Internal religious tiffs can get bi-tchy!
South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu took a shot at Anglican leader Rowan Williams of Canterbury this weekend. Gay friendly freedom fighter Tutu’s livid that Williams didn’t stop the Anglican Communion’s “restraint” on gay clergy, saying:
Our world is facing problems – poverty, HIV and Aids – a devastating pandemic, and conflict. God must be weeping looking at some of the atrocities that we commit against one another.
In the face of all of that, our Church, especially the Anglican Church, at this time is almost obsessed with questions of human sexuality. Why doesn’t [Williams] demonstrate a particular attribute of God’s which is that God is a welcoming God.
If you think that’s controversial, consider Tutu’s anti-conservative criticism and correlation between race and sexuality:
It is a perversion if you say to me that a person chooses to be homosexual. You must be crazy to choose a way of life that exposes you to a kind of hatred. It’s like saying you choose to be black in a race-infected society.
Lily white Williams has yet to release a statement. He’s still wondering which would be worse, being black or being gay.
cwm
Intriguing. I don’t know about elsewhere: but in America, it seems we LGBTQ have “learned” (more like operant conditioning) not to draw parallels between race and sexual orientation. Because if we say so, it tends to raise the temperature on the “we’re born that way; you have a choice” rhetoric.
Perhaps comparing homophobia with anti-Semitism would be more apropos, given each community’s long history of tension between the proud radicals, v. those who “pass” or assimilate.
This conclusion however is ahistorical. Are there no blacks who attempt to pass? Hasn’t the degree of darkness of skin–or the proportion of kinkiness in one’s hairstyle–been divisive issues in African-American communities for decades?
Then there are the black GLBTQs juggling all aspects of the above. Must take an incredible amount of energy just to survive the day. As a disabled queer man, I sympathize: and also–standard disclaimer–recognize my situation is different, in many important ways.
Now I’ll sit and wait for the same brickbats the courageous Archbishop Tutu is likely already ducking.
(There! I got through the entire post without any “vicar in a tutu” references.)
msim
In South Africa, if you say “gay”, people will assume you mean “black gay”. The majority of people are black, therefore so is the gay population. So you could equate race and sexuality in a South-African context without causing offense. As for anti-semitism, South Africa has white, black and Asian Jews who have had struggles as well depending where they fall in the economical/racial ladder. Whites regardless of religion have had rights that were upheld over those of black or Asian ancestry (regardless of their religions). Things are changing slowly in these post-apartheid days.
Jean Meiring
Msim, not sure I agree with you. Since the visible gay community and just about all out gay figures in SA are white, I’m not sure your equation of black and gay in that context is very meaningful. When you say “gay” in SA, no black faces come to mind. Yes, Nataniël does, and Pieter-Dirk Uys does, and a smattering of other white faces. Also, not sure about the rainbow-hued Jewish community in SA to which you advert; as far as I know, they’re mostly from Latvia and Lithuania (c. 1880) and pretty lily-skinned. A different country?