Hopefully this post will generate more light than heat.

[readmoreoften]

Please bear with this post. I know it's long.

There has been a lot of hard feelings over the McClurkin/Ex-Gay issue over the past few months, and it hit me that some DUers simply don't understand the actual goals of the ex-gay movement. I realized that this communication gap we're having is more than just quibbling over candidates, it's a fundamental lack of awareness of many straight people about what LGBT people are really facing, about what we've experienced in the past, and what we fear for our future. A good example of this occurred when someone posted a poll asking which is worse: supporting anti-gay marriage legislation or having an ex-gay speak at a rally. Many were surprised that some folks said allowing an ex-gay to speak at a rally is as bad or worse than discriminatory legislation. I'd like to explain what to many might seem purely irrational.

An 'ex-gay' spokesperson is not just some harmless buffoon with low self-esteem. The ex-gay movement is not just a group of misguided Christians who want to help. The movement seeks to undermine the very existence of the LGBT community. Its goal is to prove that gays, lesbians, and transgendered people are not just sick (if they were sick, they'd go to the doctor, right?) but in fact demonically possessed. Let us remember that fundamentalist Christians don't just have a deep and abiding faith in God; they also believe in the Other Guy. And just as they are soldiers for Christ, they believe that there are soldiers for the Other Guy. There are three groups of people who are the Five Star Generals of the other guy: pro-choice doctors, scientists, and gays. While pro-choice doctors are an example of good-gone-bad and scientists are an example of the search for knowledge gone solipsistic, gays are the agents of pure and irredeemable corruption. You can't fight an enemy without actually, you know, fighting. And they are advancing on the ex-gay front. The Southern Poverty Law Center considers them part of a larger coalition of hate groups.

http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=844
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=847

The 'ex-gay' warriors put LGBT young adults and teens into conversion centers where they are isolated, depersonalized, mentally, and sometimes even sexually abused. They are isolated from their families for months and sometimes years. The ex-gay movement also targets public school children, giving pamphlets to those they feel might be "at risk" for "becoming gay." In an environment where LGBT kids are already subjected to daily beatings, torture, and mocking, the 'ex-gay' movement comes in to make sure they have no allies. They give the hatred and violence a gentle, religious, and authoritative face.

YouTube - How Can Lies Be Truth? -An Examination of the "Day of Truth"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HI4-eDG3Bb0&feature=related

The ex-gay movement is composed of the most extreme elements of the anti gay marriage movement. These aren't just the fictional 'joe six-pack' who can't wrap his head around two men kissing. These are people who believe that LGBT people are demonically possessed destroyers, who as Donny McClurkin says "kill our children." They have an irrational hatred of gay people, blaming them for everything from the destruction of the Black family http://www.urbancure.org/dev/pagedetails.asp?SubCatID=162 to Nazism and Serial Killing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pink_Swastika to the destruction of the Twin Towers http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/09/14/Falwell.apology/ In other words, these people believe that we are responsible for every serious problem in American and maybe human history. They don't simply want to stop us from getting married. Logic would dictate that, since we are agents of Satan and the root of all social ill, they want to eradicate us completely. There are millions of them. Here are some of the most blunt examples of folks who want to exterminate us.

http://100777.com/homosexuality
http://www.covenantnews.com/rudd060607.htm
http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Evils%20in%20America/Sodomy/gay_tolerance.htm
http://www.cclmaine.org/artman/publish/Opinion_5/hating_sinner.shtml
http://www.skepticfiles.org/atheist/soundoff.htm

This last article seems like a small, handmade site. But the man being interviewed is a part of this organization--> http://www.chalcedon.edu/ If you think that this sounds extreme and note that many anti-gay Christians explicitly say that they do not "hate" gays or want violence in the streets, you should look more carefully at what they are saying. An example from the Christian Civil League Record (in the above set of links):

The fact is that you can judicially hate someone, but still talk to them civilly, still love them as your enemy, still pray for them (...) many Christians today seem unable to get their mind around this concept. That is because we have become so deeply influenced by the heathen culture around us which identifies hate - and love - as primarily, if not exclusively, emotional issues. Love and hate are seen strictly as emotions, and very intense emotions, therefore they necessarily lead to predictable actions - and that's just the way it is.

