Group endorsing Romney behind black pastor protest of Obama

According to the following video, the "cat's is out of the bag" in regards to a group of African-American pastors protesting President Obama's and the NAACP's supporting of marriage equality:



As it turns out, this is not a genuine protest of anger stemming from the African-American community, but rather an astroturfed effort by the National Organization for Marriage. The video is probably the first time NOM has attached its name to this protest, but to be honest, many of us lgbtq bloggers knew that NOM was involved from the beginning..

William Owens, the leader of the Coalition of African-American Pastors (CAAP) -  the group pushing this protest, has been described by NOM as it's "liaison to the Black Church." This is significant for two reasons.

 1. Remember that NOM got into trouble earlier this year when it was discovered that the organization planned to create a "wedge strategy" to divide the African-American and gay communities on the subject of marriage equality:

As you can read above, NOM planned to recruit black leaders to speak out in an effort to get the gay community so enraged that they verbally attack these leaders. Then the black community would respond hostilely to these attacks. The end goal is definitely cause confusion between two groups who support President Obama in wide numbers. And that has a lot to do with Reason 2.

2. NOM has endorsed Mitt Romney, President Obama's challenger:

“We are proud to endorse Mitt Romney for president,”  (NOM President Brian) Brown said. “Gov. Romney was an early signer of NOM’s presidential pledge which represents his commitment to the nation to take specific actions as president to preserve and protect marriage as the union of one man and one woman.”

In August, Romney was among the candidates who signed a pledge from NOM committing himself to back a Federal Marriage Amendment, defend the Defense of Marriage Act in court and establish a commission on “religious liberty” to investigate the alleged harassment of same-sex marriage supporters.

“Now is the time for all people who recognize the importance of marriage to come together to support a true champion, Mitt Romney, against an incumbent who has done virtually everything in his power to undermine the institution of marriage,” Brown continued.

The goal of the CAAP protest (which NOM has so generously proven) is not to take a stand against marriage equality. Nor is it to get President Obama to rescind his support of marriage equality.

The point of the CAAP protest is to generate a hostile division between gays and blacks which would help Romney get elected.

And don't be fooled by Owens and other pastors in the video. Odds that they are in on the con.

So as it becomes clear that this protest is yet another attempt by NOM to divide the black and gay communities, we must insist that the media not approach this story half-assed. We must state and insist with every chance we get that the media take the time to tell the ENTIRE story.

Granted, I don't see this strategy working because black folks aren't monolithic. We don't buck every time a pastor says "jump."

But educating people on what's going on with this astroturfed protest would go a long way to prove that while the black and gay communities may have different struggles to reach our goals of equality, we generally have the same enemies with the same mindsets. They see us as either pawns or less than nothing.

It's time that African-Americans and gays stop fighting each other over the subject of marriage equality and recognize when these enemies are trying to exploit us.

Hat tip to Jeremy Hooper.

 

'Religious right blaming gays for Penn State child abuse scandal' and other Monday midday news briefs

As these items from People for the American Way's Right Wing Watch demonstrate, the religious right care less about the children harmed in the Penn State tragedy than they care about blaming it on the gay community: 



Fischer: Lesson from Penn State is to Keep Gays Out of the Boy Scouts  

Sandy Rios: Child Abuse is tied to 'Homosexual Recruitment' 

Linda Harvey: LGBT-Inclusive Schools Facilitate Child Abuse 

In other news (if your stomach hasn't given out on you from reading the above mess):

 The latest weapon in our Homosexual Agenda™: The 'Ice Age' movies, of course - A good reason why we call Joseph Farrah's online publication World NUT Daily.

Seattle Shop Supports Marriage Equality Campaign Selling Gay Cupcakes - This is pretty cool.  

Professional anti-gay Matt Barber: the NAACP has been brainwashed by ‘white sexual anarchists’ - Matt Barber is as crazy as stir-fried cat poop. 

Homophobe compares gay equality to chicken pox

Scott Lively

Very few individuals epitomizes the vileness and absolute absence of moral integrity of the religious right more than Scott Lively.

For the uninitiated, Lively is a long-time foe of the gay community who wrote a discredited book linking gays with the Nazi Party. However, his reputation for homophobia reached new depths after he and a bunch of other American homophobes traveled to Uganda and stoked the country up against the gay community by pushing the false notion that gays are trying to "convert" children.

We all know what happened next. Now Uganda is attempting to pass an ugly bill which would make homosexuality a crime punishable by death.

