Land of the free white Protestant heterosexual males

“Land of the free.”

“Leader of the free world.”

Realistically looking to the past and present I do not see how individuals can continue to believe these sayings to be true. Just yesterday the lower house of Uruguay’s Congress passed a bill to allow same-sex couples to adopt children and the approval of their Senate is practically guaranteed. The passing of this bill will lead the way for other Latin American countries to do the same.

Adoption by same-sex couples is legal in Guam, Andorra, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, South Africa, Spain, Germany, Finland, Greenland, and now almost Uruguay. Yet 36 states if the US continue to bar same-sex couples from participating in adoption. Moreover, only a handful of states have agreed to recognize the right of same-sex couples to marry.

These unequal policies are nothing new in US history. As many of us know this country was built on the backs of slavery from the bounty of imperialism. The only group that has a long history of freedom in this country is white Protestant heterosexual males. Considering the fact that they have historically been the only individuals allowed to write government documents I guess these sayings should come as no surprise. But for the sake being accurate I contend that we edit the following sayings to fall within reality, past and present.

“Land of the free” to “Land of the free white Protestant heterosexual males.”

“Leader of the free world” to “Leader of the arms race.”


-mateo

the heaviness of argument

Hours and hours into the night

Circles and circles

As the pale moonlight

Shines in through the windows

That need to be cleaned

Like the windows of my car

That also have seen

Pained conversations

and strained tones of voices.

Trails streak the grime on the windshield

Like tears of despair

That anything can be healed.

The wounds are too deep

The differences too vast

To keep losing sleep; we may as well cast

these worries away.

The world is busted, what else can one say?

There's so much hatred and injustice, it's painfully true,

but it all hurts too much to know what to do.

The leaders of the world are the blind leading the blind

yet not enough see it, so our hands remain tied.

Words without actions are worthless,

they say

though often words still seem superfluous

when we may

stop for a moment for a moment to listen and learn

about how to love and to live - the things after which we should yearn.

But for as long as the moon has circled the earth

We’ve been running in circles

Trying to prove our own worth

By proving our point – like therefore, you’re wrong –

and like gravity ensures the moon keeps going around

the world and it problems ensure our arguments abound.

but the moon never touches the planet it belongs to

like our talk is just talk and in lieu

of real action, we never grab onto the things

that actually might matter

we are planets, we pass each other with no possible way

of making real contact with what each tries to say

and we all just circle around what really goes on

and now we’ve been talking and talking so long that its dawn

and the moonlight no longer illuminates the dust

on the windows in my room that really, really must

get cleaned someday, along with my car

and my laundry and my life, and now I’ve wandered so far

away from my point, that now what’s the point

in finishing our talk, that never meant anything

yet we've talked til the moonlight was gone, so

we must have accomplished something . . .

what if we weren’t so concerned with coming full orbit?

what if each gave up their philosophical perch on their planet

to touch each other, and really listen to the problems

and get messy with the stuff of the earth

the mud and the weight and the width and the girth

that is far far too big for our silly conversations

but we’ll never realize it until we let go of our elaborate augmentations

and hold each others hands

and walk each others shoes

and be humble enough to just wonder

about the moon.







-abbie

We walk on

*This poem is dedicated to Joe Snell, you will be remembered.

Though the journey is long, with no guarantees
And nothing awaits us but struggle
We walk on.

Though winter’s storm is at our door
And we may never again see spring
We walk on.

Though our loved ones leave us to struggle alone
And our hearts are weighed down by the pain
We walk on.

We walk on for those who have walked before
In the shadows of plantations on the rail the railroad to the north.

We walk on for those who were dragged through the streets,
Buried in the sea, and hung from trees.

We walk on for those who suffer today
Crossing borders to live another day.

This is our life.
This is our struggle.
With arms locked tight,
Let’s take on tomorrow.

Para la liberación,

Mateo

Intersex Theology

Anywhere between 1-1.5% of humans are born with ambiguous biological, sexual parts. Somewhere around .1 or .2% of births are so sexually ambiguous that they receive medical attention and often surgery. This does not seem like a huge number, but taking into account the millions of births each year, humanity is taking in thousands upon thousands of people who are intersex, often known as hermaphrodites (though true hermaphroditism is only known in the non-human animal kingdom). The parents of an intersexual person truly face a difficult decision. They may be encouraged to have the newbor undergo surgery in which they choose the sex of the child and raise her/him as that gender. Some may choose to allow that child to grow up and choose on their own which gender they will choose to live as. Either way, this is an incredibly difficult decision. It is not uncommon for a child whose sex was chosen for them by their parents to grow up and be raised as that gender, yet later struggle immensely with their sexual identity, possibly identifying with the other gender. If the parents choose to allow the child to grow up as intersex, the child is very likely to face severe ostracism from the world around them.

We live in an incredible gender dualistic world. It is important to note that there are some societies where intersex people are not only accepted, but honored, namely in societies where sexually ambiguous or intersex deities are revered and worshipped. In the western world, however, intersex people are often thrown into the sexually deviant (and misunderstood) realm, along with homosexual and transgendered people. Though this gender and sex dualistic view is supported by many, many segments of society, religious or not, I would like to focus specifically on the mainstream Christian theology surrounding intersex people. Western Christianity, in particular evangelicalism, along with conservative Catholicism, is obsessed with gender. In the American context, books like Wild at Heart and Captivated, gender specific Bible studies, male bonding, girl's nights out, and a obsession with dating and marriage are incredibly common and form much of the thread of American Christianity. In American Christianity, there is no room for sexual ambiguity- there are men and there are women. God created it this way. It is part of God''s order.

