A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled 2-1 Tuesday that a lower court judge interpreted the U.S. Constitution correctly in 2010 when he declared the ban, known as Proposition 8, to be a violation of the civil rights of gays and lesbians.

The measure, which passed with 52 percent of the vote in 2008, outlawed same-sex unions just five months after they became legal in the state.

Lawyers for Proposition 8 sponsors and for two couples who sued to overturn the ban have said they would appeal to the Supreme Court if they did not receive a favorable ruling from the 9th Circuit.

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A dramatic new chapter in the legal fight over Proposition 8 opens today, with debate over the purpose of marriage, the power of social convention and the rights of gay individuals televised live from federal court for the first time.

First, however, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco will hear an hour of debate over whether backers of California’s Proposition 8 even have the right to defend the voter-approved measure.

Discussion of the historic ruling and its constitutional soundness, set for the second half of a two-hour hearing, is sure to be emotional and capture public attention “because it’s sexier stuff, no pun intended,” said Vik Amar, a University of California, Davis, constitutional law expert.

But the debate over merits may matter less, Amar said, if the judges ultimately focus only on the question of standing. They could disqualify the proponents or Imperial County – or both – because they don’t pass the constitutional test for standing in federal court.

The 2008 proposition amended California’s constitution to declare marriage to be only between a man and a woman.

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SAN FRANCISCO — The federal judge who overturned California’s same-sex marriage ban ruled Thursday that gay marriages can resume starting Aug. 18.

The decision by Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker means gay and lesbian couples will have to wait six days before they can get married. That gives gay marriage opponents time to appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. If the appeals court fails to act by 5 p.m. local time next Wednesday, then gay marriages can go forward.

Read The Whole Story At MSNBC

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There were bitter foes in Bush v. Gore, but neither Ted Olson nor David Boies hesitated at the chance to work together on overturning Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in California. Olson didn’t like government meddling in people’s private lives, and Boies had a long background with civil-rights litigation in the South that he believed applicable to gay marriage.

But many veterans of the gay-rights movement were very nervous about the legal case brought by these accomplished attorneys. For years, lawyers and activists had been chipping away, slowly and painfully, at the smaller laws and prejudices that prevented full equality for lesbian and gay Americans—relating to the military, employment protection, hate crimes, and marriage. Olson and Boies were new to the cause, and even blocked the formal participation of veteran gay groups as parties to the case. (The powerhouse legal duo felt they could be more successful operating as a smaller cohesive team.) Their hearts might be in the right place, but how could these newcomers possibly understand the complex nuances of fighting for LGBT rights on multiple fronts? Were Boies and Olson pushing a major court case on Prop 8 too quickly? Was the risk of failure—which might set back the marriage battle for years—too high?

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DC Legalizes Same Sex Marriage

A federal judge in San Francisco decided today that gays and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry, striking down Proposition 8, the voter approved ballot measure that banned same-sex unions.

U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker said Proposition 8, passed by voters in November 2008, violated the federal constitutional rights of gays and lesbians to marry the partners of their choice. His ruling is expected to be appealed to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and then up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Read more at LATimes

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Black Voters, White Progressives & Prop 8

The California Supreme Court ruled again on same-sex marriage. This time it did to uphold Proposition 8, restricting marriage to one man and one woman. In a 6-to-1 decision the justices decided that Proposition 8 would remain part of the state constitution. And the 18,000 same- sex couples that ran to the altar to legally consecrate their nuptials before November 4, 2008, well they’re the lucky ones, since our right to marry can be so easily taken away by the pull of a lever.

For a fleeting moment in 2008 we saw democracy work for same- sex couples in California. In a 4-to-3 decision, the California Supreme Court in May of that year ruled that a “separate and unequal” system of domestic partnership for same-sex couples is not only blatantly discriminatory, but it is also unconstitutional.

The Court upheld the democratic process, offering same- sex couples “marriage” and not “marriage -lite ” with civil unions and put forth the following statement:

“In contrast to earlier times, our state now recognizes that an individual’s capacity to establish a loving and long-term committed relationship with another person and responsibly to care for and raise children does not depend upon the individual’s sexual orientation, and, more generally, that an individual’s sexual orientation — like a person’s race or gender — does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights.”

But California’s same-sex couples and their allies knew the knot on this issue was not securely tied. Proposition 8, so rightly dubbed “Proposition Hate,” would be the determining factor. And it was.

With six months now passed since the historic day in November 4, 2008 that threw LGBTQ Americans under the bus, and symbolically removed black Americans, with the election of Barack Obama as this nation’s first African American president, from riding on the back of the bus, I’m confused in terms of where my seat is on this bus ride toward democracy being both African American and lesbian and bi-coastal.

