There has been a fair amount of push back offered by Republicans who have feigned feeling insult as some have called their efforts to change voting laws a going backwards, to the days and practices of Jim Crow.

Republicans are pushing laws that will require photo IDs for all voters, will restrict college students in their ability to vote, and, in some states, will prohibit convicts who have completed their sentences and are off parole, from voting.

It smells like Jim Crow. It looks like Jim Crow, polished. It is reminiscent of the days when whites used poll taxes and literacy tests and other means to keep African Americans from voting.

It is Jim Crow all over again, polished.

It is no secret that President Obama’s victory in 2008 came largely because of the huge voter turn out among African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and young people. Thus, the Republicans have stooped to an all time low to attempt to stem the wave that brought President Obama to shore, to the White House.

Nobody really wants to talk about it, but racism has been the elephant in the room ever since Obama took office. The Tea Party, though it protests loudly, has many, too many people who are simply acting on their feelings of disapproval that an African American is the president of this country. Their cries of “we want our country back” didn’t fool a single person, I’d bet. That statement was a euphemism; they wanted, and want, things to go back to the way they were, when African Americans knew their place and stayed there.

These new voting laws smack of racism. Former President Bill Clinton said in a recent speech that we, i.e., “we the people,” should be fighting it. Clinton said the laws smacked of Jim Crow, as did Democratic Committee Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Schultz later said her use of the phrase “Jim Crow” might have been overstated, but I wish she had held her ground. She was right, as is former President Clinton. These laws are stitched with racism and we should fight them. If we do not, the slippery voting laws will go unchallenged and many people who voted in 2008 will not be able to do so in 2012.

I am not striking a battle cry for the re-election of President Obama; the president has to fight his way back to the White House just as any other person would. But I am striking a battle cry for the cessation of “sneaky racism,” this ploy to keep people of color away from the polls. We have been there, America. We have been there and done that. These laws that are being pushed by the Republicans are wrong, and “we the people” should stand up, stop being afraid of the “r” word, use it when it’s necessary, and call these laws out for what they are.

Like I said, we’ve been there and done that. We as a nation need to keep moving forward, not slide backward to the soggy fields of injustice and racism we’ve already trudged through. To do so would make the struggles for civil rights, most especially the right to vote, a time of wasted energy and lives.

I can’t stomach that thought. I hope others cannot, either.

Just a candid observation.

With the passage of the law making marriage between gay people legal last week in New York, I found myself breathing a sign of relief.

It felt like a right too long denied finally being granted.

I have been listening, though, to those opposed to gay marriage. One of the strongest statements I heard suggested that gay marriage would lead, or will lead, to anarchy in this country. I didn’t understand that when I heard it, and I still don’t.

But by far the vast majority of opinions in opposition to gay marriage circle around a feeling that allowing gay people to marry will undermine the meaning of marriage.

That has really kept me deep in thought. As I think about marriage between heterosexuals in this country, I ask myself, “What is marriage, really? Who really values it?” The rate of divorce in this country is high; adultery is rampant, and my thought is that people are more interested in having a wedding than they are interested in being “married.”

Joseph Campbell said that “when people get married because they think it’s a long time love affair, they’ll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment.” I don’t know that I agree with him totally; there ARE people who “fall in love” and stay that way.

But Campbell says something that is intriguing to me. He says that “marriage is recognition of a spiritual identity.” He says that “marriage is not a simple love affair. It’s an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of the ego to a relationship in which two have become one.” He says that marriage is not just a social arrangement; it’s a spiritual exercise.”

I have been chewing on Campbell’s words because they are intriguing and they jolt the senses. How many people who get married think of it as a spiritual exercise, church service notwithstanding? As a pastor, I have seen so many people get married who, frankly, use the church for the setting, not for its significance in the covenant the two people are making. I shudder when people “promise” God that they will be true each other and will be with each other “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer.” The divorce statistics don’t gel with the promises made.

