But in some places across the globe children would never pretend to be witches because the consequences are not only dire but they can also be deadly.

For example, Nine-year-old Nwanaokwo Edet of Nigeria was accused of being a witch by the family pastor. Nwanaokwo’s father forced acid down his throat as an exorcism, burning away his face and eyes. Nwanaokwo died a month later.

Eight-year-old Shilua Salifu of Ghana now lives with her grandmother after being accused of being a witch. Shilua’s mother tired to saw off the top of her skull to let the demons fly away.

Organizations like the United Nations Children’s Fund, Africa Unite Against Child Abuse, and Save the Children have stepped in where they could to stop the witch-hunt. But the phenomenon of “witch children” is so widespread throughout Africa these organizations have set up “witch camps” as shelters for children who cannot be safely place with a relative like Shilua.

Throughout history, people described as witches have been tortured, persecuted, and even murdered. And it is usually society’s most vulnerable who are targeted.

The rapid growth of Evangelical Christianity throughout African, however, has exploited the problem.  With these churches in competition for parishioners, some clerics establish their unique godly credentials by claiming to have special powers in recognizing and exorcising these “ child witches.”

The role religion has played in witch hunts is not new, always to targeting children, the most defendless, before targeting marginalized adults.

For example, the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.

This haunting history of the Puritan’s execution of innocent women, and certain men, is a window into how their religious fanaticism, misogyny, and homophobia destroyed not only the moral fiber of their town, but how it also decimated its own Christian zeal all to become a “city on the hill.”

Clerics’ sanctioning of Exodus 22:18 “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,”
not only gave men biblical legitimacy to control women, but it also gave them a legal license to kill them.

Homosocial circles of women threatened the Puritan’s paradigm of male dominance, giving rise to the charges of witchcraft, because of the theological belief that women ought not be in the company of each other without the presence of a man. And without the presence of a man, of course, women could not help but engage in sorcery, paganism, and lesbianism.

While today new light is being shed on the Salem Witch Trials little is still known about the first women accused of witchcraft that sparked the trials – Tituba, a black slave.

As the house slave of the Rev. Samuel Parris, minister of Salem Village, Parris’ daughter and her cousin accused Tituba of witchcraft. Allegedly, while assisting Tituba in preparing a “witch cake, ” the girls experienced unexplained “fits” and “symptoms.”

Forced to confess that she was a witch, Tituba was known throughout Salem to tell tales from her African folklore tradition that both frightened and fascinated children and adults alike, stories later seen as evidence of her personal witchcraft.

“Hell Houses” are today’s contemporary form of witch-hunting. Created in the late 1970’s by fundamentalist pastor, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, “hell houses’ are religious alternatives to traditional haunted houses. They are tours given by evangelical churches across the country design to scare people away from sin. And one of those sins is homosexuality.

In 2006 the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) put out a report titled “Homophobia at ’Hell House’: Literally Demonizing Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Youth” explaining how hell houses specifically targets youth.

“Instead of spooking youth with ghosts and monsters, Hell House tour guides direct them through rooms where violent scenes of damnation for a variety of “sins” are performed, including scenes where a teenage lesbian is brought to hell after committing suicide and a gay man dying of AIDS is taunted by a demon who screams that the man will be separated from God forever in hell,” the NGLTF stated.

A study published in the Journal of Psychology stated that a strong belief in Satan is directly related to intolerance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people.

Religious leaders who support Hell Houses believe that by scaring LGBTQ youth into “heterosexual” behavior they are saving their souls. However, the message that “homosexuals” are going to hell can have a deleterious impact on our youth. For example the NGLTF report tells the story of Bobby Griffith, a gay teen who wrote in his journal that he was afraid he was going to hell and committed suicide.

Witch-hunts have always created moral panic, mass hysteria, and public lynching of society’s most vulnerable and marginalized.

This Halloween, as I think of the children in African and of LGBTQ children here at home, I am reminded of our present and past witch-hunts.

One year later the lives of many LGBT New Orleans residents remain in tatters—no thanks to George Bush’s “faith-based” charities, most of which condemn homosexuality and refuse to recognize, much less assist, our families.

It has been over a year since Hurricane Katrina barreled through New Orleans. Thankfully the waters have receded, as has much of the stench from the wreckage.  What still lingers in the post-Katrina relief efforts are the odious fault lines of heterosexism and faith-based privilege.

While seemingly invisible in this disaster, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer evacuees and their families faced all kinds of discrimination at the hands of many of the faith-based relief agencies because of their sexual orientation, gender identity, or HIV status.

And since sexual orientation is on the “down-low” in much of the African-American community, many African-American LGBT evacuees experienced discrimination from both their communities and black faith-based institutions.

“The Superdome was no place to be an out black couple,” said Jeremiah Leblanc, who now lives in Shreveport, Louisiana. “We got lots of stares and all kinds of looks. What were we thinking? But my partner and I were in a panic and didn’t know what to do when we had to leave our home.”

“The Superdome was no place to be an out black couple … We got lots of stares and all kinds of looks. … But my partner and I were in a panic and didn’t know what to do when we had to leave our home.”

The faith-based organizations vaunted by George W. Bush presented themselves as “armies of compassion” on his behalf. But these organizations’ caveat to LGBT people was “If you’re gay, stay away.”And with black churches, many of which are known for their unabashed homophobia, conducting a large part of the relief effort, African-American LGBT evacuees and their families had neither a chance nor a prayer for assistance.

“When we were all forced to leave the dome, we were gathered like cattle into school buses,” said Leblanc. “[My partner] Le Paul and I both needed our meds, clothes, and a way to find permanent shelter after the storm, but we knew to stay the hell away from the black churches offering help. We couldn’t tell anyone we were sick and HIV-positive.”

