A Justice Call for a Religious Rebirth

And how have I used rivers, how have I used wars
To escape writing of the worst thing of all—
Not the crimes of others, not even our own death,
But the failure to want our freedom passionately enough
So that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem
Mere emblems of the desecration of ourselves?

Adrienne Rich

Rich does not speak in a religious voice. Yet her anguish over our collective failure to “want our freedom passionately enough” touches a spiritual ache no less profound than the Christian desire to be “born again.” During this holiday season when we perform frenzied and often absent-minded rituals of giving, Rich offers us an intriguing model of religious rebirth where the political act of seeking our collective freedom and the spiritual act of understanding how our sense of self is contingent on others come together as a single pursuit.

Although not often acknowledged, the desire for religious rebirth draws many of us to churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples. Religious communities speak to us when our old ways of being aren’t working and the promise of a transformed life touches an immense need in all of us.

Unfortunately, the radical right has hijacked for suspect political ends the very thing that is life-giving about spiritual rebirth. Too many have been devastated by that irony. It is nearly impossible to think about personal religious transformation outside a repressive preoccupation with discrimination and exclusion. Not surprisingly, when presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee, refused to take back his 1992 statement that AIDS patients should be isolated, his words only reinforced conservative religious credentials grounded in the public pronouncement of a religious rebirth.

In contrast, the religious left has shied away from the language of rebirth as insular and harmful and instead has embraced the language of freedom through social justice advocacy to engage religious people. Such advocacy champions mostly the tepid language of tolerance, stressing the accommodation of diverse theological, cultural, racial, and class differences. Although valuable, this work keeps the focus on including others into our spaces rather than wrestling with the ways our sense of self is shaped by others.

Understanding that who we are is bound up with who others are, requires spiritual discipline. First and foremost it requires us to awaken our curiosity about how others live in the context of our own lives. To do this we need to start from a personal connection and then expand outward. For example, when we eat our meals we might reflect on those who cannot afford nourishing food. From this simple concern other questions emerge: how has a market driven chain of food production separated communities from one another and separated all of us from the earth? How might we rejuvenate the connection between physical nourishment and spiritual nourishment? How might breaking bread together become a model of liberation? Many of us volunteer in soup kitchens, but the demands of hostility and spiritual reawakening asks us to move beyond a volunteer model of feeding others—as important as this is--to sharing a meal with others both in our own homes and in the places where others live.

Religious transformation, in community or in solitude is a longtime struggle and as Rich points out, we often find circling around our oppression easier than facing the painful truth that we might not be ready for freedom. The Israelites wandered in the wilderness for 40 years before they were reoriented enough in their trust of God and their connection with each other to be ready for liberation.

Like the Israelites many of us on the religious left are in a kind of wilderness right now. We see the importance of our freedom and we know it won’t come without transformation. Yet we remain seduced by the security of “Egypt” where our oppression is painful yet familiar. Freedom, in contrast, requires a leap of faith and trust in what we can’t control. Thus the Israelites had to learn that God would provide food when they needed it but that they couldn’t hoard it up for future use. We similarly need to stop hoarding up old arguments that perpetuate the myth of the autonomous individual. Real change will only come when we risk dismantling the boundaries we’ve constructed between ourselves and others. It will take a religious rebirth to get us there.

Calling on republican candidate Mike Huckabee to rethink his stance on HIV/AIDS

Below is a press release on Human Rights Campaign's attempt to get Republican candidate Mike Huckabee to sit down with Jeanne White-Ginder, the mother of Ryan White, to talk about his 1992 rermaks that people with HIV/AIDS should have been isolated. He has refused to repudiate these remarks.



Advocacy Groups, Jeanne White-Ginder Still Waiting to Meet with Gov. Huckabee
After two letters by the Human Rights Campaign and The AIDS Institute, the Huckabee campaign has not responded

WASHINGTON – One week after requesting to meet with Republican presidential candidate Governor Mike Huckabee, Jeanne White-Ginder, the mother of Ryan White, the Human Rights Campaign or The AIDS Institute, still have not heard from Gov. Huckabee or his campaign. The meeting was called in response to Gov. Huckabee’s 1992 remarks, that he refused to repudiate, when he said people living with HIV and AIDS should have been “isolated” even after it was determined the virus was not spread through casual contact. The morning after HRC and The AIDS Institute sent a letter to the Huckabee campaign requesting a meeting, the Governor said, “I would be very willing to meet with them.” To read the Associated Press story visit our blog, HRC Back Story: http://www.hrcbackstory.org/2007/12/breaking-huckab.html

On Saturday, a field representative working for the Human Rights Campaign approached Huckabee during a campaign stop at the Berlin New Hampshire Technical College, located in Berlin, NH. The staffer asked, “I know that you said you are willing to meet with Ryan White's mother, when will you be meeting with her?” Huckabee answered, “Well I don't know how to get in touch with her.” The staffer offered to provide contact information and Huckabee called over Christopher Herr, the campaign’s New Hampshire field manager. She provided the information to Mr. Herr while Huckabee moved on.

“Seven days after we asked Governor Huckabee to meet with Jeanne White-Ginder, she is still waiting to hear from him or anyone on his campaign,” said Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese. “As we’ve said, this is not an issue of ‘political correctness.’ Rather, this is an issue of valuing science-based evidence over unfounded fear or prejudice. If Gov. Huckabee is a man of his word, then he’ll stop stalling and stand by his pledge and immediately reach out to Jeanne.”

“We are very disappointed that Governor Huckabee has not taken steps to meet with Jeanne White-Ginder after indicating he was willing to do so,” said Gene Copello, Executive Director of The AIDS Institute. “HRC and The AIDS Institute sent two letters to Governor Huckabee with the necessary information about how we could facilitate a meeting with Ms. White-Ginder, who is a board member of The AIDS Institute. It is important to Ms. White-Ginder, whose young son, Ryan White, suffered undue discrimination because of prejudice and fear, for this meeting to occur. Since the 1980s we have had good scientific evidence about how AIDS is transmitted and how it is not. Even in the face of such evidence, discrimination against women, men, and children living with HIV/AIDS continues today. Calls for isolation and quarantine not only fly in the face of scientific evidence, they also reinforce prejudice and fear. This is our third request to meet with Governor Huckabee and we will continue to advocate strongly for this meeting until it happens.”

“Over 1.2 million people in our country are living with HIV/AIDS. It’s hard to imagine that a serious Presidential candidate would stand by a statement to ‘isolate’ our fellow Americans, and then ignore offers from Ryan White’s mother, Jeanne White-Ginder, to meet so she can educate Governor Huckabee about the devastating impact of this disease,” said Rebecca Haag, Executive Director of AIDS Action in Washington, D.C. “This nation needs a results-oriented national strategy to end this tragedy. Blaming the victim is not constructive; strong political leadership is needed. The Governor does not appear to be up to the task.”

As a candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in 1992, Huckabee answered 229 questions submitted to him by The Associated Press. The Senate candidate wrote: “It is difficult to understand the public policy towards AIDS. It is the first time in the history of civilization in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the general population, and in which this deadly disease for which there is no cure is being treated as a civil rights issue instead of the true health crisis it represents.”

