An open letter to Alan Chambers

In case you hadn't heard, the head of the nation's largest "ex-gay" ministry, Exodus International, announced that they would be closing its doors and offered an apology to the LGBT community for the damage they caused. You can watch the video below if you haven't seen it. 

For those of you who don't know, a friend of mine committed suicide after six months in a ministry affiliated with Exodus.  After mulling it over for two days, I felt the need to speak. I originally wrote this for an acquaintance, and now I am passing it on here.

~~Jackrabbit

---

Dear Mr. Chambers:

 Last night I read your apology after Exodus International shut its doors, and I was surprised at my ambivalence. For almost seven years I wanted to have this conversation with you. I have screamed at you in my mind in church. I have sparred with your shadow in my prayers and fought with you in my sleep. In the face of all the things I thought I would have wanted to say in this moment, I find that my anger is gone. The Lord, ever the reconciler, has long since settled the cold war between you and I; you are no longer the bogeyman I made you in my mind, and that has left me confused.

Instead of all the things I once wanted to say, I feel I have to tell you about James-- lean, lonely James, with the ice blue eyes and Jude Law good looks. His nervous, ecstatic energy, an infectious smile and irresistible charm. Manic as hell. An addictive personality that clung to things like static, cracked blue sparks at a touch. Like everything else in James' life, he craved God in ways only drowning victims comprehend: the cold, burning logic that says fill your lungs, swallow in the breath of Life or die. He was something to behold.

Six Things My LGBTA Taught Me about the Gospel, part 1

SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING 

FOR THE STAUNCHLY SECULAR: 

This post gets kind of preach-y at other Christians.   

Proceed with the Jesus talk at your own discretion.

So: this year marks the start of my third year with the LGBTA as the random, straight evangelical who hangs out with them at meetings.  Usually, when I talk to other Christians about why I'm there, they think that I'm walking among my gay brothers and sisters from some moral high ground and I'm giving them moral instruction.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  The fact is that they have taught me more about how to be a Christian than I think I ever did in my six years in the SBC.

It's not that I didn't learn a lot about God in the SBC; they supported me through my first years as a believer, and though their higher organization grieves me a lot, they still deserve some credit (or blame?) for making me who I am.  It's just that I learned more about this whole Gospel thing by walking with my gay friends than I ever did by running with the holy rollers.
 I have learned some great lessons from the wonderful people of my Appalachian chapter of the LGBTA, the outreach center on campus, and especially one specific professor, who is one of the coolest people on my campus and a good friend.  And so, let me share a few of those lessons with you.  So, if you're not of a particularly religious bent, feel free to skip this post, and I'll see you in a week or two.  Here we go!

1.  Jesus came to save the world from the religious.  So should we.  

My Six Whole Seconds As a Lesbian

Okay, so over the last weekend I was at a conference in Atlanta to participate in a panel about my friend's dissertation project (because I was one of her data sources) and catch some panels on social justice and the composition classroom.  Last Thursday, as two of my buddies and myself pulled into town, I was a weary, exhausted, nervous wreck.  And I hadn't eaten since 11 AM.  By the time I had checked in to our massive, creepy-looking hotel (I felt like I was standing inside a giant pink ribcage like in the end of Pinocchio) and actually found my room, I had missed every dinner invitation and was starving.  Actually, I had low blood sugar and was about to become a dizzy pile of goo. 

I didn't have a clue about where to find food, but as I was stumbling out the door to find something, anything to eat, I ran into my friend "Althea."  She was just getting back from one of the dinner invites I had missed.  She saw my glazed eyes and took over.  "We have to get you some food fast," she said, and she grabbed me by the arm and marched me out the door.

Now, there's something you should know about both myself and "Althea."  I grew up as an incurable tomboy and to this day don't really like dressing up "femmy," so to speak.  My hair is currently an inch and a half long.  Even on a day I dress up I can run the risk of "slipping under the gaydar," so to speak. On that night I was in travel clothes: blue jeans, hoodie, and my old, comfy Doc Marten's combat boots.   "Althea," in contrast, is old Southern society and was raised to be a debutante.  She was dressed in a sun dress and her "rhetorical pearls," as she likes to call them, and she'd had one mimosa too many at dinner.  On our way into the nearest takeout place-- a pub, as it turned out-- Althea clung to my arm, just a little tipsy, and chatted amicably nonstop.  I didn't think a darn thing about it, honestly.  This is just who Althea is.

We ordered my food and walked out of the bar again, but this time I was getting really woozy from lack of food, so Althea grabbed my arm again to keep me upright.  She put her head on my arm for a second.  At that moment, I looked up at one of the patrons sitting at the bar.  He was watching us.  Then he gave me "the look."  He glared at us like we weren't human.

At that exactly that same moment, Althea giggled and blurted out, "I love you, Jackrabbit!"  That look on his face intensified to something like pure hate.  Even though I was a bit dizzy, I immediately decided to "own" it.  I gave him a nasty smile and tromped out the door with my "girlfriend" on my arm.  I don't really know if Althea had noticed, and I sure wasn't going to tell her.  Pearls or no pearls, she would have seriously gotten in his face for doing that.

I didn't have time to think about it until I had some food in my stomach and could finally think straight.  On the one hand, it's not like people haven't "wondered" about the girl who likes to wear boots and pick up frogs before.  I'm used to speculation, and I never cared; I know who I am, and I'm comfortable being the butch-y straight girl.  What was different was the value judgment that came attached this time.  That look was a complete rejection of me as a human being.  It made me feel a little naked and totally pissed off.  Nobody, nobody has the right to judge like that, I fumed. 

And then I wondered what it would be like to feel that feeling for every single day of your life as an LGBT person. My mind was a little blown.  It's one thing to know something mentally and something else entirely to feel it. And, in a weird way, I was kind of thankful that, for my six seconds, I had just a tiny taste of what it's like so I could better understand what my friends are facing. 

A day later, I was slouched on a couch next to the pool with my frind "Pam," and I told her this same story while Althea was soaking her feet in the shallow end.  "How on earth do you respond to something like that?" I asked her.  "Pam," who's married and ex-roller derby, also knew what I was talking about; she got a wicked grin on her face.

"There's only way to respond, Jackrabbit," she told me.  "You answer, back, 'I love you too, babe.'  Then you waltz out the door." I cackled at the mental image. 

Ya know what?  She was right.  I don't think it could have been any more appropriate than that. 

Prairie Fires and Cannon-Fodder

Being another day in the life of a straight, conservative, evangelical fledgling LGBT activist...

Do you ever get really bizarre dreams when you're really preoccupied with something? I usually only get weird dreams when I eat pizza right before bed, but anyhow...

I had the strangest dream the other night.  I was somewhere on my college campus in the middle of a massive, angry protest, and I ducked inside a storefront of some kind after the demonstrations turned violent.  Things seemed safer inside, but then everything was filled with the sound of shattering glass as the protesters hurled some sort of heavy projectiles through the windows.  I took refuge in a side hallway to avoid getting hit.  

