Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson of Ghana is playing an important role in guiding a three-week meeting at the Vatican on the challenges of the Catholic Church in Africa.

At a news conference Monday, Turkson was asked whether he thought the time was right for a black pope, especially in light of Obama’s election.

“Why not?” Turkson replied. He argued that every man who agrees to be ordained a priest has to be willing to be a pope, and is given training along the way as bishop and cardinal. “All of that is part of the package.”

He also noted that former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan was from Ghana.

“He had problems, but he still did it,” Turkson said. “And now it is Obama of the United States. And if by divine providence – because the church belongs to God – if God would wish to see a black man also as pope, thanks be to God!”

Speculation about the possibility of a pope from the developing world has swirled for years, as that is where the Catholic Church is growing most: In Africa, between 1978 and 2007, the number of Catholics grew from 55 million to 146 million. By contrast, Catholic communities in Europe are in decline.

In 1978, the Polish-born Pope John Paul II became the first non-Italian pope in 455 years. Cardinals followed in 2005 by electing German-born Pope Benedict XVI.

Whether the European-heavy College of Cardinals will look outside Europe for Benedict’s successor is an open question. Benedict enjoys good health at 82, and there are no signs the job will become open soon.

But Turkson may well be in the running when the time comes. The 60-year-old archbishop of Cape Coast, Ghana, was appointed by Benedict to be the relator, or key discussion leader, of the synod on Africa.

It’s a high-profile position – important for letting cardinals get to know prelates from regions other than their own.

During the press conference Monday, he was deft in handling delicate questions about the church in Africa, including one about priests who stray from their vows of celibacy and live openly with women.

“I might say I knew that question would come up,” he quipped.

He said the matter was not something to hide or be ashamed of. Rather, he said, the aim should be to help priests who are struggling and support them in living out their vows.

Turkson also was asked about the Catholic Church’s position on the use of condoms as a way to fight HIV, which has ravaged the continent. The Vatican opposes condoms, as well as any form of artificial birth control. Critics say the church’s position has only worsened the HIV problem.

Turkson didn’t rule out condoms outright, suggesting they could be useful in a situation of a married, faithful couple where one partner is infected.

But he said the quality of condoms in Africa is poor, and can engender false confidence. He said abstinence and fidelity were the key to fighting the epidemic, along with refraining from sex if infected.

He also said the money being spent on condoms would be better spent providing anti-retroviral drugs to those already infected.

“Let’s talk clearly,” he said. “We’re talking about a product of a factory, and there are different qualities. There are condoms that arrive in Ghana which in the heat will burst during sex. And when that is the case, then it gives a false sense of security which rather facilitates the spread of HIV/AIDs. And when that is the case, we are reluctant – even in the case of conjugal relations of people who are faithful,” to suggest condom use as a way of preventing AIDS.

Ailey kept his life as a dancer a secret from his mother for the first two years, as a member of the Lester Horton Company in California. However, Ailey continued to train in the art form, and in 1954 he moved  to New York to dance on Broadway.

Ailvin Ailey struggled as an African American and  as a gay man. He was ashamed of his sexuality and initially refused to write an autobiography because of what his mother would think. Ailey put his pain into his artwork instead.

The founding of his company in 1957, was only the beginning of the journey. For the third season of his company, in 1960, Ailey created the masterpiece titled Revelation, which is still a signature work for the company, drawing audiences worldwide.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater popularized modern dance and transformed African American concert dance.

His company gave opportunities to black dancers who were otherwise discriminated, but the company transcends the issue of race. Today, his company represents all ethnicities and embodies American society.

Ailey died of AIDS in 1989, but because of the social stigma attached to the disease, he made sure that his doctors did not reveal it to his family, as his cause of death.

Who is included?

Thirty-three gay men and lesbians, including Wanda Sykes, John Amaechi, E. Lynn Harris, Angela Davis and Anthony Woods, a West Point grad with a Harvard Master’s degree who was kicked out of the military under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and who is now running in a special election in California’s 10th Congressional District. If elected, he would become the first Black openly gay representative in Congress.

With this month’s vote, Washington became the first place in the U.S. with a majority of black residents to take up the issue. Congress still has the final say over the district’s laws, but gay rights activists now have reason to believe that strong opposition is gradually giving way to more acceptance, despite a forceful outcry by some black churches.

The issue is particularly complex in D.C., where nearly 60 percent of the residents are African-American. Of the five states that allow gay marriage – Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts and Vermont – none has such a large makeup of blacks.

Activist Donna Payne knows just how complex the issue is for the black community.

A black preacher once told her she would be accepted into his church under one condition – that she didn’t tell anyone she was a lesbian. Payne said keeping quiet wasn’t possible.

“That’s the conundrum in the African-American community,” Payne said. “They don’t want to talk about it, but they know you’re there.”

