The Crooked Line
Figleaf at the not always safe for work Real Adult Sex had this to say:
Although it’s been many years since I was a member I grew up in that church. My youngest brother’s ashes are there. The last time I went, last year, my father introduced me around, so proud that I’d come back. I don’t know everyone who was injured but Greg McKendry, an usher, who died trying to push the gunman out of the way was a good friend of my fathers. [snip]
The church has been a bit of a lightning rod in town ever since it’s foundation in the 1950s, from their sex education and comparative-religion Sunday school programs, their anti-war stances, their provision of sanctuary for refugees, their tolerance for the divorced, for feminists, for paganism and wikkans, for alienated or expelled members of a panoply of faiths, and more and more since the 1980s, for the LGBT community.
Unitarians in the south are kind of goofy, a little hokey (and often more than a little honkey), and often clumsy when it comes to all the nuances of progressive language. But in the regional sea of intolerance (in which local conservatives like Glenn Reynolds are sunk so deep they think their hands are dry) they’ve been a small, scrappy island of progressivism and a religious refuge for people those who aren’t welcome anywhere else.
My dad told me today that local right-wing and evangelical radio have lately been blasting the church over the “pro-homosexual agenda” embedded in “coded words” on the rainbow sign out front. The coded words? “We Welcome Everyone.” My dad said not everyone in the congregation had been enthusiastic, some were (rightly it turns out) fearful and some merely reluctant to “go that far,” and so the discussion to put up the sign was long.
[Update: After conversation with other family members it sounds like there had been an even more recent, contentious vote to put up a second sign saying that LGBT people were *specifically* welcome, which to some congregants would be seen as divisive for suggesting, at the least, that some of society's "outcasts" are more welcome than others. It was evidently this recent, not-at-all-coded sign that had all the 'wingers screaming, um, bloody murder. --fl]
In the end they voted for it as they have for so many controversial stands, and they stood for it, and now some have paid for their sweet, sometimes reluctant but always sincere faith and tolerance. I’m so sad and so proud of them.
Sara at Orcinus:
We are an odd group, we Unitarians.
Conventional wisdom says that we’re soft in all the places our society values toughness. Our refusal to adhere to any dogma must mean that we’re soft in our convictions. Our reflexive open-mindedness is often derided as evidence that we’re soft in the head. Our persistent and gentle insistence on liberal values is evidence of hearts too soft to set boundaries. And all of this together leads to a public image of a mushy gathering of feckless intellectuals that somehow lacks cohesion, backbone, focus, or purpose.
You can only believe this if you don’t know either the history or the modern reality of Unitarian Universalism. The faith’s early founders, Michael Servitus and Francis David, were executed for the radical notion that belief in the Trinity — which excluded Muslims and Jews — should not be a requirement for participation in 16th century public life. Four hundred years later, in the same part of the world, other Unitarians died in concentration camps for having the courage of their humanist convictions. Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother from Michigan who was killed by the Klan in the days following the Selma march in 1965, was one of ours, too.
And then there are the thousands of us who lived to fight another day — surviving not because we were weak and indecisive, but because we were unshakable in our convictions and unwilling to back down out of sheer cussedness. That Unitarian-bred belief in the nobility of the human spirit was the spiritual foundation on which a plurality of America’s founders found sure footing as their convictions crystallized into revolution against tyranny. It fueled the passionate oratory of Daniel Webster, the wisdom of Ben Franklin, and the incisively clear writings of Tom Paine. It sent Paul Revere out into the cold of an April evening, and set Thomas Jefferson to the task of writing a Declaration. It recklessly bet the church’s entire existence — and the lives of its leaders, who willingly and knowingly committed a capital act of treason — in order to publish the Pentagon Papers.
Unitarianism and Universalism lit the spark of progressive change that drove Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Julia Ward Howe to organize for women’s rights. It sent Jane Addams, Dorothea Dix, Albert Schweitzer, and Clara Barton forth to bring health and hope to the poor. It gave voice to poets from Whitman to Plath to cummings, novelists from Dickens to Melville to Vonnegut, and musicians from Bartok to Grieg to Seeger. It fueled the boundless imaginations of Bucky Fuller and Rod Serling and Frank Lloyd Wright. It kept Christopher Reeve alive and breathing and working for his causes. I still hear it crackling hot and fresh every time UU-bred Keith Olbermann goes on one of his trademark rants.