Yes, I live in Massachusetts, the first state in the nation to legalize same- sex marriage. And on May 17 Massachusetts celebrated five years of marriage equality. But one of my jobs-coordinator of the Africa American Roundtable at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies and Ministry at the Pacific School of Religion – is in California. I’m free to marry as long as I stay within the five states that now offer me the right to.

The fight for marriage equality in the U.S. is similarly to my ancestors’ fight for freedom. In their day, before the Civil War in 1861, the U.S. consisted of nineteen free states and fifteen slave states. As a matter of fact, in the 2004 presidential race between John Kerry and George Bush where marriage equality was a hot-button issue, the election map results between Kerry’s blues states and Bush’s red states corresponded to the pre-civil war free states and slave states, respectively.

As LGBTQ Americans we’re not in slavery, but we are certainly in a civil war. Whereas President Lincoln acted on behalf of my ancestor’s civil rights, Obama is immovable on ours.

When Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked for a response to California’s ruling he told the Associated Press, “”I think the issues involved are ones that you know where the president stands.”

When society narrowly defines marriage as the union between a man and a woman, it is not only policing the sexual behaviors of lesbian and gay people, but society is also policing the sexual behaviors of heterosexuals. Handcuffing marriage to a heterosexual paradigm merely chokes its possibility of ever flourishing and lasting, especially as we are coming to understand the fluidity of not only gender and sexual identities but also of the constant changing configuration of family units.

But with heterosexual marriage being so sacred, opponents to same-sex marriage fail to see how it is constantly desecrated on any given weeknight by being slotted for family entertainment – television shows like “The Bachelor” that cavalierly join people together for high Nielsen ratings.

To me, democracy is an ongoing process where people are part of a participatory government working to dismantle all existing discriminatory laws that truncate their full participation in society. The work of democracy is rooted in justice and social change allowing us to see, along this troubling human time line, those faces and to hear those voices in society of the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the dispossessed.

Democracy can only begin to work when those relegated to the fringes of society can begin to sample what those in society take for granted as their inalienable right.

A government is ethically bankrupt when it legally frames a minority group’s civil rights as a ballot question.

If I waited for slaveholders to free my ancestors predicated on a ballot vote, we all wouldn’t be living in the America we know today.

This is a press release from the NAACP

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People today announced support of measures before the California legislature challenging Proposition 8, which altered the California Constitution to deny same-sex couples the freedom to marry and equal protection under the law.

In a letter to legislative leaders, NAACP national board chair Julian Bond and President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous urged passage of House Resolution 5 and Senate Resolution 7 to put the legislature on record calling for invalidation of Prop. 8 as an improper and dangerous alteration of the California Constitution.

“The NAACP’s mission is to help create a society where all Americans have equal protection and opportunity under the law,” said President Jealous. “Our Mission Statement calls for the ‘equality of rights of all persons.’ Prop. 8 strips same-sex couples of a fundamental freedom, as defined by the California State Supreme Court. In so doing, it poses a serious threat to all Americans. Prop. 8 is a discriminatory, unprecedented change to the California Constitution that, if allowed to stand, would undermine the very purpose of a constitution and courts – assuring equal protection and opportunity for all and safeguarding minorities from the tyranny of the majority.”

SR 7, sponsored by Equality California (EQCA), will be heard in the Senate Judiciary Committee on Feb. 24th and will proceed to the full Senate for a vote shortly thereafter. Its companion bill, HR 5, also sponsored by EQCA, passed the Assembly Judiciary Committee on Feb. 17th and is eligible for a vote before the full Assembly as early as today.

The California State Conference of the NAACP filed briefs with the California Supreme Court in the legal challenge against Prop. 8, arguing that the measure drastically alters the equal protection guarantee in California’s Constitution and that the rights of a minority cannot be eliminated by a simple majority vote. Several other civil rights organizations, faith leaders, unions and leading corporations also filed briefs urging the invalidation of Prop. 8.

“The NAACP has long opposed any proposal that would alter the federal or state constitutions for the purpose of excluding any groups or individuals from guarantees of equal protection,” said Chairman Bond. “We urge the legislature to declare that Proposition 8 did not follow the proper protective process and should be overturned as an invalid alteration that vitiated crucial constitutional safeguards and fundamental American values, threatening civil rights and all vulnerable minorities.”

Sunday at the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Atlanta, Al Sharpton gave a sermon strongly condemning churches support of Prop 8.

According to PageOneQ, Sharpton said.

