Class, Race, and Addicts Who Prefer Eliminating LGBTQ People

In response to the President publicly supporting marriage equality, it’s open season for right-wing pastors to publicly preach violence toward LGBT people.

Brown University political scientist Michael Tesler has previously shown, as in a recent issue of The American Journal of Political Science, that President Obama has such an affect on race-conscious voters that they adjust their positions on health care reform, taxes, Supreme Court justices, and even a president’s dog because of him.

Tesler’s recent analysis of surveys on marriage equality (“The Spillover of Racialization into Marriage Equality”) demonstrates that Obama’s support pulls blacks toward equality, but also pushes white “racial conservatives” away.

The most rabid of them feel free to spout the same hatred toward LGBT people as they do toward the not-white president.

On May 6^th at Berean Baptist Church in Fayetteville, NC, Pastor Sean Hayes’ sermon recommended maiming: "Dads, the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist…. Man up – give him a good punch." Later he added: "When your daughter starts acting too butch, you rein her in.”

On May 10^th, Mississippi state Rep. Andy Gipson, a Baptist minister, posted Leviticus 20:13 on his Facebook page in response to the President: "If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads." In the ensuing uproar Gipson stood firm: "To be clear, I want the world to know that I do not, cannot, and will not apologize for the inspired truth of God's Word."

On May 27^th Dennis Leatherman of Mountain Lake Baptist Church in Oakland, Maryland in a fifty-minute sermon proclaimed: “we need to put them all in prisons and we ought to fence them in.” He’d prefer worse, but the Bible constrains him from his fleshly desire to kill:

“To ... have a tendency to be effeminate or homosexual is just as wicked as to have a tendency to be a womanizer. Sinful nature does not justify sinful behavior…. First of all, there is a danger of reacting in the flesh, of responding not in a scriptural, spiritual way, but in a fleshly way. Kill them all. Right? I will be very honest with you. My flesh kind of likes that idea. But it grieves the Holy Spirit. It violates Scripture.”

Charles L. Worley of Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, North Carolina in his May 13^th sermon preferred elimination of homosexuals in concentration camps. "Build a great, big, large fence -- 150 or 100 mile long -- put all the lesbians in there…. Do the same thing for the queers and the homosexuals and have that fence electrified so they can't get out...and you know what, in a few years, they'll die out...do you know why? They can't reproduce!"

Worley’s flesh spoke too: “It makes me pukin’ sick to think about -- I don’t even know whether or not to say this in the pulpit -- can you imagine kissing some man?”

Pastor Curtis Knapp of Seneca, Kansas’ New Hope Baptist Church, however, found no biblical basis to refrain from execution. After referencing Leviticus, he added: “They should be put to death. Oh, so you’re saying we should go out and start killing them? No. I’m saying the government should. They won’t, but they should.”

These pastors must be competing for attention for their indistinguishable lives and ministries with Topeka’s notorious Fred Phelps clan. They’re like drug-pushers who need buyers to stay in business, followers to make them feel like Big Daddies.

It’s as if they can’t help being obsessed with LGBTQ people. They have a personal, inexpressible stake, which begs the question of their security in their own sexual attractions.

It’s coupled with coming out against the one they’ve turned into the face of darkness, Barack Obama.

For they’re the religiously addicted. They feel so righteous in their cause that they have no feelings about blunting their bigotry, hatred, destructiveness, violence, and inhumanity.

They’re heavily addicted users desperate for the “high” that preaching righteousness gives them especially when they feel threatened, feel their lives are accomplishing so little. Remember, John Bradshaw: “The high of righteousness is the same as the high of cocaine.”

They have no interest in your arguments about what the Bible, god, or history actually says. They must cling desperately to their interpretations as unquestionable truth.

Meanwhile an increasingly pro-LGBT culture, now including a black president, acts as if their drug is past its expiration date and no basis for feeling they’re on the side of History or Justice.

Rev. Mel White, veteran activist against religious oppression recently warned columnist Chris Hedges (“The War on Gays”) that classism and LGBT oppression are intertwined.

“The culture of hate feeds off the frustrations and feelings of betrayal among the impoverished, the unemployed, the underemployed and the hopeless…. As the economy unravels, as hundreds of millions of Americans confront the fact that things will not get better, life for those targeted by this culture of hate will become increasingly difficult.”

LGBT oppression is also used to maintain racism, and not just since President Obama embraced marriage equality.

We learned in March from internal board memos that the leading group opposing marriage equality, the very white-led National Organization for Marriage, exploits black people for their purposes. “The strategic goal of the project is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks — two key Democratic constituencies,” a memo says. This would: “provoke the gay marriage base into responding by denouncing these [black] spokesmen and women as bigots.”

When ministers of color invoke “traditional family values” to collude in LGBT oppression, they’ve ignored white criticism of families of color and promote an image our culture pictures as a very white, suburban, family of privilege in 1950s nostalgia.

Oppressive systems function by encouraging groups they oppress to join in the oppression of others rather than upset the system. Thereby the privileged who benefit from keeping others down aren’t threatened themselves.