Warren Blumenfeld's Blog

Coming up on June 28, 2012: The 43nd Anniversary of the Stonewall Inn-surrection

Introduction to a Cautionary Critique

President Barack Obama took a move on Tuesday, May 9, 2012 in an interview with ABC TV “Good Morning America” host, Robin Roberts, when he “came out” for marriage equality asserting that “Same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

Back in December 2010, President Barack Obama supported the concept of “Civil Unions” for same-sex couples, and while he said his position was still “evolving,” he was not yet on board with full marriage equality.

This “evolving” (devolving?) position seems to contradict a survey bearing then Illinois State Senate Candidate Barack Obama’s signature in 1996 in which he claims that he “favor[s] legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages.” The administration explained this discrepancy by stating that the survey was “actually filled out by someone else.”

Interviewed on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” (Sunday, May 6, 2012), Vice President Joseph Biden expressed himself as “absolutely comfortable” with same-sex couples having the same rights as heterosexual couples.

Shortly after Biden announced his position, senior Obama adviser David Axelrod said via Twitter that “What VP said-that all married couples should have exactly the same legal rights-is precisely POTUS’s position.”

Last year, I watched breaking news of the New York state senate, following the House of Representatives’ lead, passage of a bill legalizing marriage for same-sex couples. I reflected on how momentum is certainly building in the fight for marriage equality. Within hours, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo proudly signed the bill into law.

With New York’s entry into the mix of then five other states (today 7 other states with the addition of Maryland and Washington) and the District of Columbia, the number of potential same-sex couples who qualify for a marriage license has now more than doubled.

TV cameras then focused on the crowd, which spontaneously organized at the historic Stonewall Inn in New York’s West Village upon notification of the legislators’ action. One reveler interviewed on camera stated that she showed up “to be a part of history.” Also, some of the nation’s leading economists estimated the potential for enormous revenue increases to New York’s businesses because of the expected surge in marriages conducted in the state as a result of this legislation.

For me, though, watching the news accounts brought to the surface a full array of emotions from subdued optimism to discomfort and concern.

There are moments in history when conditions come together to create the impetus for great social change. Many historians and activists place the beginning of the modern movement for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender equality at the Stonewall Inn, a small bar frequented by trans people, lesbians, bisexuals, gay men, students, and others of all races located at 53 Christopher Street in New York City’s Greenwich Village.

At approximately one-twenty on the morning of June 28, 1969, New York City Police officers conducted a routine raid on the bar on the charge that the owners had been selling alcohol without a license. Feeling they had been harassed far too long, people challenged police officers on this morning lasting with varying intensity over the next five nights by flinging bottles, rocks, bricks, trash cans, and parking meters used at battering rams.

In reality, even before these historic events at the Stonewall Inn, a little-known action preceded Stonewall by nearly three years, and should more likely be considered as the founding event for the modern LGBT movement. In August 1966, at Gene Compton’s Cafeteria, in what is known as the Tenderloin District in San Francisco, trans people and gay hustlers joined in fighting police harassment and oppression. Police, conducting one of their numerous raids, entered Compton’s and began physically harassing the clientele. This time, however, people fought back by hurling coffee at the officers and heaving cups, dishes, and trays around the cafeteria. Police retreated outside as customers smashed windows. Over the course of the next night, people gathered to picket the cafeteria, which refused to allow trans people back inside.

Out of the ashes of Compton’s Cafeteria and the Stonewall Inn, people, primarily young, formed a number of militant groups. One of the first was the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). GLF was not a formalized organization per se, but rather a series of small groups across the U.S. and other countries. GLF meetings took place in people’s living rooms, basements in houses of worship, and storefronts. Members insisted on the freedom to explore new ways of living as part of a radical project of social transformation.

GLF adopted a set of principles emphasizing coalition-building with other disenfranchised groups — women, minoritized racial and ethnic groups, working-class people, young people, elders, people with disabilities — as a means of dismantling the economic and social structures they considered inherently oppressive.

During the early 1970s, I was an active member of GLF in Washington D.C. We held early meetings at Grace Church, the Washington Free Clinic in Georgetown, and All Souls Church on 16th Street, and we rented a brownstone on S Street in Northwest D.C. for the establishment of a GLF living collective. Meetings provided a space for us to come together and put into practice what feminists had taught us—that the “personal is the political.”

We laughed and we cried together. We shared our ideas and our most intimate secrets. We dreamed our dreams and laid our plans for a world free from all the deadly forms of oppression, and as we went along, invented new ways of relating. For the men, we came to consciousness of how we had been stifled as males growing up in a culture that taught us to hate the feminine within, that taught us that if we were to be considered worthy, we must be athletic, independent, assertive, domineering, competitive, and that we must bury our emotions deep within the recesses of our souls.

My discomfort in watching the joyous reactions to the President’s support for marriage equality and the celebration of revelers outside the Stonewall Inn at the passage of a statewide bill legalizing marriage for same-sex couples stems from my understanding and experience as a political activist and as a student of history, an understanding of the Stonewall rebellion as representing an impetus for revolutionary change within an overridingly oppressive social structure, as opposed to mere reform, accommodation, or assimilation.

When we consider the phrase, “Keep your eyes on the prize,” I now wonder what we consider precisely as the prizes, the goals, that we are working toward? Are we working under the vision of Stonewall of “a radical project of social transformation” and “dismantling the economic and social structures they considered inherently oppressive?” Or are we working to reform the current social system in order to assimilate? Or none of the above? I am sure each of us will have a different answer.

Looking back over the years, as our visibility has increased, as our place within the culture has become somewhat more assured, much certainly has been gained, but also, something very precious has been lost. That early excitement, that desire — though by no means the ability — to fully restructure the culture, as distinguished from our mere reform, seems now to lay dormant in many sectors of our communities.

In our current so-called “neoliberal” age, emphasis is placed on privatization, global capital, reduced governmental oversight and deregulation of the corporate sector, attacks on labor organizing, and competition. We are living in an environment in which property rights hold precedence over human rights. In this environment, we are witnessing a cultural war waged by the political, corporate, and theocratic right, a war to turn back all the gains progressive people have made over the years.

Within this environment, however, I perceive four main themes as the major focus of the larger lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) movement, what I am calling the “4 Ms” of the mainstream LGB movement.

I do not include here trans identities because, firstly, I cannot discern a “mainstream” trans movement, and secondly, the 4 Ms in their current LGB mainstream construction exclude trans people. According to my colleague, Chase Catalano, “The silencing of trans experiences often reminds me of how folks in leather, drag queens, and dykes on bikes were viewed with contempt when they wanted to be included in the early Pride events for being too contentious (folks didn’t want ‘those people’ getting the media attention from the ‘normal people’).”

The four themes of the LGB movement comprise an assimilationist/reformist rather than a revolutionary impetus. These Ms are: 1. Marriage Equality, 2. Military Inclusion, 3. Media Visibility, and 4. Making Money.

1. Marriage Equality

Now in seven states and the District of Columbia, we have soared above the symbolic line of demarcation granting us the estimated 1300 privileges and benefits of marriage previously accessible only to different-sex married couples. We can now wear our gold bands proudly on our left hands with all the benefits of publically-sanctioned recognition of our relationships including tax breaks, inheritance guarantees, adoption of partners’ children, insurance benefits, and others. We can register at department stores hoping our families and friends will buy us our favorite flatware and dishes, monogramed sheets and pillow cases, and large screen TVs.

With our ascension over the demarcation line, though, we find the deeply entrenched hierarchy of privilege remaining intact on the basis of relationship status! Why should couples in legally recognized relationships collect the government-granted array of economic and social benefits at the exclusion of those who either cannot or will not meet prescribed requirements? Why, for example, can an individual who marries an employee of a company providing health insurance qualify for inclusion of similar health insurance, while an unemployed single person who has searched in vain for a job, or an individual who works for a company not offering health insurance remain in the ranks of the estimated 50 million U.S. residents with no health insurance? Why, for that matter, does this nation link health insurance either to employment or to out-of-pocket monthly expenditures?

Rather than fighting so hard to rise beyond that line privileging those above and limiting those below, we need to work to abolish the line itself, forever, and as a society, provide these benefits to all, regardless of relationship status. For example, we must consider access to quality healthcare not as a privilege for those who have the means, but as a basic human right for all.

2. Military Inclusion

Due to the dedication and hard work by individuals and organizations over the previous decades who have been successful in lobbying government officials to repeal the highly discriminatory and offensive so-called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) military policy, now lesbian, gay, and bisexual people can serve their nation openly. This reversal stands to benefit the country by providing a greater pool of committed and talented individuals whose chief intent is to serve and protect their nation with pride. Existing medical and conduct regulations, however, still prohibit many individuals along the transgender spectrum from enlisting.

As I have followed the debates over the years, I have been constantly struck by the arguments favoring maintenance of the DADT policy, ranging from fears over the “predatory nature of the homosexual” in bunks and showers, to homosexuals crumbling under the pressure of combat, to these service members placing themselves in compromising situations in which they will be forced to divulge critical defense secrets to foreign governments. I give credit to lesbian, gay, and bisexual people for maintaining a willingness to join the military following such scurrilous and libelous depictions.

