Melissa Harris-Perry on the Intersection of Black and Gay Struggle for Justice, and Liberating Role of the Bible

Reading Dan Savage's remembrance of the Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s, and of the role the churches played in that struggle, alongside Peter Montgomery's analysis today at Religion Dispatches of the thought of Melissa Harris-Perry is instructive.  Montgomery focuses on a keynote address that Harris-Perry recently gave to the Clergy Call conference of Human Rights Campaign.

Melissa Harris-Perry is an African-American political scientist who directs Tulane University's Project on Gender, Race, and Politics in the South.  Though she is not gay, she stands with LGBT people in their struggle for justice, since she believes that this struggle is the most significant struggle for justice and rights occurring in our culture today--and her faith-based commitment to human rights compels her to speak out.

Harris-Perry told those gathered for the Clergy Call conference, 

"I believe that the struggle for equal human and civil rights for lesbian, gay, transgender, bisexual, same-sex-loving, gender-nonconforming and queer persons is the civil rights agenda of our time." And, she said, "faith must be part of the work we’re doing."

In Harris-Perry's view, progressives relinquish the bible to conservatives at their peril.  We live in a culture that, whether we like it or not, is saturated with appeals to scriptural texts, which radically and persistently inform political thinking in the United States.  (Both Ms. Palin and Ms. Bachmann have recently reassured the public that their bible-based politics has a direct pipeline to God, as they toy with the idea of a presidential run.  Rev. Harold Camping had a whole nation and its media superstructure at his beck and call for several weeks, as he kept us on our toes with his intricate biblical calculations of when the world would end.)

And so where does Harris-Perry turn for a sound progressive reading of the bible to counter the misappropriation of biblical texts by the religious and political right?  She grounds her appeal to the scriptures in the black liberationist reading of the bible.  As she notes, people of color have experienced savage, persistent biblically based oppression for centuries in the United States.  And as they have struggled against that oppression, they have learned to read the scriptures with an ear for their real message, their liberating central themes, and not for the tortuous, highly selective exegesis of religious and political conservatives intent on using the bible as a tool of oppression.

Harris-Perry notes that her great-great-great grandmother was sold as a slave in Richmond, Virginia, in a world in which, everywhere she turned, people used the bible to tell her that she was less than human, that God had made her chattel, that she had no rights and should expect no rights.  But her own experience of herself as a human being made in God's image and loved by God caused her to center her faith, instead, on the central liberating themes of the scriptures that overturn this misappropriation of the bible to support slavery and black subordination: 

When my great-great-great-grandmother was sold on a street corner in Church Hill, Richmond, Virginia, she had never known anything but slavery. When she bore children, she expected that they would never know anything but slavery. She lived in a world where every religious person she encountered could show her chapter and verse why she was unequal, who could quote back the reasons that God wanted her in bondage, and every bit of empirical evidence around her, every bit of it, said there either is no god and if there is God does not like you very much. And she had the undaunting audacity to believe that God loved her.

And, of course, Harris-Perry is telling this story to feed the faith and hope of those who struggle for justice for LGBT people today, since those who are gay and lesbian are susceptible to the same constant bombardment of carefully selected, highly manipulated "terror texts" designed to rob LGBT people of humanity, to turn them into despised objects, and to support the denial of their human rights.  In Harris-Perry's view, LGBT people and their allies can learn something valuable from the black struggle for liberation and its use of the scriptures, as this struggle deals with the anti-gay "terror texts."  

What they can learn, in particular, is that it's more important to lift up the "countering texts of liberation" than to try constantly to combat the "terror texts" through careful exegesis that exposes their many flaws.  As Harris-Perry points out, over the course of Christian history, one form of oppression after another--all once based in appeals to the bible--has been overturned, as we recognize that we misuse the scriptures when we use them to oppress and keep people in their places: 

"There are all sorts of things that we’ve decided we no longer read in the way they were once read" she says, citing verses instructing slaves to obey their masters. People are still wrestling with Pauline claims about wives submitting themselves to their husbands. She says people who don’t live by those verses haven’t rejected them because they learned something new about the texts, but because they learned, or came to appreciate, something about the greater whole. For example, enslaved African Americans focused not on the texts telling them to obey their masters, but on the God who sent Moses to set His people free. "Black liberation theology," she has written, "emerges from this tradition of rejecting scriptural evidence of a slavery-supporting God and roots itself in a biblical interpretation of God as an advocate for the oppressed."

What Harris-Perry has to say here is extremely important, and valuable for progressives fighting for justice on many fronts in our culture.  For readers who want to know more about Melissa Harris-Perry and her work: Alternet also features her today, with an essay of hers recently published in The Nation.

Melissa Harris-Perry is well worth reading.  She first came on my radar screen when I saw her carefully and helpfully commenting on Rachel Maddow's show about the ongoing resistance to gay and lesbian rights in some sectors of the African-American community, following the prop 8 debacle.  As she pointed out, this is not the whole story, since there are many African Americans who read the scriptures as their ancestors did, to support all of those struggling for justice, human dignity, and rights, and it is the latter with whom LGBT people need to build stronger ties of solidarity.

I'm happy to see her work receiving the attention it deserves.

Dan Savage on Using the Bible to Justify Bigotry: The Case of Segregation

I sometimes think people imagine I'm making things up, when I point out that not so long ago in American culture the bible was used to keep people of color "in their place" and to justify the subordination of black people to white people.  And so I'm intrigued (and encouraged) to see Dan Savage's splendid article at his blog site today, pointing out that using the bible to justify bigotry is nothing new in American culture.

