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DYANA BAGBY - RYAN LEE
Friday, September 10, 2004
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson remembers going to a movie theater in Alabama as a
child and being forced to sit upstairs in the “colored” section.
“I was so hurt by that, I never went back,” said Peterson, founder
of Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny, a Los Angeles-based religious
non-profit that focuses on personal development for urban males.
To be judged by the color of his skin shook Peterson to his core, prompting
him to join protests in front of city halls throughout Alabama, raising his
voice to demand equal rights.
But today Peterson, 55, considers some former leaders of the civil rights movement
— including Congressman John Lewis of Atlanta and Coretta Scott King,
Martin Luther King Jr.’s widow — “a disgrace to blacks, whites
and Jews who died [during that time].”
Watching icons of the civil rights struggle draw comparisons between black
people’s fight for the right to vote, to attend integrated public schools
and to sit at a lunch counter, and today’s gay rights movement, including
the current push for same-sex marriage, fills Peterson with “disgust,”
he said.
“There is [no comparison] at all. Homosexuality is not about love, civil
rights, family — it’s about sex and nothing else,” Peterson
said. “I’ve counseled men and women who have overcome their homosexuality.
I’ve yet to see someone overcome being black.”
Joining Peterson and other African Americans who are offended by comparisons
between the gay rights and civil rights movement are many white religious conservatives,
including the Washington, D.C.-based Concerned Women for America.
In March, the CWA’s lead attorney, Jan LaRue, wrote a paper titled, “Homosexuals
Hijack Civil Rights Bus: Claiming A ‘Civil Right’ to ‘Marry’
the Same Sex Demeans a Genuine Struggle for Liberty and Equality.”
Even some black gays are uneasy about too closely linking the two struggles
for equality.
“These [movements] are similar to me, but many people in the gay community
make the mistake of saying they’re the same,” said Pat Hussain,
a self-described “pissed off black dyke from Georgia” who attended
segregated schools in Atlanta during the 1950s.
“This comes from mostly white people — and they don’t have
the concept of what racism is from the other side,” she said.
Decatur, Ga. City Commissioner Kecia Cunningham, the first and only openly
gay African-American elected official in the Deep South, said the differences
between the two movements can be explained with an example:
A white lesbian can walk into a restaurant, and her sexual orientation remains
unknown to other patrons. But a black lesbian in that same restaurant can’t
escape the color of her skin.
“It’s easier to discriminate against what you see,” Cunningham
said.
Evan Wolfson, founder of New York-based Freedom to Marry and one of the leading
voices in the fight for allowing same-sex couples to marry, agreed that there
are important differences between the two movements, but said blacks and gays
are both striving for dignity.
“Certainly the African-American experience in the United States is unparalleled
in its violence, discrimination and indignity, so we shouldn’t make sloppy
comparisons, nor can we say that our experience of discrimination is ‘the
same,’” Wolfson said. “But that’s really asking the
wrong question. No group’s experience with discrimination is the same
as the others.
“What matters is the harm discrimination inflicts on the individuals
affected, and on the society,” said Wolfson, who addresses the comparison
between the two movements in his book, “Why Marriage Matters: America,
Equality and Gay People’s Right to Marry.”
To suggest that gays are less entitled to rights and protection because they
“choose” their behavior — as opposed to someone’s skin
color or gender being “benign” — flies in the face of what
this country was founded on, Wolfson argues in his book.
“Americans are as equally protected against discrimination based on race
and sex as they are against discrimination based on religion. This is the case
even though an individual’s religious belief is, of course, a matter of
‘choice,’” Wolfson wrote.
“Protection of choice and difference — in religion, in opinion,
in identity, in expression and in intimate association — is the true moral
vision of our American Constitution,” he wrote.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson and Leonard Pitts, two black heterosexual writers, also
argue that there are essential similarities between the two movements.
“When any group of people is denied rights, whether it’s based
on race, gender or sexual preference, that is wrong. Discrimination to me is
still discrimination,” said Hutchinson, author of “The Assassination
of the Black Male Image.”
Pitts, a Pultizer Prize-winning columnist for the Miami Herald who has discussed
the comparison in his writing, said the civil rights struggles for gays and
blacks haven’t played out the same way, “but in terms of striving
for some freedoms, they are similar.”
“What we have are two groups of people who have been historically marginalized
to a certain degree,” said Pitts, who is also the author of “Becoming
Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood.”
In the early days of American gay rights activism, the biggest obstacle preventing
gays from obtaining legal equality and societal acceptance was the view among
most psychiatrists that homosexuality was a sickness, said Jack Nichols, who
co-founded two chapters of the Mattachine Society, a pioneering gay rights group.
“I really see the psychiatric viewpoint as having originated in religion,”
Nichols said. “We knew we could get nowhere legally when people would
be turning to the shrinks to get their opinions of us.
“And we knew in terms of society, the religious angle was one which required
much more of a long-range approach, and as you can see it’s still going
on,” Nichols said. “I think things are now worse in terms of religion
than they were back then.”
Bayard Rustin was a gay civil rights
worker and pacifist who organized the 1963 March on Washington where Martin
Luther King Jr. delivered his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.
