Spirit in Action

Bonnie Tinker - Love Makes A Family

Bonnie Tinker has been an equality activist most of her life, with a special calling to work for the rights of gay and lesbian families. She has spearheaded many initiatives including Love Makes A Family, an organization which supports non-traditional parents and children and seeks to protect their rights, gay or straight. The daughter of a Methodist preacher turned Quaker, Bonnie has Spirit at the heart of her work.

Broadcast on:: 26 Oct 2008
Audio Format:: other

I have no hands but yours to tempt my sheep No handkerchief but yours to dry the eyes of those who weep I have no arms but yours with which to hold The ones grown weary from the struggle and weak from growing old I have no hands but yours with which to see To let my children know that I am out and out is everything I have no way to feed the hungry souls No clothes to give, and they give, the ragged and the morn So be my heart, my hand, my tongue Through you I will be done Fingers have I none to help untime The tangled knocks and twisted chains that strangle fearful minds Welcome to Spirit in Action, my name is Mark Helpsmeat. Each week I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action and progressive efforts I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Above all, I'll seek out light, love and helping hands Being shared between our many neighbors on this planet, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life I have no way to open people's eyes Examine that you will show them how to trust the inner might My guest today on Spirit in Action is Bonnie Tinker. Bonnie has been an equality activist most of her life with a special calling to work for the rights of gay and lesbian families She has spearheaded many initiatives including Love Makes a Family, an organization which supports non-traditional parents and children and seeks to protect their rights, gay or straight The daughter of a Methodist preacher turned Quaker, Bonnie has spirit at the heart of her work Bonnie jumped into the middle of the debate over Oregon's proposed anti-homosexuality constitutional amendment in 1992 But decided that it was crucial to win over those from the other side She eventually got her own talk radio show and learned to make friends of former adversaries using a form of non-violent dialogue Thank you Bonnie for joining me today Thank you for having me, it's good to be here Bonnie, if you've been a gay rights activist, gay and lesbian rights, a really inequality rights activist for a long, long time How did you get started in this? Well, if you want to go back to equality rights activist, I walked my first picket line when I was about nine My family was very involved in the civil rights movement in Iowa where I grew up My father was a preacher, he preached social gospel, Methodist, and I was very aware of the issues From the time I was probably third grade because at that point the young people in my father's church Decided that the swimming pool where we lived in Atlantic, Iowa should be integrated It was not integrated at that point, even though there was an African-American population in town And the youth group decided they should push for integration of the town swimming pool The town fathers kind of came to my dad and said, "Look, call off your youth" My dad said, "No, I don't think I can do that because I think Jesus would support them" So anyway, the upshot of that was that the pool was integrated and my father was moved out of that church So that's when I first started thinking about the issues, I hadn't really thought about it before that I was horrified, some of the people in town evidently thought that the skin color would rub off in the pool And that's why they didn't want people in the pool So anyway, through my youth I was involved in the civil rights movement We did a lot of picketing, we had an NAACP group, a core group I went to Washington, D.C. for the march on Washington and heard Martin Luther King That was an incredible experience for me Mostly because most of the people there were African-American And I was a high school student, one lone white girl in the crowd, there were other white people there But in our group, I was probably the only white girl And all of my friends were black, my close friends And we were really in this together My family was very committed, my parents went to Mississippi the summer of '64 And worked on Freedom Summer there, doing voter registration Anyway, so I grew up very much with equality on my mind So that when I came out myself in 1971, I already had a context for believing that I should have equal rights And it was a very natural move for me to go from one movement to another Well, it'd also been in the peace movement, but to recognize that this was a part of the women's movement So I just continued getting involved When you say that you came out, what led to this? Were you a woman's rights activist already? Were you still Methodist? Oh no, we hadn't been Methodist for quite a while, because when my dad lost his first church, he was sent to Des Moines, Iowa to another church And he was on the verge of losing that one because of his civil rights activities and his peace activity during the Vietnam War And he went to work for the Quakers for the American Friends Service Committee So I had shifted contexts in terms of spirituality I had got to know the Quakers, and we now had a whole spiritual community around us Who engaged in peace demonstrations and civil rights demonstrations, et cetera But I found the women's movement late in college It had not really been revived by the time I was finishing college in 1969 So it was just the very beginnings of that reborn women's movement But I was working in women's consciousness raising groups And I was in Mexico, and I had gone there because Well, I went there because I was a kid and it seemed like fun to tell you the truth And I landed there in the midst of a bunch of liberation theology folks in Cuernavaca with Ivan Illich and Paolo Freire And it was all very exciting Those of us who were young women, of course, immediately recognized that there were liberation issues for women too And we decided to have a conference of women from North America, Central America