Author Archives: Jendi Reiter

Prop 8 Update: Stay Tuned for 2010 Pro-Equality Ballot Measure


In a disappointing but not unexpected move, the California Supreme Court today upheld the validity of Proposition 8, the California ballot measure that restricted marriage to heterosexual couples. However, the court also upheld the legality of the 18,000 same-sex marriages performed in California between May 2008, when the court granted equal marriage rights, and November 2008, when the voters took them away again by a narrow 52%-48% majority. According to the New York Times report (emphasis mine):

The opinion focused on whether the use of a voter initiative to narrow constitutional rights under Proposition 8 went too far.

Supporters of same-sex marriage, who filed several suits challenging the proposition, argued that the change to the state’s constitution was so fundamental that the initiative was not an amendment to the constitution but a “revision,” a term for measures that rework core constitutional principles.

Revisions, under California law, cannot be decided through a simple signature drive and majority vote, which is what led to Proposition 8; they can only be placed on the ballot with a two-thirds vote by the legislature.

But the justices said the proposition was an amendment, not a revision. It has historically been rare for the state’s courts to overturn initiatives on the ground that they are actually revisions, and many legal scholars deemed the challenge against Proposition 8 a long shot….

…In questions that clearly anticipated the logic of today’s majority
opinion, the justices had seemed to be seeking a middle ground that
would allow the rights they had affirmed the year before to be
preserved in the form of civil unions, which would be different from
marriage in name only. Justice Kennard suggested that the substantive
rights of gays were the same after the proposition, and all that had
changed was “the label of marriage.”

That distinction was deeply
dissatisfying to Mr. Minter, representing the plaintiffs, who argued
that without the right to the word “marriage,” same-sex couples would
find “our outsider status enshrined in our Constitution.”

Chief
Justice George’s opinion dealt directly with that point, stating that
the court understood the importance of the word marriage and was not
trying to diminish it. However, he wrote, the legal right of people to
call themselves married is only one of the rights granted to same-sex
couples in the decision last May, and so “it is only the designation of
marriage — albeit significant–that has been removed by this
initiative measure.”

Karl Manheim, a professor at Loyola Law
School in Los Angeles, called the decision a “safe” position written by
justices who can be recalled by voters. The change wrought by
Proposition 8 was anything but narrow, he said, and claiming that the
word marriage was essentially symbolic was like telling black people
that sitting in the back of the bus was not important as long as the
front and back of the bus arrive at the same time.


The Courage Campaign, a California-based GLBT activist group, is gearing up to propose a 2010 ballot measure that would restore same-sex marriage. Click here to watch their new TV ad (a shorter version of the Regina Spektor “Fidelity” video that they aired earlier this year) and donate. Go here to donate to Equality California and see a video of Marriage Director Marc Solomon (formerly of MassEquality) discussing their strategy to win marriage back.

“Blogging for Truth” Week: Writing the Truths of GLBT Lives


Blogging for Truth is a project initiated by Rebecca Campbell. This week, GLBT bloggers and allies are invited to write articles sharing the truths of our lives and/or debunking hateful myths spread by anti-gay religious leaders and politicians.

As Pontius Pilate famously asked, “What is truth?” Who gets to tell it, and about whom? The debate between affirming and non-affirming Christians is fundamentally about the relationship of truth to power. For that reason, it should concern all Christians, whether or not they have a personal stake in GLBT rights.

The way I see it, one side has an egalitarian model of truth-telling, and the other, an authoritarian model. This leads to different ways of resolving the apparent conflict between anti-gay Biblical texts and the evidence of positive, loving, spiritually fruitful gay partnerships.

Some conservatives address the problem by redefining what homosexuality is. It’s an immoral choice, it’s a curable neurosis, it’s a perversion. It has to be, because the text says so.

This is the rhetorical move that frightens me. “We know you better than you know yourself: your love is only lust, your identity is confusion, and if you can’t change, it’s because you’re not trying hard enough.” Basically, the conservative church is saying to GLBT people that they can’t trust their own perceptions of reality, even concerning the contents of their own minds and the feelings in their bodies.

