In fairness to some within the Christain Community I applaud the enclosed letter from a group of black leaders within the Christain community here in Atlanta and their call for civil rights to be better extended to gay people. If all Christains would be as rational as these people are, there wouldn't be as much bickering back and forth.
ajc.com > Opinion
THE KING LEGACY
As a race, we've lost our way
Published on: 01/17/05
The following letter, written recently in memory of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., was signed by two dozen metro Atlanta black clergy and submitted to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution by Alton B. Pollard III, director of the black church studies program at Emory University.
Dear Martin,
Yours was the vision of a transformed nation, a society that dared to practice the very brotherhood — and sisterhood — that it preached. You modeled for others the commitment to racial justice and reconciling peace. Sore distressed, we the people have yet to catch up to your radically inclusive vision.
In the new millennium, our elusive and torturous quest for freedom and equality continues. The vast majority of whites see themselves as non-racist and live comfortably with little or no real contact with other racial-ethnic people. Oblivious to the obvious (and sometimes the not so obvious), the connection between white privilege and black rage is discounted, resisted, denied.
In our houses of worship, in the ivory tower, in the corporate boardroom, in the halls of government, in popular culture and mass media . . . racism lives on. In the United States, racial exclusion is still second nature. Racism is . . . our way of life.
Sadly, many black people now have difficulty seeing their connections to other black people. We have embraced societal distinctions that separate us by age, education, gender, sexuality and class. We have forgotten the example set by so many courageous souls a generation ago.
The painful truth is that we now often violate and oppress our own in the name of religion. Always, at the center of the heart of the historic black-led struggle for freedom was the black religious experience. Black self-love was upheld as a divine imperative. Local black churches became ecumenical networks of nurture and resistance.
At those beleaguered places of our most urgent human need, common ground often could be sought and found in the church. But not always. Movement women like Ella Baker, organizer of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, found themselves at odds with the sexism and sexual misconduct of male ministers. An out gay man like Bayard Rustin, architect of the 1963 March on Washington, was feared as a potential threat to the advancement of the race.
Today, in the imperfectly desegregated post-civil-rights era, religiously inspired leadership continues to perpetuate a cruel sexual ethic. . . . That black women continue to be relegated to secondary status and lesbians and gays are made to feel unwelcome, unworthy and uncomfortable in what should be the most caring, compassionate and empowering of communions is a searing indictment against all the black faithful.
Martin, like you, we are sometimes uncertain in our leadership. The dominant views on sex, sexuality and gender in the black church are undermining community, diminishing the faith and leading many to abandon churches out of sheer moral frustration and exhaustion. Our churches have been slow to embrace gender equality. They have largely spoken only opposition and condemnation to same-gender-loving people and have been unable to proclaim a sexually liberating and redemptive word. As black clergy we offer here a more hope-filled perspective.
We say, "Whosoever will, let her or him come." The "whosoever" of today are the discomforted and the distressed, those who live on the margins of the marginalized, who are the oppressed of the oppressed, the sexually battered and the abused, the homeless and the bereft, the HIV/AIDS infected, who are the young and old, female and male, lesbian and bisexual, transgender and straight. These are they, the children of God. They belong to all of us.
We must be courageous in confronting the social conditions that divide; elitism, poverty, militarism . . . await our deepest response. This is where we must go from here.]