Paladino's intolerance par for the course on campaign trail

This week, Republican New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino showed us exactly how despicable he can be when he unleashed his bigotry and intolerance against the gay community. On Monday, which was National Coming Out Day, this Tea Party favorite told NBC's Today that he stood by his controversial remarks against homosexuality and gay marriage the day before at a Brooklyn synagogue. And these statements should tell the voters of New York that this man is not suitable for public office.

On Sunday, Paladino spoke before a group of Orthodox Jewish leaders, decrying the ways in which people are "brainwashed" about gay issues. "That's not how God created us," Paladino said of being gay, "and that's not the example that we should be showing our children." He criticized his opponent, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, for taking his daughter to a gay pride parade, saying "that's not the example we should be showing our children."

"I don't think it's proper for them to go there and watch a couple of grown men grind against each other. I don't think that's proper, I think it's disgusting," Paladino said. "I just think that my children and your children would be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family. And I don't want them to be brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option. It isn't," he added.

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Can an anti-gay black pastor become Chicago's next mayor?

With the decision by Mayor Richard M. Daley not to seek reelection in Chicago next year, the potential field of candidates who hope to replace him could make for an interesting campaign. Congressmen Danny Davis and Luis Gutierrez are testing the waters for a City Hall bid, and former Senator Carol Moseley Braun is a part of the field as well. Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. is considered damaged by personal scandal and alleged ties to former Gov. Rod Blagojevich. And current White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is all but certain to throw his hat in the race as well.


This is the first wide open mayoral race in Chicago in years, and the best chance to elect a black mayor since Harold Washington died in 1987-- provided the black vote is not divided. The Chicago City Council's black caucus will decide on a consensus candidate, and one of the people on their short list is State Senator James Meeks.

Meeks is chair of the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus, and chair of the Illinois Senate's education committee. He also serves on the board of directors of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. And as head pastor of the 20,000 member Salem Baptist Church -- with a formidable political base, money, and an unparalleled ability to register voters in Cook County -- he is being taken seriously for the city's chief executive spot. Meeks, 54, is the favorite of the city's black ministers, according to a recent straw poll. Meanwhile, he came in second to Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart in a Chicago Sun-Times poll.

Meeks' career has been marked by fire, confrontation and controversy. For example, from the pulpit he once called Mayor Daley a "slave master," and referred to black ministers and elected officials as "house n-----s." Some in Chicago's political community are concerned about the use of his mega-church as a power base. Rep. Jackson, Cook County commissioner Deborah Sims, state representative David Miller, Ninth Ward Alderman Anthony Beale are all members of Meeks' church.

In addition, he has drawn attention for the alliances he has made. In 2006 Meeks ran as an independent for governor and courted the white evangelical vote. Last year Meeks joined the Republicans to support school vouchers to allow inner city public school students to attend private schools. He characterized the public schools as an "apartheid" system. The state senator has led a boycott of the Chicago public schools, a failing system with only a 55 percent high school graduation rate.

While education is his signature issue and would serve as an asset to his mayoral campaign, Meeks' stance on gay rights could jeopardize his prospects. A social conservative who opposes abortion and gay marriage, Meeks had already infuriated the gay community and civil rights groups before officially announced his candidacy.

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The Bishop Has No Clothes

Just about everyone knows about the problems facing Bishop Eddie Long, senior pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church. Specifically, there are the four young men who allege that the prominent Atlanta-area pastor coerced them into a sexual relationship, and possibly more waiting in the wings. They claim that Long used his status to seduce them with money, clothes, bling, cars, foreign trips, access to celebrities and the like. The men allege that they called Long "dad" or "daddy," which sounds awfully cultish. One of the plaintiffs even claims that he was 14 when his relationship with Long started, which brings up issues of child abuse and statutory rape.

These accusations will be addressed in court, and who knows, maybe there will be a quiet out-of-court settlement. To be sure, this is not the first religious leader to face accusations of sexual and professional misconduct and abuse of authority, nor the last. Similarly, the Bishop is not the first homophobic preacher to be outed as a gay man.

But Bishop Long's sexual orientation ultimately is not the subject of this commentary, although it provides some valuable context. Now, if these accusations are true, then Bishop Long is at least guilty of hypocrisy and self-hatred. And if the charges are not true, he is still an anti-gay minister who has damaged many people. Either way, he is a prosperity preacher who preys on the black community and shames the legacy of the civil rights movement. And that's most of what we need to know.

