“The Plight of the Progressive Church”

“The Plight of the Progressive Church”   March 26, 2023      Dr. Roger Ray   

click here to see the video

"The town where I grew up has a zip code of E-I-E-I-O." — Martin Mull

Soon it will have been 20 years since I was a fellow at Harvard Divinity School. That was a wonderful time in my life, my first time to sit in a classroom as a student since my grad school days in the 1980’s. As I was preparing to leave, the  late Harvard chaplain,  the Reverend Peter Gomes, surprised me by calling me aside to privately say “good-bye.” He said, “I have enjoyed having you in my class this year, but I realize that none of this was new to you.” I hadn’t expected to have personal conversation with Professor Gomes, and I just nervously said the first thing that came to mind, “No, it was all familiar material, but I think that I was finally ready to hear it in a new way.”

 

Please forgive me if I to take too much of your time giving you my personal life story but suffice it to say that, like you, I have not always been the person that I am today. I grew up in rural Kentucky, the youngest child of a working class family that had been shaped by their own rural Kentucky childhoods; barely surviving the Great Depression, World War II and the massive technological changes that took them from dirt roads, horseback transportation, and oil lamps into what we call the modern world with the arrival of cars, electric lights and appliances, telephones, television, air conditioning, and finally a strange child who went to college, and then went to college again, and again, and again.

 

I presided over their funerals early in this century, extolling their ability to adjust to so many massive changes in the world they inhabited. But the other side of that coin was the things they had been unwilling to change. 

I spent many Sunday afternoons of my childhood in the living room of the old plantation house of my family’s former slave plantation listening to my father and his siblings literally still grieving the end of slavery and mourning the poverty that the Civil War brought to my family for many generations. They were convinced of the inferiority of the black race, but their prejudice didn’t end there. They also despised Asians, and Jews, and Catholics, and any non-British foreigners, as well as anyone who used drugs or drank alcohol or who smoked. For their entire lives, it was as if the Civil War was just last year, and the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor had been that morning. Their hatred and judgement were intense and life defining.

 

My college career nearly ended when I came home during my freshman year and shared with them the emotional trauma of having my gay English professor make a sexual pass at me. I had never even heard of homosexuality prior to that day but I sure heard a lot about it after that . . . and it wasn’t good. 

 

Sadly, many of my family members and high school peers have never ventured very far from that world. My initial escape from that tiny mental cage came to me through the Christian faith that had me reading the Bible, and what it showed me was that the culture of my hometown was Christian in name only; with a hypocrisy that was obvious to me and apparently invisible to almost all of my peers.

 

My second salvific influence was education. I earned a degree in philosophy without really understanding any of it. But, like the gospels, the things that I read in those years eventually revealed themselves to me as I grew older and changed more. 

 

I took my largely traditional faith to seminary with me at Vanderbilt where, through a masters and doctoral program, virtually everything I had been certain of was revealed to be theologically and historically, as well as ethically, false. 

 

I can credit the faculty at Vanderbilt with exposing us to the best of religious scholarship while leaving us some room to hold onto enough of traditional Christian language to be able to keep our jobs as ministers in the more liberal Christian churches around the country. I think now that it was a mistake, but we were taught how to keep a foot in academic theology and another foot in the church that needed to believe that their pastor believed in the supremacy of the Christian religion, and that the Bible, for all of its human frailties, was still somehow, the word of God. At funerals they needed for us to assure them that heaven was real and hell, though real, was not a threat to the people that we love, the people who shared our narrow world view.

 

I managed to straddle that fence for almost 30 years, focusing on mental health, opposition to war, promoting poverty projects, and fighting prejudice, still clad in religious vestments and surrounded by the hymns, symbols, and rituals of Protestant Christianity. 

 

What finally broke me out of that compromise was when I was fired in 2007. The multiple traumas I experienced in that year destroyed any loyalty I had felt to institutional religion. My denominational judicatories revealed themselves to be dishonest in ways that would have shamed the mafia, and the church members who were offended by my public conduct of same sex marriages, protests of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and, in the mix were people who took moral stances against my decision to drive a convertible and to live in a loft downtown rather than a suburban neighborhood. It was an ecclesial dumpster fire that would have embarrassed Charles Darwin. 

 

Some very sincere friends who were outraged by this miscarriage of justice were determined to put me back into a pulpit. Many of them sacrificed tens of thousands of dollars that they arguably could not really afford to donate, to employ me and buy a small church building to keep me in the ministry.

 

Still, even after all of that, our first services looked a lot like the last services I had conducted in my former denomination. I followed the lectionary, wore vestments, I even did a few baptisms. But we were trying to figure out what it meant to be an entirely honest spiritual community that owed no fealty to denominations or traditions. 

 

It took me years to demythologize my own language, to move beyond trinitarian holidays and songs, to fully embrace an interfaith approach to spirituality. We initially described ourselves as being “progressive” Christians. We named our church, “the Community Christian Church,” and we even tried to grow into a traditional church with Sunday School classes, youth groups, a choir, and holiday special services. 

 

But the council of churches initially lumped us in with the Unitarians and wouldn’t let us join because we were not “Christians,” even though we supplied more volunteers and donated goods than any other church in town. Years later they changed their minds and extended an invitation to us to join but by then I felt it necessary to ask the director of the Council of Churches to come and stand in our pulpit and tell us why we should join…. Something he declined to do.

I had eventually come to agree with the published essays of our critics, who insisted that we are not really Christian. We abandoned our original name and began to call ourselves the Emerging Church and I became a member of a Unitarian Church. Most of us have Christian roots but we are decidedly without theistic beliefs or practices. We have no sacraments, no holy writ, no authority beyond our appeal to critical thinking and testable reality. 

