Illustration roundup

Panel from the story "Love Wears No Uniform!"




Jason Chalker turned his Big Trouble in Little China illustration into a t-shirt up for vote.





Pet food and Max Max DVD packaging concepts by Matt Smiroldo. Via.





From Mike Maxwell's show at Subtext Gallery. Via.




Last Exit to Nowhere's new True Romance t-shirt (illustrated by by Matt Haley) is now on sale.

Mary Hunt on Royal Wedding: Theologically, "Stabilizing for the Status Quo"

As with everything she writes, Mary Hunt's recent commentary at Religion Dispatches on the royal wedding is well worth reading.  Hunt's take: in key respects, the symbolism woven into the recent wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton was "stabilizing for the status quo," in a theological sense.  And more's the pity.

Hunt notes that Kate's father gave her in marriage by giving her hand to the priest solemnizing the marriage, who then gave her hand to William.  When the marriage ceremony ended, the presider pronounced William and Kate "man and wife"--not husband and wife.  And the entire ceremony relied heavily on patriarchal rhetoric identifying God as father, ruler, and king.

The puzzle here, Hunt points out, is that while increasing numbers of young people (the royal couple included) ignore the stipulations of churches about premarital liaisons and about many aspects of gender behavior, people still commonly opt for marriage ceremonies that reinforce patriarchal assumptions which couples presumably otherwise reject: 

Young people who live together for years before they marry, women who hold responsible positions in the world, even some same-sex couples fall into the traps set by patriarchal religions. Somehow, despite any other modern or postmodern ways of behaving, when it comes to a wedding they want the old model. And they get it when uncritical clergy repeat the ancient formulas without any connection to the way women with men, women with women, and men with men conduct their lives before and after the ceremony.

This makes clear just how irrelevant religion is to most people. Yet they instrumentalize it for marriages (not to mention funerals and burials) without apology. I don’t blame them. If religious leaders don’t do our part to show new ways of celebrating that are more congruent with reality—new language, symbols, and gestures—what options do they have?

These are points well worth making, it seems to me.  When it comes to thinking about gender and gender roles, there's a cultivated archaism in much of our social behavior that is apparent in few other aspects of our cultural lives today.  And in this discrete area, we deliberately and willingly resort to religious warrants to prop up gender assumptions long since exploded in many areas of our society and our own practice.

This is, of course, precisely why Austen Ivereigh wanted to point to the power of this particular liturgical ceremony to remind us that traditional marriage is all about one man marrying one woman--even if the man marrying the woman happens to have lived with her without benefit of marriage prior to the wedding.  Or to have impregnated her.  Or several hers.

It's all about issuing symbolic reminders, backed by religious warrant, of who counts in our society and who doesn't.  Of who's on top and who's on bottom.  And of who should stay on bottom and not get out of her place.

In a symbolic way, weddings still very frequently enact governing presuppositions of our society that have everything to do with heterosexual male power and control, and which those intent on using religious symbols to shore up such male domination of women and gay men do not want to see getting out of their hands.  Hence the perfervid praise of this ceremony in some male heterosexist quarters, in the Catholic church and other churches in which men have much invested in maintaining male heterosexual power and control.  

And hence Mary Hunt's questions, from a feminist theological perspective, which need to be asked.  They need to be asked, that is, by anyone who does not take for granted that someone born with a penis happens because of that biological chance to be born as well with entitlement not given by birth to anyone born without a penis.  Or by anyone who does not take for granted that God has a penis, metaphorically speaking, and that God therefore shares the concern of some of God's male cheerleaders to keep those with a penis on top in our world and in our communities of faith.

Assuming, that is, that they use their penises in the natural and divinely ordained way.

J. Crew Ad Shows Boy with Pink Toenails, and Hell Breaks Loose

I've been following the perfervid reaction of the political and religious right to the recent J. Crew ad featuring a mother with her son's toenails painted pink with no little amusement.  And quite a bit of impatience.

I can't imagine this kind of manufactured outrage in response to an ad like this anywhere else in the developed world.  What it says about us Americans and our level of education regarding matters central to our daily lives, including gender, gender roles, sexuality, etc., is hardly flattering.  And what it says about our ongoing hysteria at the thought that "traditional" male roles we consider engraved in stone (and mandated by the bible) might be more negotiable (and more noxious, to all of us) than we realize is also pretty revealing.  Revealing about who and what we really value in our world.  And who really counts in our society.

Jon Stewart did an excellent job of sending up the manufactured outrage on his "Daily Show" this past Wednesday.  His response to the rantings of the right seems to me to raise the correct questions:

1. Why do some of us persistently want to blame women--mothers, in particular--for a perceived decline in masculinity that we imagine is undermining our cultural stability?  When Sarah Hoffman blogs about her pink boy (and here), and--more importantly--when she informs bewildered critics that she doesn't force her son to conform to their gender stereotypes, all hell breaks loose.  It's as if, single-handedly, Hoffman is taking the one thread most certain to unravel the whole skein of Western Christian culture and pulling that thread out of the skein, to the peril of all of us.