When the Southern Poverty Law Center decides to write an intelligence report about you, you know you've done something wrong. SPLC calls Bishop Long "one of the most virulently homophobic black leaders in the religiously based anti-gay movement." In one sermon, he says to gays and lesbians, "God says you deserve death!" The message of "hate the sin and the sinner" are strong words in a religion that is supposed to teach love, healing and redemption.

Long believes that homosexuality is spiritual abortion, "a manifestation of a fallen man." He believes that if black gays and lesbians feel alienated and abandoned by the black church, the problem is not intolerance against them but their own sins. But before these people go to Hell as he contends they are, Long is trying to cure gays and lesbians (except himself, we can assume). And his church bookstore sells the works of authors such as the homophobic James Dobson of Focus on the Family -- no friend of the black community.

And Long's misappropriation of the King legacy is shameful. Coretta Scott King's funeral was held at New Birth in 2006 rather than at Ebenezer Baptist Church, the King family's church. Civil rights giants Harry Belafonte and then-NAACP-chair Julian Bond were so mortified by this fact that they boycotted the funeral. After all, Mrs. King was a supporter of gay marriage, and she called it a civil rights issue. The late Yolanda King, the oldest child, took after her mother in that regard, but Bernice King, the youngest child in the King family, called Long her "new father" and symbolically passed a torch to him.

To add to the insult, Bernice King and Long participated in a march to Dr. King's gravesite to support a national constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. In 2004, Long and others successfully pushed for a similar amendment to the Georgia state constitution. And it should be noted that Alveda King, Dr. King's niece, is herself a homophobic minister who exploited her uncle's name at Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally, an event replete with aggrieved white supremacists, Obama-haters and gun-enthusiasts. "Homosexuality cannot be elevated to the civil rights issue," Alveda King said in a 1998 speech. "The civil rights movement was born from the Bible. God hates homosexuality."

Bishop Eddie Long is a prosperity-oriented minister, adhering to a theology that essentially says God will financially hook up the believers. Some would call it a false gospel, given Jesus' targeting of the money changers, and his proclamation that it is easier for a camel to enter the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. Others would call it pimping.

Long's New Birth megachurch has a membership of about 25,000 and sits on 240 acres in the Atlanta suburb of Lithonia, Georgia. The nonprofit religious "charity" he started in 1997 has served him well -- a $1.4-million, 20-acre home with nine bathrooms, a $350,000 Bentley, and a $3 million salary over three years, not to mention all of the expensive jewelry. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) launched an investigation into the finances and tax-exempt status of six megachurches, including New Birth, and Creflo Dollar's World Changers International Church. Due to the recession, New Birth had to cut back on its $250,000 Easter Sunday service last year, and that is not a misprint. Tithes and membership dropped 20 percent, given that it is hard to be about prosperity when you are poor and hurting, and black folks have been hit harder than most in this recession.

And as Wall Street bankers, megachurch preachers and other prosperity pimps live like lottery winners, people in America are suffering. The Census Bureau recently reported that poverty is higher than it was 10 years ago, with nearly 15 percent of Americans in poverty. The gap between rich and poor has tripled in three decades, and is the highest it has been since the 1920s. Meanwhile, unemployment is entrenched and not going anywhere anytime soon.

Surely, Bishop Long and his supporters would maintain that his reputation is being dragged through the mud. But his reputation was already muddied via his homophobia and corrupt bling theology. Rather, Long should worry far more about what Dr. King would say about him.

Although King fought against and even disobeyed unjust laws, Long supports them. Dr. King decried the triple evils of racism, materialism and militarism, and called for a radical revolution of values, from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. Figures such as King and Malcolm X walked the talk by fighting for the people -- and for causes greater than their personal bank account -- through great personal sacrifice and a modest existence. Remember that Dr. King donated all of his $54,000 Nobel Peace Prize money to the civil rights movement. I dare say it would be hard to find many leaders today -- black or otherwise -- who would follow in the footsteps of this great man. How many of them would lift a finger to help the downtrodden?

Meanwhile, Bishop Eddie Long just wants to get paid and beat the case.

Morehouse dress code is more about homophobia than decorum

From theGrio:
http://www.thegrio.com/2009/10/morehouse-college-that-legendary-institution.php

Prop 8, Jim Crow, Nuremberg and Other Unjust Laws

Color of Law
By David A. Love
BlackCommentator.com
December 18, 2008

Forty years ago, in many states, my marriage to my wife would have been illegal. In fact, we would have been regarded as criminals and locked up for miscegenation, or “race-mixing” as they called it.

In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, which found that Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, a law banning interracial marriage was unconstitutional in violation of the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. At the time of the Loving decision, 16 states still had anti-miscegenation laws on the books.