 

There is an apocryphal saying attributed to Harriet Tubman that claims that she said that she could have freed a thousand more slaves if only they had known that they were slaves. She didn’t say that but, folks, maybe she should have.

 

Almost all of us were brought up in bondage, a mental prison from which only a few ever escape. Most of us have to keep kicking at the darkness of ignorance, mythology, guilt, fear, and prejudice for our whole lives. I have often tried to sum up this process of gradual escape by quoting the comedian, Martin Mull, who said "The town where I grew up has a zip code of E-I-E-I-O."

 

For all of the things we inherited from our families of origin and the culture in which we were nurtured, almost all of us also know that there were many very dark and ignorant things we had to overcome. My parents never got over being embarrassed about my adoption of an Asian child and they found my friendships with gay people to be too painful to even acknowledge and, frankly, I don’t feel obligated, even posthumously, to forgive them for that. Sure, they didn’t know better, but the fact remains, they could have known better and therefore they should have put their backs into it and tried. 

 

They never read any of the books I have written because they knew that they would be uncomfortable with what I said. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. 

Mythology, superstition, prejudice, can only survive in intentional darkness. We can understand a child being afraid of the dark, but it is shameful when an adult is afraid of the light. 

 

But, folks, this is not just a problem among conservatives and the untutored. Liberals can be bigots too. I was scheduled to speak next month in a Unitarian church in my home state, a church where I have spoken before, and I church that I have really wanted to help to grow and survive. But I canceled that engagement after I heard a recent recording of a service from that church in which a member delivered a sermon that was advertised as being an appeal for unity and tolerance but the body of the message was a very personal slanderous screed condemning me, in part, she explained, because my sermons are politically divisive but also because I was dismissive of my hometown when I said that the zip code there is e-i-e-i-o.  She breathlessly talked about how embarrassed she would have been if any of her rural relatives had been visiting on the Sunday that I said that. 

 

I didn’t cancel my engagement simply because these things were said but more because absolutely no one had pointed out to her that her sermon on reconciliation was really just a summary condemnation of me. Apparently, the only way to be an honestly spiritual person was to be just like her. In her mind, sermons should avoid political topics like opposing illegal wars, poverty, racism, denying health care, housing, and employment to poor people, and keeping gay and trans people deeply in the closet. She didn’t mention a word about how the prejudices of my native land had kept black people poor and engaged in menial labor, kept gay people deeply hidden in closets, or allowed our government to pursue illegal wars without challenge. She was only upset that I mentioned these things unfavorably.

 

In short, she wants to have a very liberal church that either endorses or, by silence, tacitly approves of all of the failures of fundamentalism with all of its moral indifference and irrelevance. And in as much as progressive churches would rather be polite than prophetic, then they should decline and close because they are morally irrelevant.

 

The worship chair evidently sent me the video to warn me not to step out of line again. You may recall me having said a few times in the past that I hope to live my life in a way that will cause the Westboro Baptist Church to come and demonstrate at my funeral. I want racists and homophobes to be made uncomfortable by my sermons. The last thing I want to do is to make people who perpetuate war, poverty, gender discrimination, and hypocritical piety to feel normal and acceptable. 

 

We obviously are not invested in incarnational Christian theology but at the root of the gospel narrative is the fairly reliable historical reality of the execution of Jesus by the Roman government and you can’t possibly believe that he was crucified for being a moderate, right? If he had avoided “politics” and just told people to love one another, he would have been a useful friend to the Roman government, not a victim of state murder. 

 

Being loudly and clearly opposed to oppression is not a political opinion that is the same as being in favor of oppression. The anti-slavery movement of the 19^th century was not on the same moral footing as the pro-slavery advocates. 

One was right and one was wrong. Those of us who worked for the civil rights of the gay community are not the same as those who opposed gay rights. One was right and the other was wrong. Being liberal doesn’t mean that you have abdicated from making moral judgements. 

As Elie Wiesel said, “Neutrality always serves the oppressor and never the  oppressed.” Therefore, we must choose sides, and if you are a preacher, you had better make it painfully clear which side that you are on. It is not our goal to shame or embarrass bigots and racists, but it is our goal to make it plain that the ground they have staked out is unacceptable. 

 

People try to dismiss progressive preachers by saying that they are too political or too divisive. We are all subject to being dismissed by being labeled as being too woke, or too liberal, or saying that we are socialists as if advocating for a living wage or universal healthcare makes us somehow the same as Stalin in the early Russian communist revolution. How you deliver universal healthcare or eradicate poverty may involve politics but if you are defending a healthcare system that leaves millions of people out of access to healthcare or an economic system that leaves people working two and  three jobs and still sleeping on a park bench, then I submit, that’s not a political issue, that’s a moral issue and the church damn well better be talking about it.

 

Of course, that’s just my opinion, but it also has the added luxury of also being true.

 

Moving a Balloon, Moving a Rock

Moving a Balloon, Moving a Rock: On Patience & Praxis 

by David Ketchum 

March 19, 2023

Watch the video HERE

        My reflections of late have turned back to patience, a reflection that arises again and again out of the personal, relational, structural, and cultural turmoil of the last many years. So many of the issues we face are intractable, with roots as deep as hundreds and thousands of years. And while history reminds me that there have always been people who were there to fight against oppression and insist on humanity’s potential for wisdom and compassion, it also reminds me that human lives have been consistently characterized by injustice and oppression. Our progress is at once remarkable and incomplete, and we carry the urgency of our own brief lives. And so, we also carry both a necessary patience and a necessary impatience, like oil and water in our hearts. 