and South America To come together and discuss women's issues Ironically, Illich's seminar, he would not let us use their facilities for our conference Because he didn't think women had anything to do with education and developing countries But there was another French priest there Who was the one who was kind of in charge of all the French priests who were coming to do missionary work in Latin America He became a very close friend of mine and he offered their facility So we had this international women's conference at the French priest's house, the villain, really When we were having our early get-to-know-you meetings going around doing introductions One of the women said, "I think we should talk about lesbianism" Now, I've been down in Mexico for two years I hadn't been up in the United States where folks were talking about women's issues, et cetera I was really talking about Latin America and I was utterly startled I have to remember, I was a preacher's daughter from Iowa And I didn't really know that real lesbians existed in the world I thought, you know, maybe in the deep dark dens of iniquity in New York But nobody I knew certainly So I didn't know why we should talk about it, but we did And I remember saying very clearly, you know Well, if I were to think I was a lesbian, I would think I was a total failure Those words have come back to haunt me a time or two The other ironic thing about this being the conference where I first heard about lesbians Was that my best friend in Mexico, my roommate, actually We had been planning to travel together And she had come to me right before this conference And said, "I've got a ride for us to go to Costa Rica We have to be in Acapulco tomorrow" And, you know, we kind of did things like that back then And I said, "Oh, I can't do that, I've promised to translate this conference Why don't you stay here and help me translate?" We needed another translator, and I wanted her to stay And I wanted to go with her to Costa Rica And she said, "Oh, I don't know if I can do that" And I said, "Well, you know, why not, let's do that" And she said, "You know, Bonnie, I think I'm a lesbian" And I was shocked, and I said, "Oh, Mary Lou, I mean, just because you're a virgin doesn't mean you're a lesbian" You know, I mean, just because you're waiting doesn't mean you're a lesbian She said, "Well, I think I am" But that's all she said about it And then she said, "I think I need to go on and go to Costa Rica" And I have never seen her since then And at that conference, I learned that there were real lesbians in the world And I also recognized that some of them were clearly attracted to me And was aware of some of my attractions for some of them in a very peripheral way But not real consciously But some of them were moving to Portland, Oregon These people were going to Portland, so I thought I'd go there So we were forming a collective It took us a while to get our house together, but we did And we stayed meanwhile in the house where the lesbians lived And we started learning about lesbians In the women's movement at that time, a number of us were talking about women-identified women So we were all women-identified women, which didn't mean we were lesbians It just meant that we wanted to hang out with all women So this was a way that we didn't have to say we were out We were just women-identified women Well, that was February And by April, fortunately, one of these women was a little more assertive than I was And the other thing we did as a collective We shared everything equally, you know So you didn't have your own bed We had mattresses scattered around the house And you slept wherever there was a place that night And we were going down by this time to the lesbian bar Because we were women-identified women We thought this was interesting, we were just checking it out, you know And we told all of them how we were doing back rubs And we had these beds where you just slept where you found a spot They all thought we were having orgies all night long But we weren't doing anything 'cause we weren't out yet But this one woman stayed with me And fortunately, we had a bed in a room where we were alone enough that we began a relationship At this amazing experience, it was kind of like the ugly duckling story And I looked and I saw and I said, "I am a lesbian!" And it was just the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me So I didn't begin organizing for lesbian and gay rights Because of the feeling of oppression I really began because it had opened this incredible new world of possibilities to me I understood romance in a way that I had never understood it And I had dated men, you know, I'd done more than date them for that matter I was no stranger to male/female relationships But all of a sudden, I understood what all the excitement for other people had been in high school And went through a real adolescence And part of what we did together was to create a movement Imagine my surprise I love that I found you But I ache all over wanting to know your every dream Imagine my surprise To find that I love you Feeling warm all over knowing that you've been alive ♪ ♪ Pirates of an Eastern coast ♪ When you live in danger ♪ But I hear your laughter ♪ Free of medical ♪ No need foolish of a wreath ♪ Or you're living in the 18th century ♪ You make love to each other on your boots out on the sea ♪ Imagine my surprise I love that I found you But I ache all over wanting to know your every dream Imagine my surprise To find that I love you Feeling warm all over knowing that you've been alive Knowing that you've been in my heart Lady Paul went a great acclaim I have been misreading you I never knew your poems were meant for me You lived alone in a quiet pin Oh my gosh I'm through your pen They're weeping for your little lovers As they safely married men ♪ Rugging women have gone before me ♪ Having paths like pioneers Open all alone Oh won't I dream betweens and sin to realize ♪ Facing is a point but when I was grown ♪ Facing is a point but when I was grown ♪ Oh what if imagine my surprise I love that I found you But I ache all over wanting To know your every dream Imagine my surprise To find that I love you Feeling warm all over knowing that you've been alive Knowing that