With respect to families like Leblanc’s, The Salvation Army had done an excellent job of communicating its website‘s stance that “Scripture forbids sexual intimacy between members of the same sex. The Salvation Army believes, therefore, that Christians whose sexual orientation is primarily or exclusively same-sex are called upon to embrace celibacy as a way of life. There is no scriptural support for same-sex unions as equal to, or as an alternative to, heterosexual marriage.” If Leblanc had access to the Internet from the evacuee’s shelter, he might have seen that their polices also say that “there is no scriptural support for demeaning or mistreating anyone for reason of his or her sexual orientation. The Salvation Army opposes any such abuse,” and “in keeping with these convictions, the services of The Salvation Army are available to all who qualify, without regard to sexual orientation.” But the Salvation Army’s website wasn’t there in the Superdome. The Salvation Army was, and what Leblanc drew from their presence there communicated to him clearly: “when we got to Houston, we saw the Salvation Army, but Le Paul and I knew to stay the hell away from that too.”

“[My partner] Le Paul and I both needed our meds, clothes, and a way to find permanent shelter after the storm, but we knew to stay the hell away from the black churches offering help. We couldn’t tell anyone we were sick and HIV-positive.”

The Bush administration slashed much-needed government programs, contending that more participation from faith-based groups and less participation from governments would restore the spiritual foundation to American public life. Its programs, however, rely on churches and faith-based agencies ill-equipped to provide essential social services for LGBT citizens. In other words, the government takes without respect to sexual orientation, but gives in ways that leave LGBT citizens in the lurch.

Many LGBTQ families worried about being separated from each other by relief organizatios, since Louisiana does not recognize same-sex unions. That fear was intensified as the rhetoric of Bush’s fundamentalist supporters publicly blamed the wrath of Hurricane Katrina on LGBT people. Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast just two days before Labor Day weekend, when New Orleans’s annual Queer “Southern Decadence” festival was to begin. While floods are a regular part of life in the lowlands of Louisiana and hurricanes are frequent occurrences all along the coastline, Michael Marcavage, director of Repent America, an evangelical organization calling for “a nation in rebellion toward God” to reverse itself, had this to say: “We believe that God is in control of the weather. The day Bourbon Street and the French Quarter were flooded was the day that 125,000 homosexuals were going to be celebrating sin in the street. We’re calling it an act of God.”

For these conservative religious groups, the flood was a prayer finally answered and a sin finally addressed. Never mind that neither Bourbon Street nor the French Quarter were ever flooded by the storm.

Not all churches or organizations of faith were unwelcoming to LGBT people. Some churches, albeit few, were opening and affirming parishes to LGBT people and their families before Katrina hit.

“I wasn’t going to the Superdome,” said Angelamia Bachemin, an African-American lesbian percussionist renowned throughout Boston’s Queer and music communities for her pioneering style of jazz/hip-hop, who served as a professor of ethnomusicology at the Berklee School of Music until she returned to her native New Orleans.

… the government takes without respect to sexual orientation, but gives in ways that leave LGBT citizens in the lurch.

“When my partner and I and the children fled, it was not an issue for the folks at this Catholic church. The people at Epiphany Church just took us in, and we began rolling with the evangelists during the relief effort. They paid money for the materials for my roof. They have done more for me and my family than the government.” Bachemin is one of the lucky few LGBT families now in the long process of rebuilding their homes and lives in New Orleans.

Leblanc, however,  isn’t. His partner, who was in the last stages of full-blown AIDS, died two weeks after Katrina. Without access to legal marriage, Leblanc as a widower is not eligible for Social Security benefits for surviving spouses. And because he is gay, he is also not eligible for relief assistance from some faith-based organizations that might otherwise help him get his life back in order.

Katrina showed with intense clarity just how incompetent FEMA political appointees were and just how deep are the fault lines of race and class in this country. But even after a year’s opportunity to reflect on its lessons, mainstream media have not recognized the ways in which Katrina showed some of the hidden abuses of heterosexism and homophobia, and the dark swathes left when “a thousand points of light” left to do the government’s work are deeply biased faith-based organizations who can provide or deny relief as they see fit.

Hurricane Katrina stripped people from their loved ones and families from their homes, for which we all grieve. It also stripped bare the pretenses of a brand of “compassionate conservatism” that offers government giveaways to political supporters but denies compassion to those most in need. The prayer and action of all must ensure that no neglected opportunity for compassion or wisdom remains in the rubble, and that our government is held fully accountable for sweeping both aside.

Hate speech is not passive. One of the signs of an intolerant society is its hate speech, whether used jokingly or intentionally, aimed at specific groups of people. And there’s no surer sign of a society’s lack of tolerance for diversity than when this form of verbal abuse becomes part of everyday speech, and name-calling becomes an accepted norm.

Lately, a particularly nasty and shameless brand of invective has been coursing from Republicans against queers, African-Americans, and Jews. Here’s a sample of this latest brand of “compassionate conservatism”:

In an interview with Ann Coulter, author of Godless: The Church of Liberalism, on the July 27 edition of MSNBC’s Hardball with host Chris Matthews, Coulter called former vice president Al Gore a “fag,” and she hinted that Bill Clinton might be gay.

“How do you know that Bill Clinton is gay?” Matthews asked.

“He may not be gay, but Al Gore, total fag. No, I’m just kidding,” Coulter stated. And in referring to Clinton, Coulter continued, “I mean, everyone has always known wildly promiscuous heterosexual men have, as I say, a whiff of the bathhouse about them.”

Systematic denial of human rights tells people they are less than human.

Perhaps Coulter intended her words as humor or satire, but when she uses this kind of language, she’s evoking centuries of hatred in one fell swoop, and with just one word. She’s not just insulting Clinton and Gore; she’s lashing out at the entire LGBTQ community.

Let us not forget that the word “fag” comes from the word “faggot,” which is a bundle of sticks for burning. When medieval courts condemned LGBTQ people to death, they were seen as unworthy to die standing; they were instead bound and burned at the feet of the despised “heretics” deemed their betters.

And let us not forget Matthew Shepard, the openly gay Wyoming student who in 1998 was bludgeoned and left to die in near-freezing temperatures while bound to a rough-hewn wooden fence.

