Mary Mitchell, a columnist for the Chigaco Sun-Times, is deluded. According to her, black clergy who support President Bush’s marriage amendment enter into an “unholy union” with white conservatives.
By what standard is she judging it “unholy”? The word implies there’s a such thing as “holy.” Without a biblical frame of reference, the word is meaningless.
Mitchell believes that because some of the people who oppose homosexual “marriage” are the same who didn’t want blacks sitting next to them at lunch counters back in the day (mostly Southern Democrats, by the way), black Christians should disregard the Bible. Let’s hear what she has to say:
That’s shocking when you consider the Ku Klux Klan was responsible for the lynchings of black people in the South. And what about black gays and lesbians? Would these ministers help the Ku Klux Klan burn crosses in their yards?
Amazingly, the same-sex marriage debate has also put a lot of black activists/preachers in league with white conservatives because these leaders cannot separate the equality issue from the religious one.
But black pastors who are upset because gay activists have likened their cause to the civil rights movement have overlooked an important point. That historic movement may have been founded on high moral ground, but it was a battle for legal rights, not moral acceptance.
Some of the same people who didn’t want blacks sitting next to them at the lunch counters or on the buses still don’t want them there. And some of the same people who believed it was an “abomination” for blacks and whites to marry, still believe it is an “abomination.”
Mitchell is confused. It doesn’t matter that some white people think that blacks sitting next to them at lunch counters or on buses is an abomination. It’s not, although some argue that it is. According to God, not men, homosexual behavior is an abomination. That’s the standard, not what people think about it. Perhaps someone could send Mitchell a Bible for her edification.
She goes on to praise a “brilliant letter” she “stumbled across”, written by a black minister who says he had an “epiphany” after a white priest came out of the closet. Because the priest had been active in the Civil Rights movement and impacted his ministry, the minister turned his back on God’s word.
Excited by this man’s apostasy, Mitchell writes, “As for the biblical arguments that are being wielded like swords against gays, [Reverend] Caldwell reminds us that black people have a history of ‘adapting scripture, not adopting scripture.’”
And that’s the only lucid statement in the whole column. In spite of herself, Mitchell accurately describes the power of Scripture:
For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. Hebrews 4:12
Mitchell based the whole premise of her column on a nonsensical letter written by a black minister who in no way represents biblical Christianity. Her argument fails on all points.
