The civil rights issue of our time is gay marriage, and the key players in our country’s most significant civil rights movement are on the wrong side of it. The black church has taken on a new role: oppressor. As a black person born in the late ’60s, I missed the actual Civil Rights Movement, but the remnants of oppression and stories of segregation were always fresh on my grandmother’s mind. It was her lessons in black history, literature, and Christianity that inspired me to be proud of my heritage. She did her best to teach me the value of diversity, and so I learned to love all people regardless of their race, sexual orientation, religion, or socioeconomic background. Although my grandmother taught me to love, she was not immune to her community’s mores. And so she also — unconsciously — taught me to deny the humanity of another human. My uncle (one of her five sons) is gay. For his entire childhood and young adult life he was teased and beaten by his brothers for being gay. Our family never spoke aloud about my uncle’s homosexuality, and for decades we called his life partner, who was a kind and loving man, his “friend.” It was against the rules to openly accept, acknowledge, or appreciate my uncle for all that he really was. This was being a good Christian in my family’s eyes, but for me it was telling a lie and an act of oppression. Today, I am still shocked by the response of some of my black Christian friends to the plight of gay people in our nation. “I just don’t agree that gay people can compare their struggles to ours,” they bemoan. This is followed by the list of injustices blacks have experienced: the middle passage, slavery, lynching, rapes, and deaths. “Gay people haven’t suffered nearly as much as blacks,” they say. “Being black is not a choice,” they add. “As if being gay is,” I respond. I don’t support the comparison. For me, the sufferings of a person or a group of people at the hands of other humans are frightening and heartbreaking. Instinctually, I feel that if any group can be oppressed, then I can be oppressed. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. made this very point when he said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” This is why I’m always flabbergasted when I see some black Christians fighting against the civil rights of gays. We know firsthand the impact and dehumanization of discrimination. Like many black people, I was raised in the church. I was in church every Wednesday evening and all day Sunday. There was Bible study, Sunday school, and services. I have some great memories of growing up in church. However, when I became a young adult, I began to recognize a conflict in the church’s “truth” and reality. Preachers and church members spoke of the sinful nature of homosexuality, but sometimes, the very people leading prayers, preaching, and participating in the choir were obviously gay. Living in Los Angeles, I’ve sat in some of the biggest megachurches and have been baffled to learn that some of these church leaders — who preach that homosexuality is a sin — are closeted gay people. After watching a close friend’s life come undone because of a scandal around her closeted gay husband, I left Christianity for good. Such hypocrisy in a place promoting spiritual growth was more than I could handle. Not all Christians oppose gay marriage because they are struggling with their own sexual orientation. There are also those black Christians who oppose gay marriage because the Bible declares, in their interpretation of it, that homosexuality is a sin. This is their sincere belief and value system. However, the Bible was also key in the justification of enslaving blacks centuries ago. Blacks were believed to be descendants of Canaan’s son Ham and, accordingly, were cursed to serve as slaves. We perceive this as outrageous. Is it not equally outrageous to think that God deems another group of people to be less than? Rather than opposing the right of people who love one another to be married, I will suggest that there are those black people who might look into their closets and begin cleaning them out. Our churches might begin making their priority the rising numbers of gay black men who are contracting HIV each year. They might teach church members self-awareness and inner growth as a means of revealing the spirit of Christ within them. When I was a practicing Christian, learning how to embody the loving spirit of Jesus — who dared not judge but lived a life of love and compassion — would have served me well. I believed then, and still hold dear, Jesus the Christ’s command to love. Above all things, love. Love is the driving component. Those who have suffered grave atrocities at the hands of others know too closely what the absence of love creates. They know the isolation, fear, devastation, and self-hatred the lack of love breeds. We don’t need gay people to be lynched in order to know that the denial of their rights is damaging to the progress of all peoples. If one person has suffered at the hand of another, we need not measure that suffering to prove its value. In our attempt to distance ourselves from the plight of gay people, we also distance ourselves from our own struggle and take the position of oppressor. Gay is the new black. And some Christian blacks must be willing to look into their hearts and find the seeds of fear that would have them deny the humanity of another in the name of God (just the way it was done to them not that long ago). Let’s ask ourselves: do we fear gays or fear being gay? Why must gay leaders in our churches and communities serve clandestinely? Consider what the power of love and acceptance might offer if we are willing to stand courageously with gays as we stood for ourselves decades ago. Our freedom will not truly be granted until we can pass it forward. Gay is the new black, sadly, because many blacks haven’t been willing to embrace their own practices, secrets, fear, and shame about homosexuality. Many blacks have not been able to reconcile their real-life experience with their faith, and until they do this, they are oppressed people who are also practicing the oppression of others. Originally posted here: Monique Ruffin: It’s Official: Gay Is the New Black
Beverly Hills News
Posts Tagged ‘ jesus ’
Metta World Peace thanks Jesus Christ that he still has his teeth
http://www.youtube.com/v/rZrVRU5G2dg?version=3&f=user_uploads&app=youtube_gdata Video by Melissa Rohlin Go here to read the rest: Metta World Peace thanks Jesus Christ that he still has his teeth
Pencil This In: Art Openings, Peter Case at McCabe’s and Holidays Storyelling at Vroman’s
