Starting out the year with the same old recipe

Hate And Division; GOP seeks to woo Black voters by attacking the LGBTQ community.

When 27-year-old Don Abram was in middle school, he dreaded going to his single mom's Chicago South Side church where he was often the only male in a sea of females overflowing the pews. Other Black teens in his neighborhood taunted him as "fruity" with "sugar in his tank." Abram dreamed of being a pastor but he had a secret that would be an obstacle: he was gay, kept it from everyone, even his mom. He dreamed of being a pastor. He comforted himself with the idea that he could at least be an usher, greeting newcomers, and distributing cardboard church fans and Kleenex.

But at 14, he debuted as a preacher in the Greater New Mount Eagle Missionary Baptist. His sermon was a smash so he kept preaching. Later, in Harvard Divinity School, Abram realized that his Mount Eagle congregation must have figured out he was gay and still loved him even if they were baffled by his sexuality.

"They never mentioned my being gay....but that's often how Black (Christians) react," Abram told Raw Story.

That may change fast. Now that attacking LGBTQ morality is central to religious right political campaigns, Black churches are trying to figure out what Jesus would do. Religious right leader and Trump loyalist Ralph Reed's nonprofit spent $42 million on the midterms. He told NPR his strategy for wooing Black and Latino churchgoing voters by attacking Democratic support for LGBTQ rights. He felt that white mostly Republican evangelicals could win "a minimum of 25 percent in the Black community."

But is that strategy working?

Today, Abram heads Pride in the Pews, a nonprofit that helps dozens of predominantly Black churches across the nation that want to learn how to welcome LGBTQ Christians into their congregations. When asked whether any of his clients mentioned voting Republican due to the party's anti-LGBTQ stance, he said no. But anyone seeking his help would be ready to respect LGBTQ rights. Black pastors come to him because they want to survive.

"They need young members, the next generations to join the congregations," he said. And pastors are keenly aware that millennials and Gen Zers don't view the LGBTQ community as a threat to Christianity or American morals. Pastors find that their young Black congregants have a friend or respected teacher or cool boss who is LGBTQ -- or they met LGBTQ protesters marching beside them after George Floyd's murder. They don't want to drag themselves to church Sunday morning if their LGBTQ friends are unwelcome.

Young Black and Latino voters are credited with turning the midterms from a red wave to a red ripple with 89 percent of Black youths and 68 percent of Latino youths casting their votes for Democrats

WHAT WOULD JESUS DO?

The George Floyd protests inspired Abram to launch a project documenting the civil rights battles of 66 Black LGBTQ Christians for a book and a documentary called "Can I Get a Witness?" He chose the number in honor of the 66 books of the Bible.
Abram's own story landed him on the front page of the Chicago Tribune. Yet he has moments when he wonders if politicized attacks on LGBTQ community members were more influential than projects like his.

He told Chicago's Windy City Times that he wondered if the Black church members who marched with him "on Saturday (would) then on Sunday go into pulpits and preach against my right to exist."

Interestingly, Black churchgoers seem to be more progressive on the issue than the ministers who lead them. Lifeway's 2020 poll found 44 percent of Black churchgoers support same-sex marriage compared to 15 percent of Black clergy.

Abram doesn't limit its welcome to progressive churches. He wants to bring Black Christians struggling to understand what God teaches them about LGBTQ folks to the discussion table. He wants to meet people where they stand whether or not they understand what all the letters in LGBTQ stand for. And he follows a Black Bible study tradition: don't just look at what the Bible says, look at what God and Jesus did. He explains that Black Christians don't obsess over the Apostle Paul's verse ordering slaves to obey their masters. They focused on how Moses liberated his people from slavery.

Abram's sermons often focus on stories about how Jesus welcomed the marginalized and those whom society considered outcasts.

In June, Donald Trump headlined the Faith and Freedom Coalition's Road to Majority Policy Conference where he dutifully stressed Ralph Reed's talking points. Trump denounced “left-wing indoctrination” of schoolchildren by educators “pushing inappropriate sexual, racial and political material” on children.

“You can’t teach the Bible, but you can teach that men can get pregnant, and kindergarteners can pick their own gender,” Trump said.

