We Are All God's Children

I watched a Frontline special the other night on PBS. It was about Jim West, the former mayor of Spokane, Washington. I remember hearing about his dilemma at the time, on TV and the internet. I remember wondering why he just did not quit, like so many other disgraced Republicans had.

After hearing the whole story, I see why he fought so hard to keep his job. I ended up feeling sorry for this man who never really had a chance at a true and happy life.

Here was a man born into a conservative part of his state, who became a Boy Scout leader, then a sheriff's deputy, then a state legislator, then mayor of Spokane. All the while just doing what was expected of him. Going along in the state house when his fellow Republicans proposed anti-gay bills, but never leading the charge.

Shortly after becoming mayor, he discovered that he had colon cancer. This triggered a deep self-examination, as such traumatic events often do. Realizing that he had suppressed his sexuality for his entire life, he began logging into gay chat rooms, with the hope that he may actually meet someone.

Somehow, one of the guys he regularly chatted with realized that he was the mayor of Spokane. Being a good liberal he immediately went to the local paper with the story. They, in turn, set up a sting operation, posing as a seventeen year old boy. They tried baiting him into meeting up with their decoy, but he didn't take the bait. It was not until he was certain that the boy had turned 18, that he agreed to a meeting.

While all this is going on, he does offer a few of the guys he met online unpaid internships at city hall. I think he is so socially underdeveloped, that he is like a high-school boy trying to get people to like him. Even though he is in his fifties, he has never really had any experience with gay relationships. Coming out that late in life, he was like a long-distance runner shackled by years of suppressed emotions.

By the end of the show, he is recalled as mayor, then exonerated by the FBI of any wrongdoing in public office, and then he dies of colon cancer in July of 2006.

People called him a hypocrite, a child molester, a disgrace to his office. He does not come off as an especially likeable or attractive man, but nonetheless all too human. Another man destroyed by society's expectations. If only he had been allowed to live a free and open life as gay man, he may have found the joy that loving another human being can bring.

To think he only had one or two gay sexual encounters during his entire life. Those in the back seat of a car in a dark alley. Here lies a man who never got a chance to really live his life, something so many of us take for granted. God rest his soul.

The Comfort of Faith

I remember well the comfort that faith brought me in my youth. The certainty that the world was a black and white place gave me solace through many years of struggle. It wasn't until I started college that I began to doubt anything that I was taught by the Lutheran church.

The remarkable thing was that it was my college girlfriend who made me start thinking about just how much religious dogma flew in the face of logic and reason. See, the dangers of the heterosexual lifestyle? Yes, I had a girlfriend in college, I think most gay guys did, in the early 70's.

Sometimes when I see all that is going on in the world, I think back to those days when I found so much comfort in my religion. God had an answer for everything, no matter how illogical, all you had to do was believe. That was not too much to ask, for all the happiness it brought me.

Now I see people dying in horrible, senseless ways, and I suffer with them. I ask God, and myself, why did this happen. Where is the joy of Christ's love and understanding when two men go into a party store and beat a 73 year old man to death for chump change. My heart just aches with the horror of it all. I want to live in the well-ordered world that was promised me in my youth. Through 12 years of parochial school education I knew what the world was all about. How good would always triumph over evil, how the light of God would always shine through.

Now I am in my fifties struggling to understand the meaning of life and the reasons why we all must die some day. Things could be worse, I could be Ted Haggard and know the world is a very gray place, but have to live my life as though it wasn't. Who knew that when he became an evangelical minister he had to take the hypocritical oath, telling his flock to do as I say, not as I do (shades of Jimmy Swaggert).

Getting back to my point, about faith. God gave us free will, which brought along a whole list of benefits and things that are not so beneficial. If God had just left us as we were in the Garden of Eden, we would be doing okay. Everything would just be peachy keen. I am sure God had a very good reason for giving us this free will thing. I just haven't figured out yet what it is. If you have any ideas, please let me know.

A Sea Change

Well, it looks as though America has finally woken up. Even I was surprised, on Thursday, when the Dems actually took control of the Senate too. Here in Michigan the Dems took control of the House and barely lost the Senate. No one saw that coming either.

What does it all mean? That's what I would like to know. It seems like in the Senate races all the Dems had to lean right to get elected. What will that mean in a senate whose margins are so tight? Any kind of help for gays is surely not on the table, or for abortion rights. We will probably see a minimum wage bill passed, though.

How about that vote in Arizona??? I guess we are getting to the stage in our development as a country that not every state will vote against gay marriage, in huge margins. Outside the south it seems that the margin of victory for the right-wing is getting smaller. The south will always be a unique country unto itself. If the mountain states turn blue, then maybe the Dems have a chance for a permanent majority in Congress.

In the city of Ferndale, Michigan, voters passed a law giving gays equal rights in housing, employment, etc. And by a very wide margin. This after the city had voted down the same law twice before, also by wide margins, in 1997 and 2000. Maybe people really can change.

All the pundits are saying that the gay marriage issue is starting to soften with the electorate, so that maybe in 10 years or so we can vote out all these constitutional amendments that were voted in in so many states. A recent national poll showed that nearly 70% of Americans knew someone who was openly gay. I am sure that that has made us less of a frightening specter to the great unwashed. Unless, of course, the gay they know is Carson from Queer Eye.

Now my prayers are going out to Rev. Haggard in Colorado. He must become an ex-gay with the whole world, and his flock, watching. It still saddens me to think that in this day and age a man must live a lie to be accepted and esteemed in the evangelical world.

I have been smiling for several days now, just thinking how the impossible actually happened. The Dems won control of Congress. Oo-wee...