Ever wonder why so many pop songs and folk ballads feature men killing their intimate partners? “Banks of the Ohio”, “Delia’s Gone”, “Jenny Was a Friend of Mine” (well okay, that one IS by The Killers, what do you expect)…they’re so catchy, I hear myself singing along, and then I cringe. Score one for feminism against fun? Nope, not according to the Dixie Chicks. Getting back at an abuser has never been such a blast. Even dead Earl can’t keep from dancing.
This weekend I heard a creative and challenging sermon linking our celebration of Columbus Day to the Biblical story of the Israelites worshipping the golden calf. Our preacher acknowledged the human impulse to create a tangible symbol of connection to the God we love. With Moses up on the mountain and God seemingly silent, a people adrift in a strange land needed an anchor for their devotion. This embodied imagination is the source of great religious art, but paradoxically, it can also create hindrances to knowing God. We mistake our concepts for the real God, who actually exceeds our comprehension. God became angry with the Israelites because He was trying to move them forward from concrete and magical thinking, toward openness to His infinite mystery.
The stories that we tell about ourselves as a people, said our preacher, can become an idol as well. Like the golden calf, the celebration of Columbus’s “discovery of America” helped unify and reassure a nation of displaced immigrants seeking a new common identity. But like the calf, this story is limited and distorts reality, erasing the genocide of Native Americans and implicitly judging their nomadic occupation of the land as less than its highest and best use.
I’m not content to leave this analysis with an easy moral, as both admirers and detractors of Columbus are wont to do. Had the Europeans not arrived at (discovered, colonized, civilized, exploited) the continent we call North America, later generations might not have had a refuge to survive other genocidal situations. These include my own Jewish ancestors, who fled from pogroms and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. Some historians include the Irish Potato Famine as an example of genocide, citing British prejudices as a cause of the government’s inadequate response. Many Irish emigrated to America because of that disaster.
Secular, commercialized holidays simply can’t capture the tragic complexity of cross-cultural encounters in a world of scarce resources. The Bible does it better. It includes stories where the Israelites are persecuted, stories where they are rewarded for their faith, stories where they become the oppressors of the poor and the alien, and stories where they just screw up. If we read any one of these stories without the others, it becomes an idol too. Just look at the Middle East today. I believe the Jews needed a homeland after the Holocaust, and I also believe they are oppressing the Palestinians today. We like stories with heroes and villains, but maybe we should ask what it would mean for God to triumph, rather than our side.
Last night I was thrilled to attend a concert by country diva Reba McEntire at The Big E agricultural fair in West Springfield. With her trademark Oklahoma twang, fiery-haired Reba sings about real women surviving life’s hard knocks: poverty, betrayal, falling in and out of love, making a fresh start in midlife. And, every now and then, an unsolved double murder. I spent several minutes on the drive home trying with limited success to explain the plot of this song to Adam. The official music video finally makes it clear. Whatever…I just love the chorus.
This June 2011 article from the progressive website Religion Dispatches captures the essence of why I fight so hard for GLBT equality, particularly within the church. In his piece “The Battle Beneath the Battle: Do Gay People Exist?”, Jay Michaelson says the issue is nothing less than the right to believe your own perceptions, and to be recognized as an authority about your own subjective experience. In a word: sanity.
I’ve taken the unusual step of quoting the whole article because Michaelson’s argument is so concise and well-constructed that to leave out any paragraph would undermine it. I’ve boldfaced key points. He writes:
There’s a cognitive dissonance in our religious and political debates about homosexuality: it’s the only cultural struggle I can think of where one’s very existence is routinely denied by political opponents. African Americans have long had their humanity denied—but they are still seen, and recognized. Women’s rights and freedoms are again under attack, and their full equality is still denied—but no one doubts that women exist. Yet when it comes to LGBT people, our very existence is still, somehow, subject to debate.
This makes public debates over LGBT equality seem uniquely pointless, because the real questions are not the ones being discussed. For example, several states are asking should gays be allowed (or prohibited) to marry. But the real questions they are asking are deeper: Do gay people exist? Is sexuality simply a “lifestyle choice”; and if so, should it be rewarded or burdened by the state?
For a moment, I want to bracket the question of whether sexuality and gender identity are traits or choices, and assume for a moment that many (though not all) LGBT people experience them as the former: that is, as fundamental characteristics of what might be called the soul. I recognize that not every queer person feels this way. Studies have shown, for example, that women tend to experience their sexuality as more fluid and more likely to change over time than men do. I also recognize that, in some iterations of political liberalism, none of this should matter; it’s perfectly coherent to argue that the state simply should not be involved in regulating how people organize their intimate lives.
