Trump's Education Secretary DeVos Presents Commencement Address at Bethune-Cookman University: Things Do Not Go Well for Her

Mr. Trump's Secretary of Education (and right-wing Christian activist) Betsy DeVos was the commencement speaker yesterday at the historically black United Methodist university founded by Mary McLeod Bethune, Bethune-Cookman University. Things did not go well.

On Being a Straight Ally in the Movement for LGBTQ Rights: Lessons I Learned in Fifteen Years at HBCUs

In the past week, as we discussed the Orlando atrocity and the response of faith communities to it, we had good discussion here of the role that straight allies play in the movement for LGBTQ rights. That discussion has had me thinking about the decade and a half I spent working in historically black universities — as a white ally in the struggle for rights and justice for people of color. To be specific: I've been thinking about lessons I learned in those years about being an ally in the struggle of another group of people for rights and justice.

Bethune-Cookman University under Leadership of Trudie Kibbe Reed: The Role of the Southern Association of Colleges

To add to what I wrote yesterday about Bethune-Cookman University and the recent resignation/retirement of its president Trudie Kibbe Reed: as the university's accrediting body the Southern Association of Colleges prepared to review the school for reaccreditation in 2010, it invited third-party comments from members of the public.  I submitted a third-party comment to SACS as someone who had served as the school's highest academic officer, its vice-president for academic affairs.

In Higher Education News: Bethune-Cookman University President Trudie Kibbe Reed Resigns/Retires

In the world of higher education, a very strange story now coming out of Bethune-Cookman University in Florida: as Michael Stratford reports  in the Chronicle of Higher Education yesterday, the university president, Dr. Trudie Kibbe Reed, has retired in the middle of the academic year.  At least, that appears to be the story.  But getting a clear picture of whether this is a resignation or a retirement or why it's taking place: that's another story altogether.

High-School Student Brent Taghap's Tribute to Tyler Clementi

A memorial tribute to Tyler Clementi by Jesuit high school student Brent Taghap of Tampa:  a loure of J.S. Bach.

I am deeply disturbed to learn that there has been another previous suicide at Rutgers University related to issues of sexual orientation, after which LGBT students at Rutgers went to school administrators, according to this ABC news report. And were not heard.

Neil Patrick Harris and Lance Bass Address Teen Coming Out Issues; Many College Campuses Remain Unsafe for LGBT Students, Faculty, Staff

Another valuable online resource for teens dealing with issues of gender identity and sexual orientation, and adults hoping to offer support to these teens: actors Neil Patrick Harris and Lance Bass have produced videos talking about the experience of growing up gay.

NY Times on the Country-Clubization of American Higher Education: Money Flowing to Adminstrators' Pockets, While Students and Faculty Suffer

Sam Dillon's recent New York Times article about how college and university presidents are now spending their schools' money confirms a point I've made repeatedly on this blog: namely, that many top administrators in American higher education today are earning top dollars, while faculty needs--and the needs of students--receive short shrift.  As I've noted, higher education in the U.S. is modeled more and more on the corporate world whose representatives now dominate the governing boards of colleges and universities.

In the process, the importance of education is being lost sight of, as is the value of a liberal arts education rooted in the core values of the humanities, values necessary to sustain civil society.

Words and Moral Dilemmas: Mr. Donohue Denies Defending Maciel, and I Think Through a Moral Dilemma

Slow to blog these days, in part, because I am trying to think through an ethical dilemma—one I haven’t faced before, and so I don’t have clear guidelines from my own experience to assist me in resolving it.  It has also—and this is the wont of moral thinking, since it’s our own consciences struggling to resolve moral issues, based on how our own insights and experiences cause us to perceive moral norms—gotten tied up with the experience of turning 60 last week.  And that’s making it even harder to think through.

This isn’t, in some respects, an earth-shaking problem.  There are moral problems of far more import facing most of us.  Still, it’s my problem right now, and until I figure out on which side of the dilemma I’m comfortable coming down, it’s definitely tying up my mental energy.

Loyalty Oaths and Pretensions to Power: Vatican Expects American Nuns to Take Oath of Fidelity

Shortly after my last position in an academic institution was terminated, the president who first invited me to take that position and then informed me she wanted me gone from her campus presented all of those who had reported to me with a loyalty oath.  With an oath of loyalty to her personally and to her administration of the university.  Her entire leadership team was presented with the same oath.

As well as I ever understood the logic of this bizarre action, it went something like this: I had been run off because I was plotting against her.  And forcing those who had reported to me or worked on the leadership team with me to sign an oath of loyalty to her would bolster her power over an institution where I had somehow gained unwarranted power. 

Reissuing the Appeal: Open Letter to Barack Obama on HBCUs and Homophobia

The following is an open letter to Mr. Obama that I published on this blog on 19 September last year. Since I published this piece prior to his election and he has now been elected, I want to reissue it, as a way of keeping my appeal to the new president open, to find ways to address the homophobia that troubles our society in so many ways. My 19 September letter follows:

Dear Mr. Obama:

To address this open letter to you, I am interrupting a thread on this blog that touches on painful personal experiences of homophobia in my professional life. Those experiences have resulted in my being unemployed and without health insurance at age 58—despite my proven track record of hard, productive, successful work.

My unemployment and lack of access to health care have everything to do with the fact that I have chosen not to hide that I am openly gay, and have lived my entire adult life in a committed relationship with another openly gay man.

Despite my lack of income and the dwindling of the scant retirement funds I’ve been able to save while working in church-owned universities (most of them HBCUs), I have donated repeatedly to your campaign. I have done so because I support your policies. I am working hard in every way I can to assist your election.

I have been particularly impressed by your willingness to address the unconscionable stigmatization and marginalization of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons in our democratic society. I have noted with delight your willingness to speak truth about the ugliness of homophobia to your own African-American brothers and sisters.

When you challenged homophobia at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta last January, I was moved profoundly—as I was also moved by your courage when you addressed these issues again before an audience not likely to share your views in Beaumont, Texas, in February. I have been equally impressed with your wife’s clarity and courage about these issues. I appreciate your support and that of your wife. This is among the reasons you have my vote, as well as that of many members of my family.

For this reason, I am respectfully asking you to think about your opportunity and responsibility, as you speak at HBCUs, to continue calling your own African-American brothers and sisters, and our nation at large, to recognize and address the ugly phenomenon of homophobia. I note that you will speak tomorrow at an HBCU in Daytona Beach—Bethune-Cookman University. I feel certain that you will be speaking at a number of HBCUs during this campaign.

This is as it ought to be. HBCUs have played a significant and often unrecognized role in the educational life of our nation. They have historically graduated, and they continue to graduate, the majority of African Americans who go on to earn doctorates in the U.S.

However, as I am sure you are aware, many HBCUs lack policies prohibiting discrimination against gay faculty, staff, administrators, and students. I have addressed these issues repeatedly on this Bilgrimage blog. A search of the blog for the term “HBCU” will link anyone who wants to examine this issue to numerous studies and statements about the track record of HBCUs, vis-à-vis homophobic discrimination.

I believe I have a right (and an obligation) to address the issue of anti-gay discrimination in HBCUs for a number of reasons. First, I’m a citizen who has long worked for equal rights for everyone in our democratic society, and, in particular, for those shoved away from the table of participatory democracy.

Second, I am a theologian whose vocational life has been centered on calling churches and religious groups to greater awareness of the mechanisms by which social structures stigmatize and exclude scapegoated groups. In my view, faith communities do not have the right to expect to command attention as credible moral guides, when, in their own practices, they violate key moral principles including the obligation to reach out and include the marginalized, or the obligation to refrain from harming those already harmed by structures of social exclusion.

Third, at the beginning of my career as a theologian, I deliberately chose to work in HBCUs. At the outset of my career, I had the opportunity either to take a highly paid position at a prestigious majority-culture university, or a modestly paid position at an HBCU, Xavier University in New Orleans.

I chose Xavier, and did so gladly, though my starting salary was $15,500 (to the best of my recollection) in 1984. The impulse to serve and give to those in need that brought me to the vocation of theology in the first place, as well as my history as a white Southerner who came of age in the Civil Rights period, made it obvious to me that I had an important obligation (and graced opportunity) to offer my talents, such as they are, to HBCUs.

