Date: Mon, 21 Aug 1995 12:02:03 -0500 From: mohr richard d "Mel White and Civil Disobedience" by Richard D. Mohr (March 1995) Who would have thunk it. A conservative gay clergyman is jailed for civil disobedience -- an assimilationist who had regularly chastised the gay community for flamboyance, counseled gays to be good by straight standards, and who garnered national media coverage by assuring straights of their superiority, declaring that gay people would never choose to be gay if they could change to being straight. As an act of civil protest, this man sat for nearly a month in a barren isolation cell of a Southern prison, refusing bail and set on a hunger strike for the sake of moral awakening and gay justice. Could this be a new day for gay politics? I hope so. After refusing on Valentine's day to leave the Virginia Beach, Virginia headquarters of the Christian Broadcasting Network, MCC minister Mel White was arrested the next day for trespass. He was attempting to meet with "700 Club" host, Pat Robertson, his former boss, to discuss the possibility that the televangelist's misleading and inflammatory statements about gays are contributing to the upsurge of gay bashings and murders across the country, especially in the Bible Belt. Given White's conservative credentials, his disobedience -- law breaking -- comes as a surprise, if a pleasant one. For usually gay conservatives treat anything that smacks of activism, let alone protest, as unseemly, even dirty. Direct action, they hold, spawns nothing but resentment, divisiveness, and mainstream backlash. Following in the steps of Booker T. Washington rather than of Martin Luther King, Jr., gay conservatives seek reform only through private conversation and quiet example. In the past, they have been quick to accuse gay activists of being self- centered media queens who childishly act out by acting up; and this is what Robertson claimed of White -- that his protest was simply a self-centered, attention-grabbing media stunt. Hardly. Civil disobedience is the purest principled manner in which to assert dignity in politics, for it puts one's interests imminently at risk for the sake of what is right. In it, one puts one's well-being, indeed one's body, on the line to prompt the broader culture toward a recognition that current law and custom is unjust. Civil disobedience registers in the political process an intensity of feeling and commitment which cannot be measured through the ballot box. Unlike violence or terrorism, "passive" civil disobedience nudges majoritarian politics without coercing it. It impels but does not compel. It appeals to and activates a latent moral sense in the general population, a sense not otherwise stirred. By breaking social convention in a principled way, civil disobedience probes whether society's specific rules, however entrenched, in fact reflect society's overarching general values. Gay civil disobedience coaxes the nation toward extending to gays its commitment to liberty and justice for all. It is morally odd, but understandable, that gays, even progressives, have not to date seen civil disobedience as a regular part of gay politics. Committed to business-as-usual politics, nembers of the gay mainstream, as represented by NGLTF and the Human Rights Campaign Fund, have regularly miscalculated our nearness onto justice. They have tended to think that gay justice lies just around the corner. If that were so, they would be right to think that civil disobedience is an inappropriate blunderbuss, since then only the finest details of the new social contract would remain to be drawn. But they are wrong. The lightning storm over gays in the military should have revealed to these folk just how mistaken they have been about the amount of social, cultural, and political progress gays have made. By contrast, gay progressives, like ACT-UP and Queer Nation, though they have shunned business-as-usual politics in favor of confrontation, rowdiness, and a refreshing openness, have not usually framed or carried out their direct actions as civil disobedience. Rather, progressives have conceptualized their acting up, even when it entails law breaking, as street theater and agit prop. Under the sway of academically-inspired moral relativism, the gay Left has only been interested in trying to seize the social discourse, which in turn (they suppose) will seize for them social power. They view consciousness raising and moral awakening as benighted efforts. But they are wrong. Even if civil disobedients do not achieve their desired political aims and reform social power, civil disobedience is still warranted and worth doing -- for the disobedients' own sake. When society systematically degrades gays and thwarts gays from achieving individual dignity, gays are still free to attain some of that dignity denied. We do this by putting our happiness on the line as a means of valuing and respecting ourselves and by making the sacrifices through which honor and presence are certified and sanctified. Eventually Robertson broke down and met with White. The moral witness worked. But even if White's local goals had failed, his action and courage would remain a bright exemplar for us all. -30-