The Republic of T.

Wow. After a week or so of writing mostly about race and ethnic diversity, it was something of a relief to get back to talking about LGBT-related issues. (Trust me. Talking about this stuff is a walk in the freaking park compared to talking about race. At least in my opinion.) Of course, you can imagine, I can never fully escape one or the other.

At the beginning of the week two different people emailed me about a book that’s already on my Amazon wishlist, Their Own Receive Them Not: African American Lesbians And Gays in Black Churches. After reflecting on the number of times I’ve blogged about the subject, I picked up the phone, called the publisher and got them to send me a review copy. (It’s in the mail.) Then there was the anti-gay rant by Wellington Boone at the Values Voter Summit, that reminded me of a few other black ministers who’ve sounded off on the subject. On that I can only echo the author of the book I mentioned earlier, ““This black-church-sanctioned homophobia produces a lot of twisted black people.” Then there was the matter of the (black, gay, Christian, ordained minister) of Palm Springs welcoming the “Love Won Out” conference to his city, and the question of whether the tolerance of intolerance is the new tolerance. And that was just my week. There was lots going on elsewhere.

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There’s one story I haven’t touched all week: the torture compromise. I stayed away from it for two reasons: (1) because it was already thoroughly covered by every major progressive blog in existence, and (2) I got tired of blogging about torture it once realized that a majority of Americans supported it anyway. Turns out I was almost right. Nearly half of Americans support the use of torture. Oh well. I can take some comfort in knowing that the entire House delegation from Maryland voted against torture, including the Republicans.

Torture. That’s who we are now. That’s what we want. Might as well enjoy the music.

1. Fire up the MP3 player.
2. Randomize the collection.
3. Gimme ten.

Here’s mine.

1. Give Your Hands To The Struggle from the album “In This Land” by Sweet Honey In The Rock
2. Sunset (Bird of Prey) from the album “Why Try Harder: The Greatest Hits” by Fatboy Slim
3. Sky Fits Heaven (Victor Calderone Remix Edit) from the album “Drowned World/Substitute For Love (Single) (Disc 2)” by Madonna
4. William, It Was Really Nothing from the album “Singles” by The Smiths
5. Unwritten from the album “Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield
6. Rapture (K-klassic Mix) from the album “Remixed Remade Remodeled” by Blondie
7. S.O.S from the album “Gold” by ABBA
8. We All Sleep Alone from the album “Cher Greatest Hits” by Cher
9. Jam For The Ladies from the album “18″ by Moby Feat. MC Lyte & Angie Stone
10. Give It To Me Baby from the album “Funk Classics – The 70′s” by Rick James

Oh. And the answer to last week’s bonus question: number three.

I haven’t seen much on the blogs (Oops. Wonkette beat me to it) about the Washington Times’ employee caught soliciting a minor online, and what I’ve seen in the news is pretty brief.

Local police today charged the director of human resources at The Washington Times with one count of attempting to entice a minor on the Internet, the newspaper reported.

Randall Casseday, 53, was arrested late yesterday in Northeast Washignton, D.C., where police said he had arranged to meet who he thought was a 13-year-old girl.

He had actually exchanged Internet messages and photographs with a male police officer posing as a girl, the newspaper related, adding, “The conversation included discussion of an explicit sexual nature.”

Brian Bauman, a spokesman for The Times, said Casseday had been suspended without pay. The paper added: “It is not clear from the affidavit whether the online conversation took place on company property or on a company-owned computer.”

That reminded me of a couple of stories I blogged about a while back.

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I've written about this before, and I'll just reiterate that in the past few years I've noticed more than a few moments when we seem to have gone through the looking glass. For example, we seem to have stumbled into an age where the tolerance of intolerance is the new tolerance. In other words, unless you are tolerant of those who are intolerant of — and perhaps even advocate discrmination against — you and others like you, you cannot be truly tolerant.

Take a look at the interesting bit of theater that went on in Palm Springs, where "Love Won Out" held it's conference and was officially welcomed by the Mayor, who also happens to be black, gay, and an ordained minister.

"It's a pleasure to welcome you," the mayor wrote to the notoriously antigay Christian group Focus on the Family, which organized the conference. "We are so proud to have you here in the Palm Springs area."

Focus on the Family, based in Colorado Springs, Colo., teaches that gays and lesbians lead "deviant un-Christian lifestyles" and that with the group's help, they can "change" their sexual orientation. Officials with the group were pleased with the mayor's letter. "We were refreshingly encouraged that here was a city official walking out genuine tolerance," said Melissa Fryrear, director of the group's Gender Issues division. "He's public about being a gay man, which made it even more significant that he was showing us so much respect."

