I've Learned to Live With a Very Flexibile Definition of 'Okay'

"Are you okay?"

I've been asked that a lot in the past 24 hours. I may have a bit of a reputation for emotional fragility, I'm afraid. I've been in a "thin place" for a very long time, and it doesn't take much to move me.

"Abrazo" by Hermán Marina
Neon, 2012

I'm not really sorry for that, though. We saw Steel Magnolias (yes, again!) recently and this production strangely omitted one of my favorite lines: "I have a strict policy that nobody cries alone in my presence." I subscribe to that philosophy without shame, because the alternative--being unable to respond to others' pain--sounds like prison. I know men in this culture are supposed to be stoic (the two acceptable expressions appear to be "winning" and "rage") but I've been told most of my life that I'm not a normal man and I've made my peace with that long ago.

So friends have been checking in, cautiously, like I might re-enact Sally Field's hysterical graveyard scene at the slightest provocation. The sweetest was the co-worker who offered to lend me her puppy.

"Are you okay?"

And the truth is, I don't know. I'm not even sure if I know what that is anymore.The world has been so crazy for so long that, as Sister Lily Tomlin's character on Grace and Frankie described it, "I've learned to live with a very flexible definition of okay."

"Okay" as in "Not in immediate danger to self or others?" Yes, I can go that far. I have a support system, I am not neglecting my basic needs. I eat and sleep (a lot). I made myself exercise and buy food. I know I am loved.

But isn't there more to "okay" than that? Aren't I entitled to feel safe? Shouldn't the people in charge be doing more to end the scourge of bloodshed than making hollow promises of "thoughts and prayers" (especially ironic when coming from some of the same public voices who keep reinforcing the notion that people like me are somehow "less than")?

So if you're queer in America in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Sixteen in the Month of Pride, all the world is not at peace, and "okay" is relative. You're okay because you woke up this morning and found yourself alive, you have a job and a place to stay, and a family that accepts you. But you still have to second-guess any action that might draw attention to yourself, weighing whether some man (it's seemingly always a man, have you noticed?) will have a problem with it, and whether he might have a gun.

49 people were killed by one man with one gun, which he bought in a store despite multiple queries by the FBI into his behavior. 49 people. How many is too many? 100? 200? "It was just one small town"? Sadly I despair that the will even exists to make it stop. Horrible as it is, I agree with the person who tweeted that the gun debate ended at Newtown: If 'murica wasn't heartbroken enough by the deaths of toddlers, I doubt that the slaughter of LGBT folks will be the tipping point. There are already tweets out there saying they deserved what they got.

And that, my friends, is Not Okay.

Pulse Nightclub Victims Fund

After the Fire, the Fire Still Burns

Phillips Brooks - Bishop & Preacher (1893)

Those in our area could not miss the headline earlier this week of a five-alarm fire that destroyed much of an apartment complex known as Avalon at Edgewater. If you've been around a while, you may remember that the same complex burned in 2000 as construction neared completion.

I'm not really wild about the trend toward wood frame construction for high-density housing like this.  With over 400 apartments in a city block, that's a lot of stoves, candles, extension cords, heaters, potentially careless smokers, etc., in a small area.  The building is still relatively new, but what happens when wiring and other material is 30, 40, 50 years old?  It is not as if it is cheap to live there, either; I saw mention of rents upwards of $3,000 a month.  We're getting two similar complexes in our town (one by the same developers) and I expressed concern to town officials that we may be exposed to similar risks.

On Thursday the Newark Star Ledger reported that a worker's blowtorch accidentally started the blaze, and that the crew called and spoke to their supervisor for 15 minutes before dialing 9-1-1, thus critically delaying firefighters' response.  This reminded me of another fire, which took place right across the river at Pier 88 in the Passenger Ship Terminal, seventy-three years ago this coming February 8th.

The SS Normandie, luxurious flagship of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, took shelter in New York when World War 2 began. Her crew remained on board until December 1941, when she was seized by the U.S. Navy and renamed the USS Lafayette, vessel AP-53.

