Asterisk

I’ve been supporting Barack Obama pretty strongly in the 2008 Presidential Election for several months now. Leaving aside my previously discussed concerns about John McCain and Sarah Palin, the fact is that I agree with Senator Obama’s positions on foreign policy, economics, health care, ethics, education, immigration, and most other issues. Just as importantly, his intelligence and non-combative attitude are a major step above anything we’ve seen on the national stage in quite a while.

Photo by Ethan Miller, Awesome by Barack Obama.

That’s not to say that I agree with Obama on everything. The biggest problem I’ve had is with his stance on LGBT rights. On the one hand, he supports the Matthew Shepard Act, the Employee Non-Discrimination Act, and adoption by gays and lesbians, he wants to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and he opposes a Constitutional Amendment saying that we can’t get married.

On the other hand, Obama wants civil unions, but not full marriage equality for gays. [insert record scratching to a halt here]. That’s a BIG other hand, you know what I mean? Separate But Equal (which is what civil unions amount to) is unconstitutional, but he wants to apply it to this one group.

I’d planned on voting for him anyway, hoping we could make better headway with an Obama administration than a McCain administration. But today, we got a glimmer of —dare I say it?— hope while talking to NBC’s Brian Williams about how he would choose a Supreme Court Justice.

And so my criteria, for example, would be— if a Justice tells me that they only believe the strict letter of the Constitution– that means that they possibly don’t mean— believe in— a right to privacy that may not be perfectly enumerated in the Constitution but, you know, that I think is there.

I mean, the— the right to marry who you please isn’t in the Constitution. But I think all of us assume that if a state— decided to pass a law saying, “Brian, you can’t marry the woman you love,” that you’d think that was unconstitutional. Well, where does that come from? I think it comes from a right to privacy— that may not be listed in the Constitution but is implied by the structure of the Constitution.

So yeah, Barack Obama has my vote. I hope he has yours too.

hope

(H/t: GoodAsYou.org)

(Note: As I said in yesterday’s post, my look at Madeleine L’Engle’s book A Wind in the Door ended up going in two different directions, so I decided to split it into two posts.)

Early in A Wind in the Door, Proginoskes the cherubim tells Meg Murry about their role in three tests.

When I was memorizing the names of the stars, part of the purpose was to help them each to be more particularly the particular star each one was supposed to be. That’s basically a Namer’s job. Maybe you’re supposed to make earthlings feel more human.

Isn’t he right? Isn’t that our job? To help each other know ourselves better and become the persons God meant us to be. Not just in close circles, though, I have a responsibility to help Name each person I come into contact with. You have a responsibility to do the same. And if we do our part, the whole of God’s creation becomes more perfect.

The next question flows naturally from this idea. So how do I go about Naming someone, even someone I don’t like? If we’re supposed to Name each other, then we must have the tools we need for the task. Progo has the answer:

Love. That’s what makes persons know who they are. You’re full of love, Meg, but you don’t know how to stay within it when it’s not easy. Oh—you love your family. That’s easy. Sometimes when you feel awful about somebody, you get back into rightness by thinking about—well, you seem to be telling me that you got back into love once by thinking about Charles Wallace. But this time it can’t be easy. You have to go on to the next step.

That’s not just cloud-talkin’, it’s downright Biblical. Progo’s right, it isn’t easy, but Naming someone who hates you can be a freeing decision. An important step for me was to realize that as angry as I am at someone who treats me as a subhuman, to a certain extent that person is a victim as well. When they decided to hate rather than love, they didn’t do it in a vacuum, it’s something they were led to.

Understand, I am in no way excusing the hateful things that happen. There’s a long and growing list of my brothers and sisters who have been victimized because they were gay, and I make no excuses for the person or persons who did it. Clearly those people should be brought to justice. But in the words of Dr. Horrible, those people are a symptom and the disease rages on. In the battle for equality, we need to be mindful of both the foot soldiers in the enemy’s army and the Generals.

In A Wind in the Door, those Generals who lead people to hate are called the Echthroi.

War and hate are their business, and one of their chief weapons is un-Naming—making people not know who they are. If someone knows who he is, really knows, then he doesn’t need to hate.

In the documentary For The Bible Tells Me So, Rabbi Brian Zachary Mayer makes the point that the cheapest way to make people feel like they’re part of a group is to create an “other”, a group to be different from and better than. The leaders of the Anti-Gay movement work hard not just to lie about and suppress the rights of LGBTs, but also to actively keep people in a hating frame of mind and keep them from knowing who they are.