        Reactivity, that impulsiveness that acts with no time - and sometimes no regard - for wisdom, is the obvious choice of obstacles when it comes to patience. But that has not been my preferred vice when it comes to trying to embody peace and justice in my own life and in community with those around me. I'm fairly slow and steady, and that seems to be a deep habit that isn't changing anytime soon. Instead, I've noticed that the real danger for me when it comes to losing my patience is despair. This makes sense to me. In the face of terrible odds and intractable systemic injustice, some of us lose ourselves in the moment and do something rash that we might regret. Some of us, lose ourselves in the grief and simply begin to fade away. Some of us may do a little of both, shaking our fists as we drown in tears.

        In the past, I conceptualized this kind of impatience as passivity, but I don't personally find that nearly as useful a category of reflection as despair. It's not simple indifference; it's the hollow feeling that threatens to engulf me that is most akin to mourning. And this reflection has also helped me move forward. Reflecting on my experience in this way, I can understand I have a need to grieve and that honoring that need is a radical act in itself. As part of these acts of healing, I've inclined my ear again to Elsa Tamez. She wrote that: 

“The situation of oppression and pain tends to make people feel depressed, to dehumanize them, to destroy not only their bodies but also their spirit, to make them see their oppression as normal and natural.” (The Scandalous Message of James: Faith Without Works is Dead, 74)

        These words will be recognizable to anyone who belongs to a marginalized community. We are meant to come to believe that change is not only impossible; it is unnatural. Oppressive systems want us to believe that oppression is the natural order of things, and that this natural order is good. Each of Tamez’ categories plays an important role: depression, dehumanization, destruction of the body and spirit, and the normalization or naturalization of oppression. 

        Reflect on the APA’s list of symptoms of depression, but not only for its psychological impacts, but also its impacts on us as people for change. Depression can often make it difficult for us to sustain social justice movements, including: “Loss of interest or pleasure in activities once enjoyed”; “Loss of energy or increased fatigue”; “Feeling worthless or guilty”; “Difficulty thinking, concentrating or making decisions”; and “Thoughts of death or suicide”. These mental and emotional states are further exacerbated by dehumanization. As I’ve discussed before, 

“[I]t is important to notice how dehumanization paves the way for social rejection and social control. Because of the stakes involved, human beings generally don’t want to reject someone they care about. Dehumanization makes it much easier. So whenever we notice dehumanization going on, we should also pay attention to the social rejection that might be coming in its wake. This is why governments have created propaganda that dehumanizes their enemies at war and it is why you hear people like Donald Trump using dehumanizing language to describe the folks that will suffer from his policies. 

“If you can get the public to believe the victims of oppression are somehow less than human, then that public is much more likely to tolerate violent policies. And if you are involved in the oppression, dehumanization makes it easier to live with yourself. After all, you don’t think you are harming actual people. As Brian Resnick put it, ‘Dehumanization is a mental loophole that allows us to dismiss other people’s feelings and experiences. If you think of murder and torture as universally taboo, then dehumanization of the “other” is a psychological loophole that can justify those acts.’”

        This is the destruction of body and spirit that Tamez included next. That is the end goal of dehumanization: exploited, commodified, objectified, cast aside, ridiculed, institutionalized, forgotten, left for dead, or killed. This is why we often have to recite terrifying statistics, share tragic stories, and say the names of those who have suffered. It is both necessary and it takes a toll. It takes a toll because the grief and rage, once perceived and understood, are perceived and understood everywhere, all the time. This is what James Baldwin was speaking to with regard to how racism and white supremacy suffuse every part of our society: 

“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time … . And part of the rage is this: It isn't only what is happening to you. But it's what's happening all around you and all of the time in the face of the most extraordinary and criminal indifference, indifference of most white people in this country, and their ignorance.” 

        But carrying this grief and rage is also necessary because we are resisting that fourth element, the normalization and naturalization of oppression. Oppression and injustice are normalized in our society to the point of invisibility. This is why people say we are being anti-American by simply telling the truth about history, because violence and oppression - such as the enslavement of African people, displacement and attempted genocide of Indigenous peoples, exploitation of immigrants, and destruction of ecosystems in order to accumulate power and wealth – is built into our history, systems, cultures, and even memories. It is so normalized that we cannot even see that all these social problems people grow up thinking of as normal are actually symptoms of a sick society. Yet resisting this normalization can be unsettling, and the impacts of depression are further intensified both by 1) a lack of resources and access to appropriate medical and mental health care and 2) the continued exposure to injustice. As Vikki Reynolds observed, 

“We can start to think we might be crazy (depressed, angry, obsessive, defiant, maladapted...) Hopelessness can make us think we can't do anything about injustice. Political awareness can be paralyzing, overwhelming, and spiritually painful. Individualism makes us think we're alone, that no one thinks like us.” 

In response to these four obstacles – depression, dehumanization, destruction of body and spirit, and normalization of injustice, Tamez encouraged us toward a praxis rooted in hope, patience, prayer, and integrity. Two of these especially stand out to me. First, Tamez insists on cultivating "militant patience, that is, of steadfastness, of resistance, of heroic endurance, all the while practicing justice." And, importantly for me, she concludes that those who practice in this way "do not fall into despair, but rather wisely recognize the opportune moments." (The Scandalous Message of James, 74-75) This is an approach to patience that actually works for me, and that I can carry into my days. Patience as resistance folds patience into praxis. Waiting is not passivity, but strategy. We practice justice in whatever ways we can in the conditions we find ourselves in, while we pay attention for those “opportune moments” to act decisively. 

Similarly, Tamez also reframes integrity within the context of praxis, as consistency between what we believe and what we do. This is in resistance to the contradictions within oppressive systems, which compliment themselves for belonging “to the community of faith but show favoritism against the poor, who ought to pay the workers’ salaries but withhold them, who speak ill of others behind their backs, who see others in need but do not come to their material assistance.” (ibid, 75) If we are people who would embody peace and justice, then our integrity must include solidarity. Returning to Vikki Reynolds’ wisdom,

“Our resistance to this political violence, degradation, heartbreak, and terror is to hold each other in sacred and revolutionary love, and to work for justice: that's what solidarity is. Solidarity is belonging.”

