On August 3, voters in Missouri easily passed a state constitutional amendment to restrict marriage to heterosexual couples Antigay activists in Ohio and North Carolina claim to have enough signatures to put the same sort of antigay constitutional amendment on their state ballots this fall. According to Tony Perkins, a spokesperson for the Religious Right’s Family Research Council, “in the months ahead, marriage may be on the ballot in at least a dozen states.” Noting that “Missouri is the first one,” Seth Kilbourne of the Human Rights Campaign urged that supporters of marriage for same-sex couples redouble their efforts.
The day after Missouri voters approved a constitutional ban against same-sex marriage, John Kerry said on NBC that they’d done “what’s right” and that he, himself, would have voted with the majority of Missourians to ban same-sex marriage. The next day, running mate John Edwards, said: “We’re both opposed to gay marriage and believe that states should be allowed to decide this question.”
Consistent with his position, Kerry supports a Massachusetts state constitutional amendment to overturning the court ruling allowing same-sex couples to wed in the Bay State.
Andy Thayer of DontAmend.com speaks up: “The leading political organizations in our [gay] community have chosen to politely downplay the Democrats’ attacks on our equal marriage rights, all while using the marriage issue in fundraising letters to swell their treasuries. Can you imagine the NAACP endorsing a candidate who opposed legal equality for African-Americans? Can you imagine NOW endorsing a candidate who opposed legal equality for women?”
New York Blade executive editor Chris Crain notes that while “the Federal Marriage Amendment [backed by President Bush] never had a serious chance at passage,” the “ongoing efforts to amend state constitutions [backed by John Kerry] can set back the fight for marriage by decades, and in no state is that fight more important than in Kerry’s home state.” This gay press editor asserts that this “bodes very poorly for the prospects of gay civil rights under a Kerry administration.” Crain’s editorial appeared in the August 6 edition.
Marriage for same-sex couples has now been prohibited by state constitutional amendment in Alaska, Hawaii, Nebraska, Nevada and Missouri. Eight states have the issue on the November ballot: Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, Oklahoma, Oregon and Utah. Louisiana is set to vote on a constitutional ban in September. Gene Mills, an Assembly of God preacher, is heading up the antigay effort in Louisiana. He says: “We’re casting this as: Either the people of Louisiana decide or some federal or state court in another state decides.” Those who oppose the amendment say these are echoes of the struggles against segregation and slavery, when social change was resisted as coming from the federal government and an “activist” judiciary.
“[Contrary to President Bush’s statement about the history of marriage] it’s simply a fact that marriage is ‘an evolving paradigm,’” according to former Bush-supporter Andrew Sullivan. Writing for CBSNews.com, July 13, the gay conservative pundit went on: “For the first millennium after Christ, Christianity didn’t even recognize marriage as a sacrament. It was regarded as a purely secular matter of property ownership.” Alluding to historical prohibitions against interracial marriage, Sullivan says: “The notion that [marriage] has never changed is simply untrue. The only relevant question is whether the current change [extending marriage to same-sex couples] is a good one.”
The president of the American Association of Christian Counselors grants that “we are opposed” to marriage for same-sex couples and he urges AACC members to “get involved” in the political effort to ban such marriages. Tim Clinton then goes on in his column (Christian Counseling Connection, 2004, issue 1) to say: “But let’s also show the world the beauty of a man and woman in love for a lifetime. … Let’s ask ourselves honestly, ‘Do I have a marriage I want the world to see – that I want my own children to emulate?’ It is time to concentrate on healthy relationships in our own homes and churches.” Clinton urges members to “love your spouse as Christ loves you – unconditionally, wholeheartedly, and in spite of the things they do wrong or that you don’t like about them.”
He laments that “so much of what we do in the name of Christ is impotent, even embarrassing! So much of what we do is about what we ‘are against’ instead of what we are for.”
What do American teenagers say is the “most important election issue?” According to a poll of 1,007 Americans age 13 to 19, it’s “gay marriage or abortion” The annual survey was sponsored by the Horatio Alger Foundation.
InterVarsity Press has published ABC News medical correspondent Timothy Johnson’s new book, Finding God in the Questions. Johnson is an ordained minister as well as a medical doctor. In the book, he notes that current preaching about “family values” is at odds with Jesus’ emphasis on the family of faith. Observing that we have nothing from Jesus against homosexuality but much from Jesus against divorce, Johnson says he finds it “quite startling” how so many Christians today condemn homosexuality while accepting divorce.
