Gay slavery
Slavery, Gay Rights, and the Bible
Having announced his support for gay marriage, President Obama now faces the wrath of people who quote the Bible in opposition.
They have reason to be worried. A growing plurality of Americans accepts gay unions, and approval is strongest among the adolescent. So, changes in law are probably inevitable.
But those who base their conflict on scripture should have a deeper cause for interest. Time and again, history has shown that people who cite the Bible as a reason to deny rights to others hold almost always clueless. Their arguments, in the judgment of posterity, have discredited them and their faith. Simply set, a static, selective reading of scripture has been no match for the dynamism of ever-expanding rights in America.
Few today would deliberate of using the Bible to defend the divine leadership of kings or to argue that seizing land from the Native Americans was ordained by God. Such views, once taken seriously, now seem self-serving and misguided.
Opponents of gay marriage can easily find Bible verses to buttress their case. They may have forgotten that before the Civil War defenders of slavery did exactly the s
Texas Officials Complicit in Gang Rape and Sexual Slavery of Lgbtq+ Black Man, ACLU Charges
Roderick Johnson, a Navy veteran serving period for a non-violent crime, has been bought and sold by gangs, raped, abused, and degraded nearly every day.
In a legal complaint that reads like a nightmare scenario from the graphic HBO prison drama ""Oz,"" the ACLU detailed the story of 33-year-old Navy veteran Roderick Johnson of Marshall, Texas, who for the last 18 months has been bought and sold by gangs, raped, abused, and degraded nearly every day.
""Prison officials knew that gangs made Roderick Johnson their sex slave and did nothing to help him,"" said Margaret Winter, Associate Director of the ACLU's National Prison Project. ""Our lawsuit shows that Texas prison officials think ebony men can't be victims and believe gay men always crave sex -- so they threw our client to the wolves.""
According to the ACLU complaint, Johnson appeared before the prison's all-white classification committee seven separate times asking to be placed in safe keeping from predatory prisoners. Instead of protecting Johnson, the ACLU complaint charges, the committee members taunted him and called him a ""d
To shed light on homosexual experiences of American slaves, author Charles Clifton suggests re-reading narratives written by former slaves. For instance, in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, former slave Equiano discloses that, on his passage from Africa, a white co-voyager named Queen “messed with me on board” and “became very attached to me, [saying that] he and I never should part.”[1] Equiano “grew very fond of” another white companion. On many nights they laid “in each other's bosoms.”[2]
About his fellow slaves, Frederick Douglass writes in My Bondage and My Freedom, “No band of brothers could have been more loving.”[3] He leaves un-detailed his “long and intimate, though by no means friendly, relation” with a former slave master.[4] And he alludes to the “out-of-the-way places . . . where slavery . . . can, and does, develop all its malign and shocking characteristics . . . without apprehension or anxiety of exposure.”[5]
Clifton observes “in these passages a familiarity with same-sex relations on the part of the authors.”[6] He remarks that there are many “unchartered areas of research” within “the realm of slave sexuality.”[7] An unbiase
Writing Gay History
Labor union activists in New York City attended the Jefferson School of Social Science, which was founded by the Communist party to educate the working class about the principles of Marxism. There, historians who had been blacklisted from the academy taught working-class adults about the history of slavery. They used evidence of slave rebellions to illustrate the power of an oppressed population to revolt against those in power. One of the students in the class, Bernard Katz, rushed home to narrate his two sons, Jonathan and William, over dinner about the heroic stories of black resistance.
For the Katz family, stories about slavery offered an historical explanation for the racial injustices that were exploding on the streets outside of their place. The history of black resistance then led the Katz family to study and publish books that highlighted this history. In response to the uprising in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles in the summer of 1965, William Katz published Eyewitness: A Living Documentary of the African American Contribution to American History, which was an anthology of testimonies by iconic African Americans from Harriet Tubman to