Old Wine & Fresh Skins

Some days, it all comes together in the most depressing ways. Today is one of them. At least, it is for me as I scan through the news and see threads that weave themselves together without my even trying. 

Today, Coretta Scot King’s funeral — despite her unflagging support of lesbian & gay equality — will be held at the church of one of the most vocal homophobic black ministers in the country. I’ve already written a lot about religion and about black churches in particular, but yesterday I received a link via email to a New York Blade column that says what I wanted to say, and more effectively.

Consider the inattention from black churches to the HIV/AIDS epidemic ravaging our communities, and the rise of conservative mega-churches that ought to be called the No Hope Baptist Church of God & Christ and the Apostolic Church of Hell.

… Many of us lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender children with ties to Africa would say our ancestors left us neither any teachings nor any road maps on how to survive the black church, let alone be a part of its virulently homophobic climate.

 ”Consider the innatention from black churches to the HIV/AIDS epidemic,” the columnist writes. Today is the day to consider it, as it’s National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness day. Just yeserday, I read that over half the new HIV cases in the U.S. are occurring in blacks. But most of those cases are happening in a segment of the African American population unlikely to be addressed by many black churches.

Just over half of new infections with the AIDS virus in the United States are in blacks, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

A study of detailed data from 33 states shows that of 156,000 new cases of HIV infection between 2001 and 2004, 51 percent were in non-Hispanic blacks — although blacks made up just 13 percent of the population in those states.

The good news is that the rate of new infections declined in black women and in many black men — with the exception of men having sex with other men, the team at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

 ”Men having sex with men” is a term I learned during my years working in and around HIV/AIDS issues in minority communities. It’s intended to distinguish these men from others who might identify as “gay.” (And who might thus have access to the prevention and education services developed in gay communities since the start of the epidemic.) They’re difficult to reach in that sense because it’s important that they not identify as gay, for reasons I’ve stated before.

The power of the church — along with a deeply ingrained literalist approach to scripture, along the lines of “God said, I believe it, that settles it” — in both the community and the family creates circumstances under which individuals are required to toe the line of what is accepted moral behavior by the majority, or at least appear to do so, if they want to keep their place within that refuge. Step out of line and you may find yourself “cast out from among your people”; set outside the walls of the fortified city to take your chances without the protection available within.

 How can black churches approach these men when so many black pastors say what Eddie Long says?

“God brings himself back to himself through covenant through blood. When the ordained process of God (marriage), when a virgin man has sex with a virgin woman, there is blood shed on his penis which represents covenant and the redemptive grace of God. That’s the reason why men, you are circumcised, so that every time you pull out your male organ and wants to go in the wrong direction, you can SEE that you are in covenant and anything that goes against the covenant is Anti-Christ. It creates a religious system that will not return God to God. Anything that will hinder that is Anti-Christ. It’s an abortion of the whole process of covenant and blood shedding.”  

Or what Willie Wilson says?

…“Lesbianism is about to take over our community. … I ain’t homophobic because everybody here got something wrong with him,” he said. “But … women falling down on another woman, strapping yourself up with something, it ain’t real. That thing ain’t got no feeling in it. It ain’t natural. Anytime somebody got to slap some grease on your behind and stick something in you, it’s something wrong with that. Your butt ain’t made for that.

“No wonder your behind is bleeding,” he said. “You can’t make no connection with a screw and another screw. The Bible says God made them male and female.”

 Or what a black minister quoted in the article says.

Immediately following the summit’s closing, the Rev. Wayne Cooper of Atlanta sent the NBJC this message: “I am literally sick and tired of the Rev. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson trying to force people to accept gay marriage! I am black and I believe that marriage was ordained by Almighty God to be between one man and one woman,” Cooper added. “The rectum was/is not made for ‘entry’ but for ’exit’ of toxic human waste.… I’d love to publicly debate either man on this subject, and I have no doubt that I will eat them alive!”

When all of the above, and more, is said in black churches the “amens” come rolling in and the offering plates keep filling up.

The writer of the Blade piece sums it up better than I can. 

So I ask again: Is there any hope of more inclusive leadership from the black church with its standard of charismatic, homophobic preachers?

I am immediately reminded of my ancestors’ use of the Bible as a central text of their teachings, and I turn to Mark 2:22 to get my answer: “No one puts new wine into old wineskins; if he does, the wine will burst the skins, and then wine and skins are both lost. New wine goes into fresh skins.”

Here’s to those, however few, who are making fresh skins.