The Rev. Eric P. Lee, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, will be in the District most of this week to try to drum up support for same-sex marriage within the African-American community.
Lee, who is heterosexual, has become a leading black advocate for same-sex marriage, a stance that has put him at odds with many of his peers in the faith community. After Lee came out against California's Proposition 8, which overturned same-sex marriage in that state, the leaders of the Atlanta-based Southern Christian Leadership Conference tried to have him removed from his position in Los Angeles.
Lee has so far held onto his job, and he is not relenting from his support for same-sex marriage. In a series of private meetings and media events around town this week, Lee will be trying to erode African-Americans' long-held suspicion of same-sex marriage.
You can call him a countervailing force to the Bishop Harry Jackson, the Beltsville preacher who is leading the campaign against efforts by the D.C. Council to legalize same-sex marriage.
"It is clear to me that this is a civil rights issue," Lee said in an interview. "The challenge, however, particularly for the African-American community, is how to frame it as to not cause the clergy to believe they are compromising their Christian belief systems."
As Washington Post Columnist Robert McCartney noted in a recent column, a May survey by the Feldman Group found a stark racial divide among city residents on the question of legalizing same-sex marriage.
While whites in the District back same-sex marriage by more than 8 to 1, blacks were against it 48 percent to 34 percent.
But Lee, whose trip is sponsored by International Federation of Black Prides and the Courage Campaign, said he thinks he can help gay rights activists make inroads with African-Americans through "reasonable dialogue."
"I am not of the LGBT community, so there is no pushback like I am trying to force it on them," Lee said. "I am just trying to reason with them.... I think there is a way that people of faith can affirm the dignity of everyone's humanity without compromising your Christian or religious principles."
SOURCE: Washington Post - Tim Craig
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"...reason with them!" HA!
MIND Over glands
The defenders of homosexuality continue the oxymoron
contradiction of attempting to use the mind to justify the
rule of carnal glands.
Thinking Americans still don't give 'a tinkers-sham' what
homosexuals do with their body-parts. An individual or
a society which is by law and tradition committed to the
natural human hierarchy of mind over body will not, how-
ever, ever sanction glandular rule over the human mind.
Undisciplined human desire can induce distorted perception.
The disturbed personality or inverted character can be
considered to be cognitively confused. This description is
confirmed by the work of English psychoanalyst Money-
Kyrle, who indicates that it is more accurate to recognize
such a condition as the result of distorted perception.
Neurosis, psychosis, stunting of growth, etc., are all, from
this perspective, cognitive diseases contaminating not only
perception but thinking, learning, remembering, valuing, and
decision- and choice-making.
Money-Kyrle affirms that scientific truth is not attained by a
trendy self-serving fashion, confession of inadequacy,
abdication, or collective majority-vote. There is no excuse for
professional ignorance willfully maintained.
By definition, a standard that is flexible is not a standard at all.
The human mind requires a standard of comparison that is
invariable. A criterion must be greater than the value measured
in order to supply value-meaning in a predictable direction of
survival and progression. The mind thus equipped is enabled
to maintain a natural dominion over the body and its appetites.
The very survival of the body itself, therefore, depends upon this
maintained intellectual authority. Romans 8:6
Our posterity cannot respect what it does not perceive, and it
cannot perceive that which has been abandoned or inverted to
an appetite of physical expediency by the equivocal person.
With confidence in the laws of human nature, we can know that
in the clash between carnality and intellect, the 'man of the mind'
will always prevail.
That is nature and GOD's way and intent all along.
"No one is smarter than their criteria." selah jfb
Jim Baxter
Teacher - 30 years
pointman/follower of The Lion of Judah
Santa Maria, CA
semper fidelis
Sgt. USMC
WWII & Korean War
+ + +