THOU SHALT NOT DISCRIMINATE

Rev. Abhi Janamanchi

March 4, 2007

Last Tuesday night, my colleague in St. Pete, Manish Mishra, and I, along with 20 other UUC members, attended a special session of the City Commission in Largo. It was at this meeting that Largo city commissioners, by a 5-2 vote, began proceedings to terminate their City Manager, Mr. Steve Stanton, because he is in the process of undergoing gender re-assignment surgery.

At the meeting, we witnessed a modern-day lynching unfold before our eyes. We witnessed mob hysteria demanding Mr. Stanton's removal. We heard the pastor of a local Baptist church say, "If Jesus were alive today, he would be leading the charge to fire Steve Stanton." And in response, we saw people giving him a standing ovation. We saw people shouting and cheering at the prospect of ruining the life of a long-tenured public servant, not because he was incompetent but because he dared to be different. We saw them heckling and booing those who stood up to support Mr. Stanton and the Mayor. We learned that Nadine Smith, Executive Director of Equality Florida, had been roughed up and arrested by the police for trying to pass out leaflets.

We also heard others say that it was too soon to be holding a meeting to decide Mr. Stanton's fate, that he deserved a chance to demonstrate his capabilities and professionalism after he became Susan Stanton.

I was moved by what Commissioner Rodney Woods, the first African American commissioner in 100 years, said: "I'm having great difficulty just accepting that we're going to terminate the city manager just because of some lack of professionalism . . . you mean that just came to your mind in the last three weeks? Tonight has a lot to do with me continuing being the person that I know I am, and that's one who's all inclusive of everybody." Mayor Pat Gerard said that it was not a popularity contest and that they had the future of the city in their hands tonight. "I think we're ready," she said. Unfortunately, she turned out to be wrong. Hate was the driving force that night and it won hands down.

At the meeting, I felt sick to the stomach at the amount of hate, prejudice, and venom that was directed at City Manager Stanton who, until a week ago, was well-respected for his professionalism, leadership, and achievements. I left early and came home. I turned on the television to catch the decision. Our boys – Abhimanyu and Yashasvi – were still up and started to watch with me. The commissioners were still speaking. Yashasvi, our younger son, spoke up after a few minutes. He said, “So, he wants to be a woman.” “Yes,” I replied. A few minutes later, he said, “And, they want to fire him because of that.” I said yes. He shrugged his shoulders and said, “What’s the big deal? Are they crazy?” My older son, Abhimanyu, then wondered aloud how difficult it must be for Mr. Stanton’s son to see his father being disrespected, vilified, and humiliated in this fashion. My healing began that night. And I felt that there was still hope.

All week, I have been pondering what it is in us humans that motivates us to hate? Where does it come from? Vaclav Havel once said: "Like love, hatred is ultimately an expression of longing for the absolute, albeit an expression that has become tragically inverted."

People who hate seem to harbor a permanent, irrevocable feeling of injury, a feeling that is out of proportion to reality. It is as though these people want to be endlessly honored, loved and respected, as though they suffered from the chronic and painful awareness that others are ungrateful and unforgivably unjust towards them, because they don't honor and love them boundlessly as they ought. I saw this played out in some people's comments that night who wanted him fired because they had been fired for less.

In the sub-consciousness of haters there slumbers a perverse feeling that they alone possess the truth, that they are some kind of superhumans or even gods, and thus deserve the world's complete recognition, even its complete submissiveness and loyalty, if not its blind obedience. They want to be the center of the world. The inner charge of energy, which might have been love, is perverted into hatred toward the imputed source of injury.

People who hate seem somehow never able to see the cause of their metaphysical failure in themselves and the way they completely overestimate their sense of worth. In their eyes, it's the surrounding world, not they, that is to blame. And because the surrounding world is too abstract a thing to hate, they look for ways to personify it, objectify it. And so the person who hates seeks out a particular offender.

Hatred for one's neighbor, therefore, would seem to be only a physiological embodiment of hatred for the universe that is perceived to be the cause of one's own universal failure.

Underlying hate is fear. Fear of the other. Fear of difference. Fear of change. Fear of the unknown.

Fear and the need to assess and label the stranger may be what is left of our animal instincts, the last bead on our DNA that remains from our reptilian ancestry, a vestigial gift that kept them safe from those who saw them as food.

There is much in our makeup that is destined to isolate us, to keep us separated from other animals, including other humans. Yet, we crave for connection and relationships because that's what gives us our humanity. Our humanity is deepened in and through our relationships.

In order to be connected, in order to be in relation to one another, it may be that we have to repeatedly go "against the grain" of our vestigial instincts, to go against the grain of the memory of millennia of tribal warnings to stay close to those that are like us, to beware of differences, to fear the stranger. Fortunately and unfortunately, we are the animals that think, the sentient ones. This is our blessing and our curse. For, we can reason toward connection, or away from it. We can go with our fears, or work our way through them. Last Tuesday night, I saw a group of people reason away from connection and run with their fears and their discomfort and make a decision based on fear and ignorance.

It is not just difference we are talking about here, but some sense that the other is bad, that the other is sinful, immoral - not just that you are a different color than I, or a different religion, or of a different sexual orientation or gender orientation or size - but that yours is bad, or inferior, or a threat to me.

And why does this little reckoning happen with such predictable regularity? I wonder if turning difference into a contest of rightness has to do with how each of us sees ourselves. How we see ourselves affects everything. And if we don’t see ourselves with compassion, how can we be expected to show it towards others, particularly those who are different from us?

Another thread is that how we see ourselves is reflected in how we approach the Other. The kind of self-righteous anger that goes along with our labeling others and our willful refusal to approach or engage with the Other seems often to come out of a need to protect one's own status as favored, right, proper, superior. It comes from thinking little of ourselves, from self-negation, even self-hatred, and so, having to pump ourselves up by making sure someone else is lower than we are.