Comments on this blog are moderated. Anonymous comments will not be accepted. Please include your full name and a valid email address. Comments that fail to engage respectfully with the arguments on this blog, or create a hostile environment for other participants, will be deleted, and their authors may be blocked from the site.
According to the Buddha, right speech is a statement that is timely, true, kind, helpful (connected to liberation), and spoken with a mind of good-will. Let us all try to observe this precept.
After the federal court overturned California's Prop 8 gay marriage ban earlier this month, conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat lamented the passing of a certain ideal of the family:
This ideal holds up the commitment to lifelong fidelity and support by two sexually different human beings — a commitment that involves the mutual surrender, arguably, of their reproductive self-interest — as a uniquely admirable kind of relationship. It holds up the domestic life that can be created only by such unions, in which children grow up in intimate contact with both of their biological parents, as a uniquely admirable approach to child-rearing.
Note the odd specificity of this "ideal". Why "sexually different" (have you ever met two partners who were sexually identical?), and why "biological parents"? These ethically irrelevant qualifiers must be thrown in to preserve the tenuous distinction between procreative straight couples and everyone else.
I agree with Douthat, and with conservative defenders of marriage, that society does have an interest in channeling the disruptive force of sexual desire into stable relationships, surrounding physical intimacy with emotional safety, and orienting lovers toward a future that extends beyond their desires of the moment. Christians should want to strengthen marriage because it can promote integration of body and spirit. Sex without a long-term investment in your partner's well-being presents a temptation to ignore the golden rule that one should treat others as an end in themselves, not a means to an end.
Thus far, we're still in the realm of ethics -- behavioral standards based on evidence of what is or isn't conducive to human flourishing. We can express our judgments about marriage versus other sexual arrangements, in hopes that this will encourage responsible choices. But Douthat also wants to make judgments about types of people, deeming one group superior to another, although this serves no purpose because the differences between them are biological and beyond their control. Stigma will not deter the disfavored way of being; at best, it's a very un-Christian appeal to pride as an inducement for straight married couples to be faithful spouses and parents.
Gay political columnist Andrew Sullivan responds on his blog, The Daily Dish:
...Ross' argument simply ignores the existence and dignity and lives and testimony of gay people. This is strange because the only reason this question has arisen at all is because the visibility of gay family members has become now so unmissable that it cannot be ignored. Yes, marriage equality was an idea some of us innovated. But it was not an idea plucked out of the sky. It was an attempt to adapt to an already big social change: the end of the homosexual stigma, the emergence of gay communities of great size and influence and diversity, and collapse of the closet. It came from a pressing need as a society to do something about this, rather than consign gay people to oblivion or marginalization or invisibility. More to the point, it emerged after we saw what can happen when human beings are provided no structure, no ideal, and no support for responsibility and fidelity and love.
If you have total gay freedom and no gay institutions that can channel love and desire into commitment and support, you end up in San Francisco in the 1970s. That way of life - however benignly expressed, however defensible as the pent-up unleashed liberation of a finally free people - helped kill 300,000 young human beings in this country in our lifetime. Ross may think that toll is unimportant, or that it was their fault, but I would argue that a Catholic's indifference to this level of death and suffering and utter refusal to do anything constructive to prevent it happening again, indeed a resort to cruel stigmatization of gay people that helps lead to self-destructive tendencies, is morally evil.
What, in other words, would Ross have gay people do? What incentives would he, a social conservative, put in place to encourage gay couples and support them in their commitments and parenting and love? Notice the massive silence. He is not a homophobe as I can personally attest. But if he cannot offer something for this part of our society except a sad lament that they are forever uniquely excluded, by their nature, from being a "microcosm of civilization", then this is not a serious contribution to the question at hand. It is merely a restatement of abstract dogma - not a contribution to the actual political and social debate we are now having.
We gays are here, Ross, as you well know. We are human beings. We love one another. We are part of countless families in this country, pay taxes, work hard, serve the country in the armed services, and look after our own biological children (and also those abandoned by their biological parents). Our sex drives are not going away, nor our need to be included in our own families, to find healing and growth and integration that alone will get us beyond the gay-straight divide into a more humane world and society.
Or are we here solely to act as a drop-shadow to the ideal heterosexual relationship?
...
I don't share much of my personal life on this blog. Regular readers know that I was raised by two moms. But I'd like to speak up now on behalf of another group that's also slighted by the biology-obsession of the Prop 8 crowd: Adoptive families.
One would think that social conservatives, being pro-life, would want to encourage adoption as an alternative to pregnancy termination. But their rhetoric on gay marriage ties them in knots. As Sullivan observes, gay couples are parents too. The only way to tell them apart is to elevate procreative ability to a spiritual ideal. Inadvertently perhaps, this attitude wounds and discourages potential adoptive parents, reinforcing our fear that infertility is a kind of failure, an exclusion from the highest level of sacred marital union.
As my husband and I have proceeded on our journey to build our family through adoption, we've become sensitized to this fertility bias. "Don't you want to try to have your own children?" well-meaning acquaintances might say. (What do you think we're doing?)
Through extensive reading and conversations with other families, we've also become convinced that an open adoption--where the birthparents are an ongoing part of the child's life--is beneficial for all parties, especially the child. This too can be a hard sell to friends and relatives shaped by the one-mommy-one-daddy culture. It gives Heather Has Two Mommies a whole new meaning.
I found an unlikely soulmate in sex columnist Dan Savage. In his open adoption memoir The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant, he describes attending an adoption education seminar with a group of infertile straight couples. While the others were grieving the loss of the biological child they'd expected, he and Terry were thrilled that, as gay men, their civil rights had progressed to the point that they could start a family at all. Savage speculates that a lifetime of hearing heteronormative rhetoric contributed to his straight companions' identity crisis and exacerbated the pain of infertility (boldface emphasis mine):
Heterosexual identity is all wrapped up in the ability of heterosexuals to make babies. Straight sex can do what gay sex cannot, make "miracles." The straights at our seminar had expected to grow up, fall in love, get married, make love for fun, and sooner or later make love to make life. Infertility did more than shatter their expectations; it undermined their sexual identities.
Straight sex can be recreational or procreational--or both--but gay sex can only ever be recreational. Gay sex is never a means, only an end, and the end is pleasure. Homophobes use this to justify their hatred of gays and lesbians: straight sex, since it can make a baby, is "natural"; gay sex, since it can only make a mess, is not. Babies make straight sex more important than gay sex, so straights are therefore more important than gays. Babies underpin all hetero-supremacism, from "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" to "Gays don't have children, so they have to recruit yours." Even when straights are using birth control, procreation still sanctifies straight sex. Even when straights are having sex that couldn't possibly make babies (oral, anal, phone, cyber), the fact that these two people could make babies under other circumstances or in other positions legitimizes straight sex.
