NYPD Reps Held Secret Talks With Virginia Republican Who Calls Gays ‘Very Sick’

Top NYPD union leaders held a secret meeting to get advice on improving police-community relations with a Virginia Republican whose anti-gay comments were central to his campaign.

NYPD police sergeants led by Edward Mullins, the President of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, went to Washington, D.C. last week and met in secret with several radical religious right leaders from the African-American community. The purpose, according to an exclusive report in the New York Observer, was to get advice on “improving police-community relations on a national level,” even though the NYPD only has jurisdiction over New York City.

The NYPD has been waging war against Bill de Blasio in the wake of the choke hold killing by an NYPD officer of Eric Garner. The NYC mayor in a press conference had acknowledged he had told his own son, whose mother is Black, to be wary of police officers – as many parents of African-American children feel the need to do, given the record of police.

The Sergeants last week in D.C. met with anti-gay activists E.W. Jackson and Alveda King, (niece of civil rights leader, the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.) and other “national African-American leaders,” the Observer reports.

E.W. Jackson conducted a divisive and caustic campaign in 2013 when he ran as the GOP nominee for Lt. Governor in Virginia. He lost, but not before making ugly attacks on LGBT people, who were only too happy to highlight his record of anti-LGBT rhetoric, which Right Wing Watch copiously documented.

Claiming a “direct connection” between gays and pedophilia, Bishop Jackson said gays and lesbians are “perverted,” “degenerate,” “spiritually darkened,” and “frankly very sick people psychologically, mentally and emotionally.” Of homosexuality, he said “it poisons culture, it destroys families, it destroys societies; it brings the judgment of God unlike very few things that we can think of,” and it is “killing black men by the thousands.”

Unlike most NYC residents, Bishop Jackson is a staunch conservative extremist. Unlike New York City mayor Bill de Blasio – one of the most liberal Democrats in America – he is extremely against liberalism.

Jackson has said “liberalism and their ideas have done more to kill black folks whom they claim so much to love than the Ku Klux Klan, lynching and slavery and Jim Crow ever did, now that’s a fact.”

And he has claimed that “the Democrat Party has shown itself to be anti-Christian, anti-Bible, anti-family, anti-life and anti-God… We’re calling people to come out of the Democrat Party and not support candidates who represent its values and the rebellion that it represents against God. That certainly would include President Barack Obama.”

It’s unclear why NYPD leaders and union officials would need to venture outside New York City to improve police-community relations. And certainly some LGBT activists are concerned.

 

Image of E.W. Jackson via Flickr