Gender & Sexuality Law Blog

Last Tuesday the people of California passed Proposition 8, the “California Marriage Protection Act,” amending the state constitution with this simple language: Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California. The motivation for the proposition was to overturn the California Supreme Court’s decision last June in In Re Marriage Cases finding that it was unconstitutional for the State of California to exclude same sex couples from access to state-sponsored marriage.

Thousands of people have hit the streets since the passage of Prop 8 protesting the homophobia it presupposes and expresses, and many have been struck by the irony of an election in which, at the same time, the first African American president was elected and the people of California voted to turn back a civil rights victory for gay people. Exit polling showed that African American voters “overwhelmingly voted in favor of Prop. 8 – by a 70 percent to 30 percent margin.” Thus, many eyes have turned to the African American community in California: how can they “get” the civil rights victory entailed by Obama’s election while “not getting” what it means for same sex couples to be able to marry?

Well, the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed today by Jasmyne Cannick, an L.A.-based journalist, in which she explained why she – both African American and lesbian – felt unmoved by the campaign for marriage rights:

I wasn’t inspired to encourage black people to vote against the proposition…Why? Because I don’t see why the right to marry should be a priority for me or other black people. Gay marriage? Please. At a time when blacks are still more likely than whites to be pulled over for no reason, more likely to be unemployed than whites, more likely to live at or below the poverty line, I was too busy trying to get black people registered to vote, period; I wasn’t about to focus my attention on what couldn’t help but feel like a secondary issue.

The first problem with Proposition 8 was the issue of marriage itself. The white gay community never successfully communicated to blacks why it should matter to us above everything else — not just to me as a lesbian but to blacks generally. The way I see it, the white gay community is banging its head against the glass ceiling of a room called equality, believing that a breakthrough on marriage will bestow on it parity with heterosexuals. But the right to marry does nothing to address the problems faced by both black gays and black straights. Does someone who is homeless or suffering from HIV but has no healthcare, or newly out of prison and unemployed, really benefit from the right to marry someone of the same sex?

Cannick then goes on to critique the political stratgey used by the No On Prop 8 campaign in the African American community – noting that for black people, both civil rights and marriage are tied to the black church and that the gay community pursued a doomed-to-fail strategy of attacking religion and the church when it urged Californians to vote against Prop 8.

I must say there’s much I agree with in Cannick’s LA Times opinion piece. Like her, I have published my own rants about the way marriage has been constructed as the most important civil rights victory for the gay community, while ignoring the ways in which unmarried people are judged, shamed, and denied benefits that they shouldn’t have to marry to receive. See my Politics of Same Sex Marriage Politics.

Yet I think she ignores the role of marriage in civil rights movements in the U.S. Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision finding it unconstitutional to prohibit white people from marrying people of another race, was an incredibly important landmark in the struggle for racial equality in the U.S. Of course, allowing Mildred and Richard Loving to legally marry in the Commonwealth of Virginia was not going to solve all of the problems of entrenched racism in this country. How could it? But as the Court noted in the Loving case: miscegenation laws (laws prohibiting interracial marriage) were unconstitutional because they amounted to expressions of white supremacy. About this, I have also written in Longing for Loving.

So too today, laws limiting marriage to a man and a women are expression of a kind of hatred toward lesbians and gay men. Acknowledging the injustice embodied in and expressed by these laws will not usher in an era of full equality for all people of every sexual orientation, race and class – just as, I must note, the election of Barack Obama does not mean that racism has been banished from our shores, and that the promise of all men (and women) being created equal will be fully realized. Cannick criticizes the white gay community for setting up marriage as “a one-size-fits-all catchphrase for issues of fairness.” Yet, it is unfair to ask marriage to do that much work, in Loving in the 1960s and now with same sex marriage.

What pains me is that the No on Prop 8 advocates in California failed to convince African American Californians that the stakes today for the gay community are similar to the black community’s stakes in Richard and Mildred Loving being able to legally marry in 1967.

Since I don’t live in California, I’m unable to say whether that message was not made clearly enough or it was not heard. Cannick’s LA Times opinion piece fails to mention it, however. And that’s too bad, as her piece will surely drive a deeper wedge between the black and the gay communities in California, and leave black gay men and lesbians in an even more untenable place than they already found themselves.