San Francisco’s Frameline Film Festival: On the Negative Impact of the Castro’s Gay Culture

Ideological intolerance may not be typically thought of as stemming from a psychological pathology from unresolved emotional problems, especially if the ideology is classified under “political speech.” Even so, the vehemence with which flashes of hostility are unleashed by an intolerant ideologue against people objecting to the person’s ideology and thus to it being imposed as if it were God’s eternal truth is plainly psychological. Volunteering at a film festival in San Francisco in late June, 2026, I was the receiver, or lightening rod, of such vitriol from two attendees and the festival’s manager who oversaw the volunteers because I had unwittingly made statements that violated the dominant ideology not only at the festival, but in San Francisco moreover. In business schools, it is well known (or should be well known) that an organizational culture can reflect a wider culture in the organization’s environment. A toxic local or societal norm, which reflects values, beliefs, and even assumptions held by a sufficient proportion of inhabitants to gain a “critical mass,” can infect organizational cultures within the locality or society. I contend that this dynamic applied to the Frameline (LGBT) film festival in 2026 and the wider the Castro (gay) district of San Francisco then, where the festival was based. The same overreaching ideology and hostile defense mechanism were salient both in the non-profit organization and, extending beyond the Castro neighborhood, in San Francisco itself as well as in at least some of the suburbs.

On my first shift as a volunteer, and I agreed to volunteer at all so I could include some examples of “gay cinema” in a forthcoming book I was writing on film as an excellent medium for stimulating philosophical and theological thinking, I casually mentioned to two young women who had just seen the film that was shown during my first shift that I was impressed that the film has two lesbian sex scenes. Even though my tone was that of a compliment, one of the young (presumably lesbian) women angrily declared to me, “That’s heterosexual sex!”  as if her fact trumped what was merely an opinion on my part. “No,” I slowly retorted, “a sex scene with two vaginas is not heterosexual.” To my shock, the two women dismissed this fact by stating, as if declaring a fact of their own making, “No, it doesn’t work that way.” Translation: two vaginas without any penis in a sex act is heterosexual if one of the women self-identifies mentally as a man, which was the case in the film. The context of my remark was that I came slowly to the realization during the film that the sex scenes involved two vaginas rather than a vagina and a penis. My position was that a person’s mental state does not impact the label on whether a sex scene is homosexual or heterosexual; a (real) penis and a vagina, and, technically, penetration of the former into the latter, are requisite to a sex scene being classified as heterosexual rather than homosexual. That ideological fervor can overreach so much, even to contradict such well-established labels as homosexual and heterosexual (and violate even common sense!), means that a vulnerability exists in the human brain, and therefore human nature itself, with respect to ideology in relation to facts. In other words, the fact/value distinction is vulnerable to values overruling facts.

I was stunned during the ensuing week when I discussed the conversation with other people. A handful, all under 35 years old, pushed back against my rather obvious claim that a sex scene centered on and involving two vaginas (and no penises) is not heterosexual. One college student said, “It could be.” Plain and simply, she was incorrect. Tellingly, people over 40, on the other hand, were as stunned as I was regarding the pushback I had been encountering. “That’s just crazy,” an 88 year-old gay man said in referring to the assertion that a sexual act between two vaginas (and no penis) is heterosexual. The human mind seems to be too weak, at least in the case of ideologues, to put the brakes on an ideology when it has gone too far in a person’s mind. Psychology is in the mix. One young man who actually had been awarded a Ph.D. in natural science repeatedly shouted at me at a coffee shop as if he were regressing back to his childhood, “You’re an idiot! You’re an idiot!” He could barely control himself emotionally. The arrogance that is in ideological idolatry can be so powerful in the mind that it malfunctions without even realizing it. The impact of ideology on a mind’s self-regulatory features deserves much greater attention both in scholarship and the public square.  

In addition to mental states, ideological fervor and even intense flashes of anger do not trump cognitive definitions. The sheer presumption in contradicting definitions, even more than the flashes of anger unleased on me, is what really shocked me because I had never encountered such overreaching of an ideology. Such presumption is like arrogance on stilts during a flood, and yet strangely such an ideologue’s mind is unaware of the overreach and its presumption. Besides the blatant distortion of the word “heterosexual” beyond recognition such that it could be applied as a label to homosexual sex acts in a film, the vengeance of the two young lesbians complaining about my “inappropriate” statement—the very word, inappropriate, signals subjectivity—added insult to the initial injury of being so blatantly disrespected. But for their ideological fervor having reached the level of idolatry, the two young women could have left the theater without feeling an instinctual urge to harm me. Pleasure from inflicting pain on another person is garden variety sadism, and, according to Nietzsche, the original function of punishment before moral responsibility came to be associated.

Cicily Singh, who managed the Frameline (LGBT) festival’s volunteer corps that year, instinctually reacted to the women’s complaint of my “inappropriate” statements ideologically, meaning with much prejudice because she held the very same ideology as the two women at the theater. For Cicily wrote a hostile, accusatory email to me without even having contacted me first to ask what I had actually said to the two vindictive young women. “The film contains a lesbian sex scene,” and then my explaining, “because there are two vaginas,” is in no sense inappropriate, especially at a gay film festival! Ironically, it was Cicily’s email that was inappropriate. She must have been very ideologically and, relatedly, emotionally incensed, for she was sufficiently impulsive to send me the harsh, accusatory email, which contained an implicit threat that my continued involvement at the festival was then on thin ice, in time for me to read her message while I was en route to my last shift, rather than only once it had been completed. Ideological idolatry and the related emotional state can confound rationality, and thus thinking strategically. I unilaterally activated the implied threat and implemented it myself—"that’s called taking the initiative.”[1] I quickly wrote a brief rebuttal and turned back (to do my own work!) rather than continue on to the theater to freely give my labor to such a resentful, too ideologically-driven group of people as were evidently running the film festival. Afterall, this point must be made perfectly clear: saying that a sex scene is not heterosexual because it is centered on and delimited by two vaginas is not inappropriate; in fact, it is an accurate statement, and entirely fitting at an LGBT (gay) film festival.

It is important to situate both the two young lesbians and Cicily in the local gay culture of San Francisco, which I at the time may have been very distinct from the gay cultures in other cities in several respects—all in excess. To be sure, I have no empirical studies to cite to support my conjecture. From my own observations of the distinctive sub-culture, my impression is that gay men under 50 or 60 years of age in the Castro district were both more ideologically fixated and angrier at people who opposed their sociopolitical-linguistic ideology than were gay men typically in other large cities in North America and Europe. San Francisco “Pride” had arguably gone too far in its ideological intolerance and aggressive vindictiveness not in pushing back against heterosexual anti-gay prejudice but, rather, against non-acceptance of the “woke” ideology and agenda, and in particular the linguistic dogmatism. Home-grown ideology, rather than opposition by evangelical Christians to homosexuality, had become a problem in the Castro (gay) district by 2026 as evinced by the presumed entitlement to overreach and to lash out in anger so to verbally attack anyone who is an obstacle to the overly expansive sense of self and the presumption to declare facts out of what is actually ideological opinion. The advocates and defenders of the “woke” ideology had taken the place of the evangelical “Christian right” of the 1980s in claiming truth for themselves out of what was in actuality opinion. The ideological intolerance had shifted from the hard right to the progressive left since the twentieth century. That virtually none of the gay inhabitants of the Castro were probably conscious of having taken their own ideology too far both in its content and its vehement defense can be taken as an indictment on the human brain itself, and, more particularly, on its ability to perceive going too far.

After having quit the festival after the second of my three shifts, I voted with my feet on the day after the festival’s closing night by not going to downtown San Francisco to watch the gays in their parade; I had heard and witnessed too much hostility and self-righteousness in that sub-culture for its advocates to deserve being watched performing “on stage.” I will not furnish several examples of the toxicity manifested as hostility and even aggressiveness within the subculture—the dysfunctional psychology mirrors and likely even augmented or intensified the anger and vindictiveness that I encountered at the Frameline film festival. By analogy, the more general heating of the temperature at the Castro arguably contributed to the “heatwave” that I encountered at the film festival. During that very week, in fact, scientists were making precisely this argument in regard to the heatwave then occurring in Europe—the temporary El Nino was not the driving force behind the record heat.

