Two More Updates: Gays on Christian College Campuses, Virginia Attorney General Cuccinelli Blocks Access of Poor to Health Care

And two more quick follow-ups:

I blogged some days ago about the controversy that developed at Arkansas's Harding University, when gay students and alumni launched a website to create discussion about how gay members of this Church of Christ campus community are treated.  As I noted, Harding responded to the website by blocking access to it in the campus's computer network.

Today, Erik Erickholm writes at the New York Times about the growing movement of gay visibility on campuses of evangelical Christian colleges and universities.  This movement of visibility is fighting for the inclusion of LGBT people within the communities of these campuses.  

One of the interesting segments of this article--and I heard this repeatedly when the Harding situation was discussed at the blog of the Arkansas Times website some weeks ago--is the refrain, Why would the gays want to go to one of our Christian schools, anyway?  Erickholm writes,

Gay students say they are often asked why they are attending Christian colleges at all. But the question, students say, is unfair. Many were raised in intensely Christian homes with an expectation of attending a religious college and long fought their homosexuality. They arrive at school, as one of the Harding Web authors put it, “hoping that college would turn us straight, and then once we realized that this wasn’t happening, there was nothing you could do about it.” 

And, of course, what's perplexing about this question is how anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with the gospels and the teaching of Jesus would want to keep anyone on the outside looking in.  To send signals to anyone that she is not welcome, has no place, doesn't belong.  That he is not a brother with a place at the Christian table.

Is the real message here this: some Christians are demanding that their comfort levels not be challenged by having to confront real-life human beings who happen to be gay?  I suspect it is.  And I suspect that, no matter how uncomfortable the recognition happens to be that gay people do exist, and that they are right within Christian families and churches, this reality (the gays exist!) is not going to go away anytime soon for any groups of Christians--regardless of how high they build their walls and how tight they fasten their doors.

And yesterday, I wrote again about my perplexity that any Catholic informed about Catholic social teaching (or any Catholic who has read the gospels) would defend or take lightly political initiatives to block the access of socioeconomically deprived people to health care.  And today, I'm reading that the Catholic attorney general of Virginia, Ken Cuccinelli, has chosen to do precisely that.

As Tara Lohan notes at Alternet, not content to hate on the gays, attack climate scientists, and try to censor a state symbol that pictures a bare-breasted goddess, Cuccinelli issued a ruling early this year that effectively blocks non-profits providing free health care for poor people from receiving state funding.  Lohan links to an article by Bruce S. Trachtenberg at The Nonprofit Quarterly which says that among the groups affected by Cuccinelli's ruling is the Virginia Association of Free Clinics, a network of 60 medical clinics that served 72,000 patients last year.

Again, some of the Catholic church's most ardent defenders these days--notably, the Republican politicians with whom Catholic leaders seem intent on getting into bed--are, in my view, working fast and furious with the bishops to turn the church into a mean machine.  If what Cuccinelli stands for is authentic Catholic values (and spirituality and the movement of the heart to God), I want nothing to do with those values.

Last fall, Cuccinelli, who claims to be pro-life, issued the notice of Virginia's execution of a mentally retarded grandmother.

Arkansas Supremes Strike Down Gay Adoption Ban

Just getting on the road for the lecture I'll be giving in early afternoon, so I haven't had time to blog this morning.  But as I begin my trip, I want to take note of some good news now breaking in my state, Arkansas.

In the 2008 elections, "faith-based" activists placed an initiated act outlawing adoption of children by unmarried (read: gay) couples on the ballot to get out the vote for the Republican party.  The ban passed.  And it definitely had the effect of bringing out many voters who apparently regarded it as their religious duty to pull the level for the Republican national ticket as they voted against the gays.

Today, the Arkansas Supreme Court has declared this initiated act unconstitutional.  The Supreme Court's decision was unanimous.  

As I read this news, I'm wondering how several cousins of mine who signed the petition to place this act on the 2008 ballot intend to behave when/if they next see me at any family gatherings.  A first cousin of mine who is a Southern Baptist minister signed the petition twice.  His wife signed, as did the wife of his brother, who is also a Southern Baptist minister.  A good Methodist cousin on the other side of my family, who taught in the state pharmacy school for many years, also signed, along with his wife.  My brother's sister-in-law and former business partner, a good Catholic, signed the petition.

In typical Southern fashion, when I see these cousins--now rarely, mostly at funerals--they all smile, hug, act as if they love me dearly.  I don't think I can sustain the lovey-dovey act now, if I do see them at reunions, knowing the prejudice they've worked actively to promote in our state.  

They should be ashamed.  But I doubt they will.

