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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

Olympics

By

Raise a Fist: On Saluting the Humane

Real peace is more than the absence of war. Rather, we need to change the culture, situations, and systems that lead to violence. —American Friends Service Committee

Five years ago

I’m sitting behind the bar of a House of Representatives committee room, Washington, D.C. It’s a mark up day, when the committee meets to comment on, pass, or dismiss amendments to new legislation. Bills have to survive this gauntlet before they can get to the floor of the House for a vote.

On the agenda today is the 2009 edition of the federal hate crimes bill. The bill is named for Matthew Shepard, beaten to death and chained to a fence in Wyoming, and James Byrd, Jr., chained to a pickup truck, dragged, and decapitated in Jasper, TX. But it includes sexual orientation and gender identity as well as race and religion, so some quarters of the House are in full opposition mode. I breathe out through my mouth quietly.

I look away from the representatives and into the public section of the room. Two women sit about 7 meters to my right, visibly wincing while Congressmen grandstand for the press and lob zingers they and their staff hope will hit the following day’s headlines.

Claiming to want to protect fetuses, and veterans, and elderly women, and clergy, but not “sexual deviants,” representatives propose to exclude pedophiles from the bill (as if they are germane), change the law’s name to the “Thought Crimes Prevention Act of 2009” (as if individuals’ thoughts are under legal attack), and protect pastors’ speech (as if the bill will make it illegal to be a vocal Christian).

None of these objections are based in fact. All of them smear LGBT people and incite religious fear against them.

Present day

Uganda passed its anti-LGBT legislation in December; Nigerian LGBT people now risk 14 years in jail for social meetings; and the Russian government has prohibited “propaganda” about LGBT people. The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, progress under that cloud of protest and dismissal.

I snuggle with blankets on my couch watching a young Czech snowboarder tear up the hillside with 540° rotations and incredibly clean landings. I watch her wipe out before she can skate into the finals; she cracks her helmet and bounces down the hill like a Cabbage Patch Kid. She isn’t harmed. Twitter directs me to LGBT-supportive protest commercials from Canada and Norway. The Norwegian clip already has over 2.2M views; the Canadian one, 4.6M.

1968, Mexico City

It’s five years after President John F. Kennedy is assassinated, three years after El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X) is assassinated, and the same year that Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated. South African apartheid is in full swing. Adventist racially separated conferences are 24 years old, and so is my mother.

Two Black US track Olympians, John Carlos and Tommie Smith, stand on the winners’ podium in Mexico City and salute human rights while their national anthem plays.

Their protest is reported instead as a “Black power salute” and the photos become iconic. The American public is outraged.

Three medalists standing on the winners' dais. Left, a White Australian, center and right, two black Americans. The Americans each have their fists high in the air. Two white officials stand below them.
John Carlos and Tommie Smith raise gloved fists at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. Australian Peter Norman wears an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge in solidarity with them. (Photo credit: AP)

The year before this photo is taken, John Carlos (right) and Tommie Smith (center) form the Olympic Project for Human Rights, a group that protests US segregation, South African apartheid, and racism in sport. Several American and non-American athletes also support this group, including Australian sprinter Peter Norman, who wins the silver medal in their 200m race and joins Carlos and Smith on the stand.

Carlos and Smith are vilified for “making sport political.” Few accept that sport already is political, that silence is political and indifference is political, and speaking up or acting up when one has the privilege to be seen or heard is the least a person can do to honor their conscience.

Present day

The Nation asks Carlos whether he would do the Olympic protest again. “If I had to stand tomorrow, I would stand tomorrow,” he says. “The only regret you have is that you didn’t have a whole bunch of people around you standing out doing the same thing. You know, that’s what made me stand out: it’s because so many others chose to take the low road as opposed to the high road.”

The same month this interview is posted, a triad of older, unmarried Adventist men presents a 6-part series at a church youth conference on the “dangers” of homosexuality. One tells the audience, “If we allow homosexuals to bring their lovers into church, and we start letting them teach Sabbath school, you’re allowing demons to come in with them and to engage with your children.”

This is present day. Not the mid-1960s.

Last week

On my way back from Riverside, CA, during Superbowl weekend, I stop in Salt Lake City, UT. One of our aunts has terminal cancer and we visit with her for a few days. By her chair is a copy of the latest Adventist Review. I’ve written for the world edition of the Review before, so I pick it up and leaf through.

A few pages in, under “evangelism,” is a hagiographic write up of that same youth conference. The section on the sexuality series tells readers that the triad “offered attendees insights about reaching out to homosexuals… [and] described how the church can both uphold biblical truths about sexuality while reaching out with compassion.”

I return the magazine to the side table.

Present day

With everything else that’s happening, it takes a few days for my awe to rise. When it does, Twitter hears me first.

When some church members start asking GYC to withdraw the presentations, I download all 6 sessions. I don’t know if they’ll bother to pull them. Instead I worry about the memory hole sucking away evidence that we’re not playing at victim, that we’re not imagining being called the child-endangering hosts of demons in 2014. I want there to be proof, not just my word, about what church-promoted speakers say and what they mean when they speak.

Later, with friends, I process. And I realize that I’m not objecting to the triad’s tone. I’m objecting to their content.

I don’t care whether they’re smooth or strident, genteel or ungracious. I care that their teachings explicitly and intentionally demonize the LGBTI community, and I care that the church endorses that demonization by doctrine, policy, and promotion. It bothers me that it takes the phrase “under the control of demons” to spark the same awareness that euphemisms like “not in God’s will” and “contrary to God’s plan” trigger for LGBTI Adventists at home and in churches all year round.

Like acid on iron, the church dismantles heterosexual people’s ability to see God’s unblemished image in non-hetero people as non-hetero people rather than as “broken” or “deceived” straight souls who need to “turn around” [repent]. The church selects non-hetero people to front its corrosive messages for it while it spreads the word in other ways.

A raised dark-skinned fist with multi-colored bangles around its wrist and forearm.Perhaps if I were younger and less weary, I might foresee a time when there’s no serious Adventist debate about the full humanity and unblemished God-image of LGBT people. I’m uncertain about seeing that vision manifested in my lifetime. And it’s true, as my friend Daneen Akers says, that “we don’t all have to agree” about this. No one has to accept my full humanity if for whatever reason they feel they can’t.

But if we’re going to be in relationship, then because I’m not a sitting duck, there’s a baseline. Supremacism damages the supremacist just as much as it damages me, but even if the supremacist never objects, I must. I stand, saluting natural, human, humane rights—including my own.