All’s Fair
Here in Minnesota, where I live, the State Fair is the main thing going on. It upstages even the dreaded back-to-school days which are also dominant in hearts and minds.
In other places where I have lived, State Fairs are about as central to life as, say, roller coasters, or ferret ownership, or balloon rides. That is to say, some people like it enough to spend time seeking it out, most people don’t, and life goes on swimmingly. That’s not the way it is in Minnesota.
I don’t know why it is, but it would never occur to me, or anyone I know, to miss our state fair in Minnesota. Why? We spend too much money, eat too many calories, stand in too many lines. For those of us who are urban, we see animals that we have no interest in seeing the rest of the year, ogle farm machinery we will never in our lifetimes use, and stare at strange things ranging from seed art to butterheads—Princess Kay of the Milky Way, carved live out of butter as she shivers in a refrigerator in her dress and tiara.
And we get so excited about it! I’ve already been twice, and plan to go back at least once more, with friends who like to see and do different parts of the fair. I begin looking forward to it in early August, and begin to plot out trips, buying early tickets to save a few bucks. I like to go once when the fair is just opening in the morning, primarily to see the barns and animals. I go once during the afternoon, to go to the Midway and ride some rides, play a little whack-a-mole, try to win a useless prize with skeeball tickets. And then I like to go once at night to enjoy some kind of concert. This year it was Bonnie Raitt and Mavis Staples—pure heaven!
Truthfully, I think that looking forward to the fair is about as much fun as going. As the nights get colder and the sky is dark later in the morning, as the back to school sales crank up into full swing, the fair gives us something to think about besides the end of summer. How can you dread the end of August when you get to eat a pickle on a stick? How can September be a bad thing when it comes in with seed art?
This year, when I went with a friend on opening day, the two of us were so excited we could hardly concentrate enough to pick a starting place. Eventually we strode over to the horticulture building. The vegetables on display were no better looking than the ones I see every week at the farmers’ market, but seeing them with judges’ ribbons next to them enhanced their importance.
This year, ‘the great get together’ has a sad shadow side. Elections loom. We have, in addition to the bitterly divisive Presidential election, two ballot initiatives introduced by the Republicans to crank up voter turnout in Minnesota: A constitutional amendment that limits marriage to opposite sex couples, and a voter suppression bill which disallows same day registration and demands government issued IDs—disproportionally disenfranchising the poor, people of color, transgender people, and other marginalized folks.
So at the fair, in addition to the universal experiences of food on a stick and gaping at farm animals, there was also an undercurrent of divisiveness. Plenty of people, like me, picked up bright orange fans that screamed “VOTE NO: Don’t Limit the Freedom to Marry” at the Minnesotans United for All Families booth. Meanwhile, I saw many people sporting “Protect My Vote” backpacks. I’m sure they felt as sad and helpless seeing my fan as I felt seeing their backpacks. Trying to figure out how to have a real conversation about it was an insurmountable challenge as we jostled one another in the crowded streets and competed against each other in Midway games.
Despite those differences, the fair was a good place to remember that we have more in common than what separates us. I pray that I will still feel like that the second week of November, when my stuffed animal prizes will have long since been turned into dog toys and cheese curds are but a distant memory.
Spending Your Values
There’s been a lot of controversy lately about chicken sandwiches. Specifically the fact that the family that owns the fast-food chain Chick-fil-A has donated millions of dollars to groups opposing marriage equality for same-sex couples. Suddenly, supporters of marriage equality are calling for boycotts of the chain and opponents of it are feasting there to prove their conservative credentials.
Most perplexing of all to me are the people who insist that chicken sandwiches have nothing to do with marriage equality. Maybe its just the crowd of folks I’m friends with on Facebook, but I’ve seen a lot of people insisting that where the owner of Chick-fil-A spends his money is none of their concern—they just like their pickles and sweet tea. These folks are indignant that anyone would dare ask them to give up this pleasure by connecting it to things they claim to care about.
Unfortunately for these people, it is impossible to separate where we spend our money from what values we espouse. While we might claim to hold certain things dear, if we’re not supporting those things in the world through the way we use our resources (even the smallest amounts of those resources), our value claims are lies we tell to ourselves and others.
