Category Archives: Notable Quotes

Prisons Withhold Medical Care to Coerce Inmates Into Snitching


The FACTS Education Fund, also known as Families to Amend California’s Three Strikes, just sent me this newsletter about coercive withholding of medical care from prisoners in Segregated Housing Units (SHU). The SHU is a form of restricted or solitary confinement imposed on prisoners who are accused of gang connections, which often happens based on secret evidence or arbitrary prison politics. Once there, prisoners are put under enormous pressure to “debrief”, or inform on other suspected gang members to prison officials. This report from American RadioWorks, “Locked Down: Gangs in the Supermax“, gives more background on this process.

In the FACTS newsletter, Alfred Sandoval, a prisoner in California’s Pelican Bay SHU, describes why he joined last year’s hunger strike to improve prison conditions. Sandoval reports that guards withheld family visits and essential medical care from terminally ill prisoners to pressure them to debrief. An excerpt:

A few years ago, a close friend – his name was Jimmy – developed cancer. The medical staff, MTAs and RNs, explained that if he’d debrief, become an informant, he would receive better medical care. Now Jimmy and I had known each other since we were teenagers running the streets of East Los Angeles getting high and living the lifestyle that ended up with both of us in prison for life.

As Jimmy’s cancer grew worse, he began chemotherapy. Jimmy mentioned to me how the IGI would “show up” at the clinic and comment that he could have contact visits with his wife before he died if he’d debrief. He refused but that’s how he found out the cancer was terminal! Jimmy loved his wife more than anything and he wouldn’t tell her everything about the head games and bullshit like waking up from surgery still under anesthesia being questioned by IGI, but I had warned him of that because it happened to me and at least three other prisoners.

After one of the surgeries, Jimmy was returned to his cell after a brief stay at the Pelican Bay prison infirmary. Those cells are completely bare except for a bed and all you can do is lay there and wait. On the second night back in his cell, he awoke to a bad pain. He said it was a little after 2 a.m. and the staples had opened along his abdomen and he was bleeding. He was holding his intestines in, calling for the C/O. The C/O came and saw the blood and said he’d call the RN on duty.

The C/O came back approximately 30 minutes later with a roll of toilet paper. Jimmy was sitting on the blood-covered cement floor holding a towel soaked in blood against his stomach. The cop tossed Jimmy the toilet paper and said the medical staff would not come until the next shift and there was nothing he could do. Jimmy held his stomach closed in pain until almost 6 a.m. when the medical finally came and they rushed him to the hospital. He asked that I keep it to myself because that was his style.

I was pissed! He had requested two hardship transfers to Corcoran because of its medical facility and he’d be able to see his wife and family more before he died. Both were denied and he was told to debrief and then he’d be transferred but he steadfastly refused. The cancer spread and the gang unit increased the head games, telling the medical staff to confiscate his shaded prescription glasses. But luckily, a Dr. Williams stepped in and told the medical staff to leave Jimmy alone as he was at end stage cancer. Jimmy chose to stop the chemotherapy and die. We’d talk through a steel door and discuss everything and nothing and plan out his funeral. He died in December of 2010 and I am proud and honored to have been his friend.

Shortly after Jimmy’s death, I was told that approximately eight of the older prisoners had been approved for transfer to the SHU medical facility at New Folsom, but the gang unit had those transfers stopped citing that those prisoners, all in their 60s and 70s, had not successfully completed the debriefing, thereby issuing a death sentence to all of these prisoners and denying adequate medical care.

Make a donation to FACTS to help end these human rights abuses. You can write Mr. Sandoval a letter of support at: Alfred Sandoval, D-61000, Pelican Bay State Prison, P.O. Box 7500, Crescent City, CA 95532.

Massachusetts Three-Strikes Sentencing Bill Draws Criticism


Hat tip once again to Lois Ahrens at The Real Cost of Prisons, who sent me more articles and a factsheet from Families Against Mandatory Minimums about three-strikes sentencing.

Here’s FAMM’s summary of how the legislation currently pending in the Massachusetts statehouse would change our existing three-strikes law:

Current law: Requires maximum sentence for any felony conviction if defendant was previously sentenced twice to three or more years in prison. Parole is possible after serving half of maximum sentence.

Bills passed in November: The House and Senate both passed habitual offender bills. Both bills rewrite the existing habitual-offender law and add a new section to the law. In other words, both bills provide two different ways to prosecute someone as an habitual offender.

How bills would change ‘3-strikes’ law House bill

■Option 1 — changes to existing law:
• Removes requirement that prior felony convictions must result in prison sentence of at least three years. As a result, any two felony convictions that result in any sentence to state prison (could be as little as one year) would count as first two “strikes.” Any felony conviction would count as third strike, resulting in maximum sentence possible.
• Pushes back parole-eligibility date until two-thirds of maximum sentence has been served.
■ Option 2 — new section:
• Creates a list of about 60 dangerous or serious offenses, more finally tuned list than Senate’s.
• Like Senate bill, all three offenses must be from the list, although sentences for first two offenses must have been to state prison.
• Like Senate bill, defendant gets maximum sentence possible for third offense, with no parole. Critics say this section, as with the Senate bill, offers no access to parole.

