Blog We dropped the ball: The A.V. Club on Soul Vegetarian, homosexuality, and making mistakes

Earlier today, The A.V. Club posted a feature about South Side soul food mainstay Soul Vegetarian and one of its founders, Yohanna Brown. In the interview, Brown kind of offhandedly mentioned that, as a Hebrew Israelite, she believes that wearing clothes of the opposite sex—women wearing pants, for example—leads to homosexuality.

Let me be the first to admit we missed an opportunity by not following up on that statement. It hasn’t gone unnoticed on the Internet, where Chicago Reader writer Miles Raymer said, “I actually can’t believe how epically @AVClubChicago dropped the ball re: Soul Veg and homophobia.” In the freelance writer who did the piece’s defense, she was in the woman’s restaurant and, because she was there under the guise of writing about food, she didn’t feel comfortable dragging the needle off the record and making Brown defend herself.

That being said, Brown absolutely should have had to defend herself, and we’re in the process of getting her to do just that for a story that should run tomorrow. If Brown doesn’t necessarily justify her religious belief, then she should at least answer how she feels about her gay customers who might not be aware of the Hebrew Israelite religion, or whether money spent at Soul Vegetarian goes toward propagating anti-gay rhetoric. Lord knows that people get all up in arms about Chick-Fil-A’s anti-gay donations, and, even if it’s on a much smaller scale with Soul Vegetarian, conscious consumers should know what their dollars are going toward.

For anyone wanting to know more about the Hebrew Israelite belief system, there’s plenty of information out there on the Internet, some of it more reputable than others. Both The Village Voice and the Washington City Paper have done features on the more radical branches of the religion, the ones that both Esquire and the Southern Poverty Law Center have gone out of their way to say are fairly outlandish, albeit somewhat powerful. The Voice’s article came out in March of this year and focuses pretty extensively on the sect’s thoughts on homosexuality and gender norms. It quotes one member as saying they’re offended by the media “showing little boys that it’s OK to dress like a woman, so they can grow up to be faggots.”

Some—and this is not to say all, no more than to say that the Westboro Baptist Church is representative of all Christians—Hebrew Israelites believe that homosexuals should be put to death. They also don’t believe in Christmas, Halloween, Easter, or wearing a wedding ring, as all are Pagan customs. The basic tenets of the belief system center around “the maintenance of a vegan diet void of all animal by-products (Genesis 1:29) the wearing of only natural fabrics - - cotton, wool, linen and silk (based on Leviticus 12:12) the circumcision of our male children eight days after birth (Leviticus 12:3) and, the maintenance of the laws of purification for women relative to their monthly cycle and childbirth (Leviticus 12:2-5),” as well as a genuine belief that they were God’s chosen people who were stolen away as slaves against their will. They believe that the common belief that Jesus was a white man is patently false, and that—like a lot of other religions—their faith is totally justified in the Bible.

There is almost no way of knowing what every single employee of Soul Vegetarian believes, and, arguably, how they spend their hard earned money isn’t necessarily something they should be held totally accountable for more than every other company on Earth. The CEO of Jewel-Osco could be doing some weird stuff with his paycheck, but we don’t really know. Until there’s due diligence on every company and every person, I’d rather reserve some judgment, while at the same time not choosing to support those businesses I know I don’t agree with morally.