“Truth beyond Courtesy”

“Truth beyond Courtesy”       April 29, 2018    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

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You own everything that happened to you. Tell your Stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.  Ann Lamott

This has been quite a week in America. The first of what could be called #MeToo movement convictions came down. Bill Cosby, once thought to be America’s Dad, a black actor and comedian that I literally grew up listening to his albums, watching his cartoons, and enjoying his TV shows, was convicted of multiple counts of sexual assault. It took 40 years to get to this point, with two trials and a sentencing still in the future, but it is most likely that he will spend the rest of his life in prison. I heard the news with an odd combination of relief and sadness. It would have been horrible if he had been able to translate his fame, money, popularity, and age into some kind of escape from judgment and yet it hardly seemed entirely right to celebrate. I hate that these crimes happened. I hate that he had convinced himself that it was OK to do these horrible things. And I hate that he gave away whatever positive influences of his life’s work by undermining every decent thing he has ever done with these salacious sex crimes. 

I hope that his victims feel that they have now been heard. I hope this offers them some support, some healing, some hope for the future. But there is no way to un-ring a bell. Nothing can undo what has been done. But Cosby’s victims have yet been denied one thing that might have helped. Cosby refused to acknowledge his crimes. He offered no apology, he showed no remorse. 

It was a much less serious crime but there has been another controversy stirring lately around one of MSNBC’s rising stars in the news industry.

Joy Reid has become one of the most credible and popular journalists on the air in recent months, but she has suffered from a recent revelation that she had posted some very mean and homophobic posts on a blog. Her initial reaction was that her account had been hacked. But then she thought better of it and said that she simply did not recognize the person who had written those horrible things, but she acknowledged that it was who she was, in the past, though it is not who she is now.

In a courageous and possibly career saving move, she invited several members of the LGBTQ community to be a panel on her Saturday morning show. She profusely and sincerely apologized and then took the reprimands and sat through the largely kind and supportive responses of her panel but they did not only pull punches. It was hard. She was embarrassed, but, as they say, sunshine is the best antiseptic. She did what she needed to do, which was to be honest about her offenses, to ask for forgiveness, and to take what was offered to her without trying to down grade or dismiss what she had said.

She will have to wear the scars from having said what she said, but she also gains the credibility that comes with honest confession. Unlike, if I may point it out, one of her peers on MSNBC, Chris Matthews, who constantly insists that he was one of the only journalists who publicly opposed the invasion of Iraq. The truth is that at the time he not only supported the invasion, but he said that if Bush was successful that he should have his bust added to Mt. Rushmore. He has denied that so many times that he appears to believe it himself but, sadly, for people in his profession, you can look up the video on YouTube. This kind of dishonesty is what is wrong with journalism today. You can make mistakes and correct them but lying about them has no honor to it.

I believe that I can defend everything I have said about the LGBTQ civil rights issues over the past 25 years but, I am 61 years old. I may not want to be reminded of what I might have said 30 years ago. I can’t be sure that I am entirely “woke” now but I know that I was not terribly aware 30 years ago. I changed. I have changed enough that I have thrown away all of the sermons that I wrote in the first 25 years that I was in the ministry. I am not sure that I would even want to defend everything I said seven or eight years ago. I don’t believe what I used to believe. I am not who I used to be, and I am glad that I have been serving a church these past ten years that has not only allowed me to grow but you have encouraged it and I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart.

But it isn’t just me that has changed. The world has changed. There was never a world where Cosby’s habit of drugging women and sexually assaulting them while they were unconscious was acceptable, but there was a world in which women were discouraged from telling their story, they were sometimes paid off in out of court settlements that included nondisclosure clauses. Sometimes they were paid off with jobs. Sometimes they were threatened with law suits or physical violence. 

That, thankfully, is changing. Victims are, much more often, being given the opportunity to tell their stories. This can be dangerous stuff because not every story is true and not everyone will be able to substantiate their story. But there are other issues. A couple of recent internet memes have tried to shine a bit of sunlight on our faltering progress.

Fifty or sixty women can feel some relief with the conviction of Bill Cosby but there are at least 20 who are still waiting for the world to be click here to see the videowilling to hear their stories of Donald Trump’s manipulation, payoffs, and, in at least one case, child rape. Power and money still mean too much in our court system.

And we cannot escape the fact as much as we may feel some justice in the case of Bill Cosby, we can’t help but notice that other rapists, manipulators, liars, and misogynists who are white, rich men have not yet gone to court and I just don’t see how that can be true. Can it be that race still plays an important role in our judicial system?

It reminds me of that famous scene in Casablanca, when Captain Renault, after years of accepting bribes, shouts, “I am shocked, shocked, to find that gambling is going on here!”

We are progressives, which means that we hope for and work for progress. I believe that we are making progress, but Rome wasn’t built in a day . . . it did burn down in a day and if we don’t make some real progress on this front, we might need to get ready to hand Nero a fiddle.

I often think of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. After years of violent enforcement of Apartheid, there was a reasonable fear that when Apartheid was ended that an understandably angry majority black population might turn on the white population that had done so many unspeakable things and kill them all.

In setting up the commission, Bishop Desmond Tutu said: “Forgiving and being reconciled to our enemies or our loved ones are not about pretending that things are other than they are. It is not about patting one another on the back and turning a blind eye to the wrong. True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the hurt, the truth. It could even sometimes make things worse. It is a risky undertaking but in the end it is worthwhile, because in the end only an honest confrontation with reality can bring real healing. Superficial reconciliation can bring only superficial healing.” 

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission offered the brilliant and spiritually profound opportunity for the guilty to publicly confess their sins and escape criminal prosecution. It hasn’t been perfect, but the much-feared blood bath has not happened.

This will not make me very popular to say, and, like Chris Matthews, I will have no way to hide this comment in the future, but I feel terrible cognitive dissonance whenever I am in a meeting where we are expected to stand for the national anthem or repeat the pledge of allegiance to the American flag. I don’t pledge allegiance to an empire, even if I am a citizen of that empire because empires always defend economic exploitation, institutional racism, and militarism. I believe that I am patriotic, but I do not consent to evil, even when it is domestic evil… or I should say, especially when it is domestic evil.

And while the first verse of our national anthem is thrilling and triumphant, I know its author was a terrible, pro-slavery and racist, assuring slaves and indentured servants that they will be found in a grave if they should try to free themselves.

In fact, if we had time to go into the weeds, much of the real motivation behind our 2^ndAmendment was keep slave owners armed against their constant fear of a slave revolt. It all makes Collin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel during the singing of the anthem seem like a very mild protest. He and all other American blacks have every reason to speak their minds about, not just current police violence against blacks, but a three-hundred-year history of slavery and economic oppression. I would say that I was boycotting football because of the way owners have treated Kaepernick but since I have never watched football, that would be a rather thin threat.  

But people say that a sporting event is the wrong time and place to speak. They say that victims of homophobic hate speech and sexual assault are always wrong to tell their stories now. If I may quote the survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, I have to call “B.S.” on that. It is always the right time for victims to be able to tell their story. As the author, Ann Lamott, has said:  You own everything that happened to you. Tell your Stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.

We cannot rid the world of injustice but we sure can make the decision to always come down on the side of telling the truth. We are in the truth telling business. We cannot un-ring the bell of our history of sexual and racial injustice but, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."

We can’t fix everything but this much I do know, telling victims to be quiet, telling them that the time is not right, or this is not the right place, only means that the wound festers. We are in the truth telling business; not to be mean, vindictive, or punitive but to be healing. Hate does not drive out hatred, only love can do that, and we are in the love business.