Blink

Before I acquired so many children and dogs, I used to collect antique maps and prints. Above the stereo cabinet in our living room is a poster with the slogan “Strengthen Liberty.” It commemorates my time in Chicago as a gay rights lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union. 

The poster was actually printed for the Boy Scouts of America’s fortieth anniversary in 1950, the year that also marked the ACLU’s thirtieth anniversary. BSA and the ACLU share a comically similar taste in patriotic graphic design.

 

I keep this picture of the Statue of Liberty, an American flag, a Boy Scout, a Cub Scout, and an Explorer to remind me that some things change, and some things don’t. Because some people won’t change.

John Hammell and Keith Richardson in Windy City Times

When I arrived in Chicago in 1995, I inherited an appeal defending the ACLU’s victory in an employment discrimination case against the local Boy Scout council. John Hammell, the founder of the ACLU of Illinois LGBT Right Project, had filed suit on behalf of Keith Richardson under the City of Chicago’s antidiscrimination ordinance. John and Keith were both Eagle Scouts. (I think I made it to Second Class Scout.) After the Chicago Area Council rejected Keith’s employment application because he was an “avowed homosexual,” the Chicago Human Rights Commission determined the Boy Scouts violated Chicago’s ordinance prohibiting employment discrimination based on sexual orientation.

 

Sexual orientation has nothing to do with Scouting. Nevertheless, decades ago the Boy Scouts adopted an internal anti-gay policy excluding LGBT youth and adult leaders. BSA acted at the behest of some of its major organizational partners, including the Mormon church. For many decades, the Mormons sponsored more Boy Scout troops, Cub packs, and Explorer posts than any other organization. Scouting was the church’s official youth program for boys when I was growing up.

 

The First Amendment guarantees the right of “expressive association,” which means a private organization like the Boy Scouts can exclude members whose statements or presence would prevent the organization communicating its chosen message. Until advocates like the ACLU and Lambda Legal came along, most people didn’t know about BSA’s exclusionary policy. After critics began speaking out and LGBT rights lawyers began challenging the Boy Scouts’ anti-gay policy, BSA started identifying homophobia as one of its core values – preaching that it’s impossible for a gay individual to live up to the Scout Oath’s promise to be “morally straight.” In June 2000, the United States Supreme Court ruled by a 5-4 vote in Dale v. Boy Scouts of America that the First Amendment protected BSA’s exclusionary policy from the application of local anti-discrimination laws. 

 

In hindsight, the Boy Scouts of America won the battle but lost the war. A year after the Dale decision, Lambda Legal’s Executive Director Kevin Cathcart said “I’m disappointed that we lost the court ruling, but never have we lost so successfully. It must be driving the Boy Scouts crazy - to keep thinking this is going to die down, and yet it doesn’t stop.” Gregg Shields, the Boy Scouts’ longtime spokesman, told another reporter that despite winning in the Supreme Court, it felt like BSA lost.

The Advocate (March 17, 1998)

When I was working on the Richardson v. Chicago Area Council appeal, I could see the writing on the wall. The Boy Scouts were absolutely committed to their anti-gay policy. Eventually the mounting evidence of BSA’s homophobic statements and conduct would demonstrate to any court that the phrase “morally straight” should be taken literally as one of the organization’s core expressive values. At some point the excruciatingly principled folks at the ACLU would have to start defending BSA, just like we would with the First Amendment rights of Ku Klux Klan marchers or Nazis parading through Skokie.

 

It was time to redirect pressure toward the partners and sponsors of Scouting whose own values embraced LGBT inclusion. Because the Richardson case had generated a full trial record, I inherited a mountain of documents showing how Scouting works. The Girl Scouts are like Starbucks – GSA owns and operates each individual Girl Scout troop. In contrast, the Boys Scouts are organized like McDonald’s – BSA and its regional councils franchise or “charter” local organizations to operate each youth group in accordance with BSA’s policies. The charter approach greatly expands BSA’s reach.

 

The Richardson case file included a printout identifying the organization holding the charter for each of the 400+ Boy Scout troops, Cub Scout packs, and Explorer posts chartered by the Chicago Area Council. Many of the chartered organizations were schools and other governmental entities, as well as various private groups and churches. For example, a substantial share of Explorer posts in Chicago and nationwide were operated by government agencies.