Or 1999, when Billy Jack Gaither, a well-respected and beloved textile worker in Alabama, was bludgeoned with an ax handle, burned, and left to die on a pile of tires because he was gay.

And some claim the Bible refers to us stoking the fires of hell.

The violence LGBTQ people face, though, is about more than physical threats. A climate in which both church and government bar us from marriage, many states bar us from adoption, and the federal government forbids our serving in the military does violence to our very sense of self. Systematic denial of human rights tells people they are less than human.

The governor can’t get away with pleading ignorance. The chief executive of the diverse state of Massachusetts — especially when he wants to be president of this diverse country — should make it his business to know about and avoid such racist language.

And lest we think this violence is an expression, however perverse, of communal sexual morality, the same kind of verbal violence — and from some of the same sources — is directed at Jews.

Devout Catholic and staunch Republican Mel Gibson, the megastar behind The Passion of the Christ, got pulled over while driving drunk at more than 80 miles an hour in Malibu on July 28 and flew into a tirade, spewing both sexist and anti-Semitic vitriol. “Fucking Jews,” he reportedly said to police. “The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world. Are you a Jew?” To a female officer he reportedly said, “What do you think you’re looking at, sugar tits?”

Gays and Jews are easy and related targets for Christian fundamentalists who hold neither group to be “real” or full men and women, with neither adhering to true religion. Especially when the two groups overlap, both can be the target of religiously motivated violence.

Racial epithets are such a mainstay in the American lexicon that we’re often not only numb to the pain signaling how damaging and destructive such epithets are, but also ignorant of their origins and meaning.

My state’s governor, Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, apologized this week for using the racial epithet “tar baby” at a Republican political gathering in Iowa over the weekend while describing a collapse in a Big Dig tunnel that killed a Boston woman on July 10. He said the best thing he could do politically is to “just get as far away from that tar baby” of a subject as he could.

“Tar baby” is a pejorative term referring to African-American children, especially girls. It was used by whites during American slavery. Today, the term is often used of any sticky mess or situation, referring to the 19th-century Uncle Remus stories in which a doll made of tar was used to trap Brer Rabbit.

The grin with which someone hurls racial and sexual epithets doesn’t eradicate the epithets’ historical meaning or blunt the ways in they enforce oppressive social relations among us.

Eric Fehrnstrom, the governor’s spokesman said, “The governor was describing a sticky situation. He was unaware that some people find the term objectionable, and he’s sorry if anyone was offended.” The governor can’t get away with pleading ignorance. The chief executive of the diverse state of Massachusetts — especially when he wants to be president of this diverse country — should make it his business to know about and avoid such racist language.

Indeed, we all need to make it our business to illuminate the links between homophobia and racism. We can’t afford not to, as our enemies pit LGBTQ and African-American civil rights struggles against each other in a “divide and conquer” strategy. We can’t afford not to, when the federal government’s new HIV/AIDS program requires all public-health authorities and agencies to report the identities of HIV-positive patients, resulting in hundreds of thousands of African-Americans — straight and queer — sensing that they’re being profiled for reasons more political than epidemiological.

And we can’t say, “it’s only words.” Language represents culture. It perpetuates ideas and assumptions about race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation that we consciously and unconsciously transmit across generations in our everyday conversations about ourselves and the rest of the world.

For these reasons, liberation of a people will involve liberation from abusive language, from verbal expressions of hatred hurled at them. The grin with which someone hurls racial and sexual epithets doesn’t eradicate the epithets’ historical meaning or blunt the ways in they enforce oppressive social relations among us. Indeed, dislodging these epithets from their historical context only underscores our insensitivity toward historical injustices and arrogance toward our neighbors.

Any kind of hate speech, however the speaker tries to sugarcoat it, serves to wound and silence. These are words that end real conversation.

In this conservative era of politics and religion, I have noticed how animus toward people with HIV/AIDS has not abated, even though we are now at the quarter-century milepost of the epidemic.

The new HIV/AIDS prevention program mandating all public health authorities and agencies to report HIV-positive patients to the state is an excellent example of how health care initiatives can become enmeshed with conservative politics and moral intolerance.

With government funding for HIV/AIDS prevention shrinking more and more these days, many public health authorities and agencies will be requiring physicians to report to the state the name, social security number, age, address and date of birth of all HIV-positive patients. This places public health authorities and agencies in the awkward position of having to choose between adhering to mandatory government-imposed HIV name-listing or upholding the confidentiality of the clinician-client relationship.

Those who uphold confidentiality risk losing essential funding, while those who follow the new regulations risk undermining the trust health care workers need to serve clients most effectively, as Dr. David Duong, a gay Vietnamese E.R. physician at Boston Medical Center, explains:

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King once said, “Of all forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.”

“Mandatory reporting of HIV-positive patients only engenders mistrust in the patient-physician relationship. This would potentially endanger both public health and individual rights. There are existing therapies and programs available to those with HIV. Due to the social stigma and risk of social and economic losses from a known HIV infection, these individuals would be less likely to seek testing, treatment, and take precautions in spreading the infection if doctors are seen as law enforcers more than patient advocates. (To say that) there is a conflict between public health and individual rights in mandatory reporting is not quite accurate. This view downplays the therapeutic nature of the patient-physician encounter in promoting both public health and patient well-being.”

Proponents of name-based reporting, however, argue that such reporting allows for more equitable funding, uniform accounting, and effective tracking of the epidemic, all of which would not only facilitate better clinical relationships between patient and physician, but also improve community-based education and management care.

But public health authorities and agencies failing to comply will be punished with the loss of government funding, which could force cutbacks in vital services.

Washington D.C., for one, has to comply with a Sept. 30, 2006, deadline or it will loss millions of dollars. And in my home state of Massachusetts, without compliance the state Department of Health will lose $9 million a year and the Boston Public Health Commission $6 million — money that represents medications, meals, home health care, and other services that extend life and health.

Sadly, the underlying motive for this initiative is not health: it is politically driven to both police and profile people who test HIV-positive. And the motive is not new.

