The immense harm caused to LGBT youth and others by religion-based bigotry must end and it must no longer be allowed to exist as the No. 1 barrier to full equality. The anti- gay religious establishment and its political cohorts can no longer use it with impunity. History serves as its moral arbiter and it has been judged as immoral and a grave social injustice.
Fellow North Carolinians,
Don’t you think it’s time that we stop using religion to beat up on gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender individuals?
Haven’t they been the victims of religion-based bigotry long enough?
We believe a majority of North Carolinians would agree that the harm caused to gay and lesbian individuals, especially youth, by placing a religious and moral stamp of disapproval on their lives has gone on for far too long and it really needs to to end. It certainly doesn’t need to be advanced in any area of our community as a state.
North Carolina lawmakers, on both sides of political spectrum, for several years now have resisted efforts to be a part of promoting this very harmful form of bigotry against the thousands of gay and lesbian individuals, youth and their families who live work and play in a state recognized for its beauty, its opportunity and its sense of fairness and equality.
Unfortunately, there are those working in North Carolina who continue their attempts to place religion-based bigotry’s awful burden on the backs of our gay and lesbian citizens, our neighbors, our co-workers, our friends and our family.
There is an entire industry of groups and organizations who have for years been promoting a societal climate of prejudice, rejection and hostility and who seek to justify – through direct or indirect inferences to certain religious teaching – to justify their harmful attitudes and actions. The Family Research Council, the National Organization of Marriage and the Christian Action League of North Carolina have been and are working in North Carolina to promote prejudice and hostility toward gay and lesbian individuals.
Faith in America attended a forum organized by the Family Research Council in 2009 at a fundamentalist church in western North Carolina. The forum was organized as part of an effort to solicit churches to support an anti-gay marriage initiative that had been proposed that year. It was shocking to sit there and listen to their speakers refer to gay and lesbian with such degradation and hostility. The presentation’s level of vitriol was made worse by the fact that such hostility was being expressed in a church setting.
If the current proposed anti-gay marriage is allowed to proceed, that is the type of hostility and prejudice that will be amplified many times over not only in our faith communities, but in all aspects of the community – schools, homes, public forums and on the airwaves. North Carolina’s good, hardworking gay and lesbian citizens, our youth, families both gay and straight, and our community as a whole must not be subjected to this incredibly corrosive climate of hostility.
Faith in America’s current billboard campaign is this organization’s attempt to prevent such a climate of rejection and condemnation toward gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender citizens from advancing in any aspect of the wonderful community we call North Carolina – be it in the home, in our schools, in our churches or in the halls of our Legislature.
We hope that you will support this effort. This is not an effort by the “gay rights lobby” but an effort that all North Carolinians who agree that no group of our citizens should be made to bear the awful burden of having their state constitution condemn them as morally inferior, undeserving of human dignity and beyond the equal and fairness that our state has long held as an ideal for which we must always strive to embrace.
To embrace such an expression of religion-based bigotry toward any minority is truly shameful. To deliver its prejudice, hostility and discrimination hrough an amendment to this state’s constitution is beyond shameful. It will harm not only our gay and lesbian citizens, youth, families, friends and co-workers, it will harm us all.
Tony Perkins serves as president of the Family Research Council, a group that has been listed as hate group. Perkin’s distortion of scientific research and callous disregard for the harm caused by his anti-gay views have been widely condemned, and rightly so. Read Faith in America Founder Mitchell Gold’s article at the Washington Post’s Faith and Values web site.
Exactly what is religion-based bigotry?
Religion-based bigotry is the foundation of anti-gay attitudes in our society and in the minds of some Americans, particularly those who have been exposed to church teaching that is interpreted to say that same-sex sexual orientation is immoral or sinful. It is the narrow-mindedness, intolerance and prejudice toward LGBT individuals that results when people allow certain religious teaching to be basis for their perception, attitudes and actions toward gay and lesbian people. It is when we allow certain religious teaching to justify a the mindset that a moral authority has shut the door to acknowledging gay and lesbian individuals as deserving of full human dignity and equality.
Religion-based bigotry exists in our minds not our hearts. We recognize that the majority of North Carolinians, especially those of faith, do not hate gays. But when gay and lesbian individuals hear statements that their sexual orientation – an innate part of their very being – somehow makes them immoral and therefore undeserving of all that is seen as the sanctity of marriage, what do you think it feels like to them? It certainly does not feel like love and respect.
