Shallow understanding from people of good will, is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.
-Martin Luther King Jr.

Jason Johnson, the gay college student expelled from The University of the Cumberlands in Kentucky, has been allowed to return to class and finish the school year, under an agreement hammered out by his, and the school’s lawyers.  I’m actually surprised.  I’d thought the school would dig in its theological heels and insist on its absolute right to remove filthy sodomites from its sacred grounds.  In exchange Jason agrees not to sue the school, but I’m puzzled as to how much leverage the threat of a lawsuit against a Southern Baptist school in the Bible Belt could have been.  In any case, they’re not going to lie on his transcripts that he failed the semester anymore.  Whether or not they treat him fairly in the classroom remains to be seen.

From the Lexington Herald-Leader comes this column from Paul Prather.  I wish I could like it…he says a few things I completely agree with…

• I believe private religious schools should have the right to make whatever rules they want (short of mandates to torture or behead heathens), in keeping with the tenets of their faith…

• If you can’t obey a school’s code of conduct, common sense dictates that you might not want to enroll there.

• On the other hand, the same principle holds true for the school itself. If the University of the Cumberlands hopes to earn accreditation from a secular agency, it must be prepared to abide by that group’s secular standards. You can’t have it both ways.

That’s pretty much where I am generally, and I’d go on to add that if you want to discriminate against a portion of the citizenry at minimum you can’t expect them to support you with their tax dollars.  Prather goes on to comment on the hypocrisy of singling out gay students for violations of sexual conduct rules, saying that in his own experience on Christian campuses, the straight kids could be just as sexually active as the kids on the secular campuses, if at least a tad more reserved about expressing it openly.  But then he goes on to assert that Johnson’s problem was that he called attention to himself, and from there his column goes down a familiar path…

Thus, Johnson’s main mistake wasn’t simply being gay. It was calling undue attention to his orientation. Christian colleges might have been the originators of the don’t-ask-don’t-tell philosophy.

It is a fact that Johnson posted pictures of himself and his boyfriend on his MySpace profile, but nowhere have I seen it said that he was being open about his sexual orientation at school.  What I’ve always heard to date is that someone informed on him to the school administration, and they went looking for his MySpace profile and then confronted him with it.  In other words, Johnson didn’t tell the school, the school Asked.  That’s not Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell…that’s stay in the closet if you know what’s good for you.  If heterosexuals understand nothing else about their homosexual neighbors, they need to understand this: Those days are over. 

There are a lot of us, far too many in my opinion, who are still perfectly willing to be closeted on a situational basis, but none of us but the desperate self loathing are willing to live our entire lives inside the closet anymore.  There’s a reason for that, and it’s not turning your back on God or having a lack of moral values or defiant homosexual militancy.  It’s something else, something that the Prather’s of the world just don’t seem to get.  And yet it’s so simple, or would be, if only you can see the people for the homosexuals.  Prather, in trying his best, and I don’t doubt for a minute that he’s actually trying, misses it completely.

If a straight student had, say, posted photos of himself and his girlfriend in flagrante delicto on the Internet, he also would have been expelled.

In flagrante delicto.  It means "Caught in the act."  Johnson didn’t post pictures of him and his boyfriend having sex on his MySpace profile.  But you could tell at a glance those photos were of two teenagers in love.  Look at that for a second.  Prather is using a phrase that generally is taken to mean getting caught having sex (the act) to describe photos of two gay teenagers in love.  And he goes on in that manner for the rest of the column, trying his best to be sensible and compassionate, and failing miserably because he cannot see the people for the homosexuals…

Homosexual activities and extramarital heterosexual sex indeed are contrary to biblical and historical Christian standards. Yet, they’re about equally as errant as pride, gluttony, stinginess, temper tantrums, disrespect for parents and lying.

Homosexual activities.   Homosexual activities.  Homosexual activities.

One question raised by the Johnson case is this: How should Christian groups react to sexual misconduct? All religious organizations are made up of human beings who, in my observation, tend to fail miserably a fair amount of the time.

Sexual misconduct.  Sexual misconduct.  Sexual misconduct. 

Maybe Christian administrators should consider reacting the way Jesus did. I never can think about an incident such as Johnson’s without remembering the time Jesus was confronted with a woman who had been caught "in the very act" of adultery and was about to be stoned for it…

Adultery.   The Very Act.

