A garden of homophobia: our black churches are fertile soils for planting and cultivating homo hatred.

Given the controversy over the recently released gospel single by Angie and Debbie Winans titled "Not Natural," African-American queers, like myself, have not gone into apoplexy because the Winanses have exploited a means to denounce our lifestyle. Frankly, we are just sick and tired of it! The fact that the Winanses are members of our Christian community comes as no surprise. Our black churches, both denominational and storefront, are fertile soils for planting and cultivating homo hatred. Their evangelical-conservative theologies and biblical fundamentalism share pews with the Christian right. And like the Christian right, most believe in prescribed gender roles for men and women in order to maintain the traditional composition of the heterosexual family. Most believe that many of society's ills are traced to Jews, feminists, liberals, and queers.

Let's remember that many black churches joined the religious right in supporting the video Gay Rights/Special Rights, which argued that civil rights protection based on sexual orientation does not have equal merit as that based on race. Like the Christian right, many of our black Christian churches believe that the ideal nation is a theocracy in which only heterosexual men interpret and execute God's will. Doing God's will is a prodigious task and unmistakably a human enterprise. Debbie Winans told newscaster Tavis Smiley on BET Tonight, "We don't come as Angie and Debbie. We come as messengers of God doing his will."

As a human enterprise, "doing God's will" is invariably subject to error because it is fraught with both humble intent and righteous indignation. Its anchor and its impetus are found in the human act of interpreting the Word of God. Interpreting scripture as the Word of God is always subjective and is always suspect in intent, whether it is being done in the ivy towers of seminaries or within the holy walls of sanctuaries. Interpreting scripture with menacing mesages and with litanies of dos and don'ts is not about embracing and empowering all people but about authority and power over certain groups of people. The authority of scripture does not lie in what God said. It lies in the hands of those in power who determine what God ought to say.

The Bible is replete with contradictory and damning messages to all people. Determining which messages are discarded and which are upheld is not a battle about biblical inerrancy or God's will. It is an unmitigated battle of human will. For example, there are two creationist myths in the Bible (Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:22). The first myth says that God made woman and man simultaneously. The second myth is our "rib story," in which Eve is born from a rib of Adam. Undoubtedly this story has ribbed and poked at Christian women throughout the centuries, since it is the authoritative text for substantiating gender inequity in society.

The Curse of Ham (Genesis 9:18-27) and Apostle Paul's edict to slaves (Ephesians 6:5-8) served as the scientific and Christian legitimation for the enslavement of people of African ancestry. The Sodom and Gomorrah narrative (Genesis 19:1-29) is one of the most quoted scriptures to argue for compulsory heterosexuality.

Is it the win of God to devalue the lives of women, people of African ancestry, and queers? On the question of race, African-Americans, Christians, and non-Christian clearly see the answer as no. However, on sexual orientation many of us are optically challenged. When asked by newscaster Smiley whether the words in "Not Natural" are harmful to queers, Angie Winans replied, "God gave us these lyrics, and God would never give us something negative." Because many African-Americans do not see -- or choose not to see -- compulsory heterosexuality as oppression, their use of scripture as the Word of God to rail against us queers becomes their excuse and their means to purportedly do God's will.