“It amazes me when I looked at California and saw churches that had nothing to say about police brutality, nothing to say when a young black boy was shot while he was wearing police handcuffs, nothing to say when they overturned affirmative action, nothing to say when people were being [relegated] into poverty, yet they were organizing and mobilizing to stop consenting adults from choosing their life partners.”

“I am tired of seeing ministers who will preach homophobia by day, and then after they’re preaching, when the lights are off they go cruising for trade…We know you’re not preaching the Bible, because if you were preaching the Bible we would have heard from you. We would have heard from you when people were starving in California–when they deregulated the economy and crashed Wall Street you had nothing to say. When [accused Ponzi scammer] Madoff made off with the money, you had nothing to say. When Bush took us to war chasing weapons of mass destruction that weren’t there you had nothing to say.”

SAN FRANCISCO — The California attorney general has changed his position on the state’s new same-sex marriage ban and is now urging the state Supreme Court to void Proposition 8.

In a dramatic reversal, Attorney General Jerry Brown filed a legal brief saying the measure that amended the California Constitution to limit marriage to a man and a woman is itself unconstitutional because it deprives a minority group of a fundamental right. Earlier, Brown had said he would defend the ballot measure against legal challenges from gay marriage supporters.

But Brown said he reached a different conclusion “upon further reflection and a deeper probing into all the aspects of our Constitution.

“It became evident that the Article 1 provision guaranteeing basic liberty, which includes the right to marry, took precedence over the initiative,” he said in an interview Friday night. “Based on my duty to defend the law and the entire Constitution, I concluded the court should protect the right to marry even in the face of the 52 percent vote.”

Brown, who served as governor from 1975 to 1983, is considering seeking the office again in 2010. After California voters passed Proposition 8 on Nov. 4, Brown said he personally voted against it but would fight to uphold it as the state’s top lawyer.

He submitted his brief in one of the three legal challenges to Proposition 8 brought by same-sex marriage supporters. The measure, a constitutional amendment that passed with 52 percent of the vote, overruled the state Supreme Court decision last spring that briefly legalized gay marriage in the nation’s most populous state.

Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, called the attorney general’s change of strategy “a major development.”

“The fact that after looking at this he shifted his position and is really bucking convention by not defending Prop. 8 signals very clearly that this proposition can not be defended,” Minter said.

The sponsors of Proposition 8 argued for the first time Friday that the court should undo the marriages of the estimated 18,000 same-sex couples who exchanged vows before voters banned gay marriage at the ballot box last month.

The Yes on 8 campaign filed a brief telling the court that because the new law holds that only marriages between a man and a woman are recognized or valid in California, the state can no longer recognize the existing same-sex unions.

“Proposition 8′s brevity is matched by its clarity. There are no conditional clauses, exceptions, exemptions or exclusions,” reads the brief co-written by Kenneth Starr, dean of Pepperdine University’s law school and a former independent counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton.

Both Brown and gay rights groups maintain that the gay marriage ban may not be applied retroactively.

The state Supreme Court could hear arguments in the litigation in March. The measure’s backers announced Friday that Starr had signed on as their lead counsel and would argue the cases.

The Yes on 8 campaign filed a brief arguing that because the new law holds that only marriages between a man and a woman are recognized or valid in California, the state can no longer recognize the existing same-sex unions. The document reveals for the first time that opponents of same-sex marriage will fight in court to undo those unions that already exist.

“Proposition 8‘s brevity is matched by its clarity. There are no conditional clauses, exceptions, exemptions or exclusions,” reads the brief co-written by Kenneth Starr, dean of Pepperdine University’s law school and the former independent counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton.

The campaign submitted the document in response to three lawsuits seeking to invalidate Proposition 8, the constitutional amendment adopted last month that overruled the court’s decision in May that had legalized gay marriage in the nation’s most populous state.

Both Attorney General Jerry Brown, whose office is scheduled to submit its own brief to the court Friday, and gay rights groups maintain that the gay marriage ban may not be applied retroactively.

The Supreme Court could hear arguments in the litigation as soon as March. The measure’s backers announced Friday that Starr, a former federal judge and U.S. solicitor general, had signed on as their lead counsel and would argue the cases.

Proposition 8′s supporters assert that the Supreme Court lacks the authority or historical precedent to throw out the amendment.

“For this court to rule otherwise would be to tear asunder a lavish body of jurisprudence,” the court papers state. “That body of decisional law commands judges — as servants of the people — to bow to the will of those whom they serve — even if the substantive result of what people have wrought in constitution-amending is deemed unenlightened.”

