A Messiah with a Brooklyn Accent Leads a Revolution

It’s a pleasant spring day in Central Florida, temperatures in the low 80s. Everything from azaleas to maple trees is blooming today, a riot of color against the pastel green of the oak trees bearing new leaves. The pollen count is off the charts. A warm breeze blows across the field to which we have been directed by the local sheriff’s deputies, then on foot through the gauntlet of local police security, past the row of portable toilets to the area where a stage has been set up. There are two raised platforms on either side, one for the local press and the other for the band whose rock music pounds the crowd as it arrives.

There will be no seating at this event. We will stand for two hours in the direct sunlight at this place about 45 minutes south of our home, just off US 192 and the Florida Turnpike called the Osceola Heritage Park. The famed Silver Spurs Rodeo and the spring training grounds for the Houston Astros loom just to the west of this open space that not too long ago was the home of Black Angus cows and cattle egrets.

We have come to this spot between what used to be small towns, Kissimmee and St. Cloud, along with an estimated 5,000 of our fellow Central Floridians to hear a presidential candidate give a stump speech. Bernie Sanders was an unknown name here in Florida until he began to win primaries, casting a modicum of doubt on the sure victory of Hillary Clinton in her path to the Democratic nomination.

Sanders had come to Florida for a debate with Clinton, crisscrossing the state on the days before and after the debate. He was also coming on the heels of a surprise upset victory in Michigan a couple of days earlier, a state that, like Florida, had been forecast by pollsters to go to Clinton by double digits.

Andy and I are among the older members of the crowd this day. All around us are young people bearing black “Feel the Bern” tee-shirts and periodically interrupting Sanders’ speech with chants of “Ber-nie, Ber-nie.” But more importantly, this is a crowd that reflects the incredibly diverse place Central Florida has come to be.

One of the organizers of the event spoke to the crowd in Spanish as we awaited the candidate’s arrival, telling the crowd that it was important for Puerto Rican, Colombian, Venezuelan and Dominican voters to get out the vote. “Sanders is the only one who really cares about our children,” the woman said, a theme echoed by Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard who warmed up the crowd for the candidate. 

To our left stood a mother and adult child of Indian heritage who smiled broadly when I noted the sign bearing the OM symbol a group held in front of us reading “Hindus for Sander.” A number of Muslim women in hijab stood in front of us, erupting each time Sanders spoke of the shamefulness of a campaign in which a religion and its adherents had become targeted as scapegoats.

Preaching to the Choir…..

Of course we weren’t there to be convinced by Sanders to vote for him. Both Andy and I had already cast our ballots for him in early voting. As in years past, my support for the candidate for whom I vote in the primary is always strong, something that may well not be the case for the candidate for whom I vote in the general election. There are several reasons I voted for Bernie and hope against hope he will be the Democratic nominee.

One of the analyses of the difference between Sanders and Clinton described it as a choice between a revolution and an evolutionary process. Sanders is speaking of major changes in the status quo, Clinton boasts of her ability to work within it. Another analysis notes the number of times that Clinton speaks in first person, primarily of her capabilities and her track record as a leader; Sanders speaks largely in second person: we, us and what our country is about and how we should manifest those values. This day I wear a tee-shirt bearing that message: Not Me. US! Bernie 2016.

Bernie comes by that collective focus honestly. He is the child of a Polish immigrant family who learned early on the need to work together to succeed in early 20^th New York. Bernie later spent some time on a kibbutz, the communal agrarian communities that built Israel over the last century and instilled values of community and social responsibility.

One of those values, no doubt forged in the wake of the Holocaust, is the call for justice for all peoples, particularly those oppressed by the powerful. Sanders was an early participant in the US Civil Rights movement and a forceful speaker in the more recent struggle for gay rights. Today much of his speech will decry the scapegoating of immigrants and religious minorities that has dominated the present campaign.

But it is his commentary on the disappearing middle class that most speaks to me. I watch with trepidation as the middle class has disappeared around me, the American Dream of a better life than one’s parents now available to only a few. Like Bernie, I recognize the danger of an increasingly inequitable society where the top 1% rig the system to divert more and more of the material resources and the power that goes along with that wealth to themselves.

The writer of the Proverbs was clear that “without a vision the people perish.” America seems to have lost its way over the past 35 years of trickle-down economics (consider the liquid most often associated with that verb to get a full picture of how the working poor have fared under free market fundamentalism) and an increasing consolidation of power at the top of the economic scale. In the process, America has become a contentious, fractured people less prone to honor its heritage of “Give me your tired, your poor” than to scapegoat those we construct in gruesome caricatures beginning with our own working poor. Ideals of “liberty and justice for all” seem far away these days.

