There is no greater challenge before us than the issue of marriage equality. In the U. S. Supreme Court decision that struck down this country’s anti-miscegenation laws as unconstitutional, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for the court stating the following: “Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival. … 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.”

While none of our presidential hopefuls in their campaign promises to Americans will heed to the June 1967 ruling for us, they should, at least, learn from the history lesson of Mildred Loving’s tenacity that brought about a decision in her favor, that soon too will the courts rule in ours.

“I think marrying who you want is a right no man should have anything to do with. It’s a God- given right,” Loving stated on ABC news 41 years ago.

But that God-given right has been violated throughout American History. And while we know African Americans have always had a tenuous relationship with the institution of marriage, beginning with slavery, so too, have many other Americans.

We were told here that if the state of Massachusetts legalized such an ungodly act as same- sex marriage not only would it bring about the death the institution of marriage, but it would also bring about the demise of civilization.

Many also said the righteous hand of God would be in that defining moment to stop same-sex marriage with ugly protests, with town clerks engaging in civil disobedience by refusing to issue licenses, and with just those last minute unavoidable and inexplicable legal snafus.

But none of that happened.

And get this: The sky didn’t fall either!

The ugly rhetoric against same-sex marriage is all too familiar to this country’s legal battle against miscegenation. And here are the four arguments used:

First, like the judges against interracial marriage, judges against same-sex marriage claimed that marriage belonged under the control of the states than the federal government.

Second, just as anti-miscegenation judges defined and labeled interracial relationships as illicit sex, so too do anti-marriage equality judges.
Third, anti-miscegenation judges insisted that interracial marriage was contrary to God’s will.

The trial judge’s ruling in Loving stated: “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.” This same argue shows up for us.

And lastly, these judges declared, over and over again, that interracial marriages, like same-sex marriages, are “unnatural.”

But the campaign for same-sex marriage will succeed for us because the campaign to strike down anti- miscegenation laws did for Mildred Loving.

On June 12, 2007 Freedom to Marry joined with several of the nation’s leading civil rights organizations to hold a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Loving v. Virginia decision for affirming the freedom to marry as a “basic civil right” of every American.

Lending her support to the commemoration, Mrs. Mildred Loving wrote, “When my late husband, Richard, and I got married in Washington, DC in 1958, it wasn’t to make a political statement or start a fight. We were in love, and we wanted to be married. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of Richard and our love, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the “wrong kind of person” for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. I am proud that Richard’s and my name are on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight, seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.”

In quelling the tension between black civil right activists of the 1960 who stated that marriage equality for LGBTQ Americans is not a civil right, one of the organizations that spearheaded the Loving case, the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., marked the 40th anniversary of Loving by stating the following: “It is undeniable that the experience of African Americans differs in many important ways from that of gay men and lesbians; among other things, the legacy of slavery and segregation is profound. But differences in historical experiences should not preclude the application of Constitutional provisions to gay men and lesbians who are denied the fight to marry the person of their choice.” And on April of 2006, NAACP LDF filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case brought by New York same-sex couples challenging their exclusion from marriage.

A resolution authored by Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin passed the House of Representatives on June 11, 2007 by unanimous consent commemorating the fortieth anniversary of Loving v. Virginia decision that ended the ban on interracial marriage in the United States and recognizing that marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man” at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment protections.

My ancestors give us the Yoruba proverb that states, “If we stand tall, it is because we stand on the backs of those who came before us.” It is my ancestors who taught us how to make it on the broken pieces, and they have taught us how to make “a way out of no way.” They have taught us we must lift as we climb, and they have taught us that we must always see our work in relationship to one another. And it is my ancestors who taught us it matters not who stands against us, because all that we ever need to be, to do, and to know are available to us in their teachings. The teachings of Mildred Loving we must not forget!

I have also learned that the wonderment of life is oftentimes for brief moments when you hear a song or a sermon, see a picture, or meet a person who helps you to see yourself, the world, or the journey you have been on or will be on a little clearer. For us LGBTQ Americans, who would have thought that the audacious actions of a demure African American young woman from Caroline County, Virginia is the reason our paths crossed.

But when the work of justice is bent toward freedom, it allows us to see, along this troubling human time line, those faces and to hear those voices in history of the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the dispossessed.

Let us hold in memory this Mother’s Day our “Loving-spirit” of Mildred.

Published May 6, 2008 in Black Commentator, The Bilerico Project, and New England Blade. 

While Obama has denounced Rev. Jeremiah Wrights’ incendiary remarks, suspicion, nonetheless, still surfaces about not only his professed faith as a Christian, but now also his electabilty as president.

The Black Church is a central, powerful and revered institution in the African-American community. While as a community organizer working with local churches on the South Side of Chicago, the Black Church captivated Obama’s attention. Obama says he came to understand “the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change.” However, suspicion now abounds questioning how much Obama really covets the power of the Black Church for his own political aggrandizement rather than for its religion.

“When Obama picked a ‘church home,’ he chose one that helped him with another weak spot in his biography. Before Obama joined Trinity United, Rev. Wright warned Obama that the church was viewed as ‘too radical … Our emphasis on African history, on scholarship…’ But Obama joined anyway. With that act, he had become significantly blacker — and more like local voters.,” wrote Edward McClelland.

