As you've doubtlessly heard by now, Prop 8 passed. If the legal challenges to it fail and it goes into effect (knock on wood) it will de facto annul my marriage to my husband. As if this weren't bad enough, a lot of media outlets are putting out a narrative about the election basically blaming its passage on the black voters, and this view is now being echoed all over the blogosphere because apparently finger-pointing is EXACTLY what the gay rights community needs right now.
Follow me under the break for some number crunching and analysis to show why this overly-simplistic picture is wrong, how we really failed, and how we can learn from our mistakes.
If we assume for the sake of argument that exit polls are accurate (I will do my best to keep a straight face while doing so), 70% of black voters voted in favor of Prop 8. For comparison, only 49% of whites, 53% of latinos, and 49% of asians voted yes on 8. (all my numbers are from CNN) This is where the narrative comes from. Black voters have a much higher percentage of homophobes than any other racial category.
The problem with this narrative is that the raw numbers just don't add up. About 10 million people voted on Tuesday, 10% of which were black. That comes out to 1 million black people voted in total and 700k black people voted for Prop 8. We lost by around 500k. If black voters had voted in the same proportions as white people then 490k black voters would have voted for 8 instead of 700k. The difference would only be 210k less votes for 8. That's not even half of what we lost by. Black people would have had to be MUCH less homophobic than everyone else in order to turn the tide the other way. They would have had to be more than 80% against. We didn't even get numbers that good among white Democrats (the biggest cross-section of the vote against 8). The only other way it could have changed is if there were a LOT less black people voting, and since there was the first black presidential nominee from a major party that had about as much chance as my conservative Mormon parents converting to Islam and moving to Saudi Arabia.
So, in short, blaming blacks for the loss of our civil rights is pure and utter bullshit. It's one of the more unpopular things to say right now, but this was the result of a much broader failure on the part of the No On 8 campaign and the gay rights movement in general. If you look at the rest of the exit polling data instead of focusing on some bullshit racial tension narrative a much grimmer big picture emerges.
Yes On 8 was able to put together a much broader coalition than we were. They also beat the shit out of us on getting out the vote. As I said, the strongest cross-section of the population that was against 8 was white Democrats who came out 21% for and 79% against and only comprised about 21% of voters. For comparison, white republicans comprised 24% of the voters and came out 82% for and 15% against.
Even more damning in my opinion are the numbers about when people decided. 60% of the people who decided in October voted for 8. 14% of voters decided in October. In raw numbers, that means 840k people decided in favor of 8 in October, 340k more than the difference between the winning and losing votes. Considering that October was the month when the campaign was fiercest, that tells me the campaign failed to make their case effectively.
That's right. WE failed. The blacks didn't lose it for us. WE dropped the ball, and it's about damned time we owned that and learned from our mistakes.
Since we're at least nominally on the subject of race, one thing we need to do as a community is improve outreach to the black community. Our message of equality for all seems to have failed to penetrate the black community For my entire life out of the closet the most common attitude I've seen among white gay people (which is also the overwhelming majority of out gay people) about blacks is that they're a lost cause. There seems to be some kind of fucked up assumption that blacks are genetically homophobic or something, that nothing we could possibly do would sway them to our side. I'm sorry, but that's a bullshit cop-out if I've ever heard one. There isn't some kind of magical black gene that makes them immune to persuasion. We can convince them if we find out how to communicate effectively with them. We have to stop thinking of blacks as inherently homophobic and fight for their hearts and minds the same way we had to fight for whites'. More than that, we need to make this a major priority.
We have also got to improve our GOTV game. If there's one thing we have to learn from Obama's election it's that when you're fighting against the status quo you win by building a broad coalition and organizing the bejeezus out of it. As can be seen from the exit poll numbers, we completely failed to build a broad coalition. We have got to go after more groups than just white college graduates and that means tailoring the way we address the issue to different groups instead of the one-size-fits-all approach we've been using. I've also heard from many quarters that the No On 8 campaign was horribly disorganized. THIS CANNOT HAPPEN AGAIN.
Unfortunately we'd gotten complacent. All the symbolic victories, like the increase in gay visibility on TV and elsewhere, went to our heads and we forgot that they are only a part of the battle, not the whole war. This war is about legal rights, not feel-good bullshit. WE CANNOT FORGET THIS AGAIN.
And yes, I'm aware that we're up against a powerful enemy in the Mormon church (may their leadership die in a fire so I can piss on the ashes). Believe me, I grew up in that church so I know better than most what kinds of resources they have at their disposal. It's not a fair fight. But here's a newsflash for you:
IT WAS NEVER A FAIR FIGHT TO BEGIN WITH.
It wasn't fair in the '70s, '80s, or '90s. LOOK AT HOW FAR WE'VE COME. We've always been the underdogs. All we had on our side was love and justice when they had millenia of western culture and religion, power, money, and influence. LOOK AT HOW FAR WE'VE COME. If we've come this far on only love and justice, think of what we could do if we got our shit together.
We can never match the Mormons and other fundies in sheer size and power, but we've got something on our side that they never will: simple fairness. Something that everyone can relate to and everyone wants. That's why even the Mormon ranks have started to break on this issue, as can be seen in the plethora of websites and testimonials by Mormons who opposed Prop 8. Most people who weren't raised in the church don't understand how major that is in a church that prizes the appearance of unanimity above almost anything else. Mormons may privately think their church is wrong about something, but for so many to come out publicly against it is almost unheard of.
We need to find a way to get this message of fairness across to blacks and other minorities as well as we have to whites. There must be a way, but we have to actively look for it if we're ever going to find it. There is hope, but we will have to fight smart to see our hope realized. In order to fight smart we have to cut the blame games and whining about how it's everyone's fault but ours.
Buckle up, pilgrims. It's gonna be a long fight. We've fought hard before. Let's fight smart this time.