Now if that isn't one convoluted example, I don't know what is.
$710.96... The price of freedom.
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 Just as those racist laws needed to be repealed, surely the laws against men marrying men also need to be repealed.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. —•
Blacks should feel insulted that their own leaders compare the Homosexual Agenda to their own struggle.
Blacks should be insulted that liberals compare blackness to sodomy.
Nail on head!
By that I mean that the democrats promise everything for or to the Blacks, but these promises have failed to deliver or to produce the desired results.
I strongly believed that success is not dependent on or hindered by race, especially in this day and age. Yes, there are exceptions and there are still bigots out there. But the key to success for anyone is two things:
Hard work and education.
Until community leaders take the profit out of failure, the Democrats will continue to count on the Black vote as being theirs and not do anything to try and improve the racial disharmony that is being fostered by the likes of charlatans like Sharpton and multimillionaire Jesse.
What do I mean by "profit out of failure"?
Scholarships for the undeserving (Georgia for example), intimidation lawsuits and phony settlements (Jackson-Budweiser and Toyota), affirmative action.
BTW: God bless your son. Mine just got out after four years and Navy tours for Iraq and Afghanistan (USS Lincoln). Good to have him home!
I can guarantee you that for any black person opposed to homosexual marriage, it has absolutely nothing to do with "civil rights attention". You can scour the entire nation and you won't find any black person who is opposed to homosexual marriage for that reason. It's not even on the radar screen.
It is because the black community in many ways is still very Bible-based. For the most part, they believe homosexual behavior is a sin. When something that is sinful tries to co-opt the civil rights movement it is galling to a lot of people.
The black community as a whole is much less "tolerant" of homosexuals than other communities, and political correctness has done little to change this. That's why rappers, hardly themselves paragons of moral virtue, see no hypocrisy when slamming "fa**ots" in their rhymes.
It may seem strange, since apparently the poor black community places a low value on getting married anyway. I say the POOR community because my observations of middle and upper class blacks reveals little difference between how they view marriage and how whites and others view it. One reason poor blacks place a low value on marriage is that the government programs so many of them rely on discourage marriage and do nothing to contribute to the notion of a stable family life.
I wish I could say that I believed the black community is Bible based. You can't pick and choose the issues you want when it comes to the Bible. You either take it all or leave it all.
Of course, there is little doubt that the white community also lacks that moral foundation.
A few observations.
1. "Being on the down low" is something shameful in the black community. Being a homosexual is shameful, that's why so many choose to be "on the down low". Do you even know what down low means? The very concept lends credence to the idea that blacks would be against homosexuals getting married.
2. "Down low" black males really didn't seem to be much of a big deal (in terms of media attention) until the last few years. I then observed an explosion of articles about this topic in black magazines and other media sources. In fact, they keep writing articles about it (I have seen this in Ebony, Essence, Jet, and so on, every few months). All of the articles are sympathetic to the "down low" men. I honestly believe that this is another attempt by liberals and their cohorts in the media to try to persuade people to be more "tolerant" of homosexuals. I don't believe all of the brouhaha over "down low" men is because the black community itself is changing its attitudes.
3. Another reason the "down low" issue has become so important is because HIV infection rates are rising among black women (more than any other group), who themselves are not engaging in risky sex (for the most part). It is their "down low" boyfriends and husbands who are spreading the disease.
4. If blacks don't really oppose homosexuality, how come these men have to be "on the down low" at all?
The cafeteria approach to the Bible is prevalent in ALL communities in this country. And other countries have just thrown the Bible out completely.
Yes, I know what it is.
And, it's also called being in denial. Some of these men are saying that being gay is a white man's thing and what they are doing isn't really homosexual. It's a way of being in the closet and then coming up with a name that distances oneself from the behavior. The risk of HIV is huge and what's worse is that their women are catching it from their closeted behavior.
Personally, I also think it's a bit racist saying that white people are gay but they aren't.
Homosexual Agenda/"Gay" marriage and why it is wrong Ping.
There is so much that is hitting the Truth Target in this article. Read it, keep it, email it, and take a stack of copies to church, meetings, and so on.
A Tripe Star Article!
Let me know if anyone wants on/off this pinglist.
A couple of good quotes:
"Homosexual marriage, on the contrary, depends on a rejection of objective moral truth."
"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."
"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."
And I really like this statement:
"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."
Basic, true, bullseye.
Homosexual Agenda/"Gay" marriage and why it is wrong Ping.
There is so much that is hitting the Truth Target in this article. Read it, keep it, email it, and take a stack of copies to church, meetings, and so on.
A Tripe Star Article!
Let me know if anyone wants on/off this pinglist.
A couple of good quotes:
"Homosexual marriage, on the contrary, depends on a rejection of objective moral truth."
"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."
"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."
And I really like this statement:
"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."
Basic, true, bullseye.
DING DING DING -- Winner.
Some people are too cynical to see simple truth.
Excellent article. It's in rev 1.2 of the database.
Sorry for the dupe, I have no idea how it happened. I'll ask the mod to get rid of it.
I REALLY like this article. It's truly universal in scope, starting from the point of explaning the support for real marriage among the black community.
Whoever wrote it not sees the truth very well but expresses it simply and clearly. Something not everyone can do!
Perhaps, "Brilliant", because blacks are well acquainted with gays.
He is the white guy driving through a minority neighborhood offering rides to young black boys and money for "jobs".
And for your information blacks are far more solid churchgoers than most white people. Look at any black church on Sunday. You always see black people going to church in their Sunday best, not in tshirts, jeans, and sweats like white people.
Going to church means nothing. I'm looking at the crime rate in the inner city, murder, drugs, promiscuity, not to mention that fact that the black community votes 95% Democratic in every election, and the Democratic Party is a party without a moral compass. Don't tell me all that is endorsed by the Bible. The reason that blacks are almost unanimously opposed to gay marriage obviously has nothing to do with religion.
Now if that isn't one convoluted example, I don't know what is.
$710.96... The price of freedom.
The article is speaking of the AME Church & its members. They, like their African brethren (different denomination), oppose gay marriage & the homosexual agenda. The African Episcopal Church has separated itself from the non-Bible believing, gay-marriage, American branch.
I don't think the opposition has anything to do with the competition for civil rights. Maybe they have enough sense to know homosexuality is wrong & ruins families, unlike their liberal, white counterparts in the liberal "church."
Marriage is not even a significant institution in the black community.
With about 42% of eligible African-Americans married (per the 2000 census), ... marriage is, certainly, a significant institution in the black community, ... though not a majority instutution.
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