“Part of the cultural divide between the half-Kenyan Hawaiian and his Chicago neighbors, most of them products of the Deep South’s black diaspora, was bridged. Look, for better or worse, the reality is that politicians and aspiring politicians sometimes appear to make choices about religion based at least in part on political expediency. ”

Obama knew to pander to his base.

But unbeknownst to Obama’s plans to ride Wright’s back long enough to get the needed Christian stamp of approval to win religious voters, his misguided calculations are now like chickens coming home to roost.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright is one of this nation’s most revered African American ministers.He is an iconic image not only of the Black Civil Right’s era, but he is also the iconic image of the Black Church, Black Liberation Theology, and of today’s Afrocentric churches whose pride is captured in Trinity’s motto: Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian.

Trinity’s Statement of Faith says:

“Our roots in the Black religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting and permanent. We are an African people, and remain “true to our native land,” the mother continent, the cradle of civilization. God has superintended our pilgrimage through the days of slavery, the days of segregation, and the long night of racism. It is God who gives us the strength and courage to continuously address injustice as a people, and as a congregation. We constantly affirm our trust in God through cultural expression of a Black worship service and ministries which address the Black Community.
However, positioning himself as the post-racial candidate , Obama’s candidacy has done nothing but collided with this nation’s old nagging paradigms and practices of race and racism in America.”

Some in the Generation X era, whom Obama has successfully wooed, would depict Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his civil rights cohorts as old school Negroes. And Obama’s address on race in Philadelphia would even suggest that.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen - is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope - the audacity to hope - for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

While things have shifted a tad for those of us still on the margins of society , the beneficiaries of the change have befallen only to those who come from or have ascended to the upper tiers of society’s socioeconomic ladder. While race still matters as Cornel West bestseller of the same title waxes eloquently about, the daily bite and sting of racism, however, is cushioned by class and social upward mobility that gives the illusion, to some, that we are now in a post-racial era, especially in light of presidential hopeful Barack Obama.

Peter Boyer’s article in the February 4, 2008 issue of The New Yorker titled “The Color of Politics: A Mayor of the Post-Racial Generation” wrote the following explaining this “post-racial” generation of African Americans that includes Barack Obama, Harold Ford, Cory Booker, and my governor, Deval Patrick:

“Their deeper kinship resides in their identities as breakthrough figures - Africa American politicians whose appeal transcends race. Men reared in the post-Selma era and schooled at elite institutions, developed a political style of conciliation rather than confrontation, which complemented their natural gifts and , as it happens, nicely served their ambitions.”

This political style these men employ Shelby Steele depicts it best in his recent book “A BOUND MAN: Why We are Excited about Obama and Why He Can’t Win.” Steele states that, in the African American community, there two types of people - the “bargainer” and the “challenger.”

What is a “bargainer” or a “challenger?”

According to Shelby Steele, a bargainer strikes a bargain with white America in which they say I will not rub America’s ugly history of racism in our face if you will not hold my race against me.

A “challenger,” on the other hand, does the opposite of a “bargainer.” A “challenger” charges white people with inherent racism and then demands they prove themselves innocent by supporting black friendly polices like affirmative action and diversity

So why did Obama give his speech on race?

Was his speech on race to bargain with American voters by assuaging white fear? Did Obama want to tell white America that he is not too black identified for them not to elect him, especially now knowing of his twenty year association with Rev. Wright and Trinity Church.

Or was Obama’s speech on race also to challenge black Americans to vote for him albeit his racial mix, background and ideology is different, because his black presence is enough. In other words, is Obama so post-racial that he will not speak out candidly about this country’s legacy and present-day perpetuation of racism that Rev. Wright preaches about.

The term “post-racial,” unlike its lived reality, is gaining cultural currency in today’s American lexicon with a younger generation of people of color who, some say, are more adept at being “bargainers” than “challengers” because they are the progenies of a post-black civil rights era.

However, in trying to save his political career, Obama’s post-racial platform has come back to bite him? And Rev. Wright is like a bad penny that keeps rolling back into Obama’s life and he can’t get rid of Wright.

By exploiting Wright, the media has used Obama’s religious narrative - real and imagined - to captured the public’s attention. And the media’s spin on his pastor is more about this country’s uncritical patriotism predicated on espousing a rhetoric that all is good with and in America than addressing its unjust foreign and domestic polices.

When news got out about Wright fiery sermons, Obama first said he never heard them, then he recanted by saying he denounced only those objectionable ones. But Wright has now spoken up. And at the National Press Club Wright explained Obama’s Orwellian remarks.

“We both know that if Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected. Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls — Huffington, whoever’s doing the polls. Preachers say what they say because they are pastors. They have a different person to whom they’re accountable. As I said, whether he gets elected or not, I’m still going to have to be answerable to God, November 5th and January 21st. That’s what I mean. I do what pastors do. He does what politicians do.”

Where Obama ran afoul is that he didn’t think his involvement with Rev. Wright would collide with his carefully crafted post-racial electable message.

But maybe there’s a bigger lesson here that Obama is now learning. And it’s this: whether he dons the face of a Christian and/or the face of a politician in this bid for the White House - no lie lives forever.

Like chickens, they eventually come home to roost.

Published April 29, 2008 in Black Commentator, New England Blade, and The Bilerico Project. 

