The Miller Spotlight

It all adds up to collusion: Whether we're talking about child abuse, sexual harassment, or spousal abuse, no matter if it occurs in the workplace, at school, or at a house of worship, the greatest confusion lies in how to assign blame. Some don't want to blame anybody. They speak as if there is a high road to take, especially if the victim is an adult. Juries find ways to blame females of all ages for a host of problems. So do church councils, congregants, teachers. For starters, she's blamed for not saying anything sooner. For being seductive. For not screaming or fighting back sufficiently. Not watching her child closely enough (even when that's not the case). Continuing to maintain some kind of relationship with the perpetrator. Or, most commonly, for lying, exaggerating, or being wrong about a tiny, insignificant detail that may get the whole case thrown out. I'm more intrigued with what makes a victim stand up and continue speaking out, despite the blame...

Hard to say how many clergywomen these days are victims of sexual harassment in Christian churches. Only one denomination ever tried to track that specific fact--the most progressive one, as you might have guessed. Yet that study by the United Church of Christ Coordinating Center for Women's Study is ancient. Published in 1986, it showed 48% of those surveyed revealed they had been victims of male clergy. With all the education done since, some may insist this percentage has surely changed. I'm not at all sure. My hunch is that women in ministry have just been driven further into the margins on this issue--shamed into submission. Or, like so many I've heard from, willing to work in positions of lesser prestige, even doing menial work, rather than remaining in the toxic environment where they are educationally prepared to work. The 48%, of course, excluded representatives from groups just starting to emerge in more conservative denominations in greater numbers, wher...

More than two months after J. Dana Trent's  fine article of confession , speaking from the rare breed of Baptist women who have managed to be ordained, I have finally been able to gather my thoughts to address her remarks. I have never been more outraged in my life. Where were women like Trent twenty-three years ago when I began an outcry that was read by thousands thru a series of articles published by Baptists Today? Yes, confession is in order. From a host of my sisters who chose to look the other way despite my desperate attempts to awaken them. Women closely akin to the scores who betrayed me when attempting to advocate for the removal of sexual predators on Southern Baptist foreign mission fields, rather than sweeping them quickly under the rug as if that was the normal, healthy thing to do--same as the masses were doing back in the States with other predators. Yet, people were noticing and staying silent. That's what collusion is all about, and collusion with sexual ...

Last month, my husband Ron found himself facing an even more interesting challenge than the ones he encounters every day, as a paraplegic who navigates through life from a motorized, six-wheel monstrosity known as a “power wheel chair.” His new challenge came the same day I was forced to grab one of his four-wheel walkers that had me scooting around the house from a sitting position, flying around the house backwards for the next few weeks—all because of an injury I self-diagnosed as “only a sprain.”   After all, I'd had a similar injury on the other leg a few years back. When nothing showed on an x-ray, I'd turned to a chiropractor that time, just to speed things along. In short order, I'd been able to shed my cane.   "Not nearly as bad as first time. Nor is being on wheels as terrible as you might think,” I say to friends, minimizing this interesting dilemma the two of us are managing to cope with fine as long as I don't try to venture out. Getting b...

"It's all related," my friend across the table from me at the Christmas party said yesterday. Bob, like everyone at the party has had his own life greatly impacted by disability. Even though four of the seven of us, including Bob, had arrived in wheel chairs, he wasn't referring just to civil rights issues having to do with disability. To him, all civil rights issues are related. And those who suffer do not need to suffer aloof from the other groups. That's the beauty of the advocacy world. While we may not all see eye to eye, we understand oppression from the underside--for most advocates have experienced great losses, either personally or vicariously through a dear friend or family member. Empathy is the connecting piece. Along with courage. Bob was talking about gender issues, racial issues, and the lack of government funding for the most economically disadvantaged families in our society--each an issue requiring a thorough understanding of power dynami...

It's been over six decades now--December 17, 1956, to be exact--when my status as an only child ceased. Oh, happy day!  I doubt any 10-year-old in America was happier than I was that night, eight days before Christmas. The occasion at Will Rogers International Airport was topped off by a rather unusual event in Oklahoma City, at least for mid-December.  Not a blizzard, but a pleasantly snowy night greeted the little wharf who had come to America, who would likely have been dead within a few weeks if she'd been forced to remain in the orphanage back in Korea. She arrived, weighing fifteen pounds, within days of turning fifteen months old, unable to even turn over on her own, literally packed into an open cardboard box, with scores of other infants in similar states. A photo of her was captured, as she was somehow picked from the lineup for a op-ed in a small newspaper that arrived in our box weeks after her arrival!  It ready "Precious, Little Cargo." The infants...

Desperate, tongue-tied people in power end up saying the strangest things.  With the oddest gestures that speak louder than the babble. Repeating oneself, as if to convince "the children" one is addressing. Or, to put it another way, the adults that the powerful would like to pretend are children.....this repetition can be amusing to watch for those with a sense of humor. Having a healthy sense of humor is getting far more difficult these days, however, as reality dawns. Looking closely, the transparency that's so readily evident and becoming clearer all the time holds exactly the same dynamics of  insight into this word, collusion,  which very few even understood at all twenty-five years ago. Collusion operates freely in closed systems of "faith," that are actually systems of fear in many cases, systems filled with paranoia and narcissism that acts only out of immaturity and self-protection, when faced with the preponderance of evidence of serious sexua...