Sergius & Bakkhus
(New Jersey USA)
the Moorish Orthodox Church of America.
E-MAIL: [email protected]
BISHOP MICHAEL FRANCIS AUGUSTINE ITKIN: CONFESSOR & PIONEER
"Itkin ... is a one-man resolutions mill, and next to Leo Laurence is the sotrmy petrel of the San Francisco gay scene, working hard to be more militant than anyone else except when questions of violence are raised. More angry and unrestrained even than Leo, he is adamamtly pacifist, and also an exceptional theoretician."
Teal goes on to describe (p.91) the Bishop as a leader among California's "gay liberationists" and a leftist, quoting the Bishop:
"If we are to build a loving and peaceful society, we can only do so by loving and peaceful means. If we meet the violence of the oppressors with violence of our own, then we become the same as them and if our revolution should succeed, we become merely the new masters, and oppressors ourselves..."
In addition, Teal quotes (p.100) an opinion piece written by the Bishop, a self-described "Libertarian Socialist - Anarchist Communitarian" appearing in the Berkeley Free Press elaborating the Bishop's opposition to violent methodologies as a committment no less intense than his committment to political and social revolutionary change:
"It is obvious that those of us who hold to the principles of revolutionary nonviolence and the building of a community of love based on decentralist lines could not, in any way, support David Hilliard [note: a Black Panther Party member and activist leader] when, under the pretence of speaking for peace, he caled for violence, when under the pretence of speaking for peace he spoke against the peace movement like a left-wing Spiro Agnew, when under the pretence of speaking for peace he attempted to have the anthem of his political party - vanguard or not - imposed on us as the anthem of the entire movement that day. We cannot see that violence, in any man's hand, is any less violence.
When a man is murdered, regardless of the polemics surrounding that murder, another human being is dead without consideration of color, class, nation or politics.
When a man is helped to become a transformed and liberated human being, he then aids in the revolution.
As such, in our consciences, we had no choice but to protest his [Hilliard's] speech as we did."
Bishop Itkin was not speaking in favor of the existing political-social-economic structure in America, he was speaking out against violence as a means for changing that system and against
"Supporting structures such as the Black Panther Party and the Weathermen, which we cnanot help but view as elitist in their insistance that they are the vanguard of the revolution."
Thus are the few preserved words we have of this Holy Man at hand, but from those few words we can postulate a being of great spiritual evolution, courage almost to the point of unreasonableness, acute theoretical ability and ineluctible belief in the equivalence of means and ends; in short, a man not terribly unlike him whom Itkin would call his Savior.
