Frank Schaeffer on Why White Evangelicals Love Trump: "The Context Is American Racism" — Implications for White Catholic "Pro-Life" Voters

This is the kind of testimony that white Catholics who claim to be motivated solely by opposition to abortion as they cast their votes do not want to hear. I wonder why?

The Long and Short of It: Evangelical Mulligans and Idiot Winds — Religion in the News

“Family Research Council head says that evangelical conservatives are willing to overlook Trump’s past behavior so long as he delivers for them on policy” https://t.co/4I5tGy4WcZ

— Jonathan Merritt (@JonathanMerritt) January 23, 2018 

"We don't care how many women he has abused, cheated on, or objectified. We don't care how many black people he insults. We don't care how many refugees he turns away or non-American Christians he sends back to persecution, as long he helps US." US = white, American, men. https://t.co/h7HS0Drp1A

— Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) January 23, 2018

"Trump Administration Is Dismantling Its Predecessor's Moves to Protect Women, Minorities, the Poor, and LGBTQ People": Thoughts About the Morning's News

David Gushee, "The Most Fantastic Association of Men Imaginable"

In one morning, I read (1),

The Trump administration is dismantling its predecessor's moves to protect women, minorities, the poor, and LGBTQ people (Mark Joseph Stern).

Quote for Day: Arkansas Right-to-Discriminate Bill Is Roadmap for the Nation — More Wide-Ranging and Dangerous Than Failed Arizona Anti-Gay Bill

Michelangelo Signorile continues to sound the alarm bell about the right-to-discriminate legislation in Arkansas, which is, he points out, citing none other than Tony Perkins, head of the anti-gay hate group Family Research Council, intended to be a "roadmap" for similar legislation around the country. As Signorile keeps noting, the national business community and even political leaders one would expect to have spoken out about the Arkansas legislation (e.g., the Clintons) remain curiously silent about this legislation that directly targets LGBT citizens: 

In the News: "Doonesbury" Controversy, MSNBC and Tony Perkins, and Dolan's Shtick

Other news tidbits that have caught my eye in the past day or so:

At the Maddow Blog, Steve Benen reports on the controversy that Gary Trudeau's "Doonesbury" series of comic strips satirizing legislative measures to shame women seeking abortions is eliciting in some parts of the U.S.  As Benen notes, some newspaper editors have yanked the cartoons, claiming that they cross a line of good taste.

Joel Burns, Fort Worth City Council Member to Gay Teens: It Gets Better

Joel Burns' testimony (I'm using that religiously charged term deliberately here) at a recent Fort Worth city council meeting in Dan Savage's "It Gets Better" project is circulating around the internet right now, and deserves serious consideration.  It's a powerful testimony, heart-wrenching and mind-altering to witness.

Readers Respond: The Shifting Center and New Demographic Trends Among Young Voters

After I posted yesterday (here) about the noteworthy silence of the American Catholic center re: the Iowa and Vermont decisions this week to abolish obstacles to marriage for gay citizens, an interesting discussion ensued. These comments are actually at the following posting (here), but as Carl notes when he starts this thread, he’s responding to the previous posting, which brought up the response of American Catholic centrists to gay issues and gay people.

The discussion is valuable, and I’d like to build a reader-response posting around it. Carl notes,

It occurred to me that there is a process unfolding here. Initially, those who were the vocal "far left" gave up and left. Rather than silencing their voices, the right then began directing their rhetoric at the "not quite so far left". This caused the NQSFL to become the vocal "far left" who eventually gave up and left.

Now, the "left of middle" became the "far left". Rather than silencing their voices, the right began directing their rhetoric at the left of middle, who now became the "far left", who became more vocal, but eventually gave up and left.

The reason you don’t hear the voice of the middle, is that the middle keeps getting pushed to the left. At that point, they become vocal, get fed up and leave. Those who are the far left today, are in actuality, the middle and right of middle of yesterday.

And Colleen replies,

Bill, I agree with Carl's assessment as it pertains to our generations, but with the younger generations the process may be going in the opposite direction.

The longer the right keeps screaming, kids that used to be more moderate and now leaning more to the left, and getting vocal about it. My daughter is just one example and especially on the issues of equal rights, economic injustice, and the ecology.

The combination of the two events does not bode well for organized religion. Toni Blair is more or less speaking to the same phenomenon and getting smashed by the 'boomer' right.