Savage focuses specifically on the Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s.  He notes that, in contrast to how Catholic leaders today deal with the civil rights struggle of LGBT persons, Catholic leaders at that point in American history fought for and not against (as today, in their approach to their gay brothers and sisters) the rights of an oppressed minority.  Archbishop Rummel, the archbishop of a leading Southern diocese, New Orleans, excommunicated a number of prominent Catholic opponents of integration.  

And, as Savage suggests, this produced a reaction among some Catholics of the New Orleans diocese who were adamantly certain that the bible mandates white supremacy, black subordination, and racial segregation.  Savage notes that a Time magazine article of April 1962 highlights the activities of Una Gaillot, whom Rummel eventually excommunicated when she refused to stop opposing his support for integration.  

As the Time article states, Gaillot based her opposition to integration on the bible.  Gaillot used the Genesis story of Abraham's wives Sarah and Hagar to argue that God opposes the mixing of white and black children in school, and that those promoting integration were doing the work of the devil.  Sarah offered her Egyptian slave Hagar to Abraham as a wife when Sarah was advanced in years and doubted that she could produce a son for Abraham.

But when Hagar proved fertile, Sarah turned against her and sent her packing: and don't you see, this is a parable of black-white relationships, and of the divinely ordained punishment uppity black folks who try to get out of their places inevitably receive in a holy society?  Plus, it establishes segregation, since Hagar and her son of color Ishmael were informed (in the truncated and highly selective bit of this story on which Gaillot bases her segregationist philosophy) that Ishmael could not be an heir on an equal footing with the "white" son Sarah eventually produced for Abraham, Isaac.

It all sounds far away and quaint, doesn't it?  But as Dan Savage points out, this far-fetched, dangerous exegesis was creating serious waves in a major American city with a Catholic majority in the 1960s, a mere half-century ago.  I myself remember these events as if they were yesterday, since, as I've noted on this blog, it was precisely the commitment of the Catholic church to racial healing (in contrast to the way almost all "white" churches in the South handled the Civil Rights struggle) that drew me to the Catholic church in that same decade.  

And I chose to go to college in New Orleans, where there was still a bitter aftermath of this struggle when I arrived at Loyola in the late 1960s.  The Una Gaillots of the Catholic culture of south Louisiana were still alive and kicking when I came to school there, still doing everything in their power to turn local Catholic churches into mean machines that kept black people in their place.

Dan Savage's interesting conclusion, as he compares then and now, the Catholic church in the American South in the 1960s with the Catholic church and its leaders today, vis-a-vis the LGBT struggle for justice and rights: 

In the 1960s the leaders of the Catholic church in the United States were out in front of the Catholic laity on the leading social justice issue of the day. Today the reverse is true: the Catholic hierarchy, led by a German-born priest, opposes civil equality for LGBT people while a broad and growing majority of the laity supports civil equality for LGBT people.

Savage is right.  And as a result, today the Catholic church does not attract young people inspired by the commitment of the church at an official level to human rights and to the struggle for justice for oppressed people everywhere in the world.  To the contrary: the younger Catholics of the John Paul II generation whom the current hierarchy are grooming to take over the church in the future are, to a great extent, actively opposed to gay and lesbian persons in their struggle for justice, and determined to keep women in the subordinate place that John Paul II's theology of the body mandates for them, in their connection to males, who are ordained to lead.  (I'm speaking here of the cadre of young true believers who identify themselves as JPII Catholics, and not the many younger Catholics who do support LGBT rights, but who do not receive the same welcome by the hierarchy that JPII Catholics receive.)

It's not a pretty picture.  And certainly not a heartening one.  And it's driven, deliberately and cynically, by Benedict and the bishops he and John Paul have appointed.  It's all about preserving their (male, pretend-heterosexist) clerical power and privilege and equating these with God's will for the entire church.  And the consequences for millions of Catholics who find this approach theologically dubious and morally outrageous be damned.

The graphic is Rudolf von Ems's illustration of the Sarah-Hagar-Isaac-Ishmael chronicle from his Weltchronik (1254) (the original is now at the New York Public Library).

King & Spalding Refuse to Defend DOMA: Framing the Ethical-Legal Discussion

I'm finding the furor of many of those commenting on the recent decision of the King & Spalding law firm to drop the defense of DOMA fascinating.  As many readers may know, this Monday, the D.C. law firm whose services had been retained by Republican House Speaker Boehner to defend the Defense of Marriage Act announced that it will no longer be available for that service.  At that point, the King & Spalding point man assigned to the case, Bush solicitor general Paul Clement, resigned from King & Spalding and joined the firm Bancroft PLCC, which has announced it will carry on the DOMA defense.  Clement is a Republican who routinely donates to Republican candidates.

The anti-gay machine of the religious and political right is, predictably, reacting with outrage to the decision of King & Spalding to drop the defense of DOMA.  There's the usual talk of bullying gays threatening decent, God-fearing American citizens intent only on exercising their right to free speech and to freedom of belief.  Candace Chellew-Hodge surveys the field of arguments now being offered by religious right leaders against King & Spalding at Religion Dispatches today, noting their predictability.

But if Amanda Terkel's report at Huffington Post yesterday is correct, much of the pressure for King & Spalding to drop the DOMA case was internal.  It came from King & Spalding employees concerned about their futures, if they had been associated with a law firm known to defend a discriminatory law.  There was also concern about the fact that King & Spalding touts itself as a gay-affirming employer that values diversity, and concern that many of its contracts are with companies which have specific policies in place forbidding discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation.  Some of these companies appear to have been leaning on King & Spalding to reconsider its defense of DOMA.