If we look at marriage as a spiritual exercise, it takes on a whole new dimension. I have seen so many gay people who have been together for years, and I mean a LOT of years. Theirs have been nothing less than spiritual exercises; they have stayed together “for richer for poorer, for better for worse” in the truest sense of those phrases. They have lived in secret, hiding their relationships, not daring to let on that they have such deep love and respect for each other. When I think of the many very old gay people who no longer have to hide their relationships nor their love for each other, and who now be able to have legal countenance of their relationships, I breathe a sigh of relief for their gain.

I am watching the efforts of the GOP to get our deficit under control with a sense of sadness.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s a good and necessary thing to spend within one’s means, and to have such an amazing deficit is scary. I keep thinking that it’s the Bush tax cuts that helped get us to this point.

But all I hear from toe GOP lawmakers is that we have to cut spending. There has been nothing said about making corporations pay their fair share of taxes, and I don’t get it. Even less, I don’t appreciate it.

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey wants to cut spending on Medicaid, that government arm which allows poor people, many of whom are either old or very young, to get health care. I heard a report that a woman, 56 years old with multiple health problems, will lose her health care coverage at the end of July of this year.

Why can’t the GOP see that cutting programs and benefits for “the least of these” is not only wrong but immoral? It is as immoral as allowing, maybe even encouraging, huge and wealthy corporations to find loopholes so that they can avoid paying taxes while realizing bigger and bigger profits.

The rich, then, get richer and the poor get poorer …and dumped on.

I have heard that funds for education and housing and all kinds of programs that help the poor are in trouble, and yet, I hear nothing from the GOP that says they care about the people who will be so negatively affected.

If a country ignores its underclasses, trouble is sure to follow. People can only be ignored and trounced upon for so long before they rise up. We like to think of ourselves as exempt from that kind of thing, but economic oppression brings bad results, wherever it is practiced.

While we cut programs for the poor, and allow wealthy corporations to go tax free, reluctantly even discuss cutting spending in defense. The wars we are fighting in Iran and Afghanistan (and now, Libya) are costing us billions of dollars a day! Surely, someone sees something wrong in that snapshot?

“The American dream” is becoming more and more elusive for more and more people, and the ranks of the poor and working poor are swelling. Do our lawmakers know this and if they do, do they care?

It would seem not, as the shouts for spending cuts grow louder and louder, pushing more and more people to the margins of a society which is becoming more and more plutocratic every day.

Just a candid observation.

Someone on Facebook asked me what I think about gay marriage.

I hesitated to answer because as a religious person in the African American community, I am expected to answer a certain way. Black folks are supposed to be against homosexuality, condemning it as an abomination, and we are certainly supposed to decry gay marriage. To do less is to fall below “the standard.”

And yet, I do fall below that standard, because I believe that committed gay couples ought to have the right to be married. I believe it has been wrong for religious people to discriminate against these couples, going to far even as to deny a long-standing partner access to his or her partner who is dying. Where is the compassion in that? It has been wrong for committed gay couples to be shut out legally from finances of a partner who has died, even though the two have lived for years in love with and in support of each other.

Pardon me for saying it, but I don’t think that that kind of callousness and self-righteousness is something that would please Jesus.

I once preached in a “gay” church in Dallas, the Cathedral of Hope. There, I was amazed at how many old, and I mean really old, gay couples were in worship. It made my heart sting that so many mainline churches had made it difficult if not impossible for them to worship in their spaces.

My opinion comes from my study of Jesus. This Jesus was not one who discriminated against anyone. This Jesus was one who showed compassion for everyone. I love that Jesus. The Jesus that we religious types have pushed has not been loving or kind or compassionate at all. Even when He was alive, Jesus was hated, because even back then, religious people didn’t approve of how he did ministry.

