Don't Chew the Bull - RFRA is a License to Discriminate

The owners of Memories Pizza in Walkerton, Indiana said that, as a Christian-owned establishment, they would not supply pizza to a gay wedding reception. They would, however, serve a gay couple come in for a pizza. If you're running a business, it's usually not a good idea to publicly weigh in on hot topics; and they took heat for doing it! Personally, I think that's a fair position for them to hold. There is, after all, a difference between discriminating against someone for who he or she is  (e.g. not serving a customer because he is gay) and not supporting an event or action which you do not condone (e.g. providing pizza to a same-sex wedding reception). The owners, here, said they will do the latter; and there is a very clear argument that they hold that position due to their religious beliefs.

In  Christian -- particularly, Catholic -- moral theology, a person sins when he knowingly and with volition provides material support for a sinful act. For example, if I were the driver of a get-away car knowingly transporting someone who robbed a bank to the airport so he can get out before getting caught, I am committing a sin because I am knowingly and with volition providing material support to the act of robbing a bank. My intention, in that case, is to help the bank robber escape being caught and getting away with his ill-got money. If, on the other hand, I was a cab driver and that bank robber hops in the back of my cab, asking me to drive him to that same airport without informing me he had just robbed a bank, I will be providing him material support; but I will not be doing so knowingly and with volition. I will not be committing a sin because my intent will merely be to drive him to the airport and earn my fare.

That same reasoning, of course, is applied to a same-sex wedding. Essential to the very nature of a wedding is that a couple enter into a union among approving witnesses. Witnesses, then, provide material support to the wedding in the act of witnessing. If a witness believes a same-sex union is illicit -- and knowingly and with volition provide that material support to the union -- then it could be said that the witness is committing a sinful act. The owners of Memories Pizza may believe that, by providing pizza to a same-sex wedding reception, they would be taking on the role of approving witnesses; or, at least, just approving. In that case, they would be right in not supplying the pizzas.

Now it could also be argued that the owners of Memories Pizza will not be acting as witnesses at all and that their intent will simply be to supply pizzas and make money; and that the union will take place with or without the pizzas anyway. In other words, they will be lending support to a party, providing no substantial material support at all to the union itself. That is besides the point. The question, where the State is involved, is whether the owners of Memories Pizza personally believe that, by supplying pizzas to the reception involves material support to what they believe is an illicit union. I believe it is fair that the State cannot compel them to do so.

But the distinction between a person's desire not to provide material support to what he or she believes is an illicit act (entering a same-sex union) and not approving of who someone is (being gay) is not explicit in Indiana's new Religious Freedom Restoration Act; and therein lies the problem!

While the owners of Memories Pizza implied that distinction themselves, it is not remotely believable that everyone in Indiana will make the same distinction. There are plenty of Hoosiers who believe that living out their own Christian faith (United Pentecostal Church, anyone?) requires them to proselytize and impose their own beliefs and morality on others whose beliefs and morality differ from their own. They will welcome the license to bar lgbt people from their respective establishments, citing their heartfelt religious belief that they're required to communicate their opprobrium of who the lgbt person is. And the way this law was written implies they can.

Neither being gay nor even engaging in same-sex sexual activity essentially require a public witness, however; so serving pizza to a gay person does not lend material support to anything. The business' owner, in this case, may believe he or she is acting from sincere religious conviction requirement to communicate; but it's a conviction that imposes on directly on someone else, depriving him of her of his or her rights. The lgbt person, in this case, would be the injured party. After all, as the old maxim goes: "Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man's nose begins" (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.).

Either the legal minds who drafted this law were so intellectually deficient they didn't realize that distinction does not exist in this law or Governor Mike Pence is lying when he says the law was not intended to give license to discriminate. The latter possibility has the greater weight, given that neither the Governor nor the Republican-controlled legislature will support legislation explicitly protecting lgbt Hoosiers from discrimination. In either case, discrimination is actually what this law licenses and, as such, needs to be repealed.

Dem: Congress to hold hearing on 'Don't ask, don't tell' this fall - The Hill's Blog Briefing Room

Dem: Congress to hold hearing on 'Don't ask, don't tell' this fall - The Hill's Blog Briefing Room

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Embracing a Psychic Crutch

Some people are very fervent, but narcissistic in their devotions and confuse this for spirituality. But if it does not positively effect how you perceive and relate with others and engage the world around you, if it does not force you to examine whether you impact the social order positively, negatively or not at all, if it does not question whether the justice you seek is authentic, if it does not move you to infuse the human with the divine, if all it does is satisfy you that you're in God's graces or 'at one with the universe', then it's not spirituality. It's a broken person embracing a psychic crutch; a wounded soul refusing to admit the healing power of the divine, even as it feigns attachment to the divine.

Michael Jackson's Legacy

I watched Michael Jackson's memorial yesterday. It was a well-conceived and dignified event. Like most people, though, I had work to do; so I multi-tasked, watching the memorial while working. For the most part, multi-tasking allowed me to keep an emotional distance from what was happening on-screen.