But I also want to recognize that, in my experience at least, whether or not one is “born this way” does seem to matter to a whole lot of people. For political as well as intellectual reasons, LGBT activists are loathe to base our rights on the latest scientific or pseudo-scientific data. This strikes me as wise. But as I talk about these issues with folks in the “movable middle,” I’ve noticed that the reluctant allies, semi-supportive family members, and more-or-less-convinceable moderates come to pro-gay conclusions for the reasons Lady Gaga identified: because gay people are born that way.
So it does matter, politically at least, whether sexuality is a trait or not. And here is where it gets weird. Because if that’s true, then what’s really at issue in our public debates about equality is my own subjectivity. I am telling my political opponents that I am gay. I didn’t choose it; I didn’t even want it, at first. But it’s as much a part of how I understand myself as being 6’1”, Caucasian, and male.
My opponent responds: no you aren’t. So what am I?
Well, the answers have shifted quickly over the last few decades. At first I was just a sinner. I indulged (or was tempted to indulge) in sodomy the way others are tempted to indulge in gluttony. Later, I was a psychological “invert”; someone with incomplete sexual-psychological development, and a dozen other varieties of psychological freak. But I was not what I said I was: a perfectly normal human being with a certain sexual orientation.
Today, even our opponents recognize this. The Catholic Church recognizes that homosexuality is a part of the human condition; albeit one which must be sublimated or repressed. Even in the “reparative therapy” and ex-gay movements, the rhetoric has shifted from promises of true conversion to heterosexuality, to promises of the ability to sublimate one’s desires into heterosexual expression. Ex-gay folks realize that almost no (male) clients actually stop feeling same-sex attraction. They just promise that one can work with it, live with it, and function sexually with a woman.
In other words, the only people who still say that sexuality is purely a choice are those who know nothing whatsoever about it. When you think about it that way it’s outrageous. I’m being forced to defend my subjective self-understanding to people who not only don’t share it, but who don’t even read objective books about it! I stand on the opposite sides of picket lines with people who deny that I am right about my own mind. They insist that millions of people are so deeply deluded about themselves that their own testimony must be disregarded.
Maybe, then, gay rights really are like civil rights after all. “Am I not a man and a brother?” asked Frederick Douglass. Which is to say: I experience myself as fully human. You, if you are listening to me, must hear and see that I am a human being. Yet our society denies my humanity, insists that while I am something close to a man, I am not quite one.
I hear myself saying something similar. Is this not love? Do I not know my own heart? Is my love not that of one human being for another? Not lust or perversion or sin, but love? When straight people really see gay people, when they allow themselves to look, they see that we are people, that our love is love. Similar in some ways, different in others, not necessarily better or worse—but real. We exist.
What I feel like we are still fighting for, in the places where our freedom is still contested, is neither rights nor freedoms nor any particular bundle of privileges, but some more fundamental, and fundamentally religious, human right that has only begun to be articulated: the right to self-definition, to say that I exist—and to be believed.
This is exactly right, in my opinion, and deserves to be restated far more often in the current debate. To religious people, in particular, I would say that you cannot discount gays’ own perceptions–first, that their orientation is real, and second, that their relationships can be loving and spiritually fruitful–without undermining confidence in the same psychological faculties that produce religious convictions.
Do you use reason to read and interpret the Bible? Yet you tell gays to “lean not on your own understanding” when they defend their equality based on lessons from history, science, and moral logic. Do you feel God in your heart when you pray? Yet you tell gays that “the heart is deceitful above all things” when they try to speak about their experience of love. If their minds are so darkened and their wills are so corrupt that nothing they say about themselves can be trusted, that condition of “total depravity” applies to you and your religion at least as much. (Which, I think, is what St. Paul was actually getting at in Romans 1: you holy rollers will be judged by the same measure by which you judge “those people”.)
What distinguishes abuse from other forms of violence is the element of mind control. You’re not just being hurt, you’re being brainwashed into doubting whether your pain really happened, allowing someone else to erase your reality and replace it with one that meets their own needs. Because I’ve experienced some of this, though not in the context of sexuality, the fight for gay rights will always be my fight.
Writing last year in Boston Review, a well-regarded magazine of literature and politics, reporter Lance Tapley shines a spotlight on the routine physical and mental degradation that inmates endure in America’s supermax prisons. The article was adapted from his contribution to Marjorie Cohn’s anthology The United States and Torture, published this past January by NYU Press. Tapley notes that the types of abuses we rightly decried at Guantanamo are actually common in the regular prison system, but these receive far less press attention, even though the victims are American citizens. (My pen pal Conway resides in a supermax facility in California.)