While stated military goals may promote the notion of providing global security and protecting and defending the homeland, we must maintain and extend our focused and continued attention and critique, however, on the overriding abuses of maintaining a military that engages in unjustified incursions into other lands controlled by an industrial complex that promotes corporate interests. The U.S. government has officially estimated the 2010 military budget alone at $680 billion dollars comprising 20 percent of total U.S. governmental expenditures. Outside organizations challenge these figure by estimating the actual percentage of at least 36 percent.

I contend that individuals and groups that stand up and put their lives on the line to defend the country from very real threats are true patriots. But true patriots are also those who speak out, stand up, and challenge our governmental leaders, those who put their lives on the line by actively advocating for justice, freedom, and liberty through peaceful means: the diplomats and the mediators; those working in conflict resolution; the activists dedicated to preventing wars and to bringing existing wars to diplomatic resolution once they have begun; the individuals of conscience who refuse to give over their minds, their souls, and their bodies to armed conflict; the practitioners of non-violent resistance in the face of tyranny and oppression; the anti-war activists who strive to educate their peers, their citizenry, and, yes, their governmental leaders about the perils of unjustified and unjust armed conflict and invasions into lands not their own in advance of appropriate attempts at diplomatic means of resolving conflict.

Looking over the history of humanity, it is apparent that tyranny, at times, could only be countered through the raising of arms. On numerous occasions, however, diplomacy has been successful, and at other times, it should have been used more extensively before rushing to war. I, therefore, find it unacceptable when one’s patriotism and one’s love of country is called into question when one advocates for peaceful means of conflict resolution, for it is also an act of patriotism to work to keep our troops out of harm’s way, and to work to create conditions and understanding that ultimately make war less likely.

In addition, I believe we must challenge the extraordinary wide income gap in the United States that offers few options for reasonable employment for young and older workers alike, making military service one of a limited number of options for employment and advancement.

We must work to address the largest income and asset gap of all other so-called “developed” nations, in which the top one percent of the population has accumulated an estimated 34.6 percent of the wealth, the next 9 percent an estimated 38.5 percent, and the remaining 90 percent of the nation a combined accumulation of only 26.9 percent (http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph).

Within this environment, politicians, working on behalf of corporate backers, continue to provide massive tax breaks for exceedingly wealthy individuals and to corporations. In addition, they blame and drive to decertify labor unions, end government entitlement programs designed to offer a safety net to the country’s most economically vulnerable, and attempt to privatize everything from Medicare to national parks all in the paradoxical name of “free enterprise.” Within this environment, corporate bosses, through their mouth pieces in government, divert educational institutions to the private sector to accommodate the needs of business.

3. Media Visibility

Today, we see more lesbian and gay people, and occasionally bisexual and transgender characters on television, in films, fiction and non-fiction written materials, magazines, commercials, and ads. From the pages of slick magazines, Melissa Ethridge and her (now former) partner, sporting broad smiles and holding hands, display chic Cartier bracelets on their wrists; a male couple with a young girl and a yellow Labrador Retriever smile as they are all seated on the floor beside their Ikea couch. Then there are Kurt on “Glee,” Mitchell and Cameron on “Modern Family,” “Will and Grace,” “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” Justin, Mark, and Alexis on “Ugly Betty,” Andrew on “Desperate Housewives, ” Tim Gunn on “Project Runway”; Brokeback Mountain, The Kids are Alright, The Single Man. These represent only the tip of the proverbial iceberg of recent examples of media visibility.

These characterizations, though on occasion representing minoritized races and ethnicities, comprise largely White and middle- to upper-class people. While the majority today would be considered by many as “positive” representations for the most part, which may more fully and accurately represent some of our lives relative to the rather sad and miserable or violently threatening characterizations presented previously, the majority depict the upwardly mobile, socially assimilated character who poses little overt challenge to the status quo, those who function rather successfully in the competitive corporate world, those who shop for a dishwasher or go on an expensive vacation with their heterosexual friends and relatives.

While many benefits accrue with these representations, such as providing better role models for our youth, helping to overcome many of the stereotypes and reducing prejudices, the Capitalist system seems to have employed these images of “we are just like you” in its attempts to coopt critique and possible challenge to that very system.

To provide an additional example of this project of cooptation: This past semester, I entered my university classroom and was about to introduce that day’s lesson when my eye caught a large poster pined to the bulletin board displaying a tightly clenched raised fist, reminiscent of the iconic Black Power symbol popularized in the 1960s. Above the image read the words in large capital letters, “JOIN THE FIGHT.”

Encouraged by the sight, I walked over to the poster hoping to find some indication of resurgent social activism. To my dismay and utter aversion, however, appearing in smaller letters, the poster advertised “The Fighting Burrito,” a local fast food campus hang out. The profit motive transformed this iconic symbol into a sales pitch for burritos, tacos, carbonated drinks, and nachos.

In our communities, the “Pride” marches of the past have morphed into parades and festivals funded on a base of major corporate sponsorship, and capitalist consumption. Parade contingents now include large canvas banners affixed with familiar logos of national and local banks, and insurance, soft drink and beer, and real estate companies. Ironically, some of these same companies not so long ago refused to hire “out” members of our communities, but seeing how our business will improve their economic bottom line, we are now happily welcomed.

Along the parade routes and at rally sites, companies and individuals display and sell their wares, from internet and phone company subscriptions to rainbow colored everything imaginable: from t-shirts to teething rings, and from towels to toilet seat covers. Merchants and artisans borrow the pink triangle — the Nazi patch gay men were forced to wear on their clothing when incarcerated in concentration camps — to fashion glimmering pink Rhinestone jewelry worn as glamorous fashion accessories.

I call this consumerism “the tchotchetization of a movement” (“tchotchke” in Yiddish means knick knacks, small objects, etc.).

Originally, the pink triangle, this symbol of ultimate oppression, in the 1970s, my friend Sam Pottebaum reminds us, our communities deployed as a mark of solidarity, in the AIDS activist movement of the 1980s and 1990s, as an emblem of resistance in mobilizing against the intransigence of governmental and societal inaction, and today simply as an accoutrement of vanity.

4. Making Money

While possibly the exception, and certainly not necessarily the rule, some of us at least are now “out” at work with few or no real consequences to our job security. Others now ascend the corporate ladder with relative ease, and own exclusive vacation homes in the Florida Keys, Panama, or Tuscany to “get away from it all.” We gentrify older urban neighborhoods, and spruce up city landscapes with the newest decorative trends.

I ask, however, are we actually contributing to the ever widening income gap that has overtaken our country? And what about the folks and entire communities we dislocate as we gentrify entire neighborhoods?

More often than not, these individuals include White gay and bisexual men who conform fairly closely to traditional conceptualizations of gender expression. Lesbians and bisexual women, as women within an overriding sexist society, statistically earn less than their male counterparts, and individuals who present along the transgender spectrum continue to find less freedom of expression, and, therefore, far less job security.

A Call to Further and Wider Action

While the “4 Ms” are all somewhat laudable goals, I believe that if we are going to achieve a truly equitable society, we must reach higher, wider, and broader. As important as these goals may be, I hope we do not envision them as the final resting place over the rainbow.

If we do rest here, after having been seduced by promises of achieving some degree of credibility and respectability, I fear we will have become part of the very problems that so many of us have fought so tirelessly to eradicate.

I do remain hopeful, however. The increasing visibility and recognition of trans people today has shaken traditionally dichotomous notions of gender, and in turn, other stifling kinds of binaries, which are the very cornerstones for the entrenchment keeping our society from moving forward. Their stories and experiences have great potential to bring us back into the future — a future in which anyone on the gender spectrum everywhere will live freely, unencumbered by social taboos and cultural norms of gender. It is a future in which the “feminine” and “masculine”— as well as all the qualities on the continuum in between — can live and prosper in us all.

Metaphorically, oppression operates like a wheel with many spokes. If we work to dismantle only one or a few specific spokes, the wheel will continue to roll over people. Let us, then, also work on dismantling all the many spokes to conquering all the many forms of oppression in all their many forms.

Until and unless we can join in coalition with other groups, I consider that the possibility for achieving a genuine sense of community and a genuine sense of equity will be unattainable.

I believe also that sexual and relational attractions and gender identities and expressions alone are not sufficient to connect a community, and by extension, a movement for progressive social change, and that we must, therefore, look beyond ourselves and base a community and a movement not simply on social identities, but also on shared ideals and values among individuals from disparate social identities, with like minds, political philosophies, and strategies for achieving their objectives.

Let us revel in our past victories, for we have fought tirelessly for them. But let us not dwell here because we have further to go to ensure a truly just and equitable society and world. In the final analysis, whenever anyone is diminished, we are all demeaned, when anyone or any group remains institutionally and socially marginalized, excluded, or disenfranchised from primary rights and benefits, the possibility for authentic community cannot be realized unless and until we become involved, to challenge, to question, and to act in truly transformational ways.

I hope, therefore, that we can reignite the revolutionary and transformational flame of what was Stonewall.
——————————————————————————————————————
I want to thank Chase Catalano, Bradley Freihoffer, Paul Gorski, Joseph Henderson, Nana Osei-Kofi, and Samuel Pottebaum for their insightful suggested editorial changes and additions to this essay.

Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld, Associate Professor, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Iowa State University. He is author of Warren’s Words: Smart Commentary on Social Justice (Purple Press); co-editor of Investigating Christian Privilege and Religious Oppression in the United States (Sense); editor of Homophobia: How We All Pay the Price (Beacon Press); and co-editor of Readings for Diversity and Social Justice (Routledge).