You see this in comments by some people who oppose the death penalty. Often such people will liken the death penalty to "revenge." This, of course, is nonsense. If a lynch mob killed someone to execute vigilante "justice," that would be revenge, but a judge who issues an order for execution after a person has been properly tried in a court of law and found guilty, is exercising a judicial function, not acting on passion. Anyone who can't see the difference is lacking in elementary Christian theological categories.

Before the 2004 Election, Karl Rove had a brilliant idea on how to create civil war in the Democratic ranks. He funded an anti-gay Black church to publish magazine inserts in Sunday newspapers throughout the Black Community http://headlines.agapepress.org/archive/12/82004f.asp I saw a .pdf file of the insert a few years ago. It looked a lot like Parade Magazine if I remember correctly. Rove's goal was to push just 2-3% of the Black vote to the Republican party by claiming that gays (and the Democrats who support them) are destroying and minimizing the legacy of Black civil rights. The notion that LGBT people (read as white) are undermining Black history gave the culture war a particularly horrific new frontier. If Rove's goal was to cause a civil war in the Democratic Party by pitting marginalized groups against one another, the Obama campaign walked right into this land mine with The McClurkin Incident.

A little history is in order here:

African-Americans, Asians, Latinos, and Whites have pretty much identical amounts of gay folks. If you do not believe that there REALLY are black gay folks out their (I mean beyond the DL and prison sex) I invite you to check out these links as a visual aid.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKKcRR3HDO4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZFXOYMjmek&feature=related

The media portrays LGBT people as predominately white (and male) for a number of reasons. (1) Because of the inherent bigotry of some of our supporters. They want to show that gay folks are not 'poor, degenerate, cretins' but skilled, upper-middle class, white people (read in sing-song-voice: people just like you and me.) (2) Because those who hate us also have fantasies of our whiteness and wealth. Images of white, wealthy gay men help them locate gayness as a product of a jaded leisure class who oppress good, Christian, working-class families. The Gay is 'more attractive' and 'super affluent' with a life unfettered by children and responsibility. This caricature is similar to the image of the hyper-masculine black man with an enormous and terrifying male member. The Black wants to rape your woman! The Gay wants to rape your hardworking family! It is the fantasy of victimization that oppressors concoct in order to rationalize their very real fear of retaliation by those they harm. Kinda of like when the guy who cheats beats his wife because he knows she must have a cheating heart too...

This is not to excuse the fact that white gays and males enjoy their social privilege in the gay community itself (not to mention gays and lesbians subordinating trans and bi/pansexual concerns.) There is segregation in the gay community. There are also substantive cultural and class differences between folks in the LGBT community. One of the largest gaps is between working class African American gays and the white professional gays who either try to speak for them or distance themselves from them or simply have no idea what goes on in their world. (Point of disclosure: I'm a white, ethnic, working class lesbian. I am only repeating information that I have learned from African-American LGBTs and what I witnessed coming out in the black LGBT community during my youth.)

One of the main struggles of African-American gays has been to explain within the Black community that gay and transgender Blacks are not 'betrayers' who have adopted or been infected with 'white ways'. This is an issue not just in the US but in Africa and the West Indies as well. Many have struggled to show LGBT histories in African culture: the book Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: African Homosexualities is an example of this struggle. This fantasy of 'super-affluent, white gay perversion' isn't just a problem in the US. It is getting Black gay rights activists murdered all over Africa (see: IGLHRC.org.) So maybe now some of you can understand how Obama's choice of using a white gay pastor to counterbalance McClurkin's appearance was an unmitigated disaster. What's more, it added insult to injury when Obama chose to call those who cheered at McClurkin's remarks "good, moral people."

