Two Thoughts on an Inclusive Vision of Salvation

Does it matter what you believe? I would say yes…and no.

The question of religious pluralism is often collapsed into the question of salvation, though they are distinct issues. Partly this happens because a popular form of evangelism portrays Jesus as the sole dispenser of “get out of jail free” cards. The baseline assumption is that we’re all going to hell unless we sign on to the program.

There are many good reasons for finding this position repugnant and/or implausible, simply as a matter of compassion for human suffering. Liberal Christians and others who share this opinion, though, tend to overshoot the mark and claim that “all paths lead to God”.

Both the exclusivist and the pluralist view, in my opinion, unhelpfully sever the means of salvation from the nature of salvation. To be saved, in the Christian sense, is to experience eternal life in communion with a loving God. If one believes that Jesus embodied the nature of God on earth, then becoming a follower of Jesus is not merely a means to an end. It is an earthly foretaste of and preparation for that heavenly life.

Other religions are not equivalent because their goals and methods are not the same. They may reveal aspects of the divine nature, or contain helpful spiritual practices, but to call them “means of salvation” is to impose a Christian framework on a quite different system of thought, potentially in a misleading or imperialistic way.

John 14:6 is frequently quoted to proof-text an exclusivist understanding of salvation. Let’s look at it in context (NIV translation):

2In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. 3And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. 4You know the way to the place where I am going.”

5Thomas said to him, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”

6Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7If you really knew me, you would know[b] my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.”

It seems to me that Jesus is not even addressing the problem of other religions. His followers, all Jews, are asking the (Jewish) messiah to give them some information, some program to follow, so that they can get a closer knowledge of God–the God of their own Hebrew Bible. And Jesus replies that they are already in closer fellowship with God than they imagine, and they can experience this for themselves if they get to know Jesus as he really is.

I sympathize, nonetheless, with Christians who worry that a more inclusive position on salvation makes the gospel seem irrelevant. It trivializes the rich complexity of Christian tradition, and the rigors of discipleship, to suggest that any old religion is as good as any other. A recent post on the Creedal Christian blog articulates this quite well. Again, we can get out of this box if we see the gospel as good for something more than saving our skins after death. For more on this point, see N.T. Wright’s latest writings on Christian misunderstandings of heaven.

Two of my favorite Christian bloggers have lately weighed in on salvation of non-Christians in a way that I found most helpful. What they are calling “universalism” I might prefer to call “inclusivism”, since the former term implies a level of certainty about all people’s eternal destiny that the authors themselves don’t assert.

Christopher at Betwixt and Between is a Benedictine oblate in the Episcopal tradition. In his post Universalism and Anglical Careful-Generous Reserve, he writes:

…We can proclaim definitively Who salvation is without claiming definitively who will or will not be saved outside of Him.

Salvation is through, with, and in Jesus Christ finally, only, uniquely, definitively.

That need not imply an obverse declaration about where salvation is not or who will not be saved.

Rather, we rest in the generosity of this reconciling God. To do otherwise is to skirt into proclaiming a God, often vicious, who is other than the one revealed in Christ, who at heart in the Cranmerian notion of our formulae, is all-merciful, and perhaps no more so than as found in the Rite I canon, heir to 1549, 1637, and 1928, especially in the Prayer of Humble Access. Chesed, Coverdale’s lovingkindness or Cranmer’s mercy is the very heart of God, and we know this God personally in Jesus Christ. This is in Whom we rest all our life and trust and hope.

And such a careful-generous reserve does not make one unorthodox, unless we care to count among such company the Orthodox Church, the Greek Fathers, and C.S. Lewis.

And we Anglicans also tend to avoid locating God only in the Church in a crude way. “Wherever Christ is” says Andrewes, and Maurice will follow after Him, making clear Christ’s explicit availability in the Church through the Sacraments, while not locating Him there in the crude ways many early Anglo-Catholics did in pipeline theories of grace.

Unlike cruder views that would locate the activity of the Word and Spirit only in the life of the Church, rather than explicitly and visibly therein, Anglicans have tended to acknowledge than though explicit and visible in the Church, the Word and Spirit are active in the world if hidden, unknown, and often unacknowledged. Indeed, as Stringfellow reminds, it is precisely our job as Christians who proclaim this God in Christ explicitly and visibly available in the Church to name God’s activity in the world as precisely the activity of the Word who revealed Godself by becoming one of us. Hence, ongoing discernment….

Eric Reitan, a self-described progressive Christian and philosophy professor at Oklahoma State University, writes about debating an audience member about John 14:6 during a recent lecture he gave to OSU’s interdenominational Christian fellowship:

…I began by distinguishing between two interpretations of John 14:6: the interpretation which takes the passage to say that no one comes to the Father unless they adopt the right beliefs about Jesus and/or make the right choices with regard to Him, and the interpretation which has it that no one comes to the Father except on account of the work that Jesus does on sinners’ behalf. While the former interpretation entails that only Christians who explicitly accept Jesus as savior are saved, the latter interpretation does not imply this at all….

…One of the greatest fruits of a theology of grace is that it liberates us to think, to question, to doubt, to admit uncertainty, and to take challenges to our views seriously. If we believe that our salvation does not hinge on our getting it right, we become free to be humble, to admit our finitude, to admit our inability to get it right—in short, to be intellectually honest about the human condition. And as I see it, an absolutely crucial feature of the human condition is that the fundamental nature of reality is beyond our grasp. We can theorize and speculate in ways that are more or less in line with what reason and evidence reveal, but we cannot know.

Our enormous material universe might be catalogued, its structure and mechanisms and history described to the minutest detail, and we would still face the same fundamental questions: Is there more than this? Is this world of immediate sense experience, this world whose structures and patterns we can describe, just a surface appearance? Or is it just a small part of something far vaster that is beyond description? Or is it, instead, the whole story?