I could not do ministry if my God and my Jesus were representatives and endorsers of hatred and bigotry. My Jesus would never have allowed Ryan White to be hated inside his church or in his neighborhood, for example, because he had AIDS. My Jesus could not and would not condone or support people who have bashed gay people, even to the point of driving them to suicide. My Jesus …and get this, please …could not and would not condone me hating and discriminating against white people because of the horrid way they have treated African Americans. That’s just not the Jesus in the Bible.

That being the case, in my opinion, committed couples who are that serious about each other ought to be able to marry, be they heterosexual or homosexual. I don’t think God or Jesus cares about one being homosexual. Neither do I think God condones a heterosexual relationship where there is no love or commitment while putting down a homosexual relationship where there is both love and commitment.

It hit me this morning that I am pretty much a solitary fish in a big sea. Many people of my own race will not come to my church because they say it’s a “gay church,” including some gay people who hate themselves, but things are as they are. I don’t look at my church as a “gay” church or even a “black” church, but prefer to look at my church as a church for all God’s children.

Gay marriage is not legal in Ohio so I cannot perform marriages for gay people, but I have officiated at commitment ceremonies for gay people and will continue to do so.

Sigh. What does that mean for my ministry on this earth? Probably not a whole lot of good in terms of huge membership and enough money to be able to have the resources to do ministry. But I can only do what I feel God is telling me to do, and my God tells me to embrace all of God’s children like He does and like Jesus did. So, that’s what I’ll continue to do…

It’s a lonely sea in which to swim, but that’s where I am.

And from that sea, I offer this candid observation.

Sometimes, I wonder what the world would be like if people would just stop and think.

There is such a “rush to judgment” when it comes to minority kids, especially black and brown kids. The overall, prevailing attitude of most whites and many blacks is that black and brown kids are just bad seeds, kids who are to be expected to be behavior problems. That same attitude presupposes that black and brown kids are not as intelligent, not as capable as white kids. Never mind the conditions of their schools, or the environments they live in. In fact, that prevailing attitude kind of blames the victims for their conditions.

The powers that be put those opinions out and the world buys into them. Michelle Alexander, in her book, The New Jim Crow, explains how the Reagan-initiated “War on Drugs” helped legitimize that attitude as cops swept into black and brown neighborhoods and began arresting and imprisoning young men for drug possession and use – while ignoring drug possession and use in white neighborhoods. Ah, that steady stream of black youth going to jail for being “bad” kids, using drugs, helped feed the opinions about them that were already in existence.

But I digress. What if people stopped and thought, for just a moment, leaving the propensity to judge aside and considering some things that few consider?

Today I learned about a little black kid who has been diagnosed as having autism. He is fortunate in that he has parents who realized that something was wrong and who had the resources to take their child to get tested. But it occurs to me that so many poor black and brown kids who are labeled “bad,” and who are channeled into what Marian Wright Edelman has called the “Cradle to Prison” pipeline, are really kids with physical and perhaps emotional issues that never get treated.

When I think about how many white kids, or kids whose parents have resources, are diagnosed as having seeing problems or hearing problems or metabolic problems, and who must be treated for those maladies, I shudder, because it is clear to me that just as many black and brown kids have the same conditions but never get diagnosed or treated. What happens to a kid who is having strokes because he or she has sickle cell anemia? What happens to the child who cannot hear, or who has a heart condition? Kids cannot often explain what is wrong; they act out, but it hits me that when these kids, many of whom are in need of medical attention, act out, they are labeled as bad, are sent to the principal’s office, and after that, probably ignored. What happens to the kid who has a bad tooth but cannot afford to go to the dentist? Have you ever had a toothache? How does a child handle a pain that not only will not go away, but gets worse?

If we would stop and think…I wonder what this world would be like? I wonder how many kids who grow up angry and sick would grow up better adjusted and well and more equipped to handle this world. Maybe if we could think past our preconceptions, we could also think our way to solutions so that these kids would have a fighting chance at a decent life.

Just a candid observation.