I learned a long time ago that each time I spend money, I make a choice. I can make that choice intentionally—to support the things I care about—or not. If my choices are made in ignorance, I might just wind up supporting things I oppose. When I take the time to examine my actions, I can decide which values are most important to me, and how I want to support those values in the world.
Having lived in North Carolina for fourteen years, I know Chick-fil-A and its owners’ politics well. Even when their sandwiches were otherwise-acceptable in my diet, I didn’t eat there because I knew what my money would be used to support. It is possible that you value time and cheap food more than equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. If so, please continue to buy your lunches from Chick-fil-A. I won’t be joining you there.
Lest I leave you with the impression that this is all about chicken, it is not. Every time we spend money—even a few dollars—we make a value statement.
When I travel from my home into New York City, I choose to spend the $20 it costs on a round-trip train ticket rather than on gas and parking for my car. In doing so, I am saying that I value mass transportation and environmental sustainability more than freedom and time.
When I buy coffee, I choose to spend my money on fairly traded beans even if it means going to a store I know sells them that’s a little out of my way. In doing so, I am saying that I value economic justice and accountability more than convenience.
And if I want a chicken sandwich, I’ll get it from a company that supports my right to marry. I don’t honestly know which company that is (can I order chicken sandwiches from Amazon?), but rest assured I’ll find out if I’m ever jonesing for some chicken. Maybe I can convince whatever company it is to throw a few pickle slices on the sandwich for good measure.
Holding to the Wrong Anchor
Yesterday I was listening to a radio interview with the Catholic bishop who had been charged with responding to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. Basically, his stance was that the group, which represents 80% of Catholic nuns, was just flat-out wrong when they suggested that the Catholic Church needs to re-examine its stance on birth control, homosexuality and ordaining women. He said that their vow of obedience was not to their conscience and what they felt to be the call of God, but to the hierarchy of the church. He said that he welcomed dialogue with the women religious, but that “dialogue” meant their coming to understand and accept that the traditional stand of the church and its hierarchy was correct. He pointed out that Catholicism is a revealed religion, and not subject to change based on a changing society.
And all I could think as I listened to him was: “Man, you are so screwed.” They have painted themselves in a corner. When you categorically refuse to adapt to the world you live in, you have doomed yourself to extinction. Maybe not soon, but eventually.
Now, there are plenty of people who would say that if we don’t hold to any absolute standards then we are simply awash in a shifting sea of cultural expectations. We have no compass, no guidance through the tempests and changing tides. This claim is not with out merit—after all, the fact that Kim Kardashian or Snookie thinks something is a good idea hardly means that we should all follow suit.
But here’s the thing. The Catholic Church has staked its life on holding fast to things that are failing to stand the test of time. The position of women in society has undergone a shift across the centuries from an assumption that women are property to an assumption (at least by many) that women are fully the equal of men, and deserve the same rights and responsibilities. The Church has created an absolute out of something that turns out to be quite relative. Even the notion of a strict hierarchy—Pope above bishops above priests above laity, men above women, angels above people above animals—all that Great Chain of Being vision of how the universe is arranged is severely retro. In the modern world it has largely been supplanted by an ecological model in which beings live in a complex net of interrelation, with each part inextricably bound to the whole.
I can’t fault the bishop for his statements. He is, after all, only doing the job he was assigned to do by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. And sadly, I suppose the job he was doing was a job that many of us assign to ourselves on a daily basis—holding fast to things that “have” to be true, regardless of the evidence, for fear that our worlds will fall apart if we open ourselves to the possibility that the world does not match our assumptions. It’s the commonest thing in the world. But as a foundation on which to build a church—or a life—well, it makes me sad.
“I didn’t say it was fair, I said it was the law.”
I asked my ex, my partner of almost twenty years from whom I separated three years ago, the co-parent of a teenaged kid, to attend a $14 community education session with me and update our wills.