Senate bill
■Option 1 — changes to existing law:
• Pushes back parole-eligibility date until two-thirds of maximum sentence has been served.
■ Option 2 — new section:
• Creates list of about 60 offenses; most — but not all — are dangerous or serious.
• All three offenses must be from the list.
• Sentences for the first two offenses could have been as little as one day in jail or prison.
• Defendant gets maximum sentence possible for third offense with no parole.
Critics say this section is problematic because it would include those who received very short sentences for the first two “strikes” due to a minor role in the offense or other mitigating factors. Also, critics say, the section offers no access to parole.

****

This article by Lisa Redmond, from the Feb. 22 Lowell Sun newspaper, lays out the background and arguments for and against the legislation:

The state’s former corrections commissioner is blasting a proposed bill that could restrict parole and increase sentences for three-time convicted felons, saying the law is too broad and an overreaction to high-profile crimes.

“We are driven by high-profile crimes and our sympathy toward victims, but individual mistakes in judgment cannot be cured by systematic reform,” said Kathleen Dennehy, former commissioner of the state Department of Correction….

…One of the criticisms of both the House and Senate bills is that there is no room for judges to consider mitigating factors, essentially handcuffing judges to specific sentences, Dennehy said.

Critics have also described the law an overreaction to the December 2010 murder of Woburn Police Officer John Maguire.

Maguire, a Wilmington resident, was killed in a shootout during a botched jewelry-store heist with career criminal Dominic Cinelli, who had been released on parole despite receiving three life sentences for various crimes.

Maguire’s murder triggered an outcry from the public to fire members of the state Parole Board who released Cinelli on parole. The board has since been revamped and members replaced by Gov. Deval Patrick.

“The death of Officer Maguire was more like a wake-up call than an overreaction,” said Laurie Myers, spokeswoman for Community Voices, a victim-advocacy group.

Myers, of Chelmsford, noted that the three-strikes bill was filed in response to the Maguire murder and the 1999 slaying of Melissa Gosule at the hands of a repeat offender who was released from prison.

“Our communities are not equipped to handle violent criminals and suggesting that they are is not only irresponsible it’s dangerous,” Myers said.

“The number one priority of the Legislature should be to protect our communities, not find excuses when they fail, or choose to make other budget items a priority,” she said.

State Rep. Kevin Murphy, of Lowell, who is also a defense attorney, said, “This is a reasonable piece of legislation.”

While opponents of the law have stirred the debate by saying that convictions for minor offenses will count as strikes, Murphy said that’s not the case.

“The list has very serious crimes,” Murphy said. The crimes include: rape, assault and battery on a child or elderly causing serious injury, and armed assault in a dwelling.

In his State of the Commonwealth address last month, Patrick said he supports a “balanced bill” that has “some reforms on the habitual offender” to be “as tough as we should be on the worst of the worst.”

Opponents fear the law would result in increasing a prison population that is already bursting at the seams, with taxpayers footing the bill.

The Center for Church and Prison estimates the three strikes law would trigger an increase of more than 1,500 more prisoners each year or $125 million a year to the state’s $1 billion-per-year corrections’ budget.
…

Read the whole article here.

****
In the Worcester Telegram, Clive McFarlane’s Feb. 17 editorial contends that three-strikes will permanently condemn people who could have been rehabilitated:

Jamie Domiano-Ayers’ husband was an addict and, as a result, she became one, too.

And when her husband landed in jail, she said, she had to come up with the money to satisfy her addiction.

She did, illegally, compiling a rap sheet between her mid-20s and early 30s that included convictions on assault and battery with dangerous weapons and breaking-and-entering charges.

But today, Ms. Domiano-Ayers, 49, has recovered from that dark period of her life.

She talked of her successful drug treatment, of her educational attainment — an associate’s degree in business administration in 2004 and her current pursuit of an associate’s degree in human services.

She is also proud that she has helped raise her five children to lead strong and productive lives.

But successful rehabilitation stories such as hers will likely occur a lot less in the future if Massachusetts lawmakers push through a “three strikes” bill that dramatically increases jail time for repeat criminal offenders, according to several speakers at a forum Wednesday at St. Andrew the Apostle Church on Spaulding Street.

According to speakers at the forum, a legislative conference committee is weighing two versions of a three strikes bill, both of which would increase the types of crimes for which an offender could be sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Tatum Pritchard, a lawyer with Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, said 688 infractions are classified as felonies in Massachusetts. Under current law, a third conviction on any of these felonies could draw the maximum sentence, with or without parole opportunities, she said.

Under the Senate’s version of the bill, 59 of the 688 felonies would draw maximum sentences, including 22 felonies that would draw life sentences. The sentences for these 59 felonies would be served without parole.

Currently, according to Ms. Prichard, only a murder conviction carries life without parole in the state.

The House version of the three strikes law reduces the number of felonies that carry maximum sentences without parole to 55, removing four that lawmakers felt were not serious enough offenses to meet such harsh penalties.

Ms. Pritchard said her organization is pushing to remove at least nine more low-level felonies from the list of 55.

She also noted that under current law, a defendant must serve three years or more in state prison before any of his convictions qualifies under the three strikes law.

However, under the House bill, that incarceration period for each conviction would be reduced to one day or more in state prison.

More significantly, qualifying conviction time for three strikes offenses that carry the maximum sentences without parole has been reduced to one day or more in a state prison in the House bill and to one day or more in any facility in the Senate bill.

