Spirit in Action
Holy Terror: Lies the Christian Right Tells Us to Deny Gay Equality
Mel White is an eloquent, incisive, and compassionate voice exposing the lies of the Christian Right. This is something he knows from the inside, having ghost-written "autobiographies" for Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and others, before he accepted his homosexualtity as a gift from God, rather than a sin to be obliterated.
- Broadcast on:
- 07 Jul 2013
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[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeet. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives Of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, Creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them In their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you To sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. [music] Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along Today, for Spirit in Action, we have the privilege of visiting with Mel White Mel has been on the front lines of gay rights activism for decades Particularly in terms of trying to witness amongst and shine truth into fundamentalist Christian circles And what makes his message so powerful is that he was, at one time, the ghost writer behind some of the most strident And well-known voices of the conservative right Folks like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell Yes, Mel White wrote autobiographies for Pat and Jerry Obviously as a ghost writer While he was still a self-denying homosexual on the road to learning to love himself With full acceptance of himself, Mel White became a dynamo of action To redress the injustices against sexual minorities His most recent book is "Holy Terror Lies The Christian Right Tells Us To Deny Gay Equality" With an insider's perspective full of outrage and compassion Mel fills in our picture of 30+ years of fundamentalist campaigns against gay rights Mel White joins us today by phone from his home in California Mel, I'm absolutely delighted to have you here today for "Spirit In Action" It's a delight to be on your program Mark, thanks for inviting me I just finished reading your book "Holy Terror Lies The Christian Right Tells Us To Deny Gay Equality" And unfortunately, I have never read your book "Stranger at the Gate" Thank you for writing the book, thank you for confronting the lies And thank you for really putting your life on the lines to live across from Jerry Falwell For those 10 years or so that you're over in Virginia To give up the ocean breezes to go be over there was really a noble effort Well, thank you. Jerry, 10 years ago was probably the number one homophobe in the nation If I can call him that, he gave more ignorant and very dangerous information about gay people So Gary and I decided to move into a little rental right across the street from his church To attend his church and when he spoke falsely about lesbian and gay people We would stand and protest silently And little by little, people in the congregation began to join with us It was never a mass thing, but it was really interesting to see how people would respond Even in Virginia to somebody who would protest the anti-gay rhetoric of the religious right You mentioned in the book that standing up and doing that And that somehow Jerry would also use that to turn it against you Yes, yes. Jerry was so smart After a while, I was getting such good publicity for standing up in his church That he got up in front of a group of ministers, 8,000 of them in his big coliseum auditorium there And said, "Gentlemen, until you're preaching the word with such power that people stand up and protest You're not really preaching the word Therefore, from that moment, I was working for Jerry every time I stood up" There's something going around on Facebook saying, "Live such that the Westboro Baptist Church will show up to protest whatever you're doing" That's right So that's the same thing from a leftist perspective, I guess, maybe That's true that Westboro makes gay people look so tranquil And so much a part of the middle class That every time Westboro comes to my meetings I'm just delighted because we'll get the media then Media loves sensationalism And it's hard to sensationalize truth But it's easy to sensationalize someone who's standing up and saying some really ridiculous things And joining in reticule is sometimes a very, it leads to great group cohesion, I guess you'd say Yeah, when we have a common enemy, it draws us together I went to visit Fred in his office in Topeka I thought that when we have an enemy, we should at least know him And find out what he's really trying to say And since nobody took him seriously The other thing is I feel like when we have a fundamentalist like that You have to take them seriously because they are sincere in their way So I sat down with him for two hours in his office And found out that he was a tulip Calvinist That is a pure Calvinist who believed that God has preordained those who will go to heaven And those who will go to hell And that he is out there trying to get the people who are going to heaven To realize the mistakes they're making, to jar them, he would say Out of their complacency And it was interesting to know that he was once an ACLU lawyer That nine of his children are lawyers And that he has a full Greek and Hebrew library from which he works The guy is not stupid and he has a kind of reasoning for this kind of screaming Jonathan Edwards is his model And of course Jonathan Edwards, the early American preacher who dangled sinners over a fiery hell That is a historic tradition in the US I was just stunned to learn how much thoughtfulness went behind his craziness And I think that you understand the fundamentalist movement from a much different perspective Than most of the people who are protesting issues like homosexuality or war Or any of the other things where fundamentalists seem to stand on what, from my point of view, is incorrect And certainly not Jesus equated Could you first start out by explaining the difference between an evangelical and a fundamentalist Because I think it's something lost on most of the US society And I think it's really so important to distinguish between an