“When Huckabee wrote his answers in 1992, it was common knowledge that AIDS could not be spread by casual contact,” the Associated Press reported, December 8, 2007. In a FOX News interview on Sunday, December 9, Huckabee stood by his remarks. Watch the interview: http://www.hrcbackstory.org/2007/12/hrc-and-the-aid.html.

The first letter to Gov. Huckabee:

December 10th, 2007

Dear Governor Huckabee:In 1984, a young boy living in Indiana was diagnosed with AIDS. At the time, that boy, thirteen-year-old Ryan White, had no idea that his life would become a testament of courage and bravery responsible for opening the hearts and minds of millions of people throughout our country and around the world. Six years later, in 1990, Ryan’s life ended -- a dear, precious life cut short. But Ryan’s death wasn’t the only tragedy in this well-known story in our country’s history. Ryan and his family’s battle with HIV/AIDS was also a stark reminder of what happens in our country when fear and ignorance go unchecked. Governor Huckabee, the Ryan White family was ridiculed, shunned and ostracized by people who thought the answer was to “isolate” them far away from the rest of society. In 1984, this belief was purely based on ignorance. But these same beliefs, which you espoused in 1992 and have refused to recant today, as a candidate for President of the United States, are completely beyond comprehension. When you answered the Associated Press questionnaire in 1992, we, in fact, knew a great deal about how HIV was transmitted. Four years earlier, in 1988, the Reagan Administration’s Department of Health and Human Services issued a brochure assuring the American public that “you won’t get the AIDS virus through every day contact with the people around you in school, in the workplace, at parties, child care centers, or stores.” To call for such an oppressive and severe policy like “isolation,” when the scientific community and federal government were certain about how HIV is transmitted was then, and remains today, irresponsible. Such statements should be completely repudiated, not simply dismissed as needing to be slightly reworded.

This was not and is not an issue of “political correctness,” as you state. Rather, this is an issue of valuing science-based evidence over unfounded fear or prejudice.Have we not learned the difficult lesson of how devastating these statements based in ignorance and fear can be to American families? Has it been so long ago that we have forgotten how our neighbors had the backs of entire communities turned on them? Governor Huckabee, those dark moments in American history are the direct result of ignorant views that stifle discussion, hinder resources and delay action. We have a moral obligation as a nation to never allow ourselves to repeat the shameful mistakes of the past. And we cannot sit idly by when a candidate for President of the United States tries to lead us back down that path of ignorance and fear. Governor Huckabee, if you need a reminder of how calls for “isolation” can shatter a Mother’s heart, you only need to turn to Jeanne White-Ginder. Today, we respectfully ask you to sit down with her and allow her to share with you Ryan’s story. Ms. White-Ginder continues to be active in AIDS advocacy as a member of the board of The AIDS Institute. We hope that, even in 2007, Ryan’s story can continue to open hearts and minds.We would be happy to facilitate a meeting between Ms. White-Ginder and yourself, or a member of your staff. Please feel free to contact Brad Luna, Communications Director for the Human Rights Campaign, at (202) 216-1514 at your convenience.

Sincerely,

Joe Solmonese
President
Human Rights Campaign

A. Gene Copello
Executive Director
The AIDS Institute

The second letter to Gov. Huckabee:

December 12th, 2007

Dear Governor Huckabee:
We wanted to follow-up from our initial letter sent to you Monday evening addressing your comments made in 1992 on the isolation of AIDS patients from the general public – comments that you have refused to recant.

According to media reports published Tuesday, you said: “I would be very willing to meet with them. … I would tell them we've come a long way in research, in treatment.”

We are writing to open a dialogue with your campaign to facilitate a meeting between yourself, Jeanne White-Ginder, the mother of Ryan White; Joe Solmonese, President of the Human Rights Campaign; and A. Gene Copello, Executive Director of The AIDS Institute.

As explained in our first letter, Ms. White-Ginder continues to be active in AIDS advocacy as a member of the board of The AIDS Institute. Her son, Ryan, was diagnosed with AIDS on December 17, 1984 at the age of 13, and captivated the attention of millions as he fought to attend school after being expelled due to ignorance of how HIV is transmitted. As you may know, the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act, was named is his honor. The act is the United States' largest federally funded program for people living with HIV/AIDS. Congress voted to reauthorize the Act in 1996, 2000 and again in 2006. We hope that, even in 2007, Ryan’s story can continue to open hearts and minds.
We look forward to discussing our experiences and personal insight with you and your campaign. This was not and is not an issue of “political correctness,” as you have stated previously. Rather, this is an issue of valuing science-based evidence over unfounded fear or prejudice.

To facilitate the logistics of a meeting between Ms. White-Ginder, Mr. Solmonese and Mr. Copello, please contact Brad Luna, Communications Director for the Human Rights Campaign, at (202) 216-1514.

Sincerely,

Joe Solmonese
President
Human Rights Campaign

A. Gene Copello
Executive Director
The AIDS Institute

The Human Rights Campaign is America’s largest civil rights organization working to achieve gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender equality. By inspiring and engaging all Americans, HRC strives to end discrimination against GLBT citizens and realize a nation that achieves fundamental fairness and equality for all.

Desmond Tutu's Apology

Yesterday Desmond Tutu apologized for the persecution of gay people in the church.

“I want to apologise to you and to all those who we in the church have persecuted,” Archbishop Tutu says in the interview.

“I’m sorry that we have been part of the persecution of a particular group. For me that is quite un-Christ like and, for that reason, it is unacceptable.

“May be, even as a retired Archbishop, I probably have, to some extent, a kind of authority but apart from anything let me say for myself and anyone who might want to align themselves with me, I’m sorry.

“I’m sorry for the hurt, for the rejection, for the anguish that we have caused to such as yourselves.”

As a religious leader well practiced in the art of reconciliation, Bishop Tutu is giving direction to all of us on strategies toward making change. When congregations, religious leaders and denominational heads begin publicly to apologize for past wrongs, it makes moving forward as people of faith possible. This was a profound act that hopefully will have a ripple effect in all our places of worship.

Limitations of Call

Recently I attended an ordination service. The service was powerful, the music moving, we sent the minister off to do good work in the community surrounded with the loving support of people of faith that heard and responded to her calling.

Yet there was a note in the service that caught me off guard and has gotten me thinking about the problems with the way many liberal pastors are using the language of call.

The minister who gave the sermon spoke about how God called him to ministry to do more with his life than to be a salesperson--God had called him for higher things. And, when speaking about the woman who was being ordained he warned her that her new calling would be so much more than “mere” social work.

Something about this way of thinking troubled me. Ministers are indeed called, but that doesn’t place ministerial service in an elevated position next to other professions. When the ministerial call is privileged it diminishes creative and generative thinking about the multiple ways God calls each of us—not just ministers.