“This means that people who have only spent a day or two in a county jail and who have never been to state prison can now get the maximum sentence without parole on a third conviction,” Ms. Prichard said.

She is also troubled that unlike the three strikes law in other states such as California, the bills before the Massachusetts Legislature remove judges’ discretion from sentencing.

That means the state’s 14 district attorneys would have the upper hand in these cases, she said.

Ms. Domiano-Ayers, who is now a member of the Ex-Prisoners and Prisoners Organizing for Community Advancement board of directors, said she is skeptical that prosecutors would show much empathy for a defendant with low-level convictions such as hers.

“If these bills were the law of the land years ago, I would have been put away for 10 years and that would have had a devastating impact on my family,” she said. “My children more than likely would have been placed in foster care, and there is no telling what would have happened to them.”

Critics of the bills say they are not asking lawmakers to be soft on crime, but for them to check the abundance of available research on three strikes law and to listen to both sides before making a decision, steps legislators seem unwilling to take, according to Benjamin Thompson, executive director of the Criminal Justice Policy Coalition in Boston. He who spoke at Wednesday’s forum.

“They (legislators) are people of good will who have made a bad decision by pushing public policy that was developed and crafted on emotion alone,” he said.

He is right, but there is still time for lawmakers to act rationally. There are too many lives at stake for them not to listen to both sides on this issue.

Gay News Roundup: Marriage Advances, Teens Struggle


First, the good news: Marriage equality is advancing. Gov. Christine Gregoire signed legislation this past Monday that will make Washington State the seventh in the nation to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples. On the other side of the continent, the New Jersey legislature passed a gay marriage bill, only to have it vetoed by Republican Gov. Chris Christie. Proponents of equality have until December 2013 to try to gather enough votes for an override. Meanwhile, the Maryland House of Delegates narrowly passed a marriage equality bill yesterday, which the Senate and the Governor are expected to approve.

So, it gets better, right? Well, yes and no. GLBT teens in non-affirming communities are still extremely vulnerable. They’re bearing the brunt of the right-wing backlash against the integration of gay and lesbian adults into mainstream institutions.

This month Rolling Stone published a must-read feature article about the teen suicide epidemic in Minnesota’s Anoka-Hennepin school district, whose Congressional representative happens to be Mrs. Ex-Gay Therapy, Michele Bachmann. The district’s policy against discussing homosexuality prevents them from cracking down on anti-gay bullying, with fatal results. High school freshman Justin Aaberg’s story is one heartbreaking example:

…In April, Justin came home from school and found his mother at the top of the stairs, tending to the saltwater fish tank. “Mom,” he said tentatively, “a kid told me at school today I’m gonna go to hell because I’m gay.”

“That’s not true. God loves everybody,” his mom replied. “That kid needs to go home and read his Bible.”

Justin shrugged and smiled, then retreated to his room. It had been a hard day: the annual “Day of Truth” had been held at school, an evangelical event then-sponsored by the anti-gay ministry Exodus International, whose mission is to usher gays back to wholeness and “victory in Christ” by converting them to heterosexuality. Day of Truth has been a font of controversy that has bounced in and out of the courts; its legality was affirmed last March, when a federal appeals court ruled that two Naperville, Illinois, high school students’ Day of Truth T-shirts reading BE HAPPY, NOT GAY were protected by their First Amendment rights. (However, the event, now sponsored by Focus on the Family, has been renamed “Day of Dialogue.”) Local churches had been touting the program, and students had obediently shown up at Anoka High School wearing day of truth T-shirts, preaching in the halls about the sin of homosexuality. Justin wanted to brush them off, but was troubled by their proselytizing. Secretly, he had begun to worry that maybe he was an abomination, like the Bible said.

Justin was trying not to care what anyone else thought and be true to himself. He surrounded himself with a bevy of girlfriends who cherished him for his sweet, sunny disposition. He played cello in the orchestra, practicing for hours up in his room, where he’d covered one wall with mementos of good times: taped-up movie-ticket stubs, gum wrappers, Christmas cards. Justin had even briefly dated a boy, a 17-year-old he’d met online who attended a nearby high school. The relationship didn’t end well: The boyfriend had cheated on him, and compounding Justin’s hurt, his coming out had earned Justin hateful Facebook messages from other teens – some from those he didn’t even know – telling him he was a fag who didn’t deserve to live. At least his freshman year of high school was nearly done. Only three more years to go. He wondered how he would ever make it.

Though some members of the Anoka-Hennepin school board had been appalled by “No Homo Promo” since its passage 14 years earlier, it wasn’t until 2009 that the board brought the policy up for review, after a student named Alex Merritt filed a complaint with the state Department of Human Rights claiming he’d been gay-bashed by two of his teachers during high school; according to the complaint, the teachers had announced in front of students that Merritt, who is straight, “swings both ways,” speculated that he wore women’s clothing, and compared him to a Wisconsin man who had sex with a dead deer. The teachers denied the charges, but the school district paid $25,000 to settle the complaint. Soon representatives from the gay-rights group Outfront Minnesota began making inquiries at board meetings. “No Homo Promo” was starting to look like a risky policy.

