Wednesday of this week, President Obama announced his support for gay marriage to Robin Roberts on ABC’s Good Morning America. An hour later, the Right Reverend Doctor Tyrone Jefferson Jackson Clay DD, Chairman of the Southern African-American Methodist Episcopal Baptist Family Values Council, called Gretchen to schedule a consultation with me at the first possible opportunity. Since I was booked solid until six-thirty on Wednesday, that turned out to be sunrise Thursday morning.
“I have a prayer breakfast at eight,” he informed me as he nestled into the couch in front of the picture window, throwing an angry glance over his left shoulder at the White House. “And a head full of ideas I need to run by you before I deliver the keynote address.”
“In that case,” I began, “let’s get started.”
“Very well,” he huffed, “how can we impeach Barack Obama?”
“Impeached him for what?” I asked, astounded.
“Promoting sodomy!” Dr. Clay darkly thundered.
“You mean to say,” I sought to clarify, “that’s your interpretation of his endorsement of gay marriage rights?”
“Homosexuals,” Dr. Clay sternly corrected, “have no right to marry! God Almighty has condemned them, and it says so right there in the Holy Bible! And to claim otherwise is blasphemy! These people who call themselves ‘gay’ have nothing to be gay about – look at how they behave, the unnatural acts they commit. They shouldn’t be gay at all. Instead, they deserve to be completely miserable!”
“If you want homosexuals to be completely miserable,” I suggested, “allowing them to get married would be an excellent start.”
“The misery of marriage,” Dr. Clay insisted, “has been ordained by the Lord to be endured only by a single man and a single woman!”
“But what,” I hypothesized, “if one of them is a postoperative transgendered person?”
“Then…” Dr. Clay pondered the proposition briefly. “Um… in that case, since at the… ah… chromosomal level, both partners are the same sex, the union would be an abomination of the Faith and should be illegal.”
“Okay, then,” I pressed, “what if the man used to be a woman and the woman used to be a man? If that happened, there would be a union consisting of a man, a woman, one set of male chromosomes and one set of female chromosomes – thus fulfilling all your criteria.”
“No! No! No!” Dr. Clay shouted, waving his arms excitedly. “Now you’re just trying to confuse me! The problem with that is… er… it’s… uh… all right, that’s it – the X and Y chromosomes are in the wrong bodies therefore making that marriage an even bigger abomination than Adam marrying Steve instead of Eve!”
“However,” I continued, “if those same two theoretical people I was just talking about did not undergo sex change operations, they would be a biologically, physically normal man and a biologically, physically normal woman, and, according to your interpretation of the Bible, it would be completely fine for them to get married, wouldn’t it?”
“Uh… I… that is… um,” Dr. Clay stammered, “well… yes… I suppose so. But I would recommend extensive pastoral counseling. Now, how do we impeach Barack Obama for promoting sodomy?”
“Well,” I observed, “the Constitution says ‘high crimes and misdemeanors,’ and, although I’m not a lawyer, it doesn’t appear, on the face of it, that saying he thinks gays should be allowed to get married qualifies as either.”
“But they impeached Bill Clinton for committing sodomy with that Lewinsky woman, didn’t they?” Dr. Clay protested.
“Bill Clinton,” I pointed out, “was impeached by the House of Representatives for perjury and obstruction of justice, not committing sodomy with Monica Lewinsky. Furthermore, he was not subsequently found guilty in a trial conducted by the Senate, and continued to serve as President until the end of his elected term. So even if you managed to get the current House of Representatives to impeach President Obama for promoting sodomy – an action which, actually, I wouldn’t have any problem believing the current House of Representatives would readily do, and with gusto and enthusiasm, for that matter – there’s no way the current Senate would find him guilty and remove him from office. And besides, even if they did, look at who would succeed him – Vice President Joe Biden, who said, and I quote, ‘I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women and heterosexual men and women marrying are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly, I don’t see much of a distinction beyond that,’ on Meet the Press last Sunday. So you’d have to start all over again impeaching Joe Biden for promoting sodomy, and, practically speaking, by the time you got done with that, it would be long past the upcoming elections.”
“Could we save some time,” Dr. Clay wondered, “if we impeached them both at once? Then, afterwards, John Boehner would be President of the United States, right?”
“According to the Constitution, yes,” I agreed. “But before you and your colleagues embark on such a risky strategy, why not just wait until November? If Obama and Biden win a second term, then you can try to impeach them for sodomy, and if you get what you want, John Boehner will be President of the United States for much, much longer.”
“Hmmm,” Dr. Clay considered, “maybe that would be the best plan with respect to impeachment. All right then, what can we do between now and November?”
“To defeat Obama-Biden?” I sought to confirm.
“Exactly,” Dr. Clay nodded.
“For being in favor of gay marriage rights?” I prodded. “But isn’t Barack Obama the first African-American President? Doesn’t that count for something with the Southern African-American Methodist Episcopal Baptist Family Values Council?”
