American community.

This week, a video clip of Obama’s courageous statement that homophobia is not Christian has been uploaded on several blogs, including the Towleroad blog (www.towleroad.com/2008/03/03/index.html#entry-46534010) and Michelangelo Signorile’s Gist at www.signorile2003.blogspot.com.

And in my own church, the oppression continues. The Clerical Whispers blog reported in the past week that, lest we remain in doubt about Pope Benedict’s stands on gay rights and gay human beings, the pope has praised the United States for its opposition to gay marriage—see http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2008/03/pope-praises-us-opposition-to-gay.html.

At the same time, the recent Pew Report statistics showing a significant proportion of American Catholics having walked away from the church continue to be studied. This week’s National Catholic Reporter contains an insightful podcast analyzing what’s happening with young Catholics in the U.S. The report concludes that many young Catholics keep believing, but are increasingly choosing not to belong: see http://ncrcafe.org/node/1653.

This week’s National Catholic Reporter also carries an editorial challenging church leaders to sponsor a national discussion to examine the exodus from the church—see www.natcath.org/NCR_Online/archives2/2008a/030708/030708ze.htm. In my view, if church leaders did sponsor such a nationwide dialogue (and I will be surprised if they do), they’ll find that a very significant reason for the exodus—particularly among young Catholics—is the church’s unrelenting homophobia.

As an example of such homophobia: the Clerical Whispers blog reports this week that St. Stephen’s parish in Minneapolis, a well-attended welcoming community with a vibrant liturgy and many social action programs, is being forced to make its liturgical life conform to the narrow expectations of the diocese: see http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2008/03/minneapolis-parishs-progressive.html. The blog quotes a former parish council member, Mary Condon Peters, on the liturgical shutdown: "It's incredibly sad. All these years, there was room in the big old Catholic tent for all of us. And now there isn't. And they gave us three weeks' notice." This has traditionally been a rare parish in which gay Catholics have felt at home.

One has to wonder if the big old tent will contain anyone in the future except the righteous remnant, if the church continues along its present path of weeding out those identified as unwashed and unwelcome.

And as all this happens, a reminder that the recent Fight Out Loud video about violence against LGBT citizens of the U.S. in 2008 (www.fightoutloud.org) shows that we who are gay are being murdered at the rate of 1 person every 8 days in 2008.

Do the churches have anything—anything convincing—to say about that?