Alex Pareene: Please, Mr. President, Release Photos of bin Laden Burning in Hell

As a counterpoint to the discussion two days ago about those seeking to link the assassination of Osama bin Laden to the beatification of John Paul II (his "second miracle," rhetoric employed even by the president of Peru, Alan Garcia, as TheraP pointed out in the thread to my previous posting about this issue):

Did pro-life Catholic attorney general Ken Cuccinelli of Virginia and rising star of the Republican party really tweet that bin Laden is in hell along with 72 "Virginans" [sic]?  If so, Cucinelli is in good company, since Southern Baptist minister, religious right superstar, and Republican presidential aspirant Mike Huckabee has also announced that bin Laden is now in hell.

And it appears 61% of the American people agree.  Belief in hell--in a literal hell to which we can hurl our enemies, confident that they are enemies of God while we stand unambiguously on the side of God--still matters crucially to many American conservatives.  Hell, a literal fiery destination for our enemies and those who do wrong, has been and remains an unparalleled mechanism of social control for conservatives in many Western societies, and there's fierce resistance to any questioning of the literalism or the easy division of the world into hellbound enemies and righteous saints (a society to which we ourselves, bien entendu, obviously belong).

I can understand Huckabee's (and the culture's) desire to consign enemies to hell as part of the baggage of some strands of evangelical Protestantism that are highly influential in American culture and part of the core belief system of the religious right.

But Cuccinelli's?  I had understood that the Catholic church teaches that we don't know if anyone is in hell, and that we're obligated to hope that God saves everyone, including even Judas.  And to pray for and forgive our enemies.

But maybe I labor under many misimpressions about what my church teaches and challenges me to believe as a follower of Jesus.

(For the most recent in a string of Bilgrimage postings about Cuccinelli and his "pro-life" political positions, see here.)  (And who are those "72 Virginans" roasting in hell along with bin Laden?  Inquiring minds want to know.  He surely meant 72 virgins, right?)

Attacks on Planned Parenthood Continue to Raise Questions about Goals of Pro-Life Movement

When I've blogged about Planned Parenthood (most recently here), I've noted that, for me as a Catholic, one of the overriding moral issues to be taken into consideration as proposals are made to cut funding for this organization is that it provides essential health care services to economically struggling women throughout the U.S.  And I've questioned whether one can have bona fide pro-life intent if one claims that Planned Parenthood should be shut down because it provides abortions, while the large majority of the services the organization offers are much-needed health care services for poor women.

The drive of the religious and political right to defund Planned Parenthood (which does not use tax dollars to support abortions, since it's forbidden by law to do so) remains in the news these days, as Indiana governor Mitch Daniels announces that he will sign legislation to cut all funding for the organization in his state.  Daniels' announcement has taken political observers by surprise, since Daniels had previously made noises about the need of the Republican party to stop pushing culture war issues, and had received praise in the Beltway echo chamber for making these noises.

Daniels' "moderation" on social issues had made him appear to many Beltway observers to be a viable, credible GOP presidential candidate.  And it now appears his decision to go after Planned Parenthood may well be part of a strategy to position himself as a presidential candidate by enhancing his cred with the the religious right faction of the Republican party, which has decisive power in making or breaking a potential GOP candidate.

Indiana is not the only state considering action to defund Planned Parenthood.  As Laurie Basset reports today at Huffington Post, in Oklahoma, Republican state legislator Jason Murphey is seeking to amend a nutrition bill so that no independent contractors can administer the state's WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) program.  Among the groups in Oklahoma distributing WIC vouchers, which provide food, nutrition education, and regular check-ups for mothers of small children and pregnant women, is Planned Parenthood of Tulsa.

This particular branch of Planned Parenthood does not even provide abortions.  Planned Parenthood of Tulsa provides essential health care for more than 3,535 women, infants and children yearly.  In addition to distributing WIC vouchers, the clinics of this Planned Parenthood group provide about 8,600 prenatal visits a year for poor mothers, and 5,600 pediatric visits a year for their children.

And so, in my view, what's happening in Oklahoma provides an instructive example of the moral incoherence about which I've been blogging as I look at the drive to defund Planned Parenthood: in the name of serving the values of life, of preserving life, influential political leaders are willing to remove food from the mouths of poor children and their mothers, and to block health care services that these mothers and children receive from no other organization.  To make a pro-life point.

Something is morally awry with the pro-life movement, when it arrives at this point.  Or so it seems to me.

Joe Feuerherd on Cuccinelli: What Would Jesus Pack?

It appears that Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli is on more radar screens than one today.  I've just noticed that Joe Feuerherd has published a brief piece about Cuccinelli at National Catholic Reporter today, noting that Cuccinelli is defending the right of Virginians to carry six-shooters to Mass.  Feuerherd also summarizes Cuccinelli's controversial record since he became attorney general, noting a number of the points I mentioned in my previous posting about Cuccinelli today.  

In an interview last fall with Dan Borowski of the Arlington Catholic Herald, Cuccinelli credits his Catholic faith with shaping his views as attorney general.  Which makes his willingness to spearhead an attack on a federal health care plan that makes at least some provision for the health care needs of those at the bottom of society perplexing.  As is his defense of Arizona laws targeting immigrants.  And his challenge to federal attempts to mandate more fuel efficiency for vehicles in order to curb pollution.  And his support for legislation to revoke the citizenship rights of children of immigrants born in the U.S.  And his claim that the U.S. is a "natural-law based" country in which laws should target those who are gay, because "homosexuality is wrong."

Catholic values in action, Cuccinelli maintains.  And as I said earlier, if this is what the Catholic church stands for, I want to put as much distance as possible between myself and the mean machine the Catholic church has become at this point in history. 

Two More Updates: Gays on Christian College Campuses, Virginia Attorney General Cuccinelli Blocks Access of Poor to Health Care

And two more quick follow-ups:

I blogged some days ago about the controversy that developed at Arkansas's Harding University, when gay students and alumni launched a website to create discussion about how gay members of this Church of Christ campus community are treated.  As I noted, Harding responded to the website by blocking access to it in the campus's computer network.

Today, Erik Erickholm writes at the New York Times about the growing movement of gay visibility on campuses of evangelical Christian colleges and universities.  This movement of visibility is fighting for the inclusion of LGBT people within the communities of these campuses.  

One of the interesting segments of this article--and I heard this repeatedly when the Harding situation was discussed at the blog of the Arkansas Times website some weeks ago--is the refrain, Why would the gays want to go to one of our Christian schools, anyway?  Erickholm writes,

Gay students say they are often asked why they are attending Christian colleges at all. But the question, students say, is unfair. Many were raised in intensely Christian homes with an expectation of attending a religious college and long fought their homosexuality. They arrive at school, as one of the Harding Web authors put it, “hoping that college would turn us straight, and then once we realized that this wasn’t happening, there was nothing you could do about it.” 

And, of course, what's perplexing about this question is how anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with the gospels and the teaching of Jesus would want to keep anyone on the outside looking in.  To send signals to anyone that she is not welcome, has no place, doesn't belong.  That he is not a brother with a place at the Christian table.