The scientific and medical communities have overwhelmingly concluded that sexual orientation is an innate part of a person – its not behavior and it is not some type of lifestyle choice. Perhaps, you can ask yourself: When did I choose to become heterosexual. Of course you didn’t. Neither to gay and lesbian individuals. It is simply the way the they are emotionally, psychologically and physically wired for intimacy in a relationship. Read what the American Psychological Association has to say on the matter:
“For most people, sexual orientation emerges in early adolescence without any prior sexual experience. Although we can choose whether to act on our feelings, psychologists do not consider sexual orientation to be a conscious choice that can be voluntarily changed.” You can read more at www.apa.org.
More and more people of faith are coming to understand sexual orientation and just how harmful decades of misunderstanding, rejection and hostility have been to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender individuals. A poll commissioned by the Southern Baptist Convention in 2009 found that 49 percent of Americans no longer accept that same-sex sexual orientation as immoral behavior. Last year, a national poll found that the number had risen to 51 percent.
“There is a gradual cultural shift under way in Americans’ views toward gay individuals and gay rights. While public attitudes haven’t moved consistently in gays’ and lesbians’ favor every year, the general trend is clearly in that direction. This year, the shift is apparent in a record-high level of the public seeing gay and lesbian relations as morally acceptable.” 2010 Gallup Poll
Religion-based bigotry involves an unwillingness to open our mind to a better understanding of sexual orientation. It is when we refuse to examine whether our attitudes toward gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender individuals are based on prejudice and misunderstanding. For many people, that refusal is because they have been taught that such prejudice and condemnation is a correct response to certain religious teaching. In other words, it is the notion that God wants us to treat gay and lesbian individuals as immoral outcasts and he wants us to reject them.
A March 2 editorial in the Raleigh News and Observer presented an example of how religion-based bigotry is at play as a driving force behind the proposed anti-gay marriage amendment. The article stated that N.C. Sen. James Forrester of Gaston County, who introduced the measure in the N.C. Senate earlier this year, “has tried to get such a ban passed for years. He’s explained, in the past, that he’s ‘not a homophobe.’ It’s just that ‘The Lord intended for a family to have one man and one woman.’ However, not content merely to see one reading of the Bible locked into the state constitution, other backers of Forrester’s amendment range freely into outright bigotry. For example, Bill James, a Mecklenburg County commissioner, told The N&O’s Lynn Bonner that the amendment would place on homosexuals ‘a big letter of shame on the behavior. We don’t want them here. We don’t want them marrying.’ The amendment would pass with public support to spare, James said, because voters know the difference “between perversity and diversity.”
The editorial is correct – the proposed anti-gay marriage initiative is indeed an expression of bigotry – but it by the words of Forrester and James it is not just bigotry. It is religion-based bigotry as it clearly is putting a religious and moral stamp of disapproval on the lives of gay and lesbian North Carolinians.
Through the publication of our founder’s book, “CRISIS: 40 Stories Revealing the Personal, Social and Religious Pain and Trauma of Growing up Gay in America“, and our work across America during the previous five years, the overriding premise behind our efforts and this billboard campaign is irrefutable:
Nothing is more painful and traumatic for gay and lesbian individuals, especially youth, than to live in a societal climate of such religious and moral condemnation, prejudice, rejection and inequality.
By proposing that such harmful attitude and actions be embedded into the very fabric of North Carolina’s founding legal document, North Carolina lawmakers will be sending a very clear message to gay and lesbian citizens, youth and families – North Carolina will not only place that devastating stamp of religious and moral disapproval on the their lives but also a legal stamp of disapproval.
Nothing could be more hurtful to our gay and lesbian citizens, youth and families. For lawmakers of a state that has become nationally recognized as a wonderful place to live and do business, nothing could be more shameful.
Our billboard campaign is asking North Carolina lawmakers and citizens to take an important and historic stand against the promotion of closed-mindedness, hostility and prejudice – the results of religin-based bigotry. Rather, we ask our lawmakers and citizenry to follow history as the arbiter of religion-based bigotry and the lesson that equality and human dignity are by far the superior moral goals within our society.
See Faith in America’s ads and billboards that have been publiished in communities across America.
Religion-based bigotry has been around for a long time
Religion-based bigotry against LGBT people is simply wrong. It causes harm to individuals of a minority which finds itself the target of its moral and religious stamp of disapproval and all of society when such prejudice and hostility is embedded in the social fabric of a nation’s consciousness.