This is pounded into the heads of gay people and straight people alike. Gays grow up believing that their desires, pleasures, and loves are illegitimate; and straights who fall for the hype believe they gotta work that magic, gotta make that baby, or...what? A straight person who can't make a baby isn't really a straight person at all. And if you're not straight, you must be...what? You're like my boyfriend and me. Suddenly your sex is all recreational, like gay sex, delegitimized and desanctified. Oh, it's an expression of love--but so is gay sex, and that never made gay sex okay. No babies means no miracles, no magic. The sex you're having may still be pleasurable, but in a sex-hating (and consequently sex-obsessed) culture, pleasure is not a good enough reason, otherwise gay and lesbian sex would never have been stigmatized.
I sympathized with the straight people sitting around the conference table. I understood what they must have been going through. I had been through it myself, a long time ago. When I hit puberty, I got the news that I was functionally infertile. But the straight couples at the seminar had only recently gotten that news, and they were still adjusting to it. How much we had in common with them was driven home by the rhetoric the counselors used during the seminar. It was the rhetoric of coming out. The straight couples were encouraged to accept what they could not change. In time, they'd see their "problem" as a blessing. It was important to tell family and friends the truth, even if they might not understand at first. They might in their ignorance ask hurtful questions, but be patient and try to answer. And while it is possible to live a lie, possible to adopt a child and pass it off as your biological child, no one can spend a lifetime in the closet.
James Brock: "Upon Hearing That My Grant Application Was Passed Over..."
"Your poem should touch God in places only Emily Dickinson has dared touch....Your poem cannot save anyone. Your poem must be seven words or fewer, or two thousand lines or more. Entry fee: all of your boss's money," James Brock directs in his witty prose-poem "The Jim Brock Poetry Contest: Guidelines", which appears in his new collection Gods & Money (WordTech Editions, 2010).
The poem below is reprinted by permission from his previous poetry collection, Pictures That Got Small (WordTech Editions, 2005). Denise Duhamel calls this book "a lush, sexy, nostalgic (in the best sense of the word) look at old Hollywood, the experimental films of Matthew Barney, and home movies of southern Florida. Irreverent and unpredictable, intelligent and haunting, deadpan and dead serious, these poems are buoyant and felicitous."
Upon Hearing That My Grant Application Was Passed Over and the Winner Was a Bio-Tech Professor Who Has Designed Genetically-Altered Protein for Buckwheat Seed
—for Denise
Okay, call me Tallulah Bankhead. I wanted that award,
the crystal glass eagle, the pendant, the certificate,
the lapel pin, the thousand bucks, and the parking space
next to the university president’s spot—the whole
platinum and sapphire tiara. I knew I should have
written that poem on the manipulations
of amino acid balance in buckwheat seed proteins.
I knew I should have named that new genetic
strand Omicron-Brockide-32, should have brokered
the patent rights to Monsanto, let them spread the seed
of my pumped-up, high-octane, drought-tolerant,
American-can-do-know-how buckwheat
to sub-Sahara Africa and southern Mongolia.
One year later, then, I would have written
the grant report, presented it to the committee
on PowerPoint, and finished off my presentation
with a streaming video clip, showing some adolescent
boy, from Gambia, say, and he would be eating
my buckwheat flat bread, and there he would be,
digitalized, smiling, full, and muscular. Yes,
and at that moment, vindicated and wise,
teary-eyed and generous, the grant committee
would gather and lift me on their shoulders, laughing
and singing, joyful for all the corporate sponsorships that
would follow me and bless our humble home
institution. For me, dare I dream further confirmations?
O, to be Nationally Endowed, Guggenheimed, MacArthured!
Of course, in Gambia, and other geographies
beneath the sweep and hoozah of fellowships
and announcements in The Chronicle of Higher Education,
the newly nourished could be striking the flint
of their first syllables of their first poems, poems
whose phrases—under the most subdued of flames—would
coolly scorch and burn our best American intention.
Corporations' legal staff constantly patrol the Internet, searching for disparaging parodies and unauthorized YouTube videos that threaten their ability to control the discourse around their brand name. Proving that no target is too small, the Mattel Corp. last month denied my request to use the name "Barbie" in the title of my forthcoming poetry chapbook, which will now be called Anatomically Impossible Commercialized White Female Body Image Icon at 50. Or The Happy Endings Support Group. We're still working out the details.
If God were as protective of His trademark as Coca-Cola, we'd all be in trouble.
"What right, really, do we have to talk about God?" asks Mark Galli in "God Talk is Dangerous", an article on the Christianity Today blog. Normally we'd hesitate to pronounce on an issue that we didn't know much about. But we often sling around opinions about God's will and God's attributes, even though "if there ever was a 'topic' beyond our comprehension, it is the infinite, immortal, and all powerful God!" Biblical and theological metaphors are always mere approximations. Galli writes:
This is the genius of apophatic theology, about which our brothers and sisters in the Orthodox tradition have taught us so much. Apophatic theology talks about God in terms of what he is not. God is uncreated, not bound by time and space, and in one sense is unknowable—that is, because he is infinite and we are finite, we can never know God as he is. From the perspective of apophatic theology, we can even say that God does not "exist." We use that word to talk about people, plants, animals, and rocks. But how and why these created things "exist" cannot be compared to the way a transcendent, immortal deity "exists."
...[But] the Incarnation and Jesus' talk about God suggest that there is more than one way to blaspheme—that is, to be irreverent and impious. That would be to so exalt the transcendence of God that there is no room left in the imagination for the scandalous Emmanuel, God with us.
As early church theologian Irenaeus put it, Jesus Christ "gathered together all things into himself … he took up man into himself, the invisible becoming the visible, the incomprehensible being made comprehensible, the impassible becoming capable of suffering, and the Word being made man, thus summing up all things in himself."
Today there are many who strive to protect the reputation of God. They are, so to speak, on "blasphemy alert." At their best, they remind us whenever we suggest that God is anything but holy, immortal, and almighty. In an age such as ours—which can be so casual about things divine—I'm glad there are such people around.
But the interesting thing is that God does not seem all that concerned about his reputation. He is the one who inspired people to think of him as an inert rock (Deut. 32) or a common shepherd (Ps. 23), and who came to us not in a flashy show of glory and power but as a baby in a trough wrapped in rags. He apparently isn't offended when he is mistaken for a simple gardener (John 20).
The incarnation is God's permission to talk about that which, really, we don't know that much about—God Almighty! He's even willing for us to tread on the border of blasphemy if it will communicate something true about him.