you've been in my life In my life Imagine my surprise I think you no longer live communitarian Depends how you look at it I have a spouse who I have been with Will be 29 years in August And we have three children And we have three grandchildren That's about as communal as you can get When you get right down to it So I no longer live with other adults Other than my spouse And I left the collective Actually I left it for Sarah But I still I think I carry A lot of those beliefs about sharing of resources The work that I started while I was in the collective Actually led me to Sarah The collective I was in started a number of projects And one of those was a house for women coming out of prison Not that we particularly knew anything about women who'd been in prison Or were coming out of it Except that some of us had been arrested in demonstrations So we opened this house and declared it a halfway house And there was no other place for women coming out of prison So all the social workers in prison said, "Oh great!" And they sent all these women to us We managed to keep that going for a year or so And then we all got hepatitis From hanging out in the bars with people who get hepatitis I guess Anyway we all got sick at Fella Part And I went off with my new girlfriend We had a child, we were raising And then we broke up And then we started another house Called Bradley Angle House It was started by a group of women who were essentially bar women And I think people forget about lesbians of a certain age And gay men of a certain age Most of us have some history of being in the bars And they weren't the fancy socialite bars for most of us They were the streets So a lot of these women had been there And I was working with AFSC on their Women in Violence Committee Most of them hadn't a clue of the life I lived in the bars on the streets But I said to them, you know, you don't need to talk about the third world If you want to talk about women in violence There's plenty of violence right here in Portland against women We knew women who were homeless all the time So we started a shelter for women escaping violence situations And that was under the sponsorship of the American Friends Service Committee And I was the bridge between the group of women who founded it And the AFSC, that was our means to getting the money to do it And so I sort of fell into the administrator role And I have never gotten away from that role since, I guess, not with that particular organization But we went from being just this group of women who knew real stress and real violence To creating an institution It was one of the first shelters for battered women in the country And we all became very involved in what's become known as the domestic violence movement In fact, I was the acting chairperson in the founding of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence And that also owes a lot to my experience with friends Because the women's movement, I decided that consensus was the way to go That was the revolutionary thing to do But the fact of the matter was, very few people had much experience Working with consensus or building consensus or building unity So that was the requirement that we come to consensus But people didn't know how to get there So here we were in Washington with a group of maybe up to 400 women Many of them with past political histories with each other And rivalries and splits and differences And here I was a complete unknown from the west coast Who happened to have, by that time, a fair amount of experience with Quaker decision-making process Because of my involvement not only with the meetings, but with the American Friends Service Committee And I was able to step in and essentially clerk that Although people didn't know that's what I was doing This work is where I met Sarah She was working with the women's prison project And we discovered at the house that we were this group of women who just knew this needed to happen But we really didn't know what we were doing Aside from that we weren't going to just be social workers, we were going to empower women And we needed a counselor We had severely traumatized women, severely traumatized children And we needed some resources So Sarah came in to interview She said, "Now the only thing is I can't volunteer here I have to be paid something You will have to pay me at least $5 an hour" She definitely then earned her keep She used to do almost all night group therapies She also had a child, I had a child Connie, who I had adopted with my previous partner I should be clear on this When I said I adopted her What this means is that the child's birth mother had known Sharon down on the streets in the bars The child's birth mother had decided to give the child away Because she was white, the child was black The white mother was moving to Texas with a new white boyfriend And she thought it wouldn't be a good life for her child in Texas I agreed with her If her choice was to go to Texas with her white boyfriend I thought Yes, and when I met my daughter I knew she was my daughter So we had taken her But the lawyer who told us there was no way we could get a legal adoption We couldn't even get a guardianship Or the state would certainly take her away from us So all we had was a letter from the birth mother Giving my partner custody And the reason it went to my partner is because She had said to me, "Well, go ahead you may as well put the papers in your name 'Cause I know eventually you'll lose me and you'll take her away from me" Because this had happened to her before I said to her, "If you need papers to be this child's mother put them in your name" Because I know she's my daughter And I don't need the papers This is how naive we were in those days But once again, the Quaker meeting had come in to help me I had broke up with her I was at Bradley Angle House Sarah was there with her ten-year-old son I was falling in love with her And I was also recognizing that I needed some protection for my daughter I needed to make sure that my ex, for one thing, couldn't come and snatch her and move to Idaho as she had threatened to do And I also needed to do things like put her in school And I had no birth certificate, I had nothing And the Quaker meeting, I discussed the