Jan. 9, 2008.
I have been thinking of just how many churches there are in this country, especially in my small area.
Here there are two “gay” churches, both in hiding, not listed, as is apparently the MCC church in Baton Rouge — but look at the ones that are listed on the website of Gayellow Pages — which include the Unitarian and mainline churches that are only gay-friendly so don’t really count.
But what do we have to show for these hundreds of “gay” churches? They have been around for a decade now. Yet here you can’t find the two unless you know someone. And the Unitarian church in Shreveport is not really gay-friendly.
But the question also is, how much good have all the black churches done? We think they did a lot, but it was a few and Dr. King that led the civil rights effort. Troy Perry did a lot, mostly personally, but do you see many MCC people speaking out on our civil rights?
And for the black churches I only have to look at my town. The worst part of town has five black Baptist churches in a two-block area, and that area has the most crime in town. The next biggest crime area has no churches. What does that tell us? And the areas are all black and the crime is black on black.
It was Bill Cosby more than black heterosexual male preachers who has spoken out to challenge the young black women and men to stop being so irresponsible, having kids they can’t take care of, dropping out of school with no way of getting a job in this era of computers and the globalization of jobs.
And how much help have the “gay” churches been in working to get homosexual citizens our civil/equal rights? How much good can they do if they are not even openly gay? While we of all people don’t want preachers telling us whom to vote for, we sure want them to tell everyone how much still needs to be done to get us equal rights. It is assumed that the professional gay/lesbian groups, medical doctors, lawyers, etc. are educating others in their professions. Certainly we expect the few political groups to be trying to educate the members of the parties — Democratic, Republican, Libertarian, etc.
But where are the grass-roots leaders our community needs? Where are the black church people who are speaking out on these issues? The right-wingers sure are, and they are raising lots of money by promoting fear of homosexuality among the ignorant church goers, or those sitting at home watching the TV evangelists.
While many homosexuals are no longer religious, it is nonsense to ignore the fact that most Americans are religious and that those in our community that are deserve help — and find mention of the churches in the g/l media. When has The Advocate had an article on churches in cities around the country?
Soulforce is one effort. People who can’t do anything themselves can donate money to such efforts. But only when we can see they are actually dong something — as Soulforce is.
There needs to be a C-SPAN-like conference on what our homosexual religious groups are doing and getting support for them.