Clement is seeking to claim the moral high road as he continues the DOMA defense, and is noting that he is standing for the right of any client in the American court system to a robust legal defense.  A number of significant voices are being raised now to support Clement and that right, including that of Attorney General Eric Holder and influential gay blogger Andrew Sullivan, who is doing a series on his Dish blog about the tensions in the gay community between those who argue that discrimination does not deserve a legal defense, and those who argue as a matter of principle that everyone has a right to a defense.

John Aravosis at AmericablogGay, who is an attorney himself, disagrees, and has been posting a vigorous series of commentary defending King & Spalding's decision, and rebutting the arguments of Clement and his defenders that they represent principle and the moral high road.  As Aravosis has noted, it would be interesting to ask firms like Bancroft and all those defending the right of a client to a defense whether they'd defend segregation with the same alacrity with which they're now seeking to defend a law that many Americans regard as, on the face of it, discriminatory against a minority group. 

As I wade through these articles and consider both sides of the debate, I recall vividly a number of heated discussions I had with my father about precisely these issues when I was an adolescent.  My father was a small-town lawyer, and was determined that I would follow in his footsteps.

When it became apparent that I was not interested in the law (or the other approved professional study my parents persistently dangled before me--medicine), my father and I routinely locked horns in my final years of high school.  The repeated arguments centered around what he did as a lawyer, and why I ought to respect that and consider it my own future.

From my side, there was one constant, overriding argument about what my father and other attorneys I knew did: over and over again, I would ask my father how it was possible knowingly to defend someone you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt to be guilty of some heinous crime.  How do lawyers put themselves at the service of morally reprehensible, slimy groups and individuals, I asked my father repeatedly, while claiming that they are doing a noble thing in doing so?

In these showdowns, I've invent the worst possible case scenarios--a man coldly murders his wife to get his hands on her life insurance, then absconds with their daughter, a child, whom he rapes repeatedly.  Would you defend him?

And my father would routinely respond to each horrific scenario I could put before him, "Of course.  Everyone has a right to a defense."

Because we lived in a part of the country in which serious cultural and legal battles were being fought over the issue of integration--this was the 1960s, when the Civil Rights act finally broke the back of legal segregation--some of the scenarios dealt with questions about the Ku Klux Klan and known racial terrorists.  These were pointed and very existential questions for my father and me, and he knew this very well: as I think I may have mentioned in at least one previous posting on this blog, when I was in high school, my father ran for a judge's position in our area.

And when he did so, he made me go on the campaign trail with him.  On one occasion, as he was campaigning, he disappeared into the back of a local barber shop with a group of men and held a private meeting of an hour or so.  When I asked him later who the men were and why they had secluded themselves in the back of the barber shop, he told me they were Klansmen, and he had promised them that if they gave him their support, he'd look out for their interests as a judge.

This was an eye-opening experience for me.  It taught me (or reminded me, since I had already learned this in various ways as an attorney's son interacting with other attorneys and judges in our small town) that the judiciary is hardly ever free from the taint of prejudice, from the effect of backroom deals cut by candidates for judges' positions with shady groups fomenting hatred and defending discrimination.  I learned in interacting with my father and observing how he did business as a lawyer that lawyers (many if not most of them, I concluded) routinely side with and defend those who have the upper hand in their community, against those who are beaten down by the power structures of a community.

I learned, in other words, to view the claim that lawyers are doing a morally admirable and noble thing when they defend any and all comers for a legal defense with, shall we say, a somewhat critical and even cynical optic.  And I must confess that the shit-detector hermeneutic of suspicion I developed in my adolescent discussions of the legal profession with my father kicks in now as I read all the defenses of Paul Clement and Bancroft as the current moral heroes of the DOMA debate.

Please forgive me if I don't buy this rhetoric.  Not a bit.  Everyone may deserve a defense.  But not every cause deserves a defense.  We're clearly at a tipping point in American society akin to the one I lived through in the 1960s as legal segregation was struck down throughout the U.S., and it became increasingly unfashionable and even reprehensible to try to mount open defenses of racial prejudice and racial discrimination in American culture.

White Southerners fond of segregation--people like my own father and many members of my family--had aat that point, whether they liked it or not, to get used to the change in the moral climate of the country.  They had to get used to the fact that they were no longer the moral rulers of society, and that the rules by which they played were flawed--that these rules might serve their own interests, but not the interests of many human beings who were now being recognized by the law as fully human persons with the same legal rights any person deserves.

A similar cultural shift is now taking place in the U.S. vis-a-vis LGBT rights.  I would urge Paul Clement and all this who see him as a noble exemplar of the best moral values of our culture to get used to that shift.  And to stop already with the attempt to present themselves as high-minded people fighting for what is right and best.  Because not too long down the road, they're going to be seen by the vast majority of right-minded citizens as morally dubious agents who defended gross discrimination--every in the way we now view George Wallace or Lester Maddox or Bull Connor or Jesse Helms.

Daniel Sharfstein on the Invisible Color Line in American Families

DNA

 

Another book recommendation today: I've just finished Daniel J. Sharfstein's new book The Invisible Line, and found it fascinating.  The book studies three American families who, over the course of their long histories in the United States, crossed the color line and began to "pass" as white families, though they have both Caucasian and African ancestry.  And though both longstanding prejudice and stringent (and often draconian) legal codes sought to make such "passing" impossible.

Sharfstein thinks--and I agree--that many more American families have such racially mixed heritages than is commonly known.  As he notes, knowledge of these families and of the phenomenon of "passing" is becoming far more widespread as more and more people track their family histories, and as online tools and online information make genealogical research more accessible.  And one of the significant lessons we ought to learn as we become aware of how frequently the transition from black to white took place within family lines is that racial lines are and always have been fluid.

