Obama's Base: Morally Conservative To The Core

The Northwest Florida Daily News reports:

A new coalition chose the NAACP's state convention to announce its support Thursday for passage of Florida's Marriage Protection Amendment.

It was a strange place for the announcement; the Florida State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had come out against Amendment 2.

"We are against Amendment 2 and our reason is the amendment would allow a way for discriminatory practices to be used," said Adori Obi Nweze, president of the state conference. "(The NAACP) has been around for 99 years fighting discrimination in this country. It makes no sense we still have to face it in these times."

Amendment 2 would make marriage between a man and woman the only "legal union" considered "valid or recognized" in Florida.

Nweze said the Marriage Protection Amendment, which will be on the Nov. 4 election ballot, was abominable in its discrimination against people in domestic partnerships.

However, Brenda Lewis with the Blacks for Marriage Coalition, which organized the news conference, disagreed.

"How dare anyone compare the struggles and beatings that African Americans endured in their fight for equality to homosexual struggles," Lewis said. "The comparison is far stretching and offensive to the many African Americans who lost their lives in our fight for equality. Gay rights are clearly not the same as civil rights."

Mary Esther Mayor Chuck Bolton, who spoke at the news conference, said the Mary Esther City Council voted unanimously to support the "Vote Yes on 2" movement.

"I'm offended when people say the effect of the amendment is to take rights away from anyone," Bolton said. "We've got to protect marriage the way it was designed centuries ago."

The Blacks for Marriage Coalition's news conference was held after a debate on Amendment 2 at the NAACP's convention. The debate was between John Stemberger, state chairman of Yes2Marriage.org, and Nadine Smith with the Fairness for All Families Campaign.

Stemberger said the passage of Amendment 2 would protect the institution of marriage. Smith countered that it takes away protections and benefits from people in all domestic partnerships, not just gays and lesbians.

About a dozen ministers and several residents attended the debate.

Such is the voice of the black churches, the heart and soul of the black community in United States. This year, it is perfectly possible that Obama could just scrape in on the votes of those whites in South Carolina, where he will of course clean up among the large number of black voters, who vote the ticket that has on it Bob Conley, traditional Catholic (with all that that entails on life and family issues), Ron Paul activist (with all that that entails on trade, immigration and foreign policy), and Democratic candidate for United States Senator. For that matter, the black votes for that same ticket, because it has Obama on it, also make it Conley's ticket to Capitol Hill.

Conley's moral views are in any case closer than Obama's to those of most African-Americans. Obama's moral liberalism is one of those little reminders that he is not in fact an African-American in the original or ordinary sense of the term. And the black churches are key to getting out Obama's vote nationwide.

Who are the American black churches? Baptists, Pentecostals, like-minded tendencies within other denominations, Catholics who don't like the Modern Rite because it sounds too much like how their white bosses and landlords speak whereas the Latin Mass didn't, and pockets of extremely traditional Anglo-Catholicism, which has always had a radical political edge. The godfather of Civil Rights in Obama's own Chicago is Squire Lance, a very active member of Opus Dei.

Much, in fact, like the British black churches, the heart and soul of the black community in United Kingdom, and the reason why London is a slightly more churchgoing place than the country at large. (Immigration? The more of Her Majesty's churchgoing West Indian and Pacific Islander subjects, the better. As Her Majesty's subjects, they are not really immigrants, anyway.)

All is far, far, far from lost.

Let the giant wake in the United States. And let the giant wake in the United Kingdom.