Baltimore Times
By R.B. Jones
February 17, 2006
(www.btimes.com)

Bamboozle Alert II

When I hear the words traditional values from a white person I usually feel for the cold hard comfort of my pistol. When I hear someone black say he or she is for traditional values I try to figure out what he or she is talking about. Traditional values is a term used as a banner or a sledgehammer depending on the speaker and the situation.

In my mind when white people talk about traditional values I assume, unless they tell me differently ,that they yearn for the days when I was picking cotton under the threat of death or hanging from a tree with a noose around my neck and my reproductive organs missing.

Traditional values to me mean two doors with one sign for white and one for colored and a policy where white men could rape and abuse black women at will. These things were traditional in this country for centuries and they have only been impolite or illegal for a very short time in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Of course we still have racial profiling in police work, which is a traditional value as well.

I define traditional values because they are being used to oppose same sex marriage. This is a bamboozle tactic by right wing political forces to create fear. Anything that can be made an object of fear can become an object of hatred. When people are defined as "the other" or some different kind of species anything done to the other is permissible.

Traditional values mean something different to different people. In the neighborhood where I grew up traditional values meant looking out for your neighbor, nurturing all the children in the block and watching out for the tricks and treachery of "Mister Charley" a term the older people used.

On moral issues, the people I grew up around had all the frailties and contradictions everyone else had. There were adulterous affairs that were kept hidden from the children. There were issues of domestic abuse and substance addiction. Some people were crooks and many of them subconsciously believed what white supremacists said about black people. The traditional value in my neighborhood was tolerance. People might talk bad about one, but there was no mob action to impose the vales of the majority on the minority.

The current debate in Maryland about a recent Circuit Court ruling that said that same sex couples should be allowed to marry is a Trojan Horse issue.

Supporters of Republican candidates hope that putting the issue on the table will inspire their core followers to flood the polls. They also hope that they can use the traditional values issue to bamboozle black church members into voting for their party for morality reasons. The bamboozle worked to a degree in Ohio in the 2004 presidential larceny-I mean election. Appeals to the black clergy helped elevate Presidential Appointee George W. Bush's black vote total.

The black clergy can be counted on all too often to be influenced by donations and appeals to their vanity. There are exceptions, heroic ones in fact, but for the most part they are very vulnerable to manipulation, especially when faith based initiative checks are brandished like weapons and important white men acknowledge them. Same sex marriage is irrelevant and it should not become a major campaign issue in Maryland.

The court ruling in favor of same sex marriage raised the issue of discrimination. The only reason why same sex marriage is illegal is for religious reasons. The Bible prohibits it and I am told the Quran does as well. Since this is not supposed to be a theocracy-yet- civil law should not be governed entirely by religious ideas. There should be a separation of church and state for the protection of minority groups and ideas outside what is laughingly called conventional wisdom.

If two men or two women choose to marry, it is none of my business unless I have a romantic interest in one of the parties. Traditional values warriors claim that legalizing same sex marriage will undermine the institution of matrimony. They are not blaming the budget motel industry for undermining marriage or the boredom that comes from marrying someone who can not or will not work to hold a spouse's interest. They are not blaming the economic and social pressures that drive people to indulge in the stimulant of extramarital affairs. They don't blame hormones. Marriage is in trouble in this society and gays and lesbians are not to blame.

The more important issues are the collapse of the American economy, the looting and pillaging of the majority of society by the rich and the super-rich, the degradation of the environment that might be beyond repair, the draining of the country's resources through endless wars that cannot be won and the thorny little issue of how to dispose of radioactive waste this country is producing that is poisonous for thousands of years. For black people there are issues of disenfranchisement through felony convictions, urban education issues, juvenile justice issues, economic development issues and the ever-pervasive racial discrimination in employment and promotion.

That issue is alive and well especially in Baltimore, a majority black city that recently had an all white fire academy class.

Don't be bamboozled this election year by preachers yelling about traditional values and opposing same sex marriage. I remember when a gay rights bill was debated in Baltimore City Council in the 1980s.

A host of ministers descended on city hall and held prayer rallies outside. They lobbied fiercely and condemned anybody who supported benefits for city employee's' same sex partners.

When the fact that city school officials knowingly allowed schoolchildren to drink lead contaminated water in school fountains for years was revealed, I saw no equivalent outrage from the ministerial community. Where were the protests when the Fire Academy of this city graduated an all white class decades after the department was integrated in the 1950s? Where were the avenging clergy? Don't be bamboozled in 2006.