In the narrative I am interrupting to address this letter to you, I am speaking forthrightly about the economic effects my choice to work in HBCUs has had on my life and that of my partner Steve Schafer. We both knew when we accepted jobs at HBCUs that we would never enjoy lives of economic luxury.

I spent almost two decades teaching and doing administrative work in HBCUs. During those two decades, from 1984 up to my last year in an HBCU (2006-2007), I never earned a salary in excess of $60,000 until my final year as academic vice-president at an HBCU. At Philander Smith College in Little Rock, I had the honor of serving as academic dean for a number of years. Even in that position—one that involved intense work—I drew a salary of only $29,000 for several years, until the president told me that she considered it an embarrassment to the college that it was paying its dean such a salary.

I am not complaining. I am not seeking to embarrass or adversely affect any particular HBCU, in writing this letter. I knew when I began working at HBCUs that I would not enjoy economic comfort. It was a privilege, an honor, to work in HBCUs, to have the opportunity to give something to a community that has suffered historic marginalization. I gave without expecting thanks.

What I did not expect, however, was to be slapped in the face because I am openly gay. That, unfortunately, was my experience at one HBCU, where, when the harassment began, I discovered, I had no legal recourse to protect myself against misrepresentation of my work record, and deeply personal vilification of my character.

At this institution, I had again been honored to accept the position of academic vice-president, though I was told that the salary I was being offered was some $30,000 less than that offered to my predecessor. It was enough to be wanted, to be needed, to be allowed to serve.

It was a delight, too, to have a salary that permitted me to give more than I had ever been able to give in the past. When I found that my salary included an augment from a state grant program in the amount of $20,000, I divided the augment in half and gave half of that amount to my associate, who, in my view, worked as hard as I did and deserved as much reward. In the year in which my partner Steve Schafer and I worked for this HBCU, together we donated more to the school than all other members of the university leadership team combined.

I will not rehearse the full story. Due to legal threats on the part of the same HBCU that has rewarded my hard work and that of my partner with such shameful and ugly treatment for our years of hard work and sacrifice in HBCUs, I am not even permitted to tell the whole story.

And I know that as a presidential candidate, you can do nothing about a situation of conflict between a former employee and an employer. What you can do, however, and what I believe you must do, to be true to your principles, is to call each and every HBCU at which you speak to accountability regarding issues of sexual orientation.

May I respectfully ask that, if an HBCU at which you speak has no policy forbidding discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation, you call the HBCU to accountability about its obligation to forbid such discrimination through official policy statements? Please also call on HBCUs to implement support groups for faculty, staff, and students dealing with issues of sexual orientation. Please ask HBCUs to form task forces to educate their own constituencies, as well as the public at large, about the damage that homophobia does in our society.

Please challenge HBCUs not to harass openly gay employees or students, not to issue written demands that openly gay employees refrain from traveling or making doctors’ visits with their partners, when such demands are not issued to married couples working for the same institution. Please call on HBCUs and their leaders not to demean gay employees and students, and not to punish gay employees and students who promote dialogue about homophobia in the campus community.

The state in which you will be speaking tomorrow is one with an alarming record when it comes to recent incidents of gay-bashing. Historically, HBCUs have been a part of the solution and not a part of the problem, when it comes to significant social issues affecting minorities. The prophetic African-American leader Mary McLeod Bethune, who founded the institution at which you will speak tomorrow, asked that HBCUs create town-hall meetings in which those shoved from the table of participatory democracy could gather together to discuss solutions to the problems they experienced.

Please continue Dr. Bethune’s legacy as you speak at Bethune-Cookman and other HBCUs. Please continue to remind HBCUs of their commitment to include, to refrain from discrimination, to refrain from harming those already harmed by social stigmatization. Please assist all of us who are working for justice within the faith communities of this nation, as we call on those who talk the talk to walk the walk. Faith-based institutions, including HBCUs and their leaders, should not have the luxury of representing themselves as opposed to discrimination, while they practice discrimination towards their LGBT brothers and sisters.

Thank you for hearing my plea. It comes from the heart.

Respectfully yours,

William D. Lindsey.

African Americans, Prop 8, and Homophobia: Ongoing Discussion at Box Turtle (3)

As I noted yesterday when I posted my reflections about Jim Burroway’s Box Turtle Bulletin article “The NGLTF Study On Race and Prop 8: The Problem of Margins of Error” (www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2009/01/12/7953), Burroway’s statement was followed by a number of others at Box Turtle, carrying on the dialogue about the black and gay communities in the wake of prop 8. As I also noted, to assure that my treatment of Jim Burroway’s article is balanced, I want to note the other articles that appeared after his—some in direct response to his.

Following Burroway, Gabriel Arana posted a statement at Box Turtle entitled “Why Can’t We Talk about Black Homophobia?” (www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2009/01/14/8062). This is a thoughtful consideration of the damage we do to the gay community, the African-American community, and our democratic society in general, when we suppress honest, open dialogue about issues that divide us.

Arana recognizes that the defensive response to those raising questions about black homophobia arises out of the history of ugly oppression people of color have endured in the United States. Defensiveness and closing rank are understandable responses when oppression has been so longstanding and so systemic.

“However,” as he notes, “turning a blind eye to broader cultural issues for the sake of comity is intellectually dishonest.” This intellectual dishonesty is also, Arana proposes, injurious to the many LGBT African Americans who report tremendous pressure to hide their identities.

Arana maintains that, “Among scholars, it is a well-reported and established fact that homophobia is more prevalent in the African-American community than in the general public . . . .” As he notes, Coretta Scott King acknowledged the prevalence of homophobia in the African-American community in comments she made to the National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS calling for a national campaign against homophobia in the black community:

Homophobia is still a great problem throughout America, but in the African-American community it is even more threatening. This is an enormous obstacle for ever yone involved in AIDS prevention, treatment and research. … We have to launch a national campaign against homophobia in the black community.

Arana rightly notes that addressing the problem of homophobia within communities of color is first and foremost the task of African Americans themselves. As he observes, non-African Americans insisting that the black community deal with questions about sexual orientation are often perceived as intruders in a discussion that needs to take place intramurally—and privileged intruders, at that. Arana concludes, “I think it would be best for LGBT folk who are African-American to lead the discussion, no less so because they speak from a position of greater understanding.”

Gabriel Arana’s piece was followed by a posting by Jim Burroway entitled “Prop 8 and Race: A Rejoinder” (www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2009/01/14/8059). Burroway notes that he is transcribing a comment of Jaime Grant regarding Burroway’s statement about prop 8 and race.

Jaime Grant is director of the NGLTF Policy Institute, which published the analysis of polling data re: prop 8 to which Kincaid and Burroway were responding with their two essays on prop 8 and race. Grant notes the strong religious correlation suggested by the prop 8 polling data: African Americans voted at a higher rate for prop 8 than did the general population in part (and perhaps in large part) because African Americans are more religiously affiliated and more prone to church attendance than the population at large.

Clayton Critcher adds to the discussion of race and religion vis-à-vis prop 8 with a statement entitled “Prop 8 and Race: More Complex Than First Reported” (www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2009/01/15/8078). Critcher does a close reading of the statistical data to conclude, “Being religious was associated with increased support for Prop 8, but among those who were not religious, being African American or Latino was associated with support for Prop 8.”

Critcher notes that the use of religion as an explanatory factor to divert attention from race in the prop 8 discussion is perhaps misleading. As he observes, “If that factor [i.e., the cultural factor that is primarily predictive for homophobic attitudes] is religion, the question simply becomes, ‘Why do some racial groups show more interest in homophobic religious institutions than others?’, and I do not see why this would be any less troubling to those who seek to shift this discussion away from race.”

And, finally, Timothy Kincaid has weighed in to this discussion again today with a posting entitled “Racism in the Gay Community” (www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2009/01/15/8081). Kincaid notes that any attempt to address homophobia in the black community effectively has to proceed hand in hand with efforts to address and combat racism in the gay community. He concludes, “And perhaps it’s time to start the conversation and then sit back, listen, and learn.”

And that’s where I’d like to go, as well: conversation. Listening and learning. The discussion of these important but difficult issues of race, religion, homophobia, and racism has been too frequently a non-discussion, a shouting match across ideological lines in which those most directly affected by the issues never sit down at the table together and talk. And listen.

There are all kinds of reasons we might offer for the lack of conversation. There is the blinding effect of white privilege that makes white faces and white concerns iconic for “the” gay community, with the ultimate effect of invisibilizing LGBT African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities of color. There is the adamant refusal of many African Americans to entertain any discussion at all of these issues, either discussion urged on the black community from outside or generated from within its own boundaries.

