Kentucky Church Votes to Ban Interracial Couples

From AlterNet:

Gulnare Freewill Baptist church of Pike County, Kentucky appears to have undergone a racist freak-out. According to the Kentucky Herald-Ledger, Stella Harville brought her black fiance, Ticha Chikuni, to the church in June. There, she sang while he played piano. Aww? Nope. On Sunday, in a 9-6 vote, church members decided to keep mixed couples out of most church activities. They did it “to promote greater unity among the church body,” because that makes a lot of sense.

More here.

I bet it was a Southern Baptist church. I mean, that's the denomination that was born for the express purpose of supporting slavery. Once there were Baptists. Then the Abolition Movement came along and some Baptists up North got involved. And then, suddenly, there were both Baptists and Southern Baptists. So, fuck you abolitionists.

To be fair, the Southern Baptist Convention apologized back in the 1990s for its historic stance on slavery, but like with the Mormons and polygamy, there continue to be die-hard dead-enders, and some even speculate that the Southern Baptists' sordid and intolerant past continues to have cultural reverberations lasting until this very day. How many Southern Baptists are also in the Tea Party? How many are birthers? How many think Obama is a Kenyan Muslim Socialist? I'm quite certain that the vast, vast, vast majority of Southern Baptists vote Republican.

For them, it's conservatism first, old school conservatism, and Jesus second. Anytime there's a contradiction between the two, they just interpret the Bible to make Jesus a Republican. Or a racist.

My mother was a wonderful woman, one of the few Southern Baptists I've known in my life who put Jesus first, and everything else second. But all her family was from Kentucky, and like I said, she was a Southern Baptist. From time to time, she would utter a bizarre thought that laid bare her cultural heritage. I once asked her what she thought of interracial marriage. "I just don't think that's how the Lord meant for it to be." Really, Mom? Then it should be in the Bible. What verse? What chapter? "I don't know, Ron. I'll have to look that up." By the same token, my father, who is from a long line of Houstonians, but embraced the Southern Baptists when he was my age, once told me that he almost threw up when he saw Kevin Costner kissing Whitney Houston in the otherwise forgettable film The Bodyguard. I didn't even try to engage him in discussion on this. What do you say? Really, Dad, you almost vomited because you saw a white man kissing a black woman?

We think this kind of bullshit is well behind us, but it's not. Indeed, and I say this often, the most lasting legacy of the Civil Rights era among whites is that it is now an insult to call somebody a racist. Never mind whether the statement is true, it's just that you'd better be ready for an argument, or a fight, if you point out that somebody is behaving in a racist way. I'd bet fifty dollars that the members of this Kentucky congregation who voted to ban interracial couples do not believe they are racist.

How do you fight racism when the racists strongly believe they're on your side and you're just being an asshole?

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