Prop 8 and Black Voters Again: Timothy Kincaid's Contribution

Just before I went to bed last night, I happened to see that Andrew Sullivan had linked to a Box Turtle article by Timothy Kincaid that carries on the prop 8-black voters discussion (http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/01/prop-8-and-th-1.html, www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2009/01/07/7857). Now that I’m scanning news sites this morning, I notice that an astute reader, Waldo of Waldo Lydecker’s blog, has also recommended Timothy Kincaid’s article in a comment Waldo made about my posting yesterday dealing with this topic.

Timothy Kincaid’s argument parallels mine in yesterday’s posting about prop 8 and the black vote. He notes that fashioning an honest critical discussion about the relationship of the gay community to African Americans and of African Americans to gays is well-nigh impossible, in our vexed cultural climate that makes discussions around racial issues so fraught with tension. As Kincaid notes, there is clear, reprehensible racism in some sectors of the gay community. And many of also fear to engaging the issues because we are concerned that we will immediately be attacked as racists, simply for opening our mouths.

Kincaid concludes that we have to engage these issues, unless we who are gay want to write off the African-American community—and he does not want to end up there, as I do not want to do so. In his view, we may spin the data about the black vote in various ways, but we must not allow the spinning to cloud two incontrovertible conclusions:

The Black Church is for the most part hugely homophobic.

Even non-religious African-Americans are disproportionately politically anti-gay.

I agree. And I think that anyone, from any side of the discussion, who believes in the need for all marginalized groups to stand in solidarity with all other marginalized groups, has to face these two facts squarely. We have to do so, that is, if we intend to move forward.

The time for slamming any white gay person who wants to engage these issues as racist and privileged and rich is over. In my considered opinion, the African-American community shoots itself in the foot when it continues to engage in these self-defeating tactics to hold frank discussion at bay, and when it continues to shoot the messenger who notes the elephant in the living room.

This does not mean that white gay people should give a free pass to white racist gay folks. If we call on the African-American community to deal with its homophobia, we have an equal responsibility to call on our own community to deal with its racism. For that matter, if we're going to talk about the homophobia of the black church, then why not also address the homophobia of the white churches? The Knights of Columbus gave a bundle to help pass prop 8. The Catholic bishops of California did almost everything but stand on their heads to pass the anti-gay marriage amendment. The Mormons' sordid involvement has been carefully dissected.

What the preceding provisos do mean is that the black community damages itself when it covers over its own homophobia—as Ta-Nehisi Coates so eloquently argues in the posting about which I commented yesterday. As Timothy Kincaid notes, that damage is passed on in seriously destructive ways to young gay and lesbian African Americans.

Though Kincaid admits the temptation to step away from the struggle—how often can one be slapped in the face and told that one is an unwelcome intruder before one considers that route, after all?—he finds that escapist option “cold” to consider that option, when he thinks of the needs of those young black gay men and women:

But we also know that there is a strong and unapologetic voice of harshest homophobia that has no hesitation in using race as a justification for denying that gay and lesbian Americans deserve civil equality. If we seek change, it cannot be haphazard or hesitant. It will be no picnic and we have to be willing to offend some who believe that they own the concept of civil rights and not be afraid to be called racist by those who oppose us.

Or we could also just write off this subset of the population and hope that we can sway enough whites and Asians to outweigh the African American vote. But while it may be pragmatic for winning an election, this approach strikes me as particularly cold. It not only leaves another generation of young black gay men and women growing up in a community that has pockets of severe hostility, but it also dismisses a lot of otherwise decent people as not being worth our time or effort.

I agree wholeheartedly—both about our obligation to refuse to be deterred from doing what is right in these struggles, and also about the hard road ahead for any of us who don’t choose simply to write off all African Americans in the struggle for gay rights. From bitter personal experience, I know how hard that struggle is.

As an academic vice-president charged with enhancing a university’s commitment to social justice and civic engagement, I was slapped—and slapped hard—when I brought a request of other faculty for support groups for gay and lesbian students and faculty to the top of the administration. When I listed, among many other groups for student engagement, the organization GLSEN, I was accused of promoting my cause, of putting “my lifestyle” in the face of the faculty—the same faculty who had requested support groups for LGBT campus members.

As this happened, it did not escape my attention that not a single gay or lesbian faculty or staff member supported me, spoke out, called for fair play and honesty in this discussion. All were and to my knowledge remain deeply closeted—though their sexual orientation is an open secret on the campus in question. These closeted gay and lesbian colleagues were, in fact, among my worst detractors, those most inclined to assist the top-level administrator who was determined to close the door on this discussion, as she vilified, hounded, and eventually expelled me.

There is not, to my knowledge, a single LGBT student, faculty member, administrator, of staff member at this HBCU. There is a wall of silence a mile high around the open secrets with which many campus members live. The pretense—the stupid and self-destructive determination not to deal with what is right there in the midst of the campus—is insuperable.

I understand the need for these colleagues to step gingerly. The school in question has no official policy statement forbidding discrimination against employees on grounds of sexual orientation. The community in which these colleagues work daily is hardly a receptive community, hardly one that allows them to be open about their identities. The church that sponsors this university—a mainstream white church, one that proudly professes to have an open heart, open mind, and open door—colludes in and structures the homophobia through behind-the-scenes tactics and governace procedures that forbid these issues from being publicly discussed. In many ways, those powerful conservative white men behind the scenes who are pulling the strings and pitting blacks against gays are the chief malefactors that need most to be exposed, in these struggles.

