Coming Out Strong

Recently a campaign called “It Gets Better” started by columnist Dan Savage, has been receiving a lot of attention. To raise awareness about the recent rash of teen suicides and to try to offer hope to young queer teens suffering from bullying and homophobia, Savage created a YouTube channel where people could post videos about living through bullying and harassment as young queer people and how it gets better. I can only hope that this campaign will help some young people who feel there is no hope. Unfortunately, I feel more attention should be directed and energy spent on a message that there is no place for bullying, harassment, and homophobia in our homes, schools, churches and society and we need a strong message that, as Carol Wise, director of BMC, has written, we’ve had enough!. As she said:

“Bullying does not take place in a vacuum. The persistent targeting of lgbt youth is sustained by religious ideology and practice that is either hostile, silent, waffles in ambiguity, or retreats in the face of challenge. Enough!! It is time for people of faith to stop fueling the misery of teens. This means an end to beloved “discernment processes” that are carefully constructed to drag on for years and avoid any risk. It means no more cover for pastors who wring their hands in private but are silent in public. It means actually naming the reality that violence is specifically directed towards lgbt people and not pretending that doesn’t exist or “isn’t that bad,” or that there is “pain on all sides.” It means acknowledging that the church has participated in the suffering of lgbt teens and bears responsibility for both the harm and the healing.”

Every denomination and congregation needs to look deep into itself and ask, what have we done to fuel the misery of teens? Have we been silent when we should have spoken up? Have we tacitly supported messages that lgbtq people are less than? Have we spread that message ourselves? Telling queer kids that “It gets better” feels to me a little like telling a battered woman that it will get better instead of telling a batterer that he shouldn’t beat up his wife and currently most parts of organized religion are either silent on the battering or outright encouraging/doing it themselves. The rest of us are just trying to do damage control. When will we be able to say that religion is fighting this problem instead of religion is the problem?

Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson recently published an article called “How Religion is Killing our Most Vulnerable Youth” in the Huffington Post. A few quotes:

“It is not enough for good people — religious or otherwise — to simply be feeling more positive toward gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. Tolerance and a live-and-let-live attitude beats discrimination and abuse by a mile. But it’s not enough. Tolerant people, especially tolerant religious people, need to get over their squeamishness about being vocal advocates and unapologetic supporters of LGBT people. It really is a matter of life and death, as we’ve seen.”

“Ministers who remain in comfortable silence on sexuality must speak out. Churches that have silently embraced gay and lesbian members for years must publicly hang the welcome banner. How long will we continue to limit and qualify our messages of acceptance, inclusion and embrace for the most vulnerable in order to maintain the comfort of those in our communities of faith who are well served by the status quo? In the current climate, equivocating messages of affirmation are overpowered by the religious rhetoric of hatred. Silence only serves to support the toleration of bullying, violence and exclusion. In the face of what has already become the common occurrence of LGBT teen suicide, how long can we wait to respond?”

And one more:

“These bullying behaviors would not exist without the undergirding and the patina of respect provided by religious fervor against LGBT people. It’s time for “tolerant” religious people to acknowledge the straight line between the official anti-gay theologies of their denominations and the deaths of these young people. Nothing short of changing our theology of human sexuality will save these young and precious lives.”

The “It Gets Better” campaign could be a powerful way to raise awareness and give hope to some. We can all feel a little stronger as we watch the videos and drop a few tears. But let us not be satisfied simply with the adage that “it gets better.” For if we look at ourselves, our actions, our inaction, and our churches without getting a little angry and doing something to make it better, we’ve failed the youth we wish to help.

Lawrence King?s young life tragically ended in his junior high computer lab in Oxnard, California. Larry, who identified as gay and sometimes dressed in a ?feminine? manner, made the mistake of asking his fellow student, Brandon McInerney, to be his valentine. Apparently the idea of this was so abhorrent and shameful to the fourteen year old Brandon that he brought a gun to school, walked into the classroom, and shot Larry directly in the head.