evangelical and a fundamentalist evangelical You know, an evangelical is a bearer of good news by the very definition of the word The evangelical has come to say that God loves us enough to come to the world And seek us out and redeem us and give us hope Fundamentalist is one who takes the Bible literally And then insists on all of us obeying that literal interpretation Kieran Armstrong called fundamentalism a kind of militant piety John Carnell called it Orthodoxy gone cultic The chief rabbi of Great Britain said it's an attempt to impose a single truth on a plural world Those definitions get us closer to understanding The difference between an evangelical like Jim Wallace who preaches the word From a very progressive environmentally in terms of war and so forth But still insists that Christ came and died for our sins The fundamentalist says yes, we agree with that And if you don't become that we're going to take away all your rights I think you understand this because you are in that camp for a long time Can you talk about your early conversion and then your work In particular in terms of media writing books and so on For people who are now the leadership I guess of the fundamentalist edge Yes, I think God has a real sense of humor I was struggling against my sexual orientation Thinking it was sinful and sick to be gay And for 40 years I struggled I took electric shock treatments And I even went to both Catholic and Protestant ex-assist To rid myself of the demon of homosexuality I spent all kinds of aversive therapies I went to counseling For 40 years being told by Christian counselors That if I just prayed harder or fasted more or took colder showers That I would no longer be a gay person And so during that time I had to make money enough to support my family And so I offered myself as a ghostwriter And my agent, Swifty Lazar, who was one of the classic agents He was Hemingway and Faulkner's agent and he was 92 when he picked me up And he used me to write the biographies of these religious right leaders That was in the '70s and early '80s And they would go on to become the big televangelist That was Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jim and Tammy Baker Even for Billy Graham, I don't put Billy Graham in the fundamentalist camp I put his son in the fundamentalist camp, Franklin, but not Billy Billy was a man whose heart reached out to everybody So I grew up in an evangelical home, a place I loved, and still have great, great appreciation for We went to church every time the doors opened, and I loved it We went to Clare practice and youth meeting and prayer meeting And Sunday services, all three of them And I really grew up hearing Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so And so when I came out and was rejected by almost all my Christian friends on the religious right My son asked me, "How is it that you can still work with Christians, consider yourself a Christian When they've done so much against you?" And I said, "Well, they taught me that Jesus loves me in spite of them And to pass on to a person that the love of Christ is really important And so I look back on those evangelical days and on those ghost writing days As though God was simply introducing me to a new world and preparing me for it And in fact my son Mike said, "Dad, you would never have known about what it means to be an outcast Unless you were gay because you were born a white, middle-class man who had all the privileges And so in a way, my homosexuality has been a gift You mentioned in that list of people, Billy Graham, and you share some stuff in Holy Terror Lies the Christian Right tells us to deny gay equality You talk about Billy Graham and having some correspondence with him But that he had an entourage kind of keeping you from penetrating having the communication Telling lies to keep you apart, could you recap some of that because it was touching for me? Yes, Billy Graham called me one day, he'd always been my childhood hero I took school buses when I was a junior and senior in high school School buses to go to his meetings like in the Cal Palace in San Francisco I just thought Billy Graham walked on water and many years later, 30 years later I got a telephone call, I was speaking at Seattle Pacific University and the Secretary of the President said Billy Graham is on the phone for you and I said, "Yeah, right" Picked up the phone and Billy Graham was there, I wanted to say who is this really But I could tell, you know, that unique voice and he said, "I've heard that you can help people with their books In Acapulco, I'm really tied up, I can't write and I need somebody to help me, would you fly down here?" So I flew down and Billy Graham picked me up in his little rental jeep Took me to the home where the people who were their supporters donated to them for several weeks in the summer And Ruth and Billy and I had some amazing times together And I learned to love and respect them so much He doesn't take himself seriously, he sees himself as really a voice for God and for the gospel He said, "I would rather be a farmer sitting on my porch than I would be this famous person who can't go anywhere without being recognized Later when we were in cities together, he would wear a disguise so that people wouldn't recognize him In fact, Billy is a timid person, a loving timid farmer who God has used in amazing ways And he said, "When I go into a room, I feel like people are taking skiing off my bones And by the time I get to the end of the room, I feel like I'm a skeleton walking I found a very touching that God would pick somebody as humble as Billy And so when his entourage realized the powerful voice he had They began to design a plan for Billy that he could only preach the gospel God so loved the world that he gave his only son He couldn't reach out into the prophetic areas that he felt For example, when he asked me to write "Approaching Hoofbeats" on Revelation I thought, "Oh Lord, I'm going to have to write a book on Revelation It's going to be horrible!" I sat down with him and said, "Okay, Billy, what is Revelation's you?" He says, "Well, it's about the four horsemen of the apocalypse It's about hunger and war and greed" And I said, "Wow, he's not using it