[lbo-talk] Why Blacks opposed Prop 8 -- and a simple way

Dorene Cornwell dorenefc at gmail.com
Fri Nov 14 14:22:44 PST 2008


Ah yes, Baptists, and holy roller southern Baptists, not just limpid American Baptists who can at least wrap themselves up in organizational knots dealing with those in their number who CAN countenance gay marriage, but that is a sectarian circus removed from the sites of the recent votes.

It would be interesting to find polling data broken out by both race / ethnicity and religion but I wonder whether those would track differently from the class divide.

The Baptists almost certainly help account for the anti-gay marriage votes in FL and AR and maybe marginally in CA. In a case of tru Strange Bedfellows, the Mormon church poured A LOT of money into the CA vote. Baptists and Mormons have rather testy relations on numerous grounds independent of the LDS history related to African Americans, so if anyone had been paying attention, there could have been LOTS of angles to get at a different outcome.

DC

On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 1:43 PM, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:


> "Rural" is really a misdesignation of "the rural South." I realize this
> seems highly contentious here for some reason, but my daring thesis is that
> people who come from a conservative region are likely to be conservative.
>
> Let me put this another way. My relatives in the Deep South (grandmother,
> grandfather, lots of aunts and uncles), in rural Arkansas to be precise, are
> deeply opposed to gay marriage. I would imagine that lots of black people
> are opposed for the same reason, i.e., THEY ARE BAPTISTS.
>
>
> --- On Fri, 11/14/08, Dorene Cornwell <dorenefc at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> >
> > I would not know whether working class African Americans
> > are more or less
> > likely than working class people of other hues to have
> > recent rural
> > connections, but I do not think that is particulary a guess
> > one even needs
> > to make for this argument.
> >
> > DC
> >
> > On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 12:06 PM, Dennis Claxton
> > <ddclaxton at earthlink.net>wrote:
> >
> > > At 11:29 AM 11/14/2008, Chris Doss wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > > I would say it is a working class and rural exception.
> > Plus, blacks tend to
> > >> come from the South, at least a few generations
> > ago. What a surprise that
> > >> they would share values typical of the US South.
> > >>
> > >
> > >
> > > That's pretty much what you said yesterday:
> > >
> > >
> > > I'm going out on a limb here, but isn't it
> > likely that black opposition to
> > >> gay marriage being higher than that of whites
> > (usually), at least in urban
> > >> areas, is related to blacks coming from a more
> > rural background 2-3
> > >> generations back in which the center of the
> > community was the church?
> > >>
> > >
> > >
> > > I'm going out on a limb here to suggest it's
> > likely you're running on your
> > > own steam on this. Did you get this from anywhere
> > besides what you're
> > > sitting on?
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > ___________________________________
> > > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> > >
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
>
>
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