Dan Savage: "Minnesota Has a Real Problem"

Dan Savage writes, "Minnesota has a substantial problem . . . ."

And Steve and I are questioning why this is the case (since it seems to us Savage is right here), following our recent experiences with his home in Minnesota, about which I blogged some days back.

Savage is writing nearly a dark story-the suicide of two teenage girls, Haylee Fentress and Paige Moravetz-in Minnesota recently. There is manifest that the girls were experiencing bullying, and that the bullying included slurs about sexual orientation. Dan Savage points out that the Minnesota Family Policy Council has sought to stop anti-bullying programs in the state's schools.

As I've noted in several postings in the preceding year, one Minnesota school district, Anoka-Hennepin, has seen a pile of suicides of youths, some of them clearly attributable to bullying premised on sexual orientation. In my postings about this, I elaborate the difficulties I encountered when I participated in a national movement to bid on administrators of that school zone to deal with the bullying proactively and assure protection to students being bullied.

And so Dan Savage's conclusion, which strikes Steve and me as well-founded, given our recent (and ongoing) experiences with some members of his staunchly Catholic family who decline to accept him and our relationship as a gay couple, and who do not scruple to let us experience this at every turn: Minnesota has a substantial problem. Steve and I spent a sound bit of time yesterday on a long Easter ramble round a lake in a ballpark with our friend whom we've visited for Easter, discussing why that job happens to be there in his native state.

And hither are approximately of the conclusions we've reached:

Minnesota is a land that's pretty decisively divided betwixt the large urban population of the twin cities in the south, and the relief of the state. The balance of the land which is largely rural, dotted with small towns interspersed throughout agricultural regions . . . . "The cities," as people in Steve's northwest corner of the country say, have the reputation historically of being progressive, culturally vibrant, education-focused. That's less the face with the repose of the state, much of which, in Steve's view as a native, pretty well justifies the acerbic picture of its small-town culture painted by another native son, Sinclair Lewis, in novels like Main Street: closed-in, suspicious of outsiders, repressive, defiantly certain that its small-town mores reflect (or should reflect) the principles by which right-thinking people anywhere in the universe live.

As Steve points out, however, the duality between progressive cities and the remainder of the land is first to wear down as more and more mass from the rural areas of the state settle in the twin cities, bringing those small-town mores to the cities themselves. Many members of Steve's own folk have settled there, in his contemporaries and the generation before him. Someone's voting for Michelle Bachmann, Steve points out-a voice whose congressional district begins just on the outskirts of the suburbs ringing the northern border of Minneapolis-St. Paul.

And Steve thinks he knows who some of those "someones" are: they're people from towns like his, including some of his relatives, who love the suburban life of the cities while fearing those who dwell inside the cities themselves, who are apt to be from all sorts of backgrounds and cultural origins, who are often progressive in their politics, who don't necessarily buy into the small-town mores of lots of the sleep of the state.

The dynamic that governs the thought of many of the residents of the thriving suburbs around the twin cities is not unlike that plant in suburban areas of many growing cities in the U.S. the urban centers provide jobs and many other opportunities for those living in the suburbs. But the suburbanites are often fearful of and unwilling to keep the urban centers from which they draw their incomes. And so they vote their fears, resisting taxation that might, in their imagination, go to support unsavory others in the cities, others who may be ethnically, politically, culturally, and religiously different from oneself.

Steve thinks many people he knows who have stirred from his portion of the country to the twin cities would most surely be in Michelle Bachmann's camp, because she knows how to hack into those visceral fears of the other. And she's Republican: she is a member of the party their priests and bishops have taught them, in one way or another, to ballot for, because it's God's party. And she's staunchly anti-abortion-standing on God's face in one of the two issues that those same priests and bishops have told these good Catholics are the only issues to be considered as they form their political consciences.

It seems undeniable to Steve and me that the Catholic church plays a regressive role, in key respects, in Minnesota politics and culture right now-and that function is on full display in its resistance to same-sex marriage and in the church's refusal to treat the number of intimidation of gay youths in schools. As numerous postings on this blog indicate (click on the label "Minnesota," if you need to cover these), we followed the Minnesota bishops' political meddling in the autumn elections in 2010 with fascination and consternation.

To us, it was very clearly that the Catholic bishops of Minnesota intended to make the gubernatorial election last come to the Republican candidate Tom Emmer, if they could perhaps do so, and this is why they produced an expensive video attacking gay marriage and sent it to every Catholic family in the state. The fight against gay marriage has sharpened in Minnesota in recent years, due to Iowa's enactment of civil union for same-sex couples, and this ratchets up the purpose of the Catholic leaders of Minnesota to reject gay marriage. The determination of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Us to have openly gay, partnered clergy adds further push to the bishops, as they follow their anti-gay agenda.

The Catholics bishops of the country are driven to use gay issues (and so gay people and gay lives) as a rally place for their pastoral leadership in the state: to attack gay citizens of the state, in one way or another, in place to make points for the political party with whom they have put their lot. For devout Catholic families like Steve's, the result is dismal.

What the Catholic leaders of Minnesota have established in many Catholic families about the land is to set family member against family member, brother against brother and sister. The pastoral leadership of the Catholic bishops of Minnesota has enabled self-righteous cruelty within many Catholic families, in which class members who deny to have their gay brother, sister, aunt, uncle, son, daughter, etc. feel not only entitled to exclude, but obliged to do so. They think they are doing a holy thing when they approach their gay family members.

That is the ultimate signal given by the anti-gay marriage video the Minnesota bishops mailed to every Catholic family in their state last fall. It is a point several members of Steve's own solidly Catholic family have received, and on which they mean to act with ugly statements about how their children want to be sheltered from the gays-even from gay uncles and aunts-so that they can get up as they should, righteous and devout, free from the taints of the evil secular world that is loss to sin in a handbasket.

Minnesota has become, for Steve and me, a character report in the purpose of Catholic leaders at this stage in story to flex their church into a mean machine. We're aware-and very grateful-that not all Catholics in Minnesota or elsewhere buy into the rhetoric of meanness. We keep the livelihood of about of Steve's Catholic family members.

At the same time, we cannot help seeing the ugly, the savage, cost of the political decisions that the Catholic bishops of Minnesota (and in the U.S. as a whole) have made, with their determination to attack gay marriage (and gay people and gay lives). We see the price in our own lives, as we treat with yet another condemnatory letter followed by yet another spate of vituperous emails and phone messages, reminding us of who owns God and Catholic truth, and who needs to think that he's on the outdoors and not receive as a good member of a good Catholic family.

And it seems to us crystal clear that these attitudes, which are actively fostered now by the Catholic bishops of Minnesota, are, indeed, part of the mix of the harshness that results in bullying of gay youths. Youths who then end up killing themselves, while some Catholic parents inform their own gay and lesbian family members that everything they do as they shut their gay loved ones is about protecting their own children from the contamination of homosexuality . . . .