A Green Yellow Dog Democrat

I believe our nation needs a new vision, not a reshuffling of chairs on the deck of the Titanic. And I believe Bernie Sanders is the only one articulating such a vision. There is no shortage of technocrats and economists who can put such ideals into practice. But the time for a new vision is here and now. The need for a new direction is urgent.

Truth be told, though I have always been a registered Democrat in this closed primary state, I’m a fair weather Democrat on a good day. My politics are decidedly Green beginning with my values: non-violence (including a draw down of an enormously expensive military we can no longer afford), a citizenry fully engaged in a democratic system that reflects the average citizen, a just society with equal opportunity for all, and a focus on sustainability that honors the good Creation of which we human animals are a part but only a part.

I am a Green Yellow Dog Democrat for two reasons. First, the Green Party too often dissolves into bitter in-fighting and self-focus to mount an effective campaign, one of the scourges of left of center politics. I wish it were not so, but this is America where the force of the law reflecting the vested interests of the country has been brought to bear against third parties. This essentially guarantees dualistic decision making between very low level cognitive and moral choices. Far too often our elections boil down to what the public sees as the lesser of two evils.

Second, while the Democrats often offer what is simply the lesser of those two evils, that does translate to less evil with power. Having spent a good chunk of my life in both the legislative and judicial processes of our country’s governance, I am enough of a political realist to recognize that sometimes that’s the best one can do in a winner-take-all system rigged to protect the interests of two parties and the wealthy and powerful interests who control them.

And that’s where the Yellow Dog comes in. With the sale of the Republican Party soul to the unabashed interests of the corporations and the wealthy at the expense of the middle and working classes as well as to what is increasingly a radical religious right, it really does make more sense to vote for a Yellow Dog if s/he’s a Democrat than for anyone the Republicans field.

A Capable Woman and the Clown Car

What that means for me this election year is simple. I have voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary and hope against hope he’ll be the nominee. Current polling indicates he could defeat any of the potential Republican nominees. But the odds are against this plain spoken self-described Democratic Socialist from Vermont. If the current trends hold, the Democratic nominee will be Hillary Clinton. Should that be the case, she will have my vote this fall.

The prospect of having a woman in the White House (and not just as accoutrements  to the male POTUS) is not only exciting, it is LONG overdue. Women leaders bring a whole new range of decision making to bear when they govern. I have seen the very positive effect women leadership has had on my beloved Episcopal Church and the US Supreme Court. I believe a woman president would be a very healthy thing for the country (though if I could choose, that woman would be Elizabeth Warren).

So why am I not voting for Hillary in the primary? One reason already cited, she offers Americans the possibility of an evolving status quo, not a revolution. That’s good news for the beneficiaries of the status quo (and this includes both liberals and conservatives) but probably not such good news for those currently left out. The needs of an America on the brink of unraveling would best be served by a new status quo, thus a revolution is what we need.

I also am not happy with Hillary’s close ties to Wall Street and the military-industrial-technological complex. It will also be harder for a beneficiary of a post-Citizens United campaign spend-a-thon to address the fundamental threat to democracy that elections which have devolved into auctions to the highest bidders represent.

Even so, I have no doubts about Clinton’s capacities to lead. And if she is the Democratic nominee this fall, I will vote for her if for no other reason than the complete lack of even plausible leaders from the Clown Car on the Republican side of the ledger.

Like Bernie Sanders, Mr. Trump has drawn a large and loyal following of people who are angry at the devastating effects of the current status quo. They have reason to be angry – I’m angry, too - but while electing a narcissistic demagogue may be a feel good exercise in democracy it will ultimately only exacerbate the problems these very voters seek to address. An America addicted to “reality TV” will wake up with a major hangover should this high stakes hotel magnate prove to be the only candidate not to hear “You’re Fired!” from the voters.

Mr. Cruz actually scares me more than Trump. While Trump is the consummate showman with his Jerry Springer rallies and middle school locker room humor, Cruz actually believes all the crazy stuff he says. Son of a Baptist minister, this is a true believer unable to escape his Christian Dominionist background. This could prove a clear and present danger to many groups of people should this glazed over ideologue ever get close to holding any more power than the people of Texas - whose judgment in elected officials has long since become more than a little questionable (think W, Perry, Abbot) -  have invested in him as senator.

Speaking of questionable judgment, our own Senator Rubio has proven himself too immature to hold office of any kind, much less the presidency. Marco has been an overly ambitious, opportunistic politician from the very beginning. His record in the Florida legislature was dismal and largely non-productive. His performance in the circus of the Republican debates was childish. Glibness and cunning simply cannot make up for what he lacks in mature judgment and the ability to think of anyone other than Marco. He is, as the press has labeled him, an empty suit. His only redeeming quality is his ability to openly admit that his middle school penis jokes embarrassed his own children and to apologize to them. Maybe there’s hope for his humanity yet.

