Life Lessons at a Municipal Pool
When I was in elementary
school, the closest swimming pool to my hometown of Bushnell was in Inverness,
some 25 miles to the west. During summer recreation at the school, the coaches
would load us into a school bus to take us to the municipal pool there for an
afternoon of swimming fun.
The bus rides were as much fun
as the swimming. It was on these trips I learned the folk songs which had
captured America’s imagination in the early 1960s on shows like Hootenanny and
Shindig. I came to love Peter, Paul and Mary as we sang “500 Miles, “ “Puff the
Magic Dragon” and “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore.”
It was also there I first
began learning the dangers of the water. One visit when I had floated into the
deep end of the pool on an inner tube, a little girl pushed me off the tube to
take it away from me. I plunged into the 8 feet of water below me. Not knowing
how to swim, I scrambled to pull myself up to the surface, grabbing onto the
girl’s bathing suit as she pushed me away.
Going down for the last
time, I suddenly found myself in the air and sitting on the side of the pool
choking out the 10 gallons of chlorinated water I’d swallowed. My Mother had
chaperoned the trip that day and had seen me floundering, pulled me out of the
water and saved me from drowning.
In the summer of 1966, those
trips to the pool ended. A court order handed down from a federal district
court mandated that the segregated schools of Citrus County would be
dismantled. The handwriting was on the wall. All public facilities would be
integrated. And so the city council of Inverness decided to close its pool
rather than require its white children to swim in the pool with black children.
My Mother called it “Cutting
your nose off to spite your face.”
“You know why…”
This was hardly my first
encounter with this kind of raw prejudice in action. It had been the custom of
the elementary school I attended to hold a graduation service of sorts at the
end of the 6th grade. Thereafter students would attend the big
school, the 7-12 high school across the street where my Father taught.
In years gone by, this had
actually been a big deal. Many farm kids never went beyond 6th
grade. An elementary education was presumed to be all kids who would thereafter
work the truck farms and cattle ranches of rural America needed to know. Jethro
Bodine on the Beverly Hillbillies often bragged about being a 6th
grade graduate. He reflected a time in America’s history that had passed but
whose relics remained in ceremonies like that of my school.
The year I was to graduate
to the high school, our teacher informed us that the graduation ceremony had
been cancelled. We were crestfallen. Why, we asked.
At this point our teacher’s
face became grave. “Next year we will be integrated,” she said. This was hardly
news. “So what?” I asked. “Some parents don’t want their kids standing on a
stage next to little black kids,” she continued. “Why not?” I pursued, only to
receive a look that conveyed, “You know why, Harry.” I continued, “That’s
really stupid,” unable even then to stop myself from commenting on the obvious.
Stupid or not, the
graduation was discontinued. And, like the pool in Inverness, some patently
unbelievable rationalization was offered about inconvenience, understaffing and
safety.
Once again, we had opted to
cut our nose off to spite our face.
Marriage at Midnight, Osceola County, FL
Discrimination Compounded by
Disingenuity
Those stories came streaming
back to me this morning as I read in the Tampa Bay Times
the following:
As
gay marriage comes to Florida, Pasco County's clerk of court is among a growing
number of clerks who are refusing to hold courthouse marriage ceremonies.
Rather than extend the practice to gay couples, they are ending it entirely.
From
as far west as Santa Rosa County to as far east as Duval County, much of North
Florida is opting out. But in the Tampa Bay area, home to the largest gay pride
celebration in the southeastern United States, only the Pasco clerk has chosen
that route.
"It
was an easy decision to make," Clerk of Court Paula O'Neil said. Some of
her rationale was financial: Pasco is experiencing a construction boom, generating
extra work for her employees. But there were personal and religious components
as well. Most of her staff who handle marriage licenses were
"uncomfortable" officiating same-sex weddings, she said.
"The
problem is we can't discriminate," she said. "So there are some
people who would have wanted to transfer to another area, and we can't transfer
everybody."
So, rather than follow the
practice prior to this ruling and performing marriages onsite without
discriminating against same-sex couples, the clerks have decided that if they
can’t discriminate in whom they choose to marry, no one can get married in
their offices. They’ll just take their ball and go home.
I would revert to my
childhood and ask the obvious question “Why not?” But, truth be told, we all
know why not, just like we did in Bushnell in 1964.
Like the white city fathers
of Inverness, no doubt it was “an easy decision to make” for the clerks across the buckle of the Bible
Belt which stretches from Jacksonville to Pensacola and its islands dotting the
rest of the state. They faced a legal judgment that their cherished
discriminatory practices were unconstitutional which they could no longer avoid.
