Religious Wars

Baptist Pastors Combat Anti-Gay Campaign In Black Community

Despite efforts of the National Organization for Marriage and Bill Owen’s Coalition of African-American Pastors to rally blacks against same-sex marriage, others in the religious community are pushing back.

“We as black Baptists are not single-issue persons, and we see more important things than getting stuck on this matter of whether or not there should be same-sex marriages,” argues Amos Brown, pastor of the Third Baptist Church in San Francisco and the local chapter president of the NAACP.

Brown—along with the National Baptist Convention USA, the National Baptist Convention of America, the Progressive National Baptist Convention and the Lott Carey Foreign Missionary Convention—is also calling out Bill Owen’s hucksterism: Owns claim that he has the backing of 3,000 ministers in his anti-gay-marriage crusade has been labeled “fraudulent” and “political grandstanding” by his critics.

And Brownis calling into question how authentic Owen’s crusade is to the community, and how much of it is coming from white evangelical puppet masters: “[They] have not been based so much on questions of morality, of religion, but it’s a matter of power, politics and money that they are creating these kinds of alliances.”

Given the stark contrasts in this year’s election between an incumbent who just happens to be black and his challenger, a tax cut-loving, minority-avoiding millionaire who just happens to be white, Brown and his friends in the ministry aren’t taking a single vote for granted.

Amen.

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