Somehow, somewhere, somebody needs to move all of us beyond those refusals and blindnesses. But I do not see that happening. Coretta Scott King issued her call for a national campaign against homophobia in the black community in 2001. This was an African American issuing a call to the African-American community, and a distinguished civil rights leader.

I have seen little response to this call within the African-American community, even as homophobia has risen perceptibly within that same community in the period following Mrs. King's appeal. I have witnessed continuing silence among vast numbers of African Americans, including African-American leaders, following this call—silence coupled with punishment of those who seek to break silence.

I very much agree with both Jim Burroway and Gabriel Arana that the primary responsibility for addressing black homophobia lies with the black community itself. But I am also aware, in part due to my two decades of work within HBCUs, that the leadership for such an initiative is almost non-existent within the black community, and that there remains a strong intent to preserve silence and punish those who call for this discussion in the black community.

It is time to break silence. But who will do so, from within the African-American community?

I agree with Jim Burroway and Timothy Kincaid, as well, when they insist that dialogue and not “education” needs to be the primary frame for this difficult cross-cultural conversation. No group has a privileged perspective. None should enter the conversation as the teacher, in a way that places other conversation members only in the listening position.

It is also important, it seems to me, that neither the gay community nor the black community retreat into closed, intramural conversation about these issues. Even if it is imperative that the gay community lead its own discussion of racism within its community, and that African Americans spur the dialogue about black homophobia within the black community, it is still important for these two marginalized groups to remain in conversation.

And to find ways to foster conversation—if truth be told, to begin a conversation that has not yet happened.

It’s clear to me what needs to happen. What is not clear is how to make happen what needs to happen. I have spent years within HBCUs working quietly to foster this important crosscultural dialogue. I have had a conspicuous lack of success in that regard, and I eventually found myself expelled from the HBCU world precisely because I could not in conscience remain silent about the lack of dialogue around issues of race and homophobia. Nor could I do the job I was charged to do as an academic leader, and keep silence about these issues . . . .

Since my expulsion from the HBCU world, I have called on HBCU leaders and the leaders of the churches that sponsor them to encourage dialogue about these issues in the HBCU context. My appeals to HBCU leaders and to leaders of churches that own these institutions have, to date, been met with deafening silence.

The need is great. And it is growing. Where is the intent to address that need, as Barack Obama becomes president?

African Americans, Prop 8, and Homophobia: Ongoing Discussion at Box Turtle

Box Turtle Bulletin has been doing a valuable service to the African-American and gay communities—and to the public at large, since these are questions driving to the heart of our democracy—by keeping discussion of the vexed question of proposition 8 and black homophobia (and white gay racism) alive. As I’ve stated before, I tread into this territory with cautious steps. It has been clear to me following the victory of prop 8, from the moment discussion arose about the attitudes of people of color to the victory of prop 8, that there are strong interest groups eager to squelch open conversation about these issues.

Anything anyone seeks to say about the issues—honestly, openly—is hedged by numerous menacing hedges from the outset of the conversation: keep out. Beware. Don’t go there. These hedges with their warning signs are designed to make discussion impossible. They have the effect of distorting the conversation, as well, such that appeals by a white gay man—especially one living in the American South—for continued dialogue about these issues are easily framed and dismissed as racist discourse, even when the white gay man in question has spent years writing about questions of race, challenging racism, and contributing to cross-racial dialogues.

I have noted that I’m aware I bring to this discussion a unique perspective—one situated in real-life experiences unique to my life. Because these experience are admittedly out of the ordinary, they may well make what I have to say about black-gay dialogue eccentric. On the other hand, precisely because they are unique real-life experiences, they also may be an entry point into the conversation that gives me something to say about the issues.

I am a white Southerner who grew up in a racist culture, and who became aware of that fact as I came of age, in early adolescence. My growing recognition of the complicity of most white churches of the South in the historic racism of my culture led me, even in my early teen years, to a strong interest in religion—and in the role religion plays in either furthering necessary and morally warranted social changes, or in impeding those changes. My awareness that my own church was deeply implicated in my community’s racist culture, and was not willing to do the right thing and lead the way to necessary change, led me away from my family church of origin to the one “white” church in my community—the Catholic church—that invited people of color to worship side by side with white people in the 1960s.

These commitments led me as an adult, with a theology degree in hand, to teaching and administrative work in several HBCUs—historically black colleges/universities. As with most HBCUs, these institutions were all church-owned. As I have noted on this blog, my decision to work in HBCUs—at a much lower salary than I could have earned in a mainstream institution, lower than the salaries my grad-school classmates were earning—was a deliberate decision.

I chose to work in HBCUs because I regarded my decision to study theology and teach it at the university level as a vocational decision. This decision was an outgrowth of my early adolescent inklings that, when we recognize our complicity in structures of injustice within our cultures and communities of faith, we have an obligation to deal with those structures: and to recognize that we have interiorized the injustice, by growing up within structures that shape our consciousness, from childhood on.

I saw my decision to teach in an HBCU as a decision not merely to teach, but primarily to learn: to learn from a culture I had grown up being implicitly taught to denigrate, but which had been an integral part of my life and of my family’s history for hundreds of years. I needed to learn from those I had been taught to feel better than; I needed to keep grappling with my own racism, the racism anyone raised in a racist culture imbibes with his or her mother’s milk.

As I’ve also noted, against my wishes and inclinations, early on in my years working in HBCUs, I was tagged by top administrators at each HBCU at which I worked as an academic leader, someone they wished to promote to the position of department chair, and then of academic dean/vice-president. I reluctantly accepted those positions after strong insistence from the leaders of those HBCUs—African-American leaders—because they convinced me that I had gifts to give the community, which could not be realized if I did not assume these leadership roles.

However, because I was also, at least in the first part of my academic career, a closeted gay man still struggling to come to terms with his sexual orientation and with his long-time committed relationship with another gay man and the implications of making that relationship known in my public life, being elevated to a leadership position in church-related HBCUs brought me face to face with issues of sexual orientation. With the refusal of HBCUs to acknowledge that anyone on their campus was gay—students, faculty, administrators, staff.

My being made a department chair and then academic dean/vice-president confronted me with excruciating questions about how to be true to myself as a gay man who gradually became public about his sexual orientation and his life in an explicitly homophobic professional context. These developments also brought me face to face with serious questions about how to do my job adequately—e.g., when it required me to lead discussions about how the school adhered to accreditation requirements that called for it to refrain from discrimination and to teach students to understand and accept LGBT persons.

I soon discovered that the inability—the refusal—of some HBCUs and their leaders to entertain those questions, even when they are necessary questions to entertain if the school seeks to remain accredited, placed me in an anguishing position. Unless there was support from the top level of a school’s administration for me as a leader who happened to be gay and who also happened to have to deal with “gay issues” because that was part of his job, I was easily targeted. Everything depended on the willingness of those in charge to permit open discussion and to refrain from scapegoating gay employees—to do the decent, humane, and moral thing and extend to a gay human being the same respect they demanded for themselves as people of color, or as women, or as black women.

At the last HBCU at which I held a position of academic leadership, I found that, when I once mentioned the existence of LGBT advocacy organizations in a discussion of many types of advocacy organizations in which students might do service learning work, I was “putting my lifestyle in the face” of colleagues. I found that, though I had been asked to lead a campus-wide attempt to enhance the school’s civic engagement curriculum, any mention of civic engagement work for LGBT organizations was forbidden, another way of putting my lifestyle in the face of the campus.

When faculty came to me asking for support groups for women and LGBT students, faculty, and staff, and when I brought that proposal to the top levels of the administration, I was told that this project did not merit consideration, and that it was another attempt on my part to publicize gay issues and put my lifestyle in the face of colleagues. When I noted that I had not originated this project, but that faculty were concerned about the effect of silence about gay issues on students struggling with their sexual orientation, I was punished.

At the same institution, I was told that, even though the administration knew I was gay and living with a partner whom it also hired when it hired me, and even though we had been told we were welcome as an openly gay couple, our coming to work together daily in our single car was problematic, putting our lifestyle in the face of the campus. We were given written instructions not to take each other to the doctor. We were informed that the bishop of the church that owned the school—it's a United Methodist university—had protested our hire, when he discovered we were a couple. He claimed he had no problems with gay employees, only with gay couples.