But I also know that nothing will change until these closeted gay and lesbian people of color come out of the closet and stop defending and colluding with homophobic leaders. Nothing will change until they themselves call for just treatment of gay and lesbian members of their campus community. Nothing will change until they call the hand of homophobic campus leaders and refuse to allow those leaders to continue oppressing employees who happen to be gay. Nothing will change until the African-American community stops playing games around these issues and starts talking openly and honestly about them.

And much needs to change, because on that campus as on many others, young gay and lesbian students remain in desperate need of understanding, support, and affirmation. They do not need to be preached to by homophobic faculty members who tell them that their “chosen” “lifestyle” is abhorrent to God—and such preaching does take place on this campus and many other HBCU campuses. They do not need to be told that they have a white boys’ or white girls’ disease that makes them pariahs among their own people.

How can anyone who values her or his humanity remain aloof in the face of such need? How can any educator do so—particularly educators who tell themselves that they are transformative leaders committed to social justice? How can churched communities justify such cruelty, lying, injustice, and refusal to reach out and offer a helping and healing hand to those in need?

And as I end this reflection, I want to take this opportunity to thank Ta-Nehisi Coates for his very gracious response to my comments yesterday. I agree with what he says in his response: playing the oppression of one group against the oppression of another is a zero-sum game, one that gets us nowhere fast. I appreciate very much the commitment of Ta-Nehisi Coates to gay rights, as a straight man of color who does not have to involve himself in my struggles.

And speaking of that—and apropos this discussion—there’s another very important discussion at the Box Turtle site today (www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2009/01/09/7885). This is a horrifying story of a Tennessee hotel that recently fired a gay employee. Solely because he was gay. A hotel that fired this employee while admitting that its reason for doing so was the man’s sexual orientation.

The hotel’s assistant manager Leonard Stoddard—who is an African American—is blowing the whistle. He is the one who was charged with delivering to this gay employee the news that he was fired because of his sexual orientation. He is willing to verify that this was the motive. And he is courageous about opposing the discrimination, even though he knows that the stand he is taking will lead to his own termination.

In all these battles, in which it is so easy to slip into stereotypes about “the” black church, about “all” gays, about people of color “in general,” it’s important to remember that human stories run beneath stereotypes. And human beings are infinitely surprising.

Even as “the” gay community asks “the” African-American community not to overlook the support many gays have given to black civil rights for generations, it is important that we in the gay community not forget the courage that people of color including Desmond Tutu, Coretta Scott King, Bayard Rustin, Mildred Loving, Gil Caldwell, and many others have given to our cause.

Add Leonard Stoddard to that list.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Parsing the Data about Prop 8 and Minority Voters

Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish links today to a posting by his colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates yesterday at the Atlantic blog site (http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/01/prop_8_and_blaming_the_blacks.php). Coates deals with a recent report by the Haas Fund that gives a fine-toothed analysis of the statistical breakdown of the vote of various groups for or against prop 8 in California. (Ta-Nehisis Coates has a link to the Haas report in his posting.)

Careful analysis of the data suggests that, contrary to reports in the mainstream media following the election, the African-American vote for prop 8 was not anywhere near the 70% figure bandied about in the wake of the passing of prop 8. At 58%, it was closer to the 59% figure of Latin American voters for prop 8.

And as with other groups, the vote of the African-American community can be further broken down by church affiliation and attendance: voters who are churched and attend church regularly tended to vote in higher proportions against gay marriage, although the data show that African-American church-attending voters voted in a lower percentage against gay marriage than did churched voters of other communities.

Coates rightly expresses consternation at the large number of commentators who were willing immediately to lay the prop 8 victory at the feet of black voters. He suggests that in expressing this consternation, he is not glossing over or apologizing for the homophobia of some African Americans. As he notes,

Homophobia is bad for my community. I support gay marriage because I believe it is a moral imperative, and the marker of a just society. I support it because, as a black man, I have seen first-hand the value of all kinds of family. In other words, it's in my interest. It's in my son's interest. It's a part of a world, that I hope to live in.

And then he goes on to make the following observations, about which I've been scratching my head all day, as I wondered if it's worth trying to reply or to make sense of these remarks--or better just to shake my head, mind my own business, and go my own way:

But frankly, I have no use for people--gay, straight, white, red, rich, poor--who feel like black people "owe them." I have no use for people who like to trot out their history of supporting "black causes." I have no use for people who want to compare gay racism with black homophobia. With friends like those...

I'm sorry. I have to be frank, knowing that as I state my views frankly, I make myself--a white gay man living in the American South and descended from ancestors who held slaves--a big target for anyone who wants to play the racist card against me. But a white gay man who, precisely because of both the weight of his history and his sexual orientation, has found it impossible to ignore the claims of people of color on him.

Who has taught in HBCUs (and who chose to do so at a certain cost), and participated in civil rights demonstrations. Who has written over a period of more than 20 years about the obligation of the academy to incorporate the voices of people of color and to give works by African Americans canonical status.

