Harry Jackson, flustered. Opposing civil rights is such hard work.

The bad part about direct democracy is that it empowers the tyranny of the majority to overrun the rights of unpopular minorities.

We have reported before that when the D.C. city council voted to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere, the lone dissenting vote was cast by Marion Barry, who claimed to stand “on the moral compass of God” and opposed the legislation also out of what he claimed to be racial solidarity. Joining him in standing in the schoolhouse door was Bishop Harry Jackson, a District resident (more on that below) who is the pastor of a Maryland church.

Unhappy that the city council passed the civil rights legislation, Jackson threatened to bring the matter to a city-wide referendum, where, as we have noted before, it just might pass.  Jackson hit a snag earlier this week, though, when the city’s Board of Elections invalidated the proposed ballot question since it would deny civil rights to LGBT people, whom the city’s Human Rights Act protects from discrimination. City law wisely prohibits ballot referenda that contradict the Human Rights Act; human rights are not, and should never be, up for a popular vote.

Mr. Jackson is challenging the board’s decision in court, hoping an “activist judge” will side with him and let him put the discriminatory civil rights question on the ballot. Complicating the matter is whether Mr. Jackson has standing as a District resident to propose the referendum. As the Washington Blade has reported, Jackson and his wife own two houses (blessed are the poor?) in Montgomery County, Maryland, and neighbors claim they reside in one of those houses, a $1.1-million mansion. The Jacksons, however, claim neither home as their principal residence according to tax records. For the purpose of voting, Mr. Jackson claims residence in unit 630 in the tony Whitman condominium building in the Mount Vernon Triangle area of DC. Tax records show that a Mr. Joseph Honaker owns this one-bedroom condo and claims it as his primary residence. If these records all hold true, it would appear that Mr. Jackson shares a one-bedroom condo with another man.

Joining Mr. Jackson in his battle against civil rights is Rev. Walter E. Fauntroy, former D.C. Delegate to the House of Representatives, former city councilman, and civil rights activist (until now); Rev. Dale E. Wafer, pastor of the Harvest Church in Northeast; Melvin Dupree; Sandra B. Harris, a real estate agent with Cosmopolitan Properties in Shaw; Dr. Patricia Johnson, dean of a local Christian liberal arts college; and Bobby Perkins, Sr., pastor of World Missions for Christ Church in Shaw.  Even if Mr. Jackson is not a bona fide resident, that still doesn’t necessarily stop the ballot referendum since one of these other residents could carry the torch of discrimination.

Nobody knows how the court will rule (our guess is that they will defer to the Board of Elections,  City Council and city attorney), but it is truly shocking to see such strident opposition to civil rights in a supposedly liberal city, where over 90% of the electorate cast ballots for Barack Obama.  Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

"Marriage is not a right." Bishop Harry Jackson of Beltsville's New Hope Christian Church voice his own interpretation of civil rights.

We wrote before of the fact that an astonishing 70% of black Californians voted for Proposition 8, which prohibited same-sex marriage.  We also wrote before that when we extrapolate the California results and apply them to the District, a similar city ballot question would pass if one considers income, education, or race.*

Just a few weeks ago, to our surprise, the city council unanimously passed a bill to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. That very same day, the Vermont legislature stole much of the media thunder by overriding the governor’s veto and legalizing same-sex marriage in the Green Mountain State.  Nonetheless, it was a bold move for Washington, a city whose every decision can be vetoed by a Congress looking to make a statement. The issue of marriage is usually portrayed in the media as a religious-secular struggle and another side of the issue rarely discussed: race.

The relationship between race and opinion on same-sex marriage— a relationship so quietly whispered it dare not speak its name!— has come out of the closet in DC, a city that votes overwhelmingly Democrat and is also 56% black.

Several area churches (all predominantly black and some of them suburban) spent part of Tuesday protesting the city council’s recent decision and lined up outside the Wilson Building on Freedom Plaza to voice their displeasure. (See the Post’s video of the event)

Bishop Harry Jackson (pictured above) of the New Hope Christian Church— which is outside the District— recently penned his own opinion on the matter in Newsweek lamenting his own “robbery” at the city council meeting by those dastardly “equality vigilantes”!

I felt robbed and disenfranchised as I observed “equality vigilantes” setting up an unjust concept of civil rights.