Emotional distance is nearly impossible to sustain, though, when observing a loss; even the loss of an entertainer like Michael whose only connection with you was his music's deep entrenchment in the popular culture of which you are a part. The first sign for me that I was less emotionally distant than I had thought was when Usher sang, "Gone Too Soon." I began at that moment to feel my heart moving up into my throat, reaching a crescendo as Usher approached Michael's coffin. I was able to push back my emotional response, however, and maintain my composure. That experience presented itself again when Jermaine Jackson spoke on behalf of the Jackson family. Even then, I continued to maintain my composure.

All that composure fell apart, though, when Michael's eleven-year-old daughter, Paris, made her brief remarks at the end. While most people are mourning the loss of a generation's artist, Paris' remarks reminded us that Michael was also a father whose loss his children mourn more personally and intimately. I found it impossible not to be touched with a profound empathy for Paris' pain and for that of her brothers. I cried uncontrollably, shutting the door so no one could witness my emotional display.

The fact that I was even watching Michael Jackson's memorial (and listening to Michael Jackson's songs and watching Michael Jackson's videos), much less having an emotional response to it, presents itself as a contradiction given that just a few short days ago I cynically wrote about news media and others blowing Michael's death way out of proportion.

I still hold that we should keep our response to Michael's death in perspective. After all, tempus fugit -- time flies and slows down for no one. Moreover, we as a society are confronted by many real and immediate problems that demand our significant and proactive attention. It seems we can ill afford to be distracted even for a moment from responding to those problems, even by Michael's death.

In death as in life, though, Michael commands our attention and his passing leaves us with a vacuum. Michael commands our attention because he has achieved that rare status few ever achieve, even as many try to claim it: that status as an artist. Many engaged in creative expression are talented in their respective media, whether their expressions are through music, storytelling or the various visual media. Some even make a lot of money with their expressions. But their expressions do not elevate them with Michael to that elite club of artists.

I think the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was absolutely on target in his insights about art. And his insights help us to comprehend Michael's life and art more fully. Art properly communicates to the universal human experience and embodies the zeitgeist of an age or the soul of a generation (actually Hegel would go on to say it embodies the universal human zeitgeist itself), and so does the very life of a true artist. For that reason, the right to interpret and own the meaning of art and the life of the artist does not belong to the artist, but to the generation he or she embodies and to the succeeding generations to whom the art and the life of the artist continue to communicate.

For a long time, we will continue to dissect the meaning of Michael's life and his art. In the process, we will make new discoveries about ourselves, the generation Michael's life and art embody. The many generations that follow will continue to dissect the meaning of Michael's life and his art. In the process, they will learn something of human life and experience and understand our generation more fully.

It is because Michael and his art embody our generation that we feel a profound loss from his passing. In losing Michael, we have lost a significant expression of our own experiences. In some ways, our whole generation passed with Michael. Moreover, the meaning of his life and his art embodies and communicates to the full range of our generation's experiences, not just parts. His art embodies our successes and our failures, our hopes and our despairs, our unity and our divisions, our justices and our injustices, our graces and our sins, our love and our selfish narcissism. We knew that his story -- our story -- was a story in development. While he lived, we could still hope that it would end as a story only of successes, fulfilled hopes, unity, graces, love and shortcomings redeemed. We could still anticipate that Michael's legacy would be our own story of redemption.

That could never have happened, though. While Michael and his art transcend individual expressions of the soul of our generation, the universal human zeitgeist transcends the artist. While embodying a generation, Michael could not redeem it. That search for redemption and happiness is a perpetual pursuit. It is part of what defines us as human, so much so that to cease the search would be to cease being human.

That is where the paradox in remembering Michael's legacy begins. We celebrate the tremendous capacity for good expressed in Michael's life and in his art, even as we openly acknowledge his weaknesses. In doing so, we allow ourselves the freedom to celebrate our own capacity for good and to openly acknowledge our own weaknesses. Then our generation has the opportunity to complete the story Michael's life and art express. By turning to our own capacity for good and working to allow that capacity to triumph over our weaknesses, we will ensure that, in the end, Michael's legacy becomes our own story of redemption.

I guess Michael's death matters to us after all.

Sneak Attacks on Dominant Culture

"These deformed faces, these were people who existed outside nationality and strict historical context.

"...the external features of the men and women did not tell you anything about classs or social mission. They were people persecuted and altered, this was their typology -- they were an inconvenient secret of the society around them.

"You could feel a sense of character emerge from each rough unhooding, a life inside the eyes, a textured set of experiences, and an understanding seed to travel through the audience, conveyed row by row in that mysterious telemetry of crowds. Or maybe not so mysterious.

"This is a film about Us and Them, isn't it?

"They can say who they are, you have to lie. They control the language, you have to improvise and dissemble. They establish the limits of your existence. And the camp elements of the program, the choreography and some of the music, now tended to resemble sneak attacks on the dominant culture."

--DeLillo, Don. Underworld. New York: Scribner, 1997.

Churching and Fucking

Here we go... it's that time of year again. New York Pride is coming up soon. I am already being hit up -- in some cases, pressured -- to attend a few different faith-based queer-affirming Pride events. One acquaintance of mine specifically pushed the argument that the "queer issue" is such an intimate part of my life... I owe it to the faith community to stand in solidarity with queer people of faith and participate in being personally validated by that stand of solidarity.

My reply: No I don't!

To put it bluntly, I do not go into a bedroom with another guy to think about "church." I have no intention of going to church to think about fucking.If I need any kind of "validating," I'll just go cruising. ;)