Workers using blowtorches to remove iron handrails in the ship's cavernous first-class lounge accidentally ignited a stack of life preservers, which were full of a very flammable substance called Kapok.  They attempted to extinguish the fire, but the ship's sophisticated sprinkler system had been abandoned by the Navy and they quickly discovered that the fittings did not match American hoses.

The fire spread rapidly; the Normandie boasted numerous large public spaces (the First Class restaurant was longer than the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles) which unfortunately acted  like a giant chimney. The FDNY used every means at its disposal to pour water on the ship, and she soon began a dangerous list away from the pier.  Her Russian-born designer Vladimir Yourkevitch arrived at the scene and attempted to provide expertise that would have possibly saved her, but he was ignored.  In the middle of the night, like a suffering whale that beaches itself, the beautiful ship fell on her side in the muck.

Burned-out wreck of the USS Lafayette (ex-Normandie) lies on her side at New York's Pier 88
PHOTO CREDIT: James Vaughan. Used under Creative Commons License. Some rights reserved.

She would remain there for a year, an embarrassing waste.  The Navy considered re-purposing her as an aircraft carrier, but the damage was found to be too extensive and they focused on other priorities.  She was scrapped at Port Newark after the war's end.  Luckily, much of her interior fittings had been removed and stored before the disaster, and can be seen in places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Our Lady of Lebanon (the Maronite Catholic Cathedral in Brooklyn), and the Chicago Hilton.

Like the Avalon fire, her loss was ruled an accident, and--also similarly--the response immediately after it began played heavily into the outcome.  The design of passenger ships has changed significantly since then; the SS United States, launched 12 years later, had almost no wood on board, and both she and the SS France employed large amounts of asbestos, which was also subsequently ruled to be hazardous.  Large spaces like those aboard Normandie now have to be subdivided by fire-suppressing bulkheads and doors.

But, on land, are similar precautions being taken?  Hopefully we will not have to wait 73 years for a lesson from the Avalon fire to be learned.

An Unlikely Angel

I have been wrestling with this topic for a while.  I think today is the day to post.

ALL SAINTS' DAY

Fifteen years ago this week, the world watched as a grisly story unfolded in southeastern Wyoming.  A gay college student, Matthew Aaron Shephard, was found -- beaten and left tied to a remote fencepost -- by a bicyclist who initially mistook him for a scarecrow.  Shepard died October 12th in a Colorado hospital.

Two young men, with whom Shepard had last been seen the night of October 6th at a Laramie bar, were charged and subsequently convicted of the crime.  One, Russell Henderson, pled guilty and testified against the other (Aaron McKinney) in exchange for avoiding the death penalty. McKinney's life was spared by Shepard's parents, who agreed to two life sentences with no chance of parole.

“But there was something about Matt that caused the giant, callous machine that is America to take its foot off the gas, if only for a relative moment, and maybe, just maybe, start to think it was possible that gay men were not all sick predators. Maybe we were actual people, who could and did feel pain.”

As we mark a decade and a half since Shepard's death, he is again in the virtual limelight.  A new film, entitled Matthew Shepard is a Friend of Mine, premiered on both coasts last weekend. One venue was the Cathedral Church of St. Peter & St. Paul in Washington D.C.  The Very Rev. Gary Hall, Dean of the Cathedral, used his sermon this past Sunday to remember Matthew and Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi, who committed suicide in 2010 after learning his time alone with a male friend had been secretly recorded and broadcast on the Internet by his roommate.  The mothers of both young men participated in a forum after the service.  You can read and watch videos of both the sermon and the forum using the links above.

Though I was not yet an Episcopalian (and in fact in a state of cold war with the church, more on that another day!) in 1998, I found myself with 1,000 others at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York, attending a memorial for a person I knew nothing about, other than that he was gay like me, and that he was brutally, gruesomely dead.  I didn't know it at the time, but this struck a particular chord within the Episcopal Church, perhaps because Matt was one of us, a member of St. Mark's: Casper and an acolyte.