like Tim LaHaye did, misusing revelations to bring up all of this Speculation about the future, speculation about the rapture and the thousand-year reign And he got right down to the business of analyzing the world's hunger And analyzing war and applying the gospel to it His book "Approaching Hoofbeats" that I helped him with is really a good book And is the prophetic side of Billy that most people don't know The distinctions, I'm sure, are still lost on many of our listeners One of the things you mentioned in the book is the difference between a pre- and a post-millennial list See, you don't ask me about that, are you? Oh, I'm amazed, I had no idea that I was so much on the wrong side of theology You know, I'm a Quaker, we talk a lot about bringing God's peaceable kingdom on earth, that kind of thing Which, I guess, in some respect, a fundamentalist is also looking forward to But it's a question of maybe pre- and post-millennialism, is that true? Yes, it's interesting that the whole millennial idea That, first of all, there's going to be a rapture, Jesus is going to come in the middle of the night And take all of those who are true born-again believers into heaven And then leave the world for seven years of torment And during that period of torment and tribulation, there will be many more people saved And it's especially for the Jews to have their chance at becoming Christians in the fundamentalist mind And then Jesus will return, the judgment we will have, and he will reign on earth for a thousand years Some people believe that he's going to come before the tribulation Some believe he's going to come after the tribulation Some even think we're in the tribulation now, and they spend all these word games Trying to figure out when will the seven years be, and when will he return, and when... Tim Lahey probably saw more books playing that rapture game than any other author in the 20th century This left behind series that he wrote And for me, that's just missing the whole center of the gospel The Bible Old Testament are new, Hebrew and Greek Testaments They tell a story of a God who loves God's creation enough to continue working at saving us, redeeming us From the sickness that humankind gets into And so, to talk about raptures and people being pulled up in the middle of the night There's talk about that in Revelation, but it's so obviously allegorical It doesn't really have anything to do People have been applying that to their years for the last two thousand plus It doesn't work, Jesus was very clear, but nobody knows when the end is coming And when the end comes, you know, there will be a judgment I don't know how that works, but when people say explain to me about heaven, I say, you know, I don't know what about heaven And I don't know about what's going to happen when I die No one's come back to tell me exactly what will happen, but when I'm ministering to people who are dying I have to really say what I believe, that God loves us so much The death is not the end, but as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, just before they hanged him For me, this is not the end, but the beginning of life And I'm looking forward to that, Dave, but when I will find out, but like Woody Allen says, I just don't want to find out too quickly It strikes me that your theology probably has changed significantly since you were doing the ghostwriting I mean, being a ghostwriter for Pat Robertson and for Jerry Falwell and all these people Has your theology since you accepted your homosexuality as a God-given gift? Has that changed your theology a lot from what you believed a year or two earlier? Yes, two clarifications, one, I grew up in an evangelical home We didn't hear about raptures or tribulations, we didn't have those charts that people use I was an evangelical who heard the gospel, I had no idea what fundamentalism was In our church, we discussed issues, and if the pastor brought up something that we didn't agree with He would give us a chance to talk about it And yet, when my agent, Swiftie Lazar, discovered that I had a doctorate in religion And because no ghost writers in New York could even figure out what Robertson and Falwell and these guys were saying They hired me to write their biographies I never really sat at the fundamentalist table I sat at the table with Jerry and Pat and Billy to learn their biographies So, these 60 minutes came out when Stranger came out and made me look like a fundamentalist who was turning on my friends Well, I spent a few years trying to get that straight now and then I just gave in to it It became a wonderful calling card for people to say "This man has transformed from a fundy, crazy person to a wonderful progressive" I would say "Okay, I have to explain" and then I wouldn't But your question still, Mark, really holds, has my theology changed? Oh man, I'm telling you When I grew up thinking that my sexuality was a sickness and a sin I was falling prey to biblical literalism and didn't even know it That those six passages that people use out of their historical or biblical context You know, those passages are used to condemn and caricature sexual orientation And now I'm realizing how often we can fall back into that trap of literalism Instead of looking at the gospel and letting the spirits speak through it now All my fear about God's judgment is gone I'm still feeling very strongly that the Bible is very wise in helping us know how to live But that grace covers our sinfulness But that's the story of the Bible That it's not something we do to earn our salvation But Christ came to tell us that God loves us that much That we are acceptable in his sight, that we are loved in his sight And so from a person who grew up being afraid because of the sin that I carried secretly To a person who now can stand up in front of anybody and say I love Jesus I want to model my life after Jesus But I'm not a Jesus only person In the sense that there are billions who will never hear his name Is God going to condemn them for that? You know, is God going to condemn my mother-in-law who I've loved and cared for Who is loved and cared for me? He was dying at this moment Somebody called up and said, "Aren't you going to win her to Jesus?" And I