LATENT SOUTHERN BAPTIST RACISM

From the Tennessean:

But some consider statements made Saturday by the convention’s top policy representative on his national radio show a setback. On Richard Land Live!, Land accused black religious leaders — whom he called “race hustlers” — and President Barack Obama of using the shooting death of an African-American teen in Florida for election-year gains.

“This will be vetted in court, not in a mob mentality that’s been juiced up by Al Sharpton, who is a provocateur and a racial ambulance chaser of the first order, and aided and abetted by Jesse Jackson,” Land said on the show.

And, on Obama’s statement that, if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old victim, Land said: “The president’s aides claim he was showing compassion for the victim’s family. In reality, he poured gasoline on the racialist fires.”

And

Land, a Franklin resident and president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, stood by his comments on Wednesday.

More here.

The Southern Baptist Convention is the only Christian denomination in the world that was founded for the sole purpose of using the Bible to support the ability of white people to own black people. Of course, they eventually gave up on this centrally unifying proposition. They even eventually got around to apologizing for their philosophically tainted origins--I mean, not until the 1990s, over a century after the Emancipation Proclamation, but they did get around to it. But the point is that, as a sort of center for and defender of old school Southern culture, the Southern Baptists to this day continue to operate within the cultural reverberations of their racist founding. After all, the Southern Baptists are also the most conservative Christian denomination in the world, and that conservatism, anti-labor, pro-gun, pro-war, pro-punishment, directly descends from the slavery regime that was the Confederacy--I'm sure you've seen those red/blue, Democratic/Republican state breakdown maps alongside very similar maps of the CSA.

This rant coming down from their go-to guy on ethics, of all things, is a case in point. Given what the Southern Baptists are, dead-end defenders of a point of view that ought to be literally Gone with the Wind, this comes as no surprise. I mean, it's surprising that he's being so public about it - generally, Baptists only talk this way behind closed doors - but it is very much in keeping with contemporary SBC attitudes. I suppose keeping it real, or mouthing off stupid right-wing bullshit so everybody can hear it, whatever you want to call it, is all the rage among conservatives these days.

At any rate, Land, and numerous other conservatives, are full of shit in calling the Trayvon Martin case nothing but "racialist fires": remember, Zimmerman was not arrested, and there was no investigation on the horizon, until, of course, the controversy began. Only now, after a few weeks of protest, can we watch this play out in court. Before people started making a stink about it, we didn't have that luxury. So the protest was definitely justified, and opposing it makes absolutely no sense.

Unless, of course, you're a racist. Like Land.

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