Caught totally off-guard by small-town politics.

November 19, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

 

I serve on the Greater Griffith Park Neighborhood Council in Los Angeles—one of almost 100 small and serious councils of ordinary citizens–volunteers all–who vet public issues for their neighbors and attempt to provide a link between citizens and City Hall.  In a city as large as Los Angeles, the GGPNC could represent as many as 30,000–40,000 residents–certainly equivalent to many small towns in America. Although my position representing the religious community is by appointment, most members of the council actually have to stand for election in their districts. Each of these little districts—A, B, C, D and E—have populations as large as Wasilla, Alaska, for what it’s worth.

The view of Los Angeles from Griffith Park, crowns our neighborhood.

A view over Wasilla, Alaska.  Cute.

Last night’s meeting caught me totally by surprise when we came to agenda item #11, put up by a straight man just elected last June:  to adopt a motion against discrimination in any form and to ask the Los Angeles City Council to express opposition to Proposition 8 to the California Supreme Court.

I seconded the motion, but it was immediately fenced in by council members nervous about whether a local neighborhood council had any business telling the State of California what to do (in my experience it is a typical conservative reaction to say “we shouldn’t be talking about this”), and by people who just can’t resist word-smithing somebody else’s prose.

I didn’t speak up at first, because I found it interesting to watch this overwhelmingly heterosexual council toss around my issue and the significance of my life and my marriage. Nearly everybody who spoke was opposed to, embarrassed by, and extremely aggravated by the narrow approval of Proposition 8 by California voters. I was really surprised by their open-mindedness.

Our agendas are usually long and filled with nuts and bolts matters, so the time given to this discussion also amazed me. Eventually the president of the council, an attorney in his day job, temporarily relinquished the chair to one of the V.P.’s and spoke for himself rather passionately about our council’s rightful purview in taking positions on matters of public policy that affect residents and stakeholders in the community.

Finally I raised my hand and was recognized, so this was my moment to come out to the neighborhood council directly. My life and ministry are no secret, since our October 11 marriage had already been published in the November Los Feliz Ledger (buried on page 20), and my spouse was interviewed by the Los Angeles Times last weekend. But in a city as large as Los Angeles, your next-door neighbor may never catch the published news blurb about you.

So in the interests of transparency and full-disclosure, I told the council about officiating over more than a dozen same-sex weddings, and about getting married in October. My main point was to mention that Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and two city councilmembers had spoken forcefully against Proposition 8 at last Saturday’s rally on the steps of City Hall, but that our own councilmember, Tom LaBonge, was conspicuous by his absence.

One of his staff, who was seated behind me, immediately assured the whole group that Mr. LaBonge is also opposed to Proposition 8.  Later in the meeting, a deputy for State Assemblymember Paul Krekorian assured me that Krekorian has also weighed in against Proposition 8, a risky business for an Armenian in a substantially Armenian district.

But apparently my revelation was not news:  people had seen the Ledger and Times articles.

If the Greater Griffith Park neighborhood is equivalent to a small town, our neighborhood is decidedly to the left of small towns elsewhere. After the word-smithing was done, the resolution was passed without dissenting voice.

“The Greater Griffith Park Neighborhood Council does not support discrimination of any kind. The passage of Proposition 8 will incorporate discrimination in the constitution of the State of California. We call on all elected officials of the City of Los Angeles to publicly express opposition to Proposition 8 and urge them to take action to overturn Proposition 8.”

It is not in “coming out gay” but in “coming out gay and married” which is truly transforming the day-to-day relationships in our “small town” neighborhood.  I am sure there are others who are uptight about me and my presence in one of the historic religious establishments in Los Feliz, but there seems to be plenty of neighbors who have no problem with it or actually enjoy the idea that there is a gay/married minister in the community.  The man who put up the resolution, by the way, said that many of his gay friends and neighbors had helped to get him elected.  If that isn’t a sign of mainstream politics, what is?

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

Posted in Lesbian/Gay Marriage, LGBT Rights, Public Affairs, Coming Out | Print | No Comments »

Transformative Power and Public Drunkenness

November 7, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

I see first hand the results of the 12-Step ministry every time I meet someone in recovery from alcohol or drug addiction. As you probably know, Alcoholics Anonymous has been called the most important spiritual movement of the 20^th century. There is enormous transformative power in faith and solidarity to overcome addictions and its derivatives of loneliness, depression and powerlessness.

At the same time, I see first hand the power of addiction to keep addicts in its thrall. We have a man who has been visiting our church for months, who is semi-homeless and alcoholic. He admits he never met a beer he didn’t like, and he has been asking for money from members, and even taking coins out of our fountain, to save up for a quart. One Sunday afternoon he sat on the front porch directly in front of the church doors and got totally wasted.

I am still trying to reflect on the spiritual pain I feel after the passage of Proposition 8 in California, and make sense of why some people remain so rejecting, punitive and hateful toward gay and lesbian people. That’s when this analogy came to me.