They're artificial, in fact, given that all sound genetic research shows that every human being in the world springs from the same genetic stock far back in time.  It represents an arbitrary, deadly decision for some of us to begin deciding, at some point in history, that human beings who share a common characteristic ought to be classified and separated arbitrarily on the basis of that single characteristic.  Like skin color.  What judgment would we make about this arbitrary choice if, for instance, a decision were suddenly made to lump large-footed and small-footed people into separate categories, and to suggest that the larger the feet, the more evolved one group is?

As I've noted in a posting or two in the past on this blog, I'm interested in this research about the phenomenon of "passing" because I've found a case of it in my own family tree.  A brother of one my 3-great grandfathers, a man named James Russell Winn, married a white wife in Alabama in 1831, lived for some years with her in Mississippi and had a child by her, and then divorced her in 1839.

By this point, he had formed a family arrangement with a free woman of color named Margaret Shackelford, by whom he had six children from 1834 to 1845.  In 1842, the family moved to Arkansas.  James and Margaret could not ever legally marry, though James's letters to his children over the years indicate that he regarded Margaret as his wife.  And, in contrast to many white Southern planters who fathered children by slave women or free women of color, James acknowledged his children by Margaret, and at considerable expense, he and Margaret sent the three children still living by the time of the Civil War north to Ohio as the war approached, to buy farm land and to obtain educations denied to people of color in the South.

The three Winn children ended up at Oberlin University in Ohio, a center of abolitionist activity and the Underground Railroad, and each married a white spouse there, descendants of New England abolitionist families connected to churches (as the Winns were, too: their family tree was full of Methodist ministers) who had come to Ohio to work in the anti-slavery movement.

Sharfstein's book mentions one of these families, in fact--the Lymans, who were cousins of novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe.  James and Margaret's daughter Emily Harrison Winn married Edmond Strong Lyman.  In 1858, Edmond's brother Ansel W. Lyman helped organize a rescue of a slave in Oberlin, which resulted in an historic trial testing the right of Southern slaveholders to send slave-catchers north to re-enslave escaped slaves.  Sharstein's book mentions Ansel Lyman and his group's rescue of a slave that a slave-catcher had seized.  The group took the slave and set him free in Canada.

One of the interesting points Sharfstein's book makes is that DNA research is throwing fascinating sticks into the spokes of many taken-for-granted accounts of the history of various American families.  DNA findings provide incontrovertible empirical evidence of the actual bloodlines of a family, evidence that is now overturning what many families have thought about their history for many years up to now, and what has been written and published about these families.

This has happened, in fact, in the case of my own family in the past several years.  For quite a while now, I have known that my Lindsey family roots can be tracked back to a colonial Virginia ancestor whose name I share, because that given name, Dennis, has passed down from father to son since the early 1700s until it reached me.  It's my middle name, as it was my father's, his father's, and so on back to 1700.

The earliest ancestor any of us researching these Lindseys has been able to find is a Dennis Lindsey who seems to appear out of nowhere in Spotsylvania Co., Virginia, in 1728.  Various indicators in Virginia records suggest he was born around 1700.

After having found Dennis and proven to my satisfaction that he's my ancestor, I've spent years--over 30 years, in fact--trying to close the gap between him and the several other colonial Virginia Lindsay or Lindsey families, each of which has Scottish roots, and one of which descends from a well-researched line of Scottish Lindsays whose history is known back to the early Middle Ages.  Since my Dennis Lindsey pops up in the same time and place as these other Lindsay/Lindsey families in Virginia, I reasoned after I found him that he has to be an offshoot of one of them.  Somehow.

So I spent years exhaustively researching those other Lindsay/Lindsey families, accumulating file drawers full of stuff about them.  I've made trips to Virginia and Scotland to track their roots, assuming I was likely tracking my own roots as I did so.  I was even invited several years ago to represent Virginia Lindsay descendants at the 400th anniversary of an historic Scottish church whose first pastor was the grandfather of one of the Virginia Lindsay immigrants, an Anglican parson in colonial Virginia.  Though I told the organizers of the anniversary celebration that I had not really proven my connection to that Lindsay family, they still wanted me to attend and represent American Lindsays/Lindseys, and I was happy to do that.

And then along came DNA research.  When a shared surname project developed for Lindsay/Lindsey families, I was delighted to participate, since I was certain I'd now find the empirical evidence I needed--which I hadn't yet found in historical or genealogical records--to link my Dennis Lindsey to one of those other Virginia Lindsay/Lindsey families.  And so imagine my surprise when my Lindsey line in no way matched that of those other families.

But matches, instead, a set of Lynch families with Irish ancestry.  All of whom, in fact, share a fairly rare genetic signature called the Irish Type III genetic profile, which places our roots in southwest Ireland, with a shared ancestor perhaps somewhere around 800 A.D.  My Lindsey DNA matches that of no Lindsays or Lindseys anywhere in the world.  But it perfectly matches that of a number of Lynch families, all with roots in southwest Ireland--most perfectly, in fact absolutely, a family living in the western end of Co. Waterford whose roots there can be traced at least to 1800, but who have lived there far longer.

DNA seems to establish, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that my family's surname was not Lindsay/Lindsey at all at some point back in fairly recent history.  It was Lynch.  And we're not a Scottish but an Irish family.  

And in recent weeks, I feel pretty sure I have finally solved the puzzle created by these DNA findings.  In the records of Richmond Co., Virginia, I find a court order indenturing a set of Irish servants who had arrived in Virginia in the spring of 1718.  These servants include a young man named Dennis Linchey, whose date of birth appears to be around 1700.