 

So I filed a lawsuit against the Chicago School District, instead of against the Boy Scouts. I argued that the government cannot exclude youth or adults from taxpayer-funded programs just because someone signed a homophobic charter agreement with a discriminatory private organization. Our plaintiffs were a Methodist minister and Kevin Poloncarz, a gay law student. After a few months of litigation, the school district agreed to voluntarily end its sponsorship of the Boy Scouts’ discriminatory programs. 

 

The next week BSA announced it was opening its Explorer posts nationwide to every youth, regardless of sexual orientation or religious belief. That earnest teenaged Explorer saluting in my vintage poster?  As of 1998, it was ok for him to be gay.

Every religion has its little quirks. Transubstantiation. Lutheran hotdish. Yarmulkes. Usually these peculiar beliefs do not interfere with adherents’ ability to participate in ordinary society. Since the LDS Church’s founding in 1830, Mormon doctrine has dramatically diverged from the American mainstream only three times. 

In the nineteenth century the divisive issue was polygamy. Joseph Smith, who claimed to see God and later produced the Book of Mormon, was the first Mormon Prophet. Brother Joseph was a charismatic, visionary, strange man. Before an Illinois mob shot and killed him, Joseph told his closest confidants God had revealed that the highest degree of heaven required a man to marry multiple wives. (It’s not clear whether Joseph ever told his wife Emma this, even after Joseph secretly married the nanny and several other attractive young women.) 

Joseph Smith led the church for its action-packed first fourteen years. His death in 1844 amid continuing attacks by their neighbors left the Mormons in disarray. Characteristically ambiguous, Joseph sent mixed messages about who would succeed him, and the saints split into various factions. The largest group followed Brigham Young, the senior member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. 

 

Brother Brigham was God’s dude on Earth for the next thirty-three years. He was a very different kind of leader compared to Joseph Smith, yet exactly the shepherd his demoralized flock needed. Young took Joseph Smith’s wild visions and translated them for a practical world. He held his grieving people together, then led them across the prairies and mountains all the way out of the country. After the United States stole Utah and the rest of the West from Mexico three years later, Brother Brigham pragmatically became territorial governor. History recognizes Brigham Young as an American Moses. 

As with many other aspects of Joseph Smith’s creative theology, Brother Brigham organized and systemized polygamy. Brigham himself married fifty-five wives. Despite my Mormon pioneer heritage, I only have one polygamous ancestor. Leishmans are bad at multi-tasking, and as marginal family farmers they couldn’t meet the strict financial requirements for polygamy anyway. 

By the time Brigham Young died in 1877, the United States was targeting polygamy for extermination. Within a few years Church leaders were in hiding or in prison. The federal government seized the Salt Lake Temple and other church property. Families like the Romneys crossed the border to found Mormon colonies in Mexico and Canada.  

In 1890, Brigham’s successor Wilford Woodruff announced “The Lord showed me by vision and revelation exactly what would take place if we did not stop this practice.” He issued a Manifesto that abandoned and denounced the previously eternal principle of plural marriage. Nowadays you’ll only see polygamists on HBO in Big Love, or in Northern Arizona compounds where folks in quaint outfits still believe everything Joseph Smith and Brigham Young said.   

Seventy-five years after the Utah branch of Mormons abandoned polygamy, the church found itself in conflict with evolving American values regarding race.

During the nineteenth century, the Mormons picked up a lot of racist myths and folk theology. As a result, no one with a “drop” of African blood could be ordained to the priesthood, or participate in the Church’s most sacred rites. Like so many other Americans since 1619, one generation of Mormon leaders after another were flawed human beings who embraced and perpetuated structural racism. 

The church’s anti-Black doctrine became increasingly untenable in the 1960s and 70s. Missionaries found it heartbreaking to turn away enthusiastic converts in multiracial nations like Brazil. College athletes refused to play against teams from BYU. Ordinary Mormons found the dissonance between their Christian values and the Brethren’s out-of-touch dogma unbearable.

 

One of the advantages of a rigidly hierarchical organizational structure is that a single person has the power to end centuries of evil. In 1978, when I was a Boy Scout, the Mormon Prophet was Spencer W. Kimball. After “spending many hours in the Upper Room of the Temple supplicating the Lord for divine guidance,” President Kimball “received a revelation extending priesthood and temple blessings to all worthy male members of the Church.”

Like his predecessor President Woodruff, Spencer W. Kimball chose people over dogma. Because of his humility and vision, Mormons and their church finally began the long process of emerging from a century and a half of entrenched systemic racism.

