Gold was presented the Stonewall Community Foundation’s distinguished Visionary Award at the 40th Anniversary gala dinner at the United Nations Delegates’ Dining Room on Wednesday The event celebrated the great strides made by the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community of New York and recognize Stonewall’s vital role in nurturing and strengthening the LGBT movement over the past 20 years.

Gold was recognized for his many years of advocacy work and for his efforts to better the well-being of LGBT individuals. Gold in 2005 founded Faith in America, an organization working to end the advance of religion-based bigotry toward lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals. Last fall, he edited and published the book, “CRISIS: 40 Stories Revealing the Personal, Social and Religious Pain and Trauma of Growing Up Gay In America.”

The dinner also honored Dustin Lance Black, the 2008 Academy Award® and Writers Guild of America Award winning screenwriter of Milk, the Gus Van Sant-directed biopic of the late gay rights activist Harvey Milk that also earned an Academy Award® for Best Actor for Sean Penn in the title role.

The Stonewall Dinner featured a performance by Melinda Doolittle, breakout American Idol finalist and recording artist.

The Stonewall Visionary Award honors individuals for their outstanding work on behalf of the LGBT community and who live and promote the principles of Stonewall in their personal and professional lives. The foundation honors those who are champions of equal rights, have made a significant investment in the LGBT community and contribute to improving the LGBT community’s place in society.

Stonewall Community Foundation, a not-for-profit 501(C)(3) organization, is the public charity for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) in New York. Since its founding in 1990, Stonewall has awarded more than $14 million in grants to more than 450 LGBT organizations, many of which are new or emerging groups that do not have the resources to reach potential donors. Its mission is to promote the well-being of LGBT individuals and strengthen the LGBT community.

Faith In America would like to remind Miss California Tami Farrell that in her refusal to voice her support for marriage equality for gay Americans she is allowing religion-based bigotry and prejudice to advance against them.

In a Larry King Live segment on June 10, Farrell was asked if she thought gay and lesbian couples should have the right to marry. She said she thought it was a civil rights issue and that individual states should decide the issue.

King in a follow-up question suggested California was in the process of deciding and that Ms. Farrell was a voter and then asked her how she would vote.

Ms. Farrell again refused to answer.

“We would hope that Ms. Farrell would take time to consider that by remaining silent, she is siding against the many gay and lesbian individuals who reside in California and all across the country,” said Faith In America Executive Director Brent Childers.

“You’re either for gay and lesbian citizens being treated equally or you are not.

“Religion-based bigotry and prejudice is the single greatest impediment to equality  for gay citizens – including the issue of marriage – and it brings immense harm to gay Americans, especially gay youth.

“You can’t be for full equality and against marriage equality.”

“We would also like to remind Ms. Farrell that our country has had a disastrous history of allowing individual states to decide the civil rights for others. It wasn’t that long ago that an African-American couple could marry in Illinois but not in 17 other states. Deciding on someone’s worth and dignity is not a state-rights issue.

“If you cannot say you stand for the equality and dignity of gay and lesbian Americans, you are taking a stand against them.”

Mitchell Gold, a home furnishings business owner and longtime civil rights advocate, founded Faith In America in 2005 to educate Americans about the harm caused when religion is misused to justify prejudice, discrimination and violence against people based solely on their sexual orientation. In September 2008, Gold published “Crisis: 40 Stories Revealing the Personal, Social and Religious Pain and Trauma of Growing Up Gay In America” to help bring awareness and understanding to one of the greatest moral failures of our time:  Misusing religion in a way that subjects gay teens to traumatic depression, fear, rejection, persecution and even physical violence.

Church-based hate

by David P. Gushee

“‘FAG’ ran across my chest in letters eight inches high,” recalled Jared Horsford, a student at Texas Tech and one of 40 gays and lesbians who tell their stories in this book. “I stared in the mirror, bitter irony rolling through my mind about how illegible it was, bloody and backwards, in the bathroom mirror. I wouldn’t make the same mistake a few months later when I carved ‘i hate you’—backwards this time—across the same skin.”

