Crossposted from elsewhere: gay marriage and Christian persecution.

I wanted to hold onto an exchange I'm participating in, in someone else's journal. (I will let that person decide whether to provide a link, because they might not want an influx of my friends piling on.)

( reposted gay marriage discussion )

Whoa!!

I just got a call from our grants administrator. My grant application will be proceeding to scientific review along with everyone else's.

*deep breath*

Both Jackie (the grants administrator) and I spent most of Tuesday calling around, trying to figure out what should happen next.

The grant application listed three "contacts" - two scientific, and one administrative. Monday afternoon, I had spoken to the administrative contact, who was completely unhelpful. He said he was sure that nothing could be done once a grant was late, unless it was for technical problems with grants.gov. He reminded me that this is an ongoing program, and that I was free to submit for the next deadline, in September.

Tuesday morning, I tried one of the scientific contacts. She was great. Very sympathetic, very practical. I told her that I intended to submit the grant late, with an explanatory cover letter, and she walked me through what would happen next. She dug up the name of the person in charge of "Receipt and Referral" at NIH, and said that "as an NIH insider," she advised me to have my grants administrator or someone from the Dean's office call that person to introduce/follow up my cover letter. (Don't make the call yourself, she implied very clearly but did not say.)

Believe it or not, the same person who left early on Monday? Was called away on Tuesday morning at 10am to deal with a family emergency, and was out the rest of the day. Mercifully, she called in to the Office of Research and Development at about 4pm Tuesday afternoon to tell them to go ahead and submit the grant without her signature. The NIH system accepted it, which was a relief - we had feared that it might be automatically set up to reject late applications.

Jackie tried to call the Receipt and Referral person on Tuesday. Out of the office until Thursday, she was told. And so we fretted.

She called today. Aaaaaaand... get this: my grant wasn't even flagged as "late" in the system. The woman looked at the grant, looked at my cover letter, and said, "This all looks good. She should be fine."

Competition is so fierce for these things that my chances of actually being awarded the grant are still very slim. I'm well aware of that. But at least, now I have the opportunity to fail on my own merits. And right now that feels like a victory.