He, She, They

Many especially younger persons insist that we not refer to them as he or she but as "they.” Never mind the grammatical oddity of using a plural pronoun to refer to a single person, calling a person "they" is an important way of opposing the dominant idea that there are two genders only and that every human being belongs to one or the other.

          This seems to be a very odd and eccentric conflict but it is not. At issue is the dogma that many, especially evangelical Christian Americans cling to that every human being is either a man or a woman. One significance of that insistence comes to the fore when we face the inevitable follow – up question: what kind of man are you and what sort of woman are you? It is not enough that I am classified as an unambiguous man but that classification places me under pressure to be a particular kind of man because all the alternative versions of manhood are considered unmanly or “not a real man.” Am I the one who makes decisions in my family, does my word stand and is not to be questioned? Am I the one who deals with mechanical things and mows the lawn where as the females in the family not only have to do the housework but also are in charge of emotions. They have to bring a casserole to the neighbor when their parent dies or their child is injured. They have to maintain social relationships. I don't do either of those things; it is not manly to do them. (Obviously, this is an extreme version of the patriarchal family.)

           To put this bluntly: the insistence that every human being belongs to one of two genders is an unvarnished defense of male supremacy, of the role of man as more powerful, as in charge, as the person who wears the pants in the family.

There have always been gay people. In classical antiquity they were openly acknowledged and, at least, men loving men was ordinary and accepted. Then for a long time homosexuality had to go underground persecuted by Christian churches whose Christianity happily persecuted different groups, homosexuals among them.

In recent years homosexuality has come into the open once again and with it the conflict about its legitimacy has reignited. It is not difficult to see how homosexuality is a threat to the patriarchy.

           If my wife, who plays second fiddle to me in the family and whose sexual needs and desires are not as important in our marriage as are mine, can find sexual satisfaction in a relationship to another woman, it turns out that I am unnecessary and my claims to dominance are empty, even slightly ridiculous. If women can have marriages and can raise happy and promising children, I am not needed at all. Patriarchy crumbles.

          If my son can live lovingly and become a generous father in relationship to another man, all the lessons I tried to teach him about being a real man turn out to be irrelevant. The ideology which I followed and wanted him to follow of true manhood and male domination suddenly has become pointless. No wonder that ‘real men’ are extremely hostile to homosexuality in whatever form it may manifest itself.

          Being man or woman takes many different forms and young persons as they grow up must find the kind of man or woman they are suited to be or they may be the kind of person whose gender is variable and expresses itself in different forms in different situations, and different company, at different stages of their life.

           Every person should be as fully as able to be the person that it suits them to be. Every person should be accepting of the choices about their gender identity and their sexuality made by other persons and the reasons they might give us for those choices.

          The author of Genesis who decreed that the first two members of the human race where one man and one woman got it quite wrong.

           (That author also got the gender of God quite wrong. Gender identity is always a limitation. If God were a male would he not be limited in his sexual expression?)

It is high time that we stop to tyrannize ourselves and others by demanding prescribed forms of sexual expression. What matters is that we avoid harming others and defending patriarchy by, for instance, voting in laws that define marriage as a union of one man and one woman. Without any doubt that does serious harm. End sexual oppression by trying to legislate gender and sexual identity!

Neighbor Love and Punishment

In Christianity, Judaism and Islam the faithful are enjoined to live in peace with their neighbor, to treat them kindly or even to love them. This command has its secular equivalent when a peaceful world, a world free of war and cruelty is set as a goal of political action.

This injunction to universal kindness is pulled up short in the face of cruelty when neighbors oppress neighbors. We are reminded that this is the hundreth anniversary of what is known to historians as the "Red Summer" when white mobs burned black churches, often with their congregations still inside and then went on rampages of lynchings in which hundreds of African-Americans died. One of those burned churches was rebuilt. It was burned down the gain in 2014. In 2016 several black churches fell victim to arson attacks in Louisiana. The cruelty of 100 years ago continues to this day. The advocates of peace and reconciliation are facing serious challenges today.