I saw one of the missiles rolling down the floor near me.   I picked it up and unscrewed the top to see what was inside.  It was full of ground-up pennies and old screws.  Suddenly, the whole contraption under my hands burst into flames like a Molotov cocktail, and I kicked it out a door into the open quad stretching between the four different wings of the brick building.  That's when I realized that I was standing in M______ Hall, in the new LGBT outreach center here on my campus.

Anyhow, the flaming bomb rolled against the big magnolia tree and caught the entire side of the building on fire.  I flew to the next wing of the building looking for a fire extinguisher; in my head I knew that the rioters were on the other side of the building, but now they seemed miles away.  Even the sound of the conflagration was quiet, even peaceful.  When I looked wildly around the hallway for the extinguisher, an old, bearded man sat in the foyer of the building on an old couch.  He was completely unconcerned by all the chaos.   

"Where's the fire extinguisher?"  I shrieked in panic.  "Everything's catching fire..."
"We don't have one," he drawled.  In my dream, I felt my heart skip.  My mind was still full of rioters and flames and panic.   
"What do you mean you don't have one?  Every damn floor in this building is supposed to have a fire extinguisher," I yelled.  That old man didn't even bat an eye at my mounting panic but glanced at me curiously. 

Why are you so worried? his eyes said to me.  That's about when I woke up, for my husband was trying to get me out of bed to get ready for church.

---

So, obviously, my weird dreams are just a symptom of me trying to work out in my sleep what's been worrying me when I'm awake.  I had spent the last week in some pretty heavy negotiations with my minister buddies and the LGBT center grad student over my presence in the LGBT community.  I've made some rather big plans.  And I'm terrified that they're going to cause a firestorm with the LGBT Powers That Be and the more conservative campus ministers at my university. 

It started with my minister friend.  After our Tuesday prayer group I told him that I was considering volunteering at the LGBT center over the summer.  I knew exactly why I wanted to do it.  I wanted to be useful to my friends in the gay community for a change.  The center was a great place to meet people in a setting that didn't require them to to put on a persona.  And, I wanted to demonstrate goodwill to the administrators of the center.  The goal of this is that I want to start up a non-invasive spiritual study for the members where they can start to heal from their victimization by Christians, and I want to start slowly immersing some curious evangelicals into the LGBT culture so they can get to know them as human beings instead of just a sin category.  That's how I want to start a quiet reconsideration of what their denomination has taught them about what it means to be gay. 

My minister friend was really ambivalent about it:

"I don't know, I think you're crossing the line between ministering to the lost and promoting," he answered.  I'm pretty used to comments like that.  In our circles, it's okay to love gay people as long as you make it very, very obvious that you disagree with their "lifestyle."  Whatever. My minister friend knows better, too, but old habits die hard.

"It's not like I'll be standing at the door handing out condoms," I replied.  "I'd just be there to keep the  door open for the students and answer the phone."  

"But, why?  What are your goals?"  he insisted.  After some pretty intense discussion about sexuality, culture, and my opinion on what exactly "promoting" meant, I told him, "Look, there's only one word in the LGBT community for a straight person, and that's 'Ally.'  I have to take that seriously."  He cautiously agreed with me.  But he was still a little worried.  

My next stop, the following day, was to meet with "Andy," one of the two ministers who had helped me with the street-preacher protest.  We had a long, long conversation.  It has been neat to see "Andy" grow into the idea of laying down the traditional Christian defenses to just minister to gay people's needs like everyone else.  Actually, he's actually grown rather passionate about it.  "Torben" was out for the afternoon, so Andy and I had a long chat on our own.

"So, what do you think about volunteering?"  I asked "Andy."  He shrugged.  
"Honestly, Jackrabbit?  You have to open yourself up to the possibility of making mistakes.  You're in uncharted waters.  If this is your conviction and it's wrong, you'll learn later.  But if it's what you think you need to do, you can't be afraid to do it." 

He didn't see the need to necessarily volunteer at the center for what I wanted to do, but he was fine with the idea nonetheless.  Wow.  A year ago that would have been unthinkable.  

So, the real problem came on Thursday, when I met up with someone associated with the center.   
"Luke" is a great guy--  he's an ally like me, a Christian even.  At the time we met, the first anniversary party for the center was underway, and we were crushed on every side by cake, people, and balloons.  Everything was a swirl of merry, merry chaos. 

I shared with him all the things I had been thinking about doing, but when I got excited about the possibility of some kind of safe Christian/LGBT interaction, he pulled me aside.  "There's something you need to know," he said gravely.  Then he told me that two of the directors of the center, X and Y, were "extremely tired of the Christian/LGBT connection," he said.  What he meant was that X and Y were so sick of covert evangelism and judgment underneath Christian outreach that they didn't want to have anything to do with anything that smacked of Christianity. 


I was now starting to feel like I was just setting myself up as a giant target for the wrath of X.  She would instantly think I'm some kind of missionary "plant" in her program, and since she's very much a momma bear like me, I have no doubt that she would "protect" her gay college students from me accordingly.   It occurred to me that I was dealing with a cultural war much larger than myself, and that I was stepping out into the DMZ to call for a truce before the two sides had even put down their rifles.  If I wasn't careful, this could make things very, very ugly for my campus.  I could be kindling a reconciliation between my two favorite communities-- or I could be throwing a Molotov cocktail into the center of them, blasting out an irreversible hole between them.  Which is it?

To put it a differeht way, not all prairie fires need to be put out.  The slow-moving fires clear out the dead to make way for the living; they feed the land what it craves.   But some fires, the really devastating ones, can't be stopped once they start burning.  All you can do is sit on the next hill and watch the wind play havoc with the flames and turn the world turn to ash.

So, after my dream, here's the real question: in the midst of this cultural war, which fire am I really afraid of starting?

Advocate article by Greg Pierotti on TLP and "10 Years Later"

In the middle of all this personal angst about how the members of Tectonic related to the larger Laramie community, I nevertheless feel a certain amount of personal connection to two of its members: Stephen Belber and Greg Pierotti.  Perhaps it is because these two writers and actors of Tectonic Theater have both been willing to lay bare their own experiences with Laramie, their struggles and mistakes, and how the play still haunts them.  Maybe that's also the reason I've found it so hard to find a similar personal connection with Kaufman.  In contrast to Belber and Pierotti, Kaufman usually positions himself as the artistic theorist or architect, and perhaps that distant, forensic persona makes it harder for me to relate to him.

