K
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Guest
So we’ve established that some black folks are homophobes too. No surprise there. They have the same range of human experience and opinion as the rest of us. There is a tragic irony in their blindness to the universal nature of human rights. When we start playing the game of “our rights are real and organic” but “theirs” are just some political contrivance, we are headed away from King’s dream and toward the sort of sectarian nightmare of the Balkans or much of Africa.It is patently racist to compare African Americans to people who engage in homosexual behavior.
“I do take offense at that particular community paralleling its movement with the civil rights movement in America,” he says, “because they are trying to put a moral issue over against a human issue. And they really are two completely different entities.”
Rev Charles Reese , an African American pastor
Rev. Phil Davis, who has pastored Nations Ford Community Church in Charlotte for 15 years, also says homosexuality is wrong, and takes serious offense at the civil rights comparison. In fact, he says comparing the homosexual movement to the civil rights movement is an “atrocity.”
“That line of reasoning denigrates and throws dirt on the blood of blacks who have suffered through slavery, Jim Crow and bigotry, and have died because of the color of their skin,” Davis says. “That the homosexual radical agenda would use the blood of our ancestors to justify their immoral cause and bring guilt and manipulation upon others is an atrocity.”
“I recognize that what many of us have as African Americans is due to the fact that our fore-parents suffered,” Davis says. “Saying homosexuality is a civil right undercuts the legitimacy of our discussion about racism, segregation, true discrimination, and all that our ancestors have gone through to get to this point.”
Rev Davis-An African American Pastor
vfbaptist.org/articles/articles%20101-200/article00109.htm
Unfortunate, but again hardly unique. The puritans won their religious freedom in this country only to turn around and deny others the same thing. Suffering oppression ought to give one a special insight into its nature and a measure of compassion, but it often does not. African-Americans were some of the most effective hunters of Native Americans. The tribes, for their part, often owned slaves. Africans participated in the slave trade. Black folks in this country have earned the right to a lot of consideration, but they, and these reverends in particular, do not get the unassailable right to authoritatively problaim that their suffering is “the real deal” and oppression of others is not.
At any rate my original point still stands. I don’t maintain that the situation of gay people is the “same” as the experience of African Americans in this country. I do maintain that the tactics and moral reasoning of their respective oppressors are the same