More on the Controversy at Arkansas' Harding University about Gay Campus Members: Harding Alum Speaks Out

At the beginning of this month, I blogged about a controversy that had just developed at a university in my home state of Arkansas, Harding University, when a group of gay students and alumni launched a website and e-zine calling for open discussion of the status of gay and lesbian students, faculty, and staff at their Church of Christ university.  The response of the university to the new website and its call for dialogue was to censor the site and its e-zine, by blocking access to it from the campus computer network.

Today, Religion Dispatches has published an outstanding essay by Ed Madden, a Harding alum and poet who now teaches English at the University of South Carolina.  I highly recommend Madden's commentary about what's happening at Harding and many other conservative Christian colleges and universities, as more and more students and other campus members press for honest dialogue about how LGBT people continue to be treated on many faith-based campuses.

Madden talks about his own exceptionally painful struggle to come to terms with his growing awareness that he was gay when he was at Harding, a university strongly affiliated with the political and religious right, which insists that gay people be invisible--since they simply do not and cannot exist in the world of the political and religious right.  Not unless they are closeted and self-hating.

As Madden notes, he had to run as hard as he could from that confining, twisted and dehumanizing worldview in order to find himself as a gay man loved by God.  He had to run away from his own Church of Christ, with its refusal to accept and affirm those who are gay, in order to find some church elsewhere that would offer him grace and love:

It’s a tradition I had to leave to survive. I recall the grace I felt as a graduate student in Austin, Texas, when I first turned to a little neighborhood Methodist church. Finding that church saved my life. The first time I took communion there as an openly gay man was the most profound religious experience of my life, much more than my baptism as a boy—that dunk in the cold baptistery during a gospel revival was more a flight from hell and from my growing sense of sexual difference than a spiritual conviction. After taking the bread and wine that Sunday at Hyde Park Methodist Church, I couldn’t get up. I knelt at the altar rail and wept, shaking, still not believing in a God or a community that would accept me just as I am, rather than just how others wanted and expected and demanded I be.

All of this came back to me last week as I read those two emails and as my Facebook page and mailbox filled over the next few days with the controversy about the webzine and the university administration’s response—including stories on The Huffington Post and on the New Yorker blog.

Madden articulates the experience of many gay people of faith, as they come of age within churches and church institutions that seek to make gay folks completely invisible, because the cognitive dissonance gay and lesbian persons create for these communities of faith simply by existing, simply by being, is too great.  It's too great for these faith communities to continue with their comfortable, pious platitudes, while confronting the real-life complexity of the diverse world God has created.

In the Catholic context, one of the most controversial passages of the 1986 document on the pastoral care of homosexual persons issued by Cardinal Ratzinger, the present pope, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, is a passage which says that, though the Catholic church deplores violence against gay persons, no one should be surprised if violence ensues when gay folks claim they are not "disordered."  And when civil laws begin to offer protection for people on grounds of sexual orientation.  The 1986 pastoral letter introduced into Catholic magisterial teaching a fateful new notion that gay and lesbian persons are intrinsically disordered--disordered in their very nature and human make-up.

As many theologians, social workers, and therapists noted when the 1986 document was issued, it is implicitly arguing that when gay people come out of the closet, they merit the violence directed against them for coming out of the closet.  This is an argument that the leaders of the Catholic church are still pushing even today, as recently as last week, when the Vatican representative to the United Nations, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, voiced the Vatican's opposition to a UN declaration condemning anti-gay violence around the world.  Tomasi argued, precisely as the 1986 "pastoral" document does, that gay and lesbian human beings have no right to be gay, to make their sexual orientations publicly known, to claim their identity as gay persons in a public way.

And therefore they have no right to legal protection from discrimination, and even violence, when they come out of the closet.  Though conservative Catholics who customarily take every statement of the magisterium literally are now trying to deny that this is what magisterial teaching says, official Catholic teaching continues to hold that those who are gay and lesbian are intrinsically disordered in their very personhood and natures, and that if they expect to be tolerated and not subjected to violence, they need to keep their disordered nature to themselves.

The price that repressive faith communities pay--the price they insist that gays and lesbians pay--in order to keep simplistic teachings about gender identity and sexuality in place is a steep price.  It is a price of self-denial and invisibility.

This is a price increasing numbers of gay and lesbian persons refuse any longer to pay, because we recognize that nothing is more inhumane and unholy than asking another human being to pretend not to be there. Not to exist.  So that your tiny world can remain comfortable, and your preposterous assumptions about who God is, and the kind of world God has made, can remain securely in place, untroubled by facts you cannot control.  

Untroubled by the real world, which is full of rich diversity that the simplistic notions of some believers find it impossible to recognize or incorporate into their theological universes.  Theological universes that grow smaller and smaller all the time, as the condemnation of Elizabeth Johnson's work about which I've just blogged indicates.