Several contributory factors can be identified to account for the impact of the toxic Castro culture (i.e., global warming) on the film festival’s organizational dysfunction (i.e., the heatwave). Firstly, the harsh rudeness and abject inconsiderateness, and even cruelty, with which gay men in the Castro commonly would intentionally not show up for previously-arranged (sex) date without even bothering to cancel because suddenly another man is available for sex. A guy not showing up, without bothering to cancel, at a meeting place (e.g., my place or yours) previously agreed with another guy was called “flaking,” and the disrespect in particular and the passive aggression more generally were severe enough psychologically to cause strong anger. Similarly, the language that Castro men typically used in rejecting unwanted overtures by other men for sex, such as “you’re fat” and “you’re old; you don’t belong in this bar,” doubtlessly caused outrage. Rather than being emotionally hurt from prejudice locally against homosexuality, too many gay men in the Castro were slicing into other gay men there too often and too deeply. It is as if enjoying being cruel had become engrained within gay culture. It may be that the ideological anger that was directed to me at the festival was fueled at least in part by the legitimate anger and even rage caused by gay men there. It is not as if such intense anger simply dissipates on its own; rather, it seeks openings.

Secondly, I learned from two long-time residents—two friends of mine—that the gay employees in the Castro who worked as bartenders and servers (waiters) had a reputation by 2026 for being rude, and even hostile, to customers—ruder than in other areas of the city. In the Castro, tips at fast-food (i.e., counter) food-places, bars, and even coffee shops were, according to several gay men and at least one resentful employee at the coffee shop, Poesia, required rather than up to the discretion of the patrons. “It’s the Castro standard,” a young gay man sitting with a friend at a table near mine outside at Poesia’s street-level café said in scolding me for having just objected to the petulant, hostile employee who had angrily chastised me for not tipping on coffee orders, which, by the way, the customers picked up at the counter and returned after use to a plastic bin. The self-righteous, immature gay man sitting near me then dismissively walked away from me with his friend while making it clear to me that he was laughing at me for having insisted that tips are not required anywhere, even in the Castro. In other words, the “standard” was wrong, and employees of the various establishments were wholly without justification in tacitly punishing regular customers who do not tip on every occasion. That tips were by then solicited prior to any service in many food establishments everywhere is nonsensical enough; that the self-interested employees at the cash registers in the Castro retail district blatantly looked at the screen to see if customers were selecting tips is unseemly. That an employee would then lash out at a customer for not designating a tip prior to service and thus before the quality of service can possibly be assessed, as if tipping were required, is beyond the pale and thus points to a dysfunctional business climate.

It is possible that at least some of the employees’ hostility toward non-tipping customers was due to pent up anger from having been rudely and even cruelly treated by other gay men in the context of “hooking up” for sex, and from other sordid behaviors discussed below. My larger point is that the vindictiveness of the two young women in the theater and the accusatory hostility of Cicily can be seen as not so isolated as they may prime facie appear.  

Thirdly, the hostility of non-supervisory employees at retail establishments in the Castro went beyond resentment due to a presumed entitlement to be tipped by every customer regardless of service. For example, a young Black gay man working at one bar, “440,” presumed himself entitled to demand of certain (Caucasian) tourists what their purposes were in visiting the city. Another employee was reported to have told one such tourist who complained about the first employee’s invasiveness, “We do screen certain customers.” Of course, well-to-do tourists usually appear very suspicious, and may even need to be strip-searched.  This story gets even better. At least one tourist that know of told the employee at the front door, “It’s none of your business why I am in San Francisco.” Not to be outdone by a mere prospective customer, the employee abused his discretion by blocking that tourist’s access to the bar for having been rude. The tourist subsequently reported that the other employee and several young gay customers drinking beer just outside the bar chastised the tourist for being so stupid as to be rude to an employee of the bar. Because the tourist had not been at all rude, the multi-pronged attack was excessive, and thus can be taken as yet another “data point” indicative of the excessive anger and hostility in the Castro district. I suspect that the same ideology that I came up against at the film festival was in play in the attack on the tourist. Furthermore, the anger and vindictiveness that I encountered may have been excessive in part because the “temperature” in the Castro was excessive.

The position of the city’s Board of Supervisors—San Francisco’s City Council— was that screening tourists is not the job of local businesses, and the statement, “It’s none of your business,” is not rude, especially when it really is none of the employee’s business!  The outrageous presumptuousness in the Castro’s culture can be calibrated by the reality-check by the city’s own government. Of course, the likely negative impact on the city’s revenue from the wholly unjustified screening of certain tourists at a local business during a year when tourism was down was not lost on city hall. Even so, the egregiousness displayed in front of the “440” bar is not unlike that which insists that a sex scene involving two vaginas is heterosexual rather than homosexual.  

Fourthly, evincing even more hostility that the employees and even customers at “440” bar, a Black gay young man who worked as a bouncer at another bar, “The Mix,” put at risk the elderly Caucasian victim of a violent attack that had just been committed by two Black gay young men as they were walking out of the same bathroom stall (likely sniffing cocaine). Those two young men did not feel the need to walk around the victim, who was waiting in line at the bathroom, in spite of there being enough space. Instead, they decided to walk through the old man, who, after having been thrown and slammed into a nearby wall, notified the bouncer and another employee of having just been attacked, and called the emergency number of the local police, who of course wanted the address of the bar, but the employee in front of the bar checking ID’s refused to disclose the address to the victim and the police on his phone, so the victim walked outside in front of the bar and continued the call there. The two attackers, tipped off by an employee, I suspect, that the victim was on the phone with the police, went outside to verbally threaten the victim for having called the police. Astonishingly, the Black bouncer was within earshot of the threats and yet he body-blocked the door so the victim could not seek safety inside the bar, in spite having been attacked. In fact, the bouncer let the two attackers back inside the bar! That bar’s organizational culture was clearly very toxic, and the two young gay men who had been in the same stall in the bathroom clearly had excess anger. Any prejudice against gays (or Black people) by outsiders cannot be blamed; the excessive aggression was within the gay “community.”

Fifthly, perhaps the most toxic aspect of the gay culture in the Castro, and thus the source of the most intense anger, which could easily feed into hostility towards people who do not subscribe to the dominant ideology, concerns the severity of dysfunction in how too many gay men there thought of and handled their romantic relationships—not just “hooking up” for sex. It may be that Castro “standards” were too dogmatic in being presented as requirements. We encountered this above concerning tips, which were most definitely not required. A much more toxic “requirement” commonly accepted by gay men under 40 in the Castro was having to accept the imposing by a gay man on his boyfriend and even husband of a right to have separate sex (i.e., excluding the boyfriend or husband) with other men even with romantic attachment because, as this was explained to me rather dogmatically, “everyone here does it.” The obvious emotional discomfort felt, while the separate sex would be going on, by a boyfriend or husband who is in love with the person engaged in the sex with someone else may even be dismissed by the selfish and callous person in the convenient ideological belief that he has the right to impose separate romantic sex because everyone else in the Castro was doing it. Besides taking an obvious toll on the emotional intimacy and trust in the relationship in which coupling would otherwise naturally take place, both the decision to impose exogenous “making love,” as if such behavior were justified simply because many gay men were doing it and subscribed to the underlying “poly” ideology, and the callous disregard for the boyfriend’s or husband’s obvious emotional pain doubtlessly caused deep emotional hurt and anger in the boyfriend or husband that would not easily dissipate, but would instead seek out openings to erupt in misdirected and thus excessive anger, such as I encountered at the film festival. In fact, I encountered cases in which the ideology “justifying” the imposition of a polyamorous (i.e., more than one romantic love) relationship caused young men whose partners victimized them by the imposition to deny any such discomfort or hurt feelings, let along anger. One man in the Castro said to me, “I don’t mind that my boyfriend is having a separate romantic sexual relationship.” Interestingly, when I asked a few much older married gay men how they would feel were their respective husbands to announce upcoming romantic sex with an old flame, those men admitted, albeit hesitatively because they knew the polyamorous ideology was dominate then in the Castro, that they would have a problem if their respective husbands said that an old flame would be coming to town the next week and sex would occur. “Yeah, I’d have a problem with that,” a man who had been with his partner for thirty years in an open relationship. Honesty with the courage to go up against a dogmatic ideology is a virtue. In contrast, feeling obliged to “stuff,” or repress, and even deny the very existence of deep emotional discomfort and anger because discomfort is disallowed by the ideology that insists that there is nothing wrong with separate romantic sex, so any discomfort in the partner left out would be unjustified, and thus inappropriate, and perhaps even unfair to the partner having the separate romantic sex! Everyone does it in the Castro, so why should I have to put up with his discomfort and even anger? The level of psychological toxicity in such “reasoning” is astounding. Pent-up emotional pain and hostility would be entirely natural, whereas the imposition would be selfish ideological hubris that cares little if anything about the feelings of other people.

