I Thought Stoning People Was Exclusively a Muslim Custom & The NAACP Would Like It If The Gay Community Would Stop ‘Hijacking’ The Civil Rights Movement

A Delaware County man has been arrested and charged with murder in the beating death of an elderly Landsdowne man who had befriended him and made him executor and sole beneficiary of his will.

John Joe Thomas, 28, of the first block of Sunshine Road in Upper Darby, allegedly told police he killed Murray Joseph Seidman, 70, because the older man had made sexual advances and that the Old Testament spelled out stoning as the punishment for homosexuality.

“I stoned Murray with a rock in a sock,” Thomas said to police, according to court documents.

At least, that is the defense he is using. Apparently,   no one is actually certain if the victim was actually gay.   Christianity is also practiced to its’ extremity by many in the 21st century.  I guess we really shouldn’t be shocked anymore. Hell, it’s funny how stories of violence as a result of Christianity practiced to its’ extremes doesn’t make it into corporate media as much as violence involving other religious and ethnic groups.

Or perhaps stories like these just don’t come up as often because society is still conditioned to look upon the LGBT community as second class citizens?  It appears that an NAACP leader thinks so.

A leader of the NAACP has come out attacking gays, and he is demanding the “gay community stop hijacking the civil rights movement.” Rev. Keith Ratliff Sr., president of the Iowa-Nebraska chapter of the NAACP, spoke at a marriage rally in Des Moines on Tuesday, adding, “Deviant behavior is not the same as being denied your right to vote,” and calling any parallel between the African-American civil rights movement and the gay civil rights movement an “insult.”

Ratliff, according to reports, also condemned any idea that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would have supported gay rights or civil same-sex marriage.

So, a leader of a civil rights movement, promoting  equality and  elimination of discrimination doesn’t think this should extend to the LGBT community. Interesting. Too bad it’s just not true.  The president of the NAACP, Benjamin Jealous, who’s brother happens to be gay,  talks about Bayard Rustin, the man who organized the 1963 march in Washington, and was openly gay.

We had to start from the fact — somebody once said to me, I didn’t march in the ’60′s so that men could sleep together.  And I was like, well, that’s all right because Bayard Rustin had that held down.  You know, the man who planned the march on Washington was gay, was known to be gay, and that was okay with Dr. King, it was okay with Julian Bond and John Lewis then, and it’s okay now.  Our only regrets about Bayard Rustin are that he still isn’t with us planning marches.

So, I think we have to start from the premise that gay people are a part of the NAACP.  They’ve been a part of the social justice movement.

Perhaps it’s the Baptist minister in Rev Keith Ratliff Sr that lives in a continuous state of twisted wishful thinking. If he has managed to basically bastardize the Civil Rights Movement, one has to ask just how far does his bigotry go? Does it go beyond the LGBT community? Does it extend to non-Christians? Women? Abortion providers? Women who seek to have or have had abortions? Immigrants? Muslims? What is scary is that the likes of Rev Ratliff would probably be fighting to have John Doe Thomas freed for his crime and not seek justice for the victim, Murray Joseph Seidman, simply because Thomas was following what he thinks the good book says he should do.  Even worse, knowing how the president of the NAACP feels about the LGBT community and their entitlement to civil rights, how does Rev Ratliff remain in his position?

I also believe that many more of these incidents of violence do occur in Canada and in the US in the name of Christianity, but we don’t hear about them nearly as often as we do about other ethnic communities.

All that aside, while Dr Martin Luther King was indeed fighting for racial equality back in the 60s, given the respect he obviously had for his right hand man, Bayard Rustin, and everything that was written and said about him, I believe that Dr. King would’ve continued fighting for equal rights for all.