Which have no option except to grow smaller and smaller, because they have decided to hinge their future and the future of their faith communities on literalistic interpretations of scripture or church teaching, which privilege the heterosexual males for whom these theological universes have been constructed.  While ignoring and denigrating the faith experience of everyone else--notably women and gay and lesbian persons.

African-American Faith Communities and the LGBT Community: An Arkansas Church Builds Bridges

National Organization for Marriage chair Maggie Gallagher has recently been crowing that the opposition to marriage equality in Maryland is being led not only by her own Catholic church but by black churches as well.  (Unfortunately for Maggie, her fellow Catholics decidedly do not support her attempt and that of the Catholic hierarchy to block the human rights of LGBT citizens: as Tom Fox noted recently in National Catholic Reporter, Catholic lawmakers and Catholic citizens have bucked the hierarchy to support the marriage equality bill, and polls show 49% of Maryland Catholics supporting marriage equality with 42% opposed--a higher percentage of support than among citizens at large).  

And given the persistent attempt of right-wing political and religious activists to drive a wedge between African Americans and their gay brothers and sisters, I think it's important to note that some of the strongest supporters of the movement to protect the rights of gay Americans have been and remain African-American people of faith.  Martin Luther King, Jr.'s widow Coretta Scott King famously stated in 2003 that her own strong support for LGBT rights was an extension of her husband's civil rights activism:

I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people. ... But I hasten to remind them that Martin Luther King Jr. said, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream, to make room at the table of brotherhood and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people.

Seasoned veterans of the Civil Rights movement including Georgia's former congressman Julian Bond have spoken out forcefully on behalf of the human rights of their gay brothers and sisters, drawing a clear line to connect the struggle for black civil rights and gay civil rights.  As I noted last week, Harvard professor and chaplain Peter J. Gomes, a distinguished African-American theologian and Baptist minister (and a gay man) who died on 28 February, spoke out passionately and repeatedly against homophobia in American Christian churches and on behalf of justice for LGBT persons in noted books about the state of American Christianity (and here).

Since Gallagher and other right-wing political operatives with non-existent histories of any real concern to address racial injustice want to engage in ugly, divisive wedge politics when it comes to the relationship between the African-American and gay communities, I'm happy to report these and other countervailing trends which disprove Gallagher's point--that black people of faith oppose gay rights.  Yesterday, a wonderful black church in Little Rock about which I've blogged before (and see also here) invited Steve and me to speak to their educational group about gay issues.

New Millennium is a black Baptist church (but inclusive: it has both black and white members) that shares facilities with another Baptist church which my aunt attends.  It's pastored by a wonderful, prophetic leader, Rev. Wendell Griffen, who also holds a judge's seat in Arkansas--and whom Steve and I count ourselves blessed to call a friend, along with his wife Pat, a psychotherapist and professor of psychology with whom we worked several years ago at Philander Smith College.  Wendell's stellar blog Cultural Competency is in my Bilgrimage blog list to the side of this posting.

Because Pat, Wendell, and their congregation recognize the need to call African-American people of faith to engage in the struggle against homophobic injustice, the church has undertaken an ongoing study of gay issues and questions, in light of the scriptures, theology, and the tradition of the church.  They've been reading and discussing for some time now studies of what the scriptures have to say about these issues (or what many anti-gay believers imagine the scriptures say), about the political background to anti-gay movements in the U.S., about the connections between those movements and movements that have historically sought to oppress people of color, and about what it means to be church, to walk in Jesus's footsteps, in a culture in which these struggles play a prominent role.

Steve and I felt honored to come to New Millennium and help further the dialogue by talking about own own some forty years of life as a committed gay couple, and about the real and painful experiences of injustice through which we've sometimes walked in those years--experiences made even more painful because they have often occurred at the hands of people of faith.  And we ourselves are people of faith, brothers and sisters of those doing gross injustice to us.  We met in the context of the chaplain's office at a Catholic university, and have, from the start of our relationship, considered our life together a shared journey of faith.

I say we felt honored to speak at New Millennium: we also felt trepidation.  We felt no little fear and trembling.  It is not easy to talk about what is closest to one's soul.  It is not easy to talk about the intimate aspects of one's life and relationship in a culture inclined to overlay gay lives and gay relationships with crude myths about sexual promiscuity, disease, pedophilia, and so forth.

Giving witness to the grace that runs through gay lives and gay relationships can feel like being in a forensic witness stand, with bright spotlights aimed at your face.  And that's, unfortunately, even more the case when the witness stand is in a church.

