Barack and Gay Marriage

Barack's got my support, my money, and my vote. Now that he's clinched the Democratic nomination, here's an item for his agenda...

How about some civil--and I mean civil--conversation about gay marriage? With the California Supreme Court's ruling, the tone of the conversation is already shattering the champagne glasses.

So far, the conversation has been a major yawn: one side with its irrational (as opposed to rational) appeals to the Scriptures, the other side with its knee-jerk charges of bigotry and homophobia.

Spare me! Something's gotta give here.

Barack has already catapulted our discussions about race light years ahead of where they were. Maybe he can help us find a little common ground on this important and polarized issue as well.

He doesn't have to change his opinion on the matter, much as I might wish he were more supportive of gay marriage. I'm simply suggesting that he be a catalyst for a more enlightened discussion than we've come up with so far.

Especially since people just like his own mom and dad were once, like gay people today, denied the right to marry.

Barack can make a crucial difference in getting the present conversation unstuck. If he wants to.

Mark Rothko's No. 14 at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

It all happens within a benign universe: A fiery orange rests above a deep, alluring blue.

Two movements: one in, the other out. A deep and ponderous blue, and the fiery orange of action, speech, life. The latter rests securely on the former, the former draws energy and life from the latter.

It's how a world gets created.

Barack's Speech on Race

It was unlike any speech I've heard from a political candidate. Balanced, sensitive, honest. Not politics as usual.

Just what you'd expect from one who has decried the incivility of American political discourse and hopes to set a new tone.

In this moment, Barack has lived up to my hopes.

It's Holy Week and I happen to be a christian, so maybe I can be forgiven for seeing in Barack's speech a glimmer or two of resurrection.

A Hope for Barack

As the race for the Democratic presidential nominee tightens and becomes more polarized, here's hoping that Barack will continue to hold the high ground, not giving in to the temptation to go for the jugular. Part of what has drawn me to him is his seemingly earnest desire to move beyond the present culture wars, build bridges between blacks and whites, republicans and democrats, the U.S. and its enemies.

If, under the pressure of the moment, he descends into politics as usual, then, what the hell, why not just vote for Hillary?

Francisco Goldman's The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop

It didn't just happen. It's not just a forgivable matter of dim bulbs bumbling around like the Three Stooges.

The fatal bludgeoning of Guatemalan Bishop Juan Girardi Conedera, a Roman Catholic human rights advocate, came two days after he released a four-volume report on his country's civil war that formally ended in 1996. That war had claimed some 200,000 lives over four decades. The primary suspect in Girardi's murder, Goldman believes, was one of the two runoff candidates in Guatemala's recent presidential election. The account spotlights not only Girardi's assassination, but an entire generation of brutalities, mostly against the poor Mayan population.

The book is chilling. These atrocities were not unintended consequences of otherwise innocent actions. The murderers knew what they were doing. They carefully plotted each brutal step.

We religious types call it "sin", a word that's been so misused we understandably shy away from it. But I don't know of another word that captures the flat-lined hearts, shriveled minds, clenched teeth, and white knuckles that Goldman describes.

This is a book about naked cruelty and sheer hatred, and it leaves you wondering: How does it happen? How do we humans get this way?

Internationally Adopting Parents: Angels or Devils?

Some see us internationally-adopting parents as noble creatures, Mother Theresas who nobly reach beyond their bloodlines to third-world children otherwise deprived of loving homes and families. Others see us as so blinded by the need to parent that we become unwitting child-traffickers, pawns of black markets that steal children from their rightful parents and then rob them of their own ethnic and cultural identities. Fly to Antigua, drop 30k, then fly home with a stolen child. Cool.

Both images are bullshit.

We're no more angelic than parents who choose to have children the old-fashioned way. True, in an over-populated planet where many Guatemalan kids don't reach age five, international adoption can be a globally responsible choice. But at the end of the day, parenting is parenting: We all lose sleep; spend our Saturdays ferrying our kids to birthday parties, play dates, and karate classes; worry whether they're writing their letters properly and getting enough exercise; and hurry them to get their shoes on when it's time to leave for school. We're just parents.