Mr. Jackson seems to have his own peculiar interpretation of civil rights.  In the Post video above, he states:

Marriage is not a right.  Brothers and sisters can’t get married. People who are related can’t get married.  You can’t marry a three-year-old.  There are parameters that are for the benefit of the society about marriage.

Wrong.  In Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court ruled that marriage is a basic civil right.  To deny a civil right on account of sex (that is, to disqualify a woman from marrying another woman solely because she is a woman) requires a compelling state interest.  Some states have decided there is such an interest, some have found there is not.  Nonetheless, in American jurisprudence marriage is a civil right.

Mr. Jackson, who, as the Post’s Marc Fisher has noted, has strong connections to the national conservative movement, continues, “I’d rather be politically courageous than politically correct.”  That’s a noble sentiment, for sure, but it is certainly possible to be selfishly courageous, too.

Lynne Breece, a District resident and a bystander at the event, offered some hope that not everyone shares Mr. Jackson’s views:

As a black woman, I know a lot about discrimination on both ends, and I know what it feels like.  And for us, of all people, black ministers to use the pulpit to oppress another minority and then to cloak that bigotry using the bible! This happened to black people!

Indeed, though Dr. Martin Luther King cited scripture to demand equality, Jim Crow supporters and defenders of slavery never hesitated to quote the good book either.

Councilman Marion Barry, who didn’t show up to vote on the bill, but who previously promised to vote for same-sex marriage, managed to make it to the rally and profess his new-found opposition.  Why the change of heart?  Barry provided a great gem of a quotation:

I am a politician who is moral.

Dream on!

Even with Barry’s opposition, the rest of the council and the mayor have all voiced support for eventual same-sex marriage licensing in the city.  Messrs. Barry and Jackson notwithstanding, justice and fairness shall overcome someday.

Just when you thought citing the bible for political purposes was solely the province of the Right, our quick perusal today of Leviticus turned up these verses:

And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him.

But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God. (19:33-4)

If there’s a so-called “Defense” of Marriage Act, based largely on prejudices inspired from odd passages from Leviticus, shouldn’t there also be an accompanying amnesty statute for illegal immigrants?

“George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

So said Kanye West in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when hundreds of poor, mostly black, residents of New Orleans were stranded in the Superdome and atop flood houses in the Big Easy.

No matter, with the election of Barack Obama, surely the Federal government now attends to the best interests of disadvantaged minority populations, right?  Not always.

In 2004 Congress passed the District of Columbia School Choice Incentive Act, providing vouchers of up to $7,500 for low-income children in the District to attend private schools. Since the District’s public schools are among the worst in the nation and considering that poor parents love their children, too, it’s no surprise that parents jumped on the opportunity with such enthusiasm that the program developed a waiting list. A recent U.S. Department of Education study found that children in the program scored about the same in math and slightly more in reading.  Nonetheless, voucher parents were much more satisfied with their chosen schools than public school parents were with their schools.*

The voucher program operated with the strong support of the mayor, the District’s “state” superintendent, and the low-income parents of the voucher recipients (90% black, 9% Latino), who finally got the chance to give their children what their neighbors Mr. & Mrs. Obama give to their children: a quality private education.  The parents were happy and the kids’ performance improved modestly.  In an era when the Treasury hands out hundreds of billions of dollars to shoddy banks and failed carmakers, certainly the voucher program’s modest success was worth the paltry $15 million annual cost.

Not so fast!  Enter the teachers’ unions and their partner-in-disparity, Eleanor Holmes Norton, D.C.’s non-voting Delegate to the House of Representatives.  She made clear her opposition to the program, telling the Post, “…the Democratic Congress is not about to extend this program.”

With Democratic majorities in both houses and at the behest of the teachers’ unions, Congress, fresh from passing $410 billion budget bill, callously failed to renew the voucher program.

If we ran our elections the way we run many of our public schools, there would be civil rights investigations and lawsuits to match.  Instead, when public-sector mediocrity denies poor children their right to a decent education, thereby reducing their future life opportunities, the Right doesn’t much bother with an issue it never noticed anyway and the Left willfully averts its eyes toward its well-heeled funders.  If voting patterns still hold true, the beneficiaries of these programs would vote overwhelmingly Democrat anyway; the G.O.P. has nothing to gain, the Democrats have nothing to lose.  Sadly, the children have much to lose.