Other supposed Christians were even slower than the Mormons on race. Conservative evangelical Bob Jones founded his eponymous university in 1927. His grandson Bob Jones III was president of the university in 1971 when it admitted its first Black students. Nevertheless, the Joneses and the university were convinced God had forbidden miscegenation, and therefore retained their rules against interracial dating and marriage.

In 1976, the Internal Revenue Service revoked Bob Jones University’s tax-exempt status on the grounds that it practiced racial discrimination. In 1983, the Supreme Court ruled against the university in an 8-1 decision. (Justice Rehnquist dissented. Typical.)

Last week in “Move On,” I wrote about the work of REAP – the Religious Exemption Accountability Project – which was founded last year by my former law firm colleague Paul Southwick. REAP seeks to apply the logic of IRS v. Bob Jones University to private colleges that accept government funding, yet insist on discriminating against LGBT students. Religious organizations should be free to practice their discriminatory beliefs – but not if they want to accept the benefits of being part of a civilized community.  

Bob Jones III abandoned the university’s interracial dating ban in 2000, after a campus visit by presidential candidate George W. Bush provoked intense media scrutiny. In 2008, Bob Jones University finally apologized for having allowed “institutional policies to remain in place that were racially hurtful.”

With the Mormon church, the good news is that interracial couples have been permitted to marry in the temple since 1978. The bad news is that the church still hasn’t apologized for its racist past – just like the Brethren have yet to offer a word of apology for their decades of abusively homophobic words and deeds. 

Rachel Maddow on the Bob Jones University apology

In the decades after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dale, the Boy Scouts faced increased internal and external opposition to its anti-gay policy. Membership and donations plummeted. As CBS News reported, 

In 2013, after heated internal debate, the BSA decided to allow openly gay youth as scouts, but not gay adults as leaders. Several denominations that collectively sponsor close to half of all Scout units – including the Roman Catholic church, the Mormon church and the Southern Baptist Convention – have been apprehensive about ending the ban on gay adults.

Just two years later, the Boy Scouts of America announced a compromise that “ended its blanket ban on gay adult leaders, while allowing church-sponsored Scout units to maintain the exclusion for religious reasons.”

But the Mormons were already on their way out the door.

In 1913, the Mormon church became the Boy Scouts’ very first sponsor in the United States. For the next century every Mormon congregation chartered at least one Boy Scout troop, and every Mormon boy was automatically enrolled in Scouting. Even me. The immediate past president of the church, Thomas S. Monson, was a member of BSA’s National Executive Board, and a recipient of the Silver Buffalo Award, BSA’s highest honor.

President Monson died on January 2, 2018. His successor, Russell M. Nelson, is a 97-year old former heart surgeon. President Nelson has focused his tenure on getting everyone to stop using the word “Mormon.“ (The formal name of the church is “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”) Even the Mormon Tabernacle Choir has been rebranded.

One of the most interesting items I found in the Richardson v. Chicago Area Council files twenty-five years ago was a transcript from the deposition of Jack H. Gosalind, then the Mormon church’s Young Men’s President. Elder Gosalind testified that the church’s two top ecclesiastical bodies – the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles – had each adopted written policies stating that if BSA ever backed away from its anti-gay policy, the church would end its relationship with Scouting. 

Four months after President Monson’s death, the Mormon church announced that it was following through with the Brethren’s threat, and terminated its 105-year relationship with the Boy Scouts.

Last week in “Move On” I responded to a recent speech by Mormon apostle Jeffrey Holland, who used to be the president of Brigham Young University and my English professor. Afterwards several friends asked me how long I thought it would take before the church backed away from its anti-gay message and dogma. 

My prediction:  decades. In the meantime, thousands of LGBT Mormons and their families will continue to suffer, and a generation of would-be saints will drift away from the Brethren’s perplexing and unchristian fundamentalism.

The panel that made me weep the first time I saw the AIDS Memorial Quilt 

Here are three reasons for my pessimism. 

First, as Maya Angelou said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” The Brethren have history of taking their marbles home to Salt Lake to sulk. At the conclusion of his recent anti-gay speech to BYU’s assembled faculty and staff, Elder Holland issued a threat that echoed Elder Gosalind’s deposition testimony in the Boy Scout case:

We could mimic every other university in the world until we got a bloody nose in the effort and the world would still say, “BYU who?” No, we must have the will to stand alone, if necessary, being a university second to none in its role primarily as an undergraduate teaching institution that is unequivocally true to the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ in the process. If at a future time that mission means forgoing some professional affiliations and certifications, then so be it. There may come a day when the price we are asked to pay for such association is simply too high, too inconsistent with who we are. No one wants it to come to that, but, if it does, we will pursue our own destiny….

