Terrance Heath's List: Black Homophobia

• Openly gay city  council member David Catania responded, "This is about  acknowledging our families as much as we acknowledge yours.  If this is an issue of morality, I think it is immoral  for you to be my friend on the one hand and on the  other say, 'You are not entitled to the same rights  and obligations as I am.'" Catania then suggested that  saying one supports civil unions or domestic  partnerships was just a way of saying, "I'm not  that big of a bigot." He later apologized for the  comment and clarified that he did not mean council member  Barry was a bigot, but that his position was bigoted.

   

  "I am your  equal," Catania said. "I get up every day and  serve the citizens of this city, just as you, and I deserve  everything that you enjoy. I will not stop until I  have that for every single resident of this city."  Catania is one of two openly gay city council members;  Jim Graham is the other.

• Council member  Yvette Alexander, an African-American woman who  described herself as a Christian, noted that the Stonewall  Democrats' D.C. chapter, the Gertrude Stein  Democratic Club, had endorsed her based on the  totality of her record in spite of the fact that  she does not support same-sex marriage.

   

  "So when I did  not agree on that one issue, they did not negate all  the good works that I had done. The ministers on the other  hand," Alexander said, "the ministers have really  upset me to the point that they have questioned my  Christianity, they have questioned my morality."  Alexander said some ministers had threatened to run a  Christian against her in the next election. 

   

  Even though  Alexander voted to recognize same-sex marriages performed  outside the district, she added, "I can honestly say I'm  still at odds with the issue of gay marriage in  the District of Columbia -- I still want to learn more  about that issue. But I do know one thing, I do know  that everybody is equal under God."

  • Not only can she not be a Christian and support equality, but she can't be a black woman, a Christian, support equality, and sit on the city council in D.C. Which is not far from where the Loving v. VA case originated.
    
    She is already being threatened. Barry knows two things: he will lose his seat if he supports marriage equality, and he can't really do much else.
• After the vote  was taken, the packed council chambers emptied into a  scene of mayhem in the hallway outside. People chanted,  "Take it to the polls" and "We need a new council"  while TV cameras swirled among the action. A young  African-American man stared  flatly at the display with seeming resignation and  mumbled to his friend, "This shit breaks my heart  every time I see it."

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• In June 2008, Washington D.C. Council member and former mayor Marion Barry declared his support for same-sex marriage in the District. Three weeks ago Barry co-sponsored the District law that recognizes legal same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. The former mayor now breaks his promise and appears at an anti-gay rally organized by the publicity-hungry gay-bashing Bishop Harry Jackson of the Hope Christian Church in nearby Beltsville. Barry and Jackson call marriage equality "immoral."
• The Washington Blade reports: "Jackson called on residents to demand that the Council vote down a same-sex marriage recognition amendment scheduled for a second and final vote May 5. Bishop Jackson told the gathering his supporters in many of D.C.'s black churches would circulate literature Sunday in church bulletins urging people to attend the May 5 Council session. He also urged city residents to ask their Council members to vote against the marriage recognition amendment."

• "The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy." — Martin Luther King, Jr.

   

    That's for Marion Barry, who seems to need the reminder.

• The former mayor and current city councilman of Washington, D.C. is a longtime supporter of gay rights. So observers were stunned last week when a bill committing the city to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere passed the council on a vote of 12-1.

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  The "one" was Barry.

• Wait, it gets worse. Barry said his position hasn't changed but warned that the council needs to move slowly on this issue. "All hell is going to break loose," Barry said. "We may have a civil war. The black community is just adamant against this." Indeed, after the vote, a group of black ministers reportedly "stormed" the hallway outside the council chambers, vowing political reprisals.

  The Washington Post quotes Barry as saying he voted as he did because "I am representing my constituents." He reminded reporters that "98 percent of my constituents are black, and we don't have but a handful of openly gay residents."

  That's a lot of words to say what he could have said in three: I punked out.
• There's something to be said for representing one's constituents. But there is more to be said for leading them. Barry's failure to understand the difference is galling in light of the fact that he was once a leader in the civil-rights movement.

  • Barry knows that he could not support same-sex marriage or marriage equality and hold on to a council seat in his district. There are way too many black ministers who could and would successfully challenge him for it and win.

• One wonders, too, whether those black ministers in the hall see their mirror image in generations of white ministers who have used the Bible to condone the evil of slavery ("Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters.") and the fiction of African-American inferiority (the "curse" of Ham).

  At day's end, though, the great tragedy here is neither historical amnesia nor moral cowardice. No, the tragedy is embodied in Barry's description of African Americans as a people for whom open homosexuality is rare. That description is, unfortunately, too accurate – not simply for black Washington, but for black America. We are a socially conservative people.

  And our conservatism is, quite literally, killing us.

