Proposition 8

I want to respond to Mona's retraction and to the Pam's House Blend post that she links to. Look, people who have the idea that the black vote was the proximate cause for the passage of Prop. 8 in California are wrong, but the salient point is that African-American votes substantially supported the ballot measure and that the black church, which remains at the social and political heart of black communties, specifically mobilized against it. The accusation is less that black Christians singularly scuttled gay marriage in California, but that it is especially tawdry, vicious, and unfair for a demographic that suffered commensurate discrimination within living memory to actively oppose the expansion of civil rights. There have long been historical antipathies between black activists and other minority groups, especially East Asian immigrants and their descendants, and there is a troubling tendency among some to reify the African-American experience, to make other discrimination incommensurable because only African-Americans experienced American slavery. The attitude has much in common with the insistence by many Jews that the Holocaust likewise represents a singular and inapproachable catastrophe, and that any historical comparison inherently denigrates its memory.

Homophobia may be less prevalent among black christians than among White evangelicals, but the historic discrimination and oppression of blacks in America places an additional moral burden on their sympathies, and requires them to do more to support equality for others.