NOT A PUZZLE

The big “news” after the election in which America elected an African American to be its president is that seventy percent of California’s African Americans voted to take a civil right away from another minority group. Let me say a couple of things up front: Barack Obama will be President of the United States. There are no such designations as “right handed President” or “blue-eyed President” or “short (or tall) President.” I am an American. I am a mongrel American (Dutch, French, English, Cherokee). People who insist on speaking always of Obama as Black President must get over it. America must get over it. African Americans must get over it.

So what happened to Proposition 8?

The proposition designed to strip away a basic civil right from citizens who happen to have been born homosexual rather than heterosexual was approved by fifty-one percent of Californians who voted. Everybody knows why the proposition passed (just barely). Conservative (interesting word, CONSERVATIVE), evangelical Protestant, Catholic, and Mormon leaders rallied their troops. The majority of church-affiliated African Americans are evangelicals or Catholics. Mormons kept "negroes" from church membership until the middle of the last century, so African Americans probably didn’t figure significantly in the Mormon vote. Mormon Americans have faced as much rejection as African Americans have experienced. The Mormon effect can be the subject of another journal entry.

Back to the question: Why did seventy percent of African Californians vote to take the right to marry away from gays and lesbians? The answer became clear to me when I reflected back over seven years of teaching in a San Diego public school where the majority of students were black. Most of my African American students at Samuel P. Gompers Secondary School came from families that don’t look at all like the families that Prop. 8 supporters say they are trying to protect. Single mothers, grandmothers, and aunties were heads of households in the families of most of my black students. As a matter of fact, it should be remembered that more than half of all California marriages end in divorce. There is no evidence that gays and lesbians are factors in the degeneration of California marriages. There is no evidence that gays and lesbians are the cause of disfunction in “Evangelical Christian” families or in their churches. The failure to engender commitment to justice for all people has nothing to do with the ethnicity of the people in those churches. The problem lies in the churches themselves, in church leadership, in the failure of church leaders to understand the central message of the Gospel.

Don’t blame African Americans. There is plenty of blame to go around for persistent selfishness, racism and bigotry in American culture. We don’t blame a lame person for his or her disability. Churches have made intellectual and moral cripples of a significantly high number of people. Those morally handicapped people, whatever their ethnicity, self-righteously and perhaps ignorantly voted to strip a basic civil right from citizens.

This is a temporary setback in the civil rights movement. We will get past it. We must try to get past it without bitterness or rancor.