In any case, if you want to see why I tend to sympathize with Pierotti, he has a great article in the Advocate you should really check out.  In a real sense, the first article is telling his own story, and how Matthew Shepard and researching TLP changed his life.  The series ballooned into, so far, a seven-part exploration of the two plays as the company prepared to put both on tour last fall, and the whole thing is a fantastic read.  You can get Pierotti's perspective on everything from how the Tyler Clementi story relates to TLP to safety on college campuses to the problem of making snap judgments-- about gays and lesbians, but also about Christians, and he's very up front with where his own snap judgments lead to.  Please forgive me if I label the whole series a "must read." For those who want to see how Tectonic-- in this case, Pierotti's view, at least-- sees the world, it's quite valuable.  And it will challenge your assumptions about Tectonic Theater and the way they operate. The links to all seven parts are below! 

On the Road with Laramie, Part 1-- August 10, 2010
On the Road with Laramie, Part 2-- August 25, 2010
On the Road with Laramie, Part 3-- September 14, 2010
On the Road with Laramie, Part 4-- October 6, 2010
On the Road with Laramie, Part 5-- October 18, 2010
On the Road with Laramie, Part 6-- Jan 11, 2011
On the Road with Laramie, Part 7-- February 8, 2011

Interesting developments in the Kato case...

Not to harp on current events, but there's been an interesting development in the local coverage of the murder of Ugandan activist David Kato. It makes me think back to a certain 20/20 special with Elizabeth Vargas, actually.  The very beginning of the article briefly characterizes his death as an "iron bar" robbery, but it mainly focuses on Kato as "evil gay person," in a sense justifying his death as a consequence of his personal life.  The international outcry is simply dismissed. 

The piece is being run by the Uganda Daily Monitor, and their newest piece is called "Unmasking David Kato."  It crossed my radar because at least one of their sources is publicly decrying the paper for completely falsifying information-- the blogger GayUganda.  Apparently, the paper took a trip to his blog for information, and GayUganda is crying foul.   To make matters even worse, Kenyan papers are picking up the same information and spreading the story across international borders. Actually the post from the Daily Nation seems much worse than the Monitor story to me. 

GayUganda reports that he's unsure what to do about the libel in this case.  I'll be interested to see what he decides to do, but  in any case, it's interesting... 

Arguing with the Voices in My Head

This is Bart Ehrman. I found him to be a
human being, contrary to popular opinion.

So, there is an event that has been weighing heavily on my mind recently, and it's keeping me from studying on my exam.  A week ago Thursday I was in our university auditorium setting up my camera to take pictures for a Bart Ehrman talk.  (Sometimes I think I must be the most tolerant evangelical in the world.  The pictures were a personal favor for a professor.)  I roped my minister friend into helping me set up beforehand, and we chatted quietly as he helped me get the tripod leveled:

"Did you hear about Uganda?"  He asked me.
"No," I answered with a grunt.  "What's up?"
"Some gay rights activist was killed today, and people are blaming Christian missionaries for it..." 
"Who was it?  What was his name?"  I asked, and my minister friend just shrugged; he couldn't remember.  I leaned over onto the empty tripod to kill the nausea rising in my stomach.  I was pretty sure I knew who the victim was before I checked the news reports later that night-- it had to be David Kato. I grimaced in rage. 
"...Maybe I shouldn't have told you," my friend answered, and I shrugged it off for the moment.  We had to finish setting up. 

 I watched Ehrman laugh through my camera lens while I checked the lighting and he shared some gossip with the facilitators.  His lightheartedness against my anger made me feel like were on two different planets.  I had to mentally check out of much of the lecture to sort through what my minister friend had told me, which made me feel bad.  Ehrman was an earnest, likeable fellow in his own way, and he treated me very well; I just had other things to think about.  

 If you've never heard of him, David Kato Kisule was a remarkable and troubled human being.  A Uganda native, he had worked hard on a local, national, and international level to improve the lot of an LGBT population routinely denied even basic rights in a nation where well over 90% of the population strongly disapprove of homosexuality.  He proved to be a vocal and stubborn representative for Ugandan gays, and that openness left him constantly threatened, battered, and harassed.  And, in spite of the psychological toll, he continued. 

The political wildfire started a little while ago when a few fundamentalist groups whom I rather dislike held a conference in Kampala about the so-called "homosexual agenda" and protecting the society.  After meetings with two of the conference organizers, particularly Scott Lively [oh, barf it's the Pink Swastika guy], the legislature proposed a bill to marginalize the gay population even more: prison time for gay marriage, restrictions on housing, and allowing the death penalty to those gays labeled especially "pernicious."  The international community cried foul; activists helped fuel the outrcy against it, and the bill was tabled.

David Kato, from Uganda.  He was also a human being, contrary to popular opinion.

About four months ago, Kato's picture showed up on a local paper's front page as part of a huge campaign to "out" people.  His picture, name, and personal information were all included-- with a hundred other people's-- under a banner that read "hang them."  Kato and two others filed suit against the paper's editor for invasion of privacy and won.  He only had time to celebrate their legal victory for about three weeks before his friends found him dead.  He was beaten with a hammer.   I love that newspaper editor's response to Kato's death: "When we called for hanging of gay people," he protested, "we meant ... after they have gone through the legal process...  I did not call for them to be killed in cold blood like he was." Well, gee, mister, I guess that makes things all better, doesn't it? 

So, yes, I was disheartened to hear of Kato's death.  But there is something about this story that resonates deep in my bones.  It's not necessarily the brutality or the links to Christian terrorism that bother me  (although I want to give Lively and a few radical ministers a kick in the head).

What bothers me is that David Kato Kisule died in a land of red earth. The words I hear coming from that land of red earth are echoing the voices in my head from when I was nineteen.  I know what those words led to in my own red-soiled land, and I don't like it. I hear the echo and want to argue back. 

I mean, listen to the narrative here:  An out gay male from a culture suspicious of gays is found bludgeoned with a blunt object.  The police focus on two suspects.  At the murdered man's funeral, a preacher goes on a homophobic rant, and the mourners try to block him from the proceedings.  One of the two suspects, when arrested, pulls out a "gay panic" defense.  A certain part of the religious community uses his death to rant about the "gay agenda," and the LGBT community organizes in response.  The international community intervenes, but a lot of people treat the problem like it's "way out there" and not their problem.  And in the end, the larger straight community is unsure what to do, personally and legislatively, in response.  Many of them then call the killing a robbery gone bad.

With a change of location, this narrative could just as easily be about Matt Shepard, and I personally am concerned with how much that past tragedy is scripting others now.  I mean, let's compare notes:   (WARNING: Lively is beyond offensive.  Read at your own risk!) 

Giles Muhame, editor of the paper sued for outing gays: 
"When we called for hanging of gay people, we meant ... after they have gone through the legal process," said Giles Muhame. "I did not call for them to be killed in cold blood like he was."  (source: CNN)

Scott Lively:
"It has since been reported by the New York Times that the local police do not believe this was a hate crime but a robbery. This has not deterred the Times, and the rest of the "mainstream" media from using this crime to advance the "gay" narrative that all disapproval of homosexuality leads invariably to violence and murder of homosexuals. This is propaganda, not journalism and it is a false premise."  (source: bleh.)