Jesus said, "Let the one who is himself without sin throw the first rock." That ended the stoning. Then he addressed the woman. "Neither do I condemn you," he said. "Go your way. From now on, sin no more."

What a beautiful response…

Beautiful perhaps, when made to someone who had cheated on their spouse.  But it is unmitigated ugliness to say this to a gay teenager about his first love.  Johnson is not married (never mind for now, that homosexuals can only Be married in one state of the union).  He is not having an affair with another married person.  And considering Johnson’s religiosity, it would not surprise me in the least to hear they aren’t even having sex yet.  We don’t all jump right into the sack on the first date.  So at worst you can only call Johnson’s "sin" fornication, not adultery, and there is no evidence even for that.  But notice the mental leap here, from images of two young men in love, to adultery, and even more grotesquely, to forgiveness for adultery.  No.  From Johnson’s MySpace profile, his sin can only be one thing: being a homosexual in love.  And there’s what’s missing from all of Paul Prather’s compassion and understanding: any sense whatsoever that homosexuals love, and that they are punished simply for being in love.

Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex…  This is the bedrock of anti-gay prejudice, the one irreducible premise through which everything else about homosexuals is understood.  Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. Never mind the raving haters of the world like Fred Phelps…if you want to understand how otherwise decent people can casually rip the lives of their gay and lesbian neighbors apart with no thought or care for the human misery and wreckage they leave behind, there’s why.  They can do it, confidant in the knowledge that our feelings for our mates are shallow imitations of the real feelings heterosexuals feel for theirs.  Heterosexuals feel love and contentment and fulfillment in their spouses, but homosexuals can only feel a pale imitation of that.  "Playing house" as the homophobic science fiction writer Orson Scott Card once put it.  Heterosexuals feel deep and profound grief at the loss of a spouse,  but homosexuals can only try to mimic grief at best.  So we cannot rip apart everything in their lives they ever held dear, because they don’t really hold those things dear…not the way we do.  Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.

It’s how anti gay prejudice becomes it’s own unstoppable machine, grinding up the lives of innocent people while others who fancy themselves decent and compassionate and thoughtful citizens look sadly on, as though watching the fate of dogs that have to be put down because they’re so sick.  Oh how…unfortunate…for them…  If you think that the only wrong done to Jason Johnson was being expelled from his school, you’re missing the graver injury done to his person, and right at the very core of his being.  To see it, all you have to do is be able to see the person for the homosexual.  Let me try to explain to the Prathers of the world how horrible that "beautiful response" actually is. 

Picture the first time you fell in love.  Picture that amazed, wonderful feeling.  One day, life just seemed more wonderful, more intense, more amazing then you’d ever dreamed it could be.  The sun shone a little brighter on everything around you then it did before.  The stars seemed to shine more intensely.  Everything old seemed new again.  Life was beautiful.  It was worth living no matter how hard or desperate it got.  Everything that ever happened to you was worth it, because it brought you to that moment, and that person.  Everything that ever Could happen to you from then on was worth it, so long as a certain person was there, so long as you could see them smile.  Because whenever they smiled, you smiled.

I remember it well.  When I was a teenager I used to listen to all the pop culture love songs of the sixties and early seventies on my radio, and never really understood what they were about, until I fell in love myself, with a male classmate.  I remember hearing this song on my radio one day, I’d heard it countless times before and I didn’t like it at all because it was it was slow, it had no beat, it was just some gooey sugary love song and whenever one of those came on I would reach for the tuning knob and try to find something else I could rock to, and this time when it came on I sat and listened, and began to cry…because I knew exactly how the person who wrote it felt…because it said it all about what I was feeling then…

Today I feel like pleasing you more than before
Today I know what I want to do but I don’t know what for
To be living for you is all I want to do
To be loving you it’ll all be there when my dreams come true
Today you’ll make me say that I somehow have changed
Today you’ll look into my eyes, I’m just not the same
To be anymore than all I am would be a lie
I’m so full of love I could burst apart and start to cry
Today everything you want, I swear it all will come true
Today I realize how much I’m in love with you
-Jefferson Airplane, Today

Homosexuals mate to their own sex.  That we do doesn’t take from us any of the higher emotions heterosexuals are capable of expressing to their mates, or of their unions.  We love.  We honor.  We cherish.  Til death do us part.  We are capable of great sacrifice for the honor of our love.  We are capable of great joy in that love.  Our unions are as life affirming to us as yours are to you.  The only difference between us is that we mate to our own sex.  You can’t take the homosexuality out of a homosexual, otherwise the snake oil salesmen of the ex-gay ministries would have thousands of happy heterosexuals to show as proof, instead of one paid staff member after another who proudly proclaims their heterosexuality only to get caught in a gay bar months or years later.  We are what we are. 