To me, that sounds like the first step toward mental illness, as well as an open door for all kinds of physical and emotional abuse. The virtue of humility is not the same as radical self-doubt. The former restores the individual to his or her proper place in a community of others with equally valid rights and feelings. The latter makes him or her a slave of other human beings–because, of course, he or she is not allowed to doubt their ability to perceive the truth.

Other conservatives would acknowledge that same-sex orientation may be innate and unchangeable, but they argue that the Bible calls all people so afflicted to live celibately. This position at least avoids the necessity of spreading misinformation about GLBT sexuality, but it’s still a variation of the same power grab discussed above.

Here, human authority figures are “discerning a vocation” for an entire class of people, without knowing anything about their unique gifts or what call they themselves have heard from God. Instead of undermining their confidence in their everyday sense perceptions, the church is undermining GLBT Christians’ power to communicate with God directly, without human intermediaries–the essence of Protestantism, I might add.

There is simply no support in Scripture for the notion that God created two classes of people, one able to reinterpret old traditions in response to God’s self-revelation in their lives, the other forced to defer to second-hand interpretations. On the contrary, the New Testament in particular is a record of hermeneutic revolution, as all sorts of marginalized people are suddenly speaking for God in ways that confound the religious authorities. “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings”–and eunuchs, women, Gentiles, slaves and demoniacs. St. Paul, who spent the first half of his life persecuting the church that he died for, is an unlikely role model for the “We Haven’t Changed” crowd.

If same-sex couples are not supposed to be capable of discerning that their relationships are a conduit for God’s grace, it calls into question their entire ability to perceive God’s presence or God’s will. Again, the Bible doesn’t support this radical suspicion of one’s own experience (see, e.g., Luke 1:1-4, 1 John 1:1-4). In the New Testament, personal testimony is frequently prioritized over abstract reasoning from texts and traditions. The gospel writers are, in effect, asking their fellow Jews to credit their eyewitness accounts ahead of centuries-old beliefs about monotheism and the messiah. There isn’t a sense that we must avoid error by enforcing a presumption against change. “Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (1 John 4:1); “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good” (1 Thess. 5:21). Taking personal responsibility for our faith commitments in this way keeps our potential sin and error always before our eyes, which leads to day-by-day conscious dependence on God’s grace.

The validity of personal testimony has political implications. It radically equalizes everyone who claims to speak for God. Spiritual hierarchy seems disfavored in the Gospels. Thus, I would suggest, any theological position (such as the refusal to reexamine apparently anti-gay texts in light of evidence that they cause suffering to innocent people) that creates a hierarchy of access to God should be viewed with suspicion.

Because Jesus was acutely aware of the social position of everyone he addressed, so should we be. To say that truth is situational is not to say that it is relative. Rather, it is to recognize that we cannot truly pass judgment on another’s actions without considering the power relations between us. Do we really know the truth about this person, unclouded by our own fears and desires, and do we have the right to speak it–to speak about them or for them, without questioning how we got that power?

All of us “Bloggers for Truth” have stories we can tell about our own partnerships or those of our parents, teachers, pastors and friends–all GLBT people whose lives have been touched by the Spirit. But we also have to make the Scriptural case that stories are truths, on a par with or superior to the truths of abstract reasoning, at least when it comes to practical ethics. Time and time again I hear anti-gay Christians argue that we are biased by our personal desires (either lust or pride) while they are merely following “what the Bible says”. Their epistemology doesn’t allow for scrutiny of the human element in interpretation, nor of their own emotional biases, because they need the Bible to remain magically exempt from the human condition of partiality and uncertainty.

Truth-as-objectivity is a modernist position, and ironically, one that has historically been used against religious believers since the Enlightenment. Religion’s despisers have argued that the “truths” of religion are tainted by emotion, not universally accessible, not severable from the accidental personal history of the believer. This is supposedly in contrast to the self-evident truths of reason (whether scientific or philosophical), which should not vary based on the identity of the observer.

