Some thoughts to follow Clarknt67's's excellent diary on the inauguration team's choice of pastoral kick-off lineup.
Rick Warren may be a nice guy. He may be a good speaker. He may even be the idea person to bring evangelicals to some common ground with the rest of us.
But a nice as he dresses it all up, we don't have a disagreement on the "issues." He's a perpetrator of spiritual violence. It's just a question of how close your are to being the crosshairs.
Put yourself in the head of a GLBT teen who lives in the all-enveloping world of a place like Saddleback. This is your life, in a nutshell:
a) Pray that God will change the sexual orientation He created you with.
b) Be celibate until then.
c) Repeat from step (a)
Don't like it? Well, you can leave. Or die. Dead is better than whole.
Here's a piece I wrote for our local gay rag (The Vital Voice of St. Louis; the 4yr-old link has expired, alas) after I interviewed a woman who faced what Rick Warren and his ilk preach.
"Ann" is about forty, outgoing, funny, and very comfortable in her own skin. The small wrinkles around her eyes are from smiling.
She's a committed Christian and, within the limits set by a job in a homophobic workplace, a very out lesbian.
But just four years ago, Ann was a very different woman, so determined to turn straight that for more than ten years, she put her faith in the care of "reparative therapists" who assured her that her sexual orientation would change.
It didn't. Instead, Ann spent the years wrestling with depression and suicidal thoughts. She also ran up thousands of dollars in debt with counselors who charged between $25 and $60 per hour to delve into Ann's childhood and repeat the same message over and over. She was sexually 'broken,' they told her, but with just enough prayer, just enough devotion to Christ, change was possible.
From time to time, Ann would reach out for support. The losest she cold come to outing herself was to say, "If I didn't walk closely with the Lord, I'd be a
lesbian."
"I just hated myself so much," she recalls now, "that I would only come out as a means of getting help.
The counseling sessions continued as Ann moved from town to town in her job as a fundraiser for a Christian ministry. The work paid less than fifteen thousand dollars per year. After undergoing surgery in late nineties, Ann found herself living off credit cards and working a second job in retail to pay off her debts ... and to keep up the counseling sessions.
She worked with nine counselors over her years in reparative therapy and remembers them as sincere, genuine people not out for money or control.
"They weren’t malicious," she says now. "They really believed they were improving people’s quality of life."
If Ann faults her counselors for anything, it’s for clinging to the belief that faith gay people have to be changed and that prayer and devotion are enough to
make that happen.
"You start to believe that so much hinges on whether you can overcome those same-sex attractions," she explains. "You just feel like you’ve got this horrid
disease that you’ve got to keep a secret."
In her years of involvement with reparative therapy, Ann does not recall a single person who claimed to have overcome same-sex attractions. In her experience, many of the people who committed to change their orientation ended up committing to lifelong celibacy instead.
"I Need Your Guidance."
This might have been Ann's path, too, if a pair of chance encounters had not broken the cycle of self-hatred.. At her retail job, Ann became friends with "Kate," a regular customer who one day asked her out to dinner.
"I like you," Kate told Ann in the middle of their meal. "I like you as more than a friend."
Ann was caught completely off guard. She told Kate about her struggles with spirituality and sexuality. Kate was very understanding and told Ann to take all
the time she needed to think things over.
Days later, Ann found herself sitting in her car outside a local leftie cafe, praying.
"God," she prayed, "You know my heart. You know I would do anything for you. But I can’t live without love anymore and I need your guidance."
Ann walked in and saw a bright lavender flyer with the title "Bible Study for Gay Christians."
The study group met at a progressive church, and after the first meeting, Ann realized she didn’t have to pretend anymore.
So we homos aren't being hysterical when we treat the Warren issue and others like it as if there were matters of life and death.
They are.
Hospital Bars Woman from Dying Partner
The family vacation cruise that Janice Langbehn, her partner Lisa Marie Pond and three of their four children set out to take in February 2007 was designed to be a celebration of the lesbian couple's 18 years together.
But when Pond suffered a massive stroke onboard before the ship left port and was rushed to Jackson Memorial Hospital, administrators refused to let Langbehn into the Pond's hospital room. A social worker told them they were in an "anti-gay city and state."
Langbehn filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday charging the Miami hospital with negligence and "anti-gay animus" in refusing to recognize her and the children as Pond's family, even after a power of attorney was faxed to the hospital within an hour of their arrival.
The case raises questions about the way hospitals deal with same-sex or unmarried partners of patients, which has led to controversy in the past. Hospital industry officials say they are constrained by patient privacy laws that can restrict giving visiting access and medical information to nonrelatives, a stance that some patient advocates have branded as discriminatory.
Pond, 39, was pronounced dead of a brain aneurysm about 18 hours after being admitted to Jackson's Ryder Trauma Center. Langbehn said she was allowed in to see her partner only for about five minutes, as a priest gave Pond the last rites.
"I never thought almost 20 years of love and family could be disregarded in an instant," said Langbehn, a social worker who lives with her children in Lacey, Wash.
