“I’m not going to kick gays,” he said, complaining that the Religious Right “uses gays as the enemy. … I think it’s bad for Republicans to be kicking gays.” These were the words of George W. Bush while planning his run for the Presidency. He did not realize that Doug Wead was secretly recording his privately expressed opinion. Wead, a Pentecostal preacher and Bush’s liaison to the conservative Christian community, had been an advisor to the first President Bush. The tapes were revealed to the press in February.
Does the Religious Right have too much influence in the Bush administration? According to a new Gallup Poll, 39% of Americans say it does have too much influence, 39% say it has just the right amount of influence, and 18% say it has too little influence.
A diversity of political opinion is not an option for gays? Gay Republican political strategist Arthur J. Finkelstein is launching “Stop Her Now,” an effort aimed at defeating Hillary Clinton’s bid for re-election to the U. S. Senate. Former President Bill Clinton attacked him, saying either “he’s totally Machiavellian or he may be blinded by self-loathing.” Finkelstein married his male partner of 40 years in a civil ceremony in Massachusetts this winter. He said: “I believe that visitation rights, health care benefits and other human relationship contracts that are taken for granted by all married people should be available to [same-sex] partners.”
Michael Marcavage is the young, in-your-face leader of an antigay protest group called Repent America. He crashes gay pride events, showing up with megaphone and pictures of the flames of hell to which he tells the gay people they’re headed.
Marvin Olasky, editor-in-chief of the Religious Right’s World magazine, interviewed Marcavage recently and wrote his response, “How to Hurt Evangelism,” for the March 5 issue of this newsmagazine. Olasky: “[I]t still seems to me easier to use a megaphone than to love our neighbors quietly and one-by-one.” He adds: “[I]t seems to me that pastors and protesters are more effective when they say ‘we sinners’ rather than ‘you sinners.’”
Olasky teaches journalism at the University of Texas. He reports that his students’ notions about “how Christians act” fall along these lines: “Fanatical. Cram religion down others’ throats. Trying to force others to do everything their way. Bossing, not helping, others.” Olasky observes: “That’s not the reputation that leads people to listen to the gospel of grace.”
Gene Scott, the most unusual television pastor and Bible teacher, has died. The Los Angeles based former Assembly of God leader, with a doctorate from Stanford, liked to tweak Fundamentalists by smoking cigars as he taught, uncompromisingly, on God’s grace. He also lectured on more remote topics such as the “secrets” of The Great Pyramid. He refused to condemn homosexuality, stating: “I take you as you are, as God takes me as I am.”
Scott was a collector of everything from ancient Bibles to show horses. He was also a philanthropist who contributed to civic projects such as the LA Public Library, the Richard Pryor Burn Foundation, and the Museum in Black, an exhibition of the slave and civil rights eras. Over the years he won the respect of evangelical pastors such as E. V. Hill and Jess Moody and gospel singers like Jake Hess and Merle Haggard.
Moderate evangelicals recently met together in Chicago to advocate for a broader sense of moral issues than that usually associated with evangelicals. One man stood and held up a Bible from which, he said, he’d cut out all the passages addressing issues of poverty. He challenged “anyone in the room” to cut out every verse about gay marriage and said: “we’ll compare Bibles.”
Though battling cancer, Tammy Faye Messner spoke at a North Carolina Alliance of AIDS Services benefit this winter. She said: “I believe that the heterosexual community will certainly never understand the homosexual community, but just because we don’t understand each other doesn’t mean that we can’t care for one another and love one another and live together in peace.”
“Oppression is oppression is oppression” said Kelvin Calloway, pastor of the Second A.M.E. Church in Los Angeles. “Just because we’re not the ones who are being oppressed now, do we not stand with those oppressed now? That is the biblical mandate. That’s what Jesus is all about.” He was responding to fellow African-Americans who tell him that he should not be comparing the discrimination against gay people with discrimination against black people.
The National Baptist Convention’s leader, William J. Shaw, does not support same-sex marriage but neither is he in favor of a constitutional amendment to ban it. Says Shaw: “Marriage is threatened more by adultery, and we don’t have a constitutional ban on that. Alcohol is a threat to the stability of family, and we don’t have a constitutional ban on that.”
Lamenting that “only one-third of all black babies are born into a two-parent, married family [and that] divorce, teenage pregnancy, fatherless homes and the alarming spread of HIV/AIDS are threatening the black family landscape,” D.C. mega-church pastor Harry R. Jackson, Jr. warns that “same-sex marriage would aggravate this crisis.” Writing in the April issue of Charisma magazine, he approvingly cites a Gallup Poll finding that 72 percent of his fellow African-Americans says that marriage should be limited to couples comprised of one man and one woman.