said, "We've been talking about Jesus for 30 years, she and I She has not knelt down and said, "Will you forgive me?" And I used to believe that if you didn't go through that pattern You know, Romans 3 pattern Those who have confessed their sins and are faithful and just to forgive us I believe there's something true in all of that But I don't believe that it's a paradigm It's a kind of stance we have to go through It's a kind of journey we have to take We have to kneel at a Billigram altar and write in the Bible when we were saved And I've begun to feel over these years that God is so much bigger than that That God understands the heart and God loves us in spite of our sinfulness I'm still a sinner, even though it's not gay that's making me sin Here's a humorous comment and I don't want you to give a serious answer But were you more concerned about the negative aspects of being involved with your partner Gary Because he was a homosexual or because his last name was Nixon Do you know my part of 30 years, we're now married June 18th in California 2008 during that little window of opportunity He says to a hotel clerk or to somebody "My name is Gary Nixon and I'm not related" The things that we grab hold of to have prejudice is against people It's just humorous when we see the ridiculousness of our prejudices And you know Richard Nixon is an example of, for all of us Nixon had the courage to open up China to the rest of the world Well, and many of his positions are more liberal than perhaps those of our current president You know, I mean so much of what he did and in context of his time is radically liberal in terms of current policies And I know that you must be a little bit prejudiced because he was also a Quaker But when you told me that you were a Quaker I thought, oh, what wonderful memories When I was a senior in high school American Friends Service Committee Chose me and 10 other kids from across the country to spend a week in a resort in Carmel with Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King This is 1958, you know, before he was really Dr. King to the world Just as he was becoming Dr. King to the world The marches had happened and Birmingham had happened But, you know, on the West Coast they had better the telegraph but we hadn't heard much And so when we sat down with him as seniors in high school and learned about this man and his commitment to Christ And yet we learned later of his sinfulness I find it very easy to say God's prophets are often sinful At the same time that's exhibiting this wonderful truth that God can use us even if we are And I think a lot of people think that we have to be, I grew up in a perfectionist kind of environment On Minion theology where, you know, I thought when I went to bed at night if I didn't say the right prayer If I'd done something wrong, I'd die in the night and go to hell So I was constantly afraid and people like Nixon who, you know, did some amazingly good things And yet did some amazingly bad things They found a lot like the prophets in the Old Testament to me Richard Nixon was majorly disliked by, I guess you'd say, a large majority of the Quakers Certainly the Quakers that I knew But he grew up in a strain of Quakerism that was different than what I'm used to I mean they actually had pastors and that kind of thing And he did practice but he didn't follow in the footsteps obviously He was kind of outside of the practice So I have very mixed feelings about it And I, you know, one of my guiding lights is I try and look for that of God in everyone I try and see where God's reflecting through in them and then nurture that And pray that that part grow Yes, absolutely, absolutely There was one little theological thing that you touched on as you're going forward And I think maybe this will have something to do with the six passages that you referred to previously But it's separate and that is you mentioned about, you know, Jesus coming And he's going to do all this and this literal interpretation of the Bible All of what's going to happen in the book of Revelation, etc One of the things that I read Jesus is saying that He says the Son of Man coming on cloud and all that That there's some of you here who will still be living when this happens And if I'm a literalist, that means to me it has to happen before everyone who's alive at the time Jesus is speaking before they all die How do literalists accommodate that in their literal theology? A literalist isn't bothered by reality A literalist is not bothered by facts or by scientific truths I like what Gandhi said about being a person of faith and a person of science That we go with science as far as it will take us And then from there on we go by faith But fundamentalists ignore all the places the scientific world takes us They ignore the fact that sexual orientation, for example, is so obviously something that you are born with You are shaped in the womb and shaped by nurture But basically I never had a choice whether I should be gay or not be gay That was a part of God's will for my life And now these people take six lines out of this 33,000 lines in the Bible And say to me, "You can't be a homosexual, God's going to punish you for that And send you to hell for that" And so, fundamentalists don't have to accommodate They simply "it's in the Bible and therefore it's true" I was in a 50,000 watt radio station in Seattle And usually in my interviews I have to have somebody who's opposed to me on the other side So people always get both sides of the truth I keep saying there's no two sides to this truth, gay, homosexual, bisexual, transgender people We are here and we are not in the place we have to defend our humanity But I'm sitting there and the minister says to me, "Have you ever read Leviticus 20?" And I say, "Oh, God, I've read Leviticus 20 so many times" You know, a man who lies down to another man is an abomination and should be executed Okay, we've heard that for a long time, you're also an abomination should be executed If you overspank your child, but you know, let's not get into the comparing scriptures And I said, "Yes, I've read Leviticus 20, what does it mean to you?" And he said, "It means you should be killed" And I was shocked, even the Rush