This church doesn't exist yet. Yet I am hopeful.
The establishment of a GLBT church would send a powerful signal of self-determination, independence and strength to all concerned. I cannot imagine that the founder of this church would go down in history as a saint, at least within the denomination and certainly with the same moral inevitability such advocates point out is their due.
Let us stipulate that inevitability. What does it mean then if this course is not taken? What does it mean for the actual celebration of Christian faith if those whose interpretation of Christianity fail to establish their own denomination but depend upon the law and the coercive powers of the State? I should pause a while, perhaps a day or a week to truly reflect on the notion, but I already have my conclusion. This conclusion is based upon the parallel of my own African forebears in their role as the negro race in America. Our path, unique as it was may or may not serve as a proper example, but I cannot ignore the thought illustrated by Harold Cruse in his works on plurality. Cruse said that the failures of Reconstruction and the post-Reconstruction Era were due to the failing of legislation of the Blair Bill. The Blair Bill would have established a fund and precedent for 'separate but equal' educational facilities for the negro race in the South. Cruse argues convincingly that the establishment of black run, owned and operated schools would have not only educated but also provided the critical management skills necessary for independence within the negro race. That the failure of those ex-slaves to run their own schools established in them a permanent cultural dependency that wasn't eliminated for 100 years. Instead of black power consciousness expressed in the Ocean Hill Brownsville context, that kind of news would have been made a century earlier - so goes Cruse' argument with which I agree. So if the destruction of the Negro Problem could have happened in 1868 instead of 1968, we might have had our first black President in 1908 instead of 2008. Imagine that.
Instead, America chose, more or less, the path of integration rather than independence. There is something to be said for integration, in fact a great deal. But the problem with integration which I and many of my contemporaries touch upon from time to time, is that if the thing you integrate into has problems with integrity, there is no alternative but protest and reform. You cannot abolish that which you do not control. What's worse, is that you might have a generation grow up thinking that there is no acceptable independent alternative at all. The classic example of this is the use of the term "the master's tools" - such people actually believe that institutions such as banks or real-estate agencies and even capitalism itself is something that belongs to white folks and works for white folks because they are white. To them, there is no such thing as 'black capitalism', ie capitalism itself is a species of white supremacy.
One percieves such twisted logic at the heart of that political movement which seeks in vain to destroy Chick Fil A and Westboro Community Church without commensurate effort to raise their own churches and fry their own chickens. The answer I suspect such politicos must embrace axiomatically is that Christianity itself is wholly and entirely incompatible with homosexuality and all forms of non-normative sexual expression. That's a very large presumption which I doubt, given my understanding that all have sinned and fallen short of the Kingdom of God which was what I was taught. Even with a less extreme version, parallel again to the destruction of the negro race, that no Christian church could abide sanctifying certain marriages on essentialist bases, the precedent for the establishment of a new denomination stands clear. Abyssinian Baptists were founded in 1908. African Methodist Episcopalians made their break in 1787.
It seems quite a stretch for me to assert that the practice of integration necessarily breaks the integrity of institutions that have heretofore discriminated. That can only be the case in which the matter of discrimination is more than mere taste or convention but principle. Such doctrines, such as the ordination of women in my own Episcopal Church were resolved through the slow deliberate process of reform and protest. And I am aware of one of the bitter beneficiaries of such affirmative actions. While her story may or may not be characteristic, the end result may be indicative of how unsatisfactory reform is, for those raring to go. Now.
At some point, any frustration and outrage that doesn't consider the alternative to reform cannot be taken seriously. If that alternative is the establishment of separate but equal, I see that as the most morally fit. The alternative that seeks allies in the destruction of that which will not reform, well that's a choice which holds more dangerous consequences. For the sake of gay marriage which claims to be an affirmation of love, one is hard pressed to find a more foolish choice.
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