These are not fearful people. Nor do any of them seem to be bedeviled by a lack of conviction. “Mushy” or “feckless” are about the last words I’d use to describe any of them. (”Stupid” isn’t anywhere on the list, either.) When you sign up to become a UU, this is the legacy you take on, and from then on attempt to live up to. It’s not God’s job to make the world a better place. It’s yours. This has never been work for the faint of heart, mind, or spirit — and in this era of conservatism gone crazy, it still isn’t.
Although some folks in the blogosphere have drawn a direct line from the eliminationist rhetoric of many right wing bobbleheads and the shooting at the UUA church in Tennessee, I believe the line is crooked.
From the Knoxville News:
Adkisson targeted the church, Still wrote in the document obtained by WBIR-TV, Channel 10, “because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country’s hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of media outlets.”
Adkisson told Still that “he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement that he would then target those that had voted them in to office.”
Adkisson told officers he left the house unlocked for them because “he expected to be killed during the assault.”
Inside the house, officers found “Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder” by radio talk show host Michael Savage, “Let Freedom Ring” by talk show host Sean Hannity, and “The O’Reilly Factor,” by television talk show host Bill O’Reilly.
The shotgun-wielding suspect in Sunday’s mass shooting at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church was motivated by a hatred of “the liberal movement,” and he planned to shoot until police shot him, Knoxville Police Chief Sterling P. Owen IV said this morning.
Adkisson, 58, of Powell wrote a four-page letter in which he stated his “hatred of the liberal movement,” Owen said. “Liberals in general, as well as gays.”
What little I’ve read about the shooter, he sounds depressingly like an adult version of the school shooters who have so obsessed our media in the last decade. It’s difficult for me to read any account of his life and not see him as one of those life long sadsacks who can’t ever get it right. I read one account which described his fundamental cracker barrel parents deciding he “needed the Lord” and dragging him off to church. His ex-wife had a restraining order against him. He was unemployed and faced with having his foodstamp allowance reduced. And (to borrow a phrase of Pastor Dan’s at Street Prophets), he marinated in extremist rhetoric that identified “liberals” as the root cause of all of America’s problems. Jim David Adkisson’s life seems to have been a toxic stew of failure, instability, bitterness and anger all looking for an outlet.
David at Orcinus writes:
Now, MSNBC is reporting this morning that Adkisson targeted the church because of its liberal politics. A four-page letter police recovered, according to Knoxville police officials, referred constantly to his “stated hatred for the liberal movement.”
Right-wingers love to “joke” about mowing down, rounding up, and otherwise “wiping out” all things liberal. It’s become a standard feature of conservative-movement rhetoric. And whenever anyone calls them on it, they have a standard response: “Aw, c’mon — it’s just a joke!”
The church shooter just needed an outlet for his misery. It’s fair to argue that the Malkins and Coulters and Savages and Limbaughs of the world painted a target on the backs of Adkisson’s victims, but, and have a culpability for creating an echo chamber of bitterness and rage that gave shape to his rage. That his actions were predictable doesn’t make them inevitable. Of all the places to attack a church seems least likely. Why not the local Democratic party HQ or a campaign office? Why not some edifice of the liberal media? Why of all places a church during the performance of Annie?
To me, these questions make the line crooked. Yes, the bilious spewing of Michael Savage and Sean Hannity and BillO gave shape to Adkisson’s hate and misery but they did not create it. The path through his wrecked and ruined heart was crooked, twisting and indirect. It twisted and turned and doubled back on itself. He found in the venom of the right wing nothing more than the vessel to hold his fury. That he latched onto it and lashed out comes as no surprise. But had he not found the ravings of conservative demagogues, he’d have found something else that would have directed his aim. Only the time and place had to be chosen. We may not ever know what sent him over the edge at the moment he plunged. It may have been as simple as someone saying “No” when he asked her on a date, it may have been as big as hearing we was losing his house. But the time and the place were never sure. The event itself might have been avoided.
The lines through the human heart are never straight ones. And for someone like Jim David Adkisson, the lines are expecially crooked.