An excerpt from the article follows. Tapley is discussing Mike James, an inmate at a Maine supermax:
James, who is in his twenties, has been beaten all his life, first by family members: “I was punched, kicked, slapped, bitten, thrown against the wall.” He began seeing mental-health workers at four and taking psychiatric medication at seven. He said he was bipolar and had many other disorders. When a doctor took him off his meds at age eighteen, he got into “selling drugs, robbing people, fighting, burglaries.” He received a twelve-year sentence for robbery. Of the four years James had been in prison when I met him, he had spent all but five months in solitary confinement. The isolation is “mental torture, even for people who are able to control themselves,” he said. It included periods alone in a cell “with no blankets, no clothes, butt-naked, mace covering me.” Everything James told me was confirmed by other inmates and prison employees.
James’s story illustrates an irony in the negative reaction of many Americans to the mistreatment of “war on terrorism” prisoners at Guantánamo. To little public outcry, tens of thousands of American citizens are being held in equivalent or worse conditions in this country’s super-harsh, super-maximum security, solitary-confinement prisons, or in comparable units of traditional prisons. The Obama administration— somewhat unsteadily—plans to shut down the Guantánamo detention center and ship its inmates to one or more supermaxes in the United States, as though this would mark a substantive change. In the supermaxes inmates suffer weeks, months, years, or even decades of mind-destroying isolation, usually without meaningful recourse to challenge the conditions of their captivity. Prisoners may be regularly beaten in cell extractions, and they receive meager health services. The isolation frequently leads to insane behavior including self-injury and suicide attempts.
In 2004, state-run supermaxes in 44 states held about 25,000 people, according to Daniel Mears, a Florida State University criminologist who has done the most careful count. Mears told me his number was conservative. In addition the federal system has a big supermax in Colorado, ADX Florence, and a total of about 11,000 inmates in solitary in all its lockups, according to the Bureau of Prisons. Some researchers peg the state and federal supermax total as high as a hundred thousand; their studies sometimes include more broadly defined “control units”—for example, those in which men spend all day in a cell with another prisoner. (Nationally, 91 percent of prison and jail inmates are men, so overwhelmingly men fill the supermaxes. Women also are kept in supermax conditions, but apparently no one has estimated how many.) Then there are the county and city jails, the most sizable of which have large solitary-confinement sections. Although the roughness in what prisoners call “the hole” varies from prison to prison and jail to jail, isolation is the overwhelming, defining punishment in this vast network of what critics have begun to call mass torture.
James experienced frequent cell extractions—on one occasion, five of them in a single day. In this procedure, five hollering guards wearing helmets and body armor charge into the cell. The point man smashes a big shield into the prisoner. The others spray mace into his face, push him onto the bed, and twist his arms behind his back to handcuff him, connecting the cuffs by a chain to leg irons. As they continue to mace him, the guards carry him screaming to an observation room, where they bind him to a special chair. He remains there for hours.
A scene such as this might have taken place at supposedly aberrant Abu Ghraib, where American soldiers tormented captured Iraqis. But as described by prisoners and guards and vividly revealed in a leaked video (the Maine prison records these events to ensure that inmates are not mistreated), an extraction is the supermax’s normal, zero-tolerance reaction to prisoner disobedience, which may be as minor as protesting bad food by covering the cell door’s tiny window with a piece of paper. Such extractions occur all the time, not just in Maine but throughout the country. The principle applied is total control of a prisoner’s actions. Even if the inmate has no history of violence, when he leaves the cell he’s in handcuffs and ankle shackles, with a guard on either side.
But he doesn’t often leave the cell. In Maine’s supermax, which is typical, an inmate spends 23 hours a day alone in a 6.5-by-14-foot space. When the weather is good, he’ll spend an hour a day, five days a week, usually alone, in a small dog run outdoors. Radios and TVs are forbidden. Cell lights are on night and day. When the cold food is shoved through the door slot, prisoners fear it is contaminated by the feces, urine, and blood splattered on the cell door and corridor surfaces by the many mentally ill or enraged inmates. The prisoner is not allowed a toothbrush but is provided a plastic nub to use on a fingertip. Mental-health care usually amounts to a five-minute, through-the-steel-door conversation with a social worker once or twice a week. The prisoner gets a shower a few times a week, a brief telephone call every week or two, and occasional “no-contact” access to a visitor. Variations in these conditions exist: for example, in some states TVs or radios are allowed.
When supermaxes were built across the country in the 1980s and 1990s, they were theoretically for “the worst of the worst,” the most violent prisoners. But an inmate may be put in one for possession of contraband such as marijuana, if accused by another inmate of being a gang member, for hesitating to follow a guard’s order, and even for protection from other inmates. Several prisoners are in the Maine supermax because they got themselves tattooed. By many accounts mental illness is the most common denominator; mentally ill inmates have a hard time following prison rules. A Wisconsin study found that three-quarters of the prisoners in one solitary-confinement unit were mentally ill. In Maine, over half of supermax inmates are classified as having a serious mental illness.