Precisely the same thing happened in the fall of 2010 when a blogger, Sarah, whose blog identifies her as "Nerdy Apple Blossom," permitted her son to wear a gender-bending Hallowe'en costume.  When she did so, various "Christian" mothers and assorted other "Christians" who logged onto her blog informed her, in all Christian kindness and humility, mind you, that she was wrong-headed and likely to be sending her son to hell--along with all the rest of us.  Since the stability of our culture depends on forcing little boys who might like to wear costumes with pink angel wings to don football jerseys and lay hold of baseball bats, instead.

2. And why do all those who are so (self-righteously) convinced that their version of gender roles should apply to the entire cosmos never seem to think about the disparity between how we treat mothers who "permit" their sons to wear pink and those who, without blinking an eye, allow their daughters to seize the baseball bats and sport the football jerseys?  We're really saying, aren't we, that the sole--the neuralgic--point to be considered in these mother-blaming narratives about child-rearing is what happens to little boys. About what happens to little boys when they're "permitted" to transgress the gender roles we want to impose on them.  Little girls either don't count very much, or their amusing attempts to turn themselves into little boys are to be winked at and encouraged, while boys desiring to act like girls need to be slapped down hard.

And why are we saying these things, I wonder?  And what do we intend to gain by seeking to punish mothers who do not enforce our gender stereotypes and to coerce the little boys of those mothers to act in a way that reassures us of the rightness of those stereotypes?

What are we saying about ourselves?  About the depth of our humanity?  The extent of our tolerance?  Our appreciation for diversity?

About our willingness to accept the wide-ranging differences in how people embody masculinity and femininity, across a whole spectrum of behaviors and choices that may or many not conform to our preconceived notions of what it means to be male or female?  And about the kind of society we want to build, as we confront the bewildering, enriching diversity of human behavior vis-a-vis gender roles everywhere in the world and over the course of history?

These are some of the questions this controversy and Stewart's hilarious send-up of the political and religious right evoke for me.  Somehow, I don't think the response of the religious and political right to this particular ad is designed to get us talking about those questions.

Ross Douthat on Monogamy: Moving the Goalposts as Marriage Equality Advances

When I first read Ross Douthat's recent op-ed piece in the New York Times about why monogamy matters, I briefly entertained the idea of blogging about it, and then thought better of the idea.  I can't find it in me, to be honest, to take Douthat seriously as a thinker.


But then I read John Corvino's response to the essay and saw that, like me, he considers it an extension of Douthat's piece last August on the marriage ideal, which explicitly argues against same-sex marriage on the ground of male-female complementarity.  And at that point, I began to think that Douthat's latest musings on the theme of monogamy do demand a response, if only because they are intended to lay a foundation for a plausible sounding "rational" argument against same-sex marriage, which is not susceptible to charges of religious animus and prejudice.  But which ultimately has everything to do with religious animus and prejudice.

And now that I read Andrew Sullivan writing that as a gay Catholic, he's never felt hostility from his fellow Catholics, I'm all the more convinced that Douthat's essay deserves critical attention--because it articulates, in popular language, an increasingly influential (but ill-considered) new Catholic approach to same-sex marriage.  Which is overtly hostile to gays and lesbians.  And has perceivable deleterious effects on the lives of gay and lesbian people in many places.  More on Sullivan's comment in a subsequent posting.

As John Corvino points out, Douthat's latest piece turns on a distinction between premarital sex that is a prelude to monogamous marriage, and premarital sex that is mere promiscuity.  Douthat argues that, while premarital sexual activity is embedded in all cultures, and was even a strong feature of life in the halcyon years of the 1950s so beloved of American social conservatives, the premarital sexual activity of periods like the fifties was truly premarital, in that it envisaged a life of monogamous commitment for the couple engaging in premarital sexual activity.

And that resulted, Douthat maintains, in happiness: happiness for the couple that sowed its wild oats and then settled down to the sober yoke of marriage; happiness for society in general, whose stability depends on the strength of that yoke.  And happiness, above all, for women.  Since women need sexual stability in order to live happy and fulfilled lives.  

And so Corvino is right: with this essay, we're back on the same ground Douthat covered last August, when he maintained that societies fall apart when we don't have the strong yoke of monogamous opposite-sex marriage to tame the tiger of daddy's promiscuity and mommy's sly, cunning shopping around for the ideal male.  Embedded in Douthat's theory of monogamy is a model of male-female complementarity that inevitably (and deliberately) makes marriage all about a man and a woman.

And decidedly not about a man and a man and a woman and a woman.  Since the yoke of monogamous marriage is specifically designed to tame the two gendered tigers of male promiscuity and female hankering after ever more attractive alpha males.

And because this male-female complementarity argument about traditional marriage is becoming a new talking point for American conservatives opposed to same-sex marriage, those concerned to promote marriage equality for same-sex couples need to pay attention to arguments like the one Douthat is sketching in this diptych of essays about monogamy.  These two essays, in short, are not merely about monogamy or defending monogamy.  They're also about laying a philosophical foundation for understanding marriage that excludes same-sex marriage--or that places same-sex marriage on a footing of inferiority when it's compared to opposite-sex marriage.  