That ideology comes with at least two internal flaws. Firstly, it backs up its approval of the imposing of a “right” to have separate romantic sex by championing the polyamorous, “multiple loves,” relationship. But as a bisexual woman pointed out to me in the Castro (as I was trying unsuccessfully to ask her out), “In a polyamorous relationship in which more than two persons are in the same romantic relationship, every party must freely consent; to affirm that outside romantic sex should be accepted, and thus is legitimately imposed, is just an excuse to cheat.” There was undoubtedly a lot of cheating on boyfriends and husbands in the Castro, as if gay men have such overwhelming sexual urges that polyamorous sex and even affairs outside of even such a multi-person relationship should be tolerated even by boyfriends and husbands. Enough heterosexual men with strong sex drives have nonetheless managed to be faithful sexually inside of marriage that manly lust cannot excuse gay men who cheat on their boyfriends or husbands.

Secondly, the ideology behind the imposing makes use of the proposition that a widely followed societal custom (i.e., “Everybody here does it”) is ethical (“Everyone here should do it”) because it is widely accepted. This is an invalid argument. David Hume’s naturalistic fallacy is precisely the error of inferring from even a common practice that it justifies ethically rather than is merely descriptive. To treat a descriptive norm that is as a should just because the norm exists is an erroneous move in ethics. Ethical justification, such as by an ethical principle or theory, is necessary to get from is to ought.

In the Castro, the naturalistic fallacy likely stems from self-righteous egoism that treats self-interest as normative. Just because so many young and middle-age gay men in the Castro who were in romantic relationships also had separate romantic sex outside of the relationships does not mean that because the separate romantic sex is ethically justified because such sex is in someone’s self-interest. For someone to inform a prospective boyfriend, “I will have sex with my friends (including old and current flames), and if you object, I’ll just have sex with strangers and risk your health.” A prospective boyfriend should run, not walk, from such abject coldness befitting a psychopath. Such d disregard for the feelings of a prospective boyfriend may even include the motivation for pleasure from the infliction of emotional pain. Furthermore, a fear of commitment, which can stem from underlying severe emotional problems that have not been processed and resolved, may draw on the power that a person has in a relationship to enforce the demand that separate romantic sex be accepted. The use of separate sex as a weapon to emotionally distant a boyfriend or husband points to severe emotional problems even if the neurosis is ubiquitous in a city’s sub-culture and thus misconstrued by its residents as normal rather than pathological. The prolonging of adolescence, given the adamant refusal to deal with past emotional distresses and the widespread occurrence of drug or alcohol addiction, has arguably played a role in keeping the sub-culture dysfunctional. Even “cheating” has also been conveniently and erroneously imposed as being “normal.” Such sordid norms had arguably come to enjoy default-status by the mid 2020’s, and it is precisely in being given the status of the status-quo that even highly dysfunctional mentalities and practices can be deemed imposable. Such flagrantly callous arrogance on stilts, as if during a biblical flood, suggests that a clean sweep was desperately needed in the Castro to clear away the hubris. Bad air!

In conclusion, the narrow ideological judgmentalism and the ensuing hostility toward (mis)perceived threats at the Frameline film festival in 2026 was in sync with the toxic sub-culture in the Castro district and aggravated by there being so much accumulated anger and hurt feelings there. Lashing out at people who do not subscribe to a dominant ideology that is rigorously enforced by passive aggression can be an easy opening for pent-up anger from other things to finally erupt, especially if an ideology shames that anger from being directed at its source. In terms of further study, investigating how the Castro’s heavily ideological culture and excessive built-up baseline of anger and hostility impacted the selection of films to be included in the festival in 2026 might reveal not only how narrow the festival’s ideological coverage actually was, but also just how reflective Framework was that year of the local sub-culture. How many films were selected that are critical of young “trophy whores,” for example, whose respective older “holders” live with their respective real romantic partners even in another country and yet the promiscuous young men who are selfishly being held at a distance presume to impose separate romantic sex, even with the “primary and secondary” in the other country on a prospective real boyfriend?  Would a gay film director even make such a film? Moreover, what would a truly diverse gay film festival look like? Would the problem of gay men ruthlessly turning on each other be covered? It seems to me that homosexual love can be just as healthy, self-confident and trusting, and thus emotionally intimate, as the romantic love between a man and a woman can be. It follows that ideological aggressive distancing is not inherent in gay culture and psychology, but is instead an aberration that can be treated even when it becomes ubiquitous in a gay district of a city. Ideological idolatry should not be allowed to mask undergirding psychological pathology. As I wrote to Cicily Singh regarding the two young women (paraphrasing here): “Clinical psychology is not one of my academic fields, so I am not equipped to triage a young person who is emotionally troubled and thus triggered by a perfectly acceptable and thus appropriate statement. Best of luck.” That was my way of quitting while at the same time criticizing the passive aggression by passive aggressively “socially distancing” myself from an ideologically driven presumptiveness and hostility by reducing it to psychology.

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1. Quote taken from the film, Avatar (2009), masterfully delivered by Stephen Lang as Colonel Miles Quaritch. “Reprising” his role in the sequel was so outlandish in terms of the rationale for the reprisal that the sequel itself could be said to be less than credible in terms of its narrative. In other words, the rationale put that film under water.

Intimidation in Retail: The Case of San Francisco

Visuals are an important ingredient in consumer marketing, so it is surprising to come across retail managers who are so purblind as concerns the latent yet obvious passive aggression in some of the visuals that those managers themselves approve in the name of security. The espoused, yet utterly fake claim that customer experience is improved by the added sense of safety—the actual underlying motive lies in loss prevention—is typically outweighed by the very human negative experience from being intentionally intimidated by passive-aggressive visuals. It may be that such managers, frustrated by high rates of in-store petty theft (i.e., “shoplifting”), are unconsciously taking their latent aggression out of the customers as a group. Even if not, the lack of judgment is palpable from the visuals themselves. It is no wonder that an increasing number of customers prefer shopping online.

The chain of Safeway grocery stores is a case in point. One store manager admitted to me that the subcontracted security company hires from “the ghetto,” meaning that the young security guards may themselves need to be watched. I was discussing one such guard, who had been standing just inside the interior entrance gates watching customers entering the aisle-area of the store as if we were suspects. The young man’s hostile facial expression was such that I instinctively took out my phone, which triggered him. “You better NOT be recording me, BRO!” he threatened. According to the store manager, the guard should not even have been standing in the entrance gate (as shoplifters typically do not bring and deposit merchandise inside stores, and watching people enter means missing people leaving). Even though the manager told me that the subcontracted guard would be dealt with, on my next visit that very same guard stood next to the cashier as I was about to pay for groceries; I left without the groceries or paying and reported the serial guard to the company. The manager, who had admitted to me that he had authority in the store even over subcontracted employees, had failed to hold the guard accountable, given the guard’s sordid, unrepentant attitude. The manager also told me that the guards were not supposed to cluster together, given the overdone visual, yet I witnessed just such a clustering a week later. Apparently latent visual passive-aggression, likely intended to intimidate, is not worth preventing in retail management. 