Prison officials have extraordinary discretion in extending the stay of supermax inmates. Their decisions hit the mentally ill the hardest. Administrators can add time as a disciplinary measure, and often they will charge prisoners with criminal offenses that can add years to their sentences.
In 2007 James was tried on ten assault charges for biting and kicking guards and throwing feces at them. Most were felony charges, and if convicted he could have served decades more in prison. Inmates almost never beat such charges, but James’s court-appointed lawyer, Joseph Steinberger, a scrappy ex-New Yorker, succeeded with a defense rare in cases of Maine prisoners accused of crimes: he convinced a jury in Rockland, the nearby county seat, to find James “not criminally responsible” by reason of insanity. Steinberger thought the verdict was a landmark because it called into question the state’s standard practice of keeping mentally ill individuals in isolation and then punishing them with yet more isolation when their conditions worsen. After the verdict, as the law required, the judge committed James to a state mental hospital.
But prison officials and the state attorney general’s office saw the verdict as another kind of landmark: never before in Maine had a convict been committed to the mental hospital after being tried for assault on guards. In the view of the corrections establishment, James would be escaping his deserved punishment, and this would send the wrong signal to prisoners. Officials refused to send him to the hospital, arguing he first had to serve the remaining nine years of his sentence.
Steinberger wrote to Maine’s governor—John Baldacci, a Democrat—begging him to intervene and send James to the hospital:
He continually slits open his arms and legs with chips of paint and concrete, smears himself and his cell with feces, strangles himself to unconsciousness with his clothing. . . . He also bites, hits, kicks, spits at, and throws urine and feces on his guards.
This behavior was never in dispute, but the governor declined to intervene.
After a year of court battles, Steinberger finally succeeded in getting James into the hospital, though the judge conceded to the Department of Corrections that his time there would not count against his sentence. So James faces nine years in prison after however long it takes to bring him to a sane mental state.
…
Why is the richest, most powerful nation in the world still using punishment methods that Europe abandoned 150 years ago as too brutal? Our prison system is an international scandal.
I wish I could end this article with an “action item” to mitigate the helplessness you may feel after reading this. Can’t we click on something, donate something, sign a petition? I don’t have a quick fix, but my advice is: Get informed. Feel your common humanity with those who seem alien and frightening. Look behind the “tough on crime” rhetoric in your next election. Write to a prisoner in SHU. Your letters and books could save someone’s sanity.
We couldn’t stop the execution of Troy Davis, but we can honor his final wish by abolishing the death penalty. It doesn’t deter crime, it costs the government a lot of money in appeals, it’s applied disproportionately to poor and minority defendants who can’t afford good lawyers, and most importantly, there’s no second chance when you execute an innocent person.
I signed this pledge on the NAACP website and hope you will too:
In the Name of Troy Davis: Pledge to End the Death Penalty in the United States
I pledge to fight to end the death penalty in the United States because Troy Anthony Davis was executed despite extreme and well-known doubts about his guilt.
I pledge to fight to end the death penalty in the United States because the system failed Troy, even though the system is supposed to be fail-proof.
I pledge to fight to end the death penalty in the United States because these failures are the result of a system that gives the power of life and death to humans, who are prone to error and susceptible to bias.
I pledge to fight to end the death penalty in the United States because 130 people have been exonerated from death row since 1973, and we have no way of knowing how many innocent people have been killed.
I pledge to fight to end the death penalty in the United States because death is permanent and mistakes are uncorrectable.
I pledge to fight to end the death penalty in the United States because we know that race and class disproportionately determine who lives and who dies.
I pledge to fight to end the death penalty in the United States because Troy Davis often said, “This movement began before I was born … it must continue and grow stronger…until we abolish the death penalty once and for all.”
I pledge to fight to end the death penalty in the United States because it was Troy’s final wish.
In the Name of Troy Anthony Davis, I pledge to fight to end the death penalty in the United States to ensure that what happened to Troy never happens to another person in our criminal justice system.
Not convinced? Read this shocking report about a 14-year-old African-American who was sent to the electric chair in 1944. (The URL is www.flickr.com/photos/22067139@N05/5251556905/ in case the hyperlink is not working right in this blog template.)