Limbaugh like hosts stopped talking for a change And looked at him and said, "Oh, what is this?" And I said, "Well, who should do the killing? You church people?" And he said, "No, that's the civil authorities' job That's why we need to get more good men of God elected in the government" Well, you see, the extreme fundamentalist leads us into these terrible roads that lead away from democracy to a theocracy that's crazy and terribly dangerous You know, when you say they can just quote the Bible So they could continue down and say, "Okay, so if you've got a tattoo, you're defacing your body in a way that also violates Leviticus" And, you know, you've touched a woman who is in a menstrual cycle, therefore you're unclean I mean, if they follow through all of this, if they are really literalists, doesn't it mean that the fundamentalists are really not being not wholly embracing the Bible that they're speaking of? I mean, you know, really love your enemies If they literally embrace it, then that's got to change how they live out their lives And I think they might turn into people that you and I both would not fear I'm afraid for fundamentalist, I'm afraid that in the end times that they talk about they're going to be the ones that are sent with the goats They talk about that end time and judgment And, you know, the New Testament is just filled with examples of what we are when we follow God that we are not literalists So they're not literalists, really, they're selective literalists They pick what they want And they're usually picking scriptures that, you know, out of their historical context what it meant at the time and out of their literary context, what the words mean themselves And they just use these to hammer away at social prejudices and the support their own social prejudices And in the process they become so unloving and therefore they miss, as you said Mark, the whole idea that the Bible has The Bible is an announcement of God's love for the world and Jesus left us saying, listen disciples I've only had one truth, you know, I'm trying to simplify it for you guys, you farmers and you fishermen I'm trying to simplify it to say, this is the truth that God loves you and that you need to love the world and that the world will know you by your love That's Jesus in the final moment of his life, picking the most important thing he wants to say That you don't love your neighbor, then you don't love God And God doesn't love you, he was trying desperately to say what the fundamentalist has not heard yet I hope that one day they can hear it, because these are good people who mean well but are doing terrible things You're listening to Spirit in Action, I'm your host, Mark, helps me for this Northern Spirit radio production Our website is northernspiritradio.org You come to our site and you'll find links to all of our guests, you'll find our archives You can listen and download any of the programs the last seven years You can find a place to leave comments and we really appreciate the dialogue with you You can make contributions and you will find links to people like Mel White, who we're speaking with today His websites that you might find in via are melwhite.org or soulforce.org and we need to talk about Soulforce shortly Mel His book that I just read recently, and I want to especially talk to you about today, is called Holy Terror Lies the Christian Right tells us to deny gay equality A very important book that he wrote earlier about his whole transition, accepting himself as God made him is called Stranger at the Gay, to any of those books will be a really valuable read for you And again, we're speaking with Mel White One of the things, we're just talking, Mel, about fundamentalism and fundamentalists Is it possible to be a Christian fundamentalist and to not be anti-gay? Are there fundamentalists who are not anti-gay? No, being anti-gay is one of the definitions of fundamentalism There are evangelicals by the millions who are totally supportive of their gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender kids Lots of evangelicals Jim Wallace has had an interesting journey on that, the editor/founder of Sojourner During those early issues of Sojourner, they were not pro-gay, they were anti-gay And now he has become one of the great supporters of gay people So evangelicals can change, but fundamentalists can't change The word is engraved just above their eyes That they know the truth and the truth will not be altered I don't any longer discuss the bible of fundamentalists You're not interested in hearing what you have to say They're only interested in quoting texts at you And often texts that they don't even really understand So they're good people who mean well But they're people who don't think And thinking is really important at this moment in the Christian church Why is fundamentalism so strong has been so influential in the United States, particularly over the last 30 years? I tell you, there's a wonderful history, you know, I really try to get at that history and only terror To show how fundamentalism began in the US as a kind of a resistance to Darwin And his whole evolutionary theory was, at least fundamentalists thought, totally the opposite of the creation story And so they're not fighting evolution, they're fighting bible literacy They want to support biblical literacy And that's the way it is with homosexuality These people are not anti-gay so much as they are anti-people who are not biblical literalists They're trying to preserve that text And in 1978, Jerry Falwell, who was just a fairly young pastor Then sat down with a Presbyterian guru named Francis Schafer And he said, "How are we going to win the world? We don't have enough people" Schafer said, "Well, God use pagans to accomplish his will, why don't you use pagans to accomplish your will as fundamentalists?" Jerry said, "Well, how do I do that?" And Schafer introduced him to the idea of "cobeligerency issues" Meaning something that we can be against together, even if we're not together on theology So they started out with the "cobeligerency issue" of the Soviet Union And Jerry traveled around the 48 states with his choir on the state house steps And warned people about communism and the