Over the years, and especially in these most recent 5 months, I have seen first-hand the transformative power of honesty and love in and with the LGBT community. It begins with Step One: Coming Out to Self and Others. Sometimes, people who come out are summarily rejected, but as the years have gone by, more often I hear the stories of those whose lives took a decided turn for the better, with their families, friends, neighbors and even employers.

Two weeks ago I officiated for a wedding in which one of the grooms had come through a difficult period with his family after coming out. His aging parents at first rejected and disowned him. He is in recovery, by the way, and met his life partner—now husband—at an A.A. meeting.

It took time, but his entire family has come around. The accept him, and his loving relationship with his partner. And they all came from near and far to participate in their wedding ceremony, with his sisters and parents joyfully taking part in the final blessings.

People make enormous spiritual progress through honesty and love. It changes lives. This entire family, now united by marriage, has recaptured love and made enormous strides in spread understanding, goodwill and tolerance because of one son’s integrity and honesty. That is spiritual transformation.

Now we come to the political reality of LGBT people in a society which is wrenching back and forth between rights and no rights. The conservatives hotly and loudly call it a culture war. But I now see it from the positive side — the transformative power to change lives through love, honesty, integrity, patience and reconciliation. Some people — millions of them — “get it.” They have embraced the individuals they know among family, friends, neighbors or co-workers, they have ascended the learning curve about human sexuality, psychology, and civil rights, they have wrestled through the issues that made them uncomfortable, and they have grown spiritually.

But there are millions of others, led by religious power blocks, who think they are fighting a war. What they are fighting is their own addiction to hatred, to power and money, and to control. They are drunk on their own illusions of politics, race, money, marriage, and God. They would rather destroy relationships through estrangement and disowning those who are close them (every family in America is not that far away from someone who is lesbian or gay), than to grow spiritually through listening, patience, understanding, empathy, and love.

It is ironic that those on the reactionary side of things call this a culture war, when it is obviously a spiritual struggle they do not wish to face. I am betting my life on the ultimate triumph of love and reconciliation. And I apply my faith to this struggle, remembering the words of Jesus when people of power and bigotry crucified him: “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

But in the meantime we have to continue to struggle for rights and for understanding with those who as yet have no interest in the spiritual transformation that could be theirs. Drunk with homophobia, they will not even take the first steps to understand. It is sad when they bring their drunkenness right to the front doors of the church.

—Pastor Dan Hooper

Posted in Lesbian/Gay Marriage, Homophobia, LGBT Christian, LGBT Rights, Recovery, Spirituality, Coming Out | Print | No Comments »

The New Leprosy: Marriage!

June 15, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

These twelve [disciples] Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. . . . Whatever town or village you enter, find out who in it is worthy, and stay there until you leave. As you enter the house, greet it. If the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it; but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town. Truly I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town. — Matthew 10 

The closer we get to legal gay marriage in California, the more the fundagelicals will rant and rave. They have already written us off as “lost”—damned for sure, going to spend all eternity in the fires of hell. They will continue to look for clever new ways to pronounce shame on people who are now largely impervious to new shame. Meanwhile, we are getting married, and are finding new ways to feel proud.

It always amuses and annoys me that people who are losing influence talk more and more stridently about the “dire consequences” if the world does not listen to them. The panicked, angry voices of hateful Christians has been too loud for too long in America—and they will continue to insist that we are sick or “of the devil.”

As we get closer to Tuesday’s new marital opportunity, even lesbian and gay people are having some misgivings. The media have been picking up on this more and more, since they’ve run out of steam about queer euphoria. Some same-sex couples have determined to sit this one out at least until the November ballot is over. Others are dusting off retro-thoughts from the 1970s that “marriage is an institution—who wants to live in an institution?”

We ourselves still live with some of the internalized homophobia of the early gay rights movement a half-century ago, fearful that we are somehow sick or lost or pathetic, or don’t deserve to be free and happy and gay. We wonder out loud if we are really fit for marriage, or that the (especially male) gay character is inherently commitment-phobic—that we are tramps to the core. “All men are pigs.”

Well, no, really. Thousands of us can’t wait to pay our $70 for a license to accept responsibility for one another for the rest of our lives.

For those right wing folks (who still pretend they don’t know any of us personally), we will remain society’s lepers. They insist we are not only unworthy of enjoying the rights, privileges and respect of the mainstream, but suited only for living in our pathetic ghettoes (creative neighborhoods and designer-perfect abodes filled with high-end consumer products).

It was easier for prejudice before our sense of pride emerged. We were dangerous social lepers when we skulked around truck stops, tea rooms (now reserved for Republican senators) or elementary schools. We were lepers in our pathetic promiscuity.

We were lepers when HIV and AIDS killed off our young, bright and beautiful. The right-wing fundagelicals enjoyed trying, and were highly successful for a long time, in shaming us with such terms as “sodomites” and “homosexuals.” They could describe us with words of seeming precision to elicit immediate understanding and financial support within their donor base.

