NPR broadcast a story the other day about the new great white hope of the GOP: black evangelicals.
It seems that many of the reverent and religious in the African-American community are paying attention to the morals and family values stressed by conservatives. Can you guess which issue (that dare not speak its name) is top on their list?
Some black affinity for the GOP is understandable. Law and order would do wonders for crime-ridden areas. School choice and school vouchers might enable poorer parents to pick where their children got educated, and pull them out of failing schools. Simi Valley is probably a better place to live than Compton.
Black leaders like Louis Farrakhan have long stressed responsibility, as have entertainers like Bill Cosby and Oprah Winfrey. The hedonistic and anti-intellectual thrust of rap music, pimp culture and misogyny weaken the family.
But in the choices one makes in life, for better or worse, the issues of skin color and sexual orientation cannot be put into the category of optional. We are born either liking the opposite or same sex, and we are born with the pigmentation the Lord God gave us.
Why don't some black people see the connection and share the empathy?
photo by alan light via flickr
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Religious Blacks, just like their religious White counterparts, see homosexuality as a sin because their bibles/churches tell them that this is so. Comparing skin color to sexual preference is actually seen as offensive to many of the more 'Christian' folks in the Black community.
I personally feel that those Blacks supporting republicans are as deluded as the poor Whites that vote to the right. Oh sure, the Republicans share one or two or three of the same 'moral' beliefs as you, but they aren't truly empathetic or concerned with the whole of your living situation.
That said, the Democrats don't seem to be that much more interested or understanding as of late.
A gay man can get a cab, drive without being pulled over, didn't spend 300 years in chains, weren't lynched by the thousands, doesn't constantly get selected for 'random' screening at the airport, doesn't have people cross the street to avoid him, was always allowed to sit at the same lunch counter and use the same bathrooms, don't have their homes burned down when they try to move into a segregated neighborhood, don't have disproportionate rates of arrest and imprisonment for the same crimes committed by people of a different race... the list goes on and on and on. White people telling Blacks to ease up on the Gays is kinda of funny, maybe you should read the bible about logs in your own eye &c
All your examples of race hatred are also reasons for tolerance. To claim that no gay person is an object of hate or violence is obscene.