Bluffton Today – ‘Crusaders look to right Jim Crow justice wrongs’ by Jeffrey Collins
He was 14 yrs. 6mos. and 5 days old — and the youngest person executed in the United States in the 20th Century
George Junius Stinney, Jr., [b. 1929 – d. 1944]In a South Carolina prison sixty-six years ago, guards walked a 14-year-old boy, bible tucked under his arm, to the electric chair. At 5′ 1″ and 95 pounds, the straps didn’t fit, and an electrode was too big for his leg.
The switch was pulled and the adult sized death mask fell from George Stinney’s face. Tears streamed from his eyes. Witnesses recoiled in horror as they watched the youngest person executed in the United States in the past century die.
Now, a community activist is fighting to clear Stinney’s name, saying the young boy couldn’t have killed two girls. George Frierson, a school board member and textile inspector, believes Stinney’s confession was coerced, and that his execution was just another injustice blacks suffered in Southern courtrooms in the first half of the 1900s.
In a couple of cases like Stinney’s, petitions are being made before parole boards and courts are being asked to overturn decisions made when society’s thumb was weighing the scales of justice against blacks. These requests are buoyed for the first time in generations by money, college degrees and sometimes clout.
“I hope we see more cases like this because it help brings a sense of closure. It’s symbolic,” said Howard University law professor Frank Wu. “It’s not just important for the individuals and their families. It’s important for the entire community. Not just for African Americans, but for whites and for our democracy as a whole. What these cases show is that it is possible to achieve justice.”
Some have already achieved justice. Earlier this year, syndicated radio host Tom Joyner successfully won a posthumous pardon for two great uncles who were executed in South Carolina.
A few years ago Lena Baker, a black Georgia maid sent to the electric chair for killing a white man, received a pardon after her family pointed out she likely killed the man because he was holding her against her will.
In the Stinney case, supporters want the state to admit that officials executed the wrong person in June 1944.
Stinney was accused of killing two white girls, 11 year old Betty June Binnicker and 8 year old
Mary Emma Thames, by beating them with a railroad spike then dragging their bodies to a ditch near Acolu, about five miles from Manning in central South Carolina. The girls were found a day after they disappeared following a massive manhunt. Stinney was arrested a few hours later, white men in suits taking him away. Because of the risk of a lynching, Stinney was kept at a jail 50 miles away in Columbia.Stinney’s father, who had helped look for the girls, was fired immediately and ordered to leave his home and the sawmill where he worked. His family was told to leave town prior to the trial to avoid further retribution. An atmosphere of lynch mob hysteria hung over the courthouse. Without family visits, the 14 year old had to endure the trial and death alone.
Frierson hasn’t been able to get the case out of his head since, carrying around a thick binder of old newspaper stories and documents, including an account from an execution witness.
The sheriff at the time said Stinney admitted to the killings, but there is only his word — no written record of the confession has been found. A lawyer helping Frierson with the case figures threats of mob violence and not being able to see his parents rattled the seventh- grader.
Attorney Steve McKenzie said he has even heard one account that says detectives offered the boy ice cream once they were done.
“You’ve got to know he was going to say whatever they wanted him to say,” McKenzie said.
The court appointed Stinney an attorney — a tax commissioner preparing for a Statehouse run. In all, the trial — from jury selection to a sentence of death — lasted one day. Records indicate 1,000 people crammed the courthouse. Blacks weren’t allowed inside.
The defense called no witnesses and never filed an appeal. No one challenged the sheriff’s recollection of the confession.
“As an attorney, it just kind of haunted me, just the way the judicial system worked to this boy’s disadvantage or disfavor. It did not protect him,” said McKenzie, who is preparing court papers to ask a judge to reopen the case.
Stinney’s official court record contains less than two dozen pages, several of them arrest warrants. There is no transcript of the trial.
The lack of records, while not unusual, makes it harder for people trying to get these old convictions overturned, Wu said.
But these old cases also can have a common thread.
“Some of these cases are so egregious, so extreme that when you look at it, the prosecution really has no case either,” Wu said. “It’s apparent from what you can see that someone was railroaded.”
And sometimes, police under pressure by frightened citizens jumped to conclusions rather than conducting a thorough investigation, Wu said.
Sometimes it feels like words are impotent, so long as power is held by a few people who choose to be deaf to truth and compassion. Despite millions of petition signatures and years of advocacy by such respected human-rights organizations as Amnesty International and the NAACP, the state of Georgia executed Troy Davis this week for a murder that he may not have committed. Whether or not you oppose the death penalty in general, as I do, the problems with the evidence in this case underscore the perils of allowing fallible human beings to impose a punishment that can’t be undone.