Finally, there is Mr. Kasich of Ohio.  Reconstructed as a “moderate” by the party rank and file fearing a Trump nomination, Kasich is the wet dream of the very business interests on whom Bernie Sanders has taken aim. As a member of the US House Kasich sought to reduce medicare benefits to retirees and as Governor sought to eliminate collective bargaining of public servants while insuring tax cuts to the wealthy. It is precisely the predatory politics of a war on the elderly and the working and middle classes of America that has brought America to this place of unprecedented inequity and polarization. The last thing we need to do as this bus called America approaches the ravine is to step on the gas.  

Until the Republicans offer reasonable, sane candidates who can serve all Americans without question, they simply will not be getting my vote and should not get yours. Sadly, it’s been a long time since that was the case.

Amazing I could get my very introverted husband out for this!

A Luxury We Cannot Afford

I know that a Bernie Sanders upset is unlikely tonight even as I hold out hope nonetheless. But, should that not come to pass, I will not engage in the all-or-nothing mentality articulated by some Sanders’ supporters and vow not to vote in the general election. Indeed, I would strongly urge them to reconsider that stance.

I admire the passion of the youthful voters who are supporting Bernie and I was delighted to share that passion at the rally last week. We need to encourage their participation. The future of our country and world is in their hands.

But with youth comes naiveté. I know. I’ve been there. I’ve had my heart broken and found myself deeply disillusioned by US politics more times than I can count. Should the presidential election be as close as every election since 1984 has been, a holier-than-thou purity which would prompt self-righteous Sanders voters not to get their hands dirty with the lesser of two evils will not accomplish ANY of the goals that the Sanders campaign has sought to address. If anything, it will insure the perpetuation of the very things he has rightly decried for the foreseeable future.

Tonight I will watch with bated breath as the results come in from this latest round of primaries. I hold no illusions about the outcome. But I continue to hope against hope that before the night is over, Andy and I can take up the refrain from that high energy rally in the middle of a converted cow pasture last week:

“Ber-nie! Ber-nie! Ber-nie!”    

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Harry Scott Coverston

Orlando, Florida

frharry@cfl.rr.com

harry.coverston@knights.ucf.edu

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)

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The Cleric, the Philosopher and the Shadow (part two)

[Part two of two parts]

 Irresistible Irrationality

Some of the difficulty in coming to grips with issues of sexual orientation both on an individual as well as at a societal level has revolved around the use of the term homophobia to describe prejudicial feelings regarding non-heterosexual orientations and the behaviors which flow from them. Initially cast in the language of psychopathology, the use of the suffix “phobia” suggested a morbid fear of aspects of the natural world which many people might find discomforting yet without any sense of compulsion in their avoidance. The terrified responses some feel when encountering snakes or spiders are good examples of phobic reactions.

While prejudice toward same sex behaviors is ancient in origins, the use of psychopathological language to describe this prejudice dates only to the late 1960s when a psychologist first used the term to described the internalized homophobia of men who feared that others thought they might be gay. Time Magazine quickly picked up the usage and thus homophobia entered into the American lexicon as a somewhat imprecise means of describing a wide range of negative reactions to homosexuality.

Not surprisingly, many who held such negative reactions objected to having their prejudices psychologized. Many men, intent on defending their masculinity, readily proclaimed they were hardly afraid of gay men, didn’t dislike them, they just saw them in negative terms.

Religious conservatives often insist that their prejudices were somehow located in the mind of G-d and thus they had no choice about the matter given the appearance of what they interpreted as anti-gay understandings in Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Of course, any assertion that one has no choice of what to believe is ultimately intellectually dishonest. 

No child comes into the world with a belief structure already formed and irrevocably cemented into place. Beliefs are by definition the product of choice making and for all of us that process has included many instances of changing our mind along the way. That one may find one’s current choice compelling and the alternative appalling does not mean a choice has not been made or that different choices could not be made now.

It is here that levels of moral and spiritual development come into play. The question of how to see one’s fellow children of G_d who happen to be LBGTQ draws into stark contrast the Great Commandments to love one’s neighbor as oneself – a post-conventional level of moral reasoning reflecting the thought of Jesus himself – and a legalistic appropriation of scripture – a tribal conventional moral reasoning more reflective of the Pharisees and scribes Jesus so often confronted.

Given that most people operate out of tribal or societal conventional levels of moral reasoning and corresponding levels of spiritual development, it is hardly surprising that lower level legalistic understandings emerge victorious here. Religious conservatives have often sought to avoid that contradiction with a convenient and often insufferably smarmy response of “Love the sinner, hate the sin,” a mantra big on the purity-based judgment of tribal legalism but devoid of anything resembling the unconditional love the commandments Jesus deferred to actually require.

