According to Right-Wing Watch, Bishop Harry Jackson preached a blistering sermon telling folks that if they vote for President Obama, they are voting against God and deserve any misfortune they get.
Transcript:
Listen to me Black Christian. You are foolish enough to vote against the God that brought you out of slavery, the God that brought you out of the civil rights thing. Just because somebody’s skin is black, you’re gonna support an anti-God, anti-Gospel agenda -- no wonder you can’t get a job. If you celebrate your race over grace you ought to do badly. God is spanking you right now. And I got news, you heard it right here, the folks that sign onto this now and support the president right now in this will find that their best days are behind them….Four more years of Barack Obama will ensure an aggressive anti-Christian spirit that has currently grabbed hold of the administration and this country. Beware my Christian friend, you should not vote for Barack Obama
Naturally one of the reasons he mentioned has to do with President Obama's support of gay equality. Jackson's sermon was his participation in an event called Pulpit Freedom Sunday, in which religious right groups encourage pastors to endorse or rebuke candidates in the pulpit.
If Jackson was a true Christian, he should talk about something more important, like how the influence of money can taint everyone.
Of course he wouldn't and the irony is that particular sermon would relate to him.
Remember, Jackson, has already received a grand total of $80,000 from the National Organization for Marriage for his efforts against marriage equality.
So my guess is that when he preached this sermon, his eyes wasn't on God, but his bank account.
3 comments:
Is this the same preacher that was handed an alleged check for $80,000 from NOM?
Here's what I wrote on a local pastor who participated in Pulpit Freedom Sunday. It hasn't been posted...I wonder why...lol
http://blog.speakupmovement.org/church/religious-freedom/a-call-to-pastors-part-ii/
If you want your church to be a political organization...made it legally so. Moral people, however, don't nakedly pine for the days of Protestant male dominance as you are disgracefully doing. You're obviously about enhancing conservative Evangelical political power for the legalization of economic and political discrimination against minority groups of your choosing, such as your own Gay neighbors...and likely some members of your own church.
If you're going to compare the United States and former Pres. Johnson with Nazi Germany and Hitler for writing some traditionally sanctioned restrictions on tax breaks for religious organizations into the law...let me take you back to when I was a child here in the United States.
Since you mention the Texan Pres. Johnson, who despite his many faults, nevertheless was a very effective leader against white supremacism...unlike CONSERVATIVE Evangelicals such as, say, Rev. W. A. Criswell of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas [until late in life] and the clergy in the widespread [white] Citizens' Councils who defended white supremacism with their handy lists of proof texts...which were mostly proof of their moral and intellectual bankruptcy..
Let's go back, though not as far back as when Hitler was in power, I wasn't born then, to when CONSERVATIVE Evangelical clergy were preaching against legalizing the "unnatural sin of miscegenation" and comparing the love of two consenting unrelated adults to incest. Back to when even the father in law of Billy Graham, Dr. L. Nelson Bell was making his Southern Presbyterian Journal (now World magazine) into an influential intellectual religious tool against integration and "mongrelization." ...and who made taking a vow of "voluntary" race segregation mandatory for his staffers...and who was quoted a "proof text" from Acts against miscegenation and integration in no less than LIFE magazine. Christianity Today, an editorial during the March on Selma, scolded the few Evangelical clergy who marched with Dr, Martin Luther King, Jr.. (Curtis J. Evans, 'White Evangelical Protestant Response to the Civil Rights Movement', Harvard Theological Review 102, April 2009, 245–273 is a good place to start researching that era.)
Do you want me to forward Finis Dake's (of the popular Dake Annotated Reference Bible fame) extensively proof texted "30 Reasons for Segregation of Races," which, if memory serves, wasn't deleted from the Dake Bible until...1999! You can find it on many racist websites.
Many CONSERVATIVE Evangelical clergymen didn't much respect, let alone honor, the concept of consenting loving adults back when I was young and they still don't...if it involves "the other" anyway. How many times have I read conservative Christians claiming that marriage equality would be the slippery slope to legalizing pederasty, incest and bestiality? They often justify that nonsense with using Genesis 19, the story of Sodom as proof text. Since when is rape, incest (which involves abuse and perversions of familial authority and dynamics), and abusing animals the same as consensual relationships by responsible, law abiding adults who just happen to identify as Gay?...
I seem to be wordy...sorry.
...What the opposition to GLBT equality looks like it's about is discriminating and silencing "the other" who might be competition for church leadership and theological influence to privileged heterosexual male dominance. Given the male dominance of conservative Christianity and the sordid fantasies of re-establishing some sort of patriarchal status quo ante illustrated by its opposition to the personal integrity and radical equality ideals of the Gay rights movement also makes me suspicious about the motives of conservative anti-abortion activism.
By the way, Mildred Loving (Loving v State of Virginia, which ended legal discrimination against people in "mixed race" relationships) supported marriage equality, as do, to name a few organizations, the NAACP, some large Protestant denominations, individual and independent churches and the Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative Jewish movements. Of course, in supporting an anti-Gay Constitutional amendment, anti-Gay rights activists are explicitly trying to erode the First Amendment Rights of the above religious organizations to practice their religions and to petition their government for redress of their grievances, as well as eroding the First Amendment rights of GLBT people.
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