There is a way in which I understand what Ta-Nehisi Coates says in the preceding passage. There is a way in which I completely agree with his points. If he means to say that many of us who enjoy privilege because of the color of our skins play with black causes, slide along with those causes when it is fashionable to do so, and then expect kudos for our "involvement," he is absolutely correct.

If he means that it is less than gracious to remind anyone that you have worked to assist them--less than gracious to expect to be rewarded when you have given freely out of the goodness of your heart--he is right. No one who has given to the cause of civil rights because she or he knew it was right to give should expect people of color to owe her or him.

But. But my years of teaching in HBCUs have given me insights into the rhetoric Coates is using here, which cast that rhetoric in a different light. For me, at least.

In my years of teaching African-American students, in years in which I had no possibility except to broach issues of gay rights, because I taught ethics classes in which textbooks invariably brought up that topic, I heard over and over things like the following: Gays just want to tag onto our coattails with civil rights. Gays can hide their identity; blacks can't. Why do I owe gays anything? They aren't black and I'm not gay.

At a more sophisticated level, I worked for a number of years with a top-level university administrator, a churched woman who has held high positions in her church, who repeatedly stated that she resented being asked, as a black woman, to support the rights of gays in society and in her church. Her position was that she had worked on her own for her rights as a woman and a person of color. Gays needed to do the same.

Hidden in that rhetoric is a boatload of toxins, of plain old homophobia. Because I happened to know the person making those remarks rather well--because she was someone I considered a friend and whom I supported precisely as a woman of color--I knew what she meant when she spoke about resenting gays who sought to ride on her coattails as a woman of color. And I chose to overlook what she meant, out of solidarity with her as a woman of color.

What she meant was that she was not comfortable with the cause of gay rights. What she meant was that she did not place the rights of gay human beings on the same level as the rights of women and people of color. Because she did not place the humanity of gay human beings on the level of her humanity as a black woman.

What she meant in excluding gays from "her" civil rights movement is that gay rights are insupportable because gays choose to be gay and are condemned by the bible for making that choice. Whereas blacks and women do not choose their pigmentation or their gender . . . .

Just as it is ungracious (even inhuman) to ask people to reward you when you assist them out of the goodness of your heart, it is also ungracious and inhuman to absolve yourself of any responsibility to feel gratitude when people do genuinely seek to make solidarity with you in your struggle for human rights. When I hear the language of owing nothing at all to those who have participated alongside people color in the civil rights struggle, I hear both a valid complaint that those who chose to participate should not expect gratitude, and I hear shameful ingratitude.

Perhaps I think (or feel, may be more accurate) this way because I was raised in an Anglo-American world of privilege that has strong codes governing the necessity of gratitude that have shaped my mentality? But don't other cultures around the world also have deeply rooted codes that require us to be grateful when others extend a helping hand to us? And don't those cultural codes around the world tell us that ingratitude is not something to trumpet, but to hang our head in shame about?

I'm asking, to put the point bluntly, if people of color have no obligation at all to be grateful for the contributions of others--including privileged whites who have no experiential sense of what it is like to live in this land with a darker skin--to the African-American civil rights struggle? Not because gratitude is owed or demanded by those who have assisted. But because the inability to be grateful dehumanizes the one who has taken and then cannot express gratitude. Because the inability to express gratitude communicates that one was owed what was freely offered.

This is a question that I have to ask constantly, because I happen to live in a city in which horrific things were done by white people to black people as the white high school in this city was integrated in 1957. I have to ask that question because I am living through a period in which white women who risked a great deal to assist those black families seeking to integrate the schools are now dying, as they reach advanced years.

One of those white women just died this past week. Studies of their involvement in the local civil rights struggle published in the last several years--when it became safe for the first time for these women to make their identities public--say that they involved themselves (in many cases, against their husbands' wishes) when black women approached them to ask for their support.

Those black women informed the white women whom they asked for support that, as black women, they could not accomplish all that they wanted. They knew that the women to whom they were turning had the ability, the social clout--yes, the power and the privilege--to lean on local merchants and clergy and try to keep the schools open and integrated.

And despite their power and privilege, those white women did pay a price. When they met to strategize, the FBI showed up to photograph their license plates. They received threatening letters. They were bullied. They were told to stop their agitation or face the consequences.

And most of them refused to stand down. They continued in their fight for integration. And the schools were integrated, with their considerable assistance.

Did they want rewards or fame? I don't think so. Would they be satisfied with slaps in the face, with rhetoric about how they were "owed" nothing for putting themselves on the line--yes, admittedly with power and privilege shielding them? I don't know. I cannot speak for them. I can speak only for myself. And I am probably less gracious than many of those women were and are.

I have my own story of not only astonishing ingratitude, but outright hatefulness and evil, on the part of some people of color to whom I have given of myself and my talents, to frame my thoughts about the dynamics between the gay community and the black community today.

Against the backdrop of that story, I cannot help thinking that there is something astonishingly ungracious about the insistence of some people of color that gay Americans who have supported the cause of civil rights are owed nothing, that we illicitly seek to hold onto the coattails of people of color. This rhetoric is particularly ungracious when it masks, as it too often does, homophobia, the judgment of some people of color that gay folks are second-class human beings not deserving of the same rights African Americans enjoy. When it enfolds a nasty hidden assumption that gay people are the lowest form of life on the human food chain, to be targeted and kicked by those who themselves suffer absolutely unjustifiable prejudice because of the color of their skin, it is vile.