The springboard for Tuesday’s forum, “The AIDS Epidemic and the Politics of Invisibility,” (in which I was panelist), was GLAD’s 1998 win in the Bragdon v. Abbott case before the U.S. Supreme Court, establishing that people with HIV are protected from discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

In 1994, a Bangor, Maine dentist, Randon Bragdon, refused to treat Sidney Abbott’s toothache, once she disclosed she was HIV-positive. Bragdon was the first ADA case ever heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, which in June 1998 ruled 5-4 in Abbott’s favor. Bennett Klein, GLAD senior attorney and director of GLAD’s AIDS Law Project, argued the case. At the time, it was the second Supreme Court case argued by an openly-gay attorney.

Ten years post-Bragdon v. Abbott,  Kevin Cathcart, Lambda Legal executive director; Douglas Brooks, JRI Health vice president of health services; Jacob Smith Yang, Massachusetts Asian and Pacific Islanders for Health executive director; and I discussed where we, as a community, have come since the case. Klein moderated our panel discussion.

Questions we considered in planning for the discussion were wide-reaching and included: Why were people living with HIV initially invisible to the federal government? How did they make themselves seen and heard? Are people with HIV — gay men, people of color, women — sometimes hidden within their own communities as well?; Have better treatments resulted in a new era of concealment and increased infection rates?

It’s true that prior to the 1996 introduction of protease inhibitors, the AIDS epidemic consumed the LGBTQ movement. In several ways, our attention, energies and resources were not available to pursue other issues. Though our quest for equality and civil rights didn’t end, we were clearly distracted by our need to defend those suffering from discrimination, care for the sick and dying and press our government for a response.

Cathcart pointed out during our discussion that our community was lulled into a false sense of stability and confidence after the introduction of drug cocktails. HIV-positive men and women began living longer. They were no longer visibly sick amongst us. They were, in many ways, made invisible as ways of prolonging and improving their lives became more readily available.

In the Asian community, said Yang, HIV-positive men and women were made invisible because of the focus given to HIV-positive Caucasian, African American and Latino populations along with an Asian reluctance to highlight Asian health issues. Combined, these factors helped downplay the how many Asians were HIV-positive and also kept many from getting tested regularly.

Brooks, who is open about being HIV positive, talked on Tuesday about the importance of family support.
“I refused to be invisible in my family,” he said. “I had to be me in my family.”

I spoke about HIV-positive African American women. I believe the invisibility of my group’s plight has less to do with African-American women’s agency to combat the epidemic than with how the government, African-American men, the Black Church, and the absence of a gendered race analysis makes African-American women invisible to the larger society. I also spoke about one of our sister warriors in Boston, Belynda Dunn, who died of AIDS in March, 2002, at the age of 49. She was a tireless AIDS activist, founder and director of the Who Touched Me Ministry, an initiative to educate black churches in stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS in their communities. She was the wake-up call to the African-American community and the Black Church that HIV/AIDS is not solely a gay disease.

Gay news agencies have recently reported a major increase in new HIV/AIDS infection. However, this increase doesn’t necessarily represent a surge in HIV/AIDS infections. Sources within the CDC advise us that what we are seeing for the first time is more detailed and accurate reporting by state agencies on HIV/AIDS in general. Whatever the facts about the increases the epidemic is far from over and the new population of people living with HIV and AIDS is young, Black and female.

For the past decade while the GLBT community has been focusing on other pressing social justice issues, HIV/AIDS has been silently growing in non-gay and communities of color in dramatic numbers.

GLAD held its first 30th anniversary forum in January. Called “Sex on the Margins: The More Things Change…,” it discussed cultural and legal events in the GLBT community since it’s first case 30 years ago legally challenging the entrapment of gay men in bathroom sex stings at the Boston Public Library where undercover police men enticed  men into conversations leading to their arrests. In response to the community’s outrage and protest to the sting operation, GLAD was founded.

GLAD strikes a delicate balance between the hard fought social issues of today and the public health concerns of HIV/AIDS that lies ahead of us on tomorrow.

And as Cathcart reminded us “together we can end AIDS.”

For more about events planned to commemorate GLAD’s 30th anniversary, go to www.glad.org.

Published April 24, 2008 in New England Blade. 

As the candidate running on a “post-racial” platform that best exemplifies King’s “I Have a Dream” speech that hoped this nation would one day “not judge us by the color of our skin, but rather by the content of our character,” Obama’s absence was troubling to many in the African American community, especially of the civil rights era.

Most noted was Cornel West, the renowned Princeton University professor, public intellectual and author of the bestseller Race Matters. West is not only one of Obama’s strongest supporters, but West is also one of Obama’s political advisers.

Upset that Obama did not pay his respects to the historical significance of the day, West posted his sentiments, “On Obama Not Going to Memphis,” on The Huffington Post.

“I want to say that I’m deeply disappointed that my dear brother Barack Obama decided not to go pay tribute and lay his wreath for the great Martin Luther King, Jr. That brother Martin’s profound love and deep sacrifice for black people, America and humanity is in no way reducible to political calculations, even for the campaign for presidency. That Martin Luther King Jr.’s deep commitment to unarmed truth and unconditional love can in no way be subject to strategies for access to political power.”

Ouch!