In high school, Jared was a basketball star, student government president, church youth group leader and valedictorian. But Jared was also attracted to males rather than females. “So I fought. I got counseling; I fasted; I prayed; I dated a girl from church; I worked at a Christian summer camp.” But nothing worked. He spiraled between attending ex-gay meetings and engaging in anonymous gay sex. When his desires persisted, he would start “feeling defeated because I wasn’t getting ‘healed,’ and go home and cut myself.”

Matt Comer, who came from a conservative Baptist family in North Carolina, began experiencing same-sex attraction in his preteen years. Matt’s preacher said from the pulpit things like: “Put all the queers on a ship, cut a hole in the side and send it out to sea.” The contrast between his sexuality and the beliefs of his church and family drove Matt to thoughts of suicide. But that same religious faith told him that suicide “would have sent me straight to the depths of hell, landing me in the same spot as being gay. So, I turned to begging and pleading.”

Lying on his bed at night, “crying and praying,” Matt would ask God to spare him eternal damnation if he tried his very best not to feel attraction to males. But it didn’t work. Finally Matt told the truth to his parents. “My mother said I was crazy and sick and told me I was going to hell.” Eventually, however, his mother changed her views. “Today,” Matt writes, “she is my strength and my most avid supporter, and I know that she loves me no matter what.”

The coeditor of this collection, Mitchell Gold, grew up Jewish in Trenton, New Jersey, in the 1960s. He spent his teenage years in a cloud of depression, loneliness, fear and confusion. He tried to pass as straight but was unable to sustain the fiction. “I made a pact with myself: If I could not change and want to be with a woman by the time I was 21, I would commit suicide.”

Like a number of others who tell their stories in this book, Gold moved beyond suicidal thoughts into serious planning. Finally he received psychiatric care that helped him toward self-acceptance. “The number one reason I work toward equal rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people is because I do not want kids to go through what I did.”

What exactly do such young people go through? Gold and coeditor Mindy Drucker offer not just stories but summaries of some key data. They include the following:

• Suicide is the third-leading cause of death among 15-to-24-year-olds; for every young person who takes his or her own life, 20 more try.

• Gay teens are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers.

• Forty-five percent of gay men and 20 percent of lesbians surveyed had been victims of verbal and physical assaults in secondary school specifically because of their sexual orientation.

• Gay youth are at higher risk of being kicked out of their homes and turning to life on the streets for survival. They are more likely than their heterosexual peers to start using tobacco, alcohol and illegal drugs at an earlier age.

• Twenty-eight percent of gay students drop out of school—more than three times the national average.

All the stories in this volume focus on the particular problems faced by teenagers from religious families and congregations. Some of the stories are contemporary; others tell of long-ago hurts.

Jarrod Parker woke up one morning at Boy Scout camp (having apparently been drugged the night before) with the word “faggot” written across his forehead, “a picture of a penis at the corner of my mouth,” and further obscenities and drawings scrawled over his chest and back. Jorge Valencia, who works at a teen crisis and suicide prevention hotline, recalls getting calls from youths whose parents had told them, “I would rather have a dead son than a gay son.” Rodney Powell, a black homosexual who marched during the civil rights movement, says: “I suffered more fear and numbing anxiety from my ’secret’ as a teenager than I did from racism and segregation.”

Two of the stories are told by the parents of young adult children who died. Mary Lou Wallner lost her 29-year-old daughter Anna to suicide. Wallner was estranged from her daughter because of her inability to come to terms with her daughter’s sexuality. She writes that the last communication she had from her daughter was a letter telling her that “I was her mother only in a biological way, that I had done colossal damage to her soul with my shaming words, and that she did not want to, and did not have to, forgive me.” Wallner decided to “respect Anna’s wishes and give her the space she was asking for.” The next communication she received was the news that Anna was dead.

