| Rev. Gilbert Caldwell, United Methodist Church
 The United Methodist Church is an accomplice in the spiritual and physical violence GLBT Americans are experiencing today.
That is how Gilbert Caldwell, a heterosexual, African-American man who retired as a United Methodist minister in 2001, sees it. “We are accomplices through our silence on these issues,” he said from his home in Denver, where he busies himself championing civil rights for GLBT Americans.
Examples are easy to come by. At the church’s 2000 general conference in Cleveland, counter-protesters who opposed civil rights for gays and lesbians held up signs with messages like “Methodist Fag Church.” Caldwell says many conservative people like to think that because they are not the ones holding such signs, they are not accomplices.
“But their silence and neutrality is an act of complicity,” just like people who stood by as cross-burning Ku Klux Klan members committed spiritual and other violence against blacks in the previous century, he said.
Clergy and members of the United Methodist Church also cannot hide behind the fact that the church’s Book of Discipline declares that same-sex activity by clergy, or those who want to be clergy, makes them “incompatible with the Christian faith,” Caldwell said. “Nor should they affirm the morality of a man and woman covenanting together in marriage, yet forbid covenantal commitment services between two people of the same sex.
“Suppose Rosa Parks, who sat down on the bus in Montgomery and changed history, said, ‘I will abide by the law,’ ” Caldwell said. “We would not have made the changes we did” to end discrimination against blacks using mass transit. “Again, we are compelled to challenge the law by either breaking it or getting the law changed” to try to end discrimination against GLBT Americans.
Caldwell is heavily involved an effort to raise the level of sensitivity toward, and change negative legislation against, GLBT people in the church – through United Methodists of Color for a Fully Inclusive Church. While Caldwell said he sees the similarities and differences between white racism and heterosexism, “We must connect the struggles, as different as they are,” he said. “The energy that fuels these `isms’ comes from the same source. Therefore, we cannot isolate the `isms’ as we once did. Until all of us are free, none of us are free.”
Traci West, a professor of ethics and African-American studies at Drew University in Madison, N.J., is an ordained United Methodist minister and a member of the steering committee of the United Methodists of Color for a Fully Inclusive Church. She first met Caldwell when she was in college at Yale and he was a pastor in New Haven, Conn. – more than 20 years ago.
West said Caldwell has a duality that she greatly admires. “He has both and impatience with the way the church perpetuates injustice and oppression against people based on sexual orientation and race and gender. At the same time, he has patience for the work of persevering,” she said.
Caldwell’s life experience alone is inspiring, she said. “The genuine nature of his commitment is attested to by a whole life experience. He’s lived his entire life committed to the church living out a more liberated Christianity than it has.”
Caldwell said the words that people used 40 years ago to assert that blacks would disrupt military operations if they were fully integrated into the armed services are amazingly similar to the words recently spoken about gays and their supposed threat to morale in the U.S. military.
“There’s an assumption of moral rightness in abiding by the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy. But it’s demonic because it’s saying to a gay person, ‘I can’t handle who you are in totality, but I’m willing to let you be as long as you don’t share the totality of your being,’ ” Caldwell said. “If I cannot speak out of my black personal experience because it messes with someone’s comfort zone, that’s dehumanizing to me.”
From the time he was 7 or 8 years old, Caldwell was inspired by the actions of his mother, Julia Brown Caldwell. As the family moved with his Methodist preacher father –from Greensboro to Winston-Salem, N.C., to Dallas – she developed relationships with white women who were “willing to challenge the racist segregation of church and society,” he said.
What would Gilbert Caldwell say to people of color who might argue that homophobia doesn’t compare to white racism? “I recognize the reality of the constant visibility of those of us who are black when compared with white gay people who are often able to be ‘white’ without their sexual orientation being known. It’s important for my white gay colleagues to recognize the constant pressure society imposes on black people because of our visibility. I also urge them to be willing to speak of white racism with the ease they speak of heterosexism. White and heterosexual ‘culture’ dominate in ways many people ignore.”
Caldwell describes himself as a “minor participant” in the modern black civil rights movement. He was in Mississippi for the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964. He marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. He participated in the 1965 March on Washington in which King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech.
Caldwell acknowledges he felt tested when Malcolm Boyd, an author and Episcopal priest he revered in part because Boyd expressed concern about justice for black Americans, revealed that he was gay. “As a white clergyman, Boyd understood and identified with the justice struggle for black Americans,” Caldwell said. “Boyd announced he was gay in the 1970s, and for a brief moment, I asked myself, ‘What difference does that make? Do I burn his books?’ Of course not. But I had to ask, ‘Have I absorbed the disease of heterosexism/homophobia without realizing it?’ ”
He called this reflection “a wonderful testing moment for me to see if my deeds were ready to match my words.”
GLBT Methodists have a growing support network inside the church as a result of actions by Caldwell and others: Its Statement of United Methodists of Color For a Fully Inclusive Church reads, in part: “Remembering the voices who have told us to wait on justice, we dispute the notion that issues of race and nationality are so overwhelming that to fight for another issue of injustice is to water down the movement.”
|
