THE BENEVOLENT CHAUVINIST

I've avoided evangelical man-groups for years, declining sometimes even the sincerest of invitations to bond over good food and "fellowship" (An ambiguous term which always brings to mind Rubadub-dub, three men in a tub, an occurrence I'm happy to say I've avoided). I especially avoid these gatherings when a book is involved. Not only has this awkward form of networking bypassed the normal, social speed for the development of genuine friendships to which I'm accustomed, but the language spoken in these sorts of settings might as well be Klingon to me. I'm not certain what is meant by QI'yaH, loDnI', lifting Ha' latlh jaj HoSqu'mo' lan chaH joH tIqwIj (Klingon for Hey, brother, I was lifting you up the other day because the Lord laid you on my mind) to which my normal response would be MajQa' Hech, DaH? chay' jen 'ej nuq porgh 'ay' ghop Hot mojpu'? (Oh, he did, did he? Well, how high? And exactly where did you put your hands?). But then I think I'm missing the point of the man-group altogether.

The main reason I sweat at these groups is that the subject of women comes up. Nine times out of ten, someone is going to remind us why we are at the meeting in the first place and will mention "emasculated" men, what society has "done" to manhood, "real" masculinity, the feminist movement, fatherlessness, and other curious suggestions for why masculinity finds itself rocking back and forth in the fetal position in the corner somewhere. Why am I bothered? Because in these conversations the elevation of men is almost always invariably achieved by the diminishment of women.

In group talks about masculinity, "real" men tend to establish themselves by essentially retracting the years that woman's suffrage, democratic progress, and a more progressive understanding of human nature has gained on behalf of women everywhere. The idea is that where a woman's place cannot be understood except be it in diminutive, servile, and patronized contexts, "real" men can't be who they need to be (That is to say, "real" without the quotation marks). And if "real" men cannot be who they need to be, then no hope exists for culture. Now, considering the roots of male-dominated culture, it's an understandable but unfortunate mindset.

When I ran a school full-time for eleven years, I failed to lay the foundation stones for a healthy view of female sexuality. To many traditional families, sexuality meant sex, not gender orientation. And to many progressive families, sexuality meant orientation which was sexist. So I straddled the dichotomy like a chameleon and was understandably misunderstood. When the majority of my families wanted to ban girls from Airsoft wars, I didn't raise much of a protest. And when the majority wanted the girls to wear dresses on the "dressier" days, I didn't raise much of a protest. But I finally drew the line when I was asked to officially ban dating and impose a 6-inch rule. Seriously? For me that was a sharia I was unwilling to impose for the very stupid assumption it necessitated: that female sexuality is forever the instigator in the moral failures of male sexuality. 

But was the 6-inch rule and the dating prohibition for the male or for the female? Think. Unless you have a private school full of boy perverts and helpless girls, boys can't date girls unless the girls let them and they can't touch girls unless the girls let them touch them. But do the girls initiate the aggressive desires in the boys or are the boys... well, boys? 

So when problems arise, it is the girls who have to be covered under more fabric to hide their curves, and it is the girls whose activities were restricted to limit contact with the porn-stimulated boys. And all the while the boys get to walk around with their boners poking out of their pants, taking sneak peeks at the girls' budding, feminine curves.

Now, I look like the hypocrite that, indeed, I had been all along, reinforcing sexist behavior without looking at sexuality in light of a much larger world. In all honesty, the best years of my school were when the boys and girls played Buck buck together before we got political about what special restrictions to impose on the female gender.

For Moderns, sexuality is largely empirical. So physical form is important to them. Moderns tend to see sexuality as a physical orientation that necessitates all the other sorts of orientations like emotional, psychological, and spiritual orientations. So if a human has a wiener, then he is categorically different than a "non-wiener" human. And in the same way those two categories are polar opposites, their emotional, psychological, and spiritual orientations and manifestations are categorically opposite, too. Which sets us up for, oh, so many literal ironies.