Sheer irony: Three security guards under a customer-service sign at a Safeway store in San Francisco.

At a Vons grocery store in downtown Long Beach, California, customers leaving the store must hand receipts to a security guard and then take the paper back in order to tap it to an electronic device that opens a gate allowing customers to exit the store. Presumably those customers who decide not to purchase an intended item must justify themselves to a guard in order to be let out of the store. Simply stated, this goes too far and yet strangely customers put up with the invasiveness such that it could become status quo, and thus the default not to be questioned. The passive aggression in the active involvement of security guards misleadingly dressed as police and the control-of-movement, if to become characteristic of society, would render it as saturated with latent hostility and severe distrust. 

At a Safeway store in San Francisco, customers using the self-check-out area must tap in order for a gate to open out of that area. Just outside that gate, sometimes as many as three security guards cluster to present a redundant display of intimidation, for they too are dressed to look like police employees. I submit that the managerial urge to dominate customers, even by using hired guns (literally), rather than to serve customers should be better studied in business schools, for the urge to control has arguably gotten out of hand at too many retail companies. If the latent hostility and over-control are allowed to reach a critical mass, a societal culture could be characterized in such terms, eviscerating connection that would otherwise exist between social animals like humans.

Even coffee shops are not off limits to overdone passive-aggressive visuals. Police should be mature enough to have the good sense to limit their number when they enter a small coffee shop to order and pick up coffee, for it is obvious that a lot of guns and uniforms in a small area are uncomfortable to customers who have not been in prison. The passive-aggression of guns should be obvious, especially given the incidence of abuse of power by police in the United States and the lack of accountability on police forces. Where, it may be asked, are the store managers in all of this? They err in judgment in favoring a sense of store safety and deterrence over providing customers with a comfortable in-store experience. Starbucks has been particularly guilty in throwing customer comfort under the bus in order to appease police. At the very least, the latter could leave their weapons in their squad-cars. 

Too many police in a coffee shop at once, as the store manager looked on in spite of the obvious discomfort of the customers.

One coffee shop in San Francisco that I walked past once even had a security guard wearing what looks like military (or police) heavy gear (or bullet-proof vest!) just inside the front door. Even if “people off the street” are a problem, the militaristic (or police look-alike) visual is antithetical to “chill” coffee shop culture; the sheer fact of being overdone should not go below the radar. Where intimidation is so obviously the intent, potential customers should indeed keep walking, for no innocent person deserves to be intentionally intimidated, especially in spending money for a product. The irony is that on the window facing outside was a poster urging love; just inside stood the security guard intimidating people entering the coffee shop. Intentional intimidation by overdoing visuals is antithetical to love, and yet there were the two visuals, back-to-back. 

Love may well be love, but just look inside the window and the door! San Francisco, the self-vaunted city of love, was only a patina of its label by 2026 in the retail context.

The impact on a society’s culture of this trend of presenting a visual overabundance of store guards as police and even giving them control over gates inside stores is in need of study. The related impact on the psychology of individuals is also important. Moreover, the individual-organizational-societal nexus should not be minimized. The uptick in store security-presence in the early-to-mid 2020s was no doubt due to a surge in shoplifting (stealing merchandise), but this does not justify either in moral or psychological terms the collateral damage that is done culturally and to the psychological well-being of individuals while in public.

The only security guard in a small grocery store in San Francisco closely watches customers paying while tcustomers in the aisles are presumably free to take what they like, unobserved. Where does shoplifting take place?  At the cash register? The store manager refused to intervene.

The impact on a society’s culture of this trend of presenting a visual overabundance of store guards as police and even giving them control over gates inside stores is in need of study. Perhaps more subtle, but no less dysfunctional both in terms of human psychology and the reputation of a city is severe rudeness when it becomes the norm among nonsupervisory employees enabled by their immediate supervisors. 

I am by no means a regular frequenter of bars, so the bar culture is not particularly well known to me, so I reported the following incident to the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco to obtain a more official reaction than my own to the conduct of employees that I had recently encountered at the entrance of a bar there. Just outside a bar, I encountered a regular employee, rather than an employee hired specially as a bouncer, who in spite of my advanced age demanded to see an ID, which I provided. He then demanded to see inside my laptop computer case even though the dive bar was not a dance club and this happened before 9pm. As he was looking in the case, he demanded to know, "What is the purpose of your trip to San Francisco?" That he assumed that I was visiting was strange enough; that he said that I was rude in telling him that my purpose was none of his business and therefore he was not going to allow me to enter the bar as a result was beyond the pale and utterly unacceptable, according to the city's Board of Supervisors. That the employee was acting as de facto security means that this was yet another manifestation of the presumptuous over-reaching by retail security in a business context in San Francisco. In my report to the city government, I added that when I had returned to speak to another employee of the bar who was then outside the entrance, that second employee, after repeatedly ignoring my initial statement that I had not objected to the bag-search, scolded me for not agreeing to the search. "You should not expect to be let into a bar when you refuse a bag-search." That employee's mental state could therefore stand to be scrutinized, for he had blocked out my initial statement, going on a lie told by the first employee! As if being corrected for blatantly ignoring an entire sentence were not enough, he presumed to have confidence in his opinion that saying "none of your business" is rude, so rude in fact that the original employee had been justified in baring me from the bar. The Board of Supervisors' clerk was stunned when I reported this. "It's not rude," he said emphatically; "It was none of the employee's business! Saying 'It's none of your business' in itself is not rude." That more than one of the bar's employees allowed their personal feelings to warp their judgment and perception of what is actually rude and yet presumed themselves to be omniscent, without there being a supervisor to intervene, permits a damning verdict to be made concerning San Francisco's small-business culture at least with respect to how sordid it had been allowed to become. Being so mistaken and emotionally warped, the two employees were so jejune that they should never have been hired, so the culpability extends back to the bar's manager, and ultimately to its owner. 

A local bar employee who, in demanding to know the purpose that visitors have in coming to San Francisco, dismisses his own presumptuousness and is angered when the reply is, "It's none of your business," as if saying that in itself were rude. He abuses his power by refusing entrance on that basis alone, and no supervisor is on duty at night to restrain the young man from acting out against customers who have and enforce personal boundaries.

All this goes to show the extent to which security services in that city's retail sector had become utterly unacceptable. To say that a power-trip mentality had become well ensconced is a euphanism. Sector-specific and even societal norms can have a tremendous impact on people in their daily lives even if they are not conscious of the source of the stress. "Over-kill," such as in there being three security guards clustered inside a Safeway grocery store, can, if allowed to go on long enough, be regarded as normal by customers whose measuring device has become subtly recalibrated by the sheer passage of time. That a new practice has been allowed to go on and on does not furnish it with legitimacy, and yet, sadly, as the saying goes, possession is nine-tenths of ownership. 

In illegally approving Israeli settlements in the West Bank, for example, Israel's government has been relying on this de-facto natural law; the facts on the ground come to constitute law, such that efforts to change the facts is regarded as an illegitimate usurption of someone's rights. The sheer presumptuousness of treating illegal settlements as legitimate and thus any attempt by the UN or any national government to remove said settlements as justifying military aggression is astounding, and yet how rare it is to hear something like, "Well, you shouldn't have approved the settlements in the first place." 

In San Francisco, the presumptous latant and even blatant hostility in the retail sector evinced through its security human-apparatus had arguable reached intolerable heights (or lows) in 2026. Even if crime were high, the motive to intimidate even innocent (prospective!) customers is unethical, as the actual intimidation, because such customers have done nothing to deserve even the unconscious emotions of anxiety and even of being regarded even in visually as a target. Local norms can indeed be dysfunction and yet go on, and even get worse, like arrogance on stilts during a flood. 

