Rev. Dr. Dorsey Blake. No on Prop 8 rally. 11/17/08 SF
Andrew Sullivan in one of his most eloquent moments.
I respect [Mormon’s] right to freedom of conscience and religion. In fact, it is one of my strongest convictions. But when they use their money and power to target my family, to break it up, to demean it and marginalize it, to strip me and my husband of our civil rights, then they have started a war. And I am not a pacifist.
I do not intend in any way to remove a single right from Mormons. I do intend to protest their imposition of their own religious dogma – that marriage is always between a man and a woman and it is eternal and will be replicated in heaven by the couple physically present – on civil rights protections vested in a civil constitution.
I should add that I dated a Mormon man for a few months a while back. What he told me about the LDS church’s psychological warfare on their gay members, the brutality and viciousness and intolerance with which they attack and hound and police the gay children of Mormon families, would make anyone shudder.
That African-Americans would seek common cause with a church that only recently still believed they were the product of Satan shows how profound homophobia can be. But this shared hatred can be exploited by the Hewitts and Romneys of this world. And what we have just witnessed is a trial run for much larger ambitions.
If we don’t resist this now, we will not be able to resist it later.
Some African-Americans. Not all. Not hardly. One of the most powerful speakers at the No on 8 rally in San Francisco on Saturday was an African-American minister and compatriot of Martin Luther King, the Rev. Dr. Dorsey Blake. He said he was heterosexual, that his church did not have same sex marriage at this time, but equal protection and rights are guaranteed by the Constitution and that religions should not interfere with this. He was a preacher at the top of his form and received thunderous applause.
But Sullivan is right. Religious zealots, those who want to impose theocracy with their rules and screw the Constitution, must be opposed and stopped.