Civil Rights

I'm just going to write about this tonight because I'm not sure I can sort it out any other way. And because I'm still sorting it out, I hope I will write carefully.

GLBT activists talk about civil rights all the time. Some miles have been covered. I believe police antagonism at a gay bar is much more difficult now than it was at the Stonewall Inn before 1969. I believe it is much harder for the judicial system to dismiss violence against GLBT folk because they were just a bunch of queers. It is much harder for TV personalities to make accusatory, inflammataory, or just plain desultory blanket statements about GLBT folk just on the basis of them being GLB or T. This sort of forward movement in GLBT civil rights is the result of many activists who targeted these inequties, brought them to light, and convinced more an more people that GLBT people should not be treated so inequally on the basis of their sexuality or sexual identity.

In many ways (and here's where I must tread carefully because this is so controversial), this forward movement is much like the the Civil Rights movement of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks. They---and obviously not only they---stood up to injustices, called them unjust, and said the justice system must do something about them. Police harrassment, indifferent court systems, and derogatory stereotypes are much harder to perpetrate---not impossible, but much harder---than they were half a century ago.

In this way, our movements have been very similar, and I know that many of the African American community don't like to see similarities, but I think these are fairly plain to see. I will agree with some in the African American community that there are enormous differences between the two movements, most of them having to do with the very nature of our identities. I'm fairly certain that there are many situations where I "pass" for straight, and so appear merely as a white male, and I do believe that I benefit from the slippery spectre of white privilege. On the other hand there are not many African American people who can pass for white, although there is a history of light skinned people working very hard to do just that. Just in that way, in the way that we are able to be identified when we walk into a retailer, the differences between the struggles of the GLBT and the African American communities is very different. I think it is very misleading and very condescending to make statements like "Gay is the New Black" (as I believe at least on GLBT magazine did on its cover).

But here is another way in which the two civil rights movements are very different. The black community in the 1950s and 1960s had a religious community where their leaders organized and made it a religious issue as much as a civil rights issue. The GLBT is not so strong in that area, in part because so many GLBT folk have experienced the opposite--they have been tossed out of their religious communities, by and large, and even when they formed new religious communities like the Metropolitan Community Churches, those communities were too busy bandaging the wounds of their membership to organize for civil movements. That's not to say that they've done nothing in that arena, and there is Soulforce, which tries to model itself after the work of MLK and Gandhi. So far, their efforts have failed to catch the media attention that the black churches were able to get in the middle fo teh 20th Century.

And part of that is the result of not having a traditionally gay church in the same way there were traditionally black churches. Part of that is because being GLBT is being from every layer of society. We are not from one traditional anything. We rise out of all traditions. This is our strength and it is our weakness. It is our strength because this means that no subculture can say "we have no gay people here" (despite efforts to say just that). It is our weakness because when we try to organize, we come from so many different organizational traditions that we have a hard time organizing.

So before this new civil rights movement can get a religious community to make it a religious issue as well as a civil issue, we need a large religious body with a uniform tradition of organization to say with one voice, "denying GLBT folk full access to any part of our civil and religious lives is wrong."

Being a member of the ELCA, I of course hope we might be among the first national religious church bodies to say just that. We won't be the first, but if we start taking steps, we will be the largest. And in this instance, numbers matter, since we seem to be at a place where we're still taking popular votes on who can fully participate in the freedoms and responsibilities of this nation.

That's what I'm hoping for, anyway. If the Presbyterians get there first, that would be great. The UCC is there, but they're too small (although they are doing remarkable things in trying to be heard and I honor that). The Episcopalians are still too divided on the issue, and really, they're not a huge religious body, either, just often more influential. Of course, if the ELCA passes the measures this summer, there will still be divisions---this is still a journey and the destination is still across Jordan---as is the the African American civil rights movement despite there now being a black man in the White House.

But it would be an enormous step forward. This is what I'm praying for.

(Brief civil rights history lesson: While it's certainly no secret, it's also not well known, but an important advisor and confidant of MLK was Bayard Rustin---a gay Quaker who brought to MLK nonviolent options of opposing injustice. It is generally acknowledged that had Rustin be straight, he would be honored alongside MLK, but since he was openly gay, his contribution to the civil rights movment is often ignored.)