In noting the disparities in the quality of public education in America, Rev. Al Sharpton, in a rare moment of clarity, stated why public education continues to fail millions of Americans:

The people standing in the schoolhouse doorway now are people we thought were our friends, liberals wearing suits not bibb overalls, principals and teachers who want to uphold the status quo — condescending bigots who perpetuate a system we know is profoundly unequal.

Conservatives typically don’t make public education their issue, except when it comes to biology (evolution), health (sex), and school prayer.  Liberals typically advocate the use of government power to equalize social opportunity and even equalize social outcomes.  Even though one would normally expect the Left to advocate policies that best benefit marginalized populations, the Democratic party still knows that both money and ballots talk: the nation’s two big teachers’ unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, support Democratic candidates with massive investments, volunteers, and votes.  When the interests of the unions conflict with the interests of disadvantaged children of color, the former constituency holds the trump card.

Tellingly, Ms. Norton also told the Post several months ago, “We have to protect the children, who are the truly innocent victims here.”  Indeed they are.

In his 2007 book Freedom for the Thought That We Hate, legal scholar Anthony Lewis chronicles the  history of the First Amendment’s protection of free speech.  Though the amendment was ratified in 1791, it wasn’t until the 20th century, that the Supreme Court ever overturned a law as a violation of free speech.  Though the history of America’s broad speech protections is younger than we might think, these protections are products of the Enlightenment spirit— that the elevation of knowledge and rationality are the keys to human flourishing.  (French author Michel Houellebecq disagrees, but that’s another matter.)

Lewis drew the title of his book from Oliver Wendell Holmes’s dissenting opinion in U.S. v. Schwimmer (1929):

[I]f there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought — not free thought for those who agree with us, but freedom for the thought that we hate.

Since popular opinions need no protection in a democracy, the First Amendment’s raison d’être must be the protection of unpopular opinions— including the thought that we hate.

In previous times, including the times of Holmes, the hated thoughts included pacifism and communist sympathy.  Congress and states banned various expressions they deemed seditious, usually limiting the political debate that the more philosophical Founders had likely wanted to foster.  In more recent times, contentious speech is typically the opinions and rantings of racists and bigots convinced that society is far too tolerant of this or that group.  (How ironic that the intolerant demand tolerance of their own opinions!)

Though we have lamented speech restrictions before at the University of Maryland, in the supposedly libertine Netherlands and in holier-than-thou Canada, the slow repeal of free expression in western democracies is on the march.

An op-ed in the Washington Post’s Sunday Outlook section chronicles the slow disintegration of speech protections in many western countries as the concern for multicultural tolerance conflicts with the more xenophobic views on the European fringe.  The author lists some troubling cases:

• French actress Brigitte Bardot has been convicted four times in France for demeaning Muslims and gays.
• A 15-year-old Briton was arrested for holding up a sign stating, “Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult”.
• An Austrian legislator narrowly avoided jail, but was fined, for accusing Mohamed of pedophilia.
• A Dutch cartoonist, as we wrote earlier, was arrested for drawing cartoons denigrating fundamentalist Muslims.
• Italian prosecutors launched an investigation into an Italian comedienne for insulting the pope.
• A British political aide was arrested for anti-Semitic rants directed at a TV in a gym.
• A xenophobic Dutch parliamentarian was denied entry into the U.K. for espousing anti-Muslim opinions deemed too dangerous.

Yes, many of these controversial views are blatantly racist, mean, and (more importantly) specious, but that doesn’t warrant their restriction.

Anthony Lewis, though on the Left, actually thinks America’s First Amendment protections might be too broad.  He believes the state is justified in squelching the incendiary recruitment speech of Islamic radicals, even if these radicals do not call for immediate lawlessness.  Their ability to persuade alienated young men inclined toward eventual violence warrants state intervention, he writes.

We disagree, however, and are curious as to whether Mr. Lewis would extend this interventionism to non-Muslims who speak to alienated groups.  Under Mr. Lewis’s reasoning, one could argue that Martin Luther King, though decidedly non-violent, should have been muzzled (well, more so than he was).  Such a speech restriction could open the door to the prosecution of anyone demanding significant socio-political change, as there are surely unrestrained elements of any otherwise legitimate movement.

