The Houston Chronicle had an interesting article a week back comparing reactions to last month’s U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down bans on same-sex marriage and the high court’s 1967 ruling against bans on interracial marriage. In both cases, the article notes, opponents have used religion in criticizing the court’s decisions.
Indeed, supporters of racial segregation often used religion as a justification for their stance. The Chronicle quotes a lower court judge in Virginia who ruled in favor of that state’s interracial marriage ban in the case that later went to the Supreme Court:
“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”
The article also quotes Bob Jones, the extreme-right, segregationist evangelical preacher, from a radio broadcast in 1960:
“God Almighty did not make the human race one race. It was not His purpose at all…. God made one blood of all nations, but He also drew boundary lines between races. If you are against segregation and against racial separation, then you are against God almighty.”
The article notes that the preacher’s own Bob Jones University didn’t even permit interracial dating among its students until 2000.
Today, tragically, we hear religion used once again as a weapon to oppose equality, in this case the freedom to marry for gay and lesbian couples. Pointing this out, as the Houston Chronicle article does, really angers religious-righters. In a blog post last week, for example, Dave Welch of the far-right Texas Pastor Council denounces the Chronicle:
“This article is an example of the propaganda being waged by the liberal media to not only continue, but even to escalate their campaign of equating unnatural, immoral, sexual behavior with race, sex and religion. Comparing laws banning interracial marriage to laws defining marriage as a union only between one man and one woman is completely ‘apples and oranges.’ Even Justice Anthony Kennedy in his majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges admitted the weakness in the comparison – and used it anyway just as he based the opinion on the American Psychological Association’s recently changed position that homosexuality is ‘immutable’ (unchangeable). Both of these positions are fallacious and indefensible Biblically, morally, historically, biologically and Constitutionally. The Houston Chronicle continues to serve a marketing tool of the LGBTQIA movement without any pretense at journalism.”
It’s fascinating to watch Welch attack one form of bigotry while defending another. But it’s hardly surprising. Welch’s hatred of LGBT people has consumed him. After all, he has called Houston’s openly lesbian mayor a “sodomite” who is disappointed with men, viciously attacked her marriage, warned of a “gay takeover” of Houston, insisted that transgender people are a threat to children in public restrooms, and prayed for God to destroy supporters of same-sex marriage.
Fortunately, many people of faith have supported the freedom to marry for gay and lesbian couples, just as many religious folk have marched and fought for racial equality. TFN is proud to stand with them.
The full Houston Chronicle article is behind a paywall, but you can find it here.
Bob Jones tried to directly apply “thou shalt not marry a Canaanite” to the illogical extreme as far as interracial marriage. He must have gone berserk when Japanese and Amis married after WWII.
In the case case of the LGBT there is not any justification for a Christian to be OK with that. That is plain sin
Conservative Christians have and always will be against any minority getting the same legal rights, protections and priveledges under the law. Since the Puritans created theyre theocracy, they have been fighting against equality, even after the founding of the United States, these people have been doing the same. They are purely evil beings and are the biggest threat and enemy to American democracy, to all those not exactly like them!
Sure, the last refuge of a scoundrel is patriotism. But the last, last refuge of a scoundrel is theistic religion. It seems their god can justify any bigotry.
Yea, verily! Anything that the funny-mental people do not understand is a SIN!
Recently I read an article that went through my brain like an electrical current. It pointed out that a certain percentage of all human beings are born gay or transgendered. Since that is a fact and not an opinion it proves that members of the LGBT community are NATURAL.
POW! Although I have never had a fear or distaste of the LGBT folks, it made me chuckle because that is what the funny-mentalists don’t get.
Of course, their biblically based bigotry towards anyone or anything that is not them forestalls any possibility of them changing their attitudes towards people who are not “them.”
I’m grateful that I am not a Christian or any brand, I do not have to listen to some inane and close-minded “preacher” yell at me that I will go to a non-existent place of eternal punishment if I happen to support equality of all people.
I consider funny-mentalist Christianity as a fire escape religion. If you don’t believe that Jesus was the son of god you will spend the next few billion years in agony.
I can’t wait until the last of them dies off leaving the planet safe for all people.
“Malay” is a color? Gee. I don’t remember that one in my superbox of Crayolas.
Look y’all. The Southern Baptist Convention has a whole web page devoted to continuing the war against gay marriage:
http://www.bpnews.net/45067/firstperson-your-children-and-samesex-marriage
Notice the articles at the bottom.
I have been married for 36 years, and our husband-wife marriage has not changed as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling. When is this predicted change in my marriage supposed to happen. “All the best preachers…well…theyzuns says hits acomin’—but wheeeeeeyun?
For the life of me, I cannot figure out how these dominionists can think that what they are thinking has any relation to what someone else is doing in their most private intimacies. Their belief system does not supersede anyone else’s basic life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Period.