Minnesota Theologian Gary Boelhower: Marriage Equality Is About Equality

And from Terry Weldon's outstanding Queering the Church blog yesterday, powerful testimony from a theologian, Gary Boelhower, teaching at St. Scholastica College in Duluth, Minnesota.  Terry links to an op-ed statement Boelhower wrote Monday for the Duluth News Tribune as the proposal to revise the Minnesota constitution to ban same-sex marriage, about which I blogged yesterday, goes to the legislature. 

Gary Boelhower prefaces his testimony by noting that the Minnesota constitution explicitly states, "No member of this state shall be … deprived of any of the rights or privileges secured to any citizen."  As he notes, he and his fellow citizens who are also gay or lesbian are asking merely to enjoy the rights and privileges afforded by the state constitution (and the national one) to all citizens--by virtue of the humanity they share with other citizens.

Boelhower notes that there is a range of viewpoints among faith communities in his state about same-sex marriage and the morality of homosexuality.  His own union with his partner will be celebrated in a United Church of Christ later this year.  

But neither he nor other LGBT citizens of Minnesota who are asking for a right afforded to all other citizens--the right of civil marriage (which brings with it a significant number of rights and privileges from which gay families are excluded prima facie when civil marriage is denied to gay couples)--are proposing that any faith community be forced to accept same-sex marriage.  This is a debate about the human rights afforded to all citizens in a civil context, in the context of pluralistic secular societies in which the religious viewpoint of any group should not be enshrined in civil law:

I am not asking your church to change its teachings. In the U.S. we are free to express a diversity of spiritual traditions. Religious marriage will justly remain the prerogative of each faith tradition.

But the state of Minnesota is constitutionally bound to treat all citizens equally; that includes civil-marriage equality.

Last Tuesday, Republicans in the Minnesota Legislature announced plans to put a gay marriage ban before voters in 2012 (“Minnesota lawmakers push for gay marriage vote,” April 27). To ban gay marriage would institutionalize injustice in our constitution, which wisely emphasizes the rights of all citizens and protects against the discriminatory reservation of certain rights to only some citizens.

As we know from our history, it is not unusual for those in power or those in the majority to reserve certain rights and privileges for themselves. Not until 1920 did women have the right to vote. Not until 1967 were laws criminalizing interracial marriage ruled unconstitutional. It is not coincidental that strong religious arguments were used to enforce racial segregation at the level of marriage and intimate relationships.

In seeking marriage equality, I am not asking for special privileges; I am simply claiming the same protections and responsibilities as my heterosexual married neighbors.

This is an admirably clear statement.  And, reading it, I have to wonder why some U.S. citizens and members of faith communities still don't see the point that is so clear here: this is a cultural debate about something that has happened over and over in American society as the foundational principles of our democracy are extended to groups that have been excluded from full participation solely due to indefensible discrimination.  The cultural discussion in which we're involved right now in American society, vis-a-vis marriage equality, is not a discussion about how and whether religious viewpoints should dictate legal norms in American society.

Religious viewpoints can't do that.  Not in a bona fide secular democracy.  Not in a pluralistic society normed by foundational documents that enshrine democratic principles in those normative documents.  

This is a debate about equality.  It's a debate about the full inclusion in our democratic society of a group of citizens stigmatized by prejudice, who continue to be excluded from the social mainstream by legalized discrimination that impedes their ability to contribute, to pursue their careers, to raise families, and so forth. 

What on earth does any Christian church imagine it's doing, defending the exclusion of some members of the human community from the social mainstream, solely because a church wants to envisage those human beings as less than human?  And in what way does the attack on those stigmatized human beings by leaders of any religious community--in Minnesota, notably the state's Catholic bishops--contribute to a healthy society that respects human rights?

These are questions that aren't going go to away anywhere in the United States anytime soon--anywhere including Minnesota.  No matter how much Catholic leaders shout to the rest of us that they're defending human rights by denying them to gay and lesbian people.

Joan Chittester on Wisconsin and Middle East: It's about Including Everyone in the Discussion

Joan Chittister, with her accustomed holy insight, talking about the parallels between Wisconsin and the Middle East, and about the collapse of participatory structures in both church and state when anyone is excluded from the conversation that builds those structures:

If something isn't done in all institutions -- in both state and church, church and state -- to include people in the discussion of the questions that affect them, in the real resolution of the issues that touch their own lives, the problem won't be national unrest, it will be global unrest and this time there will be no institution large enough either to suppress it or to survive it. Then what?

