A Paradoxical Act of Poetic Justice

Crispus Attucks was told, as he stood at the front of a crowd of unruly citizens harassing British soldiers in Boston Massachusetts, “this ain’t none of your affair.” When the soldiers opened fire, he was the first to die. Barack Obama, as President-elect of the United States of America, while dealing with Israel’s current air strikes against Hamas, is also being told, in musical verse, that he’s “a magic negro.”

Over the course of two hundred nineteen years, many gains have been made in terms of granting full equality to all citizens of the United States. Black folk have attained the right to vote. Women have attained the right to vote. Segregation by race is no longer legal. Japanese American citizens can live wherever they want. People from China are allowed to immigrate to the United States. Slavery has been outlawed. That none of these issues should really have been contested is moot. But the marginalization of numerical minority groups is rooted in the American landscape as surely as the ideals we aspire to. And full equality has yet to be achieved in some areas still.

So while I celebrate President-elect Barack Hussein Obama’s rise to the highest office in the land, I am also cognizant that Jim Clark’s spirit is alive and well today. I am cognizant that I had to send my young black, Chicano, Chilean children to school on November 5^th armed against their second and third grade classmates’ “innocent ignorance” when they commented that “Obama won just because he’s black.” I am cognizant that Rush Limbaugh (who said Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama was “all about race”), Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and their ilk and followers who may or may not believe that black people are inferior use their rhetoric and their megaphones to continue the oppressive racism of Andrew Jackson and John Wilkes Booth, of George Wallace and Strom Thurmond. Kanye West’s statement that “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People,” in the wake of the President’s inaction when the levies broke, and my brother the teacher’s latest experience of being pulled over by the police after the officer watched three other (white) drivers make the same left turn, and the assassination plots and attempts constantly monitored against this President-elect remind me that much as things CHANGE, the more they stay the same.

Crispus Attucks was the first man to die in the struggle for American independence. The paradoxical nature of an enslaved/escaped black man dying for the freedom and creation of a country in which he was considered less than human by the legal framework that defined it should be lost on no one. The same way that the poetic justice of a man whose father was a black Kenyan and whose mother was a white Kansan, who is African American by nationality as well as visage and life experience being elected to lead that same country should be lost on no one.

In speaking with my sister-in-law and her parents on Christmas Eve, I asked, “do you realize what it means, to have him elected to be President of these United States?” Forty years ago, black people were being killed for wanting to register to vote. Forty years ago, one man was shot for encouraging black people to dream of equality. Forty years ago, Barack Obama was seven years old.

As we look forward to the changes President Obama will enact both inside and outside of our country, it is important that we take a look back as well to understand the moment that we are standing in, the moments others have worked for, and the legacy that we are heirs to and guardians of for the next generation.

Happy New Year!

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Angels and Demons

Pope Benedict is smoking something.  Part of the reason I left the Church after high school was I couldn’t reconcile the attitude that the pontiff displayed in his celebration of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth yesterday.  And I look to the continued vitriol dripping from the purpose-driven pastor, and the legislation by the former special prosecutor, and the actions of my country in the United Nations, and I fear for humanity.

With all the threats to the human species: the destruction of the planet by technological deterioration; the destruction of the planet by military excess; the decimation of the ecosystem by apathy; the depopulation through greed, causing starvation, rampant disease, and the execution of millions which repeats each decade when a new oppressed group seizes weapons and power and takes out their grievances on their oppressors, the head of the Catholic Church decides that he needs to attack those whom the Almighty has blessed with sexuality.

With a smarmy, poorly-written play on words making homosexuality equal to deforestation, Benedict further rode down the path of intolerance, ignorance, hate and division.  Merry Christmas.  Had global warming been a greater issue fifty years ago, I’m certain that he would have equated saving the rainforest with keeping the races segregated; the same way the Vatican spoke so eloquently about helping persecuted Jews during World War II; and the Holy See spoke up during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, which saw Africa pillaged and Africans enslaved and scattered across the globe in a diaspora which still hasn’t been rectified.  Why does The Roman Catholic Church, THE institution of God’s love on planet earth, miss the larger points in favor of banning women from preaching the gospel, and forbidding priests to marry?

I believe in God.  And I believe in the possibility of people.  What I have trouble with, and this is where mega pastors who preach hate, from Farrakhan to Warren, catch hell is that they preach to the small mind, they pick and choose which words of God they want to listen to, they fail to grasp the message and instead cling to the syllables that were written by men just like them.

