Category Archives: Politics and Culture

To Dream the Ecclesial Dream: Making Demands on the Liberal Church


We yearn to have companions
who travel by our side,
strong friends to call and answer
with whom we are allied…

These words from Dosia Carlson’s contemporary hymn “We yearn, O Christ, for wholeness” (sung to the tune of “O Sacred Head”) keep running through my mind as I contemplate my feelings of alienation within the church. We’ve had a good debate on this blog about the shortcomings I perceive in the conservative Christian approach to religious knowledge. But I felt exhausted and alone after this discussion, and so many others like it, whenever I’ve tried to widen the lens beyond the usual proof-text battles over homosexuality. Are Christian progressives and postmodernists failing to step up to the challenge of advancing religious philosophy of knowledge beyond the tired old rationalist/supernaturalist debates of the 19th century? What would make the liberal church a radical church?

Beyond “Inclusion”

The liberal churches’ pastoral response to marginalized groups has been stronger than their theological response. The Episcopal Church, for instance, has shown leadership in appointing women clergy at all levels of authority, and in rolling back discrimination against GLBT clergy and laypeople. But apart from rebutting traditionalists’ interpretation of certain Bible verses to the contrary (“women keep silent in churches” and the like), we haven’t developed a positive Scripture-based ethic to replace conservative sexual mores.

To begin with, the concept of “inclusion” can’t bear all the weight we place on it. Postmodernist gadfly Stanley Fish, a professor of law and literature, has written many books urging progressives to flesh out their substantive values and proclaim them fearlessly, rather than hiding behind procedural values that give the false appearance of neutrality. “Inclusion” is one of his favorite targets. Every community has boundaries, implicit or explicit, to exclude those values and behaviors that the community simply cannot tolerate without jeopardizing its reason for existence. When we dodge conflict by pretending that there are no boundaries, we are also evading the accountability of a communal discussion about where those boundaries should be.

With respect to the status of GLBT Christians, the liberal church would welcome them unconditionally, while the conservative church would say that they have to acknowledge and work on correcting their sinful tendencies in order to be members in good standing. But why do we disagree?

Is it because we can explain why gender nonconformity and same-sex intercourse are not sinful according to Scripture? If so, have we articulated principles of responsible interpretation, so that our departure from the apparent meaning of other Biblical proscriptions does not degenerate into a free-for-all?

Is it because we don’t consider Scripture authoritative, or at least not more authoritative than reason and experience? The same question applies, as well as the question of whether we have made our religion irrelevant.

Or do we take the lazy way out and invoke “inclusion”? Here is where it gets knotty. Because there must be–there should be–some instances where the liberal church would put moral conditions on inclusion. Pedophiles, sexual harassers, “johns” who purchase exploited and trafficked women, perpetrators of domestic violence, maybe even adulterers. Economic exploitation could also come in for criticism if the rights and wrongs of the situation are clear enough (e.g. sweatshop labor, human trafficking).

I don’t mean that these people would always be banned from church or denied communion, though that might also be necessary. But at the very least, the church would publicly deem those behaviors unacceptable, and press sinners to repent and reform. (When was the last time you heard the word “sin” in your liberal church? Just asking.)

As it is, we flip back and forth between the rationales that “Jesus welcomed everybody” and “Jesus didn’t condemn homosexuality” as if they were the same. They aren’t. Jesus didn’t actually welcome everybody. He called some behaviors sinful, and he said that some sins were serious enough to be incompatible with the kingdom of Heaven. Whether we understand that as a statement about the afterlife, or about the kind of society he wants us to create here and now, the point is that our concepts of inclusion and tolerance owe more to Enlightenment philosophy than to the Bible.

Another, theologically more important, pitfall of the inclusion paradigm is that it keeps the church’s power in the hands of the human heterosexual majority rather than conceding it to God. It shouldn’t be about whether we are convinced to let gays into “our” church. It’s about universal access to the Holy Spirit. It’s about humbling ourselves and problematizing our privileges so that we learn to view any type of group-based domination as a historical accident rather than a divine right.

We need this level of spiritual formation in the liberal church. Jesus calls us to rethink the worldly understanding of power. We don’t foreground this issue enough, except in generalized anti-war sermons and charitable appeals. It should be brought into our personal lives as well.

Inclusion is an important concept, but it’s not the whole of our faith, and it doesn’t solve every problem.

Sex After Patriarchy

Monogamous love matches between consenting adults represent our modern ideal of marriage, but this norm doesn’t come from the Bible, and in fact you have to look hard to find examples. In addition, the diverse marriage patterns approved or uncritically represented in the Bible include several that we’d recognize as oppressive today: e.g. a woman forced to marry her rapist, a widow forced to marry her brother-in-law, or a male and female slave paired off by their owners. Reports from survivors of polygamous sects suggest that this arrangement also carries an unacceptable risk of exploitation and neglect of women and children.

Apart from opening up modern marriage to same-sex couples, does the liberal church have anything to say about gospel norms for sexuality? As St. Paul noted in 1 Corinthians 10:23, “All things are lawful, but not all things are helpful.” (See parallel translations here.) The liberal church hasn’t given us any resources for discerning what is helpful. In today’s chaotic and hypersexualized culture, that’s serious neglect of the flock.