Was this a public backhand slap from West signaling to the public, as well as to Obama, his concerns about Obama’s calculated ambitions to the White House?

Or, as many Obama supporters in the African American community are now speculating, is there both a personal and ideological rift between West and Obama?

Given West’s prominence and respect in the African American community nationwide, the Obama campaign knows if West breaks publicly from the campaign he’ll take a substantial portion of black voters away from Obama come November (if Obama wins the Democratic nomination).

Having won the majority of African American voters in the Tennessee primary, Obama may have felt he did not need to come back to the state to do face time.

But black talk show radios were abuzz with listeners calling in expressing their disappointment.

Tavis Smiley, one of America’s most celebrated and respected media personalities and author of the bestseller Covenant With Black America, called into the Tom Joyner Morning Show. Smiley asked listeners if Obama’s absence was another signal of Obama only courting the African American vote when it is political advantageous for him to do so.
But this charge against Obama by Smiley is not new.

When Smiley invited Obama to this year’s State of the Black Union, an event held annually during Black History Month and broadcast on C-Span, Obama declined but offered to send his wife Michelle. The event gathers a “Who’s Who” of black intellectuals, pundits, activists, entertainers and politicians to discuss and brainstorm where black America is and where it is headed. And this year it was held in New Orleans to remind the American public of the Bush administration’s unfinished business with its displaced citizens from Hurricane Katrina. This year’s topic was “Reclaiming Our Democracy, Deciding Our Future.” But Obama declined, stating he needed to continue his bid for the presidency. And in an open letter to Tavis Smiley, Barack asked Smiley to reconsider the invitation to let Michelle stand in for him.

“I especially commend you for hosting this dialogue in New Orleans. On the eve of the Louisiana primary, I visited this great city for the fifth time since declaring my candidacy to share policy proposals for rebuilding the Gulf Coast so that we never experience another Hurricane Katrina. On February 9, I was deeply humbled to win the Louisiana primary with 86 percent of the African American vote and a 14 point lead among all voters who said they were adversely affected by Hurricane Katrina…
I understand that you have declined the campaign’s request to have Michelle Obama speak on my behalf. I ask that you reconsider.”

But Smiley, like many black New Orleans and now Tennesseans, feel that since Obama has won their votes he didn’t need to show up in their state again.

Obama recognizes, however, that his bid for the presidency is made viable because of the civil rights movement and King, whom he did not have the time to stop for and pay tribute to.

“So don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don’t tell me I’m not coming home to Selma, Alabama. I’m here because somebody marched. I’m here because you all sacrificed for me. I stand on the shoulders of giants,” Obama stated in his March 2007 address commemorating the Selma Voting Rights March.

And as this country’s first legitimate black candidate for the White House, “Obama is virtually a third civil rights movement, the manifestation of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream. His candidacy has produced a fervor in black America born of centuries of wanting. Nearly every black vote that Clinton thought was hers at the beginning of the race has been siphoned by Obama, Darryl Fears stated.

And in Obama winning our votes, he must also hear and heed to the moral imperative and hurt expressed by West:

“I have a very deep disagreement with my dear brother, Barack Obama — in this case, commitment to truth is in tension with the quest for power”

Otherwise, we must wonder, if Obama can diss King, what manner of man do we have here?

Published April 8, 2008 on the  New England Blade, Black Commentator and The Bilerico Project websites. 

Who was June Jordan?

June Jordan, an awarding-winning poet, former columnist for The Progressive, author of 28 books of poems, political essays, and children’s fiction, was an “boundary crosser” who died at the age of 65 after a decade-long battle with breast cancer.

As a boundary crosser both the Norton Anthology of African American Literature and The African American Review depicted Jordan as one of the most prolific contemporary African American writers in many genres.

Author and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison told the Associated Press that Jordan’s writing life would best be depicted as “Forty years of tireless activism coupled with and fueled by flawless art.” And in describing the scope of Jordan’s writings, Adrienne Rich, renowned lesbian feminist poet, wrote in Sojourner, a feminist magazine, that “[Jordan’s] flexible, swift mind was equaled by her dazzling language, her access to both the most elegant diction and the most frontal kinds of rhetoric, so that a reader is always being surprised by a riff of music here, a trenchant political insight there. Her poems describe a complex arc back and forth between manifestos and tender love lyrics, jazz poetry and sonnets, with mood-shifts and image-juxtapositions to match.”

After her eight year marriage ended in divorce, Jordan transgressing a sexual boundary that is scoffed by many heterosexuals and queers even today and came out as a bisexual woman. And in the 1970’s, an era of lesbian and gay politics that viewed bisexuals as “fence sitters” who did not want to give up their heterosexual privilege, Jordan was viewed as a weak link in the struggle for sexual equality

Within lesbian circles, the place of bisexual women within the queer women’s community was often marginal, if not non-existant, and their commitment to feminism was always suspect. Many lesbians believed that any women who had the ability to sexually love another women had a political obligation to identify as lesbian. Others believed that the compulsory nature of heterosexuality in our culture precluded all possibilities of women freely choosing a heterosexual relationship.