And we're not as demonic as many well-intentioned adoptee-rights activists believe. When it comes to the adoption process, we rely on the structures available. True, we have to scrutinize those structures to make sure they are fair and just, but we can't always guarantee that they are. So we proceed in good faith, slavishly meeting all the requirements of governments and private agencies in both the US and the country we're adopting from--knowing full well that we can have only moral certainty that those agencies are acting with a similar integrity. We do what we can.

And many of us would love to connect with our kid's biological families. If we could find them.

Given the moral extremes with which we're portrayed, you can't blame us for having a confused self-image. In a recent issue of Mother Jones, one mom confesses to wanting her own child so much that she simply ignored the heartrending injustices in the Guatemalan adoption system. When she and her husband later awakened to the moral complexities, they considered returning their daughter to her biological mother. At the time, one aggressive adoptee rights activist told her their adoption agency "should have...dissuaded us from transnational adoption, or led us to a program through which we could sponsor a child to remain with her family. But the truth is I don't think I would have listened--so absorbed was I in the force of my own wanting."

Huh? She should feel guilty for wanting to parent a child? The moral complexity of the adoption process should make her consider giving up her child?

Psychologists might say this poor woman has so internalized the negative perceptions of well-intended but misguided friends that her own natural instincts for caring have been short-circuited. While her confused self-image is understandable, the truth is this woman has nothing to apologize for.

Given the corruption of the international adoption processes these days, especially in countries like Guatemala, the question is: How do we connect our deepest and best desires with the deepest needs of our crazy, fragile world? We can remain aloof, allowing children either to die at an early age from malnutrition or scavenge the Guatamala City garbage dump. Or we can enter the flawed processes society makes available, navigating them as best we can, trying to correct them as we go along. And, perhaps, living with some moral ambiguity as a result.

We internationally-adopting parents are neither angels nor devils. But at the end of the day, we do what we can. We're just parents. Nothing more, or less.

Was Our Son Stolen from His Birth Mother?

Was David's adoption process a fraud? The Guatemalan Procuraduria and the US Embassy are implying that it was. In the charged climate of a Guatemalan election year, they are painting American families like mine as unwitting contributors to child trafficking in Guatemala and, perhaps worse, as inflicting unspeakable pain on women like David's birth mother.

Are they correct? I doubt it. Most adopting families, including mine, have followed the existing legal procedures of those very same government agencies slavishly. And when my family went through the process, there were many precautions in place, including a DNA test establishing his birth mom's biological connection to David, her statement of relinquishment carrying her photo and signature, and a voluminous report of the social worker.

Still, even after all this, who can say for sure? The uncertainty now leaves me wondering what to think and how to feel.

Maybe I should just blow the whole thing off. Aren't we First Worlders already used to sipping rich creamy lattes knowing that the Guatemalans who picked the beans received barely enough to support their kids? We've gotten used to these moral ambiguities. Why not just add this adoption issue to the list?

But, hold on. Despite what Guatemalan politicians may say, this is not another story of exploitation by greedy Americans. It is, instead, a result of the sad legacy of Efrain Rios Mont, Guatemala's former brutal dictator, and his many sidekicks.

Thanks to that legacy, a high percentage of Guatemalan children--perhaps as many as one in four--die of intestinal infections because their families cannot afford filtered water. Education for these kids is almost non-existent, rarely going past the second grade. And there are many, many Guatemalan children in the streets and (as pictured above) around the dump in Guatemala City who survive by selling candy, shoe shines, and their bodies. It's for good reason that agencies like Camino Seguro (Safe Passage) ask for our help. And that many of us choose to adopt from Guatemala.

Rob and I once considered the surrogate route to creating our family. But with so many homeless kids in the world, we decided it would be better for us to adopt a child from a poor country. As it turned out, our discernment took us to Guatemala and Casa Quivira, an agency known for its integrity and the quality of its care.

Along with the rest of the world, I keep hoping that the authorities will clean up the abuses in the Guatemalan adoption system. But I don't regret my family's adoption path for a moment--despite the eyebrows now being raised by government bureaucrats and well-intentioned friends. Because David, the light of our lives and an aspiring race car driver, is safe, healthy, and, as I write this, tugging my pant leg and badgering me for a trip to the park. It could have been otherwise.

What to Make of George?

Now that W is almost toast, I find myself wondering what to make of him, how to capture what he has meant for me and this country as I see it. Consider this a work in progress as the dark days of his reign wind down.