Even the progressive Modern thinks this way (though he would argue in the "opposite" direction. But still, in his zeal to eradicate sexual categories, the progressive Modern simply thinks that erasing the "obvious" distinctions of male and female creates a mashup of a wholly different category with an entirely new set of emotional, psychological, and spiritual orientations. 

Come on, a homosexual is a male who is affectually oriented to other males. And a lesbian is a female affectually oriented to other women. Neither is an inhuman hybrid of male and female or some macro-evolutionary transitional form like the progressive Modern fancies). But the physical category seems always to be primary to the Modern so that the "other" human categories of emotion, psyche, and spirit follow.

So many analogies have been drawn to describe the fundamental difference between women and men (with the women being generically weaker and the men being generically stronger). But my question is What difference is being described and to what end? Certainly, we aren't describing the physical difference. I mean, we understand that. However, the generic emotional, psychological, and spiritual differences are always linked back to a woman's physical design or limitations (body) as reference. 

The same with the men. One such evangelical concept tries to describe this ultimate difference by underscoring in the Creation narrative that Eve was created inside the Garden of Eden while Adam was created outside the Garden of Eden. Therefore, women are domestic and men are... well, not domestic.

The furthest difference back of this discussion there is (which has been used time and again as a hammer blow to the progress of women everywhere) has been the question, What was in the mind of God when He created the female? Shoddy apologetics reinforces that, yes, "male and female created He them" and both were made "in the image of God." But those affirmations can be doctrinally held while practically treated as blanket sentiments when the Creation chronology is considered. 

The chronological account has Adam created perfect before there was ever an Eve. Granted, Adam was "lonely", but when you get to the eating-of-the-fruit part, we have been taught to side with Adam in practice ("The woman who I didn't ask for, but whom you thought I needed, made me do this. Therefore, you made me do this"). I'm certain that a different and, probably, more positive angle can be drawn from this text, but the dominating mindset is that Eve was chronologically an afterthought. That is the practical and old-fashioned conclusion drawn almost every time.

So before the human race even gets out of the chutes in the minds of many evangelicals, the female is at a "Biblical" disadvantage and lags far behind. Ask kids who go to Sunday School, and they will insist (in comprehension at least) that the literal translation of the Creation account underscores Eve being referential to Adam. That is to say, many of these kids believe male is primary and the woman is secondary. The man is base and the woman is derivative. 

But can't we simply go along with the law that says It is what it is? A man is a man and a woman is a woman, no matter how widely the spectrum is for each? Is it necessary to underscore that difference with a list of impositions highlighting the flawed distinction that the male is the stronger and the woman the weaker or that the male is the more intelligent and the woman the less intelligent or that the male is unrestricted while the woman domesticated? Can't a man be a real man because he is a man? Can't a woman be a real woman because she is a woman? 

People will always have special definitions and qualifications for titles like masculinity and femininity that go beyond the common understanding. But don't we realize what "real" men everywhere are trying to do? They are trying to save the world! And clearly the only way they know how is publicly to affirm the old-fashioned, fuzzy notion of the female as contingent with a great amount of time spent on the cathartic process of decrying the history of civil rights in this country, the creation of pseudo-covenants between fathers & sons or fathers & daughters, the advocation of neo-Medieval chivalry as a current, legitimate model for masculine and feminine roles, etc. 

But what about being a real man in a way that is currently meaningful instead of applying artificial pressure to roles that exist whether or not we want them to exist? What about being a good man instead of trying to match the perception of an aggressive feminist agenda with an equally obnoxious masculine agenda? A chauvinist is a chauvinist, no matter how benevolent. 

And a note on people who create special definitions: vaj chaH neH SoH, 'ej SoH yong reinventing qaS pagh.

That didn't translate well from Klingon to English (understandably), so here is the original: He who creates special categories to exclude others can easily reinvent those same categories to make sure you don't qualify to be in.

