Black support of Prop 8: Leonce Gaiter weighs in

Leonce Gaiter in HuffPo on black support of Prop 8:

According to a SurveyUSA poll, 58% of black voters support Proposition 8, which would enshrine irrational fear and rank bigotry into the California Constitution in order to deny gays the right to marry. Black support is 10% higher than support of any other ethnic group. This is ironic, considering that in striking down the law
banning same sex marriage, the California Supreme Court cited the landmark 1967
civil rights case Loving vs. Virginia that struck down the prohibition of interracial marriage.

A majority of California's voting African-Americans seem blind to that irony, however. They see no kinship to their own past as a reviled minority whose sexual touch toward a single white man or woman would sully the entire "race" of American whites--just as legally sanctioning the sexual touch of same sex partners would so sully heterosexuals' unions that they will... what? Seek immediate divorce? Abandon their children to the streets? Suffer mass orgasmic dysfunction?

58% of the black voting population sees no irony in accepting a "separate but equal" status for gays despite the fact that the Supreme Court freed us from just such subjugation with Brown vs. Board of Education; without it we would still be classifiable as second class citizens.

We see no slippery slope in enshrining hatred and bigotry against a specific group into our ruling document--our California Constitution. If we can enshrine the second-class citizenship of gays with respect to marriage, why not the second-class citizenship of blacks with respect to education, or Hispanics with respect to citizenship itself? Someone will always hate you with equal vociferousness to your hate for someone else. It's simply a matter of convincing enough to do so--as has been done in convincing 58% of blacks to support the same kind of irrational hatred that kept us in figurative shackles for most of the last century.

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