Abortion Activists Promote Agenda in African-American Churches
Rebekah Sharpe
August 11, 2008

Formerly known as the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights, what is now the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC) just completed its 12th Annual National Black Religious Summit on Sexuality. RCRC’s CEO, the Rev. Dr. Carlton Veazey, recalled the origin of these summits: “In 1996 I knew we had to go beyond [the organization’s primary mission of ensuring] a woman’s right to choose.”  He rejoiced, “We have broken the silence in the churches . . . we have broken the taboo of sexuality.”

Former U.S. Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders (shown here addressing Illiff School of Theology in 2007) recommended the promotion of masturbation because it "won't cause you to get an STD, or get pregnant, and you know you're having sex with someone you love." (Photo courtesy UMNS)

The Summit, held at Howard University School of Divinity, took place from July 9-11. While the controversial Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright cancelled his speaking engagement at the event, other notable figures, such as one-time Clinton Administration Surgeon General Dr. Jocelyn Elders, addressed the more than two hundred in attendance. 

Throughout the conference, speakers, workshop leaders, and participants showed a general disregard for biblical standards of sexual behavior. In her remarks, Elders bemoaned that “We spend all of our effort trying to prevent sex and we should be trying to prevent the consequences.” Further downplaying abstinence as a component of sexual health, she declared that, “We completely sold out Christianity to the Religious Right.”

“In order to be sexually healthy we need to get rid of some of the ‘isms’ we’ve been carrying around on our shoulders," Elders continued. "We’ve got a country that walks around saying ‘Abstinence, no sex until marriage.’ Do you know the mean age of marriage is now 26.5?” As one low-risk alternative, she recommended “masturbation [because the act] won’t cause you to get an STD or get pregnant, and you know you’re having sex with someone you love!”

The Rev. Kenneth Samuel, pastor of Victory for the World Church (United Church of Christ) in Stone Mountain, GA, seemed similarly dismissive of Christian teachings on chastity. Samuel asserted that the reason people contract HIV/ AIDS is “not because of high-risk behavior but because they belong to high-risk [racial] groups” and that “Jesus could have said ‘HIV and AIDs you will have with you always’ because it is going to take a lot more than sexual abstinence to get rid of this damnable disease!” Samuel lamented that the “condom-friendly sexual education of the ‘90s has been replaced wholesale with [teaching abstinence until marriage] and simultaneously attempting to make it constitutionally impossible for the millions of same-gender-loving [homosexual] couples to be married!”

The conference workshops echoed the same themes presented by the plenary speakers. The panel of one workshop, “Their Own Receive Them Not,” advocated for churches to bless homosexual behavior of their members and bemoaned that homosexuality still remained taboo and disapproved of in African American churches. When asked by one audience member how to convince “the biblicists” to change their view that homosexual behavior is sinful, Rev. Cedric Harmon of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State said that when you are talking about the “Bible, Qur’an, and Torah, their understanding of human sexuality is far less than ours today. All our emphasis is always on Paul.” The Rev. Dr. Horace Griffin, who left the Baptist tradition for the Episcopal Church’s permissive attitude towards homosexuality, said that it was important to “Move people away from those six passages” in the Bible that condemned homosexuality as sinful. “People are selectively choosing which passages [they will heed] already; we’re not asking them to do anything new,” claimed Griffin. All a successfully revisionist Biblical approach would require is a “vision of the Preacher as the resident theologian of the church.” The Rev. Rainey Cheeks protested that when persons object to his homosexual behavior “they quote Paul, and he had issues himself . . . the brother would be in therapy today. And he [Paul] never even knew Jesus!”

Dr. Aminata Binta spoke recalled her matriculation at Howard University’s Divinity school and change in sexual behavior, saying, “In August of ’88 when I first stepped on this campus I was married to an A.M.E. pastor. But the Earth evolves and so do we as humans, and I identify at this time in my life as a both-gender-loving [bisexual] person.”

