Dallas African American Museum honors nationally prominent homophobe. Hot bed of homophobia.
Insight on where TX State Sen. Royce West vote on anti-drag SB12 was coming from.
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This post will be sent out once I reach the email length limit, but come back to read it online to see the complete post when it is finished. There is a lot, A LOT, of homophobia to be documented here.
Rev. Bryan L. Carter gets 2023 Heritage award from the Dallas African American Museum
This shows up on Facebook. I have taken a screen shot for the record.
Notice the picture in the lower left. This is the entire photo.
This is the text about the award in the words of the African American museum. Note, this is an award for him in general and NOT any specific historical project he has done.
The Heritage Award is the highest honor which, on rare occasions, is bestowed upon someone who has contributed immeasurably to the advancement of the preservation of the overall experience and improved quality of life for all human beings.
The Dallas African American Museum is wrong in the above, for Dr. Bryan Carter doesn’t work “for all human beings” as we shall find out. Radical Gay liberationist that I am, I do consider LGBT to be human beings.
The text in the black box.
2023 Heritage Award Recipient, the Reverend Dr. Bryan Carter is a community leader, thought leader, dynamic communicator, and pastor of Concord Church in Dallas, TX.
Dr. Carter is passionate leader with a vision for inspiring people to grow to their full potential and is committed to serving the city of Dallas and beyond by working toward city transformation, building stronger families, and economic development.
Visit www.concorddallas.org
Much of this text in the black box I can say is true. Dr. Carter is a “passionate” homophobe. He is a national homophobic “thought leader.”
This is a Facebook post by Rev. Dr. Bryan L. Carter expressing his happiness getting the award.
Dallas African American Posts showing images of Rev. Dr. Carter getting the award.
In this Facebook post they mention that they will be giving an award to Rev. Dr. Carter.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=3299282250217184
It is also mentioned at their events page.
I did a 10/25/2023 save where Royce West and Rev. Dr. Carter is mentioned. This is in case reference to Carter disappears from their webpage. Give the archive a moment to load pages.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231025003539/https://aamdallas.org/events/
There were other Facebook posts which mentioned he was an award recipient.
So what are “Thought Leader” Rev. Dr. Bryan L. Carter’s “Thoughts” regarding homosexuals.
Since Dallas Dist. 3 City Council member Gracey is an Executive pastor of Concord Church were Carter is senior pastor I had included them in this report.
However, I think that “Thought leader” Carter’s “thoughts” ought to be presented in this post directly.
The headline of a Baptist Press article in 2004 was, “Texas: ‘Gay rights,’ civil rights not the same, black leaders say.”
Six pastors spoke at the rally and Bryan Carter of then Concord Missionary Baptist Church in Dallas was one of the speakers. From the article:
Carter finished by proclaiming that homosexuality is a sin. But, he said, it isn’t the only sin. He said Christians are not immune to sin. And because of that, Christians need to be careful in how they approach the homosexual community and others who favor of same-sex “marriage.”
“We have to open our arms of restoration,” Carter said. “Our churches need to be a place where we point the sin out, but we also give the people a chance to be restored. It ought to be a place where we despise the sin but we love the sinner.”
The Texas Baptist press reported the event.
https://www.texanonline.net/articles/features/gay-rights-civil-rights-not-the-same/
Gay media reported on it.
https://www.advocate.com/news/2004/05/25/black-pastors-protest-gay-marriage-texas-12536
Carter signs a anti-Gay manifesto against same-sex marriage.
This was the title of the document, “Here We Stand: An Evangelical Declaration on Marriage”
Not happy that Gays can get married. This was a coalition “assembled by the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission” which issued a statement signed by 100 religious leaders including Pastor Bryan Carter of Concord Church.
This document was reviewed by Hemant Mehta, “The Nashville Statement Is Anti-LGBTQ Christian Bigotry Written in Stone.”
Again, one of the signers is Senior Pastor Bryant Carter of Concord Church.
This is the statement.
https://cbmw.org/nashville-statement/
Christianity Today, in an article titled, “Here We Stand: An Evangelical Declaration on Marriage”
Not happy that Gays can get married. This was a coalition “assembled by the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission” which issued a statement signed by 100 religious leaders including Pastor Bryan Carter of Concord Church.
This attitude towards Gays getting married is still current as late as 2019 as reported in this New York Times article, “Pastor Carter won’t marry same-sex couples”.
It is about his church offering free weddings to couples living together. He doesn’t want people shacking up. However, as the article reports, Pastor Carter won’t marry same-sex couples.
To date, no same-sex couples have volunteered for the challenge. If they did, Mr. Carter said, he would refer them to a different church to be married. Though Concord welcomes the L.G.B.T.Q. community, he said, “our church believes in more traditional model of marriage.”
This is one reason some religious leaders are not so enthusiastic about Mr. Carter’s program. “Research bears the pastor out that stable marriages do support better mental health and stability in children,” said Janne Eller-Isaacs, a senior co-pastor at Unity Church-Unitarian in St. Paul, Minn. “My bias is that I don’t want to be promoting an old-style, patriarchal marriage. As someone who has married lesbians, gays and transgendered folks, making the ritual of marriage available to all people is extremely important to me.”