problem with them And they provided me with a certificate of junior membership Which the schools accepted in lieu of a baptismal certificate Which was one of the things you could use for enrollment in schools In a Catholic school I couldn't get her in public schools, but in a Catholic school Anyway, that's how Sarah and I had the two children And both of those children also happened to be African American So we were also involved in Bradley Angle House at working with racism And just another matter to come back to the spirituality theme in Quakers I remember in the 70s trying to talk to my meeting about racism And how we really needed to deal with racism The response was sort of "We're Quakers" We did the Underground Railroad, we're not racist So we really weren't getting very far with Quakers around race The thing I'll finish about race is to note that we started trying to have this discussion in the 70s And in fact, there was a picture on the wall which I'll bet a lot of friends are familiar with Of some nice white Quakers in meeting for worship The light is streaming in through the window Focusing on a little girl who's there The door is open and there are Native Americans with Tomahawks raised coming in the door And I know the story about how wonderful the Quakers were They left the latte strings out The Native Americans actually never killed any Quakers because the Quakers didn't fight back But I raised the question with my meeting Was this really the image we wanted on the wall When our Native American friends came in That here are the sweet peaceful Quakers sitting in meeting for worship with the light shining on them And here are the threatening Native Americans with their Tomahawks raised I did get a little discussion going about it But it was clear that picture was not going to be removed from the wall Because of anything that came up about this That was in the 70s And now it's 2006 And at least among friends general conference gathering There is a fairly substantial discussion at least of racism And especially of Native Americans And how can we be respectful Particularly where can we share traditions and where do we need to do hands-off My point being that the discussion is now engaged But it took years for that to happen So I guess part of my ongoing ministry And organizing has been to just keep at those kinds of questions Until they reach critical mass and are being carried Bonnie, one of the elements of your work That has struck me as both unique and amazingly courageous Has been your interfacing with what most people think of as the Christian right The fundamentalist Christians The Christians that so many liberals are phobic of You've somehow been able to talk to and with them in Oregon Could you tell me about that? Sure, first of all I should credit my father for a lot of this He was a minister in Iowa He loved doing talk radio As the Peace Education Secretary For the American Friends Service Committee He always thought it was important to find ways to engage a dialogue With people who disagreed with us And not simply keep talking to ourselves When I discovered that in fact I was oppressed because I was a lesbian And I needed to talk to people I thought it was most important to talk to people who didn't agree with us The first Christians I talked to were Quakers And it's worth noting that when I started talking to them about marriage Actually, marriage equality Everything that you now hear from what are now called right-wing Christians About homosexuality and sexual orientation in marriage I heard first in my very good liberal Quaker meeting So that's where I learned how to talk to Christians about these issues Because I had to talk to them Because I realized I couldn't stay in a spiritual community Where we as a community were actually acting as an agent of the state To document the very institution Namely legal recognition of marriage That was being used to oppress my children I could not continue participating in that system And as a good Quaker who had enough experience with Quakerism to know That when one has a differing point of view you don't just shut up You speak truth to power I held it my responsibility to speak to my meeting about that So I had done that for a number of years And at one point I decided if I have to live through this Somebody is going to know about it And I am going to write a book At that point I had to tell you that my meeting was not thrilled at that prospect I had not, shall we say, perfected the techniques of nonviolent dialogue at that point None of us had We were not kind and gentle with each other in this discussion But we got through it And by 1989 my meeting, Multnomah Monthly Meeting in Portland, Oregon Had celebrated the marriage of a lesbian couple in the meeting In 1992 we had our first great anti-gay ballot measure That happened to be the same year that I had finished a videotape My book had morphed into a videotape about lesbian and gay families in the religious society of friends And then this ballot measure came up At that time the way you survived as a gay person, which is what we were all called in Was that you stayed in the closet or you stayed within a safe circle of friends You didn't talk to people who disagreed with you about homosexuality Most people just didn't talk to people who opposed us On the other hand, I had just gone through years of having to talk to them all I couldn't even just outvote them We had to reach unity So when this ballot measure came up and this ballot measure was horrible It was a constitutional amendment And part of it was that all educational institutions in the state that received state money Would set a community standard that homosexuality was unnatural, immoral, wrong, and perverse There also were provisions that no government funds could be used in any way to support homosexuality Which would have meant, for instance, that perhaps we couldn't use parks for gay rights celebrations It was a truly horrible measure And I knew that we really needed to defeat it I also knew from my experience with the friends that it was not going to be easy And we weren't going to do it by using traditional political strategies Traditional election strategy is you go out and ID voters You find out who