On Evil and Angelic Troublemakers: What Bayard Rustin (and Martin Luther King and Gandhi) Were About

Colleen, thank you for reminding me that angelic troublemakers should not forget their vocation to be troublemakers. The point on which I'm insisting over and over in comments here lately is that I think we should struggle to keep aiming at the angelic side of the equation, too.

Quote for the Day: Bayard Rustin on How Laws Permitting Discrimination Threaten Everyone, Not Just Targeted Minorities

On 17 April 1986, civil rights activist Bayard Rustin testified before a meeting of a committee of the New York city council as the council deliberated about proposals to gut laws protecting LGBT citizens from discrimination. Rustin stated, 

End-of-Week Hodgepodge: On Defining Others, Bayard Rustin, Hate and Religion, Witches, and President-Elect of Conference of Catholic Superiors of Men

Today in History: Martin Luther King, Jr., Has a Dream

Today in 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his "I Have a Dream Speech" in Washington, D.C. Videos of the speech are available online, but the family of Dr. King owns the copyright to the speech, and I have not embedded one of these videos in this posting for that reason. The American Rhetoric website has an audio version and the full text.

Bayard Rustin Awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom: Continuing Pertinence of "Time on Two Crosses"

As the week winds down, I don't want to miss taking note of this important piece of news: the White House announced two days ago that it's posthumously awarding African-American gay activist Bayard Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom. I've written frequently here about Rustin, who has long inspired me. Readers interested in him and anything I may have said about him can click his name in the labels below. Rustin is the source of my logo at Bilgrimage: "We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers."

More End-of-Week News: Maciel and John Paul II, Bayard Rustin, and Crisis of Democracy

I apologize that I'm a bit pressed for blogging time today, as I prepare for a day trip to chase down some information for the book on which I've been working--specifically, to see if some distant cousins who grew up with close connections to the book's subject, the 19th-century Arkansas country doctor-cum-philosopher Wilson R. Bachelor, can help identify some old family pictures.  Since I'm preparing to be on the run, I thought I'd post briefly about several articles that interested me when I read them yesterday.

Jeremiah Wright's Little Rock Sermon: What He Said, What I Heard

When I blogged about Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s sermon at New Millennium Baptist church in Little Rock yesterday, I mentioned that I might add a bit later about what Rev. Wright said in his sermon.  I’m not sure that the notes I took are worth sharing with anyone else, because they’re idiosyncratic.  Like most longtime listeners to sermons, I hear what I want to hear in homilies that make a broader and more elegant point than the one I’m receiving—though I have long since trained myself to hear the text even as I weave my own subtext while I listen.

Ongoing Challenge for Obama Administration: Bridging the Black-Gay Divide

On Saturday, Pam Spaulding posted a stellar piece of commentary at her House Blend blog, re: how the “pink beltway” community views the Obama administration’s accomplishments vis-à-vis LGBT rights.  Pam notes that, whereas the insular community of A-list gays in the beltway culture see Mr. Obama as a preeminent champion of gay rights, many gays and lesbians who aren’t part of that self-absorbed subculture beg to differ. 

Obama and Gay Questions: The African-American Churched Context

For anyone trying to understand President Obama’s refusal to deal with gay issues—or even speak about gay lives and gay concerns—thus far in his presidency, a posting by Pam Spaulding at her House Blend blog yesterday is must reading. I’d like to offer some thoughts about this posting now, as background to my posting earlier today about Harry Knox and what I fear will be President Obama’s response to pressure from the Catholic far right acting in collusion with the political right to fire him.

Pam Spaulding entitles her posting, “Why President Obama Hurts His Own Case of Addressing Homophobia in the Black Community.” Pam builds her insightful analysis around an article by Marc Fisher in the Washington Post two days ago, which argues that, in ignoring gay issues now, the new president is necessarily playing pragmatic politics.

Fisher notes that historians will be puzzled by the fact that, on the one hand, Obama’s election appeared to usher in a new era of acceptance of the moral claims of gay human beings in our culture, and on the other hand, a strange turn in Obama’s attitudes, which represents a tempering or even a reversal of his approach to gay matters prior to his election. He notes that Obama’s approach now is “primarily political,” and is dominated by “electoral concerns,” particularly by his need to play to churched voters—a need evident in his selection of Rick Warren for a prominent role in the inauguration.

Pam Spaulding agrees with Fisher. She concludes that Obama is unwilling to challenge the anti-gay views of churched voters. She goes further, in fact, and argues that Obama has made a “decision to purposefully confuse the issue” of gay rights with his African-American churched supporters.

Pam notes the considerable backlash against gay rights now underway in some sectors of the African-American community—a backlash so powerful that it has caused D.C. mayor Marion Barry to do an about-face on gay issues that equals the one we seem to be seeing with the new president, such that Barry did a preposterous (and totally unconvincing, given his own personal history) grandstanding act when the D.C. city council recently passed a bill to recognize gay marriages performed outside D.C. In voting against the bill, Barry announced that he was defending morality! He also observed, “"All hell is going to break lose. We may have a civil war. The black community is just adamant against this."

The black community is just adamant against this: Barry is speaking the gospel truth here, though, of course, there are powerful and morally compelling spokespersons within the black community who reject homophobia and who argue that it is immoral, not moral, to demean gay persons and create second-class citizenship categories for gay persons. These powerful, morally compelling spokespersons include Leonard Pitts, to whose response to Barry I’ve just linked.

Still, it is important to note that, in dragging his feet on gay issues and playing games with gay lives, the new president is quite decidedly playing to one of the groups most strongly in his corner—the African-American community, and churched African Americans in particular. As Pam Spaulding notes, anyone following blog discussions of gay issues that center on African-American concerns can easily see this.

If the gay community wants to understand what it is up against in dealing with the silence of the Obama administration about gay lives and gay issues, it cannot afford to discount the African-American community—as it has all too often done in the past. It is important that gay citizens understand the significant, even determinative, role that black attitudes about gay people and gay rights have been playing in the new administration.

As I’ve noted previously on this blog, I have my own personal experience with precisely the dynamic now underway with the new president. My partner and I accepted the invitation of an African-American friend several years ago to work in the administration of her college. On the strength of verbal promises she made to us, and never dreaming that she would betray us (because she is a strong, committed churchgoing Methodist), we uprooted ourselves, took on a second mortgage, and moved to a new state to assist this friend who had publicly stated that she supports gay rights and combats discrimination against gay people.

Only to find ourselves in one of the most hurtful situations of our lives: within weeks after our arrival at our new workplace, our friend began to hammer away at us as a gay couple, precisely because we were a gay couple. She informed us that, just as we arrived at the new jobs, the United Methodist church, which owns her school, had had its annual statewide meeting and had split down the middle about whether even to admit gay members, let alone disavow its homophobia. She told us that her United Methodist bishop had informed her he would not have approved our hire, had he known we were a couple. She told us not to come to work together, not to go to lunch together, not to take each other to the doctor: to closet ourselves, in other words.

It was an intolerable situation. We had walked into a trap, because we had believed that an African-American Christian who professed to deplore homophobia would not first betray and then savage us. We are now saddled with a second mortgage on a house we cannot sell, which drains us financially, and I am without a job or health insurance, after what this African-American Methodist friend did to us.

This experience, and my years of work in HBCUs, have taught me some critically important lessons about the attitude of some African Americans about gay lives and gay issues. What I learned through this experience of harsh discrimination has opened my eyes to some thought patterns within the black community that I now see amply represented on blogs discussing Obama’s behavior towards his gay supporters. My life lesson also helps me to understand why Obama is maintaining silence and even reneging on his campaign promises to the gay community.