But the experience yesterday could not have been more positive.  My youngest nephew Patrick, who attends the university across the street from the church--University of Arkansas at Little Rock--got wind of the fact we'd be speaking at the church yesterday, and showed up to support us (and we were very touched by this).  And the community at New Millennium had invited us to worship with them prior to our dialogue with the church educational group, laying a foundation for warm inclusion as we sang and read scripture together, and listened to God's word broken in a sermon followed by the breaking of the bread of the Lord's Supper.

For readers who may not have followed this blog from the beginning, it occurs to me to mention something I mentioned frequently in some of the initial postings at this Bilgrimage site: this is that the single factor which, above all, drew me to the Catholic church as a teenager was the Eucharist.  The Southern Baptist church in which I grew up celebrated the Lord's Supper only infrequently, four times a year.  Those celebrations were always solemn and deeply meaningful, amd were preceded by a time of preparation rooted in Anabaptist theology, which stresses the communal aspect of communion--the way in which eating the one bread and drinking from the one cup both makes us one, but also reflects our communion in the body of Christ.  And so it's important, in Anabaptist theology, to try to become the body of Christ by healing division before one celebrates the unity of the body of Christ in the Lord's Supper.

And, frankly, because these solemn celebrations meant so much to me growing up, I wanted more.  When I encountered it, I cherished the Catholic tradition of daily celebration of the Eucharist.  The warm-hearted piety of the evangelical tradition in which I had been nurtured, which views the life of discipleship as an intimate walking with Jesus, found a new expression in the thought of such intimate union with Jesus that one could eat his body and drink his blood--and be nurtured and strengthened in a premier way as one walked the journey to the cross with him.

And so far and away, the most painful aspect of finding ourselves pushed to the margins of our church has been, for Steve and me, finding ourselves shoved from the table of the Lord.  As I've shared in previous postings, for us, the breaking point came when Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina fired first me and then Steve on specious grounds (in my case, no reason at all was given for the firing), and when we tried after that to go to liturgy at the abbey church that belongs to the Benedictine monks who own Belmont Abbey College.

Seeing the very men who had spearheaded our unjust expulsion from the college community stand at the altar and preach about the human rights of everyone, about justice for all, and then break the Lord's bread and offer it to worshipers, when they had removed us from the table of daily bread by taking away our livelihoods, our health insurance, our vocations, was too much for us.

It was impossible for us to believe that Catholic priests who claim to believe in the Eucharist can really or effectively believe in what they proclaim each time they offer the Bread of Life to others, when they can so cavalierly remove others from the the table of daily bread, while enjoying secure lives with assured housing, jobs, health insurance, etc.  The table of the Lord's bread and the table of daily bread are intimately connected.  When the church itself breaks the connection by violating the human rights of lay believers, it undermines everything it wants to proclaim about the Eucharist--and it does so in a very stark way.

And so being invited to the table of the Lord's Supper yesterday at New Millennium, as a preliminary to our sharing our lives in the educational session, was profoundly meaningful to us.  The sharing created a communion on which we built in the dialogue about gay lives and gay issues that followed.

(An aside, but a pertinent one: in the strictest canons of Baptist belief, many Baptist churches practice what's called "closed communion."  This means that not only do they exclude Christians of other denominations from their celebrations of the Lord's Supper; they also historically excluded even other Baptists who did not belong to their particular church.  According to the traditional Baptist theology with which I grew up, each Baptist church is autonomous, and the practice of closed communion safeguards the beliefs of the individual Baptist church celebrating the Lord's Supper--since its beliefs may not agree in every respect with those of another Baptist church.

And so when I was a child and before I became a church member at the age of 8, my parents and other adults in my family would not allow my brothers or me to participate in the Lord's Supper.  With one exception: the aunt about whom I blogged some days ago when I noted that, in my view, the principle that should govern adult interactions with children is the principle of doing no harm--my aunt Kat--did allow us to have a share of the bread and grape juice as it passed to her during the Lord's Supper.  She'd invariably take a tidbit of her bread and offer it to us, along with a sip of the juice.

Doing no harm meant, in her worldview, including.  Not excluding.  Though we children were not yet professed and baptized members of the church, worthy members.  And I thought of all of this, all over again, yesterday as we shared bread and the cup at New Millennium.)

And what to say in conclusion?  Simply this: it's important that churches like New Millennium are inviting openly gay people and gay couples to talk back and forth with members of their congregations.  As one of the church members who came up to thank us for our presentation yesterday said, these dialogue sessions are absolutely essential so that we can get to know each other as human beings . . . 

When many folks, including many people of faith, know their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters only as stereotypes.  As false stereotypes.  It is harder to hate and do injustice to someone when one sees the human face of the person one wishes to treat as an inhuman object.  And the people of God at New Millennium yesterday could not have been warmer, kinder, more inclusive--and well-educated about the issues we were discussing, in ways that should set a standard for other church communities.