Is the real message here this: some Christians are demanding that their comfort levels not be challenged by having to confront real-life human beings who happen to be gay?  I suspect it is.  And I suspect that, no matter how uncomfortable the recognition happens to be that gay people do exist, and that they are right within Christian families and churches, this reality (the gays exist!) is not going to go away anytime soon for any groups of Christians--regardless of how high they build their walls and how tight they fasten their doors.

And yesterday, I wrote again about my perplexity that any Catholic informed about Catholic social teaching (or any Catholic who has read the gospels) would defend or take lightly political initiatives to block the access of socioeconomically deprived people to health care.  And today, I'm reading that the Catholic attorney general of Virginia, Ken Cuccinelli, has chosen to do precisely that.

As Tara Lohan notes at Alternet, not content to hate on the gays, attack climate scientists, and try to censor a state symbol that pictures a bare-breasted goddess, Cuccinelli issued a ruling early this year that effectively blocks non-profits providing free health care for poor people from receiving state funding.  Lohan links to an article by Bruce S. Trachtenberg at The Nonprofit Quarterly which says that among the groups affected by Cuccinelli's ruling is the Virginia Association of Free Clinics, a network of 60 medical clinics that served 72,000 patients last year.

Again, some of the Catholic church's most ardent defenders these days--notably, the Republican politicians with whom Catholic leaders seem intent on getting into bed--are, in my view, working fast and furious with the bishops to turn the church into a mean machine.  If what Cuccinelli stands for is authentic Catholic values (and spirituality and the movement of the heart to God), I want nothing to do with those values.

Last fall, Cuccinelli, who claims to be pro-life, issued the notice of Virginia's execution of a mentally retarded grandmother.

Weekend News Round-Up: The Catholic Abuse Scandal (New Hampshire, Legion of Christ, Euteneuer)

I blogged yesterday about the scandalous attempt of Bishop John McCormack of New Hampshire to "out" a John Doe who has filed suit against New Hampshire Catholic officials re: claims of childhood abuse.  And this morning, I'm seeing in Voice of the Faithful's latest issue of the VOTF e-newsletter In the Vineyard that the New Hampshire VOTF chapter is challenging McCormack to "honor his pledge to treat clergy abuse survivors with care and concern, not harassment through punitive legal measures."

And two bits of fascinating editorial commentary coming recently from one of the leading intellectual journals of the Catholic right, New Oxford Review.  Editorials serving up a nice helping of theological and moral Corvus corax for the gustatory delectation of the tightie-rightie contingent of the contemporary Catholic church . . . . Both are editorial statements, and both dated April 2011.

The first is an editorial admitting that there just may have been a few problems with Fr. Marcial Maciel, the founder of the Legion of Christ, and once the darling of the Catholic right.  This statement focuses on a recent article by a former Legionary priest, Fr. Richard Gill, who decided following the revelations of the unsavory history of the group's founder Maciel that he could not longer in conscience remain a member of the Legion of Christ.  To make sense of the New Oxford Review editorial, which is only partially available to non-subscribers, you'll need to read Gill's statement about the Legion of Christ at the Chiesa website which  published it.

Gill asks if the Legion of Christ can be rehabilitated--as the Vatican thinks it can.  As a former Legion member with a long history with the community, Gill concludes that rehabilitating Maciel's religious community will require a steep uphill climb--if rehabilitation is, indeed, possible.  And it will require more transparency than we've yet seen in having answers to a list of still-to-be-answered questions about how Maciel was allowed to pull the wool over so many people's eyes for so long.

I find Gill's questions about the "origins and history" of the Maciel scandal particularly fascinating.  As he puts it, there's a "mystery" about the Maciel saga, which has not yet been adequately addressed or resolved: namely, how can his community and Vatican officials have been so taken with Maciel for so long, when serious questions about his life and leadership had long been raised?  Specific questions that flow from this central one about the "mystery" of Maciel, are, Gill thinks, the following:

• How did it happen that Maciel was reinstated as Superior General in 1959, after he had been suspended for more than two years while he was under Vatican investigation--when the accusations against him turned out to be true, and he was still permitted to carry on with more abuse and even to father children while remaining Superior General up to 2005?
• How did Maciel get a Decree of Praise for the congregation from Paul VI?
• What is the story behind the "disappearance" of Maciel for about a year in the late 1970s? This was the period in which one of of his children was born. How could Maciel regularly disappear for weeks or a month with no questions raised by church officials or his community?
• How did he get away with the double life, fathering at least three children from two mistresses over decades with no one noticing or colluding?
• Why did no one see it as a red flag that he rarely said Mass or the Breviary or went on retreats?
• How did the Constitutions of the Legion get official Vatican approval, when it's now clear that they have serious flaws and conflicts with canon law? 
• How could Maciel, with his more or less well-known history, have gained such access to John Paul II and apparently misled him for years?
• How to explain the consistent defense of Maciel by Cardinals Angelo Sodano and Franc Rodé and their encouragement of his community to esteem him, even after the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith censured him in 2006? 
• "What does it say about the internal culture of the Vatican that while Maciel was being praised at his 60th anniversary in 2004 by Cardinal Sodano, he was being investigated by Cardinal Josef Ratzinger’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith?"
• How were the Legion's leaders allowed to promulgate a different version of the Statutes of Regnum Christi than the one approved in 2004 by Cardinal Rodé?

As Gill rightly notes, until we know the answers to these perplexing questions, it will be exceptionally difficult to clean up the Legion's act--because (here, switching to my analysis and not Gill's) that act is clearly interwoven with the apparently willing malfeasance of top Vatican officials.  And since we have now amassed abundant evidence indicating that Maciel's clout had everything to do with $$$$, and since $$$$ definitely talks in the Vatican, I suspect we won't ever know the really dark secrets at the heart of the Maciel mystery, which involve payoffs of Vatican officials to buy their silence and support of Maciel.  Of Maciel, whose abundant $$$$ came from wealthy conservative Catholics around the world, who have predominant influence in the Vatican.

New Oxford Review is serving up a savory helping of crow this month not only because of the embarrassment that Maciel has proven to be for traditionalist Catholics (and because a highly regarded former member of his community keeps blowing the whistle on the lack of transparency in the attempt to rehabilitate the Legion of Christ).  It's doing so, as well, because this Catholic journal that makes strong claims about its intellectual vibrancy ("the brightest minds in Catholic journalism today") once also fawned over a now-fallen "American idol," Fr. Thomas J. Euteneuer.  Who turns out to have been perhaps not the bright star in the American Catholic intellectual or moral firmament that New Oxford Review had made him out to be.

And as this editorial statement indicates, when the idol crashed to the ground, "those of us who had interacted with him or admired him from afar were left scratching our heads."  Indeed.  Google the terms "New Oxford Review" and "Euteneuer," and you'll find one article after another by Euteneuer (e.g., "The Demon of Child Sacrifice & the Valley of Slaughter," "The New Rite of Exorcism: A Potent Weapon is Weakened," etc.) that this Catholic journal, whose masthead proclaims that it is "dedicated to delivering sparkling prose on behalf of Holy Mother Church from some of the finest Catholic writers of our times," has published.