I pity BYU students and graduates as they try to explain why they went to an unaccredited Bible school. Fortunately, like Elder Holland I have a degree from Yale to compensate for my B.A. from Bob Jones University of the West.

Second, the Mormon church is a rigid gerontocracy. Ever since Brigham Young seized the martyred Joseph Smith’s mantle, the church presidency has automatically gone to the senior member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. The current church president fills each apostolic vacancy with a thoroughly vetted disciple. Nowadays no one with the prophetic spark that inspired Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and Spencer W. Kimball can sneak into the Quorum.

President Nelson just turned 97. His presumed successor, legalistic bigot Dallin Oaks, is 88. Next in line is Russell Ballard, age 92, followed by Jeffrey Holland. Although Elder Holland is a relative youth at age 80, his recent speech at BYU demonstrated his homophobic bona fides. As with the Trump-skewed Supreme Court, religious political extremists will retain control over Mormon doctrine for the foreseeable future.

Third, Mormon hostility to LGBT dignity and equality is inescapably tied to the church’s doctrine about gender roles, including their extraordinary and inspiring belief that we have both a Father and a Mother in Heaven.

The First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles issued a “Proclamation on the Family” in 1995, at the height of hysteria over the mere possibility of marriage equality. Many states rushed to pass “Defense of Marriage Acts.” You will not be surprised to learn Utah’s mostly Mormon legislators won the race to pass the first DOMA in the country.

 

The Proclamation insists on a very narrow vision of what a family looks like:

 

Children are entitled to birth within the bonds of matrimony, and to be reared by a father and a mother who honor marital vows with complete fidelity.… By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children…. God has commanded that the sacred powers of procreation are to be employed only between man and woman, lawfully wedded as husband and wife.

 

Apparently our Mother in Heaven is the kind of wife who sits in silence while staring up adoringly at her husband. Like the church’s all-male gerontocracy itself, the language of the Proclamation on the Family comes directly from the era of Ozzie and Harriet. Nevertheless, I barely notice the Proclamation’s pervasive sexism. Instead, I’m inevitably drawn to these words:

 

“Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.”

 

As I wrote in “Our Family,” the Mormon authors and readers of the “Proclamation on the Family” didn't realize “gender” is not the same thing as “sex.” These are not Women’s Studies majors. Instead, they probably thought “gender” is just a euphemism for “sex” that doesn’t sound so, well, sexy.

In the New Testament, Jesus says “in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage.” Matt. 22:30. Where other Christians have stuck with this bright-line rule for 2000 years, I’ve always appreciated the Mormons’ openness to creative theology. Nevertheless, as applied to the reality of LGBT experience, Mormon doctrine is on a collision course with itself.

I’m a humble English Major, not a theologian. I’m not here to fine-tune Mormon eschatology, just to point out the lessons of history. The current Mormon doctrine privileging eternal male-female couples only goes back as far as President Woodruff’s 1890 Manifesto. Before that, Mormons believed God only loved polygamists. Before that, Mormons who wanted to get into Heaven were “sealed” in the temple to a righteous man. Surely God can also find room at the heavenly family reunion for His and Her lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender children.

For many of us, the most offensive and abusive aspect of the Mormons’ anti-gay campaign has been their insistence that LGBT people do not even exist – we’re just weak sinners who struggle to overcome what both Mormons and their allies in the discredited field of “reparative therapy” insist on calling “same-sex attraction.” For example, this quote comes from an influential 1996 sermon by Dallin Oaks, currently President of the Quorum of the Twelve and heir to the Prophet’s mantle: 

 

We should note that the words homosexual, lesbian, and gay are adjectives to describe particular thoughts, feelings, or behaviors. We should refrain from using these words as nouns to identify particular conditions or specific persons. Our religious doctrine dictates this usage. 

 

A quarter century later, perhaps the most disappointing aspect of Elder Holland’s recent anti-gay speech to the BYU faculty is his inability to say words like “gay,” “lesbian,” and “transgender.” Instead, he referred to “those who live with this same-sex challenge.” Elder Holland’s homophobic dog-whistle is painfully familiar to survivors of the Mormons’ traumatizing “pray-the-gay-away” preaching. 

