I read your article on homophobia. I know that the topic is the immorality of homophobia and I agree with you on this topic. Concerning slavery and the Civil War, there is an additional moral question rarely mentioned. That is, what was the best means to end slavery? Yes, slavery is immoral, but so is war. The defeat of the South resulted in slaves being freed; while at the same time the Confederate veterans lost their right to vote. This resulted in much racial hatred and the birth of the KKK. It would have been better to kick the South out of the Union and refuse to readmit them until they abolished slavery. In Utah, polygamy was legal before Utah became a state. Utah was not allowed to become a state until polygamy was abolished. It worked for Utah and would have worked for the South. Because of the violent way in which slavery was ended, it took 100 years until the Civil Rights movement and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. peacefully ended the Jim Crow era.
Dear Robert,
Thanks for your letter, but I must tell you that I regard it as a rather weak attempt to do some revisionist history. I am a child of the South, raised in segregation in North Carolina and I think your assumptions are incredibly naive. You do not seem to recognize that the South decided they would rather have slavery than remain in the Union. Utah was willing to give up polygamy so that they could join the Union. I suppose that if slavery had not been ended on the battlefields of Gettysburg, Harpers Ferry, Antietam, and Appomattox, that economic pressure on a slave-owning confederacy, might have forced them to give up slavery in another 100 years or so. Economic pressure from the world did force the Republic of South Africa to give up Apartheid in 1994. You seem to assume that to achieve a peaceful end to slavery legitimizes that inhumane institution lasting for another hundred years or so; that is a moral compromise I would never be willing to accommodate. Slavery is wrong, it is inhumane and it violates everything I believe about the Christian faith. Its end had to be achieved and the hidden racism that still lives just below the surface in the world and in our nation today also needs to be confronted openly. Listen to the racist voices that still speak in our world. Watch those states where Republicans control both the governor’s office and the state legislature where overt efforts are still being made to prevent people of color from voting. I am not willing to countenance a system of government that will compromise the freedom and dignity of black people, to give white people more time to adjust to required changes or to enable changes to take place at a pace white people can tolerate. Justice delayed is not morally neutral, it is justice denied. It must be condemned, confronted and rooted out.
Yes, I think war was a dreadful alternative and the Civil War brought great suffering on a lot of innocent people, but if slave owners were not willing to give up slavery voluntarily and immediately, I will not say that that war was somehow unnecessary. When Adolph Hitler burned Jews in the crematoriums, I believe that act warranted a war to force the Nazi government out of power.
So I regard your analysis as simply wrong. The Arc of the Universe bends toward justice and when justice is systematically denied to people because of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or religion, I believe the power of an ultimate force must be brought to bear on those who think their behavior should be tolerated, I would be quite prepared for Confederate veterans to lose their right to vote as punishment for supporting a state that sought to enslave human beings legally. Racial hatred is a disease that must be rooted out; it is not an attitude that anyone should support because changing it might upset some of the slave owners. Racial hatred needs to become so expensive that the racists are forced to give it up in order to continue to live. Slavery itself is violent; to remove it from life is not to increase violence.
I enjoyed a church sign board recently that read, “I have made some of you black and some of you gay. Get over it!” It was signed “God.” I do not just want to “get over it,” I want to celebrate it.
~John Shelby Spong
Comments