We in the gay community need to know that many African Americans—particularly many churched African Americans—not only resent our comparison of our struggle for rights with the African-American struggle, but actively combat that struggle as an immoral struggle. This attitude is strong in some sectors of the black community despite the prophetic witness of African-American leaders like Bayard Rustin, Mildred Loving, or Coretta Scott King,* all of whom noted the parallels between the black struggle for civil rights and the gay struggle.

We in the gay community also need to understand that, for some African Americans—including many churched African Americans—a psychological dynamic born out of years of oppression remains very strong in the approach to gay people: this is the need to ridicule, resent, and subordinate someone who appears weaker and lower than oneself. Read the comments of many African Americans on blogs discussing the new president’s treatment of his gay supporters, and this attitude will leap out everywhere: gays are out of line, whining about their rights, demanding what they haven’t earned, undermining the president, behaving as they usually do, like petty, quarrelsome children.

Some African Americans resist and will continue to resist any analysis of the struggle of gay human beings for human rights as a moral struggle. Those who take this approach will continue to fight for the right to treat gay human beings as morally and psychologically defective persons whom one may ridicule and discriminate against with impunity. Many of those following this line of thought will taunt the gay community for not playing politics as adroitly as the black community does, for not recognizing that the pie of human rights is tiny and has slices enough only for a few—and certainly not for weak, immoral gays.

And as this goes on, many black churches will—just as many white churches do—not only not seek to curb the savagery, but will actively promote it. There is a clear, undeniable correlation between church membership and homophobia in the black community, as there is in the white community—with notable exceptions in both communities, within some church communions.

What makes Mr. Obama’s decision to stand with these churched supporters promoting bigotry is his own recognition that, in taking this stand, he is betraying moral principles. As the article by Marc Fisher I cite above notes, in his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope, Mr. Obama wrote,

It is my obligation, not only as an elected official in a pluralistic society but also as a Christian, to remain open to the possibility that my unwillingness to support gay marriage is misguided . . . and that in years hence I may be seen as someone who was on the wrong side of history.

I would submit that, to be capable of writing such a sentence, one must already have arrived at the moral insight that one is on “the wrong side of history” in opposing gay marriage, and in remaining silent about the lives and struggles of one’s gay friends and supporters. I read this as an admission on the part of the new president that he chooses to place pragmatic political expediency over doing what is right, when it comes to questions of gay people and gay rights.

Why? Because he can do so. There is not a sufficient price to be paid, when someone who knows in his or heart that he is doing wrong betrays gay friends and supporters today. In fact, the price to be paid is considerably on the side of those who make, not break, solidarity with gay persons.

I have sought long and hard to understand why my purportedly gay-affirming African-American friend betrayed my partner and me. Sadly, I have come to the conclusion that it simply does not matter to her—not very much—that she has done so. She will, after all, walk away from her current position with money galore. With all the money she will have earned, why should she worry about the fact that she has placed us in a situation of financial need and personal grief?

As President Bush said, why worry about history, anyway, when you won't be around to read it? He, too, walked away with lots of money . . . . We are a culture that lives frankly and unapologetically by the power of the dollar, even when we pay lip-service to other values. And where one's treasure is, there will one's heart be.

I can’t, of course, speak for what people have to live with in their own souls, when they behave treacherously towards others. And I believe that as our culture shifts regarding gay lives and gay issues, we will soon see a new moral consensus which, once and for all, reveals those who attack and betray gay persons as anything but morally admirable people.

But we are not yet there. And there is a price to be paid, at this tipping point moment in our history, by leaders who move towards the future, who help shape that new moral consensus. When that price means engaging the powerful, malicious forces of the religious right, which has worked very hard to fan the flames of homophobia in black churches as well as white ones, what's a leader to do?

*For my reflections on the contribution of these thinkers, follow links to Coretta Scott King and Bayard Rustin. Information about Mildred Loving may be found by entering her name in the search engine at the top of the blog.

Bayard Rustin and Black History Month: Brother Outsider

One final posting before the day ends. Readers of Bilgrimage may have noted that the blog’s footer contains a quotation from Bayard Rustin: We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers.

I’ve blogged a number of times about Bayard Rustin and his importance to both the black and the gay civil rights movement (e.g., http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/prejudice-is-of-single-bit-continuing.html and
http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/hate-crime-in-daytona-beach-continuing.html). Rustin was an openly gay African-American Quaker and political activist, who was a close advisor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Because of his sexual orientation, King kept Rustin away from the front lines while relying on him for insight and sage guidance.

Bayard Rustin is an important point of contact between the African-American and the gay community, and the struggle of both communities for civil rights. Through his participation in both struggles, Rustin came to the conclusion that gay civil rights had become the “barometer” of civil rights in general at the end of the 20th century, as black civil rights had been in the first part of the century. In a 1987 interview he stated,

There are very few liberal Christians today who would dare say anything other than blacks are our brothers and they should be treated so, but they will make all kinds of hideous distinctions when it comes to our gay brothers . . . . There are great numbers of people who will accept all kinds of people: blacks, Hispanics, and Jews, but who won’t accept fags. That is what makes the homosexual central to the whole political apparatus as to how far we can go in human rights (John D’Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (NY: Free Press, 1993), p. 490, citing George Chauncey, Jr. and Lisa Kennedy, “Time on Two Crosses: An Interview with Bayard Rustin,” Village Voice, 30 June 1987, pp. 27-29).

Because of Bayard Rustin’s importance to the American civil rights movement, I’m happy to see that the latest newsletter of the United Methodist Reconciling Ministries Network has an article focusing on Rustin (www.rmnetwork.org/Flashnet_show.asp?FlashnetID=182#3). RMN recommends as a resource for Black History Month a recent documentary about Bayard Rustin entitled “Brother Outsider” (http://rustin.org).

I hadn’t known about this documentary, and now intend to find a copy. It looks outstanding. I’m glad to see RMN helping circulate information about this important resource and about one of the most significant, but often overlooked, figures of American civil rights struggles of the 20th century.

Hate Crime in Daytona Beach: The Continuing Pertinence of Mary McLeod Bethune

News of a horrible hate crime in Daytona Beach. According to Mark I. Johnson and Seth Robbins, “Driver Charged with Hate Crime after Bicyclist Run Down,” yesterday Thomas Darryl Cosby was charged with a hate crime after he deliberately ran down an African-American woman the day before (www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/News/Headlines/frtHEAD02EAST071608.htm). Simply because she is black.

The allegation is that, Monday evening, Cosby ran his sedan off the street in Daytona Beach, careening into Mekeda Cato, who suffered a badly broken leg and internal injuries. His car then crashed, at which point, Cosby emerged from it, inciting bystanders to racial violence and shouting that African Americans should be returned to Africa.

This story catches my attention for a number of reasons. First, it’s a story illustrating the violence to which minority communities are still all too frequently subjected. And when such events occur, news coverage is often spotty and localized. We all, as part of the body politic, need to listen more carefully to the stories told by members of various minority communities about violence to which they are subjected, simply because they belong to a marginalized group.

Second, Steve and I lived for over a year in Port Orange, which happens to be where Mr. Cosby also lives. In fact, we own a house there, one we have been unable to sell, since we acquired it as a result of promises made to us that were revoked after we made the crucial decision to put ourselves in debt by purchasing the house.

So I feel a certain personal connection with this story. We often biked along the sidewalks of this city and neighboring ones, including Daytona Beach.

Third, as readers of this blog know, I have a very strong interest in the life and work of that important 20th-century African-American educator, Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune. Dr. Bethune founded a college in Daytona Beach, now known as Bethune-Cookman University.

