Exploring Inclusion in Faith, Disability, and Sexual Identity ~ 704

Tim Villegas: In September 2018, Azusa Pacific University, a Christian liberal arts college in the San Gabriel Valley of California, dropped a long-standing policy of preventing students from engaging in same-sex relationships. According to Erin Green, leader of Brave Commons, an LGBTQ advocacy organization, the previous rule had unfairly singled out LGBTQ students.

Queer students are just as able to have romanticized relationships that abide by APU’s rules, she said via APU’s campus media outlet. The code falsely assumed that same-sex romances always involved sexual behavior. Days after the policy change, APU’s Board of Trustees reversed the changes. As a graduate of Azusa Pacific University, I was particularly interested in this story, especially as it relates to my evolution of thinking about same-sex relationships in marriage.

Hold on, Tim. What does this have to do with disability and inclusion? Well, I promise I will get there. Growing up an evangelical Christian, I held conservative views of marriage and sexual identity. Things started to change for me when I began interacting with the disability community. Some of whom expressed that they were an autistic queer or transgender disabled person.

When a person has autism, it is from birth. It is how you’re wired. Someone or something cannot make you autistic. In the same way, I began to see that sexual identity was something that you were born with. And I knew how I thought. It was also at this time that I went through a huge deconstruction of my own faith.

I questioned everything, including the existence of God, that there was even a person named Jesus, and chalked up my spiritual experiences to psychological manipulation. Since then, my faith remains, but it looks much different, more inclusive. I strive for finding the common ground between people around me, even if they have a different faith background. This includes sexual identity and disability.

How could I be promoting inclusion for people with disabilities and not do the same for people of different faiths or sexualities? I asked Erin Green of Brave Commons to share with us what she thinks the biggest barrier to inclusion for LGBTQ students at Christian universities. And here’s what she had to say.

Erin Green: I think the biggest barrier is isolation. Christian universities and faith communities don’t realize that they do this, but when they’re non-affirming or when they force someone to live in illusion and to live a lie, your message as a Christian church or a university is that we only validate heterosexual couples as genuine couples and erase the identity of being gay or trans.

It’s incredibly isolating. And I’ve been there. So I’m speaking from a place of experience and hopefully being a voice for other folks who are in this situation now. You pretend to be something that you’re not in order to be safe in that space because you’re worried about what people are going to say or do or how they’re going to judge you.

You’re being blocked from connecting with people, from saying who you are and having people love you for who you are. You’re trying to fit into this culture or ideology that isn’t necessarily something that’s forced upon us from the Bible in the first place.

We’re taking away the ability for someone to connect fully in community, and that’s probably one of the most harmful things we could do to a human being. Even in the Bible it says it’s not good for a human to be alone. That’s one of the ways we’re able to survive and thrive—having community and friendship and love and people showing us affection.

We potentially deprive someone of that basic human need. That is a huge danger because that person will start to internalize self-hatred or bias. Homophobia—basically you internalize it and you hate yourself because you can’t live up to the standard or you’ll never be what the church expects you to be or says you will be if you pray hard enough.

We become depressed, isolated, have anxious thoughts, insomnia, suicidal ideation, propensity for drug and alcohol abuse. All these things happen to that person. These are the things we have to look out for. Just even having non-affirming language starts to produce this in someone. It’s like we’re slowly killing them on the inside. That’s a huge threat to someone who identifies as LGBTQ and just so happens to be in those spaces.

Tim Villegas: In March of 2019, Azusa Pacific removed their ban on same-sex relationships for the second time after six months of student organizing and community pressure.

With news of the second ban removal, students and alumni are hopeful. This is an opportunity to continue to hold APU accountable, Green says, noting that Brave Commons will continue to monitor the situation as it develops and organize for equity for all members of the LGBTQ community at Azusa Pacific and across the country.

To learn more about the work of Brave Commons and the organizing at Azusa Pacific University visit bravecommons.org. Today on the podcast, my interview with Mike McHargue, speaker and author of Finding God in the Waves, host of Ask Science Mike podcast, and a contributor to the Liturgist podcast. We talk about his recent diagnosis of autism and his thoughts about how disability and sexual identity intersect.