Galileo before the Inquisition

One tragic irony of the Mormon’s multi-decade campaign against LGBT dignity and equality:  the Brethren were halfway to the truth all along. Here’s the next sentence from Dallin Oak’s 1996 sermon:

It is wrong to use these words to denote a condition, because this implies that a person is consigned by birth to a circumstance in which he or she has no choice. 

You can find similar statements from Spencer W. Kimball, Boyd K. Packer, and every other Mormon priesthood leader who has offered his non-expert opinion about the scientific basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. In 2021, the rest of us recognize these traits are essential and immutable aspects of individual identity.

As Galileo pointed out four centuries ago, sometimes the way to see the truth is to stop thinking you’re the center of the universe. It took 359 years before the Vatican hierarchy finally admitted Galileo was right and they were wrong. Hopefully it won’t take that long for someone in Salt Lake to embrace God’s love and recognize the truth about gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. 

On the left: Copernicus and Galileo's heliocentric model of the solar system
On the right: what it takes to live a lie

A New Hope

My children are back home after spending most of the summer with my ex at his new place in the Midwest. It was a strange long ten weeks for everyone.

In the fifteen years since Eleanor was born, the kids and I had never been apart for that long. Our longest previous gap was the three weeks I spent in Europe in 2014. Seattle Men’s Chorus toured Germany, singing in Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden, Buchenwald, and Cologne. I tacked on solo trips to Rome and London before and afterwards, and used up all my air miles to fly Business Class on British Airways. I stopped missing the kids after I was upgraded to First Class.

That Europe trip was the longest vacation I ever took while working in private practice and at the ACLU. Litigation is all about juggling. In order to keep the balls in the air long enough to step away from your desk, you have prepare for weeks by flinging each deadline in every case as high up as you can possibly throw. By the time you return to the office, everything is right above your head and ready to crash all at once. Spending more than two weeks away isn’t worth it.

For the last fifteen years, my primary identity has been Father, rather than Lawyer. It’s even harder to get away. When I was alternating kid weeks with the ex, quick getaways from parenthood were easy, but long breaks were impossible. Then when my ex moved away a year ago, we had to adjust to the reality of All Papa, All the Time. As I wrote last year in “Peak Parenting,” “it’s exhausting and overwhelming and utterly ordinary. I love it.”

So ten weeks without kids this summer was a new experience for all of us. Instead of flinging the kids into the air, I catapulted myself into the furthest reaches of time and space, like Voyager passing each planet and heading into blackness. I stopped feeling the kids’ light and gravitational pull, and had to wait for their feeble texts to eventually arrive.

If anything went wrong, I would have sensed a disturbance in the force. Instead, I knew the kids were alright.

Ordinarily my children’s gravitational force, together with their overwhelming noise and light pollution, makes it impossible for me to focus on anything else for too long. 

Long ago I drove through Yellowstone National Park in the middle of a clear dark night. (I was speeding from BYU to Cowley, Wyoming, for my last missionary companion’s homecoming from Korea.) At midnight I parked my car, turned off the lights, and stood alone at the bottom of a wide volcanic bowl. There were more stars out than I’ve ever seen in my life. 

After a few weeks without the kids, I hoped I would see something similar. In particular, I was looking for a fresh creative vision – a glimpse into my writing mind without the immediate distractions, thrills, and burdens of Fatherhood. I’ve never managed to see the Northern Lights in person. But while the kids were away I was indeed blessed with similarly ethereal mental visions. 

Most of my insights were unexpected. Originally I’d hoped to use the summer break to finish my Mormon/gay rights lawyer/PTSD memoir. Instead my focus was drawn elsewhere, to visions I’ve barely begun writing about. Nevertheless, the story of my life quarantined alone in Bellingham with two dogs gave me the perfect framework for my memoir’s blocked concluding chapter, “Times Like These.” I also made progress on several other tragicomic chapters about living through traumas, triggers, and recovery. Unfortunately, like Frodo, Gandalf, and Anakin, I seem to be bogged down somewhere in the middle of the story.

At least I finally figured out the right title for my book:  Anyone Can Whistle: A Memoir of Religion, Showtunes, and Mental Illness.

When all my Father projects went on hiatus at the beginning of the summer, I still couldn’t focus on being a Writer. I was too busy being a Lawyer. 

On June 9, the Washington Supreme Court heard argument in my lawsuit seeking damages from the sleazy lawyer-investigator firm that the State hired to illegally whitewash my discrimination complaints against my former employer, the Washington Attorney General’s Office. I can report that I survived my first ever Zoom Oral Argument.

