Quote of note:

Rep. Katherine Harris, R-Fla., who is desperately breathing life into her bid for a Senate seat, brashly declared, “We will not allow our courts to redesign society into some politically correct utopia.”

“That’s right,” one of the African-American ministers on the podium declared as the crowd applauded and cheered. It was as if for a moment the ghosts of George Wallace and his segregationist sycophants had possessed the crowd in a bizarre recreation of his infamous standoffs.

We can only hope that the emptiness and hypocrisy of their arguments will be their undoing.

Used To Sell A Mirage
Isaiah J. Poole
June 06, 2006

Few things hurt more deeply than the sight of passionate, and often compassionate, African-American pastors selling themselves for an illusion, with their followers applauding as if the rhetorical points their spiritual leaders scored had any meaning.

The illusion championed by Bishop Harry R. Jackson Jr., chairman of the High Impact Leadership Coalition and pastor of Hope Christian Church in Washington, D.C., is that preventing gays and lesbians from getting married will somehow help solve the profound problems of family stability in African-American communities. At an outdoor press conference Tuesday across the street from the Capitol, he and his supporters—including Sens. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., and Sam Brownback, R-Kan. —did not present any real evidence, but instead offered a confusion of correlation with causality that is all too typical of what passes for debate on social issues by conservatives. Out-of-wedlock births among African-American women have increased dramatically (up to 66 percent of all births in the 1990s, according to the U.S. Census Bureau ), and so has gay rights activism. Jackson’s supporters, many of whom wore black T-shirts bearing the image of a man, woman and child, were not arguing any connection beyond that.

In fact, when I asked Jackson to cite examples from his ministry in which people were having marital difficulties that were related to the push for same-sex marriage, he did not cite any, instead saying, "The issue is not same-sex marriage per se, it is traditional marriage."

The news conference showed the extent to which church leaders in communities grappling with serious social problems have been sucked into supporting a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage even though there is no connection between gay marriage and the ills they profess to be concerned about.