And that's precisely why I keep calling for a national dialogue in the U.S. Catholic church, in which everyone will finally have a voice at the table, including the thousands and thousands who have walked away in recent years.  And the gays and lesbians.  And people of color and Latinos.  And women.  And, above all, survivors of clerical sexual abuse.  (And it's why I strongly object to the proposal that if you want to learn what American Catholicism is all about, you need to go to Rome.)

If an institution is tumbling to the ground--and the Catholic church is decidedly doing that--you can't rebuild it without including every voice that should always have been at the table all along.  Not if you want the rebuilding to be effective.

And not if you want to call the church Christ's church.

Thinking Through the Egyptian Situation: Tell Old Pharaoh

I do have some thoughts about what’s going on in Egypt, of course.  And I think it’s perhaps incumbent on me to share them here, primarily because this blog pretends to follow current events, particularly ones with religious application, with interest.

But I share my thoughts with some trepidation, since I’m by no means an expert on political matters, and I am not confident that any of us is getting a complete picture of what’s going on in Egypt, particularly in the U.S., where Al-Jazeera’s English coverage is blacked out by cable networks through wide swaths of the nation.  And where we have to rely on very partial and very managed coverage by other networks.

And so what interests me perhaps more than anything right now—in addition to the excitement that anyone committed to democracy as a social ideal is bound to feel, watching the coverage on websites like Al-Jazeera’s English site—is how the events in Egypt are being handled by many American media outlets and many American political outlets.  After all, we Americans have long fatuously believed that we have a corner on the democracy market.  And we’ve approached the rest of the world as if it’s a collection of doltish students in a schoolroom called “Trying (But Failing) to Attain Democracy,” and have tried (or so we claim) in every way possible to spread the boons of democracy everywhere in the world.

That is, when we haven’t tried to do so.  Or when we’ve done so very selectively, targeting Eastern European nations for democracy while collaborating more or less openly and more or less cynically “pragmatically” with anti-democratic movements in places like the Middle East and Latin America.  Except when it has behooved us to nudge along democratic movements in the Middle East that seem to expose the dangers of fundamentalist Islam to the rest of the world.

As a result, we’re now in what my wise elderly aunt calls a “mell of a hess” when it comes to understanding—or even facing—real-life democracy in Egypt when it’s staring us in the face.  We’ve spent so much time preaching about the commodity we’re selling, and glitzing our product up with false advertising claims, that we don’t even know how to recognize the real thing when it’s looking right in our faces.

Looking at us in the aspirations of a long-suffering, long-stepped down group of people to freedom, when cracks finally open in the prison door and those people discover that, by pushing in concert and daring the reprisal of their powerful captors, they may claim freedom.  This is not, you see, what many of us—especially of the right and center in the U.S.—have long intended when we use that word “freedom” as a shining, fetishized object selectively defined down.  Defined down in contemporary American democracy from our foundational documents, which meant something much closer to what the people of Egypt understand by the term right now than any understanding of freedom or democracy for which we contemporary Americans have settled.

For many of us, especially in the political center and right wing of American politics, “freedom” has come to mean the liberty of a tiny sector of Americans, the very rich, to do almost anything they wish with the rest of us and with the resources of our nation, and the liberty of the rest of us to endure the choices of that tiny elite.  And so we go on babbling about liberty and freedom and democracy as ideals for the rest of the world, when we ourselves belie those ideals in our own contemporary political and cultural life.  In the grossest ways possible.

And the very people who talk longest and hardest about freedom and liberty in our nation today are the ones who lie the longest and hardest about what those terms meant when our democratic experiment began.  And what we’ve really made of those terms in our national life today.

And then there’s the liberal wing of the American political establishment today, which has been every bit as much blindsided by what is occurring in Egypt (and, truth be told, all through the Middle East) today.  Because the liberals dominating the institutional life of the Democratic party and therefore much of our federal government today are just as deeply enslaved to indebted to the wealthy elite which now owns our nation and its democracy as the other party, the party of the right and center-right, is.  The only difference between the two flavors of political hemlock purveyed by our two national political parties right now is that one comes with a soupçon  of soft vanilla undertaste while the other prefers its poison neat, with its bitters undisguised.

