Thoughts on rights from the Religious Right

Tuesdays are my long days here in grad land, with an exhausting string of classes that begins with Christian Ethics, ends with Christian integration, and has a nice long statistics class sandwiched in the middle. I want so badly to like my Christian Ethics professor, if only because she identifies as a pacifist and feminist, which are two of my favorite words when it comes to things that end in "ist." I hesitate though, hang back and watch silently, as I find myself doing so frequently these days, made cautious by the readings I skipped ahead to that were assigned for our upcoming class discussion of sexuality. The lingering idealist in me wants to believe that our outspoken pacifist/feminist professor will refute and not support the author's "eloquent" theological argument explaining why he cannot "condone" the "lifestyle" of his gay friend because: "Under the power of the cross, we are not subject to our pasts, to our psychology, or to our biology." Oh, really? That's news to me. Here I am, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an integrative Christian education in psychology, and apparently psychology is erased by the power of the cross. I wonder if the news has made it to my psych professors yet, who have dedicated their lives to this very field? We better pass the message along to all the doctors and scientists too, since biology is a bust as well. Oh, and do you want to be the one to tell the little girl I know who was raped by her father when she was five, and by a whole string of foster parents after that, that she isn't subject to her past, or should I?

And the really fantastic thing about reading this whole article was that when I started talking about it to my best friend of six years, as a sort of trial run to see if I was ready to talk to her about my own struggles with sexuality, she cut me off with: "Well, you really can't limit God, I mean, what's the point of believing in Him if you don't think He can do anything." Ok, sure, I'm no theologian, and frankly, I don't want to get into an argument about the theology of God's omnipotence. What I do want to get into a discussion about it how the author's argument and my friend's argument in support of it sound to me a lot like saying: "God has the power to make you a _____ (fill in the blank here with male, blond, basketball star, etc) , so then if you wake up tomorrow still female, a brunette, or clumsy and athletically challenged, etc, then it's somehow your fault.... probably because you didn't trust in God's sovereignty or something. Sure, I'll admit that there are some holes in my argument and probably some big theological words I need to insert in key places... but you get the idea. Needless to say, love her deeply though I may, she and I will not be having any confessional, revealing conversations any time soon.

So anyway, where I was actually headed with all of this wasn't in any of these directions, but was more towards the enlightening conversation we had in Christian Ethics this morning about abortion. I'll spare you the details, since I'm sure you've all heard both prepackaged sides of the argument regurgitated more times than is healthy for anyone's fragile psyche, and instead I'll fast-forward to the part where we are talking about some complexities of the loaded statements "right to life" and "right to choice", and the blond guy in the back row raises his Ralph Lauren enrobed arm and says: "I don't really think rights are important here, as Christians we don't have any rights, we just serve Christ." Is that a fact? I am twitching in my seat with the raging heat of my unvoiced words, silently shouting at him: As a white, straight, upper-middle class, highly-educated, American male, you are honestly going to sit there and tell me that you don't have any rights? And please, I'd love to know which one of those adjectives has given you so much personal experience in the absence of rights that you now have the authority to speak to us from your enlightened understanding of just how unimportant rights are?

Maybe, instead of answering that one, he'd like to ask the fifty year old black preacher in the row ahead of him what he thinks about rights. Or he could ask the handful of women in the room who have only recently been allowed to even occupy space in this once exclusively male seminary- so recently, in fact, that the women's bathroom just outside our classroom is nothing more than a small section that was partitioned off of the men's bathroom a few years back. Or perhaps, if I one day find the courage to tell him and others like him, whether he asks or not, I'll share with him what it means to me to be sitting there, in a room filled with the fellow believers of my faith tradition, contemplating the whole array of rights that I have watched evaporate before my very eyes over the past year as I begin to honestly face my own sexuality.... the right to a wedding and a marriage, to the adoption of some of those children we are all hypothetically debating about bringing into the world, and then conveniently forgetting about once they arrive into the over-crowded arms of a terrifyingly destructive foster-care system. Or even, the right to speak honestly about what I am currently experiencing within the walls of this "academic Christian community," without risking being pointed in the direction of the section of the student handbook that labels me someone who falls outside the biblical will of God, and then provides a hotline where people who suspect me of homosexual activity can call to report their "suspicions".