And that's a fact.

RACE, SEXUALITY & EVANGELICAL ANDROGYNY

Recently, I was accused by the leader of a factious, Christian group of heading up The Gay Posse, an insult that was punishment for my effective defense of someone wrongly accused of a crime. I was a little confused at first about the accusation. But over time it became obvious why he called me gay. Because he was too politically correct to call me nigger.

Blasphemy laws in religious communities have changed, directly reflecting the blasphemy laws of wider culture. It's no longer popular to level racial slurs at people you dislike unless you do it discreetly within a forum that shuns the sensibilities of the wider world. However, that's not necessarily because of personal persuasion (or conviction as they say).

It's often because it's legally actionable. 

While the LGBT community has slowly developed a nice, fat portfolio of civil rights victories over the last three decades, it's still popular to indicate ultimate disgust for a person or organization by expressions of an aggressive homophobia. 

Yet very few people take into account the obvious parallels between the two groups (African-Americans & the LGBT community). In the last century alone Civil Rights activists and legislation for both groups...

• have been identified as progressive, anti-family, anti-Biblical, un-American, and Communist...

• have been isolated, marginalized, and persecuted (often in the name of a religious purity or orthodoxy)

• have made gains against popular, governmental policy because of the advocacy of little people who often risked life and limb (in that order) to change public opinion, only turning the tide once they evoked societal rage through the sacrifice of their limbs and lives (and many times accidentally. Many weren't planning to be martyrs for any sort of cause. Rosa Parks wasn't primarily making a statement. She simply wanted to stay seated because her feet were tired)

People have asked me How can you say such things? That's sacrilegious.

Ah, but sacrilege is relative to blasphemy laws.

Being raised in Europe from ages 5-18, these sorts of things never bothered me because they rarely came up. As a resident of Europe, I was simply considered as an American. In American communities abroad I was considered an ambassador. As a result, my conscience wasn't formatted racially but nationally so that I ...

• spoke German and lived within a German framework whenever appropriate

• spoke Romanian and put on the east-bloc yoke whenever appropriate to understand my communist-oppressed brothers and sisters

• lived in compatible fashion with my British brothers and sisters in Oxfordshire, England, toning down despised and egoistically American customs for four years in order to live at peace (I lived in England during the Cruise Missile Crisis)

• understood enough French, Italian, Hungarian or whatever other language necessary to present myself as amiable (sometimes in order to get what I wanted, hahaha, but you get my point)

With this sort of orientation, living abroad found me oftentimes in conflict with fewer Europeans & more Americans who thought it unnecessary to learn another language or to give up American customs when it grated against native sensibilities or to venture abroad when we needed to stick together. 

Oh, and you guessed it: many of these sorts held to religious persuasions that might have worked, say, in New Mexico, Georgia, or Connecticut, but that suspiciously rang empty in Mehlingen, Germany or in Lechlade, England or in Satu Mare, Romania or in Calais, France. But true to form, those unwarranted sensibilities drew a deep ravine between those Americans and the native so that not only was the native politically suspect but s/he was also...

• ignorant so that the native had little or nothing of value to offer except strategic resources

• volitionally anti-democratic & anti-Christian so that any sort of friendship was considered expedient at best and terminal at worst

The overwhelming number of Americans were generally respectful and liberal in outlook (or ambivalent), but the oppositional ones typically had strange apocalyptic frameworks for filtering the souls of anyone who didn't fit the religious & political template. 

So back to my observation about the racial minority & LGBT community: unless we're not accessing the same news, the facts are open for verification. While the racial condition is considered genetic and the LGBT condition is considered to be within the realm of theoretical genetics, both groups have received similar humiliating treatment, worst of them all being the formative spiritual idea that both are under some sort of curse. 