Even before Shepard died, there was something about this attack, amongst all the others against LGBT people that occurred before and since, that was different. I don't know if it was because he was a slightly-built guy with youthful features, who looked in the photos that were everywhere in those days to be incapable of hurting a fly.  I don't know if it was the way he was found hanging pitifully from that fence, which for Christians could conjure up one image and one image only.  But there was something about Matt that caused the giant, callous machine that is America to take its foot off the gas, if only for a relative moment, and maybe, just maybe start to think it was possible that gay men were not all sick predators.  Maybe we were actual people, who could and did feel pain.

As a result, it felt natural to accept that the murder was an anti-gay hate crime.  After all, the perpetrators initially claimed as much, saying Shepard had been targeted because of his sexuality, and that they pretended to be sexually interested in him to gain his trust, so as to get him alone and rob him.  What they didn't explain is why they couldn't just rob him as planned, instead of beating him to a pulp.

But the murder had set wheels into motion.  Misanthropic quasi-Christians aside, the general consensus was that this was going to be -- like Lawrence vs. Kansas -- a case that changed everything.  It took over a decade, but the names of Shepard and James Byrd, an African-American man who was savagely killed the same year by white supremacists, grace the bill -- passed in 2009 -- that added sexual orientation and gender identity (real or perceived) to the nation's hate crimes law and expanded it past federally-protected activities like voting or attending school.

The narrative around Shepard's story is not homogenous, however, and it does not arouse compassionate impulses in everyone.  A recent University of Mississippi production of Moises Kaufman's The Laramie Project (a re-enactment of Shepard's murder and the events that followed based on interviews with townspeople who were involved) was disrupted by homophobic jeers from the audience.  Students, including approximately 20 members of the Ole Miss Rebels football team, had been compelled by the administration to attend the play.  In the absence of anyone taking responsibility, the school announced since that all students who were present will be required to participate in a discussion about the incident.

Separately, a gay freelance journalist named Stephen Jimenez has just written a book which stands the public understanding of the case on its ear.  Quoting sources who claimed friendship with them both, The Book of Matt posits that Shepard not only knew his attackers, but that he and Henderson had been sexually intimate in the past. McKinney, Jimenez claims, worked as a prostitute and enjoyed sex with gay men.  He claims that all three men used and sold crystal meth, and that it was more likely that the attack was a drug deal gone bad than an anti-gay hate crime.

In an award-winning 1999 essay for Harper's, JoAnn Wypijewski unpacked the intricacies of the world the three men inhabited, in an attempt to understand how the pieces that led to the murder fell into place.  By her account, Henderson and McKinney were both on a week long meth binge, and bore no more hatred of the gay Shepard than the other men, ostensibly straight, that they beat up later that night.  Of the media's reaction after, she wrote, "Press crews who had never before and have not since lingered over gruesome murders of homosexuals came out in force, reporting their brush with a bigotry so poisonous it could scarcely be imagined."  In her opinion, it was decided that Shepard was to be the poster child of the hate crime lobby, and any attempt to derail that was squashed.  My initial reaction was that she must be the new Anne Coulter, 'til I dug a bit and discovered she worked for a decade at Mother Jones.  Socially progressive generally, she doesn't agree with the idea of hate crime laws, arguing that putting people in different categories implies one person's murder is worse than another's. 

Wypijewski wrote about the case again in 2004 after a 20/20 piece (which Jimenez also helped produce) exploring the drug angle drew outrage by LGBT groups and Shepard's family.  She called the way the story had been framed in the public consciousness the "second tragedy" to occur at Laramie.  The third, a year after Shepard died, was the death of Russell Henderson's mother Cindy Dixon, who had been raped, beaten, and left to die in the snow. There were no hate crime laws to protect her, Wypijewski asserts.  Her well-known problems “with the drinking, and the men” led locals to write off her death as practically inevitable, and the perpetrator of a crime similar to that against Shepard got off with a manslaughter charge and is already out of jail. 

