For all the celebration of the Greatest American Political Ass-Kicking that was Election Day 2008, and the ultimate defeat of the Bush/Cheney/DeLay/Limbaugh/Rove School of Advanced Right-Wing Political Shenanigans, not everything ended up so well for progressive causes last night.
The most baffling political event that took place was in California, the very state whose 55 electoral votes put Obama over the top. Yet, that same supposedly progressive state decided to pass, by a 52-48% margin, one of the most reactionary bits of legislation ever invented: Proposition Eight, which placed in the California Constitution an outright ban on gay/lesbian marriages.
Now, Cali wasn’t the only place where anti-gay prejudice took political form — Arkansas and Florida also passed anti-gay resolutions concerning adoptions and gay marriage — but it was the Cali results that absolutely floored me as well as any other decent progressive out there.
And even worse is the fact that much of the support for Proposition Eight came from one portion of the electorate there that you would least expect to embrace bigotry: the Black and Brown community. According to exit polls, referenced by Pam Spaulding over at Pandagon, 70% of Blacks who voted in the proposition voted FOR this gay marriage ban…and up to 74% of Black women.
Of course, this would be a bit less surprising given the high degree or religiousity traditionally involved in the Black community as a whole….but you would think and hope that Black folk would be a bit less blind to discrimination, having suffered so much of it themselves.
But still, all in all, it is a bitter taste that Black folk who have done so much and achieved the ultimate victory would go ahead and simply stab the backs of other people who are suffering the same kind of discrimination.
Perhaps it’s just the fact that Black folk have been down so far and for so long and have had to travel so far to get to this point that they are simply tone deaf to the suffering of others. Or, perhaps, right-wing religion and its inborn sexual and social conservatism is such a powerful force that even putative progressives are not quite so immune to its pressure.
Whatever the case may be, the issue of social conservatism still being powerful amongst Black and Brown communities is creating a real and genuine rift amongst the progressive/liberal/Left diaspora which could potentially tear the newly-formed coalition that allowed for Obama’s big day yesterday wide open. Already, not a few gay/lesbian activists are lashing out at Blacks and Latin@s for what they see as political treason and abandonment, and some have even fixed their guns on Obama for not making a genuine effort to seriously oppose Prop. 8, if not actively support it tacitly. (Obama had made a statement restating the classic “Marriage should be between a man and a woman” meme, but he also did tacitly oppose the measure, albeit in silence. The pro-Prop 8 folks had released an ad purporting to show Obama supporting their measure, but it was proven to be a lie.) In response, some Black evangelicals who supported Prop. 8 have made the usual statements about how gay/lesbian activists are basically mooching off the cracked bones and efforts of the Civil Rights Movement to sell a “social” right that means nothing to anyone but an “cultural elite”.
Personally, I consider all that to be utter bullshit myself, since I happen to have no opposition to either gay marriage or gay adoption or recognition of alternative kinship arrangements. My position on all this is plain and simple: Gay and lesbian people are human beings more than capable of raising and adopting children with the utmost of care and respect; and the law should just get the hell out of the way and allow them the same rights and responsibilities that any other arrangement has.
I don’t believe this because I’m gay, and it wouldn’t matter one damn bit if I was, either. I believe it because it’s the moral, right, humane way to believe….and because I am a progressive human being.
Having said all that, however…I do think that among not a few White, liberal people, there is this basic assumption to believe Black and Brown people to be a monolith, and to assume that because they happen to mostly support liberal economics, they will automatically flock to other social liberal positions automatically….and when it turns out otherwise, they openly pout about how “betrayed” they are about Black folk becoming heatedly reactionary. This is almost the equivalent of the “elitist” attack on poor and working-class Whites who cross the aisle in favor of right-wing Republicans or right-wing populist Democrats as ignorant and innate robe-and-hood wearing Klansmen, except with the usual liberal guilt of not being accused of innate racism.
Such generalizations have be overcome by White liberals and progressives as strongly as the Black evangelical community has to deal with, confront, and overcome their homophobia. Left untreated and unexposed, this could kill even the strongest unity movement faster than bubolic plague through an old, untreated grain elevator filled with rabid rats.
Battling the Right — even a Right much less powerful than it was even 48 hours ago — will require so much more of our attention. We can’t afford wasting our ammo firing on each other.
[Dedicated to Aspasia over at LaLibertine's Salon, who first motivated me to write on this topic]
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