To be sure, we are wise to not transgress that border. But that job is made easier when we realize that all our talk about God is partial, that there is no word picture that can do full justice to his being, that there is always something greater than the arresting image we might fashion—and that there is a divine source that can keep us both humble and balanced in our God-talk.
Reading this piece, I had the thought that the Incarnation points to a resolution of the postmodernist paralysis that follows from the inadequacy of language. Rather than revive the failed modernist project of searching for fixed, objective meanings that perfectly contain reality, we can speak knowing that we will fail, knowing also that we are forgiven for our failure to "get it right". God-in-Jesus would rather that we took a halting step toward communication with him, than that we hung back out of false scrupulousness.
In this 7-minute video, constitutional lawyer extraordinaire Ted Olson eloquently rebuts FOX News commentator Chris Wallace's effort to pin the "judicial activist" label on him. A longtime hero of the libertarian Right, Olson gives our cause a bipartisan face. Olson argues that in overturning California's gay marriage ban, the district court did not create new rights, but rather ensured that a well-established fundamental right was equally extended to all citizens. Send him a thank-you note at the Courage Campaign website.
(From left: Princess Queerpants, Ericka Soto, transgender activist Trystan Dean, & Rev. Tinker Donnelly. Photo by Adam Cohen.)
Northampton yesterday celebrated the overturning of California's gay marriage ban at a rally organized by Gary Lapon from the W. Mass. chapter of Equality Across America. Joyful, tearful speeches marked how far we've come, yet also reminded us not to forget other ongoing civil rights battles, for GLBT folks and others. It can be hard for an embattled minority to avoid tunnel vision, focusing on one's own struggles without making the leap to the broader realization that everyone is affected when anyone is oppressed. I always appreciate how Gary, a socialist, connects the dots between issues like gay marriage and employment discrimination, transgender issues, racism, and immigrants' rights.
Enjoy this half-hour video, recorded by Adam Cohen. Speakers include Gary, Trystan, Tinker, Michael Fiorentino, Kate Losey, Ben Taylor, and yours truly (around the 27-minute mark).
Federal Court Rules "Proposition 8" Gay Marriage Ban Unconstitutional!
Hooray!
U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker of San Francisco has issued a landmark ruling in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, overturning California's Proposition 8 gay marriage ban as a violation of the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the U.S. Constitution.
The Courage Campaign's Prop 8 Trial Tracker has posted a thorough analysis of the 138-page decision (read the full text here).
Go send them a donation; they've worked hard to inform the public about
this historic legal battle, despite the other side's efforts to keep
the proceedings secret.
Judge Walker ruled that there is no rational basis for the government to impose gender-based restrictions on the fundamental human right of marriage (boldface emphasis mine):
The evidence shows that the movement of marriage away
from a gendered institution and toward an institution free from
state-mandated gender roles reflects an evolution in the understanding
of gender rather than a change in marriage. The evidence did not show
any historical purpose for excluding same-sex couples from marriage, as
states have never required spouses to have an ability or willingness to
procreate in order to marry....Rather, the exclusion exists as an
artifact of a time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles
in society and in marriage. That time has passed.
The right to marry has been historically and remains the right to
choose a spouse and, with mutual consent, join together and form a
household....Race and gender restrictions shaped marriage
during eras of race and gender inequality, but such restrictions were
never part of the historical core of the institution of marriage....Today, gender is not relevant to the state in determining spouses’
obligations to each other and to their dependents. Relative gender
composition aside, same-sex couples are situated identically to
opposite-sex couples in terms of their ability to perform the rights and
obligations of marriage under California law....Gender no longer
forms an essential part of marriage; marriage under law is a union of
equals.
[...]
Plaintiffs do not seek recognition of a new right. To characterize
plaintiffs’ objective as “the right to same-sex marriage” would suggest
that plaintiffs seek something different from what opposite-sex couples
across the state enjoy —— namely, marriage. Rather, plaintiffs ask
California to recognize their relationships for what they are:
marriages.
(And that, folks, is why gay marriage is a feminist issue.)
The court concluded that the ban was purely motivated by anti-gay animosity: "Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California
Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to
same-sex couples."
Though the decision was immediately appealed and is likely to reach the U.S. Supreme Court, a trial judge's factual findings are entitled to great deference on appeal. Thus, it's significant that Judge Walker devoted 100+ pages to a thorough examination and rejection of the other side's factual claims that gay marriage harmed children, straight marriages, and society as a whole.
Watch this space for video of tomorrow's celebratory rally and kiss-in on the steps of Northampton City Hall. I'd better go iron my rainbow-striped pants.
Winning Writers subscriber Wesley Willis recently discovered Kenneth Rexroth's translations of ancient Chinese poetry and was so enamored of them that he shared these poems with me. They're taken from Rexroth's anthology Love and the Turning Year: 100 More Poems from the Chinese (New Directions, 1970). I was moved by their meditative quality; each moment is simply observed, each feeling simply described, so that the reader naturally slows down and becomes immersed in the poet's present experience. Read more selections on the Bureau of Public Secrets website.
Sorrow
by the Poetess Chu Shu Chen (late Sung Dynasty, 13th c.)
The white moon gleams through scudding
Clouds in the cold sky of the Ninth
Month. The white frost weighs down the
Leaves and the branches bend low
Over the freezing water.
All alone I sit by my
Window. The crushing burden
Of the passing days never
Grows lighter for an instant
I write poems, change and correct them,
And finally throw them away.
Gold crysanthemums wither
Along the balcony. Hard
Cries of migrating storks fall
Heavily from the icy sky.
All alone by my window
Hidden in my empty room,
All alone, I burn incense,
And dream in the smoke, all alone.
****
Amongst the Cliffs
by Han Yu (768-824 AD)
The path up the mountain is hard
to follow through the tumbled rocks.
When I reach the monastery
the bats are already flying.
I go to the guest room and sit
on the steps. The rain is over.
The banana leaves are broad.
The gardenias are in bloom.
The old guest master tells me
there are ancient paintings on the
walls. He goes and gets a light.
I see they are incomparably
beautiful. He spreads my bed
and sweeps the mat. He serves me
soup and rice. It is simple
food but nourishing. The night
goes on as I lie and listen
to the great peace. Insects chirp
and click in the stillness. The
pure moon rises over the ridge
and shines in my door. At daybreak
I get up alone. I saddle
my horse myself and go my way.
The trails are all washed out.
I go up and down, picking my
way through storm clouds on the mountain.
Red cliffs, green waterfalls, all
sparkle in the morning light.
I pass pines and oaks ten men
could not reach around. I cross
flooded streams. My bare feet stumble
on the cobbles. The water roars.