You can’t build moral high ground by climbing on the backs of our weakest.

In 1986, conservative political commentator William F. Buckley Jr. suggested that the judicious way to keep account of those who were infected with the virus and methods of transmission was to take those with HIV and tattoo their buttocks and forearms, an act reminiscent of the ways in which human beings were tattooed and treated like animals in colonial slavery and the Holocaust.

But the people who would be most affected by this government intrusion in their lives — LGBTQ people, IV-drug users, and people of African descent — are already the scapegoats for societies in denial about how the epidemic continues to grow at an exponential rate.

But given the fact that physicians must report certain communicable diseases, is it that much of a destructive innovation to require reporting patients who test HIV-positive? Physicians who work with people with AIDS/HIV say yes. In the words of Dr. Duong:

“HIV is separate from other reportable communicable infections in that there is no cure and that the medical and socioeconomic consequences of infection are potentially so devastating. HIV infection is associated with already marginalized and discriminated populations. Reporting HIV-positive patients would further alienate and reinforce the vulnerability of these patients. The laws protecting HIV-infected individuals are inadequate, while for other reportable diseases protections are not necessary due to their lack of stigma or their ease of cure.”

This kind of intrusion threatens to exacerbate rather than alleviate the epidemic, and furthermore runs roughshod over moral and ethical issues of patient confidentiality, patients’ Fourth Amendment right to bodily integrity and protection from unreasonable searches, and their Fourteenth Amendment right to privacy. And in the absence of any scientifically proven benefit to health care or health education, the only demonstrated advantage of such programs is that they help politicians to claim that they are restoring so-called “traditional family values.”

… a government that expresses such inhospitality and intolerance is a symptom of a sick society that tests negative for compassion.

But the eagerness of the Bush administration to promote such programs anyway is hardly surprising in light of its other policy initiatives with respect to HIV/AIDS. Under pressure from the evangelical base, they may have increased funding to some initiatives to combat HIV/AIDS in the developing world, but the Bush administration has done far more to hurt than to help: they promote programs that present only abstinence for prevention and eliminate or distort life-saving information about condoms, pull funding from scientifically proven disease prevention initiatives that don’t meet their ideological standards, and refuse to fund needle exchange programs.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King once said, “Of all forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.”

And most shocking and inhumane is when a government continues to proclaim, despite hard evidence to the contrary, that contracting the AIDS virus is a direct and divine consequence of engaging in a particular “lifestyle” and treats those with HIV/AIDS with the kind isolating, dehumanizing, and fear-based approaches that previous generations employed toward their neighbors with leprosy.

You can’t build moral high ground by climbing on the backs of our weakest, but government-imposed health care initiatives guided more by “traditional family values” than by the needs of the poor do precisely that.

Our response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic is a test of our cultural values: a government that expresses such inhospitality and intolerance is a symptom of a sick society that tests negative for compassion.

For many of us who have always cast a suspicious eye on why biblical scholars, theologians and ministers do not have a clue as to who the historical Jesus was, Dan Brown’s bestseller and now blockbuster movie, The Da Vinci Code, sheds an illuminating light onto the hysteria that maintains the mystery.
And the mystery is that there has always been an open secret about Jesus’ sexuality that not only attacks the pillars of Christianity, but also profoundly plays into the oppression that women as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people face today in both church and society.
And that open secret about Jesus’ sexuality — along with the suggestions that he was gay, married, or both, if Jesus was on the “down low” — point to the issues we are wrestling with today in what conservatives call the “cultural war,” namely the institution of marriage, women in the church, and gay clergy. The hysteria surrounding those issues creates the perfect climate for stories about secret texts emerging from centuries-old closets and church authorities trying desperately to keep the lid over the “truth about Jesus.”
However, the debate about Jesus’ sexuality takes him from his mother’s womb to his tomb. The Christian depiction of Jesus as that of a lifelong virgin who had no sexual desire and who never engaged in sexual intercourse raises anyone’s suspicion, when Jesus’ traveling with unattached (and therefore “loose”) women and with at least twelve men — the law of averages would say that at least one out of the bunch was gay — made his scandalous band the subject of a great deal of winking and nudging around ancient Palestine. Of course, given the compulsory heterosexuality in ancient Palestine, a gay Jesus would have been forced to be on the “down low.”

… the mystery is that there has always been an open secret about Jesus’ sexuality that not only attacks the pillars of Christianity, but also profoundly plays into the oppression that women as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people face today in both church and society.

So if there is a spiritual and sensual narrative encrypted in Da Vinci’s 1498 painting “The Last Supper,” it’s part of a tradition going back to before Jesus’ death.

And while many Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals find Da Vinci’s sensuous painting blasphemous, Da Vinci’s homoerotic subtext pries open the door to the alluring quality about the Catholic Church that gay men find both rabidly homophobic and ravenously homoerotic.

When asked in 2002 during the Catholic Church sex scandal why so many gay men are attracted to religious life and the priesthood, Mark D. Jordan, professor in the religion department at Emory University and author of The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism, told The Boston Globe:

Homoeroticism is written into the Catholic imagination and its institutions. Many gay believers feel a strong calling to the priesthood or religious life. The call doesn’t seem to deny same-sex desires; it seems instead to complete them. It is a call to act out your manhood against social expectations, outside heterosexual marriage and in the company of other unmarried men.

Whatever Jesus did or didn’t do sexually, his reported failure to marry and have children would have made him, in the eyes of his culture, Queer, unfruitful and feminized.

They are promised an exchange of their ‘disordered’ identity as outsiders for a respected and powerful identity as an insider. They want to remain in the beautiful, sexually ambiguous space of liturgy. They are drawn to public celebration of suffering that redeems [and] they want to live in as gay a world as the Catholic Church offers.

And let’s not forget the theological significance and erotic (both homo- and hetero-) overtones in ritual kissing — between people of all genders and social classes, no less — that was a vital part of worship during the early centuries of the Christian Church, as passing the peace with a hug and/or handshake is a vital part of worship in today’s Christian churches.