Singer-actor Kris Kristofferson, who wrote “Why me, Lord?”, is one of several Christians artists who have come out for marriage for same-sex couples. Says Kristofferson: “I’m married for 21 years, and I believe in a happy marriage, and I believe everyone is entitled to one. My children feel the same way, and my daughter was telling me to be sure that I voiced my opposition to the [proposed federal] amendment” to ban marriage for gay couples.
Noel Stookey – Paul of Peter, Paul and Mary – is a devout Christian artist with a career of his own. He recently joined with the rest of the folk trio to say: “Having sung, demonstrated and participated as activists for the human rights, civil rights and dignity of all people, we are totally opposed to the Bush administration’s proposed constitutional amendment. Let us rather find ways to embrace one another, all different, all special, and all deserving of being accepted as such – without bias, without prejudice, and, most critically, without the deprivation of our rights to full and equal participation in our society.”
Coretta Scott King, veteran civil rights leader John Lewis (D-GA) and former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown have joined a coalition of black gay leaders to oppose black church leaders’ efforts against the interests of gay people. The National Black Justice Coalition is publishing pro-gay ads in African-American newspapers in the District of Columbia, Baltimore, Atlanta, Detroit and Los Angeles. The group says its is “the first time an African-American gay and lesbian advocacy organization has ever launched a pro-equality ad campaign in African-American newspapers.” .
Jamaican reggae star Beenie Man’s lyrics call for the killing of gay people. A sample: “Some bwoy will go a jail fi kill man tun bad man chi chi [queer] man!!! / Yuh seem to run off a stage like a clown (Kill Dem DJ!!!” and “I’m dreaming of a new Jamaica, come to execute all the gays.” He claims that his lyrics are part of Jamaican culture. Virgin Records, his record label, has issued an apology and some clubs have cancelled his concerts. But Beenie Man’s manager says the artist is against “the homosexual lifestyle” and has a right to attack it.
Jim Wallis of Sojourners, an evangelical journal of social justice, debated Jerry Falwell on National Public Radio in July. Host Tavis Smiley asked Falwell to name a “short list” of the values issues important to him. The amendment against marriage for same-sex couples was the only “values” issue he brought up. When Wallis countered that poverty, prisoners’ rights and the environment were also important matters about which Christians should be concerned, Falwell attacked him for presumably having voted for Al Gore and judged that Wallis was “as much an evangelical as an oak tree.” “It was an absolutely partisan and theocratic moment,” recounts Wallis. He writes: “I happen to think that both abortion and gay marriage are important issues, but they are not the only issues. Many Christians are getting tired of the tirades of the Jerry Falwells who repeatedly claim that all values issues have to do with sex and that every Christian must vote for their Republican friends.”
Wallis reports that, later in the day, in conversation with Tony Campolo, they agreed that the next time they debated with Falwell, they’d name him for what he really is: “a fundamentalist who has stolen the word evangelical.”
In The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde, Joseph Pearce presents the Victorian wit and writer as a profoundly Christian man. Long-held as an icon in gay circles, Wilde is understood by Pearce to have written “short stories [that] are almost always animated by a deep Christian morality, with ‘The Selfish Giant’ deserving a timeless accolade as one of the finest Christian fairy stories ever written.” Pearce, who is editor of the Saint Austin Review and writer-in-residence at conservative Ave Maria University, states that Wilde’s plays “are more than merely comedies or tragedies; they are morality plays in which virtue is vindicated and vice vanquished. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is a masterpiece of Victorian fiction, the overriding moral of which is that to kill the conscience is to kill the soul.”
According to Pearce, Wilde wrote about what he called the “beauty and necessity” of the Incarnation of Christ which helped us “grasp at the skirts of the Infinite.” In Wilde’s words: “Since [the birth of] Christ, the dead world has woke up from sleep. Since him, we have lived.”
Writing in the conservative National Catholic Register, Pearce cautions: “Mindful of the planks in our own eyes, we should not join the scribes, Pharisees and hypocrites who point self-righteously at the mote in Wilde’s. For, as Lord Darlington says in Wilde’s play Lady Windermere’s Fan, ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.’”
Brought out four years ago in Britain, the new American edition of Pearce’s book is published by Ignatius Press, publisher of some rabidly antigay books.
Wayne Besen writes “In Defense of Bathhouses.” He admits that a recent study of L.A.’s bathhouses funded by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention shows that HIV infection rate among gay men tested at the baths is twice as high as HIV rate in gay men tested elsewhere. And he says: “Let’s be honest, bathhouses are not the healthiest environments.” Nonetheless he states that “it is only fair to conclude that the crackdown [on L.A. bathhouses] is based on discrimination.” His “Viewpoint” appeared in the gay New York Blade.