My clothes whip in the wind. This
is the only life where a man
can find happiness. Why do I
spend my days bridled like a horse
with a cruel bit in his mouth?
If I only had a few friends
who agreed with me we'd retire
to the mountains and stay till our lives end.
I love it when a work of literature captures a feeling of mine that is so specific yet so hard to name, particularly when it involves glimpses of the transcendent. I grew up in a more urban environment than the narrator of the poem below, so for me, that distinct blend of nostalgia, longing, and mystery often arose when I looked out of my apartment window at dusk, as the outlines of high-rises turned lavender and misty on the horizon.
The text below is reprinted by permission from American Life in Poetry , a project of The Poetry Foundation.
American Life in Poetry: Column 278
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
Peter Everwine is a California poet whose work I have admired for almost as long as I have been writing. Here he beautifully captures a quiet moment of reflection.
Rain
Toward evening, as the light failed
and the pear tree at my window darkened,
I put down my book and stood at the open door,
the first raindrops gusting in the eaves,
a smell of wet clay in the wind.
Sixty years ago, lying beside my father,
half asleep, on a bed of pine boughs as rain
drummed against our tent, I heard
for the first time a loon’s sudden wail
drifting across that remote lake—
a loneliness like no other,
though what I heard as inconsolable
may have been only the sound of something
untamed and nameless
singing itself to the wilderness around it
and to us until we slept. And thinking of my father
and of good companions gone
into oblivion, I heard the steady sound of rain
and the soft lapping of water, and did not know
whether it was grief or joy or something other
that surged against my heart
and held me listening there so long and late.
Poets for Living Waters is a new online anthology of writings in response to the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico begun on April 20, 2010, one of the most profound human-made ecological catastrophes in history. This piece by Nicole Nicholson is reprinted by permission of the author. Read more of Nicole's work at her website Raven's Wing Poetry .
Gulf Song
There is an artery in the coastline, fingers spread,
bayou beckoning to the sea to come in
and travel up my arm. Gulf trajectories: seagulls
fly overhead, following the fringe of my
fingertips
inland. The ocean climbs up inside my palm,
reuniting with river at the mouth of my life,
which is
made out of little veins. Water: it is how
I live, how I came to you as a cloaked land
with veils of trees, wildflowers, and tribes
traversing
the backs of my hands, up my veins, into
my breasts
and belly. My womb has seen
millions of red men and women exit,
hug close to earth and feel me breathe,
and call me home.
I have billions, trillions, a galaxy of creatures
living just beneath the whorl of fingerprints.
Crocodiles
in my teeth, turtles in my jaw,
pelicans and people in my pulse.
At an intersection in my wrist of unoxidized
blue and bone
there sits an egret, white with sorrow, white with
the sea foam
that I baptize my forehead with. He is
oil christened, stained with brown, feathers
slicked down. You birth
dead dinosaur bones from the trenches in
my knees,
caverns in my colon, light your fires and
call them
Viet Nam’s children, little tragedies lit
when my eyes grow dark each night.
Candles do not burn in the ocean,
and boats cannot swim in God’s acre.
There is
a necropolis of expired lives, scaffolding
and chasses
of iron and bone coughed up and vacant
on the ocean floor. It will
lie beneath this shroud of oil that burns
and congeals
within the reach of my fingers. Let the poison
travel up my arm, hope that venom can
be sucked out
by a kindly mouth and a bittersweet
tongue. My wrist
is still knitting itself together,
bone halves seeking solace with
each other
after being shattered apart by a hurricane
hammer. And there is
no prayer for this, except for the cry in
your own throat,
except for the children of mine that you wash
the oil off of
like they were your own babies,
except for the sickness like tar balls resting
in the hollow behind your navel,
except for the fire launched from the
soft beds
of your own tongues. If you find that prayer,
say it for me. I will need it to survive.
Leslea Newman: "Poem for Two Dogs, Hanged in Salem, 1692"
Lesléa Newman is the author of more than 50 books for children and adults, including the poetry collection Nobody's Mother (Orchard House Books, 2008). The poem below, reprinted by permission, won second runner-up for poetry in the 2010 Solstice Literary Contest . Read all the winners here .
Poem for Two Dogs, Hanged in Salem, 1692
Did they hang
their heads
as good dogs do
when someone
slips beside them
to loop
a collar
or a rope
around their furry necks
Did they prance
along proudly
as happy dogs do
when trotting
alongside a friend
or stranger
who’s taking them
away
for a nice long walk
Did they give
sloppy kisses
as loving dogs do
when a kind man
or gruff man
kneels
down beside them
and says sit
and stay
Did they shake
all over
as frightened dogs do
when startled by thunder
or lightning
or black hoods
placed over their heads
making everything too quiet
and dark
Did they swing
their tails
as innocent dogs do
when they’re puzzled
or confused
but still
trusting those near
will bring them
no harm
Or did they bare
their teeth
growl and leap
snapping at the Hangman
before he strung them up
and they rose
to Heaven
leaving bodies behind
to be buried like bones
Prizewinning poet David Woo and the editors of the Asian American Literary Review have kindly granted me permission to reprint Woo's poem "Divine Fire" below. The poem's formal cadences and intellectual vocabulary seem to hold up a corrective to the apocalypse-fervor that he finds so dangerously inadequate.
"How to be good if a caul covers the prospect of your faith?" he asks, getting to the core of our temptation to "create an image, any image," whose rules are easier to understand than the truly mysterious God. Hating the world in the name of our imagined divinity, we wind up trapped in our own imaginings, vulnerable to the skeptics' jibe that God is only a projection of human ideals or neuroses.
Read Woo's thoughts on the genesis of this poem here .
Divine Fire
“No more apocalypses!” the fanatics never cry. Extinction
is bliss for those who resent human life. We mocked
the fizzle of New Year’s 2000. We mock the wingnuts
who let the icecaps melt because the Rapture is nigh.
How to be good if a caul covers the prospect of your faith?
Create an image, any image, haloed, scimitared, thrust it
through Time’s wasp-waisted birth canal, let it emerge
bearded, lank, rebarbative. Tell yourself he’s the Man.
Now sit back as He pries the world apart. This is the end,
you’ll surmise, the end of dalliance, of amity, the last gasp
of afflatus, of consequent sorrow. Watch as He scythes
the last wheat, which flies like the severed heads of infidels.
Then why does the bread we break savor of no body
but the embodied ghosts of ancient grass? What infinity lives
in the turning leaves but a vaulted vision of our bonhomie?
What life basks at this homely fire but sees Saoshyant’s flame?