This belonging includes uprooting our internalized oppression and dominance and together, patience and solidarity as praxis help us overcome the four obstacles Tamez named. By practicing radical care in community, we normalize relationships, organizations, and cultures that rely on compassion, wisdom, generosity, and mutuality, instead of exploitation, alienation, coercion, and violence. Instead of destroying body and spirit, we normalize healing and growing body and spirit. Instead of dehumanizing one another to cope with or accommodate injustice, we connect with our common humanity and commit to mutual care. And instead of creating conditions where depression, anxiety, rage, and despair characterize our everyday lives, we create conditions where everyone has the opportunity to thrive, and to recognize and access medical and mental health care when we do need it. Because, as Reynolds wrote, “A socially just world is a mentally well world.”

The joining of patience and integrity can also help maximize our impacts. This is both through the making the most of those “opportune moments” and through intentionally aligning our actions with our values. This brought to mind a lesson that Daniel Hunter shared from the 2006–2010 campaign to stop a $650 million casino development in Philadelphia. Rather than focus solely on policies and legislative goals, Casino-Free Philadelphia connected with community members to emphasize the predatory nature of these developments and their detrimental impacts on communities. Hunter described the choice through an image: 

“Politicians are like a balloon tied to a rock. If we swat at them, they may sway to the left or the right. But, tied down, they can only go so far. Instead of batting at them, we should move the rock: people’s activated social values. When we move the rock, it automatically pulls all the politicians towards us — without having to pressure each one separately.” 

        This analogy can help us develop the resources and skills we need to move the rock, while paying attention to identify those opportune moments to move it. Hunter likened this to being “careful about our yardsticks” - 

“A lot of the time when we’re talking about politicians it’s about do we get the legislation we want or not; do we get a bill introduced or not; do we get the bill passed or not; and all of those are a politician’s yardsticks. It’s dangerous for us to align ourselves with those yardsticks in terms of identifying whether or not are our movement is winning. At the end of the day I think we can sneak bills through from time to time, but if we build the social context they move much more quickly.”

Building that social context loops us back to our praxis, such as Tamez’ emphasis on patience as resistance and integrity as solidarity. Hunter focused on the contrast between “espoused social values” and “activated social values,” which in turn connects us to community and solidarity. Reflecting on how many people “believe in a bunch of things that they don’t do anything for,” he asks:  

“do people have a hook where they can see how to activate their value? Do they have something that they get to do that allows them to give expression to it, and not only expression but actually to make it happen in some way. … We’re taught so much that our contribution is an individual task – that’s why I think the movement building dimension, community building, is so important. Moving the rock is not an individual thing, it’s a social thing. If we’re seeing the rock individually we remain confused and we’re unable to see the ripple effect of our actions. Seeing ourselves in this social context rather than just as individuals is so important to movement building.” 

        If we want to create social justice movements that can both make a difference and don’t burn themselves out, it is very important that we are strategic about how and where to spend our energy. Insights like those from Elsa Tamez, Vikki Reynolds, Daniel Hunter, and our own communities can help us understand the lasting obstacles to the change we seek, and how we can more intentionally participate in the personal and collective healing and growing we need.

“Don’t Say Gay (Or Trans)” in Missouri

“Don’t Say Gay (Or Trans)” in Missouri

David “Katya” Ketchum March 12, 2023

Watch the video HERE

Before getting into a bird’s eye view of the current crop of proposed and passed legislation targeting gender and sexual minorities, I feel the need to repeat some of my words from 2018, slightly edited to fit today’s focus on legislation: 

“Here at the beginning, I want you to know that I am wonderfully happy about my gender and sexuality. I love – I really love – being genderqueer. I love belonging to the transgender family. I’ll be focusing on painful and difficult experiences [today] as we continue to call [our communities] to accountability, but I don’t want there to be any confusion. There is so much joy in my life. There are so many incredible, beautiful, fantastic people I’ve met and you are so important to me, and to our community. I am so grateful for the time and life we’ve shared together. I am so grateful for you. The joy and life and love we share are why I am willing to stand here and assert our humanity … . I am angry, to be sure; but I am angry because all this suffering is unnecessary and cruel, and I am so exhausted from feeling and seeing my transgender siblings suffer so much. I hope that, in the anger, you also can hear this love.”

 

March began with thousands of people flocking to the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which Christopher Mathias aptly described as “creepily obsessed with trans kids and showcased the GOP’s alarming and intensifying anti-trans rhetoric.” Highlights included former Trump advisor Sebastian Gorka, who is allegedly a “member of a Nazi-collaborating political order in Hungary,” claiming that Democrats are “mutilating boys and girls” and “sacrificing them on the altar of their transgender insanity.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene announced that she is re-introducing her failed “Protect Children’s Innocence Act,” proclaiming that it “will make it a felony to perform anything to do with gender!” The president of the right-wing website Judicial Watch, Tom Fitton, labeled gender-affirming care “a demonic assault on the innocence of our children.”

But Gorka, Greene, and Fitton were outdone by The Daily Wire’s  Michael Knowles, who declared that: 

  “The problem with transgenderism is not that it’s inappropriate for children under the age of 9 … . The problem with transgenderism is that it isn’t true. … If [transgenderism] is false, then for the good of society... transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely, the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.” 

 
Again, the crowd erupted with clapping and cheers. 

        The rhetoric coming out of spaces like CPAC reflects the growing movement centered around transgender people and their needs, a shift in focus that we’ve been watching for many years now. As transgender people, and our related vocabulary and needs, have grown both more familiar and more acceptable to the general public, we have also become an easy target for those who can exploit popular fears and misunderstandings. So it is that we also live in a time where every year, year after year, we brace ourselves for the barrage of legislation aimed at denying and banning our very existence. And it happens again and again, year after year. 