Through my work at HBCUs, I learned that there is an almost impenetrable veil of silence surrounding even the existence of gay persons on the campus, and a strong will to demonize, punish, and expel anyone who raises questions about that veil of silence, even when his or her job requires him to raise such questions and when silence is not an option if the school is to remain in good standing with accrediting bodies. I learned that homophobia is alive and well in African-American culture, and those who try to address it are quickly stigmatized and silenced.

Once again, this is the backdrop of life experience against which I address issues of homophobia in the black community and of racism in the white gay community. These experiences propel me into that discussion. They give me no choice about pursuing the conversation, even when I know that I place myself at risk for engaging in it, when exceptionally strong interest groups want to read all discourse of white gay folks about these issues as racist—and, in particular, the discourse of someone raised in the American South.

All this as prologue to the posting that follows, which will focus on the recent discussion of these issues at Box Turtle . . . .

Not Getting It: The Human Rights Question and Gay Americans

I have thought long and hard in the past few days about just why many gay Americans, and many progressive Americans, and many American people of faith who regard the religious right as, on the whole, a rancorous and invalid expression of authentic faith, are reacting so strongly to the choice of Rick Warren as the pastor of the new administration. Many commentators seem taken by surprise at the vehemence of our reaction—as if (to my surprise in turn) we have just been play-acting when we note that we are denied rights, and that being denied rights galls.

The question of human rights is clearly central both to the response of many citizens to the Rick Warren choice, and to the reaction of those mystified by this response. In my view, many Americans simply aren’t getting the human rights thing—not when it comes to gay citizens. And I’m left wondering why.

The only way I know how to seek an answer to that question of why so many of my fellow citizens are oblivious to the question of my rights, and shocked at my anger at having my rights denied, is to reflect on my own experience. And there’s a danger there.

Confessional speech can so easily turn into or be dismissed as solipsistic speech. We’re told repeatedly, those of us seeking social change, to tell our stories, stories of our experiences on the social margins. But when we do so, it seems many citizens aren’t hearing what we’re saying—perhaps because they assume we’re engaging in a venting exercise, and not telling stories that critique our social structures, that raise questions about how power and privilege are allocated in our society. About the very unequal allocation of power and privilege in our society.

Perhaps because many gay citizens think that speaking out of our concrete experiences is an exercise in social analysis and in envisaging a different, more humane future for all of us, while many other citizens just hear the predictable yammers of people asking for special privilege and not rights, it seems we’re passing like ships in the night in this country—those of us who work for an inclusive participatory democracy, and the majority of citizens who don’t get the visceral response to the Rick Warren choice.

In my view, this is why the stories gay citizens tell about our painful experiences of marginalization absolutely have to be set against the backdrop of human rights and of social solidarity. As long as those in the mainstream can pretend that these stories are happening somewhere over there, in a place that doesn’t affect every one of us—as long, that is, as those in the mainstream choose to see our stories as pretend stories of pretend suffering—we can go on, as a nation, professing exemplary ideals of democracy, while belying those ideals grossly in our treatment of one group of citizens.

We can go on, in other words, behaving as not a single other contemporary democracy in the world behaves: witness what has just happened to the UN resolution to extend the 1948 UN statement about human rights to gay human beings. To say this is to say that there is something woven into the fiber of this nation, of the American people, that is, to say the least, tone-deaf to the question of human rights for gay citizens. And somehow the experiences of those of us who are gay and lesbian in the U.S, and which are often experiences of having rights violated and denied, aren’t being heard—not in a way that reaches the mainstream.

How can that be, I wonder? As I look at my own experiences—unique ones admittedly, in some respects—as an openly gay theologian, who has worked in church-related institutions in which my rights have been grossly violated, and who also has a long history of working in historically black church-related institutions—I see some keys that help unlock the mystery. For me, at least.

I have become aware in the past several days that one of the triggers for my anger at the Rick Warren choice has to do with his statement comparing gay folks to pedophiles. That statement sends me through the roof. That long-told lie—a lie that has long since been discredited—sends me through the roof.

And here’s why. As I think I’ve mentioned on this blog, at a teaching position at a Catholic university some years back, I met that lie in all its ugly force, when I was given a one-year terminal contract, and was denied a reason for the termination.

As I’ve noted, when I approached the chair of the faculty grievance committee to file a grievance requesting that I be given a reason for being terminated, the chair initially stonewalled me, asking, “Well, what if the reason was that you have molested a student?” I pointed out that I had not done so, and that had I done so, the college would have had a contractual basis for firing me, and would not need to play the shell game it was playing to disguise its real reasons (academic-freedom ones) for terminating me.

I never received a reason for the termination. I resigned in protest. Not long after this, I heard from a friend that he had met the son of the president of the faculty senate, who had been in one of my classes. He informed my friend that his father was proudly telling people I had been fired because the campus couldn’t have “that sort” around—the sort that might “put their arm around a student.”

This is to say, early in my career as a Catholic theologian, I met the lie that gay folks are pedophiles, and I saw how it is used to smear somebody, destroy his reputation, and provide a bogus justification for terminating him—in the absence of any scrap of evidence to back the lie.

Just because. Because gay folks are pedophiles. Never mind that this was one who had lived in a committed relationship for years, and who had never once even dreamed of crossing any lines of propriety with students or anyone else.

I wish I could say that this has been my sole encounter with that toxic lie. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been. This is part of my violent reaction to Rick Warren’s continued lying about gay human beings and our lies, in the name of Christ. I react as anyone unjustly lashed over and over rects: I react with a violent reaction against the violation of my personhood and my flesh. Which is all the more horrendous when the one doing it claims to speak for God.

Down the road, same script all over again in my professional life—showing me that the gays-pedophiles lie remains alive and well in our culture, and will remain alive as long as it is instrumentally useful for people to tell when they want to violate the rights of gay folks. For any reason at all. Useful for people of faith to tell when they want to violate the rights of gay folks and not be held accountable for doing so.

Here’s what happened in my last encounter with that ugly lie. As I have also noted on this blog, at a later point in my career, I lost another position at another church-owned university—this time an historically black one (HBCU). In this case, I was informed that the university wanted me gone and was offering to buy out my contract. I agreed to the severance arrangement. I was told, in writing, in a document I was not allowed to keep, that the reason for this offer was “inability to work with this administration.”

Then all hell broke loose. The university rescinded the severance offer, forcing me to seek legal counsel. My attorney told me I had a strong case: for fraud and inducement, violation of agreements made with me, damage of my career and livelihood, and defamation. At the same time, he warned me that, because this was happening in Florida, a state with no—absolutely none—legal protection for gay citizens, I should expect a very nasty battle. With mud-slinging.

In Florida, after all, employers can fire any employee at will for no reason at all. And as a hospital administrator informed a gay woman who asked to visit her dying partner in the hospital while I lived there, Florida is an anti-gay state with anti-gay laws. Good luck making a case that your rights have been violated in such a state. Good luck defending yourself against grossly obvious misrepresentations of your character and work in such a state.

Employers know that they can get away with murder in such states. And they do so. And those in faith-based institutions can be among the most gleeful reputation-destroyers and liars, especially when the person they are attacking is gay and has chosen to stand up for her or his rights.

So here’s what happened when I began to seek legal counsel: soon after that, suddenly, in my email—my home email—there pops up a message. It purports to be from an internet social networking group, and it asks me to make a statement about how I happened to know someone in that network. Someone to whom my page in the network was linked. A friend of my nieces and nephews, with whom they were raised.

At the time I got the message, I had forgotten I even had that social network account. This was before Facebook and MySpace had taken off. My nieces and nephews had all signed up for the network, and had sent me (and their parents) invitations to join.

I joined, as did my brother and his wife. Our pages were linked to those of the young folks in the family, which linked us in turn to their friends. And then those of us who were adults, and who knew little of this new technology and its importance to young people in establishing social contacts, forgot we even had these pages. We sent a message here and there to our nieces and nephews, and then never visited the site again.

That is, I forgot until I got the message asking me to explain how I happened to know the young man who was a friend of my nieces and nephews—a young man whom I knew well because he had spent many summers with my brother’s family, as a quasi-member of the family. A young man who had grown up with my brother’s family and was the best friend of my youngest nephew.