We had spent thousands of dollars asserting, in two different states, that we were in fact related to one another: that sharing a home, a car, a life, a bed in fact meant that we would be responsible to one another even after death did us part. It turns out that, as difficult and expensive as that assertion of relatedness was, telling the state we had broken up was a breeze, and cheap to boot.
Our state of Minnesota, and our nation, enthusiastically agrees that we are no longer an item. In fact, they never believed that we were. Since we were all in agreement about this matter, I entered the community ed class in a calm place. I’m cheap, and my cheap self felt pretty happy that $28, for the two of us, would get our affairs in order.
I’m not saying I didn’t feel a tinge of sadness. I wondered, as I felt our after death wishes fit so easily into the pre-typed will templates which the lawyer leading our session had brought, just how much it had cost our relationship to be swimming upstream all those years, asserting that in fact love does make a family. I wondered if, had we been able to relax and float instead, supported without exerting an ounce of energy, our relationship might have survived.
But mostly I concentrated on filling in the forms accurately and quickly, initialing what needed to be initialed and checking boxes that needed to be checked. Everything goes to the kid. Check. Until the kid is 25, not too long now, a trust is established, with the following executor. Check. My ex and I whispered in consultation, no tension or disagreements between us, only wanting to get things set and done.
Most of the people in the room appeared, from their questions and comments, to be leaving their estates to their husbands and wives. They checked the box that said, to my spouse until their death, and then after spouse’s death to our children (insert names here).
But then. At the next table, a man, probably in his late 60’s, raised his hand. “If I want to leave everything to my friend, and then after he dies, to the kids, what box do I check?”
The lawyer clarified. “You want to leave everything to your friend?” “Well, yes, for the rest of his life,” said the man. “And then to our kids.”
The lawyer said off-handedly, “Well, you need to write on the blank line that you disinherit your children.”
The man’s mouth fell open in horror. “I don’t want to disinherit my children! I just want my friend to have what he needs for the rest of his life, and then the children would get it!”
The lawyer asked, as if he were cross-examining a witness, “Did you not say that you wanted to leave 100% of your estate to your friend?” The man nodded. “So that leaves zero percent for your children. Hence you must disinherit them.”
My mellow cheap self was suddenly gone from the room, and my mother tiger self was sitting in my seat instead, with adrenalin-clear vision. I was picturing what it would be like for my own kid to learn, after my death, that she had been disinherited. Like every other adopted child she will be processing, for her entire life, some amount of grief and loss about her birthmother. At that point, she’d also be processing the death of one of her parents. And then to be disinherited on top of it? I wondered, quite seriously, if she would survive.
Glancing at the man who had raised the question, I realized that I didn’t even know if he was gay or trying to care for some other friend after his death. But I did know I wasn’t going to sit quietly. I raised my hand. “So you are saying, “ I asked the lawyer, “That a gay couple could adopt or bear a child, raise that child together, and then they would both have to disinherit that child in order to provide for each other legally?”
The lawyer looked bored. The forty or so people in the room looked longingly at their will templates, studiously not looking up. I went on, “So you are saying, that even without the proposed Consititutional amendment on our ballot in November, which explicitly states that marriage is only between a man and a woman, loving and committed couples are forced to renounce either their children or each other in order to have legal wills?” The lawyer looked annoyed, but I couldn’t resist pushing it. “Are you saying that?”
“Look,” the lawyer said, “I didn’t say it was fair. I said it was the law.”
My ex and I finished filling out our forms, had them notarized, and left. As we walked out, this $14 class didn’t feel like such a bargain.
Who Would Jesus Fence Off?
Last week a Baptist pastor by the name of Worley got a fair bit of internet attention for declaring that gay people should all be stuck behind an electric fence – lesbians in one area and “queers and homosexuals” in another, where food could be dropped to them from an airplane until they all eventually died off because they couldn’t reproduce. OK, just for a minute we’re going to set aside things like the obvious fact that straight people would just go on having gay babies like always, thereby replenishing the supply of queers outside the fence. Let’s even let go, for the moment, of the congregants who cheered during the service and supported their pastor with a standing ovation a week later. Not much you can do about stupid and mean except call it what it is.