When I read comments like Coates', part of me wants to shrug my shoulders and to be happy that I was expelled from an HBCU in an act of ungrateful savagery, by someone who thinks my humanity is so beneath hers that she willingly took what I offered to her and her institution, and threw it back in my face (having benefited from my support and hard work), as if she was owed everything I had to give and I had no right to anything--including my reputation, fair treatment, an honest evaluation of my work. When she accused me of not doing my job after I had worked to the utmost of my ability to do my job, and had done it well . . . .

After a decade of hard work on behalf of this woman of color, I have a ruined reputation; I have her lies heaped on my head, even as I continue to hear new reports the lies still roll forth from her; and I have a house to pay for, which I bought only because I trusted and believed in this person and wanted to make my talents available to her, even if I paid a price for doing so. I wanted to help her. Because she is a black woman. Who believes that she can treat another human being with a conspicuous lack of respect solely because he is gay.

Historians have rightly expressed horror at people who have been abused and oppressed, and who then turn around and abuse and oppress others, having learned nothing from their oppression. Nothing, that is, except how to pass on oppression to the next group down the human food chain. This is a sad, predictable human dynamic. When one expects people to learn from oppression, to enlarge their hearts and to be determined not to inflict on others the unmerited pain they have endured themselves, one is all too often bitterly disappointed.

As I say, I'd like to shrug my shoulders after my own experience with this tragic human dynamic, and say fine, now that I know my contributions weren't valued and wanted, I'm free. I can go on my way. I never expected honors or rewards anyway. (I certainly didn't expect slaps, though).

Fine. The cause of black civil rights and the damage of racism are problems for African Americans to solve. Not my problems. I have enough on my plate as a gay man. A gay man with no job or health insurance due to the discrimination of a homophobic black woman. A gay man with two houses to pay for, one for which he is paying solely because he believed a homophobic black woman was truthful when she said that she needed his talents and that he would have a job up to his retirement. I have enough on my plate with those financial burdens and a combined income that cannot cover the two house notes, because of the discrimination of a homophobic black woman. Fine. I have my problems to deal with, black folks have theirs.

Unfortunately, I cannot think that way, because to do so is to diminish myself as a human being. Many African Americans may well not want solidarity with me as a dirty, immoral gay man. I cannot reciprocate the demonization and prejudice. I may fail at it again and again, but I have an obligation to care, and I intend to keep caring, even when I'm slapped in the face for doing so, as I was in what is perhaps the greatest act of evil inflicted on me in my life journey up to now.

By a black woman. Whom I supported and assisted and to whom I gave freely because she is a black woman.

And people of color and women deserve to be treated with dignity and to have their human rights respected.

And Cue the Clowns. And the Cavemen

I could not make this stuff up if I tried. Not in a million years.

After I posted my reflections on the Haight case and Benedict and relativism earlier today, I scanned the blog at NCR responding to John Allen's reflections about relativism as Benedict's primary concern with Haight's christology. Only to read the following rantin' and ravin' screed, one among several in the same vein:

END HERESY in 2009

Stomping out heresy is a good way for the Church to begin the new year.

Hopefully more peculiar theories are put asunder in the days ahead, so that the Church can speak its creed with one voice to all the world, and that all the world may come to better know the Triune God.

Yep, as I noted in yesterday's posting about my Catholic brothers and sisters of the right and center, talk about heresy is alive and well--in 2009. And not just talk about heresy, but triumphant war cries to "stomp" it out, and bring "all the world" to know the Triune God.

I could not make this up. If anyone had told me after Vatican II that this is where we would be in 2009--that voices like this believe they represent the center of American Catholicism, and are given reason to believe that, by the center itself--I would have laughed uproariously.

I am grateful, though, that the poster who posted the preceding rant did spell out what I wanted to underscore as the heart of Benedict's animus against "relativism": this is not about relativism at all. It's about triumphalism. It's about muscle-flexing.

It's about putting and keeping the other in her despised place.

Count on Benedict's friends to spell out the real social agenda--the toxic, coercive one--that masquerades behind all the high-flown theological words.

It's a big agenda that goes well beyond relativism and world religions and the hope to coerce others to accept the Trinity: because the folks who tend to post such screeds are repeat posters at NCR and other centrist Catholic blog sites, I know the agenda very well. They don't hesitate to talk about it. Ad nauseaum. In all its gory detail. These same folks now jubilating in Rome's concemnation of the works of a Jesuit that they have never read and never will read authored vitriolic postings about Obama, Democrats, and liberals all through the election period.

They jump in anytime abortion comes up. They're there with their clubs to bash gays anytime anyone suggests the church might love and not bash. They are eager to keep women in their "natural" and "God-given" place of submission.

Benedict's friends. Benedict's faithful followers. Is he truly proud of what he has made of the church, I wonder, and continues to make of it?

And what does any of this have to do with Jesus?

Benedict and the Dictatorship of Relativism: What Concern Lurks Behind the Mask?