The Supreme Court will likely issue their ruling sometime this fall. I’ll write about the appeal and my Zoom experience next week in “Good Friends.” Then I’ll wait for the Supreme Court’s opinion before commenting further about the case.

During my Covid-19 summer alone in Bellingham I took a break from blogging. Instead, I went back to look for patterns in my writing over the three years since May 2017, when I filed my original lawsuit and started this blog 300 posts and half a million words ago. 

In Phase I of blogging, covering posts in 2017 and 2018, I took advantage of my newfound freedom from thirty years of writer’s block by exploring a variety of topics and styles. My favorite essays about family were “I Come From Good People” and “Sure of You.” My favorite essay about brains was “Inside Out.” My favourite essay about Showtune Night in Canada was “Six Degrees of Kristin Chenowith.” Thanks to the mysteries of Google’s algorithm, the three most viewed blog posts in Phase I were “About My Yale Classmate Brett Kavanaugh,” “Thing 1 and Thing 2,” and “Fifty Shades of Green Gables.”

Phase II covered posts in 2019 and the first half of 2020. I got more ambitious about extended storytelling and the craft of writing. I published a week of “Rock Bottom Stories,” as well as other connected essays about topics like my dramatically improved mental health, various besetting plagues, and the comforts of dog ownership. For the first time I confronted my experiences as a gay man coming out of the closet at the height of the AIDS epidemic. And I wrote about the traumas and triggers I’d experienced while trying to shine a spotlight on dishonest government lawyers. 

Frankly I got carried away with that last topic. Sleazy lawyer stories were taking over the blog, like an oversized moon whose gravitational pull turns ordinary tides into tsunamis. When I looked at the statistics for 2020 I was aghast. I vowed I wouldn’t start Phase III until I freed myself from the power of the Lawyer dark side. 

It gets worse. 

Once I broke free from the gravity of oral argument, I was looking forward to a few months of non-Lawyer peace while we all waited for the Supreme Court’s decision. Instead, just as my trajectory back to the kids catapulted me past the bloated lawyer moon, I encountered a new battery of sleazy tractor beams and blasters on the other side, all aimed right at me. Apparently after getting fed up with my various public criticisms, someone at the Attorney General’s Office got the bright idea of removing all of my claims against State employees to federal court, then filing a quick motion to dismiss. 

As usual it was impossible to separate my former colleagues’ incompetence from their lies. Responding to the State’s opening brief was one of my most harrowing experiences in years. For every ten minutes I spent working on my response brief, I had to spend at least an hour on soothing activities like talking with my children, walking the dogs, meditating, exercising, etc. The kids arrived home just in time for my last weekend of brief writing. The presence of other observers in the house made my PTSD symptoms even more noticeable. Over and over as I was forced to confront the State’s misrepresentations and unfounded personal attacks, I would read or write a single sentence. Then I would compulsively leap out of my chair and pace ten or twenty laps around the house, grinding my teeth from bruxism and rubbing my scalp raw from trichotillomania. When my teenaged daughter who wants to go to medical school heard my involuntary wheezes and groans, she thought I was having a heart attack. 

These excruciating and debilitating symptoms were not the inevitable consequence of living with mental illness. As I’ve repeatedly explained to the State to no avail, the nature of my youthful traumas makes me particularly vulnerable to dishonest and abusive exercises of authority – such as the taxpayer-funded triggers I continue to endure from Attorney General Bob Ferguson’s minions. Including the State’s most recent misrepresentations, exaggerations, and defamatory statements to the Court and to me. 

The kids have been home for three weeks now. Each Leishman planet has settled into its ideal orbital equilibrium. Fatherhood is complicated but rewarding, like juggling cuddly chainsaws. I’m nervous about starting full time Zoom School next week. But we’ll manage somehow. 

After various summer distractions and diversions, the Writer in me is back on track as well. Future blog posts are filing up the queue; only a few unfinished chapters remain in my draft memoir; and several new book projects are busily competing for my attention. Just like the dogs. 

Even the Lawyer has found his place in our little galaxy. While I wait for the Washington Supreme Court to rule on my “real” case, I’m bringing a healthy balance to my current litigation efforts – including directly confronting each new lie from my ethically-challenged former colleagues at Attorney General Bob Ferguson’s office. I’m still not being paid by the hour for my legal work yet. But I expect to obtain reasonable compensation from the State eventually. For now, I’ve been practicing for appearing in federal court again by keeping track of my billable hours, as if I was back the law firm. Strangely, the whole lawyer timekeeping habit came right back to me. It’s like riding an uncomfortable but expensive bicycle.   

