Both black and gay: Internal rights fight
It was already challenging enough for Cornelius Jones Jr. to grow up being black in the racially-tense South.
But facing the prejudices of the people outside the African American community wouldn’t be the hardest struggle of his life. Even from the young age of 5, Jones had a sense of the obstacles he would face on the inside.
“I didn’t want to be associated with the weakness and nastiness that gay people were defined by in my neighborhood,” Jones remembers of his time growing up on a predominantly black street in Richmond, Va. “In my neighborhood, church and school, gays were constantly shunned, ridiculed and picked on.”
When he was 15, Jones moved to Washington, D.C. to stay with family friends and attend a performing arts high school — “and also to get away from the constant bullying I received,” he said. But they soon learned that he was gay and he was kicked out of the house. It was then that he had to confront his parents with his real identity.
His mother gave him one piece of advice: “Do what you do behind closed doors.”
It would be a lifetime of pain and struggle that would teach him that his mother’s advice was no way to awaken a black community deeply rooted in religion to the rights of gays. And it would be events like the passage of Proposition 8 — the anti-gay marriage measure in California that 70 percent of blacks voted for — that would be a platform for him to open the doors.
See Both black and gay: Internal rights fight
Philadelphia Metro
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Eve Pearlman: Curriculum battle lines drawn over values vs. bigotry in Alameda
A HOT TOPIC AROUND TOWN the last several months has been Alameda Unified School District’s proposed anti-bullying curriculum, which has been discussed with increasing fervor, and has turned into a referendum on gay rights. I admit I’d only been paying half attention to the debate (though my husband has been actively advocating for the curriculum’s adoption), until Tuesday night when I watched hours of testimony at the school board meeting, my heart dropping as a long line of speakers voiced their opposition to a few short lessons acknowledging the existence of gay and lesbian families. “It’s about sex!” the opponents claimed. But teaching about same-gender families is no more about sex than the words “marriage” and “husband” and “wife” and “wedding” are about sex. Yes, marriage is based in part on a sexual commitment, but we speak about husbands and wives all the time in a way in which sexuality is not the focus. To children, the word lesbian is no more about sex than the word marriage is. “But I want to teach my child about these things,” parents said. “I want to teach my beliefs to my child.” I have strong empathy for parents who want to impart their values to their children. But I do not have empathy when that “value” is that someone else is a lesser person. Imagine if the “value” in question were that women should not own property or that people could be owned by other people or that people with certain skin color should not be allowed to vote. These are not “values,” these are discriminatory prejudices.
At Tuesday’s meeting, the technique of the well-organized and coordinated curriculum opponents was to attack the series of lessons — designed to complement an already-established anti-bullying curriculum — on a number of technical grounds. “It’s not legal,” they said. “It doesn’t go far enough” or “It privileges one group over another.” But these attacks were contrived and disingenuous. Most curriculum opponents operated from what only few more frankly admitted: They don’t think gay families are the moral equivalent of their own straight families. They don’t think gay families are “OK” and they don’t want their kids being taught that they are. As many in this debate have done, all you have to do is switch the opponents’ arguments to another social group to see how undemocratic their viewpoints are. Would the district allow a student to opt out of a Black history lesson? A celebration of Chinese New Year? To leave the room any time divorce is discussed? Of course not. Religion has been used to support all sorts of atrocities past and present (as well as all sorts of good things). Because an argument is religion-based doesn’t mean that it is more right, more valid or more just. In this country, in this democracy, in this friendly city of 70,000, it is our shared value that all people are created equal — and to those parents who want to teach otherwise, well, this is not a “value.” It is bigotry. And it has no place in our community’s schools. It has surprised me that in this day and age, in the Bay Area, that some are so hostile to difference and so obsessed with other people’s sex lives. The aim of the Alameda school district curriculum is simple: to teach about reality in order to help children skillfully and respectfully navigate their diverse community. All families (the majority of families, in fact) don’t look like the Cleavers. Families have all sorts of configurations, incorporating grandparents and cousins, step-siblings and stepfathers, same gender couples and opposite gender couples. That is reality. Children should be taught what’s real.
