Call it petty or dismiss it as mere foolishness that no one could actually believe. It was probably just written there in a fit of immeasurable boredom, right? Or, just consider it for what it is: homophobic slander. When students met in White Gravenor 206 on Jan. 30, there were at least half a dozen desks with inscriptions ridiculing some student by alleging that he or she had gay sex. For those students, the engraved words were a clear indication that at least some people on this campus harbor a deep disgust toward gay people.
The White Gravenor case may not be a random sample, but if it is, then homophobia has a viable constituency on this campus. Those who wrote on the desks probably weren’t among the group that night. The 50-some students that showed in White Gravenor were there to hear about a resource center that has been proposed for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students. The center would offer mental health referrals to psychiatric specialists, collect and disseminate data on cases of harassment and assault of GLBT students, and program events that raise awareness of particular GLBT issues.
Those who wrote on the desks probably weren’t among the group that night. The 50-some students that showed in White Gravenor were there to hear about a resource center that has been proposed for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students. The center would offer mental health referrals to psychiatric specialists, collect and disseminate data on cases of harassment and assault of GLBT students, and program events that raise awareness of particular GLBT issues.
In the end, center supporters lobbied hard and got turned down. They protested at a Mass celebrated by the Archbishop of Washington, Theodore Cardinal McCarrick, which more than irked several of the attendees and other students on campus. The supporters also deluged the Office of Student Affairs with phone calls that firmly requested a formal response to their proposal with all due speed. And, in line with the apparent requirements for any start-up, they had a very long petition. Still, Vice President of Student Affairs Juan Gonzalez denied the center not just for the time being, but effectively ruled out its ever coming into existence.
The center was officially rejected by the administration in a Feb. 8 letter from Gonzalez. What struck a nerve among the center’s supporters was the reason he gave: ”… We cannot create or support a center whose mission would unavoidably lead to advocacy of sexual behavior outside the context of marriage. I believe that the proposed GLBT center cannot avoid this risk. Center staff would inevitably find themselves supporting activities that reasonably could be construed as promoting or advocating homosexual behavior. Such endorsement would run counter to Church teaching and, thus, University practice.”
Whether that is the whole story behind the “No” is uncertain. What is certain is that no one seems to publicly be able to agree on why the center was denied.
Who said what and why
To get from “information center” to “promotion of homosexual activity” requires “a leap,” said Carolyn Hurwitz, coordinator of Sexual Assault Services and Women’s Health Services. She also said that the center would not lead to what Gonzalez predicted. “That part of the letter was disconcerting to me,” she said.
Hurwitz was also one of several administrators who helped found Safe Zones in 1998, a program that trains faculty and staff volunteers to provide GLBT students with resources should those students seek out their help.
Gonzalez, who will tirelessly express his commitment to improve other services for GLBT students, refused to say why he felt the center would lead to advocacy of homosexual behavior. Instead, when asked, he reiterated what he said in the letter with even more vigor.
The center’s supporters argued in their proposal that the same fear was present at the inception of Safe Zones. About 150 volunteers mark their offices with a Safe Zones sticker to identify themselves as, in the program’s vocabulary, “allies.” No complaints have been lodged regarding advocacy of sexual behavior. Neither have there been similar complaints made against GU Pride, Director of Student Organizations Martha Swanson said.
“I think overall our student leadership is respectful [of the University’s Catholic identity],” Associate Dean of Students and Director of Residence Life Bethany Marlowe said.
Both Swanson, who has observed GU Pride since its inception about a decade ago, and Hurwitz noted that it was likely that University President John J. DeGioia felt constrained by outside pressure. As a layman in the first year of his presidency of a Catholic school, they said he would be wary to upset conservative alumni and donors.
Assistant Vice President for Communications Julie Green Bataille said she was not aware that DeGioia was directly involved in the production of the letter.
Still, Swanson said that based on her 17 years at Georgetown, it would be unlikely in any situation that persons who make an important decision do not have their boss’s own opinion in mind when they deliberate.
GU Pride President and Voice staff member Joe McFadden (CAS ‘02) said that in his discussions about the resource center with Gonzalez, the vice president had said that there was a concern about alumni pressure not to approve the center. Calls to the Office of Alumni and University Relations were not returned.
Gonzalez stressed that it was “absolutely not accurate” that alumni pressure contributed to his decision. He acknowledged that he had received e-mails from students, faculty and alumni regarding the center.
As early as September, Gonzalez said he told McFadden that he couldn’t support the center. “I never said there was hope,” he said.
McFadden said that since Gonzalez had been inviting the center’s supporters to meet with him, the group believed he had been at least keeping his mind open.
In making his decision, Gonzalez said he consulted other administrators but would not say who they were.
Vice President for Communications and Public Affairs Daniel Porterfield, a member of DeGioia’s cabinet, said he did see a draft of the letter, but would not disclose who else saw it or what edits he made to it. Porterfield said that Gonzalez’ consultation with other senior administrators is the norm on high-priority issues such as the center.
