One For Truth

Okay, One More...

2008-04-30T08:09:00.000-07:00

Just when I thought I'd run out of things to say on the subject of the church, I've found myself over the last few days thinking often of the recent events at Revolution Church as recounted on SCP.

The fact remains that I still have a powerful, almost physical response to the idea of attending church and I think that this Revolution Church experience has helped to crystallize it for me.

You see, here is this man, apparently quite talented and charismatic, who builds a successful congregation and in the moment of doing what about half of all Americans do--leaving their spouse--ends up traumatizing his entire congregation. Not just because of the thing that happened, but because it happened there. To them. By him, of all people!

People talk often of the powerful sense of community in church, but what I experienced even more strongly than community was a sense of unreality. As in, what happens in church, how people often behave, can simply be unreal. A thoroughgoing dishonesty brought on by an intense pressure to be a certain way, to say the right thing, to be who it is that other people think a person who is a Christian is supposed to be. Church is so painful to me because I simply can't take the pressure of not feeling like I can be who I am, warts and all.

For instance, if I'm having a bad day when I show up for work and a colleague asks how I am, I can shrug my shoulders and say "I'm here, anyway." Then they can either ask for details or shrug and go back to their work. I can fart at my desk or say "Fuck all" if I feel like it. The mask is off, and the only things I keep to myself are those things that I think are none of my colleagues' business.

When I was in church, the one thing I wanted to say more than anything else was, "Bullshit!" Bullshit on people acting a certain way and expecting other people to act the same way too. Hating on their neighbor while they hug and kiss them. Pretending everything is okay when it damn well isn't. Wearing their finest masks in the one place they should be the most real and human. Whatever your experience in church is, I won't devalue it at all. But that's what church ended up being for me.

So David Trotter was full of shit. Probably still is. He's apparently quite passionate about helping people have religious experiences and become personally successful and content, and sees no conflict between that and abandoning his wife and children. I will be the first to say that any one of us is capable of being both great and an asshole, often at the very same time. That's just human. To be human is to be broken and fallible and a mixed bag of goods. But that's just not okay in church. Oh, it's okay to acknowledge it in the abstract, but not to act it out in the presence of your neighbors. Sure, people sin. It's just not supposed to happen here.

Not to us.
Not in our church.
Not with our pastor.

Years later, I'm still angry about the bullshit. Weird thing is, I'm just as angry with the people at Revolution as I am with Trotter. I don't know any of them, but I've been in enough churches to understand the bullshit culture. They just suffered a major, traumatic reality intrusion into their make-believe, happy-talk culture and nobody knows what do to about it.

So let me tell you what they are going to do. I can say this, because I saw it over and over again.

They are going to pretend it never happened. People will cry and hold hands and pray, and notice that within weeks it will not be discussed from the pulpit. When people bring it up to the leadership, they will suggest that the appropriate response is a small prayer and to focus on other things. References to Trotter will disappear from websites and printed materials. Maybe they'll even change the name or move to a new location. The wife and family will move to a new church. The history of Revolution will be cleansed of this painful event so that everyone can go back to pretending that these things don't happen here. Not to us.

I don't know. Call me a cynic. But let me know if I'm wrong, because that would be interesting to see. I hope for Revolution's sake that they break the mold.

I really don't like feeling this way, so seemingly cynical and angry, but I wonder sometimes if the very title of this blog--One for Truth--ends up keeping me honest in ways I never contemplated when I started it, which at the time was when I was fully engaged with the culture. This is the truth as I see it, called out as plainly as I can call it out.

I am already without a congregation because I didn't want to hurt them by trying to stay, to take off the mask and break the mold. I don't want to hurt anybody, and I don't want to find myself without faith. But I can't and won't be a party to the bullshit any longer. Just can't tolerate the dissonance.

Adios

2008-02-21T21:17:00.000-08:00

I don't want to be one of those guys whose blog just sits there week after week with nothing new, but nothing really resolved. I have kind of run out of things to say so I'd rather just call it a day.

Thanks for being there with me, and you know where to find me.

Jesus: Isn't it time we took a look at his record?

2007-12-17T15:38:00.001-08:00

Amy Enters, RIP

2007-11-27T12:53:00.000-08:00

I never knew Amy Enters, but I was sent her obituary today by a colleague. I want to take a moment here to acknowledge from a distance the life and legacy of a woman who is a contemporary of mine, and whose passing reminded me of the increasing fragility of life.