Permission granted to forward, post, or publish this commentary. wblumen@iastate.edu

Rev. Sean Harris of Berean Baptist Church of Fayetteville, North Carolina loudly and vehemently lectured during his Sunday sermon (April 29, 2012) that parent’s must enforce strict gender role behaviors, their duty before God, on their children.

“Dads,” Harris commanded, “the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and you crack that wrist. Man up! Give him a good punch.” He directed fathers to say to their sons: “Okay? You’re not going to act like that. You were made by God to be a male and you are going to be a male.” He also instructed that parents should be “squashing that like a cockroach.” He warned that “the word of God makes it clear that effeminate behavior is ungodly.”

And to parents directing their daughters, Harris shouted and flailed: “And when your daughter starts acting too butch, you rein her in, and you say, oh, no. oh, no, sweetheart. You can play sports. Play them. Play them to the glory of God. But sometimes you’re going to act like a girl, and walk like a girl, and talk like a girl, and smell like a girl, and that means you’re going to be beautiful. You’re going to be attractive. You’re going to dress yourself up!”

Though he later retracted and apologized for the tenor of his arguments, he reiterated his basic premise “that parents have a responsibility to maintain the gender distinction that God created in them.” This, he said, is a message for which he will never apologize.

Though extreme in his language and tone, Harris promotes what most of us have been very consciously and carefully taught throughout our lives. Gender roles (sometimes called sex role) include the set of socially-defined roles and behaviors assigned to the sex we are assigned at birth. This can and does vary from culture to culture. Our society recognizes basically two distinct gender roles. One is the “masculine,” having the qualities and characteristics attributed to males. The other is the “feminine,” having the qualities and characteristics attributed to females. A third gender role, rarely condoned in our society, at least for those assigned “male” at birth, is “androgyny” combining assumed male (andro) and female (gyne) qualities.

A fairly simple way to remember the differences between “sex” and “gender” is to consider “sex” as a noun and “gender” as a verb (a repeated action). According to social theorist Judith Butler in her 1990 book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, “The act that one does, the act that one performs, is, in a sense, an act that has been going on before one arrived on the scene. Hence, gender is an act, which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again” (p. 272).

Paradoxically, while Rev. Harris attests to “gender distinctions” as God given, he betrays his own assertion by demanding that parents break their children early of any forms of gender transgression. Harris clearly demonstrates his role as director of this drama by inadvertently highlighting the social construction of gender roles and how we as social actors need to continually pass on the roles, the scripts, using applause or jeers, to future generations.

This all conjures up images of the Hollywood movie “The Truman Show” starring Jim Carrey in the lead role as Truman Burbank. The film documents a man who for most of his life remains unaware that he lives within a human-made artificial set of a reality television show, broadcast 24 hours a day to billions of people around the world. The show’s executive producer and director, Christof, placed Truman at birth in the fictitious town of Seahaven, and manipulates every aspect of his life. (I will leave it up to you to analyze why the director of this farce has been given the name “Christof.”)

To dissuade Truman from exploring past the limits of the constructed set, Christof pretends to kill Truman’s father in a fabricated storm to teach him to fear the water. In addition, actors playing the part of TV news reporters warn of the dangers of travel, and promote the benefits of staying home. However, stemming from some unforeseen glitches in the scenery and unexplained and habitual coincidences in the placement of the actors around him, Truman becomes suspicions until he discovers the truth about the artificiality, manipulation, and control Christof has perpetrated on him for the past 30 years. Truman eventually outwits Christof and escapes the fabricated set into the warmth and brightness of a true sun, and the coolness and wetness of natural rain.

Rev. Sean Harris simply serves as an extreme and fanatical example of a director in the larger coercive societal battalions bent on destroying all signs of gender transgressions in young and old alike, and in the maintenance of gender scripts. Most of us function as conscious and unconscious co-directors in this drama each time we enforce gender-role conformity in others, and each time we relegate our critical consciousness by failing to rewrite or destroy the scripts in ways that operate integrally to us.

Those who bully often fulfill the social “function” of establishing and reinforcing the socially constructed scripts handed them when they entered the play of life. Imagine you are a young person on the elementary school playground. There you see a young girl who wears her hair short and cropped. She wears jeans and a T-shirt, and plays rough and tumble games with the boys. She loves to climb trees, and comes home with torn and dirty clothing. Up to a certain age, this may be taken as “acceptable” within her gender script as currently written. However, as she ages, possibly by the time she reaches her teen years, her peers and adults direct her to “grow out of this stage,” and label her with various terms.

Originally, when she was younger, people may have called her one of the most common labels, “tomboy,” but as she ages, others more often begin calling her “dyke” or “lezzy,” regardless of her actual emerging sexual identity. Basically, because others perceive her as not conforming to her “feminine” gender role, they call her sexuality into question. In so doing, they attempt to ensure that she performs her role as written. In actuality, this direction functions as the basis in the establishment and maintenance of a patriarchal system of domination, control, and oppression.

Now imagine you are standing on that same elementary schoolyard. You witness a young boy who likes to jump rope with the girls, and who prefers not to join in sports activities with the boys. Recently he began learning to play the violin, and he wants one day to perform in a symphony orchestra. When other students call him names like “sissy, “fag,” “momma’s boy,” and “queer” because they perceive him as not reciting his gender script properly, he often cries and isolates from other students. Again, because he does not conform to his expected “masculine” gender role, his peers and adults taunt, harass, and abuse him equating the ways he expresses his gender by questioning his assumed sexuality. In so doing, they are attempting to ensure that he conforms to his requisite gender script, which is the basis of sexism and the operative apparatus maintaining a patriarchal system of male domination.

With this in mind, each time we rewrite the scripts so as to give an honest and true performance of life, each time we work toward lifting the ban against our transcending and obliterating the gender status quo by continually questioning and challenging standard conceptualization of gender roles, only then will we begin as individuals and as a society to experience what Truman experienced after he lifted himself from the manufactured dome of artificiality: the warmth and brightness of a true sun, and the coolness and wetness of natural rain.

The recent suicide death of 14-year-old Kenneth James Weishuhn Jr. from the northwestern corner of my home state this month tossed and battered me like an Iowa tornado. Though I never met Kenneth in life, I feel that I know him in death. His passing spun me like the death of an old trusted friend. His loss to me is palpable.

Kenneth reportedly took his life just weeks after coming out as gay at South O’Brien High School. Classmates teased and bullied him on campus and sent him mobile phone death threats, and they created a Facebook page hate campaign.

In the midst of the statewide and national grief surrounding Kenneth’s tragic and avoidable death, I just learned of the loss to suicide of Jack Reese, a 17-year-old gay Utah teen. On a Facebook group site in his memory, according to a user: “His suicide has impacted so many people. I HONESTLY hope things will change because of this, but I also wish that it didn’t have to come down to this for awareness to actually be seen in others who decide to bully others for their sexuality.”

What can clearly be referred to as a continuing pandemic, a number of gay and questioning young men have also taken their lives by all indications as a result of the unrelenting homophobic taunts, harassment, and attacks they had to endure by their peers: Seth Walsh, 13, hanged himself from a tree outside his California home; Billy Lucas, 15, hanged himself in Indiana; Asher Brown, 13, from Texas shot himself in the head; Tyler Clementi, 18, first-year student from Rutgers University took his life by jumping off the George Washington Bridge; Raymond Chase, 19, from Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island hanged himself in his dorm room; Carl Joseph Walker Hoover, 11-years-old, hanged himself in Springfield, Massachusetts; Justin Aaberg, 15, from Minnesota also hanged himself.

Bullying must not simply be seen as a “youth problem,” but must be viewed as resulting from larger societal issues. Institutional bullying and harassment do not exist within a vacuum, but rather reflect and actually reproduce the messages and actions stemming from the social environment.

I refer to this as “the social ecology of bullying and harassment.” Ecology can be defined as the relationships between organisms and their environment. We must, therefore, investigate the larger sociological and psychological environment for us to determine, understand, and if necessary, institute procedures to change our institutional environments.

Those who bully often fulfill the social “function” of establishing and reinforcing the social norms. They often justify their behaviors by blaming the targets of their attacks, and emphasizing that they somehow deserve the aggression because they in some ways deviate from the established peer social norms.

Within this continuing pandemic, I find it appalling when I hear national and state politicians running for and holding elective office not only downplaying, but, in fact, denying the tenacity of bullying in general, and specifically upon our lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth, as well as upon those who may define as heterosexual and gender normative, but whose peers question their sexuality and gender identities.

For example, on the floor of the Tennessee legislature, State Representative Jeremy Faison (R-Cosby) railed against the passage of a proposed cyberbullying prevention bill. He referred to the recent suicide deaths of two Tennessee gay teens, Phillip Parker, 14, who died in January this year, and senior at Cheatham County Central High School, Jacob Rogers, who reportedly suffered anti-gay harassment for years, died in December last year.

According to Representative Faison, however, these suicides resulted not from homophobic bullying, but, rather, from bad parenting: “We can’t continue to legislate everything,” he argued. “We’ve had some horrible things happen in America and in our state, and there’s children that have actually committed suicide, but I submit to you today that they did not commit suicide because of somebody bullying them. They committed suicide because they were not instilled the proper principles of where their self-esteem came from at home.”