Make no mistake, that’s the goal of the opposition. They’ve shown that they’ll do anything to keep not just their LGBT victims, but also their followers as irrational, as un-Named, as possible. That’s one of the reasons they’re so dangerous. And it’s one of the reasons they have to be stopped.

(Note: This started as one long post but grew in two directions. Here’s part two.)

When I was a kid, I absolutely loved Madeleine L’Engle’s books. A Wrinkle In Time was way out there with other dimensions and deep subjects for a kid’s book, A Swiftly Tilting Planet had its big mystery with time travel and runes and unicorns drinking moonbeams, Many Waters had half-naked Sandy and Dennys on the cover…

The book I was never fond of was A Wind in the Door. There was something about it that made the book unpleasant to read. I read it two or three times but I never knew why I didn’t like the book, just that I needed to leave it alone. Years later, I’ve finally figured out the problem. I recently read A Wind in the Door again and realized that my distaste for the book had nothing to do with the book itself; it had to do with me and my secret.

In the book, Meg Murry must accomplish a series of tasks with a cherubim (singular) that looks not unlike a drive of dragons, all flame and eyes and wings. Proginoskes is a Namer. He supposes that since Meg has been paired with him, she must be a Namer as well.

When I was memorizing the names of the stars, part of the purpose was to help them each to be more particularly the particular star each one was supposed to be. That’s basically a Namer’s job. Maybe you’re supposed to make earthlings feel more human.

That was my problem with the book. When I was 10 (assuming that’s when I read it) the last thing I wanted was to be more particularly the particular person I was supposed to be. I was embarrassed, ashamed, and afraid of that person. He was weird. He was different. If someone found out about him, I just thought I’d die. Every moment of every day was spent worrying about somebody finding out about him.

So when this book came along and tried to tell me that it was okay, even good, to let people know the real me I didn’t know what to do with it. The concept didn’t match up with what I knew of the world. Deep down I knew that Progo was right, but I also knew that it didn’t matter. I required myself to become some other person and oddly enough, the more I did that, the less human I felt. Progo was right again.

Fast forward 25 years, and I find myself still having to purposefully not hide when I interact with people. Fighting against my years of training, I have to remind myself that the person I hid for so long isn’t so bad after all. I still have to make a conscious decision not to hide, and I’ll probably be making that conscious decision for the rest of my life.

That’s one reason I tell people that we can’t wait for people to get used to the idea of having one of The Gays around, especially in the church. Our job as Namers is to make each other feel more human. The church is the source of so much of the pain, so much of the un-Naming, that boys and girls internalize as they figure out that they’re gay.

In some cases, I don’t even think it’s something that the church sets out to do. Silence, both from the pulpit and from the programs in the church, goes a long way toward negatively reinforcing what the kids are already thinking. So we need to make a concerted effort to reinforce specifically to kids and gay teens that God wants them to be, as Proginoskes said, more particularly the particular person he made them each to be.

He wants them to be Named.

Last month, friend of the blog Keltic posted over at his own blog about the phenomenon of anti-gay bloggers employing below board tactics when confronted with an opposing view. I’ve seen it before, and I’ve dealt with it before, but it’s happened to me again, and I’m a little ticked off.

On Monday, blogger Charlene Jamison (who goes by the screen name californialily) posted an outrageous entry about California’s Proposition 8 on this November’s ballot. You know, the anti-gay one that removes our right to marriage as guaranteed under the California state constitution.

Being the reasonable person who assumes the best in people (stop laughing), I replied with a fairly calm response offering to debunk all of the claims in the piece she’d cut/pasted in. I even provided a few links to get her started if she wanted to research it herself. I also attempted to explain why religion is irrelevant to Prop 8. Of course, she deleted my response and posted a reply to two small bits that she felt able to swat down. Both responses had been covered in the portion that she deleted. Funny, that.

Fortunately for me (and you, gentle reader), when I replied I checked the option to send responses to my email. So the whole thing still exists, and while Charlene Jamison has every right to censor whatever she wants on her blog, it’s a bit dirty pool, and I have a right to re-post it here. I worried a little last night about the possibility that I’m being petty, but I’ve decided that petty as it may be, I’m also refuting the outrageous claims that Ms. Jamison made on (and still hasn’t deleted from) her blog and that some people still believe are facts.

So here, in the form of screen captures, are the posts in question. They’re all pretty large, so I’m not posting them inline, choosing instead to link to the images.