For instance, why is monogamy the only Christian option? Would Jesus disapprove of the honestly negotiated open relationships that quite a few married gay male couples enjoy? I really don’t know, and I’ve never been in a church that took the initiative to shape this conversation.

Conservative Christianity focuses on lists of acceptable and forbidden acts, with too little regard for the quality of the relationship within which they occur. Husband’s penis in wife’s vagina is presumptively God-approved. Anything else needs a special permit. Once we reject this legalism, though, how do we assess that relationship? Does sex have to be tender and egalitarian? What about role-playing and BDSM? Married, LTR, or one-night stand?

We are long overdue for a discussion about the qualities of character that Jesus wants us to cultivate, and how our sexual habits can build up or damage that character. The late Pope John Paul II’s “theology of the body” uses specificially Christian concepts like Incarnation and Trinity to depict an ideal sexuality that integrates body, mind, and spirit. Despite th
e Catholic Church’s problematic assumptions about gender and sexual orientation, we can learn a lot from this project.

The liberal church is still reacting so hard against sexist and homophobic stigma that we are afraid to suggest any limits on sexual self-expression. This lapse is not cost-free. It imposes collateral damage on the children of casually formed and dissolved sexual pairings, and on adults who need guidance to recognize that they’re reenacting traumatic patterns.

From Liberal to Liberators

“Why don’t they just leave?”

Outsiders often ask this question about victims of intimate partner violence and adult survivors of child abuse who remain in contact with the abuser. These interrogators need to be educated about the brainwashing, learned helplessness, and fear of losing one’s entire social world when the relationship is terminated. Go now and read a complete explanation on the survivor website Pandora’s Project. I’ll wait.

Liberal Christians are prone to the same insensitivity toward our conservative brothers and sisters. We get angry at women and gays in patriarchal churches for apparently colluding in their own oppression, or we dismiss them as stupid. We flatter ourselves that rape culture and abuse-enabling myths are confined to right-wing institutions, whereas the average Baptist wife and mother looks at the sexual brutality and relationship chaos of modern America and decides, not irrationally, that she is safer in a community where at least some men recognize a duty to protect her and her children. The preachers of patriarchy encourage these fear-based compromises by implying that women who are not modest and submissive are asking to be raped, as last month’s dust-up over Douglas Wilson and Fifty Shades of Grey demonstrated.

Feminist bloggers like Rachel Held Evans, linked above, and Grace at Are Women Human? wrote thorough refutations of this abuse-enabling theology. But the liberal church, as a whole, hasn’t devoted nearly enough resources to identifying this heresy wherever it appears, and providing compassionate support to conservative Christian women whose own religious leaders are covering up abuse.

When we say “Why don’t you leave?” we are basically asking hundreds of thousands of Christians to join the Witness Protection Program — to turn their backs on their family and friends, the music they love, the culture they know best, the beliefs that carried them through tough times — and become New England Unitarians. There’s a lot of nourishment that conservative churches provide, which we don’t consistently offer.

For instance, members facing serious illness can be comforted by a robust public affirmation of the power of prayer to work miracles. Spouses struggling with temptation to cheat, and teenagers confused by their overpowering new urges, benefit from collective reinforcement of moral standards and the wider time horizon that their faith suggests. Conservatives say that Jesus is alive and actively caring for us, not just a good moral example from history. He bears us up in our weakness and forgives our sins; he doesn’t only command us to share our abundance. Let me tell you, when I’m drowning in anxiety and grief, I need the Lord of the Storm, not a Nobel Peace Prize winner. People in crisis will be loyal to the religion that brings order out of chaos, even at the cost of some personal freedom.

The liberal church’s avoidance of the topic of personal, relational sins (as opposed to economic and collective political ones) can actually make victims feel less safe. “And such a one was I…” The replacement of “Truth” with “true for you” removes the standard against which we can begin to judge our abuser’s behavior. Didn’t she already try to make us believe that reality was whatever she wanted it to be? We survivors need communally agreed-upon facts and moral values, in order to name our secret trauma, hand back the shame, and dethrone the god-like accuser in our head.

We liberal Christians can’t coast forever on the sins we don’t commit. We should become active allies of Christians who are entrapped by a distorted version of our shared faith.

And let it begin with me.

Excerpt From Charles Shaw’s “Exile Nation: Drugs, Prisons, Politics and Spirituality”


This week, the excellent online literary journal The Nervous Breakdown features a chapter from Charles Shaw’s prison memoir, Exile Nation: Drugs, Prisons, Politics and Spirituality, recently released by Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press. I will be ordering copies for myself and my prison pen pals. The book examines what the surveillance state and the prison-industrial complex are doing to the soul of America. Here’s a sample:

All cultures have their own particular concept of “limbo,” purgatory, or some other form of antechamber to paradise. The word “limbo” itself comes from the Latin limbus, meaning an “edge or boundary.” Used as proper nouns, Limbus describes the edge of Hell, and Limbo is a place for the souls of unbaptized infants and patriarchs who died before the coming of Christ, to wait for Christ to be born and pardon them. Once pardoned, they are in effect “saved” and become de facto Christians, and are finally granted access to eternal paradise. But the Messiah doesn’t seem to come around very often, so they sit around like millions of undocumented immigrants, waiting for the next mass amnesty.

