LOVE the letter!

Please send a copy to Donnie McClurkin.

Sir:

It always amazes me how quickly some black people, especially black ministers, are willing to jump on the homophobia bandwagon– and how willing they are to cite their bibles as their rationalization.

Your ancestors were not born in the New World, they were brought there as slaves by white people who quoted their bibles and were as sure as it was possible to be that God liked slavery, and that enslaving black people was entirely within their rights because black people were inferior beings and God thought that this was a good idea.

I do not equate the horror of slavery with what is done to gay people on a daily basis, but they are both certainly evil.Yet here you are, loudly proclaiming the rightness of your hate, that God agrees with this, that this is somehow a good idea. And I’m sure you cite your bible as your reason. Sound familiar?

Here’s my question to you as a black minister: with 300 years of oppression, discrimination, hatred, slavery and murder behind you, why do you think your homo-hatred is OK?

Or maybe I’ll just make something up for your answer. “What was done to our ancestors was a great evil thing. That is very different from hating perverted sexuality.”

My answer: your are very right. It is different in two ways.

1) Before, it was your group on the receiving end of bigotry, persecution, and oppression, all justified from a particular reading of some parts of the bible. The difference is that now it’s your group that’s doing the oppressing, all justified from a particular reading of some parts of the bible.

2) The second difference between your perspective and mine? That you can convince yourself that there ACTUALLY IS A DIFFERENCE.

Black women have, I believe, the highest rate of HIV infection, primarily due, I think, to down-low men who have unsafe sex with other men and then pass their diseases first to their wives, and then to their unborn children. So black women are dying for the sake of a black pastor’s certainty in his homo-hatred. More could be done for the black family by supporting gay people in their quest to end this stupid prejudice than any amount of posturing and constitutional amendments could EVER hope to accomplish.