Okay, now compare it to these regarding the Shepard incident...

 Fred Phelps:
"You don't kill anybody.  Not just you don't kill a fag, you don't kill anybody, because our laws prohibit it.  But that's not what's going on here.  this has become a cause célèbre for the "gay agenda..." (source: NPR)

Scott Lively (again):
"Matthew Shepard was just another self-identified “gay,” but on October 12, 1998, he was murdered by two men. He wasn’t killed because he was a homosexual, it was a matter of robbery. And the robbers obviously weren’t Christians. However, the timing was right for the “gay” scheme, and so Matthew Shepard became the new martyr of the homosexual movement: a symbol of “gay” victim hood at the hands of the evil Christians." (source: *gag*)

It's kind of fascinating to watch David's story follow such a similar form as Matt's, and especially the way that the story's being framed.  It also makes me a little nauseous because it makes me wonder how much that previous narrative might help push international discourse in the same direction. How much has Matt Shepard's story set the terms of discourse for incidents like these?  And, is there anything we can do about it?

There is one narrative in particular that I noticed, too, but I'll let the blogger Gay Uganda explain.  He has been trying to sift through the news to understand what is going on in the Kato case:

Have just heard it on Capital FM. Apparently, the guy who was staying in David's place, the guy who was working for him has been arrested. At Mukono Police station at the moment.

And, from what I heard, he has confessed to the murder, reporting that Kato forced him into having sex, so he killed him.

True, false, I don't know?...

...yeah, in Uganda, putting the blame on the big bad homosexual works all the time. [Homosexuals] are evil, they are bad, they are terrible. They deserve hanging.

So, I killed him because he attacked me, or he made advances. Homosexual advances. So, I hit him twice with a hammer...

Gay Panic Defense? I believe that is what it is called. And, in Uganda, we [gays] are so vilified, it can work. Terrible as it seems. That is a fact.

Gay Uganda (who also lives in Kampala) is recognizing a pattern within the Kato murder investigation, and "gay panic" is the phrase he settles on to define the way that authorities or perpetrators shift blame to the gay victim and justify their victimization.  When Matt died, his murderer called it "gay panic."  The name, at least, stuck.  But does the influence go no further?  I hope not.  I hope McKinney didn't serve as a role model for such dreck. 

Then there's the robbery narrative, which both the Kampala police and Scott Lively put forward.  Lively has long been involved in the Laramie story because he has long harassed and mocked the LGBT movement.  Not long after Matt's murderers were tried, Lively stuck his nose into the debate and had the temerity (or the insanity) to compare Matt's rise in the media world to how the Nazis adopted Horst Wessel as an icon.  (Oooh, Nazis.  Way to jump the shark there, Scotty.) At the same time, he also blamed Matt's murder on a simple robbery.  Not surprisingly, that's the exact same excuse he used to distance himself from his direct complicity in the Kato murder.  He went to Kampala to fuel this kind of homophobic outrage; whether Kato was a direct victim or collateral damage of his hate campaign is simply a matter of degree regarding his guilt.  It's like he's turned this into his M.O. anytime somebody says he's complicit for the results of the violence-laden homophobia he preaches. 

And, so: where are we now?  It's an interesting puzzle, but it's one that I'm a little too partial to consider correctly.  Of course I see shadows of Matt everywhere; his absence is burned into my memory like a cut-up photograph.  And yet, the story we all tell about his murder has obviously shaped the discourse on gay rights, homophobia, and violence.  What has that narrative contributed to this new story of a Ugandan activist beaten to death just three weeks after he won a suit in court?  Perhaps the Shepard murder's legacy is inscribed in our language, with terms "gay panic" or "gay agenda."  Maybe that narrative has lent us narrative schemas that the culture at large now uses to make sense of similar issues.  Or, maybe Scott Lively has simply found a cheap, dirty way to eschew any responsibility for the human casualties of his hatred and ignorance.

On the whole, the David Kato story isn't like Matt's much at all.  Kato died in a city of over a million people, in his own home.  He was possibly murdered by a man living under his own roof.  At the moment, nobody is really sure what happened or whether to trust the main suspect's confession.  Kato lived in a society with much more than a homophobic subtext; it's the majority opinion.  And, as much as I try to downplay the religious role in my own community, the direct involvement of Christian fundamentialism in Uganda is clearly making people suffer.  It's all really a matter of where you focus, and how you read the signs.

So: did Matt change the way we talk about hate crimes and homophobia?  Is it for good or for ill?  Or, am I just seeing part of a much older narrative of violence and denial?  Has the Laramie murder unwittingly developed a strategy for nay-sayers to ignore LGBT suffering? 

I don't know.  I just don't know where to go with this.  Any suggestions out there???


NOTES:
If you're interested in following David Kato's story, there are some great sites out there from African sources you can follow:

Gay Uganda: a gay blogger from Kampala who was familiar with Kato:
http://gayuganda.blogspot.com

Behind the Mask: an African organization providing LGBT news, resources, and activism:
http://www.mask.org.za

Gay Rights Uganda: Just what it sounds like:
http://www.gayrightsuganda.org/

---

PHOTO CREDIT:

1)   Bart Ehrman, by me. 
2)   David Kato Kisule, from Abolire la miseria della Calabria, via Flickr.
3)   A NYC protester of the Uganda anti-homosexuality law, from the International Women's Health Coalition, via Flickr.

The Airing of Grievances, Charge 2

Being the First Part, 
Regarding the Straw and the Plank

A couple of years ago, my Ph. D program requirements led me to take a class on composition and ethnography with our program director.  Part of the requirements of the class was to do a short qualitative analysis on some kind of literacy topic, and if there's one thing I've figured out from going through the rigmarole of IRB supervision and preparing for a qualitative study, it's that you should always distrust the self.

 That may sound paranoid, but it makes a lot of sense for a discipline that requires the researcher to observe and interact with people or cultures.  If you are an outsider, you might have different values or ways of understanding that hamper your ability to understand what's valuable or important in the culture you study.  You might not know what to look for beneath the surface.  If you grew up with the people or cultures you're studying, however, sometimes that can give you blind spots or make you reluctant to draw negative conclusions.  Both of these possibilities require the researcher to stop, look at their own motives and cultural values, and understand that those worldviews or personal experiences will color their observations. 

Hell, let's be honest-- the first nine months of this blog were basically just a really, really long bracketing interview to hash out my motives for studying this play.   The last thing I can do is just assume that I've got it all figured out and that I'm completely on the clear because I never am.   I always have motives.   I always have to accept that objectivity is impossible for me due to my personal connection to the play and events, and the best I can do is to mistrust my own conclusions and force myself to look at all the angles.  And I will still screw up.  
 