When Steve and I returned to Arkansas in 1997 to provide care for my mother in her final years, in a setting familiar to her and close to her siblings, I went to a number of leaders of churches in this area, to ask if they would consider doing precisely what New Millennium church is now doing.  I asked if they would consider helping me organize a speakers' bureau of local gay and lesbian people of faith (and also those scarred by encounters with faith communities, who have understandably distanced themselves from these communities), who would be available to go from church to church simply to meet and talk to people in each church.  About our lives.

No church took me up on my offer.  None wanted to deal with the pushback that always comes when churches in our area open their doors to gay and lesbian folks who are out of the closet, and, more importantly, when faith communities demonstrate solidarity with gay people in the struggle for human rights.

In a heavily churched part of the world like Arkansas, where churches wield enormous cultural and political influence (and where, according to a Pew study whose results were released last fall [see also here], people's religious knowledge is nonetheless abysmally low), initiatives like the one New Millennium church has begun are enormously important.  This small, prophetic African-American church is leading the way among Arkansas churches right now, when it comes to building effective bridges between the gay community and people of faith.

I can only hope that other churches will get the word and begin to do likewise.

Controversy about Gay Student Website Erupts at Arkansas Church of Christ University

My previous posting had an Arkansas angle with its comments about Rev. Mike Huckabee and my knowledge of that gentleman's political career, since I grew up in and live in Arkansas.  In fact, Rev. Huckabee graduated from a Southern Baptist university in Arkansas, Ouachita University, of which my father's brother was the academic vice-president for some years, and in which my uncle's wife taught English.

And here's another Arkansas story, which pertains to another faith-based university in my state--in this case, Harding University, the alma mater of Kenneth Starr, the Republican independent counsel who hounded President Clinton during Clinton's presidency, pushing for Clinton's impeachment following the Monica Lewinsky revelations.  Harding is a Church of Christ-affiliated university.

Yesterday, the statewide weekly Arkansas Times reported on its blog* that gay and lesbian students and alumni of Harding have launched a website to offer support to those at the university dealing with its disapproving stance towards LGBT students.  The university immediately blocked the website for those using the campus internet system.

This morning, Harding issued a statement about its actions, on which the Arkansas Times reports.  The statement notes Harding's stand on the issue of homosexuality, based in its religious tradition.  By implication, Harding is also claiming its right to discriminate overtly in the case of LGBT students, faculty, and staff, since faith-based institutions in the U.S. are frequently not bound by legal codes that prohibit discrimination in other non-faith based institutions and workplaces.

I'm fascinated to read the discussion that has developed following both of the preceding postings--fascinated above all by the insistence of many of my fellow citizens that religious groups have the "right" to discriminate against those who are gay or lesbian, and an obligation to discriminate, due to their religious convictions.  This is precisely the argument that the Catholic magisterium also promoted in response to the rising tide of gay rights around the world.

What does it say about many Christian institutions and what they are now becoming, I wonder, when one of the characteristics for which these institutions are now most known is their loud assertion of their "right" to discriminate against a vulnerable minority group?  Is this where Jesus would have wanted the churches founded to preserve and transmit his memory to end up?

Peter Gomes, whom Candace Chellew-Hodge eulogized yesterday at Religion Dispatches, certainly didn't think so.  For some of my preceding reflections on Gomes and his thinking about where some churches have ended up vis-a-vis LGBT people, see here and here.

*The Arkansas Times website has been having difficulty today, and is going up and down.  If the links to the postings at its blog don't work for you right away, you may want to try back later.  I apologize for the inconvenience if they're not working when you click on them.

Arkansas Store Censors Magazine Cover with Elton John's Family, Then Rethinks Its Censorship

This local (local for me) story illustrates why I wanted to stress the role of unvarying principle recently, as I thought about the story of Peter and Hazelmary Bull in England.  The Bulls are the English couple who refused a room with a double bed at their Cornish hotel to a gay couple in a legal civil union, and whom some sectors of the British media are now defending, though the court has fined them for contravening the nation's anti-discrimination laws.  

My last posting about the Bull case (to which the link above heads) made two points that are pertinent, I think, to the story of the grocery store in Arkansas that recently put a shield up to hide the cover of a magazine showing Elton John and David Furnish with their son Zachary.  First, I noted that, if the principles underlying laws that forbid discrimination aren't applied universally and without any waffling, we open the door to discrimination that has a spiraling effect.  Permitting one kind of selective discrimination that appeals to religious warrant as its basis inevitably opens the door to other kinds of selective discrimination on the same grounds.

