President Obama's recent declaration in support of so-called same-sex marriage have unleashed a new attack wave of agitation and propaganda in favor of the same, fueled by the usual logical fallacies and fed by distortions, lies, and character assassination.
One of the tendrils of this attack wave targets African-American church pastors as "hypocritical" for their opposition to SSM. The coordinated talking point is as follows: Black pastors are hypocritical for not recognizing SSM as a civil right issue. In fact, black pastors are enforcing a new "Jim Crow" separation based on sexual preference. What's worse, by acting like Jim Crow against SMM African-American church pastors are becoming what they most fear: intolerant bigots, fundamentalists and right-wingers. Therefore, black pastors are hypocritical.
The fallacy is one of faulty comparison: the alleged civil right to SSM cannot be compared to the civil right for racial equality and equal opportunity to all. Such rights are predicated on the existence and defense of a defined human nature, endowed with specific origins, means, and ends that in turn define the right means and the right ends to achieve natural, and supernatural happiness. SSM does not fall into this set and to the measure that it has been defined as a "civil right", it has been done at the expense of the definition of human nature, or its abolition altogether.
Furthermore, homosexuals were not brought from Africa in chains, maltreated, famished, and then coerced by force into becoming the chattel property of landed gentry solely because of the color of the skin. To equate the black civil rights struggle with the pursuit of SSM offends many of these pastors, as it does me, for to do equate is an ugly obscenity.
Government has NO POWER to redefine marriage over and against the meaning it has had for 5,000 years of recorded history, and possibly before that. As Professor Robert P. George states in a very good essay,
...marriage is the conjugal union of husband and wife united in a form of relationship—a comprehensive sharing of life at every level, including the bodily-biological level—that is in principle apt for, and would naturally be fulfilled by, procreation and the rearing of children. This distinctive type of union is, and has always been understood to be, distinguishable from ordinary friendships and even from sexual-romantic domestic partnerships in its social function of binding men and women together in a way that, overall, best serves the interests of children who are born as a result of their sexual union, and serves society as a whole, which vitally depends on the marriage-based family for its stability. The conjugal conception of marriage is, to be sure, articulated in the scriptures of Judaism and Christianity as well as other faiths, but it was also articulated and defended by thinkers such as Plato and Plutarch in the ancient traditions of Greek and Roman thought with no reliance on the concept of divine revelation.
The agitation-propaganda machine is working overtime to confuse the American people about the true nature of marriage, and its foundation upon the Natural Moral Law. It has done a great job so far. Believers and non-believers of good will have the obligation to set the record straight, and to vote in defense of natural marriage.