Tom's Blogging today (I totally agree on this:)
COMMENTS ON TODAY'S WASHINGTON POST NEWSPAPER COMMENTARY Remember in grade school, there was always one kid in the class that everyone picked on? It was OK to pick on this person because everyone did it. I remember in my 3rd grade class, there was a kid named Steven R. I liked Steve. Steve had ADD. Of course, we didn’t know it at the time. We didn’t have fancy medical terms for such behavioral problems in 1971. The teacher would take Steven out of his chair and put him against the wall for disciplinary purposes. Steven, now sitting on the floor, would violently rock himself pounding his back against the wall. He could sit there for hours doing this. There was a girl in our class named Debbie P. Debbie saw the attention that Steve was getting, so she started aping the same rocking that Steve was doing. Everyone in our class picked on Debbie because it was OK to pick on Debbie. Not only was she chubby, but now she was “copying” Steve to get attention. And that wasn’t cool.
This morning, there was a short commentary in our local newspaper about the apparent cultural divide that has developed where it is now “acceptable” for blacks to hate Gays. No one dares to speak out and call them to task on this matter lest you be dubbed a racist or a bigot.
This week, the D.C. Council passed legislation that will allow the recognition of same sex marriages that are performed outside the city limits. The black community has vehemently retaliated against this action. Angry black preachers are all up in arms vowing to oust every council member that voted “for” the measure. These same black preachers raised such a ruckus at Monday evening’s hearings that they had to be forcibly removed from City Hall.
Yesterday in Washington D.C., black men and women were picketing with large banners in Freedom Plaza. Former mayor, Marion Barry (now dubiously dubbed a “civil rights champion” and is the antithesis of what is right, moral, or even ethical), has spoken out against this resolution and, in fact, was the lone dissenting vote on the bill when the final vote was taken. Loud-mouthed Republicans in Congress, spewing their hatred, are now vowing that they’re going to fight DC’s new law when it comes before them in the next 30 days. Why is this OK? Maybe I can shed some light on the subject.
In every culture, there has to be one group that is on the “outs.” Just like my 3rd grade class used to pick on Debbie P., there has to be one group that’s OK for society at large to pick on. No one is denying the long and exhaustive history of how blacks have been treated in this country. The record is clear and well documented. Blacks, for too long, have been the downtrodden of our society.
But, rather than recognizing the fact that Gays are now in the position that blacks once were, the black community has instead learned that it’s OK to bash Gays because we are now the group that’s on the “outs.” They know this because the black community has witnessed how Gays have been treated by our society and its leaders: Gays have been fired from jobs, denied rightfully earned promotions at places of employment, kicked out of housing, beaten up by rednecks and strung up to fences in freezing cold temperatures to die, denied acceptance in churches thereby kicking dirt in the face of the very tenets of what Christianity is all about – all of this with very little rebuke or retribution.
What is perplexing in all this is that blacks should be focusing their attention on what’s wrong within their own community: the breakdown of the family unit, the large number of fatherless families and unwed mothers with children, the significant number of black children being raised by grandparents, the disproportionate number of black males that make up the country’s prison inmate population, the alarming dropout rates of black children from our educational system, and the unbridled sense of entitlement that has reached apoplectic proportions in recent years.
The right to marry will be granted to the Gay community. It’s just a matter of time. What we are witnessing is the death throes of a hateful movement that needs to die. Because the States have done such a miserable job at handling this matter in a fair and equitable manner, because public opinion can be too easily swayed by closed minded hate mongering groups with lots of money, and because it is the job of our legal system to protect and defend the rights of the downtrodden in our society that cannot protect themselves, this debate will be heading for the Supreme Court very soon.
In the meantime, perhaps the black community should not be throwing rocks when their glass house has a lot of cracks.
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