Black Baptist leader rebukes Obama

A pastor who led the Southern Baptist Convention to adopt a resolution in 2009 applauding the election of Barack Obama as America’s first African-American president termed the president’s May 9 endorsement of same-sex marriage a betrayal of the black church and an attack on the Christian faith.

“America is now a candidate for the same judgment received by Sodom and Gomorrah,” Dwight McKissic, pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, wrote in a blog May 9. McKissic compared the moral impact of Obama’s statement to the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina.

“This means that parents are now going to have an extremely difficult time teaching their children that marriage biblically and traditionally is between a man and a woman, when the president that many love and admire is now on record endorsing sodomy,” McKissic said.

McKissic said black church leaders should mobilize and address the matter with the same vigor, if not greater, that they used during the Civil Rights Movement. “If we don’t, our children and grandchildren will pay a far greater price in suffering from a governmental sanction of same-sex marriage than we would have under segregation,” he commented.

McKissic, who is black, has been a leading voice in calling for greater representation by ethnic minorities in Southern Baptist denominational life. He recommended the 2009 resolution that, while in its final form criticized many of Obama’s policies, hailed his election as a step forward for racial reconciliation.

McKissic also called for rebuke of a former SBC officer who in 2009 said he was praying that God would kill President Obama. Just recently he threatened to bring a resolution to this year’s SBC annual meeting calling for ouster of the head of the convention’s moral-concerns agency unless he apologized for negative comments about media coverage of the shooting death of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin.

McKissic said that due to a lengthy apology by SBC Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission President Richard Land May 9, that he no longer intends to introduce a resolution of rebuke when the convention meets June 19-20 in New Orleans. Instead, he said, he now plans to propose a resolution asking Southern Baptists “to go on record disavowing and repudiating the position of our beloved President Barack Obama as it relates to his position on affirming same-sex marriages.”