One party frankly wants all state control of the “free” market eradicated.  The other wants mild, managed control that continues to benefit the haves of our nation (which is to say, the leaders of this party who are pushing this ideology) at the expense of the have nots.  Both continue to crank out glitzy advertisements for the "democratic" “free” market, madly pretending that this system is what Jefferson (who is rolling in his grave at the idea) wanted for our nation.  Or Madison and Washington and Sojourner Truth and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

And so when real democracy is vaulting across our television screens around the world, with all the excitement to be found as downtrodden people in any nation anywhere finally, after long pharaonic suffering, break through to self-determination, we Americans, who were born in a similar experiment with similar excitement, don’t recognize what’s happening around the world.  We can’t recognize what’s happening. 

Because we’ve forgotten what the real thing looks like.  Because our never-completely-realized democratic experiment seems to have come to a gruesome dead end in the hands of Messrs. Koch and Murdoch and many others in their circle, and in the hands of their many sycophants—many of them in bishops’ palaces and pastors’ manses around the nation—who preach Pharaoh's message while claiming they're pointing the way to the Exodus.

And we’re deathly afraid of what democracy might really mean, if it took hold in places like Egypt or Iran or Iraq or anyplace else in the Middle East.  Or in El Salvador or Guatemala.  Or Detroit or D.C.  In Detroit and D.C. (and Atlanta and Albuquerque and Moline and Wenatchee), where we have long since been, in James Baldwin's powerful phrase, “lost, and unable to say what it was that oppressed them” (The Fire Next Time [1962, repr. NY: Random House, 1993]).

Since we've long since lost sense of the ability to tell Pharaoh from the very people in our midst who tell us they are pointing the way to freedom, as they load more bricks on our backs and herd us to building of the latest new palace they'll name with some shining title like Liberty, Democracy, or Pharaoh's ten-bathroom 2000 sq. ft. Temple to Free Enterprise.

DADT Repeal: A Victory Not for D.C.'s Beltway Culture, but for Ordinary Citizens

I'm going through the commentary this morning about the DADT repeal vote, and noting the extent to which commentators are willing to spin this victory as a victory for the very folks who have made the repeal process so tormented, so unnecessarily vacillating.  Congress and the president are receiving credit for having made a courageous decision that they should long since have made, while the real heroes who have made this possible are people like Lieut. Dan Choi, Fr. Geoff Farrow, and many others, who have been arrested protesting the policy in D.C.

The illusion of so many of those who comment on the political life of the U.S. is that the significant things that happen politically at the top of our culture happen due to the intelligence, initiative, and managerial ability of those at the top.  But that's hardly the case.  They happen because people with consciences and courage--"ordinary" citizens--push for them to happen, and refuse to accept the duplicitous side-stepping of political leaders.

Abolition happened, ultimately, because citizens like Thoreau were willing to withhold his taxes to protest slavery, and to go to jail as a result.  It happened because a minority of folks of conscience, who were treated by the social mainstream as malicious misfits and cranks, kept insisting that principle mattered in this debate--more than anything else.  More than pragmatism.  More than "seeing both sides."  More than "everybody has his views."  More than "who can tell anyone how to interpret the scriptures?"

Principle.  Principle that, in the case of recognizing the full humanity of any other human being, and granting any other human being the full range of human rights that applies to him or her, must never bend, even when one makes pragmatic compromises of one sort or another to apply that principle in the public realm, and to see it upheld by law and custom.  Principle that has to be brought front and center in cultural debates about cultural shifts that are all about core principles, before effective action can ever take place to serve principle.

It was not the beltway culture of D.C. that brought principle to the fore in the DADT debate.  It was ordinary citizens who did so, to the point that some 80% of our citizens had to stand in opposition to what the beltway culture of D.C. finally recognized was inevitable, when it at last--grudgingly, after unbelievable theater of the absurd--yielded to the conscience of the nation and decided to stop open discrimination in one of our major institutions.

I'm not ungrateful for what the political leaders of the country, particularly people of principle like Patrick Murphy--have done to make this possible.  But I cannot concur with those who permit these leaders, most of whom have done everything possible to defer and even impede this moment, to take credit for what happened yesterday in D.C.  To give most of those political leaders credit for the shift in conscience that made repeal of discrimination possible is to misunderstand how political change occurs in the U.S.  

