And just recently the Vatican’s second-highest authority, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, belted out the solution. It’s us gays! Of course, linking homosexuality to pedophilia.

And why else would the Catholic Church be in the state that it is in?

But the highest-profile pedophiles cases in Bertone’s church in Chile involve priests having underage and non consensual sex with young girls, including a teenager who became pregnant.

The teenager told the Chilean newspaper La Nacion: “I thought it wasn’t that bad to have sex with him because when I told priests about it at confession they just told me to pray and that was it. They knew, and some of them guessed that it was Father Tato. But everyone looked the other way. No one corrected or helped me.”

But when the Catholic Church looks for scapegoats they must be found. And the quick and easy answer coming from the Vatican will be to simply not ordain gay priests.

Such an order, of course, makes the assumption that all gay priests are pedophiles or, if not active pedophiles, are predisposed to it.

However, in the face of overwhelming evidence by behavioral scientists to refute such a harmful and homophobic claim, the Catholic Church, nonetheless, believes that a homosocial and celibate atmosphere of gay men produces a preponderance of pedophilic priests.

But studies have proved over and over again that the overwhelming majority of pedophiles are heterosexuals. And most of these pedophiles are not only married heterosexual men, but are married heterosexual men with children.

The Catholic Church, however, will think it can solve its problem of both pedophilia and homosexuality if it rids itself of gay priests. With the Catholic Church rid of both social cancers, the spiritual and religious life of its hallowed sanctuaries can now go on with life as normal.

However, if the Catholic Church is to go on with life as normal, it couldn’t possibly ban gay priests. It needs its gay priests.

The Rev. Donald B. Cozzens, author of The Changing Face of the Priesthood, wrote that with more than half the priests and seminarians being gay, the priesthood is becoming a gay profession. Many who know the interior of the Catholic Church would argue that the priesthood has for centuries been a gay profession, and not to ordain gay priests or to defrock them would drastically alter the spiritual life and daily livelihood of the church.

“If they were to eliminate all those who were homosexually oriented, the number would be so staggering that it would be like an atomic bomb; it would do damage to the church’s operation,” says A.W. Richard Sipe, a former priest and psychotherapist who has been studying the sexuality of priests for decades. Sipe also points out that to do away with gay priests “would mean the resignation of at least a third of the bishops of the world. And it’s very much against the tradition of the church; many saints have gay orientation and many popes had gay orientations.”

The reality here is that as quietly as the Church has tried to keep it, the Catholic Church is a gay institution. And that is not a bad thing!

The problem in the Catholic Church is not its gay priests, and its solution to the problem is not the removal of them. The problem in the Catholic Church is its transgressions against gay priests. And I ask: Who will remove the church from itself?

Years of homophobia and years of church laws to maintain the homophobia have made the church unsafe for us all, young and old, straight and gay, adult and child.

Eugene Kennedy, a specialist on sexuality and the priesthood and a former priest, wrote in his book, The Unhealed Wound: The Church and Human Sexuality, that the Catholic Church “ . . .had always had gay priest, and they have often been models of what priests should be. To say that these men should be kept from the priesthood is in itself a challenge to the grace of God and an insult to them and the people they serve.”

The Church’s edicts against LGBTQ people is a farce in light of its reality and of the gifts gay priests have given and continue to give to the Catholic Church. If the Catholic Church wants to solve its problem of pedophilia, it should not look at a priest’s sexual orientation but instead at his overall personality development.

Right now, the Catholic Church stands in the need of prayer.

Scapegoating all gay priests as pedophiles is a cheap and easy solution. It gives the Catholic Church an easy escape hatch that allows the Church to not own up to the reality that the reason the Catholic Church exists and will continue to exist in perpetuity is because of the gifts, and dedicated service of its gay priests.

When asked by the Rev. Al Sharpton on his radio show “Keeping it Real�? what possessed
Don Imusto utter such vile remarks to a group of hardworking athletes and stellar students, Imus said, “I didn’t think it was a racial insult. I thought it was in the process of us rapping and trying to be funny.”

But “funny�? for this shock jock has consistently crossed the lines of civility and acceptable on-the-air commentary.

Imus’ retort about the Rutgers athletes was inexcusable. Why? Because jokes framed around distorted concepts of race and gender invalidate the behavior, culture and accomplishments of the group .

And the ridiculing of the women’s physical features suggest a norm of beauty, femininity and class, in both Imus’ and the show producer Bernard McGuirk’s minds, these women do not possess.

“That’s some rough girls from Rutgers, Imus said. “Man, they got tattoos.”
“Some hardcore hos,” McGuirk replied.
“That’s some nappy headed hoes there,�? Imus said. I’m going to tell you that.”

The strength of these women shouldi be lauded.