We cannot know. We can be moved by the voice in our heart that encounters a hopeful vision, the voice that says, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” We can treat its urgings as emerging out of the part of us that IS, rather than the part of us that experiences and knows—the self insofar as it is a part of reality, rather than the self that stands back from it in an attempt to understand reality. We can treat our deepest longings as if they are a homing beacon, and their YES as an instinct that immediately apprehends what the discursive intellect cannot grasp. Or we can be moved by the voice that says, “I’ll believe it when I see it”—knowing that this is something we can never, ever see.

We can be moved by longing or evidentialism, but we cannot know. And the theology of grace allows us to admit this. Paradoxically, if we are convinced of this theology, we are freed from the pathological need for certainty. And while such certainty may not be the root of all hostility and intractable conflict, it is one fundamental source of these things. When we can admit we do not know, we can come together and hear each other and be more fully open to each other’s humanness. And insofar as the theology of grace facilitates that, it bears pragmatic fruits that speak in its favor. We have pragmatic reason to live as if the theology of grace is true, as if our salvation doesn’t hinge on getting it right, because only then can we break free of the psychological forces that push us into trenches of false certainty….

Thank you, Eric.
That’s the heart of why I became, and remain, a Christian.

Bishop Spong Says: Equality Is Beyond Debate

Oct19

Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong has written an eloquent and impassioned manifesto explaining why he will no longer debate Christians who oppose full equality for gays and lesbians. I’m not generally a fan of Bishop Spong because, like some of his fellow liberal Christian theologians, he can sound arrogant and dismissive towards those who still cherish belief in the divinity of Jesus, a personal God, and other elements of traditional Christology. In this manifesto, though, he really knocks it out of the park. Hat tip to the Soulforce e-newsletter for this link. An excerpt:

I have made a decision. I will no longer debate the issue of homosexuality in the church with anyone. I will no longer engage the biblical ignorance that emanates from so many right-wing Christians about how the Bible condemns homosexuality, as if that point of view still has any credibility. I will no longer discuss with them or listen to them tell me how homosexuality is “an abomination to God,” about how homosexuality is a “chosen lifestyle,” or about how through prayer and “spiritual counseling” homosexual persons can be “cured.” Those arguments are no longer worthy of my time or energy. I will no longer dignify by listening to the thoughts of those who advocate “reparative therapy,” as if homosexual persons are somehow broken and need to be repaired. I will no longer talk to those who believe that the unity of the church can or should be achieved by rejecting the presence of, or at least at the expense of, gay and lesbian people. I will no longer take the time to refute the unlearned and undocumentable claims of certain world religious leaders who call homosexuality “deviant.” I will no longer listen to that pious sentimentality that certain Christian leaders continue to employ, which suggests some version of that strange and overtly dishonest phrase that “we love the sinner but hate the sin.” That statement is, I have concluded, nothing more than a self-serving lie designed to cover the fact that these people hate homosexual persons and fear homosexuality itself, but somehow know that hatred is incompatible with the Christ they claim to profess, so they adopt this face-saving and absolutely false statement. I will no longer temper my understanding of truth in order to pretend that I have even a tiny smidgen of respect for the appalling negativity that continues to emanate from religious circles where the church has for centuries conveniently perfumed its ongoing prejudices against blacks, Jews, women and homosexual persons with what it assumes is “high-sounding, pious rhetoric.” The day for that mentality has quite simply come to an end for me. I will personally neither tolerate it nor listen to it any longer. The world has moved on, leaving these elements of the Christian Church that cannot adjust to new knowledge or a new consciousness lost in a sea of their own irrelevance. They no longer talk to anyone but themselves. I will no longer seek to slow down the witness to inclusiveness by pretending that there is some middle ground between prejudice and oppression. There isn’t. Justice postponed is justice denied. That can be a resting place no longer for anyone. An old civil rights song proclaimed that the only choice awaiting those who cannot adjust to a new understanding was to “Roll on over or we’ll roll on over you!” Time waits for no one.

I will particularly ignore those members of my own Episcopal Church who seek to break away from this body to form a “new church,” claiming that this new and bigoted instrument alone now represents the Anglican Communion. Such a new ecclesiastical body is designed to allow these pathetic human beings, who are so deeply locked into a world that no longer exists, to form a community in which they can continue to hate gay people, distort gay people with their hopeless rhetoric and to be part of a religious fellowship in which they can continue to feel justified in their homophobic prejudices for the rest of their tortured lives. Church unity can never be a virtue that is preserved by allowing injustice, oppression and psychological tyranny to go unchallenged.

In my personal life, I will no longer listen to televised debates conducted by “fair-minded” channels that seek to give “both sides” of this issue “equal time.” I am aware that these stations no longer give equal time to the advocates of treating women as if they are the property of men or to the advocates of reinstating either segregation or slavery, despite the fact that when these evil institutions were coming to an end the Bible was still being quoted frequently on each of these subjects. It is time for the media to announce that there are no longer two sides to the issue of full humanity for gay and lesbian people. There is no way that justice for homosexual people can be compromised any longer.

I will no longer act as if the Papal office is to be respected if the present occupant of that office is either not willing or not able to inform and educate himself on public issues on which he dares to speak with embarrassing ineptitude. I will no longer be respectful of the leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who seems to believe that rude behavior, intolerance and even killing prejudice is somehow acceptable, so long as it comes from third-world religious leaders, who more than anything else reveal in themselves the price that colonial oppression has required of the minds and hearts of so many of our world’s population. I see no way that ignorance and truth can be placed side by side, nor do I believe that evil is somehow less evil if the Bible is quoted to justify it….

Online Literary Roundup: Stickman Review, The Post Office Poems

Oct18

There’s no shortage of great contemporary writing online. Here are two sites I just discovered today:

Stickman Review, a biannual online literary journal edited by Anthony Brown, publishes memorable literary prose, poetry, and artwork. Their latest issue, Vol. 8 No. 2, features a powerful story by Leah Erickson. “Judy Garland” depicts the relationship between a pre-teen boy and his troubled, fragile mother, as they wait amid a crowd of fans at Grand Central Station for the movie star to arrive for the premiere of “The Wizard of Oz”. Erickson captures the psychological darkness and interiority of adolescence, with a sexual subtext that is never made crudely explicit, as the boy, like his fellow Americans on the cusp of World War II, struggles to distinguish hopeful fantasy from dangerous mania.