A piece by Aaron Hicklin in the Advocate suggests that -- even if there is truth to Jimenez's view of the story -- it doesn't make Shepard's death any less awful or undeserved.  He argues that there is a time and place for different versions of narrative. "There are valuable reasons for telling certain stories in a certain way at pivotal times, but that doesn’t mean we have to hold on to them once they’ve outlived their usefulness," Hicklin writes.  He goes back to the Lawrence vs. Texas case, which unraveled sodomy laws nationwide after (we were told) two men were arrested for having consensual sex in their own house.  Except that -- if you actually read the details -- they weren't a couple, and they weren't even having sex. 

Those of us who are LGBT must reconcile the fact that we collectively benefited from the public's response to this story as it was told them.  If any of Jimenez's version is true -- and we may never know if it is -- it messes with the imagery we have collectively built around the diminutive figure whose death galvanized a movement. Reports that Shepard was depressed and possibly engaging in harmful behavior are not new, but they were never the focus of the narrative.  Unsurprisingly, conservative voices are playing this up as evidence of why hate crime laws are bad, and progressives are pushing back, pointing out holes in Jimenez' story, most importantly the unreliability of his star witness (Henderson) and Jimenez's own connections with the defense attorney in the case. 

I found the whole controversy unsettling, but I also grew up among journalists, and -- in the process of writing this -- found myself digging deeper, wanting to understand the situation and thus make peace with it, even in a place of continued uncertainty.  I have dear friends who are furious at the idea that anyone is trying to change the public's perception of who Shepard was, especially if it appears to be for some personal motive.  Maybe Kaufman's portayal is closer to the truth, maybe Jimenez's is, but I'm not sure it matters.  Nobody deserves to suffer as Shepard did, and many LGBT people do, ever year.

Within the Episcopal church, we  seek to be inspired by those whose lives and deaths touch us is reflected in our calendar of  "saints" as documented in the book Holy Women, Holy Men.  We expect no miracles of our saints, and in fact some of them were known to struggle with deep flaws.  In the case of Matthew Shepard (who is not in the aforementioned book), I think it's important to remember that he never signed up to become an icon for LGBT rights, nor the public scrutiny that goes with it.  His death made many people think about gay people (and -- sorry -- gay men in particular) differently, but it was one death in many.  LGBT people continue to be killed, even in enlightened places like Seattle and New York, their names sadly unknown to but a handful. If the randomness of Shepard's genetics or the horrible, crucifixion-like manner in which he died meant enough hearts were changed that we could spur the progress we have made since, is that miracle enough?

.

Make it Stop

St. John of the Cross / San Juan de la Cruz / St. Jean de la Croix

We spent the last week on Captiva Island, in the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida coast.  It is a place of rustic beauty, largely overgrown by palms, sea grape and scrub pine. The weather somehow seems more "real" when not competing with traffic and neon and jet exhaust, so one can actually sense the subtle changes to light and wind and water each day. There are few people around during this "shoulder season" between the end of hurricane weather and the arrival of the snowbirds, most of them retirees from Minnesota and Wisconsin. It is not unusual to have a quarter-mile or more of shoreline completely to yourself, other than a bustling tide of sea birds who always seem to be working so busily that one feels almost enough guilt to reach for the corporate Blackberry. Almost.

"In one of the stars, I will be living. In one of them, I will be laughing. And so it will seem as if all the stars are laughing, when you look in the sky at night." ANTOINE ST. EXUPERY

Thursday night, we made plans to watch the Geminid meteor shower from the beach.  With very little artificial light, it's possible to see an amazing array of celestial detail on Captiva, and the coincidental new moon meant we should be able to take in the show with very little interference.

Alas, when the time came, a swiss-cheese blanket of clouds had spread across the island.  Nevertheless, we took advantage of what gaps there were and glimpsed at least a handful of the quick darts of light the particles made as they zipped by.

Our last full day of vacation dawned warm and muggy, and the clouds cleared up by the time lunch was over, promising a solid beach afternoon to wrap up our week.  The youngest member of our party was my companion on boogie boards in the gentle surf until he found a buddy his own age and left me to seek company with the grown-up types.

