Prop 8 legal worries

[ixat_totep]

So... the CA Supreme Court has agreed to take up the Prop 8 cases, but there's a very troubling development in that one of the Justices who helped strike down the previous Prop 22 (which was not an amendment, just an initiative) voted to deny a hearing. One of the more likely reasons to do that is a belief that Prop 8 is so obviously

Comments

[marasca]

The interesting thing I heard about prop 8 votes is that while some gigantic % of African-Americans in CA voted for Obama, 70% also voted for prop 8. Seems to me that some education and outreach in that community could make a big difference if this ends up on the ballot again.

[ixat_totep]

Definitely. Sadly, when it comes to the black vote on Prop 8, people seem more interested in blame than outreach. I think we'd get a lot of mileage by not continuing to assume/assert that the struggle for African-American civil rights was the same as the current struggle for Gay rights. They're related struggles, but on the whole, Gays were never enslaved, denied the right to vote, or any number of forms of institutionalized severe, dehumanizing discrimination. And we always have had the option to "pass", however painful it might be to live in the closet, and however wrong it is to expect us to do so. Most African-Americans couldn't have escaped persecution at any cost.

So yeah, it's a shame that some other persecuted minorities won't, on average, help us out right now. But if we stopped acting quite so entitled to their support they may be more willing to reconsider.