It occurs not because the beltway culture employs conscience and urges conscience-based change as it analyzes the needs of the nation.  It occurs because citizens of conscience and courage are willing to stand against a consensus represented by the culture of the center itself, and are willing to push against that consensus even when--as with the DADT debate--the center keeps necessary social change at bay far longer than necessary, far longer than citizens at large 

To say that the way in which the DADT repeal process has been handled illustrates that our political process is functioning smoothly is absolutely wrongheaded.  While yesterday's outcome is praiseworthy, the way we've gotten to this point has been anything but admirable.  The culture of the White House and Congress remain broken, and the DADT process underscores how broken they are, not how well they work.

John Lewis and Louis Gohmert on Discrimination in the Military: Who Owns the Future of American Democracy?

Another way to put the point about Archbishop Dolan and Bill Donohue: these battles about who owns central Christian symbols are really also about who will ultimately prevail as history moves along, and as a rich, multifaceted tradition like Catholicism moves along with the current of history.  And as the meaning of its central symbols unfolds under the impulse of historical development, as believers appropriate the symbols and apply them to their experience in ever-shifting cultural contexts.

And that's the same battle that's now occurring in American democracy, as Congress debates the eradication of discrimination in the military.  John Lewis's rejoinder to Louis Gohmert is a classic encapsulation of conflicting tendencies within our democracy.  One tendency, rooted in the experience of the founding fathers themselves, has been, from the inception of our democracy, to restrict rights and privileges to white, property-owning males.

Gohmert continues that tradition, which, throughout American history, continuously finds new minority groups to oppose and exclude, from freed slaves to women to immigrants and gays and lesbians. 

John Lewis stands within another tradition in American democracy, which calls on our nation to live according to its better angels, to open wide the door of freedom and opportunity to everyone, and, in particular, to those most in need of a helping hand.  

For my money, one of these tendencies represents the future of American democracy (if we want to have a viable future).  The other doesn't.  I'll leave it to you to decide which is which, and where the moral arc of the universe seems to be pointing.

Robert Scheer on Mr. Obama's Decision to Rely on Mr. Clinton to Sell the Tax Deal: Desperate

A campaign is already underway to give President Obama cover for his tax-cut deal and his decision to bring in the master triangulator, Bill Clinton, to soft-sell that deal to the American public.  I'm not persuaded by the apologists, though.  

For my money, Robert Scheer is right when he says the following: 

The sight of Bill Clinton back on the White House podium defending tax cuts for the super-rich was more a sick joke than a serious amplification of economic policy. How desperate is the current president that he would turn to the great triangulator, who opened the floodgates to banking greed, for validation of the sorry opportunistic hodgepodge that passes for this administration's economic policy? A policy designed and implemented by the same Clinton-era holdovers whose radical deregulation of the financial industry created this mess in the first place.

Many of us feel sorely betrayed precisely because Mr. Obama ran as an alternative to the Clinton style of Democratic leadership, with its constant concessions to neo-conservative ideology, its deal-cutting and principle-waffling.  Many of us were persuaded that things had become so bad for our nation during the Bush period, we needed (and would surely get, with the new president) a clean break with both the neo-conservative paradigm and the new Democrat paradigm that tries to reframe the traditional values of the Democratic party as neo-con values.

And so we feel conspicuously betrayed by this president, and determined to continue dissenting, because the socioeconomic problems facing our nation remain acute, and we know full well that more of the same, whether that neo-con same comes to us outright through the Republicans or in Democratic disguise, is not going to get us out of the mess we're in.

We need a whole new paradigm if we're to succeed as a nation.  That paradigm has to return to the classic values of participatory democracy.  It has to make every voice count.  It has do to so first and foremost by listening as attentively to the experience of everyday citizens as it does to the voices of CEOs.  

Nothing short of this--nothing short of a new paradigm rooted in the now-imperiled values of our participatory democracy--will retrieve democracy in the U.S.  This president's decision to keep playing by the rules of the new Democrat playbook written by Mr. Clinton has proven to be a coda to--and a dangerous one, at that--the narrative of erosion of democracy that is the legacy of the Bush era.  Not a viable and praiseworthy alternative to that legacy.  Anything but that.  To the woe of many citizens.

Chris Weigant: Attach DADT Repeal to Tax-Cut Bill

And here's a clever political proposal: Chris Weigant suggests removing the don't ask, don't tell repeal from the military budget bill and attaching it to the tax-cut deal.

Yes.  Get our Congressfolks to vote on monetary issues, and you'll get them to vote on what really counts for them.  Human rights be damned.  "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also" (Luke 12:34, Matthew 6:21).

