Being the Change: Why Our Son Joined the Boy Scouts

I sat in a circle of kindergarten and first graders, teaching a session of Our Whole Lives, a faith and sexual education curriculum used at my church.  In my hands I held a book called "Love Makes a Family."  I cracked it open for all the kids to see.  Inside were beautiful photographs of every type of family you can imagine.  I held up one picture as I slowly circled the wide-eyed children.  It featured a lesbian-parented, African American family with dreadlocks, including one youth and a child, with a small pet tucked into the corner of the photo.  "What do you notice about this family?" I asked.  An unexpected hush fell over the room.  Then one child's hand shot up with excitement.  "I notice they have a cat," she said.  "We have a cat!"

Unless taught otherwise, there's nothing wildly different or inherently strange about same-gender parents in the eyes of our kids.  They're more interested in the family pet. 

My older son absolutely adores his gay uncle, who is part comedian, part child-whisperer without any children of his own.  He creates a magic world every time we are together.  Although my son Myles doesn't yet know it, his own dad was shaped by the experience of having a gay brother who came out as a teenager.  And that's partly why I married him--his understanding of masculinity is not rooted in machismo or homophobia. 

My husband is an Eagle Scout, but we made the decision early on that our boys would not participate in the Boy Scouts due to their exclusionary stance on gay scouts and scout-leaders.  In their recent schizophrenia on this anti-gay commitment, I wrote a letter expressing our disappointment.  And then, the BSA took a tiny step forward--admitting openly gay scouts into the organization while maintaining the ban on gay scout-leaders (surely related to the harmful, false link between homosexuality and pedophilia in the paranoid minds of the anti-gay crowd). 

Myles is enamored with the out-doors, camping and wildlife.  He recently received a badge from the Nature Center and asked his father that very evening to sew it on one of his shirts, then proudly wore it the next day.  I knew he would love participating in Boy Scouts.  At the same time, the ban on gay leaders was hard to swallow. 

But what would happen if, right now, at the very moment that the Boy Scouts has gone half-way in changing their anti-gay policies, an influx of progressive families joined the organization?  What if we became the change we wished to see in the organization, working from the inside out?  We asked Myles if he wanted to join.  Of course he did.  On the day he got his uniform, he sheepishly tried it on six times before bed.  He was thrilled. 

And yet, I've received questions and surprise from many corners of our lives since we've become part of the Boy Scouts.  Why would vocal LGBT allies join this organization that still excludes gays from adult leadership? 

We are living through an exciting time in history.  Freedom is on the march.  One day we will tell our grand-kids about the fight for full equality under the law, especially here in the south.  I will tell them how I marched and wrote in the paper and presided over gay marriages before they were legal.  Our progress toward the ultimate goal is inevitable, but that doesn't mean it will come easily or without great effort.  It is only a matter of time, and yet there are those who can't afford to wait one more day.  Maybe my grandson will be a fourth generation scout leader, and one night around the campfire he will tell the story of how his dad joined the scouts to be the change he wished to see in the world. 

Enough.

My son is a super-hero.  At six years old, he understands basic issues that seem to elude our state legislature.  Take last night, for example.  Myles grinned at me and opened his hand, to reveal a shiny quarter.  "I'm going to put it in my give jar," he said.  "Really, it could be for my wallet, but I don't mind putting it in the give jar for the poor."  He paused as I squeezed toothpaste onto his toothbrush, then said (in the voice he uses when he's trying out a new idea): "You know why people are poor?"  "Tell me," I responded.  "Well, they are poor because they don't have a job to make any money, and without money they can't buy things for themselves like food or clothes or anything.  Or, a robber comes to their house and steals everything and that's why they are poor."  "Yes," I said, "and sometimes poor people do work, but they don't make enough money to buy everything they need."  His brow furrowed as he processed this information, and he looked confused.  "Who works but doesn't make enough money?" he asked.  "Oh," I said, "lots of people.  Like the people who take your order at McDonald's or the ones who clean our hotel room after we leave.  The people in other countries who sewed your clothes together and the ones who climbed up a tree to chop down your bananas."  I'm never sure if I'm taking this too far.  He's six.  I didn't know some of this stuff until I was in college.  "But why don't they get paid enough money?" he asked.  "The companies they work for don't want to pay them what they deserve," I said.  "Well I think everyone who works should make enough money to live," he concluded.

So do I  Myles, so do I.

Today, the NC legislature is debating a bill that would prohibit city and county governments from requiring private contractors to pay a living wage or require paid sick days.  Click here to contact your Reps and Senators and urge them to protect our local living wage ordinances.  All the quarters in our children's give jars cannot begin to cover the gap between the wages of the working poor and what it actually takes to make ends meet. 

White Enough

Here's what I suspect about George Zimmerman: all his life, he wasn't white enough.

I heard a teen named Miles on youth radio today.  Funny, one of the reasons I liked the name Myles for my oldest son was because it didn't scream WASP.  Hearing this youth speak with my son's name illuminated the oceanic distance between their life experiences.  The Miles on the radio has had "the talk" with his mom and grandmother from the time he was small.  You know, the talk.  About what to do when approached by a police officer, how to put his hands out and speak clearly.  How to stay safe in a world where black and brown boys and youth and men are viewed as inherently suspect.  To state the obvious, I'll never have to have the talk with my Myles.

