How I woke up

(8 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

All of this talk about Rick Warren has taken me down a road of nostalgia. You see, there was a time that Warren would have been a hero of mine, (I’ll duck for awhile now) and it wasn’t in the beginning of my journey to wake up.

I went off to a fundamentalist christian college in about 1974 and was completely wrapped up in all the dogma I had been raised with. My awakening started there with an attraction to more liberal politics and tackling racism. That’s where I lived for years. I still held on to those evangelical positions about abortion and homosexuality. But the seeds for the rest of awakening were being planted all the same.

In college I was a transfer student because I’d done my first two years at other institutions. I never really “fit in” with the crowd and ended up finding a “home” with a group of women who were the athletes on campus. I had always been drawn to sports and might have been an athlete myself if I’d grow up in a time and place where girls could do something other than be the cheerleaders.  

These young women were fun and some of the best friends I’ve ever had. They were the heart of the school’s volleyball, basketball and baseball teams. I hung with them, but didn’t play the sports.

In retrospect, I see that part of the reason they were such good friends is that many of them were undercover lesbians…at least they had to be undercover at that school. We never talked about it. But there were definitely relationships going on and for awhile I even fell in love with one of them. But we never called it homosexuality. It was all just an undercurrent because homosexuality was a sin.

One of the women (I’ll call her Ann) and I stayed connected after college. Eventually she went home to Colorado to live and we corresponded by letter. She finally started to talk to me honestly about her situation and I remember a particular letter that was excruciating to read, but finally began to break through the dogma about this issue that I clung to. I saved that letter for years and just spent an hour or so digging through old memorabilia trying to find it…but no success. I’ll try to summarize.

In the letter Ann explained to me that she had been raised to believe that homosexuality was a sin. Her first year in college she went to a state school in Colorado and began a relationship with a woman. It terrified her so much that for her second year in college, she transferred to the christian school where I met her because she thought she’d be “safe” there. Much to her surprise, she wound up in a relationship with one of the faculty at the school.

So Ann went back to Colorado in a pretty clear state of depression. She wrote to me about feeling afraid to go out and meet or interact with anyone. She mostly stayed home and drank to medicate her feelings. One time she gathered her courage and went out to a social gathering. It didn’t take long for her to start feeling attracted to a woman there. So she immediately ran home crying and drowning her feelings in alcohol. Contemplating suicide was definitely something she did on a regular basis.

That was pretty much the letter I got. I’m happy to say that since then, Ann has embraced the fact that she’s lesbian and last I saw her she was happily in a relationship. But that letter changed me. How could I read something like that and not be changed? It was my point of awakening. While I still believed in a christian god at that point, I had to believe that god loved Ann and that his heart was breaking for her too. It was either that or forget about god – which I wasn’t quite ready to do yet.

All of this reminds me of a wonderful column written by Leonard Pitts, Jr. over four years ago titled When Freedom Gets Personal. That was back when one of the issues people were chattering about was Dick Cheney’s lesbian daughter Mary. In response to a question, Cheney had said the following:

“With respect to the question of relationships,” he said, “my general view is that freedom means freedom for everyone. People … ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to.”

And here’s some of Pitts’ reaction:

What would it take to get you to stand up for me?

Let’s say I’m routinely discriminated against and in some cases outright despised. Let’s say I’m often used as a scapegoat and there’s an ongoing debate over what rights I do and do not deserve.

Under what circumstances would you be willing to break with the pack and speak a word on my behalf?

Would it be enough that you simply saw a wrong being done? Or would you need to have some emotional investment in me before you spoke up? Would we, for instance, have to be kin?…

Unfortunately for Cheney, conservativism has no place for him on this issue, does not strive to be thoughtful or even noticeably principled where gay rights are concerned. To the contrary, being persuadable is seen as weakness and being persuaded proof of moral failure. In Cheney’s world, people do not seek to put themselves inside other lives or to see the world as it appears through other eyes. Particularly the lives and eyes of society’s others, those people who, because of some innate difference, have been marginalized and left out.

Then someone you love turns up gay, turns up among those others.

One imagines that it changes everything, forces a moment of truth that mere reasoning never could. And maybe you find yourself doing what Dick Cheney does, championing a cause people like you just don’t champion. Doing the right thing for … imperfect reasons.

“Freedom means freedom for everyone,” said Cheney.

Which is a sentiment I wholeheartedly endorse. But if every conservative home is going to have to have a lesbian daughter before we can accept it, then freedom will be waiting a very long time.

This column hit home for me. That’s because I have to wonder if it hadn’t been for Ann, would I have found a “moment of truth” to wake up?

As I read Juan Cole’s post about his meeting with Rick Warren, I couldn’t help but think of my journey. Warren’s will very likely prove to be different. But he’s treading on “dangerous” ground for a fundamentalist evangelical.

A lot of pastors would tell the story of building their congregations and saving souls as the pinnacle of their lives. For Warren, that was only the beginning. He and his wife had an epiphany six years ago when  she read an article about there being 12 million children in Africa who had been orphaned by AIDS. They started going to southern Africa, and Warren became devoted to helping those orphans.

But then he began thinking bigger. He has identified 5 major problems he wants to address:

Spiritual emptiness, corrupt leadership, disease pandemics, dire poverty, and illiteracy. He wants to do job creation and job training. He wants to wipe out malaria in the areas where it is still active.

Yeah, I remember being there…and then I met Ann.