When idols turn out to have clay feet and the crumbling of those feet causes the idols to tumble to the ground, those who have bowed before the idols not uncommonly have to consume a healthy serving of crow.  Particularly when those doing the bowing have had a penchant for attacking the "false" religiosity of others.

Having eaten not a few dishes of crow in my own lifetime, I have a tiny bit of advice to offer New Oxford Review, as their Maciel-Euteneuer repast gets underway.  In my experience, nothing makes the tough strands of the old bird go down better than eating it with a helping side dish of humble pie.

Weekend News Round-Up: Continued Discussion of Planned Parenthood

 

As anyone reading the U.S. news in recent days will know, the organization Planned Parenthood has remained in the news as the Republicans in Congress tacked a tea party-driven rider onto the negotiations about the federal budget, in a last-ditch effort to defund this organization that provides much-needed services to low-income women throughout the U.S.  I blogged some weeks back about this Republican initiative, and the disinformation (Planned Parenthood is predominantly about abortion, federal tax dollars go to the organization to pay for abortions, etc.) being used to garner support for the initiative among pro-life people of faith.   

As I noted, in my view, any reasonable and sustained pro-life ethic seems to me to demand that one do all one can to provide much-needed medical services to economically marginal women who are unlikely to have access to those services if Planned Parenthood funding is cut off.  And the vast bulk of Planned Parenthood's work is not the provision of abortion, but of other desperately-needed medical services.  Largely to poor women.

Some interesting commentary/news items that bring this story up to date, as the budget deal is made and the attempt to yank funding from Planned Parenthood fails--for now:

Lawrence O'Donnell comments with conviction at MSNBC on the ethical implications of blocking the access of poor women to Planned Parenthood's medical services, and on the lies being used by the religious and political right to sustain their crusade against Planned Parenthood;

And Senator John Kyl admits he was, well, spectacularly wrong, when he claimed in the debate about defunding Planned Parenthood that "well over 90% of what Planned Parenthood does" is to provide abortions;

And, predictably and to his discredit, Michael Sean Winters argues (as well as I can understand) that the Republicans may well be right about Planned Parenthood being mostly about abortion, and the Democrats ought seriously to consider using poor women's access to health care as a bargaining chip, and (by implication) real Catholics like MSW must have "deep reservations" about Planned Parenthood and its "worldview."

Something like that.  Winters is an ardent Democrat.  When he's not.  And when he's not is almost always--and predictably--when he insists that authentic, faithful Catholicism is to be defined as what the Republicans (and bishops in the Republicans' pocket) say and believe on issues of "life" and sexuality.

Whether what the "pro-life" party says has any factual basis or not.  Or much vital connection to Catholic social teaching or not.

Faith in America on Archbishop Charles Chaput: "Anti-Gay Catholic Leader Lying--And He Knows It"

This is significant: I can't remember when I've seen this forceful of a response by a group of interfaith leaders to the belligerent public homophobia of a Catholic church official in the U.S.  The group Faith in America calls the archbishop of Denver, Charles Chaput, on the carpet today for his repeated efforts to block and remove human rights of gay and lesbian citizens of the U.S.

And Faith in America also calls Chaput a liar.  A liar who tries to twist his crusade against the human rights of a vulnerable minority community into a noble crusade on behalf of human rights.  A liar who wants us to imagine that, in some bizarre alternative universe whose rules make sense only to those of the religious and political right, fighting against human rights for a marginalized minority group somehow constitutes fighting for human rights and human dignity.

Faith in America's response to Chaput re: these issues concludes,

What you and others are espousing is religion-based bigotry – and it is one of the most vile forms of bigotry because of the religious and moral stamp of rejection and condemnation it places on the lives of LGBT people, especially LGBT youth and their families.

Religion-based bigotry has been used by the church and so-called religious organizations against other minorities many times in our past. Charles, do you recall the apology the Catholic Church issued to Native Americans for using misguided religious teaching to justify treating them as morally inferior? Do you recall the Catholic Church apology in 2000 to women for using misguided religious teaching to promote the attitude that they are inferior to men?

And let’s not forget, Charles, your now cozy anti-gay friends on the Religious Right and how the Southern Baptist Convention apologized for using misguided religious teaching to justify bigotry toward African Americans and interracial couples.

Do you really expect the American public to believe that you actually believe it was those fighting the oppression of those minorities who were the ones expressing bigotry.

Chaput stands out among the American bishops for his exceptional belligerence in attacking gay and lesbian citizens and gay and lesbian fellow Catholics.  In contrast to the archdiocese of Boston, which has made a public statement accepting the enrollment of children of gay couples in Catholic schools, Chaput's Denver archdiocese belligerently refused to admit the children of a lesbian couple in a Catholic school, in a highly publicized incident a year ago.

Chaput's Catholic News Agency does all it can, day after day, to spread the Catholic anti-gay gospel, identifying homophobia with authentic Catholic teaching and attacking fellow Catholics who do not toe Chaput's homophobic line.  CNA is working hard right now to stir up the American political and Catholic right to create trouble for Mexican bishop Raul Vera Lopez and his ministry of pastoral outreach to gay Catholics in the Saltillo diocese.

Because of the prominence of the Denver archdiocese in the American Southwest, with its large Latino population, Chaput and CNA have a particular concern to keep Latino Catholics in line, to assure that the growing Hispanic population of their area--a key constituency for whose votes Democrats and Republicans are competing--remains "authentically" Catholic.  Catholic, as in opposed to gay rights.  Catholic, as in Republican-trending.

In the past two days, Chaput's CNA has published two articles in addition to the one to which I link above (and here) attacking Bishop Vera Lopez's ministry to gay Catholics and comparing this ministry unfavorably to the Catholic organization Courage, which promotes the bogus notion that one can be "converted" from homosexuality.  It is no accident that CNA is playing Courage, with its anti-gay, bogus conversion-therapy messages, against ministries that seek to include gays and lesbians in the Catholic church.  As Timothy Kincaid noted at Box Turtle Bulletin in January, the head of the U.S. Catholic Bishops' Conference, Archbishop Timothy Dolan, has appointed Oakland bishop Salvatore Cordileone chair of the USCCB's new Ad Hoc Committee for the Defense of Marriage.

As Kincaid also notes, both Dolan and Cordileone sit on Courage's "Body of Members," which provides oversight for the organization.  By making this appointment, Dolan is giving Courage--with its anti-gay bogus conversion-therapy message--quasi-official status as "the" U.S. Catholic organization presenting the "authentic" message of the Catholic church on gay issues. 

And when one recalls the active role that Cordileone played in removing the right of civil marriage from the gay citizens of California, one sees clearly the political stakes involved in this promotion of Courage and in attacks like CNA's recent attacks on gay-inclusive and gay-affirming ministries within the Catholic church.  Since his appointment to "defend" marriage on behalf of American Catholics, Cordileone has been busy lambasting President Obama and his administration for refusing to defend the Defense of Marriage Act, and has claimed that this refusal to defend a law that the administration regards as unconstitutional and discriminatory is an attack on democracy and an act of discrimination in and of itself (!)--discrimination against minority groups that oppose same-sex marriage.  Cordileone has boasted about the significant role he played in helping remove the civil right of marriage from gay citizens of California, and has told the media that the movement to accord rights to gay persons is inspired by the devil.