As various postings on this blog have noted, Dr. Bethune developed a powerful pedagogical theory underscoring the links between education and participatory democracy. As did Bayard Rustin, the African-American Quaker thinker-activist whose work I have also cited frequently, Dr. Bethune considered American democracy unfinished business.

Both of these prophetic black leaders noted that democracy is an ideal that has not yet been fully realized. Both maintained that democracy will be realized—will be extended, will move from ideal to real—as the body politic recognizes that some groups within our society are disenfranchised and must be brought to the table.

Both Dr. Bethune and Bayard Rustin stressed the need for safe spaces in which marginal communities can come together with the mainstream community for dialogue, interaction, and development of a vision of the common good that will serve the needs of all. Dr. Bethune built such town-gown meetings into the educational philosophy and practice of the college she founded.

In these meetings, Dr. Bethune modeled the kind of inclusivity that she challenged American democracy to develop. Dr. Bethune’s town-gown meetings gave no privileged place to any group. In a time and place in which whites were expected to occupy seats of honor and blacks to sit at the back of the room, Dr. Bethune opened her doors to everyone, with the provision that people sit where they could find seating.

By eradicating preferential seating—a radical act in the time and place in which she lived—Mary McLeod Bethune demonstrated to her community what participatory democracy is all about: it’s about bringing everyone to the table, providing an equal place for everyone, and listening respectfully to everyone across lines that divide us. Dr. Bethune’s town-gown meetings abolished the lines that divide, at least for the space of the meeting itself.

In the leadership team she developed for her college, Dr. Bethune also sought to model such inclusivity and such abolition of racial lines. Dr. Bethune’s leadership team deliberately brought together people from across racial lines. She stressed the need for her students to be taught by people from all racial backgrounds, from all walks of life, since they would be functioning in a pluralistic society.

As the story from Daytona Beach that begins this posting illustrates, Florida still struggles, along with the rest of the nation, to build participatory democracy. Racial divisions remain strong in Daytona Beach, and in many parts of Florida.

As I have noted before, Bishop Timothy Whitaker, bishop of the Florida United Methodist Conference which sponsors Bethune-Cookman University, has a premier chance today to develop a model that would put into practice the recent UMC General Conference’s challenge to Methodists to educate themselves and others about discrimination. The university founded by Mary McLeod Bethune, which is under Bishop Whitaker’s pastoral jurisdiction, offers a rich opportunity for Bishop Whitaker and Florida Methodists to develop workshops and educational programs that explore marginalization and its effects in Florida communities.

With the heritage bequeathed by its founder, Bethune-Cookman University can continue to play a significant role in modeling participatory democracy and in educating for participatory democracy both locally and internationally. The recent decision of the United Methodist Church to place the current president of Bethune-Cookman University, Dr. Trudie Kibbe Reed, on its University Senate is another opportunity for Dr. Bethune's university to demonstrate to the church at large what Dr. Bethune’s legacy means in practice. Dr. Trudie Kibbe Reed is a distinguished African-American educator and a Methodist leader. Her placement on this important Methodist university body holds much promise to bring the legacy of Dr. Bethune into a wider community.

As the story of Mr. Cosby’s horrific assault on Ms. Cato indicates, we have much work to do—and Florida has much work to do—to overcome violence against minorities in our communities. What better way to begin the process than by following the path set before us by Mary McLeod Bethune—by developing safe spaces to bring various communities together for dialogue; by developing inclusive structures of educational leadership that model the kind of inclusivity we seek to teach students; and by moving our churches’ rhetoric about social healing beyond the rhetorical level to actual practice?

And, it goes without saying, such new models of educational leadership in church-sponsored colleges and universities absolutely have to deal with questions of marginalization due to sexual orientation. I’m reminded of this crucial need in Florida by a recent email I received from Chuck Wolfe, president of Victory Fund, a Florida political organization committed to pursuing rights for the LGBT community in Florida.

The email I received begins by stating,

Not every state with a big LGBT community is friendly to LGBT rights. Take Florida – where it’s still legal to fire employees based on sexual orientation or gender identity alone. Gays and lesbians also can’t adopt, and committed same-sex couples have zero partnership rights.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence then that Florida is the largest state to have never elected an openly LGBT state legislator.

There’s work to do in Florida. I’m pleased that the school founded by Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune is on the scene, continuing to embody the ideals of Dr. Bethune. I encourage Bishop Whitaker and Dr. Trudie Kibbe Reed to continue developing Dr. Bethune’s educational model for a local community in which the need is obviously so acute. With the historic first represented by Mr. Obama's bid for the presidency, we have a chance today for a renewed dialogue about race (and other forms of marginalization) in American democracy. Institutions like Bethune-Cookman University, with the rich legacy of Mary McLeod Bethune, have a singular opportunity to contribute to this dialogue.

Leadership: We Must Become the Change

I have to be away for a period of time tomorrow, so it's possible I won't be posting until later in the day--if then.

Meanwhile, since a weekend will have come and gone before I resume posting, I don't want to leave blank pages in this online journal. In case readers are looking for something to read, I'd like to make a brief mention of two interrelated resources.

First, I'm grateful to Bilerico blog for publishing the posting I wrote some days back on Barack Obama and post-homophobic models of African-American leadership. The Bilerico copy is at www.bilerico.com/2008/07/barack_obama_and_posthomophobic_models_o.php. For readers of this blog, the discussion of the text at Bilerico may be of interest.

I admire Bil Browning's Bilerico blog for all kinds of reasons. It aims at an inclusivness that crosses racial lines, as well as the the bizarre line that sometimes causes the gay community to exclude the transgendered or those considered gender-inappropriate. Bilerico is progressive without being dogmatic: it entertains a variety of political perspectives and conversations, and encourages free speech about these. Even when I don't agree with the political position someone is taking on Bilerico, I find the conversation instructive.

I also like the inclusion of younger and less official (and officious) voices than those that often appear on LGBT blogs. As someone drawn to education, I've always felt that each generation needs to make a strong effort to transmit values to the next, to draw the coming generation along, and to have the good sense to let go at some point. It's important for those of us accustomed to droning on and on to stop talking at some point and let younger folks have a go at it. When we do so, we might be surprised at what we learn.

This concern forms the background to some of what I've been posting on leadership--including what I said in my posting on Obama and the need to develop post-homophobic models of leadership in the African-American community. That posting focused on the hopefulness that (in my view) one may see in the gradual shift from generation to generation, towards a more respectful and inclusive attitude to gay citizens.

In my recent posting on Bayard Rustin entitled "Prejudice Is of a Single Bit," I noted Rustin's emphasis on the need for leaders to model leadership: to embody the values they hope to enshrine in the process of social transformation. I'm strongly persuaded that churches and educators and plain old human beings, in the process of transmitting values from one generation to the next, cannot expect to be successful unless the process of transmission is more than verbal. It's imperative that leaders model what it means to lead.

When values are what's being transmitted, it's imperative that leaders model the values they believe it's important to pass on to the next generation. My reflections on Obama (and Rustin) note the need for leaders to model inclusiveness, respect for dialogue, openness to the perspectives of the least among us, the willingness to talk beyond the lines of ghettoization that divide marginal community from marginal community.

These are essential virtues for leaders in any participatory democracy that wants to remain viable. They're traits I'm looking for as I assess the current crop of political candidates. I intend to keep the feet of any leader I help elect to the fire, regarding these virtues.

And, in case anyone is interested in further ruminations of mine on this point, I'll end this posting by pointing to another resource. This is an essay of mine on the them of leadership at www.cookman.edu/documents/leadershipin_academiclife_lindsey072306.doc.

