Washington Post Pits Black Voters vs LGBT Voters

Argggh, in an aticle published on gay pride day, the Washington Post has again pitted African American Democratic voters against LGBT Democratic voters (as if there is no intersection between the two!) as a rationale for leading Presidential candidates' hesitancy to embrace full marriage equality:

Black voters are heavily Democratic, but exit polls in last year's elections found that only 46 percent of African Americans favored allowing same-sex marriage or civil unions, compared with 61 percent of the overall population who did, a figure that included Republicans.

In 2004, aides to Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), the Democratic presidential nominee, were so worried about black voters' feelings about same-sex marriage that they put Bill Clinton on a conference call with 3,000 black pastors so the former president could reassure the pastors that Kerry truly did oppose same-sex marriage.

I found this article because I was reading TPMCafe's Election Central coverage and I saw a phrase ("[T]he core Democratic constituency of black votes has a strong social conservative element — they are 15 points less likely than the general population to support either gay marriage or civil unions.") on this usually progressive blog which reinforced the "Black people are more homophobic than others" meme that Mad Professah and other bloggers have been trying to deconstruct for years.

The pernicious nature of this "Blacks are more homophobic" notion is that it 1) erases the reality of Black LGBT individuals (like myself) and 2) shields Black people who are homophobic from having to fully address the source of their irrationality.

Keith Boykin did a good job of responding forcefully to this meme on BET's "Meet The Faith" last Sunday. He has posted a link to the video online. It's a great discussion.