Amy Enters, age 40, of Barrington, Illinois, formerly of Houston, Texas, passed away November 27, 2007 after a courageous battle with breast cancer. Amy was the loving wife of Menno Enters whom she married on September 6, 1997. Amy was born in Corpus Christi, Texas on February 16, 1967 to Carolyn and JR Viola. Cherished sister of Polly (Clay) Wilkins, Kari (Gary) Stadler, and Michael Viola. Fond daughter-in-law of Marina and Jim Enters, and sister-in-law of Karin Enters.

She is survived by sons Matthijs, Marek, and Aidan Enters. Amy was preceded in death by her infant son, Liam. Amy was a woman of exceptionally strong faith, a conqueror, who served as an inspiration to many.

Visitation to be held from 9:00 – 10:30am on Friday, November 30 at St. Francis de Sales, 135 S. Buesching in Lake Zurich, Illinois prior to funeral mass at 10:30am.

Memorial donations may be made to “Menno Enters” in the name of the Enters Family Fund at Cambridge Bank, 1100 South Rand, Lake Zurich, Illinois.

Thank You

2007-11-22T11:09:00.000-08:00

I've been at this blogging thing for about two and a half years now, and it wouldn't be interesting if it weren't for you, my blogging companions. So today, I'm grateful for this experience and the friendships I've gained here on the interwebtubes. Enjoy this day!

Modern Ruins

2007-11-14T10:39:00.000-08:00

Photograph(s) copyright Shaun O'Boyle

Modern ruins, as seen through the lens of photographer Shaun O'Boyle. One thing that leaps out at me is that somewhere along the line (and I believe the line was World War II), we lost a sense of art in the design of most of our buildings. People, the photo above was for a power plant. I'm in that business, and I can tell you that they definitely don't make 'em like that anymore.

Thanks as always to Andrew Sullivan, from whom I get most of my good stuff.

Faaaascinating...

2007-10-15T15:55:00.000-07:00

Follow this link and see whether you perceive the dancer as spinning clockwise or counterclockwise. Then see if she changes direction on you.

For me, she was all about the clockwise--until suddenly in a blink she flipped the other way, then back a few moments later. I've found that while if I concentrate I can get her to flip directions, it's only for a few moments. The exercise appears to have right brain/left brain implications, though who really knows.

Consequences of ideas

2007-10-06T09:37:00.000-07:00

As I said before, I supported the invasion of Iraq. I believed the slogans about peace and democracy in the Middle East, and I feared the weapons of mass destruction. So did Christopher Hitchens, who had written passionately about the rightness and good purpose of the invasion. Hitchens is a literate and persuasive man, and his words moved a young UCLA college student to join the Army and serve his country. That man, Lt. Mark Daily, was then killed in Iraq.

A friend sent Hitchens an article in the Los Angeles Times about Lt. Daily after noticing that Daily had been inspired by the writings of Hitchens to take the course that ultimately led to his death. Hitchens, who has since become deeply disturbed and disillusioned about the Iraq war, describes the moment he discovered he had influenced young Daily in his decision to enlist:

I don't exaggerate by much when I say that I froze. I certainly felt a very deep pang of cold dismay. I had just returned from a visit to Iraq with my own son (who is 23, as was young Mr. Daily) and had found myself in a deeply pessimistic frame of mind about the war. Was it possible that I had helped persuade someone I had never met to place himself in the path of an I.E.D.?... I feverishly clicked on all the links from the article and found myself on Lieutenant Daily's MySpace site, where his statement "Why I Joined" was posted. The site also immediately kicked into a skirling noise of Irish revolutionary pugnacity: a song from the Dropkick Murphys album Warrior's Code. And there, at the top of the page, was a link to a passage from one of my articles, in which I poured scorn on those who were neutral about the battle for Iraq … I don't remember ever feeling, in every allowable sense of the word, quite so hollow.

Driven by remorse, Hitchens finds his way to speak and visit with Mark Daily's family. What follows is well worth reading, so I'll leave it at that.