The influence of black churches was evident as the D.C. Council debated whether to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. As more than 100 mostly black protesters gathered outside city hall, council member Marion Barry, a longtime supporter of gay rights, rejected the measure and sided with ministers who he said “stand on the moral compass of God.”

But Yvette Alexander, who also represents a majority-black ward, gave her support and accused some ministers of doubting her faith.

“They have questioned my Christianity. They have questioned my morality,” she said. Then, addressing the pastors, Alexander said: “Everyone is equal under God, and there are a lot in the gay community that are at your very churches, in your congregations.”

Although black churches tend to be socially progressive and have a history of fighting for equal rights, most are theologically conservative, believing that scripture condemns homosexuality, said Anthony B. Pinn, a professor of religious studies at Rice University.

They also view gay marriage as a threat to the traditional black family, which is struggling with high divorce and low marriage rates, he said.

“From their perspective, anything that runs contradictory to that understanding of the nuclear family poses a threat,” Pinn said.

It was amid this backdrop that Barry, who served four terms as mayor, declared “we may have a civil war” after the vote. He was the only council member out of 13 to oppose the measure.

Barry wasn’t the only one using such strong rhetoric.

“I am convinced that this is going to be the Armageddon of the marriage debate,” said Harry Jackson, a black bishop who has organized rallies opposing gay marriage and has been a national voice for conservative Christians on the issue.

Jackson, who lives in Washington and leads a church in Beltsville, Md., said he plans to lead a multiracial group of pastors from around the country to Capitol Hill this week to urge lawmakers to intervene in D.C.’s decision.

Congress has until July to review the measure. If it takes no action, the legislation becomes law automatically and could be a step toward allowing gay marriages to be performed in Washington – an effort the D.C. Council intends to take on later this year.

Despite Barry and Jackson’s claims, there’s evidence the city isn’t as split on gay marriage as some suggest. Of the 12 council members who voted in favor of the gay-marriage bill, six are black.

A group of Democrats in the primarily black ward that Barry represents voted 21 to 11 to support same-sex marriage legislation over the weekend. And Washington has a history of supporting gay rights; the city passed a law in 1992 recognizing domestic partnerships.

Local gay advocates have accused critics of framing the debate as one led by rich, white gay men forcing the issue on working class black residents.

“They’re trying to whip up hysteria and use race and class issues to divide the city,” said Michael Crawford, who is black and chairs the advocacy group D.C. for Marriage.

Meanwhile, a multiracial group of gay and straight D.C. pastors are drafting a letter in support of gay marriage and urging respectful dialogue. Other gay advocates are distributing pamphlets and holding discussions to educate people on why they think it’s important that gays have the same protections as straight, married couples.

It’s difficult to know how the issue would fare today in Washington if put to a popular vote – as opponents would like. A 2006 poll of likely D.C. voters found most would oppose an initiative defining marriage as between a man and woman. White residents were most strongly against such an initiative, but 49 percent of blacks were for it.

For Shaun Allende, 27, a D.C. resident who will be at the city’s annual Black Pride event this weekend, marriage has little do with the wedding ceremony.

“It’s about the rights and privileges that people who fall in love and make that commitment are garnered when they are married,” said Allende, who is black and Hispanic.

Most recently an associate minister at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, a largely black church that welcomes LGBT members, Washington was surprised to find that in the more conservative African American community of Milwaukee, providing a safe spiritual home for LGBT congregants was dangerously controversial.

This past summer, two years after she opened the doors of Grace United Church of Christ, Washington began to receive hate mail, anonymous letters arriving nearly every week telling her that she was doing the devil’s work and was going to hell. Her message of God’s fully inclusive love wasn’t going over so well with some people.

“Some people join because they like my preaching, but then they see who we totally are” – that is, welcoming even to members of the LGBT community – “and they do leave,” Washington noted.

Tensions between the African American and LGBT communities frequently don’t take such concrete forms as hate mail and empty spots in the pews. More often, they take the more subtle forms suspicion, disregard, and missed opportunities.

Next page: The Prop 8 effect

The ban drew its strongest support from both evangelical Christians and voters who didn’t attend college, according to results released by the Public Policy Institute of California.

Age and race, meanwhile, were not as strong factors as assumed. According to the poll, 56 percent of voters over age 55 and 57 percent of nonwhite voters cast a yes ballot for the gay marriage ban.

People who identified themselves as practicing Christians were highly likely to support the constitutional amendment, with 85 percent of evangelical Christians, 66 percent of Protestants and 60 percent of Roman Catholics favoring it.

The poll also showed that the measure got strong backing from voters who did not attend college (69 percent), voters who earned less than $40,000 a year (63 percent) and Latinos (61 percent).

The proposition, which passed with 52 percent of the vote, overturned the state Supreme Court’s May decision legalizing gay marriage in California. The measure inserts language into the constitution limiting marriage to one man and one woman.