Black evangelical leaders joined in a recent “summit on marriage and moral values in New York.” They met at The King’s College campus in the Empire State Building. They discussed a “black contract with America on moral values,” a platform that includes a strong antigay plank. “We don’t want to be gay bashers, but the Bible is clearly against homosexuality,” said the pastor of Manhattan’s Central Baptist Church. It is estimated that there are 1.5 million evangelical Christians living in New York City.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church of American will consider a proposal under which gay men and lesbians could serve as pastors if they show “evidence of intent to live in a life-long, committed and faithful same-sex relationship.” At present, the ELCA requires gay pastors to be celibate. The proposal will be taken up at the ELCA national assembly in August and will need a 2/3 vote to pass. Carlos Pena, an ECLA vice president says: “I think it’s a good reflection of where we are as a church.” But church conservatives say it promotes an unbiblical lifestyle and gay Lutherans say it’s still unfair. Jeff R. Johnson, a gay pastor at University Lutheran Chapel in Berkeley, California, says it sets up a more involved approval system than it does for non-gays and does not define what the “evidence” for “faithful same-sex relationship” entails.
Same-sex marriage is part of “a new ideology of evil.” That’s what Pope John Paul II wrote in his Memory and Identity, the last of his books to be published before his death.
In spite of the pope’s anti-homosexual position during his quarter-century tenure, Roman Catholic support for gay people in America rose to 39 percent during that time. That is six percentage points higher than the support for gay people within the general population of Americans. These statistics were reported in The New York Times.
The Right-wing Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights is supporting gay parents’ rights to send their children to a Roman Catholic School. Antigay parents of students at St. John the Baptist School in Costa Mesa, California had protested the enrollment of the children of gay parents. The school is standing firm, refusing to exclude these children. According to the League’s outspoken director, William Donohue: “There is no fundamental tension between opposing gay marriage as a matter of public policy and accepting the children of gay parents in a Catholic school.” Says a parent of a classmate of the gay couple’s children: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”
Francis DeBernardo of New Ways Ministry, a veteran pro-gay Catholic organization, says that “Catholics come out among the highest in supporting gay and lesbian rights because Catholic teaching is more complicated than some think, it does not condemn homosexual orientation.”
Gay media attacks on the legacy of Pope John Paul II are in sharp contrast to the admiration coming from a broad spectrum of world opinion. Typical of the negativity is John Gallagher’s opinion piece on PlanetOut.com. Voicing nothing but disdain for the pope, he attacks his (and other conservatives’) “black-and-white terms” of discourse, “them against us, evil vs. good.” He claims: “[T]hanks to John Paul II, homosexuality has risen to the top of the list of modern evils. … Bishops who were considered weak on the topic, such as [a bishop who stepped down in the wake of his gay sexual affair with a young man], were essentially laid off.”
Another example of this negativity is New York Blade editor Steve Weinstein’s editorial for April 8. After saying, inexplicably, that “under the guise of love for the poor, this pope has done as much as anyone to increase their burden,” Weinstein asserts: “I don’t hold out much hope that the next pope will be any more realistic. The Curia is such a self-contained body that only someone who has risen through the ranks – that is, is himself emotionally stunted enough to remain in the priesthood – can aspire to the Throne of Peter.” Weinstein claims: “I don’t mean to sound like a Catholic basher,” but then he repeats, evidently in ignorance, the malicious disinformation that “the sad fact remains that more people in human history have died at the receiving end of the Holy Roman Church than any other cause.” Historically speaking, of course, more people died at the receiving end of 20th century secularism (Communism and Nazism) than througout the whole of some 3,000 years of monotheistic (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) combined.
John Paul II “relentlessly preached genuine tolerance: not the tolerance of indifference, as if difference over the good didn’t matter, but the real tolerance of differences engaged, explored, and debated within the bond of a profound respect for the humanity of the other. … John Paul II was teaching a crucial lesson about the future of freedom: Universal empathy comes through, not around, particular convictions.” Veteran observer George Weigel expressed this opinion in The Wall Street Journal, following the pope’s passing.
Religious Right leaders are voicing sharp resentment with Zondervan’s newly published Today’s New International Version of the Bible. They say it is “pandering to modern sensibilities.” But presumably they are pleased with the TNIV’s more explicit rendering of Leviticus 18:22, where “do not lie with a man” becomes “do not have sexual relations with a man” as one does with a woman.