And the whole reason that straight, right-end Christians portray us in such terms is their desire to keep us isolated by our shame, because of their fear of contamination (by our good taste? our open-mindedness? our sculpted abs?).

But it will be harder and harder to isolate and condemn us when we are highly visible as out couples, husbands, and wives, and when it becomes clear that California is not being incinerated under God’s wrath or falling into the ocean.

In Matthew 10, Jesus says that on the day of judgment God will look with greater tolerance upon Sodom and Gomorrah that upon other places that do not receive Jesus’ word or turn away Jesus’ offer of peace, who refuse hospitality to those who come in his name. The contrast between the self-righteous Christian and the compassionate Christ couldn’t be more stark. Today we are finding that lesbian and gay people are open to Jesus’ word of compassion, and to our offer of peace in his name. It is the right wing which rants and warns of damnation.

In this same chapter Jesus recognizes that ministry will almost certainly trigger controversy. The wolves out there may try to tear us apart, and we should be prepared.

It will not be any different for those of us in the Christian church who welcome couples who want to marry and to revel in the sense of God’s blessing.

Less than 48 hours from now, it will be legal for two women or two men to tie the knot in California. “Gay marriage” will become the new leprosy to the Religious Right. They are expected to spend at least 10 million dollars by November to fight the Supreme Court’s decision. This will be a summer of great controversy because the religious right is seeding it into our society.

In our congregation, there have been, and there will be many more wedding ceremonies for women and men who love one another against all odds. Our hospitality to the lesbian and gay community will never be more thoroughly tested than it will with the legalizing of marriage. But our doors will remain open to lesbian and gay couples simply because Jesus sends us his disciples to serve the outcasts, the lepers and those rejected or harassed by others, and to offer a word of peace, not dire warning.

— Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

Posted in Bible & Interpretation, HIV and AIDS, Lesbian/Gay Marriage, Fundamentalism, LGBT Christian, Coming Out, Public Affairs, LGBT Rights, Ministry | Print | No Comments »

The bigots are gathering signatures again.

April 1, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

The prejudice-mongers are at it again, collecting signatures to put an initiative on the fall ballot in California to permanently deny the possibility of same-gender marriage in this state. They claim, as of April 1, to have 881,000 signatures of the 1.1 million needed. They have three weeks left to make the deadline.

This is no April Fools Joke.

The California initiative frustrates me, primarily because it is such personal issue for me and my partner. We are not looking to destroy anybody else’s marriage, but to protect one another within a personal covenant that has equal protection under the laws of the state and federal government. We have waited for more than four years to see if the California courts would uphold or restore our marriage rights – by declaring that Proposition 22 does not ban same-sex marriage. We’re still waiting for the California Supreme Court decision later this spring after oral arguments were heard March 4.

Our opponents are so-called Christians who see us as a threat to their heterosexual marriages. That is like saying that if we drive a BMW, we are somehow “cheapening” the BMW in our neighbor’s garage; or because we have bought a house in the neighborhood we are trying to destroy the neighborhood.

Our opponents know that their arguments don’t hold water, and their arguments aren’t meant to stand up to scrutiny. All they have to do is to enlist public bigotry, in the hopes that if a majority of voters in California are prejudiced enough, discrimination will be written into the California constitution and deny us our simple right to justice for the rest of our lifetimes.

That would be bad enough if it weren’t for the fact that they peddle their prejudice in the name of Jesus— the one who included everyone and excluded no one.

There is no mechanism in the constitution to give the Supreme Court judicial review over a constitutional amendment. So if a prejudicial law is written into the constitution it will sit there for a generation or more until a sufficient social change makes it possible to repeal the evil. But even a future repeal cannot undo the harm that is done to those of us who simply want some protection from the arbitrary and heartless grinding of social systems. Last week we heard the story of a gay man who first learned that his partner was dead from the evening news broadcast, because the hospital refused to give him information since he wasn’t legally a family member.

Week after week, month after month, these sad and tragic stories continue, not merely because our over-grown and unwieldy government systems actually hurt people, but because all the other systems and entities in society which are required to abide by public policies and laws are powerless in complicity with prejudice. Where this actual prejudice on the part of individuals in decision-making positions (for example, an evil H. R. director in a company), they can easily hide their prejudice behind government regulations which appear to support them. Lawsuits usually force these organizations, corporations and entities to back off from their prejudice, but it is time-consuming and expensive to fight for each right, one at a time, hoping that a court of law will vindicate us and our quest for simple justice and equal rights.

Worse yet, injustice falls more heavily on the poor. Those who have greater means (money) can hire enough attorneys to craft their wills, irrevocable trusts, and other contractual relationships to protect their life partners and secure their assets, in a manner which attempts to replicate the rights of civil marriage without the automatic protection it affords. For those who do not have such means, doing all of this is an impossible burden.