I don't want to "play the victim" here, to use a phrase that makes my skin crawl for a whole myriad of reasons, nor do I want to claim to be any sort of expert on what it feels like to be marginalized when I myself partake daily of so many privileges that are denied to others around the world and within my own community. But what I do want to ask quietly, insistently, is.... are you listening? Do you hear the voices that are not your own, whispering, singing, sobbing, silently mouthing, shouting, humming the lines of their unwritten stories? I am just now starting to catch fragments of their many, varied voices. I am just now starting to find my own. I pray that you are listening... that we are all listening.

You killed the part of me that cares

I am wearing my favorite t-shirt, the one that has a picture of a dead dove with the words: "You killed the part of me that cares." floating above it. For anyone who knows me well at all, this is a sure sign that just the opposite is true. It generally means that I care too much.... that I am feeling small and vulnerable and absolutely uncertain about how to translate all my pent up caring into something remotely resembling productive.

I found out tonight about something terrible that happened to a friend of mine, and I will spare the details here because it is her story to tell and not mine, and I am certain that she will tell it in her own way, and in her own timing. But suffice to say, she was attacked in a violent, physical way that strikes me as both an attack on her sexuality, and on her vulnerability as a woman. And I knew that something had happened before I even knew what had happened, but I waited to call... I think more than anything because on some level, I wanted so badly for her to be okay, for me to be okay... for all of us to be okay and for all of this to somehow not be so fucking painful. But it is, and there is just no way around it, so I wear my shirt, and I plead with this keyboard in front of me to somehow help me find a voice for the things I have spent a lifetime learning to leave unvoiced.

The thing I can't quite understand- well, that is, in addition to all the other things I can't even begin to understand like how a group of people could inflict harm on someone simply because of who they are, and the tangled role that the church has played in the creation of all of this excess hate- the other thing I can't understand is my own reaction tonight. After I hung up the phone, I went back into the kitchen and I did the dinner dishes and then put on the unused apron that hangs next to our refrigerator, which I had never before worn in my inherent distaste for all that it symbolizes, and I baked some snickerdoodles for my neighbor. Here I am, raging and shaking at the injustices at the world, and the power that is stolen from us as women, and at the power I am just beginning to notice I have always had shut off from me as someone whose sexuality is not recognized as valid or acceptable by the vast majority of the people who surround me- raging and shaking and standing in the kitchen in a dress and apron, baking cookies for a man.

To be fair, A is a wonderful guy who is quickly becoming a good friend of mine, and he doesn't represent to me any of the things that are wrong with this world. He is sweet and gentle, and cooks for me much more frequently than I ever cook for him. He has even forbid me to wash dishes because he hates to see women washing dishes- he says it is him way of undoing a fraction of the vast damage that has been inflicted on women by men over the centuries. So A is really not the issue here...

But as a psychologist in training, I am going to go out on a limb here and say that my choice of timing in the cookie baking points to the fact that standing there in the kitchen, whipping up those snickerdoodles, I was hiding not just behind an apron, but also behind every heteronormative defense I could muster. Maybe, just maybe, If I look real pretty and wear my apron just right... if I do what is expected of me and find myself a nice Christian boyfriend, then I won't have to be so paralyzed with fear all the time. Fear that people here will find out the things that I have not been telling them. Fear that I will one day find myself in my friend's position, and that I will not handle it with even a fraction of the grace and strength that she is. Fear that I will never unlearn the deeply ingrained lesson that if I am not constantly in search of prince charming to sweep me off my feet, I have missed some essential ingredient of the formula for a happy Christian life.

All in all, I would have to say that victories were in short supply this evening. And yet, for me, it is a small victory to be sitting here, typing these words. It is a victory that I have begun to piece together a patchworked network of supportive friends, all across the board in both their sexualities and in the places in which they currently find themselves. But I am learning to tell them my stories, and to listen to the similarities woven within their own. We are a motley crew, alternately limping and dancing in our own corners of the world, or more often then not, dancing even while we limp.... but as B just put it, there is a certain stability in this collective instability.