Prejudice Is of a Single Bit: The Continuing Importance of Bayard Rustin

I had intended to blog today about the African-American leader Bayard Rustin, whose observation about angelic troublemakers forms the footer to this blog’s homepage. Rustin fascinates me for all kinds of reasons I’ve outlined in previous postings: he was an African-American civil rights leader who also happened to be gay, and who recognized the interconnections between the black quest for civil rights and the gay quest; his activism was fed by deep spiritual roots; along with Mary McLeod Bethune, whom he knew, he saw American democracy as an unfinished project that grows as we extend rights to groups currently deprived of rights; and he found a way to do his work and make his voice heard despite the atrocious opposition he attracted as both a man of color and a gay man.

With that nexus of thoughts in mind for today’s blog, I was delighted to click today on a blog I read each weekday—peterson toscano’s a musing—and to discover that Peterson Toscano blogged about Bayard Rustin yesterday. In fact, he incorporates some of the same material I had set aside for my posting today.

My blog is linked to Peterson Toscano’s blog in the links section. I recommend his blog because of its exploration of the connections between Quakerism and social justice—and, in particular, between Quakerism and an ethic of radical inclusion of LGBT people. That ethic is sorely needed at a time in which strong (and well-funded forces) within some churches, including the worldwide Anglican communion, are pushing hard to make the exclusion of LGBT human beings a centerpiece of what it means to be church in the 21st century.

I think it may even have been on Peterson Toscano’s blog that I first encountered Bayard Rustin and his thought. Though I spent a semester on fellowship in 1989 studying the work of Martin Luther King, Jr., I don’t recall running across Rustin in the abundant material I read by and about King in that semester. This is surely an indicator of how his significant influence on King’s thought has been muted by conscious and unconscious homophobia on the part of those of us who have studied King’s work over the years.

I noted on my comments on this year’s anniversary of Juneteenth (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/06/commemorating-juneteenth-yes-we-can.html) that I was reading John D’Emilio’s Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (NY: Free Press, 1993). I’ve been reading D’Emilio’s outstanding biography of Rustin with an eye to the debates about race and gender, models of leadership, and the influence of faith in the public sphere, which the current presidential campaign has stirred up.

Rustin is profoundly important at this juncture of American history because he offers us a vision of participatory democracy to which we need to pay keen attention as we struggle to save our own democracy. As I have noted previously, in my view, if those of us concerned to safeguard democracy in the United States do not work hard in the next few years to reverse the forces that have virtually eroded the legacy of the founding fathers and mothers, we may be facing the extinction of our democratic experiment.

Rustin also strikes me as worth studying carefully at this moment because, for the first time in our history, we have an African-American presidential candidate as a front runner. And, as I’ve noted in previous postings, Mr. Obama is a candidate who appears, thus far, to have the promise to craft new post-homophobic models of African-American leadership, which are sorely needed by the nation as a whole as well as by the African-American community (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/06/barack-obama-and-post-homophobic-models.html). Rustin points the way to those models.

In what follows, I’d like to offer some reflections on key themes of Rustin’s thought, using D’Emilio’s biography of Rustin to identify those themes:

As a civil rights leader, Bayard Rustin was sustained by a vision of democracy that presupposes democracy can and must be constantly extended to disenfranchised groups. D’Emilio notes,

He [i.e., Rustin] argued that out of the civil rights movement there could emerge a coalition of conscience capable of becoming a new progressive majority in the United States. His strategy rested on a bedrock optimism that the American political system was flexible and responsive enough to embrace change of revolutionary dimensions. He believed that peaceful democratic means were adequate to the task of remaking relations of power. Rustin also had faith that individual human beings themselves were just as flexible and that, over time, they could be moved to recognize the worth of every one of their fellows and act accordingly (my emphasis, p. 4).

Rustin’s thought is akin to Mary McLeod Bethune’s, in this respect—and the civil rights philosophy of both of these significant 20th-century African-American leaders may have been fed by some of the same spiritual currents. As did Bethune, Rustin assumed that democracy is a constantly unfinished project.

It grows as we survey the communities in which we live and identify those who are presently disenfranchised, shoved from the table. It grows as we abolish barriers to the inclusion and participation of these disenfranchised groups: as we bring them to the table. The vision of participatory democracy enshrined in our foundational documents assumes that no human being is incapable of making an important contribution to the democratic process, of being at the table, simply because of the color of his skin, her national origin, his social status, her gender, or his/her sexual orientation.

As I noted in a previous posting about Rustin, he was personally connected to Dr. Bethune; the carryover of certain themes in their understanding of participatory democracy may well be rooted in their personal ties to each other. D’Emilio notes that Dr. Bethune stayed with the Rustin family when passing through their area of Pennsylvania (p. 12, citing Gottlieb ms., August Meier Papers at Schomburg Library, New York, NY; and Rustin interview, Columbia Univ. Oral History Collection, New York, NY).

As did Mary McLeod Bethune, Bayard Rustin developed a technique of social activism that depended on sponsoring workshops and town-hall meetings in every community in which he worked. These workshops brought together as many local constituencies as possible. They intentionally brought everyone to the table, so that every perspective could be heard. As did Bethune’s town-hall meetings, the workshops focused on (and tried to model) a communal process of consciousness-raising (pp. 140f).

Bayard Rustin’s philosophy of civil rights arose out of his combined Methodist and Quaker roots. Rustin was raised in a home over which his mother Julia, an African Methodist Episcopal church member, presided. However, Julia Rustin had grown up in a culture imbued with Quaker influence, and both she and Rustin himself often noted the significance of this influence on their lives (p. 9, citing Daily Local News, West Chester, PA, 17 June 1941 and 29 April 1957, in Rustin clipping files at Chester Co. Hist. Soc., West Chester; and Rustin interview, Columbia Univ. Oral History Collection, New York, NY). Julia Rustin’s influence led to her son becoming a Quaker, with the “socially engaged spirituality” of the Friends (see pp. 25-6).

At a crucial point early in Rustin’s career as an activist, he came into contact with Abraham Johannes Muste, the executive secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. This contact brought him into association with the National Council of Methodist Youth, the most politically engaged Christian youth group of the 1930s (p. 44). Sadly, however, Muste was later to repudiate Rustin when it became apparent that he was gay and would not dissimulate about his identity as a gay man.

Bayard Rustin’s spiritual formation caused him to view his civil rights work as not a job, but a vocation. As D’Emilio notes, “His work was a calling, not a job” (p. 197). The spiritual bedrock on which his vision of civil rights activism rested grew even more solid (and ecumenical) when he encountered the thought of Gandhi. Rustin was one of the primary interpreters of Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent action for American social activists, and for Martin Luther King in particular (pp. 52-3).

In some key respects, in fact, it was Bayard Rustin who brought the concept of satyagraha to the civil rights movement in the U.S. The attempt to wed Gandhian nonviolence to American civil rights activism brought him into contact with a leading Methodist thinker of his day, J. Holmes Smith, a former Methodist missionary to India, who founded an ashram in Harlem to model satyagraha in an American context (p. 53).

The combined Quaker and Gandhian roots of Rustin’s civil rights thought (as well as the Methodist emphasis on social justice) caused Rustin to challenge the come-to-Jesus theology of some black churches. In interviews late in his life, Rustin notes that he and King struggled constantly against the attempt of many black church leaders to confine civil rights activism within a stifling theology of soul saving, which was tone-deaf to the need for social transformation (p. 238, citing Rustin interview, Columbia Univ. Oral History Collection, New York, NY).