I agree with both points. As I’ve noted before on this thread, in my view, in the final decades of the 20th century, neoconservatives succeeded in moving both the political and the religious conversation to the right, so that what is now considered the political center and the center in many mainstream churches is well to the right of what was considered the center in previous decades.

As that has happened, the left has been marginalized (and has often assisted in marginalizing itself through ideological in-fighting). What we may be seeing now both politically and religiously is a new opening to the political and religious left—though I suspect that this opening is more fragile and endangered than many of us would like to hope.

At the same time, there’s a demographic shift that is definitely moving away from the neoconservative political and religious ideas that have dominated the American imagination in the past several decades. And that shift is terrifying to the political and religious right.

The shift is very apparent on the issue of gay marriage. A number of compelling demographic studies indicate that, because of the move away from right-wing politics and religion Colleen is describing among younger voters, the last good shot the right has—nationwide—to ban gay marriage is 2012. After that the demographic curve veers sharply away from support for initiatives banning gay marriage.

Look, for instance, at Nate Silver’s recent map of the future of gay marriage, state by state, which is gaining a lot of attention on blogs this week (here). This projects a demographic trend based on various data, in which support for gay marriage moves inexorably through the nation as younger voters begin to vote—though that trend predictably lags far behind in the evangelical heartland of the Southeast, my region of the country, which has been dead wrong about its interpretation of the bible in the past, and seems intent on proving itself dead wrong yet again.

In response to this demographic trend, what does the religious and political right intend to do? In my view, Bruce Wilson is absolutely on target when he argues, in several recent postings at the Talk to Action website (here and here) that the right will now make a concerted effort to move African American and Latino voters to the right, using the gay marriage issue (and gay lives) as a wedge.
Why did Tony Perkins respond to the Vermont vote this week with the seemingly bizarre observation that “same-sex 'marriage' is a movement driven by wealthy homosexual activists and a liberal elite determined to destroy not only the institution of marriage, but democracy as well” (here)? He did so because he and other right-wing political strategists hope to stir up a politics of social resentment among Latino and African American voters.

The meme being developed here is a meme of privileged white gays illicitly claiming victim status, when they are actually far more privileged than are people of color. This meme depends on resentment as its driving force. It depends on suggesting that gay rights are a special privilege being demanded by a pampered group of largely white citizens.

This meme, of course, willingly and deliberately falsifies the real, complex, picture of gay life in the U.S., which comprises citizens from all walks of life, from all racial backgrounds, living in every region of the country. As I have noted on this blog, studies indicate that the wealthy-gay myth the right is exploiting here is without any basis in fact. Many gay and lesbian Americans and their families suffer economic privation, and that privation is likely to be more pronounced where laws do not protect gays from discrimination.

It is also likely to be more pronounced among gays and lesbians of color—that is, among the brothers and sisters and sons and daughters of those the political and religious right hope to manipulate by using anti-gay prejudice as a means of winning votes for the right. This is a politics that depends on the willingness of those targeted to repudiate the gay and lesbian members of their own families.

This is ugly. It is cynical. It is, above all, strategic on the part of the religious and political right. This is a strategy that will continue to have play in American politics as long as the groups being targeted in this way allow themselves to be so targeted and so used, as long as churches do not repudiate polarizing and hate-mongering political strategies that betray the central values of the gospel, and as long as those in the comfortable center refuse to risk engagement and continue their comfortable silence. And, as Colleen notes, until the demographic shift now underway among younger voters relegates this politics of ugly, cynical scapegoating of a stigmatized minority useful to those who depend on hate and resentment to drive the political process to the dustbin of history.

Meanwhile, for my money, chief among the reasons Mr. Gingrich has just become Catholic is to try to keep cementing the strong alliance between the evangelical right, the Catholic right, and neonconservative political leaders. Demonizing gay people and creating a politics of fear and resentment around gay lives and the gay marriage issue is central to that alliance. As Frank Cocozzelli persuasively argues in a Talk to Action posting today (here), Newt and those strategizing with him now hope to ride into the White House in 2012. And the horse they believe they can ride in on is the horse of homophobic fear and resentment.

Continued Extrusion of the Religious Right's Nose: Further Prognostications for 2009

Cassandra here. Again. Doing her sad old song and dance, warning, warning with little assurance that her warnings will be heeded. At least, as the script I see now unfolding (and no, the Deity has not spoken or shouted or shown his Old Man in the Clouds™ face to me; I just use my head and see what’s before me) does unfold in 2009, you can say you heard some of those prognostications on this website.