supports you You forget about the people who oppose you And then you go and get all of your votes to the polls and you win My feeling was that was a great strategy If you had enough potential votes to harvest, but I didn't think we did I thought we really needed to have people change their minds on this issue Or we weren't going to win And that meant that you couldn't stick just to sound bites You couldn't say no, I'm not going to talk about what you want to talk about Because, you know, they wanted to talk about homosexuality and things like gay marriage And the political advice at that time was this is not about homosexuality This is about discrimination Well, in the first place, you know, a lot of folks, a lot of white folks at that point As much as discrimination among the liberal community may have been a bad thing A lot of folks still thought that was just code word for the way that people of color got special rights You know, they might not have been saying it out loud a lot, but they weren't real happy with affirmative action And so I didn't think that was going to gain us a lot of ground And I also thought that if people said what I want to talk about is homosexuality And if you wanted to persuade them differently, it was a good idea to talk to them about what they wanted to talk about So that's how I got started And again, because of the Quakers, I believed that people could move Which was a key element of faith that most people in the gay political community didn't have I had actually watched people who were saying the same thing Move clear over the point where they supported a lesbian marriage So that's how I got started, and as a part of that, I was asked to go on Christian talk radio programs Which again, the campaign people wouldn't do because they didn't want to be bothered with them And I thought, well, yeah, that's who we want to talk to So I would go on the Christian talk stations And somebody heard me there and invited me on to what I call another traditional talk radio station Which is to say it was mostly right-wing, and it was mostly working-class people calling in Anyway, they invited me to come on and do a debate on air, and I did And I thought, well, this was kind of fun I asked the host, well, so how do you get one of these radio programs? And he said, well, essentially, the owner of the station sells time And if you get your own sponsors, you can buy time I said, well, yeah, but do you think she'd sell it to me? And he said, I don't know, I asked her So I asked her, and she thought about it a while, and she was frightened And I have to say, at that point in Oregon, it was an act of courage for her to give me time on her radio station Because she was dependent on a sponsor base that held views that were very different than mine And my radio program, and this would have been about 93, probably My radio program was called "Love Makes a Family" A public dialogue about lesbians, gays, and family values And, you know, I got all the folks calling in, and we talked about things First, she gave me a half-an-hour program, and people didn't trash the station And they didn't trash her, because I was real nice to people I've always thought that I should connect to people where I best can connect with them And so I was a Methodist minister's daughter, who was a Quaker I was already a grandmother, I still had a kid in public schools I talked about my children, I talked about my granddaughter, I talked about going to church When they talked Bible to me, I talked about my dad, and people talked to me And so she thought, well, that's okay, and so when I asked her for more time Eventually she gave us two hours on drive time, Wednesday morning from 7 to 9 So I spent about four years doing this weekly show, two-hour show, where I just talked to people And at the same time, I had been in a group called "People of Faith Against Bigotry" during the ballot measure And some of us decided that we should do reconciliation afterwards We had met some of the folks in the churches that opposed us And through some of those connections, somebody pulled together a group of, I don't know, six or eight People who were in Christian churches who were adamantly opposed to homosexuality And you know, and a like number of folks who were faith-based, but who supported equality for people without regard to sexual orientation And we spent two years meeting monthly, having a potluck together, and then talking to each other And a lot of it came down, and especially in the last year, to doing Bible study together Because eventually, the other folks eliminated every other text we tried to use Because their pastors were telling them these were sinful books We couldn't use any reference but the Bible We engaged in a lot of dialogue And this came across on my radio program too, of course, because that was a lot of the issues So from that, again, I don't know if any of those people changed But I do know that they changed to the point that one of the people in our dialogue group, when the next round of anti-gay petitions came out She reported to us that she had told them, well, she didn't think she was going to circulate them this time Because she didn't think that was the way Jesus wanted us to act with each other And something very similar happened on the radio program when one of the ballot measures came up There was this one guy who used to call me every week And he would say, well, you know, you weren't born that way God didn't make you that way And he was in his 80s Italian Catholic, and we would talk about it every week And eventually, he started sending me contributions for the program He actually helped support the radio program, because I talked to him every week When the petitions came out, he also said, you know, I don't think we ought to vote on that ballot measure And same thing, I don't think that's what Jesus would want us to do So I realized that there is, in fact, a large community of Christians who may hold views That are very opposed to homosexuality, but who are willing to engage in dialogue And not only willing, but who feel somewhat of a mandate, you know, evangelical Christians, they're evangelicals The truth of the matter is most Christians have got a little evangelical streak Quakers, although