The price that we are paying as a country for this war is a profound one. I won't bother to estimate the grief of those who have lost loved ones to the war. But I can't shake the feeling that aside from the obvious costs in dollars and strained military readiness, that we are not far from a public awakening to how deeply we were led astray and by the catastrophic failure of character that the Bush administration has demonstrated in its conduct of this war. And perhaps like Christopher Hitchens confronted with how his ideas had consequences he can never take back, that we may realize that the ideas and leadership that we consented to in the months after 9/11 have led to a nation that is not as good, not as strong, and not as right as the one we possessed in the days and weeks following that devastating day.

Things you discover when your dog wakes you up at 4:45 in the morning...

2007-09-19T06:04:00.000-07:00

Some people think Christians shouldn't do yoga. Yeah, my antibodies went into overtime on this one.

They are blowing the tops of mountains off in West Virginia because it's faster and cheaper than digging underground. I'm sorry--did the 1970's through today, and the advances in ecological protection that came with them, never actually happen? I mean... you can actually do crap like this in America today?

Sofyst wonders what we do when we are "are somewhat left by God without clear direction." I comment that this pretty much describes everyday life, doesn't it?

Eric at Two World Collision posts about being honest about, among other things, his relationship challenges. A commenter mentions about how gays often have to experience in adulthood what the rest of us do as adolescents when it comes to the awkwardness of learning how to actually romance another human being--which strikes me as a surprising truth. As an aside, MZ would probably be compelled to mention that I am still learning how to romance another human being.

By the way, gay bars are closing all over the place because gays are increasingly preferring to spend time one on one with their partners, inconveniently depriving evangelicals of a stereotype-supporting crutch. Damn them!

Tim Ferriss talks about radical honesty. Me and MZ had been talking recently about whether true transparency looks something like radical honesty. I wouldn't go that far.

Joe Carter reviews an evangelical thriller and remarks that the book "[c]ontains many of the standard faults of "Christian" novels: flat characterization, unconvincing conversions, stereotypical villains." I remark that he just aptly described evangelical culture.

Be Forewarned...

2007-09-17T21:38:00.000-07:00

Guitar Hero II will rock your muthafsking azz off.

Taking my spiritual temperature

2007-09-16T20:51:00.000-07:00

I wouldn't have expected it, but as I sit here in September of 2007, over a year since my mother's death and the ridiculous, maddening end to my involvement in the church that I served on the board at for three years--which coincided with my last desire to have anything at all to do with evangelicalism--as I sit here now, I frankly am still pissed off. I can't even pretend to believe much of what I used to believe about what I used to profess on a weekly (if not daily) basis.

I feel, for deeply personal reasons, that Jesus did live and that he lives spiritually. But as for doctrine... I almost don't even care. I don't read the Bible, I don't seek secondary sources, I don't pray, and I hardly even think about spiritual matters. I find plenty of time to drop f-bombs on the stupidity and ham-handedness of stupid church people, but don't have the desire to slice off much time at all to reflect on who Jesus still is or what I am supposed to do with him.

I can't say I am proud of the degree to which my anger at the evangelical church controls my life. I spend hours every week moving among blogs that discuss evangelical issues, processing and processing my thoughts and feelings about evangelical doctrine and praxis. Were it not for my incredible wife, I almost certainly would say Fuck All and forget about this nonsense, but she is too much a part of me to write off the process. Where I end up is not academic considering her devotion to me and to God.

And yet I feel like I now have an antibody in my system that makes me want to vomit out anything that tastes like my old evangelical diet. I feel as if I have crossed a spiritual Rubicon, and contented belief lies back on a shore that I can't and won't return to. So somewhere along this path, the anger has to get replaced by a right-minded seeking so that I can, to the extent that I still believe in Jesus (as opposed to believing about him) actually structure my life in a way that reflects that belief. For now, I do what I do because I believe it's the right thing to do. I would expect that if I take back on belief in Jesus, absent the make-work, busy-busy, nicey-nice of Churchianity, my life will actually have to show that.

Anyways, that's my spiritual temperature as of 9:07PM on Sunday, September 16th, 2007.

Dylan, Man...

2007-09-15T23:19:00.001-07:00

Check it out.

Exporting pollution

2007-09-14T08:08:00.000-07:00

Much is said of our exportation of jobs to China via our mass-consumption of their mass-produced goods, but one could just as well understand that we are also exporting our own pollution. China's air, water, and soil pollution practices are probably consistent with where we were over 50 years ago. If not further back.

In Linfen, for instance, the many coal plants and manufacturing interests pump a steady stream of sulfur oxide and coal dust into the air and arsenic into the water table. Linfen is a pathetic example of Business Gone Wild, but it is hardly alone. 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world, according to the World Bank, are in China.