He has so many faces, from the playful frat house smart ass to the devout, born again crusader against a woman's right to choose, the teaching of evolution, and gay marriage; from the resolute commander in chief in military drag (ironic since, as a young man, he avoided serving in the military) to the buffoon deliberately garbling words and sentences. Which of these will loom largest in my memory of him?

And although he's gotta be one of the worst presidents in history, still, in the past couple of weeks he has actually made some good efforts as George Packer notes:

He strengthened sanctions on Sudanese companies and officials in response to the ongoing massacres in Darfur. He called on Congress to double the funding for global AIDS programs, to thirty billion dollars. He directed his envoy in Baghdad, Ambassador Ryan Crocker, to sit down with his Iranian counterpart and discuss ways of stabilizing Iraq—the most high-profile meeting between top officials of the two countries in years. And he attacked the demagoguery of right-wing critics of the bipartisan immigration bill.

Still, as Packer continues: "Bush's legacy will be the war in Iraq and, secondarily, the array of decisions on prisoners, alliances, treaties, and preventive war which revolutionized American foreign policy after September 11th."

I know that, like myself, George is complex, a mixture of the savage and the noble, of ignorance and brilliance, good and evil. And it is wrong to overlook that complexity, seeing him in black and white terms, reducing him to either good or evil. And it's possible that in the months ahead I will see him for the human congeries that he is.

But as of this moment, I see him as a man culpably ignorant and blinded by arrogance, an insecure man who brooks no dissent, whose shock and awe tactics have unleashed great suffering on hundreds of thousands, and whose legacy we Americans will be trying for generations to overcome.

Note: Just a day or so after I wrote the above words, W, true to form, subverted the legal process and commuted Scooter Libby's sentence. Looks like my last paragraph stands. Is there no end to this guy's arrogance?

Armistead Maupin's Michael Tolliver Lives

He's a gay man in his mid-fifties, slightly arthritic, and 20 pounds overweight. He takes Viagra and testosterone shots, is HIV-positive, and for many years assumed he would be dead by now. But Michael Tolliver is very much alive and in a solid relationship with a man 21 years his junior.

He's got more going for him than simply rearranging the vases on the mantle. He's not following the script that consigns fifty-something gay men to the shelf.

Good for him--and for Maupin for telling this partly autobiographical story that replaces the deadening cultural script presently available to middle-aged gay men with one full of life and love. And thank Maupin for illumining other corners of gay life, including the lives of transgendered people and the occasional surprises within the lives of seemingly homophobic parents and relatives.

Maupin has crafted his story with insight, humor, and compassion. He's just the kind of guy you'd enjoy having over for dinner. Chances are he would feel very comfortable with you, too, perhaps especially if you don't fit the enervating scripts of our cultures, whether gay or straight, whether because of circumstance or choice.

The Landmines of Kamrieng Commune

It's a guy thing, this love David has for things that crash and blow up: tipping over towers of building blocks and cheering mightily as they tumble to the floor, or watching stock cars collide in flames in NASCAR race films, or hurling toy trains from toy bridges. He shares this crashing fascination with other boys his age. He loves this stuff.

But when the crashing and blowing up are over, David gets up and asks for cheese puffs and chocolate soy milk. Snacks, not catastrophes, have the final say. All this crashing stuff is a small part of a larger story in which life goes on.

On the other side of the world, in Kamrieng Commune in Cambodia, six-year-olds like him share his fascination with exploding things--with one important difference: Kamrieng is strewn with landmines once planted by the Khmer Rouge and by the government.

There, boys throw stones at what seem like toys, the winner being the one who detonates the mine. What would otherwise be a typical boyhood fascination, far from ending in a snack, can sever limbs and sear flesh. The larger life-over-death story does not emerge--at least not there, not yet. In Kamrieng, life does not necessarily go on.

Add to this the physical hunger and poor nutrition resulting from the mine-pocked fields. Kamrieng borders a jungle and the soil is perfect for growing yellow corn. But farmers can be suddenly maimed or killed by the exploding mines. So the black, rich soil remains untilled while families do without proper food.

Someday the landmines will be cleared from Kamrieng, and the larger story will re-emerge. Severed limbs, seared flesh, and diminished lives will no longer have the final say. People will regain their trust in the typical thrills of boyhood and the soil that gives life to an incredibly beautiful land. Life will go on as it did before.