When I got that message out of the blue, I had a very good idea why I was getting it at just that time—right after I had sought legal counsel to deal with a church-related HBCU that had made a promise of severance pay to me, and had then violated that promise. I could not and cannot say that the message came from any particular person within the institution with which I was now in conflict.

What I could say with certainty, though, was that this was not the first time I had experienced these insinuations at that particular workplace. And I had experienced them right from the top, from a person I knew well at this institution.

Case in point: not long before the process of disempowering me began from that person at the top, my nephew came for a visit. My niece came a few weeks later. The nephew who visited was the youngest, the friend of the young man about whom the questions regarding my connections were being raised.

When my nephew visited, he was intently interested in a modeling career. He tends to go through phases—perhaps like any young person, except his are all-consuming, and then he drops that interest and goes on to another. He came with me to my office one day and asked if he could check his email while I worked.

I told him of course, but pointed out to him that the computer system belonged to the university and not to me, and to be aware that he should not log onto any site that would be problematic in the workplace—rules I also apply at home if he asks to use my computer. He agreed.

Later, I happened to see he had sent his modeling portfolio by email, saving it on the desktop of my computer. He was trying to arrange interviews in Florida. I was helping him with this. I knew about the portfolio, as did his parents. We had all helped him organize it. It was a typical professional portfolio of any young man applying for modeling jobs with agencies that supply clothes models.

When I saw the portfolio on my work desktop, I thought nothing about it and put it into my recycling bin. That is, I thought nothing about it until I came to work the next day and found that the portfolio had somehow found its way in the night out of recycling and back to the desktop.

This was hardly the first clue I had had that a careful monitoring system—no, I have to be honest: a spying system—was in place, vis-a-vis my office. I was under no illusions about the system when a request was made to have a camera installed in my office, to “protect the computer.” I knew, because I knew the person at the top in this university, that when this supervisor decided to do an employee in, it was routine for her to obtain copies of that employee’s email for years back, if necessary, and to go through them with a fine-toothed comb looking for evidence to justify her dismissal of the employee.

I had seen her use this method of supervision, in fact, with two other employees in the past who happened to be gay. To my shame, though I protested in each case and had my hands resoundingly slapped, I allowed myself to be convinced that the supervisor had some strong reason for taking action against those employees—reason that went well beyond sexual orientation. I allowed myself to be convinced of this, God help me, even when she spoke to me of one employee's probable liaisons with students, of which I had seen no evidence.

When that request to explain how I knew my family’s friend at the social networking site came through, I also remembered some incidents that had just taken place when my nephew visited. The university photographer had insisted on taking pictures of my nephew, Steve, and me at a university banquet on my birthday.

I had naively thought nothing at all of this. He was, after all, snapping pictures of various folks in attendance at the event. Once again, though, I had found those pictures mysteriously uploaded to my computer—at which point I realized an ugly game was being played, one that was insinuating I had some kind of relationship with my own nephew!

This is, unfortunately, the level at which many folks continue to think about gay people and our lives. It is the level to which many folks continue to stoop even when they know better, because they know that it works, when they want to attack someone is gay for other reasons: it works to insinuate these ugly things about gay people, particularly in cultures where the equation of homosexuality with pedophilia remains strong, and where gay people lack any legal protection if their rights are violated in the workplace, in housing, etc.

And it works—this has to be noted in the context of the Rick Warren discussion—precisely because many people of faith continue to indulge themselves in these lurid fantasies about gay human beings and gay lives. People of faith who should know better.

Part of the reason, I’m convinced, that many Americans just don’t get how anguished we feel when our rights are trampled on and when folks of the ilk of Rick Warren are given such prominence in the new administration, is that buried deep inside the minds and souls of many people in our society are still toxic lies about gay people and gay lives.

And religion in our society is responsible, to a great degree, for keeping those toxic lies alive. In some church-related cultures—I’ve met this in both Catholic circles and in the heavily evangelical context of HBCUs—it is still perfectly acceptable to equate being gay with being a pedophile. No eyebrows will be raised at that equation, in these circles. If one is gay and calls for proof—for accountability for the lie being told—one is likely to be informed that this is a religious issue and gay people, being the dirty pedophiles they are, are anti-religion.

Angry? Grieved? Disappointed? Betrayed? You bet we are. This behavior has to stop. It has to stop being promoted by any churches in this land, and any church institutions. And it has to stop being given top billing at any presidential inauguration in this land.

Until it does stop, we Americans might as well forfeit all claims to being interested in human rights. Until it stops, we should continue doing what we're doing now, continue opposing declarations of human rights that include gay human beings. It’s at least honest on our part to admit that we just don’t believe in the full gamut of human rights for gay citizens.

And that we use religion to justify that selective approach to human rights. And that, in the final analysis, is why Rick Warren's presence at the inauguration is obscene to some of us, and why it signals that a business as usual that gay citizens have found toxic for decades now is going to continue with the new administration and its preferential treatment of the religious right.

End of Week News: National Conversation on Human Rights

Unusually cold weather here today, with overcast skies that look almost snow-laden—though snow this early in the season would be out of the ordinary. Steve and I are making chow chow. Steve happened to notice that our neighbors’ tomato vines, which overhang the little old-fashioned wire fence between our back yards, were laden with green tomatoes as the frost neared.

Since the neighbors had kindly offered for us to pick tomatoes on our side of the fence, and since these end-of-garden stragglers were going to waste, Steve retrieved them. And now we’re commemorating my mother’s birthday by canning a relish she loved and always made this time of year during my childhood, chow chow.

As I mind the pot of vinegar and pickling spices, a quick scan of the news. Two articles today pick up on themes about which I’ve blogged in recent days.

In “Don’t Give African Americans a Pass for Homophobia,” Clay Cane addresses Jasmyne Cannick’s recent LA Times opinion piece about gay marriage
(www.alternet.org/sex/108137). I blogged about Cannick’s views a week ago (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/11/finding-common-ground-gay-and-african.html).

Some key quotes from Cane:

As a black gay man who has endured the words "n****r" and "f****t", who lives in this duality of gayness and blackness, I have a vested interest in both inequalities.

+ + + + +

Homophobia in the black community equals a "real man." Sadly, homophobia is a conversation that we, as the black community, are absolutely refusing to have.

On the issue of civil rights, some black leaders say, "Gays need to stop comparing their struggle to blacks!" Sadly, it's the ruling class that wants these two minority groups to engage in comparisons of victimology. What it really says is, "Don't you n****rs let those f****ts think they have it worse than you!"

From my years of working in historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that Cane is correct when he says, “Sadly, homophobia is a conversation that we, as the black community, are absolutely refusing to have.” There is a conspiracy of silence within the African-American community as a whole about homophobia.

And the community is paying a steep price for that silence. Because the myth that gayness is a white boys’ disease persists in the black community, women of color are being infected with HIV at a much higher rate than the population as a whole by men who sleep with men while maintaining a façade of heterosexuality.

Silence equals death. Until African-American leaders—particularly educational and church leaders—call for open nationwide conversation among people of color about the damage that homophobia does to people of color themselves, black women will continue to contract HIV at a much higher rate than that of other demographic groups; young gay people of color will live in shame and court self-destructive behaviors, because they are not allowed positive role models in their communities and churches; and energy for change that could positively affect the nation as a whole, if one demeaned minority group did not permit itself to be played against another, will continue to be siphoned off in enervating in-fighting.

It is for these reasons that I have called repeatedly on this blog for church-sponsored HBCUs to open spaces for honest, wide-ranging conversation about these social problems (see, e.g., http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/06/and-pilgrimage-continues_03.html). The historic cultural breakthrough represented by the election of the first African-American president in American history should become a backdrop for such probing conversation of homophobia within communities of color—even more so, because of the high percentage of African-American voters in California who simultaneously supported Mr. Obama and proposition 8.

These are not simply gay issues. Nor are they simply issues for the black community. They are human rights issues that drive to the heart of what democracy is all about. Though I suspect the new administration will do all it can to dodge these issues in the name of political expediency and centrist governance, I think that it would be a mistake for the Obama administration not to call for educational initiatives about human rights, homophobia, and the role of religion in pluralistic democracy, in light of what happened with the recent anti-gay initiatives.

The second news item that catches my eye today is Waymon Hudson’s “Domestic Partnership Benefits? They Are after Those, Too.” Pam Spaulding has linked to this article from the Bilerico blog (www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do;jsessionid=9B4E72CF65BC6F88AFBF6F2B8A4B7C50?diaryId=8355).

