Posted on 07/21/2004 7:56:57 AM PDT by rhema
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 Just as those racist laws needed to be repealed, surely the laws against men marrying men also need to be repealed.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. —•
Marriage is not even a significant institution in the black community. Most likely it is because they don't want gays competing with them for civil rights attention.
That's nailing the issue good! The gay rights thing is largely a white liberal goal, and it must be really galling to blacks to watch attempts to link a sexual perversion cause to civil rights for black Americans.
In fact, the same moral failings that gave us slavery and segregation also have given us the concept of homosexual marriage. You might just as well try to re-impose slavery using the same rationale, by couching it in terms of a struggle for someone's "rights."
Against homosexual marriage but then explain the whole concept of "Being on the down low" to us....
| What We Can Do To Help Defeat the "Gay" Agenda |
|
|
| Homosexual Agenda: Categorical Index of Links (Version 1.1) |
|
|
| Myth and Reality about Homosexuality--Sexual Orientation Section, Guide to Family Issues" |
The ideals of the right are much more homogeneous and compatible with each other than those of the left. The left is made up of competing and fractured social interests.
bttt
Oh? So riddle me this, Brilliant. It is more than apparent that American blacks do not approve of homosexual marriage. That's good. But why must this rightful position be thrown away by you because you ascribe an ulterior motive for their disapproval for homosexual "marriage"?
$710.96... The price of freedom.
The whole article is misleading. The title should read "Black & right: Black Religious Leaders in America almost uniformly opposed to homosexual marriage." You are correct in stating that the institution of marriage is given little thought in the black community in general. There is a very high rate of unwed black mothers and too many black siblings with different fathers.
How can you consider their position on marriage righteous when marriage is almost nonexistent in the black community?
Nope. First things first. I asked you first. Answer, then I'll answer yours.
Why ascribe an ulterior motive for the disapproval of homosexual marriage since that disapproval is the right position?
$710.96... The price of freedom.
Because that's what I believe.
Okay, but that doesn't really tell me anything. Why do you believe that?
$710.96... The price of freedom.
What, are you a shrink, or something? Why do you care?
Personally, I am willing to be proven wrong. If the black community votes for Bush in Nov., I will conclude that it was because they took exception to Kerry's position on gay marriage. If they vote for Kerry, I will conclude that they were merely opposed to gay marriage because they feared the gays were moving in on their territory.
I'm sorry I'm a little slow this morning, exactly what do you mean when you say the Democrats give "lip service"?
1. The Democrats OPPOSED the Civil Rights Amendments.
2. The Democrats OPPOSED The SCHOOL VOUCHERS to help
educate the minorities.
3. The Democrats SUPPORT the HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA.
NEED WE SAY ANY MORE!
*** DING DING DING *** No more calls; we have a winner!
Irrelevant question. To illustrate with another example: If somebody wanted to kill Osama bin Laden because Osama ran over his cat in 1979, the fact that killing Osama is justified for greater reasons doesn't change the fact that this particular person is acting from an "ulterior motive".
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.