First, there’s Charlene Jamison’s original blog posting. I posted a link to the live version at the top of the post, but it wouldn’t surprise me if she deleted it. I noticed while writing this that she’s now deleted her reply that can be seen on this screencap.

Next up is my reply, captured by my email. Also included is Charlene’s reply to the two snippets that she didn’t delete. Since they contain valuable information, the links in my response are as follows: “The Box Turtle Bulletin”; “For example”; “comes from Paul Cameron”.

Finally, here’s a second response I made, which I never expected to see the light of day. And I was right! Hooray for expecting people to hide from truth!

And that’s my real problem with this. Charlene posted something that was incorrect and when that was pointed out, she chose willful ignorance over accepting truth. That’s what’s behind a lot of the anti-gay bias in both the church and society. Willful ignorance permits people (Charlene’s far from alone in this) to go on believing that Group X is beneath them, and that Group X doesn’t deserve the same rights and privileges as they have.

What’s so bizarre to me is that this kind of thinking is antithetical to real Christianity.

Every now and then I wonder if the struggle for equality, understanding, and respect is worth the time and energy that I and so many others put into it. ¹ I’m basically a cynic in other matters, so why do I so need to see change in the acceptance of homophobia?

Last night, I was reminded of why we fight when I ran across this news article from rural upstate Illinois.

Bourbonnais bus driver arrested after alleged taunting
10/10/2008, 10:35 am

A Bourbonnais Elementary School District No. 53 bus driver was arrested Thursday for mob action after he allegedly taunted a 10-year-old student and encouraged others on the bus to chase after the boy.

Russell A. Schmalz, 46, was arrested by the Kankakee [Illinois] Sheriff’s Police Department, Chief Deputy Ken McCabe said. Schmalz is also charged with endangering the life of a child and battery.

“The incident occurred last Friday,” McCabe said, alleging that Schmalz was taunting the boy by calling him “gay.”

“When the boy got off the bus the driver encouraged several other students to go after him and tackle him. Our investigation shows that occurred,” McCabe said this morning.

Investigators are also looking into allegations that Schmalz got off the bus and grabbed the boy he had allegedly been taunting.

Bourbonnais School District officials would only say the driver has been terminated.

This short week-old story has gotten little attention nationally. In fact it wasn’t even reported locally until nearly a week later. The school district has (thankfully) fired the bus driver. The local authorities have (thankfully) taken the correct action.

And a ten-year-old boy’s life has been changed forever.

I don’t know if the kid is gay or not. It’s entirely possible that he isn’t. Either way, the damage has been done and homophobia has been stamped on his soul. Forever.

Maybe he’ll turn it inward and learn to hate himself. After all, it’s his fault, he’ll tell himself. He said something or did something that let people know that he’s different. Maybe he doesn’t like football, or he has an unusual name, or he’s good at math. Maybe his best friend is a girl. That’s enough sometimes.

Or maybe he’ll turn it outward and learn to hate others. Maybe he’ll be the one to beat the hell out of the next kid who’s different. Maybe he’ll grow up to be the next Jim Dobson or Donald Wildmon. Maybe even Fred Phelps. I hope not. I pray not. But it’s a path that this bus driver has opened up for him.

Worse yet, maybe he’ll kill himself. It’s a frightful thought, but a full third of LGBT youth make an attempt every year, and they don’t do it for nothing.

I’m tempted to say that this boy will never forget last Friday when the bus driver shouted “Get him!”, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he blocked it out altogether. There are some things a ten-year-old shouldn’t know, and I’m pretty sure that an authority figure calling you names and telling other kids to beat you up is on the list.

This is the reason for the fight. Until the monsters like Russell A. Schmalz of Bourbonnais, Illinois ² are defeated, people like this little boy are at risk. I can’t stop everybody like Mr. Schmalz, but I can add my voice to the growing chorus of people not willing to put up with hate and violence anymore.

Incidentally, this is a perfect example of why we need hate crime laws. Without a hate crime charge, I’m betting that the maximum punishment allowed is pretty small. Illinois has a law that punishes monsters like Russell A. Schmalz of Bourbonnais, Illinois (we don’t know if he’ll be charged under it yet), but national standards like the almost-passed Matthew Shepard Act are still needed to protect people like this ten-year-old boy whose life was changed last Friday.

(h/t to Box Turtle Bulletin)

¹ To be clear, there are many many other people across the country who put so much more time and energy into the struggle than I do. I’m a lightweight at best. ⇧
² I’m hoping to get listed for when a potential employer of Russell A. Schmalz of Bourbonnais, Illinois does a search for his name. ⇧