As everyone knows, Bishop Harry Jackson has been leading the fight against marriage equality in Washington DC and regularly writing about it in his columns, like this one from earlier in the week saying that Jesus would have been giving money to his efforts:
Two weeks ago, just after the Maine’s successful reversal of the state legislature’s decision to sanction same-sex marriage, MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer asked me a profound question: “Would Jesus have spent $550,000 to oppose same-sex marriage?”
The question was exactly what many secular parties had been asking in Portland, Maine, where she was speaking to me by satellite. My answer was that Jesus would have given the money to oppose same-sex marriage. My reasoning was simple: Jesus would have upheld his own teaching; refusing to be a loving, permanent enabler of a misguided local government … [T]he biblical Jesus, who confronted both the political and religious hypocrites of his day, would never let himself be blackmailed into becoming a permanent agent of any corrupt government.”
So imagine our surprise when we saw today’s Washington Post and found this puff piece on Jackson and his fight against equality:
“I just feel like I’m on a mission,” he says. “It’s not a mission of hate. It’s a mission to protect godly boundaries.”
Using his Pentecostal congregation, Hope Christian Church, as a springboard, he has founded the High Impact Leadership Coalition, which comprises ministers who plow into national moral dilemmas. In addition to same-sex marriage, the coalition focuses on abortion, two hot-button issues that cause liberals and conservatives to cross swords.
His admirers have multiplied, and so have his critics. More than once, police have stopped by his Southeast Washington apartment to check on his safety.
His mother, Essie, calls her son’s crusade one of “holy boldness.”
Jackson calls it stopping the erosion of the black family.
He’s not a televangelist, but he has a televangelist’s following.
The article contains a few “critics say” passages, but doesn’t bother to quote any of his actual critics, nor does it even mention his deep ties to the Religious Right or the fact that Jackson is a carpetbagger who moved into the District simply in order to lend credibility to his efforts to prevent marriage equality.
If the Post was interested in finding critics of Jackson’s efforts, there are plenty available, including this organization. Heck, we even wrote an entire report about him entitled “Point Man for the Wedge Strategy: Harry Jackson is the face of the Religious Right’s outreach to African American Christians.”
The Washington Post seems to have a real soft spot for those who are leading the right-wing effort to fight marriage equality considering that in the last few month the paper has produced its second puff piece on these leaders, following on the heels of the piece the paper ran on Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage back in August.