As the new year has approached, I’ve been blogging repeatedly about the revamped, ratched-up strategy I expect the religious right to employ in the coming year, to try to recoup its recent political losses and beef up its dwindling numbers. As I’ve noted in posting after posting, I expect the religious right to do all but stand on its head to try to woo new young adherents. I also anticipate a nasty time for both the black and gay communities—and our nation as a whole—as the religious right tries to force the wedge between those two marginalized communities deeper in 2009.

As this agenda starts to play out with the new president’s inauguration, look, too, for the religious right to begin presenting itself as a kinder, gentler version of its doddering old cranky-man self. Watch for Rick Warren’s face to be plastered everywhere, as this claim is driven home. A chubby, smiling, avuncular face, the face of someone you want to hug, someone who can’t be all bad, can he, if he helps babies with AIDS in Africa and recognizes that the environment is endangered. It’s just the gays he’s after, anyway, isn’t it? And doesn’t the bible say . . . ?

With the kinder, gentler religious right, watch for one thing to remain the same: the lies. In fact, expect them to get bolder, more fantastic, the kind that would grow huge noses on the faces of people with any scrap of conscience at all. And look for the mainstream media to continue colluding in these lies, since their bread is buttered by the same folks who butter the bread of Rick Warren and his bedfellows.

In the interest of pursuing truth when falsehood threatens to prevail—a task given to all believers all the time—I’d like to point out some of the brand-new whoppers members of the religious right are telling as the new year gets underway. These lies are perhaps not entirely new ones, but the enormity of the claims now being made to prop them up is new. And that enormity will continue to be in evidence in this period of sharpened conflict between the religious right and the will of the American people in the new political landscape. We are now seeing only the tip of the big nose that will extrude from the religious right in 2009. . . .

Whopper #1: reactionary religion is succeeding in reviving the churches and attracting youth to the churches.

This is one that’s been around for some time now. The media have helped spread it—have played a crucial role in that respect, as a matter of fact. Throughout the papacy of John Paul II, in which the current pope Benedict XVI played a preeminent part as ideological czar of reaction, we were informed again and again by sober media analysts that right-wing Christianity was succeeding at doing what liberal versions of Christianity had failed to do: attract adherents; fill seminaries; bring young folks to religious vocations.* We were told that the yearly World Youth Day circus John Paul II began would fill the churches with card-carrying right-wing Catholic youth, the kind we needed to take the church back for Christ.

It hasn’t happened. The attempt to pitch reactionary forms of Christianity to youth around the world hasn’t succeeded. It hasn’t brought large numbers of youth back to the churches. If anything, it has succeeded in shoving away those who wanted to remain connected to the churches, but who did not want do so by paying the ideological price demanded. These youth have not wanted to join a neoconservative version of the Hitler Youth movement, have not wanted to leave their minds at the church door, and have not wanted to reduce their moral compass to genital fixations.

Many youth who are distancing themselves from reactionary churches today are intently interested in morality, but in an integral morality that applies faith to the wide range of moral problems demanding the attention of people of faith, which transcend the pelvic preoccupations of the religious right. To issues like the destruction of the environment, the exploitation of women by men, the injustice of an economic system that enriches the few at the expense of the man. And yes, to issues like gay rights.

Despite clear statistical indicators that reactionary forms of Christianity are not reviving the Christian churches—as in attracting huge numbers of new adherents—the lies continue rolling forth. From representatives of the religious right. With the collusion of the media.

Shortly before Christmas, mainstream media sources around the world blared forth a boast of the religious right that the downturn in the world economy was sending folks back to church—to their churches, the churches of the right. This is a version of a story that crops up predictably in the media anytime disaster strikes.

After 9/11, we were told that the churches had filled again—with the implication that most of us are a godless lot of secularists who turn our backs on God when things are going well for us, until some disaster urges us back to mother church and father God. To our role of unquestioning, childlike filial piety—the kind of unquestioning filial piety it would behoove us to adopt, as well, vis-à-vis the big men pulling the economic levers, who have our well-being at heart just as mother church and father God do.

What I am suggesting is that, for its own political and economic interests, the mainstream media have as much invested in telling us this lie of the superiority of reactionary religion, as does the religious right. Both are perfectly capable of inventing huge whoppers about the return to the churches (the “right” churches, the ones that preach about sin and hell and condemnation and the need for unquestioning obedience) when times are hard.

