Class Lines on the Front Lines, part 2: The Citizens Strike Back!

A couple of weeks ago, I looked at an AP article about the class divide in Laramie, WY from the time of Shepard's murder and how it overplayed a narrative of class antagonism to the point of absolute absurdity.  In their attempt to capture the "feeling" of the social divide in Laramie, the reporters resorted to using tropes that distorted West Laramie's character and had no basis in reality.  The reaction to that AP article, mostly from West Laramie residents, is really quite interesting.  On the one hand, they (rightly) try to attack the article as inaccurate, using their own personal experience as Laramie residents to shore up their claims.  On the other hand, after observing both hate protests and their counter-protesters for the last year or so, I have to ask: how effective is this approach for neutralizing prejudice?  I'll save that for a later post, but let's look at a couple of Laramie responses after the jump! 

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.

Twelve years later: tu benedictus in die natalis sis, Matt...

Another October the 12th is passing, which means one more year to look back on Matt's lamentable death, one more year to get all moody and self-referential, and yet another opportunity to lapse into a misanthropic grouch-fest and hate the whole world because it's such a downer.  I seriously need a more positive way to remember this person whom I had never personally met but who has changed the course of my life in ways I didn't expect.  I need to find a way to commemorate this day in a way that does justice to him and celebrates him in a positive light, not simply as a victim. 

So, where can I go for a different perspective?  Since I'm a medievalist, I guess that my natural impulse is to look backwards to the past for insight, and so pondering my problem eventually brought me to thinking about medieval memorial practices.  In medieval Christian society, for instance, monasteries often kept a calender or roll of their brothers and associates (called a liber vitae or "book of Life") in order to remember their passing.

Although a name in a Liber vitae was an act of commemoration in of itself, sometimes calendars of names organized by death date were used so the community could read their names aloud during the prime hour service as they performed the "work of God" in the cloister.  In those lists, the death date of a person is recorded as their dies natalis-- that is, their "birthday."  It makes a lot of sense from a medieval perspective, as Christianity often talks of that as the day that we are finally and truly freed from the bondage of sin and attain our real home with God when the soul is "born" in heaven.  It's the date of our heavenly birthday. 

This kind of commemoration was important in the monastic setting because it reinforced the sense that their brotherhood was an eternal bond, and that those who passed should continue to be recognized as a part of their community.  It reinforced that death really cannot sever their social, religious and personal ties, and that the departed who served the community in life are still a benefit to their abbey.   

And so, in my struggle to find an appropriate way to remember this day,  I think I'll do it with a celebration of Matt's continued presence and life within my community.  From here on out, this will no longer be for me a time when I'm forced to revisit a horrible, brutal crime that has scarred so many and ended a human life; instead, I'm going to mark this day as Matt's dies natalis, to recognize the part he still plays in my communities: in Laramie, in the states, and in the lives of those who loved him.  Is this the sensible approach that everyone will accept?  Probably not; all I know is that it helps make all of this make sense to me. 

Happy 12th birthday, Matthew Shepard.  You are still very much a part of us all.     

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PHOTO CREDIT:

Okay, so I couldn't find a picture of a liber vitae under a CC license, so the above picture is a leaf from Yale University, Beinecke Library MS 923, an unusual travel foldaway calendar and prayer book, which is available for CC use via the library's Flickr photostream. This text lists the feast days and/or dies natalis of popular saints (marked with giant, stretched out N's) in October.   The pic of Matthew's memorial is mine and very much free for use.

If you'd like to see what a liber vitae looks like, you can follow this link to one of the more famous manuscripts from the time period I work with.  On this single page of the Durham liber vitae, there's literally dozens of names written in hands at least three centuries apart, and it's remarkable.  

On a side note, October 12 marks the dies natalis for two of the more famous Anglo-Saxon saints:  Wilfrid, who tended to stir the muck, and Edwin, who was the first Anglian king to take up Christianity.  One of the most famous passages of Anglo-Saxon prose comes from his conversion, as recounted by Bede in his Ecclesiastical History 2.13.

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...

Laramie in Pictures: Campus Scenes

The campus has changed a lot since I was a naive little undergraduate here.  For one, we now have a "Cheney International Center" (no freaking kidding) and a new Anthropology building.  I was saddened to find the old Honors house razed to the ground and an OIT center plunked in its place.  (It was just as well, to be honest.)  Somebody finally got wise and also ripped down a good chunk of Coe Library and turned it into a usable library space complete with coffee shop and up-to-date computer lab.  And, most noticeably, they have put what must have been an incredible chunk of money into campus beautification, fuzzing out the hard edges of the concrete public spaces with small gardens full of boulders and birch trees, landscaped with native flowers.  I always thought this was a beautiful campus, but now it might be one of the most charming college campuses in the western US.  I'm serious. 