In response, postmodern Christian authors such as Lesslie Newbigin and Luigi Giussani have argued that all knowledge is situated knowledge, and that in fact it would be inappropriate to approach so personal a matter as one’s spiritual destiny as if one had no personal stake in it. We find truth not by suppressing awareness of our own position, Giussani writes in The Religious Sense, but by cultivating humble openness to whatever the quest for truth reveals, i.e. by letting reality speak to us instead of telling it what it must be: “Love the truth of an object more than your attachment to the opinions you have already formed about it.”

If there is a legitimate Christian argument against affirming same-sex relationships, it can’t be that texts trump experience, or that the impersonal is superior to the personal. Tying ourselves to the mast of that sinking modernist ship means giving up on religion’s claim to truth. Somewhere, Pilate is laughing.  

Laraine Herring on Writing Practice and Self-Knowledge


Kore Press, a highly regarded feminist literary publisher, hosts the Persephone Speaks online forum on women and literature. In April’s entry, author and educator Laraine Herring discusses writing as a spiritual practice and why we resist it:

I’ve had students complain to me that they aren’t writing enough, and when I ask them if they’re writing, they say, “Well, no…” To this I respond: writing begets writing. There is no way to write but to write. There are no tricks, though there are plenty of diversions. One of the points I make in my book The Writing Warrior is that any structure someone provides for your writing, or any structure you create yourself, is only as useful as your ability to work freely within it and to stay centered and focused. The structure or the concept doesn’t make the writing work. Your discipline, practice and flexibility make it work. When structure of any kind (relationship, job, religion, writing, city) becomes a prison, it’s time to move on.

Now, what writing practice does is illuminate. It yanks out into the open everything that the writer has been trying not to look at. And so the writer goes away. This is normal, but a book about writing, or a class about writing, can’t address the nuts and bolts without addressing the real reason writing is hard. It holds up a mirror to your own demons. It dares you to look, dares you further to write about it, then dares you even further to share it publicly. Yeah, is it too late to change majors to something safer like Pyrotechnics in the Middle East?

Writing practice brings up your limitations. This is a gift, not a problem. The more you know about what you do and why, the more room you have to make authentic decisions. Writing practice shows you your belief systems about yourself, your family, your world. It shows you where you need to be right and where you feel invisible.

Writing, for Herring (and for me), has some parallels to meditation. Both practices help us cultivate non-attachment to fixed concepts, replacing them with open-ended interest in whatever actually occupies our minds. And both are made more difficult by the common fear of discovering that our true selves are “unacceptable”.

That’s why, these days, the intentionally Christian aspect of my writing is more about process than content. The two are intertwined, of course, because until the experience of grace and forgiveness becomes more embedded in my consciousness, my novel characters won’t be able to reach that same resolution in their lives. However, I’ve tried to shelve the perpetual question “Is this preaching the gospel?” In an odd way, last year, the agenda of “the gospel” came to feel like a false artifact, a mask of God, no different from the manufactured images that are my fashion-photographer protagonist’s stock-in-trade. He and I despaired of finding The Real. But don’t worry, because we both have a short attention span for sitting on the pity pot, eventually we’ll grow bored with that and commit to some imperfect instantiation of the divine. Or as he would say, get over yourself, girl.

Donal Mahoney: “The Man Who Lives in the Gym”


The Man Who Lives in the Gym

    St. Procopius College
    after World War II

The man who lives in the gym
sleeps in a nook up the stairs
to the rear. Since Poland
he’s slept there, his tools
bright in a box locked

under his bed. At noon bells
call him down to the stones
that weave under oaks to the abbey
where he at long table takes
meals with the others
the monks have left in

for a week, or a month, or a year
or forever, whatever
the need. The others all know
that in Poland his wife
had been skewered, his children
partitioned, that he had escaped

in a freight car of hams.
So when Brother brings in, on a gun
metal tray, orange sherbet for all
in little green dishes,
they blink at his smile,
they join in his laughter.

first published in The Davidson Miscellany, Vol. 7 No. 2, 1972
Davidson, NC


William “Wild Bill” Taylor: “The Newborn Mother’s Eye”


(For Calvin Ramsey)

 

Tell me Colonel Sawbones,

 

did you ever see a new mother hold her son fresh;

from the battle of natural delivery;

 

where she places him to her full breast,

this emblem of love,

on her sweating chest;

 

you, Daddy Warbucks, so willing to

sacrifice other babies, for your lying

doctrines of truth, justice, and the

 

American way?