The embers will hold an American absence, ashes that leave
no mark of ankh or enso on him who frees critical mass
from a suitcase bomb. The last cloud will rain fire on flesh
that chars to faithless marrow. Even now the soul is fugitive.
****
(Editor's note: Saoshyant is the World Savior figure in Zoroastrianism.)
This provocative poem came to my attention on Kittredge Cherry's blog Jesus in Love, a site that showcases images of GLBT spirituality and other nontraditional portrayals of the divine. Kitt writes:
Xavier makes sweet poetry out of his experiences as a gay Latino whose painful past includes sexual abuse at age 3 and rejection by his Catholic mother for being gay at age 16, leading to homelessness, drug dealing, prostitution -- and at last to poetry....
...I perceived the face of Christ in his poems, even the [sexually explicit] ones. The book’s implication is that the rejected gay Jesus might turn to sex, drugs and prostitution to survive in America today. And our Savior would still embody love and beauty amid the muck.
In interviews, [Xavier] credits poetry with saving his life. "Fortunately, I walked away unscathed," he told CNN. "I thought that God had given me a second chance, and I felt like I had to do something with that."
Xavier has given me permission to reprint "If Jesus Were Gay", the title poem of his collection, below. Visit his website at http://www.emanuelxavier.com/.
If Jesus Were Gay
If Jesus were gay,
would you tattoo him to your body?
hang him from your chest?
pray to him and worship the Son of Man?
Would you still praise him
after dying for your sins?
If it was revealed Jesus kissed another man,
but not on the cheek,
would you still beg him for forgiveness?
ask him for miracles?
hope your loved ones get to meet him
in heaven?
If Jesus were gay,
and still loved by God and Mary
because he was their child after all
hailed by all angels and feared by demons,
would you still long to be healed by him?
take him into your home and comfort him?
heal his wounds and break bread with him?
Would wars be waged over religion?
Would world leaders invoke his name
for votes?
Would churches everywhere rejoice
and celebrate his life?
Would rappers still thank him
in their acceptance speeches?
If the crown of thorns
were placed on his head
to mock him as the “Queen of the Jews”
If he was whipped
because fags are considered
sadomasochistic sodomites,
If he was crucified
for the brotherhood of man
would you still repent?
Would you pray to him
when you were dying?
If he didn’t ask for you to be just like him,
If he only wanted you to love yourself,
If he asked that you not judge others,
Would you still wait for him to come back and save your soul?
Would you deny him?
Would you believe in peace?
Would there still be hate?
Would there still be hell?
Would there be laws
based on the meaning of true love?
What would Jesus do?
What would you do?
****
Listen to his poem "Waiting for God", a plea to end police brutality, on YouTube:
Turning Point Books, the publisher of my first collection A Talent for Sadness, is an imprint of WordTech Communications in Cincinnati. WordTech's various imprints have published well-known poets like Robert Hass, Allison Joseph, and Rachel Hadas, as well as many emerging writers. Their monthly e-newsletter keeps us all up-to-date on one another's readings and book reviews.
That's where I discovered Richard Newman's memorable poem "Wild Game", from his collection Borrowed Towns (Word Press, 2005). "Wild Game" was featured on Garrison Keillor's NPR broadcast The Writer's Almanac on June 22 and can be read on their website. In this poem, the narrator reminiscences about his great-grandma Lizzie, whose scandalized in-laws were unable to polish away her zesty backwoods ways. I appreciate Newman's use of the sonnet, that highbrow and tightly controlled form, to symbolize and poke fun at their containment efforts:
...It wasn't that her wildness was tamed—
Lizzie used the finishing they taught her
to sneak the savagery in under their noses.
Roast haunch of venison, roast possum
with cranberry sauce, hare pie, quail on toast
points, merckle turtle stew, and the most
famous dish of all: cherry blossom
gravy, dumplings, and beer-battered squirrel.
...
Also in the WordTech newsletter, I enjoyed Meredith Davies Hadaway's "Hall of Records", an honorable mention winner in the 2010 Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry. Her book The River is a Reason is forthcoming from Word Press next year. They also published her first collection, Fishing Secrets of the Dead, in 2005.
Somewhere in a strange city,
my father cradled me in one arm while
gesticulating to the man in charge of records:
a birth—to write it down.
He’d always said we should go back there.
As if it proved that once and far away
we’d been part of the same enterprise.
...
The 2010 Tor House first-prize winner, Jude Nutter's "Legacy", is also amazing, as is every poem of hers that I've read. See her 2005 first-prize entry in the Winning Writers War Poetry Contest here .
From time to time I like to highlight memorable work from some of my favorite online literary journals. In addition to the ones featured below, I regularly read Anderbo, Narrative Magazine, DMQ Review, and The Pedestal Magazine. Scoff all you will at the iPad/iPhone cult, but I'm in love with mine because they allow me to catch up on these journals without wasting work time at my desktop.
Wag's Revue issue #6 , "Truthiness", features fictional, nonfictional, and metafictional musings on the blurry line between fact and...everything else. One person's assault on authorial credibility is another person's mixed-genre innovation. Sometimes they're the same person. With Stephen Colbert, you're never quite sure. The man who coined "truthiness" speaks with editor Will Guzzardi about how things become true because we believe them. "My performance of myself, I think, testifies to the omnipresence of art, inasmuch as the artistic gesture ultimately comes down to an intrusion into semblance—exposing, in its brute state, the gap of the real." Yes, that's Colbert--or is it Guzzardi inventing what Colbert might say, if he deigned to be interviewed? Does it matter?
Other intriguing readings in this issue include an essay on the nonexistent Hiroshima poet Araki Yasusada, and Tony Tulathimutte's story "The Man Who Wasn't Male", whose protagonist's solution to the burden of performing masculinity has its own bloody, twisted logic. (Is "nonexistent" really the right word for a poet whose biography is fictitious, but whose work genuinely exists, though written by another? Read the essay and decide.)
****
Hallie Rundle's "Asphalt Sky ", the winner of Gemini Magazine 's latest fiction contest, is an affecting story narrated by a girl who works for an escort service, as she seeks genuine understanding of the people she meets in a profession that depends on disconnection and illusion. The runner-up stories are also good reads.
****
In DIAGRAM issue 10.3 , Emma Ramey interviews Miss Peach, the trippy but fierce protagonist of Catie Rosemurgy's new poetry collection The Stranger Manual. I enjoyed Rosemurgy's earlier collection My Favorite Apocalypse and will have to pick up this volume very soon. Other useful or ornamental features in this issue include diagrams of "Antecedents of The Wasteland" and "How to Hit Back at Dive Bombers", and Amy Marcott's "Flying the Coop", a story about Alzheimer's caregivers that's written as a discussion thread on a fictitious online message board.