It was timely, then, to receive a message from poet and expressive writing facilitator Margot Van Sluytman, with a link to her guest post at Justice With a Crunch. Margot heads the Sawbonna Project, which promotes healing and reconciliation for crime victims and perpetrators. She says of herself:
Because of reading about an award I received from The Foundation for the National Association for Poetry Therapy in April 2007, for my work creating and facilitating growth experiences through experiential workshops in writing and healing voice in North America, the man, Glen Flett, who murdered my Father, Theodore Van Sluytman, March 27, 1978 contacted me. I chose to share dialogue with him and we have shared encounter with forgiveness.
The phrase that is used for what occurred between Glen Flett and I is: Restorative Justice. I did not know about this before I was offered the gift of opportunity to dialogue with the human being who ended the life of a human being I loved so deeply. Now I know of this phrase, and I know as well, that Restorative Justice happens in very different ways for each individual who is involved in it. What has happened for me, is only one of a myriad of possibilities for those who have been harmed by crime, or have caused the harm, to find ways to navigate their lives.
Justice With a Crunch is the website of Prof. Judah Oudshoorn at the University of Waterloo. In her guest post, Margot explains the links between voice, justice, and recognition of the other’s humanity:
…The word I myself use for what is widely known as Restorative Justice is, Sawbonna. I learned it from Glen. It is a Zulu greeting, and further, it means, “I see you.” Being seen, being heard, being felt, are each ingrained in this meaning. Sawbonna speaks from a place of inclusivity, from the flesh and the bone of victim and offender. It is about people not processes. It speaks from the foundational value of Restorative Justice, one I sense can be swept away in research papers and abundant studies. No victim, no offender is merely a study. Not merely an object to be observed….
…Justice is to be heard. Justice is to listen. Justice is to find, create, and belong within communities of those who truly want to know your voice, to support you in a time of deep and savage ache and ennui, accompanying you to learn to trust that you are more that the crime committed against you, or the crime you have committed; and, justice is about coming to a place where you too, can be support. Where are the places and the spaces within academia, within government, within our communities where Sawbonna is present for victims and for offenders. Victims and offenders will not always, if ever, meet in the those same places, however, those places must become as ubiquitous as gas stations. I do not want anyone to speak my needs of and for healing. Both victims and offenders warrant the respect of telling their own story. That is justice. That is voice. That is being heard.
For an example of this process, read this brief and compelling series of vignettes posted by Judah on the blog earlier this month. The news and the legal system give us a single snapshot in time, but what was the whole narrative of this person’s life before the crime? Where are the venues where this can be told?
(1) A middle-aged man overdoses on crack cocaine and is found dead in a rooming house by the landlord.
what is justice in this situation?
(2) A young man is caught breaking into a house in a suburban part of a city by the police, who have been tailing him because of a long record of similar offences.
what is justice in this situation?
(3) A young boy is repeatedly mocked and beaten by his father when he scores less than a “B” on his report card during his elementary school days. No one ever finds out.
what is justice in this situation?
(4) Each of these vignettes is about the same person.
what is justice for this human being?
My prison pen pal “Conway” sent this poem in his Aug. 31 letter, written on the back of a disciplinary notice he received for participating in a hunger strike to end inhumane conditions in California prisons. Sign the online petition to support their protest.
Tree of Uncertainty
Begin with a gallery
hung up high.
Who was I, was I not
a lost thought,
or shattered thinker?
Fingers point, look closer
in-out at everywhere.
Full-blown kaleidoscopes
show new-views
if hopes dare.
Paint chips, in the musical time
of crackling things, tripping
over too many, themed questions.
How many more designs, laws
years, flaws, locked-up tiers?
Stacked absence, bad dreams
muffled screams, slipping
while existence’s sad smile
silently cracks;
Like the sidewalk, Avenue
you used to skip
on the way to school; Now
A void, now a prison
no win, deep end,
as chain-bound sleep
blankly yanks away
another dusty,
day plus day.
Still
I miss, what nothing needs.
(Excepting maybe weeds,)
That feed upon, another caustic dawn
which was lost again
when I was found, gone.
So, escort mere mourning
that drove time here
minds migrating
to counts we cleared.
Leaf through these pages
like History, or listen
to leaves, fall off this tree
burdens of, uncertainty…
As I’ve mentioned on this blog, my husband and I both come from a Reform Jewish background, though we’ve taken other spiritual paths since then. This weekend we attended Shabbat and Bar Mitzvah services for one of his relatives at a temple in New York City. The service leaders’ joyful reverence for the Torah, coupled with their apparent comfort at reinterpreting it to emphasize modern progressive values, made me think that Christians who wrestle with the question of Biblical authority could learn something from our Jewish heritage.