But not yet. Right now, there's too much work to do.

Ian McEwen's Enduring Love

A gay Jesus freak stalks a secularist, straight, middle-aged man. You can tell right away it ain't gonna work. But as you watch this crash in slow motion, you experience all the textures, shadows, colors, and sounds of a dysfunctionality that is both sexual and religious.

It starts with a tragic accident in the Chilterns where science writer Joe Rose sees a hot-air balloon tossed by the wind; there's a boy trapped in its basket. Joe joins the effort to bring the balloon to safety, as does a young loner, Jed Parry. Quickly obsessed with Joe, Jed mistakes his uncontrolled feelings as a divine calling to bring Joe to God. That destructive, pseudo-religious mission tests the limits of Joe's beloved rationalism, threatens the love of his wife, Clarissa, and drives him to the brink of murder and madness. It's goodbye real love, hello Fatal Attraction--but with a religious twist.

In an appendix, McEwen reflects: "It is not always easy to accept that one of our most valued experiences may merge into psychopathology." He got that right. And these days the pathological forms of both sex and religion are hard to miss. Think of the heart-breaking stories of domestic violence and child abuse. Or the many pseudo- religious "missions" that end up crushing both bodies and spirits--Bush's war in Iraq, for example, or the crusades against gay equality.

But here's the amazing thing: Given the many possible distortions of both sex and religion, most of the time we still manage to get them right. Despite its pathological forms, as San Francisco writer Mark Morford states, sex still "shoots huge gobs of endorphins and raw divine energy" into our ids, raises our kundalini, inspires awareness of the cosmos. It reveals "the interconnectedness of all things from all time in all places everywhere." And despite the many religious nuts running around these days, the genuinely religious missions of Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Dorothy Day, and the slain Jesuits in El Salvador still inspire our own smaller efforts to make the world a little kinder and lovelier.

We don't always get sex and religion right as McEwen so vividly observes. But sometimes we do. And in those moments, we humans are nothing short of magnificent!

Sex in a Porsche

I've never done it. I mean, in a Porsche. But Wilhelm Oehl has. In fact, he thinks everyone should do it in a Porsche.

He's one of the Silicon Valley tycoons interviewed in Sylvie Blocher's "Living Pictures/Men in Gold" now at the SF Museum of Modern Art.

This guy may connect money with sex, but some of his buddies confuse the two altogether. One middle-ager says, "Money certainly is erotic. It makes you feel big, powerful and safe." And another: "Money can be a sexual experience without an orgasm." One of them tells how, just out of college, he landed a gig for $100,000 in cash. Then he and his girlfriend, fully clothed, spread the money on a bed and took pictures of themselves rolling around in it.

Is it just me, or does this seem kinda strange?

But despite this occasional confusion, these men have "an unbelievable wish to do something," Blocher says, "even if they can't say what." True, that desire can get derailed into trivialities--like simply making more money for its own sake, for example. Still, this deeper restlessness is a good thing, this genuine longing for more love, more life. One of them laments his inability to find a woman who values him for himself and not just for his money. Another hopes his legacy will be appreciated years after he's gone. Hints of deeper desires.

For a few of these men, the film shows a vulnerability rarely seen by Silicon Valley drones like myself. They're not the one-dimensional, driven, moral underachievers I thought. I like Jean-Louis Gassee's self-reflection: "I had a reputation for being flamboyant and abrasive, and now that I'm at peace, I call myself a recovering ass-aholic."

Having seen this film, I can only wish them well. I hope each of them finds someone to love, and the sparkle in their kids' eyes better than that of gold. Oh, and that money really isn't a substitute for good old, delicious, sweaty, passionate sex. I hope they discover that most people in this world have barely enough to eat, much less a Porsche to have sex in. And that they can make things better.

Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things

In India, Arundhati Roy writes, "Love Laws" define who should be loved, and how, and how much. Defy these laws and you may lose your life; conform to them and you are sure to lose your soul.
These laws take their toll on Ammu, a young mother and divorcee, who returns with her children to her family home. Life there is poisoned by Baby Kochamma, the ubiquitous aunt whose youthful, unrequited love for an Irish priest has left her bitter, overweight, frightened of the world, and glued to the TV. Baby Kochamma has, by plight of circumstances, conformed to the Love Laws, and lost her soul.
By contrast, Ammu falls in love with Velutha, a gorgeous carpenter employed by the family business. The relationship is sensuous and powerful, but doomed. Velutha is an untouchable; in loving him, Ammu is breaking the Love Laws and publicly disgracing her family.
To preserve the family's reputation, Baby Kochamma trumps up charges that Velutha both raped Ammu and caused the death of a little girl, Baby Kochamma's grand-niece. (Does Baby Kochamma secretly envy Ammu's love for Velutha since her own equally forbidden love for the Irish priest could never bloom?) Velutha is hunted and brutally killed by the police.
Ammu must grieve Velutha's death silently and alone. Broken and embittered, she alienates her own children, is driven from the family home, and, despite desperate efforts and wild dreams of rebuilding a life, dies alone in a hotel. The church refuses to bury her. She is wrapped in a dirty sheet and fed to the incinerator in a crematorium for beggars, derelicts, and police-custody dead. Defying the Love Laws has cost both her and her lover their lives.
The theme is familiar to us gay men. It is echoed in films like Brokeback Mountain, dances like Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake, many gay novels, and the lives of untold numbers of gay men like Matthew Shepherd whose love never had the chance to be spent. Like Ammu, many a gay man has grieved the loss of a lover silently and alone.
This story taps into the profound sadness so many of us gay men feel; but it also energizes our resistance to the Love Laws--whether in South Asia or here in the US--that constrict our hearts and crush our spirits.

Every Family Has Its Ups and Downs

Eleanor rides a barge down the river to meet her conniving husband outside his castle. "How dear of you to let me out of jail for Christmas, Henry," she says venomously. The family quickly falls into its usual dysfunctionality. When one rowdy son asks "What'll we hang, the holly or each other?" Eleanor turns aside to Henry: "I don't like our children." After a spirited brawl leaves everyone bloodied, dazed, and black and blue, she speaks the unforgettable line that is the title of this post.

These are scenes from The Lion in Winter, but they could well be snippets of the present day Anglican conversation about homosexuality.

As a relative newcomer to Anglicanism (14 years), I'm puzzled by the rancor of so many of our conversations. Is all this venom really necessary? Can someone explain this? In an era when the lack of civility poisons our public discourse, you'd think Anglicans would model a more civil way of talking through tough issues.

Don't get me wrong. As a gay man, I'm certainly not going back into the closet. As a gay priest, I'll continue to support gay couples ready for marriage, and qualified gay candidates for bishop. No changes there. Yet I'd be very sad if my church lost its connection to the larger Anglican communion, unintentionally becoming, as The Economist recently forecast, simply a gathering of aging white liberals. I'd be sadder yet if this loss was hastened by well-intentioned but insulting rants by those I agree with.

I admit it's a cliche, but how you say something is as important as what you say. Right now, the words from both sides are too loaded with righteous indignation. As we say in California, "Negative energy, dude!"

Good idea: "If we can lower the emotional reactivity in the midst of this current controversy we just might be able to find a way to live together," says the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. "A non-violent response to this situation will need space and time to operate, and perhaps an unexpected or even humorous response. "

She got that right.

Please, somebody tell a joke!

George Bush Ain't No Psychic

Sometimes you have a flash when you just know you're right. Even before your conscious mind starts turning, your subconscious draws a solid conclusion, and you just know.
Psychics apparently have such moments. The rest of us can also have them, what Malcolm Gladwell calls "blink" decisions.
"Blinks" aren't always reliable. They can be simply the result of knee-jerk prejudice. The reliable ones come after many trials, errors, and discoveries from both the school of hard knocks and critically weighing scientific findings.
Now, George Bush ain't no freakin' psychic. Like the rest of us, he needs intensive preparation for his "blinks" to be reliable.
So the question is: Has George done the prep? Well, not when it came to WMDs in Iraq. "You can't find WMDs in Iraq?" he told his investigators. "Fine, I'll get someone else in here who can."
Same for global warming, the teaching of evolution, and, may I add, the legitimacy of gay relationships. In each case, he made a "blink" decision without doing the prep, then discounted any contrary evidence from those experts who had.
Is this because of the evangelical world he runs in, where unfounded "blinks" get confused with revelations from the Almighty? Just wonderin'.