And perhaps worst of all, prejudice seems always to have more money than justice. Right-wing conservative donors with big bank accounts always outnumber open-minded ordinary folks. They seem to always be ready to write big checks. From today’s www.365gay.com news story,

Among the major donors to Protect Marriage are a group of San Diego County businessmen. Developer Doug Manchester alone has contributed $125,000, prompting gays to urge a boycott of his properties. Manchester owns the Manchester Grand Hyatt and the San Diego Marriott Hotel and Marina.Mission Valley developer Terry Caster has donated $162,500, Carlsbad car dealer Robert Hoehn gave $25,000, and La Jolla businessman Roger Benson has given $50,000, according to state records.It raises a fundamental question of justice with broader implications, but one I’ve never heard anything about: why is it that the initiative process permits signature-gatherers to be paid per signature? This means that big money can buy the votes needed to put something on the ballot which would never get there if it really come up from the grass roots. The initiative process is not voter imitative, but special-interest initiative. LGBT leaders have used this process, too, but I think it should be made much more difficult to get any thing slapped on the ballot because too many screwball things come up in every general election, and an ill-informed electorate is asked to make decisions which affect other people’s lives when they don’t really know the consequences. Lack of information, combined with native prejudice, makes for a bigotry machine which is very hard to stop.What can we do?For one, “decline to sign” any petition put in front of you about gay marriage;

Two, get involved with Equality for All and help the efforts to stop the signature gatherers;

Three, contribute to our side of this issue — even if you don’t have or don’t want a permanent spouse, you still have a stake in this battle because if we lose our chance to secure marriage rights, what other rights will the extremists try to revoke next?

Fourth, keep on coming out—telling your story and being honest about your life, because it is the best tool we have to convince other people in our society that we are not trying to destroy their lives, or values, or marriages, simply to hold our heads up high.

— Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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Can I be a Christian and be lesbian or gay? or bisexual? Or…?

March 27, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

It is funny–to me–that Christians can get into such arguments about whether one can be gay and Christian, or lesbian and Christian, etc.  Those on the religious extreme right insist that it is impossible, as if to be who we are as human beings is contrary to Christian teaching.  This religious right is not made up only of “Narrow Baptists” in the American “Bible Belt.”  It also includes other fundamentalists, such as Archbishop Peter Akinola of the Anglican Church in Nigeria, who has made it his personal mission to split that worldwide church communion down the middle over homosexuality.

But there have to be some standards, they say, some benchmarks.  They feel that there is a “slippery slope” or a complete sell-out of Christian doctrine if we invite homosexuals in the door.

Aside from the obvious fact that we are already in the door because we were baptized as young people and accepted the faith and have never departed from it, there is something fundamentally wrong with their reasoning.  Let’s take a look:

Christian teaching is first and foremost teaching about Jesus Christ.  It is teaching about God’s gracious redemption of the human race for the sake of Jesus Christ.  It is teaching about the Good News that Jesus died upon the cross in order to reconcile God and humanity.

If there is a standard or a benchmark, it would be the Nicene Creed, which was finalized in the 4^th Century.  This is the same creed that I used to bring some clarity to whether former presidential candidate Mitt Romney is really a Christian.  I didn’t do that on the basis of whether Mitt Romney is a person of great integrity, and lives a clean life.  I did it on the basis of whether Mitt Romney confesses the faith which all Christians have confessed in the defining doctrines which have never changed since the 4^th Century.

A Creed is a concise statement of what a person or a group believes.  The essential thing about this defining document of the Christian faith is that it states what Christians believe about God, about Jesus, about the Holy Spirit, the Christian Church and the sacraments.

It does not state what our opinions are about each other. It does not enumerate sins.  It does not set admission standards except this faith in God and Jesus Christ.  It does not include a doctrine about the Holy Bible, so as to whether the Bible is to be taken literally or figuratively in different spots, whether every word of the Bible is binding upon all Christians forever, the Nicene Creed doesn’t even go there.  And most importantly, it makes no statement about human sexuality.

Is the argument over homosexuality really an argument of the Bible vs. the Creed?  Those who are extreme right-wing Christians insist that the Bible trumps everything else.  Yet the Bible, even more than the historic Creeds and other dogmatic statements and teaching, must be subject to study and interpretation.  And the Bible itself must ultimately take the back seat to the authority of Jesus Christ.  (”All authority has been given to me…”, Matthew 28:18; “You search the Scriptures…”, John 5:39)

Since at least the year 381 a.d., the Nicene Creed has been the statement which gave Christians unity.  It formed the Church’s catholicity by defining a common faith in God and in the work of Jesus Christ.  It did not attempt to settle all matters, least of all, human sexuality.  After all, we put our faith in Christ, not in sexuality:  not in heterosexuality or homosexuality, bisexuality or asexuality.

Can one “be a Christian” and be LGBT?  To confess my faith in Christ makes me a Christian, whether or not I fully understand myself, my sexuality, my gender, or my fellow believer. Is that clear?

— Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

Posted in Bible & Interpretation, Fundamentalism, Faith, Living by Grace, Coming Out | Print | No Comments »

Another senseless murder of a child.

February 17, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

I am distraught with this past week’s news of the killing of a 15 year-old, in school, by a 14 year-old—the end of a rash of school shootings that is absolutely numbing to think about. Thousand of people are grieving for a child we never met. But what caught me in the throat was that this was an effeminate boy who only recently began to admit to himself and classmates that he was or might be gay.

It is hard to imagine being 15 again. I do remember that I was scared to be myself and that I hid my feelings and my questions. What puts young gay boys or lesbian girls at such risk nowadays is that they are more self-aware, at earlier ages, and are growing more confident because of the relative acceptance in society. In the 1960s there was NO acceptance, period, as well as no information. So when I was 15 I didn’t even have a name for who I was and was bright enough not to ask questions out loud.

  Photo: Ventura County Star

Young Lawrence King became a martyr for relative acceptance. Like Gwen Araujo, a 17 year-old M2F transgender person, decent society is outraged at his senseless killing. It is small comfort that the 14 year-old killer is to be charged as an adult for a hate crime. But two lives are still destroyed: one in tragic death, the other who will almost certainly serve an appreciable number of years in detention or prison.

Clearly, “LGBT rights” haven’t gotten very far if it is still not safe to grow up gay or lesbian or transgender. The expansion of hate crimes statutes is long, long overdue.  According to a U.S. Department of Justice November 2005 report, 18% or nearly 1/5 of hate crimes were related to sexual orientation. Who is standing up, besides Barack Obama, for stronger hate crimes legislation?

Why is there so much hatred and fear of what is simply different? Why must there be martyrs to bring decent people out, and get moral people to proclaim their shock and intolerance of violence loudly enough to suppress (at least temporarily) such violence in a local community?

Wasn’t the murder of Matthew Shepard over nine years ago enough to get all of America to demand an end to such hate and such violence?

Answer to that rhetorical question: No, it wasn’t enough. America loves violence, perpetuates violence, tolerates violence, promulgates violence. Like Spaniards who still relish bullfights, Americans simply want to channel violence ever-so-slightly to protect some people.

I would personally argue for greater gun control. The equally senseless killings in Illinois by a recently-deranged bright college student illustrates this. He bought the guns legally, which means that our laws aren’t doing the job that guns rights advocates pretend they are.

Yes, I know the counter-argument: “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Blah, blah, blah.

If it were that simple then hey why can’t individuals legally purchase nuclear weapons? Nuclear bombs don’t kill people, people kill people.

The fact is that too many people, even in a free and allegedly decent society, are nut cases. They are disposed to hate, disposed to judgment of others and of anything that is foreign to their experience, and disposed to violence. Should millions of potential nut cases have access to the trigger or the button on a nuclear bomb because, it is argued, bombs don’t kill people, people kill people? Of course not.

Most violent crimes are committed by people with weapons that rightfully do not belong in the hands of individuals—from “Saturday night specials,”—cheap handguns—to assault weapons.

The surface reason we don’t have meaningful gun control in America is that politicians are pressured by gun lobbyists and nut cases disguised as conservative voters. The underlying reason is that politicians have no backbones. Remember, folks, these are the “leaders” who cannot even stand up the current administration to say that America will not torture people. If they cannot say No to George Bush on waterboarding, would they have the spine to stop the senseless killings of effeminate boys?

Obviously, we will have thousands more senseless killings of children by children before the public outcry is loud enough to stop the NRA’s death grip on America.

But my heart goes out to the family of Lawrence King, and the families of others who tried to protect their young child from the hatred of others, only to see their loved one hurt, killed, even tortured as was Matthew Shepard. My heart breaks for any children who suffer unspeakable violence. But my heart is also angered by all the complicit evil, in the name of “liberty”or “family values” or any other quackery that claims every life is sacred and then turns a blind eye to hatred, torture, violence and murder.

— Pastor Dan Hooper

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America’s Holy Family Values

December 25, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

Yesterday it was our privilege, for the fourth year, to carry gifts from our church to the Jeff Griffith Youth Center – gift cards for all 24 young people in the residential program. These kids are tying to get their lives, and life skills, together having come out of abusive homes, or having been thrown out of their homes because of the sexual orientation. The residential counselor, Mr. Joey Aguilar, was quite kind and happy to have something else to put under the tree this morning for these young people. (And they literally do provide a Christmas morning gift-giving experience for all of them!)

As Mr. Aguilar explained some of the circumstances these kids come through before finding the Center’s residential program, I listened attentively to what seems like matter-of-fact circumstances of growing up lesbian or gay –or transgender (about 25 % of those currently in the program). But inside, I was thinking these kids must have been living a horror story: sleeping under bridges or on the street; being abused by street life after having run away from an abusive home life.