These servants had arrived in the colonies on a ship owned by a group of merchants in Bristol, England, who traded between the Caribbean colonies and Virginia and the Carolinas, often with stops in Waterford to pick up Irish goods and Irish servants and to transport the latter to the colonies.  Having arrived in Virginia, the young men brought to serve indentures in 1718 were placed as servants by a Virginia merchant born in Bristol.

For all kinds of reasons--most of all, because every scrap of evidence fits, suddenly--I have now concluded that the Dennis Linchey who indentured himself in Waterford sometime early in 1718, and who was brought to Virginia as a servant after signing his indenture papers, is my ancestor, the same man who suddenly pops up from nowhere in 1728 in a county two counties west of Richmond Co. seeking to buy land.  Something most former servants did when their period of servitude ended--as Dennis' Linchey's would have ended by around 1725.

And the name of this man was almost certainly Dennis Lynch.  There is confusion in the colonial Virginia records about how to spell the given name Lynch, confusion that originates in Ireland itself, where the Irish name O'Loinsigh became anglicized as both Lynch and Lindsey.  And so some families with one of those names appear in colonial Virginia records with both spellings until the spelling of their name is finally standardized with one or the other English spelling.

And the point of that long ramble: without DNA research, I'd never have been able to follow the trail of records that was already there, in Virginia county records, but hidden to me, as long as I thought I was searching for a man named Dennis Lindsey or Lindsay prior to 1728--and not for a man named Dennis Lynch.  For some three hundred years now, my family has lived on this side of the Atlantic as a Lindsey family, and we had come to think of ourselves as very likely a branch of some Scottish family with that name.

DNA tells us otherwise: we're Lynches.  Who became Lindseys in 1718 when a young, unlettered Irish servant came to Virginia and found his name transformed by those who could read and write--by the clerks of the county courts--as Lindsey and not Lynch.

As Sharfstein notes, DNA research is, indeed, revolutionizing what many of us now know about our roots.

Mau Maus and Madrassases: Huckabee's (Deliberate and Racist) Slip of the Tongue

 

I'm fascinated by a conversation that has developed at several blog sites in the past day or so, about what Mike Huckabee meant when he recently made what he is calling a verbal gaffe as he stated that President Obama grew up in Kenya.  In particular, I'm intrigued by Huckabee's reference to the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya and the possible involvement of Obama's father's family in that event.

After Mollie Wilson O'Reilly posted her reflections about Huckabee's comments at the Commonweal blog site, an interesting conversation developed in which one poster, unagidon, pointed out that if you google the phrases "What’s wrong with Kansas" and "Mau Mau," you get about 7,800 hits.  That remark (and a bizarre attack of another commenter on Attorney General Eric Holder re: DOMA in the same thread) led me to google the phrases "Eric Holder" and "Mau Mau."

Whereupon I discovered some 4,340 hits, one pointing to a Facebook site called "President Obama making a big mistake" that contains a reference to "Mau Mau Holder," and others speaking of "Oba-mau-mau" and "mau-mau-er Al Sharpton."  There seems to be a whole demi-monde out there of barely concealed racist discourse on right-wing political internet sites, in which the term "Mau Mau" is being used as a  nasty slur term for people of color, akin to the term "macaca," which Virginia Republican senate candidate George Allen let slip in 2006.

Because I grew up in Arkansas and live here now, and have watched Rev. Huckabee at close range in the political life of my state, I find it difficult to imagine that he did not use the term "Mau Mau" in connection with the president and his family without malice aforethought.  And without knowledge of the racist way in which this term is now being applied on many anti-Obama and right-wing political websites in the U.S.

And I'm now discovering I'm far from the only person who's suggesting this.  Here's the analysis of Jim Jenkins in the Commonweal thread to which I pointed readers above:

This is out-and-out blatantly pandering to the most racist elements in American politics. Huckabee and his fellow Republicans and “birthers” know it. They all speak in code.

To the ears of anyone who grew up in the south like I did, when Joe Wilson shouted at President Obama during a joint session of the Congress, we know that Wilson cut short his remark [he's not that stupid]. We know what he was really saying was, “You lie, n—-r!”

I first heard this phrase while playing as a child at a neighbor’s house shouted at a TV screen when Martin Luther King was being interviewed. I remember this because after reporting it to my parents at the dinner table that night, there was no more playing after school at that neighbor’s house.

I think Jim Jenkins is right.  I'm convinced that Huckabee's use of the term "Mau Mau" and his attempt to connect it to the president and his family in a completely false and manufactured parable about Obama's upbringing that we're being told is a slip of the tongue was deliberate.  And I believe it's deliberate race-baiting.

It's race-baiting designed to appeal to the solid white base of the Republican party in the South, among whom Huckabee is now the front-runner among GOP candidates.  The stronghold of the religious right, which is where Huckabee's support is primarily situated, is in the part of the nation that became solidly Republican in the period following Nixon's Southern strategy, which was designed to herd disaffected Southern Democrats into the Republican party after Lyndon B. Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights act.

And I find that Jim Jenkins and I aren't the only ones proposing such a reading of Huckabee's slip of the tongue the other day.  At his Daily Dish site yesterday, Andrew Sullivan reports a note from a reader of Sullivan's blog, who says that he grew up Southern Baptist (the denomination in which Huckabee is ordained), and remembers frequently hearing the term "Mau Mau" in connection with David Wilkerson's book The Cross and the Switchblade as he grew up. The book featured an inner-city (New York City) gang of youths named the Mau Maus.  Sullivan's reader concludes, 

That is still what I think of when I hear the term, and I would be willing to bet that SoBap Huckabee has more than a passing acquaintance with the book. So it’s not just about blackness, it’s about rampaging big-city gangs.... (The lead Mau-Mau was Nicky Cruz, a Puerto Rican.)