It becomes even more oppressive when the societal climate it helps foster – one of rejection, prejudice and discrimination – is allowed to flourish in our laws and government policies.
The particular religious teachings of any given religious majority cannot be used to deny minority groups their civil rights in a democracy. California Supreme Court Justice Joyce L. Kennard said it best in her concurring opinion in the May 2008 ruling for marriage equality:
“The architects of our federal and state Constitutions understood that widespread and deeply rooted prejudices may lead majoritarian institutions to deny fundamental freedoms to unpopular minority groups, and that the most effective remedy for this form of oppression is an independent judiciary charged with the solemn responsibility to interpret and enforce the constitutional provisions guaranteeing fundamental freedoms and equal protection. “
Religion-based bigotry’s history in America is undeniable. Older North Carolinians, particular those of faith communities, are aware of how certain biblical teaching has been misused in the past against other minorities. Many can remember when interpretation of certain passages in the Bible helped justify and promote the attitude that African Americans were inferior and undeserving of full human dignity. Many can remember when interpretation of certain passages in the Bible helped justify and promote the attitude that women were somehow inferior to men and was used against them as they sought their right to vote and to be treated equally and fairly.
And of course many of us of course remember how interpretation of certain religious teaching was allowed to promote the notion that whites and black should not marry.
Faith in America traveled a short distance from Raleigh in 2007 to a small wood-frame house in Virginia where the late Mildred Loving, an icon in the Civil Rights Movement, lived at the time. Ms. Loving told us how painful it was for her to know how religious teaching had once been used to justify hostility and discrimination against her and her family.
Her and her husband married in Washington, D.C. in 1958 and later moved to Virginia where they were arrested were arrested because Virginia at that time banned interracial marriage. The trial judge in the case clearly injected religion-based bigotry in the case when he declared in his ruling that “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. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”
When Faith in America spoke with Ms. Loving in 2007, she told us how painful it was to know that people who adhered to the same faith that she adhered to had used certain teachings from that faith to condemn her as inferior and unequal. Later in her own words, she stated:
“My generation was bitterly divided over something that should have been so clear and right. The majority believed that what the judge said, that it was God’s plan to keep people apart, and that government should discriminate against people in love. But I have lived long enough now to see big changes. The older generation’s fears and prejudices have given way, and today’s young people realize that if someone loves someone they have a right to marry.”
A new documentary released this year tells her story. You can more at http://www.tribecafilm.com/festival/features/Nancy_Buirski_The_Loving_Story.html
Anyone reflecting on times in our history in which certain religious teaching has been used to justify prejudice and discrimination, can look back today and see how wrong and how harmful it was to individuals like Mildred Loving and society at large. We can know that for certain from the apologies that have issued for such misuses of religious teaching against minorities based ethnicity, race, gender and religious affiliation.
Ethincity – Native Americans…Apology by U.S. Catholic Bishops in 1977
“All of us need to examine our own perceptions of Native Americans–how much they are shaped by stereotypes, distorted media portrayals or ignorance. We fear that prejudice and insensitivity toward Native peoples is deeply rooted in our culture and in our local churches.”
US Bishops: A Time for Remembering
Statement of the U.S. Catholic Bishops on American Indians, May 4, 1977
Race – African-Americans – 1995 apology by Southern Baptists
Be it further RESOLVED, That we affirm the Bibles teaching that every human life is sacred, and is of equal and immeasurable worth, made in Gods image, regardless of race or ethnicity (Genesis 1:27), and that, with respect to salvation through Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for (we) are all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28); and
Be it further RESOLVED, That we lament and repudiate historic acts of evil such as slavery from which we continue to reap a bitter harvest, and we recognize that the racism which yet plagues our culture today is inextricably tied to the past; and
Be it further RESOLVED, That we apologize to all African-Americans for condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism in our lifetime; and we genuinely repent of racism of which we have been guilty, whether consciously (Psalm 19:13) or unconsciously (Leviticus 4:27);
Resolution On Racial Reconciliation
On The 150th Anniversary Of The Southern Baptist Convention
June 1995
Gender – Women – Pope John Paul II apology to women 2005
“Unfortunately, we are heirs to a history which has conditioned us to a remarkable extent. In every time and place, this conditioning has been an obstacle to the progress of women. Women’s dignity has often been unacknowledged and their prerogatives misrepresented; they have often been relegated to the margins of society and even reduced to servitude. This has prevented women from truly being themselves and it has resulted in a spiritual impoverishment of humanity.”
