Christian focus on gay marriage lets real injustice reign

As gross injustice — political, social and economic — appears to be the defining character of this epoch in history, the word from most Christian quarters is silence. Yet recently the effort of homosexuals to legally marry has brought Christians out from their hiding places.

My Christian brothers and sisters have chosen to be outraged about whether homosexual couples can live in wedded bliss sanctioned, ironically, not by the church but by the State. It is good that Christians find themselves taking what they feel are principled stands, but why is this the only issue that we actually hear from them on?

When did God become a one-issue or one-trick pony? There are lots of words of inspiration, directives and commands in the biblical revelation, but scant mention of homosexuality. Yet Christians have given it outsized attention.

But during the same week that President Obama was criticized — by those who are sure of the mind of God — for supporting the rights of gays to marry, Congress was considering cutting money from folks who can’t stand to have a dime taken from them. They (Christians) voiced no outrage at all when tens of thousands of God’s children died at the hands of the U.S. military.

These deaths were caused by the sin of greed and covetousness. Yet the church is silent in this matter. Only a few brave souls bear witness to this evil, and many of them are not Christians.

There was no outrage and no outpouring of Christian sympathy when it was revealed that our brothers and sisters in the Horn of Africa were dying from famine. The people of God remained silent.

There has been a foreclosure crisis in the land in which banks have been taking away the homes of people like ourselves who have worked hard all their lives. The biblical revelation insists that the earth does not belong to the banks, but to God. Yet those who claim to believe that “the earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof and the world and everything in it” stand silent in the wake of this disaster.

Racism still reigns in the land. Presidential candidates make fun of Black folks and seek to divide, but the moral voice of the country remains silent. Black youth die nearly daily from the unseen hand (the psychological culmination of racism) of the system and the seen hand (lethal law enforcement) of the system.

The leading Republican candidate makes fun of the poor and shows disdain for those who actually work by the sweat of their brow, but the people of God choose complacency.

And Black Christians are the least outspoken — to their shame — as their communities lie in shambles. Our children are undereducated right before our very eyes. The children hate their very Blackness, so they turn their hatred on themselves.

In every inner city in every corner where Black folks exist, there is gunfire on Friday and Saturday night. The young people have turned to gangs because the church offers closed doors rather than community.

The church subtly sends the message, just like the rest of the community, that it’s every man for himself. Instead of working to rebuild at least the vestige of community we once shared, we preach with our lives that I got mine and you have to get yours.

But at least they are opposed to gay marriage.

Too many Black Christians have no heart for standing up with their fellow justice-and-love-motivated Black Christians who protest the mass incarceration and the locking out of society of our children. They stand on the sidelines as our children and our people are treated as second-class rather than full citizens.

We stand aside and watch as God’s children are ill-treated. We who should know that if for no other reason, we should oppose second-class status because God endowed us all with the same dignity, the same blood, and imparted to us all the same unalienable rights.

Real moral issues to show real moral courage abound aplenty. The Black church should have led the fight to rebuild Black New Orleans. The Black church should have opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It should have opposed the so called War on Drugs, which was nothing more than a war on Black and poor folks.  Instead we chose divisiveness, because at bottom all this enmity between the church and homosexuality serves to divide a community that can ill afford another division.

The business of God’s children is to call all out all evil while practicing love. People can’t eat because the rich have too much, which they have wrangled from the poor. But we want to serve God and mammon.

This is nothing more than moral cowardice and hypocrisy. It’s cowardice because the gay community is easy to pick on, and hypocritical because it calls out other folks while missing “the beam” in its own eye.

What must God really think of this spectacle? The scriptures point to a God that cares about body and soul, society and individual, corporate as well as personal sin. The Bible from front to back tells us that God is close to and sides with the underdog, the downtrodden, the brokenhearted, the outcast and the oppressed. So we ought to be careful with our judgment and our finger pointing.

Make no mistake: This narrow-minded brand of Christian legalism springs from the same branch that equated Christianity with White Supremacy and accepted chattel slavery, the second-class status of women, and the idea that the rich are favored over the poor.

Mel Reeves welcomes reader responses to mellaneous19@yahoo.com.