Very interesting and insightful, thank you for this input!
To speak of “gay marriage rights” is, from the perspective of someone who opposes gay marriage, to beg the question. It is to assume as given something that they don’t agree with at all. You could just as well complain of anyone who wants anything to be illegal or off limits that they are interfering with people’s rights to do that thing.
Nobody argues against rights. That is, nobody goes around saying that we should prevent anyone from having or doing what they have a right to. Where the disagreement lies is over what people actually do have any right to.
Argument by analogy is not infallible, and depends on whether or not you see the things being likened as truly analogous in the first place.
Why would having a black president make anyone any more likely to believe that gays are born that way?
I do see a great deal of hypocrisy in heterosexuals who point to same-sex marriage as The Big Threat to marriage and family. [sarcasm]Because we all know that the institutions of marriage and the family would be in wonderful shape if only it weren’t for those pesky homosexuals.[/sarcasm] But that’s hardly just a black thing.
Isn’t it a “right” to not be treated in a discriminatory manner based on your gender, race, religion, disability and sexual orientation?
Isn’t is a violation of one’s rights to denied access to a fundamental and highly regarded human institution such as marriage based merely on a personal trait that someone disagrees with based on their religious beliefs, ignorance or unjustified hatred?
Because the election of a black president shows that the old ignorant prejudices of the past are dying out, and society is becoming more open and accepting of diversity. And following this trend, perhaps in the near future we will see more and more elected officials who are homosexual, and perhaps even someday a gay or lesbian president…
Also in response to Ruminator’s previous comment:
So does that mean these same people would say it’s OK to discriminate against someone on the basis of their religion? Because your religion is a choice, right?
I think you’ll find similar patallels in history, Irish Americams faced great discrimination yet remained socially conservative. That may be true for most ethnic and religious groups that at one time faced discrimination. The counter-example being Jews.
Hypocrisy implies dishonesty. To try to gain advantage by pretending to believe or feel something that, in fact, you don’t believe or feel would be hypocritical. Denying your beliefs or feelings for advantage would likewise be hypocritical.
But if you genuinely believe that being black and being gay are not comparable conditions, then you are not being hypocritical in treating them differently. Your belief does not cease to be genuine merely because other people disagree with it vehemently, or do not understand it, or even because it is objectively wrong.
It’s not just a question of believing that being gay is a choice. You could believe that it’s not a choice, but is still different from being black in some material way which justifies different legal treatment.
In so far as an accusation of hypocrisy (or, more defensibly, inconsistency) can be levelled at any group, I don’t see that the proper target is “blacks”. Blacks are under no greater moral obligation to recognise, name and fight injustice when they see it than anyone else. The proper target of such an accusation is surely all those, black or white, who oppose racial discrimination but accept discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
That’s the way it looks to you from your point of view. But from the point of view of those opposing same-sex marriage, everybody has the same rights and the same access. Everybody has the right to marry a person of the opposite sex, and nobody has the right to marry a person of the same sex. That’s what marriage is: a partnership between two complementary people of opposite sexes.
It’s like, if one guy throws a ball and another guy tries to hit it with a stick of wood, that’s baseball. But if two guys throw balls at each other, or if two guys wave sticks at one another, that’s not baseball. Likewise, if a man and a woman join their lives together, that’s marriage. If two men, or two women, join together, that’s not marriage.
(Please note: This is not my opinion. It is my attempt at understanding how such people think.)
My distinct impression is that many, if not all, of the people who oppose same-marriage simply don’t believe gay people exist. They believe in homosexuality as a behavior but not as an orientation. They believe that anyone who gets romantic or sexual with someone of their own sex is acting against their own fundamental nature.
Homosexuality is either an unfortunate mental aberration, like believing you’re Napoleon or only being able to be aroused by someone wearing a coonskin cap, and possibly caused by genetics (like Down syndrome or a predisposition to alcoholism) and/or childhood experience (the way those who were abused often become abusers themselves)—
—or it’s a deliberate choice. Lesbians go after other women because they’re hostile towards or afraid of men and want to avoid them. Gay men go after other men because they’re horndogs and it’s easier to get quick, meaningless sexual gratification that way. Homosexuals of either sex do it for the attention, or for the sense of identity and belonging, or to rebel against mainstream society and be a part of a subculture or counterculture, kind of like hippies in the 60s or punks in the 80s.
But in any case, homosexuals certainly can’t feel real, genuine, monogamous love for one another, the kind a woman and a man feel for each other, so if they want to marry each other, it must be either for crass practical reasons, or to make it easier for them to get their sexual jollies, or to thumb their nose at society. Which is why letting them marry each other makes a mockery of the institution of marriage.