Faison went on to claim that though even some of the legislators in the chamber during his speech may have acted as bullies during their youth, “But you didn’t grow up to be a bad person.”

This comes less than one year after a bill that would ban teachers from discussing LGBT issues in the classroom prior to the ninth grade passed the Tennessee Senate. Colloquially known as the “Don’t Say Gay Bill,” it is sponsored by Republican State Senator Stacey Campfield, who unsuccessfully urged passage of a similar bill while serving in the Tennessee House of Representatives. SB 49: “requires that any instruction or materials made available or provided at or to a public elementary or middle school must be limited exclusively to natural human reproduction science.”

In addition, in a move seeming more like a perverse parody or a distasteful joke than an official legislative action, the Michigan state Senate passed what I am calling the “Permission to Bully Act” in the guise of protecting youth from bullying and harassment in the schools. Divided along political party lines, Republican Senators passed the measure by a margin of 26 to 11.

The bill includes no reporting requirements, does not incorporate any type of possible best practices found effective in research and in application, and contains no enumerated categories included in many other states such as, for example, race, gender, sexual identity, gender identity and expression, disability, among others.

The bill does include, however, Section 8: “This section does not abridge the rights under the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States or under Article 1 of the state Constitution of 1963 of a school employee, school volunteer, pupil, or a pupil’s parent or guardian. This section does not prohibit a statement of a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction of a school employee, school volunteer, pupil, or pupil’s parent of guardian.”

This extremely weak bill, with the addition of Section 8, grants anyone within the school environment permission to bully and harass on “religious” or “moral” grounds – permission as long as it stems from conviction.

The denial and resistance to facing the real problems of bullying within our society and how it filters into our schools must end if we are to reduce and eliminate the tragedies. I consider the half-truths, the lies, the misinformation, the deletions, the omissions, the distortions, and the overall censorship of LGBT history, literature, culture, and enumeration in bullying prevention policies in the schools as a form of violence, which itself promotes violence.

Unfortunately, still today educators require courage to counter opposing forces, for example, the current attacks on Ethnic Studies programs currently underway in states like Arizona, and attacks on LGBT inclusion in states like those in Michigan and Tennessee.

Though I support the “It Gets Better Project” and the “Trevor Project” (two fine and dedicated projects working tirelessly to reduce teen suicide), I assert most emphatically that conditions must get better NOW, because later, or next week, or after high school graduation can seem like an eternity when one suffers the humiliation, pain, fear, and anger of unrelenting harassment and bullying, sometimes on a daily basis.

In the final analysis, all of us, regardless of our social identities, have been made to feel “less than” by individuals, by organizations and institutions, and by the systemic nature of the larger society. If we can remember how that has felt for us, we can begin to develop empathy for those who suffer marginalization by individuals, institutions, and a larger society that holds their identities, at best, as different, and more likely, in contempt.

We don’t have to “agree” with those identities, but through discussion, interaction, and empathy, we can begin to relax the stereotypes and the possible fear, and experience those we previously viewed as “the Other,” and begin to see their humanity and their contributions to our collective society. We have much to share with one another once we can get beyond the divide.

For all the young people we have lost too soon, and for their families and friends, and for all of us, I do believe that love will conquer the hatred. Thank you young people for the riches you have left us. We will continue the struggle in your name to make the world a safer and more supportive environment for all people. May your gentle and sensitive spirits forever rest in peace.

“A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful,
friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful,
thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.”
Boy Scout Law

“On my honor I will do my best
To do my duty to God and my country
and to obey the Scout Law;
To help other people at all times;
To keep myself physically strong,
mentally awake, and morally straight.”
Boy Scout Oath

Well, it seems that the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) requires not merely moral straightness, but sexual and gender straightness as well, for no gay, bisexual, or transgender scouts (youth members) or scouters (adult leaders) have the right and privilege of membership in the organization.

According to their position on homosexuality: “Boy Scouts of America believes that homosexual conduct is inconsistent with the obligations in the Scout Oath and Scout Law to be morally straight and clean in thought, word, and deed….”

Actually, no atheist or agnostic need apply either since the Boy Scouts of America “Anthem” proclaims that “The Boy Scouts of America maintains that no member can grow into the best kind of citizen without recognizing an obligation to God….The recognition of God as the ruling and leading power in the universe and the grateful acknowledgment of His favors and blessings are necessary to the best type of citizenship and are wholesome precepts in the education of the growing members.”

The United States Supreme Court in 2000 affirmed BSA’s right as a private organization to bar anyone, including gay, bisexual, and transgender scouts and scouters from membership under the First Amendment’s “freedom of association” clause when “the presence of that person affects in a significant way the group’s ability to advocate public or private viewpoints.” The justices ruled that since BSA opposes homosexuality as part of its “expressive message,” allowing homosexuals into the organization would interfere with that message.

The case involved an assistant scoutmaster, James Dale, a student at Rutgers University and co-president of the Lesbian and Gay Student Alliance, who attended a forum in 1990 on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender health issues. He was interviewed for a local newspaper in which he came out as gay. Boy Scouts officials read the article, and notified Dale that he had been terminated from his position. Dale won his case in the New Jersey Supreme Court, but the U.S. high court overturned the lower decision in favor of the defendants: the BSA.

Now we hear that the BSA has asked Jennifer Tyrrill, lesbian mom and scout leader of her son Cruz’s den, to leave her post because as reported, she did not “meet the high standards of membership that the Boy Scouts of America seek.”

What “high standards” has Tyrrill not met? Over the past year, while serving as den leader, the cubs in her den volunteered at a local soup kitchen, collected canned goods for neighboring churches to distribute in food baskets, and performed a conservation project at a state park.

The Girl Scouts of American and the Boys & Girls Clubs of America organizations proudly welcome and appreciate members and leaders of all sexual and gender identities. The Girl Scouts, for example, has, indeed, fulfilled its own written promises and laws “to be Honest and Fair, Friendly and Helpful, Considerate and Caring, Courageous and Strong, and Responsible.”

But how can a boy scout or scout leader truly adhere to the Boy Scout Law of being “trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent” when the BSA clings to its blatantly prejudicial, discriminatory, and quite frankly, offensive “expressive message” on issues of sexual identity?

I have made a commitment since the Boys Scouts of America v. Dale Supreme Court decision to refrain from donating money to the United Way until and unless it stops funding the BSA and directs pressure on the organization to change its policies. I would welcome a national response opposing BSA’s current policy in the form of a letter writing campaign, boycott of funds, and for those so inclined, abandonment of the organization as scouts and as leaders until BSA joins with other youth organizations to honor and cherish diversity of the human experience and of the human spirit.

“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” From “Me and Bobby McGee” by Kris Kristofferson

Mitt Romney, in his address on “Freedom” to the National Rifle Association on Friday, April 13, 2012 used the term “Freedom” a total of 30 times and “Free” another four times, all in the span of his few minutes behind the podium. His major thesis throughout his speech was, declared Romeny, the Obama “administration’s assault on our freedoms – our economic freedom, our religious freedom, and our personal freedom.”

Throughout the nominating process, Romney and other Republican candidates have advocated for the political philosophy that has come to be known as “neoliberalism,” which centers on a market-driven approach to economic and social policy, including such tenets as reducing the size of the national government and granting more control to state and local governments; severely reducing or ending governmental regulation over the private sector; privatization of governmental services, industries, and institutions including education, health care, and social welfare; permanent incorporation of across-the-board non-progressive marginal federal and state tax rates; and possibly most importantly, market driven and unfettered “free market” economics.

These precepts taken together, claim those who favor neoliberalist ideals, will ensure the individual’s autonomy, liberty, and, or course, freedom. “The American economy,” asserted Romney to the NRA, “is fueled by freedom. Free people and their free enterprises are what drive our economic vitality.”

I am, quite frankly, very concerned by Romney and other advocates of neoliberalist principles since they are based on individualistic, self-centered “freedoms,” while opposing general responsibility for others and for a collective cooperative society.

So, I would ask, under this version of “freedom,” how “free” are we really as individuals and as a collective nation when the upper ten percent of our population controls approximately 80-90 percent of the accumulated wealth and 85 percent of the stocks and bonds, and the political Right’s agenda will only increase this enormous imbalance?

How “free” are we as individuals and as a collective nation when many corporate executives currently pay lower tax rates than their secretaries as the political Right fights to maintain these advantages for the super rich?

How “free” are we as individuals and as a collective nation when 50 million people in our country go uninsured and their only form of health care is the hospital emergency room that the remainder of the population must pay for because our government will not provide a single-payer health care system, but instead, we all must accept the exorbitant profit-motive insurance premium rates of private health care insurers?

How “free” are we as individuals and as a collective nation as college and university tuition increases and governmental student assistance programs dry up, pushing out deserving students from middle and working class backgrounds?

How “free” are we as individuals and as a collective nation when governmental entitlement programs are cut or privatized, thereby eliminating the safety net support systems from our elders, our young people, people with disabilities, people who have suffered hard times, and others struggling to provide life’s basics?

How “free” are we as individuals and as a collective nation when the political Right passes legislation restricting immigration and social and educational services to young people?

How “free” are we as individuals and as a collective nation when the rights of women to control their bodies are under attack, and when doctors and others are intimidated, and even shot and killed at family planning clinics?