I understand the mayor says he was simply being "a good Christian" by welcoming Dobson' s the group, but would he have shown the same "Christian courtesy" to the Klan? (And yes, I meant to make that comparison, as they've also been known as the "Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.) Jay, over at The Zero Boss wondered what I thought about the whole thing, and I've been trying to figure it out myself.

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This is all kinds of wrong, and definitely NSFW. But I can’t help myself.

If you’re drinking your morning coffee, or some other beverage, you might want to finish swallowing and set it down right about now.

You’ve been warned.

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Well, my review copy of the book I mentioned earlier — Their Own Receive Them Not: African American Lesbians And Gays in Black Churches

— if it will help me understand people like Wellington Boone, the latest black minister to join the ranks of anti-gay bigotry.

In the last QKos round-up I link to Right Wing Watch, which noted one Values Voter Summit Speaker stating that the gay rights movment was “birthed and inspired by the anti-christ” and that the anti-christ himself will be gay. But somehow I missed Wellington Boone’s inspired oration. Fortunately, PageOneQ led me to Think Progress which has audio (for those who can stomach it) as well as a transcript of Boone’s speech which I’ll offer here as evidence of … Well. It speaks for itself.

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Jim sent me an email yesterday about the current issue of Shambhala Sun — which I subscribed to for a year or so, back when I had time to read magazines — and I was intrigued by the focus on mindful politics. I might just pick up this issue tomorrow, in order to read the full articles, because something jumped out at me from the excerpt of John Tarrant’s article “Return to the (Political) World”. Towards the end of last week I wrote that it was rather funny that someone as conflict averse/avoidant as I am would end up a political blogger, much less in the middle of a conflict like the one that broke out that week.

Then I read this.

Politics belongs in the general realm of imperfection, self-deception, desperate hope, and congenial affection we call civilization. That’s where the bodhisattva, who is interested in the fate of others, hangs out. Also, if you indulge in politics, certain personal implications accompany you; you don’t get away without being transformed by the material you are working with.

To consider politics is to open yourself—your mind and body, your naked and apparently unoffending skin, your naive hopefulness, and your joy in human company—to a tsunami of lies, humbug, drivel, false promises, masquerade, hypocritical piety, prejudice, greed, murder, and fattening food. To consider politics is to dive into this Hokusai wave of inauthenticity and to say, “Hmmm, this seems like a situation I can work with.”

Now, I don’t define consider myself a bodhisattva (it’s a lot to live up to). But it does help me make sense of an otherwise unlikely and crazy decision to engage in something that invariably leaves me tense and tied in knots. (Not that I haven’t given some thought to just starting a blog about vegetarian cooking, and just call it a day.)

But even if that brief excerpt. Tarrant’s article was right about something else; that you can’t help being transformed by it, and sometimes brought back to what you already knew.

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Now this is interesting. Just last week Howard Dean promised to step up outreach to black voters. Now comes news that he’ll be speaking at a kick-off event for Baltimore Black Gay Pride next Friday. I’m impressed. I wonder, though, how that’s going to play in the pews.

Update: Here’s the press release from Baltimore Black Gay Pride.

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I haven’t blogged about this yet, but looks like someone had made a movie about the people I’ve been reading and writing about lately. And, it’s something to see.

And if seeing kids this your declare themselves in training to be “the army of God” and “the key generation to Jesus coming back” doesn’t worry you a little (and it didn’t help that at the moment I’m reading The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount, about folks who want to help armageddon along by rebuilding the Third Temple) consider seeing Jesus Camp as a part of a double feature.

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This post over at AOL's Worth Repeating blog makes a good point. As long as Pope Benedict is handing out apologies, he might consider offering at least a half-hearted "my bad" to gay people.

In an almost unprecedented turn of events, the pope today gathered Muslim leaders and diplomats to his fabulously decorated summer home as an apology of sorts for remarks he made almost two weeks ago in which he referred to Mohammed and Islam as "evil and inhuman."

I say "of sorts" because, of course, he didn't come right out and, you know, say "I'm sorry." It was more like, "Why don't you stop by and let's all be friends?"

My question is, when will the gays be invited? Pope Benedict XVI has been equally accusatory of gays being an evil force, if not worse.

Um, probably not given some of the things Ratzi (my name for him) has said about us. I think he'd actually rather sit down with representatives of people who've burned him in effigy. Of course, in this case he's not apologizing for something he actually said, but for using a rather unfortunate quote. Ironically enough, from a period in which the Church was just as violent as the Muslims who've reacted to the pontiff's speech, especially towards infidels, and during which the Christian faith was spread and "defended" by the sword; something Ratzi must have been aware of, given his pervious position as prior Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith, usually called by its shorter name.

If Ratzi were to offer his apologies to gay's next, he'd be apologizing for his own words.

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Logical, that is. But what do you expect from someone who never even took college algebra?

