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| Barronelle Stutzman, Richland, Washington Christian Florist who declined a same sex wedding commission |
Cyber-Lynching
Christian Grannies Hurts GLBT Acceptance
Barronelle
Stutzman is a 72-year-old florist and great-grandmother in Richland, Washington.
For almost ten years she had befriended and served Rob Ingersoll, one of her
favorite customers. In 2013, Ingersoll asked Stutzman to create the floral
arrangements for his marriage to Curt Freed. Stutzman replied that religious
beliefs prevented her from participating in a same-sex wedding. Ingersoll turned
on the woman who had befriended him, and sued her.
Propagandists
depict Stutzman as refusing to sell a bouquet of flowers to a gay man, or
refusing to allow gay customers to enter her shop. Both allegations are false. Stutzman
knew Ingersoll was gay and sold him many bouquets. But a commission differs from
purchasing readymade products. Artists create original designs in accord with
the event and the client's specifications. Florists deliver the flowers, and
may remain to touch up their work as the event progresses.
Artists
reject commissions every day, and society respects their right to do so. No one
forces haute couture designers to create clothing for women over size 14. No
one forces rappers to create lyrics that celebrate the dignity of women or the
respect due police officers. Stutzman was accorded no such respect. On February
16, 2017, the Washington State Supreme Court ruled against Stutzman. She must
pay the ACLU court costs, estimated to be hundreds of thousands
of dollars.
Stutzman
has received death and bomb threats. Keyboard saboteurs savaged her business on
Yelp. Jeering bullies
dubbing her "Cottonelle," after a brand of toilet paper, stung her
with comments like "her face looks like it caught fire and somebody put it
out with a rake," "Remember, she's just a florist. Hardly an
important cog in the socioeconomic machinery. Just a little bottom
feeder," "a waste of DNA," "she looks like a pig," and
"she's hideous … terrible dye job … kewpie makeup." One internet
poster, targeting her Christianity, wrote, "There was a man who wanted to
be born again, so with the help of his brother, they greased up his mother; and
already he's halfway back in."
Ingersoll
and Freed were not victims. Their "persecution" consisted of getting
back in their car and driving to another florist. Leaving a business that does
not offer the product one wants to buy is not suffering – it is shopping. There
is no benefit in the "solution." Christians will fear GLBT activists.
Libertarians will resent GLBT people exercising 1984 tactics to wield the power
of the state to punish thought crimes. Christian merchants will be forced to
provide products they don't want to supply to customers who don't want to support
Christians. Some merchants, no doubt, may do what oppressed people everywhere
do – they will silently sabotage what they are forced to create, and grudgingly
deliver inferior products as a form of protest. The only winners here are
Christophobia, homophobia, and state-enforced thought conformity.
Over
twenty years ago, I moved to Bloomington, Indiana, to pursue a PhD. As my bus
journeyed through the night, I became increasingly anxious. Mile after mile,
all I saw beside the road were corn and soybean fields and the occasional stand
of forest. I wondered how I would survive in such a remote location. Upon
arrival, I encountered something I had never encountered in any serious form in
my life: homophobia. Indiana University was creating a new center for gay
students, and a local wrote in to the paper, citing Leviticus to argue that
homosexuals should be killed.
As a
Christian, I felt duty-bound to unite with others in Bloomington who were
fighting against homophobia. My first stop was at the St. Paul Catholic Center.
Sister Mary Montgomery put me in touch with many volunteer opportunities.
It is
true that the Vatican condemns
homosexual sex. It is also true that the Vatican condemns
any mistreatment of homosexuals. Many Christians have studied and prayed and
come to understand homosexuality as an accident of birth, no different than red
hair or blue eyes. In preparing my own response to the homophobia I encountered
in Bloomington, I read Christians like Virginia Mollenkot, Bruce Bawer, Mel
White, and John Shelby Spong. I published an essay, "Homosexuality
and the Bible," and broadcast via WFIU, the local NPR affiliate. I
joined PFLAG, or Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, marched and attended
meetings.