Purgatory, by comparison, is like the express line at the US-Mexican Border, the one for people with spotless backgrounds, or diplomatic cover. It’s the waiting room for the already-saved, a kind of hazmat decontamination unit that scrubs off the last few sins and moral entanglements of the true believers, before they can cross the border into freedom and eternal, unencumbered bliss. What all of these places have in common is the theme of detention. Prison is all of these things constrained within the temporal, corporeal plane. The lives of inmates exist in stasis until that time when they are released back into the world. There is absolutely nothing you can do about the outside world, or about the life you may have been living, while you are incarcerated. Everything that you are doing in life stops in its tracks. Vita interrupta. Your rent and bills stop being paid, your mail stops being picked up, your phone is never answered, your email is never downloaded, your refrigerator is never cleaned out, your dog is never walked or fed. Forget about your dreams and ambitions, your plans and goals, because those get put on hold too. If you are lucky to reemerge, you are forever altered by the reality of a conviction record.

Nine times out of ten, no one but your family and closest friends, if you have them, know where you are or what happened to you. Those few people are your lifelines to the outside world, and generally are the only people to do anything for you. You find out very quickly whom you can trust and who will really be there for you. Many inmates find themselves with no one.

Prisons are situated on the fringes of civilization, isolated from most population centers and the general public, hidden away from sight in a gulag network of thousands of municipal, county, state, and federal facilities stretching across the land. Americans not only want to feel that their communities are safe, they really don’t want to have to trouble themselves with thinking about the consequences of locking up millions of people, or the abuses, in all forms, that might be taking place under a system of Prohibition funded by fear, apathy, and taxes. In America, it is simply a matter of out of sight, out of mind.

Because of that, and because of the isolation of the prison experience, the full understanding of what it is like to be forcibly dislocated from society becomes, for many inmates, the key struggle and in the end the key transformative experience of their lives. Jazz musicians talk about “sustained intensity.” Prison life is a frantic Coltrane riff that produces no sound and sucks the life right out of you. It’s a negative-sum game for which there is no recuperative period. No . . . Sleep . . . ’til . . . Parole!

The lack of popular noise produced over our national prison system, and the underlying reasons for the apparent apathy of the public, will keep Americans from ever having a Bastille moment, which was the storming of a Paris prison that sparked the French Revolution. The American public’s pervasive lack of political involvement seems to keep them from storming anything except a Wal-Mart during Christmas shopping season. Plus, since American prisons are so far away from everything else, the proverbial angry mob would have to endure a six-hour bus trip ahead of time before they could commence stormin’.

But prisoners of the drug war aren’t seen by the Mainstream as political prisoners, as victims of tyranny like those held in the Bastille by Louis XVI, even though that’s precisely what they are.

There are reasons for this, and most are attributable to race and class. At its core, the war on drugs is nothing more than the criminalization of lifestyle. In many regards, it is also a war on religious freedom, and on consciousness itself.

The punishment for defying the system and exerting these inherent freedoms (the ones endowed by our Creator and all) is first disability, then disenfranchisement, then imprisonment, and finally, internal exile. Limbo time everybody, how low can you go? When in limbo, one invariably has an entirely new understanding of time.

I would spend 13 days in isolation at the Stateville Northern Reception and Classification center in Joliet, Illinois, before being sent on to my prison facility to serve out the remainder of my sentence. Thirteen endless days in a brand-new, state-of-the-art, hyper-sterile, hyper-industrialized detention facility. It was “only” 13 days, I can tell myself now, four years later. But while it was happening, it was a form of torture that leaves an indelible scar on a person’s soul. That is why they call Stateville “Hotel Hell.”

It is a cold and sterilized form of detention, a little taste of a supermax prison for everyone. Once they process you in, and stuff you into that 6 x 10 cement hole, you don’t come out again. You are on 24-hour-a-day lockdown with your cellmate, if you have one, and nothing else. Nothing to read, nothing to see, nothing to do but wait, wait, wait. And once the waiting begins, things start to go all sorts of ways inside your mind.

Thirteen days was interminable while on lockdown, yet right now I think over the last 13 days of my life and can’t remember half of it. Most people wouldn’t think twice about doing anything for two weeks, until it’s put into the proper context. The Cuban Missile Crisis lasted 13 days. Ask anyone who lived through it to tell you what a hellish eternity it was, teetering, if only briefly, on the edge of nuclear annihilation. Ask anyone on day seven of a two-week master cleanse fast how they feel, or two new lovers separated for two weeks, or the parents of a lost child, or someone waiting two weeks for test results that will tell them whether they live or die.

Likewise, two weeks spent in the cold and dark—half-starved, without anything to occupy your mind, contemplating your past, your life, your crimes literal and spiritual, missing people you love, pondering your future as a convict, stressing about which penitentiary you will be sent to and what you will have to face once you get there, and soon and so forth—is its own particularly menacing brand of torment.

 

Sexual Visibility and Tolerance


I’ve been thinking about the roots of homophobia, especially among people who aren’t conservative Christians, and I have a theory. Before “out” gay people and open discussion of homosexuality became routine in our culture, people could tell themselves that single-gender social environments were spaces where they could be free from the sexual gaze. Of course this was never true, but it was a comforting fiction that maintained a shield of privacy for those who wanted it.