Though the preceding story of miraculous new conversions to the churches of the right rolled out just before Christmas, it has now been shown to have been false (http://ncronline3.org/drupal/?q=node/3043). Gallup polling data in December show no increase at all in church, synagogue, or mosque attendance of Americans at any point in 2008. Polls in other parts of the world indicate the same lack of a new fervor for right-wing religion in the face of economic downturns.

Despite what the data indicate, one of the boldest spin doctors of the Catholic right, Cardinal George Pell of Sydney, Australia, has informed the media (who dutifully reported Pell’s story without asking for evidence to confirm the claim) that last year’s World Youth Day events in Australia had led to an increase in conversions, as well as to increased numbers of young men entering the seminary in Australia (http://zenit.org/article-24687?l=english and www.cathnews.com/article.aspx?aeid=10936). No empirical data support Cardinal Pell’s claims here—claims that are suspiciously matched to statements both he and Benedict made last February, prior to World Youth Day, in which they predicted conversions of Australian youth due to WYD, as well as a rise in numbers of seminarians (www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/188925,pope-hopes-for-religious-revival-in-australia--feature.html).

Pell delivered his pronouncements of the success of World Youth Cay on new year’s day. Two weeks later, Father Peter Kennedy of St. Mary’s church in Brisbane announced that he would lead his parish into schism if the archbishop of Brisbane, John Bathersby, closes his parish (http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2009/01/dissident-australian-parish-threatens.html). The threat posed by this parish? It is actually flourishing, in the real world, not just the world of wish-fulfillment. But it is an innovative parish that crafts inclusive liturgies which energize everyone in the congregation, a parish that invites native peoples to contribute to shaping the liturgy and the life of the community of faith.

It is a success story that directly contradicts the lie of the religious right that progressive religious groups are waning while right-wing religious groups are on the rise. And so it is a story that must be swept under the rug, even as stories of bogus right-wing success, based on no evidence at all, are put forth as gospel truth—with media collusion.

The real story, the factual one, of the “success” of Benedict’s reactionary movement, is quite different from the one Pell wants us to believe. As the Clerical Whispers blog reported on 10 January, Catholic marriages in England have declined by 24% since 2000 (http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2009/01/roman-catholic-church-marriages-fall-by.html). The Vatican itself is admitting that vocations of women to religious life are declining rapidly—though it is seeking to blame that drop in vocations on women’s refusal to adhere to traditional gender roles (www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0900109.htm). And in Austria, despite a high-profile visit of Benedict in September 2007 aimed at reviving Catholicism there, 40,595 Catholics formally renounced their affiliation with the Catholic church in 2008 (http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2009/01/catholic-church-exodus-rolled-on-last.html).

Cardinal Pell is, quite simply, lying. And the mainstream media that assist him in lying have to know this. The reactionary movement in the Catholic church has perhaps succeeded in seizing and holding the reins of power. But it has succeeded in little else. It has not brought large numbers back to the church, to the seminaries, and to religious life.

It has, in fact, succeeded in decisively alienating many of us. And lying about it will not change that fact. And there are strong parallels between the declining membership of the Catholic church and another mainstay of the religious right, the Southern Baptist church, whose numbers have been stagnant for several years now, as the face of congregations grows ever older and as young folks do not choose this and other right-wing churches in large numbers.

People are tired of being told no repeatedly, as if that message is the gospel message in its entirety. People rightly expect something more from authentic religiosity and spokespersons for authentic faith.

Whopper #2: Openly gay bishop Gene Robinson has split the Anglican communion.

That nasty little lie comes from the mouth of Tony Perkins, president of the right-wing Family Research Council. Perkins is reacting to the news two days ago that Obama has chosen out and partnered gay Episcopal bishop Gene Robinson to give the first prayer of the inauguration ceremonies at the Lincoln Memorial (www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-obama-clergy-webjan13,0,7483819.story).

In response to this announcement, Mr. Perkins states,

I find it kind of ironic that some were adamantly opposed to Rick Warren because he was “divisive,” If you want to talk about somebody that is divisive, look at Gene Robinson. He essentially split one of the oldest Christian denominations in this country.

The truth? The truth that Mr. Perkins knows very well, since he’s a big part of the story? The religious right and its adherents have worked overtime in the past decade to split the worldwide Anglican communion, to the extent that this communion has sought to ordain women and openly gay folks, and to promote social teachings that call neoconservative ideology, with its claims to represent Christian orthodoxy, into question. Well-funded and politically powerful groups such as the Institute on Religion and Democracy have done all they can to sow seeds of discontent in the Anglican communion, by seeking to convince Anglicans of color in developing nations that Anglicans of the developed nations—many of whom are sympathetic to women’s and gay rights—take people of color for granted.