What has happened to “home life”? And after all the conservative trumpeting of “family values” for several decades (which not incidentally has made people like Dr. James Dobson and his family values industry quite wealthy), America’s family values are just getting worse.

It further surprised and troubled me when Aguilar told us not only that kids are still being kicked out by the parents, when they come out as gay or are found out, but that not all these kids in the program are refugees from some hyper-conservative “red state” environment. Kids in Los Angeles are still rejected by their own mothers and fathers simply for telling the truth about their sexual orientation. Have I been naive to assume that people here, if not everywhere, have been sufficiently exposed to the truth about sexual orientation so that they would be much more understanding and accepting if their own child turns out to be lesbian or gay.

Or transsexual. Several years ago I saw an amazing documentary titled “Just Call Me Kade” (synopsis; review) about a “typical” suburban family from Tucson, Arizona whose darling little girl, from the age of 3 or 4, was certain that she is a boy not a girl. By the time she reached puberty and began menstruating, she was depressed and almost suicidal. This film compassionately told the story of a very understanding nuclear family that did not reject their child, but helped him transition (with hormonal treatments, etc.) to self-identify as an adolescent boy.

It being Christmas, I cannot but think too of the “Holy Family” — an entire family that was persecuted and had to become refugees in order to protect the Child. Obviously, the murderous King Herod did not care about family values.

Thinking back, I guess I had a perfect childhood in a loving home where I was not abused or neglected, but loved and encouraged. At the time, it didn’t seem perfect, of course, and I was probably as rebellious as an emerging gay boy could have been in the 1950s and 60s. I developed my life skills like everybody in those days. Sitting around the kitchen table, in long talks about everything, I learned about compromise and getting along, love, effort, money, jobs, and dreams for the future — all the ordinary stuff (to me) that seem so elusive to these young people at the Jeff Griffith Youth Center.

If American homes had any real “family values” then parents would value their kids enough to et their lives, and their family life, together to provide for and protect and nurture the kids. They would buck up and find out how to react and to treat and care for a teenager is questioning, or who comes as gay or lesbian or transgender. It is so sad that the big shot public figures who tout family values (Dobson claims that Focus on the Family is “Nurturing and defending families worldwide”!) have done absolutely nothing to equip American parents to lovingly deal with their kids coming out. While Dobson enriches himself, it is ordinary people like the Parents and Friends (PFLAG) who have done the heavy lifting for decades. They have taught countless families what family values really are.  By supporting the Center’s youth program, our church is really supporting family values that were missing at home for these kids.

This is also a plug for the excellent documentary film out this fall, “For the Bible Tells Me So” which tells the story of five families trying to cope with a gay or lesbian child. The film had a limited engagement in West Los Angeles in November, but will be shown at St. Matthew’s Church of Burbank/Glendale on Sunday January 27, 6:00 p.m. There is more information here.

— Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

Posted in LGBT Christian, Coming Out, Ministry | Print | No Comments »

A death in the family.

December 22, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

I received an e-mail yesterday about the death of a retired pastor, 89 years old. The news brought up mixed feelings in me.

As a pastor of the church I should feel some sadness for this man, who lived a long life and remained faithful to our church. I don’t know all the facts of where he served in his long career, but I only know of the one brief time—a few months—when he served as the interim pastor of a congregation I was attending.

This was in the 1980s while I served in a specialized ministry of the church.  I wasn’t officially “out” although my immediate superiors knew that I was gay and had been living in a relationship of more than 6 or 7 years. But officially I was still quite closeted.

But this particular pastor, in his 60s at the time “put two and two together” and realized that I was living with another man.  Now, perhaps in the span of his career he counseled and prayed and struggled with people who faced very significant life issues.  Perhaps he was quite supportive and loving with them.  But he never spoke to me about being gay, or how I could justify serving the church as an ordained pastor while living in a semi-secretive relationship with another man.  He never asked me about my faith, my pilgrimage in life, my sense of call, my understanding of the Bible, or any other significant life issue.

Yet I came to find out that, behind my back, he was spreading the news that I was homosexual.

Within two years I had been recommended by my bishop, and called from my specialized status back into the parish ministry in the area.  And within about a year in that position, I began to feel the suspicion of parishioners.  Before long I was asked to leave the congregation, but was never confronted over any significant failing on my part.  This story unfolded slowly, but within a few more years a woman who was in a position to know the facts confirmed for me confidentially that the reason I had been forced to resign was that people were told I was gay.  I knew that this particular pastor had been the one who launched the wave of rumors which pushed me out of the ordained ministry of the church.

Twenty some years ago, this was the fate of those who lacked the courage, the resources and freedom to just “come out.”  We were slowly, excruciatingly, hampered, limited, excluded, rejected in ways just as secretive as our lives were.  We were eliminated from the lives and callings and jobs and relationships we thought we were so skillfully preserving by keeping our own personal agony secret.  This happened everywhere in society, but especially in the church. It was as if no one needed to confront us or say anything, because we should just understand the reasons we were being rejected.  I think it must have felt similar to what African-Americans felt when they were passed over for a job or an advancement, or denied housing, or avoided in social settings—that they were just supposed to understand why they were disliked or discriminated against.  We were all supposed to internalize the shame which society implicitly demanded of us.