In synagogues, the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew scriptures), handwritten in Hebrew on a scroll of parchment, is kept in a sanctuary behind closed doors or curtains at the front of the worship space. The scroll is covered with a fancy cloth casing and sometimes also adorned with ornaments. At a certain point in the liturgy, the clergy open up the sanctuary, and everyone bows and sings songs of reverence to the Torah. During Saturday morning services, the rabbi takes out the scroll and parades it around the sanctuary for the people to touch with their prayerbook or the hem of their prayer shawl. It’s not unlike the Catholics’ display of the Host in the monstrance. The object itself is beloved, physically transmitting the presence of God and connecting today’s worshippers to past and future generations.
As the service leaders dressed and undressed the Torah in its velvet wrapper and necklaces of silver crowns, I was reminded of Hindus presenting jewelry, clothing, and food to the statues of their gods. This tender relationship with inanimate objects, sincere as a child with a doll, could be called idolatrous by purists and delusional by skeptics, but to me it appears as an opportunity to re-enchant the world, taking the risk of saying that we perceive the unseen God immanent in all things.
The Jews love the Torah in part because it represents their improbable survival. The Torah has been the center of a distinctive identity that resisted thousands of years of persecution and temptation to assimilate.
But what about the Torah is most meaningful and relevant today? For this congregation, the emphasis was on the ethical ideals of caring for the stranger, the orphan, the poor, and the natural resources that we share. Unselfishness, humility, empathy, responsibility for one another: these were the qualities that Jesus, too, chose to foreground from his own Jewish heritage.
The thing is, though, you have to do some pretty heavy interpreting to play up the universal and rational aspects of the Torah to the exclusion of the tribal and ritual ones. I didn’t sense that anyone was agonizing about the delicious crabcakes and shrimp sushi that we enjoyed at the bar mitzvah boy’s reception. Nor do I think we should. Still, it was hard to reconcile that freedom with the day’s parsha (weekly Torah portion) from Deuteronomy 26-29, in which God warns of the horrifying atrocities the Hebrews will experience at the hands of foreign invaders if they don’t keep the Law of Moses.
The key may be that Jews have always been more comfortable than Protestants with admitting — even celebrating — the role of interpretation in our relationship with the sacred text. One theory retroactively confers divinely inspired status on all future rabbinic interpretations (Talmud and so forth); these too were given at Sinai, the legend goes, but only revealed to us in stages. After all, we have to exist in linear time, but God transcends it. The Torah and its interpretations could be considered the “still point” (in T.S. Eliot’s words) where time and timelessness meet.
As someone who had no Jewish education, I have found the centrality of Hebrew in Jewish worship services to be a barrier to full engagement. I can see how this set-up could also lead people to compartmentalize Torah, not seeing it as a relevant standard for their weekday behavior. On the other hand, being continually presented with the foreignness of the text, Jews have to be more honest about the role of interpretation in every reading. Contrast this to Protestant fundamentalists who behave as if the King James Version had been handed to them by God in leather-bound volumes.
I welcome commentary from readers who are more familiar with Jewish theological practices. Have you found rabbinic styles of interpretation to be freeing and illuminating? Have you seen the Torah updated for modern values in a convincing way?
Earlier this summer, Richard Beck at Experimental Theology posted about the challenges of studying the Beatitudes with the Bible study group he leads in a men’s prison. Considering the risks of nonviolent compassion in a place ruled by the law of the jungle, he realized afresh how much it can really cost to be a follower of Christ. An excerpt:
…Week to week, as you lead a bible study with prisoners, you can come to believe that this is the most holy, devout, and saintly bunch of Christians you’ve ever seen. This is, incidentally, one of the joys of prison ministry, how nice, grateful and cooperative the men are. You’ll never have a better audience.
But I know that this is a bit of an illusion. To be sure, the men are grateful. The time they have with us is, perhaps, the only non-coercive, relaxed and egalitarian interaction they have during the week. So they are truly grateful and happy to be a part of the bible study. And many have become committed followers of Jesus.
Still, for the most part I know that the devoutness on display during the bible study is hiding a great deal of darkness. And we don’t talk much about that darkness. At least not in our bible study. But I knew it was there and I wanted to try to talk about it a bit before reading the Beatitudes.
So I waited. And asked again, “Inside the prison, who is blessed?”
Finally, a man answered:
“The violent.”
I nodded. “So that is Beatitude #1. ‘Blessed are the violent.’ What else?” The floodgates opened.
The thieves.
The liars.
The manipulators.
The hypocrites.
The wealthy. (There is an underground black market economy.)
The strong.On and on it went. These were the “virtues” that got “blessed” and rewarded inside the prison. These were the “virtues” that helped you get ahead, survive, and thrive. And I wondered, is it any different on the outside where I live?
Not much.