We learned the news of the school shootings in Connecticut from passers-by, and instinctively reached for smart phones to see what was happening.  It was hard to reconcile the squeals of laughter from the kids at the water's edge with the nightmarish experience I knew other kids, very close to their age, had been through. As the details were pieced together, the predictable pattern of debate was playing out on Facebook walls and blog posts: gun control, mental health care, school prayer.... a kaleidoscope of speculation and rhetoric, all coming from a place of confusion and pain.  Because of course nobody, regardless of politics, would wish the scene in that school on a sworn enemy, let alone a first-grader.

I have my own thoughts about guns, and health care, and school prayer, and I was not immune from the impulse to share them in the raw voice of someone trying to process the unthinkable, in what appears to be an arms race of ever-escalating unthinkables, because we can't seem as a nation to figure out what's driving people to such acts.

That night, after trying to stay out of earshot of TV gunfire, I hit the beach again with a longtime friend and the dad of my little surfing buddy.  We didn't talk much as we scanned the much-clearer sky for laggard shooting stars we were told we might see.  Staring up at the bejeweled blitz overhead, I remembered what the Little Prince told his pilot friend after meeting the snake whose bite he knew was his destiny: "In one of the stars, I will be living. In one of them, I will be laughing. And so it will seem as if all the stars are laughing, when you look in the sky at night."

We saw one meteor each, and trudged home again with stiff necks for our trouble.

On a scrap of paper on my bulletin board at work are four words I scribbled to illustrate something to a co-worker who was coming to grips with a difficult family situation

 HURT PEOPLE HURT PEOPLE.

People are calling for -- in addition to gun control -- stronger mental health systems which would ostensibly identify and separate the about-to-become-unhinged from our innocent kids. But -- to repeat an old adage I heard The Right Rev. Gene Robinson quote in a sermon -- it's not enough to keep pulling drowning people out of the water. We've got to head upstream and figure out who is throwing them in! I believe we should as a society take a closer look at how we treat each other, particularly how we treat those who don't fit the mold. Let's face it: we haven't exactly achieved the "kinder, gentler nation" we were promised back in 1988, right after I survived high school relatively unscathed. Instead it appears we have appointed Anne Robinson from The Weakest Link to determine who is smart, Simon Cowell to determine who is talented, and the Peter Pan chairman of Abercrombie & Fitch to determine who is attractive. In case you haven't noticed, these are not especially nice people, at least not the personas they wear for us.  It's not especially cool to be nice, is it? We trade casual put-downs with our friends and cheer at TV shows whose purpose seems to be to determine who can be the meanest.  And those who don't impress us or have anything to offer, we simply tune out.

If you are blessed with good looks, talent, and/or a good support system to constantly reassure you of your worth, you can survive the daily onslaught of unrealistic standards and "good-natured" barbs. But in the America of fractured homes and three-career families, where spend our days bumbling from one screen to another (I bought a week's worth of groceries today without interacting once with another human... is this really progress?), who's doing that for the people who aren't quite that strong? Who is noticing the misfit who eats his lunch alone? Whose job is it to compliment how well she draws on every surface that will take the marks of her pen?

 When I wrote about suicide a while back, I wondered if teachers have the bandwidth to understand the social dynamics of their classroom and keep anybody from falling through the cracks, but I don't think it can all fall on them. It's got to come from all of us. Nobody should be unworthy of a smile or an inquiry about their day. They may not respond in a way we would call grateful or even appropriate, but they were noticed, seen; they mattered, if even for a minute. Another Facebook poster railed that we should never mention these high-profile killers' names again, because recognition was all they were looking for. If that's true, if a tortured mind has been screaming to be heard to the point where it takes murder or suicide to get our attention, then shame on us. Maybe if they got it at age seven, we wouldn't be in this predicament. Maybe.

Are the Lifeboats Seated According to Class?

Saturday in Easter Week

By now you are probably sick unto death of references to the R.M.S. Titanic as we approach the centennial of her sinking.  Actress Kate Winslet reportedly cringes when she hears "My Heart Must Go On" and every time a cruise ship encounters any kind of mishap, breathless passengers insist "it was just like the Titanic!"  Of course it was... except that it was 2,800 miles away, 90 years later, within sight of land and your inconvenience was limited to warm beer for an afternoon in the Anchors Aweigh Lounge til the lights came back on.