You Are Somewhat Logical

Ok, so didn’t get the majority of questions right But you did answer some pretty tough questions correctly Logic may not be your strong point, but you hold your own!

Via Scientist, Interrupted.

Add this to the list of things I wish I’d said.

Attempting to break “hundreds of years of silence,” a new, controversial book argues that pervasive homophobia in the historically black church has reached “crisis” proportion.

“The black church’s teaching that homosexuality is immoral has created a crisis for lesbian and gay Christians in black churches,” the Rev. Horace L. Griffin, an Episcopal priest, writes in the preface of his new book, “Their Own Receive Them Not: African American Lesbians and Gays in Black Churches.” (The Pilgrim Press, 2006)

“This black-church-sanctioned homophobia produces a lot of twisted black people,” he writes.

Griffin, who is black and gay, grew up in a Missionary Baptist church. Based on his life and church experience, he has witnessed how “black church leaders and congregants have been resistant and even closed in treating gay and heterosexual congregants equally or, in many cases, of simply offering compassion to gay people.”

Actually, maybe I have said it before, just not so succinctly as Horace Griffin does. It looks I’ll extend my recent spell of religiously-oriented reading further than I already have. (Yesterday I picked up Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation, which I wanted to read after having been so impressed with The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, and will probably read it alongside Jim Wallis’s God’s Politics.) Two different people emailed me yesterday about Their Own Receive Them Not: African American Lesbians And Gays in Black Churches. It’s been on my Amazon wish list for a while now, so I’d remember to buy it once it came out, because it sounds like one of those things that — given my background and my issues with religion — I just have to read.

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Jasmyne is ringing the alarm. I was otherwise occupied this week, and missed the chance to join in a successful repeat of the LIFEbeat campaign, that got Buju Banton cancelled in LA. Buju Banton, for those who don’t know is infamous for gay-bashing lyrics like “Boom Bye Bye”.

(Woman is di) Greatest thing
God ever put pon di land
Buju lovin dem from head
Down to foot bottom
But some man a turn around
Where dem get that from
Peter is not for Janet
Peter is for John
Suzette is not for Paul
Suzette is for Ann
Where the bobocloth
Dem get dat from
Here come the DJ
Name Buju Banton
(Come fi) ((Straighten yuh talk?))

(Boom boom boom) Boom bye bye
Inna batty bwoy head
Rude bwoy no promote the nasty man
Dem haffi dead
Boom bye bye
Inna batty bwoy head
Rude bwoy no promote no batty man
Dem haffi dead

“Batty bwoy” is an anti-gay slur used in the Caribbean. The rest, well, you can figure out for yourself. And despite a statement that he doesn’t perform the song anymore, he performed it in the U.S. earlier this year. I guess politicians are the only ones getting busted on YouTube these days.

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Whoops. Wednesday was ADD Awareness Day. Seeing as how I’m loaded with it, I guess it’s appropriate that I’d find out several days later. It also took me about that long to come across the article in Tuesday’s Washington Post Express about possible links between smoking, lead exposure and ADD. We already know lead exposure isn’t good for the brain, so the connection to ADD isn’t much of a surprise. What jumped out at me from the Express article, though, was this blurb.

Now, I’m not going to dispute that number. I just want to add one fact that usually gets left out: some children with ADD grow up to be adults with ADD. About 70% to 30% of them, in fact. I won’t go into the experience of living with untreated ADD into adulthood, as I’ve explored it in archived posts. I just wish that it would get mentioned more often that adults can have it too. After all, children with ADD often grow up to be adults with ADD. Then it might be less common to run into someone who says they don’t “believe in” adult ADD (or ADD itself), and easier for those of us who didn’t get help as children to get it as adults.

Well, at least the one’s that live and vote in Maryland. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that’s the only reason I can think of for some of his campaign moves. The man is dancing as fast as he can, moving his feet and hoping that he keeps it up African American voters won’t where he stands; or who he really is, for that matter. One minute he’s not really a Republican. Two steps later he wants you to think he’s a Democrat. (A Rove fundraiser and $500,000 from Bush say otherwise.) Turn around, and the Democrats are the party of slavery and segregation.

Well. I can understand that from a tactical point of view, and it might work. But running ads like this one, in an attempt to fool people, instead insults their intelligence.

The spot begins with one woman telling another, “Dr. King was a real man. You know he was a Republican.”

Steve Klein, a senior researcher with the Atlanta-based King Center, said Thursday that King never endorsed candidates from either party.

“I think it’s highly inaccurate to say he was a Republican because there’s really no evidence,” Klein said.

A King biographer, Taylor Branch, also said Thursday that King was nonpartisan.

In the ad, the woman goes on to say, “Democrats passed those black codes and Jim Crow laws. Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan.” Her companion replies, “The Klan? White hoods and sheets?”