Other fine entries in this issue include poems by Gale Acuff and Jackie Bartley.

The Post Office Poems blog is an interactive, ongoing poetry project highlighting Fall City, Washington, and the Snoqualmie Valley, written by an anonymous author and posted weekly on the bulletin board at the Fall City Post Office.
The author explains:

The idea for the Post Office Poems began with a simple posting of a poem on the bulletin board at the Fall City Post Office on October 6, 2009 by an anonymous poet. Everyone in town has a post office box, there is no delivery within the city as it is pretty much out in the boonies, “rural”. When you pick up your mail after hours you enter the back door which is always unlocked. To the left on the wall is a large bulletin board with a typical assortment of small notices for rentals, items for sale, upcoming events and business cards. Once you read these, the next time you come in the reading selection becomes pretty boring. There is nothing else on the walls, though I’ve noticed lately as you come in the door the wind has blown a large handful of brilliant orange, red, yellow and brown leaves across the floor.

Thus an idea was born to enliven the lobby experience for townsfolk. Once a week a poem is posted on the board. The first was called “Four Feathers from Fall City”, it was posted on a Tuesday night about 9:30 pm with three white tacks, on a sheet of white typing paper. When I had just pushed in the last tack I heard a car pull up. I looked out the door and there was a cop car just outside. Was I breaking some unknown Postal Service rule or federal bulletin board law? As I walked out the door, an officer in full uniform walked in and said, “Hello there, how are you?”

I said, “Hello, fine thank you.” and nervously left. I wanted the poems to be anonymous. When people of Fall City read them, I want the poem and it’s images to be exerienced and enjoyed. This project is interactive. A piece of plain white paper, a poem, the quiet lobby, and then whatever happens next in the reading, the feelings of the reader, etc. will be a discovery. Something new. A gift.

I was particularly moved by the entry “Seven Pigeons and the White Angel”, a tribute to a young man who drowned in the river. The author handles a potentially sentimental subject with subtle yet deep emotion and a gift for describing the sublime landscape of the Northwest.

Gerrymandered State Districts Exploit Disenfranchised Prisoners

Oct16

Last week’s cover story from the Valley Advocate, the Northampton region’s free alternative weekly newspaper, reports that prison inmates are counted as residents for purposes of drawing state and federal legislative districts, even though these inmates lack the right to vote. The result, as Maureen Turner writers in her article The Prison Town Advantage, is that communities with prisons have disproportionate political power while the prisoners’ hometowns (often minority and urban areas) lose power:

…The Prison Policy Initiative, an Easthampton-based nonprofit, has released numerous reports in recent years examining the problem in states around the country; this month, PPI is releasing a report, “Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in Massachusetts,” that looks at the effects here. The report, co-authored by PPI Executive Director Peter Wagner and colleagues Elena Lavarreda and Rose Heyer, finds that five of the state’s legislative districts would not even exist in their current configurations if their population counts did not include prison inmates.

This apparently unintended data-gathering quirk, Wagner said, has profoundly detrimental consequences for the distribution of political power—consequences that extend further than one might expect.

Counting disenfranchised prisoners to draw up legislative districts “makes no sense,” Wagner said, “and is actually offensive to our notion of democracy.”

It also bears, in the words of Boston-based voting rights attorney Brenda Wright, an “uncomfortable resemblance” to the “three-fifths” compromise between Southern and Northern states written into the U.S. Constitution in 1787. That provision declared that a slave would count as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of apportioning congressional districts.

“The slave states benefited in terms of political power, based on a population that couldn’t vote,” said Wright, who directs the Democracy Program for Demos, a public policy and advocacy organization. More than 220 years later, legislators with prisons in their districts are likewise benefiting from a population that’s also denied the vote—while other districts lose.

*

Peter Wagner began studying prison-based gerrymandering while a law student at Western New England College. His first project looked at neighboring New York State, where the effects are especially dramatic. There, Wagner noted in a 2002 report, 91 percent of prison cells are located in the upstate region, whose economy depends heavily on the prison industry. But only 24 percent of prisoners actually come from upstate New York; the majority—66 percent—comes from New York City.

As a result, Wagner said in a recent interview, “the whole center of gravity shifts.” For state legislators who have prisons in their districts, the facilities are a boon: the prison population swells local numbers enough to justify the creation of a legislative seat, while the prison creates jobs and spurs related economic activity in a part of the state that sorely needs both. According to PPI, seven legislative districts in upstate New York would not have the minimum population required for a district were it not for their prisoners.

But not everyone wins under this scenario. While upstate legislators may have prisoners in their districts, because those prisoners cannot vote, there’s no incentive for the legislators to support policies that could positively affect the urban districts where the majority of prisoners come from. Meanwhile, because the prisoners are not counted in their hometowns, those communities’ populations, for the purposes of creating legislative districts, drop.

“Prisoners and their families have negative political clout,” Wagner said.

And it’s not just prisoners (and the family and neighbors that remain in their hometowns) who feel the effects of this imbalance, Wagner noted. Residents who live in districts without prisons have, in essence, less political influence than those in districts that do have prisons.

“These … districts get an enhanced say, which hurts every other district in general, and hurts the district where prisoners come from even more,” Wagner said.

Meanwhile, prisoners—despite the fact that they contribute to a prison-district legislator’s political power—have no political influence over “their” representative. “The way things should work is, if a legislator doesn’t represent some of his or her constituents, there’s a check in place—the overlooked residents can vote that person out,” Wagner said. “But when some of those constituents can’t vote, that natural check and balance doesn’t work.”
…

Read the whole article here.

Visit the Prison Policy Initiative website to learn more. Another interesting report recently produced by PPI argues that “a Massachusetts law that requires a mandatory sentence of at least two years for certain drug offenses committed within 1,000 feet of schools does not work to protect children from drugs and has the negative effect of increasing racial disparities in incarceration.”

Scott Russell Sanders: “Under the Influence”

Oct16

In this unflinching and eloquent essay, first published in Harper’s in 1989, Scott Russell Sanders recalls his late father’s long descent into alcoholism and how it affected his family. His reflections will resonate with anyone who grew up with an addicted or mentally ill parent.

