Prometheus 6

Ah, Mr. Blow...

We now know that blacks probably didn’t tip the balance for Proposition 8. Myth busted.

Then there's no point to your article.

There was one very telling (and virtually ignored) statistic in CNN’s exit poll data that may shed some light: There were far more black women than black men, and a higher percentage of them said that they voted for the measure than the men.

Oh, I see. It's not Black people's fault,  it's Black women's fault. But wait, Black people didn't tip  the balance, as Mr. Blow's fellow Conservatives reflexively claimed, right? So this is just a means to restart the debate about Black folks' morality, I guess. makes sense...follows the pattern...

According to the exit poll, 70 percent of all blacks said that they voted for the proposition. But 75 percent of black women did. There weren’t enough black men in the survey to provide a reliable percentage for them. However, one can mathematically deduce that of the raw number of survey respondents, nearly twice as many black women said that they voted for it than black men.

Mathematically deduce? How about we just count the damn responses?

Except, since there wasn't enough black men in the survey to provide a reliable percentage for them, it's an empty gesture...or a framing statement that pretends to accuracy.

Why? Here are my theories:

(1) Blacks are much more likely than whites to attend church, according to a Gallup report, and black women are much more likely to attend church than black men. Anyone who has ever been to a black church can attest to the disparity in the pews. And black women’s church attendance may be increasing.

The survey Mr. Blow links here is from 2007, and is a national poll. It MIGHT be applicable here if the survey was of Blacks in California.

(2) This high rate of church attendance by blacks informs a very conservative moral view. While blacks vote overwhelmingly Democratic, an analysis of three years of national data from Gallup polls reveals that their views on moral issues are virtually indistinguishable from those of Republicans. Let’s just call them Afropublicrats.

Let's just call us Black folks. And let's not pretend moral, rather than mercenary, issues are the driving force. All this "I'm a free market Conservative, but sometimes you have to abandon principle for practicality" is proof of this.

Republicans (including their Black apologists) are so hostile to Black interests that trying to graft some attachment between the two via some neologism is just...desperate.

(3) Marriage can be a sore subject for black women in general. According to 2007 Census Bureau data, black women are the least likely of all women to be married and the most likely to be divorced. Women who can’t find a man to marry might not be thrilled about the idea of men marrying each other.

That's just absurd. Women who can't find a man to marry will not increase the pool of eligibles by obstructing gay marriage. On the other hand, if you bought the other uncorrelated crap in the article, you'll likely not notice the silliness of the statement.

Proponents of gay marriage would do well to focus on these women if they want to win black votes. A major reason is that black women vote at a higher rate than black men. In the CNN national exit poll, there were 40 percent more black women than black men, and in California there were 50 percent more. But gay marriage advocates need to hone their strategy to reach them.

How about some absolute numbers?  Because I feel like this article is intended to keep the focus on Black folks as the problem. Paralleling the 60s civil rights movement is still the first form of legitimization used by American social movements. There are two ways of breaking that perceived alignment: proving there actually is no alignment (which is not the method Mr. Blow has decided on) or asserting Black folks' denial of that alignment.

The article Mr. Blow linked in his first paragraph shows gay folk understand what the issue was.

If exit polling is to be believed, seventy per cent of California’s African-American voters did indeed vote yes on Prop. 8, as did upward of eighty per cent of Republicans, conservatives, white evangelicals, and weekly churchgoers. But the initiative would have passed, barely, even if not a single African-American had shown up at the polls.

The problem? Call it the REAL Bradley Effect. 

Still, this was a fight that should have been won, and after the initial shock—which tempted a few gay and lesbian voices to blame blacks for what O’Reilly credited them with—California’s gay activists and their straight allies, judging from their online postmortems, have begun to direct more criticism at themselves than at their opponents. They were complacent: early polls had shown Prop. 8 losing by double digits. Their television ads were timid and ineffective, focussing on worthy abstractions like equality and fairness, while the other side’s were powerfully emotional. (Also dishonest—they implied that gay marriage would threaten churches’ tax exemptions, force church-affiliated adoption agencies to place children with gay couples, and oblige children to attend gay weddings—but that sort of thing was to be expected.) Barack Obama, like Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, had come out against Prop. 8, yet the No-on-8 forces let Obama’s popularity be used against them: a mass mailing suggesting that the Democratic nominee was for it went essentially unanswered.

How is this helped by focusing attention on Black women? Unless your goal is to distract, it is not helped by focusing on Black women at all.

How does one tie the discredited "Black Men On The Down Low" phenomenon to Black women voting against marriage rights for gay folks?

More specifically, blacks overwhelmingly say that homosexuality isn’t morally acceptable. So many black men hide their sexual orientations and engage in risky behavior. This has resulted in large part in black women’s becoming the fastest-growing group of people with H.I.V.In a 2003 study of H.I.V.-infected people, 34 percent of infected black men said they had sex with both men and women, while only 6 percent of infected black women thought their partners were bisexual. Tragic. (In contrast, only 13 percent of the white men in the study said they had sex with both men and women, while 14 percent of the white women said that they knew their partners were bisexual.)

Incidentally, a survey that excludes a third of the nation (only 33 states with long-term, confidential name-based HIV reporting) is somewhat misleading.

Why isn't he heaping this dung on conservative white evangelicals? Not only did they vote against Prop. 8 in greater proportion than Black folks, but in far greater numbers. And why is he suggesting approaches to Black women that will harden the opposition of the white conservative evangelicals who ACTUALLY defeated Prop. 8?

Then, make it part of a broader discussion about the perils of rigidly applying yesterday’s sexual morality to today’s sexual mores. Show black women that it backfires. The stigma doesn’t erase the behavior, it pushes it into the shadows where, devoid of information and acceptance, it become more risky.

Because Mr. Blow is hostile to the effort himself.