---

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, #162.

Transcending Caritas in Romantic Love

During the High Middle Ages, Troubadour poetry composed primarily in southern Europe included themes including of courtly love, which became associated with marriage. Before then, that institution was associated mostly with property and progeny rather than with romantic love. Interestingly, it was just as love was becoming associated with marriage when the Roman Catholic Church ended its centuries-old gay-marriage liturgy, which, sans property and progeny, was uniquely associated with love (for why else would gays marry?). The irony is that “modern” gay marriage in the West in the twenty-first century may have more to do with sex than love in the sex-centric gay culture of today, though obviously gays are fully capable of genuine romantic love that transcends such superficialities as lust that can be prioritized too highly at the expense of romantic love. Fear of emotional intimacy can exascerbate such misordered concupiscence. Adventurous exuberance combined with this fear need not eclipse more meaningful intimate relations. Indeed, married gays in loving, committed relationships even raise children in loving homes. Although utterly obscene to more conservative folks, such “mixed families” grounded in love warrant respect and even admiration for being based in genuine love even though emotional intimacy can be scary. This is what should be preached from the pulpit. Antipodally, the sex-centric approach to “relationships” in the gay “culture” justly warrants condemnation for being superficial, short-sighted, and utterly self-centered. Yet, whether gay or heterosexual, romantic love need not be selfish. The distinction in Christian theology between caritas and agape is relevant in making this point.

Augustine adopted the notion of caritas love from Plato’s eros (lust)-sourced love that can be directed upward, or sublimated, to eternal moral verities. Augustine replaced those with the Christian deity as the object of eros-fueled passionate love. “I pine for your scent,” Augustine writes in reference to God in Confessions. Such love “comes from below” in that it is based in human nature, yet when aimed to a high object, this kind of Christian love is rendered salubrious, yet not at all divorced from self-love. Eros is a clutching in a desire of attachment, after all. In contrast, the Christian love known as agape refers to God’s self-emptying love for humanity. This utterly selfless love is epitomized by the Incarnation in which God lowers itself to manifest in human flesh (i.e., Jesus). This sort of love is not at all of clutching or attaching; rather, agape is self-giving.

Genuine human love, even in the context of romantic love, can take after agape love rather than merely caritas. To be sure, it is not easy to practice such divine-sourced love in the context of romantic attachment. The heavy presence of selfishness is evinced in romance by efforts to control the beloved even in fits of jealousy. Monogamy in this sense is arguably more toxic than are open-relationships, unless the sex outside of the relationship involves connections (i.e., other loves) that are extrinsic to the couple, for the cost to the relationship in terms of foregone emotional intimacy is very great in such cases. My point is that egoism is alive and well in romantic love. I contend that couples can get beyond such an orientation of self-centric attachment and thereby introduce some agape-like love, which is not based on eros.

Looking out for the best interests of the beloved even at one’s own expense can be thought of as genuine rather than romantic interpersonal love. If, for example, in dating another person the affection is not mutual and the beloved is more taken with another person, then recommending that he or she be with that person rather than oneself even though this goes against one’s self-interest qualifies as genuine, mature love that does not reduce to one’s own self-interest (e.g., attachment). Similarly, if the beloved’s values are different, then recommending that he or she be with someone who shares those values is also in the interests of the beloved even though the temptation might be to convince the beloved to adopt one’s own values. The latter is obviously in line with one’s own self-interest, even though trying to change a person is ultimately short-sighted and perhaps even foolish.

How then can a person more easily apply agape within the context of romance? One way is by practicing the preachment of Jesus of the Gospels that inconvenient compassion is the way into the kingdom of God. Known as “love thy enemies,” this love, which I contend is spiritually more powerful than neighbor-love (benevolentia universalis), is applied not just at the extreme to one’s enemies, but also one’s detractors and even people who have simply but annoyingly been rude. Responding in compassion to their humanity—their human, physical and emotional needs—bypasses one’s ego, which would prefer to tell such people to go to hell. Love for others eclipses self-love. Practicing precisely this sort of compassion is I believe what Jesus preaches in the Gospels as the Way into the kingdom of God. 

Applied to romantic relationships, putting the interests of the other person before one's own instantiates genuine love, whether or not the two are married. While dating, for example, a person could put the interests of the other person first by being honest to oneself that the other person loves someone else more and thus should be with that other person rather than oneself, as painful as such advice would naturally be to give. As another example, a person could confront the other person with the need to get help for an addition, whether sexual or to a drug, even though the other person could end the relationship as a result of the intervention. Generally speaking, putting the genuine interests of a beloved before one's own self-love and romantic self-interest can be contrasted with forging romantic relationships on the basis of what the other person does for oneself, such sexually as is the case in sex-centric relationships.  

Religious Liturgy and the Wholly Other

In the Zhuangzi, how can Zhuangzi possibly know that the fish are happy? To know what it is like to be a bat, a person must be a bat. This is not to say that we disagree with bats. Sonar represents the “sheer otherness” of a bat. In Christianity, how does eternal joy and bliss differ from happiness? Happiness is not a theological concept. There are different kinds of experience, and it follows that they have different kinds of truth-claims. To treat every such claim as the same kind of thing is premised on conflating domains of human experience that are qualitatively different. I contend that the domain of religion is both distinct and unique. Our ordinary ways of describing the world and even ourselves are not well-suited to our endeavors in the domain of religion.

Pseudo-Dionysius, a Christian theologian, made the point that God goes beyond—is sourced, as it were—inherently beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion. According to Montaigne, humans cannot provide truly convincing arguments on any topic, especially theology. “Human reason goes astray everywhere, but especially” in theology. Augustine stressed that revelation must make it way to us as though sunshine making its way through a smoked, stain-glass church window. Hume argues in The Natural History of Religion that the human mind has a great deal of difficulty grasping the notion of divine simplicity for long, and so the mind inevitably starts hanging artifacts on pure divinity that, to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche, are human, all too human. God is angry. God is pleased. God is benevolent. God is just. God even has a human form. God has a mother.

I submit that what any of us think we know about what God does and even what divinity is goes beyond what creatures can possibly know. That faith is premised on belief rather than knowledge is all too often forgotten as claims about God are treated as if they were facts of reason. Religion within the limits of reason turns out to be human, all too human. So too, efforts to reduce religion to psychology, and emotional needs in particular, miss the qualitatively different nature of religion as transcendent in reference to a wholly other. All too often, the legitimate instinctual yearning to transcend beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility becomes conflated with knowledge of divine attributes.

In terms of liturgical worship, all too often services can be consumed by speeches by religious functionaries who know so much about God at the expense of time spent by a congregation in transcendence as experiential yearning of the wholly other. This is not to say that it is metaphysical or ontological; not even presence in a religious sense need be conflated with those fields of philosophy. Rather, the yearning itself, as in for example being prefaced by a ritualized ingestion of the divine, goes beyond knowledge and description. Worship, in other words, is inherently experiential, rather than analytical and descriptive. Focusing on a sermon, or even on a ritualized way of getting to an experience of wholly-other-directed transcendent yearning, misses the point of why people gather to worship. All too often, religious services are programmed to a stultifying death by humans who are too interested to leave their imprint. Stepping out of the way to let the divine be present in people’s distinctly religious experience does not come naturally to programmers.

This is not to say that ritual and preaching cannot play a useful role as prep for religious experience; rather, the problem lies in confounding the means with the ensuing experience that can be facilitated by them. Ritual and preaching in the context of sacred space and time, set apart from ordinary life even by stained-glass windows, have great value as means, which should know when to step out of the way and even point to what comes next as more important. In the ritual of the Christian Eucharist, for example, priests could encourage congregants to stay in the pews after receiving Communion because the point of the ritual is arguably merely to prepare for the interior yearning experience of the divine once ingested. This inward experience, back in the pews, rather than the consecration, is the high point of the Eucharistic liturgy. To treat the high point as a short time to reflect while the “dishes” on the “table” are washed demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding on the role of ritual in terms of worship experience that goes beyond the limits of symbol and ritual.