Yet, recent studies have found that negative understandings of homosexuality actually come unbidden for most people. A wide range of studies on the “ick factor” in the last two decades has revealed that the degree to which one experiences a physiological reaction to disgusting stimuli such as human excrement and worms being eaten is a strong predictor for conservative positions on homosexuality and a wide range of other sex and reproduction issues.

That’s particularly true when such reactions are based in internalized homophobia. Fear of being seen as gay is particularly salient for those for whom repressed homoerotic responses arise unbidden according to a study from the University of Georgia.

What emerges from the last half century of changing understandings and perceptions is the realization that homosexual feelings and behaviors are part of the natural order which explains why they have been reported from the beginning of human history along with negative responses to the same. The recognition that homosexuality is the subordinate expression of sexuality in humans along with a host of other animal species means that it is a consistent part of the human sexual spectrum. Contrary to years of negative construction, predominately homosexual orientations are indeed a part of the natural order. They are uncommon but normal for those among whom they occur.

That is the reality, the noumenon, the biological fact seen in the light of reason and empirical evidence with which human subjects must now come to grips. And it is in that light that the descriptor homophobia becomes salient.

The current Merriam-Webster working defines homophobia as an “irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against homosexuality or homosexuals.” The key word in the definition is “irrational.” How that irrationality plays out could vary from an immediate, overpowering fear such as that found in cases of “homosexual panic” to the more garden variety of prejudice found in everything from middle school banter to slurs among multi-millionaire sports and rock stars trying to convince the public (and perhaps themselves) of their heterosexuality. 

This is where irrationality comes into the picture:

• It is not reasonable to demonize a subordinate expression of human sexuality whether by garden variety prejudices or through the heavy handed use of the law in criminalizing it. When the latter occurs, regardless of its jurisdiction, it is a classic example of the tyranny of the majority at work.

• It is not reasonable to deny same sex couples the same rights, privileges and immunities as spouses and partners that differently sexed couples presume their entitlement. In a democratic society, that is the definition of injustice.

• And it is not reasonable to presume that the G-d from which all being arises and to which all being returns would create a small subset of human beings who over their lifetime realize that they are not heterosexual only to condemn them because they have chosen to be honest with themselves and the world about who they are. That evidences the idolatry of a rather tyrannical deity who unsurprisingly holds the same prejudices as the believer.

• It is also not reasonable to appropriate scriptures in a selectively literalist manner in which prohibitions against eating shellfish (an abomination) are studiously ignored while the prohibitions against men lying with men as they would with women (which, of course, presumes that they would lie with women in the first place) from the same chapters are seen as inviolable. It is not reasonable to approach all the scriptural justifications for slavery and sexism with a scalpel of critical reason while approaching the provisions regarding same sex behaviors with kid gloves. To do so is to evidence the hermeneutic of homophobia.

• Finally, it is not reasonable to conflate an ancient social prejudice with the fundamental doctrinal tenets of an otherwise venerable religious tradition. Socially constructed understandings of sexual orientation are simply not in the same conceptual universe as theological beliefs about the Trinity. And it is not reasonable to deny faithful adherents of any religion, particularly one centered in the Golden Rule, their full place at the table of that tradition simply because of who they are and their willingness to be honest about that reality.

The Loss of the Luxury of Naïveté

In alcohol and addictions treatment, there is a phenomenon known as the loss of the luxury of naïveté. The first time the hungover alcohol abuser wakes up and cannot remember how s/he got home last night, that luxury is gone. There is a problem that cannot be ignored or easily explained away. And chances are, it may well get worse before it gets better.  

The same is true of those who insist upon holding onto negative understandings of homosexuality in light of all the evidence which reveals those understandings to be irrational. While democratic societies protect their rights to form, hold and express their beliefs as they see fit, they do not guarantee that the beliefs themselves must be respected. Indeed, given the irrational nature of these particular beliefs, not only are they not respectable, their irrationality ultimately provides a legitimate basis for the assessment of those beliefs as homophobic.

We do ourselves no favors when we refuse to look at this reality and see it for what it is. If we are serious in our desires to understand this pattern of thinking and behavior, we must start by calling it what it is.

But there is one more piece to this puzzle we must consider.

Even as we recognize this thinking and the negative, unbidden feelings which often inform it to be irrational - and thus homophobic -  it is critical that we do not engage in the same kind of reductionist behaviors that have in the past led the holders of these same prejudices to sum up complex human beings in dismissive reductionist terms: queer, fag, homo, lesbo.

