Irreverent Reverends II
By La Shawn Barber (02/27/03)
Joining the irreverent Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton is Reverend Carlton W. Veazey, another minister of the Gospel who supports "choice."
Veazey is president and CEO of a group once known as the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights (can you believe it?), now disguised as the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC). He founded a program called the Black Church Initiative, purportedly in response to the high pregnancy rate among blacks teens. According to RCRC's web site, the initiative "encourages and assists African American clergy and laity in addressing teen childbearing, sexuality education, unintended pregnancies, and other reproductive health issues within the context of African American culture and religion."
Right. It looks good on paper, but this so-called religious group is closely associated with Planned Parenthood Federation of America, founded in 1923 by Margaret Sanger, who considered "all non-Aryan people" unfit to breed. Giving his wholehearted endorsement, the good Rev. Veazey said: "I support Planned Parenthood 100 percent."
Margaret Sanger had her own ideas about "addressing unintended pregnancies" in the black community. She instituted the "Negro Project" in 1939, and sought out prominent, trusting black ministers to share her solution to the problem: contraception, sterilization and abortion. "The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We do not want the word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it occurs to any of their more rebellious members," Sanger wrote.
Right. In our morally relative society, most Americans--including blacks--can no longer be reached through any "religious appeal." Sadly, blacks continue to vote for a political party intent on making sure they remain unreachable. In 2003, the religious appeal has been replaced by a clever "right to privacy" argument.
In his 1977 article for Right to Life News, a once-reverent Jesse Jackson correctly observed that the right to privacy argument was used to justify slavery. "If one accepts the position that life is private, and therefore you have the right to do with it as you please, one must also accept the conclusion of that logic. That was the premise of slavery." This "right" is now used to justify child-killing. Slavery proponents devalued human life; abortion proponents devalue human life.
Jackson saw through the duplicity of the pro-abortion argument, but between 1977 and 1988, he had second thoughts.
While he and his fellow black liberal elites in the Democratic party incessantly clamor for racial preferences and accuse white conservatives of racial insensitivity, they are blind to their own insensitivity. Black liberals unconditionally support a political agenda that dehumanizes the unborn, yet base their "need" for government entitlements and privileges on the history of the dehumanization of their ancestors!
And those ancestors faced some serious dehumanization. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, northern and southern delegates debated whether to count a slave as a whole person for purposes of representation in the House of Representatives, or not to count them at all. In order to ratify the Constitution, a compromise was reached--the three-fifths compromise. Five slaves would be equal to only three whites. In other words, a slave was considered three-fifths of a person. Less than human.
While twenty-first century Americans see the disgrace of such a concession, some of those same Americans are blind to the indignity of the abortion proponent's compromise--that a woman has the right to choose what to do with her body even if it means taking her unborn child's life. Just like the slave, the unborn has no dignity or worth. Less than human.
In 1977, Jackson was clear and strong in his argument against abortion. He sent this telegram to Congress: "AS A MATTER OF CONSCIENCE I MUST OPPOSE THE USE OF FEDERAL FUNDS FOR A POLICY OF KILLING INFANTS." What happened to his conscience and that of any minister of the Gospel who supports anything remotely connected to the killing of babies? As the political stakes rose in his presidential bid in 1988, Jackson traded his conscience and the call of God for another: the god of publicity and power.
He said: "The God I serve is a forgiving God." Right. Thank God for America's sake. And Rev. Jackson's.
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