As a Quaker, Rustin insisted that any path to social change that would effect lasting change within the culture at large had to begin with the change of institutions, and not of hearts (p. 400). His experience as a Quaker led him to note that relying on moral appeal to change institutions like slavery did not work: laws outlawing slavery had to be enacted first. If people’s hearts were to change eventually, they would do so only when legislative, judicial, and institutional attempts to build a more just and humane society preceded that change.

The diverse roots of Bayard Rustin’s spirituality and philosophy of civil rights reflect broad catholic interests and a refusal to accept conventional lines in his own life and in his calling as a civil rights leader. Rustin was always transgressing lines, crossing lines, building coalitions beyond the safe confines of any particular community:

Throughout his life, Bayard maintained a catholic set of interests. He refused to honor the lines that marked and separated individuals and that stratified American society. Gay worlds and straight, black worlds and white, spiritual communities and secular political ones, artistic expression and grass-roots activism all appealed to him (p. 33).

Bayard Rustin believed that the primary role of a transformative leader is to be a moral exemplar of the changes she is trying to effect as a leader. Along with Gandhi—and in line with his Quaker roots—Rustin constantly emphasized that a transformative leader cannot violate the principles he is preaching, in his own life, if he expects to be effective in leading a movement of social change. Rustin stressed the “special responsibility” of leaders to model the moral values of social change as he worked with Dr. King to develop a compelling strategy for social change in race relations (pp. 231, 239).

Bayard Rustin believed that it was profoundly self-defeating for African-American civil rights activists to confine their struggle for human rights to the issue of race alone. As did Dr. King, Rustin held that that “the uplift of all poor people is part of the struggle of Negroes for justice” (p. 266, citing King Papers, Boston University, box 5, folder 29; Bayard Rustin Papers, reel 3, Martin Luther King folder).

Rustin struggled against the NAACP’s attempt to confine civil rights activism to racial issues alone (p. 295), as well as against the gradualist philosophy of the NAACP, which trusted in a top-down approach to racial change, rather than a grassroots approach (p. 293). Rustin saw this approach as not merely self-defeating, since it isolated black Americans from other groups of the poor (that is, the marginal and disenfranchised) struggling for civil rights; he also saw it as self-serving, as an approach that benefited primarily key black ministers and other leaders of the civil rights movement, at the expense of the African-American community as a whole.

In Rustin’s view, civil rights for African Americans makes sense only when viewed within the context of a much broader progressive movement for social change on many fronts in the United States: he characterized the movement for racial equity as the “spearhead” of a much broader movement (pp. 362-3). As Rustin maintained, “We need a political and social reform program that will not only help the Negroes but one that will help all Americans” (p. 363, citing NY Times, 6 Dec. 1963). Indeed, Rustin maintained that the civil rights movement would eventually die out if it did not reach across narrow boundary lines and make common cause with other movements for progressive change—its future depended on a progressive coalition that transcended racial concerns alone (p. 401, citing “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement,” Commentary [Feb. 1965]).

Bayard Rustin’s broad vision of a coalition for progressive change in the United States included gay human beings and gay civil rights. It is incontrovertible that Rustin’s experience as a gay man led him to recognize the significant connections between the black struggle for civil rights and the struggle of gay Americans for civil rights. Rustin’s experience as a black civil rights activist and as a gay man convinced him that African Americans undermined the moral legitimacy of their claim to full human rights if they denied those same rights to other groups—and, notably, to gay brothers and sisters.

Rustin’s experience as a gay man working in the civil rights movement was made exceedingly painful due to the vicious homophobia of some of his friends and allies. In alliance with Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Roy Wilkins so brutally attacked Rustin (slandering him in public forums and seeking to destroy his reputation) that Rustin almost decided to withdraw altogether from the movement for black liberation (pp. 297-300). And, though King himself repudiated Rustin repeatedly because of Rustin’s sexual orientation—while relying on him as a key advisor and strategist—on one occasion in 1964 Rustin helped to shield Dr. King’s entourage, including King’s brother, from morals charges in Oslo when the entourage had brought white prostitutes to their hotel room (p. 396).

Rustin’s experience as the despised, dispossessed, unacknowledged prophet of human rights for all in the black liberation movement led him to note, at the end of his life, that gay rights had become the barometer of civil rights as the 20th century neared its close. In this context, he observed that prejudice is of a single bit:

There are very few liberal Christians today who would dare say anything other than blacks are our brothers and they should be treated so, but they will make all kinds of hideous distinctions when it comes to our gay brothers . . . . There are great numbers of people who will accept all kinds of people: blacks, Hispanics, and Jews, but who won’t accept fags. That is what makes the homosexual central to the whole political apparatus as to how far we can go in human rights (p. 490, citing George Chauncey, Jr. and Lisa Kennedy, “Time on Two Crosses: An Interview with Bayard Rustin,” Village Voice, 30 June 1987, pp. 27-29).

Rustin spoke those prophetic words in 1987. It is now 2008. Twenty years later . . . .

Do Christians still “make all kinds of hideous distinctions when it comes to our gay brothers” in 2008? If so, Rustin’s voice may be just as pertinent now—or perhaps even more pertinent—than it was in the 20th century.

Freedom Is Always Unfinished Business: Meditations on the Fourth

The Fourth for us? It will be some kind of cookout at Philip and Penny’s.

Not a barbecue. I have been horrified (and culture-shocked) in the past to be invited to barbecues in places like Toronto or Boston, and to find that they were plain old cookouts. Barbecue has a very specific meaning, for us in the South: meat (usually pork, unless you’re a Texan, and if so, you’re mostly outside the South) tortured by low, smoky heat while basted with some savory sauce, and then served with more of that sauce to season it.

It is not a hamburger cooked over charcoal on an outdoor grill. That’s not barbecue even if you douse it with barbecue sauce. And don’t get me started on the chili sauce I encountered in my student years in Canada—a gloppy, cloyingly sweet concoction of peppers and onions and spice without an ounce of heat to it. One of those desserts people to the northward like to put on their meat and salads, rather than to save for the dessert table.

So. We’ll probably have something grilled. I’ve made a pot of Brunswick stew so large I’m afraid to try to transport it to the party, for fear it’ll slop over in the car. Penny is going to take fresh peaches she picked last weekend and turn them into a cobbler. Philip hopes to make ice cream, but fears he’s sold or given away his ice cream maker. Our old wooden family one long since disappeared in one or other of my moves. My aunt is between baking cakes and pies for her church (“Those Baptists eat more than anyone I’ve ever seen,” she told me yesterday) and for an AARP gathering yesterday. So she is baked out, and will supply some sausages for the grill.

We’ll eat too much, want to nap afterwards but be unable to do so for manners’ sake, and then will do it all over again, Steve and I, at an evening party at our friends’ Diane and Mary’s.

And I wonder if, along the way, any of us will give any thought at all to the occasion? We weren’t raised in a world in which the Fourth was thought about much—Philip and I weren’t, that is. Penny was born in Faulkner County north of Little Rock, and has stronger patriotic roots than we do.

For us, the Fourth was normally an opportunity to go to what we called the Club (that would be the ridiculously chi-chi way of denoting the Country Club, in our little town) for barbecued chicken, drinks (for the adults; we got lemonade with maraschino cherry juice added), and fireworks. All of which we ate and watched sitting on greens of the golf course.

A nice evening, but hardly a fervent patriotic affair. Anything South-toned, by contrast, immediately captured our imagination, in the more Deep-South areas of the state, including the Louisiana-border area in which we lived. I remember going in sixth grade with a school choir group to sing patriotic songs to the DAR chapter in Pine Bluff.

