NAACP's Gay Gamble With Irrelevance

President Obama's public flip-flop on the inflammatory topic of same-sex "marriage" is spreading a widening circle of shockwaves across the left side of American politics.

With respect to hard economic times, it's said that only when the tide goes out can we see who's been swimming naked.  Similarly, when a sudden political jolt takes place, you can sometimes see which organizations have come unmoored from their original roots and purpose.  In times of stability, they stay put as you'd expect; when an upheaval comes, they go scooting across the board to a place you'd never have expected if you took their public image at face value.

Sometimes an organization or politician can get away with this, particularly on the left where the media will run cover for them.  Other times, though, the grassroots supporters angrily revolt once their eyes are opened to the alien and hostile nature of a group they'd believed to be friendly.

Thanks to the Internet, these unhappy discoveries of unpleasant reality have been happening with some frequency.  During the Obamacare debate, many members of the AMA and AARP were not pleased to find those organizations propagandizing in favor of the new legislation which would enslave doctors or ration care and ultimately murder old folks.  Both the AMA and AARP had a sudden decrease in membership in favor of the lesser-known but more conservative AMS and AMAC.

NAACP Swimming in the Wrong Direction

Now it's the turn of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.  As its name implies, the NAACP has been around for a long, long, time, dating all the way back to 1909 when "colored people" was the preferred descriptor for its members.

The NAACP's successful struggle throughout the civil rights era has placed it in an almost sainted position and understandably so: blacks were unjustly oppressed during the Jim Crow era, and the NAACP was one of the most powerful means of bringing about the liberty they, and all American citizens, deserve.

Today's American blacks have equal rights in law and their on-the-ground access to them is defended by an army of Federal agents, bureaucrats, lawyers, the media, and an American public which almost unanimously rejects racism.  It might have been better for the NAACP to retire from the field victorious as did the abolitionist movement after slavery was abolished, but their leaders preferred keeping their cushy jobs.

Instead, alas, the once-glorious NAACP was captured by the far left, cloaking unjust and unAmerican modern causes in the golden robe of the old civil rights era.  We're all too familiar with race-baiters like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who seek to inflame our differences with theft and blackmail.  When Bill Cosby, in a famous 2004 speech at the NAACP convention, said that poor blacks needed to take responsibility for their own bad choices and quit blaming whitey, the NAACP reacted with revulsion instead of knuckling down to the hard work of improving society as their ancestors had done.

Their growing disconnect from actual practical methods of, well, "advancing colored people" has now been revealed for the entire world to see, and most particularly the ordinary grassroots black Americans who've long supported the NAACP.  As the New York Times reports:

The board of the N.A.A.C.P. voted to endorse same-sex marriage on Saturday, putting the weight of the country’s most prominent civil rights group behind a cause that has long divided some quarters of the black community.

What on earth does the legal status of homosexuals have to do with either colored people or their advancement?  Nothing whatsoever, but it has everything in the world to do with far-left elitist liberal credit.  The board members of the NAACP are more comfortable at cocktail parties with the rich, trendy white Ivy Leaguers who run our government for their own benefit than they are with the common black people the NAACP was founded to help.

Common black people, in the main, find homosexuality repugnant.  Pastors in the black community, who unlike NAACP leaders actually know and care how their people feel, didn't waste much time pointing this out:

The Coalition of African American Pastors announced Tuesday that it does not agree with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s decision to endorse the legalization of same-sex marriage.

CAAP launched a petition last week to oppose broadening the legal definition of marriage.

The coalition includes leaders of black churches and veteran civil rights leaders who marched with Martin Luther King Jr... “The NAACP has abandoned its historic responsibility to speak for and safeguard the civil rights movement,” CAAP founder and President William Owens said Tuesday. “We who marched with Rev. King did not march one inch or one mile to promote same-sex marriage.” [emphasis added]

Once again, a formerly-noble organization founded for a good purpose has been captured and perverted into something its original founders would have repudiated with horror and contempt.

The real question, as with President Obama himself is: what will ordinary supporters choose to do now that their leaders and supposedly representative organizations stand revealed as anything but?  Or, put another way: will black voters back their pastors, their communities, and their religious beliefs, or far-off wealthy political elites who don't give two hoots, or even one hoot, for what black people think or worry about improving their lives?

It's time and past time for conservatives to reach out to their neighbors regardless of color.  You might be surprised what you have in common, and once again thanks to President Obama, we now have a completely non-racist way to point that out.