They include James Dobson, leader of the anti-gay Focus on the Family, and Bishop Harry Jackson, leader of the evangelical anti-gay organization, High Impact Leadership Coalition. In addition to Long's works, the bookstore in the front lobby of New Birth carries only the books of other high-profile white and black homophobes from the Christian Right. "I just couldn't imagine that she'd want to be in that church with a minister who was a raving homophobe." "I knew her attitude toward gay and lesbian rights," Bond told AOL Black Voices. Julian Bond, chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, protested the funeral as well. Harry Belafonte, the actor, refused to attend. When Bernice's mother Coretta Scott King died last year, her memorial service was held at Long's church. Civil rights activists cringed as Martin Luther King Jr.'s daughter, Bernice, handed a torch to Long, whom she has referred to as her "new father," as they marched side by side to her biological father's gravesite in a demonstration held "to protect the institution of marriage." In 2004, Long and his followers vigorously supported a proposed amendment to the Georgia state constitution to ban same-sex marriage. Long's message is: Hate the sin and the sinner. The audience, seated in a congested sanctuary, erupts in laughter. "The woman gets perverted to turn towards woman … and everybody knows it's dangerous to enter an exit! And everybody knows, lady, if you go to the store and buy these devices, it's Memorex! It ain't real!" "It is the most unattractive thing I have ever seen, when I see women wearing uniforms that men would wear, and women fighting to get in the military!" Long shouted to his congregation then. Much of what appears in I Don't Want Delilah was espoused in the videotaped "Back to the Future” sermon Long gave when his church was still small. During the mid-'90s, it swelled to over 18,000 congregation members, men and women who worship in a multimillion-dollar complex that's the size of most major universities, spread out on 240 acres of land. His book, subtitled What a Woman Needs to Know, What a Man Needs to Understand, appeared in the midst of a roaring growth period for Long's New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Ga., near Atlanta. "Men can look attractive when they are dirty," writes Bishop Eddie Long in his 1997 book I Don't Want Delilah, I Need You! "We see sweating, dirty, hardworking men on television all the time and we say to one another, 'There's a macho guy.'"ĭespite this affinity for sweaty, macho men, Long is one of the most virulently homophobic black leaders in the religiously based anti-gay movement.
0 kommentar(er)