Now that gay desire is no longer invisible, none of us feel quite so invisible, either. In my view, hysteria about male homosexuality is most prevalent in patriarchal subcultures (such as the evangelical church) because they can’t imagine male sexuality without dominance. God forbid some man should do to them what they feel entitled to do to women.

The same anxiety probably underlies radical feminists’ resistance to transgender presence in “female-only” spaces. They have a fear, ill-founded in my opinion, that male-born transwomen will carry over the predatory and dominating aspects of male lust for women, a kind of sexual gaze that’s different from how “true” lesbians would look at each other.

Now, I wonder whether the increasing support for GLBT rights among the younger generation (I can use that phrase now I’m 40) has anything to do with the disappearance of privacy in the era of social networking, reality TV, and camera phones. We are all being looked at, all the time. We break up with our partners via Facebook status reports. We give birth on YouTube. Movements like SlutWalk challenge the idea that limiting our sexual visibility is the proper way to protect ourselves from harassment and rape. The boundaries of our intimacy are undergoing huge shifts, and while not all the consequences are positive, I think sexual minorities have benefited from this trend. Your thoughts, readers?

Supermax Prison Sued for Inhumane Treatment of the Mentally Ill

This week The Atlantic’s website published a powerful three-part investigative report by Andrew Cohen on the inhumane treatment of mentally ill prisoners at “Supermax” in Florence, Colorado, the flagship maximum-security federal prison.

Part One, “American Gulag”, describes flagrant violations of Bureau of Prisons rules requiring medical treatment for prisoners with diagnosed disabilities. Prisoners are caught in a nightmarish cycle of contradictions. Federal policy prohibits prisoners with serious mental illness from being transferred to Supermax, where the inmates are not allowed to be on psychotropic medications. However, many such prisoners are sent there anyway, and then denied the drugs they need to keep from injuring themselves and others. Their acting-out prompts more disciplinary crackdowns that drive them further into madness. According to a lawsuit filed this week by five inmates, alleging violations of the Constitution’s “cruel and unusual punishment” clause, guards often chain up these prisoners in their own waste products and taunt them by giving them empty food bags at mealtime.

In Part Two, “Supermax: The Faces of a Prison’s Mentally Ill”, the magazine profiles the plaintiffs. These are not the sympathetic characters championed by groups like The Innocence Project; they are violent, delusional, convicted of murder and other serious crimes. However, the article reminds us that they are also human beings with shocking trauma histories and, in many cases, mental retardation and brain injuries. Often their conditions have dramatically worsened because prison staff has mistreated them or failed to protect them from other prisoners’ violence. Here’s just one story:

Michael Bacote: He is the first named plaintiff in the case. Age 37, functionally illiterate, and deemed “mildly mentally retarded” a decade ago by a prison psychologist, Bacote was sent to ADX in 2005 after pleading guilty to murder in a case involving the death of a fellow inmate at the federal prison in Texas. (Evidently, he did not kill the victim but rather stood guard while others did.) Bacote has been diagnosed as suffering from “major depressive disorder with psychotic features” as well as from “paranoid ideations,” and he also may suffer the after-effects of severe closed-head injury.

Bacote refuses to take medicine that has been ground up from pill form by prison officials. And they, in turn, refuse to allow Bacote to take his medicine in pill form. Bacote has repeatedly tried to transfer out of Supermax. Over and over again, his requests have been denied. Despite the prior diagnoses from prison doctors, for example, paragraph 138 of the complaint alleges that ADX officials in April 2009 told Bacote that “a review of your file does not indicate you are mentally ill or mentally retarded.”

Part Three, “The Constitution and Mentally Ill Prisoners”, surveys the issues in the current lawsuit. The takeaway question: if we require a certain level of mental competency to hold a person accountable for a crime, “why does such a competency determination not impact the severity of an inmate’s incarceration?” The answer will tell us a lot about what American values really are.

Reading this series, I couldn’t help but wonder…what would happen if Christians threw their considerable political clout behind prison reform? The religious right has poured enormous amounts of money and organizational skills into passing legislation on contentious social issues. Like the unborn, mentally ill prisoners could certainly be considered “the least of these”, whom Jesus told us to protect. Sure, their feet don’t look as good on a lapel pin, but Matthew 25 is pretty clear:

31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

So what can YOU do?
Donate to the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, one of the pro bono groups behind this lawsuit. Contact your member of Congress. Write to a prison pen pal, and share their stories so the world can see that these people are “more than their worst act” (as Sister Helen Prejean said in “Dead Man Walking”). 

Adoptive Families Are Queer Families


Truth Wins Out, a watchdog organization battling homophobia and “ex-gay” misinformation, reports today that seniors at Minnesota Catholic high schools are being forced to attend lectures about the superiority of “traditional marriage”, in which the presenters bash not only same-sex couples but single parents and adoptive families. At DeLaSalle High School in Minneapolis, for instance, the presenters (a priest and a married couple sent by the diocese) called adopted children “sociologically unstable” and implied that their families were not normal. Fortunately several brave students spoke up against this bigotry.

There’s much to discuss here, and I encourage you to read the Truth Wins Out post (and donate some money to these guys). What I want to highlight is the natural alliance between gay/lesbian and adoptive families, a connection whose full potential has not yet been realized.