The two types of work this minister contrasted to his profession—sales and social work—serve as a case in point. Ministers, more than most, are required to be salespeople—they have to sell their church, their faith, their programs, their preaching. Is it possible that rather than seeing ministers as more lofty than salespeople, we try to see how God might also call us through sales? Wouldn’t it be a soulful thing if we were collectively engaged in rethinking models of selling that didn’t reduce people to commodities, but honoring all of our humanity? And, might people that have experience in sales be able to minister to those of us who find asking for money so unpleasant that we push it on others to do?

Similarly, rather than seeing social workers as paper pushing robots moving from case-to-case without spiritual direction, wouldn’t it be better to look for the moments when social workers also serve as community ministers? Wouldn’t it make more sense to encourage what is noble and even prophetic in social work and to advocate along side them, rather than distinguishing the calling of ministers as separate and somehow more spiritual?

One of the cornerstones of the liberal church is the concept of inclusivity—we are all invited to the table; we all have worth and dignity. We use the language of class, race, sexual orientation, gender and gender identity, and ability as ways to judge our movement toward building more inclusive spaces. But we need to push these concepts further to examine the ways that we may inadvertently create barriers to being fully welcoming. It’s one thing to say that we welcome everyone but if we don’t really respect the work people do, are we really being welcoming in the end?

We need a much more expansive understanding of call—and not just extended to include other professions but also to include how we approach work. For all its hierarchical and patriarchal structure, social doctrine teaching in the Catholic Church is years ahead of liberal Protestant Churches on this score. There is in this teaching a reverence for the sacredness of work. Pope John Paul II said that when properly directed, work is an occasion for “contemplation and prayer that enlivens and redeems our spirituality.” All work so the teaching goes is a responsibility and a right given by God.

Whether cleaning houses, running for congress, or preaching sermons, we need to start thinking about all of our work lives as sacred, or potentially sacred. By doing this we’ll do more to create welcoming and radically alternative spaces in our congregations and communities than if we use the language of call as a way to establish a hierarchy distinguishing one form of labor from another.

In honor of Mo

My partner and I had to put our dog Mo down today. He was 13 years old and a major source of companionship in our lives.

It is funny what I miss about not having him around. He was a very sweet, good dog but it's not his goodness or sweetness I miss. It is the dailyness of Mo.

Just knowing I had to get up in the morning and take him out for a walk or make sure the trash can was secure so he wouldn't get into the garbage, or cleaning up his poop in the backyard so that walking in the yard wouldn't become an obstacle course.

So much of love is about companionship and not "qualities." It's about the time we spend together rather than our remarkable gifts. It's verbs not nouns, creating together rather than the created.

Mary Oliver writes about this beautifully in her poem Percy (Four). I'm sharing it here in honor of Mo.


I went to church.
I walked on the beach
and played with Percy.

I answered the phone
and paid the bills
I did the laundry.

I spoke her name
a hundred times.

I knelt in the dark
and said some holy words.

I went downstairs
I watered the flowers,
I fed Percy.

World AIDS day

The theme of this year’s World AIDS day is leadership. Bishop John Selders has blogged about what it would mean to have real leadership in the Church in fighting this pandemic.

To be real leaders means first and foremost being authentic about who we are and opening spaces where other’s feel they can be authentic as well. It also means looking beyond our own “house.” If we are white and LGBT that may mean caring with the same intensity for African American women suffering from HIV/AIDS in our inner cities as it means carrying about "our own." For all of us it means we need to connect what’s happening in our neighborhoods with the spread of AIDS around the world.

It may be time to dust off the old slogan “think globally and act locally” and claim it again as we find ways to expand our compassion and activism.

Read Selder’s blog or watch it on You Tube

Building Holy Relationships

Building spiritually-grounded spaces that honor the worth and dignity of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people demands of us a willingness to transform both ourselves and how we conceive of our relationships with one another. This is hard work not only for those who are challenged by LGBT relationships but also for LGBT people of faith. All of us are stretched to move beyond the cultural messages we’ve received, messages that often serve as a mirror for how we see ourselves. We are also required to push beyond what is comfortable. Push to see how we’ve barricaded ourselves from one another out of fear of judgment and rejection.

In an age when the marketplace defines so much of who we are, how we spend our time, how we present ourselves to the world, how we engage in friendships and sexual relationships, it is essential to have alternative spaces where our humanity is valued over our status or productivity. Creating welcoming spaces in our congregations and communities does this by requiring us to stay committed to one another when we are not particularly loveable or beautiful, when we are at our most vulnerable and raw.

By keeping this basic commitment to being authentic and in community, it is impossible to limit our understanding of who deserves our love. For me, this has meant that I’ve had to expand how I conceive of what relationships are sacred. I’ve become aware recently, for instance, of the gifts my single friends have given to my understanding of holy relationships as their love for their friends challenges the insular nature of our culture’s fixation on sexual relationships modeled on the nuclear family.

Jesus asked us not just to love our neighbor but also to love our neighbor as ourselves. To do this requires tremendous risk. We cannot get there by easy altruism but only by personal transformation in the company of others. There can be no more holy work than this, and I am blessed to be part of a movement that is engaged in it.

The Issue of Tithing

A recent Wall Street Journal article, The Backlash against Tithing, discusses how many churches are abandoning the idea of tithing, including conservative congregations. I’ve been intrigued by the question of tithing as I’ve been slowly working my way out of debt and toward a tithing practice at my church. It is a good subject for reflection as we enter the biggest holiday shopping season of the year.

Many churches look to the Bible as requiring tithing. Citing Jacob in Genesis “and this stone, which I have set up for a pillar shall be God’s house; and of all that you give me I will surely give one-tenth to you” (Genesis 28:21) these congregations insist that giving 10% of their income to the church is a biblically scripted requirement. In Mormon congregation’s members are bared from entering church if they don’t tithe and many conservative mega churches offer financial planning to help members learn how to manage their finances and tithe at the same time.

Yet, as the Wall Street Journal article points out, the idea of tithing is being challenged. In such unlikely places as the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C professor Andreas Kostenberger argues in his New Testament class that “if you add up all taxes paid by the ancient Israelites, they exceed 10%, and that in the New Testament there's no percentage rule.”

I think biblically-literal interpretation of scripture (whether for or against tithing), miss the point. I have been persuaded about the importance of tithing not because the Bible requires it of us, but because it is a way of participating in the world; it is a way of saying our humanity counts.

The best article I’ve read on tithing comes from Rebecca Ann Parker’s book, Blessing the World: What Can Save Us Now. In her chapter, “What Shall We Do with All this Beauty,” she connects honoring the Sabbath and tithing as the best practices in a global capitalist marketplace for spiritual deepening.

She argues that in a culture where global consumerism increasingly defines who we are, we need to find ways of being human that aren’t tied up with buying and selling goods. Without concrete practices that affirm our humanity we “lose our awareness that we have intimate and meaningful relationships with one another, that we are connected to and dependent upon the earth, that we have interests that transcend our personal lives.”

