What Funeral did Bishop Eddie Long recently attend?”
LITHONIA, Ga. — Two days after Vernon Forrest was celebrated in his hometown, the rest of his world came to say one final goodbye to the former boxing champion from Augusta. More than 700 people — including fellow boxing world champions Evander Holyfield and Antonio Tarver and former Atlanta Falcons Jamal Anderson and Ray Buchanan — attended Mr. Forrest’s funeral Monday at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Dekalb County. Mr. Forrest’s family pleaded for justice against those who gunned down the three-time world champion in a robbery July 25 at a gas station in southwest Atlanta, and they pledged that the fighter’s death will deliver a message against violence. “I believe in God, I believe in justice, and we want justice served to the fullest,” said Alphonso Forrest, his brother, who still lives in Augusta. “He didn’t deserve it, I don’t deserve it, none of us do. It hurts so bad. “Whatever it takes to get justice for you Vernon, legally, we’re going to get it done. I promise y
“Men can look attractive when they are dirty,” writes Bishop Eddie Long in his 1997 book I Don’t Want Delilah, I Need You! “We see sweating, dirty, hardworking men on television all the time and we say to one another, ‘There’s a macho guy.'” Despite this affinity for sweaty, macho men, Long is one of the most virulently homophobic black leaders in the religiously based anti-gay movement. His book, subtitled What a Woman Needs to Know, What a Man Needs to Understand, appeared in the midst of a roaring growth period for Long’s New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Ga., near Atlanta. During the mid-’90s, it swelled to over 18,000 congregation members, men and women who worship in a multimillion-dollar complex that’s the size of most major universities, spread out on 240 acres of land. Much of what appears in I Don’t Want Delilah was espoused in the videotaped “Back to the Future” sermon Long gave when his church was still small. “It is the most unattractive thing I have ever se