Jordan, however, felt differently on the topic of bisexuality and spoke about it In her keynote address, “A New Politics of Sexuality,” to the Bisexual, Gay, and Lesbian Student Association at Stanford University on April 29, 1991 stating “I believe the Politics of Sexuality is the most ancient and probably the most profound arena of human conflict… deeper and more pervasive than any other oppression… is the oppression of sexuality… Finally, I need to speak on bisexuality. I do believe that the analogy is interracial or multicultural identity. I do believe that the analogy for bisexuality is a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multiracial world view. Bisexuality follows from such a perspective and leads to it, as well.”

Jordan derived her bisexual and biracial perspectives from having transgressed two more societal boundaries - an interracial marriage with a white man and giving birth to a biracial child, both scoffed at during her time by blacks and whites in this country.

But it is Jordan’s “boundary crossings” that gave her the intellectual breath on an issue, and by extension giving us a new way to see ourselves and the world.
Bisexuals are individuals who transgress the artificial socially constructed boundary of gender identity as well as the biologically constructed boundary of sex. Called “gatekeepers” by the Dagara of West Africa and “Two Spirit” by many Native Americans, bisexuals in these cultures were seen as having a special spiritual inheritance and earthly destiny.

I think June Jordan came here with a special destiny and with a higher calling than many of us. I see the world much fuller because of her, and I give thanks for the many boundaries she dared to cross.

Published March 20, 2008 in New England Blade and The Bilerico Project.

In my opinion it helped him at the expense of throwing his pastor under the bus, feeding into the media’s portrayal of Rev. Wright as a demagogue, and exonerating himself of any culpability of being associated with Wright that makes Obama look like the good guy and Wright the bad one.

Let me explain why….

If religion did not play such an important role in a presidential candidate’s bid for the White House, this conversation would not be happening. But given the collapsing of church and state since Bush came into office, the lines of private and personal barely exist. And with the collapsing of these two spheres, how and where and why a presidential candidate worships or not, unfortunately, speaks to his or her electability - which brings us to my recent piece about Obama.

There is a particular strand of black theology that Rev. Wright preaches. Both Obama and Wright got caught up in a pernicious game of race-baiting instigated no doubt by the right-wing media. And the game has drawn both Obama and Rev. Wright in where neither of them wins. If one is perceived to have won it, it’s done at the destruction and denigration and denouncement of the other.

Obama’s speech on race was brilliant not only it his elocution of it, but also in the difficult topic he had to address. He spoke about race from a much wider lens than we hear in our everyday discourse. And he’s one of the few people of color who gets it that white people too are pained by our country’s legacy of racism. However, where he fell short in his speech is that he did it at the expense of feeding into the media’s portrayal of Rev. Wright as a demagogue.

And while he denounced Rev. Wright’s statements, with attempts to contextualize their origins, he played into the race-baiting nonetheless, at the expense of exonerating himself of any culpability of being associated with Wright that make Obama look like the good guy and Wright the bad one.

While it is true that Obama may have missed some of Wright’s sermons, it is impossible for him to have missed them all. And even if he did, when he joined the church and was baptized and married in it, Obama attended classes that explained the church’s mission, its theology, and its set black values.

Black Theology is a liberation theology in that is looks at black suffering from the lens of the Exodus narrative where Moses leads the Israelites out of Egyptian oppression. Black Theology also look at the prophets in the Bible and their jeremiads about injustice. One jeremiad many of us know is the Amos text we heard Martin Luther King utter when he said, “Let justice roll down like a mighty stream.” And with these biblical prophets like Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, they all speak about God’s wrath, God cursing or damning a people or a nation as we see in the Exodus narrative where God cursed Egypt with several plagues. Wright’s homilies follow the tradition of the biblical prophets that were woefully misunderstood. But I am not saying that all that is Black Theology is good. It’s myopia around gender issues and LGBTQ civil rights is just some of the reasons why I am not a proponent of it, which is why my essay first and then book How the Black Church Endangers the African American LGBTQ Community will soon be out.

Rev. Wright is problematic on the above mentioned issues, which is why I lifted up the voices of two of his LGBTQ parishioners in this piece. However, in this media frenzy to discredit Obama’s electability Wright has been the sacrificial lamb for our country’s needed public discourse on race while excusing Obama of his active involvement with Trinity until he ran for office. And like any politician - black or white - they know in order to win the black Christian vote you go to the black church.

In explaining his relations to the media about Wright, Obama described him as a crazed uncle we all have in our family. And in his address Obama stated that he “can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother.”

However, I beg to differ. There is a distinct difference between the biological family you are born into and the church family you choose to worship with.

And so too is there a distinct difference between telling the truth to the American public and telling us a lie.

Where Obama got caught is that he didn’t think his involvement with supposedly an Afrocentric church would weigh in so heavily on his electability. And because it does he has done it at the expense of throwing Wright under the bus.

Published on March 20, 2008 in The Bilerico Project, Black Commentator and New England Blade websites.

While the moral high ground to address the public’s shock with Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s condemnations on America’s foreign and domestic polices appeared to be Obama’s address on race, Obama actually ran aground with many African American Christians by anchoring the public’s outrage and his fear of losing the presidential bid on the back of one of this nation’s most revered African American ministers.

“He’s used Jeremiah, and Trinity is his strongest base. He handled the media abysmally, and the uncle reference was demeaning. Many of us said we saw it coming,” a member from Trinity told me in anonymity not to have the press come after him.