The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Miami, charges hospital social worker Garnett Frederick and physicians Alois Zauner and Carlos Alberto Cruz with negligence and "intentional infliction of emotional distress." The suit seeks damages in excess of $75,000.
"No matter what your definition of family is, this family went through terrible indignities," said Donald Hayden, a Miami lawyer who joined the national advocacy group Lambda Legal in bringing the suit. "The partners here did everything they were supposed to do under law and were still denied visitation rights that should have been allowed."
Jackson officials declined to comment, except to say that the hospital follows state and federal laws on patient privacy that can forbid releasing health information to those outside the patient's immediate family.
The hospital also may limit visitors if a patient is being treated for a trauma, emergency or serious infection, said Valda Clark Christian, an assistant county attorney representing Jackson.
At a Miami news conference, Langbehn, 39, broke down when she recalled the eight hours she and her three adopted children — now ages 11, 12 and 14 — sat in a hospital waiting room with little knowledge of Pond's condition. "As I sat there wracking my brain, I would go outside and scream into the Miami night," she said. "I felt like a failure for not being there holding her hand."
Pond, Langbehn and the children arrived in Miami for a Caribbean cruise with R Family Vacations, a company run by Rosie O'Donnell and her partner Kelli Carpenter that caters to gays.
Pond was stricken shortly after boarding the ship Norwegian Jewel as she watched her children play basketball, Langbehn said. She and the children were told virtually nothing about Pond and not allowed to see her — even though Pond's sister arrived from Jacksonville and was sent straight to Pond's room.
When Pond was declared brain dead about 10 a.m. the next day, her heart, both kidneys and her liver were harvested for donation, according to her wishes, Langbehn said.
Linda Quick, president of the South Florida Hospital and Healthcare Association, said she did not think Jackson broke any laws or rules and chided the family for seeking money from a public hospital.
"Whether [Jackson] could have been more culturally sensitive, maybe. Do the [the family members] deserve an apology? Probably," Quick said. "But that's tax money they are trying to get."
Federal health privacy laws say hospitals should not disclose details about a patient except to the nearest family member or someone with power of attorney. Hospitals legally do not have to allow visitors.
Florida law spells out a priority list for whom doctors should consult about a patient's health care: first, a guardian or health surrogate, then a spouse, adult child, parent, adult sibling, adult relative and finally a close friend.
Normally, hospitals honor a power of attorney but there could be legal or logistical reasons that would interfere, said William Bell, attorney for the Florida Hospital Association.
Quick said it may be time to modernize the law.
"Today's lifestyles may require some broader interpretations of what is a family member," Quick said.
'I Couldn't Save Kate'
[Charlene Strong] met her partner of 10 years, Charlene Strong, when she began volunteering with the Pet Project, an organization that cares for pets of people with AIDS. Strong ran the pet clinic and was in need of volunteers when she and Fleming met. The women, who were married in a commitment ceremony in the back yard of Fleming’s parents’ house in Virginia, shared their Catholic faith and love of animals.
"I will never meet anyone like her again in my life and I know that," Strong said. "That’s what saddens me."
Strong is no stranger to emotional struggles. The Mississippi native helped resettle her mother, brother and sister-in-law in Seattle after Hurricane Katrina destroyed their Pass Christian home in 2005. In the month since her partner died, Strong is still trying to make sense of it all.
"I did everything I could to get my family here but I couldn’t save Kate," she said. "I was trying to get her out of the basement and I couldn’t get her out."
Strong was visiting a friend a mile away when a rapid current of floodwaters breached a retaining wall at the top of a hill near their home in Madison Valley, a Seattle neighborhood. As water poured into the basement recording studio in their small cottage home, Fleming ran down the stairs to save her recording equipment and became trapped. Strong tried in vain to rescue her partner, who was under water for 15 minutes before firefighters cut a hole through the bedroom floor and pulled her out. She died later at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle with Strong by her side.
If Strong had been her legal spouse, the decisions that came next would have been made quickly, albeit painfully. But Strong was initially denied the right to visit Fleming in the hospital as she lay dying. When asked what relationship she had to Fleming, Strong told the truth, unwilling to lie and say they were sisters.
"A social worker called Kate’s sister to get approval for me to be back there," she said. "Once I was allowed back, the hospital was amazing. They never denied me the ability to make decisions about whether they should continue to perform CPR or let her go."
Things were not easier at the funeral home, where Strong was unable to legally approve the cremation request. Strong then found that her homeowner’s insurance refused to honor her claim because the house was involved in a flood. She does have a few rights, including right of survivorship on the house and a life insurance policy on Fleming, but she is also stuck paying off a mortgage on a house that was destroyed.
"Two weeks before she died we were talking about making a will," Strong said. "She said what kind of funeral Mass she wanted and that she wanted half of her ashes with me and half buried by her father ...
So please try to understand that GLBT folk do not come to this discussion from the same starting point as the President Elect.
[W]e’re not going to agree on every single issue, but what we have to do is to be able to create an atmosphere where we can disagree without being disagreeable, and then focus on those things that we hold in common as Americans.
Our thoughts are not on matters of "atmosphere" and "common ground" with the likes of Rick Warren. Our thoughts are with the hearts and lives his actions leave in tatters.