However, the frequency and intensity of these attacks has been increasing, and this year is a case in point. Last week, for example, Tennessee gobbled up the headlines as Gov. Bill Lee signed two bills into law that targeted transgender folks in particular, becoming, as James Factora summed it up, “the seventh state to pass such a ban on care, and the first state to ever pass a ban on drag.” House Bill 1 bans transition-related care to minors and can be used to strip healthcare providers of their license for providing care. It also allows patients who received care as a minor “to sue providers within 30 years after the patient turns 18.” House Bill 9 bans performances of “male or female impersonators” in a public place that “could be viewed by a minor.” Penalties include 11 months in prison and/or fines up to $2,500, with repeat violations classified as felonies “punishable by up to six years in prison and a fine of up to $3000.” The Trans Formations Project explains, the broad wording “effectively criminalizes just existing as a trans person in any performance, educational industry, or in public! If you’re wondering how, it’s simple. This bill defines simply being trans (or crossdressing as a cis person) as sexual.” 

Missouri led the way early on, proposing 31 anti-lgbt bills in January. (For those keeping count, Oklahoma passed that number in February, with 34 proposed bills.) Those bills are in different stages of the legislative process, and most will probably not make it out of committee. However, Missouri lawmakers were recently in the news for discussing House Bill 634, which has been dubbed Missouri’s “Don’t Say Gay” Bill. It aims to prohibit instruction that includes sexual orientation or gender identity, going even further than Florida’s ban by extending the prohibition all the way through grade 12. (Florida’s ban allows for “age appropriate” education on those topics starting in grade four.) 

The language is terribly vague, lending itself to prohibiting even the promotion of heterosexuality, something that  Rep. Phil Christofanelli (a gay Republican) pointed out in a now famous video clip of him questioning the bill’s author, Rep. Ann Kelley: 

“‘I’m just going to read you the language in your bill,’ Christofanelli said, pointing to a section that stated no classroom instruction ‘relating to sexual orientation or gender identity shall occur.’ / ‘You mentioned George Washington. Who is Martha Washington?’ Christofanelli asked. / ‘His wife,’ Kelley answered. / ‘Under your bill, how could you mention that in a classroom?/ Christofanelli continued. / Kelley replied, ‘To me, that’s not sexual orientation.’ ‘So it’s only really certain sexual orientations that you want prohibited from introduction in the classroom,’ Christofanelli shot back.” 

Missouri lawmakers have also been busy debating Senate Bill 49, the “Save Adolescents from Experimentation Act”, which would ban state and local government employed health care providers from providing gender-affirming health care to minors, as well as banning state and local facilities from providing gender affirming treatments like puberty blockers and hormone therapy. In a recent email update, PROMO’s Executive Director, Katy Erker-Lynch appropriately called out these lawmakers’ “audacity to debate trans kids’ very right to live and exist”: 

“They spread lies about the parents of trans youth, about the physicians who provide best practice care, and about the larger LGBTQ+ community. … this legislative session continues to push us into unprecedented times — over 30 explicitly anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been prioritized by this legislature—seeking to use transgender bodies as political pawns to push their political agendas forward. The fact that these bills were dignified by voting them out of the Senate Committee should be appalling to any person paying attention and a wake up call to those who haven’t been listening.” 

If you have had a difficult time keeping track, it can be helpful to know that the anti-trans legislative tactics have taken on a few predictable forms. The Trans Formations Project has provided six broad categories to track those attacks: 

•  Bathroom bills typically deny transgender folks from accessing their appropriate public restroom. However, “They increase danger without making anyone any safer and have even prompted attacks on cis and trans people alike.” 
• Healthcare bills substitute discriminatory health practices for “professional and scientific consensus” around lifesaving, gender-affirming care. They often include criminal charges against healthcare providers and child abuse charges against parents. Notably, “intersex children are typically exempted,” meaning that invasive medical procedures (that coincidentally conform to cisgender-heteronormative expectations) can still take place without the knowledge or consent of the child. 
  
  
• Public performance bills usually target drag performances, which is egregious in itself, but they are also often worded in such a way that they ban transgender and gender-expansive people from performing in public at all. Three important elements to these bans include: 1) a loose definition of “drag” as a “public performance with an ‘opposite gender expression’”, 2) labeling those performances as inherently sexual, and 3) asserting that the performances are therefore inappropriate for children. Again notably, cisgender-heteronormative gender expressions remain acceptable. 
• School bills often use the language of “parental rights” to force educators and schools to: “misgender or deadname students, ban instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity, and make schools alert parents if they suspect a child is trans.” They also typically make it difficult for trans youth to access  “life-saving affirmation and support” at school.
  
  
• Sex Designation bills create further obstacles for transgender folks to access identification and documents that match their gender identity. 
• Sports Ban bills “are often one-sided and ban trans girls from playing on teams consistent with their gender identity.” Some versions have also included “invasive genital examinations.” 

        There’s also a miscellaneous category, but variations of these six tactics have been increasingly repeated across the nation. If you look closely, you’ll also notice that there is a lot of repetition in the proposed bills. There’s a very good reason for this, as conservative legislators have learned that proposing an anti-lgbt, especially an anti-trans, bill has become a major political tactic. Greg Razer, Missouri’s only openly gay State Senator, recently explained that: 
 

“What happens is, there might be eight members of the House of Representatives who all want to go home and say they filed the bill. And so, they all filed the identical bill. And then at some point in the process they mesh all those together and make one bill that’s called House Bill 40, 72, 137 — they’ll list all the numbers. So they can all go home and say, ‘I kicked a trans kid in the face.’”