Make no mistake about it: what Chaput and the bishops with whom he is allied have been doing and continue doing in attacking the rights of gay citizens of the U.S. is overtly political.  It is more political by far than it is religious.  It is all about trying to secure Catholic votes for the single political party with whom these bishops imagine their church should be affiliated.

And it's about doing the bidding of powerful, wealthy Republican business leaders with whom Chaput is allied, and whose word counts predominantly for him as he pursues his episcopal ministry.  Faith in America is right on target to call Chaput out for his malicious lies about his brothers and sisters who happen to be gay, and to expose those lies as all about anti-Christian biogtry.

Arkansas Supremes Strike Down Gay Adoption Ban

Just getting on the road for the lecture I'll be giving in early afternoon, so I haven't had time to blog this morning.  But as I begin my trip, I want to take note of some good news now breaking in my state, Arkansas.

In the 2008 elections, "faith-based" activists placed an initiated act outlawing adoption of children by unmarried (read: gay) couples on the ballot to get out the vote for the Republican party.  The ban passed.  And it definitely had the effect of bringing out many voters who apparently regarded it as their religious duty to pull the level for the Republican national ticket as they voted against the gays.

Today, the Arkansas Supreme Court has declared this initiated act unconstitutional.  The Supreme Court's decision was unanimous.  

As I read this news, I'm wondering how several cousins of mine who signed the petition to place this act on the 2008 ballot intend to behave when/if they next see me at any family gatherings.  A first cousin of mine who is a Southern Baptist minister signed the petition twice.  His wife signed, as did the wife of his brother, who is also a Southern Baptist minister.  A good Methodist cousin on the other side of my family, who taught in the state pharmacy school for many years, also signed, along with his wife.  My brother's sister-in-law and former business partner, a good Catholic, signed the petition.

In typical Southern fashion, when I see these cousins--now rarely, mostly at funerals--they all smile, hug, act as if they love me dearly.  I don't think I can sustain the lovey-dovey act now, if I do see them at reunions, knowing the prejudice they've worked actively to promote in our state.  

They should be ashamed.  But I doubt they will.

John Aravosis and Mark Jordan: A Debate about How to Approach the Role of the Bible in Gay Bashing

I agree with John Aravosis here.  When I linked several days ago to Mark Jordan's essay on which Aravosis is commenting (I linked to an earlier version at Religion Dispatches, while Aravosis is linking to it at the Alternet site), I did so to point to a problem that needs to be addressed in the American cultural and political discussion of homosexuality.  This is that many people talk about what "the bible says" without having a clue about what it actually says.

In the American political and cultural context, people speak about the Jewish and Christian scriptures with supreme confidence that the bible condemns homosexuality--and that supreme confidence is usually in direct proportion to their ignorance of what the scriptures actually say about anything at all.  Because I thought Jordan made that point well, and his call for educating ourselves (and the public at large) re: these issues seems on target, I linked to his essay.

At the same time, I did know, of course, that he was responding to John Aravosis on these points.  But my posting didn't mention that, because, to be honest, I thought Jordan had misunderstood Aravosis's primary point about how the bible is used to support gay-bashing in the U.S.  And so my references to Jordan's essay didn't mention Aravosis at all, since I didn't want to reinforce the critique of John Aravosis.

Now that Aravosis has reiterated his point--and I'm very glad he has done so--I want to address the debate between him and Jordan, and others who have also been criticizing John Aravosis re: how the bible is understood and used in American culture to lambast gays.  I think this criticism has been unfair.  The primary point I understand John Aravosis to be making--and it's an extremely important one--is this: regardless of whether the Jewish and Christian scriptures actually do condemn homosexuality, and regardless of what they really say about "homosexuality," the bible is constantly used in the American cultural and political context as a basis for discrimination and violence against those who are gay and lesbian.

And we have to acknowledge and deal with that fact if we hope to get anywhere with movements to combat anti-gay oppression and secure gay rights.  There's a double challenge in the American cultural context, vis-a-vis gay bashing and the bible, and Jordan and Aravosis are identifying two different facets of that challenge, it seems to me.

On the one hand, the persistent, serious challenge faced by anyone struggling for recognition of the human rights of gay persons in American culture is to face the fact that, for millions of Americans, the bible is an obvious and unquestioned source of anti-gay teaching.  And that uninformed, widespread cultural assumption is going to continue to be there, and to continue to be strongly persuasive for a large sector of the population, regardless of what scholars say about the biblical texts. 

On the other hand, for the last several decades, there has been significant scholarly discussion about the six clobber texts to which homophobic groups persistently return, which strongly refutes the widespread cultural belief that "the bible condemns homosexuality."  And it's important to educate ourselves and others about that biblical scholarship.  It's particularly important, I'd maintain, for people of faith committed to gay rights to begin to assure that this scholarship impacts what the churches say, think, and do about gay people and gay issues.

The role of the churches in challenging cultural misappropriation of the bible to attack gay people could, if the churches ever dared to do the work they claim they are about, be considerable.  And that correction of cultural misapplications of the scriptures needs to begin in the churches themselves, if communities of faith are to make a dent in the prevailing cultural norms.

Here's why I think John Aravosis's point is undeniable and important: no matter how wrong or misguided they are in thinking so, many Americans, whether churched or unchurched, take for granted that the bible instructs them to despise and marginalize those who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered.  I cannot think of a single other minority group in this country right now that is routinely subject to violent attacks by people spouting bible verses.  I don't know of any other group of citizens we can point to, where someone still takes for granted that he or she has the right to fill a sock with stones and beat a man to death because the bible tells us to stone homosexuals.  Or where someone defending the savage beating of a gay man comes out to defend that action displaying a tattoo quoting the Leviticus verse that, as we all know, condemns "homosexuality" and calls for the stoning of gays.

Or where this kind of ugly hate speech, which is in the news today at the Box Turtle Bulletin site, pours out of the mouth of someone attacking a minority group, who repeatedly cites the bible as the source for his hatred--and for his right to attack.  We have a problem in American culture, and it is, to some degree, unique to our culture.

That problem is the taken-for-granted, casual belief that the bible supports hatred of those who are LGBT, and that those engaged in activities to demean and deny rights to gay people are doing a holy thing, something commanded by God--whether they themselves happen to be churchgoers or not, or whether they've even read the bible (and noticed how predominant its insistence on love, justice, and mercy is--and not on those six exegetically murky clobber texts).  In American culture, those working for gay and lesbian rights have a volatile combination of factors to contend with unique to American culture and politics: biblical literalism (undergirded by ignorance) runs throughout our cultural and political lives, whether people are churched or not; and because we are a nation with the soul of a church in which people, whether churched or unchurched, take for granted that the bible is the foundation of our unique city on a hill, ignorant biblical literalism wields enormous influence in our culture and political sphere.

