But I couldn’t let them do that to me and humiliate me anymore. I couldn’t let them win just because they think it’s their duty to rid the world of lesbians.

Mary Stephens, a women’s basketball coach from a small town in rural Texas,was fired from her position because of her sexual orientation. Parents within the community accused of her of ‘converting’ their daughter and suggested that while they might like her as a person, supporting one lesbian would be tantamount to endorsing a larger homosexual agenda, including gay adoption.

Stephens’ case has been settled out of court and parents in Bloomburg, Texas, can sleep easily at night, knowing that their daughters are safe from the ever dangerous gay missionaries.  But her case demonstrates how effectively the conservative right has coopted the feminist movement’s “personal is political” doctrine.  

Conservatives have effectively positioned individuals as symbolic of and responsible for larger political agendas.  It becomes impossible to support one woman, who coached a small-town team to regional championships — the stuff Hollywood movies and President Bush’s favorite book, are made of — because to do so would be to also support what has been painted as anti-Christian, anti-family, and anti-American.   The only connection existing between a high school basketball coach and gay adoption is one of political punditry. While fear of homosexuals in schools has often been an undercurrent in American education, historically that fear was based more in fears of predation, rather than perceived support of a liberal political agenda.

Seeing people not as individuals but symbols of ideology is a dangerous and limited line of sight.  This is nowhere more evident than in the current political fracas surrounding President Bush’s judicial nominees.  Senator Bill Frist is currently preparing for Justice Sunday, a telecast depicting the Democrats’ threatened filibuster as a campaign against people of faith.  While Senator Frist has previously appealed to the Democrats for compromise, appearing in an evangelical broadcast alongside Chuck Colson and Dr. James Dobson casts a new light on his willingness to promote dialogue.

As a society, we are slowly moving towards an understanding of racial and ethnic identity as multi-hued.  Our understanding of religion, instead, has grown ever more narrow and sharply defined and politically based.  Without a willingness to see individuals within both the “the people of faith” and those outside of that group (The people without faith? The faithless?), we cannot move forward in the Senate, the judiciary, or our communities.

llouison