…I am forty-four, and I know full well now that my father was an alcoholic, a man consumed by disease rather than by disappointment. What had seemed to me a private grief is in fact, of course, a public scourge. In the United States alone, some ten or fifteen million people share his ailment, and behind the doors they slam in fury or disgrace, countless other children tremble. I comfort myself with such knowledge, holding it against the throb of memory like an ice pack against a bruise. Other people have keener sources of grief – poverty, racism, rape, war. I do not wish to compete to determine who has suffered most. I am only trying to understand the corrosive mixture of helplessness, responsibility, and shame that I learned to feel as the son of an alcoholic. I realize now that I did not cause my father’s illness, nor could I have cured it. Yet for all this grownup knowledge, I am still ten years old, my own son’s age, and as that boy I struggle in guilt and confusion to save my father from pain.

Consider a few of our synonyms for drunk: tipsy, tight, pickled, soused, and plowed; stoned and stewed, lubricated and inebriated, juiced and sluiced; three sheets to the wind, in your cups, out of your mind, under the table; lit up, tanked up, wiped out; besotted, blotto, bombed, and buzzed; plastered, polluted, putrefied; loaded or looped, boozy, woozy, fuddled, or smashed; crocked and shit-faced, corked and pissed, snockered and sloshed.

It is a mostly humorous lexicon, as the lore that deals with drunks–in jokes and cartoons, in plays, films, and television skits–is largely comic. Aunt Matilda nips elderberry wine from the sideboard and burps politely during supper. Uncle Fred slouches to the table glassy-eyed, wearing a lampshade for a hat and murmuring, “Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.” Inspired by cocktails, Mrs. Somebody recounts the events of her day in a fuzzy dialect, while Mr. Somebody nibbles her ear and croons a bawdy song. On the sofa with Boyfriend, Daughter Somebody giggles, licking gin from her lips, and loosens the bows in her hair. Junior knocks back some brews with his chums at the Leopard Lounge and stumbles home to the wrong house, wonders foggily why he cannot locate his pajamas, and crawls naked into bed with the ugliest girl in school. The family dog slurps from a neglected martini and wobbles to the nursery, where he vomits in Baby’s shoe.

It is all great fun. But if in the audience you notice a few laughing faces turn grim when the drunk lurches onstage, don’t be surprised, for these are the children of alcoholics. Over the grinning mask of Dionysus, the leering face of Bacchus, these children cannot help seeing the bloated features of their own parents. Instead of laughing, they wince, they mourn. Instead of celebrating the drunk as one freed from constraints, they pity him as one enslaved. They refuse to believe “in vino veritas”, having seen their befuddled parents skid away from truth toward folly and oblivion. And so these children bite their lips until the lush staggers into the wings.

My father, when drunk, was neither funny nor honest; he was pathetic, frightening, deceitful. There seemed to be a leak in him somewhere, and he poured in booze to keep from draining dry. Like a torture victim who refuses to squeal, he would never admit that he had touched a drop, not even in his last year, when he seemed to be dissolving in alcohol before our very eyes. I never knew him to lie about anything, ever, except about this one ruinous fact. Drowsy, clumsy, unable to fix a bicycle tire, balance a grocery sack, or walk across a room, he was stripped of his true self by drink. In a matter of minutes, the contents of a bottle could transform a brave man into a coward, a buddy into a bully, a gifted athlete and skilled carpenter and shrewd businessman into a bumbler. No dictionary of synonyms for drunk would soften the anguish of watching our prince turn into a frog.

Father’s drinking became the family secret. While growing up, we children never breathed a word of it beyond the four walls of our house. To this day, my brother and sister rarely mention it, and then only when I press them. I did not confess the ugly, bewildering fact to my wife until his wavering and slurred speech forced me to. Recently, on the seventh anniversary of my father’s death, I asked my mother if she ever spoke of his drinking to friends. “No, no, never,” she replied hastily. “I couldn’t bear for anyone to know.”

The secret bores under the skin, gets in the blood, into the bone, and stays there. Long after you have supposedly been cured of malaria, the fever can flare up, the tremors can shake you. So it is with the fevers of shame. You swallow the bitter quinine of knowledge, and you learn to feel pity and compassion toward the drinker. Yet the shame lingers and, because of it, anger.
…

Read the entire piece on the LifeRing website, an online support network for people in recovery.

Hat tip to the Calvin College Festival of Faith and Writing e-newsletter for this link. The next festival will be held in April 2010. Sanders is one of the featured speakers. I attended in 2006 and recommend it with one-and-a-half thumbs up. On the plus side, I experienced the prophetic power of the Holy Spirit during Walter Wangerin Jr.’s closing address and emerged with a new ability to write literary fiction. On the minus side, the food is terrible and the campus layout is very confusing. So if you go, rent a car and pack lots of beef jerky, and prepare to change your life.

Welcoming Transwomen at Women’s Colleges

Oct8

This blog’s straight ally of the day, Smith College student Alexandra Bregman, writes today in the campus newspaper The Sophian in defense of allowing transgender students at women’s colleges:

Smith is not a women’s college. The confines of the gender binary are constantly blurred and redefined, as we educate one another on pronoun usage, testosterone injections and the day-to-day tribulations of what it means to be in transition. The transsexual, transgender and gender queer populations of Smith College are valid and flourishing, whether they make it onto the “I Am Smith” Web page or not. In an age where single-sex education is a niche market and a deep source of pride at Smith College, the transient population and all forms of masculinity on campus simply must be addressed….

…all students come to Smith not knowing what the future holds. It’s more than likely that an F to M candidate stumbled upon his, her, hir or ze path to self-discovery by joining the ranks of Smith’s LGBTQ (Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transsexual/Transgender-Queer) community. We’re all here to discover our futures. If the future holds another name, pronoun or gender, why should that be a problem?