Essentially, here's what has happened fairly rapidly in the cultural and religious debate about same-sex marriage in the United States: initially, those opposed to same-sex marriage could fairly glibly argue that we can't, of course, countenance gay marriage without destroying traditional heterosexual marriage, because the latter is all about procreation.  And permitting socially or ecclesially sanctioned non-procreative marriages will radically undermine traditional marriages by calling procreativity into question as the central purpose of marriage.

However, as the arguments in the prop 8 trial in California revealed (and Judge Vaughn Walker's decision in that case, handed down only a few days before Douthat's first essay on monogamy came out, underscored this), this glib argument is increasingly difficult to advance, because it's clearly counter-factual.  No rational, coherent, persuasive argument can be made to exclude same-sex couples from the right of civil marriage when our society (and its faith communities) have long married heterosexual couples incapable of procreation.  Or heterosexual couples who have no intent of procreating.

And so the argument has had to be refined.  The search for a plausible-sounding and quasi-"rational" argument against same-sex marriage has had to continue.  The goalposts have had to be moved.  The goal remains the same: excluding same-sex couples from marriage.  What has shifted, as the goalposts have been shifted in the past several years, is how social conservatives are now choosing to go about attacking gay marriage.

They're now choosing to do so by advancing the argument that it's not so much the procreation thing that's at the center of marriage as a social institution stabilizing society.  It's the male-female thing.  It's the complementarity of males and females.  Without which you simply cannot have a real marriage.  And to endanger which by letting people of the same sex marry would expose society itself to serious danger.

Setting it on a slippery slope of promiscuity, since, without the shining, univocal ideal of monogamous male-female marriage standing before them, men might get the idea that promiscuity is the end-all and be-all of their lives.  And women might keep eternally shopping around for the higher-status alpha male.

And here's my take on the goal-post changing: this is what inevitably happens when the real intent of movements of social conservatism is not, as these movements characteristically claim, to keep society from falling apart under the pressure of anarchic movements for social change.  This is what inevitably happens when the real intent of movements of social conservatism is simply to keep justice at bay as long as possible--justice for an excluded, demeaned minority group.

With each advance that African Americans made towards full equality and civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s, the goalposts shifted.  They moved a step further into the distance.  Every forward movement in the struggle for civil rights resulted in a consequent movement of the goalposts--a movement back, to make justice that much more unattainable.

Brown v. Board of Education mandated the desegregation of American schools with all deliberate speed, and school districts throughout the South announced that integration could not take place immediately (or ever) because social chaos would ensue if the changes mandated by Brown occurred hastily.  School districts like the one in which I attended school in south Arkansas put up one barrier after another to desegregation in the late 1950s and late 1960s.  One goalpost-shifting argument after another was proposed to explain why our speed at obeying the court mandate had to be at snail's pace--and why desegregation could not be accomplished for years to come.  Until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 stopped the insincere arguments and the goalpost-changing . . . .

To change metaphors: in his classic study The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Thomas Kuhn notes that scientific paradigms shift when so much new information has been amassed to call an existing paradigm into question, that one cannot incorporate all the new information into the old paradigm without exploding the paradigm.  Kuhn points out that when we have to begin adding explanation to explanation to account for new pieces of information, while seeking to keep in place a paradigm threatened by the new pieces of information, we might do well to begin thinking about the steep price we're paying for keeping the status quo intact.  And about the implausibility of the paradigm we're defending with ever more labyrinthine and complexified explanations, when simpler, more elegant explanations for how things behave are at hand.

In American society today, vis-a-vis same-sex marriage, the paradigm shift is well underway.  And as that shift continues, what will inevitably become crystal clear, as social conservatives and some people of faith resist this paradigm shift with new, ever more complex, goal-deferring arguments designed to keep justice at bay, is this: driving the resistance to same-sex marriage among American social conservatives and people of faith allied to them never has been an overarching desire to defend traditional marriage.  Driving this movement, which is willing to bend over backwards at each new juncture in the march towards equality for gay and lesbian citizens to invent ever more abstruse arguments for the superiority of opposite-sex marriage, has been sheer prejudice.  The intent to keep a stigmatized minority group in its place . . . .

Women's Ordination and Abolition of Celibacy: Probing the Theological (and Gender) Issues

 

It's instructive to read Mary Hunt's latest essay at Religion Dispatches, which asks if women priests will change the Catholic church, side by side with a number of articles that have appeared in the days following the Thomas Euteneuer story, all of which focus on the need of the Catholic church to reconsider its ban on non-celibate clergy.  Recently, Alberto Cutie, a former Catholic priest in Miami who left the Catholic church to marry last year when his relationship to a woman became known, and who is now an Episcopal priest, published a statement about his new book Dilemma: A Priest's Struggle Between Faith and Love.

Cutie argues that a "culture of (open) secrecy" is alive and well in the clerical sector of the Catholic church, and that many priests are involved in relationships with adults, about which bishops often know, and which they tolerate as long as the relationships remain secret--even when their secrecy is an open secret within clerical ranks.  Cutie also cites the case of Fr. Euteneuer, maintaining that Euteneuer was involved in "some sort of sexual relationship with an adult woman" about which both church officials and his own employer, Human Life International, knew but refused to disclose information until forced to do so.

Maureen Fiedler has made a similar point, arguing that Euteneuer's story is "nothing new," but is an old story--priest breaks vow of celibacy--regarding priests violating their obligation of celibacy with adult women.  Fiedler recently interviewed Cutie, who maintains that, in addition to maintaining open secrets about the many priests involved in relationships with other adults, the hierarchy officially frowns on gay seminarians while knowing full well that seminaries are full of gay candidates for ordination, and that there is a "Pink Mafia" within the hierarchy which promotes and protects gay priests and bishops.

Both Fiedler and Cutie call for the church to reconsider its demand that priests commit themselves to celibacy in order to be ordained.  And I say it's instructive to read these post-Euteneuer articles side by side with Mary Hunt's essay on women's ordination for the following reason: in Hunt's view, abolishing the vow of celibacy is hardly all that the Catholic church needs to do in order to return the priesthood to some semblance of scriptural and theological cogency.

It needs, instead, to reconsider the meaning of priestly ministry by placing clerical ministry within the context of the priesthood of all believers--within the context of what Hunt calls the communitarian dimension of ministry, in which all Christians, ordained and non-ordained, are involved.  And it needs, therefore, to link ordination and clerical life to the many forms of ministry within the Christian community that challenge the domination of one group of people by another, of poor people by rich people, of women by men, of gay people by straight ones.

Hunt is dubious about the push to ordain women as long as the structures of clerical life remain intact within the Catholic church, and as long as the insupportable theological foundation on which these structures rest remains unquestioned.  Her fear--and in my view, she is absolutely correct to wonder about this--is that ordaining women while the current structures and the present theology of priestly ministry remain unchanged will only plug women as objects into a badly faltering clerical system that needs warm bodies to fill holes.

It will only, that is, succeed in exploiting women even more than they are already being exploited by the Catholic church.  And it will replicate, with female bodies, a toxic theology of priesthood in which priests are little lords in the kingdom of Catholicism, and lay people are their surfs.

And in my view, Cutie's critique tends in precisely that direction--though I strongly support the drive to make celibacy optional within the Catholic church.  In my view, Cutie's understanding of the gender dynamics within the Catholic church rather uncritically bolsters popular cultural preconceptions about the roles of men and women in the world, in which men predictably come out on top and women on bottom.

I don't hear--I don't see--the radical edge of gender critique in Cutie's story that, in my view, is absolutely indispensable for the reform of the Catholic church and of all Christian churches that have invested so heavily, at this point in history, in gender roles that accord higher status to men and second-tier status to women.  And it is for this reason, I think, that Albert Cutie is spectacularly missing a key point in Fr. Euteneuer's story, which cannot be missed if we want to understand the story aright and make it the beginning of an honest and fruitful conversation about the church we have become at this point in history.

That point is this: Thomas Euteneuer was not just any heterosexual priest involved in "some sort of relationship" with a consenting adult woman.  He was a high-profile, glamor-boy priest (not unlike Cutie himself) who gained extraordinary power and privilege by playing the gender game right, and by presenting himself as a symbol of machismo in the many Catholic media circles that high-profiled him.

And he turned around and used that power and privilege--and the macho status that bought the power and privilege--to abuse a woman or women under his pastoral care.  Far from being a consensual adult relationship, his relationship was, per his own statement about it, one that took advantage of his pastoral charge of a vulnerable woman.  It was, in short, an abusive relationship and not a healthy adult relationship, and abusive in a quite specific way that regards women as objects to be used by heterosexual men, who are entitled to dominate and use women precisely because they are "normal" heterosexual men. 

And the only reason Catholic liberals are now defending that "adult" relationship is this: a surface reading of it reinforces the gender stereotypes, and the unhealthy and erroneous assumptions about sexual orientation, on which much liberal Catholic analysis of the Catholic church depends.  Analysis in which a vicious pink Mafia of closeted gay bishops have turned the priesthood into a misogynistic enclave of gay, women-hating priests.

Which needs real men, married men, to reform it, men of the ilk of Alberto Cutie.  And, God help us, Thomas Euteneuer. 

Inviting Strayed Catholics Back Home and Continuing the Gay Bashing: Can We Have Both?

Michael O'Loughlin (implicitly) asks the right question at America magazine's "In All Things" blog: if the Catholic church is serious about inviting former Catholics back home, why are the pastoral leaders of the church continuing to invest so heavily in attacks on the humanity and rights of gay and lesbian persons?  O'Loughlin links to an article in which Robert Putnam and David Campbell summarize the findings of their recent book American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us.

