Black & right: Black Americans almost uniformly opposed to homosexual
marriage!! Liberals Hate America!!
http://www.worldmag.com/newsite/content/subscriber/displayarticle.cfm?id=9425
THE METHODISTS FOUGHT, THE PRESBYTERIANS (USA) dithered, and the
Episcopalians gave in as their national conventions struggled over
what to do about homosexuality. But the African Methodist Episcopal
Church (AME), the largest black church in the country with 2.5 million
members, voted in its national convention unanimously not to allow
pastors to perform same-sex marriages.
Black Americans tend to be liberal politically. They are the most
reliable components of the Democratic Party's base, with the possible
exception of gays, whose causes Democrats and liberals are
championing. And yet, black Americans are among the demographic groups
most opposed to gay marriage.
This frustrates gay activists and their allies. African-Americans have
experienced terrible discrimination. Why aren't they more sympathetic
with the discrimination that gays experience? There used to be laws
against blacks marrying whites. Just as those racist laws needed to be
repealed, surely the laws against men marrying men also need to be
repealed. Blacks and gays should be natural allies, liberals are
saying.
Of course, some black leaders -- like former presidential candidate
and ordained minister Al Sharpton -- follow the party line of the
liberal establishment. But across the country, black pastors have been
staging rallies against gay marriage. African-Americans bitterly
resent the attempt by homosexual activists to appropriate the
civil-rights movement for their cause. Even the extremely liberal
Congressional Black Caucus has denounced comparisons of the
gay-marriage movement to the civil-rights struggles of the 1960s.
"Why are blacks, who know so well the reality of discrimination, so
uniformly unsympathetic to the case that the gay community is making?"
That question is raised by Star Parker, a black evangelical, in a
column for Scripps Howard News Service. She says that the main reason
is that the civil-rights movement depended on objective moral truth.
Homosexual marriage, on the contrary, depends on a rejection of
objective moral truth.
"It is not just that they know when their movement is being hijacked,"
she quotes Wilfred McClay, history professor at the University of
Tennessee, as saying. "It is that the religious sensibility that
animated the civil-rights movement, and that is still very much alive
in the American black community today, is bound up in a biblical
worldview that would no more countenance the radical redefinition of
marriage than it would the re-imposition of slavery."
"Blacks know instinctively that the debate on gay marriage is the
symptom and not the problem," says Ms. Parker. "They know that the
root problem is the implicit de-legitimization and marginalization in
the United States today of traditional standards of right and wrong."
She argues that it was just such a marginalization of right and wrong
that allowed slavery. "Without an anchor in ultimate standards, blacks
know that the best politics and law, even in as great a country as
ours, can lead anywhere."
Concepts such as justice, freedom, and human rights depend on a
worldview that recognizes transcendent, objective, moral truths. If
morality is just something that we can construct and reconstruct
according to our own preferences, as postmodernists believe, then
justice, freedom, and human rights will be in jeopardy. To reject
universal teachings about sexual morality and to presume to redefine
marriage to include homosexual relationships may seem kind and
tolerant. But that comes with a horrible price, the repudiation of the
very moral framework that makes kindness and tolerance possible.
One might say that black Americans are suffering the consequences of
the sexual revolution. The whole culture has drifted away from sexual
morality, and African-Americans have been paying the highest price, in
the troubled children, the crime, and the poverty that accompany
communities that do without marriage. But whites as well as blacks are
affected by the moral breakdown. Among white women, Ms. Parker points
out, the incidence of out-of-wedlock births is 25 percent -- what it
was for black women 40 years ago.
The civil-rights movement of the 1960s was moral. The gay-rights
movement is not. It is that simple. Perhaps African-Americans and
their churches could start exerting the moral leadership that our
whole country desperately needs.
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Liberals Hate America!
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