Preach It

Al Sharpton is a lot of things, quiet is never one of them, outspoken always is. Sometimes he is spouting nonsense (ok, quite a bit of the time) but occasionally he hits the nail right on the head.

It's times like these that make me appreciate Sharpton, and last Sunday in Atlanta while delivering the keynote for the Human Rights Ecumenical Service to help kick off the new Alliance of Affirming Faith Based Organizations the Reverend brought his A game...

I am tired of seeing ministers who will preach homophobia by day, and then after they're preaching, when the lights are off they go cruising for trade...We know you're not preaching the Bible, because if you were preaching the Bible we would have heard from you. We would have heard from you when people were starving in California--when they deregulated the economy and crashed Wall Street you had nothing to say. When Madoff made off with the money, you had nothing to say. When Bush took us to war chasing weapons of mass destruction that weren't there you had nothing to say...

But all of a sudden, when Proposition 8 came out, you had so much to say, but since you stepped in the rain, we gonna step in the rain with you...

It amazes me when I looked at California and saw churches that had nothing to say about police brutality, nothing to say when a young black boy was shot while he was wearing police handcuffs, nothing to say when they overturned affirmative action, nothing to say when people were being [relegated] into poverty, yet they were organizing and mobilizing to stop consenting adults from choosing their life partners.

There is something immoral and sick about using all of that power to not end brutality and poverty, but to break into people's bedrooms and claim that God sent you.

Ezra Klein pointed out Sharpton's statements and offered a very interesting economics based insight...

...But people are less comfortable digging through the implications of a market-driven religion. They're not hidden, however. Preachers obsess over homosexuality for the same reason that newscasters talk about polls rather than policies: It gets ratings. It arouses passions. It ensures relevance. It's not about religion, or justice. You can't read the Bible and honestly decide its primary political imperative is to block gay marriage. But that was, of course, the first time Warren ever entered domestic politics. This stuff is not about the judgment of the divine but the demands of the market...