So some members of a Baptist church came to the pastor and said, we heard you’re marrying some black folks in here and we’re not okay with that.
All due respect, my children, the pastor replied, that you are freaked out by non-white peoples is not Jesus’s major problem at the moment. Nor is it mine. I am sorry, but you are going to have to suck it up and just … I don’t know, not come to the wedding? Were you even invited? Then what the heck do you care? Go home, watch Storage Wars and smoke marijuana like normal people do on Saturdays.
Insiders say five or six members went to the Rev. Stan Weatherford after seeing the couple’s wedding rehearsal the Thursday night before their Saturday wedding.
The church pastor said he was surprised by the reaction of some church members.
“I didn’t want to have a controversy within the church, and I didn’t want a controversy to affect the wedding of Charles and Te’Andrea. I wanted to make sure their wedding day was a special day,” Weatherford told WLBT-Channel 3.
Charles Wilson said it was a huge disappointment that he and his wife couldn’t get married at the church they attended because of the color of their skin.
“I feel like it was blatant racial discrimination,” Wilson said Friday.
The 150-year-old church hasn’t had any black couples married there in modern times. Weatherford married the couple but moved the ceremony to a nearby church.
He didn’t want to have a controversy, so he appeased the loudest, angriest people in the room, and told the couple who wanted to get married that they’d have to move so that … I don’t get exactly what they were hurting. He didn’t want to have a controversy. Well, he’s sure got one now, and it’s well deserved.
I like the line about how it was the rehearsal that got the bigots upset, because the bride and her family had been involved with the church for a while and the groom had been attending. So a couple of black people in the congregation on Sundays was okay, but a whole bunch of ’em? Like more than three? Standing together? Clearly that’s an invasion of some sort and we can’t have that.
And the comments are full of “this isn’t the whole church, some of us like black people, etc” which I’m sure is also true. The defending your own Something about that, though: The five or six people who asked him to get the black couple out of sight of their white eyeballs are assholes, but there are always assholes in the world. All the bigots will not eventually die out. It will never happen. They don’t win when they act like bigots, they win when nice-enough well-meaning people who are supposed to be better than this decide that in order to keep the bigots quiet, we all should pretend to agree with them.
In which case not only is the controversy not avoided, but nobody learns anything and nobody grows one bit. You can avoid and avoid and avoid, and keep shrinking the world down so that eventually it’s just a ten-by-ten room with you and your fellow racists, but that’s not living, people, that’s not life. In a church of all places you should be throwing the doors wide, letting in as many people as possible, especially the ones who aren’t familiar to you and the ones who make you nervous and the ones you aren’t sure you’re gonna like.
That’s the only way any of this gets better. I can sit in my house with my fellow white people and think about how I need to be less of a racist, but I’m not gonna be less of a racist unless I get out there and get to know a lot more people and start ACTING LIKE LESS OF A RACIST. This pastor could have done quite a job by asking people who objected to the wedding to attend it, or watch the video later (admitting creepy bigoted busybodies to your wedding not being a thing many people want to do, shockingly) or really anything else up to and including telling these few people who have nothing more pressing to worry about to shut the holy hell up.
That wouldn’t have avoided controversy, certainly. Last I checked, though, the head of that particular religion got himself nailed to a tree for making a scene in public about the treatment of the downtrodden. Maybe he should have just moved somewhere else.
A.