Furthermore, determining what is controversial is easy, but it is indeed too easy.  If one could unleash the local prosecutor simply on the grounds that one feels “offended”, we will have to hire more prosecutors, as there are infinite opportunities to take offense, and enough delicate sensibilities to feel offended.  Don’t like that someone called same-sex marriage unnatural?  Call the prosecutor!  Don’t like that gay-right supporters call you a bigot?  Call the prosecutor!

The Left and Right will find ways to litigate and counter-litigate every provocative utterance out of the public realm.

There is plenty of despicable speech, no doubt, but any attempt to regulate it— to determine what is legitimate and what is not— could easily lead to capricious and unfair restrictions, where the well-counseled quash the obscure bloggers, where political parties sue newspapers for their opinion pages, and where courts rule that emotions trump truth.  A speech regime will cause many more problems than it fixes.

The best response to blatant nonsense is an articulate rebuttal exposing lies and reinforcing the truth.  Justice Louis Brandeis, who sat on the court with Holmes, famously wrote that sunlight is the best disinfectant.

When real estate prices deflate and consumer spending dives, does gentrification wither? In real estate, sale prices and rents are “stickier” when falling than when rising. Thus, rents and prices should not fall as fast as a drop in consumer spending warrants. Consequently, shops suffer this gap between revenue declines and rent declines, causing them to go out of business much faster than they otherwise would.

The New York Times discusses an example of this unfortunate process playing out right now in the once-gentrifying Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles.  The paper notes that

The deep recession, with its lost jobs and falling home values nationwide, poses another kind of threat: to the character of neighborhoods settled by the young creative class, from the Lower East Side in Manhattan to Beacon Hill in Seattle. The tide of gentrification that transformed economically depressed enclaves is receding, leaving some communities high and dry.

However, these gentrified neighborhoods did not just change economically.  They changed socially, too, attracting a base of residents with the  job skills, education, and worldly curiosity to support a variety of local retail shops.  Even when these shops that opened under brighter economic times shutter their doors due to a souring neighborhood economy, the intrinsic demand sparked by the changing neighborhood culture does not disappear.

When happy days are here again, these neighborhoods will likely sprout coffee houses, soap shops, thai restaurants and the like rather than pawn shops, tatoo parlors, and car repair shops of the long-gone decades of disinvestment.

Black voters in California voted overwhelmingly to elect Barack Obama—and to write discrimination into the state’s constitution.  The Post writes:

Any notion that Tuesday’s election represented a liberal juggernaut must overcome a detail from the voting booths of California: The same voters who turned out strongest for Barack Obama also drove a stake through the heart of same-sex marriage.

Indeed the New York Times reported earlier the worry among the proposition’s opponents that a high turn-out among California’s blacks would likely increase the measure’s passage while simultaneously ensuring Obama’s election.

Exit polls show that a bare majority of the state’s white voters voted for the measure, 53% of the state’s Latinos voters voted for the measure, and an astounding 70% of black voters voted for the measure.

One Californian discussed what drove her to vote to reduce the state’s civil rights commitment:

“I think it’s mainly because of the way we were brought up in the church; we don’t agree with it,” said Jasmine Jones, 25, who is black. “I’m not really the type that I wanted to stop people’s rights. But I still have my beliefs, and if I can vote my beliefs that’s what I’m going to do.

“God doesn’t approve it, so I don’t approve it. And I approve of Him.”

The overwhelming rejection of same-sex marriage by black voters was surprising and disappointing to gay rights advocates who had hoped that African Americans would empathize with their struggle.

The article continues with other quotations from people who wish to rework the state Constitution’s equal protection guarantees to suit their prejudices.  I’m sure many of these same people would decry any state measure that denied them rights or privileges solely on account of race, but it’s sad to see that they deem it acceptable to do the same regarding sex.

The proposition faces challenges in court (it was passed as an Amendment, though some argue that should be a Revision since it partly nullifies equal protection guarantees).

Nonetheless, Dr. King famously said that “the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.” Perhaps we shall overcome.

There I said it.

Admittedly Al Jazeera’s reporting has a bias just as all media do, but the fact that the reporter found it so easy to find such sentiments is worrying.  Let us hope such sentiments exist only on the fringe.

Ross Douthat in yesterday’s Post blames the widely-held belief that home ownership is an undeniable social virtue as one of the main causes of today’s financial crisis. Though Gov. Palin may believe that the credit crisis right now is solely the fault of “Wall Street”, the reality actually involves the complicity of homeowners, elected officials, and Wall Street together. The “virtue” of home ownership is so widespread, it is even an ideal lionized in Frank Capra’s classic It’s a Wonderful Life.

