Box Turtle Bulletin

Anti-Gay Tennesee Republican Loses Sure-Thing Speaker Position

A funny thing happened on Tuesday in Tennessee.

In the last election the Republican Party took control of the House for the first time in 40 years. And Jason Mumpower went on Tuesday to be annointed as the new Republican Speaker of the House.

But Mumpower’s day didn’t go as well as he imagined it would. To his surprise, all 49 Democrats voted for Republican Kent Williams… and so did Williams, giving him a 50 – 49 majority.

Williams went on to vote with the Democrats to elect Lois DeBerry as speaker pro tempore. Needless to say, this didn’t make Tennessee Republican Party Chairwoman Robin Smith very happy. She’s planning to expel Williams from the Party.

“Action will begin immediately to address the actions of Rep. Kent Williams,” said Smith. “His commitment today was not to Republican principles, but to the blind and shameless pursuit of personal power. He cast his vote for a pro-tax, pro-gay, pro-abortion, anti-gun liberal Democrat to preside in leadership against all 49 of his Republican colleagues.”

Now I don’t know how supportive Williams is of the community, but as for Jason Mumpower, the man he displaced,

One of the first bills Mumpower sponsored after his election was a 1997 measure to prohibit gay couples from becoming foster parents.

His bill didn’t pass in 1997 and now he’s lost his latest play for power but somehow I just can’t bring myself to feel sorry for Mumpower.

Mary Frances Berry On Gay Civil Rights and Homophobia

Dr. Mary Frances Berry has an op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times which is very appropriate to the discussions taking place in this forum these past few weeks. She’s was the chairwoman of the Commission on Civil Rights from 1993 to 2004, and is the author of And Justice for All: The United States Commission on Civil Rights and the Continuing Struggle for Freedom in America.

In her op-ed, Dr. Berry describes the commission she once headed as having been “moribund” ever since the Reagan years when appointed commissioners began to see themselves as “agents of the presidential administration rather than as independent watchdogs.” Which is why she recommends that President-elect Barack Obama disband the commission and replace it with a new one that would address the rights of many groups, including gays:

In the 1950s, race relations in America generated escalating tension and strife. As Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told President Dwight Eisenhower, other nations vilified us for our treatment of “negroes” as less-than-first-class citizens. It was in this context that Congress, in 1957, granted Eisenhower’s request for an independent civil rights commission to “put the facts on top of the table.”

The commission conducted interviews and public hearings, prepared detailed reports and recommended new protections that would ultimately be passed in the form of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These laws embodied the goals of the protestors who marched, went to jail and died to end racial discrimination.

The commission became what the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, who was the chairman from 1969 to 1972, called the “conscience of the government” on civil rights issues.

There is no need to analogize the battle for the rights of gay and lesbian people to the struggle of African Americans to overcome slavery, Jim Crow and continued discrimination. But as Coretta Scott King said to me as she tried to imagine what position the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would take on “don’t ask, don’t tell”: “What’s the yardstick by which we should decide that gay rights are less important than other human rights we care about?”

While I was scouring around the Internet looking for a photo of Dr. Berry, I found this from December 2006.  Dr. Berry gave the keynote address at Minnesota’s 23rd Annual Human Rights Day Conference, in which, among many other things, she addressed the problem of homophobia in the Black church:

The judgmentalness is perpetuated by churches and people who are religious and who ought to have compassion, who if you turn on the gospel radio station as I do every morning and when I’m out running I listen to the gospel, and there’s always some preacher coming on talking about people being homosexuals and blah blah blah, and how they should do this, and why AIDS is some of their sin or some dog-gone stupid thing. And all I can think about is that there are two kinds of people that if they didn’t go to church on Sunday morning, the black church would close. … One kind of people — black women. If black women didn’t go to church on Sunday, if we all just decided not to go, church would close. The other is that if gay men didn’t go to church, it would close. There would be nobody singing in the choir, wouldn’t be no music director, and in some cases, wouldn’t be a preacher.