Both positive and negative reinforcement is at work here. On the one hand, transgender folks have become a preferred target, so it is easy to try to leverage proposing and supporting anti-trans bills as a way to seek votes. But there’s also the negative side, in that failing to support these bills can also be used against them in a future campaign. 

As Senator Razer put it, “if it is brought to a vote, then how do they vote no? Because somebody on the right is going to primary them. And run the ad: ‘Voted to support gender affirming care for transgender kids.’” That pressure is real, and I fear that transgender lives and care are not important enough for even sympathetic lawmakers to feel compelled to risk their political ambitions and careers. Transgender lives – the wellbeing of people like me – are not important enough. We are part of the acceptable losses. We are necessary casualties in their culture war, the holy sacrifices on their altars raised to the delusions that transgender people and our basic human needs exist as a tool of some “evil-doer who is seeking to kill and destroy us and our children.” (And yes, these words are the direct quote of another Missouri State Senator.) 

There is much more to reflect on in how this is unfolding, but I’ll limit myself to one more aspect of this debate. In late February, Missouri senators held a press conference about the SAFE Act that included Chloe Cole and Luka Hein. Both Chloe and Luka transitioned as teens, including receiving gender affirming top surgery, and then later retransitioned. Both are critical about the way they received care and the failure of their medical providers to give them the care they needed. Hearing their stories is important as medical providers continue to improve standards of care for young people; everyone should have access to the care they need. 

However, what I see happening is that anti-trans lawmakers and social commentators are using the voices of Chloe and Luka to silence all other trans voices and deny us both basic care and human rights. For example, a study published in August 2022 by the American Academy of Pediatrics followed 317 trans children and youth for five years. Over that time, retransitioning occurred but was uncommon; around 7% of participants retransitioned during those five years. Obviously, standards of care need to be continuously improved so that this number is even lower. However, it is inappropriate to universalize the experience of 7% of trans youth receiving gender affirming care at the exclusion of the 93% that received the correct care. This is especially important because the impact of that care is literally life-saving. In another study published in February 2022, researchers found that trans youth (13 to 20 years old) receiving gender-affirming care (such as puberty blockers and hormone therapies) “was associated with 60% lower odds of moderate or severe depression and 73% lower odds of suicidality over a 12-month follow-up.” 

        This is not an aberration. More and more studies, collectively representing the experiences of more than 30,000 trans and gender-diverse youth, demonstrate that gender-affirming care translates into better mental health, while restricting access to that care is associated with worse mental health outcomes, including depression, self-harm, and suicide. For these very sound reasons, professional medical organizations have overwhelmingly published both policy statements and standards of care, including: the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the Endocrine Society, the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association. As Heather Boerner wrote in Scientific American, “All of those medical societies find such care to be evidence-based and medically necessary.” But anti-trans lawmakers silence all of these researchers, medical providers, and transgender voices in favor of elevating the voices of those whose experiences more neatly fit their prejudices. I am not in favor of silencing people like Chloe Cole and Luka Hein, but their voices cannot be allowed to silence all others. Everyone deserves access to the care and support they need. 

        Another aspect of the retransitioning narrative is the way the anti-trans movement obscures the variety of reasons why a person may choose to retransition. A 2021 study that included more than 17,000 people who accessed gender-affirming care found that only 13.1% had ever retransitioned. Even more significantly, 82.5% of these respondents experienced at least one external factor, “such as pressure from family and societal stigma,” that motivated the retransition. Internal factors, such as uncertainty about their gender identity, was a much less common factor, even though the current discourse focuses on these rarer cases. This is very convenient, because it hides the fact that the major motivation for retransitioning is the stress that transgender people experience, such as bigotry and discrimination. 

        The end result is that both the public rhetoric and constant stream of bills, even when they do not become laws, create an atmosphere that is dangerous for gender and sexual minorities. Just to look at one risk factor, more than 80% of trans folks have considered suicide, and more than 40% have attempted suicide. Trans youth are at the highest risk. A 2020 study of suicidality among trans youth found that “School belonging, emotional neglect by family, and internalized self-stigma made a unique, statistically significant contribution to past 6-month suicidality.” And now we are witnessing a cultural and legislative movement that specifically aims to make it more difficult for trans youth to feel like they are safe and belong at school, that empower families to emotionally neglect their gender-affirming needs, and that promotes internalized self-stigma through the constant denial of their identities, rights, and care. Our society is collectively and persistently creating the conditions for a very painful and wholly preventable tragedy. The words and actions of anti-trans media and legislators are and will continue to contribute to the deaths of transgender people. 

I don’t know how to end this reflection, which has become something of a lament. My best guess is to return to advice I gave back in January 2018. I concluded with four lessons, including this invitation:

“while we can and should support and agitate for reform in order to minimize harm, we must devote as much time, energy, and resources as possible into building community. We have to earnestly and intentionally cultivate practices, habits, and structures … that rely on and embody mutual care, respect, and justice. … We have to make justice and love normal.”  

And I concluded that: 

“I titled this talk ‘We Are Not the Fragile Ones,’ because victims are often spoken about in ways that patronize and condescend. The world knew it could break us, and they were right about that. Too many of us have had to live lives that were not ours, just to survive, locked away in a straight, cisgender world. And more - too many of us are wounded, and too many of us are dead. But I’d like to point out that it is oppressive systems that are brittle, and that it is people in positions of power and privilege who usually feel the most threatened and reactive to movements for justice.  

 

“Those of us with these stories, we are not the fragile ones. We are not the ones who need a gay panic or trans panic defense. We are not the ones who think that our families will disintegrate if we accept people’s gender and sexuality as they are, rather than as we say they should be. And we are not the ones who justify cruelty and violence out of a fear of divine judgment. I offer my reflections as an imperfect tribute to all my comrades, to all my friends at the margins, who live as exiles amid these fragile, brittle egos. I offer my love to all of us fabulous and resilient and wounded people who, together, are creating a new and beautiful world.” 