Racist origins of laws restricting marriage

Today’s laws banning same-sex marriage - including California’s Proposition 8, a ballot measure which passed in the November 2008 election - are the descendants of these pernicious Jim Crow laws and the Nuremberg laws enacted in Nazi Germany. All of these forms of codified intolerance are promulgated for the same reasons: to justify and perpetuate a regime of supremacy, hatred and violence against a group of people, end of story. And the stated rationale for these restrictions, these human rights violations, is always couched in terms of the need to protect tradition, custom, the family or social integrity. Such laws are cloaked in self-righteous, sanctimonious religious ideology, completely reflecting the obsessions and hang-ups of those who write and support them. So, in the case of invalidating same-sex marriages, those who subscribe to that proposition say that they seek to protect the institution of heterosexual marriage, whatever that means.

Similarly, the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia had concluded in a 1955 decision that the state’s anti-miscegenation laws had legitimate purposes, which were “to preserve the racial integrity of its citizens,” as well as to prevent “the corruption of blood,” “a mongrel breed of citizens,” and “the obliteration of racial pride,” a not-so-subtle endorsement of White Supremacy.

In 1958, Mildred Jeter (Black) and Richard Loving (White), residents of Virginia, were married in the District of Columbia. When they returned to Virginia, they were sentenced to a year in jail for violating Virginia’s ban on leaving the state to evade the law (Section 20-58 of the Virginia Code), and the ban on interracial marriages (Section 20-59):

• “Leaving State to evade law. If any white person and colored person shall go out of this State, for the purpose of being married, and with the intention of returning, and be married out of it, and afterwards return to and reside in it, cohabiting as man and wife, they shall be punished as provided in 20-59, and the marriage shall be governed by the same law as if it had been solemnized in this State. The fact of their cohabitation here as man and wife shall be evidence of their marriage.” (Section 20-58)

• “If any white person intermarry with a colored person, or any colored person intermarry with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony and shall be punished by confinement in the penitentiary for not less than one nor more than five years.”(Section 20-59)

The Lovings pleaded guilty, and the judge suspended the sentence if the couple agreed not to return to the state for 25 years. “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents,” the judge wrote in an opinion. “And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

How sweetly ironic that the first African-American president, himself a self-described “mutt,” won three Southern states in the Electoral College, including Virginia, the cradle of the Confederacy, which would have criminalized the union of Obama’s parents at the time of his birth.

Southern obsession with race-mixing becomes law

The anti-miscegenation laws represented a convergence of issues of sex, race and power. The Southern preoccupation with race-mixing can be explained to some extent by the need to protect the purity of the White woman. Although White men often fathered children of color, the thought of a White woman mating with a Black man was worse than murder. Blacks were regarded as dirty and subhuman, and the psychological basis of the notion of White female purity has been deep-seated. The regulations served to maintain the racial boundaries that had been established in the antebellum years, and uphold the White family as an impregnable institution. This became particularly important in a new context where Black men were now free, with the potential to express themselves in society as actual men and not slaves. The institution of racial slavery had helped to define a caste system where social equality was implausible. But in the absence of slavery, there was a risk that White Supremacy would be exposed for the farce it is.

The lynching of black men was part and parcel of the anti-miscegenation regime. Relationships between black men and white women, which became the very definition of rape in the Jim Crow context, would result in dead Black men. Thus, White men could maintain their sexual dominance over Black women and not run afoul of the law, yet control Black men and prohibit their contact with White women through anti-miscegenation and lynch laws.

The U.S. Information Agency noted that “As to mixed marriages, the most delicate question of all, it is to be noted that 29 states - all those of the South and many in the Southwest - forbid it. In the North, such marriages are frowned upon, and represent an almost insignificant percentage.” Alabama law, for example, declared that “the state legislature shall never pass any law to legalize any marriage between any white person and a negro, or a descendant of a negro,” with a penalty of two to seven years’ imprisonment for anyone choosing to intermarry or “live in adultery and fornication with each other.” Arizona prohibited marriage between whites and anyone with Negro blood, or between whites and Hindus. Arkansas prohibited the concubinage of a Negro with a white, yet allowed marriage provided the Negro blood was not “visible and distinct,” under penalty of one month to one year of hard labor. North Dakota prohibited sexual relations, cohabitation and marriage between whites and anyone having 1/8th or more Negro or “Mongolian” blood.

Oregon forbade unions between whites and anyone with one-quarter or more Negro, Chinese or Malay blood, or one-half or more American Indian blood. The state provided penalties for the marriage partners as well as the persons issuing the license and performing the ceremony. In an interesting twist, South Carolina expressly forbade the adoption of a white child by a Negro. The South Carolina state constitution stated that

• “It shall be unlawful for any white man to intermarry with any woman of wither Indian or negro races, or any mulatto, mestizo, or half-breed, or for any white woman to intermarry with any person, other than a white man, or for any mulatto, half-breed, Indian, negro or mestizo to intermarry with a white woman.”