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Souter proves a gay rights surprise
Deb PriceSouter proves a gay rights surprise
When David Souter was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1990, gay-rights groups quickly lined up to oppose him: Three years earlier, as a state judge he had signed onto an advisory opinion saying nothing prevented New Hampshire from banning gay adoption. But once on the court, Souter stepped into the shoes of civil rights giant William Brennan and quietly grew into them. What a joyful surprise Souter’s nearly two-decade run turned out to be. Using his intellectual gifts and good heart, Souter helped produce a warming trend, enabling the court to begin moving away from four decades of icy treatment of gay men and lesbians. Thanks to Souter, the court turned a major corner in 1995, when a unanimous opinion that he wrote for the court finally used the respectful term “gay.” Souter’s ruling also spoke respectfully of Massachusetts’ gay-rights law, igniting the hope that major breakthroughs would come soon. The first–Romer v. Evans–came the very next year. Souter voted with the majority in ruling gay Americans have a right to equal protection of the laws. He also voted with the majority in the landmark Lawrence v. Texas decision, which in 2003 declared gay Americans have a right to sexual privacy. In between, Souter wrote a gay-friendly dissent to the 2000 ruling allowing the Boy Scouts to ban gay scoutmasters. And, in a 1998 signal that the court was not undercutting Romer, Souter signed onto an unusual statement by Justice John Paul Stevens stressing that the court’s refusal to hear a challenge to a sweeping anti-gay amendment in Cincinnati “is not a ruling on the merits.” Within his own chambers, as my co-author Joyce Murdoch and I documented in “Courting Justice: Gay Men and Lesbians v. the Supreme Court,” Souter reacted respectfully when one of his law clerks came out. Souter hired another clerk who was a gay-rights scholar. Souter, appointed by a Republican president, added a parting gift: By choosing to retire when a gay-supportive Democrat will pick his successor, he likely ensured the court will continue its trend toward reading gay rights into the Constitution’s promises of equality. Obama offered a hint at what Souter’s replacement may look like when he said two years ago that he’d appoint justices with the “empathy to recognize what it’s like to be a young, teenaged mom … to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old.” More recently, Obama vowed to “seek someone who understands that justice” affects whether people feel “welcome in their own nation.” That kind of Souter replacement would maintain what’s now believed to be a 5-4 split in favor of basic gay rights. She — or he — will join the court’s progressive wing amid a sea change in public attitudes and legal rights for those of us who are gay. Knowledge of that “real world” could prove helpful: Unless Congress finally addresses two pressing injustices, the court might hear challenges in the next few years to the bans on openly gay soldiers and on federal benefits for same-sex married couples, notes gay law scholar Arthur Leonard. Souter’s replacement hopefully will feel a special kinship to him, as he did to Brennan. Even when ruling against a specific gay group in 1995 — declaring that forcing organizers of Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day parade to let an Irish-American gay group participate would violate the First Amendment — Souter was careful not to suggest the court agreed with anti-gay prejudices. Thank you, Justice Souter, for making gay Americans feel more welcome in our own nation. dprice@detnews.com (202) 662-8736 |
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Sean Penn: Is politics his next role? San Francisco Chronicle
Academy-Award winning actor Sean Penn met the media hordes Tuesday in San Francisco’s colorful mecca, the Tosca Cafe, to strongly endorse the official founding of a state “Harvey Milk Day” to honor the slain S.F. supervisor and gay activist.
But Penn left open the question on what might be his next big role: Does the thespian activist who has met Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, endorsed Rep. Dennis Kucinich for president and just generally rabble-roused about his ”Commie-loving” roots (we paraphrase his Oscar speech here) ever plan to run for office?
Surrounded by some of the real-life characters behind the biopic “Milk” — Milk’s friends and early activists Cleve Jones and Anne Kronenberg, state Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (who had a cameo in the film) and a host of gay and lesbian leaders — Penn deftly sidestepped the question.
“The closet,” he said looking around at the leaders behind him, “is brimming with skills.”
But the actor — who won the best actor Oscar this year for his lead role in “Milk” — did speak strongly on his belief that a state day, May 22, to officially recognize the accomplishments of Milk. And he predicted his fellow actor, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, will get behind it.
“I trust that Gov. Schwarzenegger is an increasingly reasonable man,” he said. “And that he understands that passing on prejudices, as surrounds this issue … is poisonous to future generations.” A day to recognize Milk, he said, would “wake up that interest in activism and volunteerism … in every way imaginable” among school children in California, who would be encouraged to learn of Milk’s grassroots efforts. See Sean Penn: Is politics his next role? San Francisco Chronicle * Tags = gay men gay news lesbian news transgender bisexual
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Gay Military Ban Architects Admit Deception
And last night, things got even more interesting when Dr. Nathaniel Frank, senior research fellow at the Palm Center, went on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show and said “don’t ask” advisors now admit the policy was a deliberate deception based on no empirical evidence.
Frank, author of Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America, told openly lesbian Rachel Maddow that military advisors to Clinton have admitted to the deception.
“They said it was based on nothing,” Frank told Maddow. “It was rooted in their own prejudices and fears. They even said they didn’t know what sexual orientation meant.”
“Instead they crated this unit cohesion argument. Which is the idea that openly gay service will somehow undermine unit cohesion and that you have to force service members to lie in order to preserve unit cohesion. Instead of the other way around, that forcing people to lie actually has its own impact on unit cohesion.”
Frank agreed with Maddow’s statement: “A key advisor to this panel admitted full-stop that the unit cohesion argument was completely made up out of whole cloth.” See Gay Military Ban Architects Admit Deception
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