June 25, 2009

By EARL OFARI HUTCHINSON

A June Los Angeles Times poll on voter attitudes toward gay marriage found two things, one surprising, the other not. It was no surprise that the majority of blacks still condemn gay marriage. The surprise is that the gap between blacks, whites, Latinos and Asians on gay marriage is wider than ever.

There was the no-holds-barred campaign by gay groups to defeat Proposition 8, the millions shelled out on the campaign, mountains of literature churned out to sell the gay marriage fight as a civil rights fight, impassioned pleas from civil rights leaders, and a pitch from President Barack Obama to support gay marriage. All of that meant nothing. The lines in the gay marriage war had not softened but hardened among blacks.

The Times poll dealt solely with voter attitudes on the issue in Los Angeles. But every poll since the first poll in Jet magazine in 1994 that measured black attitudes toward gays has consistently found that a sizable number of blacks are suspicious and scornful not just of gay marriage, but of gays.

It’s no puzzle why. The issue of gay marriage still pricks the social conservatism of many blacks, and their exaggerated notion of manhood. From cradle to grave, many black men have believed and accepted the gender propaganda that real men talk and act tough, shed no tears, and never show their emotions.

When black men broke the prescribed male code of conduct and showed their feelings, they were harangued as weaklings, and their manhood instantly questioned.

They also believed the racial propaganda that manhood was reserved exclusively for white men. In a vain attempt to recapture their denied masculinity, many black men mirror America’s traditional fear and hatred of homosexuality as a dire threat to their manhood.

Many blacks, in an attempt to distance themselves from gays and avoid confronting their own fears and biases, dismiss homosexuality as a perverse contrivance of white males that reflected the decadence of white America. While many Americans made gays their gender bogeymen, many blacks made gay men their bogeymen and waged open warfare against them.

A parade of rappers, black novelists and poets railed against the gay lifestyle as unnatural and destructive. Many black ministers, as many white Christian fundamentalist ministers, wave the Bible and rail against homosexuality as the defiler of faith and family values.

Blacks did not join in the loud chorus of condemnation of the late Green Bay Packers superstar Reggie White in 1997 when he made offensive remarks about gays in a speech to the Wisconsin Legislature. White was a hard-line fundamentalist minister. He later apologized for the attack, but his opposition to gay marriage did not change one whit.

At a tightly packed press conference in October 2003, five of Michigan’s top black prelates publicly called on the state Legislature to amend the state Constitution to define marriage as between a man and woman. The ballot measure passed in November, and more than 50 percent of blacks backed it.

The same year the conservative Virginia-based Alliance for Marriage corralled a handful of top black preachers to plop their name on the alliance’s letterhead and tout its anti-gay rights agenda.

At the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People convention in July 2004, there was some talk of taking a delegate vote to put the organization firmly on record backing gay rights. It didn’t get far. The Rev. Julius Caesar Hope, the head of the NAACP’s religious affairs department, warned that a resolution to back gay marriage “would make some serious problems. I would think the membership would be overwhelmingly against it, based on our tradition in the black community.”

Proposition 8 was dead in the water in California and would have gone down to a crushing defeat since whites opposed it by a solid majority. But African American voters rescued it, or more specifically, conservative black ministers rescued it by pounding away in rallies and in their pulpits on the “abomination” of same-sex marriage.

Civil rights leaders roundly denounce homophobia and urge support of gay rights. They remind blacks that homophobia and racism are two sides of the same coin and that many ultra-conservatives who oppose civil rights also oppose gay rights. Their plea for tolerance toward gay marriage, however, continues to fall on deaf ears among the majority of blacks.

There’s now much talk among gay groups about plopping another initiative on the California ballot in 2010 to legalize gay marriage.

They’ll face the same tough obstacle that they faced in trying to dump Proposition 8 in 2008; that is the conviction held by many blacks that gay marriage is a bad thing and must be opposed. This is not an insurmountable obstacle to overcome. But it’s going to take a lot of work, understanding, outreach, and most importantly, the ability to resist every impulse to blindly lash out at blacks. That’s the ultimate test.