Rev. Wright was the man who brought Obama to Christ, presided over his nuptials baptized him and his daughters, and was the inspiration for his bestseller, The Audacity of Hope.

And while Obama has now denounced Rev. Wrights’ incendiary remarks, after twenty years of hearing them, suspicion nonetheless still surfaces about his professed faith as a Christian.

Although religion came to Obama late in life, and he was reared in a non-religious household, his religious convictions, - “he say?” - were formed during his 20s at Trinity while a community organizer working with local churches on the South Side of Chicago.

As a central, powerful and revered institution within the African-American community, the Black Church captivated Obama’s attention. He says he came to understand “the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change.” However, how much Obama really covets the power of the Black Church for his own political aggrandizement, rather than for its religion, now raise questions in the minds of many black Christians since his address.

While MSNBC talk-show host Tucker Carlson was the first to publicly suggest Obama’s faith is “suddenly conspicuous,” suggesting that Obama has only recently begun addressing his religious background as part of “a very calculated plan on the part of the Democratic Party to win” religious voters in the 2008 presidential race, the suspicion is now looming even larger.

If Obama, however, is indeed using religion to win votes, he unfortunately placed himself in a difficult quagmire - not only with LGBTQ and liberal voters, but also by still being a member of Trinity. Why? Because he worships in a conservative black church within a liberal denomination. And Trinity is provisionally opened to the idea of same sex marriage.

In July 2005, the UCC General Synod overwhelmingly passed a Resolution of Marriage Equality. But in August 2005, Wright spoke against the Synod’s position causing my LGBTQ parishioners to leave.

“Please tell me what is going on here? Why does it appear we are under attack? Maybe I am reacting, but this seems to be even from the folks we admire in the church that black same-gender loving issues are not important. We are still seen as gay and white,” stated a gay member of Trinity.

In the church’s magazine The Trumpet his article “Maybe I Missed Something!” shows how LGBTQ issues are not a priority in his present-day prophetic social gospel intended to ameliorate the social conditions of all God’s African-American children.

“While our denomination grappled with how to address that human problem, the denomination also, at that Synod, voted to ordain a homosexual. Guess which item made the newspapers? Maybe I missed something!”

And in his closing tirades on the issues, Wright stated this: “Are 44 million Americans with no health care insurance less important than ‘gay marriage’? Why aren’t Black Christians in an uproar about that? Maybe I am missing something!”

When the article came out in light of the United Church of Christ’s stance on ordaining and marrying LGBTQ people, it was disheartening for many to know that Pastor Wright broke rank with his liberal denomination to stand in solidarity with a more conservative Black Church position.

“Folks were very hurt by his remarks he made in the Trumpet article. I wanted to know where he really stood with us on same-gender loving issues. The chair of the same-gender family wrote him if the church will address black heterosexism and black homophobia. He said we have done that over the thirty years and that his sermons should speak for his support on these issues. In his articles he said he was not putting same-gender loving person’s down. Just showing how society only appears to be focused on those issues and not the issues that impact Black issues. I reminded him I am a black female out lesbian. I do not choose to be one or the other which is all of my being,” stated a lesbian member of Trinity

I wonder now how much of Obama’s views on gay civil rights are shaped by Trinity? Or, if not, does he use those Christian views to avoid giving us our full civil right?

Or perhaps Obama is playing us as much as he has played his pastor?!

So it is also not surprising when Obama appeared on CNN’s “Situation Room” with Wolf Blitzer, Obama stood where his pastor does on the issue.

“Well, I think that marriage has a religious connotation in this society, in our culture, that makes it very difficult to disentangle from the civil aspects of marriage. And as a consequence, it would be extraordinarily difficult and a distraction to try to build a consensus around marriage for gays and lesbians. What we can do is form civil union that provide all the civil rights that marriage entails to same-sex couples. And that is something that I have consistently been in favor of. And I think that the vast majority of Americans don’t want to see gay and lesbian couples discriminated against when it comes to hospital visitation and so on.”

Many African American Christians are now suspecting Obama of using the “race card” to win their votes, at the expense of pitting their interests against gays.

For example, when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 2004, Obama campaigned at the Salem Baptist Church on Chicago’s South Side. It’s the 22,000-member black mega-church of Rev. James Meeks, who has called homosexuality an evil sickness. Outside of the hallowed walls of church the Rev. James Meeks is State Senator James Meeks.

Obama knew to pander to his base.

When news first got out about Wright’s Afrocentric theology and Sunday sermons that disparagingly speak ill of whites and Israel, Obama began immediately to distance himself. Yet these same sermons were not a problem for Obama when they were spiritually nurturing him into becoming a public figure. Now Obama will no longer continue to speak and write about the special relationship with his pastor, because it has run afoul of his ambitions.
In explaining his relations to the media about Wright, Obama described him as a crazed uncle we all have in our family. And in his address Obama stated that he “can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother.”

However, I beg to differ.

There is a distinct difference between the biological family you are born into and the church family you choose to worship with.

And so too is there a distinct difference between telling the truth to the American public and telling us a lie.

If Obama can throw his pastor under the bus, what will he do to LGBTQ voters on his way to the White House?

Published March 19, 2008 in New England Blade, Black Commentator and The Bilierico Project websites. 