No, what I’m thinking about at the moment is the fence. The idea that we can identify the undesirables and wall them off. For Worley, the world would be a more virtuous, lovely place if you could just stick the “queers and homosexuals” off someplace where he wouldn’t have to look at them. Which doesn’t strike me as all that different from wanting a giant wall along the US/Mexico border. Which, perhaps, is not entirely unlike wanting to live in a gated community, the kind where a neighborhood watch patrolman might shoot a kid who looked as if he didn’t belong there and might be up to no good.
There’s something deeply tempting about the idea that we can make ourselves safe by simply building a wall between ourselves and the thing that scares or disgusts us. It is, I suppose, human nature to believe that we can find security by fencing out the “other.” Which is why the role of religion is supposed to be to remind us of our better selves, to push us toward letting go of the scared hind brain that wants to wall ourselves off from danger, so that we can move instead toward a more evolved self that longs for peace built on a foundation of love.
You can search the Christian Scriptures all day for a suggestion from Jesus that we should wall ourselves off from those who are “different” or “disgusting” and all you’ll find are stories like that of the Good Samaritan, where the hero is a member of a despised ethnic group, or of Jesus eating with a tax collector – someone utterly unwelcome in polite society of the place and time. Pastor Worley may be speaking for the large percentage of Americans who have entrenched themselves in fear and loathing, but he sure as heck isn’t speaking for Jesus.
Safe Harbor
Press power on the remote control, television on
and every moment of viewing we are confronted with images that shame us into wanting to reject parts of our being
turn our bodies and ourselves into slimmer, younger, lighter, leaner
smarter, whiter, wealthier, straighter versions of our selves.
Magazines tell us what not to wear
along with 7 surprising things that turn guys off
And what men want during the NFL halftime.
Messages crafted to ensure we remember that
who we are – at our core – is not good enough.
//
Would you harbor me?
Would I harbor you?
Asks the Sweet Honey in the Rock song and:
Would you harbor you?
Would I harbor me?
How much time do we spend attempting to do the impossible?
How much energy…how many of our resources do we expend running away
From our bodies
From our identities
Our histories
Our stories…from our very own selves?
How much time, energy, and resources do we spend
not loving our bodies
fearing ourselves because who we are, is not
who we see reflected back at us in “normative” socio-cultural stories and images?
Because we’re actively being conditioned to cling to a mythical norm?
A while back on National Coming Out Day
I decided to feed my facebook obsession
by checking out the page
Wiping Out Homophobia on Facebook
There, in the photo album, I found photo after photo of
same-sex couples laughing, smiling, holding each other
women, men – people – marrying, playing, loving and…
I also found this note from Paul…growing up in a world
in which his identity is continuously questioned and made wrong.
A world in which some who proclaim to speak on behalf of God
advocate death or caging LGBT individuals until we die off
Paul writes:
“I have to tell you that for the past few weeks, I have been pretty low and had pretty dark thoughts about my life and what to do. I had been bullied at school and things got so bad that I thought about doing something really bad.
Well, I talked to you and you told me to join local groups and online groups to get support from people in my age group who know what I was going through.
Well, I joined an LGBT group in the next town and about 8 online. I now have some great new friends in real life and some online who I’ll never met but who I talk to a lot.
I know this is what everyone says, but I don’t feel so alone now, I am not like the only one. …I just thought I’d keep you up to date as you were all so kind to me. Thanks to K. and L. for talking me round and to everyone who said positive things, they really did help.”
This broke my heart…and in some small way, it offered some hope.
In a culture that is slow to extend
safe harbor for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender
children, youth, adults – elders…
In a culture that supports heterosexism & homophobia
In a culture that promotes messages of same-sex deviance often enough,
many – especially youth – begin to
internalize that message.
Believe that message.
Begin to question their, my, your, our inherent worth and dignity
It is easy to feel other-ed. To understand others and sometimes oneself as strange, deviant…
It would be effortless to create a list of all the ways we – who are
queer – have contributed to society…have enhanced the world.
It would be easy to catalogue the gifts of all the LGBT “strangers” among us.