And so, lacking any alternatives, they would comply, just as school districts
begrudgingly desegregated in the mid 1960s. But they would not participate in
what they saw as unthinkable.
At the heart of this
decision is the same reasoning that closed the pool in Inverness and ended the
graduation ceremonies in Bushnell. In the final analysis it simply boils down
to common social prejudices at work exacerbated by intellectual dishonesty.
The Pasco Clerk’s argument
that it must discontinue services that previously were no problem to provide
but now suddenly had become too costly is belied by the fact that the increase
in services will ultimately be very minimal. The most generous estimates of the
presence of LBGTQ people in our population hover around 10%, many of whom
harbor abiding mistrust of what was until recently an exclusively heterosexual
and heterosexist institution. More reliable estimates suggest about 3% of the
population will now be eligible to participate in marriage. Many of them will
elect not to.
There will hardly be much of
an increase in job duties for these clerks.
The Halo Effect
Clearly this is a
disingenuous argument but not terribly surprising. People who recognize that
honestly embracing the real reasons for their conduct may bring them some level
of disapprobation from others (and polls now suggest a small majority of
Floridians favor same sex marriages) often seek ways to legitimate their
conduct no matter how strained. Indeed, sociologists have long known that the
unwillingness to admit to shameful attitudes routinely results in voters
reporting social acceptable views to pollsters only to vote their prejudices in
the darkness of the voting booth, a phenomenon called the halo effect.
To her credit, the Pasco
clerk at least points toward the real reasons for this decision, noting that
some of her deputy clerks were “uncomfortable” officiating at same sex
weddings. In other words, these county employees were unable to get past their
own prejudices to continue doing the same job they’ve been doing. That’s the
“personal component.”
There is also a “religious
component” involved here. Many holders of conservative religious beliefs tend
to baptize the presumption of heteronormativity in religious terms.
We hear it in the simplistic
“God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” slogans slung around as if they
are revealed truth. We also see it in its more virulent homophobic forms in
places like Uganda which pass laws making the mere accusation of being gay a
capital crime. These laws were based on model laws provided them by American
evangelicals whose agendas in Africa are often greased with lots of money from
American offering plates.
Of course, religion has long
been used to baptize social prejudices. The prime dueling space in the run-up
to the Civil War over the mandate for and against slavery occurred in pulpits
across America. Much of the resistance to the inevitable end of segregation in
the South was also cast in religious terms as the letter from the Mississippi
Baptist pastor to President Lyndon Johnson stated: “Don’t force us to do
something God has commanded us not to do.”
The gods of the tribe always
make convenient and, within the circled wagons, compelling authorities for
holding onto the prejudices against those outside the tribal bounds. Confusing cultural values with the divine
mandates of a religion – often with deadly results - is a common phenomenon
observable worldwide from the attacks on the Golden Temple in Amritsar to the
Supreme Court ruling that centuries old Native American religious practices
involving peyote were not constitutionally protected.
As writer Anne Lamott notes,
"You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it
turns out that God hates all the same people you do."
Waiting in line at Orlando City Hall, Midnight, Jan. 5, 2014
(All photos from Channel 13 Orlando site)
No Privilege to Discriminate
Perhaps the most remarkable
part of the clerk’s quote is in the final comment of the excerpt above. "The problem is
we can't discriminate."
Ahem.
Why
would not being able to discriminate be a problem? Is discrimination by government
employees against members of the public they serve somehow a privilege that
should be afforded them? Upon what basis? Indeed, it was precisely the problem of unconstitutional discrimination that prompted
the federal courts to overturn laws and state constitutional amendments which
prohibited marriage of same sex couples in the first place.
This
behavior of some clerks across parts of our state is pretty shameful but not
terribly surprising. Where they claim principle and piety, the reality is that
their actions evince prejudice and pettiness. The struggle for equality for
LBGTQ people has been marked by many episodes of such shameful behaviors. This
is just the latest chapter.
But,
fortunately, it’s not the final word.
In
the wake of the closing of 12 (of 67 total) courthouse chapels across the
fringe of Florida, a number of law
firms and notary publics are making their services available to same
sex couples to marry them. Where courthouse clerks are unwilling to make their
tax money supported chapels available to them, the law firms have offered their
own locations for that purpose.
The arc of the moral
universe may be long, but, fortunately it does ultimately bend towards justice.
Even here in darkest Florida.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry
Scott Coverston, J.D., M.Div., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar
(inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church
(Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Asst. Lecturer:
Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central
Florida, Osceola Campus, Kissimmee
If
the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be
it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most
things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1 comment:
Well said. Sad to see these elected Clerks not fulfilling their duties for all their constituents.
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