John Allen thinks (and I suspect he's right) that Benedict's animus against the christology of Roger Haight is driven by a fear of relativism (http://ncronline3.org/drupal/?q=node/3062). Allen notes that Ratzinger's homily before the conclave that made him pope focused on the "dictatorship of relativism."

And, as Allen also points out, the concern to silence Haight began when Ratzinger was head of the CDF, the Vatican office that censures theologians . . . .

The theological question that occurs to me--at least, one of them--as I think about Ratzinger's claim that Christianity is up against the "dictatorship of relativism," is how Benedict thinks we can sustain Vatican II's confidence that God reveals Godself in all the religions of the world, while we condemn christologies that seek to explore the implications of that affirmation of God's salvific presence in the entire world and its religious traditions?

Under the rubric of combating relativism, Benedict is implicitly saying that Vatican II was wrong: that God is not salvifically present in the religious traditions of the world. Vatican II left room for a creative tension in Christian thinking about christology and world religions. Benedict deals with that tension by denying it, by collapsing it back into a univocal affimation that salvation comes only through Jesus (and Jesus understood in traditional high-christological terms). Benedict removes one leg of the two affirmations that seek to hold in tension traditional affirmations about Jesus and the insight that God can be salvifically present in other religious traditions.

And why does he do this? In my view, the concern is not relativism at all, though Benedict's agenda may masquerade as a concern with relativism. The underlying concern is to combat christologies that undercut the unilateral claims of the clerical system to power. Benedict needs, wants, and intends to enforce (at the price of censuring all other approaches) a high christology that undergirds the exclusive sacral claims of the priesthood.

Benedict intends to center the church--his church--on an exclusivist, triumphalistic christology that reads all other religious traditions out of the history of salvation, except insofar as they accede to his exclusivist claims. He intends to suppress any christology that might see God active among the laity, independent of clerical control--that might see God at work to save the people of God apart from and even in opposition to the privileged clerical elite.

And for this christology, he is willing to pay a tremendously high price--on behalf of the whole church, which, after all, pays the price at his command, since the church is not really his church, no matter how devoutly he believes that. It is God's church, first and foremost; it is the church of the people of God. He is willing to pretend that a century of historical critical research about the scriptures simply does not exist, as he did in a recent remark he made at a papal Angelus, when he claimed, astonishingly!, that the gospel of John is an eyewitness account of the life of Jesus.

And he is willing to write off the crisis of faith that ensues for many believers when we are told that we have to swallow exclusivist, triumphalistic claims about Jesus and his significance--a crisis of faith, because our faith has come to center, after Vatican II, on a Jesus whose entire sigificance was to undercut such exclusivism and triumphalism, in a life lived in complete self-abnegation and total donation to the other. The Jesus many of us have come to follow and believe in would never repudiate and condemn to eternal damnation the adherents of other world religions.

He would find a way to embrace them. To dialogue with them. To learn from them. To find God among them.

What an atrocious price John Paul II and Benedict have asked post-Vatican II Catholics to pay, in order to keep the clerical system alive and to bolster the dying triumphalism of the defensive Tridentine model of the church. How will history judge this movement against history, I wonder? This movement against the Spirit that brought Vatican II about . . . .

Sanjay Gupta? Count Me Underwhelmed

To say that Obama’s choice of Sanjay Gupta for the position of Surgeon-General underwhelms me would be understating the point. I find the choice totally uninspiring. It makes me wonder even more about the ethos the new president intends to create in his administration.

It’s not just the despicable way Gupta treated Michael Moore (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/the-trouble-with-sanjay-gupta). And, yes, I did recall that “mugging” (to use Paul Krugman’s term) as soon as I read the news that Obama had chosen Gupta as health czar. I have the long memory of my Irish ancestors. And, like many of my Arkansas ancestors, I remember well who has proven to be my friend and who my enemy.

No, it's not just the Michael Moore case, though that counts for me. For me, the sticking point is Gupta himself. He’s just so . . . insubstantial. Glitter and not gold. Image without substance. Someone who seems to have crafted himself for the camera and the American media, at the loss of a significant portion of his real identity.

I’m not opposed to having a celebrity in this position. It may be a stroke of brilliance to think in that direction, to assume that someone with a name and a face will convince people to take health issues seriously—to see health as sexy.

I like the choice of someone with ethnic roots for this position, of a person of color to hold this distinguished title. One of the things I held against Bill Clinton was his treatment of Joycelyn Elders when she ran afoul of the right due to her honesty. Up to then, I had admired Clinton for choosing a woman of color for this position.

But Gupta? Count me underwhelmed. He’s about as substantial as, well, as CNN.

Looks like I’m going to spend the next four years in a seat I don’t relish—that of loyal critic of an exciting new president whom I wholeheartedly supported during the election. With each choice Mr. Obama is now making, my fears grow stronger that he has a fatal infatuation with image that has no substance behind it (can anyone say Rick Warren?), and will be tone-deaf to the insights of those on the left who helped put him in office, but whom he knows he can blow off because we have little power except to raise our voices, when he betrays our ideals.

Ideals that he himself has professed to cherish, since they're central to the participatory democracy he claims to value.

