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Gay marriage is a civil rights issue, and that means it’s a black issue, too. Maybe black voters in Maine will get it right.
This week the voters in the state of Maine will go to the polls to decide on a gay marriage referendum that is widely considered a test case for the rest of the nation. This vote is so important that Californians who successfully organized in support of Proposition 8, and thus outlawed gay marriage there, have moved wast. Groups dedicated to the defeat of gay marriage have set up camp in Maine to deny consenting adults the right to legally wed.
This is a national scandal, but it moves the issue to the forefront again and gives the African-American community a chance to reaffirm its support for equal rights by supporting gay marriage. Black communities have a long, sad history of homophobia which has led many black people to oppose same-sex marriage, sometimes on religious or moral grounds. But after having served as the moral conscience of the nation during the long struggle for justice and equal rights in the last century, black Americans cannot be absent from, or take the wrong side in, this latest struggle for basic human rights.
This summer, the national office of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) called to task one of its own, Rev. Eric P. Lee, president of the organization’s Los Angeles chapter, for opposing California’s Proposition 8, which constitutionally established that "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California”) Lee’s support of love and marriage should have been applauded by the venerable civil rights organization. SCLC’s unwillingness to surge forward in support of gay marriage was backward. Instead, the SCLC chose to make its stand on the wrong side of this debate and on the wrong side of history.
The danger here is that old-school organizations like SCLC risk extinction if they continue to embrace these regressive policies. Standing in the way of gay marriage today is as vicious and ugly as George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door in 1963. Maybe even more so.
In her powerful discourse on the black female experience, When and Where I Enter, writer Paula Giddings documents the legions of newly freed couples who, during Reconstruction, circled the Freedmen’s Bureaus in long lines to obtain a certificate of marriage from the state. What a wonderful way to celebrate Emancipation?
I am certain great scholarship equal to Giddings’ important work will document the determined, similar efforts of gay and lesbian couples to legally wed.
When my friend, a beautiful brother, came out of the closet to me several years ago, he said he thought he would still marry a woman and father children one day. “So, you’re bisexual then?” I asked. “No,” he answered. He said he was just “doing what he was doing” while he was young and single. It took years for him to be able to exclusively date men, come out fully, self-identify as a gay man, and reject the false image of hetero-normative marriage that for so long had compelled him to deny his basic self and, foolishly, think he would be able to live as a straight man. Before our conversation, he had been in a few relationships with women that had lasted for years. Though he was finally able to name and claim his sexual orientation, think of all that time everyone lost because he was silenced into the closet by too many of us in the black community.
At the start of the 20th century, writer Nella Larsen began to hint at the psychological damage done by “passing for straight” in her novels Quicksand and Passing. Now, at the start of the 21st century, we need to probe deeper, into our own souls, into our own communities, into our own truths.
The most issue isn’t whether people should have to right to experience and express homosexual love; but rather whether they deserve to be victims of violent hate as a result The answer is no. What people deserve, whoever they are, is equal protection and privacy. They deserve that simply because they exist.
Eisa Nefertari Ulen is the author of Crystelle Mourning and lives with her husband and son in Brooklyn.
Comments
"Just because you believe in the Bible doesn't make it not true". Nice example of logical thinking there. By that logic one could just as easily substitute the Quran, the Greek myths, the latest Dan Brown thriller or the collective works of Dr. Seuss for the Bible and be equally as likely to be grounded in reality.
Typically I'd go right into the lack of reasoning, etc, etc, and deconstruct your whole premise point for point but if there's one thing that you learn debating religious brainwashees, it's that they are absolutely incapable of even forming a thought that isn't grounded in the reality they've been taught to follow.
You really give people with a true conviction to God a bad name. Parading around your pious morality but exhibiting yourself to be a reprehensible human being in the process. Even if it wasn't for the horrid display of ego that tells you not only that there is only one true religion but guess what... YOU are so damned smart that you figured it out and everybody ELSE is wrong, you still spit in the face of the teachings of the Bible.
You embrace and revel in the persecution of other human beings. This is inconsistent with the teachings of Christ. Any fool should be able to realize that. Sinner or not - because we are ALL sinners - your derision betrays that your heart is no more in Christ than the Pharisees he condemned in his time. You shame the Lord every time you utter his name and mark my words if there IS a judgment... you will reap more punishment for your bigotry and wrath than any of the gays you condemn.
Don't try to challenge me on issues of faith. You assume too much about me. Trust me, that on this subject matter you are way outclassed.
And it is YOU who needs to do some introspection and "get a grip". Whether you realize it or not if you claim to be such an ardent servant of God and the Bible is what you follow then you've got a lot of repenting to do. A LOT.
So Pitbull...When did you "CHOOSE" to be straight, and who was the same sex person that had you confused about which team to join?
Black people need to get educated on this subject and get their heads out of the sand and out of the bible (the same book that justified enslaving our black tails!)...
You don't choose your sexuality, it has been documented scientifically in every species. Some people say they choose, and that may be so. But do you really think a person would choose to be one of the most villified persons walking the planet (next to black people) willingly? If the fact was that we all had a choice in our sexuality, then it means that in everyones life, everyones experience, there was a same sex attraction...Pitbull, if you are a dude, who was the man that you considered CHOOSING?
Just because you don't believe in the Bible... DOESN'T MAKE IT NOT TRUE! Just because you want to stick your finger in your ears and yell "lalalala I don't want to hear how an eternal GOD holds me accountable for all my actions and that there is such a thing as right and wrong.. everything is relative!"
Dude, get a grip... there is right and wrong. No in between.. no gray area. It's either right or wrong, period. Relativism, political correctness is what is wrong with this country.. all religions do not lead to heaven.