And so, how does this apply to Tectonic Theater?  Some of them (like Stephen Belber) show themselves to be pretty ambivalent and angsty about this process, and boy, do I appreciate that; it means they're concerned about their relationship to their interviewees.  Nevertheless, I think that, as a company, sometimes they believe in their mission so much that they just know what they're doing is the right thing.  That's where maybe they slipped up a little when it came to giving a full, well-rounded portrayal of Laramie: they immediately saw the right answer and ran with it. 

And so, I would like to proceed to the second charge in the Airing of Grievances, which is related to the first:

2.  Failure to Maintain Self-Loathing

Okay, so that's a little harsh, but "Failure to Maintain Self-Referentiality" or "Failure to Bracket" just sounded too academic.  Basically, I'm just saying that maybe they believed in their mission a little too much or didn't stay suspicious enough of their own motives to question if they were getting too focused on the wrong thing.  So, here we go, and let's see what we find-- just remember, ladies and gents, to keep a healthy self-doubt about your view of western culture and Tectonic's motives, too! 

*          *            *

Good Riddance, DADT...

Photography by Jason Pier, at: www.jasonpier.com.

Well, it's finally happened-- and not via the courts as I expected.  After a wacky year of bizarre surveys, court decisions and President O seemingly backing off on his campaign promises, and John McCain having a conniption fit, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" might finally become legislative history.  CNN is reporting that the Senate voted by a margin of nearly two to one to end the military policy.  Although it rather shames me to know that the bill would have failed after the lame duck session was over, I am quite grateful to the eight Republicans in the Senate and the fifteen in the US House who voted for it.

Was this a "Hail Mary pass" like the Washington Post said?  Sure it was.  The bill is less than two weeks old.  Does the bill contain some compromises?  Yes.  But, when the smoke cleared, the decision that most people could see was the right conclusion happened.   

What I find especially interesting, however, is how the news sites are covering the vote.  For two examples, you can see CNN and Fox News' coverage at the two links above.  I especially like how each of them frames the names of the eight Republican senators who voted for the measure. 

I'm sad about the DREAM Act and that Republicans are too worried about the "message" the bill sends to make a humanitarian gesture to kids who didn't have any choice over coming to the States legally.  But, hey, I'll take progress where I can get it!

Oh, and I'm typing this post less than ten feet from my in-laws, who very much don't support the repeal.  Especially my ex-Marine father-in-law, who means well but can only compare Marine culture to his own experience in the sixties and seventies.  I don't think he understands how much of a non-issue this is for my generation and younger.  Yay, fun!

PHOTO CREDIT:  Jason Pier, who provided this photo via a Creative Commons License.  You can see his entire Flickr photostream here.  

Oh, Manhattan Declaration, you unruly thing...

Good grief, Steve Jobs, do not make me have to stick up for the freaking Manhattan Declaration...

Okay, so CNN's Belief blog is reporting that Apple had removed the Manhattan Declaration's app for iPhone from their app store, citing complaints about the offensiveness of the content.  (Well, gee, I never would have seen that one coming.)  The main issue, it seems, is a quiz you can have your friends take to show your Manhattan awesomeness or something by asking if you're against gay marriage and whatnot. 

Supporters of the Manhattan Declaration, naturally, are pitching a fit. Oh, and they've also started a petition, as it turns out.   Right now it's only got about 40,000 signers, so it might go somewhere.
Maybe. 

Okay, so on a serious note, I really don't like this due to the issues of free religious speech surrounding it.  Sure, I don't care for the Manhattan declaration one bit.  (you can see me rant about it even more here and here.)  But this is dealing with speech specifically protected by the Constitution.  Besides, the App store has tons of religious apps, from a compass that will help me determine the direction of Mecca to Ba'hai commentaries to a complete Catholic liturgy I can run on my iPod (I almost bought that, actually.)   Some of the apps I see in this category I find just as annoying as the Manhattan Declaration.  So, why single out an app that's specifically designed to be a free declaration of a person's beliefs about their faith and its intersections with culture?  (Well, it's a squeaky wheel issue, of course.  That's a rhetorical question I guess.)

Apple Inc. has never really shown itself to be a huge proponent of free speech-- rather, they are usually more proponents of huge profits, and in order to do that, they tend not to stir the muck.  Sure, I didn't complain too much when they discontinued the "Wobble" app and limited other sexually explicit content.  But then again, there wasn't such a clear component of protected speech about that one, either.  Apple reserves the right to oust content they determine to be "widely offensive," but, come on-- stating one's moral opposition is not inherently offensive.  And I'm even saying that as a strong opponent of the MD who has read the thing. 

And so, I find myself in a strange position now.  I'm all for free speech.  I'm especially for free religious expression, whether I like what others have to say or not.  On the one hand, Apple is a private corporation and they have the right to police content.  On the other hand, they are the only way to get apps onto an iPhone.  Their decision to discontinue, then, really moves into the realm of digital censorship at that point, and in my mind, that's where things get sticky. 

So, based on my personal beliefs... do I really have to stick up for the Manhattan Declaration??!?  Blech.  I'd feel like such a hypocrite...

That's one step for justice, one giant leap for Republicans!

CNN is reporting that US federal district judge Virginia Phillips ruled this afternoon to issue a worldwide ban on the enforcement of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in the US military, which is a major victory for LGBT groups.  The catch is that the military has 60 days to assess the ruling and decide whether or not they would like the Department of Justice to appeal.  You can see the entire injunction as a PDF here. CNN is also reporting that the ruling will probably be appealed in the next day or to because normal policy is to appeal all decisions which take down a Congressional decision. 

In any case, we have a couple of months to see if it's going to fall now or not, but DADT is very, very close to ending.  But do you know who's been driving this lawsuit for several years?  Log Cabin Republicans.   People within the same party which promoted anti-gay policies for years essentially crippled this massive piece of injustice.   

See, world?  Not all Republicans-- or conservatives-- suck.  No political party can "own" justice because justice is universal.

And appropriately enough, it was announced on October 12.  Maybe there's hope for my old political home after all.

Christians?! Speaking out against homophobic bullying??? AWESOME!

I don't know about you, but the recent rash of suicides of gay students in response to bullying really bothers me.  Sure, part of it is just the injustice of it, but after having dealt with the suicide of a gay friend under different circumstance, this is something I tend to take very, very seriously.  After what had happened to Tyler Clementi at Rutgers,  I was really quite encouraged to see how the students of Rutgers had come together to remember him and speak out against his treatment by his roommate. 

One of CNN's religion bloggers, Warren Throckmorton, has thrown down a sort of evangelical gauntlet in front of other Christians on the issue of anti-gay bullying, insisting that Christians need to apply the "Golden Rule" of Jesus to victims of anti-gay violence:  "Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets"  (Matt. 7:12).  (Personally, I'd point to the Great Commandment, which insists that we love our neighbor, just like we love ourselves. And upon that, and a love for God, hangs all the law, and all the prophets.) 