The cases are Strauss v. Horton, S168047; City and County of San Francisco v. Horton, S168078; and Tyler v. State of California, S168066.

The ban drew its strongest support from both evangelical Christians and voters who didn’t attend college, according to results released Wednesday by the Public Policy Institute of California.

Age and race, meanwhile, were not as strong factors as assumed. According to the poll, 56 percent of voters over age 55 and 57 percent of nonwhite voters cast a yes ballot for the gay marriage ban.

People who identified themselves as practicing Christians were highly likely to support the constitutional amendment, with 85 percent of evangelical Christians, 66 percent of Protestants and 60 percent of Roman Catholics favoring it.

The poll also showed that the measure got strong backing from voters who did not attend college (69 percent), voters who earned less than $40,000 a year (63 percent) and Latinos (61 percent).

The proposition, which passed with 52 percent of the vote, overturned the state Supreme Court‘s May decision legalizing gay marriage in California. The measure inserts language into the constitution limiting marriage to one man and one woman.

The poll found that, overall, 48 percent of voters oppose the idea of making gay marriage legal. Forty-seven percent support it, while 5 percent are undecided.

The results mirror previous PPIC polls from the last three years, suggesting that the $73 million spent for and against the measure did not do much to change public attitudes on allowing gay couples to wed, said survey director Mark Baldassare.

“At no point in time, before or after the election, did we have a majority of Californians saying they supported gay marriage,” Baldassare said. “My takeaway from this is that until there is a major shift in public opinion one way or another, it’s going to be another issue where voters are deeply divided.”

Geoffrey Kors, executive director of the gay rights group Equality California, said the PPIC poll demonstrates that same-sex marriage advocates “need to make inroads in every category. If 2 percent of voters had voted differently, we would have had a different result,” he said.

The poll was based on a phone survey of 2,003 California voters in the Nov. 4 election who were interviewed from Nov. 5-6. The sampling error was plus or minus 2 percentage points.

Gay is the new black, say the protest signs and magazine covers, casting the gay marriage battle as the last frontier of equal rights for all.

Gay marriage is not a civil right, opponents counter, insisting that minority status comes from who you are rather than what you do.

The gay rights movement entered a new era when Barack Obama was elected the first black president the same day that voters in California and Florida passed referendums to prevent gays and lesbians from marrying, while Arizonans turned down civil unions and Arkansans said no to adoptions by same-sex couples.

Racism was defanged by Obama’s triumph, leaving gays as perhaps the last group of Americans claiming that their basic rights are being systematically denied.

“Black people are equal now, and gay people aren’t,” said Emil Wilbekin, a black gay man and the editor of Giant magazine. “I always have this discussion with my friends: What’s worse, being a black man or a black gay man?”

“Civil rights have come much further than gay rights,” he said. “A lot of people in the gay community have been condemned for their lifestyle and promiscuity and drugs and sex, so it’s odd that when they want to conform and model themselves after straight people and have the same rights for marriage and domestic partnership and adoption, they’re being blocked.”

In a cover story for the Advocate magazine titled “Gay is the New Black,” Michael Joseph Gross wrote, “These past few years we’ve made so much progress that we’d begun to think everybody saw us as we see ourselves. Suddenly we were faced with the reality that a majority of voters don’t like us, don’t think we’re normal, don’t believe our lives and loves count as much or are worth as much as theirs.”

Yet even some gay leaders are reluctant to directly tie their fight to the African-American legacy. They acknowledge significant differences in the experiences of gays and blacks, ranging from slavery to the relative affluence of white gay men to the choice made by some gays to conceal their sexual orientation, which is not an option for those with darker skin.

“I believe we are very much in a modern-day civil rights struggle,” said Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay rights organization.

“We liken some of the experiences that we have had and will have to the (black) civil rights struggle. We also are enormously respectful of the differences,” he said. “What we are best served doing is when we take lessons from the civil rights experience and apply them to our work.”

Complicating the issue is the domination of minority politics by blacks and Latinos, who can be less than friendly to gay issues.

In the vote on Proposition 8 in California, which repealed gay marriage, about 70 percent of blacks favored the ban, according to an exit poll; Latinos’ close vote may have favored it, though the poll’s small sample left some uncertainty. In Florida, 71 percent of blacks and 64 percent of Latinos favored a similar ban.

Opposition to gay rights often has a religious basis, and blacks and Latinos are more churchgoing than society at large. Twenty-six percent of blacks attend religious services more than once per week, compared with 16 percent of Latinos and 14 percent of whites, according to a 2007 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

“I do not consider (gays) to be a minority in legal and adjudicated terms, the same way people who only like to eat broccoli with butter aren’t a minority,” said the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. “We can’t categorize things according to behavior. It’s based on ethnicity, on who we are rather than what we do.”