Unfortunately, gender realization is often difficult on campus. Students can be uncomfortable, and the question of transferring often comes up. A fellow student recounted the tribulations of not transferring. While he loves his ties to Smith, everything from the classroom situation to the bathroom to his on-campus job proves potentially awkward. The constant questions, most often, “Are you a Five College student?” can be exhausting.

Yet this student also fears that a transfer to the University of Massachusetts could be both physically and socially dangerous, especially in light of the recent abuse at Hampshire College.

According to circulating speculative blogs and e-mails, a transwoman of color was seeking refuge at Hampshire College on Sept. 24 when the Five College Public Safety entered her host’s mod, victimized her and took her to jail for trespassing. Then she was taken to the Amherst police station, where she was allegedly more aggressively sexually violated, and detained after her friends had paid bail. I am consistently shocked and saddened by challenges Trans college students face, because it really seems that there is nowhere to turn.

Read the whole article here.

Bregman focuses on the case of an F-to-M student who wishes to remain at Smith despite the awkwardness of presenting as male at a women’s college. The controversy seems to be greater in the other direction, from what I’ve read about this issue: what happens when someone who’s biologically male, but identifies as female, wants to be included in a “women-only” space? The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, for instance, only opened its doors to transwomen in 2006 after heated debate.

As I understand it, one rationale for women-only institutions and events is to create a safe space for a group that’s been silenced and discriminated against. Those who oppose inclusion of trans-women have argued that a person who grew up with male privilege, and whose personality was formed by being a member of the dominant group, might carry those oppressive attitudes into the women-only space, notwithstanding hir outward gender presentation.

This argument doesn’t convince me, personally. Having spent a little time with radical feminists, I understand that the presence of any man can be triggering for survivors of extreme abuse. However, I’m really wary about extending this separatist, essentialist model as the norm for women’s empowerment. Gender-nonconforming men may have been born with some privileges that we XX-chromosomal women never had, but they’ve had their own formative experiences of marginalization and discrimination. I think it’s helpful for us to share our space with women who’ve had different experiences of both gender privilege and gender bias, so that we don’t focus on our own sufferings to the exclusion of others.

Abroad, Homophobia Often Turns Deadly

Oct7

As election day approaches, American activists are preoccupied with the ballot fights over gay marriage in Maine and Washington State. Serious as this issue is, we need to remember how privileged we are in the US. In many countries in the Middle East and Africa, anyone suspected of being gay is vulnerable to kidnapping, torture, blackmail and murder. Church, state, and mosque not only fail to intervene but often encourage these abuses in order to show their control over the morals of society. I’d like to see the well-funded US-based GLBT groups doing more to show solidarity with our persecuted brothers and sisters abroad.

Other Sheep is a Christian ministry that reaches out to GLBT people and straight allies in countries where such persecution is widespread. This is dangerous work, as the following story from their e-newsletter demonstrates:

After learning through an email from Rev. John Makokha that a mutual gay friend of ours in Kenya had been attacked on Saturday evening, October 3, 2009, Jose was able, through a phone conversation, to have an interview with the victim on Sunday, October 4. Jose recorded the conversation and then made a transcript. Steve wrote up the following report from the transcript.

Rev. Steve Parelli and Jose Ortiz
Other Sheep
Bronx, New York
October 6, 2009

…The victim, an active member of Other Sheep Kenya, is a gay Christian Kenyan adult male living in Kenya. The victim is a long standing member of a large and prominent mainline church in Kenya. He takes an active role in the weekly services of his church. The victim grew up in the parsonage. His father, now deceased, was a clergyman.

(According to one Kenyan minister who commented, it is very unlikely that the victim’s present church will take notice of this attack if the members learn that he is gay.)

The Attack – as reported by the victim in a phone conversation

A new “friend” who is not to be trusted

Not too long ago, a certain neighbor of mine – a fellow Kenyan – came to my home and introduced himself. He was very friendly and so we had talks together about life in general. With time, he told me he had a job working for an organization (which he named) that has health programs for the gay community. He said he wanted to understand “what is this thing about gays, and how does it work, and if there are any gays in Kenya.” He told me that he was just beginning to hear about gay people and so he needed to understand more about it. I decided to open up to him and tell him I was gay. When I did, we had a long conversation. He asked me questions in a very nice manner.

Blackmail

Then things changed. He said he was trying to gather information to confirm that I was gay because there should not be any gays in society. He said he was going to take action. Then he started asking me if I had any money. He said he would tell someone in the neighborhood that I am gay – someone who would not take the information very kindly. If I wanted him to keep quiet about my orientation then I was to give him money. I thought, at first, he was joking. He said he studied criminology and could do what he said he would do.

Manipulated, threatened and forced to the home of a good friend who said he wanted to kill him

On the night of the beating, this same neighbor who had blackmailed me, came to my home and grabbed me and told me to come with him. He said he was taking me to see a certain friend of mine which he also knew. He named the friend and he was, indeed, a very good friend of mine. He said if I would not go with him he would start screaming to everyone nearby that I am gay and that I had tried to molest him. I said, “OK, if you want my friend to know, let’s go.” I didn’t know if they had planned this out together, but I decided it would make things easier for me if I were to go. I felt that my good friend would take the time needed to understand me and accept me still as his friend. However, I was shocked by his reaction. He didn’t want to listen to anything I had to say. He just said, “I knew he was gay. He should be killed. He should be destroyed. Don’t let him say another word. Let’s just hit him and let’s make sure he is destroyed.”

The neighbor who had grabbed me and forced me to my good friend’s home said, “You accept that you are gay and that you should not be gay?” I tried to explain to them both that there is nothing wrong in being gay; that gay people are normal human beings; that gay people do no wrong to any one; that they need to be given the opportunity to explain what they go through, that is, the kind of stigmatization they experience in society.
But they would not listen to any of this.

There, at his home, my very good friend said, “I have a gun. We have to destroy him. I don’t care if he is my best friend. He isn’t anymore.”

The victim attempts to verbally defend himself

I think my very good friend was homophobic all along, but he had no evidence that I was gay until this night when I admittedly told him I was gay. I told them they needed to understand. I told them that I have accepted myself as a gay man and that if I have done anything criminal then, instead of hitting me, they needed to call the police and write up a report against me. But they said, “No, we just have to hit you.”