And second, I noted (I spelled this out most clearly in the comments section of the posting) that those prone to one form of discrimination are often prone to other forms of discrimination.  Discrimination has a way of cloning itself, both in societies that permit any one form of discrimination (which then becomes more forms of discrimination), and in individuals prone to discrimination.  As Beverly Wildung Harrison's classic collection of essays entitled Making the Connections (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985) powerfully demonstrates, there are compelling, unavoidable links between various "-isms" including racism, militarism, homophobia, and misogyny. All derive from a worldview in which men—straight men—take for granted that they have the unquestioned right to rule everyone else and to punish those who will not submit to their rule.  

And so people who are homophobic are likely as well to harbor discriminatory ideas about women and their place in the world, or about racial matters, and so forth.  One form of prejudice fits into another like one of those Russian dolls you open up to find the next doll inside the first.  And in cultures with a Christian heritage, each of these forms of prejudice--from homophobia to misogyny to racism--is likely to appeal to theological and scriptural warrants to keep itself alive.

And so the local story to which I link at the start of this posting: a few days ago, a grocery store in a smallish north-Arkansas community placed a shield across a display of U.S. Weekly magazines that featured John, Furnish (who are in a legal civil union in England), and their son.  When the screen drew national attention through various blogs, the store began to receive complaints from all over the place, and eventually withdrew the screen, stating that only one store in their entire chain had chosen to screen this magazine cover while claiming it was offensive to the sensibilities of some shoppers.   And that "the young" might be led astray by the magazine cover.

Read the comments at the Arkansas Times blog summary of the story to which I've pointed you, though, and you'll discover the following, from folks who live near or know the community in which all this happened: there's a strong church influence in the community; some of the leading local churches are hotbeds of various kinds of prejudice and ugly right-wing political activism; and that church influence has, according to a number of folks, succeeded in controlling some of the practices of the business in question.  And this community has a history of both anti-gay and racial discrimination. 

And back to the Bull case: as I noted in my summary statement about that case, the culture in which I live, the culture of the American South, has moved significantly away from overt displays of racial discrimination in the past half century.  We had to do that.  The law forced us to do so.

Even though many folks in my local culture firmly believed (and may still believe) that racial discrimination is not merely warranted but commanded by the scriptures.  However, once federal (and then, dragging their feet and following suit, local) laws informed us that we might believe anything we wanted to believe about racial matters, but we weren't going to be allowed to continue to discriminate in businesses, schools, public life, and so forth, we began to get over our discriminatory behavior.  At least in public.

And so today, it's almost unthinkable that anyone, even in a small, church-dominated Southern town, would choose to put a shield like the one used to hide a gay couple over the cover of a magazine featuring an interracial couple.  People may still think their private thoughts about these matters.  But they know better than to try to discriminate overtly in this area any longer.  Or to drag out the tired old biblical arguments about Noah and his son Ham and about how slavery was not merely permitted by the Jewish and Christian scriptures, but commanded by them.

A principle has been established by the law forbidding racial discrimination, and it has had an altogether healthy effect in our society in blocking many open forms of racial discrimination, even if it does not root such discrimination out of the hearts and minds of all citizens.  With regard to the Bull case, I'm arguing that the same principle also needs to be firmly in place re: anti-gay discrimination, and when it's held to with unwavering conviction by democratic societies, I think we'll eventually see the same process that I've seen in the American South in the past half-century.

That is, people may well go on talking about what (they imagine) the bible says about homosexuality.  They may go on disliking and even hating, and using God as their reason for disliking and hating.  But they'll eventually have to stop discriminating--in public.  While claiming that God is their reason for public discrimination.  Because in developed, pluralistic, secular societies, God (or the bible, or "the church says") is not an acceptable basis for discrimination.

And a society that wants to be healthy will block any form of discrimination, once that discrimination has been declared out of bounds by law.  Because permitting any one form of discrimination to display itself openly--even when it cites the bible or church teaching as its basis--leads to other forms of discrimination, and the end result of that process is a very unhealthy society.  Unhealthy for everyone.

You'd better believe that the very same folks who went to the manager of this Arkansas grocery store to complain the other day that their religious sensibilities were offended by Messrs. John and Furnish were complaining a few decades ago about magazine covers featuring black and white couples.   And the society those folks built when they were in charge of things, and when the law protected their right to discriminate racially while spouting bible verses, was decidedly not healthy.  For anyone.

As Johann Hari notes in the Independent (London) today,

In order to justify their desire to discriminate against gay people, the few remaining homophobes have concocted a scenario where they are The Real Victims. They can say what they want, set up churches or mosques that preach what they want, and turn away gay people from their homes every day of the week if they so desire – and I would defend every one of those rights to the last ditch. There is only one thing they can’t do. They can’t choose to offer a service to the general public, and then turn people away on the basis of race or sexuality. They can’t put up de facto signs saying ‘No blacks, no Irish, no gays’ at their B&B.