“Who am I to say that you weren’t born that way … (but) sexual activity, what you do, who you sleep with, is your business,” Rodriguez said. “That’s between you, your lover, and the good God Almighty in heaven. I don’t want to know. Let’s leave sexual activity in the bedroom. The government shouldn’t be legislating what we do behind closed doors between two consenting adults. And to compare it to the African-American struggle, to me that’s an abomination.”

So is gay the new black, or did the election define a new and unique set of gay challenges?

“The gay fight for marriage has its own integrity, its own background,” said Andrew Cherlin, a professor of sociology and public policy at Johns Hopkins University. “The experience of blacks in the United States is very different. … I don’t think it helps the fight for equality to make that claim.”

Cherlin says that fight began in the 1980s when the AIDS epidemic unfolded. Gay partners had few rights to help their ailing loved ones, visit them in hospitals or inherit their property, which led to the push for civil unions.

Today, only Connecticut and Massachusetts permit gay marriage, and a few states allow civil unions or domestic partnerships that grant some rights of marriage. Galvanized by the stinging Nov. 4 defeat in liberal California, the marriage movement is now as much symbolic as practical.

“There was a shift in the ’90s, from rights to the symbolism of being married,” Cherlin said. “This is not primarily a battle about rights now. If it was, all you’d be hearing about is domestic partnerships. Now it’s at two levels simultaneously. One is the level of rights; the second is the level of symbols.”

One symbol that some see missing from the gay rights movement is a figurehead. There are famous people who are out and proud, such as Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., or Ellen DeGeneres. But “we don’t have our Martin Luther King or Malcolm X or Barack Obama,” Wilbekin said.

Yet the nature of activism has changed since the days when King proposed the idea of a mass march on Washington. The recent nationwide gay protests were instigated by a Seattle blogger who set up a Web page three days after the California vote.

And in some ways, gays see Obama himself as a symbol of gay progress _ even though he opposes gay marriage.

Obama is in favor of civil unions, and during his victory speech, when he included gays in his description of America, it made them feel part of the historic racial milestone.

Solmonese said that the election defeats of Nov. 4 have inspired a level of gay activism not seen since the early days of the AIDS epidemic.

“That is buoyed by equal parts anger and rage about Proposition 8,” he said, “but also hope and inspiration about doing something that for a long time we didn’t think possible _ like electing Barack Obama as our president.”

From Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish:

This is from an interview with a very experienced and committed African-American lesbian activist in California:

Did anyone come and say, “Hey, we need to do outreach in the African-American community together?”

Absolutely not, in fact the message I got from a key person in the No on 8 campaign was that the black    vote was really going to be insignificant.

It’s not enough, that it wasn’t going to be an issue because we are not a majority of the vote, even though they knew that a large number was going to come out to vote for Obama. It wasn’t a fear because they didn’t feel like the numbers were going to affect (Prop 8 ) either way.

When did you have that conversation?

It was a month prior to the elections. It was a concern after, I believe, the L.A. Times or the New York Times came out implying that black people will be coming out in grater numbers and it was going to affect Prop 8 because of the black vote and the fear of that. From there, I was like, “Okay, how can I get involved?” It was dismissive. It was kind of like it didn’t matter.

Click here for The Daily Dish.

From theroot.com:

The lingering tension between gays and lesbians and the African-American community over the passage of California’s Proposition 8—banning same-sex marriage—isn’t a laughing matter, but it is absurd. It has all the makings of a Tyler Perry movie starring the casts of Big Love and The L Word.

Diary of a Mad Black Mormon Lesbian Nun? Now showing in California and coming soon to a theater near you.

Click here for the full post.

Proposition 8 sought to change the California Constitution to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry. On Tuesday, November 4, 2008, it passed 52.3% (Yes) to 47.7% (No). Many Californians report that they were unclear that they were voting to amend the state constitution. Moreover, propaganda endorsing the Yes on Proposition 8 position obfuscated the issue by featuring children confused and vulnerable in commercials, claiming that the initiative was to protect children from education about sex and marriage in schools.

On Saturday November 8, The Letters to the Editor section of The San Francisco Chronicle led with, “Turning their backs on another minority.” In this printing, the author totalizes the civil rights movement into a comic book narrative of Rosa Parks and MLK, Jr. and sends shame to “the African American community” as she blames the passage of Prop 8 on the report that supposes that 70% of African Americans voted for Proposition 8.

Before we descend fully into to blaming “the blacks” let us look at the facts.