Centuries of Excluding Insiders at Yale

 “Into blind darkness they enter,
people who worship ignorance;
And into still blinder darkness, people who delight in learning.”[1]

“There are in the souls of wicked men those hellish principles reigning, that would presently kindle and flame out into hell-fire, if it were not for God’s restraints. . . . The corruption of the heart of man is a thing that is immoderate and boundless in its fury.”[2]

“The foolish children of men do miserably delude themselves in their own schemes, and in their confidence in their own strength and wisdom, they trust to nothing but a shadow.”[3]

Jonathan Edwards fell out of favor with Yale’s president Clapp, who opposed George Whitefield’s Christian revivals as being too “enthusiastic.” So, Clapp had two pamphlets published to criticize Edwards, who had studied and then taught at Yale. In fact, one of Yale College’s residential colleges has been named after Edwards at least since the late twentieth century. I would imagine that few if any current or former JE students have been informed that Edwards ceased attending Yale Commencement exercises and even visiting campus once he had known of Clapp’s vitriolic pamphlets. It is ironic that in Edwards’s time, Yale’s faculty minimized the impact of original sin in what became known as the New Haven theology. It seems that compassion for people who hold a different theological (or political) view, as in “Love thy enemy,” was nonetheless above the grasp of Yale’s administration. Fast-forward from the first half of the eighteenth century to roughly three hundred years later and incredibly the same hostile, highly dysfunctional organizational culture was still well ensconced at Yale.

As a student at Yale taking some courses in theology divinity school in the 1990s, I encountered Christian theological intolerance from some of the minister-professors even though they were teaching at a secular university. In a seminar on the Gospel of Mark, the professor did not appreciate my intellectual questions that went according to reason beyond the confines of the Creed. The evangelical Christian who taught Christian environmental ethics put the matter thusly to me: “It takes having a certain character to get a Yale diploma.” The irony is that I was an advocate of the messages on tolerance and compassion towards detractors that Jesus preaches and exemplifies in the Gospels when I on the central part of campus taking classes in Yale College and the Graduate School. Roughly thirty years later, when I was back on campus for a semester to translate a theological work and audit a seminar on Jonathan Edwards in the Beinecke Rare-Book Library, a divinity-school student called me a heretic because he did not understand that scholars do not necessarily personal believe in every theologian cited for academic purposes. I retorted, “You’re not at the div school here—this is the central campus—liberal arts and sciences—there are no heretics here.” Because I had earned a M.Div. degree at Yale, the student could hardly accuse me of being a secularist and relativist based at the central campus.

Why the hostility? After I had graduated in the late 1990s, I spent a semester in Yale’s Law School only for a liberal Black female student to falsely accuse me of having tripped her on hallway stairs. In the law school, she, like Hillary Clinton, according to a librarian there, was known as a “shark.” I had committed the unpardonable offence in a constitutional law course of having defended the conservative position on American federalism being held by Justices Thomas, Scalia, and O’Conner; I was critical of federal preemption and other ways in which consolidation of power at the federal level had caused the federal system to become unbalanced, hence impairing the feature of mutual checks-and-balances between the U.S. Government and those of the several states. Making such an outlandish statement put a target on my back. That did not surprise me; what surprised me was the abject lie of the student and that the so-called attorneys teaching and administrating in Yale Law School so easily and quickly passed judgment against me in spite of there being no evidence. In fact, the director of the visiting scholars program chastised me for not having come to her on the lie even though I had just learned of the accusation against me. Dean Kronman would not even meet with me. The attack against me was launched and perpetuated by the Black female student and the Black assistant dean (i.e., facilities manager). That I was already a scholar with a doctorate counted for naught, but, then again, the LLB or JD degree is not a doctorate, but even as lawyers, the law school administrators should have been familiar with the need for evidence, and this was lacking because I did not even encounter the student on the stairs.

In 2024, when I returned to campus—whereas Edwards surely would not have, were he in my shoes—in part to audit the Jonathan Edwards seminar as a heretic, apparently, I studies a lot in Sterling Library which is located across from the law school in the central part of campus. Unlike in the 1990s, the main reading room was not quiet; in fact, students likely from local universities were even talking in the aisles. One day I suggested to the receptionist of the library’s director that as long as security guards hired by the library were walking through the reading room every twenty minutes or so, perhaps they could enforce the library’s policy against loud talking in the reading room. Unknown to me, my suggestion triggered another shark.

A non-academic manager in the library’s security department sent me an email so harsh that a Yale policeman, in seeing the contents, wanted to have a word with the woman. She falsely accused me of 1) taking pictures of security guards as I entered and exited Sterling Library, 2) trespassing in “restricted office space” because I had stepped into the open doorway of the library's business office to get the location of the library administration office (a finance employee even walked me down to the office), 3) saying discriminatory things to service-desk staff (even though the service-desk supervisor had not heard of any such complaints), and 4) "trying" to use my Yale Library ID card to open other Yale buildings that house Yale libraries. Probably unknown to that manager at Sterling library, a medical librarian actually made that building’s access possible for alumni and visiting researchers, so I could swipe my Yale ID to unlock that building’s doors so I could get to the medical library.

Nevertheless, the director of Sterling library protected the security manager. Alternatively, that director could have actually met with me; she would have discovered that some of the security guards, who no doubt were locals, were actually hostile to Yalies entering and exiting the library. I would have added that I was officially auditing a course, so I was entering buildings other than Sterling library, but that that was no business of a security manager at Sterling library. Instead, even after the Yale police had spoken to that manager and I had actually decamped from Yale, the manager sent me yet another email accusing me of things that would have been impossible because I was by then back at Harvard. Such hostility!  

To claim that Yale has a dysfunctional organizational culture doesn't begin to describe the anger that too many non-academic employees have toward alumni who are back on campus. That two alumni-relations employees bluntly asserted to me in 2023 that "alumni are not members of the Yale community" struck me as very unusual way of attracting donations to the school. That disrespect and even hostility towards alumni who are on campus for a semester extends even to Elm City Partners, the commercial retail-property management company that handles Yale’s commercial properties that are rented by retail businesses on the edge of the central campus. After having been followed in Maison Café on a Sunday morning by a local Black man who was shouting at me because he thought that I had stopped on the sidewalk because of him rather than to look at my phone, I complained to the restaurant’s manager the next week because the employees had refused to tell the shouting man to leave the restaurant or call the police. That manager was nonplussed, so I walked to Elm City Management, whose receptionist told me that the problem would be solved if I simply patronized another restaurant. I even notified Yale’s office that related to that Management company, but to no avail even though I indicated that the personnel in that company did not care much whether retail tenants on Yale-owned land were letting local residents be verbally aggressive toward Yalies. There had been a vicious “town-gown” thing in New Haven for decades, and there was no question that residents in New Haven’s vast ghettos near campus resented Yalies. Had the local Black population known that Yale’s theology school had accepted an ex-slave in the 1830s to audit courses so he could preach only to forbid him from checking out books and speaking in class, the resentment toward Yale would be greater. That Yale’s “seminary” did the same thing to another Black man in the 1840s would not help heal town-gown relations.  

In the perpetuation of a hostile, dysfunctional organizational culture over centuries, in treating some insiders at Yale as outsiders who deserve to be attacked, Yale was not merely imbibing a hostile immediate environment. During the two non-consecutive semesters back at Yale as an alumnus, I encountered too many Yale professors rudely disregard the university’s promotion of auditing courses on campus as a perk of being an alum—one professor in the philosophy even told that my seven years of study in that field were not enough for his undergraduate course on normative ethics because I had not had the prerequisite course and I had already read half of his book on the topic. The vitriol of a security manager in the main library was so over the top that I wondered whether someone such as the dean of the divinity school or Yale College, or else the Yale’s security dept itself was actually behind the attempt to get me out.