“Look, Tom,” Dr. Clay explained, “it’s like this – half the African American men these days, they go and get a woman pregnant and shazzam! They disappear. Off they go, looking for another black woman, looking to make her pregnant; and so on, and so forth. And ain’t none of them brothers coming to my church on Sunday, sitting through all my sermons and putting money in my collection plate, neither. Now, a white man, see, he can’t do that, on account of the fact that white women, generally, they won’t put up with it, because they be so cold and no good in bed anyway. So your white man, he’s either got to marry the woman or pay child support; she makes sure of that. But not the brothers, see, it don’t work that way with them, because they can always talk some black woman into having sex with them, one way or another – it’s cultural; and also, as everybody knows, black men are irresistible to black women; they always have been, and as many of my congregation would tell you Tom, it don’t do no harm if that black man can preach a good sermon, too. So, anyhow, what about that other half, huh? What do you think they’re up to? Why do you think they hang around, changing dirty diapers, paying for braces, attending parent-teacher conferences, driving to my church with the wife and kids every Sunday, sitting through all my sermons and putting some genuine folding money in my collection plate?”
“Gee, whiz,” I replied, “given the alternative you just described, who knows?”
“Right,” Dr. Clay concurred. “And damned if I can figure it out either. But I’ll tell you what me and the rest of the conservative black preachers are afraid might happen if being gay suddenly became an acceptable option.”
“You mean,” I extrapolated, “that, for many of those African-American family men, living a life married to a woman is only… a beard, as it were?”
“And the problem,” Dr. Clay confided, “is that we conservative black preachers have no idea how many of them there actually are… well, you know… on the down-low.”
“So you’re afraid you’d lose another half of what’s left?” I ventured.
“Well, maybe we’d only lose another fifty percent,” he sighed. “If we were lucky. So, now do you understand why making gay marriage legal is a really scary prospect for conservative black ministers?”
“Because the best way for a closeted black gay man to hide these days,” I speculated, “is to get married, have kids and attend a conservative black Christian congregation?”
“That’s right,” Dr. Clay affirmed, “and that idiot over there,” he complained as he gestured through the picture window at the White House, “he’s about to put most of us old time, traditional fire-and-brimstone hallelujah-and-amen black preachers out of business!”
“Couldn’t you adapt?” I inquired. “Change your… ah… act, as it were, to be a bit more… um… inclusive, somewhat more tolerant… more… accepting?”
“You think we haven’t looked at that?” Dr. Clay grumbled. “We’ve paid good money for several studies, and the results have always been the same – the liberal theological sector of the economy is completely saturated. If something like gay marriage puts a dent in conservative church attendance, our market share will plummet like the value of auction rate securities during a liquidity crisis!”
“It seems that the Lord’s business,” I opined, “can be pretty harsh at times.”
“Tell me about it,” Dr. Clay grunted. “But it sure as hell beats working. So how do we get Mitt Romney moved in over there,” he gestured again at the White House, “and send brother Barack back to Chicago?”
“Well,” I analyzed, “thanks to Nixon’s Southern Strategy, your congregation is not all that likely to go out on Election Day and vote Republican, are they? Add in the fact that the vast majority of them either consider Mormons to be a Satanic cult, or despise them for their historic racism, and the idea of getting your congregation to contribute votes to Romney’s victory is essentially absurd.”
“Which means what?” Dr. Clay demanded.
“That the only effective strategy for you and your colleagues who run the Southern African-American Methodist Episcopal Baptist Family Values Council,” I concluded, “is to keep your followers away from the polls on Tuesday, November sixth.”
At that, Dr. Clay’s eyebrows raised slightly. “How?”
“If you walk in my statutes and observe my commandments and do them, then I will give you your rains in their season, and the land shall yield its increase, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit. Your threshing shall last to the time of the grape harvest, and the grape harvest shall last to the time for sowing. And you shall eat your bread to the full and dwell in your land securely,” I recited.
“Leviticus, Chapter twenty-six,” Dr. Clay recognized.
“The Lord,” I remarked, “doesn’t say anything about the statutes of man in that passage, does He?”
“No, He doesn’t,” Dr. Clay agreed.
“If you faithfully obey the voice of the Lord your God, being careful to do all his commandments that I command you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth,” I added.
“Deuteronomy, Chapter twenty-eight,” Dr. Clay acknowledged. “The Lord places the righteous above the government.”
“Rise and measure the temple of God and the altar and those who worship there, but do not measure the court outside the temple; leave that out, for that is the province of the nations,” I offered.
“Revelation, Chapter eleven,” Dr. Clay murmured. “The Lord measures us by our devotion, not our civic involvement.”
“The Lord was with Jehoshaphat, because he walked in the earlier ways of his father David. He did not seek the Baals, but sought the God of his father and walked in his commandments, and not according to the practices of Israel,” I said.
“Chronicles, Chapter seventeen,” he replied. “The nations lead the faithful away from God with sinfulness and deceit.”
“And Peter and the apostles answered, ‘We must obey God rather than men,’” I cited.
“Acts, Chapter five,” Clay mused. Seeing the light, he smiled. “One word from the preacher trumps all that campaign advertising.”
“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” I declared.
“Mark, Chapter twelve,” Dr. Clay whispered.
“And Matthew, Chapter twenty-two,” I appended. “Get the idea?”
“Use Bible verses to write sermons that convince our congregations to stay away from the polls on Election Day!” Dr. Clay exulted. “That’s brilliant!”
“Thanks,” I cheerfully responded. “Anything else?”
“No, no, no need for that,” Dr. Clay proclaimed as he rose to shake my hand, “it’s completely obvious to me that today, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost have all answered my prayers in full!”