The spiritual practice of observing the Sabbath asks us to stop participating for one day in the ways that the dominant culture has determined for us. This is not simply about our own personal need for renewal but an understanding that we can not really comprehend injustice and be agents of change if we aren’t taking time to let ourselves feel the implications of injustice in the world. Similarly and connectedly, Parker argues that we should tithe not only because it helps sustain the causes we care about but it is a way of honoring our role as participants in creation, as stewards of the earth. As one congregational member claims, “to tithe is to tell the truth about who I am. . . I am a person who has something to give. I am a person who has received abundantly from life. I am a person whose presence matters in the world, and I am a person whose life has meaning because I am connected to and care about many things larger than myself. If I did not tithe, I would lose track of these truths about who I am.”

Transgender Day of Remembrance

Today, November 20th, is set aside throughout the world for people to pay respect to those needlessly killed by transgender hate crimes and to call attention to the threat of violence faced by gender variant people. Of all groups targeted for hate crimes, crimes against transgender people are often the most violent, most underreported, and thus most often ignored by law enforcement and our communities.

Numerous cases of transgender deaths due to hate crimes have been reported this year. People like Kaia Ladell Baker from Nashville Tennessee was killed as a result of blunt force to the head and Erica Keel of Philadelphia was killed in March by a car that repeatedly struck her. In many cases, crimes like these go unsolved for years.

Sometimes deaths like Victoria Arellano who died in July of HIV/AIDS in San Pedro California happened because of neglect. She and many in similar predicamentes died after being denied treatment in HIV/AIDS clinics because she was transgender.

In popular culture the common perception of transgender people is of a white male-to-female transgender person with the financial means to afford expensive operations. The reality is that most of the hate crime violence against trans people is perpetuated against sex workers, cross dressers, immigrants, people of color and the homeless. These are the most vulnerable in our communities and hate crime legislation is desperately needed to begin to bring attention and justice to their situation.

For the 9th Annual Transgender Day of Remembrance I was fortunate to work with two extraordinary transgender pastors, Rev. Dr. Erin Swenson from Atlanta and Rev. Drew Phoenix from Baltimore to create videos to commemorate the day. Please watch Drew Phoenix, pastor of St. John’s United Methodist Church in Baltimore, MD and Presbyterian minister Rev. Erin Swenson.

Outsourced Connectivity

You know that feeling of juggling too much to the point that everything begins to unravel? I had one of those days this past weekend. I left a bag of books on the train in Boston, my luggage didn't arrive when I got to the airport, I almost lost my plane ticket, and I left a scarf on the plane. This sort of thing has happened before--just like an overloaded circuit, I had a meltdown.

Others have car wrecks, get sick or worse, but when I suffer from the deadly combination of too much information streaming in, too many demands, and too little sleep I forget things. It's a rather scary place to be and clearly part of the modern condition.

So, while in the midst of this predicament last week, I read an article about Tim Ferris’s new book The 4 Hour Week that made me think maybe I had found a way to address my situation. Ferris argues we can get our work life under control by drastically cutting down our availability to others. Ferris has been making waves in the business world by proposing the radical idea that we need to be "less connected." He doesn't read the newspaper, he has cancelled all his RSS feeds, and he even has outsourced his dating service.

He manages all this and keeps a lucrative business in operation by relying on others to deal with his e-mail traffic-- mostly by hiring highly-skilled, low-wage workers that you can find in places like India and Bangladesh. He isn’t actually interested in transforming how we think about technology; rather his is a model of globalizing the responses to technology so that people like him (lucrative executives) can enjoy more time for themselves. This model has picked up a following by the same class of people who dream of making massive amounts of money while young and then retiring early to a life of leisure. Ferris simply makes the fantasy better by showing how you can have it all right now.

For the progressive minded among us, Ferris’s model, with its blatant exploitation of others, is pretty hard to swallow. However, I would suggest that there is an uncomfortable resonance between Ferris’s model and that of the “simplicity movement” often touted by the spiritual left. Similar too Ferris, the simplicity movement speaks to a need to radically rethink our addiction to 24 hour accessibility which keeps us overly stimulated while depriving us of a rich spiritual life essential to developing our humanity. Yet, while this model is based on checking out of the high stress work world rather than hiring others to take care of our needs, the problem still remains that we can’t really think about “downsizing” our lives if we aren’t in a position of economic privilege in the first place. You can’t simplify if you are trying to make enough money to put your kids through school or if you have a chronic health care condition, or if you have to rely on food banks to get through the week.

This said, economic disparities don’t diminish the problem of our being overextended and overly available, they just require us to look at the issue differently. Without a real model of community, “being connected” becomes just another commodity in a capitalist system. The problem isn’t being connected; it’s the nature of the connection. We might ask instead: What is the quality of our connectedness and how wide is its range? Is our ability to be in touch in a moments notice actually shielding us from the deep connections that come from being in community with those different than ourselves?

ENDA victory in the House

Last night the Employment Non Discrimination Bill (H.R. 3685) passed in the house with 235 members voting in favor and 184 opposed.

This was a difficult vote in many ways. The House leadership made the calculation that the only way the bill would pass was if gender identity and expression were stripped from it. They felt that a victory in the House was essential in order for an inclusive bill to have a chance in the next few years. If the bill had gone down in defeat or had been pulled from the floor it would make it nearly impossible for it to come up again in the next couple of years and our efforts would be set back at least 10 years. By giving members of Congress the "good feeling" that they had moved civil rights in this country one step forward, it will be easier to convince them of the importance of including the whole LGBT community in the near future when we have a new President who may sign it into law.

This calculation has caused friction within the LGBT community and there is an enormous amount of healing that now needs to occur.

Still, as we move forward and try to figure out the best strategies toward getting a fully inclusive ENDA to the desk of a President who will sign it, we also need to stop for a moment and reflect on the historic nature of this victory. It has been nearly 30 years of massive education on the part of LGBT groups around the country that has gotten us this far. We now have to roll up our sleaves and start doing the same level of education on transgender issues.

Even though this victory is bittersweet the win is still enormous. It signals to the public that gay and lesbian people ought to have basic civil rights protections and not to be fired or live in fear of being fired simply because they are gay.

To follow the live blog from the debate in the House go to HRC's Back Story.

Can I Get a Witness?

“Can I get a Witness” expresses God’s presence in the shared lives of marginalized people and dates back at least as far as Nannie Helen Burroughs, the early twentieth century African American educator and proto-feminist reformer in the Baptist church. As we memorized the spirit of the dead in my Church’s All Souls Day ritual this past Sunday, I thought about Burroughs and her circle of Baptist Church ladies calling for a witness as they shared their stories of suffering and liberation. Burroughs’ spirit lived on in Atlanta Georgia this past weekend and I was privileged to witness its power at the 2007 Covenant Network of Presbyterians Conference in Atlanta.

The Covenant Network, made up of clergy and lay leaders in the Presbyterian Church USA, proclaims a vision for an inclusive Presbyterian Church embodied in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. I must confess that in the past when I’ve imagined somewhat stogy, somewhat aloof Mainline Christians, I’ve thought first of Presbyterians. Yet, if this weekend’s conference is any indication of how the spirit is moving in the Presbyterian Church USA, such stereotypes will soon be obliterated from our collective consciousness. I have rarely seen a group of people so committed to the gospel of Jesus Christ and so thoughtful in their witness to his presence among us, than I did in the company of this group.