Porterfield stressed that the matter of who saw the letter should not overshadow the importance of Gonzalez’ commitment to improve the current services that the University says are available to GLBT students. These include a part-time official trained in GLBT issues at Counseling and Psychiatric Services, GU Pride, Safe Zones and a variety of programming initiatives, including a brown-bag lunch series for discussing issues of importance to GLBT students.
Porterfield said he could not comment on what role, if any, DeGioia had in editing the letter.
Hurwitz noted that DeGioia likely wanted to avoid conflict with Church officials. McFadden said that when he met with Gonzalez and Director of Student Programs Mary Kay Schneider, Schneider explicitly mentioned that Cardinal McCarrick would be unhappy with the decision.
In an interview, Schneider said that the possible response of the Church was brought up, as were any potentially relevant issues. But the decision to deny the resource center was made only because of the conflict it posed with Catholic doctrine.
Green Bataille said outside pressures did not have a role in the decision. She said Gonzalez’s letter expressed the opinion of the University.
While taking issue with the language in the letter, Hurwitz said there is a clear logic to the administration’s decisions. “There may be a benefit to flying under the radar,” Hurwitz said.
“The more waves you make, the more difficult it gets to provide services to students,” a high-level source added.
In short, the message from some administrators was this: The administration wants to further support GLBT students, but the center would make that goal tough to achieve because of the publicity the center would draw from the Right.
All the Church’s members
Would the center actually conflict with Catholic doctrine? If the center encourages homosexual practice, then the answer is unambiguously in the affirmative. But the center’s supporters argue that the center would take no public position on sexual ethics.
That’s no better, as far as the late University President Thomas Healy was concerned. In a letter in March 1988, Healy said that the gay student rights organization at the time, Gay People of Georgetown University, had not been afforded recognition by the school because the group was morally neutral on homosexuality.
Earlier that year, a District court ruled that year that the school had to recognize the group. The court ruled that the District’s interest in eliminating discrimination?in this case, by intervening in how a private corporation allocated its budget?outweighed the school’s right to freely exercise its religion.
McFadden said he that the center’s staff would not encourage students to adopt any one opinion on the matter. He argued that this was different from moral neutrality. They are not arguing that homosexual activity is condonable. No opinion means no opinion.
The staff would not, he said, try to hide from what the Catholic Church says about homosexuality. He said he would accept a statement in the office that delineates the Church’s position.
That official position?homosexual activity is immoral and its orientation a disorder?may mask considerable disagreement among Church members. McFadden said that when he met with a group of center supporters and administrator, it was said that the center could be accepted by some bishops. McFadden said he got the impression that the center is not irreconcilable with what the Church teaches; it is irreconcilable with what some bishops believe.
Schneider said that no administrator to her knowledge said that the center could be adopted within the confines of the school’s Catholic identity.
The Voice was unable to arrange an interview with another key administrator in these discussions, Barbara Humphrey McCrabb, associate Roman Catholic chaplain.
McFadden said the school’s identity is its own choosing to some extent. Church teaching can be interpreted as permitting such a center as a means of pastoring to homosexual students.
“The University has willingly chosen to interpret Catholic teaching in a homophobic manner,” he said.
Gonzalez was adamant that he had done the right thing. Marlowe said Gonzalez’ letter is the University’s opinion.
Notwithstanding the unity the University is displaying, the division among American Church officials over issues not just including homosexuality is real. Indeed, the climate within the Catholic Church in America can make it difficult to even sit down in the same room and have a discussion of members’ theological differences, Catholic theologian Diana Hayes said.
Hayes is a member of the Common Ground Dialogue, which was founded by the late Cardinal Joseph Bernadine. The goal of the Dialogue, Hayes said, was to reduce tension within the Church by encouraging discussion of issues that divide Church members. Instead, it was received in some corners as itself a source of division, Hayes said. Some bishops, including the late Cardinal John O’Connor of New York, said that the Dialogue would add to the dissension.
As far as the issue of homosexuality goes, Hayes said the Church needs to re-explore it. The way it is handled now?the Church argues for a division between sinful conduct and orientation, which Hayes said untenably divorces the person from his or her identity?is not satisfactory for the Church or for the homosexual person.
Hayes said that she understood why the school was hesitant to approve the center. It could be perceived as violating Church doctrine, she said. And indeed, if the center even implicitly condones the condition of homosexuality, that could actually conflict with the Church’s stance that the condition?not homosexual sex alone?is a disorder, Hayes said.
When asked if he thought homosexuality was a disorder, Gonzalez declined to answer directly. He said that in his letter, he expressly did not quote one source of that term, which was a 1986 letter from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in the Vatican. The letter said that homosexuality is a disorder because “it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil.”
Ratzinger’s letter stresses that any pastoral program that involves association among homosexual persons must clearly state that homosexual activity is immoral.
