After spending months attacking President Obama over his stance on gay rights and telling African American voters to stop supporting Obama in order to punish him for favoring marriage equality, William Owens of the Coalition of African-American Pastors told the Christian Post that he thinks it’s “ridiculous” for the marriage issue to dominate political debate. “We have more problems than any other group and here we are taking about gay marriage,” Owens said. “It is ridiculous.”
Owens, a liaison for the National Organization for Marriage, was quoted in an article where one pastor warned that the use of “the civil rights struggle to promote the sexual appetites of the homosexual agenda is an affront to the dignity of black people” and where the author described black Christians as conflicted over whether to support Obama due to his “surprise announcement in late May that he now supports same-sex marriage.” What the article fails to mention, however, is that the latest polling shows Obama leading Romney among black voters by an overwhelming 94-0 percent.
On the front burner is President Obama’s surprise announcement in late May that he now supports same-sex marriage. While he solidified his support among liberals, many black voters viewed the issue in a different light. Even more so than some traditionally white conservative denominations such as the Southern Baptist Convention, predominately black churches have long held that homosexuality and specifically same-sex marriage, is a sin.
Plus, the language that gay activists use in comparing the fight for what they term “marriage equality” to the struggle for civil rights in the 1950s and 60s is insulting to many who marched along Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma and other places.
“Using the civil rights struggle to promote the sexual appetites of the homosexual agenda is an affront to the dignity of black people,” Dr. J.M. Hunter of told The Christian Post. “No other group in America has had to suffer the wicked injustices as did African blacks who were forced to provide hard labor with no compensation, and their American descendants.”
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During the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte two weeks ago, a group of black clergy calling themselves the Coalition of African-American Pastors held another in a series of press conferences to call on black Christians to withhold their support from President Obama until at a minimum, he agrees to meet with the group to justify his support for same-sex marriage.
Asked if the White House has answered his initial request for the meeting first made in mid-summer, the group’s leader, the Rev. Bill Owens, was quick to reply. “Not a word, not a single word,” he told a group of reporters in Charlotte.
Owens, who marched for civil rights in Nashville and Memphis in the 1960s said he believes the Democratic Party has taken the black vote for granted and that the National Association for the Advancement of Color People is simply just a puppet of Democratic Party leaders.
“At a minimum black Christians should think for themselves and vote for the person that best represents their beliefs,” said Owens. “We have more problems than any other group and here we are taking about gay marriage. It is ridiculous.”