TGIF! We found a few events around town tonight that might pique your interest, including art openings at LA Luz de Jesus and Gallery1988; holiday storytelling at Vroman’s; Peter Case at McCabe’s and a three-day symposium on Latin-American art at LACMA. Read on for all the details. more › Visit link: Pencil This In: Art Openings, Peter Case at McCabe’s and Holidays Storyelling at Vroman’s
Christina Patterson: It Wasn’t Just One Man Who Killed the King of Pop
When the verdict was announced, his sister shrieked. She sent a tweet to her 125,000 followers saying “VICTORY,” and ended it with seven exclamation marks. His fans waved their banners praising Jesus, and screamed, and wept, and blew horns. People said, while crying in front of cameras, that there had, at long last, been what their banners had demanded: “Justice for Michael!” His mother agreed. “I feel,” she told reporters, “better now.” Everyone seemed to. Everyone — apart, perhaps, from Conrad Murray, and his defense lawyers, and maybe some of the women who claimed to be his girlfriend, and maybe some of the mothers of some of his children — seemed to feel an awful lot better now. They seemed to think that although nothing could bring back the man they claimed to love so much, this was a very, very happy day. They seemed to feel like Michael Jackson’s mother, who couldn’t wait “to go home and share this day” with his children, and “couldn’t hold back tears of joy.” Everyone seemed to think that what had been a tragedy wasn’t any more. Because a man who was paid nearly £100,000 a month to give him the kind of drugs you can’t just pick up at Boots, had given him an awful lot of the kind of drugs you can’t pick up at Boots, and been so careless about it that he’d been chatting on the phone to a cocktail waitress while the man he was meant to be looking after was having a bad reaction to a drug you definitely can’t pick up at Boots, had been found guilty of killing him by accident. Or it wasn’t as much of a tragedy as it had been, because the person who caused it had been found and would be punished. Perhaps when these people heard that the most successful pop star in world history, who was not only a brilliant singer and songwriter, but also did some of the most athletic and original dancing ever done by a rock star, and who cared so much about his appearance that he made improving it into a life’s quest, was crippled with arthritis, and nearly blind, and had a toenail fungus so bad that doctors thought his flesh was rotting away, they thought this was a normal thing for a 50-year-old man. Maybe when they heard a recording of his voice, which was so weak and slurred that you could hardly make out the words, but which had sounded pretty good on the albums that almost everyone in the Western world had bought, they thought this was normal, too. And maybe not a single one of these people wondered what on earth had happened to his family, and the people he called his friends. Perhaps they thought it was normal to watch your brother, or son, or friend, have so many operations on his face that some people said some of the bones in it were in danger of collapsing, and that what you should say, when he came out of hospital from the latest one, was that he definitely looked better than before. Maybe they thought, when they heard he was paying someone nearly £100,000 a month, to give him drugs almost every doctor in the world would say he didn’t need, that this sounded like excellent value. And maybe when they heard another recording of the pop star in court, telling that doctor that he wanted to use the proceeds of the tour he was planning to help sick children, because he himself “didn’t have a childhood,” they just shrugged and thought “so what?” Maybe they thought that it didn’t really matter whether you had a childhood. That a childhood was a small thing to give up to produce the kind of music that the King of Pop produced, and a small price to pay for the fame he had. It isn’t all that easy to know what Michael Jackson’s family, friends and fans thought about any of these things, because, when they talk about him, they tend to talk as if he wasn’t a human being, but a god. His sister, La Toya, said on Monday that “victory was served” because her brother was, though technically dead, “in that courtroom.” She didn’t say what, if anything, she’d done when she’d watched her brother being flogged by their father for making mistakes in rehearsals throughout his childhood, and from the start of his singing career at the age of six. Nor did his mother. And nor, of course, did his father, who used, according to his son, to watch his sons rehearsing with a belt in his hand, and often told him that his nose was “too fat.” You’d have thought that sisters, and brothers, and parents, and friends, might think it wasn’t usually a good sign when someone built themselves a giant fun fair, and zoo, and named it after a fantasy land in a children’s book about a boy who never grows up. And that they might be a little bit worried when their best friends seemed to be prepubescent boys and a chimpanzee called Bubbles. But sisters, and brothers, and parents, and friends, didn’t seem too worried by any of this, or, if they were, they didn’t say so. They seemed to think that nothing could be strange in the life, and lifestyle, of someone who was very, very talented, and very, very successful, and very, very, very rich. They seemed to think that someone who was very talented, and very successful, and very rich should always do exactly what they wanted, even if what they wanted was to wreck their once-handsome face and body with plastic surgery and drugs. Michael Jackson called the drug that killed him “milk.” He never stopped seeking the props of the childhood he had lost. Perhaps when he looked at photos of that brown-skinned boy, with his big nose, big lips, and big smile, he saw a shadow of the person he once was, the person he’d paid doctors to wipe out. Perhaps he remembered a time before his life became a giant freak show. “Wasn’t nothing strange about your daddy,” Al Sharpton told Jackson’s children at his funeral. That, of course, was a lie, but what he said next was true. “It was strange,” he said, “what your daddy had to deal with. But he dealt with it anyway.” Yes, he dealt with it anyway: the parents who cared more about money and fame than that their son had a childhood, the brothers and sisters who were nearly as damaged as him, the people who said they were friends, but who only seemed to want to be sprinkled with his star dust, and the people — so many people — who just wanted his money. And a press poised for every new twist in the crazy carnival his life became. It was Conrad Murray’s defense lawyer who reminded jurors that “this is not a reality show, it’s reality.” Unfortunately, no one in Jackson’s sad, strange and shockingly friendless life, seemed to know the difference. Originally posted here: Christina Patterson: It Wasn’t Just One Man Who Killed the King of Pop
