President Barack Obama's endorsement of gay marriage has touched off a debate within the African-American community, with black churchgoers and pastors taking sides over an issue some call a question of civil rights, and others say is a matter of Biblical truth.

That debate spilled onto the airwaves and Twitter last Thursday, when Michael Eric Dyson, an MSNBC contributor and Georgetown University professor, called out what he called "sexual rednecks" in the black church, who oppose equal marriage rights for gays and lesbians -- and he named names: Roland Martin of TV One, Baltimore pastor Rev. Jamal Bryant, who has said he felt "jilted" by the president's support for gay marriage, and Sophia Nelson, an author and contributor to theGrio.

On Wednesday, Nelson got the opportunity to respond, when she and Dyson appeared together on the "Ed Schultz Show" on MSNBC. Dyson began by apologizing for calling out his friends by name.

"First of all I want to apologize to Sophia and Jamal and Roland," Dyson said, "In a fit of passion, I called out my friends, in the spirit of love, to say that, hey, we can do better than this and I shouldn't have called their names if they weren't here to defend themselves."

Dyson said he "conflated two issues: the marriage equality which is very serious and a significant issue on the one hand, and the lack homophobia as I perceived it within black communities. Homophobia is not something that's endemic to black people, it's across the globe, so to speak, but in this case, black homophobia fuels, I think, the beliefs about gay and lesbian people and whether or not they can get married."

Nelson responded by calling Dyson her friend and "brother in Christ," and "I forgive you, I thank you for that and we're gonna learn, and show people how to act as Christians."

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SOURCE: The Grio