Tim Villegas: What has the experience been like for you identifying as an adult with autism and do you think that it would have been beneficial for you to have known that earlier or was it better to find out later?

Mike McHargue: I think I was really resistant to the idea at first. My wife has said for years that she suspected I was on the spectrum. I would always get pretty offended when she would say that because I thought she was basing that on media tropes of what autism looks like. I can be eccentric. I’m gifted in really particular and specific types of cognition and memory.

Often the media narrative around people with autism, if they are portrayed at all, is either rain man level difficulty functioning in the everyday world or absent-minded professors that are extremely brilliant in one particular area. Although there can be people with autism who look like that media narrative, it ignores a wide range of lived experiences.

It causes underdiagnosis rates among women and people of color. Autism gets overly conflated with white men. So when my wife would say she thought I was on the spectrum, I thought she was applying a media trope to me. But then a couple of people who are actually credentialed in diagnosing autism suggested to me that I could be on the spectrum. I took that a lot more seriously and went to an autism testing center.

It was a strange experience because the environment was completely oriented towards children. The waiting room looked like a daycare. But I ended up going all the way to a diagnosis starting with a professional opinion from a clinical psychologist. I actually found it a relief because there were so many things in my life that didn’t make sense to me.

I’m a small-time public figure and part of my work is living in a vulnerable way, being honest about what I’m going through with people. But there were things I didn’t tell anyone—how I spin in circles in my office chair when I’m alone, the noises I make in my throat, the meltdowns I have when my routine or schedule changes. Those are things that seemed like others didn’t struggle with.

For me, if my routine gets disrupted, it is incredibly challenging and can lead to emotional breakdowns. All those things started to make sense under the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder.

I wasn’t diagnosed as a child, which is the most common and easiest way to be diagnosed. I think I’m glad I wasn’t diagnosed as a child, mainly because I grew up in the 1980s. I don’t know that how autism was defined then would have fit me, and the education system’s approach to autism might have been detrimental.

So I think things played out in as close to an ideal way as possible.

Tim Villegas: I’m really interested in your perception, being a person that was educated in special or separate classes.

Mike McHargue: Well, the problem was, in the eyes of my teachers and adults in my life, I was a bright child. But that didn’t show up in the classroom. I had trouble writing, difficulty reading, and a great deal of difficulty interacting socially with other children. In kindergarten, my presence was a disruption. I was teased so severely and so often that the teacher couldn’t proceed with the class.

The teacher would put the class in timeout, which meant I had to go sit by myself. She used inverse language and was obviously exasperated with the other students but didn’t know how to stop the behavior. In first grade, I still had great difficulty writing, especially. I started spending a couple hours a day in a separate, much smaller classroom.

I don’t remember a lot about it—I was very young. I remember one of the other students wore a helmet. There was much more individualized attention, and we mainly worked on reading and writing. For first grade, second grade, and a little of third grade, I always had this time in another classroom. Around third grade, I caught up enough that they stopped taking me into that classroom. My grades were still terrible. I still struggled with writing especially.

Tim Villegas: May I ask you a question about the writing? I spend a lot of time with students on the spectrum, and writing is one of the most difficult things for them. Some teachers interpret that as the student just not wanting to write. Was that something that was told to you or to your parents?

Mike McHargue: We had nothing but teacher conference after teacher conference with teachers telling my parents that I was bright and lazy. Over and over: “He’s bright. He just won’t do the work. He won’t write.” I would tell the teachers and my parents that writing was very difficult. They would say, “Well, it’s hard for everyone. People just do it anyway.”

I’m 40 years old and I still struggle to write a full paragraph of text by hand. The lifeline for me came when computers entered the school system. When I could type instead of write, I was much better. Over time, later in middle school, I went from okay at writing to exceptional—but only if I can use a keyboard.

Autism is primarily understood as a developmental delay. What I’ve seen over and over in my life is that things click for me, just way later than they do for everyone else. There are things that clicked for me in my 30s and 40s that clicked for my peers in middle school or elementary school.