 

Simulated Size Comparison:
Titanic vs. Oasis of the Seas(Caution: Contains Music)

For those with no other references, the Titanic remains the "go-to" vessel, to which every new passenger ship is compared.  However, for ship geeks like me, the most interesting thing about her is that she almost immediately failed at her job: that is, to get her human cargo safely from one side of the Atlantic to the other.  Her speed and size statistics were almost immediately eclipsed by other vessels, and few can name her two sisters, both of which also met with disaster in varying degrees.  Since then, hundreds of liners -- ever larger, ever faster -- came and went, most of them long forgotten except by a nostalgic handful.  Today's plodding cruise behemoths bear little resemblance to the ships of that time, yet passengers who -- when asked what ship they spent their vacation -- answer, "Um, Carnival?" know Titanic.  People who have never seen the ocean know her name and remember her story.

To me the human dynamic of what happened that night, and what it says about the time in which it occurred, is far more interesting than the ship itself, or even the human errors and vices that made it happen.  We recently started watching the British "costume drama" Downton Abbey, which is set in England in the same time period, and seeing the characters interact with those in their own and in different social strata is helping to understand a little more about the way events unfolded. Just as scullery maid Daisy knows that she is never to set foot in the family dining room, some in third class seemed to accept as normal that their station in life meant that it was more important that a wealthier person should live while they would die.  Just as the Dowager Countess has no problem with the idea that the townspeople let her win the village rose competition every year regardless of merit, the mother of Winslet's fictitious character Rose is more concerned that nobody of lesser pedigree be seated next to her in the lifeboat than the fact that -- for the vast majority of souls on board -- there will be no seat at all.  While that remark was fictitious, it was probably not especially unlikely.

Fast-forward a century, the lines of class -- while not erased -- are certainly blurrier than they once were.  While it is taking an embarrassingly long time to get past the concept of race or ethnicity as a marker of your human worth, at least we've evolved to the point where making such crass remarks is considered bad manners in most circles.  And if someone on the Costa Concordia tried to assert that a balcony suite meant he was entitled to evacuate the tilting cruise ship first, he would have likely been thrown overboard.

The Butt-Millet Memorial Fountain
Washington DC

My friend Julio mentioned in his new pop culture blog recently that a novelist used simple statistics and known cultural facts to surmise that "the love that dare not speak its name" was most certainly in bloom aboard the ill-fated ship, and that -- unlike the preposterous inter-class romance in The Movie -- males from from various passage grades and even the crew were free to roam past barriers and interact.  While his assertions are mostly speculation, I learned recently that at least one pair of men on board were widely assumed to be a couple.  Major Archibald Butt, who served as chief military aide and close friend to Presidents Roosevelt and Taft, shared a home in Washington DC with a painter named Francis Davis Millet, and the two were traveling together aboard Titanic after Millet got Taft to convince Butt he needed a recuperative vacation.  Both died, and the fact that a fountain bearing both their names was constructed the following year near the White House signals that their relationship was both recognized and respected by the President is telling considering that -- 100 years later -- the Current Occupant is "still evolving" on the issue.

I Can't Hear You

John & Charles Wesley - Renewers of the Church (1703-1788, 1707-1791)

"Then Haman said to King Xerxes, “There is a certain people dispersed among the peoples in all the provinces of your kingdom who keep themselves separate. Their customs are different from those of all other people, and they do not obey the king’s laws; it is not in the king’s best interest to tolerate them."

ESTHER 3:8

Groggers, by Avi Schwab
Used under Creative Commons License

There is in the Jewish tradition a historical character so repugnant that -- when his name is said aloud -- the congregation produces such a racket so that they don't have to hear it pronounced.  When the Book of Esther is heard during the feast of Purim, there is even a special percussion instrument called a grogger that is used to generate some of the noise.  The sound it creates is a sharp and dry, much like the warning of a rattlesnake.

I like to think that there are few people in our contemporary lives who conjure up such profound universal dislike.  Of course there have been despotic figures throughout history -- responsible for swaths of misery and death -- whom we could agree the world would have been better off without. 