The poll found that, overall, 48 percent of voters oppose the idea of making gay marriage legal. Forty-seven percent support it, while 5 percent are undecided.

The results mirror previous PPIC polls from the last three years, suggesting that the $73 million spent for and against the measure did not do much to change public attitudes on allowing gay couples to wed, said survey director Mark Baldassare.

“At no point in time, before or after the election, did we have a majority of Californians saying they supported gay marriage,” Baldassare said. “My takeaway from this is that until there is a major shift in public opinion one way or another, it’s going to be another issue where voters are deeply divided.”

Geoffrey Kors, executive director of the gay rights group Equality California, said the PPIC poll demonstrates that same-sex marriage advocates “need to make inroads in every category. If 2 percent of voters had voted differently, we would have had a different result,” he said.

The poll was based on a phone survey of 2,003 California voters in the Nov. 4 election who were interviewed from Nov. 5-6. The sampling error was plus or minus 2 percentage points.

A separate poll by Harris Interactive for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation released on Wednesday found nationally three-quarters of Americans favor either marriage or domestic partnerships/civil unions for gay and lesbian couples. 

Their fears proved accurate.

Yet as angry as the newlyweds are, they’re almost as outraged at the suggestion that African-Americans are to blame, especially as the country basks in the glow of Barack Obama’s historic election.

“I refuse to perpetuate a cycle of oppression because someone is telling me who to blame, who is at fault for my status as a second-class citizen, where I might displace my anger and frustration and outrage,” Aja Aguirre said Sunday, despite fears that her marriage could conceivably be deemed illegitimate.

“I won’t do that because it is false in every way. I know better than that. I hope we all do.”

A bitterly ironic battle has erupted in California in the days since Obama was elected the first black president in American history, a victory many African-Americans are hoping signals an end to generations of repression.

Proposition 8, banning the right of same-sex couples to wed, passed by more than three percentage points in the reliably Democratic state.

Much of that margin came from a flood of as many as 500,000 new black voters turning out to cast their ballots for Obama. According to various polls, African-American voters supported the ban by 70-30 per cent, while whites were slightly opposed and Hispanics evenly split.

“I’m not sure what to do with this,” Dan Savage, a well-known gay advice columnist, wrote on his blog in the aftermath of the vote.

“I’m thrilled that we’ve just elected our first African-American president … but I can’t help feeling hurt that the love and support aren’t mutual.”

The African-American community, Savage said, has a problem with homophobia that needs to be confronted.

“I’m done pretending that the handful of racist gay white men out there -and they’re out there, and I think they’re scum – are a bigger problem for African-Americans, gay and straight, than the huge numbers of homophobic African-Americans are for gay Americans, whatever their color.”

In the midst of such heated talk and hurt feelings, a rally late last week against Proposition 8 in Los Angeles turned ugly.

“It was like being at a Klan rally except the Klansmen were wearing Abercrombie polos and Birkenstocks,” said one attendee, a gay black man.

The UCLA student said he was twice called the n-word.

But many argue it’s not race that is to blame for Proposition 8, but the religious right. It was the Mormon church that pushed to get the measure on the ballot, after all.

Mormon church leaders badgered other Mormons countrywide to donate heavily to the campaign and recruited thousands of volunteers for door-to-door canvassing throughout the state.

Several progressive black church leaders urged Californians to vote against Proposition 8 in the weeks leading up the election, although they acknowledged African-Americans were “conservative” on the issue of same-sex marriage and so were many of their pastors.

And since black Americans go to church in greater numbers than other races, they’re confronted far more often with the suggestion that homosexuality is sinful.

“The success of Proposition 8 is certainly about religion more than anything else but there’s no denying those attitudes are ingrained in the black community – homosexuality just isn’t accepted the way it is in other communities,” says Toni-Michelle Travis, a political science professor who specializes in race at George Mason University in Virginia.

It stems back hundreds of years, Travis says.

“When you look at the struggles throughout slavery, the only way they were going to survive, to get to the next step and preserve anything culturally was to have children,” she said.

“So the value of the family and heterosexuality has always been very important, and it’s been reinforced by black churches over generations. The civil rights movement, too, was driven by the black churches, so church and religion are a very cherished part of the community. You belong to a church, and you listen to your pastor.”

Many African-Americans also fail to see the hardships facing gays and lesbians as being on the same scale as their epic battles for equality, Travis said.

“African-Americans don’t see the fights for the rights of gays the same as their struggle,” Travis said. “Their attitude is: `They wouldn’t let me vote, they wouldn’t give me a job, and you can do those sorts of things.”’

Gay and lesbian rights leaders in California are filing suit against Proposition 8, arguing it’s illegal because it strips a fundamental constitutional right from a select group of people.

