Author Archives: Jendi Reiter

Heterosexism 101: Mike Huckabee


Today’s lesson in straight privilege is brought to you by former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, a contender for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008 and possibly again in 2012. He is also an ordained Southern Baptist minister. In a recent interview with The Perspective, the student newspaper of the College of New Jersey, he repeated the old slur that legalizing gay marriage is equivalent to approving drug abuse, incest, and polygamy. As quoted in the Associated Press:

Huckabee added that his goal isn’t to tell others how to live, but that the burden of proving that a gay marriage can be successful rests with the activists in favor of changing the law.

“I don’t have to prove that marriage is a man and a woman in a relationship for life,” he said. “They have to prove that two men can have an equally definable relationship called marriage, and somehow that that can mean the same thing.”


Thank you, Mike, for defining inequality in a nutshell. We don’t think often enough about burdens of proof and why they fall where they do. More often, we take sides in existing debates without asking how one group seized the benefits of normalcy and whether they ought to retain it.

Do straights deserve to put gays on the defensive because we’re a majority? I thought one of the cornerstones of our American civil religion was the belief, embodied in the Bill of Rights, that the individual has certain fundamental human rights that shouldn’t be subject to majority vote.

Because we populate the planet? The harsh realities of nomadic desert life could explain why the Abrahamic faiths discouraged non-procreative sex, but environmentalists might say we need the reverse incentive now.

Because we’ve done such a good job keeping our marital vows? Three words: 50% divorce rate.

I think many traditionalists refuse to listen to gay-rights arguments because it’s scary to consider that our favorite “natural” hierarchies might be arbitrary and self-serving. Without even realizing it, we’re all somewhat invested in upholding social categories that make us feel better about ourselves.

The Bible has a word for basing our self-esteem on something other than God’s unmerited love for us. It’s called idolatry.

Signs of the Apocalypse: Hello Hangover


We’ve seen kid-sized stripper poles and thongs for tots, but the campaign to turn Romper Room into the Champagne Room isn’t complete without the right beverages. This item comes to us from the e-newsletter of the Marin Institute, a nonprofit that raises awareness about the social costs of alcohol and the marketing of addictive substances to youth.

Hello Kitty—the iconic cartoon image gracing thousands of children’s toys and clothing throughout the globe—is now promoting alcoholic beverages. Wine with names like “Hello Kitty Angel” (white) and “Hello Kitty Devil” (red) will be available for purchase in May.

The Rosé label features Hello Kitty in a little black dress, winking and holding a glass of wine. The “Devil” and “Angel” wine labels show Hello Kitty with a devil’s tail and angel wings, respectively, and heart-shaped tattoos on each of their behinds. The Brut Rose label displays Hello Kitty in a pink onesie with hearts, and has a special prize hanging on each bottle: a little Hello Kitty pendant on a chain.

Italian winemaker Tenimenti Castelrotto, along with with Camomilla, an Italian fashion company, collaborated to sell the wine with the Hello Kitty brand worldwide. Their rationale for this campaign: “Hello Kitty is not just for children. She is a recognized cult fashion icon among teenagers and adults around the world.”

Visit the Hello Kitty Wine website to see Kitty dodging paparazzi and hitting the sauce. Recipes include “Feline Fizz”, which sounds like an idea that should never have left the litterbox.

Drink responsibly, kids.

Of Empty Tombs


They crucified my Savior upon a common cross.
They crucified my Savior upon a common cross.
They crucified my Savior upon a common cross,
And God’s grace will lead my spirit home.

    –“Christ Rose“, 18th-century African-American spiritual

The following story comes from the April 11, 2010 Associated Press newswire (not reprinted here in full for copyright reasons):

THIES, Senegal – Even death cannot stop the violence against gays in this corner of the world any more.

Madieye Diallo’s body had only been in the ground for a few hours when the mob descended on the weedy cemetery with shovels. They yanked out the corpse, spit on its torso, dragged it away and dumped it in front of the home of his elderly parents.

The scene of May 2, 2009 was filmed on a cell phone and the video sold at the market. It passed from phone to phone, sowing panic among gay men who say they now feel like hunted animals.

“I locked myself inside my room and didn’t come out for days,” says a 31-year-old gay friend of Diallo’s who is ill with HIV. “I’m afraid of what will happen to me after I die. Will my parents be able to bury me?”

A wave of intense homophobia is washing across Africa, where homosexuality is already illegal in at least 37 countries.

In the last year alone, gay men have been arrested in Kenya, Malawi, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. In Uganda, lawmakers are considering a bill that would sentence homosexuals to life in prison and include capital punishment for ‘repeat offenders.’ And in South Africa, the only country that recognizes gay rights, gangs have carried out so-called “corrective” rapes on lesbians.