“The lawyers said, ‘You’d have a hard time defending it,'” remembers Scott Wenzel, a board member who for years had pushed colleagues to abolish the policy. “It was clear that it might risk a lawsuit.” But while board members agreed that such an overtly anti-gay policy needed to be scrapped, they also agreed that some guideline was needed to not only help teachers navigate a topic as inflammatory as homosexuality but to appease the area’s evangelical activists. So the legal department wrote a broad new course of action with language intended to give a respectful nod to the topic – but also an equal measure of respect to the anti-gay contingent. The new policy was circulated to staff without a word of introduction. (Parents were not alerted at all, unless they happened to be diligent online readers of board-meeting minutes.) And while “No Homo Promo” had at least been clear, the new Sexual Orientation Curriculum Policy mostly just puzzled the teachers who’d be responsible for enforcing it. It read:

Anoka-Hennepin staff, in the course of their professional duties, shall remain neutral on matters regarding sexual orientation including but not limited to student-led discussions.

It quickly became known as the “neutrality” policy. No one could figure out what it meant. “What is ‘neutral’?” asks instructor Merrick-Lockett. “Teachers are constantly asking, ‘Do you think I could get in trouble for this? Could I get fired for that?’ So a lot of teachers sidestep it. They don’t want to deal with district backlash.”

English teachers worried they’d get in trouble for teaching books by gay authors, or books with gay characters. Social-studies teachers wondered what to do if a student wrote a term paper on gay rights, or how to address current events like “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Health teachers were faced with the impossible task of teaching about AIDS awareness and safe sex without mentioning homosexuality. Many teachers decided once again to keep gay issues from the curriculum altogether, rather than chance saying something that could be interpreted as anything other than neutral.

“There has been widespread confusion,” says Anoka-Hennepin teachers’ union president Julie Blaha. “You ask five people how to interpret the policy and you get five different answers.” Silenced by fear, gay teachers became more vigilant than ever to avoid mention of their personal lives, and in closeting themselves, they inadvertently ensured that many students had no real-life gay role models. “I was told by teachers, ‘You have to be careful, it’s really not safe for you to come out,'” says the psychologist Cashen, who is a lesbian. “I felt like I couldn’t have a picture of my family on my desk.” When teacher Jefferson Fietek was outed in the community paper, which referred to him as an “open homosexual,” he didn’t feel he could address the situation with his students even as they passed the newspaper around, tittering. When one finally asked, “Are you gay?” he panicked. “I was terrified to answer that question,” Fietek says. “I thought, ‘If I violate the policy, what’s going to happen to me?'”

The silence of adults was deafening. At Blaine High School, says alum Justin Anderson, “I would hear people calling people ‘fags’ all the time without it being addressed. Teachers just didn’t respond.” In Andover High School, when 10th-grader Sam Pinilla was pushed to the ground by three kids calling him a “faggot,” he saw a teacher nearby who did nothing to stop the assault. At Anoka High School, a 10th-grade girl became so upset at being mocked as a “lesbo” and a “sinner” – in earshot of teachers – that she complained to an associate principal, who counseled her to “lay low”; the girl would later attempt suicide. At Anoka Middle School for the Arts, after Kyle Rooker was urinated upon from above in a boys’ bathroom stall, an associate principal told him, “It was probably water.” Jackson Middle School seventh-grader Dylon Frei was passed notes saying, “Get out of this town, fag”; when a teacher intercepted one such note, she simply threw it away.

“You feel horrible about yourself,” remembers Dylon. “Like, why do these kids hate me so much? And why won’t anybody help me?” The following year, after Dylon was hit in the head with a binder and called “fag,” the associate principal told Dylon that since there was no proof of the incident she could take no action. By contrast, Dylon and others saw how the same teachers who ignored anti-gay insults were quick to reprimand kids who uttered racial slurs. It further reinforced the message resonating throughout the district: Gay kids simply didn’t deserve protection.

“Justin?” Tammy Aaberg rapped on her son’s locked bedroom door again. It was past noon, and not a peep from inside, unusual for Justin.

“Justin?” She could hear her own voice rising as she pounded harder, suddenly overtaken by a wild terror she couldn’t name. “Justin!” she yelled. Tammy grabbed a screwdriver and loosened the doorknob. She pushed open the door. He was wearing his Anoka High School sweatpants and an old soccer shirt. His feet were dangling off the ground. Justin was hanging from the frame of his futon, which he’d taken out from under his mattress and stood upright in the corner of his room. Screaming, Tammy ran to hold him and recoiled at his cold skin. His limp body was grotesquely bloated – her baby – eyes closed, head lolling to the right, a dried smear of saliva trailing from the corner of his mouth. His cheeks were strafed with scratch marks, as though in his final moments he’d tried to claw his noose loose. He’d cinched the woven belt so tight that the mortician would have a hard time masking the imprint it left in the flesh above Justin’s collar.
…

Read the whole article here.

The Nashville Scene newspaper also reported this week on the connections between bullying, teen suicide, and a controversial Tennessee law that bans anti-discrimination protections for GLBT individuals:

…In the midst of statewide, even nationwide concern over the impact of bullying, LGBT advocates and activists point to a spate of well-publicized bills in Tennessee’s Republican-dominated legislature. These bills, they say, contribute to a culture of hostility toward gays and transgendered citizens — undermining their rights, restricting their restroom use, refusing to acknowledge their existence in the classroom…

…There is reason to worry. By the most recent statistics, Tennessee has the 17th highest age-adjusted suicide rate in the U.S. These findings arrive among a list of other grim stats.