How “free” are we as individuals and as a collective nation when lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people are denied their basic human and civil rights accorded to heterosexual people on a daily basis, and when they are vilified and scapegoated?

How “free” are we as individuals and as a collective nation when affirmative action programs to improve the chances of People of Color and women are branded as nothing more than “reverse discrimination,” and steps are taken to abolish these strategies without replacing them with acceptable alternatives?

How “free” are we as individuals and as a collective nation when the U.S. Congress threatens to privatize our national parks, and loosens environmental and consumer protections of all kinds, and when mining, petroleum, natural gas, and lumber companies lobby to exploit the land, and when they are granted enormous tax breaks and subsidies?

How “free” are we as individuals and as a collective nation when residents of the U.S., who represent approximately 5 percent of the world’s population, consume 40 percent of the world’s resources, contribute 40 percent of worldwide pollution, and in spite of this, some on the political Right are calling for deregulation of environmental standards and termination of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Consumer Protection Agency?

How “free” are we as individuals and as a collective nation really when the political and theocratic Right push for school vouchers to funnel money into their parochial institutions at the expense of public education, when forces are gathering to reintroduce prayer into the public schools, and when the lines between religion and government are increasingly blurred?

How “free” are we as individuals and as a collective nation when the political and theocratic Right tear down the wall separating religion from entering into the affairs of government and push legislation based on their notions of “morality”?

How “free” are we as individuals and as a collective nation when the political Right abolishes multicultural education, and specifically, successful and productive Latina/o Studies programs in the state of Arizona, a program that increased graduation rates of students from less than 50 percent to 92 percent before politicians axed them.

How “free” are we as individuals and as a collective nation when the so-called “No Child Left Behind” act and other educational “reform” proposals are designed and operated with its “one-size-fits-all” standards in such a way as to actually leave more students and schools behind?

How “free” are we as individuals and as a collective nation when states like Iowa pass laws declaring English as the “official” language, thereby threatening bilingual education and stigmatizing non-English language speakers?

How “free” are we as individuals and as a collective nation when politicians and business owners attempt to co-opt and decertify labor unions and eliminate collective bargaining?

How “free” are we as individuals and as a collective nation when organizations and committees set the standards for acceptable art and literature and attempt to censor and ban all else?

How “free” are we as individuals and as a collective nation when we deny the youth of our nation their basic civil rights to make many of their own decisions in the guise of “protecting them”?

How “free” are we as individuals and as a collective nation when we follow a former president into an unjustified and illegal war into Iraq, thereby resulting in the massive and horrific loss of life and the draining of the U.S. treasury?

How “free” are we as individuals and as a collective nation when the so-called “Patriot Act” profiles individuals on their appearance, and when people are detained and their constitutional rights are denied?

How “free” are we as individuals and as a collective nation when people can own and use assault rifles, and carry concealed guns into bars, political rallies, and college and university campuses, and how “free” are we as individuals and as a collective nation as the National Rifle Association claims in its literature that “GUNS SAVE LIVES,” as it fights to dismantle governmental regulations on gun ownership and use?

How “free” are we really as individuals and as a collective nation in an unrestricted “free” market system that increases the size of depth of mega global corporations that gobble up small and emerging entrepreneurs?

And I could go on in this way virtually forever.

The neoliberal battle cry of “liberty” and “freedom” through “personal responsibility” sounds wonderful on the surface, but we have to ask ourselves as individuals and as a collective nation, what are the costs of this alleged “liberty” and “freedom”?

Do we as individuals and as a nation have any responsibility and obligation to protect and to support people from falling off the ledge of circumstance to their harm or death because they simply cannot “pull themselves up by their boot straps.” Have you actually ever tried to pull yourself up by your boot straps? If you have, you will know that by doing this, you literally fall on your face!

Can we begin, for example, to view health care not as a privilege for those who can afford it, but rather, see it as a human right? Can we begin to perceive the actual crack in this beautiful notion but unmet reality of meritocracy, and respond in common purpose and sense of community to help lift those who are in need of support?

I was extremely encouraged a few months back as I witnessed news reports of a horrendous traffic accident between an automobile driver and a motor cyclist, which resulted in the cyclist being thrust under the burning car. A group of stunned bystanders immediately and without hesitation turned into courageous upstanders by joining in unison, with flames raging around them, to turn the car on its end ensuring that others could pull the young cyclist to safety, thereby saving his life.

I hope that as residents of our country we will use this incident as an analogy to come together in unity to work as hard as we can to pull our country and its people to safety according to their needs and abilities.

I argue that government has a vital place in this.

As we approach Yom HaShoah, the Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day on 27 Nisan (Jewish calendar), April 19 this year (Gregorian calendar), I reflect upon my familial history: two scenarios with somewhat varied outcomes.

When I was a young child, I sat upon my maternal grandfather Simon Mahler’s knee. Looking down urgently, but with deep affection, he said to me, “Varn,” (through his distinctive Polish accent, he pronounced my name “Varn”), “you are named after my father, Wolf Mahler, who was killed by the Nazis along with my mother Bascha and most of my thirteen brothers and sisters.” When I asked why they were killed, he responded, “Because they were Jews.” Those words have reverberated in my mind, haunting me ever since.

We later learned that Nazi troops forced most of my Krosno relatives into the surrounding woods, shot them, and tossed their lifeless bodies into a mass unmarked grave along with over two thousand other Jewish residents. The Nazis eventually loaded the remaining Jews of Krosno onto cattle cars and transported them to Auschwitz and Belzec death camps. The handful of Krosno Jews who survived liberation of the camps attempted to return to their homes that had been confiscated by the non-Jewish residents. No Jews reside today in Krosno.

More recently, on a snowy February morning in 2002, while in my university office organizing materials for that day’s classes, I received an email message that would forever poignantly and profoundly change my life. A man named Charles Mahler had been looking for descendants of the Mahler family of Krosno, Poland, and he had come across an essay I had written focusing on Wolf and Bascha Mahler.

Charles informed me that he had survived the German Holocaust along with his sister, parents, and maternal grandparents and uncle, but the Nazis murdered his father’s parents (Jacques and Anja Mahler), sister, and her two children, and other relatives following Hitler’s invasion and occupation of Belgium, their adopted home country.

My cousin Charles related their story in hiding from August 1942 until the final armistice in Europe. His father, George, altered the family’s identity papers from Jewish to Christian, and they abandoned Antwerp for what they considered the relative safety of the Belgium countryside. During their plight, members of the Belgium resistance movement and other righteous Christians shepherded them throughout the remainder of the war to three separate locations as the German Gestapo followed closely at their heels. On a number of occasions, they successfully “passed” as Christian directly under the watchful gaze of unsuspecting Nazis.

Though the majority of Jewish inhabitants of Antwerp ultimately perished, many survived. However, at the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. and Yad Vashem (The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Israel) one will observe “Krosno” chiseled into the glass and the stone walls listing towns and villages where Nazis and their sympathizers decimated entire Jewish communities.

I have learned many lessons in my studies of genocides perpetrated throughout the ages.

Strong leaders whip up sentiments by employing dehumanizing stereotyping and scapegoating entire groups, while other citizens or entire nations look on, often refusing to intervene. Everyone, not only the direct perpetrators of oppression, plays a vital role in the genocides.

On a micro level, this is also apparent, for example, in episodes of schoolyard, community-based, as well as electronic forms of bullying. According to the American Medical Association definition: “Bullying is a specific type of aggression in which the behavior is intended to harm or disturb, the behavior occurs repeatedly over time, and there is an imbalance of power, with a more powerful person or group attacking a less powerful one.”

The problem of bullying and harassment should not be seen simply as involving those who bully and those who are bullied (the “dyadic view”), but rather as involving a number of “actors” or roles across the social/school environment. In one study, peers were present to witness 85% of the bullying incidents at school.

Some researchers have defined the roles various people play. Dan Olweus, international researcher and bullying prevention specialist, enumerated the distinct and often overlapping roles enacted in these episodes:

1. Those Who Bully: the person or persons who perpetrate the bullying episodes;
2. Followers/Henchmen(women): those who are active in the bullying process, though a follower of the main “ringleader” bully(ies);
3. Supporter, Passive Bully/Bullies: those who passively support, condone, collude, or encourage the aggression;
4. Passive Supporter, Possible Bully: those who are unsure of ways to actively assist those who perpetrate the aggression, though they are with those who bully;
5. Disengaged Onlookers: sometimes referred to as “bystanders,” aware of the bullying behaviors, do nothing, often stay away from the incidents;
6. Possible Defender: those who could intervene on behalf of the targets of bullying, but for many reasons may feel disempowered, unsure of ways to assist, fearful of being a target themselves;
7. Defender of those Who are Bullied: those who either work proactively, or actually intervene, defend, and protect the targets of aggression;
8. Those Who Are Bullied, The One(s) Who Is/Are Exposed: the targets of aggression.

One piece of my family puzzle met a tragic end, another partial segment survived. In both instances, the bystanders determined the balance of power: in Krosno, many, though not all, conspired with the oppressors, while in Antwerp, many dug deeply within themselves transitioning from bystanders into courageous, compassionate, and empathetic upstanders in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.