Hitler, Lenin , Mao, and Warren: “Whatever It Takes”

If there’s any question about whether Rick Warren is interested in power rather than faith, just watch this:

Dame Edna Launches Cosmetics Line

She missed the holiday shopping season, but Dame Edna works in a time and fashion all her own. Following in the footsteps of any number of other famous celebrities and fashion trendsetters, Dame Edna now has a line of cosmetics:

“I’m probably the most loved woman in Australia next to Mrs Rudd. I’m a role model. So many women copy me it’s ridiculous.”

The colours of the 17 products in the range are inspired by Dame Edna, with titles like Kanga Rouge and Possum Nose Pink.”The colour on my eyes is Varicose Violet and it’s inspired by my mother’s legs,” Dame Edna said.

Al Sharpton: “We Know You’re Not Preaching The Bible”

Rev. Al Sharpton spoke last Sunday at the launch of the Alliance of Affirming Faith-Based Organizations in Atlanta. During his talk he called out the churches who seemed to be concerned only about one issue:

“It amazes me when I looked at California and saw churches that had nothing to say about police brutality, nothing to say when a young black boy was shot while he was wearing police handcuffs, nothing to say when the they overturned affirmative action, nothing to say when people were being delegated into poverty, yet they were organizing and mobilizing to stop consenting adults from choosing their life partners,” Sharpton told a packed audience on Jan. 11.

“There is something immoral and sick about using all of that power to not end brutality and poverty, but to break into people’s bedrooms and claim that God sent you,” Sharpton added.

… We know you’re not preaching the Bible, because if you were preaching the Bible we would have heard from you,” Sharpton said. “We would have heard from you when people were starving in California, when they deregulated the economy and crashed Wall Street you had nothing to say. When [alleged Ponzi schemer Bernie] Madoff made off with the money, you had nothing to say. When Bush took us to war chasing weapons of mass destruction that weren’t there you had nothing to say. … But all of a sudden when Proposition 8 came out you had so much to say, but since you stepped in the rain, we gonna step in the rain with you.”

Amen to that.

The Alliance was begun by Rev. Dennis Meredith, who recently came out as bisexual. The Alliance also includes Dr. Kenneth Samuel, pastor of Victory for the World Church; Rev. Paul Graetz of First Metropolitan Community Church; Rev. Geoffrey Hoare of All Saints Episcopal Church; and Rabbi Joshua Lesser of Congregation Bet Haverim.

Proof of Mormon Church’s Direct Involvment In Prop 8

The American News Project has prepared a video investigating the the Mormon Church’s lack of disclosure about direct expenditures on Proposition 8. They claim to have only spent a few thousand dollars, but ANP obtained a copy of a telecast in which they promised to perform a number of very expensive services for the Yes on 8 Campaign.

The church is currently under investigation by the California State Fair Elections Commission.

Racism in the Gay Community

The discussion about ethnic-community based disparities in voting patterns on Proposition 8 has led to the question: can we talk about homophobia in ethnic communities without discussing racism in the gay community?

I would think not.

Refusing to be self-reflective and address our own community’s flaws will only encourage and justify a negative impression. And because race-based homophobia and gay-based racism feed each other, it seems wise to address them jointly.

As a white guy, I am not qualified to make grand declaration about racism in the community. And I’m not even certain what kind of race-based distinctions can be categorized as racist or harmful.

But I do know that racism exists and that it expresses itself in both blatant and subtle ways.

An example of obvious racism is the common presumption that Asian gay men are sexually submissive. And the fetishism of black men in art and literature is unquestionably dehumanizing and far too common. These are on top of the plain old-fashioned blatant bigotry and biases that are part of mainstream society.

But other examples are less obvious. Is it racist to only be attracted to persons of a particular race? Is the notion that ethnic minorities should automatically find commonality with sexual minorities itself a racist presumption of privilege? And what about gay magazines that seem to illustrate articles solely with images of white men or women?