No one is just a homophobe even if they cling to homophobic understandings in the face of knowing better. Human beings are too complex for such thoughtless description and the most imperfect of us remains a human being bearing the image of G_d even as we may fail to recognize it in the other. That was true of those prosecuting racist agendas during the 1950s, sexist agendas during the 1960s and the Know-Nothing rhetoric of the current election cycle. Sister Helen Prejean, who ministers among death row inmates in Louisiana, is very clear that no one – including convicted murderers – can ever be summed up by the worst thing they ever did (or thought or said).

Speaking from my own life experience, it has taken many of us who were raised in our version of Plato’s Cave - an overtly racist, segregated South - our entire lifetime to come to grips with the understandings and unbidden feelings about race that were planted in our tabula rasa infant souls. Like the popular (though I believe largely unhelpful) constructions of arrested addictive behaviors, we may well always be “in recovery.” We will always need to be mindful of our thought processes, particularly when under stress we begin down well-worn mental processing paths without conscious thinking.

All of us infected with that racist prejudice have come only as far as we have because we have been willing to learn from our mistakes and because those we have harmed with our racist understandings and feelings have been patient and gracious enough to help us grow and develop out of them. The same is true of those struggling with homophobia – including many LBGTQ people for whom the demons of homophobia are alive and well, repressed into the Shadow and expressing themselves as self-denigrating, self-defeating and sometimes self-destructive behaviors. 

These understandings are the product of many millennia of human culture. They did not arise overnight and they will not go away overnight.

For folks like the religious leader referenced in the opening of this essay, a heuristic composite of my dealings with several leaders across many different religious traditions, this will be a long, hard road. But it is the road to which all of us as human beings in varying states of consciousness are called: to recognize, name, confront and heal from the misanthropies we have absorbed and developed over our lifetimes.

In the Episcopal tradition, when anyone is baptized, we all recite a Baptismal Covenant in which we pledge to “seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves…” and to “strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?” These vows reflect a decidedly post-conventional moral reasoning and spiritual development. And because we know that none of us can do this alone, we make our pledge by responding “I will with God’s help.”

Letting go of eons of socially constructed human prejudices is never easy, particularly in a culture which continues to reinforce those prejudices in blatant as well as in subtle, often unrecognized ways. It will take both human determination as well as divine grace to make the changes that loving our neighbors as ourselves and respecting the dignity of every human being requires. It will mean reconsideration of what we thought we knew and recognition of the harm done by those previous understandings, a process called repentance in religious terms. But as the response in the Covenant reflects, that process of repentance and change always begins with a simple “I will….”

Even for religious leaders.

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Harry Scott Coverston

Orlando, Florida

frharry@cfl.rr.com

harry.coverston@knights.ucf.edu

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Cleric, the Philosopher and the Shadow (Part One)

[part one of two parts]

“How can I get people to understand that I am not homophobic?” the clergyman asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. I honestly didn’t know. To be honest, his preaching, writing and votes on church policy all pretty clearly demonstrated quite the opposite to me and no doubt to most other people as well.

“But I know gay people. I am not afraid of them and I don’t hate them,” he continued.

I didn’t know how to tell him that was a variant of the “Some of my best friends…” racist comment. I also didn’t know how to tell him that his understanding of the concept of homophobia was self-serving and ultimately a form of denial.

“So why do you refuse to allow them to be married in your church," I respond, knowing I’m running right on the edge of civility at this point.

“Tell me what in the Scriptures permits me to approve gay marriage” he demands.

Of course, I knew there had been many theological essays and books printed on the subject. I also knew that he had probably not read any of them and was unlikely to do so. I could also see that he was beginning to get red in the face…

It was pretty clear that this conversation was over.

(Composite dialogue constructed from encounters with various religious leaders over time)

One of the issues with which humanity continues to struggle in the 21^st CE is its understandings of gender and sexuality. Nowhere has that struggle been more intense than within the many churches of the Christian tradition.

The primates of the Anglican Communion recently voted to suspend its American church (The Episcopal Church, TEC) for three years over its vote to conduct same sex marriages and provide liturgical rites for the same. Churches in Canada and the UK who had previously indicated plans to follow suit now appear to be backing away from them. A little ecclesial blackmail apparently goes a long way.

While this is a single page in a much longer history of a conflict whose roots lie in antiquity, the dramatic and rapid recent changes in understandings on this subject, religious and otherwise, and the resulting changes in the law among peoples in the post-industrial north suggest the world has reached a turning point in this long conflict.

Correspondingly, the level of energy and heat surrounding responses to these changes in the Global South and among more conservative pockets of the north would seem to suggest the dying gasps of a once unquestioned common social prejudice still deeply held by many. No one fights harder – and nastier - than those who realize they are losing.