The IRD has exerted tremendous influence on the mainstream media to assure that the mainstream media adopt this script, a script that depicts progressive Anglicans as empty liberals exploiting people of color while abandoning the core truths of Christianity, and Christians of the developing nations as saviors of the creed. I’ve blogged repeatedly about these matters, and for anyone interested in documentation of the points I'm making here, I suggest entering the phrase “Institute on Religion and Democracy” into the blog search engine at the top left of the Bilgrimage homepage. You’ll find a world of links there to substantiate my claims.

Lies told by victimizers who seek to make the victim responsible for the reprehensible actions of the victimizer are particularly nasty lies. That’s the kind of lie Tony Perkins is telling here.

We’re going to see a lot more of this sort of lying by members of the religious right in 2009. For those of us who hope for a renewal of our democratic culture under a new president and a new Congress, it is important to keep monitoring the lies of the religious right—and to challenge them. And, above all, to call the media to accountability, when they sell their integrity to the religious right and turn themselves into mouthpieces for a political movement wearing a religious mask to conceal its real intent, which is destruction of democratic institutions . . . .


* Though the term “religious right” generally refers to a coalition of evangelical Christian religious groups in the United States, in my view, in its stance on family issues and sexual morality, the Catholic church is also a part of the religious right.

When Faith Turns Deadly: Fundamentalist Religion, Politics, and Economics

I've been meaning to recommend an interview from the Alternet site several days ago (www.alternet.org/story/109860). It's Joshua Holland's interview with novelist Larry Beinhart. Holland focuses on Beinhart's new novel Salvation Boulevard, which explores the volatile intersection of fundamentalist religion and politics.

Some quotes worth pondering:

The primary function of fundamentalist religion is a world of order. Any religion, but on a sliding scale, the more fundamental, the more order. As someone who has been either a freelancer or an entrepreneur my whole life, I have frequently dreamed of -- but never chosen -- a life in which I didn't have to figure out what to do with myself every morning and in which structures were imposed from the outside. Not religious ones, but still, there's the same kind of desire.

One of the primary selling points of fundamentalist religion is patriarchy. A world in which wives and children obey the No. 1 male figure in the house. It's a pleasant fantasy. A very pleasant fantasy. And a common one . . . .

The great peculiarity -- to an outsider -- of religious and right-wing sexism is that there are many women who advocate such an order. It is PC to claim the patriarchy is imposed, and that if it weren't for the oppressors it would disappear. But in practice, it's often a co-conspiracy. That has to be understood, and that's actually a bigger stress.

+ + + + +

I think of Iran as America's dark mirror . . . .

We have had a Republican-led government for six years. It is a party whose dominant popular base is religious, desperately concerned with sexual issues. The Islamic government in Iran has a base of popular support. It is not an imposed foreign or socially alien dictatorship. The core of that popular support are the true believers. The ones who want women "decent" -- hair and body covered. Who want capital punishment for adultery.

There is also an intersection between religion and business. Religious organizations and religious figures are key players in the entire economy. Every business person I met in Iran said, "You can't do business without a mullah as a partner." Should you try, and you are successful, one of them will show up and announce that you have a partner or you're out of business.

It is more extreme than here. But that is only because they can. If Dr. [James] Dobson or Tony Perkins could make every business tithe and could then take that money and use it to get a stake in lots of other businesses, they would. You betcha.

Yes. It is a model for a Christian Republic of America. Slightly different costumes, kebabs instead of barbecue, but very similar (and no homosexuals! Remember, it's a choice, they can be retrained through prayer or severe chastisement).

A world of order. Centered on patriarchal fantasies. In which business and religion dovetail neatly, with big men (and big women made in the big-man mold) on top, in both cases. And in which fundamentalist Islam walks hand in hand with fundamentalist Christianity.

A frightening vision of our current cultural-political situation, in some respects, but a soberly correct one, it seems to me—one that could well become more than a fantasy, if we permit those with these fantasies to dominate our democratic process. Sometimes artists (poets, painters, novelists, etc.) have a keener vision of what's at stake in the world around them than believers and movers and shakers have. It's the creative people who are often the canary in the mine, whose witness we want to stamp out, because it makes us think about possibilities we'd rather not discuss.

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.