As an openly gay African-American candidate running for the mayoral seat in Clarkdale, Miss., McMillian was quietly signaling that neither his race nor his sexual orientation would abort his aspirations. On McMillian’s personal Facebook page there is a photo of him posing with President Obama. His campaign motto, “Moving Clarksdale forward,” was a challenge to the town as well as the state. If there is anyplace to challenge the intolerant conventions of Mississippi, Clarksdale, the Delta’s gem, known as “a place where openness and hospitality transcend all barriers and visitors are embraced as family” and the birthplace of blues music, is that place.

Police discovered McMillian’s body near a levee just a 15-minute drive outside Clarksdale. When his family reported that his body had been “beaten, dragged and burned,” I immediately thought of Mississippi’s unforgettably sordid history of lynching. In particular, the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till came to mind, and I was reminded of the words of Mississippi’s native son, William Faulkner, who wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Till was a 14-year-old African-American child from Chicago who was visiting relatives down in the Delta. He was brutally murdered and tortured for allegedly flirting with a white woman. When his body was discovered, it was reported that Till had been severely beaten, stripped nude and shot in the right ear, with one of his eyes gouged out from its socket, before his body was dumped into the Tallahatchie River with a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire.

Though many suspected that racial hatred might have been the motive for McMillian’s alleged murder, that possibility was quickly erased when it was reported that Lawrence Reed, a 22-year-old African-American male, had been apprehended and charged with murder after having wrecked McMillian’s SUV the day before his body was found. Did Reed murder McMillian? Why did he have his car? Could this have been a “down-low” tryst gone awry? There still aren’t enough details to know.

Being openly lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer (LGBTQ) is no easy feat for African Americans, even in 2013, and even with an LGBTQ-friendly president like Obama having our backs. Being from the South just complicates the matter. But in McMillian’s case, his family might also be one of the complications in our ability to ascertain the truth behind his death.

Case in point: It is unfathomable to McMillian’s mother, Patricia McMillian, that the motive for his alleged murder might have been his sexual orientation. She told CNNthat only his family and friends knew of his sexual orientation. “He did not announce in public that he was gay,” she explained. “I don’t think he was attacked because he was gay.” However, McMillian’s sexual orientation was no secret.

According to state investigators, little is known about Reed or how, if at all, he knew McMillian. To the McMillian family, Reed is an enigma. McMillian’s mother stated that she never knew him, and McMillian’s stepfather, Amos Unger, speaking for the family,told CNN, “We never heard of him.”

And although the family stated that McMillian had been “beaten, dragged and burned,” the Coahoma County Medical Examiner, Scotty Meredith, refuted that claim, telling CNN, “Beating is not the cause of death. … He was beaten, but not badly.” He also added that he didn’t know how the family had come to the conclusion that McMillian had been dragged and burned.

Another complication in ascertaining the truth behind McMillian’s death might be the state of Mississippi itself. In Mississippi LGBTQ couples cannot marry, and they cannot jointly adopt. The state’s hate crimes laws do not address sexual orientation or gender identity, nor does the state address discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Therefore, an assault on an LGBTQ Mississippian might very well be ignored as a “personal matter.” Indeed, Coahoma County Medical Examiner Scotty Meredith told CNN that “this was not a targeted attack” but “more of a personal dispute.”

After news of McMillian’s death broke, the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund and Institute, which supports gay and lesbian candidates for political office, tweeted, “Our hearts go out to the family and friends of Marco McMillian, one of the 1st viable openly #LGBT candidates in Mississippi.” Denis Dison, Vice President of Communications at the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund and Institute, told HuffPost Live that there are “approximately 600 openly LGBTQ elected officials at every level of U.S. government, with about 80 openly elected officials in the entire South.” Had McMillian won his mayoral challenge, he would have been Mississippi’s first openly gay elected official and the pride of not only the Mississippi Delta but the entire state.

African American participation in the Boy Scout movement dates back to 1911, and its impact has not only forced the integration of young black males into the organization, but also continues to address many of the challenges these young males confront today.

With young African-American males (particularly those in urban enclaves) at much higher risks for incarceration, gang violence, unemployment, fatherlessness and substance abuse, the BSA has been a source of constant and consistent strong positive male figures for these young black boys.

Like many BSA troops, African-American troops are often strongly affiliated with community black churches. These churches not only hold homophobic views, but also hold a tight-fisted hand on their non-gender-conforming males.

The BSA’s position on GBTQ scouts is unquestionably discriminatory, and its hesitancy to swiftly remove its ban dishonors the organization’s goal and philosophy, “to prepare young people to make ethical and moral choices over their lifetimes by instilling in them the values of the Scout Oath and Law.”