Another posting of Andrew Sullivan yesterday links to commentary by Time writer Joe Klein, who states, 

These comments, however, and his subsequent lie that he really meant Indonesia not Kenya, really show a demented, perverse sensibility, and they demonstrate some of the ugliness at the heart of Obama hatred.

I'm talking about the Mau Mau comment, especially. When I was growing up, Mau Mau was shorthand for: Extremely Scary Black People. The brutality of the Mau Mau rebellion was legendary (and, who knows, perhaps even accurate). It became a term of art in the sixties: to mau-mau was to intimidate white people. (As a young reporter in Boston, I covered a would-be black militant group that called itself, with brilliant irony, De Mau Mau.) To associate Barack Obama with the Mau Mau rebellion is to feed all the worst, paranoid fears of Glenn Beck's America--and, as any sane person knows, completely ridiculous.

In using the racially loaded term "Mau Mau," which floats through the sewers of some of the most virulently racist anti-Obama sites on the internet and therefore has charged significance for a sizable sector of the political right in the U.S., Mike Huckabee is playing an ugly racial game.  He's appealing to the longstanding racist and nativist sentiment of the American heartland, which has been in full reaction mode from the time an African-American presidential candidate with a Kenyan father appeared on the scene, and which went into hyperdrive when Obama was elected.

And, adding insult to injury, Huckabee is now slinging the term "madrassas" around, as Steve Kornacki reports yesterday at Salon.  Mau Maus and madrassases: we can, I fully expect, look for more of this filth--more of this attempt to employ fetishized terms loaded with racist and nativist significance--to fly around as the Republican candidates gear up for the 2012 elections.  Huckabee almost has to go the racist route, in order to build his base in the religious right of the Southeast.

Will Gingrich and Santorum compete by trying to stir and play to a racism that is never far beneath the surface among some of the ethnic Catholic enclaves of the Northeast and urban centers of the heartland to whom they're making a pitch?  I wouldn't be surprised.

This is going to be an ugly campaign.  And the worst dirt of all is going to be thrown around by the candidates who most loudly proclaim themselves to be advocates of good, old-fashioned Christian morality and traditional values.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bull Case in England: Concluding Remarks

It's possible, I suppose, to make too much of the story of the Cornish hotel owners recently fined for discriminating against a gay couple, about which I blogged several days ago.  But since media discussion of this case continues in the British Isles, and since the gay couple who sued and won this case are still being  pilloried in the British media, I want to offer some concluding thoughts about the Bull case.

As I noted in my previous posting about this story, it strikes me as . . . well, curious, to say the least . . . that the furious media response defending the couple who refused to rent a room with a double bed to a gay couple in a legal union is paying no attention at all to the principle the response is implicitly defending, in defending this couple.  Since Peter and Hazelmary Bull have a stated policy of refusing a room with a double bed to both unmarried heterosexual couples and all gay or lesbian couples, legally married or not, in defending their action in the case of the gay couple denied a double bed, their media supporters are defending the right of hotel or b and b owners in the British Isles to discriminate against unmarried heterosexual couples as well as married or unmarried gay ones.

And so they are defending the following scenario for the countries of the U.K.: any hotel or b and b owner anywhere in the land can announce that he/she has biblically based scruples against renting rooms to unmarried heterosexual couples. And that right ought to be upheld, per the response of media defenders of the Bulls, because Christians have a right to believe and practice what they choose to believe and practice.  Christians have a right to apply biblical principles in their business life and everywhere else.   

And so hotel or b and b owners should now have the right to demand proof of marriage, before they rent a room to a heterosexual couple presenting itself as a married couple.  In fact, the discrimination the Bulls are choosing to practice against gay couples can hardly be defended at all unless it also extends to unmarried heterosexual couples, since the same biblical warrants cited to outlaw gay relationships also forbid all sex outside marriage.

As I noted in my previous posting about this, I suspect that those defending the Bulls solely because they wish to defend the right of businesses to discriminate against gays and lesbians are soft-pedaling these parts of the Bull's discriminatory policy because they know very well that a great deal of trouble would ensue if any developed nation gave businesses the right to practice the kind of selective discrimination citing biblical warrants that these media folks are defending in the case of gay people.  Imagine what would happen if this principle of selective discrimination were enacted in practice in the British Isles.  Imagine all the couples from places with traditions of live-and-let-live tolerance--all the unmarried heterosexual couples--arriving in England or Scotland or Wales for a holiday only to discover suddenly that they must produce proof of marriage before renting a room together or a room with a double bed.

Imagine the economic effects of the policy of discrimination that media defenders of the Bulls' policy of discriminating against gays are implicitly defending, as they defend that policy.  Imagine the effects on the tourist industry of the British Isles.  Imagine the effects on the image of English-speaking nations that already have the reputation throughout much of the rest of the world of being hypocritically puritanical, of defending principles applied to others that they don't practice in their own lives.

And imagine the consequences of what those defending the Bulls are also proposing for the common good, for the civic life, of the nations of the British Isles.  It is the nature of discriminatory policies to extend themselves.  Once we permit discrimination in one area of life, we open the door to discrimination in other areas of life. And societies in which discrimination is widespread and supported by law are not attractive places to live--not attractive places for anyone to live.

