Some Thoughts on Civil Liberties and Strategy
About a month ago, I happened across an editorial that claimed that Prop 8 passed because African-Americans were turned off by talk about gay marriage as a civil rights/civil liberties issue. This is the most compelling analysis on the issue that I’ve seen. So far as I’m aware gays and lesbians haven’t been forced to the backs of buses, had fire hoses and angry dogs turned loose on them or been forced to use the gay restroom or water fountain. And so far as I can tell, a majority of gays and lesbians are employed, have disposable income, are educated and have health care. If we take the way gay men are represented in media (inaccurately, admittedly) then this trend seems even stronger. There’s perhaps a deeper level here too. LGBTs make somewhat less than 10% of the population, while African Americans (about 12% of the population) still struggle to get equal opportunities in education and economic success. So, I can see how construing themselves as an oppressed minority, even though nobody is locking up gays for living together monogamously, might rub African-Americans the wrong way.
More interesting to notice, however, is how the passage of Prop 8 has provoked the LBGT community to more strongly assert that marriage is an issue best thought of as a civil liberty. From a strategic viewpoint I wonder if this an activist suicide pact. African-Americans, the only group with broadly acknowledged civil liberties “street cred,” will continue to feel alienated by the sort of rhetoric. Also, it seems like Mormons and Catholics have been the chief target of homosexual demonstrators. Perhaps deserved, this focused attention does not mirror the “yes on 8″ demographics present on election day. I won’t hazard a guess at how much, if at all, the gay community harbors racist attitudes. I assume its a very very tiny amount, and certainly protesting African-Americans isn’t the way to score points on the national scale, but the fact that there hasn’t been much of anything on this front surprises me. If LGBT’s are concerned with results, wouldn’t this be an absolutely necessary thing to pursue? In fact, homosexuals do have something that could be very persuasive in building bridges into the African American community: they can appeal to continued presence of racial and sexual identity motivated violence.