This means that GBTQ black youths cannot catch the lifeline that the BSA provides their straight brethren due to the homophobia of the church and the BSA. It’s no wonder these youths have higher incidents of homelessness.

The BSA’s national office is housed in Texas, the heart of the Bible Belt, and that reflects the religiously conservative influence on the organization’s policies.

Although the BSA is a civic organization that has local chapters in public schools, a large number of them are equally affiliated with religious institutions. Those religious groups have a disproportionate influence on the organization.

Most of these religious institutions interpret and impose both the Scout Oath and Scout Law from their conservative theological perspective — and the Black Church is not alone in doing so. The Church of the Latter Day Saints, for example, has a huge influence on the BSA because the church mandates that all male youths join the Boy Scouts.

New York Times reporter Erik Eckholm writes in his recent article “As Partner, Mormons and Scouts Turn Boys into Men:”

“With mutual exaltation of God and country and a shared aim of nurturing “morally straight” men with leadership skills and a service ethic, the Mormons and the Boy Scouts seem made for each other, as entwined as a square knot. And in an unusual partnership dating to 1913, the Mormon Church has embraced scouting wholesale, giving it a central role in preparing male youths for their two-year missionary stints and adulthood as lay priests.”
The basis for discrimination against gay scouts and gay scout leaders pivots around two beliefs: the Judeo-Christian tenets about homosexuality and the myth that there is an inherent correlation between male homosexuality and pedophilia. Although these beliefs have been successfully refuted they are strategically upheld to maintain its ban.

The BSA’s 2004 position statement on homosexuality that has not changed states, “We believe that homosexual conduct is inconsistent with the requirement of the Scout oath that a Scout be morally straight and in the Scout law that a Scout be clean in word and deed, and that homosexuals do not provide a desirable role model for Scouts.”

The words “morally straight” and “clean” are what have fueled the BSA’s homophobic stance and consequently have given rise to both its misinterpretation and misuse of the group’s own guidelines.

While “morally straight” and “clean” have everything to so with being a scout, they have nothing to do with a scout’s sexual orientation. The original interpretation of both words are about virtue, readiness and open-mindedness in the context of human service, and a scout’s commitment to teamwork, honesty, respect for others, and community service.

The truth that needs to be told is that the BSA’s is fighting itself, and needs to come out of the closet about its founder. Perhaps that would dispel the dispute about gay scouts.

Scout founder Robert Baden-Powell (1857- 1941) was believed to be gay. A number of biographies on Baden-Powell alluded to his homosexuality. Tim Jeal, the author of “The Boy-Man: The Life of Lord Baden-Powell,” wrote, “The available evidence points inexorably to the conclusion that Baden-Powell was a repressed homosexual.”

Jeal further states that in Baden-Powell’s diaries and correspondences, Baden-Powell wrote frequently about his “enjoyment at watching young men swim naked; enjoy nude men; (and) expressed disdain for female nudity.” Also, Baden-Powell had an “extremely close, decades-long friendship” with Kenneth McLaren, “with whom he served in the British military and always made sure he bunked.”

The Black Church’s silent stance of BSA’s continued ban on gays help strengthen the church’s belief that strong black male leadership is exclusively heterosexual.

However, if both the Black Church and BSA goals are to continue to nurture the talents and gifts of all its young males, then they must ask themselves to what degree does their stance on homophobia hinders their goal?

Sources:
Distinguished African American Scouts

African Americans in the Boy Scout movement | African American Registry

Mormons and Scouts Act as Parthttp://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/18/us/mormons-and-scouts-act-as-partners-in-molding-boys.html?pagewanted=all ners in Molding Boys – NYTimes.com

Boy Scouts of America membership controversies

The Boy-Man: The Life of Lord Baden-Powell

The LGBTQ Catholic group Equally Blessed said in a statement:

“With the pope’s impending resignation, the church has an opportunity to turn away from his oppressive policies toward lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Catholics, and their families and friends, and develop a new understanding of the ways in which God is at work in the lives of faithful and loving people regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity.”
This pope has used his papal authority to hold back the tides of modernity. And the early signs were there long before Benedict became pope. The reaction by many religious progressives to the April 2005 election of then-cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to the papacy was tempered by either their desire to keep hope alive or an apologetic acceptance in deference to Pope John Paul II.

