8 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE DECEMBER 10, 1993

EDITORIAL

What hath SOAR wrought?

wrought (rôt) 1. formed; fashioned 2. shaped by hammering or beating

-Webster's New World Dictionary

Racism is like a disease. Unless we pay attention, we are rarely aware of how it infiltrates our thoughts, affects our actions, and hampers our good intentions. The recent focus on anti-racism training in Cleveland's lesbian and gay community is long overdue and a necessary activity to let us move forward in the struggle for equality. It is unfortunate that the group which has spoken out the loudest about this issue has done it in such a way to offend and alienate the very people it sought to teach.

SOAR (Stop Oppression and Racism) is a women's collective organization formed in the spring of this year to teach themselves about individual and institutionalized racism and work to remove it from the community.

SOAR's first gay target was Cleveland's Lesbian-Gay Community Service Center. Spurred on by an op-ed article that board member Peggi Cella wrote in the summer (printed by What She Wants but not the Chronicle), the Center was denounced as racist.

A "fishbowl" meeting was arranged by SOAR for September 10 to begin teaching people how to recognize racism. The Chronicle, in the interest of information dissemination and community building, reported on the fishbowl, and was soundly denounced for violating safe space and for being racist.

A meeting was arranged for September 30 with the publisher and the managing editor of the Chronicle. What transpired was a 90-minute tirade of accusations and name-calling from SOAR followed by a list of demands.

On October 18, SOAR set its sights on Stonewall Cleveland. During a Town Meeting whose agenda was women's issues, panelist Peggi Cella shifted to her oft-repeated racism speech and the meeting disintegrated with accusations flying.

SOAR arranged an October 30 anti-racism training session with accredited outside facilitators. This training was attended by more than 100 people, including the entire Chronicle staff. The exercises and lessons provided by the facilitators were informative and nurturing, unlike the smug and degrading rationales that SOAR had been sharing previously.

However, as the morning session came to a close, the session's "safe space" ground rules collapsed after Chronicle publisher Martha Pontoni expressed personal feelings, and Cella took issue with them. Instead of respecting and restoring safe space, the SOAR collective demonstrated personal prejudice by physically surrounding Pontoni and attempting to remove her from the room. Many of the people left the session very shaken.

Since then, some people at the Center and Stonewall, as well as the Chronicle staff, have decided that continued anti-racism work is needed, but SOAR's negative tactics are not.

SOAR anointed itself master teacher of anti-racism, when as a group it is still learning about privilege-witness the initial decision to make the October 30 training session "women only" and later specifying tiered pricing that was higher for men. Their most destructive tactic has been the stirring up of guilt and personal inadequacies of individuals in the community. During the September 30 meeting with the Chronicle,

SPEAK OUT

when we objected to the personal abuse and verbal beatings, we were actually told that it was a necessary part of the process to unlearn racist behavior. And that we would "feel good" after it was over! Astoundingly, this statement came from a social worker who has worked with battered women!

No, we did not feel good when it was over, we felt that we were taken advantage of by a group with its own agenda and prejudices. This feminist collective cannot understand or deal with any hierarchical organization, even one run by a woman. "Racism" is the buzzword that includes any real or imagined oppression-racial, gender or economic.

The well-intentioned white gay and lesbian community quickly fell in line when it should have been questioning these misguided rule-makers. The Chronicle erred too, abandoning journalistic skepticism so that we wouldn't be painted with a white-tar brush. It is precisely this sort of community hypnosis that is dangerous. How many people have since regretted blindly acquiescing to the rants of Sen. Joseph McCarthy during his communist witch-hunts of the 1950s? Today, we must ask how SOAR was able to threaten the structure of three important community organizations, and perhaps others as well.

The racism message applies to all of us, even oppressed queer people. Straight people don't "get it" unless they get educated about the gay struggle. White people don't "get it" until they get educated about the struggle of people of color.

There are many ways to educate without preying on guilt and debasing your own kind. SOAR hasn't learned that lesson yet.

The Church vs. the Gospel

by Rev. Dan Geslin

Three religious events have hit our lesbian-gay community recently-and they are all bad news. The Vatican decreed that no member of the Roman Church has the basic human right of personal conscience on any matter relating to one's own sexuality. White fundamentalists in Cincinnati have succeeded in mounting a political campaign to repeal our civil rights that will probably go state-wide. While here in Cleveland, four African-American clergymen claiming to speak for the entire Black Church were headlined as "declaring war on homosexuals." (So much for following the Prince of Peace.) Where's the Good News, the "Gospel" in all this?

