Foreshadowing President Bush’s SOTU pitch for “a constitutional amendment to protect the institution of marriage,” Bishop Harry “I SUPPORT GEORGE BUSH” Jackson Jr. launched the High Impact Leadership Coalition and unveiled the “Black Contract with America on Moral Values.” This imitation contract with America focuses on “biblical, traditional marriage,” Social Security, school vouchers, homeownership, ex-felons’ rights (who slipped that provision in there?), health care reform, and aid to Africa.
Like most black folks, I don’t support same-sex marriage. But as a single (yeah, hard to believe, but I digress) black woman who stands a better chance of winning the lottery than getting married, it’s mind-boggling that far-right reverends are more concerned about whether their gay choir director may want to marry his boyfriend than the impact of black fatherlessness on our communities.
The obsession with the “gay agenda” is straight out of the Traditional Values Coalition’s playbook, whose chairman Rev. Lou Sheldon reportedly organized the Los Angeles kickoff summit. For more than a decade, Rev. Sheldon has screened the titillating video “Gay Rights, Special Rights” to get black ministers in the mood to get up under the GOP tent. (Disclosure: I monitored the 1993 Gay Rights March on Washington with Rev. Sheldon’s daughter, Andrea, who’s executive director of TVC. On the down low, we blended in so well that some may have assumed that we were a lesbian couple. But, again, I digress.)
Later this month, another group of black “moral values” crusaders will meet at the conservative Heritage Foundation to release their “Mayflower Compact for Black America,” which reportedly was drafted with the help of the thrice-married, philanderer Newt Gingrich. By the way, when did Gingrich first hook up with his high school math teacher?
Almost makes you lose your faith. Or holler.
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