As I noted in a number of postings last fall (e.g., here) when that book appeared, Putnam and Campbell find the entanglement of many churches with right-wing politics--and, above all, their investment in gay-bashing--the single most important factor cited by 20-somethings who are leaving the churches.  Young people are moving away from church life due to the toxic homophobia of many communities of faith.

Here's what Putnam and Campbell say about this in the article to which O'Loughlin links: 

This backlash was especially forceful among youth coming of age in the 1990s and just forming their views about religion. Some of that generation, to be sure, held deeply conservative moral and political views, and they felt very comfortable in the ranks of increasingly conservative churchgoers. But a majority of the Millennial generation was liberal on most social issues, and above all, on homosexuality. The fraction of twentysomethings who said that homosexual relations were "always" or "almost always" wrong plummeted from about 75% in 1990 to about 40% in 2008. (Ironically, in polling, Millennials are actually more uneasy about abortion than their parents.)

Just as this generation moved to the left on most social issues — above all, homosexuality — many prominent religious leaders moved to the right, using the issue of same-sex marriage to mobilize electoral support for conservative Republicans. In the short run, this tactic worked to increase GOP turnout, but the subsequent backlash undermined sympathy for religion among many young moderates and progressives. Increasingly, young people saw religion as intolerant, hypocritical, judgmental and homophobic. If being religious entailed political conservatism, they concluded, religion was not for them.

Sociologists Michael Hout and Claude Fischer of UC Berkeley were among the first to call attention to the ensuing rise in young "nones," and in our recent book, "American Grace," we have extended their analysis, showing that the association between religion and politics (and especially religion's intolerance of homosexuality) was the single strongest factor in this portentous shift. In religious affinities, as in taste in music and preference for colas, habits formed in early adulthood tend to harden over time. So if more than one-quarter of today's young people are setting off in adult life with no religious identification, compared with about one-20th of previous generations, the prospects for religious observance in the coming decades are substantially diminished.

As I read this analysis, which rests on unimpeachable empirical evidence, I wonder how it is that the pastoral leaders of the Catholic church in the U.S. think they can simultaneously invite straying brothers and sisters home, and continue a large investment in an anti-gay political strategy that is at the heart of the disaffection of a growing number of younger Catholics from the church.  Why are we not having the conversation we need to have right now in American Catholicism, if we're truly concerned about enshrining in our lives and practices the kind of welcome of everyone that ought to characterize any community of disciples of Jesus?

This is one conversation among several that we American Catholics are determined not to have.  We do not intend to talk--not really, not seriously, not widely--about why the leaders of our church are committing our resources, the funds we are donating for the upkeep of our parishes and schools and for works of mercy, to attacks on our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters.

And we do not intend to talk about what this is doing to us--to  us as a church--as a result of this sinful allotment of our resources to a political cause designed to dehumanize and inflict pain on a vulnerable minority community.  We do not intend to talk about what this sinful allotment of our resources by our pastoral leaders does to what we stand for and who we appear to be in the world today.

We also do not intend to talk seriously about the gender presuppositions that underlie and feed our hostility and injustice towards our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters.  One of the not-surprising--but nonetheless deeply disturbing--developments following the recent revelations about Father Thomas Euteneuer's abuse of pastoral authority in his ministry of exorcism has been the extent to which those in the solid liberal center of the American Catholic church want to spin the Euteneuer story as a narrative about the victimization of a good heterosexual priest by a vicious, closeted gay hierarchy.

One of the reasons the Euteneuer story is not being discussed openly right now is that there is a strong whisper campaign afoot among Catholics of the solid liberal middle who are suggesting that, after all, Fr. Euteneuer's sins were only the sins of a real man doing what real men should do.  And the problem in the church is a woman-hating closeted gay hierarchy that makes it impossible for real men to enter the ministry, and keeps blocking women from positions of power in the church.

Underlying this analysis are strong gender presuppositions--presuppositions about who men are and who women are, about what men should do and what women should do, above all, about who gay and lesbian people are--that lead to all sorts of shocking disconnects between what we profess about ourselves and what we actually embody in our actions, in our life of communal witness to God's welcoming embrace of the world.  That disconnect is particularly evident among the liberal elite who have controlling influence in our Catholic theological academy in the U.S. and in our Catholic media, where there is an overarching but never really acknowledged assumption that gays are the real problem in the priesthood.

With attendant, fallacious assumptions that gay men in general are hostile to women, and the misogyny of many clerical leaders stems from their homosexuality and will vanish if we let manly men back into the priesthood.  And so the solution to our problems is to remasculinize the priesthood and bring real men into the center of our clerical life again.

This analysis entirely overlooks some key issues that demand serious attention, if we want to be a community that heals social wounds and embodies love, justice, and mercy.  It overlooks the fact that, if the hierarchy of the Catholic church is dominated by closeted gay men, it is precisely those closeted gay men who are most inclined to attack other gay and lesbian people.  It is precisely those closeted gay men who are driving the gay-bashing political crusade of the Catholic church today, which seeks to deny human rights to gay and lesbian persons at every juncture.