This isn’t a form of prejudice – it is a way of preventing prejudice. Nobody will ever force you to work in a registry office or open a B&B, but if you choose to, you can’t reject the gay couples and expect to remain in post.

As Hari also notes, those basing discrimination on biblical or theological warrants tend eventually to have no choice except to deal with significant moral shifts in their societies, which sometimes expose their prejudices (and their appeal to the scriptures) as immoral.  If the bible looks askance at homosexuality, it simultaneously supports slavery and commands us to stone adulterers.  We've managed to deal with how the growth of moral awareness in society at large affects what believers think in those areas.  And we can manage to do the same in the area of sexual orientation.

I do think there's reason to hope.  Look at what just happened with the store in my state that placed that  shield in front of the magazine cover.  By the end of the day, the store had removed the shield, after having received complaints from all over the place.  By the end of the day, the owners of this chain of stores had begun to realize that permitting one of their stores to engage in this open display of homophobic prejudice--no matter how satisfying that display was to some of their customers in the local community--was bad for business.  It was bad for their image.

The satisfaction gained from bashing the gays was outweighed by the trouble, negative publicity, and likely loss of revenue when the anti-gay display became widely known.  It became widely known because the internet permits the instant transmission of information that, in the past, would not become so widely known in such a short time frame.

And that seems all to the good, to me.  I see hope in the way in which the internet allows instant worldwide communication about this, and gives open bigots fewer and fewer hiding places.  People are able to know more and to know better these days--if they take the trouble to be informed.  And that puts the haters on guard.  And on guard is precisely where they need to be.

Cindy Jacobs Explains It All for Us: DADT Repealed, Birds Fall from the Sky

Max Brantley at the Arkansas Times blog notes (citing Right-Wing Watch) that right-wing Christian nutcase homophobe evangelist Cindy Jacobs explains it all for us: Jacobs explains why birds fell from the sky on New Year's eve in Beebe, Arkansas, that is.

It goes like this: the birds fell on the town of Beebe.  And Arkansas's current governor is named Beebe, don't you see!  And a previous Arkansas governor who became a U.S. president, Bill Clinton, brought us don't ask, don't tell.

Which in some way that escapes rational (if not theological) analysis opened the door for the recent repeal of DADT.  Which is a violation of God's laws for nature.  Which therefore results in blackbirds falling on the (heavily Republican) town of Beebe, Arkansas.  Which is in the Church of Christ belt of the state, a staunchly conservative part of the state that tends to oppose any overtures to gay rights.  (And which is in the same county as Harding University, a Church of Christ-sponsored school attended by Kenneth Starr, the right-wing tool attorney who hounded President Clinton for a number of years, wasting millions of taxpayer dollars as he tried to find a basis to impeach the president.)

And let's not forget that drum fish also died in Arkansas not long before the blackbirds fell, so God must also be giving us some kind of semantic sign there, too--a drumroll for holiness, perhaps?  And what remains to be explained is why the birds didn't fall over Clinton, Arkansas, since that would make the connection to the former president and DADT even more obvious.

Wouldn't it?

Well, watch for yourself and see if you can understand this batch of lunatic reasoning theological argumentation about why we can expect nature to rebel if we grant any concession at all to the humanity of gay and lesbian human beings:

Gene Lyons on Mark Pryor and DADT: Determined To Be on the Wrong Side of History

At Salon today, Arkansas journalist Gene Lyons talks about the obstinate determination of many Southern church folks to be on the wrong side of history.  Again.  As we were about the question of slavery.  And then women's rights.  And then the end of segregation.

Lyons is focusing on Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor.  As I noted in a posting a few days ago, it appears Pryor will not support the ending of don't ask, don't tell, even though the military itself has now issued results of a study indicating that the large majority of service personnel see no problem at all in permitting openly gay service members to serve in the armed forces.  Lyons notes that Pryor continues equivocating on the issue, and his sister blue-dog Democrat serving Arkansas in the Senate, Blanche Lincoln, continues crawfishing.

And as Lyons points out, the reason is obvious: Arkansas is a heavily churched, heavily evangelical state in which you're as likely to encounter Leviticus in church as you are to encounter Jesus, when the question of gay human beings comes up.  And Pryor himself, who belongs to a right-leaning evangelicalish mega-church, has stated publicly that he believes homosexuality is a sin.

And so he's willing to continue to defend religiously-based discrimination enshrined in the legal codes and institutions of American society.  Just because.  Because the views of a religious minority have a right, it seems, to be imposed on the will of the majority.

As Lyons points out, the case of an Arkansas soldier who was hounded out of service after the open secret of his homosexuality became a problem illustrates just how radically unjust and downright stupid DADT is.  Brian Muller was a member of the Army's 82nd Airborne Division and served parts of two years in Afghanistan.  His work was among the most dangerous any soldier can undertake, a job requiring delicate skills many people lack: he was a bomb technician who disabled booby traps and IEDs.