But the important things-- to me at least-- haven't changed much at all.  The sandstone walls of the buildings still glow like gold when the sun is at the right angle, Prexy's pasture is still the same, and the squirrels still cuss and throw things at you when you walk between Merica Hall and Old Main.  The Fine Arts building still looks like it's built out of cardboard graham crackers, sagging a little around the edges.  Although I didn't see him out there this summer, I was reassured that Dr. Shive in the Honors Program still roams the green spaces, plunking down birdies on the ad-hoc Frisbee golf course with deadly accuracy despite his advancing years. 

So, here are a few pictures of some of the places that most define the Laramie campus: Old Main, the original campus building from the territorial days, Arts and Sciences, and even some of that fancy new landscaping that blurs the distinction between public and natural space in ways that I think I rather like.  Enjoy!  

Class Lines on the Font Lines: the 1998 Reporting, part 1

So, the reason I was so interested in chatting with Coyote about West Laramie that Friday when we walked along the green belt was because of what I had read in some back issues of the Laramie Boomerang from 1998.  I was surprised to find an AP article on the class divide in Laramie dated just a week after Matthew Shepard died.  The article was put out by a couple of AP staff writers and a Cheyenne reporter, and the Boomerang ran it to show how the drama was being reported in the national media coverage.
The piece was over-the-top, honestly, and laughably inaccurate as it overplayed the common tropes of class struggle.  According to the AP, upper-class Wyoming families are all close and loving (never mind that Shepard's father spent most of his childhood working on a different continent) and all lower-class families are virtual time bombs for criminal behavior (never mind that Henderson, not Shepard, was the Eagle scout).  West Laramie, apparently, is the complete opposite of east Laramie, according to the AP, and west Laramie is therefore a crime-ridden, poverty-strapped sewage pit.  And when West Laramie residents read this article back in 1998, some of them actually (and quite understandably) flipped out.

But, what really fascinated me was the way in which the AP reporters picked up on a narrative that, to be honest, has always resonated with me, but I was never really sure if that narrative was just part of my personal relationship to Laramie (because my family splits that same class divide) or if it was a larger narrative being played out in the community.  As it turns out, I wasn't making it up.  That narrative of class and privilege was one that was floating around even while the narrative of LGBT intolerance was being passed around, too.  I'd like to share a little of this article with you, and the Laramie reactions, to show you how that east-west Laramie split, still felt by my brother Coyote today, was making waves in Laramie back in 1998... 

Grassroots

Every once in a while, I get a reminder that perhaps I'm being just a little too dour on the state of the world and that I need to look on the positive side of life.  After my pessimistic reaction to the Park51 debate last week, I needed just such a reminder.  This was it:

Isn't this the cutest act of social justice you've ever seen?  This adorable little goodwill ambassador came with her mama to spread some love and religious tolerance on my campus Appalachia on September 10th, and she came with friends.  A large and surprisingly disparate group of organizations on campus-- from Amnesty International to a local sorority, and all shades in between-- all came together to spread a little love and kindness as a more positive response to the current religious climate surrounding Islam and the ninth anniversary of September 11th.  College students, ministers, professors and their children stood on our pedestrian walkway handing out yellow balloons, candy, and smiles as the student populace walked past.  Certainly, the timing of Sept. 11th and the creepy Florida preacher with his Koran-burning intentions was on everyone's mind as they planned this, but they wanted to do this as a positive gesture in itself, not necessitated by the negative press coming from the news outlets.  They wanted to spread a little love because it was needed, not just out of counter-protest. 

I am also so proud to say that I had absolutely nothing to do with this.  I got a call from my minister friend about a half an hour before my Writing Center shift at the college on Thursday, and he wanted to know if I could bring the signs I had made for the fundamentalist preacher (and the neo-nazi rally) which I did.  I also stuck around to hold a sign for a bit and take a few pics.

I think this is a great sign of a climate change on my campus.  For a long time, people have been dissatisfied with some of the hate speech and intolerance that blows through our midst, but many (and the Christian community especially) haven't felt like they could speak up.  That's starting to change.  Even better, they're not speaking back so much as speaking out.  They have a positive message to share, and they're getting bold enough to speak it without necessarily having to do so defensively.  You have no idea how encouraged that makes me feel.  

So, without further ado, here are some photos of that small gesture of love and empathy that gave me a little faith in humankind even while religious politics gets nasty everywhere else.  Thanks so much!


The balloons were a big hit for some reason.  I saw them tied up all over campus later. 


In case you can't tell, they're all sisters-- and awesomely precocious young ladies. 


The event got some really good local media coverage, too. That's my minister friend in the left-hand picture holding the balloons.



A good friend of mine, studying here from Botswana.



Two of our organizers...

And these were my absolute favorite shots of the day: