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As I watched witnesses speak for and against D.C.'s Marriage Equality and Religious Freedom Act, I was mostly troubled by the brown faces testifying against equality. Most of their arguments were religious-based and included declarations of what "God" wants and what the Bible says. It is baffling that in the face of the immense discrimination that we have suffered as African Americans, there are still people ready to throw stones at another group that's discriminated against.
I'm an urban twentysomething, which is very likely half the age of the majority of anti-equality testifiers. But I grew up in a world where race was as much a factor as it wasn't. I was called a "nigger" at the early age of six, and though I knew it was wrong, it didn't stop me from becoming friends with people from every culture. People in my generation, for the most part, don't view race as starkly as people in my mother's generation do. In our world, discrimination is not about black vs. white, it's about oppression vs. anti-oppression. Yes, there are cultural disparages, even in the gay movement, but at the end of the day, what separates us are pro-LGBT and anti-LGBT ideals.
That premise blends the color line drastically. With regard to D.C.'s equality movement, people of all cultures are advocating for equal rights and people of one predominate culture are advocating against them: the African American religious fringe. This is particularly ironic, given that a majority of black congregations have a sizable LGBT population. And besides the Stockholm Syndrome of LGBT members of anti-gay churches, the history of Christianity and oppression in the black community should be argument enough for the opposition to take a look at what they're really saying in their argument.
African Americans didn't come here preaching Christianity. We were brought in chains after being ripped from our language, our families, our culture, and our spiritual beliefs. Christianity was forced upon us by slave owners as a means to dissipate any potential unity. Fast forward 300 or so years, and blacks were made to believe they had to straighten their hair, get rid of their slang, and assimilate fully into mainstream culture to be regarded as human. They could not marry someone of a different race. Up until the 19th century, blacks were only considered to be three-fifths of a person. All of these institutions, anti-miscegenation, slavery, and voting rights were supported and prolonged by religious ideologies. Those same ideologies that said in essence, "you are the other; in order to be tolerated, you must be invisible." This is where the civil rights movement and the equal rights movement bear close resemblance.
By refusing to acknowledge LGBT people and relationships, we send a message that LGBT people are somehow the other. Black LGBT people suffer the impact of marginalization two-fold, as they deal with bigotry not only from racial discrimination, but from religious persecution. The same people who withstood fire hoses and beatings - those who see what hate crimes and intolerance do to a people - have the audacity to seek the marginalization of another group of people in the name of a "lord" that wasn't theirs to begin with. We as a people need to wake up and start acknowledging that the hatred for our gay brothers and sisters is doing nothing but perpetuating the denigration of our culture, killing our women, and holding us back from reaching Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "promiseland."
For more information on homophobia in black churches, please join Metropolitan Network Against Homophobia for a panel discussion. 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, November 10th, at The Sumner School, 1201 17th St., N.W., in lecture hall 102. More information can be found here.
You can follow Jamelle on Twitter @JPie612.
 Posted by Jamelle Thomas,
| Nov. 3 at
11:59 AM | editor@washblade.com
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