The following is part of an ongoing discussion via another List.
Well actually two other lists.  However the content of this one 
message, I thought might interest some of you here.
Bill
aka: ]\/[usic ]\/[an
c u OUT in cyborspace
== Forwarded Message Follows =========================================
 * Originally By: Int:lefox@juno.com
 * Originally To: ** All **
 * Original Date: 07-05-97  14:15
To:  David Becker
From:  Lee Fox
Dave:
In regard to this post:
>"Religion & Politics Digest" reader Thomas P. Roche asks, "Who is Lee
>Fox, and why can't he see that equating religious persecution to that of
>perverts the Bible says are worthy of death is not a true 'Baptist'
>view?"
 If I understand Mr. Roche, and I'm not sure I do, that question
of his is a good reason for every gay in America to take up a pseudonym
and go into hiding.  Or, alternatively, to toss off pseudonyms and take
to marching in the streets.  We did the former for a few hundred years,
and now, after the Stonewall event, have decided on the latter.
Hitler felt that gays were worthy of death too.    He put pink triangles
on them and ran them through the ovens in his concentration camps when he
had worked them to near death.   But then he had a thing about Baptists,
as well.  Wasn't Corrie ten Boom an evangelical Christian?    My own
position, and that of most gays, I think, is that people like Hitler and
Mr. Roche, (if he is suggesting that gays should be killed for being who
they are) should be prevented by law from carrying out their intentions.
You know, this business of killing those whose lifestyle or belief system
offended you went on in Europe for hundreds of years and there was even a
spate of it in Salem, Massachusetts in the early Colonial Period of
American History.  But, thank God, the Constitution was framed by persons
who knew this and were interested in preventing it.   It's not
constitutional to do that sort of thing anymore.
And speaking of Baptist principles, during the religious persecutions in
Europe where the Inquistion put to death people who practiced the Baptist
version of Christianity and where Protestant reformers such as John
Calvin stood and watched as men like Michael Servetus, a Unitarian as I
recall, were burned at the stake for daring to preach other ideas than
those of the Reformers, the Baptists were some of the most tolerant
people on the planet.  They didn't burn anyone at the stake or kill
people for their "wrong" beliefs or practices.   And throughout early
American history, the Baptists were some of the strongest dissenters from
any notion of making anyone's religion, theirs or another's, a part of
the law of the land.  In fact, Thomas Jefferson once addressed a Baptist
Convention in the following fashion:
   In a letter dated 1 January 1802 replying to the Danbury
   Baptist Association of Connecticut, Thomas Jefferson wrote:
   "Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely
   between man and his God; that he owes account to none other for
   his faith or his worship; that the legislative powers of the
   government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate
   with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people
   which declared that their legislature should 'make no law
   respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free
   exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between
   church and State."
   The source of this quotation is "The Writings of Thomas Jefferson",
   Volume 16, pages 281-282.
	May I say, that hearing someone suggest that an Old Testament
notion such as killing people who violated religious laws, in what was
clearly a theocracy,  is a part of Baptist thinking, if that is what he
is saying, is completely out of sync with Baptistic thinking and
tradition throughout all of Baptist history.
And might I hasten to point out that (and this is at the very core of the
thinking of  leaders of the gay rights struggle)  this is not a
theocracy.   This is a democracy where religion is to be practiced in
churches and homes and on street corners with no interference from anyone
 (And gays would be the first into the trenches to defend every Baptist
and other believer's right to practice his or her religion as he/she sees
fit without interference from anyone).  But, and I want to emphasize this
fully,  this religion is not to be enacted into civil law.  For this is
not a theocracy.  It is a democracy, where believers and unbelievers have
equal rights.
     "'...make no law concerning an establishment of religion...
      'thus building a wall of separation between church and state."
                                               ----Thomas Jefferson
I wonder how Mr. Roche would feel about establishing Roman Catholicism as
the law of the land?  Until recently it was illegal to establish a
Baptist church in Italy.  "Error has no rights" was the thinking of the
time.  And when the Second Vatican council decided that the Church did
not have the right to impose it's thinking on non-Catholics, and did away
with the "error has no rights" notion, one crusty old conservative
cardinal fought hard to keep the notion officially in place and in
practice.
And the Holocaust was only fifty years ago.
And now Mr. Roche says gays are worthy of death.
I guess it depends on who's in power, doesn't it?
I guess that's why it's so great there's a Constitution and a Bill of
Rights.  Both for Mr. Roche and for me.