But Rustin’s homosexuality often confined him to the margins of the
civil rights movement. (Photo by AP) |
Matt Coles, director of the ACLU’s Lesbian & Gay Rights Project,
said when there is resistance against broadening civil rights protections to
new groups, conservatives tend to focus on two themes: the group involved is
unworthy — such as psychologically flawed — and that inequality
is God’s law.
Traditional religious teachings and understandings have always been used against
gay men and lesbians, but only in the past 15 years have churches transformed
into political bases for opponents of gay rights, said Laura Montgomery Rutt,
media coordinator for Soulforce, a group dedicated to ending anti-gay “spiritual
violence.”
“I think the right wing — the James Dobsons and Jerry Falwells
— first started creating a kind of fear-based movement based on misinformation
about gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, and this movement has spread
throughout the pews,” said Rutt, who is heterosexual.
“Now the churches are becoming more entrenched in their interpretation
of Scripture that homosexuality is wrong,” Rutt said. “On the other
hand, there are many denominations, religions and individual clergy who are
becoming more and more convinced that their faith calls them to the gay rights
movement.”
Rutt and others are also well aware that religion has often been used as a
weapon against those who were fighting for equal rights, including blacks.
Using the Christian Bible to devalue black people and gay people is one of
the most powerful tactics used by conservatives who want to deny rights, said
Hussain, who said she remembers the fierce demonstrations in Atlanta streets
in the 1960s and participating in a sit-in at a Krispy Kreme during the civil
rights movement.
“I remember the signs that said ‘2-4-6-8 we don’t want to
integrate’ and the discussions of about how immoral it was [to integrate],”
Hussain said. “And I hear the same rhetoric now. When you demonize a group,
then it’s OK to destroy it.”
Andrew Walsh, an assistant professor of religion and history at Trinity College
in Connecticut, said that a New Orleans archbishop ex-communicated three Catholic
politicians who supported integration during the civil rights movement.
Religion was invoked by opponents of civil rights, but not to the degree that
communist allegations were used to discredit civil rights activists, Walsh said.
Mathew Staver, president of the Liberty Counsel, an Orlando, Fla.-based conservative
legal group, pointed out that religion also played an important role in blacks’
attaining rights.
“Obviously there were some religious voices who opposed the civil rights
movement, but I think by-and-large the civil rights movement was supported by
religion more than it was opposed,” Staver said. “Martin Luther
King was a religious and political leader, and he couched and viewed the entire
movement from his religious world view.”
Rutt, from Soulforce, said gays must incorporate the moral language King used
to plea for equality into their fight against discrimination, something they
have been steadily doing in recent years.
“The secular gay rights groups are trying to bring religion into their
messaging, but because of the amount of hostility — and rightfully so
— that is still prevalent in GLBT people toward religion, it’s been
really hard for those groups to bring about change to their organizations,”
she said.
“Most of the people in America believe in God and many consider themselves
religious or spiritual, so if you are not addressing that message, you would
not be reaching the people,” Rutt said.
There is a wide gap between perceiving homosexuality as an abomination and
seeing it as a natural way of life, but gays can make spiritual arguments on
the immorality of discrimination, Walsh said.
“On the left, the argument is not about changing God’s word on
homosexuality,” Walsh said. “The argument is that [religious people]
will soon be persuaded to admit that your brother, or cousin, or sister is gay,
and you don’t want them to live as second-class citizens.”
For Mandy Carter, a black lesbian and executive director of the Durham N.C.-based
Southerners on New Ground, raising the question of whether the gay rights movement
and the civil rights movement are similar brings to the forefront a basic, but
most important issue: When will blacks recognize there are gay people among
them?
When African-American preachers and other black people criticize gay rights
advocates comparing their movement to the struggle for black civil rights, Pitts
suggested it is because most African-American men and women are historically
conservative on such issues as gun control, abortion rights, even affirmative
action.
And homophobia certainly plays into this train of thought, he said.
“People forget how conservative the African-American community really
is,” Pitts said.
But a failure among blacks to recognize the similarities between themselves
and gays being treated as second-class citizens is a disservice, said Hutchinson,
author of “The Assassination of the Black Male Image.”
“If any group should appreciate, empathize and support the struggle of
another group, it should be us,” he said.
The black civil rights movement also has a gay man to thank for one of its
shining moments, said Carter, who is also a board member of the National Black
Justice Coalition, a gay rights organization.
Black, gay pacifist Bayard Rustin was the architect for the historic 1963 March
on Washington where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have
a Dream” speech.
Rustin was among those who introduced King to Ghandi’s philosophy of
non-violence — the key ingredient to winning passage of the Civil Rights
Act of 1964 — and it was Rustin who was often marginalized within the
civil rights movement because racist opponents threatened to use his sexual
orientation to sabotage blacks’ efforts.
“What if Bayard Rustin hadn’t been there?” Carter asked.
“There wouldn’t have been the civil rights movement we know today.”
To not see the similarities between the two movements is the “height
of ultimate irony,” she said.
But it is sometimes easy for modern African Americans to adopt anti-gay attitudes,
mainly because the black gay men and lesbians around them have not revealed
their sexual orientation, or asserted their right to dignity, Carter said.
“In terms of movement for change, [black gays and lesbians] better be
[involved] because we can’t afford to not be,” Carter said.
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