Understanding the black anti-gay marriage sentiment

UPDATE: I didn't think I had to do this, given how much I've been writing about this issue, but judging from comments I do. I obviously totally disagree with the comment itself. I've said as much many, many times. But just so no one is confused, I'm not defending the comment and the point isn't to justify homophobia. I'm digging for the root of the weed, so it can be yanked out. That doesn't mean I like weeds. Heh or even black people for that matter. Yes I know. That was just wrong.

UPDATE #2: Bolded for emphasis. Hopefully it clarifies things some.

UPDATE #3: Closing comments. This isn't going anywhere. Part of that is probably the tenor of my post. I don't know. I think, on this blog, the whole subject could use a lengthy time-out.

I wanted to pull the following comment out because I think it says a lot. It comes from the Hank Johnson/John Lewis thread below:

I do not approach this topic from a religious standpoint but as one of the Black Yes on 8 voters from LA County I simply disagree with everyone here....

People make the argument that a stable gay relationship is just as good as a stable heterosexual one. I can see that argument. However...

I think children growing up in a gay household is as harmful to their sensibilities (i.e. - thinking that it is acceptable and normal) as children growing up in a household where the parents are swingers or the hetero parent has a different man or woman in their bed every week.

Courts take away parental rights for that kind of behavior... But we are supposed to think that children growing up in a gay household is ok?

Black people know first hand how dysfunctional family units can destroy a community. If we redefine marriage as being between essentially between anyone and anyone, what further damage do we want to do to an institution already on the decline in this country?

I have repeatedly argued against the whole "the blacks stabbed us in the back" narrative. Like buying a present because you want one in return, I find it narcissistic and dishonorable. But more than that I find that it is logic hinged on a kind of quasi-racism, which does not so much see black people as human, which does not see them as one my see the Irish, the Jews, the Italians, the white Southerners, the evangelicals, but as one sees an android programmed by simply by two buttons labeled "Oppression" and "Righteousness."

I shouldn't make this about race, because truly the same shit is at work with people who lampoon poor whites for voting "against their interest." Nevertheless, here is the thing. People who tend not to have actual conversations with black people, think that most black folks thing having kids out of wedlock is cool. Like we have rallies and shit celebrating the latest mother on welfare who's had her tenth kid. What they don't understand is the intense, intense shame and insecurity black people feel, a sense that history has robbed us--and that we now rob ourselves--of some essential part of the American Dream. That being the ability to marry someone and raise some kids, and then be around other people doing the same.


Negroes, you know the drill--this goes back to slavery when they'd split the fam and sell every member to a different plantation. It runs through Jim Crow when whites intentionally refused to hire black men, and terrorists actively sought to undermine the black middle class. It runs through Roosevelt and the New Deal, and Southern senators cutting blacks out of the windfall. And now here we are, trying to pick up the pieces, hiding our heads in shame over that bogus 70 percent stat. These aren't so much the reasons for black marriage rates, as they are the specters hanging overhead, the ghosts that wake you up at night. I'd submit that people who are, themselves, insecure about the institution of marriage itself, will require the most work to become advocates of its expansion.

There is a way of reading this as unfair to gay people. Frankly, being the Malcomite I've always been, if I were white and gay, I might be one to say "Leave the niggers be." It's true--I feel weak even writing this. But I would be wrong and hears why. There are people who will tell you that the past doesn't matter, like people weren't saying that during the Red Summer of 1919, like they weren't saying it while folks were covering up Tuskegee. Like they don't cookout on the Fourth of July. This hostility that black folks feel toward gay marriage is, in some sense a product of who we are--southern, religious, disproportionately poor, disproportionately uneducated. Yet in another sense, I feel it's a product of what was taken from us and what we labor to reclaim.

I don't mean to say that black insecurity over marriage and gender roles, justifies the opposition. But it explains a lot of it. It's not right that gays--black and white--should bear the brunt of this. But the New York Draft riots were wrong on a similar level--what had we ever done to the Irish? In Phillip Dray's book, At The Hands of Person's Unknown, he recounts the direct ties between lynchings, and white women starting to work outside the home. Basically, Southern working class and poor white men fearing an erosion of economic power, took out their rage on innocent blacks. It does me no good to not understand that. The maddening, inescapable fact is that anger's targets aren't fair--it's usually kick-the-dogism writ large. But anger can be rationally confronted and defused. Pain can be healed.