evil Soviet empire And started building his mailing list And out of that mailing list came the moral majority And the tremendous political power that that accrued As they continued using "cobeligerency issues" to get Catholics to work with them, to get Mormons to work with them, to get non-believers The people of no faith at all to work with them, because people of no faith can be afraid of communists too When the Soviet wall went down, when the Berlin wall collapsed, so did that "cobeligerency issue" And at that point, they really began two other issues that were "cobeligerency" That they could get lots of people against abortion and lots of people against homosexuality And so, Pat Robertson and Falwell immediately began to just issue tirades against gay people You know, when 9/11 happened and the trade towers went down, they were sitting, talking on Pat's television show And they blamed feminists and gay people for the collapse of those towers And the American people laughed at him, except fundamentalists, and I'm telling you, those guys believe that Because they believe, as literalists, that God takes his hand of mercy off a country That doesn't do what the Bible says literally And so, when you accept a gay person as a neighbor and as a Christian You are disobeying the Bible, and you're killing that truth that the Bible is to be taken literally So for me, they gained power by being simplistic like this People want simple solutions People do not want progressive radio And by the way, when you had your break there and you talked about it, you can also give a donation You did it so quick and so soft, whereas in fact, I think your listeners really need to know That progressive radio and progressive television has no way to support itself By the way the religious right does, the religious right tells lies You know, whether it's, if you give a dollar, God will give you ten dollars back Or God will bless you forever if you just give a hundred dollars to my show I mean, I can't imagine the lies a progressive could tell because we don't believe in doing that We believe in bringing the truth out, so I would like to bring out the truth And I'm hoping that people will donate to keep your program alive, Mark Because so few progressive radio and television programs exist You know, you are leading the way in so many different ways That a Quaker with a radio broadcast alone is something But that a Quaker with a radio broadcast is progressive and it's the same time deeply spiritual You know, that is so rare and people give to so many causes today But they don't realize that we have to stay on the air too And I'm so glad to be on your program because I get very few progressive radio calls I get calls from all these wealthy stations that want to tell me that I'm going to hell that I should be killed So thank you for not telling me I should be killed I know that the love of God is big enough to hold all of us You've been very active with this group called Soul Force that you helped originate Can you tell us a little bit about Soul Force because I think too few people know about it Soul Force are the two words that Gandhi and King both used to describe relentless non-violent resistance Non-violence got a bad name when it was called pacifism because pacifism sounded passive Look on in King said we need to take to the streets with our truth If they won't hear us across the negotiating table And so relentless non-violent resistance is Gandhi and King's definition of such a graja Or truth force, Soul Force So my partner put the two words together and we had a little logo and we said We're going to start an organization dedicated to Soul Force principles And we're going to use it to help religion realize that it is the primary source of homosexual hatred and homosexual ignorance And so we have spent the last 12-13 years organizing people across the country To help them understand that the Roman Catholic Church still believes that gay people are objectively disordered And intrinsically evil and godless And seeking the moral and social destruction of family values that were deplorably dangerous In the Southern Baptists they'll say that even a desire to engage in a gay relationship is always sinful, impure, degrading, shameful and natural and decent and perverted So you have these fundamentalists who are doing this kind of literal understanding of the Bible And Soul Force came along to say there's another way of reading that Bible And we spend a year before we ever do a protest trying to get through to the Southern Baptists status We went to Rome to try to get through to Benedict when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger We've been all over the world trying to help people understand that the truth is God loves us all And when you say that God doesn't love gay people, that gives other people a license to kill us, to harass us, to bully us And the church has become the huge bully The church bullies their gay kids into thinking that God doesn't love them And what is worse than that in terms of bullying So for me Soul Force has been that organization Now it's in the hands of Dr. Cindy Love and Haven Heron and some wonderful people who have taken Soul Force over because I resigned I'm old and I wanted to just do some fun things for a change And Soul Force people if they really want to understand what Soul Force is doing They ought to look at these equality writers we have every year we send busloads of young people who are trained To go on to campuses where universities have anti-gay policies Where they kick off their gay students like Liberty University and Jerry's Town To watch the organization do various things to create some kind of resistance to religion based depression That's what Soul Force is Do you have any idea how big of an organization it is? Can gay and straight and bisexual is it a mixture of everybody? We don't have membership we don't have a headquarters we you know frankly Mark I thought this issue would be long dead by now So we're not an organization we don't have membership We train freely we give our talents and our gifts away we give our materials away for example at SoulForce.org You can download booklets on what the Bible says and what it doesn't