More than 2,000 gays and lesbians protested outside a Mormon temple in Los Angeles, blaming the church for the passage of California's Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman. The protesters blame the church for funneling millions into a media campaign supporting the ballot measure. Some activists are even pushing the IRS to revoke the church's nonprofit status.
If you believe the exit polls, the overwhelming number of black voters who supported the amendment put the ballot measure over the top. An exit poll claimed that by a 69-31% margin, black voters, who came out in record numbers to support Obama's presidential candidacy, favored the amendment. That same poll showed 53% of Hispanic voters supported the amendment, while less than half, 49%, of white and Asian voters supported the amendment. Sen. Barack Obama, like the majority of black voters, opposes gay marriage, although he claimed he didn't support Proposition 8. The measure passed by a slim margin of 52.5% to 47.5%.
Recall that Indianapolis' black churches led the fight against the passage of the City's Human Rights Ordinance, which outlawed discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Twenty-nine ministers from the African-American community led a prayer at the City-County Building in opposition to the ordinance, which they claimed "promote[d] a homosexual lifestyle" against biblical teachings. The HRO passed in spite of the opposition with the support of several African-American council members. The ministers rejected the idea that the HRO had anything to do with civil rights. The Sacramento Bee notes the opposition to gay marriage within the black church as contributing to the lop-sided support for Proposition 8 among black voters. "They do not believe at all that there is a correlation between civil rights vis-à-vis blacks and rights for gays," said Gary Dietrich, president of Citizen Voice, a nonpartisan voter awareness organization.
1 comment:
There are only a handful of churches that support GLBT people.
Christianity as a whole, if you look at the census and polling data is losing members right and left, and among the ones that are staying, they are trending towards leaving the open minded/moderate sects and going over to the fundamentalist hard-head extremism sects like the Baptists and the Pentacostals, the groups I consider to be the American answer to the Taliban.
One of the groups that are growing significantly are the Mormons, and I think the Prop 8 backlash is rather directed at the material support given to get it on the ballot, and mislead otherwise tolerant people into voting for it.
This support included phone banking to teach anti-gay propaganda to voters and at LEAST $25 million in cash.
Without going into all the reasons they are wrong, there is an overwhelming majority of them that would not vote to strip us of Civil Unions, thats why they watered it down to just say the word "marriage", but you can still get a Civil Union in Cali with the same benefits as marriage, they know people in Cali just aren't that radical.
Texas on the other hand, ended up passing an Amendment that was so broad and loosely worded, that taken literally, it bans ALL marriage, it's going to be funnier than hell to see the fallout from that, but I'd like to see some gay groups sue to get it enforced as written.
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