1. California is not South Carolina. Even if there were a monolithic black community that voted unanimously to outlaw civil rights for LGBT identified individuals, it would not make or break a vote. According to the US Census Bureau (2006), California’s “black” population is 6.7% (vs. South Carolina’s 29% or Mississippi’s 37.1%). Add in issues of racial profiling and discrimination of formerly incarcerated individuals at the poll and the numbers of people with easy access to voting quickly diminish.

2.    My inner social scientist says this claim that 70% of African Americans voted “Yes” on Proposition 8 lacks empirical evidence, and my auto-ethnographic senses tell me that this is a wack attempt to wag the dog. There is over-reliance on an idea that African Americans are more homophobic than other identity groups in the US. There is also an assumption that everyone identified as LGBT is white. In order to fully understand the implications of the “70%” statistic, one must understand the conditions under which the data were collected. The exit poll numbers are from whom, what, where, when and why? What precincts were these African Americans being questioned in? What were non-African American voters reporting in these same precincts?

3.    The strategy of the No on Proposition 8 campaign was not inclusive. Many report that the No on 8 community-based efforts were not targeted toward non-white communities or communities whose primary language was not English. Such was not the case with the opposition. I received fliers to my home from the Yes on 8 campaign that included images of Obama as well as other black religious leaders supposedly endorsing Yes on Proposition 8. Both strategies insult non-white communities that identify as LGBT as well as non-white ally communities.

Despite these foul ups on the part of political workers fighting against the passage of Prop 8, that doesn’t excuse the rampant homophobia in all communities.

We have serious work to do if we are to be united. That includes not allowing our social groups to dehumanize people who identify in same sex relationships. It is also imperative that those included in the LGBT human rights movement do not erode into racism and bitterness as our struggle continues. Divided we fall.

Black voters in California have been blamed for the passage of an anti-gay marriage ban called Proposition 8. Here is yet another rebuttal of that argument, this time from noted poll interpreter Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com:

“The notion that Prop 8 passed because of the Obama turnout surge is silly….”

Click here to read the full post.

Click related links below.

Black support for Proposition 8 highlights one of the many fault-lines in the alliance that swept Barack Obama into the White House. The rhetoric is being amped up as some are essentially blaming black voters-often thought as critical to a liberal or progressive voting bloc-for  the revoking of same-sex marriage privileges.  The rift between traditional black voters and white progressives comes at a critical juncture, as President-Elect Obama seeks the political footing for his agenda. Without a viable and visible progressive political bloc, Obama will have little choice but to govern from the political center.

Though black voters have historically been some of the most consistent members of a liberal voting bloc, they tend to be more conservative on social issues such as same-sex marriage.  This was something that strategist Karl Rove understood as the Bush campaign used the shiny-ball that was same-sex marriage in the 2004 presidential to garner just enough support among black voters in a state like Ohio to turn the tide in favor of the incumbent. It was a lesson that those who sought to defeat Proposition 8 should have studied.
It is clear though that organizers did little outreach into black communities assuming that with a black presidential candidate that was supportive of same-sex marriage, (though more tepidly supportive of Proposition 8 during the campaign cycle), that black voters would fall in line.  But black views on same sex-marriage are more complicated; simply reading black voters as inherently homophobic misses the complexity of an issue that, in black communities, is often tied to the absence of black men as husbands and fathers.  Understood in that context, same-sex marriage goes against the belief of many within black communities that black survival is hopelessly tied to traditional marriage patterns.  That said, the Black Clergy needs to be accountable for hateful rhetoric directed towards gays, lesbians and transgendered citizens (including a good many in their congregations) and for willful fear-mongering.

Ultimately, black voters are simply challenged by the realities of their everyday concerns and support of issues like same-sex marriage seem more like a diversion.  This is a point that writer and activist Jasmyne A. Cannick recently made in the Los Angeles Times where she suggests that, “The first problem with Proposition 8 was the issue of marriage itself. The white gay community never successfully communicated to blacks why it should matter to us above everything else,” adding that, “the right to marry does nothing to address the problems faced by both black gays and black straights. Does someone who is homeless or suffering from HIV but has no healthcare, or newly out of prison and unemployed, really benefit from the right to marry someone of the same sex?”  Cannick offers a compelling argument here, but the very possibilities that Obama’s election created need to force those of us on both sides of this debate to think more creatively and yes, more progressively, about the challenges that we face.