If the Catholic Church was looking for a religious leader who embraces the world as it is today, then Pope Benedict XVI aka Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was not the man. Benedict used his authoritarian, “Rottweiler” interpretation of church doctrine to maintain an ecclesiastical lockdown on the church’s progressives. For example, just last year, he publicly bashed a group of “dissident” U.S. nuns for, as “The New York Times” put it, “focusing its work too much on poverty and economic injustice, while keeping ‘silent’ on abortion and same-sex marriage.” The pope believed that this rogue group of Catholic sisters was not only undermining the church’s teachings on the priesthood and homosexuality but was also brashly promoting “certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.”

Benedict pushed back against the tide of progressive theologies by upholding a rigid orthodoxy of millennium-old church doctrines and creeds. Case in point: Benedict suppressed the growth of liberation theologies in third-world countries, the emerging face of the Catholic Church, for their supposedly Marxist leanings that exposed classism. However, liberation theologies combine Christian theology with political activism on issues dealing with human rights and social justice. Liberation theologies emphasize the biblical theme that God’s actions on behalf of the enslaved, the poor, the outcasts (like women), people of color and LGBTQ people, just to name a few, are a central paradigm for a faith that embraces the world — as it is today — from an engaged and committed stance that does justice. It is liberation theologies that have given women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and those in developing countries a voice. And it’s liberation theologies that allow us all — churched and unchurched, believer as well as atheist — to stand in the truth of who we are.

Benedict’s venomous attacks on LGBTQ people have been unrelenting. Just this past December, the pontiff’s Christmas sermon denounced same-sex marriage, claiming that it would destroy the “essence of the human creature.” In previous sermonic anti-LGBTQ diatribes during his tenure as pope, Benedict has stated that marriage equality is a “manipulation of nature” and a threat to world peace.

The pontiff doesn’t waver in his stance on us with the theological qualifier “love the sinner but hate the sin.” Instead, Benedict takes his stance to a level that invites LGBTQ bashing justified in the name of God. In a 1986 letter to the bishops of the Catholic Church on “pastoral care of homosexual persons,” Cardinal Ratzinger stated, “Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is more or less a strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil.” On the Vatican’s website for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which was directed by Cardinal Ratzinger, he wrote, “Those who would move from tolerance to the legitimization of specific rights for cohabiting homosexual persons need to be reminded that the approval or legalization of evil is something far different from the toleration of evil.”

Benedict believes that evil is born into a person and that it is part of their ontological makeup; therefore, when you remove the bad seed, you ostensibly remove the evil. And many religious conservatives feel that because you cannot remove LGBTQ people from society, then society must either restrain or deny them their civil rights. And one clear way to do that is to call that group of people “evil” or state that they contribute to, if not create, evil in the world.

St. Augustine argued that evil arose from the original sin committed by Adam and Eve. And St. Thomas Aquinas said that evil derives from man’s abuse of our God-given free will. However, it wasn’t until the 18th century that philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau stated that evil was not an intrinsic nature found in man but something caused by the corruption and constraints of society.

I side with Rousseau. I believe that evil exists in its various machinations because of systems, regimes, presidencies and, yes, the Vatican, which allow it to give birth unchecked. As a system whose wheels churn on the absence of goodness, evil reduces people to objects of sin and targets of hatred, thus denying them their basic human needs. And its strength to maintain human suffering is proportionate not only to its political and capital clout but to the strength of its religious ideological underpinning. The problem with evil is not only how it diminishes human life but how it denies the suffering it causes.

It’s time for a queer-friendly pope. And the bolt of lightning striking St. Peter’s Basilica is no clearer sign.

Vodou is a persecuted and widely misunderstood religion, largely thanks to racist images of zombies rising from the grave, jungle drums, cannibalism and orgiastic ceremonies ritualizing malevolent powers and black magic, stereotypes often perpetuated by Hollywood and the New Orleans tourism industry. The Catholic Church demonized Vodou during the time of slavery, and it was also vilified by Haiti’s political ruling elite, who feared its revolutionary potential.

As a monotheistic religion, Vodou holds that there is one God, but adherents also believe that individual behavior is guided by spirits called “loas” (or “lwas”), which have their origins in the belief traditions of the people of the former African kingdom of Dahomey, now Togo and Benin. Many of these spirits are what we’d consider lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, gender-fluid, androgynous or dual-gendered. Gay males in Haitian Vodou embrace the divine protection of Erzulie Freda, the feminine spirit of love and sexuality. Gay males are allowed to imitate and worship her. Lesbians are under the patronage of Erzulie Dantor, a fierce protector of women and children experiencing domestic violence. Erzulie Dantor is bisexual and prefers the company of women. Labalèn is a gynandrous (or intersex) spirit. And LaSirèn, who is the Vodou analogue of Yemayá, a maternal spirit, is a revered transgender spirit.