Certainly home ownership has its social virtues, but if we pursue it as a social policy to the detriment of sound lending practices, we risk financial calamity.  Homely populism is financially untenable, and we are likely to find lenders now much more careful about credit scores and down payments.  Douthat writes:

Once the bailouts end, bankers and bureaucrats alike will grow increasingly tightfisted. Easy credit will become a privilege of wealth and mortgages vastly more difficult to get. No president in the near future — and certainly no Republican president — will unveil any sweeping plans to add 5.5 million more minority homeowners by reducing down-payment requirements the way Bush, eager to woo Hispanics and exurban voters, did with his minority homeownership initiative in 2002.

Having suffered the consquences of easy credit, careful lenders might adhere to an age-old lending rule of simply refusing to lend to people who can’t afford to repay.  In practice, this will translate to less lending to the poor and consequently to disproportionately less lending to blacks and Latinos.  What politician is willing to run on that platform?

The Atlantic reviews the book version of the famed blog Stuff White People Like (SWPL), a list of attitudes and tastes favored by America’s young, well-educated Left.  The review provides a good look into what I think is so compelling about the SWPL: it accurately capture the frivolous and egocentric superficiality that has infected America’s young “progressives”.  SWPL has found the young Left and called it out on its major flaw, namely its conformity masquerading as anti-conformity.

Despite its title, SWPL is not about white people; it’s about the tastes and preferences of the archetype of the young, urbane, well-educated American espousing politically leftish beliefs.  The main disappointment about this archetype is that he holds these beliefs not as a matter of universal, well-considered truth derived from a particular social or political philosophy, but as a superficial fashion statement.  It’s cool to be a privileged white liberal, after all.

This archetype forms many of his preferences because of their exclusivity or their lack of mass appeal—true elitism.  The Atlantic article notes

More damning is the conclusion produced by a careful reading of this often fine-grained semi-sociological analysis: a good deal of the progressives’ attitudes, preferences, and sense of identity are ingrained in an unlovely disdain for those outside their charmed circle. In Lander’s analysis, much of their self-satisfaction derives from consumption (the slack-sounding “stuff” in the title is deceptively apt)—and much of that consumption is motivated by a desire to differentiate themselves from the benighted. Sushi, for instance, is “everything [White People] want: foreign culture, expensive, healthy, and hated by the ‘uneducated.’” And whatever its goals, the ACLU is beloved by White People, Lander satirically but not wholly unjustifiably asserts, because it protects them “from having to look at things they don’t like. At the top of this list is anything that has to do with Christianity”—an aversion, Lander discerns, rooted not in religious enmity but in taste (Christianity is “a little trashy”), formed largely by class and education. To those of this mind-set, the problem with a great many Americans is that they don’t “care about the right things.”

How disingenuous it is indeed for one to claim adherence to the ideals of the Left (e.g. democracy, openness) while despising the tastes and values of the American majority.

We obey.

The American Prospect writes that globalization’s western hallmarks such as IBM, Google, Cisco, and Yahoo! are not globalizing democracy as many techno-utopians had expected, but are frequently enabling authoritarian governments, especially China’s, to suppress domestic dissent.  In order to win and maintain their contracts, these companies curry favor with authoritarian governments by apologizing for their clients’ behavior.

Like nearly every western media outlet, the American Prospect is critical of the practice of enabling authoritarianism.  However, if certain societies are more docile, compliant, and welcoming of authoritarianism than most, why should western companies try to change that?  Thus, the modern western liberal is conflicted: in standing for human rights (or at least the western notion of human rights), he is likely to criticize these companies for their complicity in Chinese oppression.  The multiculturalist in him, however, must defend the authoritarian leanings of cultures that have never known anything else.  Among the western Left, their notions of human rights usually trump multicultural tolerance.  Thus, the western Left really needs to admit what it really believes: that multiculturalism is dead and that western ideas of human rights should triumph over all else.

Blight and glitz, a tale of two Washingtons united in liberalism.