say about homosexuality what the science says It doesn't say in French and in Spanish and in English we're just trying to get the word out we know that we've trained over 10,000 people And we've had over a thousand people arrested with us at various kinds of nonviolent demonstrations And when stranger to gay my book came out I have received Mark over 50,000 letters from people I've had to answer And almost every letter is from a gay person who says how can you be sure that God loves you? So SoulForce is out to say you know the church has effectively scared gay people into believing the church And SoulForce says the church is worth saving but we got to do some hard work to prove that There's so many threads of what you said that I want to come back to one of them you mentioned And you certainly talk about it in Holy Terror lies the Christian right tells us to deny gay quality You point out that the political agenda of the anti-gay forces includes you think And some of this is cobbled together from various evidence but that eventually we'd have a theocracy in the country That would include as you mentioned the pastor in the Seattle area I think it was That you'd kill gays because that's what it says in the Bible you got to do to a man who lies with a man You want to talk about how strong the evidence is about that or how much we really should be concerned that that's a possible outcome? Well I've collected evidence the book that you're talking about Holy Terror I have this over 450 footnotes that show that everything I've said is researched carefully And at this point what we find about fundamentalism is that they would deny wanting to kill a gay person Because they're selective literalists But the non-selective literalists are out there banging away at the fundamentalist condemning other fundamentalists for not taking it all the way And so what I don't know is if fundamentalists become politically powerful As well as they are spiritually powerful, religiously powerful Then what happens? They want to example to start with amending the US Constitution to deny gay people all their rights Especially the rights and protections of marriage You know they did that in 1920 on probation They managed to get an amendment to stop people drinking when we know what happened there For three years you know you got HBO's boardwalk showing you what happened in terms of underground Getting liquor out in other ways So if they do an amendment like that Then that would take precedence over all the rights and protections that gay people have earned over this last 20 years of fighting And so you say well how could they possibly do that? Well at this point the Tea Party for example 69% of their membership considers themselves loyal members of the old fundamentalist right That they believe that the Bible is the literal word of God that America is a Christian nation that should return to its Christian roots 63% believe abortion should be illegal and 82% oppose gay rights So the Tea Party is what Romney is just placating He's constantly working at giving Tea Party voters because they know that this minority is really strong And will vote whether the progressives vote or not And so the last two numbers I want to give you mark If they elect Romney president and if they take over the Senate in the House All they need is 20 more votes in the Senate They have 67 now I mean a super majority requires 67 So all they need in the Senate is 20 more and in the House they only need 50 more To be able to amend the U.S. Constitution And to ratify that are the state legislatures and now there's 29 state houses in the Republican hands Most of them with Tea Party support And so all they need four more to ratify that amendment So I keep saying all we take is another 9/11 where people are afraid that progressives have been too light That we've got to go back to the words of God who restores protection of this country People think I'm an alarmist and then I start quoting what the Roman Catholic Church says about gays What the Mormons say about gays I mean the Mormons are so strict against homosexuality To elect the President there's the loyal part of the denomination that wants us to be denied all our rights And driven back into the closet So maybe I sound like I'm an alarmist and fool me at the mouth But you can't be called an alarmist when you really feel that there's alarm that should be sounded Certainly what you've written in Holy Terror is stunning And as you said well documented Since you wrote that book which I think is over five years ago A lot has changed in society There's more and more states and areas where people can get married like you and Gary just did Are things moving in the right direction? Is it getting better? Is there hope there? Or are we really backpedaling? Was it indicative that wrote it's the best of times and the worst of times? This is the best of times for gay people to imagine that we could have all of these famous people who are out Just two days ago Sally Ride the astronaut at her death announced in the bituary that she wrote That she had been in a loving relationship for a lifetime with another woman So she came out as a lesbian at her death But imagine all the people you know who are gay from Ellen to Congressman That are saying proudly that God loves us as we are These are great days for us We have six states now in which we can get married Of course no federal rights and most of the rights and protections for marriage come from the federal government And the federal government we have no rights In fact the Defense of Marriage Act says my marriage can't be recognized in any other state Unless that state votes to recognize it So these are great times but there's only six states that will marry us And there's 36 states that have laws against us And 31 of those states have constitutional amendments against us So it's also the worst of times because as we progress in terms of being accepted The resistance to that acceptance grows So fundamentalists get more and more afraid for America if they accept us fully Therefore fundamentalists seeing this growth of acceptance They mobilize and they go to war and that's what they're doing now I was disappointed that North Carolina went the