Obviously, with my own personal sentiments, this is an argument I find extremely timely for my faith community.  What I find particularly interesting is that Throckmorton holds traditional conservative views on homosexuality-- and yet he's still issuing this appeal:

"As a traditional evangelical, I may have some differences of opinion with my gay friends. However, such ideological differences don’t matter to a middle school child who is afraid to go to school."  

 That's a great place to start from, and it's a lot farther down the road to acceptance than a lot of my fellow evangelical Christians ever get.  I don't know how far we can actually get Christians down that road to acceptance-- but if we can accomplish just this one thing and realize we're not following Jesus' own commandments about loving one's neighbor like we love ourselves, and we can encourage evangelicals to speak out against anti-gay violence and bullying, we could make a huge impact on the injustices inflicted on the LGBT community, and that's nothing to scoff at.  I therefore salute you, Warren Throckmorton, as one Christian to another...

Big Gay Jim's Bigger, Gayer Blog

One of Matt Shepard's friends, Jim, still livesthere and runs a personal blog.  His blog's name makes me crack a smile every time I see it:  "Big Gay Jim's Bigger, Gayer blog."   As you can tell by the photo on the right, he was an Angel Action angel, and he's been deeply, deeply involved in Wyoming and GLBT activism since then.

I barely knew "Big Gay Jim" in college-- he was actually my boss at one point-- but he has about the quirkiest dang sense of humor of anyone I've ever met.  But that's beside the point.  His blog has some great first-hand stories about what he's been up to since 1998.

But it's a personal blog, y'all.  If you don't like personal blogs, it's probably not your cup of tea.  But he has a great perspective on the GLBT community in Wyoming and how it's been developing over the last ten years.  If you want a quick link to the relevant posts from the 10th anniversary of Shepard's death, just go through UW's online archive of Shepard materials, permanently linked and archived here.

Why conservative Constitutional values might just be great for gay marriage...

Okay, so even though I'm moving to the center and even left-of-center on a lot of social issues (and especially those important to the GLBT community), when it comes to Constitutional law I can't help but see the world through conservative-colored glasses.  It's just the sphere I was born in, and I really do think that if you give the Constitution a fair chance, it's going to uphold equality and equal justice for everyone.

With that in mind, I just read a really interesting report in the Metro Weekly about the two new federal court rulings regarding the state/federal conflict regarding gay marriage and domestic partnership benefits.  The two cases are Gill v. Office of Personnel Management and Massachusetts v. U.S. Dep't of Health and Human Services.   The Metro article naturally focuses on the violation of equal protection by the federal DOMA regulation, but there's another, much more interesting argument here they don't mention: the federal government doesn't have the right to regulate or define restrictions on covenants.  That's specifically in the rights of the state.  So, if the federal government has to pay pensions or benefits to same-sex marriage in a state that says that marriage can consist of same-sex couples, they can't do a thing about it.  They don't have the right do define the terms of that covenant; they just have to pay out. 

That's right: Conservative arguments about state's rights prevent a federal DOMA restriction that short-circuits the state's right to define contracts.  Sure, it means that you can't just pass a federal gay marriage statute to force equality, but it means that if you win the fight on the state level, it might just stick. And conservatives, if they're really good conservatives, can't really fuss about it. 

So... um, here's for state's rights!  Woo-hoo!

Eat Romaine! Romaine Patterson's official website

I can still remember the first time I met Romaine Patterson.  I was a freshman in high school, and I was competing in my first big speech meet in Powell, WY as an extemporaneous speaker.  Speech meets are pretty awesome places in Wyoming if you like teenage fringe culture: we had everything from bona fide conservative Young Republicans in their blue jackets, red power ties, and Maalox in their briefcases to punkers to to hippies to a Humor competitor who always wore a three-piece suit made of silver duct tape.  He had a duct tape fedora and wingtips, too.  Did I mention that?

Anyhow, I was on a real, live college campus, hanging around in the student union in between rounds in my event and pretending I was so cool, lounging on the couches and drinking my first honest-to-God Italian creme soda from the coffee kiosk.  (It was raspberry.  Oh yeah.)   Never mind the fact that I only weighed about eighty-five pounds and looked like a twelve-year old; I was at college, and it felt like heaven.  I was sitting about ten feet away from my coach/theater director Mr. "J" when two rambunctious girls, an orator and a poetry person, came trampling breathlessly into the lounge.

"Mr. J Mr. J, Mr. J, Mr. J!" one of the girls shrieked.  "You'll never guess what We! Just! saw!"  My coach's eyes bugged out in alarm.    
"What?!"  He asked.  Judging from the look on his face, I think he was expecting something that would require several fire trucks and at least one ambulance.  The two girls turned to each other and gaped, their eyes bulging.  
"LLLLESBIANS!" They gasped in unison.  Mr. J just about choked on his own amusement. Then the "lesbian" in question walked through the door in a black leather jacket,  and that was the first time I met Romaine Patterson.

 I always liked Romaine in high school, and we knew each other slightly.  When I introduced myself to her that afternoon, she quipped, "Hi, my name is Romaine.  Yes, like the lettuce," she continued with a mock eye roll and a grin. And with that she eternally won my approval. 

In any case, Romaine was always a talented actor and personality in high school, and it seems that part of her character has served her well.  Since Operation Angel Action, she's worked pretty tirelessly on the political activism scene, she wrote a book, and she has a job on Sirius satellite radio as a talk show host. 

She has a dedicated website that gives a lot of good information about her activism work, her take on Shepard's murder, and her life.  If you're interested, check out Eat Romaine  for information.  You'll discover that she's been up to a lot. 

Oh, but let me give you a quick heads-up...  Romaine's a pretty open lady-- meaning, there's a link to a store on the left-hand side for her favorite "love aids"  which is probably SFW but might garner you some pretty funny looks from your boss.  You've been duly warned.

http://www.eatromaine.com/

Uncivil unions: my five questions on gay marriage

Okay, so it was eventually going to happen that I would have to tackle this issue. When I go to church every Sunday in my evangelical Presbyterian church and go to LGBTA meetings every Monday, the whiplash was going to catch up to me eventually. The issue I'm really struggling with right now is what to do as a Christian, and as a social justice freak who loves the LGBT community, with the arguments swirling around about the topic of gay marriage.

So, four years ago I had no problem per se with limiting marriage as long as it was handled on the state level and it was done constitutionally.  I was a Christian, after all; at the time, I had a tough time delineating between following Christ and Christian culture, which meant that I didn't question what I had been taught about the morality of same-sex desire.  So when my home state in Appalachia put a marriage definition referendum on the ballot, the (Baptist) church I went to at the time pushed it pretty hard.  I was pretty ambivalent, honestly.  It seemed fishy, but who was I to argue?

When the time came to actually vote, I stared at that question on the ballot for a good five minutes, held my breath, and clicked the "Yes" button.  Then I spent the next six months feeling like an absolute jerk for doing it.  I just didn't think I could challenge the rest of the church on that issue, and I let the pressure push me into voting in a direction I didn't really have any conviction in.  I really regret that now. I should have realized that, if my church was pushing me to vote against my conviction, that maybe that's because something was wrong with the whole situation. 