But let’s not fool ourselves. Openly gay men are ostracized in Haiti, and anthropologist Anne Lescot’s 2002 documentary Des hommes et des dieux (Of Men and Gods) exposed the daily struggles of Haitian trans women. One of the women featured in the film, Blondine, said, “When people insult me because I wear a dress, I am not ashamed of how I am. Masisis [gay males] can’t walk down the street in a wig and dress.” (But when Blondine is at a Vodou service, she feels free.) Gay men are also ostracized across the Haitian diaspora, included in the queer-friendly state of Massachusetts, where a 22-year-old gay Haitian man committed suicide because of his sexual orientation in 2008.

Ironically, homosexuality has been legal in Haiti since 1986, but few protections and provisions come with that status. For example, neither same-sex marriage nor civil unions are recognized. It’s unclear whether LGBTQ couples can adopt children or have custody of their own children. LGBTQ Haitians don’t openly serve in the military. They don’t have hate crimes laws that specifically addresses discrimination and harassment on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, which is a daily reality for them. At the very least, LGBTQ Haitians are protected under Article 35-2 of the country’s constitution, which prohibits discrimination in the workplace based on “sex, beliefs, opinions and marital status,” and the United Nation’s International Bill of Human Rights mainly protects LGBTQ Haitians. But with no queer enclaves in Port-au-Prince or other big cities, many LGBTQ Haitians are left puzzled by what it the legal status of homosexuality really means in their country.

Moreover, we should ask how LGBTQ Haitians, one of the country’s most marginalized groups, have been helped since the world community descended on Haiti with relief aid in response to the January 2010 earthquake. The question is especially pertinent given how some LGBTQ Americans were treated in New Orleans during the Hurricane Katrina relief effort in 2005. Will the conservative, faith-based relief agencies that remain in Haiti brandish their homophobic attitudes against the country’s LGBTQ citizens?

In all repressively homophobic cultures, LGBTQ people have found ways to express themselves and live out their true, authentic lives. In Haiti, how openly queer you can be depends not only on your class, profession and skin complexion but on your religious affiliation. In a country that is predominately Roman Catholic, homosexuality is widely condemned, but LGBTQ Haitians of the middle and professional classes find ways to socialize with impunity, out of the public’s gaze. For example, in Petionville, an upscale suburb of Port-au-Prince whose residents are mostly American and European whites and multiracial Haitians, many LGBTQ people informally gather at dinner parties, restaurants and beaches. The Hôtel Montana, a well-known four-star hotel in the hills of Petionville that was destroyed by the quake, was one of the hot spots. And these queers hold positions as government officials, businesspeople and NGO and UN aid workers.

For the poorer classes of LGBTQ Haitians who live, work and socialize in the densely populated and impoverished capital city of Port-au-Prince, discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity is commonplace, but they do have at least two outlets for openly expressing and celebrating who they are: Vodou and Rara festivals. Rara festivals are yearly celebrations that begin following Carnival. Rara bands come out of Vodou societies that have LGBTQ congregations where gay men are permitted to cross-dress with impunity. In both Rara festivals and Vodou societies, our LGBTQ brothers and sisters in Haiti are free to be authentically who they are.

However, some African Americans felt “dissed” by the president’s speech. The linkage of their civil rights struggle with that of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) Americans did nothing to quell their dislike of the comparison. For them, the fact that it was spoken by this president made it sting more.

The reason that many African Americans, especially those male ministers who profess to have marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., scoff at likening today’s LGBTQ civil rights struggle to the black civil rights struggle is the persistence of racism in the lives of black people and the scarcity of gains accomplished in racial and socioeconomic equality. They expected more gains under the first African-American president, and they contend that civil rights gains have come faster for LGBTQ Americans, whose fight for equality only truly kicked off with the Stonewall riots of not-so-distant 1969. And many African Americans, both straight and LGBTQ, will argue that those gains owe much to the structural and cultural exclusion of people of color in the LGBTQ movement. The LGBTQ movement has no doubt made some tremendous gains, a reality that has not been afforded to African Americans, leaving many of them asking (especially after hearing President Obama’s second inaugural address the issue), “What’s really in this American dream for us?” Many African-American ministers try to answer that question by coming out either for or against Obama’s stance on marriage equality.

This country’s civil rights struggles have primarily been understood, reported on and advocated for in terms of past and present African-American struggles against both individual and systematic racism. Consequently, in educating the American public on other existing forms of oppression, the civil rights struggles of women, LGBTQ Americans, Native Americans and other minority groups have been largely ignored and even trivialized. Though there is merit to the argument that simplistically viewing all experiences of oppression as similar ignores the salient differences between oppressed groups, it is also true that ignoring how the experiences of oppressed groups are indeed similar — and how, by employing that understanding, they can work together — has limited the possibilities for full and equal rights for all Americans.