The Dames sat through the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” I believe they did so through the “Star-Spangled Banner.” But they got up solemnly, en masse, when we sang “Dixie.” I had an aunt who lived in Pine Bluff who considered it her patriotic duty to 1) read Gone with the Wind at least once a year, and 2) go downtown to the theater to see it when it was screened at least once a year in Pine Bluff.

That was the world in which I grew up. The Revolution was a distant memory. The Civil War was yesterday. We still lived its thrills and woes. We still lamented its setback. When we watched GWTW, those were our boys lying dead and wounded all over Atlanta.

And so this says a lot about our Southern appropriation of the glorious Fourth and all its themes. At some level, we were aware that our own Revolutionary ancestors—I’ve counted some thirty in my own lineage, all living in Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina during the Revolution—were more concerned about the taxes on their tobacco crops and their need to settle new land (and plantations with slaves) beyond the Appalachian mountain chain.

This was what motivated most of them to rebel, my ancestors. They coveted land owned by the native peoples. They wanted to leave behind gullied and over-cropped fields in the Carolinas and Virginia for the lush virgin lands of Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama.

They wanted to extend the plantation system westward. They knew full well that it was slaves who would “open” that fertile new land—who would chop down the trees, build levees to stop flooding in lowlands, hoe out weeds, build cabins for themselves and houses for the master, plow and plant and bring wealth to the plantation owner. Their lust for new land was inherently linked to the system of slavery.

So freedom? Well, maybe at some level, we knew better than to pretend that the Revolution was all about freedom. It was about our freedom. Yes. It was decidedly not about the freedom of the slaves who would do the back-breaking labor of opening new plantations. Nor was it about the freedom of the native peoples whose ownership of their lands in states like Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi would simply be ignored when we found ways to make those lands our own.

Do I value the sacrifices my ancestors made in the Revolution? Of course I do. I remember that among those thirty or so soldiers were two who gave their lives, Sergeant Robert Leonard and Captain Samuel Kerr.

But in remembering, I also remember with clear eyes. I have to do so, if I am not to be gulled into the false pieties that make our history all about the march of freedom from coast to coast. It was not such a march, anywhere in the nation.

And to the extent that it was a march worth remembering, it was a march of more than those white men who are usually lionized when we recall the Revolution. Women, their wives, held the fort while those men went to war. Women birthed babies, spun, sewed, washed, cleaned, gardened, cooked, doctored, and tried to keep things going when men were warring.

Women have done this throughout history. And as women did that, people held against their will in bondage also played a vital role in building the nation. As did each generation of immigrants who appropriated American ideals while struggling against the predictable insularity of previous generations of immigrants towards the latest group.* Any history of freedom in the United States is a lie, unless it includes all those who have built our institutions and struggled to make the history of freedom more than a deceitful story we tell ourselves and each other on the Fourth.

The history of freedom has been an up-down, started-aborted history. Freedom has been built anywhere in our land—to the extent that it exists at all anywhere in the land—only to the extent that some of those on the bottom were willing to struggle to make the ideals proclaimed by those at the top a reality for all.

I do not doubt that my Revolutionary male ancestors included a proportion of people genuinely moved by the thought of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all. I know that some of my ancestors who gave Revolutionary service included people who were willing to risk their lives to build a world in which one church, an established church, did not control the state. Not in America. They would be as horrified today as my grandparents were, in the last century, to see some Americans—and many Southerners—declaring that the wall separating church and state is a fiction.

No, I don’t deny that, in the complex and very mixed motives that led my own ancestors to revolution (and, let’s be honest, the motives were just as complex and mixed everywhere in the colonies), there were some noble motives, including a strong resolve to challenge the attempt of any church to dominate the political sector. What I am arguing is that the ideals many of our Revolutionary ancestors proclaimed were flawed—flawed in their practice and extension rather than in their conception.

They were flawed because they were ideals that held only for those crafting them. Those “at the bottom”: they were for the most part outside the scope of the crafters, of the men writing these documents, signing them, forming the new post-Revolutionary government.

This is why Bayard Rustin says that for America, freedom is always unfinished business. Democracy—real participatory democracy—is an always unfinished task. Democracy grows as we recognize the full humanity and full human rights of each disenfranchised group, and extend to that group the power and privilege we expect for ourselves with such breathtaking ease.

That’s the dream I’ll be mulling over today as I down my hamburger and Brunswick stew. The official (and officially mandated?) pieties of the day, with its huge flags flapping in the wind? No, those leave me cold, as all officially mandated pieties do.

I’d rather try to make the dream real. I’d rather see a bit more participatory democracy grow in my society than wear a flag pin in my lapel. The former might truly honor those who died in the Revolution. The latter debases all they struggled or died for, insofar as they were moved by democratic ideals.

*As the saying goes, "I never had so much trouble with immigrants until my people came to this country."

Commemorating Juneteenth: Yes, We Can

Today is the day on which we celebrate the announcement of Emancipation in Texas--and, by extension, everywhere in the United States. It is the day on which slaveholders were instructed to inform "their" slaves that these human beings had been unjustly held as chattel, and were henceforth free to live their lives as human beings, free to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.

I am celebrating Juneteenth by reading John D'Emilio's biography of the visionary civil rights leader Bayard Rustin--Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (NY: Free Press, 2003).

D'Emilio notes that, from his combined Methodist and Quaker roots, Rustin derived a strong belief that people--the American people, people across the globe--could build a participatory democracy true to the fundamental principle of democracy: a place at the table for everyone. Rustin was not a starry-eyed optimist. He was a realist seasoned by struggle to claim his own rights as an African American (and as a gay man).

Despite his constant struggle against those who sought to relegate him to second-class citizenship, to deny him a place at the table, and to suppress his voice, Rustin continued to believe that democracy was possible. As D'Emilio notes,

He [i.e., Rustin] argued that out of the civil rights movement there could emerge a coalition of conscience capable of becoming a new progressive majority in the United States. His strategy rested on a bedrock optimism that the American political system was flexible and responsive enough to embrace change of revolutionary dimensions. He believed that peaceful democratic means were adequate to the task of remaking relations of power. Rustin also had faith that individual human beings themselves were just as flexible and that, over time, they could be moved to recognize the worth of every one of their fellows and act accordingly (p. 4).

As I read this assessment of the bedrock assumptions underlying Rustin's thought and his social activism, I'm struck by how closely it parallels the thought and activism of another prophetic 20th-century African-American leader, Mary McLeod Bethune. I've blogged about Dr. Bethune and the college she founded a number of times previously.

As did Bayard Rustin, Mary McLeod Bethune regarded democracy in America as an unfinished project. Both of these critically important black civil rights leaders maintained that, until we make a place at the table for everyone, our democracy has not fulfilled its promise. Both called on their followers to keep analyzing the needs of the social groups around them, to identify who was, at any given time, being shoved from the table, and to work to bring that excluded group to the table.

Both argued strongly that the movement for civil rights for people of color had to be connected to the movement of for civil rights of every excluded group, because it is in the very nature of democracy to demand an extension of rights to every group shoved from the table.

As Dr. Bethune noted on 12 Jan. 1939 in her opening statement to the Second National Conference on the Problems of the Negro and Negro Youth, “But we recognize that no such ‘united democracy’ can possibly exist unless this ‘common opportunity’ is available to all Americans regardless of creed, class, or color” (Bethune Papers, Bethune-Cookman University; in Audrey Thomas McCluskey and Elaine M. Smith, ed., Mary McLeod Bethune: Building a Better World [Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999], p. 233).

