Dwight McKissicMcKissic, who is black, also criticized the NAACP for taking “Duck Dynasty” patriarch Phil Robertson’s “innocent racial remarks regarding relationship that he had with blacks on the bayous of Louisiana during his earlier years and spinning it into some kind of racial animus or insensitivity toward blacks during the Jim Crow era.”

A year after targeting the Boy Scouts for dropping their ban on openly gay youth, Southern Baptists meeting June 10-11 in Baltimore may have found a new cause célèbre in a reality TV show star suspended by his network for criticizing homosexuality.

“If no one else will, I will submit a resolution at the SBC annual meeting in Baltimore encouraging all believers to boycott watching the A&E Network and to boycott their sponsors if they don’t retract their position,” Dwight McKissic, pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, posted on his blog Dec. 19.

Dwight McKissicMcKissic, who is black, also criticized the NAACP for taking “Duck Dynasty” patriarch Phil Robertson’s “innocent racial remarks regarding relationship that he had with blacks on the bayous of Louisiana during his earlier years and spinning it into some kind of racial animus or insensitivity toward blacks during the Jim Crow era.”

A&E put Robertson on hiatus after gay-rights groups denounced comments he made on homosexuality and sin in a magazine interview. The second-day story turned to another part of the GQ interview, where the self-professed Bible thumper reflected on growing up in Louisiana prior to the Civil Rights Movement.

“I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person,” Robertson said. “Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field…. They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’ — not a word!… Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”

The NAACP joined the Human Rights campaign in a letter to the network denouncing Robertson’s remarks as “inaccurate” and “dangerous.”

“Mr. Robertson claims that, from what he saw, African-Americans were happier under Jim Crow,” said a portion of the letter quoted by media. “What he didn’t see were lynching and beatings of black men and women for attempting to vote or simply walking down the street.”

The letter said the remarks “go beyond being outlandishly inaccurate and offensive” to the point of being “dangerous and revisionist, appealing to those in our society who wish to repeat patterns of discrimination.”

McKissic, who in the past has chided his own denomination for lacking leadership diversity and piling on against America’s first African-American president, disagreed. He said Robertson was “simply expressing his personal observations and relationships with blacks that he knew in the Louisiana swamps and farmland” and shamed the NAACP “for this exploitation of such a sensitive and volatile topic.”

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