A person who is intersex is born intersex. It is not a disease or a handicap. It can be considered a birth disorder, but most would agree that is a very loaded term. Intersexuality is a natural thing, as being born with a mental or physical disability is natural (I compare intersexuality to mental and physical handicaps because handicaps are ony handicaps because they are not the norm- if everyone was born without legs or with Down's syndrome, being born without legs or with Down's syndrome would not be a handicap. A handicap is a handicap because that person cannot thrive in a world where their condition is the exception, not the rule). It seems as if American Christianity has moved past ascribing handicaps or most birth abnormalities to some presence of sin in the world. It is not uncommon to even hear language such as "gifts" and "blessings" when speaking of people who hold physical or biological characteristics that are not the norm, in particular people with mental disabilities. Yet it seems as if American Christianity has not come to the point where a person who is born with an ambiguous sexual identity is considered beautiful, or even a gift. Why is that? It is highly likely, in my opinion, that this is because "these people" do not fit into the American Christian worldview, propogated by prominent Christian leaders and groups, of a gender and sexual dualistic world, where men are men, and women are women- anything that challenges this "natural order" is only met with confusion at best, ignoring as common, and ostracism and labelling as-a-result-of-sin-in-the-world at worst.

Intersexuality is natural in the same way that autism, Down's syndrome, and physical deformation are natural. They are only handicaps and disorders because they are different.* Yet if an intersexual person were to enter into mainstream American Christian circles, my guess is that they would eventully begin to pick up hints that they were somehow a violation of God's established order. But how could they be if they were born this way? Another part of God's order that seems to be pushed is the idea that humans should, for example, work and play and talk. How then, could a person who is born in a vegetative state be part of that order? The simple answer is that people tweak that so that that person can be included- as a "gift", as a "blessing", though maybe "in disguise".

Jesus came from and dwelt in the margins of society- where the sick, poor, handicapped, and otherwise God's-order-violating lived. Because this is where Jesus, who is the Gospel, came, this is where theology must come from. Theology, to be Christian theology, cannot be born in the established, whole, powerful segment of creation. Those who are intersexual are at the margins of most societies today, with American Christianity certainly being no exception. They are the exception, not the rule. If mainstream American Christianity has no room for the intersexual person, whether they have chosen a gender or not, and whether they fit into that gender's societal "role" or not, then the theology of American Christianity is not a Christian theology at all. A gospel that only has good news for the healthy, whole, and otherwise "normal" is not good news at all. Let those good news continue to be that we are all created in the image of God, exactly as we are.

by: Rod


*My intent here is not necessarily to critique the concept of a handicap, and at the same time it is not to advocate the sociological designation of people as handicapped- that is an entirely different discussion, and one worth going into, I might add. For this discussion, I am going with the mainstream perceptions of people as disordered and handicapped, though I am certainly not ascribing any negative connotations to these words.

It Is Time To Re-Evaluate the Systems.

Sometimes we forget

Get caught up in the words

And stop ourselves from allowing us to see the commonality in our goals

And other times we stop ourselves

From voicing our opinion

And standing up for what pulls at our hearts

And for others, what just makes sense

In those times that we stray from the path

We somehow are reminded

Before we get lost

That while we are here

Our present does not guarantee our future

In fact it threatens it

So dive into the cliché

Of living life for today in mind of tomorrow

Knowing that the latter is affected by the first

We are not promised anything

Nor are we owed anything

Therefore function in a way that will benefit the people

And that will leave none stuck under your thumb

Function in a way that will respect the ideas of the free thinkers

In order to encourage others to think freely without the fear of

Persecution or condemnation

And finally always remember that

We will continue to function in the ways that we do

Until we question why we do…

And in that dialogue…in those questions

We will begin our journey to Freedom♥.

A better place.

I say B,
You hear C.
You leave mad,
I stand confused.

You say D,
I hear C.
I leave sad,
You stand confused.

Hurt would be avoided
If we took the time to listen;
Took the time to see life
From each other’s shoes.

Love would be attained
If we took the time to listen;
Took to time to see life
From each other’s shoes.

Before we speak,
Let’s swap views.
Let’s take the time to see life
From each other’s shoes.

Listen!

While I am in Camden most of my posts will be about the conditions here... mainly because my mind seldom wonders away from the things that I see here...always trying to connect the dots to what I have read or seen before...and also trying to map out new dots based these experiences and those past experiences....here is something that has been on my mind for the last few days

One thing that has bothered me for some time now is this notion of what "Correct English" is...

Some of the people that I volunteer with make fun of the way most of our students speak here...or they will blatantly correct them while they are saying something. And man does it frustrate me. While, I understand that there is a majority socially accepted way to how one should express their selves in a "business setting", I fail to see how that became the "correct" or "proper" way to speak.

And just because my students choose not to communicate in that way why is it okay to correct them or make fun of them?

And I know this is not the only place where this occurs because I have been corrected on and made fun of because of how I may pronounce certain words which is in large part due to growing up in a family where American "English" was not always used.

In my class I let my students speak and express their selves in ways that make them feel comfortable. But I let them know that "yes" when they go for job interviews or something like that they will have to speak in the way that has been deemed "socially acceptable" but how they speak and express their selves is not incorrect or wrong it is just different and other people are too ignorant to realize that...

But I would like to hear from you, the reader....what do you think about "improper" and "proper" English? By saying that one way is correct and the other is not are we not silencing those whose voices are already at a whisper?

Grace&Freedom♥