LGBTQ activists of African descent, like me, have long pondered what might rally those African-American ministers to support same-sex marriage and engage the black community in a nationwide discussion on LGBTQ equality. Such a discussion would certainly assist them in seeing the link between Selma and Stonewall, the very link that President Obama so eloquently pointed out. There were hopes that Obama’s May 2012 statement of support for marriage equality would begin that discussion, and it certainly allowed the black ministers who had quietly professed to be allies to the LGBTQ community to come out in favor of LGBTQ equality to their congregations. Doubtless these African-American ministers saw the liability of Obama losing his 2012 reelection bid for lack of African-American support as far worse than being chastised for not being in lockstep with their homophobic brethren.

With his second and final term before him, Obama can be both unapologetically and unabashedly in favor of marriage equality. With an enormous sigh of relief, I thank God that Obama no longer has to do a delicate dance with a deeply divided black populace on the issue. He has momentum on his side whether black ministers and community activists side with him or not.

Nowadays, support for same-sex marriage in the African American community largely falls along generational lines. The irony is that that generational divide lies between those of MLK’s era and those of Obama’s era.

But would he really? As we celebrate Martin Luther King Day 2013, we no longer have to hold King up to a godlike standard. All the hagiographies written about King after his assassination have come under scrutiny as we have come to better understand all of him: his greatness and his flaws and human foibles. As I comb through numerous books and essays, learning more about King’s philandering, his sexist attitude toward women at home and in the movement, and his tenuous relationship with the openly gay Bayard Rustin, I am wondering whether King really would be a public advocate for LGBTQ rights.

James Cone, the father of black liberation theology and the author of a book and several articles on King, states that we must understand King within the historical context of the black church. Would King have risked his already waning popularity with the African-American community, not to mention President Lyndon B. Johnson, by speaking out on LGBTQ equality? In the public address that I gave at the Gill Foundation’s National Outgiving Conference in 2007, I asserted, “If Dr. Martin Luther King were standing up for LGBTQ rights today, the black community would drop him, too.”

King certainly understood the interconnectedness of struggles against oppression. We see that understanding in his observation that ”the revolution for human rights is opening up unhealthy areas in American life and permitting a new and wholesome healing to take place. Eventually the civil rights movement will have contributed infinitely more to the nation than the eradication of racial justice.” That contribution clearly includes the current momentum toward LGBTQ justice, but would King speak out on this subject if he were alive now?

His now-deceased wife, Coretta Scott King, seemed to think he would. In 1998 she addressed the LGBTQ rights group Lambda Legal, asserting that LGBTQ rights and civil rights are the same. “I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King’s dream to make room at the table of brother and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people,” she said.

But King’s youngest and only living daughter, Rev. Bernice King, who has been rumored for years to be a lesbian, as well as his niece, Alveda King, have historically thought otherwise. In 2004 the cousins, along with thousands of protesters, participated in a march against same-sex marriage in Atlanta. In January 2005Newsweek asked Alveda, who has aligned herself with the religious right and frequently wields her family name and her voice against LGBTQ rights, whether Martin Luther King would be a champion of LGBTQ rights. “No, he would champion the word of God,” she replied. “If he would have championed gay rights today, he would have done it while he was here. There was ample opportunity for him to champion gay rights during his lifetime, and he did not do so.” She added, “My cousin, the Rev. Bernice King, has said that she knows in her sanctified soul that her father did not take a bullet for same-sex marriage.”

And that might be true. I find it ironic that the public Martin Luther King we witnessed on the national stage talked vociferously about social justice and civil rights for all people when his personal life did not reflect the same ethos when it came to women and gays. And I find it sad that Bayard Rustin, the gay man who was the chief organizer and strategist behind the 1963 March on Washington, which further catapulted King onto the world stage, was not a beneficiary of King’s dream.

In the civil rights movement Rustin was always behind the scenes, and it’s likely that a large part of that had to do with the fact that he was gay. Many African-American ministers involved in the civil rights movement would have nothing to do with him, and they intentionally spread rumors throughout the movement that Martin Luther King himself was gay because of his close friendship with Rustin. In a spring 1987 interview with Open Hands, a resource for ministries that affirmed the diversity of human sexuality, Rustin recalled that difficult period quite vividly. He said:

“Martin Luther King, with whom I worked very closely, became very distressed when a number of the ministers working for him wanted him to dismiss me from his staff because of my homosexuality. Martin set up a committee to discover what he should do. They said that, despite the fact that I had contributed tremendously to the organization … they thought that I should separate myself from Dr. King.