I'm sure most of the Gospel Tour attendees were nice people. But I am also detecting here the "soft prejudice of low expectations." You know, "gosh golly, they're just ignorant black folk! How are they supposed to understand a complex thing like gay rights!" I feel that when we excuse African American rightwing Christian bigotry against LGBT people (against mostly black LGBTs) when we refuse to accept it in white Christians, we are insulting the intelligence and moral conviction of the Black community as a whole. There are a great many African-Americans who have stood up for gay rights as a civil rights struggle: Coretta Scott King, Huey P. Newton to name two.

Here's an example of African-American hatred toward gays. It is not moral. It is not good. And it is not any more acceptable than Falwell or his ilk.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5QMw-nRXU0&feature=related
http://www.watchmenonthewalls.com/issue30.html

Ex-Football player Ken Hutcherson is particularly vile. As a new government-funded faith-based initiative, Hutcherson went to Latvia to attend a global gay hate conference with the author of the Pink Swastika. http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=809 Yes, that's right, an Black American ex-football player using US tax dollars to motivate white skinheads in Eastern Europe in hopes of inciting violence against gays on the American west coast. This is the sort of batshit logic that can only be borne from the brotherhood of mutual hatred.

When religious leaders say that gays are demonic child killers who must be stopped at all cost, what do you think is the underlying sentiment of that message?

Here are some high-profile cases of gay murder:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8Esg_9QlOA&feature=related

Here are some not so high-profile cases:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qr82-9tCdSg&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw9zJq0QGl0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55j7QuBtWww

And a recent murder:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh-C4vH1uLo

Because sexual orientation is not a protected status, murders of gay and lesbians often go underreported. It is also difficult to question a murder victim about the hatred spewed during an attack. What we do know, is that many murdered people don't make it into these you tube videos.

Lastly, we owe it to African-American LGBT people to call bigotry what it is. Here are some cases of recently murdered gay African-Americans:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aF4Avae3PE8
http://www.rashawnbrazell.com/
Rashawn was murdered in 2005. His body was found dissected throughout the NYC subway system. You might not have heard about it. It only made page 22 of the NY Times. They never found Rashawn's head.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakia_Gunn
Sakia was killed by an African-American male who she rejected.

These cases are iconic, but they are not isolated.

And now some statistics about gay youth: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaHeocHDc8g&feature=related

Almost one-half of homeless children in America identify as LGBT. I promise you, they aren't all white. Why are these children thrown out of their homes? Why are they forced to leave? What would motivate a parent to discard their child? What would make a child so uncomfortable at home that they'd rather fend for themselves on the streets, starve, or prostitute themselves than return?

The fact that there is huge religious movement in America that correlates LGBT people with demonic possessed agents of Satan may have something to do with it.

******************

During the 2004 election, many pundits and even some Democrats openly blamed gays and lesbians for another four years of war, death, and the destruction of our very democracy--all because of our mad, selfish, and stubborn desire to call ourselves 'married.' Not only did we suffer the same losses as everyone else, we also faced the wrath of progressives. The religious right wanted us out of their society and many Democrats seemed to want us out of the party. When the reality of our lives is excluded from the Democratic debate, when our fellow Democrats want us to shut-up or see us as a liability, it reminds us that we have no home. When presidential candidates give homophobes a platform to spew hate and then tell us that we need to come together and talk with these people--as if we are just two groups with a mere difference of opinion--it is painful. It is also ignorant and offensive. It's also really, really dangerous.

It's not just about the legislation you pass. It's about the climate you create. If the leader of the United States warmly embraces us, parents become less ashamed of their children and more able to love and care for them. Our communities exclude us less, violence against us seems less tolerable. If the leader of the United States treats us like a special interest group whose needs are pitted against other needs, we will be treated like a rival faction and the violence will escalate. And if we lose altogether, we may be facing a very violent future indeed. If we are abandoned by straight progressives it makes survival even more difficult.

We need you to stand with us and speak truth to hate and violence regardless of race and ethnicity. We need to say no--a strong resounding NO--to concepts like "the Urban Cure" because it is as truly evil as it sounds.

Thanks for reading.

:dem:

edited to provide link