More importantly, I’m learning how to prevent the good Lawyer from interfering with the better Father and Writer. As soon as I find the perfect photos of Thurgood Marshall, Edie Windsor, and Ruth Bader Ginsberg, I’ll post one last blog essay about litigating against corrupt Washington state officials: “Who Made a Federal Case out of It?”

In the meantime, The Kids Are Alright.®  And the dogs. And my parents and nephew across town. We’re all glad to be home, even though the Canadian border and so much else remains closed. Despite the various plagues besetting everyone, I’m as happy and healthy as I’ve ever been in my life. All is well.

To Be or Not to Be

According to our current Gregorian calendar, May 3, 2020 is the four hundred and fourth anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare. He died on May 3, 1616, just as he was turning fifty-two years old.

I was born exactly four hundred years after Mr. Shakespeare. To the day. So we have a lot in common. For my entire bardolatrous English Major life, as each major milestone approached or passed, I would compare myself to the Bard at a similar age. Until four years ago, when I turned fifty-two years old. The next day was my very last chance to ask myself “What Was Shakespeare Doing At My Age On This Day Four Hundred Years Ago?"

What was I doing on May 3, 2016, exactly four hundred years after the death of William Shakespeare? I was reading my client copy of an email from my employment lawyer to the State’s employment lawyer.

After I finally recognized I was incapable of communicating with my employer about my recent mental illness diagnosis, in March 2016 I hired one of the partners in Freed Frank Subit & Thomas, a respected Seattle law firm that represents plaintiffs in employment disputes. I chose Sean Phelan because of her experience working with disabled employees dealing with mental health and reasonable accommodation issues. I engaged her for the specific purpose of communicating on my behalf with the employment lawyers representing the State about the relationship between my disability and the status of my employment. 

On March 29, 2016, my employers designated Senior Counsel Kari Hanson to negotiate with Ms. Phelan on behalf of the State.

What were the state’s top employment lawyers and Human Resources professionals doing on May 3, 2016? Figuring out how to do the right thing after receiving that same email from my employment lawyer is was busy reading at home in Bellingham.

A few weeks before I hired Ms. Phelan, I filed a separate sexual orientation discrimination complaint with my employer. After following the State’s government contract procurement process, the Attorney General’s office hired their preferred investigator to look into my sexual orientation discrimination allegations. 

Soon after hiring this investigator, however, one of the lawyers in the Attorney General’s Office decided it made sense to combine the investigation into my narrow sexual orientation discrimination complaint with a second assignment. He therefore asked the same lawyer-investigator to evaluate a secret litany of complaints from the supervisors who had already decided to get rid of me – even though the State's contractual Work Order only authorized an investigation into my allegations regarding discrimination based on sexual orientation, and even though no one bothered to tell me they’d changed the scope of the investigation to focus on the separate State’s complaints about my interactions with other in the workplace.

The State employee who made the original decision to secretly expand the scope of the investigation into my sexual orientation discrimination complaint was the State’s top employment lawyer, Ms. Hanson’s supervisor Labor & Personnel Division Chief Shane Esquibel. By tragicomic coincidence, that same month the Attorney General promoted Mr. Esquibel to be Chief Deputy Attorney General – Bob Ferguson’s No. 2.

Almost two months later, on May 3, 2016, Ms. Hanson received an email request from my lawyer that made it obvious Ms. Hanson had a festering malpractice problem:

From: Sean Phelan [mailto:sphelan@frankfreed.com] 

Sent: Tuesday, May 03, 2016 4:08 PM 

To: Hanson, Kari (ATG) Cc: Sean Phelan
Subject: Roger Leischman 

Hi Kari,
I am following up on the voice message I left for you yesterday regarding this matter. 

Mr. Leischman has recently been evaluated by a psychiatrist with regard to his medical condition and its impact on his ability to perform his job – and specifically its impact on his interactions with others in the workplace.
Could you please send me another accommodation assessment form to send to the psychiatrist to complete?
Thanks in advance. 

Please call with any questions. Sincerely, 

Ms. Sean M. Phelan
Frank Freed Subit & Thomas LLP

Surely by this point the State’s top employment lawyers realized that all those secret co-worker complaints about “interactions with others in the workplace” – including raising my voice after my supervisor accused me of faking my disability – could not be a legitimate basis for employer retaliation, particularly during the interactive “reasonable accommodation” negotiation process required by the Washington Law Against Discrimination and the Americans with Disabilities Act. And surely by now the State’s senior Human Resources professionals realized that the Rules of Professional Conduct forbid any attorney-investigator hired by government lawyers from secretly interrogating someone who is represented by counsel. 