The blowback from the international community over this infused Lively with a schizophrenic approach towards gay equality. There are times when he claims to want to get away from the entire war over gay rights. And then there are times when he hits the homophobia full throttle.

His recent appearance in Springfield, Missouri was very much part of the latter:

Standing next to a sign reading “Human Rights Commission is a Trojan horse for the gay agenda,” Scott Lively told his audience of nearly 70 that a culture war currently raged between those fighting for sexual anarchy and those fighting for family values.

And with the chairman of the mayor’s human rights commission listening intently in that audience, the noted anti-homosexual rights activist and president of Abiding Truth Ministries exhorted listeners to kill a proposed ordinance extending civil rights protections to gay, lesbian and transgendered people.

“Don’t let this anti-discrimination ordinance go through,” said Lively during his Friday night presentation at The Library Station on North Kansas Expressway. “It’s like chicken pox. It’s in your system forever. You’ve got to kill this thing before it goes in.”

. . .Lively, who said he paid his own way to Springfield to share this message, argued that homosexual activists have capitalized on what he called the black civil rights movement by bundling their rights with those he called “legitimate ethnic minorities” and riding their coattails to social legitimacy.

“Since when is sodomy a civil right,” said Lively, who lives in Springfield, Mass. “It’s a ridiculous, preposterous notion! There’s absolutely no correlation between sodomy and skin color.”

The grand irony of Lively's talk is when he said that the city should have a "family first commission." Of course we all know that if this were the case, Lively wouldn't necessarily think that gay families should be a part of this commission.

It would seem, however, that Lively's talk may have backfired on the folks attempting to keep the ordinance from passing. According to the article, George Davis, chairman of the Mayor's human rights commission was there, but he walked out after hearing Lively's words. And apparently he wasn't one of the only ones. Davis, however, pointed out the myriad of contradictions in Lively's talk:

Davis pointed out that Lively repeatedly said that sex should take place only within the confines of marriage, but he opposed allowing gay and lesbian people to marry. He said Lively argued that society should fight to protect families, but he didn’t believe gay and lesbian people should be able to adopt. He said Lively seemed to suggest that Springfield was overrun with gay activists, but continually asserted to the audience that they were in the overwhelmingly Christian and conservative majority.

Know Your LGBT History - Homoeroticism in Fright Night

For today's Know Your LGBT History segment, I thought I would do something entirely different.

Fright Night is a movie I already featured here a few years ago. The 1985 horror movie is about a high school student (William Ragsdale) who discovers that his next door neighbor (Chris Sarandon) is a vampire.

For the purpose of this blog, I talked about the scene in which Sarandon's character transforms the friend (Stephen Geoffreys) of the high school student into a vampire. I said that I found the scene to be incredibly homoerotic for the time in which it came out:



Fright Night was remade last year with the characters pretty much intact, albeit with more detail. Colin Farrell portrayed the vampire neighbor and the scene in which he transforms the high school student's friend (this time portrayed by Christopher Mintz-Plasse)is a bit more sinister and foreboding.

But I think there is still a touch of homoeroticism:



Comments?

Past Know Your LGBT History posts:

'More proof of black vs. gay election wedge strategy?' and other Friday midday news briefs

More proof of the attempts to create a blacks vs. gay wedge strategy just in time for the November?:



Reverend William Owens’ Offensive Anti-Gay Politics - The above video is audio of Williams Owens at a press conference talking about marriage equality. Owens, NOM's liaison to the black church community, is spearheading a campaign asking African-Americans to "withhold" their votes from Obama because of his support of marriage equality. How convenient it is that NOM is endorsing Romney.

 Related post - Group seeking to divide blacks and gays before November election?  

In other news: 

 Hate Groups Hate Condi Rice - When I heard the RUMOR that Romney may pick Condoleeza Rice as his VP, I knew it was bull. This is why.

 Maggie makes case for 'non-scary' Huckabee; 'not scary?' ask my ring finger, peace of mind - Mark it in your books. The one time I actually agree with Maggie Gallgher. Please Romney, pick Huckabee as your VP because I've got so much anti-gay dirt on him. It's just going to waste.  

Tehachapi parents worried about gay education - Because apparently these folks obviously think that gay parents and children in same-sex households are simply myths.

 Maggie Gallagher’s Institute Attacks APA Support Of Marriage Equality With Vague Generalizations - And it took them 11 months to get this trash together. Pathetic.

Religious right exploiting Sandusky's crime to hurt gay community

Matt Barber

The scandal about Penn State and former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky is awful and the children who were victimized by that awful man need our prayers.