And there are other issues that are difficult to address. When one is a minority within a minority, it can be empowering (even life saving) to find others like yourself. But do race-specific bars — and even separate pride events — in and of themselves serve to segregate and disempower ethic groups? And what should my response be when a black friend uses a Shirley Q. Liquor phrase?

And just how prevalent is racism in the community? Is it more, less or the same as in the society around us?

Obviously, one example of bias and discrimination based on race is one too many. But just how pervasive is ethnic bigotry in the gay community? And what should, or can, we do?

Unfortunately, I don’t have answers for any of these questions. All I know is that no one is benefited by thinking of gay racism as someone else’s issue or by congratulating ourselves that the gay community is “better” than society at large.

And perhaps it’s time to start the conversation and then sit back, listen, and learn.

Prop 8 and Race: More Complex Than First Reported

Guest columnist Clayton Critcher emailed me (Jim) a few days ago with comments on my critique of the NGLTF report on Prop 8. Since he had some very pertinent observations — that the relationship between religion and race with regard to African-Americans and Prop 8 is more complex than reported — I invited him to write up a guest post for Box Turtle Bulletin.

Clayton Critcher is a summa cum laude graduate of Yale University, and is now a PhD candidate in social psychology at Cornell University, where he is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.  His research and publications include experimental work on political ideology and unintended consequences of anti-gay public policy.

The recent NGLTF-sponsored report on Prop 8 and race has reignited the discussion about the determinants of support for Prop 8.  Unsurprisingly, most of the interest in this report has been on what it says about African American voters’ support for the amendment.  In my opinion, the report does an impressive job of demonstrating that exit polls likely overstated Black voters’ support.  Instead, just under 60% of  both African Americans and Latinos supported Prop 8, while Whites and Asians were barely against it.

But what explains the gap between Blacks/Latinos and Whites/Asians?  This is where things get controversial.  The report suggests that the remaining gap between these ethnic groups can be explained by differences in religiosity. On Monday, Jim suggested that this analysis may have suffered from a low sample size, which can make real differences difficult to observe (statistically).  Was the NGLTF report too quick to claim that racial differences were entirely explained by religious differences?

I set out to answer this question by doing my best to reconstruct the results of the poll on which the race and religion results were based. According to a comment on BTB by Jamie Grant of NGLTF, there were 149 African Americans sampled. I used other information from the report about the poll’s sample size, data about the demographics of the sample, and the study’s assumptions about the California voting population, to complete a “best-guess” reconstruction of the racial composition of the remaining sample.

Report Modification #1: Although it is true that there is no significant effect of race after controlling for religion, there was not a significant effect of race before controlling for religion. This suggests that Jim’s point about high margins of error was right on.  If we could not find racial differences before controlling for religion, it is not very impressive that we cannot find them afterwards.

Because the first point in the report was that African Americans’ support had been overstated, and that it was African Americans and Latinos together that showed (modestly) more support for Prop 8 than Whites and Asians, I then dichotomized people racially.  I identified each person as a minority (African American or Latino) or not.  By not dividing into as many small groups, we help to bypass the sample size problem identified by Jim.

Report Modification #2: This analysis produced an unexpected finding, one that has not been considered in the discussion.  The influence of race depended on whether one was religious.  Among those who were highly religious, support for Prop 8 was equally high across the races.  But among those who were less religious, African Americans and Latinos were more supportive of Prop 8 than Whites and Asians.  The NGLTF report misses this effect because neither Latinos or African Americans by themselves show significantly higher support (in the low religiosity subsample) because of Jim’s high margins of error.

This suggests that the relationship between race, religion, and Prop 8 support is slightly more complicated than has been discussed.  Being religious was associated with increased support for Prop 8, but among those who were not religious, being African American or Latino was associated with support for Prop 8.

These conclusions aside, I must say I have been confused by the intense interest in whether religiosity can “explain away” racial differences in support for Prop 8.  Unless one believed that the skin color gene also produced support for Prop 8, racial differences in support for Prop 8 would have to be “explained through” some cultural factor.  If that factor is religion, the question simply becomes, “Why do some racial groups show more interest in homophobic religious institutions than others?”, and I do not see why this would be any less troubling to those who seek to shift this discussion away from race.  Nevertheless, my new analyses suggest that among the non-religious, an unidentified explanation for racial differences remain.