Other people join in to hit and beat the victim without mercy

It was my very good friend that started to excite to action the others who were there. They started hitting me and saying they should call the brother who plays rugby – that he would deal with me properly; that he would hit me at the end of each day until I become normal. And that I should no longer live in the neighborhood.

As they hit me they shouted, “You can change, you can change.” They were hitting me so I would change and would understand that I needed to be heterosexual. A crowd was being drawn in by the commotion and my good friend was telling them to hit me and beat me and not to listen to anyone [who said otherwise].

The beating resulted in swelling to the head and chest with bleeding. My mouth and lips are swollen because they stepped on me and jumped on me. They actually did call the rugby guy and a second guy in town. They lifted me up and threw me on the ground and then stepped on my head.

On lookers aid the victim; the perpetrators follow the victim to his home

Ladies near by started screaming, “They are going to kill this man.” Some people starting saying, “Let him live.” These people saved my life. Two men held back the guys who were attacking me, saying, “You have to stop this!” At that point I had a chance to get away and went to my home, locked the door, and went to my room. But they still came after me. They attempted to break the door in. Instead, they broke all the windows in the house. They told me they would return in the morning to destroy me.

A kind woman told me I should leave.
…

Meanwhile, this article from the German newspaper Der Spiegel reports that a “wave of homophobia” is sweeping through the Islamic world:

In most Islamic countries, gay men and women are ostracized, persecuted and in some cases even murdered. Repressive regimes are often fanning the flames of hatred in a bid to outdo Islamists when it comes to spreading “moral panic.”

Bearded men kidnapped him in the center of Baghdad, threw him into a dark hole, chained him down, urinated on him, and beat him with an iron pipe. But the worst moment for Hisham, 40, came on the fourth day of his ordeal when the kidnappers called his family. He was terrified they would tell his mother that he is gay and that this was the reason they had kidnapped him. If they did he would never be able to see his family again. The shame would be unbearable for them.

“Do what you want to me, but don’t tell them,” he screamed.

Instead of humiliating him in the eyes of his family, the kidnappers demanded a ransom of $50,000 (€33,000), a huge sum for the average Iraqi family. His parents had to go into debt and sell off all of their son’s possessions in order to raise the money required to secure his freedom. Shortly after they received the ransom the kidnappers threw Hisham out of their car somewhere in the northern part of Baghdad. They decided not to shoot him and let him go. But they sent him on his way with a warning: “This is your last chance. If we ever see you again, we’ll kill you.”

That was four months ago. Hisham has since moved to Lebanon. He told his family that he had decided to flee the violence and terror in Baghdad and that he had found work in Beirut. Needless to say he didn’t disclose the fact that he is unable to live in Iraq because of the death squads who are out hunting for “effeminate-looking” men.

In Baghdad a new series of murders began early this year, perpetrated against men suspected of being gay. Often they are raped, their genitals cut off, and their anuses sealed with glue. Their bodies are left at landfills or dumped in the streets. The non-profit organization Human Rights Watch, which has documented many of these crimes, has spoken of a systematic campaign of violence involving hundreds of murders.

Restoring ‘Religious Morals’

A video clip showing men dancing with each other at a party in Baghdad in the summer of 2008 is thought to have triggered this string of kidnappings, rapes, and murders. Thousands of people have seen it on the Internet and on their cell phones. Islamic religious leaders began ranting about the growing presence of a “third sex” which American soldiers were said to have brought in with them. The followers of radical Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr, in particular, felt the need to take action aimed at restoring “religious morals.”

In their stronghold, the part of Baghdad known as Sadr City, black-clad militiamen patrol the streets, on the lookout for anyone whose “unmanly appearance” or behavior would make it possible to identify them as being homosexual. Often enough long hair, tight-fitting t-shirts and trousers, or a certain way of walking were a death sentence for the persons in question. But it’s not just the Mahdi army who has been hunting down and killing gay men. Other groups such as Sunni militias close to al-Qaida and the Iraqi security services are also known to be involved.

Homosexuals in Iraq may be faced with an exceptionally dangerous situation but they are ostracized almost everywhere in the Muslim world. Gay rights organizations estimate that more than 100,000 gay men and women are currently being discriminated against and threatened in Muslim countries. Thousands of them commit suicide, end up in prison, or go into hiding.

Egypt Starts to Clamp Down

More than 30 Islamic countries have laws on the books that prohibit homosexuality and make it a criminal offense. In most cases punishment ranges from floggings to life imprisonment. In Mauritania, Bangladesh, Yemen, parts of Nigeria and Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Iran convicted homosexuals can also be sentenced to death.

In those Muslim countries where homosexuality is not against the law gay men and women are nonetheless persecuted, arrested, and in some cases murdered. Although long known for its open gay scene, Egypt has recently started to clamp down hard. The lives of homosexuals are monitored by a kind of vice squad who tap telephones and recruit informants. As soon as the police have accumulated the kind of evidence they need they charge their victims with “debauchery.”…

Read the whole story here.
The New York Times Magazine also recently ran a feature story on NYC-based activists who are trying to save Iraq’s persecuted sexual minorities:

n a bright afternoon in late March, an 18-year-old named Fadi stood in a friend’s clothing store in Baghdad checking out the new merchandise. A worker in a neighboring store walked into the boutique with a newspaper in his hand and shared a story he had just read. It was about “sexual deviants,” he said. Gay men’s rectums had been glued shut, and they had been force-fed laxatives and water until their insides exploded. They had been found dead on the street.

That evening Fadi met up with his three closest friends—Ahmed, Mazen, and Namir—in a coffee shop called the Shisha café in the Karada district of Baghdad. Karada is a mixed Shia-Christian neighborhood that has a more relaxed, cosmopolitan feel than many parts of the Iraqi capital. Fadi and his friends had been meeting there nearly every evening for a year, Fadi coming from his job cleaning toilets for Americans in the Green Zone and the three others from college. The coffee shop was relatively new and attracted a young crowd. The walls were colored in solid blocks of orange, green, and blue, the glass-topped tables painted red and black. It was the closest thing to hip that Baghdad had to offer. For Fadi and his three friends, who secretly referred to themselves as the 4 Cats, after a Pussycat Dolls–like Lebanese group, the Shisha was a refuge from the hostile, often violent anti-gay climate that they had grown up with in Iraq.