 

I say to you again,

 

did you ever see a new mother, as she watches her son

crawl for the first time?

 

screaming in delight as he and his new puppy

scamper close to your DMZ,

 

when the summertime brought the lightning

bugs for a silent communion with the eternal,

 

and her only child learned to eat

watermelon without swallowing the seeds,

 

And this mother knew,

 

it could not last beyond the next war cloud on the horizon;

her only son’s life was not worth the dog tags given him,

 

by all of us;

 

While tin sabers rattled,

and we invented enemies who did not look like us.

 

While pretty little Pentagon cheerleaders sang, “Hit em,

Hit em, Hit em harder, if artillery can’t do it, napalm
can!”

 

Tell me, Colonel Sawbones,

 

did you ever see a new mother as she watched her son came home

on silent weeping,

 

zipped up in a plastic body bag,

so shiny and final,

placed itself in front of her,

 

while she,

 

could not believe her eyes,

 

that her friends and neighbors had come like

a thief in the night

 

to take her only child away,

and ship him to a far off to a foreign

trench,

 

when they, themselves,

 

held barren wombs,

and pot bellied mouths,

 

for there is no cause so just,

no battle so, won,

no defeat, so singed,

 

that can replace this look,

 

in the newborn mother’s eye…

New York City Days


Greetings, loyal readers…I’m back from a wonderful vacation and novel-research trip to New York City, where I immersed myself in the world of fashion photography. Hidden treasure of the week: the photography section at the Strand Bookstore, which surpasses even the International Center of Photography gift shop. Speaking of ICP, their Richard Avedon retrospective was a gorgeous tour through 60 years of changes in female roles and beauty standards. Kudos also to the Conde Nast Library for the research assistance and unlimited free color photocopies. (Did we really wear such sensible clothes in the 1990s? I was surprised at how little skin was showing.) Jordan Schaps of C.O.D. Inc. (Creatives on Demand), formerly the creative director of New York Magazine, generously shared anecdotes and information to make my plot more accurate.

On Sunday I attended services at the Metropolitan Community Church, an ecumenical Christian denomination that was founded in 1968 to serve the GLBT community. Visit their In Our Own Words website to learn more about MCC worldwide. The NYC parish’s website is here. I loved this church’s mix of positive features from different traditions. The service followed a simplified version of the Episcopal liturgy, with lectionary Bible readings and communion, while the praise band played joyful, jazzed-up versions of evangelical standards, such as “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder I’ll Be There”. At communion, the prayer team laid hands on each of us and prayed for us individually. Their dynamic preacher, Rev. Pat Bumgardner, spoke about the inseparable connection between love and truth. Visit their YouTube channel for some videos of Rev. Pat and other affirming Christian speakers.

On Sunday afternoon, I attended a rally for equal marriage rights in New York State. The governor’s bill has passed the Assembly, but we’re concerned that the Senate won’t act on it before the June recess. If you’re a New York voter, call your senator today. The Empire State Pride Agenda website has information on how to get involved.

This NY Times article suggests that opposition groups have been overextended by the sudden expansion of equal marriage in Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire and Iowa. I know Schadenfreude is very un-Christian, but I think this paragraph says all you need to know about the “family values” crowd:

The state’s Roman Catholic bishops have been somewhat distracted, too, having focused their lobbying energies this session on defeating a bill that would extend the statute of limitations for victims of sexual abuse to bring civil claims, and have appeared unprepared for the battle over marriage.

Yesterday, I also had the pleasure of meeting Steve Parelli, executive director of Other Sheep, which ministers to GLBT Christians in the US, Latin America, and East Africa. Steve and I shared our experiences of how the closeted life harms the families of gays and lesbians, too. A former American Baptist pastor who was expelled from the ministry when he came out, Steve is going to be ordained at MCCNY later this month.