they claim not to proselytize, come from a very proselytizing history When we believe something is true, we feel we should share it with people I feel very strongly that if we can learn to talk to people the same way we have learned to talk to our families And to our friends, that people do change on this issue Something changes in me, when I witness someone's courage They may not know I'm watching, and I may not let them know That something changes in me, that will last me for a lifetime To fill me when I'm empty and rocky when I move Something changes in me, anytime there's someone singing All the songs I've never forgotten, let our voices sing them strong Something changes in me, anytime there's someone standing for the crowd to be completely All the good things that we are, there's a change of hearts Anytime there's someone counting all the lives there won't be thrown away There's a change of hearts, anytime you join the choir Be a voice upon the mountain, we'll see a fire in the rain Something changes in me, when my arms are held wide open Fear and hate are set aside, and only love remains Something changes in me, and I feel a deep emotion While the ones who fall for hell, replace the ones that just complain There's a change of hearts, anytime there's someone counting all the lives There won't be thrown away, there's a change of hearts Anytime you join the choir, be a voice upon the mountain, we'll see a fire In the rain, do not forget the children, they are the singers in the storm And when their hearts are threatened, when the fire is bounced out And it won't stop at midnight, we feel an age of pain And I do believe that love directs the flame, there is a change of hearts Anytime there's someone counting all the lives there won't be thrown away There's a change of hearts, anytime you join the choir Be a voice upon the mountain, we'll see a fire in the rain There is a change of hearts, anytime there's someone counting all the lives There won't be thrown away, there's a change of hearts Anytime you join the choir, be a voice upon the mountain, we'll see a fire A fire in the rain How did you learn to deal with it when people were directing opinions and maybe direct comments At you criticizing you saying you're not good because you are this sinful creature One thing I realized is that when I was dealing with the Quakers, I have to admit I wasn't real good about that I got pretty mad about it, and I probably pointed out how heterosexuals weren't real perfect either But I discovered when that first ballot measure hit, what I have said is, in some way the anger went out of me And I think the reason the anger went out of me was that I realized that we couldn't afford it That we couldn't afford to just fight with these people because if we did, we were not only threatening our own survival But we were pushing the whole country toward fascism, and we couldn't afford to do that We had to pull back from that edge I started teaching other people how to talk to people, and in that process I realized that when I go out speaking about this My job is not to defend myself and my family My job is not to gain rights for myself and my family And my job is not to defend the truth Because the one wonderful thing about the truth is the truth can take care of itself So my job was to share my own experience of the truth of my life and my family And my spiritual journey in a way that people could see me and see my family and get a different view than what they had held And that to the extent, I mean homophobia means fear of homos So to the extent that fear was motivating what was coming at me and most folks will deny that they are afraid of gay people But if you believe that it's fear-based, that anger is essentially fear-based I realized that my job was to release them from fear So that I needed to be a person who would not frighten them It went right back to what Gandhi says about non-violence That essentially non-violent action is Ahimsa, which gives the message "I will not harm you" When you're talking to people, you want to give that message and you also want to give the message That you can say anything you want to me and it won't hurt me, it won't harm me Because unless you can release them to say whatever it is they want to say You never know what's in their mind and in their heart And if you can't find out where that is that they are frightened Or where that is that they've got a history that says this is wrong Or if you can't find the fact that like this 86 year old man who I talked to for a long time on the radio One day I finally said to him, "You know Natali, you must know something about this that I don't Because you hold this view so strongly, what has happened to you that you know this?" And he said to me, "You know, I used to think I was that way" And I went to talk to the priest about it and he said, "Well, God didn't make you that way You don't have to be that way, just don't be that way" And he didn't take a wife until he was in his old age So this man had spent his entire life resisting his own sexual and denying his own sexuality So what I realized is that when strong opposition comes up, something is driving it And unless I can release people to start sharing enough information about themselves That I can understand where that comes from That I can't help show a way that they can walk away from it Can you talk a little bit about your spiritual and religious values? I mean you grew up Methodist, you have this activism period with American Friends Service Committee And you're active in the Quaker meeting What are the beliefs that are part of this? Is there a God or a Jesus or something in this for you? There is certainly something that I recognize as divine I also recognize that that word has been misused by a lot of institutions that I don't recognize as divine And so I'm cautious about using religious language I believe there is a spirit of goodness in the world and in the universe And I believe that is a mysterious spirit of goodness That things happen to us, which cannot be explained by our rational minds And I believe that there is a power in that goodness and that it belongs to all people My beliefs are very much in line with traditional Quaker teachings I believe