The SCUM* Are Promulgating The Story That "Minority Voters" Won the "Prop Hate" Vote In Cal.

It was on CNN the day after election, and Rachel Maddow (Friday night) devoted a lengthy segment to the question, too. Naturally, bloggers weighed in, too, including on MyLeftWing, where blogger "shanikka" picked it up, ran the numbers, and wrote, extensively, concluding that:

Utterly Supported Fact #1: There Were So Many More White, Latino and Asian Votes in Favor of Proposition 8 That Blaming Black Folks is Both Bad Math and Racist Scapegoating of the Highest Order.

I got no dog in this fight: I'm a straight, oft-married, recovering-racist, white, male, agnostic/atheist. From my POV, howsoever true it is that the passage of "Prop Hate" was not the sole responsibility of black folks--there are a LOT of fundie/homophobic Hispanic voters in California, too, who would have followed the urgings of their pastors, etc., compliantly or eagerly, as well as fundie Asians (Moonies?), to say nothing of the $70Million dollars mostly raised from WHITE churches (LDS, in particular) to promote the discriminatory law--still: How can that excuse or ameliorate the votes by the former victims of State oppression to oppress another despised group, and to claim essentially the SAME spurious ('religious') grounds that were heretofore employed to justify discrimination against them??? That's the part I don't get. Emmett Till got lynched for merely whistling at a white woman, iirc...

It seems to me and to others, there is an almost exact parallel, between the now-rejected claims of a "Biblical" warrant for the anti-miscegenation rules which prohibited inter-racial marriages, and the current, purely 'religious' prohibitions against same-gender unions? If there is any difference, it eludes me.

Oppression is oppression, whether on grounds of skin-color or sexual orientation or national origin, isn't it? Neither condition is "voluntary." How is it that people who suffered such discrimination--they, and/or their children--can calmly and without apparent shame or remorse impose their form of religious bigotry (what else to call it when the oppressors reach for Biblical justifications for their outrages?) on another socially despised group, when they themselves have so recently, only, escaped those same oppressive forces? This seems to me to be of a muchness, as a species of action--in so many ways resembling pogroms--with what makes the Israeli suppression of the Palestinians, and their violent, ruthless efforts at confining them, so incomprehensible to anyone who has even HEARD of the Holocaust.

Just out of curiosity, because I was out of the country a lot of the '60s, defending God and Country: Was there EVER a plebiscite--a popular vote--on Civil Rights for blacks, or even on the issue of inter-racial marriage? Were there ballot measures proposing to amend state Constitutions to prohibit 'miscegenation'? Loving v. Virginia was decided in '67, but the decision invalidated a Virginia STATUTE, iirc, not a plebiscite. Indeed, did the 'people' ever vote, explicitly, to accept or reject slavery, itself? (If so, I don't remember hearing about it, and I paid attention during history class.)

Though it is true that, as Shanikka wrote, the black vote alone was not sufficient to PASS the odious measure, had they voted AGAINST it in the same numbers the voted FOR Obama, they would have DEFEATED it and helped win for another oppressed minority the same rights they (though not alone) won for themselves 40 years ago; they could have crowned their historic triumph of the Obama victory in the glory of justice, instead of sullying it in the shit of superstitious bigotry and discrimination...

Mebbe that's just me.

Coda: What's that line in the Kris Kristofferson song, "Jesus Was A Capricorn": "Cuz everybody's gotta have somebody to look down on, Somebody doin' sumpin dirty decent folks can frown on..."

No, that's right. I do NOT believe in "god" or in any heavenly-ordained 'moral' order. Why?

(*SCUM = So-Called Unbiased Media)