Wisdom (?) from Miss Peach:
"There have only ever been two kinds of poetry: narrative and lyric. And some other kind that is sort of lyric but in a new way that sounds like a breakdown but doesn't lead to the hospital because that's a narrative. I say, don't worry: narrative and lyric hate each other, but like the rest of us they share a house and make babies. They buy one another the perfect gifts."
"To find something beautiful one must have no idea what it is."
"Call me optimistic, but I believe that inside every girl is someone who is not a girl but who looks like one and laughs."
Big Gay News: Massachusetts Judge Deems DOMA Unconstitutional
Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley wasn't able to hold onto the late Ted Kennedy's Senate seat for the Democrats, but she got my vote for supporting this lawsuit against the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, the 1996 federal law prohibiting the U.S. government from recognizing same-sex marriages in any context. The AG's office argued that the U.S. Constitution leaves the definition of marriage up to the states. Since gay marriage is legal here, the federal government shouldn't force Massachusetts to discriminate in distributing federal benefits.
Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) brought a companion case on behalf of several gay couples who argued that DOMA violated their equal protection rights with regard to federal income tax, Social Security, and federal employee benefits for Massachusetts residents. GLAD was also behind the lawsuit that led to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's landmark gay marriage ruling in 2003.
On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Joseph L. Tauro ruled in both cases that Section 3 of DOMA was unconstitutional. Read the decision and GLAD's press release here . Read more analysis in The Advocate magazine here . Visit the Courage Campaign website to send President Obama a message urging him not to appeal the ruling.
From The Advocate article:
...“Today the court simply affirmed that our country won’t tolerate second-class marriages,” said GLAD Civil Rights Project director Mary Bonauto, who argued the case. “I’m pleased that Judge Tauro recognized that married same-sex couples and surviving spouses have been seriously harmed by DOMA and that the plaintiffs deserve the same opportunities to care and provide for each other and for their children that other families enjoy. This ruling will make a real difference for countless families in Massachusetts.”
In his 39-page opinion in Gill, Tauro dismissed lawmakers' intentions in passing DOMA to "encourag[e] responsible procreation and child-bearing," among other identified societal aims.
"Even if Congress believed at the time of DOMA’s passage that children had the best chance at success if raised jointly by their biological mothers and fathers, a desire to encourage heterosexual couples to procreate and rear their own children more responsibly would not provide a rational basis for denying federal recognition to same-sex marriages," Tauro wrote. "Such denial does nothing to promote stability in heterosexual parenting.
Preserving marriage as a one-man, one-woman institution for the interests of "responsible procreation" was a central argument for attorneys defending Prop. 8 in federal court — one that faced similar scrutiny during closing arguments last month from U.S. district judge Vaughn R. Walker, who has yet to reach a decision in the case.
In oral arguments in May, Bonauto argued in Gill that the government has no reason to withhold the more than 1,000 federal benefits of marriage from same-sex couples, noting that a 1996 House Judiciary Committee report “explicitly stated the purpose of DOMA was to express moral disapproval of homosexuality.”
In Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. Health and Human Services, Maura T. Healey, chief of the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Civil Rights Division, told Tauro during oral arguments that Section 3 violates the state’s right under the federal constitution to sovereign authority to define and regulate the marital status of its residents. Healey called DOMA an “animus-based national marriage law” that intrudes on core state authority and “forces the state to discriminate against its own citizens.”
Christopher Hall, representing the Department of Health and Human Services, argued that Congress should be able to control the meaning of terms, such as “marriage,” used in its own statutes, and should be able to control how federal money is allocated for federal benefits provided to people based on their marital status.
In considering whether the federal government had any legitimate need for DOMA, both Bonauto and Healey had urged Tauro to apply strict scrutiny review, which requires the government to show a compelling reason for a law that affects a fundamental right or a vulnerable group. In both lawsuits, however, Tauro said that DOMA failed to meet even the most simple judicial review, rational basis.
...
Also of interest in The Advocate's June-July issue, a profile of Mary Glasspool, the new suffragan bishop of Maryland and the first openly lesbian bishop in the U.S. Episcopal Church. My favorite quote:
...Why is the issue of sexual identity so difficult for so many churches—Episcopal or otherwise? “I think the basic issue is gender,” Glasspool says. “And one can see this being played out in the Roman Catholic Church. The issue is the status and role of women, and the balance of the feminine and masculine in the way in which we experience and encounter God. Where we allow women to be in positions of leadership and power and authority, we have a more balanced view of the community that is the world.”
...
Online publishing...I hesitate to say a word against it, since it's what I do for a living. Stories on the web can be more widely disseminated than texts that are locked up between the pages of a print journal, prestigious though the latter may be. But when that site comes to an end, as they often do, your story is swept away like a Zen sand painting, as if it had never been. So, which is better: a solid yet obscure artifact, or an ephemeral but easily shared one? A story that could theoretically still be read, but probably won't be, or one that probably was read, but no longer can be?
This Borges-style conundrum is a good lead-in to young Julian's preoccupations in "Career", a flash fiction of mine that was originally published in 2008 on the Israeli literary webzine Cyclamens and Swords, but is no longer available there due to a site redesign. The editors have released it to be republished here instead.
The C&S poetry contest , with a prize of $300, is open to submissions through November 30. They're also accepting regular submissions for their next issue until July 31.
Career
(Summer 1980)
It was one of Daddy's happy nights so he was driving too fast down the hill that came after the school but before the golf course, with me and Carter strapped in the back seat screaming like we were enjoying ourselves, because that was what we were supposed to do. The air in the car was bourbon, it was the heaviness of the clouds before rain. We opened the windows and let the wind slap our faces, we yelled out like dogs.
Daddy had his angry nights and his sad nights too. We heard noises in the kitchen and tried not to put stories to them. I got good at separating the sound of glass breaking into its constituent parts: the whoosh of the trajectory, the impact, the tinkling fall, the eggshell crunch underfoot. Carter used to pop balloons. He would blow them up as fat as they could go and then stomp them. He used to go through ten, twenty a night when it was bad. I asked once why he didn't just chew bubblegum and he hit me upside the head with his semiautomatic water gun. My big brother's never been very introspective.
On a happy night Daddy would have gone drinking with his old Georgia Tech football buddies. He'd want to share that energy with us, enough to promise us ice cream that we never got, to give Mama a reason why we were being torn from her side on a school night. Well, we got it once but Carter threw up in a sand trap after Daddy plunged through the hedge separating the Boltwood Country Club from Route 28. We were members so I assume they just took it out of his dues. My sister Laura Sue got to stay home pressing little beady raisin eyes into the fat faces of gingerbread men. I wasn't a girl, I couldn't cook, and the taste from Daddy's pocket flask was like pressing my lips to a hot skillet.