In his letter, Gonzalez cited a 1997 document, Always Our Children, published by the Roman Catholic Bishops of the United States. Gonzalez said that Always Our Children welcomes homosexual persons into the Church.
Student supporters of the center likewise embraced Always Our Children, which they believe mandates a strong commitment by the Church to pastor to GLBT students. The document reiterates the Church’s position on homosexual activity, but emphasizes outreach to homosexual persons. It speaks of the need to accept them warmly and encourages their participation in the Church, provided that they remain chaste.
Gonzalez letter said, “It is important to recognize that neither a homosexual orientation, nor a heterosexual one, leads inevitably to sexual activity.”
Still, it was thought that the center would “unavoidably lead to the advocacy” of premarital sex, as noted in Gonzalez’ letter.
Boiling it down
In this environment, where the students and administrators talk past one another and Church documents are used on both sides, the search for a common ground encounters a lot of friction. For now, both sides stand steadfastly by their positions.
Gonzalez said that he wants very much to improve the current services available to GLBT students, including the counseling services and Safe Zones. After rejecting the proposal for a GLBT resource center, Gonzalez said he was forming a working group that he wanted to rigorously get down to investigating what must be done to improve the quality of life for GLBT students.
Improving services is his goal, Gonzalez said. “But I will not be told how to do that,” he said, alleging that the students had approached the discussions in an adversarial way.
It’s not resource center or bust for its supporters, McFadden said. Still, if the rejection of the center was done to avoid controversy, McFadden said he found that unacceptable.
“The school needs to stand by its conviction,” McFadden said. “It can’t say ‘We care about you, but we’re not going to let anyone know.’”
Whatever is proposed, it must get at the “causal institutional roots” behind the hostility that GLBT students feel on campus, McFadden said. The absence, in other words, of a public institutional commitment contributes to GLBT students’ alienation. For an invisible minority, part of the solution must involve a very public commitment to create an environment where gay students can feel comfortable with their sexual orientation, he said.
Women’s Center Director Nancy Cantalupo (SFS ‘95) said that for the Women’s Center, the institutional commitment was key. “There’s a symbolic element there that is unmatched by other campus resources,” she said.
The goal of the Women’s Center was to centralize existing resources, not to necessarily add to them, Cantalupo. What the center can uniquely do, among other things, is create an institutional memory, meaning that a full-time staffer will accumulate the sort of experience in operating on campus that enables him or her to better help students.
Administrators are not in agreement that the center is best way to show the University wants to help GLBT students. One oddity in this debate is the number of objections in addition to Catholic identity that administrators provide?objections that they speak of in earnest but which never made it into the final letter Gonzalez released. Indeed, McFadden said that many of these objections were not seen as defining issues in the meetings that he and other resource center organizers had with Gonzalez, Schneider and McCrabb.
Consider the objection that the center, being a centralization of resources, is not the way of improving services. Schneider argued that a decentralized network of services is preferable, since it requires everyone to put in their fair share. Why the center would necessarily weaken this network is still unclear, although Schneider implied that this was possible if other parts of campus interpreted the resource center as relieving them of their responsibilities. Hurwitz raised the same concern.
Or think of the argument Gonzalez put forth: There are other GLBT students not represented by resource center organizers who object to the center. McFadden conceded that there are students who may not need a center, but he said that the concern among some GLBT students that a resource center would further isolate them is unfounded. One general purpose of the center is to promote a more comfortable environment campus-wide for GLBT students. The center will not be an exclusive club all left to its lonesome.
Marlowe, Gonzalez’ colleague in Student Affairs, questioned whether the group had enough data on the needs of GLBT students to convince the administration that a center was necessary and that would it target these particular needs. McFadden said he and others have been relaying information to administrators for months about the experiences of GLBT students, although the information wasn’t in hard statistical form. Still, the statistical work that has been done nationwide indicates that GLBT students are especially vulnerable to depression, substandard academic performance and suicide.
Hurwitz said whatever research is done would show that there is a need for a center. But she said that without the data, the group will have a harder time selling administrators on the center.
McFadden said that if given more time and resources, the group would do the research. But “not once [did administrators] request the information” during their meetings.
Boiling it all down, the defining issue, as Schneider said, seems to be Catholic identity. Or at least that is the only thing the administration is hanging its hat on.
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The immediate future is still cloudy. Gonzalez is putting a lot of stock in the working group that is going to investigate ways to improve existing services for GLBT students. McFadden said that center supporters will cooperate with the working group.
The center’s supporters have also met with officials in the American Civil Liberties Union and in several D.C. city council members’ offices, including Georgetown graduate and At-Large Councilmember David Catania (SFS ‘90). Both Catania and Coucilmember Jack Evans, whose Ward 2 includes Georgetown University, have close ties to campus. Danielle DeCerbo (CAS ‘03), a center advocate and Voice staffer, said that Catania and Gonzalez said the vice president would formally respond to Catania by early next week.
Center supporters are exploring possible legal options, but McFadden stressed that was a last resort.