Kissing on the lips was a way of binding a community together and it always followed the communal prayer, the Eucharist, or rites of baptism and ordination. Kissing on the lips was seen as transferring a portion of one’s spirit to another, sharing in the collective blessing of the Holy Spirit, and the earliest Christian texts never suggest that gender or kinship should be a factor in whom one should exchange the kiss of peace.

While homophobia in today’s Christian churches is antithetical to the gospel proclaimed by the early Church, so too is the denigration of the sacred feminine.

It would have been highly unusual and very scandalous, given Jewish marital customs, for Jesus not to be married; normally he would have been betrothed and married long before he became an itinerant preacher and called both male and female disciples. And just as any good Jew in Jesus’ culture (aside from a few fringe sects like the one that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls) would have obeyed the command in Genesis to “be fruitful and multiply” by having children, any “real man” in Jewish or Roman circles would have shown his masculinity by penetration. Whatever Jesus did or didn’t do sexually, his reported failure to marry and have children would have made him, in the eyes of his culture, Queer, unfruitful and feminized.

Our sexualities are the expressions of who we are with and in our bodies. They are a language and a means to communicate our spiritual need for intimate communion — both human and divine.

But Jesus was unashamed to tap into the forbidden zone — his feminine side. The sacred feminine is not only the life force tied to women’s ability to produce new life, but is also the power of the erotic that African-American lesbian poet Audre Lorde depicted as “a source within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.”

Our sexualities are the expressions of who we are with and in our bodies. They are a language and a means to communicate our spiritual need for intimate communion — both human and divine. They are our self-understanding through which we experience the world.

However, the hysteria that surrounds Jesus’ sexuality forces us all to see the walls of partition erected in our society, in our churches, and in our families that prohibit us from living freely in our bodies and force some of us on the “down low.”

And these walls not only contribute to the false socialization of who we are as male and female — they also contribute to the false spiritualization of who we are as the body of Christ.

As the U.S. finds itself in a battle over immigration reform, one particular disenfranchised community — African-Americans — has displayed troubling feelings on the issue, ranging from a disquieting silence to unabashed xenophobia. And although the struggles of being black, immigrant, and LGBT overlap in many ways, many African-American organizations and individuals have treated the issues as if they were entirely distinct.

For example, while the NAACP has been outspoken in their advocacy for immigrant rights, the National Urban League, the Congressional Black Caucus, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which aided in spearheading the civil rights movement of the 1960s, have not.

And black ministers who misuse the book of Leviticus to attach LGBT people should know how it would guide them on the issue of immigration rights: Don’t mistreat any foreigners who live in your land. Instead, treat them as well as you treat citizens and love them as much as you love yourself. Remember that you were once foreigners in a strange land (Leviticus 19:33-34).

… although the struggles of being black, immigrant, and LGBT overlap in many ways, many African-American organizations and individuals have treated the issues as if they were entirely distinct.

The struggle for liberation becomes mired when activists ignore the ways in which the oppression of LGBT people and oppression of immigrants are linked, but Jasmyne A. Cannick did just that in a column published earlier this month on Advocate.com entitled “Gays First, Then Illegals.” In it, she writes:

Immigration reform needs to get in line behind the gay civil rights movement, which has not yet been resolved. I didn’t break the law to come into this country. The country broke the law by not recognizing and bestowing upon me my full rights as a citizen, and I find it hard as a black lesbian to jump on the immigration reform bandwagon when my own bandwagon hasn’t even left the barn.

The African-American community would do well to adopt a more constructive attitude and make progress on immigration rights, remembering the example of Bayard Rustin.

Rustin is most often remembered as the strategist and chief architect of the 1963 March on Washington that catapulted the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King onto the world stage. However, he also played a key role in helping King develop the strategy of nonviolence in the Montgomery bus boycott (1955-1956), which successfully dismantled the long-standing Jim Crow ordinance of segregated seating on public transportation in Alabama.

“If our government lacks compassion for these dispossessed human beings, it is difficult to believe that the same government can have much compassion for America’s black minority, or for America’s poor.”

Rustin was not a one-issue man: as the quintessential outsider — a black man, a Quaker, a one-time pacifist, a political dissident, and a gay man — he was concerned with the plight of disenfranchised people around the world. And if he were among us today, Rustin would no doubt be in the forefront of the fight against HIV/AIDS and oppression of those who are HIV-positive.

There is also little doubt of where Rustin’s energies would be in our struggles surrounding immigrants’ rights. He was a passionate advocate for those displaced by the Vietnam War, arguing that they should be allowed to emigrate to the U.S.

During his campaign to collect signatures from prominent black leaders in support of Vietnamese immigrants, Rustin wrote a New York Times op-ed published on March 19, 1979, entitled “Black Americans Urge Admission of the Indo-Chinese Refugees,” in which he argued that “if our government lacks compassion for these dispossessed human beings, it is difficult to believe that the same government can have much compassion for America’s black minority, or for America’s poor.”

Like Rustin, I stand for the rights of immigrants like my hair-braider, who takes menial jobs in Boston to feed her baby though she was trained as a nurse in the Ivory Coast and her husband was a computer scientist.

I stand with those who believe, as Rustin did, that we pay the debt of justice we owe to immigrants and all marginalized people everywhere through our individual and collective acts of humanity in making a more democratic society.

I stand up for my friend, a student at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica, who was recently gang-raped because she is a lesbian. She tells me that the day before the incident one of the assailants read an article from the March 29 issue of the Jamaica Gleaner that said, “If Jamaica is a Christian county and calls itself a Christian country, then gay and lesbian lifestyles must be deemed absolutely immoral and unacceptable.” I stand up for immigrants currently prevented from entering the U.S. because they are HIV-positive.

I stand with those who believe, as Rustin did, that we pay the debt of justice we owe to immigrants and all marginalized people everywhere through our individual and collective acts of humanity in making a more democratic society.

