Remarks by Dr. Kenneth L. Samuel
Pastor
Victory for the World Church
Stone Mountain, Ga.
June 5, 2006
Thank you and good morning to you. I am honored and privileged to add my voice and my commitment to my brothers and sisters in the clergy from various denominations and religions to oppose the endorsement of our President of this federal marriage amendment.
This is a human rights issue; and there are those of us who believe, certainly I do from a Christian clergy person’s perspective, that more than God is anything else, God is love. Congressman John Lewis has said that he has lived through the beatings and bitterness of bigotry, segregation and discrimination for many, many years. Congressman John Lewis has said that this current rhetoric of anti-gay, homophobic language smacks of the same kind of bigotry that he had to encounter as he fought to bring down the walls of segregation in the South. We cannot allow bigotry to continue to live without being challenged and certainly we cannot allow bigotry to continue to flourish in the name of God.
We believe that God indeed … [has] respect for every person and we believe that every church, every temple, every mosque, every religious entity has the right to decide according to their own beliefs, their own tenets of faith, their own conscience, what is right and what is marriage, or how a marriage is to be defined. For many of us, we just celebrated the week of Pentecost on last Sunday and at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit fell among all people. The Book of Acts says ‘Every nation was represented. There was not a common language, but there was a common understanding.’ And our plea is that the President and the Congress will allow many languages and many understandings of marriage to continue to be discussed throughout the churches and communities of our country and not intercept that dialogue with an inhumane, bigoted constitutional amendment that would in essence deny equal rights to a segment of tax-paying American citizens.
Someone asked Mrs. Corretta Scott King ‘why would she abandon civil rights and speak on behalf of the right of same-gender loving persons?’ The late Mrs. Corretta Scott responded that “I have to remind them that according to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., ‘A threat to justice anywhere, is a threat to justice everywhere.’” And so I am delighted, I am happy, I am pleased that I can continue the civil rights struggle, not only of Dr. King, but of Jesus Christ and Mahatma Gandhi and the freedom march that Moses led across the Red Sea and say that we will not all be free as long as we continue to bind and hamper the rights of a few of us. God bless you. Let freedom ring.
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