If This is Love Then Who is the Pervert?

Rev. Ruben Diaz (in white hat) at May 15 rally

As he spoke to a crowd of roughly 2,000 at an anti-gay marriage rally held outside of the Bronx Borough Hall building, Rev. Ruben Diaz took a moment to address the small group of counter demonstrators who gathered in a park directly across from building.

“We all respect you,” Diaz said on May 15. “We respect you and we love you...So you guys over there, listen. There’s no hatred in my heart.”

This is the kinder and gentler rhetoric employed by conservatives who know that Americans are fed up with the insults and slurs that right wingers aim at the lesbian and gay community. Like so many of his peers, Diaz, a Democratic state senator who represents part of the Bronx, has a record that belies his comments.

In 1994, Diaz wrote an editorial in Impacto, a Spanish-language newspaper, that said that athletes coming to New York City to participate in the Gay Games that year would spread HIV.

“Some of the gay and lesbian athletes are likely to be already infected with AIDS or can return home with the virus,” he wrote. Diaz objected to the Clinton administration waiving the ban on HIV positive travelers entering the US. He appeared at a City Hall press conference with other conservatives to condemn the Gay Games.

“These Gay Games will teach our young adults and children that homosexuality is okay,” the UPI quoted Diaz saying at the press conference. “There is nothing more obscene. This kind of behavior is biologically dangerous. Homosexuality is a sin against God's laws and therefore is not acceptable.”

Diaz was joined at that press conference by Mary Cummins, a Queens conservative who led a 1992 attack against the Children of the Rainbow curriculum because three pages in that 430-page teacher’s guide referred to positive representations of gay men and lesbians.

In 2003, Diaz sued to halt city funding of the Harvey Milk School in the West Village. That school serves lesbian, transgender, bisexual, and gay youth who have been subjected to violence and harassment in other schools.

“My goal is to let the mayor of the city of New York, the chancellor, and the school system know that it is wrong what they are doing,” Diaz said at a 2003 press conference held outside of Manhattan Supreme Court. “It is segregation. They are showing preference and they are leaving my children, my Spanish children, my black children behind.”

Then, as now, 75 percent of the students at the Harvey Milk School are African-American and Latino. Diaz was joined by Rena Lindevaldsen, an attorney with the Florida-based Liberty Counsel, a group that defends “traditional families, sanctity of life and religious liberty,” she said.

“I think you can sum it all up by saying that in New York City the Department of Education is literally taking from the poor, those who are in the poor, failing schools and giving $4.0 million to those who are going to be in a newly renovated, expanded and fully equipped school,” Lindevaldsen said. “They are taking from the poor and giving to the rich.”

At that time, the majority of students at the school were poor and 10 percent were in foster care. The school also complied with all local, state, and federal anti-discrimination laws.

The Liberty Counsel opposed overturning the Texas sodomy law in Lawrence v. Texas, a US Supreme Court case that overturned state sodomy laws, it fought recognition of civil unions in Georgia and Connecticut, and the group opposed adoption by gay men and lesbians in Florida.

His Excellency Tells a Little Lie

Archbishop Timothy Dolan

In a May 13 post on his blog, Archbishop Timothy Dolan was less than honest with the thousands of adherents who live in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. As New Yorkers, and plenty of folks who live outside the state, are contesting an effort to enact same sex marriage here, Dolan weighed in. He recalled encountering a protest when he was the archbishop in Milwaukee.

“This frenzied group, taunting the people as they left Mass, were rabid in criticizing the Catholic Church, especially her bishops, for our teaching that homosexuals deserve dignity and respect,” Dolan wrote. “They waved placards explicitly quoting and condemning #2358 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which affirms the dignity of those with same-sex attraction, and warns against any form of prejudice, hatred, or unjust discrimination against them, and insists that homosexual acts, not persons, are not in conformity with God’s design.”

This tale was meant to present Dolan and the Roman Catholic Church as respecting and defending homosexuals. Unfortunately for Dolan, #2358 does not say what he claims it says. Here is the catechism in its entirety.

“The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God's will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord's Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.”

The observation that homosexuality is “objectively disordered” refers to the 1986 “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons,” a document issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a Vatican office that was headed at that time by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. That document said that homosexuality was “a more or less strong tendency toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.”

Ratzinger did write that violence against “homosexual persons” is “deplorable,” but he was just as clear about who was ultimately responsible for that violence -- gay men and lesbians.

“But the proper reaction to crimes committed against homosexual persons should not be to claim that the homosexual condition is not disordered,” Ratzinger wrote. “When such a claim is made and when homosexual activity is consequently condoned, or when civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the Church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase.”

The Ratzinger letter cited the 1975 “Declaration on Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics,” which described homosexuality as “intrinsically disordered.”

The Roman Catholic Church, like many on the right, has found that the harsh rhetoric its leadership once used when discussing the lesbian and gay community is deemed objectionable by much of the public. Dolan is necessarily forced to spin, but in his church what the Vatican orders is the law. Dolan cannot believe what he wrote on May 13.