“What do I wish I’d done? What would I do now? Grab my toothpaste, credit card and car keys, jump in the car, drive to where she lives and tell her I love her no matter what. I did not do that, and now I never can.” Wallner and her husband now run an organization whose goal is to reunite parents with their gay children.

Elke Kennedy was awakened at 4:30 one morning in May 2007 with a call from a South Carolina hospital, where her 20-year-old son Sean had been brought. “When I finally got to see my son, my knees buckled. He was lying flat on his back, stitches on his upper lip, blood on his hair and neck, hooked up to a respirator. As I stood there holding his hand, he felt so cold. I wanted to hug him, to keep him warm. I kissed him, telling him I was there and that I loved him so much and to please wake up. I remember praying. A doctor came in and explained that the tests had revealed Sean had severe brain damage and his injuries were not survivable.”

What had happened to Sean? “As he was leaving a bar, a man named Stephen Moller got out of the car and called Sean a faggot. Then he punched Sean so hard he broke Sean’s facial bones and separated his brain from his brain stem. Sean fell backward onto the pavement, and his brain ricocheted in his head.”

Sean died. Moller was convicted only of involuntary manslaughter and was jailed in November 2007. Although his request for early parole was denied in February of this year, he will finish his modest sentence in July.

Gold and his organization “Faith in America” believe that religious hostility is at the basis of violence against gays. If the problem is religion, then religion must change.

Religious groups have a First Amendment right to teach their convictions about homosexuality. By law, if they want to teach that homosexuality is wrong, that is their business. Gay advocates usually recognize this right while asking that traditional religious communities not bring such convictions into the public arena.

Gold takes a more confrontational tack. He believes that the heart of the issue is precisely what religious groups teach within their own walls and what religious families teach within their own homes. He pleads for an end to the “misuse of religion to harm gay people.”

As an evangelical Christian whose career has been spent in the South, I must say I find it scandalous that the most physically and psychologically dangerous place to be (or even appear to be) gay or lesbian in America is in the most religiously conservative families, congregations and regions of this country. Most often these are Christian contexts. Many of the most disturbing stories in this volume come from the Bible Belt. This marks an appalling Christian moral failure.

In contrast to the love and mercy that Jesus exemplified, Christian communities offer young lesbians and gays hate and rejection. Sometimes that rejection is declared directly from the pulpit. But even when church leaders attempt to be more careful, to “hate the sin but love the sinner” (as that hackneyed formulation has it), the love gets lost. Perhaps we need to focus on refining our ability to love; maybe we are not actually capable of compartmentalizing hate.

Christ’s command that we love our neighbors, especially the most despised and rejected, means that we must respond immediately to the crisis outlined in this book. Such love requires not only that we be vigilant about the impact of individual and congregational words and actions, but also that we consider seriously the broader ramifications of Christian activism that seeks to oppose all social advances for gay and lesbian people. Many Christians act as if opposing gays and lesbians is fundamental to the church’s mission, which leads many gay and lesbian people to perceive Christianity as their mortal enemy. Is this how we want to be perceived?

Reading about the murder of Sean Kennedy in Greenville, South Carolina, helped cement a conclusion for me: there is very likely a gap between what traditionalist church leaders may intend to say when they discuss biblical references to homosexuality or the issue of gay marriage and what those listening to them actually hear. Such discussions may inflame the less discerning in the pews and lead them toward hateful and contemptuous attitudes and behavior. We must be extraordinarily careful about how we express ourselves, especially in a polarized cultural climate.

We who are Christians must love our homosexual neighbors. We must treat them as we would want to be treated. We must remember that as we do to them, we do to Jesus (Matt. 25:31ff.). We must oppose their harassment and bullying in schools, churches and clubs—everywhere. We must rebuke any Christian who speaks or acts hatefully toward gays and lesbians. We must teach Christian parents of gay children to communicate unconditional love and under no circumstances evict them from either their hearts or their homes, no matter what they believe about the moral significance of homosexual inclinations. We must seek opportunities in the church to build relationships with those who so often have encountered Christian hatred.