Gay Former Clinton Aide Furious Over Rick Warren

David Gilgoff at U.S. News and World Reports mistrusts LGBT leaders’ ability to speak for the gay community (he generally distrusts leaders of any movement, not just LGBT). So he was wondering if the rank-and-file were as mollified over Obama’s invitation to Gene Robinson as the LGBT leaders seemed to be, or were they still upset over Rick Warren giving the inaugural invocation. “Without polls, it’s really impossible to know,” he explained.

But he is getting a lot of angtry comments from LGBT people who aren’t happy with their self-appointed leaders. One came from a former Clinton White House aide:

… [T]he problem here goes well beyond Warren’s incendiary language equating gay marriage with incest. He is what he is. The greater problem lies in the President-Elect’s cruel calculation that this insult and offense to gay America is acceptable collateral damage for whatever plus he sees in the suck-up to Warren, giving profile and platform to this mega-merchant of discrimination in the first program agenda item during the first official act of his first day in office. I was one of the 12 first-ever openly gay White House staff members to take up work the day following President Clinton’s inauguration. His respect for gay Americans was evident even when setbacks and disappointments slowed the change agenda, and he certainly did not deliberately nor unnecessarily scheme to sell out gay Americans on his first day in office to score points with opponents. Ordinary gay Americans will need to hold this new Administration to the tenets of its campaign and to the idealism of its Inaugural language — and to a fundamental expectation for respect. The Warren invitation remains a disgrace and a blemish on day one of the new Administration. Shame on Obama.

Meanwhile, Nancy Goldstein thinks the Robinson choice was “too little, too late.”

Love Won Out to Air On GOD TV

Focus On the Family have announced that they will air video recorded from the Love Won Out ex-gay conference held in Colorado Springs in October of last year. Seven programs were taped and will air on GOD TV over the next three weekends. Highlights include:

• Friday, January 23: Understanding Male Homosexuality – with Joe Dallas. He replaces Joe Nicolosi. While Dallas offers a much kinder and gentler explanation of what “causes” homosexuality in men, it still comes down largely to one thing: It’s all Dad’s fault.
• Saturday, January 24: Understanding Female Homosexuality – with Focus on the Family’s Melissa Fryrear. She will be on hand to explain that in all of the years she has been part of an ex-gay ministry, “I never met one woman who had not been sexually violated or sexually threatened in her life. I never met one woman. And I never met one man either, that had not been sexually violated or sexually seduced in his life.”
• Sunday, January 25: Nancy Heche. She’s the mother of actress Anne Heche. She will explain how her very powerful prayer magically changed her daughter from a homosexual to a heterosexual.

These are just three of the seven programs listed. Unfortunately, the most honest talk, in which Exodus International Alan Chambers admits to a very small, select crowd that “I choose to deny what comes naturally to me.” That talk appears to be too frank for public consumption.

GOD TV isn’t well distributed in the U.S. For what that’s worth. GOD TV claims that they reach “almost a half a billion homes worldwide.” I wonder if that “half a billion” is counted using the same methods that Exodus International uses to claim that hundreds of thousands have changed.

See also:
Prologue: Why I Went To “Love Won Out”
Part 1: What’s Love Got To Do With It?
Part 2: Parents Struggle With “No Exceptions”
Part 3: A Whole New Dialect
Part 4: It Depends On How The Meaning of the Word “Change” Changes
Part 5: A Candid Explanation For “Change”

More Discrimination Alledged Against Tennessee Hotel Owner

Remember the Brentwood, Tennessee, hotel owner who fired two employees because they were gay? Well since those stories came to light, more employees have come forward alleging discrimination based on gender and national origin, in addition to sexual orientation:

We were spoken down to,” former food and beverage manager Freda McAllister said. I guess in [the owner’s] particular culture, women are second, so that was obvious from the treatment we got over there.”