My point in posting about these themes several days ago, as I cited Jordan's essay, was to note that this kind of biblical literalism is now affecting many American Catholics, too, despite the skepticism of traditional Catholic theology and teaching re: biblical literalism.  Listen again to those video clips of Fr. John Hollowell indoctrinating Catholic high school students in Indianapolis about their gay brothers and sisters, to which I linked several days back, and you'll hear the surprising claim that there are "multiple" bible passages condemning homosexuality, which see homosexuality as an "abomination" and "grave offense" against God, and if we question any one of these, the whole bible will become "completely useless."

These are not in the least traditional Catholic arguments.  They're not how Catholics do theology at all, including moral theology.  They're not how Catholics would approach any other moral issue today.

There's something unique about how contemporary Catholics have decided to deal with the issue of gay and lesbian people and rights, and, as I noted in my previous posting about this matter, that uniqueness begins with the 1986 letter of the current pope on the "pastoral" care of homosexual persons, which was roundly criticized by biblical exegetes and theologians when it was issued precisely because it adopts a fundamentalist approach, and pulls biblical proof texts out of context to insert into its argument, without grappling at all with the core meaning, the real meaning, of the scriptures to which it points.

The Catholic magisterium has made a calculated decision at this point in history to do, in the case of gay persons, what it refuses to do in the case of any other moral or theological issue.  The Catholic church has decided, in the case of the discussion of gay and lesbian people, to adopt a biblical literalist approach that is far more characteristic of Protestant fundamentalism than of traditional Catholicism.

To me, the reason for that calculated decision is obvious: it's a politically driven decision motivated by the desire of the leaders of the Catholic church at present to make common cause with the religious right, particularly in the United States, but also in developing parts of the world such as Africa where American-style religion has made huge inroads, to combat gay people and gay rights.  The price of this calculated decision and the coalition it forms is that Catholics are encouraged, in the single area of combating gay rights, to adopt a biblical literalism alien to traditional Catholic theology.

And this has proven to be effective.  As I've noted, I'm suspicious of the way in which the Catholics-promote-gay-rights story has gotten shopped around in recent weeks.  I'm suspicious about that story not because I doubt that an increasing number of Catholics in the U.S. do reject the politics of the hierarchy and endorse gay rights, nor because I doubt that this is a very positive development.

I'm suspicious because I think the growing meme about this development overlooks (and even masks) the very real and very powerful continued ability of some influential, highly placed, and well-funded Catholics in the U.S. to keep on doing serious damage to their gay brothers and sisters.  Anywhere that there are battles for gay rights underway in this nation, Maggie Gallagher and the National Organization of Marriage are there, with tons of money flowing their way from donors whose names they refuse to disclose, with expensive, slick videos pouring hateful disinformation into people's minds.

Anywhere there are struggles for the rights of gay and lesbian folks in the U.S. now, the Knights of Columbus are on the scene, funneling large sums of money that this organization used to give to the homeless and the hungry into the anti-gay cause, colluding with other religious groups, many of them fundamentalist ones, to block gay rights or remove rights from gay people.  And then there's the head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic bishops, Timothy Dolan, who went on national television recently to inform America--and he was speaking as head  of the USCCB, as the spokesman of all American Catholic bishops--that same-sex marriage is equivalent to incest, that it would be equivalent to his wanting to marry his mother (for more on this, see the link at the end of this posting).

The bishops, the Vatican, Maggie and the Knights: they know very well what they're doing when they make outrageous, incendiary statements like this.  They're playing to deep-rooted prejudice, prejudice fueled by misappropriation and misunderstanding of biblical texts--precisely the kind of misappropriation and misunderstanding these Catholic leaders now deliberately seek to foster as they attack gay and lesbian people in concert with religious groups used to biblical literalism.

The bishops, the Vatican, Maggie and the Knights know what they're doing and why they're doing it, why they have allied themselves with fundamentalists of the religious right and why they're adopting the tactic of biblical literalism exclusively against the gays: they're doing what they're doing because they intend to keep on bashing gays.  And the bible--the culturally deformed version of the bible that circulates through American political networks of the right--is a useful tool in this battle.  It's one of the most useful tools they have.

For that reason, we need to keep listening (I think) to what John Aravosis has to say on these points, even as we also listen to Mark Jordan when he encourages us to educate ourselves and others about how these cultural misuses of the scriptures misrepresent what the bible actually says.  And we need--I would also argue--to push back.

If you want to push back against Timothy Dolan and what the U.S. Catholic bishops are doing to their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters right now, here's one way you can do so: the Care2 site has a petition now underway calling on Dolan to apologize for his incendiary remarks equating gay marriage with incest.   I encourage readers to log in and sign this petition.

The hate-mongering needs to stop.

Wik Wikholm Reviews "8: The Mormon Proposition": Must-See Viewing about Role of Religious Groups in Attacking Gay Rights

I meant a day or so ago to mention Wik Wikholm's fine 1 April review of the documentary "8: The Mormon Proposition" at the glbtq website, and then forgot to do so.  A lazy Sunday evening is the perfect time for me to take note of this review before it slips away from my notice.  For anyone following the role of religion in the battles over gay rights in the U.S., this sounds like a must-see film.

Wikholm minces no words about what he thinks the documentary demonstrates: here's his opening statement,

The documentary film 8: The Mormon Proposition indicts the Mormon Church as the puppet master that orchestrated, funded, and deliberately concealed its role in what appeared to be a successful grassroots Evangelical and Roman Catholic campaign for Proposition 8, the state constitutional amendment that ended same-sex marriage in California when it passed on November 4, 2008.

The film frames its analysis, Wikholm notes, with an interview with Kate Kendell, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, who says that success with ballot initiatives like prop 8 in California demands money, volunteers, and a message that resonates.  The LDS church provided all three to take away the right of civil marriage for gay citizens of California, Kendell thinks.

Activist Fred Karger has succeeded in obtaining a set of internal Mormon church documents which show that the LDS church is aware that its image is an impediment in the public square, and for that reason, it allied itself secretly with conservative evangelical Christians and powerful Catholic anti-gay groups in California, supplying the bulk of the money and volunteers for the prop 8 campaign behind the scenes, while permitting the other two groups to appear to be spearheading the drive to repeal gay marriage as a grassroots initiative.

The documentary suggests that, having found this approach so successful, the LDS church is now strategizing with the largely Catholic National Organization for Marriage (NOM) to apply a similar formula--behind-the-scenes money and manpower, as NOM takes a high-profile public role with Mormon support hidden in the background--in states other than California, including Maine and Maryland.  As he notes,

The film suggests that the Mormon Church is engaged in what amounts to money laundering by concealing its funding of non-tax-exempt PACs like NOM so that the church's own tax-exempt status as a non-political religious organization is protected.

NOM, of course, persistently refuses to reveal its funders, even when federal and state laws demand such transparency, and it mounts legal battles repeatedly to keep its funding sources secret.  In the view of the documentary, the Mormon church has a strong interest in colluding with Catholic groups like NOM (and with the Catholic bishops) in attacking gay marriage because Mormon theology teaches that God, Heavenly Father, once had a human body and became a god when he died, and then married many spirit wives, populating the earth.

