Ex-Gay Activist Peterson Toscano Launches New Blog: Combining Climate Change Activism with Queer Activism

Cold Water (and Sacraments) on a Summer's Day

Steve and I have just returned from bringing a copy of my book Fiat Flux: The Writings of Wilson R. Bachelor, Nineteenth-Century Country Doctor and Philosopher to a friend of ours. John and his wife Tina are pillars of the local Quaker community and have been extraordinarily kind to and supportive of Steve and me. We wanted to give them a copy of the book to express our gratitude for the kindness and support (and it actually does have some notes on the Quaker history of Wilson Bachelor's ancestors, who are also my own ancestors).

To Readers: A Thank-You for Ideas for Postings

As I continue posting repeatedly about the Komen-Planned Parenthood events, the HHS guidelines on contraceptive coverage, and the Catholic involvement with these issues, I'd like to write a quick thank-you note to several readers who have sent me very good suggestions for postings in the past several weeks.  I always appreciate any and all such suggestions, and I want any readers who have sent these to me to know I'm not ignoring you.  And that I value you and your interest in the blog.

Religious Recognition of Same-Sex Civil Partnerships in Britain: Controversy Continues

It's a little difficult to get a fix on what's happening today in Britain with civil partnerships for same-sex couples.  My understanding (and this is from a distance and based on news reports--and I'll welcome additions and corrections from better informed readers) is that today is the day religious bodies that want to solemnize same-sex partnerships in Britain can begin to do so if they so desire.  No faith community that opposes such a step is being forced to take it.  The new option simply permits groups that wish to recognize same-sex partnerships in an official religious context to do so.

Quakers Endorse Same-Sex Marriage: A Challenge to Rowan Williams re: How Churches Change Their Moral Minds

Yesterday, I wrote that churches change their moral minds when cutting-edge groups of prophetic believers take the risk of speaking out, needling, prodding, challenging, and opening doors to the marginalized that the churches themselves wish to keep closed, when powerful interest groups that benefit from marginalizing some groups in society exert strong pressure on a church to preserve the status quo.

I wrote this to challenge the insistence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, that churches can validly change moral positions based on how “the Church has consistently read the Bible for the last two thousand years” only after a “strong . . . consensus” has been achieved, based on “painstaking biblical exegesis” and “solid theological grounding” regarding which there is “wide acceptance” within a church.

As I noted, this understanding of how churches change their moral minds is historically incorrect. The churches changed their moral minds about slavery and the place of place of women in church and world despite what had been the consistent, longstanding theological and exegetical consensus regarding slavery and the role of women. The churches changed their moral minds about slavery and women’s place in the world not because a majority of church members agreed to these theological and moral shifts, but despite the opposition of large numbers of Christians to this theological and moral shift. There was not widespread consensus on these issues when the churches finally decided to do what was right, only after prophetic groups succeeded in needling and shaming the churches into doing what was right.

As I noted, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s formula for change in the church’s moral mind regarding gay human beings is a formula for stasis. It is not a formula for the informed, conscientious change in the church’s attitudes for which Rowan Williams professes to hope. It is, instead, a formula designed to keep change at bay, through endless study, discussion, and negotiation—even when many people within the churches, including the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, already know that there is no compelling theological, scriptural, or moral reason for continued discrimination against gay persons.

It is, then, an unjust formula, one that deliberately wishes to continue discrimination against gay persons within the Anglican communion by putting off indefinitely the moment of decision at which the church must either choose to discontinue discrimination in a thoroughgoing and decisive way, or continue to discriminate, while trying unsuccessfully to convince us that everyone is welcome at its table.

As I was writing the preceding analysis of the moral conundrum facing the Anglican communion (and liberal Christians in general, insofar as they wish to be viewed as tolerant, inclusive, and loving while they refuse to make solidarity with their gay brothers and sisters), I did not know that British Friends were holding their yearly meeting this week at York. And that yesterday at this meeting, British Quakers decided to perform same-sex marriages within Quaker communities.

The decision of Friends to perform same-sex marriages is deeply rooted in traditional Quaker theology, which is informed by founder George Fox’s teaching that there is something of God in everyone in the world, an inner light that links each human being to God. From their beginnings as a religious movement, Quakers have emphasized the obligation of all believers to respect and look for that spark of God within others—Friend and non-Friend alike, Christian and non-Christian alike, believer and non-believer alike.