You can make us ashamed of ourselves.  You can make us hate ourselves.  You can make us terrified of the slightest shred of sexual arousal.  But you can’t make us heterosexuals because we aren’t.  What you Can do, is take all the higher aspects of love and devotion away from us.  All the romance.  All the poetry.  All the honor and devotion.  All the awe and all the joy and all the wonder.  You can take that from us.  You can drain our lives of every last drop of it.  But when you do we are still homosexuals, and all you have done is leave us empty human shells with sexual needs that won’t go away. 

And that’s exactly what you do, every time you tell a gay kid that his feelings for his first love are sin.  You convince him of it, and you literally leave him with nothing left in his life but mindless loveless lust.  That’s what you’re calling beautiful.

I’m not going to argue theology with anyone.  If you’ve got yourself locked into a relentless fundamentalist religiosity that insists that every last comma and period in the King James bible Must be literally true or you’re not a faithful Christian, then I guess the universe really was created in six days and is about six thousand years old and women suffer the pains of childbirth for the sin of Eve.  And if that’s what you believe then all I have to say to you is: Get the fuck off my back! 

I’m not going to argue about whether or not we have a choice.  That argument is over and done with for everyone except bigots and religious fanatics for whom no science could ever be enough to change their minds.

Here’s what I have to say about the case of Jason Johnson and forgiveness of sin: it doesn’t matter if you don’t mean to hurt anyone, if you won’t stop hurting them!  And one other thing, which was said more eloquently by another man, dealing in his own blunt way with another mindless human prejudice that was, and still is, tearing away at innocent people’s lives…

If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches,
that is not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out, that is not progress.
Progress is healing the wound…
-El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X)

Forgiveness.  The biggest problem I have with Christianity, the reason I could never go back to it, is forgiveness.  Christ would tell me I have to forgive.  I know that.  I just can’t.  But maybe if I saw a serious start in this country at healing the wound I could try. 

Via Some Guys Are Normal, Ben at Scattered Words, who is questioning homosexuality (but probably not in the same sense as physicists are questioning dark matter), finds that someone at Christianity Today didn’t think Brokeback Mountain was such a bad flick after all…

Homosexuality has been like a ghost, hiding in the shadows of my shame, telling me I can never reach my full potential as a Christian. As strange and contradictory as it may sound, seeing Brokeback Mountain helped me bury that ghost and begin moving forward.

What I saw in Brokeback Mountain tore my heart apart. I cried with Alma when she discovered the truth about Ennis and Jack. I also cried for the countless wives in real life who know that their husbands are leading a secret existence. I cried even harder for the men, more in number than we realize, who are trapped in sexual sin and don’t know how to escape it. And as I wept, I wondered if God could use me to help reach some of them with his grace and delivering power.

No scene touched me more than the one in which Ennis’s daughter pays him a visit after Jack dies, and tells him he needs to buy some furniture to liven up his cold and barren trailer. Ennis responds, "If you ain’t got nothin, you don’t need nothin." I made up my mind then and there that I would not let homosexuality rob me like it had robbed Ennis.

No you drooling moron…homosexuality didn’t rob Ennis, a goddamn tire iron swung by all the force hate could give it robbed him.  Twice…

"You won’t catch me again," said Jack. "Listen. I’m thinkin, tell you what, if you and me had a little ranch together, little cow and calf operation, your horses, it’d be some sweet life. Like I said, I’m gettin out a rodeo. I ain’t no broke-dick rider but I don’t got the bucks a ride out this slump I’m in and I don’t got the bones a keep gettin wrecked. I got it figured, got this plan, Ennis, how we can do it, you and me. Lureen’s old man, you bet he’d give me a bunch if I’d get lost. Already more or less said it — "