When I was a kid growing up in the 60s and 70s in the Los Angeles basin, I remember many summer days where to play outside meant getting sore lungs. If you haven't felt it, there's no describing it. I imagine that kids in Beijing, pictured below (after a rain on the left, on a sunny day to the right), know that feeling.

Thankfully it's not like that in Southern California any more, for the most part. Smog alerts, once a fixture of summer, are largely a thing of the past. And while I believe in free enterprise, somebody's got to be watching the store and thinking about something more than profit and employment statistics. Profit and jobs are good. Very good. But they are not the only things that matter in life.

Conservatives in the Tearoom

2007-09-13T13:27:00.000-07:00

Is it hypocrisy when a social conservative, adamantly opposed to gay rights, adultery, divorce, or what have you is caught literally and figuratively with his pants down doing the very thing he proclaims to despise?

According to Andrew Sullivan and some others, maybe it's deeper than simple hypocrisy. Says Andrew:

Social conservatives who try to have extremely discreet and anonymous sex or drugs or whatever are not, perhaps, hypocrites as such. They recognize vice, do not deny it, see it in themselves, understand that some of it is simply irrepressible, and do not see their public moralizing as in conflict with it. Think Bill Bennett or Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly or David Vitter: all involved in various personal vices (often compulsively) - and arguably more socially conservative because of them.

Reference is made in Andrew's post to a now 37-year old study that was done by Laud Humphreys, a graduate student (later professor) of sociology of the "tearoom" trade, or in straight parlance anonymous sex in men's rooms, in St. Louis in the mid-1960's.

I was impressed with Humphrey's inventiveness in how he went about peeling back the onion to discover who these men were that had sex with strangers in mens' rooms. Check this out:

Posing as a voyeur, and never revealing that he was there for research, Humphreys was accepted as “watchqueen” by the social circle hanging out at the restroom. He was entrusted with giving a signal if the police came around. He took notes on the activity taking place – including the license plates numbers of men who came around for fellatio. Through a contact in the police department, he was able to get their home addresses. After a year, and having disguised himself to some degree, he visited them under the pretense of doing a survey for an insurance company to gather more data about their circumstances and opinions. Humphreys states that he was never recognized during these interviews.

Gotta admire that commitment to discovering the truth. Though obviously deceitful, he ultimately honored the anonymity of the men he studied by destroying their personal information. Anyway, here's what he found:

Men he had observed having anonymous sex in a public place often turned out to be ardent champions of law and order. Unable to control themselves in that part of their lives, they put on the defensive “breastplate,” redoubling their efforts elsewhere: “Motivated largely by his own awareness of the discreditable nature of his secret behavior,” wrote Humphreys in his dissertation, “the covert deviant develops a presentation of self that is respectable to a fault. His whole lifestyle becomes an incarnation of what is proper and orthodox.”

So maybe that explains cats like Larry Craig and Ted Haggard, or even Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart. They're not so much hypocrites as they are tormented by their own deviance to the point that they crank up the volume of their moralism publicly to overcompensate.

That sounds reasonable to me, but I wonder if there isn't something peculiar about the religious conservative closeted homosexual. After all, we know the type has sought refuge in the Catholic priesthood. Cynics may say that they put on the cloth purely as an avenue to get the trust of young boys, but I suspect again that it's deeper than that. I wonder if the guilt and shame that society imposes upon being gay causes men to reassert their goodness and morality by becoming champions of righteousness, while unable to restrain their impulses privately.

Something, my friends, has got to change.

The Beard is Back

2007-09-07T09:55:00.000-07:00

I don't want to hate anybody in general, but I am so over this asshat, his stupid beard, and his pointless murder cult.

Saving Grace

2007-09-07T09:27:00.000-07:00

Not that we needed another TV show to pack into our busy lives, but the wife and I have started watching the new TNT series Saving Grace. Holly Hunter stars as a hard-living Oklahoma City police detective named Grace (as in saving--get it?) who, in a desperate moment, calls out for God's help which arrives in the form of Earl the angel. Played by Leon Rippy (who has one of the most syrupy and memorable voices in Hollywood), Earl is a tobacco-chewing, jean-and-boot wearing good old boy sent from heaven to rescue Grace from the fires of hell. "Lots of folks goin' to hell these days," Earl says at one point in the series premiere.