Yes, straight married couples who adopt children — your family is queer, too. Stay with me for a moment.

As my husband and I have made our way through the process of domestic open adoption, we’ve come to understand and embrace the fact that our future child, not unlike Heather, will have two mommies (and two daddies). There’s Adam and me, the child’s “forever family” in current adoption jargon, but also the birthparents, who in ideal circumstances will always remain part of the child’s life. (Terminology check: Domestic means the baby is born in the United States. Open adoption means that there is continuing contact with the birthparents and possibly other members of the biological family.)

“But won’t he be confused?” is one of the most common objections that we hear. Same-sex parents, stop me if you’ve heard that one before. Why should it be confusing to have more people in your life who love you? Why should parents be ashamed that their child was “born that way”?

My commitment to open adoption has grown in tandem with my gay-rights activism. Both share an antipathy for the closet. Of course, everyone has the right to be discreet depending on the safety of their environment. But pretending that your child was not adopted — denying the strength of his connection to his birthfamily — has some of the same invalidating effects as rejecting his sexual orientation. Both are about denying him the right to love whom he chooses.

Adoptive parents are not as political as we could be. Partly it’s because we’re afraid of rocking the boat, and partly because the process is such a challenge that it’s tempting to make life easier by “passing” when you can. I read once that there are 50 waiting couples for every one healthy Caucasian newborn. Throw in the bureaucratic intrusiveness of the homestudy, and the popularity-contest aspect of crafting an online profile that will appeal to birthmothers, and you can see why adoptive parents feel crushing pressure to appear “normal”.

However, I believe adoption shame comes from the same poisonous roots as internalized homophobia. That’s right girls, I blame the patriarchy.

Like many religious defenders of “traditional marriage”, the Minnesota archdiocese absolutely has to privilege procreative sex over other forms of human bonding, or their case for the unnaturalness of same-gender love collapses. Biology is destiny, and the woman’s destiny is to be a womb. In this analysis, a woman who can’t or won’t procreate is a failed woman, and her chosen devotion to her adopted child is not equal to other forms of motherhood, because it merely originates in her will — and God forbid that a woman’s own intentions should outweigh her biology! Hence the fear that the adoptive mother’s already-undermined authority will be threatened by competition from his “real” mother. Adoptive parenting permits a woman to exercise a creative power that is not in subjection to her gender, and for that reason it must be devalued by patriarchal religious leaders, however much they claim to be pro-life.

Adoptive families can learn from queer and feminist analysis that different doesn’t have to mean unequal. We should also be more active in speaking out against the idolatry of the procreative nuclear family, because this hurts our own children as much as it does same-sex families. Love is the new normal.

Open adoption resources:
Cooperative Adoption Consulting (Ellen Roseman)
Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute
Sharon Roszia, Adoption Educator and Counselor

 

Support Access to Justice for Low-Income Massachusetts Residents


Community Legal Aid is the state-funded civil legal aid program serving low-income and elderly residents of Central and Western Massachusetts (Berkshire, Franklin, Hampden, Hampshire, and Worcester counties). Massachusetts Justice Project is its federally-funded counterpart. The two groups have teamed up to raise money through their Access to Justice Campaign 2012. I just donated and hope you will too.

CLA and MJP have just one attorney available for every 7,000 needy clients in Western Massachusetts. Their services help our neighbors save their homes from foreclosure, secure protection from domestic violence, prevent elder abuse and fraud, and much more.

Here’s one story from their brochure:

After leaving an extremely abusive relationship, Maria* continued to be harassed and threatened by her abuser at her subsidized apartment. She was afraid to go outside, and could not do the work program required for her receipt of welfare benefits. As a result, her benefits were cut off, and she was evicted from her apartment for nonpayment of rent. She applied for emergency shelter but was told she was ineligible because she had been evicted from a subsidized apartment. She then got in touch with the Massachusetts Justice Project. An MJP attorney filed an appeal of the shelter denial, and represented her at a hearing with the Department of Housing and Community Development. To her great relief, Maria was admitted to a family shelter, and also awarded several months of retroactive welfare benefits to which she was entitled.

*pseudonym

Gemini Magazine Is My Happy Place


My poem “Depression Is My Happy Place” was published today in Gemini Magazine, one of my favorite online journals, as an Honorable Mention winner in their 2012 poetry contest. You may enjoy it (or you may not) below. Also don’t miss the 2nd Prize poem by my friend Gerardo Mena, “A Nursing Home Boxer to a High School Volunteer”. Tony Mena is not only a talented poet; he’s a decorated Operation Iraqi Freedom veteran and a musician. Check out his website.