Things have changed a lot in the last four years.  For one, I feel like I can stand up against the pressure from my church to start looking at the issue more critically.   My problem with limiting marriage now is that the only legitimate arguments I can come up with that hold any water are completely Biblical.  I can make the argument work for within the body of Christ if I actually want to, but I can't find a clear, logical argument for extending that outside into the larger social sphere.  If I can't come up with a clear, obvious reason to apply a law or rule to those outside of the Christian body, I become very reticent to force it upon a larger society who doesn't share my religious conviction.  I'm not a fan of Sabbath laws or liquor sales restrictions for that same reason. 

Next, the Manhattan Declaration keeps telling me about all the vast social ills that will invariably follow from allowing same-sex couples to marry, and I just don't buy it.  The argumentation just isn't there to support it.  So far, no single country has seen a rise in any of the "social ills" they're afraid of because they were already there; and if South Africa suddenly collapses in the next decade or so, it's certainly not going to be because they let gay people get married. It will be from a much larger complex of social problems which the government is trying to address but seems unable to resolve. 

As far as I can tell, the only thing wider society will lose with the adoption of gay marriage is an easy, clean definition they've always made between what we have deemed licit and illicit sex.  All of a sudden, we can't just push people to get married and make their sexual situation "okay" because now marriage can make sex between couples that we don't like "okay" as well.   Gay marriage, if anything, threatens the moral high ground of sexual conservatives by creating a category crisis.  First, we can no longer deny legal recognition of couples we don't really approve of to keep the "us" separate from "them."  That's the same reason miscegenation laws were so popular in the US for a long time too, you know, and those have been completely (and rightly) dismantled.  Secondly, it blurs the social distinction between the two.  When gays and lesbians suddenly become as domestic, sedentary, and monogamous as the rest of us...  how much harder is it to argue that they're immoral and disgusting? (And that's exactly the point, conservatives.  They're not.)

So, in short, this erstwhile conservative evangelical is having an extremely hard time justifying definition of marriage statutes in the United States, and right now, few people in the Christian community are helping me out.  I just keep hearing the same old flawed arguments about the collapse of society and the slippery slope.  And, strangely, I've discovered that I'm not the only evangelical to feel this way.  I keep running into scores of other people with the same problems with the Christian right's approach to gay marriage and civil unions, but right now we can't find anybody from our own community who can allay our concerns and convince us that defining marriage to exclude same-sex couples is right.  So my only recourse at this point is to conclude otherwise.

So, here are my five questions for the Manhattan Declaration crowd that need answered if you're going to get me to reconsider my opposition to definition-of-marriage statues and preference for full marriage benefits for all.  If you think you can actually answer these in a thoughtful, reasoned way with good logic and evidence, I would be very interested to hear what you have to say.

And if you're on the other side of this issue and can provide good arguments for gay marriage from within a Biblical framework, I would be very interested to hear from you, too.

All right, so my five problems are as follows:

Yarrrgh! *facepalm*

Being the day in the life of a straight, conservative, evangelical fledgling LGBT activist... who screws up.

Okay, so it's no real surprise that I absolutely hate pointless bureaucracy, especially in academia because sometimes we over-think things way too much and bury even simple little matters under a flood of paperwork.  But the power relations and power politics that go with those positions really pisses me off now and then, especially when they involve me.

So, there is an extremely important administrative process I need to get through for my grad work, and I've had an extremely hard time getting all that done before I run out of the state next week (because I am behind this summer, for a variety of reasons).  There's an administrator in a small but very important section of cubicle-land on my campus who has to review that paperwork and give her seal of approval for my department.  I was in her office last week getting some final clarification and turn in the last of my paperwork before I leave for three weeks and miss the deadline. 

So, this woman and I are chatting about my research, and eventually it turns to my research interest in The Laramie Project.  She seemed genuinely interested, so I told her about the plays and what they were about, and how in particular the GLBT community was affected by Matt's death.  At one point in the conversation, however, she pursed her lips at me disdainfully.

"Well, you know, they do bring a lot of that on themselves, you know," she said as she fiddled with the edges of my application on her desk.  I felt my eyes slit at her instinctively.
"Um, what do you mean?" I asked, a little too carefully.  Some serious outrage was welling up and I was trying to swallow it. 
"You know, by forcing it on us the way they do," she continued as she fiddled with my application.  "They just make things harder on themselves by causing trouble.  If they'd just lived their lives in quiet and didn't force it on the rest of us, then nobody would ever bother them." 

 Okay, I thought to myself, What does she seriously mean by that-- that gays and lesbians shouldn't be politically active?!  I had this overwhelming urge to start arguing with her, to explain to her how outrageously closed-minded that was.  How the hell do you justify blaming the victims of injustice for speaking up?  Would she blame the victims of the civil rights movement for picking up a placard and marching with MLK after Bull Connor sicked the dogs on them?! Besides, it's not true.  There are a lot of hate crimes that occur just because some jerk decides s/he wants to roll somebody, and the gay kid ends up being the target.   

In the end, I didn't say any of those things; I just squirmed in my seat like a beetle pinned to a card and felt completely powerless.  My paperwork was literally in her hands-- and if I pissed her off or suggested that she was perhaps that her perspective was a bit too narrow, my application might take even longer to get approval-- or never get approved at all.  So, instead, I just smiled blandly, and nodded, and suggested that perhaps it was a very hard decision for a person to have to choose between being open about who you are or being safe.  She didn't even bat an eye at me, and my pathetic little attempt to argue with her went unnoticed.  And I left her office feeling like a sellout.

So, I learned a few things this week.  First of all, just because you work in a Carnegie Research I institution doesn't make you an enlightened human being like intellectuals often think it does.  And, just because you have a moral conviction on something doesn't mean that you'll always have the spine to stand up for it when you're in a socially powerless situation.  I have friends that have lost jobs because of their moral convictions, and, hell-- I can't even be bothered to get caught up in a bureaucratic shuffle?!  Pah.

Man, I hate academia sometimes.  Almost as much as I hate myself right now.

Uncivil Unions: Rome is Falling

 Most of you have probably never heard of Paulus Orosius, but he's somebody I've studied extensively as a medievalist.  Orosius was a Spanish priest who played postmaster between Jerome and Augustine of Hippo in the fifth century, but he's mostly known in modern circles (when talked about at all) as the author of an enormous, bizarre history of the world starting with Adam and ending shortly after the sack of Rome.  According to Orosius, Rome was the fourth, and blessed, world kingdom, which God used to bring about the conversion of the world and subdue it for Christ.