Each day we all are called on to make small and larger choices and to take actions. At a homecoming dance at Richmond High School in California on October 27, 2009, for example, up to ten young men grabbed a 14-year-old young woman who had been waiting outside the dance for her father, dragged her behind a building, and gang raped her for over two and one-half hours with approximately ten witnesses observing. Some even cheered on the attackers. No one notified the police. The perpetrators left the young woman in critical condition.

But then last year during a horrendous traffic accident between an automobile driver and a motor cyclist resulted in the cyclist being thrust under the burning car, a group of stunned bystanders immediately and without hesitation turned into courageous upstanders by joining in unison, with flames raging around them, to turn the car on its end ensuring that others could pull the young cyclist to safety, thereby saving his life.

So which side are we on? This question brings to mind the old truism: “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

Today as in the past, no truer words were ever uttered, for in the spectrum from occasional microaggressions to full-blown genocide, there is no such thing as an “innocent bystander.”

Officials in 17th-century Puritan Boston coerced Hester Prynne into permanently affixing the stigma of the scarlet letter onto her garments to forever socially castigate her for her so-called “crime” of conceiving a daughter in an adulterous affair. Stigmata include symbols, piercings, or brands used throughout recorded history to mark an outsider, offender, outcast, slave, or an animal.

Though Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter is a work of fiction, members of several minoritized communities continue to suffer the sting of metaphoric stigmata forced onto their skin, birth sex, sexual and gender identities and expressions, religious beliefs and affiliations, countries of origin and linguistic backgrounds, disabilities, ages, and so on.

Many overt forms of oppression are obvious when dominant groups tyrannize subordinated communities. Prime examples include the horrific treatment of People of Color under the system of apartheid in South Africa and Black Africans in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the mass slaughter of Jews and other stigmatized and marginalized groups in Nazi Germany, and the merciless killing of Muslims during the Christian “Crusades.”

Many forms of oppression and enforced stigmata (as well as dominant group privileges), however, are not as apparent, especially to members of dominant groups. Oppression in its fullest sense also refers to the structural or systemic constraints imposed on groups even within constitutional democracies like the United States.

Stigmatized groups live with the constant fear of random and unprovoked systematic violence directed against them simply on account of their social identities. The intent of this xenophobic (fear and hatred of anyone of anything seeming “foreign”) violence is to harm, humiliate, and destroy the “Other” for the purpose of maintaining hierarchical power dynamics and attendant privileges of the dominant group over minoritized groups.

On February 26 of this year, George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch leader in Sanford, Florida, shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Martin was walking on the sidewalk talking on a cell phone to his girlfriend and carrying a can of ice tea and a small bag of Skittles when Zimmerman confronted and shot him, and then he claimed self-defense. By most reports, Martin’s “crime” was walking while being Black in a predominantly White gated community visiting family and friends. His stigmata included his black skin and his youth while wearing a “hoody.”

Black parents from all walks of life throughout the country engage with their sons in what they refer to as “the talk” once their sons reach the age of 13 or 14 instructing them how to respond with calm if ever confronted by police officers. Parents of these young men know full well the stigmata embedded into their sons by a racist society marking them as the expression of criminality, which perennially consigns them to the endangered species list.

In the wake of the killing of Trayvon Martin, 32-year-old Iraqi American Shaima Alawadi appears to be the victim of a brutal hate-inspired murder in her San Diego, California home. On March 24, 2012, Alawadi’s eldest daughter, Fatima al-Himidi, found Aalwadi “drowning in her own blood,” beaten with a tire iron. A note near Alawadi bloodied body read, “Go back to your country, you terrorist.”

Today, especially since September 11, 2001, we have seen growing numbers of violent acts directed against Muslims and Sikhs. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) released its 2006 report finding that approximately 25% of U.S.-Americans consider Islam as a religion of hatred and violence, and that those with the most biased attitudes tend to be older, less educated, politically conservative, and are more often to belong to the Republican Party.

During the single year of 2005 alone, for example, CAIR listed a total of 1,522 civil rights violations against American Muslims, 114 of which were violent hate crimes. The report included incidents of violence, as well as harassment and discriminatory treatment, including “unreasonable arrests, detentions, and searches/seizures.” For example, the CAIR report included an incident in which a Muslim woman wearing a hijab (the garment many Muslim women wear in public) took her baby for a walk in a stroller, when a man driving a truck nearly ran them over. The woman cried out that, “You almost killed my baby!,” and the man responded, “It wouldn’t have been a big loss.”

There is an old tradition in our western states of ranchers killing a coyote and tying it to a fence to scare off other coyotes, and to keep them from coming out of their hiding places. That’s what Matthew Shepard’s killers did to him in 1998 outside Laramie, Wyoming. Shepard’s convicted murderers, Russell Arthur Henderson and Aaron James McKinney, smashed his skull and tied him to a fence as if he were a lifeless scarecrow, where he was bound for over 18 hours in near freezing temperatures. The message to the rest of us lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people from these killers is quite clear: stay locked away in your suffocating and dank closets, and don’t ever come out.

We witnessed the brutal attacks on Rodney King in Los Angeles, the barbarous slaying of James Byrd, Jr. in Jasper, Texas, and the fierce rape and murder of Cherise Iverson, a 7-year-old girl in a Las Vegas casino bathroom. And these are simply the most extreme examples of hate-related violence.

We must not and cannot dismiss these incidents as simply the actions of a few individuals, for oppression exists on multiple levels in multiple forms. The killers live in a society that subtly and not-so-subtly promotes intolerance, imposes stigmata, and perpetuates violence. These incidents must be seen as symptoms of larger systemic national problems.

In these times of declining social mobility, and as the gap between the rich and the poor ever increases, dominant groups attempt to divide the dispossessed by pointing to scapegoats to blame. For example, vigilantes sometimes calling themselves members of the so-called “Minutemen” movement target and hunt down anyone suspected of being undocumented.

We are living in an environment in which property rights hold precedence over human rights. In this environment, the political, corporate, and theocratic right are waging a war to turn back all the gains progressive people have made over the years. One tactic they use is to inhibit the development of coalitions between marginalized groups.

For example, on March 26, 2012, the Human Right Campaign, an LGBT civil rights organization, revealed a series of internal documents from the conservative National Organization for Marriage (NOM), which laid out its strategies for restricting the rights of marriage equality from same-sex couples. According to the “confidential” 2008-09 report to the NOM Board of Directors: “The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks — two key Democratic constituencies. Find, equip, energize and connect African American spokespeople for marriage, develop a media campaign around their objections to gay marriage as a civil right; provoke the gay marriage base into responding by denouncing these spokesmen and women as bigots….”

To disengage and reverse stigmata once imposed can be difficult but certainly not impossible. Whenever White LGBT people, however, view Black and Latino/a people through the stigma of criminality, whenever heterosexual Black and Latino/a people view LGBT people through the stigmata of sin and abuse of youth, whenever we view Muslims through the stigma of terrorism, whenever any group views any other through lenses of stigmata, this horizontal stigmatization and oppression only further entrenches the vertical hierarchical power structures.

Metaphorically, oppression operates like a wheel with many spokes. If we work to dismantle only one or a few specific spokes, the wheel will continue to roll over people. Let us, then, also work on dismantling all the many spokes in conquering all the many forms of stigmatized oppression in all their many forms.

In the final analysis, whenever anyone of us is diminished, we are all demeaned, when anyone or any group remains institutionally and socially stigmatized, marginalized, excluded, or disenfranchised, when violence comes down upon any of us, the possibility for authentic community cannot be realized unless and until we become involved, to challenge, to question, and to act in truly transformational ways.

With the ascendency of Barack Obama during the primaries and his election as the forty-fourth president of the United States in 2008 and to the current time, on numerous occasions the media have asserted that the United States can now be considered as a “post-racial” society, where the notion that “race” has lost its significance, and where our country’s long history of racism is now at an end.

For example, National Public Radio Senior News Analyst, Daniel Schorr, during the presidential primaries on January 28, 2008 on All Things Considered noted that with the emergence of Barack Obama, we have entered a new “post-racial” political era, and that Obama “transcends race” and is “race free.”

And according to MSNBC political analyst, Chris Matthews, responding to Obama’s State of the Union message on January 27, 2010: “He is post-racial by all appearances. I forgot he was black tonight for an hour. You know, he’s gone a long way to become a leader of this country, and past so much history, in just a year or two. I mean, it’s something we don’t even think about.”

These commentators and others imply a number of claims in their statements: The first that we have become a “race-blind” or “colorblind” society – that race has become unimportant, that we don’t see “race” anymore. The second implication states that racism (i.e., prejudice along with social power to enact oppression by White people over People of Color) is a thing of the past.

Is the United States now a “colorblind” society? Or even more importantly, should the United States be a “colorblind/race-blind” society? I find the very notion of “race-blindness” as deeply problematic.

Though when we tell another that “I don’t see your race; I just see you as a human being,” may seem as a righteous statement, what are we really telling the person, and how may this come across: “I discount a part of you that I may not want to address,” and “I will not see you in your multiple identities”? This has the tendency of erasing the person’s background and historical legacy, and hides the continuing hierarchical and systemic positionalities among White people and racially minoritized people.

In addition, the assertion that we have fully addressed and finally concluded the long history of racism in the United States with the election of Barack Obama is simply unfounded.