For black communities we need to get past our romantic ties to the traditional nuclear family and the thought that we can only raise productive children if both a man and women are present in a household.  True, part of our investment in that familial model is the product of the stigma that had been historically attached to our cultural practices and indeed Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous critique of the black family suggested that we were doomed to stand outside of the American mainstream until we assumed a more traditional (less matriarchal) family structure.  But too often black communities turn a blind-eye to the violence and upheaval some of our most damaged men bring to our households, simply because there is a man in the house.  More to the point, Obama himself is evidence of models that don’t privilege the presence of father-figure per se, but rather the presence of many adults engaged in the lives of our children. Quite frankly, black children raised in a gay or lesbian household with engaged adult figures are likely better off than those raised in single-parent households or in heterosexual households where neither parent is up to the challenge of parenting.  The point here is that we need to be more sophisticated about how family structures function.

On the other side of the spectrum, those white progressives who sought to defeat Proposition 8 would do well to be a little more self-critical of the privilege that undergirds some of their politics.  Debates about same-sex marriage, however important they are, are debates that only a privileged few can really be engaged in.  The struggle for them is to better align these debates with the material realities of the working poor and the working class, communities for which the time to protest anything is at a premium.  University of Chicago political scientist Cathy Cohen has made such a point wondering aloud, for example, how Queer activists might engage the lives of women of color, who though heterosexual, have made sexual choices that “are not perceived as normal, moral, or worthy of state support?” It is incumbent upon white progressives to get better at finding common ground with black communities, beyond the dated liberal agenda that brought us together in the first place.

Barack Obama’s election, to cite James Brown, was a signal that it is a new day.  It’s about time that our political organizing begins to reflect that reality.

From theroot.com:

Somebody forgot to tell gay people that race wars are no longer in vogue. While the rest of the country has spent the last week reveling in the afterglow of Grant Park, gay America has devolved into a Sarah Palin rally.

The issue is a particularly nasty California ballot initiative, Proposition 8, which passed last Tuesday with just over half the vote. Prop 8 repealed a historic state Supreme Court ruling that gave gays the right to wed—and it appears to have won massive black support. That’s a fact that ought to shame black folks everywhere.

But it also ought to finally convince the white-led gay rights movement to take people of color seriously, a case black gay activists have been trying to make for the better part of the past 30 years. Addressing the destructive reactions of too many of my white gay compatriots in recent days would be a good place to begin.

Click here for the full piece.

“That was our mistake. So many African Americans don’t look at gay marriage as a civil rights issue. They look on it as a religious one. And we, for whatever reason … fear? Arrogance? Complacency? We did not do enough outreach to them. We need to begin a dialogue with them, because we should be putting this back on the ballot every election every year until we win.” – David Geffen

Click here for Tavis Smiley’s 3 part series on NPR about African-Americans and gay marriage.

Just check out this comment left by a white, gay reader of TheRoot.com, in response to Jack White’s article thanking white voters for their help in electing Barack Obama:

“You’re welcome. I hope one day to be able to thank black voters (as a demographic block, I mean) for enabling me to get married to someone of my own sex. Or at least to have the key rights that come with marriage–for example, having the right to visit a lifelong partner in the hospital if he or she were deathly ill. I hope that the blacks who turned out in record numbers in California to vote for Obama but who helped get Proposition 8 passed will rethink that latter decision, and the elements of their faith that led them to make it.”

But Shanikka at MyLeftWIng.com is not having it:

“[I will] try and put to rest, once and for all, this virulently racist idea that Black people are to blame for the passage of Proposition 8 here in California.  It is an idea grounded in utter myth, a complete lack of knowledge about anything related to Black people’s presence in California, and just plain old scapegoating.”

Read her scathing, incredibly researched full post here, and leave your comments at NewsOne.

Once a devout Mormon who graduated from the church’s Brigham Young University, the 41-year-old Cross was disowned by his family and his church after he was outed as a gay man in 2001.

“They are on the losing side of history,” Cross said Thursday of the church’s opposition to gay marriage. Cross and other protesters blame leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for encouraging Mormons to funnel millions of dollars into television ads and mailings in favor of Proposition 8.

The ballot measure passed Tuesday, which was sponsored by a coalition of religious and social conservative groups, amends the California Constitution to define marriage as a heterosexual act. It overides a state Supreme Court ruling that briefly gave same-sex couples the right to wed.

The protest came amid questions about whether attempts to overturn the prohibition can succeed and whether the 18,000 same-sex marriages performed in California over the past four months are in any danger.

For Cody Krebs, 27, four months was not enough time to fulfill his “intense hope” to marry one day; he and his boyfriend have been together for little more than a year, so they aren’t ready to wed.

On Thursday, Krebs dodged eggs hurled at protesters from an apartment building. He said he’d seen worse growing up in Salt Lake City.

