President’s Day weekend I was invited to be the guest Minster at Charleston’s Unitarian Church.  I took advantage of this to see some of the local sites including Boone Hall Plantation.  I chose Boone Hall because it is one of the few plantations where the buildings in which enslaved people lived are still standing.  This is a picture of one of them.

Now this building is not typical: because it was for house servants it was made of brick, which is why it is still standing, and is nicer than the typical dwelling was.  But before you think these folks were stylin’ keep in mind that up to 18 people might have been housed in one of these buildings.

For me there was something about standing inside of one of these structures and knowing that, for generations, people were born, lived, and died here, with no hope of freedom, with constant fear that their family members would be taken away and sold so that they would never see them again, knowing that the profits of your labor went to enrich others and not yourself, but  who somehow still got up in the morning and kept going, still had families and loved them, still found joy.  It gave me a renewed appreciation for the strength of these people.  I don’t know that I would have been so strong.

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“Cleveland Browns quarterback Brady Quinn was part of a group of men shouting insults at gay passers-by outside a Columbus bar early on New Year’s Day, according to a 9-1-1 call made to police.  The call at 2:35 a.m. came from Seth Harris, who reported… ‘I just walked outside and he exchanged many profanities with me and called me a faggot, of course’.”

Los Angeles Times, 2/13/08 (note: the student, Larry King, has subsequently died)

Coincidence?

I think not.

The path to engaging in anti-LGBT violence starts early for young men in American society.  You prove your manhood by first not being a homo and then further prove it by beating up on homos.  It’s apparently what All-American boy – boys like Brady Quinn, a good Catholic Midwestern boy who went to a good Catholic Midwestern college where he was (literally) an All-American football player — do.

When events like a school shooting occur, we often want to believe it is some horrific, out-of-the-norm happening, the act of a deviant person, not the inevitable product of a culture that turns a blind eye to bigotry until it is too late.  But any one who’s paying attention can see these events coming from a mile away.  First of all, there’s the plain old fact bullying and harassment based on sexual orientation and gender expression are two of the three most common in American schools (the other being that based on physical appearance), according to the 2005 Harris/GLSEN report From Teasing to Torment.  This isn’t news to eight graders in Oxnard, who witnessed the bullying of their gay classmate daily.  They also witnessed the inaction of adults.  And they got the message that this inaction sends for, as the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel put it, “Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

But it’s easier to say that it was one bad kid, or that somebody was just drunk, or that “boys will be boys.”  That way, we aren’t to blame.  I’m sorry: that’s bull, and it just doesn’t fly.  When 40 state legislatures refuse to pass laws that make it clear that bullying based on sexual orientation or gender identity is just as illegal and unacceptable as that based on race or religion, they must take some of the blame.  When school boards vote to remove such categories as sexual orientation from their policies (as Ohio’s did just last year), they must take some of the blame.  When harassment occurs at schools and school staff do little or nothing about it (which is the case in 83% of anti-LGBT incidents, according to the 2005 GLSEN National School Climate Survey), they must take some of the blame.  Yes, Brady Quinn and the unnamed eighth grader who shot his gay classmate yesterday must take responsibility for their actions.  But we must take responsibility for our inaction, which is what made their actions possible.

Let’s stop shifting the blame and take responsibility for a culture that teaches All-American boys it is fine to harass and even shoot LGBT people.  Then maybe we will have a few more truly good kids coming out of our schools.

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