But that's besides the point. The real story here is that Prop. 8 passed mostly due to the high turnout of African-American voters as a result of Obama's candidacy. As a block, American-Americans tend to vote against gay rights and gay marriage issues, and so the high turnout was what swung the ballot in favour of Prop. 8.
The lesson here should be that the gay community of the US has not done enough to reach out to the African-American community in order to gain greater acceptance and understanding. Despite all the advocacy against white religious conservatives and high-profile court campaigns, there has been precious little effort in convincing voters why they have nothing to fear and why gays should have the right to marry because that would be fair and just.
Until that happens, gay Americans are going to have to be content with winning brief victories through the courts while fearing each and every time the general public is given the chance to have their own say on the issue.
Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com points out that first-time voters voted against Prop. 8 by 62-38, while experienced voters favored it by 56-44. Therefore, if Obama's candidacy had not boosted turnout, Prop. 8 probably would have passed by an even higher margin.
Yes, black voters voted 70-30 in favor of Prop. 8, but they were only 10% of the electorate, and lots of other demographic subgroups favored it as well. (E.g., 22% of the voters attend church weekly--I bet that 22% includes the vast majority of the black voters--and they favored Prop. 8 by 82-18.) So I think treating the black vote as the reason for Prop. 8's passage is unfair.
But even if the black vote was not pivotal in this case, Silver's analysis still validates the chief point I was trying to make, which is that support for gay rights amongst African-Americans is frighteningly low and that the gay community's advocates are not doing enough to understand and get the support of the only community in the United States that truly understands what it means to be denied rights that others enjoy.
It doesn't have to be this way.
PS: There's a black church on the south side of Chicago which is unusual, for black churches, because it stands firmly in favor of gay rights. Its pastor, until recently, was a guy named Jeremiah Wright. You may have heard of him.
As for Wright, I think if we go by the rest of his sermons (which were frequently racist), his support for gay rights is as likely to be because of his desire to be contrarian and controversial as it is due to deep-seated personal convictions.
Word to the wise: The purpose of the "civil rights" movement is to weaken national unity and destroy traditional culture. That has been its purpose since day one, and the actual rights of man per se do not enter into strategic consideration. When the ruling class has to decide between alienating gays, alienating blacks, and alienating hispanics, it will do the first. When this becomes actual policy is difficult to say, since it isn't a straightforward headcount issue.
How did you come to these conclusions?
They should have equal rights in terms of their union, but in terms of procreation and furthering the species etc, how can they?
Racism doesn't really have such an argument does it.
I just don't see why the word matters all that much. Surely as long as you are equal in the eyes of the law, why not have a different word to mean same sex marriage? Then if you say "joe is married" you don't have to ask "to a woman? or another man?".
Alan Turing was gay, and never had children. He developed the code-breaking machines that allowed the Allies to win world war 2. Don't think for a second that Churchill being able to read Hitler's mail before Hitler read it didn't "tip the balance".
So it sounds like gay people can further the species without procreation. In fact, I'd argue that smart people (gay OR straight) are better off not having children until their career has 'peaked'. For the truly brilliant -- the Turings and Einsteins of the world -- a child is not going to be "their greatest accomplishment".
Seriously, a gay man basically did more for Western civilization than you or I or any Veteran still alive has. He was shamed into killing himself because of his sexual orientation. You'd really object to his happiness?
sigh. I'm going to stop here before I pull a Godwin.
I don't care if gay people wish to have even more rights than me. Fine. Just don't mess about with a word that has been defined clearly for a long time.
You DO realize that the definition of marriage has changed several times, right? Women are no longer property owned by their fathers until transferred into the possession of another Man. Being of different race no longer means you can't get married, either.
Furthermore, we re-define words all the time in the computer field. Think about how the definition of "fast" gets redefined every 18 months to to years. And how what was "fast" is now "slow".
Hands down you cannot string a rational argument against gay marriage because there isn't one. Its based on cultural fears, and intolerance. You're on the losing side of history, next to the Mississippi state police that physically assaulted my father and his friends for helping black people register to vote in early 60s. Next to KKK. And the confederates, and so on. Have fun explaining to your children or your children's children, who will grow up with gay marriage, how you were the bigot.
What?? Do you know what definition means? The definition of fast has never changed. Absolute values you might be measuring have.
Hopefully my children won't grow up with gay "marriage", they'll grow up with "marriage", and "gay marriage/union/whatever they want to call it". That's an important distinction.
You keep using the word "gay" -- are you not aware that that word has changed its meaning?
* A nun is married to God (in some religions)
* A priest is married to God (in some religions)
* A man can be married to more than one woman (in some religions)
* A woman can be married to more than one man (maybe in darkest Africa, who's to say?)
* A man can be married to a woman
* A man can be married to a tree (in India, true)
* A man can be married to a man
* A woman can be married to a woman
Why are you so sensitive about words, anyway?
Gay was defined for a long time to mean happy.
Conservative used to mean saving and preserving and conserving, instead of spending, destroying, and squandering.
Faithful used to mean good, just, and moral, instead of vituperative, devious, dim-witted, and delusional.
Words get redefined all the time. Get over it.
PS: I honestly just get creeped out when people start talking about labels as if a word by it's self means something.
(NOT).
There was some story about people who where both adopted got married and then found out they where siblings. And yea it's creepy, but while I would be ok forbidding them from having children (for the public good) I don't see the value in forcing them to break up. And, even forbidding something on genetic grounds becomes a slippery slope problem because it's one step from their to sterilizing people.
If you are going to rag on same sex 'marriage' as not being truly 'marriage' for any of the reasons you state, then you also have to discount many heterosexual 'marriages' as well.
The problem is that for one half of our society, the meaning of the term has changed radically over the past century and for the other half it hasn't changed a wit. As a result, the laws have grown confusing and contradictory and there is no longer any easy way to reconcile the terms.
The racists of the 60's called, they'd like to work with you and your brilliant ideas.