Is This Really Advancement?: The NAACP’s Support of Homosexual Marriage

By revealing his conviction that homosexual marriage is admirable, President Obama has upset much of his black voter base, which supported him at 96% in the 2008 election. The president’s declaration runs cross grain with the majority conviction of African Americans. (A November Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 58% counted gay marriage “unacceptable.”) Furthermore, he has to be concerned that seven out of ten black voters in California affirmed Proposition 8, which overruled the state Supreme Court’s legalization of same-sex marriage—and that in North Carolina, two-thirds of the black voters supported a ban on such marriage.

Opposition voices in the African American community are starting to surface, most notably that of Bishop Harry Jackson, pastor of the 3,000-member Hope Christian Church in Beltsville, Maryland, who, on April 28, led a rally in Washington’s Freedom Plaza. (The good bishop has observed, “I believe that the Bible teaches that same-sex marriage is an oxymoron.”) Still, he and other opponents have their work cut out for them since such reverends as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have rallied on behalf of the president’s perspective. And now the NAACP has thrown in with them.

What could possess them to do so when race is determined at conception but sexual activity is a matter of day-to-day choice? How could they equate the two morally?

Fortunately, we have some statements on the matter:

Al Sharpton explains, “We cannot be selective with civil rights. We must support civil rights for everybody or we don’t support them for anyone.” Jesse Jackson adds, “You may choose your mate, but you cannot deny someone else the right to choose their mate.” Then, quoting their resolution on the subject as well as the Fourteenth Amendment, the NAACP’s Benjamin Jealous says that it’s their “objective to ensure the ‘political, educational, social and economic equality’ of all people.”

Unfortunately, they’ve not explored (or disclosed) the implications of this sweeping language. If “civil rights for everybody,” “right to choose their mate,” and “equality of all people” opens the door for gay marriage, then it also opens the door for pedophilia, polygamy, incest, and polyamory. This is what happens when “all people” have “a right to choose their mate.” Of course, these advocates would object that they’re not talking about these immoral and illegal practices. But there they tip their hand. To keep some marriage guidelines in place, they have to adjudge homosexuality as at least morally neutral, which it’s not. In other words, they know perfectly well that some marriage discrimination is in order. But they have to paper over this obvious fact with grand, vague language.

Benjamin Jealous presumes to speak for a group dedicated to the “advancement of colored people,” but it’s hard to see how ignoring logic and defying natural law (not to mention biblical revelation) can serve to “advance” anything beyond short-term political calculations.