As Wikholm notes, "According to church doctrine, good Mormons will become gods when they die and populate their own planets just as their heavenly father did."  Hence the abhorrence of same-sex relationships and of gay people, since the theology of the LDS church is heavily invested in maintenance of traditional gender roles and in a model of family and procreativity that stresses the obligation to marry heterosexually and have children.  And though what Catholics and evangelicals call "traditional" marriage is miles and miles apart from this theological understanding, the shared hostility of some religious adherents in these religious traditions to gay and lesbian people leads them to make common cause with a religious group whose understanding of marriage (and of God) is strongly at variance with traditional Christian notions.

This sounds to me like a necessary film to watch, for those interested in the role that religious groups and (some) people of faith are playing in the American political context today to block gay rights and attack same-sex marriage.  And as I notice Wik Wikholm's review, I'd like to put in a plug for the outstanding glbtq website, which is one of the best online scholarly resources around for information about gay and lesbian people, lives, and issues.

Inciting Violence in the Name of Jesus: Pastor Terry Jones and Americans' Obligation to Speak Out

Lizette Alvarez reports in the New York Times today that Pastor Terry Jones of the Gainesville, Florida, Dove World Church says he'd do it all over again, even knowing people would be killed when he publicly burned a Koran.  Jones tells Alvarez he did it to "stir the pot" and "shake the boat" and to show that Islam and its holy book are instruments of violence, death and terrorism.

The fire Jones's actions lit has continued to spread.  Protests in Afghanistan, where 11 people including 7 U.N. employees were killed on Friday, are now in their third day.  As Fred Clarkson reminds us in an instructive overview of the story and its background at Daily Kos, when Jones first threatened to burn the Koran last year, world leaders from the pope to President Obama pled with him to refrain from an act everyone knew would incite violence, and he backed down.

Only to stage a Koran burning on March 20 and place video clips of the action on his website--lighting the flame of reaction now sweeping across Islamic areas of the world.

And I'm surprised to hear so few voices within the U.S. raised in outrage at what Jones has accomplished.  It's to Andrew Sullivan's credit, I think, that he blogs about the incident yesterday, though, in my view, his framing of the Islamic response to the Koran burning as typical of an entire religion overstates the case in a way that's characteristic of how Sullivan approaches discussions of Islam and Islamic issues.

As he notes, "The interaction between Christianism and Islamism could take us all back to the dark ages."  But as readers of Sullivan's work will know, "Christianism" is a term that's not equivalent with "Christianity," but which denotes a bastardization and politicization of the Christian message by groups whose understanding of what Jesus preached and stood for has long since taken leave of the actual message.  And who persistently distort what the gospels say for political gain, turning the message of Jesus into its precise opposite.

Which is, I'd like to think, what Sullivan also means when he speaks of Islamism--that it's to be contrasted with Islam itself, though that contrast doesn't come through strongly in his statement about Islam as a religion of violence.  Islamism as a politicization and bastardization of the message of Mohammed and the Koran that has little to do with what Mohammed actually taught and what Islam stands for . . . . 

My own perspective is that I happen to live in that part of the world that has a primary responsibility to do something about the Christianism--about the deformation of the message of Jesus--and as a Christian, I have an obligation to keep trying to set the record straight as some of my fellow Christians continue to distort what Jesus said and taught.  To make his message fit a worldview entirely antithetical to everything he stood for.

Something some political leaders are working overtime to do right now as they prepare for the Iowa primaries in 2012.  As Erik Erickholm reports in the New York Times today, a concerted effort is underway now in that state to revive the religious right coalition that jhas dominated American political life in the period from Reagan to Obama.  A coalition whose worldview depends on the dangerous, illicit identification of a mythical "American way of life" with the gospels, with what Jesus stood for and proclaimed.

As if God plays favorites in the world, choosing one nation and anointing and protecting it, while condemning others.  As if God has chosen and is blessing a nation that owns the majority of the world's wealth, a nation in which the gap between the rich and poor is reaching epic proportions.

As if the scriptures are not brimming over with condemnations of the exploitation of the poor by the rich and of the lust for wealth.  As if Jesus did not make our salvation entirely dependent on whether we recognize him in the least among us, in the sick, the homeless, the prisoner, those without food and clothing.

As I say, even though I naturally deplore the misuse of Islamic ideas and Islamic religious tenets to foster violence, I happen to live in a nation that professes to be, in some unique way, a city on a hill set there by God as an example to the entire world.  And I happen to be a Christian living in that nation.

And so my responsibility is to deal with what I have the power, possibly, to change.

And from where I stand, what Pastor Terry Jones has done in lighting fires now sweeping across significant  sectors of the globe is a heinously dangerous, indefensible act that needs to be condemned resoundingly by Americans in general and by people of faith in this nation with the soul of a church in particular.

More on the Controversy at Arkansas' Harding University about Gay Campus Members: Harding Alum Speaks Out

At the beginning of this month, I blogged about a controversy that had just developed at a university in my home state of Arkansas, Harding University, when a group of gay students and alumni launched a website and e-zine calling for open discussion of the status of gay and lesbian students, faculty, and staff at their Church of Christ university.  The response of the university to the new website and its call for dialogue was to censor the site and its e-zine, by blocking access to it from the campus computer network.

Today, Religion Dispatches has published an outstanding essay by Ed Madden, a Harding alum and poet who now teaches English at the University of South Carolina.  I highly recommend Madden's commentary about what's happening at Harding and many other conservative Christian colleges and universities, as more and more students and other campus members press for honest dialogue about how LGBT people continue to be treated on many faith-based campuses.

Madden talks about his own exceptionally painful struggle to come to terms with his growing awareness that he was gay when he was at Harding, a university strongly affiliated with the political and religious right, which insists that gay people be invisible--since they simply do not and cannot exist in the world of the political and religious right.  Not unless they are closeted and self-hating.

As Madden notes, he had to run as hard as he could from that confining, twisted and dehumanizing worldview in order to find himself as a gay man loved by God.  He had to run away from his own Church of Christ, with its refusal to accept and affirm those who are gay, in order to find some church elsewhere that would offer him grace and love:

It’s a tradition I had to leave to survive. I recall the grace I felt as a graduate student in Austin, Texas, when I first turned to a little neighborhood Methodist church. Finding that church saved my life. The first time I took communion there as an openly gay man was the most profound religious experience of my life, much more than my baptism as a boy—that dunk in the cold baptistery during a gospel revival was more a flight from hell and from my growing sense of sexual difference than a spiritual conviction. After taking the bread and wine that Sunday at Hyde Park Methodist Church, I couldn’t get up. I knelt at the altar rail and wept, shaking, still not believing in a God or a community that would accept me just as I am, rather than just how others wanted and expected and demanded I be.

All of this came back to me last week as I read those two emails and as my Facebook page and mailbox filled over the next few days with the controversy about the webzine and the university administration’s response—including stories on The Huffington Post and on the New Yorker blog.

