Blacks, Gays, Hate and the Bible
21/05/08 07:19
The following also appears at Huffington Post.
“… Colin Powell… told Ted Koppel in 1993 that the real issue with gays n the military was that ‘we have to shower together.” Uh-huh. Mr. Koppel gave General Powell a pass by not asking the obvious question: ‘So which is it, General: Are you afraid of them or are you afraid of yourself?”
- Jim Callaghan, New York Observer, November 30, 2003
In striking down the ban on gay marriage, the California Supreme Court cited Loving vs. Virginia, the 1967 Supreme Court ruling that struck down state bans on interracial marriage, drawing direct parallels between racial prejudice and prejudice against gays.
In the past, black Republicans and bigoted preachers have been trotted out to quash any such comparison.
In 1993, Colin Powell said, “skin color is a benign, non-behavioral characteristic. Sexual orientation is perhaps the most profound of human behavioral characteristics. Comparison of the two is a convenient but invalid argument."
He ignores the fact that skin color has always been attached to behaviors. Dark skin connoted everything from licentiousness and violence, from idleness to idiocy. It still does. That’s what stereotypes are.
In addition, gayness, per se, is no more directly behavioral than skin color. Set a gay and straight individual to the task of reading and you could not tell which was which. Even religions don’t mind celibate gays (“hate the sin, love the sinner") so the argument cannot be about “gayness,” per se. Nor is the issue behavior. The issue is one single behavior—sexual. “Behavior” is code for “The Act.” Straight people do it, too, but our way is wrong. Why? “Because the Bible says so.” That’s the rationale for vociferous opposition to gay rights. No less authority than The Book condemns us. No less than God disapproves.
For centuries, Christian religions widely adhered to the Curse of Ham theory, which cited the Book of Genesis as proof that blacks were the result of a curse from God. Per the racists, God disapproved of us. No less authority than The Book condemned us. No less than God disapproved. The theory wasn’t officially abandoned until the mid-twentieth century.
For centuries, Christian religions have held that the Bible condemns homosexuality. However, that evidence is just as specious as the Curse of Ham biblical interpretation that justified racism and slavery.
In his 1981 book, “Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality,” Yale University history professor John Boswell proved that “it is quite clear that nothing in the Bible would have categorically precluded homosexual relations among early Christians. In spite of misleading English translations which may imply the contrary, the word ‘homosexual’ does not occur in the Bible: no extant text or manuscript, Hebrew Greek, Syriac, or Aramaic, contains such a word.”
Boswell revisited original biblical texts in their original languages. He showed that the two appearances of the word “sodomite” in the King James translation of the Old Testament did not necessarily imply homosexual and are, in fact, “simply mistranslations of a Hebrew word for temple prostitute.”
He looks at Leviticus, “The only place in the Old Testament where homosexual acts per se are mentioned…”
Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination. [18:22]
If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them. [20:13]
He explains that, “the Hebrew word ‘toevah’, here translated as ‘abomination,’ does not usually signify something intrinsically evil, like rape or theft (discussed elsewhere in Leviticus), but something which is ritually unclean for Jews, like eating pork or engaging in intercourse during menstruation, both of which are prohibited in these same chapters.”
He notes similar mistranslations in the writings of Paul, in which a common Greek word translated to mean everything from “loose,” “delicate,” “gentle” and “cowardly” is twisted in translation to mean “homosexual.” Another instance has a word meaning “male prostitute” until well into the fourth century, transformed to “homosexual” some time thereafter.
These mistranslations don’t change the fact that Paul was a raging homophobe. But as a mortal, living, breathing, necessarily flawed individual, there is no reason to take his hatred of gays as any more definitive than his acceptance of slavery.
Boswell did an extraordinary service. Through close reading of original Biblical texts and concurrent writings, he proves that the violent prohibitions against gay sex were Biblical add-ons, introduced in translation as tolerance for gays waned between the Christian Era and the end of the Middle Ages. He simultaneously puts the lie to the principal source of hatred against us—that God agrees. On close examination, it seems he agrees only in relatively recent translation.
“The Old Testament strictures against same-sex behavior,” writes Boswell, “would have seemed to most Roman citizens as arbitrary as the prohibition of cutting the beard, and they would have no reason to assume that it should receive any more attention to the latter.”
Blacks and gays have both had negative character traits attributed to them by dint of their genetic heritage. Both groups have endured centuries of hatred based on perversions of original Biblical texts.
Far from an “invalid” argument, the comparison between the prejudice against gays and against blacks is extremely apt. In this day and age, both should be equally embarrassing. But as this political season and the inevitable battles born of the California Supreme Court ruling prove, that's not the case for either.