Anti-racism consultant Valerie Batts discusses what she terms as “new forms of racism.” While the Brown v. Board of Education decision (1954), the Civil Right Act (1964), and other judicial and legislative actions have criminalized a number of past realities (for example, slavery, “Jim Crow” laws, lynchings, cross burnings, segregated educational, employment, business, and governmental institutions, and more), many forms of racism continue. While some of these conditions certainly remain today on a de facto basis, Batts lists these “new forms” of racism as “Dysfunctional Rescuing” where White people “help” People of Color” in a condescending and patronizing way believing they can’t help themselves; “Blaming the Victims” of systematic oppression for the oppression itself; “Avoidance of Contact” where White people self segregate in their personal and professional lives from People of Color, and where White people show little interest in learning about the cultures of Communities of Color;  “Denial of Cultural Differences,” the notion of “color blindness,” which minimizes the cultural and behavioral difference among people, which simply mask discomfort with racialized differences; and “Denial of Political Significance of Differences,” in which White people deny the profound impact regarding the social, political, and economic realities of the lives of People of Color.

I add to the list of conditions that perpetuate systemic racism the concept of stereotyping. A stereotype is an oversimplified or misinformed perception, opinion, attitude, judgment, or image of a person or a group of people held in common by members of other groups. Originally referring to the process of making type from a metal mold in printing, social stereotypes can be viewed as molds of regular and invariable patterns of evaluation on others.

With stereotypes, people tend to overlook all other characteristics of the group. Stereotypes of out-group members by in-group members depersonalize them, in effect seeing them largely as members of a group and not as individuals with unique and distinctive qualities and attributes. This often results in the tendency to diminish the humanity of out-group members relegating them to the category of “other,” and as “different.”

Individuals sometime use stereotypes to justify continued marginalization and subjugation of members of that group. In this sense, stereotypes conform to the literal meaning of the word “prejudice,” which is a prejudgment, derived from the Latin praejudicium.

This is the case, for example, in actions explicitly intended as a mockery of Black History Month when a number of institutions around the country a few years ago, and most recently when a group of students at the University of California at San Diego, throw off-campus “ghetto themed parties.” Attendees were advised to come wearing chains, cheap clothing, and speak very loudly, and where female students are urged to come as “ghetto chicks.”

More recently, during the NCAA March Madness college basketball tournament game between Kansas State University and Southern Mississippi, a number of Mississippi students taunted Kansas player Angel Rodriguez with mocking chants of “Your green card! Where’s your green card!,” an obvious racial epithet against a Latino player from Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory.

And now we hear of the alleged murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida by a neighborhood watch leader on February 26. Martin was simply walking on the sidewalk talking on a cell phone to his girlfriend and carrying a can of ice tea and a small bag of skittles when George Zimmerman confronted and shot him, and then claimed self-defense. Martin’s crime: walking while being Black in a predominantly White gated community while visiting family and friends.

We must not and cannot dismiss these incidents as simply the actions of a few individuals, for racism and other forms of oppression exist on multiple levels. These incidents are symptoms of larger systemic national problems.

In their book Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society (Brown et al), the authors show how the concept of “colorblindness/race-blindness” attempts to deny and further entrench hierarchical and deeply rooted systemic racial inequities and privileges accorded to White people that permeate throughout our society.

We must as a society get beyond this false and counterproductive notion of “colorblindness/race-blindness” and confront head-on our past history and current realities of racism and transcend, to use Mica Pollock’s term, “colormuteness” by engaging in honest and open conversations on the impact and legacy of race and racism in our country.

In my continuing quest to understand and make meaning of current political, economic, and social realities, I constantly glance back into historical eras looking for similarities and parallels from which I can draw conclusions and possibly learn from past mistakes we as humans have made. While each era unquestionably poses unique conditions and challenges in many respects, I believe history has enumerable lessons to teach if we are willing to learn.

Though I rarely offer comparisons between events transpiring before and during the ascension to power of the German Third Reich with resemblances to contemporary United States – since to do so could result in trivializing one of the most horrific episodes in human history – nonetheless, I am haunted by certain parallels that demand expression.

I am troubled by multiple similarities between that time not so very long ago with the discourses expressed and events transpiring today, though I want to highlight, in particular, the parallels I see in Nazi portrayals and understandings of sex, sexuality, gender, and gender expression: a divisive and brutal program that was anti-feminist, anti-women’s equality, anti-women’s reproductive freedoms (anti-family planning, anti-contraception, anti-abortion), anti-lesbian, anti-gay, anti-bisexual, anti-transgender, anti-gender nonconforming, anti-sexuality education in schools.

On Women

Alfred Rosenberg, one of the Nazi’s chief ideologues, directed his misogynist outrage against women: “The emancipation of women from the women’s emancipation movement is the first demand of a female generation trying to rescue nation and race, the eternally unconscious, the foundation of all civilization, from decline…. A woman should have every opportunity to realize her potential, but one thing must be made clear: Only a man must be and remain judge, soldier, and politician.”

Englebert Huber, a Nazi propagandist, dictated the “proper” place of women in the Third Reich, figuratively (and literally as well) beneath men: “In the ideology of National Socialism, there is no room for the political woman….[Our] movement places woman in her natural sphere of the family and stresses her duties as wife and mother. The political, that post-war creature, who rarely ‘cut a good figure’ in parliamentary debates, represents the denigration of women. The German uprising is a male phenomenon.”

The Nazis added Paragraph 218 of the German Penal Code to outlaw abortions and establish a national file on women who had undergone and doctors who had performed abortions.

On “Indecency”

In their increasing obsession with “purifying” the social sphere, Nazi leadership enacted the “Decree for Combating Public Indecency,” which included such provisions as working to eliminate prostitution; closing all bars and clubs that “are misused for the furtherance of public indecency” including “public houses solely or mainly frequented by persons engaging in unnatural sex acts” (a.k.a. homosexuals); closing kiosks and magazine stands in libraries and bookshops “whether because they include nude illustrations or because of their title or contents, are liable to produce erotic effects in the beholder.”

Though Pope Pius XII maintained a position of neutrality and rarely spoke out against the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi regime, of which he was roundly criticized in some circles, The Vatican, on April 3, 1933, praised the Reich on this policy:  “The Vatican welcomes the struggle of National Germany against obscene material. The strong measures that Prussia’s Minister of the Interior Göring has ordered for the combating of obscene writings and pictures…have received serious attention in Vatican circles. It will be recalled the Pius XII, in his recent encyclicals, has repeatedly and vigorously stressed that defensive actions against obscene material are of fundamental importance for the bodily and spiritual health of family and nation, and he most warmly welcomes the type and manner…with which this struggle has been undertaken in the new Germany.”

On Homosexuality

The Nazis acted on and eventually extended Paragraph 175, the section of the German Penal Code dating back to 1871 with the unification of Germany: “Unnatural vice committed by two persons of the male sex or by people with animals is to be punished by imprisonment; the verdict may also include the loss of civil rights.”

Nazi ideology rested on the assessment that homosexual (males) lowered the German birth rate; they endangered, recruited, enticed, and corrupted youth; that a possible homosexual epidemic could spread; that homosexuals are “potential oppositionists” and enemies of respectable society; and that sexual relations between people of the same sex impairs their “sense of shame” and undermines morality, which inevitably will bring about the “decline of social community.” Even before taking power, appearing in their daily newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter 14 May 1928, the Nazi party argued:

“Anyone who thinks of homosexual love is our enemy. We reject anything which emasculates our people and makes it a plaything for our enemies, for we know that life is a fight, and it is madness to think that men will ever embrace fraternally. Natural history teaches us the opposite. Might makes right. The strong will always win over the weak. Let us see to it that we once again become the strong. But this we can achieve only in one way — the German people must once again learn how to exercise discipline. We, therefore, reject any sexual deviation, particularly between man and man, because it robs us of the last possibility of freeing our people from the slave-chains in which it is now forced to toil.”

While Nazi ideology and practice rejected lesbianism as well, they did not criminalize same sex sexuality between women, as they had in Germany’s Paragraph 175 of the Penal Code, because they believed that so-called “Aryan” lesbians could produce children for the “New Germany.”

On the other hand, Heinrich Himmler, Gestapo head and chief architect of the Reich’s anti-homosexual campaign, justified his actions by arguing that male homosexuals were “like women” and therefore, could not fight in any German war effort. Subsequently, he conducted surveillance operations on an estimated 90,000 suspected homosexuals, arrested approximately 50,000, and transported somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 to a number of concentration camps throughout the Nazi dominion. Very few survived.

Upon coming to power in 1933, under their Youth Leader, Baldur von Shirach, the Nazis took over all youth groups converting them into Hitler Youth groups. One action taken following consolidation was to eliminate all signs of “homosexual corrosion,” because it allegedly posed a threat to state control by “fostering political conspiracies.” Nazi leaders purged all boys suspected of “homosexual tendencies.” They tried and convicted an estimated 6,000 youth under Paragraph 175 between 1933 and 1943.

Hitler also proposed eliminating all sexual education from the German school system and encouraged parents to take on the primary responsibilities for sexuality instruction within the home.

While the Catholic Church spoke out then and today against same-sex sexuality, their own policies actually boomeranged and hit them in their own faces. Used primarily to silence any potential resistance from the Church, the Nazis conducted their so-called “Cloister Trials” in which they dissolved Catholic youth fraternities, arrested and incarcerated a large number of priests, religious brothers, and Catholic laity in prisons and concentration camps accusing them of being “threats to the state” on fabricated charges of homosexuality. For example, prison guards at Dachau concentration camp murdered Catholic priest, Fr. Alois Abdritzki, one of a number of fatalities from the “Cloister Trials.”

