Pulling Up the Ladder

I see where something like 70% of black voters in California voted Yes on Proposition 8, the one to (apparently) enshrine in the California state constitution the ban on gay marriage.

I have to say I am damn disappointed, for my gay CA friends and in these voters. The voters don't seem to consider that this is a huge and legitimate civil rights issue every bit as much as anything they have encountered as black people in the past or present. They seem to be regarding it as a matter of choice that gay people are gay, and that such a "repellent" "lifestyle" should not be encouraged by permitting the "aberration" they consider gay marriage.

Well, though it may sound racist to say so, consider the source. Uneducated, or poorly educated; fearful of social change that seems to exclude them; above all deeply in thrall to simplistic religions and religious organizations that preach bigotry and fear of the unknown...you'd think--or I'd think, anyway--that this particular voting bloc would be tending the other way, out of fellow feeling for an oppressed minority.

But it didn't play out like that. And I wonder what can be done to ensure a better outcome from these voters the next time the matter comes up, and it will. Challenges are already being mounted to the "amendment" or "alteration", and quite rightly. It will be interesting to see how this unfolds in the courts; we already see it in the streets.

And I do SO wish New York State would get on the stick and do something; we're supposed to be fearless groundbreakers in such matters, not followers of Connecticut and Massachusetts, at best, and at worst total ignorers of this great issue where we have a chance to take the lead now that California has temporarily stalled out.

Maybe it needs to be pitched as civil rights from the start: a whole segment of the American populace being denied a basic human right by a bigoted majority. Sound familiar, black Californians? It damn well ought to.