April 30, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

The best ways to kill

Sr. Helen Prejean, a member of the Congregation of St. Joseph, is the face of Ministry against the Death Penalty and author of Dead Man Walking and The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions.

She has been mobilizing people to take action against legal executions in the United States for more than forty years, and was honored for her humanitarian activism four years ago at one of my local churches.

Sr. Prejean has been among the most vocal opponents of judicial killings during Arkansas’ recent Easter spree. As I mentioned earlier this month, the state of Arkansas initially scheduled a grip of executions for the fortnight after Easter Sunday, and the governor and others had acknowledged that their haste was due at least in part to the pending expiration of one of the execution drugs.

The United States has killed about 1,400 people as part of legal sentencing since 1976, and most of the stories of those executed don’t draw international attention.

But a few do. Troy Davis’ execution in 2011 did. The Arkansas executions have. And the popular debate about justice, judgment, vengeance, and efficiency in killing has been reignited once again.

What’s the best way to kill someone? Injected chemicals, electrical shocks, gassing, a broken neck, a firing squad’s bullets? Should we be regretful?

The first time I ever performed a series of verbal arguments on this topic was in my London high school’s English class. England refined death by hanging as its chief method of legal execution, but had begun outlawing it just thirty years before I was born.

Our entire class analyzed and debated one of the last cases that British courts applied capital punishment to: the murder trials of Derek Bentley and Christopher Craig.

Both Bentley and Craig lived locally to my school, and Bentley was hanged in 1953. He and Craig had planned a robbery and been caught in the attempt. Bentley didn’t shoot at any policeman but Craig did and two died. Bentley was convicted anyway over an ambiguous comment to his accomplice.

Forty-five years later, the courts overturned his conviction.

Of course that ruling and pardon came too late for him.

“The death penalty, if it is to be opposed, must be opposed in all circumstances, regardless of the crime or whether the offender is rehabilitated,” Australian journalist Steven Raeburn wrote in 2015. “Do we oppose all judicial killings, or only when we empathize with the convicted, or they have shown sufficient remorse & rehabilitation?”

I’ve been asking these questions of friends both in terms of state punishment and in terms of the theologies that lie under many of their responses.

After all, if our God is a god who kills, we’re made in that god’s image and can look for reasons and methods to imitate his efficiency!

That’s not the path of reasoning I’m willing to choose for myself. I think Sr. Prejean is right to challenge the death-dealing the US allows more than thirty states to do in the name of goodness, orderly community, and the honoring of moral law.

The Ministry against the Death Penalty value statement puts it like this:

We believe in the dignity and rights of all persons and recognize that government-sanctioned killing and the practice of torture is a violation of those rights and a denial of human dignity… We are committed to promoting compassionate alternatives to the death penalty, including restorative justice and funding for victims’ services. We believe that the criminal justice system in the United States disproportionately affects poor people and people of color. We believe that prison reform and the abolition of capital punishment will support necessary systemic change.” —MADP

Donate to join Sr. Prejean and MADP in their work. New Orleans’ giving day is May 2 and you can schedule a contribution to support them ahead of time.

April 7, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Deciding when to opt out

One of the hardest things for a typically accommodating personality to do is decide who not to spend energy talking to. I’ve had to do it a few times over the last decade, and it’s not been something that’s ever felt good to me, not while I’m in the midst of it.

Choosing not to respond to “comment bait,” comments designed to provoke, or choosing not to engage Just Asking A Question™ means choosing to opt out of unproductive or [passive-]aggressive interactions.

It allows you to exert effort where it might bear fruit and not fritter it away where others don’t or can’t value it.

The advocacy world’s movable middle concept is one way to organize the decision of stepping into a conversation or stepping out of it.

Any given controversy will have supporters and detractors. Both groups will likely have fixed ideas and be difficult to persuade or even hostile to information that contradicts their opinions.

There will also be a third group, the “movable middle.” This group, typically described as “moderate,” includes people who, whether they’re inclined to support or critique, don’t have fixed ideas, are open to persuasion, and will receive new information if it’s framed accessibly.

It’s that movable group that’s going to be most open to change, and therefore it’s the group that may be most worth engaging.

Moderation doesn’t always yield great social outcomes, but progress can’t happen without the people who resist extremes of ideology or certainty and take moderation as a core value.

October 20, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Why I write (Also, thank you)

Last fall, I spoke to the Society of Adventist Philosophers about how the Adventist community handles “the word” and how our commitments to literacy and logos influence our approach to informing, persuading, and communicating.