Coming to grips with sea changes in international bodies like the Anglican Communion has proven difficult for a number of reasons. National and regional cultures tend to exhibit varying stages of development of moral reasoning. 

Moreover, old habits of thinking die hard, particularly those fraught with theological baggage. This particular issue has identity implications for a humanity whose understandings of what it means to be human have been drawn into question repeatedly over the past century as once self-evident constructions of race, gender and now sexual orientation have all been challenged and found lacking.

Perhaps the most difficult impediment in the process of coming to grips with the new realities that we face as human beings is the need to be honest with ourselves. Stripping away ideological lenses – including the theological variety - to look squarely at the questions we face has never been easy for human beings. It is particularly difficult in a post-modern era in which any truth claim, regardless of how reasonable or well supported, can be simultaneously considered revealed truth by some while others dismiss such claims unconsidered with the assertion of “That’s just your opinion.”

Often the latter response is little more than a defense mechanism whose roots lie in an unstated assumption that everyone’s opinion is of equal value and thus there is no need to critically consider one’s own. 

But is that true?

Shadowy Perceptions of Reality

According to Plato, Socrates wrestled with these questions 2600 years ago in Athens. In the famous Allegory of the Cave, Socrates recounts a tale of denizens of a metaphorical Cave, chained to seats and absorbed by the contests among them to identify shadows on the wall of objects passed in front of the fire which lit the cave interior. Because the actual objects in question were behind them, the contestants were unable to distinguish the objects themselves from the shadow cast by those objects.

When one of their number manages to escape the Cave, after an initial adjustment of his eyes from the darkness, he sees the world outside in the bright sunlight of reason. Ultimately, he feels it his duty to return to the Cave to enlighten his former Cave-mates, freeing them from their delusions.

But the Cave-mates are not interested in enlightenment. The sunlight of reason would require them to leave the comfort of the common sense of the Cave. As Socrates notes, should their liberator persist in his efforts to persuade them of their errors, they would rather kill him to put him out of their misery than do the hard work of growing and changing.

Fast forward 2300 years. A German philosopher who never left his small town of Konigsberg, Immanuel Kant, delineates a similar distinction between things in themselves, the noumena, and perceptions of those things held by human beings, the phenomena. Kant argues that because noumena are not knowable in themselves, by definition human beings must apprehend, interpret and relate their perceptions to previously held knowledge to understand anything they encounter. The well-known example of the multiple witnesses of a traffic accident who provide as many accounts of the event as witnesses, each bearing their own version of the event, is a classic example of the phenomena v. the noumena at work.

Finally, moving into the last century. German philosopher Hans Gadamer observed that every human being is a product of both personal and socio-cultural histories. What any of us brings to any encounter with the world around us shapes what we find there. While we are rarely aware of our hermeneutical lenses, we peer through them much like contact lenses to see and thus interpret what we see with regularity. According to Gadamer, it’s not “just your opinion” that you offer in response to any encounter with the world; at a very basic level it’s what you actually perceive. 

If Socrates, Kant and Gadamer are right that we human beings are inclined to subjectively conditioned encounters with the world around us, we probably see things as they actually are only rarely. That ought to make all of us a little humbler and less quick to make pronouncements about the truth of the world we encounter. And given our inabilities to know with any confidence the more limited truth about the world we inhabit, it ought to make us even more cautious about making any assertions about ultimate truth, much less the mind of a G_d which as humans we do not share. 

But clearly the record of homo religioso suggests a failure to heed the caution such limitations dictate. Humanity’s religious constructions of sexual orientation are a prime case in point.

A Crime Against Nature?

One of the common arguments in favor of laws which have penalized LBGTQ people historically has been that any non-heterosexual inclination and the behaviors which flowed from it somehow ran contrary to nature. Called “the crime against nature” throughout Christian history and much of American jurisprudence, this understanding presumed without question that heterosexual inclinations and behavior were normative for all animals including the human species.

Of course, it is not difficult to understand how such a presumption would arise. The sheer prevalence of heterosexual inclinations and behaviors among human animals - including many who did not innately share those inclinations but bowed to social pressures as a means of survival – insured that the majority’s self-experience could come to be seen as normative for all members of the species. 

Confusing empirical norms (statistical prevalence) with imperative moral constructions of “normal,” the essential assertion was that everyone was like the majority or ought to be. And those who weren’t were readily declared abnormal or deviant by the imperial majority.

This normative understanding came to be known as Natural Law, an understanding emerging from medieval European Christian thought. Dominican philosopher Thomas Aquinas would argue that nature reveals the divine plan for the world which humans can observe and comprehend through the use of reason. Once the experience of the majority had been conflated with the divine mind, to engage in behaviors which ran contrary to the imperial majority meant one was acting in ways that violated both the natural order as well as the will of the divine creator of that order.