“Across many parts of Africa, we’ve seen a rise in homophobic violence,” says London-based gay-rights activist Peter Tatchell, whose organization tracks abuse against gays and lesbians in Africa. “It’s been steadily building for the last 10 years but has got markedly worse in the last year.”

To the long list of abuse meted out to suspected homosexuals in Africa, Senegal has added a new form of degradation — the desecration of their bodies.

In the past two years, at least four men suspected of being gay have been exhumed by angry mobs in cemeteries in Senegal. The violence is especially shocking because Senegal, unlike other countries in the region, is considered a model of tolerance….


The article goes on to say that the current backlash in Senegal began in 2008 when a tabloid published pictures of a clandestine gay wedding. Suspected gays were arrested and tortured. Worsening economic conditions also fueled the search for a scapegoat, Cheikh Ibrahima Niang, a professor of social anthropology at Senegal’s largest university, told the AP reporter.

…The crackdown also coincided with spiraling food prices. Niang says political and religious leaders saw an easy way to reach constituents through the inflammatory topic of homosexuality.
“They found a way to explain the difficulties people are facing as a deviation from religious life,” says Niang. “So if people are poor — it’s because there are prostitutes in the street. If they don’t have enough to eat, it’s because there are homosexuals.”


Muslim imams preached in favor of killing gays. The same sentiments were published in Senegalese newspapers and magazines. Some people evidently took the exhortations to heart:

…Around this time, in May 2008, a middle-aged man called Serigne Mbaye fell ill and died in a suburb of Dakar.

His children tried to bury him in his village but were turned back from the cemetery because of widespread rumors that he was gay. His sons drove his body around trying to find a cemetery that would accept him. They were finally forced to bury him on the side of a road, using their own hands to dig a hole, according to media reports.

The grave was too shallow and the wind blew away the dirt. When the decomposing body was later discovered, Mbaye’s children were arrested and charged with improperly burying their father.

In the town of Kaolack three months later, residents exhumed the grave of another man believed to be gay. In November 2008, residents in Pikine removed a corpse from a mosque of another suspected homosexual and left it on the side of the road….

…Among the people who appeared in the photograph published from the gay wedding was a young man in his 30s from Thies. He was an activist and a leader of a gay organization called And Ligay, meaning “Working together,” which he ran out of his parents’ house.

He was HIV-positive and on medication.

When the tabloid published the photograph, Diallo went into hiding, according to a close friend who asked not to be named because he too is gay. Unable to go to the doctor, Diallo stopped taking his anti-retrovirals. By the spring of 2009, he was so ill that his family checked him into St. Jean de Dieu, a Catholic hospital in downtown Thies, says the friend.

He was in a coma when he died at 5:50 a.m. on May 2, 2009, according to the hospital’s records. Although the hospital has a unit dedicated to treating HIV patients, the young man’s family never disclosed his illness, according to the doctor in charge.

Several gay friends tried to see Diallo in the hospital but were told to stay away by his family, says the friend.

When the AP tried to speak to Diallo’s elderly father at his shop on the main thoroughfare in Thies, his other children demanded the reporter leave. One sister covered her face and sobbed. Another said, “There are no homosexuals here.”

Hours after he died, his family took Diallo’s body to a nearby mosque, where custom holds the corpse should be bathed and wrapped in a white cloth. Before the family could bathe him, news reached the mosque that Diallo was gay and they were chased out, says the dead man’s friend. His relatives hastily wrapped him in a sheet and headed to the cemetery, where they carried him past the home of Babacar Sene.

“A man that’s known as being a homosexual can’t be buried in a cemetery. His body needs to be thrown away like trash,” says Sene. “His parents knew that he was gay and they did nothing about it. So when he died we wanted to make sure he was punished.”


Where in this story is the Savior who was crucified? On which side do you think you’ll find him?

In Memoriam: The Internet Monk


Dennis Michael Spencer, the Christian blogger known as the Internet Monk, passed away on April 5 at age 53 after a four-month battle with cancer. He left behind him a devoted community of readers who were inspired and challenged by his “dispatches from the post-evangelical wilderness”.

Michael never shrank from pointing out uncomfortable truths about American Christianity’s militarism, materialism, shallowness, and other distractions from a faith centered on God’s grace and Christ’s saving work. He gave a voice to many people who felt that their church was no longer a safe place to admit that they weren’t perfect. While I had trouble with his conservatism on sexuality and gender, and wish he could have extended his wonderful critique of legalism to include these issues, the work he did is enduring and valuable, and (in my opinion) led by the Holy Spirit.