The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network’s 2009 National School Climate Survey found that LGBT students in Tennessee report levels of verbal abuse higher than the national average. Ninety-eight percent of Tennessee high schoolers have heard a peer use the word “gay” in a derogatory fashion, compared with a national rate of 89 percent. Likewise, 68 percent of Tennessee students did not report bullying to school faculty, and 65 percent kept instances of bullying from their families.

Compounding matters, fewer than one in 10 Tennessee students attends a school with a comprehensive anti-bullying policy. In addition, only one in seven could access LGBT information via school computers — the subject of a 2009 ACLU lawsuit against Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools and Knoxville Public Schools that was ultimately successful in overturning the policy. For these and other reasons, Chris Sanders, director of the LGBT advocacy group Tennessee Equality Project, thinks the change in attitudes he hopes for will come slowly.

“Unfortunately, it takes time for things to reach Tennessee,” Sanders says. “It’s not to say it won’t get better at some point, but right now, 2011-2012 — or you could say the time that coincides with the 107th General Assembly — it’s the worst it’s been since the marriage amendment went through the legislature. We’re back really to — I think the worst point in history for Tennessee’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community in years.”

The irony, noted by Sanders and others, is that while conservative lawmakers dismiss equal rights legislation for gays on grounds that no group should be singled out for special treatment, they have had no compunctions whatsoever about punitive bills that specifically target LGBT citizens.

The most notorious example is HB600 — the blanket nullification of municipal anti-discrimination laws crafted by state Rep. Glen Casada, signed by Gov. Bill Haslam last year, and lobbied for in secret by powerful Christian conservative interests. A direct one-stroke obliteration of Metro Nashville’s LGBT workplace-protection ordinance, the law essentially gives employers free rein to fire or not hire individuals solely on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identification.

That was the first salvo in what has become a culture-war blitzkrieg. There is state Rep. Joey Hensley’s HB 0229, the House version of Knoxville Sen. Stacey Campfield’s “Don’t Say Gay Bill,” which bans any mention of sexuality other than the hetero-variety in K-8 sex education classes. There is HB 1153, which critics say codifies First Amendment protection for the very bullies who tormented Jacob Rogers and Phillip Parker. Most controversial — and LGBT advocates argue, most appalling — is HB 2279, which would make it a crime for a transgender person to use the restroom that best coincides with their gender identity.
…

As both of these articles point out, the causes of teen suicide are complex and varied. However, as far as I’m concerned, the bigots’ culpability doesn’t depend on whether all of these poor kids were gay or perceived as gay. Seeing that bullies run the adult world, from the legislature to the school board, is enough to drive any persecuted kid to despair. If they’re doing this to the gays, they’d do it to you too, because you’re fat or poor or female or Hispanic or…whatever. That’s the message that drowns out “it gets better” for boys like Justin Aaberg. What are we going to do about it?

One place to start: Donate to The Trevor Project, a GLBT suicide-prevention hotline.

Sunday Non-Random Song: Whitney Houston, “The Greatest Love of All”


I was grieved to learn today that pop diva Whitney Houston died this weekend, at the young age of 48. Sadly, like many brilliant performers, she struggled with addictions and unhealthy relationships.

Her hit song “The Greatest Love of All” was a favorite anthem of mine in the 1980s. The theology of this song may offend some Christians, as too redolent of the “cult of self-esteem”, but personally I believe that you can’t hate yourself and love God at the same time. He made you, didn’t He? Was He wrong? Accepting yourself as lovable is a necessary part of believing that God loves you, not merely as an idea but as a lived psychological reality. Also, a certain amount of self-love protects you against making an idol of religious teachers, who can be a great help in proper perspective, but shouldn’t substitute for your own knowledge of God inside. Sometimes the Spirit will “lead you to a lonely place” where you must “find your strength in love”.

Sending God’s love to you, Whitney, wherever your soul’s journey takes you…



Tupelo Press Poets Talk About Their Faith


The Poetry Foundation website has posted a substantial excerpt from a forthcoming essay collection from Tupelo Press, A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith. This volume, edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler, gathers reflections from 19 accomplished poets about spirituality and the craft of writing. Here are a few choice passages to encourage you to read further. The book can be pre-ordered now and will be released in March.

Jericho Brown:
“Hope is the opposite of desperation—it’s not as comfortable as certainty, and it’s much more certain than longing. It is always accompanied by the imagination, the will to see what our physical environment seems to deem impossible. Only the creative mind can make use of hope. Only a creative people can wield it.

“Today I believe that anything one visualizes consistently becomes reality. Isn’t that what prayer is? Maybe that means my beliefs have not changed at all: lift every voice and sing till earth and heaven ring. I am a believer. True believers see their way as the way. That doesn’t mean I can’t stand someone else’s way. It means that I am capable of joyfully getting lost in my own. Spirituality is important to me because I think there is something among us greater than the physical, something we know exists and can address directly. I love God. I love liberty. I shame one if I lose the other. I think of God now as way more patient than I could ever be. I have to believe that God is better than I am, and better than all of us. That’s the only thing that could make God God.”

