What is it going to be today? Is it the Mormons fault Prop 8 passed or what it all those black homophobes? Or maybe they conspired together to stomp down all the gays and keep them in their places. Goodness knows that over the years both of those communities have faced their share of struggles as well.
The thing is that more black people voted in the last election than ever before, for obvious reasons. Problem is that on that same ticket was the dreaded Proposition 8. Was it all those vote happy African-Americans who ended up with the final say on same sex marriages in California?
Some reports have gone so far as to say that seven out of 10 back voters voted against gay marriage. Okay, that sucks but if only 7% of the voters were black, then that other 45% had to come from somewhere else. We can’t in good conscious blame African Americans for the whole disaster, can we?
Besides once all was said and done and the real numbers came through we saw that black voted with 58% in favor of same sex marriages for gays and lesbians. Not the best number in the world, but probably no worse than other groups like Latinos, the aforementioned Mormons etc. etc.
Patrick Egan of New York University and Kenneth Sherrill of Hunter College of New York wrote up a pretty fascinating post-election report for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. This is what it had to say:
“Party identification, age, religiosity and political view had much bigger effects than race, gender or having gay and lesbian family and friends.” Huh.
Turns out that among weekly church-goers, African American supported gay marriage more than any other ethnic group. More and more blacks are jumping on the gay bandwagon. They are sick of being labeled bigots and so they should be.
I look forward to seeing more people support the cause of freedom for all, whether they are Asian, White, Black, Latino or anything in between. Come on people! It’s 2009 not 1522! Get with it.
To read more about this subject you can read an article on the same topic, only theirs goes into a lot more detail. The name of the article is Are Black People Really Homophobic? by Mary C. Curtis.
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Interesting subject. I can’t say I’ve had any specific impression as to whether black people are more or less homophobic than white people.