It is precisely those closeted gay men who ensure that openly gay or lesbian people find no home in Catholic workplaces, and to a considerable extent, in Catholic parish life in many places.  And so the problem is not, as the simplistic (and culture-embedded rather than culture-transforming) analysis of liberal Catholics would have it, gays: it is the twisting of attitudes about gay and lesbian human beings and about gender.  It is the closet itself.  And it is the fallacious belief that bringing real men back into the priesthood will cure misogyny.

Because Fr. Euteneuer was, if anything, a real man--a former Marine whose clerical masculinity is rock-solid.  Who has scored points for the side of rock-solid clerical masculinity by knocking his gay brothers any chance he can get to knock them.

And--again, contrary to the narrative framework that the liberal intellectual elite of American Catholicism is already seeking to place around the Euteneuer story--Fr. Euteneuer has not stumbled because he developed a healthy adult relationship with another adult, with a woman.  He is not being hounded by a misogynistic closeted gay hierarchy because he and an adult woman chose to engage in a consensual relationship.

He has stumbled because he used a woman or women in the exercise of his ministry.  He took advantage of a woman or women under his control.  His misogyny is not a misogyny that flows from homosexuality.  It is a very particular kind of misogyny--one woven into all the structures of our society--of heterosexual men.  It is a very particular kind of misogyny that stems from the widespread, deeply embedded cultural belief that women exist to be used by real men. 

It is that kind of misogyny--a heterosexual, taken-for-granted misogyny--that the hierarchy of the Catholic church is actually defending when it bashes gays.  Bringing manly men back into the priesthood (if, indeed, they've ever been banished) is not going to solve that kind of problem.  Indeed, if the Euteneuer story teaches us anything, it should teach us that the misogyny of our hierarchy will in all likelihood only intensify if we have more priests of the ilk of Thomas Euteneuer among us.

We cannot address the problems of our clerical life--of our institutional life in the American Catholic church in general--without being more honest and more intelligent than we have been up to now about issues of gender.  And we cannot address those problems without admitting the gross injustice of our continued gay-bashing.

We cannot address our problems without honest conversations about the ways in which, as a community of disciples of Christ, we have made gay and lesbian people conspicuously unwelcome in our communities, our institutions, our conversations.  This is the kind of conversation we desperately need to have now, as evidence piles up that the primary reason younger people are leaving the churches is the churches' hostility to gay folks.

And it's the kind of conversation we desperately need to have following the Euteneuer story.

But it's a conversation we do not intend to have in American Catholicism, because that conversation would call on all of us--and, in particular, the liberal intellectual elite that has such large influence in our academy and media--to reexamine some of the crude, simplistic notions to which we still cling, re: issues of gender and sexual orientation.  And to reexamine our crude, unwelcoming ways of expelling from the conversation of the center anyone who presses inconvenient questions about these matters.  And to reexamine the ways in which the academies (and theology departments) where many of the theologians of the liberal American center have treated and continue to treat those who are gay and lesbian.

And the power and privilege the theologians of the center attain by playing games about gender roles and keeping their mouths shut as their gay brothers and sisters are slapped about and expelled from conversations.  These are conversations we don't intend to have, because they would mean reexamining who we have become at this point in our history.

And it might be unbearable to begin looking into that particular mirror.  And to hear what those slapped about and expelled from our self-congratulatory conversations about ourselves would tell us, if they were--for once--really permitted a voice in our conversations.

Ramin Setoodeh Steps in It Again, Refuses to Retract Thesis re: Gay Actors Playing Straight

Journalist Ramin Setoodeh is taking heat again for . . . well,  it's difficult to figure out precisely what Setoodeh wants to say in his latest statements about the debacle that ensued last April, when he published a Newsweek essay attacking gay actors who try to play straight, and proposing that the more aware we are that a gay male actor is gay, the less convinced we'll be when he plays a heterosexual romantic lead.  Not only does Setoodeh refuse to retract that thesis, he has now reiterated it in a follow-up essay in which he seeks to claim that Hollywood is responsible for the problem by shutting out openly gay actors.  And that he has been spectacularly misunderstood.

And I'll confess that I myself still don't understand Setoodeh's point, not even after listening to him hold forth on the Joy Behar show.  In that interview, I do, however, hear something that I found troubling in his initial essay about Sean Hayes's inability to play convincingly a straight man involved in a heterosexual relationship:.  And this is telling, in my view: as he talks to Behar, Setoodeh talks about what "we" expect to see and hear on the stage or on television, as if there is some monolithic theater or media audience whose tastes and presuppositions are roughly the same everywhere.  As if we are all, when it comes to our normative gazes, essentially heterosexual.  And therefore troubled when a gay man tries unsuccessfully to gull us into thinking he is straight, as he plays a romantic part with a leading lady.

