The following message was sent to Rev. Dr. Cindi Love, our executive director, after her talk with Joe Dallas at the National Religious Broadcasters’ Convention. We post it here with the author’s permission.

dear cindi

everything you said about love was just as it was written in scripture. dallas represents a group of believers who think we we still have a relationship to god through regulation as in deut 28. under the new covenant our relationship to god is directly to god, to the spirit that lives in each believer. it is his spirit in us that says not only what the law is, but also what it says. if dallas was as concerned with scripture as he said he was, he would know that according to romans, believers are led by the spirit of god. and that the law is now to make us believers “conscious” of not GODLOVING(love one another as i have loved you) as directed by the 2nd commandment (love neighbor), the love of the 2nd commandment not only being the summation of all new covenant law, but also the standard of the new covenant as well,…………….. and not the interpretation law as dallas attempts to make the case.

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February 11, 2011

Pastor Lou Engle
International House of Prayer/The Call

Dear Mr. Engle,

We at Soulforce and the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) are saddened and distraught at the plight of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Ugandans. The social climate in Uganda has become so toxic that LGBT people are not safe in their homes or on the street. And, we believe that the untruths and misrepresentations that you and other U.S. based Christian evangelical leaders continue to proclaim regarding the goodness and wholeness of LGBT people is at the root of this climate of fear and violence. These misrepresentations and untruths must stop now.

The safety of LGBT people, as well as their friends and their families, has been put at risk because of the proposed “anti-homosexual bill.” You have claimed to oppose this bill, but you have not taken a clear and public position in Uganda where your opposition could make a difference.  Instead, after fueling the flames of anti-LGBT sentiments in Uganda, you have stood beside the bill’s supporters and referred to their work as righteous. You cannot preach that  “homosexuals have demons” or say to LGBT people, “let the Bible kill you?” and then ignore the results of speaking such words. Words have power.  And, your words create fear and hatred toward LGBT people.  This fear and hatred puts the lives of LGBT people at risk and perpetuates a climate of terror and violence.

The purpose of this letter is to introduce ourselves and let you know that it is our intention to continue to pursue dialog with you until you stop your vitriolic rhetoric against LGBT people.   (more…)

Last week I had the amazing opportunity to attend the Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s annual conference: Creating Change. This conference is a series of workshops, day long institutes, and other educational events designed to empower Queer* activists by strengthening our core values while encouraging growth, gain, and unique networking opportunities. With an expanding emphasis on intersectional justice, comprehensive education on trans identities and even sexual empowerment, Creating Change is an incredible opportunity to be an even better activist.

This was my first Creating Change, and I spent much of my time at the Soulforce table, telling people about the next Equality Ride and the other great things we do. I spoke to hundreds of people throughout the week, handed out tons of flyers and even gave out a bunch of prizes. In addition to the general festivities, there were some activities that reminded me of how important the work is that we do here at Soulforce.

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Over the last couple of years, I’ve been researching off and on a right wing evangelical group that has very successfully kept its cover for the most part. When I first discovered them, even my friend Mel White, who is considered an expert of anti-gay groups wasn’t familiar with them. I recall sending him the information I’d uncovered and asked him if he were familiar with them and he said he wasn’t. The Group is known as “The Family.” Since then, there have been a number of articles written about them, but it always seemed to me that they were much more powerful than anyone suspected.

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The following is a transcript of a speech Haven Herrin gave at the women’s pre-conference during the 25th World Conference of the International Lesbian and Gay Association in December 2010.

My queer community can feel a lot like a linguistic playground. All the words and turns of phrase that we use to talk about ourselves are, in some sense, illusory, but they also point to the nuances of communities built out of ever-more complex and self-determined identities. It is a beautiful freedom to witness.

Today I want to talk about how language in part creates communities with its terroir. Certain words can locate one geographically, can’t they? I also want to address the tension between infinite possibilities for words and identities and the need for unity and collective struggle.

I will keep my comments to where I come from, the twin cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul in Minnesota in the United States. My sense of queer self and the words I use to convey that queer experience are borne out of this particular place. I can’t speak with much detail or honesty to other places and how they grapple with the evolution of language and to what ends people use it.
Some days I am a fag, some days trans, every now and then a high femme, never a woman, always female-bodied, a bit butch and nearly always genderqueer. I am a changeling but it is more an internal shifting than external changes for you to see. The Twin Cities is where I first began to really grow into my queer self. Specific places, ideas, languages, and communities of people have supported me there in becoming my whole self.

Even keeping my comments to the Twin Cities, I will get dangerously close to generalizations that obscure more than they reveal. It is difficult enough to even talk about my individual experience, let alone another human’s. But I will try to travel with you from the very personal to thoughts about how we can work to create solidarity, community and mutually supported liberation.

Me. In addition to my queer identities, I am 28 years old. I am white. I am usually able-bodied. I have always had more than enough resources. My language, my passport, my education and my familiarity with Christian culture have generally met with acceptance in the mainstream culture of the United States. In short, I carry much privilege where I live.

My community has helped me see this and has also challenged me to articulate where my politics and my way of life do not fit the mainstream model. In fact, this is one of the defining characteristics of the Queer/Trans community in the Twin Cities, to think and talk about identity from many angles all at once, support self-determination and deep reflection, and examine how identities are working in concert or creating dissonance vis a vis mainstream culture.

For example, I get incredible support around my gender identity. It’s common in my community – this Queer/Trans community – to ask, “What is the gender pronoun you would like me to use for you?” There are a lot of options: he, she, ze, they, none at all and more. I use “they” and “them,” and it feels pretty amazing to have friends who will honor that, English grammar rules be damned. I use it because it reflects the multiplicity I feel in my gender expression.