Hudson reports alarming, but not unexpected, news from the the Florida Family Association, one of the groups that led the fight for amendment 2 outlawing gay marriage, in Florida. Hudson notes that David Caton, executive director of FFA, recently informed the Miami Herald,

We're going to use the momentum from the marriage amendment to speak to the fact that most people in this state don't want a recognition of that type of relationship. At this time of economic stress, our government should not be providing benefits to nonemployees on the basis of their sexual relationships.

As Hudson points out, during the months leading up to the vote in Florida, FFA and other groups advocating for a ban on gay marriage in the state claimed that they were not trying to abolish health benefits and hospital visitation rights for gay couples. Now, as he says, “the truth comes out.” The goal of these initiatives against gay marriage is to roll back as many rights as possible from gay citizens.

We who are gay would be foolish in the extreme if we did not recognize that this is the game plan of those using gay lives and gay human beings to make political points. “[M]ost people in this state don't want a recognition of that type of relationship”: the ultimate objective of those using gay persons in these ugly political battles is to tell us that we are unwelcome, and should return to the closet in order to make our fellow citizens comfortable.

If we do not intend to do that—and I, for one, don’t—then we need to push for the kind of national conversation for which I’m advocating under the new administration. If the Obama administration does not make human rights—and, in particular, gay rights, because it is in the lives of gay citizens that human rights are most threatened in American society today—a centerpiece of its program of change, then the change promised us is not going to accomplish what we expect. Not for gay citizens. Not for the nation as a whole.

Finding Common Ground: The Gay and African-American Communities in Obama's America

In my “Finding Common Ground” series earlier this week, I deliberately chose to wait before I appended the reflections I want to offer today. I did so because these touch on the volatile topic of the African-American community’s complex engagement with (and occasional resistance) to human rights for gay brothers and sisters. That topic has been made a minefield, and while I don’t mind stepping on a mine or two myself, I am unwilling to be responsible for detonating more than those already exploding all around, as a group of citizens deals with justifiable outrage at having its human rights removed by popular fiat.

As I’ve noted before, my perspective is singular, and perhaps therefore less valuable precisely because it is less common. I approach this topic as a gay white man who chose to work in historically black church-sponsored universities from the outset of his career as a theologian, and who came out of the closet only gradually as he worked in the HBCU context.

I also bring to the subject the history of white racism in the American South—the explicit, deep-rooted, historic experience of white racism that perdures among many of us who were shamefully implicated for generations in the practice of slavery. I bring to my reflections the life-long struggle to confront the racism bred in me from infancy, and to live in solidarity with people of color seeking a place at the table of participatory democracy.

I live, for godssake, in a state that has just voted more Republican than in the previous presidential election. And with strong indicators that if Hilary Clinton had been the nominee, she would have carried Arkansas, how can one credibly discount the role that racism played in my state during this election? I live in a state that also, to its eternal shame, just voted to ban all unmarried couples from adopting or fostering children—a vote in which whites outstripped blacks in support of this homophobic legislation.

I also approach these issues as someone who learned in my two decades of work in HBCUs that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, homophobia is alive and well among some African Africans—as it is among many other groups in American society, including the majority culture. I bear scars as a result of my years working in HBCUs. Those scars are there because I am a gay man who has chosen not to disguise that fact, and who has not hidden his longstanding committed relationship with another gay man who worked alongside me in two of the three HBCUs in which I taught and did administrative work.

I am now without a job and income, health coverage, entrée to professional academic communities, because of ugly homophobia within the HBCU setting.specifically, because of the homophobia of a particular African-American female whom my partner and I had previously considered a friend, and in support of whom we have made sacrifices that now place our economic lives in jeopardy. I have been hesitant to engage the current debate about the connection between the black and gay communities in light of proposition 8 precisely because of the deep scars I bear from these experiences.

It does not help, when passions are inflamed, to add fuel to the fire. When people are wounded, it does not help to deepen pain through inflammatory rhetoric. I refuse to write from my own place of hurt and anger when doing that will injure and not heal.

Even so, there is something that can be said—something that must be said—to address black homophobia from the outside. No community exists in isolation from others. Communities that seek to close themselves off from the perspectives of other communities—including the critical perspectives of those communities—do so at great risk to themselves.

Communities that harass their members when anyone breaks rank to blow the whistle if something is wrong, or that lock arms and combat any and all critiques from the outside, ghettoize themselves. Through such bullying tactics, they succeed in doing precisely what they should be combating more than anything else: they succeed in making themselves and their insights marginal to the social mainstream. They complete the marginalization process that they should be kicking against with all their might, in solidarity with other marginalized communities.

And with that apologia as a frame for the following analysis, I want to compare two very different responses of LGBT members of the African-American community to proposition 8. These are Terrance Heath’s “Marriage Matters to Us” (www.republicoft.com/2008/11/13/marriage-matters-to-us) and Jasmyne Cannick’s “No-on-8’s White Bias” (www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-cannick8-2008nov08%2C0%2C3669070.story).

Heath’s statement is actually in part a response to Cannick’s, which appeared in the Los Angeles Times after the election. Heath adverts to the line-drawing and bullying that sometimes tries to prevent those who break rank with the dominant view of a subculture from speaking freely. As he notes, W.E.B. DuBois’s “twoness of being” analogy for the African-American experience applies in a crucially important way to the experience of African Americans who are also LGBT.

The experience of belonging simultaneously to two oppressed minority communities can create a split in the soul, divided loyalties, internal war between competing agendas. Heath concludes that he and Cannick come down on opposite sides, vis-à-vis which of the competing sets of interests dominate their analysis of debates about gay human rights.

Cannick, who is an African-American lesbian, is an out and out racial exclusivist who states frankly, “There's nothing a white gay person can tell me when it comes to how I as a black lesbian should talk to my community about this issue.” Cannick’s essay against gay marriage as a priority rehearses claims often repeated within some black communities: that gay citizens enjoy socioeconomic privilege which exceeds that of most people of color; that the gay attempt to use the language of the black civil rights movement is illicit because the black movement was born in the churches and the gay movement is antithetical to the churches; and that marriage is a concern only of elite white gays, and not of the African-American LGBT community.

Heath responds to these arguments by noting that the exclusion of gay couples from marriage and all the privileges attendant on marriage further undermines the socioeconomic security of black gay and lesbian couples, which already have, on the whole, lower household incomes than do either black heterosexually married couples or white gay couples. Heath states politely but firmly that he will not allow Cannick ’s characterization of “the” black response to gay civil rights (including marriage) to speak for him, noting,

There are many paths to justice. We each chose ours for different, often deeply personal reasons. Sometimes they weave together in places where we need help and can help one another to keep going. Sometimes they part, but they inevitably cross again. We will meet each other many times on our winding paths to justice. We will need each other again. Let’s not put roadblocks in front of each other.

I find Terrance Heath’s argument far and away more cogent than Jasmyne Cannick’s. And I would hope that I do so not because I am white, or live in a racist culture, or have privilege. I do so because Heath’s argument is simply more humane—more thoughtful, more aware of nuances within the human experience in general (black or white, gay or straight), and therefore more willing to struggle with ambiguity to find commonality in human suffering beyond slogans and line-drawing.

Cannick’s argument is, I am sorry to say, racist. In its insistence that a black lesbian (or an African American in general) has nothing to learn from the experience of a white gay person, it truncates black experience from the experiences of any other marginal community that does not share the experience of marginalization due to color. This racist analysis siphons humanity from a community already subject to dehumanizing oppression. In that respect, it tragically mirrors white racism, which robs racist whites of their own humanity even as they try to dehumanize people of color.

When Coretta Scott King notes that some gay Americans stepped out courageously to defend the rights of African Americans when we ourselves did not even enjoy those same rights, she is noting that any marginalized community can build bridges of sympathy and solidarity to other marginalized communities by reflecting about what it means—as a human being—to experience unmerited suffering imposed from the outside. She is also noting the historic fact that those supporting black civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s included a high proportion of gay and lesbian citizens, whose contributions should not be ignored.

Marginalization in and of itself does not lead to sympathy and solidarity with others who are marginalized. Indeed, it can lead to precisely the hard, recalcitrant defiance of solidarity—and willingness to oppress others—that seems to abide in the heart of Cannick’s argument.