(Again, this is not my own view! It’s the impression I get of where at least some of the anti-gay-marriage people are coming from.)
Not really. And my using a particular phrase . . . means I use a particular phrase a lot.
They are denying human nature. Unless your friends aren’t human, they know better. If they denied gay people felt pain would you say “Oh, they’re just ignorant” ?
While I think the fight against ignorance does well to point out hypocrisy when it rears its ugly head, I think it’s a grave mistake to focus specifically on Black homophobia when addressing the issue of gay rights. While it is true that Black voted 70% in support of Proposition 8, they only made up 10 percent of the overall vote (Warning: PDF) on Prop 8. Pointing to Black homophobia as a major (if not the major problem) facing gay marriage in California effectively ignores the other 90% of the vote.
If we look at relative ratios for the voting record, for every Black person that voted “Yes” on Prop 8, we have:
9 whites
1.36 Hispanics
0.42 Asians
which indicates that Hispanics may be slightly more homophobic than Blacks. And Hispanics have been involved in civil rights struggles as well; where is the justifiable concern around not linking their own fight with civil rights for gays and lesbians?
More telling factors seem to be a person’s age, gender, marital status, and religious persuasion - again, I’m no statistician but the numbers further down the page I linked to lead me to think the most likely Black person to vote for Prop 8 was the older married Black woman who had kids and went to church regularly. There was a study done in 2003 that showed while Black were more disposed to see homosexuality as wrong, their attitudes towards antigay discrimination itself was less tolerant - they were somewhat more likely than whites to support laws against antigay discrimination.
I think this goes a long way towards demolishing the myth (and it is a myth) that Blacks are more homophobic than the general population. How, then, should we explain the increase of “Yes” votes for propositions like 22 and 8 in California among Blacks?
The answer lies more in how the two campaigns around Prop 8 were conducted than in Black attitudes. For instance, the “No” campaign took in more money ($43.6 million) than the “Yes” campaign ($29.8 million) but didn’t put it to good use. TV ads, for example, specifically avoided the use of words like ‘gay’ and ‘bigoted’; one particular didn’t focus directly on gay couples but used a straight white couple as spokespeople instead, only briefly focusing on a picture of a lesbian couple with children. The “Yes” campaign, on the other hand, used recordings of Obama and Biden expressing personal opposition to gay marriage in campaigns targeted at Democratic voters, while Democratic campaign workers went door-to-door and never mentioned the gay marriage issue.
In other words, the homophobia that does exist among Blacks was never directly challenged by the opposition to 8 while it was fanned by the support. The results of such an approach are painfully obvious.
This is where the biggest problem lies in focusing primarily on Black homophobia as the problem, blowing it out of all proportion to its actual impact. It ends up being a hostile “How can you people be so hypocritical?!” and highlighting their faults, real or perceived, which can only serve to alienate. Honestly, nyctea - how many Black minds do you expect to change if you harp on their supposed higher rate of out-of-wedlock births?
The better approach is to actually and explicitly make the connection between the various struggles for civil rights - Black, Hispanic, gay and lesbian, and so on. Not only that, but act in solidarity with those struggles even if you’re not part of the oppressed group. I can think of no better example than one I know of personally - the Rev. Graylan Hagler, pastor of Plymouth Congregational Church in the suburbs of Washington DC., and a Black man. The ISO, the group I was a member of back in the States, worked alongside him on any number of social justice issues that related to, and didn’t relate to, civil rights for Blacks and he’s made the connections - he’s now on the Steering Committee for DC United for Marriage Equality (as is the Rev. Wiley from the OP’s article!) - that body alone is just as large as the group around Rev. Walker, and I’d bet the number of parishioners who follow the co-signers have a good chance of outnumbering the parishioners around Walker and his group.
Why would any color/religious/national group not see the SSM issue as equivalent to there own group’s injustice? I see a couple of obvious things:
All the other groups are clearly identifiable, they are a specific color, or dress different or talk different, homos just pop up randomly among all of the other groups – that is hard to even understand for people who don’t want to. The only other group that just pops up randomly are children with birth defects and other disabilities.
The other is the significant number of conservative leaders who proclaim that “gay is a choice” only to later be found to be having SSS (Same Sex Sex) – for them it was a choice, and one they seem to have waffled on. 
Combine that with the fact that most people have found people of the same gender attractive, at least on some occasions, and the number of children who are molested, and you have a lot of people who are in a religion/culture that does not accept gay as OK, but feel that they could have been gay, and they “chose” not to.
