In wake of horrific anti-gay violence, MIND’s mission more urgent than ever
Still reeling from the heartbreaking news of six teenage suicides, members of the LGBT community awoke on Saturday to headlines about the latest anti-gay hate crime: three men brutally attacked in the Bronx, each lured to a location where they were tortured and sodomized for hours in punishment for being gay. Yet that is not all: the Bronx attack is one of three assaults on gay men that happened last week. The other two were in neighborhoods long deemed to be gay-friendly, and one took place in the Stonewall Inn, the namesake of the bar and the riots that sparked the modern gay rights movement in 1969.
Gay rights activists organized two protest actions in response to this latest wave of violence. We are proud to say that MIND members took part in both. Photos are on the MIND Facebook page.
MIND and other groups in the New York Annual Conference have been planning a symposium on hate crimes for over a year. This latest wave of violence makes My Brother's Keeper: People of Faith Confront Hate Crimes more urgently necessary than ever. The event is November 20. Read more and register for it here.
On Friday, October 8, hundreds of people took part in a die-in at Grand Central Station in the middle of the evening rush hour. The message was simple and powerful: homophobia kills. As demonstrators lay on the floor, the names of the victims of anti-gay violence were read aloud and repeated by everyone there. The police, who reneged on an earlier agreement to allow activists to hang a banner and hold the action without arrests, instead tore down the banner and threatened arrest if people did not get up. Some of the organizers were inexplicably arrested. As the demonstrators got back on their feet, a chant of “civil rights now” started and echoed powerfully through the cavernous hall for several minutes before the police again threatened to arrest everyone who did not move. The entire action, which lasted less than 10 minutes, took place while a heterosexual couple was having wedding photos taken on the balcony of the station’s eastside staircase – a poignant reminder of heterosexual privilege and the rights still denied those laying and chanting below.
On Saturday, October 9, hundreds of LGBT activists gathered again to protest the three anti-gay attacks of the past week. With candles and signs they marched from the corner of 25th Street and 9th Avenue in Manhattan, the site of one attack, to the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street, the site of a second attack. As they walked the mile and a quarter through neighborhoods that LGBT people have sought out as safe haven for decades, they repeated a call and response chant led by Lt. Dan Choi: “I am. Somebody. I demand. Full equality. Right here. Right now.” It was a moving self-affirmation for a people that feels increasingly expendable and vulnerable. A people allowed to exist and serve in institutions like the U.S. military and the United Methodist Church only invisibly, praised for their work but then tossed out if they dare to speak the truth of who they are. A people denied basic human and civil rights in most of the United States and subject to hate violence even in the heart of its most famous gathering place.
A people vilified by political and religious leaders, and made second-class citizens in policy and law. Case in point: On Saturday, the very day that New Yorkers learned of the sadistic attack in the Bronx and the day we marched chanting “I am somebody,” the Republican candidate for governor in New York, Carl Paladino, said this to a group of Orthodox Jewish leaders to repeated applause:
We must stop pandering to the pornographers and the perverts, who seek to target our children and destroy their lives. I didn't march in the gay parade this year… That's not the example that we should be showing our children, certainly not in our schools….I don't want them to be brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid or successful option. It isn't.
Is it any wonder that school children pick on LGBT classmates when they are told by leading politicians that homosexuals are pornographers and perverts? Are we surprised that the Latin King Goonies agree with Paladino that being gay isn’t a “valid” option, an opinion enforced by their means of choice, box cutters, chains, pipes and bats?
Paladino’s insistence, in the same speech, that he doesn’t want to “hurt homosexual people in any way” is pathetic, the hallmark of the privileged ad prejudiced who refuse to take responsibility for the link between their words and the actions of others who take their words seriously.
Churches as well as politicians bear blame for the hostility and violence against LGBT people. “I find it difficult to believe that even those among us with a vibrant imagination can muster the creative energy to picture a reality in which anti-gay violence and bullying exist without the anti-gay religious messages that support them,” wrote Cody Sanders in a recent opinion piece, “Why Anti-Gay Bullying is a Theological Issue.”
There has been some response from religious leaders in the wake of the recent violence, but many more remain silent or, worse, untroubled by their homophobic beliefs. The leadership of our own conference remains silent, despite repeated pleas from MIND over several years to speak out in solidarity with LGBT people. Our annual conference resolution Ministry to the Marginalized, which would have committed the conference to a public statement of its longstanding position that the UMC is wrong in its condemnation and exclusion of LGBT people, was ruled out of order by our bishop. Yet that message is exactly what people of faith must proclaim more loudly than ever now to do whatever we can to help stop the carnage.
It is up to all of us, in each congregation, to make sure that message gets out to every LGBT person and to every school child in America – every potential bully, every potential victim. We must dissent from the UMC’s homophobia, visibly, vocally, relentlessly.
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