“[We were told] we ‘didn’t know how to run businesses,’ and we should do things more like they do in India,” added Tamara Head, former controller.

Former front office manager Timothy Horne said that he was treated badly partly because of his young age and also because he was gay, a charge echoed by former hotel supervisor Sergeo Lleneza.

Federal law protects workers from discrimination based on race, religion, gender, national origin and disability. It does not protect against discrimination based on sexual orientation. While David Hill, one of the two gay employees who were fired, has filed complaints with the EEOC and the Department of Labor, those complaints aren’t likely to go anywhere.

But there does seem to be a modicum of justice in all this. Hotel owner Tarun Surti and his hotel are reportedly bankrupt.

Why Can’t We Talk About Black Homophobia?

To contribute to the saturated discussion on here about homophobia in the black community:

It is understandable to question the CNN exit poll that found 70 percent of African-Americans supported Prop. 8 given the range of figures that have been reported. But there is a misguided hesitation to acknowledging the fact that — statistically and anecdotally — African-Americans tend to be more homophobic than their white counterparts. 

Citing the support for LGBT rights from black organizations such as The Black Caucus, Bishops Carlton Pearson and John Selders call black homophobia a myth and a ploy by “our enemies” to divide us. Many have also argued that church attendance/religiosity as opposed to African-American identity was responsible for the majority of blacks voting in favor of Prop. 8.

These arguments are intended to prevent scapegoating of the black community, shifting the burden of culpability from race to religion. However, turning a blind eye to broader cultural issues for the sake of comity is intellectually dishonest. 

Among scholars, it is a well-reported and established fact that homophobia is more prevalent in the African-American community than in the general public: see, inter alia, studies by Brandt (1999) (PDF), Carter (1994), Hudson and Ricketts (1980), Schneider and Lewis (1984) and Tiemeyer (1993). Research bears out that a number of social factors are correlated with homophobic attitudes among blacks, including:

• church attendance/religiosity
• education
• age
• urban residency (urban residents are less homophobic than rural residents)
• sex (men are more homophobic than women)

However, according to a 2003 study by Gregory Lewis, a professor in the Department of Public Administration and Urban Studies at Georgia University, even if one controls for these demographic variables, blacks are still more likely to be homophobic than their white counterparts, though they are also more likely to support nondiscriminatory legislation (e.g. employment nondiscrimination).

Coretta Scott King acknowledged the problem of homophobia in the black community (comments from the National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS): 

“Homophobia is still a great problem throughout America, but in the African-American community it is even more threatening. This is an enormous obstacle for ever yone involved in AIDS prevention, treatment and research. … We have to launch a national campaign against homophobia in the black community.”

Failing to recognize homophobic attitudes in the black community is not only dishonest, it fails to acknowledge the unique hardships that African-American LGBT individuals face: in many surveys, African-American gays and lesbians have reported greater pressure to hide their identity and homosexual behavior and identify as straight. It has further been speculated that the hostility toward homosexuality among blacks is partially responsible for the “down low” phenomenon in the black community and the increased prevalence of HIV among black LGBT individuals. Failing to acknowledge homophobia in the black community erases the experience of black LGBT individuals from the story of LGBT rights and ignores the numerous sociological and medical implications of these attitudes.

The question of why attitudes in the black community are more homophobic than in the general public is an interesting one — and too large to be settled in a blog post. But as Harvard professor Orlando Patterson, who is African-American, points out, it need not be the case that examining issues in the African-American community invariably turns into a blame game. If the goal is really to “educate” and “[reach] out to the African-American community,” we should understand the terms on which we do so.

Finally, I think part of the hesitation in acknowledging homophobia in the black community is about privilege: Who gets to talk about problems in the African-American community? For members outside of the African-American community (read: White people) to critique its social norms is to invoke White privilege and call to mind the historical power relationship between blacks and whites. I think it would be best for LGBT folk who are African-American to lead the discussion, no less so because they speak from a position of greater understanding.