Since I tend to aim at a willing suspension of disbelief when I watch a performance, I am not in the habit, myself, of imagining that an actor's personal life or sexual orientation is somehow mirrored in her performance.  The very point of suspending disbelief--of entering a world of fantasy--is that anything is possible, once the curtain goes up and the fantasy world of the stage reveals itself.

Why people--why so many people in the U.S., to be precise--should worry about whether an actor is gay, straight, blue, yellow, or red, is beyond me.  There seems to be a certain . . . well, cultural immaturity . . . in our peculiar American fixation on the sexual orientation of an actor and our need to correlate that orientation to her (or, far more commonly, his) acting performance.  When this cultural penchant is placed beside the almost absolute lack of a similar penchant among, say, our British cousins as they go to the theater or watch television, one can only conclude that, as a younger culture with a stronger Puritan overcast, we are excessively troubled about distinctions that matter not a whit to our cousins across the Atlantic as they happily watch, say, a partnered gay man like Derek Jacobi play a presumably heterosexual king in "King Lear."  With never a peep of protest about Jacobi's inability to play straight.

We need to grow up.

And I'm not at all sure that Ramin Setoodeh is part of the growing up process we need--particularly not with his previous stinky Newsweek essay that sought to excuse Lawrence King's killer and implicitly to blame young King for his own murder, an essay that lies behind much of the outrage of the gay community as Setoodeh then turns his attack to gay actors whose masculinity he regards as less than convincing on the stage.  

I'm not sure that I am among the "we" for whom Mr. Setoodeh speaks.  Or that I want to be among those "we."

I've been thinking through these issues in the past week as I watch William Wyler's classic 1956 film "Friendly Persuasion" while I slog away daily on my treadmill.  It has been years since I have read the Jessamyn West book on which the movie is based, or have seen the movie itself.  

And what strikes me now, as I watch "Friendly Persuasion" in this post-Rock Hudson era in which the glass closets of many gay actors have been shattered by media coverage and the AIDS crisis, is how ludicrous some of the gender shenanigans of the American theater and cinema appear, now that we know.  Now that we know that Rock Hudson was a gay man merely playing a role (imagine!) when he wooed sweet, wholesome Doris Day to the delight of millions of American viewers in the innocent days before we knew better.  Or that Cary Grant may have had more catholic erotic tastes than most of us imagined as we watched him seduce the siren du jour on our movie or television screens.

Or that poor, hapless Tony Perkins may well have been doing more than acting when, in "Friendly Persuasion," he cringes in terror as Ma Hudspeth sics her three voracious daughters Ruby, Pearl, and Opal ("Gems ever' one of 'em, Mr. Birdwell!") on young Friend Perkins/Joshua Birdwell.  Knowing what we know now, the shenanigans that follow as the gems try, each one, to capture Josh for herself, bedecking herself in beyond-outré frills and furbelows, producing pipes and jugs of corn liquor, harping and fiddling and singing to beat the band "Marry me, marry me, do!": knowing what we know now, I say, the humor of this frank, hungry pursuit of an inexperienced young Quaker boy by three manly gems more accustomed to chopping wood than wearing bonnets is doubled and redoubled.

Because we know Perkins is gay.  And perhaps shrinking from Ruby, Pearl, and Opal because he has not the slightest interest in wedding and then bedding (or vice versa--whatever it takes, from Ma Hudspeth's point of view) any one of these jewels.  Not a female one.

I'm not at all sure that this subtext was apparent to many American viewers of this film in the 1950s.  But now that the circumstances of history have made it apparent, it adds immensely to the wry humor of a scene already made hilarious due to the clash of the Quaker code according to which young Friend Birdwell lives with the bawdy and dubiously moral code according to which the Hudspeth women live.  

The point of that aside being, it didn't seem to matter at all to American audiences in the past that Tony Perkins played straight in movies like "Friendly Persuasion."  And our knowledge today that he (and Hudson, and who knows about Grant?) had affairs with men only adds spice to our viewing of scenes that we know full well are all about fantasy and not about the ability of a film to mirror real life.  We're watching the movie for precisely the opposite reason, for pete's sake.  As my brother has long said, I go to movies to escape: if I want to hear arguing, ranting, and raving, I can stay at home.

We Americans need to grow up.  We need to understand that fantasy is fantasy, and that in the world of make-believe, not all of our crude Puritanical moral assumptions about fitting tab A into slot B may or need be perfectly mirrored.  And that's precisely the point of fantasy.  And that it can even add a certain invigorating humor to many theatrical situations, when we know that the part someone is playing is at a huge variance from the life he or she leads in real time.

And so I continue to think that Mr. Setoodeh's fixation on the bona fide masculinity of gay actors playing straight--or on who plays whom--is spectacularly misplaced.  Unless he wants to argue that Hollywood reflects and reinforces the immaturity of American culture in seeking to shield us from the knowledge that some human beings are gay, and that gay actors can play straight roles with every bit as much power and conviction that straight actors exhibit in playing those roles.

Fall Arrives: Hope in the Turning of the World

You may have noticed.  