Dedicated to a world of peace, whether for religious reasons or following secular political principles, how shall we treat the arsonists, the lynch mobs, the murderers?           At this moment, in Togo, a small African country that only very recently emerged from a brutal dictatorship, maintained by murdering often innocent citizens, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission encourages citizens to confess whatever terrific part they played in the past and for the victims to try to reconcile with the guilty parties. The assassins will not be tried in a court of law, they do not face long periods of incarceration or even death. The goal of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is to reunify a population divided for many years between the henchmen of the dictatorship and the victimized population at large. Here is one way in which the religious and secular political injunction to practice kindness to all is actually being applied.           Not everyone is satisfied with this interpretation of neighborly love. Surely, they say an important part of loving your neighbor is to respect them. One form of paying respect to human beings is to hold them responsible for their actions. You disrespect them if you do not pay attention to their actions, may those be acts of heroism or self-sacrifice or maybe they be deceitful acts or acts of violence. Refusing to acknowledge what a person has done, how he lived his life, whether she contributed to the well-being of our community or acted to destroy it is to deny respect to the perpetrators of civil oppression and war, the recognition that is an important element of respect. If you forget how a person has lived his life, how he injured neighbors he did not even know, you refuse the person the respect and thus the kindness or love you are professing.. The forgiveness of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission denies genuine respect to the persons offered forgiveness.          Can one forgive and respect a person guilty of exceptional cruelty? It is a question that is not easy to answer. The truth is that forgiveness may be respectful, fully horrified by the action of the person before us, or it may be as it were absent-minded, unthinking and more or less mechanical. In that case it clearly denies the person forgiven the respect they are entitled to. Respectful forgiveness makes difficult demands on the person trying to forgive.          But punishment as it is demanded by the enemies of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions continues the cycle of brutality. It inflicts pain on those who inflicted pains on others. Now they are aggrieved and the cycle of victimization is being continued.          However heartfelt our desire for peace and an end to inflicting pain on those who have inflicted pain on others, that end remains unattainable unless we practice what we preach and forgive. Punishment as the response to breaking the peace will never allow us to restore a more durable peace than we have accomplished so far.          Fully aware of the misdeeds of those who supported and practiced violence against their fellow citizens, we need nevertheless to allow them back into our community in order to try to heal it and allow it once again to come together and to create as much harmony as it can. That is the true meaning of the injunction to love our neighbor, to befriend our neighbors and to be genuine promoters of peace.

About Elections

We recently hosted an event in support of one of the candidates for the local School Committee. This young person was born in Africa and came to the US as a child and went through the entire public school system in my town. She knew at first-hand what it was like to be a public school student in our town as a person of color. Since there had been a good deal of controversy recently about the treatment of African-American and Latinx students in our school system, run by white persons almost exclusively, supporting her campaign seemed important. Add to that, we came to like and respect her as we got to know her better.

Most of the members of our school committee have had their position for a long time. Their names are familiar but I have never met any of them and have a very hazy idea of any of them. I am not clear what they stand for when it comes to educational policy and I do not know them personally. I do not know to what extent to trust their campaign statements and whether one could rely on them to act on the principles they profess.

Well, you say, that's the way it is in a large country like ours. But that is of course totally beside the point. I have the same problem of not knowing what candidates I vote for in the town I live which is not a big town by any means. More importantly, we say that in our democracy the people have the ultimate power over the government and that they exercise that power by selecting representatives of their choice. But a population voting for representatives they often do not know and who are, in fact, different from the voters think they are does not strike me as a population that is in control of its government or society. The choices we make, most of the time, are rather sightless. Rather than making thoughtful, well-informed choices, we yank the lever of an electoral slot machine. Our choices tend to be pretty random.

Is there a way of remedying that problem? Suppose in each neighborhood where people know each other or live close enough together to meet and talk, the citizens meet to select someone who is familiar with the school committee and knows the persons who are running to join that committee. Perhaps that person was a member of the committee some time ago and thus knows the personalities of the current membership and the functioning of the body. Suppose further that each neighborhood selects one such person well able to make an informed choice with respect to members of the School Committee. The representatives of each neighborhood will meet and choose the requisite number of persons to serve on this committee. The committee membership is picked by persons who know each candidate and have some judgment as to who may be the best person to help the schools. In this way the problem of citizens voting for more or less unknown candidates has been circumvented.

You may object that this indirect vote for school committee members puts a great distance between the individual citizens and the organs of city government. But that distance exists already. There is a large gap between me and institutions whose members are elected but are on the whole unknown to the people who vote for them and therefore cannot really be said represent those people. If voters under our present system of direct elections of members of the School Board or the City Council wanted to be familiar with the persons they vote for, they would need to spend a great deal more time to meet the candidates at different forums or when they volunteered to work for a candidate or another. Most citizens do not have the time available.

Counting up the number of votes that different candidates get from voters that do not know them strikes me as an irrational way of electing a government. The jobs we elect people for are important. It makes a great deal of difference for us how well those jobs are done. We need the best candidates available. We don't get those as long as we respond to campaign literature written by professional campaign strategists that often are only faintly related to the ideas and practices of the candidate.

We need to elect persons as electors we know, whom we can trust that they will do what they promise us. That means we should choose persons in our neighborhood who are familiar with the office we are voting for and familiar with the candidates. They can choose the one who will do the best job for us.

This is, I believe, a good project. But Is it realistic? In many places in the United States citizens do not live in stable neighborhoods where neighbors know each other and are thus able to choose the right electors for local as well as national elections. Many neighborhoods are unstable in that people move in and out constantly. Think of neighborhoods with large student populations or neighborhoods of poor people who are regularly getting evicted because they are unable to pay the rent. In areas surrounding military installations, families move regularly when their members in the military are transferred. There are parts of many towns populated by young people on their way up who will leave when they get promoted and their pay goes up. Others leave because they lose their job in times of economic instability. In short, the picture of areas with stable populations does not seem to apply to significant parts of the country.

But many folks in these highly mobile populations may not participate in elections, especially not in local elections because their ties to the locality may be very weak. They may also remain aloof from elections because they do not feel at all included in the political system. Candidates do not seek them out or mentioned there needs and problems in their campaign speeches. Feeling overlooked by politicians they may well stay aside when elections come around.

Choosing the electors we do know instead of candidates we don't, is a realistic project that deserves serious consideration.