And then one of his officers decided to use Muller's sexual orientation against him, and he was drummed out of the military.  And we lost that all-important skill in our army, due to sheer prejudice.

Lyons maintains that Pryor has, at least, the moxie to recognize that he's fighting a losing battle against the moral arc of the universe, in defending discrimination in American institutions.  And he has the grace to admit that this defense of discrimination may be just a tad bit on the wrong side of Jesus himself, who challenges his followers not to judge and to refrain from throwing stones at other sinners when we ourselves may well harbor sin in our own hearts.

But, just as his (and my) churched Southern ancestors were adamantly determined to move against the moral arc of the universe when it came to slavery, women's rights, and segregation--quoting scripture at every turn to justify our obstinance--Senator Pryor is determined to go down in the rolls of history as a bigot who opposed the turning moral arc of the universe at this important point in American history, when draconian legal impediments to full rights for gay human beings begin to fall one by one.  We seem to excel at that, we Southerners: the proud, defiant gesture on behalf of the lost cause.

And we seem constitutionally unable to learn from our history that the defiance, and the pseudo-religious gloss we seek to give to it, is not always as honorable as we imagine.  Far from it.

The illustration is a photo of the Arkansas-born American hero, Brian Muller.

Arkansas School Board Vice-President Responds to Gay Teen Suicide: Celebrating Death

 

 

And, as a brief postscript to what I wrote earlier today about the sickening climate of hate in our nation, much of it to be laid at the feet of people of faith (at the feet of people of faith who torture the fundamental tenets of world religions to justify hate, and other people of faith who remain silent in the face of such abuse of religion):

I'm sure that most readers of this blog already know about the case of Clint McCance, vice-president of a school board in northeast Arkansas, who wrote on his Facebook page recently that he enjoys seeing "fags" dying and that he will wear purple for gay youth who commit suicide only when they all kill themselves.  McCance also crowed that if any of his own children were gay, he'd "absolutely run them off."  But that will never happen, he writes, because he has taught them "solid christian beliefs."

Elsewhere online, Mr. McCance expresses his devotion to "god, family, and fishing," and poses with a fishing buddy in a semi-obscene diptych that raises interesting questions about the psychological matrix from which his outspoken (and exceptionally mean-spirited) homophobia arises.

Major news outlets, including CNN with Anderson Cooper, have done incisive reports on the McCance story, and the local statewide free newspaper Arkansas Times has been admirably vigilant for days now in reporting on the story and a protest held today at the school of which Mr. McCance is a school board vice-president.

A point that deserves strong attention in this story: Clint McCance encourages the suicide of gay people as a man of faith.  He claims the sanction and even encouragement of his religious community, as he tells gay youth to commit suicide.  His "right" to express these hateful opinions in writing in a public forum while serving on a school board is being stoutly defended by many citizens of my state, who would not dream of defending this "right" if Mr. McCance had used ugly rhetoric equivalent to "fags" as he encouraged African-American or Jewish children to kill themselves.

Faith--people of faith and their claims to represent their faith traditions and the bible adequately--are right at the heart of the hate speech that rolls forth from mouths across the U.S., as gay youth commit suicide.  And as leaders of churches like my Catholic church remain utterly silent about this behavior.

I take heart in the fact that at least one courageous pastor in my state has, however, spoken out against the distortion of biblical values and of Christian faith represented by Mr. McCance and his defenders.  This is Rev. Wendell Griffen, a Baptist pastor in Little Rock whom I'm honored to call a friend. 

Rev. Griffen writes today on his Cultural Competency blog:

McCance, Tea Party nationalists, and neo-fundamentalist Christians aren't merely wrong-headed about human diversity. They're wrong-headed and wrong-hearted about the religion of Jesus. The Gospels present Jesus as someone who embraced people, especially people who were otherwise shunned because they were lepers, women, children, religious, political, and social outcasts, and sick. The Christ of the Gospels did not inspire the "Christianity" proclaimed and lived by McCance, Tea Party nationalists like Sarah Palin, and other neo-fundamentalist Christians who condemn people because of their sexual orientation, religion, language, and ethnicity.

This is the kind of clear, prophetic voice that one expects from religious leaders today, as our culture deals with the effects of savage homophobia in the lives of young people struggling with issues of sexual orientation.

One does not expect the silent complicity of the leaders of my Catholic church--even as they celebrate the charitable work in which the Catholic church in the U.S. has historically engaged.  For increasing numbers of people, the silent complicity in hate now taking lives of young people completely undercuts the rhetoric about the charitable intent and good works of the Catholic church.