Opposing same-sex marriage has made Pastor Jerry McAfee a lightning rod

Stay in the know.

MinnPost’s top stories delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Saturday.

Pastor Jerry McAfee long has been a leading Twin Cities civil-rights activist.

So it stunned  many when McAfee, pastor at New Salem Missionary Baptist Church in north Minneapolis, stood last September alongside Catholic Archbishop John Nienstedt and a number of pastors from conservative white churches in support of  the so-called marriage amendment, which would have made same-sex marriage unconstitutional.

Not only did that amendment fail, but in the next few days, Minnesota is expected to become the 12th state making same-sex marriage legal.

McAfee’s opposition to that action has made him a lightning rod in the marriage debate. He has been bombarded with e-mails, charging that he’s homophobic and a fraud in the whole area of civil rights.

Those charges and threats to do economic damage to his church have not exactly brought the pastor to his knees.

“If you want to fight, you better know I don’t preach non-violence,” McAfee said.

 His opposition to same-sex marriage is a complex combination of theology and pragmatic politics.  

‘I preach the Bible’

The theology part is relatively simple.

“I preach the Bible from Genesis to Revelations,” said McAfee, who’s been at that task for 32 years.

In his reading of the Bible, homosexuality is wrong. But no more wrong, McAfee is quick to point out, than a number of other sexual practices.

“I preach against children being born out of wedlock, I preach against adultery, I preach against fornication and I preach against homosexuality,” McAfee said. “All come under the stench of sin. Man is a sinner, the homosexual and the heterosexual. I will never isolate one group of sinners from another.’’

He knows his church is filled, typically to overflowing, with fornicators, adulterers, children born out of wedlock and, yes, even homosexual couples. And all are welcome.

“I’ll treat you right, but I’ll preach the Bible,” he said.

 But isn’t equality a civil right? And if so, shouldn’t the marriage of a gay couple be a right?

 This is where it starts getting more difficult in understanding McAfee.

He doesn’t buy ‘civil rights’ comparison

 “Definitely not,’’ said McAfee when asked if marriage should be a civil right. “When they [members of the LGBT community] get hanged in the numbers that we have, get burned in the numbers that we have, get red-lined the way we still do, then, come and talk to me.

“When they want, they can live together. My people couldn’t. They can congregate. My people couldn’t — and, in some cases, still can’t.  Have you ever heard of being stopped for driving while gay? Being stopped for driving because you’re black happens all the time. Anybody who tries to equate the two [race and sexual orientation] is a dunce and needs a lobotomy.’’

 Of course, those in the LGBT community can tell horror stories of what happened to those who cohabited or congregated.

“They should have protections, live as they want to live,” said McAfee. “But to call me homophobic because I preach the Bible, that’s simply wrong. Do you hear anyone calling me adulterer-phobic or fornicator-phobic? Of course not, but I preach against those, too.”

He believes laws could have been written to grant some aspects of protection to gays, for example, guaranteed visitation rights at times of illness.  But marriage, he said, is a step too far.

“It’s biblical and you cannot preach around it,” he said.

 Move on to the politics.

Unhappy with DFL priorities

Although he doesn’t explicitly say it, it sounds as if McAfee stood on the steps with the archbishop and a number of white conservative clergy in part because of a meeting with DFL leaders that outraged him.

When Republicans succeeded in putting two constitutional amendments on the ballot – one prohibiting same-sex marriage and the other requiring a photo ID to vote – DFL leadership convened a meeting of community leaders to talk about how those should be opposed. McAfee was invited.

At that meeting, McAfee said, it became clear that the party was going to put less effort and money into fighting the voting amendment than the marriage amendment.

“They weren’t going to put up much of a fight on the ID amendment because they thought they’d lose,’’ he said.

He left the meeting with contempt for the DFL. In McAfee’s view, the voting amendment was the crucial amendment because it would have repressed voting among poor blacks, the people he serves.

Meantime, in his view,  the  GLBT organizations are largely white and economically well off.

“We were getting sold out again,’’ said McAfee, who believes that for too long the DFL has assumed it would get black support and yet has, year after year, failed to deliver the help needed in his community.

The push for same-sex marriage this session underscores to McAfee that the poor black communities have been put at the back of the party’s priority line.  

 “They have the governor, they control the House and the Senate,” McAfee said. “Whatever they think is important they deal with. We’re left standing at the altar again. Same-sex marriage is not nearly as important to our community as poverty, unemployment, lack of education. We have always been better to the DFL than they have been to us.”

Outreach to GOP

He’s so disgusted with the DFL that McAfee has scheduled two meetings. First, he’s holding a meeting at New Salem with Somalis, Liberians and Kenyans to start to create a unified voice.

The next step, he said, will be to meet with the Republican Party. Is that party willing to reach out to communities of color, communities filled with social conservatives?

McAfee doesn’t expect immediate changes within the GOP. But, he said, Republicans do have to understand that they must begin to appeal to minority groups if they are to succeed at the polls. There are common needs and common values, he said.

“We have a state of emergency in our community,” he said. “We have to do something differently.” 

Laughing, he did say, he understands that there can be discomfort in new alliances. When he stood with many of those conservative white pastors, “I felt like a fish out of water.’’

For all the anger he feels toward the DFL, the push for gay marriage, and the charges that he’s intolerant and homophobic, McAfee points out he really did little to fight gay marriage. He didn’t go from black church to black church, pushing for those congregations to fight the changes. He didn’t even bring pressure to bear on the two black DFL senators, Jeff Hayden and Bobby Joe Champion, whose district includes New Salem, both of whom support same-sex marriage. 

“I told him [Champion] that if gay people helped get him elected, I understand,” said McAfee. “I told him, ‘You’re elected to represent all the people in your district. I’m the preacher.’ ”

 And through all of this, McAfee said the fundamental mission of his church is unchanged.

 “Our mission is to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and visit the sick and those in prison,’’ he said. “We don’t ask a person about their sexuality when they come to our door. We don’t ask about their sexuality when we visit at a nursing home or a prison. And we don’t ask about their sexuality when we’re handing out chickens.’’