After creating this list we then turned to Matthew 5 and we read aloud:
Blessed are the poor in spirit…
Blessed are those who mourn…
Blessed are the meek…
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness…
Blessed are the merciful…
Blessed are the pure in heart…
Blessed are the peacemakers…
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness…
As we read these words the room became very somber. In light of what we’d just been talking about the radical call of Jesus shone like a white hot light. It burned. When you read the Beatitudes on the outside it all sounds so nice and happy. But read inside a prison you suddenly see just how crazy you have to be to be a follower of Jesus. How the Beatitudes really are a matter of life and death.
I asked the prisoners, can you be meek, poor in spirit, or merciful in prison? Finally opening up, they said no, you can’t. You’d get hurt, taken advantage of, raped, killed. Your days would be numbered if you tried to live out the Beatitudes.
And suddenly, I didn’t know what to say. For it became very clear to me what it would mean for me to preach the Beatitudes to these men. I’d be asking them to give their lives to Jesus. I’d be asking them to die.
So I hesitated. For one simple reason. I didn’t know if I was ready to make that commitment. And sensing hesitancy in my own heart, my own fear of Jesus, I couldn’t ask these men to do something that I myself lacked the courage to do.
None of this was verbalized. After the men described how it would be suicidal to live out the Beatitudes inside the prison we started to talk about how, in small moments here and there, they could let their defenses down to show a little meekness, to show a little mercy. We started to figure out ways they could fit Jesus into the gaps and margins of prison life. Where their shell of violence and toughness could be dropped for a moment.
Basically, we talked about compromise. How to accommodate Jesus to the ruling ethic of prison life. And like I said, I couldn’t ask for anything more. Who was I to push them for more mercy and meekness when I’d be walking out of the prison gates in less than an hour? I didn’t know what I was asking them to do. Nor was I confident about what I would do if I was in their shoes….
I printed out this post and mailed it to my pen pal “Conway”, whose poetry and letters I have shared on this blog. Conway responded with one of the most inspiring stories of Christian love that I have read in a long time. Let me also add that when he wrote this, he was in the middle of a three-week hunger strike to demand more humane conditions in California prisons. Here is an excerpt from his July 4 letter:
I can see some prisoners feeling relaxed inside of the chapel setting in prison. I have only entered the chapel for religious service on one occasion in prison. That was for a friend who had died of AIDS at Vacaville. I was there for maybe two years recovering from being paralyzed by L.A. County sheriffs. (In L.A. County Jail.) It took about eighteen months to be able to walk again.
I was pissed off that it took several months before the service was held for Johnny. He and four others had died from AIDS in that time.
I was listening to the priest or what they call chaplain speak on each man’s life that had passed. And it just seemed so weak to be waiting this long to be approved for a decent ceremony. He’d already been cremated months before. Why now? and why pack them all into one ceremony?
But I do recognize that the blanket patch had to be sewn together with others. It was large.
Still why wait to leave this soul roaming along the halls of that place? It had me mad and I stood up to confront the chaplain. He called me up to the podium and asked me to say a few words of what Johnny was about. The funny thing is even though he was gay and had caught his sentence for protecting himself, this was not what I talked about. It didn’t matter to me what preferences he had. He was just a good dude and I wanted everyone to know it.
All of those cons were crying like babies when I’d finished my tirade. And of course I was too. But the point I make is that the label of holy or devout, what the hell is that, if we are to become righteous in our lifetime. Like I said that was the only one time I went to a religious service. But it amazes me. So many of those guys later on thanked me for standing up and speaking on that day….
…I’m sure I got off track on that subject, but the comments [on the blog post] brought back memories of my connection with their discussion. But I disagree with one point they said you can’t be merciful in prison. Actually you can. It’s not as ruthless a crowd as everyone makes out. Nevertheless it is a harsh environment that one must prove themself everyday. But we all are tested daily.
Visit the website of California Prison Focus to find out more about the hunger strikers’ demands and track the progress of the reforms. Their five core demands were as follows: (1) Eliminate group punishments for prisoners of the same race when one breaks a rule; (2) Reform the criteria for declaring a prisoner to be active in a gang (currently prisoners like my friend Conway are sent to long-term isolation on dubious evidence); (3) Comply with the recommendations of the US Commission on Safety and Abuse in Prisons (2006) regarding an end to longterm solitary confinement; (4) Provide adequate food; (5) Expand and provide constructive programs and privileges for indefinite SHU inmates. (Conway was mentoring at-risk youth until he was transferred to the Segregated Housing Unit on false evidence of gang activity.) The California state legislature held hearings on these issues in August.
Related resources: PrisonerSolidarity.org; TGI Justice Project (advocate for transgender, genderqueer, and intersex inmates).