Before such propositions can go to the ballot, they argue, the state legislature must approve them and that didn’t happen in California.

The Aguirres are confident their battle will eventually be won, especially after a San Francisco march last Friday night that was attended by people of all races and from all walks of life.

“There were friends, lovers and families like ours,” said Aja Aguirre, who has a 10-year-old daughter, Celeste.

“It felt so good to be there and be part of this effort not to back down, not be silenced or defeated. Seeing the thousands of people gathered together there peacefully brought tears to my eyes and was exactly what I needed to shake off the depression I’d been in since it became clear on election night that Prop. 8 would pass.”

At the end of a recent sermon, Smith told about 50 worshippers at his Word of Outreach Christian Center: “I will be voting for John McCain and Sarah Palin.”

Smith, who is black, said neighbors and friends have questioned why he isn’t backing Obama, the first black presidential nominee from a major party.

“I just tell them it’s not about race to me,” said Smith, who was a delegate to the Republican National Convention. “It’s about principle. I wouldn’t care if it’s my mother. If she isn’t for life or for heterosexual relationships, I wouldn’t vote for my momma.”

Smith’s sermon was aimed at fighting an Internal Revenue Service policy that prohibits charities and churches from involvement in political campaigns. Smith said he didn’t tell parishioners anything they didn’t already know from talking to him at dinners or in private.

“In my investigation of the candidates, neither one of them meets the Biblical standard 100 percent,” Smith said during the Oct. 5 homily. “But only one of them has the basic understanding of when life begins. Only that one can be trusted to ensure that life does not end prematurely.”

Smith said he would send a recording of the sermon to the IRS in hopes of triggering an investigation that would lead courts to abolish restrictions on church involvement in politics. He said what he did is not unlike what other pastors do regularly.

“In the black community, they do it all the time and they do it in other communities as well,” Smith said in an interview after the sermon.

Smith isn’t just testing the law. He’s also testing his predominantly black congregation and neighborhood by backing McCain, in a city that was torn by racial strife when schools were desegregated 51 years ago.

“You never heard him once say you should vote for this person. He just said, `This is who I’m going to vote for and here are the principles behind it,’” said Angela Roberson, who has been attending the church for about a year and also supports McCain.

Experts say sermons such as Smith’s violate IRS rules and federal law. Congress amended the tax code in 1954 to state that certain nonprofit groups, including secular charities and places of worship, can lose their tax-exempt status for intervening in political campaigns.

Smith was one of 33 pastors who had planned to make pointed sermons about political candidates in September in an effort orchestrated by the Arizona-based Alliance Defense Fund, which hopes to challenge federal law and IRS rules on political speech by pastors. Scrapped because of a missed flight, Smith finally delivered the sermon last week.

“For the last 54 years, the tax restrictions have been used to silence and intimidate chruches on those issues,” said Erik Stanley, a senior attorney for the Alliance Defense Fund.

IRS spokeswoman Nancy Mathis would not comment on Smith’s sermon but said the agency would monitor any allegations of political activity by churches.

The study, by the Williams Institute at the University of California Los Angeles, found there are approximately 55,000 lesbian, gay, and bisexual black adults living in California and the state is home to 7,400 black men and women in same-sex relationships.

At 9 percent, it makes California home to the second-largest percentage of the nation’s coupled black men and women.

The study also shows that nearly 55 percent of black women and 11 percent of back men in same-sex couples in California are raising children.

But when compared to opposite-sex black families, gay families have far lower incomes.

“These analyses break stereotypes about gay, lesbian, and bisexual people, like the idea that they are all wealthy.  We find that gay and bisexual black men in California have household incomes that are 44 percent lower than their heterosexual counterparts,” said study co-author Christopher Ramos.

Black gay and bisexual men have median household incomes averaging $25,000 compared to $45,000 for their straight counterparts.

Black women in same-sex couples earn, on average, less than black men in different-sex marriages as well as black males in same-sex couples in California.

The median household income of black individuals in same-sex couples with children is $60,900, less than the $76,000 median household income of black parents in different-sex marriages, the study found.

“African-American men and women raising children in same-sex couples experience economic disadvantage compared to their different-sex married counterparts with lower household incomes and home ownership rates,” said Williams Institute Senior Research Fellow Gary Gates.

The homeownership rate of black individuals in same-sex couples raising children is 29 percent compared to 63 percent of those in different-sex marriages raising children.

Opponents of same-sex marriage who are pressing for passage of the constitutional ban on gay unions are targeting black voters who traditionally support traditional marriage.  In an election year where Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is expected to bring out a massive black vote, there are concerns those voters will support the ballot measure.

A recent poll found growing support for the amendment in California.

The SurveyUSA poll, taken for four TV stations across the state, found that 47 percent of likely voters would support the measure, known as Prop. 8, with 42 percent opposing it.