The African-American Face of the Hate Crime Bills Opposition

Henry Jackson, an African-American preacher with a Harvard MBA who leads a church only a few miles away from me in College Park, Maryland, has emerged as the face of the religiouis opposition to the Matthew Shepard Law that would include sexual orientation as a protected minority.

I wrote about his campaign a few days ago when I linked to a USA Today article that mentioned him. There is much more about him in this article from The American Prospect.

But Jackson wasn't elevated just because of his preaching style, his popularity, or his voter registration. Because Jackson is black, his claim that granting rights to gay people amounts to discrimination against Christians is more emotionally charged -- and, in a sense, more credible -- than if it came from someone white.

Only in the rhetoric of the Christian Right can an effort to protect the civil rights of one's fellow Americans be turned into a war against Christianity. And that's exactly how Jackson and his allies have deceitfully framed the issue. The Matthew Shepard bill, they claim, will "criminalize" speech and thought, and in particular, make preaching the gospel a crime. Never mind that the bill deals only with crimes involving "bodily injury" and specifically exempts from prosecution "expressive conduct protected from legal prohibition by, or any activities protected by the free speech or free exercise clauses of, the First Amendment to the Constitution."

Jackson nonetheless maintains that the legislation could be amended in the future to "widen" the definition of a hate crime to include his preaching on "one man, one wife, for life," which he says is "appropriate biblical morality." And while he insisted to me that painting him as anti-gay is "terribly offensive" and "bigotry in reverse," to his audience in Virginia Beach, Jackson promised that "God is going to lift up a standard against this abomination that wants to take the freedom away from our nation."

The church has been "diminished," he claimed, and "the authority of the evil one in the nation has continued to ascend and get stronger and bolder. 'Til now we're dealing with the fact that if God doesn't move and you don't act, they're about to shut us down with a Hate Speech [sic] legislation." Somebody, he added, "needs to reverse the curse," and everyone in the audience could start by signing the petition in the church lobby.

The man obviously enjoys being a media attraction, and the religious right loves using African-Americans to do their bidding, a trend they've had a lot of success with in fighting LGBT rights.

Of course, it is preachers like Jackson who are actually diminishing the church by diminishing Jesus. People like him place restrictions on Him that are clearly filtered through their own prejudice. Trying to defend their right to preach hate and what they claim is God's word by misrepsenting the facts and playing to the lowest common denominator in people (fear) goes completely against the message of Jesus, who is the way, the TRUTH, and the light.

It does get Jackson and his ilk a lot of face time and air time, though, doesn't it?