Working on that paper sent me trekking through the library of Plato, especially the Phaedrus dialogues where Socrates and his interlocutors explore what the new art of writing might mean for older forms of rhetoric and other arts, like memory.

Socrates here is a writing skeptic, and we know this only because his student Plato frames him as such in writing. Because of Plato, we get to enjoy Socrates, even if our dear teacher once thought we’re not “the right sort of people” because we write:

In the garden of letters, [he who knows the just and good and honourable] will sow and plant, but only for the sake of recreation and amusement; he will write [thoughts] down as memorials to be treasured against the forgetfulness of old age, by himself, or by any other old man who is treading the same path. He will rejoice in beholding their tender growth; and while others are refreshing their souls with banqueting and the like, this will be the pastime in which his days are spent.” —The Phaedrus

Thousands of years post-Plato, we’re still writing things.

More: I’m writing. A descendant of a people once explicitly barred from writing and other language arts is writing. I’m writing a lot, stretching my ability, testing my discipline, hoping that I improve in the process, trusting that the people who most need the Word behind the word will catch it in these words.

I write for so many reasons.

At the top of the list: I write because I can. I’m feeling a rush of gratitude to my parents who conspired to teach us writing for information and writing as craft. My mother made Mummy Writes What I Remember journals for my siblings and me, and she sat with each of us almost daily, recording what we could recall until we were old enough to train our attention and write our memories for ourselves.

Mum’s diligence meant that I was writing well before I went to school: no later than the age of four. A decade later, my father let me loose on his calligraphy set, reviewing my attempts to form pretty letters. I didn’t train long enough to master the art, but it hasn’t stopped me from seeing writing as a craft and not a mere utility. Thanks, Mum. Thanks, Dad.

Next on the list: I write because I should. Writing has been part of almost every job and trainee role I’ve ever held: legal assistant, opinion writer, editor, teaching assistant, parliamentarian, editor again, graduate assistant, policy writer, grant writer, rhetorician, technical communicator, still-an-editor, researcher, contractor, fundraiser, program manager, writer-who-speaks-too, consultant and business owner, communications coordinator, and program director.

Writing is the tool I use to cast visions and reshape organizational matter at the levels of the work unit and the funding request. I use it to articulate what my colleagues and I are all about, to imagine what more we can become together, and to connect us with the communities around us.

Writing is also the tool I use to recover from organizations behaving badly. Whether I write privately or publicly, writing is my means of making sense of the insensible and nonsensical so I can still show up at the common table open-hearted. I don’t mail every letter or send every email—thank God—but I still write!

And finally: I write because I must. About a month ago, I shared with one of my communities how societal silences shaped my early sense of who I was and how I fit into my ethnic, religious, and national cultures. I wrote about growing up not seeing my whole self in the mirror of these cultures; I wrote about what it has meant for me to discover affinity communities as an adult through fictional and nonfictional literature. Writing, others’ writing, allowed me to encounter them and therefore encounter myself.

Today, writing is how I carve my own reflection into my cultural mirrors. Writing is the way that I reshape that early story and make new endings out of it. Writing is what I offer the world, no matter what, in the hope that young ones as young as I once was will have at least one more reflection in their mirrors, one more token of their peer group and the communities beyond the kin they can touch.

I write because some of you still want to read. I also write regardless of whether any of you ever want to read.

But I’m glad that you do read.
Thank you.

March 4, 2014 By Keisha McKenzie

Time to Speak Up

"Where are our LGBTI voices? — A new meme asks “Where are our LGBTI voices?” at the GC’s summit on gender and sexuality this March in Cape Town, South Africa

As I wrote last year, the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists has planned a global summit on gender and sexuality for March 21-24 this year. The summit falls under the planning authority of Elder Pardon Mwansa, a GC vice-president and chair of the committee on “alternative sexuality practices” [sic] that will report to the church in session in 2015. He has been receiving a great deal of feedback on this summit far more graciously than most.

Despite recent criminalization initiatives in Nigeria and Uganda that were influenced in part by US-based Christian evangelicals and received limited on-continent pushback from local or international Adventists, the General Conference decided to host this meeting in Cape Town, South Africa. South Africa is one of 9 African nations that has embedded anti-discrimination principles in its law, but it also has a disturbing culture of sexual violence against women, especially women known or assumed to be non-heterosexual.

The summit schedule and presenter line-up has now been released and several observers have wondered how the global church can gain from excluding so many participants from a conversation that already affects them.

