Box Turtle Bulletin

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.