The Pope is preaching hate, no matter what language and no matter what context.  He is preaching division and intolerance.  The celebration of Jesus’ birth (“He’s the reason for the season,” as my aunt likes to say) is supposed to be a time of love, understanding, renewal, companionship, and awe at the miracles that each of us as an individual is, and who we have to thank for that gift.  It’s not about the toys we can accumulate, or the flat screens we can acquire.  And it’s definitely not about raising ourselves up by stepping on and keeping others down.  It’s about celebrating the angels, in ourselves and each other, not demonizing others.

Why do people forget that?

Jesus would stand with oppressed

California Attorney General Jerry Brown Asks Court To Overturn Prop 8

U.S. balks at decriminalizing homosexuality

Pope’s message angers lots of people

Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can break my heart.

We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all citizens, whatever their background. We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization.

-   Franklin D. Roosevelt

Sometimes words can be placating.  Sometimes words can be divisive.  Sometimes words can be amusing.  Sometimes words can be hurtful.  Two words of late have become both a rallying cry and an epithet – Gay Marriage.  Personally, I think those two words should be shelved in favor of more accurate words – Civil Rights.

The basic rights that all citizens of the United States enjoy are called civil rights.  They have little to do with religion, although religious freedom is first among them.  They are the security that each of us is guaranteed that our lives, liberty and pursuits of happiness will not be trampled by a large group of others who think differently.

Today, a battle has been enjoined between those who favor civil rights for all, and those who wish to curtail the civil rights of a distinct minority.  I wrote a short while ago that the same restrictions were placed upon black and white Americans in this country within my parents’ lifetimes, just forty-one years ago, that in fact Gay is the new Black.

Both in the comments section of the blog, and in numerous email conversations, I’ve been told that a) God don’t like ugly, b) gays choose to be gay, c) it’s a moral/religious issue, or d) I’m wrong for equating those who support Proposition 8 with slavecatchers.  But the link is there.  And while I was originally writing to and for my fellow black Americans, this is, much like President Elect Obama’s election, a moment of choice for all Americans.

Do “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal?”  Whether you are a God-fearing Jew, Christian, or Muslim or a heathen like Bill Maher, you have the right to worship as you choose in the United States. And whether you are in love and/or a monogamous relationship with a man or a woman, you have the right to marry them in the United States.

The Bible, the Torah and the Qur’an are the source of faith and inspiration to millions of people . . . but they are being used, as they were once by slave masters intent on shepherding their “colored children” into the arms of God with the end of a whip, to separate, to discriminate, to shield fear, hatred and prejudice.  And I’ve heard told (must have been in my confirmation class early on in life) that “the devil can quote scripture for his own purpose.”  And I’m sure some would say it of me, since I also remember Jesus saying, “that which you do unto the least of these, you do unto me.”

Are we loving our brothers and sisters?  Are we sheltering our brothers and sisters?  Are we excluding our brothers and sisters?  Are we telling them that they are not the children of God, too, because they are loving as God has shown them to love?

I’m sorry, I digressed into a philosophical question . . . must have been Keith Olbermann’s influence.  I was talking about legalizing discrimination.  I was talking about actions speaking louder than words.  Marriage is a public expression of a private commitment.  It is the celebration of union between two people who have chosen to become pillars of the community by establishing together another franchise of a pivotal institution.

An institution regulated by the State of California (or Massachusetts, or Hawaii, or Connecticut, etc.) which means that the fees paid for marriage licesnses are taxes used to support the public good; that marriages are also contracts between two people recognized by the government; that marriage is an “unalienable right” which should be accessible to all citizens – black, white, gay, straight.

We have a history in this country of thinking that civil rights belong to everyone except: the people we really don’t want to have them.  Want a list?  Plessy v. Ferguson, The Chinese Exclusion Act, English Only, Proposition 8, miscegenation laws, the Rule of Thumb, the slave codes, the black codes, the fifteenth amendment, Executive Order 9981, the ERA, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, etc.

Proposition 8 isn’t about “protecting traditional marriage.”  It isn’t about “the government supporting something God calls an abomination.”  Proposition 8 is about taking away those same civil rights fought for by the American Revolutionaries and codified in the United States’ Constitution and Bill of Rights; it’s about changing the discrimination defeated in the sixties into one supported in the new millennium; it’s about doing unto others what we would never agree to have done unto us.

Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can break my heart.  The founding of our country began with powerful words:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal.  That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights . . . that to protect these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

The man who wrote those also wrote:

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed, from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

I think we are responsible, as citizens, to stand up and fight tyranny in all its forms, even when it is especially when it is for others.  And so I end this as it began.

We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all citizens, whatever their background. We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization.