I’m happy to see that his literary agent, Jeff Dunn, and the guest preachers who filled in on his blog when he became ill, plan to continue the iMonk website and community. Among other projects, they will be promoting his book Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality, forthcoming from WaterBrook Press in September. Pre-order your copy at Amazon.com now.

One of the most popular and representative of Michael’s blog posts was “Wretched Urgency“, in which he confronts Christians’ “guilt-inducing, blood on your hands” panic about making converts. We should be zealous to know Christ and be transformed into his image, Michael says, but a “humble and quiet rest in who God is and what God does” should always come first. God’s grace saves the world, not us.

My personal favorite from the iMonk archives, though, is the 2006 post “I Hear Pepper Talking“. I thought I was the only one who felt compassion for inanimate objects. Without sliding into pantheism, Michael defends his tendency to personification, saying it’s not only a sign of respect for God’s creation, but an ethically useful habit of mind that counteracts our tendency to dehumanize people:

…The smallest thing I ever personified was a packet of pepper. I got it in the cafeteria line and didn’t use it, so I put it in my pocket. When I got ready to throw it away, it said “Please, sir. I was created to be useful to someone’s food. Can’t you give me another chance? Don’t throw me away and waste my life.”…

…If someone were to film our family personifying animals, they would conclude we were several fries short of a happy meal. We enjoy the fun. We’ve passed on this little habit to our kids, and along the way, taught them to think about what they were doing to a toy, or how it felt to be lost and misplaced, or why something given as a gift wants to be shared.

God took the dust of the earth and made human beings. He took a rib and made Eve. These are stories of God making persons out of the impersonal. Capon (via Augustine) says that we are given our meaning in the mind of God, who conceived of us as persons when we were not yet, and had done nothing. He thought of us, as we are at every stage and moment of life, loved us in Jesus, and reconciled himself to us… all before we existed. He delights in us in his own thoughts in perfect grace….and then he makes us persons in his image and in his Son.

We are persons, made in God’s image, only because God gives to us a voice, significance and life. We have life in Christ. His life is the light of men. He gives creation its personal character. We are persons because we reflect our creator, and not just the creation or other beings. We are made persons by God’s personal action to cause us to be, and to be again.

Jesus treated all those he met with love, dignity and compassion. He made persons out of the non-persons in his culture. He included the sinful, the excluded and the dehumanized. Oppressors have always used the process of dehumanization to cement their power over the world, but God causes the downtrodden to be lifted up, the forgotten to be remembered, and the dead to be raised up.

Now we who are loyal to Jesus and worship the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ are person-makers as well. We follow Jesus when we look upon the world and endow it, again, with its God-given character. All that God has created displays dimensions of his being, and the wonderful work of his hands. We do not merely exist, use or consume, but we worship God as stewards and namers of creation. We are creative because we want to take the someTHING and show that it all related to and speaks for someONE.

Most significantly of all, we give voice and significant to other persons in a dehumanizing, empty world. We make persons out of the lonely, the overlooked and the suffering. We refuse to live dumbly and distracted in a world where people are numbers and statistics. We seek to joyfully live and serve in a way that gives human dignity, human respect and God’s love and grace to every person who knows us, works with us or lives with us.

Our personification is ongoing, as God makes us, through the Spirit, more and more like himself. Our giving personal significance to others is ongoing as well. Whether we are parents, teachers, artists, counselors or caregivers, we imitate and obey God when we make those around us more the persons God created of for whom Christ died.


Rest in peace, generous heart.

Dorothea Lasky: “Whatever you paid for that sweater, it was worth it”


Sometimes I have a very specific, weird experience, and am amazed to find that another poet has written about this exact thing. I had this feeling when I came across this poem from Dorothea Lasky’s book AWE on the Wave Books website. For me, it describes the exhilaration, terror, and shame of writing a novel about someone who lives a much wilder life than I do.

When I say that my inner self (or some previously-repressed aspect of it) is a man, and a rather oversexed and sarcastic man at that, what am I saying about the ways that being a woman limits my life? And are those limitations cultural or inherent? In this poem, the woman who is murdered is apparently also set free, “careening back there up into the stars”. Even more than the license to be a sexual adventurer, which I don’t especially want except in fantasy, the freedom from the pressure to be “good” and “nice” seems like a privilege associated with masculinity. At the same time, I am a woman, and I need to find some way to affirm that female energy, or I fall into another type of self-betrayal.

My protagonist is a fashion photographer, and so my book includes some exploration of artifice versus nature, and concealment versus intimacy. I think he’d appreciate the poem’s incongruous title, whose throwaway pop-culture lightness seems to be telling the narrator not to take her lyricism and high drama too seriously. The confession is disavowed even before it’s made.

