CNN's Racist Depiction of Black Church and Gay Marriage

In an opinion piece for EURweb, Dr. Boyce Watkins asks why black Christians are being scrutinized so much more intensely than their white counterparts when it comes to views on marriage equality.

On the front page of CNN today, there was an interesting article about the divide between the Obama Administration and the African American church.

The author of the piece seems to be implying that black church opposition to gay marriage is hypocritical, in large part because the bible being quoted by Christians is the same one that promoted the institution of slavery…

I don’t oppose gay marriage myself, but I was annoyed by the CNN article.  What bothered me most about CNN’s depiction of the black church is that it is one that wreaks of the kind of liberal paternalism that treats African Americans as if we are savages who need to be educated by white folks.   The comparison of gay marriage opposition to slavery is a deliberate effort to poke at the political pressure point of African Americans, reducing our most painful collective experience into a political football.  It’s no different from telling a woman that she should protest the labor practices of Wal-Mart because she was once raped by a Wal-Mart employee.

Read Dr. Boyce Watkins' entire piece at EURweb.