Of course, Aquinas and those who would subsequently cite his Suma Theologica had no way of knowing what the findings of the world of natural science of the 20^th CE would bring. Prior to the 1960s, the idea that one might observe homosexual behaviors in the animal kingdom outside the human species was considered unworthy of serious consideration, much less active research.

But representatives of the human animal species who did not fit that supposed divinely ordained pattern began to insist on the diversity of the human sexual experience beginning in the 1960s. About the same time, natural scientists began to observe what was previously unthinkable. In one species after another, they observed same sex behaviors and long term coupling. By 1999, same sex behaviors had been documented among more than 400 different species of animals, particularly among the species most closely related to the human animal in the evolutionary chain, primates.

In all cases, the same-sex behaviors were the subordinate expression of sexuality. Heterosexual behaviors were required to insure survival of the species and thus remained the dominant expression of sexuality. But, contrary to the implications of Natural Law that same-sex behavior was somehow unnatural, scientists found it to be a statistically consistent though subordinate expression of animal sexuality. Nature was more complex than the simplistic black and white dualisms of the middle ages had previously presumed.

Houston, we have a problem….

Once this construction of Natural Law began to break down, the implications for religiously based teachings against same-sex inclinations and behaviors were immediately apparent. While religion is commonly used as a means of legitimating social constructions, when those constructions are themselves deconstructed, their religious legitimations necessarily come into question.

If the good Creation of G_d evidences a consistent subordinate expression of sexuality throughout the animal kingdom, then clearly homosexual behaviors were hardly unnatural, they were simply less frequently observable than heterosexual behaviors. As Sister Vicious Power Hungry Bitch of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence pronounced this matter at National Coming Out Day in Berkeley in 1992, “Instead of calling heterosexuality normal, call it what is really is: common.”

Sister Vicious Power Hungry Bitch, Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence 

As the reality of a subordinate sexual expression began to be documented, the realization began to dawn on many that continued deference to constructions of heterosexuality as natural (meaning normal) and same-sex inclinations and behaviors as unnatural (meaning deviant) was no longer possible in good faith. As more and more LBGTQ people came forward to speak the truth of their own lives, refuting the assertions of their straight counterparts that they had somehow chosen to be other than heterosexual – thereby choosing to be deviant in the eyes of a dying paradigm of science, sinful in the eyes of normative religious constructions and criminal in the eyes of the law - notions of naturally occurring diverse sexual orientations became harder and harder to refute.

Some of the weight behind retaining the increasingly brittle constructions of heterosexuality as normative for all human beings was historical in nature. Such understandings are  ancient in origins and are reflected in the writings of a number of ancient cultures including Hebrew and Christian scriptures. At the same time, a minority report on this normative understanding has always been observable in a wide range of cultures from the Hellenistic Roman world to a number of indigenous cultures. But by the 20^th CE, the hegemony of European and US imperial forces around the world and the cultural understandings that arrived in the wake of the gunboats had resulted in a fairly universal understanding of heterosexuality as the normative – and thus moral -  expression of human sexuality worldwide.

With the rise of post-modern critique, this default understanding of heterosexuality as the norm against which any other expressions of sexuality must be considered deviant came to be called heterosexism. Understandings arising out of heterosexism were called heteronormative suggesting the widespread acceptance of heterosexuality as normative for all human beings.

But as the studies began to pile up demonstrating homosexual behaviors in the non-human realms of the animal kingdom, heterosexist presumptions became more difficult to maintain. Coupled with increasing self-reports of non-heterosexual men and women who swore they had never made any choices other than to be honest with themselves and others, that their sexuality was always a part of their self-understandings, the common sense nature of heterosexism had been mortally wounded.

Confronted with strong indications to the contrary, those who had previously held the heterosexist presumptions they had largely inherited without a second thought from trusted authorities and absorbed like sponges from heterosexist cultures around them no long had the luxury of naïveté in continuing to believe them in good faith.

This knowledge would prove painful for many now required to reconsider their understandings of what it means to be human from the perspective of diverse sexualities. But once they had become aware of the same, those who once operated out of heteronormative presumptions could no longer in good faith claim ignorance about those presumptions. 

They knew better.

