going pink

I must enjoy banging my head against a wall, because I’ve sort of gotten myself wrapped up again in the fight for LGBT equality in the Mennonite church. “Fight” probably isn’t a good word, unless defined in a sort of broad, battle-metaphor sense that I would dig but many other Mennonites might find unnecessarily combative. Movement, then. Let’s say movement. It’s a sort of laxative process by which we hope to gradually eliminate, with the help of wholesome fibrous activities like hymn-singing, pink-t-shirt-wearing, story-telling, and networking, the gas-leaking bowel obstruction that is heterosexist religious conservatism. The Mennonite church, as I’ve written about on several occasions, has its wee issues with queer acceptance. Or, put differently, it has a massive brick yet to shit.

There are several reasons why I generally fear getting into this kind of thing. They may be recognizable to others who have been involved in similar church advocacy work.

1. I break out in aggression issues every time I hear the word “dialogue.” They have not invented a cream for this yet.
2. The phrase “agreeing and disagreeing in love” does not make me feel loving.
3. The phrase “fucking douchebag” is not considered acceptable in church circles, even when it is an accurate representation of the person speaking at the time.
4. I do not believe that discriminating against queer people is morally equivalent to the practice of calling out bigots, which is a premise you more or less have to submit to in order to participate in all this wishy-washy self-consciously centrist dialogue bullshit.
5. Despite this anger stuff, I also fear that my own rhetorical agility will alchemize with my Midwestern desire for everyone to get along and turn me into a two-faced, crap-jargon-spouting hypocrite before I even know what’s hit me.
6. What am I doing getting involved, anyway? It’s not like I even go to church. And part of why I don’t go to church is that I don’t, actually, enjoy banging my head against a wall.

Except it’s a little different this time. There’s a new movement of queer Mennonites (and straight allies) called Pink Menno, and they are trying to avoid some of the traditional pitfalls that have plagued past attempts to make progress with the forces of darkness status quo on these things. For one thing, they are strongly de-emphasizing denominational politics and placing their focus on grassroots networking and relationship-building, as opposed to haggling with church authorities over the wording of various resolutions and/or participating in officially-sanctioned “dialogues” that are rigged against them to begin with. Their inaugural effort was a big presence at the latest denominational convention just a few weeks ago, a presence that was notable enough to get Associated Press coverage. (The article was later denounced by the denominational authorities as a distortion of the “secular press,” which in this house prompted squealings of “Teach me, George-Michael! Teach me the ways of the secular world!” (If you haven’t seen Arrested Development yet, then go watch it already, for the love of God.))

So basically, the idea is to stop waiting for or begging for the denomination to become more accepting, and just start being a significant presence of unapologetic but approachable queer Mennonites and supporters. I don’t claim to have any breadth or depth of perspective on such things, but I think this is about the only approach that has any promise. In spite of all my snark, I do have some hope for things to change on this front, simply because I’ve observed over and over that knowing someone’s who gay, lesbian, bi or transgendered, or having a close friend or someone in one’s family come out, really does have the effect of making people come around. Not always, but frequently enough to be noteworthy. Hell, I was homophobic enough in my early teens to spend most of high school freaked out that people would think I was a lesbian, but I got over it when a friend came out to me my first semester of college, and by the end of the year I was writing speeches for my speech and rhetoric class on equal rights for gay parents.

I debated long and hard with myself about going to the convention (in Columbus, OH) and actually participating in the Pink Menno presence, though admittedly my interests there were more research-oriented than anything; I’m planning to do my dissertation on related issues, and it would have been good for me to be close to the action. But if I’d been there, I would have worn a pink t-shirt and sang hymns and all the rest; research and life tend to mix it up in my world, and I couldn’t possibility have resisted lending my presence to a movement that grows stronger with every participating body. In the end, I balked at spending the money, which would have been considerable. Still, I followed the whole thing pretty closely.

Closely enough to be amazed by how much good seemed to be coming of it. There were some ugly encounters, to be sure. But there was also a tremendous amount of positive interest in Pink Menno, and people seemed to be coming back optimistic.

It’s difficult to be explicit about what happened after the conference, and how I responded, without sharing details and mentioning names that, due to a nebulous sense that it wouldn’t serve the greater good, I’d rather not mention in my own public forum. If you’re Mennonite—or just curious—it’s pretty easy to get the basic scoop from the Pink Menno website. What happened, broadly speaking, is that a bunch of people called the central church office to complain about Pink Menno (whose worst offense was existing at all), and a major denominational executive sent out a really unfortunate e-mail to conference leaders, public chastising Pink Menno over some ambiguously-worded, nebulous charges related to literature distribution, implying that they were outside interlopers of some sort, implying that consensus exists in the denomination on queer issues (it SO does not), and generally using the kind of passive-aggressive hypocritical language that makes me want to run screaming from church and never look back. Then—maraschino cherry on the shit sundae—he signed off with “In Christian Love.”

I cried when I read it. I just broke down and wept, right there at my computer. And then I chided myself for getting so emotionally involved. Don’t I know better than this by now? Did I actually expect the powers that be to behave differently than this? I didn’t really believe that the official in question was as dickish as he sounded in the letter; I know a little about him, and I also know that ass-covering “let’s just keep the conservatives appeased so they don’t explode” language when I read it. Milquetoast Mennonite church leaders who are too scared to be progressive anywhere but behind closed doors are total pros at this crap; I’ve been hearing it all my life. (And of course it must be acknowledged that the job of serving a politically disparate group like Mennonites is not easy.) This analysis did nothing to make me feel better, though. And isn’t the point of not going to church to escape from having to care about this kind of garbage, anyway?

Having established to myself that like it or not, I suck at not caring, I spent three days chewing over words in my head and then sat down and wrote an e-mail to the church official in question. Not having been at the convention, I focused more on my personal convictions, including that my generation of Mennonites, queer and straight alike, is sick of being paternalistically dismissed and that, you know, your fear of social change will not defeat us, etc. Really, it was polite wording and all. Just emphatic. To understand the power of what happened next, you have to understand that as I was doing this, a whole bunch of other supportive Mennonites were doing the same thing. I can’t give you numbers, but there was an outpouring of letters in defense of Pink Menno. After sending them, we swapped copies in e-mails and shared them on message boards. People reached into themselves and pulled out the most powerful language at their disposal.

I had no idea to expect next, but what I wasn’t expecting was that the same executive who wrote the awful letter would respond to people personally. But he did. Within the same afternoon of my sending my letter, I had a response, and shortly after sending a response to that response the following morning, I had another response, a gracious one, assuring me that my letters would be passed on the executive board and that we were in this together. I’m not going to get into details about the contents of the exchange, because I don’t really feel good about doing that. I’ll just say that I came away from it feeling like something positive came out of something shitty, and that there might be more hope for change than I thought, and I am a cynical bastard when it comes to the church, so there is that. And it seems that others are feeling the same way about their exchanges with him.

And as further evidence that things are moving (in the continuation-of-colonic-metaphor sense), Pink Menno leaders are having a conversation with him later this week. Of course, they are rightly reminding all of us that the point of this movement is not to get caught up in denominational politics and the wording of letters and resolutions and whatnot. The point is not to bang at locked church doors and plead with those inside to open up. Because in doing so, we implicitly agree to the fallacy that the people who refuse to open those doors own the church. And they don’t. They don’t, they don’t, they don’t.

Still, a good conversation is a good thing.

Sometimes Mennonites kick ass.