September 28, 2006 - Issue 199
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Julian Bond sees a frightening level of homophobia
in the black community
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Life long civil rights activist, teacher, thinker, writer and NAACP Board Chairman, Julian Bond continues to speak out for the civil rights of gay people.
The 66-year-old Bond’s latest expression of his belief that gay rights are civil rights comes in an interview with AOL’s Black Voices, published this week (September 25, 2006).
Black Voices asked Bond if it was his objective to change the mind of those who believe in Biblical literalism and others about gay marriage. He responded by saying,
”No, it's my objective to say, you can believe whatever you want to believe but marriage is a CIVIL affair, and you don't have a right to impose your rights on the civil society. If you want to say gay people can't be married in your church, OK. But you can't say they can't be married in City Hall because of something you read in the Bible.”
Bond’s support for gay rights is not new. In an Ebony Magazine article he authored in July of 2004, he answered his own question: Are Gay Rights Civil Rights?
”Of course they are.
"'Civil rights’ are positive legal prerogatives – the right to equal treatment before the law. These are rights shared by all – there is no one in the United States who does not – or should not - share in these rights.”
”Gay and lesbian rights are not ‘special rights’ in any way. It isn’t ‘special’ to be free from discrimination – it is an ordinary, universal entitlement of citizenship. The right not to be discriminated against is a common-place claim we all expect to enjoy under our laws and our founding document, the Constitution. That many had to struggle to gain these rights makes them precious – it does not make them special and it does not reserve them only for me or restrict them from others.”
Black Voices advanced the belief that the Civil Rights movement had its foundation in the black church. Black Voices asked Bond how gay rights can advance when there is so much opposition coming from the pulpit.
”The Civil Rights Movement had the support of a number of ministers but typically, if you look at Montgomery in 1965 and '66 or Birmingham in '63, it was a minority of ministers who were engaged in the movement and who had their congregation engaged. The rest of them are sitting on the sidelines saying, 'Good, keep it up, I'm with you,' or doing nothing at all. And that pretty much is the condition now. [The clergy] is a fairly conservative bunch of people. They’re not as much into social change as we'd like to think they are.”
Dr. Bond also asserted his long-held belief that a change in law is something that must happen if a movement is going to succeed. But he recognized that a challenge to the gay rights movement is the thinking about homosexuality in the black community.
”You've got to have a change in attitudes primarily because there's a frightening level of homophobia in the black community. And there's a frightening level of ignorance. Because there are many people who believe that somehow gay and lesbian people choose to be gay and lesbian. And that's just nonsense. And it goes against all the science that we know about. And how people can believe it is just a mystery to me.”
Bond has always believed an important part of understanding the advancement of civil rights for any group of people is removing the idea that giving rights to one group damages another group’s rights. In regard to this issue of rights gained and lost, Bond told Black Voices the following:
“I don’t think we do it in order for them to become your allies. I think you do it in the hopes that they’ll become your allies. But there are no guarantees that they will. And experience teaches us that many of them will not. No matter who the ‘they’ is. You don’t do it for any profit for yourself; you do it because it is right.”
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