Most
of my interactions with fellow PFLAG members in Bloomington were positive and
rewarding. The particular roadblocks I encountered in Bloomington, though, find
echoes in the Stutzman story.
My
stay in Bloomington was an eventful time. In 1998, RCA, a major employer,
closed up shop and moved its 58-year-old manufacturing plant to Juarez, Mexico.
This devastating local loss of jobs was reflected in national news – everywhere
across the "Rust Belt," working class Americans were losing their
livelihoods. This hemorrhaging of jobs and manufacturing might depressed
America's spirits and piqued anxiety – how would low-skill workers make a
living? What would become of America?
In
Bloomington I encountered a kind of poverty that was new to me. One woman told
me she had been born in a house with a dirt floor. I knew a man in his forties
who could eat only soft food, his teeth were so bad. He had no access to dental
care or even dentures. He, like many others in town, was originally from
Appalachia, and had come to Bloomington seeking a university job.
In
1998, Benjamin Nathaniel Smith, a member of the World Church of the Creator,
began distributing fliers in local driveways. The fliers were anti-black,
anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, and anti-Christian. On July 4, 1999, Smith
murdered Won-Joon Yoon, a Korean graduate student, just as the victim was
attempting to enter a Christian church for Sunday services.
Indiana
was once a significant Klan state, and I frequently met locals who told me that
they had friends who were Klan members. Locals often protested when I told them
my Polish-sounding name, calling it "weird." At one job I simply
worked under the name "Sue Brown." When I mentioned that I was
Catholic, people made dismissive comments. For my dissertation, I interviewed
Jewish people in Bloomington. Their stories included being visited at home by
the Klan, receiving anonymous threats, and overhearing comments about "Jew
bastards" and "jewing me down."
Good
people confronted hate with a group called "Bloomington United." Lawn
signs sprouted up. The signs read "NO NOT." Upon closer inspection,
one saw: "NO hate speech / hate crimes NOT in our yards / in our
town." At a Bloomington United meeting, I said, "Why don't the signs
say 'YES YES'? Why don't we say what we are for, rather than what we are
against?" I knew what I wanted my side to read. I was for Christian love,
the Judeo-Christian tradition, Western Civilization, and the Constitution. No
one liked this answer.
In
the discussion that followed, one person suggested that we were for
"tolerance." A man said, "No, I'm not for tolerance. If someone
is a Nazi, I don't want to tolerate that person's ideas." No one picked up
on his comment.
Our
refusal to name what we were for was a weakness. Enemies of the US, from Smith
to jihadis, know exactly what they are for.
Some
university-affiliated members decided that what we were against was the local
"white trash." Ben Smith was often denounced as "white
trash," "trailer trash," or "redneck." In fact,
though, Smith was not from Appalachia or a working class background. He grew up
in affluent
Chicago suburbs, and he was an IU student. Again, our demonization of poor
whites was a weakness.
I
regularly attended gay rights meetings during this period. I felt frustrated by
what struck me as a focus on homophobia in a way that excluded other victims
and other victimization. Many of the leaders of the local gay rights meetings
were economically very well off. They were senior employees of the university,
living in large, comfortable homes in desirable neighborhoods. They had access
to a level of health care, paid vacations and junkets, and job security that
many locals would never experience. It was frankly surreal for me to hear men
who were so blessed insist on what victims they were, and how unique their
victimization was, in a town where the local synagogue required police
protection, low-wage university employees had to make use of a food bank to
make ends meet, and black students had to be warned about reputed "sundown
towns" like Martinsville.
I'm
not saying that these gay people were not victims. I knew that they were. I'm
saying that their laser focus on the victimization of gay people, to the
exclusion of their neighbors who also labored under injustices, wounds, and
frustrations, diminished the group's level of understanding, compassion, and,
yes, their outreach and effectiveness. In the Good Samaritan parable, Jesus
calls us to recognize, care about and address the pain of the other unlike
oneself. It was exactly that parable that prompted me, a heterosexual, to care
about gay people's pain.