direction it did this past year In terms of gay marriage One of the things that I had hoped was that they could see the states that have accepted gay marriage And where it was promised that if gay marriage happened Armageddon was going to arrive in the state immediately And the world didn't change and in fact crime rates have gone down And everything else seems to be moving in a right direction Why is there such a resistance to the reality? I mean we know that Don't Ask Don't Tell has finally been repealed There's people openly gay who are in the military I can't help but think that people are going to see this and say Oh my fears were unjustified I think more and more people are seeing that when they realize they have a gay or lesbian couple as neighbors That we keep our lawns tidy and we pay our bills and we are good neighbors In fact when a neighborhood when gays move in they say oh there goes the neighborhood up We're proving ourselves to be good Americans and good neighbors And we're proving that we have so many pastors and priests and rabbis and so many Christians And before long this resistance has to end But in the meantime what's going to happen how much suffering has to go on? We are the number one victims of hate crimes in every state in the nation The Southern Poverty Law Center did a very reputable study on hate crimes in America And found invariably gay people are the ones who are harassed and hounded and beaten and killed So that there's a very hostile climate even with all this good things happening So when you put it all together you have to say Are we backpedaling? In some ways we're backpedaling because the opposition is becoming more ferocious But are we swimming forward? Yes, we're swimming forward because Ellen has her own TV show I'm so pleased to just note over 30 or 40 years the inroads that have been made And let's end with one very more positive step that's being made The National Council of Elders which is being formed to help leaders of the 21st century This is a historic council of elders that's being put together You were invited to be part of this group Number one, have you accepted? Or are you just going to go on having your fun time down there in California? It was so difficult to even realize that I was being asked to join this august group These are the people who led the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 50s James Lawson taught King about nonviolence And Dolores Huert has just received the President's Medal of Freedom Because he was a co-founder with Chief of the United Farm Workers And John Fife, co-founder of the Sanctuary Movement Harry Belafonte, River Joan Brown Campbell, whose first ordained woman The head of the General Secretary of the Council of the Church Gloria Steinem, Alice Walker, Julian Bond, Danny Glover I mean, they asked me to be in this group And so I went to the first meeting and said, "Did I get an invitation by mistake?" And they stood up, they had done research And they found that soul force had been at the heart of the movement within the churches to change And now the Lutherans have changed The United Church of Christ changed early The Reformation rabbis changed So they said, "You have been the leader in the movement that created change" And I said, "I thought I was just a dummy who was trying desperately to get past fundamentalists" They say, "No, you're a leader in the movement" And I say to myself, "Don't anybody tell them that I'm just Mel" And I am so delighted and so in awe of being called to this Council of Elders Already we have met several times It's been interesting, somebody said to me on the Council, it was Jim Lawson Who taught the Nashville people and the writers on those buses in the '50s, '60s He said, "You know, you have it harder than we African Americans did" He said, "What?" He said, "We had our families on our side and we had our churches on our side" "You don't have either" And that was a stunning realization to me That the African American folks had another kind of support system The gays are so victimized by churches now That they can't even sing church songs So that the African Americans sang these great Jesus gospel songs as they marched I can't even have a prayer before a march without offending too many people So it's a strange thing to be on a Council of Elders When we're trying to give advice to these 21st century leaders But it's such an honor and a privilege to be there to be able to say To gay people from this great platform God loves you, God created you, God loves you as you are What the fundamentalist is saying about homosexuality is wrong Scientifically, psychologically, historically It's wrong biblically You know, it's a great place for me to be able to say God loves gay people And hear it louder than I've heard it before You deserve a lot of credit for being such a holy font of effort in this direction I've been speaking with Mel White, his most recent book Holy Terror lies the Christian right, tells to deny gay equality You may also have seen his book Stranger at the Gate You can find him at MelWhite.org And you can find about the organization that he helped found Called SoulForce.org All of these things, Mel, are just wonderful efforts And to do it with love, love for the others Admitting that there is no other, there is only us Is such a powerful statement I thank you so much for joining me for Spirit in Action It was a pleasure Mark, thank you for inviting me The theme music for this program is "Turning of the World" performed by Sarah Thompson This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website NorthernSpiritRadio.org Thank you for listening I am your host Mark Helpsmeet and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light This is Spirit in Action With every voice, with every song We will move this world along With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing You
Mel White is an eloquent, incisive, and compassionate voice exposing the lies of the Christian Right. This is something he knows from the inside, having ghost-written "autobiographies" for Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and others, before he accepted his homosexualtity as a gift from God, rather than a sin to be obliterated.