People tell me If I were Black, I would be offended at being associated with homosexuals. Well, I supposed that's just nice for them (it's just like those sorts of people to believe that whatever they imagine in their redeemed minds must be "inescapably" true in hardcore reality).

But they never ask me if I'm offended by the zealously religious who cite additional restrictions (as laid out in the Bible, even) about...

• who I can and cannot marry (should or should not have married in my case)

• how I am or am not designed (I am designed racially for subjugation)

• what I am or am not likely to do in my life (I am not likely to do anything of value unless it falls within or under the framework of a revisionist history, because if it doesn't then I will be revised out of history)

They think I should actually prefer this sort of benevolent treatment than associate with that other godless horde. 

Maybe I should. 

But I don't. 

And maybe they have no idea what they would do or think were they Black.

I find three things difficult to speak about with self-consciously world-viewish people who think in these sorts of formulae:

• The first is politics. Politics is gaming, I think, and the seriousness that people take the game off the board and into the Great Beyond is surreal to me. When Clinton first was elected President, a number of people on my college campus wore black to protest. The professor of my Materials & Methods class took the first few minutes of class that morning to address the mood. One student cited Clinton as supporting the killing of fetuses. But Bill Clinton wasn't even President yet. Weren't fetuses already being killed? How was he now responsible and the current President not? Oh, because the current President didn't believe in abortion (oh, the power of redemptive abstraction). That's what makes him innocent and Clinton guilty, and I would know that were I taking the political game as seriously as I should be taking it. 

• The second is emerging (emergent) Christianity. As if Christianity were like an erection in danger of going flat. Christianity has survived approximately 2013 years and will no doubt last the next 2013 years with the longevity of a cockroach and without the futuristic branding techniques of chubby apologists and innovative marketeers who collaborate in their ecclesio-cubicles or sit on not-for-profit think-tanks that turn a profit to convince us that Christianity is in danger of extinction if we don't purchase their line of commercial goods that will somehow magically foul the efforts of Antichrist himself from emerging. 

• Last of all is race. I don't think that people who aren't Black should tell me what it's like to be one (and neither should I tell people who are Hispanic or Armenian what it's really like to be one). I also don't think that people who aren't Black should think my thoughts are so far off from their own because of something as surface as my skin color (Nah, but, Lawd, wese Negros has sucha speshals ways o' thinkin...). If any sort of minority is self-conscious in a dominant culture context, I can assure you that it's not skin color that primarily makes them uncomfortable.

It's deeper than that: it's history (enter the revisionists). It's the fact that my New England-educated mother (born and raised in Alabama) was subject to Jim Crow and found it difficult to watch her boys embrace German culture without wincing because we weren't wincing. It's my Philadelphia-born father warning me the week before I came to the U.S. on my own in 1991 that I wasn't going to find it easy living in America as I had found it living in Europe (and I unknowingly was going right into the bowels of the bastion of fundamentalism!). I took the advice compliantly though cryptic it was. It's his sigh at my response because I wasn't sighing. 

Yesterday at my office I introduced my student, CVR recording artist Gabrielle Solair, to Marcela Gomez, The Hispanic Marketing Group founder and CEO. Both women are Colombian. I sat down and listened to them talk for over an hour in pointed, blunt, no-holds-barred Colombian fashion. 

Gabrielle, turning 17 this weekend, finally found someone who spoke to that part of her heritage that for almost seventeen years had been written off to be culturally embarrassing and rebellious, suppressed and refined by the Southern hospitality on her mother's side, and despised and shunned on her father's nationalistic pro-Colombian side. 

While their conversation disparaged the male dominance of American culture (I made sure to keep my mouth shut because... well... I'm male) and analyzed the quirks of American Caucasian women (I made sure to keep my mouth shut because... well... my wife is Caucasian), what a beautiful thing it was to watch understanding morph to a new level. 