Religious affiliation:
And should we not also regret, among the shadows of our own day, the responsiblity shared by so many Christians for grave forms of injustice and exclusion? It must be asked how many Christians really know and put into practice the principles of the Church’s social doctrine.
John Paul II, “Tertio Millennio Adveniente (As the Third Millennium Draws Near),”
1994-NOV-14
Religious affiliation – John Hagee apology to Catholics 2008
“Hagee, an evangelical who has been outspoken in his support for Israel, had enraged Catholics with statements about the “apostate church” and the “great whore.” He said in his letter that he meant neither of those to apply to the Catholic Church.”
Media Matters may 14 2008
Billy Graham apology to Jews
About the same time, another shocking revelation broke into the news. The National Archives made public thousands of tape recordings of conversations of the late President Richard Nixon, who was notorious for his slurs against Jews. On some of these tapes, were exchanges between him and the famed evangelist, Rev. Billy Graham. In 1972, Graham agreed with Nixon that our nation’s problems lie with the satanic Jews. Both accused Jews of dominating the media, one of the oldest anti-Jewish canards. Graham went on to blame Jews for putting out pornographic stuff. He told Nixon that the Jewish stranglehold has to be broken or the country will go down the drain. He admitted to Nixon that Jews do not really know his true feelings about them.
“Although I have no memory of the occasion, I deeply regret comments I apparently made in an Oval Office conversation with President Nixon. They do not reflect my views, and I sincerely apologize for any offense caused by the remarks. Throughout my ministry, I have sought to build bridges between Jews and Christians. I will continue to strongly support all future efforts to advance understanding and mutual respect between our communities.”
New York Times, Sunday, March 3, 2002
The history of religion-based bigotry is clear. So is the judgement history places on this heinous form of bigotry.
North Carolina’s lawmakers have a very clear choice. They can embrace a form of bigotry that has been deemed by history as morally corrupt and one that today is immensely harmful to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender citizens. Or our lawmakers can embrace the ideals of human dignity, fairness and equality for all and seek to better the lives of so many individuals and families who call North Carolina their home.
How does it harm gay youth, their families and others?
Imagine telling a 13-year-old child who is just coming to understand that his or her sexual orientation is different from her peers or her siblings that there is something terrible and awful about the very person they were created to be. That it is so ugly and bad that they will never be treated with the human dignity and respect of others. Something so shameful that they will never be able to experience the sanctity that is seen by others in a lifelong, committed relationship with someone they want to share their life with.
More than a million LGBT teens today are suffering debilitating depression because families, pastors, peers and elected officials promote a societal climate of rejection and condemnation toward them. Suicide rates amongst LGBT youth are four times higher than heterosexual youth. It truly is a national disgrace. It truly is shameful that this is still going on in America. We must not allow it to go on in North Carolina.
LGBT people are victims of discrimination and bigotry, which is justified and promoted often by religious teaching that says homosexuality is immoral, sinful or an abomination. It is a debilitating form of oppression that brings to bear an incredibly destructive force to bear on innocent lives.
Learn more about the harm by religion-based bigotry in these books.
In 2008, Faith in America Founder Mitchell Gold printed and self-published the book, “CRISIS: 40 Stories Revealing the Personal, Social, and Religious Pain and Trauma of Growing Up Gay in America.” Traveling the country promoting CRISIS, we have seen first-hand the pain that so many gay and lesbian people, especially youth, are suffering at the hand of reloigion-based bigotry. This is what Dr. David Gushee, a Christian ethicist, author and Southern Baptist minister wrote about CRISIS in the June 2009 issue of Christian Century “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. Many of the most disturbing stories in this volume come from the Bible Belt. This marks an appalling Christian moral failure.”
Faith in America has spoken with thousands of gay and lesbian individuals, especially youth, who have relayed the emotional and psychological pain and trauma that they have experienced from religion-based bigotry and those who promote it and also those who are complicit in the harm it causes through their silence or unwillingness to stand against it.
The possibility of being fired from a job is in ways harmful to a person but it cannot compare to the type pain and trauma associated with being condemned or rejected as morally inferior by a parent, your school peers or society at large.