Below is one of the threatening emails based of fabricated accusations that was sent to me, Dr. Worden as Mr. Worden, by Ms. Lynn Leronimo. She may have been the security manager whom I had seen spying on students in the stacks in Sterling Library. Once when I witnessed this, a security manager pretended to be curious about which department I was with at Yale. "Just curious; what are you doing research on?" Answer: Alumni are not with any department.

“Dear Mr. Worden, 

I am writing to address concerns regarding your interactions with Yale Library staff that are misaligned with Yale Library policy and community values. As a library, we are committed to cultivating an inclusive work environment supportive of research, scholarship and study. We hold ourselves and each other accountable for embodying the values of access, inclusivity, and creativity in our shared work. Yale Library patrons and visitors are expected to adhere to these values in community with us. Specifically, I have received reports of the following behaviors significantly impacting both library staff and library users: 

·       Photographing and recording library security staff members upon entry and exit. 

·       Reports of attempts to use your library issued Access Pass to justify access to restricted campus spaces. 

·       Filing frivolous complaints about Library Security staff, as they perform the responsibilities of their assigned positions. 

·       Using harmful or discriminatory language when in conversation with library staff. 

·       Entering open office spaces within Sterling Memorial Library for the purpose of complaining about library security staff members.  

·       Engaging service desk staff in lengthy and repeated conversations impacting the user experience of other library patrons. 

 

I expect you to stop the above behaviors immediately. Failure to do so may result in the revocation of your Yale Library Access Pass and its corresponding privileges. Currently, your Yale Library Access Pass is valid through March 6, 2025. Probationary renewal is contingent upon alignment with the above expectations. In the future, I ask that you direct questions related to safety and security to Lynn Leronimo, Director, Library Security. Issues regarding access to collections or library services should be directed to Kim Copenhaver, Director, Access & Public Services. I appreciate your cooperation in maintaining an inclusive environment for both library staff and library users . . .”

I believe she sent that email after Yale police had talked with her about the inappropriate hostility in her first email. If so, such bravado and intractable spite! I now turn to answering these false accusations that Ms. Leronimo made concerning Dr. Worden. Firstly, a finance employee invited me into the library’s business office and actually walked me to the office of the library’s director, so I was not trespassing on restricted library space. Secondly in entering and exiting the library, almost every student, faculty member, and academic researcher held up a phone; it doesn’t mean that we were photographing security guards, and I certainly did not, except for one occasion in which a guard was hostile to me because I had not said hello to him after he, whom I had never met, said hello to me. I did show that photo to a circulation-desk manager and subsequently followed her direction not to record even such atrocious behavior again, and I did not. My complaint against the angry employee was hardly frivolous. Especially in leaving the library, it was not uncommon for us to be looking at our Yale phone app to see whether a shuttle bus was coming, especially during the winters. I maintain to this day that no duty exists at Yale to engage in small talk with petty, angry security guards at the library doors. To expect such an obligation evinces the presumptuousness of false entitlement. 

As for inappropriate or lengthy conversations with employees at the circulation service desk, I had legitimate business with them, and they seemed to like chatting with patrons, including myself. Not once did I use a racial, misogynistic, or anti-gay word. I did, however, complain about the plight of New Haven as the urban blight had not improved since the 1990s. The head of the circulation desk told me that none of his employees to his knowledge had complained about me, and I had had several chats with him, which he enjoyed because of his interest in theology. Therefore, all of Ms. Leronimo’s accusations were false, which suggests to me that someone else wanted me gone. The dean of Yale College and the Divinity dean would be my prime suspects, as both went out of their way to avoid me on sight. It could also be that the library security manager was trying to frame me because more than a year earlier, when I had been on campus to translate a text, I reported a security guard who was stalking me in the Humanities building. 

Even after I notified the administrator of religious studies of the stalking, the guard did it again. The administrator was stunned—as I had again taken photos of that guard following me and looking angry, but that was in the Humanities building rather than the library. After the second infraction by the culprit, on one night when I was leaving the Humanities building after having watched a film, a young man waiting for me a bit farther on along the sidewalk suddenly stood up when he saw me, accosted me and even pushed me, daring me to fight him so he could legally “defend himself.” I pretended to call the police (while I walked to the middle of York St) and shortly a get-away car came to pick the young man up, which means he probably was a local man rather than living on campus as a student. I bet someone working in Yale’s security department hired the man to rough me up—a nice way to treat alumni. At the very least, Yale had some very nasty employees working security with impunity.

I think I know exactly how Jonathan Edwards felt after Clapp published the pamphlets against Edwards, how the twice-escaped slave felt when Yale employees told him that he could not check out books or talk in class, and even perhaps why the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas avoided visiting Yale because the law school was so anti-conservative. That any organizational culture could be passed down for centuries, protected in this case by the great academic reputation of the school, such that the same pattern can be detected in key instances century after century, is the most astounding bit to be gleamed from this report. On a much more temporally-limited scale, the sordid organizational culture at Wells Fargo, an American bank, was said to go on for decades after the unethical, secret fee-charging practice was uncovered and the bank faced fines. In fact, the bank was fined again! A former employee told me at my bank that she knew that the unethical, greedy organizational culture had not changed in spite of Wells Fargo’s lies to the contrary. As Watergate taught Americans, cover-ups can be worse than the original crimes. Changing a dysfunctional organizational culture, whether of the White House, a business, or a university, is, I submit, very, very difficult precisely defense-mechanisms can be so utterly ruthless even in expunging certain insiders qua outsiders. In short, Yale, I must admit, is run like the mob, using its “community values” like a Nietzschean club to exclude rather than be inclusive. Best, therefore, that all concerned alumni stay away, including with our wallets and purses.

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1. Brhadaranyaka Upanishad 4.4.10 in Upanishads, Trans. Patrick Olivelle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 66.
2. Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” The Works of President Edwards, Vol. 4 (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1864), pp. 313-321, p. 315.
3. Ibid., pp. 313-321, p. 316.

An American Proto-Fascist Presbyterian Church

Mixing religion and politics can be a dangerous business, especially if done from the pulpit and backed up by fully-weaponized police poised in a worship space at the laity in the pews, and from the front so the congregants know they are being intensely watched even as the words, “Peace on earth” are shown on the big screen directly above one of the uniformed police employees. To my utter astonishment, I encountered just this scenario when I visited a large Presbyterian church in the U.S. early in 2026. A Christian who has read the Gospels might look askance at the weaponized, uniformed police in the sanctuary who were facing the people from near the front, and the television cameramen who were standing on the stage even very close to the altar, and think of Jesus castigating the money-changers and sacrifice-animal sellers operating inside the temple.

During the piano prelude, a cameraman hangs out near the altar.

The modern equivalent to the greedy businessmen in the temple is the power-tripping, weaponized police officer staring down congregants in a sanctuary even while the people are worshipping God. To see people worshipping the prince of peace while a fully-weaponized policewoman looks directly at the worshippers from just left of the stage in front—staring at the people—is surreal. True Christianity cannot thrive in such a hostile environment. Lest any members of that Presbyterian church might consider complaining about the obvious hypocrisy, the pastor’s sermon could easily be interpreted as a warning against complaining, not just about the church, but also, and even more troubling, the government.

Just one day before my visit to the large church in a Trump-friendly state in the U.S., Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Kamenei denounced rioters, saying that they “must be put in their place.”[1] Such a sentiment is hardly surprising because Iran’s “democracy” is severely constrained to include only approved candidates for office. So, it does come as a surprise that Iran’s supreme leader went on to say, “We talk to protesters, the officials must talk to them.”[2] It may also come as a surprise that the pastor of the Presbyterian church would not agree with Iran’s leader on talking with protesters, for that pastor said in his lengthy sermon that Christians should not complain about government. To do so is to “rebel against God’s sovereignty.” Anyone who complains has an overblown, selfish sense of oneself. The pastor also urged his congregation to contact the White House’s office of religion about a public prayer for the U.S. coming up.