I can, however, think of one contemporary American family that probably fits that description.  While their actions are nowhere in the scope of the atrocities committed by Haman or Hitler, they manage to conjure up much of the same reaction.  And that is by design.  They want you to hate them.  They want you to hate them because they want you to talk about them, tell people about them, come out to confront them and possibly let your emotions get the best of you and do something for which they can -- shrewd scholars of the law that they are -- take you to court, where they will most likely win.  That's how they can afford to seemingly be everywhere at once, and -- now that they have forced America to once again acknowledge that even hateful speech is protected under our law -- they have vowed to redouble their efforts.

We wanted free speech, and now we've seen what that can sometimes cost.  As upsetting as it is to see such vile people be handed a victory, I do not think the Supreme Court could have ruled any differently. Once you start deciding that some speech is subject to censure, you're opening the door for any opinion that is unpopular to be repressed. As we have seen during certain political conventions, even as it is the First Amendment does not protect protesters when the vague claim of a security threat trumped their right to assemble peacefully and speak their minds. Do we really want to open the door for courts or -- worse -- legislators to decide what speech should be protected and what is fair game for punishment?

What upsets me more is the knowledge that the outrage of the public, now that the targets include military families, Catholics, the Swedish, Queen Elizabeth and whatever other group has managed to cross their delusional paths, was pretty much non-existent when the only people whose funerals were being picketed were AIDS patients. Where was Sarah Palin then?

So what do we do?  One school of thought -- which seems logical -- is that we respond to the way civilized people respond to an act of shocking incivility whose only purpose is to gain attention: we stop rewarding it with more attention.  Readers should tell news outlets "This is not news. Stop covering it." Interviewers should not kid themselves into thinking they will be the one who can foster a rational conversation.  Counter-protesters should stop thinking they will get the upper hand. Satirists should stop going for the easy laugh by giving them a platform for their bile.

We have tried it.  It didn't work.  So stop rewarding the behavior.  Turn your back.  Don't react.  Stop feeding the beast and maybe it will go away. After all, with any miscreant you encounter, what happens next is as much about you as it is about them.  In this case, they may serve us Christians well, because -- in a scramble to make sure others know we're not like that -- its up to us inclusive types to witness to our own understanding of who God does and doesn't hate.

If that doesn't work, maybe we should all be issued groggers.

Buyer Beware! The Episcopal Church is "No Longer Christian"

Did you get the memo to take the cross down?

In today's edition of Fundies Behaving Badly, one Michael Youssef of "Leading the Way Ministries" and the Evangelical Anglican Church of the Apostles in Atlanta (Both? Ambitious guy!) opined in an American Family Association newsletter that the Episcopal Church became officially "no longer Christian" when the Right Rev. M. Thomas Shaw, Bishop of Massachusetts, witnessed the marriage of Katherine Hancock Ragsdale (dean and president of Episcopal Divinity School) and Mally Lloyd (Shaw's Canon to the Ordinary) at St. Paul's Cathedral in Boston, an action which Youssef describes as a "defiance of church cannons" (sic). Right Wing Watch has the full story.

I always thought of 'piskies as peacenicks, actually, and thus was surprised to learn that we had cannons. Nevertheless, if we do, then it was rather brave of these folks to stand up to them.  Assuming he meant canons, at the most recent General Convention in 2009, the decision he refers to -- which we were pressured into by Canterbury -- was reversed and bishops were given "generous discretion" to meet the pastoral needs of their constituents.

Meanwhile, in the business world, a splinter church like this that used the word "Episcopal" or "Anglican" in its name could be sued for trademark infringement on the grounds that the public could get confused into thinking the defendant was an agent of the larger organization publicly associated with those words.  I'm fairly certain no formal communion exists between Mr. Youssef and the Present Occupant at Lambeth, nor our own Presiding Bishop and Flying Ace.  If the famous clothier could make an (ultimately unsuccessful) case of deliberate deception against aberzombie.com, surely the same is true here.

Watch out for those cannons!