I can see how the black community would not see the equivalence that I do between the queer struggle and the color struggle. It’s taking longer than I would prefer for things to become equal, but I know they will.
Recently I said “Among my friends, when a new acquaintance finds out that I am gay, I usually see there eyes flicker in the realization*, and then they quickly re-think who they could fix me up with.” Eventually, most people will be like that.
*not shock or anything, it’s just that I look pretty hetero, and I hang out with “burners”, and that means many of the hetero guys are running around in all kinds of flamboyant costumes. That messes up everyone’s gay-dar. 
Two questions:
What’s a burner?
What the heck does child molestation have to do with homosexuality?
Nothing, except in the minds of the anti-gay bigots who like to equate the two ( and often bestiality as well ).
Why should blacks be the group most sympathetic to the plight of gays? Because they were both persecuted minorities? Sorry, but that doesn’t add up at all. Minorities can both be persecuted historically yet still be inimical towards each other.
You may well believe that persecution should unite people in some sort of bond of sympathy and understanding, and maybe in a perfect world it would. But each minority has its own beliefs, ethics, morals, etc. They’re not going to abandon those simply because they clash with the beliefs of other oppressed groups.
I think that the history of the Women’s Movement has indicated that feminists tend to be more united with other persecuted groups in general – migrant workers, blacks and others.
It has always puzzled me why any persecuted group is not more finely tuned to the signals and signs of discrimination of other groups. But instead of being in sympathy, too often there seems to be a need to dominate and suppress. Gays and women are generally supportive of each other, don’t you think? But then there are the Jews and the Palestinians, or Blacks against gays. And so many people against immigrants.
Der Trihs, during the 1960s it was commonly thought among many psychologists that maternal influences caused homosexuality. This “nurture” thinking changed with progress in the science, but I’m reasonably certain that there are still people who are unaware that homosexuality has a genetic cause. That is not willful ignorance. They just remain uninformed. Some people are just not concerned with the topic.
You are better read in this than I and I’m certainly no sociologist. But I would have thought that blacks have not yet changed from their maternal centered culture. Notice that most of what you quoted doesn’t even acknowledge the presence of females in the culture. It says that the one thing that you can do when you are poor or a second class citizen is to hold onto your manhood! Most blacks are women! It says the ultimate put-down in black urban culture is to call someone a bitch or a punk. I think “yo mama” still comes in first, but correct me if I am wrong. That’s because it is worse by far to insult someone’s mother than it is to actually insult the person directly.
Who raises any child born out of wedlock? The mothers and the grandmothers. Who graduates? The women. Who stays employed? The women. Who lives longer? The women. The strongest and most successful blacks that I know have been women.
The most famous have been black men in sports, but they are a small group in comparison. Of course there is a young political upstart who seems to be making the news lately. I guess we have to count him…
Just my opinion.
Actually it adds up rather well. Yes, we know groups that have suffered persecution and bigotry can be bigots and persecute other groups for their own reasons. Still, it’s perfectly natural to expect those who have been on the receiving end of unthinking baseless prejudice and suffering to identify and sympathize with the suffering of others.
The* most *sympathetic? Maybe not. There seems to be a conflict between their own struggle for civil rights and their religious belief. It is surprising to find them more opposed to SSM than other groups given that common struggle.
That it is ignorant is self evident.
That they choose to remain ignorant despite a great deal of discussion and evidence on this very topic makes it willful ignorance.
That they will hold to their erroneous belief without a fair examination of all sides of the issue makes them intellectually dishonest.
Worse, in this case they want to actively deny rights to a certain class of people. It should be ingrained into every American that denying rights to a group is anathema to our very way of life. Any move to do so should only be made with exceptionally good reason and a complete understanding of all the issues at stake. An understanding they willfully avoid getting.
I’ve gone through every instance I can think of where rights were denied to a certain class of people and I cannot find a single one of them with an exceptionally good reason behind it. You got any?
Sure.
Denying the right to own a gun if you are mentally ill.
Not allowing anyone under the age of 18 to vote.
Mostly though I agree with you.
So, getting back to the OP, let’s just ensure we’re clear. You believe most black people are dishonest?
There is a large difference in degrees. Marriage is one of many ‘rights’ we have in this country, and gays already have many of the rights associated with marriage, if not use of the ‘word’. We don’t make gays drink from different water fountains, we didn’t separate them in school, we did’t make them live in their own communities, we didn’t use them as slave labor.
For them, when gays complain about their oppression, it’s like a when a rich kid complains that his Dad isn’t letting him use the Ferrari for the weekend.