This was the time when [Rev. Adam Clayton] Powell threatened to expose my so-called homosexual relationship with Dr. King.

When Rustin pushed King on the issue, urging him to speak up on his behalf, King did not. John D’Emilio, in his book Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin,wrote the following on the matter:

Rustin offered to resign in the hope that this would force the issue. Much to his chagrin, King did not reject the offer. At the time, King was also involved in a major challenge to the conservative leadership of the National Baptist Convention, and one of his ministerial lieutenants in the fight was also gay. “Basically [King] said I can’t take on two queers at one time,” one of Rustin’s associates recollected later.

And in the 1988 book Other Countries: Black Gay Voices, Vol. 1, Rustin is quoted as saying, “It is difficult for me to know what Dr. King felt about Gayness….”

By the time he was assassinated, Martin Luther King’s popularity had been waning. Some observers argued that the plight of black America was not improving with King’s theopolitical ideology of integration, and the rising Black Power movement was challenging the very idea of nonviolent direct action. Meanwhile, some of King’s followers felt that he was paying more attention to loving the enemy than to doing something about the suffering of black people. Young, urban black males in particular felt alienated by King’s approach, which they believed relied too heavily on the largesse of the white establishment, concentrated too much on southern issues like eliminating segregation and ending black voter disenfranchisement, and ignored the economic problems of blacks in the northern urban ghettos. And amidst the race riots that broke out in 128 cities across the country between 1963 and 1968, King’s interpretation of the Black Power movement as ”a nihilistic philosophy born out of the conviction that the Negro can’t win” lost him the potential support of these urban black males. Disaffected observers identified the various causes of the riots as high unemployment, poor schools, inferior living conditions, the disproportionate drafting of black men for the Vietnam War and the assassination of civil rights activists, issues that they did not feel were being addressed in King’s approach.

Given Martin Luther King’s waning popularity toward the end of his life, I am beginning to wonder whether he really would have offered his voice on behalf of LGBTQ people. Chatting about this subject with my friend Richard, a straight ally, I wrote, “I agree that you have to wonder whether King would support LGBTQ rights today, even if he felt he couldn’t in the 60s. You’d like to think he would given his courageous stands otherwise.” I now believe that not only would King not have supported LGBTQ rights but his relevance on social issues would have continued to wane considerably had he survived. Coretta Scott King kept King’s words, theology and legacy alive by rightly attaching them to contemporary social justice issues like LGBTQ rights, but, though it is clear that King’s words resonate with our cause, and that we can take those words with us as we march for our own civil rights, I’m not certain that we could take the man.

What do you think?

One blockbuster hit that’s playing in cinemas now, and is likely to walk away with several Golden Globes and Oscars, is Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained.”

“Django Unchained” depicts a slave-turned-bounty hunter (Jamie Foxx) who fearlessly treks across the U.S. to find his wife (Kerry Washington) in order to rescue her from a brutal Mississippi plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio).

The film is classic Tarantino; this time a homage to the spaghetti western with romance and revenge narrative. Tarantino set the story in the most unlikely of places— America’s Deep South before the Civil War in 1858.

Tarantino is known as the “King of Carnage,” and his films’ aestheticized depictions of violence (which he calls “movie violence”) is both cruelly disturbing yet undeniably entertaining. In giving his view of “Django Unchained,” “New York Times” film critic A. O. Scott wrote,  “A troubling and important movie about slavery and racism..Like Inglourious Basterds, “Django Unchained” is crazily entertaining, brazenly irresponsible and also ethically serious in a way that is entirely consistent with its playfulness.”

It is Tarantino’s playfulness set in the troubling historical environment that is still unsettling many Americans. But leave it to Tarantino—he’s challenged us to ask a number of difficult questions:

Is it politically incorrect to depict American slavery in a playfully entertaining way?

Is there a politically correct way to depict American slavery?

While some will contest that Tarantino is being well…Tarantino, and he means no disrespect, others argue that his privilege as a well-respected moneymaking white heterosexual male filmmaker gives him carte blanche to recklessly express his creative juices even if it reinscribes stereotypes that many feel Django does.

But Tarantino pushes his critics back stating his objective in making “Django” is to stir a conversation about slavery because America won’t. And he takes his making of Django to heart.

“It’s one thing to write on the page, ‘Cotton field in the background while two white characters are drinking lemonade, 100 slaves picking cotton in the background,’” Tarantino told “Nightline. “It’s another thing to plant that cotton and put 100 black folks in slave costumes broiling under the hot sun picking cotton. That can get to your soul a little bit.”