Depression Is My Happy Place

that lake waits anytime
for me to slip
under its threaded green hush
i don’t need summer or parking
to arrive
where my hurtling family
is already one less

depression is easy to get to
even on holidays
the standards are lower than church
or kindergarten
you can run with scissors there
but you probably won’t bother

it’s my tight light box
where i turn back the sun
to a pale hum

i don’t need fattening pills
or fermented dizzy bottles
i can spin it on my own
straw into lead
because a lead house
never blows down or burns

side effects of depression may include
eating more or less
than people in magazines
sleeping more or less
by yourself
sudden loss of interest
in what your mother thinks

it’s my soft dust pillow
under the boxspring where grandma money
refuses the bankers’ conjurations
of brown fields into winking green numbers
racing round the globe
like a tornado-spun house

it’s my black screen
i won’t trade

there may be a cost-saving generic
alternative to depression
ask your doctor about marriage
smiling often and wearing a good suit
may cause people to leave you alone
did you know that your natural skin tone
adds a layer of protection at no extra charge
(some restrictions may apply)

depression is not recommended
for unattractive women

Myth-Busting the Family


The humor site Cracked.com might seem like an unlikely source of wisdom, but this article by John Cheese, “4 Old Sayings About Family That Are (Sometimes) B.S.”, offers better advice about emotional boundaries and manipulation than many therapists and clergy provide. If I had a penny for every time a religious leader has enabled an abuser with the Fifth Commandment…I could do some serious damage with my piggy bank.

From the article:

Myth #4: “You Have to Help Him, He’s Your Father!” (or Mother, etc.)

Why We Say It:
You owe your parents everything. Without them, your entire existence would have been abbreviated to a latex reservoir tip swatting that shit out of the air like an NBA center. They put food on the table and a roof over your head, and by God, the least you can do is be there for them in return.

As adults, we expect the same from our own kids — a return on our investment. And that’s a perfectly logical, reasonable request, isn’t it? “I helped you, now you help me.” At some point, every parent does it, and we enforce that with one phrase that means two completely different things, depending on the recipient’s age: “I’m your father!”

As a child, it’s a demand. “You will mow the lawn because I’m your father, and you will damn well do what I tell you. Now you get out there before I clothe you with snakes!”

As an adult, that meaning loses its weight because they no longer make the rules. That’s when the phrase becomes a plea. “Can I borrow 20 bucks for some crack? Come on, man, I’m your father. You know how you made it to this age without dying? That was me who did that!”

When It’s Bullshit:
Right now, I have no fewer than two dozen messages in my inbox from readers asking me what to do in their seemingly unique situation. One or both of their parents are addicts, or habitual criminals, or general fuckups. The kids are taking care of themselves. They watch these grown-ass adults wrecking the entire family with stress about bills, borrowing money from anyone they can to keep the lights on while feeding hundreds of dollars per month into their vices. Every time the parents attempt to clean up their act, they fall right back into the same destructive cycle within weeks. The kids are essentially on their own. You know, normal family problems. We’ve all been there.

And here’s the thing — the whole “broken childhood” bit doesn’t end at childhood. There are people who will spend 40 consecutive years with this bullshit from their parents, knowing that their own kids won’t have the sitcom Grandma and Grandpa that’s always waiting with a hug and a turkey at Thanksgiving. These are the parents who are always borrowing, or begging, or making demands. They’re constantly needing to be bailed out like teenagers, or roping you into petty family disputes (“Your Uncle Steve has been talking shit about your mom again. Now be a good son and go slash his fucking tires”).

But … “I have to be there for them because they’re my parents, right?”

If you take nothing else from this article, please make it this: Childhood is not a bill that you have to pay for later. Parenting is not charity, or a loan — it is a requirement for those who took on the job, whether they meant to or not. When you become a parent yourself, you will be required to do it as well, without thanks or compensation. In fact, in the first year, you will often get shit on and stomped in the genitals.

Do you owe it to your own parents to be supportive? To try to help them break destructive habits? Of course. But not at the risk of your own health and emotional well being. For the first 20 years of your life, you are being trained to be a caregiver. At no point in that time should you be required to be one yourself. That’s not your job. Your job is to learn and grow.

Again, I’m not saying that if your mom is wheelchair-bound and needs help painting the house that you shove a finger in her face and say “I got my own problems, whore!” I’m talking about people who are outside your power to help unless you make it your full-time job. You can’t fix their addictions, or depression, or stupidity, or chronic need to constantly be in some kind of dramatic crisis. I think there’s a point where you’re allowed to let that shit go to voice mail.

Prisons Withhold Medical Care to Coerce Inmates Into Snitching


The FACTS Education Fund, also known as Families to Amend California’s Three Strikes, just sent me this newsletter about coercive withholding of medical care from prisoners in Segregated Housing Units (SHU). The SHU is a form of restricted or solitary confinement imposed on prisoners who are accused of gang connections, which often happens based on secret evidence or arbitrary prison politics. Once there, prisoners are put under enormous pressure to “debrief”, or inform on other suspected gang members to prison officials. This report from American RadioWorks, “Locked Down: Gangs in the Supermax“, gives more background on this process.

In the FACTS newsletter, Alfred Sandoval, a prisoner in California’s Pelican Bay SHU, describes why he joined last year’s hunger strike to improve prison conditions. Sandoval reports that guards withheld family visits and essential medical care from terminally ill prisoners to pressure them to debrief. An excerpt:

A few years ago, a close friend – his name was Jimmy – developed cancer. The medical staff, MTAs and RNs, explained that if he’d debrief, become an informant, he would receive better medical care. Now Jimmy and I had known each other since we were teenagers running the streets of East Los Angeles getting high and living the lifestyle that ended up with both of us in prison for life.

