Christians Must Stop Disguising LGBTQ Exclusion as Religious Freedom
By: James Finn
Tags: LGBTQ, Religion, Equality, Military, Workplace

I once worked beside a man who could have destroyed my career (and maybe my life) with a snap of his fingers. That he didn’t testifies to the power of pluralism, to respect for diversity, and to Christian love of neighbors. His behavior highlights a growing crisis facing the U.S. as conservative religious people fight legally to maintain privilege and destroy pluralism.

Let me explain.

Writers joke all the time that at least their mothers will read their work if nobody else will. But what if your writing was classified Top Secret and restricted even from most people with clearances?

And what if your masterpieces were boring as hell … by design?

When I was a young man just a few years out of college, that’s exactly the writer’s nightmare I lived in. I worked in West Berlin as a Soviet Air Defense specialist in the Air Force, and my job was — despite being super hush-hush and “espionage-ish” — dry as toast.

Much like in academia, military analysts like me had to “publish or perish.” Get papers accepted in intel-community journals or forget about promotion.

At least my office wasn’t boring!

The six of us were young and full of energy and jokes. Our boss, whose only mark of privilege was having the biggest desk, was older than us but barely over 30, an Air Force captain who I pegged for a lesbian minutes after meeting her.

She had a wry sense of humor that set the office tone.

My desk abutted John’s. He was the office dark horse, quiet and serious. Even though he was my age, I couldn’t relate to the responsibilities he shouldered with a wife and two small children. He almost never joked around with the rest of us, and I didn’t get to know him at all.

One day, after I got a paper accepted somewhere, I literally danced around the office. The captain laughed, and a colleague (who everybody thought was gay but wasn’t) jumped up and tangoed with me.

“Drinks on me at the club!” I whooped. “Don’t worry, I’m gonna make Harry pay for all mine.” Harry was the base civilian public affairs officer, a rather obviously gay man everyone in the office knew I was having an affair with.

I never shut up about the affair because I was proud of it. Harry was older, sophisticated, and at least in my little world, powerful. He’d asked me to be more discreet, but with the arrogance of youth, I felt invulnerable.

When I sat back down, John was hard at work, bent squinting over a report. He stood and walked over, setting my just-published paper down in front of me. Almost whispering, he said, “I found a mathematical error here. See? Page 6, line 16. It doesn’t affect your conclusion, but you’d better send up a correction before somebody makes a big deal over it.”

He smiled while I stuttered out a quiet thank you.

John and I were rivals. We had slightly different specialties but worked with much of the same raw data. We could each “scoop” the other and sometimes did. Ours was a polite competition, but it was competition.

One day the captain called us to her desk and told us we’d be working together. Our unit was hosting an annual NATO fighter pilot conference on Soviet tactics, and she and the colonel had decided John and I would take the lead presenting important briefings.

Then I asked myself what Jesus would do and I couldn’t. You have a right to live your life.

I whooped as John looked quite properly nervous. We wouldn’t just be briefing a bunch of fighter jocks, as fun (and sexy) as that sounded to me. The conference would include very senior officers and even high-level NATO civilian leaders.

John and I worked insane hours for several weeks preparing. One Wednesday night as we polished up slides after everyone else had gone home, he told me he had to dip out. “It’s Wednesday night, and I can’t miss church again.”

“Oh, are you religious? I didn’t know.”

I DID know habitual Wednesday night church-going was a feature of the evangelical Christianity I had been raised in and “escaped” from. This tidbit of intel didn’t make me warm up toward John, though we were finally getting to know each other.

A few days later, he rubbed his head and stretched, red-eyed. “Come on,” he said. “We’re making more mistakes than progress working this late. Want a lift home? Or better yet, why not stop by base housing? Susan made a Sunday roast that’s just begging to turn into sandwiches.”

I’d met his wife already, but only at formal affairs. When we pulled up, the kids were already in bed, and Susan was ready to eat with us. Before forks hit plates, she and John clasped hands and asked God to bless the food. I politely lowered my head and waited for them to finish.

After dinner, they hit me with it.

The Roman’s Road. God’s plan for salvation. “Can we pray with you?” If you’ve ever been witnessed to by evangelical Christians, you know the drill.

