There was an interview in the past issue of the New York Times magazine with the head of the NAACP, Benjamin Todd Jealous. The interviewer, Deborah Solomon, focused on California’s Proposition 8 last fall. Here’s the relevant portion of the interview: Solomon: Exit polling suggested that 70 percent of black voters - the largest by far of any minority group - voted to make gay marriage illegal in California by voting in favor of Proposition 8 last fall. How do you explain that? The bond between black culture and church culture? Jealous: You’re looking at this from 50,000 feet. I’m looking at it from the ground, and I know that church leaders are on both sides of the debate. Black voters have been scapegoated - so many pundits blamed the passage of Proposition 8 on them. But it would have passed even if 100 percent of the black voters had voted against it.
That last underlined bit elicited a big “Really?” from me. Anybody know whether this claim is true?
If Wikipedia’s numbers can be trusted (sourced from the Sacramento Bee), tt is not true. The numbers are:
RACE SIZE YES NO WGTDY WGTDN
B 10% 70% 30% 7% 3%
H 18% 53% 47% 10% 8%
W 63% 49% 51% 31% 32%
A 6% 49% 51% 3% 3%
O 3% 51% 49% 2% 1%
TOTAL 100% 52% 48%
Had every black voter voted no, the results would have been 45%-55%. If on the other hand, if black voters voted as whites and Asians did (49%-51%), it would have been a dead heat, 50%-50%.
Interestingly, black women supported Prop 8 at a 75%-25% ratio. The survey does not give results for black men (presumably because with 6% of respondents being black women and 4% being black men, the sample size of black men was too small to obtain statistically significant results); however, using these numbers, it is possible to estimate that about 63% of black men supported Prop 8. I suspect this data is the reverse of what people might expect to be the vote patterns by sex on this issue. For both whites and Latinos, the only other groups for which the data is broken down by sex and race, men were more likely than women to support Prop 8.
It looks like the guy is full of bs. From wiki, 10% of voters were black. That’s 10% of 13,743,177, or 1,374,318. Adding 1,374,318*.7 to the no votes and taking away that number from the yes votes yields 6,039,061.4 yes, 7,363,504.6 no.
It’s true that it wouldn’t have passed if black voters had stayed home. But it also wouldn’t have passed if all conservative voters had stayed home . . . or old voters . . . or religious voters.
Quite a few people were slamming California African Americans after the election, but the fact is that, even though the black vote in favor of Prop 8 was higher, percentage-wise, than other groups, there were still millions of others who voted for the proposition.
Yes, but that should have been Jealous’ reply not the one he made which is wrong and therefore only continues the argument by allowing people to correctly disagree with his statement rather than disagreeing with the voting.
There’s no blame to be apportioned anywhere here, on either side of the debate. People voted for or against the proposition because they either believed it was right or they didn’t.
You don’t ‘blame’ people for voting as their beliefs dictate, you work to try to change those beliefs.
And you don’t blame people for expressing their feelings about the blameworthiness of other people’s beliefs, you work to…oh, wait, I guess you can do that.
In the aftermath of the Prop 8 debacle, the Left was attacking Mormons, who are only a tiny percentage of the population in California.
People on the Right (Bill O’Reilly, among them) provocatively asked “Black voters were MUCH more important in defeating gay marriage than Mormons. Why aren’t you slamming THEM?”
Keith Olbermann, among others, dismissed the question, and pretended O’Reilly was just being racist.
Mormons weren’t “slammed” for how they voted–they were criticized for the way that they, as outsiders, dumped money into the campaign for Prop 8 before it was voted on.
I believe that the vast majority of money, and certainly time that Mormons put into Prop 8 was donated by those who were Californians. Where does the outsiders claim come from? Certainly there were Mormons from out of CA who donated money for Prop 8, and just as certainly there were plenty of out-of-staters who donated to defeat it.
There was also the underreporting issue. Oh, and I’m not sure where the “Mormons got yelled at, but not Blacks” came from, since I seem to recall a lot of people being vocal in their disappointment and disbelief that a minority group who knows all too well what it’s like to have legalized, codified discrimination against them would vote that way.
Of course you blame people for voting according for their beliefs if you think those beliefs are evil or stupid. Why wouldn’t you? Voting is an act like any other, and can be wrong like any other. And can therefore be condemned like any other if you disagree with it.