It
was especially frustrating when gay men insisted that being gay was just like
being black. It shouldn't have to be repeated: the experience of African
Americans is unique. They were kidnapped, stacked like logs, and considered so
negligible that they were thrown overboard if doing so suited the ship
captain's needs. They were enslaved and their lives were proscribed by Jim Crow
for a hundred years after slavery's end. No, being gay is not just like being
black. And yet Ingersoll and Freed insist on that equivalence. In their amicus
brief, again and again the African American experience is equated with the
experience of Ingersoll and Freed at Barronelle's florist shop. This insistence
on a non-existent equivalence is absurd. Ingersoll and Freed are not Rosa Parks.
They are not Anne Frank. They are disgruntled shoppers who needed to go to
another store that offers the item they wanted.
The
focus on the victimization of homosexuals to the exclusion of the suffering of
members of other groups was manifested in concrete ways. A self-identified
"Christian" group came to Indiana University to protest. They held
signs that were anti-gay, anti-woman, and anti-Catholic. Several protest signs
depicted Catholics burning in Hell. Other signs called women in revealing
clothing "whores." A member of the gay rights group published an
article about this protest. He mentioned only that the group carried anti-gay
signs. He never mentioned the anti-woman or anti-Catholic signs.
It
wasn't just the gay groups that focused on their own sense of victimization,
and refused to acknowledge others' victimization. An African American campus
official told me that he made it his business to make sure that funds coming to
the university for diversity and tolerance went to African American programs,
and not gay rights or women's programs. He insisted that because one could not
differentiate between gays and straights on sight, but could differentiate
between blacks and whites, that black suffering trumped gay suffering. White
women were merely whiners, beneficiaries of white privilege, and deserving of
no funds.
I
found this competition for pity, and the refusal to acknowledge suffering
outside of one's own identity group, or even the complete lack of awareness of
that suffering, to be distasteful and counterproductive. I see it in responses
from many gay people to Barronelle Stutzman. I have not seen a single post from
a gay person expressing any compassion about what this case is doing to a
72-year-old woman, or the long-term impact on the cherished Western ideal of freedom
of conscience. Rather, I see post after post that strike me as a sort of
internet version of a lynching party. Each poster competes for a more extreme
level of vitriol.
These
posts are full of "NO NOT." Clearly, the posters don't like
Christians or Christianity, or what time does to a woman's face. But what are
they for? They are not for liberty. They are not for the Constitution, whose
first amendment guarantees freedom from state interference in religion.
I
have not seen posts recognizing that if the state can force Stutzman to violate
her conscience, it can force anyone to violate his. I have not seen any posts
acknowledging that attacking someone's personal and professional life are
overkill for the "crime" of exercising one's personal conscience. It
would have been easy enough to protest Stutzman's decision with a boycott. No,
a boycott was not punishment enough. Her home, her good name, her sense of
wellbeing, her livelihood and her faith must be destroyed.
Another
factor that frustrated me in my attempts to be supportive of gay rights was the
Sisyphean steeplechase, or infinite series of litmus tests. It was a ritual,
and it worked like this. Each encounter offered the chance for one person to
test the other to see if his commitment to gay rights met current requirements.
Perhaps this person was a closet homophobe. He must be tested before he could
be accepted. For some, the test was a blunt instrument. If you were a
Christian, you were a homophobe. You could never be offered intimacy or respect.
No similar test was applied to Muslims. Muslims were defined as victims of
Christian bigotry, and therefore comrades in arms.
The
tests could be more subtle. If you said you were proud of your "gay
son" you probably didn't really love the boy because you called him your
"gay" son rather than merely your "son." On the other hand,
if you called him your "son" and not your "gay son," you
were probably in denial, and robbing him of his true identity. Even the word
you used to identify same-sex attraction was suspect. "Homosexual,"
"gay," "GLBT:" none of these terms were merely innocent
syllables. They each carried with them the potential for a show trial.