The Haight Case and the State of American Catholicism

There has been ongoing discussion of the Roger Haight case at the Commonweal and National Catholic Reporter blog sites lately (www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/?p=2648,
http://ncronline3.org/drupal/?q=node/3046). This is in addition to the discussion to which I linked several days ago, when I first noticed the new actions Rome had taken against Haight (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2009/01/continuation-of-inquisition-new.html).

I have become as fascinated with the blog discussions as with the case itself. In my view, they say a great deal about where the American Catholic church has ended up as a new millennium gets underway—about the very unhappy situation in which it finds itself after concerted attack from the center of the Catholic church on the project of Vatican II, and after several decades of close alliance of American Catholicism with neoconservative politics and thought.

The American church is in trouble. That trouble is on display for all the world to see on the fractious, headed-nowhere discussion the Haight case is evoking on various centrist blogs of American Catholicism. The movement of "restoration" spearheaded by Cardinal Ratzinger before he became Benedict XVI, with the blessing of John Paul II, has succeeded not only in dumbing us down, but also in shifting the discussion so far to the right that the position now occupied by the center is pretty much where the right was as Vatican II ended.

I had written several lengthy and perhaps turgid overviews of these discussions in postings I chose not to upload today and yesterday. Perhaps it was providential that I have had to spend both days tied to telephones as tech services seek to deal with bizarre problems that continue to afflict my computer.

The heart of what I’d like to say about the blog discussions I’ve been following re: Roger Haight and Rome’s silencing of him: as I read them, I feel a million miles away. I feel totally removed from the church my co-religionists represent, the co-religionists of both the right and the center.

It’s as if I am dropping in on a discussion taking place in 1950, as though Vatican II has not even happened—and no one has informed the movers and shakers of the American Catholic church that time has marched on and they are living in a little bubble in time, with rarefied air that is rapidly vanishing. The ghetto is a thing of the past. The defensive posture with all its plaintive cries of persecution by the cultural mainstream is no longer necessary. We are the mainstream—and we’re doing no better with the mainstream than other religious groups have done in the past.

I am beyond weary reading postings (not to mention papal statements) that act as if there has been no significant biblical scholarship in a century—scholarship which irrefutably demonstrates that the scriptures (including the gospels) are not eyewitness accounts to events the biblical writers were chronicling, but theological reflections on historic events and mythic stories. I’m flabbergasted that many American Catholics still seem to think that living a life of faith is primarily a matter of ingesting pills of catechetical “truth” and then spitting those pills out when the evil menace of modernity requires a sharp dollop of “the” Truth.

I’m baffled, in fact, that many of us are fighting modernity when modernity is over and done with and postmodernity is in full sway, that many of us (including our pope) continue to natter on about the dictatorship of relativism, when the primary danger churches face today is the dominance of irrelevance—of a self-imposed irrelevance.

And here’s what’s perhaps most shocking of all to me in these discussions: the stolidity, the stupidity—and yes, the mean venality—are on exhibit not only in the postings of the many self-designated saviors of orthodoxy who haunt those blog sites, to set aright posters who have forgotten to ingest their catechetical pill for the day. One expects those qualities in the postings of many of these self-appointed watchdogs. But the stolidity, stupidity, and mean venality are even more strongly in evidence in what many centrist American Catholic thinkers have to say about Haight and the church’s challenges today.

These are, after all, educated Catholics, these movers and shakers. They purport to have theological educations. They have gone, many of them, to the best ivy-league universities. They are journalists and lawyers and political consultants, some of them. They are even, God help us, theologians.

And they are talking on and on about heresy. As if that word has compelling import at the dawn of the 21st century. As if the biggest challenge the Catholic church faces is a threat to its ideas and to the clarity of its "truths," not the self-inflicted wound it insists on re-inflicting every time a church dignitary opens his mouth these days. The wound we inflict when we make bizarre statements about gay people as threats to human ecology. The wound we re-open when we pontificate about how the urine of women who take birth control pills is polluting the environment and causing males to be infertile.* The wound we deepen when we loudly proclaim our commitment to human rights but side with fundamentalist Islamic nations that make homosexuality a capital crime punishable by death, when the U.N. proposes to add sexual orientation to its human rights documents.

Above all, the deep, abiding, festering wound the church refuses to deal with, which it has inflicted on itself from the very center in its atrocious behavior towards those who report sexual abuse by clerics in their childhood. The wound the church keeps inflicting on itself when its dignitaries hide and move abusive clerics, and then refuse to admit any guilt when they are found out. The wound that stinks from the center of the church, through the refusal of bishops who have been exposed as protectors of abusive clergy to resign.

And the wound to the faith of all of us that these actions cause. And the horrible unlanced wound borne by countless numbers of Catholics who were abused by clerics and religious as minors.

I am deeply frustrated—no, even more, I am completely alienated—by centrist Catholics who should know better, who seem to think that the church attracts people more by the clarity of its ideas than by the life it leads. And whose discussion of theological issues totally prescinds from the real lives of real people in real places at real times. I can find nothing in common with my centrist brothers and sisters of faith who talk about doctrine in isolation from people, and how people—real people in real places and real times—embody doctrine. I can find no common ground with my centrist co-religionists who seem to think we can continue doing systematic theology apart from sociological, political, and cultural analysis.

