Black Pastors Oppose President, Democrats on Same Sex Marriage

Support for same sex marriage is now in the Democratic Party
preliminary platform. Once approved by the full platform committee and
voted on at the convention, same sex marriage will have the formal
support of the Democratic Party.

But as Democrats institutionalize their support for same sex
marriage, their relationship with the Party’s most loyal constituency,
black Americans, becomes increasingly uneasy.

A new survey just released by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public
Life shows 65 percent of Democrats supporting same sex marriage compared
to just 40 percent of blacks.

A group of 3,700 plus black pastors, the Coalition of
African-American Pastors, under the leadership of Rev. William Owens,
has moved to formally oppose the Democratic Party and President Obama on
this issue.

The group is spearheading a “Mandate for Marriage” campaign to gather
100,000 signatures on a petition declaring support for traditional
marriage and calling “on President Obama to repudiate his assertion that
gay marriage is a civil right.”

These black pastors are not in the business of politics nor are they
policy wonks. They are driven by commitment to Biblical truths and the
direct challenge to and rejection of these truths by social acceptance
of homosexual behavior and same sex marriage.

They don’t see Biblical truths as academic points divorced from the
practical realities of life. They see them as the rules that sustain
life. And they see the crises spreading in their communities and in our
nation as acceptance of these truths fall by the wayside.

HIV/AIDS is devastating black America. Reading the grim statistics
from the Center for Disease Control makes clear that this plague is
driven, first and foremost, by homosexual behavior.

According to the CDC, “In 2009, African Americans comprised 14% of
the US population but accounted for 44% of all new HIV infections….black
men accounted for 70% of the estimated new HIV infections among all
blacks…black men who have sex with men represented an estimated 73% of
new inflections among black men…”

Research abounds showing the importance of intact traditional family
life in the education success of children and of overall economic
health.

In recent testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, Ron Haskins
of the Brookings Institution noted that individuals who follow three
rules – complete high school, work full time, and wait until 21 and get
married before having a baby – have a 2 percent chance of winding up in
poverty and a 72 percent chance of being in the middle class.

http://townhall.com/columnists/starparker/2012/08/06/black_pa...