No Doubt About the Link Between Gays and Global Warming (Says the Pope, While Wearing a Dress)

I went to a Catholic grade school. Many of my teachers were nuns. The nuns were a group of women with different personalities who were, generally, educated, travelled, and dedicated to justice. I was drawn by the sisters’ stories of other places, other struggles and their life of reading and contemplation. I benefitted from their tireless committment of their teaching. I liked that, even when,by the second grade, I was almost (but not quite) sure I didn’t believe in God, I was comfortable expresing that doubt while still developing a deeper belief in living and working in the service of others with passion and conviction. Certainly though, I was insulated. In a small town. In a small school. I certainly did not live in the Bronx, which is the setting for “Doubt”.

Last week, Tefere and I went to see “Doubt” It was a good movie. Great actors. Excellent performances. Doubt is set in 1964 and is about a nun who confronts a priest who she suspects of abusing an alterboy who is a student at the school of which she is the principal. One aspect of it that I thought was interesting (and I haven’t read or seen the play so I don’t have that comparison) was the portrayal of St. Nicholas—a school that is seemingly a world onto itself. The school was an almost-prison full of potential and hope, seemingly disconnected from the world beyond its walls. Doubt is like a part of the set. Doubt is a wall, constructed to allow the school-world to rub against the Bronx, for curriculum to be changed and developed, for the penguin-suited nuns and steak-eatting priests to struggle with power and hierararchy on a set closed to the outside world.

Doubting the audience ability to deal with a school-world removed from the Bronx or, more likely, hyper-cognizant of the public embarressment over the Catholic Church sexual abuse cover-ups, Shanley brings the outside world into the school with a literal metaphor when a cat catches a mouse in the school. He also uses weather. Rain and thunder and whipping winds rattle windows and scatter leaves. Oh yes, Shanley reminds us, the weight of the world is not doubt but certainity. The awful feeling that doubt has led you to certainity.

For me, the most powerful scene in the movie takes place outside the school. Sister Aloysius walks with Mrs. Miller, the mother of the boy (the only black boy in the school) whom the sister suspects is being sexually abused by Father Flynn, the church’s new priest. The scene is powerful because more than overwrought weather or cat-and-mouse antics, the school-world and outside world rub against one another and crack and leak and everything is much more complicated than we thought. All our prejudices and beliefs are in play, and the stage of doubt expands.

In the conversation between the Sister and the mother, we learn that Mrs. Miller also knows, the way mothers know, that the relationship between Father Flynn and her alterboy son may not be appropriate. We, too, learn that the Miller boy is “inclined” toward gay-ness. Mr. Miller is enraged by his sons sexuality. Hence, Mrs. Miller tells Sister Aloysius that her son just has to make it through June (the end of the school year and his last year of grade school) because getting sexually abused is better than being killed by your father. Cat-and-mouse and nasty weather were certainly a much more straight-forward intrusion of the outside into the the school-world than this scene. Now, in the embodiment of this runny-nosed domestic worker/ mother we movie-goers are positioned to view many forms of oppression systematically working together. We suddenly feel uncomfortable in our seats and wonder “where is this going?” We are less powerful, more doubtful, more helpless. The movie-goer wonders: Might I have to confornt my own rape? What about homophobia at my church? The violence in my home? What is my responsibility in all this? We don’t want to think about such things while chomping popcorn at the theater on a Friday night.

Yet, think we do. Homophobia, and homophobic opprenssion, have taken a special centrality in California in the past couple of months. Let’s take a little heuristic jump from the big screen to the ballot box. On November 4th Californians passed Proposition 8 that amended that state constitution to narrow civil rights for gay and lesbians couples by defining marriage as only being between a man and a woman. There was much activism by black pastors to pass Prop. 8 in an election year when many progressive and “change” candidates won public office. Post-election polling showed that in communities of color where Barack Obama won overwhelmingly, so, too, did Proposition 8 pass overwhelmingly. What does it mean to elect a black community organizer as President and, at the same time, vote to use the constitution to remove civil rights?

It is interesting that during the Bush administration and the uncovering of the sexual scandals in the Catholic Church, we also witnessed a disproportionate number of homophobes in postions of power who were likely to be gay and closeted (some of whom were uncerimoniously un-closeted in places like airport bathrooms). Not since I saw Tony Kushner’s excellent stage-outing of Roy Cohn in Angels in America, a play that connected homophobes and red-baiting to poltical realities of post-Regan America, had such a sad and funny and poignoint inquiry into sexual politics unfolded before my eyes.

Now, not to be outdone, the Pope, has come out comparing the effort to save the planet with sancticty of heterosexual sex. Pope Benedict said that just as the earth, water and air are gifts from God, so to is the intended role of man and woman. Neither the rainforest or hetrosexuality should be destroyed. Quite the dialectic your holiness! Looks like the Pope checked out popular opinion polling, and, accordingly, the pontiff made his talking points. He argues that marriage between a man and woman is objective and logical, and, just like nature, it is valuable. If the rain forests and straight-sex have implicit god-given value, than gays well, you just gotta fend for your value-less selves.

Hopefully we won’t wait for a Pope to help alleviate us of doubts that we are connected to the planet in a more wholelistic way, that we are ecologically derived. Such a wholisitic view might just lead one to think that gays and lesbians should have civil rights. I doubt we can afford to ignore the needs of one another and exploit each other for too much longer without suffering together (though some much more than others) disasterous consequences. Just like the weight of certainity on Sister Aloysius’s shoulders, doubt can lead to a conviction of non-belief that challenges the open secrets keeping our ecological St. Nicholas intact. The crisis of our environment, derived from the same economic “values” the Pope gave to straight-sex and rainforests, need to be confronted with certainity by all of us, including organizers and forward thinking nuns and black ministers. (And a few “out” staff people or appointees from the Obama team would help too) .

~ by jenniferbadgley on December 26, 2008.