When Color Trumps Christianity – Star Parker

By Star Parker, founder and president of CURE

How can black Christians allow race and color to trump Christian principles in driving their support for a leader?

President Obama hosted a reception at the White House celebrating LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) Pride month. Black Christians should take note and learn a few things about our black President.

As they say, we are what we do.

It tells us something that Mr. Obama had no time to host an event for the National Day of Prayer.

Nor did he have time to accept the invitation to convey greetings and a few remarks to the couple hundred thousand who came to Washington, as they do every January, for the March for Life.

However, the LGBT Pride event did make it onto the president’s busy schedule.

Here are parts of his remarks I think noteworthy for black Christians.

First, we now know that Mr. Obama buys into reasoning equating the homosexual political movement to the black civil rights movement: “….it’s not for me to tell you to be patient any more than it was for others to counsel patience to African Americans who were petitioning for equal rights a half century ago.” Perhaps Obama can extend some of his famous empathy to a black Christian woman, Crystal Dixon, who lost her University of Toledo job for writing a column in her local paper challenging this premise. Dixon was fired for being uppity enough to write “….I take great umbrage at the notion that those choosing the homosexual lifestyle are ‘civil rights victims’ …I cannot wake up tomorrow and not be a black woman.”

Considering our president’s priorities, I recall a song popular during the civil rights movement: “Which Side Are You On?”

Second, Obama sees the black community as being a little slow on the uptake to grasp that homosexuality and same sex marriage are okay. There still are those, according to him, “who don’t yet fully embrace their gay brothers and sisters…” He deals with this, he said, by talking about it in front of “unlikely audiences,” such as, “in front of African American church members.”

Maybe a lot of us black folks, still readin’ our Bibles, just haven’t had enough of that Harvard learnin’.

And, third, Obama talked about HIV/AIDS but didn’t bother to mention that it’s overwhelmingly blacks that this scourge is killing.

Why would our black president discuss HIV/AIDS and not mention that although blacks represent 12 percent of our population, they account for 50 percent of HIV/AIDS cases and half of HIV related deaths? Or that the incidence of HIV/AIDS infection per every 100,000 people is 9 times higher among blacks than whites?

Of course, it would have been bad form for Obama to sour the punch bowl at the LBGT Pride month festivities by mentioning the disproportionate toll this lifestyle takes on blacks.

Blacks, of course, made the difference in getting Proposition 8 passed in California, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman. They then switched over and voted for Obama.

Obama has said he opposes same sex “marriage.” Can this really be so? He said at the White House event that he’s called for Congress to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act. DOMA is the main obstacle to nationalizing legalization of same sex marriage.

Black Christians have a lot of soul searching to do. We know the pain of black history. But we also must retain clarity that these many injustices were the result of race and color trumping Christian principles.

How can black Christians do this to themselves? How can black Christians allow race and color to trump Christian principles in driving their support for a leader?

Particularly as sexually transmitted diseases kill our people, when a third of all abortions are black babies, and the only hope for future black prosperity is restoration of the black family?

Star Parker is founder and President of the Coalition for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE), based in Washington, DC. Telephone: 202-479-2873; www.urbancure.org. CURE is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Column distributed by Scripps Howard News Service