However, African American women beat the odds, they are either demonized as being emasculating of black men or seem impervious to stereotypes that obfuscate our real countenances.

And when a disparaging comment such as Imus’ is accepted as a joke or brushed aside as distasteful humor and not acknowledged for what it is- hate speech- it closes the window of opportunity to educate.

But in the competitive world of the broadcast industry, where ratings add up to corporate sponsorships this shock jock, whose off-colored remarks and politically incorrect acid-tongue are his signature, has one of the top shows in the business.

And while no one wants to be butt of Imus’ acerbic jokes, his no-holds-barred humor has, peculiarly enough, both entertained and offended millions, broadcasting on more than 70 stations across the country and simulcast on the cable station MSNBC. Imus’ offensive behavior has increased his viewership by 40 percent since last year. And this recent incident will raise it even more.

What wrong with this picture?

We have become a culture more concerned about being entertained than caring about the souls we hurt for a laugh.

Published April 11, 2007 in Metro News.

The reaction to his blunder has brought out politically correct histrionics by politicians and has also bought up historical baggage for many African Americans.

A seemingly innocuous word “articulate,”? however, has become a loaded word today in our cultural lexicon. Depending on the users’ tone, tenor, and intent the word can be received as a compliment. But when it is not, the word is unquestionably a put-down suggesting a speech disability due to a person’s race, accent, and even U.S. region they reside in.

For example, many African- Americans are offended when whites use the word “articulate”? as a back-handed compliment to express their astonishment by our masterful elocution of standard English. And regardless of our varied class, educational and professional backgrounds Black English, pejoratively called Ebonics, is thought to be our native tongue.

But the word “articulate”? is also far out of reach in depicting folks with strong regional accents. And the regional North-South divide on the issue of which accents sound pleasant to the ears or are linguistically correct has created a cacophony of completing opinions and very little middle ground. While many southern accents, for the most part, are stigmatized and mocked, nothing is more linguistically recognizable than the southern drawl associated with the Deep South. Its lengthening of certain vowels has come to be derogatorily depicted as a slow and lazy speech pattern attributed to the region’s heat, where people commonly say “y’all”? instead of “you all”? when addressing a group of people.

But as a girl from Brooklyn, where our accent competes mightily with New Jersey’s, I was shamed out of my accent when I left home to attend an elite Ivy-League college in New England, and forced to adopted an acceptable accentless tone, free of regional characteristics. I began to sound like I came from nowhere, but now I was perceived by my peers as “articulate.”?

There is a cadence to all accents that makes language musical and colorful. And having one does not make you less articulate than not having one- but there is nonetheless a bias. And for Biden, Obama’s isn’t associated with the group he identifies with. That’s where Biden messed up.

Published in The Metro and Black Commentator, March 1, 2007.

In a country beleaguered by HIV/AIDS, Oprah’s extravagance for only 152 girls has many wondering why she would spend $40 million on one school when she could have spent $1 million on 40 schools — especially if her objective is to improve and democratize education for girls throughout South Africa. For many grassroots organizations and activists in South Africa, their frustration with Oprah’s charitable gift lies with its failure to distribute her vast donation in a way that produces the greatest good for the greatest number. And for Oprah’s critics, the academy is seen as a shrine built to herself on a world stage whilst disguised as goodwill.

Many South African educators worry that Oprah is replicating the American paradigm of elite education. While they applaud Oprah’s objective to educate young girls to become the country’s future leaders, they worry that the outcome will produce a privileged class that will not only become disconnected to their families and friends, but will also become disinterested in the ongoing struggles in their communities. As with many of Africa’s educated class who have left their family and village for a chance at success, they often don’t return. Consequently, the money and resources poured into these students never benefits their communities and contributes to their country’s brain drain.

While it is admirable for Americans to want to help Third World countries most in need, it is equally as admirable for us to respectfully ask how we can best meet their needs — the cardinal rule in International Philanthropy 101. Otherwise, the global reception of American’s donations — while filled with a heart of good intentions as Oprah’s is — will continue to be perceived by Third World countries as our unexamined acts of benevolent paternalism at best, unbridled colonialism at worst. Why? Because how we give matters as much as what we give.

Published in The Metro, February 7, 2007.

If King were among us today, he would say that it is not enough to look outside ourselves to see the places where society is broken, like our institutions and workplaces that fracture and separate people based on race, religion, gender and sexual orientation.We must also look at the ways we manifest these bigotries. Often, we find that these institutions and workplaces are broken,dysfunctional and wounded in the very same ways that we are — thus, being mirrors not of who we want to be, but who we really are.

King would remind us that we cannot heal the world if we have not healed ourselves. So perhaps the greatest task, and the most difficult work we must do in light of King’s teachings, is to heal ourselves in relation to our justice work in the world.