But marginalization reflected on, taken into one’s soul and processed with humanity, can and often does lead to a willingness of those who have been marginalized to reach out and make common cause with others who are oppressed. It can and often does lead to a resolute determination never to oppress others as one is herself oppressed.

As Leonard Pitts notes . . . . In his recent “Some Blacks Forgot Sting of Discrimination” commenting on the African-American vote and proposition 8, Pitts grants that there is not full equivalence between the gay and the African-American struggles for human rights (www.miamiherald.com/living/columnists/leonard-pitts/story/767511.html). Gay people have not been enslaved. A war has not been fought to free us.

Nonetheless, Pitts sees commonality in the experience of the two marginalized communities struggling for human rights, a commonality that, in his view, ought to fuel African-American determination to reject any complicity with the oppression of gay Americans:

But that's not the same as saying blacks and gays have nothing in common. On the contrary, gay people, like black people, know what it's like to be left out, lied about, scapegoated, discriminated against, held up, beat down, denied a job, a loan or a life. And, too, they know how it feels to sit there and watch other people vote upon your very humanity, just as if those other people had a right. So beg pardon, but black people should know better.

What Pitts says here, and what Heath also notes, is something that demands to be said in response to Cannick. Just as some African-American commentators accuse gay citizens of lumping all African Americans together and making wild generalizations about “the” African-American community, Cannick illicitly stereotypes “white” gays, turning all of us into paragons of privilege.

And that is simply not where many of us live. Not only black gay couples but many white gay couples, as well, suffer economic and social deprivation because we are barred from the right to marry. Many of us live in one of the 31 states that do not even afford us legal protection from being fired simply because we are gay. Many of us have been fired solely because we were gay—when we have worked hard and given much.

Gay couples across the nation often experience discrimination when a spouse is hospitalized, and the other spouse is barred from the right to see the partner or to make medical decisions about him or her. The ways in which we can be targeted at work, our good work denied, our jobs taken away ultimately for one reason alone while other specious reasons are advanced: these are manifold.

And they have everything to do with those same forces that rabidly oppose gay marriage. What Cannick seems unable or unwilling to recognize is that those engineering the fight against gay marriage oppose all gay civil rights. The ultimate goal of this ugly end-game against gay human beings is not simply to bar gay citizens from the right to marry. It is to strip as many rights as possible from gay citizens everywhere in the land.

And that should concern Cannick. Lesbians and gay people of color occupy socioeconomic situations that are precarious enough, even where there are minimal rights for such citizens. Removing those rights everywhere in the land will disproportionately affect the very people for whom Cannick claims to be a spokesperson.

In analyzing political arguments, I long ago developed a hermeneutical principle that goes something like this: when those who claim to be your allies start saying the same thing that your enemy says, something is wrong. The ally shows herself not to be a friend but a foe when she channels to you the hate rhetoric of those who oppress you.

Sadly, this is precisely what Cannick is dong. When I listened to Dan Savage and Tony Perkins spar about proposition 8 on Anderson Cooper’s show earlier this week, I could not avoid hearing—God help me—echoes of Jasmyne Cannick running through all that Tony Perkins said (http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/11/why-dan-savage.html).

Perkins is all over the black-gay divide regarding gay human rights. He is positively jubilant about that divide—as Cannick is. He crows and gloats along with Cannick that proposition 8 passed.

As does Bill O’Reilly. Cannick was on his show last night!—and not for the first time (www.jasmynecannick.com/blog/?p=2907 and www.jasmynecannick.com/blog/?p=1902). Here’s the mind-boggling irony about where Jasmyne Cannick’s arguments have led her: she is now the darling of the right-wing media circuit, of the anti-gay (and deeply racist) right-wing media circuit.

And what terrible irony, when Cannick noted in a previous essay regarding gay marriage,

Our worth [i.e., the worth of people of color] in the gay civil rights movement, whether you choose to believe it or not, amounts to our willingness to be used in photo ops and carry their message of marriage to Blacks, putting aside all other issues. That’s it. Those of us who have been willing to do it have been rewarded handsomely for our time (www.advocate.com/news_detail_ektid55977.asp).

Out of her own mouth: though Ms. Cannick appears to resent (and should resent) the tokenist use of people of color in photo op ads for gay marriage, she herself is now being amply rewarded for her outspoken blacks-vs.-gays arguments by becoming a poster child for the likes of Bill O’Reilly.

I only hope that as Ms. Cannick plays into the hands of these lowlifes, she calls her new allies on their racism as strongly as she has been calling the mainstream gay community on its racism. Tony Perkins’s ties to one of the most strident racists in the land, David Duke of Perkins’s home state of Louisiana, were probed as long ago as 2005 by Max Blumenthal in the Nation (www.thenation.com/doc/20050509/blumenthal).

In 1996 Perkins bought the mailing list of Duke, former Grand Wizard of the KKK, for $82,000. Perkins was then campaign manager for a Republican candidate for the Senate from Louisiana, “Woody” Jenkins. As Blumenthal notes, the Federal Election Commission fined Jenkins for seeking to hide Duke’s contribution to his campaign. Perkins denies having known of Duke’s contribution to the Jenkins campaign (www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=LH05F09).

Yes, the religious and political right—with a sordid history of overt racism—are all over the black-gay divide these days (see e.g., http://sunlituplands.blogspot.com/2008/11/anti-prop-8-activists-aim-racial-slurs.html, which has predictably been linked to the religious right LifeSite news site).* And there, right in the their midst, stands Jasmyne Cannick, an African-American lesbian. Something is wrong with this picture.

Can Cannick truly be unaware of the deliberate attempt of the religious and political right to exploit divisions between the black and gay communities for some time now—to divide and conquer in order to consolidate the power of the men who rule us, white men like Perkins and O’Reilly? Straight white men.

I’ve documented that attempt at length on this blog. I won’t repeat all I have said about it. It’s not hard to find abundant evidence for this longstanding strategy of division and what it intends. It is easy to follow the money, to see how economically privileged right-wing interest groups (largely comprised of white men purporting to be straight) are doing all they can to fund movements in mainline churches like the Methodist, Anglican, and Presbyterian churches, to pit people of color against gay persons.

Using precisely the argument Cannick herself advances . . . . Namely, that the quest for human rights by people of color is authentic and biblically mandated, whereas the quest for human rights by LGBT persons is inauthentic and not rooted in the core values of religious communities. I have written at length about these issues, and won’t repeat myself here.

I can only hope that as Cannick poses for her photo ops on FOX news, she listens to the powerful words of fellow African Americans like Leonard Pitts, who comes to very different conclusions than she does. In the article I cited previously, Pitts states,

Yes, I know. I can hear some black folk yelling at me from here, wanting me to know it's not the same, what gays have gone through and what black people did, wanting me to know they acted from sound principles and strong values. It is justification and rationalization, and I've heard it all before. I wish they would explain to me how they can, with a straight face, use arguments against gay people that were first tested and perfected against us.

Or perhaps Cannick will listen to Princeton professor of politics and African-American studies Melissa Harris Lacewell, who told Rachel Maddow in an MSNBC interview I cited a few days ago, “Communities of color demonstrated an awfully bigoted vote [with proposition 8].”

For my part, I have to conclude that when I hear someone who appears on the surface to be a friend and ally saying to me precisely what my enemies and oppressors say to me, I perk up my ears. I know that something is wrong when that happens.

As I’ve stated on this blog, I have had the gruesome experience of having had my life and work interrupted by an African-American woman to whom I reported in a previous workplace, who talked solidarity but walked oppression. She did so in part because she herself was answerable to a United Methodist bishop—a white man—who has made a name for himself as a defender of homophobia in his church. In turn, in her crusade to attack me as an unapologetically gay man, she was aided and abetted by a Mormon woman and a Southern Baptist one, both white, both jealous of my position and intent on undermining me. Both unwilling to respect me because I am gay; both secure in their jobs after hounding me out of mine, both unapologetic about their message to me that my humanity counts less than theirs does.

I could, if I so chose, use these experiences to conclude that all black people, or all African-American feminists, or all Mormons, or every Southern Baptist, or the Methodists in general, are the enemy. I could wash my hands of people from each group as Jasmyne Cannick appears willing to do with white gays.

But what good does it do for me to write off all members of any ethnic or religious group? Within each of those groups of people, I may find both oppressors and those willing to stand in solidarity with me as a gay man. For every African-American woman willing to sell herself out to the white male power structure in church or society as a token representative of the "good" minority groups—and I've met such women and seen how they are rewarded for selling themselves to those men—there are two more refusing to sell out.