It is tempting to gasp, express dismay, and then convince oneself that this is an isolated incident that is tragic but, thankfully, an anomaly. However, this dismissal ignores the disturbing statistic from the 2005 California Healthy Kids Survey that 28% of gay and lesbian students report being threatened or injured with a weapon, a rate that is five times that of other students and consistent with national findings. In such an environment, it is no wonder that social engagement, educational aspirations and overall academic achievement can suffer. Students who experience harassment because of sexual orientation or gender expression are more likely to skip school, drop out, reject college, suffer from depression and substance abuse, and under perform academically.

Both the Mennonite Church and Church of the Brethren have included language in their sexuality statements that expresses sorrow at the violence and hatred directed towards gay and lesbian people and calls for understanding and even the pursuit of civil rights (note: bisexual and transgender people are not included in the statements ? the obsession is with ?the homosexual.?) Such sentiments, however, have had little impact. This year BMC proposed a booth for the exhibit space at the Church of the Brethren Annual Conference that would focus solely upon providing education related to lgbt hate crimes, job discrimination and housing discrimination. The request was denied, with the committee citing homosexuality as ?an issue which causes passionate divisiveness in our denomination.? It is a telling comment when violence directed towards lgbt people is understood as ?the issue of homosexuality.? Is anti-Semitic violence the ?issue of Judaism??

In practice it is difficult to interpret pious denominational words as little more than an exercise in cheap grace. What efforts have any of the denominations made? What can they point towards in terms of fulfilling this promise? Where have they made a difference? I can think of no instance where the Mennonite Church USA, the Mennonite Church Canada or the Church of the Brethren has spoken out to challenge lgbt directed violence, discrimination or the violation of human or civil rights. Indeed, denominational officials from Mennonite Church Canada were vociferous in their opposition to marriage equality. The courageous congregations and the few pastors who have taken seriously this message of non-violence and understanding have found themselves becoming targets of discipline, derision and hostility.

Lawrence King is dead. May he find a peace that was denied him in life. Brandon McInerney, age 14, will probably spend most of his life in prison. Thousands of young lgbt kids have just gotten the message to be very careful about coming out or displaying any type of gender non-conformity. All are victims of a tragic homophobia that is reinforced by the policies and practices of the Mennonite and Brethren denominations. It is up to each of us to end this shameful complicity. Speak up, come out, talk to your friends, challenge your congregation, demand that your pastor break silence, organize your campus, ask more of the larger church, and get involved in the movement for lgbt justice. For the sake of other young people like Lawrence King and Brandon McInerney, it?s time.

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If you’ve been perusing the categories section, you may have noticed this jumble of letters and wondered, what is LTS HTS? It means “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” It gets used so much in the church that I decided to just abbreviate it here.

If anybody feels inspired to write about their thoughts and feelings on LTS HTS, I welcome some comments, or even a post. I’ll wait a bit to write more about it.

For some more of my thoughts on the language of like this: check this out. Like a lot of my other stuff here, it was at young.anabaptistradicals.org first because that is where I was writing before I started this blog here.

I posted this first bit a little while ago here at young.anabaptistradicals.org but I’m adding more at the end to update the situation.

The US House of Representatives just passed hate crimes legislation that would extend hate crimes protections to be based on gender, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity in addition to current protections for race, religion, color, and national origin. It still has to go through the Senate and then face veto by you know who.

The thing that really blows me away is that people are actually against this, and that those people happen to call themselves Chrisitians. Now, if folks have a problem with the idea of hate crimes protections in general, eh, I would be happy to discuss that. But the idea that some groups of people should get protections while other groups (groups which happen to experience a disproportionate amount of hate crimes) should not is completely ridiculous. As it happens, the religious right is coming out en force against hate crimes protections for lgbt people. I linked this article about this (really, check it out, it’s a good one) in an earlier post.

Read the rest of this entry

Former BMC board member Adam Hostetter sent this video linkto the office (aka the mothership) and said it would be okay to share here. It is a wonderful story and the video is great. I’ll copy and paste the text that goes with it but I’ll just link up the video and you’ll have to go to the Stories for Change website to see it.

Taboo Underoos Video
“Some things felt right and normal to me when I was a kid, and as I grew up, I realized my “right and normal” wasn’t quite so. This story is about coming back around to my own “right and normal” and feeling FABULOUS about it.”