The KKK, never a political party, was a racist group of white men that started in the South after the Civil War, when Republicans were almost unheard of in former Confederate states. The mainstream Democratic Party never endorsed the Klan nor claimed to have founded it.

The first woman also says, “Democrats fought all civil rights legislation from the 1860s to the 1960s. Democrats released those vicious dogs and fire hoses on blacks.”

The ad asserts that “Democrats want to keep us poor while voting only Democrat” and “Democrats want us to accept same-sex marriages, teen abortions without a parent’s consent and suing the Boy Scouts for saying ‘God’ in their pledge.”

About the Republicans, the ad says: “Republicans freed us from slavery and put our right to vote in the Constitution.”

I’m not even going to go down the path of asking if Steele or the National Black Republican Association actually believe this — they may have convinced themselves of it by now — but do they actually think a significant number of African Americans will be so ignorant of history as to buy this?

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Can we just not talk about this week? Suffice it to say I was otherwise occupied, and when I looked back over the lgbt-related links I somehow still managed to compile I was surprised that there was actually other stuff going on. So trust me, I’ll find these links as informative as anyone else will. Because it’s almost like I’m hearing them for the first time.

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About Al Wynn, from the previous post. Remember when I posted about Maryland’s voting machine fiasco during last week’s primary? Naturally the votes are still being counted. Not only that, they’re coming out of the woodwork. Like the ones that just turned up in Prince George’s County, one of the two that had voting machine problems on voting day.

In Montgomery and Prince George’s counties yesterday, election officials continued to count the thousands of paper provisional ballots that could determine the outcome of the 4th Congressional District Democratic primary race between incumbent U.S. Rep. Albert R. Wynn and challenger Donna Edwards. Prince George’s officials yesterday cracked opened 26 machines and retrieved votes that had not been counted.

That’s interesting enough all by itself, in a close race between a challenger and an incumbent. But it’s even more interesting when that incumbent has an exchange like this one on the House floor.

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Quick. How much does a black panther cost, and what will he do once you buy him? Well, if it’s former Black Panther Bobby Rush he might turn a trick or two if the price is right. The right price is $1 million, and here’s what it’ll get you.

On April 27, [the BlackCommentator.com] BC published two stories about CBC member Bobby Rush’s sponsorship of this year’s noxious telco legislation. We explained how the Rush-Barton Act, also called the COPE Act or HR 5252, would kill off public access TV, strip towns and cities of the right to force cable monopolies to serve blacker and poorer areas in return for being able to do business in the wealthier parts of town, and allow companies to charge web sites like this one for allowing content or email to reach users. We called attention to the acceptance of a million dollar donation by a tentacle of AT&T to a not for profit organization associated with the congressman. All this earned us a call that morning from a Chicago-based defender of the congressman.

BC was making a big mistake, the caller told us, by leading with the issue of network neutrality. Our deeply misguided caller accused us of playing into the hands of white media activists. Network neutrality, she said again and again in the course of an hour long conversation, was just not “our issue.”

But when a black member of congress accepts a million dollar telco donation for a supposed community-based project in his district, and turns up as co-sponsor of telco legislation to redline and disempower black communities nationwide, along with suppressing everybody’s freedom of access to the Internet, it is indeed a black issue.

Well, it is. But there are folks better at explaining why than I am. And since I haven’t blogged about it much yet, I’ll let them do it.

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You might have noticed a change on the sidebar in the last day or so. After yesterday’s post, I got to thinking that it would be good for me to start learning a bit more about local and state politic in my area. We’ve been homeowners in Maryland for almost three months, and don’t plan on going anywhere until our kids are out of high school at the least. Considering that one’s not quite four, and the other isn’t here yet, we’re pretty much here for the long haul. It time to commit. So I’m stickin’ a toe in the water.

I stopped by Lefty Blogs and grabbed the Maryland blog feed for my sidebar, subscribed to some the RSS feeds while I was there, and added a few to the blogroll.

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Late Monday night, I posted a proposal for moving forward after the discussions that followed the blogger lunch with president Clinton. Then I spent yesterday reading and listening to ongoing discussions in a lot of other places, and began to think that maybe I got ahead of myself; that before many of us can begin turning all of this into something constructive (something I believe we can do), there are some things that need to be said. I don’t know if it will help for me to say them, but as one who bears some responsibility in starting this discussion I’ll take a step and say that despite the sometimes rowdy nature of the discussion, some good things happened that got overshadowed by the nature much needed-discussion that ensued.

I can think of at least two positives. Actually, three: (a) a former president of the United States sat down and talked with a group of bloggers that (b) was very inclusive of women, and (c) that it sparked a discussion about diversity in the progressive blogosphere that’s caused a lot of people to think about what they can do to increase diversity. I think all three of those items point to strengths of the progressive blogosphere that we all share in, and that will carry us forward.

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