Fadi has a warm, irrepressible laugh; his eyes narrow under thick black eyebrows whenever someone tells a joke. He told his friends about the newspaper story, but insisted it couldn’t be true.

“They’re doing this to frighten us,” he said.

In recent weeks, with rumors of gay death squads and torture on the rise, the four friends had lowered their profile. They no longer went to the Shisha every night. “We’ll see what tomorrow brings,” Fadi said, on the last night they met there.

On April 4, at about 8 p.m., Fadi’s cell phone rang. It was Mazen’s brother.

“Mazen and Namir have been killed,” he said.

The maimed bodies of the two friends had been discovered together in the vast Shia district of Baghdad named Sadr City, which is a stronghold of the Mahdi Army, a powerful Shia militia. Mazen had had his pectoral muscles cut off. There were two drill holes in Namir’s left leg, below the knee. Both had been shot in the head, apparently from close range.

“Two young men were killed on Thursday,” an unnamed Sadr City official told the Reuters news agency in a story published that same day. “They were sexual deviants. Their tribes killed them to restore their family honor.” In the same story, Reuters cited a police source as saying that the bodies of four other gay men had been found in Sadr City on March 25 with signs on their chests reading PERVERT.

Fadi called Ahmed. They spoke for an hour. They were devastated by their friends’ deaths, of course. They were also terrified. Under torture, Mazen and Namir may have given up their names….

…As virulent as the violence against gay people (men mostly) was, it
operated at a kind of low hum for many years, overshadowed by the
country’s myriad other problems. But in February of this year,
something changed. There was no announcement, no fatwa, no openly
declared policy by a cleric or militia leader or politician, but a wave
of anti-gay hysteria hit the country. An Iraqi TV station, with
disapproving commentary, showed a video of a group of perhaps two dozen
young men at a private dance party, wiggling their hips like female
belly dancers. Terms like the third sex and puppies,
a newly coined slur, began to appear in hostile news reports. Shia and
Sunni clerics started to preach in their Friday sermons about the evils
of homosexuality and “the people of Lot.” Police officers stepped up
their harassment of openly gay men. Families and tribes cast out their
gay relatives. The bodies of gay men like Mazen and Namir, often
mutilated, began turning up on the street. There is no way to verify
the number of tortured or harassed, but the best available estimates
place that figure in the thousands. Hundreds of men are believed to
have been killed.

The eruption of violence in February appears to have been an
unintended consequence of the country’s broader peace. In the wake of
the surge in American troops and the increase in strength of the Iraqi
military and police forces, Iraq’s once-powerful Sunni and Shia
militias have wound down their attacks against American forces and one
another. Now they appear to be repositioning themselves as agents of
moral enforcement, exploiting anti-gay prejudice as a means of
engendering public support. Gay Iraqis seem to believe that the Mahdi
Army is the main, but not only, culprit in the purges. “They’ve started
a new game to make people follow them. No more whores, no more
lesbians, no more gays,” a friend of Fadi’s told me. “They’re sending a
message to people: ‘We are still here, and we can do anything we
want.’ ”

It
doesn’t help that gay people have virtually no allies in Iraqi society.
Women, ethnic minorities, detainees, people who work for the
Americans—just about everyone else in the country has some sort of
representation. But there are no votes to be gained or power to be
accrued in any Iraqi community—Shia, Sunni, Kurds, Christians,
Turkmen—by supporting gay people. Gays in Iraq today are essentially a
defenseless target….

In Praise of Wasted Time

Oct7

We’re in New York City, probably through the rest of October, visiting family on the Upper East Side and making plans for a new project. While Adam manages his Northampton activist campaigns from afar, I have been “doing research for the novel”, which to the untrained eye might look like shopping for clothes. Fortunately, here is novelist Nick Hornby, in an interview on the literary social-networking site Goodreads, to ease my guilt:

GR: The idea of wasting time is a strong theme in your work. The characters of your novels often share a disability to engage fully with life—a motif that can be traced back to your memoir, Fever Pitch. Do you see this as one of life’s primary challenges?

NH: The trouble is, of course, that it’s a challenge one can never win. I refuse to accept that the people who have never wasted a second of their lives in the conventional sense, the people who climb mountains and run for high office and find cures for diseases, have succeeded in engaging fully with life. They’re the ones with the damaged relationships and the piles of unread novels, the people who don’t know what Little Walter sounds like…I’m frustrated by how much time has slipped by in my own life, and I’ve wasted more time than most, but I’m not sure I’d feel any better if I’d been more productive. For a start, my first couple of books were a product of all the times I’d wasted at football matches and in record stores.

Later
in the interview, Hornby’s nostalgia about his intense relationship to his small record collection reminded me how I felt about the few poetry books I owned as a teenager.

NH: I think I used to obsess over albums simply because I didn’t have very many. Back when I started listening to music, your record collection began with one album. And then, a couple of weeks later, when you’d got the pocket money together, it became two, and so on. And that meant you had a pretty intense relationship with the albums you owned in your teenage years. Now it’s different. My nieces and nephews ask me to fill up their iPods. I give them a couple hundred albums with the flick of a mouse. I can’t really imagine what that is like, being presented with the history of rock ‘n’ roll like that.

The books that somewhat randomly fetched up on my
shelf, which I reread more closely than anything I’ve bought since,
included Diane Wakoski’s Emerald Ice, the collected poems of Auden, Eliot, and Sexton, the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, Robert Hass’s Field Guide and Praise, Gregory Corso’s Gasoline, and Robert Kelly‘s The Mill of Particulars.
This last, which I received as a 16th birthday gift from Alissa Quart,
fascinated me even though (or because) I didn’t understand much of it.
I was a real high-modernist in those days; Allen Ginsberg gave a reading at our high school (!!) and I commiserated with my friend Nick about what a poseur the great man was. Now Nick is a priest and I am writing the great gay Christian novel. “I saw the best minds of my generation…”

In honor of life’s unforeseeable twists and turns, and Hornby’s passion for rock music, I’ll close with a favorite song from one of the few non-classical cassettes I owned in the 1980s (see “high-modernist” above). It’s still so very true.