it is our job to answer that of God in everyone Or for folks who are uncomfortable with calling this goodness God Answer the spirit of goodness in everyone And it just comes down to treating everyone the way you treat your kids in some way Or your spouse, you give them the benefit of the doubt In psychological terms, I've heard psychologists talk this way People are trying to make something good happen Most people are trying to do good in the world So that is a part of my spiritual belief That we come into this world as children filled with love and goodness And it is the hurts of the world that replace that goodness with anger and violence Therefore, if we want to ease the anger and violence in the world We can only do that with love Again, that's very much in line with not only Quaker teachings With Martin Luther King, with Christianity, but with many of the world's religions It's very important to me that I believe life is good And that doesn't mean I deny the pain and evil that happened to people I also believe there is unexplained evil Very good men, very good women have awful things happen to them So having faith and being good is not a guarantee that you're going to live an easy life Some of my other spiritual beliefs come right out of the Sermon on the Mount What you have, you should share People who are in trouble should be helped You should feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick and imprisoned Again, for me, that comes from the recognition of the goodness in all people And the connection in all people That if we are all one, and I believe we are I believe life is all one That I am connected to folks who are hungry And I shouldn't be overindulging if I'm not doing everything I can to get food to hungry people I don't believe in storing up money in banks Because I believe that if I have resources, I should share them I don't believe I should determine my work in the world based on how much it pays I believe that there is a way of knowing what my work is in the world That comes from, some would say from God I might say from just my deep understanding of what was given to me when I came on this earth What it was I was to do, and I think I should do that And if I don't get a salary for doing it, I should do it anyway I believe in the Lord's Prayer Give us this day our daily bread I don't think that I need to ask for more than that And actually I think that is one of the biggest dividers of our country, and of the world at this time It's not really race, it's not really sexual orientation, it's not gender identity It's the difference between people who believe that the earth and everything on it belongs to all of the people who live here However you express that, in Christian terms, we are all God's children And the riches of this earth have been given to all of us You don't withhold food from your brother You don't withhold shelter And yet, increasingly, if you don't live for your own financial gain, you are deemed crazy If you do not stockpile riches Provide for the security of your old age, you are deemed irresponsible And there is a moral value placed on a person's wealth And it is not that people who share their wealth are more moral So that's one of my core spiritual beliefs Is that you don't deny people something because they don't have the funds for it I'm a bit unclear about all this work that you're doing as part of Love Makes a Family When did it start? What are you doing now? What all is involved in this? Love Makes a Family was incorporated in 1993 It was found directly out of my work with In Quaker meetings to tell the story of lesbian and gay families within Quaker meetings In Quaker terms, I was released by my meeting and my yearly meeting To travel in the ministry gathering and sharing the stories of lesbian and gay friends Once the ballot measure hit, it became clear that we needed to do more than just go Quaker meeting to Quaker meeting That we needed a real organization and that there was a lot more work to do So it was incorporated to the 501(c)(3) I am the executive director We did initially a lot of support work for lesbian, gay, bi and trans parents and their children We still do that What I realized from my own children is they had been very deeply injured as they grew up Because of the way they were treated and also the way they perceived their family was treated Because we were lesbians and that those children needed each other Because even as their parents, we didn't share their experience So that was the first thing in creating family support systems Was so those kids could find each other and the parents could find each other and have a community The other piece of that we call this area constituency support was that the LGBT community at that point Many folks didn't think of themselves as family, they didn't have children And therefore they thought they didn't have families So we've been putting out the message everybody has a family Families are the people you draw close to you who become your primary support system So we do other activities at gay pride We have family activities and it turns out we have a lot of teenagers there and a lot of older people So we put out picnics for the whole community, that sort of thing The next area of work has been institutional change And again initially we started working on marriage rights because the mechanisms that oppress lesbian and gay by and trans people Are primarily mechanisms of exclusion from the family The chief one of those being of course marriage If you can't have your marriage recognized socially You don't have the social glue and the legal and economic support to keep your relationship together In this society in many ways it means you don't have full adult status Because how do we know when somebody has grown up? They get married So we wanted to change that system where we could be adults who form families and who even have children And we've had children for generations What we haven't been able to do is to come out and keep those children Our children have been taken away from us And I was so painfully aware of this with the daughter I adopted Because I couldn't legally adopt her until she turned 18 Because she had to sign her own adoption papers or I would have lost her