Blacks And Same Sex Marriage

On Feb. 21, 2013 over 200 Black LGBT celebrated in the nation's capital during the annual Black LGBT Emerging Leaders Day - an event highlighted on the White House website during African American History Month. The politics of African American opposition to gays and same-sex marriage has come a long way and the longtime assumption that blacks are against gay rights seems to be experiencing a sea change.

That sea change is churning over two issues: The Obama administration’s opinion to the March 26 Supreme Court case challenging California’s Proposition 8, and the slaying of openly gay, black Clarksdale, Mississippi, mayoral candidate Marco McMillian, who’s funeral was Saturday, Mar. 9, 2013.

When America elected the first black President in 2008, California voters passed Proposition 8 revoking previous gay marriage rights with 58 percent of African Americans voting for it. In 2008 and 2009, a Pew Research Center survey showed just 28 percent of African Americans backed gay marriage. But a Pew Research Center exit poll after the November 2012 election found that 51 percent of African Americans nationwide now endorsed gay marriage - up from 36 percent in 2011. The latest analysis of 2012’s election exit polls released Mar. 7, 2013, found that opposition to marriage equality is closely split with African American voters who identify as “evangelicals,” with 45 percent supporting it and 47 percent opposed.

Much of the black communities past opposition to gay issues can be attributed to the National Organization for Marriage’s campaign to target African Americans with their “Not a Civil Right" project to separate Democrats from black voters, including finding “attractive young black Democrats to challenge white gay marriage advocates." This play was for traditional Black Church goers (In 2008, the United Methodist Church reaffirmed marriage was only between a man and a woman). People for the American Way Foundation's African American Ministers Leadership Council released a statement in March 2012 calling NOM's past strategies “a deeply cynical ‘wedge’ strategy to divide African Americans and the gay community, playing up what are now old and tired clichés.”

Two months later, when President Obama's endorsed same-sex marriage, the NAACP, noted, “Civil marriage is a civil right and a matter of civil law. The NAACP’s support for marriage equality is deeply rooted in the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution and equal protection of all people.”

Obama had evolved on gay marriage from only supporting civil unions, but prior to the 2012 re-election, some black ministers warned him that supporting gays would cost him the black vote and the election. But the 2012 election also saw African-American clergy and national leaders - including the Rev. Al Sharpton - encouraging Maryland voters (a state with a 30 percent Black population) to vote for “Question 6” to defend that state’s civil marriage law. Obama was re-elected and the Maryland state law passed.

Fast forward to Feb. 28, 2013, when the Obama Administration filed a brief for a Mar. 26 Supreme Court hearing arguing that California's Proposition 8 (Hollingsworth v. Perry) violates the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of equal protection. Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement that the Justice Department was weighing in because "Throughout history, we have seen the unjust consequences of decisions and policies rooted in discrimination." The historically black Howard University School of Law, one of the oldest law schools in the country, also filed a brief that notes how the arguments against same-sex marriage are merely variations on the same arguments used to justify baring interracial marriage prior to 1967.

A second case addressing the Defense of Marriage Act will be heard Mar. 27.

What has thrown the whole issue of being gay in the black community into high gear is the Feb. 26, 2013, slaying of openly gay, black mayoral candidate Marco McMillian in Clarksdale, Mississippi. The 33-year-old politician's body was found after he had been beaten and burned. On Tuesday, Mar.5, the National Black Justice Coalition sent a letter to Attorney General Holder calling for a federal hate crime investigation. “Whether on the basis of race or sexual orientation, hate is hate. If there is the possibility that McMillian was murdered because of who he is, that warrants the Department of Justice’s involvement," notes the letter.

The Justice Department’s involvement could get sticky. Mississippi’s attitude of gays mirrors the region’s racial tension: Support for same-sex marriage is at 13 percent, according to a November 2011 Public Policy Polling survey. And in May 2012, President Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage prompted Rep. Andy Gibson (R-Brandon) to Facebook a Bible passage advocating death to gay men and refused to issue an apology.

The fact the Marco McMillian was gay was never mentioned at his Mississippi funeral on Saturday, Mar. 9.