• It is no coincidence the community that has yet to make a safe place for its gay members to openly be who they are, the community that still regards gay as a dirty secret not to be spoken in open company, the community in which people still think gay "can't happen in my family," is also the community that accounts for half of all AIDS diagnoses in this country, the community that has lost 211,000 brothers and sisters to this disease, the community where marriages keep popping like balloons from the discovery that the husband is gay on the "down low."

  The measure of a man, said Dr. King, is where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. Marion Barry should take note. We all should.

  Where sexuality is concerned, African America lives by lies. We are long overdue to wake up, grow up and speak up to tell the truth openly and without fear. We are dying in this silence.

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• At a "Stand Up For Marriage" rally in Washington, D.C. recently, ex-Mayor and current Councilman Marion Barry said, "We have to say 'no' to same-sex marriage in D.C....I am a politician who is moral." The rally was in response to legislation that would allow the District to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states.

  Jon Stewart, ever the stickler for hypocrisy, pointed out that "morals" never seemed to be Barry's strong suit in that he smoked crack and cheated on his wife for years. He was eventually charged with three felony counts of perjury, 10 counts of misdemeanor drug possession, and one misdemeanor count of conspiracy after being caught in a sting operation, though 12 of those counts didn't stick. When Barry returned to politics after jail, he ran under the slogan, "He May Not Be Perfect, But He's Perfect for D.C."

• D.C. Council member Marion Barry (D-Ward 8) certainly does not speak for the entire black community regarding gay marriage in the District ["Uproar in D.C. as Same-Sex Marriage Gains," front page, May 6]. 

   

   

   I am straight, I have been married for 18 years, and I have a child. I think I'm a pretty average member of the black community, and I support same-sex marriage. I don't believe it is a threat to my family, community or faith. 

   

   Discrimination, like torture, diminishes us all. It doesn't hurt to remember that at one time slave owners and slavery proponents used the Bible and "God's will" to justify slavery. 
• While I don't purport to know what God believes with regard to gay marriage (we haven't discussed it), I do know that marriage brings with it certain rights that I would not deny to my friends who happen to be gay.

• I have to admit that it was disturbing that this clip showed lots of older black men, including DC’s Former Mayor-for-Life Marion Barry, proclaiming that recognizing out-of-state gay marriages in Washington DC is the apocalypse come. Well, it ain’t. I found John Stewart’s rip on DC’s infamous crack-smoking & whoring former mayor, who loudly proclaimed his “morality” in recently voting no on gay marriage to all that would hear, humorous. Yet it’s a fact that Barry was the lone vote on the DC Council that voted no — a council that remains majority black. The clip makes black folks look backward and bigoted — none of the pro-gay marriage council members are shown in the clip or have received much attention. There are 7 black members of the DC Council out of 13, including the Chairman, Vincent Gray.

  • Or do we make ourselvse look tha way? What are the demogrpahics of the other city council members districs vs. Marion Barry's? Barry knows what side his bread is buttered on, and D.C. black ministers don't have a great history of being supportive of equality.

• As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.
• Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference -- those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older -- know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.
• Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

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• It's "The Master's tools will never dismantle the Master's house." And the reason why is that, when we use the Master's tools (i.e., the tools of patriarchy), we are reifying his authority, his ability to determine which tools are effective. Therefore, each act of "dismantling" also rebuilds his power.

• If the two do break bread, they'll discover that they share a view that gay couples ought to have the same legal rights as any other Americans, but should not be permitted to marry. They'll take comfort in the fact that their views are both based on the biblical definition of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. They're both happy to point to the fact that President Obama is also opposed to gay marriage. 

   

   But the lunch is destined not to be a lovefest. It's not just that Chaffetz and Barry come from wildly disparate backgrounds or represent very different Americas, although it is true that Chaffetz's district is 88 percent white and only 25 percent of his constituents have a college degree, whereas Washington is 56 percent black and 45 percent of its residents have a bachelor's or beyond. 

   

   No, the divide that is most likely to keep these two politicians from sharing too many bags of fries is their opposing views on democracy in the city where they live and work. Chaffetz, who sleeps on a $45 aluminum frame cot in his office on the Hill, believes the Founders wanted him, as a member of Congress, to have the ultimate say on anything the D.C. government does. Barry, who lives in a modest apartment in Ward 8, believes the residents of Washington deserve to control their own government, to have a voice in Congress and to join the 50 states as equals. 
• In one of his "cot-side chats" -- online videos that Chaffetz records from the narrow nook where he sleeps -- the congressman lays out his opposition to D.C. voting rights, saying that "the Founders . . . purposely excluded Washington, D.C.," from the basic guarantee of a full voice in our democracy.
• Barry, who owes a good share of his early successes in D.C. politics to the city's gay voters, has his own challenge with hypocrisy. A man who once argued that the battle for gay rights is of a piece with the black struggle for civil rights now dismisses gay couples as having less of a moral claim on marriage than straights. But Barry would emerge from a lunch with Chaffetz with one clear advantage: As much as the congressman might chuckle over any claim Barry might make to morality, it's the council member from Ward 8 who believes that every American deserves an equal voice.

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