“It’s not left or right, it is right or wrong”

“It’s not left or right, it is right or wrong”  March 5, 2023   Roger  Ray

click here to see the video

Time Magazine, Dec. 8, 2022

By Azadeh Moaveni    https://time.com/heroes-of-the-year-2022-women-of-iran/

These younger women are now in the streets. The movement they’re leading is educated, liberal, secular, raised on higher expectations, and desperate for normality: college and foreign travel, decent jobs, rule of law, access to the Apple Store, a meaningful role in politics, the freedom to say and wear whatever. They are quite unlike those who came before them; sometimes they feel more like transnational Gen Z than Iranians: they are vegans, they de-Islamicize their names, they don’t want children. I’ve often wondered what has made them so rebellious, because their ferocious character was evident well before 22-year-old Mahsa (Jina) Amini, arrested at a metro station by the morality police who enforce the dress code, died after being held in their custody on Sept. 16, setting off the most sustained uprising in the 43-year history of the Islamic Republic. The average age of arrested protesters is notably low—Iranian officials estimate as young as 15. I can only conclude that when a generation’s aspirations for freedom appear tantalizingly within reach, the more humiliating the remaining restrictions seem, and the less daunting the final stretch of resistance feels.

 

In 2008, Morning Joe co-host, Mika Brzezinski discovered that the man sitting next to her, Joe Scarborough, was being paid 14 times as much as she was. He started the show, it was named for him, but when she considered how much she contributed to the show and how big the difference in their pay was - Joe was getting, not just twice as much and not even ten times as much, but 14 times her salary, she was furious.  

Initially she may have been angry at MSNBC for exploiting her but she came to believe that the problem was actually with her. Somehow, she had not advocated for herself. She was so happy to land a position on a national news show that she failed to recognize her own value to the very successful program.

 

There are a lot of twists and turns to this story line. Joe and Mika eventually divorced their respective spouses and married each other but before that, Mika negotiated a much more equitable contract. Don’t feel sorry for her, Joe makes $13 million a year and Mika now makes $10 million. . . and I don’t mind saying that I think they are both horribly over paid, but the only reason I bring this up is that Mika took her story on as a cause for other women. She wrote the book, Know Your Value, and she has held annual conferences for encouraging women to have the self-confidence and courage to demand fair treatment. 

 

I have always been entirely sympathetic with her cause, even though I have reservations about having a multi-millionaire blue-blood spokesperson for the downtrodden women in the world. But her movement got my attention recently when it was announced that this year’s Know Your Value conference will take place in Abu Dhabi. Now your talking! These conferences always feature top-notch keynote speakers but taking a women’s rights event to a Muslim country has made me forgive Mika for a lot of her years of “high school cheerleader” style of reporting the news. 

 

Now, Abu Dhabi is no Saudi Arabia. They are not an extremist Muslim nation, or this conference couldn’t be hosted there. They have, in fact, tried to model religious harmony and have even built an interfaith center which hosts Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Hindu congregations. Still, to take a very feminist conference into a Persian Gulf state is exactly what this world needs right now. 

If you have been listening to my sermons for very long, you know that I am convinced that all of the world’s major religions are due for a modern 

Reformation. In fact, the term for the 16^th century reformation was “Protestant,” literally, “those in protest.” All of the world’s religions have undergone reformations in the past, when enough people are brave enough to protest the status quo. In terms of misogyny and homophobia and the promotion of radicals who embrace terrorism, Islam is in sore need of reform.

 

We liberals prize freedom of religion as well as tolerance of differences. At one level, we are trying to fight against any reflexive xenophobia by insisting that differences in apparel or diet should not be alarming to us. I’ve even seen a meme that compares women wearing the hijab to Catholic nuns wearing a habit.  This classic “whataboutism” argument falls apart pretty quickly upon examination. This what we call, in philosophy, a tu quoque fallacy. Ignoring the the original issue of the oppression of women in Muslim states by saying that Christians do the same thing. Granted, the Catholic Church is very patriarchal and is so misogynist that they constantly praise virginity and deny women any role of ordained leadership in their church. However, in spite of the fact that Catholics and Evangelicals keep trying to impose their values on the whole of our population, and they have succeeded in overturning Roe v Wade, still, we mostly maintain individual choice in this country. And, I am convinced, these recent backwards steps are the last gasps of a dying and out of date form of Christianity. 

 

Still, Catholics, as backward as they are, cannot rationally be contrasted with Islam as it is institutionalized in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Saudi Arabia. There are 350 million people in this country and fewer than 50,000 of us are Catholic nuns and more than half of them no longer wear a habit. And every single one of them chose to enter holy orders, no one made them become a nun and in most convents, street clothes are the accepted norm. 

In more conservative Muslim states, total covering of a woman’s body in public is the law. We are all familiar with the case of the 22-year-old Iranian woman Mahsa Amini, who died in police custody last fall after being arrested for improperly wearing her head covering, allowing some of her hair to be seen in public. Most women in Iran didn’t choose this, the extreme laws that regulate how women must appear in public is a product of the Islamic revolution of the early 70’s. 

Prior to the revolution, Iran was a country with a moderate form of Islam and women were very fashion conscious and there were as many mini-skirts in Tehran as there were in New York City. 

50 years later, the strict dress code and rules that restrict women’s education and careers are still in place, but they are beginning to be challenged.

My complaint against my progressive peers is that standing under a banner of tolerance, we have defended the right of Muslim women to wear the hijab without seriously questioning whether those women want to be wearing a hijab. Freedom of religion also includes the option of freedom from religion.

 

Many of you know that I have just returned from an extended winter vacation in Thailand on the tropical island of Phuket. 