“It’s important to come out like this because it gets the gay community into the public eye,” Krebs said. “I feel like this has started a lot of conversations that had to get started.”

The temple protest was organized by the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center. Its chief executive, Lorri Jean, announced a Web-based effort, InvalidateProp8.org, to raise money to fight the constitutional amendment.

Gay-marriage proponents filed three court challenges Wednesday against the ban. The lawsuits raise a rare legal argument: that the ballot measure was actually a dramatic revision of the California Constitution rather than a simple amendment. A constitutional revision must first pass the Legislature before going to the voters.

Andrew Pugno, attorney for the groups that sponsored the amendment, called the lawsuits “frivolous and regrettable.”

“It is time that the opponents of traditional marriage respect the voters’ decision,” he said.

The high court has not said when it will act. State officials said the ban on gay marriage took effect the morning after the election.

“We don’t consider it a ‘Hail Mary’ at all,” said Kate Kendell, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “You simply can’t so something like this — take away a fundamental right at the ballot.”

With many gay newlyweds worried about what the amendment does to their vows, California Attorney General Jerry Brown said he believes those marriages are still valid. But he is also preparing to defend that position in court.

The amendment does not explicitly say whether it applies to those already married. Legal experts said unless there is explicit language, laws are not normally applied retroactively.

“Otherwise a Pandora’s Box of chaos is opened,” said Stanford University law school professor Jane Schacter. Still, Schacter cautioned that the question of retroactivity “is not a slam dunk.”

An employer, for instance, could deny medical benefits to an employee’s same-sex spouse. The worker could then sue the employer, giving rise to a case that could determine the validity of the 18,000 marriages.

Supporters of the ban said they will not seek to invalidate the marriages already performed and will leave any legal challenges to others.

A 2003 California law already gives gays registered as domestic partners nearly all the state rights and responsibilities of married couples when it comes to such things as taxes, estate planning and medical decisions. That law is still in effect.

For example, The League of Young Voters (aka “The League”) called our city-issued voter guide a “phone book” due to the amount of propositions that were included, and Dave Chappelle, who graced the SF Punchline Comedy Club all of last week, teased the amount of funding given to certain propositions via commercial time versus others. A comparison of two State Propositions (6 and 8) can reveal why the  “snaps” from folks like the League and Brother Chappelle are deserved. Both Propositions 6 and 8 sought to threaten human equality and civil rights, but only one enjoyed extensive fanfare and national coverage.

Proposition 8 seeks to eliminate the right of same sex marriage. It is a ridiculous attack on human equality and even Chappelle joked about its backwardness, particularly its endorsement commercials which sought to obfuscate the issue. I vehemently oppose such an outmoded attack on anyone’s basic rights and wonder who missed the Rev. Dr. MLK, Jr. memo regarding the fact that ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere’?

On the same note, Proposition 6, requires a “minimum of $965,000,000 of state funding each year for police and local law enforcement,” and it makes approximately 30 revisions to California criminal law.”  I think The League’s summation of this proposition breaks it down. They posit that “this is a crass and vindictive attempt to demonize the poor, immigrants, and youth of color in order to pump more money into California’s failed and bloated prison system,” as it allows for the prosecution of children as young as 14, denies undocumented immigrants’ right to bail, and targets families’ housing assistance if associated members do not pass criminal background checks.  Where were the human rights zealots, celebrities from Hollywood and Unions’ commercials to highlight the affects of Proposition 6, as they did for Proposition 8? Injustice anywhere?

City and County Propositions ranged from K, which seeks to decriminalize prostitution and sex work, but also defunds alternative rehabilitation and support programs in the nonprofit sector, to R, which would rename a sewage treatment plant after George W Bush. This is my second time voting in San Francisco as I am recent resident, yet I see a troubling trend between today’s election and last June’s ballot options.

Clarity, focus and equal coverage of key human rights issues will be the challenge to SF’s claim to diversity and democratic ideals. While I don’t know what tonight will bring, I do know that election agenda items that secure housing for economically underdeveloped African Americans, such as Proposition F from our June 3rd election have not passed previously. In a city where black people are disappearing like bathwater down a drain, we need more than rhetoric to solidify what Rev. Dr. MLK, Jr. proposed.

Indeed, I am committed to organizing better in my social network for the next local election. This includes making sure my peer group has a trusted presence at meetings where propositions are written and revised. The implications of the local election propositions that I mentioned reach beyond Obama, and they are equally worth our attention and voice.

Visit Dawn Elissa-Fischer’s website: www.DEFprofessor.com