This haunting history of the Puritan’s execution of innocent women, and certain men too, 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.”

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

Born in Barbados, earlier white historians depict Tituba as Carib Indian. However, African American feminist historians depict Tituba as black. With Tituba married to a man named John Indian, at the time the trans-Altantic slave trade was transporting Africans throughout and among the Caribbean islands, also known as the West Indies, Tituba’s racial identity is only obscured to those who erase the history of slavery.
“There are those who dispute her African descent, countering that she was Indian, perhaps hoping to stir up enmity between black and native American women as we seek to recreate our respective histories…. For, in the final analysis, Tituba’s revenge consists in reminding us all that the doors of our suppressed cultural histories are still ajar,” states African American lesbian feminist scholar and activist Angela Davis.

Tituba is the protagonist of the novel I, TITUBA: BLACK WITCH OF SALEM (1982) by Maryse Conde, a Guadeloupean author of historical fiction. Conde’s novels like I, TITUBA explore racial, gender, and cultural issues in a variety of historical eras and locales.

While queries about Tituba’s race is of debate, her gender is indisputable. And though a slave, Tituba was nonetheless subjected to the same gender restrictions placed on Puritan women. And Puritan men had only two views of women: the good wife and the bad witch.

But nothing, however, was deadlier the plight of Puritan women than clerics’ sanctioning of Exodus 22:18 “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

Not only did this scripture verse give men biblical legitimacy to control women, but it also gave men 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.

“Lesbianism was identified with witchcraft… she could not form a household of her own apart from church and family… Her relations with a man were apt to be moral to the point of martyrdom, but not romantic. Puritanism does not seem to have been any more personally fulfilling to women than the slavery that they had willingly submitted to in previous times,’” historian Ellwood Johnson points out.

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

Forced to confessed 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.

“It is ironic that the belief that Tituba led these girls astray has persisted in popular lore, fiction and non fiction alike. The charge has barely disguised racial undertones and is based on the imagination of authors like Starkey, who eerily mirrors Salem’s accusers, ” states Mary Beth Norton, author of In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692.

And Marion L. Starkey’ in her book The Devil in Massachusetts unabashedly stated, “I have invented the scenes with Tituba… but they are what I really believe happened.”

Tituba’s “confession,” nonetheless, served to silence most skeptics at the time of the veracity of the witch trials, thus giving Parris and other ministers a righteous license to hunt and kill witches with a religious fervor and zeal.

But Tituba’s bogus confession also spared her her life. Interestingly, however, the disappearance of Tituba immediately following the witch trials is clouded with intentional silence and a brief mention that she went back to Barbados, implying perhaps for some, that Tituba went back to her native land and lived happily ever after with her husband John Indian and her daughter Violet.

However, the truth is Tituba, as a slave and chattel property of Parris, was sold. Her utility to the Parris family was depleted.

Also, Parris’ church brought charges against him for his part in causing the Witch Trials. He had to rebuild his reputation and regain the trust of his community. Tituba, on the other hand, was expendable and had to leave.

However, in later years, Tituba’s confession gave many historians the belief that her race and low status as a slave in the community were enough to accuse her of being a witch.

Published on March 12, 2008 in New England Blade, Black Commentator, and biblerico.com websites.

“I think that it is a legal right that they [homosexuals] should have that is recognized by the state. If people find that controversial then I would just refer them to the Sermon on the Mount, which I think is, in my mind, for my faith, more central than an obscure passage in Romans,” Obama said, which was then used in advertisements in the four largest LGBTQ markets in Ohio and Texas — Columbus, Cleveland, Dallas, and Houston.

According to Obama’s LGBTQ Steering Committee member Eric Stern, purchasing of these ads was “the icing on the cake” leading up to today’s primaries.
But before the Obama campaign have their cake and eat it too in celebration of their outreach to these targeted queer communities, perhaps they need to chew on this as well: What about the queer newspapers in Rhode Island and Vermont that run throughout the New England states, one of which I write for?

Perhaps the LGBTQ populations are two small in numbers to matter and the states too weak in delegate power in helping Obama clench the presidential nomination?

But let me refer Obama to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus says in Matthew 5:5 “Blessed are the meek, for they too shall inherit the earth.”

And our community here needs to hear this from you as well if we’re going to ever believe that you want to be part of us.

This timely conversion might appear more faith-driven than politically motivated, but the language of Christian equality was non-existent in Obama’s “Open Letter from Barack Obama to the LGBT Community” as a guest blogger here on The Bilerico Project just last week, in which he said:

I personally believe that civil unions represent the best way to secure that equal treatment. But I also believe that the federal government should not stand in the way of states that want to decide on their own how best to pursue equality for gay and lesbian couples — whether that means a domestic partnership, a civil union, or a civil marriage.

The differences between civil union vs. civil marriage for same-sex couple is approximately 1,049 benefits and protections that are conferred upon heterosexual marriages. And the differences have been explained and expounded upon to Obama and his campaign ad nauseum. However, his repackaging the same pro-civil union rhetoric since his run for the White House is like re-gifting your undesirable Christmas presents. Sooner or later, when these gifts are passed around enough, someone will take them.

But, Obama, not everyone is buying your re-gift.