I am gutted over this week's news.  I wonder if the difference between me, as a white ally, and my friends of color is that I didn't see the not-guilty verdict coming, whereas none of them seemed truly surprised.  I was blind-sided.  I still imagine our country to be better than this.  And yet here we are.  Too many of my white, progressive friends seem silent.  There's a sense that because we don't truly know every detail of what went on that night, we can't get too specific in our judgments. 

Here's all I need to know:

1.  Trayvon Martin was an unarmed teen, walking home from the store with skittles in the pocket of his hoodie, talking to his friend on the phone.  (I also have learned that he was about to enter college on a scholarship, but that's beside the point.)
2.  George Zimmerman, neighborhood watchman, sees Trayvon and believes him to be suspicious.  He calls the cops, who tell him to back off, don't pursue the kid, don't get out of his car.
3.  George Zimmerman, armed with a gun, gets out of his car and pursues Trayvon.
4.  Some kind of altercation occurs.  Trayvon fights back like he was fighting for his life which, in fact, he was.
5. George shoots Trayvon and kills him.

Now, there are many other relevant details--like Zimmerman's history with racism, violence and law enforcement, like what Trayvon's friend heard on the phone that night, like the fact that Zimmerman wasn't drug tested and simply walked away from the scene of the crime.  But even without those other details, the basic five points above are more than enough.

A child is dead.

An unarmed child is dead.

A brown-skinned unarmed child is dead.  Again.

How can it not register in every mother's heart?  How can we not be absolutely crushed with grief over this event, made all the more tragic by the heavy layers of race, violence, and white privilege?

Stand Your Ground laws have enshrined racism into our justice system.  If it all comes down to a perception of threat, then the option of when and how to use gun-violence (legally, mind you) is completely subjective.  Zimmerman "felt" threatened.  Whether Martin was actually a threat to him is irrelevant, according to Stand Your Ground.  It's all about whether Zimmerman felt threatened, and he did, so violence was his right.  And yet when Martin was literally within moments of his death, he was said to have used the concrete sidewalk "like a weapon," thereby justifying Zimmerman's perceived threat.  Trayvon had no right to stand his own ground.  Stand Your Ground laws amplify the worst in us, and they are inherently unjust.  Lord have mercy, we've got to get rid of them.

The day after the verdict, there's George Zimmerman on Fox and friends, stating politely that he has no regrets.  That everything that he did was in God's plan.  He wouldn't do anything differently if he had it to do all over again.  I could be wrong, but I thought I saw surprise even in Hannity's eyes at that.  What Zimmerman articulated is a lethal theology.  He suggests that everything that happens is God's will, God's plan, and so everything that happens is as it should be.  To reduce this line of thinking to absurdity, does that mean that God willed the Holocaust?  Did God will my dad to die of cancer?  Does God dig the war in Syria and delight in refugees scuttling across the border into Turkey?  How can we assign the world's evil to God, and call it good?  I daresay this is an unexamined theology, a theology of excuses where we refuse to take responsibility for our own actions by assigning them instead to God.  Mixing up his own choices with God's, Zimmerman misses the deep irony in that.  But it shouldn't be lost by those who claim to follow in the ways of Jesus.

Here's what I suspect about George Zimmerman: all his life, he wasn't white enough.  His dad is white, and that's where he gets his WASPy name.  His mom is Latina.  His brother looks white, George looks Latino with his olive skin, dark eyes, and black hair.

In the construct that is white supremacy, one isn't simply born white.  You have to prove it, to choose it, to claim it.  That's what the "one drop" rule was all about...the ability to oust someone who could pass for white by uncovering just one drop of African blood coursing through their veins.  Anyone could be stripped of their whiteness, and the privileges that come with it, at any time.  To become white, we align ourselves with white family and white society...even when our childhood hearts detect the wrongness of discrimination, the evil of hatred.  That must be pushed aside to fully claim whiteness.  That may sound extreme if you're white and you've never really thought about it, but when I first heard this theory, I thought of my Grandmother.  My Grandmother was of a fierce spirit, hilarious and resilient, round and warm.  I loved my Grandmother with an undying love.  My Grandmother was one quarter Native American.  I don't know which tribe, all that was shameful and buried.  But of her 3 other siblings, she looked the most Native American.  She had jet-black hair, offset by clear blue eyes.  Her skin was a few shades darker than the rest.  And as I learned about her awful, difficult childhood, I learned that she was tormented by her white grandparents, taunted for being an Injun kid.  She was never white enough.  And while I can't draw a straight line from there to her racism, I believe that line is there.  I believe she always wanted her grand-kids to be white enough, so she threatened to disown my sister or me if we married a Black man.  (To which I remember my sister promptly responding "I'd disown you first!")

White racism never rests, as I heard someone say on the radio this evening.  It demands absolute allegiance.  Not just from George Zimmerman, but from the jury of white women, from white audiences in the privacy of our homes, from silent white onlookers chatting about other things on social media.  If we speak out, we risk the criticism of friends and family, the tension of claiming a side.  So we stay quiet and wait for the world to turn.

But a child is dead.

An unarmed child is dead.

A brown-skinned unarmed child is dead.  Again.

A mother's child is buried.  And as the Miles on youth radio struggles to figure out what this means for him, I realize I need to have "the talk" with my Myles after all.  It's the talk about how white supremacy/racism/privilege distorts our hearts and stunts our spiritual growth.  It's the talk about how hatred and violence cage us from the people we were each created to be--beloved children of God.  It's the talk about repentance and change.  Maybe it's the white kids who need the talk.