[Concluded in part two]

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Harry Scott Coverston

Orlando, Florida

frharry@cfl.rr.com

harry.coverston@knights.ucf.edu

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)

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Dancing Dangerously Close to the Abyss

I don’t always agree with CNN talking head Fareed Zakaria but as of late he’s offered some fairly incisive commentary on the US elections and our role in the world. This past week he penned a column in the Washington Post that painted a bullseye on the pathology that has marked this year’s Republican nomination process. To wit:

Here is a much simpler explanation for Donald Trump: Republicans have fed the country ideas about decline, betrayal and treason. They have encouraged the forces of anti-intellectualism, obstructionism and populism. They have flirted with bigotry and racism. Trump merely chose to unashamedly embrace all of it, saying plainly what they were hinting at for years. In doing so, he hit a jackpot.

The problem is not that Republican leaders should have begun to condemn Trump last year. It is that they should have condemned the ideas and tactics that led to his rise when they began to flourish 20 years ago.

Zakaria is onto something here. When you pimp the public with fear mongering and play the country’s ends against the middle with tribalistic us v. them thinking for so long, it should hardly be surprising when this pattern of thinking takes on a life of its own. Moral panics are fostered by opportunistic moral entrepreneurs, festered by an opportunistic media and routinely produce destructive results historically. The public pays the price for such unabashed grasps at power.

Words *can* hurt us….

One point I continually attempt to make in my posts on my blogs, on Facebook and in emails to people is that the way we conceptualize the world and express those understandings makes a difference. Contrary to the nursery rhyme, while sticks and stones can break our bones, words can definitely hurt us and not just for the moment. It should not be surprising that an extended legacy of misanthropy and declining expectations from an American public more than willing to trade in civics for entertainment is manifesting itself in the sleazeball politics of the current election.

It is a common tactic to approach politics as we might approach sports, thinking instrumentally. In such a limited and immediate analysis, whatever it takes to win becomes acceptable. The end – winning – justifies virtually any means.

But the reality is that the means employed almost always determine the ends we actually obtain. When subtly disguised racism – and some not so subtly disguised – becomes the focus of a campaign, it affects the way we see ourselves as Americans. It should not be surprising that we come to view groups that differ from us by ethnicity, national origin, religion with suspicion. But when those aspects of our humanity which have historically been seen as immutable become fair game for exploitation in a game in which real power may eventually be brought to bear, how safe can any of us really feel?

It was supposed to be a satire

Perhaps more importantly, what can we really expect from a president charged with negotiating with the heads of the world’s nation states who was elected by means of frat house humor? When the tenor of our public discourse is set at the lowest level by those seeking our highest office, what happens to our nation's status internationally much less the body politic at home?

If you want a troubling look at a possible answer to that question, invest a couple of hours to watch the 2006 film Idiocracy. And bear in mind that the filmmaker created this film with a profanity spouting, machine gun totin' president and a public who responds to everything with mindless consumerist mantras as a satire. He recently said he feared it was becoming a documentary.  

I’m Mad as Hell and…..

Of course, we must not discount the role that anger plays in this election. There is no small amount of anger over being economically displaced and socially discarded, anger no doubt misdirected as working class voters elect the very people who have screwed them over and over. There is anger over a Congress beholden to the corporate and moneyed interests who pay for their enormously expensive campaigns trading in childish caricatures while avoiding substantive issues like the plague. And there is a lot of anger over the increasing solidification of the material wealth of the 1-10% obtained by raping the 90-99% fighting over what’s left.

I’m angry, too and with good reason. But I am unwilling to cut my nose off to spite my face to express that anger. The very real concerns I face in my life as a recent retiree, like most Americans, have nothing to do with Muslims or Mexicans. Our lives will not be better if gay marriage is abolished or if unions are dissolved. And our trust in the hands that will have access to the “football” that could launch a nuclear strike has little to do with the size of those hands or the crude analogy to the male anatomy that was made from the stage of the last Republican debate.

A frighteningly familiar gesture

America is dancing dangerously close to the abyss these days. The polemics of scapegoating and nationalism sounds frighteningly familiar to those of us who study world history. Fascism did not solve Germany and Italy’s problems and it will not solve ours. It also did not simply erupt overnight; it arose in a decided stream of angry rhetoric fostered by opportunistic political figures which then followed a path of scapegoating and nationalism deliberately confused with patriotism to death and destruction.

If we must be angry – and if you’re not angry you’re not paying attention – let us channel that anger toward real change, addressing the problems we face. Feel good, blow-hard nationalism and scapegoating of socially disadvantaged people is not only counterproductive, it is childish. Indeed, in times gone by, we could have safely said it was un-American.

There is too much to lose in an election where everything from the ability of working people to actually make a living to the ability of the human race to dodge annihilation by climate change forms the subtext of the election. It’s time we grow up, adolescent America, and face our demons. As the 1^st CE Jewish sage Hillel once posed it, “If not now, when?”

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Harry Scott Coverston

Orlando, Florida

frharry@cfl.rr.com

harry.coverston@knights.ucf.edu

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)

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