Collective Instability

One down, 239 to go. Weeks of seminary, that is. I have a handful of different ways of explaining how I got here- and more importantly, how I agreed to stay here taking 16 units a quarter, four quarters a year, for the next six years. My general answer is to shrug and say that I don't know. If someone pushes me a bit further, I will recite some brief speech on how my PhD will enable me to do anything and everything I might want to do in the field of psychology, how I love the area, or how I just didn't get any other grad school applications in before the shit hit the fan at work. What I almost never tell people is that I came because I am terrified, more terrified than I can remember having ever been of anything- of facing the questions and conversations that I know I will have to face while I am here, and that is exactly why I have to stay and face them.

While traveling this summer, I entertained fleeting thoughts of dropping out before I even arrived at this seminary/psychology grad school and heading somewhere like the women's studies program at Berkeley instead. But that would be the easier thing to do, and coming from the girl who chose to run cross-country in the heat of 125 degree summers, taking the easy way out has really never been my style. And so here I am, in a program that prides itself on teaching integration, seeking out a sort of personal integration of my own. What they teach here is an integration of Christianity and Psychology, but what I'm here to learn is an integration of a different sort- an integration of my faith with my increasing awareness of my sexuality, and what a poor match it is for the heteronormative culture in which I find myself embedded.

So far, my progress has not been stellar. I make a lot of alternatingly weeping and fury-laced phone calls to my friend B, who is raging her own, less closeted war in grad school out in North Carolina. On days like today, I also might make a quick pit stop at the coffee shop down the street, where the woman behind the counter, an old friend who happens to be one of the few people on this side of the country with whom I share a sense of camaraderie in any of this, notices before I do that I am shaking from some inexact combination of stress and over-caffeination, and consequently offers me a cup of decaffeinated tea instead of the nonfat triple latte that I had planned on ordering. But it turns out that the tea actually does a pretty decent job of calming me down, and the ranting with B generally do an even better job, and before too long I find that I am remembering how to breathe, which is a really great thing to remember, and an excellent place to start, I think, all things considered. And then eventually, I also start to find that just a little, just around the edges and maybe a tad bit in the center, I am also remembering how to be. To be authentic. To be honest with myself. To be the way I am increasingly understanding I was created to be.

Under the circumstances of me being a seminary student, and a PhD student, and whatever the hell all that entails, now might might be when you might expect me to launch into some sort of sermon on all the peace and inner tranquility I am finding, and how others can find it to. But remember, I said it was just a little bit here and there, and really for the most part I am still all twitchy and weepy and angry and uncertain inside, so I'm afraid there will be no sermonizing or lists of five easy to steps to inner peace coming from this direction. No, the truth of the matter is, I am not expecting to find many answers, not now or in the foreseeable future. I don't hold much faith in clear-cut answers anyway, and I haven't for quite some time now. But what I am looking to find is my misplaced words. My friend, the one from behind the counter at the coffee shop, used to tell me back when life was not quite so complicated, or at least complicated in a whole slew of different ways, that when you let something steal your words, you let it hold far too much power over you. And I've let my terror over facing my sexuality steal my words for way too long now, and I am determined to find my way back to them- if an anonymous blog of rambling word vomit is the only way to do, then so be it. We've all got to start somewhere, don't we?

So today, today I am clinging to the fact the I may be feeling particularly damaged and unstable, but B assures me that I am not alone in this. I am joined in a sort of collective instability with all of us who identify with at least one of the initials that make up the acronym for the list of sexual minorities, which I know begins with LGBTQ, but I can't seem to remember how it ends, no matter how many times she tells me. And maybe that it is true for the whole situation, come to think of it- I know where it begins- with this painful/weepy/angry sense of collective instability, but I don't yet know where it ends. I pray that it will be in a different place, far from here. That is the closest I can come to praying these days. For now, it is enough.