No
one ever passed these tests. You donated money? Not enough. You attended
rallies? Not enough. You contacted legislators? Not enough. Did you ever
"misgender" a trans person? Did you ever tell a joke someone objected
to? Did you ever diss a Gay Pride Parade marcher's costume? You were always one
step away from being exiled as a hater, a bigot, a homophobe. Such an
accusation might destroy your career or leave you friendless. No matter. You
had to live your life with the blade of a guillotine constantly suspended above
your head. You knew that anything you did or said that might signal less than
complete dedication to the group's agenda, whatever the group's agenda was at
any given time. It was never enough simply to disagree. One had to renounce and
repudiate the holder of heterodox views. You could never experience the embrace,
the safety, of true intimacy; you could never experience truly being accepted
as a human being. Rather, any acceptance or friendship you were offered was provisional.
You were acceptable – on a probationary basis – as long as you marched in step
with the group. Barronelle Stutzman has discovered this. A man she befriended
for a decade turned on her.
I saw
other gay people ruin friendships over these infinite purity tests. Why? I
suspect because identifying themselves as victims was key to their identity. A
victim requires a victimizer. If no one was actively victimizing you, you had
to invent persecution. You sacrificed friendships to do so.
I
cherished my friendship with "Tom." He was an active member of the
gay rights group and a beautiful human being. At least one other member of the
group, "Bob," hated Tom. Tom was plump, and he was pale. This was the
Midwest: there were plenty of plump, pale men in the group. Tom, though, at
meetings, would not talk about how the straight world tormented him. Tom talked
about how gay male culture humiliated, devalued, and isolated him because he
was overweight and did not have chiseled features. Bob hated Tom for this.
Tom
was openly, actively gay. He was also a Christian. Tom contracted a terminal
illness. He would come to meetings much thinner, and bald. He smiled and
insisted that the latest treatment was working. His death was slow and painful.
Even as Tom was dying, Bob spread malicious gossip about him. Bob said that Tom
was dying because he was a Christian, and his faith poisoned his soul so much
that it was killing him. Bob's Christophobia was especially ironic in
Bloomington, given that we held most of our gay rights meetings in local
churches.
Some-not-all
gay rights' activists turned to Christianity as the source of all their woes. On
April 13, 2012, sex columnist Dan Savage, addressing a student journalism
conference, condemned what he called "the bullshit in the Bible about gay
people." Savage's attack is the tip of the iceberg. Ingersoll and Freed's
attorneys blame Christianity for slavery, white supremacy, and misogyny. Their amicus
brief is a single-minded slander against Christianity.
In
fact, of course, Christianity significantly liberated women (see Rodney
Stark). Christians, marshalling Judeo-Christian scripture – "Let my
people go!" – ended slavery. The Civil Rights Movement was a
profoundly Judeo-Christian phenomenon. Taylor Branch's
Pulitzer-Prize-winning, three-volume biography of Martin Luther King is aptly
titled Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, and At Canaan's Edge. These are, of course, allusions to the central
narrative of the Old Testament; God liberating his people from slavery. William
Wilberforce, a Christian, was key in ending slavery. Other traditions, the
Confucian, Hindu, and Islam, for example, are much more comfortable with slavery
and race and gender hierarchies than the Judeo-Christian tradition has ever
been. The Muslim Slave Trade dwarfed, in territory, number of enslaved persons,
and duration, the Atlantic Slave Trade. The Hindu Caste system has limited the
lives of more victims than both slave trades combined. Yes, sexists and racists
have often cited Christianity to support their crimes, but so did Andrea Yates.
No one cites Yates as an exemplar of Christian thought. The sexists and the
racists lost the historical battle, and the liberators won. One will not learn
any of this from Ingersoll and Freed's lawyers.