When those with whom I have hoped to make common cause in the struggle for every human being to find a place at the table refuse to walk with me, the humane reaction—I’m convinced—is to look for solidarity with someone else. For everyone who talks but doesn’t walk, there are others aplenty out there willing to walk, if we don’t burn the bridges to them and their communities.

*Hat tip to Waldo Lydecker's Journal for this citation, and a profound thanks to Waldo Lydecker for linking to and recommending Bilgrimage recently.

Faith-Based Homophobia and Second Class Americans: A Test of the Mandate for Change

In light of continued media/blog discussion of divisions between the African-American and gay community after the passing of proposition 8 in California, I want to revive this posting from October 3.

Dear Mr. Obama:

To address this open letter to you, I am interrupting a thread on this blog that touches on painful personal experiences of homophobia in my professional life. Those experiences have resulted in my being unemployed and without health insurance at age 58—despite my proven track record of hard, productive, successful work.

My unemployment and lack of access to health care have everything to do with the fact that I have chosen not to hide that I am openly gay, and have lived my entire adult life in a committed relationship with another openly gay man.

Despite my lack of income and the dwindling of the scant retirement funds I’ve been able to save while working in church-owned universities (most of them HBCUs), I have donated repeatedly to your campaign. I have done so because I support your policies. I am working hard in every way I can to assist your election.

I have been particularly impressed by your willingness to address the unconscionable stigmatization and marginalization of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons in our democratic society. I have noted with delight your willingness to speak truth about the ugliness of homophobia to your own African-American brothers and sisters.

When you challenged homophobia at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta last January, I was moved profoundly—as I was also moved by your courage when you addressed these issues again before an audience not likely to share your views in Beaumont, Texas, in February. I have been equally impressed with your wife’s clarity and courage about these issues. I appreciate your support and that of your wife. This is among the reasons you have my vote, as well as that of many members of my family.

For this reason, I am respectfully asking you to think about your opportunity and responsibility, as you speak at HBCUs, to continue calling your own African-American brothers and sisters, and our nation at large, to recognize and address the ugly phenomenon of homophobia. I note that you will speak tomorrow at an HBCU in Daytona Beach—Bethune-Cookman University. I feel certain that you will be speaking at a number of HBCUs during this campaign.

This is as it ought to be. HBCUs have played a significant and often unrecognized role in the educational life of our nation. They have historically graduated, and they continue to graduate, the majority of African Americans who go on to earn doctorates in the U.S.

However, as I am sure you are aware, many HBCUs lack policies prohibiting discrimination against gay faculty, staff, administrators, and students. I have addressed these issues repeatedly on this Bilgrimage blog. A search of the blog for the term “HBCU” will link anyone who wants to examine this issue to numerous studies and statements about the track record of HBCUs, vis-à-vis homophobic discrimination.

I believe I have a right (and an obligation) to address the issue of anti-gay discrimination in HBCUs for a number of reasons. First, I’m a citizen who has long worked for equal rights for everyone in our democratic society, and, in particular, for those shoved away from the table of participatory democracy.

Second, I am a theologian whose vocational life has been centered on calling churches and religious groups to greater awareness of the mechanisms by which social structures stigmatize and exclude scapegoated groups. In my view, faith communities do not have the right to expect to command attention as credible moral guides, when, in their own practices, they violate key moral principles including the obligation to reach out and include the marginalized, or the obligation to refrain from harming those already harmed by structures of social exclusion.

Third, at the beginning of my career as a theologian, I deliberately chose to work in HBCUs. At the outset of my career, I had the opportunity either to take a highly paid position at a prestigious majority-culture university, or a modestly paid position at an HBCU, Xavier University in New Orleans.

I chose Xavier, and did so gladly, though my starting salary was $15,500 (to the best of my recollection) in 1984. The impulse to serve and give to those in need that brought me to the vocation of theology in the first place, as well as my history as a white Southerner who came of age in the Civil Rights period, made it obvious to me that I had an important obligation (and graced opportunity) to offer my talents, such as they are, to HBCUs.

In the narrative I am interrupting to address this letter to you, I am speaking forthrightly about the economic effects my choice to work in HBCUs has had on my life and that of my partner Steve Schafer. We both knew when we accepted jobs at HBCUs that we would never enjoy lives of economic luxury.

I spent almost two decades teaching and doing administrative work in HBCUs. During those two decades, from 1984 up to my last year in an HBCU (2006-2007), I never earned a salary in excess of $60,000 until my final year as academic vice-president at an HBCU. At Philander Smith College in Little Rock, I had the honor of serving as academic dean for a number of years. Even in that position—one that involved intense work—I drew a salary of only $29,000 for several years, until the president told me that she considered it an embarrassment to the college that it was paying its dean such a salary.

I am not complaining. I am not seeking to embarrass or adversely affect any particular HBCU, in writing this letter. I knew when I began working at HBCUs that I would not enjoy economic comfort. It was a privilege, an honor, to work in HBCUs, to have the opportunity to give something to a community that has suffered historic marginalization. I gave without expecting thanks.

What I did not expect, however, was to be slapped in the face because I am openly gay. That, unfortunately, was my experience at one HBCU, where, when the harassment began, I discovered, I had no legal recourse to protect myself against misrepresentation of my work record, and deeply personal vilification of my character.

At this institution, I had again been honored to accept the position of academic vice-president, though I was told that the salary I was being offered was some $30,000 less than that offered to my predecessor. It was enough to be wanted, to be needed, to be allowed to serve.

It was a delight, too, to have a salary that permitted me to give more than I had ever been able to give in the past. When I found that my salary included an augment from a state grant program in the amount of $20,000, I divided the augment in half and gave half of that amount to my associate, who, in my view, worked as hard as I did and deserved as much reward. In the year in which my partner Steve Schafer and I worked for this HBCU, together we donated more to the school than all other members of the university leadership team combined.

I will not rehearse the full story. Due to legal threats on the part of the same HBCU that has rewarded my hard work and that of my partner with such shameful and ugly treatment for our years of hard work and sacrifice in HBCUs, I am not even permitted to tell the whole story.

And I know that as a presidential candidate, you can do nothing about a situation of conflict between a former employee and an employer. What you can do, however, and what I believe you must do, to be true to your principles, is to call each and every HBCU at which you speak to accountability regarding issues of sexual orientation.

May I respectfully ask that, if an HBCU at which you speak has no policy forbidding discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation, you call the HBCU to accountability about its obligation to forbid such discrimination through official policy statements? Please also call on HBCUs to implement support groups for faculty, staff, and students dealing with issues of sexual orientation. Please ask HBCUs to form task forces to educate their own constituencies, as well as the public at large, about the damage that homophobia does in our society.

Please challenge HBCUs not to harass openly gay employees or students, not to issue written demands that openly gay employees refrain from traveling or making doctors’ visits with their partners, when such demands are not issued to married couples working for the same institution. Please call on HBCUs and their leaders not to demean gay employees and students, and not to punish gay employees and students who promote dialogue about homophobia in the campus community.

The state in which you will be speaking tomorrow is one with an alarming record when it comes to recent incidents of gay-bashing. Historically, HBCUs have been a part of the solution and not a part of the problem, when it comes to significant social issues affecting minorities. The prophetic African-American leader Mary McLeod Bethune, who founded the institution at which you will speak tomorrow, asked that HBCUs create town-hall meetings in which those shoved from the table of participatory democracy could gather together to discuss solutions to the problems they experienced.

Please continue Dr. Bethune’s legacy as you speak at Bethune-Cookman and other HBCUs. Please continue to remind HBCUs of their commitment to include, to refrain from discrimination, to refrain from harming those already harmed by social stigmatization. Please assist all of us who are working for justice within the faith communities of this nation, as we call on those who talk the talk to walk the walk. Faith-based institutions, including HBCUs and their leaders, should not have the luxury of representing themselves as opposed to discrimination, while they practice discrimination towards their LGBT brothers and sisters.

Thank you for hearing my plea. It comes from the heart.

Respectfully yours,

William D. Lindsey.

Anderson Cooper, 360, 6 November 2008: "Was this [i.e., addressing support for proposition 8 prior to the election] the first test for Barack Obama of his real support for gays and lesbians in America and if so, did he fail that test?"