Turf War

Turf War - Twin Cities black ministers push back at the comparison between gay marriage and the civil rights moveement:

"There's no parallel between the African-American struggle to win civil rights and the campaign for gay marriage, said a group of Twin Cities black religious leaders that supports a state constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman.
'Our marriage laws do not deny access to any individual the right to marriage, unlike the days of segregation when African-Americans were systematically excluded from full participation in society,' said the Rev. Bob Battle, pastor of Berean Church in St. Paul and former chairman of the city's human-rights commission.

I like the way the Strib reinforces his bona fides.

But I digress:

The five leaders, who said they were representing themselves, responded Thursday to claims made by some gay-marriage advocates that denial of marital rights to same-sex couples is comparable to racial discrimination.

Not so, they said.

Sam Nero, pastor of the Church of New Life Christian Ministries in Minneapolis, said he was denied rights while growing up in Louisiana. 'My civil rights were violated because of my skin color, not because of my lifestyle. ... It doesn't match. It's not the same. It doesn't come close,' he said.

Remember this question. I'll come back to it in a bit.

Battle said that the laws that once banned interracial marriage unfairly segregated people but didn't redefine marriage as gay advocates want to do.

The gay-marriage debate has divided African-Americans and religious leaders as it has other groups.
Civil rights leaders Coretta Scott King, widow of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., each have said each have said gay marriage is a civil-rights issue and back efforts to legalize it. Sixty black activists and religious leaders meeting in Los Angeles last week announced support for gay marriage.

Yet a national survey conducted last summer by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that 64 percent of black respondents opposed gay marriage...

...Mahmoud El-Kati, a civil-rights activist and former professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, said he's still figuring out his position on the issue. One thing he's sure of, though, he said: Civil rights and gay rights are not analogous.

"People struggling for their dignity as human beings is quite different from a question that's essentially private. ... It's obvious that many gay people enjoyed rights that I couldn't enjoy," said El-Kati, who is black.

He added that it's not surprising that many black congregations oppose same-sex marriage. He said he thinks black Christians generally are conservative and base their beliefs on the Bible.

"I think the black community by and large has been very tolerant of gayness in their churches, but because they don't have the vocabulary, they just don't deal with it," he said.

Battle said he believes "100 percent" of the 43 Minnesota Church of God in Christ congregations he oversees, as chairman of the elders committee, oppose same-sex marriage.

So 2/3 of Afro-American churchgoers oppose gay rights. As we say above, many see it as a lifestyle issue rather than a genetic or adaptational one - which flies in the face of the current party line on homosexuality.

Question: Let's do the math. In the Democrat Party nationwide, the gay vote is non-trivial; the Afro-American vote is huge. Here in Minnesota, the gay vote is big - and due to the MNDFL's caucusing system that guarantees every significant special interest a disproportionate voice in party goings-on, they're even more powerful than nationwide. This is a line-in-the-sand issue for the gay faction in the DFL, and a big one for the Afro-American side as well. What does this mean for the DFL?

Question 2: Why do Afro-Americans stay with the Democrats, especially the DFL? There are three issues with which black Minnesotans seem to differ with the DFL, especially if they're middle-class and have families; education (especially in the city), crime, and now gay marriage. Add in some issues where black middle-class Minnesotans (and Hispanics and Asians) have serious interests - like economic development, taxes and small business issues - and you have to wonder what it is besides force of habit that keeps them with the DFL. I'm seeing more and more Afro-Americans at the GOP caucuses and events lately, so there's something to it...

Posted by Mitch at March 26, 2004 07:00 AM