A commenter at Pam’s House Blend wrote:

Obama not only thinks that separate-but-equal is just ducky for LGBT couples. It was a gimmick from an era in which Obama could have aspired to no position in the White House higher than that of head janitor…, Once he’s in office, LGBT citizens will be forgotten. Fast.

Obama is also in favor of the “States Rights” approach to the whole marriage equality issue. This was a principle sacred to the White Citizens’ Councils a half-century ago and is just as unconstitutional now.

This isn’t a compromise or incremental approach to marriage equality; it’s flat-out opposition to it — and on the basis of old segregationist tricks at that all.

But there’s no limit to the ability of some voters to believe whatever is presented to them in a slick package, apparently.

Another commenter there wrote:

People are very galvanized by Barack (who is my Senator) in a way that surprises me. I am all for hope and change and then the question becomes what will the change be on the issues I care most about. My husband and I have two kids and face constant challenges, great and small, by not being treated as legally married (which we are in Canada) so protecting my family is critical for me. Here, Barack advocates something less than marriage (and since he is very popular and very persuasive, this reassures a lot of people that they, too, can be against marriage). This has particular sting because he presents himself, as Karen noted, as a constitutional law expert. As such he knows that the right to civil marriage is constitutionally protected and has been held to be so important it cannot be denied even to convicted serial killers (who can lose the right to vote and other civil rights). Why do we deserve less? No one ever asks him.

Since Obama doesn’t often defend his position on civil unions to members of the GLBT media, it is politically prudent for him to buy ads speaking to us because doing so lets him control his interactions with the LGBTQ community and the topics on which he doesn’t want to be challenged.

Let me suggest that Obama take his time and read the entire Sermon on the Mount, chapters 5-7, from which he referenced recently. It contains the central tenets of Christian ethical teachings on which he claims to base his campaign. And I strongly suggest that he reads all of Matthew 7, the concluding chapter. It emphasizes the difficulty of doing what is right, but the moral imperative to do so nonetheless.

Published on In Newsweekly, Black Commentator, and bilerico.com websites.

Missing from the annals of African American history and the history of Nazi Germany are the documented stories and struggles of African Americans, straight and “queer.” Valaida Snow, captured in Nazi- occupied Copenhagen and interned in a concentration camp for nearly two years, is one such story forgotten every Black History Month in celebrating our heroes and survivors.

Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Valaida Snow came from a family of musicians and was famous for playing the trumpet. Named “Little Louis” after Louis Armstrong (who called her the world’s second best jazz trumpet player, besides himself, of course) Snow played concerts throughout the U.S., Europe and China. On a return trip to Denmark after headlining at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, Snow, the conductor of an all-women’s band, was arrested for allegedly possessing drugs and sent to an Axis internment camp for alien nationals in Wester-Faengle.

While in pre-Hitler Germany all-female orchestras were de rigeur in many avant-garde entertainment clubs, these homosocial all-women’s bands created tremendous outrage during Hitler’s regime. Snow was sent to a concentration camp not only because she was black and in the wrong place at the wrong time, but also because of her “friendships” with German women musicians, implying lesbianism.

Although laws against lesbianism had not been codified, and lesbians were not criminalized for their sexual orientations as gay men were, German women were nonetheless viewed as a threat to the Nazi state and were fair game during SS raids on lesbian bars, sentenced by the Gestapo, sent to concentration camps, and branded with a black triangle. As a matter of fact, any German woman, lesbian, prostitute or heterosexual, not upholding her primary gender role — “to be a mother of as many Aryan babies as possible” — was deemed anti-social and hostile to the German state.

Because Nazis could not discern between the sexual affection and social friendship between straight and lesbian women, over time they dismissed lesbianism as a state and social problem, as long as both straight and lesbian women carried out the state’s mandate to procreate.

Nazi Germany’s extermination plan of gay men is a classic example of how politics informed their science. Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code differentiated between the type of persecution non-German gay men received from German gay men because of a quasi-scientific and racist ideology of racial purity. “The policies of persecution carried out toward non-German homosexuals in the occupied territories differed significantly from those directed against German gays,” wrote Richard Plant in “The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals.” “The Aryan race was to be freed of contagion; the demise of degenerate subjects peoples was to be hastened.”

Hans J. Massaquoi, former Ebony magazine editor, and the son of an African diplomat and white German mother, in his memoir “Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany,” depicts a life of privilege until his father returned to his native Liberia. Like all non-Aryans, Massaquoi faced constant dehumanization and the threat of death by Gestapo executioners. “Racists in Nazi Germany did their dirty work openly and brazenly with the full protection, cooperation, and encouragement of the government, which had declared the pollution of Aryan blood with ‘inferior’ non-Aryan blood the nation’s cardinal sin.” The Gestapo rounded up and forcibly sterilized and subjected many non-Aryans to medical experiments; others just mysteriously disappeared.

After 18 months of imprisonment, Snow was one of the more fortunate blacks to make it out of Nazi Germany, released as an exchange prisoner. There was no systematic program for elimination of people of African descent in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945 because their number were few, but their abuses in German-occupied territories, like the one in which Snow was captured, were great and far-reaching.

Snow was both psychologically and physically scarred from the ordeal and never fully recovered. She attempted to return to performing but her spark, tragically, was gone.

Published on February 26, 2008 in In Newsweekly, Black Commentator, and bilerico.com.