Btw- ditto to everything said above.
I pit the First Baptist Church of Crystal Springs, MS for not allowing a black couple to marry there
50 person congregation, 20 already hate his guts from the great prayer debacle of '84, doing this changes it to 27.
Its not inherently impossible. although it does suggest utter spinelessness at best.
Otara
More liberals trying to censor a genuine expression of Christian values! I’ll be buying an extra white marriage on Monday in their honor!
Maybe they thought that the next bride standing at the altar would be infected by teh black, and so it would become an interracial marriage.
Or spite. Note that they waited until the day before the ceremony to tell the black couple they weren’t welcome; that’s what someone trying to cause the maximum amount of disruption and aggravation would do.
If it is anything like the strict Southern Baptist church my family was a part of when I was a child (80s and 90s), you can attend the services all you want, but you’re not a member until you get baptized in front of the congregation with a ceremony (regardless if you’ve been baptized before somewhere else). You’re also expected to start tithing and attending certain functions, and this all has to get approved. But I have no idea if that’s how they do it at this church, just a guess.
Well, you know what they say, an Episcopalian is a Methodist with money, and a Methodist is a Baptist with shoes.
No idea what rules are in place for Baptists or this church in particular, but don’t some churches have a rule that at least one person in the engaged couple has to be a member before they can be married in the church? Which of course wouldn’t explain why the pastor agreed to perform the ceremony in the church until he was allegedly blackblocked by the Klan faction of his congregation.
Anyone seen/heard a response from the church members? So far in the news I’ve only seen the story told by the couple themselves.
What I still don’t get is why the couple wanted the same pastor to still marry them.
Maybe they just wanted to get it done?
I wonder if they could get married at the Westboro Baptist Church ? I hear Pastor Phelps and the congregation are pretty open minded. 
Strangely enough, Fred Phelps was once best known as a champion of civil rights for blacks.
I don’t think Larry The Cable Guy is ordained.
Lord, I apologize.
While their list of foibles Bekenstein abounds and googolplexes, racism doesn’t seem to be a factor…
On the other hand, I don’t think they’d cater to the type of marriage Condescending Robot desires.
Maybe it makes me a bigot, but I draw the line at robosexuality. Next thing you know, they’ll be putting shoes on women.
Without official word from the church it’s about race, it might not be about race. My family went to a Congregational church in New Hampshire that had a rule that only church members in good standing could be married there (it was a picturesque old (1775ish) white New England church with a steeple). The couple said they went to the church but weren’t members.
Why they weren’t told of the church’s policy until just before the wedding is a mystery, though.
For fuck’s sake, read the damned article before offering the bigots a break!
If the pastor’s word isn’t “official”, then what the fuck is?
Probably because the church does not have a formal policy. The pastor probably initially thought that marrying people who attended the church was non controversial and just went ahead with things. Later a racist busybody on the governing board of the church decided to complain causing the pastor to fold like a cheap suit.
Yes, odds are good that there are racists in the congregation (but why allow the couple to attend the church at all?) but saying they were “against the black marriage” doesn’t absolutely mean they were against it because they are black, the sentence might (but probably wouldn’t) be continued: “they were against the black marriage… because the couple weren’t members of the church.”