Dave, I'd like to suggest a thought to you.  Post the things I write.
Let them stand there and be read by folks who believe in baptistic
principles and sort out for themselves the things I say.   And I suggest
it for this reason:
I believe that the gays of America will eventually have the legal right
to exercise their inherent and inalienable rights to liberty and the
pursuit of happiness.  And the reason I believe that is that I happen to
know that at the Stonewall event, the willingness of gays to live their
lives in hiding as second class citizens having to live in the shadows of
religious disapproval ended.  We know there is a Constitution, and we
know it includes us with rights absolutely equal to any Baptist or other
evangelical Christian.    We may not have the legal right to practice
those inherent rights yet as established in civil law, but I believe it
will come.  Just as the Civil Rights marches under Dr. King began when
one little old black lady decided she'd had enough sitting at the back of
the bus and giving up her seat to white men, so at Stonewall (check the
net for Stonewall) gays said, "Enough!"    We are willing to march in the
streets and we're willing to die rather than to remain second class
citizens and sit at the back of the bus or in the dark shadows because
someone doesn't approve of us anymore.  That time has ended.
But I think you evangelical Christians have more to lose than you
realize.  You'll lose the rights struggle.  Southern Baptists were not
noticeably present marching with Dr. King, and Ralph Reed admits you've
been on the wrong side of history in the civil rights movement.
But there's something else going on that I don't know you folks realize
or even care about.  You're going to live in the infamy of history as
those who fought against a people struggling for equality.  But worse
than that:  you're earning the undying hatred of a people yearning to be
free.
There were gays all over the place in Jesus' day.  He didn't even mention
the issue, and in the Roman Empire of his day gays were not persecuted.
Some of your own writers have pointed that out.  And yet Jesus didn't
even mention the subject.   Paul mentions it, but nowhere did he organize
an anti-gay movement in terms of civil law.
But the hate thing is what bothers me and I hope will bother you when you
think about it.
American slaveowners quoted Paul where he said that Jesus was returning
in his own lifetime and therefore advised slaves not to seek their
freedom.    And so American blacks did not seek freedom.  And those slave
owners are hated by black people today not only for having kept their
grandparents slaves,  but for their use of Scripture, of religion,  to
keep them slaves.
To us in the gay rights struggle, you folks are seen as the living,
present-day counterparts of the arch-conservative Pharisees of Jesus day.
 They killed him as a matter of expediency, the New Testament says,
because he "threatened their religion."  We hear the same "threatens our
religion, our culture" refrain from Donald Wildmon, Pat Robertson, Curt
Tomlin, Dave Becker.    And Dave, however convincing it may be to the
people in the pews, there is not one gay in America who believes for a
minute that equal rights for gays threatens one Baptist's right to live
his life and practice his faith just as he wants to.  We don't believe
you for a moment.  We consider it the same lie used to justify killing
Jesus, the same lie used to keep slaves in America slaves, the same lie
that  told blacks they were "separate but equal."
You have a mole on QueerPolitics and Gaynet, I hear.   I'm glad you do.
It furthers discussion.  We have one, I think, on your list, as well.
Why not?  But Dave, that mole of yours, has he/she not told you about the
hate talk on our lists?   It's the most important talk there.   And it's
not because you're evangelical Christians.   I could not possibly
emphasize enough how little we care what you believe or do--except for
one thing.  In terms of "doing," you go to the legislature to make sure
that we don't have the legal right to exercise our equality with you.
And that we will not forgive!    Not now!    Not ever!   Two hundred
years from now you will be in the history books, not treated in the
section on patriots, but with those who burned witches in Salem, with
those who told blacks that the Bible says slaves shouldn't seek to be
free.
But the hate, Dave!   The hate!    And I can't tell my brothers and
sisters not to feel it.  What can a man or woman hate, if not oppression?
 How does one not hate oppression?  And you don't know with what cynacism
your "we love the sinner and hate the sin" is greeted.  The Inquisitors
said the same thing while torturing Baptists and Jews and others who
didn't believe correctly.  And we know it.  We may be different, but
we're not uneducated!
Mr. Roche asked who Lee Fox is.    Lee Fox is a gay man, a man asking in
concert with all his brothers and sisters, to be treated with dignity and
respect and equality.
I'll post this to the gay lists, Dave.  You can post it to yours, if you
like.
Lee Fox
**********
======================================================================
---
Sent via MailLink, 05-JUL-97, 22:27:04, from:
(RAI)