It’s been a weird week for Americans who support equal marriage rights for gay people. On the disappointing side, there was the more-or-less inevitable passage of an amendment to North Carolina’s state constitution that doubly extra-bans gay marriage (while smuggling in a bunch of other assholish nonsense for good measure). It also appears that Colorado would rather dither and adopt a faux-libertarian posture than see gay people achieve even second-class status. On the other hand, the President finally decided to alight from his perch on the fence* and state, finally, that he supports gay marriage. Of course, marriage is not the be-all-end-all of the gay rights struggle, but it has become a proxy for general acceptance of gay Americans as full-fledged citizens.
Whenever the gay marriage issue comes up, there is always someone in the conversation (and sometimes it’s me) who brings up the intersectionality between race and homophobia – pointing out that in California’s notorious “Proposition 8” battle in 2008, black Californians voted 70% in favour of denying marriage equality to gay people. It is often raised in discussions of the seeming hypocrisy in a group that was so long denied civil rights using those freshly-granted rights to deny others the same. I stumbled across an interesting analysis of actual voting data (rather than exit polls) that examines this exact question, and I thought it would be worth taking a closer look. [Read more…]