As Jimmy’s cancer grew worse, he began chemotherapy. Jimmy mentioned to me how the IGI would “show up” at the clinic and comment that he could have contact visits with his wife before he died if he’d debrief. He refused but that’s how he found out the cancer was terminal! Jimmy loved his wife more than anything and he wouldn’t tell her everything about the head games and bullshit like waking up from surgery still under anesthesia being questioned by IGI, but I had warned him of that because it happened to me and at least three other prisoners.

After one of the surgeries, Jimmy was returned to his cell after a brief stay at the Pelican Bay prison infirmary. Those cells are completely bare except for a bed and all you can do is lay there and wait. On the second night back in his cell, he awoke to a bad pain. He said it was a little after 2 a.m. and the staples had opened along his abdomen and he was bleeding. He was holding his intestines in, calling for the C/O. The C/O came and saw the blood and said he’d call the RN on duty.

The C/O came back approximately 30 minutes later with a roll of toilet paper. Jimmy was sitting on the blood-covered cement floor holding a towel soaked in blood against his stomach. The cop tossed Jimmy the toilet paper and said the medical staff would not come until the next shift and there was nothing he could do. Jimmy held his stomach closed in pain until almost 6 a.m. when the medical finally came and they rushed him to the hospital. He asked that I keep it to myself because that was his style.

I was pissed! He had requested two hardship transfers to Corcoran because of its medical facility and he’d be able to see his wife and family more before he died. Both were denied and he was told to debrief and then he’d be transferred but he steadfastly refused. The cancer spread and the gang unit increased the head games, telling the medical staff to confiscate his shaded prescription glasses. But luckily, a Dr. Williams stepped in and told the medical staff to leave Jimmy alone as he was at end stage cancer. Jimmy chose to stop the chemotherapy and die. We’d talk through a steel door and discuss everything and nothing and plan out his funeral. He died in December of 2010 and I am proud and honored to have been his friend.

Shortly after Jimmy’s death, I was told that approximately eight of the older prisoners had been approved for transfer to the SHU medical facility at New Folsom, but the gang unit had those transfers stopped citing that those prisoners, all in their 60s and 70s, had not successfully completed the debriefing, thereby issuing a death sentence to all of these prisoners and denying adequate medical care.

Make a donation to FACTS to help end these human rights abuses. You can write Mr. Sandoval a letter of support at: Alfred Sandoval, D-61000, Pelican Bay State Prison, P.O. Box 7500, Crescent City, CA 95532.

Massachusetts Three-Strikes Sentencing Bill Draws Criticism


Hat tip once again to Lois Ahrens at The Real Cost of Prisons, who sent me more articles and a factsheet from Families Against Mandatory Minimums about three-strikes sentencing.

Here’s FAMM’s summary of how the legislation currently pending in the Massachusetts statehouse would change our existing three-strikes law:

Current law: Requires maximum sentence for any felony conviction if defendant was previously sentenced twice to three or more years in prison. Parole is possible after serving half of maximum sentence.

Bills passed in November: The House and Senate both passed habitual offender bills. Both bills rewrite the existing habitual-offender law and add a new section to the law. In other words, both bills provide two different ways to prosecute someone as an habitual offender.

How bills would change ‘3-strikes’ law House bill

■Option 1 — changes to existing law:
• Removes requirement that prior felony convictions must result in prison sentence of at least three years. As a result, any two felony convictions that result in any sentence to state prison (could be as little as one year) would count as first two “strikes.” Any felony conviction would count as third strike, resulting in maximum sentence possible.
• Pushes back parole-eligibility date until two-thirds of maximum sentence has been served.
■ Option 2 — new section:
• Creates a list of about 60 dangerous or serious offenses, more finally tuned list than Senate’s.
• Like Senate bill, all three offenses must be from the list, although sentences for first two offenses must have been to state prison.
• Like Senate bill, defendant gets maximum sentence possible for third offense, with no parole. Critics say this section, as with the Senate bill, offers no access to parole.

Senate bill
■Option 1 — changes to existing law:
• Pushes back parole-eligibility date until two-thirds of maximum sentence has been served.
■ Option 2 — new section:
• Creates list of about 60 offenses; most — but not all — are dangerous or serious.
• All three offenses must be from the list.
• Sentences for the first two offenses could have been as little as one day in jail or prison.
• Defendant gets maximum sentence possible for third offense with no parole.
Critics say this section is problematic because it would include those who received very short sentences for the first two “strikes” due to a minor role in the offense or other mitigating factors. Also, critics say, the section offers no access to parole.

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This article by Lisa Redmond, from the Feb. 22 Lowell Sun newspaper, lays out the background and arguments for and against the legislation:

The state’s former corrections commissioner is blasting a proposed bill that could restrict parole and increase sentences for three-time convicted felons, saying the law is too broad and an overreaction to high-profile crimes.

“We are driven by high-profile crimes and our sympathy toward victims, but individual mistakes in judgment cannot be cured by systematic reform,” said Kathleen Dennehy, former commissioner of the state Department of Correction….

…One of the criticisms of both the House and Senate bills is that there is no room for judges to consider mitigating factors, essentially handcuffing judges to specific sentences, Dennehy said.

Critics have also described the law an overreaction to the December 2010 murder of Woburn Police Officer John Maguire.

Maguire, a Wilmington resident, was killed in a shootout during a botched jewelry-store heist with career criminal Dominic Cinelli, who had been released on parole despite receiving three life sentences for various crimes.