Well baby, there you stand
With your little head, down in your hand
Oh, my god, you can’t believe it‘s happening
Again
Your baby‘s gone, and you‘re all alone
And it looks like the end.

And you‘re back out on the street.
And you‘re tryin‘ to remember.
How will you start it over?
You don‘t know what became.
You don’t care much for a stranger‘s touch,
But you can‘t hold your man.

You never thought you‘d be alone this far
Down the line
And I know what’s been on your mind
You’re afraid it’s all been wasted time

The autumn leaves have got you thinking
About the first time that you fell
You didn’t love the boy too much, no, no
You just loved the boy too well, farewell
So you live from day to day, and you dream
About tomorrow, oh.
And the hours go by like minutes
And the shadows come to stay
So you take a little something to
Make them go away
And I could have done so many things, baby
If I could only stop my mind from wondrin’ what
I left behind and from worrying ’bout this wasted time

Ooh, another love has come and gone
Ooh, and the years keep rushing on
I remember what you told me before you went out on your own:
sometimes to keep it together, we got to leave it alone.
So you can get on with your search, baby, and I can
Get on with mine
And maybe someday we will find, that it wasn’t really
Wasted time

(Lyrics courtesy of Lyrics007)

Homophobia Creates Public Health Crisis in Jamaica

Sep24

This stark report from the September issue of The Atlantic describes how rampant homophobia in Jamaica forces the gay community underground, inhibiting efforts at AIDS education and treatment. One has to wonder whether similar factors are contributing to the epidemic in some African countries, where anyone suspected of being gay runs the risk of criminal punishment and mob violence. Then, to top it off, anti-gay pundits feed these statistics back to impressionable young men who are struggling with their sexual orientation, warning them that “the lifestyle” inevitably leads to misery, disease and early death.

From The Atlantic article by Micah Fink:

We may be accustomed to thinking of AIDS as most rampant in distant parts of the world like Africa, India, and South Asia. But these days the epidemic is flaring up a bit closer to home, in the Caribbean. Indeed, AIDS is now the leading cause of death among adults there, and the Caribbean’s rate of new infections is the second highest in the world, following just behind Sub-Saharan Africa.

A major factor in the region’s susceptibility to the epidemic is its pervasive atmosphere of homophobia, which makes education and outreach efforts nearly impossible. Jamaica, which lies near the middle of the Caribbean and, as of last year, was found to have an astounding 32 percent HIV infection rate among gay men, offers a case study in how anti-gay attitudes have helped spread and intensify the epidemic’s impact.

In Jamaica, homophobic attitudes are reflected in everything from laws that criminalize anal sex, to the lyrics of popular dancehall music that celebrates the murder of gay men, to widespread acts of anti-gay violence, and a gay culture of sexual secrecy and high-risk behavior. Each of these factors is intensified by a religious context that defines homosexuality as a mortal sin and points to the Bible for moral justification in violently rejecting the concerns of the gay community.

According to Dr. Robert Carr, widely recognized as one of the world’s leading researchers on cultural forces and the unfolding of the AIDS pandemic, local awareness of the disease was initially shaped by the international media: “AIDS was seen as a disease of gay, White, North American men. And people were really afraid of it.”

“There were no treatments available in the Caribbean at the time,” he says, “so AIDS really was a death sentence. You had people with Kaposi’s sarcoma, people with violent diarrhea, who were just wasting away and then dying in really horrible and traumatic ways.” The terror induced by these deaths, combined with an already intense local culture of homophobia to produce a violent backlash. “To call what was going on here ‘stigma and discrimination’ was really an understatement,” he says. “In the ghettos they were putting tires around people who had AIDS and lighting the tires on fire. They were killing gay people because they thought AIDS was contagious. It was a very extreme environment, and really horrible things were happening.”…

Experts are increasingly convinced that getting AIDS under control here will require putting out not just general public health messages to the whole population, but targeted ones, directed at those most at risk. “A good starting point,” Maluwa suggests, “would be to openly design programs [for the gay population], just like we have programs to address the general population, to address children.” And these programs, she contends, should come complete with “adequate commodities, such as lubricants and condoms.”

But the social and political environment makes such targeted public health assistance nearly impossible—in part because the gay community is afraid to come forward to receive it, and in part because the (frequently violent) intolerance gays face makes AIDS a relatively less pressing concern….

Read the whole story here.

Friday Random Song: Jason Bravo, “You Raise Me Up”

Sep18

Buffalo, NY-based singer/songwriter Jason Bravo’s performances of original pop songs and classic covers can be enjoyed on his YouTube channel, BraveHealerMusic. His debut album “Between Head and Heart” is available from CDBaby.

In this concert clip from summer 2009, he’s performing Josh Groban’s hit song “You Raise Me Up”, with my best buddy Greg Bravo on the awesome guitar solos.

When I am down, and oh my soul, so weary.
When troubles come, and my heart burdened be.
Then I am still and wait here in the silence.
Until You come and sit awhile with me.

You raise me up so I can stand on mountains.
You raise me up to walk on stormy seas.
I am strong when I am on your shoulders.
You raise me up to more than I can be.

There is no life — no life without its hunger.
Each restless heart beats so imperfectly.
But when you come and I am filled with wonder.
Sometimes I think I glimpse eternity.

You raise me up so I can stand on mountains.
You raise me up to walk on stormy seas.
I am strong when I am on your shoulders.
You raise me up to more than I can be.

You raise me up so I can stand on mountains.
You raise me up to walk on stormy seas.
I am strong when I am on your shoulders.
You raise me up — to more than I can be.

Lyrics courtesy of AnyChristianLyrics.com

Reiter's Block

The blog of poet and novelist Jendi Reiter

Category Archives: Notable Quotes