“I stopped and looked into their eyes but they only showed disgust. … They closed the door behind me.” These are the words of Jimmy Roy Mortimer, whose parents called his same-sex orientation “a horrible decision” and told him to pack his things and leave their home. They denied him promised support for college. Now, thanks to The Point Foundation, “A Scholarship Lifeline for LGBT Students,” he is a Freshman at Boston University.
A new facility to shelter New York City’s estimated 7,000 homeless gay youth will be opened in the city’s Chelsea neighborhood. “We don’t want to just house the kids but we want to help them to get off the streets,” said the project’s director, Carl Siciliano. “We want to create New York City as a safety net for kids so when they get thrown out of their homes we are creating what a healthy family should create for them. We are looking to try to provide as many stabilizing services to those kids as possible.” Phyllis Steinberg, director of advocacy for Parents, Friends and Family of Lesbians & Gays in New York expressed her support: “We must step up to the plate and fight to reclaim these kids. They are not disposable.”
Maine has a new law to protect citizens from discrimination in employment, housing, credit, public accommodations and educational opportunities based on real or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity. Christians who support the law say it only legislates the Golden Rule. But an antigay group calling itself the Christian Civil League thinks otherwise. The CCL is trying to overturn the law by a “people’s veto” and is canvassing the state to collect signatures to that end. According to CCL
For an anti-AARP ad, the Web site of the Rightwing American Spectator posted a photo of an Oregon state gay couple kissing. A federal judge has ruled that the photo must be removed because the couple had not consented to the use of their photo.
Did Bishop V. Gene Robinson imply in a speech that Jesus might have been gay? Claiming he did, Rightwing religion Weblogger David Virtue sparked angry emails to the openly gay Episcopal bishop from around the world. “I can assure you with absolute certainty that was not my implication, and certainly not anything I ever said,” Robinson told the New Hampshire Union Leader. What Robinson says he had pointed out in his speech at Christ Church in Hamilton, Massachusetts, was that Jesus, in his life and teaching, neither modeled nor taught the model of the modern nuclear family. Noting that Jesus was not married with children “is a long way from saying Jesus is gay, or saying that he had sex with anyone, male or female,” said Robinson.
A Swedish court has cleared a Pentecostal pastor of inciting hatred against homosexuals. In a sermon in 2003, Ake Green had said that homosexuality was “a cancerous growth in the body of society.” Under Sweden’s hate-crimes law, he was sentenced to a month in jail. The court ruled that there was no proof that Green had “used his position as a preacher as a cover for attacking homosexuals.” Green said that, in future, he “won’t be dedicating so much time to this issue.”
The conservative minority within the Scottish Episcopal Church is up in arms over their bishops’ backing of priestly ordination for practicing homosexuals. The conservative churches are the wealthiest in the communion and their leaders are saying that the bishops’ decision is threatening to split the entire communion and have an adverse effect on ecumenical relations.
“They are creating a deep and terrible sorrow that is unbearable.” This is the view of Shlomo Amar, Israel’s Sephardic chief rabbi, at the prospect of the 10-day WorldPride 2005 festival and parade scheduled for Jerusalem in August. He was joined in a protest news conference by a Sufi sheik who said: “We can’t permit anybody to come and make the Holy City dirty. This is very ugly and very nasty to have these people come to Jerusalem.” The interfaith protest was prompted by Leo Giovenetti, an antigay preacher from Southern California. He has been circulating a petition entitled: “Homosexuals to Desecrate Jerusalem.” WorldPride organizers say some 75 non-Orthodox rabbis have signed a statement of support for the event. Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox mayor says he has no way of stopping the event. Annual Gay Pride marches have been held in both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv for several years.
Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan wants gay marchers in the 10th anniversary commemoration of the Million Man March in October. He said that “the makeup will be our people, whatever we are. Male, female. Gay, straight. Light, dark. Rich, poor. Ignorant, wise. We are family. We will be coming together to discuss family business.”
AND FINALLY:
A recent Bill Schorr cartoon shows a husband and wife having breakfast in their kitchen with their little daughter. The husband is reading a newspaper with these headlines: “Mary Kay LeTourneau to Wed Ex-Student,” “Charles-Camilla Marriage,” and an item about Michael Jackson. Says the husband: “Suddenly same-sex marriage doesn’t sound that bad.”