Jesus and the first Christians faced this same oppression. It's called patriarchy.

Patriarchy ("father-rule") is a system of social organization in which power is concentrated at the top and lorded over the people below. Historically, straight white men were the only people who could exercise this power over others. (There were exceptions: in the 1500s, for example, Queen Elizabeth was a female patriarch.) Nowadays, more and more women and even some people of color can hold positions of power in corporations, churches and community organizations if they honor the ways of the Patriarchy.

Jesus said, "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so with you. For whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave." (Mark 10:42-44)

In ancient Mediterranean cultures, society was organized around the patriarchal

household. The father ruled over his wives, slaves, children and workers with absolute control. Roman law required all people to marry into this system, which oppressed both women and gay men. Lords ruled over clans, kings ruled over lords, emperors over kings. The Caesar was so powerful that he was worshipped as a god. Roman paganism reinforced the power and control of the Patriarchy over the minds of the people.

Jesus said, "You are not to be called rabbi/clergy, for you have one teacher [the Spirit], and you are all equal students. Call no man your father on earth, for you have only one Father, who is in heaven, and you are all sisters and brothers. Neither be called master, for you have one master, and the one who is greatest among you shall be your servant." (Matthew 23:8-12)

Jesus saved people from patriarchy. He gathered the outcasts from patriarchal society and formed a New Community, an alternative family of equal participants. As seen in the above quote, his New Community did not include the status of "father," thereby rejecting all patriarchal claims, powers, relations and structures. Jesus often used feminine imagery for the Spirit, but when he did symbolize the Eternal as the one and only Father, it was for the sole purpose of undermining social patriarchy by characterizing all human beings as equal children of the Spirit-equal sisters and brothers, regardless of class, race, gender or sexuality— with no privileged status for breeding males. No one is to have power over anyone else in the Family of the Spirit.

You didn't have to wait for heaven to be saved. Just by joining Jesus' liberation movement, salvation was now. By communally pooling their resources, the first Christians took care of themselves, protected

their freedom, and grew into large alternative communities (Acts 2:44-47). The New Testament tells us that many wives, slaves, and workers ran away from their patriarchal masters and joined these churches. These counter-cultural Christian communities usually met in the homes of free women, and these "house-churches" bought the freedom of slaves who joined the Body of the Risen Christ. Thus the gospels say that Christ was "the ransom for many." The earliest non-biblical record of Christianity is from a Roman government census report which characterized the movement as "a new religion made up of women and slaves."

Galations 3:28 was the liturgy sung during adult baptism: "You are all children of God. For as many as are baptized into Christ are clothed in Christ, covering all distinctions: You are no longer Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. For you are all one in Christ."

Obviously, when those ancient folks were baptized they did not lose their race, their class, nor their sexuality! It was their way of saying that they had joined a New Community in which the social construction of those differences no longer ruled how they related to each other. They were all born again as equals, in solidarity with the least among them, set free and saved from the oppressions of the Patriarchy. No wonder their numbers grew so fast!

The Patriarchy saw the Gospel subverting their power. They crucified Jesus. They fed Christians to lions. But still the Gospel Communities spread like wildfire outside of their control, spreading from Jewish communities into the wider Pagan society. But the faster the liberation movement grew, the deadlier the Patriarchy's persecution be-

came.

GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

Volume 9, Issue 12

Publisher: Martha J. Pontoni Business Manager: Patti Harris Managing Editor: Kevin Beaney Production Manager: Brian De Witt Reporters & Writers: Martha J. Pontoni,

Dora Forbes, Marne Harris, Kevin Beaney, Timothy Robson, Barry

Daniels, Mike Radice, John Graves, Charlton Harper, Joseph Morris

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By the end of the New Testament era, a great debate emerged among the oppressed Christians over how to endure the Patriarchy's persecution. A couple of straight male leaders wrote letters to the house-churches arguing that they should betray Jesus' vision of community and reorganize themselves into a patriarchy! They wrote that women should be silent in the churches, that slaves should remain subject to their masters, and that lesbians and gay men should be excluded-so that Christians would be more in conformity with the dominant norms of the empire and the Patriarchy would stop persecuting them.

Eventually the patriarchal side won, about 400 years after Jesus, and the Roman Church was born. They destroyed the letters from the other side of the debate, and their letters became the last books in the Bible. Splitting reality from spirituality, they preached that Christians could still be free and equal, but only after we die and go to heaven, and that until Kingdom Come we should submit to their power over us. Not unlike dynamics we see happening in our own movement today, ancient grassroots Christianity gradually transformed from a liberation move-

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