It is time for this country to embrace Rustin’s example and move forward on immigration rights.

There is also something politically amiss when a governor like Mitt Romney, who was elected to represent all the people of Massachusetts, forsakes state law and files legislation that promulgates a religious bias disguised as religious freedom.

“It is a matter beyond dispute, and a prerequisite to the preservation of liberty, that government not dictate to religious institutions the moral principles by which they are to carry out their charitable and divine mission,” Romney wrote lawmakers in a letter accompanying his “Protecting Religious Freedom” bill.

Selective discrimination always hurts the targeted group, but when gays are banned from adopting, the greatest harm done is to the children.

Romney’s legislation also states that it will be legal for “any religious or denominational institution or organization” to “take any action” to provide adoption services that promote its religious principles as long as the groups do not “discriminate among prospective adoptive parents on the basis of race, creed, national origin, gender, [or] handicap.”

Of course, the list excludes sexual orientation.

Selective discrimination always hurts the targeted group, but when gays are banned from adopting, the greatest harm done is to the children.

While it is easy for elected officials to politically extol why gay adoptions are wrong and for clerics to religiously pontificate why gay adoptions are antithetical to its church’s sacred tenets, it is hard to fathom why politicians and clerics would use their power to further an agenda that benefits no one — particularly not the parentless children in need of adoption. As much noise as our culture generates about “no child left behind,” when society politicizes adoption in this way, it abandons each child denied access to loving parents.

… LGBTQ parents are as capable as other parents of raising healthy and happy children.

How do I know this?

I grew up as a ward of New York state. I was shuffled back and forth from foster home to foster home in Brooklyn at a time when it was not only politically incorrect for white couples to adopt black children, but it was also legally prohibited across the country. While the country in 1967 had to accept the landmark decision case of Loving v. Virginia allowing interracial marriage, the country did not accept interracial families.

Child experts of the day argued that black children would have a loss of identity. We would not know what group of people socially and culturally we belonged to. Some argued that black children growing up in white families would unconsciously appropriate not only “white ways,” but these black children would also appropriate white racist attitudes toward other blacks, like comedian David Chappelle portrays in one of his skits as a blind black man ranting and raving why he hates “niggers.”

Elected officials and clerics who rail against gays adopting have no idea what it is like to grow up as a ward of the state …

Today the arguments are eerily reminiscent of that time, but toward a different target group. The concerns surrounding LGBTQ adoptions are superfluous, bigoted and wrong-headed, but they nonetheless prevail in the face of hard social and scientific evidence that LGBTQ parents are as capable as other parents of raising healthy and happy children.

Many argue that our adopted children would be bullied and ostracized by their peers, and thus would develop psychological problems. They say our children would show atypical gender development, with less feminine girls and less masculine boys. And they claim that children raised in same-sex households would experience difficulties in emotional well-being and intimate relationships. Therefore, the argument goes, children raised by LGBTQ parents are more likely than children raised in heterosexual households to develop a gay or a lesbian sexual orientation.

Many right-wing ideologues view LGBTQ parenthood as treading on the sanctity of the American family, and many churches nationwide see our families as nothing less that threatening the death of civilization as ordered by God. There is even a debate brewing about whether lesbians should have access to assisted reproduction procedures like donor insemination.

But not allowing LGBTQ couples to adopt leaves more children parentless as I was, ending up in foster care. And the evidence of what happens to us as wards of the state show that many endure abuses of the sort we hear about in cases of trafficking in women and children in third world countries.

No child should be bereft of the joys of living in a loving and nurturing household where its focus is on its spiritual content and not its physical composition.

Coming through the foster care system, we are the children left behind. We are bounced from foster home to foster home. Many foster parents take us in because they receive money from the state that should be used for our care, but often isn’t. Foster children have the highest high school dropout rates and the highest percentage of poor health, incarceration, and unemployment. And when we age out of foster care, we are homeless and parentless again.

Elected officials and clerics who rail against gays adopting have no idea what it is like to grow up as a ward of the state, when you are the child society left behind because you got caught up in their self-serving agendas.

A 2003 Vatican document called gay adoptions “gravely immoral.” The document reflects no awareness of what children need for their physical, psychological and spiritual well-being in any family configuration. But the document’s most egregious error is its violations of the three commandants dealing with children’s civil rights:

• No child should grow up without the love and security that comes from committed parents.
• No child should be bereft of the joys of living in a loving and nurturing household where its focus is on its spiritual content and not its physical composition.
• And no child should get caught up or be left behind because of politicians’ and clerics’ promotion of their self-serving agendas.

A violation of any of these commandments is gravely immoral.

In the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer communities, Black History Month focuses primarily on gay men and Women’s History Month is all about white lesbians. The invisibility of bisexuals, transgenders, queers and women of color is not because there is a paucity of us that exist or made history; our invisibility is evidence of how race, gender and sexual politics of the dominant culture are reinforced in ours.

As we move out of Black History Month and into Women’s History Month, I am reminded of Gladys Bentley, a 250-pound African-American lesbian known as “America’s Greatest Sepia Piano Player” and the “Brown Bomber of Sophisticated Songs.” Bentley’s fall from the entertainment spotlight, however, is a cautionary tale about what can happen to us during a repressive political era when both church and state are our enemies.

… our invisibility is evidence of how race, gender and sexual politics of the dominant culture are reinforced in ours.

Bentley is, therefore, best understood in a context not only of how gender roles and sexual relations in the 1950s influenced, shaped and policed LBTQ women in the Black Church, and by extension the entire black community, but also of how the homophobia of the Black Church exploited the repressive era of McCarthyism to force Bentley to conform and deny her lesbianism.

A talented pianist and blues singer and one of the most notorious and successful African-American lesbians in the U.S. during the Harlem Renaissance, Bentley (1907-1960) cultivated a large LGBTQ following up until the 1950s. As an African-American woman whose success derived from her raunchy and salacious lyrics to popular tunes, Bentley not only openly sang about sex, but she also openly lived and celebrated her sexual orientation as an out lesbian.