What's uncomfortably painful to religiously conscientious minorities in dominant-culture congregations is that while our congregations battle the political issues of the day in Sunday School lessons, sermons, and extra-curricular activities (like book groups), we don't want to be affiliated with Jim Crow tactics used on our people just a few short years ago (or for some Hispanics, tactics currently being used on their people). 

I'll tell you why. Because the majority of minorities don't believe these sorts of political issues initially to be an issue of ethics when it comes to who we are (or who the opposition is like)...

We believe it to be unmistakably an ontological issue. We believe that our existence (in general) in said congregations is largely seen to be an awkward embarrassment and a misfortune on two fronts:

• a misfortune that racial lines of demarcation and solidarity weren't upheld in the larger culture to make relationships easier to maintain. I hear this echoed in the laments of Well, back in our day... or When I was young... (Oh, I've read what it was like back in the day... my parents and grandparents have told me what it was like back in the day).

• a misfortune that the presence of racial minorities in dominant-culture congregations is easier dealt with by minimizing distinctions to the point of ignoring or erasing them: that is to say, amplifying the distinction disproportionately to the attention it deserves and thereby unintentionally making minorities targets of special treatment (at one church I attended, no one ever looked at me... until each summer vacation Bible school when I was sought after to play some Black missionary or African convert.)

I believe the same for many of our LGBT brothers and sisters. I don't believe the attitudes or means with which many Christian communities view and deal with LGBT persons are initially borne of righteous indignation. They are borne of disgust, first and foremost, because what the LGBT community sexually represents isn't culturally palatable (I attended a fundamentalist college where I was always hounded for my dating, engagement, and eventual marriage of a white woman. While people leveraged the Bible to convince me of my error, they largely cited how it wasn't acceptable in American culture unless I moved to some places up North or out West, how my children would be confused, and how I wouldn't find a church that would accept me). 

I also believe it to spring from the same ontological attitude of believing it would be easier were the LGBT person to be at the least visibly marked for special treatment and at the worst socially segregated so as to make life easier for both groups (because then there would be clear-cut rules). In the case of the minority and LGBT person, the religious community doesn't initially begin its thoughts about them with acknowledgement of their relationship to each of us as fellow human beings who were created in the image of God. No, they are the enemy. They are the reason our kids listen to gangsta rap. They are the reason our kids have sex at younger and younger ages. They are the reason marriage is falling apart. They are the reason for the War on Terror. They are the scapegoat, so heap it all on them. They are the sacrificial lambs, and it's better that they take all cultural blame than the rest of us.

So if the religious community wants to characterize the homosexual as confused at the least or rebellious at the worst, it should assume that many minorities fall within the same camp. We have no idea what our congregations think about our people groups, our history, or our presence in their congregations save that they tolerate us (and what a glorious, fat diamond they shall get in their crown for such a risk). 

What a mixed message. 

The Christian idea that man is made in God's image is deliciously tantalizing to millions of us. Until we realize that it's application is qualified by factors many of us cannot control or do not understand. I can't and I won't agree with the religiously ideological treatment of homosexuals because...

• I simultaneously find myself rationalizing the lynching of my great-grandfather for having a child with my German great-grandmother (American race laws forbade it). 

• I find myself rationalizing the shutting up of my German grandmother in the psych ward in Somerset County, Pennsylvania to live out the rest of her days because she had a bi-racial child (Children obey your parents). 

• I find myself rationalizing the deportment of Hispanic children born in this country. 

• I find myself being understanding of all the Black, Mexican, and Polish jokes that were a part of my Christian fundamentalist and evangelical experience. 

So someone is going to have to come up with a better apologetic for describing the difference between my racial history and the history of behavioral minorities like the LGBT community... because it all sounds androgynous to me.

While I think the leader of that small band of factious Christian believers should be honest with what he really wants to say to me, I don't think that will help much. If unbelievers are worthy of eternal damnation, then a little terminal damnation isn't going to hurt them much. 

Especially if the unbeliever is gay. 

Or a nigger!