In many African American communities Tarantino’s films got to their souls, too, and it received mixed reviews from a tepid nod to expressions of outrage. And those outraged by the film feel “Django Unchained” needs to be locked up, bound, buried if not burned because the film uses the inhumanity of slavery as a backdrop and it dishonors those who have suffered under its reign.

Then there’s the liberal use of the n-word in the film which many will find deplorable. When asked about it, Tarantino told Cynthia McFadden on ABC’s “Nightline,” “I don’t think anybody is actually going out there saying that we used the word more excessively than it was used in 1858 in Mississippi. And if that’s not the case, then they can shut up.”

But one critic in particular who won’t shut up about Django is renown African American filmmaker Spike Lee whose gripes resonate for many and were recorded in the New York Times.

I can’t speak on it ’cause I’m not gonna see it,” Lee said. “The only thing I can say is it’s disrespectful to my ancestors, to see that film.” Days later on Twitter he tweeted, “American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust. My Ancestors Are Slaves. Stolen From Africa. I Will Honor Them.”

American slavery continues to be a difficult topic to talk about. And it’s avoided at all cost, particularly if not spun to appeal to white audiences.

For example, the Queen of Daytime talk, Oprah Winfrey tried to tackle the topic with her production of the 1998 film  “Beloved” based on Toni Morrison’s novel by the same name. It was a box office failure. The failure is speculated to be that the film didn’t appeal to white audiences, casting them in a negative light. Some critics contest that the movie was too serious, not entertaining enough, and was mind-numbing to both black and white audiences of all ages. The weekend “Beloved” opened it was beat out by the horror flick “Bride of Chucky”.

The 1977 hit television series “Roots” based on Alex Haley’s novel by the same name was an international success, nominated for 36 Emmys and winning nine. It was intentionally written to win over white viewers.

“Familiar television actors like American (sic) actor Lorne Greene were chosen for the white, secondary roles, to reassure audiences. The white actors were featured disproportionately in network previews. For the first episode, the writers created a conscience-stricken slave captain (Edward Asner), a figure who did not appear in Haley’s novel but was intended to make white audiences feel better about their historical role in the slave trade,” the Museum of Broadcast Communications reported.

Tarantino’s creative rendering of it, albeit understandably troublesome, sheds a disturbing light on our culture’s ability to willingly sit alone in a dark theater for two plus hours watching an entertaining film about American slavery than to voluntarily sit in a lit room face-to-face with each other and talk about it.

American slavery is an American story.  And we all have ownership of it.

The original purpose for the document core to President Abraham Lincoln’s presidency may have been to free slaves; or it may have been solely a strategic move to decimate the Confederate troops stronghold in the South and win the Civil War. Its purpose was probably a little bit of both. Regardless of Lincoln’s intent, my ancestors named the day of Lincoln’s signing of this historic document Jubilee Day. Many African Americans continue to celebrate Jubilee Day with a New Year’s Eve church service called “Watch Night Service.”

I grew up in the tradition. Every December 31st there was a mad rush to clean the house, cook a pot of black-eyed peas for good luck, and call folks to tell them that, if God wills, you’ll see them in the New Year. Then we’d prepare for the most important event of New Year’s Eve, the “Watch Night Service,” which always started at ten o’clock that evening, and ended at midnight with us stepping into a new year.
This New Year’s Eve many folks joined in on the celebration: Boston’s Museum of African American History celebrated the sesquicentennial of President Abraham Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation with a concert by the Handel and Haydn Society Chorus and the story of Boston’s role in this historic event. The Huffington Post marked the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation with publishing  ”Letters to Our Ancestors, “ by African Americans.

In celebration this historical moment I was asked what gifts my enslaved ancestors passed on to future generations to assist us in our continued fight for freedom. While clearly there are many, inarguably, one of the greatest gifts my ancestors passed on to African Americans is their use of the Bible as a liberation tool. And for many African Americans, even today, will contest their Emancipation Proclamation is the Bible.

The Bible, with all its inconsistencies, continues to have moral authority in the African-American religious community. Functioning as a moral text, the Bible is used as a subversive tool to form and to frame a democratic moral order.

King is gone from us now and we’re in a new century with the election of Barack Obama in 2008 as our country’s first African-American president and his reelection in 2012. My ancestors who built the White House could have never imagined that one of their progenies would one day occupy it.

My ancestors were happy about the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, but they also were prescient about our continued long and arduous journey toward freedom, which is why they passed on to us their talking-book and it’s still talking for us today.