Whatever you paid for that sweater, it was worth it

Be scared of yourself
The real self
Is very scary.
It is a man
But more importantly
The man is tall
And is everything in you that is an absolute
   reverse of all your actions
In you he will do things and in you no one
   will know the difference
Still the honey and the herb, the bright lights.

The piece of fiscal fish, the lemons,
The blank above with stars will praise you
But he, he puts his legs over frail women
And tries to get to the thing they won’t give up.
Just as true loneliness gets to the very real
   thing in you
Scary or not, is part man for all it is wanting
   and can’t get
To the place where it has married woman, it sits
In a sea of lemons, its tail dragged bloody across
   the floor.

Still, here I do not speak of mutilation.
The real self is not muddy, it is pure
Still here it is a thing of murder
The self comes off itself and murders the woman
   in its path
Her skirts effortlessly careening back there up
   into the stars.

Reprinted by permission of Wave Books. Visit Dorothea Lasky’s page on their website here, to read more poems and to order AWE and her new book Black Life.

Easter Hymn: “Come, Ye Faithful, Raise the Strain”


A belated happy Easter to my readers! (The liturgical season of Easter is actually 50 days long, so this post is not as untimely as it might appear.)

NetHymnal.org has posted a list of 188 Easter hymns, with lyrics and music to sing along. This is one of my favorites. Listen to the melody here.

Come, ye faithful, raise the strain of triumphant gladness;
God hath brought forth Israel into joy from sadness;
Loosed from Pharaoh’s bitter yoke Jacob’s sons and daughters,
Led them with unmoistened foot through the Red Sea waters.

’Tis the spring of souls today; Christ has burst His prison,
And from three days’ sleep in death as a sun hath risen;
All the winter of our sins, long and dark, is flying
From His light, to Whom we give laud and praise undying.

Now the queen of seasons, bright with the day of splendor,
With the royal feast of feasts, comes its joy to render;
Comes to glad Jerusalem, who with true affection
Welcomes in unwearied strains Jesus’ resurrection.

Neither might the gates of death, nor the tomb’s dark portal,
Nor the watchers, nor the seal hold Thee as a mortal;
But today amidst the twelve Thou didst stand, bestowing
That Thy peace which evermore passeth human knowing.

“Alleluia!” now we cry to our King immortal,
Who, triumphant, burst the bars of the tomb’s dark portal;
“Alleluia!” with the Son, God the Father praising,
“Alleluia!” yet again to the Spirit raising.

Holy Week Non-Random Song: Graham Kendrick, “To You O Lord” (Psalm 25)


Not all of Graham Kendrick’s music is my style, but this praise chorus based on Psalm 25 wonderfully uplifts and comforts me. During this Holy Week, when I hear the line “No one whose hope is in you will ever be put to shame,” I think of Jesus’ humiliation on the cross. Because he took on the worst shame, out of love for us, and triumphed over it, we don’t have to be so afraid of any defeat, mockery, or prejudice we encounter in our lives. Not that it doesn’t hurt, in the moment, but we should remember that God’s love for us is more significant than any human judgments.

(Copyrighted lyrics available on Graham Kendrick’s official website, and in the video.)

I’ll be vacationing without my computer this weekend, so no more blogging for a few days. Have a blessed Easter and Passover, everyone.

Shantideva: “The Way of the Bodhisattva”


I came across this poem in the latest monthly newsletter from the Insight Meditation Center of Pioneer Valley, the Buddhist center that my husband attends. Although I believe that evil is real and has consequences in this lifetime and beyond, Christians sometimes get hung up on hellfire, neglecting to ponder how God’s infinite love and compassion are stronger than any sin. That is, after all, what we’re supposed to be celebrating this Easter weekend. The Christian equivalent of this poem may be the Harrowing of Hell, a doctrine that’s been obscured in the modern West but still part of the Eastern Orthodox celebration of Easter.

Moreover, I think it’s good to wish that all living beings will be saved, whether or not we feel secure about asserting universalism as a doctrine. If we could spend more time contemplating visions like Shantideva’s, and less time dwelling on images of divine punishment (eternal or otherwise), we might find it easier to love our neighbors as ourselves.

The Way of the Bodhisattva

Throughout the spheres and reaches of the world,
In hellish states wherever they may be,
May beings fettered there, tormented,
Taste the bliss and peace of Sukhavati.

May those caught in the freezing ice be warmed,
And from the massing clouds of bodhisattvas’ prayers
May torrents rain in boundless streams
To cool those burning in infernal fires.