The upshot of my loss of career was the personal decision—with the help of a competent therapist—that I would never again go back into a closet.

But I have mixed feelings about the man who spread the rumors that deprived me of 16 years of my life work.

Was this like the patriarch Joseph in the book of Genesis: hated by his brothers, sold into slavery, and because of false accusations went to prison before being vindicated by God?  In this (overlooked) story, Joseph finally confronts his hateful brothers with love and forgiveness:

“His brothers were so dumbfounded at finding themselves face to face with Joseph that they could not answer.  Then Joseph said to his brothers, . . . ‘I am your brother Joseph whom you sold into Egypt.  Now do not be distressed, do not reproach yourselves for having sold me here, since God sent me before you to preserve your lives.’”—Genesis 45:4–5

This elderly pastor and I were brothers in the family of God, so I should be respectful of his passing.  The circumstances of life sent us along very different paths, and he would never have had reason to fully understand me.  When he personally brought great harm to me, I confess, it took years to expunge the bitterness out of my life.  We never saw each other again. He went into retirement.  I went into another line of employment for sixteen years.

And now at his death what am I to feel?  I came out; I have never regretted that step, and will defend the necessity of coming out publicly, especially within the church of Jesus Christ.

Society has changed—in ways for which this elderly pastor would, I am sure, have felt contempt.  Increasingly there is safety for more and more LGBT people to be who we are, and to live without the shame that earlier generations forced upon us. We still may have to duck some homophobic slurs and even violence.  But more and more we will not internalize the homophobia that previous generations accepted as inevitable.  Perhaps, like ancient Joseph, it took me years of life experience to be able to let my bitterness go and to forgive the one who intended harm, because now I know that God intended it for good.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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Why can’t we talk?

December 14, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

“Why can’t we talk about religion or politics?”  This is the opening question which Jim Wallis poses to begin his important 2005 book God’s Politics:  Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It.

It is an old aphorism that these two subjects are taboo “in polite society,” and that says something about politeness–that it’s main rule is to not do or say anything which might be “unpleasant.”  (My friend John in Atlanta says that Southerners used to refer to the Civil War as “that recent unpleasantness.”)

A quick test drive of Google will tell us that people do in fact talk about both religion and politics, constantly, and often in strident tones.  Those who hate religion are equally as vocal and earnest as the salespeople and brokers of religion.  And politics, oh my!  Those on the extremes of both Left and Right are no less vocal than those who are committed to cynicism about the public arena and refuse to identify with the Left or Right.

Well, really, politeness would also forbid us (at a dinner party for example) from talking about sex, or cancer, or for that matter, obesity.  Politeness knows that people have strongly-held opinions, or they do not want to face certain information, or opposing persuasions, in a situation in which they feel trapped such as around a friend’s dinner table.  Years ago an acquaintance was known for going ballistic at a dinner party over the Shroud of Turin, and it became a running gag to try to “set him off” every time he was at a party or other social setting.

My favorite translation of 1 Corinthians 13:7, in St. Paul’s well-known “Love Chapter” is the New English Bible:  “There is nothing love cannot face.”

My loved ones faced cancer with me.  I know a morbidly obese lady who will soon have the bypass surgery, and is facing it largely because she found love in our community and was able to take the first steps with the loving support of another lady who had the surgery to stop her obesity years ago.  In love, we have talked about her obesity and her fears and her dream for a much better life after the surgery.

Is it possible that, if we all practiced love, we could talk about both religion and politics and remain polite?   I realize this sounds like flimsy, pathetic liberalism to some — that, instead of “being right” we would have to be satisfied with “being loving.”  It is the slippery slope of that dreaded liberalism that love could so easily slide or collapse into condoning, accepting or even approving of things which should be considered absolutely wrong!

For example, Jesus himself must have already slid off into liberalism when he said to the woman caught in the act of adultery, “Neither do I condemn you,” John 8:11.

Ah, but what about where he says, “Enter by the narrow door,” Luke 13:24.  Who is it that is making the door narrow—God or human beings who don’t want to condone anything but their own behavior?  That is general advice, in its context in the story of Jesus.  Clearly, he spoke with great fervor about the particulars of moral narrowness, and scolded scribes and Pharisees for their self-righteousness.   How does anyone, or an entire society, know what ethical standards ought to guide us, if we can’t talk about it?

But round and round we go.  Polite society composed only of dedicated Christians will never agree until they surrender their hard-edged “rightness,” and agrre to be open to the influence and maybe persuasion from another source or another point of view.  That has certainly been the case with the huge controversy about human sexuality and homosexuality.  The other point of view, the other experience, which has most influenced the discussion of sexual ethics in our times, has been the “coming out” of individual men and women to their friends, families, employers and churches.