Christianity
is not the source of homophobia. There are other likely suspects. The people
who bully gays, the people who beat them up in high school and make their lives
miserable, are, largely, alpha males engaging in atavistic hierarchy-building
rituals. Gay men have not taken on alpha males with anything like the energy
that they have invested in destroying septuagenarian florists. It's easy to see
why. Gay men fetishize alpha males and masculinity. It's hard to attack your
sexual fantasy. It's easier to go after grandma. Popular culture, including the
Christophobic, atheist kind, is drenched with homophobia. Famously atheist and
Christophobic Bill Maher regularly tells sodomy-or-fellatio-anxiety jokes. A
Tribe Called Quest, praised for their anti-Trump performance at the February
2017 Grammys, are one of many popular music performers who use homophobic
lyrics. It would be impossible to detail here the utter hypocrisy around gay
activists' cowardice when it comes to Islam.
After
I left Bloomington and retired from active work on gay rights, I changed my
mind about gay marriage. I was very surprised when I changed my mind on this
matter, and also surprised by what changed my mind. It had nothing to do with
religion. I left Indiana and began living in a majority-minority city. I passed
housing projects inhabited exclusively by African American welfare recipients. I
saw fit, young black men smoke marijuana, inject heroin, and loiter on garbage-strewn
streets. I obsessed on what hurt my black neighbors and students, fifty years
after the passage of Civil Rights legislation.
I
researched and discovered a raft of material supporting the assertion that the
presence of the biological father in the home is accompanied by numerous
benefits to the child, and the absence of the biological father is associated with
harm. Too, the Cinderella Effect was not mere folklore. Non-biological parents
are more likely than biological parents to abuse children. It astounded me that
I had previously been completely unaware of this scholarship. In retrospect I
can see that my liberal professors and largely liberal media would not be eager
to publicize it. After all, "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a
bicycle," and only mindless bigotry would suggest that a nuclear family
offers something that no other configuration can. I came to agree with
conservatives like Walter E. Williams, Shelby Steele and others that efforts to
help black people actually hurt them. Social engineering subsidized
single-parent households. White liberals undermined black marriages. Black
people suffered.
I
found other reasons why it made sense for society uniquely to cherish its
definition of marriage. The concept of marriage as a chosen union between an
adult male and an adult female united by love and respect is something special.
In many other cultures, marriage can occur between an unwilling female of any
age, including infancy, and an adult male, and between one male and many
females. The Koran recommends that husbands beat their wives. These concepts of
marriage are already influencing American society. In 2010, a
New Jersey judge declined to issue a restraining order against a Muslim man
who raped and tortured his arranged bride. The judge's rationale was that the
husband's abuse was consistent with his Islamic beliefs.
I
continue to support gay people's right to form unions of love and mutual
financial dependence. I respect, but don't agree with, the Supreme Court
decision on same sex marriage, which is now the law of the land. If I were
Barronelle Stutzman or Jack Phillips or the wedding photographers or venue
providers who had been approached by a same sex couple, I would have been
honored to be chosen. I would done my job with the same joy that I would bring
to any ceremony. But I'm not Barronelle or any of the others, and I respect
their right to act in accord with their conscience.
Let's
turn back the clock. It's March 1, 2013. Rob Ingersoll and Curt Freed are in
their car, just after Barronelle Stutzman has declined to provide flowers for
their wedding. They are hurt and they are wondering what to do. As gay men,
they know what it's like to be disrespected. They know what it's like to be
forced to assume attitudes that violate their integrity. They do not want to
use their hurt as excuse to add more hurt to the world. Barronelle is their
friend. They will invite her to their wedding. They will invite her to their
home for dinner. When Christmas rolls around, they will give her a book by a
gay, Christian author using Christian scripture to argue for full acceptance of
gay people. Slowly but surely, with time, they will bring her around. At least
they can hope for that. The hope that they can make the world a better place
through love brings a smile to their faces and warms their heart. They start
the car and drive to another florist.
Danusha
Goska is the author of Save
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