The Reverend Irene Monroe

With Iowa being the fourth state to approve marriage equality, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer Americans’ optimism is high, believing many more states will follow suit. “We’re hoping this momentum is contagious,” Daniel Richards of Rhode Island told me. And should Rhode Island soon approve of same-sex marriage, it would be the fourth New…

When Democratic U.S. Representative Barney Frank called Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia a “homophobe,” criticizing his likely support of the Defense of Marriage Act, his remarks were wrongly taken as only a personal attack on Scalia. But Barney Frank’s remark was an accurate statement about the present-day climate and culture in our country’s highest judicial…

When preachers pontificate too much from on High about the sins of homosexual sex, the cautionary tale is to be careful of what you say, because your words invariable will come back to bite you, as we have seen with fallen evangelical star Pastor Ted Haggard. The rantings against homosexuality by Bishop T. D. Jakes,…

The last time a nation came to Washington and was mesmerized and stirred to action by the oratory brilliance of an African American man was at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963 when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his legendary “I Have a Dream” speech. In that speech King said “I have…

If you are African American and gay, and fighting alongside your white LGBTQ brothers and sisters for queer civil rights, the notion that “Gay is the new black” is not only absurdly arrogant, it is also dangerously divisive. In a presumably “post-racial” era with the country’s first African American president-elect, it’s easy for some to…

In the face of a financial Armageddon, the economy has become the center of the campaign, where it should have been all along. But the moment all Americans have been waiting for – the McCain-Obama debate – was a yawn. The melodrama and histrionics of whether the debate would happen titillated anxious taxpayers hopes about…