Smart people saying smart things

Kathy Escobar: “Power is not like pie“

It’s all about power.

Patriarchy in the church, in the world, isn’t just about male-centered leadership in our church system. It’s about who’s got the power because in our human-brains-who-are-bent-on-making-it-all-make-sense, it must be clear.

And making it clear means that we have to make it finite.

We think of it like a limited resource.

We think of it as being a certain size.

We think of it like a pie, with only so many pieces to slice up.

We think that when someone gets more power, that means someone else has to get less.

… Power is not like pie at all.

Instead, it’s more like loaves & fishes.

Dan Savage: “O They Will Know We Are Christians …“

The Apostolic Truth Tabernacle is in Greensburg, Indiana. That’s the town where Billy Lucas was bullied to death for being perceived to be gay by his classmates. I wonder if they stood up and cheered at Apostolic Truth Tabernacle when Lucas died — hey, another homo in hell. I wonder if any of Lucas’s tormenters attend services at Apostolic Truth Tabernacle.

And remember: I’m an anti-Christian bully for pointing out the connection between what straight kids are taught about “homos” in the shithole mega-churches they’re dragged to by their parents and what they turn around and do to “homos” they encounter in classrooms. And what if that precocious little four-year-old singer is gay?

Praise the Lord and pass the barf bags.

Jonathan Rauch: “We are a sideshow no longer“

I think back on a conversation with my own father. This is in 1995, not so very long ago, but an eon as it seems today. He is urging me not to write about gay marriage, a subject I will soon take up for the Economist and the New Republic. He knows and accepts that I am gay; that is not the problem. It is my career he is worried about. The idea of a man marrying a man or a woman marrying a woman, he tells me, is such an outlandish idea that if I associate myself with it I will no longer be taken seriously as a writer. People will think I’m a nut. At the time, his prediction seemed plausible.