Back when I was working as director of public policy for Georgia
Family Council (GFC) a few years ago, I received a phone call from
Eli McKenzie, president of Citizens for Community Values (CCV) in
Atlanta. McKenzie’s group focused its efforts on inhibiting the
advance of pornography. I knew the group had excellent downtown
office space and that McKenzie happened to be an African-American.
He called me to forge an alliance for installing Internet filters
on public library computers. I readily agreed. As a longtime
library aficionado, I’d witnessed the new spectacle of reckless
individuals openly viewing pornography in space shared by families
and children. Shame went completely out of style sometime during
the Clinton presidency.
We made a pretty good team. GFC had a strong suburban support
base. CCV had more backers in urban Atlanta. Both were backed
largely by successful, well-educated Christians. We took our bill
to the Georgia Assembly, testified before committees, and worked
with sympathetic members. Although we easily passed the Senate, our
bill stalled in the House, despite the fact that we had a very
senior conservative Democrat sponsoring the legislation. We even
met with Governor Roy Barnes to ask for help. Though he was
sympathetic, he wasn’t prepared to spend big political capital on
our library bill. The speaker of the house and the chairman of the
Rules Committee listened to the American Library Association
instead of our quickly assembled black and white grassroots
coalition, and the bill was never released to the floor by the
Rules Committee.
The black and white Christian folks got a little revenge this
year on a much bigger issue. The usual suspects in the white
evangelical world pushed to have Georgia change its constitution to
forbid gay marriage. The votes weren’t quite there for the Assembly
to put the measure on the ballot for Georgia voters. In particular,
a few black representatives insisted on voting with upscale white
liberals against giving voters input on the definition of marriage.
Black pastors got involved and those same legislators experienced a
well-informed change of heart. Georgia voters will be deciding the
marriage issue for themselves in the near future.
For years we’ve been hearing that 11 a.m. on Sunday morning is
the most segregated hour in America. For all I know, that may still
be true. But what keeps whites and blacks in separate pews is less
a matter of racism than it is different worship styles. In
charismatic and Pentecostal churches, which feature more energetic
services, congregations are beginning to look nicely mixed.
Nevertheless, liberals have depended on the divide between black
and white Christian party allegiances to maintain their political
power. Thus, we’ve witnessed the odd spectacle of culturally
conservative African-Americans throwing their lot in with the
ultra-secularists who rationalize the religious habits of their
allies as a relic of slavery.
That fragile, old rainbow coalition is in very great danger and
is about to be replaced by a new slate of blacks, whites, yellows,
and browns. Every time the multi-colored group from the Alliance
for Marriage steps up to a podium you can feel liberal radars
lighting up in New York City and San Francisco. The same was true
of the Promise Keepers rally in Washington back in the late 1990s.
These moments when Christians look across the two parties at each
other and wonder why they aren’t voting together are becoming more
common.
The devout, particularly black and white evangelicals, have had
a long time to chew on their failure to stand up and be counted on
abortion when it still mattered in the late '60s and early '70s.
Now, the very nature of marriage and family is on the line. The
white evangelicals are going to be right on the front lines with
Catholics. As is demonstrated by the new energy of black pastors in
Georgia and the exciting Senate campaign of cultural conservative
Herman Cain, the African-American church is definitely showing
signs of marching to the front.
Liberal Democrats know this and that’s why they are essentially
trying to run out the clock. Instead of coming out and expressing
their usual antipathy for the one man-one woman family Christianity
and Western civilization strove so mightily to produce, they now
worry endlessly about altering the Constitution. Never mind that
Supreme Court Justices alter the Constitution in virtually every
decision they make. Heaven forbid someone should actually go to the
trouble to amend the document in the way actually provided for by
its framers. The liberal strategy is simply to block things up long
enough for the question to be decided by right-minded ladies and
gents in black robes (secular priests, if you will).
In the final analysis, it seems liberals may well win the battle
by sowing confusion long enough to see the Supreme Court create gay
marriage in our midst. But in so doing, they are quite likely to
lose the war. Only a very small percentage of African-American
voters have to decide they’ve had enough to change the balance of
national elections and court appointments for decades to come. The
Democratic Party has a hard choice before it. It can keep pleasing
wealthy, white elites on the coasts or it can maintain its 90-10
hold on African-American loyalties. Seems pretty clear to me which
path they’ve chosen.