I know children within the last five years who have been taken away from their parents who have come out So institutionally to change the laws so that we could have children and keep them has been very important So that's one kind of institutional change we look at The other one is schools because our children are in schools Which means they are surrounded by that very institution That some folks think should set the community standard that homosexuality is unnatural, immoral, wrong and perverse And the only thing the right wing really got wrong in that ballot measure is that they already had that from schools That was already the role of schools in communities And we've been trying to change that and they're right, we are And we've done things like we had a panel that we called the Parent Teacher Action Panel Which was a panel of lesbian, gay and straight parents and teachers and students That would go out to staff meetings and talk about the experience of kids with LGBT parents Or kids who themselves were starting to come out in schools We created in Portland a group called the Sexual Minority Parents Advisory Group Which was a group that worked with the school system and it was independent of love makes a family But a lot of staff time went into supporting it and it was a parent involvement group So that we had status to speak directly to top levels of administrators And we had status to disseminate information through school systems That all happened in Portland From that we created what we called the Middle School Transition Project Because we realized that the kids, in grade school they were doing pretty good Parents were still able to surround them with fairly supportive communities But by the time they got to middle school and were starting to experience their own sexuality They were much more vulnerable to the anti-gay jokes And they needed support as they went from that fairly protected grade school into middle school So we had panels of kids of older kids who would go out into the schools and talk about bullying It wasn't just about being gay or having gay parents, it was all kinds of bullying But it was a way again to create some level of safety in the schools The third thing that we have done is public education and that ranges from what I call the gay on display speeches Which was our early, the early invitations were from sociology classes who wanted to see a live one Or from high school civics classes who wanted to know what a real gay person looked like And we would go out and talk about what was it to be lesbian or gay But we still do a fair number of those, we've got a lot of speakers identified We do things like go to the state fair with a family's faith in marriage equality booth Along with that came the speaker training program to help other people learn how to go out and engage in dialogues In a way that people can change That has evolved into a whole program that we call opening hearts and minds In Michigan we trained a group from the American Vents Service Committee there They have taken the program and spread it all over Michigan And our method is called Lara Briefly it stands for Listen of Firm Respond and Add What we have decided with Love Makes a Family is that in some ways I can go back more to the Quaker Origins And to the strength that comes from the involvement in various nonviolent movements To take this system that we have for really being able to talk with people Is probably the most important contribution that we have to make The other programs ran on assortment of patch together grants and student interns And I have stopped trying to patch that together so that I can focus on the workshops I do it close to full time but we are now trying to take these workshops and turn our workbook into a real book We have discovered that this works for any issue you want to use it on And that many of the social change movements are realizing That the tactics that they have been using aren't working very well So anyway that's what I am focusing on right now I should let people know Love Makes a Family is a membership organization We have members all over the country and we invite people to join We have a website at www.lmfamily.org And we do do these workshops wherever we are invited We have been all over the country with them So if it's something that people are interested in learning more about Please get in touch with us Bonnie it sounds like some great work you are doing for years And I am particularly impressed particularly I guess proud To know you as a person who does front line work but does it lovingly There are so many people out there who are saying down with the other side And somehow you have been able to meet them And I just want to thank you for doing that work Thank you and I want to put in a word for the folks who are angry I just want everyone to know that I am no more loving than anyone else I have been blessed by a community that heard my anger and changed The folks who are out there being angry and they are organizing Are people who are still in great pain and who need to be heard It is my hope that anyone I have been able to talk with When one of those angry people comes upon them They will remember me as that angry person Because I was that angry person I still am sometimes I was that hurt person And it is the love of other people that has released me from my fear Thank you again Bonnie You've been listening to an interview with Bonnie Tinker of Love Makes Family Their website again is lmfamily.org You can listen to this program again via my website NorthernSpiritRadio.org And you can also find helpful links and information on that site Music featured in this program includes Imagine My Surprise by Holly Neer And also by Holly Neer Change of Heart The theme music for Spirit in Action is I Have No Hands But Yours by Carol Johnson Thank you for listening I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit You can email me at helpsmeet@usa.net May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light This is Spirit in Action I have no high your call for you and dreams To love and serve your neighbor Enjoying selflessness To love and serve your neighbor Enjoying selflessness To love and serve your neighbor Enjoying selflessness You