For me, one of the can-never-go-back contributions of Vatican II is its rediscovery of the biblical and patristic notion of the church as a sacramental sign of God’s love and salvation in the world. Once one begins to reappropriate that very traditional theological notion and to talk about the church as the sign of God’s salvation in the world, one has no choice except to look at what the church does, how the church lives, what the church effects in the world, as one talks about what the church holds, teaches, and proclaims.

There is no separating the two, in a sacramental universe. It is impossible to talk about the church’s teachings, about its “truths,” without talking about how the church lives, with how those teachings affect people’s lives. In much centrist discourse in American Catholicism today, there is a hidden presupposition that this kind of analysis—analysis that talks about real people in real places at real times; analysis that adverts at all to people’s lived experiences—is vulgar, analysis that somehow runs beneath the high-order analysis of abstract thought and of philosophy.

There is the assumption that grounding what we say about theology and doctrine in references to real people’s real lives and real experiences is not “objective,” that such analysis opens the door to prejudice—and to lapses of charity.

As a result, a tiny handful of centrist Catholics who inhabit a very particular world, one that they read as the whole world, talk on and on about objectivity and truth and the church’s obligation to safeguard its deposit of faith, as if their viewpoints represent the viewpoints of the entire American Catholic church. A handful of almost exclusively white, middle-class, heterosexual, married Catholics living in major American cities (mostly on the coasts, at that) speak as if their experience reflects the experience of all American Catholics—as if it should be read as experience tout court.

The off-the-wall comments of Catholics on the far right at these centrist blog sites are not really intrusions at all—not, that is, intrusions into the centrist conversation. They are the alternative voice of the same group of people. They are the center speaking out of the other side of its mouth. They are the right-wing flip side of the centrist perspective.

And both voices are as irrelevant to the majority of American Catholics as they possibly could be. Most American Catholics have made the move from modernity to postmodernity with more or less equable grace. Most American Catholics have long since made that move where we live and have our beings. Most American Catholics intuitively get the need to connect analysis of real-life experience with theological analysis.

And more and more of us are alienated not by what the church says, not by lapses from abstruse christological points, but by how the church lives, by what it does, by its lived witness to the gospel. Most of us no longer mull over fine points of what the church teaches, because the disconnect between the teaching and the lived witness has become so unbearably wide. Who can care, really, about relativism and christology when clerics abusing minors are shifted about in our parishes, and when the men doing that shifting not only escape punishment but are even elevated to positions of honor in Rome?

Most American Catholics would immediately experience revulsion at the details of how the Vatican investigates and censures a theologian, if those details were known to them. They would be repulsed by the lack of respect for human rights and human dignity—by the fact that Rome does not even disclose to a theologian charged with error the error or errors that have been reported about that theologian, that a theologian under scrutiny is not permitted to know the identity of her detractors or to answer the possibly false charges of those detractors, and so on. Most American Catholics would question the qualifications of the church to stand for human rights while it egregiously violates human rights, if they knew how Rome deals with theologians.

To their discredit, most of the centrist commentators on the Haight case I’ve been reading recently are so intent on parsing abstract theological concepts that they appear totally unmoved by the question of the violation of theologians’ human rights and human dignity. As are their confreres on the right, who are, for the most part, gleeful to see another theologian go up in flames—who seem eager to renew the actual flames of the Inquisition of the past.

God help us if these folks are the best we have to offer, if the future of the church is in their hands: if our lives are in their hands.

And as the nattering continues, the faith of many of us has been going up in flames long since. As these brothers and sisters of the center and of the right carry on. As they carry on their theological discussions about Love and Truth, as if no questions about actual love and actual truth merit attention. Questions about actual love and actual truth right among us, in the real world in which most of us live, far removed from the grand discussions of airy ideas and the parsings of theological fine points.

*On this story, see the excellent recent summary at Enlightened Catholicism (http://enlightenedcatholicism-colkoch.blogspot.com/2009/01/human-ecology-backed-by-pseudo-science.html).

Telling the Old, Old Story: Race in America, Ongoing Saga

One of my new year's covenants with myself is to move beyond the information-gathering stage with the writing project about which I blogged some months back. To move beyond the research stage to writing, that is. Because I enjoy research, and because there is always more to find, one of the temptations with anything I write is to gather endlessly and to defer writing.

At the time I noted on this blog that I was undertaking the project, I didn't give details. Its parameters still remain open, dependent on what I can find in some areas. Dependent, really, on whether people who know some aspects of some stories I want to tell are able and willing to talk . . . .

But about one aspect of it, I can share freely now. This has to do with a story some Midwestern cousins who hunted me up several years back have brought to me, and about which I blogged in the past year when some of these cousins came to visit.

Their family descends from a brother of one of my four-great-grandfathers, who married (in that he committed himself to the relationship when he could not legally marry) a woman of color. The family moved from Mississippi to Arkansas in the 1840s. I grew up in the same county in which this family lived, never dreaming I had any connection to the county going back to that period, or relatives who had lived there a story that is turning out to be of tremendous significance to me.

My hope in telling this story is to link it to one, and possibly several, others that I encountered growing up in the same place over 100 years later--stories that illustrate the ongoing struggle of those who want to eradicate racism from our society. In some ways, much had changed in the place in which I grew up after 100 years. In other ways, things remained dismally the same, dismally centered on demeaning racial distinctions that allowed those with white skins to claim amazing privilege and power over those with darker pigmentation.

