Five Steps Back of the Day: A church in Pike County, Kentucky, voted this week to ban interracial couples from becoming members of the congregation, as well as from participating in worship services.
Melvin Thompson, a former pastor at the ironically named Gulnare Freewill Baptist Church, asked that a proposal stating uneqivocally that “the church did not condone interracial marriage” be brought to a vote.
It passed 9 to 6, with several members abstaining.
Thompson was apparently incesed that the daughter of church secretary Dean Harville brought her Zimbabwean fiancé to church. Harville said the decision was clearly motivated by racism. “It sure ain’t Christian. It ain’t nothing but the old devil working,” he told the Lexington Herald-Leader.
“Most of us thought that we’d moved well beyond that,” said Pike County Ministerial Association president Randy Johnson. “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance,” responded 18th century Irish orator John Philpot Curran.
Please, please watch this and tell me we’re a, “Post-racial,” society. It doesn’t matter if it’s one church, one town, one school, one city, one neighborhood. We’re not, “Post-racial,” and we don’t get to pat ourselves on the back for it. Is it grand that the majority of us will be outraged? Of course, but every time we hear a 90 year-old grandmother say things that are racially charged and we don’t confront it because it’s not polite, we perpetuate this bullshit.
You can be polite and not put up with racism. It’s just a lot harder.