Inarguably, one of the greatest gifts my ancestors passed on to African Americans is their use of the Bible as a liberation tool.

The Bible, with all its inconsistencies, continues to have moral authority in the African-American religious community. Functioning as a moral text, the Bible is used as a subversive tool to form and to frame a democratic moral order.

When slave masters gave my ancestors the Bible, their intent was not to make them better Christians, but instead better slaves. The Bible, at least according to slave owners, was used as one of the legitimate sanctions for American slavery.

However, my ancestors had the moral outrage and courage to take this authoritative text that was meant to aid them in acclimating to their life of servitude and turned it into an incendiary test that not only foment slave revolts and abolitionists movements, but also the nation’s black civil rights movement. The Bible told African Americans how to do what must be done. And, in so doing moral leaders sprung up. Nat Turner revolted against slavery, and Harriet Tubman conducted a railroad out of it, to name just a few.

With the use of the Bible my ancestors also expanded not only the understanding of what it meant to be human, but also the parameters of what it meant to be a Christian; thus giving us a biblical language that could be heard. And my ancestors understood the power of that language.

For example, they knew that their liberation is not only rooted in their acts of social protests, but it is also rooted in their use of language, which is why they used the Exodus narrative in the Old Testament as their talking-book. Functioning as a talking book for my ancestors, the Exodus narrative dramatically shifts the discourse on slavery from the authority of white voices to the control of black voices. In so doing, Exodus was used to rebuke themes of silence, exclusion and oppression in the text, which in return allowed my ancestors to represent themselves as speaking subjects outside of the text.

One of the oldest spirituals that inspired my ancestors to persevere in the face of hardship was “Go Down Moses,” which was the earliest form of African Americans’ appropriation of the Exodus narrative. “Go Down Moses” became a standard hymn for African-American churches across the country. And it became a standard hymn because the spiritual has three central themes in the song that shaped black liberationist agency in the U.S.: a desire for freedom, a tactical battle for gaining freedom, and a mandate for justice mediated by God on behalf of the oppressed. And The Rev. Dr. King masterfully contextualized the 1960s Civil Rights Movement in the story of the Exodus narrative, and the church, media and American public saw him as a present-day Moses.

Being of African descent creates a distinctive epistemology that shapes not only our identity but it also shapes our distinctive interpretative lens about freedom and democracy that derives from the black church, and is part of the religious cosmos of my ancestors.

For my African ancestors, the Bible became a subversive tool, particularly in a Western culture that did not value the veracity of their lives told in an African oral tradition. They made visible with the use of the Bible those lives that are too often, with intent, omitted, and they knew those behind them, their progeny, would need it. And stories like the Exodus narrative became part of an African-American biblical canon for survival, reminding their progeny and their oppressors that our lives, too, are sacred texts.

Justice in America for African Americans continues to come slowly, just as it did for my ancestors awaiting the good news that President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had finally become law. But only slaves in the Confederate States were declared legally free even as the Civil War was still going on. A century after the Emancipation Proclamation, King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and said, “one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.”

King is gone from us now and we’re in a new century with the election of Barack Obama in 2008 as our country’s first African-American president and his reelection in 2012. My ancestors who built the White House could have never imagined that one of their progenies would one day occupy it.

But they were prescient about our continued long and arduous journey toward freedom, which is why they passed on to us their talking-book and it’s still talking for us today.

The enormity of this devastation is incalculable. There are the small coffins of the victims killed during a holiday season at a tender age. It is also the death of the safety of a Norman Rockwellian. We now know that none are safe.

This shooting, like so many others before, has sparked a debate on gun control and the need for adequate healthcare for our nation’s mentally ill. But glaringly omitted from the national discourse is the motive of these mass shootings that are purported predominately within a specific demographic group— young white privileged men.

“I think we need to examine critically, the fact that most mass shooting are done by young, white, relatively economically privileged males. What is it about their socialization that results in the manifestation of their mental illness in a rage-fueled carnage of this magnitude? If we don’t ask these questions, along with all the others, I fear we are missing an important factor in this and other mass shooting tragedies,” wrote an academic administrator from UMASS Boston in an email to me.

The Columbine High School massacre in 1999 involved two young white males, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Both were from an affluent suburb of Colorado. Their massacre of schoolmates called attention to the killers next door. At least for a while. Loners wearing trench coats dominated the news then faded into the background.

This oversight in examination might be one of the reasons mass shootings by white young men from middle class families seems to be happening more frequently.

For example, a list of mass shootings compiled by the online blog “Think Progress” of this specific demographic group reveals, not including Newton, that this year alone there have been seven: