Proposition 8 Results Are Causing Racial Division

African Americans Voted 70 Percent in Favor of Ban on Same-Sex Marriage

More than a month after the election, people are still analyzing California's Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage on a vote of 53 percent to 47 percent.

The theme of the Proposition 8 analysis is that if only whites (and Asian Americans) had voted, Proposition 8 would have failed, 49 percent to 51 percent, and people in California would have maintained the civil right of same-sex marriage.

However, Hispanic Americans favored Proposition 8's same-sex marriage ban by 53 percent to 47 percent. Furthermore, African Americans gave overwhelming support, 70 percent to 30 percent.

Resentment remains unbridlged among some of the white gay activists. They are saying to blacks, in essence: "America finally has given you an African American president in the person of Barack Obama, but at the same time you have taken a step backward by denying the civil right of same-sex marriage. If anybody should know better, it should be you. We do not understand and we are very angry with you."

First, rightly or wrongly, white gay activists and sympathizers who make this statement apparently have had little contact with African American culture. Black people are highly conservative on questions of homosexual behavior, so the nature of the vote on November 4 should not come as a surprise.

There were other divisions in the Proposition 8 vote. Democrats were opposed, 36 to 64 percent, while Republicans were in favor, 82 percent to 18 percent. People earning less than $30,000 were opposed, as were people earning more than $150,000, but people in the middle income groups supported Proposition 8's same-sex marriage ban. In terms of education, the more schooling that a person possessed, the more likely was the individual to oppose Proposition 8.

Still, the African American vote stands out. Kathryn Kolbert, president of the People for the American Way Foundation, attempts to draw some sort of compromise.

Kolbert describes herself as "a (white) mother who has raised two children in a 30-year relationship with another woman," and she acknowledges her frustration at the passage of Proposition 8.