From the Los Angeles Times:
In a move that some called historic, the county’s oldest African American civil rights group voted Saturday to endorse same-sex marriage.
The National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People passed a resolution supporting gay marriage at a meeting of its board of directors in Miami, saying it opposed any policy or legislative initiative that “seeks to codify discrimination or hatred into the law or to remove the constitutional rights of LGBT citizens.”
Directors of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force erupted in applause at their board meeting Saturday as their phones buzzed with the news.
“Today is a historic day,” Rea Carey, executive director of the task force, said a phone interview from Seattle. “This is what leadership looks like in this country.”
The vote marks a national turning point on the issue of gay marriage. President Obama announced this month that he supports gay marriage. A Gallup Poll last year found, for the first time in the poll’s history, that a majority of Americans supported the legalization of gay marriage, 53% to 45%. This year, the poll showed 50% supported it, while 48% opposed it.
“Civil marriage is a civil right and a matter of civil law,” Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the 103-year-old NAACP said in a statement.
“The NAACP’s support for marriage equality is deeply rooted in the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution and equal protection of all people.”
Read the rest here.
While tragic, it is not at all surprising that the NAACP has taken a course of action that is at odds with the 62% of the black community mentioned in the article, who oppose such unions on religious grounds.
In New York City, 60% of black pregnancies end in abortion and authentic African American leaders such as Dr. Alveda King and the Reverends Catherine Davis, Walter Hoye, Stephen Broden, Clenard Childress, Michael Faulkner, Arnold Culbreth, Dr. LaVerne Tolbert, and Ryan Bomberger (to name a few), cannot get a hearing by the people Rea Carey calls “real leadership.”
With 6/10 of New York Blacks never seeing the light of day, and similar statistics elsewhere, African Americans are locked into what can only be assessed as demographic suicide. The NAACP leadership has thrown in with the same Democrat party that funds Planned Parenthood nationally with a third of a billion dollars annually; and it is this same Planned Parenthood that has been operating some 78% of their centers in minority neighborhoods, commensurate with Margaret Sanger’s Negro Project.
Now this.
It is tempting to assess the NAACP’s recent vote as an indiscriminate siding with anyone who is oppressed. However, if that were so, the NAACP would be joining the Catholic Church and other religious faiths in opposing the HHS contraceptive mandate, which is actually a war on religion.
The truth is that the American people stood by passively and consented to gays and lesbians being granted all of the goods and privileges society once reserved for married couples, everything from adoption rights to shared employment benefits, domestic partnerships protecting housing rights, etc.
The truth is that gays and lesbians were handed everything but a marriage license. We now see the emerging agenda with the emerging punitive measures against military chaplains opposed to performing such weddings.
The truth is that heterosexuals have been far more tolerant and permissive than the gay community is now behaving, and that the NAACP has missed the opportunity to address the new discrimination in America: Gay intolerance of authentic Judeo-Christian morality. It is an intolerance that, to use the NAACP’s words, “seeks to codify discrimination or hatred into the law or to remove the constitutional rights of,” traditional Christians.
The truth is that it isn’t leadership being demonstrated by the NAACP. It’s something far worse. I’ve heard the assessments range from sheer cluelessness to something sinister. With almost 2/3 of the people it purports to “lead” opposing same-sex marriage on religious grounds, the NAACP has joined in President Obama’s war on religion. Dragging one’s members by the hair is not the same as leading. Neither is neglecting the demographic suicide that has gripped their community.
This weekend the association purporting the “Advancement of Colored Persons,” ceased to exist. Not willing to address their membership’s demographic suicide, they have thrown in with a president bent on reshaping the Christian faith that sustained them during slavery and the Jim Crow era, as well as the authentic and noble struggle for civil rights. In so doing, the NAACP has abdicated the sacred trust that once made them the noblest and most honorable institution in the United States of America.
The African American community in America, as many other quarters in America, has real needs, real problems that call for real, fresh, and imaginative leadership. Becoming embroiled in a war on the Christian roots of its membership and much of the nation has only cemented in the minds of many the image of an organization that has become thoroughly radicalized.
The rest of the nation should take heart that there are many, many other black leaders committed to authentic equality that respects the constitutional rights of all citizens. We turn now to those leaders and seek the way forward together, a way that is characterized by mutual support and respect.