Because it is unclear how a democracy can endure without complaints being made about elected officials, government policy, and even laws, I contend that the pastor was advocating a proto-fascist, anti-democracy message as a religious sermon. That he lapsed in overreaching from the domain of religion to that of politics and government—a category mistake—was dangerous because he had stationed fully-uniformed, and fully-weaponized local police not only at the periphery of the building outside, but also inside the sanctuary and in front, facing the people—staring at them as they (presumably) worshipped amid the blatant show of force. 

I intentionally made transparent the latent hostility by pivoting in the pew in the direction of the policewomen because she was staring in my direction throughout the entire service, except during the sermon, when she faced the pastor. Her loyalty was clear, and this means that the pastor’s demand that the laity not complain, even though in the Gospels Jesus complains about the money-changers, is dangerous. Were he to have seen me holding my phone/camera at my chest in the direction of his hired gun and told her to harass me, she would not have hesitated to do so, and with manufactured anger directed at me. In short, the pastor’s autocratic mentality plus the blatant, literally “in your face” presence of a fully-weaponized police officer is so toxic to Jesus’ message in the Gospels that the pastor could hardly be trusted to wield such power as he did.

The policewoman was even staring in my direction through a gap between the cameraman and the camera. She probably took my sustained stance toward the screen above her as a provocation, as she was well accustomed with passive aggression. So much overt hostility in a Christian church belies its raison d'etre. 

The environment inside and outside of the church was so toxic to worship that the pastor actually did his congregation a favor by talking through almost all of the service, lest the people be put in the uncomfortable position of closing their eyes in engaging in transcendent religious experience. Outside of the building, before the service, at least two uniformed, near riot-gear police employees roamed around the perimeter while security guards were also present. It was a sight, ironically, of excess, and thus bad judgment. As I sat in a pew inside the sanctuary, I noticed two cameramen standing near the main table/altar even though the only activity was that of a piano-player, who was very good. The Christmas lights were still up, and the sight was beautiful, but unfortunately false (which is what Aristotle wrote of Plato’s theory of the forms). After a hymn was sung, just before the Creed was said, the pastor warned his congregation, “If you don’t believe in the Apostles’ Creed, you aren’t getting into the kingdom of God.” Apparently that minister had never read Paul’s dictum that without the love of compassion, even, and I would like to add, especially for one’s enemies and even rude and dislikeable people, even faith that can move mountains is for naught. Love is not primarily about belief, though that it part of it, as I discovered ironically as I was walking from the pews.

The pastor went from reciting the Creed to making a bunch of announcements of upcoming church social-events. Any sense of transcendence that the laity may have felt arising in them from reciting the Creed was instantly wiped out by the profane announcements, which were essentially advertisements. The profane turn was made complete when he urged people to contact the White House’s office of religious affairs regarding an upcoming public prayer for the United States, which was then aiding and abetting Israel’s committing of what the UN and the International Criminal Court have both determined to be a genocide. “Praying for the country” would not include praying that the United States hold the guilty accountable and extend compassion to the million of homeless, starving civilians in Gaza.

Empty pipes even during the sermon.

The pastor’s sermon came after a reading not of the Gospels, but of one of Paul’s letters to a congregation. Philippians 2:12-6 was the reading. Interestingly, it includes the expression made popular by Soren Kierkegaard, fear and trembling. These words rightly apply to a human’s reaction to the presence of God, rather than to that of a uniformed, weaponized police officer confronting a congregation inside a sanctuary. Not surprisingly, the pastor referenced his recent sermon on fear and trembling. Fittingly, in the current sermon, the minister claimed, “Paul is almost like a sergeant.” Not. Then the pastor turned to his personal dislike of people who complain. “Remember God hates complaining,” he said without any scriptural justification. Furthermore, “complaining is a type of unbelief,” by which he probably meant atheism. Then he overreached onto the domain of government—something that Jesus refuses to do in the Gospel stories. “Complaining about the government is really complaining about the sovereignty of God.” Only self-centered people who think too much of themselves complain. Of course, democracy requires criticism of government officials, their policies, and even laws. In fact, in strenuously opposing people who criticize their respective governments, the minister was advocating autocracy because under that form of government, political criticism is prohibited. 

How do you suppose the elderly couple felt about a heavily-weaponized, uniformed "off duty" police employee of the city looking in their direction at such close range? That the couple was effectively barred from complaining even about such an overt wrong goes without saying. Forget about worshipping; transcendent experience, had there been any during that service, would have been utterly untenable in the face of such a blatant show of force. Such palpable distrust of people who could be regular members evicerates the conditions that are necessary for worship.  

Consistent with his heavy-handed political ideology, which also manifested in there being weaponized police in the sanctuary, the minister's theology of grace had little room for credit going to free-will, which is why complaining can only be rooted in arrogant selfishness. His draconian theology can be likened to that of the Jansenists, who were extreme Augustinians—extreme because they believed that the Fall is so devastating on human nature that even free-will is severely warped. Redemption by the Cross is by grace alone. The use of free-will to extend humane compassion to one’s detractors and even enemies is instead totally by grace—the person deserves no credit for making the choice to help. 

As I was thinking about the pastor's theology in the church that I hated so much as I was walking in a line past pews at the end of the service, I saw a cell phone fall on the carpet ahead. Immediately, I picked up the phone and another person helped me locate the man who had just dropped it. As I returned it to him, I said to just a few—now I wish I had had the guts to really speak up as Jesus does to the money-changers in the Gospels—“I am really opposed to your church, but, here, this is real Christianity—I am intentionally returning this phone to this man to show humane compassion even when it is not convenient. I really oppose your congregation.” The few people who heard this nodded in agreement that what I was intentionally illustrating was indeed what Jesus stands for in the Gospels, and that my complaint against the brazen police presence was valid. Even though credit is deserved for my use of my free-will to pick up and return the phone—this was not solely due to God’s grace, though I did wonder about how fortuitous the phone being dropped such that I saw it first was. It was as if a supremely intelligent being sourced beyond our realm—including our domain of politics—was testing me to see if my anger at the violations in a house of worship was in line with authentic Christianity, and thus akin to Jesus’s anger at the money-changers in the temple. As in the Gospel of Mark, the word immediately came into my mind as I saw the phone on the carpet. I knew it would have to be a split-decision whether to ignore the phone out of spite for the minister and the policewoman who had been staring at me, or to be compassionate in such an environment in which I was so angered. I would even state that it is precisely in making the choice to be compassionate when being so is inconvenient at the very least that the image of God is in us, and that the proverbial Fall does not diminish that image in us. Even Augustine argued that a person’s self-love of that in oneself that is in the image of God is theologically laudable, whereas selfish self-love is a sin.

During my first master’s degree (and Ph.D. minor-field) program in religion, my advisor used to take his graduate students to a variety of religious places on weekends so we could observe religious rituals along the lines set out as a methodology by Geertz. We were to bracket our respective religious backgrounds and perspectives to focus on knowing “the other of the other.” We did so at Hindu and Sikh temples, Greek Orthodox churches, Protestant churches, and Roman Catholic churches. I’ve continued this practice off and on through the rest of my life. In visiting the anti-democratic police-state Presbyterian church at the beginning of 2026, however, Geertz’s methodology of bracketing one’s own religious view went out the window; I couldn’t get away from that church fast enough, though I did get a glimpse of real Christianity as I paused to pick up a phone on the way out.  

By chance, I was wearing blue and the man I helped wore red. I had come from a very "blue" state, and he lived in a red state. The phone returned, nonetheless, from one hand back to the rightful owner. That he was still holding his phone when the photo was taken may suggest that having his phone back meant a lot to him. That humane compassion can seep through the cracks in such a hostile environment as a proto-fascist church is a testament to the value of the principle itself. Without valuing it and willing it into praxis, belief in the Creed is for naught. 

 

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1. The Associated Press, “Rioters ‘Must Be Put in Their Place’ Following Week Long Protests, Iran’s Khamenei Says,” Euronews.com, 3 January, 2026.
2. Ibid.