Pastor Platt’s Exposition of The Views of Baptists, Relative to the Homosexual Population of the United States

Pastor David Platt

When David Platt, the pastor at The Church at Brook Hills in Birmingham, Alabama, cited the Bible and argued that homosexuality is wrong, he opted for an old rhetorical device. He applied the reasoning used by “those in the homosexual movement to describe or justify homosexual desires or actions” to “pedophilia, more specifically homosexual pedophilia,” Platt said in a 2008 sermon.

“After all, the pedophile argues, we both enjoy this, how can it be wrong?” he said. “Jesus never spoke against. He welcomed children to himself...I am part of a persecuted minority and as a result I am all the more deserving of civil rights.”

Platt asked his audience “Are you convinced? You say ‘Of course not. It’s against the law.’” Then, after pausing for dramatic effect, Platt said “Ladies and gentlemen so was same sex marriage two months ago in California.”

The 32-year-old Southern Baptist pastor never explained the point he was making other than to say “Please hear me, I am not equating these two things completely together, but I am showing us in scripture and practically in our lives that causation does not imply justification.”

The transgender, bisexual, lesbian, and gay community has never said that causation implies justification, but that is the advantage of a sermon. The pastor states all the facts and reaches the conclusion without presenting alternative views or opposing voices.

Platt still has problems. The first is that he apparently cannot distinguish between sex between consenting adults and sex between an adult and someone who is younger than any state’s age of consent. The gay, transgender, lesbian, and bisexual community sees a difference in those relationships.

The North American Man Boy Love Association, or NAMBLA, was founded in 1978. That political and social group had support within the broader community, but it also met with resistance that grew louder and more strident with the passing of time. Today, NAMBLA, which never had more than 1,200 members and a few thousand dollars in the bank at any given time, is a shadow of its former self and its members do not even try to associate with queer community groups.

Platt’s bigger challenge is his Furman problem as in the Rev. Dr. Richard Furman. In 1814, at the first Triennial Convention of the American Baptists, Furman was elected president of that denomination. He was also the first president of the South Carolina Baptist Convention and served in that office from 1821 to 1825. In 1845, a schism, largely over the morality of slavery, led southerners among the American Baptists to form the Southern Baptist Convention, the denomination that Platt belongs to.

In 1822, Denmark Vesey, a former slave, was accused of organizing a slave rebellion in South Carolina. Authorities in that state arrested, tortured, and tried Vesey and roughly 100 co-conspirators. Thirty-five, including Vesey, were hanged and 40 were shipped out of the US.

Historians debate whether Vesey ever planned a rebellion. It was common across America in the 19th and early 20th centuries for authorities or mobs to manufacture charges of insurrection or rape of a white woman by a African-American man as a pretext for responding with lynchings or other forms of violence.

In 1822, John L. Wilson, then the governor of South Carolina, asked Furman if he would recommend that the state establish a “Day of Public Humiliation and Thanksgiving” to commemorate its having avoided this rebellion. Furman responded affirmatively and offered a fullthroated defense of slavery. His source for that defense was the Bible.

“The result of this inquiry and reasoning, on the subject of slavery, brings us, sir, if I mistake not, very regularly to the following conclusion -- That the holding of slaves is justifiable by the doctrine and example contained in Holy writ; and is, therefore consistent with Christian uprightness, both in sentiment and conduct,” Furman wrote.

“That it is also the positive duty of servants to reverence their master, to be obedient, industrious, faithful to him, and careful of his interests; and without being so, they can neither be the faithful servants of God, nor be held as regular members of the Christian Church,” Furman wrote later in the 19-page treatise titled “Rev. Dr. Richard Furman’s Exposition of The Views of Baptists, Relative to the Colored Population of the United States.”

Does Platt believe that Furman was correct? Furman’s authority was the Bible, the same good book that Platt cited in his attack on homosexuality. If Platt does agree, he has endorsed slavery and he has no moral authority to preach on any topic. If he does not, then he must concede that the Bible can be used by vile people to serve immoral ends. Having conceded that, he must explain how his congregation can distinguish between right Biblical teaching and wrong Biblical teaching. He must also concede that there is a very real possibility that his teaching on homosexuality was as wrong as Furman’s on slavery.

Platt is not a minor player in the denomination. He will nominate Brian Wright, the current president of the Southern Baptist Convention, to his second term when that group meets in June in Phoenix and he was selected to deliver this year’s convention sermon.

Platt’s Furman problem is shared by every member of the Southern Baptist Convention. That denomination defended slavery and segregation for over 100 years. It remained silent in the face of the brutal violence that was visited upon African-Americans. Its muted 1995 apology for that has done little to heal the wounds caused by that history. It remains a predominantly white denomination.

In contrast, the bisexual, transgender, lesbian, and gay community has thoroughly and completely repudiated NAMBLA and yet Platt employs the device of the homosexual as pedophile to argue against gay marriage.

It is no surprise then that it is always galling to be the subject of a lecture on morality and sin from a member of the Southern Baptist Convention.