This cartoon was posted by blogger Ernest Hardy in response to Dan Savage's arguably racist comments on black homophobia in the wake of Proposition 8 passing last week. Savage responds here.I'm out of town for a few days. Y'all can discuss the semiotics of this image while I'm away. Comments that include hate speech will be removed.
Well, after reading many a gay blog after the Prop 8 vote, I am sad more at the racial intolerance and straight up in your face gate and bigotry at blacks, gay or straight, religious or not, than anything else. Its as if some could not wait to spew the slurs, and, now, some are trying to back track?
ReplyDeleteTime for tolerance and getting to actually figure out why this failed, and, stop the race baiting and hate.
If the alleged "mainstream leadership" in the gay community does not condemn this, good luck with any sort of future alliances with people of color, and, while I voted NO on 8 this time and encouraged my family and others to vote NO as well, next time, I will not vote one way or the other.
I am increasingly perplexed at this whole series of disjointed pseudo-conversations on supposed black homophobia and/or gay racism. The central fact that no side in this increasingly incoherent debate seems to address is that the
ReplyDeletegreatest number of people who supported Proposition 8 were whites who self-identified as Christians.
Who are these "white Christians"? Well, they aren't just any old "white Christians," but certain groups--Mormons, Roman Catholics, fundamental/evangelical protestants--in which women are largely excluded from formal positions of spiritual power such as the regular ministry and the episcopate. In other words, they were traditionalist rather than progressive (think of Unitarian-Universalists, Episcopalians, United Church of Christ) in organization and doctrine. One further, relevant characteristic of these traditionalist groups is that they tend to be gerontocracies--the holders of the most power tend to be old men. (Think Bishops.)
Now these same kinds of organizational and doctrinal splits are found in African-American churches as well. The more conservative groups--pentacostal groups like the Apostolic or C.O.G.I.C.--exist alongside other, more progressive churches like the AME, while the Baptists range from the extremely fundamentalist to the progressive SCLC. Here, again, there's the same diversity and much the same sort of split between traditionalist and progressive denominations, and between younger and older church members, that's apparent in white communities.
The supporters of proposition 8, mainly white but also Latino and black,come disproportionately from these traditionalist religious groups, in which doctrinal heterosexism and homophobia turns into a petrified anti-LGBT theocracy.
In the jargon of social science: controlling for religious traditionalism and for age, I suspect the independent influence of the variable race/ethnicity essentially disappears as a causative factor in support of Prop 8.