As Neighborhoods Change, So Must Politicians' Views

By Marc Fisher
Thursday, April 20, 2006

O n the street, between boarded-up buildings, the coat of fresh paint stands out, sentinel of change, harbinger of gentrification. A bar is coming to Ninth Street NW.

A bar to be owned by three gay men. A bar where homosexuals would be welcome, along with anyone else who lives in Shaw. A neighborhood bar. The owner plans to call it Be Bar, as in "let it."

Bishop C.L. Long's church, Scripture Cathedral, sits right across the street from Be Bar. You know where this is going. Long believes he is called to prevent this bar from getting a liquor license. His instructions are in Romans, Chapter 1, which speaks of "vile affections" and says, "And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly . . . "

Long told me he would talk to me if I read and published what Romans says on this issue. I'm always happy to share this space with Scripture. The bishop and I spoke yesterday in the halls of government, outside the D.C. Alcoholic Beverage Control Board's meeting room, where the state must mediate the conflicting forces of church, citizens and economy.

The bishop, who was in Shaw decades before the owners of the Be Bar, is a man accustomed to being listened to. He travels with staff, wears suits of eye-popping hues and drives a shiny Rolls. He boasts of a congregation 3,000 strong. Historically, when he speaks, the District's politicians act.

Long says he would oppose any bar that sought to open near his church, but he is particularly exercised about a gay bar. Never mind that Be Bar owner Tom McGuire says the bar is designed to be open to all.

Long does this "because I have to preach what Romans says. If this is a gay club, that's bad for the kids."

Hundreds of such conflicts arise in the continuing saga called Whose City Is It Really? Smart people keep falling into these confrontations, knowing that grown people will accuse one another of evil intent, rapacious greed and unfiltered selfishness.

Long won't tell me whether he would speak to the bar's owners. Twenty feet apart in a hallway, he won't even face them. "You ask them," the bishop instructs me. "They're standing right there."

"We would be more than willing to sit down and talk with him any time," McGuire says. "We could tell him about the hundreds of neighborhood residents who are tired of not having anything within walking distance of their home."

Some facts: Shaw is changing. New people -- young, single, gay, straight, struggling student, well-to-do professional, white, black and other -- are moving in. Some longtime residents are heading out; some were forced out by rising rents and taxes, others cashed in and moved to the suburb of their dreams. But census numbers show Shaw going through evolution, not wholesale change: As of 2000, the area around Be Bar and Scripture Cathedral was still 70 percent black. From 1990 to 2000, the neighborhood's white population went up by 201 people and the black population increased by 228 people.

Another fact: Shaw has always been changing, always uncomfortably. Whites and blacks clashed there in riots in 1917.

Shouldn't this be a simple matter of mathematics? If Bishop Long's congregants have been moving out to Prince George's County, and new residents of Shaw have been registering to vote, doesn't it stand to reason that District politicians would set aside their reflexive support for the church and cast their lots with the voters?

No.

In the District, pride and prejudice often trump the political forces that rule other places. Those who sense that their home is being taken from them may not be a powerful voting bloc, but they still wield power.

Especially over gays. The District has been unusually open to gays for decades. But today, even with two openly gay men on the D.C. Council, many gays, like many blacks in Shaw, feel besieged. To make way for the new baseball stadium, a decades-old gay club district is about to be razed. The District promised to find alternative sites but hasn't. And now the Be Bar standoff.

"The city is really saying that gay people are expendable," says Phil Pannell, a Ward 8 activist who was the mayor's assistant for gay issues. "The whole gentrification battle gets even more complex now. People who felt pushed out by income and race now have to deal with sexual orientation, with people who their religious beliefs tell them are an abomination."

The ABC Board, loath to weigh in on morality, tends to stretch out conflicts like this for a year or more, hoping that one side or the other will just go away.

No business can wait forever. Scripture Cathedral actually put its building up for sale a couple of years ago, just to test the waters. Everyone has a price.

But the forces of faith and love are eternal.

In the end, the city will have to recognize that neighborhoods change.

You can debate morality until the end days, but in politics, numbers talk.

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