“Comparing the infringement on civil rights that gays are experiencing to that suffered by black Americans is to begin a game of ‘top my oppression’ that you’re not going to win. The struggle for equality — beginning with freedom from human bondage (see: references to the book of Exodus at the Gospel Brunch) — has been so central to African-American identity that many blacks find homosexual claims of a commensurate level of injustice frivolous, and even offensive.”-- Caitlin Flanagan and Benjamin Schwarz, “Showdown in the Big Tent,” The New York Times, Dec. 7, 2008
Flanagan and Schwarz’s op-ed article in the Times more than two weeks ago is one of the first in the mainstream media to discuss openly what many progressives noted privately with dismay: the overwhelming support of African-Americans for California’s Proposition 8, which amended the state constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman.
For all its pretensions to objectivity and disdain for PR and marketing, the media Powers That Be have long operated under the same mantra as Madison Avenue: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
If journalists had done their jobs all these years, they might have examined a number of stray incidents—Protestant African-American ministers who lent crucial support to the Bush Administration in the closing days of the 2004 Presidential campaign in the election-deciding state of Ohio, anti-gay statements by black athletes such as Tim Hardaway and the late Reggie White—and begun to notice a pattern. Instead, they concentrated on simpler, more seemingly conservative targets on which to pin the label of homophobia: the Mormon and Roman Catholic Churches.
That’s why, when the results came in for Proposition 8, many media mavens (except for the astute Samuel G. Freedman) were surprised by the seeming disparity between a single group’s economic and “lifestyle” views. They scratched their heads over exit poll results showing that seven in 10 African-American voters voted in favor of the measure.
Though the Times and other media outlets continued to lash the Mormons for their economic support of Proposition 8, responses on many progressive blogs featured a common lament by gays against African-American colleagues in the Rainbow Coalition: How could you, after all we did for you?
Though supporters of same-sex marriage, Flanagan and Schwarz offer some advice that gays might want to heed: Get over it, lest you divide the liberal community before it has a chance to accomplish something under President Obama. Along the way, the media should rethink the notion of why resort to judicial rulings without a majority voting consensus in favor of same-sex marriage is okay, but pro-lifers’ similar resort on behalf of even the mildest curbs on abortion (limits on partial-birth abortion, calls for brief waiting periods) constitutes litmus-test politics.
History happens to be on the side of Flanagan and Schwarz about the dangers of secularists picking fights with religiously inclined members of liberal coalitions. As Garry Wills pointed out in his history of religion and politics in the U.S., Under God, the caricature of William Jennings Bryan created by Clarence Darrow and H.L. Mencken in the Scopes “Monkey” trial did nothing to make born-again Christians feel welcome by liberals, even though Bryan was and remained a genuine radical when it came to opposing the mandarins of Wall Street.
More recently, Democrats suffered for two decades because of the growing political homelessness of Roman Catholics. Formerly among the most reliable shock troops of the New Deal coalition (actually, given landmark legislation passed by Alfred E. Smith and Robert Wagner after the Triangle factory fire, practically the inventors of the New Deal itself), Catholics found themselves marginalized because of the veto power of pro-choicers over party nominees (a phenomenon much less discussed in the media than the similar primacy of pro-lifers in the GOP).
Just as disastrously, the “Dutton Rules”—named after a prominent party activist from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s who helped rewrite delegate selection rules before the convention of 1972—shifted the longtime ideological focus away from income inequality and toward issues with greater appeal to a more affluent and secular base. That led to nearly 40 years of Democratic handwringing over the rise of the “Reagan Democrats,” and even the spectacle of Roman Catholics rejecting one of their co-religionists in the 2004 Presidential race.
If you want to understand just how disastrous that slippage was, just recall this: it took not just a mismanaged war, a united Democratic Party, and an opposing Vice-Presidential selection with little experience, but more important, the worst economic downtown since the Great Depression to ensure that Democrats regained the White House in 2008.
Don’t bet that eight years of being out of the White House will be enough to prevent gays and African-Americans from going toe to toe. Already, the lesbian director of People for the American Way, Kathryn Kolbert, had to warn against the “appallingly racist” reaction of some in the gay community to African-Americans following Proposition 8.
Blogger Andrew Sullivan, who wrote an Atlantic Monthly cover story (“Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters”) a year ago with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of positive adjectives toward Barack Obama, noticed after the election that the President-elect “has always opposed marriage equality, even splitting with his own church on the issue.” (
This is going to be interesting to watch. Early in the Bush Presidency, he could not say enough good things about the President and his conduct of the war on terror. Bush’s support for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between heterosexuals seems to have led the blogger to support Kerry in ’04. Are we about to watch Sullivan execute a similarly motivated shift?)
Outrage over African-American rejection’s of Proposition 8—and now over Obama’s invitation to Rick Warren to speak at the inauguration—can only be counterproductive. Recall what happened to Bill Clinton at the start of his Presidency, when he fell into a silly controversy over gays in the military instead of, as he promised, “focusing like a laser beam” on the economy (or, for that matter, terrorism--remember that the first World Trade Center bombing occurred only a little more than a month after he took office). Don’t think the GOP isn’t panting over a possible repeat of this divisiveness and diffuse focus.
Moreover, “bigots” is not the best term to apply to a group such as African-Americans that is still acutely—and often justifiably—aware of racial snubs.
And while we’re on the subject, other terms about yourself (e.g., “the reality-based community”) or others (“theocracy,” “the Christian industrial complex” or Sullivan’s ridiculous formulation, “Christianist”) that reek of condescension also don’t offer gays the possibility of How to Gain Friends and Influence People.
If gays think the results of Proposition 8 were wrong, they should remember the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s prescription for what to do when the Supreme Court is wrong: debate, litigate, legislate. Somehow, they forgot the third leg of that triad.
As a way of reversing the results, gays might try talking to religiously minded voters on their own terms. Discuss the original biblical injunctions against homosexuality and why they are wrong. Detail the reason why civil unions are an inadequate substitute for gay marriage.
In other words, do anything but shout derogatory names and bandy about stereotypes, which only gets people’s backs up—and which, come to think of it, was part of what gay activists long told us they ostensibly were fighting against all along.
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