May forests where the leaves are blades and swords
Become sweet groves and pleasant woodland glades.
And may the trees of miracles appear,
Supplanting those upon the hill of shalmali.

And may the very pits of hell be sweet
With fragrant pools all perfumed with the scent of lotuses,
Be lovely with the cries of swan and goose
And water fowl so pleasing to the ear.

May fiery coals turn into heaps of jewels,
The burning ground become a crystal floor,
The crushing hills celestial abodes,
Adorned with offerings, the dwelling place of buddhas.

May the hail of lava, fiery stones, and weapons
Henceforth become a rain of blossom.
May those whose hell it is to fight and wound
Be turned to lovers offering their flowers.

And those engulfed in fiery Vaitarani,
Their flesh destroyed, their bones bleached white as kunda flowers,
May they, through all my merit’s strength, have godlike forms,
And sport with goddesses in Mandakini’s peaceful streams.

(Excerpt from Shantideva’s Dedication in No Time to Lose: A Timely Guide to the Way of the Bodhisattva by Pema Chodron, pp.343-45.)

Palm Sunday Non-Random Song: “My Song Is Love Unknown”


This is one of my favorite hymns for Holy Week. Both the music and the lyrics are complex, and the message goes straight to the heart. Words by Samuel Crossman (1624-1683), tune by John Ireland (1879-1962). Sing along at Oremus Hymnal, an online version of the 1982 Episcopal Hymnal.

Here’s an intimate, low-key performance by Barbara Dickson, against the beautiful backdrop of Lindisfarne island.

My song is love unknown,
my Savior’s love to me,
love to the loveless shown
that they might lovely be.
O who am I
that for my sake
my Lord should take
frail flesh and die?

He came from his blest throne
salvation to bestow,
but men made strange, and none
the longed-for Christ would know.
But O my friend,
my friend indeed,
who at my need,
his life did spend.

Sometimes they strew his way,
and his strong praises sing,
resounding all the day
hosannas to their King.
Then “Crucify!”
is all their breath,
and for his death
they thirst and cry.

Why, what hath my Lord done?
What makes this rage and spite?
He made the lame to run,
he gave the blind their sight.
Sweet injuries!
Yet they at these
themselves displease,
and ‘gainst him rise.

They rise, and needs will have
my dear Lord made away;
a murderer they save,
the Prince of Life they slay.
Yet steadfast he
to suffering goes,
that he his foes
from thence might free.

Here might I stay and sing,
no story so divine:
never was love, dear King,
never was grief like thine.
This is my friend,
in whose sweet praise
I all my days
could gladly spend.

Deliverance Takes Many Forms


“Change is possible,” goes one common slogan of the ex-gay movement. Survivors of so-called reparative therapy counter that while behavioral self-control may be possible, changing one’s core identity is not. For every anecdote that my conservative friends can share about someone who’s been “delivered” from homosexuality, I can point to another testimony from someone who only found peace in their relationship with God after accepting themselves as a same-gender-loving individual.

A similar debate is occurring in a discussion thread at Gay Christian Fellowship, a new website for open and affirming evangelicals. The site’s lead author, Pastor Weekly, shared a video of a woman performing her poem about being freed from lesbianism, hoping to provoke discussion. Some commenters responded that the only deliverance they needed was from the closet, while another visitor respectfully supported the ex-gay poet. A commenter identified as “Kudo451” made these wise observations:

…[A]s deliverance goes I think it is just as unfair for us to assume that her claims of having been delivered are doubtful based on our experience. I am a gay man but I have meet and have friends who are straight or even bi, that have been delivered from a gay lifestyle. Just as I know gay men and women who have been delivered from a straight life style. We are talking about human beings and once we take off the blinders of gender identity and sexuality and even abuse and trauma, you begin to realize that anything is possible.

The problem with most people who claim deliverance from anything is the assumption that what they have been delivered from is bad for everyone’s life. Yet just because God heals a blind man doesn’t mean that such a man has the right to accuse every other blind person of leading a sinful life that cannot glorify God unless they are healed as well. Nor should he accuse those who go blind in life of sinning while using their blindness as proof. I think that is what Jesus spoke of when he spoke of the Eunuchs and also when he spoke of the sick. Prior to Jesus most people felt that anyone who wasn’t “normal” was assumed to be either caught in their own sin or caught in some generational or family related sin (curse). It was Jesus who really changed that sort of thinking for all of Western Civilization, including the heathen.

Sign up for a free site membership to join the discussion. I also recommend their weekly “Voice of GCF” podcasts, which feature in-depth Bible teachings, commentary on current events, and interviews.