In Dr. Bethune's view, the essence of democracy--its genius--is the recognition that we need everyone at the table, because everyone has something to contribute. No individual or no single group can provide all the gifts a participatory democracy needs in order to be vital, creative, humane. Hence, Bethune argued that educating youth to respect those who are different is not merely essential if democracy is to flourish: such education also opens the one being taught tolerance to a much wider range of ideas, viewpoints, and perspectives than that afforded him or her by his own culture of origin:

The essence of Democracy is the concept that no one group or individual is all-wise or has a monopoly of all the virtues. Training ourselves and our children to have both tolerance and respect for opinions diverging from our own, is one of the best possible ways to promote brotherhood—among the peoples of the world, and among our neighbors in our block! (“The Lesson of Tolerance,” June 16, 1952, Bethune Papers, Bethune-Cookman University; in McCluskey and Smith, p. 267).

This vision of the unfinished project of participatory democracy led Bethune to the conclusion--central to her mission as an educator--that we have an obligation to train the generations that will inherit the world after us to "remake the world," to struggle, within new cultural contexts and new historical settings, to identify who is being shoved from the table, and to work to remove barriers of exclusion that vitiate the democratic process:

I listened to God this morning and the thought came to me, “Any idea that keeps anybody out is too small for this age—open your heart and let everybody in—every class, every race, every nation.” We must remake the world. The task is nothing less than that “(Address to a World Assembly for Moral Re-Armament,” in McCluskey and Smith, p. 58; emphasis in original).

Mary McLeod Bethune and Bayard Rustin sound so much like soul mates in their view of the unfinished project of participatory democracy, that it is tempting to look for connections between them. And such connections are there.

They are there in that both were seminal thinkers of black (and human) liberation in the 20th century. But they are there in other respects, as well: both were strongly influenced by Methodism and its belief in the need for followers of Christ to work against social injustice wherever it was found. And Dr. Bethune knew Bayard Rustin and had close connections to his family. D'Emilio points out that Mary McLeod Bethune stayed with Rustin's family as she passed through their area of Pennsylvania on repeated occasions.

Given these connections, one must ask whether Dr. Bethune would have agreed with Bayard Rustin when he argued in 1986, a year before his death, at an interracial gathering in support of gay civil rights,

Indeed, if you want to know whether today people believe in democracy if you want to know whether they are true democrats, if you want to know whether they are human rights activists, the question to ask is, "What about gay people?" Because that is now the litmus paper by which this democracy is to be judged. The barometer for social change is measured by selecting the group that is most mistreated. To determine where society is with respect to change, one does not ask, "What do you think about the education of children?" Nor does one ask, "Do you believe the aged should have Social Security?” The question of social change should be framed with the most vulnerable group in mind: gay people (as cited from speech transcript; "Introduction," in Bayard Rustin, Time on Two Crosses, ed. Devon W. Carbado and Donald Weise [San Francisco: Cleis, 2003], xxxix).

I'm inclined to answer my question with a resounding yes: if Mary McLeod Bethune had lived to 1986--if she were living today--she'd be working for gay civil rights as ardently as she did for the civil rights of other marginalized groups. She'd be standing with her brother Bayard Rustin.

She'd be standing against the churches and church leaders who say, "No, we can't." To these, she'd be saying, "Yes, we can." She'd be standing against church-based institutions of higher learning whose response to gay rights is "No, we can't." Mary McLeod Bethune would be saying, "Yes, we can."

Yes, we can. Because we have to. That is what being a democracy is all about.

That is what being a humane society is all about. And that is what being a follower is Jesus is about.

Question for the Day: Gay Rights as Barometer of Human Rights

Just now catching up on my daily internet news reading.

I find H. Alexander Robinson’s “A Cause of Celebration: Reflections on Our Progress” at today’s Bilerico blogsite fascinating.

Robinson focuses on Bayard Rustin, African-American gay Quaker activist and associate of Martin Luther King, Jr.

According to Robinson, “A year before his death in 1987, Rustin said, ‘The barometer of where one is on human rights questions is no longer the black community, it's the gay community. Because it is the community which is most easily mistreated.’

Does this remain true, I wonder? Twenty years down the road, is the gay community the community most easily mistreated in our society?

What does “most easily mistreated” mean? What does that phrase translate into, in terms of concrete attitudes and actions towards gay human beings?

It’s interesting that this insight comes from a man who writes about spending time on two crosses—the cross of racism, and the cross of homophobia. He writes, in other words, out of the experience of double discrimination (as does H. Alexander Robinson, who is also a black gay man).

Interestingly enough, earlier today I had read the tributes to Robert Kennedy by his children in the NY Times, and learned of the website “Speak Truth to Power” that Kerry Kennedy has set up to commemorate her father and continue his work for human rights.

The website has a human rights statement that made me stop and think (www.speaktruth.org). The statement insists that those who struggle against oppression for their own human rights have an obligation to struggle for the same rights for anyone who is oppressed. It states:

Another definition for human rights is those basic standards without which people cannot live in dignity. To violate someone's human rights is to treat that person as though she or he were not a human being. To advocate human rights is to demand that the human dignity of all people be respected. In claiming these human rights, everyone also accepts the responsibility not to infringe on the rights of others and to support those whose rights are abused or denied.

Is that statement true, I wonder? Does any group that experiences oppression have an obligation to struggle on behalf of others who also experience oppression? Do I, as a gay man, have an obligation to work for justice for people of color? For women?

I have always thought so. I believe so. I believe that my own claim to human rights cannot be taken seriously if I do not extend that claim to every other group that is unjustly marginalized.

Bayard Rustin’s thought stresses the obligation of African Americans to stand in solidarity with LGBT persons.

Is there such an obligation? Is Rustin correct, I wonder?

The Week in Review: Combating Violence Against Gay Youth

As this week winds to a close, and I try to juggle multiple projects (what birthday gift do you give a connoisseur of chocolate who has every variety in the world?), it occurs to me to gather an assortment of articles that have impressed me in recent days. All are pertinent to themes discussed in previous postings.

As my profile for this blogsite indicates, one of the issues that most engages my passion is to stop bullying of LGBT children in school. This passion stems, in part, from my own experience of having been bullied for my conspicuous lack of gender “normativity” in childhood. I can recall being taunted in junior high school, called a queer, even before I had any inkling what that term meant. I remember coming home the first time I was called this, and asking my mother what the term meant.

Her answer was a variant of one she gave me when I learned the 10 commandments as a young child, and asked what “adultery” meant: “It’s when mommies and daddies do bad things.” “Queer,” she replied, means “when men do bad things.”

Not very enlightening, but enough to clue me in to the fact that this term had something to do with the forbidden area of sex, and that, as with everything falling into that murky shadowland, to be queer was to be shameful. So I was queer, then, even though I had no clear idea what this meant, and the area of sexuality itself was a complete shadowland into which I had never even ventured . . . .

Whatever being queer was, I soon learned, it evidently justified being knocked down by the vice-president of the school’s bible study club, whenever I missed a shot in volleyball (not an infrequent occurrence). It justified the coaches standing by and watching this happen and doing nothing to reprimand the boy who repeatedly assaulted me.

Being queer evidently also allowed other boys to grope what they called my breasts (my non-existent male breasts!) in gym class, again without any punishment by the coaches. It allowed the coaches to put me at the start of the line of boys on all fours over which the class vaulted when we did gymnastics, a position that allowed anyone vaulting over to kick the first person in line in the ribs or side—hard kicks excused as part of the launching process.