What I like about this show is that it's a nice mix of edginess, grit, physical beauty, complex characters, humor, and hope. Touched by an Angel it's not, but neither does it take a low view of God and spirituality.

The language and sex is as bold and explicit as it gets on commercial TV, so be advised, but I like the show for its artfulness and perspective.

Freedom bleeds from a thousand little cuts...

2007-09-03T15:54:00.000-07:00

For most of my adult life, the term "civil liberties" was more likely to induce a little roll of the eyes, a little "there they go again" directed at the avant garde of social excess, pushing the boundaries of what a polite society would consider remotely reasonable stretches of personal freedom. And in the 1980s, when I was coming of age, that's mostly what they were: ACLU lawsuits that always seemed to favor the cause of the extreme left (although I do recall them defending the rights of the Klan to march) or just plain bizarre behavior.

But in the last few years, my reflexive rightist tendencies have been draining from me, and perhaps not coincidentally I've had the increasing sensation of encroachment on my liberties as an American citizen.

Maybe it's the security cameras that keep popping up.

Maybe it's the "rights management" controls that have invaded the digital content I buy.

Maybe it's the obtrusive security at airports, and the way minor civil servants have started to talk to me like I was a third grader at a fire drill.

Maybe it's these inexplicable camps that my wife has been questioning lately.

Maybe it's the way that the Congress seems to be bending over backwards to serve the interests of corporations.
Maybe it's my realization that while the government says it's never about oil or money, it's always about oil or money.

Maybe it's the way that no matter where you are, somebody can find you from your cell phone.

Maybe it was when a co-worker figured out something I posted anonymously on the internet that didn't even concern him directly--and in the course of his search, identified a psuedonymn that I've used to post a lot of private observations online.

Maybe it's all this talk of a national identity card.

Maybe it's this talk of building fences and militarizing our borders.

Maybe it's that we are being "temporary inconvenienced" with wartime laws and security measures for a war that nobody can project a real end to.

Maybe it's all the money in politics.

I really don't have the answers, and I'm far from being a raver about this stuff. I just have to confess that where I once implicitly trusted--I don't know, call it "the system"--I no longer do. I think I've been around too long and seen too much. Wisdom doesn't counsel trust of power; "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." I have found, to my great disillusionment, that those with money and power can be trusted to do almost anything they think they can get away with to get more of both. And the more power that is concentrated in Washington, the more money competes to buy it and direct its hand.

Distressing, and frankly at this stage I'm not entirely sure what to think about it all.

Don't you get between God and his favorite political party...

2007-08-26T08:12:00.000-07:00

Pastor Wiley Drake, 2nd Vice President of the Southern Baptist Convention, has called down fire from heaven on a couple of staffers from the "watchdog" group Americans United for Separation of Church and State because the staffers called on the IRS to audit the reverend for endorsing political candidates from the pulpit--thus risking his church's status as a non-profit.

Because God loves Mike Huckabee and has chosen him to be president of the United States, Pastor Wiley heartily endorsed him on his radio show and in a press release, both as leader of his ministry and as representing his position as 2nd Vice President of the SBC.

Referring to his press release, Drake added, “I want to ask you to please pray for me and for a press release that we just put out this morning. And the press release is simply this: this comes from my office, pastor, First Southern Baptist Church and second vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention, etc., etc.”

This led to the call to the IRS for an inquiry against him, to which Pastor Wiley responded:

Drake responded to AU’s allegations in an Aug. 14 press release calling on Christians to join in offering imprecatory, or cursing, prayers. He called the complaint an “attack from the enemies of God.” Drake listed several biblical passages as examples of imprecatory prayers.“Please join us,” Drake added, “with Bible in hand, and let us do battle against the enemies of God.”

It got nasty:

In a section of his press release called “How To Pray,” Drake includes a long list of biblical citations that call on God to smite enemies. For example, the alleged enemies of God “shall be judged,” “condemned,” and “his days be few….” Additionally, supporters should pray that the enemy’s “children be fatherless, and his wife a widow,” and “his children be continually vagabonds, and beg; let them seek bread also out of their desolate places.”

Of course, AU was appalled. Too bad, according to Drake:

“If they think it’s ‘outlandish,’ it doesn’t surprise me,” Drake stated. “They’re ungodly, un-scriptural, not even Christians.”“They have no reverence for the Word of God,” Drake continued. “And if they think it’s ‘outlandish,’ don’t blame me, I didn’t write it, God did.”

You get that? God told Drake Wiley to call for believers to pray for the death of a couple of staffers at a watchdog group for suggesting the IRS investigate the endorsement of a candidate God himself has chosen to be president because the endorsement violates IRS regulations for non-profits.

When the insanity of the religious entanglements of evangelicalism in right-wing politics ends--and I believe that it will--I can promise you I won't look back.

Get these guys on TBN!

2007-08-22T14:19:00.001-07:00

Anne Rice, Catholic, Endorses Hillary Clinton

2007-08-19T08:30:00.000-07:00

As some of you may know, Anne Rice--author of the notorious Vampire Chronicles novels--converted to Catholicism and has dedicated herself to "write books for the Lord." The first, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, I reviewed when it came out back in November of 2005. She recently published this letter on her website:

I repeat: I am a Christian; I am a Democrat. I support Hillary Clinton for President of the United States.

I recall mentioning before that once upon a time, when I identified myself as a "card-carrying member of the vast right-wing conspiracy" that I expressed befuddlement that anyone could be both a sincere Christian and a Democrat. I think that in this essay Anne Rice makes as good a case as any but it seems to boil down to this:

Though I deeply respect those who disagree with me, I believe, for a variety of reasons, that the Democratic Party best reflects the values I hold based on the Gospels. Those values are most intensely expressed for me in the Gospel of Matthew, but they are expressed in all the gospels. Those values involve feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, visiting those in prison, and above all, loving one’s neighbors and loving one’s enemies. A great deal more could be said on this subject, but I feel that this is enough.

I certainly can't and won't argue with the sentiment except to say that I'm not convinced that expecting government to express the principles of the gospel is what's expected of us as believers, but I'll leave that for another day.

As an interesting aside, given her public conversion a lot of readers have been asking her why she has not (or believing that she had, why she did so) renounce the Vampire Chronicles novels. The entire posting is worth reading, but here's what I believe is the most important point she makes:

For me, the entire body of my earlier work, reflects a movement towards Jesus Christ. In 2002, I consecrated my work to Jesus Christ. This did not involve a denunciation of works that reflected the journey. It was rather a statement that from then on I would write directly for Jesus Christ. I would write works about salvation, as opposed to alienation; I would write books about reconciliation in Christ, rather than books about the struggle for answers in a post World War II seemingly atheistic world.

My books reflect now, as they always have, what I see and feel and struggle to understand.

Viscerally fearful and ignorant evangelicals will no doubt continue to look at her work as a spawn of Satan. Be that as it may, literate and thoughtful men and women such as Anne Rice hold out hope that belief in Christ in America will in the future look less and less like today's angry, reflexively right-wing evangelicalism.

Gay Marriage: What was I really afraid of?

2007-08-17T16:33:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure what images are conjured up when evangelicals contemplate the dangers of gay marriage. Which is odd, because I used to be one of them. But for the life of me I can't remember what, when I opposed gay marriage, I was actually afraid of.

I suppose the opposition was visceral. I've heard and repeated the usual arguments, but at the risk that I might restate them in a way that's unfair to those who still hold them, I turn to nonpartisan BalancedPolitics.com:

Most religions consider homosexuality a sin.
It would weaken the definition and respect for the institution of marriage.
It would further weaken the traditional family values essential to our society.
It could provide a slippery slope in the legality of marriage (e.g. having multiple wives or marrying an object could be next).

Please just read the story below and tell me whether any of the arguments above still hold weight with you in the reality of what happens in this world without gay marriage (I quote this post from Andrew Sullivan in its entirety):

Some people seem to think that because gay couples have the right in a free country to live together, the legal protections of civil marriage are unnecessary. They don't understand the legal power that homophobic families can have over sons and daughters - even adult ones in long-standing relationships. In Indiana, a couple who lived together for 25 years saw their lives turned upside down when one of them had an aneurysm and a stroke. His parents, who disapproved of his relationship, swooped in and barred his spouse from custody. The story is here. Money quote:
Conrad traveled to the Atlanta hospital to be with Atkins but was soon denied access by the family. Hospital staff defied the family's wishes and let Conrad visit Atkins during off-hours.
Atkins eventually was moved to a nursing facility in Carmel, where Conrad would arrive after regular visiting hours so the Atkinses would not see him.

He filed his guardianship request in June 2005. That November, the Atkinses moved Patrick into their home and have since refused to let Conrad visit. They also have refused his phone calls.
Atkins is in no mental state to defy his own parents. The law is on their side. Without marriage, it always will be. If a heterosexual who had lived with her spouse for two and half decades was barred from even seeing her husband after a stroke, no one would doubt the law needed to be changed. It is just as evil when it is done to a gay couple. Yes, there are some contracts that can be drawn up to provide more protection than Conrad is getting. But in states which have passed marriage and civil union bans for gay couples, those protections are vulnerable to legal challenge from other kin. Gay couples are human beings. To have our families ripped apart and have no legal recourse is institutionalized cruelty - designed for no other purpose than to stigmatize and marginalize a small minority. We need and deserve full equality now. Nothing short of civil marriage will ever suffice.

What if the person you lived with and loved for 25 years was taken from you as soon as they were no longer able to make their own choices in life? I shudder to think what my life would be like if someone prevented me from seeing my wife when she was at her greatest hour of vulnerability.

I would just suggest to my evangelical friends that if you want to continue to throw your consent behind a system that results in this kind of injustice, you at least might want to be clearer than I ever was about why that makes sense.

Gay Marriage: What it's Really About

2007-08-15T20:44:00.000-07:00

My apologies for posting on this issue yet again but here's another real-life story that sums up perfectly why our current resistance to formalizing gay relationships creates what anyone would have to consider to be true injustice.

Take the case of Buffalo police officer Patricia A. Parete, shot in the neck by a criminal while on duty almost one year ago. Since the time of the shooting, Officer Parete has been working to recover the use of her body after severe damage to her spinal cord. Her gay partner has been with her every step of the way:

Since Buffalo Police Officer Patricia A. Parete was shot in the neck, Maryellen Opalinski has been by her bedside on all but about five of the 257 days.

“As soon as this happened, it was just automatic, like a reflex,” Opalinski said. “I’ve been by her side the whole time. I have never given it a second thought.”

This kind of behavior demonstrates the deepest kind of love and commitment, true "for better or for worse, in sickness and in health" devotion. Those who oppose gay marriage on the grounds that homosexuality is "perverted" or "abnormal" or who say that gay relationships can't demonstrate the same kind kind of elevated love, where two halves become one whole, simply aren't cognizant of reality.

If you oppose gay marriage, get clear on two things: why you actually oppose it, and what the cost of that opposition is in the lives of men and women like Patricia Parete and Maryellen Opalinski, and Brett Conrad and Patrick Atkins.

Quote of the Day

2007-08-15T08:36:00.000-07:00

“Comfort and prosperity have never enriched the world as much as adversity has.”

-Billy Graham

Peace be with you...

2007-08-13T09:45:00.001-07:00

For some reason, my mind conjured up this morning a memory of the portion of the Catholic mass where we would "offer one another the sign of Christ's peace." This would involve shaking hands with one another and saying "Peace be with you... and also with you." A very simple ritual, without compare in the evangelical realm.

I say this because in the evangelical realm it felt... so much more forced to me. Like a concerted effort to break the ice before the sermon. And they were never so forced as when you were supposed to "Turn to your neighbor and tell them 'x'!", x being something like "I'm glad you're here today!", or "Isn't it great to be in the house of the Lord!" or some such other exclamation-pointed pablum.

I must say, while I almost never think about the old Catholic mass, I sure miss that simple handshake.

Peace be with you.

Noise cancelling addictions

2007-08-08T23:13:00.000-07:00

My thus-far faithful iPod Mini gave up the ghost without warning yesterday morning. Given that this little unit has been my almost constant companion, lulling me to sleep and filling my commutes and workouts with songs and the spoken word on a daily basis for two and a half years, my first reaction was total dismay. No more iPod?

Damn. Lameness.

Then I began to reflect on why this was such a big deal for me, especially when it comes to going to sleep. I should mention that while in general I don't sleep terribly well on any given night, the summer heat makes it even worse. And when I am troubled in my thoughts, sleep can be very elusive.

But the iPod helped with that. I came to realize that the iPod was often acting like a kind of white noise generator. This is sort of what noise cancelling headphones do, by the way. Just generate more noise to help tune out some other noise. In this case, the chattering in my skull.

Can anyone else relate to this?