But it's not clear if that message resonates with Black evangelicals.

Raw Story interviewed 11 Black pastors in seven red or purple states for this story. All of them had received numerous emails from far-right "ministries" that warned about LGBTQ indoctrination in public schools and drag shows. One Texas pastor and one in Tennessee went to a protest out of curiosity. The Texan mistook two right-wing protesters for predators because they were skulking around the venue filming children with their phones. The Nashville pastor said storytime ended when a screaming protester disrupted a reading of Dr. Seuss.

The pastors are interested in a civil, informed discussion of issues like how and when it's appropriate to answer children's questions about LGBTQ issues.

"But the (Extremists) aren't interested in discussion," Peabody and two-time Emmy winner Imara Jones, a Black transgender woman, told Raw Story. The Columbia University and London School of Economics alum doesn't believe that proposed Texas legislation to make drag performances adults only will placate protesters. "The extremists aren't interested in being placated...They focus-grouped this tactic...They'll keep using it."

RUBIO CALLED OUT FOR VIEWING DRAG QUEENS AS A BIGGER MENACE THAN HURRICANES

Drag performances have been part of American entertainment for so long—from powderpuff football games (high school cheerleaders put on shoulder pads to play while guys wear wigs and cheerleader dresses), comedians Milton Berle, Monty Python, and Flip Wilson playing female characters, Tyler Perry's family-friendly Madea films, Rudy Giuliani in drag for a charity skit in which Trump kisses Giuliani's cheek and motorboats his fake boobs.

Yet drag queens are repeatedly presented in right-wing politicians' ads as a threat to children. GLAAD tracked attacks on drag queen events (20 in Texas) in all the 48 states. (Only West Virginia and South Dakota had none.)

Florida's Sen. Marco Rubio aired an October campaign ad, days after Hurricane Ian had ripped up his state's Gulf Coast. But the ad's star was a drag queen, Lil Miss Hot Mess.

“The radical left will destroy America if we don’t stop them,” Rubio's voiceover warns grimly. “They indoctrinate children, trying to turn boys into girls” as a photo of Lil Miss Hot Mess reading to children in a library fills the screen. Rubio used the photo without her permission.

Lil Miss Hot Mess was furious. She publicly wondered why Rubio was obsessing over nonexistent drag queen dangers instead of helping Florida's still homeless hurricane victims trying to salvage belongings from rubble.

A common theme for pro-Trump candidates is that children are allowed to get transgender surgery without parental permission or knowledge. Jones (aka Lil Miss Hot Mess) says she isn't aware of any proposed or current state or federal law that would allow this. Jones says that she realized she was transgender as a child but she agrees that "trans surgeries aren't recommended for consideration until after 16 and then, of course, only with the consensus of parents, doctors, therapists," Jones sees the right-wing warnings about forced surgeries on children as a "red herring" to distract voters from candidates who envision a theocracy instead of a democracy.

When the multinational marketing and polling firm Ipsos completed a September 2022 survey about U.S. parents' priorities for public schools, gender confusion and drag queens didn't pop up as concerns.

"When it comes to K-12 schools, parents are most worried about safety, bullying, and preparing children for success," Ipsos reported. "Parents feel these are the issues that elected officials should focus on for K-12 public schools... Parents didn't want educators distracted by the battles over whether or how to teach kids about gender and sexuality, battles they perceived as political."

"Supermajorities strongly agree that classrooms should be places for learning, not political battlegrounds, with three in four Americans (76%) and parents (77%) sharing this sentiment."

Polls predicting a midterm red tsunami demonstrated that what Americans tell pollsters about their priorities may not always reflect what's in their hearts. As much as voters feared inflation and street crime, they voted for democracy in waves rather than supporting anti-democracy extremists. Jones thinks it's too early to know if Black Christian voters will drift to the GOP due to the attacks on LGBTQ equality.

But Black evangelical pastors often refer to voting as a sacred duty, invoking the civil rights activists who sometimes died for the right to vote. They made the voting booth a sacred place and that may be where Black evangelicals respond to religious right attacks.