Wallis, who is the respected Editor of Sojourners and an avid, committed evangelical Christian, makes the persuasive argument that if Christians got their religion right, their politics would change.  Perhaps both left and right would find an ethical, responsible, moral, and polite, position somewhere near the center.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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Shall we overcome? Part 1

November 18, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

All human beings are unique. Every body is different. Each of us has a unique life experience which results from what we have been given from birth onward (both our genes and our birth-family environment, etc.). Some are born to privilege, others in dire circumstances, some with physical challenges, others with extraordinary physical “good luck” — no genetic time bombs, etc.

The variety of human beings is endless. The stuff of literature, however, is fairly finite, and one of the recurring themes used by writers (whether novelists, essayists, or those who craft screen plays) is the story of someone who overcomes great difficulties or obstacles. For example, the heroic figure who rose out of poverty, or broke free of slavery, or overcame ignorance, racism, disease, handicaps, physical hardships — you name it.

In films, this “overcoming obstacles” is one of that limited number of story ideas. I had some fun with this in my earlier blog, “Everybody knows there are only five basic plots.”

It set me thinking whether we are so conditioned by popular literature and especially the movies that we have trouble with people who accept the circumstances they are in, rather than struggling against them and overcoming them. And I think of St. Paul’s advice, in 1 Corinthians 7, that “each of you lead the life that the Lord assigned, to which God called you.” He begins by talking about marriage, singleness and virginity, but when he comes to these verses (17–24) he also includes circumcision and slavery. Slaves, he counseled, should be willing to accept their enslaved condition, knowing that they are “free in the Lord.”

This is of course one of those passages that gets St. Paul in trouble with modernists, feminists, liberations, etc. But I have thought of this passage as it might be understood by lesbian and gay people — or for that matter, but transgender persons. Are we asked to accept the condition or circumstance in which we find ourselves, make the best of it, and just try to be spiritually free in the Lord even if we feel trapped in what life has dealt to us?

The story of transgender individuals tests this interpretation. Individuals who are born with a male body but perceive themselves to rightfully be female, or the other way around, suffer from gender dysphoria. There is a lot of debate right now about whether this or another label even belongs in the diagnostic manuals of mental health. But if we try to apply St. Paul’s advice — on a parallel track with being single or being married or being a slave, we would have to counsel a transgender person not to seek to change genders, through hormonal treatment or gender reassignment surgery. “Let each of you lead the life the Lord has assigned.”

But then what of the situation for those who discern themselves to be lesbian or gay? Shouldn’t we just accept the fact that we are homosexual, accept our sexual orientation as a given, as part of what life has dealt us?

The rub comes not within ourselves but from others, who weigh in with strong opinions about what it means to “accept.” Conservatives and fundamentalists quickly counsel a transgender person not to change genders but to accept their birth gender and to live (present themselves) as that gender, but take the opposite point of view on homosexuality. They do not believe that we should accept ourselves as gay or lesbian, and live the life “assigned” to us. The conservative would argue that being gay or lesbian was not “assigned” by the accidents or vagaries of human diversity, but chosen as a willful act of human disobedience and sin.

It makes for a fine, coherent systematic view for conservatives. The only problem is, it’s not particularly truthful. Most of us cannot remember choosing to be heterosexual or homosexual, and we don’t discern our sexual responsiveness (arousal, emotional attraction, and even love) as willful acts. We can suppress and stifle our true humanity and human experience—with enough social pressure and internalized shame brought about by the disapproval of others—but that is far from accepting our “condition” and claiming our “freedom in the Lord.” In fact, it’s quite telling that in the very same discussion in 1 Corinthians 7, St. Paul also advises those who are single “It is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.”

Taken as a whole, Paul’s advice is quite mixed. He strongly counsels those who are unmarried to remain unmarried and to accept their circumstances. He counsels the slave to remain content in his “condition” of enslavement. Yet he suggests that it is not a sin for the single person to marry after all, rather than to be aflame with passion. And he stops short of advising the slave that it’s not a sin to seek freedom rather than to be aflame with anger and resentment.

What rule would Paul give to a person who is lesbian or gay? Are we to be content with being lesbian or gay, and so go ahead and “lead the life that the Lord has assigned, to which God called you”? Or to attempt to remain celibate and abstinent, even if constantly aflame with passion? Or aflame with bitterness, loneliness and resentment?

Or as the conservative Christians insist, can a lesbian or gay man overcome the sexual orientation she or he has discerned, through great heroics and with great triumph. Conservatives want to believe the latter, because they have a whole “ex-gay”industry riding on it which they seek to protect from the ridicule of both the LGBT community and of health professionals.

I don’t think I’m through with this one, at all. I’ll get back to this.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

Posted in Hollywood, Bible & Interpretation, Fundamentalism, LGBT Christian, Coming Out, Ex-Gay | Print | No Comments »