In reality, it was a pretty untenable argument, but Orosius held onto that premise so doggedly that he eventually bent historical fact, logic, and Scripture itself to try and fit his theological bed of Procrustes.  For one, it leads him to argue a lot of silly things, like that the barbarian sack of Rome wasn't really a sack, or that Constantine (who wiped out a lot of his family) was a model of virtue.  His theology is absolutely terrible (Augustine pretty much tears it apart in City of God, Book 18), but its Christian-imperialistic vision appealed to the clerical masses-- so it stuck around as a fundamental text of the European middle ages and was even translated into Arabic.

Orosius was so convinced that God established the Roman Empire as the backbone of his new Christian order that he argued it was essential for Christian society to thrive on earth. So, if the Roman empire fell...? Hmm. Perhaps it's for the best that Orosius never lived long enough to see a barbarian king on the Roman throne and the dissolution of his beloved empire into little states run by Franks and Vandals. He'd have thought the world had gone to hell in a hand-basket.

So, I was morbidly interested to discover that the Manhattan Declaration invokes the same event, the presumed fall of Rome, in its Preamble:

After the barbarian tribes overran Europe, Christian monasteries preserved not only the Bible but also the literature and art of Western culture.

What's funny so about this is that it isn't really true.  Barbarian "tribes" didn't exactly "overrun" Europe; except for the Huns, a large part of them were already there, and the Romans pushed into them first.  And, a huge portion of the Burgundians, Franks and Goths were Roman federates, soldiers, or-- depending on whose articles you read-- Roman citizens.  The earliest copy of a non-Latin vernacular Bible is in Gothic.  And, in just a couple of generations those monasteries they mention are stocked with so-called "barbarians" copying out the Bible themselves, completely unaware they almost destroyed Western Civilization.  These barbarian invasions are mostly just a story we use to buttress our feelings of pride in our Christian heritage, and one the Manhattan Declaration invokes without question.  There are a couple of other ideas they invoke without question, too-- things that make them pull an Orosius and distort their argument to make it support a bad premise. 

Specifically, Orosius made the Roman empire more important to the continuance of Christian social order than it really was.   I think that's my main problem with the Manhattan Declaration, too: they're trying to build the backbone of the social order on things never meant to bear that kind of weight-- and that thing is marriage.  They think that the continuance of a sound social order rises or falls on the definition of what a marriage actually is. 

So, that's where I'm going to spend some time today: what's the real center of society, as envisioned by the Bible?  Where's the place of marriage?  And what happens when hetero sex gets fetishized to the point of absurdity?

Uncivil Unions: Why This Jesus-Lover Didn't Sign the Manhattan Declaration

A few months ago I was part of a Veritas planning team to bring in a speaker to our campus.  (If you haven't heard of Veritas, it's a great Christian scholastic organization.)  We brought in a eminent early Christianity scholar to talk with one of our religious studies professors about the creation of the idea of the "heretic" in Late Antiquity.  He was a wonderful speaker.  We also asked him to speak to Christian students about being a Christian academic and how to balance the two.   This speaker, whom I helped bring to campus and whom I genuinely like as a human being, humanitarian and scholar, announced to a room of my colleagues that some moral issues are universally recognized as critical to the Church, like abortion and gay marriage, and that he had therefore signed the Manhattan Declaration as a result.  He implicitly suggested that we as good Christians and role models should do the same.  I flinched. 

The truth is, even though I'm an evangelical Christian for the most part (I do have some liturgical tendencies), I'm no real fan of The Manhattan Declaration.   If you haven't heard of it, this is a religious manifesto created, in their own words, "in defense of the sanctity of life, traditional marriage, and religious liberty. It issues a clarion call to Christians to adhere firmly to their convictions in these three areas."  I was originally interested in it because this is the first time in a while that I've seen Orthodox, Catholic, Baptist and Charismatic Christians of every stripe actually agree on something. 

Normally, I'm a huge fan of such ecumenical movements because 1) I don't believe in divisions in the body of Christ and 2) I spent six years in a denomination where the lion's share of its members doubted whether any the other denominations were actually Christians.  But this brand of ecumenism... well, I'm not sure I like this one.  On the one hand, I am a firm pro-lifer (with reservations about approach) and I'm a huge proponent of religious freedom for all faiths.

But then there's that third tenet: the "defense of traditional marriage."  As you all doubtlessly know, I find myself stuck between the two main communities on this one.  On the one hand, I am a straight evangelical.  I know what the traditional interpretations of Scripture says on this one, and that's something I'm still struggling to understand for myself, and the more I do, the more I find myself on the other side of the issue from my compatriots.  On the other hand, I know intimately the degree to which the Christian moral conviction against sexual sin is really a veil over a deep-rooted homophobia.  I've seen it.  That's why I'm actively participating in our local LGBTA and trying to get my co-religionists to realize that they have a moral obligation to reach out to the LGBT community with love, compassion, and acceptance no differently than we're supposed to be doing to the rest of the world.  And I firmly believe that the church as a whole needs to reach out to the gay community to ask for forgiveness for our sins against them.  The most horrible "coming out" stories I've heard nearly always come from the most zealous Christian families and congregations.

Secondly, I don't like the entire premise of their argument, their reason for drafting the declaration, and the assumptions it makes.   It's based upon a premise that I simply can't accept, Biblically speaking, and one that has been bothering me for quite a while now, long before I'd heard of the Declaration. Besides,  I think it odd that Christians who can't even always agree on the first seven councils of the Church can all agree that gay people shouldn't get married.  So, we can't even agree on the procession of the Holy Spirit or the nature of the Trinity, but we can all agree that we don't like gay couples?!  There seems to be a strange disconnect here with the Manhattan Declaration and the relationship between God and society they create, so that's what I want to spend some time thinking about for a few posts as I work on some more material for TLP.

"Has Anything Changed?" cont.: The Tectonic Uncertainty Principle

In my attempt to think through the relationship of Tectonic Theater to the Laramie community, I've tended to focus on their relationship to the Laramie community as a whole:  are they reporting it like they are from the "inside" of the community in reflection or from the "outside" in judgment?  There's another way to think of the organization, however: as either passive observer, or active participant in, the events they're observing.  When Tectonic came into Laramie this second time, how much had they already changed the situation in Laramie with their first play?  For me, the answer is simple because I don't think that passive observation of a community is possible; you're always changing the environment you're observing.  Therefore, for me the question is not whether Tectonic Theater has had an influence in Laramie; the  question is how much, and whether or not Tectonic recognizes that fact in the second play. 

So, to start, all of you Trekkies out there understand the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, right?  Here it is in a nutshell:  you can't observe an aspect of a particle in space without changing something else about it.  For instance, if you can pin down a particle's momentum, you know nothing about its position because your observation of its momentum precludes knowing its position.  And, since you have to "poke" a particle to know where it's at, you have to sacrifice knowing its momentum just to know its position.  It's the damnable, frustrating fact of life for quantum physicists:  you simply can never be a passive observer; to some extent, just by observing you are always a participant, you always interfere and you can therefore never know everything.