RE: Hopeful

I’m with you, Amanda . A yes vote on California’s Proposition 8 would ban gay marriage and would trump the court’s imposition of gay marriage on the people of California. The final tallies are not in, but it looks like the attempt to legalize gay marriage has been narrowly defeated (as it was in Arizona and Florida as well).

A common argument heard among the supporters of gay marriage is that so-called “heterosexist” or “homophobic” opposition to gay marriage is morally equivalent to old-style-racist opposition to interracial marriage. We heard also this argument ten years ago when the move to legalize gay marriage (by the courts, of course) kicked off in Hawaii. After working fervently to keep the question of gay marriage off the ballot, gay marriage advocates tried to draw a moral equivalency between racist laws and traditional “heterosexist” marriage (i.e., between a woman and a man). But multiracial Hawaiians didn’t buy the moral analogy and the attempt to legalize gay marriage was crushed.

How did the argument fare in California among African Americans, that is, among those some might think would be most receptive to the argument that opposition to gay marriage is as morally odious as opposition to interracial marriage? We will have to await more accurate polling data, of course, but the exit polls strongly suggest that African Americans aren’t buying it. An overwhelming 74 percent of African-American women voted to ban gay marriage. No data was available for African-American men, but 70 percent of African Americans supported the ban on gay marriage. Evidently African Americans haven’t bought the analogy and, in fact, oppose gay marriage in far greater numbers than white folks.

Good thing, too. I argued as much exactly ten years ago:

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries state legislatures and courts in the South were prepared to deconstruct and redefine marriage in order to achieve racist goals. For them, race was everything. Similarly, the Supreme Courts of Hawaii and Alaska were also prepared to deconstruct and redefine marriage to advance their vision of social transformation. In Hawaii, the Supreme Court explicitly declared that the State “created” the institution of marriage and thus could redefine it to include persons of the same sex. For them, the only two players in civil society are autonomous, freely-contracting individuals and the state.

Just as the racists tried to redefine marriage for their purposes, thereby distorting its genuine meaning, the Alaskan and Hawaiian courts tried to do the same thing. In both cases the state attempted to redefine marriage to achieve its ideal of an improved society. Both were unjustly tampering with the most crucial pre-political society of all—the unique community of marriage, based upon the union of the two sexes.

While African Americans understandably voted nearly unanimously for Barack Obama, they resoundingly and consistently reject the legalization of gay marriage and the claim that opposing it is morally equivalent to racism. Social conservatives and the Republican Party more generally should think long and hard about the implications of all this in the coming years.