Kazim Ali:
“Prayer is speaking to someone you know is not going to be able to speak back, so you’re allowed to be the most honest that you can be. In prayer you’re allowed to be as purely selfish as you like. You can ask for something completely irrational. I have written that prayer is a form of panic, because in prayer you don’t really think you’re going to be answered. You’ll either get what you want or you won’t. It feels to me like that, a situation where you’re under the most duress. Often people who are not religious at all, when suddenly something terrible happens, they know they have to pray. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. We all engage with the spiritual at different points. Prayer is not a refuge or shelter so much as it is an opening of arms, an acceptance of whatever storms exist in the world. You don’t really pray for your situation to change, you pray to be able to handle your situation. It’s not the world you want to change; it’s you that you want to change.”

G.C. Waldrep:
“Most Americans, I think, compartmentalize, because it is convenient: we find our modern lives intolerable otherwise. Now I am a teacher. No, now I am a consumer. No, now I am a parent, a man of faith, a poet, an investor in off-shore oil drilling, etc. It tears the soul. Even a serious faith commitment can become simply one more compartment.

“The Anabaptist conception of faith, on the other hand, is encompassing. Whatever one is doing, one should be doing it with a spiritual aim and value, hopefully in some connection with the life of the body, which is the church. It may seem inconvenient, but our lives are united and made complete in Christ, and in the community and fellowship of fellow Christians. Of course I know (non-Christian) poets who feel the same way about their art, about the community of work and feeling that poetry convokes. When I am someplace like the artists’ colonies of Yaddo or MacDowell, I tend to hear quite a bit about this. But for me, poetry inheres within the whole defined by Christ, His Word, and the church.

“Prayer is that which conveys a message to God, who is either known or knowing, more or less by definition. Poetry is that which conveys a message to a stranger.”

Joy Harjo:

“Incantation and chant call something into being. They make a ceremonial field of meaning. Much of world poetry is incantation and chant. The poem that first made me truly want to become a poet was sung and performed by a healer in Southeast Asia. As he sang and performed the poem he became what he was singing/speaking, and even as he sang and spoke, his words healed his client. When I saw that in the early seventies on a television program, the idea of what it meant to be a poet shifted utterly for me.”

Gregory Orr:
“I have faith that when the emotional, imaginative, and spiritual life is activated inside a person, when one becomes fully human, feeling and caring deeply, this represents a resurrection of some kind. This happens for me often when I read poems or hear songs. The feeling of being moved represents a resurrection. Every time meaning or feeling flows into your experience, that’s resurrection. I choose to believe that this has something to do with the beloved. One of the perils of being human, and of lyric poetry, is narcissism, the solipsistic sense that the self is all there is. Likewise, one of the perils of trauma is extreme isolation of the damaged self. To me, the beloved is that figure that exists independent of the self, that figure that calls us into relationship with the world and saves us from what I consider the emotional, spiritual, and psychological error of solipsism and narcissism. The beloved calls us out into connection with the world, into reciprocal relation with the world.”

Jane Hirshfield:
“No one undertakes something as difficult as Zen practice because they already feel the perfection of ‘things as they are.’ We humans turn toward a spiritual practice in part to restore ourselves from some felt form of separation or exile. We feel something is wrong, or missing. This is not my usual vocabulary, but one of my poems, ‘Salt Heart,’ has a passage that may be relevant here: “I begin to believe the only sin is distance, refusal./All others stemming from this.” Separation from others, separation from self, are close to the root of suffering. Christians might say ‘separation from God,’ Sufis might say, ‘separation from the Beloved.’ Jung might call it a failure to recognize all parts of the psyche as parts of one self; that shadow-self, refused, grows perilous. Buddhism proposes that the separation of selfhood itself is a mistake of the mind, an attitude in some way reflected in our English use of the word ‘selfish.’ While Zen is the particular practice that drew me, I certainly don’t believe there’s only one ‘right’ spiritual path—if something is true, it will be findable anywhere, and there are as many spiritual paths as there are people, and probably sparrows and frogs and pebbles as well. Still, for me, this not uncommon sense of being exiled from full presence in the world brought me to both Zen and poetry.”

Audre Lorde on the Spiritual Power of Eros


Audre Lorde (1934-1992) was a black feminist lesbian poet and activist whose work continues to inspire creative writers and political movements today. This essay of hers, “The Uses of the Erotic“, was reprinted on the alternative spirituality site Metahistory.org.

It resonated with me because of my experience of eros in my own writing, and how it led me to greater confidence in a queer-affirming theology. I believe that any ideology that alienates a person from her erotic self must eventually cut her off from personal knowledge of the divine. (I’m not talking about a true vocation to celibacy, but rather the shame-based repression of one’s erotic nature, whether acted upon or not. I would imagine that a healthy celibate person acknowledges and mindfully sublimates desire, without aversion or self-delusion.)

For me, the erotic is where I most completely will myself, commit myself despite risks, and wake up to the consciousness of myself, at the same point where I am also most completely dissolved into an interpersonal connection. To know God, to know the beloved, and to know myself–all these are essentially one.

From the essay:

…As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same depth too much to examine the possibilities of it within themselves. So women are maintained at a distant/inferior position to be psychically milked, much the same way ants maintain colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving substance for their masters.

But the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough.

The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, and plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.

The erotic is a measure between our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.

It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society is to encourage excellence. But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.

This internal requirement toward excellence which we learn from the erotic must not be misconstrued as demanding the impossible from ourselves nor from others. Such a demand incapacitates everyone in the process. For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors bring us closest to that fullness.