“It seems I was born different. At least, I always thought so,” Bentley told Ebony Magazine back in the ’50s. “From the time I can remember anything, even as I was toddling, I never wanted a man to touch me. Soon I began to feel more comfortable in boys’ clothes than in dresses.”

Known to perform in her infamous white tuxedo and top hat, Bentley’s gender-bending would label her by today’s term as a “stone butch.” But in black queer parlance of that era, she was a “bulldagger.” And the police consistently harassed her for wearing men’s clothing. By the ’50s, the country was on a campaign to restore traditional gender roles that were disrupted by W.W. II, and McCarthyism was its policing mechanism. Special attention, however, was given to LGBTQ people.

“It seems I was born different. At least, I always thought so,” Bentley told Ebony Magazine back in the ’50s.

With the absence of 16 million men, predominately white, in the workforce, women, and ethnic and queer minorities filled those vacancies.

Women of the time transgressed not only traditional career opportunities, but also traditional dress codes. Women wearing trousers to work and on the street and buying them in department stories gave women in the ’40s and ’50s the freedom to dress down and still be viewed as acceptable.

For gender-bending lesbians like Bentley, the wearing of trousers — usually confined to the privacy of their home, lesbian bars and on the performance stage — was a welcomed freedom. However, Bentley wore trousers since the ’20s — without the consent of the time, except in the private and acceptable spaces where trousers were permissible.

As troubling as that was, especially given her public lesbianism, Bentley accosted the sanctity of marriage with her active participation in this country’s racial and gender obsession — interracial marriage.

Bentley accosted the sanctity of marriage with her active participation in this country’s racial and gender obsession — interracial marriage.

Had her “woman-friend” been African-American, their coupling would have clearly been subjected to condemnation and jeering, but their same-gender loving relationship would not have conjured up the wrath, fear and disgust that interracial marriage did. With anti-miscegenation laws operating in all states until 1967, and with LGBTQ people today being denied both the right of both state and church weddings, Bentley single-handedly performed a coup d’etat against the institution of marriage and the prohibition against miscegenation. She married her white girlfriend in a civil wedding ceremony.

To punish her, the forces of McCarthyism made Bentley conform, and once she did, the Black Church stopped railing against her and the black press lauded her conformity. Bentley wrote an article for Ebony magazine in which she claimed to take female hormones to cure her lesbianism and proclaimed, “I am woman again!” And then as a churchwoman and ordained minister, the ceremonial act of compulsory heterosexuality had to be consummated. She married a man, albeit one sixteen years her junior.

With the church’s belief in a heterosexual paradigm as the model to showcase black humanity in order to win God-given civil rights, the dynamic between the black press and the Black Church set up a new sexual McCarthyism.

And the cautionary note here is that it is not so different today.

After celebrating Black History Month and Valentine’s Day, I am reminded that there is no greater challenge to the African-American community than the issue of marriage equality.

With the topic still being debated — with African-American ministers leading the campaign against it and, ironically, with many African-American lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer communities also not wedded to the idea — I am afraid that the civil rights issues concerning same-sex marriage as they affect all black families, straight and gay alike, may very well become a non-issue.

As we honor the contributions and achievements our ancestors have made toward American democracy, let us not lose sight of the fact that they have taught us we must lift as we climb. They have also taught us that we must always see our work in relationship to one another.

As the beneficiaries of this rich legacy, we must not forget these teachings.

And if we are looking at how to move forward on the issue of same-sex marriage, let us remember that an African-American woman named Mildred Loving set the precedent for same-sex marriage.

“Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.”

Loving gained notoriety when the U.S. Supreme Court decided in her favor that anti-miscegenation laws are unconstitutional. Her crime was this country’s racial and gender obsession at the time: interracial marriage.

Married to a white man, Loving and her husband were indicted by a Virginia grand jury in October of 1958 for violating the state’s “Racial Integrity Act” of 1924.

The trial judge said to the guilty couple:

“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and He placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with His arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that He separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

The trial judge suspended their sentences on the condition that the Lovings leave Virginia and not return to the state together for 25 years. The Lovings initially agreed and left, but returned soon after and decided to fight their case.
On June 12, 1967, Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the opinion of the high court:

“Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State. These convictions must be reversed.”

African-American same-gender households have everything to gain in the struggle for marriage equality and more to lose when states pass amendments banning marriage equality and other forms of partner recognition.

One of the ways this society has been able to control and regulate human sexuality and race relations is through the institution of marriage. Before the Loving case, there was the case of marriage equality concerning our ancestors residing in the American South. African-American slaves were forbidden to marry until the end of the Civil War in 1865. Prior to that, my ancestors had to “jump over the broom” — an African-American tradition — to solemnize their nuptials before a crowd of witnesses.

African Americans have always had a tenuous relationship with the institution of marriage. Therefore, one can argue that the topic of marriage equality in the U.S. has always been a black issue. So I ask: why the opposition or indifference to same-sex marriage?

Social research shows that African-American same-gender households have everything to gain in the struggle for marriage equality and more to lose when states pass amendments banning marriage equality and other forms of partner recognition.

In November 2005, Equality Maryland and the National Black Justice Coalition published “Jumping the Broom: a Black Perspective on Same-Gender Marriage.” The publication was produced to initiate dialogue in churches, fraternal organizations, media outlets, and NAACP chapters.

Statistics from the report include the following: forty-five percent of black same-sex couples reported stable relationships of five years or longer. Even if marriage becomes a legal option, clergy will decide who they wish to marry. And twenty percent of black men and twenty-four percent of black women in same-sex households are denied health care benefits for their partners by government.

Statistics may be helpful, but what does same-sex marriage look like in real time and in black face?

… multiple family structures are what have saved and are still saving African-American families.

Historically, it is about saving black families, with its focus on spiritual content and not physical composition.

Contextually, it’s about raising and protecting our families. It is LGBTQ couples raising their siblings’ or other family members’ children because those family members have died of AIDS, are incarcerated, or are too sick.