On this night I remember especially, I was about eight and Carter was ten. It was January, raining. We sped down the hill belting out "The Wanderer," the Beach Boys one, not Johnny Cash. Daddy and Carter were out of tune and I wasn't, but there were two of them and one of me. The black road curved across the intersection, slick in the mist.
We snapped forward, like hanged men when the rope drops, as Daddy slammed on the brakes, cursing. A truck's red grille filled our windows, blaring its horn in our naked ears. I saw the stop sign we'd blown through, peeking out from under a low-hanging branch, like it was teasing us.
"Jesus Christ on a trampoline," Daddy yelled, and hit the steering wheel. "Did y'all see how fast that faggot was going?"
"Yeah, I saw," I lied, thinking it would please him. I didn't have the same rules about this that I have now, to be true to my own eyes.
"Well, why didn't you tell me to stop, then, you friggin' fairy princess?"
Daddy called his boys girl names when he wanted to humiliate us into being stronger. I wouldn't have minded being a princess if it meant I could get gingerbread instead of whiplash.
"I thought you could see. It was right there."
"Don't you backtalk me." I knew what was coming. Next gas station, he pulled over into the parking lot so he could smack my ass good. He sent Carter into the convenience store with money for candy bars, both of which my brother bought for himself, pretending to forget that peanuts gave me spots. It's funny that I didn't notice the pain. It was only a drum beating far away. The light over the pumps was such a pure, bright white; the purple-gray sky was so big and swollen with wind. I had been on the truck side of the car.
Back home Mama was boiling rice for a casserole. I was mesmerized by the sight of the steam rising. As every unique curl of vapor lifted and dissolved, I thought, I almost wasn't here to see this; and then, I was saved so I would see this. Why would something so unimportant keep me alive? Maybe I was unimportant too, but I was here, and the shape of the steam in this instant, from the white rice giving up its clean hot essence like laundry, couldn't be seen by anyone else in the world.
"Then I saw that the wall had never been there, that the 'Unheard of' is here and this, not something and somewhere else, that the 'offering' is here and now, always and everywhere -- 'surrendered' to be what, in me, God gives of Himself to Himself. So long as you abide in the 'Unheard of', you are beyond and above -- to hold fast to this must be the first commandment in your spiritual discipline." --Dag Hammarskjold, Markings
My prison pen pal "Conway" shared this quote with me in his latest letter. Too well, he understands that the impulse to pin down and possess the sacred can fuel the self-righteousness of the oppressor. Hammarskjold suggests that God is a mystery that we abide in, with humility. Believing we can comprehend God is a short step away from believing that our group has the divine right of superiority over someone else who disagrees with us.
Conway also sent me a revised version of his poem "Screw", which I published herehere in May. Though I miss a few of the phrases from the original, I like this version's tighter rhymes and slam-poetry energy, and the new title, which adds a dimension of political commentary.
Coliseum
Which bowl do I pick to torture me
I'll choose one or two, but never three
that's an unlucky number for me.
All screw-ball;
Captured with fiction (false prevention)
for a warrant scored, law ignored
in turn arrested, past inspected
stuck in the county jail congested.
Forced to sleep on a nasty-ass floor,
as time passes by but never clicks
on phantom clocks (in our mind) that tick,
unless of course, someone pays for bail
cares enough perhaps, to spare those straps?
Only then;
Can we be dragged, from beneath of it
this God-forsaken -- bottomless pit
Where a pancake tastes like pigeon shit.
Jailbirds, bound against each other nude
then lewdly gagged with rude restraint
beseeching eyes express their complaint
scooching voiceless, along corridors.
Where chains, dragged in exploit (bragged about)
by infinite banes of committee --
sparing no scrap of humane pity.
Suffer the fools, this ruthless city
Controlled lies can never compromise.
Show us when;
Take this summons they say "Come along"
It matters not, if you've done No wrong!
Blind's the law, to an innocent's song.
What is all of this, our time of day?
Without a window sun's light to see
What would you say, if you had grown cold
while nakedly sold, then told "No way!"
you cannot wear their warm clothes today.
"Rue ice-cold talons of punishment"
chilled bones are part of this correction;
We must oppose (who chose) to strip skin
of warm clothes (like the fooled emperor).
They say, while --
wearing a poison barbedwire smile:
"You'll harm yourself for quite a long-while"
receive reprisal without god' style.
Fool! pick your poison, get on inside
regardless if, you will not decide
to ever get caught-up on this ride
screaming so loud, to start a landslide,
where razor-wire, divides the road;
One, our ancestors surely have strolled,
built on fanatical persuasion --
on some poor fool's screwed-up vision
sanctified rule of prohibition.
Do you know?
To break free-spirit, is their main goal.
We only leave when we've paid that toll,
then, some lost soul just refills their bowl...
This song touched my heart when I heard it about four years ago, when I was just beginning to write my novel and was scared by the unpredictable ebb and flow of feeling close to my characters. I've always been hyper-aware of the transience of human lives, and for that reason, all the more grateful for the hope that God's love is an unchanging foundation.
This clip is from The Big Sing at the Royal Albert Hall, featuring soloist Aled Jones and a whole lotta choirs.
1. Great is Thy faithfulness, O God my Father,
There is no shadow of turning with Thee;
Thou changest not, Thy compassions, they fail not
As Thou hast been Thou forever wilt be.
(Refrain) Great is Thy faithfulness! Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning new mercies I see;
All I have needed Thy hand hath provided—
Great is Thy faithfulness," Lord, unto me!
2. Summer and winter, and springtime and harvest,
Sun, moon and stars in their courses above,
Join with all nature in manifold witness
To Thy great faithfulness, mercy and love.
(Refrain)
3. Pardon for sin and a peace that endureth,
Thy own dear presence to cheer and to guide;
Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow,
Blessings all mine, with ten thousand beside!
Tell Hard Truths, But Go Easy on Yourself: Advice from Glimmer Train Writers
There's always something inspiring and insightful in the email bulletins from the literary journal Glimmer Train. Each issue features interviews with fiction writers who've been published in the magazine. These two articles particularly resonated with me.
I think I'm a reasonably upbeat and entertaining person to be around, but darkness predominates in my writing. My novel protagonist is a gay fashion photographer with a laid-back Southern approach to life--what could be fluffier?--but after four years of working with me, he's often found lying on the beach in a drunken stupor, crying for his dead boyfriend and worrying about his soul. "Be more funny, Julian!" I berate him, like Homer Simpson talking back to "Prairie Home Companion".