"Whoa, whoa, whoa. It ain’t goin a be that way. We can’t. I’m stuck with what I got, caught in my own loop. Can’t get out of it. Jack, I don’t want a be like them guys you see around sometimes. And I don’t want a be dead. There was these two old guys ranched together down home, Earl and Rich — Dad would pass a remark when he seen them. They was a joke even though they was pretty tough old birds. I was what, nine years old and they found Earl dead in a irrigation ditch. They’d took a tire iron to him, spurred him up, drug him around by his dick until it pulled off, just bloody pulp. What the tire iron done looked like pieces a burned tomatoes all over him, nose tore down from skiddin on gravel."

"You seen that?"

"Dad made sure I seen it. Took me to see it…"

Annie Proulx,  "Brokeback Mountain"

That’s what robbed Ennis.  That’s what stole from him his capacity to love and accept love from another man.  Nearly every review of the film I’ve seen has commented on how perfectly the actor who played him, Heath Ledger, captured the sense of a man completely uncomfortable inside his own skin, so completely inhibited he can barely talk.  Shame.  Guilt.  Self loathing.  It’s not enough for the hatemongers to make other people hate us.  We have to hate ourselves too.  We have to hate ourselves even more then they hate us.  Because only by hating ourselves that much, will we keep punishing ourselves for simply existing, for just being alive and walking this good earth along with them and breathing their air, when they’re not able to punish us for it with their own two hands.  And those of us who never fell into or who manage to escape that bottomless pit of shame and self loathing, still have to deal with the hate and all the myriad ways, large and small, that it cheats us out of one of this life’s most perfect joys. 

That’s what robbed Ennis.  And it robs all of us.  Some of us more then others…horribly more.  I’ve never hated myself and never tried to obliterate myself in reckless squalor, or an all controlling self-annihilating religious cult.  I’ve never lost a lover to the tire iron.  I’ve never been forced against my will into ex-gay therapy.  But I can count in months the time in my life I’ve had someone to love, and that’s partly because I’ve fallen in love so many times with other guys, who could not love and desire whole heartedly, because they were so ashamed to love and desire at all.

Hate, and the tire iron.  One way or another it robs us all.  It robbed me…and it robbed you too. Mr. Belkofer.

This week’s cartoon. 

More about PFOX’s war on gay youth in our schools later, when I’ve caught up a bit… 

Did you remember to count all the hungry mouths you feed…?

More Mark and Josh tax time fun, here and here.   I missed getting one in for 2005.  The 2003 cartoon is obviously an early effort at drawing the two…I’d only just discovered them recurring in my political cartoons.  They’ve managed since then to get themselves a better kitchen table set, and a slightly better artist. 

Peterson Toscano posts about the blog of ‘J’, a gay man who was recently in Love In Action :

There is a power in sharing our stories and I hope we can learn more of J’s experience and others like J who have submitted to ex-gay treatment.

Peterson, himself a former Love In Action participant (like J, he voluntarily entered the program), knows whereof he speaks.  Their stories are wrenchingly powerful.  This passage from J’s blog struck me at a place too deep for words:

I just started a new job, and the first day was very interesting. I found out that my manager, who happens to be a pastor of some small Apostolic church, also "Hates Fags." Well, we are all familiar with Fred Phelps and "God hates fags." When I came out to my parents the first time at the age of 16, my father conveniently left pieces of paper around and the website(godhatesfags.com or something) as the homepage on my computer.

Some days I find myself trying to fathom the cruelty of some parents toward their children and I just can’t.  Nor could I imagine what it must be like to walk through life with that memory.

One interesting tidbit I learned from J’s blog, and in the comments on Peterson’s, is that LIA is apparently not telling prospective entrants (the voluntary ones) that their program does not promise a cure for their homosexuality, until after they’ve signed on the dotted line and coughed up their dough.  In comments on Peterson’s blog, one poster puts it this way:

I too went into LIA expecting to be cured–expecting to come out completely heterosexual. Imagine my disappointment when I learned during orientation that there was no promise of a cure. The disappointment that I felt learning that I would never be anything more than ex-gay was bitter. While some of us in that orientation class were disappointed, others were angry–even livid.

If you take someone’s money under false pretenses, isn’t that stealing?  Isn’t there a commandment or something about that…?