In “The Old Man and the Sea,” Ernest Hemingway said that the world breaks us all, but some of us grow strong in those broken places. King’s teachings invite us to grow strong in our broken places — not only to mend the sin-sick world in which we live, but also to mend the sin-sick world that we carry around within us.

We are foolish if we think we can heal the world and not ourselves. And we delude ourselves if we think that King was only talking about the woundedness of institutional racism, and not the personal wounds we all carry as human beings.

In light of King’s teachings, I believe that when we use our gifts in the service of others, as King has taught us, we then shift the paradigm of personal brokenness to personal healing. We also shift the paradigm of looking for moral leadership from outside of ourselves to within ourselves — thus, realizing we are not only the agents of change in society, but also the moral leaders we have been looking for. Our job, therefore, in keeping King’s dream alive, is to remember that our longing for social justice is also inextricably tied to our longing for personal healing. “We are foolish if we think we can heal the world and not ourselves.”

Published in The Metro, January 16, 2007.

With a proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage — and with the country’s moral values jihadis like Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America campaigning on a one-woman, one-man family values platform — Cheney must now realize how he and his boss will have to play a profound role in both the political disenfranchisement and the social stigmatization of his grandchild. And with the GOP rhetoric of no child left behind, this grandchild will be.

Bereft of the same state and federal protections and rights that children born to heterosexual couples enjoy, this child, because of the legal restrictions imposed on the family unit, is forced to be born to an unwed mother. But the bastardization of this child will go beyond the pejorative sting and social stigmatization of both mother and child; it will be the day-to-day treatment of them as an illegitimate family, a shared guilt and shame imposed on them by their grandfather’s government.

The Christmas season is a time of remembering the Nativity narrative, of reflecting on how Jesus’ birth was born of struggle in a conservatively recalcitrant political era, and that the struggle during Jesus’ time was also for acceptance at a difficult point along the Roman government timeline.

There was no room for Mary and Joseph at the inn. Similarly, there is no room for a child like Mary Cheney’s baby in the state of Virginia. The laws in that state not only deny same-sex families the right to marry, but also the right to a civil union and shared rights and equal responsibilities for children in their household. With the oldest fundamental right to establish a home and to direct the upbringing of your children denied solely on parents’ sexual orientation, it desecrates the wonderfully different and diverse configurations of the human family.

While the news of Mary Cheney’s pregnancy is an embarrassment for the GOP, the real embarrassment are themselves. Cheney’s pregnancy is — symbolically and in reality — the pregnant pause the Republican Party needs to face.

Published in The Metro, January 4th, 2007.

While it is easy to get sidetracked by raising queries about the intent of Richards’ repetitive use of the n-word, or to vilify Richards for his vitriol, we as Americans must look at the systemic problem of what happens when an epithet like the n-word develops a broad-base cultural acceptance in our society today.

The current bickering over the word — made popular by young African-American use in hip-hop music — is no longer about who has been harmed or hurt by its use, but about who has the right to use it, which is why Richards was publicly pulverized. Many African-Americans, and not just the hip-hop generation, state that reclaiming the n-word functions as a form of resistance against the dominant culture’s use of it, and therefore the epithet gives only them a license to use it. However, the notion that it is acceptable for African-Americans to refer to each other using the n-word — yet it is considered racist for others outside the race — unquestionably sets up a double standard. The notion that one ethnic group has property rights to the term is an absurd argument, since language is a public enterprise.

The appropriation of the n-word by African-Americans fails to obliterate the word’s historical baggage. The n-word is firmly embedded in the lexicon of a racist language that is still used to disparage African-Americans. However, today the meaning of the n-word is all in how one spells it. By dropping the “er” ending and replacing it with either an “a” or “ah” ending, the term morphs into a term of endearment. But many slaveholders pronounced the n-word with the “a” ending, and in the 1920s, many African-Americans used the “a” ending as a pejorative term to denote class difference among themselves.

In 2003, the NAACP convinced Merriam-Webster lexicographers to change the dictionary definition of the n-word to no longer mean African-Americans, but instead a racial slur. And while the battle to change the n-word in the American lexicon was a long and arduous one, our culture’s continuous use of the n-word makes it harder to purge the sting of the word from the American psyche. Why? Because language is a representation of culture. Language reinscribes and perpetuates ideas and assumptions about race, which we consciously and unconsciously articulate in our everyday conversations about ourselves and consequently transmit generationally.

Many activists argue that Richards’ repentance should be volunteer work in a predominately African-American community. However, he would find there, too, that many of us keep the n-word alive. What would work for him — and many in my community — is a history lesson.

Published in the Metro, November 29, 2006.