Cheeks expressed frustration, because he said, “I feel like one more time I have got to justify why I exist . . . I model my ministry after Jesus; he didn’t conform, he agitated, he wasn’t doing what everyone else did.”  Rev. Dr. Griffin proffered his own opinions on Christ, whom he claimed, “came giving a different message . . . Jesus was not a traditionalist but came to challenge the bondage of tradition.” He argued that “the term homophobia . . . [applies to] any discomfort [with homosexuality]. I would present that as sin, rather than homosexuality as sin.”

Dr. Elders continued her advocacy for condom usage and other forms of contraception that earned her the moniker “the Condom Queen.” She contended, “Our sexual health system is an absolute betrayal of everything we say we hold dear. Forty-one million women have no access to contraception.” Responding abstinence-based sexual education, she protested that “the vows of abstinence break sooner than a condom.”

Glenn Northern, the sexuality education policy manager at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, led another workshop that taught participants to lobby in favor of early and comprehensive (not abstinence-based) sexual education. Northern remarked that it was important participants persuade their representatives about sexual education because “who they normally hear about on this is the Religious Right,” and that, fortunately, sexual education is not “as controversial as some of the reproductive choice agenda.” One participant said that an obstacle to their success in legislative advocacy is that “a small group of very ultra conservative people have had a monopoly on sexual education,” and advocated developing a “unified voice to counter that.” Much of the workshop was spent advocating a measure called the REAL (The Responsible Education About Life) Act, a bill in currently in both houses of Congress that seeks funding for a sex education program that emphasizes contraception use. 

The Rev. Dorothy Chaney, a pro-choice activist and associate pastor at Mt. Sinai Baptist Church in Florida, led a workshop on “Pastoral Care and Reproductive Health Counseling.” Chaney instructed pastors to offer no guidance to women, but instead, “when a woman comes to you in a crisis pregnancy let her make her own decision [about whether to abort or have the baby]. It is between her and God . . . They’re not your children; they’re your clients. I don’t care how you feel or what you think.”  She said that regardless of the Bible she keeps on her desk, “I’ve never had one person to have a termination that wanted to know what the Bible” said about abortion.

“If I ever got pregnant, I’d probably terminate it—I don’t like kids,” Chaney joked.

She affirmed one participant who advocated, “It’s important that we remove the stigma that abortion is only okay in certain cases.” Another participant objected that often Christians who reference the Bible about abortion “don’t use the Bible to give you choices, they use the Bible” to limit options or reject abortion. She said that adoption was not a good option, particularly for African-American babies, because “when we go to adopt children, people don’t want black babies.”

On Thursday, Rev. Samuel gave a politically charged speech challenging participants to “Agitate until Latinos are not criminalized for their citizenship status! Agitate until homophobia is relegated as an article of history rather an article of faith! Agitate until we live in society where Barack Obama can be elected and Jeremiah Wright can be respected! Agitate!” He criticized Booker T. Washington’s approach to lift African-Americans out of poverty by the “practice of personal piety, and emulating the values of Western Christian society” and praised W.E. B. DuBois’ ideas, because Samuels said DuBois understood that “living a good, pious Christian life and all that is good, but the bastions of iniquity and systems of inequality in America won’t change without aggressive political agitation.”

Such political action is necessary, according to Samuel, because “Benevolence alone will never eradicate poverty, because poverty is the result of systemic greed and institutional inequity . . . some people think that the way to deal with poverty in society is to blame the poor for being in poverty.” He suggested that the only reason Christ said, “‘the poor you will have with you always’ is because your Holy Ghost imagination is crippled! Imagine that the Kingdom of God is already here.”  He proceeded to quote the lines from John Lennon’s utopian song “Imagine.”

The United Methodist Church is a founding member of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, which also receives the support of the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ, and the Unitarian Universalists. Despite the divisive nature of the group’s work, the 2008 United Methodist General Conference voted to reject a measure that would have cut ties with the pro-abortion lobby.