The Patriarchal Connecting Strand

The Nazi regime connected multiple forms of oppression when Heinrich Himmler reorganized the Reich Criminal Police Bureau to centralize operations by creating a national file on male homosexuals, transgender people, what they referred to as “wage abortionists” (women and their doctors), and to monitor the production and ban the use of contraceptives to “Aryan” women. Within this Bureau, they established The Reich Office for Combatting Homosexuality and Abortion, which in the single year of 1938 alone, conducted 28,366 arrests for abortion, and 28, 882 arrests of male homosexuals.

The common thread running through Nazi ideology regarding gender, gender expression, and sexuality was their intense campaign to control individuals’ bodies and the bodies of members of entire communities in the attempts to control their minds.

Throughout history, examples abound of patriarchal domination over the rights and lives of women and LGBT people. Men denied women the right to join political organizations and the vote until women fought hard and demanded the rights of political enfranchisement; strictly enforced gender-based social roles mandated without choice that women’s only option was to remain in the home to undertake housekeeping and childcare duties; women and LGBT people were and continue to be by far the primary target of harassment, abuse, and physical assault; women and LGBT people were and continue to be locked out of many professions; rules required that women teachers relinquish their jobs after marriage; in fact, the institution of marriage itself was structured on a foundation of male domination with men serving as the so-called “head of the household” and taking on sole ownership of all property, thereby taking away these rights from women.

In other words, women and LGBT people have been constructed as second-class and even third-class citizens not merely in Nazi Germany, but today as the current political discourse indicates. But women and LGBT are certainly not victims because through it all, women and LGBT people as individuals and as groups have resisted and challenged the inequities and have pushed back against patriarchal constraints.

I hope, though, that we as a society can learn from the tyranny of the past.

Leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) yet again has come under intense scrutiny recently when Elie Wiesel, renowned author and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize who survived the German Holocaust, publicly requested that presidential candidate and member of the Mormon Church, Willard Mitt Romney, advise his denomination immediately to abandon its practice of posthumously baptizing Jews, many of whom the Nazis ruthlessly tortured and killed during World War II.

In an interview with the Huffington Post, Wiesel said that Romney “should speak to his own church and say they should stop” the practice. “I think it’s scandalous,” he continued. “Not only objectionable, it’s scandalous.”

The LDS Church often performs these baptisms by proxy for the supposed purpose of “saving” Mormon ancestors and members of other faith communities who did not receive baptism while alive. The Church does so without the authority of the deceased’s family members.

An Israeli genealogist discovered the practice back in 5754 on the Jewish calendar (or 1994 on the Gregorian calendar). While researching her family, she uncovered records in the LDS database that the Mormons had posthumously baptized her grandfather, a religiously devout Jew whom the Nazis murdered. She went on to discover that other prominent Jews suffered similar humiliation, including Anne Frank, Albert Einstein, the parents of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, and Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion.

Her discovery at the time engendered justifiable indignation within the Jewish community, and following arbitrations between Mormon and Jewish leaders, led to an agreement in 5755 (or 1995) in which the Mormon Church committed to stop all posthumous baptisms of Jews, excluding those who were direct ancestors of Mormons. When the agreement ultimately collapsed, the two sides negotiated another settlement in 5770 (or 2010) that explicitly banned proxy baptisms of Holocaust survivors.

Elie Wiesel and other Jewish people claim, however, that to this day, Mormons have circumvented all past agreements, a claim supported by Salt Lake City researcher and former LDS member, Helen Radkey, who recently discovered Wiesel’s name and other Holocaust survivors on the LDS database for proxy baptisms. Radkey reportedly found this information on a database open only to Mormons.

But what the Mormons have done, and the twisted reasoning behind it, is nothing new.

Throughout millennia up to the current era, some Christians have represented the Jewish religion — and by implication, the Jewish people — as an immature or intermediate developmental religious stage on the way to Christianity, the so-called advanced, mature faith, and the Jewish Bible as only a prelude to the eventual coming of Jesus and the Christian testaments.

Charles Darwin, in his pioneering book The Origin of Species, published in 5619 (or 1859), posited an evolutionary theory of plant and animal development. Though Darwin himself did not assert this, some of Darwin’s successors extended his ideas to theorize that Jews and the Jewish religion were throwbacks to earlier stages of religious and human development, and even that Jews were not fully human.

Within Darwinian theory we find the concept of continuity and advancement, from animal to human, from savage to civilized. A supposed “Darwinian” model, published in the German magazine Der Schlemiel in 5664 (or 1904), depicted in a four-staged horizontal drawing how the underdeveloped immature Chanukah menorah, symbolizing Judaism, “evolved” ultimately into the highly developed mature Christmas tree, symbolizing Christianity (even though Christians appropriated the symbol of the lighted tree from Paganism).

Throughout the 5680s to the 5710s (or 1920s to the 1950s), Jews, as well as other groups, suffered from institutional restrictions in the United States. A large number of colleges, clubs, hotels, and boarding houses restricted Jewish entry. Signs often appeared on hotels and in hotel newspaper advertisements forthrightly announcing that Jews, people with tuberculosis, and dogs were not welcome.

Hitler and the Nazis used “racial arguments” as the cornerstone of their policies and considered Jews (and most people of color, including people of African descent, and also people with disabilities) as descendants from inferior “racial strands.” Hitler claimed that Germany lost World War I because of their internal enemies: the Jews, who had “polluted” the so-called “Aryan” race.

During the 5630s (or 1870s), some lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives attempted to pass a constitutional amendment acknowledging the supremacy of Christianity. Though the proposed amendment eventually failed, its intended purpose was to acknowledge the supposed supremacy of Jesus and of Christianity.

In 5756 (or 1996), delegates to the annual Southern Baptist Convention in New Orleans passed a resolution (“Resolution on Jewish Evangelism”) committing to put more energy and resources into converting Jews to Christianity: The resolution read, in part: “WHEREAS, There has been an organized effort on the part of some either to deny that Jewish people need to come to their Messiah, Jesus, to be saved;…BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED, That we direct our energies and resources toward the proclamation of the gospel [of Jesus] to the Jewish people.” Many Southern Baptists continue to believe, as do members of some other denominations, that Judaism remains an inadequate religion without Jesus as its central figure.

In fact, I received a brochure in the mail sent to my home in 5757 (or 1997) from a group calling itself “Messiah Today” out of Waverly Hall, Georgia, insisting that I must “see the truth,” in their terms. The brochure went on to argue that, “If you reject Jesus, you do so not because the facts are lacking, but out of a choice not to believe the valid evidence. It is not so much that you cannot believe, but that you will not believe. Whether you will admit it or not, Jesus is the Messiah on whom your eternal destiny rests.”

This claim comprises the central thesis for the apparently oxymoronic “Jews for Jesus” or “Messianic Jewish” movement. Also calling themselves “completed Jews,” they claim that Jesus is the Messiah, that the remainder of us uninformed Jews need to understand, and that by accepting Jesus as THE true Messiah and as our savior, we too can attain completion and salvation.

And who can forget red-meat flinging columnist and commentator Ann Coulter, who infamously declared on the cable CNBC show “The Big Idea” on 29 Tishrei 5768 (or October 11, 2007), hosted by Donny Deutsch (who is Jewish), that Jews need to be “perfected” by becoming Christians, and that America would be better off if everyone were Christian. A stunned Deutsch pressed Coulter further by asking, “We should just throw Judaism away and we should all be Christians?” “Yeah,” quipped Coulter, unfazed.

According to Ashkenazi (European-heritage) Jewish tradition, a newborn infant is named after a deceased relative. I had the good fortune of being named after my maternal great-grandfather, Wolf Mahler, an observant Jew, a good man whom the Nazis murdered along with many of my other family members in my ancestral village of Krosno, Poland.

The thought of anyone posthumously baptizing any member of my family, or anyone for that matter against their will brings up in me a sense of righteous outrage that knows no bounds. I find it unfathomable that any individual or denomination would manifest the unfettered audacity and chutzpah to engage in such cynical, offensive, and yes, oppressive practices and utterances in defense of their worldview and understanding of the Divine.

For me, this is no simple disagreement, but rather, a fight against oppression, and a fight for social justice. I will not permit any religious group to define me and other Jews, to deny us our right of self-definition and self-determination, and to deny us our integrity and our humanity by attempting to prevent us from maintaining our subjectivity, our agency, and our voice.

To Mormons and others I say, while you may find the practice of baptism well and fine for yourselves, and also while you may conceive the practice of proxy baptism as offering some kind of gift from your perspective, speaking for myself, KEEP YOUR PRACTICES OFF JEWISH BODIES AND OFF JEWISH SOULS! You need to curb your proselytizing dog-ma. We neither want nor need your so-called “saving.”  Furthermore, to all others I declare, Jews have already been “perfected,” and we are “complete” as we are.

Though some religious denominations and individuals may continue in their attempts to define us, they will not succeed, for they are fighting a religious and cultural war they will ultimately lose. In the final analysis, their actions only bring disgrace upon themselves and upon their denominations.