School was a lot harder for me than it needed to be. No amount of making me write is going to make me able to write like other people. It just won’t happen.

Tim Villegas: Right.

Mike McHargue: All it does is make me feel frustrated and confused. And tired and overwhelmed. It did as a child. It does today. If I go to a doctor’s office and there’s a form to fill out, that’s going to be a bad day. If my wife goes with me, she generally fills the form out. She gets it and she’s always gotten it—even before the diagnosis—that it’s harder for me than other people.

Tim Villegas: In the discussion of inclusion and inclusive education, I didn’t know if you had any thoughts.

Mike McHargue: I don’t want autistic people to be siloed from the rest of the world. I don’t want them to be isolated. To me, that means the way forward is not creating increasingly insular communities and sidelining people on the spectrum or any intersection of identity, but instead all of us working together to create a society where we’re better at understanding and dealing with all the different ways people happen and people are.

Tim Villegas: As your faith evolved in your story, did you also feel like you were being open to other things like disability or gender identity?

Mike McHargue: Absolutely. For me, the inclusive journey started with sexuality and gender. As my old assumptions about scripture fell away, I didn’t have any non-scriptural basis to object to same-sex marriages. That led me to learn more about gender. At first, I conflated sex and gender all the time. Didn’t understand any subtlety or difference. Then I learned about intersex people, and I was like, wow.

Intersex folks and the issues they face start to brush up against ableism. So then I started to look at inclusion in the context of disability. I’d always thought about it in terms of race, but I could certainly be guilty of post-racial notions of inclusion.

These days, the way I read the Bible, I just understand that the authors believed things I don’t believe and lived in cultures I don’t live in. I’m not a “go to the Bible for simple answers” kind of person. A credible read of the Bible requires significant academic expertise. There’s room for discussion and debate on what the Bible says about anything.

On most things, the Bible says several things—even contradictory things. That’s not a flaw in a beautiful old library. To me, it’s a strength that it tells so many stories of faith. The arc of it, if there’s one thing the Bible does continuously, is push on assumptions about inclusion. Whatever context any specific part of the Bible was written in, it pushed against notions of exclusion. That’s a valuable lesson. The Bible teaches me about inclusion and who belongs and who doesn’t.

Tim Villegas: What would you like—in just a dream for the future—for the next 10 to 20 years for disabled people? How would you like the world to be different?

Mike McHargue: I’d hope that as a society we decide that accommodation matters. That it matters enough that people are willing to make personal and structural changes to accommodate others. How many people resent the number of handicap accessible parking spaces in a parking lot? How many small business owners complain about the expense of ADA compliance? How many older buildings rely on exemptions to skirt accessibility requirements?

The most wonderful moment I’ve had in recent years was watching an autistic man sing beautifully on stage in a church. When he finished, people started to clap, and he raised his hands to his ears in obvious discomfort. Someone in the third row started waving their hands instead of clapping. Then that spread across the entire room. It moved me to tears.

That is the kind of behavior we all need to emulate to make a more inclusive society. Realize with sensitivity when our well-intentioned actions cause others harm or discomfort, and then actively look for solutions to alleviate it.

Tim Villegas: If you would like to hear the entire unedited recording of my interview with Erin Green from Brave Commons or Science Mike, consider becoming a Patreon subscriber at patreon.com/thinkinclusivepodcast. Follow the Think Inclusive Podcast on the web at thinkinclusive.us and tell us what you thought of the podcast via Twitter at inclusive_pod, on Facebook or Instagram.

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Thank you to Patreons Donna L, Kathleen T, and Veronica E for their continued support of the podcast. Also a special shout out to my producer and love of my life, Brianna—the only person I would run through an airport for is you. Thank you to my boys—you know who you are—for your feedback and suggestions. It is greatly appreciated. Aren’t you glad you didn’t take Saquon in the first round?

Next time on the Think Inclusive Podcast:

Christina Samuels: These kids are in the general education classroom. They are with the general education teachers, and general education teachers cannot realistically say this has got to be somebody else’s job. It’s their job.

Tim Villegas: Thanks for your time and attention. See you next time.

Kids: This has been a production of Think Inclusive, LLC.