My chosen community challenges and cares for me. We share a lot of dinners as we organize for social change…topics of dinner conversation almost always touch on race politics, poverty, capitalism, patriarchy, ableism and classism in some way. We call each other out when needed, and it always feels like there is space to change and grow ourselves. We see each other as people with multiple, evolving identities. We are not singly defined boy our gender or sexuality, rather we are bound by principles…and this is how I have learned what solidarity can look like.

We do not live within singular identities, and our community’s struggle is not single-issue. I am learning how to hold space in a conversation for the complex reality that white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy all have something to say about gender and sexuality – and vice versa. I am trying to juggle all of it while not privileging some forms of oppression over others.

There are many communities in the Twin Cities that contain LGBTQI-identified people of course. Not all people in the Queer/Trans community identify as queer or trans per se. Many would identify as gay, for example. I will share a story to characterize the difference between the Queer/Trans group and the other main sub-culture, the Gay and Lesbian community. The organization that hosts the Pride Festival that’s been taking place for 20 years invited people in the Twin Cities to give their feedback on the festival and its future. I decided to attend because the Pride Festival is actually not a place I enjoy. I don’t feel it reflects my priorities: it is expensive, it has a lot of vendors who seem to want the “gay dollar” more than our liberation, and it is overwhelmingly white and male.

Around the same time of this meeting, I had been doing some work with my [queer] friends to unionize a chain of sandwich shops. It would have been the first labor union in a fast food restaurant in the United States. Their demands included an end to racism, transphobia and homophobia in the workplace and better pay.

So I went to this meeting with the Pride organization, and for lunch we had the sandwiches from the same business I was helping to unionize. It was a rough meeting besides: no one asked my gender pronoun and they referred to me as “she” even after I told them I prefer “they.” That to me, right there, says that self-determination will likely not be respected in this space.

The leaders of the meeting asked us, essentially, why we think Pride tends to be very white and solidly middle class in what is a diverse city. I asked them how they determine what is and what is not a “queer issue.” Looking at my activism, you could determine that I see fighting racism and workers’ rights as queer issues. But there we were, eating the sandwiches that pay the people who perpetuate the unhealthy workplaces my [queer] friends go to 5 days a week.

I share this story as a way of describing the dividing line between the Queer/Trans community and the Gay and Lesbian community. The titles themselves are not meaningful, for surely there are people who claim varying identities within any and all kinds of communities. Like the Pride Festival, the Gay and Lesbian community in the Twin Cities trends toward being more white and more middle and upper class. The agenda is more narrowly defined to rights and protections attached specifically and only to sexual orientation gender identity and gender expression, such as marriage equality, being able to serve in the military, and hate crimes laws. These are the priorities, often to the exclusion of the difficulties LGBTQI people experience as a complex product of one’s class and race alongside sexuality and gender. Examples of these more complex LGBTQI issues may include poverty, homelessness, worker’s rights, healthcare, and job access. And the healthcare issue as seen from the context of marriage equality work is very different than the view from a place of poverty, undocumented status, trans identity, or being very young or old.

These latter issues seem to get more care and attention in the Queer/Trans community. I think it comes out of that sense of solidarity among many issues, identities, and social justice movements. All issues are queer issues, more or less, because we are just about everywhere. So when we are willing to have complex conversations about white supremacy and heterosexism and capitalism and ask people, “Hey what pronouns do you use?” we can see people as the multidimensional beings that they are. It becomes harder to fight one kind of oppression without fighting the other. If I am working for the liberation of my community, then I am working against more than just homophobia, am I not?

So if I were to generalize the differences between these two communities, I might say that the Queer/Trans community allows a lot of space for self-determination and bringing the whole self to the work. The Gay and Lesbian communities focuses less on the nuances of identity and more on the agenda that is circumscribed by sexual orientation and, to a lesser extent, gender identity and expression. To be transparent, I am sure there is an unhealthy amount of judgment from both sides about which community is more desirable.

So why do I bring this up? It is not just to point out yet another division and not just to play word games. Living in Minneapolis, I have seen the value in allowing the space for an infinite number of ways to self-identify and having an infinite number of words available to explain our lived experiences in the Queer/Trans community. This encourages identities to come first, then agendas and priorities to flow from that. In the reverse, to set the agenda and then expect identities to get in line…well, what I see is the clear delineation of the center and then the margin when our lives our organized in that way. The people at the margin continue to be the very old, the very young, the differently-abled, the people of color, the trans, the gender non-conforming, and any folks so bold as to uncategorizable.

The Gay and Lesbian community in the Twin Cities seems to put the agenda first, narrowly defined and not based in complex and diverse lived experiences. So, despite its simplification of what the movement’s agenda, I find it fracturing and divisive in the ways it excludes people who don’t fit a mainstream mold or aren’t served by a mainstream agenda. In my own queer activism, I find myself working on housing foreclosure, sandwich shop unions, bathroom and school access and anti-police brutality measures. The other option is to really see the people in our midst first, and then define our direction and agenda by what we, as a collective, care about and why.

I have framed this essay in terms of language and its power, not just in creating it but allowing room for it to evolve and to be heard, because respecting, embracing, and exploring with enthusiasm the maze of words – tomboi, bearded femme, diesel dyke, two spirit, fag, genderqueer, and on and on – seems to be way to invite in everyone to the center, supporting not chaos and fragmentation but unity and diversity.