The aim of each thing which we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children richer and more possible. Within the celebration of the erotic in all our endeavors, my work becomes a conscious decision – a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered.

Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic from most vital areas of our lives other than sex. And the lack of concern for the erotic root and satisfactions of our work is felt in our disaffection from so much of what we do. For instance, how often do we truly love our work even at its most difficult?

The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need – the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel.

As women, we need to examine the ways in which our world can be truly different. I am speaking here of the necessity for reassessing the quality of all the aspects of our lives and of our work, and of how we move toward and through them.

The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects – born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.

There are frequent attempts to equate pornography and eroticism, two diametrically opposed uses of the sexual. Because of these attempts, it has become fashionable to separate the spiritual (psychic and emotional) from the political, to see them as contradictory or antithetical. “What do you mean, a poetic revolutionary, a meditating gunrunner?” In the same way, we have attempted to separate the spiritual and the political is also false, resulting from an incomplete attention to our erotic knowledge. For the bridge which connects them is formed by the erotic – the sensual – those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us, being shared: the passions of love, in its deepest meanings.

Beyond the superficial, the considered phrase, “It feels right to me,” acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for what that means is the first and most powerful guiding light toward any understanding. And understanding is a handmaiden which can only wait upon, or clarify, that knowledge, deeply born. The erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge.

The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.

Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy, in the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, harkening to its deepest rhythms so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, or examining an idea.

That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.

This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.
…

Read the whole essay here.

Mended Souls, Better Than New


A friend who is a sexual abuse survivor loaned me Renee Fredrickson’s Recovered Memories to help me be a better ally and represent these issues more accurately in my creative writing. I’d like to share these words from the book’s final chapter, as an inspiration to anyone recovering from trauma.

On display in the Freer Museum in Washington, D.C., are ancient Zen ceremonial bowls renowned for their delicate beauty and fine craftsmanship. Over generations of use these lovely porcelain bowls became cracked and chipped, and some had whole pieces missing. Rather than being discarded or devalued because of the damage, the porcelain was repaired with gold. The gold adds strength, beauty, and value to the bowls, and the sacred bowls are marvelously enhanced by the repair process.

So it is with survivors. You were damaged as you grew up, and the more abusively you were handled, the greater the damage. When you undertake to repair this damage, you replace bitterness and sadness with understanding and healing. You become stronger and more resilient when change comes. You grow kinder to yourself and more compassionate toward those you love. You, like the sacred bowls, are enhanced rather than diminished by the repair process. (pg.225)

(See images of repaired Zen bowls here and here.)

Gender-Policing Ron Paul


My best friend from Harvard is gradually winning me over to support Ron Paul’s presidential candidacy over Obama’s. The feisty libertarian is holding his own in the GOP race despite derision from self-styled experts in both parties and some suspicious poll-doctoring by the major news networks. Anyone with so wide a range of ideological enemies is probably putting his finger on some uncomfortable truths about our country’s asset bubble, military over-spending, creeping police state, and substitution of “culture wars” for genuine solutions. The site Ron Paul Myths gives a good overview of his actual positions and how they’ve been misrepresented.

This morning my friend called my attention to this generally favorable Washington Post article, which nonetheless treats the Texas congressman as something of a sideshow act. As Hillary Clinton found, gender-policing is one of the tools that commentators use to undermine a candidate, making it seem ridiculous, even unnatural, for this person to inhabit the office of Big-Daddy-in-Chief. Because we’ve unconsciously imbibed these stereotypes for so long, we don’t even realize the commentary is biased.

From the headline, “Ron Paul’s slight stature and high-pitched passions set him apart at debates”, a suspicion of effeminacy is cast over everything that follows. (Not that I perceive anything wrong with effeminacy, but most readers would.) Though the piece fairly summarizes his positions, and notes that he has the most enthusiastic supporters of all the GOP candidates, we’re told that “experts” have written him off, in part because he doesn’t perform masculinity in the same way as Romney and Gingrich. The article mentions his “high-pitched voice”, “smaller” and “weaker” build, and “excitable hands”. Hello, Dolly!

The reporter, Sarah Kaufman, isn’t actually saying that she thinks these traits make him un-presidential–merely acknowledging that the hypothetical average voter could feel that way. Nonetheless, by pointing out Paul’s image problem without discussing sexism as a factor, the article subtly perpetuates these slurs.

Ron Paul, you just became the queer candidate.

Thoughts on Transgender Day of Remembrance


Apologies for the blog hiatus. 30 Poems in November is kicking my butt. (Donate here to raise funds for literacy education.) More original content will be posted soon.

Meanwhile, I would like to share these eloquent words from Natalie at the Skepchick blog about the importance of today’s Transgender Day of Remembrance. Activists estimate that over 100 transgendered people are murdered each year in hate crimes. This is in addition to the other violence, discrimination, and sensationalized misrepresentation in the media that transpeople endure on a regular basis. On a more positive note, though, Massachusetts finally passed a bill to add some protections to our civil rights law for gender identity and expression. The compromise legislation now bans discrimination in employment, education, healthcare, and housing, though they were not able to get enough votes to add public accommodations to the list.