Madden articulates the experience of many gay people of faith, as they come of age within churches and church institutions that seek to make gay folks completely invisible, because the cognitive dissonance gay and lesbian persons create for these communities of faith simply by existing, simply by being, is too great.  It's too great for these faith communities to continue with their comfortable, pious platitudes, while confronting the real-life complexity of the diverse world God has created.

In the Catholic context, one of the most controversial passages of the 1986 document on the pastoral care of homosexual persons issued by Cardinal Ratzinger, the present pope, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, is a passage which says that, though the Catholic church deplores violence against gay persons, no one should be surprised if violence ensues when gay folks claim they are not "disordered."  And when civil laws begin to offer protection for people on grounds of sexual orientation.  The 1986 pastoral letter introduced into Catholic magisterial teaching a fateful new notion that gay and lesbian persons are intrinsically disordered--disordered in their very nature and human make-up.

As many theologians, social workers, and therapists noted when the 1986 document was issued, it is implicitly arguing that when gay people come out of the closet, they merit the violence directed against them for coming out of the closet.  This is an argument that the leaders of the Catholic church are still pushing even today, as recently as last week, when the Vatican representative to the United Nations, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, voiced the Vatican's opposition to a UN declaration condemning anti-gay violence around the world.  Tomasi argued, precisely as the 1986 "pastoral" document does, that gay and lesbian human beings have no right to be gay, to make their sexual orientations publicly known, to claim their identity as gay persons in a public way.

And therefore they have no right to legal protection from discrimination, and even violence, when they come out of the closet.  Though conservative Catholics who customarily take every statement of the magisterium literally are now trying to deny that this is what magisterial teaching says, official Catholic teaching continues to hold that those who are gay and lesbian are intrinsically disordered in their very personhood and natures, and that if they expect to be tolerated and not subjected to violence, they need to keep their disordered nature to themselves.

The price that repressive faith communities pay--the price they insist that gays and lesbians pay--in order to keep simplistic teachings about gender identity and sexuality in place is a steep price.  It is a price of self-denial and invisibility.

This is a price increasing numbers of gay and lesbian persons refuse any longer to pay, because we recognize that nothing is more inhumane and unholy than asking another human being to pretend not to be there. Not to exist.  So that your tiny world can remain comfortable, and your preposterous assumptions about who God is, and the kind of world God has made, can remain securely in place, untroubled by facts you cannot control.  

Untroubled by the real world, which is full of rich diversity that the simplistic notions of some believers find it impossible to recognize or incorporate into their theological universes.  Theological universes that grow smaller and smaller all the time, as the condemnation of Elizabeth Johnson's work about which I've just blogged indicates.

Which have no option except to grow smaller and smaller, because they have decided to hinge their future and the future of their faith communities on literalistic interpretations of scripture or church teaching, which privilege the heterosexual males for whom these theological universes have been constructed.  While ignoring and denigrating the faith experience of everyone else--notably women and gay and lesbian persons.

Steve Kornacki on Iowa and What the Republicans Have Made of Themselves: Attacks on Gays, Muslims, Obama, and Godless Liberalism

And speaking of that political party the U.S. Catholic bishops have anointed in recent years as the Catholic party of choice (I'm linking here to my previous posting): as Steve Kornacki points out at Salon today, the Republican party has created a nifty trap for itself, by permitting itself to be taken captive by religious right extremists (and tea partiers masquerading as libertarians while keeping the religious right extremism alive).  In Kornacki's view, we see on full display right now in Iowa an exhibit of the mean-spirited "religious" lunacy that has become the GOP:

This is what it has come to for the Republican Party: The lead-off contest for its next presidential nomination -- an event that has played a vital role in winnowing GOP fields since 1980 -- will be utterly dominated by voters with ravenous appetites for  attacks on gays, Muslims, President Obama's "otherness" and godless liberalism in general.

To repeat: this is what the U.S. Catholic bishops have been working overtime in recent years to align American Catholicism with.  Until, unless, lay Catholics begin to exercise ownership of their church, I can't see much of a bright future for American Catholicism, with these folks in the drivers' seat.

More on the Appeal of Anti-Gay Biblical Literalism for Some Catholics: My Personal Struggle, Captured in Journal Entries

As a follow-up to what I posted yesterday about the surprising trend among some American Catholics to buy into the Protestant fundamentalist ploy of biblical literalism when it comes to gay and lesbian issues and gay and lesbian persons, I'd like to direct readers' attention back to two pieces I posted here some time ago.


That is, I'm pointing readers to these pieces if anyone reading these postings is interested to see how one particular gay Catholic theologian dealt with these scriptural arguments some time ago, as he struggled to come out of the closet.  In the summer of 2009, I posted two excerpts from my journal back in 1990.

In these journal entries, I was trying to deal with what it meant to be a gay Catholic theologian teaching in a Catholic university, as my sexual orientation and longstanding committed relationship with another gay Catholic theologian were becoming publicly known, despite our neither having said anything at all to anyone in any public setting about our identities and relationship.  Who we were was becoming public because, out of the blue, Steve happened to find a job teaching in New Orleans a year after I did, as we both finished graduate school.

And so--sheer grace, we thought, but also burdensome grace, since it meant we couldn't hide--we were able to continue living together, something we had not had any assurance of when we went off to do doctoral studies and then began looking for jobs.  And as our lives and identity became public knowledge, even though we had always walked that fine line that the Catholic church demands of gay folks working in its institutions--don't ask, don't tell; don't appear gay, don't talk gay--the troubles began.  The doors began to slam in our faces, one by one, with this denial of tenure despite a faculty and student vote to support tenure, with that unexplained one-year terminal contract, with this terminal contract on specious grounds of financial exigency, with that unrenewed contract to do adjunct work after one of us had given a poor grade to a student who wrote an essay that was a homophobic rant but wanted his work to be regarded as sound moral reasoning.

Through all of this, we had no choice except to think very carefully about what it means to be gay within the Catholic context, and gay theologians teaching theology in Catholic universities.  And the two journal entries to which I'm pointing any interested readers--here and here--are my own personal attempt to deal with the biblical evidence.  For myself, as a gay person.

As a gay person who would hope to find salvation, not to end up condemned to hell.  As a gay person for whom everything--not just my job and a salary and my future as an employee in a Catholic institution, but the fate of my soul--depended on struggling to understand and respond to the biblical evidence that, so many other Christians would have me believe, condemns "homosexuality" and me as a homosexual.

These two journal entries from 1990 show where I ended up after a number of years of difficult, exceedingly painful struggle with these biblical texts, and with those intent on using these texts to condemn, bash, exclude me.  And to be honest, once I came to terms with what I realize these texts are about, and once I found peace--a hallmark of the Spirit's presence--in coming to terms with who God has created me to be, I've never gone back.  What I mean to say is, my years of struggle to understand what's going on with the six biblical clobber texts--and, more importantly, with Christians intent on using them to bash me and my kind--have led to me to a recognition from which there is no turning back.

And that recognition is this: the scriptures decidedly do not condemn what we call homosexuality today.  They don't condemn homosexuals.  They can't do so, since they were written in a cultural context that had no concept of what we call homosexuality now.