Thailand is a largely Buddhist nation with a Buddhist royal family, but they have a significant Muslim minority population. It was not difficult to spot the Muslims on the beach. But you have to wonder, even in a country that legally provides for religious diversity, did this woman choose to wear a hijab in the heat and humidity of a tropical beach, or is this a standard imposed upon her by her faith community and her family?

 

I have heard the comedian, Bill Mahr, say several times, “You can despise Donald Trump, but you can’t despise all of the people who vote for Trump.” And my gut reaction to hearing that is to just say to Bill, “Here, hold my beer.” But what about all of the women who still go to Catholic mass every week? Why do these intelligent, educated, professional women still attend, contribute to, and support a patriarchal, misogynist religion when they wouldn’t tolerate that kind of oppression in their home or their workplace? 

 

It is difficult for most people to think beyond the limitations of their environment. I was eleven years old when the public schools were integrated in my hometown in rural Kentucky. I can honestly tell you that prior to my first day in fifth grade, I didn’t even know that I had been attending a segregated school. 

I didn’t even know that there was a “colored” school in Glasgow. It had not occurred to me that I had not seen any black kids, that I knew from surrounding farms, in my school. 

 

Indoctrination is not always conscious. My older brother still does not understand why I am so mad at him for being a Trump supporter. And in the one conversation we had about it in 2016, I pointed out to him that my daughter is a brown immigrant and the couple I always bring to breakfast when I meet him in Birmingham for breakfast are both women and yet he voted to take away the rights of my friends and to encourage prejudices against my daughter. I mean, I have disdain for Trump on moral grounds, but I made it very specific and personal in my conversation with my brother, and his reply was, “We shouldn’t let politics come between us.” And I replied, “Neither my daughter nor the civil rights of my friends are matters of politics, this is about ethics.” And that was the last time we have talked. This is not about left and right, this is about right and wrong.

 

As I have often said through the years, if you are morally opposed to same sex marriage, then just don’t marry someone of the same gender. However, your religious views should have no authority over the choice of others. If your religion teaches you that abortion is a sin, then maybe you shouldn’t get an abortion. The problem is when you try to legislate your religious values for everyone and, frankly, I think it is a problem to brainwash your own kids into that kind of subjugation, but that is a much more complex issue. 

 

There is misogyny and patriarchalism in all of the world’s religions and, of the big five: Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, Islam is the youngest and might logically be expected to be the most progressive, but the opposite is true. The other four religions have successes and failures in their attempts at modernization but progressives among the Islamic faith are still far too few.

This is anecdotal but, in some ways, not a surprising illustration of my point:

In 2008 the 34-year-old Italian artist, Pippa Bacca, 

set out to make a statement of tolerance and trust by hitchhiking, wearing a wedding dress, across the Middle East. Her intention was to go from Istanbul to Jerusalem, but she was raped and murdered before she ever got out of Turkey. As you can see, her wedding dress was modest, it just wasn’t a hajib. And I know all too well that women are raped and sometimes murdered by strangers in Europe and America as well, it is just that Pippa’s death was rather more predictable. 

 

It isn’t universal but there is a mentality among Muslim men that insists that women are supposed to keep them from being sexually aroused and if you show too much of your face and hair, or if you travel unaccompanied by a man, that you are basically asking for whatever happens to you and that, I submit, is not a matter of religion, that is a matter of ethics. It isn’t about being right or left on the political or religious spectrum, it is about right and wrong. 

 

I love the song by the Haymarket Squares that says, “These are not opinions, I am right, and you are wrong.” The chorus repeats:

Who the hell are you to deny
Your fellow man his human rights?
Nobody says that you have to agree
But you have to let others be free

A saying that was common among Christian reformers of the 19^th century was, “In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. In all things, charity.” We don’t often agree on the line between essentials and non-essentials but whatever else we may debate, individual freedom is a line I can’t cross. Your religion cannot dictate the sexual orientation of others, your beliefs cannot take civil or reproductive rights away from women. Not as a government nor as a family. If it isn’t obvious, there is no such thing as an “honor killing.” 

 

Just last month, the popular YouTuber, 22 year-old Tiba Albi, was strangled to death by her father because he deemed her YouTube videos to be an embarrassment to her family. What could be more dishonorable than killing a member of your own family because they refuse to be bound by your religious beliefs? 

Any religion that makes such horrible crimes normal in any way must change or die itself.

 

We have an audiology professor at MSU who is a very active Muslim who regularly speaks locally in defense of Muslim beliefs. I have attended some of her talks and she will seriously try to defend the tradition of giving women only half of the inheritance that sons receive because men have to support a family. As if there were no Muslim single mothers. 

 

And she defends women having to stay in the back of the mosque because, she explains, “You can’t expect men to look up and see a bunch of women bowing with their behinds in the air,” as if a woman, even fully covered, in that position, would drive a man into a mating frenzy. 

I certainly respect any woman’s decision to be modest, if that is her choice, but to suggest that a woman bending over, or not covering her hair, is a provocation to men, well, I think it is obvious that the shoe is on the wrong foot here. Men need to choose to not be rapists. 

Martin Luther King, Jr. often repeated the injunction that people should stand up straight because no one can ride on your back unless you bend over for them. “Whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can't ride your back unless it is bent.” 

 

I don’t want to blame the victims here but, the only way that these regimes can continue to oppress women in this way is if most of them complacently go along with it. You cannot stand idly by and expect oppressors to suddenly see the error of their ways and become liberators. 

 

In December, Time Magazine chose to honor the women of Iran as their “heroes of the year” because, in the wake of the death of Masha Amini, many Iranian women just started to refuse the restrictions of the morality police. They 

 

The government’s violent crackdown was anticipated, but even though more than 400 protestors have been killed and thousands have been jailed, these public acts of defiance continue as the women of Iran begin to stand up for themselves.