Tuesday, September 02, 2008
JEREMIAH WRIGHT'S POSITION ON HOMOSEXUALITY
Given that Obama allegedly engaged in homosexuality, and given that there are claims alleging his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, also engaged in such acts, I thought it would be interesting to find out where Wright stood on the subject.
I found a 1999 article on The Presbyterian Layman website by Mark Tooley and Holland Webb of the Institute on Religion and Democracy.
From the website:
The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC) hosted its annual "Breaking the Silence" summit on black sexuality in Washington, DC, attracting over 600 clergy and laity. Summit speakers defended not only the full availability of abortion, but also the full acceptance of homosexuality by churches and the distribution of contraceptives to sexually active children.
With few exceptions, RCRC speakers were skeptical of sexual abstinence programs for teenagers and declined to mention traditional Christian teachings about heterosexual marriage as the proper context for sexual expression....
Jeremiah Wright, a United Church of Christ pastor in Chicago, told the RCRC audience how he once had been "homophobic" but now accepts that God has created a certain number of animals in each species to be attracted to the same sex. He now asks parents to accept their children's homosexuality and to avoid the example of Saul in the Bible, who Wright believes opposed Jonathan because of a homosexual relationship with David. "Fag hags [meaning women who support homosexual causes] need to rise up and put Homo-bashers in their place," Wright concluded.
Joining Wright in the same workshop was Bishop Kwanebe Rainer Cheeks of the Inner Light Unity Fellowship, a New Age-type group. Cheeks, who is homosexual, said, "My sexuality is a gift of God. It is between me, God and whoever I'm with." He said he was merely following the example of Jesus, who preached love and acceptance but was rejected by the religious elites of His day.
You can see a picture of Bishop Cheeks here and read more about his ministry to the GLBT community. Cheeks talks about his life at this website, including his decision to open a church and develop a ministry, his fight to stay alive with AIDS including the various alternative medicine remedies he uses.
The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, the organization that sponsored the "Breaking the Silence" summit on black sexuality at which Wright and Cheeks spoke, deserves a look.
Rev. Carlton W. Veazey is President and CEO. He is pictured on its Mission webpage where we are told
RCRC was founded in 1973 to safeguard the newly won constitutional right to abortion. The Coalition founders were clergy and lay leaders from mainstream religions, many of whom had provided women with referrals to safe abortion services before the Supreme Court legalized abortion in Roe v. Wade. The founders believed that there would be at most a ten-year struggle to secure the right to choose. In fact the struggle is far from over. It has changed and intensified, and the stakes are growing....
While our member organizations are religiously and theologically diverse, they are unified in the commitment to preserve reproductive choice as a basic part of religious liberty.
The Member Organizations webpage lists 40 organizations including Catholics for Choice, the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ, plus organizations within the United Methodist, Presbyterian and Unitarian Universalist churches. There are several secular organizations as well, and an interestingly disproportionately large number of Jewish organizations--17 to be exact, nearly half. Catholics for Choice is the only Catholic organization on the list.
The Board of Directors webpage indicates there is a representative from People for the American Way on the board, and Francis Kissling is a member.
The History webpage tells that the organization was founded by a Baptist minister in 1967. At a 1973 meeting the topic of discussion was "the Roman Catholic Church's pledge to overturn the new U.S. Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade. This meeting, called by the United Methodist Board of Church and Society, leads to the formation of the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights. The name was changed in 1993 to Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. In 2004 it was active at both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions.
SourceWatch tells of Veazey's receipt of a Planned Parenthood's Champions of Choice Community Partnership Award in 2001.
What is the relevance of all of this information about the activities of Jeremiah Wright in 1999? To me this would indicate that Wright was not just in sympathy with the pro-abortion and pro-homosexual arguments, but that he was actively promoting them, and would likely have done so in his preaching to which Obama listened for many years. We see in Obama's voting record on partial birth abortion, that his actions are in sympathy with the RCRC position on abortion--that abortion must be defended at every level. Is it not reasonable, then, to suspect that he is every bit as much in sympathy with the RCRC position on homosexuality, and that Obama would support every effort to make same-sex marriage legal nationally?
Obama's "change" is a change that Catholics cannot approve and still be faithful to the teachings of the RCC. A vote for Obama is a vote against the Roman Catholic Church.