And. Here’s the power of affirming the inherent worth and dignity:
It’s inherent. It matters what we do, sure. And, it matters more that
we simply are.
We…any one of us…shouldn’t need to be any more special to be accepted. To be loved.
To be equal.
We only need to be here. To show up. To love…
That’s the nugget of wisdom in the first principle: inherent worth simply “is.”
To love ourselves is the equivalent of a tiny revolution
To love all those unchangeable innate beautiful truths that
make us who we are
and the imperfect pieces and parts that we argue with
That we shove away
That we suppress
That we pretend we feel okay about…
when we embrace all of those parts
and come to see them as holy
it is the equivalent of a tiny revolution.
In her book: All About Love: New Visions,
bell hooks writes:
“When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness,
then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat.
When we choose to love, we choose to move against fear –
against alienation and separation.
The choice to love is a choice to connect – to find ourselves in the other.”
When we’re taught that safety lies in sameness
when we’re taught that the only safe community is
a community of people who look like, dress like, think like we do
When we’re taught that only certain body types belong in the public sphere
When we’re taught that only people of certain heights or gender identity
or educational background or sexual orientation are capable of leadership
then we begin to fear everything in ourselves
and subsequently in others – that fail to fit what we’ve been
carefully taught.
We begin to fear everything that differs from the constructed “norm.”
And. What we fear, we seek to destroy.
But, when we – as individuals, as social systems with power,
as a community –
choose to love…move against fear…and connect
with difference, with that which appears to be strange – then
we make room for the Holy to thrive in and amongst us.
The tiny revolution in Paul’s story was just that.
A community that willingly created room for him – holy and inherently worthy –
to show up
Willing to extended safe harbor.
I want it to be true that we can create such harbors for
ourselves and for others.
A Wild Patience
Rev. Dr. Michael Tino
A wild patience has taken me this far/as if I had to bring to shore/a boat with a spasmodic outboard motor/old sweaters, nets, spray-mottled books/tossed in the prow/some kind of sun burning my shoulder-blades. -Adrienne Rich, Integrity
Patience is a spiritual virtue worth cultivating, and yet it is something in short supply in my life right now. Last night’s news from my former home state of North Carolina is just the latest in a long string of insults to all people who believe that love is love. And as a gay man of faith, a part of my heart is torn out every time another vote is taken to declare my love to be inferior.
It’s hard to muster patience when your civil rights—or the rights of those you love and care about—are on the line. It’s hard to muster patience when the list of states banning same-sex marriage in their constitutions steadily grows and grows. It’s hard to muster patience when lawmakers fail again and again to have the courage to pass even simple legislation to, for example, ensure workplace non-discrimination for LGBT people.
It’s hard to keep repeating to myself Theodore Parker’s assertion from so long ago that “the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” That quote has long been a mantra of mine and yet with every passing election, with every legislative session, with every disappointing vote, it becomes harder to say, harder to believe, harder to force myself to think about.
And yet with every vote, it becomes more important to say. It becomes more important to remind myself of the truth in that statement. It is as if I am breathing necessary oxygen on the ember of hope that burns within me, keeping it glowing so that it might one day become a flame. And so, I practice patience.
And then today, our President announced that his “evolving” views on same-sex marriage had evolved some more. Did I hear this correctly? The President of the United States contradicted 61% of the voters in an important swing state? Maybe that moral arc of the universe will bend towards justice after all.
And so it is that I realize that what needs to be cultivated is not mere patience, but a wild patience.
A wild patience that knows when it’s time to wait, and when it’s time to act. A wild patience that sits sometimes, spreading healing balm on burned skin, and gets up sometimes to build, to work, to do. A wild patience that knows the difference between faith and resignation, that keeps the ember glowing amidst the howling storm, that steers the boat toward the shores of tomorrow.
Yes, hope is here. Love and justice are coming. Their arrival requires patience. Their arrival requires waiting, and breathing, and letting things go. And it also requires hard work.
May we find in ourselves both the patience to wait and the impatience to do what must be done. This year, let us be wildly patient together.