WSJ On Post-Prop 8 Rift Between Blacks and Gays

MadProfessah fave Rod McCollum has a second mention in as many weeks in the Wall Street Journal about the racial politics of the Proposition 8 aftermath. hee's an excerpt:

But it was the anger toward black and Latino communities that caught many off-guard. A blogger on the Web site Mollygood.com posted a map of Los Angeles showing the voting trends on Proposition 8. “Here’s your handy-dandy visual representation of LA’s homophobia…Conclusion: Another way to look at this map is as a guide to show you where Los Angeles ethnic minorities and old people live. Sad but true.”

Rod McCollum is a 37-year-old gay black man who writes commentary and a blog on gay issues on his Web site Rodonline.typepad.com. Mr. McCollum said he received a posting to his Web site from a gay black student who said white protesters shouted racial slurs at him during a protest at a Mormon church. “It was like being at a klan rally except the klansmen were wearing Abercrombie polos and Birkenstocks,” the young man wrote.

Several religious leaders from the black and Latino communities said that during the campaign, gay and lesbian activists framed the marriage issue as a civil rights battle, and they assumed black and Latino voters would support their cause. But that message didn’t necessarily resonate.

“There was an assumption there would be a lot of empathy from the black community, and that wasn’t necessarily the case,” said Mr. McCollum. “There is a danger that gay activists face when they embrace the civil-rights mantle,” he said. Though Mr. McCollum said that he sees the gay-marriage fight as “an extension of the civil-rights issue,” he said not everyone agreed.

Some black community leaders said the gay-marriage campaign didn’t spend time or money courting the black community. Meanwhile, those in favor of banning gay marriage worked hard to get their message out through black and Latino churches.

“It was a miscalculation that we would see it as a civil-rights issue,” said the Rev. Eric Lee, an African-American and president and chief executive of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Los Angeles, who supports gay marriage.

“Whatever the vocabulary is to describe the struggle, I don’t think there’s anyone in our leadership who would equate what we’re going through with the black experience,” said Darrel Cummings, chief of staff for the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center. But, he added, “Our community members are being denied fundamental rights that are afforded heterosexual people.”

The issue is far from settled. The California Supreme Court plans on ruling on the legality of Proposition 8 some time next year.

Respectfully, I disagree with Reverend Lee that it is a mistake to characterize the struggle for LGBT equality as a "civil rights struggle." I have appeared on panels with the Reverend and I understand that he thinks we should talk about "gay rights" in the context of human rights but I disagree. The civil rights struggle (or as Dan Savage likes to call it, The Civil Rights Struggle) was about a group of people being able to participate fully in civil society, i.e. the idea that the public square would not discriminate on the basis of race, color or ethnicity. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said the "content of one's character" would determine one's ability to suceed in America, not the "color of one's skin" and the government would enforce equal opportunity for everyone in the public sphere. That idea was quickly broadened to include categories such as religion and sex in the landmark legislative remedies of the 1960s and 70s.

What is going on now (and has been going on, since the early1970s) is to broaden the categories from race, religion, sex and ethnicity to include sexual orientation and gender identity, specifically. In other words, in the public sphere how the state treats a person shall not be predicated on that person's sexual orientation or gender expression. That is a civil right.

It's very painful as a Black gay person to hear people says that gay rights are not civil rights because it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of 1) gay people and 2) civil rights. (By "gay rights" I mean LGBT rights in the previous sentence.)

As in The Civil Rights Movement, not every disenfrachised group was treated equally or was equally successful. The Equal Rights Amendment failed, and thus cases involving race and ethnicity are treated differently by the United States Supreme Court than cases involving sex and gender. But the courts are only one avenue in the road to equality.

Similarly, not every right that is bestowed upon one groups will be bestowed equally to others, but the long term goal of The Civil Rights Movement (and all other civil rights movements that followed) is to have America live up those words "liberty and justice for all."