The Covenant Network has been working for change in the Presbyterian Church for 10 years and while they have suffered defeat they exude a spirit of hopeful promise not built on pie in the sky fanaticizing but grounded in faithful listening to the pain of so many Presbyterians who have been deeply harmed by the Church. By bearing witness to one another’s stories—stories such as Rev. Andy Cullen’s, a conservative Evangelical Presbyterian pastor who changed his mind about LGBT people and lost his parish as a consequence; or Ann Speer, a lifelong Presbyterian who was shunned by her Church community when she told members her son was gay—they have discovered in themselves a transformational love that is infectious and life giving and rings of Jesus’ spirit.

A Justice Call for a Religious Rebirth

And how have I used rivers, how have I used wars
To escape writing of the worst thing of all—
Not the crimes of others, not even our own death,
But the failure to want our freedom passionately enough
So that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem
Mere emblems of the desecration of ourselves?
----Adrienne Rich

Faith is a powerful language that at once offers solace and challenges us to fundamentally change who we are. Rich in these lines does not speak in a religious voice, yet her yearning for a passionate desire for freedom is no less profound than the desire to be born again. The same desire for personal transformation is what draws many of us wishfully to churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples.

Faith speaks to the spiritual needs of the individual but it also draws the individual into the needs of the whole community. If we are ever going to learn to live differently we need to see how desire for personal transformation goes hand-in-hand with our social justice work, with our embrace of the neighbor. What is required is a deep and total transformation and it needs to happen by connecting our advocacy for social justice directly, passionately, and personally with our spiritual need to be reborn in the service of God—however we define God.

Images of personal rebirth capture the imagination and the yearning of the soul much more effectively than language stressing mere tolerance. Yet it is the language of tolerance that dominates our liberal congregations and much of our interfaith work. Toleration built on a model of accommodation is easy for us because it doesn’t ask us to change but only to bring others into our already comfortable, safe world. We might buy free trade coffee in our fellowship halls or put Save Darfur signs in front of our congregations but what have we risked?

On the other hand, Christian radical right speak has so hijacked our imagination about personal conversion that it is nearly impossible to think of religious transformation outside a narrow, repressive, life-destroying preoccupation with discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, and those who are not Christian.

Yet when we look at a situation in which the richest 1% of adults in the world owns 40% of the planet’s wealth, when the effects of global warming are waging daily havoc on our environment, when the threat of terrorism is only matched by the shameful propaganda of fear based on those threats it becomes clear pretty quickly that tepid toleration isn’t enough.

As a people we need stories of personal transformation. Secular one’s are valuable but richest are the sacred texts, whether the Jewish Prophets, Siddhartha, Jesus, Mohammed, or others. It matters less in whose name we claim our spiritual rebirth but that we claim it as the foundation for a richer, deeper, more personal connection to our work for social justice.

We can see this fundamental transformation in communities all around us. It exists in congregations like the United Methodist Church in Baltimore Maryland whose members embraced Rev. Drew Phoenix as their pastor when he transitioned from female to male and has now covenanted to stay with him despite excessive media attention, a heavy financial burden, and the stigmatization of others in the larger community. When congregations like this one truly wrestle with LGBT equality their sense of who they are as a religious body changes.

We also see real transformation happen in interfaith movements like the New Sanctuary Movement where congregations consciously choose to support and sometimes house illegal immigrants at considerable risk their own security and the security of the congregation.

Our sacred texts don’t ask us to tolerate each other but to embrace one another. Jesus said “Love your neighbor as yourself” not try to get along with your neighbor. The Tibetan Buddhist teaching of tonglen, or exchanging oneself for others, works by consciously breaking down the difference between self and other. This is a radical freedom and it’s not easy.

The Israelites wandered in the wilderness for 40 years in order to trust in God, to love freedom enough that they could learn to purge themselves from their oppression in Egypt—oppression defined by an occupying power that imposed a physical and spiritual regime not their own. Those of us on the religious left are in the wilderness right now. We want change but we’re hoping it will come if we write a check or volunteer occasionally in a soup kitchen. Incremental engagement like this is important but real change will only come when we risk who we are--when our personal transformation drives our connection to others. We need religious fervor to carry us there.

Dreaming of a common language beyond platitudes.

Surely at a time when religious fundamentalism in its varied expressions is polarizing nation from nation and people from people, finding a common language for people of faith would be a priority. But how to do that is no easy feat.

On this topic I was intrigued when in a recent edition of On Faith , panelists wrote in on the Dalai Lama’s pronouncement that “All major religious traditions carry basically the same message: That is love, compassion and forgiveness.” While there were a few, most notably the Muslim scholar Sulayman Nyang, who expanded on how the Dalai Lama’s words spoke across religious traditions, most writers dissected the statement to show its limitations.

Susan Thistlethwaite pointed out how when not connected to a social justice context of non-violence the concepts of love, compassion and forgiveness can be as corrupting as they are liberating. She argues, for example, that women are often counseled by religious leaders to forgive their batterers and stay in violent situations for the sake of a misguided interpretation of the Christian doctrine of forgiveness.

Other panelists speak to the real damage done by religion. As Hindu Chaplain Rajan Zed pithily explains: “there are some more things in common in religions: misapplying holy scriptures through selective study and decoding, seeing ourselves as God’s charge d’affaires, claiming to be the lone owner of the truth and all the roads to salvation, positioning the ideal portrayal of one’s own religion with the apparently defective truth of other religions, etc.”

Others challenged the value of lumping together these sentiments and showed the ways varied religious traditions respond differently to concepts like love, forgiveness and compassion.

I agree with many of the panelist; without a context these words are little more than platitudes. Nonetheless, I see the Dalai Lama as an international pastoral voice attempting to articulate a dream shared by many for a common language, to borrow a phrase from the poet Adrienne Rich. Many of us are searching for the principles of love, compassion, and forgiveness in our own religious traditions while simultaneously seeking out ways to connect with similar shared values across cultures and faiths. Think of the new Coexist bumper sticker and tee shirt that are popping up everywhere. The Dalai Lama is speaking directly to this longing.

I know sometimes when I throw together a litany of “good faith values” like love, compassion, and forgiveness—or add in a few others such as hospitality and care for the neighbor—my list can sound shallow and easily exploited for unintended uses.

Yet, it still speaks to a longing for connection. When Rodney King famously stated, "Why can't we all get along," his words became easily mocked as naive and were turned quickly into cliche. Nonetheless, they also spoke to a deep seated pain and longing; they made vulnerable a desire for connection and understanding, a desire in and of itself worth nourishing. Words like "love, compassion and forgiveness" figure the same way and, for all their vague and seeming insipidness, they still speak to a deep human need for connection. Something that we can ill afford to ignore.

unhinged

What do you do when you can’t get your cable hook up?