Crisis recounts the sad stories of dozens of young people who, like the biblical Esau, cried for a blessing from their parents, friends and churches. All too often they have not received it. All too often they have been left broken, rejected as human beings—at the hands of Christians and in the name of the Bible. Obviously we must extend basic acceptance to gay youths such as these, as well as Christian love.

Moreover, after reading these stories, I feel that Christians have something they need to request from God and from gays and lesbians, and that is forgiveness.

David P. Gushee is professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University.

Copyright © June 2009 by the Christian Century. Reprinted by permission from the June 2, 20909 issue of the Christian Century. Subscriptions: $49/yr. from P. O. Box 700, Mt. Morris, IL 61054. (800) 208-4097.

About the author: Dr. David Gushee is a distinguished university professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University. He is the author of approximately 80 articles, chapters and reviews as well as the author of 11 books. Ordained as a Baptist minister, Gushee writes for a number of religious publications.

Faith In America today challenged Miss California’s pastor to consider the disservice he does to her and others with his embrace and promotion of religion-based bigotry and prejudice toward gay Americans.

According to Carrie Prejean’s pastor, Rev. Miles McPherson, he contacted the Miss USA contestant just hours after she stated she did not believe gay Americans should be allowed to marry when asked a question during the April 19 Miss USA pageant. After being told that Ms. Prejean attends his church in California, McPherson said he sent her a text message as she was flying to New York the day after the pageant to be interviewed by the Today Show.

In his text message, McPherson stated that he was proud her – apparently for voicing her opposition to same-sex marriage during the nationally televised pageant. McPherson, who serves as pastor of The Rock Church  in San Diego, Calif., reportedly has continued to counsel the 21-year-old woman and had her appear at an April 26 service at his church. 

“We must ask Rev. McPherson if he would have been proud of Ms. Prejean if she had stated that she believes interracial marriage is wrong based on her understanding of certain religious text,” said Rodney Powell, a member of Faith In America’s board of directors who was active in The Civil Rights Movement. 

“McPherson during a recent Fox News appearance stated that civil rights for gay Americans cannot be compared with civil rights for Africans-Americans. As an African-American who marched with Martin Luther King and as a gay American, I can state unequivocally that the religion-based bigotry and prejudice once used against me as an African-American is the same bigotry and prejudice used against me today as a gay man.”

During the May 5 appearance on Fox News’ O’Reilly Factor, McPherson said that Ms. Prejean “honored her God” by voicing her opposition to same-sex marriage. He also stated during that interview that sexual orientation is behavior and discounted the possibility that anyone is born gay – even if gay Christians were to tell McPherson that their sexual orientation is the way God created them.

Mitchell Gold, founder of Faith In America, said he would like to ask McPherson a simple question:  “When did you decide to be heterosexual?”.  

“Science and common sense prove that sexual orientation is a natural part of a human’s being and not some promiscuous choice,” Gold said. “Rev. McPherson should consider the fact that many people of faith would respectfully disagree with his statements and many have come to reject attitudes based on prejudice and misunderstanding as attitudes that people of faith should honor or uphold.

“I sincerely ask McPherson, and other pastors across America who still hold such views, to consider the immense emotional, psychological and spiritual harm that is done to gay and lesbian Americans, particularly gay youth, when they hear religious leaders say that their sexual orientation puts them at odds with their God.”

Gold said that he has sent McPherson a copy of his book, “CRISIS: 40 Stories Revealing the Personal, Social and Religious Pain and Trauma of Growing Up Gay In America”, in hopes that McPherson will come to better understand the harm that is caused when religious teaching is used to justify prejudice, discrimination and violence toward gay Americans simply because of a person’s sexual orientation.

“Children at the age of 11 are taking their owns lives because they are hearing a message that gay Americans are unworthy, inferior and a threat to society,” Gold said. “To promote such attitudes is a grave disservice to people of faith and I sincerely hope that Rev. McPherson will consider the disservice that he has done to Ms. Prejean and many others with his promotion of this attitude and the fear and misunderstanding that is associated with it.”