You’d think. Call me a cynic, but I wouldn’t be surprised to eventually read a sworn statement addressed to some tribunal or another from every single lawyer in Attorney General Bob Ferguson’s Office. No doubt each lawyer will swear he or she personally had no idea that the disabled gay single dad isolated on “home assignment” had hired an employment attorney to represent him in connection with complaints about allegedly improper interactions with others in the workplace. No idea at all, not until after they’d heard that someone else had already fired me. 

Unfortunately for the State, however, this is one of those situations when more lies can’t help. After filing whistleblower requests under the Public Records Act, last year I finally obtained copies of the damning emails the State concealed from my attorney and me. Even the truth-impaired folks at the Washington Attorney General’s Office must admit that by they time they saw Ms. Phelan’s May 3 email to Ms. Hanson, the State’s lawyers were on notice that they should have been paying attention to my disability – and to my disability attorney.

What did the State’s employment lawyer Ms. Hanson do on May 3 after she received my attorney’s email? She forwarded a copy to two people. 

The first recipient was Rochelle LaRose, the Human Resources representative who was responsible for coordinating with me about the investigation into my sexual orientation discrimination complaint. The second recipient was one of the supervisors above Ms. Hanson in her chain of command – Deputy Attorney General Paige Dietrich. 

Even if Ms. Hanson completely misunderstood the purpose of my lawyer’s attempts to contact her for the last six weeks, don’t you think at least one of these other experienced public servants should have recognized there was a connection between my employment, my disability, inquiries from my disability lawyer, and the secret assignment the State had given to its investigator? 

After bringing Ms. LaRose and Ms. Dietrich into the loop, the next morning Ms. Hanson decided to tell a fib. Rather than finally respond to my lawyer’s inquiries about accommodating my disability, Ms. Hanson instead told her she’d been swamped with work, and that of one of the managers had been traveling. At Ms. Hanson’s request, she and Ms. Phelan agreed to meet the following week to discuss my case.

Later that day on May 4, Ms. Hanson forwarded a copy of her fibbing email exchange to Chief Deputy Attorney General Esquibel and several other senior managing attorneys at the Attorney General’s Office. Thus even more of the State’s lawyers had the opportunity to recognize Ms. Hanson’s and Mr. Esquibel’s mistakes, and to mitigate the harms they caused. But none of the lawyers from the Attorney General’s Office ever answered Ms. Phelan’s numerous letters, phone calls, and email messages. 

Instead, on May 5, 2020, Ms. LaRose – the same Human Resources representative who received a copy of my lawyer’s email on May 3 – telephoned me at home. Ms. LaRose reported that the investigation into my sexual orientation discrimination complaint was complete, and told me to show up at the Attorney General's Seattle office the following Monday.

Despite receiving my attorney’s May 3 email directly spelling out the connection between my disability and my workplace behavior, under the Chief Deputy Attorney General’s compromised direction, the State went ahead and finalized the written report about its investigation. The investigation that was supposed to be limited to examining my complaint about discrimination based on sexual orientation. The investigation that instead focused on previously-undisclosed criticisms about my allegedly improper interactions with others in the workplace.

Then on Monday, May 9, 2016, relying on their illegal investigation report despite receiving my disability attorney’s May 3 email, the State handed me a copy of the investigation report before knowingly and wrongfully terminating my employment. Since then, the State’s lawyers have engaged an illegal and unethical cover-up for the purpose of protecting each other and their boss.

Four years later, where are all the players?

·       William Shakespeare is still dead.

·        I’m still a disabled unemployed gay single dad. But I’m beginning to feel Better-ish, all things considered.

·        Senior Counsel Kari Hanson’s distinguished sixteen-year career with the Washington Attorney General’s Office ended expectedly in August 2016 – three years after the legal and ethical mistakes that destroyed my health and career. According to the internet, Ms. Hanson has started her own solo law firm. That’s a typical if unusually delayed outcome for lawyers who get caught making career-ending mistakes. 

·        Shane Esquibel is still employed by the State, where he continues to be shielded from accountability at illegal taxpayer expense. 

·        Bob Ferguson is running for a third term as the Attorney General of Washington.

Regardless of the size of the mistake, some men are simply too big to fit under a bus.