But apparently some members of the religious right are using this terrible tragedy to score points against the gay community. Diane Gramley of the American Family Association of Pennsylvania and Matt Barber of the Liberty Counsel seem to be practically drooling as they made the following comments:

"Through all this we cannot ignore the fact that Jerry Sandusky's victims were all young boys. We can't ignore the homosexual aspect of this," Gramley offers. "And through Graham Spanier's tenure as president, he has brought more and more homosexual-oriented programming and events to the campus than ever before."

Adds Barber: "There also is an element of political correctness run amok here," he explains. "Anytime homosexuality is involved -- even though in this case it's a homosexual predator preying on children -- people seem to have this innate fear that they are going to be crushed by the sexual anarchist lobby if they speak out against it." Yet Barber says it is a fact that percentage-wise more sexual crimes are committed against children by homosexuals than by heterosexuals.

Neither Gramley nor Barber know what they are talking about. In fact, American Psychological Association, the National Association of Social Workers, the American Academy of Child Psychiatrists and the Child Welfare League of America, all say that the homosexuality and pedophilia are not linked.

Furthermore, Dr. Greg Herek, Professor of Psychology at the University of California at Davis, says the following:

The distinction between a victim's gender and a perpetrator's sexual orientation is important because many child molesters don't really have an adult sexual orientation. They have never developed the capacity for mature sexual relationships with other adults, either men or women. Instead, their sexual attractions focus on children – boys, girls, or children of both sexes. 

It's bad enough that Jerry Sandusky victimized children. It's equally sad that Barber and Gramley are attempting creating new victims in their attempt to exploit the scandal to attack the gay community.

Related post - If Matt Barber hates gay sex so much, then why does he keep talking about it?

Group seeking to divide blacks and gays before November election?

William Owens

A group of black pastors who call themselves the Coalition of African-American Pastors (CAAP) recently traveled to the NAACP annual convention in Houston with a message demanding that President Obama meet with them to discuss his support of marriage equality. They are also supposedly angry that the NAACP has come out in support of marriage equality.

According to the Huffington Post:

The Coalition of African-American Pastors (CAAP), headed by Rev. William Owens of Memphis, Tenn., said that the NAACP had abandoned its core mission by supporting same-sex marriage.

"This is supposed to be an organization for black people who were beaten, who were mistreated and who were enslaved," Owens told The Huffington Post. "You're advocating for something that's not normal, that's not natural. It's still out of line, it's against moral law."

Owens and CAAP is asking that African-Americans withhold their votes until supposedly this issue is resolved.

Personally I think that asking African-Americans to withhold our votes is a worse insult to the civil rights movement than marriage equality. Many people have been beaten and killed for us to have that simple right to vote so I have a serious problem with anyone attempting to speak for our community in that regard.

And I also think that this story needs a bit of levity before it blows up - and it will.

Owens and his Coalition of African-American Pastors have a history participating in anti-gay actions.

In 2007, he was involved in campaign which falsely claimed that adding gays under present hate crimes legislation would lead to pastors being arrested in their pulpits if they called homosexuality a sin. The following full page ad ran in a DC newspaper:

You can see Owens on the lower left hand corner. The claim about pastors being arrested in their pulpits was a lie:

 . . . the Hate Crimes Prevention Act only addresses violent crimes causing “bodily injury” – not speech, not preaching.

A larger copy of the ad can be seen here.

The Don't Muzzle Our Pulpits campaign was led by Bishop Harry Jackson’s High Impact Leadership Coalition. The People for the American Way published a huge expose on Jackson, accusing him of being a point man for a wedge strategy of dividing the black and gay communities:

Apparently Owens is of the same ilk as Jackson. Last year, he partnered with the National Organization for Marriage in its unsuccessful fight to stop marriage equality in New York. He was even the star of a NOM video called “Will the Black Church Rise Up in New York For Marriage?”

To make matters worse, he continues to partner with NOM as a liaison to the black church even after documents came out that the group was attempting to sow division between the black and gay communities on the subject of marriage equality.

 And NOM is supporting Romney.

You see, that's what this entire protest is about.  It's a sham. Owens knows that President Obama will not meet with his group and that the NAACP will not change its mind on marriage equality.

The entire protest by him and CAAP is simply a way to divide the black and gay communities because they are two groups who support President Obama heavily.

If these two groups are divided over a hostile war over marriage equality, Obama will have problems.

So to folks in both communities who may hear about Owens and his organization's protest, I say this:

Folks are attempting to manipulate your emotions. Don't fall for it.