One option is to go after the Comcast offices with a hammer. As reported in the Thursday Washington Post Style section, a 75 year old woman, Mona Shaw, smashed a monitor, a keyboard and a phone at a Northern Virginia Comcast office. The couple had ordered the combo service (full phone, cable TV and internet) through Comcast but the company came two days late, only did half the job and then turned their service off completely. When they went to the office to complain they were asked to wait outside on a bench for two hours in hot August heat. When someone finally came out it was only to tell them that the manager had left for the day. The couple fretted over the weekend and Mona decided to go back to the office on Monday with a hammer and smashed things up. The story ends by telling us the couple attends a local Unitarian Universalist congregation.

I found this story hysterical and indulged in Unitarian and hammer jokes all day. It is in a sense a “safe” vigilante story—safe because no one is hurt, because the perpetrator is a 75 year old woman, because she’s part of a church known for its peace work. She’s a charming outlaw—a church lady who had too much!

For people who have had horror stories with some aspect of the service industry—and most of us have—it’s a nice little vigilante tale. Yet it also raises serious questions about how the elderly are often ignored and discounted. About how we create systems were violence seems to be the only option left for people. About how destruction of property is lauded as a way to prove one’s vitality and courage. And, how because the women with the hammer is elderly, white, suburban and a church lady, it is easy to identify with her frustration when with a different set of circumstances, and a different casts of characters, the situation would seem threatening.

Faith as the Counter to Fear

“A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he [Jesus] was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they [the disciples] woke him up and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?’” Mark 4:37-40.

Professor Mary Ann Tolbert preached a brilliant sermon this past Sunday on this passage in Mark and on the power of fear to destroy faith. As she pointed out, the disciples knew Jesus. They had witnessed first hand his miracles; they had been taught about the realm of heaven; they were not new to his power. And yet, when faced with a dangerous storm, they reacted in fear and forgot all they learned and all they believed.

Tolbert argues that the opposite of faith is not doubt but fear. It was the disciples fear for their own lives that made them retreat inward. Because of their fear they forgot not only Jesus’ power but their love of him as well. Presumably if they were to perish Jesus would too, yet when they cry, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” it wasn’t Jesus but their own skin they were worried about.

Fear has a way of making us small. We retreat into ourselves and look at the outside with foreboding and anxiety. Fear also destroys communities, particularly when manipulated as a mechanism of state power. By keeping people anxious about their own security you also keep them suspicious of anyone around who is in any way different. As the Bush administration’s tactics have revealed, fear is a mighty weapon for inculcating a culture of suspicion against those on the outside of a very narrowly defined norm: immigrants, people of color, LGBT folk. Such manipulation of fear can further be used to legitimate torture on the suspicion that someone might know something and preemptive strike against a country whom we perceive might be a threat.

I am struck by how important an examination of fear is not just of the culture at large but for those of us (and I include myself in this group) who, like the disciples, want to follow Jesus, want to live lives of purpose and justice, but find our courage tested and our faith challenged. I’ve been thinking about this recently in terms of the recent abuses against immigrants.

This Sunday's New York Times reported a recent raid in Long Island of undocumented workers suspected of being part of a gang. Once found, the suspects were taken away without a warrant, without a reading of their Miranda rights, and without the right to a lawyer (unless they could pay for one). To prevent the possibility of their getting legal representation or family support they were transported to York, Pennsylvania rather than questioned locally.

As if all this wasn’t bad enough, federal agents indiscriminately barged into homes of legal immigrants as well as illegal immigrants searching for potential offenders. Such actions are not unique to Long Island but are part of a disturbing, well documented trend that has helped the Bush administration set a new staggering record of 195,000 deportations this last year. By indiscriminately raiding homes, the federal agents weren’t simply casting a wide net out of laziness; they were also visibly flexing their muscles. These stories are cautionary tales, letting us know exactly what we could be facing if we go too far in our protection of immigrants.

As a nation of immigrants it’s time to let our outrage over this kind of inhumane treatment be heard. As people of faith we have the added responsibility of explaining how a doctrine of fear not only keeps our anger in check and thus perpetuates a cycle of violence but also deprives us of faith. Faith rests on the conviction that the world we inhabit is worth loving and thus demands our passionate attention. To love our neighbor as ourselves means risking ourselves for someone else; it means stepping out of our own anxiety, our own isolation, for the possibility of a transformation that is bigger than ourselves. When we can ground our actions in a love that encompasses more than our own fears we can find the courage to act even when the risks seem insurmountable.

Many religious communities are testing their faith right now by challenging real fears to their security and well being. As in the 1980s churches, mosques, and synagogues are declaring themselves a safe zone for immigrants dealing with the daily terror of deportation. This New Sanctuary Movement is being closely monitored and the consequences for congregations and individuals within them are not insubstantial. All congregations aren't ready to take part in the Sanctuary Movement, yet if we are going to move away from fear and toward faith we need to start the dialogue about what kind of moral stance we as religious people are willing to take for our immigrant neighbors against hate, workplace discrimination and unjust deportation.

Our gift to the Episcopal Church

Since the Episcopal Church, USA House of Bishops met in New Orleans last week , there has been news story after news story describing the current tension between the Episcopal Church, USA and the larger Anglican Communion as a “schism,” “rift,” “chasm,” or “split.” This imagery, suggestive of a kind of a cataclysmic “continental divide,” is troubling on a number of levels.

First and foremost, in such stories LGBT people are regularly seen as the culprit, the outside force tearing the Church apart. Even in credible news sources we are bombarded by headlines such as “Gay Issue Looms over Episcopal Church,” “Episcopal leaders act to avert a schism, vow restraint on more gay bishops,” “Anglican rift grows over gay row.” The suggestion is always that LGBT people are responsible for the breakup of the church. Yet, we are not the ones threatening to leave the church, suing for Church property, or refusing opportunities for dialogue. A more appropriate headline would be “Bigotry issue looms over Episcopal Church.” Despite every attempt at an honest conversation about the Church’s stance on full inclusion, powerful players in the Anglican Communion and the Episcopal Church, USA have made as much trouble for the Episcopal Church as they can. Indeed, as of Friday the 28th a group of ultra-conservative Episcopalians voted to take the first formal step to leave the Church. If there is a schism in the church, they are the cause.

Second, the regular suggestion of a cataclysmic breakup of the Anglican Communion creates a sense of fear and doom that obfuscates history. As with most institutions, the Episcopal Church’s past has been checkered and its future has always been uncertain. The House of Bishops in the nineteenth century refused to choose sides in the Civil War and Episcopal priests used Scripture to argue for slavery and against it. Indeed, for the entire nineteenth century the House of Bishops refused to discuss race relations at all for fear of political fallout. Yet the real fallout from such cowardliness was an exodus of African Americans from the Episcopal community. The struggle for women’s equality in the Church has been equally hard won. It took a full 50 years after women’s suffrage for women in 1970 to be allowed to serve as deputies at the National Convention, and it wasn’t until 1976 that women were finally allowed to be ordained as priests. Throughout its history those marginalized by the Church have pushed hardest to help it achieve its potential glory. LGBT folks are just the latest in a long list of brave people working to make the Church more accountable.