Once we allow business owners to cite biblical principles to justify illegal discrimination against one minority group, we open the door for those business owners to cite the bible all over again to justify discrimination against another minority group.  Once we have defended the "right" of "Christian" hotel owners to discriminate against those who are gay and lesbian because they sincerely believe the bible commands such discrimination, what is to prevent another group of "Christian" hotel owners from announcing that they will not rent a room to a Muslim?  Because the bible commands such discrimination.  Or to an interracial couple?

Because the bible commands such discrimination.  Those defending the "right" of "Christians" to discriminate against gays and lesbians because the bible encourages such discrimination have a  strangely shallow historical memory.  They seem already to have forgotten what was going on in the American South little more than a half century ago; they have forgotten the pertinence of this history to what they are now defending, at the start of the 21st century, in the British Isles.

Because I grew up in the American South as segregation--legal segregation--gave way to integration, I remember very well what it was like to live, little more than half a century ago, in a part of the world in which everyone around me in the ruling sector of my culture devoutly believed that the bible commanded the separation of the races.  And the dominance of one race by another--the subjugation of the race to which we rulers did not belong to us, the rulers. 

We, too, quoted the bible as we discriminated.  We told and retold the story of Noah and his son Ham, a story that had been told for centuries in Western Christianity to support the subjugation of people of color to light-skinned ones.  And the society that resulted from such legally sanctioned discrimination based on theological claims and biblical warrants was a mess.  It was not a society that any sane group of people would choose to use as a model for civic life at this point in history.  But it is precisely the society--that society of the segregated Old South--that defenders of the Bulls are proposing for the British Isles when they defend the "right" of "Christians" to practice discrimination in contravention of the law, because the bible tells them to practice such discrimination.

Better, it seems to me, to recognize that a vibrant pluralistic civil society depends on enshrining in civil law certain unvarying principles of non-discrimination that apply to all, in all cases, and that do not waver simply because any given religious group within that civil society has qualms about this or that group of people.  Better to draw a line between what religious groups happen to believe and how a society will proceed, when it comes to serving the common good and building a humane world based on principles of justice and inclusion.

This is certainly a lesson we Southern Christians had to learn in the latter half of the 20th century, and today, it's unthinkable that anyone in the media would raise a hue and cry if any of us would claim that our "right" to practice racial discrimination violates our "Christian" bible-based principles.  The culture at large and the media that reflect the views of the culture at large have long since recognized that our selective, warped reading of the bible to support racial discrimination doesn't deserve serious attention as a bona fide Christian claim.  Any church that wants to hold onto the reading of the story of Noah's son Ham to justify the subjugation of his descendants to the descendants of Shem's brother (read: the subjugation of people of color to light-skinned ones) certainly has the right to do so.

But these churches, we've long since concluded, don't have the right to impose that bizarre reading of the scriptures on the culture at large.  Or to encourage discrimination that has been outlawed, while quoting the bible and citing our right to religious freedom.  The selective, twisted way in which many churches read the scriptures for centuries to justify racial oppression no longer holds water in the culture at large or in the media.

And so one wonders why discrimination against gay and lesbian human beings, based also on a selective, twisted, and harmful reading of the scriptures, is still being defended in the secular media--when the media wouldn't defend a similar use of the bible to justify racial discrimination or any other biblically based form of discrimination, for that matter?  Or when it downplays a similar use of the bible to justify discrimination against heterosexuals who are contravening biblical principles about marriage? 

Much depends, doesn't it, on who still has the right to lord it over whom.  On who has the right to tag whom as disordered or diseased or a threat to life and the human race.  On who has the right to claim that the bible is unambiguously on his side, even when he ignores vast portions of the scriptures he cites selectively to continue demonizing the group he insists on tagging as disordered, diseased, and a threat to life and the human race.

That's ultimately the principle that media defenders of Peter and Hazelmary Bull are defending: the right of one group in society (to which they themselves happen to belong) to continue tagging another group as subhuman.  And the right to use religion as a basis for such dehumanizing treatment of another group of human beings, even when many of these media gurus themselves have only a tenuous connection to religion or religious values, and would not support the domination of the public square by religious warrants in other areas of life--especially vis-a-vis their own sexual behavior.  Or economic outlook and practices.

Not a very admirable principle being defended here, is it?  And certainly not one that leads to healthy societies, when it is permitted to play out in the business practices and cultural life of a nation.  But one that, by all indicators, will remain with us for some time to come, until the culture at large begins to marginalize such behavior and the illicit use of religious warrants on which it depends.

Eric Deggans on Martin Luther King's Legacy: Why Do the Media Still Give Time to Anti-Gay Spokespersons?

A day late, but Eric Deggans' commentary on Martin Luther King's legacy in light of the  contemporary struggle for LGBT rights deserves wide readership.  Deggans asks--an extremely important question--why major mainstream media outlets like CNN, which wouldn't dream of pretending to offer "balanced" coverage to issues like racism or segregation by inviting rabid racists onto their programs, still think it's legitimate (and necessary) to give air time to rabid homophobes whose only arguments against gay rights are that they themselves find gay and lesbian persons distasteful.

Deggans writes:

Back in Dr. King's time, when debates over issues of civil rights were covered by the media, they also dutifully included those who favored segregation or denying black people the vote or banning interracial marriage. But eventually, the news media concluded that such views were prejudiced and stopped presenting them as equal arguments -- reasoning that treating racists like equal participants in such debates only granted them a power they should not have.

So when will media take similar action with anti-gay activists?

I think the answer to Deggans' question is obvious--and it should be painful to anyone in American society who supports the full human rights of all citizens, regardless of race, gender, socioeconomic status, age, sexual orientation, etc.: gay and lesbian human beings remain, in American society, a group uniquely singled out for abuse.  In the U.S., LGBT persons continue to be one among several minority groups (illegal immigrants and Islamic citizens are others) that one may single out, target, and speak hatefully about without significant reprisal.  And without any strong public censure for one's prejudice and hatred.