No on Proposition 8.  Yes on marriage, love, hope, and civil rights.

Same-sex marriage rallies stretch across the nation

Gay marriage supporters take to California’s streets

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Gay is the new Black.

On a day when we are celebrating Barack Hussein Obama’s election as the first black president and the forty-fourth president of the United States, we are also mourning the fact that those who have benefited most from the struggle against discrimination are now wielding the bludgeon themselves.  While half of the white voters in California opposed Proposition 8 (the attempt to marginalize and discriminate against a minority population based on what makes them a minority), and half of the Latino population as well, fully seven in ten black voters supported taking away people’s right to marry each other.

I have many friends who are black.  I have friends who are gay.  I have some friends who are both.  I don’t believe that any of them should be told that they can or cannot do something simply because of those facts.  However, I have had to argue with my black friends that they shouldn’t be practicing discrimination, shouldn’t be supporting the legal differentiation between people.  They should know better, if they know anything about the history of the United States.

Civil Rights Protestors in California

“Laws prohibiting miscegenation [marriage between people of different races] in the United States date back as early as 1661 and were common in many states until 1967.”

Proposition 8 on the California ballot is another miscegenation law.  Plain and simple.  And if you don’t understand that, let me explain in another way how gay is the new black.

When my grandfather, a black man born in 1921 in Monroe, Lousiana, joined the Army of the United States, he was placed and fought in a segregated unit.  His commanding officer was white, by Army regulations.  He was not allowed to mix with, serve with, fight with, bleed with, and in some cases, die with, white soldiers because he was black.  President Truman finally ended this ridiculous practice with an executive order, and today black white brown yellow red and all other colors and types serve the United States of America in the armed services without restriction.  We also have soldiers of Christian, Jewish, Muslim and many other religious affiliations serving, because discrimination based on ethnicities, based on religious beliefs, based on who people are is wrong.

In 1992, Bill Clinton came into office promising to finally remove the last “okay” discrimination, so that gay Americans could serve their country without fear of retribution, prosecution or expulsion because of their sexual orientation.  He copped out, giving us “Don’t ask, Don’t tell.”  Gay men and women are now allowed to serve in the armed forces of the United States, but only if they hide their sexuality.  They are not allowed to be themselves, share their lives with their fellow soldiers, read a magazine that appeals to their natures publicly, for fear of discharge.  If they keep their “secret”, they are allowed to serve our country.  They are discriminated against.  Gay is the new black.

A friend of mine argues that homosexuality is wrong because of his religious beliefs.  I disagree with his interpretation, but I accept his right to that belief.  Even then, Proposition 8 is wrong.  It’s wrong because in this country, you are not married by your church, or synagogue, or mosque.  In order to be married, you have to get a license from the State.  If you don’t get legal permission from the government, you are not married.  I know that many people feel that that part is the formality, and that the church service is the important part – but don’t you remember after you came down from the altar, going in the back with the minister and the witnesses, and signing your marriage certificate?  Doesn’t the minister also say, “by the power vested in me by the state of                                     “?  Marriage today is not the sole province of the church, though it is still a sacrament and it is sacred.

Proposition 8 is another us and them. It’s Plessy v. Ferguson in 2008.  It’s the Fugitive Slave Law for the modern “others”, those people who are looked at by the majority as THEM. The question, then, is this: are you on the side of the slave catchers, or on the side of the slaves?  Are you watching the bodies swing from the tree, or are you helping people get out of town?

Gay is the new black, when laws are being passed that make homosexuals different in the eyes of the law.  It is no longer fashionable for those “lunatics, crazies and fringe people” who were shouting at the McPalin rallies to be in the mainstream.  But it is okay for liars to write laws and propositions that “protect traditional marriage”?

And what happens, once this law is passed, if they try to “protect real traditional marriage”?  Is someone in a few years going to tell my African-Chilean-Mexican-American children that they can’t marry because the person they love is white?  Gay is the new black . . . 

Same-sex marriage bans paradoxical in historic election

After Prop 8

California high court will hear appeal of gay marriage measure

Pastors in Black and White

And here it goes . . . after the controversy over Senator Obama’s pastor, Senator McCain appears to be getting a free ride.  With simply a letter, the evangelical pastor who called the Catholic Church “the great whore” and blamed Hurricane Katrina not on FEMA but said that it was “God’s punishment” for the (gay) sins of the city, appears to be an OK endorsement for Senator McCain (http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-mccain14-2008may14,0,2628360.story)  Is this different treatment for the black church and the white church?  for the black candidate and the white candidate?