Americans New McCarthyism
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insinuation that they are solely or largely because of homosexuals can and must
be. The clerics’ connection with the Traditional Values Coalition would provide
a source for many of the myths and stereotypes they used in their letter, but
perhaps they were also listening to the wrong “experts” within their own
community.
The Dallas Morning News reported in August 2004 that the AIDS
service organization Renaissance IQ which was supposedly dedicated to
preventing HIV infections among at-risk groups, including gay men and African
Americans, was ordered to pay back $112,867 to the federal government
because of questionable expenses, including exorbitant staff bonuses.
Renaissance IQ had also been ordered in February 2004 to repay the Texas
Department of Health nearly $77,000 in state grants.
Renaissance IQ was run by its controversial African-American
cofounder and CEO Don Sneed. On December 8, 2004, Mr. Sneed announced
that he had been dismissed from the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV and
AIDS. He did so in a press release and letter that included a vicious attack on
gay men and women. In his letter to Brent Minor, chairman of PACHA’s
Treatment and Care Committee, Sneed wrote, “As a black grassroots Republican
activist, my hands are becoming quite full as we continue to beat back the
scourge of ‘marriage for gays,’ wliich would have a most detrimental effect on
the black family should it come to pass” (www.dallasexaminer.com).
“Scourge of ‘marriage for gays’?” Are monogamy and civil equality
scourges? As has been repeatedly documented in Europe and Canada, as well as
in the United States since May 17, 2004, when marriage equality became a
reality in the state where the American Revolution began, same-sex marriage
has had no effect on the “destabilization of traditional marriage” or families of
any race or ethnicity, despite the McCarthyism and rhetoric of the Christian
Right.^ Any “destabilization” is the result of forces that existed well before gay
rights and marriage equality became faith-based political issues. Yet Sneed
claimed marriage equality “would have a most detrimental effect on the black
family.” He did not explain why or how that would be so. He simply relied on
McCarthyism and the stereotypes that have become so pervasive. But the facts
contradict both Sneed and the stereotypes.
A February 2005 report prepared by the National Gay and Lesbian
Task Force and based on Census 2000 showed that in Los Angeles and San
Francisco black gay and lesbian families have a high rate of parenting, almost
equal to opposite-sex African-American households (59 percent vs. 68 percent).
As Strategic Director of the National Black Justice Coalition H. Alexander
Robinson said, “ F