White Lessons
07/05/08 07:40
The following also appears at Huffington Post.
He’ll be the first black major party candidate for President, and the narrative is already in play: He’s doomed by his inability to seamlessly engage those the Beltway Insiders probably call “white trash” behind closed doors. Unfortunately, I think they project. It’s themselves to whom he seems out of place.
Beltway Insider Maureen Dowd asked, “Why does Obama, the one with the bumpy background and mixed racial heritage, the one raised by a single mother who was on food stamps, seem so forced when he mingles with the common folk?”
Of course, being black, male, and ambitious, Obama learned early to present himself with an air of cultured detachment to avoid being considered (by Beltway Insiders, like Maureen Dowd) a “nigger.” So it’s between the rock and the hard place. He’s either uppity, or Al Sharpton scary. There’s no in-between (except to express self-loathing and tacit contempt for blacks a la Clarence Thomas, or work so hard to erase any vestige of negritude from your presentation that you remove yourself from the category of human, a la Condoleeza Rice).
So now, he’s supposed to be able to march his black ass into a white working class bar and not stand out. He’s supposed to shoot hoops like a street corner denizen, and at the same time, remain non-threatening and non-aggressive enough to make us forget the negative associations we’ve learned to assign to his black American skin over the past couple of hundred years.
I was raised largely in white neighborhoods, attended overwhelmingly white schools, worked in overwhelmingly white worlds. I spent my young adult life on the West Side of LA and currently reside in a northern California town that is 99% white. After half a lifetime surrounded by whites, I have never been confident in Obama’s November chances against a competent, passably sane white Republican (while the Bush administration remains in office and without a third-party challenge from the Republican right).
Cluelessness like Dowd’s is why. It is omnipresent. And people are most susceptible their deepest and darkest impulses when they don’t even know (or refuse to admit) they’re there.
I have spent my life watching how deeply the taint of this nation's history of race hatred stains us all—blacks, yes, but mostly whites. Most white men and women do not consider themselves racist. All things being equal, they have no open animosity toward blacks. However, when challenged and confronted by us, I have seen the beast too often rear its head.
Having worked in marketing, it’s been my business to tweak people’s deep-seated hopes, dreams and fears. If I were a ruthless Republican operative (is there any other kind?), I know what I’d do to defeat Barack Obama. I would paint him as challenging and confrontational on numerous levels. I would set in place exactly the narrative that’s currently taking form.
In fact, he is challenging our national image of a president. He is confronting our long-held disgrace on the subject of race. He is doing so by his very presence, by the very fact of his skin, and by his acknowledgment of his association with the culture of the descendants of African slaves, (as opposed to pulling a Tiger Woods). Of this, I would continually remind the national audience (very different from a local, state or district one). And then I’d wait. Soon, the poisons that lurk in the mud would hatch out.
If a Jeremiah Wright hadn't existed, he would have been created. In fact, he was. You saw no such histrionics when Jerry Falwell said that the US deserved the 9/11 attacks for tolerating abortions and gays. If not Wright, it would have been something else (and will be yet again). Perhaps another Michele Obama comment like the one about feeling proud of America for the first time. Perhaps an Obama daughters' grade school paper on slavery....
If Obama had a deeply ingrained national personality and record of political or military accomplishment, it would be more difficult to use this nation's historical memory against him. However, like many an ambitious politician, he succumbed to the fierce urgency of ego... I mean "now." The excitement was transitory because it had little foundation. Again, it’s been mostly white folks projecting on him the role of black Messiah—all forgiveness and chimerical “unity” that exists, outside of World Wars, only in the national imagination. And it’s been black folks rationally and predictably rooting for the home team.
As a nominee, I wish he had built a strong national political profile atop the foundation of literary and speechifying fame. It would have vastly increased his chances at the Presidency (don't we black folk have to take more time, do more groundwork, toil harder to get what whites are often handed on faith?) Instead, however, he seemed to buy his own "post-racial" press.
Most of my deepest, most treasured voluntary relationships have been with white men and women. However, I am not blinded to this country's racial realities. In fact, because I have been surrounded and confronted with them on a daily basis throughout my life, some might argue that I am too keenly aware. However, I’ve learned that when you’re driving at midnight on New Year’s Eve, the discomfort of vigilance is far superior to the damage of a crash.
Perhaps Obama has a "faith" in white Americans that I lack. But you see, without the softening of ties of blood, I have spent my life around them. That’s a faith I learned the hard way that I cannot afford. We’ll see if he can.