I sensed, without having full clarity, that being queer had something to do with being a sissy, another term with which I had contended in school (and at home, and at church) as far back as I could recall. I was a liability in most games boys played on the school ground, so that I was almost always chosen last for a sport. In baseball, I was put far, far into one of the fields, where I could usually find something that really interested me, like heads of clover to be woven into flower necklaces—thus confirming the poor opinion of my sporting skills when the ball that I wouldn’t have caught, anyway, flew over my head as I sat on the ground in the clover, oblivious to the game around me.

I remember the cheek-burning shame of being nominated for the position of captain of the safety patrol team in fifth grade (whatever can S. Gibbs have been thinking?), and the speech my nominator gave before the whole school: “Bill Lindsey may walk like a girl and talk like a girl, but I can assure you he’s all boy.” Most of all, I remember the howls of laughter that day from the sixth-grade classes who occupied the front rows of the auditorium.

I don’t recall these scenes to wallow in self-pity. I can laugh at most of them now. I recall them to remind myself and others that there are still children enduring this treatment in our school system—and with the full complicity of school officials and parents. What happened this week to Lawrence King in Oxnard, CA—a gay fifteen-year old boy murdered by a classmate after repeated taunts about his sexual orientation--should not happen again to any other child in an American school: http://www.towleroad.com/2008/02/gay-junior-high.html.

And even now, the “mainstream” media remains shamefully silent about this event, and about the problem of bullying of LGBT children in schools (on media silence, see www.bilerico.com/2008/02/wheres_the_outrage.php). At my last job, where I was repeatedly reprimanded (in a church-based institution!) for bringing up issues having to do with LGBT concerns, I remember being told—by a supervisor whose son is gay, no less—that it was inappropriate and unacceptable for me to mention GLSEN, Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, in a discussion of the school’s mission to educate students to address social ills.

Never mind that the school prides itself on having a founder who linked liberal education to civic engagement, and who stressed that the scope of a college’s civic engagement should be as wide as the needs of the community it served. Or that the university’s Education Department is accredited by an institution that requires the Department to assure that it does not discriminate on grounds of sexual orientation, and prepares teachers who can respect diversity and teach tolerance . . . . Or that my charge was to lead the faculty in preparing a major project that would highlight the school’s commitment to civic engagement of all kinds . . . . Or that violence towards gay students is a serious problem on many historically black college/university campuses (HBCUs)—a group to which this university belongs—where a culture of silence feeds violence and leaves LGBT students with few role models to help them navigate currents of shame and self-loathing.

I was also told by the same supervisor that bringing up attacks on homeless people was unacceptable, because the faculty leaders who reported to me weren’t interested in hearing about this problem. Interestingly enough, just this past week, the NY Times reported that the community in which the university is located has been identified as the key city in the nation in which educational networks must address the problem of violence against the homeless. This is an epidemic problem in the community in which this civic engagement-oriented HBCU is located; and it is youth, youth who need education, who are primarily responsible for the problem.

When I proposed that GLSEN, among many other organizations helping youth address social ills, should be looked at as a possible resource for our school’s civic engagement project, I was told by my supervisor that I was “putting my lifestyle into the face of colleagues.” My response—that I have a life, and not a lifestyle—was not well-received, to say the least. When the powers that be decree that LGBT people have lifestyles rather than lives, it evidently behooves us to accept the demeaning social location we’ve been assigned, and to be silent—even when we are educators charged with leading civic engagement projects on behalf of the youth we are educating.

So my concern with LGBT bullying has deep roots. For that reason, an article in today’s Bilerico blog caught my eye: www.bilerico.com/2008/02/the_way_we_raise_our_gays.php. Erik Leven asks what happens when we leave LGBT children to fend for themselves as they are bullied and shamed. He calls the churches to accountability for their silence about this endemic American problem. A choice quote:

“If a child is particularly beaten down--by their church, their parents, their school or their peers when they come out--the baggage is that much heavier. As they approach adulthood it would be common and understandable if they carry feelings of worthlessness, self-loathing and general depression. Is this what we want? All you Christians who believe you're speaking FOR Jesus--do you really think Jesus himself would want this? Whole populations of unhealthy, unhappy kids who go on to lead unhappy and unhealthy lives. This is not because we're gay. It's because YOU can't accept it. Wouldn't you suppose this world would be a better place if children were to feel comfortable with who they are and then approach adulthood in that way?”

On a related, but separate, theme, this week’s news carries many articles noting that the Vatican’s attack on the Spanish government, which has legalized gay marriage and teaches tolerance for LGBT persons in its schools, continues. On this, see especially two postings on the Clerical Whispers blog at http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com, entitled "Rift Between Madrid and Vatican" and "Spanish Opposition Leader Targets Gays." It strikes me as particularly reprehensible that the Vatican-backed opposition party is using the issue of gay adoption as a wedge issue to gain votes.

And on the continuing use of that wedge issue in our own political context, I recommend Brynn Craffey's www.bilerico.com/2008/02/my_give_a_damns_busted.php.

"God’s got my back,” indeed.

For a humorous look at how gay marriage is responsible for every possible calamity in the universe, see the second video on Peterson Toscano’s a musing blog under the entry “Friday Night Ex-Gay Entertainment” at http://a_musing.blogspot.com/.

And as a reminder that gay artists and activists are interested in issues transcending those of the gay community, see Sam Harris’s new anti-war song at www.samharris.com/waronwar/.

And, finally, for a heartening reminder that some church folks do get it, see the following article about a Catholic Chinese ministry to the gay community at Clerical Whispers:
http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2008/02/sister-fabians-pro-gay-crusade.html.

Since this is Black History Month, I want to close this week in review blog entry with a quote from one of my African-American heroes, who worked intently (as did Bayard Rustin, the black gay Quaker activist whose quote about angelic troublemakers forms the footer for this blog page) to develop strategies of social analysis that recognize the interconnection of problems such as racism, sexism, poverty, and homophobia. This hero is Mary McLeod Bethune.

Bethune once spoke of seeing a small girl cross the street and thinking to herself that this child could one day be a Mary McLeod Bethune. Mary McLeod Bethune saw everyone’s child as a child to be nurtured, educated, taught self-respect. Her philosophy of educating students through requiring them to be involved in civic engagement is based on a strong conviction that colleges and universities should be involved in addressing the social ills of their own communities.

If Mary McLeod Bethune were alive today, I have absolutely no doubt that she would be intently concerned about incidents such as the murder of Lawrence King. I have no doubt that she would be strongly supporting the coalition of HBCUs who have banded together under the auspices of the Human Rights Project to address anti-gay violence on black college campuses. And I can well imagine she would applaud Barack Obama for his heroic speech in a black church in Atlanta several Sundays ago, in which he spoke courageously and forthrightly about the need of the African-American community to confront homophobia.

Bethune’s last will and testament speaks eloquently of her commitment to build a better world for youth. During Black History Month, wouldn’t it be wonderful if black churches and white churches—all churches alike—realized that some of the youth to whom we are handing over the world are gay and lesbian youth, or youth who will choose new gender identities? Those youth are often, as people are reporting about Lawrence King, sensitive, kind, gentle, gifted human beings whose gifts are sorely needed to build a more humane world.

They do not deserve to live in shame. They certainly do not deserve to be bashed, taunted, or murdered. I call on the churches to listen to Mary McLeod Bethune’s last will and testament and to imagine some of the youth Bethune envisages here as gay youth:

"The world around us really belongs to youth for youth will take over its future management. Our children must never lose their zeal for building a better world. They must not be discouraged from aspiring toward greatness, for they are to be the leaders of tomorrow. . . .We have a powerful potential in our youth, and we must have the courage to change old ideas and practices so that we may direct their power toward good ends."