I need some levity these days.  And the last place I expected to find it was at the dentist’s office last Thursday.  But find it there I did, like the precious diamond glinting out of a patch of mud at the Murfreesboro diamond fields in Arkansas.  Where my mother once went and came home saying, “It was like making mudpies all day, sitting in that field trying to find diamonds.  If I wanted to play with mud, I would have gotten a time machine back to childhood.  Never again.”

The dentist’s office levity?  Their names were Eli and Addie.  They were brother and sister.  I’ve had my stint in the dental chair, a bloody hour spent lying so rigid my neck is screaming with pain even after the filling is over and done with.  An hour in which the dentist repeatedly had to ask me to open my mouth wider, and his assistant had to remind me I was biting down on the squeegee thingy that suctions the blood and gore from the sad patient’s mouth.

I come out and sit waiting for Steve to have his usual A and three gold stars checkup—No cavities again, Mr. Schafer.  What wonderful teeth you have!

And there are Eli and Addie, she perched in a little rocking chair in an old ladyish plain rose sweater, he lording it over her on the sofa nearby, interrogating her about what she had been reading while he was in the dentist’s chair.  Their mother has just gone in for her check-up.  I learn their names because they call each other by name and their mother uses their names, too, as she goes into the dentist's office.

Eli is in pink crocs with knee-high white socks that seem to have some opalescent glitter painted across the white.  He’s in fifth-grade.  Addie never mentions her grade level, but I’d put it at about third.  She has a precisely, accented, determined way of speaking, he an overly emphatic one intent on making drama out of the tiniest thing around him.

Eli: You’re reading about teeth in the dentist’s office?!

Addie: Yes.  It’s interesting.  It tells you what people around the world do with their teeth.

Eli: If it’s so interesting, then how come you haven’t finished that little book?

Addie: I’m a slow reader.

Eli: What did they give you when you finished?

Addie: A toothbrush.  

Eli: What color?  Mine’s yellow and purple.

Addie: They gave me purple and yellow.

Eli: That’s no fair!  The same color.  But I got a pair of sticky hands.

Addie: They gave me sticky hands, too.  What flavor of dental film did they use for you?

Eli: Bubble-gum.

Addie: I had mint.

Eli: That’s no fair!  They didn’t even tell me they had mint!

Addie: They didn’t tell me, either.  I saw it and asked for it.  They said they don’t usually give it to kids because kids don’t like it.  It tasted like root-beer.

Eli: Want to fight with our sticky hands?

Addie: No, it’s a dentist’s office.  We’ll get into trouble!

At this point, Addie sneaks a peek at me, the only adult in the waiting room.  Eli never looks at me.  The difference between little boys and little girls: the latter are socialized early on to be aware of what others are thinking, doing, feeling.  The former have the luxury of not caring about those matters.

And so the fight begins.  I’ve never heard of sticky hands and still have no clear idea of what they are, but they appear to unravel and stretch and whop around in a wicked way that can make Addie scream, when Eli invades her personal space with a hand five feet long. 

And so, predictably, we end up with a real fight on our hands, because personal space is personal space and “He touched my face when I told him not to, Mom!”  

And this is how the world turns, this November day in the year of our Lord 2010: bossy, assertive little girls who know their own minds, little boys who dare to wear pink crocs and glittery socks, mothers who seem totally unruffled by the gender transgressions on both sides.

This is where hope lies, in the turning of the world to what is new.  And perhaps—who knows?—better.

One lives, at least, in hope that it will be so.

Fresh Sperm: Bishop Eddie Long and John Paul II's Theology of the Body

One of the supposedly earth-shaking insights of the Catholic theology of the body developed by the late pope John Paul II is its insistence that male-female complementarity is the central thread on which Judaeo-Christian beliefs hold together.  The theology of the body insists that everything in scripture and tradition should be read through the optic of the crude biological facticity of gender, of maleness and femaleness.

And because it employs a literalistic framework for reading scripture and tradition, the theology of the body tortures the central symbols of religious traditions to make them fit its mindless literalism. And so we end up with arguments that priests must be male because the church is female, and priests are married to the bride of Christ through ordination.

And here's where these arguments are headed; here's where the mindless literalism, with its fixation on biological gender as the most significant fact about Judaeo-Christian faith ends up, when taken to its logical, absurd extremes.

This is Bishop Eddie Long of Atlanta preaching about the "fresh sperm" that he and other (male) preachers inject into the church's "womb" through their preaching:

"The word of God is potent. The word of God is His sperm," Long thunders. "The job of the preacher is to bring fresh sperm and when he speaks it, the womb -- the church -- is to take it in and say, 'Sho' you're right.'"

And this is absolutely no different at all from what John Paul II teaches in his theology of the body, and what those (like Maggie Gallagher and Robert P. George) now trying to impose the theology of the body on our entire culture through the political process, are arguing.

It all comes down to fresh sperm.  And male preachers and priests supplying it.  And the supple, receptive--but above all, passive--womb of women to receive it.  And the womb of the female church, with its its passive, receptive stance to the mighty men supplying it with fresh sperm.