The Texas anti-miscegenation statutes are a conspicuous example of the arbitrary, irrational, and cruelly intrusive nature of the Jim Crow laws:

• “If any white person and negro shall knowingly intermarry with each other on this state, or having so intermarried in or out of the state shall continue to live together as man and wife within this state, they shall be confined in the penitentiary not less than two nor more than five years.”

All interracial marriages in Texas were void, but punishment was not imposed unless the amount of Negro blood was one-eighth or more. Further, a municipal ordinance prohibited sexual relations between whites and blacks in the city of Fort Worth.

Jim Crow gives birth to Nuremberg Laws

The Jim Crow legal regime - which embraced not only anti-miscegenation laws but also labor exploitation, political disenfranchisement, segregation in public accommodations, housing and education, not to mention rigid definitions of who was “colored,” hence the “one-drop” rule - informed and inspired Hitler’s promulgation of the Nuremberg laws in 1935.

The Nuremberg laws, like the Jim Crow laws, were designed to strip a targeted minority group (in this case the Jewish people) of all of their rights. The preamble of the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor stated that “purity of the German Blood is the essential condition for the continued existence of the German people.” Not surprisingly, and eerily similar to the Virginia law at issue in Loving, section 1 forbade marriage between Jews and Germans, with a penalty of hard labor:

• “Marriages between Jews and subjects of the state of German or related blood are forbidden. Marriages nevertheless concluded are invalid, even if concluded abroad to circumvent this law.” (§ 1(1))

Meanwhile, section 2 stated that “Extramarital intercourse between Jews and subjects of the state of German or related blood is forbidden.” (§ 2) Under the Reich Citizenship Law, Jews lost their German citizenship. This was part of a legal regime that had begun to dismiss Jews from government jobs, prohibit them from taking state professional exams or joining professional organizations, severely restrict their numbers in public schools and universities, and criminalize their religious and dietary practices. In the coming years, the laws became harsher, with Jewish exclusion from the social welfare system, expulsion from public schools and complete segregation in education and housing. Jews could not hold driver’s licenses, were banned from resorts, beaches and swimming pools, barred from sleeping and dining cars on trains, and made to register for forced labor. Jews were forbidden to walk in certain places at certain times of the day. Non-Jewish women married to Jewish man were urged to divorce or suffer the disadvantages suffered by Jews. Nazi law defined children as “persons who are not Jews.” Being Jewish, in essence, became illegal. (Source: Midwest Center for Holocaust Education)

Dr. King on unjust laws

One should be suspicious of laws which, whether through edict, legislation or ballot measure, allows the majority to strip the minority of its rights in a wholesale manner. Such laws are immoral and invalid. And as Dr. Martin Luther King noted in his April 16, 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail, unjust laws are made to be broken:

• “You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may won ask: 'How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?' The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust…. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that 'an unjust law is no law at all'…. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.”

So, fast forward to today, and California’s Proposition 8, which restricts the definition of marriage to a union between a man and a woman, and prohibits same-sex couples from marrying. It is necessary to ask whose interests are served from the law, who is behind the law, and who paid for the law. Right-wing Christianity tends to be the usual suspect in such matters. For example, Focus on the Family, a group which opposes abortion and gay rights, and advocates for abstinence-only education, spent $539,000 in cash and $83,000 in nonmonetary support to pass Prop 8. As a result, the evangelical Christian group had to cut its workforce by 20 percent, which is a good thing.

Mormon Church

But the bulk of the money for Prop 8 came from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS), the Mormon Church. LDS church leadership supported the ballot initiative, and urged their members to contribute to the effort, to the tune of $20 million, or as much as 70 percent of total funds raised by Protectmarriage.com. This has caused protests by some Mormons, resignations from the church, and has led to an effort to strip the religious organization of its 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. The LDS church, it should be noted, once embraced polygamy, and excluded Blacks until 1978 on the grounds that dark skinned people bore the Curse of Cain and were inferior. And now, apparently, they have given themselves authority as moral arbiters to decide what consenting adults should or should not do in the privacy of their own household, who they should or should not love, and who they can or cannot marry.

Nothing good can come from unjust laws that treat one group as less than human and deny them their full civil and human rights. Jim Crow laws, Nuremberg laws, Prop 8 - different names, but they’re all one in the same. Like Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, today’s anti-gay marriage laws must be abolished.