I wasn’t offended, but I wasn’t at all interested. I told them about my strong Christian background. I told John for the first time my dad had been a Baptist minister and my uncle still was.

“I know you guys mean well, but I’ve had a lot of years to think about these things, and I’ve made different choices than you have.”

John looked disappointed, Susan looked sad, but that was the end of that.

The briefings went great even though I almost choked when I spotted a three-star general in the audience. The fighter pilots drank themselves silly at the club every night, and I did my best to keep up with them. Even John went; turning down an opportunity to socialize with senior generals is a bad career move.

We hung out the club together because conference attendees knew we were a team. I flirted OUTRAGEOUSLY with some of the pilots, because well … fighter pilots. What’s a red-blooded gay boy to do?

John cornered me late one night looking very nervous and unhappy. “You need to cool it. You’re going to get yourself into a huge heap of trouble.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Look around the club! This is the REAL Air Force, not our little intel world. The wrong person finds out you’re gay, you’re done. You lose your clearance, your job, everything. Make a move on one of those fighter jocks and you might even land in jail.”

“I’m not going to jail for flirting! And I NEVER told you I was gay.”

He sighed. “Look. This is my career, and you’ve told me it’s yours too. But you don’t seem to get it. Did you know you make me really uncomfortable in the office? Did you know you’re lucky nobody’s gone to the colonel about you yet?”

“What!?”

“You can’t just be gay like that, all out in the open. It’s … it’s disrespectful. You need to learn discretion. You’re lucky it’s me in the office with you and not somebody like me.”

“Huh?”

“Want to know the truth? A year ago, I thought about reporting you. I even prayed about it. But I didn’t because … I dunno, it felt really wrong. Then I asked myself what Jesus would do and I couldn’t. You have a right to live your life, even though I resent that you rub my face in it.”

“Rub your face! What the …”

“Forget it, it’s cool. You’re a great analyst and a professional, even if I don’t like your personal style. I was wrong to think about turning you in for being gay. Just please be more careful. You’re going to get in serious trouble.”

LGBTQ people in the workplace

I haven’t thought about that conversation in years, and I realize a lot of younger people probably find it shocking. The military has changed: being gay is no longer an overt liability.

In the corporate and academic worlds, LGBTQ people mostly expect they won’t be discriminated against.

The Supreme Court ruled last summer in Bostock v. Clayton County that federal law prohibits workplace discrimination against transgender and gay people.

Even so, things are about to get complicated. As Catherine Caruso reported yesterday in an article on Medium, the Trump administration just finalized a rule that will make such anti-LGBTQ discrimination much easier for for-profit businesses that contract with the federal government.

The problem doesn’t end with the Trump administration

As Ronald Brownstein examined in depth last week in The Atlantic, the Supreme Court, despite Bostock, is aligning itself to “elevate ‘religious liberty’ over other civic goals is coming even as the share of Americans who ascribe to no religious faith is steadily rising.”

Brownstein says the high court is likely to set off a political explosion in the near future as it “backs religious-liberty exemptions to laws on employee rights, health care, education, and equal treatment for the LGBTQ community.”

He expects, as do many other legal analysts, that the court will soon carve out exemptions to allow Christians to legally exclude LGBTQ people on religious grounds, setting Christian belief up on an altar of civil privilege.

Living in a pluralistic society demands mutual respect

John understood the issues pretty well all those years ago, and so did I in my blithe way. I didn’t take offense when he invited me home to proselytize, and despite himself, he understood he could work well with me even though his faith told him my life was immoral.

We respected each other at work, and we ended up earning a unit citation for that NATO conference. The colonel called us into his office and congratulated us. The captain bought me a bottle of Champagne, winking when she gave it to me, whispering that it was a consolation prize seeing how all my flirting went unappreciated.

Of course LGBTQ people and Christians can live, work, study, and socialize together, despite whatever the Supreme Court rules over the next few terms. Trying to carve out exemptions to that principle is un-American and un-Christian at the same time. Just ask John.

Religious liberty should have nothing to do with giving religious people the privilege to hurt and discriminate. That shouldn’t be such a tough concept to understand.