Marc Fisher in the Post today writes about Marion Barry’s return to life as a civic organizer.  The voice that once denounced the evils of gentrification now seeks more redevelopment in his home ward east of the Anacostia.  The article sports one especially telling paragraph:

In public settings, Barry still says that “if we are not careful, we are going to become a city of the very, very rich and the very, very poor.” But alone in his car, he sounds like a developer, touting the idea that bringing in residents with stable jobs and a stake in the community will do more to stabilize neighborhoods in Southeast than any government giveaway.

Too late, Barry.  Washington is a city of the very, very rich and the very, very poor.  Moreover, the very, very rich are well-educated and typically white whereas the very, very poor are almost always black and are victims of the city’s miserable public schools.  The only thing these two Washingtons share is a long-standing affinity for liberalism and the Democratic Party.

However, it is nice to see that Barry has moved away from the angry separatism of his earlier years and toward an integrationist attitude.  Ward 8 has enough poverty as it is and it could use some wealthier residents to move in and share their wealth.  Whereas good fences make good neighbors, sometimes good neighbors make good neighbors.

Gregorius Nekschot

In left-leaning modern democracies, one wonders what happens when the freedom of expressions is brought to the high altar of multiculturalism?  In Canada, as we have reported, it may be illegal to publish speech “hateful and contemptuous” of any ethnic group.  In the Netherlands, long a safe haven for political and religious dissenters, one particular cartoonist by the pen name Gregorius Nekschot (Gregory Shot in the Neck) has been arrested for drawing offensive cartoons of Muslims and other minority groups.

The Dutch police have released him, but he is to face a trial in the near future.  One can rest assured, however, that Dutch intolerance of undesirable speech is not only reserved for the ethnic majority:

The prosecutor’s office notes that it has also taken action against Muslims suspected of discrimination. A Moroccan-born Dutchman was recently convicted of discrimination for writing in a blog that homosexuals should be tossed from rooftops and thrown down stairs. A court ordered him to do community-service work.

Smoking weed may be legalized, but voicing unpopular opinions is not.  The Dutch parliament is investigating the cartoonists arrest, lest the prosecutor’s office reverse the country’s famous permissive speech policies.

Thomas Friedman at the New York Times condemns Thabo Mbeke’s defense of Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe.  The South African president has refused to apply strong pressure to the Zimbabwean autocrat and has also arranged for South Africa’s U.N. Security Council minister to vote against a resolution targeting sanctions at Mugabe and his ruling clique.  You would think that a South African president would be well aware of the usefulness of international pressure in removing odious regimes, especially since it was international pressure that led to the end of apartheid.

Friedman laments:

So let us now coin the Mbeki Rule: When whites persecute blacks, no amount of U.N. sanctions is too much. And when blacks persecute blacks, any amount of U.N. sanctions is too much.

Friedman’s cyncism is sadly true, but this particular criticism often goes unrecogznied.  The world narative, particularly on the Left, holds that it is the West—or rather, the whites of the West—who are responsible for all the world’s misery.  This view fails to account for much of the violence and mayhem in Africa that has occured since the sunset of European imperial rule.  It is time to change the narative lest we continue to excuse internecine violence and thuggery in poor countries.

Anglicanism is in the midst of schism over the acceptance of gays and women as people deserving equal respect.  Nigerian archbishop Peter Akinola, the splinter group’s most vocal advocate, has accused the more liberal churches in the United States and Canada of losing faith by appointing openly gay clergy (e.g. Gene Robinson, pictured below) and accepting roles for women.  Akinola is trying hard to export his homophobic and mysogynistic interpretation of the bible to the rest of the Anglican communion and is willing to split from Canterbury on the issue.

Though there are numerous churches in the United States that agree with Akinola, it is interesting that this movement of bigotry is being led most vocally by the Third World arm of the global Anglican church.  Not caring much for Anglicanism, the only question I ask is what it is a self-righteous, liberal, western campaigner is to think of the issue.  Race, class, colonialism, religion, and sex battle it out on this topic.

For one, he must show solidarity in expelling the world of sexism and homophobia.  However, he must also show solidarity with poor Africans, even if their mores do not match his.  If he sides with equal treatment for gays and women, would the imposition of this view, which he undoubtedly considers a human rights issue, signify an act of neo-colonial cultural imperialism upon an African splinter church?  If homophobia and second-class citizenship for women are important values of the Anglican church in Africa, who are these liberal westerners to decry that?  Is their disapproval just as odious as the disapproval of the Afrikaners toward black South Africans?