Third, when LGBT people are perceived as threatening the future of the Church, even those of us working for full inclusion can loose sight of the tremendous gifts we bring to the table. Because of our efforts the Church is beginning to have long overdue conversations about sexuality, and not just LGBT sexuality. We have opened the doors to honest and open discussions in our faith communities about sexuality and sexual morality for all of us. Thanks to us, Church members are also looking deeper at Scripture. It is no longer okay to say, “God condemns gay people” and quote a few Bible passages out of context. Our advocacy demands that the Church take a closer look at the biblical text and contemplate the rich language of justice, compassion, and love for the neighbor in addition to the passages so often used to oppress us. Finally, through example we are teaching others the courage to stand up to bullies. In particular, the ministry of the Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson, the Bishop of New Hampshire, exemplifies the mighty power we can have when we speak with heartfelt conviction for justice.

Change never happens without a struggle; our struggle will in the end make the Episcopal Church more honest and more accountable to the Gospel and the community for which it serves.

We Won!

Today was a historic victory for LGBT people. The Mathew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act passed today by a vote of 60 to 39 in the Senate! This is the farthest a national LGBT piece of legislation has gone. Such a victory would not have happened if it were not for the work of justice-minded people of faith. As late as 11 pm last night HRC's legislative department asked for help finding scriptural references that would give support for the Hate Crimes bill. On the floor today, Senator Kennedy quoted from an interfaith,Clergy Against Hate letter, that went out with over 1,400 signatures. Faith leaders standing up for justice are making a difference.

People shouldn't have to live in fear simply because of who they are and today's victory is a step away from fear and a step toward justice. Below is a copy of the HRC press release that went out today.


Senate Passage of Hate Crimes Bill Moves Bill Closer Than Ever To Becoming Law Bill Signifies Major Victory toward Equality for GLBT Community

WASHINGTON— In an historic step toward equality for GLBT Americans, the U.S. Senate voted to pass the Matthew Shepard Act, which updates and expands the federal hate crimes laws to include bias motivated violence based on a victim’s sexual orientation, gender identity, gender, and disability, and provides new resources and tools to assist local law enforcement in prosecuting vicious crimes.

“For over a decade our community has worked tirelessly to ensure protections to combat violence motivated by hate and today we are the closest we have ever been to seeing that become a reality,” said Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese. “Congress has taken an historic step forward and moved our country closer to the realization that all Americans, including the GLBT community, are part of the fabric of our nation. The new leadership in Congress fully understands that for too long our community has been terrorized by hate violence. And today, the US Senate has sent a clear message to every corner of our country that we will no longer turn a blind eye to anti-gay violence in America.”

The Senate in a bipartisan vote of 60 to 39 accepted cloture which ended debate on the bill and then moved to approve the Matthew Shepard Act by a voice vote -- attaching it as an amendment to the Fiscal Year 2008 Department of Defense Authorization bill.

On May 3rd, the House of Representatives passed a companion bill, the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act (H.R. 1592), with a strong bipartisan margin of 237 to 180. Twenty-six state Attorneys General, including 23 from states with anti-hate crimes laws already on the books, as well as 230 law enforcement, civil rights, civic and religious organizations support the Matthew Shepard Act and the LLEHCPA because, despite progress toward equality in almost all segments of our society, hate crimes continue to spread fear and violence and local law enforcement often lack the tools and resources to prevent and prosecute them. Some of these supporting organizations include the National Sheriffs Association, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, 26 state attorneys general, the National District Attorneys Association, the NAACP, the Episcopal Church, the League of Women Voters, the Anti-Defamation League, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the YWCA of the USA and the United Methodist Church.

The President has threatened to veto the legislation, calling it “unnecessary.” According to the FBI, 25 Americans each day are victims of hate crimes—that means approximately one hate crime is committed every hour. One in six hate crimes are motivated by the victim’s sexual orientation. It’s time to update the law to protect everyone, and this year marks our best chance yet to get it done.

“Hate crimes terrorize entire communities and violate America’s core democratic principles that all citizens are created equal and are afforded equal protection under the law,” continued Solmonese. “On behalf of the millions of Americans who have waited too long for these critical protections, we urge President Bush to sign the bill when it arrives on his desk.”

The hate crimes amendment was introduced by Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Sen. Gordon Smith (R-OR). It confers authority on the federal government to investigate and prosecute crimes committed against victims solely because of their real or perceived sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, and disability when local officials are unwilling or unable to do so. It also expands existing federal hate crimes law to improve prosecution of bias-motivated crimes based on race, religious, national origin and color and provides additional resources to local law enforcement.

The Human Rights Campaign is America’s largest civil rights organization working to achieve gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender equality. By inspiring and engaging all Americans, HRC strives to end discrimination against GLBT citizens and realize a nation that achieves fundamental fairness and equality for all.

Hurricane Katrina

The Washington Post reported Sunday that enduring depression is at a crisis point among residence living in New Orleans. According to the article, “the most thorough survey of the Gulf Coast’s mental health recently showed that while signs of depression and other ills doubled after the hurricane, two years later, those levels have not subsided, they have risen.”

Unlike most traumas, people tend to get better over time but in New Orleans many are living without hope that they’ll find work, that their homes will be restored, or their neighborhoods repaired. The loss is not only devastating but it lingers without any sign of change.

It strikes me that as a country we are now burdened with the task of facing honestly the psychological effects of devastation. Churches and other religious and secular institutions have been going to New Orleans regularly since the devastation hit. This is critical work. But it is equally critical that we pay close attention over the long haul, and without easy solutions, to the effects such disaster will have over the long haul. Just as with the war, those of us who have not faced combat or natural disaster are challenged now more than ever to listen to the pain of those whose lives have been forever changed.

The Pain of War

British historian Martin Gilbert observed, “the greatest unfinished business of the Second World War is human pain.” If this was true for World War II it is even truer today. This weekend I watched Paul Haggis’s remarkable new film, In the Valley of Elah, a film everyone ought to see. In it, Haggis tells the story of Hank Deerfield's (Tommy Lee Jones) search for his son Mike who, after a tour of duty in Iraq, is first reported missing from Fort Rudd in New Mexico and then discovered dead--burned and dismembered in a field near the army base.

On one level the story is a classic detective piece recording a father’s attempt to find out what happened to his son. On another level, as Dennis Denby points out in his excellent review in the New Yorker, the film documents the father's painful but unflinching search to learn what kind of person his son became in Iraq. He discovers the capacity of his son and his son's friends to commit unspeakable violence both against the Iraqis and each other.

Based on a number of true stories, the movie reveals the damage the Iraq war is having on the psyche of individuals. While I see in my neighborhood more and more people with prosthetic arms and legs, what I don't see is the emotional trauma caused by the war. Yet it is the effects on the mind and the spirit, as much as the effects to the body, with which we all now have to be prepared to deal.

As Haggis’s film makes poignantly clear, the aftermath of the Iraq war has already begun. The onus is on us to listen as openly and honestly as we can to what people faced. We need to get busy advocating not only to end to the war but to make sure those who served have the mental health services they need to begin the long, slow process of recovery. It is the human pain, pain that turns so quickly into violence, that is our burden now.