Also, he isn’t upfront about his attitudes. When he says his church “welcomes the L.G.B.T.Q. community” is likely as sinners to be saved.
The President of the Board of Directors of the Dallas African American Museum is a serious homophobe.
I have reported on this. Vonciel Jones Hill who wanted a life-saving anti-AIDS program outreach to African American men blocked.
I got a complaint that I had mentioned Hill being the head of the Museum board and also that homophobia at the Museum was the fault of Gays.
It is not surprising that years latter there was a failure to reach African American men who have sex with men when mpox hit. African American men were much more severely impacted than white men.
I wrote Jasmine Crockett about it. No reply, but the impact on African Americans was at least twice that of whites.
Even though the census shows more Whites than African Americans, African Americans got impacted much more by mpox. (Data 1/31/2023 screen capture from the Dallas Co. Health Dept. Race classifications theirs.)
Homophobia has real world medical impacts on African American men.
Much of the local Dallas African American establishment was their at this museum lead by a homophobe to give an award to a homophobe.
I will try to list names here later, but I saw judges and others.
Texas State Senator Royce West and the African American Museum
TX State Sen. West voted for the anti-drag bill SB12. It turned out that the local LGBT establishment was all working to except his excuses for doing so.
The following is a directory of posts on his voting for the anti-drag bill and the LGBT making excuses for his vote.
Sen. West is at the Gala event at the Dallas African American Museum giving an award to Rev. Dr. Carter.
He is involved in fund raising for the anti-Gay museum.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2488078574705875
Internet Archive save. Give the archive a moment to load pages.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231025003539/https://aamdallas.org/events/
Sen. Royce West surely knows about the leadership of this museum and surely knew who was going to be honored and Rev. Dr. Carter’s prominent activism against LGBT. But he chose to be at this award event and support this institution.
Maybe his vote for SB12 wasn’t a mistake and he is laughing privately about the willingness of the local “leadership” to accept and defend his excuses for voting for SB12.
The Dallas African American Museum is an unsafe place for LGBT.
I am sure there will be many excuses made for their homophobia and I am sure there are Lesbians and Gays lining up to defend the museum and explain away or make rationalizations or denials of homophobia.
They will be the usual excuses made by some LGBT for some anti-Gay person, especially, since it seems to be a Dallas thing.
These are excuses for the vicious homophobe W.A. Criswell of 1st Dallas Baptist church would would say that AIDS was punishment for “sodomy” published in the Dallas Voice.
The African American experience and Christianity and slavery
American slave owners had a big debate on whether to teach Christianity to the slaves. They view that won out is that teaching slaves Christianity would make them more manageable and less troublesome.
Confederate General Stonewall Jackson is a hero to conservative Christians to this day for teaching African American slaves Christianity. James Henley Thornwall had a very famous speech in 1850, “The Rights and Duties of the Masters” in which he explains that the viewpoint that slavery should be taught to the slaves to make them more obedient was vindicated.
https://archive.org/details/rightsandduties00thorgoog
There is some talk about secret African American Christian meetings away from the masters. With slave patrols and slave societies always being on constant alert for slave revolt, it has to be asked how secret they were. Likely slave owners saw them as a great way of diverting African American slave energy into safe (safe to the slave owners) channels.
Subversive religion I think would be to have secret Muslim meetings or secret meetings with their African Gods.
Most people are Christian because of an empire in their ancestors’ past, whether Roman, Charlemagne, Spanish, Portuguese, English, French or Russian.
The Japanese, Chinese, Thai have their ancestral religions because they were able to defend their nation from imperial aggression, whereas Africans and Latin Americans adopted the religion of Pizarro, Cortez, the London Missionary Society, and others.
Additionally, Kublai Khan was able to defeat a rebellion by his uncle Nayan, who had adopted Roman Catholicism and had a Christian Cross on his Battle Standard. So a lot of Buddhist and Taoist temples ended up not being burned to the ground. And yes, they would have, just as the Christians burnt Mayan literature, as they burnt Buddhist temples in Japan.
Christianity got its start back in Roman Empire times because it meet psychological wants for slaves and it was popular for slaves. It was a religion that had as one of its Gospels, a runway slave being sent back to his master. Very useful religious belief for a society with huge, I mean huge, latifundia with vast slave holdings.
The Bible in the Old Testament and New Testament was fairly solid on slavery. Jesus constructs his religion using narratives of slavery. I go into it in this post.
Of course a modern African American church has to do a lot of rationalization to get pro-slavery out of the Bible. I am sure they have elaborate involved arguments to do so. However, when they want to justify their prejudices against Gays they just latch on to Leviticus or whatever and run with it. Christianity is more flexible than the most advanced yoga practitioner or double-jointed contortionist. It can be whatever you need it to be when you don’t like someone.
Other nationalities have not been slow to notice the impact of Christianity that arrives with imperial gunboats.
Though I don’t endorse them, groups outside the West will say things outload or do research that the Western neoliberal university won’t.
There is a reason why there is nothing like this in Africa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C5%8Dry%C5%AB-ji
I suggest African American churches leave the LGBT alone and focus on your historical origins and deal with that. Also, maybe deal with the Christian accounts of African religion which represent it as savage, while Christians eat the body and blood of their God.
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