Natalie’s blog post explains why trans rights should matter to everyone (boldface emphasis mine):

…I suppose a question with these kinds of things is often why exactly one should care beyond simple respect for the deceased and ongoing commitment to working against bigotry in its many forms. How does this relate to those beyond the immediate consequences?

Part of it is the internalization of fear by the rest of us. Our lives begin to become defined and restrained by it. In much the same way that women may often internalize fear of sexual assault and lose luxuries such as the ability to walk around after dark without needing to be constantly attentive of their surroundings, keeping keys clenched in their fist, trans people end up losing similar luxuries of being able to feel safe in many circumstances. Our lives become limited by that fear in very real ways. It becomes a force of social control that keeps us quiet and invisible. We desperately strive for “passability” far beyond what is simply comfortable self-expression out of awareness of the very real dangers that come with being visibly gender variant. I don’t really like painting my nails all that much, but every little bit helps.

Part of it is that this affects people beyond those who fall within the transgender spectrum. It is essentially about policing the lines of gender. Using violence and the threat thereof as a means of imposing very real consequences for those who transgress the carefully delineated paths afforded to those born with certain particular anatomies. It marks in blood a line that you may not cross. This confines all of us. Male, female or neither, cis or trans, straight or queer, binary-identified or not, we all end up boxed into a coercively defined destiny based on nothing more than the configuration of one particular body part.

Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of victims of trans-related violence are women. This sends a strong message that it is unacceptable to value femaleness or femininity, or to consider these states preferable, empowering or fulfilling. MtF spectrum individuals embody a fundamental challenge to the assumption of male superiority. Who could possibly be happier as a woman than as a man? Who would want to trade the almighty phallus for the lowly vagina? Along with using violence and fear to enforce a gender binary, it uses the same to enforce patriarchy.

These messages are internalized into our culture. They mean something very, very real. There are untold many who remain in their prescribed gender roles only out of fear of retribution.

But this day isn’t about gender theory or politics or the struggle forward for the living. It is about recognizing, remembering and respecting those we’ve lost. But a big aspect of respecting them is to recognize what it is they died for. They sacrificed their lives for the idea that all of us, regardless of where we fall within the various spectrums of gender and sexuality, can express ourselves and exist exactly as we are, exactly as we feel ourselves to truly be. They died to build a world where we needn’t live in fear and compromise, where we needn’t apologize for our gender. Where our identity is our own. Where biology is not destiny.

So if you get a chance today, please take a moment to pause and think, or to grieve. Perhaps light a candle. Perhaps reflect a bit on the freedom that you may enjoy to express your gender in a manner that is honest and comfortable, or reflect on those who may not yet have that privilege. Perhaps reflect on how valuable and meaningful that is, what it is to feel at home in your body. Remember that it is something that some people have given their lives for.

Read the whole post here. (Hat tip to the Twitter feed of No Longer Quivering, a must-read site for women recovering from patriarchal religious abuse.)
 

Historic Homecoming for GLBT Alumni at Wheaton, an Evangelical College


Wheaton College in Illinois has been called the Harvard of the evangelicals. Longtime readers of this blog may recall my reports from their theology conferences on the Trinity and spiritual formation. Though at one time I felt nourished by immersion in a community of serious Christian intellectuals, my shifting political sensibilities eventually made me too uncomfortable to return to an environment where non-heteronormative lives were (at best) erased. 

That’s why I was particularly happy to receive the latest Soulforce e-newsletter, which featured a report on OneWheaton, “a community of LGBTQ’s and allies at Wheaton”. This month, some 600 members took the bold step of attending Wheaton’s homecoming weekend as openly queer alumni and allies. Here’s an excerpt from the newsletter:

“This is a real coming out, being here, being ourselves,” said Frances Motiwalla, a 2000 Political Science graduate. “That’s what this weekend is all about. This was a reassertion of our whole self as part of the community.”

Motiwalla joined dozens for whom this past weekend was their first time returning to their alma mater. Most gay Wheaton alumni never return to campus, associating their college years with shame, loneliness, and marginalization. But in a show of pride and courage, over 50 rainbow clad alumni spanning the classes of ’54 through 2013 ate together in the school’s cafeteria, attended the sold-out Homecoming football game, and showed their families around campus.

They kicked off the weekend with a free concert by Jennifer Knapp, a Christian musician who recently came out as lesbian, and a panel led by LGBTQ Wheaton graduates. OneWheaton explains that most LGBTQ Wheaton alumni never return to campus because of too many negative associations and hurtful memories. This homecoming weekend, however, saw over 50 rainbow clad alumni going back to 1954 and even current students eating together in the cafeteria, attending the football game and showing friends and family around campus.

The groups explains that the weekend, besides a few stares and off-hand comments, was a success in engaging students in conversation and providing some reconciliation for alumni. Said the group’s Co-Director Ruth Wardchenk, “When I drove onto the campus Friday I was there for the first time in 15 years and I burst out in tears. I was home and I was no longer afraid.”

While the school is not officially budging on the issue yet, their impact was certainly felt on campus. Wrote one student, “Thank you for coming to campus this weekend… I don’t quite know what I think yet, but you’ve got me asking questions and thinking. So, thank you so much for coming back to Wheaton.”

Click here to support Soulforce’s Equality Ride, which brings the message of inclusion to Christian colleges across America. Click here to sign OneWheaton’s statement of support, share your story, or find resources to end your isolation.