Those Uppity Gays

In commemoration of Utah filing its brief late last night with the 10th Circuit Court of Appeal, I am republishing this piece which was originally written during the Chick-fil-A controversy and published on another of my blogs, Beyond the Closet Door (now closed). I have updated certain aspects of the post to reflect contemporary events.

Recent events in Utah and around the country with respect to marriage equality remind me of a period of time in recent American history when a segment of our society that tried to assert what it believed to be its civil rights and dignity was brutally repressed, particularly in a certain section of the country.

I refer, of course, to African-Americans – which is certainly not what they were called back then.

Recently, I loaned our copy of The Help to my young teenage son to watch. He told me later that he enjoyed the movie but was appalled that black people were actually treated that way. I was dismayed, but not surprised I suppose, that he knew so little about what things were like “back then.”  

My son has probably never even heard the word “nigger.” The thought that a black person was forced to use separation public washrooms, was expected to sit at the back of the bus, was expected to remember her place, was expected to accept second-class citizenship and (perhaps most of all) was expected not get “uppity” and aspire to being treated equally – all of this was beyond the pale of my son’s comprehension.

I gave him a very brief history of what it was like, what I remember watching on the news growing up in the 60’s. What I didn’t go into was the way segregation was viewed by society at large, particularly in the South. How in those days, sermons were preached in many pulpits about the propriety of keeping things “the way God intended them to be.” How those who were trying to change things were called “agitators” and were routinely intimidated, beaten or even murdered. How most people were simply part of the “silent majority” who didn’t commit acts of violence but who nevertheless – to one degree or another – agreed with those of their ilk who were committing acts of violence, whether government-sanctioned (e.g., police) or acts of vigilantism. 

What I think he would have had the most trouble comprehending, however, is the concept that African-Americans were expected to just accept the order of things as dictated by the racist white majority. Blacks were expected to see themselves as inferior, because of course they were. No amount of “agitation” could change the religiously-sanctioned (and even promoted) view that blacks were inferior to whites and needed to be treated so. What really enraged certain segments of the white population in the South (as well as elsewhere in the country) was when blacks simply refused to accept this status-quo. How dare they be so uppity!

So, here we are in 2014, and the same thing is going on – only this time, it’s the gays that are being uppity. Certain segments of the population are perhaps willing - at least publicly - to accept the existence of homosexuals, but they are enraged that gays presume to aspire to the same degree of civic equality as heterosexuals. They insist that gays accept second-class status and are infuriated (or express other, varying degrees of indignation) when we refuse to do so.

To me, the Chick-fil-A thing, as well as Marriage Equality in Utah (and elsewhere) is all about Dignity. Vast swaths of our society expect us to accept their world-view, their beliefs about ourselves and their views as to what we are entitled in the way of civil rights. The fact that we refuse to do so makes some of them practically foam at the mouth, whereas others look on in cold, stoney silence.

I wonder, will my grandchildren, 40 years from now, express incredulity that a minority in our society was discriminated against, suffered acts of violence and was expected to know their place and keep it? Will they find it difficult to comprehend that religious organizations actively participated in this discrimination and fostered this intolerance and hate? Will they wonder why a majority of society simply accepted this situation as being part of the natural order of things?

I hope so.

The 60's Memorials

Moving from the FDR Memorial to the MLK Memorial was an interesting, thought-provoking experience. It was as though we were making a pilgrimage to monuments to the on-going struggle throughout the 20th century for the creation of a more just, equal and enlightened society. 

I knew nothing about design and content of the MLK Memorial prior to our visit. But I could remember the 60's. I can remember seeing protest marches on the evening news, along with news of that day's killing in Vietnam, news that nightly visited every family in the nation. I remember the awful spring of 1968, when MLK's assassination by a white man set off violent demonstrations in many cities of the country. I can also more vividly recall the assassination and funeral a few months later of Robert Kennedy.

Upon doing some background reading for this post, I came across a speech that Robert Kennedy (who was running that spring for the Democratic nomination for president) made at a campaign rally in a predominantly black area of Indianapolis the night of King's assassination. (King's death wasn't confirmed until Kennedy had landed in Indianapolis, and he conveyed the news to those assembled at the rally. The speech, therefore, was extemporaneous.) As I read the speech, it brought back the sense of idealism I recall being associated with RFK and demonstrates how different the tone of political discourse was then as compared to now. Here is an excerpt:

"Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it's perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black -- considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible -- you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge.

"We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization -- black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand, and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion, and love.

"For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill with -- be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.

"But we have to make an effort in the United States. We have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond, or go beyond these rather difficult times.

"My favorite poem, my -- my favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote: 'Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.'

"What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black."

One enters the King Memorial through the "mountain of despair," a reference to a quote from MLK's famous "I Have a Dream" speech.

Neatly cut out of this mountain of despair is a "stone of hope" - King.

From the MLK Memorial, we walked to the Lincoln Memorial. It seemed fitting that this was the next stop on our "pilgrimage," as this edifice has served not only as the closest thing we Americans have to a national shrine, but as the site of many historic events marking the struggle toward a more equal and just society and nation, such as Marian Anderson's performance in 1939 and MLK's "March on Washington" in 1963.

I thought about these events as Mark and I ascended the many steps to the "temple of freedom." (I think Memorial's resemblance to ancient Greek temples is no accident; and in fact the inscription above Lincoln's statue explicitly refers to the memorial as a temple.)

I also thought about how the Tea Party and their ilk don't have much time for Lincoln. Lincoln was a unifier, a preserver, a man who sought to "bind up the nation's wounds" after the terrible slaughter incurred in the Civil War - as memorialized in the words of his second inaugural address:

These people clothe themselves in the garb and in the supposed ideology of those who were there when Moses parted the Red Sea and God himself fought the American Revolution and delivered the Constitution on Mt. Sinai. These people are too often filled with hatred, division and bigotry. No, they have no use for Lincoln. They can't use him, for he was the great unifier, not the great divider.

It gave me pause, as we stood in front of Lincoln's statue, to wonder how differently American history might have progressed if Lincoln had lived and had been able to carry out his dream of a unified, compassionate and equal America.

Isn't he gorgeous?

The Vietnam War Memorial is visible from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial - another monument to that critical decade of the 60's, to both the dreams and the contradictions of that tumultuous time. We were fortunate to be there on Veterans' Day. I won't add any commentary about our visit to that long black wall. The pictures tell the story.

This struck me as a cool picture, but I sense a deep meaning to this photograph that is eluding my grasp.
Perhaps we are a reflection of what these men would have been had they been standing there?