Editor’s note: We are trying out Gabriel Arana as a possible new contributor to Box Turtle Bulletin. Gabriel is a graduate of linguistics from Cornell University, and he is now pursuing a career in journalism as a fact checkor for The Nation. Some of you may remember him as a former patient of ex-gay therapist Dr. Joseph Nicolosi. While he’s had a personal blog for some time, he’s new to the world of LGBT community blogging. He’s an Arizona native — specifically from Nogales on the U.S./Mexico border — but he now makes his home among the bright lights of New York City. Please welcome Gabriel to the pad. — Jim Burroway.

Prop 8 and Race: A Rejoinder

I want to highlight this comment left by Jaime Grant, director of the NGLTF Policy Institute, the research arm of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Jaime critiques my critique of the NGLTF study on California’s Prop 8 shedding some light on a key figure, discusses my concern about margins of error, and disagrees outright on some of my points. This is why we have comments; well-informed commenters keep us on our toes. We will have someone else weighing in on the study, hopefully later today.

As director of the NGLTF Policy Institute, I want to thank Jim Burroway for ultimately concluding that the authors of our recent election analysis report on Prop 8 – Ken Sherrill and Pat Egan “were successful in demonstrating that the Black vote may be closer to 58% than 70%.” At no point in the Task Force report do we make a claim that 58 percent is the precise answer. Rather, we stress throughout the study that the range of data available to us leads us to the conclusion that 58% is much more accurate than 70%.

Burroway is justifiably concerned about sample size. The DBR survey includes 149 African Americans, making the margin of error for that population (as is typically calculated by pollsters) 8 percentage points. Our analysis of this minority population is of course limited by its sample size in this survey. But unlike other polls, the DBR survey makes a deliberate attempt to rectify this problem by over-sampling African Americans, resulting in an African American sample that is at least double the size of those found in typical surveys of Californians. This greatly augments the statistical power of our survey to detect differences among racial and ethnic groups.

Burroway says that we conclude that “religiosity explains the differences in how African-Americans voted relative to everyone else.” This falsely characterizes our conclusions. We say rather that “controlling for frequency of religious attendance helps explain why African Americans supported Proposition 8 at higher levels than the population as a whole.” In other words, if you’re trying to figure out why African Americans voted at higher rates for Proposition 8 than the general population, part of the answer is that they as a group are more religious than the general population–and religious people voted at high rates for Prop. 8. We show this quite clearly.

Thanks for your attention to this study, which we believe points to the value of LGBT-friendly faith based organizing in ballot measure campaigns. As all of us consider how to move the dial just a few more critical points toward marriage equality, taking a close look at the vote, while taking stock of our strategies to date, is an important next step.

Jaime Grant
Director of the Policy Institute

Heterosexual Menace: There’s Hope In Jesus

Usually we use these heterosexual menace posts to highlight the many tragic ways in which heterosexuals pose a serious threat to society’s morals and health, as they pursue their empty lifestyles of misery, hopelessness and loneliness.

The good news is that heterosexuals don’t have to be victims of their compulsions. A new organization, Leviticus International, stands ready to help millions find true freedom in their struggle with heterosexuality. According to the web site, “Jesus Christ has the power to end heterosexuals’ misery and make them happy well-adjusted gays.”

You can read more about the misery and emptiness of the heterosexual lifestyle here and in our report, “The Heterosexual Agenda: Exposing the Myths.”

Marriage Wins Elections

Freedom to Marry has just released a study (PDF: 112 KB/5 pages) which shows that “exhibiting leadership by voting to support the freedom to marry helps rather than hurts politicians.”

Many politicians, particularly Democratic politicians, fear that if they appear too closely aligned with same-sex marriage, they will face the consequences at the ballot box. But Freedom to Marry found that those who voted to end marriage discrimination since 2005 have a 100% re-election rate. This finding goes beyond re-election to their current seats — even those who sought higher office in 2008 all won.

These findings extend to those who evolved from opposing to supporting same-sex marriage, as well as to those who voted against anti-marriage amendments in their state legislatures.