I have spent recent weeks poring over letters my distant cousins brought me (copies, that is) from this family, in the period from 1850 to 1880. These document at close hand the thoughts of the white plantation owner who raised a family of color, as the Civil War approached. They also track his effort to keep his land in the tumultuous period following the war, when the value of land dropped, prices for crops bottomed out, and taxes skyrocketed.

It is interesting, to say the least, to read ruminations of distant Urcousins about what would happen if Lincoln were elected. The fact that these cousins were living lives that spanned the color line makes the reflections all the more poignant. It is clear that the white plantation owner father of the family did not want the Democrats to win the 1860 election--that is, he did not want slavery to endure. What is less clear is whether his sympathies were with Lincoln or the Bell-Everett ticket. He says that he would be more pleased if people engaged religious issues with the passion they were giving to political ones in the late 1850s.

It is equally plain that his sons in Ohio, both young men of color, were ardent Lincoln supporters. The family has letters that they exchanged as the War neared, talking about various political issues, including Lincoln's election.

Perhaps the most interesting discovery I've made as I have rummaged through the treasure-trove of documents this family has shared with me is a school report for the older son, who was sent with his sister from Arkansas to Ohio in 1852. The school report is from 1854.

It gives me the final clue I needed to understand precisely why the parents of these two youngsters sent them north when they were young teens. It has long been clear to me from a number of letters that the parents took this difficult action, with much anguish, to protect their children from harm as racial tensions rose in the South with the approaching war. Seven years after the first two children went north, their father brought their younger brother to live with them.

But the school report adds another dimension to their decisions: on careful reading of it in the past several weeks, I've noted that it gives the name of the academy in Ohio that the teen was attending. When I research that name, all kinds of doors open: it was a school noted for its willingness to teach children of any race, at a time when such schools simply did not exist in the U.S.

It was also closely connected to the Underground Railroad. I now see clearly that the parents made the difficult decision to send their children away not only to protect them from harm, but also to see that they were schooled. After the schooling, the youngsters were set up on farms. Much of the correspondence of the latter part of the 1850s has to do with their father's determination to pay for their land so that they could live free of any debt.

The more I read these family letters, the more I am impressed by this man. I'm impressed by his determination to see that his children of color got good educations, a determination many white fathers of children of color in the South did not have. I find a touching account in the 1880s of this school's early history, which names the young man whose school report I have, speaking of him as a "colored boy from Arkansas" who arrived at the school without much education, but who learned rapidly, because he had a brilliant mind.

The descendants of this man still speak of his acumen at academic subjects, his ability to memorize and repeat passages of literary works. The 1854 school report notes that in the period from 17 April to 1 September, he had memorized 547 scripture verses and had read 23 chapters of scipture per week--this in addition to making outstanding marks in subjects ranging from algebra to grammar to natural philosophy.

Unlike many white men who fathered children of color in the South at this period, the father of this young man acknowledged both his wife and his children by her. His letters to his children remind them constantly that whatever belonged to him belonged to them, too--that they would not be in want as long as he had resources.

The letters are both exceptionally affectionate and also religious, in a way that transcends maudlin piety. This was a rare person who took his religious obligations seriously, and who was persuaded by the position his Methodist church took on slavery, to such an extent that he simply made no distinction based on color, in his regard for his wife and children.

I have wondered about the attitude of other family members towards this branch of the family that crossed the color line. The descendants in this line of the family do have stories of some prejudices their ancestors encountered from white members of the family. A family history by a Georgia relative acts as if the wife of color and her children simply didn't exist.

On the other hand, I find fascinating letters from relatives in Alabama, a sister and sister-in-law of the white father of the children of color, which suggest that these relatives affirmed and accepted their niece and nephews of color. One of these women was the widow of a brother of the white plantation owner who was a state representative and Methodist minister in Alabama.

That minister left a will in which he made provisions for his slaves to be brought to Liberia by a free man of color who bore the family name--to be set free. I find a letter in which his widow writes her "esteemed nephews" in Ohio, telling them that their children were beautiful in the pictures they had sent, and demonstrating affection for them.

This is proving to be an interesting project. It's one I have undertaken because I have been asked by a journal to write an article about this family story. It's also one that I hope to turn into a longer, book-length narrative. It had been my dream for several years to write such a book, and until now, I have not had sufficient time and space in my life to do the work necessary to complete it. Perhaps now is a good time to think about this topic, with a new president whose history comprises some of this complexity around the charged issue of race.

I am also stubbornly determined to complete this project after I told several of my co-workers about it at the last academic institution at which I worked, and discovered that one of these co-workers, a prominent member of that school's cabinet for some years, mocked the project and suggested I could not complete it. I had thought he might be interested, since the woman of color on whom the story focuses had his surname, a not-too-usual one.

If I seem slow to post in coming days, please know that I am working on this project--but with an eye to current events and educational and theological issues that will still, I hope, elicit commentary from me.

P.S. The photo is a photo of one of the two young men of color sent by their parents to Ohio for schooling and protection. This man was, unfortunately, murdered in Arkansas after he inherited his father's land. In the same week in which he was ambushed and shot in the back while riding on his land, black men were lynched all across south Arkansas, in an act of organized terrorism.