Multiple family structures presented by same-sex marriages should not be opposed by the African-American community; multiple family structures are what have saved and are still saving African-American families. A grandmother or an aunt and uncle — straight or gay — raising us in their loving home have anchored our families through the centuries. And these multiple family structures, which we have had to devise as a model of resistance and liberation, have always, by example, shown the rest of society what really constitutes family.

Since the beheading of St. Valentine in Rome in the year 270 A.D., marriage has been controlled by heads of the church and the state, and not by the hearts of lovers. When Emperor Claudius II issued an edict abolishing marriage because married men hated to leave their families for battle, Valentine, known then as the “friend to lovers,” secretly joined them in holy matrimony. While awaiting his execution, legend has it that Valentine fell in love with the jailer’s daughter, and in his farewell message to his lover, he wrote, “from your Valentine.”

Both Mildred Loving and St. Valentine knew the importance of saving families.

If you get tied in a knot and start wondering what to do concerning the civil rights of same-sex marriage, remember the Loving spirit of Mildred and the justice acts of St. Valentine.

As progeny of the African diaspora, many of us pause in the month of February to pay homage to our ancestors who survived the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade. We pay homage to our ancestors by remembering the Yoruba proverb that “if we stand tall, it is because we stand on the backs of those who came before us.”

When it comes to the black church, however, this is a present-day horror. Many of us lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender children of the African diaspora would say our ancestors left us neither teaching nor direction on how to survive the black church with its virulently homophobic climate.

… should the black church continue to have such a central role in the life of black communities in 2006?

For centuries, homophobic yet charismatic pastors of the black church have provided the primary paradigm of leadership in the African-American community. But when the black church is selling out its social gospel message of justice to grab cash and power from George W. Bush’s “faith-based” initiatives, how can it serve as the locus of liberation for African-American LGBTQ people? Is there another way forward?

Those attending the National Black Justice Coalition’s (NBJC) Black Church Summit on Gay Rights over the weekend of Jan. 20-21 at the First Iconium Baptist Church in Atlanta certainly think so. The Summit’s goal is to build a Black Church Social Justice Community Action Network, which would be a national coalition of affirming black churches and clergy to provide leadership to NBJC’s ongoing campaign to end religious-based discrimination.

The Black Church Social Justice Community Action Network will host community trainings, develop a speakers network, and reach out to NBJC’s allies in the media, seminary students and others with its message of inclusiveness of LGBTQ families. More than 100 African-American LGBTQ clergy, religious activists and allies came to hear sermons and speeches on how to develop specific strategies challenging the systemic homophobia in black churches, from pulpits to pews. Most notably, the Rev. Al Sharpton delivered the event’s keynote address.

“Martin Luther King said there are two types of leadership. There are those who are thermometers, who measure the temperature in the room, and those who are thermostats, who change the temperature. I come to tell you to be thermostats. Turn up the heat in the black church. Make these people sweat,” said Sharpton, a former Democratic presidential candidate.

Sharpton’s rhetoric of inclusion may be calculated to exploit African-American LGBTQ people hoping for greater acceptance in black churches to regain the national stage as a leader for all black people.

And the heat was turned up even more in Sharpton’s homily as he pointed out how the black church fell prey to the divisive tactics of both the Christian Right and the Republican National Committee to garner votes by any means necessary:

“The Christian Right were not concerned about same-sex marriage; they were concerned about the same president being elected. They use gays and lesbians as scapegoats. They knew they couldn’t talk to the black church about the war, health care, about education. They took the cheap way out; they used gays and lesbians. . . . The Republican National Committee stopped being involved in the marriage issue after the election. It was hard for them to sell morality after [Hurricane] Katrina.”

Sharpton plans to take his message on the road. However, many African-American LGBTQ people are asking why Sharpton is speaking up now when we needed to hear his voice crying out for queer justice in the homophobic wilderness of black ministers two decades ago.

For Sharpton, it is both personal and political. He has a personal stake: Sharpton’s sister is a lesbian. In the October 2005 issue of The Advocate, Sharpton said, “I understood the pain of having to lead a double life in the system [since] we grew up in the church.” And at the Summit, he made reference to his sister: “Black, gay, and female. Imagine the social schizophrenia.” And then Sharpton has a political stake in his memory of working with Bayard Rustin, the chief architect of the 1963 March on Washington, who was kept largely behind the scenes because he was gay. Rustin gave Sharpton the funds in the early 1970s to start the National Youth Movement.

“No one puts new wine into old wineskins; if he does, the wine will burst the skins, and then wine and skins are both lost. New wine goes into fresh skins.”

However, with no church of his own, Sharpton lacks credibility for many African-American LGBTQ people, who suspect that Sharpton may simply be repackaging himself to stand out more from the slew of homophobic black religious leaders vying constantly with each other for the spotlight. Sharpton’s rhetoric of inclusion may be calculated to exploit African-American LGBTQ people hoping for greater acceptance in black churches to regain the national stage as a leader for all black people.

It isn’t working for homophobic black leaders either. Immediately following the closing of the Summit, the Rev. Wayne Cooper of Atlanta sent the NBJC this message:

“I am literally sick and tired of the Rev. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson trying to force people to accept gay marriage! In fact, most Americans are. I am black and I believe that marriage was ordained by Almighty God to be between one man and one woman. It is clear from the distinct physical anatomies of men and women. It is a sad day for men who supposedly represent God to believe that God would ordain for a man to put his penis in the rectum of another man! The rectum was/is not made for ‘entry’ but for ‘exit’ of toxic human waste. I’d love to publicly debate either man on this subject and I have no doubt that I will eat them alive!”

So I ask the question again: can we rely on the black church’s paradigm of leadership by charismatic preachers? Like my ancestors, I turn to the bible, and see a potential answer in Mark 2:22: “No one puts new wine into old wineskins; if he does, the wine will burst the skins, and then wine and skins are both lost. New wine goes into fresh skins.”