Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Church leader disgraces his integrity to run interference for NOM

Bishop McKinney
Today the National Organization for Marriage is trumpeting a column written by Bishop George McKinney, a member of the board of the Church of God in Christ, in The Daily Caller. The column seeks to refute NOM's recent race-baiting scandal.

However, Bishop McKinney's column will probably raise eyebrows seeing that he went out of the way to avoid addressing the scandal head-on, even to the point of  attempting to distract folks from what NOM's internal documents actually said in regards to driving a wedge between the black and gay communities. This the first paragraph of Bishop McKinney's piece:

On March 30, an MSNBC news anchor accused the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) of “race-baiting” for (among other charges) writing in a 2009 in-house document, “We … need to … interrupt the attempt to equate gay with black, and sexual orientation with race; we need to make traditional sexual morality intellectually respectable again in elite culture.”

McKinney is citing another part of NOM's internal documents. In his piece, he did not cite the part of the internal documents which talked specifically about driving a wedge between the black and gay communities. It was this part which led to the scandal:

“The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks — two key Democratic constituencies,” reads one document. “Find, equip, energize and connect African American spokespeople for marriage; develop a media campaign around their objections to gay marriage as a civil right; provoke the gay marriage base into responding by denouncing these spokesmen and women as bigots. No politician wants to take up and push an issue that splits the base of the party. Fanning the hostility raised in the wake of Prop 8 is key to raising the costs of pushing gay marriage to its advocates and persuading the movement’s allies that advocates are unacceptably overreaching on this issue. Consider pushing a marriage amendment in Washington D.C.; Find attractive young black Democrats to challenge white gay marriage advocates electorally.”

And I have a feeling that what Bishop McKinney did was not by accident. He then proceeds to go on a tangent in his column by using talking points that we have heard Maggie Gallagher and company use before, i.e. "you can't equate race with sexual orientation," "marriage is for men and women to come together to create the next generation," gays are trying to redefine marriage," etc.

However for me, the fact that Bishop McKinney felt the need pull attention away from the specific portion of NOM's internal document, the portion which talked about exploiting the gay and African-American difference of opinion on marriage equality, says a lot more his motivations and his integrity.

Actions do indeed speak louder than words. And no matter how Bishop McKinney tries through words to make NOM's cause - and thus his cause - sound noble, his actions (in this case, a deliberate attempt at misdirection) betray him.

By all means, please go to The Daily Caller piece and point this out in a respectful manner.



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1 comment:

Daniel Wachenheim said...

I added the following comment to the article. Sorry for the typos. If we are going to use bible definitions of marriage, then we need to include polygamy and incest as valid models for marriage. The bible does, and those men who had multiple wives were honored and revered as leaders and good men. In addition, the bible supports use of a man's wife's slave as sex partners and mothers to add more children to the family, The bible supports slavery as a way to obtain wives. Anyone who has read the bible knows that the bible version of marriage includes many models that deviate far from "one man"one woman". So did Hebrew life and ancient live in various countries. If the good Bishop is willing to support those models of marriage, then he can be regarded as a credible Christian scholar. If not, then the good Bishop seems to be selling himself out to a group with a non-bible based agenda.