The decision of the British Friends to perform same-sex marriages rests on the discernment of this religious body that God chooses to marry people of the same sex, and those attuned to God’s will ought not to stand in the way of that divine choice, but to celebrate it. This decision is, in other words, an outgrowth of the Quaker belief that God lives within each human being, and one of our most fundamental religious obligations is to find and witness to that divine presence in others.

This decision to honor what God is accomplishing through the love and marital union of people of the same sex now puts the Quakers in a ticklish position vis-à-vis the British government, which recognizes civil unions for same-sex couples but not same-sex marriages. The Quaker decision to marry same-sex couples means that Quakers will begin reporting same-sex marriages to the government on the same footing that they now report opposite-sex marriages.

British Friends are choosing, in other words, to make no distinction at all between the religious status of an opposite-sex and a same-sex marriage performed at a Quaker meeting. Quakers believe that they can no longer support such a decision. To do so would be to deny that God is accomplishing in same-sex relationships precisely what God is accomplishing in opposite-sex ones: loving unions that build families and society, particularly when these unions are publicly recognized and supported by a society. The Quaker insistence on paying attention to what God is doing even, or especially, within a despised marginalized group, is in line with the longstanding Quaker tradition of looking for the inner light, the presence of God, wherever it dwells, even (or particularly) among those overlooked by the social mainstream.

To my mind, what British Friends have just decided to do, and the theological rationale they advance to justify their decision, strongly supports the argument I offered yesterday against the Archbishop of Canterbury’s understanding of how churches change their moral minds. When social attitudes begin to show churches that certain practices they have long taken for granted are no longer morally defensible, churches usually change their moral minds not because they have reached wide agreement about a new moral consensus, or as a result of ongoing study and discussion about the new consensus.

They change their moral minds because prophetic, cutting-edge groups within the churches and outside the churches needle the churches into rethinking their complicity in practices that can no longer be justified on theological, biblical, or moral grounds. Quakers have a very important history of needling and challenging the social mainstream, when the mainstream insists on taking for granted (and justifying) longstanding practices of unjust social marginalization. This Quaker tendency has caused Friends again and again to come up against strong norms within mainstream Christian churches, which support the social status quo and refuse to reconsider and reject discriminatory practices long taken for granted by mainstream churches and by society itself.

The Quakers led the battle against slavery, for instance, when all mainstream churches, including the Church of England, were heavily invested in that practice and did not want to critique it, for fear of alienating powerful interest groups within their society and their church. With their belief that there is something of God in everyone, the Quakers recognized the right of women to preach and engage in ministry centuries before the mainstream churches, including the Anglican church, changed their minds about these matters.

At a time in which the mainstream churches, including the Churches of England and Ireland, were largely oblivious to the suffering of the poor in Ireland in the 19th century, the Quakers were actively working to create jobs for and to feed the Irish poor. During the terrible years of the Famine, the Quakers set up soup kitchens to keep starvation at bay for many poor people in Ireland, while the mainstream churches remained silent about the suffering of the Irish poor, and even justified it as the will of God manifested in the lives of those who did not work and thus did not deserve to eat.

Quakers and their history, and the decision they have just made to perform same-sex marriages, illustrate, then, precisely the point I hoped to make in my critique of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s understanding of how the churches change their moral mind when longstanding tradition supports discriminatory practices that a shifting social consensus has begun to call into question. When a growing consensus begins to reveal traditional Christian practices as morally questionable, changes in the moral minds of churches, do not begin at the top, with archbishops, who have everything vested in maintaining the status quo and not rocking the boat.

Nor do they begin with the majority of believers within a church communion, who will inevitably resist having to rethink taken-for-granted assumptions about the bible and religious authority, and having to revise their practices as they reassess those assumptions. Changes in the moral minds of churches do not begin, either, with powerful interest groups that hope to keep the church on their side as they continue the oppression of a targeted minority for their own benefit.

Changes in the moral mind of churches begin with cutting-edge groups such as the Quakers, who retrieve powerful prophetic strands of the scriptures that are fundamental to Christianity, but are always being lost sight of as the church settles down comfortably within history and strikes deals with the rich and powerful at any given moment in time. Changes in the moral mind of churches begin with prophetic groups like the Quakers that are willing to risk something in order to do what is right.

As Symon Hill, associate director of the theological think-tank Ekklesia (and a Friend himself) notes re: yesterday's decision,

As with other churches, this has not been an easy process for Quakers. I hope that others will have the courage to follow this lead and speak up for the radical inclusivity of Christ. As Christians, we are called to stand with those on the margins who are denied equality.

I hope the Archbishop of Canterbury is listening.

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.

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.