A Possible Approach to Conversation

I know several more people who have met with attendees or plan to do so ahead of the summit. If you’re among them, reflect on and/or pray about your approach before you do. I offer you a few items you might consider to help guide your thoughts:

Concerns: What most concerns you about the summit given what you already know? What are you hearing from SDA Kinship, from the Seventh-Gay Adventists film community, and other sources? Believe Out Loud published an article on this today too; are your questions being answered? If not, what other questions do you have?
Goals: What do you think the church wants to accomplish with the people it intends to gather? What might the church worker you reach out to be able to tell you about the denomination’s goals? What questions might you have about whatever they tell you?
Your Own Story: What’s your personal stake in what happens at the summit? Does your contact already know about it? If not, how might you share your story with them in a brief, but relevant way? What about your biography and experience do you most want them to remember when they go to all the sessions at the summit and/or vote on any statements that result from it?
This Friendship: How do you plan to keep in touch with this person after you talk? What if you might be able to share with them over the long term, no matter what their opinions are right now? Would that continued relationship be meaningful to you? If so, how can you let them know?
Overall: Simply enjoy being one human sharing conversation with another: you and this person, regardless of their organizational status, are peers. Enjoy their company as much as you can and consider that they may be even less at ease with the conversation than you are! Whatever is said, however it’s said, offer them grace.

Climate Concerns

The climate for workers at the General Conference hasn’t been too open in the last few years. Some have shared with me that they feel hyper-monitored or even repressed because of informers and backlashes. They don’t want any drama; they want to keep working and serving, so they guard what they say to colleagues and church members, especially in sensitive cases like this. This is one of a few possible adaptations to a surveillance subculture.

In this climate, should you have the chance to speak to a church worker, please do whatever you can do to show that you want to keep their confidences and honor their willingness to discuss freely with you. Also, the denomination is quite comfortable framing the “issue” in terms of arguments and decontextualized text debates. If conversants refocus their discussions on real people, their lives, families, and consciences instead, that’s likely to produce more effective and more humane outcomes all round.

My Thoughts

To be sure, as an individual, I have very strong opinions on the arguments and the last 40+ years of research and experiential evidence, and I continue to pursue my own inquiry about the subject. I could argue confidently about this with family and friends, but for the last several years, I’ve chosen not to. I don’t see these debates as a good use of my time or energy or as beneficial for the people involved in them. The Backfire Effect is real.

I also don’t accommodate these debates for the same reason that I wouldn’t debate a White supremacist about ethnic segregation. I don’t accept the core premise that the mainstream’s “approval” or “agreement” is required or appropriate in this case. If they don’t own the “standard” from which Others deviate, they also have no authority to police it.

We are each born into this life and come to know ourselves as one of billions. We’re not responsible for the demographic categories we occupy. We are responsible for the quality of relationship we nurture with people in and beyond those categories. That’s what guides me.

What about SDA Kinship?

As far as the SDA Kinship membership goes, I think there is an incredible, mostly latent power in its stories and in how widely members’ stories vary. I don’t think Kinship should respond to the denomination’s Single Story about LGBTI people (“Not a category of their own, just a broken, maladjusted subcategory of us!”) with a Single Story of its own (“Just like you, but with a twirl!”). At minimum, SDA Kinship is an LGBTI group and not just a “gay” one; not all members remain Adventist today—some have been chased out of membership and others have voluntarily moved on.

But beyond these basics, the organization shouldn’t agree to tell a Single Story because it’s not the Borg. It thrives because it isn’t. Members have different experiences, different beliefs, different approaches, and different strengths to bring to the organization’s table as well as to the commonly held table of their church. The under-acknowledged fact is that LGBTI people have co-built, co-funded, and co-staffed the Seventh-day Adventist church from its founding days and continue to do so. They don’t serve the church to claim any special stars in their crown; they serve because of their religious convictions and beliefs in improving the world and witnessing through healing work. For decades, LGBTI Adventists have worked alongside heterosexual members to advance the church’s mission regardless of those heterosexuals’ marital statuses—whether they are unmarried, married, or remarried, whether they are content, struggling, or suffering. And this will always be true.

The diversity of the people who have co-created the church as it stands today—that is what I think makes SDA Kinship such a powerful continuing witness to the mainstream, mainstreaming SDA church. Variance makes learning possible, but we have to be open to that variance in order to draw its best out of it. I do hope the church learns to listen to its own diversity: listening is a holy act, and not listening isn’t sustainable.

Fortunately, the church will have plenty of opportunities to choose new directions for this and similar conversations in the near future: Kinship’s community and its growing cloud of witnesses and advocates isn’t likely to fall silent, and the LGBTI Adventists around the world won’t disappear.

It’s time to start learning; it’s time, they say, to speak up.