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Home  Community Voices Fight for Gay Equality is Not a War of Cultures
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Fight for Gay Equality is Not a War of Cultures |
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Written by Terelle Jerricks
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Friday, 22 May 2009 |
Over the past several years, Random Lengths began to focus attention on the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community’s ongoing struggle for equality—using specifically the annual Long Beach Pride Festival and parade as an opportunity to explore the ways America’s promise of equal protection and equal opportunity has fallen short and perhaps more importantly highlight the efforts of those who aim to help America reach its highest potential as a model for social justice. Over the past year, we have steadily stepped up our efforts, particularly after the divisive passage of Proposition 8, the anti-gay marriage initiative that amended the state constitution to deny the LGBT community the right to marry. Random Lengths is doing what it has always done from its very inception: advocacy on behalf of the minority versus the powerful, and the voice for the voiceless.
The May 7 edition of this paper, with the profile of Reverend Sunshine Daye as its cover story, was no different. When the list of grand marshals for the Pride Parade was released, we found all of their stories compelling enough to feature as the dominant profile, but we chose Reverend Daye because of her particularly unique life story, growing up as a dark-skinned Latina, in a religiously and culturally conservative household. While the battle over Prop 8 centered on the use of the initiative process to specify the definition of marriage, this was also a matter of faith. Faith communities were the primary drivers of Prop 8. African Americans voted overwhelmingly for the initiative (though not out of line with religious norms across racial lines). What was largely missing from the debate was the voice of members of the faith community who oppose using the initiative process to make any group second-class citizens. But perhaps more importantly, there needed to be a push back against the lie that the LGBT community is without faith and by extension, without God. When we decided on Daye being the featured profile, we were acutely aware of the problems this story would present.
Aside from disturbing the sensibilities of conservative members of our readership, this story had the potential of being misguidedly perceived as an attack against Christianity. Rev. Daye was raised in the Christian church. She loved her church family. After being rejected by her church family after her sexuality was revealed, she lost her self before finding her way back to faith again. Our hope in presenting her story was to address the other extreme about homosexuality and faith, which is the tendency of some civil rights advocates to dismiss as silly the fervent faith by which Californians voted for Prop 8. This tendency does not serve well the LGBT community’s fight for equality because of its exclusivity of religious believers who also believe that an individual’s rights are not truncated at the point of sexual orientation.
Some would have wondered aloud about what connection Daye has to San Pedro. It should be noted that every single one of us probably has a son, daughter, brother, or sister, an uncle or aunt, cousin or friend that is gay. San Pedrans are no different.
When Daye married Sunny Daye, she became a part of Sunny’s family whose father is Robert Farrell, a civil rights activist, journalist, former Los Angeles City Councilman and local San Pedran. This is important because we live in a town where family roots go back generations and family ties and community rooted-ness means something. The LGBT’s fight for equality under the law isn’t a culture war as many conservatives would have you believe. This is a continuation of the fight over the question of whether the Bill of Rights truly applies to all Americans or simply to some Americans some of the time.
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