 

Mitchell Gold, a home furnishings business owner and longtime civil rights advocate, founded Faith In America in 2005 to educate Americans about the harm caused when religion is misused to justify prejudice, discrimination and violence against people based solely on their sexual orientation. In September 2008, Gold published “Crisis: 40 Stories Revealing the Personal, Social and Religious Pain and Trauma of Growing Up Gay In America” to help bring awareness and understanding to one of the greatest moral failures of our time:  Misusing religion in a way that subjects gay teens to traumatic depression, fear, rejection, persecution and even physical violence. The book offers understanding to parents, teachers, and religious leaders about the harm being done and how society can end it. For more information, visit http://www.crisisbook.org.

]]> http://www.endtheharm.com/2009/a-pastors-disservice-to-carrie-prejean/feed http://www.endtheharm.com/2009/an-open-letter-to-carrie-prejean http://www.endtheharm.com/2009/an-open-letter-to-carrie-prejean#comments Wed, 22 Apr 2009 23:23:12 +0000 Brent http://www.endtheharm.com/?p=87 Dear Ms. Prejean,

 On a recent interview with FOXNews.com’s Courtney Friel, you stated that you did not mean to offend anyone when you stated your opposition to gay Americans having the right to marry.

 We believe you are sincere in that answer.

 But we are writing this letter in hopes that you will come to better understand why it does offend gay Americans, their families and their friends. It’s the kind of hurt that burrows deep within a person’s soul always there to remind them that there are those around them who deem them inferior, undeserving and unworthy to be treated like everyone else.

 Just imagine if the question had been about Mildred Loving’s marriage to her husband Richard?

 Mildred and Richard lived in Virginia, a state that banned interracial marriage at the time. So they went to the District of Columbia and married in 1958. Upon their return to their home in rural Virginia, they were arrested.

 Leon Bazille, the trial judge in the case, ruled in 1959 that the Lovings had violated what was considered at the time a religious tenant of civil marriage in America – that people of the opposite race should not marry because 

 “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages.” 

 Later in 1966, the Virginia Supreme Court upheld the Lovings’ conviction, with then Chief Justice Harry Lee Carrico writing these words: “Marriage, as creating the most important relation in life, as having more to do with the morals and civilization of a people than any other institution, has always been subject to the control of the Legislature.”

 Sound familiar?

 It’s interesting that this month is the same month that the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in the Loving case. The question before  them was basically the same question that we as a society face today in regard to marriage between two people of the same sex and in essence the same question before you Sunday night.

 Is it right to use deep-seated prejudice – even when such prejudice is widely accepted in society – to deny someone the same right that other Americans enjoy?

 The U.S. Supreme Court in 1967 ruling that Mildred should not be denied the right to marry the person she loved – despite the fact that interracial marriage was not widely accepted in America at that time.

 The most important question as it relates to your response to the question Sunday night is why was interracial marriage not accepted by a majority of Americans in 1967?

 It was because for years the church had taught what Judge Bazille referred to in his statement – that God did not want people of opposite races sullying the sanctity of marriage.

 I had the rare honor to meet with Mildred Loving in May 2007, just weeks before the 40th anniversary of that landmark Supreme Court decision. As we sat there in the same wood-frame house in which she and Richard resided, I asked Mildred what she thought about those people who had used their Bible to justify prejudice against her.

 She said it obviously offended her but that the pain didn’t penetrate deeply because she knew in her heart that God doesn’t want us to use religious teaching to look down upon others as inferior, unworthy or undeserving.

 In the FOXNews.com interview, you also stated that you considered your response Sunday night a test of your character and your faith.

 Mildred Loving in 2008 issued a statement which answers the question about gay Americans having the right to marry:

“Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don’t think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the ‘wrong kind of person’ for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.”

 They are the words of an extraordinary and beautiful woman who possessed rare courage, strong character and unyielding faith.

 

Brent Childers

Executive Director

Faith In America

828.612.4682

 

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