Jena 6: Standing on the Side of Love

In the soon to be released movie For the Bible Tells Me So, Rev. Irene Monroe talks about the real sin of Sodom and Gomorrah:

I know a lot of towns that are like Sodom and Gomorrah…you can walk into these towns and they don’t show any sign of hospitality simply because you are black or simply because you are gay or lesbian or just because you are an outsider. . . .That’s the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah.”

Jena Louisiana is a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah kind of town for the young African American men sentenced unfairly for a schoolyard fight. Yet the larger social ill exposed in Jena extends well beyond the six accused men. On a moral level, their story exemplifies how inhospitable so many of our cities are to African Americans. When we incarcerate nearly 1/3 of our black men, we are in a very real sense declaring open hostility on the entire African American community.

To date public outrage against the racial disparity in our criminal justice system has not been strong enough to effect change, which is why the recent protests in Jena are so heartening. They are a sign that people are finally demanding that we as a country act better.

On a personal note, I was encouraged that my organization, the Human Rights Campaign, stood in solidarity with the protesters in Jena as well. Quoting Martin Luther King’s famous line, “injustice against any of us is an injustice against all of us,” Joe Solmonese, the President of the Human Rights Campaign, spoke at the Washington, DC rally about the need to stand with others in the fight against injustice just as others have stood with us.

In Jena, Unitarian Universalist pastor, Meg Riley from Minnesota wore a tee-shirt imprinted with the UU slogan for marriage equality, “Standing on the Side of Love.” I’ve been thinking about how that marriage equality tee-shirt worked so well for the Jena 6 protests. Whether working for Marriage Equality or for racial justice in our criminal justice system, when we stand on the side of love we address the real sin of Sodom and Gomorrah and create communities built on expansive hospitality and welcome.

The Power of Analogies

A teacher of mine used to argue that all analogies are faulty. Analogies always reduce the difference between two terms and cheapen at least one in the process. Analogies erase history. In the LGBT world we have learned from experience that to compare, for instance, the Civil Rights struggle directly with the human rights struggle of LGBT folks is a recipe for disaster. Issues around “passing,” around the different forms of economic and political disenfranchisement in each community are minimized by analogies. While LGBT activists can speak to learning from the work of the Civil Rights movement this is much different than making a direct comparison.

That said, analogies are made all the time and politically speaking they are extremely effective. When people hostile to marriage equality compare marriage between a woman and a woman to say marriage between a woman and her cat, I for one am left dumbfounded without knowing where and how to begin to address the faulty comparison. I want to scream, "that's insane." Not exactly an effective rhetorical response!

So when I read the piece on marriage by Geoffrey R. Stone in the Chicago Tribune I was happy to see his proposal of another paradigm, of “choosing wisely among competing analogies.” He doesn’t argue that analogies are perfect but instead gives us a way to challenge the validity of the controlling analogy. This seems to me to be a useful strategy for starting a conversation that moves beyond using language to score political points and easy rhetorical "gotchas." Here is an excerpt from the piece:

So is Mollie's marrying Andrea more like Mark's marrying Alice or John's marrying his cat? The very asking of this question might be taken as insulting (indeed, very insulting) to Mollie and Andrea. That is precisely the point.

Changing the controlling analogy entails risk. Recognizing that discrimination against women is "like" discrimination against African-Americans opens the door to new and sometimes disturbing questions. What about discrimination against the disabled? The elderly? Gays and lesbians? Similarly, a decision to allow Mollie and Andrea to legally marry might raise unsettling questions about polygamy and Discrimination against women was "natural." . . . But such questions are inevitable and healthy in a robust, ever-questioning, ever-evolving society. They are a fundamental and cherished part of our American history and culture. If we did not ask such questions, we would still burn witches, buy slaves and deny women the vote.

In the end, we must rely on our deepest moral intuitions, our commitment to individual dignity, our belief that all persons "are created equal" and our common sense to draw the "right" lines for our generation.

To what are we escaping?

Like most good lesbians of a certain age, I have a thing for Jodie Foster. I find her androgynous strength, intense focus, and her Clint Eastwood-like aloofness sexy. Consequently, even though I’m not a fan of violent movies and I compulsively read reviews before picking a film, the other night I went to the new Foster flick, Brave One, knowing next to nothing about it except that Foster had a great new haircut.

Foster delivered. The age lines magnified on a too-thin body only added to her appeal. She looks better now at 44 than she did 10 years ago. Walking down gritty New York streets with her phallic signifiers about her--microphone, cigarette, gun--she was simply hot!

Nonetheless, the pleasure of watching Foster was marred for me by a realization that her sexiness was packaging an all too familiar script about violence and commodification. I went to the movie after a long work week. I wanted something easy to digest and pleasurable to watch. I wanted an escape. But I left troubled, wondering what kind of damage movies like this do over the long haul to our collective psyche.

For those who haven’t seen Brave One, it tells the story of Erica Bain’s (Jodie Foster) transformation into a vigilante killer after she and her fiancée are brutally attacked by strangers. The movie left hanging a number of themes that if explored could have been interesting: the way tragic loss to violence often reproduces violence, or how “righteous” killing offers a sense of power and control after a life-crushing tragedy.

What we get instead is a movie that anesthetizes us to death and relies on stock caricatures of urban criminals to do so. We "know” these victim/victimizers; they make up our country’s collective narrative of “the bad guy.” They are the Latino thugs roaming the parks, the young African-American hoodlums on the train, the greasy elderly pervert/pimp in a beat up car, the mafia man who lives in Park Heights. Their social circumstances are never explored. Their lives are the sum total of their brutality. They are disposable. As Erica Bain continues to kill, we as an audience become anesthetized to her as well. Despite Foster’s good acting, the more she kills the easier it is to focus on her as a film icon—the sexy, slightly butch woman—rather than on the complexities of her character. She in a sense also becomes disposable.

The escapism this film offers up doesn’t take us out of our lives, it simply reinforces uncritical messages we receive daily. From code red warnings, to criminal profiling, to the propagandistic promotion of preemptive strikes, we are told over and over again to be anxious, prepared, on the offensive, and to never forget that it is a violent, lonely world where the vulnerable and soft are sacrificed. I’m not drawing a conspiratorial parallel between Bush’s war propaganda and the movie Brave One, but I am suggesting that so often our escapism—whether packaged through Brave One or Brave Heart, whether staring Jodie Foster or Mel Gibson, whether marketing a lesbian subculture or a heterosexual male demographic—is really only reinforcing old tapes of perpetual anxiety and set stereotypes of what to fear, all made palpable by the allure of a sexy star.

I’ve been intrigued lately by a Quaker pamphlet on the history of spiritual discernment which makes the case that a good way to know if the Spirit of God is with us is to pay attention to the characteristics of “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness and self-control.” Galatians 5:23. While it may be too much to ask of a Hollywood film to embody all of these characteristics, I think we ought to ask whether, after seeing a film, our humanity has been touched or whether we've been pushed even further away from what makes us vulnerable, requires our engagement in community, and demands a complex and compassionate look at life.

I went to this film with friends and anticipated going for a drink afterwards, but we all ended up just going home instead, a little more tense than when we came.