In the past several days, I've watched recent movies that casually refer to objectionable decisions or behavior as "so gay."  I've seen on my Facebook page conversations at the pages of younger relatives of mine, in which the "you're so gay" epithet is casually thrown around, with no objections from any quarters. 

I routinely hear the particular minority group to which I belong, a group still susceptible to astonishing levels of violence in the nation in which I live, a group whose teenaged members still routinely commit suicide because they see no way to live with any dignity or peace, casually referred to in ugly ways and with prejudice-laden references that the culture at large would not dream of permitting any more, if the group being discussed were people of color, Jews, ethnic minority groups, or women.  And so I applaud Eric Deggans for reminding us as we commemorate Martin Luther King that he and some other African American leaders get the connection between racial oppression and the oppression of sexual minorities, and that the civil rights struggle of gay and lesbian persons deserves recognition as a bona fide civil rights struggle.

This is an important reminder from a minority community as religious leaders, including leaders of my own Catholic church, speak of the human rights of gay and lesbian persons as "alleged rights," and as these same religious leaders claim that they are defending human rights in the very actions in which they bash gay and lesbian human beings and seek to block our human rights at every turn.

(And--once again, because it has to be said--as all of this unfolds within the world in which we live, the intellectual elite that sets the standards for the theological conversation of the Catholic mainstream in the U.S. continues to talk on and on about recovering pertinence for American Catholic theology, while it never says a single word about these issues.  And while some of the loudest proponents of "pertinence" ally themselves with movements that continue to deny rights to gay and lesbian persons, even as they dare to speak about creating a welcoming church to stem the tide of those now leaving the Catholic church in droves.)

Patricia Hampl on How Liberal Societies Deal with Difference and Otherness

And then there's this (again, from one of my journals of the past): Patricia Hampl, A Romantic Education (NY: W.W. Norton, 1981):

That, after all, is the core of racism: these others, because they are discernibly unlike us, must not live.  Or, in relatively tolerant times, need not live.  Or most typically, in liberal societies, need not live as we do (p. 33).

Hampl grew up Catholic in St. Paul, I seem to recall, in a household with an Irish-American mother and a Czech-American father.   This insightful analysis of racism applies, of course, to homophobia, as well, since both social impulses spring from the need to construe other human beings who are built different than we are from birth, as threateningly other.  

And it's the observation about liberal societies that I want to zero in on: how is it that so many Catholics of the ostensibly liberal center seem content with the notion that those who are gay need not live as we do.  We who are the norm.  We who occupy the center.  

We for whom the rules are made, and who expect to bend them as we will--for ourselves.  While using those very same rules to keep the refractory gay others in their place, living differently than how we ourselves live, with our full range of power and privilege.

Something about the way even "good" Catholics of the center are dealing with their gay brothers and sisters these days seems just not right.

Chauncey DeVaga on DADT and the Guide to Command of Negro Naval Personnel

Chauncey DeVaga with wise insights (rooted in the African-American experience of struggle against marginalization) into what the DADT debate is really about:

I have long thought that the real stakes at hand in the opposition by Conservatives to our gay brothers and sisters serving openly in the armed forces is prefaced on an understanding that military service is often a pathway to full and equal membership in the polity. While these debates are couched in the language of “military readiness” and “unit cohesion,” they are ultimately about belonging and citizenship. Some Americans simply do not believe that gay folks ought to be part of our political community. Most certainly, they ought not to be treated equally. In this imaginary, if “those people” openly die in the trenches and battlefields (as they have for centuries), then God forbid those same folk may actually both demand and deserve their full rights as citizens.

The American religious and political right want to keep barring entrance of out, self-avowed, unabashed gay folks into the military arena, because military service is one of the most important tickets to inclusion and power in American society.  As I noted here months ago, one of the telling historical facts of which the series "Mad Men" reminds us is the extent to which American economic and political life following World War II was dominated by military connections (as Eisenhower predicted it would be).  Top executives of corporations, who call the shots politically, have been largely military-rooted.  "Mad Men" suggests (and the series is historically accurate in suggesting this) that it would have been unthinkable for a man to gain access to the top circles of corporate management in the U.S. following World War II if he hadn't done military service in that war. 

And so DADT is about entree, access, full inclusion, equal rights across the board, and power.  And it's about the continued "right" of "Christians" (including the Catholic church, whose leaders stand firmly with the religious right in this respect) to engage in any and all gestures they're permitted, to remind gays and lesbians and society at large that those who are gay are unequal, unwelcome, less human than heterosexual people are. 

And if anyone imagines the ugly gestures of exclusion of people of color from power and privilege in American culture weren't, for centuries, supported by biblical injunctions that many Americans took for granted as gospel truth, in this nation with the soul of a church, he/she should do a bit of reading.  About our real history.  And about the real (and exceedingly seamy) underside of mainstream Christian theology, which has repeatedly required some imagined enemy-inferior or other to target, as it hammers out its  doctrinal affirmations about christology, sacraments, ecclesiology, etc.

Addendum, later in the day: and for a valuable complement to the preceding take on DADT, check out Timothy Kincaid's posting yesterday at Box Turtle Bulletin, which I'm just now seeing.  As he notes, the talk about military preparedness and unit cohesion is all a smokescreen.  What's really going on underneath that rhetorical smokescreen is the intent to keep gays and lesbians outside, to keep them stigmatized, and to keep on claiming that this activity preaches the good news of Christ to the world.