An article in the Oct. 5, 2010 edition of the Washington post entitled “As life experiences of gay teens illustrate, the world is still far from accepting” included the following observations:
“Trina Cole remembers the head-to-toe, white linen outfit she wore to junior prom.
And how the outfit looked after she was attacked, how the cranberry juice her classmates threw at her as they yelled and screamed and shoved her in front of everyone made it look as though she were bleeding, even though it only felt that way.
Rejection, harassment and humiliation – first by her conservative Washington family and then by tormentors in high school and at a college in West Virginia – have left scars all over her arms.”
Cody J. Sanders is a Baptist minister and Ph.D. student in Pastoral Theology and Counseling at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, TX. Last October after the rash of gay teen suicides that received national attention for weeks, Sanders published an article entitled “Why Anti-Gay Bullying is a Theological Issue And the moral imperative of anti-bullying preaching, teaching, and activism.” In the article he states:
“While a majority of LGBT people may avoid ever becoming the victim of a violence, none will be able to avoid the psychic terror that is visited upon LGBT people with each reminder that this world is one in which people are maimed and killed because of their sexual and gender identities. It is this psychic terror that makes life so difficult for many LGBT people. It is this psychic terror that does the heavy lifting of instrumental, systematic violence. It intends to silence and to destroy from within.
“Anti-gay bullying is a theological issue because it has a theological base. 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.
“I cannot count the number of times I have heard well-meaning, good-hearted people respond to this appeal, saying, “Things are a lot better for gay people today than they were several years (or decades) ago. In time, our society (or churches) will come around on this issue.” To these friends and others, I must say, “It’s time.” For Lucas, Brown, Clementi, Walsh, and Chase the time is up. For these teens and the myriad other bisexual, transgender, lesbian and gay youth lost to suicide, the waiting game hasn’t worked so well.
“As simply as I can state the matter: The longer we wait to respond, the more young people die.”
The thought of a young teenager taking their life for any reason should make us shudder. The thought that a life was ended because we as a society have allowed an awful form of bigotry and oppression to bear on their young lives is truly horrendous.
While suicide is the most tragic consequence of such oppression, there are many other harms inflicted upon gay and lesbian youth, their families and other gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender individuals that can take other tragic forms of harm.
According to recent research by Caitlyn Ryan with the Family Acceptance Project, LGBT teens who are highly rejected by their parents and caregivers are at very high risk for health and mental health problems when they become young adults as they are more than 8 times as likely to have attempted suicide; and nearly 6 times as likely to report high levels of depression.
This is the very real and very painful emotional, psychological and physical harm that is brought to bear on gay and lesbian youth when they face the type rejection and condemnation that is promoted within our society by expressions of religion-based bigotry.
Make no mistake – the proposed anti-gay marriage initiative is an expression of such bigotry. It will unleash a torrent of ill-will in North Carolina against children in our schools and homes, parents with gay and lesbian children, our friends whom we cherish, our co-workers in the workplace and those who we worship with in our faith communities.
We appeal to the conscience of our lawmakers in Raleigh and the citizenry of our great state to stand with us and many others who do not want to see this type harm being waged in our communities.
How can I assist Faith in America in helping end this awful form of oppression?
First, you need to contact your elected state senator and representative and let them know that North Carolina should not be a state that embraces bringing harm to bear on gay and lesbian individuals or any other population within its citizenry. Ask them to please not put North Carolina’s gay youth, their families and others in harm’s way.
*** You can find contact information for your local state representative here
*** You can find contact information for your local state senator here
• Encourage your friends, family, co-workers and those in your faith community to also contact their representatives in Raleigh.
• Write a letter to-the-editor briefly stating your opposition to any attempt by our elected officials to promote religion-based bigotry toward gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender citizens of North Carolina.
• Talk to your pastor and let him or her how you feel about using church teaching to promote attitudes of rejection and condemnation and how harmful that can be to those around you.
• Begin a conversation at home, in the workplace, in your faith community about religion-based bigotry and the immense pain it causes individuals and society. Help us educate people about its history and its clear moral mandate to oppose such oppression. Use Mitchell Gold’s book “CRISIS” or Jimmy Creech’s new book, “Adam’s Gift” as a conversation-starter about this important topic.
• Commit to personally sharing a copy of CRISIS and/or “Adam’s Gift” with your pastor and others in your faith community.
• Use your online social network to encourage fellow North Carolinians to join this effort to prevent North Carolina from being a place where the harm caused by religion-based bigotry is anyway justified or promoted.