And so those Christians now building their theological worldview around a handful--six verses!--of exegetically murky texts that have nothing at all to do with the current fixation of many believers on homosexuality are radically distorting the bible.  And what it's all about.

The scriptures point above all to love, justice, and mercy as core values for those who want to be in union with God.  Believers using six exegetically shaky texts as the foundation for a worldview built on harming and excluding some brothers and sisters they despise are missing the core message of the biblical text.

I can't go back from that recognition, because my own understanding of faith and everything that it comprises is built on that foundation.

And if anyone doubts that those carrying signs that blare out biblical quotes they imagine to be anti-gay are not primarily about love, justice, and mercy, but about doing harm to others, ask yourself for a moment if these same people would walk around carrying signs that say, "Slaves, obey your masters" (Ephesians 6:5);  or "Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip the edges of your beards" (Leviticus 19:27); or "Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of materials" (Leviticus 19:19); or "Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery" (Mark 10:11 and Luke 16:18); or "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28).

No.  Those carrying signs which say "Male and female he created them" are not doing so to make what the bible says more widely known, or to assure that we are faithful to the bible in our political life.  They're doing so for one reason and one reason alone: to demean a group of their brothers and sisters, and to use God as a warrant for their dehumanizing behavior towards those they despise, and those they wish to keep in their place as second-class citizens.

Once one's eyes are open to such misuse of the scriptures, there is no going back to a point at which one can entertain the idea that this misuse of scripture is holy and salvific.  It's the precise opposite.

P.S. The journal entries to which I link above date, as I have said, from 1990.  For any readers interested in tracking what I've written on these themes in recent years at this Bilgrimage site, click on the tags "Bible" and "scripture" below, and you should see a list of postings.

Remembering a Brother's Death, Looking at Churches' Response to LGBT People

Dear Folks,

Continuing to feel raw these days, in part, due to what is happening in Japan, and  the strange way in which my dream life involved me in that disaster with a dream full of foreboding some days before the events there.  Not a bad thing to feel raw for Lent, I suppose, since feeling the tender new skin with which we approach each day exposed and wondering how to fit things together opens us to God, I have to believe.

Today is a day of remembrance for me, too.  As in past years, I'll post a link this year to an essay I wrote on this blog some years ago, remembering my brother Simpson's death on 14 March 1991.  I pray for rest for my brother.

And because of the raw feelings, I find it exceptionally painful to read Valerie Schultz's posting yesterday at America's "In All Things" blog, about her struggle as she deals with being both a practicing Catholic and a practicing mother of a lesbian daughter.  Schultz writes about her active involvement in her community's PFLAG group, a group much needed, since the community has the reputation of being a place in which gay teens are bullied, and, apparently in one case, a teen has chosen to deal with the bullying by committing suicide.

And all of this has an exceptionally personal meaning for me as I read, since last evening, Steve and I took one of my family members to our local PFLAG group, and in doing so, we saw all over again and at close hand, how imperative groups like PFLAG are in areas like ours, where the churches not only often fail to provide any healing space for families struggling with these issues, but even take an active role in inflicting more pain.

As I've noted in several recent postings, my family is walking through a difficult patch lately, and this has to do with a family member's struggle to deal with gay-identity issues.  I can't really say more until I'm confident that those more closely involved want that kind of exposure.

And because the pain of this emergence process is intense for several of my family members closest to the situation, Steve and I have been trying to offer support in various ways, and thought of PFLAG as a resource for one family member who is especially distraught now.  We have gone to PFLAG meetings here in the past and know the group is among the best places in our area to find the kind of understanding, healing people our family member needs.

And so, this morning I read Valerie Schultz's essay after having just sat through an evening in which people shared exceedingly painful stories within a group of loving, supportive people, many of them dealing with their own struggles: stories about a child coming out as gay in a local middle-school and being subjected to bullying; about a spouse and parent who made the painful decision to come out to a spouse and children several years ago; about a daughter who came out as a lesbian and then died tragically, and about her mother's choice at that point to be a mother to other young people through PFLAG.

And a recurring theme all evening long: this is the South.  The churches are a big part of the problem: 

When I left Los Angeles and came here, my father, who was raised in Houston, told me he was very frightened for me.  He grew up in the South and he knows how mean people can be.

Some day, I'll tell you what happened when I told my grandmother I was a lesbian.  For now, let me just say that the scene involved a bible, fire, and a grapefruit.

The recurring motif of last night's meeting: we cannot find in most of our church communities what we find here.  Love.  Acceptance.  Healing.  A chance to be who we are and to celebrate who God has made us to be.

And all of this makes me read Valerie Schultz's reflections with a strong sense of pain at the struggle in her own soul--the struggle to affirm a beloved daughter while remaining connected to a church many of whose members tell her that this affirmation is an abdication of her responsibility as a Catholic parent.  And that toxic viewpoint--tell your daughter she's a sinner! put Truth ahead of love!--is predictably reflected in several of the comments following Schultz's posting.

I'm thinking, too, of a bright, mercy-filled young African-American lesbian at last night's PFLAG meeting, who got up from her seat when she saw the mother whose gay child is being bullied begin to cry, got tissues for her, put her arms around the mother: I'm thinking of this young woman this morning as I read Alvin McEwen's blog posting today about how the battle within the African-American community and African-American churches tears the souls of black gays and lesbians in half.

McEwen is writing about the role the black church (and the Catholic church, through local bishops and the National Organization of Marriage) played in Maryland recently in blocking marriage equality.  As I noted several days ago, Maggie Gallagher of NOM was already crowing, even some days before the bill for marriage equality died, about how successful her well-financed Catholic group has been at driving an ugly wedge between some African-American people of faith and their LGBT brothers and sisters.

McEwen notes that the most destructive effects of all when black churches turn their backs on those who are gay and lesbian occur in the lives of African-American gays and lesbians--who experience a ripping apart of their souls as their own community repudiates them in the name of God.

And that's, of course, precisely, what Valerie Schultz is also describing as a Catholic mother.  And so as I read, I ask all over again, What, in the name of God, do followers of Jesus imagine they're doing these days, spreading so much pain around over these issues?

And calling that a good a holy thing to do.

P.S. If anyone needs information about PFLAG, there's a link to the organization's website in the list of sites I recommend on this blog.

P.P.S. When I read a Catholic writing to a sister Catholic--in this case, to Valerie Schultz--the following at the America posting to which I link above, I'm baffled all over again that America can censor postings of Catholics pushing back against this mean-spirited nonsense, and still let the venomous nonsense stand in these threads: "The Church teaches....it's a mental disorder needing treatment, not political/ideological agenda driven praise."  

Please keep in mind my primary point in highlighting this statement: this is a fellow Catholic telling a mother that her church requires her to view her daughter's God-given nature as "a mental disorder needing treatment."

How we get from Micah's (and Jesus's) call to view our primary religious obligation as doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God--how we get from Micah and all the prophets and Jesus to such astonishing meanness, I have yet to understand.  Astonishing meanness in the name of God! 

And perhaps I'm mistaken, but I also thought America had a policy requiring posters at these blog threads to sign their full names.  Why doesn't this John do so?