Besen is the gay author of Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals & Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth (Haworth).
The New York City Council has awarded over $500,000 in HIV prevention to 46 black and Latino faith communities and a similar about to the Latino Commission on AIDS and the National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS. According to Dennis deLeon, president of the Latino Commission on AIDS, “for better or worse (depending on your perspective), black and Latino churches are critical institutions in the lives of the respective communities.” He says that these churches “reach populations that would otherwise have little access to information and support.”
The 15th International AIDS Conference, held in Bangkok in July, yielded findings about the increasingly risky behavior of gay men. A CDC study of 1,468 HIV-negative or untested men at gay bars in 13 U.S. cities found that increased “treatment optimism” – though ill-founded – is a factor in increased engagement in risky behavior. Other reported studies supported these findings
“HIV/AIDS globally is already the worst disaster in recorded human history. It is already worse than the Black Death in Europe in the fourteenth century and the word ‘already’ is very significant because it is going to get much worse before it gets better, even if we do all the right things tomorrow – and we are not.” That’s what Richard Feachem, director of the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria said to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Africa in March.
Feachem is cited by Alex de Waal in his Times Literary Supplement review (August 6, 2004) of two important books on AIDS: Catherine Campbell’s Letting Them Die and Nicoli Nattrass’ The Moral Economy of AIDS in South Africa. Both books deal with AIDS in Africa. He calls Campbell’s book “the best book yet written on the struggle.” She claims that the epidemic in South Africa, as de Waal puts it: “pivots on the sexual demands of gold miners, for whom going underground and going after women are inextricably linked. Stripped of the traditional means whereby masculine identity was constructed in a patriarchal society, these men seek intimacy and self-esteem in unprotected sexual encounters.” She argues that they don’t care about contracting and spreading AIDS because they have nothing for which to look forward in a long life.
Forty groups of Quakers in the mid-Atlantic states are withholding funds from the Friends United Meeting to protest the FUM’s antigay hiring policy. Approximately 4,300 Quakers are refusing to pass on they annual membership donation, amounting to $17,400, because the FUM “effectively bars from staff and leadership positions those Friends” who are in same-sex unions.
The African Methodist Episcopal Church has voted, with no dissent, to forbid AME ministers from performing same-sex weddings. According to Joe Darby, a minister of this 2.5-million-member denomination, “I think this vote was done so that those who would try to use it as an issue wouldn’t have it as a tool.”
Singer Michael Jackson made a surprise visit to L.A.’s First African Methodist Episcopal Church on August 16th. He met with boys and girls in the Sunday School and, when asked his reason on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” he said he went “to worship and to see the children.” Jackson was reared as a Jehovah’s Witness.
Another Evangelical Lutheran pastor has come out as gay. Jay Weisner was “formally married” to his partner of five years at Bethany Lutheran Church in the Twin Cities and will be installed on the staff of that congregation. Granting ministry to gay people in relationship is contrary to the policy of the Evangelical Lutheran denomination.
“In more than 20 years of pastoral ministry, I have seen many threats to marriage, but these threats haven’t come from gay men and lesbians.” Lutheran seminary professor Barbara K. Lundblad, in a letter to The New York Times, protesting a federal ban on same-sex marriage, continued: “I’m certain that a survey of pastors, priests and rabbis would confirm that adultery, abuse and addictions are far more destructive.”
Pacific School of Religion has launched a new Certificate in Sexuality and Religion program. The liberal school’s new curriculum includes courses entitled “Biblical Interpretation and Queer Perspectives,” “Gay/Lesbian Spirituality,” and “Queer Exegesis and the Hebrew Bible.”
Meanwhile, in New York City, American Baptist-affiliated Judson Memorial Church, is the venue for a GLBT youth series on “The Journey to Spiritual Freedom: Exploring Queer Spirituality in Today’s World,” featuring panelists from the Metropolitan Community Church, One Spirit Learning Alliance and Hebrew Union College along with a “performance artist-drag king comedienne.”
AND FINALLY:
Exodus has launched a new “ex-gay” ad campaign, “I Questioned Homosexuality.” It carries the tag: “Change is possible.” In one installment, Exodus leader Alan Chambers claims “I’m living proof that change is possible.” But the “change” is hardly a change in sexual orientation. The “change” is termed “a way out of a gay identity.” Testifying to his own “way out,” Randy Thomas says: “Today I am an ex-gay. No, wait … I don’t define myself anymore with a sexual identity. I’m just … Randy.”