Maguire’s murder triggered an outcry from the public to fire members of the state Parole Board who released Cinelli on parole. The board has since been revamped and members replaced by Gov. Deval Patrick.

“The death of Officer Maguire was more like a wake-up call than an overreaction,” said Laurie Myers, spokeswoman for Community Voices, a victim-advocacy group.

Myers, of Chelmsford, noted that the three-strikes bill was filed in response to the Maguire murder and the 1999 slaying of Melissa Gosule at the hands of a repeat offender who was released from prison.

“Our communities are not equipped to handle violent criminals and suggesting that they are is not only irresponsible it’s dangerous,” Myers said.

“The number one priority of the Legislature should be to protect our communities, not find excuses when they fail, or choose to make other budget items a priority,” she said.

State Rep. Kevin Murphy, of Lowell, who is also a defense attorney, said, “This is a reasonable piece of legislation.”

While opponents of the law have stirred the debate by saying that convictions for minor offenses will count as strikes, Murphy said that’s not the case.

“The list has very serious crimes,” Murphy said. The crimes include: rape, assault and battery on a child or elderly causing serious injury, and armed assault in a dwelling.

In his State of the Commonwealth address last month, Patrick said he supports a “balanced bill” that has “some reforms on the habitual offender” to be “as tough as we should be on the worst of the worst.”

Opponents fear the law would result in increasing a prison population that is already bursting at the seams, with taxpayers footing the bill.

The Center for Church and Prison estimates the three strikes law would trigger an increase of more than 1,500 more prisoners each year or $125 million a year to the state’s $1 billion-per-year corrections’ budget.
…

Read the whole article here.

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In the Worcester Telegram, Clive McFarlane’s Feb. 17 editorial contends that three-strikes will permanently condemn people who could have been rehabilitated:

Jamie Domiano-Ayers’ husband was an addict and, as a result, she became one, too.

And when her husband landed in jail, she said, she had to come up with the money to satisfy her addiction.

She did, illegally, compiling a rap sheet between her mid-20s and early 30s that included convictions on assault and battery with dangerous weapons and breaking-and-entering charges.

But today, Ms. Domiano-Ayers, 49, has recovered from that dark period of her life.

She talked of her successful drug treatment, of her educational attainment — an associate’s degree in business administration in 2004 and her current pursuit of an associate’s degree in human services.

She is also proud that she has helped raise her five children to lead strong and productive lives.

But successful rehabilitation stories such as hers will likely occur a lot less in the future if Massachusetts lawmakers push through a “three strikes” bill that dramatically increases jail time for repeat criminal offenders, according to several speakers at a forum Wednesday at St. Andrew the Apostle Church on Spaulding Street.

According to speakers at the forum, a legislative conference committee is weighing two versions of a three strikes bill, both of which would increase the types of crimes for which an offender could be sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Tatum Pritchard, a lawyer with Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, said 688 infractions are classified as felonies in Massachusetts. Under current law, a third conviction on any of these felonies could draw the maximum sentence, with or without parole opportunities, she said.

Under the Senate’s version of the bill, 59 of the 688 felonies would draw maximum sentences, including 22 felonies that would draw life sentences. The sentences for these 59 felonies would be served without parole.

Currently, according to Ms. Prichard, only a murder conviction carries life without parole in the state.

The House version of the three strikes law reduces the number of felonies that carry maximum sentences without parole to 55, removing four that lawmakers felt were not serious enough offenses to meet such harsh penalties.

Ms. Pritchard said her organization is pushing to remove at least nine more low-level felonies from the list of 55.

She also noted that under current law, a defendant must serve three years or more in state prison before any of his convictions qualifies under the three strikes law.

However, under the House bill, that incarceration period for each conviction would be reduced to one day or more in state prison.

More significantly, qualifying conviction time for three strikes offenses that carry the maximum sentences without parole has been reduced to one day or more in a state prison in the House bill and to one day or more in any facility in the Senate bill.

“This means that people who have only spent a day or two in a county jail and who have never been to state prison can now get the maximum sentence without parole on a third conviction,” Ms. Prichard said.

She is also troubled that unlike the three strikes law in other states such as California, the bills before the Massachusetts Legislature remove judges’ discretion from sentencing.

That means the state’s 14 district attorneys would have the upper hand in these cases, she said.

Ms. Domiano-Ayers, who is now a member of the Ex-Prisoners and Prisoners Organizing for Community Advancement board of directors, said she is skeptical that prosecutors would show much empathy for a defendant with low-level convictions such as hers.

“If these bills were the law of the land years ago, I would have been put away for 10 years and that would have had a devastating impact on my family,” she said. “My children more than likely would have been placed in foster care, and there is no telling what would have happened to them.”

Critics of the bills say they are not asking lawmakers to be soft on crime, but for them to check the abundance of available research on three strikes law and to listen to both sides before making a decision, steps legislators seem unwilling to take, according to Benjamin Thompson, executive director of the Criminal Justice Policy Coalition in Boston. He who spoke at Wednesday’s forum.

“They (legislators) are people of good will who have made a bad decision by pushing public policy that was developed and crafted on emotion alone,” he said.

He is right, but there is still time for lawmakers to act rationally. There are too many lives at stake for them not to listen to both sides on this issue.