After all, my so-called logic goes, if my book doesn't make people happy, I won't be able to sell my ideology to the masses, and the whole idea that I'm doing Something Important for the World is called into question. Then I start to feel guilty that I'm not using my law degree to bring about social change instead of writing gay erotica. (Or sitting at my computer blogging about my literary self-loathing instead of writing the damn book!) I once wrote in my diary, "I don't want to sing the blues that no one wants to hear."
Jenny Zhang, winner of Glimmer Train's April 2010 Family Matters Competition, understands this fear. When she was a young girl in China, her parents left for America to get an education, and she sent them cassette tapes recounting her adventures in kindergarten. Only problem was, her upbeat tales weren't actually true. She missed her parents and felt like a misfit in school, but created an alternate storyline for the adults to hear. To protect them? She isn't so sure. What she does know, as a grown-up storyteller, is this:
...I have come to realize that as fiction writers, the easiest thing we can do is to invent, to lie, to make things up, to imagine, to create fictions. I know this is true because there is nothing more natural and intuitive than the impulse to dream. The difficulty lies in telling the truth. We will always have opportunities to tell stories that are meant to comfort, to delight on dark days when light is needed, but where else and when else, if not in our fiction, are we going to tell the stories that comfort no one, the stories that we often don't tell out of love or pity or compassion or simply because it is unpleasant? If not in our fiction, then where else can we tell stories that say: I'm lonely. Or: I fear I may matter so little to this world that I can cease to exist and no one and nothing would mourn my disappearance. I know it isn't much to say: Tell the truth! But it's the only thing I have, and it's the only thing I can offer you.
Zhang's essay reminds me that my approach to writing can become too instrumental. I fall into thinking of my book as a way to change what other people do and feel, when perhaps it would be better understood as a way to name and reflect the experiences that they already have. In other words, my job is to give my readers a way to make sense of who they are, not force a new identity or agenda on them. My excessive need for control springs from the fear that I may not be heard by the people I most want to reach, because they are unwilling to recognize themselves in Julian and his friends, no matter how charming he is or how clever I am.
In the same bulletin, Nic Brown advises writers to "Make It Easy": use whatever simple tricks you can find to turn your book-length project into a manageable task that you can get your mind around. In his case, it was structuring his story collection like a 12-song musical album with A and B sides. "Make it easy, however you can. It's not going to cheapen the work. It will improve the writing. It will keep you from hating the process."
This essay recalled themes from my earlier post on resisting compulsive revision. Writers need to overcome insecurity that we're not doing real work, because to the untrained eye, we seem to be lying on the couch daydreaming. But being kind to one's self is the necessary support for telling those hard truths.
Supreme Court Says: Non-Discrimination Trumps Free Association
Last month I blogged about Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, a pending Supreme Court case that pitted a public university's nondiscrimination policy against a Christian student group's desire to restrict membership based on belief and behavior. Specifically, Hastings College of Law (a University of California institution) denied official recognition to the CLS because they required their members to be professing Christians and to disavow "unrepentant participation in or advocacy of a sexually immoral lifestyle", i.e. homosexuality.
Following their tradition of shooting off controversial opinions just before they leave town for the summer, the Court yesterday decided the case in favor of Hastings, in a 5-4 decision written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
As I wrote before, it depresses me that a Christian group chose to make their anti-gay stance so fundamental to their identity. I'm glad that Hastings is trying to be a safe place for gay students, especially gay Christians. However, I think the precedent established here will do more harm than good. I sympathize with this analysis from the Christianity Today article:
...[I]t's unlikely that many state colleges and universities will adapt such an "all comers" policy in the future, said Carl Esbeck, a constitutional law professor at the University of Missouri who filed a friend of the court brief in the case for the National Association of Evangelicals, Evangelicals for Social Action, and leaders of the Evangelical Theological Society.
"It's unlikely, because an all-comers policy by and large defeats the purpose for which state universities allow student organizations to be created and recognized by the educational institution," he told CT. "Namely, that like-minded people can band together in an association or organization and thereby have not only common reinforcement among themselves but also have a greater voice because they're speaking as a united group."
Timothy Belz, who wrote the friend of the court brief with Esbeck, agreed that few schools will follow Hastings's lead. "Even Justice Ginsburg said that just because it was constitutional didn't mean it was advisable," he said. "A lot of universities are not going to find that this is an advisable policy, where you can force the Young Democrats to elect a Republican, or a lesbian group to elect a straight male as their president. It's a silly rule."
The spectre of students organizing to take over the leadership of groups they don't like has already happened at Central Michigan University, said David French, senior counsel at the Alliance Defense Fund and director of the ADF's Center for Academic Freedom. It's a strong possiblity at any school with a policy like the one at Hastings, he said in a blog post.
"By emphasizing the value of dissent within groups, the Court ignores the fundamental reality of an all-comers policy: Distinct student organizations exist at the whim of the majority," French wrote. "If 'all comers' can join, then the majority can override the speech of any student group. Thus the true marketplace of ideas exists by the permission (or, more likely, apathy) of the majority. The potential for minority or disfavored groups at schools with an all-comers policy to self-censor to avoid controversy — and potential hostile takeovers — is high."
But even if Hastings remains the only institution with such a policy, the Supreme Court decision is a blow, Esbeck said.
"The ruling today by the majority of the Supreme Court means that associational freedoms for all groups are diminished today. That includes groups that might celebrate the particular result here," he said. "The First Amendment is of less value to all of us."
...
Indeed, imagine your favorite unintended-consequences horror show here: A men's rights activist takes over the leadership of a student feminist group. A Holocaust denier wants to join the board of Hillel. Applied in this mechanical way, a school policy aimed at protecting diversity actually produces homogenization because there are no safe places for affinity groups to flourish and resist assimilation by the majority.
Elsewhere, at the liberal site Religion Dispatches, Candace Chellew-Hodge counters:
...I don’t really know that, given the tenor of CLS and what it stands for, how many budding gay or lesbian lawyers would want to join them—but they ought to be afforded that right—especially if CLS is looking for recognition and funding from the college. They have to abide by the rules—they don’t get any special right to discriminate.
For all the years that the religious right has been howling about how gays and lesbians want "special rights," it's always nice to see the double edged sword cutting the other way from time to time.
I don't think Candace is seeing the big picture here. Still, she's right to point out the irony in conservatives' selective use of the principles of equality, tolerance, diversity, and free association--all of which they want to deny to the GLBT community.
Ultimately, student groups across the political spectrum may realize that official recognition by the university comes with too high a price tag. A little more church-state separation, so to speak, might do them some good.