Blog Love for Ariana Reines: Interviews and Readings Online


Ariana Reines. What can I say? If she were a band, I’d follow her around like a Deadhead. I would name a beef-flavored ice cream after her. But that would probably freak her out, so instead, here are some links to her awesomeness online so you can see for yourself.

The poet Thomas Moore interviewed her on his blog in 2007, after her book The Cow was published by Fence Books. Moore says, “To refer to The Cow, as poetry, seems rather reductive – it feels more like a living creature. Using the cold, clinical language of the abattoir, mixed with a fragmented cut-up of various characters – Reines has sculpted a multi-faceted yet cohesive voice that forces the reader into avenues of sex, scat and violence. Words don’t do this thing justice.” Here, Reines speaks about the freedom from self-consciousness that so inspired me in her work:

I want to say something about bad writing. I’m proud of my bad writing. Everyone is so intelligent lately, and stylish. Fucking great. I am proud of Philip Guston’s bad painting, I am proud of Baudelaire’s mamma’s boy goo goo misery. Sometimes the lurid or shitty means having a heart, which’s something you have to try to have. Excellence nowadays is too general and available to be worth prizing: I am interested in people who have to find strange and horrible ways to just get from point a to point b.

This hour-long video shows Ariana reading at the Holloway Series in Poetry, UC Berkeley, in April 2008:

And this half-hour radio program was first broadcast on KCRW’s “Bookworm” program, also last April.

Time to End “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”: Lt. Dan Choi’s Story

Army Lt. Dan Choi, an Iraq War veteran and Arab linguist, is just one of the 12,500 American military personnel discharged for being honest about their sexual orientation in the 15 years since the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy was signed into law by President Clinton. Choi is facing a dishonorable discharge because he came out on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show last March. Official Pentagon policy views this as the equivalent of “homosexual conduct”. That’s right, according to the DOD, telling the truth is bad for morale. I guess that explains why George Bush always looked so happy.

Here, Choi returns to Maddow’s show, along with Armed Services Committee member Rep. Joe Sestak, to urge President Obama to repeal this policy as soon as possible. Visit the Courage Campaign’s website to sign their petition to the president.


 

Cyril and Priscilla Defend Traditional Marriage


Parodies of the National Organization for Marriage “There’s a Storm Gathering” advertisement are still proliferating on YouTube. The ad is such a spur to creativity that one could almost hope for NOM to release more of them, were it not for the fact that their scare-mongering tactics could actually convince people to take away our families’ rights.

Meanwhile, always alert for that silver lining behind the storm cloud, my friend Greg and I were inspired to make our own video with our new friends “Cyril” and “Priscilla”:

Here are some more of our favorites from the web:



Mark D. Hart: “Planting Garlic”


Mark D. Hart, a Buddhist meditation teacher and award-winning poet, read the poem below at the Karuna Center in Northampton last year, at a 20th anniversary celebration for the Northampton Insight Meditation Community. It was first published in the October 2008 issue of Midwest Quarterly. He’s kindly permitted me to reprint it on this blog. Read Mark’s Honorable Mention prize poem from the 2007 Winning Writers War Poetry Contest here.

Planting Garlic

I love to imagine the first blind rootings
in gravity’s dark light, the sodden waiting,
the slow ignition of their tiny green rockets

as I bury their pink-skinned cheeks in the
corpse-cold ground, soon freezing to stone.
My neighbor says the mounded beds look like

freshly dug graves. He’s right—I am
an undertaker for the living, consigning innocents
to birth not death, though

not every womb is warm. Let this planting
stand for all inhospitable beginnings,
for what shivers unseen awaiting its chance.

Foot to shovel, back to wind, sky dour with
coming rain, crows squawking, a few creaking pines,
the hoarse whisper of corn stalks blowing,

their dry matter to be thrown on the pile—
I could work up a good sweat of melancholy here
if wonder were not constantly interrupting.

I’m fifty. I take no comfort in the rites of religion.
Let me see the miracle before me,
the one I too am.

Let planting bring me to my knees.