Now you want special protection under the law, gay slurs offend me... hurts my feelings.. so what! So what if someone calls someone else a homosexual... I have right a to FREE SPEECH! I can say whatever I want! if what I say hurts your feelings... so what!
Like I said "When they start hanging,castrating,raping,selling,buying,beating,breeding homosexuals for profit,murdering a continent of homosexuals,shipping them across seas... then maybe as a black community we will look into it!"
Just because you don't believe in the Bible... DOESN'T MAKE IT NOT TRUE! Just because you want to stick your finger in your ears and yell "lalalala I don't want to hear how an eternal GOD holds me accountable for all my actions and that there is such a thing as right and wrong.. everything is relative!"
Dude, get a grip... there is right and wrong. No in between.. no gray area. It's either right or wrong, period. Relativism, political correctness is what is wrong with this country.. all religions do not lead to heaven.
Now you want special protection under the law, gay slurs offend me... hurts my feelings.. so what! So what if someone calls someone else a homosexual... I have right a to FREE SPEECH! I can say whatever I want! if what I say hurts your feelings... so what!
Like I said "When they start hanging,castrating,raping,selling,buying,beating,breeding homosexuals for profit,murdering a continent of homosexuals,shipping them across seas... then maybe as a black community we will look into it!"
All of your rationalizations have already been raised and dispelled in previous posts. Please review.
To answer his comment... have you read your BIBLE? just TO LET YOU KNOW... it is a sin... it is a perversion... it is immoral... It's an abomination... all these descriptions In your BIBLE...
Find it...Read it... Believe it.
In what way does the homosexual agenda even remotely relates to being black? Black people had no choice in the fact that they were born black. They had no choice in the matter of which TREE THEY WERE HUNG FROM! They had no choice in which KNIFE WOULD BE USED TO CASTRATE THEM! They had no choice in which PART OF MASSA'S FIELDS THEY WOULD PLOW ON ANY GIVEN DAY! They had no choice in which WHITE FAMILY BOUGHT AND SOLD THEIR CHILDREN!
Kinda see what I'm getting at? Please don't come with the tired argument that people are born gay or you like who you like....
if you are homosexual... you are so by choice! It is your own business what you do with your bum hole... I don't have to like it,endorse it, or even know that that is your persuasion.... But at least be honest, it is your choice! Homosexuals are always screaming tolerance.. Be tolerant.. be tolerant! Well, homosexuals where is your tolerance? why must you try and teach our children your ways? why must we be forced to accept your lifestyle CHOICE? why must you sully the CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT so you can go have same sex sex?
Let me be clear: THIS IS NOT A BLACK ISSUE! THIS IS NOT A CIVIL RIGHTS ISSUE! THIS IS ABOUT YOUR CHOICE OF SEXUAL ORIENTATION!
PEOPLE.. black,white,red or what ever your color... You are THAT color by the GRACE OF GOD... not by your damn choosing, because how many people you know would CHOOSE to be black in 1956?
Would you CHOOSE to march with Dr. King? Would you choose to get the hell beat out of you? would you choose to lynched? maybe castrated? You got your ideas and your morals mixed in with a little bit of history, and because you think you tag CIVIL RIGHTS to it, the black community is going to come running?
you must be out of your damn mind!
When they start hanging,castrating,raping,selling,buying,beating,breeding homosexuals for profit,murdering a continent of homosexuals,shipping them across seas... then maybe as a black community we will look into it!
So straight people don't partake in oral and anal sex (stains on the sheet) And marriage is the only union that can produce children...That's odd, most of the straight porn I have show plenty of women takin in the but tocks, lol...And I have never met one that I had to ask for oral delights...As for the baby thing, I know a whole lot of them that aren't married walking around with babies (and plenty married to dudes that they should full well know are gay men - who are pretty good fathers...they are there!).
Discrimination is discrimination in guise. Just because you don't agree with something, doesn't justify you to impose your beliefs on consenting adults on how they should be able to live their lives. We (black people) have a short memory, and lot of nerve to discriminate against anyone, when clearly our own fight for equality isn't done...What hypocrites we are...Perpetually and willingly enslaved by the very religion and thinking that justified our forced servitude and viscious slavery and Jim Crow in this country...
...you're a bigot and your idiocy is irrelevant. Does that get through any better?
You've been told repeatedly that your assigning "value" is irrelevant. Yet you persist on that tired track.
You continue to insist that others marrying affects you. It does not.
You assert the asinine notion that "homosexuals cannot grasp parenting". As stupid as it is on the surface it's compounded by the fact that you have ZERO backing to your statement.
In fact, do you have ANYTHING to back ANY of your statements? "The gay movement is about power", "gays only get this and that out of their relationships", and as far as "relatives who turn their heads in disgust at the concept of two grown men engaging in rectal delight while baby sleeps down the hall" it might shock you to find that many have rejected the sickening prejudice that you so proudly embrace.
Sad.
Badda...as I said..oral and anal homoeroticism...stains upon the sheets as you will..offer not a damned thing to society..and thus society is under no obligation to assign such lifestyles as having any worth to the enhancement of society. Proof of what I say lies in the results of the rejection of homosexual marriage by two of the most ultra liberal states in the country. Society is willing to let homosexuals live their lifestyles so long as it does not creep into their own under the guise of the Greatest Lie..the great deception of the 21st century. The homosexual movement is about power..not rights. By the way..as for children..it takes mor ethanlove to raise a child. "Loving homes" sounds all warm and fuzzy..but many homosexuals can't grasp the concept of real parenting. Even in single parent homes..kids have access to grandparents..uncles..aunts..cousins..and not relatives who turn their heads in disgust at the concept of two grown men engaging in rectal delight while baby sleeps down the hall.