Editor’s Note: With the Senate decision to end invocations, Civil Beat is asking those who’ve given them in the past to share their reflections on the experience.

Linda Hamilton Krieger recalls an unforgettably bad day at the Legislature.

It was in 2009 when the University of Hawaii law professor testified in favor of HB 444, the civil unions bill. The Senate auditorium and adjacent hallways were crowded with red-shirted evangelicals, many of them bussed down to the Capital by their churches.

HB444 opponents outnumbered supporters by a large margin, and the crowd was worked up. Krieger was supposed to be one of the first to testify before the Senate Judiciary and Government Affairs Committee, but she couldn’t even get into the auditorium.

Two very tall, large men wearing anti-civil union T-shirts were blocking her way, telling her that the hearing room was full. Finally, she screwed up her courage and pushed her 5’4’’ frame through them into the auditorium to deliver her testimony.

After finishing her testimony, Senator Sam Slom sarcastically thanked her for “lecturing us,” and the crowd burst into laughter. He then proceeded to deride her in ways that many Senators and staffers watching the closed circuit TV in their offices found disturbing, Krieger later learned. As Krieger was questioned, the crowd chuckled and jeered.

“The Committee leadership’s failure to control the crowd was shocking,” Krieger told Civil Beat. “The crowd was taking their cues from the anti-444 Committee members, jeering, laughing at us, cheering their own, calling us ‘sodomites,’ ‘child molesters’ and ‘diseased,’ likening us to necropheliacs. No attempt was made to reign in the overtly sectarian vitriol spewing from these people; no efforts were made to put a stop to the insults or the derision. It was like a big, staged humiliation ritual, and many, many people who testified for the bill were treated very poorly. A number of people felt menaced. For example, two men I spoke with after the fact were terrified after being followed to their car by two very beefy civil union opponents.”

The experience stung even someone who, as a former federal civil rights lawyer, describes herself as “a tough cookie.” The crowd’s jeering and taunting in particular, and the willingness of certain senators to play off of it, triggered some very difficult memories of an earlier time in Krieger’s life, when as an 18-year-old, newly out lesbian she was verbally and physically bullied during her first year in college — to the point where she contemplated suicide.

So when Sen. Les Ihara invited her to give a Senate invocation about a month after the hearings, she gave the matter a great deal of reflection.

Many of the invocations that year had been pointedly sectarian and tied to specific policy issues, Krieger said. She wanted to use the opportunity to “do some psychological and spiritual healing,” not just for herself, but for the whole LGBT community, and perhaps even for some of the senators – on both sides of the debate.

The SB 444 Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing, “had felt like a mass bullying ritual inflicted on the LGBT community; it was so hurtful that the Senate leadership had just stepped aside and allowed it to happen,” she said. “That was the motivation for the invocation I gave. I was reaching for words that would lead my own heart to forgiveness, to reconciliation, to psychological and spiritual healing, but I wanted to do that in a way that challenged the Senate to do better. I also wanted to provide comfort for all the people – including some members of the Senate — who had been hurt, who had taken political risks for the LGBT community.”

She described the experience as “very healing, a solemn occasion.”

Here is the text of what she said:

Senate Invocation
April 3, 2009
Linda Hamilton Krieger

Let us join together in earnest intention:
Blessed are you, source of our humanity, who has placed in our throats a thirst for justice.
Blessed are you, source of light, who has placed in our minds the capacity for reason.
Blessed are you, ground of our being, who has placed in our hearts the seeds of compassion.
Reawaken in us the ideals of our youth:
That we would stand for what is right, rather than bow to what is self-serving;
That we would strive to understand, rather than mock or disparage what we cannot yet comprehend;
That we would risk our own positions to protect the powerless, rather than protect ourselves by currying favor with the powerful, and
That we would never mistake conformity for faithfulness.
As we move together into our common future,
Let us reason together.
Let us choose justice over power,
clarity over obfuscation,
equality over subordination,
compassion over judgment.

And if, because we stood up for what is right and true, we are punished by the proud or the powerful, help us find comfort, and new ways to serve.
If we have betrayed our own commitments, help us forgive ourselves and try again;
If we have been mocked and slandered, help us forgive those who have mocked and slandered us;
Source of our source, and light of our light, in everything we do, help us remember who we really are.
Adonai, Elohai, compassion and tenderness, patience, forebearance, kindness, awareness…
Bearing love from age to age
Healing guilt and mistakes,
And making us free.

And let us say,
Amen