One man's fantasy
It arrives, this latest effort to ''start a dialogue," in glossy print, full of pictures of happy, nuclear, African-American families.
A product of the obscure Seymour Institute for Advanced Christian Studies, it appears inoffensive.
Then I began to read it, and realized that my patience is wearing thin with people who say they just want to talk.
I'm referring to a newly released report called ''God's Gift." An alleged scholarly study, it reduces what it contends is the crisis facing African-American families to a litany of familiar complaints: absentee husbands/fathers, promiscuity, abandonment of traditional values.
It is the latest production of the Rev. Eugene F. Rivers 3d, pastor of the Azusa Christian Community, who has added the title of founder and president of the Seymour Institute, his very own think tank.
There's a lot of dense prose about various types of pathology. But the pictures really tell the story: page after page of smiling African-American families.
Note, please, what is excluded in that description: interracial families, any kind of nontraditional family, and, especially, any representation of gay marriage, which Rivers -- like much of the local black clergy -- vigorously opposes.
Now I am all for traditional nuclear families. I grew up in one. But that does not stop me from bristling at the idea that anyone else's idea of a family must be wrong. If we could just get back to the 1950s, some people seem to think, all our problems would go away -- which, like all nostalgia, is rooted in fantasy.
To be fair, the report claims to be an update of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1965 essay on ''The Negro Family" in which he prophesied that weakening family bonds, and, especially, absent black men were dooming a generation to poverty and worse. Black intellectuals pilloried Moynihan at the time, and he spent years deflecting charges that his sweeping judgments amounted to intellectualized racism.
Forty years later, many of his critics believe he saw the future more clearly than they did. ''This guy was actually calling for social policies that would focus on the black family, and he was impaled for it," Rivers told me yesterday. ''The chickens have all come home to roost."
The report cites familiar statistics on divorce, drug use, HIV/AIDS, and other ills in making its case that black America is in the throes of self-destruction. This is the kind of sky-is-falling prophecy that sells to the political right, and Rivers has been selling it for some time now.
He said Republican Senators Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Sam Brownback of Kansas have expressed interest in holding congressional hearings on the report.
I mentioned to Rivers that neither has much of a record, as best I can tell, of deep commitment to African-American families. His response was that black politicians had basically been unresponsive on these issues, so why shouldn't he talk to the people willing to talk to him?
Indeed, the report saves its harshest words for black clergy and politicians, who are taken to task for their failure to address issues related to sexuality.
''There is a crisis around sexuality in the black community that is the third rail that nobody wants to talk about," Rivers insisted.
That's true. But he was also unabashed about baiting the gay community by directly attacking same-sex marriage, same-sex child rearing, and anything else that doesn't fit his monolithic world view.
''The only way to get a debate is to have a fight," he said. ''People don't pay attention to anything unless there's a fight."
During one of the gay-marriage debates on Beacon Hill, a friend who is raising a child with a same-sex partner asked me a memorable question: ''Why do black ministers think my family undermines their families? Telling people how to live is what preachers do, but why does their vision of family have to demonize everyone else?"
Can we have a hearing on that?
Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com. 