Posted on 10/08/2004 12:24:12 AM PDT by GOPcapitalist
Freedom from Slavery (of all kinds)
By JACQUELINE BRANNON GILES
Governor Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, spoke to a diverse audience at Pleasant Grove Missionary Baptist Church on the eve of Juneteenth. A theme of love and reconciliation was encouraged in the celebration in the historical church whose members worshipped in the downtown Houston area 139 years ago, but were asked to move the location of the church because of the loud response they had when they learned that slaves were set free in Texas.
Pastor C. L. Jackson was a host pastor of the event and numerous pastors attended the celebration, the press conference and elegant reception. An emotional sector of the celebration was the kneeling for prayer to ask God to forgive all of those who practiced the sin of racism embodied in slavery. The white participants were asked to kneel and pray, and the black participants were so touched that they, too, kneelt, hugged, and embraced their fellow Christians. There was a call to action for churches to get more involved in using the Word of God as the guideline for human decisions and behavior, suggesting that not only should people know the Word but they must live the Word and encourage others to do so. The term "Christocrat" was used to express the need for aligning oneself with truth and the issues that align with God's Word.
(Excerpt) Read more at justiceatthegate.org ...
While it is perfectly proper for the Governor of Texas to participate in annual Juneteenth events, this one is of particular note because of what happened there. It was hosted by a cultish fringe group called Justice at the Gate that I have been watching for some time. Justice at the Gate falls on the "religious right" end of the political spectrum but they're immersed in the "white guilt" that typifies many groups on the far left and in the slavery reparations movement. Simply put, this organization (which includes many prominent Texas Republicans such as state party vice chair David Barton and former chair Susan Weddington) travels around the state and hold racial apology ceremonies for slavery and other historical wrongs to various minority groups, even though nobody who actually enslaved another is alive today.
At this particular event they singled out anglo members of the audience and asked them to kneel down in the front of the church - almost as if a spectacle - in apology for slavery. The same group has held previous ceremonies in which leadership figures from the Republican Party of Texas specifically invoked their offices to issue apologies for slavery on its behalf.
I consider this to be racial pandering of the worst form and find little distinction between it and the left wing spectacle that happened in Annapolis last weekend when a reparationist group paraded volunteers through the streets in chains as a way to assign guilt for slavery.
This is one of the many reasons why I will never vote for Governor Perry again. He's gotten himself involved in a truly cultish racial pandering organization that's done this sort of stuff and worse many times before. They're kind of like a "evangelical right" version of a Jesse Jackson "religious charity" that goes around pandering out reparations schemes. They pretty much do the same thing with these fake apology ceremonies. The people who support this all claim they're doing it in the name of minority outreach for the Republican Party but it's not - it's racial pandering of the Jesse Jackson-Al Sharpton type and those who are not so caught up in themselves and their power in the Republican Party of Texas see right through it. I heard from several who were dragged along to this ceremony but got up and went outside midway through because it was so bizarre - esp. when they started singling out groups by skin color and asking them to repent, as if they were guilty of some "group sin" just by being that skin color.
How silly. There's no group in the world that hasn't been discriminated against in some way, but most of them don't groove on it, continually resurrecting the old wounds. I wish someone could buy the Move On title for a group aimed at folks like those who put together this kind of silliness. Move on!
It offends me because I never enslaved anybody and I've never treated other people badly based on their skin color! So why should I have to kneel down in a ceremony and repent for a sin that I did not commit simply because I happen to be one skin color or another?
These idiots need to get a copy of Brenda Lee's "I'm Sorry", and play it at every public event.
Unfortunately, this "truly cultish" group, as you so accurately tag them, runs the Republican Party of Texas, selects candidates, and doles out support on the basis of participation in their perverted version of evangelical Christianity.
If you're not a member of Susan Weddington and Tina Benkiser's church group, you're on the outside looking in.
It's way past time for a major housecleaning.
Unfortunately, this "truly cultish" group, as you so accurately tag them, runs the Republican Party of Texas, selects candidates, and doles out support on the basis of participation in their perverted version of evangelical Christianity.
If you're not a member of Susan Weddington and Tina Benkiser's church group, you're on the outside looking in.
It's way past time for a major housecleaning.
Don't know if I agree:
things were different back when we had one!
One of them shows David Barton standing next to an object identified as a "slave kettle." It was a large metal cauldron that was purported to have been used by slaves who "whispered prayers" into it in the Christian sense. Somebody gave a presentation about it during the apology ceremony and claimed it was hidden under a slave's cabin because the slaveowners wouldn't allow them to practice Christianity.
The story is immediately suspect because it simply does not mesh with history, which shows several very deliberate and supported attempts by clergymen and missionaries to convert the slaves to Christianity as most of them practiced African and Caribbean forms of what we know today as Voodoo when they were brought here. Even some of the most vicious slaveowners permitted missionaries to preach to the slaves for this purpose, so it is simply not believeable that the cauldron would have been hidden for the purposes claimed.
That said, there is also an overwhelming volume of historical and archaelogical evidence from known plantation site excavations showing that non-converted slaves buried metal cannisters including cauldrons of this sort below their cabins as to practice the old voodoo religions in secret. They believed that the metal harnessed some sort of "magic energy" and if they whispered into the container they were communicating to dead spirits and other voodoo creatures.
I mention this because it says something very telling about the self-appointed arbiters of the official "church" in the Republican Party of Texas: its leaders, in their bizarre quest to pander for votes and conduct leftist-style slavery apology ceremonies, also unwittingly prayed around a pagan voodoo relic on the floor of a Christian sanctuary. These sort of things always have a curious way of exposing themselves.
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