Get our senators to vote on something that involves their own self-interest, and attach legislation designed to protect a stigmatized group of people from discrimination, and we might finally get some much-needed movement in the direction of principle.  And meaningful democracy.

More on the Erosion of American Democracy by Filthy Rich Anonymous Donors (And, Yes, on the Minnesota Catholic Bishops)

Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under President Clinton, writes about the perfect storm now threatening the democratic institutions of the U.S.: as he suggests, we're returning to the age of robber barons, when obscenely rich businessmen could buy elections by depositing money on the desks of legislators (or, in the case of the Minnesota Catholic church, Catholic bishops), while the public never learned the identity of these overlords.


Here's Reich's description of the perfect storm now facing our democracy:

The perfect storm: An unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top; a record amount of secret money flooding our democracy; and a public becoming increasingly angry and cynical about a government that's raising its taxes, reducing its services, and unable to get it back to work.

We're losing our democracy to a different system. It's called plutocracy.  

Dan Gillmor writes in a similar vein at Salon today about the "anonymous cowards" who are  buying the 2010 elections.  As he notes, there's not a great deal those of us concerned to preserve our democratic institutions can do about this right now, some two weeks out from the elections.

But Gillmor thinks that unless we wish to relinquish control of our government to wealthy puppet masters hiding in the shadows, who are pouring hundreds of millions into this election cycle via organizations that launder their money into an increasingly corrupt political system, we need to force the anonymous cowards out into the open.

I agree.  But I wonder how this is going to happen.  The one tiny piece of this much larger narrative of corruption on which I'm choosing to harp these days (at the risk of sounding like a broken record) is the choice of the Minnesota Catholic bishops to accept funds from a donor whose identity they will not disclose, to make gay marriage a major issue in a campaign in which it was on no one's radar screen, in order to put a conservative Republican into the Minnesota governor's seat.

This is gross politicking by a religious group, which is using its tax-free screen to shield the identity of a donor or donors seeking to buy the Minnesota's governor's seat for a Republican candidate.

This politicking by a set of Catholic bishops serves the needs of unnamed corporate interest groups at the expense of the people bishops are called to serve first and foremost: the little people, those who are down and out, those without voices and without influence.

By accepting these funds to attack their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters to score political points for a Republican candidate, the Catholic bishops of Minnesota have done serious damage to their credibility as Christian pastors, and have undermined their authority as teachers of faith and morals.  They are also actively assisting a wealthy anonymous donor or donors to tear apart the institutions of a democratic society.

This is dirty work.  It is not work that good shepherds walking in the footsteps of Jesus should be doing.

NY Times Editorial on Elections and Stealth Money: Further Questions about Political Activities of Minnesota Catholic Bishops

The New York Times editorial today about the stealth money now stealing American democracy--some of it apparently from hidden corporate donors overseas--once again raises disquieting questions for me about the choice of the Catholic bishops of Minnesota to accept what is thought to be at least a million dollars from a donor whose name they will not disclose, to mount a political campaign against same-sex marriage that benefits the Republican gubernatorial candidate in their state.


The Times writes:

Republicans, so far, have the advertising whip hand as partisan operatives solicit and spend large under the cover of blandly named “good citizen” committees. There is good reason to fear that foreign corporations are also taking advantage of the new no-tell rules.

When churches, and bishops of churches, accept stealth money from unnamed donors in an attempt to determine the outcome of elections, aren't those churches and those bishops helping to erode democracy by acting as fronts for donors whose identities are concealed from the public?  And is this what bishops should be about, when our democracy is holding together right now by tenuous strings, indeed?

The erosion of the ties holding a democratic society together by religious groups acting as money-laundering machines for hidden donors is serious moral business.  When the institutions of a democratic society cease to function, those at the bottom of that society--those bishops are committed by their vocation to serve above all--suffer disproportionately.

What the Minnesota bishops have chosen to do this election cycle by accepting funds from hidden donors for an overtly political campaign that benefits a single gubernatorial candidate deserves serious critical scrutiny on the part of those interested in strengthening our democratic society.  And it deserves serious critical scrutiny from a moral standpoint, as well.  Undermining democracy is not merely political activity: it is morally reprehensible activity, too.  This is activity in which Catholic bishops ought not to be involved.

Related articles

• Outside cash pours into races, much of it anonymously (philly.com)
• Return of the Secret Donors (nytimes.com)
• The Perfect Storm (tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com)