Obama alienates black clergy

Barack Obama supports gay marriage (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

African-American Christians waver over vote – Yahoo! News.

Believe it or not, but some black clergy are advising their congregations to stay home on Election Day rather than voting for President Obama. Why?

Because Obama supports gay marriage. And Romney isn’t a suitable alternative since some believe Mormonism to be a cult, perhaps even a racist one.

I don’t know about you, but I find this beyond ridiculous for a number of reasons, the first of which is historical.

The ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution in 1870 ensured that no citizen would be denied the right to vote based on their color or ethnicity. Slavery was abolished with the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, of course, but the right to vote finally gave blacks the power to participate in their future and placed them on equal footing with their white counterparts, at least at the polls.

Now more than 140 years later, there are black clergy urging their flocks not to vote? Is this right no longer important to them? To me, a write-in vote for some non-candidate would be preferable to not voting at all. Isn’t one of our duties as Americans to actively participate in the political process, after all?

Another reason this story bothers me involves the whole gay marriage controversy. Here we have a marginalized group of people (gays) who are being denied rights that other Americans possess simply because they are different. Opponents to gay marriage even use the Bible to prove that homosexuality is wrong and that gays do not deserve treatment equal to Christians.

Is any of this sounding familiar?

Slavery (Photo credit: quadelirus)

I’m no history buff, but it seems to me that blacks were once treated the same way that gays are being treated today. They were marginalized and mistreated by whites during slavery, some of whom even used the Bible to prove blacks were inferior to other races.

So it’s hard for me to understand how some blacks clergy could be so quick to deny equal rights to gays, not to mention refusing to vote for Obama simply because he’s willing to recognize their rights.

Since when did freedom only apply to some Americans rather than all of them?

I sincerely hope these clergy realize how refusing to vote in November might make a statement, but will also rob them of the freedom their ancestors fought so hard to obtain. And the people they hope to deny the right to marry, namely gays, likely feel like their ancestors did back then: mistreated and ignored.

History doesn’t always need to repeat itself, does it?

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